A Berry Cunning Conman: A Laugh-Out-Loud Cozy Mystery (Kylie Berry Mysteries Book 4)

by A. R. Winters

  It didn’t take long for the door to open and a tall, lanky man with light brown curly hair to appear in its place. The bottom part of his blood-shot, glazed eyes seemed to droop, he was as pale as a ghost, and his red lips wore a silly, happy smile.

  “Yo, Derek. Need to take a deuce again? You clogged the toilet up last time.”

  “No,” Derek said as he turned away and hooked a thumb over his shoulder in my and Zoey’s direction. Derek shuffled back to his swinging porch swing and cocooned himself once more in the covers piled on it.

  “Whoa,” the tall guy said, looking at us. “We’ve got some class in the joint. Mi casa es su casa.” He stepped through the door and into the closed in porch. “Come on in. I’m Neville.”

  Zoey and I stepped into the cluttered enclosed porch. His smile was getting goofier and friendlier, and I couldn’t align the thought of him as being the angry, vengeful neighbor in my head.

  “What can I get you ladies? I’ve got some home-brewed beer. I could do some tokes and the three of us could have a par-tee.” His hand ran up and down the length of his potbelly and he looked back and forth between the two of us. He had actual hope in his eyes that we were going to hang out and have fun with him.

  “We wanted to ask you some questions about Morgan,” Zoey said.

  Neville’s face screwed up like he’d bitten into a lemon. “Whoa, man, that guy was messed up!”

  “He did die badly,” I offered, hoping to get the very high Neville to talk about what had happened. If we got lucky, he’d claim to have done it without ever being fully aware of what he was saying. Then Zoey and I could leave and call Brad to tip off the police.

  “Noooo, I’m not even talkin’ about how he died,” he said. He turned a bucket upside down and sat on it. His fingers randomly tapped it like a drum down between his open legs. “I’m talkin’ about how uptight he was. He came over a few times, we laughed a bunch, then he tried to start working me. Get me to do stuff for him. He thought if he could get in good with me that he could get me to get rid of my collection.”

  “Collection of what?” Zoey asked.

  “All my cars and stuff! Did you see everything when you came in? It looks dumb, I know, but that stuff keeps my house safe. There are sooo many places to set up booby traps.” He made a pained face. “Harder to remember where they all are, though. But! I got ginseng out there! Yeah…” He nodded like we’d said something. “That’s right. All that green space out there between all the stuff, I got ginseng planted. That’s my retirement plan right there. Mountain gold is what that is. I gotta protect it.”

  Neville gasped, his eyes got wide and he looked all around him. “I shouldn’t said nothin’ ‘bout my mountain gold. You’re not gonna tell anybody, are ya?”

  I grabbed a wicker ottoman, pulled it over and sat down on it. The thing looked half rotted, but it held me. It had the benefit of putting me at eye level with Neville, and I sat mirroring how he sat. “We need your help, Neville. We need to know what happened between you and Morgan.”

  “You don’t wanna know about him. I’ve got some kush in the back. We could light up.” His smile was big and his expression was optimistically hopeful.

  “We really gotta know, Neville. It’s super important.”

  Neville nodded his head as his shoulders sank. “Well, if it’s super important, I’ll tell ya, but he wasn’t a nice guy. Like I said, Morgan tried to cozy up to me first, act like we were besties, then came the manipulation. My mom was a psychiatrist, and she could manipulate me up one side and down the other, so I recognized it right off when he started trying to work me.” Neville laughed. “Damn amateur. I was tempted to send my mom over to talk to him, but I didn’t think I could get her to come all the way down from Delaware.”

  “What did he do?” I asked. I wanted to get Neville back on track.

  “Well, he tried to work it like I was his friend and that I’d want to get rid of all my yard trophies to make him happy. Then he worked it that I’d want to do it to keep him from getting mad.” He snorted. “I laughed at that one. Anyway, when he couldn’t get his way, then the tantrums started. I knew they were comin’ before even he did. He started throwing massive fits, ruining my groove. Threatened to call the cops on my entrepreneurship, and then threatened to pay someone to haul everything off and then set my yard on fire.”

