The Widower's Two-Step (Tres Navarre #2)(13)

"Hey now—" Sheckly spoke with the twangy, hard edged accent of a GermanTexan, someone who'd grown up in the hill country around Fredericksburg, where many of the families still spoke a brand of cowboy Deutsch. "Play nice with me, son. I just dropped by to see how things were coming along. Have to make sure you're doing right by my girl. You remind Les about that contract yet?"

Milo kept flipping through his mail. "Les is still in Nashville. I'll tell him you dropped by.

The contract's right next to the toilet where he left it."

Sheckly's laugh was a rich chuckle. He kept twirling the Stetson. "Come on now, son.

You want to dispute our agreement, you've got to put me in touch with the boss man.

Otherwise I'm expecting Miranda in the Split Rail studio come November first and I'll tell you what else—you send Century that demo and I'll send them a copy of my contract, see if they want to sink their money into a girl who's gonna bring their legal department a mess of business."

Milo opened another letter. "You know where the door is."

Sheckly got up from the desk slowly, told the receptionist, "You think about it," then started walking out.

In front of me he stopped and offered to shake. "Tilden Sheckly. Most people call me Sheck."

Up close, it looked like all the unnecessary pigments in Mr. Sheckly's face had drained into his tan, which was dark and perfect. His eyes were so bleached blue they were almost white. His lips had no red at all. His hair had probably been thick and chocolaty at one time. It had faded to a dusty brownishgray, uncombable tufts that looked like clumps of moth wings.

I told him my name.

"I know who you are," he said. "I knew your father."

"Lots of people knew my father."

Sheck grinned, but it wasn't friendly. He looked like I'd missed the joke. "I suppose so.

Most of them didn't contribute as much as I did."

Then he put on the Stetson and said goodbye.

When he was gone Milo turned to Gladys. "What did he mean, 'think about it'?"

Gladys said Sheck had offered her a secretarial job with a fifty percent pay raise. She said she'd turned him down. She sounded a little wistful about it.

Milo stared at the space on the desk where Sheck had been sitting. He looked like he was contemplating putting his fist through the mahogany. "You do those calls yet?"

Gladys shook her head. She launched into a long story about how some club owner in San Marcos had called and complained that Eli Watts and His Sunrisers had torn up the hotel room he'd rented for them and now he wanted the agency to pay the damages. Gladys had spent her entire morning trying to smooth things out.

I thought the desk was going to get it, but slowly Milo's meaty fists unclenched. He mumbled something under his breath, then led me down the hall and into his office.

Everything in the converted parlour had been custom made for Milo's comfort—two massive red leather chairs, a halfton oak desk with a twentyoneinch computer monitor and a candy bowl the size of a basketball, bookshelves that started as high as most bookshelves stopped and went all the way to the ceiling. The only thing small was Milo's rosewood Yamaha acoustic in the corner, the same guitar he used to bring on our drunken college road trips into the Sonoma wine country. There was still a crescentshaped dent near the sound hole where I'd thrown a beer can at Milo and missed.

I sat across the desk from Milo.

On the right wall were framed pictures of Les Saint Pierre's past and present artists. I recognized several country stars. Nobody recent. Nobody I would've considered huge.

Prominently displayed in the centre was a photo of the Miranda Daniels Band—six people at a bar in a honky tonk, all facing out toward the camera and trying to look casual, like they lined up that way every night. Julie Kearnes and Miranda Daniels were shoulder to shoulder in the middle, sitting up on the bar with their cowboy boots crossed at the ankles and their denim skirts carefully arranged to show some calf.

Miranda looked about twentyfive, her hair dark and shoulderlength, just curly enough to look tangled. Petite body, almost boyish. An unremarkable face. In this shot she was smiling, looking out the corner of her eye at Julie Kearnes, who got caught midlaugh.

With the air brushing you almost couldn't tell Julie was older than Miranda.

The two good old boys on their right were in their sixties. One had a trimmed white beard and a healthy belly. The other was tall, with no body fat at all and thinning, greasy black hair. The men on the left were younger, both The Widower's Two it Step 45

in their forties, one with longish blond hair and a thick build and an Op Tshirt, the other with dark curly hair and a black cattleman's coat and black hat and a scowl that was probably supposed to be James Deanesque but didn't quite make it. The cattleman looked quite a bit like Miranda Daniels, but twenty years older.

On the wall behind the picture was a pale square halo that told me the band's photo had superseded somebody else's whose picture had been slightly larger.

Milo followed my eyes to the photo on the wall.

"They're not important," he assured me. "The old fart with the white beard is Miranda's dad, Willis. The guy in the Wyatt Earp outfit is her big brother, Brent. You know—knew—Julie. The thin greasy one is Ben French. The burly surfer reject is Cam Compton."