Denton - 03 - Way Past Dead

by Steven Womack

  The problem with this sort of blathering is that if you listen to it long enough, you actually start to be able to follow it. It starts to make sense. I put my head down on the kitchen table.

  God, do I need a vacation.

  I drove by Lonnie’s trailer, but he wasn’t there. Either he was still in Kentucky picking up cars, or he’d gone to ground somewhere to recover. I petted Shadow for a while, made sure her water and food bowls were full, then left Lonnie a note telling him where I’d be and what I was doing. I didn’t expect anything particularly bad to happen today, but it never hurt to leave a paper trail with a buddy.

  Alvy Barnes told me to come by the office around two, which meant I had just enough time to slide through the drive-in window, then stop by my office before showing up early enough to catch her off guard. There was some kind of riverfront festival going on downtown, so the traffic was as thick as sludge in a blizzard. I made my way around the fringes of the crowd and got to my office by avoiding Broadway. I parked the car near the front of the garage, then carried a sackful of Krystal cheeseburgers, fries, and a Coke upstairs. I don’t know what self-destructive urge drove me to subject my stomach to a Belly Bomb assault during times of great stress. I ought to have more sense. If Marsha found out, I would undergo a severe corrective interview.

  Maybe that’s why I was doing it; right now I’d welcome even a chewing-out from her. If she were here, I’d give her a good listening to.

  I ate at my desk while wading through the mail, which consisted of a medley of junk and bills. A quick tote of the accounts payable told me most of my check from the insurance company was already gone. No matter, I thought, if I could just maintain the next few days, I’d be ready to drum up biz again.

  Right, like I could focus for shit on anything beyond the next five minutes. What if this was crazy? I thought. What if Mac Ford didn’t have anything to do with Rebecca Gibson’s death? Beyond the fact that I really didn’t like the guy, there wasn’t much to go on.

  Finally the clock moved. I gathered up my trash and stuffed it into the wastebasket. Inside my desk drawer, a small zippered leather case held a set of lock picks that I’d bought from Lonnie. Ever since I saw him go through a couple of locked doors like they weren’t there, I’d wanted to learn more about locks. Lonnie’d been glad to teach me, and in the past few months I’d gotten to where I could pick an ordinary cylinder without too much trouble.

  I slipped the case into my shirt pocket, then almost as an afterthought tucked the stun gun into my other shirt pocket after first making sure the safety was on. I left the office and drove out Charlotte Avenue, under the interstate bridge, then turned left and crossed first Church Street, then Broadway, and on up to Demonbreun. Music Row was up the hill, past the loudspeakers booming country music on a warm Saturday afternoon and the tourists with white hairy legs, plaid shorts, and novelty T-shirts wandering in and out of traffic oblivious to the Nashville drivers.

  I made my way through that maze, then down Music Row and parked in the block before Mac Ford’s office. I nestled into the curb, between a Ford Ranger with a camper bed and a brand-new Saturn. I sat low in the seat, hugged the driver’s side door, and by looking around the corner of the pickup, had a perfect view of the front door of Mac Ford’s building.

  There were two cars parked on the brown pea-gravel driveway, with two more on the curb directly in front. I sat there hidden for nearly twenty minutes before anyone came out the front door. A tall woman with a bundle of file folders got into one of the cars in the driveway, followed by a scruffy short guy with a briefcase in one hand and a portable phone in the other. He got into the car behind the woman, and the two backed out onto the street and pulled away. The driveway was empty now. I checked my watch. It was almost one o’clock.

  I sat there another fifteen minutes. There was no guarantee that the two cars parked in front of the building were owned by Mac Ford’s employees. Alvy could be in there alone by now and there’d be no way for me to know it.

  The sun was high now, and the inside of my car was turning into a greenhouse. I felt a sheet of sweat on my forehead, and suddenly wished I could strip off these clothes and dive into a swimming pool. I waited until I couldn’t stand it anymore, then got out of the car and locked it behind me.

  I walked quickly down the street, past the office building, then rounded the corner and walked down the side street. The alley that ran behind Mac Ford’s building was empty. The parking slots were vacant as well. I decided to go for it.

  I slipped across the grass and climbed the wooden stairs to the back door. The knob wouldn’t turn; I thought for a second, then decided to try the doorbell. I pressed the small button and heard a muffled buzzer go off from somewhere inside the building.

  Flies buzzed around me from the Dumpster out by the alley. There was no traffic. Silence everywhere. I didn’t know the Row got so quiet on weekends. I was about to hit the buzzer again when I heard hard shoes on steps.

  Alvy Barnes cracked the door open and glared at me.

  “You’re early,” she said.

  I reached into the crack and yanked the door open, then stepped inside before she had a chance to do anything besides deepen her dirty look.

  “You have a keen grasp of the obvious,” I said. I was in no mood for her bullshit. I wanted to get this over with as quickly as possible, then get the hell out. If this worked out as I fantasized, my next stop would be Sergeant E. D. Fouch’s office at police headquarters.

  “You can’t just—”

  “Move,” I interrupted. “Let’s do it.” I took her right arm just at the tricep and gently pushed her forward.

  “Listen you,” she snapped. “You can’t come in here pushing me around like this!”

  “Alvy, the sooner we get this done with, the sooner we can get out of here. Let’s stop jerking each other around, okay?”

  “I hate you,” she said. But she turned anyway and started up the flight of stairs behind her.

  I followed her up the stairs, through a doorway into the second-floor hallway, then down to Mac Ford’s office. Alvy’s computer was on and there was a stack of papers on her desk. She pulled a key ring out of the center drawer, fumbled with the keys a moment, then selected one and opened the door. I followed her into Mac Ford’s office as she switched on the overhead.

  The only other time I’d seen it, it had been as cold as January and filled with the purplish glow of black lights. Now, without air-conditioning and lit by the harsh glow of a rack of fluorescent tubes in the ceiling, it looked dusty, cluttered, and full of junk that gave the place lots of class; all of it low.

  “Ford’s filing cabinets are in the closet, right?”

  “Just one. He has one filing cabinet where he keeps his private correspondence and files. But I don’t have a key to it. I don’t even have a key to the door.”

  I reached into my pocket. “If we’re lucky, we won’t need one.”

  Alvy looked over my shoulder as I unzipped the case and unfolded the side pockets. Each pick had its own little slot in the leather case. I took out a small black metal raker pick, a thin blade with a series of bends in the end that looked like a sine wave from the side. From the other side of the case, I took a tension wrench, an even thinner L-shaped blade that was flat at the end.

  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 t
he 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.