  “Set your yard on fire! But that would have destroyed all your ginseng. It would’ve ruined all your plans.” I did my best to make Neville feel that I was on his side, not that I was in favor of anyone setting his yard on fire. So I guessed I actually was on his side. It sure made building camaraderie easier.

  “Exactly!” He threw his arms up in the air so fast that he almost tipped off his bucket.

  “So what’d you do to him?”

  “I called my mom and told on him.”

  The breaks of my brain screeched to a halt. “You told on him? To your mom?”

  “I know, I know. Harsh, right? But he left me no choice!”

  “Uh, what did your mom do?” Hire a hitman? Call her mob-boss uncle?

  “She sent a lawyer.” His eyes were large, and he was being dead serious. It was like he didn’t see any of the absurdity of what he was saying.

  “Was the lawyer Jason Statham?”

  “Huh?”

  “Never mind,” I said, glad that the mention of the villainous superhero from the movies went over his head. “What did the lawyer tell him?”

  “Told him to cease and desist or mom would hire a private detective to dig up all his dirty skeletons. I never heard one more peep out of him after that. In fact, he got downright friendly again, but always from a distance. Would wave hi and bye, that kind of stuff.”

  I was starting to really like Neville’s mom. She had moxie.

  “What about you guys getting into a physical fight?” I was reaching. I hadn’t heard any such thing.

  “Well, he took a swing at me that one time, but I just put him in a headlock ’til he passed out and then carried him over to his house and left him leaned up against his door. I even put a blanket on him. It was cold but it was a sunny day. Didn’t want the little dude to freeze to death or nothin’.”

  I was calling it. Neville wasn’t Morgan’s killer.

  “Neville, Morgan snitched on a dirty cop involved with a drug dealer, and we think that might have been what got him killed.”

  “So now you want me to snitch and get killed?”

  Neville wasn’t as stoned as I thought. “We don’t want you to get killed,” I reassured him, “but we do need help. The cop that Morgan snitched on was Officer Dill. Officer Dill was dirty. He was tipping off a local drug dealer any time the police were getting ready to do a raid on… well, anywhere they do drug raids. Do you have any idea who Officer Dill might have been working for?”

  “Ohhhh, it wasn’t me. I’m small time. Mostly the Mary Jane. A few pills here and there. All the dealing I do is from here, and I ain’t had no raids done on my place. Besides that, I couldn’t afford to have a cop on my payroll. Would be nice, though.”

  “Do you know of any drug dealers who would be big enough to have a cop on their payroll?”

  Neville sat back, crossed his arms over his chest and pressed his lips together. He wasn’t going to say anything.

  “Jimmy.”

  The name hadn’t come from Neville. I looked in the direction of the pile of blankets that Derek was lost inside of.

  “Shut up, man!” Neville said, turning to look at the far end of the porch enclosure where the porch swing hung. “Mom can’t send a lawyer to that dude. He’d kill the lawyer!”

  Derek sat up, still wrapped in blankets. He looked like a moth that hadn’t come out of its cocoon. “Jimmy,” he said again. He wasn’t backing down.

  “Hey man, you keep talking smack like that, you gotta go,” Neville warned him.

  “Don’t matter. I ain’t got much time left anyway.”

  While Derek didn’t look as bad as he had the
other day, he did look far from good. Far, far from good. I wondered if he was right—if maybe his time was running out.

  I wanted to get him help, but I didn’t know where to start.

  “Where can we find Jimmy?” Zoey asked.

  “I can take you,” Derek said, and Neville threw up his hands, got up and walked back in his house. His door slammed shut hard enough to shake the whole porch.

  Looked like our chat with him was firmly over.

  “Derek, if you take us to Jimmy’s house, will he try to kill you?”

  “Probably.”

  “Will he try to kill us?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. You guys aren’t homeless. Too much property to explain away if you go missing. People would notice, and Jimmy don’t like when people notice.”

  I frowned. “Has Jimmy killed before? Do you think he killed Morgan?”

