by Bill Crider
“Rapper?”
“That’s the one. You shouldn’t be hasslin’ him, Sheriff. He’s a good ol’ boy, wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
Rhodes had to smile at that. It was about as far from describing Rapper as you could get.
“Have you seen him tonight?” he asked.
The one in the T-shirt didn’t smile. He didn’t look as if he knew how.
He said, “Nope, we ain’t seen him tonight. And we won’t see him, either. You scared him so bad, he’s left the county.”
Rhodes smiled again. If these two got any funnier, they could get their own sitcom.
“I didn’t know he scared so easily. And I’m surprised he’d run off and leave his buddy in jail.”
“Don’t you worry about Nellie. He’ll be out in the mornin’, soon as he pays his fine.”
“I wasn’t worrying about him. I’m going to have to ask him a few questions before he leaves, though. And I’d like to talk to Rapper again.”
“Look, Sheriff,” the one with the teeth said, “all we want is to be left alone. We didn’t come here to make any trouble for you, and we’ll be leavin’ quietly.”
Rhodes didn’t believe a word of it. Quietly wasn’t in Rapper’s vocabulary.
“You tell Rapper I want to talk to him,” Rhodes said. “Tell him that I don’t think it would be a good idea for him to leave the county without coming by to see me. I’d have to see to it that he was arrested and brought back.
The two men glanced at one another, then looked back at Rhodes. T-shirt took a step closer to the sheriff. He was close enough to touch now, if Rhodes had wanted to touch him, which of course he didn’t, because he could also smell him. He smelled as if he hadn’t had a bath in quite a while. Within, say, the last couple of years.
“People don’t tell Rapper what to do and what not to do,” T-shirt said.
“I do,” Rhodes said. “Maybe you’re forgetting that I’m the sheriff.”
“We’re not forgettin’. We’re just wonderin’ how come you think you can talk so big without any deputies to back you up.”
Rhodes hadn’t thought he’d need any backup at The County Line. He hadn’t counted on any trouble.
“I don’t need any deputies. If you two make trouble, I’ll have to take you in. Ask Rapper. Or ask Nellie. They can tell you.”
T-shirt had apparently already spoken to Rapper, or, if not, he seemed to know that Rhodes meant what he said. He stepped back.
“We ain’t gonna cause any trouble. We’re just tellin’ you to lay off Rapper. He’s not mixed up in any murder. And you could be sorry if you keep on hasslin’ him.”
“Maybe Nellie can tell me what I want to know,” Rhodes said. “Since I already have him, I’ll ask him. That way, Rapper won’t be bothered so much.”
“Nellie won’t tell you a thing. That’s not the way Nellie operates.”
“Maybe not, but it won’t hurt to try.”
Rhodes was tired of the conversation. It wasn’t going anywhere. He walked between the two men, brushing his shoulder against the leather jacket. The man stepped aside, putting his foot into a puddle of rainwater.
“Son of a bitch!” he said.
Rhodes stopped and turned around. The two men looked at him; Rhodes looked back. After a few seconds, they dropped their eyes.
Leather Jacket looked down at his foot. He was wearing a heavy motorcycle boot, made darker by the water that had soaked into it.
“That water’s cold,” he said. He shook his foot as if hoping to dry it.
Rhodes said, “Better go put on some dry socks. You could catch a cold if you don’t take care of yourself, and dry that boot at room temperature. That way the leather won’t crack.” He turned to walk away. “You fellas drive carefully now.”
“You’re the one that better be careful,” T-shirt called after him. “You never know what kind of mess you might get into.”
Rhodes didn’t bother to turn around and answer him, but the truth was that Rhodes had a pretty good idea. He’d been in too many messes before.
Chapter Ten
It was not quite nine o’clock, so Rhodes thought it wouldn’t be too late to drive by and have his talk with Nancy Meredith. Maybe she would be a little more forthcoming than Rapper’s two friends.
