Evil at the Root

by Bill Crider

  EVIL AT THE ROOT

  Book Five of the Dan Rhodes Mysteries

  By Bill Crider

  Digital edition published by Crossroad Press

  Copyright 2013 / Bill Crider

  Cover images courtesy of:

  Nicolas Raymond (Texas flag image)

  LICENSE NOTES

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  DISCOVER CROSSROAD PRESS

  Visit our online store

  Subscribe to our Newsletter

  Visit our DIGITAL and AUDIO book blogs for updates and news.

  Connect with us on Facebook.

  Join our group at Goodreads.

  Meet the Author

  BILL CRIDER is the author of more than fifty published novels and numerous short stories. He won the Anthony Award for best first mystery novel in 1987 for Too Late to Die and was nominated for the Shamus Award for best first private-eye novel for Dead on the Island. He won the Golden Duck award for “best juvenile science fiction novel” for Mike Gonzo and the UFO Terror. He and his wife, Judy, won the best short story Anthony in 2002 for their story “Chocolate Moose.” His story “Cranked” from Damn Near Dead (Busted Flush Press) was nominated for the Edgar award for best short story.

  Check out his homepage at: http:// www.billcrider.com or take a look at his peculiar blog at http://billcrider.blogspot.com

  Book List

  Novels:

  The Sheriff Dan Rhodes Mystery Series

  Too Late to Die

  Shotgun Saturday Night

  Cursed to Death

  Death on the Move

  Evil at the Root

  Booked for a Hanging

  Murder Most Fowl

  Winning Can Be Murder

  Death by Accident

  A Ghost of a Chance

  A Romantic Way to Die

  Red, White, and Blue Murder

  “The Empty Manger,” (novella in the collection entitled Murder, Mayhem, and Mistletoe.)

  A Mammoth Murder

  Murder Among the O.W.L.S.

  Of All Sad Words

  Murder in Four Parts

  Murder in the Air

  The Wild Hog Murders

  The Murder of a Beauty Shop Queen

  Compound Murder

  The Carl Burns Mystery Series

  One Dead Dean

  Dying Voices

  …A Dangerous Thing

  Dead Soldiers

  The Truman Smith Mystery Series

  Dead on the Island

  Gator Kill

  When Old Men Die

  The Prairie Chicken Kill

  Murder Takes a Break

  The Sally Good Mystery Series

  Murder Is an Art

  A Knife in the Back

  A Bond with Death

  The Stanley Waters Mystery Series (Willard Scott, Co-Author)

  Murder under Blue Skies

  Murder in the Mist

  Stand-Alone Mystery and Suspense Novels

  Blood Marks

  The Texas Capitol Murders

  Houston Homicide (with Clyde Wilson)

  House-Name Spy Fiction

  The Coyote Connection (a Nick Carter book, in collaboration with Jack Davis)

  Western Novels

  Ryan Rides Back

  Galveston Gunman

  A Time for Hanging

  Medicine Show

  Outrage at Blanco

  Texas Vigilante

  As Colby Jackson:

  Dead Man’s Revenge

  Gabby Darbins and the Slide-Rock Bolter

  Horror Novels (all published under the pseudonym “Jack MacLane”)

  Keepers of the Beast

  Goodnight, Moom

  Blood Dreams

  Rest in Peace

  Just before Dark

  Books for Young Readers

  A Vampire Named Fred

  Muttketeer

  Mike Gonzo and the Sewer Monster

  Mike Gonzo and the Almost Invisible Man

  Mike Gonzo and the UFO Terror

  Short Story Collections:

  The Nighttime is the Right Time

  To Angela and Allen

  EVIL AT THE ROOT

  Chapter 1

  It was a brisk morning—48 degrees on the jailhouse thermometer—and Sheriff Dan Rhodes had all the windows rolled up on the county car. It didn’t matter, though. He could still hear the little man yelling at him as he parked in the lot of the Sunny Dale Nursing Home.

