by Bill Crider
Rhodes was sorry he’d bothered her. This visit had been a mistake from the beginning. He should have gone straight to Buck Sandstrom, but he’d thought maybe he could find out something that would give him an edge. Instead he’d just upset Edith Bolton, and probably Gerald, too.
“I’d better be going,” he said.
Bolton got up to show him to the door. As they were leaving the room, Edith said, “There was one thing.”
Rhodes barely heard her. He turned around and said, “What?”
“Ronnie liked Buck. He looked up to him because Buck was older. Like Buck looked up to Gerald.”
She almost managed to smile at her husband, but it didn’t quite come off.
“So I’m sure Buck and Ronnie did spend some time together That Day. I don’t know if that means anything.”
Rhodes didn’t know, either, but he thanked her for the information.
When Bolton and Rhodes got to the front door, Bolton said, “Tell me the truth, Sheriff. Is Larry Colley’s murder connected to Ronnie’s disappearance? Is Buck?”
Rhodes told him the truth. He said, “I don’t know.”
20
BUCK SANDSTROM HAD HIS OWN BUSINESS, A QUICKIE LUBE THAT specialized in oil changes and state inspections. It had three bays, and it was busy most of the time.
Rhodes parked the county car away from the tiny office and away from the bays. When he got out of the car, he saw heat waves rising off the concrete.
He started toward the bays, but he hadn’t gotten more than a couple of steps before he was accosted by a young man in a khaki-colored jumpsuit with QUICKIE LUBE stitched on the left front side over the name LANNY. His khaki cap had the bright yellow and black Quickie logo on it.
“Ready to switch the county business over to us, Sheriff?” Lanny said.
He was smiling, and Rhodes knew he was kidding. Still, he gave him an answer.
“We’re still getting our oil changed at the county barn,” he said. “Is Buck here today?”
Lanny laughed. “He’s always here. Not that he doesn’t trust us, but he likes to be here in case there’s a problem. Not that we ever have a problem.”
Lanny laughed again, but this time there was a hint of nervousness in it. Rhodes figured that was because one of the things every employee at the Quickie Lube did was try to sell every customer an additional product or service: an air filter, a radiator flush, a transmission fluid change, something that the customer hadn’t come in for and had no thought of buying. It wasn’t illegal, but it sometimes caused a problem when a customer thought he was being hassled or cheated. Rhodes had heard from more than one of them.
“You want to talk to Buck?” Lanny said. “I can get him for you.”
“Fine. I’ll wait here.”
“Cooler in the office.”
The office held a counter, a soft drink machine, and several chairs for the customers. Through the full-length windows, Rhodes could see people sitting in the chairs.
“I’d rather talk to him in private.”
“Sure, sure,” Lanny said, laughing even more nervously. “I’ll get Buck right now.”
He went into the first bay and disappeared down a red metal stairway into the pit that ran along under all three bays. In a couple of minutes, Buck Sandstrom came climbing up the stairs and walked over to Rhodes, wiping his hands on a red rag. He stuck the rag in his side pocket and put out his hand.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “My hand’s clean.”
Rhodes wasn’t worried. He’d shaken plenty of greasy hands in his time.
“Is this about Larry?” Buck said, releasing Rhodes’s hand. Buck was wearing the company jumpsuit, too, but his didn’t fit him very well. He was too big for it, and the shoulders looked tight and uncomfortable. Rhodes remembered that Buck had played linebacker for the Clearview Catamounts during his high school days and then went on to play at the junior college where Tom Vance taught. Buck had been good enough to get a lot of offers from big universities, but he’d torn up a knee during his sophomore year and had given up on education and football. He’d come back to Clearview and worked at a couple of different jobs before getting the Quickie franchise.
“What makes you think it’s about Larry?” Rhodes said.
“Karen told me you’d talked to her. I figured it would be my turn next.” Buck turned and gestured with his thumb. “It’d be cooler in the shade.”
