The Redneck Detective Agency (The Redneck Detective Agency Mystery Series Book 1) (10 page)

Chapter 20

Rusty took him a long, hot bath. Then he put on some fresh jeans and T-shirt. Just as he walked into the living room, the black phone rang.

              He stopped and stared at it for a couple rings, like someone might do in an episode of
The Twilight Zone
, an episode that probably didn’t exist, but an episode that Rusty was living. Like he was going to answer it and it was going to be Compton’s ghost and that ghost was going to give him some cryptic clue as to who did it.

              Rusty picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

              “Dad, it’s me.”

              “Crystal! Where are you?”

              “Argentina. On my Fellowship. It’s autumn here.”

              “Far out. You sound like you’re across the river,” Rusty said, before he realized she would have no concept of how out of state calls, much less calls to another country, would be all static jumbled with time lags.

              “Hey, I talked to Mom earlier today and she told me about you being arrested.”

              “Yeah, don’t worry, honey, it’ll get straightened out.”

              “I know you didn’t do it, Dad.”

              “Thanks. It’s hard on your mother. A big shock.”

              “I guess,” Crystal said. There was a hesitation in her voice, like she was going to say something else. Rusty had seen little of his daughter the last two years, but all her life, before that, they seemed to seldom be more than ten feet apart. And like her mother, Rusty knew her through and through.

              “What, Crystal?”

              “Well, I met him a few months ago up there.”

              “I know.”

              “And, well, he came on to me.”

              Rusty wanted to say fuck, shit, piss. But he just kept his mouth shut. Crystal could feel the hesitation, he knew, and before she could voice her own ‘what’ he said, “Did you tell your mother?”

              “No. I thought she would get mad at me.”

              “Oh, honey, she wouldn’t have.” His words did not seem natural coming out of his own mouth.

              “I felt like she would have thought it was my fault. He came up to me and was talking to me and then got real syrupy with me. I had on pants, but he ran his hands between my legs and was moving them up and leaned in to kiss me, but I broke away from him. Then he said, ‘Please, your mother doesn’t have to know about this. I was in surgery all night last night and I’m not quite myself today.’”

              “It’s all right,” Rusty said. It wasn’t all right, but the son of a bitch was dead. He thought Crystal was going to start crying.

              “And, of course, I haven’t told Mom. She’s so upset. But, Dad, I’m glad she’s not going to marry him. Does that make me a bad person?”

              Then Crystal did start crying. In between her sobs, Rusty tried to be reassuring, “You are not a bad person…You are a very good person…Come on, it’s going to be all right.”

              Then Crystal snapped out of it, and said, “Dad, I got to go. We’ve got to leave for a museum.”

              “Okay. Now you don’t worry about this stuff anymore. It’s done with.”

              “Thank you, Dad.”

              Then he said what he told her every time he’d ever dropped her off anywhere or at school or she’d left out the door: “Don’t take any shit off anybody.”

              They said goodbye. Rusty hung up and went back out to the front porch. How do you get even with a dead man? Go piss on his grave?

              Just as he was pondering it, wondering if someone came up, if they could see the steam coming out his ears, his cell rang.

              It was Melvin.

              “Okay, Rusty. I did an interview with Action News 19. It will be on the six o’clock news. I really lambasted the prosecution for circumstantial evidence…”

              “Melvin, assume this phone is being monitored.”

              After a pause, Melvin said, “All right.”

              “Don’t call me paranoid, Melvin.”

              “Not at all. Listen, the reason I called, we need to get together very soon.”

              “How about tomorrow morning, early?”

              “Good. Are you okay at your place?”

              “What, you want to meet me out here?”

              “No, I mean, is your house covered up with reporters and TV news crews?”

              “No.”

              “That’s strange. My office is covered up. I just had to hire a receptionist.”

              “There you go, Melvin. I knew you were the man. You’re doing your job. You’re drawing in the sharks, keeping them off me.”

