Denton - 01 - Dead Folks' Blues (22 page)

I stood there scanning the car, trying to recognize the driver. But the windows were smoked just enough, and the setting sun was striking the glass at just the right angle. It was impossible to see inside.

If I went down there and knocked on the glass, one of two things would happen. If the person inside was tailing me, then I’d blow his cover, and there was no telling what might happen next. If the guy wasn’t tailing me, he’d just think I was another urban crazy.

I turned away from the window. I knew I’d seen a long black car a couple of times in the past few days. But was it
that
car? Where had I seen it before? If I could only remember …

The boys down the hall struck up another tune. Slim and Ray’s office looked directly out the front of the building. I could keep an eye on the Lincoln from their window even better.

I walked down the hall. Their door was cracked, but I rapped a couple of times with my knuckles.

“Yo!” a voice inside yelled, halting the strumming of guitars.

“Yo, yourself,” I said, stepping in.

“Hey, Harry, you dirty rascal. Where have you been, boy?” Ray jumped up from a desk with his guitar in his left hand. He stuck his right hand out and jerked mine like a pump handle.

“Must be a special night,” I said. “You’ve got the Martin out.”

Ray’s prized possession was a thirty-year-old Martin D-28. It was a work of art, as preserved and cared for as the day it was brand-new. Even a musically ignorant, tone-deaf brick like me knew it was a classic.

“Yeah, we been working on this new song. Think it’s going to be our next hit, don’t you, Slim?”

Slim looked up from the strings of his Ovation, smiled at me, and shook his head. Slim was decidedly not the lyricist in this team. I doubt I’d heard him say twenty-five words in the months that I’d known him.

There were four other people as well crammed into the tiny, two-room office: a bleached blonde in worn jeans and a T-shirt, two other cowboys, and a girl who looked maybe sixteen. I tried to figure out who was with whom, without any luck. The woman had an old, beat-to-hell guitar with nylon strings. Cowboy No. 1 had a shirt pocket full of harmonicas, and Cowboy No. 2 had a fiddle.

A bucket full of longnecks in ice cubes sat on the floor.

“Mind if I listen?” I asked.

“You know better than that, boy,” Ray said. “And grab that one on the left. It’s got your name on it.”

I reached down and pulled an amber Pabst Blue Ribbon bottle out of the bucket and popped the top with the opener on Slim’s desk. Slim was an interesting kind of guy; year or two younger than me, frame like a body builder, thick, wavy light-brown hair, blue eyes that cut right through you. He was more than handsome, almost the kind of man that could be called pretty, although you better not call him that to his face.

Ray, on the other hand, was thin, somewhere way over forty, and had the skid marks on his face and thinning gray hair to show for it. Ray had come to Nashville in the Fifties, played Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge down on Lower Broad and the Stockyard Restaurant for twenty-five years before giving that up to save his liver. Now he just wrote songs, except for an occasional appearance at the Opry or on the Nashville Network. He’d been through a lot, yet seemed to me the least scarred veteran of the music business I’d ever met. I kept thinking I ought to get him and Lonnie together sometime, but Ray was too busy writing songs and Lonnie was too busy repossessing cars and making homemade explosives.

The beer was as cold as a mountain stream in January, in contrast to the thick, hot air of our old office building. All
the tenants kept saying we were going to have to complain to the management company, but nobody ever did. Besides, autumn was just around the corner. Another month or two, the worst of the heat would break, anyway. If I could stand it without air conditioning in the car, I could stand it in the office.

An old, thirteen-inch black and white flickered away in the background as Slim and Ray, accompanied by the other four on either instrument or voice, began their new song. I don’t know much about country music, but I have to admit I was impressed. It sounded good to me, a fusion between traditional country and modern pop, without all the overproduced studio effects and the other crap that goes into music these days. Slim and Ray were on the last verse of the song when I glanced over at the television. “The Scene at Six,” the local newscast, was just starting, and the lead story was Conrad.