There were several cars parked in front of the Meredith house when he got there. The relatives had begun to arrive. Rhodes was met at the door by Nancy’s mother, a short, bird-like woman who told him that her daughter was too distraught to talk to him.
Rhodes was about to leave when Nancy came up behind her mother and said, “If it’s about Brady, I can talk to him. Maybe he knows who did it.”
Rhodes said that he didn’t know but that she might be able to help him if she answered a few questions.
“We can talk in the TV room, then,” Nancy said, ignoring her mother’s obvious disapproval. “Everybody else is in the kitchen.”
The TV room was a small bedroom that had been converted into an entertainment area. There was a couch against one wall and a television set with a 27-inch screen was against the opposite wall. The only other furniture in the room was a small end table by the arm of the couch. A copy of the latest Reader’s Digest lay on the table.
Nancy Meredith sat on the couch, and since there wasn’t any other choice, Rhodes sat beside her. He looked around and saw her mother hovering in the doorway.
“It’s all right, Mother,” Nancy said. “I’ll be fine. You go on in with the others. I’ll be there when we’re done.”
Her mother stood indecisively for a few seconds and then turned and walked away without a word.
“Now, then,” Nancy said. “What did you want to ask me, Sheriff?”
“In cases like this we have to deal with some pretty delicate matters,” Rhodes said. “I hope you won’t think I’m trying to discredit your husband’s memory by anything I have to say.”
“You’re talking about that Deedham bitch, aren’t you?”
Rhodes was a little shocked at her choice of words. He was a little old-fashioned, and it seemed strange to him to hear a coach’s wife use language like that.
“Uh, maybe,” he said.
“Oh, don’t be so embarrassed,” Nancy said. “I knew about her, all right. She’d been after Brady for more than a year. He’d sneak off to that honky tonk, thinking I didn’t know that she’d be there. He should have known you can’t fool a wife about those things.”
“Who told you she’d be there?”
“Nobody had to tell me. I could see the way she’d look at him when she didn’t think Bob and I were watching. She had to meet him somewhere.”
“Bob knew, too?”
“Of course he did. Brady wasn’t the first one she’d made a run at.”
“Who else?”
“Roy Kenner, for one. But his wife’s like me. She knew that Roy had better sense than to get hooked up with someone like Terry.”
Rhodes was beginning to wish that he’d taken on the questioning of the Deedhams personally. Purely academic curiosity, he told himself. Nothing to do with getting a look at Terry.
“How did Bob take all this?”
“That’s hard to say. He’s really wrapped up in his job, you know? I think that’s part of Terry’s problem, really, and I’m sorry I called her a bitch, even if she is one. She probably doesn’t have much of a home life. But Brady does.” She caught herself. “Did, I mean. So does Roy Kenner. They didn’t need her.”
Rhodes thought that it might be a good idea to have a talk with Roy Kenner anyway.
“Brady needed to go to The County Line,” he said. “Or he thought he did. Home life or not.”
“There was nothing wrong with him going out there. I knew he went, and I didn’t mind. He needed some way to blow off a little steam after a week of building up to the game. There’s a lot of pressure on a coach, and it doesn’t get any better when you start winning. He thought it was a good idea to go where there was a little music and some bright l
ights, and somewhere that was a long way from town so no one would see him and comment on it.”
“What about the people who saw him there? There must have been a lot of them.”
“They weren’t in any position to criticize, you know? Anyway, he never drank much, and he never stayed out there very long.”
She didn’t seem upset at all by her husband’s having had a few beers each weekend, though the fact that Terry Deedham had met him at the honky tonk bothered her a little. Rhodes thought it might be a good idea to probe that some more.
“Did he ever dance with Terry? There’s a lot of dancing at The County Line.”
Nancy Meredith sat up a little straighter. “I never asked him. I knew she went out there, but I trusted Brady, and that was enough for me.”
“How did you know about her going out there?”
“You hear things. She went all the time. I’ll bet she was very popular with some people.”
“And you don’t know how Bob reacted to that?”
