“Just like being a doctor. Some nights you’re on call, some nights you’re not.”
“The press pick up on this yet?”
“If they haven’t, they will soon.”
“You notified the decedent’s next-of-kin?”
“Why don’t you let me ask the questions, Mr. Denton.”
“I just thought she ought to be called.”
“What’s it to you?”
I looked up at him. There were dark circles under his eyes as well. Guess everybody looks like hell in the middle of the night.
“That’s who I’m working for,” I said, at least savvy enough to know that in this state, client privilege doesn’t extend to P.I.s. “Fletcher’s wife hired me to get him out of a jam.”
Sergeant Spellman’s eyes flicked from his notebook to me, then back down. “Yeah,” he said. “We need to talk.”
Which is how I found myself on the way to the Metropolitan Nashville/Davidson County Criminal Justice Center at just shy of two o’clock in the freaking morning.
6
Spellman offered to give me a ride downtown; I was too tired to argue otherwise. We pulled out of the med center parking lot onto 21st Avenue. The white and fluorescent blues of the emergency room faded quickly into the dark oranges of the city streetlights and the neon rainbows of restaurant signs, retail shops, all-night pancake houses. At two in the morning, Nashville’s a strange compound of insomniac music types, graveyard-shift workers, and people looking for love or trouble and not caring very much which one they find first.
I sat in the unmarked Ford Crown Victoria and rested my head against the back of the seat. Every time we hit a pothole my head felt like it was coming apart. But I was too tired to sit up straight.
“What happens next?” I asked.
“We just want a statement from you. That’s all.” Spellman navigated expertly through the thick traffic on Broadway. I thought of the line from some twenty-five-year-old Rolling Stones lament: Don’t people ever want to go to bed.…
“There’s not much to say, I just came across the guy-”
“Not now,” Spellman said. “Wait till we get downtown.”
I settled back as we crossed over I-40 and drove past Union Station. My uncle, the one I’m named after, worked the L amp; N railroad for decades before he died, back before the automobile makers conspired to screw the trains into oblivion. Now only freight trains came through the station, and it’s mostly home for pigeons.
Ten minutes later, I followed Spellman into the police station, down the earth-tone carpeted halls to an interview room. It was quiet there in the middle of the night, a cold kind of quiet.
I sat at a table in front of a portable tape recorder. Spell-man sat across from me and opened his notebook. Then he leaned across and fiddled with the tape recorder.
“Want anything? Coffee, a Coke maybe?”
“Cup of coffee’d be great,” I answered. “Milk, half a sugar.”
He stood back up, left the room for a minute. There was a mirror on the wall behind me. I wondered who was watching from the other side. Figured I’d better not pick my nose or scratch my crotch.
Spellman came in with a Styrofoam cup in each hand. Steam wafted off the coffee.
“Powdered’s all we had. Can’t keep milk around here. It starts stinking after awhile.”
“No problem.”
I sipped the coffee as Spellman jacked around with the tape recorder again, then pressed the RECORD button. He recited his title and name, the date and time, then asked me to state my full name and address into the mike.
So asked, so done. Then Spellman opened his notebook and scanned a page of notes. “Tell me what happened from the time you got to the medical center until you found Dr. Fletcher’s body,” he instructed.
I began the narrative. It felt strange trying to recollect, and recreate in my mind, an entire evening’s events. Like most people, I go through life relatively oblivious to everything around me. There’s so much stimulation, so much stress, these days, that if you paid attention to everything, you’d never get anything done and lose your sanity in the process. It’s like some New Age fruitcake telling you to live every day as if it were your last; hell, that’s impossible. You’d be so overloaded you’d explode, and it would be your last day.
It only took a few minutes to recite the tale. I tried to remember everything like a professional. It was impossible to tell from Spellman’s face what he thought. He sat there in his tan shirt and brown flowered polyester necktie like a law enforcement sphinx, making a few notes here and there and watching the tape recorder spin.
