Evil at the Root

by Bill Crider

  “I’ll tell you about it Friday,” Ivy was saying. “He probably wouldn’t even mention it, but it’s a pretty good story.”

  She listened some more, said she’d see Kathy on Friday, and handed the phone back to Rhodes.

  “What have you been up to?” Kathy asked.

  “Nothing very exciting. Did I hear Ivy say something about seeing you on Friday?”

  “You didn’t think I’d miss the wedding, did you? I’m taking a personal business day to be there.”

  “We’re just going to be married by the county judge,” Rhodes said. “It won’t be a big deal. Won’t take more than five minutes.”

  “You incurable romantic, you,” Kathy said. “I’m not going to miss it, even if it does take just five minutes. It’s not every day a woman’s father gets married.”

  “What about you?” Rhodes said. Kathy had once dated a deputy on Rhodes’s staff, and she had left Clearview shortly after that romance had ended unhappily. Or not. Rhodes supposed it all depended on your point of view.

  “You might be getting a surprise on Friday,” she said. “There’s someone I’d like for you to meet.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Greg,” Kathy said. “He teaches math. What time will you be getting married?”

  Rhodes hadn’t really thought about that. He realized suddenly that he was being entirely too casual about the whole thing, and he thought that might be an unspoken reason why Ivy had been upset with him. He didn’t blame her. He’d more or less thought he’d wait until he got a few spare minutes, call Ivy, and walk over to the courthouse. He knew now that wouldn’t be a good idea.

  “Eleven o’clock,” he said.

  “Good. I can get there easily by that time. I’ll see you then. I love you.”

  “I love you, too,” Rhodes said. Then he hung up the phone.

  “Eleven o’clock, huh?” Ivy said.

  “Will that be all right with you?”

  “I suppose so. And what will we be doing after our five minutes are up?”

  There was no edge to her voice, but Rhodes was beginning to realize that no matter what Ivy had said to Kathy, he was guilty of a mistake much worse than that of allowing an old man to beat him with a tree limb.

  He was guilty of taking Ivy for granted. Not only had he not talked with her about the housing situation, he hadn’t even set a time for the wedding. Ivy might have thought she was angry with him for putting himself in danger, but that wasn’t the only reason. No wonder she had been upset. He was an insensitive creep.

  Why, he had never even considered what they would be doing after they got married. He and his first wife had gone to Colorado on their honeymoon. They had driven through New Mexico, through Raton Pass, and on up to Colorado Springs. They had stayed in the Broadmoor Hotel for two days, which was all they could afford, and then they had driven back to Texas.

  “Have you ever been to Cozumel?” he said. He had heard that it was a beautiful place, and he’d seen ads for it on TV. He’d never been there himself.

  “No,” Ivy said. “Were you planning to take me?”

  Rhodes figured that planning could consist of ten seconds thought if you didn’t put too strict a limitation on the meaning.

  “Yes,” he said, wondering if the local travel agency would be able to get them a flight and book them into a hotel on short notice. He didn’t know what the tourist season was in Cozumel, but he thought there might be a lot of people going there to keep warm in the winter. Maybe he had enough pull with someone in the travel agency to work something out. He’d have to see about it first thing in the morning.

  “You believe in keeping things to yourself, don’t you?”

  Ivy did not sound unduly suspicious. Rhodes knew that he was somewhat reticent, a quality that usually served him well in his work. It wasn’t going to serve him well in marriage, though it might have gotten him out of this situation. It was something he’d have to work on.

  “I’ll try to do better,” he said.

  “It’s always nice to be surprised,” Ivy said. “But you should have let me know sooner. I need to buy a bathing suit and some summer clothes.” She looked distressed. “I don’t know where I can find anything at this time of year.”

  “Well,” Rhodes said, thinking that he might have an out, “I can cancel if you’d rather just go somewhere close. We could drive down to Houston and spend a few days.”

  “Oh, no. I think Cozumel would be wonderful. I’ve got an old suit that doesn’t look too out of style. Of course it doesn’t show as much as those new ones do.”

