Way Past Dead

by Steven Womack

  There was a switch on the side of the case. I placed it in the palm of my hand, flicked the switch on, and pressed a button on the other side of the case from the switch.

  A crackling sound filled my office and a bright blue spark danced across the test prongs. Real Frankenstein lab stuff. At the bottom of the case, another decal read

  WARNING: EXTREME DANGER. KEEP OUT OF REACH OF CHILDREN. USE ONLY AS DIRECTED.

  I thumbed the safety switch down and pressed the button one more time to make sure it was off and quiet. Then I tucked the stun gun into the right pocket of my suit jacket and left the office.

  * * *

  Anybody who’s hung around Music Row longer than your average tourist learns p.d.q. that there’s a dark side to all the glitter and rhinestones. I was never an insider; even as a newspaperman, I was just another entity to be manipulated by the PR machine. Anybody who’s lived here longer than a few months, though, picks up on it. It’s not just the money and the drugs, the deals and the steals, the lives and careers made and ruined over a handshake that may or may not be as dependable as a signed contract, and God knows how dependable even a signed contract would be. It’s something even darker than all that. I’ve always thought it was not only ironic, but poetically just, that Music Row after the sun sets is one of the most dangerous areas in the city to walk around unprotected. Muggings, rapes, robberies, even murder, are not all that uncommon on the Row. The sun sets, the vampires come out. Smart people carry wooden stakes and silver bullets.

  I was glad I had the stun gun with me, even if the sun wasn’t completely down yet. It was after five; the traffic on I-40 slowed to a walk in both directions as far as the eye could see. I turned left off Broadway and cut over to Demonbreun, then doglegged left around the freeway entrance and wound my way on a side street behind the Music Row Shoney’s and onto Division.

  Down Division, the Faron Young Building sat perched on a bluff overlooking the traffic jam on the interstate. The two-story structure was brown brick and had a parking lot big enough to accommodate a fleet of tour buses. I pulled into the lot and took my choice of a couple hundred spaces.

  The building was occupied mostly by independent record companies, booking agencies, and freelance writers and photographers. Every office seemed to be related, in one way or another, to the industry.

  I scanned the directory, then moseyed down the hall to IBA, the International Booking Agency. Most of the offices were still open. I checked my watch again. Maybe I’d get lucky.

  The decor was dark paneling, set off by worn carpet. The odors of cigarettes and stale coffee permeated the hallways. I stopped in front of a solid wooden door with a gold-and-brown plaque—IBA—mounted on it.

  Inside, an overweight woman with the last vestiges of teenage acne and a terrible bleach job sat behind a gray metal desk. She filed her nails with a scraggly emery board as I closed the door behind me, and never missed a beat. To her left, a computer monitor sat on the desk, its screen saver floating multicolored balloons across the glass. Dozens of badly framed photographs covered the wall, mostly head or group shots of country-music acts. Three pictures over from the receptionist’s desk, a photograph of Rebecca Gibson strumming a huge twelve-string still hung. It gave me a chill to look at it.

  “Can I help you?” she asked.

  I edged over to the desk and smiled down at her. There were traces of tomato sauce on the front of her blouse, and her mismatched bright turquoise skirt threatened to disintegrate at the seams if it didn’t get some relief soon.

  “I’d like to see Faye Morgan, please.”

  The filing stopped as she focused on my face through smudged wire-rim glasses.

  “You got an appointment?”

  “No, but it’s about the murder of Rebecca Gibson.” I took out my license case and flipped it open in front of her. “My name’s Harry James Denton. I’m a private investigator.”

  At that, she sat up and reached across the desk with her free hand. She held the bottom of the license steady for a second as she studied.

  “Dadgum,” she said. “I never seen one of those.”

  I smiled at her as sweetly as I was able, then brushed the bottom of her fingers with mine. “It’s real. I promise.”

  She looked into my eyes and smiled, then settled back in the chair, hinges squealing in distress. “I’ll see if Ms. Morgan has a moment to spare.”

