Murder in Four Parts

by Bill Crider

  MURDER

  IN FOUR

  PARTS

  ALSO BY BILL CRIDER

  SHERIFF DAN RHODES MYSTERIES

  Of All Sad Words

  Murder Among the O.W.L.S.

  A Mammoth Murder

  Red, White, and Blue Murder

  A Romantic Way to Die

  A Ghost of a Chance

  Death by Accident

  Winning Can Be Murder

  Murder Most Fowl

  Booked for a Hanging

  Evil at the Root

  Death on the Move

  Cursed to Death

  Shotgun Saturday Night

  Too Late to Die

  PROFESSOR SALLY GOOD MYSTERIES

  A Bond with Death

  Murder Is an Art

  A Knife in the Back

  PROFESSOR CARL BURNS MYSTERIES

  Dead Soldiers

  A Dangerous Thing

  Dying Voices

  One Dead Dean

  OTHERS

  The Texas Capitol Murders

  Blood Marks

  MURDER

  IN FOUR

  PARTS

  BILL CRIDER

  MINOTAUR BOOKS NEW YORK

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  A THOMAS DUNNE BOOK FOR MINOTAUR BOOKS.

  An imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

  MURDER IN FOUR PARTS. Copyright © 2009 by Bill Crider. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.thomasdunnebooks.com

  www.minotaurbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Crider, Bill, 1941–

  Murder in four parts : a Dan Rhodes mystery / by Bill Crider.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-312-38674-0

  ISBN-10: 0-312-38674-5

  1. Rhodes, Dan (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Sheriffs—Fiction. 3. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. 4. City and town life—Texas—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3553.R497M855 2009

  813'.54—dc22

  2008036246

  First Edition: February 2009

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To Members of the Alvin Crossroad Chorus

  MURDER

  IN FOUR

  PARTS

  1

  SHERIFF DAN RHODES COULDN’T SING VERY WELL.

  It wasn’t that Rhodes didn’t like music. He did, and he could hear songs perfectly well in his head, every note in tune, every tone rounded and full. When he opened his mouth and tried to sing, though, the sounds that came out didn’t match what he heard in his mind. They sometimes came close, but not in a good way.

  Which explained why Rhodes had never before been asked to join a musical group. He’d been asked to join just about everything else: civic clubs, book groups, political parties, record clubs (that had been a while back), and even a softball team or two. Lately AARP had been making persistent overtures.

  Rhodes, however, wasn’t much of a joiner, and he’d resisted all the opportunities presented to him so far, including the latest one, as he explained to Hack Jensen, the Blacklin County dispatcher.

  “Well, you oughta think about joinin’ the barbershop chorus, anyway,” Hack said. “It’s a kind of thing that might get you some votes. There’s an election comin’ up, whether you want to admit it or not.”

  Rhodes didn’t want to admit it. He didn’t like elections, and he especially didn’t like campaigning.

  “It’s more than a year until the election,” he said. “Besides, nobody’s announced to run against me.”

  “You think it’ll be easy, then?”

  Rhodes wondered if Hack knew something he didn’t. It was possible. Even likely. For a man who hardly ever seemed to leave the jail, Hack knew a lot about what was going on in the county.

  “It’s never easy,” Rhodes said.

  “If you lost the election, you’d miss this place,” Hack said, waving a hand to indicate the big room they were in.

  Rhodes spent a lot of time at the jail, all right, more than he should have, he sometimes thought. The room where Hack sat at the dispatcher’s desk was as familiar to Rhodes as his own living room. That might not have been such a good thing.

  The open area was also the room where people were booked into the jail and where most people came if they were looking for help from the county’s law enforcement. There wasn’t a lot to recommend it, but Hack was right.

  “I’d miss it,” Rhodes admitted, “but I could get used to being a private citizen.”

  Hack snorted. “I bet. You been sheriff for so long, you wouldn’t know how to do anything else. And half the county’d still be lookin’ for you to take care of ’em.”

