Bill Fitzhugh - Fender Benders (29 page)

All this excitement about an unknown singer-songwriter was
seen as a mixed blessing on Music Row.
 
The good news was there
was
a song and an
artist out there that their audience wanted.
 
The bad news was twofold.
 
First,
obviously, was the fact that no one knew how to find the artist.
 
Secondly, if and when they ever found him,
there was going to be a serious bidding war for his services.

And all this was good news for Eddie Long.

40.

Jimmy wasn’t worth a milk bucket under a bull when he first
woke up.
 
The randy couple next door had kept
at it late into the night, long after Jimmy had satisfied his own needs.
 
He finally drifted off around two in the
morning.
 
Unfortunately his four-button
neighbor started laying pipe again at six sharp, so Jimmy didn’t get half the
sleep he needed.
 
He lay there for a
while, listening as the neighbors worked to perfect their dawn coupling.

“A little higher,” she said.
 

“Okay,” he replied.

“But hold that in your other hand, then push and twist at
the same time.”

After about fifteen minutes of this, Jimmy dragged himself
out of bed, fixed a large thermos of coffee, and headed back to Quitman
county
.

By the time he was halfway to Greenwood,
the caffeine had him agitated and thinking bad thoughts about Eddie.
 
In fact, he was so pissed off at the whole turn
of events he was thinking about writing an article exposing the truth about the
Internet scheme in the hope of ruining Eddie’s strategy.
 
But Jimmy realized he wouldn’t even be
allowed that satisfaction since his own success depended on Eddie’s.
 
The bastard.

Jimmy arrived at the Quitman
County sheriff’s station, explained
what he knew so far,
then
said he had a few more
questions.
 
The sheriff, a calm, patient
man in his fifties, figured since Jimmy already had the coroner’s report and
the other information, there was no good reason to keep any other facts from
him.

“One thing I can’t figure out,” Jimmy said, “is where the
Chinese food came from.”
 
He held up his
file, fanning the air slightly.
 
“There’s
nothing in these reports about it.”

The sheriff nodded, looking mildly dismayed but not quite
embarrassed.
 
“First on the scene saw a
girl with a hole in her head,” he said.
 
“Didn’t think a coupla Chinese food take-out boxes in the garbage were
real important.”
 
The sheriff opened a
file drawer as he spoke.
 
“Didn’t know it
mattered until
a coupla days
later when we found out
she’d been poisoned, and even then it turned out the poison was in the headache
powder, not the food.”
 
The sheriff
looked at his own file, then up at Jimmy.
 
“It’s a place called Feng Shang’s in Memphis.
 
Never been there myself.
 
I always go to the Rendezvous when I’m in Memphis.”
 
He pointed vaguely out the thick glass
window.
 
“For Chinese I like Chow’s down
in Clarksdale, they got that twice
cooked pork I like.”
 
The sheriff pulled
a document from the file and showed it to Jimmy.
 
“We checked Eddie’s credit card
activity.
 
He’d been at Feng Shang’s two
days before and a few other times too.”
 
The lawman sat back in his chair and thought about sending a deputy for
some cashew chicken.

Jimmy made a note:
Why
Memphis
if local egg rolls
good
?
 
He looked at the sheriff and broached the
final subject.
 
“How would you
characterize the status of your investigation into Ms. Long’s death?”

The sheriff didn’t hesitate.
 
“Closed,” he said, sliding the file drawer shut.

Jimmy was no homicide investigator, but that seemed
premature to him.
 
“What about the National
Crime Information
Center bulletin?
 
Are they still looking at this as part of a
pattern?”

“Can’t really say.
 
‘Bout all I know is Louisiana State Police
are talking to law enforcement in Tuscaloosa and Gulfport and a-course I sent
‘em everything we got, but until somebody somewhere proves something…”
 
The sheriff shrugged, thinking about his
friend Henry Teasdale.
 
“My case is
closed.”

Jimmy thumbed through his notes to see if he’d forgotten
anything.
 
Satisfied that he hadn’t, he
stuffed his file back in his briefcase.
 
“You have a Memphis phone
book?”

The sheriff shook his head and again pointed vaguely out the
window.
 
“But there’s a library just down
the street.”

Jimmy made the short walk to the library and found the
Memphis Yellow Pages.
 