  I kept the smile pasted on. “Thanks. I appreciate that.”

  She picked up the phone and pressed the intercom button. “Faye, there’s a guy out here.…” Then she spoke too softly for me to hear. I stepped away from her desk and studied the office. The waiting room was maybe twelve by fifteen, with a couple of doors leading off into what I assumed were private offices. Not much to look at, really, for an agency that billed itself as international.

  Behind me, the receptionist hung up the phone. “Ms. Morgan will be right with you. Can I fix you a cup of coffee?”

  “No, thank you. Say, you guys represent all these groups?”

  “We have at one time or another,” she answered.

  “Restless Heart, Willie Nelson, Asleep at the Wheel,” I read off the titles on the publicity photos. “Carlene Carter! Wow, she’s one of my favorites!”

  I crossed the room over to Rebecca’s picture. “Too bad about Rebecca Gibson, huh? I only heard her sing live once, but she sure was something else.”

  “Yeah,” the receptionist said. She was bored now, back to filing her nails. “If you like that sort of thing.”

  I leaned down toward her and lowered my voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “What was she like? Really, I mean?”

  The emery board stopped midstroke, and her voice lowered to match mine. “Well, I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, you know.”

  Let me guess, I thought, in this case, you’re going to make an exception.

  “Yeah?” I said grinning.

  “She was a b-i-t-c-h of the first degree. I mean, you know, you expect these hillbilly singers to be kind of temperamental. Know what I mean? But she was h-e-double-hockey-sticks on wheels.…” She jabbed the emery board at me like a pointer, and as she did, an enormous slab of fat under her upper arm bobbed up and down in time to the shaking.

  Behind me, a door opened and a throat cleared impatiently. I turned to meet a stern woman, medium height, small-boned, and very light, with curly auburn hair and light green eyes. She wore brown corduroy pants that fit tightly around her hips and narrow waist, with a silk blouse on top that matched the slacks perfectly. She was professional, subdued, and quite attractive.

  “Gladys, hold my calls,” she said.

  I turned and winked at Gladys, who retreated back into her desk chair like she’d been caught with her hand in the cookie jar, an experience she’d probably had many times before.

  “This way, Mr. Denton.” She turned and led me into her office. I followed as she held the door for me, then shut it behind us. Her office was cluttered with trade magazines, newspapers, and the obligatory autographed celebrity photos. A speakerphone sat on her desk amid the rubble across from a wall with a floor-to-ceiling bookcase jammed with books and mementos. I got the feeling she spent most of her life in here.

  “Ms. Morgan, thanks for taking the time to see me. I know you’re busy.”

  She sat down in a high-backed leather chair that could have been in a senior law partner’s office. The chair seemed to engulf her. “What can I do for you, Mr. Denton? What’s your involvement in this?”

  “I’m doing some follow-up on the murder of Rebecca Gibson. Just trying to get some background.”

  “Who hired you?”

  I started to dodge that one, having hoped the subject wouldn’t come up. Then I figured if she could be that direct, so could I.

  “I’m working for Slim Gibson.”

  Not a muscle in her face moved. I expected her to throw me out, but instead found myself being stared at. I stared back. The first hints of lines and furrows were just beginni
ng to mark her face. She was in a high-pressure business and, I guessed, approaching her midthirties. She was at that point where stress and age would begin to wear at her natural beauty.

  “Well,” she said finally. “That puts us on opposite sides of the fence, doesn’t it?”

  “Not really. We’re both after the same goal.”

  “Which is?”

  “That Rebecca Gibson’s killer is brought to justice. That whoever killed her pays for it.”

  “Rebecca Gibson’s killer has been brought to justice,” she said flatly.

  “That’s still to be decided, isn’t it? Innocent,” I said, though I wasn’t sure even I believed it, “until proven guilty.”

