by Bill Crider
“Not exactly,” Rhodes said.
He tried another sip of coffee. It was cooler, but it didn’t taste any better. He set the cup down, clinking it against the saucer. He didn’t think he’d try it again. Enough was enough.
“It’s about me and Brady, isn’t it?” Terry said.
“That’s right,” Rhodes said. “Do you want to tell me about you two?”
Terry crushed her cigarette in the saucer and lit another one.
“There’s not much to tell. I liked Brady, but he didn’t like me.” She smiled reflectively. “That’s not really true. He liked me, but he liked that mousy little wife of his more, if you can believe that. Are you married, Sheriff?”
Rhodes said that he was.
She nodded. “It figures. The cute ones always are.”
“So are you,” Rhodes pointed out.
“True. But in my case it hardly matters.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because I’m not a football. If I were, maybe Bob would pay more attention to me.”
“How would he feel if someone else paid a little attention to you?”
“You mean Brady? I doubt that Bob would even notice, no matter who it was.”
“He noticed, all right. He saw the two of you at The County Line.”
“What? Bob was spying on me? You don’t mean that!”
Rhodes told her about his chat with Zach, the bartender.
Terry lit her third cigarette. There was a gray haze hanging around the ceiling fixture above the table.
“You wouldn’t happen to have any Dr Pepper, would you?” Rhodes said. He tapped his still-full coffee cup. “I’m not really much of a coffee drinker.”
“I’ll see.” Terry got up and looked in the refrigerator. “Sorry. Just an old bottle of Pepsi. Will that do?”
“That’s all right,” Rhodes said. He already had one of the Marlboro butts in his pocket. “I don’t need anything.”
“Zach is sure it was Bob he saw?” Terry asked when she sat back down.
“He’s sure. But come to think of it, he didn’t actually say that Bob saw you and Brady. He just said that you two were on the dance floor and that Bob was in the bar.”
“Damn. That’s about the only time I was ever even able to get Brady to dance with me. Usually he’d have a couple of beers and then he was out of there. I think he just danced with me because he was feeling sorry for me.”
“Maybe Bob didn’t see you. But why would he have been there if he wasn’t looking for you?”
“He saw me, all right. He’d never say it, though. I’m just surprised that he cared enough to follow me. Maybe he does care about something besides football.”
“Were you at The County Line on Friday night?” Rhodes asked.
“Yes. And before you ask, I’m sure plenty of people saw me there; not everybody thinks football is the only thing in the world. I’m sorry Brady’s dead; he was a nice guy. I sure didn’t kill him.”
“Did you go to the game before you went to The County Line?”
“No.” Terry waved smoke away from her face. “I don’t go to the games anymore. I’ve seen enough football to last me a lifetime.”
Rhodes could have given her a little lecture, using Velma Knowles as an example, about wives who shared their husbands’ interests, but he didn’t think it was his place to do it. And Terry had a right to her own life, after all. Maybe Bob was the one who needed the lecture.
“What time did you get home?” Rhodes asked.
“I told you that I didn’t kill Brady. Don’t you believe me?”
“I don’t know what to think right now,” Rhodes said.
“Well, I didn’t kill him. And Bob didn’t either, if that’s what you’ve been trying to get me to say. He might have followed me to The County Line, but I’m still not sure I believe that. And even if he did, he wouldn’t kill anybody because he was jealous. He’s not the least bit jealous. He hardly even knows I’m around.”
“What time did Bob come in on Friday night?” Rhodes asked.
“I don’t know. He always comes in late, but he never wakes me. I keep telling you — he’s just not interested.”
“But he came in after you did?”
“Yes. And before you ask, I came in at two o’clock. Or somewhere in there.”
Deedham had told Ruth that he left the field house around one o’clock. That left an hour of his time unaccounted for. It was an hour unaccounted for in Terry’s case as well. Rhodes asked a few more questions, but he didn’t get any more information. Terry Deedham stood in the kitchen door and waved good-bye when he left.