He turned to
‘Restaurants’ and found a quarter page ad for Feng Shang’s.
 
It featured a serpentine dragon breathing fire
and spouting the words, “NO MSG!”
 
That
can’t be right, Jimmy thought.
 
He
checked the coroner’s report again.
 
It
stated clearly that Tammy had MSG in her system, though Jimmy had no idea if
the concentration in her blood was consistent with what you’d expect from a
typical Chinese restaurant meal.
 
He
pulled out his cell phone and dialed.

“Feng Shangs!” a woman yelled into Jimmy’s ear.
 
In the background, he could hear the din from
the kitchen, scraping metal, leaping flames, screaming.

“Yes, this is Jimmy Rogers with the, uh,
Memphis Commercial Appeal
.
 
We’re doing a story on local Chinese
restaurants and I need to know if we should list you under the MSG or the
no-MSG banner.”

The woman became hysterical.
 
“No MSG!
 
Nevva!”
 
Her screaming drowned out the chaos of pots
and pans behind her.
 
“You
come
look!
 
No MSG,
okay?
 
Spell name right!
 
F-E-N-G S-H-A-N-G!
 
No MSG!
 
You
come
look!”

“No, that’s okay,” Jimmy said.
 
“I believe you.”
 
The woman continued yelling as if Jimmy had
accused her of peeing in the egg drop soup.
 
“I’ll put you down as a no-MSG establishment,” he said.
 
The woman was still screaming as Jimmy
flipped the phone shut.
 
He wondered
where the MSG had come from if not Feng Shangs.
 
He also wondered if it mattered.
 
To answer that, Jimmy would have to find out if Tammy was allergic to
MSG in the first place.
 
But, in any
event, it seemed odd it was in her system when the restaurant was so adamant
they didn’t use it.

Until he had that squared away, Jimmy needed to find out
about the nature of sodium fluoroacetate.
 
He pulled a copy of the
U.S.
Poison Control Center Guide
To
Toxic Substances
.
 
The USPCC used a six point scale to rate
poison toxicity.
 
Substances with a
rating of 1 were almost
nontoxic,
those with a rating
of 6 were called ‘super toxic.’
 
Sodium
fluoroacetate had a non-nonsense rating of 6.1.
 
It was a botanically derived pesticide in the form of a fine white
powder with no smell or taste.
 
It
blocked cellular metabolism in the entire body, including the central nervous
system.
 
Depending on dosage and means of
exposure, death occurred within minutes as a result of respiratory failure due
to pulmonary edema or ventricular fibrillation.
 
Sodium fluoroacetate was used as a rodenticide in some cases, but was
mainly an insecticide used on fruits to combat scale insects, aphids, and
mites.
 

Jimmy’s mind seized on something.
 
Fruits?
 
His blood suddenly chilled.
 
The peach orchard
.
 
Was it possible?
 
He drove
straight out to the Lytle’s farm and went directly to the shed where Eddie used
to sit and play his guitar when he wasn’t tending the peach trees.
 
He looked at the shelf with all the large
brown bottles and the rusty cans but all he found was Benzahex, Ortho-Klor,
Ethylene chlorohydrin, and Compound 1080.
 
No sodium fluoroacetate.

Jimmy was relieved.
 
He was also a little embarrassed for thinking, even for a moment, that
Eddie was a murderer, let alone a serial killer.
 
It wasn’t until he was driving back towards town
that another thought, perhaps slightly more evil, occurred to him.
 
If he’d found the poison, and it turned out
that Eddie was a killer, he just might be sitting on a best seller.

41.

Big Bill was nearly done.
 
It was two in the morning and he was alone in his studio, lights dimmed,
doing the final mix.
 
Earlier, a cello
player laid down a track for ‘
It Wasn’t Supposed To
End That Way.’
 
Big Bill put it way in
the back, lurking, whispering something dark and sad.
 
The instrument blushed
a
lucid
warmth so low you could hear more wood than strings.
 
It was perfect.

As Big Bill listened to a playback, he remembered the moment
he was first touched by music.
 
He was
ten years old and the teacher had Bill and his little classmates arranged in a
tiny choir.
 
They were singing a hymn, a
dozen guileless voices, free of self-consciousness, united and soaring.
 
Bill was in the middle row, his eyes closed,
his
soul open, and the music moved him.
 
