Denton - 01 - Dead Folks' Blues Read online

  “Me, too. I had to leave earlier. Had to check something out.”

  He grabbed my arm and pulled me closer to him. In the crowded room, with a buzzing conversational din all around us, nobody was going to hear anything we said. But Walter wanted to make sure.

  “Are you still working on this, Harry?” he whispered.

  “Yeah. Of course.”

  “Harry, I want you to stop. This is killing Rachel. It’s not what she wants.”

  “What do you mean?” I demanded. “She wants the person who murdered Conrad, doesn’t she?”

  “Yes, she wants him. Bad. But she doesn’t want anything to happen to you. And you have a lousy habit of getting yourself into places where you shouldn’t be.”

  Tension radiated through my shoulders, and I found myself wanting to tell him to mind his own business. This was, after all, between my client and me. Walter, though, was my lawyer and he was a buddy. So I guess he had the right to butt in if he wanted to.

  “Walter, we’ve been on this ride before. I can take care of myself. This is important to me, damn it. And I’m not quitting.”

  “Suit yourself, you jerk,” he snapped, letting my arm go with a push. “But when you get hurt, don’t come yelling to me for help.”

  I walked away without saying anything else. He’ll cool off, I thought. Everybody’s walking the edge today.

  Inside the chapel, Rachel stood in a simple black dress, her hair pulled back in a bun, with just enough makeup to cover the dark circles under her eyes. She was at the head of the aisle, a few steps away from the coffin and the still-expanding circle of wreaths and flowers. No tears had been expended by the mourners, but I’ll bet some checkbooks had been strained. It was a great day to be a florist.

  I stood halfway down the aisle for a moment, in the long line of people waiting to extend condolences, when I spotted Howard Spellman at the back of the chapel. He sat off in a corner by himself, at the far end of the last pew. I broke from the line and walked back down the green carpet, then cut in toward him. He watched me without getting up, and I slid into the seat next to him.

  “Lieutenant Spellman,” I said. “How nice to see you again.”

  “Hello, Denton.”

  I followed his eyes toward the front of the sanctuary. He was watching Rachel, along with several other people I didn’t recognize, as they shook hands in the receiving line.

  “Her family?” I asked.

  “The two on the left are her parents. The silver-haired one on the right is his father. I understand Fletcher’s mother had to leave. Too much for her.”

  “How about the tall guy at the end?”

  “Mrs. Fletcher’s brother, I think. The man and the woman on the other end are Fletcher’s brother and sister.”

  “Fletcher had siblings?” I asked.

  Spellman turned to me. “He was human, you know.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “People do have brothers, sisters, cousins.”

  “Funny,” I commented, “I’d have guessed that Fletcher was an only child. Maybe it was the combination of being an overachiever and difficult to deal with.”

  “He was the oldest.”

  I looked down at my watch. The funeral was going to start in about fifteen minutes.

  “If I’m going to make it through the receiving line before the kickoff, I’d better get on up there. You staying for the whole ball game?”

  Spellman looked up at me as I stood up. “Not if it means you’re going to come back and sit with me.”

  “Lieutenant, I hope you don’t think my presence here is a case of the killer coming by to check out his own handiwork.”

  He went stone-faced on me. I took my cue and walked off. I couldn’t help jibing him; he was such a tough guy. Cop works homicide for twenty years, he’s going to get a little jaded. Just thought I’d put a little humor back into his colorless, dreary life.

  The line sped up a little as the clock wound down to show time. Funerals make me so uncomfortable that my mind runs around in unconnected, disjointed, extremely inappropriate patterns to avoid feeling what’s happening. Sort of a mental Tourette’s Syndrome. Thank God, we can’t see inside each other’s heads. The world would be even crazier than it already is.

  Finally, I got to Rachel. I hugged her, her form warm and vibrant in my arms. This, I thought, is the roughest of duties. Amazingly enough, she had not yet reached that point where she was on automatic pilot. She was still actually hearing the words of sympathy from each person, still feeling the loss, the conflict of despair, sadness, along with the good dose of anger we all feel at the dead. How dare you die on me, you rat bastard?

