Ghost of a Chance

by Bill Crider

Hack gave him a hurt look. “I’m already workin’ on that,” he said.

  24

  WHEN RHODES STOPPED HIS CAR IN FRONT OF FAYE Knape’s house, nothing appeared to be wrong or out of place. It was a beautiful day. The sun was shining, there were big fluffy white clouds in the sky, and sparrows were flickering in and out of the trees in Faye’s yard.

  Rhodes got out of the car and looked down the driveway at the garage. The door was up, and Rhodes could see the rear end of Faye’s car, a seven-year-old Pontiac.

  “Sheriff Rhodes,” someone called. “Are you Sheriff Rhodes?”

  Rhodes turned around and saw a woman coming across the street. She was wrapped up in a purple flannel housecoat and wore fuzzy pink slippers. She had a coffee cup in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

  “Are you Sheriff Rhodes?” she asked again when she reached him.

  “That’s me,” he said. “How can I help you?”

  “I’ve seen your picture in the paper. I thought I recognized you, but I wanted to be sure. I’m Melva Keeler, and I live across the street there.”

  She pointed with her cigarette, and Rhodes looked over at a dilapidated frame house that didn’t appear to have been painted since his Edsel was new.

  And Melva Keeler appeared to have been living there at least that long and probably longer. She had untidy gray hair that she had carelessly pinned up on her head and wore no makeup to cover the dark circles under her eyes.

  She took a drag on her cigarette and said, “I should have called you yesterday, but I didn’t really think it was necessary. Now I’m not so sure.”

  “Why not?” Rhodes asked.

  “Because every morning, Faye comes out and gets her newspaper about the same time I do. We always say something, you know, ‘Good morning,’ or whatever. But not today. Look.”

  She pointed with her cigarette again, this time at the Dallas Morning News that lay on the sidewalk not far from where they were standing.

  “You mentioned something about yesterday,” Rhodes said.

  “It was awful,” Melva said. “I was sitting on the porch reading a book when it happened.”

  “What happened?”

  “It was really a coincidence, since the book I was reading was Wild Texas Wind. Do you believe in coincidences, Sheriff?”

  “Not usually.”

  “Neither do I, but I guess that’s what you’d have to call it. There I was, sitting on the porch and reading that book, when who should drive up but Vernell Lindsey. Did you know she wrote a book?”

  Rhodes said that he knew.

  Melva took a sip of coffee and a drag from her cigarette. The cigarette was smoked down almost to the filter, and she dropped it to the sidewalk and stepped on it with one of the fuzzy slippers. Rhodes thought briefly about asking her if she was aware of the local littering laws but decided it wouldn’t do any good.

  “I think it’s just wonderful that someone from Clearview has the talent to write a book,” Melva said. “Don’t you?”

  “Sure. And you say Vernell was here yesterday?”

  “That’s right, and I could tell as soon as she got out of the car that she was hopping mad. She slammed the door and practically ran up to Faye’s porch.”

  Rhodes had a bad feeling about where this conversation was heading, and he wondered if he might have been responsible in some way. But he was sure he hadn’t mentioned any names to Vernell Lindsey.

  “Faye came to the door,” Melva went on, “and Vernell just started right in on her, yelling real loud. You can guess how much Faye liked that.”

  Rhodes’s guess would have been that Faye didn’t like it at all, but Melva didn’t give him a chance to say so.

  “Faye got red in the face and started yelling right back at her. I was afraid they were both going to have strokes right there on Faye’s front porch.”

  Melva paused and looked into her coffee cup. It was nearly empty, and she turned it upside down to pour the last couple of drops out on the sidewalk.

  “Could you hear what they were saying?” Rhodes asked.

  Melva looked down at the two dark spots on the walk and said, “No. They were yelling, but they were too far away to hear. And then they went inside.”

  “How long were they in there?”

  “It must have been fifteen minutes. I managed to get quite a few pages of the book read, but I’m a very fast reader. When Vernell came out, I walked to the front of the porch and waved to her. I wanted to tell her how much I was enjoying her book. I thought that if she was a little out of sorts, a compliment might help. I’ve found that compliments often do.”

