Denton - 01 - Dead Folks' Blues Read online

  Ray and Slim really had written a winner. The chorus was catchy, the bridge was bridgey. The more I listened to Ray and Slim, and the new, younger voices of country music, the more I grew to love it. The work of songwriters like Bob McDill, Jim Glaser, Randy VanWarmer, sounded more like poetry than pop to me. And I’ll take Garth Brooks, Randy Travis, Kathy Mattea, any day over Metallica and Poison and the obscene urban MTV warfare raps.

  The two sang on, their voices blending in a harmony as sweet as clear sunshine. The verses were not sophisticated, but they were genuine and earthy and touching. I felt like I was sitting in on something pretty impressive. Ray and Slim played guitar licks off each other at the end of the song, then note by note, traded off the resolution, hit the final chord, and let the sound echo away into silence inside the office.

  Then there was a scream.

  We sat there a moment, stunned. That definitely was not part of the song. “What the hell?” Ray said, stretching out the word hell into about four syllables.

  I couldn’t even tell where the scream had come from. I shrugged my shoulders.

  “I don’t know,” Slim said. It was one of the more profound statements he’d ever made.

  “Where’d it come from?” the bleached blonde asked.

  “Beats the shit out of me,” Cowboy No. 1 offered.

  Then we heard it again, muffled, from a distance: a solid, human scream bellowing from a healthy set of lungs.

  I looked over my shoulder at the Lincoln. Someone stood next to the driver’s side window, with a shopping cart full of cardboard boxes, rags, and garbage, held with one hand to keep it from rolling down Seventh Avenue. A bag lady, I realized, and just then she released the shopping cart, raised both hands to the side of her face, and let loose with another long, bloodcurdling howl. The shopping cart rolled down Seventh Avenue, picking up speed as it went, then hit a pothole and toppled, sending the bag lady’s prized possessions arcing off into the street and blocking both lanes.

  “Ray,” I said, “I think we got trouble downstairs.”

  Ray laid the Martin down carefully on the desk, then was behind me only a couple of steps as we bolted for the stairs. No time to wait for the elevator, I realized, as we pounded down to the landing, pivoted, and took the next flight down three or four at a time.

  On the landing just above the main floor, I hit the wrong way. My bum ankle twisted and pain shot like a bolt of lightning up the side of my leg. I slammed against the side of the wall, pulled my knee up to my belt, and let out an old-fashioned obscenity.

  The young girl stopped beside me; everybody else flew past in the, by now, mass hysteria.

  “I’m all right,” I grumbled, rubbing the ankle through my socks. “C’mon, let’s go.”

  I hobbled down the hall as fast as I could, then pushed through the front door and down the steps to the sidewalk. Across the street, a crowd was already gathering around the car and the bag lady as she continued howling like a demented wolf, both hands to her face, staring through her dirty fingers at the heavens.

  Traffic had stopped now in both lanes. I skipped across the street to the crowd and pushed my way through the first layer. Ray reached inside the window to unlock the car door.

  “Wait a minute, Ray,” I yelled as I got next to him. “Hold up.”

  “I just want to help him,” Ray said, turning to me. “We got to get the door open and get him out of there.”

  I elbowed him out of the way and bent to look inside the car. On the edge of my consciousness, I could hear the faint high pitch of the police sirens growing louder by the second. Inside the car, the crumpled body of a huge black man lay slumped over, held up only by the armrest folded down on the front seat.

  There was a small hole about the size of a dime in the left side of his head, just above and ahead of his ear. Barely visible gray powder and burn maries starbursted out from the wound on his dark skin. Chemical tests, I knew, would bring out plenty more.

  There wasn’t much blood, just a small trickle down the side of his face. He wasn’t breathing. That much was obvious. There wasn’t anything anybody could do for him now.

  I leaned inside as far as I could go, which wasn’t far, trying to get a better look at him. It worked. I recognized the man, and everything in my gut went liquid. It was Mr. Kennedy, Bubba Hayes’s right-hand man.

