by Jason Miller
“We promise,” I said, and introduced the two of us. “You’re Carol Ray? We don’t want to get you in trouble at work here.”
“That’s me. Carol Ray. And you can’t get me in trouble. I own this place.”
WE WENT BACK INSIDE WHERE THE SUN WASN’T TRYING TO melt our faces and got some complimentary sodas before Carol Ray led us toward her office at the back of the main building. As we were heading in, a man was coming out. He was tall and powerfully built with dark hair and one of those walrus mustaches stakes a claim to most of your face. He had gray eyes and the slightly yellowed fingers of a cigarette smoker and was rocking a leather holster loose on the hip of his denim jeans. In the holster was an ivory handled revolver, a replica of the Colt 1873 single-action maybe.
Carol Ray stepped an intimate distance toward this person and said quietly, “See you later?”
“See what I can do,” he replied, and smooched her awkwardly on the cheek. He looked at me once or twice with a frown, and then he and his fancy pistol and kisses were gone.
Carol Ray sighed a little and shook her head, watching after him. Then she gathered herself and turned to us and with a grin said, “I hope y’all like conditioned air.”
“We like it good enough,” Anci said. “When we get it, that is. The one at home is broke.”
“You poor thing.”
She opened the door, and we went in. The office was like a meat locker and our chairbacks and cushions radiated with the cold. We sat around Carol Ray’s desk. There was a computer, along with enormous paper ledgers and, sitting in an open safe, piles of cash. On the wall was mounted an antique long gun, a Henry Hammond Sporting Deluxe, probably made during the end of the 1860s. Behind the desk was a big picture window filled with the empty field next door and vibrating with the sound of the firearm reports.
Carol Ray said, “Just out of curiosity, you always take your daughter along with you on private detective business?”
Anci said, “No, but sometimes I take him.”
I smiled at her. To Carol Ray, I said, “We’re after information about Dennis Reach. Anything you’d be willing to share might end up being useful.”
“I’ll do my best. You were working for him?”
“No, but I probably was the one ran into him last,” I said. “Besides his killer, I mean. I ended up spending three nights in the Jackson County lockup for it. I’m guessing the police have talked to you already.”
“They certainly have,” she said. “Made me rehearse my alibi a half dozen or so times. Maybe more. Honestly, I lost count. Finally, they were satisfied. I do have an alibi, you know?”
“Okay.”
“You don’t want to hear it?”
I said, “Only if you want to rehearse it again.”
She laughed again and touched my hand lightly and said, “You’re adorable,” but then she didn’t rehearse her alibi for me. Instead, she said, “There was that sheriff and a cadaverous-looking person with him. Ammons, I think they called him. A state cop. I don’t remember the sheriff’s name.”
“That’d be R.L. Lindley.”
“That’s him. A serious person. But not as serious as Ammons. Have you met him?”
“Not Ammons, no.”
She said again, “Very serious. And you say they arrested you for it? Killing Dennis?”
“I was held for it briefly, but not charged. They think I’m tangled up in it somehow and wanted to know what I know. Trouble is, I didn’t have much to tell them. Still don’t. I was only hired in the first place to retrieve a dog that Mr. Reach had kidnapped.”
A confused look crossed her face. “I misheard you, hon. It sounded like you said Dennis kidnapped a dog.”
“That’s right.”
“Dog’s not slang for something I don’t know about, is it?”
“I don’t know. It might be. But in this case I mean a woof woof kinda dog.”
I showed her the picture. “Name’s Shelby Ann Cleaves. She belongs to a pair of Union City sorghum farmers of the same name.”
“That’s amazing.”
“We thought so,” I said. “I’m guessing you didn’t know anything about it, or the dog.”
“Dennis and I aren’t exactly in the same phone tree these days. Do you know why he did it? Took the dog?”
“He was . . . he died first, I regret to say. Frankly, I was hoping you might help to fill in a few of the blanks for us.”