There was a pecan tree sticking up through a big square hole in the center of the concrete near the side of the office. Buck started toward it without waiting for Rhodes to say anything. Rhodes followed him.
Buck was right. It was cooler in the shade. A locust whined somewhere up in the tree.
“What I was wondering,” Rhodes said, “is why Karen lied to me about Larry.”
“She didn’t lie to you,” Buck said.
Rhodes was willing to concede the point. After all, he wasn’t a hundred percent certain.
“Maybe not. But she told me she hadn’t seen Larry or talked to him in years. I’m not sure that’s strictly true.”
Buck put out a hand and leaned against the pecan tree. “She didn’t say she hadn’t seen him. She said she hadn’t talked to him.”
So Karen and Buck had discussed her conversation with Rhodes. For some reason, Rhodes had thought that Karen might not mention it to her husband.
“So she’s seen him?” Rhodes said.
“You could say that, but it’s stretching. He’s been kind of hanging around.”
Rhodes thought back over what Karen had said to him. She’d told him that she hadn’t had any contact with Colley—no cards, no calls—but she hadn’t said anything about hanging around. Rhodes asked Buck to explain what he meant.
“Now and then he’d be outside the library when she left to come home. He never spoke to her, and she wouldn’t even look in his direction. She didn’t like him much.”
“Why would he be doing that?” Rhodes asked.
“I don’t know. I can tell you what I think, but that’s about it.”
“That’s fine.” Rhodes was willing to listen to anything that might help him. “Tell me what you think.”
Buck pushed away from the tree and folded his arms across the front of his jumpsuit. “Larry was always a jerk.”
That isn’t exactly news, Rhodes thought, but he didn’t say so. He waited for Buck to continue.
“So I think he was sorry about what had happened between him and Karen, the divorce and all. He never paid her much attention, just went right on living the way he had before they were married.” Buck grinned. “I never made that mistake.”
“You’re smarter than Larry, then.”
“That’s right, I am. But Larry’s getting older. Was getting older. I guess he won’t be getting any older now.”
Not unless he knew a secret the rest of us don’t, Rhodes thought.
“Anyway,” Buck said, “I figure he was wondering what his life would’ve been like if he’d had any sense. If he’d acted like a husband and stayed with Karen. Maybe he even missed her, missed being married to her and having a real life. So he sort of started hanging around her, wondering if there was any way they could ever get back together.”
It was an interesting theory, but nobody was ever going to be able to test it. So Rhodes didn’t see any need to keep discussing it. He said, “Someone made a couple of calls to Larry’s cell phone from your number. Was that you or Karen?”
“She told you she hadn’t talked to him, and she hadn’t. I’m the one who called him. She doesn’t even know I did it.”
“How did you get his number?”
“It’s in the ads for that repair business he and Bud Turley have. Had. Whatever.”
Rhodes hadn’t seen any ads and said so.
“You should look at the Clearview Herald. There’s one in there every week. ‘Call Bud or Larry, day or night’ and then the numbers. So I called.”
“And what did you tell him?”
“What
do you think I told him? I told him to stay the hell away from my wife or we’d both have to go to the hospital.”
Rhodes looked out across the concrete parking area and saw the heat waves shimmering up from the surface. He didn’t ask why they’d both have to go to the hospital, but Buck told him anyway.
“Because I’d kick his ass so hard, it’d take major surgery to get my foot out.”
“And what happened then?” Rhodes asked.
“Nothing.” Buck pushed his cap up on his head. “Nothing except that he didn’t turn up outside the library again. If you’re thinking I killed him, you’re barking up the wrong tree.”
“What kind of car do you drive?” Rhodes asked.
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Humor me.”
“Sure,” Buck said. “Come around to the back.”
They left the shade of the pecan tree and walked behind the office.
“There she is,” Buck said, pointing to a Chevrolet pickup that Rhodes guessed must have been nearly forty years old. It was a bright cherry red, and the Quickie Lube logo was painted on the doors.
