Denton - 03 - Way Past Dead (38 page)

Down on one knee, I carefully put the tension wrench into the keyway like Lonnie’d shown me, then with my left index finger, I put just enough pressure on the cylinder to force the pins into contact with the cylinder body at the shear line. Then I gently stuck the raker pick in until I felt it hit the back of the lock. Lifting the pick just a hair, I pulled it smoothly out, feeling the raker hit the pins and push them up and down.

Nothing.

I tried it again. Sometimes it takes a few tries. Sometimes you have to pull the tension wrench out and start all over again. Sometimes it never works at all, at least when you’re a beginner like me.

This time, I pulled a little harder and a little faster. I felt the cylinder slip just a bit, mainly by the change in pressure on the tension wrench. I tried it a third time, figuring maybe it was going to take a different pick. The only question was how much time we had.

I jerked the pick out; the tension wrench gave way, spinning the cylinder around and unlocking the door.

“Hot damn,” I whispered.

“Wow,” she said. “That was cool.”

I looked up at her. “Alvy, you’ve been watching too much MTV.”

I opened the door, half-afraid of what I’d find inside. The tiny closet was mostly empty, though, except for a couple of cases of Dos Equis and diet Coke in the corner, a small bookcase jammed with CDs, and a filing cabinet. There was a bare bulb in the ceiling with a piece of string hanging down. I yanked it, filling the closet with an unforgiving light.

The cabinet was a standard-issue, five-drawer filing cabinet, almond-colored, with the smiling skull of a Grateful Dead decal on the front of the top drawer. The tiny lock in the top right-hand corner was pushed in, locking all five drawers down.

“Okay, same scene, take two,” I said. I handed Alvy the pick case. “Here, hold this for me.”

I’d never picked a filing-cabinet lock, but it looked like a smaller version of a standard cylinder lock. I used the same tension wrench, with a smaller diamond pick this time. After five minutes of fuming and cursing under my breath, I gave up on that and dug out an even smaller ball pick, which was a thin blade of metal with a round piece cut in the end.

That didn’t work either, and I was just about to go outside and see if I couldn’t find a big damn rock, when Alvy said: “Here, use this one. It looks like the one that worked on the closet door.”

I took the pick from her. “It may be too big, but I’ll try.”

It took some boogering to get it all the way into the cylinder, but I managed to maneuver it past the tension wrench. It was hot as hell inside the closet, with a particular type of musty, earthy smell that made me speculate that somebody’d been burning something illegal.

“Damn it,” I muttered as the pick stuck. I pushed harder, and felt it bend a bit, then snap past the last pin.

I took a deep breath, then let it out slowly as I raked the pick through the cylinder. Just the way the Boy Scouts taught me to pull the trigger on a .22 rifle.

The tension wrench slipped and the lock popped.

“Awright!” Alvy yelled.

“Shhh!” I whispered.

“The building’s empty,” she said. “Chill out.”

“Chill out, nothing,” I said, pulling the first drawer open. There were stacks of files jammed in tightly, in no apparent order. Chicken-scratch handwriting on the file-folder tabs was the only indication of each folder’s contents.

“There must be hundreds of them,” I said, frustrated. I looked at my watch. It had taken nearly twenty minutes to get this far and the afternoon was slipping away fast.

“I don’t know Mac’s filing system,” she said. “That is, if there is one.”

“Oh, I’m sure he’s got one. It’s just not from this planet.”

I pulled the top drawer all the way open. It was jammed with files, front to back. Then I checked the other four drawers. Same deal. It looked to me like Mac Ford never threw anything away.

“Okay, this is the only way this is going to work,” I said. “You’re going to have to help me. I’ll pull the top drawer out and set it on the floor. Then you start at the bottom. You find anything with Rebecca Gibson’s name on it, call out.”

She scowled at me. “How did I get so involved in this?” she demanded.

“Alvy, every second we’re in here, we run the risk of getting caught. The more you help, the faster you can get out of here.”

She ran her lip out again, but sat down cross-legged on the floor and pulled out the bottom drawer. I carefully pulled the top drawer off its track and took it out
of the closet, then sat down on the thick Oriental rug in Mac’s office right next to a large burned spot.

There wasn’t time to examine the contents of each folder, but I flipped through the first few pieces of paper in each one. I wished I had more time; there were confidential contracts and pay schedules, notes of cash transactions that would probably have been received with great interest at the IRS, and stacks of paper that Mac Ford obviously didn’t want anyone to see.

I heard Alvy sliding the bottom drawer shut just as I was halfway through the top drawer. I hoped she was being thorough, but decided not to piss her off any further by saying so.

Nothing in the first drawer. I groaned as I lifted the heavy drawer back onto its track and slid it in. My lower back twinged, and once again I had the privilege of experiencing the first few steps of middle age.

Alvy was into the fourth drawer as I painfully eased out the second and took it back into the office. This time, I thought I might have hit pay dirt. The first file had the name Dominic Wright penciled in on the tab. Dominic Wright had had his first hit song about two years earlier, a real tearjerker of a tune about a Kenwood driver losing the love of his life at the Zodiac Lounge when a Peterbilt driver steals her away.

That wasn’t important, though. What was important was that I’d found the drawer with the artists’ files. I thumbed through the stack, one after the other, reading off a list of the famous, near-famous, and never-gonna-be famous singers that Mac Ford had dealt with. Some of them surprised me; Mac had been in on the early careers of some of the hottest people in the business.

Been in, then been out, that is. I marveled at the levels of frustration, what it must have been like to build an artist up from nowhere, only to have them dump you when the money started to get good.

