Way Past Dead

by Steven Womack

  Ray looked up at me, a pained look in his eyes.

  “There’s no need to start name-calling here.”

  I jumped out of my seat and took a step toward him. He tensed. I must have looked as mad as I felt.

  “Now, listen, bud, we’re establishing some new rules around here, understand? If I’m supposed to help you, then you have to tell me everything. All of it. No more obfuscation.”

  “No more what?” he asked.

  “No more bullshit!” I yelled, then placed my hands palm down on the desk in front of him. “If you agree to my terms, I’ll go down to my office and get a notebook. I’ll bring that notebook back here and start making notes, and maybe, just maybe, we’ll figure out a way to keep Slim’s permanent address from being in care of the Tennessee Department of Corrections. If you don’t agree to my terms, then I’m not coming back.”

  Ray gazed at me like he’d never seen me before.

  “Deal?”

  He nodded.

  “Okay,” I said. “Try to get that feeble brain of yours in gear. We’ll never be able to prove Slim didn’t do it; you guys have already taken care of that. The only way we’ll get Slim off is to figure out who the hell did kill Rebecca Gibson and why.”

  “Okay,” Ray agreed, his voice real low.

  I walked over to the door and opened it, then paused. “There’s only one thing I can see that’s obvious here,” I said.

  Ray stood up. “What?”

  “Whoever killed Rebecca,” I said, “was probably going out the back door at the same time Slim was coming in the front.”

  I was talking to myself more than to Ray by then. I started down the hall, trying to figure out how the timing could have been as precise as it appeared. There couldn’t have been more than a few moments’ overlap. The neighbors heard two sets of noises: screams and fighting, then the squeal of tires burning rubber out of the parking lot. Slim caused the latter; he claims he had nothing to do with the former.

  I heard a muffled phone ring somewhere ahead of me, but didn’t realize it was mine until I was halfway down the hall and heard the relays in my answering machine clicking. I had the volume turned down low on the machine, so couldn’t hear whose voice was leaving the message. I fumbled with the keys, then got the door open just in time to hear the machine cut off and begin recycling itself.

  “Damn it,” I muttered. I waited for the machine to reset, then turned the volume up.

  “Hello,” the familiar computerized voice said, “you have one message.”

  There were more clicks and the crackling of static as the heads in the machine hit the worn tape. The voice that came through was high-pitched male, deeply country, and mad as hell:

  “Hey, you son of a bitch! I’m gonna git you, you got that, son? Yer ass is mine, and I mean it! You have a nice day, ’cause you ain’t got many left!”

  Click. Dial tone.

  I sank slowly into my chair. What the hell? If I didn’t know better, I’d say that was a threat.

  I hit the button and played the message back. The accent was twangy and nasally, relatively common in these parts among the didn’t-finish-high-school-and-pumping-gas-at-the-filling-station crowd. I tried to place it. East Tennessee, perhaps? I didn’t think so. More like rural Mississippi or Alabama, maybe west Tennessee. There was no way to pinpoint it. The only thing I knew for sure was that there’s only one region in the country where the phrase son of a bitch is reduced to a pair of slurred syllables.

  I replayed the message, listening carefully for background noises, other voices, anything that might reveal the caller’s identity. Nothing. I dug around inside my cluttered center desk drawer until I found a blank tape, then replaced the one in the answering machine. I tucked the tape with the message on it inside my jacket pocket, grabbed a spiral notebook, and locked my office door behind me as I headed back to Ray’s.

  Halfway down the hall, I stopped. I was alone, with only the cracked linoleum, green chipped plaster, and decades’ worth of dust balls surrounding me. This wave of fatigue swept over me, and I found myself feeling almost dizzy.

  “Okay,” I muttered, “now you’re getting death threats. Add that to the list.…”

  “I thought you’d changed your mind,” Ray said when I opened the door to his office. I took off my jacket and laid it across the back of the chair, then loosened my tie about down to the third button and rolled up my shirtsleeves. Then I sat down at the desk across from him, opened the notebook, and pulled the cap off a cheap pen.