“He didn’t like it, I’m sure. Would you, if it were your wife? But if you’re wondering whether he was jealous enough to kill Brady, I’m sure I don’t know. If he was, and if he did, I hope you put him so far back in that jail of yours that he never sees the light of day again.”
The jail wasn’t quite that big, but Rhodes didn’t see any need to mention it.
“There are a couple of other things,” he said.
Nancy looked down at her hands, which were clasped in her lap. She rubbed her thumbs together and said, “All right. Go ahead.”
“It has to do with gambling,” Rhodes said. “I saw someone that looked a lot like Brady talking to Hayes Ford just before the game last night. Do you know who Hayes Ford is?”
“I know who he is, all right, and I can tell you for sure Brady didn’t gamble,” Nancy said, but her voice weakened at the end, and Rhodes knew she was covering something up.
“Were you two in debt? Did you need money?”
Nancy looked away, and Rhodes said, “You might as well tell me. I can find out anyway.”
Nancy stood up and walked over to the TV set. Then she turned to Rhodes.
“It’s Brady’s father,” she said. “He’s got Alzheimer’s.”
For her, that seemed to explain everything, but it wasn’t enough for Rhodes. He asked her to go on.
“Do you know how much nursing homes charge? Nearly three thousand dollars a month, at least, and that doesn’t count medicine.”
Rhodes knew what she was getting at now.
“Brady’s mother is still alive,” he said.
“That’s right. And that means she has to pay for his father’s care until she’s reduced to two thousand dollars in the bank. The government will help out then. Oh, and she gets to keep her house and her car. Isn’t that nice?”
“So Brady was trying to help her?”
“He and his brother. It’s quite a strain on our finances, even with both of us teaching. We’ve been sending some money, but Brady wouldn’t talk about where he got it. I don’t know what will happen to his mother now. I guess she’ll lose everything.”
“So Brady gambled to get money.”
“I don’t know that,” Nancy Meredith said.
“But you suspect it.”
“I’m not sure. Someone used to call here and ask for Brady. He’d never give his name, but I thought I heard Brady call him ‘Ford’ once.”
Rhodes didn’t know much about the University Interscholastic League’s rules, but it seemed likely that Clearview would have to forfeit its games if it were proven that Brady had been gambling. Rhodes hated to think what that might mean to the town.
“What about money changing hands?”
“I don’t know anything about that. I know Brady was sending money home, but we never had much in the bank, that’s for sure.”
Which didn’t prove anything. Brady could have been using cash. Or, if he’d been winning, he could have been taking cash. That’s the only way Hayes Ford worked, in fact. No need in letting the IRS get its hands on your hard-earned money if it could be avoided.
“There’s still something else,” Rhodes said.
Nancy seemed to grow even smaller.
“You’re not joking, are you?” she asked. She looked at Rhodes and shook her head. “No, you wouldn’t joke about something like that. What else, then?”
“I’ve heard a rumor that some of the players are taking steroids,” he said.
Nancy giggled with relief. “That’s one thing you don’t have to worry about involving Brady in. He hated drugs. He didn’t even like to take aspirin when he had a headache. He always said he didn’t like the idea of letting some drug have more control over his body and mind than he did. He didn’t even like for the boys to drink caffeine.”
Rhodes was beginning to wonder just how reliable a source Goober Vance was. Most of his suggestions were turning out to be nothing more than gossip, and gossip that didn’t have much of a basis in fact.
If Nancy were telling the truth, and Rhodes believed that she was, Brady wasn’t chasing Terry Deedham; she was chasing him. And unless Jasper Knowles, his wife, and Nancy were all lying, no one had heard the rumors about steroids.
But Rhodes still felt that Rapper was mixed up in things somehow, and to Rhodes that meant drugs of some kind or another. He wasn’t going to give up that angle just yet.
“I notice that there aren’t any ashtrays in the house,” Rhodes said. “I suppose that with your husband’s attitude toward drugs, he didn’t smoke.”
“He hated smoking,” Nancy said. “That was the one thing he didn’t like about The County Line. His clothes always smelled like smoke after he’d been there.”