  Rhodes thought about some photos he had seen in last spring’s Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue that someone had left in the jail. He was just as glad Ivy wouldn’t be wearing anything that revealing. He was sure she would look great, but he was a little too old-fashioned to feel comfortable with a suit that exposed almost all of a woman’s anatomy.

  “I’m not sure I can take the time off, anyway,” he said. “What with these murders and Kennedy turning up dead—”

  “How long has it been since you had a day off?” Ivy said. “One year? Two? Five?”

  Rhodes thought about it. Since his wife had died, he had pretty much devoted himself to the job. Kathy had lived with him for a while, but then she had seen she wasn’t needed anymore and moved away after breaking up with the deputy. He didn’t have anyone except Speedo to go on a trip with him and nowhere to go except home and the jail. He knew that he had not taken any time off, not even a day, for a long time.

  “It’s been a while, “‘he admitted.

  “So it’s about time. You’re not going to get out of this now. No one would dare object to your taking a short trip. When are we leaving?”

  He wondered how much extra time he could buy. Not much. But even a day might make a difference in getting the tickets.

  “Uh, Saturday,” he said. “I thought we’d drive to Dallas, stay there Friday night, fly out on Saturday.”

  Ivy was getting excited. “That’s wonderful. I’ll need to pack, but that won’t take long. Some of the stores may already have their summer things in. The spring outfits are already on the racks. I’ll go shopping tomorrow at lunch.”

  “Uh, are you sure you can get off?”

  “I’ve already asked for my two weeks’ vacation. That won’t be a problem.”

  “Great,” Rhodes said. He felt like a criminal, himself. He hoped he knew someone at the travel agency, and for a minute he wished that Billy Joe Bryon had never left home today. if he hadn’t found Kennedy’s body, then Rhodes would have had a perfect excuse to put things off. As it was, he was going to have to produce. Then he dismissed his regrets as unworthy. He could take care of things. There would be no problem. He told himself that two or three times, and eventually he even started to believe it.

  They decided to watch TV for a while before Ivy went home, and that was when Rhodes discovered that things were never so bad they couldn’t get even worse.

  “I can’t read this TV Guide,” he said, flipping through the pages. “Is the light bulb all right?”

  “The light’s fine,” Ivy said. “Here. Let me have that.”

  Rhodes handed her the magazine. “There’s nothing wrong with the print,” Ivy said. “I can see it just fine. The late movie is The Red Badge of Courage. You like Audie Murphy, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” Rhodes said. He had read an article about Murphy in an issue of Texas Monthly some time ago. The article had been excerpted from a biography of Murphy written by someone named Don Graham. Rhodes had been intending to buy the book, but he never had much time to read. Watching old movies didn’t require as much concentration. Now he was wondering if he would be able to read the book if he bought it. He could still see the movies just fine, however.

  “Let me see that magazine,” he said.

  Ivy handed it back. He still could not read the program description. He carried the magazine to a lamp and turned on the light. Holding the TV Guide at a
rm’s length and getting it fully under the light, he was able to see what the anonymous critic had to say about the movie.

  “Did you ever think about getting reading glasses?” Ivy said. “You can buy them at the drug store.”

  “I thought about it,” Rhodes admitted. “I just haven’t had time.”

  “There are a few other things you need to find time for, too.’,

  “What?” Rhodes wondered just exactly what he’d forgotten now.

  “A blood test, for one thing,” Ivy said. “Not to mention a little detail like the marriage license. You’d better take care of your blood test tomorrow, so the doctor will have time to get the lab work done. I’ve had mine done already. And it wouldn’t hurt to get the license soon, either.”

  “That’s what I was planning to do,” Rhodes said, stretching the definition of “planning” just about as far as it could be stretched.

  “Good,” Ivy said. “I was afraid that with all the excitement, you might forget.”

  “I won’t forget,” Rhodes promised.

  Chapter 16

  Having promised, Rhodes did not forget, but he almost got sidetracked. He had other things to do first, including making a stop at Wal-Mart, where he thought he’d seen reading glasses on a rack near the jewelry counter.

