One Right Thing (Marty Singer Mystery #3)

by Matthew Iden

  It was all over in five minutes. She disappeared back into the office, wiping her eyes. I got in the car and started it to get the AC going. In the time it took me to fiddle with the controls, she was on her way back to the car, put back together almost as if nothing had happened. Only a red swelling around the eyes gave her away.

  She slid into the passenger’s side and we sat there for a second. I sat as still as possible while she took several deep, shuddering breaths.

  Finally, she asked, “Does this change anything?”

  I sat back. “I don’t know. It depends on whether his ALS factored into the drug dealing.”

  “But the doctor said that the…the Riluzole didn’t have any value.”

  “He said it wouldn’t have any recreational use,” I corrected. “There’s still a market for pharmaceuticals simply because they’re expensive as hell. Granted, they don’t have a street value like run-of-the-mill narcotics, so I’m skeptical. But it’s something we have to consider until we can prove otherwise.”

  She stared out the window. The blast of cold air was condensing around the edges of the glass. “It hurts. To know he was going through this and not know how or why. Maybe the doctor will tell us more later.”

  “But?”

  “But, in a way, what does it matter? J.D. was killed by a person, not a disease. All of this information is useless in the face of that. We still have to find the person who killed him and bring him to justice.”

  I didn’t say anything, just started the car and eased out of the parking lot. Her voice had gained strength in just a few sentences, sounding nearly normal by the end. I didn’t want to do anything to wreck that, but after hearing about J.D.’s ALS—and with the consequences of my own disease fresh in my mind—I couldn’t help wondering if whoever had killed J.D. had done him a favor.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Things hadn’t changed at Woodland Corner trailer park. Kids were still splashing and screaming in the stream, toys and grills littered the side yards, and the same lady was yelling for Jack again. One change, however, was that instead of knocking on Ginny Decker’s front door, I went right around back, where I found her sitting in a chair, smoking. She was staring out over the treetops, the smoke from her cigarette curling into the sky.

  She didn’t see me until I was nearly at the steps to the deck. When she did, she made a quick motion to get up. I raised a hand to stop her. “Just give me a minute, okay? One minute.” She froze with her hands on the arms of the chair, neither moving nor settling back.

  “I know you don’t want to talk to me,” I said. “I know you’re scared. I’m not trying push you into anything or make your life any harder. That’s the last thing I want.”

  She didn’t say anything, so I kept going, my voice low.

  “Problem is, it might not be up to me. Or you. I’ve talked to a crowd of people who all seem to agree that J.D. was still involved with something dirty back here at home. The local police think it caught up with him, that he was done in by a mysterious hit man from Washington, DC.”

  The look on her face told me what she thought of that. I rushed on. “I know. The story’s so fantastic that I think they either don’t know or won’t say what’s going on. I’m betting you’ve got some ideas. I know you’re afraid of where that might lead, but I can tell you from experience it doesn’t matter if you don’t tell me.”

  I waited. Finally, like the words were being dragged out of her, she said, “What do you mean?”

  “It’s simple. If whoever you’re afraid of thinks you have information that could hurt them, it won’t stop them from taking an interest in you. Tell me and at least I can do something about it, maybe even stop whoever it is that’s got you so scared.”

  “What the hell is it to you?” she asked, her voice strained. “Why do you give a damn about J.D.? About me?”

  I took a deep breath. If I didn’t give a real answer, or at least part of one, this conversation was over for good. “I owe him, Ginny. It’s as simple as that. I let something happen to him that I shouldn’t have.”

  “J.D.’s dead, mister,” she said, blunt as a bullet. “Whatever debt you owed is gone with him.”

  “It’s not about him, really.” I stared at her as I spoke, realizing it was true. “This is about me. About what I think of myself. About who I am. If J.D. were here himself and told me to give it up, it’s okay, I don’t think I’d do it.”

  “We’re all just along for the ride. Is that it?”

