by Bill Crider
“What’s the son of a bitch done this time?” she asked.
Rhodes recalled that son of a bitch was one of Yvonne’s favorite phrases, one that she didn’t use exclusively when referring to Grat. She’d called Rhodes that on more than one occasion, but he was pretty sure that this time she meant Grat.
“Can I come in?” he said.
“Sure, why not,” Yvonne said. “Nobody here but me and Alex Trebek.”
She let Rhodes into a small living room that was dominated by a thirty-two-inch TV set on which three Jeopardy contestants were confronted with the answer, “He wrote The Autobiography of Malcolm X before he discovered his roots.”
“Alex Haley,” Yvonne said before a contestant buzzed in.
“Not bad,” Rhodes said when she proved to be right.
“Men like women with brains,” Yvonne said.
Rhodes wondered if that was her secret, since her physical appearance didn’t seem to provide a clue. But then he wasn’t much of a judge.
“You can have a seat if you want to,” Yvonne said, turning off the TV set with the remote.
Maybe it wasn’t her brain, Rhodes thought. Maybe it was her gracious manners.
He looked around the room for a place to sit. There was a couch, a recliner, and a wooden straight-backed rocker to choose from. He sat in the rocker, and Yvonne sat on the couch where she could reach the nearly full ashtray on the coffee table. The whole house smelled like smoke.
“You still haven’t told me what the son of a bitch did,” Yvonne said.
“If you’re talking about Grat, I’m not sure whether he did anything. Did he go out to his fishing place last night?”
Yvonne stubbed out her cigarette and picked up a package of Marlboros and a red plastic lighter from the coffee table. She shook a cigarette out of the pack and lit it.
“Yeah, he went out there,” she said, exhaling smoke. “Said he needed to think about his part in the Fourth of July jamboree. I don’t know what there was to think about. All he does is the announcing. He just reads what they give him, and they haven’t given him anything yet. You’d think he could stay here and read over it anyway.”
Rhodes wondered why Grat had left, too. It seemed to Rhodes that if a man’s wife were straying, the man might want to stay at home with her. Maybe she wouldn’t go anywhere if he was there. Or maybe that was too simple an answer to be worth anything.
“Have you heard from him today?”
“Who, Grat? Why should I hear from him? What’s the matter? What’s he done?”
“Does Grat drink much?”
“Drink? Of course he drinks. You can’t live without drinking. The body’s more than ninety percent water, you know.”
Rhodes said he didn’t know but that he wasn’t talking about water.
“You mean liquor, then? I guess he drank a little. Everybody drinks a little. Well, maybe sheriffs don’t. But everybody else does. Why? Why are you asking all these questions?”
Rhodes hated to tell her what he had to say next. In all his years in law enforcement, he had never found a good way to tell someone that a relative or friend was dead, and in this case it might not even be true. He hated to alarm someone unnecessarily. But he didn’t see anything else to do, so he went ahead.
“There was a fire out there at the house near Grat’s fishing hole,” he said. “The whole house burned.”
“Grat,” Yvonne said. “What about Grat?”
“The firemen found a body in the house. I don’t know that it’s Grat. That’s what I’m trying to find out.”
“That son of a bitch!” Yvonne said. She threw her cigarette in the ashtray. “That son of a bitch! He can’t do this to me. He can’t go and die on me! It’s not right!”
And then she started to cry. Not quietly, not with gentle sobs, but with great gasps and wailing. Rhodes had never seen anyone react quite so frenziedly to the news that her husband might be dead.
In fact, Yvonne was so wracked with sobbing that Rhodes didn’t know quite what to do, and he found himself going to the couch, sitting beside her, and putting his arms around her, which was really out of the ordinary for him and made him feel vaguely uncomfortable.
His comforting, such as it was, didn’t help. Yvonne continued to cry, and her body jerked spasmodically. Rhodes was afraid she might have some kind of seizure, but he kept on sitting there, holding her and hoping that she would eventually cry herself out.
