Murder in the Air

by Bill Crider

  “Do naked women disturb you?” Ivy asked before Rhodes started the movie again.

  “In certain ways.”

  “Would you rather be disturbed or watch Abbott and Costello?”

  Rhodes was quiet. The silence stretched.

  “Well?” Ivy said.

  “I’m thinking it over.”

  Ivy hit him with a throw pillow and left the room.

  Rhodes wasn’t far behind. Abbott and Costello would have to wait, and Rhodes didn’t really care if Captain Kidd ever got his treasure map back.

  18

  The next morning was warm and damp, a sure sign that a cold front would be moving through later in the day. The backyard was wrapped in fog, and while Rhodes didn’t like it, Speedo didn’t seem to mind. Neither did Yancey, who lolloped through the damp grass yipping with delight.

  Rhodes sat on the damp back step and watched them. He’d dreamed something about the rock pit, but he couldn’t remember what it had been. When he woke, the remnants of the dream fragmented and drifted away like pieces of a ragged cloud. He didn’t think the dream would have been any help to him even if he’d been able to recall it, but it did remind him that he still hadn’t figured out how whoever killed Lester Hamilton had gotten away from the rock pit.

  If he’d thought of it, Mikey Burns might have blamed the killing on terrorists who’d come up from Mexico and were now roaming the back roads of Texas on their way to assassinate as many government leaders as they could. Burns would say they’d just been practicing on Hamilton before making good their escape into the countryside.

  Rhodes wasn’t being fair, he knew. Burns was normally a level headed man, and he’d just let that flat tire get the better of his good judgment.

  So that left the problem of the killer’s exit from the area around the rock pit. The only person who’d been there when Rhodes arrived on the scene was Hal Gillis. It would be like something from an old TV show if Gillis had killed Hamilton, called the law, waited around for the sheriff to arrive, and then claimed innocence.

  Rhodes wondered if anyone had ever tried a trick like that before. It had been his experience that there were no new tricks, just variations on old ones, so it had most likely been done, and more than once.

  Ivy was still convinced that Gillis had been involved, and while Rhodes had eaten his cereal (with skim milk) earlier that morning, she’d told him again that he should pay Gillis a visit and have a long talk with him.

  Ivy thought more of Rhodes’s abilities than he did. She was sure that Gillis would confess if Rhodes would just ask him the right questions.

  Maybe that was true, but Rhodes didn’t know what the right questions were. Gillis had already claimed his innocence in the face of Rhodes’s questions after the body was found, and it didn’t seem to Rhodes that the old man was likely to change his story.

  However, he might have seen someone or something that he hadn’t remembered at the time. A good talk might be able to jar loose the memory.

  Could someone have just walked away from the scene? It was possible, but where had he been parked? Rhodes hadn’t found any tire tracks.

  Did that mean the killer had been in the car with Hamilton? That was possible, but how could anyone walk back to town without being seen? By sticking to the fields? They were too open. No one could have walked through them without being conspicuous.

  Hide a car along the road? Wouldn’t Hamilton have wondered about someone who came walking up? A flat tire would make a good excuse, though.

  Rhodes knew he’d have to go back out to the rock pit and examine the road to see if a car had been pulled off nearby. He should have done it sooner.

  Someone would have to talk to Hal Gillis, too, and Rhodes wanted to confront William Qualls about his inheritance. He could visit both of them since they lived at Mount Industry, or he could call them in for interviews at the jail. That would be more formal, get the men out of their comfortable and familiar surroundings, and maybe be more likely to produce results, so he decided to take that approach. He’d call Hack before he left the house and have him make appointments for Gillis and Qualls to come in for interviews.

  Sitting on the step while watching the dogs play wasn’t the way to get anything done, however. Rhodes stood up without putting his hands on his knees to push. He’d read somewhere that having to push up from a sitting position was a sure sign of old age, and he didn’t want to think he was getting old.

  He whistled for Yancey, who of course ignored him. When he was playing with Speedo, Yancey was as good at ignoring Rhodes as Sam.

