Denton - 01 - Dead Folks' Blues

by Steven Womack

  I turned into Rachel’s driveway and noticed the lights were still on upstairs in her bedroom, although the rest of the house was dark. I slowed the car and doused the lights, not wanting her to see me pulling in. Let it be a surprise.

  I coasted up the driveway and stopped. I set the parking brake, held my breath, and prayed the car door would open quietly for once. I cut around the edge of the house into the back. I was almost giggling to myself with excitement, imagining the expression on her face when I held the tickets up in front of her.

  I turned the corner and walked right into the back bumper of a car I hadn’t seen.

  I didn’t hit it hard enough to hurt myself, but I was stunned for a second. It was pitch-black. The outside lights were turned off. Nothing but shapes were visible all around me, heightened by the soft glow from the bedroom window on the second story.

  I fumbled around, straining to see in the darkness. Over past the car I’d stumbled into, I could see the outline of Rachel’s car. Past that, barely visible in the garage, was the silhouette of Conrad’s Jaguar.

  Three cars in a driveway that normally held only two: Rachel had company. I turned back to the strange car, running my hand along the edge, trying to feel it. I got down low and followed it all the way around to the back. I was down behind the car now, trying to focus. Then, in the shimmer of a distant streetlight that reflected dimly off the bumper’s chrome, I recognized the car. It was a Beemer, a silver BMW sedan. A shudder ran up the back of my neck.

  The BMW was Walt Quinlan’s car.

  I sure as hell didn’t feel like listening to any damn heartbreak tunes. The Janis Ian tickets went out the window as soon as I coasted down the driveway and into the street.

  No wonder Walt didn’t want to tell me who he’d been seeing.

  Once safely out of the driveway, I started the Ford and turned on the headlights, then got out of there as quickly as the clattering valves could carry me. Two blocks away, I rolled through the stop sign onto Hillsboro Road, then through two lights to the freeway entrance ramp. I ran the car up to seventy-five, the steering wheel shaking like it had the ague.

  I felt like such a fool. It’s not so much that Rachel slept with me; hell, people sleep with each other every day without even the benefit of a proper introduction. Happens all the time.

  No, it was more that I bought into the whole charade. All my life, I’d been a sucker for this sort of thing. I get interested, misread signs, take too much for granted, get my hopes up for nothing. Jeez, at my age, you’d think I’d have learned by now.

  One thing was for sure; I could hold off on packing my bags and giving Mrs. Hawkins my notice. I hadn’t realized until I pulled into that driveway and saw Walt’s car how much I’d been subconsciously fantasizing about a future with Rachel. I still had feelings for her. It just seemed natural that we’d slide back into life together, and that eventually we’d find what we once had with each other, before Conrad came along and ruined it all.

  I passed over the Cumberland River on the 1-265 bridge, the water below a ribbon of darkness cutting through the city’s nightlights. A single tugboat, a pinpoint of light as sharp as a needle, plodded slowly upriver against the current. The amber freeway lights cast harsh shadows over the darkened concrete. The night air was filled with the smell of the rendering plant.

  I took the exit ramp off the freeway and drove up to the entrance ramp of the Ellington Parkway, a lightly traveled bypass that ran from downtown Nashville north toward Madison. The E.P. started next to one of the city’s most grim housing projects, the chain link fence separating the highway from the grounds of the project peeled away in some places, torn completely down in others.

  I slapped the steering wheel, disgusted with myself and life in general. I got off the parkway at Douglas Avenue, steered my way through the roller-coaster hills to my own neighborhood, and back to the safety of my apartment. I went upstairs, locked the door behind me, and threw my clothes in a pile in the corner. I opened the refrigerator and realized I was out of beer. Damn, I thought, I ought to throw on a good drunk.

  Only thing was, I’d outgrown throwing on good drunks years ago, and I never had much luck with it then. I never liked that out-of-control, reeling feeling that hits you right before you head for the porcelain.

  But I wanted to be drunk, wanted to drown in the stuff until my head spun like a Ferris wheel gone wild. I wanted to forget it all—Conrad’s murder, Mr. Kennedy’s murder, the smell of sweat on the racquetball court, the sheen of perspiration on Rachel’s face as she twisted beneath me in the sheets.

