Dead Folks' blues
( Denton - 1 )
Steven Womack
Steven Womack
Dead Folks' Blues
1
All right, I’ll tell you. But you have to promise not to laugh, okay? I’m a private investigator. In Nashville, Tennessee.
Stop snickering.
No, I do not wear a trench coat, or a double-breasted suit, or a homburg. I don’t smoke cigarettes or drink straight Scotch out of the desk drawer in my office, and I don’t smack women around.
These days, they hit back. Hard.
Neither do I sing country music, nor write country music, nor even listen to country music. My tastes run to jazz, and I did not just fall off the turnip truck. I was born here, but I went to school in Boston, spent my junior year abroad in France, and wear shoes almost every day. I can lay on a country accent as thick as molasses on a frosty morning, if I have to. But I can also throw in enough Newport, Rhode Island, to make Tom Wicker sound like a hick.
I can hear you now: But a private detective, in Nashville, Tennessee? Give me a break.…
Well, let me tell you, friend, we’ve got a million people in this city now. And any city that’ll elect as mayor a guy who plays harmonica on Donahue and explains how it’s okay for him to be engaged to his fourth wife while still married to his third, is a city that’s got character. I’ve been to some interesting and corrupt locales in my time: New Orleans, New York City, all of Texas. And believe me, they’ve got nothing on this place.
After all, how many cities elect a sheriff named Fate, a man who winds up in a federal penitentiary for corruption and gets visits from his buddy Waylon Jennings? Speaking of sheriffs, I think this state holds the national record for the most ex-sheriffs now doing time behind bars.
Freaking Greek tragedy, that’s what it is. I love this city. It cracks me up.
So I’m a detective. I didn’t say I was a competent detective. I didn’t even say I’d been doing it very long. In fact, I just opened my office about two months ago, a couple of weeks after I got fired from the paper.
I was a newspaper reporter, and I like to think I was a good one. In fact, I was too good. The publisher of the newspaper had a brother who was a lobbyist, and he got involved with this group of amusement operators; you know, guys who run video game parlors and stuff like that. These operators-to coin a phrase-had a pretty strong lobby working to pass a law that allowed video poker machines to pay off. I mean, it’s not like pinball machines and video games hadn’t been paying off for years anyway. It’s just that these guys were trying to get it legal so they could stop paying protection money to the small-town cops.
Anyway, the publisher’s brother was handing out hundred dollar bills like business cards on Legislative Plaza. Most people knew that it was standard operating procedure on the Hill. But this guy started getting cocky, because his brother owned the local paper and they were all well-connected. Blatant as hell he was, so I wrote a story about his contributions that were papering the legislative halls in green.
I knew the city editor would never sanction the story, but I decided to throw it in the queue just to get a rise out of the desk. Only problem was, we had this new guy on the night staff. We’d hired him from Oklahoma, and he really didn’t know his way around yet. He released the story.
The expose ran page one, below the fold.
Nobody was more surprised than I was. The early edition hit the newsstand, and the publisher hit the ceiling. Went completely ballistic. He had the story pulled and loose copies collected from the newsstands.
By noon, the story was gone and so was I.
So here I am, thirty-five years old, living from paycheck to paycheck, and with a name that’s, professionally speaking, Mud. But what the hell, I was getting bored anyway. I remembered reading somewhere that in this state the only prerequisite for a detective’s license is a background check. I had a hard time believing it was that slack, so I called a buddy in the D.A.’s office. He said the law was changing in January; after the first of the year, you’d actually have to have credentials to be licensed.
So with six weeks to spare, I rushed downtown, paid my $75.00, had my picture taken, passed a quick computer check, and became a private investigator.
I sunk the last of my meager savings into setting up an office down on Seventh Avenue, near Church Street, in a dumpy building nestled between a tiny restaurant and a three-story parking lot. I was on the top floor, one room only, with a dirty, greasy window that looked out on an alley strewn with broken bottles of Night Train and Wild Irish Rose. But it was only $200.00 a month, utilities included. Factor in a hundred bucks or so to get the phone started up, a couple hundred for stationery and business cards, and another hundred for an old wooden desk and a filing cabinet, and voila: instant office.
