Murder in Four Parts

by Bill Crider

  “That’s Lew’s job, but if Alton brings her in, that should get Lew’s attention. Call Alton and put him to work on it.”

  Hack said he’d do that.

  “Anything else going on?” Rhodes said.

  “Just the usual. Nothin’ you need to worry about.”

  Elvis hadn’t been something Rhodes needed to worry about, either, but Hack and Lawton couldn’t resist an opportunity to give Rhodes the business.

  “All right,” Rhodes said. “Since everything’s under control, I’m going to do some more investigating. Be sure to have Ruth check on Happy Franklin’s place every half hour, and give me a call if you need me.”

  “Don’t I always?” Hack said. “Where you goin’?”

  “Lloyd Berry’s house,” Rhodes said.

  Rhodes went through Berry’s house again, but he didn’t find anything he’d overlooked the first time. So he called Seepy Benton.

  “Benton’s the name, and math is my game. What can I do for you?”

  Rhodes identified himself and told Benton he needed to work on a new greeting.

  “I’ll do that, Sheriff, and what can I do for you today? You need somebody who can bend reality with his bare hands? I’m your man.”

  “I need somebody with a GPS. Do you have one?”

  “Actually, the GPS is up in orbit. So I don’t have one. I have a GPS receiver, though. In fact, I have two, one for the car and one I can carry around.”

  That came as no surprise to Rhodes.

  “I’m writing a song about a GPS,” Benton continued. “You remember Lou Reed’s ‘Satellite of Love’?”

  Rhodes had to confess that he didn’t.

  “Great song. Anyway, I’m writing one called ‘GPS of Love.’ It’s going to be even better than Lou’s.”

  Rhodes said he was sure that was true. “Can you come to Lloyd Berry’s house and bring your GPS with you? Your receiver, I mean.”

  “Anything to help out the law, you know that. I’ll let my department chair know where I’m going and be there in a jiffy. Or in a car. One or the other. Or both.”

  “I’ll be waiting,” Rhodes said.

  Benton arrived in a jiffy and a car. Rhodes met him at the curb and asked about Bruce.

  “He’s doing fine,” Benton said. “I bought him one of those igloos at Wal-Mart. I had to get a really big one, but I think he likes it. He eats a lot, but that’s okay. I think he and I are going to be good friends.”

  “How good?” Rhodes said.

  “He likes me. I like him. That good. Why?”

  “You might be stuck with him. The Eccles cousins mentioned something about leaving him in his foster home.”

  Rhodes hoped they’d do it. Bruce would be better off with Benton, who’d already seen to a better shelter for the dog than anything Rhodes had seen at the Eccles place. Benton would probably feed him better, too.

  “He’s welcome to stay with me,” Benton said. “I don’t want to steal him from his rightful owners, but if they don’t want him back, he’s right at home in my backyard.” He paused. “I thought maybe Deputy Grady would come by and check on him, but she hasn’t.”

  “She’s been pretty busy,” Rhodes said. “I hope you didn’t take Bruce just because you thought she might drop by.”

  “No, no. I wouldn’t do a thing like that. I like Bruce as a person. Or as a dog. You know what I mean.”

  Oddly enough, Rhodes did know.

  “That’s good,” he said, “because Bruce may be living with you for a long time.”

  “I hope so,” Benton said, “but you didn’t call me out here to talk about Bruce.”

  “No. I want to have a look at some of those locations that Lloyd had in his computer history. Can we do that?”

  “Sure. I’m fully armed with GPS receivers. They’re both in the car.”

  Benton opened the door of his car and got a small portable receiver out of the glove box. Rhodes noticed it was a Garmin and asked if it was from Tom’s TomToms.

  “I bought it online,” Benton said. “I know I should support local businesses, but I got this before I moved to Clearview.”

  Rhodes told him not to feel guilty about it, and they went inside to check the computer coordinates. After Benton had programmed three of them into the Garmin, they left to find the sites.

  The first one was in Obert, down a county road that went past the college and the rock crusher. Rhodes had investigated crimes at both places, but the location they were looking for was at the foot of an old wooden bridge that was due for replacement soon. It took them a while to find the exact site, even with the receiver leading them, and when they did, there was nothing there.

