by Bill Crider
Hack noticed immediately. “What you got there?” he said. “New pair of cheaters?”
Rhodes looked at him without saying anything, peering over the top of the glasses.
“You look kinda mean like that,” Hack said, and then he turned back to his desk. He didn’t have anything else to add. Lawton smiled, but he didn’t say anything.
Rhodes turned back to the reports and kept on reading, finding it much easier with the glasses on. They were uncomfortable sitting there on the bridge of his nose, and the side-pieces hurt his ears, but the discomfort was worth it. Being able to see the reports so clearly made him realize how long he’d been needing the glasses. He was going to have to stop putting things like that off.
He had been reading for about a half hour when James Allen entered the jail. Rhodes slipped the glasses off his face and back into his pocket. No need in letting Allen see them. The commissioner might think the county sheriff was getting old.
“You were right,” Allen told Rhodes after greeting Hack and Lawton.
“Good.” Rhodes said. “What was I right about?”
“That rain. I sent Miz Wilkie over to the newspaper office to check the weather records. It didn’t rain a single drop while you had Little Barnes in jail.”
“I guess that’s good news,” Rhodes said. “What about those structural engineers? Is that going to get us the rest of the way off the hook?”
“Maybe. That lawyer’s already started waffling. I called him this morning and dropped him a hint about the rain, said I thought that tainted his whole case. Then I told him we were gonna have that outside firm come in and do a study of the jail. Took some of the wind out of his sails.”
“How much wind?”
“What I think is, he’ll try for a small settlement. But we might not even have to worry about that. I found out that Harry Harmon is the presiding district judge, and he’d be the one to hear the case.”
“Hanging Harry,” Rhodes said.
Allen smiled a satisfied smile. “The very same.”
Hanging Harry was a man who had achieved his present position by his hard-line approach to law and order. District judges in Texas were elected, and Harry Harmon had swept in on his record as a county prosecutor who seldom lost a case and who never lost a major case.
He got sentences that other prosecutors could only dream of, and had once gotten a small-time drug dealer—which was the only kind that Blacklin County had—a sentence exceeding a hundred years. Since becoming a judge, he had handed down some sentences that made that one seem light. There wasn’t a criminal in the state that wanted to come up before him. Harmon might have been many things, but he was definitely not soft on crime.
Not even a hot-shot attorney from Houston would want Harmon sitting on a case where a convicted criminal was complaining about his treatment in a county jail. Harmon’s expressed opinion was that the best thing the state could do to cut the crime rate would be to bring back the rack and the thumbscrew.
“That sounds good,” Rhodes said. “When are those engineers going to be here?”
“Friday,” Allen said.
It took a lot of talking to convince Allen that the sheriff didn’t necessarily have to be there when the engineers made their inspection of the jail.
“I know you’re getting married,” Allen said. “And I can see that it’s going to be a problem. I guess Miz Wilkie just forgot what day it was when she scheduled the visit.”
Rhodes thought he heard Hack snort, but when he looked over at him, the dispatcher was busily writing something on a note pad. Lawton was sitting at Hack’s desk, looking down as if studying the pattern of cracks in the floor and trying to hide a smile.
“I can’t be here,” Rhodes said. “There’s just no way. I’ve got airplane tickets to Mexico.”
Rhodes heard Hack’s chair creak as the dispatcher turned around. He and Lawton gave up all pretense of being involved with their own concerns. They both turned toward Rhodes’s desk with unabashed interest. Rhodes thought it served them right. If they hadn’t started up about the mooning incident and dragged it out like they had, he would have told them about the trip to Cozumel. He still would, sooner or later, but he knew they wouldn’t like it because Allen was finding out first.
“Cozumel,” Rhodes said. “Ever been there?”
Allen had not, though he had been to the Virgin Islands. “You gonna do any snorkeling?”
Rhodes thought not. “But I’m going. No question about that.” He didn’t mention that he was afraid Ivy would kill him if he tried backing out of the trip.
