Way Past Dead d-3

by Steven Womack

  An intercom with a series of white buttons hung barely mounted in the wall next to the door. Dwight Parmenter’s name was third up from the bottom. I pressed the button and heard a buzzer somewhere above my head. A moment later a crackling voice answered through the cheap speaker.

  “Yeah?”

  I gave him my spiel, then stood waiting for a few moments. The voice came back: “Second floor, apartment six. Up the stairs and on the right.”

  An electronic buzzer went off. I pushed the door open and stepped into the entrance foyer. The place smelled of mold and cat urine. At least I think it was cat.…

  The bare bulb overhead was burned out, leaving the entryway about as dark as a closet. I pushed a second heavy door open and entered. What had once been beautiful oak-plank floors were scarred and pitted, with dark watermarks staining the honey-colored wood. A ratty carpet was nailed to the steps leading upstairs, which creaked and moaned as I stepped on them.

  Blue paint flaked off the walls, with a thick coating of dust over everything. From an apartment below, country music of the Marty Robbins era filtered through a closed door. I climbed the flight of stairs as quickly as possible, turned, and found Parmenter’s apartment. He answered on the second knock.

  This time, I produced my license. He scanned it quickly, then compared my face with the picture on the ticket.

  “Okay,” he said sullenly. “C’mon in.”

  I stepped into an apartment with twelve-foot ceilings, crumbling plaster walls, and old wooden windows that had to be held open with pieces of two-by-two. Dwight Parmenter wore a frayed white T-shirt, his skinny arms freckled and lightly haired. His face was thin, the kind of face that would sink in on itself when it got old. He hadn’t shaved, and while that looked either sexy or artsy on some men, on Dwight Parmenter it just made him look like one of Walker Evans’s Depression-era photographs. I guessed he was about thirty-five or so, and I concluded from his posture and his bearing that his years in the music business had been brutal.

  “Thanks for your time,” I said.

  “Sit down.” He motioned to an overstuffed green sofa with a rip on one end of the seat cushion. I sat, feeling myself sink into the padding as he sat in a matching lime-green easy chair across from me. He picked up a battered old acoustic guitar with nylon strings and slung it across his lap.

  I looked around at the old furniture, the torn music posters on the wall, the ancient stereo system, and the stacks of LPs. “Nice place you got here,” I said.

  “Thanks. It’s home,” he said.

  We made a couple more passes at small talk. He offered me a beer. I declined. After a moment of awkward silence, I decided to jump in.

  “I’ve been retained by Slim Gibson,” I said. “He says he didn’t kill his ex-wife.”

  “You believe him?” Parmenter asked.

  I rubbed my chin and thought for a moment. “I believe him. And I’m looking for any information that will help clear his name.”

  “I like Slim,” Parmenter said, his right fingers breaking into a little picking pattern on the strings as his left hand formed a chord on the neck. “Even if he did kill her, I feel real bad for him.”

  I studied him for a second. His right thumb hit alternating bass notes on the guitar as his index and second fingers picked the top strings in a catchy little melody. His left hand shifted from chord to chord flawlessly, but there was something curiously flat in the playing. It was as Mac Ford had said, there was no fire in his belly. He was an accomplished craftsman, a technician, but there was no passion in him anywhere that I could see. That struck me as odd for someone struggling in such a passion-filled, tumultuous business. And yet, word was he was in love with Rebecca Gibson. So there had to be some mettle hidden in him somewhere.

  “You were there that last night,” I said. “Anything happen that caught your eye? Anything a little weird?”

  He stopped playing. “Nothing that out of the ordinary. I’d done a few of these gigs with those guys before. Not a lot. This was just another one, that’s all.”

  “Did Rebecca seem, I don’t know, like her normal self?”

  He strummed another chord, as if buying himself a little time. “Becca was always high-strung. Sometimes it was a little hard to tell when she was wired and when she was just being Becca.”

  “Tell me what happened,” I said, softening my voice just a bit. “After the performance was over.”

