by Bill Crider
“I don’t think we have any around,” Allen said. “What’s this all about, anyway?”
“You can make poison with those things. Did you know that?”
Allen looked away, first up at the strips that hung from the ceiling and then off to one side.
“Poison?” Allen said. “No. I didn’t know that. Who cares?”
“Jay Beaman, for one,” Rhodes said. He felt tired. Maybe it was all the mud. “What I can’t figure out is how you got mixed up in all this. I thought it was Beaman, but it was you all along.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Allen said, but Rhodes could tell that he knew, all right.
“I should’ve figured it out when I saw the way Beaman lived,” Rhodes said. “He had an old house that needed a lot of work. His lake house was even worse. It looked like something he might’ve built himself on weekends. But your house, well, that’s a little different.”
“You know why my house is big. I have a lot of kids.”
“You sure do. Which makes me wonder how you can afford to keep the place up like you do. It looks a lot better than the one Beaman lived in. And that paved road of yours should have been the tip-off. You and Oliver were working together, weren’t you?”
Allen looked as if he might be sick. He said, “What’s Oliver got to do with anything?”
“He’s the one who poisoned Beaman. You knew about it, though, didn’t you?”
“Beaman? I thought he hit his head during that fight with you.”
“No, you didn’t think that. You helped make the poison that killed him, or maybe you made it by yourself. I don’t know, but I think you’ll tell me. Killing Beaman might have been Oliver’s idea, but you were in on it. Oliver’s already in jail, by the way. I’m sure he’ll start talking before long, so you might as well get your side of the story told first. Sometimes it’s better that way.”
“I don’t have a side,” Allen said. “I don’t have a story. Look, Dan, you’ve known me since we were kids. You know I wouldn’t do something crazy like that.”
Rhodes was sorry that he had to hear the pleading note in his old friend’s voice. He was even sorrier that he knew Allen was guilty.
“There was a time I wouldn’t have thought you’d do it,” Rhodes said. “But people change, I guess. Here’s what I think happened. I think Grat Bilson, while he was snooping around and trying to dig up some dirt on Beaman, found something on you instead. He didn’t feel about you the way he felt about Beaman, so maybe he called you up and asked you to talk things over with him. Maybe he even thought you could help him get Beaman, and if you could, well, he’d just forget what he knew about you. But things didn’t work out, you argued, and you hit him with a whiskey bottle that happened to be sitting around. You probably didn’t mean to kill him. It was an accident. I know that.”
Allen didn’t say anything. The man that Allen had been talking to earlier left the barn, waving in Allen’s direction as he did. Allen didn’t wave back. Rhodes didn’t think Allen even saw the other man leave.
“You didn’t know what to do,” Rhodes went on, “so you thought it would be a good idea to make people think Grat had died in a fire. You doused him with whiskey and gasoline and set the fire. I never did find the gas can. I figure you put it in the back of your truck and forgot about it.”
Allen looked over his shoulder as if his truck were parked right there.
“The can’s still there, huh?” Rhodes said. “Well, don’t worry too much about that. We probably can’t prove it was Grat’s in the first place, unless he had his name on it. But we have your fingerprints on the whiskey bottle.”
Rhodes was only guessing about the fingerprints, since the report hadn’t come back. But Allen didn’t know that.
“I don’t know how Beaman got onto you,” Rhodes said. “But I’d bet he figured it out because of things Grat was saying and that Jennifer Loam talked to him about. Beaman knew that if there was any bribing going on, he wasn’t getting his share, and he knew he wasn’t furnishing any county help to work on Oliver’s house. He thought maybe it was you, and Grat might have confirmed it to him. The next election, you’d have been in big trouble, and Beaman wouldn’t have had to worry about his fireworks stands anymore.”
“Fireworks stands?”
“He owned every one of them in the county,” Rhodes said. “That’s why he was going to let the world know about you. So he could get you off his case. Bilson must have told you that he knew about you and Oliver, and I think Beaman suspected that you killed Bilson. So you went to Oliver, and the two of you decided to get rid of Beaman. Oliver might have put the poison on the ribs, but you’re the one who told him how to make it. You had the strips right here.”
“I have kids in college,” Allen said. “I have five more who want to go. I needed money, and Oliver made it seem like working with him wasn’t really a bad thing to do.”
“It would’ve been tough for you to send your kids to college without Oliver’s money, but you could’ve managed it somehow. It’s going to be a lot tougher on them now.”
Allen’s shoulders sagged. He said, “Ralph and I didn’t think anybody would check for the poison. We thought everyone would just think it was a heart attack.”
“That might have worked,” Rhodes said. “But it was a long chance. It got even longer when we had to do the autopsy.”
“What’s my wife going to think? What about my kids?”
“I don’t know,” Rhodes said. “I just don’t know.”
The front that had brought the rain passed on through. It took the humidity with it, leaving the air dry and the sky clear. It was a long time until fall, and there would be more days to come when the temperature climbed past one hundred degrees, but the hot, dry night didn’t feel nearly as oppressive as the moisture-laden afternoon.
When Rhodes got home after a long interview with Jennifer Loam, he saw fireflies sparkling in the grass in the backyard. Speedo was sitting on his haunches, watching Yancey, who was trying to catch fireflies. He wasn’t having much luck. Either they would flicker out and he would lose them or they would fly up over his head, causing him to bounce up on his hind legs, yipping and pawing at the empty air where they had just been.
The dog’s antics cheered Rhodes up a little. He was feeling as bad about arresting a man as he’d ever felt before, which was a shame. There was no reason to feel bad. James Allen was guilty, after all. But Rhodes had never had to jail a friend before, a man he’d known for more years than he liked to think about. And he felt sorry for Allen’s family. It would take them a long time to recover from what Allen had done, if they ever did. Allen should have thought of that, of course, but Rhodes was pretty sure most people never really considered the consequences of their actions. They just did what they thought would benefit them most at the time.
Ivy was standing on the porch, watching the dogs and waiting for Rhodes. He wasn’t looking forward to telling her about Allen, but he knew she’d want to know.
He walked on over to the porch and looked up at her.
“Hot enough for you?” he said.
ALSO BY BILL CRIDER
SHERIFF DAN RHODES MYSTERIES
A Romantic Way to Die
A Ghost of a Chance
Death by Accident
Winning Can Be Murder
Murder Most Fowl
Booked for a Hanging
Evil at the Root
Death on the Move
Cursed to Death
Shotgun Saturday Night
Too Late to Die
PROFESSOR SALLY GOOD MYSTERIES
Murder Is an Art
A Knife in the Back
PROFESSOR CARL BURNS MYSTERIES
A Dangerous Thing
Dying Voices
One Dead Dean
OTHERS
The Texas Capitol Murders
Blood Marks
THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
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sp; RED, WHITE, AND BLUE MURDER. Copyright © 2003 by Bill Crider. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.minotaurbooks.com
eISBN 9781466818774
First eBook Edition : March 2012
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Crider, Bill, 1941–
Red, white and blue murder / Bill Crider.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-312-27185-9
1. Rhodes, Dan (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Fourth of July—Fiction. 3. Sheriffs—Fiction. 4. Texas—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3553.R497R43 2003
813’.54—dc21
2003050622
First Edition: October 2003