  She looked at Rhodes as if expecting some kind of compliment from him. He didn’t know what to say, since he wasn’t all that fond of fuzzy pink slippers.

  “Did it help?” he asked.

  “I didn’t get a chance to say anything. She just jumped in her car and tore out of here like a bat. You know the kind of bat I mean?”

  Rhodes said that he knew.

  “And now Faye hasn’t come out for her newspaper. She’s never let it stay there that long, not even when she had the flu last fall. I should have called you yesterday.”

  “Maybe she’s just sleeping late,” Rhodes said. “I’ll check.”

  “All right,” Melva said.

  Rhodes went up to the porch. Before he knocked on the door, he looked back, and Melva was still standing there in her robe and fuzzy slippers, watching him. He wished she’d go back to her own house, but he didn’t feel like telling her that.

  He looked around the porch. It was very quiet, and there were no cats in the windows. A sparrow fluttered in a nearby tree. Rhodes knocked.

  There was no answer, but then he hadn’t really been expecting one. He tried the doorknob, which turned easily in his hand. The door wasn’t locked.

  He opened it and went inside and called Faye’s name. His voice echoed off the hardwood floors and bounced down the walls of the hallway.

  There was no sign of the cats, but Rhodes knew they were there somewhere. He could feel his eyes beginning to itch already.

  He walked down the short hall to the living room. Faye Knape was lying on the floor, her knees drawn up, her mouth open as if in a scream. Her forehead had been crushed. The cut-glass vase lay not far away, and the dried flowers were scattered on the floor.

  25

  RHODES FORGOT ABOUT HIS EYES AND LOOKED AROUND the living room. Nothing other than the vase seemed to be out of place; aside from that, the room looked exactly as he’d left it.

  He turned and went back outside, where Melva Keeler was still standing on the walk. She watched him coming toward her with wide eyes.

  “Is Faye ... all right?” she asked.

  “No,” Rhodes said. “She’s not. Do you know what time it was when Vernell Lindsey came by yesterday?”

  Melva’s eyes went vague. Then they cleared and she said, “There was still enough light to read by, but it was already getting late. It must have been around four-thirty. Maybe a little later. Should I go call an ambulance?”

  “I’ll take care of that,” Rhodes said. “There’s no hurry.”

  “You mean that Faye is . . . dead?”

  “That’s right. Do you remember whether anyone else came by after Vernell left?”

  “I went inside right after she left. It was getting a little chilly. And then I watched the news and ate supper. After that I watched a rerun of Murder, She Wrote. I just love Jessica Fletcher. Faye does, too. Sometimes we’d talk about the show when we picked up our newspapers.”

  Her eyes filled with tears, and she brushed them with the sleeve of her robe.

  “I guess I won’t be talking to her about anything anymore.” She paused. “Did she have a stroke?”

  “I don’t think so,” Rhodes said, wishing it was as simple as that.

  “What was it, then?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Did Vernell... do something?”

  “I’m not sure about that, ei
ther.”

  “Oh, dear,” Melva said, and then her face changed as another thought struck her. “Who’s going to take care of Faye’s boys?”

  “The boys?” Rhodes said, but then he remembered. “You mean the cats?”

  “Yes. Someone will have to take care of them. Faye treated them just like members of her family. And someone has to feed them right now. They’re probably starving, and I’m sure they wonder what’s happened to her.”

  “I’ll feed them,” Rhodes said.

  “But who’s going to take care of them after that?”

  Not me, Rhodes thought. He said, “I don’t know.”

  Rhodes called Hack and said that he wouldn’t be going out to see the Packers for a while. He asked him to send Buddy Reynolds to Vernell Lindsey’s house.

  “Somethin’ wrong?” Hack asked.

  “You could say that,” Rhodes told him. “Faye’s dead. Looks like somebody killed her.”

  “That’s bad, all right. Faye was a little gripey, but she was okay. I’ll get Buddy out to Vernell’s. What’s he supposed to do there?”

