Dead Folks' blues d-1 Page 9

  “But now you’re not so sure.”

  “Yes, sir. I’m not so sure. But I still want to stick with this, if only to make certain my own name stays clear.”

  “Are you a suspect in this murder?” His eyeglasses slid a little farther down his nose as he asked.

  “Not a strong one. But yes, sir, I’m sure the police are keeping an eye on me.”

  “But you didn’t have anything to do with this, did you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Well, then, why don’t you just back off and let the police do their jobs? You’re only going to get in more trouble if you interfere.”

  I felt the blood pressure in my neck rising. Who was this guy? Just because he and my father fought, drank, and screwed their way across the European Theater of Operations nearly fifty years ago doesn’t give him the right to-

  “I’m not going to interfere.” I interrupted my own train of thought. “But I am going to do some background checking. I can do some things the police can’t do, mainly because I’m not the police. I want to find out what happened to Dr. Fletcher, too. It’s important. It’s what I’m getting paid for.”

  He snorted. “You think you can do a better job than the police.”

  “No sir, only a different job.”

  He paused, letting the weight of his words sink in even before he spoke them. “Harry, you came from a good family. You’ve got a fine education, a crackerjack mind. You had a fascinating career, and for some reason or other, you’ve chosen to self-destruct. And now this … this … detecting business. I don’t like it.”

  “I appreciate that, Dr. Hughes, but for the time being, it’s what I do. I’m a grown man, sir. I make my own way now.”

  “And what a way,” he filmed. “Sneaking around some sleazy motel on Murfreesboro Road at night, taking pictures of adulterers and prostitutes.”

  “Doc, there’s not much difference between those motels on Murfreesboro Road and the mansions in Belle Meade. Just a different class of John, that’s all.”

  “You’ve become profoundly cynical, haven’t you?”

  “No, sir, just a realist.”

  “Does your father know about this mess?”

  “Not yet. And I’d appreciate your not saying anything to him.”

  He reached up and pulled his glasses off his nose and twirled them in one hand by the earpiece. “All right. But I want you to let me know if there’s anything I can do to help. Your father and mother never appointed a godfather for you, so I sort of feel like the job’s mine by default.”

  “I appreciate that, Dr. Hughes. And the one thing you could help me with now is by letting me talk to James.”

  He stiffened. “What has James got to do with this?”

  “Nothing, sir. I just want to find out what the medical students thought of Dr. Fletcher. I’m only looking for background.”

  “I don’t want my son drawn into this.”

  “He won’t be.”

  I sat downstairs while the doc went up to get his son. I heard water running upstairs, so I figured James was in the shower. I wandered around the living room and made my way to the kitchen. The remains of an early dinner were heaped up on the counter. I glanced at my watch and realized it was nearly seven o’clock, and that I was getting a bit peckish myself.

  James came downstairs, impressed khaki pants buttoned but still unbelted, no shirt, no shoes, rubbing a towel through his wet hair.

  “Hey, Harry,” he greeted me. James was a decade younger than me, with a couple of years to spare on top of it. I remembered him as a child and realized I hadn’t seen him in several years. For the first time in my memory, he seemed an adult.

  “Hey, James, what’s happening, man?”

  “Same old, same old.” He took my hand and pumped it. He had his mother’s reddish-brown hair and his father’s deep brown eyes. He was a handsome young man, intelligent, with a bright future. I found myself envying him.

  “How’s medical school?”

  “Tough. I’m third year, though. So apparently I’m going to make it. A lot by now is just routine. You grind it out. Next year, I start jockeying for residencies.”

  “Great. Hey, listen, where’d your dad go?”

  James looked behind him. “He’s upstairs in his office, I guess. He just came up, said you wanted to talk to me. Seemed kind of tight.”

  “It’s my fault,” I said, leaning against the counter and crossing my arms. “He doesn’t approve of my present career path.”

  James winced. “Oh, man, I’m sorry. I hate when he does that. The old man seems to think he knows what’s best for everybody.”

