“Hey, Charles,” Bug said, a push broom in his hand, “get off the phone and check this out.” There in the charred rubble were loose diamonds and emeralds and melted gold and platinum, the remains of the Teddi the Gleam bling. The brothers sold it all and bought a tire and rim shop.
Bobby Grimes was the hardest hit. His premier artist was in rehab and Greenleaf withdrew its offer to acquire BGME. The rest of his roster was leaving the label. Shonda Simmons said she heard Bobby was going into bankruptcy.
Skip’s employer was still a mystery and Isaiah couldn’t get it out of his mind. He’d slouch in his armchair, mentally flipping the case over, upside down, and sideways while Ruffin, named after Marcus’s favorite singer, David Ruffin, chewed on his shoes and peed everywhere but on the pee pads. There was nothing else to do but go back to work.
Mr. Everwood had Alzheimer’s and couldn’t remember where he’d hidden fifteen thousand dollars in Krugerrands. Susan Paul’s ex was extorting her with a video they’d made in the privacy of their bedroom. Vandals vandalized the abortion clinic. They wrote BABY KILLERS and DEATH CAMP on the walls and made off with an aspirator, a suction apparatus, and a surgical chair.
Deronda’s friend Nona had a husband who beat her when he was drunk, which was almost every day. Isaiah paid for a bus ticket and brought Nona’s father, Earl, in from Bakersfield, where he worked for Union Pacific coupling and uncoupling freight cars and cabling them to the hoist. Earl met Nona’s husband coming out of the liquor store with a half gallon of Thunderbird. Earl beat him, stomped on his hands so he couldn’t hit Nona anymore, and drank the Thunderbird on the bus back to Bakersfield.
Nona, realizing her husband could still kick and bite, decided to move in with Deronda. Isaiah said he’d help. Nona was friends with Cherise and she volunteered Dodson. They used Dodson’s ten-year-old two-tone Lexus RS as a moving van, filling the backseat and trunk with Nona’s belongings and strapping a mattress to the roof. The car had a hundred and ten thousand miles on the odometer, was silent as a bank vault, and rolled over potholes like they were hopscotch lines on the sidewalk. Dodson drove with his neck pulled into his shoulders and held the steering wheel with one arm stuck straight out. Tupac rapped from the stereo. Isaiah sulked.
“I need new tires,” Dodson said. “You know what they cost for this car? Something to be said for public transportation. I might have to break down and buy me a bus pass. That’s okay, you don’t have to talk, it’s not like I crave your conversation, but just out of curiosity, did you forget to send me a thank-you card?”
“A thank-you card for what?” Isaiah said.
“For saving your life.”
“I don’t remember getting one from you.”
Isaiah went still. The key to the case was materializing like a Polaroid snapshot. Streaks and blurry colors forming. Tupac’s rapping was distracting. “Could you play something else, please?” Isaiah said.
“I could but I won’t,” Dodson said.
“Don’t you get tired of him?”
“No I don’t. All his albums? Must be two, three hundred songs and he recorded more than that. Yeah, Tupac was a songwriting fool. Remember Suge Knight and Death Row Records? Suge robbed the boy blind. Tupac sold millions of records and when he died he was damn near broke.”
“Suge got away with it?”
“He spent the money if that’s what you mean,” Dodson said. “But Tupac’s mama, Afeni, sued Suge, got control of the leftover songs. Was a bunch of ’em. Oh, check this out.”
Tupac rapped:
My homie told me once, don’t you trust them other suckers
they fought like they were your homies but they phony motherfuckers
“Yeah, Tupac should have took his own advice,” Dodson said. “You can’t trust nobody in the music biz. You don’t watch them muthafuckas every damn minute they’ll steal the vision right out your eyeballs.”
Isaiah squirmed in his seat. Lines were connecting on the Polaroid. A string of facts. A logic. The case-breaker. It was right there. Right fucking there.
Dodson hit the brakes so hard the mattress slid down over the windshield and a box of stuffed animals spilled into the front of the car.
“What?” Isaiah said, tossing a one-eyed koala bear over his shoulder.
“After Tupac died, Afeni used the leftover songs and put out seven more records,” Dodson said. “People called ’em R.I.P. albums, rest in peace. Made ’em seem like collectors’ items. Six of the records went platinum. Don Killuminati sold five million copies all by itself.” Dodson looked at Isaiah and said: “Tupac sold more records dead than he did when he was alive.”
“I knew that,” Isaiah said, snapping his fingers.
Bobby Grimes watched helplessly as Cal’s mental state went swirling down the toilet. No way his star was going to make a decent album by his contractual deadline or make one at all anytime soon. Bobby could sue Cal for breach of contract but where would that get him? The lawyers would haggle for a year, Bobby would lose his premier artist, who was also the main reason Greenleaf wanted to acquire BGME.
But Cal was more of a songwriting fool than Tupac. The average album had ten tracks but he’d record fifteen or twenty, weeding out the ones that had weak beats, were lyrically flat, or were otherwise not up to his standards. Bobby wanted desperately to use the leftover songs and make more albums but Cal wouldn’t have it. The albums would be second-rate, he said. They’d saturate the market and tarnish his brand. Bobby was within his rights to release the songs anyway but Cal said he’d get an injunction and publicly trash the records. Do interviews and tweet his fans, say the songs were second-rate, and let the rap world know that Bobby disrespected his artists. If that happened the albums would tank, there’d be lawsuits, Greenleaf would kill the deal, and nobody but the lawyers would get what they wanted.
On the other hand.
If Cal was to prematurely meet his maker, Bobby could release more albums the way Afeni had. Call them the basement tapes or the lost recordings or some other made-up nonsense. Greenleaf would be chomping at the bit when they found out there were over three hundred songs in the data vault. Add in remixes, tribute songs, live recordings, bonus tracks by other artists, and Bobby would have more albums than Cal could make if he was drug-free, ate barbecued tempeh at every meal, and lived to be a hundred. At that point, Bobby could either bid up the Greenleaf deal or walk away from it altogether. All he had to do was get somebody to cancel Cal’s ticket. Make it look like a drive-by, let the police chase Noelle or Kwaylud and come up with nothing. They still didn’t know who killed Tupac, or Biggie for that matter.
When Bobby was promoting raves back in Sacramento, Jimmy Bonifant was dealing ecstasy and what was the point of going to a rave without a double drop of vitamin X? The two hustlers shared a condo, ate breakfast at the Silver Skillet at three in the morning, and brought tweakers home and did them in the same room.
Eventually, they both moved to LA, Jimmy pushing weight by then, a lot of dangerous people in his circle of friends. Bobby asked him for a reference and Jimmy told him about a guy named Skip who raised pit bulls in the desert. He was crazy but always came through. Jimmy would hear about that. But by the time Skip came on board Cal had stopped leaving his house and Skip couldn’t set up on him for a drive-by or anything else. Then that lunatic turned that damn dog loose and brought Quintabe into the picture and he fucked up everything. Skip falling into a coma was a lucky break. At least he couldn’t cause trouble but the deal with Greenleaf was deader than Tupac and Bobby’s creditors were calling every day. He could declare bankruptcy but Cal’s leftover songs were a company asset and he’d lose them unless his lawyers could figure something out. He’d already drained the company coffers, fired most of the staff, and moved the songs to a cloud within a cloud.