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Nominee: Shamus Award For Best Original P.I. Paperback
Nominee: Anthony Award for Best Original Paperback
Don't get me wrong; I like sex.
Really.
It's just that I never——well, I never thought, how do I say this? Never thought that there'd be so much of it.
But wait, let me backtrack just a bit. When I was a reporter, before I got fired from the newspaper and entered the glamorous world of private investigating, I got to be friends with an inmate out at "The Walls," the old Tennessee State Penitentiary. Many convicts are compulsive letter writers, and the victims of their correspondence are usually either women or reporters.
This particular jailbird was a fellow named William "Baby Face" Yeager, and I finally answered his letters out of curiosity more than anything else. Baby Face——so nicknamed because he was still getting carded buying beer at forty——was a real party animal in his younger days, but one night he passed out half-on and half-off a railroad track outside Memphis. The Panama Limited came along and whacked off both his legs just above the knee as neatly as if he'd paid a surgeon to do it for him.
His nurse in the rehab home was an African-American dwarf named Darnelle. Given that they were now about the same height——and that they considered this a sufficient enough emotional connection to sustain a relationship——Baby Face and Darnelle soon fell in love. When Baby Face was released with a new pair of artificial legs and a guaranteed four hundred dollars a month for life from Social Security disability, he and Darnelle set up shop in a trailer outside a little town just east of Nashville called Lebanon.
One night, Darnelle and Baby Face got to drinking, and the next thing you know, there was a big fight. Darnelle had a mouth on her far out of proportion to her diminutive size, and she apparently wasn't afraid to use it. Baby Face, who was as intellectually challenged as he was physically, was an unarmed man in this battle of verbal wit. He finally felt he had no recourse but to go after her. No one's ever been able to figure out the exact logistics, but somehow Baby Face got Darnelle pinned in a corner, and then proceeded to beat her to death with one of his prosthetic limbs.
Baby Face pulled The Bitch out of it——a life sentence at The Walls——with his earliest parole date set for June, 2047. One has to wonder if the nickname will still apply by then.
I used to go visit Baby Face whenever I felt in need of a good laugh. We'd sit on the picnic grounds, away from the open copulating that took place on the picnic tables nearest the far corner of the chain-link fence, and he'd babble away about the system.
One day we got to talking about how weird life gets without women. I hadn't yet met the woman who would become my first ex-wife, so I was familiar with long dry spells. And he started talking about the ways you handle it in prison, and the hierarchy of sexual release. There were the standard, mostly solitary, ways of course. Then there were the ones more unique to prison: ritual gang rape, girlfriends, and the guys who were, he maintained, the most dangerous men in prison: sissies.
Sissies, he explained, were the men who wore makeup, tight pants, walked with an exaggerated swish, and would cut your heart out if you said the wrong thing to them.
"But how could you, I mean—— how could you do it with them?" I asked.
"Hey, man," he laughed. "Nobody's chain lays straight."
Okay, so it's not grammatically correct. But it pretty well sums up the human condition. Nobody's chain lays straight. We've all got kinks in our links, little dark corners in the psyche that we'd just as soon not have anyone illuminate. Desires, obsessions, urges, predilections, tastes. Things we'd like to try, even if just once.
Secrets.
Only thing is, until Betty Jameson called my office a few weeks ago and asked me to drop by her home in Belle Meade that afternoon, I thought my chain lay about as straight as anyone's. The closest I've ever come to pushing the sexual envelope was dating two women at the same time when I was a Boston College undergraduate in the early-70's. That was back before AIDS, though, and before a whole laundry list of STDs brought the sexual revolution to a grinding——if you'll pardon the expression——halt. Dating two women, and frankly only intermittently sleeping with either of them, was about as risqué as I ever got.
Not only that, it was about as risqué as I ever wanted to get. All my life——with that one exception——I've been a practitioner of serial monogamy, never getting into one relationship without severing another. It was never an ethical issue; I'm just a lousy juggler.
And while that wasn't a pain-free way to handle one's affairs, it was much simpler. I clung to that policy through the frustration of a deteriorating marriage and the frontier of divorce. Even now, I'm deeply involved with only one woman——Dr. Marsha Helms, the assistant medical examiner for Metropolitan Nashville and Davidson County. We've been seeing each other nearly three years now, and in that time, never a thought of straying.
Well, okay, maybe a thought or two now and then. After all, I'm in what is referred to in the 90s as a "committed relationship," but hell, I'm not dead.
At least not today. That could change any minute, though. One of the things I've learned in the past few weeks is just how quickly that can change.
And it all started when Betty Jameson called my office one afternoon and said: "Mr. Denton, I have a problem...."