Then his tone changed. Suddenly, we were into details.
“Where did you park your car?”
“Off 21st, a block or so from the hospital.”
“Where off 21st?”
I thought for a moment. “I don’t know the name of the street. I mean, this is Nashville, man. I saw a space, I grabbed it.”
“You don’t know where your car is?”
“Of course, I know where my car is. I just don’t know the name of the street.”
“Who else knew you were going to the hospital?”
“Nobody.”
“You didn’t call anybody?”
“I live alone, Lieutenant. My landlady was asleep.”
“You didn’t call a girlfriend? Maybe tell her you were meeting her later?”
“I’m not seeing anyone right now.”
He raised an eyebrow. “No relationships with women, huh?”
I cocked an eyebrow right back at him. What the hell was going on here?
“I said not right now. I didn’t mean never.”
“Who’s your client?”
I hesitated, then remembered he already knew. “Rachel Fletcher, Conrad Fletcher’s wife.”
He was firing questions like this was the freaking Double Jeopardy round: When did she hire you? Where? How much did she pay you?
“Why did you wait until ten at night to go to the emergency room?”
“My ankle didn’t start hurting bad until then.”
“Why did you go looking for Fletcher?”
I felt myself going dizzy again. “I don’t know. Not really. I was thinking I ought to connect with the guy. Maybe talk to him. I was going to wing it, make it up as I went along. Maybe that wasn’t such a good idea.”
“Tell me again the sequence of events in the hallway.”
“I heard a noise behind me. I turned. There was a nurse coming out of a room.”
“Was it the room where Fletcher was?”
“Maybe,” I said. “I’m not sure. It was dark. I was at the other end of the hall.”
“Get a look at her?”
“I vaguely remember thinking it odd that she didn’t have a clipboard or anything. She just stood there, staring at me.”
“Then?”
“She seemed stiff, awkward. Then she reached up and kind of smoothed down her blouse. I turned away for a sec. When I turned back, she was gone. I don’t know where. Maybe into another room. There’s a stairwell exit down at that end of the hall, too. Anyway, I thought it was weird. That’s when I headed down the hall and found him.”
Then the clincher: “Why did Rachel Fletcher hire you?”
I hesitated, decided I’d had about enough. “Client privilege,” I said. “That’s personal information between me and my client.”
Color rose in Spellman’s face. Twenty-five years ago, he’d have brought in a couple of the boys with rubber hoses to work me over. But that was then, as they say, and this is now, and I’ve got to give Spellman credit: he kept his cool.
“Client privilege is not recognized in a private investigator-client relationship. We can either have you deposed by the district attorney, or we could stretch it and have you charged with interfering with a police investigation.”
I thought I saw the faintest trace of a smile on his face. “What’s it going to be?”
I smiled back at him. I had a feeling I’d lost this
one; may as well flow with it. “She told me Fletcher was a compulsive gambler. Up to his ya-ya with some bookie. She didn’t know who. Said they’d been threatening him, and she wanted me to find out what was going on. Arrange to pay off the guy quietly.”
“You believe that?” Spellman asked. “A top gun surgeon, med school faculty, into some street bookies?”
“I’ve seen weirder.” And so had he.
Spellman leaned back in his chair. “Why’d she come to you? You just opened shop. You’re not even in the yellow pages yet. How’d she find you?”
Again, I found myself hesitating. I knew that without realizing it, I’d compromised myself by taking the case in the first place. I’m a little slow on the uptake sometimes, but I did have sense enough to recognize that the worst reflex would be trying to shuck and jive my way out of this.
“Rachel and I were involved in college. Pretty seriously. Then along came this guy Fletcher, and the next thing I know, I’m looking at the world from inside the dumper. She and Fletcher got married, moved away to New York. I moved back here. Then Rachel and Conrad came back when he got his appointment at the hospital. I didn’t see them socially. She saw my byline in the newspaper. When she got in trouble, she tracked me down.”
