Sedona Law 5 by Dave Daren (romantic novels in english .TXT) 📕

“Alright, Irving,” he sighed as he approached me. “What is it you want to see, here?”

I leaned against my car and took a swig of water as I nodded my head.

“I just want to look around,” I replied, “and see if there’s anything in there that might give us a lead or two.”

“We’ve been through here a few times,” Hal told me. “The place is a dump. But I’ll take you in.”

A couple of bored looking officers got out of their cars, and they stood around with Durant, who nodded slowly.

“Alright, men,” he said, without taking his eyes off me. “Take him inside.”

The officers nodded, and we all headed up the drive to the house. We walked in through the door to a darkened entry, and I coughed from the dust. Then someone flipped on a light switch, and I saw what Hal meant.

“Whoa,” I said as I took in the sight.

Hal’s comment that it was a dump was an understatement. Jerry was a next level of pack rat. He was such a straight up hoarder, it was disturbing.

We entered into what was supposed to be the living room, and I guessed I could make out some couches, under an incredible amount of clutter. Stacks of boxes hit the ceiling in some places, and in others, they were just casually tossed and open.

Everything imaginable was in that room--boxes and boxes of clothes overflowed onto the furniture, with sporting equipment, board games, a box fan, a defunct microwave, and old shoes. An old pizza box on top of a pile grazed my arm, and I noticed the delivery label.

“The date on this label,” I croaked out as my stomach churned, “was in January.”

“Uh-huh,” Officer Durant said.

“It’s June,” I stated.

“Yep.” Durant nodded.

I tried not to gag from disgust and moved on with my search. I walked through the living area and found what looked like an original Beatles Abbey Road LP. I picked it up, pulled out the record, and flipped it around in my fingers. Great condition. I thought about how much my dad would freak out if he saw that--especially thrown in with all of this junk.

“This is probably worth a lot of money,” I told Durant.

Durant eyed me suspiciously, and I gently placed the record in the safest place I could see in the mess.

Then I looked at a stack of books and found a yearbook that appeared it might be of some interest. But when I tried to remove it from a stack, I caused an avalanche with photos from the 1980’s tumbling down, and they were quickly followed by a table and lamp as they clattered to the ground.

“Careful,” Durant warned. “You could get injured in this place. God only knows what’s in this crap.”

“Or what lives in it,” I muttered.

“Exactly,” he grumbled as he looked around at his feet. So far, we had not run across any “tenants” but we knew they were somewhere.

“Do you know what might have been an office?” I asked as I got to the point of my visit.

“It’s back that way,” one of the officers replied as he pointed off down a hallway.

We picked our way through the mess and passed the kitchen. I didn’t even want to know what was in that room without a hazmat suit. We finally arrived at an open area designed to be a den, and Jerry had turned it into an enormous cavern of an office.

This was the only room that looked like it might be operable, or at least habitable. A built in bookcase took up an entire wall and overflowed with books and dusty encyclopedias, and more sat in piles on the floor.

I stepped over several stacks of thick volumes and noticed many of them were centered around World War I military history. I guessed those were the ones he’d been studying for the film period.

It would have seemed that he would’ve been more historically aware, based on the number of books he had on the subject. I flipped through a couple and figured out why he hadn’t read them. Just a glance through the subtitles and the grainy black and white photos was enough to put me to sleep.

World War II was about Nazis trying to take over the world, and the good guys trying to save the starving Jews. At least there was a point and a human interest story there.

World War I was much more complex. It was a nebulous bloody trench war that amounted to a European power game of that reality show Survivor, with all of these competing alliances, and everybody making secret deals behind each other’s backs, until one day the archduke got shot and hell broke loose.

That’s much more difficult to follow in black and white. It occured to me that it would make an interesting modernized screenplay adaptation, though.

Oh, God, was I starting to think like Jerry Steele and The Count now?

On the other walls were glass framed movie posters, and a glance at the credits showed they were ones he’d done. There were mostly of the sexy lady gets almost eaten by zombies variety, but then there was one of The Godfather. It figured he would like that movie.

It was there I finally found his collection of vintage audio equipment. As Leila had mentioned, Jerry had built an in shelf system with old electronics in various states of repair.

“This is like a museum,” I remarked.

There were chrome and black VHS players and brown and beige electronics from the 1970’s I didn’t even know what to do with. There were also several record players and what I thought was a cassette boombox from the early 1990’s. Then I found the original Walkman I’d heard once retailed for about a hundred dollars when it came out.

I played