Denton - 03 - Way Past Dead (24 page)

I cut over to Belmont Avenue, then out Belmont to one of the side streets. I managed to make my way over to Marsha’s apartment in Green Hills without getting caught in the end-of-rush-hour traffic.

Her mailbox was jammed again, this time with a mixture of catalogs, junk mail, and windowed envelopes that looked like bills. I let myself into the apartment and was amazed how lifeless and cold it seemed. It felt good to be there, though, like it was my only connection to her. Sometimes it seemed like she’d just gone away on a business trip or something, and soon I’d be picking her up at the airport.

I milled around aimlessly, then decided I needed focus
I opened the curtains and then the windows, letting the fresh air fill the place and drive out the stale. I pulled a beer out of the icebox—these things go bad, you know, if you let them sit around too long—and sat down at the dining-room table. I stacked the mail into separate piles: junk, this can wait, this can’t. The pile that couldn’t wait included her electric bill, the phone bill, the water bill, a couple of credit-card bills, and something that looked like a notice from the insurance company.

I opened up the bills and got them in order. There was a couple of hundred on her VISA card, another hundred or so on a Platinum American Express. The charges were all recent. I figured Marsha paid her cards off every month, unlike some of us who have to bloody well live off them.

I went into the den and dug through her desk until I found the extra checks she’d mentioned. There were a couple of payment books in there, one for the mortgage company and one for her car loan. I pulled them out and carried them back into the dining room. It was getting close to the end of the month. I thought I may as well write checks for those as well.

I opened the mortgage coupon book and gasped.
Twelve hundred a month in mortgage payment for a freaking condo!
Excuse me, but you can get a pretty damn nice house around here for that much. Who’d pay that much for a condominium, or as my father used to call them, condo-
minimums?

That intake of breath was nothing, though, compared with the heart tremor I had when I opened the car payment book.

“Four hundred seventy-two dollars and sixty-eight cents a month in car payment!”
I yelped. I knew you didn’t get a Porsche 911 for the same price as a Ford Fiesta, but jeez, that much? Marsha paid almost as much a month for a car payment as I paid for apartment and office rent put together.

I was definitely dating above my station.

Figuring that forgery would make me less uncomfortable than putting Marsha’s money in my checking account, I signed her name to all the checks and stuffed them into the appropriate envelopes. I’d seen her name signed before, and tried to halfway imitate it. Anybody who looked closely would never let it pass, but all the checks were routine monthly obligations, so who’d look that closely?

Doing her bookkeeping, sorting, and posting took me the better part of forty-five minutes. By then I was getting the beginnings of a blood-sugar-crash headache. I’d been so preoccupied since getting back to town last weekend that with the exception of dropping in at Mrs. Lee’s, I’d been living off whatever I could scrounge out of my own kitchen and fast-food joints.

Then I remembered Marsha wanted me to clean out her refrigerator. I was peckish, and a tad short of cash, so why not combine the two agendas into one? I went through the refrigerator and found enough produce to make a big salad, as well as some eggs that were only a few days beyond their expiration date, and a couple of hunks of gourmet cheese that had the beginnings of a green sweater growing around the edges. A quart of milk was starting to turn, but being a bachelor, I was used to that. I pulled the salad together, then whipped up an omelette with spinach, feta cheese, and baby Swiss—minus the green fuzzy stuff.

An old Bogart film was on American Movie Classics, so I sat down to a solitary feast, a great flick, and a couple more of Marsha’s beers. The evening went on and fatigue caught up with me. A little human activity had transformed Marsha’s condo into a warm, safe, and comfortable place. I was in no hurry to get anywhere, and found myself slipping off toward the end of the movie. When I woke up, it was after ten. I changed channels quickly, but had already missed the local
news. I thought about going home, but the drive was too long and I didn’t feel like facing my place alone.

I washed the dishes and took a quick shower, then settled into bed with one last beer. I drifted in and out, tuned to the local ABC affiliate, until
Nightline
came on at eleven-thirty. I rarely get to watch Koppel because the local station delays the program to work in an hour’s worth of syndicated oldies: M*A*S*H and
The Cosby Show
, the classics that win their respective time slots even though most people have the scripts memorized.