“You must have seen me around town,” Buck said. “It’s hard to miss me. Good advertising for the business, and it still drives like a new one.”
“I have an Edsel,” Rhodes said. “It doesn’t drive like a new one, though.”
“Maybe it does,” Buck said. “From what I’ve heard about those things, they didn’t drive all that good when they were new.”
Rhodes grinned. “You could be right. Let’s get back to that shade.”
They went to stand under the pecan tree again, and Rhodes said, “Here’s another question for you.”
“What’s that?”
“You only talked to Larry on the phone, right? You never confronted him in person?”
“Nope. He didn’t even have his oil changed here. Probably did it himself out there at Bud’s place.”
“Probably,” Rhodes said. “You were at Gerald Bolton’s the day his son disappeared, weren’t you?”
Buck moved closer to the tree and leaned his shoulder against it. The locust was still whining somewhere up above, and another one joined in. Rhodes looked into the tree but couldn’t see either of them.
“I was there,” Buck said. “What’s that have to do with anything?”
“Maybe nothing. But sometimes things that don’t get closed out in the past can have an effect on what’s happening now.”
“Ronnie was a good kid. He and I got along. I’ve always wondered what happened to him. He was just gone, like he’d never been there.”
“Were you with him that day?”
“Some. We played horseshoes for a while that morning, but he was more interested in visiting with his cousin from California than with me. He could see me any old time.”
Buck stopped and seemed to think about that last sentence.
“He didn’t see you again after that day,” Rhodes pointed out.
“I’ve thought about that a lot. Whose fault it was, I mean.”
“It wasn’t anybody’s fault, the way I heard it.”
“Maybe not. I’ve wondered about a few things, though.”
Rhodes asked him what things he’d wondered about.
Buck pushed away from the tree, seeming to use only his shoulder. Rhodes tried to remember if he’d ever been quite that spry.
“I shouldn’t have said anything. It’s nothing.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“Well, you know how Gerald tells everybody that he warned Ronnie and his cousin not to go in the woods?”
Rhodes said that he knew.
“I’m not so sure that’s true. I’m the one who told Ronnie a lot of stories about the wild hogs, but they were more funny than scary, the way I did it. Gerald was drinking some beer that day. Hell, everybody was drinking some beer, I guess. Anyway, I don’t remember him telling Ronnie anything, or even paying much attention to him. I don’t think he even knew the kid had wandered away. I’m the one who noticed. When I told Gerald, he waved me off. He didn’t even get worried for another half hour or more.”
Rhodes thought back over the file he’d looked at that morning. “I don’t remember seeing an interview with you in my files,” he said. “I thought I talked to just about everybody who was there.”
“You didn’t talk to me, and if you had, I wouldn’t have mentioned anything like what I just said. It’s just something I’ve wondered about over the years.”
Rhodes thought it over. If Bolton felt guilty about what had happened to his son and had lied to cover it up, that was one thing. It would explain a little about the Boltons themselves, too.
On the other hand, Buck might be lying. People lied to Rhodes all the time. It was part of his job to separate the true from the false in what he was told.
“All right,” Rhodes said. “Thanks for telling me and for taking the time to talk to me.”
“Don’t mention it,” Buck said. “I try to stay on the right side of the law all the time.”
Rhodes went back to his car. As he was driving away, he looked in his mirror and saw Buck talking to Lanny. Lanny was probably getting a price on a new timing belt that he wanted to sell to somebody, Rhodes thought. Just a couple of semihonest businessmen hard at work.
Rhodes was headed to the Dairy Queen to get himself a Blizzard when Hack came on the radio to tell him that there was a disturbance at the public library. He wasn’t clear on what kind of disturbance it was.
“Lots of yellin’ goin’ on in the background,” Hack said. “I couldn’t make out just exactly what the caller was sayin’.” The caller, he told Rhodes, was Dora Foley, the head librarian. “She was kinda excited. They don’t get a lot of disturbances at the library. They like it quiet.”
