by Bill Crider
Rhodes came on into the office. Hack had been very suspicious of a woman deputy at first, but Ruth had turned out to be very good at her job. And she could fix things, too. It had not taken Hack long to begin thinking very highly of her.
“What are you looking at?” Rhodes said.
“Simon Graham’s criminal history,” Hack said.
Rhodes was surprised. “He’s got one?”
Hack turned away from the screen. “Naw. Just a lotta speedin’ tickets that he ain’t paid. Guess he won’t be payin’ ’em now, either.”
“No,” Rhodes said. “He won’t. Did Ruth fill you in.”
“Sure did. You had a busy night.”
Lawton stopped sweeping and leaned on his broom. Rhodes knew this was a bad sign. It meant that the two men were ready to talk and that they knew something he didn’t know.
That was bad because it would take forever for him to get it out of them, whereas he was ready to continue his investigation of Graham’s death. He wanted to go back to Obert, talk to the people who lived around the college. He wanted to get in touch with the people whose numbers had been in Graham’s wallet, Wallace and Rolingson, to see what they knew about the death, if anything. He needed to look inside Graham’s house, try to find a key for the door to which the rope had been tied, and see what was behind that door. He wanted to talk to Brame again, too, but all that would have to wait until he heard whatever it was that Hack and Lawton had to tell.
“Any other calls last night?” he said to get the ball rolling.
“Nope,” Hack said. “Nothin’ out of the ordinary, that is. One little wreck. One break-in. Buddy got to the break-in and scared some kids off. Didn’t catch ’em, though. He got there before they took anything.”
There was nothing unusual in those items. Rhodes began to relax a little.
“How about this morning?” he said. It was a little early for anything to have happened, or so he hoped.
“Just one call,” Lawton said.
Hack looked over at him. As the dispatcher, Hack took the calls, and he felt he had a right to get the story started.
Rhodes sat at his desk and started thumbing through his paperwork. He picked up Brame’s card, still lying there, and put it in his shirt pocket. Then he turned around and waited. He was going to hear the story, but it wasn’t going to be straightforward. It hardly ever was.
Hack and Lawton were looking at him expectantly.
“Well?” he said.
“Fran Newly called,” Hack said. “From the Covered Wagon.”
The Covered Wagon was a restaurant on the south side of town, locally famous for its family-style meals, which as far as Rhodes could determine meant that everything they served was fried, except for the breakfast biscuits, which weighed in the vicinity of a pound each. Rhodes had eaten there several times, but not recently. The risk of heartburn was too great.
Fran Newly, the owner, was a colorful character. She was a widow, about sixty, and she ate all her meals at the Covered Wagon. As a she result weighed in the neighborhood of two hundred and thirty pounds. She liked to mingle with the customers, particularly the male customers, and joke with them while they ate. There were some who said that Fran was still a lusty woman, but Rhodes wouldn’t know about that.
“What was Fran’s problem?” Rhodes said.
“It was the trash,” Lawton said, getting it in before Hack could say anything.
“What trash?”
“In her dumpster,” Lawton said.
“It wasn’t in the dumpster,” Hack said, taking over. “Leastways, she didn’t think it was.”
“What was it?” Rhodes said. “A rat?”
Hack and Lawton laughed. “You might say that,” Lawton told him. “A white rat.” They laughed again.
Rhodes was getting impatient, but he controlled himself. If he let his restlessness show, they would just slow down. He might never find out what they had to tell him.
“So it was a rat,” he said.
“Not exactly,” Hack said. “Not unless rats wear clothes.”
“It had on clothes?” Rhodes was getting confused.
“Not many,” Lawton said. “Just shoes and socks.”
“Shoes and socks?” For some reason Rhodes thought of Mickey Mouse.
Hack had decided things had gone on long enough. “Fran went out to dump some trash after the breakfast rush,” he said. “Threw back the dumpster lid, and it made a hell of a racket. You know how that lid sounds when you bang it against the back of that big metal thing. Anyway, it must’ve woke up somebody who was sleeping’ behind the dumpster, and he came out. Like to scared Fran to death.”