  I smiled at him. “He means well. I’ve just gotten myself in a mess over this Conrad Fletcher situation.”

  James wrapped the towel around his head and gave it a good shake. “Yeah, it’s been all over the school. Not you, I mean. Just Fletcher getting murdered.”

  “I wanted to get an insider’s point of view from you, James.”

  James pulled the towel off his head and wrapped it around his shoulders. “I took classes from Fletcher. We had to. No way out of it. I’d have probably gotten him next year for surgery rotation. Whoever killed him had fabulous timing. Did us all a favor.”

  “I got the feeling not many people were fond of him.”

  “He was abrasive, abusive, probably a rageaholic. Popular? No, I’d have to say not.”

  “Diplomat,” I commented. “Any idea who might have hated him enough to kill him?”

  “God, Harry,” he sighed. “Who didn’t hate him enough to kill him?”

  “James,” I said, pulling out my notebook and pen, “can you be a little more specific?”

  “To begin with,” he said, pausing a long moment, “there was me.”

  11

  “What?” I asked, my notebook falling to the floor. I bent to pick it up.

  James laid the towel across the back of his neck and pulled both ends tightly.

  “When Dr. Fletcher decided he didn’t like you, you were on his list forever. And it was pretty easy to get on that list. Sometimes, you didn’t even know you’d done anything.”

  “And you were on the list?”

  He nodded his head. “Since first year. At the time, he taught an anatomy course. He hated it, doesn’t do it anymore.”

  “Obviously,” I interrupted.

  James smiled. “Yeah, that’s right. I forgot. Anyway, I was one of the herd, that’s all, and content to stay that way. Somehow, I got singled out. He used to drill us, more like law school than med school. Remember The Paper Chase?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He made Professor Kingsfield look like a den mother. He tore me apart one day in lecture, caught me in a weak moment. I was a target for the rest of the term. Dropped me a letter grade at the end of the semester, even though everything else I’d done was top-notch. When I went to his office to protest, he tore me apart again. Apparently, no one’d taken him on like that before. He threatened to have me thrown out of school.”

  “Could he have done that?”

  “I’ve seen him do it since. I think the only reason I survived is that my dad’s an alum. Still knows people. Political bullshit. That’s all it is.”

  “I had no idea medical schools were such shark tanks.”

  James smiled. “Grow up, Harry. A lot’s at stake. You know what a doctor’s lifetime earnings can be?”

  By the time I left Dr. Hughes and Son’s an hour later, I had several pages filled in my notebook: petty jealousies, betrayals, treacheries, sexual peccadillos, resentments. The struggle for research grants, tenure, awards, and recognition brings out the worst in people. I always had this naive notion that somehow the hallowed halls of the university, where learning and knowledge were prized as ends in themselves, were free of cutthroat craziness.

  Right, Ace. And where’s that oceanfront property in Arizona you want me to look at?

  It was getting late, and I really needed to eat. I have this weird blood su
gar thing: I never seem to get hungry, and then within the space of five minutes, I’m breaking out in a cold sweat, shaking, and I’ll eat anything in sight. I could feel the onset of another blood sugar crash. Fortunately, I was headed downtown. I made a left turn just past the park onto Elliston Place, spotted a space just coming free in front of Rotier’s, and grabbed it before anybody else had the chance.

  Mrs. Rotier had been fixing double cheeseburgers on French bread for the local student population for decades. I’d been eating them since high school. She’s surrogate mother for half the under-twenty-one population of Nashville, a tiny woman with the metabolism of a runaway locomotive. Her grown kids, along with most of their spouses, work the restaurant with her. It’s one place in the ever-shifting flood of the city that never seems to change.

  I slid into a red vinyl booth near the back. A couple of the Rotier’s waitresses are notoriously ill-tempered, which only adds to what’s usually called the atmosphere of the place. After all, what’s Mama going to do, fire them?

  It was my luck to get one that evening. About thirty seconds after I sat down, a plastic-jacketed menu slid across the table in front of me, having become airborne from somewhere behind my left shoulder.

  “Make it quick. I don’t have all night.”