  “Someone’s moved the cache,” Benton said. “They’re not supposed to do that. You just record that you found it, or if you take what’s there, you replace it with something else.”

  So Benton knew the rules of geocaching, too. Again, Rhodes wasn’t surprised. Benton seemed to know about everything.

  “Let’s try another site,” Rhodes said.

  The next location was a block away from what had once been downtown Obert, near the remains of the old Obert school. Not the college but the public school, which had shut down in the 1950s when the school district had consolidated with Clearview. The redbrick building was nothing more than a brick facade now, with no roof and no glass in any of the window openings. When Rhodes and Benton found the cache location, they again found nothing.

  “That’s funny,” Benton said. “I don’t know what the game is, but it’s not geocaching.”

  “We don’t know for sure,” Rhodes said. “Doesn’t it take three points to make a line?”

  “Yes, but this isn’t a line. It’s a game with rules.”

  “I still want to check one more site.”

  “Fine with me. I can avoid doing any actual work that I’m being paid for.”

  The third site was at an old roadside park on the highway back to Clearview. The park looked as if no one had used it in years. The concrete benches on both sides of the concrete picnic table were cracked, and the table was covered with dirt, along with leaves and sticks that had fallen from the big oak tree that spread over it.

  The cache was at the base of the tree, by the top of one of the thick roots that sank into the ground, and nothing was in it.

  “You have a real mystery here,” Benton said. “But a professional crime-solver like you isn’t going to be baffled by a little thing like this.”

  “That shows how much you know about professional crime-solvers like me,” Rhodes said. “I’m as baffled as you are.”

  “You’ll figure it out. Just like I can solve any math problem.”

  “We’ll see,” Rhodes said. “Have you talked to any members of the chorus lately?”

  The leaves of the oak rustled above them, moving spots of sunlight and shade over the table and ground.

  “I talked to Max today,” Benton said. “He’s thinking he might be a good director. I encouraged him.”

  “Isn’t he too busy with his restaurant and his music store?”

  “He has more energy than three normal people. He can handle it.”

  “What about Lloyd? Has anybody mentioned him to you?”

  “Darrel Sizemore called today. He’s still worried about the money. He says that there should be a lot more music than there is.”

  “He still thinks Lloyd was stealing from the group.”

  “He hasn’t put it that way, but that’s what he thinks. Did you find any music when you searched the house? Maybe he had it stuck away somewhere.”

  “If he did, it was stuck where I couldn’t find it. Like whatever was in these caches.”

  “Just another mystery for you to work on. It probably doesn’t matter in the long run. Nobody killed Lloyd to steal sheet music.”

  “No, but it’s funny that the music would disappear.”

  “He may never have ordered it. Darrel thinks he faked the receipts.”

  “There are a lo
t of things about all this that don’t make any sense at all,” Rhodes said, more to himself than to Benton.

  “Maybe Lloyd was like me, able to bend reality with his bare hands.”

  “That would explain it,” Rhodes said.

  24

  RHODES WAS BUCKLING HIS SEAT BELT WHEN HACK CAME ON the radio.

  “Randy Lawless wants to know if you can come by his office,” Hack said. “He has some clients who want to talk to you.”

  “Which clients would those be?” Rhodes said, though he had a pretty good idea.

  “The Eccles cousins. Randy wants to thank you, too. He’s glad to have Neal Carr off the streets.”

  “I thought you said he’d bonded out.”

  “Yeah, I did. But so far he’s not prancin’ around in front of the law offices in his panties, and Randy’s glad of it. You better go on over there. Maybe he’ll give you an endorsement in the election.”

  “Not likely,” Rhodes said. “He’s not one of my biggest fans. Anyway, like I keep telling you, the election’s not until next year. I might not even run.”

  “You’ll run. What else you got to do? You don’t collect baseball cards or paint pictures of bluebonnets.”

  Hack had a point, but Rhodes wasn’t about to admit it. He signed off and drove downtown.

  The Lawj Mahal gleamed white in the sun, looking more like a national monument than ever. A small monument, true, but an impressive one in a place like Clearview. It was the only building in town that Rhodes felt vaguely uncomfortable in, as if he didn’t quite belong. He wasn’t sure whether it was because the building was so new or because he was intimidated by its grandeur.

  Less intimidating than the building were the two pickups parked in front. Rhodes recognized them as the two he’d seen at the Eccles boys’ place, and they meant that the Eccles cousins were inside the Lawj Mahal, where they’d feel even less at home than Rhodes.

  Lawless’s secretary, dressed to the nines, told Rhodes to go right on into the attorney’s office, an antiseptic place that harbored no dust or clutter.

  Lawless stood up behind his clean desk when Rhodes came through the door and said how pleased and happy he was to see the sheriff.

  “I want to thank you for catching that prankster, Neal Carr,” Lawless went on. “He was bad for business.”

  The Eccles cousins sat in a couple of big maroon leather chairs, wingbacks the same color as the bindings of the law books that lined one wall of the office. They wore their baseball caps and jeans. Just as Rhodes had thought, they looked uncomfortable and out of place, certainly more out of place than they had in the jail cell. Then again, Rhodes couldn’t fault them for that. He was more comfortable in a jail cell, too.

  “Just doing my job,” Rhodes said, with a glance at Lance and Hugh to let Lawless know that Rhodes had been taking care of business when he arrested them, too.

  “You do a fine job for the county and the town,” Lawless said. “Everybody knows that.”

  The Eccles cousins looked at each other and smirked, not caring if Rhodes saw them. Lawless should have coached them better.

  Rhodes took a seat in a third wingback chair, and Lawless got right to the point.

  “Sheriff,” he said, “my clients have decided that they want to be of assistance to you in an investigation you’re conducting.”

  Rhodes had figured that was what the meeting would be about. A little time in jail had given Lance and Hugh a new perspective on things.

  “What do they want from me in trade?”

  “They’re hoping that for their cooperation you’ll consider asking the DA to drop the charges against them.”

  “I might,” Rhodes said, “if they have anything I can use. It’ll have to be good.”

  Lawless leaned back in his chair and relaxed. “Why don’t you tell him what you know, Lance. Then he can decide if it’s of any help.”

  Lance looked at Hugh, who nodded as if to give him permission to speak. Lance cleared his throat.

  “Okay, Sheriff,” he said, “here’s the deal. Me and Hugh got a pretty good hauling job lined up. It’s gonna take us way outta state, and if we take it, we can’t stay around the county. We need the money, and we’d like to get things settled so we could take the job.”

  Lawless looked as if he were suffering from severe gas pains, but he didn’t try to stop Lance from laying out his position.

  “You’re kind of weakening your argument,” Rhodes said. “Knowing how important this is to you, I’ll have too much leverage.”

  “Hey, you haven’t heard what we got. You’ll be willing to make a deal. I guarantee it.”

  Lance sounded confident, and Rhodes got a little more interested. He’d thought all along that the Eccles boys had a story to tell, and maybe now he was finally going to hear it.

  “Get on with it, then,” he said.

  “Well, me and Hugh don’t just gamble at the Rollin’ Sevens. We kind of keep an eye on the place for Guy. Mr. Wilks, I mean.”

  “You’re the bouncers,” Rhodes said.

  “When we’re there, we are. Not that the place needs us much. That’s why we said we’d do it. See, we’re peaceable guys, me and Hugh. We don’t like getting into confrontations, but if it’s part of the job, then we will.”

  “How was getting into a confrontation with me part of your job?”

  “We just do what Mr. Wilks tells us,” Lance said.

  Rhodes was disappointed. He’d thought they’d do better than the old I was only following orders defense.

  “Not good enough,” he said. “You’ll need a lot more than that.”

  “We got it,” Hugh said, taking over from Lance. “See, we know the reason Wilks wanted us to get after you. I’ll bet he didn’t tell you that Lloyd Berry used to come in the Rollin’ Sevens.”

  Wilks hadn’t told him, but Rhodes wasn’t surprised to hear it. He remembered what Max had told him about Wilks and Berry sitting together in Max’s Place. Wilks had denied knowing Berry, but he’d obviously been covering up.

  “Wilks didn’t tell me that,” Rhodes said, “but there’s nothing wrong with Lloyd having a little relaxation in a homey family atmosphere like the one at Rollin’ Sevens.”

  Hugh gave Rhodes a suspicious glance. “Are you making fun of us?”

  “Not me. I’m just saying that there’s nothing wrong with a man having a little fun.”

  Hugh looked skeptical, but he said, “You got that right. There’s more to it than that, though. See, Wilks and Berry had a big falling-out a couple of days before Berry got killed.”

  That got Rhodes’s attention. “What about?”

  “Don’t know that, but they had a big argument in Wilks’s office. I think it had to do with money. Lloyd stormed out, and Wilks told us not to let him in if he came back.”

  “How about that?” Lance said. “Good enough for you?”

  Rhodes thought it over. If Lloyd had been stealing from the chorus, as Darrel Sizemore suspected, he might have been using the money to gamble. Rhodes didn’t know how much money Lloyd had taken, but music was expensive. He could have spent hundreds of dollars, which was a lot to feed into eight-liners. Things were beginning to fall into place.

  “It’s not bad,” Rhodes said. “I’m tempted to talk to the DA, but I’m not sure he’d go for the deal. He’s a hard man to convince.”

  Randy Lawless was smiling. Rhodes never liked it when a lawyer smiled, but this time he had a feeling that Lawless was smiling because his clients had even more to tell. That turned out to be the case.

  “That’s not all we got,” Lance said. “We know something else we bet you don’t know about. Even Cecil Marsh doesn’t know it.”

  “That’s right,” Hugh said. “If he did, he’d have killed Berry for sure.”

  “Maybe he did kill him,” Lance said, looking at his cousin. “We don’t know. Anyway, Berry was getting mighty friendly with Cecil’s wife. He used to give her all those little stuffed animals he won.”

 
; “Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” Hugh said, back in his Seinfeld mode. “Faye Lynn came in now and then, but she hardly ever won. Lloyd gave her his animals because he didn’t want them.”

  “Did it go beyond the animals?” Rhodes said. “How friendly were they?”

  “Well,” Hugh said, “me and Lance are pretty good with the women, if you know what I mean.”

  Rhodes knew what he meant, and he didn’t believe a word of it. If Hugh and Lance had been good with the women, they wouldn’t have been hanging out at Rollin’ Sevens.

  “So we know what’s what,” Lance said. “I don’t think Berry and Faye Lynn were gettin’ it on or anything, but it wasn’t because Lloyd wasn’t trying.”

  What they said explained a lot. Faye Lynn had covered for Lloyd by letting Rhodes think she’d won all the animals by gambling.

  Rhodes wondered if Cecil had known more than he was telling. What if he’d been putting on an act when Faye Lynn claimed to have won the animals? To Rhodes’s way of thinking, Cecil was a suspect again, along with Wilks, who’d joined the list.

  Rhodes thought of something else. Could Lloyd have been the one who dedicated the song to Lindy Gomez in Cecil’s name? He would have been the one trying to persuade Faye Lynn that Cecil was having a fling, not Royce Weeks. Rhodes suspected that was what had happened, all right. No wonder Lloyd didn’t explain exactly how he’d gotten the request.

  “You have anything else to offer?” Rhodes said to Lance.

  “Outside of that, we don’t know a thing. Being public-spirited citizens, though, we knew you’d want to hear what we had to tell.”

  “Nothing a law officer likes better than public-spirited citizens,” Randy said. “Isn’t that right, Sheriff.”

  Public-spirited citizens who’d kept quiet until their own necks were on the chopping block.

  Public-spirited citizens who’d sicced their dog on Rhodes when he came out to their house because they thought he was going to arrest them for harboring an alligator.

  Public-spirited citizens who’d lied and concealed the truth until it suited them.

  “That’s right,” Rhodes said, “and Hugh and Lance are full of it, all right. Public spirit, I mean,” he added when he saw the look on Randy’s face. “There’s something else I need to know, though.”