Chapter Twelve
Hayes Ford lived pretty well for a man with no visible means of support.
Several years earlier he had bought one of the few real mansions in Clearview, built during the days when a few of the citizens were getting rich from the oil that lay under the county in pools that were now mostly depleted. The house looked vaguely like a miniature version of a Spanish castle, with two whitewashed turrets topped by red tile, and a white-walled courtyard in front.
The black wrought-iron gates of the courtyard were open. No one in Clearview worried much about locking up. Rhodes drove right in and parked by some spiky-leafed yucca plants. He walked up to the front doors, massive wooden portals that would have looked just fine on the front of an old Spanish mission. There was no doorbell, but on the right-hand door there was a heavy brass knocker shaped like a cowboy boot. Rhodes lifted the boot and pounded it on the plate beneath.
No one came to the door. Rhodes looked at his watch. Ten o’clock. It might still be a little early for Ford to be waking up. Rhodes pounded again.
There was still no response, and Rhodes looked to his left at the garage. The door was up and Ford’s black Lexus was parked inside. Rhodes wondered idly how the Lexus drove. He wasn’t likely ever to be able to afford one himself.
After pounding the knocker again and again getting no answer, Rhodes walked over to the garage. The Lexus was a little muddy, but it still had a shine.
Rhodes went around to the front of the car and put his hand on the hood. It was cold, which meant that Ford had been home for a while. Surely he had his nap out by now. Maybe he just didn’t want any visitors.
There was a door leading from the garage into the house. There was a glass panel in the top of the door, but there was a curtain over the panel on the inside. However, there was a lighted doorbell button beside the door. Rhodes pushed the button and the light went out. He could hear the doorbell echo inside the house. Two notes — one high, one low.
He waited for a minute, looking inside the Lexus while he did. Leather interior. Rhodes wondered if the leather weren’t uncomfortably hot in the summer and cold in the winter. Probably not cold, he thought. Probably the Lexus had heated seats.
He rang the doorbell again, waited again. He was getting tired of looking at the Lexus. It was a nice car, but Rhodes wanted to talk to Ford.
He tried the knob of the door. As he expected, it didn’t move. Locked. Rhodes walked back around to the front. That door was locked as well.
Obviously Ford didn’t want company. Or maybe he already had company and just didn’t want anyone to intrude.
Or maybe there was another reason. Rhodes was getting a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach. Unfortunately, a bad feeling in the stomach wasn’t a good enough reason for a representative of the law to enter someone’s residence.
Rhodes returned to the garage. In the rear wall there was a screen door that opened into the back yard. Rhodes pushed through the door and went around the back of the house to look for another entrance.
There was a semicircular patio with a glass-topped umbrella table sitting in the middle. Beyond the table there was a sliding glass door into the house. There was a heavy curtain over the door, so Rhodes couldn’t see inside.
Rhodes wasn’t interested in seeing inside by now. He wanted to get inside, and the sliding door was perfect for his purposes, a
s any burglar could have told Hayes Ford. Such a door was almost impossible to lock effectively, and the old trick of laying a broomstick in the track didn’t work very well either.
The fact of the matter was that sliding doors were generally lifted up and set onto the track. They could be removed the same way easily and quickly if you knew what you were doing.
Rhodes knew what he was doing, but he tried the door first. It was surprising how many people forgot to flip the flimsy lock, but Ford had remembered. Rhodes now had two choices: He could turn around and leave, or he could break in.
He wasn’t going in with the intention of making an illegal search, but that didn’t matter. Breaking into someone’s house was still a crime, even if you were the sheriff.
Rhodes didn’t care. The feeling that something was wrong was getting stronger, and he could always argue that he suspected that a crime had been committed on the premises if anyone asked him. No one was going to ask, anyway, if Hayes Ford was dead inside the house.
It took Rhodes about ten seconds to get the sliding door off its track and set it aside. In fact, it was even easier than it should have been, which could mean that someone had already done the same thing and loosened the door.
