Booked for a Hanging

by Bill Crider

  “Did he get downtown?” Rhodes said.

  “He sure did. I guess those tennis shoes did make him able to run fast, like I said. By the time Buddy caught up with him, he’d passed the furniture store and the drugstore. The church, too.”

  “I imagine a lot of people saw him,” Rhodes said.

  “Some lady in the drug store fainted,” Hack said. “I don’t think she’d ever seen anything like that.”

  “Maybe it was the tennis shoes,” Rhodes said.

  “This ain’t funny anymore, Sheriff,” Hack said. “Buddy had to hold him pressed against that plate glass window in the front of the drugstore while he cuffed him. Then he marched him back to the patrol car.”

  “Right past the whole town,” Rhodes said.

  “You bet. I got a call from Billy Lee down at the drugstore. He was a little depressed about that woman faintin’ on the premises, but considerin’ what was pressed up against that window, he wasn’t too surprised that it happened.”

  “That’s not good,” Rhodes said.

  “I know somethin’ worse,” Hack said.

  “What could that be?”

  “Red Rogers was in the drugstore.”

  Rhodes could only guess what Clearview’s intrepid reporter would have to say about the incident, especially considering that it came right on the heels of Graham’s murder. He decided not to tune in to the local station for a day or two. The trouble was that most of the county commissioners could be counted on to be among the listeners even if Rhodes wasn’t.

  “Did we get him booked?” he said.

  “Lawton’s settlin’ him in right now. We got him a jailhouse outfit to wear, so at least he’s decent.”

  “He give any reason for being dressed the way he was?”

  “Says he’s one of Blacklin County’s homeless. Says he can’t afford anything to wear, and it’s all society’s fault. Says he has the shoes because he found ’em in somebody’s trash pile. Says he was looking for somethin’ to wear in the dumpster behind the Covered Wagon.”

  “Did you tell him he wouldn’t be very likely to find it there?”

  “Sure did, but he said he didn’t care. Said the food they throw out there is the best in town. He hopes it’ll be better here in the jail, though.”

  “It will,” Rhodes said. Miz Stutts, who provided the meals for the jail, was the best cook in town. The flasher, or whatever the right term for him was, wouldn’t have any complaints on that score.

  Rhodes talked to Hack for a bit longer and finally convinced him that the excitement would soon die down. He was about to leave the jail when the phone rang.

  It was Twyla Faye. She sounded panicky, and it took Hack a minute to get her to slow down and tell him what she wanted.

  What she wanted was to tell someone that Oma Coates was dead.

  Twyla Faye had spent the day thinking over what Rhodes had said, and she had decided that she wanted to talk to her mother. If her mother would go to the counselor, then Twyla Faye would go with her. It wouldn’t hurt to try it, not while Appleby was in jail, at least. There was nothing he could do to them while he was there.

  The Applebys didn’t have a phone, so Twyla had gone to Oma Coates’ house to call the sheriff. She had heard scuffling inside the house when she got there, and she had heard a weak call for help.

  She had opened the door, which was unlocked, and called out. There had been a crash in the kitchen, and the back door had slammed shut. She had gone into the kitchen. That was where she had found Oma Coates, lying on the floor, dead.

  Miz Coates had been strangled.

  Twyla Faye had told Rhodes all of this in between sobs after he arrived at the house. Her flippant toughness had not been more than skin deep. Miz Coates’ murder had stripped it away, partly, Rhodes thought, because Twyla Faye for the first time realized what her own father’s violent behavior might one day lead to. He had arranged with the ambulance driver to drop her off at Ivy’s house.

  Rhodes inspected the scene. The shotgun that Miz Coates had been carrying when she came to the door earlier in the day was now leaning in a corner by the kitchen stove. It hadn’t helped her at all when the time came. She was still wearing the same sweater.

