Evil at the Root

by Bill Crider

  Rhodes couldn’t stop him either. He might have been able to do so under normal conditions, but these weren’t normal conditions. He had a cracked rib or two, fire ants crawling all over him and stinging his hands, and blood from the cut over his eye was dripping down his face.

  West lowered his head and slammed into Rhodes’s midsection, knocking the air out of the sheriff and pushing him back down. They landed a few feet away from the fire ants, which was the only good thing about the situation.

  Rhodes managed to make a fist and hit West in the side of the head twice. Then he grabbed West’s right ear and started twisting. He was hoping to tear it off West’s head, or at least make West think that was going to happen, but West didn’t even seem to mind. He had succeeded in working himself into such a state of anger that nothing reached him. The message about the pain in his ear wasn’t getting through to his brain.

  Rhodes, on the other hand, was getting a definite message, and the message was that he wasn’t going to be able to keep on breathing for much longer. West had his thick fingers wrapped around Rhodes’s throat and was squeezing as hard as he could.

  His thumbs were crushing Rhodes’s windpipe, and Rhodes thought that those thumbs were probably going to meet West’s fingers, which were on the back of Rhodes’s neck, in a very short time.

  But by then, Rhodes would be past caring.

  In fact, he was almost past caring now. He could feel West’s hot breath on his face and he could see West’s madly staring eyes. Beyond West’s head was the blackness of the sky, or maybe it was some other kind of blackness, because after a minute, the blackness was all that Rhodes could see, and after that he couldn’t see anything at all.

  The next thing he heard was Ruth Grady’s voice. He hadn’t expected to hear her. He hadn’t expected to hear anything ever again.

  She said, “Where’s Sheriff Rhodes?” Her voice was faint, and she sounded very far away.

  “Over here somewhere,” Miss Bobbit said. “With Andy.”

  Rhodes gradually became aware of a heavy weight on his chest, pinning him to the ground. That was probably Andy, all right.

  Rhodes was very cold, and he felt something wet soaking through his jacket and into his shirt.

  Blood? If it was, he didn’t know for sure whether it was his own or Andy’s. His throat felt like someone had stuck a hot poker down it, but he didn’t remember bleeding.

  Then he thought of the cut over his eye. Could that be it?

  He opened his eyes. He still couldn’t see much. It was too dark, but he thought he could see a flashlight beam not far away. He closed his eyes again. He was too tired to keep them open.

  “There they are,” Miss Bobbit said.

  “Oh my God,” Ruth said. “Are they both dead?”

  “I don’t know,” Miss Bobbit said. “They might be. I couldn’t figure out how to shoot the gun at first.”

  She must have found his pistol and shot West, then called the jail, Rhodes guessed. He was glad his mind was working enough to figure things out, even if they were only simple things.

  The flashlight was on him now. He kept his eyes closed and tried to say that he was fine, but the sound that came out was like a rusty gate swinging open.

  Miss Bobbit stifled a scream, but Ruth didn’t waste any time. She pulled Andy West off Rhodes and shoved the body aside. It fell to the ground like a sack of seed corn. Ruth knelt down on one knee.

  “Can you hear me, Sheriff?” she said.

  Rhodes decided not to try talking again. He just nodded. That hurt even more than talking, however. He opened his eyes.

  “The ambulance will be here in a minute,” Ruth said. “Do you want to sit up?”

  “No,” Rhodes croaked. Then he heard the siren, and in a minute or so he could see the lights of the ambulance bouncing across the field.

  When the ambulance got there, the attendants loaded Rhodes in the back as tenderly as they could and then stuck West in with him. They rode-back to town together, but no one was going to be able to do much for West. Miss Bobbit had shot him in the back five times.

  Rhodes did not have a good night.

  Ruth had called Ivy, who met them at the hospital emergency room as they were taking Rhodes inside. She walked beside the gurney.

  Rhodes didn’t want to look at her. It would have been much easier to keep his eyes closed and pretend that he had passed out, but he was supposed to be the sheriff. The sheriff couldn’t be a coward. He’d faced West’s cleaver. He could face Ivy.

