I thought I saw the faintest trace of a smile on his face. “What’s it going to be?”
I smiled back at him. I had a feeling I’d lost this one; may as well flow with it. “She told me Fletcher was a compulsive gambler. Up to his ya-ya with some bookie. She didn’t know who. Said they’d been threatening him, and she wanted me to find out what was going on. Arrange to pay off the guy quietly.”
“You believe that?” Spellman asked. “A top gun surgeon, med school faculty, into some street bookies?”
“I’ve seen weirder.” And so had he.
Spellman leaned back in his chair. “Why’d she come to you? You just opened shop. You’re not even in the yellow pages yet. How’d she find you?”
Again, I found myself hesitating. I knew that without realizing it, I’d compromised myself by taking the case in the first place. I’m a little slow on the uptake sometimes, but I did have sense enough to recognize that the worst reflex would be trying to shuck and jive my way out of this.
“Rachel and I were involved in college. Pretty seriously. Then along came this guy Fletcher, and the next thing I know, I’m looking at the world from inside the dumper. She and Fletcher got married, moved away to New York. I moved back here. Then Rachel and Conrad came back when he got his appointment at the hospital. I didn’t see them socially. She saw my byline in the newspaper. When she got in trouble, she tracked me down.”
Spellman made a few notes, then reached up and stroked the rough side of his cheek. “So this guy Fletcher stole your girlfriend. Years later, the lady comes to you for help. Little more than twenty-four hours later, he’s on his way to Forensics.” He paused again, stared right through me. “Interesting,” he observed.
My attitude problem erupted suddenly. “Oh, Jesus, Spellman, use your brain. Who’d be stupid enough to kill somebody, then get caught in the same room with the still-fresh corpse? What, you think I wasted Fletcher, then slammed my own head into the wall to cover it?”
Spellman snapped the notebook shut. “Actually, we already checked that out. Doctor says it would have been tough for you to give yourself that kind of injury, and there was nothing in the room that would have made it any easier for you.”
I shifted in the seat and must have put my weight down the wrong way; this jolt went through my bum ankle, all the way up my leg, and into my rump. The back of my neck was stiffening up. I rotated my head and felt the bones grind and snap together like steel marbles in a box. What minuscule help that spray-on crap had given my pate was long gone. What a night.
“You’re serious, aren’t you? You think I murdered him?”
Spellman shook his head, held a palm out in front of him. “Whoa, fellow, I didn’t say that. We just need everybody’s story, that’s all. We don’t even know what killed him yet. That’s going to have to wait for the medical examiner. The rest of it’s just routine. But you’ve got to admit,” he continued, “this all looks pretty flaky. What if the coroner comes back with a finding that Fletcher was, say, smothered with a pillow? And you the only one in the room.”
“But I wasn’t the only one in the room! Whoever dropped that dump truck on my head was in there, too!”
“But you didn’t get a look at whoever it was. Nobody else saw anybody leave that room. Everybody else on the floor can account for his whereabouts the whole evening. So what happened to this person?”
I looked at him as coldly as I could muster. “My guess is that since he murdered Conrad Fletcher, he probably got the hell out of there.”
I stood up. It came off as a gesture of defiance, but it was mostly that my legs were cramping. Either way, I didn’t care anymore.
“I’ve answered about as many questions as I feel like answering tonight,” I said. “If it’s okay with you gents, I’m going to call a buddy for a ride back to my car.”
“We’re through, anyway,” Spellman said. “I can have a uniform drive you back.”
“No, thanks,” I said. “I think I need a return to civilian life.”
“No problem, fella,” Walter cracked as we walked out the front door of the police station. His BMW was parked on the street, in a spot on the James Robertson Parkway right out front. “I enjoy waking up at three in the morning. Do it all the time.”
It was pretty lousy of me to roust him so early, but I needed a friend to talk to and a lawyer as well. Walter was the only one who met both qualifications.
“How you feel?”
“Like death on a soda cracker,” I answered truthfully.
“You don’t look even that good.”
“Thanks. I owe you one, buddy,” I panted, trying to keep up with him on my bum leg. Walter went at everything like killing rats.
“I’ll take it out on you when the ankle mends.”
Walter unlocked the driver’s door to the BMW and disabled the alarm. He reached down to flick a switch on the armrest and the passenger door lock button popped up. I climbed in to the smell of leather car seats. The night was still bright orange under the streetlights; even the usual middle of the night pedestrian parade of the homeless, the blistered, and the demented had diminished.
“Sun’ll be up soon,” I said.
“Harry,” Walter said, his hand pausing before he twisted the ignition key. “You are through with this business, aren’t you?”
“I don’t know. Can you believe those idiots, thinking I offed Fletcher?”
Walter started the car, then put it into gear. The BMW took off as smooth as a blue point oyster sliding down a throat. “They mirandize you?”
“No.”
“Then they don’t really think you did it. They put a little pressure on, though. Ask you a lot of detailed questions. They want you to say a lot in your statement, even if it’s irrelevant. That way, they can come back in a year or so and impugn your testimony if you do become a suspect.”
“More to work with, huh?”
“You got it,” he said. “You get a look at whoever bashed you?”
“If I had, I’d have told the cops. But no, not a glance.”
“Don’t worry. You’re off the hook. Let it go.”
I fumbled with a row of black switches on my armrest and lowered the window. A big whiff of the rendering plant filled the car. It was like sticking your head in a freshly opened bag of dry dog food. This is the only city I know that locates incinerators, rendering plants, thermal plants, anything that stinks, right downtown.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Don’t know what?”
“Whether or not I’m off the hook.”
“Oh, no,” he sighed. “I’ve seen that glint in your eye before. You’re going to stay on this son of a bitch, aren’t you?”
I turned to him. “Yeah. Think I will.”
“Listen, bunghole, what makes you think Fletcher’s killer won’t do it again?”
“Maybe-”
“Harry, as your attorney, I advise you to go home, drink a quart of tequila, and get one of those cheap weekend deals to the Bahamas.”
“I hate tequila.”
“Whatever.”
“Walter, this may not make any sense, but I’m staring middle age right in the face. I feel like a failure.”
“Oh, c’mon,” he said. “Give it a rest. You’ve been reading too many of those male sensitivity books.”
“No, I mean it. You and I went to college together. Look at you: you drive a BMW; you’re a successful lawyer. Even if you didn’t make partner, you’ve got a future. I live in somebody’s attic in East Nashville, drive a six-year-old Ford, and have an ex-wife who spreads dirt about me to anybody who’ll listen.”
“Harry, you’ve been feeling sorry for yourself ever since the paper canned you.”
“It’s not that, Walt. This is different.” I stared out the window as we drove over the Church Street Viaduct. Below us, street people sleeping in the Gulch were stirring to life.
“I want to know I can do something well, even if it’s just be a cheap, sleazy private investigator.”