Cursed to Death

by Bill Crider

  She’d been thinking, which was a good sign. Probably her thoughts had run along the same lines as Rhodes’s. Where could they go? Why leave a good practice and try to begin over? And how could you begin over if you were a dentist? It wasn’t like working at a service station.

  “I don’t blame you for being hurt,” Rhodes said. “Did he tell you why he wouldn’t go away?”

  “How could he?” Carol asked. “I haven’t seen him.”

  Rhodes didn’t say anything. He was too surprised. Here he was, thinking that someone sitting not ten feet from him was confessing to a crime, and being completely fooled. Suddenly the air in the room seemed too close. The smoke seemed to seep into his lungs all at once, and he had an almost overwhelming desire to cough.

  “Do you think he’ll come back?” Carol asked.

  “I . . . uh . . . I don’t know,” Rhodes said, being completely honest. He not only didn’t know that, he didn’t know what was going on at all.

  “Do you think he’ll speak to me?” Carol tossed the butt into the coffee cup, where it smoldered briefly, sending up a thin white line of smoke. “I don’t mean see me again. I guess I couldn’t expect that. I mean just speak to me. Be nice to me.”

  “Well . . . he might,” Rhodes said.

  Carol leaned forward suddenly, speaking intently. “He ought to,” she said. “It’s just as much his fault as it is mine. If he’d just come by, it wouldn’t have happened. I think it was all the business with the curse. It got him so upset. I told him to forget it, not to even call you. But he had to do it. He thought that woman was crazy. If it hadn’t been for that, he might have done it. He might have gone away with me. It’s all that woman’s fault.”

  Rhodes didn’t think this was the time to tell her that the woman she was so upset with wasn’t a woman at all. “We can’t always blame someone else,” he said. “Sometimes we have to take the responsibility for our own actions.”

  Carol relaxed and leaned back again. “You’re right,” she said. “I know that. But still, if everything hadn’t gone wrong, I wouldn’t have killed her.”

  This time it was Rhodes who sat forward. “ ‘Her’?” he asked. “You killed Mrs. Martin?”

  “Of course,” Carol said. She looked puzzled. “What have we been talking about all this time?”

  Rhodes got Carol to the jail and Lawton installed her in the cell previously occupied by Betsy—or Barney—Higgins. Ruth Grady searched her without making any startling discoveries.

  “So she killed Miz Martin,” Hack said. “I always say, you never can tell about a woman.”

  Ruth Grady had gone back out on patrol, so no one bothered to contradict him. Lawton, in fact, shook his head in agreement. “Hell hath no fury,” he said, as if it was something new.

  “She didn’t mean to do it,” Rhodes said.

  “That’s what they all say,” Hack said, echoing Rhodes’s own thoughts.

  “I mean she really didn’t mean to do it,” Rhodes said. “She just went over there to see if Martin was there, and maybe to ask him what was going on. When she saw that his Suburban was gone, she got out and went to the door. That was her big mistake.”

  “Not to mention it didn’t do Miz Martin any good,” Hack said. “What did she do, coldcock Miz Martin right then and there?”

  “No,” Rhodes said. “I gather there was quite a discussion, though, what with Miz Martin knowing about Carol and Dr. Martin and their little romance. She accused Carol of first one thing and then another, and Carol must have called her a few things too.”

  “Catfights,” Hack said. “I remember I had to break one up one time. Worst I ever got hurt in my life. When two women get goin’, you better just back off and get out of the way.”

  “I think this one was mostly words,” Rhodes said. “Sort of hot, but not physical. But sometimes words can hurt worse than anything.”

  “You got that right,” Lawton said, joining in. Then he thought about it. “Except it wasn’t words that caved in Miz Martin’s head.”

  “It was words that caused it to get caved in,” Rhodes said. “I think. Mrs. Martin called Carol a low-down, husband-chasing, lying bitch. Or something pretty close to that. Then she gave Carol a little push toward the door. That must have been something, that little woman pushing that big one. Maybe it was the push that did it. Some people don’t like to be touched like that.”

