Jonathan Kellerman - Capital Crimes

Danny and Dixie, traveling the back roads doing honky-tonk, county fairs, roadhouse one-nighters. Danny on guitar, Dixie on the mandolin.

The mandolin.

A long way from stars, nothing on Google. Lamar dug some more, found the obit in an old newspaper file.

Sue was insightful, but still, there had to be more to it than longtime grief.

She said, “Let me make you some eggs.”

“No, thanks, baby. I just need to sleep.”

“Then I’ll tuck you in.”

Baker went home, stripped naked, fell into bed, was asleep before his face hit the sheet.

Much of the afternoon was spent with the two of them sitting at the center table in the pale purple Murder Squad detectives’ room, working the phone and sifting through the slew of tips that had poured in after Jack Jeffries’s murder hit the news.

TV, broadcast, radio, the final edition of The Tennessean. By evening, it would be the national entertainment shows.

Fondebernardi and Lieutenant Jones stopped in to see how everything was going. Both of them too experienced and smart to push because that would accomplish nothing other than make their detectives nervous. But they were edgy, all that media attention.

Baker and Lamar had a data flood on their hands from the blitz of phone tips. Sometimes too much information was worse than none at all. Like a room with fifty different fingerprint patterns. Every call they fielded was from a nut, a psychic or just a well-meaning citizen imagining or exaggerating. Two dozen people claiming to have seen Jeffries in two dozen unfeasible places at impossible times.

A few informants were certain he’d been accompanied by a dangerous-looking person. Half of those described a woman, the other half a man. Details as to height, weight, clothing and demeanor were cloudy to the point of uselessness, but everyone agreed on one thing: a dangerous-looking black person. And that included black informants.

The detectives had seen that before, called it The Color Kneejerk, but given a 911 caller who sounded African-American, it couldn’t be dismissed.

Then the 911 caller showed up at headquarters, a former merchant marine, now homeless, named Horace Watson, who lived in an eastside shelter and liked to take long walks by the river. The man was seventy-three, wizened and toothless. He was also as white as Al Gore; his southern Louisiana accent misconstrued as black patois.

Lamar and Baker took him into a room and started in on developing a relationship by giving him a Danish and coffee. Watson was already tipsy but outgoing, a nice drunk and eager to help. Volunteering about how he always walked by that area- that particular piece of land because sometimes you could find aluminum cans for the Redemption Center and one time he’d found a watch. Too bad it didn’t work.

This time, he’d found more than he was looking for. Freaking out when he saw the dead man, he’d hurried back to the shelter to tell someone. Found a pay phone along the way and made the call.

Now he was wondering…ahem…about maybe a ree -ward?

“Sorry, sir,” said Lamar, “no rewards for finding bodies, only murderers.”

“Oh,” said Watson. Flashing a sunken grin. “Cain’t blame a guy for trahn.”

They questioned him awhile longer, ran him through the system and got a hit with a few misdemeanors. When Baker suggested a polygraph, Watson loved the idea. “Long as it don’t hoit.”

“Painless, Mr. Watson.”

“Let’s do it, den. Always wanna try new t’ings.”

Lamar and Baker traded looks.

Stretch cleared his throat. “Uh, sorry, sir, no polygraphers on the premises. We’ll call you.”

“Oka-ay,” said Watson. “I got nuttin a do.”

Calls to Jack Jeffries’s credit card company, follow-up chats with a supervisor at Marquis Jet and the limo driver who’d taken Jeffries and Delaware to the hotel, and a brief sit-down with the staff at Jack’s Bar-B-Que confirmed every detail of Dr. Delaware ’s story.

No one at the restaurant had noticed where Jeffries had gone.

Baker and Lamar spent the next two hours canvassing neighboring merchants east of the barbecue joint, talking to passersby, anyone who hung out regularly on the numbered streets between Fifth and First.

Nothing.

With little else to go on, the two detectives started making phone calls, splitting the list of the performers for the upcoming “Evening at the Songbird Café for the Benefit and Protection of the First Amendment.”

Among the names were some of Lamar’s idols: Stretch did his police duty with gusto. Baker made the calls with reticence bordering on hostility. The sum total of twenty-two phone calls yielded the same results, which were no results. Everyone was stunned by the news, but no one had seen hide nor hair of Jack Jeffries. Some didn’t even know he had been scheduled to perform. Checking Jeffries’s outgoing cell calls verified the stories. If Jack had attempted to reach former buddies, he’d done so on a landline that the detectives were unaware of.

A seven PM call to Lieutenant Milo Sturgis in LA verified Dr. Alexander Delaware’s longtime association with the department. Sturgis termed Delaware as brilliant.

“If you can use him,” the lieutenant said, “do it.”

Baker asked him if he knew Delaware had been treating Jack Jeffries.

Sturgis said, “No, he never talks about his cases. Guy’s ethical.”

“Sounds like you like him.”

“He’s a friend,” said Sturgis. “That’s an effect of his being a good guy, not a cause.”

The AFIS report on the scrap of song lyrics from Jack Jeffries’s room came back negative for any match with an individual in the system. The crime scene people were still working at the scene and the results would start to trickle in tomorrow.

Baker called the coroner’s office and spoke to Dr. Inda Srinivasan. She said, “Obviously tox won’t be back for a few days but this was one unhealthy guy. His heart was enlarged, his coronary arteries were seriously occluded, his liver was cirrhotic and one of his kidneys was atrophied, with a cyst on the other not that long from bursting. Top of that, he’s got noticeable cerebral atrophy, more like what you’d see in an eighty-year-old than a sixty-five-year-old.”

“He was also fat and had dandruff,” said Baker. “Now tell me what killed him.”

“Severed carotid laceration, exsanguination and subsequent shock,” said the pathologist. “My point is, Baker, he probably didn’t have long, either way.”

At seven thirty, they returned to the kill-spot. In diminishing daylight, stripped of hubbub and artificial illumination, the site was even more depressing. Last night’s foot-indentations were almost gone, plumped by dew. But streaks of rusty brown remained on the weeds. Fresh dog dropping deposited inches from where the body had lain, the pooch disregarding the boundaries of the yellow crime scene tape.

Why should life stop?

At eight thirty they were starving and went back to Jack’s Bar-BQue, not just for the food, but also hoping someone might remember something.

Baker ordered smoked chicken.

Lamar asked for Tennessee pork shoulder and when the food arrived, said, “It’s like some primitive rite.”

Baker wiped his mouth with a Wash’n Dri. “What is?”

“I’m eating what Jack ate, like that could transfer his karma to us.”

“I don’t want his karma. You gonna eat all those onions?”

They wiped their chins and drove to The T House. The front door was open but from the street, the club looked empty.

The interior was a single dim, plywood-paneled room with a warped pine floor, mismatched chairs pulled up to small round, oilcloth-covered tables, a few pictures of bands and singers hanging askew.