Too Late to Die

by Bill Crider

  “The small tenderloin, I think. Well done,” she added.

  “Sounds good to me too. I’m glad I won’t have to watch the blood when you cut.”

  I’ve got to do better than that, Rhodes thought, even if I’m not interested.

  But Ivy seemed not to notice anything crude in his statement. “I’ll have the salad, not the soup, and a baked potato instead of the French fries,” she said.

  “So far, so good,” Rhodes said. “I’ll have the same thing.”

  The waitress came with the wine and took their orders. After she had gone, Rhodes decided that it was time to find out why Ivy Daniels had wanted to talk to him. He took a sip of the wine, which wasn’t too bad, although he didn’t really like wine, and said, “I was a little surprised to get your call. Were you that impressed with me last night?”

  Ivy smiled. “It does have to do with last night,” she said, “but not necessarily with my impression of you.”

  “You weren’t impressed, then?”

  “Oh, I was impressed, all right, but I was more impressed with that stunt of Ralph Claymore’s. I thought it was quite unfair.”

  The waitress came back in with the salads and a basket of breadsticks and crackers, along with a revolving stand holding various kinds of dressing. Ivy helped herself to the Thousand Island, as did Rhodes. Then he took a breadstick and unwrapped it. “I don’t think that what happened was entirely Claymore’s fault,” he said. “I’ve done a little checking, and I’m pretty sure that he and Terry Wayne—the guy who made the big scene—don’t know one another.”

  “Oh,” Ivy said. “I was so sure that it was a setup.”

  “I didn’t say it wasn’t a setup. I agree with you that it was. I’m just saying that I don’t think it was Claymore’s idea. I think that Wayne probably went to him with it.”

  “But he went along with Wayne.”

  “Well, you can’t blame him, really. It was a ready-made piece of sensation.”

  “Yes, and it made the front page of this afternoon’s paper.”

  Rhodes usually read the paper after eating supper, and in his rush to pick up Ivy he had forgotten all about it. “Is that so?” he said.

  ‘‘It’s so. The paper didn’t really take sides, but it didn’t look so good for you.”

  They ate in silence for a minute. They both knew that the Clearview paper rarely took sides in any election.

  Finally, after mastering a particularly large piece of lettuce, Rhodes said, “I’ll bet you didn’t call just to offer me your sympathy.”

  “That’s right, I didn’t. I don’t really know how to go into this. It’s just that I didn’t like what happened, and I know something that probably you should know. But it may not be important at all, and I don’t like to think that I’m being vindictive by telling you. Besides . . .”

  “Hold on, hold on,”‘ Rhodes said. “The best thing to do is just to tell me. Then we’ll work on the morality of it. It’s too late to hold back now.”

  “Couldn’t we just have a nice dinner and talk about something else?”

  Rhodes suddenly realized how much he was enjoying talking to this woman, and he knew that he really didn’t care if she had anything of importance to tell him or not. But he said, “I think that you should go ahead and tell me. You wanted to, or you wouldn’t have called. We can have another dinner later and talk about something else at it.”

  Ivy looked at him. “That would be very nice. The other dinner, I mean. I think I’d like that.” She paused and took a sip of wine. “Now. What I wanted to tell you was this. I have an aunt who lives in Thurston. She told me yesterday afternoon that Ralph Claymore has been visiting Jeanne Clinton.”

  So that’s why he avoided that topic last night, Rhodes thought. He didn’t want to be tied to it in any way. “How does she know?” he said.

  “Someone told her, she said.”

  “Did she say who it was?”

  “Yes. Someone named Bill Tomkins.”

  Chapter 7

  It was Friday morning, the morning that most residents of Blacklin County looked forward to each week. But that was not the case in the sheriff’s department. Friday meant that the weekend was coming, the weekend when ordinary citizens would be getting ready to go to the lake and do a little fishing, go to the local clubs and do a little drinking, go out on the highway and blow the carbon out of their car’s engine. For some other citizens, not so ordinary, it meant a chance to sneak in a not-so-carefully guarded store or get up a friendly little game of poker in an abandoned warehouse or maybe just drive off from a convenient self-service gas station without paying.

