Southern Gothic Gray: A Rusty Clay Mystery (The Redneck Detective Agency Mystery Book 2) Read online

  Chapter 1

  Rusty sat in his wooden chair at his roll-top desk. He swiveled around and stared at his office door. He had just replaced the upper translucent glass. He looked at the backside of the black gothic lettering: The River Clay.

  You just can’t hold them river Clay’s down too long. That used to be the saying. Well, there were only two river Clay’s left, not counting old Aunt Essie. And Rusty had been down so long he wasn’t sure he’d ever make a comeback.

  Put on top of that, tomorrow would be the worst day of his year.

  He swiveled back around and put his attention on the old Tennessee River map that had belonged to his grandfather. He ran his hands over it and there was something mystic about it. He was sure if he could get Aunt Essie to dowse the thing for him, he’d be able to find the lost gold of the Penelope Belle.

  Hunting for sunken Civil War treasure. Shit, he was getting desperate.

  And on top of that, the last time, just some months ago, that he’d approached Aunt Essie about helping him with the treasure, hints mostly—he should have just come out and been more direct—she’d blown him off right away. He figured she’d had her fill of that legend from her husband Herman, the one she’d been married to four times. He’d wasted his whole life practically searching for it.

  But Rusty was supposed to go to her house this afternoon. If she was as good at dowsing as she was other mystic practices, then why hadn’t she found it for Herman? So be it. Rusty was more desperate than he’d been in years. He needed to try something.

  And then he heard the street door downstairs creak open. Silence for a moment. Then slow heavy footsteps came up the stairs, each step a little louder than the last. Rusty, almost with the same cadence as the footsteps, pulled down the roll-top to hide the map. He swiveled around toward the door just as a silhouette of a big man appeared in the wavy, translucent glass. Then there was a firm knock.

  Rusty got up, stepped over to the door, and opened it. He recognized the man.

  He looked quite different than the last time Rusty laid eyes on him, some thirty years ago. And it was not age that changed his looks. The man had a whole different persona.

  He no longer looked the slob of his reputation. He possessed no protruding gut. He probably weighed two-ten tops. He was toned and groomed and sported a fake tan. Tanning booths and spray-on tans in Dolopia, Alabama. Shit. The world was going to hell in a handbasket.

  “John Tooley,” Rusty said.

  “Rusty Clay.”

  Tooley wore cowboy boots, jeans and a black western-cut sports coat. The right sleeve of the coat was neatly pinned.

  The rumor Tooley came into some money must have been true. It appeared he invested some in himself, in his clothing, in his image. Rusty didn’t understand Tooley or his own cousin Ray—why they didn’t invest themselves in some kind of cyber prosthetic.

  What could he want? Maybe Tooley was going to use some of his newfound wealth to bring a law suit against Rusty and the Travertine County Board of Education. Maybe he wanted his high school field goal record back that Rusty broke under questionable and contestable circumstances.

  “Come on in, Tooley.”

  He entered. Rusty closed the door. Tooley meandered about the twenty by twenty-two foot main room, checking everything out: the antique roll-top desk, the leather couch, the small Persian rug in the middle of the floor, the wooden file cabinets, the paddle ceiling fan, the black rotary phone, Rusty’s Lifetime Achievement Award Plaque for catfish grabbling.

  Rusty remained silent, let him do his looking. Then Tooley turned and said, “I never been in a private eye’s office before.”

  “Look all you want.”

  “I need to talk to you, Rusty.”

  Rusty pointed to the wooden flat desk that sat between the two large windows looking out to the courthouse. “Have a seat, Tooley.” The man, all his life, had been called by his last name. “Or are you John now?”

  “Naw, I’m still ole Tooley.”

  He went over and sat down. Rusty walked over to the coffee machine at the opposite end of the room. “Want some coffee?”

  “No, thanks.”

  Rusty poured himself a cup, went over, and sat across from Tooley.

  “I want to hire your detective services, Rusty.”

