Denton - 01 - Dead Folks' Blues Read online

  “Lonnie!” I yelled. Lonnie glanced up just as Fatty brought down the ax handle on the hood of the Chevy. The three-quarter ton was built like a tank and beat all to hell anyway, so it’s not like it did any actual damage to it. But it pissed Lonnie off real bad.

  “Hey!” he yelled. “Cut that out!”

  I was away from the guy, both trucks between us. And I was determined to keep it that way. He was swinging his ax handle like a Louisville slugger, connecting with anything that got in his way. Lonnie hopped down from the Ranger and ran around in front of the guy, then stopped just beyond swinging range.

  “Put it down, fella,” he warned. “We have to call the cops out here, you’re going to spend a weekend in jail.”

  Fatty growled. I mean, really growled, like a dog or something, then raised the handle over his head and came straight at Lonnie like a bull.

  Lonnie sidestepped him, ducked, and stuck out a leg. The guy caught the instep of Lonnie’s right foot with his right ankle and lost his footing. The ax handle flailed helplessly in midair before the guy completely lost his balance, slipped over a concrete curb, and wound up facedown in the dirt.

  Lonnie was over him in a second, yanking the guy’s face up by a handful of hair. Then he jerked a small aerosol can out of his rear pocket and sprayed the guy’s face. Liberally. Next thing you know, the guy’s choking and heaving and blowing chunks all over the side of his pickup.

  “Mace?” I asked, as Lonnie walked around to the front of the Chevy.

  “That guy fuck up my truck?” he demanded. I stepped around front next to him.

  “Looks like he dinged the hood a few times,” I commented. “Didn’t get the headlights, though. You going to swear out a warrant?”

  Lonnie looked over at Fatty, who by now was up on all fours, gasping for breath, the worst of his convulsions passing.

  “The hell with it,” Lonnie spat. “It’ll take too long for Metro to get here. I ain’t got the time. Let’s go.”

  Lonnie tossed me the keys to the Chevy. I started the motor, then sat in the cab with the truck idling until Lonnie got the Ford running. Then I pulled out of his way and let him go first. I trailed him to make sure our newfound friend didn’t try anything else. As we turned left around one of the apartment buildings, I checked in the rearview mirror. Fatty was pulling himself up to his feet now, shaking, trying to get his balance back.

  I felt sorry for the guy. If you’re a hotshot land developer and you file bankruptcy owing the banks a couple hundred million, you get your picture in the paper. But fall behind on a two-hundred-a-month loan payment, then two goons come steal your truck and spray Mace all over you on your day off.

  I began to wonder if I could get my job at the paper back.

  Lonnie was giving me forty bucks a car on repo work, and we were getting in six to ten a week. So I was making it, barely. But I was having a good time with my new life. I unloaded the expensive Honda with the four-hundred-a-month car note and bought a repo’d ’85 Escort from a finance company. What the hell; it wasn’t pretty, but it ran. And it was paid for.

  I also started skip tracing for Lonnie, using the phone in my office. Skip tracing’s not quite as risky, but it’s about as intense. Somebody falls behind on a loan payment, the bank sends them a letter, and it gets returned NOT AT THIS ADDRESS. So some silly-assed bank officer calls the number in the file folder and explains that he’s trying to locate the person who’s fellen behind in his payments.

  They usually don’t have much luck, which should come as no surprise. Not many people are willing to cooperate with a bank on the trail of a deadbeat. And the suits at the bank, being all but completely bereft of imagination, don’t know what else to do, so they turn the account over to a skip tracer.

  Lonnie’s got a terminal in his office that runs off credit reports. It’s scary the stuff that comes in off these computers. Nobody has any secrets these days. Frightening. Anyway, Lonnie runs a credit bureau report, sticks it in a file with the bank’s paperwork, then hands it over to me. I get twenty bucks for each verified address and phone number, with an extra five thrown in for verifying employment. It was pretty rough at first, but after a few days’ practice, I got to where I could scam about six or eight a day, when I’d make myself work at it.

