Ghost of a Chance

by Bill Crider

  Rhodes asked what she meant.

  “Unless you’re here to make it my problem,” she said.

  “I might be. But maybe you have an alibi for the night Ty was killed, and I can just go away and leave you alone. Were you with anyone that night?”

  “I sure was.”

  “Good. Who?”

  “Zeke Haverford and the beautiful, untamed daughter of Potifair Jones.”

  “They don’t live around here, do they?” Rhodes said.

  “They’re characters in my new book. I’ve been working on it for the last month, and I’m here every night doing revisions of what I wrote during the day. When I’m not writing, I’m researching. I don’t have time to go out and kill people in cemeteries.”

  She stubbed out her cigarette in an ashtray shaped like the state of Texas. Smoke writhed upward and Rhodes closed his eyes for a second.

  “You and Ty went together for a good while, didn’t you?” he asked.

  “Define ‘a good while.’ ”

  “Months.”

  “It was probably months. But it doesn’t really matter. We just didn’t get along. We had a mutual interest in history, but there wasn’t anything else between us. No spark. You know what I’m talking about?”

  “Sort of,” Rhodes said. “Did Ty feel the same way?”

  “Yes. We broke up by mutual agreement. We both liked history, as I said, but we didn’t like the same books, we didn’t like the same movies, we didn’t have the same political views, and when it came right down to it, we didn’t like each other very much. So we decided to stop seeing each other. Why waste the time?”

  “Did he ever mention anyone who might want to kill him?”

  “Of course not. Who’d want to do that? We didn’t get along all that well, but he was a nice enough guy. You should be able to figure out who killed him. It was whoever’s been stealing things from the cemeteries.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Rhodes said. “But people keep giving me other ideas.”

  “And I’ll bet I can tell you who gave you the idea it might have been me,” Vernell said. “But I won’t. I know you wouldn’t tell me even if I guessed right.”

  That was true. Rhodes wasn’t in the habit of telling people any more than they needed to know about his investigations.

  “And since I know you can keep a secret,” Vernell continued, “I have a little tip for you if you want to look into things besides the cemetery thefts.”

  “What’s that?” Rhodes asked.

  Vernell got out another cigarette, lit it, and exhaled more smoke. Rhodes felt his eyes turning redder.

  “You should find out who owns those buildings downtown,” Vernell said. “The ones that fell down.”

  Rhodes thought about sitting on his hands. If he didn’t, he was going to start doing some serious eye-rubbing. He resisted both impulses and said, “Why should those buildings interest me?”

  “Because they interested Ty. You know why they collapsed, don’t you?”

  That was an easy one. “Neglect,” Rhodes said. “A whole lot of it.”

  “That’s right. No roof repairs for years and years, and that let the rain get in and rot the wood and wash out the grouting and God only knows what else. No upkeep at all. With a little care, they might still be standing there. They could be remodeled into something useful. But there wasn’t any care, so they’re gone.”

  “Not exactly,” Rhodes said.

  “Oh, I didn’t mean they’re totally gone. But they’re not really buildings anymore. All that’s there is a pile of rubble.”

  Rhodes wasn’t sure just what the point of the discussion was, so he asked.

  “You know how Ty was,” Vernell said. “He worried about everything that had any kind of tie to the past, even if it wasn’t much of a past to begin with.”

  Rhodes agreed that Ty was like that.

  “Yes. Everyone knew that. He saw what towns like Thurston were doing with their old buildings, and he thought Clearview could do something similar. He thought some kind of renovation might save the downtown area, but it turned out that whoever owned the property here had let things go for too long. It was too late to do anything to save the buildings. The repairs would have been too expensive.”

  Rhodes admitted the truth of all that she had said, but he still didn’t see what any of it could have had to do with Ty Berry’s murder.

  “That last time I saw him,” Vernell said, “he was looking into the possibility of a lawsuit against the owners of the buildings.”

  “What was he going to sue them for?”

  “Do I look like a lawyer?”