Rhodes knew what she meant. “And I guess he had strict rules for the players.”
“He sure did. Smoking was one thing he and Jasper agreed on.”
“They didn’t always agree on what plays to call, did they?”
“Not always. They got into a few arguments about it, because Brady was a little bull-headed about calling what he thought was right. I guess that’s what happened last night.”
Rhodes wasn’t so sure about that. He was practically convinced that Brady had been involved in shaving points, or trying to. He didn’t know how he was going to prove it, though.
“There’s one thing I want you to know, Sheriff,” Nancy said, breaking in on Rhodes’ thoughts.
“What’s that?”
“I loved Brady, and I want you to find out who killed him. I can accept that he’s dead, but he was a good man, no matter what you’ve been thinking. He had a few drinks, but that was just one night a week. He didn’t chase that Deedham woman, and he didn’t let his players take steroids. He might have gambled, or he might not. I can’t say for sure about that. I don’t like to think that he did, but he might have. He needed money, all right. Anyway, none of that matters to me. What matters is that he was a good husband and I loved him. Somebody has to pay for killing him. I want you to promise me that you’ll find out who it was and make sure they suffer for it.”
It was a promise that Rhodes would have liked to make, but he knew that he couldn’t. He’d do what he could to find the killer. That was his job. Making the killer suffer wasn’t. But he didn’t have to tell Nancy Meredith that.
“I’ll do what I can,” he said, and that was the truth.
Lawton and Hack were waiting for Rhodes when he got to the jail. He knew that spelled trouble, but he didn’t know what kind. He also knew that it wouldn’t do any good to ask, but he did it anyway.
“Has there been anything going on tonight?”
Lawton cut a glance at Hack. Hack, being the dispatcher, claimed first right to tell all the stories, though Lawton often tried to jump in first. If he did, that just made things worse, and Rhodes hoped he’d keep his mouth shut.
But he didn’t. He said, “Been a criminal assault.”
Rhodes had been feeling tired, but he got a sudden jolt of adrenaline
that perked him right up. An assault was trouble, right enough.
He was afraid there’d be another assault, too, when Hack jumped on Lawton for taking over the story. Much to Rhodes’ surprise, it didn’t happen.
He didn’t ask why. He could come back to that later. Right now he had to find out about the assault and who’d handled it. “Where did it happen?” he asked.
“At Wal-Mart’s,” Lawton said.
“Wal-Mart?”
Another surprise. Wal-Mart wasn’t the kind of place where assaults generally occurred, though of course Lige Ward had been known to chain himself to the doors there on more than one occasion before his unfortunate demise.
“That’s right, Wal-Mart’s, right there just inside the front door.”
“Who investigated?” Rhodes asked.
“Ruth,” Hack said, finally getting in a word. “Henry pulled her car out of the ditch and brought it in, so I thought she might as well go.”
Rhodes knew that Ruth could handle herself, but he would have thought Buddy a more likely candidate to check out an assault case.
“Who got assaulted?” he asked.
“Didn’t say it was a who,” Lawton told him.
“What?”
“That’s right,” Lawton said.
“What’s right?”
“That’s what I said.”
Rhodes sank down in the chair at his desk. It had finally happened, just as he’d always been afraid that it would. His conversation with Lawton and Hack had finally turned into an Abbott and Costello routine.
He took a deep breath, and said, “Let me get this straight. There’s been an assault at Wal-Mart. Is that right?”
“Right,” Hack and Lawton said together.
“So far, so good. Now. Who got assaulted?”
“Not who,” Lawton said. “What.”
“What?”
“That’s right.”
And I-Don’t-Know’s on third, Rhodes thought. He wished he had a Dr Pepper.
“Tell me what happened,” he said. “From the beginning. Very slowly.”
“I told you,” Lawton said.
“Go over it again. But do a better job of it.”
Lawton looked insulted. “Well, like I said, there was this assault at Wal-Mart’s.”
