Denton - 01 - Dead Folks' Blues

by Steven Womack

  “C’mon, Harry, this one really isn’t that bad. You’ve seen worse.”

  “I know. Just been awhile.”

  She walked over to the table. There was a small sheet draped roughly over his crotch, but modesty was something that was neither called for nor particularly appreciated here. No neat white sheet covering him over head to toe. Just something thrown over his privates, almost as an afterthought.

  She crossed around the gurney and stood, arms folded over the file in front of her. I ambled over and stood on the other side facing her. Conrad was between us, unaware that he was the topic of the day. I studied his face. It was a little sunken, his eyelids pulled down. His color was all wrong; the embalmer hadn’t had a chance to pretty him up. I was grateful that he had enough hair to cover the scalp incision, the one that’s made from ear to ear across the head, the one that Marsha had cut to remove his skullcap, and then his brain.

  It was a strain to imagine her in this line of work.

  “This wasn’t real hard to figure out,” she said, unfolding her arms and opening the file. “A first-year intern could have gotten most of it.”

  I felt a sudden wave of dizziness pass over me as I stood there staring down at the huge stitches across Conrad’s chest.

  “How do you do this stuff?” I asked, woozy.

  “Should’ve seen him before I sewed him back up,” she said offhandedly.

  I looked up at her. She was staring down at her notes. “So what killed him?” I asked.

  “All the classic symptoms: blue mottling of the brain tissue. Paralysis of the musculature of the esophagus, larynx. Diminished ventilation of the pulmonary alveoli. Chronic and progressive congestion of the bronchial tract.” She looked up at me as if she expected me to understand what she was talking about.

  “Okay,” I commented.

  “Mucus in the lungs,” she continued. “Textbook anoxia. Acute respiratory paralysis.”

  “So what’s that mean in English, Marsh?”

  “Harry, dear,” she said, cocking an eye toward me, “the man drowned in his own snot.”

  I was trying to keep my brain working, trying to understand all this, mostly to keep from heaving.

  “What, you mean somebody smothered him?” I thought of Spellman’s comment about the pillow.

  “Nobody smothered him,” Marsha said. “He was poisoned.”

  “Poisoned?”

  “Your acute respiratory paralysis …”

  I stared down at Conrad, cold and dead and poisoned. For the first time, I felt sorry for the poor bastard.

  “What kind of poison?”

  She walked around to the foot of the gurney, then stuck her thin hand inside the right pocket of the lab coat. “Tox screen’ll take a week or so. Samples went off to the T.B.I, lab this morning. My guess is, especially given that this went down in a hospital, that it was one of the anesthetics. Pavulon, maybe. More likely succinylcholine or protocurarine—”

  “What in the hell is succin …”I stumbled. “And protocurarine?”

  “Powerful anesthetic. Synthetic curares. Used for patients who are allergic to everything else. Paralyzes the respiratory system in large doses. It fits. Again, though, we’ll have to wait for the lab.”

  “Synthetic curare. Poison-tipped arrow?”

  “Try twenty-gauge needle,” she said, pulling a magnifying glass out of the lab coat pocket.

  “You serious?”

  Marsha laid the file folder across Conrad’s hairy legs. She moved her hand up his leg, above his right knee to the top of his thigh. She searched around for a second, then looked up at me.

  “See? Right there.”

  I bent down and looked through the magnifying glass as she held it. I moved my head up and down to focus and then saw it. An unmistakable, tiny hole in the skin, with just the faintest trace of a bulge around it.

  “There’s a hole in his pants, too. A match.”

  I stood up and looked her straight in the eye, for the first time that day without any lascivious thoughts. “Why would a doctor lie there and let somebody jab a twenty-gauge needle into him—and through his pants?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Somebody knock him out?”

  “Not a mark on him. Not even a scalp abrasion. He fell back on the bed.”

  “Stun device?”

  “I don’t know. I’m no expert on that. But every one I’ve seen leaves either burn marks or pinpricks.”

  We left the cooler and its two inhabitants behind, then walked slowly back to Marsha’s office. In the hall, I remembered something I hadn’t thought of before.

  “You know, I think he was still breathing when I first saw him.”