  “Ah ain’t got no teef! Ah ain’t got no teef!”

  The man had on a Western-style straw hat, not exactly appropriate for the weather, a white Western shirt that was buttoned at the collar and seemed to have been made for a neck about two sizes larger than the one that was in it; very clean blue jeans, newly pressed with a sharp crease down the front; and black cowboy boots. Over the white shirt he wore a puffy insulated ski jacket, unzipped. It was electric blue with a bright red band circling the chest. His face was red and scraped from his morning shave, and he was quivering with anger.

  “Ah ain’t got no teef!” he yelled. “Ah ain’t got no teef!” His voice was thin and high, but strong.

  Rhodes walked up to the porch. The little man came up to about his shoulders and probably didn’t weigh more than ninety pounds. His eyes were red and rheumy.

  The porch was lined with chairs, but the man wasn’t sitting in one. He was standing in the sun to keep warm, though Rhodes suspected that anger was keeping his blood pretty hot.

  “I’m the sheriff,” Rhodes said, indicating the badge case on his belt. “What’s this about your teeth?”

  “Ah ain’t got no teef!” the man yelled.

  Rhodes resisted the urge to put his hands over his ears.

  The man stopped yelling and pointed to his mouth. There were no teeth in there, that was for sure. It was just a smooth-rimmed black hole surrounded by chapped lips.

  “I’d better check with Mr. Patterson,” Rhodes told the little man. He opened one of the big glass doors and started inside.

  “Ah ain’t got no teef” the man yelled behind him.

  Rhodes let the door swing shut. He was in the lobby now, the sun coming in through all the glass and making the somewhat worn furniture look as cheerful as possible. There were no visitors sitting there yet, but it was still early in the day.

  Rhodes was not overly fond of nursing homes, no matter how much sunshine there was in the lobby. He didn’t like their peculiar odor; he didn’t like the rails on the walls, there to help the people walk without falling down; and he especially didn’t like to think that he was not getting any younger himself, though that was certainly the case. Besides, they were always too hot in the winter, in deference to what Texans considered the well-known fact that people’s blood thinned out as they got older, a condition that caused them to suffer more from the cold than younger folks.

  Rhodes had visited Sunny Dale before in the course of his job, when some of the residents had rioted to protest about certain rules they thought were unfair. He had later attended the marriage ceremony performed for two of those residents, Mr. Stuart and Mrs. White, and he had visited them several times since then.

  Familiarity had not endeared the place to him, though he knew that it was well run and that the residents were well cared for. He still hoped that he would never wind up there.

  He wal
ked to the reception desk. Earlene, whose last name Rhodes had never learned, and who shared reception duties with a black woman named Linda, sat in a chair behind the desk. She was reading a tattered, dog-eared copy of Cosmopolitan that she had probably picked up from the visitors’ area.

  “Good morning, Earlene,” Rhodes said.

  She looked up from her magazine. “Hi, Sheriff.” She giggled. “That’s a joke. Get it? ‘Hi, Sheriff’? It’s like High Sheriff.”

  Just in case he still didn’t get it, she spelled it out. “You know. Like H-I-G-H Sheriff?”

  Rhodes tried to laugh convincingly. “Is Mr. Patterson around?” he asked.

  Earlene stood up, laid her magazine down with the spine up to save her place, and leaned over the counter. “It’s about Mr. Bobbit’s teeth, isn’t it?” she said in a conspiratorial whisper.

  “I’m not sure I ought to say anything about it until I’ve talked to Mr. Patterson,” Rhodes said.

  “Hell, honey, we all know about it,” Earlene said. “You’d be surprised at what-all gets stolen around here. Candy bars, money, jewelry boxes, all kinds of stuff. A toothbrush now and then, even. This is the first time for teeth, though. I tell you, these old people, they’ll—”

  “That’s enough, Earlene,” Mr. Patterson said, coming up behind her from his office. “I’ll handle this.”

