The Redneck Detective Agency (The Redneck Detective Agency Mystery Series Book 1) (9 page)

              The bastard thought he was guilty and figured he would end up with the building they were sitting in. The building that belonged to Rusty.

              And he thought he knew Perry? Perry all the while lurking, waiting just for the right time to get not only all his rent money back but the whole piece of real estate. Rusty had told Melvin he needed read the
Art of War
. Rusty was the one who needed to crack that book open again.

              “I don’t need to step back,” Rusty said. “I don’t need to think about it. I’m not paying that kind of money.”

              “Rusty, you just made five million dollar bail. Not many people can do that. You own this building and you own land and a house on the river. It’s going to be impossible for you to convince the court that you need an attorney appointed for you.”

              “I’m not going to ask them for shit.”

              “I can’t do this for free, Rusty.”

              “I’m not asking you to.” Rusty just happened to have his bank book in his back pocket. He plopped it up on Perry’s desk. “What do I owe you?”

              “We haven’t started yet.”

              “Yes, we’ve started and ended. And this has nothing to do with our landlord-tenant relationship. This is just about this murder case. I’m going to walk out that door in about two minutes and when I walk out, I don’t want to owe you a penny.”

              Perry threw up his hands. “Nothing, Rusty. You don’t owe me a thing. I haven’t done anything for you.”

              “Yeah, you have.” Perry was a smart one. He didn’t want Rusty to go up on the rent and he didn’t want to move. “You went all the way over to Huntsville when I was arrested and you came over there for my arraignment and you just said you charged two hundred and fifty an hour.”

              “Okay, you want to play it that way, Rusty. Call it two hundred fifty dollars.”

              Rusty wrote out a check, signed it, and laid it on Perry’s desk. Perry had done very well by not charging Rusty travel time. That would have pissed Rusty off.

              When Rusty stood up, Perry said, “I’m not cashing that check. You go off a couple days and get some rest, Rusty.”

              “I got all the rest I need. Cash the check, because I want a receipt.”

              Rusty walked out Perry’s office door, then through reception, where two reporters gathered around Brenda, Perry’s receptionist, didn’t even notice him, didn’t even look at him.

              Rusty walked straight from Perry’s office the block to Melvin Waters’ office.

              “I got a deal for you, Melvin.”

              Melvin stared at Rusty. Melvin’s body language said Melvin was on the defensive, that he suspected Rusty was a little crazy, that perhaps I’ve-got-a-deal-for-you meant some multilevel marketing scheme he wanted to involve Melvin with.

             
Rusty, shouldn’t you let the deals rest a while? Get your priorities straight. You have just been arrested for murder.

              “I’m listening,” Melvin said.

              “I was just arrested for murder.”

              “Yeah, I heard.”

              “I want you to represent me.”

              “I thought Perry was your attorney?”

              “Not any more. But here’s the deal. I didn’t murder anybody.”

              “All right. I believe you.”

              “That’s more than I can say for my former lawyer. But here’s the deal. You represent me. I don’t pay you one single penny.” Rusty held up his hand. “Here’s what you get out of it. This is about to be a media circus. I don’t even know if I can go back to my own house or not for the reporters. So, you get about a million dollars of free advertising out of it. You could get your ass on Channel News 19, 31, and 48 every night if you want. You just have to think up some bullshit to tell them. Because this case is bullshit. And how do you fight bullshit?”

              “With bullshit?”

              “Right. And despite any of the media exposure, just me walking away from Perry and coming to you, will sort of get you into the boy’s club here in Dolopia. Not to flatter myself. But in a few weeks you should have more work than you can handle. Enough to hire on a receptionist and paralegal anyway.”

              Melvin stuck out his hand. “It’s a deal.”

              They shook on it. Melvin had a rough, hard hand, like he moonlighted as a frame carpenter. Not to mentioned he’d canoed down the Missouri. The feel of his hand, his build, the way he moved--he was probably a martial artist. He probably went home every night and ran his hands into rice or pebbles to keep them tough.

              “Oh, and by the way, Melvin. I don’t expect this to go beyond a preliminary trial.” Rusty didn’t even know what a preliminary trial was a couple days ago and here he was spouting off this legalese.

              “I’ll do what I can to make that happen.”

              “Believe me, I will, too, Melvin, I will, too.”

              “Come on back and let’s talk.”

              Rusty told Melvin everything--everything except the Katfish King hiring him to find his stolen catfish. There would be a time for that. Rusty felt he owed it to tell his ex-brother-in-law Sammy first. Some order of things you just had to respect.

