Denton - 01 - Dead Folks' Blues Page 21

  “Don’t be too sure. Fortunately, women gain perspective as well. Part of that perspective is realizing that the true value of something often exceeds surface appearances.”

  “Thanks a bunch, pal. What you mean is that I’m still worthwhile even if I’m no Mel Gibson.”

  “So what’s wrong with that? I ain’t exactly going to win People magazine’s Sexiest Man of the Year award myself.”

  “Well, all I know is she hasn’t given me a hell of a lot of encouragement.”

  I stood up. My guts were starting to tell me that I was wasting my time with him. “Don’t give up, fella. People sometimes wait a long time to get what they want. Only makes it better when they do get it.”

  “That’s what they told us in pre-med,” he said. “Yeah, I’ll wait for Jane. But I won’t kill for her. And I didn’t.”

  I started toward the front door. “Yeah, Albert, I know you didn’t.”

  Damn.

  I’d be less than honest if I didn’t say that I truly wanted Albert to be the murderer. That would have made matters so much easier. I just couldn’t accept that Jane Collingswood was a killer; pretty girls don’t go around committing such nasty acts.

  Right, and Tricky Dick was basically a good guy who got some bad advice.

  I didn’t want to think LeAnn Gwynn had done it; I was too sorry for her. James Hughes couldn’t have done it, either; his father and my father were best friends.

  As if that meant anything.

  And Bubba Hayes was out, unless he killed Mr. Kennedy to throw me and everybody else off the track. Hey, now there’s a novel theory. Come to think of it, Bubba struck me as a guy who could do something sleazy like that.

  Only he hadn’t, and I knew it. Five suspects: five people who couldn’t possibly have killed Conrad Fletcher. Only thing was, he was still dead. If everybody was innocent, then how’d he get dead? Maybe I did it in my sleep. Yeah, that’s it. They sneaked some drug into me in the emergency room that made me go flappers, drove me to kill on sight anyone who’d just had sex with a nurse.

  Talk about desperate. I was so deep in reverie that I didn’t even swear or lay on my horn when the snooty blue-haired Belle Meade society matron in a maroon Cadillac Fleetwood pulled out in front of me onto West End and nearly drove me up on the sidewalk. I slammed on the brakes, scraped my tires against the curb for half a block, then went on without even giving the old bitch the Universal Sign Language Gesture of Disdain.

  Maybe there was somebody I hadn’t found yet—some person in the hospital who had some yet undiscovered grudge, some private hatred, some unknown motivation for icing Conrad. Or maybe I was letting my instincts cloud my judgment. Most of what I was relying on was feeling, but feeling that in each case was backed up by just enough hard fact to be solid.

  Back at the office, the answering machine was as empty of messages as I was of answers. I was certainly going to rejoice when the new Yellow Pages appeared; at least my small display ad might result in an occasional call. I wasn’t sure which would ruin me first, the poverty or die loneliness.

  I leaned back in the chair, loosened my tie, and kicked my feet up on the desk. There wasn’t much to do besides think. Down the hall, Ray, Slim, and company were already tuning up guitars for the Friday afternoon songfest. I could hear the metallic spewing of beer can pop tops as they were pulled. Outside, rush hour had already begun. Office workers were bailing out everywhere possible to start the weekend early.

  Everybody, it seemed, was either having a good time or looking forward to one. Everybody except me. I wasn’t even going to see Rachel until Sunday night. The weekend stretched out before me like fourth down and hopeless. I felt like breaking into a chorus of “Oh, Lonesome Me.”

  I left the office quietly, not wanting to be noticed by the developing party down the hall. It was hot as blazes outside, but I decided to walk to the bank anyway. Too much trouble to get the car out of the lot. I cashed a check for fifty dollars, which left me with less than five hundred in my account and no prospects. Rachel was going to get her way after all. You can’t play detective when you’re standing behind a stainless steel counter wearing a paper hat and going: “Hey, was that eat-in or takeout?”