Allen finally agreed that it was only right that Rhodes be allowed a little time off since he was getting married and since he hadn’t taken any vacation time in years.
Rhodes assured the commissioner that Hack and Lawton could take care of the engineers. Maybe if he praised them enough, they would forgive him for not telling them about the trip to Mexico.
They weren’t interested in praise, however. After Allen left, Hack asked Lawton what he had in the pool.
“Cancun. I was pretty close. How about you?”
“Belize,” Hack said.
“Wait just a minute,” Rhodes said. “I know there was a pool on the wedding date, but you don’t mean to tell me there was one on the honeymoon, too.”
“Sure there was,” Hack said. “Me and Lawton were beginnin’ to wonder if you were ever goin’ to get around to thinkin’ about takin’ one, though. You have any trouble get-tin’ the tickets?”
“No,” Rhodes said. “I’ve been planning it for a long time.”
“Sure you had,” Lawton said. “A man likes to plan ahead.”
He went to clean the cells. He said that if the drunk was up, he was going to try to get him to sing “The Whiffenpoof Song.” This time it was Hack who was laughing.
The blood test was the last of the day’s little chores, and the least pleasant. It wasn’t that Rhodes got weak or queasy at the sight of blood, though it was something he never got used to; it was just that he didn’t like the idea of getting stuck with the needle.
He told himself that was a silly way to be and that a man with spectacular bruises on his back and chest, not to mention a few stitches on the back of his head, shouldn’t be intimidated by a small woman with a needle.
He was intimidated anyway, but he managed not to flinch when she stuck it in him.
After he left the doctor’s office, he drove by Ballinger’s to see if Dr. White had left a report on his autopsy of Maurice Kennedy. He also wanted to see if the dentist had called about the teeth.
Ballinger was glad to see him. “You sure do know how to complicate things,” he said when Rhodes walked in his office.
There was a book lying face down on the desk, its spine in the air. Rhodes sneaked a glance at the cover. It was called Drive East on 66, by someone named Richard Wormser. He could see the cover easily; he was far enough away from it not to need his glasses.
Ballinger caught the glance. “It’s an old one, all right. I don’t think anybody drives on Sixty-six anymore. There used to be a TV show about that highway, about those two guys in a Corvette, but I don’t even know if it’s still there. There was even a song.”
“It’s still there,” Rhodes said. “What’s this about me knowing how to complicate things.”
“You know that old boy you brought in here yesterday, that Maurice Kennedy?”
“I know,” Rhodes said. “That’s why I came by, to ask about him.”
“Well, in the first place we got the word from Dr. Richards about a half hour ago. Those were Lloyd Bobbit’s dentures Mr. Kennedy was wearing. Dr. Richards would be willing to swear to that in court if he has to.”
“He probably won’t have to,” Rhodes said, glad to know that everyone’s suspicions about the dentures had been confirmed. “I don’t think even Miss Bobbit will be filing a complaint against a dead man.”
“No, I don’t guess so,” Ballinger said. “Wouldn’t do a whole lot of
good, would it.”
“No,” Rhodes said. “It wouldn’t. We pretty well knew about the teeth all along, though. What’s the complication?”
“Oh,” Ballinger said. “That. Well, you know how when you heard where the body came from and all, you thought Kennedy’d been mashed to death by the trash truck?”
“That’s what I thought,” Rhodes said. “You saw him, too.”
“I sure did. And I thought the same thing. Anybody would, considering the way he looked and that Billy Joe saw him dumped out of the truck along with the trash.”
“You sound like that wasn’t what happened,” Rhodes said, feeling a little ball of apprehension beginning to form in his stomach.
“It wasn’t,” Ballinger said. “It was something else entirely.” He looked thoughtful. “Or maybe not entirely. He’d been mashed up, all right. If you hadn’t had Dr. White look at the body, we probably wouldn’t ever have known that it wasn’t the trash truck that killed him.”
