Dead Folks' blues d-1

by Steven Womack

  I suddenly felt dizzy. “Man, I got to sit down. You mind?”

  “Sure.” He pulled the chair away from the desk for me.

  There it was, the Great American Success Story. No wonder there was tension in their marriage. It’s tough making medium six figures a year when you’re supporting a high six figures lifestyle.

  “Look,” I said, “two MasterCards, three VISAs, American Express Gold, Optima, Diner’s Club, Carte Blanche.”

  “All maxxed out or over their credit limits,” Lonnie commented, standing over my shoulder. “Look, they’re three months behind on that VISA, two on the other ones.”

  “Where did it all go?” I asked, exasperated.

  “Beats me. Maybe up their noses.”

  “No, you toot up that kind of dough, people are going to notice. Man, I think it’s just fancy living. Vacations, cars, clothes, restaurants.”

  “Look, that’s another mortgage, I’ll bet. Bank of Cookeville-that’s up by Center Hill Lake. Sixty-five grand outstanding. Man, it’s almost got to be a summer home or something. See, next column over. They’re four months behind on that one. I don’t know why the bank hasn’t already foreclosed.”

  I stared down at the paper, seeing the letters and the numbers, but too much in shock to make much sense out of it.

  “Check it out, man,” Lonnie continued, “Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman-Marcus, Dillards, Castner’s, Lord amp; Taylor. Damn, man, what’d these two do? Fly up to New York every weekend to shop?”

  “Down here at the bottom,” I said, pointing. “Look, a charge off.”

  “Twenty-five hundred to Dominion Bank. And here, look. His student loan is even late. Now that’s some serious shit, man. You deadbeat a student loan, they go after you hard. They’ll pull your freaking income tax refund nowadays.”

  “If he had one. The one thing I don’t see is an IRS lien.”

  “It wouldn’t necessarily be there. I usually don’t see personal liens on these reports until after the IRS has come in and seized everything you own.”

  “Then they list it afterward on your credit report?”

  “Yeah. Keeps you from replacing all your stuff with something else. I tell you, fella, these two were on the edge of it.”

  “Edge of what?”

  “Collapse, man. Collapse.”

  I scanned down to the end of the report, each printed line another nail in the financial coffin. How can anyone let themselves get in this kind of shape?” I wondered.

  “We can get out the calculator,” Lonnie said, “but my guess is that between the credit limits, the mortgages, and the judgments, they owe somewhere around three-quarters of a big one.”

  “No, don’t. I don’t want to know.” I let the paper fall out of my hand onto the floor, then wearily put my head down on the desk next to the computer. Lonnie leaned against the door frame, cradling the cup of coffee in his hands.

  “Man, I know it’s tough,” he said. “But you gotta get straight about this. You’re either going to have your head in the right place, or your ass in the wrong one.”

  I raised up and rubbed my burning eyes. “How could this happen? They were so bright, so successful.”

  “Hey, you think they’re different from anybody else? I don’t want to get too political on you here, buddy, but it’s the legacy of the Reagan years. You got your billionaire stockbrokers in New York that went down the toilet when the bubble burst. What makes you think a doctor could get away with it? Fletcher was a pauper compared to Ivan Boesky.”

  “I know, man. You’re right.”

  “Of course, I’m right. And I tell you one other thing, bucko. She whacked him. As sure as I’m standing here wearing boxer shorts under my jeans, Rachel Fletcher killed her husband.”

  I leaned back and stared at him as if he were an escaped lunatic. “You’re off there, Lonnie. It don’t make sense.”

  “What the motherfather you talking about? Makes perfect sense.”

  “No, Lonnie. It’d made perfect sense if he didn’t owe a nickel. But Conrad was in hock up to his eyebrows. What could Rachel inherit? I mean, what’s the benefit to her? A week ago, she had a husband who was pulling in two-hundred-grand a year. Now all she’s got is a house the mortgage company’s going to take within a matter of days, two leased cars she can’t afford, and a purse full of plastic a clerk in East Beehaysoos wouldn’t take.”

