Capital Crimes (29 page)

“Because he wouldn’t talk.”

“Because he was being
rude.
Being rich doesn’t give you any right to be rude. Uh-uh, no sirree, Mr. Jeffries. The world don’t work like that.”

Her second delusion. The first was thinking she could sing.

Baker said, “It sure isn’t fair.”

She looked at Lamar. He said, “Downright rude.”

“I mean who is he thinking he is? A big fat ugly gross disgusting person who used to be famous but now no one gives a
shit
about him? Who’s
he
to go all silent and pissed and leave without saying good-bye? Still, I minded my manners. I said, ‘What’s wrong? Did the tea taste bad?’”

Lamar said, “He was being rude but you held on to your dignity.”

“Exactly! Dignity’s what it’s all about. Everyone deserves a little dignity, right?”

“Darn right,” Baker said. “So then what happened?”

“He just kept ignoring me and I just kept walking alongside him. We keep walking and walking and walking and then he stops again and makes a sharp turn…like that’s gonna confuse me.” She let out a laugh. “Except now he has no idea where he’s going and he ends up in this empty lot. I stick right with him. He turns around, not looking where he’s going, and his foot hits a wall. He starts cussing and swearing and then…and then, he starts screaming at
me.
That I should stop
stalking
him, can you believe that?”

The detectives shook their heads.

She touched her hair, licked a finger and ran it over her eyelids. “He sounded crazy, I was scared. I tell you, Detectives, that old boy was on drugs or something.”

“Did you try to leave?”

“Too scared.” Gret made her eyes go wide. “It’s all dark and he’s going crazy on me. He starts calling me horrible names—a lyin’ no-talent little bitch, if you must know.”

She sniffed, grimaced, and rubbed her eyes, trying to dredge up some tears. The floor had been dried since Tristan Poulson’s sob-fest. It stayed that way.

“It was horrible,” she said. “No one ever, ever,
ever
talked to me like that. That’s what I said to him—trying to stop him from being so
rude.
Then I looked him straight up in the eye and said ‘Shut your mouth for a second and hear the truth. I’m your
daughter
and you know what, I don’t even
care
about that, it means
nothing
to me! And you know what else? I’m lucky you weren’t never in my life, you don’t deserve to ever be in my life, you sorry-ass, has-been
motherfucker
!’”

The room fell silent.

“You told him off good,” Lamar said.

“Wait, wait, it gets better. Then he gets this wild look, this really wild crazy look gets in his eyes, and he says, ‘You’re lying, it’s just another lie, you been a lying little bitch since the moment I laid eyes on you.’ And
I
say, ‘I’m the daughter of Ernestine Barline. You knew her as Kiki. Remember that night you fucked her all night? The result is
me
.’”

She stopped. Panting, sucking in breath.

Finally, the tears came…a constricted trickle that ended with a gasp.

Lamar said, “What did Jack say to that?”

“His voice got real quiet and he gave me this look. Not the wild-eyed one, but a different one. Scarier. Cold, real, real cold. Like I was nothing…but…dirt. He smiled, but not a nice smile, an ugly smile. Then he said, ‘I don’t remember
her
and I don’t give a shit about
you.
And even if I did fuck her, no way you were the result. Know how I know?’”

She gasped, covered her eyes. Lamar thought of patting her shoulder, but hesitated. Baker reached over and did it for the both of them.

“I didn’t answer him,” she said. “But he told me, anyway.” She shivered.

Neither detective spoke.

Gret’s hand dropped from her face. For a second, she looked young, untouched, vulnerable. Then the brown eyes sparked with fury.

“The bastard touched me here.” Gret fingered the bottom of her chin. “Chucked it, you know? Like I was some baby, some stupid little baby thing.” Another shiver. If she was faking her emotion, she was Oscar-quality. “Then he said, ‘I know you didn’t come from me because you got no
talent
. You sing like shit and I’d rather listen to nails on a chalkboard than to hear you screech like a crow. I knew Janis and she’s the lucky one, being dead so she didn’t have to be subjected to that sorry-ass, ultra-fucked-up abortion you did of her classic. Girl, your voice should never be used except for talking, and not much of that, either.’”

