Bill Crider - Dan Rhodes 09 - Death by Accident

by Bill Crider

  What Hack had found was a record of a complaint filed against John West by Mack Riley. It had been filed three years earlier, and in the complaint Riley alleged that West had assaulted him.

  “Never went to court,” Hack said. “Mack dropped the charges.”

  “Why did West assault him?” Rhodes asked.

  “That’s not in here. Just the record of the complaint.”

  “Computers can’t do everything, then, can they.”

  “They can jab a fella’s memory,” Hack said. “I know Mack a little, and I heard somethin’ about this little argument.”

  “Tell me, then.”

  “Well, as best I remember it, West owed Riley some money, maybe a good bit. When Riley tried to collect, West threw him out.”

  “Why didn’t it go to court, then?”

  “I don’t know about that, but usually it’s because the money gets paid. That generally settles things pretty quick.”

  “Why would West owe Mack Riley money?”

  “I don’t know,” Hack said. “I can guess, though.”

  Rhodes waited. Hack turned back to the TV set. After a minute or so Rhodes gave up.

  “Tell me what you’d guess, then.”

  Hack looked up from the TV. “Well, you might not know this, but old Mack’s made a lot of money over the years one way or another.”

  “I knew he had some money,” Rhodes said. “I don’t know how he got it.”

  “Speculatin’,” Hack said. “Sometimes when people default on a mortgage, he’ll buy the house from the bank. It’s usually in pretty bad shape, so he gets it fixed up cheap and sells it for a profit.”

  Rhodes remembered what Riley had said about dealing with painters and Mr. Fix-its. It hadn’t registered at the time, but now Rhodes knew what Riley had meant.

  “And you think he did that with John West’s house?” he asked Hack.

  “He might have,” Hack said. “And if West got behind in the payments, that could’ve caused the trouble.”

  It was too late to talk to anyone who kept normal Clearview hours, so Rhodes didn’t think it would be a good idea to talk to Kara West until the next day. The County Line might be going strong, but there were still a lot of people who watched the ten o’clock news and then went straight to bed. The news had been over for a while, but that was all right. The going to bed part was still a good idea. Rhodes told Hack good night and went home.

  Ivy was sitting up in bed reading, her back braced by a thick triangular pillow.

  “What’s the name of the book?” Rhodes asked.

  “Voodoo River,” Ivy said. “It’s about a private detective named Elvis.”

  “Good name. Can he sing?”

  Ivy put a piece of paper in the book to mark her place, closed the book, and laid it on her nightstand.

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t say. He gets very emotional, though. Why is it that you never seem to get emotional about your work?”

  “You know us Texas men. We don’t like to show our feelings.”

  “That’s what you’d like for people to think. If you’ll go take a shower, I can get you to show a feeling or two.”

  “You really think so?”

  Ivy smiled and nodded. “I’d be willing to bet on it.”

  Rhodes smiled, too. “Sounds like a pretty safe bet to me,” he said.

  Sunday morning was cold and dry. The wind had died down to nothing, and there were no clouds at all. Speedo loved it. He rollicked all around the yard, tossing his frog into the air. Rhodes didn’t have time to play with him for more than a minute or so, but Speedo didn’t seem to mind. He was having plenty of fun all by himself.

  Which was just as well, since Rhodes didn’t think this would be a good time to introduce Yancey. The Pomeranian was curled up on his tattered towel, awake but not yet ready to venture out into strange new surroundings.

  Rhodes drove by the jail and checked in with Hack. There were no special problems to deal with, so he went to pay a call on Kara West. It was a little before nine o’clock when he got to her home, but she didn’t look as if she were dressed for housework. Her hair was done, her make-up was perfect, and she was wearing a dress.

  “Were you going to church?” Rhodes asked. “I won’t keep you long.”

  “I wasn’t going to church this morning. With John gone, I just feel better when I’m dressed up a little. I’ll be starting to work at the store in a few more days. I’m going to learn the business from the ground up. But right now I’m still trying to get adjusted.”

