Booked for a Hanging

by Bill Crider

  Rhodes let his gaze drop from the rafters and looked out the window. Two fieldlarks—feelarks, Rhodes had called them when he was a kid; still did, for that matter—flew out of the grass as if they had been startled. They perched for a minute on top of the largest rock, and then they flew up and away. Rhodes lost sight of them in the intense blue of the sky.

  His thoughts returned to Graham’s murder. The twins were strong enough to hang two or three men, all at the same time, but Rhodes didn’t think they had done it. They were hiding something, and he thought now that he knew what it was, but they weren’t killers. They might even turn out to be all right if they got a chance to spend some time away from the influence of their father, and they were about to get that chance, thanks to the fact that the blood testing had worked out.

  So as Ivy had said, that didn’t leave very many suspects.

  Only two. That narrowed the field, all right.

  There was, however, the little matter of proof.

  After finding Brame’s body, Rhodes had asked Hack to call the local motels, as well as those in some of the surrounding counties.

  He didn’t really think Rolingson would have stayed right in Clearview, and he had been right about that. But the big man hadn’t gone far, and the motel manager could identify him. So could the clerk at the Lakeway Inn. Brame hadn’t checked out himself; Rolingson had checked him out. The night clerk had not been on duty when the check-out took place, and the day clerk had no idea that Rolingson wasn’t Brame.

  It was a good ploy, and it might even have worked if Rhodes hadn’t caught on. It seemed clear that Rolingson didn’t have a very high opinion of Rhodes’ abilities.

  But with the testimony of the clerk at the Lakeway Inn, Rhodes could tie Rolingson to Brame, though he didn’t have anything that could be considered real proof that Rolingson was involved in killing anyone. Maybe Ruth would find Rolingson’s prints in Brame’s car.

  As for hanging Graham, that would have been easy for the muscular Rolingson, as easy as it would have been for the equally powerful Appleby.

  Rhodes left the window and went to the office door, which was still open. The place had been thoroughly searched, and toward the end the searching had become much less organized than it had been at the beginning. Most of the books had not been replaced on the shelves, and it appeared that Rolingson and Wallace had been looking along the walls for a hidden safe or some other hiding place.

  Why had Rolingson killed Graham? Rhodes still wasn’t sure, but he was going to get in touch with Graham’s lawyer as soon as he could and find out about Graham’s will. He had a feeling that neither Wallace nor Rolingson would be mentioned in it, and that they both knew it. Rolingson would have wanted to get the book and get out, sell it quietly, maybe to Brame, and then deny ever having seen it.

  So the book was one motive. Rhodes thought that Marty Wallace was another. She and Rolingson were almost blatantly living together now, and their relationship was not a new one. Graham might not have approved; he might even have threatened to dissolve his partnership with Rolingson. Motives number two and three.

  Now suppose that Brame had stumbled onto the murder by accident, having come to look at the Poe book. Suppose that he had gotten away before being spotted. He might have informed the sheriff in a roundabout way, to insure his own safety, and then begun a little game of blackmail.

  If that was the way things were, and Rhodes was pretty sure he was right, or close to right, Brame had been fatally wrong about how well the sheriff could protect him.

  So had Oma Coates, if she had even thought about it. Rhodes figured that she had seen something the night Graham died, too, probably Rolingson’s car. Maybe she hadn’t been certain about how it related to Graham’s death, or maybe even she was interested in blackmail. Rhodes didn’t know whether he would ever find out which was the case, but he was sure that Rolingson had killed her, as well.

  There was the shotgun, for one thing. She had left it in the kitchen, or put it there. She had felt safe with whoever was in her house, had even walked back to the kitchen with him. She knew that Appleby was in jail, but she would surely have taken the gun and run the twins away from her door had they appeared there. But Rolingson? She might have had business to talk over with him, and the kitchen was the place for that.

  It all came back to Tamerlane. When he’d first heard of it, Rhodes wouldn’t have thought something like that could be a motive for murder. But when he’d talked to Scott and found out the book’s true value to a collector, he had changed his mind. A quarter of a million dollars was more than enough to tempt almost anyone, especially if that someone were in financial trouble.

