Bill Crider - Dan Rhodes 20 - Compound Murder

by Bill Crider

  “Not much. You know how a water heater works?”

  “I have a pretty good idea,” Rhodes said, and Hack nodded.

  Buddy filled them in, just in case. “When the water in it gets below a certain temperature, the heat comes on and the water starts to heat up. It makes a little bit of a noise when it does that. When the thing gets old, it might even make more of a noise. Anyway, Mr. Murphy had a pretty noisy one. He has a little bit of a hearing problem, and he’s been watching too many old movies. Somebody gave him a big set of DVDs with a bunch of old movies from the fifties about space aliens and such. Must’ve given him ideas. Anyhow, I convinced him that his water heater wasn’t talking to him. I think he believed me, but if he calls again I’ll go back over and have another talk with him.”

  “Good idea,” Rhodes said, thinking that if Benton had made the visit, he’d have made Mr. Murphy a tinfoil hat, which might have worked just as well, for all Rhodes knew. “You’d better get Ike now and get over to the courthouse. I’m going to be in Armistead County for a while this morning, and I’ll want to know what happens with Ike.”

  “You goin’ off again?” Hack said. “How come you can’t stay here and do your job?”

  “Because this part of the job means I have to go talk to some people in Armistead County, and I want to see them face-to-face. I’ll take my cell phone.”

  “You better,” Hack said. “You never know when we might have another wild hog emergency.”

  “Two words,” Rhodes said. “Alton Boyd. He’s the animal control officer, not me.”

  “That’s more than two words.”

  “I’m leaving now,” Rhodes said, and he did.

  * * *

  Rhodes decided that he didn’t have time to stop by the local college, so he just drove past it on his way north. He also passed Max’s Place and the little strip center where he’d shut down some eight-liners not so very long ago. A couple of other eight-liners had opened elsewhere, but so far no illegal gambling had been reported in either of them. Rhodes figured it was just a matter of time.

  A little farther down the highway on the right was an old pond that Rhodes had fished in a couple of times when he was a boy. He wondered if anyone fished there anymore. He hadn’t cast a bass lure in longer than he liked to think about. Maybe someday he’d have time to wet a hook again, but it wouldn’t be today.

  When Rhodes crossed the line from Blacklin County, the country looked no different at all. He’d have to drive all the way to Oklahoma to see much difference.

  Off to his left, some distance from the highway, was the area known as Omega Ridge. A small community had been there once, but it was long gone now. Maybe a few tumbled-down houses were left, but Rhodes doubted that more than a trace of them was left. Around the turn of the last century the young men from Omega Ridge had been known as the biggest hell-raisers within a hundred miles. They were well known in all the little towns in two counties. Like the houses, they were all gone now. Hardly even the memory of them remained.

  Rhodes passed through the little town of Willene, which had even less of its downtown left than Clearview, mainly because there’d been a lot less of it to start with. It didn’t take him long to pass through.

  The next town was Swallow, which Rhodes assumed had been named for the bird rather than a physical action or a family. Barn swallows were thick in the air all over Texas most of the time, and Rhodes saw a couple of them swooping low over a field as he neared the town. Swallow was even smaller than Willene, and as soon as he was through it, Rhodes entered the interstate, driving across a long bridge over some often flooded bottom land. Not so often flooded these days, however, in the time of very little rain. Lots of cracked ground and dry grass filled the space where water stood less and less often.

  After that it wasn’t far to the town of Derrick City. The “city” part was a misnomer, since the population was only about double that of Clearview, and the derricks were missing, too. They’d been there once, however. Like Clearview, Derrick City had been an oil-boom town, and oil had been found there years before the Clearview boom, all the way back in the nineteenth century. The Omega Ridge boys had probably raised some of their hell in Derrick City, but now both Clearview and Derrick City were sleepy places where the boom days were long past and where even the derricks were gone, taken down because their metal was too valuable to be allowed to rust away in an old oil field.

  The college buildings sat on top of a low hill and stood a little above the rest of the town. That made them easy to see from the highway.