  She invited Rhodes in and offered him coffee, which Rhodes declined. He never drank coffee, preferring to get his caffeine in Dr Pepper. They sat at the kitchen table, and she drank coffee from a china cup while Rhodes talked. He noticed her braces again and wondered if they were uncomfortable, but he didn’t ask.

  What he asked was about West’s run-in with Mack Riley.

  “That was a long time ago,” she said. “The business hit a bad patch, and we had to miss a payment on the house. Mr. Riley came by, and he was a little upset about his money. John didn’t blame him. He said he’d try to get it soon.”

  “I heard there was a fight. Mr. Riley filed assault charges.”

  Mrs. West took a delicate sip of coffee. “There wasn’t any fight, really. Mr. Riley said that John knocked him down, but John just bumped into him. It didn’t amount to anything. Mr. Riley filed those charges because he was mad about the money, but he dropped them when we made the payment. We never had to miss again.”

  “Mack’s a little touchy, all right. I’m going to have a talk with him today, myself. Do you think he could still be bitter about the misunderstanding?”

  “I don’t see how. It was a long time ago. Mr. Riley and John got along fine after that.”

  “What about Pep Yeldell?” Rhodes asked. “Do you remember telling me that you’d never heard of him?”

  Mrs. West’s hand shook slightly as she set her cup in the saucer with an audible clink.

  “Yes,” she said. “I never did, until he died.”

  “I’ve found out that your husband knew him fairly well. They seem to have spent some time together.”

  “I didn’t know John’s friends.”

  “You told me that,” Rhodes said. “I guess you weren’t aware that John knew Randall Overton, too.”

  “Wasn’t he the other man who died by accident?”

  “That’s the one. Did you know him?”

  “No. I just heard that he burned to death.”

  “I think there’s some connection among all three deaths, and I’m trying to find it. Who did you say told you that John was seeing other women?”

  Mrs. West picked up the coffee cup and looked at Rhodes over the rim. Then she took a sip and put the cup back on its saucer. Her hand wasn’t shaking this time.

  “I don’t believe I said.”

  Rhodes had known that. He said, “That’s right. You just told me that it was someone from the church. I think it would be a good idea if you told me who. It might help.”

  “I can’t remember. If it would help, I’d tell you, but I just don’t recall.”

  She sounded so sincere that Rhodes almost believed her.

  Mack Riley wasn’t at home, so Rhodes decided to check out another little theory he’d developed. He drove out to the Old Settlers’ Grounds and parked his car. Then he walked down to the swimming pools. The water was calm but covered with leaves that the norther had blown into the pools. Rhodes looked up in the pecan trees, squinting his eyes against the bright sun as he tried to locate the place where the limb had broken off.

  It was still and quiet under the trees. Rhodes heard a car somewhere on the road, and then there was silence except for a squirrel chattering in a tree.

  Rhodes couldn’t spot the squirrel, but it didn’t take him long to locate the place where the limb had been. The more he looked at it, the more unlikely it seemed to him that anyone would tie a rope there. The limb hadn’t been in the best position
for swinging out over the water, and there was a perfectly healthy limb not far away that would have served better.

  There had been a period in Rhodes’s life when he spent a lot of time in trees. He and the other kids in his neighborhood had climbed trees all the time, seeing who could go the highest and sometimes staying up on their favorite perches for hours.

  Climbing had seemed perfectly natural to Rhodes then. He could jump up, grab the lowest limb of a tree, and haul himself right onto it. From there he could go on up, from one limb to the next, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. His mother had called him a “little monkey,” a name that didn’t bother him at all.

  That had been so long ago that it was mostly a dim memory now. Rhodes had been in a few trees since, but generally only out of urgent necessity, like the time he’d been trying to escape the tree whacker that the county highway department used to cut back the branches that hung over the less-travelled roads. That wasn’t an experience he wanted to repeat.