  I spent the rest of the afternoon back in the office waiting for the traffic to thin out. I drew diagrams on paper, outlining everybody I thought could be involved in the murder. There had to be something I wasn’t seeing, some other pattern, some other possibility. I hadn’t gone to detective school, but I’d read my share of crime novels. That had to be worth something.

  Okay, what was it Sherlock Holmes said? “Eliminate the impossible, and whatever is left, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.” Or something like that. Maybe it was Miss Marple. Hell, I don’t know. I sat there, staring at the wall, going over every possibility. He owed Bubba money, and a lot of it. But if he killed Conrad, that money was gone forever. Like it is now. No, it made more sense to squeeze him, not kill him. Maybe there was some other person at the hospital who hated him for some other reason, but with five thousand people wandering that hospital in any given twenty-four-hour period, how was I going to find the one who hated Conrad Fletcher enough to do him in?

  Damn it, I thought, I’m going around in circles. It was time to clear the brain. I needed something to take my mind off. What I wanted to do was call Rachel. But being pushy wasn’t going to get me anywhere with her. Besides, dating the murdered victim’s widow is no way to forget the murder.

  Marsha Helms—that’s it. She wanted to see me again. I wanted to see her, but given how things stood with Rachel, that almost felt like cheating. Besides, truth be told, I really wasn’t in the mood to see anyone. At least not anyone I had to share any involvement with. What I needed was an old-fashioned dose of emotionally detached male bonding.

  Walter—yeah. Split a pizza, coupla beers, maybe take in a movie. My leg was still too bunged up to play racquetball, but I wouldn’t mind shooting some stick if we could find a pool hall that didn’t have a bunch of bikers hanging around looking to crush some skulls.

  I thumbed through the Rolodex and stopped at Walter Quintan’s card. I punched the number up and listened through five rings before the secretary answered.

  “Potter and Bell. May I help you?”

  “Walter Quinlan, please. Harry James Denton calling.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Quintan’s in a meeting. I expect him out within the hour. Can he call you?”

  I gave her my number.

  “May I say what this is in reference to?”

  “I’m his racquetball partner.”

  “Oh,” she said, pausing for a second. “Sorry to hear about your leg.”

  I winced. “He told you, huh?”

  “Yeah, from what I hear, Walt’s a real killer on the racquetball court.”

  Great, I thought, now even women I’ve never met think I’m a wimp. “He’s not so tough,” I said. “I’ve taken him once or twice.”

  Another hour passed before he called. By then I’d forgotten I’d left him a message. I was so surprised to hear the phone ring, in fact, I nearly fell out of my chair going for it.

  “Denton Agency,” I said, “Private Investigations.”

  “Hey, dude. What’s happening?”

  “Nothing much, man. Just waiting for you to call so I can close down the office.”

  “Rough week, huh?”

  “I’ve had better. Listen, I thought we’d go split a pitcher, get a pizza, maybe catch a movie or shoot some pool. What do you say?”

  There was this protracted silence, as if he didn’t want to accept my invitation, but didn’t want to come out and say he didn’t want to spend Friday night hanging around with another bachelor. I knew it was a lost cause by the third second. “Hey, man,” I said, “you got plans, it’s okay.”

  “In fact, I’m going to be tied up most of the weekend.”

  “Hey, great, who is she? Anybody I know?”

  “Just somebody I’ve been seeing.”


  “Anything serious? She the one you were talking about before?”

  “Yeah on both counts. I think it’s serious. I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “For a guy who’s just found true love, you don’t sound too happy.”

  “Oh, no, man, I don’t mean to sound that way. It’s just that, well … Damn, man, I don’t know. Life’s just complicated sometimes.”

  “Ride with it. Enjoy it while it laste. Life’s too short.”

  “I know that, Harry. Believe me. After this week, I know. Listen, man, I got to go.”

  “Yeah, I understand. Have a good weekend.”

  “You, too. Got any plans?”

  “I’m hoping my landlady will invite me down for Cream of Wheat, maybe show off her new dentures.”

  “Funny, Harry. Trezz-amuzzante…”

  I hung up, disappointed. I was getting more sour and grumpy by the minute, and the four walls of my office were closing in fast. I set the answering machine up, on the long shot that somebody might actually want to communicate with me. Then I flipped off my light and eased out into the hall.