She took awhile to catch her breath. Stared at both detectives as if she’d seen the afterlife and it wasn’t pretty.

“Oh, man, that’s cold,” said Lamar.

Baker said, “God, what a bastard.” Sounding as if he meant it.

Greta Barline said, “He’s saying those things…those horrible things…cutting me…cutting my singing…cutting my life…I can’t even speak, it’s like I’m
bleeding
inside.”

She gnashed her teeth, clawed her hands.

“
Then
he starts pushing at me,
pushing
—like to get away. Honestly, I don’t know what happened. He was so big and I’m so little and he’s pushing at me, pushing at me. I was so scared. I don’t know how the knife got into my hand, I promise. All I remember is him holding his neck and looking at me and making this gurgly noise. Then, he fell down and made this thud noise. And then he gurgled some more.”

A strange, distant smile skittered across her lips. “I’m just standing there and I’m thinking about that gurgly noise and I say out loud, ‘You don’t sound so good, yourself, Jack Jeffries.’ After that, he got quiet.”

The room felt as if all the air had been sucked out of it.

Lamar waited for Baker to speak, but El Bee had a funny look on his face, kind of glassy-eyed.

Lamar said, “Thanks for telling us, Gret. Now I’m gonna have to read you your rights.”

“Just like on TV,” she said. Then she perked up. “So what do you think, it’s self-defense, right?”

16

L
amar got home at four thirty
AM.
Sue was sleeping but she woke up, brewed some decaf and sat with him while he ate cold pasta, a couple of hastily fried breakfast sausages, and five pieces of toast.

The usual case-closed munchies.

“Another one bites the dust,” she said. “Congrats, honey.”

After he told her the details, Sue said, “The girl’s obviously disturbed but you can see her point.”

“About what? She cut the poor man’s throat for insulting her singing.”

“If what she said is true, he was brutal, honey, just dumped on her dreams. Of course, it doesn’t justify what she did. But still, to be rejected like that.” She touched his face. “Maybe I’m being a bleeding heart, but I guess I understand her a little.”

“If it’s even true,” said Lamar. “She lies about everything.” But he knew he was denying the obvious. For all Greta Barline’s lies, he was certain she’d spoken the truth about that final encounter.

Jack Jeffries had paid for it. Now Greta Barline was going to ante up.

They’d closed the case, a high-profile whodunit, they’d get their names in the paper. Maybe even be there at the press conference.

He should’ve felt more satisfaction.

Sue said, “How’d Baker react?”

“To what?”

“The way it ended.”

“He seemed okay.” Lamar immediately regretted the lie. He was always honest with Sue, no reason to change that, now. “Actually, he didn’t react at all, hon. Once she signed the confession and he made sure the tape had recorded he just left. Fondie called Jones and Jones called in to congratulate us and Baker wasn’t there to hear it.”

“Maybe he’s got a point, Lamar.”

“About what?”

“The business, all those dreams, a thousand people come to town, nine hundred ninety-nine get stepped on and shattered and the one who gets a chance doesn’t last long either.”

Lamar didn’t answer. Thinking about his own arrival in Nashville, fifteen years ago, from New Haven. Good solid bass player, he had the moves, extra-long nimble fingers able to span eight, nine frets. A darn good ear, too. After a couple of listens to something, he could often play it back note-perfect.

He couldn’t invent, but still, an ear like that counted for something. Everyone back home telling him he was great.

In Nashville, he was good. Maybe even real good.

Meaning not even close to good enough.

He felt cool hands on the back of his neck. Sue had gotten up and was massaging him. She wore that old Med Center 10K commemorative T-shirt and nothing else. Her smell…her firmness and her softness, pushing against him.

