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  DEADLY SCIENCE

  A Shane Hadley Mystery

  Ken Brigham

  Secant Publishing

  Salisbury, Maryland

  Copyright © 2020 by Ken Brigham

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise — without prior written permission from the publisher, except for the use of brief quotations for purposes of review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Originally published as Death in Printers Alley

  Copyright © 2015 by Ken Brigham

  Secant Publishing, LLC

  615 N Pinehurst Ave

  Salisbury MD 21801

  www.secantpublishing.com

  978-1-944962-66-1 (paperback)

  978-1-944962-68-5 (e-book)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2020904844

  To Mark Manner. Probably the smartest man I know.

  By Ken Brigham

  The Shane Hadley Mysteries

  Deadly Science

  Deadly Arts

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Chapter 1

  The still familiar pop pop pop pop… pop of gunshots drew Shane Hadley like a magnet toward the sound. He struggled for a moment with the brake on his wheelchair, forgetting that he had locked it and then sped as fast as he could spin the wheels down the long corridor toward the front of the apartment where the balcony hung out over Printers Alley. He shoved open the French doors leading onto the balcony and wheeled himself outside.

  Leaning over the balcony rail, he caught a brief glimpse of the back of someone running from the alley toward Union Street, away from the red brick building with the flashing neon Bonz’s Booze and Music sign. He thought he recognized something about the person but he wasn’t sure. There was something vaguely familiar about the person’s gait, the way his right foot pigeon-toed inward. It wasn’t a limp really, but an odd movement that made his stride just slightly asymmetrical, a rhythmic little list to starboard with each step that seemed oddly familiar to Shane.

  Then he noticed Bonz Bagley’s lanky body sprawled awkwardly beside the chair in front of his club. Bonz often sat there for long hours holding Pecan Pie, his pet miniature poodle, and chatting with the passersby. Bonz’s body lay prone with his head turned to one side. His face was a bloody mess. Blood matted his sparse strands of hair plastering them spider-like against his pale smooth skull. A pool of blood expanded around his head and rivulets of the dark liquid were beginning to form, gravity sucking Bonz’s lifeblood away down the alley that had been the center of his life for longer than most people could remember; Printers Alley was no stranger to blood. And Pecan Pie. The dog lay as lifeless as her master beside him, her white coat almost completely blood red.

  Shane reached for his cell phone and was about to dial 911 when he heard the sirens and saw the flashing blue lights of three squad cars entering the alley from the Church Street end. He dropped the phone back into his shirt pocket.

  It was early Sunday morning and the alley was deserted. It was always quiet on Sunday mornings. Bonz Bagley appeared at his usual spot early every day, even on Sunday, but he just sat there alone in the morning silence. The clubs wouldn’t be open for several hours yet. That’s when the crowds would filter in. Had they already started to arrive they would have scattered at the sound of gunfire. Shane pondered how people reacted to the threatening sound of a gunshot. Cops, even ex-cops with useless legs, were drawn to the sound. Normal people ran as fast as they could the other way.

  The guys in blue descended on the scene, abandoning the squad cars with their engines still running, lights flashing. Shane might have recognized a couple of them from when he was an active member of the force. They would be the older guys. And there weren’t many of them left who’d pull this kind of duty. It had been several years since he was part of that scene. And this part of the job was a young man’s game.

  One of the cops knelt and felt for a pulse in Bonz’s neck, smearing his hands with the congealing blood that coated the old man’s head and neck. The cop just shook his head and stood up again. Bonz was dead. One of the younger cops ran into the club and then down the alley looking in all directions hoping, Shane guessed, to catch the killer on the spot. The older guys knew how unlikely that was and didn’t bother. They had learned to conserve their energy for more urgent situations.

  The men in blue stood for a few minutes staring down at the dead man and his dog, sizing up the situation. They all knew Bonz. The cops knew pretty much everybody who had any regular connection with the alley. Shane overheard the officers’ conversation.

  “Who the hell would want to kill Bonz?”

  “Yeah, who is right. And the dog? Why kill the dog? Sadistic bastard.”

  “Maybe a robbery?” one of the younger cops said. “Everybody around here knows that Bonz always had a wad of bills on him.”

  “But Pecan Pie don’t carry no wad. Besides, everybody around here knows that Bonz would give you money if you asked him. Give you the shirt off his back, he would.”

  “Not many folks would want that shirt,” one said.

  Years earlier, Bonz had been a regular on a popular TV show that was a parody of the Nashville country music subculture. He was mostly an extra but sometimes was featured playing the bones which is how he acquired the nickname (pronounced bones; the odd spelling and the underlined o were the brainchildren of a long-forgotten publicist for the TV show) that everyone still knew him by. On the show Bonz wore a ridiculous get-up, old bib overalls and a garish red, white and blue shirt decorated with sequins in the pattern of an American flag. That was years ago, but he still wore the getup, the colors fading and the cuffs fraying, when he presided over his disintegrating Printers Alley nightspot. The shirt wasn’t likely to appeal to the kind of person who would do a thing like this. Maybe the well-known wad of bills was another matter.

