Murder of a Beauty Shop Queen

by Bill Crider

  A couple of yellow jackets buzzed around a nest that they were starting just above the door. If the men were in the building, they were going to be hard to find, and it was going to be dangerous to look for them. Rhodes glanced at the yellow jackets. They were dangerous, too.

  Danger is my business, Rhodes thought. That was why they paid him the mediocre bucks, so he started down the snaky aisle to his left. In places the metal was higher than his head, with piles of engine blocks, car fenders, refrigerators, air conditioners that had been gutted for their copper, metal lockers, army surplus ammo boxes, and anything else that was made of metal. There were a couple of piles of plastic and paper. Rhodes saw plastic buckets, bags of bottles, cookie containers, and even some flowerpots in huge clear-plastic bags. The back wall was lined with batteries from trucks, cars, and tractors.

  Rhodes stood still and listened. He didn’t hear a thing, not the sound of the yellow jackets, not the clink of a shoe against a tie rod, nothing. Maybe the yellow jackets had been frightened by his pistol.

  “I guess there’s nobody here, Deputy,” he said, a little too loudly. “Let’s check the outside.”

  It was an old trick, one that had been used since long before Rhodes was born, but it had been around for so many years because sometimes it worked.

  Rhodes started for the door, but just before he got there he stepped behind a couple of refrigerators without doors and stopped. He squatted down to wait, thinking about the two men he’d chased. He hadn’t had a good look at either of them, but they were both Hispanic and both young. Odds were that they didn’t have green cards and were just passing through town on their way to somewhere else. Otherwise they’d have found better accommodations.

  He could understand why they’d run. They wouldn’t want to have any dealings with the law, whether they’d had anything to do with Lynn Ashton’s death or not. Rhodes thought it was likely that they hadn’t. If they’d killed her, they wouldn’t have stayed around, and they certainly wouldn’t have stayed right across the street.

  They might have seen something, however, if not a person, then a car or a pickup. Any information would help.

  Rhodes thought about Buddy, searching the dark warehouse. It seemed to Rhodes that the men wouldn’t have gone there. They wouldn’t have been familiar with it, and they wouldn’t have wanted to stumble around in the dark. They were in the junkyard, all right, either in the building where Rhodes waited or nearby, if they hadn’t already gone on somewhere else.

  A bird that Rhodes hadn’t seen earlier fluttered near the roof and flew out a broken window. Something must have spooked it, and just as Rhodes had that thought, he heard a soft noise that sounded like the scrape of a shoe on concrete. He straightened a bit but not far enough that his head showed above the refrigerator.

  Someone whispered, but Rhodes couldn’t make out the words. He waited. The seconds stretched out. Someone whispered again, closer. This time Rhodes could hear enough to know that the language was Spanish.

  Two men edged into sight. “Buenos días,” Rhodes said as they passed by the refrigerator. He held his pistol so they could see it. “¿Cómo están ustedes?”

  “Mierda,” one of the men said, which wasn’t the polite answer that Rhodes had hoped for.

  The speaker was the taller of the two men. His black hair was mostly covered with a Texas Rangers baseball cap, and he wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the Rangers emblem. The other man also wore a T-shirt, but it had a faded Bugs Bunny on the front.

  Both men looked at Rhodes as if they couldn’t quite decide whether to run, jump him, or just give up.

  They didn’t appear to be impressed with his pistol, but Rhodes thought they would have given up anyway, if the shooting hadn’t started.

  Chapter 4

  The shots came from the direction of the warehouse, and Rhodes was distracted just long enough for one of the men to snatch the handle of a five-gallon heavy-duty plastic bucket from the pile of scrap beside him and swing the bucket at Rhodes’s head.

  Rhodes dodged aside, but not far enough. The bucket made a hollow clonk when it connected with his skull. The bucket split down its side, and Rhodes was staggered. He slumped against the refrigerator as the two men bolted out the door.

  Rhodes saw blackness and pinwheeling sparks, and he had to lean against the refrigerator for a short while until the wave of dizziness passed. When it did, he kicked the bucket aside and walked out the door. The sun dazzled his eyes, and he saw nothing of the two men.