  After looking through the house and finding nothing else that seemed relevant to the murder, Rhodes searched the surrounding area, but no one had anything helpful to report. No one in any of the closest houses, which were all more than a block away, had seen or heard anything out of the ordinary. They were all shocked and outraged to hear of the murder of Oma Coates.

  Rhodes visited Mitch Rolingson and Marty Wallace last. They were watching a game show on television.

  “Didn’t hear a thing,” Rolingson said. “We were just taking a break from inventorying Simon’s collection.”

  By that Rhodes understood him to mean that they were still searching for Tamerlane but that they hadn’t found it.

  “You didn’t see anyone drive up to the Coates house? You didn’t hear a car?”

  “Not a thing,” Marty Wallace said. “It might have happened while we were over there in the other building, up in the office. We just got back here a few minutes ago. You don’t think that woman’s death had anything to do with what happened to Simon, do you?”

  Rhodes didn’t know, but it certainly seemed likely. He wasn’t much of a believer in coincidences.

  “Good Lord,” Marty said. “That’s horrible. I hope you catch whoever did it.”

  “And soon,” Rolingson said. “I’m beginning to believe that this isn’t a very healthy place to be.”

  Rhodes left them there. Ruth Grady had come and taken Twyla Faye to Ivy’s house to be with her mother, and Oma Coates’ body had been taken to Ballinger’s funeral home.

  Rhodes went back to the kitchen and the scene of the struggle. It was clear that there had been someone else there with Miz Coates. There had been a cup of coffee on the table. The killer had thrown Oma Coates down, and she had hit the table. The coffee cup had overturned and coffee had run across the Formica table top and onto the floor. The table had been knocked up against the stove at the side of the room.

  Who the visitor had been, or why he or she had been there, Rhodes didn’t know.

  One thing he did know, however, was that he was going to have to start looking for another killer.

  Or maybe Oma Coates’ killer was the same one who had murdered Graham.

  If so, that eliminated Appleby. Rhodes was sorry about that. He had really hoped to put Appleby away in the TDC for a long time.

  The elimination of Appleby left Rhodes wondering even more about Brame. Oma Coates had seen Brame’s car at the college the night Graham had died. Had she seen something else? Rhodes recalled again that she had appeared to be holding something back when he had first talked to her. He wished now that he had taken the opportunity to press her a little harder, but he had thought there would be time for that later.

  He should have known better, but it was too late to scold himself about that now. She might not have told him, and even if she had, what she had to say might not have meant anything.

  On the other hand, it might have saved her life.

  It was easy to say that what had happened to her was her own fault, but Rhodes couldn’t shake the notion that he was at least partly to blame.

  He would do what he could to set things right, but he knew that he could never really do quite enough. Oma Coates would never shake her head at anyone again.

  Before he left the house and drove to the Lakeway Inn, he used the telephone to call Ivy at work. He told her what had happened and asked her to go by and check on Twyla Faye and her mother.

  “I suppose this means you won’t be home until late,” Ivy said.

  “Probably not. I hope you don’t mind going by and looking in on those two.”

  “I don’t mind. In fact, I want to. But I can’t seem to get used to the idea of not having you around every evening. I was worried about that before we married, you know.”
>
  “I know,” Rhodes said. “I’ll get there as soon as I can.”

  “See that you do,” Ivy said. But Rhodes could tell that she was smiling when she said it. Or he hoped she was. He didn’t feel quite so bad when he got in his car and drove away.

  “Checked out?” Rhodes said. “When?”

  The motel clerk, who looked about seventeen, looked at the monitor of his computer. As Hack had often told Rhodes, everybody had one.

  “Noon,” the clerk said. “Is there something wrong, Sheriff?”

  He looked worried, as if the motel’s owner would hold him entirely responsible if anything besmirched the good name of the Lakeway Inn.

  “I don’t know yet,” Rhodes said, but he did. There was something wrong, all right, and it was getting more wrong all the time.

