Way Past Dead

by Steven Womack

  Somebody behind me cheered. Rebecca turned her head in our direction. “You tell ’em, baby! ’Bout damn time, ain’t it?”

  More clapping.

  “What I’d like to do for you tonight is the title song off the new CD. It’s called ‘Way Past Dead.’ I hope you like it.”

  She cleared her throat and nodded to Slim. Slim played an intro, then Rebecca began singing. As she did, Ray and the other fellow joined in, strumming with Slim and doing a real low backup harmony on her. The song was a mournful tune, part classic folk, part Patsy Cline, about a man trying to hold on to his love, and the woman in his life trying to tell him it was over and not knowing how. It was bittersweet from the get-go, and if I’d been a little more stressed-out or had a few more beers in me, I’d have probably choked up myself.

  She sang each verse of the song brilliantly, followed by the chorus that tied it all together:

  You ask me now

  If our love still breathes …

  If our love still grows,

  Like the springtime leaves.

  But my heart

  Is filled with dread.

  My love for you

  Is way past dead.…

  My love for you, darling,

  Is way past dead.…

  As the last notes of her voice and Slim’s guitar faded away, there were about two heartbeats of the deepest silence I’d ever seen in a crowded room. Then the whole place exploded once again in standing ovation. Rebecca Gibson sat motionless, her head down, as the cheering continued. Then, as the applause ebbed, she raised her head, and I could see that her eyes were wet. She stared straight at Slim, and as the yelling faded out she whispered into the microphone: “I’m sorry, baby. I really am.”

  Slim’s eyes were dark, intense, his jaw locked so hard the outline cast a shadow on his cheek. Whatever had happened to them, I thought, had resulted in more pain than anyone should have to bear, and was now irrevocable.

  Then the other guy did a song, and I caught his name: Dwight Parmenter. Then Slim again, then Ray, and round and round and round, until the next thing I knew, it was two in the morning and I was driving up Hillsboro Road to the freeway on my way back to East Nashville. At the last second, I turned and headed out to the other side of town. The key to Marsha’s apartment sat in my pocket like a chunk of lead. If I couldn’t have her next to me, then maybe by sleeping in her bed, I could feel her next to me.

  It was nearly nine when I came to, my head groggy and heavy. I had to get home fast, change clothes, then get out to my office, grab that videotape, and head to the insurance company. Somehow, though, the energy just wasn’t there. I dawdled in the shower, made a cup of coffee, made up the bed, straightened up a little, brushed my teeth—the usual. I tried my luck at cellular-phone roulette, with the same frustrating results as before. I felt like a puppy who’d been yanked from his momma.

  Marsha doesn’t subscribe to the morning newspaper—she’s usually at work before it arrives—so I sat at her kitchen table with a towel wrapped around me and coffee in front of me, then flicked on the television. The last segment of Today was just wrapping up, and then a local newsperson came on with a quick roundup of Nashville news, headlined, of course, by the hostage situation at the morgue.

  It was right after that when I learned that the sweet-voiced, high-cheeked, long and lanky ex-Mrs. Slim Gibson had been found murdered early that morning, beaten to death in the bedroom of her apartment. After last night’s appearance at the Bluebird, she really had become the late Rebecca Gibson.

  Even though I’d never met Rebecca Gibson, certainly didn’t know her, and her death had not touched me personally, I found myself shocked at her murder. Maybe it was her being Slim’s ex-wife. Maybe it was that I’d seen her perform and had heard that sweet voice, now silenced for good.

  The morning rush hour had ended by the time I got moving, and there was still another hour or so before the lunchtime rush hour began its slow segue into the evening rush hour. You want to get anywhere in this city, you’ve got about a forty-five-minute window three times a day to go for it. Then you’re screwed. The Big Apple’s got nothing on Music City, gridlock-wise.

