“Okay, I love the idea that I finally get a front row seat.” This was exciting. "What’s the angle?"
“The angle?"
"It’s an official interview session and I’m not the least bit official. Nadine Hines is more official than I am, which means she will be deliciously jealous. At any rate, I assume there is a reason you want me there."
"I want to take advantage of your local knowledge. I’m interviewing both Rudy Phlint and Bogdan Ratkovich this morning. I think having you there might be a good idea. You know the area and the people—well enough anyway. In Rudy’s case, it might help him relax if he sees a friendly face.”
“While I’m glad to help. I didn’t know Old Joe and I know little about Bogdan or his family. I mean, Danilo is the only one of Bogdan’s brothers I’ve ever talked to. I’m not even sure what the others look like.”
"But you know Bogdan’s family history and the lay of the land. I want you to mostly listen to what they say. If there is anything odd about their stories that relates to those things you stand a better chance of spotting it. You have a knack for spotting irregularities."
"That’s sweet of you to say, James. You really know how to flatter a girl."
"However…" he waved a finger at me, "I have one rule. If you have questions about their statements, give them to me privately. You don’t ask them yourself, and don’t comment on what they say. I might ask you to fill in some gaps but other than that…"
"Keep my yap shut?"
"Not the words I’d use, but yes. I’m fussy about how questions are asked and about how much we let them know about what we know or suspect.”
That made perfect sense although the idea of being there to validate Rudy’s story made me feel a bit treacherous. I felt a shiver of uncertainty and hoped he wasn’t hiding anything. But, I told myself, if I was there, I’d know if he was a serious suspect. Then I could help him. “Sounds good to me."
Woodley sipped his coffee. “In reviewing this early this morning I have to say I still haven’t come up with any serious, or even realistic, motives for the murder. This talk about a moonshiner turf war doesn’t make much sense. None of the stills in this area is a big operation, and from what I’ve learned, in this area it's always been more of a family business that didn’t threaten anyone but the Federal Agents who came snooping around, and the customers, who were only at risk from drinking a bad batch, not being deliberately killed.”
“Then it’s appropriate time for a public service announcement. Sarah asked me to remind you that she thinks you, we, are making a mistake by not considering the possibility it was all an accident."
That stopped him. "If anyone but Sarah…"
"I know."
"She has a point. There are only three possibilities."
"All unlikely. And she thinks that until you could figure how he might have done it accidentally you have no idea whether it is more or less possible than the others.”
He sighed. "Let’s walk over to the police station and see if our guests have arrived. With a little luck we will find out something that makes one of them more logical, to my mind, possibilities a bit more possible." He shook his head. “I’m used to being second guessed by my boss, but having the errors of my thinking pointed out by a seven-year old, and thinking she might be right… that takes some getting used to.”
“And good luck to us in doing that,” I said.
# # #
Even though I’d known Rudy Phlint ever since grade school, even though he was married to my best friend, I had to agree with Nellie when she pointed out that I barely knew him. He was an elusive person. Nellie was right that I knew him superficially. Not that I wouldn’t have enjoyed knowing him better, but he withdrew from me.
I’d been in their home and seen him around his boys. Then he was a boisterous, childlike man, who loved games and adventure. One on one he was shy and secretive, but then his family grew up needing to keep secrets so they wouldn’t be raided by the revenuers whose business was to find and arrest moonshiners. So, in a perverse way, he came by that honestly. I’d seen him interact with other men, looking relaxed at sporting events or in the tavern, but you seldom saw him chatting with women. Yet he adored Nellie and she said that some of the best times of her life were when they were alone. She said they could just be together, sometimes dreaming about life like they had in high school. I had to take her word for it.
I did know that sitting across the table from the authorities at the police station was nothing new for him. He’d been in his share of trouble as a young man, although never anything serious. It was all there on his record, sitting in a folder in front of James Woodley. "Arrests for fighting, petty theft, public drunkenness, and shooting off weapons within the town limits…" Woodley rattled them off.
