by Dave Daren
“He did seem on edge,” I admitted, “but we’re in a situation that one could easily be on edge about. He could just be having a rough time with his girlfriend possibly facing years in prison.”
“But you didn’t even know about him until today,” Vicki pointed out. “Isn’t that weird?”
I shook my head. “It’s not that weird.”
“You don’t think so?” Vicki cocked her head to the side. “I thought you and your sister were tight.”
“We are, I guess,” I agreed. “Closer than I am to the rest of my family, anyway. I just don’t come down very often, and my conversations with my sister on the phone are kinda just superficial small talk. We spend most of it talking about everyone else rather than ourselves and our own drama.”
“It’s family,” Vicki chuckled. “Drama is kind of the whole thing.”
“You visit your family a lot, then?” I asked her.
“Oh, no,” she shook her head. “They all moved to back Korea after I moved out to LA. I’m not spending that much on airfare, no matter who gave birth to me.”
“Fair enough,” I chortled. “After all, those shoes are rather fancy.”
“But back to business,” Vicki returned to the topic at hand, “I think that mystery boyfriend warrants some suspicion. He showed up in her life and got close to her right before all the craziness started. We should run a background check on him.”
“The timeline is certainly suspicious, but I doubt we’ll find anything bad in his background check.”
“When something does come up, my ‘I told you so’ will be loud and annoying,” she said confidently.
“So, in your regular voice then?” I smiled.
Another cushion smacked me in the face. “Assuming Harmony’s hands are covered in paint and not blood, how did the forensics analyst get that so wrong?” Vicki asked.
“No idea,” I shook my head. “He must have purposefully filed a fraudulent report or tampered with the evidence. What other conclusion could there be?”
“Those are weighty accusations,” she stated solemnly.
“I know, we need to run a background check on him too,” I concluded. “If he has any skeletons in his closet, we need to know about it. It’s a small town, everybody knows everybody and everybody is into everybody’s business. Maybe we can have AJ find his friends and get some information? We can start by figuring out his name.”
“Justin Pell,” Vicki told me.
“Huh?”
“That’s the analyst,” she said. “I had a lot of time on the plane here. I made a list of every relevant law enforcement person who was involved and their contact information.”
“So you called him already?” I asked.
“Not exactly,” she shook her head. “I reached his assistant’s phone. He’s on vacation, apparently.”
“Awfully convenient time to go on vacation,” I considered.
Before Vicki could respond, my phone went off in my jacket pocket. I flinched and remembered the times it imposed upon that musical theft case back in LA. That had only been yesterday, but it seemed like ages ago.
“Hello, Anjanette,” I prompted.
“Hi, it’s AJ please.”
“Oh, sorry," I exclaimed. “We have some leads for you to look into when we meet tomorrow morning.”
“Who is it?” Vicki mouthed to me.
“AJ,” I mouthed back, but it was clear that Vicki was a poor lip reader. I gestured to half my height, indicating a short individual, and then mimed a magnifying glass to indicate an investigator.
“A little person smoking a cigarette is calling you?” Vicki guessed out loud.
“No!” I exclaimed.
“What do you mean ‘no’?” AJ replied on the line. “I didn’t ask anything yet.”
“No, no, not you,” I said. “What do you need, AJ?”
“I was following up on a lead, and it took me to this skeevy bar downtown,” she said. “It’s called Slinger’s. It’s super cowboy-themed, so I guess it’s short for Gunslinger’s? I think they put the piano out of tune on purpose. It’s kind of weird how much they-- Actually, this isn’t my point. The point is, I’m too young to get in.”
“What kind of lead are we talking about?” I pressed.
“It’s not a lead exactly,” she admitted. “It’s more like a lead to a lead. There’s this guy here who I’ve blogged about before, Bloodhound Bill. He’s supposed to be able to track down anyone, no matter where they are.”
“AJ, we don’t even know what we’re looking for yet.”