I was almost proud that day, when the sign painter finished stenciling HARRY JAMES DENTON-PRIVATE INVESTIGATIONS on my door. I just hope to hell my parents don’t find out.
I figured my skills as a reporter would easily transfer to my new field, and I hoped my hanging around the courthouse for the better part of ten years would get me jobs.
Wrong.
I went from instant office to instant poverty. I called every lawyer I knew, every politician, every well-connected crony I could find.
I couldn’t get arrested.
A month after I opened up, I had to give up my expensive apartment in Green Hills and move across the river to East Nashville, to the funky part of town, to the neighbourhood where Archie Bunker would’ve lived if he’d been born in Music City and driven a truck for a living. I found a little old retired lady who’d had her attic converted into an apartment. She knocked ten bucks a month off the rent if I’d cut the grass in the summertime. I took it.
Finally, I called Lonnie Smith, a buddy I’d met back when I was doing a story about repo men. Lonnie came to Nashville to make it big in the Grand Ole Opry and wound up repossessing cars. He’s been doing it about twenty years now. And he hates the movie Repo Man.
“That picture sucked,” he said, in his rapid-fire, high-pitched voice. “Repo’ing ain’t nothing like that. Most of the time the job is downright boring.”
He was trying to talk me into going to work for him, repossessing cars and tracking down deadbeats.
“Business’s been good lately,” he peppered. “And it ain’t anywhere near as dangerous as people think. I’ve repossessed ten, maybe fifteen thousand cars in my life. And I only been beat up about a dozen times.”
Thanks, Lonnie. I’m real reassured.
Times being what they were, though, I took the job. Our first gig together was grabbing some guy’s pickup out by the lake. We drove out I-40, got off at Stewart’s Ferry Pike, and cut left to drive across Percy Priest Dam. It was a cold day, windy, one of the last before the summer’s heat settled in. In this part of the country, you don’t get much spring; one day you’re freezing, the next you’re sweating. The whitecaps on the lake jumped, as sharp and white as teeth. We drove on a mile or so past the lake and pulled into an apartment complex.
“I know the guy lives here, but I don’t know which apartment.”
“So let’s ask at the office,” I offered.
Lonnie turned to me in the cab of his dirty pickup and grinned. “How long you been in the real world?”
“They won’t tell you, huh?”
“Violation of privacy. But there’re ways.”
We walked into the office where a creamy redhead in a flowered dress sat behind a typewriter.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” Lonnie drawled, switching into his good-ole-boy voice. Nobody would ever have guessed Lonnie’d moved down here from Brooklyn. “But I lost my buddy, Joey Richards. I was over h
ere helping him move in a month or so ago, and I know it was over this way-” Lonnie pointed off in some vague direction past her head. “But for the life of me, darlin’, I can’t remember which building it was. Can you help me here?”
She eyed us cautiously. Lonnie’d warned me this might be dirty work, so I was in an old flannel shirt and jeans. Red stared at us a second, then decided we were too dumb to be anything but what we looked like.
“I’m not really supposed to give out that information,” she said.
“Aw, Joey ain’t gonna mind. He’s waiting for us right now. We’re gonna go fishing.”
Lonnie was as slick as Elvis’s pomade. Red didn’t have a chance. She pulled a computer printout off her desk and scanned the list.
“Okay, he’s down in C Building. Apartment nine.”
Lonnie grinned at her. She smiled back, hoping, I guess, that he wasn’t going to hit on her or anything.
“First we find his truck and block it in,” Lonnie explained back out in the cold wind, “then we knock on his door. See if he’ll give us the keys.”
“You think he might do that?”
“Sometimes they do. People usually know when they’re about to get repo’d. Hell, the finance companies give ‘em every chance they can. What the hell’s a finance company going to do with a bunch of repossessed cars? They don’t want vehicles; they want their money. Yeah,” Lonnie continued, spitting out the left side of his mouth, “he knows we’re coming.”
