by Bill Crider
Speedo pulled a dirty trick, however. He ran over and dropped the duck at the foot of the steps for Rhodes to pick up and throw to him. Rhodes picked it up and threw it as high and as straight up as he could.
“Jump ball!” he said.
The dogs both timed it pretty well and jumped together. Speedo was so big that he knocked Yancey a yard or so away and grabbed the ball in the air. Yancey rolled over and attacked.
Ivy came out the back door. “Sometimes I think you have more fun with that toy than those dogs do.”
Rhodes stood up. “I probably do. Come on, Yancey. Time to go inside.”
Speedo dropped the duck and trotted back to his favorite spot. Yancey did something that he’d never done before. He snatched up the duck and headed for the back steps at his top speed. Rhodes grinned and opened the door as Yancey bounded up the steps and into the house. Speedo took no notice, but Yancey didn’t seem to care.
“He thinks he put one over on Speedo,” Rhodes said.
“Speedo let him,” Ivy said. “Sometimes it’s easier that way.”
Rhodes thought there might be some hidden meaning there, but he couldn’t figure out what it was. He said, “This isn’t official business, so let’s go in the Edsel. I haven’t driven it lately, and I need to be sure the battery’s okay.”
“That’s fine with me,” Ivy said.
Rhodes had come by the Edsel at the same time he’d come by Yancey in the investigation of a murder case. It was kind of a package deal. The old car had been well maintained, and Rhodes liked to drive it now and then to be sure it stayed in working order. It was considered by a lot of people to have been one of the auto industry’s biggest failures, but Rhodes liked it for its peculiarities, like the fish-mouth grille and the push-button automatic transmission with the buttons in the center of the steering wheel.
The Edsel hadn’t been driven for a while, but the battery cranked the motor after a couple of seconds, and Rhodes backed the car out of the garage. As they drove to the restaurant, he told Ivy about the discovery of Riley Farmer’s body.
“He’s not married,” Rhodes said, “so his wife couldn’t have killed him.”
“Melvin Hunt’s wife could have,” Ivy said. “It’s always the wife. If Riley was Melvin’s best friend, then she might have had to kill him to cover up the first murder.”
“Anything’s possible,” Rhodes said.
“But you don’t believe it.”
“I didn’t say I didn’t believe it. It could have happened that way. There are some things that make me wonder.”
“What things?” Ivy asked, and Rhodes told her about Will Smalls.
“What if Joyce is the one who lied?” Ivy asked when he was finished.
“Her sister’s the one who told me, not Joyce.”
“Well, then. Everybody makes mistakes.”
“I thought I’d made a mistake once,” Rhodes said, “but I was wrong.”
Ivy laughed.
Rhodes laughed, too. It was about time somebody appreciated one of his jokes.
Chapter 18
Rhodes found out that the joke was on him when he arrived at the Round-Up. The sign in front had formerly said ABSOLUTELY NO CHICKEN, FISH, OR VEGETARIAN DISHES CAN BE FOUND ON OUR MENU! Now it said TRY OUR NEW CHICKEN AND VEGETARIAN DISHES!
“You knew, didn’t you,” Rhodes said when he’d parked the Edsel on the asphalt lot.
“I’d heard that there’d been a menu change,” Ivy said, giving him an innocent look. “I wasn’t sure how drastic it was.”
“Pretty drastic,” Rhodes said, getting out of the car and looking at the sign again. Underneath the main message was TODAY’S SPECIAL: GRILLED CHICKEN BREAST WITH GARLIC HERB DRESSING, RICE, AND GREEN BEANS. Underneath that it said FREE WI-FI!
Rhodes sighed.
“Don’t take it so hard,” Ivy said. “I doubt that we’ll see a single person with a computer on the table.”
“It’s not computers that worry me,” Rhodes said.
Ivy grinned. “I didn’t really think so, but you don’t have to order the chicken breast. I’m sure you can find plenty of things that will clog your arteries.”