  Sounds of laughter and music came full tilt from Ray and Slim’s office. I knew from past Fridays that the party would go on for another couple of hours, then they’d head over to Second Avenue to a restaurant. Later, they’d wind up at a songwriter’s bar swilling beers and picking tunes until they got too drunk to hold their guitars steady. I’d hung with them a night or two, but not tonight.

  I left the building quietly, crossed the street, and walked four floors up the parking garage to retrieve the Ford.

  I drove out Main Street until it swerved and became Gallatin Road. I didn’t even feel like Mrs. Lee’s Szechuan chicken tonight, so I pulled into a grocery store parking lot, picked up a six-pack of beer, a couple of frozen nukeable dinners, and headed for my apartment. Catch a movie on the tube, drink a few beers, get to bed early.

  After all, Mrs. Hawkins wanted her grass mowed tomorrow.

  Nashville sits nestled deep within a natural bowl, surrounded by high ground on all sides. This has the effect of making the entire city a natural garbage dump for stale air, automobile exhaust, heat inversions, and organic pollution of every kind imaginable. We’ve got more pollen, mold, dust, and varieties of airborne fungi than any place ever chronicled in National Geographic. If you don’t have bad sinuses when you come to Nashville, you’ll soon get them. You’ll wake up one morning hungover beyond belief when you haven’t had a drink in weeks. Your eyes will puff up like adders. Every part of your body will itch like crazy, including some parts too intimate to scratch. And your cheeks will be so swollen your teeth will hurt. The river running down the back of your throat will make you feel like you ought to rent a canoe and shoot the rapids.

  And you’ll go to the doctor convinced that a terminal virus has got you in its grip, and if it’s not Lyme disease or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or Epstein-Barr, it’s probably something even worse. You’ll find yourself reviewing your sexual history over the past two decades wondering which one it was who gave it to you, asking God to give you enough time to track the person down and give them one last terminal bit of your enfeebled, senile mind.

  Then to add mortal insult to grievous injury, you’ll stagger into the examining room, every orifice from the neck up seeping stuff you neither want to think about nor endure a second longer, and you will relate your laundry list of symptoms to your trusted, faithful family physician.

  And he will laugh.

  Yes, he will laugh, for he has heard it all before. And he will assure you that despite desperate hopes to the contrary, you are not going to die. You do not have some awful disease. Your body has not been taken over by some alien being.

  You simply live in Nashville. And like all other long-time residents of this city, you will learn to clear your throat politely, to keep a box of tissues always nearby, and to study the qualities and characteristics, if indeed not the actual chemical composition, of every over-the-counter remedy from Benadryl to Sudafed. And like all other Nashvillians, when you find one that works, you will buy it five hundred at a time and write letters to the pharmaceutical companies asking when they’re going to start selling it in the large size.

  And you will dread days like the one I’m having today, the days when you have to cut grass.

  It was ninety degrees outside when I woke up at 9:15. The air conditioner was frozen shut again, as useless as an ice-covered airplane wing. The motor, now too hot to touch and in great danger of setting the whole house ablaze, chattered away as it strained futilely to move air through the clogged filter.

  I unplugged the machine, determined to watch it for the next hour with the fire department number nearby. I made coffee, then went out on the landing with a steaming cup and sat on the hot metal in a pair of cutoffs. My night had been full of bad dreams. In them I had committed some unspecified crime and was locked away in prison. My cell was tiny. I could stand in the middle of the cell, turn to face the door, and touch both walls without fully extending either arm. I lived alone, and each day was planned, each moment accounted for. We ate at the same time every day, showered three times a week, and ate food at the same times every day seated silently at long tables.

  I sat on the landing a long time, until the sun shifted in the sky and began to beat down too hard on me. I retreated inside and made a plate of scrambled eggs and polished off the rest of the coffee, read the paper, stared at the air conditioner. Finally, there was no way to delay the inevitable.