  She looked relieved to see that he was alive, but she was not happy with him. “You must think you’re John Wayne,” she said.

  “No,” Rhodes growled. “Foghorn Winslow.”

  That got a smile. Ivy remembered Foghorn Winslow. Then she said, “What’s the matter with your voice?”

  Rhodes didn’t say anything. One of the attendants pointed to Rhodes’s throat. Rhodes heard Ivy suck in her breath. He figured his throat didn’t look too good.

  It took the E.R. doctor a while to take care of Rhodes. It bothered Rhodes that the doctor looked like a high school student. One of the real problems with getting older was that you had to trust all your ailments and contusions to people who looked hardly old enough to have a driver’s license.

  Rhodes had to get the back of his head re-stitched, and he needed eight more stitches over his eye. The doctor’s touch was deft, even if he did look like a fugitive from a Clearasil ad.

  Then there were the ribs. Two of them were slightly cracked.

  The good news was that they wouldn’t have to be taped; the bad news was that they were going to be very painful.

  “For a month, at least,” the doctor said cheerfully. “Any movement at all is likely to cause a sharp pain. Planning on doing any moving around for a while?”

  “I, ah, I’m getting married tomorrow,” Rhodes rasped.

  “Well, well, well,” the doctor said. He smiled. “Well, well, well.”

  Rhodes sneaked a look at Ivy. Her shoulders shook as she laughed silently. Rhodes didn’t see anything funny about it himself.

  “We’ll be keeping you overnight for observation,” the doctor said. “What time is the wedding?”

  “Eleven o’clock,” Ivy said.

  “We can let him go by then,” the doctor said. “If he can walk.”

  “He’ll walk,” Ivy said. “Even if I have to carry him.” Later, in Rhodes’s room, she was not quite so chipper. “One of these days,” she said, “you’re going to get into a terrible mess like that one tonight, and you aren’t going to walk away from it.”

  “I didn’t exactly walk away from this one,” Rhodes said. His voice was a little better, but his throat still felt as if he’d swallowed a cactus. He had sucked a lemon, which he didn’t think helped much, and gargled something the doctor had prescribed.

  “I could have walked, though,” he said. Then he added, “I think.”

  Ivy sighed and looked at him with a frown. “I’m never going to get used to it,” she said. “You haven’t ever thought about changing careers, I don’t suppose?”

  Rhodes knew that she didn’t really mean it, but he said, “Change to what? I don’t know how to do anything else.”

  “I guess I’ll just have to put up with it, then,” Ivy said, but she was still frowning. “Do you want me to go by and feed Speedo tonight?”

  Rhodes said that he did. “He’s practically your dog, too. As of tomorrow, he’ll be community property.”

  “Not exactly. You had him before we got married.”

  “What’s mine is yours,” Rhodes said.

  Ivy finally smiled. “And don’t you forget it,” she said.

  Rhodes didn’t want to take anything to make him sleep, but the nurse insisted. Since he didn’t know which pills were for the pain—and he did want those—and which ones were for sleeping, he didn’t argue much; but sleeping pills always made him dream.

  Tonight was no exception.

  He dreamed again and again th
at Andy West was sitting on his chest, choking the life out of him. And in every dream, Rhodes seemed to see Miss Bobbit standing behind West, pointing a pistol at her fiancé’s back.

  “What are you waiting for?” Rhodes wanted to yell at her, but he couldn’t because West had that death grip on his throat.

  Miss Bobbit just stood there, watching.

  Then, just as Rhodes was about to wake up, Miss Bobbit would fire the pistol. Oddly enough, instead of waking Rhodes, the sound of the shots would always put him back to sleep.

  He woke up the next morning at seven fifty-eight by his watch. His head felt as if it were stuffed with cotton, another reason he didn’t like the sleeping pills.

  He forced himself to sit up, ignoring the pain that shot through him from just about every part of his body. Even his legs were sore. They hadn’t been injured; he just wasn’t used to running.

