Denton - 01 - Dead Folks' Blues

  Just as the light disappeared, the kitchen door imploded, the heavy brass doorknob bouncing off the wall behind it. A black form came at me out of the darkness, blocking out all light behind it. Something caught me in the chest, threw me backward. I felt myself airborne for a split second. Then I slammed down on the kitchen floor and lay there helpless.

  Then there was weight on me and I couldn’t move my arms, an oppressive, awful heaviness that was crushing my chest, pinning me to the floor, with the world going blacker around me by the second.

  In what I was afraid was going to be my last coherent thought, I realized I couldn’t breathe anymore.…

  By Steven Womack:

  The Harry James Denton Books

  DEAD FOLKS’ BLUES*

  TORCH TOWN BOOGIE*

  WAY PAST DEAD*

  CHAIN OF FOOLS*

  The Jack Lynch Trilogy

  MURPHY’S FAULT

  SMASH CUT

  THE SOFTWARE BOMB

  *Published by Ballantine Books

  Copyright © 1992 by Steven Womack

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 92-97042

  eISBN: 978-0-307-77592-4

  v3.1

  I’m deeply indebted to a number of people who helped me out with advice, guidance, inspiration, and an insider’s point of view of many things I was unfamiliar with. Here are just a few:

  Roberta Rosser, C.M.A.,—better known as Bert—of Nashville’s T.E. Simpkins Forensic Science Center—better known as The Morgue—was tremendously helpful in explaining how autopsies are done, how coroners work, and the unique perspective one can’t help but gain in that line of work.

  Lieutenant Tommy Jacobs, head of the Metropolitan Nashville-Davidson County Police Department Homicide Division, gave me great insights into a homicide investigator’s work, how witnesses are interrogated, and a sense of the unusual mindset that police work calls for. He also lent me a copy of Dr. LeMoyne Snyder’s Homicide Investigation, which I’d advise against reading on a full stomach.

  I know just enough about guns to get hurt by one. That’s why when I needed to know more about weapons, I went to Ed Mason, owner of Madison, Tennessee’s Gun Mart. He’s smart, helpful, and heavily armed. He knows his work. I’m grateful to him.

  Jeff and Amy Morland, of DB Locators, Inc., in Nashville (I’ll let you guess what the DB stands for) gave me deep and wonderful insights into the business of skip tracing and the art of repo’ing. Writers make it up; these guys do it for real. In the midst of it all, Amy finds time to write. And well, at that.

  As always, Jeris Bragan and Woody Eargle, two long-time attendees of my writing workshop at the Tennessee State Penitentiary, contributed more than I can explain here. Their support and friendship means a lot.

  Carole Abel, my agent, mother-confessor, and confidante, has patiently and serenely seen me through the rough waters of publishing. In fact, she’s kept me in this business the last few years. The jury’s still out on whether this is a boon to humanity, but I’m grateful as hell.

  Joe Blades, whose editorial guidance and friendship is a wonderful gift, continues to amaze me. It’s hard to get used to an editor who finds time to be a good friend as well as an inspired editor. I’m having a great time making the adjustment, though.

  Jean Yarbrough, my mother-in-law, a voracious reader and super copy editor, was understanding enough (or foolish enough, depending on one’s perspective) to let her daughter marry a writer. She helped me a lot in preparing this manuscript. You’ll hear no mother-in-law jokes in this house.

  My wife, Dr. Cathryn Yarbrough, insisted on editing this manuscript while awaiting treatment for mugging injuries in the Vanderbilt Hospital emergency room. Talk about grit. See why I married this woman? At the risk of repeating myself, all writers should fall in love with a psychologist. After that, they should marry one.

  Finally, I’m grateful for all the things that make Nashville such a fascinating place to live. No kidding. It’s a writer’s gold mine.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  All right, I’ll tell you. But you have to promise not to laugh, okay? I’m a private investigator. In Nashville, Tennessee.

  Stop snickering.

  No, I do not wear a trench coat, or a double-breasted suit, or a homburg. I don’t smoke cigarettes or drink straight Scotch out of the desk drawer in my office, and I don’t smack women around.

  These days, they hit back. Hard.

  Neither do I sing country music, nor write country music, nor even listen to country music. My tastes run to jazz, and I did not just fall off the turnip truck. I was born here, but I went to school in Boston, spent my junior year abroad in France, and wear shoes almost every day. I can lay on a country accent as thick as molasses on a frosty morning, if I have to. But I can also throw in enough Newport, Rhode Island, to make Tom Wicker sound like a hick.

  I can hear you now: But a private detective, in Nashville, Tennessee? Give me a break.…

  Well, let me tell you, friend, we’ve got a million people in this city now. And any city that’ll elect as mayor a guy who plays harmonica on Donahue and explains how it’s okay for him to be engaged to his fourth wife while still married to his third, is a city that’s got character. I’ve been to some interesting and corrupt locales in my time: New Orleans, New York City, all of Texas. And believe me, they’ve got nothing on this place.

