Chapter 9
Odette had said a week. It took six days.
Savannah's phone went off at six forty in the morning, which is not a time anybody calls with good news, and she was already awake, because she had been getting up at five thirty since March and had stopped pretending that was going to change.
"Rennie at Tempo," the voice said. "I'm not running anything for two hours. I wanted you to have it before it was up."
"That's new."
"I owed you one." Paper moving on the other end. "There's a demand letter out of Odette Callahan's office asking for a nine-year accounting on the Holloways publishing. It went to Sennett Media. I've had it since yesterday afternoon from two people who don't know each other."
"All right."
"I'm going to describe it as a dispute over historical registration and allocation, and I'm not putting a number in it, because nobody's given me one I believe.
" A pause. "There's a line in it I want you to hear before it's on your phone.
A person familiar with the matter says the claim is, and I'm reading it, a negotiating posture ahead of a tour. "
Savannah poured coffee into a mug with a cartoon fish on it, because there were four forks in this house and two mugs and one of them had a fish.
"Do you want a comment," she said.
"I'd take one."
"'I asked for the numbers. That's all I've asked for.'"
Rennie read it back. "That's it?"
"That's it. You can put after it that I'm available for questions, which nobody has ever once taken me up on."
"I'll use the first part."
She called Odette at seven.
"I've seen it," Odette said.
"A negotiating posture."
"That's Holt. That's the whole man in four words." Odette sounded like a woman with her glasses already on. "It's fine. It's better than fine. He answered a demand for records with a statement about your motives, and now I get to put that in a file."
"You're enjoying this."
"I've been at it thirty years, Savannah, I take what's offered." The window unit rattled somewhere behind her. "Don't answer your phone today."
"I've got one call to make."
"Make it and then don't answer your phone."
The routing binder was still in the bottom of her canvas bag, three inches thick and black, with a shoelace where the zipper pull used to be. She had carried it out of Cordelia Hall in March and had not opened it since April.
Tab two was contacts. Thirty-eight names, alphabetized, with cell numbers, because a tour is a phone book with buses under it.
WEXLER, K.
Savannah looked at it a while. Then she typed standing up at the counter, and did not sit down to do it, because sitting down would have made it a bigger thing than she was willing to let it be.
This is Savannah Holloway. I'd like to buy you a coffee. Not to yell at you. No press, nobody else, one hour. Say no and I won't ask again.
The answer came in four minutes.
yes. anywhere you want. thank you for asking instead of
There was no rest of that sentence. She had sent it before she found the end of it, which told Savannah more about the next hour than anything else was going to.
The coffee counter on Wedgewood was eight metal tables under two awnings, near enough to the studios that half the chairs had a guitar case leaned against them. Nobody in that place had ever looked up at anybody.
Kinsley Wexler was already there at ten twenty, at the far table, with two coffees in front of her.
She was small. Savannah had known that from photographs and had not understood the scale of it.
She wore a good jacket that belonged to a taller woman's idea of herself, and boots that had been expensive and were being worn wrong, and a heavy silver ring on her thumb that she turned when Savannah sat down.
Twenty-four years old.
"I got you one," Kinsley said. "I didn't know how you take it. There's a black one and one with cream, and if you don't want either I'll drink both."
"Black's fine."
"Okay." She let a breath out. "Okay."
Savannah set her keys on the table.
"I'm going to ask you some questions," she said. "You can answer them or not. I'm not recording, I don't have a lawyer sitting in a car, and nothing you say goes anywhere."
"I figured."
"Did you know I didn't know?"
Kinsley's chin came up. "No."
"Say more than that."
"I asked him twice." It came fast, the way a thing comes out of somebody who rehearsed it in a truck in the parking lot.
"First time was November. I said, does Savannah come to any of these, and he said, she's got her own thing going.
Second time was February, because by then it was a record and there were dates getting talked about.
I said it straight. Does your wife know what this is. "
She stopped.
"Say it," Savannah said.
"He said, 'Savannah doesn't want to write anymore.'"
Traffic went by out on Wedgewood. Somebody's machine screamed steam.
"Okay," Savannah said.
"I believed him." Kinsley had both hands around her cup. "I want to say that out loud, because it's the only thing I've got that's any good, and it isn't good. I believed him and I didn't check, and I could have checked. Anybody in this town would have told me in nine seconds."
