by Bill Crider
Hack cut him off. “Clint had what he called his annual marsupial supper. Invited nearly ever’body in Obert. I never went myself, but I heard he had ’possum fixed five or six different ways. You ever eat ’possum, Sheriff?”
Rhodes stood up. He didn’t think he wanted to hear any more about gourmet cooking.
“I never did,” he said. “Where’s Buddy?”
“Prob’ly on patrol. You want me to call him?”
“Might be a good idea,” Rhodes said. “Tell him he can meet me at Lonnie Wallace’s house.”
* * *
It was a lot quieter in Lonnie’s neighborhood than it had been earlier in the day. Nobody was mowing a lawn or blowing the grass off a driveway. Rhodes figured everybody was inside having lunch or off having a burger at the Dairy Queen. He was pretty sure nobody was having raccoon pie or a tasty ’possum dish.
Lonnie came to the door and let Rhodes in.
“I was just about to cook myself a hamburger,” Lonnie said. “You want one? I can throw another patty on the grill.”
“No, thanks,” Rhodes said. “We have some things we need to talk about.”
“I thought we’d gone over everything,” Lonnie said. He looked a bit apprehensive. “I’ve told you all I know about Jeff and Lynn.”
“Not quite all,” Rhodes said. “There’s one other thing.”
“I don’t know what it could be,” Lonnie said.
“You can go ahead and grill that burger,” Rhodes said. “I can talk while you do.”
“Okay,” Lonnie said.
They went through the house and out on the patio. Lonnie had a little hibachi that he’d set near the table. Rhodes sat down in one of the lawn chairs while Lonnie put charcoal in the hibachi.
“You’re sure you don’t want anything?” Lonnie asked.
Rhodes said he was sure, and Lonnie put starter fluid on the briquettes. He put away the fluid, then touched a match to the charcoal. When he was sure it was burning properly, Lonnie sat in the other chair.
“It’ll take a few minutes for the coals to get ready,” Lonnie said. He looked out at his lawn. “Sometimes Jeff would come over, and I’d grill burgers for the two of us.”
Rhodes was saved from having to respond to that because Buddy appeared from around the corner of the house.
“Who’s that?” Lonnie asked.
“That’s Deputy Buddy Warren,” Rhodes said. “How’d you find us, Buddy?”
“Smelled the charcoal,” Buddy said. “Thought you might be back here. Hope I’m not interrupting lunch.”
“Lonnie was just about to grill himself a hamburger,” Rhodes said. “I told him this wouldn’t take long.”
“What’s going on here, Sheriff?” Lonnie said. “Are you going to arrest me? Is that what the deputy’s here for?”
“We’ll just see how it goes,” Rhodes said.
“I don’t think I’m hungry anymore,” Lonnie said, looking at the charcoal.
Rhodes couldn’t blame him for losing his appetite. “You’ve been holding out on me, Lonnie.”
“No,” Lonnie said. “I’ve told you everything you asked.”
Rhodes shook his head. “Not quite. I think I know pretty much what happened, but there’s still one thing I haven’t quite figured out. I have a guess. You can tell me if I’m right. It’s about the money. Lynn had a reason for wanting it, and you know it. Now’s the time to tell me.”
“I don’t know. Not really.”
“She must have talked to you about it. Here’s what I think. I think she wanted to open her own shop. Maybe she even wanted you to go to work for her.”
Rhodes was only half guessing. Everything he’d heard added up to the idea that Lynn might have been leaving the Beauty Shack.
Lonnie seemed to shrink in his chair.
“She didn’t have anybody special,” Rhodes said. “She didn’t even care that much about the men she was dating. She just wanted money, and she was going to use it to go out on her own.”
Lonnie straightened. “It wasn’t her fault. She tried to get a loan. The banks wouldn’t even talk to her. They blamed the economy. They said it wasn’t because she was a woman, but I’m sure that was it. Or part of it.”
“So she tried to get the money from another source,” Rhodes said. “I can understand that, I guess, but she should’ve found a better way.”