  “Well,” he drawled, “a bunch of us hung around, tossing back a few beers, trying to unwind.”

  If Dwight Parmenter unwound any more, I thought to myself, we’d have to check his pulse. “Did you talk to Rebecca?”

  “Sure. I was always talking to Becca.” He hesitated, like he’d said too much then. I let it slip by unnoticed.

  “I mean,” he continued, “Becca and I talked a lot.”

  I nodded. “What’d you talk about that night?”

  He shrugged, the skin on his unshaven jaw stretching around his chin. “Same old stuff.”

  I shifted on the sofa and brought a little iron into my voice. “C’mon, Dwight. I feel like there’s something here I’m not getting.”

  “Like what?” His brow furrowed as he stopped midlick on the guitar.

  “I’ve heard from several people that you and Rebecca Gibson had something going on. That you two were involved romantically.”

  He leaned over the side of the chair and placed the guitar on the floor. He released it in such a way that it plonked onto the wooden floor. The plonk reverberated and hung there for a few moments.

  “People say a lot that ain’t true.”

  “So you weren’t involved with her?”

  “Not like people think,” he said. “I don’t know why I’m even talking to you. I already told all this stuff to the police.”

  “Maybe you’re talking to me for the same reason I’m asking so many questions. Rebecca Gibson may have been difficult, but she was still one of the most attractive women I’ve ever seen in my life. She sure as hell didn’t deserve to die that way.”

  His jaw locked up and quivered a bit, the sallow skin on his cheeks pale almost to the point of blue.

  “No,” he said, a hitch in his voice, “she didn’t.”

  I let that hang there for a few seconds, then: “You loved her, didn’t you?”

  He stared off into space, unfocused, silent. His eyes watered, and I saw for the first time evidence of what was hidden real deep inside of him. Mac Ford had been wrong. Dwight Parmenter had his passions; it was just that nobody else saw them.

  “Yeah,” he said finally. “I loved her. And I’d been watching out for her, taking care of her. She needed me. There’s so goddamn many sharks out there. Nobody she could trust.”

  “That’s true,” I said. “It’s a lousy business.”

  “That ain’t the word for it.”

  “Were you her lover?”

  He brought his gaze back to my face. “You don’t pull no punches, do you?”

  “Sorry, pal. I’m not in the punch-pulling business.”

  He chuckled at that. “No, we weren’t sleeping together steady. It’s not from a want of trying, though. Hell, I knew she’d been with a trooptrain full of men. Didn’t make any difference to me. I loved her for what she was, not what she’d been. She used to tell me she loved me.…”

  His voice faded to silence. “But not that way,” I said, filling in his blanks.

  “She might have one day. I was the only man who ever stuck by her. I’d have never left her. The only way she’d ever gotten rid of me was by running me off.”

  Or die by trying, I thought. But for once I had sense enough to engage my brain before putting my mouth in gear.

  “Did you take her home that night?”

  He shook his head. “No. I wanted to. It was damn near the middle of the night, after all. But she said she’d be fine, that she had to tend to something-and I should quit worrying about her.”

  He teared up again, and this time he lost co
ntrol and covered his face with his hands. “God,” he sobbed, his shoulders shaking, “if I’d just gone with her. If I’d just made her let me take her home. You don’t think she was afraid of me, do you? Was that it?”

  He looked back up at me, his face wet. “Was she afraid to let me go home with her?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think that was it.”

  “If I’d taken her home, none of this would’ve happened. Or maybe it would have happened to me. Yeah, maybe it would’ve been me. I’d have done that, you know. I would have, swear to God.”

  I stood up. I’d done about as much damage here as I could, without learning much beyond the fact that I could bet the rent money on Dwight Parmenter being innocent of Rebecca Gibson’s murder. If he killed her, he deserves a freaking Academy Award for Best Performance by an Actor Before They Attach the Electrodes.

  “If it’d bring her back, I’d die for her right now,” he said. “I’d have died for her in a heartbeat.”