  “All right,” I said, “let’s get to work. First of all, let’s consider all the alternatives. Could it have been just a random crime? Could Rebecca have walked in on a housebreaker?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Was anything stolen from her apartment? Money, jewelry, the television, a VCR?”

  “No, definitely,” Ray said. He shook his head. “Nothing was taken.”

  “And nobody’s ever made mention of her being raped or sexually assaulted, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So the police have eliminated the possibility of random crime, and so can we.”

  “For the time being.”

  I looked up at him after scribbling a note on the page. “Yeah, for the time being. Now, what about lovers?”

  He made a humming noise. “I never thought of that.”

  “With the severity of the beating she took, there had to be some degree of passion involved. Somebody had to loathe Rebecca Gibson to wear her out that bad. Whoever it was could have killed her a lot easier.”

  The bags under Ray’s eyes and the creases on his forehead lifted as he brightened. “Yeah, I hadn’t thought of that. The problem is, I don’t know if she was seeing anybody. There were rumors, of course, about her and—”

  He paused. “Her and who?” I asked.

  Ray settled back in his chair again. “Naw, it couldn’t be.”

  I slapped my pen down on the paper. “Don’t do that to me. If we’re going to help Slim, we’ve got to consider every possibility.”

  “I don’t see how Dwight could have—”

  “Dwight who?” I demanded.

  “Dwight Parmenter,” he answered. “Dwight’s the guy we were singing with Sunday night at the Bluebird.”

  I pulled a picture of Dwight Parmenter out of memory and ran it past. Guy was tall, wiry. He was wearing a checked flannel shirt that night. During their performance, he seemed to be the quietest, the one with the least ego. He was also, musically, the least impressive.

  “The guy on Rebecca’s right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So tell me about him,” I said. “Did he and Rebecca have something going on?”

  Ray plopped his elbows on the desk and leaned forward. “Maybe. I know they’d been seen out a few times. I know Dwight was sweet on her.”

  “I didn’t notice any particular sparks flying Sunday night.”

  “That’s ’cause Slim was there. And partly because you have to get to know Dwight to see what he’s really thinking.”

  I paused for a moment. “Let me get this straight. Rebecca was still singing and performing with her ex-husband, her ex-husband’s partner, and the guy who may have been her lover—all at the same time.”

  Ray grinned. “Yeah, I guess that’s about it.”

  “Does any of this seem just the slightest bit strange to you?”

  The grin widened into sheepishness. “You got to understand, Harry. People in the music bidness do things a little bit different.”

  “Apparently so. Okay, so we’ve got Dwight Parmenter. Maybe you’re right and he wasn’t involved. If he wasn’t, he’ll be easy enough to scratch off the list. What about other lovers?”

  “How much time have you got?”

  I drew a line beneath my notes on Dwight Parmenter. “How much will I need?”

  Ray straightened up. “Harry, Rebecca was a grown woman, and she’d been around awhile. And like I said, music-bidness types—”

  “I know, I
know. Operate under a different set of rules. Tell me this. Is there anybody out there who was involved with Rebecca and broke up with her under particularly bitter circumstances. More than just your usual soap opera.”

  “The only one I know of is Slim,” Ray said. “I mean, people come together, stay awhile, and then drift back apart. Law of the jungle, man. I do know the only one she ever married was Slim, outside of some guy back in west Tennessee she married back when she was eighteen.”

  “What about him?”

  “Hell, I don’t even know his name. But Rebecca used to joke about him. Said he was a tractor-trailer mechanic, chewed tobacco, and would rather hunt deer than have sex.”

  “At least he had his priorities straight.”

  “Maybe so. But they divorced with no big battles, and she came to Nashville to make it big as a country-music singer. That must have been twelve, thirteen years ago. As far as I know, she never saw him again.”

  “So Slim was the only one where any … recriminations were involved.”

  “Yeah, but even then, they still worked together. Their business interests were tied together real close. They co-owned songs, split royalty checks—the whole shooting match.”

  “Only Slim was getting the fuzzy end of the lollipop on most of their deals, right? Otherwise, he wouldn’t be so broke.”

