Booked for a Hanging

by Bill Crider

  After he’d dried off and changed clothes, he put the clothing he’d removed into the washing machine, poured in some liquid detergent, and started the cycle.

  After that he cleaned and oiled his pistol. It was a dirty job, and he wished he’d done it before taking the shower. It took him almost an hour.

  Then he went into the kitchen for something to eat.

  There was still some meatloaf left, so he made a sandwich. It was either that or cereal, and he’d had about as much fiber as he wanted for the day, except for what he got in the sandwich. Ivy would not buy white bread, so Rhodes had no choice but to go for the loaf made of oat bran. It wasn’t bad, but there were times when Rhodes craved the taste of the puffy white airiness that he was used to, even if it had been scientifically proven that rats fed an exclusive diet of white bread all died of malnutrition.

  While he ate, he flipped the pages of the Sunday supplement until he came to the article about Graham. There was a color photo of Graham’s shop in Houston and another of the college campus, looking much more impressive that it did in reality. Graham was standing in front of the main building in his professional Texan outfit, and wildflowers were blooming in profusion in the grass around him. That made the picture at least a year old.

  Rhodes got his glasses out of his pocket. They hadn’t been broken in the fight, but he had to straighten the right earpiece. When he had done that, he put the glasses on and started reading the article.

  He didn’t find out anything that he didn’t already know, except for a name of a San Antonio bookman, Willie Scott, who was apparently the author’s main source of information about the book business in general and Simon Graham in particular. Rhodes thought it might be a good idea to talk to Scott. After all, the information he’d gotten from Wallace, Brame, and Rolingson came from highly prejudiced sources.

  Rhodes went out into the back yard and checked Speedo’s water. It was another warm day, and Speedo was lying in the shade of a tall pecan tree on a patch of cool earth that he had scratched free of grass. Speedo didn’t like warm weather; he preferred the depths of winter to even the touch of summer. His tongue lolled out of his mouth, and he didn’t even bother to get up to greet Rhodes, though his tail did make a couple of light thumps on the bare ground.

  After filling the water bowl, Rhodes brushed as much of the dried mud as he could out of the car seat and drove to the courthouse. He used his office there only occasionally, generally at times he did not want to be disturbed, and this was one of those times.

  He walked through the cool halls and up the stairs. He unlocked the office door and went inside. It was dim and shadowy in the room, but Rhodes didn’t turn on the fluorescent lights. He liked the dimness, the weak light coming in through frosted glass. He sat at his desk and dialed information to get Scott’s number.

  Scott was a little suspicious at first, and Rhodes offered to let him call back.

  “I can give you the number, but you’d probably rather get it yourself, just to be sure,” Rhodes said. “Ask for the Blacklin County Sheriff’s Office. Not the jail.” He gave Scott the area code.

  “You must be on the level or you wouldn’t give me a chance to call back,” Scott said. “I’ll go ahead and talk to you if you think it will help in some way. I’m not sure I can tell you anything germane to Simon’s death, however.”

  “It’s some other people that I want to know about,” Rhodes said. “People associated with Graham.”

  “Oh,” Scott said. “You probably mean Mitch Rolingson. And Marty Wallace.”

  “Two out of three,” Rhodes said.

  “I can’t think of any other associates,” Scott said.

  “How about a man named Hal Brame?”

  “I wouldn’t exactly call him an associate. More like a rival.”

  “That’s the kind of thing I want to know,” Rhodes said. “But there’s something else I want to ask you about first.” He told Scott about Tamerlane.

  “I’d heard that rumor,” Scott said. “I didn’t believe it, of course, but the really interesting thing about the book business is that you never know what might turn up in some old attic or barn. It’s just barely possible that Simon could have found a copy. God knows where it came from, but it’s still a possibility. It would be quite a coup if he had.”

  That was pretty much what Brame had said earlier. Too bad that the book would not do Graham any good now even if he had found a copy.

  “How much would it be worth?” Rhodes said. “About.”

  “It’s really hard to give a definite answer to that question, Sheriff,” Scott said. “The value of a rare book depends on a number of factors. Condition, for example, would be very important, though with a book as difficult to obtain as the Tamerlane, that might not matter as much as it would with a more recent publication.”

  “I don’t have to have an exact figure,” Rhodes said. No one seemed to want to commit to a dollar amount. He wondered if that were a characteristic of book dealers everywhere. “Just some kind of a ballpark estimate will do.”

  “Very well, then,” Scott said. “Let’s say somewhere in the neighborhood of a quarter of a million dollars.”

  Rhodes whistled. He had gathered that the book was valuable, but he hadn’t expected that it would be worth that much.

  “Are you sure?” he said.

  “I told you,” Scott said, “that it would depend on a lot of different things. It could be worth as little as a hundred and fifty thousand. It could go even higher than a quarter of a million if you found the right buyer and if everything else was right.”

  Rhodes was stunned at the amount of money involved, but he had something else to ask. “There’s something else I’d like your opinion on,” he said.

  He started to tell Scott about the Byron letters, but Scott interrupted him. “I know all about those letters, Sheriff. Everyone in the business does.”