  Outside, a rolling, burbling rumble came from the sky. I pivoted and looked through the thin gauzy curtain over the window. In the distance, a flash of lightning tickled the horizon, followed a few moments later by a hard thunderclap. Rain began falling, at first only light drizzles. Then, in a matter of seconds, the roof of the trailer rattled like BBs falling on sheet metal.

  “If anything,” I said over the din of the rain, “Conrad’s death leaves her in worse shape than before. Now she hasn’t even got the income they had.”

  “You’re forgetting one thing, Ace.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Life insurance.”

  “Oh, right,” I said, suddenly angry with him. “Like I’m just going to walk over to Rachel’s and say ‘okay, babe, where’s the key to your lock box?’ I’m sure he had insurance, although God knows how he paid for it. I know his university policy won’t come anywhere near paying off those debts. There was probably barely enough to bury him.”

  Lonnie stood still for a second, his face blank, expressionless. Finally, he said: “There’s one way to find out, my man. But this is one you really got to keep quiet about.”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “Insurance companies are like anybody else. They don’t want to do anything stupid. They got certain standards for certain occupations. You’re a freaking ditch digger carrying five mil worth of insurance on yourself, the insurance company’s going to want to know why you value yourself so highly. The scam used to be you buy a bunch of policies spread out over several companies.

  “Not anymore,” he continued. “Now they got a computer. When you buy an insurance policy, the insurance companies run your Social through a database and see how many policies you’ve got with other companies.”

  “Get out of here.…”

  “I’m serious, man. You wouldn’t believe what you can find out. You got a modem, a phone number, a password. You go to a new doctor with a bad back, he’s going to run your name through the MTB, see if you’ve ever been involved in a malpractice suit. You got a track record for suing doctors, he’s going to tell you to hit the road, Jack. Go see a witchdoctor.”

  “Great,” I said. “We don’t have to worry about the government being Big Brother. The corporations’ll do it for us.”

  “You got that right, bro. Only thing is, there’s always somebody out there who can infiltrate. You make it accessible to one person, you’ve made it open for everybody. Just takes a little ingenuity.”

  “And let me guess,” I said. “You’re a very ingenious person.”

  “So I’ve been told,” Lonnie answered, smiling. He set his coffee cup down on a table, came over to the desk, and shooed me out of his seat. He took the chair and flipped on the PC next to the laptop. A green glow filled the screen, followed by the computer’s self-test.

  Then a menu appeared. Lonnie chose the option labeled COMMUNICATIONS. He hit a few more keys, then the speaker in the computer gave out a dial tone, followed by a series of beeps as the computer dialed.

  Seconds later, we were logged on. I don’t know where Lonnie got a valid password, but he had one. He worked his way through a couple of layers of menus, then set his cursor on a line labeled CUST INQU.

  Then he picked up the credit bureau report and typed in Conrad’s Social Security number. The cursor blinked, the green pulsating dot like a heart monitor.

  “How long does it take?”

  “Shouldn’t be too long. Be cool.”

  “Can’t man. No chill to cop on this one.”

  The dot went solid green. Then the computer spit out line af
ter line of numbers and letters.

  “Need a calculator?” Lonnie asked.

  The amounts were even, large and even. “I think I can handle it.”

  “That one there is his university-supplied policy,” Lonnie said. “See, it matches his salary.”

  “Then there are two association policies. The rest must be private.”

  “Yeah, looks like. Hmmmm, interesting. It seems the good Dr. Fletcher was carrying about-”

  “Two million,” I said.

  “Which leaves, after paying off the debts-”

  “Maybe a million, three. Would you kill somebody for that, man?” I asked.

  Lonnie leaned back in the chair, looked at me in amazement. “Only my mother, man, only my mother …”

  I fell against the wall and slid down to the floor. Damn, could it really be? An overwhelming fatigue enveloped like a sudden onset of flu. I saw Rachel in my mind, her face floating out in front of me, her body, her hair. I smelled her in the air, heard her deep inside my brain. She was part of me, and while I hadn’t exactly figured out how big a part yet, I knew it was going to be something important.