  He did hear two more shots from the warehouse, however, so he started to walk as fast as he could in that direction. Running was out of the question.

  When he arrived at the office building, the man he’d spoken to earlier came out the door.

  “Dammit, you said there wouldn’t be any shooting,” he yelled.

  “My plans didn’t work out,” Rhodes told him and went on by without stopping.

  Rhodes walked out of the junkyard and smelled something that might have been a load of dead chickens. He thought for a second that the air from Mount Industry had become fouled again by the chicken farms out there and blanketed the town, but the odor came from one of the Dumpsters.

  As Rhodes crossed the street, two more shots boomed in the warehouse. Rhodes saw a muzzle flash through the doorway, and he hotfooted it over there.

  He flattened himself against the wall and yelled, “Are you all right in there, Deputy?”

  Rhodes had hoped for an answer, but none came.

  “Buddy?” he called. “Let me know if you’re all right.”

  “I’m okay!” Buddy yelled. “I’m coming out!”

  Rhodes waited, and it wasn’t long before Buddy backed out of the warehouse door, stepping down carefully so he wouldn’t fall. He held his revolver in a two-handed grip as if ready to fire it again at any moment.

  “Who’s in there?” Rhodes asked.

  “I didn’t see anybody,” Buddy said. He didn’t lower his pistol and continued to stare into the dark warehouse.

  Rhodes noticed that he was still holding his own pistol. “Then what are you shooting at?”

  “Rats,” Buddy said. He shuddered, though the day was quite warm now. “Giant ones.”

  “How big would that be?” Rhodes asked.

  Buddy held his hands apart. “About the size of a cat. There’s a lot of ’em in there.”

  “How many is a lot?”

  “Maybe a dozen. That I could see. Might be more hiding around in there. Probably are. They were coming at me. I could see their little beady red eyes in the flashlight beam.” Buddy shuddered again. “I don’t like rats.”

  Rhodes didn’t like rats, either, but he wouldn’t shoot at them with a gun the size of the one Buddy carried. A .38 would splatter a rat over a wide area if the bullet hit it right. Or wrong, depending on your point of view.

  “It’s dangerous to shoot in that warehouse,” Rhodes said. “A bullet could ricochet off some of the metal and kill you.”

  Buddy gave him a look that seemed to say that when it came to rats, he considered the risk worth taking.

  “The floor’s wood,” Buddy said. “I shot at them when they were on the floor.”

  Bullets couldn’t hurt the floor, Rhodes knew. It had been built to hold hundreds of bales of cotton. It was as solid and thick as the walls of a frontier fort.

  “When I was a kid,” Buddy said, “my grandmother read me a poem about rats. It was in some old book she had.”

  “‘Three Blind Mice’?” Rhodes asked.

  “No. I wouldn’t have minded if it had been about them getting their tails cut off. This one was about some old-timey guy who did something wrong. Hatto was his name. Anyway, he tried to get away from the rats by hiding in his tower, but they came after him and got him.” Buddy paused and shook himself. “They whetted their teeth on the stones. I remember that part. Then they picked him clean like a chicken. I sure wish she hadn’t read me that poem. I’ve never liked rats since then, and I didn’t like �
��em any even before that.”

  “I don’t blame you,” Rhodes said.

  “It’s the garbage that’s attracting those devils,” Buddy said. “I can smell it from here.”

  “Right,” Rhodes said.

  “They probably come out and scrounge around in it at night,” Buddy went on. “They don’t like the daylight. They’re like vampires.”

  “You mean like Dracula?”

  “It’s not funny,” Buddy said.

  “And I’m not laughing,” Rhodes told him. “Those two men we were chasing got away from me.”

  Buddy lowered his pistol and looked at Rhodes for the first time. “How’d they do that?”

  “Hit me in the head with a bucket.”

  Rhodes reached up with his free hand and felt the left side of his head. He could feel a small knot, but it didn’t hurt much. Maybe nobody would even notice it.

