Murder in Rat Alley

by Mark de Castrique

  “Does your twin brother know you’re here looting his sister’s house?” Newly asked.

  Bobby Senior said nothing.

  “I didn’t think so.” Newly moved his hand from his holster to the phone on his hip. “Let’s call him so he can bring your bail.”

  The old man shook his head. “Look, this is a big misunderstanding.”

  “A big misunderstanding,” Newly repeated. “Then we’ll sort it out. After you put everything back.”

  Newly and I followed as the two reversed their steps. If they had any guns, carrying the television made it impossible to get to them. When they’d set the flat-screen back in place, Newly ordered them to unload the chairs. We both accompanied them to the truck and back. Bobby Senior started to slide his chair under the dining room table, but Newly stopped him.

  “Set the chairs in the middle of the room back to back.”

  They did as instructed.

  “Now sit down.”

  Both men glared at Newly. The detective smiled and reached for his phone. They sat. I realized they were more afraid of Newly calling Bobby Senior’s twin than the gun. I also understood Newly had them seated back to back so that they couldn’t communicate with body language during the questioning.

  Newly stepped so close to Bobby Senior that the mountaineer had to crane his neck to look up. “You see, Bobby, when we have a house under seal, we come by frequently to check it.”

  I figured that was an exaggeration, but at least it explained why we were here.

  “Why’s he with you?” Bobby Senior asked.

  “He’s Sam Blackman. He’s a private detective and looking into the death of Frank DeMille. You remember Frank, your sister’s fiancé. The man you threatened and the man who has now been determined to have been murdered.”

  “Murdered?” Bobby Junior whispered.

  “We had nothing to do with that.” Bobby Senior’s forceful denial sounded directed more to his son than to Newly and me.

  Newly held up his palm to stop the man from saying anything further. “We know you hiked into the tracking station to threaten him when your sister wasn’t there.”

  Gordowski had told us one of the twin brothers did that, but he hadn’t known which one. Newly must have figured the odds were fifty-fifty, and if he was wrong, Bobby Senior would probably give up his brother.

  “DeMille wasn’t there,” he said. “And I just wanted to talk to him. Nobody threatened him.”

  “You expect me to believe if you tried it once and failed, you didn’t try again?”

  “I ain’t expecting nothing of you. I’m telling you I didn’t threaten the man.”

  Newly glanced at me, signaling it was okay to ask a question.

  “Then why did Loretta tell me you were there the night Frank DeMille disappeared? That you showed up wearing dirt-coated overalls?” This wasn’t true, of course, but I thought I might as well play the odds too.

  Bobby Senior leapt from the chair like it had been electrified. He wheeled to face me. “That’s a goddamned lie.” He hurled the words at me in a spray of spittle.

  “I heard her song,” I said. “I heard her special verses.”

  The old man looked down at his son. “Tell him, Junior. We didn’t know where that came from. She never told us she was going to sing. She never told us what those verses meant.”

  “That’s right,” his son agreed. “We saw her talk to you, then she sings this song, and then she’s dead. We thought you killed her. She never told us you were a detective.”

  That was probably true. I got the distinct impression Loretta didn’t want her family nosing into her business.

  I looked at Bobby Senior. “So you’re calling your sister a liar.”

  “If she told you I showed up the night DeMille disappeared, then yes. Hell, I don’t even know what night that was.”

  “Then how do you know you didn’t show up?”

  That stopped him for a moment. “All right,” he said. “We didn’t like him.”

  “We?” I prompted.

  “My brother, Danny, and me. DeMille was an outsider. We knew he’d break Loretta’s heart and break up the band. Yes, we’d talked to him. It was at one of the fiddler conventions while Loretta was backstage. But we didn’t touch him. We just told him how things stood. He told us where he stood, and he wasn’t backing down. He also said he wouldn’t tell Loretta what we’d tried to do. Danny and I had to respect him for that. So we knew he and Loretta had their minds set, and Loretta had the stubbornest head of all of us.”

