Bill Crider - Dan Rhodes 20 - Compound Murder

by Bill Crider

  Rhodes went inside, Andy still right at his back, and they went through the house a room at a time. Each room held burned furniture—a piano, a china cabinet, a desk, a bed—but there was no sign of anyone lurking in the darkness.

  They did find where the Sheetrock had been torn away and some of the wiring stripped out, but that was all. When Rhodes was satisfied that there was nothing more to learn, he led the way back outside.

  “You go on by the hospital now,” he told Andy. “Have them patch up your face. When you get back on patrol, check by here fairly often. Those fellas might come back.”

  “I’ll drop by every hour or so,” Andy said.

  Rhodes said every hour would be fine, and Andy went on his way. Rhodes went back to the car, and Ivy unlocked the door.

  “I heard gunshots,” Ivy said.

  Rhodes locked the shotgun back in position and got in the car. “So did I.”

  Ivy gave him a stern look. “Don’t you joke about this, Dan Rhodes.”

  Since she’d used his full name, Rhodes knew he was in trouble. “I didn’t mean to. I was overcompensating.”

  “Don’t give me any psychology, either.”

  Rhodes sat quietly, and after a while Ivy said, “I’m fine now. I don’t like to think of you being shot at.”

  “I’m fine,” Rhodes told her. “Nothing even came close to me. Somebody was just trying to warn us off.”

  He didn’t believe that was true, but it seemed like the right thing to say.

  “You don’t have any prisoners,” Ivy said, “so the warning must have worked.”

  “We’ll get ’em next time,” Rhodes said.

  “I hope there’s not a next time, not with guns.”

  “I could do without the guns myself,” Rhodes said.

  He got on the radio and called Hack to let him know what had happened. He also told him to have Ruth check the brushy lot for tire prints in the morning.

  “Ain’t rained in a month,” Hack said. “Won’t be any tire prints.”

  “Have her check anyway.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I do,” Rhodes said.

  * * *

  Ivy didn’t do any talking on the drive back home, and Rhodes tried to get his thoughts in some kind of order. He had a feeling that he had just about everything he needed to make a case against somebody, but the problem was that he didn’t know which somebody to make the case against.

  Harold Harris was clearly worried, probably about somehow being caught getting his score changed on ProfessoRater, and he’d lied about being at the faculty lounge the day Wellington died. That is, he’d lied unless both Mary Mason and Seepy Benton were wrong. Rhodes didn’t think either of them was wrong. If Wellington had uncovered the problem with the scores, Harris could have argued with him and accidentally killed him. Harris might also have tried to shift suspicion to Ike. Rhodes still wasn’t sure about that. Maybe it was just a coincidence that he’d mentioned Sandi Campbell.

  Dean King was another possibility. She was intent on doing whatever was necessary to protect the college. She wouldn’t want the word to get out about Harris’s cheating, and she was easily strong enough to whack Wellington’s head against the trash bin.

  Ike Terrell was a puzzle. Rhodes was pretty sure he knew something, too, but he was caught between his father and his desire to get away from the compound. Rhodes didn’t know how real that desire was. He had only Sandi Campbell’s word for it, and a young man Ike’s age was apt to say anything he thought a pretty girl wanted to hear.

  There were a number of other things bumping around in Rhodes’s head, too, and he figured that sooner or later they’d stop bumping into each other and line up in orderly fashion so he could look at them and sort through them.

  “Why so quiet?” Ivy asked when they stopped in their own driveway.

  “Thinking,” Rhodes said.

  One thing he was thinking was that she’d been the quiet one.

  “Why don’t we have some ice cream and talk about it,” she said.

  “We have ice cream?”

  “I put some in the freezer the other day. I thought you’d have found it by now.”

  “I wasn’t looking.”

  “You were going after those M&M’s.”

  “I’d rather have ice cream.”

  Ivy got out of the car. “Then come along,” she said.