Rhodes wouldn’t have thought anything was apt to scare Fran, especially the kind of man who was likely to sleep behind a dumpster. He said so.
“This ’un scared her, all right,” Lawton said. “The fella that came out was stiff-starch nekkid.”
“Not nekkid,” Hack said. “He had on his shoes and socks.”
“Tennis shoes,” Lawton said. “White socks.”
“That’s all?” Rhodes said.
“That’s all.”
“Can she identify him?”
Hack and Lawton started laughing so hard that Rhodes was afraid they might have strokes.
When they finally got their breath, Hack said, “Yeah, she can identify him. She said she wanted us to hold a line-up and let her pick him out.”
Rhodes didn’t see what was so funny about that.
Hack was only too glad to explain. “She said she wouldn’t mind meetin’ the fella again, but she didn’t think she could identify his face. So we’d have to have a special kind of a line-up for her. She said she knew we sometimes used officers, just to check on whether folks was takin’ the line-up seriously, and she thought it’d be nice if that cute Sheriff Rhodes was put in there just to keep her honest.”
Hack managed to keep a straight face through his explanation, but Lawton was snorting through his nose and clinging so hard to the broom for support that Rhodes thought his knees must have gone out on him.
“I guess it would be all right with her if we put you two in there along with me,” Rhodes said.
Lawton stopped laughing immediately. “Ain’t no old woman gonna get a look at me like that,” he said. “I ain’t even got a pair of tennis shoes. Hack, he can do it. ’Cept Miz McGee wouldn’t like it.”
Miz McGee was Hack’s romantic interest. He didn’t like her name being brought into the discussion.
“You better take that back,” he said.
“Will not,” Lawton said.
They might have gone on like that for quite some time, but someone came into the jail.
It was a man of about forty-five. He was wearing faded jeans and low-heeled boots that were caked with dried mud and cow manure around the soles, a faded brown western shirt, and a stained Houston Oilers gimme cap. His face was weathered, and he hadn’t shaved for two or three days.
“You the sheriff?” he said, looking at Rhodes.
“That’s right,” Rhodes said standing up. “What’s the trouble?”
“Somebody stole my damn cows,” the man said.
The man’s name was Seth Adkins, and he had a little herd of cattle near the Milsby community. Or they had been there until four or five days ago.
“Ten of ’em,” he said. “Pretty things. Six heifers and four little calves. Might be another calf or two by now. Those other heifers was springin’.”
He didn’t know when they’d been stolen. “I been out of town for more’n a week. My sister in Dallas had surgery on her gall bladder. Got nearly fifty rocks outta there, one of ’em big as a golf ball. Her husband’s dead, and I had to go help with her kids while she was out of the house. I come back last night, and when I checked on the cows, they was gone.”
There was another problem, too. The cattle were all unregistered. They represented a broad mixture of breeds, and they had not been branded.
“Too damn much work,” A
dkins said. “I can’t afford a squeeze chute, and one man can’t hardly do the brandin’ without one.”
“It would have helped us find the cattle, though,” Rhodes said. Brands had to be registered with the County Clerk, and while they could be altered, it wasn’t easy to do a clean job of it. If anyone tried to sell the cows at auction, they could be traced quickly to the thief. Branded cattle were also a lot easier to spot in a pasture.
“Well, I didn’t brand ’em. Some of ’em got marked ears, though.”
“Split?” Rhodes said. “Underbit? Overbit?”
“Split,” Adkins said.
That meant that he had literally split the end of one ear rather than taking a chunk out of the top or bottom. Unfortunately, that was a common way of marking cattle, and it didn’t prove a thing to find a cow marked that way.
“Any other distinguishing marks on any of them?” Rhodes said.
“One of ’em’s got the left horn missin’,” Adkins said. One’s got a bad left front hoof.”
That might help, but Rhodes didn’t think it would help enough.