Rhodes hoped that was true, but he didn’t think it would be a good idea to say so. They went inside, where they were greeted by Mary Jo Colley, one of the servers. Rhodes knew her, and not just because he was a regular customer. She’d been on the periphery in a couple of his cases.
“Good evening, folks,” she said. “I see you’ve had a tough day, Sheriff, but you handled it all well.”
“What do you mean?” Ivy asked.
Mary Jo gave her a quizzical look. “He hasn’t told you?”
“He never tells me anything.”
“You’re starting to sound like Hack,” Rhodes said.
“Let me get you seated,” Mary Jo said. “Then I’ll tell you the news. I’ll even show it to you.”
She led them to a seat in a booth by one of the front windows. Several people waved or nodded to Rhodes and all of them seemed to be grinning. Rhodes wondered what was going on.
“Let me get y’all some water,” Mary Jo said after they were seated. “I’ll be back in a jiffy.”
The restaurant’s soundtrack was something that was called “classic country,” which was fine by Rhodes. He wasn’t fond of the current music masquerading as country, but he liked the old stuff. At the moment, Roy Drusky was singing “Red, Red Wine.”
Mary Jo returned in the jiffy she had promised, and in addition to the water she carried, she had an iPad stuck under her arm.
Wi-Fi, Rhodes thought. Trying to put off what he was sure was coming, he said, “When did the policies change around here?”
Mary Jo set the water and the iPad on the table. It was in a black case. “Last week. Had too many people coming in and complaining about the menu and asking about the Wi-Fi connection. I guess Clearview is growing up.”
“That’s one way to look at it,” Rhodes said.
“We might even have some gluten-free items before long,” Mary Jo said. “Clearview is getting more like California all the time, but you can still get a steak and a baked potato with butter and sour cream, though.”
That was the best news Rhodes had heard all day.
Ivy tapped the iPad. “What’s that for? Do we order with that now?”
Mary Jo laughed. “Nope. That might be coming down the pike, but that’s not what it’s for. There’s some video I want to show you. Your husband’s a real hero, you know that?”
“In general, yes, but not specifically. Are you talking about the loaf-of-bread incident?”
“Well, there’s that,” Mary Jo said, “but that’s yesterday’s news, and there’s no video. I was thinking about the Jurassic Turtle.”
“Jurassic Turtle?” Ivy looked at Rhodes, who shrugged. He remembered that Jennifer had said she was going to “edit some video,” but he didn’t know exactly what she might have done.
“Let me show you,” Mary Jo said.
She opened the iPad case’s cover and found A Clear View of Clearview. She opened a link, and a video started. Mary Jo was standing on Ivy’s side of the booth, so the video was upside down from Rhodes’s side. He couldn’t tell much about what was going on, but he could see that he and the turtle were involved.
“I found some muddy clothes in the hamper,” Ivy said when the video was over. “Little did I know they’d been worn by somebody who’s not afraid of taking on a fight with a really big turtle.”
“That’s an alligator snapping turtle,” Mary Jo said. “One of those things can take your fingers right off if you aren’t careful. I had a boyfriend one time that lost a pinkie finger to one of those turtles when he was out fishing and hooked it by accident. Tony Spano. That turtle wasn’t one bit grateful when Tony tried to get the hook out of its leg. Tony had a beer cooler with him, so he put the finger on ice. The doctors reattached it, and it worked as good as new. Well, almost.”
She pushed something so the vide
o would replay, turned the iPad around, and shoved it over to Rhodes’s side of the table. He didn’t want to watch, but he felt he had to. Sure enough, the headline said JURASSIC TURTLE, and the way Jennifer had edited the video made him seem much more in control of the situation than he had been in reality. She even made it look as if his face-to-face confrontation with the turtle on the creek bank had been both brave and deliberate. In fact, the video looked to Rhodes like something out of an old Jungle Jim movie, the ones Johnny Weissmuller made after he’d gone a little bit to seed and gotten a tad too heavy to play Tarzan. He still looked pretty good, though, and so did Rhodes, who now understood why everybody had been so friendly to him as he walked through the restaurant. Most of them had probably seen the video.