  Still, why would Rolingson need to kill Graham? He was Graham’s partner and would share in the proceeds if the book were sold, no matter who bought it.

  That point had bothered Rhodes for a large part of the previous sleepless night, but then he thought about Marty Wallace and Rolingson’s relationship to her. Graham had not even shown Rolingson the copy of Tamerlane, probably because he didn’t trust him any longer. It was going to be Graham’s book and Graham’s sale. Rolingson had heard about it the same way others had, by rumor, and determined to do something to get the book for himself.

  That was the how and the why of the murder, as best Rhodes could figure it.

  Now all he had to do was prove it.

  “What are you looking for, Sheriff?”

  Rhodes twitched slightly at the sound of Marty Wallace’s voice. He hadn’t expected anyone to intrude on him, and he had been so deep in his thoughts that he hadn’t heard her coming up the stairs.

  “Clues,” he said.

  Marty Wallace laughed. She had a nice, throaty laugh; Rhodes thought it was too bad about her hair style. Too bad about her association with Rolingson, too.

  “You won’t find any clues in there,” she said, smiling.

  “How do you know?” Rhodes said. “There might be a thing or two you overlooked.”

  She stopped smiling. “I doubt that very much, Sheriff Rhodes.”

  Rhodes looked around the ransacked office again. “You’re probably right. Where’s your friend?”

  “Mitch? He’s over at the house. Why?”

  “There are a few things I’d like to talk to him about,” Rhodes said, leaving the office.

  “I’ll walk with you,” Marty said.

  The house didn’t look like the same place, not on the inside. The almost antiseptic neatness had become near chaos. Floor boards had been pried up. Couch cushions had been slit open and the stuffing rearranged. Wallpaper had been peeled back.

  “What happened?” Rhodes said when he entered the front door. “Did you have a burglary.”

  Rolingson’s voice came from somewhere in the back of the house. “Marty! Get your ass back here, now!”

  Marty’s face darkened at his tone, but she quickly forced a smile. “Mitch, why don’t you come in the front room? We have company.”

  Rolingson came from the back bedroom. He was wearing a t-shirt that stretched its message across his chest. It said:

  SEE DICK DRINK

  SEE DICK DRIVE

  SEE DICK DIE

  Rhodes didn’t have to see the back of the shirt to get the message, having seen similar shirts before. He knew that it said, “DON’T BE A DICK.” More than the message, however, he was interested in Rolingson’s arms, which the shirt showed to considerable advantage, and his hands. If John Henry had been built like that, the steam engine would have died instead of the steel-driving man. One of those hands could have encircled Oma Coates’ thin neck, or Brame’s.

  “What do you want, Rhodes?” Rolingson’s face was hard as rock; he seemed to have lost his grip on civility. That was no surprise to Rhodes. Rolingson had demonstrated even in their first conversation that he had a temper and that it wasn’t always well controlled.

  “I guess you haven’t found the book yet,” Rhodes said.

  “That’s none of your business. If you’ve go
t something important to say, say it. If you don’t, why don’t you just go on back to your sheriffing?”

  Rhodes walked over to the vandalized couch, straightened the cushions and sat down. He looked across the room at Rolingson. “This little visit has to do with my sheriffing, as a matter of fact,” he said.

  Rolingson came to the couch and loomed over Rhodes. “Come on, then. If you have something to say, get it said. And then you can get out.”

  Rhodes looked up at Rolingson. He had heard that looming was supposed to give you an advantage in interviews, but he didn’t think it worked that way when the loomer was as wrought up as Rolingson appeared to be.

  “Why don’t you and Miss Wallace have a seat?” Rhodes said. “This might take a while.”

  “I don’t have time for a friendly chat, Sheriff,” Rolingson said, not moving. “I’m a busy man.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Rhodes could see that Marty was trying to get Rolingson to calm down by making discreet hand motions. It wasn’t working.