  “Tell me, then,” Rhodes said. “How is something like that done?”

  Scott explained that paper of the proper age could be obtained from old, but not necessarily rare, books of the same era that the letters were supposed to come from.

  “The endpapers could be cut out, for example. And the handwriting could be forged even by a skillful amateur. It’s the ink that would give trouble, and it did in this case. It’s not easy to find ink that was made in the early part of the nineteenth century.”

  “But it almost worked,” Rhodes said.

  “Almost,” Scott said. “But not quite.”

  “Then what I want to know is, could a man forge a whole book like this Tamerlane?”

  There was silence on the line while Scott thought about it. “That’s an interesting question,” he said after a moment. “Especially considering what we’re discussing here. The age of the paper used in those letters would be just about right for Tamerlane. Not exactly, but close. And of course Tamerlane isn’t a book, precisely. Not in the modern sense. It’s more like something we might call a pamphlet.”

  There was another silence while Rhodes and Scott both considered the implications of all that.

  “What are you getting at, Sheriff?” Scott said then.

  Rhodes wasn’t sure himself. He changed the subject to Mitch Rolingson.

  “Rolingson is a good book hound. He finds things, in large quantities sometimes. But they aren’t always good things, and sometimes he buys an enormous collection to get one or two valuable items. Then he and Simon would be stuck with a huge and not very desirable inventory.”

  “That’s the case now, isn’t it?” Rhodes said.

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “Unless Graham found something like this Tamerlane stashed away in that inventory,” Rhodes said.

  “Yes,” Scott said. “Something like that would make a rather large difference.”

  “Have you heard whether either Rolingson or Graham was involved in forging those letters?” Rhodes said, getting back on track.

  “There are always plenty of tales flo
ating around in this business,” Scott said. “I don’t intend to repeat them, however. No one seems to know conclusively, anyway, and there are strong arguments on both sides. Personalities enter into it, as they usually do. Rolingson has suffered a lot from his association with Graham. It won’t be easy for him to make a go of it as a book dealer from now on, not unless he can convince people of his innocence.”

  “What about Hal Brame?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He seems to have an interest in this Tamerlane, but Rolingson doesn’t like him very much. Marty Wallace may not like him either, but she made Rolingson promise to let him look at the book, maybe buy it.”

  “Brame is an interesting character,” Scott said. “Not entirely reputable, in a sense, though plenty of people deal with him. He’s always on the edge, but no one has ever actually caught him crossing the line. He always seems to make money and to have plenty of it available.”

  Scott paused for a moment as if thinking about how to put what he was going to say next. Then he went on. “As I mentioned, there are a lot of tales floating around in the book trade, and one of them has it that Brame bought some books from Graham, books that he later discovered had missing endpapers. So when he heard about the letters, he spread the word immediately that they might be forged. No one could prove that it was Graham who removed the endpapers, of course, and he did make restitution.”

  “But it didn’t help him any financially. He didn’t have any reason to like Brame.”

  “No, and neither would Rolingson. There’s also a rumor that Brame tried to imply that Rolingson was implicated as well, but no one bought it.”

  “And then there’s Marty Wallace.”

  “You sound a little wistful, Sheriff.”

  “I’m a married man,” Rhodes said.

  “Yes. That’s enough to make anyone wistful if he comes in contact with Marty. She looks wonderful, doesn’t she.”

  Rhodes admitted it.

  “But that’s as far as it goes. She associated with Simon primarily because of his social contacts and his money. Now, thanks to Brame, he’s lost a lot of both. She wouldn’t have stayed with him much longer, even if he hadn’t died.”

  “She’s here, now, though,” Rhodes said.

  “Then she believes the Tamerlane is real. You can count on it. One thing that the lovely Marty likes is money.”

  “Would any one of those three have a reason to kill Graham?”

  “Good Lord, Sheriff. I thought he committed suicide.”

  “I didn’t say he didn’t. I was just asking a hypothetical question.”

  Scott paused for thought again. Finally, he said, “Very well. I’ll give you a hypothetical answer. All of them. If they thought they could get away with it and get their hands on Tamerlane.” There was a stretch of silence. “I don’t suppose you collect books, Sheriff.”

  “No,” Rhodes said. He thought about Ballinger. “I know someone who does, though.”

  “It’s like a disease in a way,” Scott said. “It’s not just the money, you know, though that’s a part of it. It’s also the fact of the book itself, possessing it, knowing that you have a copy of something that other people would literally kill for if it’s rare enough. There’s great pleasure in owning something like that. Of course dealers don’t generally experience that kind of pleasure. They like to think they keep themselves above it while they cater to the pleasure of others.”

  Rhodes had collected baseball cards when he was a kid. He could almost understand what Scott was talking about. There were some he traded; there were others he would never have parted with for any amount of money.

  “Sometimes I wonder if I wouldn’t kill for a book like that,” Scott said. “Not to have it, of course. Or at least not to have it for long. But to be able to say I had it and sold it, well, that would be something. Once in a lifetime.”

  “Brame might feel that way, then,” Rhodes said.

  “Perhaps. Maybe even Rolingson. Not Marty, however. She would care only about the money.”

