Denton - 03 - Way Past Dead (19 page)

“M-18 smoke grenade,” he said. “Military issue. Pull the pin, wait a couple of seconds, and then over the next minute and a half, you’ve got a quarter-million cubic feet of dense colored smoke. I sent for the variety pack. What color’d you get?”

I looked down at the writing on the can. “Red.”

“Great, I got violet.”

“Well, whoop-de-doo. Let’s go outside and play.”

Lonnie scooted over and dropped his canister back into the pile of packing peanuts. “What in the hell’s going on with you, Harry? Lately, you been about as much fun as a bad rash.”

I put my head back on the couch and stared straight up toward the ceiling. The dirty-white and brown-stained acoustic tiles looked like someone had been spitting tobacco juice at them.

He stared at me until I became uncomfortable. “What?” I finally asked, just to break the silence.

“I’ve known you for a long time, Harry, and you ain’t never been this weird before. What the fuck’s going on with you?”

“I wish I knew.”

I got up and walked into the kitchen. The sink was permanently discolored with grease stains and dirt. A huge, four-barreled Holley carburetor sat on the counter, the tops of its brass jets polished to a shine. I opened the refrigerator and grabbed another can of beer. It was the first time I’d ever done that without thinking.

Just make yourself at home, dude, I thought. “Want another one?” I yelled.

“No,” he called. “I like to savor mine. The delicate bouquet and the lingering aftertaste.”

“Yeah,” I said, walking back into the living room and pacing around with the can in my hand. “It’s the aftertaste I keep trying to wash away.”

“Who are you kidding, Harry? Don’t pull that Sam Spade shit on me. You don’t even drink that much.”

“Well, I may start.”

“Has it occurred to you that with all you’re dealing with, you’ve got every right to be a little stressed-out?”

“Yes,” I said, “I have the right to be a little stressed-out. I don’t have the right to quit functioning, which is what I feel like I’m doing.”

Lonnie’s heavy workboots hit the top of the coffee table with a bang as he stretched out. “Look, guy, your girlfriend’s a hostage, another friend’s in jail for murder, and you’re so fucking broke you can’t afford to pay a lawyer to bankrupt your ass. And to top it off, my dog just missed chewing your nuts off by the thickness of a chain-link fence. You think there might be some situational triggers here?”

“Yeah, and as soon as I get this laundry list of situations taken care of, I’ll be okay.”

“That’s it,” he yelled, slapping the armrest of the worn red-velour chair he sat in. “That’s the problem. See? You keep saying
taken care of
and
fixed
and all that shit. You keep acting like you’re going to solve some crime and be the big hero. And there ain’t nothing for you to solve. It’s not your business. You aren’t a hostage negotiator and you aren’t a homicide investigator and you’re not, not a …”

He paused. “Not a detective?” I asked. “Or at least not much of one.”

“That’s not what I meant. You still don’t get it. What I’m trying to tell you is that you’re going about it the wrong way. You can’t be a detective here. So stop trying.”

“So what do I do?” I yelled. “Sit here while the whole damn world swirls down the toilet?”

“If it does, you can’t stop it, can you? But that’s not even the point.”

“Then what
is
the point?”

He shifted up in the chair and dropped his boots on the floor with a thud that shook the floor of the trailer. “Forget all this Mike Hammer shit. Go back to what you know best.”

I felt my forehead tighten involuntarily. “What do you mean?”

“What did you do before you became a private investigator?”

“A reporter,” I said. “You know that.”

“Right. And you were a much better reporter than you are a detective.”

“Gee, thanks,” I said.

“What the hell would you expect me to say? You were a reporter for, what, fifteen years? And you’ve been a detective maybe two years. Do the math.”

I set the beer can down on the coffee table, still unopened. Then I settled into the corner of the couch and found that I had unconsciously chewed a sore place on my lower lip.

“So stop thinking like a detective,” he said. “And go back to thinking like a reporter.”

“You know,” I said, after a moment, “I’d gotten out of that mind-set.”

“So get back into it. Forget about catching the bad guys. Go back to looking for the truth, just for its own sake. You do that, everything else will fall into place on its own.”

Then, for a moment, this incredible sense of calm came over me. Lonnie was right. I’d been trying to chase down and hog-tie something I couldn’t even see. I began to see Marsha’s situation in a different light, and Slim’s as well. But there was one situation—the financial one—that had only one perspective, and that perspective was inescapable. In order to change that, I was going to have to do something I’d never done before, and I was real uncomfortable at the thought.

“Listen, pal. You don’t happen to have an extra couple
of hundred laying around somewhere you could loan me, do you? Just until the insurance company cuts my check?”

Quit thinking like a detective; start thinking like a newspaperman. Fall back on what you know best. Go with what’s worked before.

I drove home without remembering how I got there, ate dinner without tasting it, then stared at the tube without watching it. Marsha called about ten, exhausted, half-asleep. We made forced small talk for five minutes, than rang off.

Next morning, all I could think of was where to start. In my mind, I went back to my newspaper days, back to when I used to follow a trail to see where it was going, and not because I wanted it to go somewhere. That had been my problem the last few days; I was pursuing my own agenda, rather than reality.

I didn’t know what good it would do, but the logical first step was to see Slim.

It had been years since I’d set foot in the Davidson County jail. Back in my younger days—the crime beat being a young man’s game—I hung around the jail a lot. That was the old days. Everything was different now, I discovered as I crossed Second Avenue North and went into the ground floor of the Criminal Justice Center. The place was tighter, more efficient than it was in days past, when prisoners and staff would often mingle in a backslapping informality that was shocking to the outsider. Now the uniformed officers were crisp and almost military in bearing, while the plainclothes staffers wore pressed suits and wide polyester ties. The
place was even quieter than I remembered, with little of the background chatter and metallic din that characterizes most jails.