  For once, my parking fees were paid up, so I was able to slide into a space in the lot across Seventh Avenue from my office. I didn’t know how long I was going to be able to keep the place; cranky old Mr. Morris had raised my rent seventy-five a month after the fire in my office last year. Hell, it wasn’t my fault some joker burned my car and my office in the same day, but try telling that to Morris. Rat bastard …

  At least he’d let me stay, though. At first he wasn’t even going to do that. Just to be on the safe side, I avoided him as much as possible. So when I took the steps up to the front door two at a time, I peered through the dirty glass first to make sure he wasn’t there.

  In a few seconds, I’m bouncing up the two flights of stairs to my office, trying to stay focused on what comes first. I wanted to try Marsha first, but I needed to call Phil Anderson over at the insurance company to make arrangements to deliver the videotape. I ought to stop by Slim and Ray’s office down the hall as well, just to offer my condolences and make sure they were okay.

  Then the thought struck me: does one offer condolences upon the death of an ex-spouse? Life is so complicated these days. I decided that, uncomfortable or not, I’d offer my sympathies. So I turned right at the top of the flight of stairs, away from my office, and walked down to Slim and Ray’s office. The door was locked and there was no reply to my knock.

  In my office, there was still a stack of mail on my desk unopened from yesterday. None were checks, though; I could tell that, and I couldn’t bear to open the rest. I’d spent the last month or so, including my expenses on the trip to Louisville, living off the plastic shark. A couple of windowed envelopes in the pile meant the shark had come for his vigorish, and I didn’t have the juice to pay him.

  Christ Almighty, I thought, I’m starting to sound like a dick. And I don’t mean private eye.…

  I thumbed through my Rolodex, located Phil Anderson’s number, then dialed it on the speakerphone.

  “Tennessee Workmen’s Protective Association,” a young woman’s voice answered.

  Yeah, right, I thought. Protection, my keister.

  “Phil Anderson,” I said.

  “Please hold.”

  This is why I finally bought a cheap speakerphone. Being on hold gives me a cramp in the neck, among other places.

  “Fraud services,” another telephone voice answered. “Phil Anderson, please. Harry Denton calling.” Another round of hold, then Phil’s deep voice laced with southern Mississippi twang answered. I didn’t know much about Phil, beyond the fact that he grew up in the Delta, went to Ole Miss, got into the insurance business, moved to Nashville, and hates the Vanderbilt Commodores with a passion bordering on the pathological.

  “Hey, bo-wee,” he practically yelled into the phone.

  “Jew have any luck?”

  Jew, I thought? What Jew? Then I realized that in the two weeks since I’d last spoken with Phil, I’d forgotten how to listen to him. It is, after all, an acquired skill.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I think you’re going to be real pleased. I’ve got a little movie to show you.”

  “Hot day-um,” he said, then: “Hey, where you at, boy? You sound like you at the bottom of a fish tay-unk!”

  I picked up the handset and held it to my ear. “Cheap speakerphone,” I explained.

  “Well, hail-far, I believe I’d take ’at sucker back and get me the next model up.”

  “You pay this invoice,” I said, “I just might do that. When can we get together?”

  I heard a flipping of pages as Phil consulted his calendar.

  “How about four this afternoon?”

  “Works for me,” I said. “Your office at four.”

  “You got it, boy. Later.”

  I hung up the phone, wondering how old a Southern male had to be before people stopped calling him b
oy.

  I set the phone down inside its cradle and stared at it a moment or two. Should I? I wanted to hear her voice. I had begun, in fact, to ache for it. But could I get through? Would Marsha be able to talk to me? Would she want to?

  Oh, hell, this is crazy. I reached over and grabbed the phone and punched in the number to Marsha’s cellular phone, which I’d now committed to memory. Once again, that damn computer monotone told me where to get off.

  I stared out the window five more minutes before giving up. There was no way I could sit still or concentrate on anything. So I trotted back down the stairs, outside into what was becoming a gorgeous spring day, and pumped thirty-five cents into a newspaper machine and pulled out the early edition of the afternoon paper. I wondered if Rebecca’s murder had made the paper yet.

  SIEGE CONTINUES the headline read. And below that: HOSTAGE DRAMA IN DAY THREE.

