“How long had you worked for her?” I had to ask him something, keep him talking. Otherwise, I was afraid I’d find myself sailing through the plate-glass window that looked out onto his Harley.
He walked past me to the refrigerator and pulled out another can of Colt .45. “Too fucking long. Put up with her shit till I just couldn’t take it anymore.”
“You managed her road show, right?”
He looked over at me, disgust on his face. “I drove the semi and helped tote the heavy shit. Whipped the boys into line when they smoked too much reefer. Anybody messed with Becca, I took care of ’em.”
I leaned over, interested now. “You were her bodyguard?”
“Nothing that fancy. I was just her big dumb fucking biker nobody wanted to mess with.”
He turned the tall can up and downed about half of it. “Cut the crap. What do you want?”
“I’m just confused here, that’s all. If you weren’t stealing equipment and you were her bodyguard, why did she fire you after all these years? I’m just trying to understand this.”
Suddenly he slammed the Colt .45 can down on the washbasin counter next to the refrigerator hard enough to make dust come off the wall. I jumped, startled, and fought the urge to dive for the door.
“She fired me ’cause I wasn’t fucking good enough for her anymore!” he bellowed. “I started out working for her for free, goddamn it, back when she didn’t have gas money to put in the truck. Now she’s a big star, and Mike Pinkleton Biker Man ain’t good enough for the high-and-mighty Rebecca Gibson!”
His head shook and his hair bounced around off his shoulders.
“Why you?” I asked.
“I just told you why!”
“No, that’s not what I mean. I mean, why you in particular? Why now? She’d known about the new album, the touring, for months. She knew things were about to take off. Why did she cut you loose when she did?”
His shoulders stooped and his jaw lowered to his chest, as if he were about to doze off on his feet. I could see when he turned back to me, though, that it wasn’t fatigue or the effects of some drug kicking in that was causing this change. It was anger, anger to the point of hatred. I could see it in his eyes when he looked at me. Make that glared at me.
“I don’t want to fucking talk to you no more,” he said, his voice low now, and mean.
“But wait, Mike, don’t you see? Something about this stinks. I don’t know what it means, but I’ve got this feeling-”
He was on me in a split second, his hands on my shoulders like clamps, jerking me up out of that chair like I was a rag doll that got in his way.
“Wait a min-” I tried to talk him down from wherever he’d gone, but it was too late. I felt the drywall crack as my back slammed into it, followed a heartbeat later by the back of my head. My ears rang for a second, and my skull felt like somebody whacked me with a nine iron. That was good, I thought. When you really get hammered, you don’t feel it for a few seconds. I felt this from the get-go, so I was probably okay.
I slid my hand toward the pocket of my field jacket, fumbling for the Mace or the stun gun, whichever I got to first. It was too late, though. He had me pinned against the wall, the stench of unwashed body, partially digested Colt .45, and cigarette smoke in my face like garbage.
“I said I don’t fucking want to talk to you anymore.” I nodded. He doesn’t want to talk, I’m not saying a word. It’s that simple. “Get the fuck out.”
I nodded again. His grip relaxed, and I slid back down to the carpet. The back of my head stung like hell and my shoulders ached from where he’d slammed me into the wall. I felt the lump in my right pocket that was the Mace can, and briefly considered spraying him down with it just to see the look on his face. But then I remembered what a security consultant had told me back when I was doing a story on self-protection, something that the Mace companies didn’t particularly relish having everyone know. Mace, he said, is better than nothing. But for some guys, especially guys with a lot of bulk who aren’t wired right, Mace didn’t do anything but make them more pissed off than they were to begin with.
Mike Pinkleton looked like one of those guys. So when he backed off two steps and motioned toward the door, I took him up on the offer. I’d gotten nothing from Mike Pinkleton but a fierce headache, and the feeling that something still stank.
Nothing speeds up the onset of an impending blood-sugar crash like a rush of fear-induced adrenaline. By the time I got the Mazda started and peeled a little rubber out of the parking lot onto Dickerson Pike, I was shaking and sweating like Morris the Cat in a room full of pit bulls. I’d met some mean people in my life, but never had I felt myself in the presence of such complete and unpredictable danger caused by a man who could still technically be called sane.
Mike Pinkleton killed Rebecca Gibson. As sure as I’m sitting here in traffic wondering if I need a change of Jockey shorts, he beat that woman to death. He’s the only one who could have, the only one with that unique nexus of raw power and fury that could have resulted in that particular death. Over and over, it kept coming back to me, the fact that it’s work to beat a human being to death. It’s work to beat a human being to death.
It’s work to beat a human being to death.