  “My understanding from the police and from the newspaper accounts is that the physical evidence, the circumstantial evidence, and the testimony of eyewitnesses proves that Rebecca’s ex-husband killed her. They’d fought off and on for years. He has a violent history.” She wove her fingers together into a tent. “Seems pretty conclusive.”

  “On the other hand, what was the motive? If it was just a passion murder, your typical domestic explosion, why didn’t he kill her years ago when the fireworks were really flying? There’s no evidence he wanted her back, so it’s not a question of him being a spurned suitor. And while he inherits the song catalog—that is, if he’s acquitted—the truth is he stood to benefit more in the long run if she lived. The bottom line is he had no reason to kill her. He doesn’t really benefit from her death.”

  “But no one benefits from her death!” Faye Morgan leaned forward and planted her elbows on the desk. It was the first hiccup of excitement I’d seen in her. “If that’s the deciding factor, then nobody murdered her!”

  “And you can’t hold Slim accountable for a revenge motive unless you consider everyone else who might have had the same motive.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “C’mon, Ms. Morgan. Rebecca Gibson wasn’t exactly the most beloved person in the cosmos. Even your secretary—”

  “Gladys talks too much,” she interrupted.

  “Don’t be angry at her,” I said. “She’s not the only one who’s said that to me.”

  “Rebecca Gibson was just another Thoroughbred,” she said. “Like many others.”

  “Is that how agents think of their singers? Horseflesh?”

  “The similarities are amazing, Mr. Denton, especially toward the posterior end of the animal. If every difficult artist wound up being murdered, the entire industry would collapse.

  “No,” she continued, “you don’t have much of a case here. It’s straightforward. Slim Gibson beat his wife to death and now all of us will suffer for it.”

  “Which leads me to another question. If you don’t mind my asking, how much will you suffer?”

  She relaxed in the chair and let her arms drop onto the armrests of the chair. “For some reason or other, Mr. Denton, I think I’ll be candid with you.”

  She returned my smile, which made me like her, even though I had no reason whatsoever to trust her. “I appreciate that,” I said.

  “IBA is a B-level booking agency. We handle all the big stars before they become big. We don’t take on the new kids, unless there’s something truly spectacular and promising about them, and by the time they start running around in the major leagues, they’ve gone on to somebody else. That’s okay. My partners and I have made a good living in the last ten years or so booking Rebecca Gibsons into one-, two-, and three-night stands in places like Abilene and Tulsa. I know every honky-tonk operator from here to Bakersfield and back, and they all know me. Rebecca Gibson’s death was a blow to all of us, yes. But we’ll survive.”

  “How long had you represented Rebecca?”

  “I’d have to check my records for an exact date, but about eighteen months.”

  “And it’s been in those eighteen months that her career started to take off.”

  “Yes,” Faye Morgan said. “And she would have stayed with us through the release of her next album. If that turned out to be the breakout for her that everybody expected, then she would have left us shortly thereafter.”

  “Isn’t that frustrating?” I asked. “To work so hard to build up an artist’s career, only to have them dump you just when they could start to make you some real money?”

  She smiled, but above the smile, her eyes darkened.

  “Is the owner of a Triple-A ball club frustrated when George Steinbrenner calls his best players up to the Bronx? It’s the nature of the business.” She shrugged her shoulders.

  “Sounds more like the nature of the food chain,” I commented.

  “That may be the most apt analogy I’ve ever heard.”

  I leaned forward and, without thinking, said: “You seem like a nice lady. Why do you put up with it?”

  She pursed her lips, then rolled her lower lip inward and bit it nervously.

  “Sorry if that’s too personal,” I said. “Bad habit of mine.”

  “That’s okay. I’m just not sure I can answer it.”

  I stood up and pulled a business card out of my shirt pocket. “Look, I’m trying to help out a friend who’s in trouble. All I want is to find the truth. If the truth is that Slim killed Rebecca, then that’s where I’ll be led, and that’ll be the end of it. If you can recall anything that might help, I’d sure appreciate it.”

  I laid the card on her desk. She picked it up and studied it for a moment. “If I can help,” she said, “I’ll call you.”

