Denton - 03 - Way Past Dead (22 page)

“I don’t think Slim had anything to do with Rebecca’s death,” I said. “I think he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and then made a series of terrible decisions after that.”

“That ain’t what the police think,” he said. He spoke quickly, almost maniacally, with an intensity in his voice that made me glad I didn’t have to negotiate a music deal with him. He had a trace of Southern accent in him, but spoke with the cadence and rhythm of a New Yorker.

“The police are wrong,” I said. “I’m a private investigator, and I’ve agreed to help Slim out as much as I can, even though he can’t pay me much, if at all. I’m sure it means more to you than most to find out who actually did this.”

The young woman turned her face up and stared into Ford’s face. Ford looked back down at her and paused for a moment.

“Okay,” he said. “This is my administrative assistant, Alvy Barnes.”

“Hi, Alvy,” I said, smiling at her. To hell with the executives; you want to get anywhere in this world, be nice to the people who work for the executives. “Glad to meet you.”

She nodded and smiled as Ford continued. “Call her this afternoon and set something up for tomorrow morning. I’m leaving town right before lunch. Becca’s funeral is in Waverly tomorrow at one.”

Waverly, Tennessee, is a small town in west Tennessee, near Kentucky Lake and just north of I-40, maybe an hour and a half’s drive away. I remembered from the newspaper articles that Rebecca Gibson had been born there to a mother who worked in the café on the square. Her father had been a truck driver, but he disappeared when she was six and neither she nor her mother had ever seen him again.

“Have you got a card on you?” I asked. “I don’t have your office number.”

He dug in the inside pocket of his jacket and retrieved a small gold case. Expensive, I thought, a little overstated but still classy. He handed me the card.
MFA, INC
. it read, in a bold red script that whipped across the width of the black card with flair and style. Below that:

MAC FORD ASSOCIATES, ARTIST MANAGEMENT
.

“I’ll call you as soon as I get back to my office,” I said.

“Right. We’d better get on in there.”

I let them go ahead of me, and then I took a seat near the back. Even though everyone was seated and a speaker had taken the podium, Ford McKenna Ford walked up the aisle with Alvy trailing him and took a seat right up front, dead center. In the pecking order of Rebecca Gibson’s life, I figured I’d do well to remember who was in the first row.

The service lasted just over an hour, and by the time I got back to the parking garage across from my office, the shadows across Seventh Avenue had deepened. The temperature had dropped as well, like a spring cold front that moves in as one last insult from the past winter.

I climbed the ramp again to the top level to check out the car. The windshield repairman had come and gone, and left behind what looked like a decent patch job. He’d even swept up most of the glass around the car, then vacuumed out the broken glass from inside. Not bad for a hundred bucks.

I figured I’d be in my office for a while longer, so decided to move the car down to one of the spots below. I sure as hell didn’t want to run into the brick chucker again after dark. I fumbled with the door lock, then plopped in on the torn cloth seat without thinking.

For one brief, intense moment I danced around and did my vocal imitation of a Subic Bay sailor on shore
leave as broken bits of safety glass embedded themselves in my backside. I jumped out of the car, swiping at my pants like I’d sat on hot coals. Then I realized I had ground glass stuck in my palms; long red scratches decorated the insides of my hands.

“Shit! Why do they call this stuff safety glass?”

I keep a box of tissues inside the car for emergencies, and this certainly qualified. I blotted the scratches on my palms until I determined they weren’t going to bleed much anyway. Then I balled up a wad of tissues and dusted the car seat until I couldn’t see anything else glittering. Gingerly, I slid back into the car, then hit the key. As the rotary engine whined to life I put the car in gear and headed down the ramp to a safer place.

This day had well and truly bitten the big one. As I crossed the street, with stray bits of glass still brushing my butt and the backs of my thighs, I wondered what else could go wrong. I jumped a couple of steps into the alcove and nearly mowed down the letter carrier as he stepped out the door.

