Denton - 03 - Way Past Dead (16 page)

I rubbed my eyes wearily. This was incredibly bad. Goddamn it, boy, I wanted to ask him, didn’t you ever watch
Perry Mason?
In my humble layman’s opinion, Slim was looking at about twenty to life right now.

“Did you see anybody else there?” I asked. “Any sign of anybody or anything?”

“Nothing, Harry. But it was late. Until I found Becca, I wasn’t paying a lot of attention. After that, I don’t know. It’s all a blur.”

“Now this is real important,” I said. “When—”

The computerized voice of the jailhouse phone interrupted me: “This call will end in ten seconds.”

“When did you get there?” I demanded. “Exactly what time was it?”

C’mon, blast you, I thought, answer me.

“I don’t know, Harry. Maybe four-thirty in the morning. A few minutes before? Hell, I just don’t know.…”

“You sure, Slim? You damn sure about that?”

“As sure as I can be. I mean it was late and all—”

Then the computer cut us off.

Ray and I sat there staring at each other until another computer voice came on: “If you’d like to make a call,
please hang up and try again. If you need help, hang up and dial your operator.”

“Ray,” I said. “We’re going to need a hell of a lot more help than any operator can give us.”

We sat there for a moment or two, struck dumber than bricks.

“Did you know any of this?” I asked. I don’t think I meant to sound pissed off, but that’s the way it came out.

Ray silently feigned innocence, and very badly, I might add.

“C’mon, Ray,” I said, “don’t give me that
who, me?
shit.”

Then he sighed and his shoulders relaxed. “He came pounding on my back door just before five o’clock. Woke my ass up out of a coma. He still had blood on his shirt where he’d wiped his hands.”

I felt my jaw slacken. “Goddamn it, Ray, this could make you an accessory after the fact.”

“Hey, I’m the one told him to turn hisself in.”

“Yeah, twenty-four hours later. After he’d had time to hide his shirt and boots.”

Ray shook his head. “I know. I can’t believe he did that.”

“Me, either. What an effective way to make yourself look guilty as sin.”

“Hell,” he said, almost as an afterthought, “I told him to burn ’em.”

I slapped my forehead. “Thank you, Ray. Now that I know that, I’m an accessory after the fact.
Thanks
for sharing that with me.”

“You’re not no damn access after the—whatever the hell you said.”

“Maybe not. I just happen to be aware of a failed attempt to suppress evidence in a murder case, that’s all. You know something, Ray? Slim may not be guilty, but you two bozos are sure conspiring to make him look that way.”

Ray looked up at me, a pained look in his eyes.

“There’s no need to start name-calling here.”

I jumped out of my seat and took a step toward him. He tensed. I must have looked as mad as I felt.

“Now, listen, bud, we’re establishing some new rules around here, understand? If I’m supposed to help you, then you have to tell me everything. All of it. No more obfuscation.”

“No more what?” he asked.

“No more bullshit!” I yelled, then placed my hands palm down on the desk in front of him. “If you agree to my terms, I’ll go down to my office and get a notebook. I’ll bring that notebook back here and start making notes, and maybe, just maybe, we’ll figure out a way to keep Slim’s permanent address from being in care of the Tennessee Department of Corrections. If you don’t agree to my terms, then I’m not coming back.”

Ray gazed at me like he’d never seen me before.

“Deal?”

He nodded.

“Okay,” I said. “Try to get that feeble brain of yours in gear. We’ll never be able to prove Slim didn’t do it; you guys have already taken care of that. The only way we’ll get Slim off is to figure out who the hell did kill Rebecca Gibson and why.”

“Okay,” Ray agreed, his voice real low.

I walked over to the door and opened it, then paused. “There’s only one thing I can see that’s obvious here,” I said.

Ray stood up. “What?”

“Whoever killed Rebecca,” I said, “was probably going
out the back door at the same time Slim was coming in the front.”