  “Probably,” she said as we entered her office. “The stuff doesn’t kill you immediately.”

  She walked behind her desk, tossed the folder onto the ever-present pile. “Want to hear a good one?”

  “Sure,” I said. The smile on her face was a wicked, naughty one.

  “He’d just had sex,” she said, almost with a note of triumph in her voice. “Ten, maybe fifteen minutes before he died.”

  My jaw dropped. “How can you tell?”

  She raised her right index finger, her voice a bad imitation of Major Strasser telling Victor Laszlo he wasn’t going anywhere.

  “We haff ways of makink you talk.”

  “Marsh, that’s not funny.”

  “Hey,” she continued, “the guy went out in a blaze of glory. Besides, you know what they taught us in stiff school, don’t you?”

  “Okay,” I said, “I’ll bite.”

  “Rigor mortis,” she said, grinning from ear to ear, “is just an all-over hard-on.”

  I knew I should head out to Green Hills and see Rachel. She sounded desperate on the answering machine. But I wasn’t ready.

  Besides, I was starving. The heat seemed even more intense after leaving the icy cold morgue. Between the temperature and my empty insides, a full-tilt blood sugar crash was on its way.

  I crossed the river and snaked my way over to Main Street. The city changed complexion almost immediately. Downtown Nashville could be any urban city in America: skyscrapers, government buildings, plazas, bus transfer points. But cross the river, less than a mile, and you’re in the middle of instant funky. That’s my side of the river now, the working class, blue collar, slowly gentrifying side. No cluster homes, a great euphemism for ghettoes for the rich, no $80,000 condos, no upscale shopping malls. Just old homes, neighborhood bars and restaurants, and people who chug beer out of cans on their front porches. It was a daily and endless source of fascination to me.

  Quite a change from my married days out in yuppie, upscale Green Hills. Personally speaking, it’s no great loss. Besides, the smoking Ford would have been dreadfully out of place among the Mercedes-Benzes and the Jags.

  Around the bend in front of East High School, Main Street becomes Gallatin Road. A couple of miles farther out, there’s a hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant with the best damn Szechuan chicken that’s ever cleared this boy’s sinuses. I pulled into the parking lot next to a twenty-year-old rusted out pickup truck with a pair of pit bulls chained in the back. They looked at me with either curiosity or hunger; I didn’t get close enough to check which.

  I’d pulled my jacket off by now, rolled up my sleeves, and decided to live with the drenching sweats soaking through my white shirt. My stomach rumbled at the aroma floating gently toward the bumper-to-bumper traffic.

  “Why doan you twy somepeen else?” Mrs. Lee barked as I smiled across the counter at her. I hadn’t even ordered yet, but she knew.

  “And pass up the best Szechuan chicken this side of Shanghai?” I said. “No way.”

  “You wooden know Shanghai if it came up behind you and bit you on da butt!” She scraped a hand across her sweaty forehead, then whipped the green ticket behind to her daughter, a midteens Asian beauty that I’d been lusting after ever since I moved to this part of town. Hmmmm, maybe it’s not the chicken I ke
ep coming back for.…

  She must have signaled to her husband to fix my order Extra Fierce. Maybe she wanted to wean me from my predictability. But as soon as I bit into the chicken, my whole face started sweating like the textbook throes of passion. I could feel the epidermis at the roof of my mouth coming loose. Every breath drawn in through my nose came from a flamethrower. It was exquisite. I took a couple of the fatter pieces of chicken, dipped them in a glass of water to get most of the pepper off, then wrapped them in a napkin and stuck them in my pocket. I wolfed down the rest of the food, drank my diet soda, then carried my plate back up to the counter.

  “Almost got me that time,” I said.

  “What you talkeen about?” she demanded. Mrs. Lee was as genuinely fussy and ill-dispositioned as they came.

  “It was delicious,” I said, reaching across the counter and patting her hand. “See you later.”

  The sweltering air outside seemed normal now. I pulled my tie down another notch and opened the door to the Ford. The pits were gone now; the parking lot was safe for humanity. I settled in carefully on the hot vinyl car seat, and after a few deep-throated rumbles that made the Escort sound like an Alfa, I pulled back out into traffic.