"All BN stuff," he said.
Woodley scowled. "BN?"
"Before Nellie.”
I laughed. “He’s right, you know.”
Rudy nodded emphatically. “I haven’t been arrested since I started dating Nellie in the last year of high-school—and that was a few years back. Aubrey, our oldest is going on eighteen."
"He turned eighteen two months ago," I said. "You bought him a new computer."
Rudy struggled to remember. "Oh right. He used it to redo our web site."
I tugged at Woodley’s sleeve. “Nellie would give him far too much grief if he did anything deliberately wrong,” I said, emphasizing the word ‘deliberately.’
Woodley gave me a look that was supposed to remind me of my promise to keep my mouth shut, then closed the folder and slid it aside. "So you were out at Old Joe’s the day he died?"
“That afternoon. Me and him was making sure the latest flavors of our totally legal brew weren’t poison. Quality control, Aubrey says its called."
"You were drinking."
"No, we were tasting. If I’d been drinking with Old Joe you would’ve found us both lying on the floor somewhere. When I told Nellie I was going over there I promised I wouldn’t drink."
Woodley smiled. "Just taste?"
He smiled at Woodley’s insight.” Exactly."
Woodley looked at me. “Does that make any Knockemstiff sense?”
“For moonshiners that would be a logical distinction to make. There is drinking to test the product, aka tasting, and drinking for pleasure.”
He turned back to Rudy.” You were going to meet Nellie there, but you left before she arrived. Why?"
Rudy shook his head. “Well, Joe had decided that just because we liked the flavors we’d come up with didn’t mean we’d know what would work for public consumption. Making what Old Joe called ‘upmarket hooch’ was a new thing for us. It was Aubrey’s idea, actually. Nellie was handling holding a tasting and finding out what people thought. Joe had suggested that she swing by after work and let us know.”
“How did you get to Joe’s?”
“In his truck. I figured Nellie could take the four wheeler for the day. I wasn’t using it. That way she wouldn’t get stuck getting out there and then I’d ride home with her."
"But you left before she got there?”
He nodded. "We were doing a little retasting of the new stuff. Refreshing our memory of them, sort of. For me none of it tastes like hard liquor and I think we might’ve accidentally started drifting into some actual drinking. Then Joe got a phone call. Surprised me cause I didn’t know he’d already gotten a cell phone—not until it rang. Anyway, he gets a call. When he hung up, or closed the thing, whatever you call it now, he tells me someone was coming over to talk some private business.”
“But he was expecting Nellie. You both were.”
“Well, with all the tasting we’d been doing we both forgot all about that. I did remember that I didn’t have a vehicle, but I walked over there lots of times and it was in the middle of the afternoon. So I filled a flask with my favorite flavor and decided to walk home."
“Right through the swamp?"
"I grew up in the swamp, Detective. K
now it like the back of my hand."
"Investigator, not detective," Woodley said.
"A few miles through the swamp is just a stroll."
"With no gun?"
"Well, I didn’t say that, did I? I had my shotgun with me. You never know when you might meet some other critter who is also taking a stroll through the swamp. You might disagree about the right of way or something."
“And you want to invite him home for dinner?”
Rudy grinned. “You’re coming around here often enough to get the hang of things. It ain’t poaching when it’s self defense.”
"And you went straight home?"
"Not straight. Heck no. You don’t go straight anywhere through there unless you like being up to your neck in quicksand. There’s a big bog right in the middle of the line ‘tween my house and Joe’s that you gotta give a wide berth too.”
"I mean did you go anywhere else?"
He laughed. “Anywhere else? There’s nowhere else to go. My house is the next place over. If I’d gotten turned around I would’ve wound up at the shack that Leander grew up in, or over at the Ratkovich place, but I didn’t. And there’s no other places to go to, not walking."