  “And you never bothered him after that?” I asked.

  “No. Looking back, I wish he hadn’t disappeared. At the time, we thought we’d been right. He’d run out on her and broken her heart. Now it turns out Randall Johnson was the only one who hurt her.”

  “Hurt her how?” Newly asked.

  “Cheated on her. With some of the younger women who came to him for flat-pick guitar lessons. He was learning them how to play and play around. Loretta caught him tuning more than their guitars, if you know what I mean.”

  “And she threw him out?”

  “Yep. She would have made him disappear if she could have.” He sighed. “Too bad. Randall was a damn fine musician. The band sure missed him.”

  “And they also met at PARI,” Newly said.

  “Yep. Loretta met both DeMille and Randall there. She would have been better off if that place never existed.”

  “Even today?”

  Bobby Senior shrugged. “There’s stories of strange goings-on. I pay it no never mind.”

  “Well, somebody tried to burn it down,” Newly said. “And somebody tried to burn down the house where Sam was staying. You know, the man you said you thought killed Loretta.”

  Both men stiffened.

  “Hey, man,” Junior exclaimed. “I know nothing about that.”

  “What about your brother, Danny?” I asked the younger man. “He feel the same way?”

  “I ain’t his keeper. You’ll have to talk to him yourself.”

  Bobby Senior put a hand on his son’s shoulder and gave a nearly imperceptible squeeze that silenced him. “Danny was with me,” Bobby Senior declared.

  Newly and I looked at each other. Neither of us had said when the fire occurred.

  Chapter 17

  After giving Bobby Senior and Bobby Junior a severe lecture on the crime of disturbing a police-sealed location, Newly let them off with a warning. He further admonished them that the forensics team had taken numerous photographs of everything, and if so much as a pencil turned up missing, he would come after them. We left after watching them relock the front door. I was anxious to get to Danny the banjo player before his father and brother had time to coach him on a story. The fact that Bobby Senior so quickly proclaimed himself as Danny’s alibi had all the veracity of a politician’s stump speech.

  According to GPS, Danny’s house was only a mile farther down Dusty Hollar, and Newly pushed his unmarked Chevy Malibu until the road’s washboard surface rattled my teeth. The noise was so loud, I barely heard my phone ring. The screen flashed with Hewitt Donaldson’s number.

  “Where are you?” the attorney asked.

  “With Newly. We’re almost to Danny’s house. What’s up?”

  “I’ve learned something I thought you might find interesting. I’ll leave it up to you whether you want to share it with Newly.”

  I glanced at the detective. He was concentrating on the bumpy road, but I saw he leaned a little closer in an effort to hear me.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I called around to several lawyers I know who specialize in wills and estate work. Most litigators who’ve faced me in court wouldn’t give me the time of day, but the will and estate shysters are a group I just haven’t had the chance to piss off.”

  Hewitt had never b
een one to endear himself to his fellow lawyers. “What about attorney-client privilege?” I asked.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Newly lean even closer.

  “Well, the client’s dead. There aren’t a whole lot of privileges that come with that status. I made it clear that I’d be happy to return the favor some day. I was looking for the attorney who might have drawn up Loretta’s will. Just exploring the old axiom, ‘Follow the money,’ or, in this case, the property.”

  “Any luck?”

  “Yes. You don’t need to know the attorney’s name at this stage, but Loretta updated her will a month ago. Her sole heir is her husband, Randall Johnson.”

  “Really? Even though they’re divorced?”

  “Evidently, she gave him a mountain divorce,” Hewitt said. “Simply chucked him out of the house fifteen years ago. Nothing was ever done officially. She’d made a will leaving everything to her brothers, but her anger cooled, and she worried about Randall in his old age.”

  “Did her lawyer say whether she’d told her brothers about the change?”

