by Bill Crider
Rhodes again said the expected, and it was true enough that Francine looked thin and fit.
“You don’t seem to have a weight problem.”
“That’s because I work at it.” Francine got a glass from a cabinet and put it on a coaster beside the Dr Pepper can. “Go ahead and drink. I’ll talk while you do.”
Rhodes popped the can open and poured about half the Dr Pepper into the glass. He took a swallow and smiled. It was the Real Thing for sure.
Francine smiled and laced her fingers together. “Helen and I were in the OWLS together, you know.”
Rhodes hadn’t known that Francine was in the OWLS. And he hadn’t looked for the membership list in the Harris house. He’d have to do that if Ruth Grady didn’t come across it.
“We were two of the founding members,” Francine went on, “and we try … tried to keep the group on track. Lately some of them have suggested outlandish books for discussion.”
She paused, and Rhodes was about to ask what books she meant, but she went on without prodding.
“Helen and I prefer Texas writers. Like Vernell Lindsey.”
Vernell was a local success story. She’d had several romance novels published and had even sponsored a writing workshop at the old college campus in Obert. The workshop hadn’t turned out so well, and the college’s old main building now housed a church. There had been a murder there only two weeks earlier, and Rhodes sometimes wondered if Obert was jinxed.
“But some of the ladies wanted to read racier books,” Francine said. “Like something by Joe Lansdale. Have you ever heard of him?”
Rhodes said that he hadn’t.
“His books are just filthy.” Francine giggled and put her hand to her mouth. “But they’re very funny.” Her face assumed a pious blandness. “He does have serious themes, you know.”
Rhodes said that he didn’t know.
“They’re about the real Texas, not like some things we’ve read,” Francine said. “They’re about murders and things. Do you think Helen was murdered?”
Rhodes, who wasn’t sure that murders and things were the real Texas, said that he didn’t know anything for sure.
“If she died under suspicious circumstances,” Francine said, “I think you should talk to Alton Brant.”
Rhodes knew the name. Brant was a veteran of the Korean War and the person the Clearview Herald always interviewed on patriotic holidays. He’d once been quite a good-looking man, and he still made a good appearance in a photo on the Herald’s front page, even though he’d gained weight and become a bit stooped.
“He and Helen have been courting, you know,” Francine said.
Rhodes said that he hadn’t known.
“Oh, my, yes. They’ve been going at it hot and heavy.”
Rhodes didn’t think hot and heavy was a ladylike expression, but he didn’t mention that to Francine. He said, “Does Alton stop by Helen’s house often?”
“Certainly. They’re not being discreet about anything. He visits several times a week. I wouldn’t be surprised if they, well, it wouldn’t be nice to say.”
Rhodes didn’t want to get into that kind of speculation. He said, “Do you know if she had a will?”
Francine paused and looked away. “Yes, she did. I witnessed it, in fact.”
Rhodes took another drink of the Dr Pepper. It hit the spot. He should order a case for himself, he thought. Maybe two cases. He’d ordered it before, and while it was expensive, it was well worth the money.
“I didn’t think Helen had a lot of money,” Francine said when he set the glass back on the coaster. “Or anything else. Of course, that was before.”
“Before what?”
“Before the big gas boom.”
Rhodes nodded. In the last couple of years, the price of natural gas had risen to highs that would have been unbelievable not so very long ago. There had always been gas under the ground in parts of Blacklin County, but it had been deep, so it hadn’t been economically feasible to drill for it. Now it was, and quite a few landowners had become much better off as a result. Instead of griping about the lack of rain in the summer and the cold weather in the winter, they complained about their taxes. It was always something.
“So Mrs. Harris had a gas well?” Rhodes said.
“Not yet,” Francine said. “But she owned a good bit of property in the south part of the county where there’s a lot of drilling. Her husband bought it years ago just for speculation. He never realized a thing from it, but Helen would have. Or she thought she would. She told everybody all about it at an OWLS meeting. Some of the property had very good leases on it, and one of the big gas companies started drilling on the property only a few days ago. Helen just knew it was going to be a good well.”
