Denton - 03 - Way Past Dead (21 page)

The next step was to drop in on Mac Ford, Rebecca’s manager, and get whatever I could out of him. I dodged a couple of cars and scampered across the street, then began the long climb up the ramps to the fourth floor of the parking garage. As usual, I’d come in late and lost
my chance for a prime parking space. That didn’t really bother me, though. The ramp wasn’t steep and I needed the exercise.

There was a memorial service for Rebecca Gibson later that afternoon, down on Broadway at Christ Episcopal Church. I figured I’d take a chance on catching Ford, then head back downtown for the service. I wasn’t sure what I’d get out of attending the service, but it seemed like it couldn’t hurt anything.

I rounded the slick concrete ramp on the third level and headed, slightly winded and quickly moistening, up toward my car. Ahead of me, the faded, chipped paint on the wall gave the place a decayed look, and I fought not to think of how far my life had deteriorated in the past couple of years. Back at the newspaper, I had seniority in the parking lot as well as the office, with a prime spot in the employee lot down in the Gulch, the area that ran below the Church Street Viaduct down in back of the newspaper building.

What the hell, I thought, think of it as a built-in exercise machine.

Above me, there was a crash. Not a loud one, not the heavy metallic grind of cars slamming into each other, but more of a thud followed by …

Breaking glass.

I quickened my steps halfway up the ramp, then broke into a trot. A half-dozen steps later there was another crash, this time louder, followed by the distinct tinkling of shattered glass hitting concrete.

I accelerated from a trot to a run, but my street shoes were slick on the concrete and I missed a couple of steps, almost losing my footing. I reached out to regain my balance, then hit the top of the ramp. I whipped around a concrete pillar and saw, at the farthest end of the garage, a running hulk of a man maybe sixty yards away from me. All I saw was a blur of blue legs and a pair of arms in a checked shirt pumping away.

“Hey!” I yelled, without thinking. I put everything I
had into it, figuring that somebody hauling ass like that in a direction away from me was certainly up to no good.

Whoever he was, he knew how to run. He outpaced me, getting to a large steel door with a push bar before I was even a quarter of the way down the building. He slammed the brass exit bar and was through in a half second, leaving only a puff of dust as the door closed behind him.

I ran like hell, hoping he’d gotten stuck out there somehow. But the door exited out onto an exterior stairwell that ran straight down the side of the building to a driveway that led, in turn, to the alley behind the parking garage. I gave it all I had, but by the time I got to the door, I was puffing so hard I wouldn’t have heard his footsteps even if he’d still been there. As I held on to the door to keep from being locked out of the garage, I caught a glimpse of him rounding the corner of the building and streaking into the alley.

There was no use following. He was long gone.

I sputtered, straining to get my breath back. Sweat had broken out everywhere, and I felt like ripping my suit coat off.

I pushed the door all the way open and stepped back into the garage. I wondered what the hell had gone on, when I noticed my shoes were crunching on the concrete. I bent my knee and examined the bottom of my right shoe.

Broken glass was embedded all over the sole.

Oh, boy, I thought. Somebody’s in for a lousy surprise when they get off work. I was debating getting involved with the police when I noticed a spray of broken glass on the concrete about a dozen cars ahead of me.

I worked myself up to a trot again, my fears growing as I approached the twinkling mess. Then I got to the car, which had been tucked in between two long sedans so that its nose was invisible unless you were right on top of it.

My car.

The windshield was smashed in, with a thousand bits of glittering safety glass all over the hood and a gaping hole right in front of the steering wheel. My heart sank as I walked over and surveyed the damage.

There was a large, ragged-edged chunk of brick lying beside the driver’s side door, but no attempt had been made to break into the car. Mindless, idiotic vandalism, I thought. If I’d only been here a couple of minutes sooner, I thought, I could have stopped the guy.

Or maybe he’d have used the brick on my head.

The sweat I’d worked up turned into icicles as I realized what had happened. Was I getting paranoid? Somebody trashed my car, but didn’t even try to steal the stereo. I’m getting death threats on the phone and bricks through the windshield.

What the hell’s going on?

“What the hell do you mean?” I demanded. “The police don’t take these calls anymore? Lady, my car has been vandalized, for God’s sake!”

“I’m sorry, sir,” the impersonal voice on the other end of the line said. Then she repeated her canned explanation of why the police are too busy to respond to routine car break-ins. There are just too many of them. She could, she offered, assign a report number that might satisfy my insurance company.

“I don’t
have
any car insurance,” I protested. “Since I’m an honest citizen, I can’t afford it anymore.”

“Sir.” Her tone shifted to the stern one she used when her kids were out of control. “It’s against the law to drive without liability insurance.”

“Aw, assign it a number,” I said, giving her my best Bowery Boys go-to-hell attitude as I slammed the phone down.

I thumbed through the Yellow Pages and found the auto-glass companies. I called four of them and discovered, to my utter confounded amazement, that they all charged the same amount to replace my windshield.

“What a coincidence,” I said to Polite Young Receptionist Number Four. “A hundred and fifty is what the other three companies said.”

“Oh, yessir,” she said, missing the massive dose of smart-ass I’d injected into my voice. I guess she wasn’t too up on price-fixing laws, either. “We all charge the same.”

She’d already told me that the windshield replacement would take a couple of hours, so I figured what the hell. Price fixing or no price fixing, I had them right where they wanted me.

“The only problem is,” I explained, “I’ve got to be somewhere. I can’t wait around.”

“That’s okay, sir. We can bill your insurance company direct, then put your deductible on a credit card.”

I cleared my throat. “I don’t have any insurance.” I half expected her to hang up on me in disgust.

“Oh,” she said. Her voice dropped about fifty percent in volume. “You seem like a nice guy. Noninsurance claims we’ll let slide by for a hundred. That okay?”