  Derrick City’s growth, like Clearview’s, was along the highway, and Rhodes turned off to drive through a cluster of convenience stores, fast-food outlets, and motels. He didn’t have to go through the old downtown business district to get to the college, but he suspected it was about as deserted as the one in Clearview.

  The college was prosperous, however. Its well-maintained main building had three stories, and the other buildings, if not as large, were equally well kept. Rhodes parked in a spot reserved for visitors and went into the main building. He looked at the directory on the wall and saw that the president’s office was just down the hall.

  Rhodes located it easily and went right in. He told the secretary, an attractive woman in her forties, who he was, and she told him to have a seat while she checked to see if President Arlan was ready to see him.

  Rhodes sat in a well-padded chair with a seat and back covered with smooth brown leather. Two pictures hung on the paneled walls, both paintings of generals, one of Dwight D. Eisenhower and the other of Colin Powell. Rhodes had no idea what their significance was.

  The secretary returned and asked Rhodes to follow her down a short hall to the inner office where President Arlan waited. She stood aside at the door, and Rhodes went inside, where the carpet wasn’t quite deep enough to tickle his ankles, though it came close. Arlan stood behind a desk about the size of an aircraft carrier deck. Aside from a couple of pictures, a model spaceship, and an old-fashioned telephone set of the kind you saw only in offices these days, it was bare. Its top gleamed. If there was a speck of dust on it anywhere, it was the loneliest speck in town.

  Arlan was an impressive man in an impressive navy blue suit, and Rhodes felt a bit underdressed. Maybe the badge in its holder on his belt would make up for his sport shirt and khaki slacks.

  Arlan came around the desk and shook Rhodes’s hand. He had a firm, dry grip, which was supposed to be a good sign, and, like the secretary, he asked Rhodes to have a seat. This time the leather chair covering was dark red.

  When Rhodes was seated, Arlan sat behind his desk and said, “I’ve heard about Earl Wellington’s death, Sheriff, but I don’t know much about it. What can I do for you?”

  Rhodes told him.

  Arlan listened well. He didn’t interrupt, and he maintained an interested look. When Rhodes had finished, he leaned forward with his arms on the desk and clasped his hands. “As you probably know, Sheriff, I can’t comment on personnel matters. Those are confidential. At any rate, I don’t think I know anything that would help you.”

  “You could tell me if Wellington had any problems here,” Rhodes said. “He seems not to have been well liked by the faculty and students in Clearview.”

  “He was only part-time here, and I don’t really keep up with the adjunct faculty. The department chair might know more, but I’m not sure she can tell you. Would you like to talk to her?”

  “That would be fine,” Rhodes said.

  Arlan picked up the office phone and called his secretary. “Marian, please see if Dr. Sandstrom is in her office. If she is, tell her that I’m sending someone to talk to her about Earl Wellington.”

  He hung up and asked Rhodes what it was like to be a sheriff. Luckily the phone rang almost immediately and Rhodes was saved from having to make up some kind of answer.

  “Dr. Sandstrom is available,” Arlan said, hanging up. “Marian will show you to her office.”

  He stood up, and so
did Rhodes. Arlan didn’t offer to shake hands again. He said, “I hope you can find whoever killed Wellington, Sheriff.”

  “I will,” Rhodes said.

  “You always get your man, is that it?”

  “Pretty much,” Rhodes said.

  Chapter 14

  Dr. Sandstrom’s office wasn’t nearly as nice as Arlan’s, but it wasn’t bad. The carpet was a basic industrial weave, and the desk was standard size. The office reminded Rhodes in some ways of Seepy Benton’s office, though the floor was clear of books and papers. Instead the books filled the bookshelves that lined the office walls. They appeared to be in no particular order, and they were more tumbled around than lined up. None of them looked like the kind of books that would interest Clyde Ballinger. Rhodes had seen some of the same or similar titles in Wellington’s office, but he didn’t see a copy of anything about Sage Barton.

  There were books on Dr. Sandstrom’s desk, too, held in place by bookends that were busts of Shakespeare. Rhodes remembered the face from a portrait he’d seen in a school textbook long ago.

