“Am I under arrest?”
Spellman grinned again. “You do anything to get arrested for?”
“No, definitely not.”
“Then this is only a request.”
I brought up my hand and rubbed my eyes, stretching the skin on my face to try to bring some feeling back into it. The only feeling, though, was the searing pain in the back of my head.
“You work this late all the time?” I asked.
“Just like being a doctor. Some nights you’re on call, some nights you’re not.”
“The press pick up on this yet?”
“If they haven’t, they will soon.”
“You notified the decedent’s next-of-kin?”
“Why don’t you let me ask the questions, Mr. Denton.”
“I just thought she ought to be called.”
“What’s it to you?”
I looked up at him. There were dark circles under his eyes as well. Guess everybody looks like hell in the middle of the night.
“That’s who I’m working for,” I said, at least savvy enough to know that in this state, client privilege doesn’t extend to P.I.s. “Fletcher’s wife hired me to get him out of a jam.”
Sergeant Spellman’s eyes flicked from his notebook to me, then back down. “Yeah,” he said. “We need to talk.”
Which is how I found myself on the way to the Metropolitan Nashville/Davidson County Criminal Justice Center at just shy of two o’clock in the freaking morning.
6
Spellman offered to give me a ride downtown; I was too tired to argue otherwise. We pulled out of the med center parking lot onto 21st Avenue. The white and fluorescent blues of the emergency room faded quickly into the dark oranges of the city streetlights and the neon rainbows of restaurant signs, retail shops, all-night pancake houses. At two in the morning, Nashville’s a strange compound of insomniac music types, graveyard-shift workers, and people looking for love or trouble and not caring very much which one they find first.
I sat in the unmarked Ford Crown Victoria and rested my head against the back of the seat. Every time we hit a pothole my head felt like it was coming apart. But I was too tired to sit up straight.
“What happens next?” I asked.
“We just want a statement from you. That’s all.” Spellman navigated expertly through the thick traffic on Broadway. I thought of the line from some twenty-five-year-old Rolling Stones lament: Don’t people ever want to go to bed.…
“There’s not much to say, I just came across the guy-”
“Not now,” Spellman said. “Wait till we get downtown.”
I settled back as we crossed over I-40 and drove past Union Station. My uncle, the one I’m named after, worked the L amp; N railroad for decades before he died, back before the automobile makers conspired to screw the trains into oblivion. Now only freight trains came through the station, and it’s mostly home for pigeons.
Ten minutes later, I followed Spellman into the police station, down the earth-tone carpeted halls to an interview room. It was quiet there in the middle of the night, a cold kind of quiet.
I sat at a table in front of a portable tape recorder. Spell-man sat across from me and opened his notebook. Then he leaned across and fiddled with the tape recorder.
“Want anything? Coffee, a Coke maybe?”
“Cup of coffee’d be great,” I answered. “Milk, half a sugar.”
He stood back up, left the room for a minute. There was a mirror on the wall behind me. I wondered who was watching from the other side. Figured I’d better not pick my nose or scratch my crotch.
Spellman came in with a Styrofoam cup in each hand. Steam wafted off the coffee.
“Powdered’s all we had. Can’t keep milk around here. It starts stinking after awhile.”
“No problem.”
I sipped the coffee as Spellman jacked around with the tape recorder again, then pressed the RECORD button. He recited his title and name, the date and time, then asked me to state my full name and address into the mike.
So asked, so done. Then Spellman opened his notebook and scanned a page of notes. “Tell me what happened from the time you got to the medical center until you found Dr. Fletcher’s body,” he instructed.
I began the narrative. It felt strange trying to recollect, and recreate in my mind, an entire evening’s events. Like most people, I go through life relatively oblivious to everything around me. There’s so much stimulation, so much stress, these days, that if you paid attention to everything, you’d never get anything done and lose your sanity in the process. It’s like some New Age fruitcake telling you to live every day as if it were your last; hell, that’s impossible. You’d be so overloaded you’d explode, and it would be your last day.
It only took a few minutes to recite the tale. I tried to remember everything like a professional. It was impossible to tell from Spellman’s face what he thought. He sat there in his tan shirt and brown flowered polyester necktie like a law enforcement sphinx, making a few notes here and there and watching the tape recorder spin.
Then his tone changed. Suddenly, we were into details.
“Where did you park your car?”
“Off 21st, a block or so from the hospital.”
“Where off 21st?”
I thought for a moment. “I don’t know the name of the street. I mean, this is Nashville, man. I saw a space, I grabbed it.”
“You don’t know where your car is?”
“Of course, I know where my car is. I just don’t know the name of the street.”
“Who else knew you were going to the hospital?”
“Nobody.”
“You didn’t call anybody?”
“I live alone, Lieutenant. My landlady was asleep.”
“You didn’t call a girlfriend? Maybe tell her you were meeting her later?”
“I’m not seeing anyone right now.”
He raised an eyebrow. “No relationships with women, huh?”
I cocked an eyebrow right back at him. What the hell was going on here?
“I said not right now. I didn’t mean never.”
“Who’s your client?”
I hesitated, then remembered he already knew. “Rachel Fletcher, Conrad Fletcher’s wife.”
He was firing questions like this was the freaking Double Jeopardy round: When did she hire you? Where? How much did she pay you?
“Why did you wait until ten at night to go to the emergency room?”
“My ankle didn’t start hurting bad until then.”
“Why did you go looking for Fletcher?”
I felt myself going dizzy again. “I don’t know. Not really. I was thinking I ought to connect with the guy. Maybe talk to him. I was going to wing it, make it up as I went along. Maybe that wasn’t such a good idea.”
“Tell me again the sequence of events in the hallway.”
“I heard a noise behind me. I turned. There was a nurse coming out of a room.”
“Was it the room where Fletcher was?”
“Maybe,” I said. “I’m not sure. It was dark. I was at the other end of the hall.”
“Get a look at her?”
“I vaguely remember thinking it odd that she didn’t have a clipboard or anything. She just stood there, staring at me.”
“Then?”
“She seemed stiff, awkward. Then she reached up and kind of smoothed down her blouse. I turned away for a sec. When I turned back, she was gone. I don’t know where. Maybe into another room. There’s a stairwell exit down at that end of the hall, too. Anyway, I thought it was weird. That’s when I headed down the hall and found him.”
Then the clincher: “Why did Rachel Fletcher hire you?”
I hesitated, decided I’d had about enough. “Client privilege,” I said. “That’s personal information between me and my client.”
Color rose in Spellman’s face. Twenty-five years ago, he’d have brought in a couple of the boys with rubber hoses to work me over. But that was then, as they say, and this is now, and I’ve got to give Spellman credit: he kept his cool.
“Client privilege is not recognized in a private investigator-client relationship. We can either have you deposed by the district attorney, or we could stretch it and have you charged with interfering with a police investigation.”