“Excuse me, guys. Gotta hear this.” I crossed to the corner of the room and turned up the sound just enough to hear.

“Friends, family, and colleagues of surgeon and professor Dr. Conrad Fletcher mourned his passing today, as police reported startling new evidence in the murder.” The anchorwoman’s face was earnest, serious, begging us to trust her and be her friend.

I turned the volume up another notch. Behind me, the music stopped.

“The results of Dr. Fletcher’s autopsy were released today by the Metro Nashville Medical Examiner’s office, and the findings lend only more credence to police suspicions that the murder was an inside hospital job. We turn now to Daphne Fox with more.”

The station switched to a videotape of a reporter standing just outside the hospital, with a university building in the background.

“Police now say that, as a result of the autopsy done on murdered surgeon Dr. Conrad Fletcher, Nashville private investigator Harry Denton is no longer a suspect.”

Ray let out a cheer behind me, then slapped me on the back. “Way to go, dude! Ya’ll didn’t know we had a celebrity in our midst, did you?”

“Hush, Ray,” I said, “I’m trying to listen.”

“The coroner’s office announced today that Dr. Fletcher was murdered by an injection of a lethal synthetic anesthetic, protocurarine, which hospital security officials indicate would have only been available to hospital personnel. Police are now turning their attention to reports that Dr. Fletcher may have been murdered by one of his colleagues at the hospital.”

The videotape jumped again, this time to Lieutenant Spellman behind a podium in the police press conference room.

“Yes, that’s correct, Mr. Denton is no longer a suspect in this homicide.”

Man, I thought, I’ll bet he had to pry those words out with a crowbar. It hadn’t occurred to me, though, that I really had been a suspect. It just seemed too ridiculous. If I’d have known I was held in such high regard by the homicide squad, I’d have been a little less chatty over the past couple of days. Especially with Spellman …

“We have a number of clues, however, and several leads that will be very helpful in light of the autopsy findings and the T.B.I. toxicology lab results.”

Videotape switch again, this time to Dean Malone at the med school looking shocked and concerned: “It’s beyond me that anything like that could happen at this university. However, I want it known publicly that we intend to cooperate with the police in every way possible to bring the perpetrator of this horrible crime to justice.”

I laughed. Wonder how this was going to affect admissions next year.
You’re going where? I hear they don’t flunk you down there. They kill you!

Back to the reporter now: “All evidence then points, police say, to an inside job. With over five thousand employees and medical students at the medical center, however, finding
the one who killed Dr. Conrad Fletcher may be more like looking for a needle in a haystack than anything else. For “The Scene At Six,” this is Daphne Fox.”

“Yeah,” I whispered, “especially when the haystack is full of needles to begin with.”

I turned down the volume knob. Raising the beer bottle to my lips, I noticed that everybody in the room was staring at me. The bottle froze in midair as I looked out over the top of it.

“Did you really find him?” the young girl asked.

I nodded my head yes.

“Was it awful?” she asked, her drawl becoming even more syrupy as she drew the words out.

“It was no tiptoe through the tulips,” I said, wanting more than anything else not to discuss it. “Hey, Ray, why don’t you let me hear that song again?”

Ray hit a lick on the Martin, filling the room with notes as clear and loud and sweet as heaven’s doorbell. I backed away toward the window, to listen to the song as they all let go again. Over my shoulder, I could see the black Lincoln still parked in the loading zone. The driver’s side window was rolled about halfway down now, but I couldn’t see anything because of the angle.

Ray and Slim really had written a winner. The chorus was catchy, the bridge was bridgey. The more I listened to Ray and Slim, and the new, younger voices of country music, the more I grew to love it. The work of songwriters like Bob McDill, Jim Glaser, Randy VanWarmer, sounded more like poetry than pop to me. And I’ll take Garth Brooks, Randy Travis, Kathy Mattea, any day over Metallica and Poison and the obscene urban MTV warfare raps.