Or maybe I’m just getting paranoid, Rhodes thought. He pushed the curtain out of his way and entered the house.
Rhodes looked around the room, knowing that he was going to be embarrassed if Ford was upstairs with a girlfriend. The room was furnished with heavy carved wooden furniture that looked very uncomfortable.
“Anybody home?” Rhodes yelled.
His voice echoed off the high stucco ceiling and tile floor. There was no answer to his question, and he walked out of the room into a large foyer that led to the wooden doors at the front of the house. On his right was the kitchen. On his left were a hallway and the stairs leading to the second floor.
On the theory that the bedrooms would be upstairs, Rhodes started climbing.
“Ford? Are you up there?” he called.
No one called back. Rhodes stopped on the landing. Ford’s car was in the garage, but no one appeared to be in the house. That wasn’t right.
Rhodes didn’t want to go on up the stairs. He was afraid of what he was going to find. But of course he went up anyway.
There was a hallway at the top of the stairs with three doorways on the left side. One of the doors was open.
“Ford?” Rhodes said, walking slowly toward the open door.
There was a king-size bed in the room. It had red satin sheets. There was a mirror on the ceiling that Rhodes strongly suspected hadn’t been installed there by the original owners, who had been staunch Presbyterians.
The current owner, Hayes Ford, was staring wide-eyed at his reflection in the mirror as he lay on his back on the right side of the bed. He was wearing a red robe that gapped open over white satin boxer shorts with red hearts on them. The hearts matched the sheets, but Ford didn’t care. He didn’t care about anything, being dead.
He should have locked those gates, Rhodes thought, but it was too late to do anything about it now.
About the only interesting fact about Hayes Ford’s murder that Rhodes came up with after a careful search of the house was that Ford had been shot in the head with a small-caliber gun. If Ford had been alive to take the wager, Rhodes would have bet him that the bullet came from the same pistol that had killed Brady Meredith.
The search had been interesting in other ways, however. One of the upstairs rooms had been converted into an office, complete with desk and computer. But there were no computer disks that Rhodes could find. He knew just enough about the machine to turn it on and discover that the hard drive had been disabled. Someone had made sure that there were no records of Ford’s activities available.
Despite Rhodes’ virtual certainty that Ford’s murder was connected with the death of Brady Meredith, there was no way yet to prove the relationship. Judging from the condition of Ford’s body, the gambler had been dead for about five or six hours, meaning that he had probably been killed not long after arriving home from wherever he had been on Saturday night. He’d probably been getting ready for bed when he was shot, but Rhodes couldn’t be sure about that. He would have to wait until after the autopsy.
Things were getting complicated, the way they always seemed to when murder was involved, but at least Rhodes could remove Ford from his list of suspects in Meredith’s killing.
Or maybe not. There was no need to get in a hurry about it. What if Ford had killed Meredith and someone else had killed Ford? That was certainly possible. For that matter, there didn’t have to be any connection between the deaths at all.
But Rhodes didn’t believe in coincidence in cases like this. There was a connection, all right. He just had to find it.
Rhodes, having missed lunch yet again, was a little late in getting to the field house. Jasper Knowles must have assumed that Rhodes wasn’t coming; Jerry Tabor was addressing the team.
Tabor was wearing his letter jacket and a Clearview Catamount cap. The patches that lined the jacket’s leather sleeves indicated that Tabor had been chosen for the all-district team, the all-region team, and the all-state team. The cap was much newer than the jacket, and it covered Tabor’s bald spot.
Rhodes stood unobtrusively in the back of the room and listened to Tabor’s speech.
“I want you to remember one thing,” Tabor said. His voice sounded a little hollow in the large room. “Every game you win from here on in is something you’ll have forever. Every one of them will give you a feeling like nothing else you’ve ever had and like nothing else you’ll ever experience. When you come back to your twenty-fifth-year class reunion, you’ll look at each other, and you’ll feel that special feeling all over again. It’s something nobody will ever be able to take away from you, no matter what happens.”