Every time I drive in Belle Meade, the wealthiest and most exclusive of Nashville enclaves, I get tangled up. The streets wind around, change names, are more confusing than even the normal Nashville maze. The other source of discomfort, though, is that I've never been particularly fond of rich people; they have too much money, and it skews their perspective. Come to think of it, it doesn't do mine any good.
I had an address on Tyne Boulevard and instructions to turn left off Harding Road onto Belle Meade Boulevard, then head toward the Belle Meade Country Club and Percy Warner Park. In theory, I'd find Tyne tucked in there somewhere.
I caught a glimpse of the black-and-gold street sign announcing Tyne Boulevard just as I passed it. I growled under my breath, then made a U-turn at the next break in the median. I made my turn, then fumbled with the note in my jacket pocket to find the house number.
The Jameson's black, ornate wrought iron gate caught my attention first. It hung between two red brick pillars the size of small silos. In the middle of the gate, woven into the iron, was a circle with a cursive J in the center.
I pulled onto the parqueted brick drive and nosed up to the fence. A silver box mounted on a curved pole protruded into the driveway. I pressed a green button below a speaker grille and waited.
"Yes?" an older woman's voice asked, nearly drowned out by the buzzing of the speaker.
"I'm Harry James Denton," I called. "I have an appointment with Betty Jameson."
I waited for some response, but got none. Then I heard the clicking of relays and the grind of an electric motor. The gate swung open slowly. I eased the car past as soon as the opening was wide enough, then headed up a long, circular drive that swung lazily around the front of a two-story Colonial mansion.
I whistled softly. So this is how the other half lives. I hadn't had a chance to check out the Jamesons before the appointment. Wonder where it all came from.
I took the brick steps up to the verandah that ran the width of the house. Tall Doric columns supported the wide, two-story high roof. Oak double doors twelve-feet high slowly opened in front of me, eased inward by an elderly black woman in a gray maid's uniform.
"Hi," I said, stepping forward. "I'm Harry Ja——"
"Come in, Mr. Denton," she said in weary tones. "Miss Betty's waiting for you."
Her voice had been the one on the gate speaker. Her hair was conked——in the forties and fifties tradition of "fried, dyed, and laid to the side"——and laced with silver. She had the proud yet burdened carriage of a woman who'd spent her life in service to wealth, walking the several blocks from Tyne to Belle Meade Boulevard each evening to catch the bus that would carry her home to North Nashville, where she would securely lock her doors and close the shutters before the sun set.
She held the door for me, and I nodded in thanks as I entered. The entrance foyer was straight out of Gone With The Wind, with a circular staircase leading up the second floor seemingly without support. An oversized Oriental rug covered most of the hardwood floor. Opposite the front doors, a hallway led to the back of the house.
"Miss Betty's in the study," the maid said, motioning to the right. She opened the door and held it for me.
I stepped onto another Oriental rug that covered the floor of a large square room with floor-to-ceiling, built-in bookcases on opposite walls, left and right. On the wall facing the door, two portraits in Baroque gold frames hung next to each other above an antique credenza. The one on the left was of a stern yet distinguished gentleman of middle age wearing a general's uniform. Next to it was a portrait of a young Southern Belle in an evening gown with a bouquet of roses and a far-off look in her face.
I heard a voice say: "I've got to ring off now. I'll call you later."
A high-backed chair behind a desk that faced the portraits swiveled around. The woman in the chair stood up. Her face was chiseled, patrician; her hair a kind of auburn tinged with gold and more than a couple of strands of white. In the dim light, she was of indeterminate age. She wore a simple but elegant blue dress with a wide lace collar and a long string of pearls.
"Mr. Denton, would you care for something to drink? Coffee, iced tea, perhaps?"
"No, thanks," I said. "I'm fine."
She looked past me. "Thank you, Emily. That'll be all."
"Yes ma'am," the maid said, as she left the room and pulled the door to behind her.
The woman motioned for me to sit. I took a seat in a leather wingback chair across the desk from her.
"Thank you for coming, Mr. Denton," she said. "I'll get right to the point. I called you because you had the smallest and least conspicuous ad in the Yellow pages. I took this to mean that you're a low-profile kind of investigator, one that can be trusted to remain absolutely discreet in all your clients' matters. Is that assumption correct?"
I didn't have the heart to tell her I had the smallest and least conspicuous ad in the Yellow pages because it was all I could afford.
"Yes, ma'am," I said, "that's right."
"What I'm about to tell you has got to be kept in the strictest confidence. If word about this ever got out, then scandal of the worst sort could result."
She leaned back, propped her elbows on the arms of the chair, and made a tent with her hands, the fingertips barely touching. There was a weariness about her in addition to the formality, and when she relaxed, gravity tugged at her face.
