As she rides by

surprise—there wasn’t one photo of him posed with clients or other celebrities and then lovingly signed, as is the show business norm, from my experience. I’d noticed the OD’d kid’s fingertips were callused in the way that all guitar players’ digits get after a while; it seemed unlikely he’d wind up smiling down from some mogul’s wall. Him and a million others. Know what the cops had found when they went through the pockets of his fake army surplus pants? A couple of guitar picks and a wad of Monopoly money.
    “So what are you lookin’ at?” Dick said then.
    “Bare walls,” I said.
    He laughed. “It was my first wife’s idea. I forget her name. I think it ended with an ‘i,’ so it could have been Bambi or Bobbi. She said it was tacky, a whole lotta glossies, she said it made the place look like a second-rate delicatessen; she said what I should do is like right before a meeting I should put up just one photo of the guy I got the meeting with. That way I don’t look tacky and he thinks I think he’s my main man.”
    I laughed.
    “What the hell,” he said, waving one hand. “So what I was saying was, how come? How come is, I was their manager too late in the game, it was all over pretty much by then, they were already too deep in the doodly squat, they’d signed everything but the Declaration of Independence by then, the dummies. We did what we could, me and the present incumbent next door there”—he gestured with his thumb to the door that led to his wife’s office—“but she’ll give you the details on that if you’re interested and if she hasn’t finished that giant thermos of martinis she brings to the office every day in a brown bag that she thinks I think is cranapple juice. What you want from me, if I heard you right this a.m. when you called, is anything I know about the way Jonesy, pres and sole owner of Western Records, Inc., does business.”
    “You’d make an old man very happy if you did,” I said, “and also help him earn a few measly bucks.”
    “Speakin’ of which,” he said, “bucks he’s got. Skid Row Annie in there can probably find out how many, if she don’t know already; she sure knows how many I’ve got, down to six decimals.”
    “These might help,” I said, hefting the manila folder. “Lots of bank statements and what have you in here, I took a peek earlier.”
    “So Annie’ll check,” he said. “Big deal. Think Jonesy’s gonna give you some tarted-up accounts for Annie to run her beady eyes over? Forget it. As for me, I never heard one word that Jonesy was less than ultra straight, and you can’t say that about too many guys in this rotten business.”
    “Or any other,” I said.
    He shrugged. “Know what? He don’t even send out large, well-attired dudes with pockets of C-notes and a plenteous supply of coke to all the radio stations. He doesn’t try to bribe DJs and programmers either directly or with expensive Christmas presents; forget about two-hundred-buck call girls stoppin’ by their hotel rooms, hell, he doesn’t even try and rig the charts, and I don’t mean the weather charts, neither. Heavens to Betsy, what secrets is little moi disclosing! What you must think of us!”
    I grinned, found the right control, and tipped my chair back a little further. “Just out of curiosity,” I said, “how do you rig a chart, anyway?”
    “Listen,” he said, “airplay equals singles chart position which equals album sales, anything hard about that? The thing is, how do you get airplay? Pluggers can get you some, most you get from checkin’ out what singles are moving in the record stores. If it’s movin’, it gets played. Now, although it’s supposed to be this great secret, every record company in the world has a list of what outlets are on the checklist types like Gallup use to compile their charts. So the record company either pays the manager of one of these retail outlets—stores to you—to rig his daily totals in their favor, or how about sending out a fast-movin’ team of buyers to hit all the stores in the list. In England it’s easier, you got fewer stores to cover, shit, for a few grand your record starts burning up the sales charts, so it pops up on the singles chart, so it gets played, and around and around we go. Last I heard, over there weekly sales of twenty-five hundred or so are enough to break into the Top 75 and maybe seven to eight thousand to break the Top 40, which automatically gets you onto most