Way Past Dead

by Steven Womack

  His voice had become softer, lower, as if somewhere beneath the decade’s worth of abuse and baggage and emotional garbage, he still loved her. Some people, I knew from hard experience, were just like that. They get under your skin, wrap themselves around your very nerve endings, and never turn you loose.

  “Well, if it’s any comfort,” I said, “she doesn’t have anything to be afraid of now.”

  Slim’s eyes glazed over, and I was sorry I’d said that. “Nobody could ever understand it who hadn’t been through it, Harry. That woman was the best thing that ever happened to me—and the worst. All at the same time.”

  As I left the jail a half hour or so later, I thought of what Slim had said: The only thing worse than wanting her was having her. I couldn’t help but think of Saint Teresa, and the price she quoted for inordinately strong desires.

  Something about answered prayers and shed tears …

  The five hundred in cash Lonnie’d loaned me was going to be a pretty good cushion, but I still needed to stay on top of Phil Anderson at the insurance company to get my invoice paid. I got my car out of hock at the parking lot across the street from the jail, then navigated through the traffic back to my office so I could catch him before his usual round of afternoon meetings.

  It was nearly ten-thirty by the time I hit the landing on the third floor and turned for my office. As I scrambled for my keys I heard the relays in my answering machine clattering away again, and a muffled voice leaving what sounded like the last of a message. I couldn’t understand what the caller was saying, but the voice was Southern, almost hick.

  “All right,” I said out loud, thinking it sounded like Phil Anderson, “do that paperwork thing you do so well.” For some unknown reason, I was in a good mood. Maybe it was just the apex of the bipolar roller-coaster ride. I hoped, maybe even assumed, that Phil was calling me with good news. I already had the money spent.

  I pushed the door open just as the caller hung up. My ancient answering machine takes about thirty seconds to reset itself. I took off my coat and cracked a window to air the place out.

  I opened my briefcase and took out the notebook where I’d made a page of notes after talking to Slim. The conversation with him had helped a little, but not much. I absentmindedly reached over and hit the play button. After the obligatory greeting from the computer chip, a voice dripping Dixie syrup began playing off the tape. It wasn’t the voice I expected.

  “Hey, you son of a bitch, this’s me again. I just wanted you to know I ain’t forgot the promise I made. You go ahead and have you a real good time, boy, because yo’ good times is about to come to a end.…”

  Click and dial tone, fade the hell out.

  “Jeezus H.,” I said, “what is going on with this guy?”

  I reached into my briefcase and recovered the tape with the first threatening message and slapped it in the machine. I hit the button again and listened to the first message.

  Yeah, same voice. Same slurring of the words son of a bitch. Somehow, I’d managed to piss off somebody who sounded like they had a mouthful of cotton, or more likely, chewing tobacco.

  I pulled the tape out of the machine and stuffed both tapes into my briefcase. If this kept up, I’d soon be heading to Wal-Mart for a case of answering machine tapes.

  Who the hell could this be? The only thing I knew for sure was that I didn’t know the person. Not only did I not recognize the voice, but the threatening messages had only been left on my office machine. After some nut I ran into made a couple of nasty phone calls to my apartment a few months ago, I’d had my home number changed and unlisted. So whoever was taking a turn at me now was beholden to the Yellow Pages. My only recourse was to save the tapes until I had enough of them to call South Central Bell and file a harassment claim.

  I raked across my Rolodex cards until Phil Anderson’s came up. Seven short number punches later, I was talking to his secretary.

  “This is Harry Denton,” I explained. “Is he in?”

  “May I ask what this is concerning?” she asked.

  It always irritates the pee out of me when somebody asks that. I’ve always wanted to say to some secretary:

  “No, you may not ask what this is concerning, and if you do again, I’m going to come up to your office and rip your liver out through your nostrils.”

  Boy, I thought, am I getting hostile these days or what? “Certainly,” I said as politely as I could muster. “I’m just following up on the case I completed for him.”