I climbed back in the cab of Lonnie’s truck and picked up the Xeroxed paperwork. Guy had an ’84 Ford Ranger, red, license number DTB 042. “So we just drive around, huh?”
“Yeah, I called the warehouse where the guy works. Today’s his day off. He ought to be here somewhere.”
We cruised the parking lot slowly. There was no red Ford pickup in front of C Building.
“Maybe the guy’s not here,” I said.
“Nah, he’s here. Sucker knows we’re after him. He’s got the truck hid somewhere.”
We drove on around. In the back of the complex, there was an area roped off for people to park boats and trailers, to keep them out of the way of the regular traffic. Behind that parking area, partially up on the grass, sat a red Ford Ranger backed in, nose out, so you couldn’t see the license plate.
“Boogie-woogie,” Lonnie sang. My heart started beating faster. Lonnie wheeled his three-quarter ton Chevy around the boats, then pulled up in front of the Ranger and parked T-bone style. The woods were behind the truck, us in front.
Lonnie hopped out on his side and went around to the back of the Ford.
“Got him,” he said. “Plates check out.”
I tried the door to the truck. “Locked.”
“Okay,” Lonnie instructed, “let’s go knock on the guy’s door.”
We trotted around the complex to C Building and up a flight. Lonnie turned to me, grinned, and knocked on the door three times.
We heard a shuffling inside, and the low drone of a television. But no answer to our knock. Lonnie pounded on the door again, this time a little harder.
“Mr. Richards, can we talk to you, sir?” he shouted.
There was only silence from inside, not even the television now.
“Mr. Richards,” Lonnie called, banging the door one last time.
“What do we do now?” I asked. Lonnie stood there a moment, glaring at the door.
“Guy wants to be an asshole, ’sokay by me. Let’s go get his truck.”
“You going to hot wire it?”
Lonnie grinned at me again. “You are new at this. Nobody hot wires cars, anymore, son. It’s too much trouble. Besides, you damage a repo’d car, you gotta pay for it. If I ain’t got a key what fits it, we’ll just call a wrecker.”
We walked back to the trucks. Lonnie reached under the seat and extracted a ring of keys as big around as a Frisbee. Then he pulled out a thin hacksaw blade with a notch cut in one end. I’d never seen anybody slim jim a car open before. I watched in admiration as Lonnie slipped the blade inside the door, past the rotting black-rubber seal, and swished it around for a couple of seconds. Then he seemed to latch on to something, pull just a hair, and I saw the door lock inside the cab of the Ranger pop up.
“Damn, man,” I said, “I’m impressed.”
Lonnie smiled. “Nothing to it. Beats punching a time clock.”
He climbed inside the truck and fiddled with the keys, trying to find the match for the Ranger’s ignition lock. I was beginning to think maybe this car repossessing stuff wasn’t too shabby a way to make a living … when I heard footsteps pounding up the asphalt behind us.
I turned just as this balding, unshaved guy in a T-shirt, belly hanging over his belt like a sack of flour, came chaining straight at us with an ax handle raised over his head. My eyes popped wide open as the guy let out a lunatic banshee scream.
“Lonnie!” I yelled. Lonnie glanced up just as Fatty brought down the ax handle on the hood of the Chevy. The three-quarter ton was built like a tank and beat all to hell anyway, so it’s not like it did any actual damage to it. But it pissed Lonnie off real bad.
“Hey!” he yelled. “Cut that out!”
I was away from the guy, both trucks between us. And I was determined to keep it that way. He was swinging his ax handle like a Louisville slugger, connecting with anything that got in his way. Lonnie hopped down from the Ranger and ran around in front of the guy, then stopped just beyond swinging range.
“Put it down, fella,” he warned. “We have to call the cops out here, you’re going to spend a weekend in jail.”
Fatty growled. I mean, really growled, like a dog or something, then raised the handle over his head and came straight at Lonnie like a bull.