But then I calmed down and stopped rehashing my own anger, my own humiliation at being thrown around by the greasy hulk of a man with as much indifference as if he’d been kicking a stray dog. Mike Pinkleton could have killed her, yes, but he wasn’t smart enough to cover it up. It wasn’t his style. He’s more the type that would have gotten in the cops’ faces and said: Yeah, I killed the bitch-want to make something out of it? I wondered how Rebecca had reacted to him, how she’d found the spine to stand up and fire him.
She was one ballsy lady.
Maybe it was dumb to go directly to the people whom I thought might have murdered Rebecca Gibson. On the other hand, when I covered political corruption stories as a reporter, I found the most useful technique was to ask the suspected politician a direct question, like: Pardon me, Senator. Did you take that bribe? Then watch the reaction. I call it the Shake the Tree and See What Falls Out theorem.
I dug through my notes, searching for Dwight Parmenter’s address while sitting at a stoplight on Music Row. Parmenter lived a block or so before Wedgewood on a side street on the right. I stopped in front of his house and sat there for a moment trying to regroup. Parmenter lived in a Belmont-area house that had been a showplace fifty years ago, but had since been cut up into what had become run-down apartments. The house sat on a rise, with a half flight of concrete steps from the curb up to a buckled walk that led to the front porch.
An intercom with a series of white buttons hung barely mounted in the wall next to the door. Dwight Parmenter’s name was third up from the bottom. I pressed the button and heard a buzzer somewhere above my head. A moment later a crackling voice answered through the cheap speaker.
“Yeah?”
I gave him my spiel, then stood waiting for a few moments. The voice came back: “Second floor, apartment six. Up the stairs and on the right.”
An electronic buzzer went off. I pushed the door open and stepped into the entrance foyer. The place smelled of mold and cat urine. At least I think it was cat.…
The bare bulb overhead was burned out, leaving the entryway about as dark as a closet. I pushed a second heavy door open and entered. What had once been beautiful oak-plank floors were scarred and pitted, with dark watermarks staining the honey-colored wood. A ratty carpet was nailed to the steps leading upstairs, which creaked and moaned as I stepped on them.
Blue paint flaked off the walls, with a thick coating of dust over everything. From an apartment below, country music of the Marty Robbins era filtered through a closed door. I climbed the flight of stairs as quickly as possible, turned, and found Parmenter’s apartment. He answered on the second knock.
This time, I produced my license. He scanned it quickly, then compared my face with the picture on the ticket.
“Okay,” he said sullenly. “C’mon in.”
I stepped into an apartment with twelve-foot ceilings, crumbling plaster walls, and old wooden windows that had to be held open with pieces of two-by-two. Dwight Parmenter wore a frayed white T-shirt, his skinny arms freckled and lightly haired. His face was thin, the kind of face that would sink in on itself when it got old. He hadn’t shaved, and while that looked either sexy or artsy on some men, on Dwight Parmenter it just made him look like one of Walker Evans’s Depression-era photographs. I guessed he was about thirty-five or so, and I concluded from his posture and his bearing that his years in the music business had been brutal.
“Thanks for your time,” I said.
“Sit down.” He motioned to an overstuffed green sofa with a rip on one end of the seat cushion. I sat, feeling myself sink into the padding as he sat in a matching lime-green easy chair across from me. He picked up a battered old acoustic guitar with nylon strings and slung it across his lap.
I looked around at the old furniture, the torn music posters on the wall, the ancient stereo system, and the stacks of LPs. “Nice place you got here,” I said.
“Thanks. It’s home,” he said.
We made a couple more passes at small talk. He offered me a beer. I declined. After a moment of awkward silence, I decided to jump in.
“I’ve been retained by Slim Gibson,” I said. “He says he didn’t kill his ex-wife.”
“You believe him?” Parmenter asked.
I rubbed my chin and thought for a moment. “I believe him. And I’m looking for any information that will help clear his name.”
“I like Slim,” Parmenter said, his right fingers breaking into a little picking pattern on the strings as his left hand formed a chord on the neck. “Even if he did kill her, I feel real bad for him.”
I studied him for a second. His right thumb hit alternating bass notes on the guitar as his index and second fingers picked the top strings in a catchy little melody. His left hand shifted from chord to chord flawlessly, but there was something curiously flat in the playing. It was as Mac Ford had said, there was no fire in his belly. He was an accomplished craftsman, a technician, but there was no passion in him anywhere that I could see. That struck me as odd for someone struggling in such a passion-filled, tumultuous business. And yet, word was he was in love with Rebecca Gibson. So there had to be some mettle hidden in him somewhere.