Too Late to Die dr-1

by Bill Crider

  Johnny Sherman was another problem. He’d offered to resign, of course, and of course Rhodes had turned him down. One of Rhodes’s many faults was his loyalty to the men who worked for him. If he could take the heat instead of passing it along to them, he took the heat. If he could put himself in as a buffer between them and public opinion, he put himself in. He’d never been sorry in the past, but things were beginning to look different to him this time. There were a number of troubling signs, none of them big enough in themselves to call for Rhodes to change his mind about his policies, but taken together they were certainly beginning to look bothersome.

  Rhodes got up from the desk and went back out into the hall. He took some change out of his pocket and headed for the Dr Pepper machine. It was the only machine in town, as far as Rhodes knew, that still held bottled drinks in returnable bottles. There was a rack beside it which held two wooden soft-drink cases partially filled with empties. He put in his change, pushed the button, and picked up his bottle. It was somehow much more satisfying to hold a cool, moisture-beaded bottle than an aluminum can. He opened the bottle and went back to his office.

  It was very quiet in the old building, even for a Saturday. Rhodes thought that he might be the only person there. From his office he couldn’t hear the old men loafing around the front door. He took a drink from his Dr Pepper and sat back down in his chair.

  Rhodes sat for quite a while, drinking his drink and enjoying the silence. He hardly thought about the various problems that confronted him, at least he hardly thought about them consciously. He thought about his daughter, and he thought about Ivy Daniels, both of whom were much more pleasant to contemplate than murder and assault. Finally he called Hack. There were no problems at the jail, nothing that required the immediate attention of the High Sheriff of Blacklin County.

  Rhodes removed his feet from his desk and went home.

  Clearview was one of the few towns of any size at all that still had no franchise hamburger stands. No MacDonald’s. No Burger King. No Wendy’s. This was just fine with Rhodes, who did not want something that you had to order by a number or by some funny name. When he went out for a hamburger, he wanted a hamburger-a bun, a meat patty, pickles, mustard, onions, and lettuce-and he wanted to order a hamburger. You could get a hamburger nearly anywhere in Clearview, but Rhodes took Ivy Daniels to the Bluebonnet Cafe because the owner was a friend of his.

  “Cafe” was probably too fancy a name for the Bluebonnet, to tell the truth. It was nothing more than a ramshackle wooden building that contained one big room to eat in and a kitchen separated from the room by a high counter. There were no fancy plants, and probably none could have survived the atmosphere of the Bluebonnet, which had a high grease content. Rhodes didn’t mind that, either. A real hamburger was, by definition, a little greasy. There were a lot of old wooden tables and benches-no chairs-scattered around the room. Several men in working clothes sat at the tables drinking beer from long-necked bottles. They hadn’t bothered to remove their gimme caps.

  Everyone looked up when Rhodes and Ivy Daniels entered. One man waved a hand idly, then went back to his beer. “It’s not exactly Jeoff’s, is it?” Rhodes said.

  “Not exactly,” Ivy said, but she clearly didn’t care. She walked over to one of the benches. “Let’s sit here. I’ll have a hamburger all the way. Do you want to split an order of fries?”

  “Sure,” Rhodes said. He was feeling slightly giddy. He’d decided to bring Ivy to the Bluebonnet as a sort of a test. He didn’t know exactly what he’d been trying to prove, but whatever it was, Ivy had passed without question. She hadn’t even asked him to get salad dressing on her hamburger. She hadn’t even asked him to cut the onions. She was almost too good to be true.

  Rhodes walked over to the high counter, which came almost up to his shoulders. “Hey, Sheriff, how you doin’?” the cafe’s owner asked. Lonnie Eslick was a short man with a crew cut. If there hadn’t been a raised platform behind the counter, only his crew cut would have been visible.

  “Fine, Lonnie, just fine. Give me two hamburgers all the way and an order of fries.”

  “Comin’ right up, Sheriff. I’ll call you,” Eslick said. He disappeared from view as he stepped down off the platform and went back into the kitchen.

