Nashville: The Mood (Part 1)

by Donald H. Carpenter

  Lurleen had been on the lookout for such a development from the first day the woman walked in the door. Several years before, a close friend of hers had been financially bankrupted after being “taken care of” by a caregiver who also happened to be a career criminal, one who specialized in preying on elderly people with assets. She had watched the woman’s movements carefully, but hadn’t really detected anything until recently. Some of the classic signs were there; the woman was overly helpful, interested in any type of bookkeeping or financial information under the guise of being helpful, and displayed a more than casual interest in Lurleen’s computer. Lurleen had generally succeeded in keeping most financial information far away from her, but being confined to her home, it was difficult to keep incoming mail or telephone calls isolated from her. Eventually, some strange charges had begun appearing on her credit card statements, and although she had tried to have most of them reversed, she hadn’t always succeeded. And then a few checks had been written for large amounts directly from her checking account. Lurleen supposed that the woman was growing desperate because of the very steps Lurleen had taken in the beginning to prevent access to delicate financial information.

  The woman had a boyfriend, as was usually the case in this type of situation. Lurleen had no doubt that he was either the instigator of the woman’s actions, or had latched onto her because of her ability to “earn” a nice income from her activities. Lurleen had met him a few times and had instantly disliked him. He didn’t seem to hold a regular job, and even appeared to have been involved in some type of illegal activity, possibly the drug trade. Lurleen had tried to bring all of these issues to her daughter’s attention, but her daughter was busy with her work, and with family life, and had downplayed Lurleen’s concerns. Eventually, Lurleen had decided to take the matter into her own hands.

  She had been diagnosed, a year or so ago, with a terminal illness. The exact timetable was uncertain; the doctor had advised that it could be anywhere from one to three years. Either way, Lurleen reasoned, it didn’t really matter in this situation. She was going to need care to wind down her life, and it didn’t really matter where that care was, as long as it was reasonably competent. Anywhere she got it had to be on a par with what she was getting now.

  Lurleen heard a car coming down the driveway. She realized what she already knew, that she had neglected the final stage of the plan, the where and when, the exact moment. It didn’t really matter, though; today was going to be the day, she already knew that.

  She heard the car door slam, and the footsteps on the sidewalk approaching the front door. She removed the pistol from a nearby table and looked at it carefully. It was a snub-nosed twenty-two revolver, holding nine shots. It looked like the stereotypical type of gun a woman would carry, and many hardened gun veterans would have maintained that it had no stopping power. But Lurleen knew better. She had read enough about guns to know that it was more than adequate for the job she had in mind.

  She heard the person at the door turning the knob, attempting to open it without even knocking. It was one more reminder of the woman’s habits and gall that she didn’t like; she had simply begun entering the house without knocking, without ever getting Lurleen’s permission, many months ago, and all of Lurleen’s gentle efforts to persuade her to knock first had been to no avail. Lurleen had begun locking the door, and now she walked slowly to it, placed her hand on the inside knob, and leaned against it, thinking one last set of thoughts.

  She wondered what she would say when the police arrived, even though she had thought of that many times. Just yesterday, she had read a story in the newspaper about a murderer who claimed he had seen a blinding flash of light at the moment it all had happened, and she wondered if she should say something similar. But that was no good, unless she wanted to go to a mental institution, and in her mind that would be even worse than prison, especially at her age. Too many doctors—too much medicine. Better to stick with the story she had already thought of. Meanwhile, the pounding at the door continued.

  She unlocked the door and opened it slowly. A short, mousy-looking woman in her early forties entered, without smiling or saying anything. Lurleen backed gingerly into the room, swinging the door open and watching carefully before easing it to again.

  “Why didn’t you have the door open for me?”

  “Now, you know I always keep it locked when I’m alone. Of course, if I had known it was you I would have had it unlocked already.”

  “I hope you don’t have a lot for me to do today, because I really don’t feel all that well myself. In fact, I’ve got a mind to take off a little early today.”

  “How long were you planning on staying, Dear?”

  “No longer than I have to.”

  “Well, I don’t have too much for you to do. Just my leg massages, and I need to be bathed. Oh, and I almost forgot. I left your check on the kitchen tableRight in there”

  The woman turned to where Lurleen pointed. Lurleen placed her hand in her pocket and felt carefully, positioning it the way she had practiced at least a hundred times.

  In an abandoned warehouse in a decaying area of north Nashville, two young men sat on an old concrete bench inside the building. The building had been vacant for more than ten years, and the owners had been unsuccessful in selling the land or the building for the price they wanted. Years ago, vandals had kicked in doors, broken windows, and damaged interior walls, and the elements had punished the building from the roof down over a period of eighty years. At one time, it had been a thriving manufacturing facility; now it was a gathering place for the sorts of activities most people didn’t mention openly.