  “Yeah, Mr. Parmenter, I believe you would have.”

  No matter how much Rebecca Gibson had been the temperamental prima donna from hell, she had one decent man who loved her and mourned her death. Her memorial service had been nothing but a public display of envy, malice, greed, and networking. But here, in a solitary, run-down apartment, one man wept for her alone out of no other motive beyond simple human grief.

  Maybe the thought of grieving for a lost woman pushed a few buttons of my own. Or maybe in this sea of lying, treacherous bastards, I found the thought of someone without ulterior motive touching. In any case, I spent the drive over to my office thinking about my short interview with Dwight Parmenter. I’d meant to ask him more details about that last night, about who he thought might have killed her. All that went out the window when I saw how deeply pained he was by talking about her at all. I felt like I hadn’t learned much, outside of the comfort I could take from Thomas Edison’s dictum: I’ve learned lots of things that don’t work.

  The downtown rush-hour traffic had thinned more than I expected, until I checked my watch and realized it was almost six o’clock. I made it back to my office without too much agony and found a parking space on one of the lower floors of the garage. I kept replaying my conversation with Parmenter in my head, and wanted to get upstairs to make my notes as quickly as I could. With my degree of mental fragmentation these days, I needed to get everything down on paper.

  One thing did bother me, though. Dwight Parmenter said Rebecca didn’t want him to take her home because she had something she had to take care of. What was it, I wondered, that someone could do at four A.M. on a Monday morning? Did she have to put the cat out? Wash her hair? Slap another coat of paint on the living-room wall?

  What the hell was it?

  The front door was still open, even though it was technically after business hours. I let it squish shut behind me and took the stairs two at a time. Behind me, I heard Mr. Porter open his door a crack and check me out.

  “Hi, Mr. Porter,” I said behind me. He grunted and closed the door.

  I hit the landing, turned, and headed up the last half flight to my office. Dwight Parmenter’s voice was replaying itself in my head, his sobs echoing between my ears. I felt awful for the guy, I thought as I dug my hand into my jeans pocket to retrieve my keys.

  That’s when something shot out of the shadows and slammed into me like a cement sled. There were arms around me: I couldn’t move. There was growling in my right ear and hard, fast breathing.

  Then the pressure started, huge arms around my chest, pinning me, squeezing me. I fumbled, trying to fight, but my arms were jammed into my sides. I felt my feet coming up off the floor, and with that, little red-and-black sparkles formed in the corners of my eyes and worked their way toward the center of my vision.

  Chapter 27

  How odd to see my feet in the air in front of me, my knees cocked at right angles. I felt like the wimpy guy in a TV wrestling match you know was just thrown into the ring as fodder.

  Whoever my attacker was, he was on me like Nately’s whore. He growled loudly, his hot breath on my neck as he fought to force the last breath out of me. He was concentrating on squeezing my chest, and as he did so I felt my legs dropping back down toward the floor. We were jammed close to the wall. My shoes brushed against the plaster as they came down.

  Suddenly I contracted my gut as hard as I could, crunching myself into a tight ball. I wedged my feet between the two of us and the wall, planted them on the plaster, and kicked as hard as I could.

  He grunted loudly and fell back, losing his balance in the process, and momentarily easing his grip around my chest. As we fell backward I pulled my head in close to my sternum, then snapped up as hard as I could.

  The back of my skull connected with his chin. He barked loudly in pain, then fell back against the opposite wall. My arms dropped free. I held my right hand out in front of me, balled it tightly, then ripped down hard to my right, as fast as I could in the meanest arc I could muster. I connected perfectly and felt the whoosh of air jet out of his lungs as my crumpled fist hit the collection of lumps between his legs.

  He dropped. Match over.

  I fell on top of him as he went down, my back on his chest. In a blur, I had the stun gun out of my field-jacket pouch pocket and jammed it into his thigh behind me. I hit the button and a thin, watery scream escaped from his lips. He jerked so hard he almost threw me off him, but my weight held him down. His whole body gyrated and shook. I let him have about two seconds worth of Great White Light, then rolled over to face him.

