Denton - 01 - Dead Folks' Blues

by Steven Womack

  The doctor’s eyes darkened. My experience is that doctors—even beginners—don’t appreciate civilians telling them what to do.

  “You can step outside,” he said to the officer.

  “No can do, Doc. My orders are to stick with this guy.”

  “I can’t really talk now,” I said, hoping to bring peace to the world. “Don’t worry, though, Doctor. All your wishes will come true.”

  The doctor stood on tiptoe and pulled my head around to examine it. “Any dizziness?” he asked.

  “A touch at first. But it went away.”

  “Nausea? Shakiness?”

  “Only at first. Better now.”

  I grimaced as he pried apart the edges of the cut.

  “You’ve got quite a knot here,” he observed.

  “For this, you went to medical school?”

  He pulled out a penlight, then shone it in my eyes one at a time. I blinked. I couldn’t help it; it hurt like the devil.

  “Pupils are responding,” he said. “That’s good. Everything looks okay. If you’ve got a concussion, it’s a mild one. I’ll sign you in for twenty-four hours’ observation, if you want. But I think you’ll be okay.”

  The only thing I wanted to do was escape from that place. “I’ll pass. Thankfully, I’ve got a thick skull.”

  “I’ll have a nurse dress the wound,” he recited as he scribbled notes on a pad. “We’ll give you a skin local, probably have to shave off about a quarter’s worth of hair. No stitches, but a couple of butterflies. Go home, get some rest. Keep Neosporin on it. You’ll be solid in a day or two.”

  “Great.”

  “You start getting dizzy, seeing spots before your eyes, any similar reaction, then see your own doctor or get back in here. Okay?”

  “Yeah, I got you.”

  “You can go as soon as the nurse finishes with you.”

  I looked over at the campus cop. We made eye contact; I knew I wasn’t going anywhere.

  By then, it was sometime after midnight. I was fried and getting more fried by the minute. My ankle ached, and the spray-on yellow goop they promised would numb my head while the nurse worked on it failed miserably. This middle-aged angel of mercy clipped my hair back away from the cut. Then she pressed the edges of the cut together with a pair of vise grips and taped it shut with duct tape—or so I imagined. I’ll probably get an aneurysm when I pull it off.

  Then came the inevitable waiting. The campus cop pulled up a chair. I lay on the examining table, found that putting my head back even on a pillow was like slamming into a brick wall, then rolled onto my side. About an hour later, I was drifting off when I began to hear voices that didn’t sound like medical people. The curtain to the cubicle slid back. A hefty, middle-aged man in a brown suit, carrying a loose-leaf notebook, stepped in. He motioned to the campus cop, and the guy disappeared in about half a second.

  Cop body language, I guess.

  I sat up on the edge of the table, the dry white paper cover crinkling beneath me. My sense of smell was coming back; I realized I was ravenous. Somebody outside was drinking coffee; it smelled marvelous.

  “I’m Sergeant Spellman, Metro Homicide,” he said. Up close, he had pockmarked skin, the last residue of teenage acne, and his hair was graying. I recognized him. We’d met a year or two earlier when I was reporting the murder of a country music star’s head roadie. Turned out the guy supplemented his income with ventures into the pharmaceutical import-export business, and wound up taking a header off the I-265 bridge over the Cumberiand. Occupational hazard, I hear.

  “I’m Harry Denton,” I said, offering him my hand. “We’ve met before.”

  He stared at me, questioning, as he shook my hand. “Oh, yeah. You’re the newspaper reporter.”

  “Ex-newspaper reporter. I’m a private investigator now.”

  Spellman choked off a snort. “Sony to keep you waiting so long, but we had to finish our on-scene upstairs. You know the routine.”

  Actually, I didn’t know the routine, but I was willing to take his word. “So what’s the program now?” I asked.

  “Has the doctor released you?”

  “Yeah. If I spend any more time in this hospital, I may not survive.”

  Spellman grinned. “I hate ‘em, too. I’d rather take a horse whipping than see a doctor. You feel like answering some questions?”

  I looked down at my watch: 1:20 A.M. “Right now?”

  “We like to interview witnesses as quickly as possible,” he said. “You get a good night’s sleep, big breakfast tomorrow morning, get back to business, I guarantee you won’t remember what you’re remembering now.”

  “Am I under arrest?”

  Spellman grinned again. “You do anything to get arrested for?”

  “No, definitely not.”

  “Then this is only a request.”

  I brought up my hand and rubbed my eyes, stretching the skin on my face to try to bring some feeling back into it. The only feeling, though, was the searing pain in the back of my head.

  “You work this late all the time?” I asked.

  “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.

  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 & 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. Spellman 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?”