Die Laughing 2: Five More Comic Crime Novels Read online

  In reality, however, Harvey Blaylock was a man who held tremendous sway over my future, near- and long-term. I intended to remain respectful and deferential.

  Blaylock’s necktie—green, with bucking horses printed on it—rested on his paunch as he leaned back in his chair, scanning the contents of a manila folder. I knew it was my file, because it said ROY W. BALLARD on the outside, typed neatly on a rectangular label. I’m quick to notice things like that.

  Five minutes went by. His office smelled like cigarettes and Old Spice. Rays of sun slanted in through horizontal blinds on the windows facing west. As far as I could tell, we were the only people left in the building.

  “I really appreciate you staying late for this,” I said. “Would’ve been tough for me to make it earlier.”

  He grunted and continued reading, one hand drumming slowly on his metal desk. The digital clock on the wall above him read 6:03. On the bookshelf, tucked among a row of wire-bound notebooks, was a framed photo of a young boy holding up a small fish on a line.

  “Boy, was I surprised to hear that Joyce retired,” I said. “She seemed too young for that. So spry and youthful.” Joyce being Blaylock’s predecessor. My previous probation officer. A true bitch on wheels. Condescending. Domineering. No sense of humor. “I’ll have to send her a card,” I said, hoping it didn’t sound sarcastic.

  Blaylock didn’t answer.

  I was starting to wonder if he had a reading disability. I’m no angel—I wouldn’t have been in this predicament if I were—but my file couldn’t have been more than half a dozen pages long. I was surprised that a man in his position, with several hundred probationers in his charge, would spend more than thirty seconds on each.

  Finally, Blaylock, still looking at the file, said, “Roy Wilson Ballard. Thirty-six years old. Divorced. Says you used to work as a news cameraman.” He had a thick piney-woods accent. Pure east Texas. He peered up at me, without moving his head. Apparently, it was my turn to talk.

  “Yes, sir. Until about three years ago.”

  “When you got fired.”

  “My boss and I had a personality conflict,” I said, wondering how detailed my file was.

  “Ernie Crenshaw.”

  “That’s him.”

  “You broke his nose with a microphone stand.” Fairly detailed, apparently.

  “Well, yeah, he, uh—”

  “You got an attitude problem, Ballard?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Temper?”

  I started to lie, but decided against it. “Occasionally.”

  “That what happened in this instance? Temper got the best of you?”

  “He was rude to one of the reporters. He called her a name.”

  “What name was that?”

  “I’d rather not repeat it.”

  “I’m asking you to.”

  “Okay, then. He called her Doris. Her real name is Anne.” His expression remained frozen. Tough crowd.

  I said, “Okay. He called her a cunt.”

  Blaylock’s expression still didn’t change. “To her face?”

  “Behind her back. He was a coward. And she didn’t deserve it. This guy was a world-class jerk. Little weasel.”

  “You heard him say it?”

  “I was the one he was talking to. It set me off.”

  “So you busted his nose.”

  “I did, sir, yes.”

  Perhaps it was my imagination, but I thought Harvey Blaylock gave a nearly imperceptible nod of approval. He looked back at the file. “Now you’re self-employed. A legal videographer. What is that exactly?”

  “Well, uh, that means I record depositions, wills, scenes of accidents. Things like that. But proof of insurance fraud is my specialty. The majority of my business. Turns out I’m really good at it.”

  “Describe it for me.”

  “Sir?”

  “Give me a typical day.”

  I recited my standard courtroom answer. “Basically, I keep a subject under surveillance and hope to videotape him engaging in an activity that’s beyond his alleged physical limitations.” Then I added, “Maybe lifting weights, or dancing. Playing golf. Doing the hokey-pokey.”

  No smile.

  “Not a nine-to-five routine, then.”

  “No, sir. More like five to nine.”

  Blaylock mulled that over for a few seconds. “So you’re out there, working long hours, sometimes through the night, and you start taking pills to keep up with the pace. That how it went?”

  Until you’ve been there, you have no idea how powerless and naked you feel when someone like Harvey Blaylock is authorized to dig through your personal failings with a salad fork.