I was talking to myself more than to Ray by then. I started down the hall, trying to figure out how the timing could have been as precise as it appeared. There couldn’t have been more than a few moments’ overlap. The neighbors heard two sets of noises: screams and fighting, then the squeal of tires burning rubber out of the parking lot. Slim caused the latter; he claims he had nothing to do with the former.

I heard a muffled phone ring somewhere ahead of me, but didn’t realize it was mine until I was halfway down the hall and heard the relays in my answering machine clicking. I had the volume turned down low on the machine, so couldn’t hear whose voice was leaving the message. I fumbled with the keys, then got the door open just in time to hear the machine cut off and begin recycling itself.

“Damn it,” I muttered. I waited for the machine to reset, then turned the volume up.

“Hello,” the familiar computerized voice said, “you have one message.”

There were more clicks and the crackling of static as the heads in the machine hit the worn tape. The voice that came through was high-pitched male, deeply country, and mad as hell:

“Hey, you son of a bitch! I’m gonna git you, you got that, son? Yer ass is mine, and I mean it! You have a nice day, ’cause you ain’t got many left!”

Click. Dial tone.

I sank slowly into my chair. What the hell? If I didn’t know better, I’d say that was a threat.

I hit the button and played the message back. The accent was twangy and nasally, relatively common in these parts among the didn’t-finish-high-school-and-pumping-gas-at-the-filling-station crowd. I tried to place it. East Tennessee, perhaps? I didn’t think so. More like rural Mississippi or Alabama, maybe west Tennessee.
There was no way to pinpoint it. The only thing I knew for sure was that there’s only one region in the country where the phrase
son of a bitch
is reduced to a pair of slurred syllables.

I replayed the message, listening carefully for background noises, other voices, anything that might reveal the caller’s identity. Nothing. I dug around inside my cluttered center desk drawer until I found a blank tape, then replaced the one in the answering machine. I tucked the tape with the message on it inside my jacket pocket, grabbed a spiral notebook, and locked my office door behind me as I headed back to Ray’s.

Halfway down the hall, I stopped. I was alone, with only the cracked linoleum, green chipped plaster, and decades’ worth of dust balls surrounding me. This wave of fatigue swept over me, and I found myself feeling almost dizzy.

“Okay,” I muttered, “now you’re getting death threats. Add that to the list.…”

“I thought you’d changed your mind,” Ray said when I opened the door to his office. I took off my jacket and laid it across the back of the chair, then loosened my tie about down to the third button and rolled up my shirtsleeves. Then I sat down at the desk across from him, opened the notebook, and pulled the cap off a cheap pen.

“All right,” I said, “let’s get to work. First of all, let’s consider all the alternatives. Could it have been just a random crime? Could Rebecca have walked in on a housebreaker?”

“Maybe.”

“Was anything stolen from her apartment? Money, jewelry, the television, a VCR?”

“No, definitely,” Ray said. He shook his head. “Nothing was taken.”

“And nobody’s ever made mention of her being raped or sexually assaulted, right?”

“Yeah.”

“So the police have eliminated the possibility of random crime, and so can we.”

“For the time being.”

I looked up at him after scribbling a note on the page. “Yeah, for the time being. Now, what about lovers?”

He made a humming noise. “I never thought of that.”

“With the severity of the beating she took, there had to be some degree of passion involved. Somebody had to loathe Rebecca Gibson to wear her out that bad. Whoever it was could have killed her a lot easier.”

The bags under Ray’s eyes and the creases on his forehead lifted as he brightened. “Yeah, I hadn’t thought of that. The problem is, I don’t know if she was seeing anybody. There were rumors, of course, about her and—”

He paused. “Her and who?” I asked.

Ray settled back in his chair again. “Naw, it couldn’t be.”

I slapped my pen down on the paper. “Don’t do that to me. If we’re going to help Slim, we’ve got to consider every possibility.”

“I don’t see how Dwight could have—”

“Dwight who?” I demanded.