It was a spiritual moment and he was fully
aware of it.
 
He knew it was something
special, a gift from a higher plane.
 
And
he knew, from that point forward, music would be his world.

He listened to the radio and he bought records and he went
to local shows to hear and, just as importantly, to watch people play.
 
He always got as close to the stage as he
could.
 
He wanted to see how it was done,
how someone could take wood and strings and coax emotions from them.
 
They were magicians and it thrilled him that
he couldn’t see how they did their trick, no matter how close he stood.
 
He watched the players communicate without
speaking and he wanted to learn how it was done.
 
He loved watching the guitar players
especially, their faces contorting as they reached for notes and chords and
meaning.

Bill saved his money and bought a guitar.
 
He took lessons and he practiced every
day.
 
But he could never get beyond the
notes and the chords and the mechanics.
 
He could never do the alchemy he had seen others do.
 
Still, he knew his place was with music and
he could work with those who had the gift and that would have to be enough.

The playback ended and the sudden quiet eased Bill back to
the present.
 
The only sound in the
perfect room was the hiss of tape racing across the heads at thirty inches per
second.
 
He hit a button and the room
went silent.
 
Big Bill sat in the dim
light, a tired old man far nearer the end of things than the beginning.
 
He tried to recall when his life had become
more about the business than about the music.
 
Sad enough he couldn’t remember; worse, he realized he no longer cared.

42.

It was dark by the time Jimmy left the Lytle’s farm.
 
He wanted to go by Eddie’s and Tammy’s old
house before returning to Jackson
but he didn’t want to go at night, so he got a room at the Roadway Inn in
Hinchcliff.
 
He’d go by the house
tomorrow to take some photos, even if he had to break in to do it.
 
Seems the place was still considered a crime
scene since the National Crime
Information Center
bulletin had piqued FBI interest.

Jimmy was sitting in a booth in the back of the motel’s
coffee shop.
 
He was working on his
fourth Budweiser and starting to get angry with himself for thinking about how
much he still loved Megan and how much he missed her despite how she’d done him
wrong.
 
What the hell happened to my self-respect?
 
He was just drunk enough to think he should
write a song about it.
 
But before he
could get started, the waitress stopped by to take his order.
 
“I’ll have the catfish and the dinner
salad.”
 
He handed her the menu.
 
“And another Bud when you
have a chance.”

Jimmy toyed with some lyrics for his been-done-wrong song:
You left without a word, and got a number
unlisted; love flew off like a bird, just ceased and desisted.
 
He shook his head, deciding he was either way
too drunk or not near drunk enough for country songwriting, so he turned his
attention back to his book.
 
Looking over
the sheriff’s report Jimmy found something he thought might be helpful.
 
The sheriff had made a list of everyone
they’d interviewed after Tammy’s death.
 
Jimmy hoped to find someone on the list
who
might be willing to answer a few more questions.
 
The Teasdales were at the top of the list but
Jimmy wasn’t prepared to pester the parents of the deceased, so he skipped down
a bit.
 
There was a Steve Teasdale, an
uncle, way the hell over in Fulton
but Jimmy didn’t think his questions warranted the two hour drive to Itawamba
County.
 
Next on the list was one of Tammy’s
co-workers, Carl.
 
He circled the name
just as the catfish arrived.

43.

Jimmy got to The Dollar Store about ten the next
morning.
 
He found Carl lining up a putt
on the little Astroturf green in the middle of the sporting goods section.

“Excuse me,” Jimmy said.

Carl never broke concentration.
 
“Be riiiight with you,” he said.
 
He reset his feet, looked at the cup,
then
stepped up to address the ball.

Jimmy waited for Carl’s backswing before speaking.
 
“Sheriff tells me you knew Tammy Long.”
 
Carl’s putt soared across the green and
disappeared into cosmetics.
 
Jimmy looked
off in that direction.
 
After a pause, he
looked back at Carl.
 
“That’s a bad case
of the yips.”

Carl’s right leg suddenly got the weak trembles.
 
He thought all this was behind him.
 
Ever since Tammy’s death, he’d been going to
church regular, had been faithful, more-or-less, and was starting to feel
better about
himself
.
 
Until now.
 
“You shouldn’t talk when a man’s fixin’ to putt,” Carl said.
 
“It’s bad manners.”