by Bill Crider
“It’s flea,” Hack said. “Squashed him like a flea. Ever’body knows you can’t squash a fly.”
“Can’t squash a flea, either,” Lawton said. “You ever try it? Those boogers are unsquashable, unless you get ’em between two hard places. Sometimes they can get away even then. I remember an old dog I had—”
“We ain’t talkin’ about your old dog, and we ain’t talkin’ about fleas,” Hack said. “We’re talkin’ about a man that’s been shot. And from what I hear, he was shot with a .22. Is that right, Sheriff?”
Rhodes admitted that the .22 was a possibility but not a certainty.
“And by the way,” he said, “where do you get all your information, anyhow?”
“I got my sources,” Hack said. “We ain’t talkin’ about that, though. We’re talking about a .22. Woman’s gun. Ever’body knows that.”
“Not all the time,” Lawton said. “Those big-time hit men for the Mafia, they like that .22 Colt’s Woodsman.”
“Mafia?” Hack was incredulous. “Big-time hit men? You been rentin’ The Godfather again, am I right? That part three really bites the moose if you ask me.”
“Nobody asked you, though,” Lawton said. “And anyway, that part three’s not as bad as—”
“That’s enough,” Rhodes said, knowing that if he didn’t stop them they could go on all day like that. He was pretty sure they did it just to drive him crazy. “You can forget about the Mafia. I don’t think they’re involved in this. Blacklin County’s a little too far out of the way of things to get them interested. And you’d better forget about Miss Knape, too, at least until I’ve done some investigating. We don’t go accusing people of murder on the basis of suspicion.”
Lawton leaned on his broom, grinning widely, and didn’t say a word.
“Humpf,” Hack said. “Well, if you don’t think it was Miz Knape who shot Berry, who do you think it was?”
“I don’t know,” Rhodes said. “Maybe it was whoever’s been taking things from the cemeteries. Maybe not. That’s what I’m going to find out.”
“I bet the commissioners want you to find out this afternoon,” Hack said. “If not sooner.”
For a second Rhodes wondered if Hack had tapped his home phone, but he knew that wasn’t the case. Hack just knew what the representatives of county government were like.
“You’re right,” he said. “Did you get me the number of Berry’s cousin?”
Hack handed him a piece of paper. “Here it is.”
“Thanks,” Rhodes said. “Now, if you two will hold it down, I have a phone call to make.”
7
THE CALL WAS JUST AS BAD AS RHODES HAD THOUGHT IT would be. He wasn’t good at dealing with the grief of others, and though Ty Berry and his cousin obviously hadn’t been close, there were still some difficult moments. Rhodes was glad to hang up the telephone. After trying to clear his mind for a couple of minutes, he put on his reading glasses and started working on the report of Berry’s death.
Almost as soon as he did, another call came in. Hack took it and began smirking at Rhodes before he’d exchanged ten words with the caller. Rhodes had an uncomfortable feeling he knew what that meant.
Sure enough, Hack put his hand over the mouthpiece and said, “It’s Miz Wilkie. She wants to talk to you.”
Mrs. Wilkie had once thought of Rhodes as her future husband. Her former husband had died, and she saw Rhodes as the logical candidate to replace him. As far as she was concerned, they were the perfect match. So she’d been quite disappointed when Rhodes showed his obtuseness by marrying Ivy Daniel instead of her.
After Rhodes’s marriage, Mrs. Wilkie had re-created herself. She’d let her hair, which had been a shocking shade of orange, return to its natural color. She’d gotten a job and begun dressing in very businesslike outfits. Rhodes was no psychologist, but it seemed to him that she was trying to become a lot more like Ivy. She was also trying to let Rhodes know what a big mistake he had made by marrying the wrong woman. In every encounter he had with her, she made it clear that she hadn’t given up on him.
Rhodes grimaced at Hack and picked up his extension. The call probably wasn’t a coincidence. The job Mrs. Wilkie had gotten was in the office of James Allen.
“This is the sheriff,” Rhodes said.
“Sheriff Rhodes?”
