Evil at the Root

by Bill Crider

  “To any of us,” Rhodes said.

  “Yes, well, some are more susceptible than others. Age can be a factor.” Patterson smoothed his hair, which did not need smoothing. “I suppose you haven’t found Mr. Kennedy yet?”

  “No,” Rhodes said. “I don’t think he could get very far, though, without a car, and we haven’t had any stolen vehicles reported. He didn’t have one of his own, did he?”

  “No,” Patterson said. “He didn’t. He was perfectly capable of driving, however. His eyesight and reflexes were excellent for a man his age.”

  Rhodes thought for a second about his own eyesight. “And he didn’t have any friends in the community that he could stay with?”

  “I don’t believe that he did. As I mentioned, I suspect that one of the reasons he came here was loneliness.”

  Rhodes couldn’t imagine where Kennedy had gotten to. It had been cold last night, getting down near freezing. Where could a man nearly ninety spend the night if he didn’t have a friend to give him a room or a car to drive somewhere in? He hoped the deputies had checked the motels. He would have to make sure they did.

  “I don’t suppose that anyone saw him leave,” Rhodes said.

  Patterson shook his head. “I’m afraid not. He just slipped away. We don’t keep prisoners here, you know. The doors aren’t locked.”

  “I know,” Rhodes said. But he still wouldn’t want to live there.

  It turned out that Andrew West, Sr., had a room right next door to the one in which Mr. Bobbit had died. West was lying on his bed, watching television.

  At least Rhodes thought that was what he was doing. It was hard to tell, because of the odd angle of the old man’s head. He had the head of his bed elevated, and his body was facing the TV set that was on a shelf fixed to the wall of the room, but his head was twisted to the right, his chin practically resting on his right shoulder. His mouth hung slightly open, and there was a towel pinned to the shoulder of his pajamas. There was a damp stain on the towel.

  There was a fishing show on TV. Two men were in a bass boat, casting spinner baits in and around some lily pads. The lake looked mighty fishy to Rhodes, and he wished that he was one of the men in the boat.

  Rhodes tapped on the door frame. “Can I come in?” he said.

  The man in the bed said something that sounded roughly like “Nobody’s stopping you,” and Rhodes entered the room.

  There was a chair by the bed, and Rhodes sat down. “Watching TV?” he said.

  “Hell, no, I’m playing pocket pool. What the hell does it look like I’m doing?” West’s speech was slurred, as Patterson had said, but Rhodes had no difficulty understanding him. He felt a little silly about his question.

  “I’m Sheriff Dan Rhodes,” Rhodes said. “I was wondering if I could talk to you for a minute.”

  “You’re doing it, ain’t you?”

  “I guess I am,” Rhodes said.

  On the TV one of the men got a hard strike. He reared back on his rod, setting the hook solidly, and the fish began to make a run for the vegetation, the line cutting through the water and the drag on the reel singing.

  “You fish?” West said.

  “Not often enough,” Rhodes told him, watching wistfully as the man on TV lipped and boated a bass that looked like it would go a solid five pounds. The spinner bait with a yellow-and-black rubber skirt dangled from the fish’s jaw.

  West fumbled around on the covers with his right hand and found the remote control. He pushed a button and the TV snapped off.

  “I used to go fishing,” he said. “Had me a little Skeeter bass boat, place on the lake. I was out on that water all the time.” His voice was virtually toneless, but Rhodes could feel the emotion in it. “I don’t go much anymore,” he said.

  Rhodes couldn’t think of anything to say to that. He sat there for a minute, looking at the blank screen of the TV.

  “Didn’t mean to cheer you up so much,” West said. “I bet you didn’t come in here to talk about fishing.”

  “No,” Rhodes said. “I didn’t.” He told him what he had come in there to talk about.

  “Yep, my boy came to see me yesterday,” Mr. West said. “Sat right in that chair till I woke up from my nap. He has to get somebody to watch the store when he comes in, but he does it two or three times a week, you can count on that.” Rhodes asked about the night Louis Horn died.

  “I remember that night about as well as anything,” West said. “Ain’t no doubt in my mind that Maurice Kennedy killed that Horn boy. Not a doubt in my mind.”

