by Bill Crider
Rhodes parked behind a thirty-year-old Ford Tudor with a light blue body and a navy top. There were large areas of rust on the trunk lid. Standing by the front door of the house was Mrs. Ramsey.
Mrs. Ramsey was a considerable woman. Rhodes guessed her weight at around 275 pounds, and he glanced involuntarily at the Ford to see if its springs sagged toward the driver’s side. He thought it did, but that might have been his imagination.
Mrs. Ramsey was swathed in a navy blue dress, and she looked to Rhodes a little like Marjorie Main might have looked if she’d let herself go. She carried a worn leather purse in one hand and an even more thoroughly worn Bible in the other. It was still an hour before noon, so the heat hadn’t reached its full power as yet, but Mrs. Ramsey’s dress showed dark, circular stains under each armpit. When Rhodes reached her, he could see that she’d been crying. Her red eyes didn’t help her appearance much.
“Buster Cullens done it,” she said wearily when Rhodes reached her. “Ain’t no doubt but that Buster done it.”
“How’s that, Mrs. Ramsey?” Rhodes said.
“Buster Cullens done it,” she said again. “Ever since Wyneva took up with Buster, she’s been after him to do it.
“Wyneva?” Rhodes asked.
“Wyneva Greer. She and Bert lived in sin here for six months. Then she left and took up with Buster Cullens. He’s the one who done it.”
It couldn’t be put off any longer. “Did what?” Rhodes asked.
Mrs. Ramsey pushed open the screen door. Bert, or what was left of him, lay just inside it. His head was easily identifiable, but there wasn’t much of his chest that hadn’t been blasted into a red mass of blood and mangled flesh. Mrs. Ramsey let the door swing shut. For the first time, Rhodes noticed the flies that had clustered on the screen. Some of them had gotten inside.
Neither Rhodes nor Mrs. Ramsey said anything for a moment. The Eller’s Prairie Baptist Church was about half a mile down the road. It had no air conditioning, and through its open windows came the strains of the opening hymn. Rhodes recognized it: “Amazing Grace.” He didn’t look at Mrs. Ramsey. “How did you call the jail?” he asked.
Mrs. Ramsey gestured vaguely in the direction of the rear of the house. “I went in the back door,” she said.
“Did you call anyone else?”
“No,” she said. “Just the jail.”
“Let’s go back in there,” Rhodes said. “I have to make some calls, and we can call one of your friends.”
“All of my friends will be in church,” she said.
“Well, you can sit down while I call,” Rhodes told her. He started around to the back, and Mrs. Ramsey followed slowly.
Inside the house, Rhodes walked through the kitchen to the living room. There was a huge Sony television set against one wall, with a Super Beta video recorder sitting in a cabinet beside it, along with a compact disc player. There were two La-Z-Boy chairs and a large, comfortable-looking couch, all sitting on a very thick, brown carpet. There was no telephone.
Mrs. Ramsey sank down in one of the chairs and immediately cranked up the footrest. “Lets me get the weight off me feet,” she explained in a dead voice. “The phone’s in the bedroom.” She pointed to a door on Rhodes’s left.
Rhodes entered the bedroom, which was dominated by a king-size waterbed. There was another television set and another VCR in that room. A red push-button phone sat on the night table beside the bed. Rhodes walked across the plush carpet, wishing he’d remembered to dust off his shoes before coming in the house.
First he called the justice of the peace, then the ambulance. Then he called Hack Jensen. “Get hold of Ruth Grady,” he said. “Tell her I want her to footprint and fingerprint every arm and leg in those three boxes. We’ve got to make sure we can account for all of them one way or another.”
Hack said he’d get right on it, and Rhodes went to look at the body of Bert Ramsey. He’d seen shotgun wounds before, and he already knew just about what he’d find. Whoever had shot Bert had been very close to him, so close that the pattern of shot hadn’t had time to spread out before it hit him in the chest. He couldn’t locate any stray pellets, so he figured that the shot had come from only a couple of feet away. Bert must have gone to the door and been shot almost as soon as he opened it, unless he had known whoever was there. Then he might have stood there for a while, talking.