“How about plastic ear tags?” he said.
“Don’t use ’em,” Adkins said. “Brush pulls ’em out.”
“I hope you’re not counting on our finding them?”
“Somebody stole ’em. You’re the Sheriff. It’s your job to find cattle thieves.” Adkins said it in a determined way and set his jaw. It was clear that he expected Rhodes to find the cattle, and to find them quick.
“We’ll do our best,” Rhodes said.
When Adkins had left, Rhodes had Hack get in touch with Ruth on the radio.
“Tell her to meet Adkins at his pasture and see if she can find any trace of the thieves. I’ve got to talk to Brame about Simon Graham. If any emergency calls come in, get Buddy to handle them.”
“Right,” Hack said. “What about that line-up?”
“We’ve got to find a suspect first,” Rhodes said.
He knew that wasn’t likely. The naked man had no doubt been someone who had drunk a little too much the night before. There were more than enough people like that in Blacklin County. He had then slept it off in a convenient spot, and he would be long gone by now. Fran had probably scared him as much as he had scared her. Maybe more. Rhodes wondered if she had tried to catch him.
Brame was staying in the Lakeway Inn. Rhodes parked in front of room 133, got out, and knocked on the door.
Brame opened the door. “Good morning, Sheriff,” he said. “I was expecting you a little earlier.”
“Some things came up,” Rhodes said, looking around for a place to sit.
The room held only a dresser, a bed, and two uncomfortable-looking thin-cushioned chairs by a small table; on the table were the remains of Brame’s room-service breakfast—a coffee cup and a plate with scraps of egg, a few crumbs of bacon, and about a spoonful of grits and butter. Rhodes thought of his own healthy bowl of cereal with regret. He would have preferred eggs and bacon. And grits and butter, lots of butter. Ivy was death on butter.
Brame walked over to the table and moved the plate over to the dresser. “We can sit here,” he said.
Rhodes sat in one of the chairs, which proved to be just as uncomfortable as it had appeared.
“How well did you know Simon Graham?” Rhodes said when he had gotten settled.
“As well as most anyone, I suppose,” Brame said. “I had occasional business dealings with him.”
“Do you know someone named Marty Wallace?”
“Ah, the lovely Marty. Simon’s ‘friend,’ I suppose we should call her. Yes, I know Marty. They were very close, if you know what I mean.”
Rhodes could hear the contempt in Brame’s voice. “You didn’t like her?”
“I didn’t like Simon, for that matter, but at least he was a businessman. Marty is simply greedy.”
“What about Mitch Rolingson?”
“Simon’s partner? Yes, I know him. He was the gofer, but he might have been smarter than Simon. He was the one who located the books. Simon made all the deals, however. Will Mitch be coming here?” Brame didn’t sound particularly eager to see him.
“I’m sure he’ll be here,” Rhodes said. Then he got to the important question. “Can you think of any reason why Simon Graham might want to kill himself.”
Brame didn’t even have to think about it. “Several. He was in extreme financial trouble, for one thing. He’d overextended himself. Buying that college campus was just one example of his foolish monetary policies. He had warehouses full of books that had never been catalogued, much less sold. And I’ve heard from reliable sources that most of the books are practically worthless. He had invested a great deal in them, far more than most people in the business thought they were worth, and he would never have realized a profit on them; in fact, he was losing his shirt.”
“Are you sure?” Rhodes said.
“The book business is as full of idle gossip as any other, Sheriff,” Brame said. “Perhaps more than most. But I’m as sure as I can be without looking at Simon’s accounts.”
“What about gambling?”
Brame leaned back and smiled. “You’ve heard about that, have you? Well, I can say for certain that’s true. I was at Louisiana Downs one afternoon when Simon lost nearly fifteen thousand dollars. And from what I’ve heard, that was one of his good days. He didn’t do well in Las Vegas, either. He loved to play cards, but he wasn’t any good at it. I’m sure he lost a great deal more than he ever won.”
