A Song to Die For (2 page)

“Well, what if we don't go along with it?”

The A&R man grabbed a stack of publicity photos and flipped them out across his desk like a card dealer. “Then we scrap your project and put your marketing budget into one of these acts instead. Your choice.”

Bill looked at Jo Ann, who had stayed out of the argument. “What do you think, Jo Ann?”

She had shrugged. “Call me
Dixie
 …
Creed
.”

On the road, promoting the album at small venues and country radio stations, Dixie began carrying a stash of marijuana whenever she could acquire the stuff from fans. Creed didn't mind. He had smoked the weed before and considered it pretty harmless. He even enjoyed it in moderation. Dixie liked it a lot more, but it never seemed to affect her performances, nor did the whiskey they typically started slamming with the onset of every show.

“Written in the Dust” began to climb on the charts, and Dixie Creed got an invitation to open a big show for none other than Buck Owens. The opener went well and led to a string of tour dates with Buck and the Buckaroos. Their album sales soared. The first pressing quickly sold through, and another twenty thousand were packaged and shipped to distributors nationwide. “Written in the Dust” peaked at number eight—not a bad start for a new band. The label started clambering for more material and a second album before Dixie Creed even got in off the road.

Reality waited back at their Nashville apartment. Creed found a stack of bills he couldn't pay, and a draft notice from Uncle Sam. His number had come up. He was to report to boot camp in three weeks.

Dixie threw a fit, as if it were his fault for getting drafted. “Why did you even register, you dipshit!”

“It's the law, and I ain't no draft dodger.”

“You dumb-ass!” she wailed, pulling at her hair and raking dirty dishes off the kitchen counter like some insane woman.

The night before he left for basic training, Creed snuggled with her in bed, after making love to her for the last time. “I've been thinkin',” he said. “Maybe we should get married. If I get killed over there, you'll have benefits for life.”

“Shut up,” she said. “I ain't marryin' you. If you come back with your arms and legs blowed off, I don't want to have to wipe your ass.” She cackled loudly as if her laughter could compensate for her lack of tact.

“Jesus, Jo Ann…”

“It's Dixie, damn it. Hey, I's just kiddin.' You'll be fine. Come home a war hero and we'll go right back into the studio.”

*   *   *

Willie's bass player slapped Creed on the shoulder, and his thoughts returned to backstage at the Armadillo. The bassist gave him a thumbs-up sign, and Creed shot a cocky smile back. Just for a moment, he thought he smelled Dixie's perfume. It was as if she had just been standing there. But no … That part of his life was over …

Llano County, Texas

2

CHAPTER

1:15
A.M.

Headlights appeared in her rearview mirror, and her fear surged again. It had come and gone in waves since she left Las Vegas, sixteen hours ago, headed for a sorority sister's place in Austin. Her speedometer hovered around eighty miles per hour, the engine and transmission of the Corvette singing a discordant harmony. Whoever that was gaining on her from behind had to be doing ninety-five.

Was it a cop, or was it
him
? The Fuzzbuster radar detector on her dashboard remained silent, suggesting a civilian vehicle on her tail. Maybe it was just another Texas cowboy driving way too fast in a pickup truck, headed home from a Friday-night rodeo or a wild spree at some dance hall. She hoped against hope that might be the case. She prayed the headlights did not belong to Franco.

Her mind seemed to whir like the tires on Highway 71, thinking about the terrifying turn her life had taken in the last couple days. Rosabella Martini was twenty-five years old. Born and raised in Las Vegas, Nevada, her mother had died of heart disease when she was only six. She grew up surrounded by lavish opulence, thanks to her father, successful restaurateur, Rob Martini, whose swank eateries fared well through the booming fifties and sixties in Vegas. Rosabella knew very well that she was a spoiled only child—a daddy's girl. She had boasted about it to her friends in high school, where she became the student council president, head cheerleader, and an all-state flautist.

When she turned eighteen, she began to worry about the possibility of inheriting her mother's heart condition. Her father dropped the bombshell as gently as he could. Rosa had been adopted. The blood that ran through her veins was Italian blood, he assured her, but it was not Martini family blood. Her mother had been too frail to carry a pregnancy to term, so her parents had adopted her from an agency.