He said, “Let’s hit the hay. Thanks for the grub, Nurse Van Gundy.”

“Anything for you, Favorite Patient.”

“Let’s hear it for Marvin Gaye.”

She laughed, for the thousandth time, at the in-joke. Time for Sexual Healing. Lamar wondered if he should find some phrases that weren’t music-connected.

Sue didn’t seem to mind. She took him by the hand and laughed again.

By the time they reached the bedroom, they were kissing deeply.

17

B
aker went home to an empty silent house, popped a beer, and sat in the kitchen with his feet propped up on the Formica dinette table.

Fifty-year-old table, everything in this place was older than he was; since inheriting the house, he’d bought virtually nothing.

Hanging on to all the discount-outlet crap his parents had bought when they moved in.

Danny and Dixie.

When he thought of them that way, they were strangers.

When he used their real names, it was different.

Danville Southerby and Dorothea Baker had met when he was sixteen and she was fourteen, singing in the choir of the First Baptist Church of Newport, Tennessee.

The town, nestled on the edge of the Great Smoky Mountains, was rich in music and folk art and memory, poor in everything else. Danny’s father barely broke even farming tobacco and Dixie’s daddy didn’t do much better with corn.

Singing hymns threw the teenagers together. Blinding love soon followed and within two months, Dixie was pregnant. The child, a small, squalling, pink-faced boy they named Baker, was born three weeks premature, one half year after a hastily arranged church wedding. Dixie bled a lot and the doctor told her she’d never conceive again. She cried, as much from relief as regret.

Like a lot of people in the church, the teens were highly musical. Danny had a clear tenor voice, played piano and organ and guitar without ever taking a lesson. Dixie was on a whole other level, a mandolin prodigy with an astounding vibrato and, some said, technique better than Bill Monroe’s. Top of that, her soprano, always nice, smoothed out and stretched following the delivery of her baby. Maybe singing to the cranky little red-faced tot helped, or it could’ve been one of those strange hormonal twists. Either way, listening to her was a privilege.

The young couple lived on the corn farm with her family, doing scut work and sinking low emotionally. In their spare time, when someone else would take the baby, they sat and played and sang—softly, so as not to share the precious thing they had with anyone else. It was the only private time they had. In those moments, each of them wondered if life wasn’t slipping away, but they never shared the thought with each other.

One night, after Dixie’s daddy scolded Danny for indolence, he got up in the middle of the night, woke Dixie and told her to get dressed. She watched him pack a bag, carry it out of the house, then return for his guitar and her mandolin.

“What—”

He shushed her with a finger. She got dressed, followed him out to the old Dodge his daddy had given him last year but which he never got to drive, being stuck on the corn farm, working like a mutt.

They pushed the car away from the house so as not to wake anyone. When he got far enough, he started up and hit the road.

Dixie said, “What about the baby?”

Danny said, “They all love him. Maybe even better than we do.”

For the next two years, all their families got were postcards. Gaudy souvenir cards from tourists spots all over the South—places Danny and Dixie never visited because instead of seeing the sights, they were doing the roadhouse circuit, playing one-nighters. Mostly the new stuff called Rockabilly, but also bluegrass standards, and gospel hymns when the audience was open to that, which was almost never.

Making petty cash but it was more than Dixie’s dad had paid them for working the cornfields, which was nothing because they were supposed to be content with room and board. Top of that, they were doing what they loved and getting paid for it. Meeting people, all kinds of people, having all kinds of eye-opening experiences that no way would’ve happened back in Newport.

Christmas, they sent store-bought toys to Baker, along with sweet notes in Dixie’s hand. The baby became a quiet, determined toddler, unlikely to give up whatever he was working at, unless forced to.

When he was three, his parents showed up at the corn farm, wearing fancy clothes and driving a five-year-old Ford van full of instruments and music and costume changes and talking about meeting Carl Perkins and Ralph Stanley, all those other famous people in “our world.” Talking about colored singers doing that rhythm and blues, sometimes you could be safe in those colored clubs and it was worth listening.