  “Oh, he’s killed. Don’t know who, but he brags. Wants to make sure people don’t think he’s a pushover. He don’t name names. You still wanna go?”

  I thought about it a moment. Zoey had been living here longer than me, but she wouldn’t know the history of the place as well as someone like Derek. “Do you remember anyone else getting killed like Morgan did?”

  “No,” he said with a shake of his head.

  If that was true and if Jimmy had killed people before, it was unlikely that Jimmy had killed Morgan. If Jimmy had killed Morgan, he probably would have done it in a similar fashion to whomever he’d killed before. But since Morgan died in a way that was different than anybody else around, then Jimmy probably didn’t do it.

  “Still wanna go?” Derek asked.

  I looked at Zoey. She knew the risks, and I needed to know if she was still on board. She nodded at me, and then I nodded at Derek. “Yes, let’s go see this mass murdering Jimmy.”

  If things went well, we’d get a lead that would take us to Morgan’s killer. If things went badly, we wouldn’t have any more life worries ever again.

  Win-win.

  I really needed a therapist. I wondered if Neville’s mother was available.

  Chapter 27

  Zoey was in the driver’s seat. I was in the passenger seat, and Derek was slouched in the backseat. It seemed as though he was shrinking. Every time I saw him, he seemed smaller. Not just skinnier, but smaller. Almost like he was fading away.

  “Derek, want us to stop some place and pick up some food?” We had skirted back into town on our way to heading out into the country to get to Jimmy’s. Derek had said that Jimmy’s place was “tucked up in a holler.”

  I’d had to ask Zoey on the sly what a “holler” was. She’d said it was a little valley between two hills. Then she offered a tidbit I hadn’t thought to ask about. She said that “tucked up” meant that Jimmy’s place was located toward the back of the holler.

  “No, I’m fine,” Derek said. But nothing about him was fine.

  If we took him to a hospital, I wondered if we could force him to stay. It would mean he’d have to go through a detox of whatever drugs were in his system, and I didn’t get the sense that he’d be willing to do anything of the sort. From everything he’d done and said, he seemed more ready to die than face going through the horrors and struggles of giving up drugs.

  It was a long drive to Jimmy’s, and we did it mostly in silence, with the exception of Derek providing occasional proof-of-life by offering directions at the necessary moments.

  I had gone on a variety of trips out into the countryside, but this felt like an entirely different world. There were trees and hills everywhere. Steep drop-offs on the side of the road. Snaking, narrow roads with no center paint line or lines on the side. Occasional houses that looked more like shacks. And an eerie feeling that I was going to start hearing banjo music at any second.

  “Turn here,” Derek said, and Zoey slowed to make a right turn onto a road that was only big enough for one vehicle at a time. It crossed a cement bridge over a stream, and then wove its way between hills. It wasn’t a straight shot. The road curved with the shape of the hills as the “holler” reached further and further away from the rest of civilization. There were trailers or house shacks on either side of the road, with stretches of land between them. Anyone out of their home stopped whatever they were doing to watch us pass. Homes without someone outside had eyes peering out of windows.

  “Derek,” I said, “what are the chances that we’ll make it back out of here?” I wondered if the folks of this holler would flow together in our wake to create an impenetrable sea, barring our escape.

  “I been here before,” Derek said. “I left. Don’t be startin’ no fights with no one. Don’t go killin’ no one. We’ll prolly get to leave.”

  Wow. Just wow.

  I wanted to turn to Zoey and tell her how sorry I was for getting her into this, but I didn’t want her to know how scared I was.

  “That’s it,” Derek said, reaching between the driver and passenger seats to point to where he was meaning.

  It was a shack-like house on top of a steep hill. It had a gravel driveway that looked like it hit fifty degree angles in spots. It was narrow, curving, had incredibly deep and irregularly spaced ruts and a sheer drop away on one side once you got about a third of the way up.

  “How do you get up it?” I asked.

  “You drive,” Derek said.