I tried not to gasp. Ordinarily, I don’t like benefiting from rip-offs, but in this case I’d make an exception. “Sure, that’d be great. Can I put it on a card?”

“Sure, go ahead,” she said pleasantly. I opened my walled and took out my VISA card, which the last time I’d checked still had just about enough left on the credit limit to cover the bill.

“We’ll take care of it, Mr. Denton. Thanks so much.”

I hoofed it out of the building and down Seventh Avenue to Broadway, pondering all the while the confusing array of moral choices that day-to-day living involves, not to mention the implications involved in a society that does everything it can to make being a crime victim as convenient as possible.

In a city where you can’t throw a dead cat out a window without hitting a church, Christ Church stands out as one of the grandest. A nineteenth-century Anglican cathedral, its gray stone spires tower over Broadway just across the wide avenue from the federal courthouse.

In the end, I was glad I walked. The cars waiting to get into the inadequate parking lot adjacent to the church had traffic blocked all the way down the hill. Horns blared and tempers flared as even the usual
crowd of winos that hung out on the steps of the church was driven away.

A crowd of people, dressed in everything from jeans and rhinestone-studded cowboy shirts to three-piece suits, gathered in front, milling about and making small talk. Women and men huddled together, their faces close, lips moving, with an occasional physical gesture of comfort or familiarity. On the fringes, television and print reporters scouted the crowd for celebrities. Off in another corner, one bright, young, fresh-scrubbed face was doing what looked like a live remote.

I hate funerals, but let this one slide with the rationale that it was a memorial service, not the full-blown pageant. As I crossed the sidewalk and stepped up to the entrance to the church, a few heads turned and checked me out. I didn’t recognize anyone, and it was obvious from the casual dismissals that no one recognized me either.

I wove my way through the crowd and into the church. My eyes took a few moments to adjust to the subdued light. The narthex of the church was carpeted in a deep, thick red that felt soft and velourlike under my feet. Dark oak and mahogany trim surrounded the doorways and a dim light over a pedestal barely illuminated a registry for visitors.

I stood in line to sign the register, then wandered around and people-watched as inconspicuously as possible. I recognized several rising music stars, mostly ones I’d seen on the Country Music Television cable channel late at night. There were a few of the old guard around, but Rebecca Gibson’s fans and friends were mostly young.

At the back of a group of five people huddled near one of the entrances into the church nave, I saw a face that seemed familiar. I couldn’t remember where I’d seen him; he certainly wasn’t any kind of big celebrity that everyone would know. But I’d seen him before, and it bugged me that I couldn’t remember where.

He had hair down to his shoulders, although I saw in the subdued yellow light that he was thinning on top. He wore two big earrings in his left ear, gold hoops that were gaudier than what was usually considered fashionable for men.

Where had I seen this guy before?

He laughed at something the woman next to him said, then took a hit off a can of Coke.

That’s when it struck me. I thought how odd it was that someone would be swilling Coke in church. Whoever this guy was, he had a habit of drinking sodas in inappropriate places, like in Judge Alvin Rosenthal’s courtroom during Slim’s preliminary hearing yesterday. He’d been lucky, I knew from my years spent in courtrooms as a reporter, to avoid a contempt citation. You just didn’t behave that way in a courtroom.

Curious, I moved closer to the outer edges of the small group, catching glimpses of the conversation.

“I heard she had a development deal with CBS.…”

a feminine voice said.

“No,” another voice, this one male, said. “It was for a series pilot on TNN.”

“Had she finished the other album?”

“Why did she fire …” That voice trailed off before I could hear the rest. I shuffled around, just listening and watching.

“There’s a slew of people in this town that ain’t sorry she’s gone.” My ears perked up.

“Shhh,” another voice said. “Don’t speak ill of the dead.”

“Why not?” the same voice shot back. “It’s the only time you’ve got a chance against ’em.”

“Mac, what do you reckon this is going to cost the record company?”

I turned. The long-haired Coke drinker took a last slug off the can, then turned around and pitched it into a wastebasket next to the stairwell. So that was Ford McKenna Ford.

“Beats me,” he said. “They’re speeding up the release of the new album, but who knows? Sometimes death makes an artist’s career. You think Elvis’d be selling like he does now if he hadn’t crapped out on a toilet seat?”

“Elvis dead?” a guy standing behind Mac said. “Say it ain’t so.…”

Interesting perspective, I thought. From inside the cavernous church, the organist began a serene, somber dirge. A requiem, I thought, for a sweet, now silent voice. As the volume increased people slowly filed into the church. The group over near the stairwell that had been the subject of my eavesdropping splintered as well.

The Coke drinker lingered outside for a moment, talking to a young woman, early twenties tops, to his right. She had hair the color of blue coal, sharply drawn eye makeup, and candy-apple-red lipstick that was thick and bright enough to reflect what little light it could find. Even though he was fairly short, maybe five-six, five-seven, she was even shorter.

I stepped over to them quickly. “Excuse me, but I couldn’t help overhearing. Are you Mac Ford?”

He glared at me suspiciously. His eyes danced quickly and nervously about and there was something alive in his face that was almost a tic. He seemed wired, agitated.

“Yeah, I’m Mac Ford. What can I do for you?”

I held out my hand, but he didn’t respond. “I’m Harry Denton,” I said. “I’ve been meaning to call your office and set up an appointment. I’m a friend of Slim Gibson’s, and—”

“If you’re a friend of Slim Gibson’s, we ain’t got nothing to talk about.” He turned quickly and took his companion by the arm.

“Wait, just a moment of your time, please,” I said. I reached out and touched his arm. He stopped, stared
down at where my fingers had brushed him just above the back of his left elbow.