  After all, how many cities elect a sheriff named Fate, a man who winds up in a federal penitentiary for corruption and gets visits from his buddy Waylon Jennings? Speaking of sheriffs, I think this state holds the national record for the most ex-sheriffs now doing time behind bars.

  Freaking Greek tragedy, that’s what it is. I love this city. It cracks me up.

  So I’m a detective. I didn’t say I was a competent detective. I didn’t even say I’d been doing it very long. In fact, I just opened my office about two months ago, a couple of weeks after I got fired from the paper.

  I was a newspaper reporter, and I like to think I was a good one. In fact, I was too good. The publisher of the newspaper had a brother who was a lobbyist, and he got involved with this group of amusement operators; you know, guys who run video game parlors and stuff like that. These operators—to coin a phrase—had a pretty strong lobby working to pass a law that allowed video poker machines to pay off. I mean, it’s not like pinball machines and video games hadn’t been paying off for years anyway. It’s just that these guys were trying to get it legal so they could stop paying protection money to the small-town cops.

  Any
way, the publisher’s brother was handing out hundred dollar bills like business cards on Legislative Plaza. Most people knew that it was standard operating procedure on the Hill. But this guy started getting cocky, because his brother owned the local paper and they were all well-connected. Blatant as hell he was, so I wrote a story about his contributions that were papering the legislative halls in green.

  I knew the city editor would never sanction the story, but I decided to throw it in the queue just to get a rise out of the desk. Only problem was, we had this new guy on the night staff. We’d hired him from Oklahoma, and he really didn’t know his way around yet. He released the story.

  The exposé ran page one, below the fold.

  Nobody was more surprised than I was. The early edition hit the newsstand, and the publisher hit the ceiling. Went completely ballistic. He had the story pulled and loose copies collected from the newsstands.

  By noon, the story was gone and so was I.

  So here I am, thirty-five years old, living from paycheck to paycheck, and with a name that’s, professionally speaking, Mud. But what the hell, I was getting bored anyway. I remembered reading somewhere that in this state the only prerequisite for a detective’s license is a background check. I had a hard time believing it was that slack, so I called a buddy in the D.A.’s office. He said the law was changing in January; after the first of the year, you’d actually have to have credentials to be licensed.

  So with six weeks to spare, I rushed downtown, paid my $75.00, had my picture taken, passed a quick computer check, and became a private investigator.

  I sunk the last of my meager savings into setting up an office down on Seventh Avenue, near Church Street, in a dumpy building nestled between a tiny restaurant and a three-story parking lot. I was on the top floor, one room only, with a dirty, greasy window that looked out on an alley strewn with broken bottles of Night Train and Wild Irish Rose. But it was only $200.00 a month, utilities included. Factor in a hundred bucks or so to get the phone started up, a couple hundred for stationery and business cards, and another hundred for an old wooden desk and a filing cabinet, and voilà: instant office.

  I was almost proud that day, when the sign painter finished stenciling HARRY JAMES DENTON—PRIVATE INVESTIGATIONS on my door. I just hope to hell my parents don’t find out.

  I figured my skills as a reporter would easily transfer to my new field, and I hoped my hanging around the courthouse for the better part of ten years would get me jobs.

  Wrong.

  I went from instant office to instant poverty. I called every lawyer I knew, every politician, every well-connected crony I could find.

  I couldn’t get arrested.

  A month after I opened up, I had to give up my expensive apartment in Green Hills and move across the river to East Nashville, to the funky part of town, to the neighbourhood where Archie Bunker would’ve lived if he’d been born in Music City and driven a truck for a living. I found a little old retired lady who’d had her attic converted into an apartment. She knocked ten bucks a month off the rent if I’d cut the grass in the summertime. I took it.

  Finally, I called Lonnie Smith, a buddy I’d met back when I was doing a story about repo men. Lonnie came to Nashville to make it big in the Grand Ole Opry and wound up repossessing cars. He’s been doing it about twenty years now. And he hates the movie Repo Man.

  “That picture sucked,” he said, in his rapid-fire, high-pitched voice. “Repo’ing ain’t nothing like that. Most of the time the job is downright boring.”

  He was trying to talk me into going to work for him, repossessing cars and tracking down deadbeats.

  “Business’s been good lately,” he peppered. “And it ain’t anywhere near as dangerous as people think. I’ve repossessed ten, maybe fifteen thousand cars in my life. And I only been beat up about a dozen times.”

  Thanks, Lonnie. I’m real reassured.

  Times being what they were, though, I took the job. Our first gig together was grabbing some guy’s pickup out by the lake. We drove out I-40, got off at Stewart’s Ferry Pike, and cut left to drive across Percy Priest Dam. It was a cold day, windy, one of the last before the summer’s heat settled in. In this part of the country, you don’t get much spring; one day you’re freezing, the next you’re sweating. The whitecaps on the lake jumped, as sharp and white as teeth. We drove on a mile or so past the lake and pulled into an apartment complex.

  “I know the guy lives here, but I don’t know which apartment.”