No wonder he was a rageaholic.

I flipped quickly through the folders and never found Rebecca Gibson’s. I started at the front and went all the way to the back of the drawer again.

Nothing.

Maybe there were more in the next file drawer, I thought. I stood up, bent over, picked up the file drawer, then yelled as it slipped out of my right hand and fell like a hammer on my big toe.

“Damn!” I yelled through clenched teeth, trying not to drop the other end of the drawer. About half the folders had tumbled out onto the floor, leaving a chaotic pile of paper and cardboard. I eased the file drawer down onto the floor and sat down next to it.

“What’s the matter?” Alvy said from inside the closet.

“Nothing that a week at the beach wouldn’t fix,” I whispered, then louder: “I need you out here.”

I heard her pull herself up off the floor. “What happened?” she asked as I sat there on the floor holding my right foot and rubbing the toe through my shoe.

“I slipped.”

“I can see that.”

“Help me get this mess cleaned up,” I said. “We’ll never get it back in order. Let’s just get out of here.”

I got up on all fours and leaned over the drawer. I reached in and gathered up the files that were still in the drawer and mashed them forward to make room for the ones on the floor. As I did, one caught. It caught because it had been slipped into the bottom of the file drawer, flat rather than on its edge, with the rest of the folders covering it up. Scratched in ink on the tab was one word:
GIBSON
.

“Oh, shit,” I muttered. It was the best I could do under the circumstances.

“What?”

“Look.” I pulled the folder out. Alvy’s face lit up like she’d just won the lottery

“You found it!”

The folder was about an inch thick. I opened it. On top of the stack lay a boilerplate-printed contract with Rebecca Gibson’s name typed in. On the last page, signatures and dates nailed down the deal. There were a few sheets of correspondence and copies of checks, minus commissions, paid to Rebecca. Another thick pile of stapled sheets proved to be Rebecca’s recording contract, followed by a copy of an advance check for fifty thousand dollars. Eighty percent of fifty thousand dollars was probably more money than Rebecca, or anybody else in her family for generations back, had ever seen in one lump sum.

After a few more loose pages, there was another stapled stack of papers, this one headed
ALLAMERICA SPECIALTY INSURANCE COMPANY
, and below that:
SERVING THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY SINCE
1969.

I whistled as I read through the first few paragraphs.

“What?” Alvy asked, looking over my shoulder.

“Here it is.” I flipped through the policy, doing my best to speed-read. Finally I got to the important parts, and when I did, it took my breath away. I turned to Alvy.

“Two million dollars,” I whispered, “with Mac Ford named as beneficiary.”

Her eyes widened. “Oh, my God,” she squealed. “Two million dollars!”

I turned back quickly to the file. This still didn’t prove anything beyond the fact that Mac Ford’s financial problems would soon be over, and that wasn’t enough to get Slim Gibson out of jail.

My eyes hurt. I picked up the file and limped over to Mac Ford’s desk, set the file down on top of a pile of clutter, and flipped on his desk lamp. There were more loose pieces of paper, nothing beyond business stuff with lots of numbers, and Mac’s private correspondence with promoters. One handwritten note outlined an agreement to slip Mac five grand on the side in cash in
order to get Rebecca to agree to a series of dates in Texas, presumably at the insider’s price.

“Crap,” I said, frustrated. I flipped quickly through the last few pieces of paper and was about to give it up when I got to the end of the file. An envelope, with its flap torn open, lay loose in the file. I picked it up. It was addressed to Mac Ford at an address that was not the office. I showed it to Alvy.

“That’s his condo in Franklin,” she said.

I recognized the return address as Rebecca Gibson’s. The envelope was postmarked two days before her death. My fingers shook as I opened the envelope and slipped the letter out. It was handwritten on plain white paper, the cheap kind you can buy at any drugstore.

“Dear Mac,” it began.

I eased back in Mac Ford’s office chair, the springs squeaking as wearily as I felt.

“That’s it,” I said.

Alvy’d been standing behind me, reading the letter over my shoulder.

“Yeah, that’s it,” she said. Only there was an energetic edge to her voice, as if the thrill of discovery outweighed the terrible thing we’d discovered.

Ford McKenna Ford had murdered Rebecca Gibson. He’d done it quickly and, in terms of his purposes, neatly. Two million dollars was too much money to kiss goodbye because some goddamn ignorant west Tennessee cotton-field crooner got sucked in by a different snake-oil salesman. This might not be enough to convict Ford, but it would sure get Slim out of the crosshairs.

The only question was what to do with it. If the police came in here and found this without a search warrant, the evidence would be tainted, inadmissible. But if an employee of MFA, Inc., blew the whistle and took it to them, would it hold up in a court of law?

I was willing to take my chances that it would.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said. “We’ve got one more stop to make.”

I stood up and dropped the letter back into the file, then tucked the file under my arm.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“Just come on,” I said. “This is some serious shit here, Alvy. We’re going to the police.”

“Oh, no, we’re not,” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

“No!”

I stepped to the door of the office and turned to her one last time. “I’m not going to argue with you. Let’s go.”

Then I turned and stepped through the door into Alvy’s office.

“Oh, shit,” I said. Maybe it was the fatigue and stress, but this was becoming my favorite expression.

Alvy came up behind me. She grabbed my arm without
saying a word and squeezed so hard it would have hurt like hell if I’d bothered to notice.

Mac Ford was standing in the middle of Alvy’s office. In his right hand, he held what I can only describe as a very large, chrome-plated pistol.