  A couple months go by, and things are cruising along. I still haven’t got a case yet, but I’m bringing in a few bucks now and then subcontracting for Lonnie. The two guys down the hall are songwriters and publishers: Slim and Ray. They told me their last names, but I’ve never been able to remember them. They rent another one-room office and write songs all day and listen to tapes from other starving songwriters. I don’t really know how it all works; it just seems like everybody I’ve ever met in the music business is hungry. Like the old joke you hear down on Music Row: Know what they call a Nashville musician without a girlfriend? Homeless.

  Occasionally, at the end of the day, I’ll stop by Slim and Ray’s office and have a beer with them. Cocktail hour for these two starts around four. The singing gets a little louder. People drop by with guitars. The place turns into a regular little party, and they’re playing all this moaning and groaning, crying in your beer stuff. But some of it’s pretty good, and I can’t really knock it.

  One Wednesday afternoon, I was sitting in my office with a stack of folders in front of me. I opened the top one; a Linda Wolford at 2545 Forest Avenue had defaulted on an unsecured personal note. The bank couldn’t even go after this lady’s car. They sent her a half-dozen notices. All were returned. Somebody from the bank called. A female voice claiming to be a roommate said Linda Wolford moved away. Sorry, no forwarding address. No phone number.

  I figure if I call this lady up and say “Hey, I need to verify your identity and address so the bank can nail your ass,” I’m probably not going to get very far. I decided to run the UPS scam on her, then picked up the phone and dialed the number.

  “Hello.”

  “Yeah, I’m trying to reach Linda Wolford at 2454 Forest Drive.”

  “Ugh, who wants to know?”

  “This is Carter over at UPS Customer Service. We had a package to deliver for a Ms. Wolford that came back as un-deliverable. We’re just trying to find the right address so we don’t have to send the package back.”

  “What’s in the package?”

  “I don’t know that, ma’am, but it’s insured for two hundred dollars and it’s prepaid, so you don’t owe anything on it. Must be a gift or something.”

  “And what address was that?”

  “2454 Forest Drive, ma’am.”

  You usually get a chuckle or a sigh of anticipation at this point. This time, it came right on schedule.

  “Oh, that’s it, Mr. Carter. I’m Linda Wolford, but my address is 2545 Forest Drive.”

  “I’m grinning now.” Bang, got her. “Let me see, you’re Linda Wolford at 2545 Forest Drive, correct?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Great, Ms. Wolford. Sorry for the inconvenience. You’ll be hearing from us in a few days.” Yeah, and give my regards to the bankruptcy judge.

  “Thanks for going to the trouble to find me.”

  “All part of the service, ma’am. All part of the service.”

  So after twelve years of private school and four years of private university, I’m making a living by lying to people. Which puts me up there with some of the top biz school graduates in the country.

  For a guy who got canned and had to move into a dumpy little apartment in a neighborhood filled with old Buicks on concrete blocks in the front yards, I’m doing okay. I’m having a swell time. I’m getting by. I’m nailing deadbeats. Life is sweet.

  I close the folder in front of me, then look up from my desk just as the door opens. Rachel Fletcher is standing in my doorway.

  Damn.

  She was Rachel Todd when I first met her, back when we were undergraduates at Boston U. in the Seventies. Maybe it’s my own dysfunction, but spending my adolescence at a boy’s school
kind of skewed my early perceptions of women. In fact, when I met this woman freshman year, at some dumb mixer on campus, it was like being run over by a truck, just as powerful and marginally less painful. Her blond hair was longer then, her face a little fuller, with the last traces of teenage baby fat still hanging on. But she was gorgeous, drop-dead-leave-your-tongue-in-the-dirt gorgeous. And somehow I got her to date me. A couple of weeks later, I got her to sleep with me, only we didn’t sleep very much. Three years later, she left me and married some dweeb named Fletcher, a rich prick who went on to become a doctor.

  What the hell! I made peace with it a long time ago. So unlike some other relationships I’ve wound up in, I don’t carry too much baggage from this one. But seeing her looking down on me that day was, for a long moment, akin to getting hit by that truck again.

