by Gerald Duff
“It’s Supremo,” Princess Wilbur said from the desk behind J.W.’s. “The big gun, that’s what.”
“Princess, are you sure?” J.W. said. “Cause I ain’t feeling all that strong today in my belly. I don’t know if I can take that stench right now. Don’t play with me, please.”
“I’m speaking from experience, Sergeant,” Princess Wilbur said, delicately typing at her keyboard as she finger-tipped around and with a full set of two-inch chartreuse nails. “I know when I smell the Italian Supremo, and I wouldn’t joke about that. I don’t have to guess what’s stinking.”
“Why does he have to want to see me now?” J.W. said. “Why didn’t I stay where I was a little longer before coming back to the station? Why don’t I ever think ahead further than a minute and a half?”
“Don’t ask me to analyze your shortcomings, J.W.,” Princess Wilbur said. “I ain’t no shrink. Where were y’all this morning, you and Sergeant Walker?”
“Aw, up yonder off Jackson in one of them old big places turned crackhouse. Got a call in on a working girl punched full of holes.”
“Fresh kill?”
“Naw, shit. Been dead a week anyway,” J.W. said, then deciding to go on the offensive against Princess Wilbur a little. “How you keep them pretty green fingernails all perfect, kind of work you do, Princess, on that keyboard?”
“I buy them by the boxful from the Korean, that’s how,” she said, extending a hand toward J.W for his closer inspection. “Why you worried about the major’s lunch grossing you out when you spent all morning poking around a ripe one, J.W.? That don’t make sense to me.”
“It’s a question of right things in right place, Princess,” J.W.said. “Like you and them plastic fingernails.”
“Ain’t plastic. Acrylic.”
“All right, say acrylic, whatever they are,” J.W. said. “Think about it this way. A kill a week ripe has got a right to smell bad, but damn it, what a man eats for lunch ought not to leave a stink high enough to gag a turkey buzzard, Princess. That’s what I mean.”
“Well, it’s your turn to see the major, not mine,” Princess Wilbur said. “Here’s you a stick of Big Red gum to cram in your mouth.”
Major Dalbey was holding both hands about six inches from the top of his desk, moving them back and forth in slow sweeping motion, when J.W. walked through the door. The Supremo smell hung in the air strong enough to be seen.
“What you looking for, Major?” J.W. said. “You look like you’re after buried treasure.”
“It’s buried all right, J.W.,” Major Dalbey said, “but it sure as hell ain’t treasure. It’s a letter from Ovetta Bichette.”
“Oh, Lord,” J.W. said. “What does Ovetta Bitchhead want?”
“Don’t call her that name, now,” Major Dalbey said, after he’d finished a half-hearted attempt at a laugh. “You liable to get me in the habit of thinking that, and it’ll pop out of my mouth sometime just when I don’t need for it to do. And here’s what the honorable councilwoman is concerned about. I found the letter right in front of me.”
“If it’d been a snake,” J.W. said.
“Yeah, right, you’ll think snake when you hear it. Here’s the part you need to know about. Listen to this.”
J.W. chewed down on his wad of Big Red and leaned back in his chair, lifting a hand to his face as though he was moving into a state of deep concentration. Held that way, maybe his fingers up to his nose would block out some of the heaviest load of the Supremo smell.
“Here it is, after all the first bullshit blah blah blah that Ovetta starts up with. ‘To my knowledge, partial though it may be at this point, not one lead has been established in pursuing the matter of the murder of Mrs. Beulahdene Jackson, late resident of North Montgomery Street. Investigations have been perfunctory at best, and it’s become clear that the priorities of certain officials of the Memphis Police Department are directed not toward protection of those most vulnerable, African-American citizens of fixed income, but toward pandering to the white power structure of this city.’”
Major Dalbey stopped and looked over his glasses at the sergeant of homicide sitting before him, reared back in his chair with his eyes focused on the ceiling as though he saw an event of great interest depicted in the panel boards there.
“What do you think about that, J.W.?”