Chapter 18

Rusty Clay’s place measured over an acre. Except the water’s edge, the whole lot was enclosed in hog-wire fence with two strands of barb-wire at the top of the locust fence posts. Land access was with a wood plank double gate. The gate usually stayed open, but since his arrest two days ago, Rusty and Ray kept it closed.

              Now, there were enough fifty-five gallon drums around his yard to float Clear Springs right down the Elk River. Ray piled a bunch of them in front of the wooden entrance gate. The fact one of those TV vans with their antennae wasn’t able to get through the low branches of the overgrown river roads helped. But still the reporters came, but all they got were pictures and a lot of barking from Ray’s hound dog Brett.

              When Rusty drove up from Waters, Ray used a hand lift to roll a pallet of barrels out of the way. Rusty drove his pickup and parked near his front porch. Ray’s old hound dog Brett--Ray named him Brett because he looked just like Tony Brett he had gone to high school with--stood up and gave a couple of deep barks before he saw it was Rusty. He lay back down and went to sleep.

              Rusty went in and took off his city clothes and put on some well-worn jeans, t-shirt, worn khaki long sleeve and some dock shoes. He grabbed his cellphone. When he came out of his bedroom, Ray waited for him at the kitchen table. Rusty didn’t sit. He stood there and told him about firing Perry and hiring Waters. Ray liked that idea. And said he would commence to build some floating docks back there in Rusty’s workshop until some great idea of how to get Rusty out of this mess hit him.

              Ray said, “Shit, Rusty, looks like with this DNA shit, they could just find you innocent some way. Take all those blown up pieces of Mercedes, run ‘em through the laboratory and say naw, naw, Rusty didn’t do it.”

              “One of these days, Ray, they just going to put a camera down at the scene of a crime and click in the date and it’ll show them what happened.”

              “They already do that. That’s how they got you on tape checking out Compton’s car.”

              “No. I mean just run it to when there wasn’t a camera there or back to any date before there was this computer technology. I’m talking science fiction stuff here. I don’t know if time travel is possible or not but time-looking might be. I think that will be the first step.”

              “That’s scary stuff. You’re a deep thinker there, Rusty, to be a river rat.”

              “That’s what makes me so dangerous.”

              “That is your Twilight Zone stuff, Rusty. Did you see that on
The Twilight Zone
?”

              “Naw. I made it up. You were always into the opposite of what I was.”

              “Outer Limits.”

              “The Beatles.”

              “I was an Elvis man.”

              “
Gallant Men
forever.”

              “
Combat
.”

              “Johnson.”

              “Mercury.”

              “Chevy.”

              “Ford.”

              “Sometimes a man has to choose sides.”

              “We the last of a dying breed.”

              Rusty walked down to his boathouse. He called Gloria’ cell. She answered, “Rusty!” He told her to assume all his phone lines were tapped, but that he needed to come down to the marina and see her. She told she was at her house to come on.

              Gloria had the nicest house and nicest lot on the river. It was up on the hillside, had three levels and practically all the front was French glass door and windows. To Rusty, it looked like some French villa stuck into the side of the mountain on the French Riviera. Not that he’d ever been to the French Riviera, but he could image.

              He drove his skiff to her dock. He walked up the steep slate-rock steps landscaped into the hillside and went right to Gloria’s front French door. She stood there waiting for him and opened the door. She wore one of her knee length skirts and blouses, like she had been uptown doing some business.

              She said, “Hey, handsome. What you up to?”

              Rusty said he was just cruising along the Elk Riviera. Being in Gloria’s presence brought some kind of calm to him, made him feel everything was going to be all right. He told her right off about hiring Waters. She nodded and said that might just be a good move.

              “What I came by was to ask, Gloria, is do you mind if I go see Al?”

              “Why should I mind if you go see Al?”

              “Well, y’all just got divorced and I didn’t want to go behind your back and be cohorting with him without your knowledge.”

              “Good, Lord. I don’t care. But what do you need with him?”

              “They confiscated my computers. I thought I could do some research on his.”

              “Al would probably be thrilled, but you can knock yourself out on mine if you want.”

              “Thanks, but I don’t want my research to be able to be traced to me.”

              “Well, research on Al’s computers can’t be traced to anybody. Believe me. That was the sort of stuff that spooked me about him. One time he erased a bank overdraft charge on one of my accounts. Don’t ask me how. That’s all too weird for my simple Elk River life. But, yeah, go get what you need from him with my blessing.”