  “No, Lonnie. It can’t be.”

  “You told me she’s a nurse, right? She’d know what to get, how much to shoot into him, right?”

  “But that still doesn’t answer how it happened.”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “Why did Conrad Fletcher simply lie there and let her shoot him full of the stuff?”

  “You never said anything about him laying there.”

  I looked at him intently. The expression on his face was blank. Apparently he really didn’t know what I was talking about.

  “I told you. Remember? I found him lying back on a bed. No sign of a struggle, no marks on him. They didn’t even find anything in the autopsy.”

  Lonnie shook his head. “No, man, you never told me that. All you said was he got shot up with some kind of synthetic curare. I figured he was knocked down, tied up. Hell, I don’t know.”

  I pushed against the wall and stood back up, my hands out in front almost in supplication.

  “No, see, that’s the mystery here. How did it happen? How come he didn’t fight? I asked Marsha Helms if it could have been a TASER or a stun device, and she said every one she’d ever seen left a mark where the darts hit you.”

  Lonnie laughed, more of a snort, really. “Then she hasn’t been keeping up with the literature, my man.”

  I went cold. “What are you talking about?”

  “Follow me, bud.”

  He hopped out of the chair, back out into the hall, and down to the living room of the trailer. He pulled open a wooden desk drawer, dug around in a pile of stuff, then found what he was looking for.

  “Latest generation, man. State of the art. Close support self-defense weapon. Small, hand held, you can’t fire it at anybody. You have to be close enough to jam it into them. It’s just a capacitor circuit, actually. Like the ignition coil on a car. Takes a nine-volt alkaline battery and turns it into a 65,000 volt charge. No darts. Doesn’t leave a mark on you. No permanent damage. It just short circuits every nerve in your body, and you drop like a rock.”

  He held up the device in the palm of his hand, a small black plastic box with four metal prongs poking out of the end. Lonnie pushed the button; there was a crackling noise in the air. An inch-long blue spark danced between two of the contacts. Right out of Frankenstein.

  “Completely legal, and only fifty bucks at your local gun dealer’s. Disables a mugger for about five minutes. Gives you time to get away, call the cops. Maybe get a tire iron out of your trunk and tap dance on the sucker’s head.”

  He tossed the black box toward me. “It’d also give you time to press the plunger on a syringe,” he added.

  I caught the stun gun, held it in my hand. The edges of the plastic rectangular box were molded to provide a good grip, the button right under my thumb. It was comfortable, at home in a hand. I held it up and took a long, close look at it.

  Damn thing looked just like a beeper.

  28

  Outside, the rain came down in sheets, the layers of water pounding so hard the sky was completely obscured. I splattered through the mud, fumbled with the chain link fence gate, and was thoroughly soaked when I got back to my car.

  Lonnie was right, of course. It was all there. Maybe had been from the start. I just refused to see it, which made me feel like an even bigger yutz. I still didn’t want to believe it. How could that petite, blond, middle-American, Betty Crocker-cute woman take another human life? How did she get the alibi? It didn’t make sense, or if it did, then all the basic fundamental illusions we depend upon to get through from one day to the next are just useless drivel.

  Or maybe her alibi was good. Maybe it was a contract killing. People killed for cheap these days, or so my deep background sources used to tell me at the paper. Didn’t make any difference. If Rachel paid somebody to ice him, it’s the same as if she did it herself.

  I had to sit in the Ford for a couple of minutes to get myself together. The defroster on the car had long since gone to meet its maker; whenever the humidity gets within a few degrees of the dew point, fog settles in over the inside glass so thick it’s like flying by instrument. I started the car, turned on the defroster full blast out of hope and habit, and sat there while the car warmed up. It was no good though; the only way those windows were going to be clear was for me to wipe them that way. Even then, visibility was so bad I was afraid to pull out into the street for fear of being T-boned.