  I considered, then nodded slowly. “Yes, I guess you are. I’ll help you out if I can, but I’m going to find out who killed J.D. and why for myself.”

  She took a long drag from her cigarette and blew it straight up. “Might not like what you find, mister.”

  “Probably not,” I agreed. “I’m not here to clear his name. For all I know, J.D. came back home and picked up where he left off before he went to jail. The guy wasn’t a saint. But I don’t care. He still gets justice. And I get peace.”

  She shook her head. “Sounds nice, but there still ain’t nothing you can do.”

  “Try me, Ginny. I’m a son of a bitch when it comes to finishing what I started.”

  Slowly, glacially, she settled back into her chair. I climbed the short steps to the deck and eased myself into a rickety-looking lawn chair across from her. I looked at her over a battered white plastic bistro table. We stared at each other for a minute, the tension high enough to taste. I felt like I’d cornered a wild cat.

  Apparently, I passed some kind of test. She sighed, and said, “What do you want to know?”

  “Let’s start easy,” I said. “How did you and J.D. meet?”

  “High school. Nowhere else to meet anyone around here. He was two years ahead of me and made all the girls squeal with this black Trans Am he bought off his uncle. We used to peel around the school parking lot and haul ass into the country. We drove the hell out of that thing.”

  “You get married after high school?”

  She shook her head. “Later. Before he went to the big city.”

  “What was he like before he left?”

  She sighed and stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray, where it joined a forest of others. “J.D.’s dreams were always two sizes bigger than he was. Which is all right, that’s most everyone’s problem. But he couldn’t focus on any one of them. I told him he must have ADD, the way he picked up and dropped ideas. First, he was going to open an auto body shop, then he was going to get into construction—even though he didn’t know what end of a hammer to grab—then he told me he was about to sell vacation property in the Carolinas. J.D. did everything but sell Amway.”

  “All that sounds aboveboard.”

  “Yeah, well. Those were the dreams. The reality was, from high school on, J.D. was always hanging with the wrong crowd. We both were, I guess. I was there because he was, but J.D. was there because he wanted to belong to something. Problem was, he was willing to do pretty much anything to impress. And some of them were lowlife shits, so J.D. did a lot of stupid things just to get on their good side.”

  “Running dope? Stealing cars?”

  “Not that bad. Not yet. He’d lift beer from the store or break into people’s houses. Wouldn’t take anything. He just wanted to see if he could.”

  “That’s it?”

  “He smoked weed. I mean, we both would. But he wasn’t into dealing it.”

  A man and a woman walked by on their way to the stream. I could see them shooting glances back at us. They waved when they knew they’d been seen. Ginny waved back with a weak smile. I raised my eyebrows.

  “Donna and Fred Ray,” she explained. “From three trailers down. They wouldn’t set foot in that stream if their hair was on fire, so the only reason they’re walking by is because my next-door neighbor phoned them and said she’d seen a tall, dark, and handsome stranger sitting on my back porch with me. Nosy sons of bitches.”

  “Glad I could provide today’s entertainment for Woodland Corner,”
I said.

  Ginny reached for her lighter and pack where they rested on the table. “Honey, you provided this month’s entertainment for Woodland Corner.”

  I waited for her to light her cigarette, then asked, “What happened to make J.D. want to leave Cain’s Crossing so bad?”

  “Even J.D. could see he was going nowhere fast with the scum he was hanging out with. And he had no prospects. Work didn’t suit him and he’d never been much in school. He thought he might be able to make something of himself in DC, so off he went.”

  “Well, he certainly made something of himself,” I said. “A felon.”

  She sighed. “I told him not to go, told him DC was going to grind him down to nothing. But he wanted to prove something to me, to his friends. To his mama.”

  “You two split when he went?”

  “Well, we weren’t together. And when he went and got himself arrested, I figured the courtship was over. I had to move on. The papers for the divorce came through around the time the door to his cell slammed shut.”

