Amazingly enough, my tampering with the telephone box worked. I picked up the kitchen phone, got a dial tone, and immediately dialed my office.
I punched in the remote code just as the message started. A few clicks, pauses, and then a computer voice said: Hell-o, you have—twenty-three—messages.
“Crap,” I muttered, scrambling in a drawer for a pad and pencil.
The first seven messages were from a guy I used to know at the newspaper, Randy Tucker. Randy did an internship the year I got fired. He had the longest hair of anybody who’d ever worked there, given that the editor-in-chief was a conservative Neanderthal, but he was just enough of a hotshot J-school maniac to get away with it. After graduating, he’d come back and managed to get hired with a minimum of sartorial damage.
“Harry, Randy again,” the last message said. “C’mon, call me, man! For old times’ sake.”
“Yeah, right,” I grumbled. “Old buddies just catching up.”
Truth is, I was surprised to hear from him. He’d gone to work for the business section and had brought a life to it that had never been there before. But why would the business section be interested in a murder?
The next bunch of calls were from two of the three local network stations, one all-news radio station, a newspaper up in Clarksville, an AP reporter I had a passing acquaintance with from years past, blah blah blah. I didn’t even write them down. I had no intention of saying word one publicly about any of this. I’d gone to ground and was by God going to stay there.
Message sixteen was from Marsha: “Harry, call me. It’s just before ten Sunday morning. I’ll be at the center till late. Okay? Please, I want to talk. And hey, what’s the matter with your home phone?”
Next was Victoria Reed, who sounded as if she’d been crying: “I would have thought you’d have tried to call me by now.”
I gritted my teeth. She’s right. I should have.
Three more reporters I didn’t know, followed by an anonymous sobbing female voice who said that a wonderful and wise man had had his light prematurely extinguished and if I had anything to do with it, God would see that I was punished.
“Maybe I should just let my office phone go under, too,” I said.
Next up was Lonnie: “Hey, dude. Tried to call your house and your phone’s been disconnected. What’s up? Listen, sorry I was so weird last night. It’s just that, well, it’s the first date I’ve had in a while. Kinda nervous. You know how it is. Or maybe you don’t. Anyway, I’ll be over at the yard working this afternoon. Drop by, give me a call. Whatever.”
So he didn’t know, at least not yet.
The last message was the worst. In Hawaii, my dad had watched the early Sunday-morning news just about the time the paramedics were hauling Mrs. Hawkins away.
“Son, I tried to call your apartment and couldn’t get through. Nashville made CNN this morning. Did you hear? That guy who wrote that stupid little book got killed. Give us a call. Mom sends her love.”
Over the years, I’d developed a keen ability to sense subtext in the tone of my father’s voice, like all sons who could instantly read what kind of a mood Dad was in when he came home from work. Clearly, my name had not been mentioned, at least not by CNN. I was off the hook for now, but I better not let too much time go by without calling him.
There was one last cup of thick, aging coffee left in the pot, so I poured it into a mug and splashed enough milk in to at least thin it out a bit. I sat down at the kitchen table and tallied up the score. Of the important people in my life, one knew of Reed’s murder and my involvement, one knew of the murder but not my involvement, and one knew nothing. Nobody knew about Mrs. Hawkins yet.
Of the unimportant people in my life; well, hell, there were a whole slew of them. And they all wanted a piece of me.
To hell with them.
I leaned back and gazed out the kitchen window for a few moments. Mrs. Hawkins’s death hadn’t quite hit me yet. She was a sweet old lady; patient, nonjudgmental, kind of like my own grandmother. She never intruded into my life, never pried. Never asked questions when I came home in the middle of the night after being gone for three days.
Never threw me out after an attempt on my life a few years ago backfired and ended in the death of a man she loved.…
I couldn’t think about that now. It was all in the past and nothing could change any of that. Death is messy, but life’s even messier. Right now, I had to figure out just how big a mess my life had become.
I’d taken a shower, shaved, cleaned up, and was about to give up on the Reverend Brian Hawkins when his silver Lincoln Town Car pulled into the driveway and parked in the back next to the garage. I was standing at my kitchen window, looking out at a gray late-winter Nashville day.
He was a big man in a black polyester suit, with a wide regimental tie clipped down over his white-shirted belly. He walked around the back of the car and opened the passenger’s-side door. A late-middle-aged thin woman in a stiff blue dress climbed out of the car and pulled a fur jacket around her to ward off the damp cold. Her hair was starched into a beehive, the original Sixties rendition of Big Hair, and even from the window of my apartment, I could sense a certain tightness about her. She was thin-lipped and thin-hipped, and looked like if she cracked a smile, her face would shatter.