Rhodes went back to the living room, where Mrs. Ramsey still sat in the La-Z-Boy chair. She had put her purse and Bible on the floor beside her and was wiping her eyes with a handkerchief.
“Mrs. Ramsey,” Rhodes said.
She made another brief wiping motion and wadded the handkerchief in her hand. “Yes, Sheriff?”
“This Buster Cullens. Where does he live? He from around here?”
“He lives down on the Long Bridge road,” Mrs. Ramsey said. “You go on past the church and turn right at the old hay barn. It’s about two miles to the Long Bridge Crossing. He’s livin’ on the Kersey place.”
“I know where that is,” Rhodes said. “What makes you think he’s the kind of man to do something like this?” Rhodes hated asking these questions, especially at a time like this, but he knew it was something that had to be done.
“He’s a hard man,” Mrs. Ramsey said. “Bert wasn’t a hard man, Sheriff. He liked to work, and he was honest and fair. Anybody’d tell you that about him. Buster Cullens ain’t like that.”
“How do you mean?” Rhodes asked.
“He hangs out with a mean crowd. He rides a motorsickle. . ” Mrs. Ramsey’s eyes seemed to unfocus momentarily as she stared off into the vague distance of her thoughts.
“Mrs. Ramsey?”
She snapped her attention back to Rhodes. “It was Buster that done it,” she said with renewed conviction. “Listen, Sheriff, I live down past the church, too, not but a quarter mile past that old hay barn. Last night I heard motorsickles! I know that was it! All the rumblin’, roarin’, and poppin’ like they do, it had to be motorsickles! It was Buster Cullens!” She grabbed the handle on the right side of the chair and snapped it up, causing the footrest to drop. It was almost as if the chair had propelled her to her feet. She scooped up her Bible and purse. “It was Buster Cullens,” she repeated.
Just then the ambulance arrived. “Sit down for a few more minutes, Mrs. Ramsey,” Rhodes said. “There’s a few things I have to do.”
She sank into the chair again, and Rhodes left the room.
Later, after the ambulance and the J.P. were gone, Rhodes went back inside to talk to Mrs. Ramsey once more, but she had nothing to add to what she’d already told him. He offered to drive her to the church, but she said, no, she’d rather go in her own car. He walked her outside and watched her get in the old Ford. The driver’s side sagged and the springs groaned. Under other circumstances, Rhodes might have thought it was funny.
She pulled the door shut, and Rhodes stepped over to the car. “Did you hear anything else last night?” he asked.
“No, Sheriff, I didn’t,” she said. “I know what you mean, but I didn’t hear a thing, except for them motorsickles. And I guess my house is just about the closest one to here.” She started the car and circled around by the shed, then drove away.
Rhodes watched her go. The fact that she hadn’t heard any gunshots didn’t necessarily mean anything. She could have had the television set turned up, or she could have been asleep. He watched the old Ford travel down the road, dust pluming up behind it. It turned into the churchyard just as the first people were coming out the door. Maybe she would find some comfort there, Rhodes thought. He went back into the house.
There was nothing where Bert Ramsey had died to tell Rhodes anything, but he intended to search a little further. There was no evidence that anyone else had looked through the rooms, and therefore, it seemed likely that robbery wasn’t the reason for the killing. So Rhodes decided to see what he could find.
It didn’t take him long. In the back of a dresser drawer, rolled up in a sock, th
ere was nearly six thousand dollars.
Chapter 4
Rhodes drove the county car across Long Bridge, a rickety wooden structure that really wasn’t very long at all. It had gotten its name from a certain Mr. Long, who had built the original bridge at this crossing nearly a hundred years ago. Rhodes knew this because he’d once read a book on the history of Blacklin County. He doubted that there was anyone else in the county-well, maybe there were two or three others-who either knew, or cared. Most of them didn’t even know the bridge was there.
The Kersey place was a quarter of a mile past the bridge. There was a barbed wire fence with what people called a “gap” in it, a gate made of barbed wire that looked like part of the fence. Off the road twenty or thirty yards was a house.