  “But then he came back,” I said.

  She nodded, blew a plume of smoke towards the sky. “Surprised the hell out of me. Just showed one day, knocking on the door. He had seventeen dollars and a duffel bag full of old clothes. He smiled and said ‘hey, Ginny’ and next thing I knew he was in my bed.”

  “Did he move in?”

  She shook her head. “He was here most nights, but kept a room out at that shitty motel where they found him.”

  “Any idea why?”

  “Why what?”

  I gestured at her home. “Free place to stay, the woman he loves. Why get a motel room?”

  She laughed. “Maybe I scared him. I told him if he wanted the two of us to be an item again, he needed a plan.”

  “He already had one, though. Headed right back to the dark side.”

  “It didn’t start that way. Jail made him a different man. Harder, meaner. I didn’t like all of it, but can’t deny it was nice to see him stick up for himself for once.”

  “How?”

  She tapped the ash from the end of her cigarette. “Some smartass was razzing him at Jackie’s bar one night not long after he came home. Said something about him being some bad man’s girlfriend when he heard J.D. had done time. Well, my sweetie hit him in the throat with a bottle of Rolling Rock and that was the end of the jokes.”

  “Who was this guy?”

  “Name’s Jay.”

  I thought back to my run-in at the doughnut shop and described the surfer wannabe to her. “Is that Jay?”

  She nodded. “He runs around with the Brower brothers.”

  “Tell me about them.”

  She paused and I was afraid she was going to clam up again. But she blinked a few times and continued. “Three rednecks like you read about in a bad book. They tool around in pickups, bad-mouthing the Mexicans, the blacks, college kids, don’t matter. They spit and cuss and run over old people.”

  “And hassle people at gas stations,” I said. “So they’re racists and have a bad attitude. They do anything more serious?”

  “Anything bad happens in Cain’s Crossing, you can pin it on them.”

  “Do they run dope? Hookers? Chop cars? Rob banks?”

  She gave a little shake of her head, which could mean no or I don’t know. I dropped it, afraid it might make her skittish. “So. These Brower boys. They hear through the grapevine that J.D. was back in town after pulling time in the big city, and…”

  She nodded again. “Buck is the youngest. He was in the bar the night J.D. nearly killed that guy with the bottle. I guess Buck was impressed and tried to get J.D. to talk to the other two.”

  “Darryl and his other brother Darryl?”

  She tried a small smile, shook her head. “Tank and Will.”

  “Tank?”

  “His real name is Harold, but everyone’s called him Tank since grade school. He’d twist your nose off your face if he caught you calling him Harold.”

  “What about Will?”

  She shrugged. “He ain’t bright, but the others do what he tells them. Just a mean son of a bitch. Spent some time in the Army, then got out and worked in Norfolk before giving it up to come back here.”

  “You said Buck ‘tried’ to get J.D. to talk to his brothers,” I said. “He didn’t want to?”

  She shook her head and took a sip of her beer. “I think he wanted to try something legal for once, but he couldn’t get work anywhere. Tank and Buck took to coming by at night, talking him up, until finally he agreed to do some jobs for them.”

  “That bother you?”

  She closed her eyes briefly, opened them. “It didn’t matter what I thought. He was always making the wrong decisions. Nothing I was going to do or say would turn that around. And I couldn’t feed us both on what I was bringing home, so he needed to start making money. Maybe I should’ve told him to straighten himself out first, get a real job, keep his hands clean. But what job was that supposed to be, exactly? He couldn’t all of a sudden decide to be a doctor or an engineer. J.D. was born a small-time crook and always would be. I could love him the way he was or tell him to leave, but change him? Wasn’t going to happen.”

  “What did the Browers want him to do?” I asked.

  “It wasn’t washing their cars, I can tell you that,” she said, taking a drag and blowing out the smoke.

