at least one person, and probably one person who was somewhere in this room, this was not a terrible tragedy.
It was simply and completely a job well done.
19
I can’t decide whether I was born a good liar, or it was simply a skill I acquired over time out of the necessity of need and the tedium of practice. I guess it’s lucky I was born with a sense of moral value as well, because I have no doubt that had I been so inclined, I’d have made a pretty fair grifter.
“This is Dr. Evans, Neurosurgery,” I said to the hospital night operator.
“Oh, yes, Dr. Evans,” she said. “I recognize your voice.”
“I’m trying to locate two residents who should be in the hospital tonight. Do you have any way of checking the scheduling?”
“Why, you know better than that, Dr. Evans. Of course, I do.”
I thought quickly, then laughed. “No, of course, I know you can do it. I meant, have I caught you at a bad time?”
“Oh, no, Doctor. Things are quiet around here tonight. Who are you trying to locate?”
“Doctors Albert Zitin and Jane Collingswood.”
“Please hold.”
I leaned back in my office chair and put my feet up on the desk. Outside, the traffic was finally thinning, and the temperature was taking a slide out of the nineties. Conrad’s funeral had been a long one, what with the drive out to Mount Olivet and all. I’d stayed for the duration. For Rachel’s sake, I’d told myself. Most of the people, though, had chosen to do otherwise. And outside of the family, a couple of TV cameras, and the university hotshots, there probably weren’t twenty people at graveside.
“Dr. Evans?” the pleasant voice came back.
“Yes.”
“Dr. Zitin is not on call tonight. Dr. Collingswood is doing a rotation in E.R.”
“Thank you,” I said, equally pleasant. “I really appreciate your help.”
“That’s what I’m here for,” she said, clicking off.
It occurred to me that if the real Gordon Evans ever called this woman, he was going to have an awful time avoiding arrest for impersonating a doctor.
So Dr. Jane’s in E.R. I’ll be damned if I’ll go out and bung up my leg again just to see her. The swelling had gone down almost completely, and I’d now been almost twenty-four hours without a twinge. All that was left were some nasty blue and yellow streaks that would probably be around for at least a month.
I lowered my pair of good legs to the floor and stood up. Down the hall, I could hear a guitar strumming and the sound of voices. Slim and Ray were holding their nightly songwriter’s cocktail hour. I thought I might drop in on them. I hadn’t said much of anything to either of them since the day Rachel Fletcher walked into my office. They were good people; I’d best reconnect with them.
I spread my jacket across the back of the chair and rolled up my shirtsleeves. Casual was the order of the day at Slim and Ray’s office. In fact, I’d be the only one down there out of denim, not to mention the necktie. I was about to leave the office when I heard the squeal of tires and a blaring horn outside.
The corner of the building blocked part of the view, but apparently somebody had taken the curve at Church and Seventh a little too tightly and almost collided with a car illegally parked in the loading zone for the drugstore on the corner. Idiots, I thought, turning away.
Then I looked back.
It was a Lincoln, a long black bear of a car. You didn’t park a car like that; you docked it. Was it the same one that had been in the loading zone the other day? Maybe the one that followed me on the parkway last night? I wasn’t sure, but something set off bells and whistles.
I stood there scanning the car, trying to recognize the driver. But the windows were smoked just enough, and the setting sun was striking the glass at just the right angle. It was impossible to see inside.
If I went down there and knocked on the glass, one of two things would happen. If the person inside was tailing me, then I’d blow his cover, and there was no telling what might happen next. If the guy wasn’t tailing me, he’d just think I was another urban crazy.
I turned away from the window. I knew I’d seen a long black car a couple of times in the past few days. But was it
The boys down the hall struck up another tune. Slim and Ray’s office looked directly out the front of the building. I could keep an eye on the Lincoln from their window even better.
I walked down the hall. Their door was cracked, but I rapped a couple of times with my knuckles.
“Yo!” a voice inside yelled, halting the strumming of guitars.
“Yo, yourself,” I said, stepping in.
“Hey, Harry, you dirty rascal. Where have you been, boy?” Ray jumped up from a desk with his guitar in his left hand. He stuck his right hand out and jerked mine like a pump handle.
“Must be a special night,” I said. “You’ve got the Martin out.”
Ray’s prized possession was a thirty-year-old Martin D-28. It was a work of art, as preserved and cared for as the day it was brand-new. Even a musically ignorant, tone-deaf brick like me knew it was a classic.
“Yeah, we been working on this new song. Think it’s going to be our next hit, don’t you, Slim?”
Slim looked up from the strings of his Ovation, smiled at me, and shook his head. Slim was decidedly not the lyricist in this team. I doubt I’d heard him say twenty-five words in the months that I’d known him.
There were four other people as well crammed into the tiny, two-room office: a bleached blonde in worn jeans and a T-shirt, two other cowboys, and a girl who looked maybe sixteen. I tried to figure out who was with whom, without any luck. The woman had an old, beat-to-hell guitar with nylon strings. Cowboy No. 1 had a shirt pocket full of harmonicas, and Cowboy No. 2 had a fiddle.
A bucket full of longnecks in ice cubes sat on the floor.
“Mind if I listen?” I asked.
“You know better than that, boy,” Ray said. “And grab that one on the left. It’s got your name on it.”
I reached down and pulled an amber Pabst Blue Ribbon bottle out of the bucket and popped the top with the opener on Slim’s desk. Slim was an interesting kind of guy; year or two younger than me, frame like a body builder, thick, wavy light-brown hair, blue eyes that cut right through you. He was more than handsome, almost the kind of man that could be called pretty, although you better not call him that to his face.
Ray, on the other hand, was thin, somewhere way over forty, and had the skid marks on his face and thinning gray hair to show for it. Ray had come to Nashville in the Fifties, played Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge down on Lower Broad and the Stockyard Restaurant for twenty-five years before giving that up to save his liver. Now he just wrote songs, except for an occasional appearance at the Opry or on the Nashville Network. He’d been through a lot, yet seemed to me the least scarred veteran of the music business I’d ever met. I kept thinking I ought to get him and Lonnie together sometime, but Ray was too busy writing songs and Lonnie was too busy repossessing cars and making homemade explosives.
The beer was as cold as a mountain stream in January, in contrast to the thick, hot air of our old office building. All the tenants kept saying we were going to have to complain to the management company, but nobody ever did. Besides, autumn was just around the corner. Another month or two, the worst of the heat would break, anyway. If I could stand it without air conditioning in the car, I could stand it in the office.
An old, thirteen-inch black and white flickered away in the background as Slim and Ray, accompanied by the other four on either instrument or voice, began their new song. I don’t know much about country music, but I have to admit I was impressed. It sounded good to me, a fusion between traditional country and modern pop, without all the overproduced studio effects and the other crap that goes into music these days. Slim and Ray were on the last verse of the song when I glanced over at the television. “The Scene at Six,” the local newscast, was just starting, and the lead story was Conrad.