  The two men who sat there, curiously enough, were doing nothing except talking. They were both in their early twenties, and had known each other off and on through junior high and high school, and just from seeing each other in the area after that. They had begun using the building in their teens to drink alcohol, smoke pot, and even occasionally for sexual activity with a girlfriend or a prostitute. But occasionally, they just met there and talked, depending on what was happening in one or the other’s life.

  “You ever decide to crank it?” the first man asked. He was sandy-haired, lean but adding some pounds around his waist in the last year or two. He had been a track star in high school, but smoking and alcohol had slowly, but again relatively quickly, pushed him in the wrong direction and chipped away at him.

  “Nope, never done that. Doubt I ever will.” The second man was mixed black and white; his mother was black, his father was white. He had been born in Michigan, but the family had moved South about twelve years earlier. A year or two after that, his mother decided to leave his father, and the father had soon gone back north.

  “I used to bring my first girlfriend here five, six years ago. We used to go right down that hall there, trying different rooms.” The first man pointed to his right, down a dark-looking corridor set off by concrete cinder block walls. The hallway used to house offices, and even today some of the rotting furniture and personal effects of the former employees remained. “She hated this place. It used to really creep her out. But I think she liked coming here for the thrill of it, and then she liked to complain about it afterwardsOr at least complain about it while we were here, so that she could try to manipulate me.”

  “They all do that if they can get by with it. I never liked coming here for that. Not a very comfortable place, and you never knew what was going to crawl out when you had your clothes off.”

  “How’s your sister doing?” the first man asked.

  “Okay, I guess.” The second man responded unenthusiastically to the question, but a few seconds later he looked up sharply at the other man. “Why, what are you asking that for?”

  The first man shrugged. “Don’t know. Just thought I’d askI still think about her from time to time.”

  “You ever bring her here?”

  “Hell, no!” the first man responded instantly, with no hesitation. He didn’t l
ook at the other man, and he looked uncomfortable himself. “I doubt if I’d tell you if I did, but I didn’t.”

  “It doesn’t matter to me, one way or the other.”

  “You want to see where I brought most of the girls?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  The first man stood up quickly, anxious to change the subject and move along. He took a few steps toward the hallway, then looked back at the other man. The other man watched him, a slightly amused look on his face, sensing his discomfort. He stood up and walked slowly, following the first man as he led them down the hallway. They passed a series of doors on both sides, and every few doors the first man would stop for a brief moment and look inside, as if trying to decide if that was the room he had been talking about.

  Eventually he came to one about midway down the hallway, stopped, looked tentatively back at the other man, and then gestured toward the inside of the room. “I think this is it. It’s hard to tell for sure.”

  The second man looked inside. There was a desk and some chairs, and several filing cabinets, all decaying or rusty. The mixture of items didn’t look much different than any of the other offices they had passed, and the second man wondered if the first man was even telling the truth about anything related to the story. But he went along with it, nodding slowly; he wasn’t in any mood to start an argument.

  “And down here.” The first man seemed to want to keep moving, and he led them down to another office on the opposite side that looked about the same as the one they had just left. “This is another place we came to sometimes.”

  “And what did you do in here?”

  “Everything I could get by with.”

  They walked by another few doors, and the first man glanced across the hall, to his left. He glanced casually, as he had done in every open doorway, and had shown no sign of stopping. But after looking, he stopped abruptly, and a look of alarm came over his face. He raised his arm and pointed into the office, and although he tried to speak, he could get nothing out at first.

  The other man walked cautiously toward the open doorway and looked around into the room, standing between the door and the first man. The first thing he saw was the leg protruding from behind the open door into the center part of the room. He looked at the first man, who was now approaching the doorway; he still seemed stunned by it. It was a bare leg, that of an African-American, a woman’s shoe still attached to the left foot. The second man edged into the room, looking all around, trying to take in everything that could be taken in; he put his hand out and gently touched the door as he walked to the end of it. He hesitated before looking around; he wasn’t sure he even wanted to. He looked back quickly at his friend, and worked up the nerve to look around the edge of the door.

  He was shocked by what he saw, although how could he not be? He was used to bad things happening in this part of town, and he had seen some of those things here and there over the years, but he had never gotten completely numb to them. He wanted to turn and run out of the room, but he knew to keep control of himself.

  “See if you know her,” the second man said to the first.

  Tennessee’s other United States Senator, Edward Lindale, appeared a little frustrated. His chief aide, Nicole Summers, was used to it, though. The senator frequently, but only in private, expressed frustration when things weren’t going perfectly. Things often didn’t go perfectly in a political life, so he often appeared frustrated, but never before the public.

  Lindale had served four terms as senator. Prior to that, he had been a governor for one term, and prior to that had been a congressman for one term. He was very popular in Tennessee, and rarely attracted what someone in another state would call serious opposition. Yet he had always had primary challenges, and general election challenges. The opponents, however, had never been a major threat, although the campaigns had always seemed very serious.