  “To find out why I hold the Traventine County field goal record?”

  Tooley laughed. “I put high school behind me. I’m here about stuff I can’t put behind me.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I want you to find my arm,” Tooley said.

  “What, somebody stole your prosthetic?” Rusty stared at the pinned up sleeve.

  “No.”

  “The one you got cut off?” Rusty asked.

  “What other one would there be?”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “The one I lost on the railroad track.”

  “That’s been over forty years ago.”

  “I need closure,” Tooley said.

  “Closure?” The man had been watching Oprah and got ideas put into this head.

  “Yes. Maybe I should explain myself fully.”

  “Yeah. Try that,” Rusty said.

  “I’m trying to become a better man. I still have my short comings.”

  “But you’re working on them.” Rusty knew people who watched Oprah often ‘worked on themselves.’

  “Yes. But if I’m going to be whole I need to find my arm. Years they sent me to this psychiatrist. He give me some drugs and kept telling me that I was going to have to forget about my arm. You know, you got to move on shit.”

  “But you need closure?”

  “Listen, Rusty, I’ve tried to forget. What I need is to remember and to find. Listen, I wasn’t drunk. Something happened to me that night.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like I had found the secret of the universe, but then forgot it.”

  “The secret of the universe?”

  “Yeah. And then I got this great idea for something like Billy Bass. I mean, this was years and years before Billy Bass. But then the idea disappeared, like someone came up behind me and sucked it out of my head with a vacuum cleaner.”

  “Someone stole your invention idea?”

  “Yeah. Then I found myself walking along the railroad tracks. I don’t even know what I was doing near them. All of life was wonderful. Then the next thing I know. I come to, didn’t have an arm. See, they should have shown it to me. You know like if a kid’s pet dies. You just don’t bury when they off at school, don’t let them see it dead.”

  You not supposed to just bury it while he’s a school. You let them bury it.”

  “Yeah, I know the hard way. But we won’t get into that.”

  “Naw, let’s don’t. I want my arm back.”

  “Tooley, what if, I hate to say this, what if it got mangled up? What if there wasn’t any arm to show you?”

  “I saw it, Rusty. I saw it flying up through the air. I remember. I had a Batman glow-in-the-dark ring on my finger. It was just a-glowing.”

  “You don’t remember the secret of the universe. Or your Billy Bass idea. But you do remember seeing your arm flying through the air with the glowing Batman ring?”

  “That’s right. And I’m imagining or implanting my own false memory there, like that psychiatrist suggested. As far as the arm, I don’t think they threw it away. I think somebody at the hospital stole it and sold it to the University of Alabama, to the medical department for an arm cadavers. I’ve
been having dreams. Did you see Terminator II?”

  “Yeah.” Rusty couldn’t remember which one II was, but he’d seen all three.

  “In the dreams, my arm’s in this showcase thing, like in Terminator II.”

  “I get the picture very vividly, Tooley.”

  “Rusty, my arm needs to come back and be with my body. I need to see it, touch it, and then lay it to rest in a proper manner. You may think I’m crazy. You may think like that psychiatrist did…”

  “No, not at all, Tooley. I’m with you.”

  “I need to get my arm back, Rusty. When I do, I think I’ll recall the secret of the universe I had that night.”

  “The Billy Bass idea?”

  “The secret of the universe and the Billy Bass idea. But it was bigger than Billy Bass.”

  “And you think someone actually…” Rusty said and paused.

  “That’s right. Stole my severed arm.”

  Rusty paused on purpose, for dramatic effect. He wanted Tooley’s last words accentuated, like this was what it all came down to. Rusty took him a long sip, then said, “Tooley, there’s a reality to the situation here.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s been over forty years.”

  “There must be something you can do?”

  Something? Rusty’s very thought about his own wretched situation: I need to tray something. “I don’t think I’m the best man for you, Tooley.”

  “You were a field goal kicker. I was a field goal kicker.”

  “Yeah, Tooley.”