"That's true."
"I know it's true."
"When did you meet him."
"July." She looked up. "Not October. I know what the press says.
I don't know who fixed that and it wasn't me.
July, at a publisher's thing on a roof that I got into because somebody's assistant felt sorry for me.
He'd heard a song of mine off a phone. We sat on a stair and wrote about a verse and a half into my voice memos, and then his people came and got him, and I didn't hear one word from him again until the second week of October. "
Savannah did not move her face.
"Three months," she said.
"Three months of nothing. I've been over my own phone like the police.
" Kinsley's voice went thin at the edges.
"There's a tape of it going around. The roof one.
I know there is. I've been sick about it for five weeks because the date on that file says July and everybody's going to do the math wrong. "
"Three people have it," Savannah said. "Two writers and somebody at a label. A reporter at Tempo has been offered it twice and won't run it, because she says a file date is not a fact."
Kinsley put her hand over her mouth.
"Don't do that here," Savannah said, not unkindly. "There's eight tables."
"Sorry. Sorry." She got it back. "You didn't have to tell me that."
"No."
"Then why did you."
"Because you're twenty-four and you've been hauling a thing around for five weeks that turned out to be nothing, and I happen to know exactly what that's like, and I'm not interested in you having it.
" Savannah drank some of the coffee. It was better than Silas's, which was not a high bar.
"That's the last free thing you're getting from me. Hold on to it."
"What did he offer you," Savannah said.
"On the record?"
"On the record."
Kinsley set her cup down. "Co-write and co-produce. Both names. Same size type on the front, not a with, not a featuring. Equal say on takes and on what stays off. Papered before we wrote a line — his publisher drew it, and my lawyer, who is my cousin, marked it up, and they took every mark."
Savannah nodded once, slowly, the way she'd nod at a monitor engineer who had just told her the room was fine.
She had written those four things down herself. On the back of a thirty-cent receipt, in a gravel lot in Eastland, with a pen out of the cup holder. She had turned that receipt over in her hands for an hour trying to name what frightened her about it.
Now it had come out of a twenty-four-year-old's mouth, in order, like a parts list, at a metal table on Wedgewood.
"That's a good deal," Savannah said.
"It's the best thing that ever happened to me."
"I know it is."
"I don't know what to do with that."
"Nothing," Savannah said. "There isn't anything to do with it."
She should have stood up there. She had gotten what she came for, twice over, and the smart thing was the door.
"Is it any good," she said.
Kinsley blinked. "The record?"
"The record."
"You want me to be honest or nice."
"I've had nine years of nice."
"Eight of them are good." Kinsley said it without any pride in it at all, which was the first thing that afternoon that made Savannah think she might be the real article.
"Two of them are the best thing either of us has done.
And there's two in the middle of it I'd take off if it was mine, and it isn't mine, so they're staying. "
"Which two."
"Track four and track nine."
"Why."
"Track four's a first draft with a good chorus on it. He got excited and we quit." Kinsley turned the thumb ring. "Nine, I don't know. It's fine. It's just — it goes where you think."
Savannah looked at the awning strut for a second.
"Where's it sit," she said. "Nine. In the set."
"Second to last, before the encore."
"Then it isn't the song. It's the slot." She heard herself doing it and could not stop it, the same way she had never once been able to sit in a room and let a bad turnaround go by.
"You've got a whole show telling people what's coming, and then the one place in the night where you get to break your word, and you're spending it on a song that goes where they think.
Move it up to five, put four in the trash, and run the quiet one at nine. "
Kinsley had gone very still.
"That's what he said," she said.
"What?"
"About the slot. Not the rest of it. He said the back half of the set was wrong and he couldn't hear why.
" She was looking at Savannah like a woman watching somebody tune by ear in a cold room.
"He said that in a rehearsal in April and then he sat down on a road case and didn't say anything for about ten minutes. "
Savannah picked her coffee back up.
"Well," she said. "There it is."
Kinsley got up and got them two waters, because she needed to stand, and came back and sat down and did the thing people do when they have decided to hand you something.
"Can I tell you one thing that isn't about him?"
"Go ahead."