“Not even I know who your birth mother was,” her father had told her. “But she must have been a beauty, because, look at you. You're the most beautiful girl in the whole world.”

It explained a lot. Her uncle Paulo, known as “Papa Martini,” and his son, Franco, who was Rosa's adoptive cousin, ten years older than her, had never made more than halfhearted attempts to accept her as family. Franco had always remained especially cold toward her.

At her high school graduation party, Franco had told her, “So, I hear you're going to the University of Texas.”

“Yeah,” she replied, shocked that he was talking to her at all.

“When you get your degree, why don't you just stay in Texas. You're not one of the family and you never will be, so don't try.”

That was her mistake. She had tried. She should have taken Franco's advice.

Rosa had returned to Las Vegas to work for her father after her graduation from UT-Austin in 1972. With her degree in interior design, she began remodeling and decorating her father's four restaurants, even winning a design award at the flagship business—Il Ristorante Martini
—
for the Tuscan motif she created. A month later, her father died in his sleep of a massive stroke. Rosa's grief, confusion, and emptiness led her to her uncle Paulo for solace.

But Papa Martini proved a poor comforter. His embraces were stiff, and brief. Her cousin Franco was even colder. They only wanted to talk about the restaurants her father had left her. “You don't know the food trade,” Papa Martini insisted. “I'll pay you a fair market price. You can put the money into your little design studio.”

“What do you want with dirty dishes?” Franco had added. “Freakin' doped-up waiters, crooked health inspectors. Stick with your ruffled pillows, Rosa.”

Her whole life, Rosa had laughed off rumors that Papa Martini was some kind of Las Vegas mob boss, and that all the Martinis were mafiosi. “Why, because we're Italian?” she had often scoffed to her high school friends. True, Papa Martini tended toward seedier business ventures than her father's restaurants, including nightclubs, casinos, and even a topless joint or two. True, there had been charges pressed by jealous competitors, but no indictments, except for Franco's aggravated assault arrest. That matter was dropped when the plaintiff mysteriously disappeared.

“Chickenshit didn't have the guts to face me in court,” Franco had said.

Of course, the rumor was that Franco had bumped the plaintiff off, but Rosa only rolled her eyes at that kind of talk. Yes, he carried a pistol, but only for protection as he often moved large sums of cash. Franco acted like a tough guy, but he was nothing more than his father's ramrod who sternly oversaw his many business concerns. For that reason, Rosa knew that Franco would do a better job at running her late father's restaurants than she could. And she could use the cash from the sale to upgrade her interior design studio. She decided to take her uncle up on the offer to sell out.

On Thursday—a day and a half ago—Rosa drove to Papa Martini's mansion unannounced to surprise him and Franco with her decision to sell. As she rounded the corner to the entry gate, she saw her uncle's Land Rover barreling away toward Rancho Drive. The choice of vehicle probably meant her uncle was going out to the ranch, for the roads were rough out on the piece of land her father and uncle had bought as a getaway years ago. She tried to catch up to the Land Rover, but got caught at a traffic light.

Rosa knew the code to the entry gate at her uncle's house, so she turned around and let herself into the complex. She saw Franco's Shelby GT parked in front of the house, so she used her key to enter.

“Hello? Franco?” She heard no reply. She checked her uncle's office. On a whim, she pressed the play button on his Code-A-Phone telephone recorder. There was one message, from Franco:

“Pop. I got the tree from the nursery. I'll meet you out there.”

Rosa knew that “out there” meant the ranch. Her uncle Paulo had a penchant for planting trees around the ranch house. It was an hour's drive, but she had nothing better to do, and she was anxious to move forward with the sale of her late father's restaurants.

