Bill Fitzhugh - Fender Benders (45 page)

Estella’s mistake was a common one.
 
She dismissed the pain as an upset stomach at
first.
 
It would pass.
 
But it didn’t.
 
It got worse and she started to sweat.
 
She tried to convince herself it was just
gas.
 
She needed to get
a Co-Cola
and burp it up, then she’d feel better.
 
But that didn’t help either.
 
Finally she had to accept that the pain
wasn’t so much in her stomach as it was in her chest and it was starting to
radiate out.
 
Estella was afraid she knew
what that meant.
 
I can’t be havin’ no
heart attack
, she
told herself.
 
I already had one.

Estella sat there with a growing sense of anxiety.
 
She was alone and didn’t know when Otis would
arrive.
 
She got up to go to the phone
but collapsed halfway across the room.
 
The plaque in a coronary artery had ruptured.
 
A blood clot had formed.
 
She lay on the floor, trying to breath.
 
Unable to do anything to help herself, she
began to pray.

Otis walked in a couple minutes later and found her.
 
He called 911 and administered CPR the way
they’d showed him at the hospital the last time Estella was there.
 
The ambulance got there quick and carried Estella
to the hospital.
 
She was still alive,
but unconscious, they said.
 
They didn’t
know if she’d make it.

79.

Megan loved the new house.
 
It had so many possibilities.
 
It
was a ten thousand square foot Belle Meade Colonial, once owned by Wanda Jackson.
 
A gated property, it sat on three and a half
rustic acres.
 
Megan had rented some
furniture while she worked on the interior scheme.

She’d read part of a book on Feng Shui and had done her own
element analysis.
 
The house would be a
haven for the creation of music.
 
This
was clearly related to the harmony element, which was used to sweeten the
music.
 
Thus, Megan figured, it was
important to enhance this aspect.
 
She
decided the harmony element would be energized by blues and light greens.
 
These colors, in turn, called to mind the
water element.
 
So Megan was in the
kitchen looking through magazines for an indoor fountain to go with the blue
and green sofa.

Eddie was in the living room just glad she was working on
something other than one of his songs.
 
He was sitting at the big wrought iron and glass top table in the center
of the room thinking he was just one good line from having a great song.
 
His big flat top Gibson leaned against a
chair while Eddie leaned over the table to the line in question.
 
It was a long sparkling stripe he hoped
contained his inspiration.
 
He snorted it
and threw his head back, putting a finger to his nose so he wouldn’t lose anything.
 
He sniffed once or twice, grabbed the Gibson,
and tried to think of another rhyme for heart.
 
“
Cart.
. . smart… apart… K-Mart
. .
.
shit
!”
 
He grabbed the legal pad, ripped off the
page, and crumpled it.
 
The floor was
littered with yellow paper balls.
 
Eddie
told himself to relax, that he still had plenty of good songs inside.
 
He just needed something to pry them
out.
 
He set his guitar down, hunkered
over the glass top table, and snorted another line.
 
Maybe that would do it.

“Save some for me,” Megan said.
 
She breezed into the room with fabric samples
draped over one arm and
an
catalogue for indoor
fountains tucked under the other.
 
She
crossed to the table, picked up the straw, and snorted the remaining coke.

Eddie saw her at the last minute.
 
“Heyheyhey!
 
What’re you doin’?
 
That was the last of it, goddammit!”

“Would you relax?
 
I
got a call in for more.”
 
Megan sat down
and looked at all the crumpled yellow paper.
 
“I got an idea.
 
How about we
write a song—”

“How about you leave the goddamn songwriting to me,
huh?”
 
Eddie bolted to his feet.
“How about that?”
 
He
grabbed the pad of paper and started circling the table.
 
“Jesus.”

Megan threw her hands up.
 
“Sure, whatever.
 
I was just trying to help.
 
Christ.”

Eddie jabbed the pencil in Megan’s direction.
 
“Godammit, I haven’t written a decent song in
four months!
 
And I gotta tell you, if I
don’t have some hits on the second record I’m fucked.”

“Hey!
 
What about the
songs we wrote?
 
You said—”

“I know what I said but they’re all crap and Bill
agrees.
 
And he said A&R at the label
hates every one of ‘em.
 
Called ‘em amateurish and derivative.”
 
Eddie figured this bit of humiliation would
shut Megan up for a while, let him get back to work.
 
He shrugged.
 
“Not a single one we can use, simple as that.”

Megan exploded.
 
“Well
fuck them!”
 
Standing in a fury, she
snatched the big Gibson by the neck.
 
“When did you start giving a shit about what those idiots think, huh Mr.
Long Shot Hot Shot?”

“Calm down,” Eddie said derisively.

“Don’t you tell me what to
do!
”
 
Megan suddenly turned and smashed the Gibson
into the wrought iron leg of the table.
 
The solid flamed maple split on impact.
 
Strings popped and coiled up the bound Madagascar
rosewood of the fingerboard.

Eddie snapped.
 
“Goddammit, bitch!”
 
It happened
quick
.
 
Eddie landed an open hand against the side of
Megan’s head.
 
She dropped the busted
guitar and staggered backwards feeling the sting on the side of her head.
 
“Oh God,” Eddie said immediately.
 
“I’m sorry.”
 
He reached out and put his arms around her.
 