“Name one,” Lonnie said. “Money just wasn’t coming into the shop the way it used to. She couldn’t save enough to start her own place, and even if I’d gone in with her, she might not have had enough.” He stopped and looked at Rhodes. “Anyway, I was scared to try. I’ve been with Sandra too long. I didn’t want to take the risk.”
Buddy stood by listening. He didn’t say anything, but his hand stayed near the butt of his pistol.
“Lynn wanted to take the risk, though,” Rhodes said. “What would’ve happened to the Beauty Shack without her?”
“Sandra would’ve lost a lot of business,” Lonnie said. “Especially if I went with Lynn. But I wasn’t going to.”
“So Lynn had to keep it a secret,” Rhodes said.
“She couldn’t tell Sandra. If she had, Sandra would’ve tried to stop her. Lynn was a little paranoid about it. She even thought Sandra might have suspected something and talked to the banks so they wouldn’t lend her any money. That’s crazy, I know, but she mentioned it to me.”
“She must have finally said something to Sandra,” Rhodes said, “and Sandra didn’t like it. Maybe she even lost her temper. Or maybe Lynn did. There was a fight.”
Everything pointed that way. Sandra’s nervousness was clear from the way she’d been smoking. She’d even been sure to tell Rhodes that she’d touched some of the things in the Beauty Shack, and she’d tried very hard to make him believe that Guillermo and Jorge had killed Lynn.
It also explained why the two men hadn’t seen any cars over at the Beauty Shack when Lynn was killed. Well, that wasn’t quite true. They’d seen cars, all right, but they hadn’t noticed them because they were just the ones that were often there. Lynn’s and Sandra’s.
“I don’t think Sandra would kill anybody,” Lonnie said, but his voice wavered. “She liked Lynn.”
Rhodes didn’t doubt it, but he also knew what could happen when tempers got out of hand. A jab with a pair of scissors, a hair dryer swung at the end of a long cord. Bad things could happen, and had.
“One other thing you haven’t told me,” Rhodes said.
“What?”
“Jeff was Lynn’s last appointment on the day she was killed. You said you were the one who called him to let him know.”
“Yes,” Lonnie said.
His voice was so low that Rhodes could hardly hear him.
“Somebody must have called him to cancel the appointment,” Rhodes said. “I don’t think it was Lynn. Was it?”
“No.”
“He told you who it was, though, didn’t he.”
“Yes.”
“It was Sandra, wasn’t it.”
“Yes,” Lonnie said. It was no more than a whisper.
Chapter 27
Lonnie told Rhodes that he hadn’t thought anything about it at first, not even after Jeff was killed. It was the usual way of things. Somebody couldn’t keep an appointment, and Sandra would call the client to let him know.
“You can see why I didn’t think about it,” Lonnie said. “Can’t you?”
“If you had, Jeff might not have been killed,” Rhodes said.
“I know.”
Lonnie started to sniffle. Buddy tore a paper towel off a roll that sat on the table and handed it to Lonnie. Lonnie took it and wiped his face.
“Sandra got worried,” Rhodes said. “After she thought about it, she knew she shouldn’t have called Jeff. She only did it because she didn’t want him to come in and find the body. She hadn’t decided what to do about that yet.”
Buddy spoke up for the first time. “She just left Lynn’s body there?”
�
�That’s right,” Rhodes said. “Then she worked out a plan. She’d come in the next morning, pretend to find the body, and call it in. She took the purse to make it look like a robbery, and she tried to put the blame on the men living across the street.”
Rhodes thought that Sandra knew about Frankie and his friends’ habit of looking through the trash for things and that she’d planted the purse behind Tyler’s store in hopes that Rhodes would think they’d left it there or that they’d tossed it there after killing Lynn. She should’ve thought about taking things out of the purse first.
“If that was her plan, it didn’t work very well,” Buddy said.
“No,” Rhodes said, “it didn’t.”
“She didn’t have to kill Jeff,” Lonnie said. “He wouldn’t have said anything.”
“He might have after he worked things out,” Rhodes said. “You’re the one who should have told, though. You knew all this, but you kept it quiet.”
“I couldn’t believe it was Sandra,” Lonnie said. “I still can’t believe it. I didn’t want to say anything that might get her in trouble if she was innocent.”