It happened, but it took awhile. Rhodes was in no position to check his watch, but he was sure the crying went on for at least five minutes. Finally it subsided, and the jerking slowed down to nothing more than hiccups.
Rhodes released Yvonne and said, “I’ll get you a drink of water.”
He didn’t ask where the kitchen was. He figured he could find it, and he didn’t want Yvonne to try to tell him. He was sure that she couldn’t complete a sentence.
The kitchen was, in fact, easy enough to find. Rhodes opened a cabinet, found a glass, and filled it at the tap. He found a roll of paper towels and tore off a couple. Then he took the water and the towels back into the living room and handed the towels to Yvonne. She used them to dry her face, and a lot of her makeup came off on them. She crumpled them into a ball and threw them on the coffee table.
Rhodes gave her the water. Her hand still was shaky, and she slopped a little of the water into the ashtray, but Rhodes thought that was a good thing. The water put out the still-smoldering cigarette that she had dropped there. It wouldn’t do to have another Bilson burning down a house and dying in the fire, especially not right after a visit with the sheriff. Much less while he was still there.
Yvonne drank the entire glass of water and set the empty glass on the coffee table. Rhodes thought that it would probably make a ring, but that didn’t seem worth mentioning at the moment.
“Are you going to be all right?” he asked.
Yvonne hiccupped and said, “Yes.”
Rhodes wasn’t sure he should believe her. Her eyes were red, and her face was haggard.
“Is there someone I can call?” he asked.
“No. I’ll call somebody myself. When you’re gone.”
Rhodes could recognize subtle hints when he heard them, but he was good at ignoring them. He said, “I know it’s upsetting to think that Grat might be dead. But he might not be. The body hasn’t been identified.”
“It’s him. It’s just like the son of a bitch to go kill himself and leave me alone.”
Judging from all he’d heard about Yvonne, Rhodes didn’t think she’d be alone for very long. However, after the display she’d just put on, he wasn’t sure.
On the other hand, he wondered if the weeping had all been nothing but a big show for his benefit. Maybe he was getting too cynical, but Yvonne had never demonstrated much affection for Grat in the past, and she was one person who’d known for sure where he was the previous night. What if she’d decided to get rid of him once and for all, with the idea that no one would ever suspect a woman who was so overwhelmed with grief and who seemed to believe that her husband had killed himself?
Rhodes decided that he shouldn’t be thinking along those lines. While he was pretty sure that Grat’s body was the one that had been found, there was no reason to suspect that he’d been murdered. Yet.
“I don’t think whoever it was killed himself. It might not have been Grat. We don’t know for sure.”
“How did he die, then? Whoever he was.”
“It looks like an accident, like he was smoking in bed and drinking heavily. He must’ve dropped a cigarette onto the mattress.”
“That sounds like a good possibility. There’s just one thing wrong with it, as far as Grat’s concerned.”
“What?” Rhodes asked.
“Grat didn’t smoke,” Yvonne said.
9
RHODES WASN’T SURE WHAT TO MAKE OF HIS VISIT WITH YVONNE Bilson. The more he thought about her behavior, the more he wondered how much of it had been real and how much had bee
n for show.
The way she had questioned him when he first mentioned Grat’s name, for example, was a little bothersome. What was that all about? Was she simply concerned about her husband, or was she setting Rhodes up for all the moaning and wailing that were to come later?
One thing was certain, however. The fact that Grat didn’t smoke made it a lot more likely that the fire hadn’t been accidental.
It was easier than people thought to set up something that looked like an accidental death, as Rhodes knew from some of his recent experiences. It was one thing to set something up, however; fooling everyone involved was a different matter.
Yvonne had been feeling somewhat better when Rhodes left. She was, or claimed to be, convinced that the dead man couldn’t be Grat. After all, if he didn’t smoke, he couldn’t very well have burned himself up by smoking in bed.