  “Yancey,” Rhodes called. “Either you come in with me now, or you’ll have to stay out here all day.”

  Yancey stopped in his tracks. Speedo, who’d been chasing him, had to swerve aside and narrowly missed trampling him.

  Yancey looked at Rhodes. Speedo, who had managed to come to a less than graceful stop, did the same, his tongue lolled out.

  “Well?” Rhodes said.

  Yancey trotted over, and Rhodes let him in through the screen door.

  “I don’t think I’ll come with you,” Rhodes said. “I have work to do. You leave the cat alone, you hear?”

  Yancey turned and sat down, looking at Rhodes with a hurt expression.

  “I know the cat’s more likely to bother you than the other way around,” Rhodes said. “I was just joking. Go on and look for Ivy. Tell her I’ll see her this evening.”

  Yancey turned and trotted off as if he’d understood every word. For all Rhodes knew, he had.

  “Maybe I should put you on the case,” Rhodes said. “How about it?”

  Yancey didn’t turn around to accept the challenge.

  “Smart dog,” Rhodes said.

  The fog hung over the smooth surface of the water in the rock pit and drifted through the weeds and grass of the field like smoke. Rhodes felt it on his skin almost as if it were rain. The warm dampness made his shirt stick to his back.

  No one was around, and no one was likely to be. Even the most avid fisherman would think twice before coming to wet a hook on a day like this one.

  Rhodes wasn’t sure what he was doing. He still thought he’d overlooked something at the crime scene, but returning hadn’t jogged loose any answers. Maybe he hoped an arm would rise up out of the dark water, holding a clue in its hand instead of a sword. He’d seen an illustration of the hand and the sword in a book about King Arthur many years ago, when he was a boy.

  Rhodes shook his head. When he started thinking about half-forgotten stories from his childhood, it was time to get moving. He didn’t think the rock pit was anything like the Arthurian lake, and there was certainly no island of Avalon in the middle of it. There was nothing out there except a giant turtle, and even the turtle was staying under cover this morning. Rhodes didn’t blame it.

  Getting back in the county car, Rhodes drove along the road that led to the bridge across the river. He saw several places along the way where a car could have pulled off the road and been left safely. Unfortunately all of them were entrances to other pieces of property, and all had gravel topping that wouldn’t show any tracks even if there’d been any. A car stopped at any of them would have drawn attention from someone passing by, and because Blacklin County was like any other small place, someone would have reported it to the sheriff’s department after hearing about Hamilton’s death. Rhodes didn’t think the car was a possibility.

  He drove on over the steel bridge, his tires humming. Down below, the river flowed sluggishly along. Rhodes had fished in the river long ago, but now it was low most of the time because of all the lakes that had been built above it. There was still a slope beside the road that a car could drive down, but nothing had driven along it lately, as the weeds attested. Trees grew along the bank, and their branches extended out over the brown water.

  Past the bridge, the road got a bit narrower. The trees grew closer to the sides, almost making a canopy over the road. When Rhodes was young, he’d ridden down many roads like that
on his bike, taking his fishing pole to some stock tank or other, never even considering the possibility of drowning. He wondered if kids did that sort of thing anymore. He doubted it. Their parents wouldn’t dare let them because of the dangers involved, and certainly the kids were safer for it. For all the safety, though, something was lost along the way. Rhodes wasn’t just sure what, and he didn’t want to think about it. The next time he came to a good place, Rhodes turned around and went back to town.

  Hack and Lawton were glad to see him when he stopped by the jail. Hack had just gotten a call about an emergency.

  “Woman wanted to know if we could get her out of a moving car,” he said.

  “A moving car?” Rhodes asked. “Wouldn’t it be easier if she just stopped the car and got out? That’s a whole lot safer.”

  “Would you believe that’s exactly what Hack told her?” Lawton said.

  Hack turned to the jailer. “I’m telling this story.” He turned back to Rhodes. “That’s exactly what I told her.”