  The latter types the sheriff’s department would always have with them, and to tell the truth Rhodes and his deputies didn’t even spend very much time worrying about them. They had to worry about the ordinary folks, the ones whose boats hit a snag in the lake and disappeared under the brownish water; the ones who got a little too excited when their girlfriends won a wet T-shirt contest and strangers, who had to be disciplined, looked at them too long and hard; the ones who were out endangering everyone else’s lives by zooming down the county roads at ninety miles an hour.

  Thursday night, however, had been quiet; Hack had little to report when Rhodes came in. “Just a couple of drunks, and one little domestic fight. Billy Joe’s doing fine. Him and that Polish fella have hit it off right well.”

  “Just how do you mean that?” Rhodes said

  “I mean they don’t bother one another none. Billy Joe still ain’t talking, and the Polish fella can’t talk so any of us can understand him. Except that Bob says he ain’t Polish. He’s gonna check up on him today.”

  “Well, keep me posted,” Rhodes said. “I’ll be back this afternoon.”

  “Thurston again?”

  “That’s right. Thurston again.”

  Rhodes left the office.

  April was Rhodes’s favorite month, even in election years. It might have seemed a cruel one to that poet Kathy had once told Rhodes about. T. S. Eliot, that was his name. Old T. S. hadn’t been from Texas, though, to see the way the grass and wildflowers just seemed to spread all over the place almost overnight if the rains were right. It was a pleasure to drive along and look at things growing.

  Unfortunately, the pleasure was marred considerably by the thoughts that kept crowding themselves into Rhodes’s mind, thoughts not connected in any way with the freshness of the season. There was Ralph Claymore, for one thing. It was beginning to seem as if everyone in Blacklin County had been slipping around to see Jeanne Clinton on the sly, even Claymore, who therefore almost certainly had to be considered a suspect in her murder.

  And there was Billy Joe, with what was probably Jeanne’s blood on his shirt. Not to mention Hod Barrett, who certainly had the physical equipment to do the job, not to mention the temperament. Of course, if you wanted a motive, you couldn’t forget Elmer.

  But it was Bill Tomkins who was worrying Rhodes the most right now. Tomkins hadn’t minded at all mentioning the fact that Hod Barrett was seeing Jeanne, or if he’d minded, it hadn’t taken much to get him to mention it. But he’d held back about Claymore. Why? That was the main thing Rhodes wanted to ask him. Besides, if he’d held out one bit of information, he might have held out more. What if he’d been stopping in at Elmer’s himself? He seemed to be about the only one who hadn’t been, if what Rhodes had found out about Claymore was true.

  Thinking about how he’d gotten that piece of news turned Rhodes’s mind into channels of thought that were considerably more pleasant, if still somewhat puzzling and complicated. He hadn’t really thought of women at all, as women, since the death of his wife. He’d dealt with women on both sides of the law, seen them at stores and in restaurants, talked to them in the course of his re-election campaign (such as it was); but he had not until the night before thought of one of all those women—certainly not someone like Mrs. Wilkie—as being of a different sex from him. It was as if he had been neutralized in some way, had lost h
is sexual feelings completely.

  Now he realized that those feelings hadn’t been lost. They’d just been in mourning, or storage, or hibernation, or wherever it was that such things went after the death of a wife that you’d loved long and deeply. Now, stirred by Ivy Daniels, they were back.

  Rhodes wasn’t sure just what the attraction was that she held for him. She was a good-looking woman, of course. There was that. But there was more to it. There was something about her that he liked: her self-sufficiency, her competence, something like that. Anyway, he thought, it did no good to try to explain it; the feeling was there, and that was that. What he would do about it was something else again.

  Last night he had taken her home and walked her to her door. There was no adolescent heavy breathing, no panting good-night kiss on the order of the latest romance novel’s description; yet both of them knew that there was something between them, a feeling that neither was quite ready to acknowledge in words but which was nevertheless obviously present.