She was still thinking about the dog, though. You could tell. Finally, she blew out a breath and shook her head some and said, “Well, Dennis and I were married back in 2010. Divorced not much later. A few months, I guess it was. It was one of those marriages. You know the kind. Quick as knife, twice as nasty. Dennis gave up wives after that. I guess I spoiled it for him. Marriage. I know he spoiled it for me. Well, him and the next two husbands. You married, Slim?”
“Not at present, no. What happened?”
“I don’t know. The usual things, I guess. It was a poor pairing. Like when the earthquake met San Francisco. Dennis hired me to keep the books at the Classic Country. I was twenty-two years old and didn’t know anything about nothing. Dennis . . . Well, Dennis was just a bad man.” She paused to sip some of her cola. “And that’s not even to mention his so-called friends.”
“Friends?
“Hard to imagine, ain’t it?”
“A little.”
“Well, he called them work friends, but really they weren’t much more than a gang of hard-core bikers, losers, fellow White Dragons.”
Hello.
“Wait, Reach was a white supremacist?”
“He was. For many years. His daddy was, too, and his older brother, and I think they got him mixed up in it. And this was a person with ambition, too. Wanted to be First Dragon or whatever they call it of that chapter of his. He let them use the CC as their clubhouse, even when he wasn’t there. And, let me tell you, that led to some awkward circumstances. One night I dropped in up after close and walked right into a coke buy gone bad.”
“Fund-raising drive?”
“The Dragons don’t sell T-shirts and sugar cookies, Slim,” she said. “It took me ten minutes to talk a guy with one hand out of shooting me in the face, and another day and a half to find a new place to live, as far away from Dennis Reach as possible.”
“Any notion that they did him in?” I said.
“One of them, maybe. It’s possible. Or one of his other exes. But they live in other states. Maybe that boy of his, Jessie. I’m just surprised it took as long as it did.”
I said, “You’re not the only one. He seemed to think you’d ripped him off.”
“He said that? Mentioned me to you, I mean?”
“He did,” I said. “He was under some duress at the time, though, and maybe not the happiest camper in the world. I wouldn’t put too much stock in any of it.”
“You could never put much stock in anything Dennis said to you. That was the kind of person he was in life. Ambitious but mean and lazy and just a bit too stupid for his own good. A person can be happy-stupid or stupid-stupid, and Dennis was the latter. He’d take money from anyone, but even with that he was an expensive hobby. You’ve heard of throwing good money down a hole?”
“Sure.”
“Dennis Reach was the hole.”
“Someone told me a story you set his car on fire with him inside it. Anything to that?”
She said, “Really it was just some hay bales in the bed of his pickup. Car caught fire a little, I guess. Not much. Car won’t burn like hay. Found that out. Anyway, just my little way of serving divorce notice.”
“And yet no jail time?”
“I didn’t know better, I’d think you were nettling me some.”
I shrugged. “Maybe some. Sorry. Vocational force of habit. But really, no jail time?”
She laughed a little at me and my persistent nettling. “Turns out the judge I drew handled Dennis’s earlier divorces. Knew the man. Knew what he was like. Knew what he’d drive a w
oman to do. Nothing like a bad man to introduce you to desperation. You got the sense the judge wouldn’t have minded setting Dennis Reach’s car on fire his own self.”
We thanked her for her time. We shook hands again and I said we might be in touch, anything came up to be in touch over. Carol Ray said that would be fine and gave me her phone number. Then she said she was pleased to meet Anci, who was a polite young lady and sure enough would come to big things in the world. Anci beamed a smile at her and thanked her for her kind words, and then the two of us went out into the hallway and closed the door behind us and Anci said, “She did it.”
“YOU THINK?”
We’d gone outside before continuing our talk, account of me not wanting Carol Ray to hear a thirteen-year-old accuse her of first-degree murder. Anci climbed on the Triumph behind me. A fat man I knew from town was walking to his truck with a shotgun in one arm and an infant in the other, an image that probably ought to be stitched on some kind of flag for rural places.
Anci said, “Now, don’t be jealous I figured it out before you.”
“I’ll try.”