  “Not really,” Ray said after another moment’s pause. “Slim just ain’t no good at handling money. That’s why he never has any. It runs through his fingers like gas through a ’66 Cadillac.”

  “Well,” I said, encouraged, “that may help. After all, if she wasn’t screwing him, business-wise, there was no reason to kill her.”

  “Yeah,” Ray mumbled. Then he looked away nervously.

  “What?”

  He looked back at me. “I’ve seen their partnership agreements and all the contracts,” he said. “Slim and Rebecca set up a weird arrangement.”

  “What was the arrangement?”

  Ray bit his lower lip. “In the event that either of them died, the rights to the song catalog totally reverted to the other.”

  “Oh, no,” I muttered. “The rights don’t revert to Rebecca’s estate?”

  “Nope,” Ray said. “They go back to Slim.”

  “And how much is that worth?”

  “There’s no way to answer that question. Right now the catalog brought in enough for both of them to live on, if they was careful. But if some major star was to pick up a song or two of theirs, say Garth or Wynonna or somebody like that, and make a number-one hit out of it—well, hell, the sky’s the limit. Six figures easy. Maybe more. Could happen.”

  Great, I thought as I finished scribbling down the note on what Ray’d just told me. One more reason for Slim to whack his ex-wife.

  Just what we needed.

  I had about as much hope of pulling this off as a steerage passenger had of getting on one of the Titanic’s lifeboats. Every little piece of information I learned was one more revelation that could send Slim packing for the next couple of decades.

  “One more bad piece of news. That’s just what we need.”

  “How is that bad?”

  “What do you mean?” I almost shouted at him without meaning to. “It’s one more motive!”

  “But the DA ain’t going to find out about that,” Ray insisted.

  “Ray, excuse me for allowing a little reality to intrude upon this discussion. But I think we’d both be better off if we assumed the District Attorney’s Office and the police are going to know everything.”

  I paused for a second. “Everything!”

  He jumped back. “Okay, okay!”

  “Now let’s move on,” I said. My stomach churned. “Let’s look at her other business arrangements. I don’t know the music business very well. What other people did Rebecca work with?”

  “Well, I guess the closest would be her personal manager, Mac Ford. Then there was her talent and booking agent, Faye Morgan over at CCA, the Concert Corporation of America. And then there was her accountant. What was his name? And the lawyer, of course.”

  “Mac Ford,” I said. “I’ve heard of him. Got a weird name or something, hasn’t he? I’ve seen it in the papers.”

  “Ford McKenna Ford is his real name, but everybody calls him Mac. He used to manage Slim and Rebecca both, but Slim left him after the divorce. Mac’s taken care of Rebecca since he stole her away from her original manager back when she and Slim were just selling their first songs.”

  “Stole her?” I asked. “That happen often? Managers stealing each other’s clients away, I mean.”

  Ray smiled. “You don’t know this business, do you?”

  “So let me in on it.”

  Ray leaned back, glad to take back control of the conversation. He threw his big snakeskin shitkickers up on the desk and intertwined his fingers into a headrest. Suddenly he’d changed from a serious, scared middle-aged guy about to lose it all to the country-music-industry insider who was holding court for the uninitiated. His ego was back in gear.

  “Harry, I once knew a guy who paid an artist’s manager ten thousand cash under the table to talk him into a record deal that wound up ruining the singer’s career. The first thing you learn in this business is that people will lie to you when it’s goddamn easier to tell the truth, and would be a hell of a lot less to keep track of in the bargain. You got to watch out for yourself, ’cause the wounded are left behind or eaten.”

  “But what about Rebecca?”

  “Rebecca Gibson came to town in the late Seventies, with a little bit of talent as a singer, a lot of determination, and a whole lot of undiscovered talent as a songwriter. She had hair bouffed up to the ceiling, an ice-cream-cone bra, and dreams. That was about it. She got a job as a waitress and worked the open-mike nights for about two years before her first manager discovered her. He was a guy named Will Harmetz, and he was known then for hanging around the Trailways station like a child molester.”