  Although he’d promised himself he wouldn’t tune in the local radio station, Rhodes forgot himself, getting sucked in by a female disk jockey who promised to play two songs by Emmy Lou Harris back to back. Rhodes was a sucker for Emmy Lou.

  He should have changed the station after the songs, but he didn’t, because then the disk jockey played an old Roy Orbison record, and Rhodes couldn’t resist Roy Orbison, either, especially when he was singing “Crying.”

  After that, it was too late to switch. Red Rogers had already come on.

  Unfortunately, he had found out about the murder of Oma Coates, which made him suspicious that Simon Graham, “a near neighbor of the late Mrs. Coates,” had also been murdered, “though our elected law officials refuse to speculate on that point.”

  Then he really got going. The gist of Rogers’ remarks was that not only was there a murder epidemic in Blacklin County, but that naked perverts were roaming freely through the public streets, exposing their vulgar selves to the pure matrons of Clearview.

  “The shocking spectacle inspired fear and disgust in many Clearview residents, causing one woman to collapse to the floor of a local business establishment. After being rushed to the hospital emergency room, she recovered consciousness and told this reporter, and I quote, ‘I’m seventy-two years old, and I never saw anything like it.’ ”

  Well, Rhodes thought, Hack had been right about that.

  There was more to the broadcast, with Rogers declaiming in his best imitation-Paul Harvey voice, but Rhodes didn’t listen. He twisted the knob until he got a country station out of Dallas that was playing cuts off a new Clint Black album. Rhodes thought Black was one of the best things to happen to country music since Randy Travis and Dwight Yoakum had come along, and the songs helped to take his mind off Red Rogers.

  They didn’t take his mind off other things, though. He got on the police band radio and had Hack start calling Brame’s home and shop in Houston.

  Then he went looking for Claude and Clyde.

  He wished that he had looked for the twins sooner. He was afraid that they might be the ones he should have been looking for all along. They had worked for Graham and spent a lot of time very near Oma Coates’ house. She might have seen something, if they were the ones implicated in Graham’s murder, and it might have been what she had seen that she was holding back from Rhodes.

  They might also have killed her for another reason. Their father had already attacked her, and now he was in jail. Revenge was something that had been very much on Appleby’s mind.

  Like father, like sons.

  Rhodes thought of the marks on Miz Coates’ neck, and he thought about the twins’ big hands.

  He drove back to Obert. It was getting late, and the shadows stretched across the top of the hill. It would stay light at the top longer than it would in the surrounding countryside.

  Rhodes had always liked the hill. For one thing it reminded him of the hills he had seen in the B-Westerns of his childhood, and it had everything required for the set of a Republic serial except a cave. As far as Rhodes could recall, every serial he had ever seen had a cave in it.

  If there had been a cave on Obert’s hill, that would have been the first place Rhodes would have looked. In a serial, that would be the place where the villain was lurking about in his robe and mask, plotting against the hero. Rhodes wished the world were still as simple as that, with the bad guys wearing such outrageous get-ups that you couldn’t miss them.

  Even though there wasn’t a cave, however, there was an unusual pile of rocks that might be a good place for the Appleby twins to hide out. Rhodes had no idea how the rocks had come to be there. They were a part of the college grounds, in fact a part of the same field through which Claude and Clyde had fled after taking off down the fire escape, and Graham had no doubt had some plan to work the rocks into his renovations. They would have made an interesting tourist attraction.

  Rhodes parked in front of the main building and walked across the field through which Claude and Clyde had made their escape. The ground was soft under his feet, though not as bad as the yard at the Appleby place. The bluebonnets brushed against his pants as he walked along, and he watched for fire ant mounds. He didn’t have to worry much about chiggers. The fire ants had eaten them all.

  About halfway across the field, Rhodes angled back to his left. He could see the rock pile sticking high out of the ground, green with weeds around the base. There were a few flowers growing there, too, but they were yellow and Rhodes couldn’t identify them, though Ivy probably could have. He’d have to ask her.