              “Thanks, Gloria.”

              Gloria grabbed him by the arm and led him to the kitchen. “Thanks for signing the bond, Gloria.”

              “You’re welcome, honey. What are friends for?”

              “I didn’t know you had that kind of money?”

              She reached into the refrigerator got two small bottles of Coke, twisted the tops off and handed Rusty one. “I don’t,” she said. “It’s just all this property I own on the river is worth a fortune now.” She took a sip of Coke. “Come on. We can talk while I get dressed. I got to put on my marina duds and get back to the café.”

              He followed her up the stairs. She talked all the way. “The damn catfish hadn’t laid their eggs yet. They should be in their holes and the grabbling going on by now. I’m wading ass deep in Grabblers, RVers, big-tittied young women and every hardcore redneck from Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee. And those RVers from Mississippi are starting to pull their redneck stunts.”

              When they got to her bedroom, Rusty sat on the foot of the bed and watched Gloria shuck her dress off and go into her closet. She mumbled something about the catfish rodeo, something Rusty couldn’t understand and didn’t care to get clarified.

              She stepped back out of the closet wearing a tight pair of jeans and was naked from the waist up. She had her Coke in one hand and a blouse and bra in the other. Rusty found the sight overly inviting.

              She walked right over to Rusty, pushed his legs apart. She tossed the blouse and bra on the bed. She sipped the Coke with one hand and put her other hand on his head.

              And then like the Elk River, things took their own course.

Chapter 19

Everything about Albert Bolton intrigued Rusty. He was Rusty’s symbolic line out to the rest of the world. Al was the only person Rusty had much contact with on the river, who was from somewhere else. The only fellow river rat who hadn’t known Rusty as a kid and the whole Clay family. The existence of Al Bolton gave life on the Elk River a nice touch of flavor.

              Al was born and partly raised on Bermuda. His folks divorced and then he moved to London with his mother and went to boarding school somewhere in Switzerland, Le Rosey, or something like that, then they moved to New York City. By the time he was eighteen both his parent had passed away. From ages eighteen to twenty-two Al made over six figures a year as a male model. After that, the work got more irregular at lower rates. Age, he said, was that profession’s occupational hazard.

              He found himself in Boca Raton, living on his savings, working for minimum wage at a treasure ship hunting company cleaning whatever the divers found off the Florida coast, and going to college. About the time he got a degree in computer engineering--Al already had two years of college piled up between his modeling gigs--against all odds, the salvage company located one of the biggest galleon ship wrecks ever found off the east coast of Florida, of which Al was entitled a cut and gave him the biggest windfall of his life.

              After that Al’s life story got a little vague. Rusty read between the lines. It seemed Al went off and did contract work for clandestine arms of the government using his computer skills. He came to Huntsville, Alabama, on a small job and fell in love with the area. He was two-years divorced from a marriage that lasted three and he liked the slow river life. He found it romantic the way someone from Alabama might have envisioned life romantic on Bermuda or in the South of France or in a rural province of Italy.

              He met Gloria and they fell in wild romance and the rest was history.

              Rusty thought Al was
too
good-looking. It was one thing to be ruggedly handsome like Ray Clay, but it was another to be as handsome as Al.

              Rusty moored his boat and walked up the wooden steps fixed into the hillside to the cabin where Gloria’s father Doc Davenport once lived. Rusty stepped into the screened-in front porch and knocked on the front door.

              The door opened and there stood a young female beauty. She was about five-ten, had light green eyes, tan, smooth perfect skin, white straight perfect teeth, dark blonde hair, and two huge breasts that were strapped up in a bra and covered over in a skin tight athletic shirt.

              “Hi,” she said.

              “Hi. I’m Rusty Clay. Is Al here?”

              She smiled and extended her hand. “Hi, I’m Vivian. I’ve heard so much about you. Please come in.” She had no discernible accent. It sounded mature, none of this whiny dialect a lot of the kids had today. Or that high-pitched annoying voice a lot of young women seemed to sport these days.

              She wore khaki shorts and a sleeveless white blouse. She could have been eighteen, as Gloria claimed, or twenty-five, for all Rusty knew. All Rusty knew was that she looked youthful, like a goddess of Youth and Fertility.

              Al walked into the room. He held an unfiltered cigarette in his right hand. Rusty smelled it when Vivian had opened the door. At the time, Rusty figured it was residual from Doc. Rusty never saw Doc without a Camel or hand rolled Prince Albert hanging out the corner of his mouth.