  What I was trying not to say is that I’m calling about the damn money he owes me. That usually doesn’t get you very far, I’d found.

  “Please hold, Mr. Denton. I’ll see if he’s available.”

  I reread my page of notes twice before she came back. “I’m sorry to keep you waiting, Mr. Denton. Mr. Anderson’s unavailable right now. May I have a number where he can reach you?”

  “Sure,” I said. What was I going to say? So I gave her my number and stared at the phone for a few seconds after hanging up.

  In all the times I’d phoned Phil Anderson, he’d never not taken my calls. I began to recognize the foul stench of a telephone dodge.

  Still fuming over the insurance company’s shabby treatment of me after I’d pulled their unaudited asses out of the fire, I dialed Roger Vaden’s office and took a chance on him being in. Lawyers, I’ve found over the years, will rarely admit to being in their offices when you need them, and on the few occasions when they are, they are adamant in their unavailability for unsolicited phone calls. Vaden was no exception.

  “When do you expect him back?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure,” the sweet feminine voice on the other end of the line answered. “Perhaps you could tell me what this is in regard to.”

  I suppressed the urge to bitch somebody out. “I’m a friend of Slim Gibson’s. I’m a private investigator, and he’s asked me to help him out with his case. I thought I should at least let Mr. Vaden know what I was doing before I started doing it.”

  “Oh,” she said abruptly. “Please hold.”

  I drummed a succession of fingers on the desk, waiting for perhaps an hour or more during the next thirty seconds. Roger Vaden’s stiff, cool professional voice finally came on the line, sounding much more in control than it did before Judge Alvin Rosenthal.

  “Yes, Mr. Denton, what can I do for you?”

  “I spoke with Slim,” I began.

  “You saw him at the jail?”

  “Yes, just this morning.”

  “I wish you’d asked my permission.”

  Something about his tone of voice made want to rear back on my haunches and flash a fang at him. “I didn’t know I needed your permission to visit the jail during public visiting hours.”

  “You don’t, but you do need it to question my client.”

  “I didn’t question your client. Your client wanted to talk to me.”

  He backed off at that. “Bickering like this will do us no good. What do you want?”

  “Slim asked me to do a little looking around. As a courtesy, I’m making you aware of that. I don’t know how deeply I’m going to get involved in his case. As I’m sure you already know, the Slim Gibson defense fund is a little on the meager side. Also, I’m not exactly sure what I can do for him. He’s in a lot of trouble.”

  “I know,” Vaden said.

  “You can do something for me—and for Slim. If I need the leverage of working in an official capacity, I’d appreciate it if you’d back me up.”

  “Meaning?”

  “If I get in a spot where I have to tell somebody I’m working for you on Slim’s behalf, that you just verify that.”

  “I won’t be responsible for you. I take no responsibility or liability for anything you do.”

  “I’m not asking you to,” I said. “But if somebody calls and says, ‘There’s a guy here who says he’s working for you,’ could you just say, ‘Yeah, he is’?”

  “You are a licensed private investigator?” he a
sked.

  “That’s correct. I’m even bonded.”

  “The problem is that I don’t know how long I’m going to be on the case.”

  “I understand. You’re trying to get a criminal lawyer involved, right?”

  “Yes, but I’m not having much luck. Mr. Gibson is not being held in very high esteem within the local community. The press has pilloried him, practically convicted him. And with his limited resources, he can’t afford the defense he needs. The only alternative, really, is the …” His voice faded away, as if he couldn’t bring himself to say the two dreaded words.

  “Public defender?” I asked.

  “Yes. And that basically means he won’t have a defense. More likely, he’ll just have someone negotiate the length of his prison term.”

  “Slim deserves better than that.”

  “I agree. But what can we do? I’m not even sure what our options are. The judge will hear preliminary motions in about a month. It’s going to take almost that long for defense to prepare. Which doesn’t leave much time to find him an advocate.”

  “And you’re definitely not going to represent him?”