Rhodes didn’t keep up with all the drilling activity, and Ivy hadn’t been to an OWLS meeting in a while. So he hadn’t known about Helen’s good fortune. Which was now the good fortune of whoever might be her heir. That was something else Rhodes would have to consider if the death wasn’t accidental.
“Maybe Alton Brant is in her will,” Francine said, interrupting Rhodes’s thoughts. “I didn’t look at it, naturally. I just signed where she showed me. But maybe Alton killed her for the money. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was it, not in the least.”
Rhodes said he didn’t think anyone had killed Mrs. Harris, that her death was probably just an accident.
“I don’t doubt it. She was always too careless about climbing on things.”
The thought of Mrs. Harris’s heirs reminded Rhodes of something. “Wasn’t she related to Leonard Thorpe? I seem to remember hearing that sometime or other, but I don’t know how they’re related.”
“He’s not a Harris,” Francine said, as if she knew all about it. “He’s a cousin, related to Helen on her mother’s side.”
She didn’t seem to want to talk about Thorpe, which wasn’t surprising. He lived in Clearview’s only trailer park, out past the city limits on the west side of town. It wasn’t called a trailer park, of course. It was the Tranquility Mobile Home Park. It usually lived up to its name, but not always. Some of the people who lived there were interesting characters, and Leonard was definitely part of that group, except that interesting wasn’t precisely the right word. Rhodes had dealt with him more than once when he’d disturbed the public tranquillity.
“I think you need to investigate the alley-walker,” Francine said.
“The alley-walker?”
“You know who I mean. I forget his name. He’s always walking the alleys and snooping in the trash. He can be scary.”
Billy Joe Byron, Rhodes thought, and he felt something that might have been his conscience give him a jab in the ribs. He’d had dealings with Billy Joe, too. He’d made a decision that he’d never regretted, though he’d never been certain that it had been the right one. The situation, when he thought about it, was uncomfortably similar to the one with Mrs. Harris, or it could be. Rhodes hoped it wasn’t.
“The alley-walker might have done it,” Francine said. “Or it could have been some tramp.”
Rhodes hadn’t heard that last word in years. He said, “Have you seen any tramps around lately?”
“I really don’t recall. Do you really think some tramp might have killed Helen?”
“I don’t think anybody killed her. I was just wondering who might have visited her this morning. If anybody did.”
“I wish I could help, but I spend most of my time on the computer. I don’t see much of what’s going on outside.”
Rhodes thought that might be a familiar story these days, even among people Mrs. Oates’s age, though she seemed to know a lot about Alton Brant’s visits.
“I’m writing a book,” she said. “A romance novel. Vernell Lindsey is my inspiration. I think people need a little more romance in their lives, and I believe I can bring it to them with my book.”
“I hope your book is a big success.” Rhodes stood up and thanked her again for the Dr Pepper. “If you think of anything
else, or if you remember seeing anybody, call the office.”
“I’ll be sure to do that. I just can’t imagine that Helen is dead. She always seemed so alive.”
“I used to see her mowing that lawn.”
“Yes.” Francine shook her head in disapproval. “She shouldn’t have done that. Very unladylike.”
Rhodes said he appreciated Francine’s help and started to leave. But he turned back at the door to ask if Francine wanted a cat.
“You mean Helen’s cat?”
“That’s the one. Somebody will have to take care of it.”
Francine looked away from Rhodes. She twitched slightly and rubbed her arms as if fleas were hopping around on her skin underneath the shirtsleeves.
“I don’t like cats,” she said. “Cats are sneaky and hateful. Just turn it over to your animal control officer.”
Rhodes was sure that Speedo would have agreed with her characterization of cats.
“They’re dirty, too,” Francine continued, “and they have fleas. I’ve never understood how a woman with Helen’s habits was able to have one in the house with her.”
Rhodes started to say that the cat had lived inside and wasn’t likely to have fleas, but he didn’t think Francine would be convinced. He left to see if he could get any better information from someone else along the block.