  My own breathing sounded like an air compressor gone wild. My heart raced like it had never done before; there was a gang fight going on in my temples.

  I stared into his face, trying to figure out who the hell he was. Slobber ran from his lips. His eyes were wide-open and wild, his color almost slate gray.

  “Who the hell are you?” I screamed, inches from his face.

  I heard thumping on the steps behind us. I jerked and turned, ready to fight again. Only it was Mr. Porter, fat and breathless, with his.38 pointed in a two-handed police stance right at us.

  “It’s okay,” I gasped. “It’s over.”

  Mr. Porter stood two steps down the flight of stairs, his arms bent, covering the guy from behind the corner of the stairwell.

  I grabbed the lapels of a dingy work shirt. “Goddamn it, who are you?”

  His eyes flicked back and forth like a Parkinson’s disease tremor. For all I knew, after a couple of seconds’ worth of stun gun he might not be able to figure out who the hell he was. But I’d been scared witless myself, and I was in no mood to feel sorry for anyone. I put the stun gun in his face, with my finger on the button.

  “You want some more?”

  An animal cry of fear jumped out of his throat, and his lips struggled to make the word no.

  I got up on my knees, then reached down and ran my hands down his sides, around his pants pockets.

  “Where is it?” I yelled.

  He looked at me like I was from another planet. “Where’s what?” he croaked.

  I recognized the voice. I’d heard it before, on a collection of tapes I’d pulled off my answering machine. The revelation that I had the death-threat guy made me even crazier. “The piece! The knife! The slapjack! Where is it?”

  I yanked on his collar, hard enough to make him grimace. “I ain’t got nothing,” he gasped.

  I eased up on him, then backed off, leaned against the opposite wall, and squatted back on my heels. “No gun? No knife?”

  He pulled himself up on his haunches and leaned against the wall, sweat pouring off of him, color coming back to his face. He self-consciously put his hand in his crotch and rubbed gently.

  “I didn’t come up here to kill ya,” he said.

  “Then what did you come up here for?”

  “I just came up here to whip yer ass, that’s all.”

  I looked up at Mr. Porter, who had a quizzical look on his face as
he stared down the pistol barrel.

  I relaxed a little and lowered my hand holding the stun gun. “You ignorant-assed redneck hillbilly, you came up here to whip my ass and you didn’t even bring a weapon?”

  Suddenly I felt insulted. “What kind of wuss do you think I am?”

  He looked up at me and gave me this look that was right out of an episode of Gomer Pyle USMC. “I don’t rightly know what kind of wuss you are.”

  I couldn’t help it; I broke out laughing, partly from relief, partly from the whole situation being so damned crazy. Mr. Porter looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “You want me to call the police?”

  I stood up, trying to control myself. No use humiliating the poor sucker even further. “No, I’d say we got things pretty well under control.”

  Mr. Porter lowered the pistol and inserted it gingerly into the small holster on his belt. Just to be sure, though, I kept my hand wrapped around the stun gun. I looked down at the guy as he gingerly massaged his groin. “Just who are you?” I asked, this time more politely.

  He cocked his jaw and looked at me as I stood above him. With that I saw his face as I’d seen it once before, from above and a distance, through the viewfinder of a videocamera.

  “Holy shit,” I said. “You’re the bricklayer.”

  He pulled his legs under him and started to rise. I backed off a step and pointed the stun gun at him. He stared at me like a puppy I’d just kicked the stew out of. “Can I please stand up?”

  “If you do it real slow.”

  He slid against the wall as he stood. “I’d be a retired bricklayer by now if you hadn’t dogged me all the way to Louisville.”

  I scratched the side of my head in the classic display of confusion. “But how the-how did you find me? How did you know it was me? I was never any closer to you than a telephoto lens could get. We never talked, never met.”