  “Good decision,” Rhodes said.

  He went to his desk, hoping that was the end of the matter, though he knew in his heart that it wasn’t.

  He was right.

  “There was a problem with that solution,” Hack said.

  Rhodes had been afraid of that, but he didn’t ask what the problem was.

  “She couldn’t stop the car,” Hack said when he saw that Rhodes wasn’t going to take the bait.

  “Accelerator stuck?” Rhodes asked.

  “That’s exactly what Hack asked her,” Lawton said.

  Rhodes thought Hack might get up and throttle Lawton, but Hack didn’t like to get up unless he had to, and throttling Lawton wasn’t worth the trouble.

  “That’s exactly what I asked her,” Hack said. “See, I was thinking that we could do something like in the movies. We have Duke drive alongside her car, and she gets the window down. You’re on the hood of Duke’s car, and when you get to just the right spot, you jump in through the window and save her.”

  Rhodes didn’t think he could jump in through the window, much less save anybody.

  “How was I supposed to do that?”

  “I’m not the sheriff,” Hack said. “You’d have to figure it out for yourself.”

  “Wouldn’t have worked, though,” Lawton said.

  “Why not?”

  “The accelerator wasn’t the problem,” Hack said. “The driver was.”

  Rhodes was getting confused, a not unusual thing when Hack and Lawton were telling him something.

  “The driver?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” Lawton said. “The woman who called wasn’t doing the driving.”

  “That’s not good,” Rhodes said.

  “It’s sure not,” Hack said. “When she told me that, I figured she was trapped in the car with a serial killer, or maybe somebody trying to sell her insurance.”

  “Then she hung up,” Lawton said.

  That wasn’t good, either, but Rhodes was determined not to ask what had happened next. Hack watched him. Lawton watched him. The silence in the room stretched out until Rhodes gave in.

  “All right. What happened? Did you send somebody out to find her?”

  “Nope,” Hack said. “She called right back.”

  “And?”

  “And she said she’d just been mad at her boyfriend, who was doing the driving. She thought she could get back at him by threatening to phone the law, and he called her bluff. They’d made up, though, so everything was all right.”

  “Good thing, too,” Lawton said. “I’m not sure the sheriff would’ve fit through the car window.”

  “I’m not sure he could even have made the jump,” Hack said.

  “Sure I could have,” Rhodes said. “I’m a regular Jackie Chan. Did you set up those appointments I called about?”

  “Sure did,” Hack said. “You think I’m not on the ball or something?”

  “Just checking. What time are they coming in?”

  “When you said. Qualls at ten, Gillis at eleven.”

  “I’d better check out the room, then,” Rhodes said.

  “You think it’s not clean,” Lawton said, hurt.

  “Just want our visitors to be comfortable.”

  “Yeah,” Hack said. “Right. Like anybody’s comfortable in a jail.”

  “You are,” Lawton said.

  Hack took in a breath as if readying a retort. Then he let the air out slowly.

  “You know what?” he said. “You’re right.”

  19

  The room in which Rhodes interviewed people at the jail wasn’t exactly the way people expected it to be, and its appearance often threw them off stride. That was the way Rhodes wanted it.

  People expected the room to look like something they’d seen on TV, with two-way mirrors, a microphone hidden in a light fixture, a scarred wooden table with nothing on it but an ashtray, and a couple of metal folding chairs.

  The room held a table, all right, but it was a dining table with a Formica top that was hardly scarred. There was no ashtray because no smoking was allowed in the jail, not even in the cells, a policy that put a severe strain on some of the prisoners.

  The table matched the chairs, which were also part of the old dinette set Rhodes had picked up at a yard sale at a price so cheap that he hadn’t even charged the county for it. He wanted the interview room to look more like a kitchen where you’d find Julia Child, not a place where Torquemada would have been at home.

  The idea was to make people comfortable so they’d confide in Rhodes or whoever was doing the interview. Rhodes thought the casual approach worked better than intimidation.