  He stuck his hand across the counter to Rhodes, and Rhodes shook it. It was soft and white, like the rest of the man. Patterson obviously didn’t get out in the sun much, and he was even dressed in white, right down to a pair of gum-soled white shoes. He had carefully styled blond hair that was sprayed stiff, every individual hair in its place.

  “Let’s go in my office,” he suggested, and Rhodes went around the counter and followed him in. It was a small, cramped room, most of the space taken up by a wooden desk and a gray metal filing cabinet. The top of the desk was neatly arranged, papers in three separate piles, and Rhodes couldn’t help envying Patterson’s ability to keep things in their places.

  Patterson went behind his desk and sat down, asking Rhodes to take the only other seat in the room, an uncomfortable wooden chair with a straight back and no cushion.

  “What’s this about the teeth?” Rhodes said.

  Mr. Patterson touched his hair with his right hand as if to smooth it down. Rhodes figured there was so much hairspray on it that touching it would be like touching baling wire.

  “Someone stole Mr. Bobbit’s teeth,” Mr. Patterson said.

  “I gather that’s Mr. Bobbit on the porch,” Rhodes said, squirming a little in the chair. It didn’t help. He still couldn’t get comfortable.

  “Yes,” Mr. Patterson said. “That’s him all right. A dear gentleman, most of the time.”

  “He seems a little upset about the teeth, though,” Rhodes said.

  Patterson smiled weakly. “Yes. Well, it’s not him so much as his daughter. Seems to hold me personally liable, though of course I’m not.” He looked sharply at Rhodes. “Am I?”

  “You’d have to check with your lawyer about that,” Rhodes said.

  “Oh. Well, I will. Still, Miss Bobbit is very insistent that we find the teeth. And of course, it is pretty hard for Mr. Bobbit to eat without them.” Patterson touched the left side of his hair this time. “Not that we don’t have things that he can eat perfectly well. We do, all sorts of things. But he does miss his teeth.”

  Rhodes nodded. “So I gathered.” He was thinking about having to eat strained prunes or pureed vegetables or something equally horrible for every meal. “Can’t say that I blame him.”

  “Naturally. That’s why I called you. I hoped that you’d investigate and see what you could do.”

  “Couldn’t he just have lost his teeth? Misplaced them?”

  “We thought about that, but there’s really no place for them to be, at least not in his room. We searched very carefully.”

  Rhodes thought about it. This kind of theft, if that was what it was, wasn’t exactly the kind of thing the taxpayers wanted their sheriff to spend his time on. Still, he might be able to do something without sacrificing any time from his other duties. Patterson was a taxpayer, too.

  “I’ll try to help out,” he said, standing up.

  Patterson stood too, putting out his hand for another shake. “Thank you, Sheriff. If there’s anything that I can do to assist you, please don’t hesitate to ask.”

  “All you need to do is let me talk to a few people,”

  Rhodes said.

  “Of course. Of course. Anyone in particular?”

  “I thought I’d start with Mr. Bobbit.”

  “Well, Mr. Bobbit…I mean, you met Mr. Bobbit.”

  “On the porch.”

  “Yes. Then you know…”

  “I want to talk to him anyway.”

  “Of course. Of course. Go right ahead.”

  Mr. Bobbit was still on the porch where Rhodes had left him.

  A man and a woman about Rhodes’s age had gotten out of their car and were trying to get through the front door, probably to visit a relative or friend.

  Mr. Bobbit was yelling at them. “Ah ain’t got no teef!”

  The man, pudgy and red-faced, wearing a gray felt hat, was trying to maneuver around him on one side, his wife, also pudgy, on the other.

  But Mr. Bobbit wasn’t having any of it. They weren’t going to get by him like Rhodes had. He was moving from one side of the door to the other, yelling.

  “Ah ain’t got no teef.”

  Rhodes went outside. He was sweating under his shirt because of the heat in the building, and the sudden chill of the air felt very good. “Mr. Bobbit?” he said.

