"Hiaasen, Carl - Basket Case" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hiaasen Carl)

One night I fell through a hole in my soul,
And you followed me down, followed me down.
I fell till the blackness broke low into dawn
And you followed me down till you drowned....
Smiling, I drain the beer. Irony abounds! Poor Jimmy.
Again I close my eyes.
When I awake, it's daybreak. The phone is ringing and with chagrin I realize I've forgotten to turn off the call-forwarding from my newsroom number. It can only be a reader on the other end of the line, and no possible good can come from speaking to a reader at such an ungodly hour. Yet the interruption of sleep has made me so bilious that I lunge for the receiver as if it were a cocked revolver.
"Yeah, what?" I say gruffly, to put the caller on the defensive.
"Is this Mr. Tagger?" Woman's voice.
"Yeah."
"This is Janet. Janet Thrush. I read what all you wrote about my brother in the paper."
Idiotically, I find myself anticipating a compliment. Instead I hear a scornful snort.
"Holy shit," says Jimmy Stoma's sister, "did you get scammed, or what!"

4
When I went to work for this newspaper I was forty years old, the same age as Jack London when he died. I'm now forty-six. Elvis Presley died at forty-six. So did President Kennedy. George Orwell, too.
It's an occupational hazard for obituary writers-memorizing the ages at which famous people have expired, and compulsively employing such trivia to track the arc of one's own life. I can't seem to stop myself.
Not being a rotund pillhead with clogged valves, I am statistically unlikely to expire on the toilet, as Elvis did. As for succumbing to a political assassination, I'm too obscure to attract a competent sniper. Nonetheless, my forty-sixth birthday brought a torrent of irrational anxieties that have not abated in eleven months. If death could snatch such heavy hitters as Elvis and JFK, a nobody like me is easy pickings.
Implicit in the dread of early demise is a lugubrious awareness of underachievement. At my age, Elvis was the King; Kennedy, the leader of the free world. Me, I'm sitting in a donut shop in Beckerville reading a newspaper story about a dead musician, a story I apparently have botched. Nice display, though: front of the Metro section, above the fold. The text is accompanied by a recent Reuters photo of the deceased, looking tanned and happy at a benefit barbecue for Reef Relief. Even the headline isn't terrible: Ex-Rocker Dies in Bahamas Diving Mishap. (James Bradley Stomarti, by the way, passed away at the same age as Dennis Wilson and John Kennedy Jr.)
Janet Thrush-who else could it be?-takes the stool next to me and says, "First off, nobody calls me Jan."
"Deal."
"It's Janet. My ex once called me Jan and I stuck a cocktail fork in his femoral artery."
I am careful to display no curiosity about the marriage.
"So, Janet, exactly how did Cleo Rio scam me?"
"She lied about her new record-'Waterlogged Heart' or whatever. Jimmy's not producing it."
Janet has freckles on her nose and unruly ash-blond hair and green bulb earrings the size of Yule ornaments. She's wearing Wayfarers and a pastel tube top over tight jeans, and looks at least five years younger than her brother.
"How do you know he wasn't producing it?" I ask.
"A, because Jimmy would've told me. B, because he was too busy working on his own record."
"Hold on." I reach for my pen and notebook.
"Fact, I didn't even know Cleo had a CD in the works. My brother never said a word about it."
"When's the last time you spoke?"
"Day he died." Janet blows on her coffee, steaming up the sunglasses.
"He called you from the Bahamas?"
She nods. "I can't ever call him. Not with her around. Cleo goes jiggy."
In contrast to Jimmy's widow, Janet speaks of her late brother in the present tense, which enhances her credibility. I write down what she says, even though there's little chance of using it in another story. Obituaries tend to be one-shot deals.
Besides, it's her word against Cleo's.
"She didn't even mention his new record?" Janet sounds incredulous.
"Not a word."
"What a tramp." Her voice cracks. The coffee cup is suspended halfway to her lips.
"She told me Jimmy was finished with the music business until he met her," I say.
"And you believed that?"
"Why wouldn't I? He hasn't had an album out since Stomatose. Besides, you never called me back yesterday. The story would have been different if you had."
This is low on my part, pinning a factual omission on a grieving relative. Janet, however, seems unoffended.
"FYI," she says, "my brother's been working on that album for four years. Maybe five."
I feel vaguely sick to my stomach. Some reporter in the music trades probably knows about the unfinished Jimmy Stoma CD, and it'll be the lead of his story. It would've been the lead of mine, too, if only Jimmy's widow had thought to tell me about it.
"You don't look so good, Mr. Tagger. You get a bad cruller?"
"Call me Jack. Why doesn't Cleo like you?"
"Because I know what she is." Janet smiles tightly. "Now you know, too."
In the parking lot, I walk Jimmy's sister to her car, an old black Miata that looks about as perky as a rat turd. By way of explanation, she says, "I clobbered an ambulance." Then she adds: "Not on purpose, don't worry."
I tell her I've got one more question; a heavy one. "You think your brother's really dead?"