She didn’t mention the other possibility, the one that was worrying Rhodes; that the body was Grat’s, all right, but that he’d been murdered. Rhodes didn’t bring it up, either. He didn’t want to set off another round of grieving, whether real or faked. And he wondered if Yvonne’s failure to mention murder was deliberate. Had she thought that if she didn’t bring it up, Rhodes wouldn’t think of it on his own?
There were some other nettlesome questions. If the body wasn’t Grat, who was it? And where was Grat? If it was Grat, or even if it wasn’t, what had caused the fire?
Rhodes didn’t like questions like those.
Ballinger’s Funeral Home was located in a well-preserved example of what once would have been called a mansion. The grounds had held both a swimming pool and tennis courts, luxuries found at no other home in Clearview. For that matter, no other home in Clearview even had grounds.
Clyde Ballinger had bought the place after the death of the last member of the family who had owned it, and converted the mansion into his funeral home.
It had been a good choice. There was nothing somber about the place. The tennis courts and swimming pool were long gone, but the oak trees in front of the building remained, and the tall white columns on the porch recalled an earlier, simpler time.
Rhodes drove around to the back, where Ballinger had his office in a brick building that had once served as the servants’ quarters, in the days when there had been one or two people in Clearview rich enough to have servants.
The door was closed, and there was no bell, so Rhodes knocked. Ballinger was inside and called for him to come in. The office was not where Ballinger met his potential clients. That was inside the main building. This place was his personal refuge, and it was where he went when he wanted to get away from his business and relax for a minute or two. It was littered with paperback books, most of them forty years old or older and most of them by writers Rhodes had never heard of. Ballinger picked the books up at garage sales and flea markets and claimed he liked to read them because they were short.
“Not a hundred and fifty pages of story and five hundred pages of padding like the books they write these days,” he’d once told Rhodes. “You get the hundred and fifty pages of story, and that’s it.”
Rhodes didn’t have a lot of time for reading, so he’d never found out for himself. He just took Ballinger’s word for it.
When Rhodes walked through the door, Ballinger said, “Hot enough for you?”
“I’ve already been told I can’t go around shooting people for saying that,” Rhodes told him. “Otherwise, you’d be one of your own customers.”
“I’m training somebody to take care of me,” Ballinger said. “I want to look natural.”
He picked up a book from his desk and held it so that Rhodes could see the cover. It looked more like a magazine than a book, and it was called Body and Passion. Below the title, a red-haired woman in a low-cut yellow dress reclined on a couch or bed of some kind. Her fear-filled face stared off the cover at the reader. She wasn’t wearing any shoes. Beside the bed was an apprehensive-looking man, shirt collar undone and bow tie drooping down. He was also staring at something. Behind them was a circular mirror, and reflected in it was what appeared to be a dapper mummy in a tuxedo. Rhodes figured that the man and woman were supposed to be looking at the mummy, who must have walked in on them.
“They don’t write ’em like this anymore,” Ballinger said. “But they ought to.”
“Why’s that?” Rhodes asked.
“Because they’re like real life,” Ballinger said. “Sort of. See, the guy all wrapped up in bandages has been in this big fire. He survived, but he’s burned so bad that nobody knows who he is. And to top it all off, he’s got amnesia. Even he doesn’t know who he is.”
“So you’re telling me that the man from Grat Bilson’s place is alive?” Rhodes said. “All wrapped up in bandages at the hospital?”
Ballinger put the book down on his desk beside a stack of others.
“Nope, I’m not telling you that. Whoever they brought in here about a half hour ago is dead as he can get. But the point is, we don’t know who it is, do we?”
“No, we don’t,” Rhodes said.
“Wonder if it’ll turn out the way it did in the book.”
“The man in the book was alive.”
“Yeah. But in the book there were two men in the place that burned down. One of them was dead, and one was alive. Nobody knew which was which.”
“You didn’t mention that part.”
“Well, now I am.”
“Are you trying to tell me that there were two people in the fire at Grat’s place?”