  Surprised, Mr. Bobbit spun around. The pudgy man and woman scooted past him and through the door, looking back gratefully at Rhodes. He hoped they’d remember him at the next election.

  “Did someone steal your teeth?” he asked Mr. Bobbit. The old man looked immensely pleased that someone had figured it out. “Dod-damn wight! Sum’buddy stole ’em!”

  “Who did it, do you think?”

  That stumped Mr. Bobbit temporarily. He quit moving around and stared at the concrete porch beneath his feet. Or maybe he was looking at the toes of his boots poking out from beneath the bottoms of the jeans.

  “Mr. Bobbit?” Rhodes said.

  The old man’s head jerked up. “Ah ain’t got no teef!”

  Rhodes nodded. “Right. And who do you think might have taken them?”

  Mr. Bobbit went into another trance, and Rhodes was about to give it all up as a bad job, when the old man spoke again.

  “Mighta been ’at Dod-damn Mah-weece Kenn’dy.”

  “Maurice Kennedy?”

  ‘At’s what Ah said. Dod-damn sumbitch.”

  “Does Mr. Kennedy live here?”

  “Ah ain’t got no teef!”

  Rhodes decided that he had learned just about as much as he could from Mr. Bobbit. He left the old man to his anger, which seemed to be about all he had left, and went back inside.

  He didn’t stop at the desk to ask Earlene about Mr. Kennedy. He had a feeling that anything he said to her might just as well be published in the local newspaper. Instead, he walked down the hail of what had been known as Sunny Dales “men’s wing” until the riots. Now that Mr. Stuart and Mrs. White were man and wife and were being allowed to live together, there was no more separation of the sexes. No more riots, either.

  Rhodes tried not to look into any of the open doors as he walked along the hallway. Though some of the elderly residents of Sunny Dale were spry and lively, the Stuarts being a case in point, others were invalids, seemingly without any spark of life or hope. They often sat in their chairs studying the floor for hours on end, or they lay in their beds staring endlessly and blankly at color television sets, their eyes as unblinking as the screens.

  Once upon a time they had rolled on the lawn with collie dogs, played hide-and-seek and baseball, fallen in love, borne children, had families, worked at jobs they loved or hate
d. And now this. What really bothered Rhodes was that he was a lot closer to them in age than he was to a kid playing hide-and-seek.

  The depression that he usually felt in the nursing home lifted a bit when he went into the Stuarts’ room. They had a television set, but it was hardly ever on. They preferred to read or to play draw poker.

  Mrs. Stuart liked Stephen King and was a steely-eyed opponent at the game table. Rhodes had sat in for a few hands of penny ante once and lost fifty-seven cents to her in about fifteen minutes.

  Mr. Stuart read mostly mysteries, and his greatest wish was to live long enough to read every hard-boiled private-eye novel so far published in a large-print edition. He was nowhere near the poker player his wife was, and had told Rhodes on a recent visit that he was down five thousand dollars at the last accounting. Fortunately they didn’t play for real money, just kept a running tab. That way, Rhodes didn’t have to arrest them for running a high-stakes illegal gambling operation.

  They were both well over eighty years of age and were quite frail, but their health was in general very good, and their marriage seemed to have made them even more energetic and spirited than they had been before.

  They were seated at the small table in the center of their room when Rhodes entered through the open door.

  He didn’t say anything, just glanced at Mr. Stuart’s hand—two pairs, nines and tens—and went to stand behind Mrs. Stuart. She had a pair of threes in her own hand, which she couldn’t quite hold steady.

  “I’ll see your twenty and raise you fifty,” she said in her quavery voice, shoving five red chips to the center of the table and staring into her husband’s eyes.

  Mr. Stuart was wearing a sport coat that looked about three sizes too big. He looked back at his wife for a second or two, then sighed and folded his hand.

  “Too rich for my blood,” he said. “What did you have?”