Deadly Arts

by Ken Brigham

  When the three of them met on a sunny afternoon at TAPS and managed, not uneventfully, to acquire a less than generous glass of an anemic concoction of too much ice and too little of a second-tier blended Scotch whiskey, here’s how they sized up the situation.

  Everyone accepted that Mace Ricci had managed to extract a firm commitment from the artist’s daughter to assign all of her father’s paintings in her possession for sale exclusively by the Galleria Salinas in New York. Granted, SalomeMe was something less than a conspicuously reliable sort, but Ricci was sure of this, and the others, somewhat reluctantly, accepted his judgment.

  However, there remained two problems that appeared to be delaying the process: establishing the daughter as Bechman Fitzwallington’s sole and legitimate heir, and eliminating any possibility that the old guy’s death would be considered a possible murder. Although there was absolutely no reason to question whether SalomeMe was the legitimate heir, the pending lawsuit brought by Parker Palmer and his lawyer friend did just that, so the question had to be answered once and for all. Fine. The daughter had retained a lawyer who was having the DNA from both parties analyzed and should very shortly have incontrovertible evidence of her legitimacy as the heir. They’d just have to wait for that information to get the lawsuit dismissed and move on.

  Problem number two should never have existed. All of the evidence and the conclusion of the city police department said that the artist had died of natural causes. There should never have been any other consideration. But there was. Although he was obviously a minor player in the situation, the paralyzed ex-cop just couldn’t leave this thing alone, and the legitimate police department didn’t seem to be doing much to rein him in. These guys feared that if he looked hard enough, the ex-cop might turn up something that would raise enough questions that an official murder investigation would be launched. The problem there was the delay in transfer of the paintings that would undoubtedly result. The New York money guys would not be happy with anything that delayed the deal, which would mean that these three men would not be happy either. They would be really unhappy if they failed to move this deal forward. The big city money guys would see to that.

  Although Bruce Therault was a little hesitant, the group finally agreed that if they could suspend Shane Hadley’s interest in this situation just long enough to get the decisions about the paintings finalized, their mission would be accomplished. They could go their merry ways, collect sizeable fees for their services, and put all this behind them.

  If Damian Saturn’s approach to problem-solving could be expressed in mathematical terms, it would have approximated Newton’s Second Law, F=ma: force equals mass times acceleration. He was convinced that most of the kinds of problems he was called on to help solve yielded most readily to force, action. The fact that he was a man of action accounted for Saturn’s niche in the criminal underworld. As was his habit, before journeying to Nashville, he had done some due diligence, made some connections with kindred spirits in Music City, of whom there were more than most people knew. Anticipating what he might need to use his talents optimally toward solving this particular situation, he had identified some local sources of materials and services that were likely to be essential. He did not consider this a particularly difficult task. They could nab Hadley, dose him up with Midozalam (easily obtained from the Nashville drug network), hold him somewhere remote and inaccessible for a few days, and then drop him a place that allowed him to be found, unharmed and, thanks to the unique properties of the drug, totally unaware of what had happened to him during his time in physical and pharmacological captivity. Piece of cake. Saturn could make the arrangements. Bruce Therault basically washed his hands of the matter and went back to New York. Mace Ricci and Damian Saturn set about activating the plan. They had both been involved in much riskier jobs. They did not view the Nashville Police Department as deserving of very much respect—bush-league, they thought. And this guy Shane Hadley was a has-been nobody, so that his abduction, if carefully done, shouldn’t attract much attention.

  An initial hint of the magnitude of their miscalculation came the morning after their abduction of Shane Hadley when Mace Ricci returned from a local MiniMart with the morning newspaper and some provisions. He tossed the paper on the table in the kitchen of the small house with boarded-up windows in the largely abandoned South Nashville ghetto where Damian Saturn sat looking bored and drumming his fingers on the Formica tabletop. Shane Hadley was in an adjacent room, sitting in his wheelchair, his head lolling about aimlessly. He may have been dozing off and on. He looked small. He looked vulnerable. He bore precious little resemblance to the Sherlock Shane of Music City myth.

  “Holy shit!” Saturn exclaimed, holding the morning Tennessean out in front of him as if he feared it would contaminate him if let it get too close. A headline just below the fold on the front page read SHERLOCK SHANE HADLEY MISSING, POSSIBLY ABDUCTED. He laid the paper on the table and read the short article through. Although it appeared to be based on dubious sources (principally a homeless man who didn’t sound like a reliable witness), the story recounted the abduction essentially as it had occurred. The description of the van was not detailed but was accurate as far as it went. And the license plate number was accurate. The reader was encouraged to call the police department if they had any information that might be relevant. The article went on to recount Shane Hadley’s illustrious history as a member of the Metropolitan Police Force, the source of the admiration and affection that the people of the city felt for him. Neither Saturn nor Ricci had done enough due diligence to realize how well-known their victim was. Had they done so, they would have planned a less conspicuous operation. Working in unfamiliar territory, they had badly miscalculated. Some problems are not solved by calculations based solely on Newton’s Second Law.

