Denton - 01 - Dead Folks' Blues (24 page)

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. Then he’d see what it was like to have the room turn red on him.

Only it wouldn’t work. The Reverend Bubba Hayes was obviously experienced at using his bulk as a weapon. He had me, and more than anything else, more than the pain and the fear, it made me mad. Who the hell did this guy think he was? If I could only get close enough to bite him.

“You talk to me, boy.” He was back in my face again, his breath less rotten now that my nose was swollen shut. “I had to see his wife, his children, tonight. You know what that was like?”

I panted there quietly for a moment. He’d decided to give me room to breathe, but it was still no picnic. I opened my mouth, tried to form words.

“I can’t talk like this. You got to let me up.”

His bulk came down on me heavy again and my rib cage crunched into my lungs. I tried to hold my breath, to keep him from forcing all the air out of my lungs, but I knew I couldn’t hold on long. I felt the panic again, only I was too battered, too weak, to get much strength out of it. Maybe he was going to kill me after all. And it came to me that it was really stupid of him to do that. It didn’t make sense. To die senselessly filled me with sadness and regret, and I felt tears coming into my eyes. Had he broken me finally? Is this the way people died? I wondered. Crying and wishing that it didn’t have to be this way?

“If I let you up, boy, you’re going to spill your guts. And if you try anything stupid, I’m going to break you in half. You understand?”

The breath I was holding spewed out of me in a wet spray. I shook my head as enthusiastically as I could.

Then he was off me.

As soon as I felt my body relieved of his mass, I went completely limp, as weak as a newborn. I hadn’t realized I’d been pushing so hard against him, but every muscle must have been locked tight. I was exhausted to the point of nausea.

I heard a scraping across the linoleum, then the creaking of the floor as the man who weighed over a sixth of a ton settled into a ten-dollar kitchen chair. I raised my head, and in the dusty silver shafts breaking through the kitchen window I saw Bubba Hayes at my table, his elbows propped up, his head in his hand.

He sobbed. I stared at him slack jawed for a moment, a three-hundred-pound criminal sitting at my kitchen table crying. Who’d have thought? I rolled over on my side, pushed against the floor, and painfully rotated up onto my haunches. I pulled my knees up into my chest, stretching, trying to figure out how many ribs were broken, feeling alertly for the sharp pain in my chest that might indicate a punctured lung.

Get a grip, I told myself, and brought my arms behind me and pushed myself up into a kneeling position.

The room spun around me. I was apparently overreaching myself once again. I leaned across the floor, grabbed one of the other kitchen chairs, and pulled it toward me. Then I climbed into it, feeling the soft vinyl pad beneath my butt, glad to be up off the hard cold floor.

“So what’s next?” I asked, still panting. I felt a sharp cramp in my right side and massaged my ribs with my left hand, trying to work it out. With the other hand, I grabbed a dish towel off the kitchen table and ran it across my face as gently as I could. It came away with an ugly dark smear,
but it was a mostly dry smear. I sniffed, feeling for the sensation of wet on my face. Nothing; my nose had clotted.

Bubba raised his head. Even in the darkness, I could see the filmy reflection off his eyeballs like sharp points of light. I was glad the lights were off; if I saw the look on his face, I probably would have been frightened into paralysis.

“I want the man who did this,” he said, his voice like a bulldozer in low gear pulling a hill. There was no evangelical flair in his voice, no theatrics, just cold, murderous rage. I was glad I didn’t kill Mr. Kennedy for more reasons than just the law.

“Well, you ain’t got him yet,” I said. “Why did you have Mr. Kennedy following me?”

“Mr. Kennedy was following several people. You were just one of them.”

“What were you doing? Playing private eye yourself?”

Bubba dropped his hands to the kitchen table. It shook like I’d dropped a thawed frozen turkey on it.

“I wanted to know what’s going on. It’s bad for business when people think they can get whacked for owing Bubba money. I’m a moral man. I don’t kill people. I give them what they want.”

Yeah, right, I thought: the same old tired argument they all use. Call it sin if you want, call it vice. But don’t call it victimless. But I wasn’t about to say that to Bubba. “So who else was he following?”

Bubba turned away from me. He was heaving and panting now himself, overcome with either emotion or exertion. I neither knew nor cared which.

“I trusted Mr. Kennedy. He was on his own.”

“So you don’t know who else he’d been trailing?”

“I intend to find out. And when I do …”

A silence as threatening and cold as any I’d ever endured lay between us. I felt sorry for whoever killed Mr. Kennedy. If the killer were lucky, the law would get him before Bubba could, and all he’d have to face was the electric chair.

Now he had me thinking. Why would somebody kill Mr. Kennedy?

“There’re only two reasons somebody would have killed him,” I said.

“And?”

“One, Mr. Kennedy was getting close to figuring out who killed Conrad Fletcher. Two, Mr. Kennedy was getting close to someone who was getting close to finding out who killed Fletcher. And they killed Mr. Kennedy to keep control of the situation.”

“You ain’t making sense, boy.”