  “Then I won’t take up any more of your time.” I turned for the door.

  “Mr. Denton,” she said.

  “Please, call me Harry.”

  “Harry—” She hesitated. “There was a time when I loved this business. Loved being a player, loved the music. Loved hanging around with the celebrities, swimming with the sharks. But that wears off quickly. Now I just do it because it’s all I’ve ever done. It makes me a comfortable living.”

  “But the cost is high, isn’t it?”

  She grinned again, waving me off, all seriousness gone. “Everything’s expensive these days. Inflation …”

  I opened the door to her office and stood there for just another moment. “I hope you don’t mind my saying this,” I said. “I think you deserve better.”

  “You’re a gentleman, Harry,” she said sadly. “I don’t meet many of those in my business.”

  “Yeah, well, nice guys finish last.”

  She leaned her head back against the back of the chair. “So I’m told.”

  I liked Faye Morgan. There was something subliminally attractive and appealing about her. For a woman who couldn’t have weighed more than one ten, one fifteen tops, though, she sure carried a lot of weight around inside her.

  I wondered what secrets she’s got.

  The light turned at Wedgewood Avenue and I started to ease out into the intersection, then realized the fool to my left had no intention of stopping simply because the traffic light facing him had turned. He roared through the intersection doing about fifty in a red Nissan pickup truck, ignoring the blaring horns and the raised middle fingers. In this town, green doesn’t mean go; it means look both ways and, when all the idiots have finished running the light, proceed cautiously.

  I cut over to Belmont Avenue, then out Belmont to one of the side streets. I managed to make my way over to Marsha’s apartment in Green Hills without getting caught in the end-of-rush-hour traffic.

  Her mailbox was jammed again, this time with a mixture of catalogs, junk mail, and windowed envelopes that looked like bills. I let myself into the apartment and was amazed how lifeless and cold it seemed. It felt good to be there, though, like it was my only connection to her. Sometimes it seemed like she’d just gone away on a business trip or something, and soon I’d be picking her up at the airport.

  I milled around aimlessly, then decided I needed focus I opened the curtains and then the windows, letting the fresh air fill the place and drive out the stale. I pulled a beer out of the icebox—th
ese things go bad, you know, if you let them sit around too long—and sat down at the dining-room table. I stacked the mail into separate piles: junk, this can wait, this can’t. The pile that couldn’t wait included her electric bill, the phone bill, the water bill, a couple of credit-card bills, and something that looked like a notice from the insurance company.

  I opened up the bills and got them in order. There was a couple of hundred on her VISA card, another hundred or so on a Platinum American Express. The charges were all recent. I figured Marsha paid her cards off every month, unlike some of us who have to bloody well live off them.

  I went into the den and dug through her desk until I found the extra checks she’d mentioned. There were a couple of payment books in there, one for the mortgage company and one for her car loan. I pulled them out and carried them back into the dining room. It was getting close to the end of the month. I thought I may as well write checks for those as well.

  I opened the mortgage coupon book and gasped. Twelve hundred a month in mortgage payment for a freaking condo! Excuse me, but you can get a pretty damn nice house around here for that much. Who’d pay that much for a condominium, or as my father used to call them, condo-minimums?

  That intake of breath was nothing, though, compared with the heart tremor I had when I opened the car payment book.

  “Four hundred seventy-two dollars and sixty-eight cents a month in car payment!” I yelped. I knew you didn’t get a Porsche 911 for the same price as a Ford Fiesta, but jeez, that much? Marsha paid almost as much a month for a car payment as I paid for apartment and office rent put together.

  I was definitely dating above my station.

  Figuring that forgery would make me less uncomfortable than putting Marsha’s money in my checking account, I signed her name to all the checks and stuffed them into the appropriate envelopes. I’d seen her name signed before, and tried to halfway imitate it. Anybody who looked closely would never let it pass, but all the checks were routine monthly obligations, so who’d look that closely?