  Make that ex-right-hand man. Mr. Kennedy wasn’t anybody’s anything anymore, except a fading memory.

  They carted the bag lady off to the Middle Tennessee Mental Health Institute, formerly known as the Central State Asylum. Apparently the sight of a corpse in a thirty-thousand-dollar car on her turf was more than she could handle. Come to think of it, I could say the same for myself.

  For the second time in less than a week, I found myself sitting in an interrogation room at the Metropolitan Nashville Justice Center.

  “You know,” Spellman said, “just when I think I’ve gotten you out of my hair, boom, you wind up next to another stiff. What is it with you? You got a thing for dead bodies, son?”

  What is it with you, I wondered, and the legions of other Southern men that makes them think they can call anybody they want to son, no matter how old they are, or how little the chance of any blood relation? The way I was feeling about Spellman right then, I’d trace my roots all the way back to the slime pool to deny any connection to him.

  “Lieutenant, I was sitting in a room full of witnesses who’ve told you I was with them until we heard the street lady screaming. I couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with this death.”

  He loosened his tie. It was late, the end of a long day. We were both tired and stressed out. I’d had one beer up in Ray’s office; I was ready for another.

  “Do you know who he was?” Spellman asked.

  “I didn’t check his wallet.” A true statement.

  “We did. His name was Kennedy, Roosevelt Kennedy. Ex-TSU star, All-American, drafted by the Falcons in the early Seventies.”

  “Explains the wheels,” I said.

  “No it doesn’t, and you know it. For the past six or seven years, he’s been working for the Reverend Bubba Hayes. Ever heard of him?”

  I screwed my mouth into a tight turn. “Name’s familiar.”

  “It should be,” Spellman said. He bent down in front of me, put a hand on each armrest of my chair, got real low, right in my face. “He controls most of the action for the university area. We keep a close eye on him. And we know he was Conrad Fletcher’s bookie. And we know you knew that.”

  “So when did knowledge become illegal?”

  “Knowledge isn’t illegal,” he said. “Interfering with a police investigation is. I know you’ve been all over the hospital, questioning nurses, questioning doctors, and I know you’ve been to see a cutie by the name of LeAnn Gwynn. That one, I could probably make a case for impersonating an officer. But frankly, I don’t have time for pissant private investigators who’ve been watching too many episodes of “Magnum, P.I.” The paperwork is more trouble than you’re worth.”

  He backed away, paced the room, then turned toward me again. “You’re a smartass, Denton, and I don’t like you very much. You’ve been defecating in my nest, and I don’t like that either. To make matters worse, you’re an incompetent. You couldn’t find your ass with both hands and a set of instructions. If I catch you so much as spitting on the sidewalk around this investigation again, I’m going to have your license yanked, and I’m going to have you up on charges. You savvy, boy?”

  I stared at him, a long bout in an ice-cold staring contest. “You finished?” I asked him finally.

  “Maybe, maybe not.”

  “In that case, I want my lawyer. Now.”

  He glared at me, disgusted. “Get out of here,” he spat.

  I felt sorry for Mr. Kennedy. Even if he was muscle for a scumbag ex-preacher-turned-bookie, there was something about him that radiated more class in an afternoon than most lowlifes could muster in a lifetime. I don’t know what he was doin
g following me around, but I regretted that doing so got him killed. The only people winning this contest, it seemed, were the grave diggers.

  My frustration was doubled by what Mr. Kennedy’s death meant in my search for Conrad Fletcher’s murderer. The best candidate all along, especially given that I was sure he was innocent, was Bubba Hayes. My newspaper days taught me that the guy who looks the cleanest has probably got the most to hide. So while I didn’t have any way to prove Bubba’s guilt, I was certainly remaining open to the possibilities.