“I think that Ovetta Bitchhead is running for mayor again, Major,” J.W. said. “I would put money on it. And I think she didn’t write that letter herself, neither.”
“Don’t call the bitch bitchhead, J.W. I already told you that. Know something else? This letter I been reading to you from ain’t directed to me. Nuh uh. This is a copy the Chief has sent to me of the original she sent to him.”
“That don’t surprise me none,” J.W. said. “I figured it’d be addressed to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, calling in a airstrike on the Midtown station. I figure we’ve got off easy this time.”
“Yeah, ha, ha,” Major Dalbey said. “Meanwhile what is going on with that case? Give me something to work with.”
“Nothing much,” J.W. said. “Ain’t nothing going on you don’t already know about. I figure the way we going to find out who did it and put Ovetta back in her box is to wait until one of the little shitheads who did it’s buddies drops the word on him. It’ll happen, like it generally does.”
“Or it won’t,” Major Dalbey said. “At least not quick enough. What’s the M.E. say, what’s the lab rats’ take on this thing, what about the damn neighbors? They ain’t said nothing?”
“Some blood evidence, but that don’t mean nothing until you actually got hold of the perp. This ain’t TV, Major.”
“I know it ain’t TV, goddamn it, it’s my career,” Major Dalbey said. “I wish to God that Ovetta Bichette was in hell with her back broke.”
“She’d still be whining,” J.W. said, “writing letters and position statements and shit. She’d drive the devil crazy.”
“I know it, J.W. I know it,” the Major said. “Listen, go talk to the M.E. again, find something you can dummy up to make it look like progress and get it back to me asap.”
“Asap,” J.W. said. “All right, I will jump on that, Major, and get back to you. I’ve always wanted to write a fiction story or two. This could be my first one.”
“First, my ass,” Major Dalbey said. “I read the reports you and Tyrone turn out. Real entertaining, they are sometimes, too.”
“Thank you, Major,” J.W. said. “We just fling on in and do the best we can to get that writing done.”
On the way out of Major Dalbey’s office door, drawing in the first real breath he’d allowed himself in the last several minutes, J.W. considered the task before him. The easy part would be the writing up portion, since Tyrone Walker had a knack of making a description of total inertia seem to be an accurate account of a lively and ongoing investigation well on its way to conclusion.
Studying English in college was a damn good thing for a homicide detective’s partner to have done, and J.W. was grateful to whatever professor in Tyrone’s past at Memphis State had taught him how to make shit sound like Shinola. That was a skill worth the having of it.
The hard part was finding something for Tyrone to work with, J.W. knew, since he would not sit down and write a barefaced lie from scratch, and J.W. wouldn’t ask him to. Shading the truth now, or as Tyrone Walker put it, interpreting the facts of a matter, that was a different thing. It allowed some breathing space. It stepped back from the bare bones of a matter and let the facts about them cool off enough to be able to worry down and live with.
Closing the door to Major Dalbey’s office behind him, J.W. permitted his mind to touch on the subject of the medical examiner it was now his assigned duty to see, and doing that caused him to let a smile grow on his face as he walked back to his desk to record where he was headed. Nova Hebert, that was her name.
“What’s wrong with you, J.W.?” Princess Wilbur said, turning to get Tyrone Walker to notice wh
at she was seeing. “Why you grinning like that? Something bad must’ve happened in the Major’s office. Look at him, Tyrone, how cheered up J.W. looks. That ain’t right.”
“The reason J.W. looks so strained in the face, Princess, is because he’s doing something not natural to him, smiling like that,” Tyrone Walker said. “The muscles that generate that kind of facial activity hadn’t had any practice functioning for years in J.W.’s case, see. They’re quivering and about to tear loose from their sockets.”
“Y’all go to hell,” J.W. said. “Both of you. I got to go to the morgue.”
“That’s why you’re grinning?” Princess Wilbur said. “You a gruesome bastard, if that’s why you smirking so hard.”
“I’m going to have to leave before y’all run out of ammunition,” J.W.said. “I can tell the pressure of trying to think of some other way to low-rate me is getting to you. Y’all ain’t got that much gray matter to keep it up much longer. It’s pitiful to stand here and watch y’all strain so hard.”