  I looked up to see a mass of brown hair wearing an apron, with a green order pad in one hand, a cracked Bic pen in the other. I smiled. It felt good to be home.

  I flipped open the menu and scanned it. “Roast beef and gravy, potatoes, stewed tomatoes, fried okra. Unsweetened tea.” I rattled off my order as quickly as possible.

  While I waited for dinner, I tried to earn my money by pondering my next move. Problem was, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. I could go see Bubba-what was his last name?-Hayes. Yeah, that was it. Hayes. Or I could go track down a few of the people that James Hughes had mentioned. I opened my notebook and scanned my scribblings.

  Some of them I could eliminate right off. After all, the dean of the medical school may have been hacked off about that rumor that Conrad had been sleeping with his wife, but he wouldn’t have had to kill him. There would be better, more efficient, ways for the dean of a medical school to ruin one of his professor’s lives.

  I stared at two names I’d written down: Jane Collingswood and Albert Zitin. James told me they were two surgical residents who had been under Conrad’s direct supervision. There had been a lot of friction; rumor was that he was about to bust Dr. Collingswood out of the program. There’d been a blowup the day Conrad was killed. Zitin and Collingswood had gotten into a shouting match with Conrad, right out in the hall in front of patients and staff. Everybody on Four West heard it. Most uncool. That was why, in fact, James knew about it. Tension and hostility were rampant at all levels of the institution, but open warfare in front of patients was a real breach of protocol.

  Another concern had been tugging at the back of my mind ever since the police questioned me. I mentioned, in relating my linear chronicle of events, the woman I’d seen step out of the room where I found Conrad. But in my memory, I seem to remember … It’s hard to say. It’s almost as if I saw a second person. Not anybody I saw clearly, you understand. But I saw this woman, an attractive, young woman in a nurse’s uniform. That is, of course, why I noticed her in the first place. But there was something else, and in my mind’s eye, I was simply unable to reconstruct it.

  I heard a throat clearing behind me. “You want this or not?” I looked up to see my waitress standing behind me with a steaming plate and a drink. She’d obviously been standing there a moment or two, waiting for me to come back to earth.

  “Oh, sorry.” I scooted out of her way and pulled my notebook off the table.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she said. “Here. You need anything else?”

  I looked down at the plate. It was all there and looked great. “Everything’s fine. Thanks.”

  She broke what appeared to be a human smile, “Good. Knock ya’self out,” she instructed.

  The food was exquisite, like dinner at home back when my mother still cooked. Meat-and-three, it’s called down South, and there’s nothing like it for finding a little bit of comfort in a lousy, grown-up world.

  The sun had long since set even on this late summer evening when I turned left off 21st Avenue onto Division and headed toward Music Row. Way before I got there, though, I found a parking space on the street beneath an enormous umbrella of maple whose branches hung drooping and heavy out over the near lane of traffic. This part of Division was quiet at night, far from the packs of tourists that crowded the Country Music Hall of Fame, Barbara Mandrell Country, and the line of tacky souvenir shops that lined the streets all the way down to I-40. I swear, it seems that the first thing every truck driver from Tupelo who comes to Nashville and gets a recording contract does is buy himself a gift shop. Go figure. It gave new meaning and depth to the word kitsch, and there’d been many a time I had to slam on my brakes to keep from smashing into some hairy-legged, knobby-kneed geek in Bermuda shorts who wandered out into traffic because the sign that read HERE ONE DAY ONLY-ELVIS’S CADILLAC had caught his eye.

  And they call L.A. La-la land.

  Two punkers with safety pins through their cheeks walked past in the darkness. This town was joining the twentieth century fast, but we were still sufficiently out of it to find safety pins through cheeks shocking. I watched them walk far enough up the sidewalk to where I was sure they weren’t going to turn around and mug me, then I crossed the street. Ahead of me a block or so was the bright neon sign in the small parking lot of Bubba’s market.