“You have to trust the system,” Buddy said, always ready with a cliché.
“Ha,” Lonnie said. “Trust the system. Do you ever read the papers? Do you know how many death row inmates have been released in this state in the last few years because they shouldn’t have been there in the first place?”
Rhodes stood up. “None of those were from this county.”
“I don’t care. I wasn’t going to take a chance. I still don’t think Sandra did it.”
“I do,” Rhodes said.
* * *
Rhodes parked in front of the Wileys’ house. Buddy parked right behind him. When they started up the cracked walk, Buddy said, “You think Lonnie called ’em to say we were on the way?”
“I told him not to,” Rhodes said.
“Maybe he did it anyway.”
“I don’t think so. He’d be too scared. He still thinks we might arrest him.”
“Well, we might.”
“Not likely,” Rhodes said.
He rang the doorbell, and Jimmy answered it. He was dressed just as he’d been the last time Rhodes saw him. White shirt and jeans. He didn’t look any healthier.
“What’s up, Sheriff,” he said.
“We’re here to see Sandra,” Rhodes told him.
“Take two of you to do that?” Jimmy asked. He didn’t move out of the doorway.
“Don’t make this any harder than it has to be, Jimmy,” Rhodes said.
“Just kidding, Danny. Come on in.”
Jimmy moved aside, and Rhodes went into the house. Buddy followed him.
“Sandra’s in the kitchen,” Jimmy said, “cleaning up a little. You two go in the den and I’ll get her.”
Rhodes and Buddy went into the den. Rhodes looked around the room, which if anything looked shabbier than before. He wondered how much money Jimmy and Sandra had spent on Jimmy’s medical bills over and above what the insurance had paid. A lot was the only estimate he could come up with. It was a sad situation all around.
Jimmy and Sandra came into the room. Sandra was smoking a freshly lit cigarette, as nervous as ever. More nervous, if anything.
Jimmy said, “Have a seat, Danny. You, too, Deputy. No need to stand up.”
Rhodes and Buddy sat in chairs in front of the coffee table. Jimmy and Sandra sat on the sagging couch across from them. Jimmy squirmed as if he couldn’t get comfortable. Sandra blew out puffs of gray smoke.
“What’s the big deal?” Jimmy asked. “Did you catch the people who killed Lynn?”
“Not exactly,” Rhodes said. “We’re getting close to making an arrest, though.”
Jimmy gave a husky chuckle. “Cops always say that on TV. ‘We’re close to making an arrest.’ Sometimes they are, and sometimes they aren’t.”
“We are,” Rhodes said.
“Who you think did it?”
“Sandra,” Rhodes said.
Sandra coughed as if she’d inhaled too much smoke and couldn’t get it out of her lungs. Jimmy took the cigarette from her hand and crushed it in an ashtray that badly needed emptying.
“You ought not to joke about that kind of thing, Danny,” Jimmy said. “Sandra’s mighty upset over the whole thing, and you’re not helping.”
“I think she killed Jeff Tyler, too,” Rhodes said.
Sandra had stopped coughing. She leaned back against the couch and closed her eyes.
“You say you think she did. You got any proof of that?”
“Not yet,” Rhodes said. “I figured I’d ask her. Just a few things I have to say first. Or I’ll let Buddy do it. You have your Miranda warning, Buddy?”
Buddy pulled a laminated card from his shirt pocket and read out the warning.
“Thanks,” Rhodes said. “That was for the two of you. Any questions?”
“You think Sandra’s going to say she killed anybody?” Jimmy asked. “You must be crazy.”
“I don’t think so,” Rhodes said.
“There’s that think again.”
“Let me tell you why I think it,” Rhodes said, and he got out his own paper, the one on which he’d written everything down, and hit the high points for them.
Jimmy and Sandra didn’t say anything when he finished. Sandra lit another cigarette.
“Doesn’t prove anything,” Jimmy said. “Just a lot of speculation.”
Rhodes folded the paper and put it back in his pocket. “That’s right, but it all points one way. I think that if I look hard enough I’ll find somebody who saw Sandra’s Suburban in the alley behind Tyler’s place when he was killed. Believe me, I’ll look hard enough. I think we’ll find Sandra’s fingerprints on Lynn’s purse. I think—”
“Think, think, think,” Jimmy said. “That won’t cut it, Danny, and you know it.”