  Rhodes walked back to the table and sat on the bench across from Ivy Daniels. She grinned at him. “Come here often, Sheriff?” she asked.

  He smiled back. “Often enough to know this is the place with the best burgers in Clearview. You said the other night that a hamburger would be fine, so here we are. I hope you weren’t kidding.”

  “I wasn’t kidding,” she assured him. “I like a good hamburger as well as anyone. To tell the truth, I’d just as soon have a good burger as that tenderloin.”

  Rhodes found himself not knowing what to say next. It struck him suddenly that he was too old to be out on a date, and he felt awkward.

  If Ivy sensed his feeling, it didn’t show. The brief silence didn’t seem to bother her at all. She let it lengthen for a minute, then spoke again. “How is your investigation going?” she asked. “Have you cracked the case yet?” She laughed. “Or do real lawmen really say things like ‘crack the case’?”

  Rhodes laughed too. “I don’t know about ‘real lawmen,’” he said. “I do know that nobody around the sheriff’s department is likely to say anything like that. That could all change, though, if Ralph Claymore is elected. I expect he’ll require everybody to talk like they talk on television.”

  The conversation went smoothly after that, with Rhodes telling Ivy about what he’d been doing and about the lack of progress. “Of course, the second killing hasn’t made it any easier,” he added.

  “I’ll just bet,” Ivy said. “Nothing is ever as easy or as simple as it should be.” She then launched into some funny stories about the hazards of running for justice of the peace. There had even been a letter about her in the Clearview Herald, which Rhodes hadn’t read.

  “Well, you should have read it,” Ivy told him. “It was a classic. Really, it’s hard to believe that people could believe such things, especially in 1986.”

  The letter had been from a woman who objected to Ivy’s campaign. The woman felt that it was a fine thing to live in a free country, where women had the right to do as they pleased; but she thought that it was a shame that some women were pleased to run for public office. She knew that she, as a mere woman, would hate to be put in a position where she might have to make a decision that reflected unfavorably on a man, one of those creatures that God had clearly intended as her superiors. For her part, she was quite content to cook and clean for her husband, as every woman should do in the natural order of things.

  “Honestly, I almost felt guilty after I read it,” Ivy said, laughing. “I wondered if I were doing the wrong thing. Thank goodness I came to my senses before I resigned my job and gave up my campaign.”

  Rhodes laughed with her, then got up and walked over to the counter in response to Eslick’s call. “Burgers up, Sheriff.”

  The hamburgers were warm in their grease-spotted paper wrappers, and the wedge-shaped home fries almost burned Rhodes’s fingers through the thin cardboard of their box. He hustled them back to the table, almost overwhelmed by the smell. He hoped that his mouth wasn’t watering.

  Ivy again impressed him. She made no small talk but went right about unwrapping her burger and taking a healthy bite, and he followed suit. Plenty of mustard, just the right amount of sweet white onion, and a generous portion of fried meat.

  It was probably terrible for your heart, but it did the soul good. Rhodes took a paper napkin from the holder on the table, wiped his mouth, and continued eating.

  Only then did he remember that he’d forgotten to order drinks. He was saved embarrassment by Eslick, who came to the table carrying two large paper cups.

  “Dr Pepper, right?” Eslick asked.

  “Thanks, Lonnie,” Rhodes said. “I guess I was in a hurry to eat.”

  The s
hort counterman grinned. “That’s fine with me. I always take it as a compliment when someone wants to eat my cookin’.”

  “These really are delicious hamburgers,” Ivy said. Eslick didn’t quite blush.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” he said, then scurried back behind his counter.

  After they had eaten, Rhodes and Ivy drove around Clearview. Ivy brought up the killings once more. “What about Ralph Claymore?” she asked, referring to the information she had given Rhodes earlier. “Don’t tell me if you think I shouldn’t know,”‘ she added hurriedly. “I don’t want you to gossip about your job. It’s just that I’m curious about what I’d heard.”

