Denton - 03 - Way Past Dead (29 page)

I stood up. I’d done about as much damage here as I could, without learning much beyond the fact that I could bet the rent money on Dwight Parmenter being innocent of Rebecca Gibson’s murder. If he killed her, he deserves a freaking Academy Award for Best Performance by an Actor Before They Attach the Electrodes.

“If it’d bring her back, I’d die for her right now,” he said. “I’d have died for her in a heartbeat.”

“Yeah, Mr. Parmenter, I believe you would have.”

No matter how much Rebecca Gibson had been the temperamental prima donna from hell, she had one decent man who loved her and mourned her death. Her memorial service had been nothing but a public display of envy, malice, greed, and networking. But here, in a solitary, run-down apartment, one man wept for her alone out of no other motive beyond simple human grief.

Maybe the thought of grieving for a lost woman pushed a few buttons of my own. Or maybe in this sea of lying, treacherous bastards, I found the thought of
someone without ulterior motive touching. In any case, I spent the drive over to my office thinking about my short interview with Dwight Parmenter. I’d meant to ask him more details about that last night, about who he thought might have killed her. All that went out the window when I saw how deeply pained he was by talking about her at all. I felt like I hadn’t learned much, outside of the comfort I could take from Thomas Edison’s dictum: I’ve learned lots of things that don’t work.

The downtown rush-hour traffic had thinned more than I expected, until I checked my watch and realized it was almost six o’clock. I made it back to my office without too much agony and found a parking space on one of the lower floors of the garage. I kept replaying my conversation with Parmenter in my head, and wanted to get upstairs to make my notes as quickly as I could. With my degree of mental fragmentation these days, I needed to get everything down on paper.

One thing did bother me, though. Dwight Parmenter said Rebecca didn’t want him to take her home because she had something she had to take care of. What was it, I wondered, that someone could do at four
A.M
. on a Monday morning? Did she have to put the cat out? Wash her hair? Slap another coat of paint on the living-room wall?

What the hell was it?

The front door was still open, even though it was technically after business hours. I let it squish shut behind me and took the stairs two at a time. Behind me, I heard Mr. Porter open his door a crack and check me out.

“Hi, Mr. Porter,” I said behind me. He grunted and closed the door.

I hit the landing, turned, and headed up the last half flight to my office. Dwight Parmenter’s voice was replaying itself in my head, his sobs echoing between my
ears. I felt awful for the guy, I thought as I dug my hand into my jeans pocket to retrieve my keys.

That’s when something shot out of the shadows and slammed into me like a cement sled. There were arms around me: I couldn’t move. There was growling in my right ear and hard, fast breathing.

Then the pressure started, huge arms around my chest, pinning me, squeezing me. I fumbled, trying to fight, but my arms were jammed into my sides. I felt my feet coming up off the floor, and with that, little red-and-black sparkles formed in the corners of my eyes and worked their way toward the center of my vision.

How odd to see my feet in the air in front of me, my knees cocked at right angles. I felt like the wimpy guy in a TV wrestling match you know was just thrown into the ring as fodder.

Whoever my attacker was, he was on me like Nately’s whore. He growled loudly, his hot breath on my neck as he fought to force the last breath out of me. He was concentrating on squeezing my chest, and as he did so I felt my legs dropping back down toward the floor. We were jammed close to the wall. My shoes brushed against the plaster as they came down.

Suddenly I contracted my gut as hard as I could, crunching myself into a tight ball. I wedged my feet between the two of us and the wall, planted them on the plaster, and kicked as hard as I could.

He grunted loudly and fell back, losing his balance in the process, and momentarily easing his grip around my chest. As we fell backward I pulled my head in close to my sternum, then snapped up as hard as I could.

The back of my skull connected with his chin. He barked loudly in pain, then fell back against the opposite wall. My arms dropped free. I held my right hand out in front of me, balled it tightly, then ripped down hard to my right, as fast as I could in the meanest arc I could muster. I connected perfectly and felt the whoosh of air jet out of his lungs as my crumpled fist hit the collection of lumps between his legs.

He dropped. Match over.

I fell on top of him as he went down, my back on his chest. In a blur, I had the stun gun out of my field-jacket pouch pocket and jammed it into his thigh behind me. I hit the button and a thin, watery scream escaped from his lips. He jerked so hard he almost threw me off him, but my weight held him down. His whole body gyrated and shook. I let him have about two seconds worth of Great White Light, then rolled over to face him.

My own breathing sounded like an air compressor gone wild. My heart raced like it had never done before; there was a gang fight going on in my temples.

I stared into his face, trying to figure out who the hell he was. Slobber ran from his lips. His eyes were wide-open and wild, his color almost slate gray.

“Who the hell are you?”
I screamed, inches from his face.

I heard thumping on the steps behind us. I jerked and turned, ready to fight again. Only it was Mr. Porter, fat and breathless, with his .38 pointed in a two-handed police stance right at us.

“It’s okay,” I gasped. “It’s over.”

Mr. Porter stood two steps down the flight of stairs, his arms bent, covering the guy from behind the corner of the stairwell.

I grabbed the lapels of a dingy work shirt. “Goddamn it, who are you?”

His eyes flicked back and forth like a Parkinson’s disease tremor. For all I knew, after a couple of seconds’ worth of stun gun he might not be able to figure out who the hell he was. But I’d been scared witless myself, and I was in no mood to feel sorry for anyone. I put the stun gun in his face, with my finger on the button.

“You want some more?”

An animal cry of fear jumped out of his throat, and his lips struggled to make the word
no
.

I got up on my knees, then reached down and ran my hands down his sides, around his pants pockets.

“Where is it?” I yelled.

He looked at me like I was from another planet. “Where’s what?” he croaked.

