The Redneck Detective Agency (The Redneck Detective Agency Mystery Series Book 1) (4 page)

Chapter 7

After Gloria left, Rusty wrote a note to the catfish man, jotted down his cellphone number, told him to call. He put the note in an envelope, printed “To Catfish Man” on it. He would tape it to his door when he left.

              Used to Rusty was different. Nowadays he didn’t give a shit. He didn’t like being on the worrying side of something, waiting for somebody. He had the man’s money. To hell with him. Let him show up when he wanted the money back.

              Rusty heard the door downstairs creak open this time. Then footsteps. A man’s. Not Sammy or the Catfish King. Too light and quick.

              Soon, there was an image on the other side of the translucent glass, then a knock.

              Rusty went over and opened the door. There stood a slim, sleek six foot black man he knew to be Melvin Waters. Waters must have been in his thirties and had an athlete’s build.

              “Hello, I’m Melvin Waters.”

              “Rusty Clay.” They shook hands. “Come in, Mr. Waters.”

              “That’s Melvin to you.”

              Melvin came in. Rusty closed the door. “What brings you up those stairs?”

              “I have an office a block down the street. I just opened my one man firm a month ago.”

              “I heard.”

              “I thought I would introduce myself on a professional basis. And actually, I may need a private eye from time to time. I was wondering how much you charged? I would bill the client and you’d get paid when I got paid.”

              “I’m not a private eye.”

              “I must have misunderstood. The word around the Square is that you are the proprietor of The Redneck Detective Agency.”

              “It’s a joke.”

              “What do you mean?”

              “I managed to buy this building a few years ago. That door there went with the office.”

              “Oh, there used to be a redneck detective agency here before you came?”

              “No, that was a scam.”

              “A scam?”

              Rusty had Melvin sit on the couch. No, Melvin didn’t care for a soda. Rusty sat in the swivel chair and told him the story of the scam.

              “That’s quite amusing,” Melvin said. “So, what is it you do do, Rusty?”

              “I was a commercial fisherman and a mussel diver by trade. I made a couple of good real estate deals with my ex-wife, back when she wasn’t my ex-wife. Now, I’m always just looking for that perfect scheme that’s going to net me a few million dollars.”

              “Aren’t we all?” Melvin said.

              “And what can I do you out of today, Melvin?”

              “Nothing, really. I am actually walking around pounding the pavement, trying to stir up some business.”

              “Well, I don’t have any business for you.” Rusty started to say something like, here it is the twenty-first century and you’re the first black attorney in all of Travertine County, but Rusty let it slide, figured it might come out as some racial statement.

              So he said, “Hey, Melvin, you may think I’m just a wacky redneck.”

              “No, no. Not at all.”

              “I can’t do it today, but one day we’ll go to Freddy’s Place on the Square here and have lunch if you want. Not to brag, but the truth of the matter is I’m sorta in the boy’s club around here. You just being seen with me would give you a little credence. Then later I’ll introduce you to my brother-in-law Sammy Reese.”

              “Sammy Reese, the district attorney, is your brother-in-law?”

              “Yeah. You didn’t know that?”

              “No.”

              “Hell, Melvin. I head you went to Harvard.”

              “I did.”

              “You a little bit naïve here if I must say so myself. You need to know who’s who around here and who knows who and who’s screwing who and who hates who. You don’t need to be pounding the pavement. You need to be back at your law office. And not looking at your law books. You need to be reading
The Art of War
.”

              “I just finished it. Why do you think I’m walking around town asking questions?”

              “I think I like you, Melvin Waters.”

              “I think I like you, Rusty Clay. And I know you’re not a redneck.”

              “To tell the truth, I don’t know what a redneck is. I do know I’m a riverman.”

              “I knew we were kindred spirits, Rusty.” Then he blurted out: “I have actually canoed alone down the entire length of the Missouri River.”

              “No?!”

              “Yes.”

              “The longest river in the country.”

              “Few people know that. They think it’s the Mississippi.”

              “You’re a river celebrity, Melvin.”

              “Like I said, I think I like you, Rusty.”

Chapter 8

Rusty wasn’t one to lie around on his ass doing nothing during the daylight hours. That’s all he had done come early afternoon Saturday. Two things you could say about the Clays, even old crazy Aunt Essie, they weren’t lazy and they paid their bills.

              He just laid on his couch in the living room. All the windows were open. The front door was open with only the screen door closed. The sun shined bright and a late morning rain shower had made everything fresh. This was one of those precious May days.