  I turned out the lights and went to bed, the neighborhood strangely and eerily silent. Saturday night in East Nashville usually brought with it the sound of parties gone wild, tires screeching as teenage boys fought to impress girlfriends and one another, the occasional sounds of ominous gunfire. But tonight there was nothing, only silence.

  I lay there half the night, struggling vainly to find sleep, that wonderful, empty, dark hole that I could step into and fall forever void of thought and feeling. I needed more than anything else to quit thinking, and that seemed the one thing I could not do. Over and over again, the screens inside my head played the same movies.

  Conrad lying beneath me, his lights fading to black.

  Rachel lying beneath me, her breath coming in short bursts.

  Bubba Hayes on top of me, his thighs like tree stumps, pinning me to the floor.

  Walt standing over me, dripping sweat on me, helping me up off the racquetball floor.

  Rachel’s face outlined against the ceiling as she sat astride me, the two of us pumping away at each other madly.

  The glowing red digital numbers of the alarm clock read 4:30 the last time I looked at it. I drifted off finally, into an uneasy and troubled sleep that was anything but rejuvenating. I woke up around seven. I was exhausted.

  I spread the Sunday paper out on the kitchen table, but didn’t have the concentration to get very fer. My eyes burned from lack of sleep. I felt brittle, old.

  Even then, I couldn’t stop thinking. I kept seeing Rachel’s house, with its great lawn and expensive furniture, the cars, the clothes. The more I pondered, the odder it seemed that Conrad Fletcher could afford all that, yet couldn’t afford to pay off his bookie. A hundred thousand dollars, Bubba said he owed. Not exactly pocket change, but probably only a few months’ salary to Conrad. A fortune to me. If I owed that kind of money to a bookie, it could just as well be a hundred million. But Conrad could have paid it off. How come he didn’t?

  Maybe the truth lay somewhere else. Maybe, I thought, it was the house and the cars and the lifestyle that kept Conrad from paying off Bubba.

  If that were true, then the mirror was cracked. All the perfect reflections I’d seen were false, tricks put before my eyes like a magician’s scarf covering sleight of hand. I sat at the kitchen table staring at the wall for over an hour, my thoughts reduced to pure, nonverbal essence.

  Something’s stinko.

  “You rook awfuh.”

  “Thanks, Mrs. Lee. Good to see you again, too.”

  “Weah you been? It been days now.”

  I looked across the counter as Mrs. Lee scribbled my order down on her green lined pad. She was as crotchety as ever, the result, I guess, of risking your keister to escape to the land of freedom and opportunity and discovering that freedom and opportunity meant opening up at 7:30 in the morning and closing at 9:30 at night seven days a week for the rest of your life.

  “Don’t tell me you missed me.”

  “I nevah miss anybody,” she spat. “We just made too much chicken tree days in row ’cause you didn’t show up. Cost me money.”

  “I’ll leave you a big tip.”

  “Oh, yeah, weah I heahd dat befoah?”

  She disappeared behind the stainless steel counter between the cash register and the kitchen. I could see her husband back in there, slaving over a hot wok.

  Maybe things weren’t so bad for me. Then again, maybe Mrs
. Lee would give me a job. I used to make a pretty mean Mooshu Pork back when Lanie and I were married.

  Mrs. Lee came back around with the steaming plate a moment later. She shoved it across the front counter.

  “I put exta chicken on theah foah Shadow. Doan you eat it all.”

  I smiled at her. “Mrs. Lee,” I said, “you’re one of the few truly wonderful people I’ve ever met in my life. I mean that.”

  “Yeah, and you fuh of it.” She waddled off behind the counter with a load of dirty plates.

  This was the longest I’d gone without a visit to Mrs. Lee’s since I moved to East Nashville. I guess I didn’t realize how much this part of town had become home for me. It’s weird to think that I used to eat at joints with names like Mario’s and Chef Sigi’s and Arthur’s, all restaurants where you were as likely to run into the mayor as anyone else, or maybe the chief of police, or maybe the head of the Nissan plant in Smyrna. With two people, you’d walk out with a VISA that was three figures closer to being maxxed out than it was before you walked in.