  He had, and he tried on several of the half-moon type before settling on a gray pair with the number 1.25 on the tag. He supposed that meant everything he saw through them would be magnified one and one-fourth normal size.

  He was amazed at how well he could read the print on the display with the glasses on. They had the unfortunate effect of making him look like Ben Franklin with a belly-ache, or so he thought when he glimpsed himself in the mirror above the rack. But that was better than not being able to read the TV Guide, so he paid for the glasses. He took them out of the bag when he got outside and slipped them in his shirt pocket.

  Then he went by the travel agency, where he discovered one of the agents to be Lacey Hollowell, a young woman who had gone to school with Kathy. It wasn’t easy, but Lacey managed to get him and Ivy a Saturday flight out of Dallas and a room at one of the better hotels in Cozumel, thanks to a last minute cancellation by someone or other whom Rhodes would never meet but to whom he would be eternally in debt. He paid with his Visa card, thankful that things had worked out. Before he signed the Visa slip, he put on his glasses and was pleased that he had no difficulty seeing the little space where he was to write his name.

  He went by the jail on his way to the doctor’s office for the blood test, and he was almost sorry that he stopped. The jail was where the major distractions were.

  For one thing, Hack and Lawton had big news. It had nothing to do with Lloyd Bobbit or Maurice Kennedy—that was yesterday’s case, and closed up tighter than Dick’s hat band, as Hack liked to put it. Kennedy was dead, the murders were solved, and everyone was happy. This was something entirely different.

  Hack started things off. “We had us a real problem last night,” he said.

  Rhodes decided to get his licks while he could. “Was Miz McGee in on this, or had you taken her home?”

  Lawton found that remark particularly funny. He laughed so hard that his smooth, chubby face got extremely red and he sounded as if he might choke.

  “What’s the matter with him?” Rhodes said. “It’s that girl we had in here last night,” Hack said. “The real problem was a girl?” Rhodes asked. “That’s what I was trying to tell you,” Hack said, though

  Rhodes didn’t think he’d been trying very hard.

  “It’s a g-g-good thing Miz McGee was g-g-gone,” Lawton said. Then he was overcome by laughter again, and this time he laughed so hard that he started coughing. Rhodes resisted the urge to walk across the office and pound him on the back.

  “Tell me about the girl,” Rhodes said. He was getting curious and thought maybe the direct approach would be the best.

  “She fell out of a car,” Hack said, and Rhodes knew that the direct approach had failed again. There was nothing very funny about falling out of a car.

  “Was she hurt?” he said. He knew that she hadn’t been; he would have been called in that case, and there wouldn’t have been such an excess of joviality in the office.

  “Naw, she wasn’t hurt bad,” Hack said. “The car wasn’t goin’ very fast when she fell out.”

  “Part of her was hurt,” Lawton said, having gotten his breath. “Gonna take the doctor a good while to pick all that gravel out.”

  “What gravel? Out of where?” Rhodes said.

  “The gravel in her behind,” Hack said. “She couldn’t even sit down when she was in here.”

  What Rhodes wanted to know, naturally, was exactly how the gravel had gotten embedded in the girl’s delicate anatomy, but he was determined not to ask.

  “Was she the driver of the car?” he said.

  Lawton started laughing again, but Hack was able to maintain a straight face through it all. They often reminded Rhodes of Abbott and Costello, but never more than at times like this. He almost found himself asking them who was on third base.

  “Couldn’t have been drivin’, not the way she was when she fell out,” Hack said.

  Rhodes was beginning to catch on. “She didn’t have any clothes on, did she.”

  “Sure she did,” Hack said. “You don’t think any of Blacklin County’s young ladies would drive around without any clothes on at all, do you?”

  Rhodes said he wasn’t sure what Blacklin County’s young ladies might do these days.

  “Well anyway,” Hack said, “she had her clothes on.”

  “Mostly,” Lawton said, giving the game away. Hack turned and gave him a look that would have sanded the paint off a county car. He had obviously hoped to keep things going for a while longer.