Spellman made a few notes, then reached up and stroked the rough side of his cheek. “So this guy Fletcher stole your girlfriend. Years later, the lady comes to you for help. Little more than twenty-four hours later, he’s on his way to Forensics.” He paused again, stared right through me. “Interesting,” he observed.
My attitude problem erupted suddenly. “Oh, Jesus, Spellman, use your brain. Who’d be stupid enough to kill somebody, then get caught in the same room with the still-fresh corpse? What, you think I wasted Fletcher, then slammed my own head into the wall to cover it?”
Spellman snapped the notebook shut. “Actually, we already checked that out. Doctor says it would have been tough for you to give yourself that kind of injury, and there was nothing in the room that would have made it any easier for you.”
I shifted in the seat and must have put my weight down the wrong way; this jolt went through my bum ankle, all the way up my leg, and into my rump. The back of my neck was stiffening up. I rotated my head and felt the bones grind and snap together like steel marbles in a box. What minuscule help that spray-on crap had given my pate was long gone. What a night.
“You’re serious, aren’t you? You think I murdered him?”
Spellman shook his head, held a palm out in front of him. “Whoa, fellow, I didn’t say that. We just need everybody’s story, that’s all. We don’t even know what killed him yet. That’s going to have to wait for the medical examiner. The rest of it’s just routine. But you’ve got to admit,” he continued, “this all looks pretty flaky. What if the coroner comes back with a finding that Fletcher was, say, smothered with a pillow? And you the only one in the room.”
“But I wasn’t the only one in the room! Whoever dropped that dump truck on my head was in there, too!”
“But you didn’t get a look at whoever it was. Nobody else saw anybody leave that room. Everybody else on the floor can account for his whereabouts the whole evening. So what happened to this person?”
I looked at him as coldly as I could muster. “My guess is that since he murdered Conrad Fletcher, he probably got the hell out of there.”
I stood up. It came off as a gesture of defiance, but it was mostly that my legs were cramping. Either way, I didn’t care anymore.
“I’ve answered about as many questions as I feel like answering tonight,” I said. “If it’s okay with you gents, I’m going to call a buddy for a ride back to my car.”
“We’re through, anyway,” Spellman said. “I can have a uniform drive you back.”
“No, thanks,” I said. “I think I need a return to civilian life.”
“No problem, fella,” Walter cracked as we walked out the front door of the police station. His BMW was parked on the street, in a spot on the James Robertson Parkway right out front. “I enjoy waking up at three in the morning. Do it all the time.”
It was pretty lousy of me to roust him so early, but I needed a friend to talk to and a lawyer as well. Walter was the only one who met both qualifications.
“How you feel?”
“Like death on a soda cracker,” I answered truthfully.
“You don’t look even that good.”
“Thanks. I owe you one, buddy,” I panted, trying to keep up with him on my bum leg. Walter went at everything like killing rats.
“I’ll take it out on you when the ankle mends.”
Walter unlocked the driver’s door to the BMW and disabled the alarm. He reached down to flick a switch on the armrest and the passenger door lock button popped up. I climbed in to the smell of leather car seats. The night was still bright orange under the streetlights; even the usual middle of the night pedestrian parade of the homeless, the blistered, and the demented had diminished.
“Sun’ll be up soon,” I said.
“Harry,” Walter said, his hand pausing before he twisted the ignition key. “You are through with this business, aren’t you?”
“I don’t know. Can you believe those idiots, thinking I offed Fletcher?”
Walter started the car, then put it into gear. The BMW took off as smooth as a blue point oyster sliding down a throat. “They mirandize you?”
“No.”
“Then they don’t really think you did it. They put a little pressure on, though. Ask you a lot of detailed questions. They want you to say a lot in your statement, even if it’s irrelevant. That way, they can come back in a year or so and impugn your testimony if you do become a suspect.”
“More to work with, huh?”
“You got it,” he said. “You get a look at whoever bashed you?”
