Evil at the Root

by Bill Crider

  Rhodes eased himself into his chair. He told them what had happened. He didn’t even feel like drawing out the story to give them a dose of their own medicine.

  “I guess Ruth won’t be havin’ too much to say about old men, now,” Hack said. Rhodes thought he detected a note of pride in the dispatcher’s voice. “‘Course you ain’t so young yourself anymore.”

  “That’s what got me into this mess,” Rhodes told him. “Thinking about when I was younger.” He reached up to touch the back of his head.

  “I expect you got a concussion,” Hack said.

  “Maybe broken ribs, too,” Lawton said. “What you need to do is see a doctor.”

  “I will,” Rhodes told them, “but not until we get out a bulletin on the car.” He leaned back in his chair while Hack put out the bulletin on the radio. Before Hack was through, Rhodes was asleep.

  He woke up in the hospital. It was dark in the room, but he knew by the smell where he was. He sat up and fumbled around for a light switch.

  “I’m glad you’re finally awake,” Ivy Daniel said. There was a click, and the room light came on. “I was getting worried.”

  “What time is it,” Rhodes said.

  “Nearly ten o’clock. You’ve slept for quite a while.”

  “How did I get here?”

  “Ruth Grady brought you, with a little help from Hack and Lawton.”

  Rhodes didn’t feel much better, in spite of the sleep he’d gotten. He was still sore all over. He sat up and felt the back of his head, where there seemed to be an odd lump. He touched smooth skin and a fresh bandage.

  “You have a mild concussion,” Ivy said. “They shaved the back of your head and took a few stitches. Four, I think. Maybe five. Not many.”

  “What about my—”

  Your chest is badly bruised, but no ribs were broken. Your back seems fine, except that you’re bruised there, too.” Rhodes looked at her. Her mouth was tight with disapproval.

  “I need to get to the jail,” he said.

  “You’re not going anywhere, not for a day or two. The doctor said that if you didn’t have such a hard head you might be dead.”

  Rhodes wondered whether she was worried about him or mad at him. He couldn’t quite tell, so he asked her.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t decided yet.”

  He knew what she meant, or thought he did. She knew that he was a lawman, but she hadn’t yet accepted the fact that his job was sometimes, though not very often, dangerous. It was something that she was going to have to get used to.

  “I don’t want to get used to it,” she said, as if reading his mind. “I don’t want to think that I might find myself standing in front of the county judge next Friday, waiting for a man who might not show up because he’s getting himself beaten up by some old man with a tree limb.”

  “Hack tells too much,” Rhodes said. “And speaking of Hack, I have to find out about the county car. And I need to talk to Ruth Grady.

  “Don’t you try to change the subject,” Ivy said.

  Rhodes hadn’t really been trying to change the subject, not consciously. “I have to do my job,” he said.

  “Not when you’re in the hospital.”

  Rhodes lay back against the pillows. “You can’t keep me here until Friday.”

  “I know. I’d like to, though.” Ivy smiled faintly, and Rhodes felt a little better.

  He looked over at the night stand by the bed. There was an afternoon Clearview paper lying there, and he could see part of the headline. He reached for the paper and unfolded it.

  FORMER INMATE SUES COUNTY, SHERIFF, the headline read.

  “Great,” Rhodes said. “I wonder what Hack and Lawton think about this.”

  “They’re disappointed because their names weren’t in the headline,” Ivy said. “That’s what they told me, anyway.”

  “I imagine the commissioners are disappointed too, but not about that,” Rhodes said.

  He read the story. It wasn’t nearly as bad as he had expected, and it did mention one thing he didn’t know, that the commissioners were planning to call in a team of structural engineers to see if the jail was sound. “If it is,” Commissioner James Allen was quoted as saying, “then there will be no need to call for a bond election. We can repair the present facility, and with a few minor changes it will continue to serve us well.”

  That must have been something the commissioners had decided on after Rhodes had talked to Allen. It made sense. If the jail was structurally sound, and if the engineers certified that it was, then they could fix the roof, maybe even air condition the cells. Get an exercise yard built behind the jail. Buy a computer system. Maybe he wouldn’t have to worry about a new jail after all.