              As soon as he clicked his phone off, a pickup came trundling up to the barricaded gate and parked. At first Rusty thought it was Ray, returning with another load of lumber, but it was an old GMC.

              Old man McAllister got out of the cab. He had on bib overalls and brogan shoes.

              Just what Rusty needed in his life right now--a McAllister.

              Rusty walked over, manipulated the gate and some fifty-gallon barrels so that old man McAllister could get onto the lot, and then shook his hand. “I got a little business to go over with you, Rusty.”

              “Come on up on the porch. Take a load off.”

              They walked to the house. Pelfry McAllister climbed up the two steps onto the front porch and sat down in the ladder back chair there. Rusty figured him to be about eighty-three, the age his own daddy would have been if he were still alive.

              Rusty sat in the porch swing. He just sat there, waiting for old man McAllister to say something. That was the proper thing to do.

              Old man McAllister took a chipped and scarred briar pipe out of his bib and started dipping it in a tobacco pouch, tamped on the tobacco. He let his words come slow and deliberate.

              “The McAllisters and Clays been in this county together and in this part of the county before it was a county. Before Alabama was a state.”

              “That’s right, Mr. McAllister. We go way back.”

              “Your daddy was a good man.”

              “Yes, he was.”

              “My great granddaughter got married last week.”

              “I heard. Heard he was a mighty rich man she married. You McAllisters are coming up in this world.”

              “Well, Rusty. It was too rich for my blood. I can tell you that. That’s the main reason that brought me here. I found out you didn’t git invited.”

              “That’s fine with me.”

              “Well, it ain’t with me and I let Halsey know that. She claimed she thought it was bad luck having McAllisters and Clays at the same party where there was liquor.”

              “She might have a point there.”

              “She let superstition git in the way of proper manners if you ast me, but nobody was asting me. Ain’t that a hell of a fix?”

              “The world’s going to hell in a hand basket,” Rusty said.

              Old man McAllister got his pipe going and then spit out a stream of something that looked like he had been chewing tobacco before he dug out his pipe. Some of the spit landed on the corner of the porch. Rusty made a mental note to take the hose pipe and wash it down after Pelfry left.

              “You said that right. The other thang, I just come over from seeing that judge on your case.”

              “Judge McCartney?” Rusty could remember his name because it was the same as Paul the Beatle’s.

              “Yeuh. Some McCartneys moved over here from Mississippi when I was a boy. All of them was sorry. I ast the judge about it, he didn’t know anything about him having any Mississippi McCartney blood in him. Said his folks was originally from South Georgia. But that’d be just like a Mississippi McCartney to claim they’s from South Georgia.”

              “Yes, sir. How’d you get in to see the judge?”

              “I told them Pelfry McAllister, a Travertine County McAllister, was here to see Judge McCartney and if they knew what was good for em, they better let me see him right away. They was uppity about it, but the Judge was patient enough. Now, I told him that you didn’t do that murdering.”

              “Well, thank you, Mr. McAllister. That was kind of you. Much obliged.”

              “You welcome. I told that judge that you and you daddy and you daddy’s daddy could cook up a mean stick of dynamite. And that ya’ll’d rather blow something up than eat. But if you had some objection to that fancy heart doctor marrying your ex-wife that you’d just gone to him face to face and killed him with your bare hands, not gone blowing him up behind his back. That he’d just better find him somebody else to hang that murder on.”

              “Thank you, Mr. McAllister. I appreciate that.”

              “If there’s anything else I can do for you on this, Rusty, you just let me know.”

              “I think you’ve done enough already, Mr. McAllister.”

Chapter 21

Rusty stood at his screen door. What in the hell was this? Prosecuting Attorney Jeffrey Starr getting out of a boat and coming up to his house?

As the man got closer, thank God, Rusty saw it was Al Bolton.
I’m going crazy. The stuff is getting to me so that I can’t see straight.