  “Do you think he killed Mr. Bobbit?” Rhodes asked.

  It was hard to read West’s face. It was lined and wrinkled, and he hadn’t been shaved yet that day. The partial paralysis didn’t help, either. But Rhodes could have sworn that something changed in the old man’s faded brown eyes. He looked somehow more cunning, secretive.

  “He did it, all right.”

  “How do you know? Did you see him? Did you hear anything?”

  “I didn’t see him, but he did it all right.”

  Rhodes sighed inwardly. West had no proof, had seen nothing either time, but he was sure Kennedy was guilty of two murders. That was often the way it was. People were convinced of the guilt or innocence of others, but they had no evidence at all to back up their convictions. And they wondered why the sheriff didn’t rush out and make an arrest.

  But there had been that change in West’s eyes.

  “Why are you so sure?” Rhodes said.

  “Because Bobbit had the goods on him,” West said. “And he was going to tell the world.”

  “What was he going to tell?”

  “He knew where Kennedy dumped Horn’s body,” West said. “That’s what he was going to tell.”

  Rhodes pulled his chair a little closer to the bed. “Are you sure about that?”

  “Damn right, I’m sure. I heard ’em talking about it.” West tried to hitch himself up a little higher in the bed. “People think I’m just a piece of furniture, think I don’t know what’s going on, but I do. I maybe can’t run a damn race or drive a car, but there’s nothing wrong with my ears.”

  “You heard Bobbit tell Kennedy he was going to say something about a body?”

  “Which word didn’t you understand? ’Course I heard him.”

  “When?” Rhodes said.

  “Yesterday morning. They were arguing in Bobbit’s room. It’s right next door, in case you didn’t notice.”

  Rhodes had noticed. “What did they say, exactly?”

  “Well, now that’s not so easy. Bobbit didn’t always make a lot of sense; it was like he sort of faded in and out.”

  Having talked to Bobbit, Rhodes knew what West meant. “Just do the best you can, then.”

  “They were arguing about teeth,” West said. “Bobbit said that Kennedy had stole his teeth, and Kennedy said what if he did? What was Bobbit gonna do about it? And Bobbit said something like he knew where the bodies were buried.”

  “That’s a pretty common expression,” Rhodes said.

  “Yep. He didn’t say it like that, maybe. More like, he knew where the body was dumped, like I said before.”

  “I don’t guess he said where.”

  “Oh, yeah. He even said that. Said it was dumped down a well.”

  Rhodes didn’t say anything for a minute. He’d had a recent experience with looking for a body in a well; it wasn’t something that had turned out the way he’d thought it would, and he wasn’t eager to repeat it.

  Then he said, “Did he mention where the well was located?”

  “Nope, didn’t say that. Kennedy didn’t give him a chance. Just said that if Bobbit tried to tell, wouldn’t anybody believe him because he was a senile old fart. Then he left.”

  “Kennedy?”

  “Yep. Walked out of the room and down the hall. I saw him go by, but he didn’t look in here.”

  “Did you tell your son any of this?”

  “Nope, but I’ve told him about Kennedy be
fore. I knew all along that he killed that Horn boy.”

  “Why didn’t you say anything to Mr. Patterson about this yesterday?”

  “Nobody asked me. Like I said, they think I’m just a piece of the furniture. But I can still do a lot of things if I get the chance.”

  Rhodes wished he had talked to West earlier. “Did you see anybody else go into Bobbit’s room? His daughter? A man named Lyle Everett or one named Dave Foley?”

  “Nope. Don’t even know those men. I think their mamas are in here, though. I’ve heard the names.”

  “And you didn’t hear anything when Mr. Bobbit was killed?”

  “Musts been taking my nap,” West said. “I sleep pretty hard, don’t hear much. These doors and walls are pretty thick.”

  “I thought the doors were always kept open,” Rhodes said.

  “Usually are, but you can shut ’em if you want to. Long as they don’t stay shut too long, nobody’ll say anything.”

  Rhodes talked for a few minutes more, but West was obviously tiring. As Rhodes left, the old man switched the TV set back on, but the fishing show was over.