“What did kill him then?” Rhodes asked. He didn’t like the way this was going.
“I can’t tell you that. Neither can Dr. White, but he can come close. He said it was a blow to the back of the head with a blunt instrument.”
“But it wasn’t the trash truck.”
“Nope. Like I said, you’d never notice it. The body was in pretty bad shape. The head, too. But according to Dr. White, the way the back of Kennedy’s skull was caved in wasn’t consistent with the way the trash truck operates. It wasn’t just mashed. It was splintered in, the way it’d have to be if somebody hit it with something. Like a wrench, maybe. Hit it hard. You know what I mean?”
Rhodes knew. His own head started to throb. He’d thought it was getting better. Maybe he was just having sympathy pains, though why he should be sympathetic with the man who’d caused the wound, he wasn’t sure.
“Is Dr. White certain about that?” he said. He could see how mashing and striking would be different, but he felt as if he had to ask.
“He’s certain. Besides, you can call the city and see what time the trash was picked up, but I’ll bet it wasn’t before seven o’clock Monday morning. And Dr. White says Kennedy’d been dead about twelve hours by that time.”
Rhodes thanked Ballinger, took the report, and got out of there. He wondered if he could get a refund on those airplane tickets.
Chapter 17
Considering all the distractions that he’d had, it wasn’t surprising that Rhodes didn’t get around to cleaning the pistol until Thursday.
He’d taken it out of the car and left it in the office, but there had been quite a bit on his mind, and he’d forgotten it. He was pretty sure that he was afflicted with a disease that Hack referred to as CRS—Can’t Remember Stuff—something that had come on him about the same time that his eyes had started failing.
It wasn’t that he forgot important things, just little ones. And the things he forgot were in his short-term memory. He still thought with pleasure of the accomplishments of baseball players like Ralph Kiner, Hank Sauer, or Johnny Mize; but though he still followed baseball closely every summer and read about the games of the Astros and Rangers in the paper each day, he couldn’t recall the names of seven of the eight starters for either team.
Hack told him that this wasn’t unusual.
“Hell,” Hack said. “You’re just gettin’ old. You get my age, you won’t even remember that you forgot somethin’.”
Rhodes had been made amply aware in the last week that growing older wasn’t going to be any fun, and the memory bit was typical of the changes he was aware of in himself. He didn’t like it much.
As soon as he found out from Ballinger about the cause of Kennedy’s death, he had gone back to the jail and read Dr. White’s report, which added little to the oral version he’d received from Ballinger.
Then he’d called the crime lab where he’d sent the grocery bag and asked for them to rush him the report. That had arrived Wednesday, but it was no help at all. A lot of grocery stores these days were switching to plastic bags; they had proved to be cheaper than paper and were convenient for small items, especially wet ones. The one that had been used on Lloyd Bobbit was a generic item, no advertising printed on it, and identical to those used in a number of stores in Blacklin County and the surrounding area. There were partial prints on the bag, but partials were not always accepted for the purpose of identification by the courts. Maybe if he could find a good match, they would help. Maybe not.
Rhodes was getting very worried, if Kennedy hadn’t killed Bobbit, who had? And if Kennedy had killed Bobbit, who had killed Kennedy? And why? It was all more complicated than it had seemed, and Rhodes, who had thought the case was over now realized that he was right back where he had started, if not worse off.
He had at least been successful at one thing; he had kept the news of Kennedy’s murder from leaking either to the news people, as represented by Red Rogers, or to Miss Bobbit. Everyone still believed the original story to be the true one and that Kennedy had died in an accident. That didn’t help Rhodes with finding Kennedy’s killer, but it did take some of the pressure off.
Not all the pressure. It was getting dangerously close to Saturday, and Rhodes had not canceled the airline tickets. It was going to be exceedingly difficult for him to leave the county during a murder investigation, no matter how many vacation days he was owed, but he was going to have to do it. He couldn’t disappoint Ivy.