  “That sums it up pretty well,” I said.

  “Did it work?”

  “What, the pills?”

  He nodded.

  “Well, yeah. But coffee works pretty well, too.”

  “You were also drinking. That’s why you got pulled over in the first place, and how they ended up finding the pills on you. You got a drinking problem?”

  I thought of an old joke. Yeah, I got a drinking problem. Can’t pay my bar tab. “I hope not,” I said, which is about as honest as it gets. “At one point maybe I did, but I don’t know for sure. Probably not. But that’s what you’d expect someone with a drinking problem to say, right?”

  “Had a drink since your court date?”

  “No, sir. I’m not allowed to. Even though the Breathalyzer said I was legal.”

  “Not even one drink?”

  “Not a drop. Joyce, gave me a piss te—I mean a urine test, last month, and three in the past year. I passed them all. That should be in the file.”

  “You miss it?” Blaylock asked. “The booze?” I honestly thought about it for a moment.

  “Sometimes, yeah,” I said. “More than I would’ve guessed, but not enough to freak me out or anything. Sometimes, you know, I just crave a cold beer. Or three. But if I had to quit eating Mexican food, I’d miss that, too. Maybe more than beer.”

  Blaylock slowly sat forward in his chair and dropped my file, closed, on his desk. “Here’s the deal, son. Ninety-five percent of the people I deal with are shitbags who think the world is their personal litter box. I can’t do them any good, and they don’t want me to. Most of ’em are locked up again within a year, and all I can say is good riddance. Then I see guys like you who make a stupid mistake and get caught up in the system. You probably have a decent life ahead of you, but you don’t need me to tell you that, and it really doesn’t matter what I think anyway. So I’ll just say this: Follow the rules and you can put all this behind you. If you need any help, I’ll do what I can. I really will. But if you fuck up just one time, it’s like tipping over a row of dominoes. Then it’s out of your control, and mine, too. You follow me?”

  ***

  After the meeting, I swung by a Jack-In-The-Box, then sat outside Wally Crouch’s place for a few hours, just in case. He stayed put.

  I got home just as the ten o’clock news was coming on. Howard Turner had been located in a motel in Yuma City, Arizona, there on business. Police had verified his alibi. He had been nowhere near Texas, and the cops had no reason to believe he was involved.

  So Tracy Turner was still missing, and that fact created a void in my chest that I hadn’t felt in years.

  4

  Mia knocked on my apartment door at nine fifteen the next morning looking absolutely stunning. Black skirt that reached mid-thigh. A snug green top that gave a peek of cleavage. Medium heels. Hair loose and wavy and full of body. Not slutty, but sexy. Like she could be working as a receptionist at an advertising agency or a laid-back software company. Even her perfume was divine. It reminded me that I’d been contemplating making a particular proposition to her, but now was not the time. It could wait.

  I was in jeans but still shirtless, so I waved her in and asked if she wanted coffee.

  “Better not,” she said. “It makes me pee all the time.”

  “Hey,
good to know,” I said, heading into my bedroom. “Gimme a sec. Make yourself comfortable.”

  “I’m not sure that’s possible,” she called out. I assumed she was referring to the piles of dirty laundry on the couch. A few seconds later, she said, “Jesus, Roy, what is that smell?”

  Oops. I’d been meaning to take the garbage out. “The one like a bouquet of springtime flowers?”

  “No, the one like a dead animal.”

  I slipped a T-shirt over my head, then looked around for my tennis shoes. “Oh, that’s just my aunt in the guest bedroom. She came for a visit, and, well, I know it’s sad, but she’s in a better place now.”

  When I walked back into the living room, Mia was standing beside the bookcase, holding a picture frame in her hands. Laura. In a bikini. A shot from our honeymoon.

  She looked at me. “You’re fucking pathetic, you know that?”

  “Don’t mince words.”

  She shook her head.

  “I found it in some old stuff. I wasn’t going to leave it there.”

  “Right.”

  “Let’s just go,” I said.

  You had to be clever about it. The subject couldn’t think the incident was staged. That was the key.