  “There’s no confidential information involved,”‘ Rhodes said. “‘I don’t think Claymore had anything to do with Jeanne’s death, but you were right. He had been seeing her.” He went on to tell her about Hod Barrett, Barrett’s wife, and Elmer Clinton’s grief.

  “I’ll bet Hod Barrett did it,” Ivy said. “The way you describe him, I can almost see it. Why, I think he could even have staged the robbery of his store to put you off, to make you think of something else instead of him.”

  “That’s possible, I guess,” Rhodes said. “I’ve thought about it. And of course Mrs. Barrett’s an unusual woman.” He had mentioned only Mrs. Barrett’s cleaning habits, not her views of sex.

  “She surely is,” Ivy agreed. “Anyone who is that clean must be putting a lot of energy into house and yard work to avoid putting it somewhere else. If she directed it toward Jeanne Clinton, who knows what might have happened? She sounds a lot like the woman who wrote that letter I mentioned.”

  Rhodes figured that he knew exactly what energy Mrs. Barrett was putting into her physical labor, but he didn’t say anything. He wasn’t quite ready to talk with Ivy about intimate things like that. He changed the subject. “How did you ever get a name like Ivy?” he asked.

  She looked at him. “What?”

  “How did you get a name like Ivy? I mean, I like it. It’s a nice, old-fashioned name. These days I find myself having to deal with grown women named ‘Fawn’ or ‘Sharamee.’ Not long ago,I had to deal with one named ‘Rainbeau.’’” He spelled it. “I’m not making this up,” he added.

  Ivy laughed. “I believe you,” she said. “Remember, I work in an insurance office. I’ve probably heard a few that you haven’t heard.

  “For example?”

  “How about ‘Winsey’?”

  “‘Winsey’?”

  “Her father’s name is ‘Winston,’” Ivy said.

  “OK, but I still think ‘Rainbeau’ wins the prize,” Rhodes said. He noticed that somehow Ivy had gotten closer to him. In fact, she was very close. Feeling almost like a teenager, Rhodes put his arm around her, and his heart chugged as she settled against him.

  Rhodes woke up the next morning thinking that it was a good thing he was no longer a teenager, even if he had briefly felt like one. As he remembered his teenage years, the hormones, or whatever they were, had been coursing through his veins at such a rate that Ivy Daniels would not have been safe within half a mile of him. As it was, he didn’t know exactly what he might be getting himself into. He knew that he had strong feelings for Ivy, but he didn’t know just what she felt about him. Oh, she liked him. That much was pretty clear. But whether she was beginning to think of him as something more than just a friend was a question that Rhodes couldn’t answer.

  Still, he could hardly keep a sort of half-grin off his face as Kathy scrambled eggs for their breakfast. It was to her credit, he reflected, that she said nothing at all about it.

  After breakfast, he called the jail to check in and found that nothing out of the ordinary had happened overnight; everything was under control, and there was no need for him to go in. He could relax, read his Sunday paper, and think about the bad part of the afternoon ahead. Hack had told him that the autopsy on Jeanne had been completed-she had died of a broken neck and had not been raped. Her funeral would be that afternoon at two o’clock.

  Even the thought of the funeral didn’t bother Rhodes. For some reason, he had the confident feeling that things were going to start going his way and that the case would take a turn for the better soon.

  He was wrong, however. That afternoon at the funeral, all hell broke loose.

  Chapter 13

  Things started out as well as anyone could expect. The church service, held at the Thurston Baptist Church, was quietly dignified. Only one hymn was sung, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” which surprised Rhodes. He hadn’t thought anyone in Thurston, particularly Elmer Clinton, had the good taste to choose something other than a traditional weeper like “The Old Rugged Cross.” The minister painted Jeanne as a fine young woman, who if not a pillar of the church had at least “reformed” since her marriage to Elmer and had no longer sought the “bright lights and glamour” of the “world of the flesh,” a reference which Rhodes took to mean that she’d given up participating in wet T-shirt contests at the Paragon.

