Felonious Jazz Read online

  Felonious

  Jazz

  a novel

  Bryan Gilmer

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2009 by Bryan Gilmer

  All rights reserved.

  Independently published in the United States as a Laurel Bluff Book.

  bryangilmer.com

  Gilmer, Bryan, 1972–

  Felonious Jazz, a novel / Bryan Gilmer – 1st ed.

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  First Edition

  For Kelly

  Rocky Falls, a suburb of Raleigh, North Carolina

  MONDAY

  One

  Leonard Noblac stood in someone else’s kitchen and shoved the cork back into the neck of the ’82 Haut-Brión. He held the stemmed Riedel glass by its base and checked the wine’s color against a white kitchen towel lit by the afternoon sun. Deep garnet.

  So, all the hype was justified. The smell of leather filled the glass. The taste was earthy and beautiful; practically made you hallucinate you were in the vineyard – just like clove cigarettes always made him think of his big night at the Village Vanguard, of standing in the point of that triangular basement, the Carnegie Hall of jazz. Yeah, man, 1982 had been a good year. Maybe his last one.

  These Reuss cats had stashed a full case of this stuff in a temperature-controlled cellar under the granite kitchen island. The wine ran $600 a bottle if you could find it, and you had no idea if it had been stored worth a damn. He was smart enough to taste the shit before stealing it.

  The Haut-Brión was the only artistic thing in the whole house besides the 9-foot Steinway concert grand. Maybe they picked up the wine on their honeymoon, or maybe it was a present from Mommy and Daddy. Either way, it was just one more status symbol for the Reusses to show off when other zeroes came for dinner. Had to give them credit for holding the ’82 until it was at its peak. But now it was time for an artist to enjoy it. Creativity fuel.

  Leonard slurped the last sip with the same moan that slipped out when he saw a fine looking lady. He stuffed the glass into the empty cell of the cardboard wine case and slammed the partial bottle after it, smashing the crystal like a drummer hitting the cymbal to end a number at the set break.

  The loopy golden retriever stumbled up to him, its toenails clicking against the maple floorboards. He’d jammed a Valium inside a piece of pork sausage, and – what was its name? He didn’t remember what Catalina Reuss had called her – Booboo or whatever – ahh, he didn’t want to know her name – had gobbled it right up. Then the sweet old dog had followed him around wagging her tail and sniffing the hand that had held the sausage while he’d hauled every TV out of the place.

  Now Leonard knelt next to the animal. She was a pretty thing, with a little gray dusting her orange fur. He gently draped his arm across her back like they were on a date to the movies. The dog pressed the side of her head against his thigh, a gesture of affection that brought a tightness to his throat. But Leonard kept moving. He found the bulge of a vein on the dog’s neck and shoved the needle in. The dog felt the prick and aimed questioning eyes at him.

  He pushed the plunger hard to squeeze out all the liquid. Within two seconds, the heartbeat stilled. The dog twitched against him, her eyes still open, as her muscles contracted involuntarily. Then she relaxed, and her bladder and bowels spilled onto the floor.

  Leonard’s heart was racing, and the air in the room suddenly felt freezing. He gently laid down the dog’s body and stood. He bent again and pulled out the needle. He fought to calm himself and dropped the syringe into the wine case among the necks of the bottles. Animals – all living things – got sick and eventually died. He felt a lightning strike of anger at having to give himself this talk. He pushed the feeling away. Somebody had to do the right thing, even when it was hard.

  Leonard went three paces, flailing his head side to side with the anguish of it, flapping his cheeks violently against his teeth. He sniffed in a great breath as the dizziness wore off.

  He reached into his pants pocket for the little plastic bottle of hand sanitizer.

  Leonard flipped the lid, and the citrus scent calmed him immediately. He tipped back his head and squeezed the tangy goo into his mouth. The first drops dissolved directly into his tongue and cheeks.

