Bones of the Rain: The Blue-Eyed Indian Series, #1

By Russ Hall

A murder at the Kerrville Folk Festival is no way to celebrate life with music, especially when it puts Travis, known by Austin papers as the Blue-Eyed Indian, in the crosshairs of the kind of back country paramilitary enthusiasm that means stringing up "Injun" P.I.s like pinatas.

Even the company of Cassie Winnick, a blond deputy who seems out to shake Travis' image as the detective who never gets the girl, doesn't keep this from being one of the scaliest cases he's ever handled.

"Just remember," a friend tells Travis, "there are people out there who can give the cold wet willies to even your worst nightmares."

Before it's over, Travis is going to crave solitude like he never has before . . . if he survives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Russ Hall
• Release date: Sep 11, 2014
• ISBN: 9781502217325

Russ Hall

Russ Hall lives on the north shore of Lake Travis near Austin, TX. An award-winning writer of mysteries, thrillers, westerns, poetry, and nonfiction books, he has had more than thirty-five books published, as well as numerous short stories and articles. He has also been on The New York Times bestseller list multiple times with co-authored non-fiction books, such as: Do You Matter: How Great Design Will Make People Love Your Company (Financial Times Press, 2009) with Richard Brunner, former head of design at Apple, and Identity (Financial Times Press, 2012) with Stedman Graham, Oprah's companion. He was an editor for over 35 years with major publishing companies, ranging from Harper & Row (now HarperCollins) to Simon & Schuster to Pearson. He has been a pet rescue center volunteer, a mountain climber, and a probable book hoarder who fishes and hikes in his spare moments.

Book preview

Chapter One

People like to say your friends are your silver and gold, but when they call you out into a night where the rain beats down angry hard on the canvas sides of the tent where you sit hunched on the floor with the cold and damp seeping up into the pants of your suit, and lightning is flashing in bursts like white upside-down trees accompanied by thunder that sounds like timpani drums rolling sideways down a hill, you begin to think they haven’t done you any real favors, that instead they’ve lured you all the way out to the other side of nowhere.

I did the best I could to try to regain some positive spin about being in Texas Hill Country on a night when the elements tugged and hammered in what seemed an effort to tear the tent in half. Rain cycles, I reminded myself, were vital to the Indian tribes of the west. They had good things to say about rain, even danced to get it. The Cheyenne, who were no strangers to sleet and hard rains, called something like this the bones of the rain. The Comanche used the Shoshone word emar for rain and called a rainbow: sunlight on ripened rain. For the Kiowa, the word for rain, I’d been told, was the same as bow. Maybe it seemed to them that rain was being shot from one. That felt like the case tonight. Another hard sheet of it hit the tent and swayed and buckled the sides. The damp cold had at last soaked all the way through to my crotch and I suppressed a shiver. I wasn’t doing such a great job of getting to the half full glass on this one.

Well, it sure enough is a dark and stormy night out there. Johnny Gringo let the tent flap drop back into place with a wet smack and headed back to where he had been sitting.

Will you knock that off and sit back down a spell, Jimmy Bravuro said. He turned back to me. "Trish Mirandez, the absolute prettiest little songbird in the entire Austin live music scene, put down her guitar, the stage lights dimmed, and she slipped off toward her trailer. The next thing we see and hear is the stage manager flipping on the full lights and rushing out onto center stage to yell as loud as he could, ‘Someone’s killed Trish.’ Now, that was just what a Kerrville Folk Festival crowd needed to hear right then."

The stark worried lines of Jimmy’s face, three feet from me in the light of a swaying Coleman lantern, looked like something you might see crawling out of a grave on a rainy Halloween night. His long hair had gone stringy inside the damp tent. The tanned tint of his face, like mine, showed an indication of a Native American heritage that traced itself back to when Oklahoma was an Indian territory.

No one would mistake him for the rugged outdoorsy type, or me either, for that matter, given the suit and tie I wore, albeit an outfit that by this point wouldn’t get me into a dress-code-restricted restaurant. A steady drip plunked down onto my left shoulder. Beneath my suit jacket, my long-sleeved white shirt had begun to cling to me. I felt another slow damp shudder shiver through me.