  “I don’t have to be friendly if you don’t want me to,” Rhodes said. “We can start by talking about what you’ve done to this house. It isn’t yours, and it looks to me like you’ve torn it up pretty good.”

  “Look,” Rolingson said, trying to relax his tensed shoulders, “Miss Wallace and I have been through a damn tough time here. We’ve lost a good friend, and we just want to find what belongs to us and get out of this place.”

  “We haven’t established that anything around here belongs to you,” Rhodes said. “I’ll be talking to Graham’s lawyers about that later today. Until then, you’d be better off to stop looking for that book. I don’t think you’re going to find it, anyway.”

  Rolingson’s head jerked, and he looked at Marty.

  “Why not?” she said.

  “Call it a hunch,” Rhodes said. He crossed one leg over the other and leaned back on the couch.

  “Hunch, my ass,” Rolingson said, his mouth twisting into an ugly sneer. “I’m tired of your crap, Sheriff. Get up and get out of here.”

  “Mitch—” Marty Wallace said stepping over beside him and resting a hand on his huge left biceps.

  “Shut up,” Rolingson said, shaking her hand off. “This hick sheriff has been hassling us from the very beginning. That book’s ours, and he can’t do a damn thing about it. Isn’t that right, hick?”

  “Wrong,” Rhodes said. “I can do a lot of things about it. For one thing, if it does turn up, I can impound it as evidence in a murder case.”

  “Murder?” Marty said. “But what does Ha—Simon’s murder have to do with anything?”

  “That depends,” Rhodes said.

  “Depends on what?” Rolingson said.

  “On who told you Hal was murdered,” Rhodes said, leaning forward on the couch so that he could get to his .38. He was pretty sure he couldn’t take Rolingson barehanded.

  “Stupid bitch,” Rolingson said.

  He didn’t go for Rhodes. Instead, he reached out and grabbed Marty Wallace, his right hand encircling her arm. He jerked her toward him, snatched her off the floor, and threw her bodily at Rhodes.

  Up until that instant, Rhodes had thought he was handling things exactly the right way. Rolingson seemed frazzled, in a bad mood, irritable. Typical of the man. Rhodes thought maybe he could stir him up, agitate him even more, and get him to blurt out something incriminating. Not that Rhodes had been trying that hard. He had been talking about Graham’s murder, but Marty had interpreted his statement in the wrong way. Her preoccupation with Brame’s murder had caused her to make a mistake.

  Rhodes didn’t think that even Red Rogers knew about Brame’s death yet, so the only people who knew were those who had been on the scene the previous night—and the murderer, of course. Or, as Rhodes saw it now, the murderers.

  He hadn’t wanted to think that Marty Wallace was a party to the killings. She was too nearly beautiful to be a killer. He should have known better. He had already seen that she was greedy. And she had been in the motel with Rolingson; the records would show that she had checked her own messages, just as he had. She had been the one to calm Rolingson down and get him to go along with Brame earlier. How could she not have known that Brame had been murdered? Rhodes had a fleeting second to feel ashamed of himself for letting a pretty face so mislead him before she crashed into him.

  Rolingson threw her hard. The front of her head and Rhodes’ clonked together like two blocks of wood.

  Rhodes fell back on the couch, and for a second he didn’t see anything but blackness shot through with sparkling yellow and orange lights. His head felt at first as if it might float away from him. Then it started hurting like hell.

  Marty bounced away from Rhodes, just missed the coffee table, and landed on the hardwood floor. Her head, the back of it this time, hit with a hard thunk.

  Rhodes struggled against the waves of nausea the roiled up from his stomach and spun around in his head as he tried to get off the couch.

  Rolingson kicked him in the chest. Rhodes shot back against the couch, and the couch slammed against the wall, stopping short and throwing Rhodes forward onto the floor. He caught himself on his hands, managing to avoid smashing his face into the wood. He held himself there, trying to focus on the floor, waiting for Rolingson’s foot to punt his head through the window.

  It wasn’t that he wanted his head to be kicked through the window; it was just that he couldn’t do anything to prevent its happening.