  * * *

  Rhodes and Ivy sat at the kitchen table with bowls of vanilla ice cream in front of them. The cats were sitting up, grooming themselves without any interest in each other or anything else. Yancey sat in the doorway, looking into the kitchen with mournful eyes.

  “Yancey will get over it,” Rhodes said. “I give him one more day of trying to make us feel guilty, and then he’ll be back to normal.”

  He took a bite of the ice cream. It wasn’t a Blizzard, but it would do.

  “Have you interviewed that Mary Mason yet?” Ivy asked. “I’ll bet she has something to do with all of this.”

  “As a matter of fact, I did interview her, and she had some helpful information. She didn’t have anything to do with Wellington’s death, though.”

  Ivy looked disappointed. “Who did, then?”

  “That’s what I can’t figure out.”

  Rhodes went through his various scenarios with her and asked her what she thought.

  “I still think Mary Mason did it,” she said.

  Rhodes ate some more ice cream, slowly enough to avoid brain freeze. When he’d had a few bites, he said, “If only it were that easy.”

  “What about that Dr. Harris?” Ivy asked. “He’s obviously hiding something. You should take him to the basement and give him the old third degree.”

  “There’s a problem with that,” Rhodes said. “Two problems, really.”

  “What?”

  “First of all, we don’t give our suspects the old third degree these days. I’ve heard they used to right here in Blacklin County, sixty or seventy years ago, but someone who’s getting beaten up will confess to anything to stop the pain. When you get that kind of confession, you don’t have much.”

  “I knew that,” Ivy said. “What’s the other thing?”

  “The jail’s like the Alamo,” Rhodes said. “It doesn’t have a basement.”

  “Darn,” Ivy said. “That’s inconvenient. I think Harris is the one, though. You just need to figure out how to get him to talk.”

  “I’ll work on it,” Rhodes said.

  He finished off his ice cream and was considering getting another dip when the telephone rang.

  “I’ll get it,” Ivy said.

  “Never mind,” Rhodes said, getting up. “It’s bound to be for me.”

  It was Mayor Clement, and he wanted to know if Rhodes had anybody locked up for killing Wellington.

  “Not yet,” Rhodes said. “I have a lot of suspects, though. I’m thinking about taking one of them down to the basement and giving him the old third degree.”

  Mayor Clement didn’t think it was funny. “I don’t care if you waterboard the lot of them. I want a confession. I want this thing wrapped up. You understand that, right?”

  “I understand,” Rhodes said.

  “Good. Get it done.”

  “Shouldn’t that be ‘Git ’er done’?”

  “What?”

  “Never mind,” Rhodes said. “I’m working on it.”

  “You’d better be,” Clement said, and he hung up.

  “It’s always a pleasure to talk to our mayor,” Rhodes said, sitting back down at the table.

  “He does have a way of putting a smile on your face,” Ivy said, “but I could do a better job of that. Want to bet?”

  Rhodes grinned. “You’re on.”

  Chapter 20

  Rhodes’s first stop the next day was the college. He got there early, before classes started, and went straight to Harold Harris’s office, but the door was closed and locked. Rhodes knocked. No answer. Rhodes didn’t think Harris was hiding
in there, so he went to the faculty lounge. Seepy Benton was inside, chatting up Mary Mason and a man Rhodes didn’t know. Among the others who were there, Rhodes recognized only Tom Vance. Everyone but Benton was drinking coffee. There was no sign of Harris, so Rhodes called Benton outside.

  “Let’s go to your office,” Rhodes said. “I want to talk about Harris.”

  Benton didn’t ask any questions. He just went to his office with Rhodes at his side. The formula Benton had written on the dry-erase board the previous day was still there, and Rhodes had to resist the urge to pick up the eraser and wipe it off.

  “What about Harris?” Benton asked when they’d taken a seat.

  “He’s not here,” Rhodes said.

  “You think that’s significant?”

  “I do. I talked to him at his home yesterday. He’s worried and maybe a little scared.”

  “You would be, too,” Benton said, “if you’d been caught cheating on your ProfessoRater score.”