              For once, Rusty felt alone and lonesome. Cousin Ray had his other life. A life with his wife Alice. Tonight Ray would probably “jam” somewhere, playing Dobro with his Elk River Blues Review Band.

              Gloria was off to that big hours-long wedding to-do. One of the McAllister’s got married. And Rusty wasn’t invited? There was a time that never would have happened. He was somewhat emotionless about it. He knew if he were still married to Jenny, they would have been invited. With that last divorce, something disconnected between Rusty and life, or maybe civilization. All that was left was Rusty and the river.

              And now he was alone and disconnected from Jenny. The other two divorces had not lasted. But this one had a finality to it. She would go out of his life and never come back. Even Crystal would not connect them anymore.

              For three decades Rusty and Jenny lived on different rivers. First, in that house boat on the Miami River. They divorced and remarried. She followed him to Ecuador and the Napo River, where they gold mined. Made a little, all the while thinking they would strike it rich. They moved to the Esmeraldas River on the other side of the Andes. They came back to Miami. Got divorced, remarried.

              They moved to Crystal River, for their longest run together. Crystal was born. They made some good money by just owning some of their own river lots and a house.

              They sold out and moved to the Elk River. He and Jenny got into renovating houses in the old part of Dolopia. Did good. Jenny got her realtor license and started in on selling high end shit. Then divorce number three followed.

              Rusty was back where he started. Started at Elk River. Ended at Elk River.

              Maybe that’s what he needed to get his ass in gear. It was Saturday and all those yuppies from uptown would be crowding the Elk Riviera, in their fancy boats and their pontoon party boats. And all those grapplers would be stirring up the water out from Davenport Marina.

              He would just get in his hydroplane and head upriver toward the Tennessee line. There was nothing like the sight and feel of a river bank on both sides of Rusty to make him feel alive.

              He got off his lazy ass and walked down barefoot in his T-shirt and an old tattered pair of jeans to his boathouse. He let himself in, flipped two switches. One to let his hydroplane down into the water and the other to open the slatted exit gate.

              Rusty stepped down the wooden ladder and into the boat--a homemade hydroplane with an old classic fifty-five horse Mercury outboard. His daddy, an ardent Johnson man, got the Mercury off a McAllister in a sweet deal and gave it to Rusty.

              Ray built the boat, with Rusty helping. It could blow those overpriced pieces of shit bass boats with their two hundred horse outboards out of the water.

              Rusty unhooked the cables from either end of the boat and pulled them out of the way by placing them in hooks on the side of the slip. He tested the electric motor that adjusted the Merc engine up and down on the transom, so that you could start off with the prop down in the water and as you built up speed you could lift it on up nearer the water’s edge to get maximum speed.

              The boat had no windshield, but the single seat was a little fore, to offset the weight of the huge outboard, and was right in the bottom of the boat behind the steering wheel.

              Rusty squeezed the bulb on the fuel line a few times and was about to turn over the engine, and fill the boat house up with two-stroke exhaust when the door to the boat house opened. He thought he had latched it from the inside.

              He turned around to see who it was. It was last person in the world he expected to see step inside his boathouse. It sent his heart up to his throat.

              “Jenny,” he said.

              She just stood in the doorway a minute. The afternoon sun was behind her and an aura of light glowed around the back of her like an angel or something.

              But she didn’t look exactly like an angel. She looked like one of those rich women from Palm Beach, her hair was all stiff and in place, a lot of gaudy gold jewelry, and her outfit looked like it cost the price of a boatload of filleted channel cats.

              She wore some shiny black pants and this tailored cotton blouse, that accentuated her trim, kept body.

              Rusty climbed out of his boat. She stepped back out of the boathouse and just stood there on the deck of the pier, looking out at the river.

              Life was never fair. There was a restraining order that kept him from showing up at her real estate office or calling that office. But she could walk right into his most private of place. Rusty decided not to bring that up. He didn’t want to start bickering.

              He stepped out. She turned and said, “I just want to go over a couple of things with you.”

              “Okay. Want to go up to the house?”

              “No, out here is fine. I won’t stay long.”

              He saw Jenny’s SUV now. The big black thing was parked on the other side of his pickup.

              Two benches, made out of wooden planks, were against the front of the boathouse on either side of the door. Jenny stepped over to the left, turned and bent over. She swatted at the seat, getting off any random dirt.

              Rusty just stared at her ass. Looked like she had lost ten pounds since their divorce. Had her a nice little tight ass going there. She looked like she worked out every day and had one of those tanning salon tans going for her.

              Then Jenny twirled around and sat down. Rusty sat up on the nearest piling and put his bare feet up on the lower railing.