  “So let’s ask at the office,” I offered.

  Lonnie turned to me in the cab of his dirty pickup and grinned. “How long you been in the real world?”

  “They won’t tell you, huh?”

  “Violation of privacy. But there’re ways.”

  We walked into the office where a creamy redhead in a flowered dress sat behind a typewriter.

  “Excuse me, ma’am,” Lonnie drawled, switching into his good-ole-boy voice. Nobody would ever have guessed Lonnie’d moved down here from Brooklyn. “But I lost my buddy, Joey Richards. I was over here helping him move in a month or so ago, and I know it was over this way—” Lonnie pointed off in some vague direction past her head. “But for the life of me, darlin’, I can’t remember which building it was. Can you help me here?”

  She eyed us cautiously. Lonnie’d warned me this might be dirty work, so I was in an old flannel shirt and jeans. Red stared at us a second, then decided we were too dumb to be anything but what we looked like.

  “I’m not really supposed to give out that information,” she said.

  “Aw, Joey ain’t gonna mind. He’s waiting for us right now. We’re gonna go fishing.”

  Lonnie was as slick as Elvis’s pomade. Red didn’t have a chance. She pulled a computer printout off her desk and scanned the list.

  “Okay, he’s down in C Building. Apartment nine.”

  Lonnie grinned at her. She smiled back, hoping, I guess, that he wasn’t going to hit on her or anything.

  “First we find his truck and block it in,” Lonnie explained back out in the cold wind, “then we knock on his door. See if he’ll give us the keys.”

  “You think he might do that?”

  “Sometimes they do. People usually know when they’re about to get repo’d. Hell, the finance companies give ‘em every chance they can. What the hell’s a finance company going to do with a bunch of repossessed cars? They don’t want vehicles; they want their money. Yeah,” Lonnie continued, spitting out the left side of his mouth, “he knows we’re coming.”

  I climbed back in the cab of Lonnie’s truck and picked up the Xeroxed paperwork. Guy had an ’84 Ford Ranger, red, license number DTB 042. “So we just drive around, huh?”

  “Yeah, I called the warehouse where the guy works. Today’s his day off. He ought to be here somewhere.”

  We cruised the parking lot slowly. There was no red Ford pickup in front of C Building.

  “Maybe the guy’s not here,” I said.

  “Nah, he’s here. Sucker knows we’re after him. He’s got the truck hid somewhere.”

  We drove on around. In the back of the complex, there was an area roped off for people to park boats and trailers, to keep them out of the way of the regular traffic. Behind that parking area, partially up on the grass, sat a red Ford Ranger backed in, nose out, so you couldn’t see the license plate.

  “Boogie-woogie,” Lonnie sang. My heart started beating faster. Lonnie wheeled his three-quarter ton Chevy around the boats, then pulled up in front of the Ranger and parked T-bone style. The woods were behind the truck, us in front.

  Lonnie hopped out on his side and went around to the back of the Ford.

  “Got him,” he said. “Plates check out.”

  I tried the door to the truck. “Locked.”

  “Okay,” Lonnie instructed, “let’s go knock on the guy’s door.”

  We trotted around the complex to C Building and up a flight. Lonnie turned to me, grinned, and knocked on the door three times
.

  We heard a shuffling inside, and the low drone of a television. But no answer to our knock. Lonnie pounded on the door again, this time a little harder.

  “Mr. Richards, can we talk to you, sir?” he shouted.

  There was only silence from inside, not even the television now.

  “Mr. Richards,” Lonnie called, banging the door one last time.

  “What do we do now?” I asked. Lonnie stood there a moment, glaring at the door.

  “Guy wants to be an asshole, ’sokay by me. Let’s go get his truck.”

  “You going to hot wire it?”

  Lonnie grinned at me again. “You are new at this. Nobody hot wires cars, anymore, son. It’s too much trouble. Besides, you damage a repo’d car, you gotta pay for it. If I ain’t got a key what fits it, we’ll just call a wrecker.”

  We walked back to the trucks. Lonnie reached under the seat and extracted a ring of keys as big around as a Frisbee. Then he pulled out a thin hacksaw blade with a notch cut in one end. I’d never seen anybody slim jim a car open before. I watched in admiration as Lonnie slipped the blade inside the door, past the rotting black-rubber seal, and swished it around for a couple of seconds. Then he seemed to latch on to something, pull just a hair, and I saw the door lock inside the cab of the Ranger pop up.

  “Damn, man,” I said, “I’m impressed.”

  Lonnie smiled. “Nothing to it. Beats punching a time clock.”

  He climbed inside the truck and fiddled with the keys, trying to find the match for the Ranger’s ignition lock. I was beginning to think maybe this car repossessing stuff wasn’t too shabby a way to make a living … when I heard footsteps pounding up the asphalt behind us.

  I turned just as this balding, unshaved guy in a T-shirt, belly hanging over his belt like a sack of flour, came chaining straight at us with an ax handle raised over his head. My eyes popped wide open as the guy let out a lunatic banshee scream.