  The mourners, of which there were a goodly number for Thurston (about fifty in Rhodes’s estimation), were silent and respectful. In the pews near the back were Hod Barrett and his wife. Rhodes recognized Larry Bell and a few others as well. Elmer sobbed quietly and alone in the front pew.

  It was at the graveside that things got bad. The rain had made digging easy, and Rhodes could see the backhoe machine parked at a discreet distance behind some trees at the edge of the Thurston cemetery. The mound of muddy earth scooped from the grave was covered with something resembling Astroturf. The mourners were seated under an open-sided tent in wooden folding chairs. Almost everyone from the church had come to the cemetery.

  Elmer’s sobbing was louder in the tent, and the vague outdoor sounds of the winds in the trees and the insects in the grass did nothing to drown him out. The minister seemed to have decided to make up for the lack of sentimentality in the previous service by making his opening remarks about “a beautiful young woman, struck down in the prime of her life,” at which a number of women began digging in their purses for tissues and handkerchiefs. One of the women so engaged was Mrs. Barrett.

  Then the minister made a few remarks related to the scriptures, about returning to dust and the sun also rising and the sun going down. Several of the women, and Elmer, were weeping openly.

  Rhodes looked at the casket sitting over the open grave on the belts that would be used to lower it. Elmer was walking toward it, and it was only then that Rhodes realized that this was going to be one of those funerals in which the casket was lowered in full view of the mourners and in which the deceased’s husband was going to throw on the first clods of earth. Rhodes understood the theory-it would be a definite parting, shocking the husband into the realization that life must go on and his dead wife could no longer be a part of it. He understood the theory, all right, but he didn’t necessarily approve of it.

  The coffin was lowered slowly and expertly into the ground by two men from the funeral home who had been standing quietly by in their black suits, looking for all the world like any other mourners there.

  Elmer worked a clump of the damp black earth in his hands as the tears streamed down his face. “I love you, Jeanne,” he said in a choked voice, so quietly that Rhodes could hardly hear. “I’ll never forget you.” He crumbled the dirt in his hands and tossed it into the grave, then stood silently looking down.

  It was a dramatic moment, and Mrs. Barrett couldn’t have chosen it better if she had been Cecil B. DeMille. She leaped out of her chair, slamming it into a stout woman in black who sat behind her. The stout woman may have cried out, but if she did Rhodes didn’t hear her. All he could hear was Mrs. Barrett, yelling at the top of her lungs. “The Whore of Babylon!” she shrieked. “The Scarlet Whore of Babylon!” Apparently she hadn’t bought the minister’s picture of a reformed Jeanne Clinton after all. She’d been crying about something else.

  After her first outburst, Mrs. Barrett ran amok. Rhodes was pretty sure that he’d never seen anyone
run amok before, but that was about the only way to describe Mrs. Barrett. She ran crashing through the mourners, knocking chairs right and left, and knocking a few of the less agile mourners right and left as well. Once she leaped into the air. Had she flapped her arms, she might have taken flight.

  The minister was paralyzed. Like Rhodes, he’d never seen anything to resemble what was going on. Mrs. Barrett didn’t stop for him. She bowled him over and kept on going. She came to an abrupt stop at the edge of the open grave, yelling down at the coffin.

  “You lured the men with your skimpy clothes and your painted face,” she yelled. “But you never gave them what you promised. A teaser, that’s what you were, and now you’re dead! Killed by Hod Barrett, that you lured from his proper bed, and serves you right!”

  She worked her throat, and Rhodes was horrified that she was about to spit into the grave. He finally managed to get himself into action, at just about the same time as Hod Barrett. Elmer Clinton had started for her first, a strangled cry ripping from his throat, but when she had named Hod as the killer, Clinton had changed course and made for Hod.

  Rhodes didn’t know which way to go. Clinton had collided with Barrett and had his hands wrapped around his throat. Barrett had Clinton in a bear hug and was squeezing for all he was worth. At the edge of the grave Mrs. Barrett was hopping around. Her shoe heel caught in the soft earth and her right leg gave way beneath her. She started to fall into the grave.