Steven Womack: Dead Folks' blues

“Great,” I said. “We don’t have to worry about the government being Big Brother. The corporations’ll do it for us.”

“You got that right, bro. Only thing is, there’s always somebody out there who can infiltrate. You make it accessible to one person, you’ve made it open for everybody. Just takes a little ingenuity.”

“And let me guess,” I said. “You’re a very ingenious person.”

“So I’ve been told,” Lonnie answered, smiling. He set his coffee cup down on a table, came over to the desk, and shooed me out of his seat. He took the chair and flipped on the PC next to the laptop . A green glow filled the screen, followed by the computer’s self-test.

Then a menu appeared. Lonnie chose the option labeled COMMUNICATIONS. He hit a few more keys, then the speaker in the computer gave out a dial tone, followed by a series of beeps as the computer dialed.

Seconds later, we were logged on. I don’t know where Lonnie got a valid password, but he had one. He worked his way through a couple of layers of menus, then set his cursor on a line labeled CUST INQU.

Then he picked up the credit bureau report and typed in Conrad’s Social Security number. The cursor blinked, the green pulsating dot like a heart monitor.

“How long does it take?”

“Shouldn’t be too long. Be cool.”

“Can’t man. No chill to cop on this one.”

The dot went solid green. Then the computer spit out line after line of numbers and letters.

“Need a calculator?” Lonnie asked.

The amounts were even, large and even. “I think I can handle it.”

“That one there is his university-supplied policy,” Lonnie said. “See, it matches his salary.”

“Then there are two association policies. The rest must be private.”

“Yeah, looks like. Hmmmm, interesting. It seems the good Dr. Fletcher was carrying about-”

“Two million,” I said.

“Which leaves, after paying off the debts-”

“Maybe a million, three. Would you kill somebody for that, man?” I asked.

Lonnie leaned back in the chair, looked at me in amazement. “Only my mother, man, only my mother …”

I fell against the wall and slid down to the floor. Damn, could it really be? An overwhelming fatigue enveloped like a sudden onset of flu. I saw Rachel in my mind, her face floating out in front of me, her body, her hair. I smelled her in the air, heard her deep inside my brain. She was part of me, and while I hadn’t exactly figured out how big a part yet, I knew it was going to be something important.

“No, Lonnie. It can’t be.”

“You told me she’s a nurse, right? She’d know what to get, how much to shoot into him, right?”

“But that still doesn’t answer how it happened.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“Why did Conrad Fletcher simply lie there and let her shoot him full of the stuff?”

“You never said anything about him laying there.”

I looked at him intently. The expression on his face was blank. Apparently he really didn’t know what I was talking about.

“I told you. Remember? I found him lying back on a bed. No sign of a struggle, no marks on him. They didn’t even find anything in the autopsy.”

Lonnie shook his head. “No, man, you never told me that. All you said was he got shot up with some kind of synthetic curare. I figured he was knocked down, tied up. Hell, I don’t know.”

I pushed against the wall and stood back up, my hands out in front almost in supplication.

“No, see, that’s the mystery here. How did it happen? How come he didn’t fight? I asked Marsha Helms if it could have been a TASER or a stun device, and she said every one she’d ever seen left a mark where the darts hit you.”

Lonnie laughed, more of a snort, really. “Then she hasn’t been keeping up with the literature, my man.”

I went cold. “What are you talking about?”

“Follow me, bud.”

He hopped out of the chair, back out into the hall, and down to the living room of the trailer. He pulled open a wooden desk drawer, dug around in a pile of stuff, then found what he was looking for.

“Latest generation, man. State of the art. Close support self-defense weapon. Small, hand held, you can’t fire it at anybody. You have to be close enough to jam it into them. It’s just a capacitor circuit, actually. Like the ignition coil on a car. Takes a nine-volt alkaline battery and turns it into a 65,000 volt charge. No darts. Doesn’t leave a mark on you. No permanent damage. It just short circuits every nerve in your body, and you drop like a rock.”

He held up the device in the palm of his hand, a small black plastic box with four metal prongs poking out of the end. Lonnie pushed the button; there was a crackling noise in the air. An inch-long blue spark danced between two of the contacts. Right out of Frankenstein .

“Completely legal, and only fifty bucks at your local gun dealer’s. Disables a mugger for about five minutes. Gives you time to get away, call the cops. Maybe get a tire iron out of your trunk and tap dance on the sucker’s head.”

He tossed the black box toward me. “It’d also give you time to press the plunger on a syringe,” he added.

I caught the stun gun, held it in my hand. The edges of the plastic rectangular box were molded to provide a good grip, the button right under my thumb. It was comfortable, at home in a hand. I held it up and took a long, close look at it.

Damn thing looked just like a beeper.

Outside, the rain came down in sheets, the layers of water pounding so hard the sky was completely obscured. I splattered through the mud, fumbled with the chain link fence gate, and was thoroughly soaked when I got back to my car.

Lonnie was right, of course. It was all there. Maybe had been from the start. I just refused to see it, which made me feel like an even bigger yutz. I still didn’t want to believe it. How could that petite, blond, middle-American, Betty Crocker-cute woman take another human life? How did she get the alibi? It didn’t make sense, or if it did, then all the basic fundamental illusions we depend upon to get through from one day to the next are just useless drivel.

Or maybe her alibi was good. Maybe it was a contract killing. People killed for cheap these days, or so my deep background sources used to tell me at the paper. Didn’t make any difference. If Rachel paid somebody to ice him, it’s the same as if she did it herself.

I had to sit in the Ford for a couple of minutes to get myself together. The defroster on the car had long since gone to meet its maker; whenever the humidity gets within a few degrees of the dew point, fog settles in over the inside glass so thick it’s like flying by instrument. I started the car, turned on the defroster full blast out of hope and habit, and sat there while the car warmed up. It was no good though; the only way those windows were going to be clear was for me to wipe them that way. Even then, visibility was so bad I was afraid to pull out into the street for fear of being T-boned.

It didn’t matter, anyway. I wasn’t going anywhere, literally or metaphorically. I found myself alternately angry and depressed, believing and disbelieving. Somebody I once loved, maybe still loved, was a murderer. And I had to figure out what to do with that.

That, then, was the most frightening part; the notion that I could sit here and even consider letting her slide. Had I gotten that desperate, that cynical, that I’d know who did a murder and let them get away with it? If Rachel got away with the murder, she was going to be rich. But she and Walter had something going now. Was I going to be a part of her life, her rich, sheltered, safe life?

This prospect made me feel even lower. Not only was I considering keeping my mouth shut about a murder, but if I did talk, it would be at least partly because I wouldn’t get any benefit from it.