  Rhodes wasn’t sure what a lawyer was supposed to look like. Or a writer, for that matter. So he didn’t bother to answer her question. She wasn’t expecting one anyway.

  And she didn’t wait for one. “Reckless endangerment, maybe? The buildings could have fallen on someone. He must’ve had something in mind.”

  “So you think the owners killed him?”

  “I don’t know,” Vernell said, puffing on her cigarette. “The last time I talked to him about it, he hadn’t been able to find out who the owners were.”

  That was interesting, Rhodes thought. It should have been easy to find out something like that. Maybe in a city, where some Mafia slumlord was hiding behind dozens of corporate aliases, it would be hard to find out who owned a property. But in Blacklin County, it shouldn’t have taken more than a few minutes at the courthouse.

  Rhodes stood up and said, “I appreciate your help. I might have to talk to you again before this is over.”

  Vernell mashed out her cigarette and looked up at him. “Well, try not to interrupt me when I’m writing.”

  “All right. I hope things work out for Zeke and the beautiful, untamed what’s-her-name.”

  “Maddie.”

  “Nice name,” Rhodes said.

  “She’s a nice girl,” Vernell said. She smiled. “Most of the time.”

  19

  RHODES DROVE FROM VERNELL’S HOUSE TO THE LATE TY Berry’s place, an old brick home with a neatly trimmed and edged yard that Rhodes envied, considering the usual ragged state of his own lawn.

  Berry’s cousin answered the door. She was about fifty, short, with blondish hair. She didn’t seem overly concerned that Berry was dead. Her name was Cathy Miller.

  “He was my cousin on my father’s side, and we never saw each other much,” she told Rhodes after taking him into a living room that made Vernell Lindsey’s look positively slovenly by comparison. Obviously Ty Berry was a man who liked to keep things clean and in perfect order. His pickup had been nearly spotless.

  “You knew him, though,” Rhodes said.

  “Oh, sure. We visited here some when I was a kid. Ty was a little younger than I was, and he was a little priss even then. It’s okay to call him a priss, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t mind. But I’m not sure what you mean by it.”

  “Oh, just that Ty was always afraid to get dirty. Wouldn’t even go barefoot in the summertime, didn’t want to walk on the ground without his shoes on. Look at this house. Did you ever see anything like it?”

  Rhodes looked around. He had known people who were even more obsessed with neatness than Ty had been, but that wasn’t what Ty’s cousin wanted to hear. So Rhodes said, “I guess not.”

  “Of course you haven’t. Why would anyone want to kill a man like Ty? All he wanted was to have things in their places and to preserve what he could of the past.”

  “I don’t know why anyone would kill him,” Rhodes said. “That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

  “Well, I’m afraid I can’t help you. Ty and I talked about once a year, if that often, and we saw each other even less. I have no idea what might have been going on in his life.”

  “Is it all right with you if I look around the house?” Rhodes asked.

  “Be my guest. But you won’t find anything. This place is cleaner than a hound’s tooth and twice as slick.”

/>   Rhodes thanked her and had a look around anyway. He didn’t find anything of interest, however. Berry seemed to have been one of those people who, in spite of his interest in history, didn’t hang on to things. There were no collections, unless you counted the five framed pictures of county courthouses. There were only a few clothes hanging in the closets and folded carefully in the chest of drawers. There were some nonfiction books on Texas topics, famous ones like Dobie’s Coronado’s Children and The Longhorns, Graves’s Goodbye to a River, and Lea’s The Brave Bulls, but they hardly appeared to have been read.

  Rhodes flipped through several of them to see if they were valuable first editions. They weren’t. The margins occasionally had penciled notes in Berry’s hand, but Rhodes couldn’t make anything of them. One typical note in The Brave Bulls said, “L is R about this.”

  Rhodes thought a meticulous man like Berry might have kept a diary, but there was no sign of one. There was nothing written down anywhere that would help Rhodes: nothing about cemeteries, about the buildings downtown, about Faye Knape, or about Vernell Lindsey.