  It didn’t matter, anyway. I wasn’t going anywhere, literally or metaphorically. I found myself alternately angry and depressed, believing and disbelieving. Somebody I once loved, maybe still loved, was a murderer. And I had to figure out what to do with that.

  That, then, was the most frightening part; the notion that I could sit here and even consider letting her slide. Had I gotten that desperate, that cynical, that I’d know who did a murder and let them get away with it? If Rachel got away with the murder, she was going to be rich. But she and Walter had something going now. Was I going to be a part of her life, her rich, sheltered, safe life?

  This prospect made me feel even lower. Not only was I considering keeping my mouth shut about a murder, but if I did talk, it would be at least partly because I wouldn’t get any benefit from it.

  Sometimes I don’t feel like a very nice person anymore. We grow up with these little, safe notions about the lives we want to lead, the people we want to love, the work we want to do, and how we’ll be rewarded for our hard work. Then we get out there in twentieth-century urban America and it’s Dodge City all over again. The spoils go to the ones with the best aim, the quickest draw, the biggest guns. It tends to make one want to be as big a bastard as the rest of the world.

  “Quit thinking, damn it,” I said out loud. “Stop this ridiculous pontificating. The world’s the world, that’s all, and there’s no use in pouting because it isn’t what you think it should be.”

  What I had to do was figure out how I was going to handle this. Any way I looked at it, all the options sucked.

  In a blind leap of faith, I pulled out onto the roadway and made the curve around to Gallatin Road, then out into the heavy traffic. Up ahead, the brake lights of a large, mid-Sixties Chevy suddenly glowed cherry-red, then oscillated back and forth across the road as the car hydroplaned. The thunderstorm pelted us with rain so hard it was like staring through a shower spray. I pumped the Ford’s brakes carefully, feeling for that moment when the wheels lost contact with the road and you became simply a passenger in a two ton chunk of out-of-control metal. The Chevy ahead of me slid into the oncoming lane of traffic, slammed into a rock wall, and came to a floating stop in six inches of water, blocking both lanes of traffic. I slowed the car to stop, but there was a semi behind me, the driver laying on his horn, letting me know that if I slowed any further I was going to wind up roadkill tartare.

  Yeah, I thought, the
world’s a dangerous place. It seems more so now than it did when I was young. Or maybe I just notice it more.

  I slowed to a fast walk and drifted easily into the left-hand turning lane. Once off Gallatin Road, I made it safely back to Mrs. Hawkins’s driveway and into the backyard. My dry, safe apartment was only a few feet and a flight of stairs away.

  One thing was for sure: I couldn’t handle seeing Rachel. I wasn’t ready to deal with it, and there was no way I was going to make chatty all evening, drink wine, have a good dinner, maybe wind up in bed with her again. I’d see Rachel, and soon, but only after I sorted some things out.

  As quickly as it roared in, the storm was gone, leaving everything damp and lush. I stood on the landing outside my kitchen, that peculiar earthy smell that hangs around after a heavy rain filling me. I’d changed into a dry pair of jeans. The rickety metal stairway up the side of Mrs. Hawkins’s house groaned a little; I wondered how long it would be before I came home from work one day and found myself stranded by a twisted heap of metal in the backyard.

  I looked down at my watch: 3:30 in the afternoon. I was supposed to pick up Rachel at six. There was some new fern bar trendy chic restaurant in Green Hills she wanted to try. I’d have been happy to run her through Mrs. Lee’s and let her see how the other half eats.

  I felt sour, out of sorts. I either needed to resolve this whole mess or start taking a fiber supplement. If I’m not going to dinner, I thought grumpily, then I damn well better call her and beg off for the evening.

  I dialed her number and waited through six rings before she picked up. She must have had the answering machine off. Maybe she had to tear herself out of Walter’s arms. God, I’m a bitch.

  “Hello.”

  “Rachel?”

  “Harry, how are you?”

  Her voice sounded different. Maybe it was because in my mind, hers was now the voice of a murderer.

  “I’m fine, Rachel. But listen, I’m going to have to skip out on dinner tonight. I’ve had some things come up at the office that have to be taken care of tonight.”