  Rhodes talked to Scott for a bit longer, but he didn’t learn anything else that seemed helpful. After hanging up, he went down the hall to the Dr Pepper machine, got a bottle, stuck it into the opener and yanked off the top. He wondered why it was so much more satisfying to do that than it was to pop the top on a can or twist the cap off a two-liter plastic bottle.

  He went back to the office then, put his feet on the scarred top of his desk, and leaned back in the chair. As he sipped the drink, he tried to go through everything again, point by point, to see if he could put his finger on all the little things that were bothering him about the entire affair.

  It was quiet in the courthouse in the afternoon. Rhodes heard the far-off hum of the air-conditioning unit. He listened to someone’s high heels clicking down the hall. And as he listened, one of the things that had been bothering him came into focus.

  He should have thought of it sooner, but too much had happened in too short a time, even though it had been obvious from the beginning. How did Hal Brame hear what he said he’d heard? When he came to the jail, he said that it wasn’t just the lights that had frightened him at the college that night. There were also the sounds, the ghostly groans.

  There was no way Brame could have heard any groans, not if he had been outside the building. The windows had been closed, and the wind had been blowing a gale. Graham had died on the third floor, very high up and a long way from where Brame said his car was parked.

  No one had hearing that good. Of course Brame could have added the part about the groans to get Rhodes’ attention and to make sure he investigated the lights.

  Rhodes went back over the whole evening in his mind. One other incident stuck out. He had been about to leave the third floor when Brame grabbed his arm and called his attention to the rat. Had Brame really been frightened, or was he just trying to call Rhodes’ attention to the hanged man, who Brame had known was hanging there all along?

  And if the office had been locked that night, how had Marty Wallace gotten in the next day? If the keys had been taken from Graham, had she taken them? Or had someone else? And where were the keys, anyway? Rhodes still hadn’t seen them.

  None of these questions fit with Rhodes’ pet theory, which was simply that Cy Appleby was the killer. Appleby fit the profile. He was violent, he was a thief, he was an abuser. Graham could have seen something from the third floor that Appleby wanted to keep hidden; Appleby had implied as much. Suppose Graham had had been on the third floor and seen Appleby unloading a trailer full of cattle in the middle of the night. Even a book dealer might have become suspicious of something like that. And suppose he had said something about it to Appleby.

  Appleby was the kind of man who would murder under those circumstances, Rhodes thought.

  He really wanted it to be Appleby.

  But what about Clyde and Claude? Where were they? Why had they run away? Had they killed Graham?

  It wasn’t impossible. They worked for him on the third floor. Suppose that they had seen the copy of Tamerlane and asked Graham about it. He might have played the big man, told them its real value. That would have been quite a temptation to two boys like Claude and Clyde. They might not have realized until it was too late that they were unlikely to have the contacts to sell it.

  Rhodes then thought of another scenario, one he liked even better. This one had Claude and Clyde telling their father about the book. It had them going into hiding because the Sheriff had come looking for their father, whom they knew to be guilty of Graham’s murder.

  The more he thought about that idea, the better he liked it; it explained everything, and more. It explained why Brame, Wallace, and Rolingson hadn’t been able to find the book.

  That was it, all right. Rhodes was sure of it.

  Now all he had to do was find the twins.

  He might have looked for them then, but he was distracted.

  When he drove by the jail to check in with Hack, he found


  out that Buddy had captured the flasher.

  And then he found out that someone had killed Oma Coates.

  Chapter 13

  “Where you been?” Hack said when Rhodes entered the jail. He was unusually agitated. “I been callin’ all over.”

  “Did you try the courthouse?”

  “I was about to. We got us a mess here.”

  “What’s the trouble?”

  “Buddy caught up with the fella who’s been sleepin’ behind the dumpster at the Covered Wagon.”

  “Good. Did he bring him in?”

  Hack nodded. “He sure did. That’s not the trouble.”

  “Well, what is?” Lawton wasn’t around, and Rhodes thought he might actually get a direct answer.

  “He had to chase him on foot.”

  Rhodes said that he didn’t really see anything wrong with that.

  “Nothin’ wrong with it?” Hack said. “You know where the Covered Wagon is?”

  Rhodes knew.

  “Well, Buddy pulled up behind it, in the alley close to the dumpster. He checked ever’thing out, but there wasn’t nobody there. He was just about to leave when he decided to check out the old Sinclair fillin’ station up the block. You know which one I mean?”

  Rhodes nodded. The old white-painted brick station was a familiar sight in Clearview. Although it had not been in operation for fifteen or twenty years, there was still a sign with a faded green dinosaur on it hanging out in front. There was no longer any glass in any of the windows, and the two overhead doors to the garage section had long since disappeared, along with the doors to the restrooms.

  “And that’s where the man stays during the day,” Rhodes guessed. “In the Sinclair station.”

  “That’s right. He must’ve seen Buddy coming, though, and he took off like a scalded dog, right up the street. And all he had on was those tennis shoes. Well, them and the socks, not that the socks made much difference.”

  Rhodes thought about that. The Covered Wagon was several blocks from the main section of the town, but Hack would not be so upset if Buddy had caught up to the man within a short distance.