Rhodes got out of his car and opened the gap, then got back in and drove through. He didn’t bother to close it.
The house was old and weathered. It had been painted once, no doubt, but that had been many years ago. No trace of the original color remained. The boards were weathered a uniform light gray. The roof looked to be in pretty fair shape; it was probably no more than thirty or so years old. Nearly all the windows that Rhodes could see had glass in them, except for one on the front corner, which had a pane missing.
The house was small, probably four rooms, Rhodes guessed, and small ones at that. Out back there was another very small house, which Rhodes recognized immediately as the privy. It was made of the same weathered boards as the main house.
Beside the house, under the scanty shade of a huge mesquite tree, there was a black motorcycle. Rhodes knew nothing at all about motorcycles, but he could see the Nighthawk on the gas tank, along with the word Honda. From what he recalled of The Wild One, Marlon Brando had ridden a Harley-Davidson.
The house sat up on wooden blocks, and as Rhodes stepped toward the porch, a brownish dog that must have had a Collie in its ancestry came out from the cool shadows beneath the house. It gave a half-hearted growl and its fur ruffled slightly, but that was all. It looked at Rhodes incuriously for a moment, then turned around, got down on its belly, and crawled back under the house. “Mighty fine watchdog I got myself there,” said a voice from the front doorway. Rhodes, whose attention had been on the dog, looked up. A man pushed open a half-collapsed screen door and looked back at him.
The man was big, that was all Rhodes thought at first. His shoulders were so wide they almost filled the doorway. He was wearing only a pair of black shorts, so that Rhodes could see the full expanse of his chest. He was also handsome, and Rhodes thought he looked a little like Reg Park in Hercules in the Haunted World.
There was a difference, though. This man’s hands were hard and rough, and the calluses and creases were black from ground-in grease and carbon, the way a mechanic’s hands are likely to get. He looked perfectly capable of dismantling an engine with his bare hands and maybe a small screwdriver.
“Your name Buster Cullens?” Rhodes asked.
“That’s right,” the man said, making no move to step out onto the porch. He didn’t appear the least impressed by Rhodes’s badge. “What’s yours?” His voice, instead of the deep bass that would have seemed appropriate to Rhodes, was thin, high and nasal. He sounded like Arnold Stang.
“I’m Sheriff Dan Rhodes. I’d like to talk with you for a minute.”
Cullens stepped onto the porch. “All right,” he said. “Talk.”
“I’d like to talk to Wyneva Greer, too, if she’s here,” Rhodes said.
The man just looked at him. His eyes were black and set deep in their sockets.
Rhodes looked back. He didn’t particularly care for macho games, but he could play them if he had to.
After about a minute, Cullens turned his head and yelled through the screen door. “Wyneva! Come out here if you’re decent.”
The screen door opened and a woman came out. Rhodes wasn’t sure she was decent. She had on a pair of cut-off jeans, cut off so high that they must have hurt her when she walked. She was also wearing a faded denim vest. But she wasn’t wearing a shirt. Rhodes looked down, then to the side. Then, deciding that she was playing a game too, he looked up.
Her hair was long and black, and her face was very pretty in a tough sort of way. She shrugged her shoulders, and her breasts jiggled behind the faded denim.
“So talk,” Cullens said.
Rhodes cleared his throat as quietly as he could. “A neighbor of yours got himself killed last night,” he said.
Cullens laid a proprietary arm on the woman’s shoulders. “Sorry to hear that,” he said. “Who was it?”
“Bert Ramsey,” Rhodes said, looking at the woman, who gave no sign that the name meant anything to her. “I think Miss Greer knew him at one time. I’d like to know if you two saw or heard anything unusual last night.”
Cullens didn’t answer the question. “How’d he die?” he asked.
Rhodes had to admit that Cullens was smart. Either that, or he was completely innocent. He was certainly asking the right questions, the ones that made it appear as if he knew nothing at all about what had happened. Rhodes saw no harm in answering him.
“Someone cut him down with a shotgun,” Rhodes said, cutting a glance at Wyneva Greer out of the corner of his eye. She appeared completely unaffected.
