Bone Valley

by Claire Matturro

  The upshot of that scene was basically that Delvon got to keep his long hair, and he’d had it long ever since, except once when it was forcibly cut while he was incarcerated in the county jail. That he was thinking about cutting his hair so that it might be made into a wig for Lenora, bald as she was from the chemotherapy, warmed my heart suddenly for not just Delvon, but for the potential of the whole human race. I don’t usually feel warm and fuzzy about human potential. But there you had it, Delvon could do that.

  Thus, perfectly comfortable with the idea that my brother Delvon and the new love of his life were doing about as well as they could under their particular set of circumstances, I hung up.

  That night I was unable to sleep and kept listening for Jimmie.

  After all, the world was a big and evil place for one old man to get lost in.

  Chapter 17

  Still no Jimmie the next morning.

  My anxiety was now a persistent kick in the gut, which I fueled with an extra cup or two of coffee, just in case I wasn’t high-strung and heartburned enough.

  Where coffee is concerned, I have no learning curve.

  Ditto, worry.

  But, regardless of the missing status of Jimmie, I had my hearing in Bradenton, the county seat of Manatee County, and had to be about my official, professional day. After promising Rasputin I’d come home at noon to feed him another trail mix bar, I had gathered up my purse, briefcase, and keys when the front door swung open.

  “Hey, Lady,” Jimmie said, as if he had not been out all night, leaving me to wonder in what ditch his dying body lay.

  “Where have you been?”

  “Out. Working. Busy.” He held up the video camera. “I done been tracking that jerk who’s suing me, jes’ like you wanted me to.”

  If I didn’t leave now, I’d be late for my hearing, and being late is something I never am at hearings. It puts you on the defensive from the get-go and pisses off most judges. “Jimmie, I have to go. Right now. I’ll be home this evening. Can you feed Rasputin today?”

  “Can do,” he said. “I’ll get that grass cut out back too.”

  “Good,” I said, and slammed out my front door, glad that at least Jimmie was alive and well.

  The hearing was one of those where basically all I had to do was show up and identify myself to win. My opposing counsel was an idiot who had failed to comply with the pretrial requirements for suing a physician, and all I had to do was establish that fact in black and white, recite the Florida statute on point, and listen to opposing counsel whine and babble in response, and rebut with a choice Florida Supreme Court case on point and in my favor.

  After winning, I ducked out and got into my little Honda and sat for a moment with my bucketload of curiosity. Being in Bradenton and therefore already in Manatee County, I decided to find Josey at the Manatee County Sheriff ’s Office and see if I might convince her to provide me with some information.

  Naturally, I arrived at the sheriff ’s office just as Josey was preparing to leave for lunch. Notwithstanding my coming in as she was going out timing, Josey seemed as interested in talking to me as I was to her, and invited me to join her for lunch. “But, I warn you, I have to go home and take care of all of my cat s.”

  “How many cats do you have?” I asked, thinking she had overemphasized the plural a tad much.

  “Only four,” Josey said. “Though I’m cat-sitting for a fifth.”

  Oh great, cat-hair soup for lunch, I thought. Still, I wanted the chance to talk with Josey about M. David’s murder, plus anything she might know about Angus John’s murder. Yeah, okay, I really wanted to talk to her about Miguel. And after all, Josey might be more talkative in her own house than she would be at the sheriff ’s office, so I accepted her invitation to ride home with her.

  After a ride with Josey in her official Manatee County car, we arrived at a small house in the old historic Wares Creek neighborhood. Small, but quaint, or maybe even funky, with a yard full of native plants, hibiscus, citrus, mango, and banana trees. A spray of fuchsia bougainvillea all but blocked the carport, built in the backyard in an old-timey fashion. A regular fruit salad growing in her yard, I thought rather enviously, as I ducked under an aggressive banana frond on my way up the front steps toward a bright red door, set against fading gray paint on what I bet, given the apparent age, that being old, of the house, was actually real cypress wood.