  Only problem now was, it didn’t make sense, at least not based on what I knew and what I’d observed. There was a bond between Bubba Hayes and Mr. Kennedy. I figured there was no way they could work together, given their differences, without it. They were like two components of a machine that operated so smoothly, so tightly, that it seemed effortless. It didn’t make sense that Bubba Hayes would kill off somebody like Mr. Kennedy. Good help’s too hard to find these days.

  It had to be somebody else.

  I sat back on my old couch and wrapped my palm around a lukewarm bottle of beer. I was still smarting from the verbal working over Spellman had given me, still sore from where I’d taken the landing wrong, and still torqued that the day had gotten so screwed up.

  On top of it all, I couldn’t sleep. And I was beginning to have some heavy-duty doubts about finding Conrad’s killer. I figured that with all the people who hated the guy, it ought to have been easy. It would have been my first big case, the kind of case that could give me some serious stroke in a very competitive marketplace. The private investigators in this town take up a complete spread in the yellow pages, and then some. But there was more to it besides business, although going months without a case had been bad enough. There was more to it than that.

  Lanie, my ex-wife, was an assistant vice president at the city’s largest advertising agency when we were married. Since we divorced, she’s become a group V.P. in charge of acquisitions for a fifteen-state region. Don’t have to look too hard to find out how she’s handling the breakup. Lanie’s tough, ambitious, attractive. She’s also ten years younger than me. We met when she was new in the business and hustling reporters to get press releases published. She brought in a couple one day, and I offered to take her on a tour of the paper. What the hell, she was a looker, and I was currently unattached. I wound up taking her to lunch in the company cafeteria. It really knocked her panty hose off when, in mid-bite, the publisher himself came up and patted me on the back over a story I’d just done about the lack of sprinklers and fire-code violations in one of the downtown office buildings. We called each other by first names, laughed around a bit. I introduced her to him, and he kissed her hand, European-style. Lanie thought she was in high cotton, and she thought I was freaking Walter Cronkite or something.

  Six months later we were married. The paper did a feature on the wedding. One of the television stations even did a spot. Her parents were awed by it all. Mine were pretty blown away, too.

  It was only after we’d been married a year or so, and had the chance to share a joint checking account and file our taxes together as married people, that Lanie figured out that she was fresh out of college, two years into a career in business, and was already making more than me. I explained to her that most newspaper people rarely make more than about thirty-five grand a year under the best of circumstances, no matter how hot they are, and my circumstances were nowhere near the best. And while I might move on to a larger paper in a bigger city someday, for now I was pretty happy and didn’t plan on going anywhere.

  When she was made assistant V.P., the trouble started. It wasn’t merely that she was doing better. We both could have lived with that. It was more that I didn’t want to do any better. She couldn’t imagine that I could work the hours I worked, get as many front-page bylines as I did, and still be willing to settle for a three percent annual raise every year.

  She encouraged me to go into television, where the truly big bucks are. For a while, I considered it. But even more than print journalism, broadcast journalism is as much entertainment as anything else. There was no way I could endure the happy horseshit that permeates the local news every night and still keep my lunch down. Sooner or later, I’d wind up pushing somebody’s button and get fired, which I figured would never happen on the paper.

  Reality, of course, had a way of figuring differently.

  Anyway, my lack of ambition doomed the marriage, and pretty soon, when we couldn’t qualify for the loan she wanted to buy the house out in Belle Meade, and we couldn’t take the European vacation because the paper didn’t give me that much vacation time, and not only could I not pay for a Jaguar, I didn’t even want one.… Well, things went down the dumper fast. I got called out one night to cover a major apartment-complex fire. It wasn’t my usual beat, but the late night cityside guy was doing twenty-eight in an inpatient dry-out unit. When I got back in at five in the morning, Lanie’d packed a bag and moved out. I got served a week later. And that was, as they say, all she wrote.

  It wouldn’t be so rough if I hadn’t gotten myself ashcanned on the paper. There was a certain satisfaction in knowing that when Lanie drove her Alfa into the parking lot of her West End condo, took the elevator up to her well-furnished living room, poured herself a glass of twenty-dollar-a-bottle wine, and settled back to look at her daily paper, she was more likely than not to run into my smiling name, still there in her life and in her face. Now even that satisfaction was gone.