Dixie’s father scowling at that. Spooning his soup and saying, “I won’t hold it against you, running off like that, and leaving your problem with us.” Meaning the little boy, sitting right there. Talking about him like he didn’t understand. “Be up tomorrow at five to atone. We got a whole edge of the north field to do by hand.”

Danny fingered his leather string tie with the piece of quartz up near the collar, then smiled and stood and laid down a fat wad of bills on the table.

“What’s that?” said his father-in-law.

“Payment.”

“For what?”

“Babysitting, back rent, whatever.” Winking at his wife.

She hesitated, avoided her family’s eyes. Then quaking so hard she thought she’d fall apart, she scooped up Baker and followed her husband out to the van.

As the Ford drove off, Dixie’s mother said, “Figures. They never took their gear out the back.”

Baker Southerby grew up on the roadhouse circuit, learning to read and write and do arithmetic from his mother. He picked things up quickly, making her job easy. She hugged and kissed him a lot and he seemed to like that. No one ever talked about the time that she and Danny had gone and left him.

She told him to call her Dixie because everyone did and, “Sweetie, you and me both know I’m your mama.”

Years later, Baker figured it out. She’d been all of seventeen, wanted to see herself as that pretty girl with the lightning fingers up on stage, not some housewife.

When he was five, he asked to play her Gibson F-5 mandolin.

“Honey, that’s a real precious thing.”

“I’ll be careful.”

Dixie hesitated. Baker stared at her, with those serious eyes.

She ran her hand over his blond crew cut. He kept staring.

“All right, then, but I’m sitting right next to you. Want me to show you some chords?”

Grave nod.

An hour after he started, he was playing C, G and F. By the end of the day, he was coaxing forth a respectable version of “Blackberry Blossom.” Not at full speed, but his tone was clear, his right hand nice and smooth.

“Dan, come listen to this.” Listening to him, watching how careful he was, Dixie was comfortable letting him play the mandolin without her hovering.

Danny came in from the porch of the motel, where he’d been smoking and strumming and writing songs.

“What?”

“Just listen—go ahead, sweetie-pie little man.”

Baker played.

“Huh…,” Danny said. Then: “I got an idea.”

They bought him his own mandolin. Nothing high-priced, a forties A-50 they picked up in a Savannah pawnshop, but it had decent tone. By age six, Baker had a trunk full of stage-duds and a thirties F-4 almost as shiny as Dixie’s F-5 and he was a full-time headliner. The new act was officially The Southerby Family Band: Danny, Dixie and Little Baker the Amazing Smoky Mountain Kid.

Mostly there wasn’t room for all that on any marquee so it was just The Southerbys.

Baker’s chord repertoire ran all the way down the fretboard, encompassed the majors, minors, sevenths, sixths, ninths, elevenths, and thirteenths, along with diminished, augmented, and a whole bunch of interesting extensions he came upon himself that could be called jazz, even though the closest they got to jazz was a few Texas swing songs that always ended up sounding bluegrassy.

By the time he was nine, he played cleaner and faster than his mother and to her credit, she reacted with nothing but pride.

Homeschooling—though that concept hadn’t been invented—continued and Baker was smart enough to get a year ahead of his age group. At least according to the intelligence test Dixie had clipped out of
Parents
magazine.

Baker grew up on fast food, tobacco smoke and applause. Nothing seemed to alter his quiet personality. When he was twelve, a smooth-talking man who’d heard them play at a honky-tonk outside of Natchez told Danny he’d give all three of them a recording contract, make them the new Carter Family.

They went into the studio, laid down five old standards, never heard back from the guy, tried calling a few times, then gave up and went back on the road.

When Baker was twelve, he announced that he wanted to go to a real school.

Danny said, “Just like that? You give it all up?”

Baker didn’t answer.