  “I don’t,” Lawton said, “but I don’t think I’d kill somebody for doin’ it to me.”

  “You’ve got to remember that both of them were under a lot of strain,” Rhodes said. “That can make a difference.”

  “Some people can get under a strain if they don’t get a nice present for Christmas,” Hack said, looking meaningfully at the small tree.

  Rhodes ignored him. “Anyway, Carol went outside, getting madder by the second. She saw that toolbox in the garage, with a crowbar sticking out, and that was that. She grabbed it up, went right back in the door, caught up with Mrs. Martin, and clobbered her with it. That’s all it took. She was mad, and she was strong.”

  Lawton leaned back against the door frame. “She was pretty smart, too.”

  “Yeah,” Hack said. “She must have come to her senses pretty fast.”

  “I guess she did,” Rhodes said. “But I should have known from the start that it wasn’t a real burglary. Not enough things taken. Lots of stuff scattered, but not much really missing.”

  “What’d she do with it?” Hack asked.

  “It was in the back seat of her car,” Rhodes said. “Covered up with a blanket. The crowbar, too. Been there all the time.”

  “Smart, but dumb,” Lawton said.

  Rhodes frowned. “Hard to say. It might’ve worked, but I don’t think she even wanted to get away with it. I think she was just running on automatic pilot after she hit Mrs. Martin. In shock, maybe. Trying to do something to muddy the water, but not trying to get away.”

  “You think she did in Dr. Martin, too?” Lawton asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Rhodes said. “If she did, why confront his wife and have an argument about him? It wouldn’t make sense.”

  Hack pushed back in his chair and put his feet up on his desk. “None of this whole thing makes sense. Right from the first, it was crazy, with that curse and all. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the curse that did it, myself. That Higgins fella—or whatever—is the guilty one.”

  “When you think about it, you might be right,” Lawton said. “That’s what got everything stirred up.”

  “If they hadn’t called the sheriff about it,” Hack said, “none of this would’ve happened.”

  “I don’t believe in curses,” Rhodes said.

  “Where’s Martin, then?” Hack said.

  “I don’t know,” Rhodes told him.

  Chapter 19

  Rhodes spent the rest of the day on paperwork and in visiting Little Barnes in the hospital, this time with Barnes’s lawyer present. The lawyer was Wally Albert, a mild-faced, pleasant man who looked more like a college professor than a lawyer.

  “My client prefers that I do the talking for him,” Albert said, his eyes sparkling behind his glasses. Rhodes could tell the lawyer was already having fun, and the game had just begun.

  “That’s all right with me,” Rhodes said. “What does he want you to say to me?”

  “He wants me to say that he has been treated shamefully by you and your department,” Albert said, the mildness disappearing from his face as if it had never been there, revealing the toughness it had hidden. “‘He is considering bringing suit against you for brutality. After all, you beat him savagely and endangered his very life.”

  Rhodes was tempted to say that Barnes had started it, but that seemed too childish. “I just stopped by his truck to ask him a few questions,” he said. “He fled the scene, and I considered him armed and dangerous.”

  “You sound like a police report, Sheriff,” Albert said.

  Barnes nodded approvingly from the bed, but sa
id nothing.

  “I suspected him of involvement in a crime,” Rhodes said. “His behavior seemed to indicate that he might very well have guilty knowledge. And then he shot at me.”

  “Ah, but you were brandishing your pistol in his face,” Albert said.

  Rhodes wanted to tell Albert that his mother wore Army boots, but he thought better of that one, too. He could see that the discussion could easily degenerate into a “Did not!” “Did so!” argument if he didn’t control himself. Lawyers didn’t bring out the best in him.

  “Does he have any witnesses to that effect?” Rhodes asked.

  “Ah, well, for the moment, that will have to remain our little secret,” the lawyer said.

  “That’s fine,” Rhodes said. “On the other hand, I don’t mind saying that Billy Lee down at the drugstore saw the whole thing through his plate-glass window, and he’ll be glad to testify to that in court.” In fact, Rhodes hadn’t spoken to Lee, but he was sure that Lee had been watching. At least, he hoped so.