“Probably all the detective reading I’ve been doing lately.”
“Oh, probably.”
“She had a motive, one. Reach said she owed him a debt. Maybe she couldn’t pay. Or maybe just didn’t want to. Plus, not sure if you noticed, but it appears to me like there’s a firearm or two around here.”
“But these are registered-type guns,” I pointed out. “Paperwork guns. One the killer left behind wasn’t.”
“Fine, I’ll give you that one. But I bet if she wanted to get her hands on a gun like that, she’d know how to do it.”
I guessed she would, at that, though I hesitated to say so. It was still too early in the game to accuse anyone of murder.
Anci had a play date around that time—she punched my arm when I called it that—so we rode into the next little town over where I dropped her off at a friend’s. This friend’s daddy, an employee with the state, I believe, was in the yard tending his dead grass and shrubs, and when he saw me he waved and gave me the peculiar look state employees give to private eyes on motorcycles. I thought for perhaps the millionth time of the life I was leading and the life that I was giving to my daughter thereby, one of mayhem and murder and the occasional kidnapped dog. I wondered whether it was worth it or whether I ought to do something sensible like take my civil service exam and deliver mail or fill potholes on county roads. I waved back at the disapproving man and told Anci I’d be back around to pick her up. She said that was fine. She said not to accuse Miss Shotguns & Shakes of murder yet, on account of she wanted to be there to see it when I did, as I surely and inevitably would, her being the culprit and all. I promised I wouldn’t, then backpedaled out of the driveway and rode away, happy to have some alone-time to contemplate what my next move should be, who I should talk to. When you’re dealing with rifle decapitations, you generally want to lock down as many of the facts as possible. R.L. Lindley surely would.
Right then, though, I wanted to lock down lunch. All that running around and interrogating had left me with a hunger. I found a pizza place I liked near midtown and got off my bike and went inside. It was crowded with lunch business, and I had to fight my way to the counter, where I found myself standing beside an off-duty cop I’d known as a boy way back in grade school.
When he noticed me standing there, he scowled and said, “Keepin’ yourself out of trouble, dill weed?”
I said, “Well, Bill, I ain’t beating up meth dealers for payoffs, but I scrape by.”
That got him. He stared back at me with dark little weasel eyes, hate flaring his nostrils. I smiled at him and patted him on the shoulder in a friendly way. I ordered two slices of pepperoni and an orange soda. That’s how full of life I was feeling. I was so full of optimism, in fact, that I decided to diddle around with our heavily armed local hate group. I knew a person I could talk to, maybe get some answers. I figured if I could get some sense that Reach had been offed by his racist pals, I could aim the Jackson County sheriff in that direction and walk away clean from the whole mess.
I was proud of myself and my plan and eager to put it into action. I finished my lunch and went out again. I got on my bike and rode north on Park Avenue and then through the intersection at West Madison, where the cop from the pizza joint was waiting for me in the cross street. He pulled in behind the bike and turned on his globes. I stopped on the shoulder and put down my stand and watched him walk up to me, already writing a ticket in his little book.
“Taillight’s out, Slim,” he said.
“It’s not.”
“Taillight’s out, Slim,” he said.
“We can both see that it’s not.”
“Taillight’s out, Slim,” he said.
“Just give me the goddamn ticket.”
He gave me the goddamn ticket.
He said, “Hey, you really kill that club owner?”
“No.”
“Heard you blew his brains all over his kitchen. Ruined his breakfast, too. Sheriff’s report says steak and eggs.”
“I didn’t do it. I didn’t do either of it.”
“Wish I could burn you for it.”
I said, “Let me ask you something, Bill, what did I ever do to you?”
“You personally? Nothing specific.”
“Then what?”
“Private snoop ruined my marriage.”
“By ruined, I assume you mean caught you in the hay with another lady?”
“I said ruined.”
“Okay. Fine. Ruined. But it wasn’t me.”
“Nope.”
“I got to go,” I said.
He tipped his hat and started back to his prowler.