  The grapefruit tang spread through his sinuses as he pressed his lips together. The gel slid down his throat with a glorious burn. It took just two more mouthfuls to finish the four-ounce bottle. As he screwed off the top to fish out the last bits with his tongue, he welcomed the soft, mind-cleansing surge of ethyl alcohol.

  Leonard breathed out slowly. His breath smelled pure. His mouth was clean, free of 99.9 percent of bacteria. He took another breath and got back to business.

  The vino fit easily with the TVs and other crapola in the back of the minivan he’d left in the garage. He’d gotten the van in there using his black-market garage door opener. All you had to do was hit the button, and the box would transmit all the known garage-door opener radio signals, one after the other. There were only a few dozen.

  Now one quick press of the button, then another after driving through the opening, and the van dipped unnoticed into the broad, curving street as the door descended again behind it.

  As Leonard thought again about his album, he cheered. He plucked at the seatbelt shoulder strap with the fingers of his right hand as if it were the strings of his bass. His head felt airy, and in his mind, he heard the riff he’d written for this track.

  Man, he could feel his great mood coming back now. He was grooving again. This new composition was putting the world right, was unquestionably his big break. His music was finally going to make him famous.

  He was really drunk from the sanitizer now.

  He put on a pair of women’s sunglasses he found above the visor and smiled at his incognito reflection in the mirror.

  Just another square in Squaresville, baby.

  Two

  Just after 4 p.m., J. Davis Swaine III parked his Audi TT Roadster along the curb in a subdivision of McMansions called Mill Run Estates.

  This house’s multi-gabled roofline resembled a range in the Rockies. A two-story stacked-stone portico dwarfed a man and woman in business clothes standing by Mexican-tile house numbers staked into the ground by the front steps. The woman, who had brittle-looking blonde hair, waved her mobile phone. Jeff Swaine pushed the car door open with his left ankle.

  Mickey Reuss wrapped the new Mrs. Reuss against his chest with the arms of a college football player gone to seed. “That bitch,” the woman spat into his extra-large golf shirt. “Beebee? She kills sweet, old Beebee? This is not her house any more. This is our house. Fuck all of this. Just get me a gun and let me go kill her right now. Give me a pistol, Mickey. Right now. Let go.”

  Mickey Reuss was a real estate developer on the board of the Raleigh Chamber and knew key state representatives. And he was a top client of the Raleigh trial firm, Cross Baker Allison, where Jeff was a staff investigator.

  Mickey was an asshole. Jeff remembered photographing Mickey’s previous wife disappearing into a Hilton room on her lunch hour a year before, her skirt already unzipped, a younger man’s hand under the edge of the fabric. That picture had gotten Mickey the division of property he wanted.

  Jeff could smell the asphalt, damp from an earlier spring shower, as he pulled his camera bag out of the trunk.

  According to Sarah Rosen, CB Allison’s managing partner, Mickey’s new wife had come home half an hour ago and found her golden retriever, Beatrice, dead on the kitchen f
loor and the house vandalized. Instead of calling the cops, she’d called her husband. And Mickey, instead of calling the cops, had called CBA. So Sarah had sent Jeff and would happily bill $150 an hour for his time.

  Jeff was a tall, blond, man coming up fast on 30. People thought he looked well bred, and he was well educated. Yet he had grown up near Charlotte in a working-class family with parents who retained the earmarks of their impoverished South Carolina upbringing. Some part of him felt as if there were holes in the socks underneath his cherrywood Italian loafers.

  He shut the driver’s door of his expensive car parked in this neighborhood. People assumed he belonged here. And maybe he did, now. He started up the cobblestone walk.

  The front door stood half open. Jeff had the impulse to extend his hand to Mickey Reuss, but Mickey was busy preventing a homicide. So instead Jeff made eye contact, jerked his head toward the house.

  “You ain’t gonna believe it,” Reuss said in lieu of a greeting. “Go on in.”

  Jeff said to the back of the woman’s head, “Don’t worry, ma’am. Davis Swaine from CB Allison. We’re going to take care of this.”

