Spiral

still fine. So, I don’t give them any excuse to stop me.”
    ”What’s the excuse for where we’ve been tonight?” Eisen did glance over this time. ”What do you mean?”
    ”Those bars, and your ‘lessons’ on music.”
    His eyes went back to the road. ”Cuddy, what did you see and hear?”
    ”Three different kinds of entertainment.”
    ”Describe them.”
    ”Why?”
    ”Indulge me.”
    I said, ”Female vocalist with accompaniment, versatile band with fiddler, show band with a male lead singer.”
    ”Okay, that’s objective. How about subjective?”
    I tried to capture what I’d felt. ”People with talent, enjoying themselves.”
    ”That’s it. On the fucking button. Everybody on those stages was talented, and the better performers brought out the best in the rest. Made them play up to the level of the most talented person on the stage.”
    ”Your point?”
    ”My point,” said Eisen, ”is that those people are gonna be talented, and perform like that, no matter what’s hot on the CHR stations.”
    ”The top-40 ones.”
    ”Like I told you in my office. All the performers you saw tonight, they’re gonna be fine, regardless of which way the fickle fucking wind blows.”
    I thought I saw it. ”But Spiral won’t be.”
    A nod, sad in its certainty. ”That’s right, too. Spi and the boys, they’re has-beens, a garage band that just happened to have the right sound for a couple of years, and an echo of the right sound for a couple more. Except maybe for Ricky, and even he has just the talent, not the instinct.”
    ”The instinct?”
    ”It’s like an animal thing. The desire to climb the ladder of success with a fucking knife between your teeth.”
    ”I thought I saw some of that when I spoke with Spi Held.”
    ”No.” A shake of the head, even sadder than the nod had been. ”No, what you saw in Spi is desperation. The guy was on top once, and that’s a hell of a sweet taste to have in your mouth, Cuddy. Only problem is, it doesn’t last very long And when that sweet taste works its way from your mouth to your gut, it starts rotting down there. Makes you do things you wouldn’t ordinarily.”
    Eisen turned into the drive for my hotel. Instead of using the circular spur servicing the main entrance, though, he went past the pool area and came to a stop at the entrance to the parking garage.
    I shifted sidesaddle in my seat to face him. ”There a reason we’re back here?”
    ”Yeah. I don’t want some fucking bellhop hearing me ask you questions with names attached to them.”
    ”Like what?”
    Eisen squeezed the steering wheel of his car like an exercise machine. ”Twenty, twenty-five years ago, I managed a mixed bag of fucking kids with more energy than talent, and more talent than brains. You saw for yourself how fucked up they all are, and believe me, Tommy O’Dell was even more fucked up than the ones who lived through it.”
    ”Through what?”
    ”The rock-star scene, with all it does to you for the little it does for you. But there’s one thing it does real well, Cuddy, and that’s produce money. Fuck, you’d think it shits the stuff, the way the green rolls in.”
    I thought back to Gordo Lazar’s description of Eisen and Held, on that ”comforter of cash” in the bedroom of their tour bus. ”But that was then.”
    ”And this is now. Or it could have been, Very didn’t piss somebody off enough to snuff her.”
    I stared at Eisen. ”If you have a point, Mitch, I’m not seeing it.”
    He returned my stare, the eyes hard. ”There’s a possibility, a faint fucking thread of a chance, that I can get that I mixed bag of fuckheads up and running again enough to make some real money out of all this.”
    ”You said as much in your office.”
    ”The right spin, yeah. But that’d take a lot of my time for no real return unless that thread comes through.” Eisen’s eyes grew harder. ”And even that fucking thread gets cut, the money train don’t stop at the station anymore.”
    ”Colonel Helides backing the band.”
    ”Right. So here’s what I figure. Very’s killed by somebody in the band, we’re fucked with the Colonel. He’s never gonna keep writing checks’ll remind him of what one of them did.”
    ”Go on.”
    ”But, I figure that if somebody else did his granddaughter, then maybe, just maybe, the money train rolls on, kind of a sympathy vote, you might say.”
    I willed the words to my lips. ”A memorial almost.”
    ”Exact-a-mundo. Like a