  She sobbed in my arms, her face tightening, although her eyes remained dry. The tear ducts can only work so hard before even they give out. But the heart continues.

  I felt like hell for her. I wanted to wrap my arms around her, take her away from this grim room. I even found myself with that old familiar burning down below that she’d always fired in me. I had to fight to suppress that one, let me tell you. Nothing like getting frisky at a funeral to get yourself dropped off the A-list at party time.

  “Thanks for coming,” she said, pulling away from me.

  “What can I do to help you?”

  “You can take care of yourself. Be my friend. Come see me after all this is over.”

  “You got it,” I said. “No problem.”

  I wove through the rest of the line, meeting the relatives and the in-laws, shaking my head in sadness and agreeing that this was indeed a terrible tragedy. Then I took a seat in the chapel about midway down the aisle. I looked around and saw Dr. Collingswood and Dr. Zitin sitting next to each other. James Hughes sat farther back with a group of other medical students. I looked around for LeAnn Gwynn, then realized she was in the back of the chapel with Jackie Bell and a covey of much younger nurses. All we needed was Bubba Hayes to complete the cast, but I doubted if bookies were in the habit of showing up for their customers’ funerals. After all, how could they collect?

  Yes, I’d agreed with someone from Conrad’s family in the receiving line: this was a terrible tragedy. But for at least one person, and probably one person who was somewhere in this room, this was not a terrible tragedy.

  It was simply and completely a job well done.

  I can’t decide whether I was born a good liar, or it was simply a skill I acquired over time out of the necessity of need and the tedium of practice. I guess it’s lucky I was born with a sense of moral value as well, because I have no doubt that had I been so inclined, I’d have made a pretty fair grifter.

  “This is Dr. Evans, Neurosurgery,” I said to the hospital night operator.

  “Oh, yes, Dr. Evans,” she said. “I recognize your voice.”

  “I’m trying to locate two residents who should be in the hospital tonight. Do you have any way of checking the scheduling?”

  “Why, you know better than that, Dr. Evans. Of course, I do.”

  I thought quickly, then laughed. “No, of course, I know you can do it. I meant, have I caught you at a bad time?”

  “Oh, no, Doctor. Things are quiet around here tonight. Who are you trying to locate?”

  “Doctors Albert Zitin and Jane Collingswood.”

  “Please hold.”

  I leaned back in my office chair and put my feet up on the desk. Outside, the traffic was finally thinning, and the temperature was taking a slide out of the nineties. Conrad’s funeral had been a long one, what with the drive out to Mount Olivet and all. I’d stayed for the duration. For Rachel’s sake, I’d told myself. Most of the people, though, had chosen to do otherwise. And outside of the family, a couple of TV cameras, and the university hotshots, there probably weren’t twenty people at graveside.

  “Dr. Evans?” the pleasant voice came back.

  “Yes.”

  “Dr. Zitin is not on call tonight. Dr. Collingswood is doing a rotation in E.R.”

  “Thank you,” I said, equally pleasant. “I re
ally appreciate your help.”

  “That’s what I’m here for,” she said, clicking off.

  It occurred to me that if the real Gordon Evans ever called this woman, he was going to have an awful time avoiding arrest for impersonating a doctor.

  So Dr. Jane’s in E.R. I’ll be damned if I’ll go out and bung up my leg again just to see her. The swelling had gone down almost completely, and I’d now been almost twenty-four hours without a twinge. All that was left were some nasty blue and yellow streaks that would probably be around for at least a month.

  I lowered my pair of good legs to the floor and stood up. Down the hall, I could hear a guitar strumming and the sound of voices. Slim and Ray were holding their nightly songwriter’s cocktail hour. I thought I might drop in on them. I hadn’t said much of anything to either of them since the day Rachel Fletcher walked into my office. They were good people; I’d best reconnect with them.