“You’re right,” Rhodes said. “That’s why I want Sandra to tell me what happened.”
Sandra put out her cigarette and patted Jimmy’s hand. “I knew you’d figure it out, Danny. You always were one of the smartest boys in our class. I’ll tell you how it was.”
“No,” Jimmy said. “You hush. I’ll tell him. I’m the one who did it, Danny. I killed them both.” He reached behind his back and brought out a snub-nosed .38 revolver. “I sure would hate to kill you, though.”
“I wouldn’t like it a whole lot, either,” Rhodes said. “You better put down the gun and let Sandra talk.”
“She doesn’t have anything to say. I was at the shop with her and Lynn. Lynn got smart about how she was going to quit and get her own place. She said she was tired of Sandra raking in all the money. Look around, Danny. Does it look like we were raking it in?”
“Takes a lot when you have doctors’ bills,” Rhodes said.
“You’re damn right it does. Lynn didn’t care about that, though. Just cared about herself. I told her she better not talk like that, and one thing led to another. She had her scissors in her smock, and she took a swipe at me with ’em. Came right at me. I snatched up that dryer and swung it.” Jimmy paused and looked Rhodes in the eyes. “What happened then was an accident. I never meant to kill her. I was trying to knock the scissors out of her hand, that’s all.”
“Maybe that’s so,” Rhodes said, “but Jeff Tyler’s a different story.”
“He got to thinking about Sandra calling him to cancel his appointment. That wasn’t smart. I should’ve told her not to do it, but I wasn’t thinking just then. Jeff wanted Sandra to come by and talk to him, but I knew what he wanted. Money. That’s what everybody wants.”
“He might have wanted to make sure she didn’t do what he thought she did,” Rhodes said.
“Well, he never got to talk about it. I shot him, and that’s all there is to it.”
“What about the purse?”
“I threw it away. Shouldn’t have taken it from the shop in the first place, but Sandra … I thought you’d believe somebody killed Lynn for
it and then ditched it. Those fellas across the street don’t belong in this country anyhow. I figured they could take the blame.”
Rhodes thought things had gone pretty much the way Jimmy had told it, at least in the case of Tyler’s death. Jimmy was probably responsible for that one, all right, but not for the other. That one had gone the way he told it, too, but with Sandra doing the things Jimmy claimed he’d done.
“Things didn’t work out like they were supposed to, did they,” Rhodes said.
“No, but if you were any kind of sheriff, they would’ve. You shouldn’t care more about a bunch of illegals than you care for somebody you grew up with and played football with, Danny. This country’s just plain gone to hell when that happens.”
“So now you’re going to shoot me and Buddy?”
“Nope. Sandra and I are gonna leave, and you and your deputy can just sit here till we’re gone. After that you can try to chase us down if you want to, but it won’t do you any good. I know all the places to hide in this county, Danny. You won’t find us.”
Rhodes didn’t think that was Jimmy’s plan at all. He turned to Buddy.
“You ever hear of ‘suicide by cop’?” he asked.
“Sure have,” Buddy said. “Guy tries something that gets himself killed, and it turns out he planned it that way all along. You think that’s what Mr. Wiley has in mind?”
“Might be,” Rhodes said. “That way Sandra might get off. Jimmy, has the cancer come back?”
“None of your business,” Jimmy said. He stood up. “Come on, Sandra. Let’s go.”
“It won’t work, Jimmy,” Rhodes said. “We aren’t going to shoot you.”
“You will if I shoot first. Come on, Sandra.”
“I’m not leaving, Jimmy. You sit back down.”
Jimmy looked at her, and that was all Rhodes had been waiting for. He kicked the coffee table, and it smacked into Jimmy’s shins with a crack like the sound of a branch breaking.
Jimmy yelled and fell back on the couch. He fired the pistol, but the bullet went into the ceiling. He tried to right himself and shoot again, but he was too weak. Rhodes stepped across the coffee table and took hold of the revolver. His hand grasped the cylinder so it couldn’t turn.