The breathy notes of a saxophone began to lift and fall in a far back corner of my head.

You drag me all the way out here to an event I’m as likely to attend as a Grateful Dead concert, in the teeth of a storm, with a case for me that’s not really all that pressing. Then I get here and find a murder just happened? I said.

That’s about the sum of it, Trav. Jimmy’s eyes would have twinkled if a corpse hadn’t been found. The trademark of his singing is his intensity—the kind that makes you wonder if at any moment he might climb right out of his own skin. When he’s not on stage he usually assumes a folksier, more laid-back, even jovial persona, something that was heightened by circumstances more than usual at the moment.

All I’m saying is it wasn’t in the plan. I was having a quiet night at home.

On the way out, through black skies and rain that slashed across the twisting road in horizontal lines the color of steel piano wires snapping, I’d negotiated hills and S-curves to the constant roll of thunder and lightning the like of which I hadn’t seen in many a moon. It had been sinister enough to make me reach for the heater control in my relic of a car before remembering it didn’t work.

"Quiet night at home. Do you hear that? This coming from the one private detective who never gets the girl. I mean never. That while hanging ’round the music biz too." Jimmy turned to Johnny Gringo, who now sat like some thirty-year-old skinny Buddha with a can of beer in his hand, careful not to touch the wet tent walls or get near the one or two small puddles forming in the corners of the tent.

Was my need to come out here urgent or not? I said.

He ignored me and turned to Gringo to speak in the slow measured way of imparting wisdom. You know, we often think of someone who craves being alone as a failure. There are those who think the hermit merely enjoys a different kind of marriage, off to commune with himself, nature, to stay home. What we see as a retreat, he sees as an advance. What we’d view as poverty, he views as luxury. That hermit, recluse, solo flyer in the world of human relationships, whatever you want to call him, may be simply one who discerns the difference between loneliness and solitude.

I crumpled the empty beer can in my hand in my fist. If there’d have been a table I’d have pounded on it. What you don’t take into consideration is the attitude of rural law enforcement officers when a murder—something that happens about as often as the Borzoi ballet performing out here—occurs in their backyard, and minutes later a private investigator appears.

Don’t like it, do they?

No, they don’t.

I only asked Hal to call for you to get you some social life.

I don’t need a social life.

Johnny Gringo’s eyes followed us back and forth like he was watching a ping-pong match, a not particularly riveting one.

Jimmy shook his head in mock sadness. You look at him, this detective of ours—go ahead, look at him, I said—and you see someone who looks like the world not only stepped on him, but gave the foot a little twist, like putting out a cigarette butt. I mean, the suit’s rumpled, the hair’s black and likely to stick out in more than one direction with the least insubordination from the wind, and the sparkle of blue eyes above high cheekbones hardly compensates for a heritage that has more Indian in it than is even fashionable these days, excepting, of course, for myself.

People grieve or deal with death in different ways. I’d been too close too many times not to have picked up a mental scrapbook of every variation. I knew Jimmy did not mean to make light of a tragic moment. The much younger Johnny Gringo didn’t seem so sure of that. This was a folk festival, after all, and one that had been brought to a screeching halt.

There should have been music outside right now—lively, peppy, foot-tapping music—with the sound of fireside chatter, and the convivial clinking of bottles. Instead, there was the steady sound of rain, the rustling of cans being yanked from paper bags, and the kind of subdued grumping you get when a body has turned up like a turd in the punch bowl.

The festival’s an annual event, makes you think of Woodstock with cowboy hats—folk music shows all day long, campfire sing-alongs at night, tents, campers—you get the picture.

There wasn’t supposed to be a body there, and I should have been dry back in my musty old office looking, in the dim light from street lamps that filtered through the heavy rain, at the shadowed parts of the Indian relics hanging on the opposing wall. They were the most valuable things in the office, except I couldn’t sell them. I’d earned them as fees for all the tribes I’d helped during the years before settling in Austin. But, no, I was here instead, in a tent, a wet tent, and I was pretty sure my butt was getting chapped even as I sat there. The tent was some undetermined sort of green canvas army surplus job, not one of those nice, expensive waterproof Gortex types. Its canvas floor showed the darker damp of puddles forming in a couple of spots. The pulsing, swinging white light from the camping lantern’s twin mantles lit half of everything in the tent, leaving the other half in black shadows.