  There was a photograph of the jail accompanying the article. The old building didn’t look half bad. In fact, it looked good for another eighty or so years.

  Rhodes looked for the story on Lloyd Bobbit’s murder. He knew it would be there. Ordinarily, a murder was big news in Blacklin County and would certainly have rated a headline above the fold. This time, however, the article had been crowded down to the bottom of the page, for which Rhodes was thankful. Most people probably wouldn’t even notice it.

  He put the paper down. “I still have to talk to Ruth,” he said, reaching for the telephone.

  Ruth Grady was off duty, but Rhodes reached her at home. She had done everything he had asked her to do, and more. She had found the county car, too.

  “It was in the Wal-Mart parking lot,” she said. “The keys were in it. Whoever took it just left it there and walked away.” That seemed to mean that Kennedy was still in the county. “What about my pistol?” Rhodes said.

  “That wasn’t there,” Ruth told him. “Sorry.”

  Rhodes sighed. He hadn’t really expected it to be. That would have been asking too much. At least they had the car back, unharmed.

  “Was the shotgun still in the car?”

  “Yes. Lucky for us it’s not so easy to get to.”

  It might not be easy to get to in an emergency, either, but that didn’t matter to Rhodes right now. He was just glad it was still in the car.

  “Did you get a chance to talk to Foley and Everett?” he said.

  She had talked to both of them. Dave Foley was a truck driver for a grocery company. His mother was in Sunny Dale, and he had visited her around the time Lloyd Bobbit had died. However, he said that he didn’t know Bobbit, didn’t even know who he was. His mother’s room was on the other hall, and he had never even been near Bobbit’s room. As far as Ruth could determine, he was telling the truth.

  Lyle Everett was another story. His mother was in Sunny Dale, too, but there was a definite connection between her and Bobbit. She had dated him when they were both much younger. Her maiden name was Lansing.

  Rhodes thought he recalled seeing that name in the old records relating to the disappearance of Louis Horn.

  “You probably did,” Ruth said. “I talked to her. She was there that night.”

  Rhodes couldn’t think of any reason why Everett might kill Bobbit, however, unless it was the fact that Bobbit had threatened his mother the way he had threatened Kennedy.

  “She says he didn’t threaten her. According to her, they hadn’t talked for weeks, maybe longer,” Ruth said.

  “That’s about what I’d say, too, if murder was involved and I was being questioned,” Rhodes said. He knew they would have to check it out, no matter how likely a suspect Kennedy was. “What about the dentists?”

  According to Ruth, the dentist who had made Bobbit’s teeth was a Dr. Billy Richards. “He says that, sure, Kennedy could have used the teeth. But it wouldn’t be very sanitary, and they wouldn’t fit well at all. They’d probably be very uncomfortable, maybe even painful.”

  Rhodes thought about the man who had attacked him, about the way his teeth had protruded slightly from his lips. “Why would he want them, then?” he said.

  “Maybe because he’d lost his own a
nd didn’t want to be fitted for others. Richards checked his records, and he made a set of dentures for Kennedy about six years ago. He remembers Kennedy as just about the most contrary customer he’s ever had.”

  Rhodes told Ruth what a good job she’d done and hung up the phone. He had a lot to think about, or rather, to talk about, since Ivy was still there. She sometimes had good ideas about his cases, and it always helped to talk to her about them.

  He told her what he thought might have happened—that Kennedy had lost his own dentures and taken Bobbit’s, that Bobbit had threatened to tell the story of Louis Horn’s death if the teeth weren’t returned, and that Kennedy had killed him to shut him up.

  “Kennedy was probably out there at the Old Settlers’ Grounds today checking to see if anyone had talked to Bobbit before he was killed, to see if we were investigating the Wishing Well. When he saw me, he decided to get rid of me right there.”

  “He nearly did, too,” Ivy said, shaking her head.