Rhodes wondered why people always asked that after he’d just identified himself.
“That’s right,” he said. He took off his glasses and laid them on the desk. “What can I do for you, Mrs. Wilkie?”
“Mr. Allen was just telling me about Mr. Berry,” she said. “I was sorry to hear it. Mr. Berry was a nice man.”
Mrs. Wilkie sounded genuinely sad, and Rhodes wondered if she’d developed an interest in Berry.
“Did you know him well?” Rhodes asked.
“No, but I think it was nice that he was interested in the history of the county. Don’t you think we should all be interested in history, Sheriff?”
Rhodes agreed that an interest in history was a wonderful thing. He wondered where the conversation was going.
Mrs. Wilkie said, “Mr. Allen said you’d be working hard to find out who killed Mr. Berry.”
“That’s my job.”
“Well, I thought I might be able to help.”
“How?” Rhodes asked. “Do you know something about the murder?”
Mrs. Wilkie turned coy. “Not exactly.”
Rhodes waited. The silence dragged itself out for several seconds.
“Would you like to come out to the precinct so I can tell you?” Mrs. Wilkie asked.
“I have to follow up on some leads,” Rhodes said. He wasn’t going to put himself in Mrs. Wilkie’s clutches if he could avoid it. “I’ll be busy the rest of the day. Do you have something for me?”
“Yes, but I’d prefer to tell you about it in person.”
Rhodes knew there was absolutely nothing Mrs. Wilkie could tell him in person that she couldn’t tell him over the phone just as well.
“I’m sure you would,” he said. “But there’s no way I can get out there today, and every minute counts in a murder investigation.” Rhodes thought he might be laying it on a little thick, but it was the truth. “Why don’t you tell me now? It could be important.”
“Oh, all right.” Mrs. Wilkie was clearly put out. “I just thought you’d like to know that I heard motorsickles again the other night. I was going to call you then, but I was afraid you’d think I was being silly.”
“You didn’t see anyone?” Rhodes asked.
“No, I just heard the motorsickles. Rut they sounded the same way they always do.”
Motorcycles all sounded pretty much alike to Rhodes, and he suspected they did to Mrs. Wilkie, too. But he was certain that Mrs. Wilkie had heard two particular motorcycles. He couldn’t have said why he was certain, but he was.
“So you don’t know where they went,” he said.
“No, but they’re somewhere around Milsby. I’m sure of that much.”
“Thanks, Mrs. Wilkie. I’ll check it out this afternoon. You’ve been a big help, as usual.”
“Why, thank you, Sheriff. But I’m just doing my duty as a citizen.”
“And I appreciate it. Good-bye, and thanks again.”
Rhodes hung up and looked at Hack. The dispatcher was still smirking. So was Lawton. They looked at each other, smirked some more, and looked back at Rhodes.
“That Miz Wilkie,” Hack said. “You got to give her credit for stickin’ to a job once she takes it on. Sooner or later, Sheriff, she’s gonna marry you, whether you like it or not. You might as well ditch Ivy now and give it up.”
“It might not be as easy for her as you think,” Rhodes said. “Mrs. McGee might get you first.”
He knew it was a low blow, even as he said it. Mrs. McGee was the woman Hack had been seeing for a while, and the dispatcher didn’t like talking about her when Lawton was around. Lawton liked to tease him.
Well, if you can dish it out
, you have to be able to take it, Rhodes thought.
Lawton didn’t miss his cue. He said, “He’s right about that, Hack. That Miz McGee’s had her cap set for you since she first set eyes on you. You might’s well give in and save yourself some trouble.”
Hack’s face started to turn red, and Rhodes knew he had to change the subject before things got out of hand.
“Mrs. Wilkie said she heard motorcycles out at Milsby,” he said.
Hack turned toward him, and the red started to fade from his face.
“You think it’s those two gangsters back again?” he asked.
“Could be,” Rhodes said, though gangsters wasn’t exactly the word he would have chosen to describe the two men he was thinking of. “They seem to have a way of turning up when things get bad around here.”
“Looks like they’d have learned their lesson by now,” Lawton said.
