Southern Fried (12 page)

I didn’t say anything about my own career confusion. The red light changed. How would life in Dacus be for Melvin Bertram?

“Avery, I did have another favor to ask. Before you got there, two of the deputies were talking. One of them—a fellow named Mellin—attended the autopsy. Of the body from the lake.” His voice had lost its wry edge. “Apparently he hadn’t even had time to fill the sheriff in on the details.”

Body
wasn’t a word that floated first to my brain when I thought of the passenger in that car, with those teeth bumping against the back window.

“—if you could talk to him.” Melvin’s words floated back into focus. “You know.” He paused uncomfortably. “Find out—”

I nodded. “I’ll check and see. Who’d you say accompanied the—remains to Charleston?”

“Rudy Mellin? I think that’s his name.”

Melvin climbed out at the bottom of his brother’s driveway. This had become an awkward ritual.

“I’ll call if I find out anything,” I said.

He nodded and waved.

I turned toward my parents’ house. Carlton Barner had closed his office for the day, so I couldn’t go there to use the phone. But no point in driving back up the mountain if Rudy Mellin had already returned from the autopsy.

To preserve the chain of custody—or whatever
they called handling a body—and to reduce the number of times the state’s few medical examiners must testify in court, cops usually accompany bodies and observe the autopsies. That, I’m sure, adds immeasurably to the attraction of law enforcement as a career.

But such activities didn’t explain why cops like Rudy Mellin developed doughnut butts. Seemed to me a steady diet of autopsies would act as an appetite suppressant. But I’d heard stories about them holding a cadaver’s liver in one hand and munching on a bean burrito in the other. At least that’s the kind of stuff they tell each other.

Neither of my parents was home. I called the sheriff’s main number and, after a couple of transfers and lots of holding time, a slurry voice drawled into the phone.

As soon as I heard his voice, a picture of Rudy Mellin materialized unbidden in my brain. I’d run into him in Maylene’s a few times over the years. He still wore the same size-34-waist pants he’d worn when we sat next to each other in high school chemistry. Unfortunately, now his actual waist size spanned an additional ten inches, while his size-34 pants sank lower and lower on his hips.

“Hear you drove to Charleston with a friend, Rudy.”

“She-ut, A’vry. Truth tell, I never been around bones that stunk like those. Can’t get the smell outta my nose for nuthin’.”

“Who’d’ve thought it.” I paused a polite interval. “What’d they find? Any word?”

“Shouldn’t be by now, but there is. It’s Lea Bertram, all right. Car was hers, so I carried her dental records with me. Perfect match.”

“Any sign what killed her?”

Rudy snorted rudely. “Hard to check for lake water in her lungs, bein’ as she didn’t have any lungs.”

“Right.”
Har
, har.

Rudy smacked on something. Chewing gum? “No broken neck or trauma visible on the bones, though. Doc went over those with a magnifying glass. Said sometimes bullet or stab wounds actually nick a bone and are visible long later. But nuthin’.”

“What was that stuff on the face?”

Rudy made a gagging sound. “That’s what still stunk after all these years. Doc called it grave wax. Looked like Grandma’s tallow soap to me. Which Doc said it kinda was. Bodies that rot in damp places, sometimes their proteins change into fat. ‘Hydrolyzed something.’ Sounded like the ingredient list for potato chips.”

Cop humor.

“Could they tell how long she’d been down there? Would that stuff have lasted very long?”

“Hard to say for sure. But Doc—she got so excited, she had to go to her office and pull a couple of humongous books off the shelf while she dictated her report—she said some cases have been reported ten or fifteen years later with that stuff. She called it adipocere.” He pronounced it
addy-po-sear
.

“That long? But don’t bodies decompose faster in water?” I’d been an avid
Quincy
fan, mostly because of a kid-size crush on Jack Klugman.

“Sure, but the little fishies couldn’t get to her to nibble her up. And she certainly didn’t float to the top as the gases bloated her. Nope, she stayed down there a decade and a half, sealed up in her own little soap-making factory.”

Ick, I thought. But I wouldn’t give him the pleasure of my squeamishness. “So everything points to her dying about the time she disappeared.”

“Yep.”

L.J. and company had sense enough to send Lea Bertram’s dental records to the autopsy, so I knew they’d have been digging around in the old files.

“So what do you think happened, from what you know so far? Did she just drive off into the lake and drown?”