  I used to think I enjoyed that life, even regretted losing it, but realizing that Mrs. Lee had honestly missed me the past few days made me feel better than all the three-figure dinners ever had.

  This was home. How odd.…

  I guess it was okay that I wasn’t going to be moving back across the tracks to live with Rachel. I ate the Szechuan chicken with a delight that bordered on the sociopathic. I realized that the dinner I’d paid twenty-five dollars for in Green Hills hadn’t filled me, and that the $3.95 I’d just spent at Mrs. Lee’s would do me for the rest of the day.

  I pulled the last few pieces of chicken out of the gloppy sauce and dipped them one at a time into my water glass, washing off most of the hot pepper and chile oil. One of these days, I was going to get in a hurry, feed Shadow some unwashed chicken, and she was going to tear my head off.

  I wrapped the chicken in a couple of paper napkins and stuffed them in my jeans pocket. I pulled out onto Gallatin Road at 11:30, which meant the church traffic would be just about peaking. No matter, I wasn’t in any hurry, wasn’t even sure if I could find out what I needed to know on a Sunday.

  It was a gray day; the clouds overhead looked like rain. I felt better after eating, though, and I’d set out that morning with something that resembled a plan of action. It took twenty minutes to make it up the street to Lonnie’s. The side road that led to the junkyard was completely deserted, the garages and body shops closed, the bikers having locked their building down and gone off somewhere to sleep off Saturday night’s binge. I pulled up in front of the gate and stopped.

  Overhead, the thick clouds grew more menacing by the minute. These late summer thunderstorms come up out of nowhere in this part of the country, and you can go from dazzling sunshine to inside a tornado in moments. I stepped up to the gate and raided it, hoping to get inside the trailer before the gullywasher started.

  Shadow padded out from her nest behind the trailer, her tail and head held low in alert.

  “Hi, Shadow,” I said brightly, hoping my voice would relax her. She hadn’t seen me in days, and would be suspicious for a bit until her doggy synapses located the right memory bit and cleared me through security.

  She approached slowly, cautiously. Then her tail began to wag and her head came up, her eyes widening from the narrow slits they’d been.

  “Shadow, girl, how’s it going? How you been?” I unlatched the gate catch, swung the door open, and stepped in. She was on me in one leap, her great paws on my shoulders, her stale hot breath right in my face. I wrapped my arms around her back and hugged her, delighted to see her again.

  Over her shoulder, the trailer door opened. Lonnie stood there in a pair of worn jeans and a white T-shirt. He could do James Dean with the best of them, I thought.

  “Hey, stranger,” he said.

  “Lonnie,” I said, nodding. Then I stepped back, pulling Shadow’s paws off my shoulder, and backed up a step. I reached into my pocket, pulled out the fist-sized wad of chicken, and held it out in front of me. I pulled the paper off.

  “Speak. Speak, Shadow.”

  She dropped to her haunches, her head pointed up eagerly.

  “Speak!”

  She let out a bark that was more of a bellow than anything else, and at that moment I sent the chicken flying in a slow arc toward her. She sprang up, her jaws snapping shut like a bear trap.

  “You’re going to spoil her, goddamn it. I got to live with her.”

  “That’s okay,” I said, scratching her ears, then walking past her to the porch. “She deserves it.”

  “Yeah, right,” Lonnie said. I stuck out my hand to him, which was prompüy refused. “Wash that crap off your hands first.”

  He led the way into the trailer, the door swinging to on its own behind us. I walked over to the filthy sink, with auto grease and used, dried crankcase oil caked around the edges, and turned the water on.

  “You won’t shake hands with me because I’ve got a little chicken on them, but you’ll drink a glass of water that comes out of this filthy sink.”

  Lonnie laughed. “Who said I drink water? I don’t drink water. Stuff don’t taste right.”

  “Need to get you one of those water filters. Filters out all the chlorine and crap they put in it.”

  “It’d have to be some filter to make Nashville water taste good. Like sucking up a swimming pool.”

  The table with the scorched hole in it had been pushed into a corner. In the middle of the room on an old blanket sat some kind of disassembled motorcycle engine.