“Some people never learn,” Hack said, giving Lawton a hard look.
“Especially those two,” Rhodes said, before the conversation could get sidetracked.
“I was hopin’ they might die,” Hack said. “I guess they’re just too mean.”
“That’s probably it,” Rhodes said.
The two men they were talking about were called Rapper and Nellie. They were supposedly members of a motorcycle gang called Los Muertos, though no other members of the gang had ever showed up in Blacklin County.
In their first encounter with Rhodes, Rapper had lost the ends of a couple of fingers. That had been enough to keep him away for a while.
In the next confrontation, Nellie and Rapper had both ended up in the hospital, Nellie with two broken ribs and Rapper with a severe wound in his thigh, where Rhodes had stuck a hay hook. They’d sneaked away from the hospital because they’d thought they might be charged with murder.
“Broken ribs never killed anybody,” Lawton said. “But I’ll bet that Rapper fella is still walkin’ funny.”
Rhodes hoped so. He’d used the hay hook on Rapper because Rapper had been trying to kill him.
“Maybe they knew a doctor somewhere else,” Rhodes said.
“What do you reckon they’re up to?” Hack asked. “You think they’ve got somethin’ to do with this cemetery business?”
“I wouldn’t be a bit surprised,” Rhodes said.
8
BEFORE RHODES LEFT THE JAIL, HE ASKED ABOUT THE ghost again. “Not a peep out of him today,” Lawton said. “Maybe he’s moved on to haunt somebody else. That’d be fine with me. I’m tired of ghosts. I’m ready for things to get back to normal around here.”
“Things ain’t never been normal around here,” Hack said.
“You got that right,” Lawton said, being more agreeable than usual.
“What about Ty Berry?” Hack asked Rhodes. “You really got some investigatin’ to do this afternoon, or were you just puttin’ Miz Wilkie off?”
“I thought I might have a talk with some of the cemetery association presidents,” Rhodes said. “And maybe some of the Sons and Daughters of Texas, see if they have an idea what Ty’s been up to and whether he’s tangled with anybody lately. While I’m doing that, give Ruth Grady a call. If she’s got the situation with those goats straightened out, have her and Buddy Reynolds go out to the cemetery and impound Ty Berry’s pickup. She can bring it in and go over it for evidence.”
“You think she’ll find anything?” Hack asked.
“I doubt it. I’ve already searched it. I probably messed it up a little.”
“Ruth won’t like that.”
Rhodes agreed that she wouldn’t. Ruth was a stickler for doing things the right way. But Rhodes had wanted to know what was in the cab of the pickup, and he hadn’t wanted to wait.
“Tell Buddy to go around to all the houses around the cemetery and ask if anyone heard shots last night,” Rhodes said.
Buddy was another of the deputies. He had a mild puritanical streak, but he could be counted on to ask the question in a way that wouldn’t scare everyone half to death.
“Hard to hear a little old .22 from any distance,” Hack said.
“Not if it was a still night,” Lawton said. “You can hear things for miles up on that hill.”
“It wasn’t still last night,” Hack pointed out. “The wind was blowing up a storm.”
“Didn’t say it was still,” Lawton said. “Just said you could hear a .22 a long way if it was.”
“Never mind that,” Rhodes said, heading off the argument. “Just tell Buddy to ask around. I’ll go to see the presidents of the associations.”
“What about Faye Knape?” Hack asked. “You gonna talk to her, too?”
“I guess so. She might not be much help, though.”
“What you need to do is find out who’s been taking that stuff from the cemeteries,” Lawton said. “That’s who killed Berry, I’ll bet.”
“Anything’s possible right now,” Rhodes said. “But I have to start somewhere, and I can’t talk to the people who’ve been stealing from the cemeteries because I can’t find them. I’ve been trying for weeks, and I haven’t had much luck.”
“Maybe today will be the day things turn around,” Hack said.
Rhodes hoped he was right.
For most of the rest of the afternoon, it looked as if Hack had been wrong. Rhodes talked to the presidents of five cemetery associations, all of whom were genuinely sorry about what had happened to Berry but none of whom had really talked to him within the past week.