There were just the three of us in the leaky tent at the moment—Jimmy, me, and the younger new kid from Oklahoma by way of Nashville, John Murray Greenberg, who had, in the tradition of country singers out this way, already been given a new handle, Johnny Gringo.

Don’t you do most of your detecting in cities? he spoke for the first time in a while. What do you know about cops out here?

What I do know is that cops everywhere don’t like PIs in general, and usually me in particular. No local cop is going to feel good about some PI being in the area right now. A county this size, some ninety miles from Austin, is bound to have so few murders they’ll take them as personal. They’re not going to believe that a professional snoop like me being out here has nothing to do with a murder they’re investigating.

You still don’t believe Trish is the one who’s been murdered, do you? Johnny Gringo said. He had the hubris it takes to be a performer, which is a necessary thing. It’s a bumpy career path he’d chosen. Even though I respected what it took to be a singer and a songwriter, I was getting tired of the youthful thinly veiled sarcasm in his face at a time of death and probable inconvenience for me.

He’s the cautious type, your gringoness, Jimmy Bravuro said. He won’t believe Trish is dead until he stands looking at the corpse. He’s been burned before believing things on hearsay without proof, haven’t you, Trav?

I could feel my forehead tighten into one real bowline hitch of a tension knot. Tell me what it was that made you think I ought to come all the way out here in the rain from Austin.

He was called, Johnny Gringo said, couldn’t go. Went anyway. Weren’t wanted. Johnny’s no more an original talking Texan than I am, but that made him try extra hard, in a way that scratched fingernails across my chalkboard.

I struggled to my soggy feet, got all the way upright and had turned toward the tent flap door when Jimmy waved at me to sit back down. Oh, take a chill pill. We’ll go into the case we have for you later. This Trish thing is bigger just now.

I eased back down. The spot where I sat hadn’t gotten any drier in my absence.

He had to stretch from where he sat cross-legged on his sleeping bag to reach for the can of beer on the ground beside him. The downpour outside hammered on the tent’s surface like Marine Corps drummers for a parade having a serious practice. The tent flap pushed inward and open. Dutch Hitchcock shoved himself inside and stood dripping like some wet-and-wear lumberjack. He tugged a blue handkerchief loose from the back pocket of his jeans and wiped across the deep lines of his weathered face. Water oozed in at the bottom of the front flap onto the already soggy tent floor.

It still raining out there? Jimmy asked, in that same casual tone I’d come to recognize as his not entirely successful tension-cutting comedy in the face of death. We all moved back in the small tent so that Dutch wouldn’t drip all over us.

Dutch’s head snapped to Jimmy.

One plain, plumb frog-walloper. That’s what she is, Johnny Gringo said, pushing that heavy-handed Texas accent that was still fresh to him.

Dutch swung his head to look at John. His face looked like a few miles of hard road. Meeting him for the first time, you might take him for a construction worker, or wrestler of alligators. His roots were out in Lubbock, what they call a flatlander in Texas. No one was going to hand him any unsolicited beauty contest prizes either. The general cut of musicians out this way ran to the rustic model. Dutch had presence, though, the kind that made the inside of the tent seem much smaller with him being in it.

Raining hard enough to fill a wire basket, Jimmy said, playing along with Johnny Gringo.

Like a cow pissing on a flat rock, Dutch finally snapped back.

You wouldn’t drink so much of our dwindling supply of beer, you wouldn’t have to go out there so often, Jimmy said.

Next time I won’t. Dutch glanced around at the corners of the tent in a bathroom-searching way that worried me. I had nothing to add. I felt as cooped up as they did. As some of Texas’ top musicians, they had more experience with outdoor versions of road trips like this than me.

Dutch said, And who was it inspired you to buy this crappy beer, the worst tourist-swilling diarrhea beer south of Yankee land?

It’s all they had. You’re the one was going to fix us up in a motel, remember?

Full. All of them. You know that. Dutch tugged off his jacket. In the process he managed to hit both Jimmy and myself with a spray of water.