Rudy snorted. “And pigs fly. S’pose anythin’s possible. But how do you accidentally drive down a boat ramp and end up eighty feet from shore?”

“Could she have committed suicide?”

“Hard to read her mind, A’vry. Despite the time me and her spent together on the way to Charleston.”

“Did your records indicate what she was supposed to be doing the day she died?”

“Yep. According”—he paused to make a couple of smacking sounds—“to a coupla witnesses, she’d planned to drive up the mountain. Do some painting. You know, pitchers.”

“Um-hmm.”
And I’d thought for a minute she’d taken up house-painting, you goober
. “So, did you find painting stuff in her car?”

Smack, smack. “A plastic box, with some metal tubes inside. Prob’ly anything else would’ve rotted.”

“How about some little metal cylinders, like the bands around paintbrushes? Or—”

“Yeah, A’vry. We dug around in amongst the rusty seat springs and rust-covered floorboards looking for rusty cylinders that would probably turn to powder soon as we touched ’em. Like everything else in that spook-show wreck.”

“Oh.”

“The hood, whole parts of that car just crumbled away. Dangdest thing, that it’d hold together all this time, then just crumble.”

Had it crumbled away faster, they would’ve had nothing to pull Lea Bertram to the surface in. Her wax-covered bones would’ve scattered and sunk in the muck of Luna Lake. And nobody would be hauling Melvin Bertram to the sheriff’s office for questioning.

“Why is L.J. asking about Nebo Earling? He have something to do with the fire?”

“Well,” Rudy drawled, “there’s been some speculation about that. But not by anybody that knows Nebo. Nebo’s one dumb shit. Hadn’t got sense enough to strike a match without-singeing his eyebrows off. Naw, they reckon he might’ve seen something.”

“At Garnet Mills?”

“He ’uz sort of a watchman. Not that I’d set him to guard my doghouse without expectin’ to find the dog’s collar gone and him hungry.”

“So, is the ME running tests on the bones from the car? Or—”

“Tests on what? On commercial uses for that cheesy stuff growing on her face? Come on, A’vry.”

“Well, how about a bone expert of some kind? Or—”

“A’vry, this is Camden County. The autopsy on that weirdy sack of bones already cut into our budget bad enough. This itn’t some fancy-britches law firm. This is a little county with a little law enforcement budget. Hell, they got us on a paper clip ration here. We gotta pay for experts. And for what? We already know who she is. Maybe Sam’s bloodhounds could come chew on those bones and render us an opinion.”

“Okay, okay. But what about Mr. Bertram? He’s still got a cloud hanging over his head. And—”

“What makes you think he wouldn’t still have a cloud, even if some kinda gahdam expert dicked around with those bones? Huh? My thought, he’d be likely to have a murder warrant hanging over his head, ’stead of that halo you’d have us hang there.”

“Rudy—”

“You ner nobody’s gonna convince me that little girl decided to kill herself by drownin’ herself in a car. And if it’s an accident, it’s one of the damdest I’ve ever seen.”

“Rudy, cars drive off into creeks and ponds and rivers all the time. Who knows how many people just disappear and nobody knows—”

“Scant few, if I had my guess. The way I see it, you’ve gotten yerself snookered by a wife-killer.
He’s probably just lookin’ at ways to get better at gettin’ away with it.”

“Thanks for your advice, Rudy. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it.”

“Any time.”

“Will the ME issue a report?” I didn’t know how these things were handled. “Can I get a copy?”

“When I get one. Sometimes takes ’em a while. Depends on how many people die in peculiar ways over the holiday weekend. I’ll send you a copy. Or you stop by and pick it up, how ’bout?”

Rudy managed to invest that last sentence with a clear-intentioned leer.

“Sure, Rudy. Thanks.”

I called Melvin’s brother’s house. The kid who answered the phone went screeching through the house in search of Uncle Melvin, then Melvin’s measured voice came on the line.

“Melvin. I just wanted to let you know.” I paused. The words came harder than I’d anticipated. “It’s—it is Lea. I’m sorry. The dental records confirmed it.” As if a medical opinion somehow sanitized the news.

He didn’t speak for an uncomfortable number of seconds. “Thank you, Avery.” Another pause followed, but when he spoke, his voice didn’t waver or show any emotion. “When will they release the—body? For burial. Did they say?”