I climbed the steep flight of stairs to the second floor, where I would be logged in and patted down before being allowed into the visiting gallery. A man in a gray suit with a plastic ID tag clipped to his shirt pocket that identified him as Officer Combs examined my driver’s license and had me empty my pockets. Then I signed the log and was led down a narrow hallway, past closed doors and a few stray inmates in orange jumpsuits with
DCSO
—Davidson County Sheriff’s Office—stenciled on the back.

Everything was gray—painted cinder block and drywall, with slick linoleum floors, institutionally cold but clean and orderly. The first thing I noticed was the absence of that particular odor that’s so indigenous to jails and prisons. It’s impossible to describe unless you’ve taken in a lungful of it, but it’s a strange mix of masculine sweat, cigarette smoke, disinfectant tinged with a faint trace of urine, and something else that’s cold and sterile and unidentifiable, as if the concrete and steel had a smell of their own that was heightened and reinforced by the presence of so many incarcerated bodies. It’s not an unpleasant odor; it’s just more pervasive and omnipresent than anything else. I’ve never smelled it anywhere else but jails and prisons, but there wasn’t any of it here.

Officer Combs led me into a rectangular room with a series of partitions on the long left and right sides of the rectangle. At the end of the room was a large plate-glass window that looked out onto a hallway, on the other side of which was the glass-enclosed room that was Central Control. Video monitors and electronically controlled doors oversaw access to every door, every elevator, every room in the facility.

A crowd of guys, a random mix of tall and short, thin and fat, black and white, lingered in the hallway.

“What’re they doing?” I asked.

“Awaiting transit,” the officer said in a monotone. “They’ve been sentenced and they’re off to classification.”

Then I remembered what I’d been told years before; with the exception of the trustees and a few inmates with sentences short enough to serve locally, all the people in this jail were technically innocent.

Shows you just how far a technicality will get you, I thought.

Officer Combs motioned me toward one of the stalls on the left. “Sit there,” he instructed. “The prisoner will be here as soon as we can get him down from the fifth floor. You’ve got an hour.”

“Thanks,” I said, but he’d already turned and walked away.

I sat on a low circular gray stool bolted to the floor in front of a small ledge beneath a window. The glass window was about eight-by-twelve inches and looked out on a wall maybe two feet away. Slim would be led in by a guard, would squeeze onto the stool on his side of the metal wall, and we’d talk through a metal screen beneath the porthole.

There were so many layers of paint on the metal walls around me that I could see waves from the varying thicknesses. In front of me, someone had carved love graffiti in the paint with a ballpoint pen.

JRF LOVES JIMMY
, the message read, with a scratched heart around it. Not in this place, she doesn’t.

There wasn’t quite enough room in the tiny stall to spread my elbows out to the horizontal, which made me feel a bit claustrophobic. I wondered how I’d deal with being locked up, then hoped I’d never have the chance to find out. Voices echoed around me in hollow metallic ringing.

I heard the muffled sound of movement through the tiny screen, then a shadow moving against the wall opposite me. In a moment an orange jumpsuit followed by
a uniform appeared in the window, then the orange jumpsuit settled down and Slim’s face filled the small square of thick glass.

Slim looked tired, with deep-purplish-and-gray circles under his eyes. He was clean-shaven, though, and his hair looked freshly shampooed.

“Hey, Harry,” he said. The sound of his voice spoke of fatigue beyond help.

“Slim,” I said. “How are you?”

“Holding on,” he answered. He settled down on the stool and folded his arms onto the metal ledge on his side of the window, as if he were trying to get his face as close to free air as possible. “Can’t sleep much, though.”

“Too noisy?”

“Naw, it ain’t that. I just can’t sleep. It ain’t so bad, though. ’S not like it’s the first time I’ve ever been in jail or anything.”

I must have unconsciously frowned at him. “Don’t look at me like that, Harry,” he said defensively. “Coupla DUIs in my wilder days and one aggravated assault. I ain’t fucking Jack the Ripper.”

I grinned at him. “Okay, so you ain’t Jack the Ripper. But you’re in some deep effluent, Slim. I can’t lie to you. I don’t know what the hell to do to help you out. I’ve lost a little sleep myself the last couple of days.”

His eyes wandered down to the floor. “Maybe nobody can help me.”

“No, I don’t believe that. We just aren’t there yet, that’s all. You didn’t kill her. We just got to find out who did, which is why I’m here.”

His eyes refocused on my face through the glass. “You think that’s possible?”

“Anything’s possible, especially when it looks like it’s your last hope. So let’s get started. You knew her, maybe better than anybody else. I’ve talked to Ray and he’s filled me in on some of the background. I want to hear it from you. Who else could have killed Rebecca?”

Slim brought both hands up and massaged the tension out of his face. I started getting the jitters again, and almost reminded him we only had an hour. Then I decided to hold on and let Slim do this his own way.

“If I had to bet money on it,” he finally said, “I’d lay it all on either Dwight Parmenter or Mike Pinkleton.”

“I know who Dwight Parmenter is, but who’s Pinkleton?”

“Mike Pinkleton was her road manager, the head roadie.”

“Was?”

“Yeah, was. She fired him a week ago.”

“What for?”

“I don’t know, although Mike was a pretty tough kind of guy. Biceps the size of half-gallon jugs and biker tattoos everywhere. Hair down to his shoulders, blue-jean jacket with the arms cut off. You know the type.”

“How long had he worked for her?”

“That’s the weird part. Becca inherited him after our act broke up. That’s how far back we all go. He’d worked for her maybe five, six years.”

“Then why would she fire him?”

“You find that out, you may be onto something,” Slim said.

“But you think he could beat somebody to death?”

Slim snickered. “Wait’ll you see him.”