Jimmy said, Well, hell, Dutch, no one ever said the music business is all tits and champagne.

Hey, guys . . . , I said.

Come on, Trav, lighten up. There’s nothing any of us can do right now, Jimmy said.

Let the private detective talk, Jimmy. You drag him all the way out here, probably tearing him away from a case where someone’s robbed a Cheyenne reservation casino or some other bleeding-heart damned thing. Dutch sloshed over to rustle around in the paper bag that held the last of the beer. Though none of those jolly moments are going to weigh much with the local law I met.

I already took my beating in there answering their questions, Jimmy said.

What d’you mean by that? They didn’t really hit you, did they? Gringo’s voice nearly cracked. There was no Texas twang this time.

Why’d they bust your chops? You didn’t have anything to do with Trish’s death, did you? I asked.

Jimmy just shook his head.

Dutch said, That’s one deputy in serious need of a laxative. You’ll see what he means. You’ve got more’ve an Indian look than Jimmy does. Man’s not fond of anyone who’s not a white-bread born-in-Texas white man like himself is the way I read it.

People aren’t really still like that anymore, are they? Gringo asked.

I heard steps outside splashing toward us through the rain. They had the official sound of deputy-sheriff boots. Maybe I’ll find out soon enough, I said. I’d guess my chance to talk with the local law is approaching.

A hand pulled aside the tent flap. The Smoky the Bear hat came in first, then the dark wet uniform. The soaked front of her uniform was pressed out in a significant way that was hard to miss. I looked up, caught the long blonde hair tucked up into her hat, the smooth attractive face. She pointed a finger at me and beckoned.

Well, Jimmy said to Dutch, at least it’s not all champagne.

* * * * *

We slogged our way through the puddles and mud toward the music hall. The deputy, in her taut, wet uniform, might have been worth watching closer, but my head stayed down, mostly, watching each step. A lot of people were still at the folk festival, huddled in their tents, as miserable as I was, no doubt. Spreading out from the entertainment center, through the relentless rain, I could see quite a few more tents, campers, and RVs. It was quiet as a stone here in the center of things. Only one or two people were stirring on the muddy creeks the streets had become. I saw Ponty Bone load his accordion case into the back of a van and then drip his way back toward the hall. It made me realize how different tonight was. There’d be none of Ponty’s zydeco tunes to pep or cheer us up.

Usually, at the Kerrville Folk Festival, the key part is singers and songwriters out by campfires trying out new tunes on their devout fans. The event has happened every year since 1972, and has featured the likes of Willie Nelson, Peter, Paul & Mary, Gary P. Nunn, Nanci Griffith, and Kinky Friedman. It’s usually more peppy, weird, and fun. Even on the rainiest of days, you can hear guitars strumming and songs carrying out from the lit tents. Tonight was as silent as death, and I heard only an occasional cough, low mumbling, or the whoop of someone tying on a semi-toot as my tent roomies were, while I trudged through ankle-deep puddles with sheets of rain hammering down onto my uncovered head.

I got thinking about how the Cheyenne wouldn’t drink water that’s been left standing overnight. The women would always go down to the stream to get water each morning, because the Cheyenne believe it’s live water, while water left standing overnight is considered to be dead. There seemed to be more live water going on out here tonight than live music. Some of it was soaking all the way through my suit as I walked.

Then I saw Hal Jansen himself, the guy who’d called me on behalf of Jimmy and dragged me into this predicament. Now wasn’t the time to give him a piece of my mind. He and his camera were being escorted out of the main theater building by a deputy at the same time I was being escorted in. Hal didn’t look my way, and I whooshed along myself to keep up with the deputy; but I promised myself I’d chew on his ear later about this mess.

The Armadillo Theater, where they hold the sundown concerts, was as quiet as I’d ever seen it, even with the handful of uniformed people gathered around at the center of the empty stage. Someone had set up a command post, comprised of a table for a desk and three straight-backed chairs. The bulky guy seated behind the table probably had a cushy chair behind his desk back at his office, which he visibly seemed to be missing. His face twitched in a scowl and he twisted to get more comfortable in his chair as I sat down across from him after squishing across the empty dance floor and hiking around up the stairs onto the stage.

