Read Online Denton - 01 - Dead Folks' Blues by Steven Womack - Free Book Online Page B

restaurants, bars, and dance clubs now. Cities get gentrified all the time, but seldom with the class of this town. People flowed freely, happily. Tourists mixed in with suited business people, street singers, and city workers in a buzz saw of activity. I drove past the replica of Fort Nashborough, past Riverfront Park, on out First Avenue until it changes into Hermitage Avenue. One of the things that make this city so wonderful is that you can get lost forever if you don’t grasp the concept of street names changing mid-block—and that Old Hickory Boulevard has no beginning and no end. It’s just kind of everywhere.
    Around the bend, just past the building that’s a different Oriental restaurant, with a different owner every six weeks, is Metro General Hospital. It’s a nineteenth-century facility overloaded with twenty-first century stresses: eleven-year-old girls pregnant by their fathers, their younger brothers, or cousins; junkies; alcoholics; AIDS patients who never heard of health insurance, even if they could afford it. The knifings, stabbings, car wrecks, plane crashes—they all go to General.
    I made a left turn just past the main entrance of the hospital into an unidentified parking lot. Up a short hill, behind a rise that blocks the building from the road, sits the Forensic Science Center.
    Strange place, the Nashville morgue. I don’t know if morgues are like this all over, but this city’s is more of a bunker than anything else. The doors are heavy, armor-plated, and the few windows in the place are bulletproof. Inside, the staff’s got the makings of a pretty good arsenal, and they all know where the bullets go.
    Go figure. I mean, who’d want to blast their way into a morgue? God help anybody who tries, though.
    Kay Delacorte sat at her desk, eyeing me through the thick glass. She made a face kind of like a kid biting into a sour ball and pushed a button on a wall next to her desk.
    “What do
you
want?”
    I looked at her through the glass, gave her my best lost boy look. “C’mon, Kay. Can I come in?”
    She giggled, her laugh coming through the speaker as static. Kay’s bright, funny, with a real
M*A*S*H
sense of humor. Guess that’s what it takes. At forty something, she’s the oldest staffer at the morgue, a combination earth mother-social director for the employees.
    “What for?”
    “I want to talk to Doc Marsha.”
    “She doesn’t want to talk to you.” Kay was messing with me now. All part of the game.
    “C’mon, Kay, you’re not careful here, you’re going to make me think of my ex-wife.”
    “Oh, God forbid …” she yelled, laughing as she pushed another button. The door buzzer wailed. I grabbed the handle and pulled. The front door to the morgue is so heavy you’ve got to grasp it with both hands and plant your feet solid or you’ll never make it.
    The bunker door swung open, and I stepped into the heavily air-conditioned building. I shivered slightly after being outside in the hot sun. Every time I’ve ever been in this building, it’s as cold as a meat locker. So to speak.
    “You’ve got a lot of nerve, showing your face around here after all this time.” Kay was teasing me now, or at least I hoped that’s what she was doing. Tough to tell with her.
    “I know it’s been a long time, babe. But since I got canned at the paper, I don’t have much chance to get down here.”
    She stood up, motioned for me. I stepped over to her desk and leaned in. She gave me a quick hug, a peck on the cheek.
    “I saw your name in the paper,” she said. “You okay?”
    “Little tired. Little sore. Nothing heavy. I guess you know why I’m here.”
    “Yeah, and it’s a good thing Dr. Henry’s up in East Tennessee.”
    Dr. Henry Krohlmeyer, all the right credentials including Stanford Medical School, was the head meat cutter, the official city medical examiner. He also probably would’ve thrown me out, given the circumstances. My being here was most improper, and I knew