I called after him, “And don’t you break my tail—”
He broke it. His nightstick swung hard from his hip. Shards of red plastic clattered to the street.
Sonofabitch.
A WHILE LATER I FOUND THE NEIGHBORHOOD I WAS LOOKING for. I stopped in at the little P&R near the old Catholic church and picked up a bottle of wine and some of that good bread they got and then I rounded another corner south and there it was: the same house on the same lot under the same tall silver maples. There was a Lincoln in the drive with the curb feelers and whitewalls and everything and a garden in the side lot with freshly turned earth and plenty of tomato and pepper and basil plants sprouting under green wire cages and fine netting. Just like I remembered it, just like it’d been when I was a boy and hanging around there probably because my own old man wasn’t worth two shits and a cough.
I found them in the backyard, shooting a pellet gun at a line of coffee cans on some old concrete blocks. Dad’s old friend and union buddy Cheezie Bruzetti was eighty-two years old and walker-bound but still strong in the arms and chest with a full head of curly white hair. His son Paul was in his fifties, fat, and bald, and he looked as defenseless next to his invalid father as a depilated squirrel. When they saw me, Cheezie smiled and Paul frowned, Cheezie because he was one of my dearest friends and Paul because I was intruding but also because he was an unlikable little shit given to frowns and sour moods.
The old man said, “Slim, come shoot cans with us.”
He kissed me on the cheek. Paul rolled his eyes. I took the pellet rifle, cocked it. The cans were maybe twenty yards away. Not far. I sighted and fired and missed. Paul smirked.
Cheezie said, “CO2 cartridge probably needs replaced. Try again, and remember that the pellets drop a little near the end.”
I sighted again and remembered about the pellets, then fired and shot the cans down, one after another. They make such a nice sound when you hit them. Satisfying. I handed the rifle to Paul, who snatched it from my hand with a grunt. I’d spoiled his smirk.
Cheezie said, “Your daddy could shoot like that. You’re his son all right.”
“I guess.”
“You been to visit him recently?”
“Not recently, no,” I said. We’d talked o
nce a year ago or thereabouts, my dad and me, but Cheezie had been there and knew all about it. “We don’t visit much these days, Cheezie.”
In response, the old man shrugged and smiled a little and said, “Family,” but you could tell he didn’t understand, not really.
“Let’s go one more time around with these pellets,” Cheezie said. “I’m feeling lucky.”
I went and set up the cans. As I was doing so, I happened to spot another can, an extra can, in the tufts of grass behind the wall of blocks. Somebody had filled it with concrete. A cheater. Paul, probably. It was either a good way to win a bet against a superior shooter or a bad way to get a pellet in your ass if the superior shooter had more than a few brains in his head. I left it alone. I went back across the lawn and waited my turn with the gun.
Cheezie went first. He hit the first couple of cans and grazed a third but missed the rest.
“Not so lucky after all,” he said, and handed the gun to Paul while I set up the cans again. “My eyes ain’t what they used to be. And by ‘used to be,’ I mean yesterday.”
I came back from setting, and Paul took his turn. He knocked the cans down, quickly and neatly, with center shots. He smirked again at me and handed across the gun. The stock was sweaty from his fat little palms.
“I’ll get them this time,” he said, and jogged across the lawn. I watched him set up the cans. The last can was the concrete can. You could tell all the way from that distance. Paul jogged back over, wearing self-satisfaction like a Sunday hat.
“Let’s see what you can do,” he said.
I sighted again and fired, remembering about the weak Co2. I knocked them all down until I came to the last can. Then I hesitated.
Cheezie said, “He hits that last one, he wins the day.”
Paul nodded and grinned his thin-lipped grin. No one likes a cheater and no one likes a thin-lipped sort, and Paul Bruzetti was both. A thin-lipped cheater. Nature’s mistake.
I squinted down the rifle barrel at the concrete can. Even with a full gas cartridge, there was no way to knock it over. I began to squeeze the trigger. At the last moment, I turned the gun and shot Paul point-blank in the ass. Paul cried out and cussed up a storm. Cheezie roared.