“I’d like to see Sage Barton do it any better,” Mary Jo said.
“Has everybody in town read those books?” Rhodes asked, closing the cover on the iPad case.
“Just about,” Mary Jo said. “Those two women who write ’em really do know you.”
“They don’t know me at all,” Rhodes said. “I’m not anything like Sage Barton. More like Johnny Weismuller.”
“Who?”
“Never mind. Let’s just leave it that I’m not Sage Barton.”
“That’s the truth,” Ivy said to Mary Jo. “He’s a whole lot better than Sage Barton.”
Mary Jo gave Rhodes an admiring look. “I’ll just bet he is.”
Rhodes reached for a menu from between the napkin holder and the ketchup bottle next to the wall, and Mary Jo took the hint.
“I’ll give y’all a minute to look things over,” she said. “The menu’s a little different.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Rhodes said.
Mary Jo laughed, picked up her iPad, and left. On the speakers Loretta Lynn was singing about how nobody was woman enough to take her man.
“Were you going to tell me about the turtle?” Ivy asked Rhodes.
“I hadn’t thought about it. It wasn’t a big deal.”
“It looked like a big deal to me.”
Rhodes handed her a menu. “It’s all in the editing.”
Ivy opened her menu. “Editing?”
“Never mind,” Rhodes said.
“What are you going to have?” Ivy asked, looking at the menu.
“Not the chicken,” Rhodes said. “What about you?”
“I wonder if they have turtle soup,” Ivy said.
* * *
Rhodes had a New York strip and a loaded baked potato, which was a very satisfying end to a not very satisfying day. He was thinking about having dessert when he saw Mikey Burns approaching the table.
Rhodes had to answer to all the county commissioners, but Burns was the only one who called him in for little talks with any kind of regularity. Burns always had some new idea or proposal that he wanted Rhodes to consider, and in spite of the fact that Burns frequently wore colorful aloha shirts and looked like a smaller, more benevolent Santa Claus except with a shorter beard, the proposals almost always involved heavy-duty ordnance of one kind of another.
This evening Burns wore a shirt just a bit less brightly colored than those he usually sported. This one was navy blue and covered with guitars of various sizes. It was still a shirt that stood out in the Round-Up, or for that matter in Clearview itself, which was a town of more traditional dressers. Rhodes had always thought that the shirts were part of a carefully crafted image, something that set Burns apart from anyone who might dare to run against him for his position. How could anybody vote against a man who wore shirts like that?
“Good evening, Sheriff,” Burns said when he reached the booth. “Good evening, Ivy.”
“Good evening,” Ivy said, and Rhodes nodded, thinking that it was good-bye to dessert.
Burns didn’t wait for an invitation to join them. He pulled a chair away from a vacant table and sat down at the end of the booth.
“Great job with that robber at the convenience store,” he said when he was seated. “With that turtle, too.”
“Thanks,” Rhodes said. “That’s what the county pays me for.”
“You’ve handled things well.” Burns paused. “Any progress on those killings?”
“I can’t really talk about an investigation in progress,” Rhodes said, using the cliché to cover for the fact that he hadn’t arrived at a solution yet. “Not even with a commissioner. I have a few ideas I’m following up on.”
“What about those marijuana fields?”
“They aren’t really fields. Just small patches.”
It occurred to Rhodes that they were small because that made them easier to hide. The small size might also explain why there were two of them. Spread them around so that if one was found, the other might remain undiscovered. But if there were two, why not three? Or four? It was something to consider.
“You know what we need, don’t you?” Burns said.
Rhodes had a feeling that he knew what Burns was going to say, but he pretended not to. “I have no idea.”
“Drones,” Burns said. “We need drones.”
“Why?” Rhodes asked.
“You know why. We could spot those marijuana fields from the air a lot easier than you can stumble across them when you’re investigating something else.”
“It’s not like we have a lot of marijuana patches,” Rhodes said.
“Even one is too many. We don’t want people to think this is a sanctuary county for marijuana growers.”