  As soon as we went inside the house, we were assaulted by cats. It certainly seemed to me that there were more than five of them, but perhaps this was an illusion created by their constant movement and the free-floating swirls of cat hair they produced as they tromped through the house. Josey introduced each cat to me by its name, which I didn’t even pretend to absorb, and showed me that the cats could actually do tricks.

  “Roll over, Cleo,” Josey said, and an orange tiger rolled over.

  “Give me five, Bailey,” Josey said, and a gray tabby stood on its back legs and patted the air with its right front paw.

  That was actually pretty cute, I had to admit. “I didn’t think you could teach a cat to do tricks.”

  “Of course you can,” Josey said. “Cats are the smartest animals, next to pigs and dolphins. You just talk softly, look them in the eye, and tell them exactly what you want.” Then she grinned. “Feeding them goodies helps,” and she tossed each cat a kitty treat.

  “Have a seat,” Josey said, waving her hand with the big, beautiful sapphire ring toward a cane-bottom ladder-back chair that was either an antique or way, way past its prime. I sat, and the orange tabby immediately construed this as an invitation of some kind.

  “Let me feed the boys and girls,” Josey said, “then we can talk.”

  Nodding, I turned my attention to the big orange tabby that was pressing its butt in my face and commanded, under my breath, “Go away.”

  But the sound of the pop-top popping on the cat-food can made the orange tabby bounce out of my lap and up onto the top of the kitchen counter with the other four of her fellow felines.

  “Say your prayers,” Josey commanded, and all five cats sat down, and bowed their heads.

  Okay. I was impressed, and maybe a bit puzzled, by Josey the domestic-cat trainer. While the cats ate, I scoped out the kitchen and what else I could see of the house, which was cluttered, though fundamentally clean, except for those little clouds of cat hair floating through the air.

  “Bottled water?” Josey asked.

  “Please.”

  “Grilled cheese?”

  “Er, well”—I looked around at the floating cat hair again—“guess not. Watching my carbs.”

  “Why?” Josey asked. “You aren’t skinny enough?”

  Ignoring Josey’s jab, I talked the kind of idle, flattering chitchat that one makes when you’re trying to warm a person up so they’ll spill their guts and tell you things they really weren’t supposed to tell you. While I blabbered in my most charming way, Josey made her grilled cheese sandwich, and my mouth watered so badly I had to stop talking.

  “Sure you don’t want one?” she asked, making me wonder if I’d whimpered.

  Tempted, I sniffed the air and checked out the countertop. Josey had used real cheese, real butter, and a grocery-store whole wheat bread. I knew the sandwich would taste really, really good. I knew it would add an inch where I didn’t want an inch. Lord knows what was in the bread, probably high-fructose corn syrup and preservatives. “Thank you, but no.”

  “Okay, you don’t eat meat, you don’t eat carbs. What do you eat?”

  Actually I ate carbs, I mean, trail mix bars were, at least lately, my mainstay in life. I just thought that “I don’t eat carbs” would sound better than “No, thank you, I don’t eat cat fur.” What I answered was “Salads, fruit, brown rice, yogurt. But I’m fine, really. Not hungry.” My mouth drooled as I lied.

  “Okay, no fruit in the yard right now. Too late for citrus, too early for mangoes. Yogurt, I have.”

  My mouth watered again. “Full-fat, low-f
at, no-fat, organic, or regular?”

  Josey gave me the same look Philip often did at meals. “Banana,” she said.

  Okay, close enough. “That’d be great.”

  In no time at all, we were eating, as were the kitties.

  I had stopped drooling, and was savoring, when Josey peered over her sandwich and asked, “Now, tell me, why did you want to talk to me?”

  Okay, enough cat chatter and food talk. “Do you have anything new on the M. David murder case?”

  “Not so you’d know.”

  “So, the widow’s not a suspect?”

  “Didn’t say that,” Josey said.

  “What about the other shareholders in Boogie Bog? I understand they lost a bundle when M. David gutted the company and fled. I’d be pretty interested in the Boogie Bog gang. I mean, you know, revenge and all.”

  Josey kept eating.

  “So, okay, who exactly were the shareholders in Boogie Bog?”