  Rhodes had followed through on his earlier hint, to which Ivy had responded so positively, and asked her to have dinner with him again. They would be going out Saturday night. He found himself wondering whether he should buy a sports jacket for the occasion. He hadn’t had much need to dress up lately.

  Well, he wouldn’t worry about it yet. Maybe they could just go somewhere and get a hamburger. Ivy looked like the kind of woman who didn’t demand that you make a big impression on her. Besides, they’d already been to the fanciest restaurant in Clearview. It was all downhill from Jeoff’s.

  Rhodes’s pleasant thoughts were interrupted by his arrival in Thurston. The town was clearly dying, and before long it would probably go the way of Milsby. There was only one paved street, and that was actually a farm-to-market road leading on to another little town. The only businesses left in Thurston were on the paved street—Hod Barrett’s grocery, the post office (the only new building in town), the bank, a hardware store, a tavern (“beer joint” the residents called it), another grocery store even smaller than Barrett’s. There had been other stores once, but they were now almost forgotten. A local resident had bought their buildings, torn them down, and sold the brick. On graveled streets and dirt roads leading off the paved one were the homes and churches.

  Looking at one of the latter off to his right, the First United Methodist Church, a white frame structure with a black shingle roof badly in need of replacement, Rhodes happened to think of Barrett’s remark about his wife. “She goes to bed and reads her Bible. . . .” That was what Hod had said. Thinking about it, Rhodes decided to pay Mrs. Barrett another call, even before he visited Bill Tomkins.

  The Barrett house wasn’t like every other house in Thurston. It was what Rhodes’s mother used to call “spruce.” It was more than that; it was immaculate. Funny he hadn’t really noticed that the first time. The lawn looked as if it had been edged with a ruler. The bushes might have been trimmed by an artist; there was not a single twig above the proper level. There wasn’t even a leaf out of place, for that matter. Rhodes remembered Hod’s standard joke about buying his wife the best yard equipment money could buy. She certainly deserved it; she knew just how to use it.

  As Rhodes parked his car in the drive, he noticed that Mrs. Barrett’s passion for order extended beyond her lawn. Rhodes had heard of houses that were so clean you could eat off the floor—the Barrett house was so clean that he had no doubt you could eat off the driveway. He recalled the spic-and-span room he had sat in before, the coaster he had been provided for his glass of tea. Mrs. Barrett was a woman whose desire for cleanliness and order was far out of the ordinary. He wondered just how far that passion did extend.

  When she answered his knock at the door, Mrs. Barrett was wearing a plain housedress. Her hair was caught up in a sort of turban fashioned from a faded pink towel, and she held a brush in one hand.

  “Oh, it’s you again, Sheriff,” she said. “I was just cleaning the light fixtures.” She gestured with the brush. “Sometimes I take them down and wash them in the bathtub, but I thought they could go for another week without that.”

  Rhodes wondered vaguely if his own light fixtures had ever been washed in the bathtub. He was pretty certain that they hadn’t even been dusted since his wife’s death, unless Kathy had done it and not mentioned it to him. Somehow, he didn’t think that had happened.

  “I was in town to see someone else,” Rhodes said, “and I thought of a few more questions that I wanted to ask you.” He paused. “If it wouldn’t be too much of an interruption.”

  Mrs. Barrett looked at him calmly. “I suppose not,” she said, stepping back from the doorway and holding the screen door open for him.

  She asked Rhodes to have a seat, but she didn’t offer to bring him any tea. “I’m really very busy, Sheriff. There’s a lot of cleaning to be done in a house this size, though most people wouldn’t think so. I hope this won’t take too long.”

  “No,” Rhodes said. “Not too long. You see, I was talking to Hod the other day, and he told me that you and he were . . . well . . . having some sort of difficulty. He seemed to me to imply, even if he didn’t really say it, that the problem might have something to do with your religious beliefs.”

  Mrs. Barrett’s back stiffened, though Rhodes wouldn’t have thought that it could have gotten any stiffer than it already was. He was sorry to have to talk about these things with her. He was small-town enough to dislike some of the things he had to do, but that had never stopped him from doing them.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Mrs. Barrett said. “Of course I’m a believing woman, but so should we all be believers.”