Lonnie sidestepped him, ducked, and stuck out a leg. The guy caught the instep of Lonnie’s right foot with his right ankle and lost his footing. The ax handle flailed helplessly in midair before the guy completely lost his balance, slipped over a concrete curb, and wound up facedown in the dirt.
Lonnie was over him in a second, yanking the guy’s face up by a handful of hair. Then he jerked a small aerosol can out of his rear pocket and sprayed the guy’s face. Liberally. Next thing you know, the guy’s choking and heaving and blowing chunks all over the side of his pickup.
“Mace?” I asked, as Lonnie walked around to the front of the Chevy.
“That guy fuck up my truck?” he demanded. I stepped around front next to him.
“Looks like he dinged the hood a few times,” I commented. “Didn’t get the headlights, though. You going to swear out a warrant?”
Lonnie looked over at Fatty, who by now was up on all fours, gasping for breath, the worst of his convulsions passing.
“The hell with it,” Lonnie spat. “It’ll take too long for Metro to get here. I ain’t got the time. Let’s go.”
Lonnie tossed me the keys to the Chevy. I started the motor, then sat in the cab with the truck idling until Lonnie got the Ford running. Then I pulled out of his way and let him go first. I trailed him to make sure our newfound friend didn’t try anything else. As we turned left around one of the apartment buildings, I checked in the rearview mirror. Fatty was pulling himself up to his feet now, shaking, trying to get his balance back.
I felt sorry for the guy. If you’re a hot-shot land developer and you file bankruptcy owing the banks a couple hundred million, you get your picture in the paper. But fall behind on a two-hundred-a-month loan payment, then two goons come steal your truck and spray Mace all over you on your day off.
I began to wonder if I could get my job at the paper back.
2
Lonnie was giving me forty bucks a car on repo work, and we were getting in six to ten a week. So I was making it, barely. But I was having a good time with my new life. I unloaded the expensive Honda with the four-hundred-a-month car note and bought a repo’d ’85 Escort from a finance company. What the hell; it wasn’t pretty, but it ran. And it was paid for.
I also started
skip tracing for Lonnie, using the phone in my office. Skip tracing’s not quite as risky, but it’s about as intense. Somebody falls behind on a loan payment, the bank sends them a letter, and it gets returned NOT AT THIS ADDRESS. So some silly-assed bank officer calls the number in the file folder and explains that he’s trying to locate the person who’s fellen behind in his payments.
They usually don’t have much luck, which should come as no surprise. Not many people are willing to cooperate with a bank on the trail of a deadbeat. And the suits at the bank, being all but completely bereft of imagination, don’t know what else to do, so they turn the account over to a skip tracer.
Lonnie’s got a terminal in his office that runs off credit reports. It’s scary the stuff that comes in off these computers. Nobody has any secrets these days. Frightening. Anyway, Lonnie runs a credit bureau report, sticks it in a file with the bank’s paperwork, then hands it over to me. I get twenty bucks for each verified address and phone number, with an extra five thrown in for verifying employment. It was pretty rough at first, but after a few days’ practice, I got to where I could scam about six or eight a day, when I’d make myself work at it.
A couple months go by, and things are cruising along. I still haven’t got a case yet, but I’m bringing in a few bucks now and then subcontracting for Lonnie. The two guys down the hall are songwriters and publishers: Slim and Ray. They told me their last names, but I’ve never been able to remember them. They rent another one-room office and write songs all day and listen to tapes from other starving songwriters. I don’t really know how it all works; it just seems like everybody I’ve ever met in the music business is hungry. Like the old joke you hear down on Music Row: Know what they call a Nashville musician without a girlfriend? Homeless.
Occasionally, at the end of the day, I’ll stop by Slim and Ray’s office and have a beer with them. Cocktail hour for these two starts around four. The singing gets a little louder. People drop by with guitars. The place turns into a regular little party, and they’re playing all this moaning and groaning, crying in your beer stuff. But some of it’s pretty good, and I can’t really knock it.
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