Denton - 03 - Way Past Dead

by Steven Womack

  I finally went under again, then woke up about daybreak with the bright silver flashing of the television dancing off the dirty cup in my lap. For a moment I couldn’t remember where I was. Then it came back to me. I grabbed the clicker and ran frantically through the local stations, then CNN.

  Nothing.

  I fought the urge to call her, not wanting to wake her if she’d had as bad a night as I had. I showered again, this time to wake up, and made a cup of coffee. The carton of milk in my refrigerator had gone solid on me; I choked the coffee down black. The day outside was dreary, with the threat of spring thunderstorms in the air. I threw on a robe and walked down the driveway to retrieve my Sunday-morning paper.

  STATE OF SIEGE the newspaper headline blared in seventy-two-point bold block type. I laughed when I saw the headline, but then remembered how I used to feel when something like this went down in my old newspaper days.

  I’d have handled the story the same way. The newspeople had to milk the story for all it was worth. If this kept up, half the city would be talking to Ted Koppel by Monday night. I unfolded the paper and spread it out on the kitchen table. Most of the front page was taken up by the story. And there, down in the far right-hand corner, was Marsha’s picture. Below the picture, a caption read: Dr. Marsha Helms, Assistant Medical Examiner and another line below that: Now held captive by cult members.

  Held captive. I read the words over and over. I’d never known anyone who was held captive, at least not outside the normal channels of incarceration.

  Held captive.

  I rubbed my forehead and poured another cup of coffee, trying without much luck to shake off the cobwebs. I lay back down, somehow managed to drift off again, then woke up an hour later. I called Marsha on the cellular phone, but got busy signals for nearly a half hour. It occurred to me that with the regular telephone lines cut, the cellular would be her only connection to the police outside.

  I spent the rest of the morning trying to find out anything I could. Events were occurring so fast that everybody was playing catch-up. I called the city room at the newspaper where I used to work. I got some new guy who’d never heard of me—and who didn’t want to talk anyway. Then I called another reporter I’d worked with, but he didn’t know anything either. I phoned the police-department media liaison, but she wouldn’t talk to me. I called Lieutenant Howard Spellman, my old buddy who was in charge of the Homicide Squad, but was told simply that he was unavailable.

  I sat at my kitchen table, perplexed and frustrated. One more try for Marsha, one more busy signal. Then it hit me that I was ravenously hungry. I hadn’t eaten since the burger and fries the night before on the outskirts of Louisville.

  May as well get dressed and get out, I thought, given that there was nothing to eat in my apartment and the walls were closing in fast. Most of the time I enjoyed being a bachelor, especially when I remembered the last few months of my failed marriage. Occasionally, though, Sundays spent alone got to me. I had the feeling this was going to be one of them.

  I threw on a pair of jeans and a frayed oxford-cloth shirt, then walked down the rickety backstairs of my attic apartment to the driveway. Mrs. Hawkins stood at the window of her kitchen, washing a load of dishes and humming loudly off-key. She looked up as I crossed in front of her window, then cranked off the water and hurried to her back door.

  “Hello, Harry,” she called through the screen. I turned and smiled at her.

  “Hi, Mrs. Hawkins,” I said loudly. “How are you?”

  “Just fine. I put your mail on your kitchen table while you were gone.”

  “I got it. Thanks.”

  “Did everything go as expected in Louisville?” she asked.

  “Better than I expected.”

  “Then you nailed the SOB!”

  I smiled and raised a thumb at her.

  “Good,” she called. “It’s bad to defraud the insurance companies. It just makes it harder on the rest of us. The insurance companies are only trying to protect us.”

  Right, Mrs. Hawkins, I thought to myself. And Santa Claus wiggles his fat ass down your chimney every December the twenty-fifth, too.