  Zoey rolled her shoulders, stretched her neck, tightened her jaw, and turned onto the narrow driveway. There were spots where the tires spun on loose gravel. The car pitched sideways at a heart-stopping angle that had me think we were going over the side at one point, but then we reached the top.

  I blew out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding, and Zoey rewarded me with a dazzling smile and a wink.

  The girl had skillz.

  For the first time I focused on the shack instead of the drive up and saw a man standing at the edge of his porch. The steps leading up to the porch were wide, made of paint-chipped wood, and extremely steep. The man himself looked to be in his late twenties, dark hair, was in the upper range of five feet tall, and had a wiry build. He was shirtless with belted jeans and sneakers. He had his arms crossed over his chest, without a smile on his face.

  Derek was the first to get out of the car. He got out immediately. He called out a greeting to Jimmy as soon as he stood up, before he’d even stepped out of the way to close the car door.

  “Hey, Jimmy,” he said.

  “Derek. What’s up?”

  I saw Jimmy’s eyes shift to us when he asked the question.

  “This here’s a couple ladies from town. Kylie here owns Sarah’s Eatery, but don’t eat there. She’s a terrible cook.” He followed up his poke at me with a laugh.

  Jimmy smiled. It didn’t reach his eyes.

  “This other lady… well, I honestly don’t know what she does, but she’s good friends with Kylie, and Kylie’s been a good friend to me. They’re okay.”

  “They lookin’ for somethin’?” Jimmy asked before giving a swipe to his nose. I guessed that he was inferring a drug that’d be snorted.

  “No, no, nothin’ like that. They had a friend that ended in a bad way. Was hoping you could help them figure some stuff out.”

  “How ‘bout you? You needin’ somethin’? You ain’t lookin’ good, Derek.”

  Derek hesitated. “If you got some work for trade I could do, I could be interested.”

  Zoey and I got out of the car. We got out slower than if we were hopping out to run into the store. We got out a lot more slowly. It felt like exposing myself to a feral dog I was wanting to make friends with—neither one of us knowing yet if he’d bite.

  I walked around to the front of Zoey’s car as a show of faith.

  “Mind if we come up?” I asked.

  Jimmy’s eyes got wide with surprise, and he followed that with a short scoffing laugh. “Yeah, yeah. Come on up,” he said, giving a wave hither.

  The three of us climbed his stairs. There were no side railings, and the steps them
selves were shallow. It’d be easy for a person to lose their balance, and it’d be a hard tumble down. When we got up to the porch, it didn’t have any railing on it either, and it dipped and slanted in spots. Falling off of it offered an even harder tumble.

  “Thanks for having us up,” I said, giving Jimmy my friendliest smile. Up close, I could see the pockmarks in his face, almost like little scars he’d scratched into his skin.

  “You had somethin’ you wanted to ask me?”

  “Yeah, we wanted to know if you killed Morgan Bleur.” I was pretty certain he hadn’t. I was really only asking him the question so that I could see his reaction.

  Jimmy threw his head back and laughed. It wasn’t a nervous laugh. It was the kind of laugh a person gives a toddler who has said something a forty-year old might. There was nothing about it that contained any fear, worry or even malice.

  Now I not only thought that Jimmy didn’t kill Morgan himself, I was also pretty sure that he’d had nothing personally to do with Morgan’s death.

  “We were hoping you might point us in the direction of a drug dealer who might have had a cop on his payroll.”

  Jimmy’s laughter stopped, his smile fell flat, and all humor left him.

  “What do you know about any cop on somebody’s payroll?” His stare was intense, and I felt as though he’d moved closer to me without him actually having moved.

  “We know that Officer Dill with the Kentucky State Police was fired because he’d been on a drug dealer’s payroll. Any idea whose payroll he’d been on?” If we found that out, we’d probably found Morgan’s killer. All the financial romancing he’d done had come up to dead ends, no pun intended.

  After a pause, Jimmy laughed again, but there wasn’t much humor in it. “Can I get you ladies something to drink? Mountain Dew? Beer?” He smiled big with teeth that weren’t horrible but had seen better days. “I even got some moonshine for the adventurist.”