  It was nearly eleven and I was getting peckish, so I bought a hot dog and a large Coke off a vendor’s wagon on Church Street, then parked myself on a bench in the little pedestrian mall across from the Church Street Center. The government employees, who were about all that was left in a central downtown that everyone else had fled for the ’burbs, filed out of buildings and headed off for their own lunches in a flurry of suits and dresses.

  I scarfed down the dog and flapped open the newspaper. It was hard to imagine that the words blared across the front page had their origin barely a mile from where I sat. First Avenue was still closed from the Thermal Plant on up to where the road curved around and changed names. As I sat there reading I could hear the dim buzzing of the helicopters circling the area. General Hospital, I read, had been evacuated of all but the most seriously ill patients; the rest were sent to Meharry Medical Center, Vanderbilt, and Baptist Hospital. The obligatory urgent call for blood donations had been made. The mayor announced that for the time being, he was not going to ask the governor to activate the National Guard.

  On page two of the first section, a long profile of Brother Woodrow Tyberious Hogg occupied all the space above the fold. I felt like I’d seen his picture a thousand times: the earnest eyes with droopy eyelids above a thickening set of cheeks and jowls, the head atop a thickening neck in white shirt and polyester tie. It was the same face that had been on the hundreds of religious stations that the cable companies were now required to carry—the tacky, sleazy appeals for money in God’s name pouring forth from mouths that blended together and all started to look alike after you’d surfed around the channels long enough on a sleepless night.

  And in a box on the front page, near the bottom, with a jump to the last page, were the details of Rebecca Gibson’s murder. Police reported that neighbors heard the sound of a fight around four A.M., glass breaking, screams, the thud of bodies slamming, or being slammed, against walls. Someone had phoned 911, and when police got there, Rebecca was already dead. She’d been beaten brutally, the kind of brutal that only a closed casket can hide.

  Witnesses reported seeing a white, mid-Seventies Chevrolet four-door speeding away from the house.

  I leaned back on the concrete-and-wood bench and let the sun beat down on my face. The noon whistle from the tobacco factory behind the State Capitol blared. Behind me, on Church Street, a bearded driver in a yellow taxi slammed on his brakes and laid on the horn to keep from hitting a street person who’d stepped off the sidewalk in a daze.

  A white, four-door, fifteen-years-old-or-so Chevy, I thought. A white Chevy. I’d seen one before. Then it hit me.

  Slim Gibson had a white Chevy.

  I’d seen Slim Gibson’s white Chevy parked, double-parked, and triple-parked on Seventh Avenue in front of our offices so many times it was like a landmark. Once, I’d even given Slim a ride over to the Metro tow-in lot across the river to retrieve it after it’d been hooked. I never knew why Slim didn’t buy himself a slot in a parking lot somewhere.

  One thing was for sure: the Chevy wasn’t parked out front today.

  I entered the building this time without even bothering to check for Morris. I scooted up the stairs, turned left at the top of the landing, and fumbled for my key as I approached my office. The jangling of the keys must have been like an alarm. As soon as I closed the door behind me, I heard footsteps.

  Just as I was bending over to check the answering machine, the pounding on the door started.

  “Hold on,” I said loudly. “Just a sec.”

  Truth was, I didn’t have to yell. My office is only one room, L-shaped, with just enough square footage in the small part of the L for the door to open without hitting my visitor’s chair.

  I opened the door to find Ray standing there, without Slim, lines creased on his face deeper than I’d ever seen before. His eyes were bloodshot, and he looked like he hadn’t slept for a week.

  “Ray, c’mon in, man.”

  Ray stepped in behind me as I shut the door. “I guess you heard,” he said.

  “Yeah, it was on TV this morning. And in the paper.”

  I passed around him and slid into my seat, motioning for him to grab the other chair. Ray flopped into it, his butt barely on the edge of the chair, his elbows close into his sides, his hands pointing out toward me.

  “Shit, I ain’t never seen nothing like this.”

  “What’s going on? Where’s Slim? The newspaper said witnesses saw a car like his pulling away from Rebecca’s place last night.”

  Ray brought his hands up and rubbed his forehead. “Harry, there’s a lot you don’t know about Slim. He looks real quiet and laid-back most of the time—”

  “Yeah?”