  He got dressed, called the nurse, and checked himself out. He didn’t feel like driving. He felt even older than Lloyd Bobbit had been, and he phoned Ruth to come after him. His voice was almost back to normal, but his throat still hurt.

  While he waited, he thought about the dream and wondered what it had meant. Probably nothing. Then he thought about something that West had said. He asked if he could use the hospital phone again, and this time he called Tom Dunstable.

  It was early, but Dunstable was in his office. He said that he would be glad to talk to Rhodes.

  Ruth took him by his house first. He fed the dog and got the wedding ring he had bought a month before. It was nothing fancy, just a simple gold band.

  Ruth then drove him to the lawyer’s office and he struggled out of the car and hobbled inside. An old song kept running through his head. “Hand Me Down My Walking Cane.”

  “Godamighty,” Dunstable said, looking up as Rhodes entered. “You’ll excuse me if I don’t get up. What the devil happened to you?”

  Rhodes told him, just hitting the high points.

  “Well, I hate to say it, but you look a little the worse for wear. Weren’t you supposed to be getting married here pretty soon?”

  “This morning,” Rhodes said. “Eleven o’clock.”

  “Godamighty,” Dunstable said again, shaking his head. “Well, I guess you didn’t come here to talk about a personal injury suit, seeing how as the guy who injured you is dead. What can I do for you?”

  Rhodes asked him the question that had been bothering him. Dunstable’s answer was about what he had expected.

  “You sure you don’t want me to come in?” Ruth Grady said. They were parked outside Miss Bobbit’s house.

  “I’ll take care of it,” Rhodes said. He hadn’t told her why they were there. Getting out of the car wasn’t any easier this time than it had been before.

  Miss Bobbit answered the door. She had on different glasses this morning. Rhodes wondered if she had lost the others in the fighting. His own had disappeared from his shirt pocket, and he was planning to buy another pair.

  “What is it, Sheriff?” Miss Bobbit said.

  “I just wanted to talk to you for a minute,” Rhodes said. “And thank you for saving my life last night.”

  “Come in, then,” Miss Bobbit said.

  He followed her into the living room. When she turned to face him, he said, “You knew all along, didn’t you?”

  “Knew what?” She was the cold fish again.

  “Knew a lot of things. You knew that the power of attorney automatically ended with your father’s death, for one.”

  She started to say something, but Rhodes didn’t let her. “Don’t bother to lie about it. I talked to Tom Dunstable this morning. He arranged it, and he told me that he explained everything to you, particularly that part. I don’t know why I would have ever thought otherwise. You knew, but you didn’t tell West. I wonder why?”

  “You probably think you already know.”

  “I do. I think you wanted him to kill your father. It was an easy way to get rid of him, and you could shift the blame to Maurice Kennedy simply enough. It worked out very well.”

  Miss Bobbit smiled tightly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Sure you do,” Rhodes said. He wasn’t smiling. “If West was caught in the act, that was too bad, but there was every chance he’d get away with it. He thought he was putting one over on you, but he knew whose fault it was. It dawned on him last night.”

  Rhodes was sure now that the emotion he had heard in Miss Bobbit’s voice in West’s store was not the result of her discovering that she had been used by West; it was fear of West’s realizing that he was the one being used all along.

  “I don’t know what kind of hints you dropped,” Rhodes continued, “but I’m sure West picked up on them. He was sure that with your father out of the way he’d get the money, and you were glad to be free of an old man who was causing you embarrassment.”

  “I could sue you for slander,” Miss Bobbit said.

  “You could,” Rhodes said. “But you won’t. I don’t think you want anyone else in Clearview to hear all this, much less get it discussed in open court.”

  “You could never prove it. You’d look like a fool.”

  “Probably,” Rhodes said. “I’m not going to try proving it.’’

  “You’re not? Then why are you here?” She seemed genuinely curious.

  “I told you. I wanted to thank you for saving me. Even if you were doing it to shut West up.” Rhodes paused. “There’s just one other thing.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “I was wondering why you waited so long to shoot him,” Rhodes said.

  “I don’t know much about guns. I couldn’t figure out how to use it after I stumbled across it,” Miss Bobbit said.