  Mrs. Hawkins had a shed out back, a largely decayed wooden frame structure, that had been built by her late husband. It mostly served as a honeymoon hotel for the neighborhood stray cats and as a refuge for brown recluse spiders. As a matter of personal policy, I kept as far away from it as possible. But since she stored the lawn mower in there, at least once a week during this summer and for all my future summers there, since it looked like I’d never have the money to move, I’d risk life and limb to get what I needed to make her happy. I kept hoping one of the neighborhood urchins would crawl in to sneak a smoke one day after school and burn down the damn hovel. So far, though, my customary luck held out.

  I suited up in my cutoffs, an old T-shirt, a dust mask I’d picked up at the local hardware store, and my old workboots. Just as a matter of habit, I kicked the door and rattled it on its hinges just to make sure whatever critters were inside knew I was coming.

  The lawn mower roared to life after only the twenty-ninth pull. By then I was sweating torrents, covered in dust, and swearing like a drunken sailor on leave in a Hong Kong whorehouse. The cloth filter in the plastic face mask was about as effective as holding a minnow net over my mouth, and soon I was choking, spitting, and generally miserable. I pushed that unholy wheeled contraption around the yard for two hours, in the process nicking the corner of one of Mrs. Hawkins’s flower beds and playing hell with some lilies.

  The one good thing that came out of the day’s work in the sun was that—while clogging my sinuses—it cleared my mind. For the first time since Rachel first stepped into my office and back into my life, I spent a few waking hours with my mind on something else besides murder and desire.

  Only that didn’t last very long. Late in the afternoon, after I finally finished trimming borders and edging the driveway, I went upstairs, cranked up the now thawed air conditioner, and sat down on the floor with a cold beer in front of the television. I was too dirty to sit on even my worn furniture, so I simply rolled on my haunches across the hard wooden floor to get the remote control.

  Thirty-six channels and not a damn thing worth watching. I grazed around for a few more minutes, the choice finally coming down between Looney Times and that idiot preacher from Dallas with the demented look who tells people they can buy their way into heaven with a thousand-dollar faith gift. I had sense enough to take the Looney Times, and was soon cooling off under the air conditioner with a second beer.

  Saturday night was an endless stretch of empty road. How many
times had I sweated and longed for and waited impatiently for Saturday night to roll around? I used to enjoy Saturday nights, my favorite time of the week. But then I became self-employed, divorced, and now Saturday nights are a calamity of unfulfilled expectations.

  This one, I promised myself, would be different. I was going to prove that a single person can spend a Saturday night alone, enjoy a good dinner, catch a movie, and not be lonely. Around seven, I showered, put on my best dress shirt with a paisley tie and a pair of jeans—nice combination, I thought—and headed out to my old neighborhood with its movie theatres, chic restaurants, and late-night music places.

  I grabbed the morning paper on the way out, and over grilled Alaskan salmon and a dynamite California chardonnay at the Sundowner Grille off Hillsboro Road, saw that Janis Ian would play that night at the Blue Bird Café. The Blue Bird was always crowded Saturday nights, and especially so on nights when somebody famous was playing. I finished dinner about nine, drove over and, on impulse, picked up two tickets.

  That’s right, two tickets. I’d been fooling myself that I was having a good time on a Saturday night by myself. What I wanted to do was see Rachel, and the more I thought of it, not to mention the cumulative effect of a hot day in the sun, two beers, and the better part of a bottle of wine with dinner, the more I became convinced that it was silly for us to let life trickle away when we could be enjoying ourselves and making up for lost time. We had nearly an hour to go before the show started. I’d call her, run by her house, and pick her up, and—

  No, don’t call. If I call, she’ll have the option of saying no. She’ll still have that option, but at least she’ll have to say no to my face, and I’ll get the chance to see her. There was time to feel like a fool tomorrow. For now, I needed to hustle.

  I fired up the Ford and pulled back out into the traffic on Hillsboro Road. I even hit the lights right, not missing a one all the way down to Rachel’s street. I cut in front of somebody in a classic, horn-blowing, Nashville maneuver, and hammered down on it the two blocks to her house.