  The room also didn’t smell the way anybody expected. No fear-sweat odor permeated the walls. Rhodes had read that the smell of vanilla made people comfortable and improved their mood, and Ivy had found some vanilla-scented trash bags for him. Rhodes always made sure to have a fresh one in the room’s trash can.

  There was a microphone in the light fixture, however, though nobody could see it. All the interviews were recorded, just in case.

  As for the two-way mirrors, the county had never seen any reason to go to the expense of installing them, and Rhodes didn’t miss them. He’d never needed any witnesses to his interrogations other than the people he had in the room with him, usually one of the deputies.

  Today, the witness would be Ruth Grady. She showed up at fifteen minutes before the hour. She and Rhodes went to the interrogation room and sat at the table while Rhodes told her what was going on.

  “That’s a strange way for things to work out,” she said when he got to the part about Qualls being Hamilton’s heir. “I wonder if he knew.”

  “So do I,” Rhodes said. “That’s the main reason I want him here. The lawyer says he didn’t tell him, but Hamilton could have. We need to find out.”

  “Who gets to be the good cop, and who gets to whack him with the rubber hose?”

  In the distant past, the rubber hose was a distinct possibility in the Blacklin County jail. Or some said a battery cable was more likely. Rhodes didn’t use either. He didn’t think pain worked very well when it came to getting information. Just about anybody would confess to just about anything to stop a painful beating. Rhodes didn’t want a false confession. He wanted the truth. So no pain, no intimidation. Ruth knew that, of course. She was only joking.

  “You can use the rubber hose,” Rhodes said. “When I step out of the room for coffee, let him have it.”

  “You don’t drink coffee,” Ruth said.

  “Right, but Qualls doesn’t know that.”

  “Good. Where do we keep the rubber hoses?”

  “You’ll have to pick one up at the hardware store.”

  “We don’t have one of those anymore.”

  Rhodes thought about the old hardware store. It had been gone for a while. Everyone bought hardware at Walmart now. Rhodes was about to tell her that when Hack came in.

  “Qualls is here,” he said. />
  “Good,” Rhodes said. “Bring him on back.”

  The one intimidating thing about the room was that it was located right next to the cellblock. Might as well give the person being questioned a glimpse of the hard life, not to intimidate him, but to let him know that what was about to happen was serious business.

  When Hack let Qualls into the room, both Rhodes and Ruth were standing. Hack ushered Qualls over to the table and told him to have a seat. Qualls sat, and Hack left the room.

  Rhodes took a good look at the former professor. It was the first time Rhodes had gotten a good look at the man without his respirator mask. His eyes were sunken, with black circles beneath them as if Qualls hadn’t been sleeping too well. He had a prominent nose and a wide mouth. He clasped his hands and put them on the table. Rhodes glanced at them, and Qualls unclasped them and dropped them to his lap.

  “I assume you’ve called me here for a good and sufficient reason,” Qualls said. Without the mask and speaker, his voice was low and pleasant. “If I’m a suspect in some crime or another, I’d like to have an attorney present.”

  “You don’t need an attorney,” Rhodes said. “I just wanted to talk to you. Funny you should mention a lawyer, though.”

  “I don’t see anything funny about that.”

  “Coincidence,” Ruth said. “That’s what it is. Some people think coincidences are funny.”

  Qualls wasn’t laughing. “Then why don’t you let me in on the joke.”

  Rhodes had planned to ease into the question of Hamilton’s will, but Qualls was impatient. Rhodes didn’t blame him. Being called in for an interview with the sheriff would bother anybody, even if an informal discussion was the intention.

  “I talked to Randy Lawless yesterday,” Rhodes said. He hooked one of the chairs with his foot and pulled it away from the table. The metal runners scraped on the concrete floor. Rhodes sat down across from Qualls. “Lawless mentioned your name.”

  Qualls looked genuinely surprised, but Rhodes supposed a teacher would be a pretty good actor when the occasion called for it.