Bill Crider - Dan Rhodes 09 - Death by Accident

by Bill Crider

  Rhodes lowered the tarp and walked to Overton’s covered porch, which wasn’t connected to the ground by any steps that Rhodes could see. He put one foot on the porch, grabbed one of the roof supports — a two by four nailed to the floor of the porch and one of the roof beams — and pulled himself up. He could hear muffled voices inside the house, but as he knocked on the rusty screen door he realized that the voices were coming from a TV set. Either that, or Overton had invited Oprah to come over for a visit and she had accepted.

  No one answered his knock. He knocked harder, but there was still no response.

  Rhodes stepped off the porch, which proved to be no easier than stepping up on it had been. About the time the Edsel had been new, he would have jumped both up and down with no trouble at all, but those days were long gone.

  He walked around to the back of the house. There were three bundles of shingles and a stack of warped two-by-fours in the weeds near the steps leading to the back door. Rhodes was glad to see the steps. He mounted them and knocked on the door. There was no screen this time.

  And there was no answer to the knock. Maybe Overton was out somewhere chiseling someone out of money for a worthless roofing job. Or maybe he was just asleep. Or the TV was too loud. Rhodes really did want to ask him about the Edsel. He hammered so hard on the door that it rattled loosely in the frame.

  A dog started barking somewhere inside, and a man’s voice yelled, “Shut up, you mutt!”

  So Overton, or someone, was there after all. Rhodes knocked again. The dog continued to bark, but no one tried to quiet it again.

  “All right, all right,” the man’s voice called. “Keep your britches on. I’m coming.”

  The back door opened and the barking got louder, though Rhodes couldn’t see the dog.

  He could, however, see a man who was bigger than Rhodes had expected. He must have weighed two hundred pounds, and he was solid and wide.

  The roofer was wearing a threadbare Joe Camel t-shirt that didn’t quite reach the top of his faded jeans. He wasn’t wearing a belt. No shoes, either. His head was completely bald, but there was hair coming out of every opening in the t-shirt, pushing up Overton’s neck and down his arms. It made a furry fringe between the t-shirt and the jeans. It was as if a cheap sofa had exploded inside the t-shirt.

  Overton looked at Rhodes without expression. It was possible that his face wasn’t capable of much expression. It was almost flat, like the face of a cartoon character who’s been hit by an iron. Even the nose was flat.

  “Randall Overton?” Rhodes said.

  “Yeah,” Overton said. His voice was even flatter than his face. “So?”

  Rhodes hated to have to show Overton his badge. It would probably mean the car deal was off. But there was nothing else to do.

  “Sheriff Dan Rhodes,” he said, producing the badge. “I’d like to talk to you for a minute.”

  Overton didn’t appear to be unduly impressed by the badge or Rhodes’s name.

  “Talk about what?” he said.

  “A roofing job.”

  “You got a bad roof you need fixed? A leak?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Well why do you want to talk about a roofing job, then?”

  The dog was still barking, but it was quieter now. Rhodes could hear the TV again.

  “Can I come inside?” he asked.

  Overton didn’t move. He just shifted his weight so that his feet were planted a little more firmly on the floor.

  “We can talk just fine right here,” he said.

  Rhodes didn’t push it. “All right. It’s about the roofing job you did at the Free Will Church.”

  “What about it?” Overton sounded bored.

  “It’s a pretty sorry job. The roof still leaks and Brother Alton tells me that you won’t do anything about it.”

  Overton leaned against the door frame. “Can’t. They won’t pay me.”

  “They’ve already paid you.”

  “I did what I was paid for, and then some. I spent most of the money on materials. Didn’t get hardly a thing for all my labor.”

  “Brother Alton says you won’t show him the receipts for the materials.”

  Overton shrugged. “Lost ’em. He’ll have to take my word for it. He’s a Christian man, right? Why would I lie to him?”

  “Because you’re a con man and a swindler,” Rhodes said.

  Overton straightened up and looked at Rhodes with surprise.