  “He hasn’t been caught,” Rhodes said. “We just think he might have done that. What I’m more interested in is why he told me he was in the faculty lounge on the morning Wellington died.”

  “You think he was outside with Wellington?”

  “I don’t know what to think. When I talked to him at his house yesterday, he wouldn’t say anything helpful. I’m going back for another visit if he doesn’t show up here soon.”

  “He’s not in his office?”

  “If he is, he wouldn’t answer the door.”

  “You should check his schedule and see if he has an early class today,” Benton said. “He’ll have to show up there. I can just look the schedule up right here on my computer. Can I have my badge back?”

  “Just check it for me, please,” Rhodes said.

  Benton turned to his computer and with a few mouse clicks had Harris’s schedule displayed on the monitor.

  “Here it is,” Benton said. “He has an eight o’clock, all right. American Lit. In room two-sixteen. I can show you where that is.”

  “I can find it,” Rhodes said. “You need to get ready for your own class.”

  Benton picked up a can of Pringles potato chips from beside his desk. Rhodes hadn’t seen it there when they walked in.

  “This is my lesson,” Benton said, shaking the can.

  “You’re teaching a class in potato chips?”

  “The potato chips are merely illustrative. What I’m teaching is hyperbolic parabaloids, of which a Pringles chip is a perfect example.”

  “Right,” Rhodes said.

  “It’s an important part of multivariable calculus,” Benton said.

  “I should have remembered that.”

  “You certainly should. It’s going to be on the final exam.”

  Rhodes was happy he wasn’t going to have to take the final exam.

  “You can use a graphing calculator on the final,” Benton said. “If you need one, that is.”

  “That’s good to know.” The bell rang, for which Rhodes was grateful. Probably Benton’s students were, too, now and then, though not as grateful for the bell to begin class as for the one to end it. “Time for class. Thanks for looking up the schedule.”

  “Anytime,” Benton said.

  Rhodes left the office and walked down the hallway to the room where Harris’s class was to meet. Students went by, some of them texting on their phones, some of them talking on their phones, and one or two of them talking to each other. Rhodes wondered how much longer that would last. In a few years, maybe communication between two people sitting next to each other would be conducted by phone, too.

  He noticed a student standing by the wall, holding up his phone and aiming it at Rhodes. Down at the end of the hall another student was doing the same thing. It took Rhodes a second or two to realize that they were either taking a picture of him or recording a video. He hoped the videos wouldn’t appear on Jennifer Loam’s Web site later that day with headlines like SHERIFF PROWLS THE GROVES OF ACADEME!

  It wasn’t impossible. Loam encouraged her readers to send in photos and video, and occasionally she got some interesting things. The sheriff appearing on campus wouldn’t be among them, not as far as Rhodes was concerned, anyway.

  Harris wasn’t in the classroom, though there were students already seated. Rhodes stood outside the door and waited. He didn’t have to wait long. Harris came hurrying down the hall with a thick textbook and a couple of manila folders.

  “I don’t have time to talk,” he told Rhodes when he reached the door. “I have a class to teach.”

  “Your students won’t mind waiting,” Rhodes said. “They might even want to take video of us.”

  “You can’t hold me out here against my will. I have an obligation.”

  “You’re acting mighty funny for an innocent man,” Rhodes said.

  “Look, I want to talk to you, too,” Harris said. “It will just have to wait until after this class. Come back in an hour, and I’ll meet you in my office. Will that satisfy you?”

  “I’ll be there,” Rhodes said.

  Harris nodded and went past Rhodes and into the room, pushing the door shut behind him. Rhodes stood and looked at the door for a while before walking back down the hall, down the stairs, and out of the building.

  * * *

  Rhodes drove to the courthouse. It was where he always went when he needed a little time to think. Nobody ever bothered him there, except Jennifer Loam, and she didn’t have any reason to track him down today, as far as he knew.