  I’d replaced my eight-year-old Ford Escort—which had been incinerated along with Mrs. Hawkins’s garage in an unfortunate accident a few months earlier—with a sixteen-year-old Mazda Cosmo that Lonnie had repo’d. The finance company didn’t want the car. What are they going to do with a rotary-engine-powered rustbucket? So I got the car for five hundred. Lonnie tuned it up for me and now it ran like a top, despite the spreading bubble rust on its cream-colored skin and the quart of oil it burned with every tankful. It had electric windows that still worked and, more importantly with summer approaching, an air conditioner that pumped out cold air by the boxcar load. So what if nobody ever heard of a Mazda Cosmo? I considered it a future collectible.

  I pulled the choke out, fired up the Wankel engine, and headed over to Shelby Street. Rather than take the freeway, I crossed into town on the bridge and maneuvered my way back to First Avenue. Midmorning Sunday had brought a quieter crowd to the barricades, but people were still milling about so thickly you couldn’t get a car within half a block. Things looked quiet enough, though, and as long as I didn’t hear any gunfire or explosions, I allowed myself to feel relieved.

  A couple of minutes later I pulled off Demonbreun Street and into the parking lot of the Music Row Shoney’s. The Shoney’s breakfast bar is an institution in this city—one of those all-you-can-eat deals that runs until the middle of the afternoon on weekends. Eggs, bacon, sausage, grits swimming in butter, biscuits covered in gravy, coffee strong enough to make your nipples erect; my stomach growled and my arteries started clogging up with the anticipation alone.

  The parking lot was packed with the usual conglomeration of tourists, Music Row hustlers, songwriters, good ol’ boys, musicians, drifters, and cowboys, urban and otherwise. I took a number, sat down to wait for a seat, and flapped open the Sunday paper. I had my head buried in a sidebar on the Pentecostal Enochians when I heard my name called from across the room, above the din of voices and the clattering of dishes, pots, and pans.

  “Harry!” a voice yelled. “Yo, Harry! Ovah heah, boy!”

  I looked up, stretching my neck in the direction of the noise. Sitting in a booth, halfway down the smoking side, were Ray and Slim, the two songwriters who were my next-door neighbors in our run-down Seventh Avenue office building.

  The grin on my face hid the fact that I was gritting my teeth. I really didn’t need this, but I didn’t want them to think I was as snotty as I was feeling at that moment. I waved back and nodded my head.

  “C’mon, Harry,” Ray yelled. “Come join us, man!”

  Ray was yelling loud enough for the whole restaurant to hear, and heads were beginning to turn in my direction. Slim, on the other side of the booth with his back to me, turned around and stared. He motioned silently—his usual style—for me to join them, so I figured what the hell, it beats waiting another twenty minutes for a table.

  I threaded my way through the crowd over to their booth. Ray scooted over and slapped me on the back as I slid in next to him.

  “Where you been, fella? We ain’t seen you around here in a week or so.”

  “I was up in Louisville, working a case,” I said, reaching across the table and shaking Slim’s hand. The remnants of a record-breaking chowdown lay scattered and messy across the table. I’d seen Ray and Slim eat and drink before, and neither one of them ever put on an ounce. It made me want to slap them.

  “How’d it go there, Perry Mason?” Ray asked jovially.

  “Perry Mason was the attorney, doofus,” Slim said seriously, his soft voice barely cutting through the restaurant racket. “Paul Drake was the detective.”

  Ray stared back at him a moment. “Kinda anal this morning, ain’t we, Slim?”

  “Everything went fine,” I said. “Glad to be back home. I was just reading about the morgue. Sounds like a real standoff down there.” Ray and S
lim didn’t know I was dating one of the participants, so I chose to feign only casual interest.

  “Yeah,” Ray said, picking his teeth with a ragged, well-chewed toothpick. “You know who them people are, don’t you?”

  I shook my head. “No, who?”

  Ray turned around and pointed out the plate-glass front window of the restaurant toward the hill up Demonbreun Street. “Up there the other side of Mickey Gilley’s place. The clothes store.”

  The hill up Demonbreun across from Barbara Mandrell Country and just down the street from the Country Music Hall of Fame was a strip of tourist hangouts, tacky souvenir shops, and cold-beer-and-hot-dog joints. At the top of the hill, a multistoried gray building housing a saloon had Mickey Gilley’s name out front in lights. I’d never been in there, but it was popular. There was always a line of cars in front slowing up traffic.