  Rhodes thought it over. “Send him by here instead. I’ll talk to Vernell myself.”

  “All right. ‘Fore I let you go, though, there’s somethin’ you need to know.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You remember those buildings you wanted me to check on?”

  Rhodes had to admit that the buildings had slipped his mind. Finding Faye like that had pushed everything else right out of his head.

  “What about them?” he asked.

  “Well, I guess you could say it’s a kind of a coincidence, you wantin’ me to find out who owned ‘em and all.”

  There were getting to be too many coincidences, Rhodes thought.

  “What kind of coincidence?” he asked.

  “The kind where it turns out that they were owned by Faye Knape,” Hack said.

  Hack went on to explain that Faye hadn’t bought them or anything like that. They’d been left to her by her husband at his death. He’d owned them under a corporate name, the Wendigo Corporation, of which Faye had been the vice president and treasurer.

  “It was easy to check on,” Hack had said. “Since there’d already been somebody going through the records. Mary Cate works with that stuff in the courthouse, and she knew all about it. And guess who was the one that’d been checking it all out?”

  Rhodes knew the answer to that one. Vernell Lindsey had told him.

  “Ty Berry,” he said.

  “Right the first time. What d’you think it all means?”

  “I don’t have any idea,” Rhodes said.

  He thought about it while he leaned against the county car and waited for Buddy Reynolds to arrive. Ty had been mighty upset about the buildings, and, according to Vernell, he might even have been considering a lawsuit against the owners for negligence or whatever other charges a good lawyer could come up with. Rhodes was sure there were any number of things even a mediocre lawyer could think of if there was a chance of getting some money out of the deal.

  Had Ty told Faye that he knew she owned the buildings? If he had, that was plenty of motive for her to kill him right there. The lawsuit would have ruined her personally even if it hadn’t affected her financially. It would have destroyed her credibility with the Historical Society, and that would have been far worse from Faye’s point of view than losing every penny she had in the bank.

  But if Faye had killed Ty, who had killed Faye? Vernell Lindsey?

  Right now it looked as if Vernell were the culprit, all right, which was too bad. Rhodes liked Vernell in spite of her bad temper, and he thought it would be a shame for her to go to prison just as she’d finally achieved her life’s ambition and published a novel. On the other hand, maybe she could use jail time to write a book about women in prison. Rhodes thought about a bad movie he’d seen once. Chained Heat. Somehow he couldn’t see Vernell in it. She wasn’t the Sybil Danning type.

  He couldn’t see Vernell as a killer, either, no matter how much it appeared that she might be. Rhodes knew better than to rule someone out merely because of his own feelings, however. He’d been wrong before.

  At that point, Buddy Reynolds pulled up and got out of the county car. Buddy was thin, with a narrow face, narrow shoulders, and a narrow mind. He didn’t approve of smoking, drinking, or public displays of affection. If it had been up to him, all three would have been classified as felony crimes. But the thing Rhodes liked best about him was that he didn’t let his narrowness interfere with the way he did his job.

  “Hack tells me you got a problem,” Buddy said, squinting in the morning sun. He squinted in the evenings, too.

  “It’s Faye Knape,” Rhodes told him. “Somebody’s killed her.”

  Buddy’s eyes narrowed even further. “You know who it was yet?”

  “Nope. That’s where you come in. I want you to talk to all the neighbors, except for Melva Keeler. She lives right across the street, and I’ve already talked to her. I want you to find out if they saw anybody visit Faye’s house yesterday afternoon or evening, from around four o’clock on. After you’ve done that, you go see Ida Louise Tabor and ask about last night’s Chickenfoot game. Faye was supposed to be there, but she wasn’t. Ida Louise says she called her. Find out when she called and how many times she called. Ask if anybody in the group drove by to check on Faye. If somebody did, find out who it was.”

  Rhodes paused to give Buddy a chance to ask questions, but Buddy only looked at him.

  “When you’ve got all that taken care of, go back to the jail and write up a report for me. I’ll get by there and read it later. Or if I’m still here, you can just tell me.”