              Rusty opened the door, and without any salutation Al walked in like he owned the place. Al tossed two thick folders down onto Rusty’s kitchen table. Rusty just stood there and stared down at them as Al spoke.

              “Okay, I did a quick search. It seems Compton had a thing for young women. Not that I can cast the first stone, but I don’t flip from one to another. And I don’t do it behind my spouse’s or fiancée’s back. He was on the board of the hospital. Some bigger corporation was trying to buy it out. He was for it. The others on the board were against it. He stood to make a lot of money off the deal. Millions over a few years’ time. I don’t know whose financial toes he was stepping on, but I think that’s a line to follow up on. If I were you, I’d give that little piece of information to my lawyer.”

              “Thanks. I feel like I’m getting somewhere now.”

              Al leaned in toward Rusty like he was going to kiss him, but all he did was lean over to put his fingertip on the other folder.

              “This is your problem right here, Rusty. Mr. Jeffrey Starr. He was a scumbag, ruthless lawyer with Bittleman, Burns, & Getz. And now he’s got his eye on a political career. And, believe me, he’s custom made for it.”

              “That’s what I figured.”

              Then Al reached into his satchel-man-purse attaché thing and pulled out a small electronic device that looked like an old cellphone charger station that Rusty once had. He walked over to the phone, but stopped and turned around and asked, “Look, Rusty, I’m not trying to get too personal, but did you have your cellphone on the night Compton got killed?”

              “No. I didn’t even have it with me. Luck had it, I spent the night alone in Dismal Canyon.”

              “I love that place. Starr probably knew you couldn’t be traced that night.”

              Al. The man knew everything. In Dolopia, some people lived there all their lives and never heard of Dismal Canyon. A mysterious natural anomaly sixty miles away. But Al, the outsider, was savvy to it.

              “How’s that? Starr knew I couldn’t be traced.”

              “If you have your cell on, your exact second by second location can be traced by satellite. There’s a record of it.”

              “Shit!”

              “Yeah. Believe me, Rusty. Big Brother is here. If you’d had on your cellphone that night you could have proven you weren’t at the scene of the crime. Well, you could have proven your cellphone wasn’t at the scene of the crime. But believe me, Starr wouldn’t have let that get in his way.”

              Al stepped over to the rotary phone, dialed some numbers. He finished dialing and put the receiver into the apparatus. Then he reached into the bag, got a cellphone and a charger, handed it to Rusty. “Here’s a pre-paid phone. It can’t be traced to you. It’s got a local number and it’s good for two more months. When it stops working, come and I’ll give you another one.”

              “How much do I owe you for this?”

              Al gave a forget-it-it’s-on-me dismissal wave of his hand.

“Thanks,” Rusty said.

              Al took out another instrument—this thing that looked like a wand Rusty had seen on some show where they were looking for a ghost—and started walking around the house with it. Rusty followed him.

              After a while, Al stopped back by the phone and put the instrument back in his pack, looked down at the phone device, took the receiver back in its cradle. “Hey, look, Rusty. There doesn’t seem to be any bugs in your house and your phone doesn’t seem to be tapped. But that doesn’t mean anything.”

              “What do you mean?”

              “It could just not be activated right now. Or see that little bluff across the river?” Al leaned over and peered out the front window. Rusty didn’t bother looking. You had to be sitting on the couch to see across the river.

              “What about it?”

              “They could set up over there and be monitoring every word we say by a device that picks up the vibrations on those window panes there.”

              “No?”

              “Yeah.”

              “How do you defend yourself from being monitored?”

              “I hate when someone does this to me. Answer a question with a question. But Rusty, how to you fight fire?”

              “With fire?”

              “Right.”

              “Hey, Al. Just between you and me, all right?”

              “All of this is between just you and me. You don’t see Vivian with me, do you?”

              “No.” And Rusty would have noticed her if she’d been there, naked or not naked.

              “What?”

              “Do you think you could monitor some of Jeffrey Starr’s phone conversations for me?”