  There was a reason for that. Lindale had long picked his opponents; the process had a long tradition in Tennessee, and particularly in the Nashville area. A popular elected representative would often reach across the aisle to the opposition party and reach a sort of gentlemen’s agreement that no serious opposition would be put forward in an election. However, the voters expected a political show, and it was customary to put forth a shadow opposition so that the public could feel that a real election was going on. The tactic had been used by congressmen and senators, but rarely governors. For the governor’s race, there usually was a serious fight, although there had been private talk of instituting the same system for the governor’s race, at least for re-election to a second term.

  This time, though, Lindale was having a somewhat difficult time picking his opposition for the next election, which wouldn’t take place for well over a year. He wanted both primary opposition, and general election opposition, and he always hated the process of picking the opponents. He knew there was a risk that the opponent could get a swelled head, merely by being picked, and decide to attempt to make a real fight of it. The odds of it becoming a real fight were somewhat small, but elections were a wild card, and there was no point in taking unnecessary risks. A serious evaluation had to be done in potential shadow opponents, almost in the same way one would a legitimate opponent, or even a running mate in a coalition race.

  Picking the opponent in one’s own party was no big deal, because the party machinery was in on the process. But picking an opponent from the opposing party was trickier, and trust became a main issue. One never picked an already elected representative, like a congressman for a senate race, unless that congressman was really planning to retire from politics, or had become very unpopular during his recent time in office. Ideally, one wanted a person who never had really held a statewide office, or a federal office, someone who was not even all that well known in the state.

  “Nicole, what’s the name of that fellow you mentioned to me?”

  “Bernson. William Bernson. He’s from East Tennessee.”

  Lindale shook his head, and a sour look came over his face. “I’ve heard some bad things about that guy. And I don’t mean the good kind of bad, I mean the bad kind of bad.”

  “What sort of things?”

  “Didn’t he run against the Congressman over in the Kingsport area?”

  Summers nodded. “That’s right.”

  “Well, I heard he had a staff member who was kind of an investigator-type and they started digging up dirt on the Congressman. And I also heard that at one point he even threatened to go public with whatever he dug up, saying that he didn’t see why he should be denied an office if he was the best qualified, and all that”

  “I hadn’t heard that before—“

  “Well, that’s why I hire you, to do these things,” Lindale erupted.

  Summers watched him intently, a semi-amused look on her face. She liked working for the senator, even on his worst days. She took it as a challenge to carry out whatever mission he wanted carried out, and to solve any problem he wanted solved. The part about picking an opponent for re-election was generally easy, although it had its rough spots, as today was proof of.

  “I’ll check into it,” she said. “It didn’t make its way into the public knowledge, as far as I know, but I’ll check on that as wellI agree that that wouldn’t be a good thing, so we need to head it off if it happened. You haven’t spoken to the Congressman directly?”

  Lindale shook his head vigorously. “No, you know I don’t trust that bastard, either.”

  The weather was clear again now, and the humidity low, and the skies were blue and the air was very clear for a stretch of days in a row. People were not paying close attention while driving, and it was not uncommon to see people slowly veer across from one lane to another on the interstate highways crisscrossing Nashville, even when they weren’t talking on a cell phone or texting. It happened every spring when the weather was nice, and was the cause of a number of accidents, and many more near misses. School would be out in a couple of weeks, and traffic levels duri
ng rush hour would die down slightly, but the heat of the summer, though milder in Nashville than southern states further south, still caused a variety of temper tantrums during rush hour.

  Predictions for the summer had generally been that it would be hotter than normal, but also drier than normal. It was expected that homeowners would have to water their shrubs, flowers, and even trees much more often than usual. Things were looking very green now, because of the recent rains, and because of the heavy rains back during the winter, but that would change very quickly if a dry spell of more than two weeks hit. Anything longer than a month, combined with very high temperatures, could cause a rapid deterioration in the number of leaves, and could even permanently damage plants.

  Morris Foxworth looked out the window of his law firm, nineteen stories up, and surveyed the city landscape. He had a corner office with glass all around, and could see a panorama of about a hundred and eighty degrees if he stepped to the edges of the windows and looked as far to the right or left as he could. It was six-thirty in the afternoon, and he was waiting on his son-in-law, Charles Matoguwu, a junior member of the firm, to arrive at his office, for a meeting Matoguwu had requested. Matoguwu, who was working out of the office that day, had e-mailed him around one o’clock in the afternoon requesting the meeting, but without stating the purpose; he had not answered Foxworth’s return e-mail asking what it was all about.

  Matoguwu’s family was originally from central Africa, but his father and mother had settled in London about thirty years ago. Matoguwu grew up there, and had come to the United States to attend law school in Philadelphia. He had met a young woman about to graduate from the University of Pennsylvania, a history major who had been accepted to law school at Vanderbilt. Matoguwu followed her to Nashville, transferring to Vanderbilt for his last two years of law school. He and his girlfriend had broken up, but he had remained in Nashville after graduation, marrying Foxworth’s daughter and joining the firm.