  “Which half? The half that voted for me?”

  “You wouldn’t get half the votes. You lost, remember?”

  Things had moved fast, a little too fast for Rhodes. The election was more than a year away, Rhodes didn’t even have an opponent, and he’d already lost.

  “What does all this have to do with me joining the Clearview Community Barbershop Chorus, anyway?” he said.

  He and Hack had been arguing about the chorus off and on for more than a week, and Rhodes was getting a little tired of the whole thing.

  Hack gave Rhodes an exasperated look. “Like I said. Bein’ in the chorus gets you some votes. Lets folks know you’re a part of the community that’s havin’ a good time and that you’re not just out on the street arrestin’ people who have overdue parkin’ tickets.”

  “When’s the last time I arrested anybody for an overdue parking ticket? Or even gave a parking ticket?”

  “That ain’t the point.”

  “Anyway,” Rhodes said, ignoring him, “arresting people is my job. I’m the sheriff, not a barbershop singer.”

  “Well, you oughta be glad they asked you to join the chorus. They might get their feelin’s hurt if you turn ’em down.”

  Something in Hack’s tone clued Rhodes in to the real subject under discussion. He said, “I think they should’ve asked you to join. You have a nice baritone voice.”

  Hack nodded. “I sure do. You’d think they’d have invited me, but they invited you, instead.”

  “You don’t need an invitation, you know. They don’t have tryouts or anything. You can just go down to the community center and join. They’d be lucky to have you.”

  Hack grinned. “Yeah, but who’d run this dispatch board? The county needs me.”

  “But not me?”

  “You got plenty of deputies.” Hack paused. “You ever think they might have a reason for askin’ you to join the chorus besides your singin’ abilities?”

  As often happened, Rhodes knew he’d been wrong at least twice now about the actual direction of the conversation.

  “What would the reason be?” he asked.

  Hack shook his head. “I don’t know. It was just somethin’ in the way Berry asked you.”

  Lloyd Berry was the director of the chorus, and he’d come by the jail a bit earlier to talk to Rhodes about joining the group. Berry was a local florist, and singing was his hobby. He’d been enthusiastic about the benefits of belonging to the chorus. He’d also seemed a little nervous, as if he might be worried about something, though he’d said nothing about what that might be.

  “Could be he wanted you there to referee any fights that broke out,” Hack said.

  “Why would there be fights at a chorus rehearsal?”

  “Well,” Hack said, “there’s some strange folks in that bun
ch.”

  Rhodes knew who Hack meant: C. P. Benton and Max Schwartz, both of them relative newcomers.

  Benton, better known as Seepy, was one of the bass singers in the chorus. He played guitar and drove a Saturn. That qualified him as strange by Clearview and Blacklin County standards.

  Max Schwartz sang baritone. He’d given up his law practice in Kentucky and moved to Clearview with his wife, Jackee, to open a music store. He was devoted to the music of the Kingston Trio, not a group known for their barbershop arrangements. Rhodes didn’t know why Schwartz was in the chorus. Maybe he just liked to sing harmony. At any rate, a man who’d give up a law practice to open a music store in a small town would certainly be considered odd by most people in the county.

  Then lately he’d gotten into the restaurant business. Nothing strange about that, at least Rhodes hoped not. The last man who’d had the restaurant hadn’t come to a good end.

  Schwartz and Benton had a few other peculiarities, too, but that didn’t make them troublemakers. Both had been involved in one of Rhodes’s previous cases, but they’d been on the side of the angels.

  Hack wasn’t talking about those two, though.

  “It’s Cecil Marsh and Royce Weeks that’d worry me if I was the director of that bunch,” Hack said. “Those two never have liked each other, and now they’re both singin’ tenor in the chorus. They’re on opposite sides in the chicken deal, too. Could be a problem.”