"You have my assurance that any work I do for you and anything you tell me will be kept in complete confidence."
"My father is General Breckenridge Jameson," she said. "You've heard of him?"
Damn, I must be slipping. Suddenly it all came together for me. General Breckenridge "Wreckin' Brecken" Jameson had been one of George Patton's top tank commanders during the tail end of World War II, when Patton was coming up from the South to rescue all those guys in Bastogne the horrible Christmas of 1944. "Wreckin' Brecken"——so called because as a young captain in 1942, he'd once disabled a Nazi tank in North Africa by ramming it with his own tank when he ran out of shells——came home to Nashville in 1946 a hero, then went on to start his own insurance business. Forty-nine years later, he retired as Chairman of the Board of the Magna Capital Life & Health Insurance Company of America. Among his many honors was a permanent invitation to the annual Swan Ball and a firmly entrenched position on every local list that mattered.
"Yes ma'am," I said. "I've heard of him. Only not much lately."
"He's been ill," she said. "In fact, both my parents are ill, and that's why it's so important that this matter be handled judiciously. I'm dreadfully afraid that if my father learns anything of this awful situation, it will kill him."
I leaned forward in the chair and slipped my notebook out of my coat pocket. "Why don't you tell me all about it?"
Betty Jameson stared off somewhere behind me, her gaze intense, unsettling.
"My father married late in life," she began. "And while his business judgments have always been superb, some of the decisions he made in his personal life were, well, not superb."
I made a note, then nodded. "I understand."
"My father is——or was, before he became ill——a demanding and ..." She hesitated for a few moments, then cleared the tight catch in her throat.
"... almost brutal man at times. My mother, on the other hand, is simply unavailable. When I was a child, times were different. Not so dangerous for young people. I ran around, sowed my wild oats, but eventually I grew up and managed to survive it all."
She sighed deeply and twisted uncomfortably in the chair. "My younger sister, though, is another matter."
"Younger sister?" I asked.
"I was in college when Stacey was born," she said. "She was a late and somewhat unwelcome surprise in my father's life."
I scribbled again. "That's 'Stacey' with an 'e'?"
"Yes. She's seventeen, and she's gone."
I looked up.
She nodded. "Run off, for about the fourth or fifth time. Only this time, I think she's gone too far."
"What do you mean? In what way?"
"She's run off with a man whom I fear may cause her more trouble than even she's used to handling. Stacey has always been a problem. She was kicked out of Harpeth Hall for getting drunk at a school party and running her Miata through a plate glass window in one of the buildings."
"At which point," she added, "we took it away. Permanently."
Harpeth Hall was the local private, exclusive all-girls school. I'd briefly dated a Harpeth Hall girl back when I was in high school. I thought they all got drunk and drove their convertibles through plate glass windows.
"That one cost us a pretty penny," she said. "And it was the last straw for the school. Mother nearly had a stroke."
"And your father?" I asked.
"We didn't tell him," she answered, then added. "It wouldn't have done any good anyway."
"Where's she going to school now?"
Betty Jameson's mashed her lips together until they were a thin line surrounded by dimpled skin. "Nowhere. She's dropped out."
"Great," I said.
"I want you to find her and get her back here. Any way you have to."
"Well, there are certain legal limitations on what I can do in that regard, but there are ways."
"Don't worry about the legal limitations. I'll take care of that." Her voice tightened. The set of her jaw hardened.
"Okay, I'll need a recent photo, plus her full name, Social Security number, date of birth. Oh, and a list of her friends, if you've got them. Runaway teenage girls sometimes wind up hiding out at a buddy's house for awhile."
"You don't understand, Mr. Denton. This is much more serious than that. First of all, Stacey turns eighteen next month."
I shrugged my shoulders. "Once she turns eighteen, she's an adult," I said. "I can locate her, but there's not much I can do to get her back."
"Which is why it's so important to get her back before then." With each word, she tapped her index finger on the desk.
I shook my head. "I don't get it. Stacey's about to be an adult anyway. She can make her own decisions, legally and every other way. I can understand your wanting to make sure she's healthy, but I don't understand why she has to physically be back here."
"That's something I don't wish to discuss."
I flipped my notebook shut, then uncocked my ballpoint. "Something's not right here, Ms. Jameson. It's going to be awfully difficult for me to work for you when you're not willing to work with me. If you're going to ask me to skirt the law, you've got to tell me why. I like to know what I'm up against."
Her voice grew even colder. "I'm afraid that's not possible."
I stood up. "Then you need yourself another boy. Sorry to have wasted your time."
I pushed the chair with the backs of my knees and started for the door.
"Wait a minute," she said. "Sit down."
I turned back to her and lifted an eyebrow. "Lady, you don't know me well enough to talk to me like that."