  “You mean Jericho’s, that place that sells the two-thousand-dollar rhinestone denim jackets with the airbrush paintings on the back?” I asked.

  “You got it,” Ray said. “They own it. Not too many people know it, either. If they knew their money was going to a bunch of religious cuckoos, they might not be so willing to spend it in such great quantities.”

  Jericho’s was as famous among country-music fans and stars as the Ryman Auditorium. For the past twenty years, the gaudiest, the brightest, the shiniest, the tawdriest of the tawdry, had been for sale at Jericho’s. A matador could outfit himself in the hillbilly equivalent of a suit of lights from Jericho’s, and all it would take is a fistful of cash. It was considered the height of country chic to show up at a place like the Stockyard Restaurant on a Friday night wearing one of their creations; the more sparkles, the better.

  “Well, that certainly explains where they got the money to buy all those exotic weapons,” I said.

  “Yeah, I hear they got some strange shit down there,” Ray said. “Hear the Metros are afraid to take ’em on.”

  “They ain’t careful,” Slim, the master of understatement, said, “somebody down there’s gonna get hurt.”

  The waitress stepped over, pad in hand. I ordered coffee and motioned for the breakfast bar.

  “You guys going to stick around?” I asked.

  “Sure,” Ray said. “We ain’t going nowhere.”

  “Seems that way sometimes, don’t it?” I cracked. “Let me go load up.”

  A couple of minutes later I was back at the booth with enough fat grams and serum cholesterol to send Richard Simmons into apoplexy.

  “What’re you guys up to these days?” I asked. “That deal with Randy Travis ever work out?” The last time I talked to Ray, he was whooping that Randy Travis was going to run one of their songs on his next A-side.

  Slim shook his head slowly side to side. Ray looked down at his coffee cup. “No,” he said. “We ain’t got much going on in that area these days. That’s all kind of fizzled out.”

  “We’re writing a few songs,” Slim added. “But not much is happening.”

  “Times are kind of hard everywhere, aren’t they?” I said, with a mouth full of pancake.

  “Hey, why don’t you come out tonight and hear us at the Bluebird?” Ray asked. “We’re roundtabling with two other singers.”

  The last thing in the world I felt like doing was fighting for a seat at the Bluebird Café on a Sunday night. With Marsha in trouble, I wasn’t going to enjoy much anyway. But sitting around pulling my hair out wasn’t going to accomplish anything either.

  “What the hell …” I said. “Maybe. Let me see what else is happening. What time you playing?”

  “We start at nine,” Ray said. “Oughta last a couple of hours.”

  “Can the Bluebird pull a crowd like that so late on a Sunday?”

  Ray laughed. “When’s the last time you went there?” I settled back, swallowed a mouthful of wonderfully greasy bacon. “Hell, Ray, I haven’t been to the Bluebird since I moved out of Green Hills. That part of town’s not my usual haunt anymore. Guess it’s been a couple of years.”

  Slim spoke over the rim of his coffee cup. “Get there early if you want a parking space.”

  Right, I thought, my girlfriend’s hunkered down in a concrete blockhouse with bulletproof windows surrounded by religious wackos with bazookas in Winnebagos.… And I’m going to go listen to country music.

  You ask me, the world has become completely deranged.

  “Oh, great,” Marsha spewed, her voice coming through the cellular ether crackling and strained. “I’m locked up here eating canned ham and crackers, drinking Nashville water, for God’s sake, and you’re going off to the Bluebird with your songwriting buddies.”

  “I didn’t say I was going.”

  Through the static, her laugh sounded like a titter. “I’m just kidding, Harry. Go ahead. Go to the Bluebird. There’s no reason not to.”

  “You’re not taking this very seriously.”

  “Oh, I’m not?” she said. “I’m the one who got to sleep on the couch in my office last night and has had the same underwear on for two days. How seriously do you want me to take it?”

  I leaned back in my office chair and put my feet up on the desk. The effort stretched the tangled cord, dragging the phone across my desk. “Would you feel better if I kept the same underwear on until this was over?”