“You mean we don’t know who we’re looking for yet,” AJ said. “If Harmony is innocent the real killer has to be someone who was around the gallery at the time of the murder. Maybe this local dude knows what was happening around that time. If anybody is going to have his ear to the ground in this town, it's a bounty hunter. I could go in alone, but I, uh, really don’t want to do that. This place seems full of angry guys who look like they drink sarsaparilla unironically. I walked here when it was still daylight, and now it’s not, and I really would rather be picked up.”
“I can come get you,” I offered with a sigh. “Just stay put and don’t talk to anyone.”
“You don’t have to tell me twice,” she replied, and I ended the call.
“I’m going to go retrieve our teenage investigator who pursued ‘Bloodhound Bill’ to a cowboy-themed roughneck bar,” I informed Vicki.
“Cool,” she said as she picked up her shoes from the mattress. “To the Mystery Machine!”
“I’d actually prefer if you do a bit of snooping here,” I said.
“Oh?” she asked.
“Yeah, you just said you wanted to dig into Harmony’s boyfriend, so make a few phone calls. Then see if you can get any more info on this Pell guy. If we can find out where he went on vacation that will help.”
“Oh, okay,” she didn’t miss a beat. “Have a good time!”
“I’ll try,” I said as I swung my legs out onto the rope ladder.
Chapter 6
AJ’s description of the bar was pretty spot on to how I remembered it being as a kid. This was the type of place that motorcycle outlaws, or people who liked to pretend to be outlaws on the weekend, gathered to drink their problems away. As I pulled up to it, it was like I was entering a cowboy-themed alternate universe. The burnt out Slingers Saloon sign had two decorative pistols on either side of it, and the “O”s were shaped like spurs. Faint country music croaked out by twangy old men blared out to me in the parking lot. A lanky bouncer cowboy who had sagging jowls guarded the door with only half-attention. A thick cigar hung out of his mouth, and he seemed to be drifting off the sleep. AJ could have gotten by him with only a bit of effort if she had really wanted to. Unless he was carrying a pistol or something, which didn’t seem terribly farfetched.
AJ was standing outside, arms wrapped around herself to stay warm in the cool desert night. While she appeared a bit frightened by this place, there was still a sparkle in her eye that indicated to me that she wanted to go in and investigate.
“Are you alright?” I asked AJ as I approached her.
“Oh, yeah, totally,” she nodded. “I just really want to talk to this guy, you know?”
“Even if he is the best bounty hunter and tracker in the area, I’m not sure how useful he’ll be,” I said. “It’s pretty unlikely he’ll have anything on this case.”
“Yeah, maybe that’s true,” she agreed, “but he has something on someone. I run a crime blog, and he chases after people who commit crimes. If anybody knows anything, it’s him.”
“I’m definitely glad you didn’t and I’m not at all encouraging this, but why didn’t you just get a fake ID?” I asked.
“Oh, gosh, no, I would never do that,” she said coyly. “I wouldn’t even know where to do that.”
“Really? You seem pretty resourceful to me,” I replied.
“I mean, I guess I know people and could get one if I wanted but I…” she trailed
off while looking down at the ground. “I’m just not comfortable breaking the law, you know?”
“I understand, my job is built upon upholding an ethical code. Not every lawyer is great at that, but I try to be. Anyway, I can go in and talk to the guy to see if he knows anything if that makes you feel better,” I offered.
“Yeah, I guess that would--”
Just then, we were interrupted by two drunken cowboys who crashed through the saloon doors, in the midst of a fierce brawl. The bouncer jolted awake, and his cigar fell out of his mouth and rolled onto the ground. He took in the brawl going in front of him, but he didn’t seem to care much at all.
A herd composed of a mixture of cowboys, bikers, and hippies spilled out of the saloon. Only a few stopped to watch the fight proceed. Most of them decided to start throwing punches of their own. Guttural battle cries and expletives totally masked the music coming from the saloon.
As AJ and I tried to back away from the chaos, one of the men in the fray mistook me for his enemy, grabbed me by the arm, and whipped me into the thick of it. I felt as if I was in some sort of moshpit of metalheads and they were eager to have any bystander jump in.