  “Now we can get ’em for assaulting an officer,” Buddy said. “Plus murder.”

  “I wouldn’t be too sure about that last part,” Rhodes said. “I don’t think they’re guilty of that one.”

  “They ran, didn’t they?”

  “Sure, but so would you if you were squatting in an abandoned building and the law came calling.”

  Buddy gave a last look into the warehouse and holstered his pistol. “They didn’t know we were the law.”

  “I expect they’d been looking out the window,” Rhodes said. “They must have seen us in the parking lot across the street.”

  “Maybe so. They’re probably not in the country legally, either.”

  “We don’t know that.”

  “I guess not.” Buddy didn’t look convinced. “What do we do next?”

  “We go see what Ruth’s found out.”

  “Clues,” Buddy said. “What if she didn’t find any?”

  “We do what we always do,” Rhodes said. “We start asking questions and hoping we can find some answers. In fact, you can get started on that as soon as we get back across the tracks.”

  “You have some suspects already?”

  “Not a one, but somebody in those houses up the street might have seen or heard something that will help us. You can ask them.”

  Across the street from the big lot where the hotel building stood were three houses. All three had been there for generations, and while Rhodes had known some of the owners at one time or another, he had no idea who lived in the houses now.

  “Let’s go, then,” Buddy said. He looked toward the houses. “I don’t even know if anybody lives in those places.”

  “You’ll find out,” Rhodes said. He put his pistol back in its hidden holster, straightened up, and started walking.

  “Sure is a sorry excuse for a street,” Buddy said just before they got to the railroad tracks. “I can remember when it was fairly smooth.”

  Rhodes looked down. The pavement was crazed with cracks, and in some places the bare ground showed through. He didn’t know how long it had been since the street had been paved, but he knew it was a long time. All the life had been sucked out of the downtown, and the nearby areas and the businesses had moved out to the highway, trying to get as close to the Walmart as they could. Paving the streets anywhere in the older areas of town was no longer a priority.

  They crossed the tracks and went down the incline. Rhodes noticed that walking downhill seemed to jar his bones more than it had a few years earlier.

  When they got to the cross street, Buddy went over to the houses to begin his questioning, assuming he could find anybody at home. Rhodes walked on back to the Beauty Shack, where Ruth Grady was putting something into the trunk of her car. Sandra Wiley stood by the Suburban, smoking a cigarette and watching Ruth.

  “Find anything?” Rhodes asked the deputy.

  “Nothing that’s going to help us. There are prints on the hair dryer, but I’d bet they’re Lynn’s. I’ll check. There’s not much else.”

  “Did you check the car?”

  “I haven’t had time,” Ruth said. “I’ll get on that right after you tell me what you’ve been up to. Sandra says you and Buddy went tearing off after a couple of squatters from that old building across the street.”

  Rhodes gave her the short version.

  “And they got away?” she said.

  “They got away. On the upside, Buddy didn’t get his bones picked clean by the rats.”

  “Was there any danger of that?”

  “There was if you ask Buddy.”

  Ruth laughed. “Maybe I’ll do that. Do you think those men you chased had anything to do with Lynn?”

  “I doubt it,” Rhodes said. “They were just scared of getting picked up.”

  “They could’ve had another reason to be scared.”

  “Maybe. Was Lynn’s purse in the shop?”

  “No. You think this was a robbery?”

  “I don’t know what to think yet. You go ahead and look over the car. I’ll talk to Sandra for a minute.” He started toward the Suburban, then turned back. “Did you call for an ambulance and the JP?”

  “They’re on the way,” Ruth said.

  * * *

  Sandra lit a cigarette as Rhodes approached.

  “You’re going to smoke up the whole pack before noon,” Rhodes said.

  “I guess I’m nervous,” Sandra said. She brushed at the corners of her eyes with the hand not holding the cigarette. “I still can’t believe this happened. I can’t believe Lynn’s dead.”

  Rhodes didn’t have any comforting words for her. He didn’t think there were any.

