Steven Womack: Way Past Dead

“Oh, I’m not?” she said. “I’m the one who got to sleep on the couch in my office last night and has had the same underwear on for two days. How seriously do you want me to take it?”

I leaned back in my office chair and put my feet up on the desk. The effort stretched the tangled cord, dragging the phone across my desk. “Would you feel better if I kept the same underwear on until this was over?”

“Oh, gross. Besides, that doesn’t bother men.”

“Now wait a minute,” I protested. “That’s the kind of sexual stereotyping you’d bust my chops fo-”

“Don’t get torqued on me,” she interrupted with a laugh. “I was only kidding.”

“Not funny. You’ve got a shower in the building, right?”

“If you like cold water. Which is not bad, given how hot it is in here. There’s no ventilation and the air conditioner’s off.”

“I thought there was a generator.”

“There is, but it’s not big enough to cool the whole building. It only drives the unit on the cooler. We take turns going into the cold room and sitting with Evangeline.”

“I hear she’s not much of a talker.”

Marsha laughed again. Yeah, I thought, she’s doing fine.

“No, the conversation tends to be a little one-sided. It wouldn’t bother me so much, but there are three others in there right now that haven’t even been cleaned up yet. Dr. Henry phoned in and said to stop all work. He didn’t want us in the middle of an autopsy if the shooting started.”

“So everything’s on hold.”

“Yeah, big guy, including my heart. And a couple other parts of me.”

“I thought you said this wasn’t a private line,” I said, contemplating all my parts that were on hold for the time being.

“It’s not,” she said, her voice starting to break up. “Listen, babe, I’m losing you. This phone’s about dead. I’ll have to plug in the charger for a bit. Guess I’d better go.”

“I read the stuff in the paper about these idiots,” I said, not wanting her to go. “I think they’re just bluffing. I’m reading the newspaper and watching television, but they don’t really say much about what’s going on.”

“We don’t know either,” she said. “We’re staying in touch with the negotiators. We talk to them every hour. But there’s not much to deal with here. They want Evangeline back and we’re not going to let them have her.”

“So what the hell are they going to do?” I asked, an edge in my voice.

“There’s not much anybody can do. We’ll just have to wait it out. Nobody wants to see any shooting.”

“Ye-” The phone momentarily popped out, then came back on. “Hope you’re right. Listen, love-” Snap, crackle, cellular pop …

“-later.”

Dial tone.

“Yeah, love,” I said to nobody. “Later.”

Exasperated, I went by Marsha’s apartment, watered the plants, and checked the locks. Bored with puttering around at her house, I spent the rest of Sunday afternoon restlessly puttering around my office.

There was mail to open, but no answering-machine messages to return on Monday. Business had picked up over the past few months, but then recently dropped off again. On a few rare days, it looked like I might even sort of kind of maybe might be able to make a living at this. Other days, the outlook wasn’t so bright.

Funny, I’d taken on this new profession almost on a lark. After losing my job at the newspaper-and being pretty well burned-out on the daily grind anyway-I thought being a private detective would be kind of a hoot. I envisioned trench coats and late nights parked in front of sleazy motels waiting to take pictures of bank presidents sneaking out with the bimbo du jour. But bank presidents are smarter than that these days, and the people who sneak out of sleazy, twenty-dollars-for-three-hours motels are people I wouldn’t want brushing up against me in a crowd. Might catch something a good shower couldn’t wash off.

I’d been at this game almost two years now, and truthfully I’d begun to miss the paper. It’s not that I haven’t had my good moments; it’s more that after a while the insecurity and unpredictability begin to wear on you. I can’t remember when I didn’t have what I diplomatically refer to as a “slight cash-flow problem.” In other words, I’m always tapped out. Thank God Tennessee doesn’t require liability insurance (technically, they do, but nobody enforces it). After the car fire, I couldn’t afford the rate hikes. And as for health insurance-hell, the only way I’ll ever get health insurance again is when Ed McMahon pulls up in front of my apartment with that ten-million-dollar Publishers Clearing House check he’s been promising me every month for the past decade.

I know-bitch, bitch, bitch. Nobody has any sympathy for middle-aged white guys. Besides, I really can’t complain. I answer to nobody, work my own hours, live my own life. And even though I knew her as a source back when I was a reporter, if I hadn’t become a private investigator, I’d have never gotten to know Marsha.

Of course, I could always go back to repoing cars with Lonnie, although even that had lost its appeal. He mostly needed me in the middle of the night, and usually to run to someplace like northern Alabama or somewhere up in Kentucky. Lots of driving, tedium, lack of sleep, punctuated by moments of extreme terror.

The gig with the insurance company represented my best prospect. I’d been hustling them for a couple of months now, hoping to pick up just about anything. Their in-house investigators had given up after a couple of months of watching the bricklayer. He’d had all kinds of tests run: MRIs, CAT scans, the whole program. The doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with him, but there was the incontrovertible evidence of the wheelchair. The guy never got out of it. He never slipped. He played his part perfectly. But so had I.

I’d taken the job on a contingency basis, which a half-dozen people had told me never to do. I only got paid if I came up with proof that the guy was defrauding them. If I hadn’t gotten the videotape, it would have been wasted time. It was a gamble, and it had paid off. With a little luck, I’d be an insider now with the insurance company.

I reread the paper, with its sidebars on the Pentecostal Evangelical Enochians and Brother Woodrow Tyberious Hogg. Brother Hogg, it seemed, had done a little time down in Texas for credit-card fraud and paper hanging back in the mid-Seventies. He’d undergone a jailhouse conversion and had come out a Bible-thumping sidewalk preacher in a polyester leisure suit with a head full of Scripture and Brylcreem. In the mid-Eighties he came to Nashville and took his shot at becoming a country/gospel crossover star, a shot that thankfully missed the target by a Texas mile. He brought Sister Evangeline and a few other people, mostly runaway kids, with him, and they rented one of those decaying, once-grand houses on Belmont Avenue. They passed out religious tracts, leaflets, and pamphlets blasting the communist and/or Catholic conspiracy to pollute our spiritual purity, or some such crap. Standard paranoid religious deviant stuff. They had a thing for the Masons, too. They were passing out anti-Masonry tracts long before the Southern Baptists got their panties in a wad over them. Ahead of their time, I guess.

Somewhere along the line, the group-slash-cult started making clothes. At first, they’d buy stuff from Goodwill and the Salvation Army, then spray-paint pictures of Jesus and outline them in rhinestones. People, especially music types, started paying money for these faded denim jackets and torn blue jeans that had undergone the Enochian metamorphosis. After a while the group didn’t have to buy used clothing anymore. They rented an old building over on Charlotte Avenue. Then they bought the building. Then they took in more and more runaways, who worked cheap and hard and loved Jesus and didn’t ask a lot of questions. Pretty soon the Pentecostal Evangelical Enochians didn’t have to survive on handouts anymore. Now they owned several buildings, including a three-million-dollar, ten-acre estate on Hillsboro Road near the county line. Three million may not be much in New York or L.A., but down here it’ll still buy you something that’ll make reporters use the word estate . A high brick-and-stucco wall surrounded the ten acres, and the place was as secure as a fortress.