by Bill Crider
“Where are the hogs?” Ruth asked, breaking into Rhodes’s thought of catching a lunker bass.
“Maybe we won’t see any,” Rhodes said. He preferred to think about fish. “In the daytime they hole up in the woods, but they move around a lot. They could have been here last night and today they’re miles away. If there are any around they’ll be down in the creek bottoms. They won’t bother us.”
He hoped he was telling the truth. Even in the daytime, an encounter with feral pigs could be dangerous.
“How far is the creek from here?” Ruth asked.
“Another quarter of a mile or so, down there beyond the trees.”
They walked on most of the way to the trees, and Ruth stopped, pointing off to the left. “What’s that over there?”
A wooded area marked the boundary of the pasture, and Rhodes thought Billy would need to clear off more of his land if he wanted to run any more cattle on it. It wasn’t the trees that Ruth was talking about, however. It appeared that there was a clearing among them, but it wasn’t quite a clearing. Something was in it.
“We’d better take a look,” Rhodes said.
He couldn’t see a path to the trees, so they had to cut across the pasture. As they drew closer, Ruth said, “That can’t be what I think it is.”
“Sure it can,” Rhodes said.
Rhodes had seen something like it before, but he knew why Ruth was surprised. The clearing held a large marijuana patch. It was surrounded by two rows of supposedly hog-proof wire, one within the other, so that the feral pigs couldn’t run through it without a lot of trouble. It wouldn’t have been worth it to them, so that must have been the plan. It seemed to be working so far.
Off on one side of the patch was a water pump with a pipe leading into the woods. Rhodes was sure it went to the creek, which was well filled this year. Nobody would notice if some water was missing. A marijuana patch required a lot of water for irrigation.
“I’m not talking about the marijuana,” Ruth said. “I’m talking about that.”
She pointed to something that hunkered down in a little wallow under the cover of a lean-to by the water pump. Rhodes had to stop and shade his eyes from the sun to get a better look. When he did, he was just as surprised as Ruth was.
“An alligator,” he said.
“That’s what I think it is, too,” Ruth said. “What’s an alligator doing here?”
Marijuana patches weren’t the only odd things Rhodes had seen in Blacklin County during his career. He’d had to deal with an alligator before, too. He just hadn’t seen an alligator and a marijuana patch together. It was an interesting pairing.
“I’ve read about this,” Ruth said.
“You knew it was here?” Rhodes said.
“No, I don’t mean that. I mean I’ve read about marijuana growers using alligators to guard their crops. It seems to be something that happens all over the country. Alligators don’t need to be taken care of like dogs do. You can go off and leave them for a while. They can go a long time without food.”
Rhodes hadn’t heard about the new trend in marijuana-growing security. He didn’t think that gators would make very effective guards. While it was true that they were very fast over short distances and that they could clamp down on an arm or a leg and snap bones like toothpicks, they were generally lethargic and not prone to violence unless provoked. Or very hungry. Rhodes wondered when the gator had last had a tasty, nutritious, filling meal.
It wasn’t a very big gator, maybe five feet long, and it was quite lean. It might well be hungry. It might also scare off someone who didn’t know much about gators, but it didn’t bother Rhodes, even if it was hungry, because at the moment it was inside the hog-wire fence and he was on the outside.
“I have a feeling Billy Bacon didn’t think we’d come down here,” Ruth said.
“He almost certainly didn’t,” Rhodes said. “He had to call us, though, even if he did think about it, considering that there was a dead body in the barn. He had to take the chance we wouldn’t go for a walk in the pasture. The little hill hides this place from the barn, so we wouldn’t have seen it if we hadn’t come this way.”
“He could have fed the body to the gator and gotten rid of it that way,” Ruth said.
Rhodes hadn’t realized she was so hard-boiled. “He might have been too squeamish for that, and the gator might be too small.”
Ruth shrugged. “Maybe. What are we going to do?”
“For the moment we won’t do anything.”