  “He didn’t know, but he’s going to step forward and inform the police that he’s in possession of her will.”

  “Thanks, Hewitt. I’ll give Newly a heads-up.” We disconnected.

  Newly took his eyes off the road a second. “Give me a heads-up about what?”

  “Loretta’s will.” I gave him the details.

  “That might explain Bobby and Bobby Junior looting her house,” Newly said.

  “Yes, but would it explain her murder?”

  “If someone in her family got wind she was going to change the will and didn’t realize she had already done so.”

  “Or Randall knew and didn’t want to wait around for Loretta to die of old age. Have you spoken to him?”

  “Not yet,” Newly said. “But he’s now at the top of the list.”

  “I want to talk to him about the night Frank DeMille disappeared.”

  Newly shook his head. “Wait your turn. I’m doing enough by humoring this UFO escapade of yours.”

  “Have you gotten Loretta’s phone records?”

  “We didn’t find her phone on her body or in the house. We have to assume her killer took it and probably destroyed it. Maybe he thought that would prevent us from seeing a call number or text message and didn’t realize the carrier would have all that information. We found an invoice for her account, and we’ve made the official request to Verizon. That should give us a way to learn if she’d set up a rendezvous.”

  “Unless she used something like WhatsApp through Wi-Fi,” I said.

  Newly grunted. “Is it too much to ask for a little optimism? We’re due a break.”

  He slowed as we neared a battered mailbox. The faded name CASE was hand lettered on its side. It marked a driveway more dirt than gravel. We couldn’t see a house.

  Newly drove slowly, and soon we were surrounded by trees on both sides. If a vehicle came from the other direction, one of us would have to back up. About a quarter of a mile in, the road opened into a clearing. A small farmhouse sat on a knoll. A barn was off to the left, and a few cows grazed in an adjacent field. Beyond, a slope held Christmas trees in various stages of growth. Guinea hens roamed free in front of the porch. A pen of mismatched boards and chicken wire stood to the right of the house. One half had an open door, evidently the home of the guineas, and the other half contained regular chickens herded in their caged space by a pompous rooster. I recognized the place as the site of the family photograph I saw at Loretta’s.

  A brown dog of indeterminate pedigree roused himself from under the porch. The only sign of human life was a girl of about ten or eleven who played on a rope swing attached to the overhanging limb of an old oak tree by the chicken coop. She wore tattered blue jeans and a too-large T-shirt knotted at her midriff. Her bare feet were in a loop tied at the end of the rope. She gave us a wave. The dog gave a half-hearted bark to satisfy his minimal effort as a watchdog.

  Newly stopped the car before we entered the clearing. “I want to keep the driveway blocked. No sense giving him an escape route if this thing goes south on us.”

  “You expecting trouble?” I asked.

  “Always. I’m a cop.”

  The girl hopped down from standing in the swing and ran into the barn. Newly and I got out of the car.

  “Let’s wait for him to come to us,” he said. He leaned against the hood. I stayed by the passenger’s door.

  In a moment, Danny came out of the barn. He wore a greasy yellow jumpsuit like a car mechanic’s. He wiped his hands on a soiled rag, and I wondered if he’d been working on farm machinery. As soon as he recognized us, his pace slowed.

  “Git on in the house, Louisa.” He jerked his head toward the front door for emphasis.

  Before the child could react, the screen door opened, and a woman stuck her head out. “Danny, your dad’s on your cell phone. It’s the second time he’s called.” Then the woman saw us and opened the door wider. She wore a shapeless brown dress, and even from a distance, I could tell she wore no makeup. She might have been in her midthirties but had aged beyond her years. She turned to the child. “Louisa May, come in right now. You’ve got chores to do.”

  Newly raised his hand in a friendly greeting. “Danny, I hate to trouble you, but I’ve got a few more questions, and you might be the only one who knows the answers.”

