Dagger Key and Other Stories

  “He didn’t like it…” Wine paused for dramatic effect. “He was knocked out.”

  I wondered how Geffen had gotten hold of the EP. Mine not to reason why, I figured.

  Wine told me that Geffen wanted to hear more. Did I have any other recorded material?

  “I’ve got nine songs on tape,” I said. “But some of them are raw.”

  “David likes raw. Can we get a dupe?”

  “You know…I usually prefer to push out an album or two before I look for a deal.”

  “Listen, Vernon. We’re not going to let you go to the poorhouse on this.”

  “That’s a relief.”

  “In fact, David wanted me to sound you out about our bringing you in under the Dreamworks umbrella.”

  Stunned, I said, “In what capacity?”

  “I’ll let David tell you about that. He’ll call you in a day or two. He’s had his eye on you for some time.”

  I envisioned Sauron spying from his dark tower. I had a dim view of corporate life and I wasn’t as overwhelmed by this news as Wine had likely presumed I would be. After the call ended, however, I felt as if I had modeled for Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel mural, the man about to be touched by God’s billionaire-ish finger. My impulse was to tell Stanky, but I didn’t want his ego to grow more swollen. I called Andrea and learned she would be in court until mid-afternoon. I started to call Rudy, then thought it would be too easy for him to refuse me over the phone. Better to yank him out of his cave and buy him lunch. I wanted to bust his chops about missing the EP release and I needed to talk with someone face-to-face, to analyze this thing that was happening around Stanky. Had the buzz I’d generated about him taken wings on a magical current? The idea that David Geffen was planning to call seemed preposterous. Was Stanky that good? Was I? What, if anything, did Geffen have in mind? Rudy, who enjoyed playing Yoda to my Luke, would help place these questions in coherent perspective.

  When I reached Rudy’s office, I found Gwen on the phone. Her make-up, usually perfect, was in need of repair; it appeared that she had been crying. “I don’t know,” she said with strain in her voice. “You’ll have to…no. I really don’t know.”

  I pointed to the inner office and mouthed, Is he in?

  She signaled me to wait.

  “I’ve got someone here,” she said into the phone. “I’ll have to…yes. Yes, I will let you know. All right. Yes. Goodbye.” She hung up and, her chin quivering, tried several times to speak, finally blurting out, “I’m so sorry. He’s dead. Rudy’s dead.”

  I think I may have laughed—I made some sort of noise, some expression of denial, yet I knew it was true. My face flooded with heat and I went back a step, as if the words had thrown me off-balance.

  Gwen said that Rudy had committed suicide early that morning. He had—according to his wife—worked in the office until after midnight, then driven home and taken some pills. The phone rang again. I left Gwen to deal with it and stepped into the inner office to call Beth. I sat at Rudy’s desk, but that felt wrong, so I walked around with the phone for a while. Rudy had been a depressed guy, but hell everyone in Black William was depressed about something. I thought that I had been way more depressed than Rudy. He seemed to have it together. Nice wife, healthy income, kids. Sure, he was a for-shit architect in a for-shit town, and not doing the work he wanted, but that was no reason to kill yourself.

  Standing by the drafting table, I saw his waste basket was crammed with torn paper. A crawly sensation rippled the skin between my shoulder blades. I dumped the shreds onto the table. Rudy had done a compulsive job of tearing them up, but I could tell they were pieces of his comic strip. Painstakingly, I sorted through them and managed to reassemble most of a frame. In it, a pair of black hands (presumably belonging to a mineworker) were holding a gobbet of pork, as though in offering; above it floated a spiky white ball. The ball had extruded a longish spike to penetrate the pork and the image gave the impression that the ball was sucking meat through a straw. I stared at the frame, trying to interpret it, to tie the image in with everything that had happened, but I felt a vibration pass through my body, like the heavy, impersonal signal of Rudy’s death, and I imagined him on the bathroom floor, foam on his mouth, and I had to sit back down.

  Beth, when I called her, didn’t feel like talking. I asked if there was anything I could do, and she said if I could find out when the police were going to release the body, she would appreciate it. She said she would let me know about the funeral, sounding—as had Gwen—like someone who was barely holding it together. Hearing that in her voice caused me to leak a few tears and, when she heard me start to cry, she quickly got off the phone, as if she didn’t want my lesser grief to pollute her own, as if Rudy dying had broken whatever bond there was between us. I thought this might be true.