  Vaden cleared his throat nervously. “This is not my specialty. Even if I could afford to take the case on for what Mr. Gibson can pay, I seriously doubt I’m equipped to give him the best representation possible.”

  “How long have we got? Or rather, how long have you got before you’re off the case?”

  “A week. Perhaps a bit longer.”

  I felt overwhelmed and frustrated by so much coming from so many different directions at once. “Okay, listen,” I said. “Let’s try this. I’ve got a form that’s just a simple boilerplate that says I’ve been retained by you. It’s got some blanks to be filled in that describe what I’m supposed to be doing, and for how long. I’ll fill in the blanks, sign the form, and mail it to you. If it meets with your approval, sign it and mail it back to me, along with a check for one dollar. I’ll bill Slim for the rest when this is all over—that is, if he’s in a position to make any more than the sixty cents an hour or so that inmates earn. Is that all right with you?”

  “Yes,” he said, after a moment’s silence. “That will do. I can go that far, as long as there aren’t any problems on the form.”

  “Add whatever you need to in order to protect yourself,” I said. As if he wouldn’t anyway …

  “I’ll turn it around as soon as I get it,” he said.

  “Okay, Mr. Vaden. It’s a pleasure doing business with you.”

  “I only hope this does Slim some good.” His voice relaxed now that the negotiations had ended. “I’m extremely worried about him.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Me, too.”

  I filled in the blanks and typed up an envelope in about five minutes, then plopped a stamp on it and dropped it in the mailbox on the way out of the building. The sun was high above the Seventh Avenue buildings now; another beautiful spring day was in the making. We get about six or eight weeks every year in Nashville when this city is draped in the most glorious weather you’ll see anywhere on the planet: temperatures in the low seventies, bright blue skies, little or no humidity. Sometimes I think this little balmy window between the frozen gray of winter and the sweltering red of summer is all that keeps most of us here.

  The next step was to drop in on Mac Ford, Rebecca’s manager, and get whatever I could out of him. I dodged a couple of cars and scampered across the street, then began the long climb up the ramps to the fourth floor of the parking garage. As usual, I’d come in late and lost my chance for a prime parking space. That didn’t really bother me, though. The ramp wasn’t steep and I needed the exercise.

  There was a memorial service for Rebecca Gibson later that afternoon, down on Broadway at Christ Episcopal Church. I figured I’d take a chance on catching Ford, then head back downtown for the service. I wasn’t sure what I’d get out of attending the service, but it seemed like it couldn’t hurt anything.

  I rounded the slick concrete ramp on the third level and headed, slightly winded and quickly moistening, up toward my car. Ahead of me, the faded, chipped paint on the wall gave the place a decayed look, and I fought not to think of how far my life had deteriorated in the past couple of years. Back at the newspaper, I had seniority in the parking lot as well as the office, with a prime spot in the employee lot down in the Gulch, the area that ran below the Church Street Viaduct down in back of the newspaper building.

  What the hell, I thought, think of it as a built-in exercise machine.

  Above me, there was a crash. Not a loud one, not the heavy metallic grind of cars slamming into each other, but more of a thud followed by …

  Breaking glass.

  I quickened my steps halfway up the ramp, then broke into a trot. A half-dozen steps later there was another crash, this time louder, followed by the distinct tinkling of shattered glass hitting concrete.

  I accelerated from a trot to a run, but my street shoes were slick on the concrete and I missed a couple of steps, almost losing my footing. I reached out to regain my balance, then hit the top of the ramp. I whipped around a concrete pillar and saw, at the farthest end of the garage, a running hulk of a man maybe sixty yards away from me. All I saw was a blur of blue legs and a pair of arms in a checked shirt pumping away.

  “Hey!” I yelled, without thinking. I put everything I had into it, figuring that somebody hauling ass like that in a direction away from me was certainly up to no good.