  I spread my jacket across the back of the chair and rolled up my shirtsleeves. Casual was the order of the day at Slim and Ray’s office. In fact, I’d be the only one down there out of denim, not to mention the necktie. I was about to leave the office when I heard the squeal of tires and a blaring horn outside.

  The corner of the building blocked part of the view, but apparently somebody had taken the curve at Church and Seventh a little too tightly and almost collided with a car illegally parked in the loading zone for the drugstore on the corner. Idiots, I thought, turning away.

  Then I looked back.

  It was a Lincoln, a long black bear of a car. You didn’t park a car like that; you docked it. Was it the same one that had been in the loading zone the other day? Maybe the one that followed me on the parkway last night? I wasn’t sure, but something set off bells and whistles.

  I stood there scanning the car, trying to recognize the driver. But the windows were smoked just enough, and the setting sun was striking the glass at just the right angle. It was impossible to see inside.

  If I went down there and knocked on the glass, one of two things would happen. If the person inside was tailing me, then I’d blow his cover, and there was no telling what might happen next. If the guy wasn’t tailing me, he’d just think I was another urban crazy.

  I turned away from the window. I knew I’d seen a long black car a couple of times in the past few days. But was it that car? Where had I seen it before? If I could only remember …

  The boys down the hall struck up another tune. Slim and Ray’s office looked directly out the front of the building. I could keep an eye on the Lincoln from their window even better.

  I walked down the hall. Their door was cracked, but I rapped a couple of times with my knuckles.

  “Yo!” a voice inside yelled, halting the strumming of guitars.

  “Yo, yourself,” I said, stepping in.

  “Hey, Harry, you dirty rascal. Where have you been, boy?” Ray jumped up from a desk with his guitar in his left hand. He stuck his right hand out and jerked mine like a pump handle.

  “Must be a special night,” I said. “You’ve got the Martin out.”

  Ray’s prized possession was a thirty-year-old Martin D-28. It was a work of art, as preserved and cared for as the day it was brand-new. Even a musically ignorant, tone-deaf brick like me knew it was a classic.

  “Yeah, we been working on this new song. Think it’s going to be our next hit, don’t you, Slim?”

  Slim looked up from the strings of his Ovation, smiled at me, and shook his head. Slim was decidedly not the lyricist in this team. I doubt I’d heard him say twenty-five words in the months that I’d known him.

  There were four other people as well crammed into the tiny, two-room office: a bleached blonde in worn jeans and a T-shirt, two other cowboys, and a girl who looked maybe sixteen. I tried to figure out who was with whom, without any luck. The woman had an old, beat-to-hell guitar with nylon strings. Cowboy No. 1 had a shirt pocket full of harmonicas, and Cowboy No. 2 had a fiddle.

  A bucket full of longnecks in ice cubes sat on the floor.

  “Mind if I listen?” I asked.

  “You know better than that, boy,” Ray said. “And grab that one on the left. It’s got your name on it.”

  I reached down and pulled an amber Pabst Blue Ribbon bottle out of the bucket and popped the top with the opener on Slim’s desk. Slim was an interesting kind of guy; year or two younger than me, frame like a body builder, thick, wavy light-brown hair, blue eyes that cut right through you. He was more than handsome, almost the kind of man that could be called pretty, although you better not call him that to his face.

  Ray, on the other hand, was thin, somewhere way over forty, and had the skid marks on his face and thinning gray hair to show for it. Ray had come to Nashville in the Fifties, played Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge down on Lower Broad and the Stockyard Restaurant for twenty-five years before giving that up to save his liver. Now he just wrote songs, except for an occasional appearance at the Opry or on the Nashville Network. He’d been through a lot, yet seemed to me the least scarred veteran of the music business I’d ever met. I kept thinking I ought to get him and Lonnie together sometime, but Ray was too busy writing songs and Lonnie was too busy repossessing cars and making homemade explosives.

  The beer was as cold as a mountain stream in January, in contrast to the thick, hot air of our old office building. All the tenants kept saying we were going to have to complain to the management company, but nobody ever did. Besides, autumn was just around the corner. Another month or two, the worst of the heat would break, anyway. If I could stand it without air conditioning in the car, I could stand it in the office.