I threw my jacket on and stepped out on the landing. The noise caught their attention. They looked up; I nodded and went down the stairs and onto the porch.
“Reverend Hawkins,” I said somberly, holding out my hand as they stepped up. “I’m Harry Denton. Sorry to have to meet you under these circumstances.”
He shook my hand. His hand was soft and fat, his grip squishy like kneading warm bread dough. “Mr. Denton,” he said, “thank you for calling us. This is my wife, Mrs. Hawkins.”
I nodded. “Mrs. Hawkins,” I said, being careful to use the two-syllable traditional pronunciation of the word and not the more contemporary Miz.
“Mr. Denton,” she said. Her voice was brittle, dry. I tried to figure out what mistake of nature had put these two in the same family with the warm sweet old lady I’d known the past few years.
“Well, I guess we should go on in.” I turned to the door and fished the key out of my pocket. “Have you had a chance to call the—”
“I’ve already made the arrangements,” he said. “The funeral director is on his way to the morgue now.”
“Good,” I said, unlocking the door.
We walked into the kitchen and I switched the overhead light on. I’d turned the heat down and the place had quickly become damp and cold.
“When will the service be?” I asked. “I’d like to be there.”
“She’ll be at Holt and Chandler up in Goodlettesville,” Mrs. Hawkins’s son said flatly. He looked around the room, sizing the place up like he hadn’t been here in a while.
“Hasn’t changed much,” he commented.
“Nothing ever did,” she said.
I looked at the two of them. “Why don’t I leave you two alone down here? I’m sure there are things you want to take care of.”
I started for the door. “Where did you find her?” he asked.
“In the bathroom. She was on the floor. For what it’s worth, it looks like her heart gave out and she went quickly. They said she didn’t suffer.”
“The Lord calls us in His own way and His own time,” the Reverend said. I didn’t know what the hell that had to do with anything, but I nodded my head in agreement anyway.
“I’ll be upstairs for about another half hour,” I said, “then I have some errands to take care of myself. If you need me for anything, that is. And by the way, I’m happy to keep an eye on the place until you, you know, decide what you’re going to do and all.”
“Actually, Mr. Denton, that won’t be necessary,” the wife said. “We’ll take care of everything from here on out. In fact, there won’t be any need for you to have a key. So if you don’t mind …”
She held out a gloved hand.
“Sure,” I said. I reached into my pocket, laid the key in her hand.
I stood there a moment, strangely awkward. “Thank you,” she said, dismissing me.
I started out the door. “Oh,” I said, “I, uh, had switched the phone lines so her phone would ring in my apartment. Just in case you or anybody else called. I’ll just switch them back.”
The two stared at me without moving, damn near without blinking. I could understand about her; when you smear on makeup with a butter knife, you don’t want to move those facial muscles and risk cracking anything. But I didn’t understand that attitude in the son of a woman like Mrs. Hawkins. I turned and exited.
Outside, under the ever-watchful eye of Crazy Gladys, I rewired the phones and shut the entrance bridge. Then I went upstairs, gathered my stuff, and got the hell out of there. All the time I couldn’t help but wonder what they would do with the house and how much longer I’d have a roof over my head.
Maybe, I speculated, Lonnie had a spare room in the trailer.
The phone was ringing in my office as I got the door opened. I reached for it, then stopped. What if it was another reporter?
I wished I had Caller ID, but, hell, I can’t even pay for regular phone service, let alone the extras. I let the answering machine pick it up.
After the beep, Marsha’s voice started. “Harry, it’s me again and I—”
“Hi,” I said, jerking the phone up and switching off the machine. “I’m so glad it’s you.”
“Where have you been?” she demanded. “You know your home phone’s not working?”
“There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just been disconnected.”
“Disconnected?” Her voice rose.
“I forgot to pay the bill. I feel like a dumb ass.”
“Forgot or didn’t have the money?”
“No, really forgot. I mean, I don’t have the money and if I thought of it, I still wouldn’t have paid it. But I didn’t even think of it.”
She sighed. “Harry, let me loan you some cash. This is ridiculous.”
“No, I’m okay. Really. I’ve made a little money. I’ll pay off the phone company,” I said. “Are you at the office?”
“Yes, and I’m exhausted. I’m on my way home.”