  Jeff was good at talking to people. He could slather on or completely drop the Southern accent at will. That made him a monster investigative interviewer, but he had a hell of a time choosing between lacrosse and NASCAR while flipping channels.

  The woman’s venom seemed to be receding now, so Mickey let her go, and she turned around to pout at Jeff. “I want you to nail that saggy sow. Put her in a jail where she never gets anything but oatmeal. Then sue her and get everything. She got all of it from us, anyway.”

  Now the new wife dabbed her eyes against the shoulder of her jade green blazer. She certainly wasn’t saggy, but why women thought Botox and surgery made them more attractive, Jeff couldn’t figure. Nor why the new wife, who had been Mickey’s mistress for two years before the divorce, felt she had any moral standing. The divorce had gone Mickey’s way only because he had the top trial firm in the state handling his end of it. Jeff hoped gathering ammo for class-action suits against pharmaceutical companies that shoved drugs with deadly side-effects through FDA review made up for the sleaze work he did on high-stakes divorces.

  “We do have to call the Sheriff’s Office,” Jeff told Mickey, to get that straight from the start. “Let me do it. I’ll make sure they send the right people. But let me make a quick pass first and get everything we’re going to need. How’d she get in?”

  “Hell if I know,” Mickey said. “Nothing’s busted. I got the door locks all re-keyed after she left, like y’all said, but maybe there’s something she still has a key to.”

  “Garage door opener?”

  “Shit.”

  Jeff nodded. “Where’s the dog?”

  “Kitchen.”

  Jeff reached into the camera bag and hefted his Nikon D2. He clicked off black plastic caps and twisted the wide-angle lens into the socket. He left his loafers on the mat, urging open the heavy front door with his elbow.

  A solvent smell irritated Jeff’s nose as soon he stepped in: spray paint. “White, white, white,” was painted in black above a childlike drawing of a picket fence just inside the front door. Mickey’s ex-wife was Hispanic, Jeff remembered.

  He grabbed a photo of the scribbles and followed a marble-tiled hallway straight back to the kitchen.

  The gorgeous golden retriever looked like it had sprawled out for a nap, except for the feces and urine around it. The room reeked.

  Jeff blinked and turned away. He remembered his aunt Rebecca’s harmless and affectionate golden. His throat tightened as he triggered the shutter for a scene-setter.

  Now he made himself kneel beside the dog’s body and lean in close. No wounds or strangulation marks. It looked as if she’d been poisoned, but they would need a necropsy.

  He sniffed and shook his head. Jeff took three quick close-ups with the Nikon from various angles, his fingers tingling.

  He stood and shook his head again. He chose his footing carefully and stepped into the dining room. There he read, “White Bread” painted on the surface of the mahogany dining table.

  What he found in the next room didn’t fit at all: Another message painted in foot-high letters around the perimeter of the family room, across the walls and the pictures that hung on them: “Poor kids out of sight out of mind.” The sentence ended with the word “mind” painted angrily across the sofa cushions. This wasn’t something an angry ex-wife would write at all. He doubted Mickey and his new wife had come into this room or seen this.

  Jeff noticed a pedestal for a giant-screen television, bare with stray cables dangling across its surface. He inhaled a quick breath through his nose and widened his eyes.

  It wasn’t her. He was pretty sure petite little Catalina Reuss hadn’t hauled the set out of here.

  Jeff measured his breaths through dilated nostrils. This burglar was a pro. He had gotten in without leaving evidence of forced entry. And a bastard: Most intruders simply moved on when they came across a house with a dog, but this one had killed her. That probably meant there was some reason it had to be this house and not another. This was all a message for Mickey Reuss and his wife.

  Jeff stretched his neck to the left, then to the right, hoping it would pop, but it didn’t. He noticed faint, parallel tracks in the carpet and followed them back toward the kitchen as he pulled out his mobile phone to call one of CB Allison’s favorite cops, Sheriff’s Lt. Randy Cooperton.