“Are you all right?
 
I didn’t mean to…”

Megan struggled to maintain her composure.
 
She didn’t want to do or say anything to set
him off again.
 
She had too much to
lose.
 
She made a small whimpering sound,
then
slowly lifted her head.
 
“Eddie,” she
said,
her eyes clear and sweet.
 
“It’s okay, I
love you.”

“I’m sorry I hit you.”
 
Eddie felt terrible.
 
“I’m just
under so much pressure.
 
And I never have
any time alone anymore.
 
I’m feelin’ all
penned in, you know?
 
Just
trapped.”

“I know.
 
I’m sorry.”

Eddie took a couple of steps away, looked outside.
 
“I’ve been thinking,” he said.
 
“Maybe it’d be better if we kind of cooled it
for a while, me and you.”

Megan tried not to stay calm.
 
“No,
it’s
okay
sweetie, I forgive you.
 
It didn’t really
hurt.”
 
She reached down and picked up
the shattered guitar which sounded a damaged note.
 
“I shouldn’t have done that.
 
We’ll get you a new one.”

Eddie stared at the guitar for a moment then blankly walked
across the room and dropped into the La-Z-Boy.
 
“It’s just that I’m used to being alone more.
 
I work better that way, you know?
 
That’s how I wrote all my old songs.
 
And after being cramped up on that bus for a
month and a half, hell, I just need some space, that’s all.
 
I just need my space.”

Megan couldn’t believe her ears.
 
This country prick was trying to toss her
after all she’d done for him?
 
Hell, she
practically made him.
 
And this was her
thanks?
 
“Eddie?”
 
She said it in a small, almost childlike
voice.
 
“There’s something I have to tell
you.”

“About what?”

Megan bit her lip and looked like she might cry.
 
“I just didn’t know how to.
 
I didn’t want to mess things up for you.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“Remember on the plane?
 
To
Dallas
before the first show?”

“What about it?”

“In the bathroom.
 
You didn’t have a condom?”

“Yeah.”
 
Eddie started to get a bad feeling about the
direction of the conversation.

“I didn’t want to do anything without telling you first.”

“Megan, what the hell’re you talking about?”

“It’s all my fault, I’m so sorry.”

“Sorry about what?”

She hesitated, looking down at her belly.
 
“I think I’m pregnant.”

80.

Jimmy felt like a proud papa as he held the complete draft
of the manuscript in his hands.
 
Three
hundred forty-seven pages, double spaced, one inch margins all around.
 
It was well written.
 
It was thorough.
 
It was something you could thump against a
desk.
 
It was a lot of things, but it
wasn’t finished.

After reading it cover-to-cover for the first time, Jimmy
knew it was missing something.
 
He had
failed to show Eddie had access to any sodium fluoroacetate.
 
He reviewed his notes from when he visited
the Lytle farm.
 
The shed there had all
sorts of chemicals on the shelf.
 
According to his notes there were containers of Benzahex, Ortho-Klor,
Ethylene chlorohydrin, and something called Compound 1080.
 
But no sodium
fluoroacetate.

The link was too important to ignore.
 
If he couldn’t show Eddie had access to the
poison, the rest of the evidence seemed considerably more circumstantial.
 
Problem was
,
Jimmy
had looked at all the obvious places the poison might be.
 
In addition to the Lytle’s shed, Jimmy had
been to the Hegman property, and he’d looked in Eddie’s garage.
 
Of course if Eddie really was the killer,
there was no reason to think he’d leave the stuff somewhere it could be
found.
 
So Jimmy decided to take one last
look at where he’d been.
 
If he didn’t
find what he was looking for, so be it.
 
He’d go to print with what he had.

The coroner’s report confirmed sodium fluoroacetate was the
cause of Tammy’s death.
 
The documents
from the National Crime
Information Center
said the same thing about the three other victims.
 
Jimmy went on line and linked to the National
Poison Control Center
website.
 
He started reading about the
various substances in the shed.

Benzahex was a trade name for the chemical benzene
hexachloride, a synthetic pesticide soluble in oily and fatty solutions, but
not water.
 
Already highly toxic, it was
especially deadly if ingested after a fatty meal, making it that much more
hazardous in the
deep
South.

Ortho-Klor was a trade name for
chlordane,
a chemical commonly used against termites during the 1950’s, 60’s, 70’s and
80’s.
 
It was banned by the EPA in March of
1988 after the manufacturer was forced to acknowledge that chlordane was a
carcinogen.

Ethylene chlorohydrin had a wide range of industrial uses,
but down on the farm it was used to speed up the sprouting of potatoes and to
treat seeds to inhibit biological activity.
 

That left compound 1080, a substance that occurred naturally
in the African plant,
Dichapetalum
cymosum
.
 
Its synthesized cousin had
been used in the United States
as a rodenticide since 1945, as well as being an insecticide used on fruit trees
to combat scale insects, aphids, and mites.
 
According to the website, most mammals were fatally poisoned by less
than 1 mg of Compound 1080 per kg of body weight.
 
Compound 1080
was
also known as Fratol, sodium salt, sodium monofluoroacetate, and sodium
fluoroacetate.

“Bingo.”
 
Jimmy
grabbed the phone and dialed.
 
“Jay,
it’s
Jimmy.
 
Guess who
just finished writing a best seller?”