  “We better get the crime scene guys out here before we move him,” the cop in a rumpled business suit, obviously the detective assigned to the scene, said, taking the phone from his belt and placing the call.

  “Zack,” the older detective addressed one of the young guys. “Round up anybody you can find in the alley and ask them if they saw anything.”

  The younger cop nodded and started off down the alley with the exaggerated swagger that this new generation of cops seemed to feel was a requisite part of the image. Shane wasn’t impressed. He never thought much of the tough guy image that some cops seemed to get off on. He thought it got in the way of the job
.

  Hardy Seltzer looked up toward the balcony. He recognized Shane from the old days. Seltzer was on the force when Shane’s career came to a sudden and what was generally considered a tragic end. They hadn’t actually worked together and didn’t know each other well.

  “Shane Hadley,” Seltzer called up to him. “How the hell are you?”

  Shane recognized the voice and then remembered Seltzer’s face.

  “I’m OK, Hardy,” he answered. “Looks like you’ve got a spot of work to do here.”

  “Looks that way,” Seltzer responded. “Did you see anything?”

  “I didn’t see it happen but when I heard the shots I came out here. Please join me and I’ll tell you what I saw. I fear it may be of little help.”

  “Sure,” Seltzer said and turned and spoke to one of his colleagues. “Stay here until the crime scene guys arrive.”

  “I’ll release the door and the elevator for you. Just punch floor two,” Shane called down.

  The flat where Shane and KiKi had lived since moving from Oxford, England to Nashville over a decade earlier occupied a floor in a rehabilitated warehouse. The other floors were lawyers’ offices except for the sixth-floor penthouse which belonged to Rory Holcomb. Holcomb had bought up several Printers Alley properties some years earlier. He leased most of the properties to clubs and other small businesses (including an incongruous sushi bar at the Church Street end of the alley), but renovated this one into units that he sold as condos except for his penthouse; he kept that as his in-town pied-a-terre where he periodically entertained the many political and music industry acquaintances he had cultivated over a long and interesting career as a real estate entrepreneur and raconteur.

  How Holcomb, a country boy from Greenbrier, wound up in his current position was a matter of some speculation among the locals. The truth was that a childhood friend who had risen to become governor of the state hired Rory as a driver and then convinced him to take advantage of inside knowledge of impending state projects that would require buying up large tracts of otherwise worthless land in west Tennessee. Rory borrowed the money and bought the land dirt cheap, resold it to the state at an exorbitantly high price and used the proceeds to buy up properties in the city. In the course of achieving his remarkable financial success, he had made a lot of friends as well as some enemies. The enemies were pretty much neutralized by Rory’s knowledge of where their skeletons were buried. There were a lot of skeletons.

  Access to the building from the alley was via a secured door controlled by the occupants from inside. The elevator opened directly into the living room of Shane and KiKi’s apartment and access to their floor required a key release in the elevator. Shane rolled back into the living room, released the front door and unlocked the elevator.

  He kept thinking about the man he saw running from the alley. At least he thought it was a man. He couldn’t make out much about the person except the way he ran. Shane couldn’t get that out of his mind. Something resonated that he couldn’t put his finger on. He wasn’t sure whether he should mention that to Hardy Seltzer. Shane couldn’t remember ever fingering a criminal based solely on the way he ran. He smiled.

  Detective Seltzer approached the door with some trepidation. He had never visited Shane Hadley in his home and didn’t really want to. He preferred not to think of Hadley at all, not as a living person. He preferred the myths that pieced together the jigsaw puzzle memory of the detective when he was active, before the accident. There were many myths. Seltzer thought of tales about Hadley’s uncanny ability to construct a story from subtle and often overlooked clues. There were stories of him solving several especially difficult cases that way. The old guys called him Sherlock Shane—the nickname coined by a local newspaper reporter—when they regaled their new colleagues with those memories, underscoring the connection with Hadley’s SH initials that he had routinely scrawled with a flourish at the bottom of interoffice memos. Seltzer didn’t want whatever the current reality of Shane Hadley was to spoil the myth.

  “Why Bonz?” Seltzer asked.

  They sat in the living room facing each other. It was difficult for Seltzer to look directly at the paraplegic former detective. Hadley was still a strikingly handsome man. The waves of his expensively styled dark hair drifted just slightly over his ears and shirt collar. And those legendary pale blue, almost gray, eyes that seemed to bore into one’s soul. But it was hard for Seltzer to reconcile the man with flaccid legs in the wheelchair with the Shane Hadley of the department’s cherished legend.

