Bill Crider - Dan Rhodes 09 - Death by Accident

by Bill Crider

  “I won’t give him the chance,” Rhodes said, wondering if he was being foolish.

  Hack gave him a gloomy look. “It’s times like this I’m glad the county has good insurance on us. They don’t have any burial policy, though. You ever thought about getting one?”

  “Not lately,” Rhodes said. “But I appreciate the vote of confidence.”

  Hack was shaking his head when Rhodes went out the door.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Bull Lowery’s body shop was in an old sheet metal building on a side street not far from Clearview’s downtown area. The body shop had been there ever since Rhodes could remember. Chub Lowery had run it from the early 1950s until his death, and then his son Bull had taken over.

  There was a blue and white sign in front, giving the name of the shop and letting everyone know that they could rely on Lowery Paint and Body to give “free estimates,” not to mention that the establishment would “pay $50 of the deductible on all windshield replacements.” It still wasn’t raining, but the mist and fog had covered the sign with droplets of water that slid down its slick metal surface and dripped off the bottom edge.

  Rhodes parked next to a dark green Camaro with a crumpled fender, got out, and went inside. He smelled the sharp odor of fresh paint and saw a Chevy pickup with its glass and chrome protected by paper and tape. It had a fresh coat of shiny blue metallic paint. In the back of the shop someone was banging on metal with a rubber mallet. The noise almost drowned out the chugging of the shop’s air compressor.

  Lowery’s office was in a little room that had been added to the inside of the building. There was a big window through which Rhodes saw Lowery sitting at a desk and talking on an old-fashioned black telephone. Lowery was big, all right, wide and squat and powerful. His neck was just as big as Hack had said it was. He was wearing a black baseball cap turned backwards so that Rhodes couldn’t see the emblem on the front.

  Lowery looked up and saw Rhodes through the window. He put up a big hand and motioned for Rhodes to come inside the office, so Rhodes opened the door and stepped in.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Lowery said into the phone.

  In spite of Lowery’s size, Rhodes had always heard that his voice, not his physique, had given him his nickname. It was a deep croak, and for most of his life he had been known as “Bullfrog.” In recent years the “frog” part had been dropped off and the name shortened. Rhodes didn’t know why.

  “I can get to it tomorrow,” he told his caller. “No, fixin’ a headliner’s no big deal. I do it all the time. The glue gives out in all those GM cars about that age, and the liner just falls right down on your head. Yeah, I know it’s a pain. You get it in here about eight o’clock tomorrow, and I’ll take care of it. I’ll have it out for you by Wednesday.”

  After the caller agreed to bring in the car, Lowery hung up and looked at Rhodes. “What can I do for you, Sheriff?”

  “I wanted to talk to you about your brother-in-law.”

  “Which one? I got two of them.”

  “Pep Yeldell.”

  “Yeldell? He don’t count. He’s my ex-brother-in-law. And he’s dead.”

  “You don’t seem very upset about it.”

  On Lowery’s desk there were an electric adding machine, the telephone, a credit card reader, a thick pad of work-order forms, and an ashtray that held a dead cigar with a wet-looking, well-chewed end. Lowery fished out the cigar and stuck it in his mouth.

  “Upset?” he said around the cigar. “Why would I be upset? Hell, I’d dance on his grave if I could dance.”

  “You told Deputy Grady that Pep abused your sister.”

  “I didn’t say he abused her. I said he hit her.”

  “How often?”

  “I can’t tell you that because I don’t know. But he stopped after I found out about it. I made damn sure he didn’t do it again.”

  That sounded a little ominous to Rhodes. He said, “You want to explain that?”

  Lowery chewed his cigar for a second, took it out of his mouth, and set it carefully in the ashtray. The wet end glistened.

  “You wouldn’t be accusing me of killing the little weasel, would you, Sheriff?” Lowery said.

  “You had a motive for it. You had one for killing Randall Overton, too.”

  “How’d you find out about that business?”

  “He kept records.”