Rhodes said he’d get right over there.
The Clearview Public Library was big and square and white, a slab-sided building that sat right in the middle of an entire block surrounded by a wide lawn on all sides.
There was plenty of parking, but Rhodes had to walk what seemed like quite a distance to get to the door. When he got there, he had to push through a group of five or six people who were gathered to watch the fun inside. They were cheering someone or something, and they didn’t much want to give up their positions when Rhodes asked them to move aside.
He was able to clear a path through them, however, and he was glad to get into the cool air-conditioned library. He saw Dora Foley, who wore glasses and put her graying hair up in a bun on top of her head, as if she’d studied pictures of librarians in books from the 1940s and decided that she wanted to look as much like them as possible.
Dora stood behind the circulation desk, and Karen Sandstrom was beside her. As Rhodes watched, a book came wobbling through the air from the children’s section, pages flopping like useless wings. The two women at the desk leaned to the left and right. The book passed between them and hit the wall behind them.
Dora picked it up and put it in a stack of books on the desk. Then she saw Rhodes and said in a loud voice, “The sheriff is here. You’re in big trouble now.”
“I’m not afraid of the sheriff,” said a woman from somewhere in the children’s section.
Rhodes couldn’t see the speaker, but he recognized her voice.
“What’s going on here, Mary Jo?” he said.
“She’s crazy, that’s what,” Dora said. “She came in here and started yelling and throwing books. She’s going to have to pay for the ones she’s mutilated, too. I won’t put up with that kind of thing.”
“I’m not crazy,” Mary Jo said. She walked out where Rhodes could see her. “I’m just pissed off.”
She was wearing her tight jeans and western shirt, as if she’d dressed for her job at the Round-Up, but she didn’t have on her cowboy hat. Her hair was loose and fell around her face.
“We don’t allow that kind of language in here, either,” Dora said. “It’s against library rules.”
Dor
a hadn’t been in Clearview long. She’d moved there about six months earlier from a branch library in Houston. Jennifer Loam had interviewed her for the paper, and Dora had said that she’d left the city because she wanted to get away from the crude habits and manners of the people who lived there.
Little did she know what she was getting into, Rhodes thought. Small towns were not necessarily places of gentility and elegance.
As if to prove what Rhodes was thinking, Mary Jo said she didn’t give a damn about library rules.
“Arrest her, Sheriff,” Dora said, pointing in Mary Jo’s direction. “Arrest her right now.”
“I’ll take care of this, Dora,” Rhodes said. “Mary Jo, you and I need to have a talk.”
Mary Jo told him what he could do with his talk.
“See what I mean?” Dora said. “She’s crazy as a bedbug. We can’t have language like that in the library!”
Mary Jo grabbed a book off a shelf and heaved it in Dora’s direction. It was a heavy book, and it didn’t make it to the desk. It hit on the floor and slid a foot or two. Rhodes could see the title. Something about Harry Potter.
“Arrest her, Sheriff!” Dora yelled.
“Not right now,” Rhodes said. “She and Karen and I will just borrow your meeting room for a little while and talk things over.”
Rhodes went into the library and walked around the far end of the desk.
“The room’s right back here, Mary Jo. Come on. You, too, Karen.”
He went on to the room and sat down to see if anyone would show up. After a few seconds Karen came in.
“Hey, Sheriff,” she said.
“Have a seat,” Rhodes said, and she did.
They waited without talking for another minute or two. Mary Jo stuck her head in the door. She looked to Rhodes like a woman who badly needed a cigarette. Rhodes knew that if she lit one in the library, Dora would have a stroke, so he didn’t suggest it. Mary Jo might very well have taken him up on it.
“I’m not going to jail,” Mary Jo said, still showing no more than her head. “All I did was throw a few books.”
“We’ll see,” Rhodes said. “Come on in and sit down. You’d better close the door, too.”