The two sang on, their voices blending in a harmony as sweet as clear sunshine. The verses were not sophisticated, but they were genuine and earthy and touching. I felt like I was sitting in on something pretty impressive. Ray and Slim played guitar licks off each other at the end of the song, then note by note, traded off the resolution,
hit the final chord, and let the sound echo away into silence inside the office.

Then there was a scream.

We sat there a moment, stunned. That definitely was not part of the song. “What the hell?” Ray said, stretching out the word hell into about four syllables.

I couldn’t even tell where the scream had come from. I shrugged my shoulders.

“I don’t know,” Slim said. It was one of the more profound statements he’d ever made.

“Where’d it come from?” the bleached blonde asked.

“Beats the shit out of me,” Cowboy No. 1 offered.

Then we heard it again, muffled, from a distance: a solid, human scream bellowing from a healthy set of lungs.

I looked over my shoulder at the Lincoln. Someone stood next to the driver’s side window, with a shopping cart full of cardboard boxes, rags, and garbage, held with one hand to keep it from rolling down Seventh Avenue. A bag lady, I realized, and just then she released the shopping cart, raised both hands to the side of her face, and let loose with another long, bloodcurdling howl. The shopping cart rolled down Seventh Avenue, picking up speed as it went, then hit a pothole and toppled, sending the bag lady’s prized possessions arcing off into the street and blocking both lanes.

“Ray,” I said, “I think we got trouble downstairs.”

Ray laid the Martin down carefully on the desk, then was behind me only a couple of steps as we bolted for the stairs. No time to wait for the elevator, I realized, as we pounded down to the landing, pivoted, and took the next flight down three or four at a time.

On the landing just above the main floor, I hit the wrong
way. My bum ankle twisted and pain shot like a bolt of lightning up the side of my leg. I slammed against the side of the wall, pulled my knee up to my belt, and let out an old-fashioned obscenity.

The young girl stopped beside me; everybody else flew past in the, by now, mass hysteria.

“I’m all right,” I grumbled, rubbing the ankle through my socks. “C’mon, let’s go.”

I hobbled down the hall as fast as I could, then pushed through the front door and down the steps to the sidewalk. Across the street, a crowd was already gathering around the car and the bag lady as she continued howling like a demented wolf, both hands to her face, staring through her dirty fingers at the heavens.

Traffic had stopped now in both lanes. I skipped across the street to the crowd and pushed my way through the first layer. Ray reached inside the window to unlock the car door.

“Wait a minute, Ray,” I yelled as I got next to him. “Hold up.”

“I just want to help him,” Ray said, turning to me. “We got to get the door open and get him out of there.”

I elbowed him out of the way and bent to look inside the car. On the edge of my consciousness, I could hear the faint high pitch of the police sirens growing louder by the second. Inside the car, the crumpled body of a huge black man lay slumped over, held up only by the armrest folded down on the front seat.

There was a small hole about the size of a dime in the left side of his head, just above and ahead of his ear. Barely visible gray powder and burn maries starbursted out from the wound on his dark skin. Chemical tests, I knew, would bring out plenty more.

There wasn’t much blood, just a small trickle down the side of his face. He wasn’t breathing. That much was obvious. There wasn’t anything anybody could do for him now.

I leaned inside as far as I could go, which wasn’t far, trying to get a better look at him. It worked. I recognized the man,
and everything in my gut went liquid. It was Mr. Kennedy, Bubba Hayes’s right-hand man.

Make that ex-right-hand man. Mr. Kennedy wasn’t anybody’s anything anymore, except a fading memory.

    They carted the bag lady off to the Middle Tennessee Mental Health Institute, formerly known as the Central State Asylum. Apparently the sight of a corpse in a thirty-thousand-dollar car on her turf was more than she could handle. Come to think of it, I could say the same for myself.