  “Well, like the doctor said, I’ve got a thick skull. I’ve got to get out of here and find Kennedy.”

  “From what Hack says, you didn’t have much luck at that even before you were concussed. It won’t hurt you to spend the night here, at the very least. You can play Sergeant Preston again tomorrow.”

  That was one of the many reasons Rhodes liked Ivy. She remembered things like Sergeant Preston.

  “And just what are you planning to do when you get out, anyway?” she asked. “You’re not in any condition to go running around the countryside looking for anyone, not even an old man.”

  “I’m not going to run. I think the next stop is to dig down by that well and see if we can find anything. If we do, then we go after Kennedy even harder.”

  “What if you don’t?”

  “That doesn’t mean Kennedy didn’t kill Bobbit, or Horn either. We still have to find him.”

  “He’s the number one suspect,” Ivy said.

  “That’s exactly right.’

  "Not the only one.”

  “No,” Rhodes said. “Not the only one. There’s still the daughter, but I think we can rule her out. She had power of attorney, and now that Bobbit’s dead, that’s ended. The money will be tied up until the will goes through probate. If anything, she’s worse off. We still have to check out Lyle Everett, though. It’s just possible that he’s involved somehow.” He went on to explain that Everett’s mother had been at the dance where Louis Horn was killed. “Her maiden name was Lansing.”

  “Faye Lansing,” Ivy said. “That name was in the records of the investigation, all right.”

  Rhodes was glad to have his own memory confirmed.

  “It seems like a pretty tenuous connection, though,” Ivy said

  Rhodes agreed that it was. “But you never know,” he said. “You just never know.”

  They talked a little longer, about the wedding and other things, but Rhodes could tell that Ivy was still upset with him for getting himself beat up. First the lawsuit, now this. Things weren’t going well on the romance front.

  When she left to go home, she didn’t kiss him good night. She did promise him that she would feed Speedo, however. It was nice to know that she still liked his dog.

  Chapter 12

  The next morning, Rhodes was still sore. He managed to get out of bed and dress himself, but every time he bent his left arm he could almost feel the tree branch slamming into him. The doctor tried to talk him into staying another day, but he didn’t listen. He just promised to be careful and not get hit again.

  Ruth Grady picked him up at the hospital and drove him out to the Old Settlers’ Grounds. It was still cold, but the overcast had blown away and the sun was shining through the trees as they drove down to the pavilion. There was a truck parked there; it had towed a long, low flatbed trailer, but there was nothing on the trailer now.

  “I guess James is down at the well already,” Rhodes said as they got out of the car. He felt about a hundred years old because it was so painful to move. Stretching his shoulders caused all the muscles in his chest and back to hurt. The wind felt funny, blowing on the back of his head where the bandage was.

  They could hear the backhoe machine chugging as they walked down toward the well. Rhodes had called Allen from the hospital and asked him for a favor; Allen was glad to oblige.

  “Be a good way to get out of going to church,” he said.

  It seemed that there was a feud among the congregation, about half of them wanting to get rid of the preacher and the other half wanting to keep him. Because Allen was in politics, people seemed to expect him to take sides and lead the charge one way or the other.

  “I’ve got enough political troubles on the job,” Allen said. “I don’t like having to deal with them at the church. Rather drive a backhoe.”

  They saw the ugly yellow backhoe with Allen at the controls. He was wearing his work clothes, faded jeans, a green-and-black plaid mackinaw, and leather work gloves. There was already a large mound of damp, dark-brown dirt piled beside the machine.

  As they watched, Allen came up with a scoop of dirt, swung the scoop around, and dumped the dirt on the pile. Clods tumbled down the side of the pile and rolled across the dead grass. The scoop moved back over the hole and dived in.

  When they got down to the well, Allen waved to them and kept digging. Rhodes looked into the hole. It was already seven or eight feet deep. He didn’t figure the well was much more than fifteen feet deep, if that.

  “How much longer?” he said to Allen. He had to yell over the noise of the backhoe’s engine.

  Allen shrugged and yelled something that sounded like “About an hour or so.”