“Wish you’d talk more, son. Kind of hard to know what’s going on behind those eyes.”

“I just told you.”

“Giving it all up.”

Silence.

Dixie said, “That’s what he wants, maybe it’s not such a bad idea.”

Danny looked over her. “Yeah, I been feeling that’s coming.”

“What has?”

“Itching to settle down.”

“Could’ve done it years ago,” said Dixie. “I was waiting.”

“For what?”

She shrugged. “Something.”

They moved to Nashville, because it was in Tennessee and, theoretically, not a big deal to visit their families. The real reason was: Music City.

Danny was still a young man, though sometimes he felt like he’d lived three lifetimes. The mirror told him he looked sharp, and his pipes were good; guys a lot less talented than he were making it big-time, why not give it a shot?

He used some of the cash he’d saved from years on the road and bought a little frame house in The Nations. Nice white neighborhood, full of hardworking people. Dixie wanted to play house that was fine; he’d be over on Sixteenth Street.

Baker went to junior high and met other kids. He stayed quiet but managed to make a few friends and, except for math where he needed some catch-up, classes were pretty easy.

Dixie stayed home and played her mandolin and sang “Just for the sake of it, Baker, which is music at the purest, right?”

Sometimes she asked Baker to jam with her. Mostly, he did.

Danny was out most of the time, trying to scare up a career on Music Row. He got a few gigs playing rhythm guitar at the Ryman when regulars were sick, did some club dates, paid his own money to cut demos that never went anywhere.

When the money ran low, he took a job teaching choir at a Baptist church.

After a year and a half of that, over dinner he announced it was time to hit the road again.

Baker said, “Not me.”

Danny said, “I didn’t mean you.” Glancing at his wife. She screwed up her mouth. “I put on weight, nothing’s gonna fit.”

“That’s why God invented tailors,” said her husband. “Or do it yourself, you used to know how to sew.”

“I still do,” she said, defensively.

“There you go. We’re leaving on Monday.”

Today was Thursday.

Dixie said, “Leaving for where?”

“Atlanta. I got us a gig opening for the Culpeppers at a new bluegrass club. Nothing fancy, all they want is S.O.S.”

Family talk for the Same Old Shit.

Meaning the standards. Danny, seeing himself as a modern man, had come to despise them.

“Just like that,” said Dixie. “You made all the plans.”

“Don’t I always? You might want to get some new strings for your plink-box. I overheard you yesterday. The G and D are dead.”

“What about Baker?”

“He can take care of himself, right, son?”

“He’s not even fourteen.”

“How old were you when you had him?”

Talking about him as if he wasn’t there.

Baker wiped his mouth, carried his plate to the sink, and began washing it.

“So?” said Danny.

Dixie sighed. “I’ll try to sew it myself.”

From then on, they were gone more than they were home. Doing a month on the road, returning for a week or ten days, during which Dixie doted on Baker with obvious guilt and Danny sat by himself and smoked and wrote songs no one else would ever hear.

The summer of Baker’s fifteenth birthday, Danny announced they were sending him to Bible camp in Memphis for six weeks. “Time to get some faith and spirituality, son.”

By sheer coincidence, Danny and Dixie had been booked for a six-week gig exactly during that period. Aboard a cruise boat leaving from Biloxi.

“Hard to get phone contact from there,” said Dixie. “This way we know you’ll be safe.”

During the last week of camp, Baker ate something off and came down with horrible food poisoning. Three days later, the bug was gone but he’d lost seven pounds and was listless. The camp doctor had left early on a family emergency and the Reverend Hartshorne, the camp director, didn’t want to risk any legal liability; just last summer some rich girl’s family had sued because she’d gotten a bladder infection that developed into sepsis. Luckily that kid had survived, probably her fault in the first place, she had a reputation for fooling with the boys but tell that to those fancy-pants lawyers…

Hartshorne found Baker in his bunk room and drew him outside. “Call your parents, son, so they can pick you up. Then start packing.”