“Why not?”
“We don’t want to alert Billy that we know about it yet. I want to poke around some more while we’re here and see if this patch ties in with Melvin’s murder.”
“You think it does?”
“It could,” Rhodes said, “but if it does I don’t know how. This whole thing is getting more complicated than I thought it was at first.”
“So what’s the next step?”
“We’ll go on down to the creek and see if there’s anything there.”
“Sounds good to me,” Ruth said. “I don’t really want to deal with an alligator right now.”
“Me, neither,” Rhodes said.
* * *
There wasn’t much that was helpful at the creek. All they found was the other end of the water pipe. It was obvious that someone had been trampling around it, but whether that someone had come through the woods or from somewhere else was impossible to tell.
While they didn’t find anything useful, they also didn’t run across any feral pigs. Rhodes considered that to be good news.
“Let’s go back to the barn,” Rhodes said after he decided they weren’t going to stumble onto any clues to either the murder or the marijuana patch. “You can go on patrol, and I’ll have Alton Boyd and Buddy come down here and take care of the gator.”
“Why don’t I stay here and help Alton?” Ruth asked. “Are you trying to protect me just because I’m a woman?”
“Maybe I was,” Rhodes said. “I know better than to do that. I wasn’t thinking straight. That’s a good idea. Three of you working on the gator will be better than two, and it would be a good idea to have someone here to watch the marijuana patch in case the owners show up.”
“Where will you be?” Ruth asked.
“I think I’ll have a little talk with Billy Bacon,” Rhodes said. “I think it’s time to mention this little weed patch after all.”
* * *
On the drive back to Clearview, Rhodes got Hack on the radio and told him to send Alton Boyd and Buddy to the Bacon place.
“Ruth will be at the barn,” Rhodes said. “She can tell them what has to be done.”
“You going to tell me what has to be done?” Hack asked. “Put me in the loop? Or do I have to guess?”
“There’s a marijuana patch in the woods,” Rhodes said.
“Alton’s animal control, not drug enforcement.”
“There’s an animal with the marijuana.”
“I know what you’re doin’,” Hack said after a pause.
Rhodes wasn’t good at pretending innocence, but he gave it a try. “I have no idea what you mean.”
“Yes, you do. You’re tryin’ to keep me out of the loop. That’s okay, but Alton and Buddy need to know what kind of animal it is.”
“You’re right,” Rhodes said. “They do. It’s an alligator.”
“Now you’re just makin’ fun of me.”
“Nope. It’s an alligator. Dark green and scaly. Tell Alton it’s not as big as the other one he and I wrestled. He and Buddy can handle it with Ruth’s help.”
“You mean you’re not jokin’?”
“I’m not joking. There’s an alligator, and it looks hungry. Tell Alton and Buddy to get on down there, but don’t tell them the gator looks hungry.”
“I’ll tell ’em there’s a gator,” Hack said, “but they won’t believe it.”
“They will when they get there,” Rhodes said.
Chapter 12
The Clearview First Bank was one of the few buildings left in the old downtown area. It had been built well, and while other buildings around it had collapsed, it had held its own, standing tall and straight with its bricks and mortar as firm as ever. The inside had been remodeled, but the floors were still marble, and the sounds were as hushed as they would’ve been in a church.
Rhodes went straight to Billy Bacon’s desk in a glass-enclosed office to the right of the entrance. Bacon stood up, wincing as if his knee bothered him. He seemed surprised to see Rhodes there. He probably was.
“To what do I owe the pleasure, Sheriff?” he asked.
He didn’t look as if he really thought it was a pleasure. He wore a gray business suit, a white shirt, and a dark blue tie, looking nothing at all the way he had at the barn the previous day.
“We need to talk,” Rhodes said. He closed the office door. “I hope you don’t have any appointments.”
Billy sat down and looked at his calender. “Not until after lunch. Have a seat. What do we need to talk about? Have you found out who killed Melvin?”