  I headed up Gallatin Road toward Inglewood. This part of town has more junk stores, salvage warehouses, cheap liquor stores, and pawn shops per capita than any other place I’ve ever seen. Off to my right, Riverside Drive ran parallel a mile or so away, changed names, then curved left and intersected Gallatin Road just ahead of me. I stopped short of the light, turned left onto some side street I never could remember the name of, and meandered back into a really seedy part of town.

  Maybe it’s not all that seedy; it’s just that I’ve never gotten accustomed to being surrounded by junkyards, body shops, illegal dumpsites, and motorcycle gang headquarters. Down the road, on the left, next to a concrete block building that housed Billy and Sam’s Expert Auto Maintenance on one side and the Death Ranger’s clubhouse on the other side, sat a faded, old mobile home in the middle of a desolate, closed junkyard. An eight-foot-tall chain link fence surrounded the lot, which was littered with the rusting hulks of generations’ worth of automotive dreams and overgrown with weeds and brush.

  I pulled up in front of the gate and parked. I walked up, shook the gate to make a little noise, and waited for Shadow to emerge from wherever she’d been hiding out from the sun. Shadow, an aging black female German Shepherd trotted around from behind the trailer, ears at attention, a slight tilt to the left that came from age and the genetic hip displacement that seems to plague shepherds so badly.

  She was slow, laid back, but I knew that was because I was on this side of the fence. If I crossed to the other side without either permission or recognition, she’d tear my throat out.

  “Shadow,” I said, holding a hand, palm out, against the gate. “Hey, babe, what’s happening?”

  She stopped about six feet away, sniffing, focusing. Then she approached slowly and ran her huge, wet, black nose up the chain link fencing to my hand. She sniffed a couple more times, then the tail started bouncing around like a clock unwinding. She whimpered a little, then backed away so I could open the gate. I lifted the chain off the hook, pressed the gate open a foot or two, and stepped inside the lot. Shadow was on my shoulders in a second, licking my face and nuzzling me. I reached inside my pocket, pulled out the napkin and unwrapped the chicken.

  I took a step back; she was on the ground, jaws dripping.

  “Speak. Speak to me, Shadow.” She brought up a gnarling growl that erupted into a bark.

  “Good girl!” I squeezed the chicken into a ball, flipped it into the air. It was gone before it hit the top of the curve.

  “Where’s daddy, Shadow?” I said. Why do dogs and babies make people talk so damn goofy? “Where’s daddy, baby?”

  The sun was really baking now, the bare ground cracked beneath my feet. I looked over toward the trailer, and even with the rust stains and dull, weathered paint, the reflection hurt my eyes. I walked toward the pale green hulk with Shadow flopping happily along at my side. At one end of the trailer, an overworked window unit struggled to pull the humidity out of the air. I knocked once and opened the door.

  Lonnie stood inside, back to me, bent over slightly, staring at something on the table. He whipped his head around, shushed me, then motioned me in.

  “And for God’s sake, don’t slam the door,” he whispered.

  Lonnie’s office and sometimes apartment was a clutter of papers, used automobile parts, scattered books, grease, tobacco stains, empty beer bottles. Lonnie was the smartest repo man I’d ever met, but he had strange tastes.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, real low.

  “Shhh,” he hissed. “Experiment.”

  Lonnie was barefoot, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. In his outstretched hand, he held a few straws plucked from an old broom. He moved slowly toward the massive wooden table that normally served as his desk, but which had been swept clean for the drama du jour.

  I strained in the low light to see what that was. Behind us, from the other room, the air-conditioner chugged away like an old steam locomotive. He padded slowly forward, reached out toward the middle of the table, then turned his head around and blindly moved a little closer. I bent down, looking around him, just as the straws touched a tiny pile of what looked like dirty table salt on the wood.

  There was a terrific boom and a flash of white, followed by an acrid stink that made Mrs. Lee’s Szechuan chicken smell as benign as Cream of Wheat. I jumped back, slamming against the door. I was blinded for a second, then dived on the floor with a yelp.

  “Jesus H. Christ!” Lonnie yelled from the floor next to me. I looked over at his arm to see if I needed to start calling him Stumpy. “It works!”