  The hallways were mostly deserted since the courts weren’t in session. He wished the barbershop chorus would come over and sing a couple of songs. The acoustics, with the granite floors and plaster walls and ceilings, would have made it a great place to practice. The people in the offices would appreciate the break, too.

  Rhodes didn’t bother to stop at the soft drink machine. He’d decided to continue his boycott of his favorite drink, and he still wasn’t ready to change to something new. Maybe next week. Anyway, laying off the soft drinks had probably been good for him. He wasn’t consuming as much sugar, and that was supposed to be a good thing, wasn’t it?

  He unlocked the office door and went inside. The room got a regular cleaning, but it always had an odd odor that Rhodes thought came from the fact that he hardly ever used the place. He considered opening a window to air it out, but it was cool in the office and hot outside. When it came right down to it, he preferred the cool stale air rather than the fresh outside air, a common failing among Texans in the summertime.

  Sitting in his chair, Rhodes leaned back, ignoring the squeak, propped his feet on the desk, and thought things over. He’d seen a couple of examples in the last few days of people using their cell phones to take video. It was a common occurrence and had been for years, and Rhodes knew he’d overlooked something that should have been a standard part of his investigation. It wasn’t too late to do something about it, and while it might turn out not to have any bearing on things at all, he’d have to give it a try. It was the kind of thing he should’ve thought of earlier, and he felt bad about it.

  He still couldn’t figure out Harold Harris, who didn’t act exactly like a man who was guilty of killing someone, accidentally or not. He looked like a man who was guilty of something, though. Rhodes was sure of that, and Duke Pearson believed it, too, with the problem being that neither of them could figure out just what it was that Harris might have done. The ten o’clock meeting with Harris might provide an answer to that.

  Rhodes thought about calling Hack to check on things around town, but Hack would have been in touch if there’d been a problem, and Rhodes didn’t feel like dealing with him at the moment.

  About ten minutes until nine, having reached hardly any conclusions, Rhodes got up and left. He didn’t feel that his time had been wasted, even if it might seem as if it had to someone else. He never knew when his ruminations would bring something to the surface.

  He was eager to hear what Harris had to say, so he
went down to the car and got on his way.

  * * *

  Harold Harris’s office was neat. No papers on the floor, no clutter on the desk, books neatly arranged on the shelves. The chair he had for students to use looked considerably more comfortable than those in Benton’s office, and Rhodes chose to sit in it rather than to loom. Harris already looked nervous enough.

  “I just got through talking to my students about Achilles,” Harris said. Nervous or not, he was dressed again in what Rhodes thought was appropriate for a college instructor, with a blue blazer over his white shirt and patterned tie. “You know who Achilles is, of course.”

  The way he said it irritated Rhodes a little, but he didn’t let it show. He said, “Sure. There was this thing about his heel. He was at Troy when the Greeks hid in the wooden horse. The thing about his heel isn’t in that story, though.”

  Harris gave him an appraising look. “Indeed. Anyway, Achilles might have been an uncivilized ruffian by our standards, but he had something that a lot of us lack, a high sense of honor. He had that, and courage, too. He was a real hero, in a way a lot of our so-called heroes now aren’t.” Harris gave a weak grin. “Excepting Sage Barton, of course.”

  Rhodes repressed a sigh. Was there anybody who didn’t read those books?

  “As for me,” Harris continued, “I’ve recently demonstrated that I’m just about the opposite of Achilles. And Sage Barton, for that matter. My students would think I’m a fraud, standing up there and reciting the virtues of a hero when I’ve been a coward so recently. You could see through me at once, I’m sure.”

  Rhodes decided that his best tactic would be to look inscrutable, which was easy enough for him to do, since he didn’t have any idea where Harris was going with all the stuff about Achilles and heroism. While Harris might have been about to confess to killing Wellington, he could just as well be ready to admit that he’d somehow managed to alter his standing on ProfessoRater.

  Harris waited for Rhodes to say something. When he didn’t, Harris kept going. Rhodes felt clever for keeping his mouth shut.