“I forgot to ask. I’m sorry. I’ll call and let you know.” My words tumbled over themselves. How stupid to forget the need for funeral arrangements. Of course a grieving husband would be concerned
about that, even fifteen years later. Would a murdering husband think of that so quickly? Perhaps, especially to get it over with, maybe escape the guilt if it could be buried deeper than the car had been.

I’d spent too much time the last couple of days with suspicious cops.

“Thank you, Avery. For everything.” He should have been a radio announcer, with a phone voice like that.

When I called the sheriff’s number again, Rudy had already left the office. The fellow who answered the phone couldn’t tell me anything about the release of the remains. So I left a message for Rudy to call me.

When the phone rang, I didn’t screen it with the answering machine, thinking maybe Melvin or Rudy was calling back. Jake Baker’s mush-mouthed Charleston slur took me by surprise.

“A-ver-ee, darlin’. Ah’m so glad I caught you in. This is Jake Baker down in Charleston. How you doin’?”

“Just fine, Jake. How ’bout you?”

“Be a lot better if you’d return my calls and tell me you’re fixin’ to come down here and work with me.”

“Jake, I told you when you first called, you can’t turn an insurance defense lawyer into an ambulance chaser. That defies the laws of nature.”

Jake chuckled right on cue. “And I tole you, Averee, the only reason I call most insurance lawyers is to get ’em to write one of my clients a check. But you, you’re worth savin’. You’re one helluva trial
lawyer. You just went astray temporarily, fell in with a bad crowd, those defense lawyers. But I’m the one can turn you from the dark side.”

I had to chuckle in return. That summed up the opposing camps of civil trial lawyers as well as anything—each saw the other as lured away from the paths of righteousness by unfathomable evil.

“Jake, I can’t change my spots. You know that.”

“Avery, pardon me for bein’ blunt, darlin’, but what the hell you plannin’ on doin’ with yourself? After Winn Davis at the Calhoun Firm gets through trashin’ you, no stuffy, staid defense firm in the state’ll let you in the delivery entrance. And a cracker-jack litigator like you would shrivel and die stuck in some padded boardroom doing corporate transactional work.”

Those last words he drawled out with an audible sneer. “You read the want ads? What the hell’s transactional work? It’d bore me so bad my dick’d shrivel up and fall off. And it’d bore you too, Avery. Admit it.”

“I’m exploring other options, Jake. I appreciate—”

“She-ut, Avery. With your now-tarnished reputation, fighting for the rights of the little people is probably the only option you have left. Nobody who pays big salaries for legal counsel likes to take risks. Hell, if they liked takin’ risks, they wouldn’t be workin’ by the hour for some corporation or defense firm. They’d get real jobs.”

“Fighting for the little people? Don’t you mean
fighting for big settlements that you grudgingly share with the little people?”

“I can see my work’s cut out for me. But that’s okay. It’ll take time to deprogram you. But hell, this may be the only employment option left for a lawyer with a questionable past. Joe Six-Pack who got crushed in the machinery at work won’t care that you’ve been blackballed at the country club.”

“Now, Jake, not all plaintiffs’ lawyers have dark pasts. Even I know that, watching ’em from the other side of the courtroom.”

“Yeah, but how many of those plaintiffs’ lawyers live in an honest-to-God historical mansion in downtown Charleston and drive a Lamborghini to the beach on weekends?”

“Not many, Jake. But you didn’t say anything about being able to sleep in that mansion of yours. You have any problems doing that?”

He laughed. “Not a bit. I found if you fuck good and hard a couple of times before bedtime, you sleep like a baby. And fortunately, my dick’s not fallen off from boredom. What about those weenies you worked with down at the Calhoun Firm?”

“Jake, honey, you’re a piece of work. I’ve got to go.”

“Come do me anytime, sweetie. I’ll be in touch. Standing offer.”

“Thanks, Jake.”

To keep from dwelling on Jake’s assessment of my employment options, I considered stopping by the Builder’s Supply for some pressure-treated
lumber. I could borrow Dad’s circular saw. But I hadn’t measured how many board feet I’d need—or estimated how much the rotting porch would cost me to fix.

I delayed deciding what to do next by rummaging in Mom’s refrigerator for something to augment my long-past Fig Newton breakfast. I grabbed a cold chicken leg off a plate of leftovers and poured a glass of ice tea. My mom brews it right—steeped, never boiled, with loads of sugar cooked into the hot water until it’s sweet as syrup.