  Like Arlan, Sandstrom had a good handshake. She wasn’t quite forty yet, Rhodes guessed, very thin, with only a touch of gray in her short brown hair. She wore rimless glasses and showed straight white teeth when she smiled. She asked Rhodes to call her Janet.

  The only chair in her office besides hers was beside the desk. The standard chair for student visitors. If a student brought reinforcements, they’d have to find their own chairs.

  “Earl Wellington,” she said when Rhodes sat down. “What can I tell you?”

  “I’m starting to wonder if anybody will tell me anything,” Rhodes said. “Seems like everything on a college campus is confidential.”

  “We worry about lawsuits,” Janet said. “The administration does, at least. Not just here. Everywhere. Personnel matters are sensitive.”

  “Yet there’s ProfessoRater,” Rhodes said.

  Janet grinned. “There’s that, all right. Have you looked at it?”

  “I have,” Rhodes said. “Students don’t mind saying what they think.”

  “They’re not worried about lawsuits.” She leaned forward. “Look, Earl was one of my adjuncts, and I want to help you if I can. Tell me what you’re after, and maybe I can find a way to answer.”

  It was worth a try. “Did he have any enemies here? I’m talking the serious kind, the kind who’d follow him down to Clearview and get into an argument with him. A serious argument.”

  Janet thought it over. “I don’t see why I can’t answer that. It doesn’t have anything to do with academics. You said you’d looked at ProfessoRater, so you probably know that Earl wasn’t well liked by the students.”

  “That was true in Clearview, too,” Rhodes said.

  “He was a fussy man,” Janet said. “You know the kind?”

  “I think so. ‘Picky’ was the word they used in Clearview.”

  “As good a word as any. He was a stickler for the rules. His students couldn’t be a minute late. They couldn’t miss class. If they did, he called them at home. A couple of times he even went to a student’s home to confront him. I had to call him in and speak to him about it. I told him never to do it again, but he couldn’t seem to help himself. He was almost like a stalker. He wanted everybody to toe the line.” She smiled. “That’s a cliché, I know, but I was thinking about it today when I was grading papers. My students don’t understand the meaning of the phrase, and they’ve started to spell t-o-e as t-o-w. It always makes me laugh to think of someone towing a line.” She paused. “I’m getting off the subject. I try not to do that in class, but sometimes I do. I was telling you about Earl being fussy. Picky, you called it.”

  Rhodes hadn’t called it that. Others had, but it didn’t matter. He said, “Right. Did that cause trouble here?”

  “Mostly with the students. He didn’t seem to know how to talk to them. Some of them were insulted by him, but I don’t think he meant any harm by what he said.”

  That squared with what Harris had told Rhodes.

  “What about plagiarism?” Rhodes asked.

  “Oh, my. He was death on plagiarism. It infuriated him, but then so many things did. He was one of the most prescriptive grammarians I ever met.”

  Rhodes didn’t want to ask what that meant. It sounded bad.

  “A run-on sentence was anathema to him,” Janet continued, “and making the verb of a sentence agree with the object of a preposition drove him up the wall.”

  “With good reason,” Rhodes said, thinking that he’d never heard anyone use the word “anathema” in a sentence before.

  Janet gave Rhodes a look. “Are you making fun of me, Sheriff?”

  “Not me,” Rhodes said. “I never make fun of English professors.”

  “I’ll just bet you don’t. Let me tell you one more thing about Earl. He was so fussy, or picky, that he used to mark up the local paper with a red pen and send it to the editor. He even marked up a few of Dr. Arlan’s memos and returned them.”

  “How to win friends and influence people.”

  “An appropriate allusion and use of sarcasm. Earl didn’t have a lot of friends.”

  “Did he have any at all?”

  “The only one I know was Francie Solomon.”

  “Who’s Francie Solomon?”

  “She’s another adjunct. She teaches history. Would you like to talk to her?”

  “Sounds like a good idea,” Rhodes said.