"Okay. Tell me about the syrup."
Rudy looked puzzled. “Syrup?"
“The other day it seems that you and Joe bought all the Karo in town and loaded it on a truck."
"Oh the Karo… that was for Joe. He’s been helping me and asked me to go to town and help him load up the Karo. His back isn’t what it used to be and he asked for a little help getting it on and off the truck. So I went along as muscle." Suddenly he seemed to remember the old man is dead. "Not that it matters now."
"What was it for?"
Rudy tipped his head. "For?"
"Why did he want all that Karo syrup?"
The question made Rudy laugh. "I have no idea at all."
"It didn’t occur to you to ask?"
"I didn’t care, to be honest. Joe came by with a truck he’d borrowed and asked if I could give him a hand. Seeing that that’s what neighbors do, I agreed. I got in and we drove up to the store. They had the order ready for him. He paid in cash and we loaded up the stuff and took it to his place. He gave me a bottle for my trouble and I took mine home. And before you ask, I used it on some waffles I made the next morning. Hadn’t had it a long time. It was good. The boys loved it.” He scratched his head. “Too bad that’s all there was.”
"Whose truck was it—the one he borrowed?”
"I’m not certain, but I’d guess it belonged to the Ratkovich clan. I recall them having one like it."
“This call he got—did Joe say who it was, who he was supposed to be meeting?"
Rudy thought for a moment. “No he didn’t. Just that he had some business.”
“And you didn’t ask who it was or what it was about, I’m guessing.”
“That’d be rude. If he’d wanted me to know he woulda told me what was going on.”
“Is that normal?”
“Getting calls? Like I said, I didn’t even know he had a phone until the call came.”
“I mean him having secret business meetings.”
“Look, the way people are out in the swamp is that they get along by not being nosy. You don’t pry. A stranger shows up at your door, you don’t start asking him all manner of questions. It’s more so with a friend. They will tell you what they want you to know. Who he’s meeting? Why he wanted the Karo? He’d tell me if I needed to know."
Woodley wrote it all down in his notebook even though I couldn’t imagine that Rudy had said a thing worth taking note of. "What time did he get the call?"
We both knew that Woodley already knew exactly what time the call had been made. Rudy just shrugged and I saw the mischievous twinkle in his eye that was the core of the boyish charm that had captured Nellie’s heart. Rudy was her bad boy, without ever being a bad man. “Late afternoon sometime. Can’t call it closer than that.” He held up his bare wrist. "I don’t pay much attention to the time."
"What kind of mood was he in when you left?"
“Cheerful. Looking forward to the rest of the evening. A little tipsy, like me.”
"And when did you hear about Joe’s death?"
"When Savannah here drove Nellie back to the house.” He grinned at me. "Yeah, I knew about that. Nellie don’t know that I was looking when ya’ll drove up though… let her think she got away with it, okay?"
I laughed.” I’m good with that, Rudy." Saying the words, agreeing gave me an odd sensation. For the first time in all these years, Rudy had volunteered something to me; he was trusting me with a confidence, something that was between he and me and we’d keep secret from Nellie. It wasn’t anything big or important in the scheme of things, still, he was asking me to share a secret from her. I was astounded. And pleased.
The bond he was forging was deliberate. I could tell by the conspiratorial wink he gave me. I didn’t know if it was just that I’d been around enough years now that he had decided to accept me, or if there was some other agenda. The truth was, I didn’t care. The distance between Rudy and I had always been the one fly in the ointment of our relationship.
"That’s everything, then? You were there, he got a call and said you should go so he could meet someone in private, so you left?"
Rudy grinned. "Yeah. That’s the whole thing."
"And you didn’t possibly linger around, maybe hang in the bushes to see who Joe was meeting?"
Rudy snickered. "Why the heck would I care who Old Joe meets. Besides, like I said, I’d forgotten Nellie was coming over and wanted to get home to dinner."