“Too bad,” Cullens said, as if he didn’t feel it was too bad at all. In fact, he said it so casually it was as if death, or at least someone else’s death, was a matter that didn’t concern him in the least. “Naw,” he said then, “we didn’t hear a thing last night.”
“I suppose you were both here all evening?” Rhodes asked.
Cullens looked at Wyneva, and for the first time Rhodes saw an emotion flit briefly across her face. It was fear, he was pretty sure of that.
“Yeah,” Cullens said. “We were right here. That right, Wyneva?”
The woman nodded slowly. “That’s right,” she said. Her voice was low and husky. She didn’t meet Rhodes’s eyes.
“How’d you two come to be staying in such an out-of-the-way place, anyway?” Rhodes asked.
Cullens looked as if he might say it was none of Rhodes’s business, but if the thought had crossed his mind, he didn’t speak it aloud. “One of the Kerseys is a cousin of mine,” he said. “When I decided to come up here from Houston, he let me have the loan of it till I could get a good mechanic’s job somewhere. I haven’t found one yet.”
Rhodes looked again at Cullens’s hands. He might not have had a job, but it was a cinch that he’d been doing some mechanic work somewhere.
“Well,” said Rhodes, “I appreciate you all taking the time to talk to me. I might have to come back by in case I think of something else to ask.”
Cullens just looked at him, so Rhodes got in his car, started it, and drove to the gap. After he drove through, he looked back at the house. Cullens was still standing on the porch, watching him, but Wyneva was nowhere in sight. Rhodes closed the gap. The dog came out from under the house again, and Rhodes drove away.
On his way back to Clearview, Rhodes stopped at Bert Ramsey’s house again. This time he looked around the tractor shed, but he couldn’t find anything else of interest.
He took off his hat and waved it in front of his face, trying to stir up a little breeze. It was early afternoon, now, the hottest part of the day.
About three hundred yards in back of Ramsey’s house, there was a thick line of trees. Rhodes wondered just how far back Ramsey’s property ran, and he wondered if there might be a stock tank somewhere in those woods. He’d like to go bass fishing in a little tank that no one had tried out yet.
He’d also like to know a lot more about Bert Ramsey. It seemed to Rhodes that Ramsey had been around Clearview for at least ten years, doing odd jobs and such. And before that he was in the Army, or at least that was the way Rhodes remembered it. Say he was around thirty-five years old. Not particularly good-looking, weathered from plenty of hard work in the outdoors, quiet, never in trouble with the law.
; How, Rhodes wondered, did a man like that manage to afford two new TV sets and two VCRs? How did a man like that manage to have nearly six thousand dollars in very large bills stuffed in his sock drawer? And why was he dead?
Rhodes settled his hat back on his head and walked to the car. He was a patient man, and he would start asking questions. He wanted to talk to Mrs. Ramsey again, and he wasn’t through with Buster Cullens and Wyneva Greer, not by a long shot. He often envied the big-city police departments that he read about, with their computers and ballistics experts-not that a ballistics expert would be any help with a shotgun killing. He had to work differently from them. He had to talk to people and sift the facts from the lies. If he was careful and if he kept it up long enough, he usually got results, even if he wasn’t in the 87th Precinct.
He got in the car and drove back to town.
Clyde Ballinger was ecstatic. “Boy, Sheriff Rhodes, this is a good one!” he exclaimed. “Carella and Hawes would love this! I mean, you’ve got hacked limbs, you’ve got a murder that’s connected, you’ve got-”
“Wait a minute,” Rhodes interrupted. He was beginning to regret stopping by Ballinger’s to check on how Ruth Grady was doing with her fingerprinting. “We don’t know that there’s any connection at all. In fact, there probably isn’t. We’ll know more when we get in touch with the owners of the old Caster place.”
“Come on, Sheriff,” Ballinger said. “There’s always a connection in cases like this. I remember one time when this dead woman-she was buck naked-was found right across the street from the 87th. And right after that, the guys started getting this weird series of clues about something that looked totally unrelated. Anyway-”
“Anyway,” Rhodes cut in, “this isn’t New York.”
“Isola,” Ballinger said.