“If I had, I’d have told the cops. But no, not a glance.”
“Don’t worry. You’re off the hook. Let it go.”
I fumbled with a row of black switches on my armrest and lowered the window. A big whiff of the rendering plant filled the car. It was like sticking your head in a freshly opened bag of dry dog food. This is the only city I know that locates incinerators, rendering plants, thermal plants, anything that stinks, right downtown.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Don’t know what?”
“Whether or not I’m off the hook.”
“Oh, no,” he sighed. “I’ve seen that glint in your eye before. You’re going to stay on this son of a bitch, aren’t you?”
I turned to him. “Yeah. Think I will.”
“Listen, bunghole, what makes you think Fletcher’s killer won’t do it again?”
“Maybe-”
“Harry, as your attorney, I advise you to go home, drink a quart of tequila, and get one of those cheap weekend deals to the Bahamas.”
“I hate tequila.”
“Whatever.”
“Walter, this may not make any sense, but I’m staring middle age right in the face. I feel like a failure.”
“Oh, c’mon,” he said. “Give it a rest. You’ve been reading too many of those male sensitivity books.”
“No, I mean it. You and I went to college together. Look at you: you drive a BMW; you’re a successful lawyer. Even if you didn’t make partner, you’ve got a future. I live in somebody’s attic in East Nashville, drive a six-year-old Ford, and have an ex-wife who spreads dirt about me to anybody who’ll listen.”
“Harry, you’ve been feeling sorry for yourself ever since the paper canned you.”
“It’s not that, Walt. This is different.” I stared out the window as we drove over the Church Street Viaduct. Below us, street people sleeping in the Gulch were stirring to life.
“I want to know I can do something well, even if it’s just be a cheap, sleazy private investigator.”
Walter laughed. “The sleazy part’ll be easy. The rest, I don’t know. One thing you need to keep in mind: the cops are going to assume right o
ff that Rachel killed Conrad. You get involved, they’ll figure you’re in on it.”
“Jesus, Walter,” I sighed. “Not you, too.”
“Are you sure you aren’t just thinking with your pecker?”
I looked over at Walter. Sometimes he could be a real jerk.
7
Walter’s two-bit psychoanalysis pissed me off at first, but the truth was I’d already considered it. Rachel Fletcher comes to me with this story about her husband being in trouble with bookies and can I help him out and all that good stuff. The next thing you know, he’s dead. C’mon, give me a break. Something’s stinko.
If I were a real detective, I’d have gone home, chugged a couple of shots of cheap bourbon, smoked a pack of unfiltered cigarettes, and grabbed a few hours’ shut-eye. But bourbon gives me heartburn like the devil, and the one time I smoked a cigarette was when I was twelve-out behind my grandparents’ garage. My father was going to spank me, until he decided that twenty minutes of projectile vomiting was punishment enough.
And I sure as hell needed more than a few hours of shut-eye. I hate to confess it, but if I don’t get an unbroken eight hours of sleep every night, I’m not worth killing the next day. Just a wuss, I guess.
By the time I got back to East Nashville, it was nearly four in the morning. I decided to hide out for a while and regroup. I closed all the blinds, made myself a cup of hot chocolate, turned the ringer off on the phone, and crawled into bed. I drifted off to sleep as an all-night news program played out some hostage drama in the Mideast.
When I woke up, the soaps were on. Something about somebody being unfaithful to somebody else, or some such melodramatic twaddle. I was too dazed to know or care what they were talking about. I fumbled for the remote control. The room sank back into blessed silence.
Only I couldn’t sink back into sleep. I lay there awhile, but it just wasn’t going to happen.
The answering machine light was blinking a fast red. I pushed the button; the synthesized voice on a chip said: “Hello, you have … two … messages.”
Rachel’s voice came next: “Harry, are you there? Harry? The police were here. They told me.… Oh, God, Harry-” There was a long silence, followed by a phlegmatic wet sob. “Call me.”
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