“I don’t think anybody would get an idea like that,” Rhodes said. “Here’s what we can do. We can call it cannabis. That’s the name some people prefer. That way it won’t have the bad connotations.”
Burns thought it over. “I’m not sure that would work. We need some drones.”
Rhodes tried another tactic. “If we fly a bunch of drones around the county, people are likely to get the idea that we’re spying on them. Plenty of folks around here are suspicious of things like drones. Some of them already think we have cameras on every street corner in town.”
Burns brightened. “Those cameras might be a good idea. It wouldn’t take many of them. It would cut down on crime.”
As far as Rhodes could recall there hadn’t been any crime downtown in years, mainly because there was hardly any downtown left.
“We’d have to hire people to maintain the cameras, watch the video, fly the drones, write up the reports,” Rhodes said. “It would be a big strain on the budget, and the results might not be worth it. It might cost us some votes, too.”
Burns didn’t look happy about that. Drones might be dear to his heart, but votes and money were more important.
“Maybe you’re right. We don’t want to upset the voters or go over our budget.” Burns stood up and pushed the chair back to the vacant table. “I’d better get back to my booth. Mrs. Wilkie might start feeling lonesome. You keep up the good work, Sheriff. Y’all have a good evening.”
“Is he going to marry Mrs. Wilkie?” Ivy asked as Burns walked away and Willie Nelson was singing about a redheaded stranger. “They’ve been dating for a good while now.”
Rhodes didn’t know how to answer that. At one time Mrs. Wilkie had had her eye on him, but that hadn’t worked out because Rhodes had met Ivy. Later Mrs. Wilkie had become Burns’s secretary, and eventually they’d begun dating. Rhodes didn’t think it was a serious affair, at least not on Burns’s side, but he wasn’t a very good judge of that sort of thing.
“He doesn’t talk about it,” Rhodes said.
“I think she’d like to get married,” Ivy said. “That’s what I heard at the beauty shop.”
“Well, that settles it,” Rhodes said, thinking that Mikey Burns was as good as hitched, although he might not know it yet.
* * *
After they left the restaurant without having dessert, which was a bit of a disappointment, Rhodes took Ivy home and put the Edsel in the garage.
“I’m going to visit a few people,” he said before Ivy went in the hous
e, “and I need to go by the jail. Official business, so I’ll take the Tahoe.”
“It’s getting late,” Ivy said.
“I’ll try to be home in time to watch the news at ten.”
“You never watch the news.”
“There’s always a first time,” Rhodes said, climbing into the Tahoe.
* * *
At the jail the first thing Rhodes did was ask Hack if he was in the loop.
“No thanks to you,” Hack said. “Buddy filled me in, though.”
“I thought he would. Did he find anything at the crime scene?”
“Said he didn’t. Animals had pretty much messed everything up.”
Rhodes had thought that might be the case, but there was always the chance that the killer might have overlooked something. Too bad it hadn’t happened like that.
“Buddy had the JP come out and then called to have the body picked up and taken to Ballinger’s,” Hack said. “Dr. White’ll do the autopsy when he gets around to it. Maybe tonight.”
“Anything else going on that I need to know about?”
“You feelin’ out of the loop?”
“Don’t start that,” Rhodes said. “Just tell me if there’s anything I need to know.”
“Depends on what you think you need to know.”
Rhodes wasn’t in the mood to play any of Hack’s games tonight.
“Major crimes only,” he said. “Pretend nothing else has happened.”
“Then there ain’t a thing you need to know about.”
“Good. Now I have a question for you. Departmental business. Who has a jon boat and a trolling motor that the department can borrow?”
“That’s an easy one,” Hack said. “Lawton.”
Rhodes was a little surprised that he hadn’t known about Lawton’s boat.
“He don’t ever use it,” Hack continued. “Bought it years ago when he thought he was gonna be a fisherman. Never took to it, though, and put the boat in his garage. It’s still there, and the trolling motor is, too. You plannin’ to go fishin’ on department time?”