  “Hard to believe he’d have that little sense, him being an out-and-out crook like he was. Anyway what happened with him was my own damn fault. I should’ve known better than to pay some jake-leg like him for a job. I should’ve known he’d spend the money on women or beer and never do a lick of work. But I took care of him.”

  Rhodes wished he’d brought a tape recorder. Lowery was practically confessing to doing away with both men.

  “What about John West? Did you take care of him, too?”

  “John? I didn’t have anything against John. We did a little business now and then, but that’s about it. He always struck me as being pretty honest.”

  Oh, well, Rhodes thought. Three confessions in a row would have been too much to hope for.

  “Tell me about how you took care of Pep,” he said.

  “I took him out in back of the shop and beat the tar out of him,” Lowery said. “You don’t really think I killed him, do you?”

  “The thought had entered my mind.”

  “Well you can get it out of there. I never killed anybody. But as soon as Cissy told me he’d hit her, I taught him a little lesson. When I finished with him, I told him that Cissy would be filing for a divorce and that he’d be moving out. He got out that very afternoon.”

  “But you kept him on here at the shop?”

  “He was good with his hands, and he knew about painting. You didn’t have to worry about the paint running or dripping when Pep was doing the job. Besides, we’d settled our differences, and he wasn’t going to be seeing Cissy again.”

  “Where were you the night he was killed?”

  “I’m glad you asked me that, Sheriff. It just so happens that I was at home with my wife.”

  Wives could usually be counted on to back up their husbands, and Lowery’s probably wasn’t any different. Unless she was like Yvonne Bilson.

  “Was anybody else with you?” Rhodes asked.

  “Sure was. Ken and Verna DuBose. We played 42 till about midnight.”

  Ken DuBose owned the Dairy Queen and had a reputation for honesty. It was a pretty good alibi.

  “What about Overton?”

  “I asked him for my money back. He got nasty.” Lowery made a fist. It was about the size of the old black telephone on his desk. “I clocked him one. He didn’t have much to say after that, and I just wrote the money off to experience.”

  Rhodes was beginning to believe that Lowery was telling the truth. He hadn’t been confessing before. He’d just meant that he’d knocked Yeldell and Overton around a little bit.

  Rhodes shifted gears. “You told Deputy Grady that no one had brought a Jeep Cherokee in to see about getting any damage repaired.”

  “Not lately. There’s three or four Cherokees around town, but I haven’t ever had one of ’em in here.” Lowery picked up his cigar, looked at the wet, unappetizing end and set it back down. “I been thinking about that, though.”

  “Thinking what?” Rhodes asked.

  “Pep did a little free-lance work, you know?”

  “He was a shade-tree mechanic,” Rhodes said. “I heard about that.”

  “Yeah. Well, he did a little body work on the side, too. I wasn’t supposed to know about it, since he was cutting me out, but I did. Cissy told me.”

  Rhodes wondered if that was why Pep had hit her, but he didn’t want to get into that.

  He said, “She didn’t mention a Jeep Cherokee, did she?”

  “Nope. But that don’t mean there wasn’t one. Just suppose old Pep worked on that Cherokee and then decided there might be some more money in it.”

  “You mean
blackmail?” Rhodes said.

  “Yeah. It’d be just like the little weasel. You ever think about that?”

  Rhodes had thought about it, all right, but not exactly this way.

  “Did Pep have the equipment to do the work at home?”

  “Nah, probably not. But he had a key to this place. He could’ve done the work on a Sunday and nobody the wiser unless I just happened to drive by.”

  “Did you make it a habit to come by on Sunday?”

  “I never come by. Pep knew that.”

  “If Pep worked on it here, what happened to the car?” Rhodes asked.

  “Hey,” Lowery said. “I can’t do all your work for you, can I?”

  “I guess not.” Rhodes said, and it suddenly occurred to him that he might already know the answer to his question. However, he had something else to talk to Lowery about, so he said, “I might have a little body work for you, myself.”

  “Yeah? What kind?”

  “I bought an Edsel,” Rhodes told him.

