“I’m outta here next month,” he said.
“You were right? They sold?”
“I’m the Teacher, Jesse, man. The Teacher always knows best.”
“I have an acquaintance in town who’s going to be pretty upset you won’t be on the air anymore.”
Niles laughed again, joylessly. “Yeah, your friend and about fifteen other people.”
Jesse got lost in his own head for a second. What was Vinnie Morris to him?
“Yo, Jesse!” Roscoe Niles snapped his fingers.
“Yeah, sorry. So what’s all this about? Why do I need gloves and an evidence bag?”
“For this.”
Niles pulled an eight-by-twelve-inch brown envelope out of his top drawer and slid it across the desktop to Jesse. By then Jesse was already slipping into the gloves. As he was putting the gloves on, he noticed there was a computer-generated white label on the envelope. Printed on the label in black ink were Roscoe Niles’s name and the station’s address.
“What’s in it?”
Roscoe Niles smiled a crooked smile, one Jesse had trouble reading. There was something feral about it, something angry in it, too. Jesse guessed he understood the anger. Roscoe Niles had been a fixture on FM radio for decades and was now being shown the door. No one was going to give someone Roscoe’s age a job, not in this environment. Roscoe was a fellow alcoholic, and alcoholics didn’t deal very well with big changes in their lives, though big changes, negative ones in particular, opened the self-pity spigot and nothing gave an alcoholic carte blanche like a healthy dose of self-pity. Jesse was well familiar with the mechanics of how that worked.
“Hey, man, you mind if I have one while you do that?” Niles asked, pulling two glasses and a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label out of his bottom drawer. “Want one?”
“No, you go ahead.” Jesse repeated his question. “What’s in the envelope?”
“A myth realized,” Niles said, pouring himself his usual half-glass of scotch.
“Uh-huh. C’mon, Roscoe.”
“I’m not yanking your chain, Jesse. I swear. You’ll see.”
Jesse flipped the envelope over, undid the two-pronged clasp, lifted up the edge of the flap with his pinkie, and reached his right thumb and index finger inside.
“Careful, man. It’s pretty old and fragile, though it’s in plastic.”
Jesse felt the corner of the plastic and carefully pulled it out of the envelope. What it was was a very yellowed, almost brown sheet of unlined paper in a thick, clear plastic folder. There were fifteen handwritten lines on the paper. The handwriting was a beautiful, flowing cursive. The line at the top of the page read: The Hangman’s Sonnet.
59
Jesse read it and reread it. He wasn’t much for poetry. He wasn’t even sure he knew what distinguished a sonnet from any other kind of poem, but there was something about the verse in front of him that hit a raw nerve. So many times in his career he’d heard the confessions of the guilty, of men who had brutally murdered their wives, girlfriends, or lovers. Men who inevitably blamed it on their victims. Still, he wasn’t sure what to make of the poem or his reaction. He’d worry about that later. For now, he slid the envelope and the poem into the evidence bag.
“There it is,” Niles said, gunning down his scotch. “The genuine article. The actual ‘Hangman’s’ fuckin’ ‘Sonnet.’ I never quite believed the myth about the poem. I guess I’m going to have to readjust my chronic cynicism.”
“What’s the myth?”
Niles shrugged, poured himself another. “Story goes that Terry Jester took a motorcycle trip out west after he went into his funk. He was in some trading post on an Indian rez in Wyoming and he came across this poem stuck between the pages of a horse soldier’s diary. The diary was in a different hand, so Jester knew it hadn’t been written by the soldier. Apparently, he went nuts over it and spent the rest of his time out west writing a song cycle inspired by the poem, imagining who wrote it, thinking about this Jane May woman, and contemplating how the poet killed her and why. Like I said, I always thought it was a crock, some story dreamed up by Stan White to market the album. I mean, he never released the text of the poem. All anyone ever knew was that it was written by a condemned man forgiving his executioner. Turns out that it’s way more complex than that.”
“What is it you don’t like about Stan White?”
“Ah, man, where to begin? We were pals once, but... I’d rather not relive the bad old days, not when I’ve got the unemployment line staring me in the face.” Roscoe took a big gulp of scotch. “Sure you don’t want one?”
Jesse refused. His next questions were the kinds cops were supposed to ask, not questions about myths or music. He asked about who had delivered the envelope. Somebody said a messenger dropped it at the reception desk. What did the messenger look like? The girl wasn’t at the desk and the guy who saw him barely noticed. The girl found it there when she got back from lunch. How many people had handled the envelope? The messenger, the girl, and me.
Niles leaned across the desk and looked Jesse in the eye. “Jesse, we’ve been friends a few years now. What the hell’s going on?”
“I’ll answer that, but we need to talk about something else first.”
“Shoot.”
“What if I were to tell you that I think the missing master tape is about to reappear?”
“Holy shit, man!” Roscoe stood up out of his chair, banging his knee against his desk. “Ow!” He bent over and rubbed his knee. “Are you making conversation, Jesse, or are you telling me that’s what this is about?”
Jesse didn’t answer him directly. “Last time I was here I asked you how much it would be worth and you said millions. That was then, two friends shooting the breeze. Now I’m asking for real. How much?”
Niles stopped rubbing his knee, rubbing his fleshy, gray-stubbled cheek instead.
“Five million. Six, maybe. Ten. Twenty. More. Depends.”
“That much?”
“Every time some putz finds an acetate or reel-to-reel of a Beatles song or performance, it goes for big money.”
“Jester isn’t the Beatles.”