  His arm was intact, which was more than I could say for my ears. The smoke was dissipating. I stood up. A scorched circle on the wooden table outlined a gouge maybe an inch or so deep and a foot around.

  “You jerk!” I yelled. “Why didn’t you warn me?”

  “Damn, man,” he panted, standing up. “I didn’t know it would be that powerful. I mean, the book—”

  “Damn it, Lonnie” I moaned. “Which one this time? The Anarchist’s Cookbook?”

  He looked from the table to me, electric delight on his face. “No, man. I just got a copy of The Poor Man’s James Bond.”

  I looked around the room. On the moth-eaten couch, a paperback about the size of a telephone directory lay open. I picked it up.

  “ANTI?” I asked, reading the page.

  “Ammonium Nitrogen Tri-Iodide. Stuff’s a pistol, man. In fact, it’s more a fulminate than an explosive. Easiest junk in the world to make.”

  I scanned the article. “You trying to get yourself killed?” This was not the first time I’d walked into Lonnie’s Playhouse just in time to almost get my head blown off. The last time, he was making ersatz napalm out of gasoline and Styrofoam cups.

  “No, man, this is great! All you do is soak iodine crystals in pure ammonia, then press the goop through a coffee filter. What’s left is ANTI. As long as it’s wet, it’s harmless. But when it dries, it’s the nastiest stuff you’ve ever seen.”

  “Yeah, great,” I said, dropping the book on the couch. “One of these days I’m going to have to come in here and scrape your ass off the walls with a spatula.”

  Lonnie grabbed a greasy rag and wiped his hands. My ears still rang from his little demonstration, and my nostrils were filled with what I now recognized as the stench of ammonia with a faint burning tinge added. Sort of like being at the landfill the day they burn the Pampers.

  Lonnie reached into a dented, thirty-year-old Kelvinator and pulled out a beer. “You going down to Shelby ville with me?”

  “Ain’t got the time this time, bro.”

  “I picked up the early edition of the Banner. Saw your name. You sure you don’t want to get out of town for a while?” Lonnie popped the top and passed it over to me. I held
out a hand to decline. He shrugged, lifted the can to his lips.

  “Not this time. I mostly came by for information.”

  “Information?”

  “Yeah. About the murder.”

  “You got any sense, you’ll go to Shelby ville with me. Pick up that Trans Am. Drive back with the T-tops off. Have yourself a good time. Forget that murder shit. You look like death warmed over now. Don’t make it permanent.”

  “Fine talk from a guy who sets off bombs in his office.”

  Lonnie lifted the can to his lips and downed the rest of it in one gulp. He tossed the can behind him, into the hallway leading back to the bedroom, then let loose with a long, deep belch.

  “Okay, what you want?”

  “That doctor who was murdered. He worked at the University Med Center, was on the medical school faculty. His wife said he was a real compulsive gambler. Owed his soul to a bookie.”

  “So?”

  “So who’d it be? Who controls the action out 21st Avenue, Division, the West End Area?”

  Lonnie tightened his lips and furrowed his brow. That meant he knew but was wrestling over whether or not to tell me.

  “You not careful, you gonna get in over your head. You know that?”

  “I’ll watch myself.”

  “Okay, it’s your funeral. You know where Division splits off Broadway?”

  “Yeah, there at the triangle.”

  “Right, so you go down Division to where the restaurants are. That vegetarian hippie place on the left, you know where it is?”

  “Those are the Seventh-Day Adventists, Lonnie. Not vegetarian hippies.”

  “Whatever. There’s a little market there. You know, convenience market. Beer, bread, milk, cigarettes. Guy owns it, his name is Hayes. Bubba Hayes. He’s about three-hundred pounds, tattoos, Brylcreem, used to be a preacher. Guess he got to backsliding. Anyway, he’s got the action for the whole area.”

  “So if Fletcher was betting, that’s who he’d be making book with?”

  “If it wasn’t Bubba, Bubba’d know who it was. He runs the whole area. Got a bodyguard, ex-pro football player. Used to play for the Falcons. Name’s Mr. Kennedy.”