  He walked over to the pecan tree where he thought the rope had been hanging and reached up. The lowest limb was about a foot above his outstretched hand.

  Getting hold of it would have been a cinch for Rhodes when he was a boy, but he’d weighed a lot less then. He’d had more of a vertical leap.

  But, still. It was only a foot. Surely he could jump a foot.

  Rhodes took off his jacket, wrapped his pistol in it, and laid them on the grass. He measured the distance again with his eyes, crouched down, and jumped for the limb.

  His fingers touched it, missed any kind of grip at all, and then his feet jolted against the ground. He didn’t remember ever having a jolt like that from such a short drop. Maybe he’d been more shock-absorbent as a kid.

  He looked up at the limb again. “You can do it,” he said aloud, and jumped.

  He went barely high enough, and his hands clamped around the limb. For a few seconds he just hung there, dangling with his toes about a foot off the ground. He was pretty sure he couldn’t pull himself up the way he’d done when he was a kid, but he gave it a try.

  He strained until his face got hot and seemed to swell. His arms tingled, and his palms burned. But he didn’t move very far.

  He let go of the limb and dropped back to the ground. He was breathing hard, so he sat down for a minute with his back against the tree trunk while he waited for his pulse to slow down. When it had slowed, he took off his shoes and socks, stood up, and jumped again.

  He grabbed the limb and started climbing up the trunk of the tree with his feet, moving his hands outward on the limb as he did. After a while he was able to hook his feet around the limb and pull himself up on it.

  He had to catch his breath after that, so he sat and looked up at the limbs above him, hoping to find a few that would hold his weight. The bottoms of his feet felt strange, as if they might be scratched, but he didn’t try to look at them. He was afraid he might fall if he did.

  While he sitting there, he watched a squirrel jump from one tree to another, grabbing branches that looked as thin as telephone wires. It was moving with a swift confidence that Rhodes envied. When it disappeared from sight, it hadn’t slowed down.

  “Smart aleck,” Rhodes said.

  He braced himself against the trunk of the tree and stood up on the limb, surprised to find that his knees were a little unsteady.

  He took a deep breath and started to climb.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Rhodes stood in the vee formed by a thick branch and the trunk of the tree. He remembered now that one of the best things about climbing trees was how peaceful it seemed up away from the ground. That, and how far you could see.

  From where he stood, he could see over the top of the dance pavilion and the persimmon trees near the Burleson cabin and all the way to the county road that skirted around the Old Settlers’ Grounds. There was a pickup parked on the side of the road, but it was too far away for Rhodes to see if there was anyone in it. Beyond the road he saw white-faced cattle grazing in a field and farther on there was a patch of brown woods.

  Practically in front of his eyes was the spiky end of the broken branch, and a foot or so below that, jutting off at a slightly different angle, was the limb that Rhodes would have tied the rope to if he had been the one tying it.

  Evidently someone else had thought that limb was better, too. The mark the swinging rope had worn in the branch was plain to see.

  Rhodes had suspected something like that might be the case after Ivy had said that the limb didn’t have to fall and hit Pep on the head, but he’d had to see for himself. Someone had killed Pep Yeldell, all right.

  The way Rhodes figured it, the killer had somehow lured Pep Yeldell to the swimming pool with the intention of doing away with him, maybe by faking a drowning. Rotten limbs fell from trees all the time, but finding one there on the ground was just luck — good luck for the killer, bad luck for Pep. The killer had hit Pep with it, probably knocking him out. That would have made drowning him a lot easier.

  After that, the killer — or killers, Rhodes told himself, thinking that there could have been two of them — must have decided to make things look more consistent with the “accident” idea. To do that, someone would have had to climb the tree. The climb might have been hard in the dark, but Rhodes knew that it wouldn’t have been as difficult for a younger person as it had been for him.

  Mack Riley didn’t exactly fit the profile of a tree climber, but Yvonne Bilson was certainly lithe enough to do it. So was Grat. And when Rhodes thought about it, he couldn’t rule Riley out completely. He was pretty agile for an older man.