  Marsh and Weeks currently had two problems, including what Rhodes liked to call “neighbor trouble.” Others might have called it an ongoing feud. It had started when Weeks had moved next door to Marsh more than twenty years earlier. Weeks insisted that Marsh move three or four ornamental shrubs that were over the property line. Marsh said they weren’t over the line, and he wasn’t going to move them. Weeks called a surveyor, who found that the shrubs were indeed on Weeks’s property, by about six inches, seven at the most. Weeks told Marsh to move the shrubs or he’d chop them down.

  That was the beginning. Over the next twenty years, Rhodes or one of his deputies had been called to one house or the other to settle problems with barking dogs, uncut lawns, rogue sprinklers, suspicious smells, terroristic threats, garbage that was improperly disposed of, allegedly stolen newspapers, disturbances of the peace, and any number of other things that Rhodes couldn’t recall at the moment.

  “They haven’t killed each other yet,” Rhodes said.

  “That was before the chickens,” Hack said.

  Clearview was in the midst of a great chicken controversy. For as long as the town had been there, some of its citizens had kept chickens in their backyards. Weeks was one of them.

  Now, times were changing. Some people objected to the chickens, saying they were a health hazard, that the roosters disturbed the peace way too early in the morning, and that civilized people didn’t need chickens anyway. Marsh was one of that group, though Rhodes thought his real objection was to Weeks rather than to the chickens.

  “Could be just a matter of time before one of ’em does the other one in,” Hack said. “The way those two go at it, I’m surprised it hasn’t happened already. Just think about ’em sittin’ by each other ever’ week and singin’ the same part in that chorus. Tenors are kind of nutty anyway.” He paused. “Or so I’ve heard.”

  “I’m not a tenor,” Rhodes said.

  “Never said you were. I was thinkin’ of Lawton.”

  Lawton was the jailer, the Lou Costello to Hack’s Bud Abbott. It wasn’t that Hack and Lawton were a comedy team, at least not intentionally. They did, however, bear a certain physical resemblance to the long-deceased vaudevillians, whom Rhodes had often watched in black-and-white movies on television. Now those movies seldom turned up anymore. Ten years or so down the line, Rhodes thought, hardly anybody would even remember who Abbott and Costello were, which Rhodes thought was a shame.

  “Lawton might be a baritone,” Rhodes said. “Like you.”

  “Baritone?” said Lawton, coming into the big room through the door that led to the cellblock. “Who you callin’ a baritone? I’m a lead, if I’m anything. I been thinkin’ about joinin’ that barbershop chorus they’ve got and givin’ ’em the benefit of my vocal cords.”

  Hack rolled his eyes, but before he could start an argument, Rhodes said, “Lloyd Berry just came by and asked me to join the chorus. Hack thinks he had an ulterior motive.”

  “That bunch needs somebody to keep an eye on ’em, all right,” Lawton said. “Darrel Sizemore, for one.”

  Sizemore owned a junkyard where he bought and sold scrap metal, and he got a lot of jokes about his name because he was, as he liked to put it, height-challenged. His lack of height didn’t keep him from being a bit more pugnacious than most people. For all Rhodes knew, the lack of height was the cause of the assertiveness. Whatever the reason was, he didn’t take kindly to the jokes. He’d had a little legal trouble once, but it hadn’t amounted to much.

  “I was comin’ to Darrel,” Hack said. “Sings bass. You wouldn’t think it to look at him, but he can drag the bottom. Must have a hollow leg or something to get a sound that big. Anyway, he’s a fight waitin’ to happen. He’s fine as long as nobody argues with him or says anything about how short he is, but if you cross him, it’s Katy bar the door.”

  “We oughta invite the chorus to the jail,” Lawton said. “Let ’em sing to the prisoners.”

  “I don’t think they’re that hard up for an audience,” Rhodes said.

  “Maybe not,” Lawton said. “You gonna join?”

  Rhodes shook his head. “I don’t have time. I have to be out there busting crime twenty-four hours a day.”

  “You’ll be sorry you didn’t join if a fight breaks out and somebody gets hurt,” Hack said.