  * * *

  The adjunct instructors had their own office. Just one office for all of them. It was sort of a bullpen, a big room with a few desks, some fabric-covered privacy panels whose haphazard placement didn’t provide any privacy, and gray-painted steel lockers along one wall. Yet another step down from Arlan’s office. Or several steps. Long ones.

  Two people were sitting at old, scarred desks when Janet took Rhodes in. One of them was a tall man with long, lank hair who looked as if he hadn’t had a good meal in far too long. The other was a woman in her middle thirties. She had short blond hair and blue eyes. She wore a Western-style shirt, boots, and jeans. Janet introduced her as Francie Solomon. She didn’t introduce the man, who hadn’t even looked up at them when they came in the room.

  “Sheriff Rhodes is here about Earl,” Janet said after the introduction. “I have to go back to my office now, Sheriff, but would you please stop by before you leave?”

  Rhodes said he would and asked Francie if there was somewhere they could talk.

  “Right here’s fine,” she said with a wave at the panels. “We adjuncts don’t get a lot of privacy. Pull up a chair.”

  It seemed as if everyone wanted Rhodes to be comfortable, or maybe they didn’t want him looming. He located a metal chair by one of the other desks and pulled it over.

  “You were a friend of Earl’s,” he said, sitting down. “How well did you know him?”

  “Not very well,” Francie said. “Nobody did. He was hard to know, and he didn’t have a lot of friends. I kind of liked him, though.” She shrugged. “Maybe I felt sorry for him. I was a little jealous when he got a full-time job, but now that he’s dead, I really do feel sorry for him.”

  “What can you tell me about him that might help me?” Rhodes asked.

  “Not a thing. Who’d want to kill Earl? Nobody that I know.”

  “It was more or less an accident, I think,” Rhodes said. “An argument that got out of hand.”

  “Well, that I can believe. Earl liked to argue. One thing he didn’t mind was confrontations. I think he even liked them, courted them. Some people do, you know. Not me, though. I try to avoid them. You being a sheriff, I guess you don’t mind them.”

  “I take them as they come, but I don’t go looking for them.”

  “Earl did. Go looking for them, I mean. Okay, he didn’t do that exactly, but he gave his students such a tough time that he had plenty of them. He had them with the parents, too. And with Dr. Sandstrom.”

  Rhodes would have to ask her
about that. She’d shuffled him off to Francie before he got a chance.

  “You visited him in Clearview, didn’t you,” Rhodes said.

  Francie looked surprised. “How did you know that?”

  “I’m a trained lawman. You drive a black Silverado?”

  “I do. You must be a really good sheriff to have found that out already.”

  If she wanted to think that, Rhodes would let her. No need to destroy her illusions.

  “He was lonesome,” Francie said. “I just went once. He gave me a call and invited me down for dinner. I went. I’d just broken up with my boyfriend and didn’t have anything better to do. I’m back with my boyfriend now.”

  “That’s good,” Rhodes said.

  “I guess. Sometimes I wonder. Anyway, Earl and I ate barbecue at Max’s Place. You ever been there?”

  “More than once,” Rhodes said.

  “Some guy was singing that night. Open mic night, maybe. He had some interesting songs. You ever hear him?”

  “More than once,” Rhodes said.

  “Then you know what I mean. Anyway, in between songs Earl told me some of his troubles. He wasn’t getting along with his chairman for some reason or other. He wasn’t clear about it.”

  Rhodes thought he knew.

  “Maybe it was the plagiarism problem,” Francie continued. “Earl thought some kid had cheated on a paper. Earl couldn’t stand that kind of thing.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “He said he was going to get the kid,” Francie said. “He didn’t say how, though. You think it was the kid who killed him?”

  “I hope not,” Rhodes said.

  He talked to Francie for a while longer, but he didn’t find out anything more. He thanked her and went back to talk to Janet Sandstrom. The man at the other desk still hadn’t looked up.

  Janet was in her office, but she told Rhodes that she had a class in fifteen minutes.

  “I won’t keep you long,” he said. “I have to ask you about any clashes you might have had with Wellington.”

  “I hope you don’t think I killed him.”