  It didn’t happen, however. Rolingson seemed to have decided to quit the premises. Through the throbbing that engulfed his head, Rhodes heard a door slam. Then he heard a car start and drive away.

  Rhodes sat up, careful not to jar his head. He was afraid it might fall off if he did. He reached up and gingerly touched the spot on his forehead where he and Marty Wallace had collided. It was very tender, and a lump was beginning to form.

  Even at that Rhodes was better off than Marty, who lay still as a stone on the floor nearby.

  Rhodes put his hand to her neck, felt for a carotid artery. There was a pulse, faint but regular. At least she wasn’t dead. Rhodes didn’t want to leave her there, but he felt an obligation to go after Rolingson.

  Rhodes stood up shakily, putting a hand on the arm of the couch to help himself. He was able to focus better now, but his legs were wobbly as he started for the kitchen. He remembered seeing a phone in there.

  He called the jail, told Hack what had happened, and asked him to send an ambulance for Marty. “Send Buddy or Ruth, too,” he said. “Or both of them. Rolingson’s in a BMW.” He hung up and went out the back door.

  The bright sun dazzled his eyes. There were already little suns dancing in front of them, and the real thing didn’t help a bit. He shaded his face with his hand and looked at the garage. The pickup was missing.

  Well, that was smart. The pickup was a lot less conspicuous than Rolingson’s BMW. Rhodes thought of going back in to call Hack, but he decided to wait and get him by radio. He couldn’t afford to waste any more time.

  As he shambled toward his own car, he noticed that Rolingson’s passing had caused the dust of the gravel road to rise in the still morning air, giving a clear notion of the direction the pickup had taken.

  Instead of heading back toward Obert and the main road, Rolingson had gone down the hill toward Appleby’s house. That wasn’t as dumb as it might seem, either. The county roads were much less traveled than the highways, and although they wound all around over creation, they all came back to a main road sooner or later.

  Rhodes got into his car, which with the sun beating down on the top and streaming through the windshield was like getting into a metal box that had been heated in a fire. It didn’t do his head any good.

  He radioed Hack and told him about the pickup, told him the direction Rolingson was taking.

  Hack said that it was no problem and that he would notify Ruth and Buddy. He said that he could get the license number of Graham’s pickup with the c
omputer.

  “Right,” Rhodes said, and then he was off in hot pursuit.

  Chapter 18

  Hot pursuit was the right term for it, all right, Rhodes thought.

  Although he had turned the air-conditioner on high and directed all the vents within reach at himself, his entire body was running with sweat. He wasn’t sure just how much of that was due to the actual heat and how much to the blow on the head. He hoped it was all the fault of the heat, but he didn’t really think it was. He wiped a hand across his slick forehead, wincing when he touched the rapidly growing lump there, and then dried his fingers on his pants leg.

  He roared past Appleby’s pasture with hardly a glance in the direction of the stolen cattle, which were no longer bunched near the fence. They were getting familiar with the place, beginning to spread out over the pasture. Adkins was luckier than he had any right to be.

  The road was, like all the country roads, curvy and tricky. And bumpy, besides. Rhodes had to keep his mind on his driving, not an easy job with a head that felt as if it were expanding and contracting in time to the beat of his heart.

  Nevertheless, hick that he was, he had been driving on roads like that all his life. He knew more or less how his car would respond to the curves and the gravel under the tires, and he had been on that particular road often enough to anticipate the deep ruts, the sandy spots, the places where the gravel was spread too thick or too thin on the curves.

  Rolingson, being a city boy, might not know exactly what he was doing. And in one way taking the pickup hadn’t been such a smart idea after all. Unlike the BMW, it had rear wheel drive, and when the back end was unloaded, as it was now, it had a tendency to behave differently from the back end of a car. Rolingson might also not be accustomed to the way the trees grew right up almost to the road, and the tree whacker had not been used much beyond Appleby’s place. The tree branches reached out so close to the road that they almost touched the car doors. Sometimes they did touch.

  Rhodes hoped all these things would slow Rolingson down enough for Rhodes to catch him.