I ducked into the crowd of brawlers. Bodies barreled into me from all sides and fists whizzed past my face. I did my best to stay low and keep my guard up, I certainly didn’t want a trip to the emergency dentist to get a new set of teeth.
“Gragahghgahgh!” was a vague approximation of what a particularly intoxicated young man called out to me as he thrust his entire body into mine wildly.
We crashed to ground with him hovering on top of me. We made too-lengthy lingering eye contact with him a few inches from my face, and I decided that I really had had enough of this, so I shoved the guy off me roughly.
I quickly got to my feet and took a good look at him. He was mean-looking, with a thick mustache perched over a deep-set frown. His frown contorted into a snarl, and he came at me again, and as his meaty arms flew at me wildly, I noticed his various tattoos of objectified female figures. I ducked out of the way easily since it appeared his punches had more ambition behind them than fighting technique.
I stepped back to try to disappear into the throng of violent ne’er-do-wells, but it was impossible to avoid all the violence since bodies and fists were flying all around me. I grabbed one of the closest men to me, pulled us both far to the side, and hoped he would be willing to talk to me rather than fight.
“Hey!” I called out to the man I grabbed, a man about my age with stringy, light hair slicked back under a cowboy hat. “What’s going on?”
“Horace done called Nico’s wife a--” the string of words he put together to describe what exactly Nico’s wife was accused of being was a foreign concept to me, with vocabulary I thought I must have misheard due to the chaos and few words I was certain were in a foreign language. “And Nico’s wife’s brother was here, and they decided to settle it like men.”
Family law wasn’t really my forte, so I decided to move swiftly past this.
“Listen,” I said to the man, “do you know anyone here who goes by the name Bloodhound Bill?”
The man raised an eyebrow at me.
“You a policeman or something?” he asked menacingly.
“No, I’m--”
“Wait!” The man’s face lit up as he interrupted me. “I know exactly who you are!”
“You do?” I asked a bit caught off guard.
I had no idea who he could be confusing me for, but I was curious enough to hear him out. The brawl had begun working its way further from the bar, so he led me around the edge of the melee and toward the saloon.
“Let me buy you a drink!” the man offered as he gestured toward the saloon doors.
“Well, I actually have a...” I looked around for AJ.
She was nowhere in sight, so I figured she must have snuck into the bar during all the commotion. This flagrant display of rule-breaking, if not strictly law-breaking, was probably giving her heart palpitations.
“Uh, sure,” I changed my reply to the muscular man. “I’m Henry, by the way.”
“Oh, I know,” he smirked. “I’m Bloodhound Bill. Nice to see you again!”
“Wait, again?” I repeated. If I had met Bill before, I was certain I would have recalled.
“Yeah, again!” he nodded. “I haven’t seen you since high school!”
I scanned through people I knew in high school. Bill did not ring any bells, and it wasn’t a particularly big school.
“I went by William, then,” Bill helped out as he remained nobly unoffended.
“William Flannigan!” it finally clicked. “Yeah, I remember you! You were… you were different when I knew you.”
“Yeah, I was more of a character back then,” he reminisced.
“You were more hippie than cowboy back then,” I said as I remembered the gangly teenager who I’d grown up with. “You burned bras and everything. You would think that’s not really your fight, but it’s good to have empathy, I guess.”
“Yeah, those days are behind me now,” he said fondly. “Still believe in standin’ up for the little guy fightin’ injustice. I just also really like guns and westerns.”
The Bloodhound Bill that stood before me seemed like he wouldn’t be caught dead a bra-burning event. The babyface, waist-length hair, and tie-dye shirts that I had associated with him in high school had given way to a well-maintained mustache, various wearable versions of brown leather, a cowboy hat, and a pair of western looking revolvers on his hip.
Bloodhound Bill looked like he’d stepped out of some western movie, and not the gritty Clint Eastwood type of movie, more the Roy Rogers sparkly western movie.