  “But sometimes, you push the wrong buttons, ol’ Slim’ll get kind of wild.”

  I leaned back in the chair and thought for a second. Marsha trapped inside a morgue, surrounded by armed Winnebagos, me with a stack of bills to pay, and God knows how long the insurance company’s going to take to pay that invoice. Now this. So life’s never dull.

  Please God, I thought, give me a little dull.

  “Where is he, Ray?”

  “That’s kind of hard to say.”

  I crossed my feet and put them up on my desk, wrapped my hands around my head, and leaned back in my creaky office chair. Trying my best to look like a country lawyer, I guess. Maybe Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird.

  “He didn’t decide to jackrabbit now, did he?”

  Ray looked me in the eye and I saw his lips start to move.

  “ ’Cause if he did, Ray, he’s mega-screwed. Can’t nobody help him now.”

  Ray fidgeted a moment longer, then: “Well, he ain’t exactly run off. He’s just staying low to try to figure out the lay of the land. I got a friend over at the courthouse who called me about a half hour ago, said the police were looking for him as a material witness.”

  “You know how to get in touch with him?” I asked.

  “Maybe.”

  “I’m no lawyer, buddy, but I do know nothing good ever comes from running. If he’s rabbitted out of here, they’ll find him. If I was you, I’d get ahold of him, tell him to get a lawyer, and come on in. If he’s innocent, then sooner or later they’ll figure that out.”

  I knew I was lying. Not about the police catching him, of course. If Slim’s run off, they’ll find him. I was lying about the if-he’s-innocent-he’ll-get-off stuff. Anybody who’s hung around courtrooms and jailhouses as much as I did in my years as a reporter knows that once you enter the judicial system and the system thinks you’re guilty, then nothing else matters. You can pretty well kiss your ass goodbye. But there’s no good in trying to acquaint people with the truth when they don’t have the basis upon which to accept it.

  “You think so?” Ray asked.

  “Absolutely,” I said. “Tell him to c’mon in and clear himself.” Then I hesitated just a moment. “He didn’t do it, did he?”

  Ray’s mouth curled up. “Hell, no, Harry. He didn’t do it. That ain’t Slim’s style. You ought to know that.”

  I didn’t know why I ought to ha
ve known that, but I let the comment slide for the sake of propriety.

  “I didn’t mean anything,” I said apologetically. “I just had to ask.”

  “Well, he didn’t do it,” Ray insisted. “But appearances are going to hurt him. You got to understand, Slim and Rebecca fought like hell the whole time they were married. Most of the time, it wasn’t any kind of big deal. Some people are just like that. It’s the way they express affection. But if you don’t know that to begin with, then … well, it could look pretty bad sometimes.”

  I shifted in my seat and plopped my feet to the floor. Ray fidgeted uncomfortably. “Harry, if this gets nasty, you’ll help him, won’t you?”

  I felt a cramp in my chest. Oh, hell, I thought, here it comes. This was not something I had any interest in getting involved in; besides, even as cheap as I am, Slim couldn’t afford me.

  “I got an awful lot on my plate right now,” I said, with more than a hint of reluctance in my voice.

  “Aw, c’mon, Harry, he’s a buddy. You can’t let a buddy down now, can you?”

  I put my hands out in front of me. “Now wait a minute. There’s no indication whatsoever that Slim’s going to need any help. You just get in touch with him and tell him what I told you.”

  Ray stood up. “I don’t know, man. I got a bad feeling about this.”

  I rose and stood next to him. “Somebody you know got murdered, Ray. You’re supposed to feel bad.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, I guess so.”

  The phone rang as I was easing him out the door. My head was starting to hurt and I was about to let the machine take the call. On the third ring, though, I decided to pick it up.

  “Denton Agency, may I help you?”

  “Yeah, I’d like to phone in a pizza order, please. Can you deliver in thirty minutes or less?”

  I sucked in a gulp of air. “Hell, yes, just get me through that long blue line of cop cars.”

  “How are you, babe?”

  “I’m fine. More importantly, how are you?”