He didn’t.
Chapter 4
BACK AT THE HARRIS HOUSE, RHODES FOUND THAT MRS. HARRIS’S body had been removed. Because he wasn’t sure about the circumstances of her death, he’d considered having it sent to the Southwest Forensics Laboratory for autopsy, but Dr. White had been doing autopsies for the county for years, and Rhodes figured he could handle this one, too. So far, nothing had proved too tricky for him.
Ruth Grady was still going through the house, and she had only one question for Rhodes. It was about the bookshelf Rhodes had noticed earlier.
“Do you think something’s missing?” Ruth asked.
Rhodes didn’t see how she could tell. On some shelves he could name, it would be easy to see if something had been moved because the lack of dust would reveal where it had been sitting. These shelves were spotless.
“Look.” Ruth counted off the items on each shelf.
“Ten on all of them,” Rhodes said when she finished. “Except the top one.”
“That’s right. You can tell by looking around the house that Mrs. Harris was a particular person. Very precise. So shouldn’t there be ten things on every shelf?”
Rhodes didn’t know. It seemed likely, but it wasn’t a certainty.
“There’s no empty space,” he said.
“It wouldn’t take much to nudge a couple of things around. Like these two.” Ruth moved a rusty belt buckle and a corroded penny. “See?”
Rhodes nodded. “Why those two?”
“Look a little closer.”
Rhodes got his reading glasses from his pocket. He hated using them, and he’d even thought about having Lasik surgery until someone told him that it wasn’t always successful. He put the glasses on and looked at the shelf again. He had to bend down until his nose was almost touching the wood, but he finally saw a tiny scratch. He straightened and put the glasses back into his pocket.
“So?” he said.
“You don’t think Mrs. Harris would stand for a scratch like that, do you? She’d have taken care of it as soon as she noticed it.”
“If she noticed it,” Rhodes said, but he knew that people like Mrs. Harris always noticed things like that, no matter how small, no matter how bad their eyesight.
“I think it’s a fresh scratch,” Ruth said. “I think something’s missing, and I think whoever took it made that scratch.”
It was pretty far-fetched, Rhodes thought, but no more than the assumptions he’d already made. He felt as if he was getting way ahead of himself. He’d have to sit down and think everything over. Maybe there was nothing missing at all. Maybe Mrs. Harris had simply had an accident, after all.
“Why would anybody as clean as Mrs. Harris keep junk like this around in the first place?” Ruth asked.
Rhodes told her about the metal-detecting club. “I think these things were souvenirs from some of her treasure hunts.”
“Well, I think one thing is missing, but I could be wrong.”
It was one more item for Rhodes to add to his list of suspicions. He asked Ruth if she’d gone through Mrs. Harris’s desk.
“Not yet.”
“Let’s have a look, then,” Rhodes said, and they went into the room where the desk stood.
A piece of plate glass had been cut to cover the wooden top of the desk. The glass was spotless, of course, and so clean that it was hard to tell it was even there. Pictures were beneath it, and Rhodes recognized Mr. and Mrs. Harris in one of them. They had been young and on vacation somewhere. They stood in front of a mountainous backdrop that Rhodes didn’t recognize.
He opened one of the two desk drawers. A manila folder lay inside, along with a couple of ballpoint pens. Black lettering on the outside of the folder told Rhodes that it held Membership Lists.
He opened the folder. Inside were several sheets of notebook paper, each one with a neatly printed heading, with block letters large enough for Rhodes to read without putting on his glasses. The one on top said OWLS. The one beneath it said Rusty Nuggets, which Rhodes assumed was the name of the metal-detecting club. The next said Red Hats. He didn’t look at the others.
“Bring all of these with you when you’re finished,” Rhodes told Ruth, putting the folder back into the drawer. “We need to make copies.”
Ruth said she’d bring it, and Rhodes opened the other drawer, which held several more folders, all of them labeled in Helen Harris’s careful printing. One held Bills. Another was for Canceled Checks. Rhodes flipped through the folders until he came to one labeled Last Will and Testament.