  He looked at Berry’s computer, which was located in a small bedroom that Berry had fixed up as an office. Rhodes didn’t know much about computers, but he’d learned enough from Hack to know how to turn it on and search through the word processing program for information relating to cemeteries. He found a good bit, but nothing that was of any use. There were also a number of files relating to the Sons and Daughters of Texas, but none of them was any help. And there was nothing at all about the buildings, Faye, or Vernell. Rhodes thought he might have Ruth come out and check the computer later if he didn’t turn up anything in the normal course of the investigation, but for now he’d assume that what he’d found on it was all there was.

  Rhodes left the office and thanked Ms. Miller for letting him look through the house.

  “You’re not going to find out who killed him, are you?” she said.

  “Oh, I’ll find out,” Rhodes said. “I usually do.”

  She looked at him as if she didn’t believe it in the least, but she didn’t say anything. So Rhodes went on out to his car.

  Rhodes spent the rest of the afternoon talking to some of the Sons and Daughters of Texas that he hadn’t talked to previously. Not a one of them could think of any reason for Ty Berry’s death or name a single enemy that he might have had. And like the others Rhodes had interviewed, all of them mentioned that the chief suspects had to be whoever was looting the cemeteries. They were no help at all, so Rhodes went back to the jail to see if anything had happened in his absence.

  “Not much,” Hack told him. “Unless you count a little wreck or two.”

  “Anyone hurt?”

  “Nope, so I wouldn’t count ‘em, myself.”

  “Who handled them?”

  “Ruth took care of things.”

  Rhodes said he wouldn’t count them, then. Ruth wouldn’t have left any loose ends.

  “There’s something I want her to check on for me,” Rhodes said. “Have her go by the courthouse tomorrow and see who owned those old buildings downtown. The ones that are on the sidewalk now.”

  “I’ll tell her. What’s that all about?”

  “Ty Berry was looking into it. It might have something to do with what happened to him.”

  Lawton was lurking around in the background, occasionally pushing his broom. He was clearly listening to the conversation, and Rhodes knew something was going on. He also knew he’d have to wait until Hack and Lawton were ready to tell him what it was. Sooner or later, they would. Rhodes went to his desk and looked around on it for the forms he needed to fill out.

  “Ain’t you gonna tell him about the ghost?” Lawton asked.

  “Not again,” Rhodes said.

  “Depends on what you mean by again,” Hack said.

  “I mean in the jail.”

  “Well, it wasn’t here,” Hack said. “But it’s not a different ghost. It’s the same one.”

  “Someone saw it again?”

  Lawton shook his head. “Nope.”

  Rhodes counted to ten under his breath. “What, then?”

  “The word’s out all over town,” Lawton said.

  “Yep,” Hack said. “Surprised you ain’t heard about it.”

  “I haven’t, though,” Rhodes said. “And I’m beginning to wonder if I ever will.”

  Lawton gave Hack a significant look. “Touchy, ain’t he? Wonder if ever’thing’s all right at home.”

  Hack sighed and looked at Rhodes. “I hope so. I like Ivy a lot. I’d hate to see anything bust you two up.”

  “The ghost,” Rhodes said. “Tell me about the ghost.”

  “Oh, yeah. Well, it’s the same ghost. It’s just that the word on the street is that Ty Berry’s come back to haunt the graveyard. Folks’re sayin’ he’ll walk the night until his killer’s been brought to justice. They say he told you that last night in the graveyard.”

  “Told me? When would he do that?”

  “When you went out there to talk to him after those kids spotted him. Seems you two had quite a conversation.”

  “Good grief,” Rhodes said.

  “Yep,” Lawton said. “That’s kinda what I thought. But you know how people are, ‘specially when something supernatural shows up in the cemetery. Ty’s ghost is the talk of the town.”

  “That’s just great,” Rhodes said. “I don’t suppose you have any other good news you forgot to mention to me.”

  “Don’t think so,” Hack said. “Not unless you mean the dope.”

  Rhodes sat up straighter in his chair. “Dope? What dope? As in drugs?”

  “You said you weren’t gonna count them wrecks,” Hack said. “Remember?”