  The rocks were quite large. To Rhodes they looked a little bit like a herd of dinosaurs that had somehow been petrified and left right there in the middle of the field.

  He remembered having visited the rocks long ago, and as he recalled there were several of them that were leaning together in such a way that they formed a sort of shelter. While you couldn’t call it a cave, it was a place that had looked as if it would stay dry in the rain and keep the wind off if the weather turned cool. On a day like this one, it would provide a comfortable shade.

  The only thing Rhodes didn’t like about it was the possibility that there were snakes lurking about. He had never seen a rattler in Blacklin County, but if there happened to be one in the vicinity, the rocks would be the best place for it to hide out. If other people felt about snakes the way Rhodes did, they would keep their distance from the rocks, making it an even more attractive place to the Appleby twins.

  It was a good theory, but as it turned out the twins weren’t there after all. There were signs that someone had been there fairly recently—a couple of aluminum Diet Pepsi cans, some cigarette filters, three pieces of crumpled wax paper that had bread crumbs in them. Someone who had no fear of snakes had probably had a picnic there, not so surprising when you considered the privacy and comfort of the place. It didn’t really look so snaky when you got close to it.

  Rhodes picked up the cans, paper, and filters to carry away in his car. He didn’t like littering.

  He was not too disappointed in not finding Claude and Clyde. He hadn’t really thought he would find them in the first place he looked. That would have required more luck than he usually had when he was looking for people. There were at least three other places he could search.

  There was no one in the first of those three, the college gymnasium. The gymnasium had suffered somewhat less for the passage of time than the other college buildings because it had been used by some of the local kids for pick-up basketball games for years before the property sold to Graham. They had kept it swept out and even made some minor repairs to the floor and walls.

  Now it had broken windows, and there were birds’ nests in the rafters. And there was no one hiding in it.

  The next place was the dormitory, which at present wouldn’t really do for anyone to sleep in. The floor was sagging, there were few windows left at all, and Rhodes was sure he could hear rats in the walls. He wouldn’t have stayed there himself, and he was pretty sure no one else would, either, not as long as there was somewhere else to go.

  And there was at least one other place.

  There was the Haunted House.
r />   Chapter 14

  The Haunted House was not far from the college, but then nothing in Obert was far from anything else. The road that led from Clearview to Obert swung through the town and then made a sharp turn back to the left, cutting off the college, which was reached by driving on one of the town’s few streets.

  To get to the Haunted House, Rhodes had to drive back to the decaying business district of Obert—only the Post Office and a small grocery store left—and get back on the highway and head toward the next town, a little place named Gorton, approximately three times Obert’s size, which did not qualify it as a metropolis.

  About halfway down the hill, Rhodes turned off on a gravel road to the left and drove a quarter of a mile. The Haunted House loomed up on his right.

  It was of the same era as the college’s main building and made of the same stone, two stories tall and deserted for the past sixty years. There were many tales about the house, and as far as Rhodes knew, some of them might even be true, though he had serious doubts about most of them.

  The locals had two favorites. The first had to do with the house’s original occupants, a Mr. and Mrs. Findley. According to the story, Mr. Findley had been a man not entirely unlike Cy Appleby, except that he was fairly well-to-do. Unfortunately, however, he had a penchant for beating his wife, but in his case, since he was a prominent citizen, everyone in town had known what was going on. Things being the way they were in those days, however, no one seemed to want to do anything about it. They figured that Mr. Findley pretty much had a right to do whatever he wanted to do to the woman he was married to.

  Mrs. Findley, however, for some reason or another, didn’t share the prevailing opinion. One night after a particularly brutal session with her husband, she waited until he was asleep, went out to the woodshed, and got the axe. She even sharpened it. She supposedly told the neighbors later when she wakened them to tell them what she’d done that if she did the job at all, she wanted to do it right.