Bill led me deeper into the bar which was just as aggressively cowboy themed as the exterior. Signed photos of white guys who played cowboys on TV hung on the walls, along with various skeletal remains of dead animals. Raucous men laughed and argued and yelled for no apparent reason all through the noticeably unclean place. AJ sat at one of the round wooden tables near a spittoon and was white-knuckling a glass of water, and I struggled to breathe through the blanket of tart tobacco smoke.
“What did you think you would do when you got in here?” I asked when we came closer to her.
“I didn’t have time to think,” she replied, wide-eyed.
“Friend of yours?” Bill asked.
“Yes, she’s my… investigator,” I decided to describe her as an associate rather than letting him believe we were intimate.
“Ah, yes!” Bill exclaimed, and we sat down at AJ’s table. From AJ’s baffled expression, I could tell she didn’t know what to make of that. “That makes sense. Fancy LA lawyer should have an investigator. She’s kind of young to be doing any investigating, though.”
“She is young, but she has a keen eye for detail,” I offered, and the compliment made AJ’s cheeks redden. I then gestured to the cowboy. “AJ, this is my buddy Bill.”
“Bloodhound Bill!” AJ blurted.
“The man, the myth, the legend in the flesh,” he told her proudly.
“So, Bloodhound Bill,” I began. “You know what I’ve been up to since high school?”
“Oh, everyone does,” he said. “We all know your folks, Saffron and Moondust.”
“Saffron and Moondust?” AJ broke out of her daze with a giggle.
“Shame about your sis,” he shook his head sadly. “I didn’t know she had it in her.”
“She doesn’t,” I told him fiercely. “Not even a little bit.”
“Well, the way I hear it, she done stabbed a guy who said her art wasn’t worth lookin’ at,” he recalled, “but if you’re back down here in Sedona that means you’re here to convince a jury that she had a good reason for it.”
“She didn’t do it at all,” I corrected him.
“Ah, so you’re already practicing your convincing technique on me,” Bill guffawed loudly.
“Bill,” AJ cut in. “Er, Bloodhound Bill, sir. I’ve heard that you can locate peop
le. Particularly, people who commit, like, crimes.”
“I was just getting to that,” Bill perked up. “So Henry, your family tells me you’re a fancy LA entertainment guy these days.”
“That’s sort of true…” I confirmed hesitantly, unsure where he was going with this.
“I have a very marketable set of skills,” Bill continued. “If you could connect me to the right people, I could give you a very lucrative reality television series that would be an ideal binge-watch material for several appealing demographics on live TV and streaming services.”
“I… what?” I regarded him with surprise both at the odd nature of the request and for how well-researched he apparently was about the pitch.
“I’m a very successful bounty hunter with a very photogenic profile,” he expanded. “I would make superb primetime material.”
“That’s very interesting, Bill,” I started, “but I’m just a lawyer. I don’t have the kind of connections you’re under the impression that I do.”
Bill was, however, undeterred.
“An entertainment lawyer,” he specified. “And I am, as they say, entertaining.”
“I’m not an agent or anything,” I said. “If you ever get a deal, I can help you work out a contract, but that’s the most that I can do within my skill set.” This wasn’t entirely true, since I knew most of the top agents and producers in Los Angeles, but I wanted to focus on getting Harmony acquitted.
“Okay, look,” Bill adjusted his posture to make more direct eye contact with me, “I can prove it to you. I’m a great bounty hunter. Name me anyone and I’ll find ‘em.”
AJ and I exchanged glances.
“Uhh, how about the forensic analyst with the local police?” I asked as I recalled Vicki’s difficulty tracking him down.
“Oh, Justin?” Bill laughed. “Yeah, we all know Justin. He’s right over there.”
We turned to where Bill pointed. A skinny blonde man leaned listlessly over a deck of cards alone at a poker table. Didn’t look like the rest of his game was here yet. Or maybe they were all outside fighting.
“Huh, that was… easy,” I exhaled.
“Can you do that with whoever murdered the art critic?” AJ asked, as if putting quarters into a toy machine to make people’s locations fall out.