  “Mummmmmm, yes, well, be that as it may, we don’t know what it is that Mr. Lee saw, do we?”

  “I don’t know about ‘we,’ “ Rhodes said. “I know what he saw. He saw that I didn’t take out my pistol until your client had run away, not until way after I’d been pushed into the street. Did I mention, by the way, that I think your client might be guilty of kidnapping?”

  “Uh, no, I don’t believe you did.”

  “Well, I do.” Rhodes looked at Barnes. “You might be better off if you can get him to tell you things a little straighter, Wally. See you in court.” Rhodes pulled open the door and went out into the hall. He listened to the door sigh shut behind him, hoping to hear a word or two of lawyerly conversation as well, but no words escaped.

  Rhodes walked down the hall and went outside. It was four o’clock, and the weather had stayed warm. Rhodes wondered if he had time to go fishing. He was convinced that Barnes was guilty, but there was nothing more he could do with him for the time being. Let him stew a little. Worry him a bit with the kidnapping threat. Then Rhodes could try him again. Give it twenty-four hours.

  Rhodes drove to his house and got his spin-cast rod with its Zebco 33 reel. He had an extra, so he called Ivy at work.

  “Want to take off early and go fishing?” he asked.

  “I guess I can,” she said. “Who’s buying the bait?”

  “We’ll just cast a little,” Rhodes said. “I’ll bring my spare rod and reel. Five minutes?”

  “I’ll be ready,” Ivy said. She worked at an insurance office, and Rhodes thought it would be all right if she took some time off. Her boss liked and appreciated her, and he wouldn’t begrudge it.

  Rhodes hunted up his tackle box and tossed it and the two rod-and-reel combos into the back of the county car. This wasn’t official business, but he didn’t think the commissioners would complain. He was going to visit the site of a suspected crime, after all.

  He picked up Ivy, who was waiting in front of her office. She was wearing low heels, but her pants outfit was much too nice to go fishing in. Or most women would have thought-so. “I don’t need to change,” she said when she got into the car. “We don’t have much daylight left.”

  Rhodes knew that he wasn’t making a mistake in being engaged to her. Anyone who understood the importance of fishing was a rare treasure.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “I thought we’d run out to Little Barnes’s place. Or Dr. Martin’s. Little told me the other day to come on out, and Dr. Martin isn’t in any position to object. I wish he could object, to tell the truth.”

  Rhodes had told Ivy the whole story the night before after finally leaving the jail. She reached out and touched the patch on his head. “Are you sure you feel like fishing?”

  Rhodes was surprised. “It doesn’t bother me at all,” he said, and it was the truth. In fact, he hadn’t even thought to mention it to Wally Albert, who was sure to have noticed it.

  When they got to the Barnes place, Rhodes stopped at the gate. Ivy got out and opened it. It wasn’t really a gate, just a gap in the barbed wire fence that opened back. Anybody who could open one as easily as Ivy did was deserving of praise. Rhodes usually couldn’t get the wire that held the gap together to come apart, or to slip up over the post, whichever was necessary. He drove through, and Ivy closed the gap. Then she got back into the car.

  They drove to the stock tank. The wooden dock Barnes had built for fishing extended out into the tank for twenty feet or so. The planking had weathered a uniform gray. Sitting on one side of the dock was a ceramic or chalk statue of a black man, who was holding a fishing pole. Rhodes decided that the statue was probably Barnes’s idea.

  He stopped the car under a large mesquite tree, hoping he hadn’t driven over any of its branches. Mesquite thorns could puncture a tire as quickly as a nail, and they sometimes lay in wait when rotten branches fell off the tree. A tree as old as this one was likely to have shed a branch or two sometime in its history.

  Rhodes got the rods and the tackle box out of the backseat, and he and Ivy walked out on the dock. “Left side or right side?” he asked.

  “Left,” Ivy said.

  “H&H?”

  “If you have one with a black and yellow tail,” Ivy said.