  “Was he? A child molester, I mean?”

  “Let me put it this way. Rebecca spent most of her time with Will on her back with her legs in the air. But she was over twenty-one and he blew enough smoke up her ass that she was willing to put up with it. Besides, the world wasn’t exactly beating a path to her door. Then she met Slim.”

  “And started to blossom.”

  “You bet your ass she did. Slim taught her a lot, and she taught him a lot. They were going places, and the first thing they had to do was find a real manager. Mac Ford was just starting out then, but he was taking in some of the hippest young country acts around. He wasn’t getting very far with most of them, but he was in there punching. Rebecca had a long-term contract with this slimebag Harmetz. If I remember correctly, he was putting together a deal to have Rebecca start a tour singing in truck-stop restaurants. You believe that, man? Truck-stop restaurants …”

  “So how’d he get her out of it?”

  “Rebecca was going to go to Harmetz and just tell him she wanted out. Mac knew better, though. He knew Rebecca would eventually be worth something, and he figured Will Harmetz probably knew it, too. He also was savvy enough to know that if Harmetz figured Rebecca was about to jump ship, he’d just get the wagons in a circle.”

  Ray was the Charlie Daniels of the mixed metaphor. I struggled to keep a straight face. “So what did they do?”

  “By this time, Slim and Becca were living together and planning on getting married. Harmetz didn’t mind so much that she wasn’t doing the horizontal bop with him anymore. After all, there were other girls out there. Now that she was near her midtwenties, she was quickly becoming too old for him anyway. But she arranged to meet Will at his office for one last bout on the leather couch. She must have put it to him, because he fell asleep afterward. Rebecca lifted some of his letterhead, and Mac forged a letter releasing her from her contract. He forged Harmetz’s name, then had a friend notarize it for him.”

  “They forged a release?” I asked, surprise in my voice.

&
nbsp; “Sure, happens all the time. Then they made a few crappy-looking copies of it and planted them in file folders. Rebecca stuck the original back in Harmetz’s filing cabinet. And when he started raising hell about having her locked in on a long-term management contract, she just produced her copy and told him where to find his.”

  “And he fell for it?”

  “Wasn’t nothing to fall for,” Ray said. “Wasn’t nothing Harmetz could so. They had him by the short ones. Besides, this kind of shit happens all the time. Harmetz knew how the game was played. He certainly wasn’t surprised.”

  “But you’d think he’d at least go to court and fight for it.”

  “Oh, he tried. Threatened to, anyway. Said he owned twenty percent of everything she ever did for the rest of her career and a hundred percent of the name Rebecca Gibson. Becca just laughed and told him to get a life. An artist and a manager have almost a marriage. You can’t sue somebody to make ’em love you when they don’t anymore.”

  “Given the way this society’s going, I’m surprised somebody hasn’t tried it,” I said. “But okay, we’ll add Will Harmetz to the list.”

  “Well, you can add, but it won’t do any good in his case. He got drunker’n Cootie Mae Brown about five years ago and fell off a houseboat out in Percy Priest Lake. He washed up on the beach at Hermitage Landing on the Fourth of July weekend.”

  I drew a line through Will Harmetz’s name. “Okay, so much for that. What about Mac Ford?”

  “Well, I could see Mac Ford killing somebody. He is, after all, a manager. But it don’t make sense. He and Becca got along. They’d been working together for years. She was all set to make him some serious money. Mac’s kind of a wild man, but why would he want to kill her?”

  I couldn’t answer that. “Okay, no motive for him. Who else?”

  “Well, there’s Faye Morgan over at CCA.”

  “All right, that’s something I don’t understand. What’s the difference between a booking agent and a manager?”

  “A booking agent actually arranges the dates. The personal manager handles an artist’s business affairs, approves contracts, negotiates deals with record companies. Basically, anything an artist needs. You got to understand, Harry, some of these kids come up here out of these small towns where the most sophisticated thing they’ve ever seen is the VFW hall on Friday night. As a rule, they ain’t too well educated, and most of them are a little light in the basic-brains and common-sense department.”