  Someday, Rhodes thought, he was probably going to strangle Hack. But when he did, what would the county do for a dispatcher? They were never going to find someone like Hack, someone who didn’t have much of a life outside the jail, who was willing to work for a small wage, and who even slept in the jail most nights to be sure he was there when the calls came in. So Rhodes would control himself.

  “Maybe I made a mistake,” he said.

  “Could be,” Lawton said.

  “Sure could,” Hack said to Rhodes. “You never know what’s gonna be in some car that’s been in a wreck. I remember one time you found a pistol lyin’ in the front seat of a car that’d had a little fender bender, and while you were there at the scene you got a call that somebody’d robbed a convenience store just before the wreck. Didn’t take you long to figure that one out.”

  “But Ruth didn’t find any guns this time,” Lawton said. “Just that dope.”

  Hack nodded. “That’s right. As in drugs.”

  A less patient man would just shoot them both, Rhodes thought. But he couldn’t do that. It wasn’t that he was so patient. It was just that he was sworn to uphold the law, even in the face of the aggravation provided by two old men.

  “So Ruth found some drugs,” he said. “Where, when, what kind?”

  “In a car,” Lawton said.

  “That was in a wreck,” Hack added.

  Rhodes took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and said, “I gathered that much. Where in the car and what kind of drugs?”

  “Meth,” Hack said.

  “Ice,” Lawton chimed in.

  “Crank.”

  “Speed.”

  Hack grinned. “Crystal.”

  “This isn’t a synonym game,” Rhodes told them.

  Hack tried to twist his face into a contrite look and didn’t quite make it.

  “I guess you’re right,” he said. “Ruth said the stuff was in plain sight, thanks to the glove box falling open in the crash. It was in a little-bitty plastic bag.”

  “How much was there?” Rhodes asked.

  “Ruth’s gonna bring it in. She said maybe a quarter pound.”

  That would have been worth around two hundred and fifty dollars or so, Rhodes thought, and it was probably cut. Meth dealers would cut t
he powder with whatever they happened to have, anything from talcum to rat poison to dog-worming pills.

  “Did she test it?” Rhodes asked.

  “Yep. With that little portable deal y’all carry in the cars. It’s the real thing, all right.”

  “What about the driver?”

  “Ruth says he didn’t notice at first it was lyin’ there, but when he did, he took off runnin’, faster than if his hair was on fire.”

  Rhodes thought about the way amphetamines could affect someone’s body chemistry. He thought about how fast the ghost had been running.

  “Ruth couldn’t go after him,” Hack went on, “because there was still somebody in the other car. But she got his license. Name’s Burt Trask.”

  “Never heard of him,” Rhodes said.

  “He’s from out of the county, but it’s a good bet he bought the stuff around here. When you catch up with him, you can ask him. That’s assumin’ you can catch him. From the way Ruth talked, he might be runnin’ yet. Heck, he might be in Mexico by now.”

  “Panama, maybe,” Lawton said.

  Hack nodded. “Brazil.”

  “What about an APB?” Rhodes asked.

  “Ruth already got me to do that,” Hack told him.

  “I bet I know just about where Trask got that stuff,” Lawton said.

  Rhodes didn’t take the bet.

  “Rapper,” he said.

  20

  METHAMPHETAMINE HAD NEVER REALLY BEEN A PROBLEM in Blacklin County, but Rhodes knew about it, all right. For years, the drug had been made mostly in rural areas because the labs for its manufacture created a powerful smell that was a dead giveaway. Meth labs were easy to find in cities, but in the open country, it was a different matter. They were easy to find if you got close to them, but first you had to get close.

  The smell wasn’t the only drawback. The manufacturing process also created large amounts of toxic waste. In a city it could be poured into the storm drains and sewers, but that could also lead to getting caught. In the country, you could put it in fifty-five-gallon drums and stack them in a barn.

  The fumes that resulted from cooking the meth could be poisonous. More than one meth lab had been shut down not because it was discovered by the law but because the amateur chemists inside it had all died from inhaling their product. It was easier to get good ventilation in the country.