  Rhodes went back to Patterson’s office. “I want to search Kennedy’s room now. Has anyone been in there yet?”

  “No,” Patterson said. “I’ve kept it locked.”

  Rhodes didn’t know what he hoped to find. False teeth, maybe, or some clue to Kennedy’s whereabouts.

  He found neither. The room was practically bare. There were five shirts hanging in the closet, a run-down pair of Hushpuppies on the closet floor, and two pairs of Levi’s Gentleman’s Jeans. There was a kit of toilet articles in a drawer in the nightstand. That was all.

  “He didn’t have many personal possessions,” Patterson said. “Not very many of our guests do. When you get to be their age, you know that material things don’t matter very much.”

  “I wonder why he left his toothbrush and razor,” Rhodes said.

  Patterson frowned. “Maybe he was in a hurry,” he said. A big hurry, Rhodes thought. The kind of hurry you might be in if you’d just killed a man.

  Chapter 9

  The wind had picked up out of the north and seemed to cut right through Rhodes’s corduroy jacket. The wind had brought clouds with it, thin and gray and high. The sun was a dim white ball.

  Rhodes went back to the jail to see if Hack had found out about Mr. Bobbit’s lawyer, though it seemed more and more likely that Maurice Kennedy was the guilty party. Now all they had to do was find him.

  Ruth Grady was there when Rhodes got in, and she told him that Kennedy had done a really good job of disappearing. “He’s not registered at any of the motels under his own name, and I described him to all the clerks. They don’t have anyone like that staying with them.”

  Checking the motels was a fairly easy job in Clearview. There was only one establishment that anyone with a family would consider stopping in, and three of a somewhat sleazier variety.

  “There are probably a couple of vacant houses close to Sunny Dale,” Rhodes suggested. “He might have broken in and stayed there.”

  “I’ve already looked,” Ruth said. “He’s not in any of them. I checked all around on the county roads, too.”

  She was the only deputy Rhodes had who had actually studied law enforcement, and she was sometimes a step ahead of him. Hack and Lawton had resented her at first, simply because she was a woman, but they had soon come to realize that she was a top-notch deputy. Rhodes had known it all along, and she had gotten him out of tough situations more than once.

  “How about those state boys with their computers?” Rhodes asked Hack, who had to admit that the Department of Public Safety, even with its technological superiority, had not yet called in with any leads to Kennedy’s whereabouts.

  “I don’t see how a man, especially a man that old, could disappear like that,” Ruth said. “Where could he go?”

  “He ain’t all that old,” Hack said.

  “Sorry,” Ruth said. “I didn’t mean to imply anything. But it’s hard for anybody to disappear so quickly, much less someone who can’t get around very fast.”

  “Who said he couldn’t get around fast? Just because he’s old don’t mean he can’t get around.”

  Ruth knew when to cut her losses. She changed the subject. “Any other suspects, Sheriff?”

  “Nobody solid. What about Mr. Bobbit’s will Hack?”

  Hack got a pitiful look on his face and put on a quavery voice. “What’re you askin’ me for? I’m so old and feeble, I can’t hardly get around to findin’ out things like that.”

  “Never mind the old and feeble act. We all know better. What about it?”

  Hack grinned to show that there were no hard feelings. “His lawyer’s Tom Dunstable. He wouldn’t say anything about the will, though.”

  Rhodes hadn’t expected him to. “I’ll talk to him later.” He gave Ruth the paper with the names of Everett and Foley on it. “See what you can find out about those two. And if you get a chance, check with the dentists to see who made Bobbit’s teeth. See if they could be worn by someone else. I’ll put Buddy to looking for Kennedy. He can’t have gotten too far.”

  “Right,” Hack said. “Bein’ as how he’s so old and feeble.”

  Rhodes smiled at Ruth, secure in the knowledge that his back was to Hack, who couldn’t see the smile.

  Hack was about to say something else when the door opened. Pushed by the wind, it slammed back against the wall.