  Whoever he was, he knew how to run. He outpaced me, getting to a large steel door with a push bar before I was even a quarter of the way down the building. He slammed the brass exit bar and was through in a half second, leaving only a puff of dust as the door closed behind him.

  I ran like hell, hoping he’d gotten stuck out there somehow. But the door exited out onto an exterior stairwell that ran straight down the side of the building to a driveway that led, in turn, to the alley behind the parking garage. I gave it all I had, but by the time I got to the door, I was puffing so hard I wouldn’t have heard his footsteps even if he’d still been there. As I held on to the door to keep from being locked out of the garage, I caught a glimpse of him rounding the corner of the building and streaking into the alley.

  There was no use following. He was long gone.

  I sputtered, straining to get my breath back. Sweat had broken out everywhere, and I felt like ripping my suit coat off.

  I pushed the door all the way open and stepped back into the garage. I wondered what the hell had gone on, when I noticed my shoes were crunching on the concrete. I bent my knee and examined the bottom of my right shoe.

  Broken glass was embedded all over the sole.

  Oh, boy, I thought. Somebody’s in for a lousy surprise when they get off work. I was debating getting involved with the police when I noticed a spray of broken glass on the concrete about a dozen cars ahead of me.

  I worked myself up to a trot again, my fears growing as I approached the twinkling mess. Then I got to the car, which had been tucked in between two long sedans so that its nose was invisible unless you were right on top of it.

  My car.

  The windshield was smashed in, with a thousand bits of glittering safety glass all over the hood and a gaping hole right in front of the steering wheel. My heart sank as I walked over and surveyed the damage.

  There was a large, ragged-edged chunk of brick lying beside the driver’s side door, but no attempt had been made to break into the car. Mindless, idiotic vandalism, I thought. If I’d only been here a couple of minutes sooner, I thought, I could have stopped the guy.

  Or maybe he’d have used the brick on my head.

  The sweat I’d worked up turned into icicles as I realized what had happened. Was I getting paranoid? Somebody trashed my car, but didn’t even try to steal the stereo. I’m getting death threats on the phone and bricks through the windshield.

  What the hell’s going on?

  “What the hell do you mean?” I demanded. “The police
don’t take these calls anymore? Lady, my car has been vandalized, for God’s sake!”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” the impersonal voice on the other end of the line said. Then she repeated her canned explanation of why the police are too busy to respond to routine car break-ins. There are just too many of them. She could, she offered, assign a report number that might satisfy my insurance company.

  “I don’t have any car insurance,” I protested. “Since I’m an honest citizen, I can’t afford it anymore.”

  “Sir.” Her tone shifted to the stern one she used when her kids were out of control. “It’s against the law to drive without liability insurance.”

  “Aw, assign it a number,” I said, giving her my best Bowery Boys go-to-hell attitude as I slammed the phone down.

  I thumbed through the Yellow Pages and found the auto-glass companies. I called four of them and discovered, to my utter confounded amazement, that they all charged the same amount to replace my windshield.

  “What a coincidence,” I said to Polite Young Receptionist Number Four. “A hundred and fifty is what the other three companies said.”

  “Oh, yessir,” she said, missing the massive dose of smart-ass I’d injected into my voice. I guess she wasn’t too up on price-fixing laws, either. “We all charge the same.”

  She’d already told me that the windshield replacement would take a couple of hours, so I figured what the hell. Price fixing or no price fixing, I had them right where they wanted me.

  “The only problem is,” I explained, “I’ve got to be somewhere. I can’t wait around.”

  “That’s okay, sir. We can bill your insurance company direct, then put your deductible on a credit card.”

  I cleared my throat. “I don’t have any insurance.” I half expected her to hang up on me in disgust.

  “Oh,” she said. Her voice dropped about fifty percent in volume. “You seem like a nice guy. Noninsurance claims we’ll let slide by for a hundred. That okay?”

  I tried not to gasp. Ordinarily, I don’t like benefiting from rip-offs, but in this case I’d make an exception. “Sure, that’d be great. Can I put it on a card?”