              “You blew out two windows at The Point the other morning,” she said, in that tone of accusation that only Jenny Clay could deliver.

              That took him by surprise. He thought she was here to talk about something important. Life maybe. Marriage maybe.

              “What are you talking about?” Rusty said.

              “You know what I’m talking about. The explosion woke me up. I ran to the window. I saw you in your boat. I could recognize the way you hold an outboard throttle if I were up in the Space Shuttle. The tenants in 204 and 404, the ones with the broken windows almost called Homeland Security.”

              “Homeland Security, hell. They should call Homestyle Construction, the shit asses who put those cheap windows in that condo. They want to call some government agency they ought to call OSHA.”

              “You never did like that Yamaha outboard did you?”

              “Never.”

              “In our divorce settlement the judge ordered me to give you a like kind boat and outboard for the one you claimed I sold out from under you.”

              “And I took it just to get the thing settled and get on with our lives.” Rusty couldn’t believe that. That he’d said: Get on with our lives. Next thing he knew he would be saying things like things happened for a reason. And all that other muddy shit people picked up from those Oprah-esque shows.

              “I didn’t come here to talk old times,” Jenny said.

              “I can imagine.”

              “I wanted you to hear this from me. I wanted to tell you face to face,” she said. “Robert and I are getting married.”

              “I heard. But thank you for telling me face to face.” He hoped that didn’t come out snide because he meant it.

              “I owe you that much.”

              “You don’t owe me anything,” Rusty said.

              “And you don’t owe me anything. Consider our slates clean with each other.” Jenny stood up and wiped the butt of her pants off.

              “Agreed. We’re clean. Don’t owe each other anything. No bad guys here.”

              “Yes,” Jenny said. They shook hands.

              Somebody observing this might have thought Jenny got up to leave. Got up to officially shake hands. But Rusty’d been married to the woman three times. She did it so she was not sitting lower than he. So that her head was actually higher, him sitting on the pier railing. It was one of those, call it one of those alpha-animal things, where the domineering animal gets higher on the tree limb or the rock than the others. Or speaking of
Art of War,
that was more like it, she had to get higher on the hill, ready for an attack.

              “Just one other thing, Rusty.”

              Here it came. He knew it. He stayed seated on the piling.

              “Do me a favor.”

              “What’s that?” Rusty asked.

              “Don’t get rid of your office.”

              “What you want it for a real estate branch office in Dolopia or something?”

              “No. Just you keep it. You could get rid of that door glass and put that one in that we had made. The one that read The River Clay. Do you still have that?”

              “Yeah. It’s still in the closet there. You trying to run my life? I think micromanage is the exact word.” He thought that would set her off—not that he intended to—but she started pacing back and forth, like she was making him wonder when she was going to pounce on him, but good.

              “No, Rusty. I just don’t want you to stay off to yourself down here on the river all the time. You know stay connected to the world.”

              “Oh, now I get it! You worried about me going crazy. You think I’m going to start howling at the moon like my daddy did. Yeah, that wouldn’t look good for you when your name comes up to be on the board of the Alabama Arts Council or some shit. ‘Oh, Jennifer Compton. Yes, I know who she’s married to now. But wasn’t she married to that crazy river man who howls at the moon. Used to have a door that said The Redneck Detective Agency?’”

              “Stop it, Rusty! I don’t give a shit about society stuff.”

              “I doubt you’re worried silly about me.”

              She stopped pacing and looked Rusty in the eye. Now, she was ready for the pounce. “We still have a daughter together. Crystal may be nineteen now, but she’s still our daughter. You’ve been a good father. But I don’t want her to ever have a crazy father that she’d be ashamed of.”

              Damned woman knew right where to get him.

              “I stay connected to the world, quote-unquote.” Rusty couldn’t believe he said something like quote-unquote. “In fact, I have a date.” Now, he couldn’t believe he was using his personal life information in an argument with Jenny.

              “You do?”

              That softened Jenny’s demeanor a bit. He could see it in her facial expression. In her body language. She always was affected by matters of the heart.

              “I do,” Rusty said.

              “With whom?”

              “Gloria Davenport.”

              “That figures.” The words themselves seemed a little snide, but she had glanced up before she said it, like she was contemplating it and that it all made sense now. She added, “You always liked older women.”

              Rusty had no idea where she got that.

              Then she said, “Where are you going on your date?”

              “To a play.”

              “I see. When?”

              “That has yet to be determined. Shortly, after the Catfish Rodeo. She’s consumed with that right now.”

              “Are you going to go grabbling for it?”

              “Hell, naw!”