  CB Allison paid Cooperton and several other local law officers twenty bucks an hour to provide off-duty “security” at the CB Allison offices one night each week. They all got their checks without showing up, so they were reliable when the firm needed them.

  While the desk officer tracked Cooperton down, Jeff stooped. The tire tracks continued as faint, linear diamond patterns about two inches wide smudged into the high sheen of the maple flooring. Tire marks on the kitchen floor.

  “A handtruck,” Jeff said out loud. The pattern led to the door to the garage. A couple of fresh-looking dings smiled from the molding. He bent down and exhaled onto the door handle, and the condensing moisture revealed no fingerprints – only marks from being wiped with a cloth. So he wrapped the knob with his shirttail, turned it and looked into the garage. Empty.

  Cooperton finally came onto the line, and Jeff outlined the situation, stepping back into the kitchen so his words wouldn’t echo across the concrete garage floor.

  “Shit fire, son,” Cooperton said. “Get your ass out of that house. They might still be inside.”

  “I don’t think so. Y’all get on out here.”

  “We’re coming.”

  Jeff took a photo that showed the tire tracks. He decided to wait for Cooperton to look upstairs. This was unlikely to have any civil legal dimension, so he had less of an excuse to traipse through the crime scene.

  He stepped back onto the front steps with the Reusses. “It’s not her.”

  The new wife looked ready to find a pistol to use on him now. “What the hell?”

  “It’s too slick. This is pros. Do you know the TV’s missing from the living room?”

  Their faces showed they didn’t.

  “Have you been upstairs?”

  “Me neither. We’ll let the deputies check up there.”

  They shook their heads and started to ask him questions, but now Jeff’s eye locked on a tan minivan stacked with items rolling past the house. The driver was wearing oversized sunglasses. Jeff wasn’t sure why it grabbed his attention. Going a little too slow. Maybe not quite expensive enough for this neighborhood. A Chrysler. He looked down for the tag number, but now the road was curving the wrong direction and he couldn’t make out the digits.

  Jeff interrupted the Reusses. “Turn around. That van. Is that your neighbor?”

  “Nuh-uh,” Mickey Reuss said, as the van signaled a right turn out of the subdivision’s fake stone gateway.

  Jeff shoved his feet back into his loafers, shot five quick
frames from the hip – the van was small in the center of the frame, but he could blow it up digitally – stuffed the camera into the nylon bag and sprinted to his Audi. He threw the camera bag onto the passenger seat, started the engine, yanked his seatbelt across himself and nosed the little car into the next driveway to turn around.

  * * *

  Leonard saw the three zeros on the porch turn and follow him with their eyes as he went back past the house. He felt a shot of panic. He watched in the rear-view as J. Davis Swaine III dashed across the street to the little sports car. He couldn’t believe the Reusses had found what he’d done this quickly or that they’d gotten Swaine involved so fast.

  * * *

  By the time Jeff squeaked to a stop at the neighborhood gateway, the van had folded into the evening wall of cars on five-lane Rocky Falls Boulevard. He’d missed his chance to read the plate. If he’d had the long lens on the Nikon, he could have zoomed in and seen it.

  Jeff used the center turn lane to pass a garbage truck, then jammed the car back into the left-hand travel lane. He spotted the shape of the van about fifteen cars ahead. He worked the Audi into a two-car-length crack in the right lane and got chastised with horn bleats but drew a couple of cars closer. One more aggressive lane change, and he got close enough to see the van’s plates.

  Finally, he fell in directly behind the van. He’d only recited the number to himself once when he looked up to see a redheaded elementary boy and his little sister craning their necks around in the back seat to see what all the honking was about.

  Now a traffic signal changed to yellow, and the mom driving the van snatched it to a stop, trapping Jeff behind her at the light. He shaded the Audi left in its lane to see around the decoy van. A quarter mile ahead, he thought he saw another tan van turning onto the I-540 on ramp.