  “What are you sayin’?”

  “Which word didn’t you understand?”

  Overton took a quick step forward, thrusting his chest out without bringing up his hands. He bumped into Rhodes, who almost lost his balance on the top step.

  But not quite. He wasn’t as agile as he had been when he was a kid, but he was still steady enough when he had to be.

  When Overton tried to bump him again, Rhodes grabbed the front of Overton’s t-shirt with one hand and the door frame with the other. Using Overton’s momentum, Rhodes helped the roofer keep right on moving, past the steps and into the back yard.

  Overton hit the ground with his legs churning, but he lost his equilibrium and stumbled to his knees. Before he could get to his feet, Rhodes was standing over him with his hand pushing down on his back.

  “Think about it before you try anything,” Rhodes said. “You wouldn’t want to get arrested for assaulting a peace officer.”

  “You’re the one that assaulted me,” Overton said, but he didn’t try to get up.

  “We could let a judge decide that,” Rhodes said, keeping his hand pressed against the small of Overton’s back. He could feel the thick hair through the t-shirt. “If you really want to, that is.”

  “You called me a name,” Overton said.

  Rhodes nodded, though he was aware that Overton couldn’t see it. He was a little surprised that Overton was so sensitive.

  “That’s right. I called you a con man. And a swindler, too, I think. I could have said you were a crook and a cheat and a few other things, but I didn’t.”

  “I didn’t cheat nobody.”

  “Sure you did. You cheated Brother Alton and his church. For all I know you’ve cheated other people around here, too, but they haven’t told me about it yet. I’m going to ask around and find out. If you have, I’m going to see if I can get some of them to press charges.”

  “For what? Ever’ time I hire on to do a job for people, I do it.”

  “But do you do it well? Or do you take the money, do a halfway job, and then claim you spent all the money on materials before you run out on the people who paid you?”

  “I do the job right, dammit.”

  “I hope so,” Rhodes said. “I don’t want to have to arrest you for deceptive business practices.”

  “You won’t be arrestin’ me. I didn’t deceive nobody.”

  “We’ll see about that. I want you to finish the job on Brother Alton’s roof, too. And I want you to do it right.”

  “I’ll have to have a little something for my labor if I do.”

  “No you won’t,” Rhodes said. “You’ve already taken all the money you’re going to take. Unless you can find those receipts and show them to me.”

  “You know I can’t do that.”

  “Then you’ll just have to finish the job for free. Either that or be arrested. Which do you want to do?”

  “I’ll finish the damn job.”

  “Good.” Rhodes moved his hand off Overton’s back and moved away. “You can stand up now.”

  Overton stood up and glowered at Rhodes.

  “I think you made me strain my back, bendin’ me over like that.”

  “I’m sure it’ll heal fast,” Rhodes said. He looked toward the driveway. “That’s a nice-looking car you have under that tarp.”

  Overton glanced in the direction of the car. “That car belonged to my daddy. He loved that old car. Took good care of it right up till the day he died.”

  “I could tell it was in good shape,” Rhode
s said.

  “It needs some body work and a new paint job. But one of the last things Daddy did after he put it up on the blocks was to drain the oil out of the crankcase and put the tires in storage. I still got those tires. Genuine wide white sidewalls on ’em.”

  Rhodes was impressed. “I don’t suppose you’d like to sell the tires and car along with them.”

  “I wouldn’t mind sellin’ it, tires and all” Overton said, “It’s just stuff that’s takin’ up room, and I’ll never have the money to get it fixed up right.”

  Rhodes started to ask him how much he wanted for it.

  He didn’t get a chance, however, because Overton said, “But much as I’d like to get rid of it, I sure as hell wouldn’t sell it to you.”

  Chapter Twelve

  A disappointed Rhodes was headed home when he got a call from Hack on the radio.

  “Ty Berry’s here at the jail,” Hack told him. “Says he has to talk to you.”

  Rhodes had planned to go by his house, feed his dog, and maybe even have a quiet supper with Ivy. Well, he thought, he could still do all that if Berry didn’t keep him too long.