  “You point it and pull the trigger,” Rhodes said.

  “Well, I—”

  “You wanted me out of the way, too,” Rhodes said. “It occurred to you that I might have figured it out. There was no way I could prosecute you, but you couldn’t stand the idea that I might know. You should have waited just a little longer.”

  “I couldn’t,” Miss Bobbit said. Her voice was calm and steady. “Andy was through with you. He looked around at me and yelled something at me. I couldn’t even understand what he was saying, but I knew that I couldn’t wait any longer.”

  “Too bad,” Rhodes said.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Not a thing. There’s no doubt you killed West in self-defense. If I filed charges against you on that, they’d never clear the grand jury. And there’s no way I can prove you manipulated West into killing your father. Even he didn’t know until it was too late.”

  “I’m not admitting that I did that. I didn’t do it.”

  “Yes,” Rhodes said. “You did.”

  “Let me ask you once more. What are you going to do?”

  ”I’ll give you the same answer. Not a thing.”

  “Then why did you come here? It certainly wasn’t to thank me.”

  “No, it wasn’t. Not really. I just came to tell you that I know what you did. You can go on being a respected member of the community, thinking about your good name if you want to, pretending to be the devoted daughter, but I know.”

  Miss Bobbit looked at him stonily. “You’d better leave now,” she said.

  Rhodes turned and shuffled out of the room and let himself out of the house. Before he shut the door behind him, he looked back. Miss Bobbit stood exactly where he had left her, her back rigid, her eyes staring straight ahead.

  The door didn’t make a sound when it closed.

  “Is everything all right?” Ruth said when Rhodes eased himself back into the car.

  “Everything’s fine,” Rhodes said. “I just wanted to thank her for saving me. What time is it?”

  “Ten forty-five,” Ruth said.

  “I guess we’d better get on over to the courthouse, then, hadn’t we?”

  “I guess we had,” Ruth agreed.

  Chapter 19

&nbs
p; No place in Clearview was very far from any other place. They got to the courthouse in plenty of time.

  Rhodes was surprised to see that the judge’s chambers were crowded when he and Ruth entered. Hack was there, along with Mrs. McGee.

  “Lawton wanted to come, too,” Hack said. “But somebody had to stay there with those engineers, so we flipped a coin. I won. “

  “What about the engineers?” Rhodes said.

  “You don’t have to worry about them. They’re doin’ whatever it is they do, lookin’ and tappin’ and all that. Lawton’s got everything under control.”

  Rhodes hoped so.

  James Allen and Mrs. Wilkie were there, too. Allen grinned and shook Rhodes’s hand. “Good work on that murder case, Sheriff,” he said. “You’re making the county look good in law enforcement circles. I stopped by the jail to check on the engineers. Everything’s going along just fine.”

  “That’s what Hack says,” Rhodes told him. “What about the lawsuit?”

  “I’m still betting that the lawyer’s going to ask for a settlement from the county, and nothing at all from you boys over at the jail. You can keep your million dollars.”

  “Ivy will be glad to hear it,” Rhodes said.

  Mrs. Wilkie just stood there and didn’t say anything. She looked like she might be going to cry, and Rhodes hoped that she wouldn’t.

  Rhodes was surprised to see that Mr. Patterson was there, along with Mr. and Mrs. Stuart.

  “Wouldn’t have missed it,” Mr. Stuart said. “I told my wife, they came to our weddin’, and we’re gonna be at theirs.”

  “That’s right,” Mrs. Stuart said. “And here we are.” She was standing in her walker, and Rhodes wondered how on earth she had gotten up the stairs. He had barely made it up the stairs himself; there was no question that the courthouse needed an elevator, and the sooner the better.

  Kathy was there, too. There was a young man with her. “Good Lord, Daddy,” Kathy said. “What happened?”

  Rhodes looked around the room for help, but everyone studiously avoided his eyes. Judge Parry was looking at the unlighted cigar in his hand, Hack was talking to Mrs. McGee, Allen was congratulating Ruth on her part in solving the murders, and Mrs. Wilkie was looking out the window.