  BUBBA’S! YOUR 24-HOUR CONVENIENCE MART, the sign flashed, its blue and red blazing like a visual Islamic call to prayer for those bereft of cigarettes, beer, disposable diapers, and munchie relief. Below that, in bright, steady white, the guarantee: WE NEVER CLOSE!

  I stepped through the heavy metal and glass doors onto the dirty linoleum floor of Bubba’s. The place was your basic redneck all-night market. Disposable lighter displays carried photos of half-nude women, Confederate flags, and my personal favorite: the broken down old Rebel soldier with a drink in one hand and the Stars and Bars in the other with the caption, “Forget, Hell!” Beer coolers lined the entire length of the wall opposite the entrance. Wire cage displays held every kind of gooey snack cake, processed cracker morsel, and potato chip variation imaginable. The place was a cathedral of cholesterol: potted meat product, deviled ham, beef stick, beef jerky, pickled pig’s feet, Vienna sausages, on and on and on, ad-quite literally-nauseam.

  A skinny white dude with greasy hair, wearing a dirty T-shirt that exposed tattooed arms, stood behind the counter. He was barely visible below an overhead rack full of cigarettes, but I got a good enough look at him to guess that he was probably a recent graduate of the Tennessee Department of Corrections. I moseyed up to him and tried to look casual.

  “What can I do for you?” he asked.

  “Bubba around?”

  He looked at me, suspicious that somebody actually wearing a necktie would want to see the boss. Maybe I should have left it in the car. Maybe I should have gone home and changed into overalls.

  “Who wants to know?”

  “My name’s Harry. Harry Denton. Bubba doesn’t know me, but I think he’ll want to talk to me.”

  The clerk’s eyes wandered to the tip of my chin. Seemed this guy had trouble looking people in the face. “I don’t know about that.”

  “Why don’t you call Mr. Kennedy and ask him if it’s okay.” My one trump card had been played. If I knew who Mr. Kennedy was, I had to be an insider. At least, that’s what I hoped he’d think.

  He stared right through me for a second. Behind me, the front door opened and two teenage kids with thin, scraggly beards and bad skin walked in, a couple of Jeff Spiccoli types by way of Birmingham. I turned back to the clerk.

  “How about it? Can I talk to him?”

  “Well, I-”

  “At least call him,” I said. “He can always
say no. But what if it turns out he really does want to see me and you don’t call him?”

  He stared at me, like screw you, smart guy. But then he turned his back to me and picked up a black receiver from the shelf behind him. He whispered something into the phone, listened for a second, then hung up.

  “Mr. Kennedy’ll be out in a minute,” he said, turning immediately to the two guys behind me.

  I took a step or two back, looked around the store. Good spot for a holdup, I thought. Wonder how many times this place has been hit? Then again, if Bubba really does have some stroke around here, maybe the local crackheads have figured out this establishment isn’t a viable target.

  I noticed a metal door nestled in a corner of the store, to the left of the beer cooler and facing the checkout counter. I hadn’t seen it before, and then I realized the overhead cigarette display rack camouflaged it, probably deliberately. In the center of the door was a small dot framed in a ring of metal: an eyepiece.

  In a moment, the door opened, and the godawful biggest black guy I’ve ever seen in my life stepped through. Come to think of it, this guy could have stepped through without opening the door. This hunk had to be 250, 270, all muscle, wearing a knit pullover shirt that was clean, expensive, fashionable, and a pair of stone-washed jeans that fit him like a glove. His hair was cut short, conservative, and he wore a surprisingly tasteful gold chain around his neck. What’s a good-looking guy like that doing in a place like this?

  He stepped toward me. I fought the urge to run like hell, figuring an ex-pro-football player could probably still outrun me in the forty-yard dash. “You looking for me?” he demanded, his voice low, serious. He was not a man to be messed with. I picked that up pretty quick; I’m a detective.

  “Actually,” I squeaked, my throat suddenly dry. “I’m looking for Bubba Hayes.” God, I wish I’d been born with a deeper voice.

  “Mr. Hayes is busy right now. Perhaps if you explained your business to me, I could set up an appointment at a later date.”