  Holy shit! Saturn thought to himself. He feared the possibility that all hell might be about ready to break loose. They better get ahead of this in a hurry. As Saturn was about to fill Ricci in on the newspaper story and initiate a discussion of what their next move should be, Ricci’s phone blared a tune that Saturn didn’t recognize. Ricci read aloud the name of the caller from the screen. It was Bruce Therault.

  Although Hardy Seltzer went to work early, by the time he got in to see Assistant Chief Goetz, the phone lines at the department were already white-hot with calls from a variety of people claiming to have information relevant to the fate of Shane Hadley. He had been seen drinking with rowdy friends at a dive on Lower Broad, wheeling far from downtown along Hillsboro Road near Green Hills Mall, driving a dark green van too fast headed south on I-75, and a long list of other creative and irrelevant snippets of citizens’ imaginary visions of the ex-detective’s whereabouts. And one caller who gave only an address in a deserted part of South Nashville without leaving a name or any other information.

  “What in holy hell have you done, Hardy? The whole department is tied up with the phones. Your buddy Harvey Green’s article has done a number on us, and I have absolutely no doubt that you deserve total credit for the fiasco. What were you thinking? Talk to me.”

  Goetz was in a rage, red-faced, eyes bulging, veins pulsating at his temples. He paced a circle around Seltzer, glaring at the detective from all sides as though setting him up for a physical attack. Hardy thought he had prepared himself to take the heat for what he had done, but this was worse than he had expected.

  “I was thinking, sir,” Seltzer tried his best to speak with reason and calm, to appear confident and in control, to clearly contrast his demeanor with that of his boss, “that the life of a valued citizen of our community was probably in imminent danger and that extraordinary measures were justified if there was any chance of averting that disaster. That decision and the resulting action were mine alone. I will accept the consequences.”

  “You bet your sorry ass, you’ll accept the consequences,” the Assistant Chief shrunk the radius of his paced circle around Seltzer, almost brushing against him, closing in for the kill. “A
nd there will be consequences, Detective. There will be consequences.” A less than gentle forefinger jab to the sternum.

  The two men’s eyes met for a long moment before Goetz turned, walked to his desk, and sat down emphatically, implying that he was finished dealing with Hardy Seltzer for the present and was moving on to other responsibilities. He shuffled some papers on his desk unconvincingly. Hardy stood stock-still exactly where Goetz had left him.

  “We’re done, Seltzer,” Goetz said, not looking up from the sheaf of papers.

  “Not quite,” Hardy replied. “There remains the matter of the possible murder of Bechman Fitzwallington.”

  “We’ve been there, Seltzer, and I don’t intend to return to the subject. The old guy died of natural causes, and that’s that. Let it be.”

  “I’m sure that Shane Hadley’s abduction had something to do with his interest in Fitzwallington’s death. He was convinced it was murder. Someone didn’t like that.”

  “So, find Hadley and let’s see what he’s got. If he’s got some convincing evidence, we can talk.”

  “We may be too late for Shane Hadley. His abductors, whoever they are, are not nice people.”

  Hardy genuinely feared for his friend.

  “The powers that be are very fond of Shane Hadley, Seltzer. If something bad happens to him, the department will catch hell and I and therefore the chief will blame the entire thing on you. Understand? Find Hadley. Forget about Bechman Fitzwallington. For God’s sake, forget about him!”

  Hardy skimmed rapidly through the stack of pink phone message slips piled on his desk. The messages were brief notes without attribution and mostly without any value in any effort to locate Shane Hadley. Hardy had made a mistake by convincing Harvey Green to include a request to contact the department in his newspaper story without making some advance preparation to handle the calls and to outline a strategy for dealing with them. Too late now. Hardy should have known better. How many times did he need to relearn the lesson that haste, even driven by a noble motive, was more often than not a mistake?

  One of the phone messages caught his eye. An address, nothing more. He called up the address on Google maps. A largely deserted lower-class residential area south of town. When he switched to the street level view, the small bungalow at that address was obviously unoccupied, windows boarded up. Interesting. Hardy picked up his desk phone and called the dispatcher.

  “This is Detective Seltzer. I need two blues and a cruiser. I’ll be down there in ten minutes. Got it?”

  The chain reaction of telephone calls triggered by the Wrath of Wroth eventually filtered out to Damian Saturn’s connections in the dark side of the city’s society. It reached as well, in a way, to Martin Reese, and thence to the operator on call for answering the 911 emergency line, and finally to Hardy Seltzer and his two blues in the police cruiser who were diverted from their intended destination of a seedy area of South Nashville to the idyllic environs of Shelby Bottoms.