I recognized the voice. I’d heard it before, on a collection of tapes I’d pulled off my answering machine. The revelation that I had the death-threat guy made me even crazier. “The piece! The knife! The slapjack! Where is it?”

I yanked on his collar, hard enough to make him grimace. “I ain’t got nothing,” he gasped.

I eased up on him, then backed off, leaned against the opposite wall, and squatted back on my heels. “No gun? No knife?”

He pulled himself up on his haunches and leaned against the wall, sweat pouring off of him, color coming back to his face. He self-consciously put his hand in his crotch and rubbed gently.

“I didn’t come up here to kill ya,” he said.

“Then what did you come up here for?”

“I just came up here to whip yer ass, that’s all.”

I looked up at Mr. Porter, who had a quizzical look on his face as he stared down the pistol barrel.

I relaxed a little and lowered my hand holding the stun gun. “You ignorant-assed redneck hillbilly, you came up here to whip my ass and you didn’t even bring a
weapon?”

Suddenly I felt insulted. “What kind of wuss do you think I am?”

He looked up at me and gave me this look that was right out of an episode of
Gomer Pyle USMC
. “I don’t rightly know what kind of wuss you are.”

I couldn’t help it; I broke out laughing, partly from relief, partly from the whole situation being so damned crazy. Mr. Porter looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “You want me to call the police?”

I stood up, trying to control myself. No use humiliating
the poor sucker even further. “No, I’d say we got things pretty well under control.”

Mr. Porter lowered the pistol and inserted it gingerly into the small holster on his belt. Just to be sure, though, I kept my hand wrapped around the stun gun. I looked down at the guy as he gingerly massaged his groin. “Just who are you?” I asked, this time more politely.

He cocked his jaw and looked at me as I stood above him. With that I saw his face as I’d seen it once before, from above and a distance, through the viewfinder of a videocamera.

“Holy shit,” I said. “You’re the bricklayer.”

He pulled his legs under him and started to rise. I backed off a step and pointed the stun gun at him. He stared at me like a puppy I’d just kicked the stew out of. “Can I please stand up?”

“If you do it real slow.”

He slid against the wall as he stood. “I’d be a retired bricklayer by now if you hadn’t dogged me all the way to Louisville.”

I scratched the side of my head in the classic display of confusion. “But how the—how did you find me? How did you know it was me? I was never any closer to you than a telephoto lens could get. We never talked, never met.”

“Rick Harvey and Steve White told me,” he said sheepishly.

I thought for a moment. “Who the hell are—”

Then it hit me. “The insurance investigators

he bricklayer grinned. “Them two boys was awful pissed off at you. You made ’em look bad in front of their boss.”

I shook my head, exasperated. “Well, I’ll be dipped in …”

“You need me anymore?” Mr. Porter asked.

I turned to him. “No, thanks, Mr. Porter. I really appreciate you helping me out. I owe you one.”

He turned, his massive belly shaking as he started down the steps. “I just hope you never have to repay the favor,” he said as he disappeared.

I turned back to the bricklayer. “Them two boys is going to be even more pissed by the time I get through with them. C’mon, bud. This way.” I motioned toward my office door.

“Where we going?” he asked.

“My office. I’m going to dig out my tape recorder, and you and I are going to have a little talk.”

“Hey, no way,” he said, holding his hands palm out toward me. “I ain’t talking into no tape recorder.”

I pushed the button on the stun gun and sent a bright blue inch-and-a-half spark crackling across the test probes. “You can talk to my tape recorder or you can talk to the police. Your choice.”

He shuffled his feet toward my office. “Aw, hell,” he muttered, then groaned as he took his first painful steps.

I unlocked my office door and led him in. He took my visitor’s chair while I dug the tape recorder out of a drawer and plugged it in. When the red light glowed, I pointed the microphone in his direction.

“All right, give me your name, the date, and the time.”

He cleared his throat and shifted in the chair uncomfortably. “My name’s Bubba Ray Evans,” he began. Then he studied for a second to remember the date and glanced down at his wristwatch.

I asked him a couple of questions to get him going, but once Bubba Ray got started, it was like a dam bursting. He told me the whole story, of how he’d been so careful to set everything up, how he’d been steered to a crooked doctor by a buddy of his, and how he’d done his wheelchair act so well the insurance company was about to roll over and settle before the lawsuit came to court. But he’d always been active, loved sports, missed his bass fishing, and the wheelchair was driving him crazy. He’d finally talked his wife into going on a short
vacation, but even then they’d maintained the charade until they were sure they were safe and in seclusion.

Then two guys from the insurance company showed up at his house one night with a copy of the videotape. At first Bubba Ray thought they were there to nail his hide to the wall, but they kept being so danged friendly. Finally he figured out they were trying to warn him to drop his claim before he was brought up on fraud charges. And, he added, Rick Harvey and Steve White had been only too glad to give him the name of the guy who’d exposed him.

Bubba Ray’d gone nuts, but it was nothing compared to what the little lady did. She was tired of living off the proceeds of an itinerant, self-employed bricklayer’s efforts. Because he was self-employed and acting as a contractor, the workmen’s comp laws—which prohibit an employee from suing his employer for negligence—didn’t apply. So Mrs. Bubba Ray was counting on a couple of mil or so in a settlement. And when she figured out she wasn’t going to get it, she went completely off the deep end. The deeper she got, the madder Bubba Ray got, until finally, what started out as phone harassment escalated into assault.

Only problem was, Bubba Ray couldn’t fight any better than he could lay bricks.

I was furious at the treachery of it. Those two punk slimeball Clint Eastwood wannabes had ratted my wimpy butt out just to get even with me for making them look bad. The only reason I wasn’t laid up in a hospital room right now was that they’d ratted my wimpy butt out to somebody who was even wimpier than me.