  Danny watched his wife and daughter disappear into the house. Then he started walking toward us. “I’ve done told you all I know.” He stopped about ten feet away and eyed me suspiciously. “What’s he doing here?”

  From what his wife had said, I knew his father hadn’t been able to tell him about the encounter at Loretta’s house. That meant we were hitting him cold.

  “He’s got some cock-and-bull theory about what happened to your sister.” Newly managed to screw his face up into a scowl that conveyed he’d rather have an enema than be with me. “He’s a private detective, and I didn’t want him coming out here alone and bothering you, what with the recent death of your aunt and all.”

  I didn’t know what “and all” referred to, but Newly was letting Danny fill in anything relevant to his own mind.

  “A private detective? Who for?”

  “The family of Frank DeMille. The man whose bones were found up at PARI.”

  He nodded slowly. “I heard something about that.” He turned to me. “So what’s this theory of yours?”

  Newly laughed derisively. “Get ready for a whopper.”

  “The tunnels. That’s how they did it.”

  Danny’s eyes widened as he reassessed me. “What tunnels?”

  “The ones under PARI. The ones the police either choose to ignore or have been bought off. I saw your shirt Tuesday night. I know you know the truth is out there.” I grabbed the tagline from The X-Files figuring if Danny watched the show, he’d consider it a documentary.

  “What makes you think that?” Danny’s question wasn’t skeptical. He sounded genuinely curious.

  “Why do you think? It’s as plain as the nose on your face. Frank DeMille was taken by them in the tunnels. Maybe he saw something he shouldn’t have.” I gave a quick glance at Newly like I didn’t want him overhearing. I looked back at Danny and mouthed the word “Aliens.”

  “That was a long time ago,” Danny said.

  “What’s time to them? All these years, they might have been studying Frank or kept him in suspended animation until they needed him to reappear. They could pull his skeleton right out of his body and age the bones. If they can travel from another galaxy, they can easily do that.”

  “But why now?”

  “The fire, Danny. The fire. Connect the dots, man. Someone tried to burn them out. You think they’re going to let that stand?”

  Danny shook his head.

  “Of course not. So th
ey issue a warning. Frank’s skeleton appears right at the edge of the burn. Hell, they probably made the wind shift. So we have a fire, and then a body appears as if from out of the blue. The message—try that again and you’ll wind up like Frank.”

  Danny nervously licked his lips. “I see that.”

  I stole a glance at Newly. He gave a barely perceptible nod to keep going.

  “Then I step into the picture. I’ve investigated these paranormal events for years. They’ve probably got a file on me describing what I had for breakfast.” I studied him for a second. “You too I bet.”

  He said nothing.

  “I made the mistake of talking to your aunt. I’m sorry, man. I didn’t intend for her to get dragged into this. We inadvertently became two more dots in the pattern. When they saw us connect, alarm bells must have gone off. I’m good at my job, and Loretta must have had information she didn’t know was important at the time. We talked at Jack of the Wood. You saw us. And then she tried to tell me something in that song she sang. Something she didn’t want them to know. But I didn’t understand the message.”

  “I didn’t either,” Danny said. “But I knew it was important.”

  “And they got her, Danny. They got her in Rat Alley. A space that’s really a tunnel. I know there must be a link to the other secret tunnels under Asheville. You do too. Aliens and tunnels. At PARI and in Asheville. The evidence is overwhelming. The dots are connected except for one.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The man who tried to burn them out. Was that what Loretta was trying to tell me?” I looked at his soiled jumpsuit. “A man with knees earth-covered. Or was it whoever killed Frank DeMille? Either way, she drew their attention. So they killed her. Or was it someone who was afraid she’d give him up to them?”

  The color drained from Danny’s face. “You think I killed my aunt?”

  I looked past him to the rope swing with the single loop at the end. The family photograph from Loretta’s home flashed through my mind. The little girl seated in the tire beside her. “Why not, Danny? You set the fire. Who puts up a tire swing for their child and then takes the tire away?”