Rhodes sat in one of the chairs at the front of the desk and leaned back.
“I haven’t found the killer,” he said.
“Then what?”
“Marijuana.”
“Huh?” Billy said, tensing. “I mean, what?”
“Marijuana,” Rhodes said. “Pot. Mary Jane. Weed. You know.”
“Well, yes, I know what it is.” Billy relaxed a little. “I just don’t know why you want to talk about it.”
“Sure you do,” Rhodes said. “You have some growing down at your place in a little clearing in the woods. You even have an alligator there to guard it.”
Billy laughed and looked up at the ceiling. “An alligator? You must be joking.”
“That’s what Hack thought, too.”
“Hack?”
“Never mind,” Rhodes said. “I’m not joking. When I’m joking, nobody laughs.”
Billy stopped looking at the ceiling and looked down at his desk. “Alligators, marijuana. I … I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I think you do,” Rhodes told him. “The marijuana’s growing on your land. You have to have known it was there. The gator’s inside the fence around the marijuana patch, so you’d know about that, too.”
“No, that’s not true. I never go down there. I never go anywhere but to the barn. The cows come up there when they get fed, which hasn’t been often this year, thanks to the rain. If something’s not around the barn, I wouldn’t know about it. I don’t even go down in the pasture to check on the cows, and I certainly don’t know anything about marijuana. Much less an alligator.” He waved a hand to indicate his office, or maybe the entire bank. “I have a job here. I work every day. When would I have time to grow marijuana? I don’t even know how to go about it.”
“It doesn’t matter what you say you know about growing it. The plants are on your land, and nobody’s going to believe you’re not the one who’s growing them.”
“But I’m not,” Billy said. He held his hands out over the desk, showing Rhodes the backs and the palms. “Look at my hands. Do they look like I’ve been cultivating a crop?”
Rhodes had to admit that they didn’t. He didn’t see any calluses, and the nails were so rounded and clean that he suspected Billy of having had a manicure. If he’d been doing any cultivating, he’d worn gloves.
“If somebody’s growing pot on my place, it’s not me,” Billy said. He looked angry. “You’re the sheriff. You have to find out who it is and make them confess. You can’t arrest me for something I’m not guilty of.”
Rhodes thought it over. Billy sounded convincing, but Rhodes had been lied to for years by suspects and even by victims. He’d come to expect it, and he’d learned how to tell, most of the time, when someone was stretching the truth. He had a feeling that Billy was doing just that, but not by much. There was more to the story, so Rhodes would let it go for now. He’d find out what was going on eventually, but at the moment he had more things to worry about than a small marijuana patch.
“I’m not going to arrest you,” he said.
Billy, who’d put his palms down on the desk, pulled his hands back and relaxed. “I’m glad to hear it. I’m innocent, Sheriff. Somebody’s using my land for illegal purposes, but it’s not me.”
“And you don’t know a thing about it.”
“That’s right. Not a thing.”
“You know I’ll have to burn the field,” Rhodes said.
Something flashed in Billy’s eyes, but it came and went so quickly that Rhodes wasn’t really sure he’d seen it.
“I know,” Billy said. “You’re the sheriff, and you have to do your job.”
Rhodes stood up. “I will,” he said.
* * *
Clyde Ballinger was the owner and director of Ballinger’s Funeral Home, where he lived a sedate bachelor life in what had once been the servants’ quarters of the mansion where the funeral home was now located. Rhodes had sometimes wondered what the original owners of the fine home would have thought had they known the purpose to which it would eventually be put, but he’d decided that they wouldn’t care, not in their current situations, at any rate. They’d been Ballinger’s clients in his old location and were now safely buried in the local cemetery.
Ballinger had at one time been a fan of old paperback books, but he’d taken to reading on a tablet for a while. Then, as he’d explained to Rhodes, he’d gone back to books because he missed them. There were a couple of them lying on his desk when Rhodes walked into his office on the ground floor of the former servants’ quarters. The odd thing was that they looked brand-new.