  Rhodes looked down at the river. The turtles were on the log again, or maybe they were different turtles this time. They stayed where they were and enjoyed the sun, completely unaware of Rhodes’s presence.

  Rhodes was thinking about climbing down when the trunk next to his cheek exploded. The explosion was followed almost instantly by the crack of a rifle, which Rhodes heard but didn’t worry about at first because the pain caused by the splinters of wood that stuck in his face was too intense.

  A second shot clipped off a small branch just above Rhodes’s head. Rhodes froze. He didn’t know whether to go up or down or stay right where he was. Blood ran down his cheek and onto his shirt collar.

  He was completely defenseless. His pistol was on the ground, wrapped up in his shirt. He could see that the shots were coming from the persimmon trees, but the shooter was too well concealed for Rhodes to get any impression of who it was. It might have been a man or a woman or a goat for all Rhodes could see.

  He moved around to the other side of the trunk just before a bullet thunked into the wood where he had been. The trunk saved him that time, but it wasn’t going to save him much longer. He was no longer as slender as he had been when he was ten years old, and the trunk could hide all of him. Besides, the slugs that were slamming into it were big enough to chop it in two if they hit it often enough.

  Rhodes thought about the .30-.30 he’d seen in Mack Riley’s gun cabinet. It was a powerful gun. Rhodes wondered if he’d live long enough to dig any bullets out of the tree.

  A bullet tugged at the shirt that covered one of his love handles. Rhodes put a hand on the spot. There was a tear in his shirt, but no blood. There might be the next time, however, and he knew that he had to do something. He wished he knew what.

  One thing was for certain: No one was going to come to his rescue. Out here in the country, rifle shots weren’t all that uncommon, even if there was anyone to hear them.

  Rhodes looked down at the swimming pool. There was always the chance that he could jump. He wondered how high he was. Thirty feet? Forty? Not that it mattered. If he stayed where he was, he was most likely going to get killed.

  Was the pool deep enough for such a high dive, or would he hit the bottom too hard and break a leg? A broken leg wasn’t much compared to his life, but what if he hit his head and drowned? Or he might hit his head on a limb on the way down
and break his neck.

  If any of those things happened, he’d be just another death by accident. It occurred to Rhodes that another death by accident was just what the killer wanted, and he was likely to get it, too.

  After all, who was going to climb the tree to look for bullet marks if Rhodes was found lying dead on the ground below? Or drowned in the pool? People might wonder what the sheriff had been doing up in a tree, but it was possible that no one would climb up to see.

  Ruth Grady probably would, Rhodes thought. She was thorough, and she would wonder about the splinters in his face.

  The thought didn’t give Rhodes much comfort. Although the day was cold, he was sweating heavily. He had to make a choice. He could stay in the tree, or he could jump for the water.

  He looked down again. There were only a couple of limbs that looked threatening. He might be able to avoid them.

  Or he might not.

  A bullet whacked into the tree and gouged out a large chunk of wood about six inches from Rhodes’s fingers. The idea of losing his fingers chilled him.

  The idea of jumping didn’t appeal to him much, either. For just the fraction of a second an image of Johnny Weismuller flashed through his mind — Tarzan swinging on a movie-jungle vine.

  There weren’t any vines for Rhodes, but he was able to move himself a little farther out on the branch, far enough, he hoped to avoid hitting the bank.

  Another shot cracked the wood hear his head. He took a breath and jumped.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  It had been a long time since Rhodes had done a cannonball off the high board at the Clearview swimming pool, but there were some things the body never forgot. He hiked his knees up to his chin, or as close as he could get them these days, and wrapped his arms around his shins.

  A limb slapped him in the face as he passed it, driving one of the splinters a little deeper into his cheek. He ignored the pain and tucked his head down to his knees as he tried to concentrate on landing just right.

  If he hit just below the base of his spine, he would send water geysering high into the air. He would also be less likely to break any bones than in any other kind of dive.