  Mia backed her 1968 Mustang into a space at the front of the complex, near the exit. I parked the Caravan in a spot near the corner of Wally Crouch’s building, where I could see both his car and Mia’s. The plan was to sit for an hour or so and wait for Crouch to emerge. In the previous three days, he hadn’t left his apartment before ten o’clock. If he hadn’t left his apartment by 10:30 or so, Mia would reposition her car closer to his apartment and actually knock on his door, which would be risky. He might get suspicious.

  It didn’t come to that. At nine-fifty, Crouch came waddling out to his Toyota. He climbed in and started it up.

  I was sitting on the bench seat in the rear of the van, behind the tinted glass. I grabbed my cell phone—we had a line already open between us—and said, “The cow is leaving the barn.”

  A second later, I heard Mia’s reply: “You are such a dork.”

  I watched as she stepped from her Mustang and raised the hood. The car was almost as eye-catching as she was. It was a fastback model that her dad had passed down to her a few years ago, mostly because he wasn’t driving it much anymore. Same kind of car that Steve McQueen drove in Bullitt, with that famous chase, except Mia’s was red, and her dad had insisted on some after-market safety improvements. But a girl like her driving around in a car like that? It was like something out of a Van Halen video.

  Now Mia was bending over the engine, holding her hair back with one hand, her skirt riding up, showing a country mile of gorgeous thigh, and I knew right then that Crouch was dead meat. No warmblooded heterosexual male in America could resist a damsel in distress who looked like that.

  And here came Crouch, rounding the corner in his Tercel. I ducked as he passed the front of the van, then I raised back up and saw him slowing as he approached the Mustang. I lifted my handheld video camera and started recording.

  I couldn’t help smiling. Crouch had stopped and was leaning toward the passenger window, saying something to Mia. I could imagine the conversation.

  You need some help?

  Mia turned and looked at him. Oh, God, yes. My battery is dead.

  You know anything about cars?

  You got jumper cables?

  Mia gestured toward the Mustang. Actually, I have a new battery in my trunk. I went to get it last night, but I don’t know how to put it in. I bought a wrench, too, but I can’t remember which thingy goes where.

  Right on cue, Crouch pulled into a parking spot beside her. I zoomed in a tad as he came around to Mia’s car and proceeded toward the trunk. I noticed that she touched his arm—sort of a thank-you-so-much gesture—as he went by. You are so sweet to stop and help. He was grinning like a kid who’d found a twenty on the street.

  Then Crouch bent over and came out of the trunk with a car battery weighing nearly forty pounds. His maximum was supposed to be ten. Searing pain? Nope. He hoisted the battery like it was made of Styrofoam.

  Gotcha, you fat bastard.

  “Damn, you are good,” Heidi said an hour later, after we’d watched the recording twice.

  “Thank you. Women often forget that I’m more than just a hot slab of beef.”

  The two of us were in a small conference room down the hall from her office. Heidi was sitting across from me, wearing a blue blouse, her blond hair cut in a pageboy. Cute as a button. Petite. Happily married, despite our occasional flirtations and innuendos. I’d seen the way her face glowed whenever she talked about her husband Jim, and I understood that, when it came down to it, our relationship was as inconsequential to her as that of a customer and a convenience-store clerk.

  She pointed at the video screen. “That was all a set-up, right? The hottie in the Mustang?”

  I shrugged. “Sometimes you have to get creative.”

  “Who is she?” Heidi asked. “Girlfriend?”

  “Local prostitute.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Such a bullshitter. Hold on. I’ll go get the other file.”

  She came back a minute later, holding a manila folder not unlike the one with my name on it in Harvey Blaylock’s office. She handed it to me. I expected manila folders in a bureaucrat’s office, but this was the private sector. I tended to tease her about it.

  I said, “You know, they have these things called computer nowadays.”

  “Don’t start with that again. We’re getting there. Supposedly just days from pulling the trigger. Sadly, that means we will no longer be able to rendezvous like this.”

  “Sad is right.”