“I tried to call you last night about Robert Jefferson Reed. Have you … done him yet?”
“Finished the paperwork an hour ago. We bumped him up to the head of the line. Famous people get special service here. Why do you ask?”
My God, I thought, she doesn’t know.
“Marsha, have you not read the paper today?”
“Of course not. Who’s got time?”
“And you haven’t talked to Jack Maples?”
“Jack was in and out, but—” She stopped for a beat. I could hear her breathing. “Harry, what are you talking about?”
“Sweetheart, Robert Jefferson Reed was the person I’d been hired to follow. His wife thought he was cheating on her. I was out at their farm in Williamson County last night. I’m the one who found him dead.”
She gasped. “Oh, my God, you’re kidding!”
“I wish I were. And somebody in the Williamson County Sheriff’s Department ran his big mouth and told the papers. I’m front page this morning, darling.”
She moaned into the phone. “Good heavens,” she said. “Has anyone questioned you?”
“Well, yeah, I got questioned by the homicide detective in Williamson County. I gave a statement, they let me go.”
“No, Harry, I meant the papers, the TV stations.”
“I’m dodging them.”
“You better keep dodging them. Reed was murdered.”
“So I figured. He drown?”
“Yes and no,” she said. “We won’t have the tox-screen results back for a couple weeks, so this isn’t final. But he had a fractured hyoid bone, interior tissue damage to the neck, throat, and larynx. Petechial hemorrhaging in the conjunctivae cinched it, I thought.”
I knew just enough of the buzz words to know what she was talking about. Reed had been strangled.
“You thought?” I asked.
“Then when we opened him up, he had water in his lungs and I noted the presence of hemorrhagic edema fluid in the mouth and nostrils.”
“I don’t know what that means, but it sounds impressive.”
“He was frothing at the mouth,” Marsha said.
“Was there a ligature? I don’t think the cops found anything.”
“Bruising’s wide, unfocused. If a ligature was used, it was most likely something like a towel. And since he was in the water, any fibers might have washed. We did scrapings, didn’t find anything under the scope. My guess? A very strong forearm.”
“Could it have been a woman?”
“Oh, sure. But it would have to have been a pretty fit woman with some leverage.”
I re-created the scene mentally and scanned the area. “He was found in an outside Jacuzzi, in a secluded backyard. The whirlpool motor and the motor jets would have disguised the noise of footsteps.”
“Yeah,” Marsha said, into it now. “And if somebody came up behind him and had him locked in a choke hold, the bottom of the tub might have been too slippery for Reed to get a foothold. Then they finished the job by jamming him underwater.”
“He would have splashed around like a landed fish,” I said. “But there wouldn’t have been any getting away from it. Great, so now we know how. The only remaining questions are who and why. How long do you think it took?”
She shrugged. “Several minutes probably. Pretty agonizing way to go.”
She was silent for a moment. “Why did you ask about Jack Maples? What’s he got to do with this?”
“Oh, yeah, I forgot to tell you. I ran into him a while ago.”
“Yeah?”
Then I told her about Mrs. Hawkins. And Shadow.
“You’ve had a rough couple of days,” she said. “Are you all right?”
I reflected a moment. Was I? “Yeah, I guess I’m okay.”
“Harry, I apologize for the other night. I’m not sure I even meant what I said. It’s just that I’ve been under an awful lot of strain. And I feel lousy. All the time. I don’t know what I want anymore.”
“Have you told anyone at the office? About being pregnant, I mean?”
“I haven’t even told Kay. That way, it’ll stay a secret.”
“Not much longer. Jack tried to pump me for information.”
“You say anything?”
“Of course not,” I said. “I got pretty damn chilly with him, though. Maybe he took that for an answer.”
She sighed again. “Doesn’t matter. I can’t hide it much longer.”
“I’d like to see you tonight.”
Silence for a beat. “Yeah, I guess we could both use a little company. I’ll stop at the Kroger on the way home, pick up some dinner.”
“Okay,” I said, smiling. “Around six?”
“Sure. We’ll watch a movie, crash early.”
“Oh, does this mean I should bring a toothbrush?”
“Not necessary. You’ve already got one at my place.”
“Perhaps a change of underwear?”
She snickered. “That’s not my area, Harry. I don’t monitor these things unless they get to be a problem.”
We said a quick goodbye. I was relieved. I’d expected another tense conversation and this one went okay. Damage control was progressing pretty well.
Now if I could get off so easily with Victoria Reed.