  Rhodes wasn’t worried. Some of the people involved in the chorus might be a bit odd, and some of them might be overly aggressive, and some of them might be bad neighbors, but that didn’t mean there was any danger of a fight breaking out. Rhodes thought that singing in harmony together might bring everyone to harmony in other ways.

  It was nice to think so for a couple of seconds, but Rhodes forgot all about it when they got the call about the alligator.

  2

  THE ALLIGATOR SQUATTED ON THE MUDDY BOTTOM OF THE drainage ditch that ran along the county road in front of Seepy Benton’s house. The gator was partially covered with windblown leaves, and it looked a lot like a log. Benton claimed he had no idea how it had gotten into the ditch, not that it mattered. The immediate problem was how to get it out without getting hurt.

  It had been a long time since Rhodes had seen an alligator. There weren’t a lot of them in Blacklin County. None, in fact, as far as Rhodes knew.

  The last time he’d seen one, he’d been just a kid. He and his parents had been on a family vacation, headed down to the Gulf Coast to visit Galveston, and they’d stopped at one of those roadside attractions that was advertised for miles with billboards promising spectacular exhibits: SNAKES! JUNGLE BEASTS! FEARSOME CREATURES OF THE SWAMPS!

  As far as Rhodes remembered, the exhibit had turned out to be a couple of snakes that might have been defanged rattlers or maybe just hog snakes, a flea-infested monkey or two, and an alligator. The gator hadn’t been a very big one, certainly smaller than the one Rhodes was looking at now.

  This one was at least seven feet long from the tip of its snout to the tip of its tail. As far as Rhodes was concerned, that was plenty big enough.

  “Maybe it’s a crocodile,” Deputy Ruth Grady said.

  “No, it’s an alligator, all right,” Seepy Benton told her.

  Benton looked a little like an out-of-place rabbi. He had blue eyes, a salt-and-pepper beard, and curly hair that stuck out from under the narrow brim of his hat. He taught math at the local branch of a community college, but he knew about a lot of things not related to mathematics. Strange things, mostly, and that included alligators.

  “How do you know?” Ruth asked.

  “For
one thing, you can’t see its teeth,” Benton told her. “You can see a crocodile’s teeth even when its mouth is closed.”

  Rhodes was glad he couldn’t see the animal’s teeth, but he didn’t mention it.

  “Also, the snout’s wider than a croc’s,” Benton continued. “An alligator’s got a lot more crushing power in its jaws. It even eats turtles. A croc’s snout is narrower and kind of comes to a point.”

  Rhodes would just as soon not have heard the part about the crushing power of the jaws, but he didn’t mention that, either.

  “All we have to do is clamp its mouth shut,” Benton said. “Alligators have the crushing power, all right, but the muscles that open its jaws are a lot weaker. I could hold its mouth closed with one hand. Then it couldn’t bite anybody.”

  Rhodes believed him about the mouth, but he wasn’t relieved by the information. The alligator seemed to be sculpted out of pure muscle.

  “Who’s going to hold the rest of it?” Rhodes said.

  Benton smiled. “You’re the sheriff.”

  Rhodes wouldn’t have been surprised if Benton had jumped into the ditch and wrestled the gator. The math teacher had been interested in Ruth Grady for a short time before falling for Mel Muller, a Web site developer. Benton had helped Mel do a beautiful site for the county. The site had pleased the commissioners, but Benton and Mel’s relationship had ended when the site was completed. Rhodes didn’t know why, and it wasn’t any of his business.

  Now Benton was interested in Ruth again. That wasn’t any of Rhodes’s business, either, but he couldn’t help being a bit curious.

  Benton gave the gator a speculative look.

  “I’ll wrestle it,” Benton said to Rhodes, who wasn’t surprised at all, though he knew the remark was intended to impress Ruth. “You can hold its mouth shut. I do a hundred push-ups every day. I’m pretty strong.”