even more than print journalism, broadcast journalism is as much entertainment as anything else. There was no way I could endure the happy horseshit that permeates the local news every night and still keep my lunch down. Sooner or later, I’d wind up pushing somebody’s button and get fired, which I figured would never happen on the paper.
Reality, of course, had a way of figuring differently.
Anyway, my lack of ambition doomed the marriage, and pretty soon, when we couldn’t qualify for the loan she wanted to buy the house out in Belle Meade, and we couldn’t take the European vacation because the paper didn’t give me that much vacation time, and not only could I not pay for a Jaguar, I didn’t even want one.… Well, things went down the dumper fast. I got called out one night to cover a major apartment-complex fire. It wasn’t my usual beat, but the late night cityside guy was doing twenty-eight in an inpatient dry-out unit. When I got back in at five in the morning, Lanie’d packed a bag and moved out. I got served a week later. And that was, as they say, all she wrote.
It wouldn’t be so rough if I hadn’t gotten myself ashcanned on the paper. There was a certain satisfaction in knowing that when Lanie drove her Alfa into the parking lot of her West End condo, took the elevator up to her well-furnished living room, poured herself a glass of twenty-dollar-a-bottle wine, and settled back to look at her daily paper, she was more likely than not to run into my smiling name, still there in her life and in her face. Now even that satisfaction was gone.
I don’t usually allow myself to drift into self-pity. Ironically, I didn’t realize how much being a hotshot newspaper reporter meant to me, how much seeing my name on page one above-the-fold made up for so much, not the least of which was the relatively puny paycheck. In one of our last conversations, Lanie insisted she was leaving me because I lacked ambition. She said that the contacts I’d made and the influence I had on the paper and in the community were wasted-because I refused to take advantage of them.
Maybe she’s right. I could always get a job as a P.R. flack for somebody and make double the dough I was making at the paper. Buy a nicer car, get a nicer place. Go back to pinstripes and drinks after dinner at Maude’s Courtyard and Mario’s. This business of being a private investigator’s just not worth it. I didn’t have any idea what I was getting into, don’t have any idea what I’m doing, and am probably going to do more damage than good if I don’t cut and run while I still can.
I finished off the last inch of flat, warm beer. Somehow, it felt appropriate to be sitting in the middle of the country music capital of the world crying in my beer. Any minute now, I was going to break into a chorus of some George Jones song. Only I don’t know the words, and it’s hard to sing George Jones when the crying in your beer only extends to two over the whole evening. I just don’t like beer well enough to drink enough of it to cry in.
Hell, I can’t sing, I can’t drink, and I can’t detect. Maybe I can sleep.
I got up, limped into the kitchen to turn off the lights-though my leg wasn’t really hurting anymore-and to see if there wasn’t some orange juice in the fridge. Maybe there was an old movie on television.
The kitchen clock said 12:20. The neighborhood is finally quiet about that hour. Downstairs, Mrs. Hawkins, my landlady, would have removed her hearing aids, put her four cats out, and be snuggled under her handmade comforter. I felt alone, maybe a little lonely, but I was all right with that. Maybe I’d blow this whole business off and find something else to do with my life.
I leaned across to douse the kitchen light and lock up. Just as the light disappeared, the kitchen door imploded, the heavy brass doorknob bouncing off the wall behind it. A black form came at me out of the darkness, blocking out all light behind it. Something caught me in the chest, threw me backward. I felt myself airborne for a split second. Then I slammed down on the kitchen floor and lay there helpless, random sparkles going off behind my eyelids, and the back of my head pounding like a drumbeat.
Then there was weight on me, and I couldn’t move my arms, an oppressive, awful heaviness that was crushing my chest, pinning me to the floor, with the world going blacker around me by the second.
In what I was afraid was going to be my last coherent thought, I realized I couldn’t breathe anymore.
21
It felt like the whole damned house had caved in on me. But then, in the darkness of the kitchen broken only by dusty shafts of silver cast by distant streetlights shining through the windows, I felt hot breath on my face.
“You and I are going to talk,” a gruff, low voice said. I struggled to recognize the voice and couldn’t. But I recognized the peculiar smell that came with the hot breath.
Bubba Hayes.
I’d been in trouble before, had seen times in my life where I wondered if I were going to see another day. Like when I did the undercover story on suburban kids going into the projects to buy crack and nearly got my head blown off in the crossfire of a street corner shootout. But never have I felt as close to the grim reaper as I did that very second, with the three-hundred-pound-plus Reverend Bubba Hayes sitting on my chest.
There was one thing Bubba had to realize: until he got off my chest, it was going to be a somewhat one- sided conversation. “Can’t …” I managed to whisper, “breathe …”
He bent over, the dark vague shape looming over me now, blocking out even the streetlights’ glow.
“Neither can Mr. Kennedy. Unless you want to join him, you’d better do exactly what I tell you.”
I could feel drowning man’s panic washing over me. For a second, I hoped that terror and its ensuing adrenaline rush would give me the strength to toss him off, like the little old lady who lifts the Volkswagen off the mechanic when the jack gives way and traps him underneath. Only I could tell after a few quick muscle twitches that there was no way. He had me pinned. My thoughts were coming slower now, the sparkles again in the edges of my vision. I’d have been better off if the house had fallen on me.
I managed to nod my head yes but just barely. He must have felt me move; a moment later, his legs flexed, and his huge backside came up off my chest just enough for me to suck in one desperate, loud gulp of air. The rush of oxygen into my lungs left me light-headed, and the stretching of my rib cage hurt so acutely I almost cried out.
But it felt wonderful to be breathing again.
“I didn’t have anything to do with it,” I said. “I didn’t kill him.”
“Do you know how long he worked for me?” Hayes demanded. There was a whooshing sound in the air, like the sound of a golf club, and then his palm slammed into the side of my face. The slap caught my left cheek and the very tip of my nose. Strange, I thought, it burns more than anything else. I imagined, in one of those ridiculously irrelevant thoughts that invade human brains in times of crisis, that I now knew what it was like to have my head shoved against a hot waffle iron.
“Do you know how good a friend he was to me?” Another whoosh, and this time the slap came on the right side of my face, like somebody closing the waffle iron. Something wet ran down the side of my face; I hoped it was blood and not snot. I’d hate for this s.o.b. to think I was crying.
I lay there, sucking in breath, figuring that his questions were purely rhetorical. I hoped he’d yell the next question a little louder and that Mrs. Hawkins downstairs might hear him even without her hearing aids and call the police.
Both of his hands, which looked in the dark like cast iron skillets coming at me, encased the side of my head and locked it down.
“All right,” he hissed, “who did it? Who did Mr. Kennedy?”
“I don’t know.” I felt his hands clamp even harder onto my head. He lifted it an inch or two off the wooden floorboards, then slammed it back down with a loud crack.
An explosion went off, like Lonnie’s little homemade goodie blowing a crater in his office table. I wished I had a cupful of the stuff right now; I’d blow us both to hell just to get this guy off me. Blinding pain turned everything red, and I thought, damn, man, there go the closure strips again. I’m gonna need those stitches yet.
“If you didn’t kill him, you know who did.”
My arms were pinned at my sides, running beneath his huge thighs down the side of my leg. I shifted a shoulder on the floor. If I could get one hand up just a few inches, I might be able to get one hand into his crotch.