  “Tell him I’ll be there in five minutes,” he said, and turned the car toward the jail.

  Berry was sitting by Rhodes’s desk when the sheriff arrived. He stood up when Rhodes entered the room.

  “I’m glad you could get here so soon,” he said. He looked over at Hack, who was watching the early news on his little Sony. “Is there somewhere that we can talk?”

  “We can talk right here,” Rhodes told him. “Anything you can say to me, you can say in front of Hack.”

  Hack nodded, but said nothing, apparently intent on a story about an alligator that was caught crossing a highway down near Houston.

  “All right, then,” Berry said.

  He sank back in the chair, and Rhodes walked over to his desk and sat down.

  “What’s the trouble?” Rhodes asked.

  “I got a phone call a little while ago from someone who’s not a member of the Clearview Historical Society but who knows a lot of them. He says there’s a plot afoot to move the Burleson cabin to town tonight and put it in the city park.”

  Several questions immediately occurred to Rhodes. He asked the first one: “Why not the courthouse lawn?”

  Berry pulled a wrinkled handkerchief from his shirt pocket, took off his Catamount cap, and wiped his balding head. He stuck the handkerchief back in his pocket and put his cap back on.

  “If you think that was a hard question,” Rhodes said, “how about this one: who called you?”

  “I suppose I can tell you that. It was Mack Riley.”

  Rhodes knew Mack. He was a cranky old codger, too ornery to join either the Sons and Daughters of Texas or the Historical Society because neither of them would let him run the show. When he was younger, he had by all accounts been a real hellion, getting into one fight after another.

  But age or wisdom or both had supposedly reformed him, and now the only fights he got into were fights that used words. He was a self-appointed expert on the history of Blacklin County and a frequent contributor to the Clearview Herald’s letters-to-the-editor column. His letters usually condemned either the Society or the Sons and Daughters for some misguided project or what Riley saw as a distortion of history in an article written by one of their members.

  “Mack’s on your side?” Rhodes said.

  “This time he is,” Berry said.

  “OK. I’ll take your word for it. Now, tell me why the city park.”

  “Mack says it’s because the county commissioners would never allow anyone to just set the cabin on the courthouse lawn and get away with it. They’d have it hauled off the next day.”

  Rhodes worked closely with the commissioners. They could be as cranky as Mack Riley when the occasion demanded it, and he didn’t imagine they’d be any too happy to see the Burleson cabin parked on the courthouse lawn. Riley was probably right about their reaction.

  “But the city council’s different,” Berry said. “Mack says they haven’t done a thing for that park in years except let it to go to hell in a handbasket. They’ll hardly even pay for someone to cut the weeds in the summer. If the Society puts the cabin there and promises to take care of the upkeep, maybe even keep up the whole park, the council will let them leave the cabin for as long as they want to.”

  That too sounded about right to Rhodes. The council would do just about anything to save money, even the little bit of money they spent on mowing the park two or three times a year.

  “Where did Mack get his information?”

  “He didn’t say. But he knows a lot of people, and he’s a good listener. People like to talk to him.”

  Rhodes figured that Berry would have mentioned the drowning to Riley, so he said, “Did Mack have anything to say about Yeldell?”

  Berry took off his cap again, but he didn’t wipe his head. He just put the cap on his knee and left it there.

  “He thinks the same thing I do.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That it would be just like Faye Knape to put that rope in the tree and then suggest to Yeldell that he go swimming out there.”

  The rope’s being tied to a rotten limb could be explained by the fact that someone wanted the limb to break, but Rhodes found it hard to believe that Faye Knape was that someone. And he didn’t think that Faye and Pep Yeldell moved in the same social circles.

  “Are you making an accusation?” he asked.

  Berry looked down at his cap. “I don’t know,” he said.

  “It seems pretty unlikely to me that Faye Knape would know someone like Pep Yeldell,” Rhodes said. “And depending on a rotten limb to break and kill someone seems a whole lot more unlikely than that.”