“No, think about it.” I stood up, energized by the notion that maybe I was closer to figuring this out than I had imagined. One thing was certain: if reason number one was not the motive for killing Mr. Kennedy, then reason number two almost had to revolve around me. There was nobody else out there.

“Except for the police,” I said, “I’m the only one who’s actively looking for Conrad’s murderer. If I’m getting close, then the killer’s going to have to play his hand. But he has to play his hand when it suits him. And with Mr. Kennedy in the picture, there was one more thing he’d have to control. With Mr. Kennedy out of the way, it’s just me and the killer.

“To paraphrase a disgustingly racist, politically incorrect saying,” I ventured after a moment, “Mr. Kennedy was the Ubangi in the fuel supply.”

The Reverend Bubba Hayes swiveled in the tiny chrome and vinyl kitchen chair, a squeal cutting the air from where the legs screwed into the base. If the chair didn’t give way with him on it, it might last the night. But it’d never be the same again.

“I don’t completely understand what you’re saying, boy.” Then there was silence for a moment, until he spoke again. “But what I
do
understand makes sense.”

I closed my eyes, trying to concentrate through the pain and the fatigue.

“Something’s wrong here,” I said. “And I’m not seeing it. I’m closer than I realize. Don’t you see, Bubba? I’m close. The answer’s out there, and I’m just not seeing it.”

He said something, but by then I wasn’t paying attention
anymore. I stood up and rubbed my temples. Damn, it’s here somewhere. I know it is.

It’s got to be.

Bubba Hayes’s last remark before he left at three
A.M
. was that if he found out I had anything to do with Mr. Kennedy’s death, he was going to make damn sure I was looking out at the world from inside a dog food can.

Talk about raising the stakes. I knew I didn’t have anything to do with Mr. Kennedy’s death, but now I had to convince Bubba. And while I’m at it, I should work on convincing the Metro Homicide Squad I didn’t kill Fletcher. Spellman had announced to the media I was no longer a suspect. But the police, I knew from hard experience, could be less than forthright.

Everybody thinks I killed somebody. Wonder if I can get my old job back.

Not to sound like a Pollyanna, but one bonus did come from Bubba’s nocturnal visit: the realization that I wasn’t as far off the mark as I thought. That was good. On the other hand, I’d personally seen two dead bodies that were the result of the killer’s handiwork, and if he killed once, he’d kill again. Maybe me. That was bad.

Suddenly, I had this sensation that I was dealing with some really serious stuff. I don’t know why, but up to now it felt on some level like a game to me. I go up, I go down, I go all around, chasing after something as if it’s some kind of 3-D, real-time version of Clue. Colonel Mustard did it with the pipe wrench in the drawing room.

Only this time, if you lose the game, Colonel Mustard does you. And it’s for real.

That dose of reality kept me up all night. When Bubba
finally plodded down the metal staircase to Mrs. Hawkins’s backyard, thankfully not pulling the side of the house down as he went, I pushed the door to and leaned a chair against it, figuring I’d repair the splintered doorjamb tomorrow. Then I checked all the windows. I settled into bed, but as close as I could get to sleep, it may as well’ve been in the next county.

Finally, around six, I rolled out of the sack and made a pot of coffee. I looked in the mirror and saw that my nose was still swollen, with a few disgusting flakes of dried blood on my cheek, a little more mixed in with my hair. There’d been a little blood seepage as well from the closure strips on the back of my head. Damn, that thing was never going to heal if people didn’t stop slamming me around like a fifty-pound sack of dried dog food.

Dog food, again. Bad joke.

I cranked the shower up full blast and stood under the spray until the hot water ran out. Every muscle in my body, it seemed, ached. I was hurting in places I hadn’t hurt since I’d gone out for football my freshman year at prep school. All it took was two workouts; I never came back for the third. My father called me a quitter, until the coach told him I was, at 125 pounds, the smallest kid he’d ever seen go out for varsity football, and he was surprised I made it through two days.

I’d felt like a quitter last night as well, at least until Bubba Hayes showed up and had the unfathomable kindness to beat some sense into me. He’d never know what a favor he’d done, and while somewhere inside there was part of me that wanted to tie him down and jump on his head for an hour or two, I was strangely grateful to him.

Put back together as well as I could be, I finished the coffee and headed to the hospital. I had no idea if Jane Collingswood was still on duty or not. I knew residents pulled some god-awful shifts, so I figured she might be there. I was going to hunt her down, and Zitin, too. It was time to get some answers.

There was the usual midday construction on the freeway; I could see as I crossed the Shelby Street Bridge that traffic
was backed up in both directions all the way to the horizon. I decided to skip that experience and threaded my way through the downtown traffic, up past the Union Rescue Mission, just over from the downtown bus terminal, and maneuvered my way onto Broadway. There was construction there as well, with traffic slowed to walking speed. The Ford began overheating, the indicator moving up fast toward the “oh, hell” range. I loosened my tie, having already thrown my jacket into the seat next to me. I rolled my shirtsleeves up past my elbow. Life went on like that for nearly forty minutes before I found a parking space six blocks from the hospital.