Lanie, my ex-wife, was an assistant vice president at the city’s largest advertising agency when we were married. Since we divorced, she’s become a group V.P. in charge of acquisitions for a fifteen-state region. Don’t have to look too hard to find out how she’s handling the breakup. Lanie’s tough, ambitious, attractive. She’s also ten years younger than me. We met when she was new in the business and hustling reporters to get press releases published. She brought in a couple one day, and I offered to take her on a tour of the paper. What the hell, she was a looker, and I was currently unattached. I wound up taking her to lunch in the company cafeteria. It really knocked her panty hose off when, in mid-bite, the publisher himself came up and patted me on the back over a story I’d just done about the lack of sprinklers and fire-code violations in one of the downtown office buildings. We called each other by first names, laughed around a bit. I introduced her to him, and he kissed her hand, European-style. Lanie thought she was in high cotton, and she thought I was freaking Walter Cronkite or something.
Six months later we were married. The paper did a feature on the wedding. One of the television stations even did a spot. Her parents were awed by it all. Mine were pretty blown away, too.
It was only after we’d been married a year or so, and had the chance to share a joint checking account and file our taxes together as married people, that Lanie figured out that she was fresh out of college, two years into a career in business, and was already making more than me. I explained to her that most newspaper people rarely make more than about thirty-five grand a year under the best of circumstances, no matter how hot they are, and my circumstances were nowhere near the best. And while I might move on to a larger paper in a bigger city someday, for now I was pretty happy and didn’t plan on going anywhere.
When she was made assistant V.P., the trouble started. It wasn’t merely that she was doing better. We both could have lived with that. It was more that I didn’t want to do any better. She couldn’t imagine that I could work the hours I worked, get as many front-page bylines as I did, and still be willing to settle for a three percent annual raise every year.
She encouraged me to go into television, where the truly big bucks are. For a while, I considered it. But even more than print journalism, broadcast journalism is as much entertainment as anything else. There was no way I could endure the happy horseshit that permeates the local news every night and still keep my lunch down. Sooner or later, I’d wind up pushing somebody’s button and get fired, which I figured would never happen on the paper.
Reality, of course, had a way of figuring differently.
Anyway, my lack of ambition doomed the marriage, and pretty soon, when we couldn’t qualify for the loan she wanted to buy the house out in Belle Meade, and we couldn’t take the European vacation because the paper didn’t give me that much vacation time, and not only could I not pay for a Jaguar, I didn’t even want one.… Well, things went down the dumper fast. I got called out one night to cover a major apartment-complex fire. It wasn’t my usual beat, but the late night cityside guy was doing twenty-eight in an inpatient dry-out unit. When I got back in at five in the morning, Lanie’d packed a bag and moved out. I got served a week later. And that was, as they say, all she wrote.
It wouldn’t be so rough if I hadn’t gotten myself ashcanned on the paper. There was a certain satisfaction in knowing that when Lanie drove her Alfa into the parking lot of her West End condo, took the elevator up to her well-furnished living room, poured herself a glass of twenty-dollar-a-bottle wine, and settled back to look at her daily paper, she was more likely than not to run into my smiling name, still there in her life and in her face. Now even that satisfaction was gone.
I don’t usually allow myself to drift into self-pity. Ironically, I didn’t realize how much being a hotshot newspaper reporter meant to me, how much seeing my name on page one above-the-fold made up for so much, not the least of which was the relatively puny paycheck. In one of our last conversations, Lanie insisted she was leaving me because I lacked ambition. She said that the contacts I’d made and the influence I had on the paper and in the community were wasted-because I refused to take advantage of them.
Maybe she’s right. I could always get a job as a P.R. flack for somebody and make double the dough I was making at the paper. Buy a nicer car, get a nicer place. Go back to pinstripes and drinks after dinner at Maude’s Courtyard and Mario’s. This business of being a private investigator’s just not worth it. I didn’t have any idea what I was getting into, don’t have any idea what I’m doing, and am probably going to do more damage than good if I don’t cut and run while I still can.
I finished off the last inch of flat, warm beer. Somehow, it felt appropriate to be sitting in the middle of the country music capital of the world crying in my beer. Any minute now, I was going to break into a chorus of some George Jones song. Only I don’t know the words, and it’s hard to sing George Jones when the crying in your beer only extends to two over the whole evening. I just don’t like beer well enough to drink enough of it to cry in.
Hell, I can’t sing, I can’t drink, and I can’t detect. Maybe I can sleep.
I got up, limped into the kitchen to turn off the lights-though my leg wasn’t really hurting anymore-and to see if there wasn’t some orange juice in the fridge. Maybe there was an old movie on television.
The kitchen clock said 12:20. The neighborhood is finally quiet about that hour. Downstairs, Mrs. Hawkins, my landlady, would have removed her hearing aids, put her four cats out, and be snuggled under her handmade comforter. I felt alone, maybe a little lonely, but I was all right with that. Maybe I’d blow this whole business off and find something else to do with my life.
I leaned across to douse the kitchen light and lock up. Just as the light disappeared, the kitchen door imploded, the heavy brass doorknob bouncing off the wall behind it. A black form came at me out of the darkness, blocking out all light behind it. Something caught me in the chest, threw me backward. I felt myself airborne for a split second. Then I slammed down on the kitchen floor and lay there helpless, random sparkles going off behind my eyelids, and the back of my head pounding like a drumbeat.
Then there was weight on me, and I couldn’t move my arms, an oppressive, awful heaviness that was crushing my chest, pinning me to the floor, with the world going blacker around me by the second.
In what I was afraid was going to be my last coherent thought, I realized I couldn’t breathe anymore.
21
It felt like the whole damned house had caved in on me. But then, in the darkness of the kitchen broken only by dusty shafts of silver cast by distant streetlights shining through the windows, I felt hot breath on my face.
“You and I are going to talk,” a gruff, low voice said. I struggled to recognize the voice and couldn’t. But I recognized the peculiar smell that came with the hot breath.
Bubba Hayes.
I’d been in trouble before, had seen times in my life where I wondered if I were going to see another day. Like when I did the undercover story on suburban kids going into the projects to buy crack and nearly got my head blown off in the crossfire of a street corner shootout. But never have I felt as close to the grim reaper as I did that very second, with the three-hundred-pound-plus Reverend Bubba Hayes sitting on my chest.
There was one thing Bubba had to realize: until he got off my chest, it was going to be a somewhat one-sided conversation. “Can’t …” I managed to whisper, “breathe …”