  “More important. You a river man. I’m a river man. To the day we die. I’m Tennessee River. You Elk River. Together, we can’t fail.”

  “Never underestimate my ability to fail.”

  “River man to river man, Rusty Clay.”

  That shut Rusty up for a moment.

  Tooley reached into the inside breast pocket of his blazer with his good hand, the way businessmen on TV reached in and came out with a checkbook or their wallets. But Tooley didn’t pull out a checkbook or a wallet. He set a stack of hundred dollar bills, held together by a rubber band, on the desk and scooted them toward Rusty.

  “I’m familiar with hundred dollar bills, Tooley. And I’d say that is about five thousand dollars.” This was changing everything.

  “It’s exactly five thousand dollars. My brother passed away a little while back and left me some money. What do you say, Rusty?”

  “Look, Toolie. I’m about to go into a deep depression for a couple, three days.”

  “A deep depression?”

  “Yeah, it happens once a year, every year.”

  “I tell you what, Rusty. You hold onto that five thousand. I’ll get back with you in about a week, after you pull out of your deep depression. Then we’ll talk. River man to river man again.”

  Rusty couldn’t get over this new Tooley. If he’d been selling fifty-five gallon drums of river water, Rusty would have bought a couple barrels.

  Chapter 2

  Rusty knew he had to keep moving—mentally. He didn’t want to think. He didn’t want to jump into that abyss of what-if. Tomorrow would be tough enough as it was.

  So, he got out his laptop and set it up on the flat desk. Here he had high speed internet, unlike down on the river. What he wanted to know was: Who was the emergency room doctor who attended to Tooley that night? The Travertine Courier most definitely had an article on the incident, maybe a lengthy one, and they might just have quoted the attending doctor. That was back before medical information was so precious.

  What was Tooley then, fourteen years old? That would be forty-three years ago. A young doctor, somebody working in the hospital, would still be alive to remember that night.

  There it was. The Travertine Courier on-line sight. Rusty clicked archives. Shit. Not available. ‘In the process of digitalizing our archives as a public service.’ That nor the physical archives were available during the process.

  The only inside connection Rusty had was Sammy. And Sammy was forever at odds with the reporters and editors at the paper.

  Rusty logged off. Nolan Barker, the sheriff. Yessirre. Back then when teenage kids were driving their families’ hand-me-down clunkers, Nolan was one of the county ambulance drivers. That was Rusty’s main hope. If Nolan happened to be the one who hauled Tooley to the hospital, Rusty could find out all manner of info. What happened to the arm? Who all was working at the hospital that night?

  A couple days from now, if Rusty took the case, that would be his first order of business.

  Rusty closed his laptop and stared at the bundle of hundreds.

  Not take the case? Who was he kidding?

  It had been two years since his last case. Not that he gave a shit. Except the economy had tanked and he could use the money. All the remodeling jobs and small time buy-and-sell deals he did with Cousin Ray had been few and far between. Rusty had recently sold his modified 450SL Mercedes and was counting on that money to get him through a lean and frugal winter.

  He never thought he’d be this strapped again. Not since a few years ago, when he and his then-wife Jenny were knocking out some sweet real estate deals.

  Somethings changed, somethings remained the same. He was still five-nine and had his lean, muscular build. He kept, at age almost fifty-seven, a thirty-one inch waist. That was what he judged his whole body by. If his waist went over thirty-two, he did whatever he had to do to get it back flat. His eyes were still blue and he still had his hair. What had changed in two years: His salt-and-pepper hair had turned salt.

  He still owned this building. But it was worth half the price of what he paid for it. Perry & Company, attorneys at law, still rented the entire downstairs from him. But he spent every penny of that and then some to keep it up. Seemed as soon as the recession hit, the building decided to start falling apart.

  He still was tight friends with Gloria Davenport. But there love affair was fading into the sunset. And he wasn’t riding beside her.