  Mildred Roth, along with the people whom she represented, was following the happenings in Nashville intently, so that she read the online version of the Tennessean each morning. When she saw the article about Shane Hadley’s abduction, she was livid and acutely aware of the fact that something had to be done. Now! She immediately called Bruce Therault and read him the riot act. Why didn’t he stay there and see this thing through? How could he possibly have agreed to such a hare-brained scheme carried out in broad daylight in the middle of town? Ricci and Saturn, supposedly big-league crooks, had behaved like rank amateurs and were absolutely sure to be caught regardless of the skill level of the local police force. They had, the three of them, failed miserably and there would be hell to pay. THERE WOULD BE HELL TO PAY! Bruce Therault could count on that. So Therault called Ricci, read him the riot act and instructed him to get out of this mess and the sooner the better. Ricci placed the reading of the riot act on speakerphone for the benefit of his partner in crime and as soon as the performance of the riot act was completed, curtain descended, and applause acknowledged, Saturn got in touch with his local contacts and obtained advice about where and how they might rid themselves of their captive without undue risk of being found out. Saturn enlisted the help of those contacts in arranging transportation and dealing with the other necessary details.

  Martin Reese was awakened by a bright slat of morning sunlight that struck him square and sudden across the eyes just before the alarm he had set the previous evening sounded its shrill and insistent wakeup call. His wife, Muriel, was already up and no doubt in the process of orienting their two-year-old son to yet another wonder-filled day in his short life. Martin got up, had a quick shower, and dressed. It seemed such a nice morning that he volunteered to take their son for a stroll before they got organized sufficiently to make certain that each of them was deposited in their proper place for the conduct of a normal workday—dentist office, law firm, daycare. Because it was walking distance from their middle-class home and because it was an especially appealing place for a stroll on a nice sunny morning, Martin zipped his only son into a bright blue onesie, nestled him into a stroller, and struck out for Shelby Bottoms.

  Shelby Park had been a popular outdoor space for East Nashvillians and the occasional wanderer from some other part of the city or from a more remote place, since the Fourth of July, 1912. It was a pretty much standard-issue city park—playgrounds, softball diamonds, picnic areas. But in 2011, the park was transformed. The city acquired adjacent space that included the Cornelia Fort Airpark (a small general aviation landing strip where Patsy Cline was headed when she wound up in eternity instead) and some additional acreage. They created Shelby Bottoms, a thousand-acre greenspace with paved walking trails, vast displays of indigenous flora, and open and ready access to anyone who was interested. On that sunny morning, Martin Reese could not have imagined a more pleasant place to be wandering with his young son and contemplating the blessings of his life

  That is until a wheelchair raced by just grazing the edge of his son’s stroller, careening off down the sloping path and crashing off into the weeds, dumping its occupant unceremoniously into a patch of what may have been mountain laurel (although Martin Reese’s knowledge of botany was more visceral than intellectual; he would not have known mountain laurel from poison ivy). What he did know was that whoever the occupant of the runaway wheelchair was, he was in need of help, and so he whipped out his cell phone, dialed 911, and described the incident to whoever answered the call.

  Whoever answered the call was not your average bear. She had read the morning Tennessean story. She knew who Shane Hadley was, the myth. She relayed the message to the ambulance service, but then connected with the police department and told them that she believed they might have located the missing ex-detective. The department dispatcher immediately contacted Hardy Seltzer, who instructed blue #1, his driver, to alter their destination. They headed for Shelby Bottoms. Hardy Seltzer’s pulse quickened at the thought of rescuing his friend from what he had resigned himself to accept was likely to be a tragic outcome.

  When they screeched, siren blaring, into the normally silent parking lot at Shelby Bottoms, an ambulance was already there and the EMTs were just wheeling a stretcher toward the open rear door of their vehicle. Hardy raced over to them. Shane, looking pale but wide-eyed and obviously breathing, looked up at Hardy from the stretcher. His eyes were blank … nobody home.

  “How is he?” Hardy asked.

  The obviously alpha EMT—older, more overweight, and less jumpy than his young colleague—replied, “His vitals are OK, but he’s really out of it. Has no idea of the who’s, what’s, where’s, and how’s. Almost certainly drugs. Do you know anything?”

  Hardy, angered by the EMT’s implication that this was just another unknown junkie who wound up by some vagary of fate out of his depth, said not too gently, “Do you know who this man is?”

  “Why would I know that? Even though I see more than enough of them in my line of work, I don’t remember the names
of every OD I pick up. Never learn the names of most of them.”

  “This man is Shane Hadley,” Seltzer locked eyes with the EMT. “He is a distinguished and widely honored former member of our police force who would be familiar to most people in the city who are able and inclined to read. I presume you are not among that group. Your job is to get him to the university hospital ER ASAP and to treat him en route with the respect and care that he and other human beings deserve. I will call ahead to the hospital to ensure that you do your job in a timely manner and that he is promptly cared for. If you have a problem with that, you should find yourself a job that doesn’t require empathy for your fellow humans.”

  Hardy grasped Shane’s limp hand for a moment and tried to engage his eyes without success. He went back to the cruiser and placed a call on the radio.