  Josey stared at me for a moment, and then said, “You do know that you are not a law-enforcement officer, don’t you?”

  So, okay, apparently grilled cheese did not loosen Josey’s tongue, like, say, maybe a bottle of wine would have. I didn’t think she would drink on the job, though, so I didn’t even try to induce her to open a bottle of wine. Instead I just nodded pleasantly and then tried to cajole some more information, but Josey pretty much took the position that she was going to pet her cats, eat her sandwich, and ignore the rest of my questions.

  Just what I needed, a cajole-proof detective.

  “So, that’s M. David, then,” I said, officially signaling that I was giving up that line of inquiry. “What have you learned about Angus John?”

  “Nothing. Nothing except what I’ve read in the newspaper. You do remember, don’t you, that his case is with the Bradenton police, out of my jurisdiction? Not my case,” she said, with a deadpan expression.

  Not her case, yeah, I remembered that. But I also remembered Josey questioning me, the Sunday after Angus died, like it was her case. So, okay, maybe being a lawyer made me cynical, but I suspected Josey knew more than she was admitting about Angus John.

  But my bottle of water was empty, my banana yogurt was eaten, as was Josey’s grilled cheese. It was time to go, so I stood up, thinking that was a pretty obvious hint.

  But first, I asked, innocently enough, if I could use her bathroom. Josey pointed down a hallway that conveniently enough passed right by her second bedroom, which she had converted into a home office. I could hear Josey talking to her cats in the kitchen, so I cruised into the office, checked out her computer, her desk, her piles of stuff, and just sort of accidentally started reading exposed papers. What she had, sort of vaguely on top, if you shoved the other stuff out of the way, was a set of the Antheus corporation papers. I read as fast as I could, and learned in not too much longer than a real trip to the bathroom would have taken that the Antheus bylaws provided that M. David’s private stock would go back into the corporation at his death, and not be inherited by his heirs. That’s not so unusual, I knew, with privately held stock in a small company, where the shareholders want to control who is part of the business. My private shares in the Smith, O’Leary, and Smith stock have the same provision.

  But what made this particularly interesting was that it meant the good widow, the very Mrs. Sherilyn Moody, would not get any share of Antheus. And even if the company couldn’t mine it, that much pristine land was prime real estate gold. Rather than Sherilyn getting a cut, M. David’s fellow Antheus shareholders’ own cut would increase.

  And that made for an interesting motive on the part of M. David’s Antheus shareholders.

  “Hey, you all right?” Josey called out.

  Quickly, I put the papers back as neat as I had found them, dashed into the bath, flushed, washed my hands, and idled back into the kitchen. Josey gave me an odd look, and I smiled. “You have great light in your bathroom. I was checking my makeup. Think I need more blush?” Better she think me vapid and vain than a snoop who’d snooped in her own office.

  Josey squinted her eyes and gave my face a serious look. “Naw, you look fine. Don’t know why you’d fool with makeup anyway.”

  And with that, we got back into her car and left.

  When Josey dropped me off in front of my Honda, she looked at me with cop eyes. “You be careful who you ask what to, you hear? There’s something out there worth killing over. Sometimes when you turn over rocks, what’s under there will bite you.”

  Chapter 18

  As the cosmic forces had obviously decreed that this was Field Trip Day, I thought, oh, what the heck, I might as well drive back to work via Delilah Groves in east Sarasota County and see if I could find out if it had already been sold, and to whom or what. I mean, it wasn’t like I had a trial starting tomorrow morning. What had Rayford the anti-suave said while he was trying to bilk me out of a deposit for a future crop that wouldn’t be grown? Take State Road 72 to Sugar Bowl Road and turn north?

  That meant bumper-cars-at-eighty till I hit Sugar Bowl Road, which was pretty far east, but a sweet little road through honest-to-gosh countryside.

  The first thing I saw when I drove through the gates of the orange grove was a covey of surveyors working among the trees. I knew I’d have to see what that was all about, but at the moment, I filed it in the “later” box and continued to the office. Where I was rewarded by a “Closed” sign on the door and no one around.

