Denton - 01 - Dead Folks' Blues Read online

  Then I remembered. I’d been concentrating so hard on Conrad and Rachel that I forgot to put any connection from their life into my own. My father’s closest friend, before my parents retired to Hawaii, was a doctor: Dr. Eugene Hughes. Dr. Gene, we called him. Dr. Gene was a pediatrician, and he and his wife had a surprise late baby after the rest of their children were nearly grown. And that surprise late baby, James, was now in medical school himself.

  Guess where? I could have slapped myself as I drove toward Hillsboro Village. And Dr. Hughes lived about ten minutes away. I jerked into the left-hand-turn lane at Wedgewood Avenue, which becomes Blakemore, then changes names again and becomes 31st Avenue. I turned left on West End Avenue, which becomes Harding Road a mile or two down. I drove out past St. Thomas Hospital and turned right onto White Bridge Road, which is Woodmont Boulevard on the other side of the intersection before it becomes Robertson Road the other side of the interstate. What a town.

  I lost track of the street names chugging around the steep curves and wandering roads of the part of town called Hill-wood. Dr. Hughes’s house was a big gray one; I remembered that much. But it had been years since I’d been there. The last time was my father’s retirement party. My father and Dr. Hughes had flown in the war together and had been lifelong buddies after that.

  There, on that corner, I thought, as I pulled into a steep downhill driveway and coasted to a stop. This looked like the right place. If not, I’d just have to hope they didn’t keep many shotguns around.

  Dr. Hughes raised dogs, some of the finest hunting dogs I’d ever seen. I must have smelled like squirrel that day, or maybe they got a whiff of Shadow. Anyway, the dogs went crazy as soon as I got out of the car. I headed away from them, back up the drive to the walk that led to the front door.

  I had to ring twice. Dr. Hughes opened the door, stood there holding a newspaper in one hand, his glasses tipped down on his nose, trying for a moment to recognize his dearest, most lifelong friend’s son.

  “I’m Harry, Dr. Gene. Harry Denton.”

  He paused for a moment, more astonished than anything else. “Well, of course you are, son. I recognized you. I was just trying to figure out if it was really you after all this time.”

  He held the metal storm door open for me, and I walked in. The difference in lifestyle between a pediatrician and a hot-rod surgeon was acutely obvious here; Dr. Hughes’s house was large and comfortable, but it was definitely lived in. The furniture was old, most of it from the Fifties and early Sixties, with plenty of evidence that when no one else was looking, Dr. Hughes let the dogs in.

  “Good to see you, Harry. It’s been too long.” His voice was jovial, yet with the distinguished edge that educated Southern men start to take on when they get old. It’s as if they live under some compulsion to sound like gentlemen farmers at that stage in life, as if all their great-grandfathers had been Civil War generals. If everybody who claimed to have a Civil War general in his past really had one, the whole damn war would have been fought with nothing but men wearing stars on their collars.

  “Good to see you, Dr. Gene. How’ve you been?”

  “Just fine, my boy. Just fine.”

  Dr. Hughes’s wife had passed on about five years earlier. He’d lived alone until James finished his undergraduate work at Emory and came home to go to medical school. Now the two of them lived by themselves in this big house. And while I’m sure they had someone come by every week or so to clean house, domestic science obviously wasn’t all that much of a priority to them.

  “Dr. Gene,” I said, after he closed the door and escorted me into the living room. “I kind of came by on business.”

  There was a picture of him and my father on the mantelpiece, an old black-and-white from the war; the two of them were wearing leather flying helmets and parachutes in front of a P-40.

  He frowned at me and led me over to the couch, newspaper still in hand, and motioned for me to sit. He settled into his easy chair and fanned the paper out in front of him.

  “I’ve been reading about your business, boy. I heard you lost your job at the paper, but I didn’t know you’d gone into private detecting.”

  He made it sound like pimping. I was a long way from becoming a pimp; six or seven weeks, at least. I shrugged my shoulders. “Same old story. Seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  “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 seem
ed 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.”

  “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 sugar 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.