  She wasn’t going to make it easy, Rhodes thought. “What I mean is,” he said slowly, “what I mean is that he seemed to imply that you read your Bible an awful lot, even at night. That you . . . uh . . . that you even read it in the bed.”

  That was as much of a hint as Rhodes was going to allow himself, but Mrs. Barrett got it. Her face turned almost as red now as her husband’s had been on the morning Rhodes had been investigating the robbery of his store, just before Jeanne Clinton’s body had been found. And for the same reason. Mrs. Barrett was filled with what she would no doubt have called “righteous anger.”

  “I don’t believe that when or where I read my Bible is any business of yours, Sheriff Rhodes,” she said in the same tone an elementary teacher might use to scold a particularly troublesome pupil.

  “Generally speaking, I’d agree with that,” Rhodes told her. “But this isn’t a general thing. Some bad things have been happening here in Thurston lately, and some of them seem to involve your husband. So I try to find out about things that will help me do my job.”

  “I can’t believe that.”‘ Mrs. Barrett’s hand gripped the handle of her brush so hard that the knuckles whitened. It was a strong hand.

  “It’s true enough, though,” Rhodes said. “Hod could even be in trouble.”

  Mrs. Barrett looked down at her immaculate rug. “All right,” she said in a furious voice, her head shaking. “All right.”

  Rhodes said nothing.

  Finally Mrs. Barrett looked up, more in control of herself now. When she spoke, her voice was firm and had a stem, lecturing tone. “Marital relations, Sheriff Rhodes, are meant for the purpose of having children, creating a family. I had always hoped to have children of my own, but we never did, Hod and I. Then I had to have an operation. After that, a family wasn’t possible. Do you understand?”

  Rhodes shook his head affirmatively, though he wasn’t sure he did. Did she think that he might not know about hysterectomies? Or did she think he might not understand about a family?

  Mrs. Barrett, however, accepted the head shake and continued the lecture. “The Bible tells us that marriage—and what goes with it—is for the purpose of being fruitful, of bringing issue into the world. If you can’t do that, then . . . relations are unnecessary. Oh, there are those”—her voice began to rise—”there are those, I know there a
re those, who use the flesh for other means, who defile the purity of the flesh for pleasure, but they shall have their reward! They shall be purified in the refiner’s fire! They shall . . .”

  She stopped suddenly to look at Rhodes. The room seemed to echo with her voice.

  “I see what you mean,” Rhodes said. For the first time he was getting a glimpse of Mrs. Barrett’s fervor, and he was beginning to understand why Hod went out walking. “Does your husband feel the same way?” he asked.

  Mrs. Barrett spoke in her lecturing tone once more. “I’m afraid that Hod is not a purely Christian man,” she said. “He tries to be, I think, but he won’t go to my church with me. The Devil still has a little bit of a hold on him. He feels the call of the flesh, but that sin will be on his own head, not mine.”

  Rhodes wondered about the church Mrs. Barrett must attend, but he didn’t ask. Instead he said, “Do you think Hod’s need for ‘the flesh’ might cause Hod to stray from the right path?” He might not be in the congregation of Mrs. Barrett’s church, but his upbringing had prepared him to talk to people like her in their own language.

  “Hod has made errors in this life, Sheriff, as we all have, but I do not believe that he has strayed that far. Oh yes, I know what you must be thinking. You think that maybe he visited that floozie Jeanne for carnal pleasure. I could tell that you had that very thought in mind from the beginning.” Her voice was cold now, cold as one of the blue northers that swept down on Thurston from the Panhandle in January. “But I don’t believe he did. Surely he would not dare to transgress God’s law so openly.”

  Rhodes stood up, and Mrs. Barrett immediately walked to the chair in which he had been sitting, straightening the antimacassar on the plump back.

  “Well,” Rhodes said, “I guess that’s all for now Mrs. Barrett. You did know that Hod was going out at night, though?”

  “Of course I knew, Sheriff, but I never said anything. A man may be a born deceiver, but sooner or later he deceives no one but himself.”