  “It’s really sad,” Shane responded. “Bonz was pretty much a shell of his younger self but he had a good heart. The alley was his territory. He knew all the characters. He seemed happy to be one of them, just sitting out there every day and gradually fading away. I doubt he ever contemplated the possibility of a violent death.”

  “Probably not,” Seltzer commented. “Probably not. So tell me what you know about what happened.”

  “Well, I was in the back of the house, watching the Third Avenue barristers and their clients come and go. Our back window looks out on Third Avenue where the better class of lawyers does business with the better class of criminals.”

  “Your place spans the whole block?” Seltzer asked.

  “Yes, yes,” Hadley responded. “I think of it as a bridge that connects the perpetrators in the alley with the barristers on that stretch of Third Avenue who’ll wind up defending the erring alley denizens who can afford their price. I spend most of my time patrolling the bridge. I have a lot of time.”

  He paused for a minute. Seltzer squirmed. He didn’t want to know how Hadley spent his time these days. Didn’t want to have that stuck in his mind. Sherlock Shane was the memory he preferred.

  “At any rate,” Shane continued, “I was back there when I heard the gunshots. There were five shots, four in rapid succession and then a short pause before a fifth. As soon as I heard them I rushed up here to the front as fast as I could and went out onto the balcony. By then the scene was quiet. That odd brief stony silence that always comes suddenly in the wake of gunfire.”

  “Yeah,” Seltzer said. “I know.”

  “I saw someone running from the alley toward Union. He, or I should say the person, I couldn’t be sure of anything specific. I couldn’t swear to even gender or race. I only had a quick glimpse as the person’s back disappeared around the corner. I couldn’t tell if he had a gun. I only saw poor Bonz and his dog after that. I was about to call 911 when you and your men arrived.”

  “Nothing at all about the person?”

  “He wasn’t very big. But he was wearing a hooded shirt, dark blue, that covered his head so I don’t know hair color, no details. I can’t think of anything else,” Shane answered, not sure why he chose not to mention the odd way the person ran.

  “You know the alley pretty well, I gather,” Seltzer continued. “Any idea who might want Bonz dead?”

  “If it wasn’t a robbery, I can’t imagine a reason for it. Or anyone who would do it. But I’m an alley observer, not a participator. There may be activities that aren’t obvious from my vantage point. I do wonder why they killed the dog. If it was a robbery gone wrong, you’d think the perpetrator would want to get away as fast as possible. Why would he risk attracting even more attention by killing the dog?”

  “Yeah. That is strange if it was just Bonz’s money they were after,” the officer thought about that for a minute and then continued. “Bonz’s bar hasn’t done much business in years. How’d he stay open? Any hint of drugs or something like that?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Bonz wasn’t into that scene at all I don’t think. He was old school. Did he have any money on him? Could this just have been a random robbery?”

  “That seems to be the most likely thing, like you said, except for the dog. And maybe the shots to the head, not the usual target for a challenged robber. Looks like there were several shots, all to the head. We waited for the crime scene boys to check his pockets.”


  Seltzer was anxious to go. He wasn’t comfortable in the presence of a former cop reduced to a shadow of who he had been by a stray bullet taken in the line of duty. It could happen to anybody.

  “Thanks, Shane, for telling me what you saw,” he said. “If anything else comes to mind, give me a call. I better get down there and finish up the immediate chores.”

  Seltzer got up and reached down to shake Shane Hadley’s hand, noticing how thin and cold it was.

  “You’re welcome, Hardy. Good luck with solving this one. If I think of anything else or hear anything, I’ll let you know.”

  The officer left and Shane rolled himself back onto the balcony. An ambulance had arrived and the crime scene guys were going about their business. The ambulance attendants were loading Bonz’s body into their vehicle, moving slowly and chatting with the cops. There was no hurry. Bonz’s time in his small world was over. Hardy Seltzer joined the group and exchanged some words Shane couldn’t hear.

  Seltzer looked up at the balcony and called to Shane. “Wasn’t a robbery. Or if it was it was aborted. Big wad of hundreds in his pocket.”

  “Thanks,” Hadley called down and wheeled back inside.

  He went to the bar and retrieved his prized leather case from a shelf. He placed the case carefully on the bar, opened it and lifted one of the cut crystal sherry glasses from its bed of crimson satin. The set of six Oxford sherry glasses was a treasure from his days at that venerable university. Those two years had headed Shane in a different direction than anyone would have predicted for him. And molded the man as well as plotting his course. He returned to Nashville with the hint of an accent and a habit of using words and how they were assembled that an English intellectual might have recognized as faintly Oxfordian. And a demeanor to match. When he was on the force, the more generous of his fellow policemen thought him idiosyncratic; the less generous ones thought him arrogant, pretentious and self-centered. There was some truth to both opinions. He didn’t identify with the other cops. He was different. But he had been one hell of a detective. No one could deny that.