“Hey, Kenny,” I said. “Leave me much today?”

“Hi, Mr. Denton.” Kenny had been delivering mail downtown since before Nixon resigned. Seeing him every day was like knowing the clocks were still running.

“Looked to me like a bunch of bills,” he said, dodging me on the steps and moving around me as slick as fish passing each other in a school.

“Great,” I said. “Just wonderful …”

The red light on the answering machine was dark and unblinking, which meant no new threatening messages, but no calls from Marsha either. Not to mention no new clients. I realized that this day, lousy as it had been, had gone by so quickly I hadn’t even had time to obsess on her.

Kenny was right: South Central Bell bill, two bills from magazine subscriptions, another warning letter from a hospital regarding a bill I’d had with them a few months ago and never quite gotten paid off.

Disgusted, I threw the letters down on my desk and kicked my coat off. The tie went next, then the shoes. I locked my office door behind me and didn’t bother to pull the office window blinds as I stripped off my pants and held them over the wastebasket. I brushed them off as well as I could with a crunched-up wad of paper towel, then bent around in a decidedly kinky position to check out my own bottom. Like the inside of my palms, there were a couple of nasty scratches, but no profuse bleeding. I dabbed at what little there was with another tissue, then pulled my cheapie first-aid kit out of my desk. I painted the scratches with Mercurochrome, then stood around letting the stuff air-dry.

I pulled out Ford’s business card and stapled it to a Rolodex card, then filed it away in the holder. I punched the number into the phone and waited through four rings.

“Mac Ford Associates,” a pleasant enough voice said. “Mr. Ford’s office.”

“Please hold.”

Thirty seconds later Alvy Barnes answered. “Hi, Alvy,” I said. “This is Harry Denton.”

“Oh, hi, Mr. Denton.”

I smiled. “My father’s Mr. Denton. Call me Harry.”

A chuckle came through the phone. “Okay, Harry. I guess you’re looking for that appointment with Mac, aren’t you?”

“Sure. What’s he got?”

“How about nine tomorrow morning?”

“Works for me.”

“Done deal,” she said. “See you then.”

I penciled the time in on my calendar while standing awkwardly waiting for the red stuff on my keister to dry. Just as I turned to stare out the window awhile, the phone rang again.

“Denton Agency,” I said.

“Hello,” she said. She was tired, edgy. I could feel it through the phone.

“Hello, love. How are you?”

“Weary. It’s been a long day. What are you doing?”

“Standing in the middle of my office with no pants on.”

“You
have
missed me, haven’t you? Is there anyone else there?”

“Of course not. That’s not why I have my pants off, anyway. Somebody trashed my car and I sat in broken glass.”

“What happened?”

“Well, my dear, there’s some kind of weirdness going on here that even I don’t understand. Twice in the past two days, some kind soul has left a death threat on my answering machine. And this afternoon, somebody heaved a brick through the windshield of my car.”

“Jesus, Harry! Have you called the police?”

“They weren’t interested.”

She sighed. “The world’s going to hell in a handbag.”

“Sure seems that way. What’s the latest from the barricades?”

“They aren’t giving an inch. They don’t want Evangeline autopsied, period. And the state AG is waffling on the legality of turning the body over to them. He probably figures if he gives in, the public perceives him as a wuss. But if he comes right out and says no, some bloody fool may start shooting.”

“So as long as nobody does anything, everything’s cool.”

“Hostage Negotiating one-oh-one in a nutshell. Keep everybody talking, but don’t do anything to back yourself into a corner.”

The phone popped, followed by a short hiss. “We don’t have long,” she said. “Are you checking my mail for me? Watering the plants?”

“Of course. What about your bills?”

“Anything pressing?”

“I’ll have to check. Is it okay for me to open your mail?”

“Another level of intimacy. Sure, take care of it. I trust you. If you need cash to pay the bills, I’ve got an extra checkbook in my desk. If the bank won’t let you write the checks, get the extra ATM card out of the same desk drawer. My access code is 4-2-9-7. Get the cash out of the machine and put it in your own account, then write the checks for me.”