              “Rusty, my man!” Al said. He extended his hand and they shook.

              That’s another thing Rusty liked about Al. Al was always tickled to see you.

              “I see you two have met. I’ve told Vivian all about you.”

              “Al has been training me to grabble,” Vivian said. “I’ve entered the rodeo. It’s my goal to grabble a catfish of equal or greater body weight than my own. I plan to be the female Rusty Clay.” Then she giggled. It was a hearty, raspy, giggle.

              “A female Rusty Clay. That sounds like a dangerous thing to me. I think you make a much better female Vivian,” Rusty said.

              “What’s up, my man?” Al said. “What makes you climb my hillside on this fine river day?”

              “I need to talk to you.”

              “Well, Al, I think I’ll go out back and get myself some sun,” Vivian said. “I’ll leave you two alone.”

              Vivian walked to the kitchen. Rusty heard the back door open and close.

              Al said, “Come on into my office.”

              They walked into what had once been Doc’s den. There must have been about seven computers in the room and electronics Rusty had no idea what was. There was a row of clocks on one wall--London, New York, Tokyo…and a map of the world. Two walls of bookshelves were crammed with technical manuals.

              The second thing that caught Rusty’s eye--after the just sheer overdrive of electronic and international war room--was an 8x10 color photo that sat beside what appeared to be Al’s main computer. At first Rusty thought it was a picture of Cary Grant and Grace Kelly. But that didn’t fit in. Rusty stepped over and took a closer look. Two beautiful people Rusty just couldn’t take his eyes off of.

              “Who’s that?” Rusty asked.

              “My parents,” Al said. “They’re both passed away now.”

              “They’re both beautiful.”

              “Inside and out. Any shortcomings I have I can’t whine and blame on either one of them, that’s for sure. Great folks, they were.” Al pronounced either like a Yankee. Eye-ther.

              Al sat at his computer. Motioned for Rusty to sit. Rusty took his attention off the picture, sat, and said, “I was arrested for murder,” like it was an announcement.

              “I heard all about it. I’m sorry. I know you didn’t do any such thing.”

              “Thanks. Listen, Al, I need to talk to you very confidentially.”

              Al held up his hand in a swear.

              “I need to know everything I can about Dr. Robert Compton, the surgeon I’m charged with bombing. And this Madison County DA, Jeffrey Starr, he seems to be a real career climber and at my expense.”

              “So you need a dossier on these fuckers?”

              “That’s right, Al. But they had search warrants on me. They nailed me because I Googled the engine compartment specs on a 450 Mercedes. They took my computer.”

              “So, you need some untraceable internet surfing?”

              “You got it.”

              Al extended his hand out toward his computers. “My casa is su casa. Knock yourself out.” Knock himself out? Isn’t that what Gloria just told him. The last thing he needed right now was knocked out. Before Rusty could thank him, Al said, “No, wait, man. I’ll do it for you. I might be able to get into some files you can’t get into. Can wait until the morning?”

              Rusty said of course he could. Al got Rusty to follow him to the kitchen, so he could get his glass of wine and he offered Rusty one. Rusty declined, told him he drank very little and only for medicinal purposes. Unlike everyone else, Al did not take Rusty’s statement for a joke.

              The kitchen was what Rusty knew to be quaint and cosmopolitan. The appliances were old. The old green wooden table was fashionably chipped here and there. A bottle and a glass of wine sat on it.

              Rusty was in this very kitchen many times as a kid--the same appliances, the same table. Back then it looked to belong on Elk River. Now it looked quaint, like something you might see in the South of France or Ecuador. Then Rusty saw her through the kitchen window. Vivian lay naked in a chaise longue, sunbathing.

              Rusty diverted his eyes but her naked image was singed in his brain. Al stepped over, grabbed his glass of wine. Rusty followed him through the main room and to the screened-in front porch.

              Al saw Rusty down to the boathouse and dock. He put his wine glass on top of a piling and unmoored Rusty’s boat for him. “Just a little advice, Rusty. Not to make you paranoid, but assume your phones are being monitored and that the walls have ears.”

              “I am.”

              “Good. I’m behind you on this, buddy. If I come up with any good ideas, I’ll let you know.”

              As Rusty was taxiing away from the dock and then opening up the throttle near the channel, he sensed the river was taking him. Maybe Jenny was right. He was turning into his old man.

              He was arrested for murder. He was out on bail. All that seemed another world and another time away. Right now all Rusty could think of was the sight of Vivian lying naked.