“We’ll need a copy of this, too,” Rhodes said, handing her the folder. “If it’s a murder investigation, that is.”
“It seems to be,” Ruth said.
Rhodes returned the folders to their places. “We’ll just go along pretending it is until we know better.”
Before he could say more, he was interrupted by Speedo, who was barking in the backyard.
“He’s hungry,” Rhodes said. “I was going out to feed him this morning, but I never got around to it. Come to think of it, there’s a cat at my house, and he might be hungry, too.”
Ruth gave him a quizzical look. “A cat?”
Rhodes shook his head. “It’s a long story. You finish up here and we’ll talk about this back at the jail.”
On his way out of the house, Rhodes stopped in the kitchen and picked up the bowl of dry cat food. Feeling guilty for taking anything at all from a crime scene before the investigation was complete, he called out to Ruth to let her know what he was doing.
“They never do things like that on CSI,” she said.
Rhodes didn’t answer. He went out into the backyard, where Speedo was barking at a squirrel in a pecan tree. Speedo lost interest in the squirrel as soon as he noticed Rhodes and ran over to him.
“You ready to eat?” Rhodes said.
Speedo wagged his tail and looked hopefully at the bowl of food Rhodes was holding.
“Not this stuff. Let’s go home and get you something of your own.”
On the walk back to the house, Speedo made his usual detours, but he didn’t spend long on them. For his part, Rhodes couldn’t enjoy the walk. The town was quiet and seemed peaceful enough, but Rhodes felt a hollow sadness inside because of Helen Harris’s death. It seemed senseless to him, accident or not.
Looking at the houses he passed, he didn’t think they seemed as peaceful as before. Any one of them might be holding secrets that no one outside ever imagined, and the secrets weren’t always pleasant.
When they got to the backyard of his house, Rhodes left Speedo and went inside, but only after telling the dog that he’d be right back.
Spe
edo sat down in the shade of a pecan tree and thumped his tail on the grass, watching Rhodes until he was inside.
In the kitchen Rhodes looked around for Yancey, who should have come bouncing in to greet him. Yancey wasn’t there, but the cat was. It wasn’t going to bounce out and greet anybody. It lay under the table, stretched out to its full length and taking its ease as if it had lived in the house all its life. Yancey, Rhodes presumed, was still cowering under a bed somewhere.
Rhodes put the bowl of cat food he’d brought from Mrs. Harris’s house down on the floor beside Yancey’s water bowl. The cat (Rhodes still refused to use its name) heard the sound and got up slowly. Then it stretched, looked at Rhodes, stretched again, and walked over to the food. It sniffed it a couple of times and started to eat.
Rhodes sighed. He knew that he’d just made a big mistake. Feeding a cat was worse than naming it, much worse. Cats made themselves at home wherever the food was, and they didn’t have a great deal of loyalty. Whoever fed them last was going to be blessed with their presence.
Rhodes sneezed, and the cat stopped eating to look up at him.
“It’s not psychological,” Rhodes said, “and don’t try to tell me that it is.”
The cat didn’t try to tell him anything. It went right back to crunching the dry food between its teeth.
Rhodes got out the dog food and went into the backyard to feed Speedo, who was much more appreciative than the cat had appeared to be.
When Rhodes went back in the house, the cat was sprawled under the table again. Rhodes sneezed and put away the dog food. Then he sat down at the table. The cat wasn’t disturbed. Rhodes thought about disturbing it, but he decided that wouldn’t be a good idea. Instead he thought over everything he’d seen and heard that morning.
If Mrs. Harris’s death was an accident, then someone would have to explain why the cat was in Rhodes’s kitchen. Rhodes still didn’t believe Mrs. Harris would have allowed it to go outside.
Rhodes, however, couldn’t think of any reason why someone would have killed her. Maybe the will would give him a clue if Francine Oates’s information about the gas wells was accurate. He had no reason to doubt that it was.