"And the fact that you had to walk home didn’t jog your memory?"
"Nope. Half the time I go anywhere I’m walking. Nothing unusual about it.”
"That’s not a short walk."
Rudy seemed pleased. "No it ain’t… Investigator."
Woodley sighed. "You can go, Rudy, but if I come looking for you, it means I’ve got more questions, so don’t go hiding in the swamp or anything."
"Nellie wouldn’t like that neither," Rudy said.
“And if you think of anything…”
“Investigator, Mr. Woodley, if I had any sort of idea who might’ve shown up and done Joe harm I would be shouting it. And that includes things that I think of later.”
“Okay.”
Rudy smiled at me as he stood up. “No telling Nellie,” he said.
“Promise,” I said.
“I notice he’s more concerned that you and he are sharing the secret about his four wheeler than whether or not I believe his story.”
“He assumes you’ll believe it because it’s the truth, as far as he’s concerned.”
“Yet he lies to Nellie?”
Woodley was resting a hand on the table and I put mine on it. “James, not telling her that he knows something is a far cry from lying in his book. Seeing that he told you he doesn’t know anything else about Joe’s death I’m sure he isn’t holding anything back. You have to admire that sort of elliptical honesty.”
"One of the problems of interrogation techniques, the ones we get taught, is that they assume that the person you are talking to is either telling the truth or lying. That means they don’t work particularly well if the person thinks they are telling the truth. And unfortunately, the techniques don’t pay attention to verifying the stability of the observer."
"What does that mean?"
“The stability of the observer?”
“It’s an idea from an essayist named Montaigne. He noted, along with some other people, that the world was unstable, an ever changing place. He took the idea a step further and said that the observer is also changing, so that when he recalls an event he might, truthfully and honestly, remember it differently than it happened. Memory requires re-experiencing the event and since the observer changes, a different person sees it than the one who experienced it."
"Pretty philosophical stuff, especially considering we are talking about
Rudy Phlint, who is a complex, yet relatively uncomplicated person.”
James folded his hands and looked pleased. "I have my moments. Unfortunately those ideas can complicate my view of what I’m being told. The concept of an unstable observer forces me to consider that the person is honestly remembering the events incorrectly, even if they see them clearly, when they talk about what happened they are interpreting what they see. And one who has been drinking is more difficult.”
"Sarah would approve of your line of thinking."
"She’d probably also have some idea of how to unclutter my thoughts from the confusion these ideas sow."
"I can rent her to you."
"That might be useful, but on my budget I’d have to go for a simple bribe of mango juice."
"She’d love to help. There isn’t a greedy bone in her body—although she might hold out for onion rings at BaconUp.”
"So I didn’t get everything behind the sly exchange between you two. I was hoping you’d volunteer the information, but since you didn’t…"
"The sly… oh, Rudy was telling me that he was aware I drove his four wheeler that night. Whenever Nellie uses it, he makes her promise that no one will drive it but him. She was really rattled by Joe’s death and I took her keys away and insisted on driving. Rudy saw and he wanted me to know that he wasn’t going to let on he knew and that I shouldn’t spill the beans. It was an overture of friendship, to be honest.”
"I’m beginning to think there is a secret Knockemstiff communication code I am just stumbling across."
“There is one, but you can only crack it through years of knowing the same people. Unlike the city, you deal with the same people every day. As you’ve seen that has merits as well as disadvantages."
Woodley turned a page in his notebook. "So that was it? You drove his truck?"
"His four-wheeler. A truck is something different out here."
"The code."
"I suppose."
"All right then, I guess I should have them bring in Bogdan Ratkovich. We can have another enlightening discussion and see if his view of the universe aligns with Rudy’s and what little we know."
I gave him an encouraging smile. "I’m ready when you are."
False Nails and Tall Tales (The Teasen and Pleasen Hair Salon Cozy Mystery Series Book 5) Page 11