You Travis? he said. The one the newspapers call the Blue-Eyed Indian? His angry eyes flicked to the other deputies.

Before I could comment that the handle was only used by Austin’s version of a Daily Planet and a few other newspapers, not me, he added, "And don’t you look like you just crawled off a buffalo nickel, too. Whooee."

My face, with its high cheekbones and dark reddish tint, does send a certain strong signal. Most folks these days don’t make as much of it as this deputy. I mulled over which side of that antique nickel he meant, hoped he didn’t mean the buffalo butt side.

I don’t want you to get the impression that all Texans are prejudiced against Indians. Though you can come across individuals here and there, like the deputy before me apparently, whose sentiments still ran along the lines of the late General Sheridan’s comment that the only good Indian’s a dead one.

Without waiting for a response from me, he glanced down at a sheet of paper on a clipboard in front of him and said, Never met a real live private detective before. He said it the way I might have commented about never having stepped in a cow pie. I glanced around at the other deputies. Something was lousy here. The one who’d escorted me here, with Winnick on her uniform nameplate, stood back and looked off at nothing. Another deputy stared at us, his weasel face leering at me like I was a dartboard and all he needed was a triple eighteen to go out.

My head panned back to the beefy guy across from me. He said, My name’s Alvin Turnbull. I’m the acting sheriff here. He said it the way Alexander Haig said he was in charge that time. I caught an eye roll from the weasel deputy. The word dysfunctional zipped across the wasteland of my skull. Sheriff Harmon Cuthers is away, camping with his grandkids down to Big Bend.

I gave Alvin the benefit of a careful look. His hair was trimmed as close as you can get without resorting to a razor. The wide square face, chiseled on top of a thick neck, did little to diminish the look of pit bull menace which he seemed to crave and cultivate. He either lifted weights or had been recruited from the San Antonio Zoo. He had the beefy rounded look you’d expect to see of a fellow climbing out of a pickup truck in the gravel lot beside a late night honky-tonk with an ax handle in his hand. Oh, I was getting good vibes from this one. His Texas drawl was as heavy as that Johnny Gringo had been trying for, but his was genuine. He was from here.

He squinted at me. Later I might could take time to actually be impressed at meeting a real-to-life private dick like yourself . . . and an Injun besides. But for now, what I want to know is what brings your suit-and-tie ass out here to the Laughing Burro Ranch. You sure as shit don’t look like the other moonie-eyed dropouts from life who think this is the sixties all over again.

This time I caught the eye roll from Deputy Winnick. Her eyes clicked on mine and skittered away again. I began to wonder how Alvin came to be in charge, how he even came to be in his line of work. His colleagues seemed to wonder the same thing. Something had gotten under his skin, and it was more than just his having a long and stressful day.

I felt irritated myself—at Jimmy Bravuro for not telling me what case he had for me, and at Hal for calling me in the first place. I couldn’t tell this gorilla of a deputy anything, even if I wanted to. It bugged me too that the deputy, in advance of me talking to him, was aware I was a PI, and one with Indian blood, something that didn’t endear me to him.

A hubbub came from behind the stage, back where small trailers were lined up to act as dressing rooms. A fellow came out of the wing of the stage and came across toward us. His heels clicked on the wooden stage. He wore a black rain slicker that said Medical Examiner in white letters. He looked like one of the crew instead of the ME himself. Alvin turned to glare at him, but the guy plopped a clipboard onto the table and ignored me. Better sign here, he said, and we can haul her away.

Alvin picked up a pen, looked up at the man, back down at the paper, then signed. He tossed the pen to one side, ignored the fellow and called over to the weasel deputy, The boyfriend still around?

Deputy Winnick started to say something. Alvin held up a hand to stop her. The men are talking, honey, he said. Her mouth shut with a click I could hear without straining.

Yeah, the weasel deputy said.

Well, hang onto him. He’ll be wanting to go to town with the body.

I said, I wasn’t aware Trish had a boyfriend.

Alvin’s head snapped to me, and there was a glitter in the squint of his eyes, as if I’d gone for the bait, fallen for a trap. "What do you