“Dwight Parmenter,” he answered. “Dwight’s the guy we were singing with Sunday night at the Bluebird.”

I pulled a picture of Dwight Parmenter out of memory and ran it past. Guy was tall, wiry. He was wearing a checked flannel shirt that night. During their performance, he seemed to be the quietest, the one with the least ego. He was also, musically, the least impressive.

“The guy on Rebecca’s right?”

“Yeah.”

“So tell me about him,” I said. “Did he and Rebecca have something going on?”

Ray plopped his elbows on the desk and leaned forward. “Maybe. I know they’d been seen out a few times. I know Dwight was sweet on her.”

“I didn’t notice any particular sparks flying Sunday night.”

“That’s ’cause Slim was there. And partly because you have to get to know Dwight to see what he’s really thinking.”

I paused for a moment. “Let me get this straight. Rebecca was still singing and performing with her ex-husband, her ex-husband’s partner, and the guy who may have been her lover—all at the same time.”

Ray grinned. “Yeah, I guess that’s about it.”

“Does any of this seem just the slightest bit strange to you?”

The grin widened into sheepishness. “You got to understand, Harry. People in the music bidness do things a little bit different.”

“Apparently so. Okay, so we’ve got Dwight Parmenter. Maybe you’re right and he wasn’t involved. If he wasn’t, he’ll be easy enough to scratch off the list. What about other lovers?”

“How much time have you got?”

I drew a line beneath my notes on Dwight Parmenter. “How much will I need?”

Ray straightened up. “Harry, Rebecca was a grown woman, and she’d been around awhile. And like I said, music-bidness types—”

“I know, I know. Operate under a different set of rules. Tell me this. Is there anybody out there who was involved with Rebecca and broke up with her under particularly bitter circumstances. More than just your usual soap opera.”

“The only one I know of is Slim,” Ray said. “I mean, people come together, stay awhile, and then drift back apart. Law of the jungle, man. I do know the only one she ever married was Slim, outside of some guy back in west Tennessee she married back when she was eighteen.”

“What about him?”

“Hell, I don’t even know his name. But Rebecca used
to joke about him. Said he was a tractor-trailer mechanic, chewed tobacco, and would rather hunt deer than have sex.”

“At least he had his priorities straight.”

“Maybe so. But they divorced with no big battles, and she came to Nashville to make it big as a country-music singer. That must have been twelve, thirteen years ago. As far as I know, she never saw him again.”

“So Slim was the only one where any … recriminations were involved.”

“Yeah, but even then, they still worked together. Their business interests were tied together real close. They co-owned songs, split royalty checks—the whole shooting match.”

“Only Slim was getting the fuzzy end of the lollipop on most of their deals, right? Otherwise, he wouldn’t be so broke.”

“Not really,” Ray said after another moment’s pause. “Slim just ain’t no good at handling money. That’s why he never has any. It runs through his fingers like gas through a ’66 Cadillac.”

“Well,” I said, encouraged, “that may help. After all, if she wasn’t screwing him, business-wise, there was no reason to kill her.”

“Yeah,” Ray mumbled. Then he looked away nervously.

“What?”

He looked back at me. “I’ve seen their partnership agreements and all the contracts,” he said. “Slim and Rebecca set up a weird arrangement.”

“What was the arrangement?”

Ray bit his lower lip. “In the event that either of them died, the rights to the song catalog totally reverted to the other.”

“Oh, no,” I muttered. “The rights don’t revert to Rebecca’s estate?”

“Nope,” Ray said. “They go back to Slim.”

“And how much is that worth?”

“There’s no way to answer that question. Right now the catalog brought in enough for both of them to live on, if they was careful. But if some major star was to pick up a song or two of theirs, say Garth or Wynonna or somebody like that, and make a number-one hit out of it—well, hell, the sky’s the limit. Six figures easy. Maybe more. Could happen.”

Great, I thought as I finished scribbling down the note on what Ray’d just told me. One more reason for Slim to whack his ex-wife.

Just what we needed.