And if they didn’t go on the trip, she would be disappointed. She had found a bathing suit and some summer outfits, she had told her friends that she was going to Cozumel, and she had been studying a stack of travel brochures. Rhodes knew that there was no way out of the trip. He had to solve the crime.
But there didn’t seem to be any clues. The grocery bag had been his best hope, and it had proved not to be useful. He sifted through his suspects in Bobbit’s death.
Mr. Patterson seemed the most unlikely, though money was always a powerful motive.
Miss Bobbit already had the money, and her father’s death was an inconvenience. Rhodes thought she might have killed him simply to get rid of him. He was an embarrassment to her, standing out on the porch of the nursing home and announcing the theft of his teeth to all corners, and she was not the sort of person who enjoyed the kind of attention that - called to her. Her main concern was to keep her name out of the newspapers, both when her father had disappeared and when he was killed. That seemed a farfetched motive, however.
Kennedy was the best suspect, even now. He obviously was a man with a violent temperament, if he had indeed killed Louis Horn in the argument at the dance. And Rhodes didn’t think there was any question about that.
Bobbit had known of the long-ago murder, had even threatened to reveal the truth of the matter, according to old Mr. West, and that would have been enough to make Kennedy angry and perhaps frightened, maybe frightened enough to kill again. Besides, if Kennedy had not killed Bobbit, why had he run away from Sunny Dale?
Rhodes pondered those questions and others when he wasn’t worrying about his impending marriage and honeymoon. To tell the truth, he was glad of the distraction the new perspective on the deaths gave him. Worrying about the murders kept his mind off the other things.
But pondering and worrying didn’t get him anywhere. He went to the nursing home and talked to the Smarts and to Mr. West, but he learned nothing new from them. He’d had the feeling earlier that Mr. West knew something that he wasn’t telling, but the old man revealed nothing. If he did know anything, he was hiding it well. His more or less frozen face made it difficult to read anything in his expression.
Rhodes did remember to go by to get his stitches checked, get the results of his blood test, and to pick up the marriage license, but he almost forgot the last thing. Ivy reminded him again, however, and he got it done in between visits to the nursing home, worrying about the murders, and performing the normal chores of his office.
And so it wasn’t until Thursday afternoon that R
hodes opened the bottom drawer of his desk and saw the pistol. He took it out and noticed something that he was surprised he had not noticed before.
The pistol had been fired. Twice.
It had been dark in the car, and Rhodes had hardly looked at the pistol. There was no reason he would have noticed it then.
When he had taken the gun in the jail and locked it in his desk, he had been in a hurry. There was too much going on, and Hack and Lawton had started in on him almost immediately with the story about the mooning.
He wished he had noticed the two missing rounds sooner, but it would not have made any difference to the outcome of the case. It would just have helped him to reach some conclusions earlier and taken some of the pressure off, because seeing the two empty chambers in the cylinder seemed to make everything click into place.
He put the pistol back in the desk, locked the drawer, and told Hack that he was going to visit Sunny Dale.
“You sure go out there a lot,” Hack said. “You thinkin’ about reservin’ a room?”
Rhodes thought about his eyes and his failing memory. “Maybe I should,” he said.
Hack laughed. “You got a few years on you yet. I bet you come back from Mexico feelin’ like a colt again.”
Rhodes hoped Hack was right, but he doubted it.
Mr. West’s room was dark. The television set was quiet, and there was only a small lamp burning on the night stand.
Rhodes went on in anyway and sat in the chair beside the bed. Somehow, he didn’t think that Mr. West was asleep.
He had been sitting in the chair for about five minutes when the old man spoke.
“What’re you doin’ here, Sheriff?” West said. “Visitin’ the sick?”
“No,” Rhodes said. “There’s something that you and I have to discuss.”
“What’s that, Sheriff?”
“It’s about Andy,” Rhodes said. “Just how bad a job is he doing at the store?”
“Pretty bad,” West admitted. “I told you that. He’s not a businessman.”