  “Not that one in Overton’s driveway.”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Well, I won’t ask you what you paid for it, but you probably got a good deal. The body was in pretty good shape. You’ll be needing some upholstery, a paint job, maybe some chrome and a little body work. I don’t know about the taillights. Those get broken pretty often. Parts are gonna be hard to come by, but you can get ’em. You could check with Tuffy West about that. He’s got a computer that’s in touch with junkyards all over the country.”

  Computers again, Rhodes thought. Hack would be proud.

  “If a part’s out there,” Lowery went on, “Tuffy can get it for you. I tell you what, you bring that car in, and I’ll give you a free estimate. You won’t find a better price in town, either. I can promise you that. What I can’t promise you is whether it’ll run. I don’t do mechanic work.”

  “But you can take care of everything else.”

  “That’s right. It’d be a pleasure to work on that ugly old car. You just leave it to me.”

  Rhodes said that he’d probably do that.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Rhodes was on his way to Tuffy West’s junkyard when Hack called on the radio.

  “Ivy wants you to phone her,” he said. “She says you’ve been holding out on her.”

  “Holding out about what?” Rhodes asked.

  “She didn’t tell me that. I’m just the old dispatcher. Nobody ever tells me anything.”

  Rhodes could tell from Hack’s tone that the dispatcher’s feelings were hurt, and he thought he could guess the reason why.

  “Ivy told you about me getting shot at, didn’t she,” Rhodes said.

  “I ain’t sayin’ she did, and I ain’t sayin’ she didn’t. Course, it’d be your place to tell me about somethin’ like that. If you wanted me to know about it, that is.”

  “I didn’t feel like talking about it.”

  “That’s just fine with me. It ain’t none of my business. If you want to keep ever’thing a secret, you just keep it a secret. It’s all the same to me.”

  “I’ll tell you about it later,” Rhodes said.

  “Can if you want to. Don’t have to, though. I wouldn’t want you to put yourself out any.”

  “Did Ivy say where she was?”

  “She’s at work. You got the number?”

  “I know what it is,” Rhodes said.

  Rhodes stopped at a pay phone and called Ivy.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about Kara West’s make-over?” Ivy asked.

  “I guess I forgot,” Rhodes said, wondering why Ivy cared. He hoped she wasn’t thinking about coloring her hair. “Where did you hear about it?”

  “At the Hair Barn. That’s where I get all the news.”

  The Hair Barn was the shop where Ivy got her hair washed, cut, and blown dry. Rhodes had never understood the appeal of the name. It sounded to him like the name of a place where hair was stored in bales, like hay. But the name aside, Ivy was right about one thing: If you wanted the news — the real news — about Clearview, the Hair Barn was a more reliable source than either the newspaper or the radio station.

  “I forgot this was hair-cut day. Are you thinking about getting braces? You sure don’t need them.”

  “I’m not thinking about anything like that. I’m thinking about why Kara West got a make-over.”

  “Her husband just died. She probably wanted to do something to make herself feel better.”

  “Maybe. But I think a woman usually does something like that for other reasons.”

  “What other reasons?”

  “A man,” Ivy said.

  “I never thought about that,” Rhodes admitted. “She seemed genuinely sad that John was dead. I felt sorry for her. I thought she was just trying to make herself feel better.”

  “You can be sad even if you have somebody else lined up,” Ivy told him. “And you can get a make-over for another man as well as for yourself.”

  Rhodes could feel his clothes soaking up the damp cold. He rubbed his hand across his face and wiped the moisture on his jacket.

  “That’s a comforting thought,” he said.

  “I’m not trying to comfort you. I’m just saying that it might throw a new light on those accidents of yours.”

  “Kara West couldn’t have killed those three men,” Rhodes said. “She might have run over John, but she wasn’t strong enough to have killed Pep.”

  “How strong do you have to be to hit somebody in the head with a tree limb?”

  Rhodes thought about that for a second. “Good question,” he said.