  She opened the door without knocking. I guess she figured she’d be walking in on a secretary and a waiting room and all the other normal business fixtures. She looked surprised to see me, as if she wasn’t really sure I was who she thought I was. Then she turned and stared at the black lettering on the frosted glass. She shook her head almost imperceptibly, then stepped in, closing the door behind her.

  “Hi, Harry. How’ve you been?”

  By this time, I was standing behind my desk without even realizing I’d gotten up. I looked her over, trying not to gape. You have to understand, I hadn’t exactly—well, I think the euphemism is been—with anybody in quite some time. Kind of a long dry spell, you see, but at least partly by choice. So when I found myself alone in a closed office with a lovely blonde, and not just any lovely blonde, damn it, but this blonde, I had to remember not to drool out loud. And remembering she was a natural blonde didn’t help.

  “Hi, Rachel,” I said, hoping like hell my voice held up. “How are you?”

  “I’m fine, Harry. How are you?”

  I stood there a second, awkward and tight, then finally managed to activate my tongue.

  “Nervous, actually. You’re the last person I expected to walk into my office.”

  “Don’t be nervous, Harry. I’m not a process server.”

  “Good. I got nothing worth suing for. Have a seat.”

  She was dressed in a black silk blouse, white pants with a sheen bright enough to hurt your eyes and a crease sharp enough to pick your teeth with. I hoped my chair wouldn’t get her dirty. She’d lost the weight in her face, leaving the outline of high cheekbones visible just underneath her skin. I always suspected there was great bone structure buried there someplace. Her skin was as alabaster as always, as clear as unpolluted snow. Her hands were thinner as well, and the soft blue of her veins gave a tinge of color to them.

  Or maybe it was because they were knotted tighter than a dick’s hatband. Whatever the hell a dick’s hatband is; I’ve been hearing that expression for years now and it’s always struck me as just this side of vulgar. In any case, Rachel Fletcher’s face may have been calm and smiling, but her hands were knotted together like a rugby scrum.

  “Can I get you anything? Coffee? There’s a soda machine down the hall.”

  “No, thanks, Harry. I’m fine.” Her hands continued squirming. She noticed me looking, then self-consciously pulled them apart and uncomfortably put one on each armrest of the chair. It was as if her arms had become two foreign objects hanging off her, and she didn’t know what to do with them.

  “It’s good to see you, Harry. How long’s it been now?”

  I thought back. “Maybe ten years ago. The benefit for Children’s Hospital.”

  “That’s right. What happened to that woman you were seeing then? The tall one, with the dark hair pulled back tight.”

  Who was that? I thought. Was that— “Oh, yeah, that was before I got married. Debbie, I think her name was. Long time ago.”

  “Right,” she said.

  “How about you, Rachel? You and what’s-his-name still—?”

  “Conrad,” she said, “and yes, we’re still married. In name, anyway.”

  Her focus dropped to the floor. I decided to sit and wait for ter to continue. Finally, she did. “Harry, I know things haven’t always been that easy for us.”

  “No worries.” I grinned at her as I spoke. “I’ve always prided myself on being a gracious loser.”

  She looked up quickly. “You weren’t a loser, Harry. You’ve never been a loser. I never thought you were.” Her head drifted to the right, her sadness a weight pulling her down. “I’ve just made some mistakes in my life.”

  I suddenly felt sorry for her, the first time in years I’d felt anything at all for her. And I was surprised to see it was that. But there was something about her, despite the great looks, the obvious wealth and health, and all the other accoutrements, that was downright pitiable. I wanted to reach across the desk and touch her, but knew that was probably the worst thing I could do.

  “What is it, Rachel? Why are you here?”

  She opened her bag, a small silver clutch, and withdrew a pack of cigarettes, the long, skinny kind with blue and red flowers intertwined on the paper. Her hand shook as she took out a disposable butane lighter in a gold case and lit the cigarette.

  “It’s Connie,” she began, after taking a good long pull on the smoke. “He’s gotten himself into some trouble. I’m terribly worried about him.”