“No, but it would sure be interesting if there were, wouldn’t it?”
“I don’t need that kind of interest,” Rhodes said. “I think the one body is going to be trouble enough.”
“I called Hack. He said you were out talking to Mrs. Bilson.”
“I talked to her. She’s convinced that it’s not Grat’s body.”
“I’d just about bet that it is. Who else could it be? He owned that place out there and spent a good bit of time there. Has anyone else turned up missing today?”
“Not that I’ve heard about.”
“There you are, then.”
“I think we’d better wait for a positive ID before we make up our minds about who’s dead and who’s not. Have you called Dr. White?”
“He’ll do the autopsy tonight. I called Dr. Lewis, too.”
Dr. Lewis was one of Clearview’s two dentists. There had been another one, a Dr. Samuel Martin, but he’d been killed a few years earlier, after having a curse put on him by someone who rented a house from him.
“Thanks,” Rhodes said. “Sometimes I think the county pays me too much, what with you doing most of the hard work.”
Ballinger gave a dismissive wave.
“Think nothing of it. Glad to do it. I knew you’d need the dental records and someone to do the examination. Lewis was Bilson’s dentist, so he was the logical guy.”
Rhodes didn’t ask how Ballinger knew who Bilson’s dentist was. He said, “I wonder if this will have any effect on the Fourth of July activities.”
“If it’s Bilson, it will. The historical societies will be in a real tizzy, and they run the show.”
“There weren’t going to be any fireworks, anyway.”
“Yeah, but there was going to be a fun run, and the historical pageant. Not to mention the crafts show and the band concert.”
“The show must go on.”
“We’ll see,” Ballinger said.
Back at the jail, Rhodes let Hack fill him in on what else was happening in the county.
“Got a call from down around Thurston,” Hack said. “Lots of shootin’ goin’ on.”
Hack, and Lawton when he was there, delighted in being as vague as possible in order to keep Rhodes guessing for as long as they could. Rhodes sometimes suspected that they had a secret plot to drive him crazy, but he hadn’t been able to prove it.
“Shooting in town or outside of town?” he asked.
“Pretty close to town. It was Hod Barre
tt that called it in.”
Hod Barrett had a little grocery store in the town of Thurston. He wasn’t one of Rhodes’s biggest fans.
“Did somebody shoot at Hod?” Rhodes asked.
“Nope. It ain’t like we live in Houston, where they have those drive-by shootings. This wasn’t like that.”
“What was it like?” Rhodes asked.
He knew he wasn’t going to get a straight answer, but he thought it was worth a try.
“It was like guns goin’ off, pop, pop, pop,” Hack said. “Like that.”
“I know what guns sound like,” Rhodes said, not adding that they didn’t go pop, pop, pop.
“There were a lot of ’em,” Hack said.
“What was going on? A war?”
“You don’t have to be sarcastic,” Hack said.
“Sorry. I was just wondering if you were going to get to the point.”
“You’re gettin’ mighty touchy these days,” Hack said. “Are you feelin’ okay?”
“I’m fine,” Rhodes said.
“You might try takin’ a good multivitamin. I don’t think you eat right.”
“I think we’re getting off the subject,” Rhodes said, though he knew that had probably been Hack’s intention.
“Maybe so. What were we talkin’ about?”
“Guns,” Rhodes said. “Pop, pop, pop.”
“Right. There was a lot of ’em.”
“You said that.”
“I did? Must be gettin’ absentminded in my old age. Anyway, it’s the truth.”
“What were they shooting at, and who was doing the shooting?”
“Kids,” Hack said.
That was a little more specific. Rhodes figured Hack was tired of the game, so he pressed his advantage.
“Kids. Okay. Now, what were they shooting at?”
“Armadillos,” Hack said. “There was six or seven kids, prob’ly all about thirteen, all out with their .22s. They must’ve decided there were too many armadillos around Thurston, and they were goin’ to thin the population.”