  Rusty stood up, picked up the bundle of hundreds and went to his walk-in closet. There at the back was his heavy squat safe. He kneeled down at it, was about to spin the combination lock. He looked over and there was the door glass he’d just taken out: The Redneck Detective Agency.

  The Redneck Detective Agency wasn’t a detective agency at all, and it had come into existence back when Rusty and Jenny were off living on a river hundreds of miles from the Elk River. It existed only as a main setting of a major motion picture to be filmed on location right there in Dolopia, Alabama.

  The film never saw the first day of production. The same day the producer pocketed over a quarter million dollars from three of Travertine County’s wealthier and greediest citizens was the day that the “Hollywood producer” alias international con man skipped town.

  After living on the Miami River, two different Ecuadorian rivers, and then the Crystal River in Florida—where Crystal was born—Jenny and Rusty moved to Elk River, in the little house where Rusty grew up. They began renovating houses, buying and selling lots, and finally bought this building here. They renovated it. Perry & Company moved in downstairs, but they used this little upstairs office for their own. When they needed a name for their two-person operation, Jenny liked The River Clay’s. That’s what folks called him and Ray to distinguish his family from another clan of Clay’s who lived in Dolopia. Jenny liked the fact she was a river Clay.

  She ordered a new translucent door glass with lettering—The River Clay’s. But ole man White, a sign painter with a penchant for misspellings and mistakes and drunkenness, made it—The River Clay. It irritated Jenny. However, it was a sign in more ways than one. Shortly, Jenny left him and it did, in fact, become the River Clay, singular, as in just Rusty. What was the term? Self-fulfilling prophesy? The door had been a self-fulfilling prophesy.

  Rusty, quit thinking. He was in no mood to wax nostalgic right now.

  He had tomorrow and the guilt and sorrow to deal with.

  He changed him mind. He
stood up. Put the money in his pocket. He would take the money, not the map—he was no mood for Aunt Essie to blow him off again—to her.

  He walked back out into the office to his roll-top desk. He pulled out the bottom right hand drawer and got the little bottle of whiskey. That would put her in a good mood.

  Chapter 3

  Rusty and Cousin Ray called themselves the last of the Travertine County Clay’s. That left Aunt Essie out of the mix. She was not really their aunt. She was their daddies’ first cousin.

  She had the marriage record. Eight times. Some claimed only five, because she’d been married to one man, Carlton Edwards, four times.

  Ole Aunt Essie was crazy even by River Clay standards. And she didn’t live on the Elk River like any self-respecting Clay, but on the Tennessee, in one of the spookiest-looking houses in all of Travertine County.

  And now Rusty stepped up onto the front porch of that ninety year old, two-story, clapboard Victorian. He figured he looked presentable enough for Aunt Essie.

  He wore what he called his uptown uniform—neat blue jeans, black roper boots, black belt, and a long-sleeve dress shirt. Rusty had a few different shirts, all solid color—white, light gray, charcoal gray, black, blue, and royal blue. Right now he wore his light gray.

  Before he knocked, he noticed the gray painted clapboards. That’s when it came to him. It was about Aunt Essie he first heard the words Southern Gothic. And it had come out of his sister Lola’s mouth.

  “Aunt Essie and her house are Southern Gothic. Strictly Southern Gothic. Beyond that. They are Southern Gothic Gray.” And the term was born. Lola was fourteen at the time and already into literature. The term would become the title of her signature song.

  He knocked and in a couple minutes, Aunt Essie opened her door. She stood five-six, was bean-pole skinny, and was one year older than her ninety year old house. A curved little pipe hung clenched between her teeth. She wore khaki cargo pants, a lacy blouse and antique gold jewelry—a good pound of it Rusty figured—dangled from her ears, neck and wrists. She smelled of Dial soap and lilac water.

  She let him into her cluttered house. It smelled of old antiques and Prince Albert tobacco. Rusty would have liked to take more notice of the Oriental rug he stood on and the antiques about him, if it wasn’t for that damned monkey.