“But he said he had this book for you, the one that’s worth a lot of money. This Tamerlane.”
Brame’s face changed. The smile was replaced by a poker face that would have done the Cincinnati Kid proud.
“He didn’t say he had it for me. He just said he had it, and that it was for sale. I was hoping to see it. That’s all.”
“Tell me about it,” Rhodes said.
“It’s the first book by Edgar Allan Poe,” Brame said. “Though his name doesn’t appear on the title page, which says simply ‘Poems by a Bostonian.’ It was published in 1827, and it’s an extremely valuable American first edition. Fewer than twenty are known to exist. I don’t know its value precisely; there hasn’t been one on the market in quite some time. But it would be worth a great deal of money if it’s genuine. A very great deal. If Simon did indeed have a copy, it would have gone a long way toward getting him out of a deep hole.”
“Did Graham come up with rare items like that very often?”
“More than you might think, though usually not of that rarity. But Mitch Rolingson was quite good at locating rare and costly books and papers in places that no one else seemed to know existed.”
“And all of them were authentic?”
Brame’s face remained frozen. “I couldn’t say about that, Sheriff. There have been rumors. But only rumors.”
“Could a book like this Tamerlane come into Graham’s possession without a big fuss? It seems to me that something like that would cause a stir if it went on the market. And that there might be more reliable customers than Simon Graham.”
Brame smiled. “Very astute, Sheriff. If the book had been sold through normal channels, most likely at an auction, everyone would have known. That obviously wasn’t the case.”
“What other channels are there?” Rhodes said.
“He might have gotten the book through another dealer, though that isn’t likely. The only real possibility is that he’s had it for quite some time.”
“Then why didn’t he sell it before now?”
“Well,” Brame said, “he might not have known he had it.”
“I don’t see why not,” Rhodes said. “If a man had something as valuable as that he’d know all about it. You said it was a famous book.”
“It could simply have been stored away in one of those warehouses I mentioned,” Brame said. “Mixed in with all the others, most of them worth next to nothing. He could have been going through the books, maybe even trying to catalogue them, a
nd stumbled across it. It would have been a very exciting find. Very exciting.” Brame’s eyes were alight, and he rubbed his small hands together, almost as excited as if he had found the book himself.
Rhodes stood up. “All right, Mr. Brame. I appreciate the information. You’re free to go back to Houston whenever you want to. I hope you’ll stay in touch with me, though. I might need to talk to you again.”
“I’ll be right here, Sheriff.” Brame said. “I want to see that book, if Simon really had it.”
“So do I,” Rhodes said.
Chapter 5
There were plenty of bluebonnets and Indian paintbrushes to be seen in the bright morning sunshine as Rhodes rounded the curve that led into Obert. There were, however, only a few of the pink flowers that Rhodes had always called buttercups but that Ivy had informed him were primroses. They would come along later, and he would still call them buttercups in spite of Ivy’s correction.
He came to the small town, drove past the post office and several deserted buildings, went directly to the house where Graham had been staying, and parked in front of the garage.
The front door of the house was not locked. It was likely that Graham had picked up the habits of his rural neighbors; no one in Obert worried very much about locking doors. Or they hadn’t in the past. Graham’s death might change that.
Rhodes entered the living room and looked around. Whatever else you could say about Graham, he had been a neat housekeeper. The hardwood floor was shiny, and there was no dust on the coffee table or the lamp table. There was a copy of the current issue of Texas Monthly on the coffee table. There was also a copy of the Sunday supplement that Ivy had told Rhodes about. Graham’s picture was on the cover; he was wearing virtually the same get-up Rhodes had seen on the hanged man.
Rhodes was glad he wouldn’t have to visit the library. He picked up the magazine, folded it once, and put it in his back pocket.
In one of the house’s two bedrooms there was a desk. On top there were a clean desk pad, a Smith-Corona portable electronic typewriter, and a beer stein that held three ball point pens and one No. 2 yellow pencil.