***
J.W. figured that by the time he got over to the city morgue on Gayoso Street, located Nova Hebert, the blonde M.E. who’d handled the crime scene description on Montgomery, and found whether or not she could give him something for Tyrone to whip into shape for Major Dalbey to use on Ovetta Bichette that it’d be time to slip out for the day. So he took his Buick from the lot rather than a city car, as complicated a pain in the ass it was to get reimbursement for use of a private vehicle.
Pencil Neck Fognan liked nothing better than making some detective squirm and beg, trying to justify a rebate for fifteen or twenty dollars, but the prospect of that seemed worth the trouble today to J.W.
First of all, he hadn’t even felt like taking notice of a woman for a long while, much less talking to one, ever since Diane Edge had moved off to Washington, DC, almost a year ago. J.W. had known that getting involved with a woman of Diane’s education and class and particularly her profession was a bad idea to start with, one sure to cost him on down the road. But he’d done it because he felt like it at the time. Just said fuck it, and flung on in. The upside in hand now would be worth the downside to come, he’d figured. Thing was, he had underestimated the weight the downside would develop by the time had come for him to pay the freight costs.
Diane Edge was a lawyer, an educated one, and divorced once, so she had no misconceptions about what it meant to be with just one man for a while. She liked to tell jokes and laugh and drink gin at the end of the day, and take car rides down into the Delta to see what crop was growing and how it looked and to listen to blues in honky tonks and eat the best barbecued pork shoulder in Mississippi and thus in the world.
But Diane was smart, too, so when the DOJ offered her a job in DC, she took the first plane flying out of Memphis so she could start work the next Monday morning.
They had spent the last weekend before she left together, and got drunk and made love and cried and said they’d see each other all the time and spend vacations together. And when J.W. carried her to the airport and promised to call Diane’s cell phone that very night, she stopped after she’d gotten through the security checkpoint and waved back at him and blew a kiss and said “I love you” for him to lipread. J.W. could still see the sandals she was wearing and the off-white dress with the design of red seashells on the bodice whenever he closed his eyes and wanted to call the scene up.
He hadn’t seen her since then, and she’d finally stopped calling and leaving messages on his machine, and J.W. hadn’t been in bed with a woman now for nine months, and no, he’d told Tyrone Walker several times, I ain’t lonely and I stopped missing her right after she left Memphis.
Tyrone hadn’t said a word the last time J.W. swore everything was just jake with him, thanks for your concern. He’d just looked at J.W. for way too long, shook his head a couple of times, and looked off and begun to whistle the tune to an old Jimmy Clanton song from a long time ago. “Just a Dream,” J.W. recognized it to be immediately, but he didn’t make a sign that he knew what mood music Tyrone was providing.
So driving toward the location on Gayoso where the medical examiners hung out with cadavers and body parts, J.W. switched on the Buick radio and pushed the button set to an oldies station, one of several in the Memphis listening area, and considered the fact that it was damn different to see a woman and feel that little tingle of interest kick up in the lower section of his belly again.
About time, too, though it was not likely to come to anything existing in the real world where a man and a woman might get together and feel like there was something out there besides themselves that wasn’t themselves and could be worth getting close to. Or might be possible to get close to. Or at least you might think, despite all experience to the contrary, that it might be possible for at least part of a day or two.
Then, J.W. told himself, beginning to hum along to some tune on WRVR he didn’t recognize but felt like he might have known once a long time ago, that ought to qualify and damp down what I’m expecting enough to let me live with it for a while. Don’t look at it close, fool, or it’ll show you what it really is.
***
“I need to talk to a M.E.,” J.W. said to the clerk II in the outer office of the morgue on Gayoso Street, a young man dressed in a yellow jumpsuit that looked to have been double-starched before it had received a careful ironing. The cuffs were turned back at precisely the same width and angle, and they were perfect. So was the manicure and the light purple polish job on the clerk II’s nails.