She drove back to her father's house, a few miles away on West Tropicana, left her Corvette there, and fired up the Jeep Wrangler, the vehicle she and her father always took to the ranch. Rosa hadn't been “out there” in months, and she missed the place. A ranch in name only, it consisted of a thousand acres of desert dirt and scrub rising to a pine-forested slope in the Spring Mountains, bordering the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest. Her father had often taken her there as a little girl, and she had enjoyed hiking and horseback riding for miles in the national forest, and swimming in the pool her uncle had built in the yard. She thought the trip there, in her father's Jeep, would do her good.

On the way to the ranch, she began to get giddy, thinking what fun it was going to be to surprise her uncle, and her cousin Franco. The sale of the restaurants had begun to make her feel closer to them, standoffish as they were. She had even begun to believe she could win them over, and finally get them to accept her as family. She had no one else. No steady boyfriend, though she dated often enough. She had even lost touch with her high school friends and her sorority sisters from UT.

The sun was low in the sky as she eased up to the last ridge in the dirt road that led to the ranch house. The ridge would give her a view of the house and surrounding outbuildings from a couple hundred yards away. Suspecting her uncle and cousin might be lounging poolside this time of day, she decided to stop the Jeep and get out with her father's hunting binoculars to check out the scene from afar. She didn't want them to spot her from the pool, spoiling her surprise. Killing the motor of the Jeep, she felt the mountain quietude wash over her, and she was glad she had come. Gravel crunched under her sneakers as she walked up the road with the binoculars. She peeked over the ridge. She saw no one. Good. She might be able to coast up to the house undetected and surprise them.

Lifting the optics to her eyes, she saw that the diesel backhoe had been pulled out of the barn, and a hole had been dug in the backyard. Franco's four-wheel-drive Ford pickup was backed up to the hole, and a pine tree with a large root ball waited on the tailgate. Rosa smiled as she lowered the binoculars. Her uncle had nurtured a couple dozen saplings over the years. A man who liked to plant trees had to have a heart, she thought.

Just then, she heard the corrugated tin door fly open on the toolshed, and saw three men walk out of the dark interior of the little ramshackle building. The first man staggered as he stepped into the light. Rosa recognized the man. One of her uncle's top men, the manager of his largest casino: The Castilian. His name was Bert something-or-other. She knew him by his permanent limp, from an auto accident, she had been told. Bert couldn't bend his right knee, so his gait was easy to recognize, even as he stumbled out of the shed. Drunk already, this time of day? She shook her head and smirked, then raised the binoculars for a closer look.

Papa Martini and Franco followed close behind Bert. Franco was wiping his hands on a rag. As she focused the lenses, Rosa got a better look at Bert, and her breath caught in her throat. Blood covered his face and his shirt. Had he fallen? Was he that drunk? She thought she had better get to the house quick and help the men doctor Bert's injuries. But something urged her to watch a moment longer.

Papa Martini grabbed Bert's arm to guide him. But instead of going to the house, he led Bert to the edge of the hole that had been dug for the planting of the tree. The two men stopped there, and her uncle stepped aside. Franco came up behind Bert. He threw the rag he had been using to wipe his hands into the hole. Then he reached into the front of his trousers and pulled out his pistol. He put it to the back of Bert's head.

Bert's head jerked forward, spray flying from the exit wound in his forehead. By the time the crack of the gunshot reached Rosa, Bert had already buckled and fallen into the hole. She dropped the binoculars, her breath shuttering into her lungs. She placed both hands over her mouth to keep that breath from screaming out. She collapsed onto her hands and knees on the gravel road, partly from weakness, and partly because she didn't want them to spot her. One of the lenses from the binoculars had shattered, the pieces scattered on the gravel.

She lost track of time, trying to make sense of everything—the things she had heard and denied, the naive fool she had been, and what she had just witnessed. She heard the diesel engine of the backhoe start up, and peeked over the ridge again. The tree had been lowered into place on top of Bert's body, and Papa Martini was using the machine to fill in the hole around it with dirt. Franco was using a garden hose to spray the inside of the toolshed.

The diesel engine died, though there was dirt left to spread. The first wave of fear hit Rosa like an electrical shock. Had she been spotted? She froze, afraid to move, or even to breathe. Franco was rolling the garden hose. In the dry mountain air, sound carried easily. She heard her uncle shout: