by Bill Crider
Hack ignored him, reaching for another doughnut.
Ruth explained what she’d found out. “Apparently the Martins don’t socialize much, at least not around that neighborhood. All Dr. Martin is interested in is buying old houses and fixing them up for rent property. At least, that’s what most of the neighbors think. You know that area—not many houses, and the ones there are aren’t too close to each other. I got most of this from a Mrs. Stone, Scottie Stone. She lives in what you’d call the house next door if it weren’t a half block away.”
“I know the one,” Rhodes said. “Brownish brick, shake shingles.”
“That’s it. This Mrs. Stone—she insisted that I should call her Scottie—is a member of the Garden Club and the Rotary Anns and the Friday Club and just about every other club in town. Mrs. Martin wasn’t in a one of them. A lot of the women resent that, what with all the money the Martins make. They ought to be ‘contributing to the community.’”
“But they aren’t,” Rhodes said.
“Not a bit. All Mrs. Martin does is sit around the house all day, at least according to Scottie. Sometimes she comes out—came out—and worked in the yard a little, but that was it.”
“That’s not much help,” Rhodes said.
“Well, there’s one other thing. Scottie has the impression that the Martins weren’t getting along too well.”
“That might be interesting,” Rhodes said. “What gave her that impression?”
“You know the kind of weather we’ve been having this winter, kind of cool at night but pretty warm during the day? Except for that last cold snap, I mean.”
“Sure,” Rhodes said. “So?”
“So everybody leaves their windows up most of the time, except at night. Scottie heard them yelling in the late afternoons.”
“She hear anything specific?”
“Well, she thought she heard Mrs. Martin yell something about—” Ruth stopped and sneaked a look at Hack, who was studiously ignoring them “—about someone she called ‘that bitch.’”
Rhodes sneaked a look at Hack as well. Hack wouldn’t like the idea of a woman using such language. He was a real Texan.
Since Hack was still ignoring them and apparently hadn’t heard, Rhodes got to work trying to think of someone who might seem like a bitch to Mrs. Martin. The name of Betsy Higgins came to mind almost at once. Could Martin have had something going with her? Could the blowup in the office, and the whole thing about the curse, have been some sort of cover-up? It was possible, Rhodes supposed, but Betsy hadn’t seemed like Dr. Martin’s type. Still, if there was one thing that Rhodes had learned in his career, it was that you could never, never, tell what someone’s type might be.
“She hear anything else?” Rhodes asked.
“No,” Ruth said, “and I sort of got the impression that she was really trying. I wouldn’t be surprised if she went out in the yard and listened. She seemed really curious about the whole thing.”
That didn’t surprise Rhodes. There was nothing like a crime to get people’s curiosity aroused. Just seeing an officer in the area was enough to stall traffic, whether you were in a small town or a big city.
“I wonder . . .” Rhodes said.
“What?”
“Nothing. I’ve got enough on the prisoner upstairs to hold him for a while. I was just thinking that the story he told me might not be as truthful as I thought it was.”
In fact, Rhodes was thinking that Swan might have been a better liar than he’d given him credit for. It was certainly a possibility that he was lying to protect Betsy Higgins, especially if the two had been involved in some sort of scam to get something from Martin, a scam based on some relationship between Martin and Higgins. It was something he’d have to devote more thought to.
“You have anything else for me?” Ruth asked.
“Not right now,” Rhodes said. “You working on anything in particular?”
“Just that hot check case. Another one turned up today.”
“Forgot to tell you about that,” Hack said. He’d been listening all along.
“Any leads on that?” Rhodes asked.
“I’ve got an informant who wants to talk to me about it,” Ruth said. “We’ll see what he has.”
“Good,” Rhodes said. “Keep after that. I’ll get in touch if I need anything else on this Martin business.” He turned to look at Hack, but he didn’t say anything.
“Anybody can forget,” Hack said. “I got a lot on my mind. Besides, I’m an old man. Can’t expect much from an old man.”
Rhodes still didn’t say anything. Hack had a mind like a teenager.
“I got to worry about whose name I’m gonna draw,” Hack said. “That’s a problem, too. I got a lot on my mind.”
“I’ll write down the names and leave them in a bowl or something on your desk,” Ruth said. “When the deputies come in, they can draw.”
“Good idea,” Hack said.
“Think you can remember to tell them about it?” Rhodes asked.
Hack glared at him.
It was getting late afternoon when Rhodes left the jail. The air was crisp, but not cold. He wondered how much longer the good weather could possibly last. It was December, after all. He wished he’d had a chance to get by Little Barnes’s place and try out that tank, which was no doubt full of fish eager to bite the first hook presented to them. He knew better, of course. There never was a tank like that, but every fisherman liked to think that the one he hadn’t fished in was the one that would prove to be the exception.
Rhodes got in his car and drove toward the house where Betsy Higgins and Swan had lived. There was always the chance that Betsy had come back. After all, her TV was there and probably most of her clothes and other worldly goods, whatever those might be.
The pickup was nowhere to be seen as Rhodes drove down the street, but he stopped anyway. He got out of the car and looked at the house. If Swan and Higgins had been responsible for Martin’s disappearance, then where was Martin?
In the house?
Buried in the yard?
Neither possibility was very likely. There were all too many places in Blacklin County where a body could be dumped and never seen again, except by accident.
Rhodes remembered an old movie that he had enjoyed, The Trouble with Harry, in which a body had been found in the woods somewhere. Vermont? He couldn’t remember exactly. Various members of the cast had dragged it here and there, trying to dispose of it.
It had been funny in the movie, but it wouldn’t be funny if it were really happening, if Martin’s body were somewhere out there being dragged from place to place.
That opened up a new train of thought.
What if there wasn’t a body?
All along Rhodes had been considering things from the angle that Martin had not only disappeared but was dead. Why did he think that?
Rhodes started off to the west where the sun was about a half hour from going down, turning the few clouds in that part of the sky a grayish pink. The slight chill came through his shirt, and he wished he’d put on his windbreaker.
Why did he think Martin was dead? Well, it sure seemed that nobody liked the man. Little Barnes didn’t. Swan didn’t. Betsy Higgins didn’t. Or she didn’t seem to. Rhodes wasn’t ready to clear her on that count yet, not considering the words that Mrs. Stone thought she had heard.
Martin’s office staff seemed to like him, though. Tammy, Carol, Jamie. They were all pretty torn up over the whole thing. Rhodes thought about his talk with them. There was something there, he thought, something he might have missed. He went over the scene in his mind, but he couldn’t quite figure out what it was that was bothering him.
He looked at the house again. It was neat and well kept. Martin must have been a man who took pride in his property, and Swan—or Betsy Higgins—hadn’t let things go the way renters sometimes did, those who thought that after all the property wasn’t theirs and never would be, so why bother taking care of it?
Rhodes
thought he heard something from inside the house.
He caught himself staring at the front door, as if his eyes could help him to hear better.
A minute passed with no further evidence of a sound. Rhodes had begun to think that he’d heard something from one of the other houses nearby. Then it came again, a faint bump of some kind.
Rhodes moved away from his car and up toward the front door. He knocked, but there was no answer from inside.
Rhodes felt for his sidearm. It was there, as usual, in its thumb-release holster, but he didn’t draw it. He didn’t like to use weapons if it wasn’t necessary, and if it hadn’t been necessary with Swan, it shouldn’t be necessary now. Most of the time, Rhodes thought, guns just got in the way, and sometimes they were downright dangerous. Sometimes they were dangerous to the wrong people, and he had reason to know that, too.
He walked around to the side of the house and stood listening by the windows.
Nothing.
He went on around to the back door, the door through which Swan and Betsy Higgins had tried to make their getaway earlier. The door was slightly ajar.
The sun was dropping lower now, almost to the horizon. There was a definite chill in the air, and in a few minutes it would be getting dark.
No lights showed in the house, not from any of the windows Rhodes had passed or the back door. If he waited any longer to go in, whoever was in there would have an advantage—assuming that whoever was in there was familiar with the arrangement of the furniture, and Rhodes was assuming that the “whoever” was Betsy Higgins.
On the other hand, maybe one of the neighborhood kids, someone who had seen the earlier incident, had decided to slip in and see what he could find, figuring that Swan wouldn’t be back anytime soon to stop him.
There were three cement steps, the kind you buy at the lumber yard, leading to the doorway. Rhodes stepped up on the top one, pulled open the screen, and pushed the slightly open wooden door.
As the door swung silently inward, Rhodes drew his pistol. He didn’t like it, but he really didn’t want to enter the house without it. He’d had experience doing that, too.
He stepped into the kitchen. It was much darker on the inside than it had been outside, even with the door open. Rhodes could make out a table and four chairs, the cabinets, the stove, and the refrigerator. There was no one in the room, and no more noise from anywhere in the house.
He stood quietly for a minute, listening. He was almost certain that someone was doing the same in another room, standing silently and listening to him.
He looked through a doorway into the dark shadows of the living room. No one there, at least no one he could see.
He walked through the doorway and went through it fast, just like in the movies, whirling around, his gun ready.
There was nobody there.
He felt a little foolish, and he knew that he hadn’t been able to make the move quietly. If there really was someone else in the house, whoever it was knew where he was located for sure.
The other door led to a short hall and the two bedrooms. The back bedroom would be where the TV set was. If Betsy Higgins had come back for anything, it would be the TV. How she was planning to get it out to the pickup, wherever she had parked it, Rhodes had no idea, but he was convinced that she was in the back room.
He went into the hall, as quietly as he could this time, getting his back to the wall opposite the door and keeping his eyes toward the back of the house.
The sun must have been completely below the horizon by now. It seemed very dark to Rhodes. He waited, hoping that his eyes would adjust, but it didn’t help much.
He edged along the wall, glancing in the open bathroom door as he passed. More darkness, but nothing moving.
When he got to the door into the back bedroom, he took a deep breath, squared himself into the hallway, and prepared to go through.
That was when he heard the noise behind him.
He tried to turn, but by then it was too late.
Something hit him in the back like a runaway dump truck.
Chapter 11
Rhodes was forced forward into the bedroom. The force of the blow caused him to drop his pistol, which skittered across the floor and bumped into a wall.
When he recovered from his initial surprise, Rhodes was even more surprised to discover that whatever had hit him was still there, hanging on to his neck and shoulders, pummeling his head and pulling his hair.
He tried to shake loose, but whatever was on him was sticking to him just like one of those little sticker burrs from a sandy land hill. There wasn’t much weight there, but there was plenty of tenacity.
The fury of it all finally bore Rhodes to the floor, where he was able to roll over and get a grip on Betsy Higgins’s wrists before she beat him black and blue, at least in the area of the face. First Swan and now this. It hadn’t been a good day at all.
He held on to the wrists until Betsy Higgins began to tire, though it wasn’t easy. He wouldn’t have thought she had that much energy in her, but while she wasn’t big, she was certainly wiry. She thrashed and flopped like a catfish on a tank dam on a sunny day.
When he could finally get a breath, Rhodes said, “You’ve got to calm down, Miz Higgins. Nobody’s going to hurt you.”
“You’re going to, if you can,” she said, getting out the words between gasping for breath and trying to spit on him. “You had a gun in your hand.”
Rhodes managed to push her away slightly and get to his knees, still keeping his grip. “I didn’t know for sure it was you in here,” he said.
“You wanted to kill me,” Higgins said, kicking, squirming, pulling with that wiry strength. It was all Rhodes could do to hold on.
“I just don’t want you to kill me,” Rhodes said. “It seems like you’re still trying.”
Suddenly Betsy Higgins stopped moving. She grew rigid as a rock and threw back her head. “By the name of Lucifer,” she cried out, “by the name of—” He couldn’t understand the names she called out then. They sounded something like “Ah-hee-yay” and “Eh-gla,” but he wasn’t very good at the language of witchcraft.
“—I command you to release me.” Then she started to struggle fiercely again.
Rhodes held on. Apparently the spell wasn’t going to work.
“I call upon you and your house a plague of demons!” she shouted. “By all sacred names, by the name of—”
Rhodes didn’t like to hit a woman, but he decided that was the only way he could shut Betsy Higgins up. Besides, she was proving almost more than he could hold on to. He risked letting go of one wrist, pulling back his right hand to tap her on the jaw.
She didn’t give him a chance. She swung her left hand faster than Rhodes would have thought she could, and with more power, hitting him flush on the nose.
He felt something crunch and the first hot flow of blood. He reached and grabbed her wrist before she could swing again, but he realized that it was just a lucky grab. She was not only fast, she was faster than he was. Rhodes felt vaguely the same way he had felt the day he’d found out that Ivy Daniel could ride a motorcycle and he couldn’t. He wasn’t going to take any more chances. He started dragging Betsy Higgins down the hall.
It wasn’t easy. It was dark, and he couldn’t see. Besides, he was having to walk backwards. And of course Betsy wasn’t coming along without a fight. She hooked her feet on the door frame; then when Rhodes pulled her away from that, she managed to hook them in the bathroom doorway.
They went through the house like that, Rhodes occasionally bumping into something like a chair or a wall, Betsy hooking her feet on anything that came in her path.
Finally he got her out in the yard. As he dragged her around the house, she began to scream. “Help! Rape! Rape! Murder! Rape!” The thin voice was a falsetto screech.
Rhodes could hear doors opening in the nearby houses, and he even saw a porch light come on, but no one came too close. Most of them had already spotted his car in front of the h
ouse earlier, peeking from behind window shades and curtains. They weren’t about to interfere.
He got Betsy to the county car and this time did not let go. He got hold of both wrists with his right hand and opened the door to the backseat with his left. She almost managed to pull away, but he held on. When the door was open wide enough, he shoved her roughly inside, without regard for her head or body. It wasn’t good procedure, but it got the job done.
When he slammed the door behind her, she threw herself at it. She hit it so hard that Rhodes was momentarily surprised that it held. It seemed almost to bulge out at him like the door of a car in a Merrie Melodies cartoon.
He walked around and got in the driver’s seat. Betsy was rattling the metal grille between them furiously, spitting and cursing and calling on strange names, none of which Rhodes could have pronounced. He wasn’t worried about the grille. If the door held, so would the grille. He got on the radio and called Hack, asking him to get in touch with Ruth Grady and have her waiting at the jail.
Then he went back in the house to retrieve his pistol. This time he turned on the lights and went into the front room. He had been mistaken about where the TV was located. It was in the front, along with a king-size waterbed.
Betsy Higgins had brought a small dolly made of red-painted metal into the room. Rhodes had seen them for sale at Wal-Mart. She had managed to get the TV set down off the stand where it rested and onto the floor. The lip of the dolly was slid under it. No doubt the bumps he had heard were made by Betsy, as she struggled with the set. She probably intended to wheel it out the back door and on to wherever she had parked the pickup.
When Rhodes got back to the car, Betsy had stopped struggling. She was curled up in a corner of the back seat with her legs under her, staring at him. He hoped she didn’t have a weapon. He hadn’t searched her, but that was a job for Ruth Grady. He figured that if she had been carrying anything dangerous, she would have used it on him in the house instead of jumping him, though, so he felt relatively safe.
He started the car and drove away.