I was shallow enough into twilight sleep to recognize the opening theme music and claw my way to alertness. Live from Nashville, the Grand Ole Hostage Situation. Koppel did a quick recap, then introduced the filmed segment of the show.

A crisp, cool professional whose name I didn’t recognize stood before the barricade at the foot of the hill on First Avenue. “Ted, it would be almost comical, if it weren’t for all the live ammo,” he began. “A dozen armed Winnebagos manned by religious fanatics demanding the return of the corpse of their leader’s wife have held off the Nashville Police Department for nearly a week now. And there appears to be no break in the situation expected anytime soon.”

The correspondent rattled on, summarizing the latest stuff everybody here already knew, then cut away to a remote beside the walled estate of Brother Woodrow Tyberious Hogg.

“The Pentecoastal Enochians are an offshoot fundamentalist sect that bases its bizarre theology on a connection between the resurrection outlined in the New Testament with Enoch of the Old Testament, who was the seventh generation in line from Adam and only lived three hundred and sixty-five years, a relatively short life span in biblical days. The mystical conjunction of seven and three hundred sixty-five has been used by the Enochians to predict the end of the world, which
they believe will happen on October nineteenth, 1998. At the same time, the Pentecostal Enochians take an extreme view of the resurrection of the body, maintaining that cremation, dissection, and autopsy all deny everlasting life to the believer.

“The result,” the correspondent added, “has produced chaos.”

Cut to a bad, homemade video of a polyester-suited, overweight Brother Tyberious Hogg standing red-faced at a podium, Bible in hand, spit flying from his mouth as he screamed:

“By faith Enoch was translated that he should
not
see death! Hebrews 11:5! And have hope toward God, which they themselves also allow, that there shall be a resurrection of the dead, both of the just and the unjust!”

The camera focused on the wide-eyed, enraptured audience, some with their heads rolled back, tongues exposed, spewing forth glossolalia as Brother Hogg took off in another direction with his own dramatic reading from what I thought I recognized as the Book of Revelations:

Then we cut again to a shining fat face shrouded in the angelic wings of hair that sprouted down the side of a bouffant hairdo. It was Sister Evangeline, and she was near The Rapture herself as Brother Woody really cranked it up:

Weird stuff, I thought. Very bizarre. Cut back to the
Nightline
correspondent, who explained that ex-cult members had revealed that the group became polarized over Brother Woodrow Tyberious Hogg’s recent disclosure that God came to him in a dream and told him to take another wife.

And wouldn’t you know it, the wife God told him to take was Sister Jennifer, the sixteen-year-old daughter of one of the believers.

Now, I thought, we get down to it.

Sister Evangeline had gone along with it for a while, believing, of course, that her husband’s dream was a divine revelation of the Lord. Pentecostal Enochians don’t smoke, drink, dance, wear makeup, or play music during services, but if God tells them to bed a sixteen-year-old—hey, go for it. And gone for it they had, until Brother Woody tried to give Sister Evangeline’s Cadillac to his new wife, Sister Jennifer. Sister Evangeline went ballistic, and apparently wound up overdoing what was supposed to be a simple dramatic suicide attempt.

As Ted Koppel introduced the guest for the discussion portion of the show, I laughed so hard I almost rolled off the side of the bed. I couldn’t take it anymore, so polished off the beer, buried myself beneath Marsha’s thick comforter, and pretended I could smell her hair on the pillow.

Maybe it’s a measure of how frazzled I am these days, but I dropped off to sleep without setting an alarm clock. I’d completely forgotten my nine o’clock appointment with Mac Ford. I awoke in stages: first this dreamy, languorous, aroused state; then a dim awareness
that there were other things that should have been on my mind; then a growing sense of panic; and finally, full-blown hysteria as I got my eyes open enough to hone in on the alarm clock, which read 8:25.

I shot out of bed and dashed for the bathroom, brushed my teeth, then scrambled around the bathroom until I found a package of pink disposable razors intended for legs rather than cheeks. I lathered my face with bar soap and raked the razor over stubble, hoping I wouldn’t open up a spurter.