  “You rebuilding the bike?”

  Lonnie looked at me real serious, then sat in a chair and planted his feet against the wall. “You didn’t come here to talk about engines and feed Shadow. First time I’ve seen you in a week. What kind of trouble you got yourself into?”

  I pulled a chair around backward, spread my legs, and sat. I rested my chin on the back of the chair. “It’s like this, Lonnie,” I said, and I began telling him everything that had happened since the day of Conrad’s funeral. I started with Bubba, worked my way through James Hughes and the medical students, LeAnn Gwynn, Jane Collingswood, Albert Zitin, and anybody else I could think of who even remotely might have wanted to kill Conrad Fletcher. And I ended with pulling into Rachel’s driveway the night before and finding Walt Quinlan’s car parked behind her house and all the lights off except in the bedroom.

  Lonnie whistled. “You got yourself in a hell of a mess, boy. Damn lawyers’ll stab you in the back every time.” Lonnie’d never met Walter Quinlan; they didn’t exactly run in the same circles. But he knew who he was.

  “You want to know what I think?” he asked.

  “Sure.”

  “I think she killed him.”

  “Rachel?”

  “Yeah. A man gets killed, first thing you do is look at the wife.”

  I sat for a second, thousand-yard stare pasted on my face. “Don’t think I haven’t thought of it,” I said finally. “But it doesn’t make any sense. Besides, she’s got an airtight alibi.”

  “Airtight alibi, my ass. Ain’t no such thing. And what you mean, it don’t make sense? She told you they weren’t getting along.”

  “So? You don’t kill someone because they’re not nice to you. No, she might have divorced him, would have divorced him. But not killed him. You don’t kill doctors; you divorce them and take everything they’ve got. That hurts them a lot worse than killing them.”

  “And they had a lot worth having?”

  “You ought to see this place, Lonnie. Straight out of the country club crowd. And I don’t know what kind of money he made, but it had to be serious.”

  “You’re looking at appearances again, man. You got to look behind that, beneath it, around it.”

  “I know. That’s why I came here today.”

  “Yeah?” he asked, confused. “What’ve I got to do with it?”

  “You still got your laptop?”

  Lonnie s
miled. “Is Elvis still making records?”

  “Let’s go.”

  Lonnie stood, led the way down the hall to the back bedroom of the trailer. This was Lonnie’s private office, with all his electronic surveillance gear, computers, nightscopes, cameras, wiretappers, super-secret stuff that you didn’t want to get caught with in a routine traffic stop. Only this time, we were going legitimate.

  Lonnie unlatched the cover on the laptop computer, folded it back to reveal a screen and built-in printer. The laptop was a dedicated computer rented from the credit bureau. You didn’t have to program it. You just turned it on and it booted itself up.

  “You got a Social?”

  “No, I don’t know what his Social Security number was. Can we just run an inquiry?”

  “Sure.” Lonnie typed in a command to dial up the credit bureau.

  “Would the computer already have Conrad listed as deceased?”

  “Maybe. I’m not sure. Sometimes it takes ten days, maybe a couple weeks. Depends partly on whether Rachel’s notified them yet.”

  My stomach churned as the screen began displaying a message, then a menu of options. This was as sleazy as anything I’d ever done in my life. I felt like I was betraying Rachel, a breach of trust so serious that even if I never told her, it would lay inside me for the rest of my life like a sleeping virus strain.

  The worst part was that I couldn’t figure out whether I was doing this because it was part of my job, or if I wanted to know out of some sick compulsion.

  “Got a middle name or initial?”

  “No,” I said. I stood behind Lonnie as he sat there, typing in commands, looking over his shoulder at the silver and blue LCD screen.

  Lonnie typed in a string of letters, followed by Fletcher, Conrad. He hit the RETURN button, and we sat there for what seemed like a long while.

  “Maybe this don’t work on Sunday,” I said.

  “No, the offices are closed. But the computer’s on twenty-four-hours-a-day, seven days a week. Except when it crashes or shuts down for maintenance.”

  The screen lit up in a burst of characters. There were four Conrad Fletchers, each with a different middle initial and address.