  I scratched the back of my neck. “They might grow weed, but the margin on that’s a little light these days. And if they weren’t into robbing banks or chopping cars, seems like the only thing J.D. might know that they didn’t would be something more hard-core,” I said, thinking out loud. “Which is drugs. When I busted him back in DC, he was working for a crack dealer, but these bumpkins wouldn’t know how to get their hands on that. You need connections and business relationships and it doesn’t sound like these guys have been outside the county in twenty years. Plus there’s no market for it here.”

  “Maybe you could figure this out on your own time?”

  “So, weed is too light. The action for coke and crack are too hard to elbow in on, there’s no way to get a source, and there’s no market. Same thing with heroine,” I said, going down the list. “There’s oxycodone, but that’s all on its way up from Florida. Dealers might pass through here, but they’re not sourcing it here.”

  Ginny didn’t say anything, tapping nonexistent ash from her cigarette several times in a row.

  “How about a shot in the dark? Rural farm country, a bunch of tough guys, and a huge profit margin,” I said. “I’ll take crystal meth for a hundred, Alex. They can make it easy enough if they learn how, but then who do they sell it to? The big money is in the city. Enter J.D. Hope, right?”

  Ginny gave a humorless laugh. “Mister, I like the way you look and you seem nice enough, but you’re not going to be around later if one of the Brower boys decides to throw a gallon of gas on my trailer. I’d just as soon you learn that on your own.”

  “How about if I guess and you just nod if I’m right?” I asked. She shook her head, but I plowed on. “The Browers are the local badasses since time began. They grow some weed on the side, but then they hear about how easy it is to make meth. You need space to cook it, but there’re lots of farms and empty barns out here in the boondocks. Then J.D. comes home after a few years pulling time and they say to themselves, hey, I wonder if good old J.D. learned a few tricks working with those crack dealers in DC? Maybe he’s got some connections we could use.”

  Ginny kept shaking her head no.

  “But then J.D. made a play of his own or got caught skimming off the top or just said the wrong thing at the wrong time and Buck or Tank or Will decided they didn’t need J.D.’s big-city experience after all.”

  Ginny stood and started gathering the ashtray, lighter, and beer cans with quick, jerky motions.

  “But the question is,” I said, into the air. “The way J.D. was killed. From what everyone is telling me, the Browers aren’t the type to hit someo
ne once and call it off. So, did they hire someone to do it for them or was it not the Browers at all?”

  Ginny finished gathering her things and, without a word, went into the back door of her trailer and shut the door.

  iv.

  “He won’t roll?”

  Stan slams his mug down. Coffee sloshes out and a dark puddle spreads across his desk until it’s stopped by a stack of folders. He swears and snatches at a stack of fast-food napkins to mop up the spill.

  “No, he won’t fucking roll. He thinks he’s got a better chance with a crack dealer who’s killed four of his best friends.”

  “We got anything else on Maurice?”

  “No,” he says, sulking.

  I try to bridge the gap. “Want me to pick him up again? Try my charms?”

  “Be my fucking guest. I see him again, I’ll punch him in the face. He could help us put away the whole crew. Wants to be a stand-up guy for a crack dealer. Jesus.”

  I grab my car and head over to Southeast. Territories are tight here, measured by half-streets and storefronts, but even knowing where to look, it still takes me all day to find J.D. He’s slouched in the driver’s seat of a beat-up white Accord at the corner of Benning and E Street, hand draped over the top of the steering wheel, staring off into space. Wondering, maybe, if Stan was right. Wondering if he’s going to get shot in the head.

  I pull up, roll down my passenger-side window, lean over the seat. “J.D.”

  He looks over, uninterested. Maybe a slight lift of the eyebrows. “Yeah?”

  “You know who I am?”

  Eyes sleepy, too street-slick to care. “Should I?”

  “I’m a friend of Officer Lowry’s. We need to talk.”

  He gives a start, then catches himself and settles back in his seat, trying to salvage some of that cool. “No, we don’t.”