  “Remember what it used to be like here in Clearview, Danny?” she asked. “Back when we were in high school? Remember how quiet and peaceful the town was?”

  “It wasn’t all that quiet,” Rhodes said. “We just didn’t know what was going on. Kids never did, not in those days.”

  “At least there was a town then,” Sandra said. “Stores and drugstores, and things going on. Cars on the street. It’s quiet as a graveyard now.” She paused and looked at her shop. “I guess I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “Lynn won’t mind.”

  “No, she won’t, and the quiet’s not real, anyway, not when somebody can come here and kill a girl like Lynn.” Sandra puffed her cigarette, not looking at Rhodes. “It’s a terrible thing, just terrible.”

  “You said you don’t have any idea who might have killed her.”

  “Not a single one, but I’ll think some more about it. I heard what your deputy said about the purse. I’ll bet it was a robbery. I’ll bet those two men across the street killed her for her money and her credit cards.”

  “I doubt it,” Rhodes said. “They wouldn’t have stuck around.”

  “You don’t know what that kind’s like.”

  “What kind is that?”

  “Those illegals. That’s another thing that’s different now. They come here and take our jobs and send the money back home. It doesn’t do the town any good.”

  Rhodes would have said something about that, but he saw the ambulance coming down the street.

  “We’re going to have to keep people out of the shop for a while,” he said. “A few days, probably.”

  “I’m closing for the week,” Sandra said. “People will just have to put up with bad hair.”

  The ambulance parked by the Suburban, and the justice of the peace parked next to the ambulance. The parking lot was getting crowded. Rhodes spoke to the ambulance crew and the JP. Then he told Ruth that he was going to have a look inside the hotel building. “Maybe those men left something behind that will help us find them.”

  “You don’t really believe that,” Ruth said.

  “No, but it never hurts to be sure.”

  Rhodes started across the street just as a car pulled into the parking lot. The driver, a woman Rhodes didn’t know, rolled down her window and asked what was going on.

  “Sandra can tell you,” Rhodes said, and he went on his way.

  Chapter 5

  The room was
cluttered with paper, and it smelled of cigarette smoke, dirty laundry, and fast food. Empty chip bags, candy wrappers, and jerky coverings were scattered all around, along with plastic sandwich containers and hamburger wrappers. Plastic soda bottles lay all over the place, and they would provide some fingerprints. So would some of the empty cigarette packs. Rhodes knew the men must have eaten real meals at some time or other, but there was no evidence of it in the room.

  A couple of thin mattresses lay on the floor. A mound of clothing filled one corner, and a couple of roaches skittered out of it when Rhodes kicked it. Where there were two, there were hundreds more, Rhodes had heard, but he didn’t look for them.

  He didn’t see anything that looked like a woman’s purse anywhere in the room. He’d have Ruth go over everything again, but he didn’t think she’d find any clues to Lynn Ashton’s death.

  Rhodes left that room and took a look in the others. They were even more depressing than the one where the men had stayed. Rhodes wondered if there were any rats in the building. He wouldn’t be surprised if there were. Maybe he could have Buddy come and investigate.

  The floor in one room was rotten. A hole near one wall made walking inside dangerous, so Rhodes didn’t bother to enter. It was time to go.

  He went back down the fire escape and back to the Beauty Shack. The ambulance was gone, and with it the earthly remains of Lynn Ashton. The JP was gone, too, and so was Sandra. Ruth had put the crime-scene tape around the building and was waiting for Rhodes by her car.

  “She’s coming back with a sign to put on the door,” Ruth told Rhodes. “I’m supposed to turn the customers away.”

  “Have you found anything in the car?”

  “Not if you don’t count the things that belong there. No sign of the purse.”

  “We’ll impound the car,” Rhodes said. “You’d better go over to the hotel and have a look at the room where the men stayed. When you’re finished, call Carl Evans. He can secure the door.”

  Evans was a carpenter the department had used before. He’d have to put in a new door with a lock. That wouldn’t keep a determined person out, but it might be enough to hold things for a while.

  “Who owns that building, anyway?” Ruth asked.