  I parked my car, tried the front door, and the back door, both of which were locked. Then I eyed the windows, but decided breaking into the headquarters of the plaintiff who was suing two of my clients, especially while surveyors were within shouting distance away, would not constitute a move that The Florida Bar’s ethics division would in any possible way condone. Besides that, the lower windows had burglar bars on them, which immediately piqued my interest in what might be inside. I mean, who would want to steal a bunch of orange orders and shipping labels?

  Curiosity thus raised, I found myself peeking in the windows, between the burglar bars, even jiggling things, testing for sturdiness. In fact, as fate would have it, I was doing my best to unfasten a loose screw on the attached bars when I heard a car drive up. Good thing I was in the back, and I inhaled myself back into lawyer, not burglar, mode and sallied around to the front to meet whoever was in the car.

  A tubby blonde with Tammy-Faye-lite makeup jumped down from a tall SUV and said, “You looking for something?”

  Mentally I added her to my list of prospects for my grooming school if I ever burned out on this lawyer thing, but said, “Oh, yes, thank you. I was looking for Rayford Clothier.”

  “You looking for him out back of the office?”

  “Oh, just admiring the groves. Doesn’t look like Rayford’s here.”

  “Oh, he’s here all right. Had me lock the doors while I was at lunch so nobody would bother him. What’cha need to see him ’bout?”

  Well, it was none of her business, I thought, but I smiled, and introduced myself by name and trade and said I needed to speak with Rayford on business.

  “I’m Odell,” she said, and stuck out her hand, which I took as briefly as I could under the prevailing customs and conventions. Then she bent down, turned over a rock, got out a key, and clumped heavily on weirdly outdated platform shoes toward the door. “Rayford doesn’t trust me to take the key with me.”

  My curiosity level hit a new high as Odell unlocked the door. What did Rayford have inside?

  While I pondered Rayford’s burglar bars and mistrust of Odell, she plunked the key back under the same rock.

  So much for security, I thought, and made a careful mental note as to exactly which rock hid the door key. That information could come in pretty handy if my meeting wasn’t quite as fruitful as I hoped.

  “Rayford’s not much for lawyers,” Odell said as she went inside the orange-grove office. Assuming an implied invitation, I followed her.

  Without saying anything further to me,
Odell shouted out at a closed door, “Yo, Rayford.”

  Good professional manners, I thought, and waited. In another minute, a tall, dark-haired man, sporting a cowboy shirt, came out the door and glared at me. Then his glare softened.

  “Well, little darling, no flies on you.”

  Okay, a western yahoo I needed to bend to do my bidding. How hard could that be? I smiled so big that my eyes squinted up, and fluffed up my half yard of perfect hair. “Hello, my name is Lilly Cleary, and I’m hoping to borrow you for just a few minutes.”

  Rayford stared at my chest for a second, and then took a good look at my legs.

  When his eyes landed on my face, I said, “If we could just step into your office for a minute—”

  “We know each other? You seem…familiar.”

  Uh-oh. Either a worn-out pickup line, which didn’t seem necessary since I’d already come on to him, or he might have remembered my voice from my two alt-personality phone calls.

  “Oh, no,” I said, “I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting you until now.” Which was, of course, technically true, though possibly misleading in the context, a well-used trick of trial lawyers.

  “You sure?”

  “Oh, quite. I’d remember you.” Big movie-star smile.

  “What do you want?” His tone sounded carefully neutral. But his grin was one inch off a salacious sneer.

  “I’m an attorney and I was hoping to talk a little business.”

  The glare came back on Rayford Clothier’s face. Okay, most people lose the grin when they find out I’m an attorney. I’m used to that.

  “What do you want with me?”

  “I’m the attorney representing Angus John and Miguel.”

  “Who?”

  “You know, the two men Delilah Groves is suing. The orange-defamation case.”

  “Look, I already told my attorney to get that lawsuit dropped. You don’t need to waste my time any further. You can go now.” But for good measure, Rayford stole another look at my legs.