  Rhodes drove out of town to Tuffy West’s wrecking yard. The wide front gate was open, and Rhodes could see the tangle of old cars that the fence was supposed to hide. Tuffy hadn’t gone to the expense of paving the entrance, or any of the rest of the yard for that matter, so the county car splashed through wide, dark puddles as Rhodes drove inside.

  Rhodes parked beside Tuffy’s wrecker and went inside the building. Tuffy was inside behind the high counter watching a little TV like the one Hack had at the jail. He had it turned up loud, and Rhodes could hear Rod Roddy yelling for someone to “come on down.” Rhodes had heard that Roddy was from Ft. Worth originally, but he didn’t know whether that was true.

  Tuffy looked up from the TV when Rhodes walked across the oily concrete floor to the counter. When he saw who his visitor was, he turned off The Price Is Right and smiled.

  “You caught the bastard that killed my brother yet?” he asked.

  “Not yet,” Rhodes said. “But I’m working on it.”

  “Good. What can I do for you, then?”

  “I bought an Edsel,” Rhodes told him. “I was wondering how hard it would be to get parts for it.”

  “An Edsel, huh? Well, it won’t be easy gettin’ parts for her, I can tell you that. Not as hard as you might think, though. Most of the parts are interchangeable with parts from old Fords and Mercurys. Those old Edsels are mighty popular with collectors right now. I don’t know why, ’cause they’re so ugly — sorry if that hurts your feelin’s, Sheriff, but they are.”

  Rhodes didn’t care what Tuffy West thought about the Edsel’s appearance. He just wanted to know about the parts.

  “I got me a computer, and I’m in touch with places all over the U. S. A.,” Tuffy continued. So if the parts are out there, I can find ’em for you.”

  “I don’t know what I’ll need yet,” Rhodes said. “I haven’t really looked at the car very carefully.”

  “Is it that one Randy Overton had?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “It was in pretty good shape. His daddy took care of it, and it’s been under that tarp ever since.”

  “You called him ‘Randy,’” Rhodes said. “Were you two pretty good friends?”

  Tuffy narrowed his eyes. “I knew him. Lots of people knew Randy.”

  “But how many people knew Overton, Yeldell, and John West?” Rhodes asked.

&nbs
p; “Plenty, I bet. Why? What difference does it make?”

  “It wouldn’t make any difference if they hadn’t all been killed,” Rhodes said.

  Tuffy shrugged. “Accidents happen.”

  “Sure they do. But your brother wasn’t an accident.”

  “I wasn’t talkin’ about John. I was talkin’ about the other two.”

  “Those weren’t accidents,” Rhodes said.

  “Yeah? What makes you think so?”

  “Somebody killed them,” Rhodes said. “Somebody who knew all three of them. Somebody who’s lied to me about them two or three times already.”

  “You better not be talkin’ about me,” Tuffy said.

  “I am, though,” Rhodes said.

  Rhodes had thought about things for a long time after hanging up the pay phone. He’d stood out in the weather until his pants legs were wet and sticking to him the way they had when he’d climbed out of the pool at the Old Settlers’ Grounds.

  Eventually he’d gone over everything that people had said to him, and he’d realized that Tuffy had been lying right from the start.

  It was the brother-in-law business from the Ma and Pa Kettle debate that had bothered Rhodes. Tuffy was Kara West’s brother-in-law, the one on whose shoulder she’d been crying so hard at the funeral. Rhodes should have been suspicious then. He should have known it was Tuffy all along.

  “You told me that John left the County Line alone,” Rhodes said. “But he didn’t. He left with you.”

  “Who says?” Tuffy asked through clenched teeth.

  “That doesn’t matter,” Rhodes said, hoping that Yvonne Bilson would be willing to testify in court. “You also told me that you didn’t remember whether you saw Pep that night. But according to my witness, you did see him.”

  “That’s a lie,” Tuffy said.

  “We’ll have to let a jury decide that,” Rhodes said. “Besides, there’s more.”

  “There can’t be.”

  “There’s Pep. Did you let him have a look at John’s Cherokee to see if he could fix it? It might have brought more if you sold it in Mexico or somewhere than if you just broke it down for parts.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”