  “Oh, gross. Besides, that doesn’t bother men.”

  “Now wait a minute,” I protested. “That’s the kind of sexual stereotyping you’d bust my chops fo—”

  “Don’t get torqued on me,” she interrupted with a laugh. “I was only kidding.”

  “Not funny. You’ve got a shower in the building, right?”

  “If you like cold water. Which is not bad, given how hot it is in here. There’s no ventilation and the air conditioner’s off.”

  “I thought there was a generator.”

  “There is, but it’s not big enough to cool the whole building. It only drives the unit on the cooler. We take turns going into the cold room and sitting with Evangeline.”

  “I hear she’s not much of a talker.”

  Marsha laughed again. Yeah, I thought, she’s doing fine.

  “No, the conversation tends to be a little one-sided. It wouldn’t bother me so much, but there are three others in there right now that haven’t even been cleaned up yet. Dr. Henry phoned in and said to stop all work. He didn’t want us in the middle of an autopsy if the shooting started.”

  “So everything’s on hold.”

  “Yeah, big guy, including my heart. And a couple other parts of me.”

  “I thought you said this wasn’t a private line,” I said, contemplating all my parts that were on hold for the time being.

  “It’s not,” she said, her voice starting to break up. “Listen, babe, I’m losing you. This phone’s about dead. I’ll have to plug in the charger for a bit. Guess I’d better go.”

  “I read the stuff in the paper about these idiots,” I said, not wanting her to go. “I think they’re just bluffing. I’m reading the newspaper and watching television, but they don’t really say much about what’s going on.”

  “We don’t know either,” she said. “We’re staying in touch with the negotiators. We talk to them every hour. But there’s not much to deal with here. They want Evangeline back and we’re not going to let them have her.”

  “So what the hell are they going to do?” I asked, an edge in my voice.

  “There’s not much anybody can do. We’ll just have to wait it out. Nobody wants to see any shooting.”

  “Ye—” The phone momentarily popped out, then came back on. “Hope you’re right. Listen, love—” Snap, crackle, cellular pop …

  “—later.”

  Dial tone.

  “Yeah, love,” I said to nobody. “Later.”

  Exasperated, I went by Marsha’s apartment, watered the plants, and checked the locks. Bored with puttering around at her house, I spent the rest of Sunday afternoon restlessly puttering around my office.

 
There was mail to open, but no answering-machine messages to return on Monday. Business had picked up over the past few months, but then recently dropped off again. On a few rare days, it looked like I might even sort of kind of maybe might be able to make a living at this. Other days, the outlook wasn’t so bright.

  Funny, I’d taken on this new profession almost on a lark. After losing my job at the newspaper—and being pretty well burned-out on the daily grind anyway—I thought being a private detective would be kind of a hoot. I envisioned trench coats and late nights parked in front of sleazy motels waiting to take pictures of bank presidents sneaking out with the bimbo du jour. But bank presidents are smarter than that these days, and the people who sneak out of sleazy, twenty-dollars-for-three-hours motels are people I wouldn’t want brushing up against me in a crowd. Might catch something a good shower couldn’t wash off.

  I’d been at this game almost two years now, and truthfully I’d begun to miss the paper. It’s not that I haven’t had my good moments; it’s more that after a while the insecurity and unpredictability begin to wear on you. I can’t remember when I didn’t have what I diplomatically refer to as a “slight cash-flow problem.” In other words, I’m always tapped out. Thank God Tennessee doesn’t require liability insurance (technically, they do, but nobody enforces it). After the car fire, I couldn’t afford the rate hikes. And as for health insurance—hell, the only way I’ll ever get health insurance again is when Ed McMahon pulls up in front of my apartment with that ten-million-dollar Publishers Clearing House check he’s been promising me every month for the past decade.

  I know—bitch, bitch, bitch. Nobody has any sympathy for middle-aged white guys. Besides, I really can’t complain. I answer to nobody, work my own hours, live my own life. And even though I knew her as a source back when I was a reporter, if I hadn’t become a private investigator, I’d have never gotten to know Marsha.