  Her office had been making the transition to a totally digital system, which meant thousands, or maybe millions, of documents had to be scanned and organized. From then forward, everything was to be electronic.

  I made a show of blowing imaginary dust off the folder, and then I opened it.

  Heidi said, “His name is Brian Pierce. Twenty-six years old. He’s a dishwasher at a Mexican food joint near Lakeway.”

  Right up front was Pierce’s photo, most likely from his driver’s license. His hair was white-blond, sheared to a half-inch crew cut. Narrow jaw, not much of a chin. Small, wide-set blue eyes. Acne scars on his cheeks. Buck teeth. There was something about his bone structure that suggested Pierce hadn’t gotten his fair share of chromosomes. The expression on his face—somewhere between a frown and a confused grimace—indicated he wasn’t comfortable in front of the camera.

  “This guy won’t be modeling for GQ anytime soon,” I said.

  “Be nice.”

  “What’s his story?”

  “A week ago yesterday, he slipped on a wet floor and injured his wrist when he broke his fall. Supposedly. Nobody saw it happen. They heard glass break, but he could’ve tossed a stack of plates in the air.”

  “Which wrist is it?”

  “Right.”

  “Is he right handed?”

  “Yep.”

  “Seen a doctor?”

  “Of course, but you know what that’s worth. Even the legitimate docs can be fooled.”

  I nodded, continuing to scan the file. “Thomas Springs Road,” I said, noting the street address.

  “You know where that is?” she asked. “Out in the boonies, between Oak Hill and Bee Cave.”

  “Yeah, I know the area. My grandparents used to live on Thomas Springs.”

  “You had grandparents?” she said. “I figured you were hatched.”

  5

  I went back to my apartment and took a two-hour nap. When I woke, I had a voicemail waiting.

  Ballard, it’s Spence. Just a heads-up that Wade Gruley is getting out tomorrow. Call me if you have any questions.

  Duly noted.

  Then I sat at my computer and began to do some research on Brian Pierce. In my line of work, Google is your friend.

  Say, for example, a subject claims to hav
e a foot injury. Say also that he’s on a men’s softball team, and you’d like to attend the next game, in case he decides he is miraculously healed and can run the bases after all. So you Google his name, sort through the results, and there you go. A complete schedule for the Austin Assassins. Just show up with your camera and hope the guy does something stupid.

  Google Maps can also be helpful. When the subject lives out in the country—as did Brian Pierce—satellite shots of the property can tell you all sorts of things. The position of the house and any outbuildings. Is there a pool or a creek on the property? How about livestock, or farm and ranch equipment? Sounds irrelevant, but think about it. If a man is faking an injury, and he’s sitting around the house all day, bored to tears, and he owns a horse, what’s he going to do? Eventually, on a nice day, he’s going to get cabin fever. He’ll ride that horse, mow the back forty, or take a swim.

  Maybe that’s a bad example, because Pierce didn’t own a horse. Or, if he did, I didn’t see any evidence of it. What he did own was twenty acres of heavily wooded Hill Country land west of Austin, a good thirty-minute commute to downtown. The land had been deeded to him five years earlier, when he was twenty-one, so I was guessing it was an inheritance. Didn’t matter. I didn’t need to know.

  The house was in the center of the property, ringed by cedar and oak trees. To the left of Pierce’s property was a home on seven acres. To the right, a home on ten acres. Behind him, to the northwest, was nothing but raw land, with no buildings or paved roads for at least a solid mile. That chunk of land, I knew, was part of a nature conservancy. Four or five thousand acres of pristine beauty, free of man’s clumsy footprint. Or, from a different viewpoint, filled with rocks, thorny things, and rattlesnakes.

  Obviously, working a case in a sparsely populated area can be a challenge. The big question is: Where do you set up? How can you keep tabs on the subject without being obvious? Thomas Springs is a narrow two-lane blacktop with no shoulders. If you pull off the road, onto the grassy right-of-way, you look like you’ve broken down, and that’s the furthest thing from being discreet. You can’t park in a neighbor’s driveway, even if the house is half a mile off the road, because eventually someone’s going to wonder what you’re doing there.