  There was nothing to do but wait. Rhodes and Ruth went back up to the pavilion where they could talk and sat down on the steps. Ruth explained that she had looked for Kennedy earlier that morning.

  “I know he must be somewhere in town,” she said. “Otherwise, why bring the car back there? But I can’t figure out where he’s staying. I checked the motels again. He’s not there, that’s for sure. Not unless he’s got somebody lying for him.”

  “He has to eat, too,” Rhodes said.

  “Darn,” Ruth said. “I didn’t think of that. I should’ve checked the restaurants. I wonder how much money he had?”

  “Probably not much,” Rhodes said. “Why don’t you go back to town and see what you can turn up. Take a couple of hours, and then come on back hem.”

  Ruth stood up and tugged on her gun belt. The deputies always wore uniforms, though Rhodes never did. “Want me to stop by the jail and get you a pistol?” she said.

  “That might not be a bad idea,” Rhodes agreed. “Kennedy’s got one.”

  She got in the car, backed it around, and drove off toward the highway. Rhodes got up slowly and walked back down to see if Allen was making any progress.

  It was almost exactly two hours before they found Louis Horn. Or what was left of him. Or what was left of somebody.

  Allen had begun digging toward the well when he came to the depth they estimated would be about the bottom. He came up with a few bricks in his first scoop, indicating that he had indeed broken through the side of the well, and then he ran into the tree roots.

  The roots made the going a little tougher, but on the second scoop after that he brought up the leg bone.

  It didn’t look much like most people probably thought bones were supposed to look. It wasn’t white and shiny; it was almost as brown as the dirt. But there was no mistaking what it was.

  It was in the middle of the scoopful of dirt, but Rhodes saw it as the earth was being dumped on the third pile that Allen had started. He yelled at Allen, who leaned forward to hear. When he understood what Rhodes was saying, he used the scoop to dig off a layer of dirt at a time, the big metal teeth curiously delicate at the task, until the bone was uncovered. Then he cut the engine and climbed down to see what he’d unearthed.

  Rhodes felt a little bit like Hamlet in the graveyard, in Shakespeare’
s play that he’d been forced to attend a performance of when he was in high school. His English teacher had driven the school bus to Dallas, and three classes of students had suffered through three or four hours of the Bard’s great work.

  Or pretended to suffer. Rhodes would never have admitted it then, but he had secretly enjoyed the play. He even understood most of the lines, having been coerced, thanks to the threat of daily pop tests in English class, to read the play over the period of the previous several weeks.

  He couldn’t say that he knew the man whose leg bone he held in his hand, not the way Hamlet had known the jester whose skull he observed, but it gave him a strange feeling just the same. Yesterday he had been here thinking of how things had been when he was a boy, and now he was being reminded of what he would become when he was dead.

  This whole business, from dealing with the old folks at Sunny Dale to finding what he suspected to be the bones of the long-dead Louis Horn, was getting to be too much a reminder of his own mortality. He was beginning to wonder what a mid-life crisis was and whether it was time for him to have one, if he wasn’t having it already.

  Ruth Grady came back while they were looking at the bone. She was carrying a Smith & Wesson chief’s special and a shovel. She handed the pistol to Rhodes and said, “It seems like this happens to you a lot.”

  Rhodes didn’t say anything. He knew what she meant.

  She pointed the shovel at the bone. “Anybody we know?”

  Rhodes was tempted to tell her it was poor Yorick, but he didn’t want to show off his education. “Louis Horn, maybe,” he said. “It won’t be easy to find out. Did you check out the restaurants?”

  “Sure did. Kennedy, or somebody who looked a lot like your description of him, ate a taco at the Whataburger this morning. I knew he was still in town; now if we could just find him…”

  “That won’t be much easier than finding out if this belongs to Louis Horn,” Rhodes said, holding up the leg bone. There were plenty of places in Clearview or nearby that Kennedy could hide, deserted buildings, barns, collapsing farm houses. “We can tell the restaurant workers to be on the look-out for him, though. That’s one thing.”