  “She fell out of the car while she was mooning someone,” Rhodes said. Some of the kids thought it was funny to give the adults a shock every now and then; it had been happening fairly often lately.

  “That’s right,” Hack said, obviously not too happy that Rhodes had figured it out so soon. “Mooned the wrong person this time, though.”

  “Buddy?” Rhodes said. Buddy had been one of the deputies on duty last night, and he was a strict, old-fashioned moralist, sort of along the lines of Cotton Mather.

  “Yeah, it was Buddy,” Hack said. Rhodes had taken all the fun out of things by putting it together, and Hack was ready to tell the whole story. “Buddy’d stopped a drunk driver at the edge of town and he was talkin’ to him, tryin’ to get him out of the car. It was pretty late, about two o’clock. Buddy followed the car for nearly a mile, he said, with it weavin’ all over the place.”

  “Guy didn’t want to get out,” Lawton chimed in. “He figured he was too drunk to stand up and that wouldn’t look good to the judge when Buddy told it in court, so he was just sittin’ there behind the wheel. Singin’ ‘The Whiffenpoof Song’ off-key, Buddy said. I don’t think I know that one, do you, Sheriff?”

  Rhodes said that he did, but that he wasn’t going to sing any of it right then.

  “You could sing it off-key,” Lawton said. “If Buddy can stand it, I can.”

  Rhodes said he’d rather hear what happened.

  “Well,” Hack said, “Buddy was there by the car and these girls drove by. Goin’ real slow, Buddy said. He looked up, like anybody would, and the one on the passenger side mooned him. Might’ve got away, since he didn’t want to leave the drunk, if the door hadn’t come open.”

  “Musta got her pants hung on the door handle,” Lawton said. “It was an old car. They don’t make handles where you can get stuff hung on ’em these days.”

  “Fell right on her butt,” Hack said. “Slid a good little ways on the road. That’s where she picked up the gravel.”

  “Buddy arrested the whole bunch of ’em,” Lawton said. “The drunk, the girls in the car, all of ’em. Brought ’em down here for me to book ’em. It was real noisy for a while, what with the way the girl was cryin�
��. The drunk guy had switched to ‘My Way.’ I know that one, though.”

  “Then he stopped singin’ and started hollerin’ for the girl to show us the evidence,” Hack said.

  “Did she?” Rhodes asked.

  “Naw,” Lawton said.’ “She had her clothes on by then, but it’s just as well Miz McGee wasn’t here. That sure was a cute little ol’ gal. Prob’ly not more’n nineteen. Miz McGee wouldn’t like it if Hack was to see somethin’ like that.”

  He started laughing again. He seemed to find something inherently humorous in Hack’s romance. Hack watched him, stony-faced.

  “Anybody still here?” Rhodes asked.

  “The drunk is,” Hack said. “Upstairs sleepin’ it off. Buddy didn’t put the girls in a cell, but he sure wanted to do it. He wanted to send ’em up the river.”

  Rhodes believed it. Buddy was not only a strict moralist; his sense of humor was more akin to Jerry Falwell’s than Jerry Lewis’s.

  “We talked him out of it, finally,” Lawton said. “I didn’t much like the idea of keepin’ three girls in jail overnight. Besides, that one with the rear-end trouble needed to go by the hospital.”

  “I’m glad you talked him out of jailing them,” Rhodes said. He figured they’d been punished enough, or at least one of them had. She wouldn’t want to be seen in one of those new bathing suits even by the time summer rolled around. He hoped she really had gone to the hospital and gotten the gravel taken care of.

  “I guess Buddy did give them a ticket, though,” he said.

  “Damn right, he did,” Hack said. “More’n one, if I remember right. They said they’d appear before the Justice of the Peace and pay up.”

  That seemed to be the extent of what there was to say on the subject, and Rhodes was looking at some of the other reports from the previous evening, none of them as interesting as the one Hack and Lawton had provided, when he realized that he couldn’t make out the reports very well. He slipped the glasses out of his pocket as unobtrusively as he could, unfolded the sidepieces, and put them on.