  “That’s the only kind I have,” Rhodes said. He took two of the spinners out of the tackle box and handed one to Ivy. She took the rod leaning against the left side of the dock, opened the swivel at the end of the line, and attached the spinner. Some people—purists, Rhodes thought—like to tie their spinners on. He’d never seen the sense in it. He caught plenty of fish this way.

  They cast for a few minutes in silence, aiming for sticks or weeds that poked through the top of the water. Rhodes liked to fish in clear water when he was using artificial baits, but this tank was fairly muddy. He hoped the noise of the vibrating spinner blade would attract a bass.

  He was about to say something to Ivy when the tip of her rod dipped and she jerked back, setting the hook. “Got ‘im,” she said. She began to crank the reel, and the line ran out against the drag. She pumped the rod and cranked harder.

  “Must be a big one,” Rhodes said. He felt the excitement in his stomach that he always felt when either he or someone he was with hooked a good fish. “Keep him coming.”

  “He wants in those weeds,” Ivy said, referring to a patch of greenish brown that stuck up ten yards from the dock.

  “Don’t let him get tangled in them,” Rhodes said. He was thinking that it had been a long, long time since he’d fished and that the monofilament line might have gone bad. If the fish got in the weeds, he’d break it for sure. “Don’t let him jump, either.”

  Ivy didn’t say anything, concentrating on cranking and pumping. She got the fish to within ten feet of the dock when something happened. The fish had been coming smoothly, when suddenly it made a stop. Then it ran to the right. Then to the left.

  Then the line parted as smoothly as if it had been cut.

  “Damn!” Ivy said.

  Rhodes was surprised. He’d never heard her say that before. “What happened?” he asked.

  “The line broke,” Ivy said, holding up the rod. Rhodes could see the thin, clear monofilament, limp and crinkled, lying on the surface of the brown water.

  “It was like he ran into a wall,” Ivy said. “I felt it. There’s something in the water out there.”

  Rhodes looked at the water, but he could see nothing below the surface. There was too much sediment in the water. He cast his own spinner out beyond the place where the line had parted and reeled it back slowly. It bumped into something hard, then rode over.

  “Did you notice anything before?” he asked.

  “No,” Ivy said, “but I might have been reeling faster than you were.”

  Rhodes looked at the bank near the place where the underwater object lay. He thought back to the previous evening and the grit in Barnes’s pickup bed and the thick mud under the back wheel we
lls.

  Sure enough, he could see the impressions of the tires in the Soft mud where the water washed up on the bank. It was shallow and clear there, and a small school of minnows flashed through the tire tracks.

  It was getting near to sunset, but with the humidity in the warm air, it felt more like springtime than winter. Rhodes knew, though, that the water would be cold. He walked down off the dock and looked for a limb from the mesquite tree. He found one about four feet long and thick as his arm.

  “What are you doing?” Ivy asked.

  “Just poking around,” Rhodes said. He waded out into the water.

  He was right. It was cold. It seeped through his shoes at once and soaked his socks. His pants legs clung to him with a clammy touch.

  “Poking around?” Ivy said. “You must be crazy. Are you looking for the fish?”

  “I’m pretty sure the fish got clean away,” Rhodes said. “I’m poking.” He gave a push at the water with the mesquite limb, feeling the rough bark turn in his hand.

  The limb met something hard and solid. Rhodes tried to figure out its dimensions, then waded back to the bank. His legs and feet immediately felt wetter and colder out of the water than they had felt in it.

  He stood for a minute letting the water drip down his legs and run out of his shoes.

  “I can’t believe this,” Ivy said. “What on earth?”

  “I’m wondering where we can borrow a tractor,” Rhodes said. “And a long chain.”

  Buddy had the lights up again, but it was warmer than it had been when they had looked in the well. Rhodes had driven down the road to the house of Harmon Heyes and asked to borrow a tractor and chain. Heyes had provided both, along with a towel, but Rhodes was wet again.

  He was wet all over this time, because he hadn’t had an easy time of attaching the chain to the concrete block in the tank. When it was finally done, Harmon Heyes cranked the tractor and moved off.