  “It’s not so unlikely if the someone was drunk. Yeldell liked to drink.”

  “Let me see if I’ve got this right,” Rhodes said. “Faye Knape doesn’t want the Old Settler’s Celebration to be a success, so she climbs one of the tallest pecan trees on the grounds. Then she ties a rope to a rotten limb in the hopes that some intoxicated man, or a woman would do, I guess, will come along, swing on the rope, get hit in the head by the falling limb, and drown in the pool.”

  Hack made a sound that might have been a cough or a laugh, and Berry looked over in his direction. Hack was staring hard at a slick-haired anchorman and didn’t appear to notice.

  Berry turned back to Rhodes. “It sounds ridiculous when you say it that way, but it could have happened. And then there’s Grat Bilson.”

  Grat was the vice-president of the historical society. He was a former Clearview Catamount football player now in his middle forties but still in commendable condition.

  “What about him?” Rhodes asked.

  “Well, he could climb that tree, for one thing.”

  “Maybe,” Rhodes admitted, “but it still sounds ridiculous.”

  “How about this then,” Berry said. “When Pep Yeldell was in high school, he stole Bilson’s car.”

  “Check on that, Hack,” Rhodes said.

  “Check on what?” Hack asked, as if he hadn’t been listening to every word.

  Rhodes told him, and Hack went to work on his computer. It didn’t take long.

  “Joy ridin’,” Hack said. “The car wasn’t hurt.”

  “But it gives Bilson a motive for murder,” Berry said. “He’s the kind of man who holds a grudge.”

  Rhodes didn’t agree. “It sounds pretty thin, and the method is still ridiculous.”

  Berry took his cap off his knee, smoothed down what was left of his hair, and fitted the cap on his head.

  “I don’t think you care about Pep Yeldell,” he said. “Or about the Burleson cabin.”

  “I don’t know that there’s much I can do about either one of them. Dr. White’s autopsy report indicates that Yeldell died by accident. As for the cabin, I’m not sure that the Historical Society would be breaking any law by moving it.”

  Berry�
�s face turned red. “How can you say that?”

  Rhodes didn’t answer; he asked another question. “Who owns the cabin?”

  Berry opened his mouth, then shut it.

  “Your bunch paid for the restoration,” Rhodes said. “But that doesn’t make you the owners. Do you have a deed to it?”

  “Well, no, but that’s not the point.”

  “What is the point, then?”

  “The point is that they’re going to move it!”

  “Maybe they have a deed to it.”

  “They don’t. They can’t!”

  “They might. Have you tried to find out?”

  Berry stood up. “Sheriff, I hope you’re not counting on my support in the next election. I could never vote for a man who won’t uphold the law.”

  “I’m doing my best,” Rhodes said.

  “Well it’s not good enough.”

  Berry stalked away, his shoulders rigid. He tried to slam the door, but it had an automatic closer on it.

  “Looks like you lost a vote,” Hack said, looking at the door and no longer making a pretense of watching TV.

  “It’s not the first one,” Rhodes said.

  “Won’t be the last one, either. You really gonna let them move that cabin to town?”

  “We’ll see,” Rhodes said.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Rhodes was about to leave when Ruth Grady came in.

  “I’ve been talking to Bull Lowery,” she said.

  Bull was the owner of Lowery’s Paint and Body, where Pep Yeldell had worked.

  “Dr. White seems to think Yeldell’s death was an accident,” Rhodes told her, describing what he’d read in the report. “Did Bull give you any reason to doubt any of that?”

  “It’s hard to say. Did you know that Bull was Yeldell’s brother-in-law?”

  Rhodes shook his head. “I didn’t even know Yeldell was married. Hack?”

  “See what I’m tellin’ you about computers?” Hack said. “You gotta have ’em.”

  “Never mind the little lesson in life,” Rhodes said. “Just check on Yeldell.”

  In a few seconds Hack said, “Married to Cissy Lowery in 1993, divorced the same year.”