  I don’t usually allow myself to drift into self-pity. Ironically, I didn’t realize how much being a hotshot newspaper reporter meant to me, how much seeing my name on page one above-the-fold made up for so much, not the least of which was the relatively puny paycheck. In one of our last conversations, Lanie insisted she was leaving me because I lacked ambition. She said that the contacts I’d made and the influence I had on the paper and in the community were wasted—because I refused to take advantage of them.

  Maybe she’s right. I could always get a job as a P.R. flack for somebody and make double the dough I was making at the paper. Buy a nicer car, get a nicer place. Go back to pinstripes and drinks after dinner at Maude’s Courtyard and Mario’s. This business of being a private investigator’s just not worth it. I didn’t have any idea what I was getting into, don’t have any idea what I’m doing, and am probably going to do more damage than good if I don’t cut and run while I still can.

  I finished off the last inch of flat, warm beer. Somehow, it felt appropriate to be sitting in the middle of the country music capital of the world crying in my beer. Any minute now, I was going to break into a chorus of some George Jones song. Only I don’t know the words, and it’s hard to sing George Jones when the crying in your beer only extends to two over the whole evening. I just don’t like beer well enough to drink enough of it to cry in.

  Hell, I can’t sing, I can’t drink, and I can’t detect. Maybe I can sleep.

  I got up, limped into the kitchen to turn off the lights—though my leg wasn’t really hurting anymore—and to see if there wasn’t some orange juice in the fridge. Maybe there was an old movie on television.

  The kitchen clock said 12:20. The neighborhood is finally quiet about that hour. Downstairs, Mrs. Hawkins, my landlady, would have removed her hearing aids, put her four cats out, and be snuggled under her handmade comforter. I felt alone, maybe a little lonely, but I was all right with that. Maybe I’d blow this whole business off and find something else to do with my life.

  I leaned across to douse the kitchen light and lock up. 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, random sparkles going off behind my eyelids, and the back of my head pounding like a drumbeat.

  Then there was weight on me, a
nd 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.

  It felt like the whole damned house had caved in on me. But then, in the darkness of the kitchen broken only by dusty shafts of silver cast by distant streetlights shining through the windows, I felt hot breath on my face.

  “You and I are going to talk,” a gruff, low voice said. I struggled to recognize the voice and couldn’t. But I recognized the peculiar smell that came with the hot breath.

  Bubba Hayes.

  I’d been in trouble before, had seen times in my life where I wondered if I were going to see another day. Like when I did the undercover story on suburban kids going into the projects to buy crack and nearly got my head blown off in the crossfire of a street corner shootout. But never have I felt as close to the grim reaper as I did that very second, with the three-hundred-pound-plus Reverend Bubba Hayes sitting on my chest.

  There was one thing Bubba had to realize: until he got off my chest, it was going to be a somewhat one-sided conversation. “Can’t …” I managed to whisper, “breathe …”

  He bent over, the dark vague shape looming over me now, blocking out even the streetlights’ glow.

  “Neither can Mr. Kennedy. Unless you want to join him, you’d better do exactly what I tell you.”

  I could feel drowning man’s panic washing over me. For a second, I hoped that terror and its ensuing adrenaline rush would give me the strength to toss him off, like the little old lady who lifts the Volkswagen off the mechanic when the jack gives way and traps him underneath. Only I could tell after a few quick muscle twitches that there was no way. He had me pinned. My thoughts were coming slower now, the sparkles again in the edges of my vision. I’d have been better off if the house had fallen on me.

  I managed to nod my head yes but just barely. He must have felt me move; a moment later, his legs flexed, and his huge backside came up off my chest just enough for me to suck in one desperate, loud gulp of air. The rush of oxygen into my lungs left me light-headed, and the stretching of my rib cage hurt so acutely I almost cried out.