“They are,” Ballinger said when Rhodes asked about them. “Seems as if a lot of small companies are starting to reprint things that you couldn’t find anywhere, no matter how hard you looked, until the Internet came along. Then you could find them, but some of them were so expensive that you couldn’t afford them.”
“You could,” Rhodes said.
“Well, maybe, but I liked finding them for a quarter at a garage sale. The rare ones never turned up there. Now I can buy them for a few bucks. You take this one, for example.”
Ballinger picked up one of the books, a trade-sized paperback, and handed it to Rhodes, who looked it over. The cover was just as tawdry as any of the older ones Rhodes had seen in the office and showed a nude woman diving into a swimming pool where a man waited for her. Two titles adorned the cover along with the nude woman and waiting man: Lust Queen and Lust Victim.
“Racy stuff,” Rhodes said, handing the book back. “Lots of lust. I didn’t know you went in for that kind of thing.”
“It’s not as racy as it looks,” Ballinger said. “See, back in the old days a lot of writers, big-name guys sometimes, wrote midcentury erotica because it paid well and they could write it fast.”
“Midcentury erotica?”
“Sounds better than soft porn. Anyway, the books were mostly mystery or crime stories with some sex thrown in. Pretty good stuff.”
“I’ll bet,” Rhodes said. “Don’t let Buddy catch you with any of those.”
Buddy had a puritanical streak, and the naked woman would’ve been shocking to him.
“I’ll keep it out of sight,” Ballinger said, opening the middle drawer of his desk and sliding the book inside. “Not that there’s anything wrong with it. These stories were all pretty moralistic. The wicked were always punished, usually in ways that gave some business to my profession.”
“Speaking of the wicked being punished,” Rhodes said, “let’s talk about Melvin Hunt. Did Dr. White get here to do an autopsy on him?”
“He did. I have the report for you, and a couple of slugs that he took from the body.”
Ballinger took the report and a couple of plastic bags out of a desk drawer and passed them to Rhodes. Rhodes was a little surprised to learn that the slugs were from a .32, but he knew well enough that a
.32 could penetrate enough to kill, especially if it hit a vital spot. The first one hadn’t, but the second one had. Survivors will be shot again.
Billy Bacon’s gun was a .38, or the one that he claimed belonged to his wife was. If that was the only one they had, Billy was in the clear, but Rhodes knew that Billy could have an off-the-books gun, just like a lot of other people in Texas.
Rhodes flipped through the report until he came to the important part. Hunt had indeed died a day before he’d been found. Dr. White had determined this in a couple of ways, one of which was the growth stage of the maggots in the wounds. The blowflies that Rhodes had brushed away had laid eggs, and the maggots had just hatched. If Billy could prove his alibi for the day of the death, the gun wouldn’t matter. Rhodes would mark him off the list of suspects. So far he had only his wife to vouch for him, however.
“Anything interesting in there?” Ballinger asked
“Maybe,” Rhodes said, “but not anything that’s going to help me find out who killed Melvin.”
“You’ll find out,” Ballinger said.
“People keep telling me that.”
“You and Sage Barton always come through.”
“People keep telling me that, too. I wish they’d stop.”
“Not gonna happen.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Rhodes said.
* * *
Rhodes’s next stop was the jail, where his worst fears were realized. Seepy Benton was there. Rhodes had hoped to see Mika Blackfield, not Seepy, but Mika had already done her report and left. Rhodes was stuck with Seepy.
It wasn’t that Seepy was a bad person. It was just that he always wanted to be helpful. Even worse, he had been helpful in the past, and that gave him some credibility. After that, Rhodes had consulted with him a couple of times, thus giving Benton leverage, or so Benton thought. Most recently Benton had been operating his ghost-hunting business and had in the process led Rhodes to an important clue in a murder case. Benton wasn’t the kind to forget something like that.