  “When’d you start those?” I gathered from her glare that she considered the question inappropriate.

  “What kind of trouble?” I asked, trying to extricate myself.

  She hesitated, self-consciously lifting her hand to take another drag off the cigarette. “He’s been gambling again. Heavily, I’m afraid. Apparently he’s into somebody for a lot of money. He’s getting threatening phone calls, letters.”

  I fought the urge to smile. I remembered Dr. Conrad Fletcher as a smug, conceited, privileged jerk. Somehow, seeing him up to his keister in bookie reptiles was at the very least amusing, at the very most downright pleasurable.

  “I tried to call you at the paper,” she continued. “Just to see if you had any advice. They told me you were no longer employed there.”

  “Diplomats. Actually, Rachel, I was fired. Booted out on my ass.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Anyway, someone on the desk gave me your phone number and address. I had no idea you’d become a—”

  “Private investigator?” I said, grinning. “Yeah, sounds a little goofy to me, too.”

  Rachel smiled back, the first real one she’d cracked since she sat down. “I decided to come see you in a professional capacity, rather than just an old friend asking for advice.”

  “What kind of letters and phone calls are we talking about here?”

  She opened up the purse again, took out a torn-open envelope. Cheap paper, available at any drugstore, electric typewriter, no return address, mailed from a downtown zip code. The note inside read:

  Fletcher:

  Your account is seriously overdue. You’re going to settle up within 24 hours or we’re going to turn you over to our collections staff. You won’t find that very pleasant.

  Simple, straightforward, to the point. I’d written some articles in my time that had generated unhappy letters, a few of them threatening. The rule around the newspaper office was that the ones that ranted and raved and threatened to cut your gonads off were the ones you could laugh about over a beer. The calm, serious, understated ones were the ones you kept and reread over and over in your dreams, the ones that make you wake up in a cold sweat.

  This one was definitely a keeper.

  “The letter came in yesterday’s mail. I opened it by accident; Connie gets furious when I open his mail, but I just wasn’t paying attention.”

  “Have you shown it to him?”

  Her eyes rolled. “Oh, God, no. He’d throw a fit. He’s got a terrible temper, you know.”

  “And the phone calls?”

  “Just two. One about a week ago. One this morning.”

 
; “What did they say?”

  “The first time, a voice asked to speak to Connie, and he wasn’t home. I asked who it was. The man wouldn’t say. He just hung up. The second time was yesterday. Same voice. He asked to speak to Connie, and when I said he wasn’t home, the man asked if Connie had gotten the letter.”

  “What’d you do?”

  “I panicked, I guess. I asked who it was and he said ‘never mind,’ that Dr. Fletcher would know who he was and he’d goddamn better take the note seriously.”

  She looked me directly in the eyes, the clear blue of hers shimmering in my office light. “That’s when I started looking for you.”

  I shifted uneasily in the chair. I wasn’t at all sure this was something I wanted to take on. To begin with, I didn’t much care for the s.o.b., and on top of that, I had a feeling that if I started getting involved with Rachel Fletcher again, I might want to get involved with Rachel Fletcher again.

  The office suddenly seemed very stuffy. “Have you talked to Conrad about this? Does he know you’re here?”

  “Heavens, no. If he did, he’d blow a fuse. Things haven’t been going so well with us these past few years. What with his work and all. We don’t spend much time with each other. And when he’s not working, he’s always off somewhere else. Gambling, apparently.”

  “This isn’t an easy question, Rachel, but I’ve got to ask it. Is there another woman in here anywhere?”

  She looked as if her face had just gone numb and she was afraid to raise her hand to her cheek, afraid she wouldn’t be able to feel anything, afraid she wouldn’t be there anymore.

  “I don’t think so,” she whispered. “I don’t know.”

  “So what do you want me to do, Rachel?”

  She hesitated, fumbling with her still-lit cigarette butt, wondering what to do with it.

  “Just mash it on the floor,” I suggested. “I’m afraid I don’t have an ashtray. Sorry.”

  She dropped the cigarette. I watched her right knee swivel back and forth as she ground the butt out.