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."
"Miranda's brother and her dad are in the band?"
Milo spread his hands. "Welcome to Hillbilly World. Funny thing is, until about two years ago Miranda was considered the w?talented one in the family. Then Tilden Sheckly, the lovely human being you just met, took an interest in her."
"Sheckly is part of your problem."
Milo reached for his candy bowl. "Butterscotch or peppermint?"
"Definitely butterscotch."
He threw me a roll of midget Life Savers, then took two for himself. "Sheck owns that big honkytonk on the way to Medina Lake, the Indian Paintbrush. You know the place?"
I nodded. Anybody who'd ever driven toward Medina Lake knew the Indian Paintbrush. Plopped next to the highway in the middle of several hundred acres of rock and dirt, the dance hall looked like the world's largest portable john—a white corrugated metal box big enough to accommodate a shopping mall.
"Paintbrush Enterprises," I speculated. "The company who's been sending Julie Kearnes biweekly deposits."
Milo stared at me. "Do I want to know how you got access to her bank account?"
"No."
He cracked a smile. "Sheck is known for promoting pet acts. Usually pretty younger women. He lets them open for his headliners on weekends, sometimes gets them into his house band. Sooner or later, he gets them into