Little by little, I realized, Marsha and I were rearranging her life—our life—to fit what was shaping up to be a long-term situation. For the first few days, we both assumed that whatever was going to happen would happen quickly and vanish before we had to deal with other options. But now, like a wartime siege or a rerun of the David Koresh Follies, it appeared we needed to learn to live with the day-to-day tensions of an illogical, unpredictable, and dangerous circumstance.

We were hunkering down for the long run.

I’d just tucked my shirt in when the phone rang again. I dropped my necktie on the desk and leaned over to pick up the handset.

“Denton Agency, Harry Denton speaking.”

Nothing.

“Denton Agency. May I help you?”

Silence, then more of it. “Hello …”

No heavy breathing, no moaning. No dial tone, either. Just the quiet. Then faintly, in the background, I heard the sound of a radio playing, real scratchy, like a cheap AM.

I felt a twirl in my gut, then suddenly a rush of anger. I fought to keep from screaming into the phone.

“Nice job you did on my car today,” I said, as casually as I could muster. “Who are you?”

Nothing.

“We could get together, talk this out. No use in both our being—”

He/she/whoever hung up.

“You spineless rat bastard,” I growled as I slammed down the phone.

There had been only one time in my entire life when I’d resorted to carrying a gun, and I’d had to borrow that one from Lonnie. I despise guns, don’t own one, and won’t have one in my house or office. And as much as I dislike the government, it wouldn’t bother me that
much if the marines choppered in, did a house-to-house, and confiscated every last goddamn one of them.

On the other hand, I wish I had one right now.

That wouldn’t do any good, though. What was I going to do, shoot the telephone? And if I’d had a gun, I might have put one into the guy that busted my windshield this afternoon. Then I could share a cell with Slim for a while.

I don’t even have a carry permit, despite Tennessee’s new Wild West law that allows anyone who’s not drunk or crazy to carry a concealed weapon. Somewhere in my office desk, though, was a little souvenir of another case I’d worked on. Lonnie’d given it to me when I’d refused his offer to supply me with a guaranteed clean throwaway gun.

I opened my center desk drawer. In the middle of the pile of debris that passed for my organizing system, buried beneath a stack of old business cards with the wrong address on them, was a piece of hard, palm-sized black plastic with a black cloth strap hooked to the side. A white decal with a lightning bolt through it read z
-FORCE II
, and below that 80,000v. There were four metal prongs poking out of one end of the case, two pointed outward and two test prongs pointed inward.

There was a switch on the side of the case. I placed it in the palm of my hand, flicked the switch on, and pressed a button on the other side of the case from the switch.

A crackling sound filled my office and a bright blue spark danced across the test prongs. Real Frankenstein lab stuff. At the bottom of the case, another decal read

WARNING: EXTREME DANGER. KEEP OUT OF REACH OF CHILDREN. USE ONLY AS DIRECTED
.

I thumbed the safety switch down and pressed the button one more time to make sure it was off and quiet. Then I tucked the stun gun into the right pocket of my suit jacket and left the office.

* * *

Anybody who’s hung around Music Row longer than your average tourist learns p.d.q. that there’s a dark side to all the glitter and rhinestones. I was never an insider; even as a newspaperman, I was just another entity to be manipulated by the PR machine. Anybody who’s lived here longer than a few months, though, picks up on it. It’s not just the money and the drugs, the deals and the steals, the lives and careers made and ruined over a handshake that may or may not be as dependable as a signed contract, and God knows how dependable even a signed contract would be. It’s something even darker than all that. I’ve always thought it was not only ironic, but poetically just, that Music Row after the sun sets is one of the most dangerous areas in the city to walk around unprotected. Muggings, rapes, robberies, even murder, are not all that uncommon on the Row. The sun sets, the vampires come out. Smart people carry wooden stakes and silver bullets.