  An old, thirteen-inch black and white flickered away in the background as Slim and Ray, accompanied by the other four on either instrument or voice, began their new song. I don’t know much about country music, but I have to admit I was impressed. It sounded good to me, a fusion between traditional country and modern pop, without all the overproduced studio effects and the other crap that goes into music these days. Slim and Ray were on the last verse of the song when I glanced over at the television. “The Scene at Six,” the local newscast, was just starting, and the lead story was Conrad.

  “Excuse me, guys. Gotta hear this.” I crossed to the corner of the room and turned up the sound just enough to hear.

  “Friends, family, and colleagues of surgeon and professor Dr. Conrad Fletcher mourned his passing today, as police reported startling new evidence in the murder.” The anchorwoman’s face was earnest, serious, begging us to trust her and be her friend.

  I turned the volume up another notch. Behind me, the music stopped.

  “The results of Dr. Fletcher’s autopsy were released today by the Metro Nashville Medical Examiner’s office, and the findings lend only more credence to police suspicions that the murder was an inside hospital job. We turn now to Daphne Fox with more.”

  The station switched to a videotape of a reporter standing just outside the hospital, with a university building in the background.

  “Police now say that, as a result of the autopsy done on murdered surgeon Dr. Conrad Fletcher, Nashville private investigator Harry Denton is no longer a suspect.”

  Ray let out a cheer behind me, then slapped me on the back. “Way to go, dude! Ya’ll didn’t know we had a celebrity in our midst, did you?”

  “Hush, Ray,” I said, “I’m trying to listen.”

  “The coroner’s office announced today that Dr. Fletcher was murdered by an injection of a lethal synthetic anesthetic, protocurarine, which hospital security officials indicate would have only been available to hospital personnel. Police are now turning their attention to reports that Dr. Fletcher may have been murdered by one of his colleagues at the hospital.”

  The videotape jumped again, this time to Lieutenant Spellman behind a podium in the police press conference room.

  “Yes, that’s correct, Mr. Denton is no longer a suspect in this homicide.”

  Man, I thought, I’ll bet he had to pry
those words out with a crowbar. It hadn’t occurred to me, though, that I really had been a suspect. It just seemed too ridiculous. If I’d have known I was held in such high regard by the homicide squad, I’d have been a little less chatty over the past couple of days. Especially with Spellman …

  “We have a number of clues, however, and several leads that will be very helpful in light of the autopsy findings and the T.B.I. toxicology lab results.”

  Videotape switch again, this time to Dean Malone at the med school looking shocked and concerned: “It’s beyond me that anything like that could happen at this university. However, I want it known publicly that we intend to cooperate with the police in every way possible to bring the perpetrator of this horrible crime to justice.”

  I laughed. Wonder how this was going to affect admissions next year. You’re going where? I hear they don’t flunk you down there. They kill you!

  Back to the reporter now: “All evidence then points, police say, to an inside job. With over five thousand employees and medical students at the medical center, however, finding the one who killed Dr. Conrad Fletcher may be more like looking for a needle in a haystack than anything else. For “The Scene At Six,” this is Daphne Fox.”

  “Yeah,” I whispered, “especially when the haystack is full of needles to begin with.”

  I turned down the volume knob. Raising the beer bottle to my lips, I noticed that everybody in the room was staring at me. The bottle froze in midair as I looked out over the top of it.

  “Did you really find him?” the young girl asked.

  I nodded my head yes.

  “Was it awful?” she asked, her drawl becoming even more syrupy as she drew the words out.

  “It was no tiptoe through the tulips,” I said, wanting more than anything else not to discuss it. “Hey, Ray, why don’t you let me hear that song again?”

  Ray hit a lick on the Martin, filling the room with notes as clear and loud and sweet as heaven’s doorbell. I backed away toward the window, to listen to the song as they all let go again. Over my shoulder, I could see the black Lincoln still parked in the loading zone. The driver’s side window was rolled about halfway down now, but I couldn’t see anything because of the angle.