“You do?” the clerk said. “Any M.E. in particular you’re looking for, sergeant, or will just anyone do for you?”
“Naw,” J.W. said, making a big production of looking through his notepad for the name, flipping pages and then backing up as though he’d missed one. “Not just anyone of them will ever do for any job, I don’t believe.”
“You got that right, Sergeant Ragsdale,” the clerk II said, delicately pointing with one of the perfect nails on his left hand at J.W.’s police ID. “It’s been my experience that a substitute for anything will never do. Do you know his name?”
“It’s a woman,” J.W. said, settling on a page in his notepad to read from. “I believe it’s Hebert, her name is. Nova Hebert.”
“Oh, Nova, oh my yes,” the clerk II said. “I’ll call her and let her know you’re coming back in there to see her.”
“It’s about a case,” J.W. said. “Tell her that’s why I’m here.”
“Why, of course,” the clerk II said and pushed a button on his telephone keypad, “what else could it be?”
J.W. looked around the room, cool and casual, as though not listening to the clerk II talk to Nova Hebert, and then began flipping through his notepad again.
“The medical examiner says come on back,” the clerk II said and hit a switch to buzz open the lock to the steel door behind him. “Don’t you just love her hair? It’s completely natural, Nova’s hair is, that curl and that color. I’d give a lung for it.”
“I’m here to talk to the M.E. about a dead woman,” J.W. said, headed for the door. “That’s the reason I’m here.”
“I believe you,” the clerk II said, tossing his head and lifting a hand as though to ward off something unseen in the air. “Trust me, Sergeant.”
The temperature on the other side of the door was much lower than that in the anteroom, and J.W. always enjoyed that contrast when he stepped into the working part of the police morgue. Besides the cool, it was generally quiet here, too, except when some of the M.E.’s and lab nerds might be horsing around with each other and telling stiff stories. Then they could get loud, laughing in the way that J.W. had noticed only science types do, high-pitched and in too much volume for what they were laughing at would justify.
It was not that way this time of day, though, the morgue rush hour generally coming later in the night hours, and the only sound was that of somebody laying down a metal instrument on metal and the whine of a bone saw cutting off abruptly and then c
ranking up again.
About halfway down the aisle between rows of polished steel tables, coming toward him at a brisk pace, J.W. saw Nova Hebert, and he wondered how it was you could instantly recognize somebody you either wanted to see or didn’t want to see as soon as you saw them. He hadn’t seen Nova Hebert more than two or three times in his life, and he’d only talked to her for a minute or two and that in the little white house on Montgomery with blood all over the floor and walls, but he could have picked her out of the crowd at a Memphis Grizzlies game with one glance.
Was it one thing in particular about somebody your eyes settled on, maybe, he asked himself as he watched her come toward him, and then that made you remember a connection? The hair, say? Or the way she walked? Or the way she tilted her chin back as she looked at the person she was about to speak to? It was an interesting question, and he’d have to ask Tyrone Walker about it someday when they were on a stakeout trying to come up with something to shoot the shit about and make the time pass. He wouldn’t use any names, of course. Keep it theoretical.
“Good afternoon, Sergeant,” Nova Hebert said. “Keeping cool in all this weather?”
“I don’t mind the heat,” J.W. said. “I don’t care if I sweat some or not.” Jesus, why did I say that, first thing out of my mouth? Panola County upbringing, I reckon, like every damn thing else I do. “I mean sweating in the summer.”
“That is the time to do it in Memphis all right,” she said. “Which one do you want to ask me about?”
Nova Hebert had on a city-issue lab coat and white shoes like nurses used to wear, but that didn’t seem to be holding her back any, J.W. noted. Her hair was contained in a net-looking arrangement which didn’t allow its interesting thrash much room to operate, but that too was no real obstacle to its being a focus of interest.
“It’s the one on Montgomery the other day where you were working that scene with Hoot Sarratt,” J.W. said. “The knife thing on that lady in her house.”
“Oh, yeah,” Nova Hebert said. “Blunt force, too, but that wasn’t what did it. It was the bleed-out.”