  “What’re you gonna do here?” Buddy asked.

  “Search the house,” Rhodes said.

  Before he searched, Rhodes fed the cats. The house had a small enclosed back porch, just large enough for a washing machine, a dryer, and six cat bowls, three of which held water and three of which were for dry cat food. There was a bag of the dry food in a cabinet over the washer, so Rhodes got it down and put some in each of the bowls.

  One of the cats came out of hiding when he heard the sound and poked his head around the edge of the doorframe. It was a big gray tabby, and when he saw Rhodes, he disappeared. Neither of the others showed up. Rhodes figured they were still under a bed somewhere. He put the food sack back in the cabinet and looked at the water bowls. They were all about half full, but Rhodes decided that the cats would like it better if it was fresh, so he refilled the bowls in the kitchen. When he was finished, he sneezed twice. His eyes were itching furiously, but he didn’t rub them. Resisting the urge, he went to look at the rest of the house.

  First, he took another look at the living room and Faye’s body. He’d brought the Polaroid camera from the county car, and he took some photos to show the position of the body relative to the vase, though he didn’t think they’d prove useful, especially the two he’d taken when he was sneezing. The vase, if it had been smooth, might have provided some fingerprints, but it was cut glass, all pointy rough edges that wouldn’t be any help at all.

  When he was finished taking pictures and looking over the room, Rhodes called Clyde Ballinger and told him what had happened. Ballinger said that he’d be there shortly, and Rhodes went to get some tissues from the box on the end table. He sneezed a couple of times and moved on to the rest of the house to see what he could find.

  He located two of the cats, one of whom was in a closet with a half-open door. He came streaking out when Rhodes opened the door all the way, and Rhodes didn’t see him again.

  There was nothing out of the ordinary in any of the rooms except for the back bedroom that Faye Knape was using for an office. In one corner of the room there was an unlocked gun cabinet. Rhodes remembered that Faye had mentioned selling her late husband’s guns, and when he opened the doors on the cabinet, it was empty. There were places where pistols had been mounted and where rifles and a double-barreled sho
tgun had stood. The inside was free of dust, as if Faye had recently cleaned it.

  There was a computer on a desk in the middle of the room, but Rhodes didn’t find anything helpful on the computer’s hard drive or on any of the disks that Faye had filed neatly away in a plastic box.

  What he did find was in a drawer in the computer desk, one that slid open easily when he pulled it, as if it had been recently oiled.

  Looking inside, Rhodes saw a new ink cartridge for the printer, an instruction manual for the scanner, and a couple of blank disks. Rhodes wasn’t surprised to see them.

  What he was surprised to see was the small two-shot .22 derringer that lay half hidden under a blank white memo pad.

  26

  RHODES PICKED UP THE GUN WITH HIS FINGERTIPS AND sniffed it. It had been fired fairly recently, probably within the last couple of days. So what did that mean? One answer, certainly the most obvious, was that Faye had killed Ty Berry and that Rhodes was holding the murder weapon in his hand. He put it in an evidence bag and marked the bag carefully. He didn’t want any mistakes.

  He was putting the bag in his car when Clyde Ballinger arrived, along with his two helpers.

  “This is pretty bad, Sheriff,” Ballinger said. “Two outstanding citizens dead within a couple of days. What’s Clearview coming to?”

  Rhodes said that he didn’t know.

  “Was she shot, like Ty?”

  “No. Somebody hit her with something, probably a flower vase.”

  “Any idea who did it?”

  “You know better than to ask me that,” Rhodes said.

  “Sure, but you never know when I’ll sneak one by you. This is going to have the county commissioners in an uproar, you know.”

  Rhodes nodded. He wasn’t worried about the commissioners. They liked to have everything solved neatly and quickly, but things didn’t always work out that way.

  “The paper’s going to be all over it, too,” Ballinger said. “I mean, we’ve lost the president of both the county’s historical associations. This is big news, like there’s some kind of weird serial killer on the loose. If Ed McBain were telling the story, the Deaf Man would be behind it.”