  A young red-haired man stood in the doorway. “Sorry about that,” he said. He reached for the doorknob and closed the door. He looked like a first-year college student, with freckles sprinkled across his cheeks and the bridge of his nose. He was wearing a denim jacket and jeans; his boots were snakeskin.

  What bothered Rhodes was the tape recorder the young man had hanging from a strap around his neck.

  “I’m Larry Redden,” he said, He had a deep, clear voice that made him sound twenty years older than he appeared to be. He looked at Rhodes. “Are you the sheriff?”

  Rhodes admitted that he was. He introduced Hack and Ruth.

  “I’m from the radio station,” Redden said. He didn’t have to say which one. There was only one station in Clearview. “You’ve probably heard me on the air.”

  No one had heard of him, but no one wanted to say so.

  He noticed the blank looks and laughed. “Oh. I guess I should have said that my air name’s Red Rogers.”

  Rhodes knew that name. Red Rogers did a five-hour country music show in the mornings. He also did all the morning newscasts and an hour-long local news show at noon. On that one he talked about “All the news of special interest to you, the citizens of Clearview.” Rhodes liked the tape recorder less and less.

  “I’ve heard your show,” Rhodes said.

  “I’m here to interview you about the lawsuit that a former prisoner has filed against you and the county, Sheriff Rhodes,” Redden, or Rogers, said. “Is there a place where we can sit down?”

  “I don’t think I ought to be giving any interviews,” Rhodes said. “The lawsuit will be tried in the courts, not on the radio.”

  “But our listeners have a right to know about conditions in the jail that their tax money supports,” Redden said. “We don’t have to talk about the lawsuit at all if you think we shouldn’t. I’ll just mention it, and then we can just talk about the leaky roof, the lack of an exercise program, neglected prisoners, things like that.”

  “No prisoner in this jail ever got neglected,” Hack said. “You can tell your listeners that I said so.”

  “Just a second,” Redden said, glad to find someone willing to talk. “Let me get this recorder set up.”

  He put the recorder down on Hack’s desk and pushed a couple of buttons. “It’s got a built-in mike,” he said. Then he rewound the tape and played it. It repeated his words: “It’s got a built-in mike.”

  “Ready to go,” he said as he rewound the tape again. He looked at Hack and pushed the record buttons
. “Now, what’s your position here?”

  “I’m the dispatcher,” Hack said. As if to prove his point, the telephone rang. Hack was answering it when Rhodes sneaked out the door. Redden looked around when the wind hit him, but by then it was too late. Rhodes was already gone.

  Tom Dunstable had his office in a remodeled two-bedroom house about a block from the jail. Rhodes decided to walk. He hated to leave Hack at the mercy of the radio reporter like that, but he had an idea that Red Rogers, boy reporter, might have met his match. Rhodes’s only regret was that Lawton had not been there. Maybe Red’s luck would be running bad and Lawton would come in while the interview was still going on.

  Rhodes certainly hoped so.

  Dunstable had been a lawyer in Blacklin County since passing the bar exam more than twenty years before. Rhodes had known him ever since he was a skinny young man with a head of thick blond hair. Now he was a rotund middle-aged man with only a fringe of hair remaining. The top of his head was completely bald. He didn’t get up when Rhodes came into his office.

  “Too damn fat to be getting up and down all the time,” he said, waving Rhodes to a seat in a plush red leather chair. The walls of his office were lined with wooden book shelves with glass fronts, and there was a computer on his desk. Rhodes had come in through the secretary’s office. She had a computer, too. Hack would have been envious.

  “I guess I know what you’re after,” Dunstable said. He was leaning back in his own posh chair with his hands clasped on his belly. “Hack called me early this morning.”

  “He said you didn’t tell him anything about a will,” Rhodes said.

  “I wouldn’t be telling you, if I hadn’t called and talked to Miss Bobbit. She said it was all right. Besides, I don’t like giving out information on the phone. You never know who you might be talking to.”

  “You knew it was Hack, though.”

  “He said that’s who he was. But I figured if you really wanted to know, you’d be over here yourself.”

  “You were right. So what can you tell me about Lloyd Bobbit’s will? Did he have a lot of money? And if he did, who’s he leaving it to?”