And none of them had actually done what they’d said about patrolling their own cemeteries, either. It had been too wet or too cold or too this or too that for them to do what they’d talked about. What it all added up to was that they weren’t nearly as enthusiastic about the possibility of confronting the looters as Berry had been.
Frank Conners was in charge of the Sealy Cemetery. He operated a feed store, and he and Rhodes stood out in front while they talked. Rhodes could smell the rich odor of cottonseed meal coming from five dusty sacks of it that were stacked against the wall.
Conners said, “That little cemetery is a long way off the main road, and I got to thinking what I’d do if I caught anybody there in the middle of the night. Sure, I could call your office on my cell phone, but what if they saw me? What if they decided to do something about me? I’m licensed to carry a concealed handgun, but I’m not sure I could actually shoot it at anybody. I’d most likely just wind up getting killed.”
All the private cemeteries were located in out-of-the-way places, off the main roads. Some of them could be reached only by one-lane dirt roads that hardly anyone ever traveled. They had been started long ago, in the nineteenth century in some cases, by families too far from town to consider traveling there to bury relatives, or by small rural churches whose congregations had long ago moved away or died, or by small communities of which nothing now remained other than the graves of the former residents.
People wanted to keep the cemeteries in appropriate condition and they wanted the remains of the people buried there to stay exactly where they were. The current caretakers would never have considered moving the graves to a more accessible location. Rhodes didn’t blame them, but the remote locations were what made it so easy for someone to loot the graveyards, what made it so hard for Rhodes’s department to patrol them, and what made it so dangerous for anyone to try to protect them from looters. Though, come to think of it, being right there in the city limits hadn’t helped Ty Berry even a little bit.
“I did drive by the place at night a time or two,” Conners told Rhodes. “But I never saw anything. Tell you the truth, Sheriff, I can understand why you haven’t caught anybody yet. And with what happened to Ty, I don’t think anybody’ll be going out there at night to help you. I don’t envy you your job.”
Rhodes was glad for the understanding, but it was no more help to him than what he’d heard from other association presidents. He was beginning to think he wasn’t going to find out anything at all.
But then h
e went to talk to Faye Knape.
Faye Knape lived in an old frame house near the downtown area. It was late afternoon when Rhodes arrived. It would have been near sundown if there had been any sun. The thick clouds made it seem almost like night, and the tall pecan trees in the yard made things even darker. There was a light shining through the front windows, however, and Rhodes could see cats sitting in some of them. Rhodes did a quick count and came up with three. He knew there were probably more than that, though not many more. Maybe six or eight altogether, though Rhodes wasn’t sure how many cats Mrs. Knape had. He didn’t know whether even Mrs. Knape was sure.
Mrs. Knape’s husband had died of colon cancer some years before, and she’d transferred all her affection to her cats. Her love for the animals was well-known in Clearview. She had all colors: white, black, black and white, gray, orange, and calico. Rhodes, who was slightly allergic to cats, hoped he’d be able to keep himself from sneezing while he was in the house, but he knew it was a vain hope.
He stepped up on the porch and knocked on the door. At the first hollow tap, all the cats disappeared from the windows as if they’d never been there.
After a few seconds Rhodes could hear someone inside. The porch light came on, and Mrs. Knape peered out at him through one of the small glass panes set in the upper part of the door. When she saw Rhodes, she threw a dead-bolt, snapped a lock, and opened the door.
“Good evening, Sheriff,” she said. “I suppose you’re here about Ty Berry.”
She was a tall woman, nearly as tall as Rhodes. Even taller if you took into account her masses of amazingly black hair. The hair color would have been even more amazing had it been real, which it wasn’t. Mrs. Knape was well over sixty, and she’d been dyeing her hair for years. She did it herself, and she used Clairol Nice ‘n Easy, according to Ivy, who’d seen her buying it at Wal-Mart.
Rhodes wasn’t at all shocked to hear Mrs. Knape knew about Ty Berry, since everyone else did.