“I intend to find out. And when I do …”
A silence as threatening and cold as any I’d ever endured lay between us. I felt sorry for whoever killed Mr. Kennedy. If the killer were lucky, the law would get him before Bubba could, and all he’d have to face was the electric chair.
Now he had me thinking. Why would somebody kill Mr. Kennedy?
“There’re only two reasons somebody would have killed him,” I said.
“And?”
“One, Mr. Kennedy was getting close to figuring out who killed Conrad Fletcher. Two, Mr. Kennedy was getting close to someone who was getting close to finding out who killed Fletcher. And they killed Mr. Kennedy to keep control of the situation.”
“You ain’t making sense, boy.”
“No, think about it.” I stood up, energized by the notion that maybe I was closer to figuring this out than I had imagined. One thing was certain: if reason number one was not the motive for killing Mr. Kennedy, then reason number two almost had to revolve around me. There was nobody else out there.
“Except for the police,” I said, “I’m the only one who’s actively looking for Conrad’s murderer. If I’m getting close, then the killer’s going to have to play his hand. But he has to play his hand when it suits him. And with Mr. Kennedy in the picture, there was one more thing he’d have to control. With Mr. Kennedy out of the way, it’s just me and the killer.
“To paraphrase a disgustingly racist, politically incorrect saying,” I ventured after a moment, “Mr. Kennedy was the Ubangi in the fuel supply.”
The Reverend Bubba Hayes swiveled in the tiny chrome and vinyl kitchen chair, a squeal cutting the air from where the legs screwed into the base. If the chair didn’t give way with him on it, it might last the night. But it’d never be the same again.
“I don’t completely understand what you’re saying, boy.” Then there was silence for a moment, until he spoke again. “But what I do understand makes sense.”
I closed my eyes, trying to concentrate through the pain and the fatigue.
“Something’s wrong here,” I said. “And I’m not seeing it. I’m closer than I realize. Don’t you see, Bubba? I’m close. The answer’s out there, and I’m just not seeing it.”
He said something, but by then I wasn’t paying attention anymore. I stood up and rubbed my temples. Damn, it’s here somewhere. I know it is.
It’s got to be.
22
Bubba Hayes’s last remark before he left at three A.M. was that if he found out I had anything to do with Mr. Kennedy’s death, he was going to make damn sure I was looking out at the world from inside a dog food can.
Talk about raising the stakes. I knew I didn’t have anything to do with Mr. Kennedy’s death, but now I had to convince Bubba. And while I’m at it, I should work on convincing the Metro Homicide Squad I didn’t kill Fletcher. Spellman had announced to the media I was no longer a suspect. But the police, I knew from hard experience, could be less than forthright.
Everybody thinks I killed somebody. Wonder if I can get my old job back.
Not to sound like a Pollyanna, but one bonus did come from Bubba’s nocturnal visit: the realization that I wasn’t as far off the mark as I thought. That was good. On the other hand, I’d personally seen two dead bodies that were the result of the killer’s handiwork, and if he killed once, he’d kill again. Maybe me. That was bad.
Suddenly, I had this sensation that I was dealing with some really serious stuff. I don’t know why, but up to now it felt on some level like a game to me. I go up, I go down, I go all around, chasing after something as if it’s some kind of 3-D, real-time version of Clue. Colonel Mustard did it with the pipe wrench in the drawing room.
Only this time, if you lose the game, Colonel Mustard does you. And it’s for real.
That dose of reality kept me up all night. When Bubba finally plodded down the metal staircase to Mrs. Hawkins’s backyard, thankfully not pulling the side of the house down as he went, I pushed the door to and leaned a chair against it, figuring I’d repair the splintered doorjamb tomorrow. Then I checked all the windows. I settled into bed, but as close as I could get to sleep, it may as well’ve been in the next county.
Finally, around six, I rolled out of the sack and made a pot of coffee. I looked in the mirror and saw that my nose was still swollen, with a few disgusting flakes of dried blood on my cheek, a little more mixed in with my hair. There’d been a little blood seepage as well from the closure strips on the back of my head. Damn, that thing was never going to heal if people didn’t stop slamming me around like a fifty-pound sack of dried dog food.
Dog food, again. Bad joke.
I cranked the shower up full blast and stood under the spray until the hot water ran out. Every muscle in my body, it seemed, ached. I was hurting in places I hadn’t hurt since I’d gone out for football my freshman year at prep school. All it took was two workouts; I never came back for the third. My father called me a quitter, until the coach told him I was, at 125 pounds, the smallest kid he’d ever seen go out for varsity football, and he was surprised I made it through two days.
I’d felt like a quitter last night as well, at least until Bubba Hayes showed up and had the unfathomable kindness to beat some sense into me. He’d never know what a favor he’d done, and while somewhere inside there was part of me that wanted to tie him down and jump on his head for an hour or two, I was strangely grateful to him.
Put back together as well as I could be, I finished the coffee and headed to the hospital. I had no idea if Jane Collingswood was still on duty or not. I knew residents pulled some god-awful shifts, so I figured she might be there. I was going to hunt her down, and Zitin, too. It was time to get some answers.
There was the usual midday construction on the freeway; I could see as I crossed the Shelby Street Bridge that traffic was backed up in both directions all the way to the horizon. I decided to skip that experience and threaded my way through the downtown traffic, up past the Union Rescue Mission, just over from the downtown bus terminal, and maneuvered my way onto Broadway. There was construction there as well, with traffic slowed to walking speed. The Ford began overheating, the indicator moving up fast toward the “oh, hell” range. I loosened my tie, having already thrown my jacket into the seat next to me. I rolled my shirtsleeves up past my elbow. Life went on like that for nearly forty minutes before I found a parking space six blocks from the hospital.
Lack of sleep, physical abuse, urban stress-by the time I walked into the air-conditioned lobby of the medical center, I was a dripping mess. By now, I pretty well knew my way around, so I walked past the lobby, down a hall, turned left onto a corridor that looked as long as a football stadium, and walked about twenty minutes. At the end of the hall, two closed beige metal doors supported a sign that said EMERGENCY ROOM-AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY and below that ALL OTHERS USE OUTSIDE ENTRANCE.
I walked out a glass door and into the heat. A curved drive wide enough for ambulances three abreast ran from the street, under a concrete canopy, and back out onto the street. The drive was empty save for one quiet orange and white van that had emblazoned on the side in blue paint: PARAMEDIC EXTRICATION UNIT.
I didn’t even want to speculate on that one. I walked past the van onto the breezeway that led up to a series of glass doors, the same ones I’d gone through what seemed so many nights before, back when life was simpler and nobody was threatening to kill me, jail me, fill-in-the-blank me.
The emergency room was its usual buzz. The E.R. people seemed frenetic, even when there was only a couple of patients waiting around with skateboard injuries. Stress junkies, they’ve got to be. Otherwise, they’d never last.
The calm, suited woman in the middle of this maelstrom sat behind a high circular desk with a row of clipboards set out in front of her. I walked up to the counter and leaned over to look at her.