Her mouth formed a small O. She took a deep breath, held it for a second as the pressure built up. Then she exhaled and relaxed.
"Please?"
I stepped back and leaned against the chair, my arms crossed, then wagged an index finger at her. "Only if you make nice with me," I said.
Betty Jameson almost cracked a smile, the first one I'd seen.
She stood up and eased over in front of the desk, then crossed her arms and leaned back with her hips over the lip of the desk. "Stacey's run off with a real scumbag," she said. The Belle Meade formality vanished. "A sleazeball of the worst sort. That wouldn't worry me so much, given that she probably deserves the guy. What worries me is that when Stacey turns eighteen, she becomes the beneficiary of an irrevocable inter vivos trust. Do you know what that is, Mr. Denton?"
"No, I played hooky that day."
"Well, I probably couldn't define one either, except that I know it means when Stacey turns forty-five, she inherits somewhere in the neighborhood of three million dollars, more or less. If she's not dead by then. Until that time, she receives the income from the trust. The trust officer at the bank tells me that will be somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty-thousand dollars a month."
I whistled.
"Yes," she said. "Do you know how much trouble an eighteen-year-old, undisciplined, spoiled, self-indulgent, Margarita-drinking, cocaine-snorting, bed-hopping little bitch can get into with twenty-thousand dollars a month?"
It was my turn to grin. "Don't mince words. Tell me how you really feel."
"I think you can safely gather that my sister and I don't get along very well."
"Yeah, well, I'm a detective, you know. I pick up on these things pretty quick. Why don't you just cut her off?"
"My father, in his infinitely bad people judgment, made the trust irrevocable. No one can cut her off."
Once the stiffness went away, Betty was all right. She even seemed a few years younger. And beneath the expensive clothes and jewelry, she had a body and face that was very nice to look at.
"And that jerk she's run off with, that really worries me. I don't think he'd hurt her seriously; that would be like killing the Golden Goose. But God knows what he'll turn her into. There are things worse even than Stacey, and I'd hate to see her become one. For my father's sake, more than anything else."
"Know the guy's name?"
"No, but one of her friends told me he's called 'Red Dog.' And here's the scary part. He works at one of those clubs, I believe."
"Clubs?" I asked.
She glanced down, embarrassed. "Yes, one of those clubs where women dance, you know, naked.... For all I know, he's recruited Stacey."
I rolled my eyes. Just freaking great. There were a ton of nude dance clubs in Nashville, with more opening all the time. It'd be a bitch to find her, not to mention getting her away from a guy who calls himself "Red Dog."
"How long's she been gone?" I asked.
"Almost three weeks."
"A seventeen-year-old girl's gone for three weeks and you're just now getting around to calling somebody?"
"It's not like this is the first time," Betty said defensively. "She's always come back before, but usually after a few days. Never this long."
I scribbled a few more notes.
"Listen, Mr. Denton. I don't care what it costs. Send me a bill. If you need a retainer up front, just tell me. But find my sister and get her away from that awful man. And do it before she turns legal."
"And starts getting all that nasty, wicked money." I said. "Can I search her room?"
"Can we do it sometime when my mother's not awake and skulking around upstairs like a ghost?"
What kind of house is this? I wondered. "Sure. Just get me the other information I need. Then I'll send you a copy of my standard contract and you can write me a check for the retainer."
She wrote out everything I needed that she knew on less than half-a-sheet of paper. There was a lot of distance between Betty Jameson and her younger sister.
"Okay," I said, as I folded the paper and stuffed it in my pocket. "I get five hundred a day plus expenses. Case like this would usually involve just a few days retainer. Let's say three days. I'll type up a contract and pop it in the mail to you."
"Drop it by first thing in the morning and you're hired."
I walked to the door of the study. "Deal. I'll be in touch."
"Oh, and Mr. Denton," she added. "There's another reason I called you. Not just the ad."
I turned. "Really?"
"I used to read you in the newspaper. You were the best political reporter in the state."
I smiled at her. "Yeah, I was, wasn't I? Why don't you call me Harry?"
She smiled at me from across the room. "Okay, Harry. And I'm Betty."
Emily was waiting in the entranceway and held the front door open for me. Suddenly, from above, I heard the rustling of clothes. I stepped back and craned my neck to look up the circular staircase to the second floor. A drawn, gray face with dark bags under its eyes stared down. When she saw me, she let loose with a muffled shriek and jerked back behind the railing. The padding of bare feet on hardwood floors disappeared down the upstairs hallway.
"Emily, this is a screwy house, isn't it?" I asked as I stepped outside.
The whites of her eyes were more yellow than white, and very bloodshot.
"Mister, you don't know the half of it...." she muttered.
So what do you think? Drop me a line....