I could shave and wash my face, comb my hair, and get most of the sleep out of my eyes, but I couldn’t disguise the fact that the same clothes I had on yesterday were going back on today. I took a wild guess that Mac Ford wouldn’t care, even if he noticed. I was a little embarrassed about Alvy Barnes, though.

What the hell, I thought as I ran out the door with fifteen minutes to get from Green Hills to Music Row, you can carry this personal-grooming stuff too far if you’re not careful.

Decades ago, the two parallel avenues that make up Music Row were just a couple of residential streets in Nashville. As the music business moved in, more and more of the older homes were taken over for commercial uses. Some of the most powerful independent record companies, agents, managers, accountants, and lawyers had set up offices in renovated old houses. Mac Ford owned one of them, and I was driving like hell to get there before nine o’clock.

All the craziness was for nothing. I pulled into a pea-gravel parking lot in front of a gray, nondescript two-story Cape Cod. I had about ninety seconds to spare before being late as I stepped through the oak-and-beveled-glass front door. Beige leather sofas sat in front of an open fireplace in what had once been someone’s living room. Behind them, against the opposite wall, a receptionist sat at a desk manning a phone system that
had eight lines all lit at once. I stood before her, trying to calm my breathing after the mad rush through town.

“May I help you?” she asked quickly between flashing lights.

“I had a nine o’clock with Mac Ford,” I said.

“I don’t think he’s in yet. Let me check with Alvy.”

I sat down while the receptionist juggled the phone lines and tried to reach Mac Ford’s assistant. I settled into the soft, cool leather with an audible squish. The morning newspaper sat rolled up on a coffee table between the sofas. I picked it up and unfolded it. The news media having the attention span of a Chihuahua on methamphetamine-flavored Alpo, the hostage situation at the morgue had already faded to Section B importance. Today’s lead story was on another shoot-out at a local public high school, this one ending when a Metro cop assigned to security duty had to blow away a sixteen-year-old who wouldn’t drop his 9mm Glock because it would’ve dissed him in front of his homeys.

I shook my head and whispered: “Fucking Looney Tunes …”

By the time I finished the story, with the requisite sidebar about how the anguished parents were going to file police-brutality charges and one motherthumper of a civil suit, Alvy Barnes had descended the wide oak staircase with an apologetic look.

“I’m sorry, Harry, Mac’s not in yet. And I haven’t heard from him.”

“Oh,” I said, trying to keep a smile on my face. “Can I hang around for a bit? I’d like to see him before he leaves town this afternoon.”

“Sure,” she said, very sweetly. “Why don’t I get you a cup of coffee?”

“That’d be great. Cream and light sugar, if you’ve got it.”

“I’ll bring it right in.”

Alvy walked down a hallway behind the receptionist and disappeared. She seemed intelligent, and was certainly
young and attractive in a Generation-X sort of way. I never thought I’d be old enough to look at women that age and think:
She’s too young for me
—but, damn, here I am.

I wondered if Mac Ford was sleeping with her.

Alvy returned with a steaming Styrofoam cup of coffee that felt as good going down as CPR to a dying man.

“That’s great,” I said after the first sip. “Thanks. I’ll just sit down here and catch Mac when he comes in.”

She smiled again and put her hand on my arm. “I’ll take care of that. He parks in the back and sneaks in through the rear stairway.”

“Hiding out, huh?”

She leaned toward me, her hand brushing against my forearm even harder. “There’s a few out there he needs to dodge.”

I watched her walk back up the stairs. I tried to avoid an avalanche of lascivious fantasies without much success. I sat down and picked up the paper with one hand, the coffee cup firmly glued in the other.

Section B was local news, with Day Six of the hostage story as the lead. A little clock in the upper right-hand corner of the page ticked off the hours that the crisis had gone on. A sidebar described the
Nightline
installment from last night, not without some measure of civic pride. There was a brief mention in the main story of Marsha and the other people locked in the morgue, but since no one in the media knew about Marsha’s private cellular-phone number, they hadn’t been available for interviews.