Barely visible gray powder and burn maries starbursted out from the wound on his dark skin. Chemical tests, I knew, would bring out plenty more.
There wasn’t much blood, just a small trickle down the side of his face. He wasn’t breathing. That much was obvious. There wasn’t anything anybody could do for him now.
I leaned inside as far as I could go, which wasn’t far, trying to get a better look at him. It worked. I recognized the man, and everything in my gut went liquid. It was Mr. Kennedy, Bubba Hayes’s right-hand man.
Make that ex-right-hand man. Mr. Kennedy wasn’t anybody’s anything anymore, except a fading memory.
They carted the bag lady off to the Middle Tennessee Mental Health Institute, formerly known as the Central State Asylum. Apparently the sight of a corpse in a thirty-thousand-dollar car on her turf was more than she could handle. Come to think of it, I could say the same for myself.
For the second time in less than a week, I found myself sitting in an interrogation room at the Metropolitan Nashville Justice Center.
“You know,” Spellman said, “just when I think I’ve gotten you out of my hair, boom, you wind up next to another stiff. What is it with you? You got a thing for dead bodies, son?”
What is it with you, I wondered, and the legions of other Southern men that makes them think they can call anybody they want to
“Lieutenant, I was sitting in a room full of witnesses who’ve told you I was with them until we heard the street lady screaming. I couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with this death.”
He loosened his tie. It was late, the end of a long day. We were both tired and stressed out. I’d had one beer up in Ray’s office; I was ready for another.
“Do you know who he was?” Spellman asked.
“I didn’t check his wallet.” A true statement.
“We did. His name was Kennedy, Roosevelt Kennedy. Ex-TSU star, All-American, drafted by the Falcons in the early Seventies.”
“Explains the wheels,” I said.
“No it doesn’t, and you know it. For the past six or seven years, he’s been working for the Reverend Bubba Hayes. Ever heard of him?”
I screwed my mouth into a tight turn. “Name’s familiar.”
“It should be,” Spellman said. He bent down in front of me, put a hand on each armrest of my chair, got real low, right in my face. “He controls most of the action for the university area. We keep a close eye on him. And we know he was Conrad Fletcher’s bookie. And we know you knew that.”
“So when did knowledge become illegal?”
“Knowledge isn’t illegal,” he said. “Interfering with a police investigation is. I know you’ve been all over the hospital, questioning nurses, questioning doctors, and I know you’ve been to see a cutie by the name of LeAnn Gwynn. That one, I could probably make a case for impersonating an officer. But frankly, I don’t have time for pissant private investigators who’ve been watching too many episodes of “Magnum, P.I.” The paperwork is more trouble than you’re worth.”
He backed away, paced the room, then turned toward me again. “You’re a smartass, Denton, and I don’t like you very much. You’ve been defecating in my nest, and I don’t like that either. To make matters worse, you’re an incompetent. You couldn’t find your ass with both hands and a set of instructions. If I catch you so much as spitting on the sidewalk around this investigation again, I’m going to have your license yanked, and I’m going to have you up on charges. You savvy, boy?”
I stared at him, a long bout in an ice-cold staring contest. “You finished?” I asked him finally.
“Maybe, maybe not.”
“In that case, I want my lawyer. Now.”
He glared at me, disgusted. “Get out of here,” he spat.
I felt sorry for Mr. Kennedy. Even if he was muscle for a scumbag ex-preacher-turned-bookie, there was something about him that radiated more class in an afternoon than most lowlifes could muster in a lifetime. I don’t know what he was doing following me around, but I regretted that doing so got him killed. The only people winning this contest, it seemed, were the grave diggers.
My frustration was doubled by what Mr. Kennedy’s death meant in my search for Conrad Fletcher’s murderer. The best candidate all along, especially given that I was sure he was innocent, was Bubba Hayes. My newspaper days taught me that the guy who looks the cleanest has probably got the most to hide. So while I didn’t have any way to prove Bubba’s guilt, I was certainly remaining open to the possibilities.
Only problem now was, it didn’t make sense, at least not based on what I knew and what I’d observed. There was a bond between Bubba Hayes and Mr. Kennedy. I figured there was no way they could work together, given their differences, without it. They were like two components of a machine that operated so smoothly, so tightly, that it seemed effortless. It didn’t make sense that Bubba Hayes would kill off somebody like Mr. Kennedy. Good help’s too hard to find these days.
It had to be somebody else.
I sat back on my old couch and wrapped my palm around a lukewarm bottle of beer. I was still smarting from the verbal working over Spellman had given me, still sore from where I’d taken the landing wrong, and still torqued that the day had gotten so screwed up.
On top of it all, I couldn’t sleep. And I was beginning to have some heavy-duty doubts about finding Conrad’s killer. I figured that with all the people who hated the guy, it ought to have been easy. It would have been my first big case, the kind of case that could give me some serious stroke in a very competitive marketplace. The private investigators in this town take up a complete spread in the yellow pages, and then some. But there was more to it besides business, although going months without a case had been bad enough. There was more to it than that.
Lanie, my ex-wife, was an assistant vice president at the city’s largest advertising agency when we were married. Since we divorced, she’s become a group V.P. in charge of acquisitions for a fifteen-state region. Don’t have to look too hard to find out how she’s handling the breakup. Lanie’s tough, ambitious, attractive. She’s also ten years younger than me. We met when she was new in the business and hustling reporters to get press releases published. She brought in a couple one day, and I offered to take her on a tour of the paper. What the hell, she was a looker, and I was currently unattached. I wound up taking her to lunch in the company cafeteria. It really knocked her panty hose off when, in mid-bite, the publisher himself came up and patted me on the back over a story I’d just done about the lack of sprinklers and fire-code violations in one of the downtown office buildings. We called each other by first names, laughed around a bit. I introduced her to him, and he kissed her hand, European-style. Lanie thought she was in high cotton, and she thought I was freaking Walter Cronkite or something.
Six months later we were married. The paper did a feature on the wedding. One of the television stations even did a spot. Her parents were awed by it all. Mine were pretty blown away, too.
It was only after we’d been married a year or so, and had the chance to share a joint checking account and file our taxes together as married people, that Lanie figured out that she was fresh out of college, two years into a career in business, and was already making more than me. I explained to her that most newspaper people rarely make more than about thirty-five grand a year under the best of circumstances, no matter how hot they are, and my circumstances were nowhere near the best. And while I might move on to a larger paper in a bigger city someday, for now I was pretty happy and didn’t plan on going anywhere.
When she was made assistant V.P., the trouble started. It wasn’t merely that she was doing better. We both could have lived with that. It was more that I didn’t
She encouraged me to go into television, where the truly big bucks are. For a while, I considered it. But