It was sentimental but true. As much as Rhodes tried to downplay his days as the Will-o’-the-wisp, he’d never forgotten the thrill of making that run.
On the other hand, it wasn’t something he thought about all the time, and he wasn’t sure that anyone else really remembered it, even Ivy, who was about the only one who ever brought it up, and she was usually joking.
Tabor, on the other hand, evidently took his glory days seriously and thought about them often, especially now that the team’s winning season was helping people to recall his brief interval of celebrity. To be fair about it, though, his interval had been a lot longer than Rhodes’.
Nevertheless, Rhodes didn’t think it was a good idea to tell high-school kids that they were having the best experience of their lives by getting into the play-offs. It didn’t give them much to look forward to as adults.
“And it’s just going to get better,” Tabor continued. “Every game, it gets better. Bi-district, regional, all the way to state.” He paused and looked around the room. “Now, I never made it to state myself, but you’re going all the way. No doubt about it. Nothing can stop you!”
The team members stomped and whistled and cheered and bounced around in their chairs. The coaches applauded, Bob Deedham more enthusiastically than the others.
“That’s right,” Tabor said. “You’re going all the way! And when you come back to that twenty-five-year reunion, you’ll look in each other’s eyes, and you won’t even have to say a word. You’ll look older, even if you can’t believe that now. Some of you’ll have gray hair. Some of you won’t have much hair at all.”
He took off his cap and rubbed his bald spot. Some of the players laughed, and he settled the cap back on his head.
“It won’t be as easy for you to get out of bed in the morning, and your bellies won’t be near as flat as they are now. But it won’t matter! When you see the men you shared this experience with, they’ll still look the same to you, and you’ll still look the same to them. It’ll be like all those years never even happened. They’ll just drop away, and you’ll be Catamounts again!”
Tabor’s voice cracked. There were more cheer
s, stomps, and whistles.
Tabor had to wait for a few seconds after the noise died down before he got control of himself.
“You’re such a great bunch of guys,” he said. “You deserve this, and I want you to know how much I appreciate you and the coaches letting me share it with you.”
“You’re one of us, Jer’!” someone yelled, and the cheering started again.
“Naw,” Tabor said when things were calm again. “I was good, but I was never as good as you guys!”
More cheers. It was almost as good as a brush-arbor revival meeting, Rhodes thought. He wondered why Tabor wasn’t more successful at selling used cars. If he could get to his customers the way he was getting to the Catamounts, the whole town of Clearview would be driving around in cars with little chrome “Del-Ray Chevrolet” signs stuck to the trunk.
“Now,” Tabor said, his voice lowering, “there’s something else you have to think about. Coach Meredith.”
He paused, but there weren’t any cheers this time. Just dead silence in the room. Rhodes could hear the click of the thermostat just before the heat came on. Warm air poured out of the ceiling vents.
“We all remember Coach Meredith,” Tabor said. “And we always will. We’ll remember what a great guy he was, what a fine gentleman. We’ll remember how much he taught us about the game. How much he taught us about sportsmanship and character.”
Rhodes thought that last was a pretty peculiar remark, considering that Meredith had recently tried to punch out the head coach, but the team didn’t seem to think so. They sat quiet and still, waiting for Tabor to continue.
“But we can’t let his death stop us. We’ve got to go on. That’s the way he’d want it, and all of you know it. He wouldn’t want us to quit on him now. He’d want us to go out there and play our very best. He’d want us to go right on to that state championship game, and he’d want us to win it! And that’s all I’m really talking about here. I want us to win this week and to go on winning until we get to that big game. And I want us to win that one for Coach Meredith!”
While Rhodes was trying to figure out just exactly when Tabor had lapsed into the first person, the room erupted in cheering. The team members jumped out of their chairs, pounding each other on their backs, giving high fives, and elbowing each other out of the way for the chance to shake Tabor’s hand.
