by Bill Crider
“What happened was this,” Hack said. “Shirley got out. She does that a lot.”
“I know,” Rhodes said. “Get on with it.”
“Impatient,” Lawton said. “Always in a hurry.”
“Sure is,” Hack said. “You’d think he was a busy man.”
Rhodes kept his mouth shut.
“Anyway,” Hack continued, “the goat got out and ran down to the Walker house. You know where that is?”
“About a block from Vernell’s,” Rhodes said.
“Right. The two Walker kids was playin’ in the yard.”
“One of ’em’s three,” Lawton said. “Other one’s four.”
“Just the right age to be scared of a crazy nanny goat,” Hack said. “They ran behind some pittosporum bushes in front of the house, and the goat trapped ’em there. Wouldn’t let ’em out.”
“Their mama is the one that called,” Lawton said.
“I’m the one took the call,” Hack said. “Thing of it was, Miz Walker’s like her kids, scared of goats, ’specially crazy pregnant ones. So she called us.”
It had taken a while, but now the whole thing was out. Or Rhodes hoped it was.
“So what did you do?” he asked.
“Called Alton Boyd. He’s the animal control officer, ain’t he?”
“Did he take care of it?”
“Guess so. Haven’t heard back from him. Hope Shirley didn’t gore him or somethin’ like that.”
“He’s got the county insurance,” Lawton said. “If he got gored, he’d be covered.”
Rhodes had enjoyed about as much of the conversation as he could stand. It was time to get back to the business of being the sheriff.
“Lawton,” he said, “would you please bring Jorge to the interview room?”
“Sure thing, Sheriff,” Lawton said. “You know all you got to do is ask.”
Chapter 19
Jorge was even twitchier than the other time he’d been in the interview room. He didn’t relax even after Rhodes told him that he wasn’t in any more trouble and that in fact Rhodes didn’t even want to talk about Frankie or Guillermo.
“It’s about the Environmental Reclamation Center,” Rhodes said.
That topic didn’t seem to appeal to Jorge any more than talking about his friends. He looked past Rhodes’s shoulder at the wall as if he might see something interesting there.
“I saw Frankie there today,” Rhodes said. “I thought he’d be long gone by now, maybe visiting his poor old mother down in Matamoros.”
Jorge dropped his gaze to the table in front of him and thought that over.
“She’s a good cook,” he said.
“So I’ve heard, but he didn’t go to Matamoros, did he.”
“That’s what you say.”
“Just tell me why he showed up at the junkyard. That’s all I want to know. What kind of deal do you have with Al?”
“We don’t have no deal.”
“Then why would Frankie show up there? Or was he there all along?”
Jorge shrugged.
“I think he was,” Rhodes said. “He couldn’t have gone back to Womack’s place because Womack would’ve called me. So Frankie went where he knew he could hang out for a while.”
“No way,” Jorge said. “We got to stay away from there most of the time.”
That was more like it. “Where could he go then?”
“Lots of places in town,” Jorge said. “Old places.”
“You mean empty buildings.”
“Sure. Nobody bothers you in those places.” He gave Rhodes an accusatory glance. “Mostly.”
“You know, I’ve been wondering if you saw anybody there yesterday afternoon after closing time. You must look out the window now and then, especially after everybody’s supposed to be gone home.”
“We look out. We didn’t notice anybody there.”
“The parking lot was empty?”
“When I looked. I don’t sit there and watch, you know?”
“Let’s get back to Frankie and Al. What’s the deal?”
“I told you we don’t have no deal. Frankie must’ve needed money. Maybe he had something to sell.”
Rhodes hadn’t thought of that. If Lynn didn’t carry much cash in her purse, Frankie might have been broke or close to it. He’d hidden out for the night and gone to see Al in the morning.
“Maybe he thought he could get a loan,” Rhodes said. “You ever do that?”
“Sometimes. If we promise to bring something in. Just things we find, you know?”
“Right. Nothing that you steal.”
“Now you got it. We don’t steal.”
Rhodes would let it ride for now. Jennifer would be looking into it, and he suspected she’d know plenty in a day or two. He’d gotten a search warrant, too, and he’d have a look around. He sent Jorge back to his cell and told Hack he was going to see Sandra Wiley.
“Buddy called in,” Hack said. “He says he’s been lookin’ for that Frankie fella all mornin’. Hasn’t see him, though.”
“He’ll turn up,” Rhodes said, “unless he got some money. If he did, we won’t see him again.”
“Just as well,” Hack said.
* * *
Sandra Wiley was wearing black and smoking. Her husband, Jimmy, was doing neither. He wore jeans and a clean white shirt, and he no longer looked like the football player he’d once been. He seemed to have shrunk, except for the head that wobbled on his now thin neck. The skin of his face sagged, and his eyes were sunk in his skull.
“How long do you think I should keep the shop closed?” Sandra asked. “I don’t want to open too soon and look bad.”
“Nobody’s going to hold it against you if you open tomorrow,” Rhodes said. “It’s business.”
They were all sitting in the Wileys’ living room, in an old house that had once been much nicer than it was now. That was true of a lot of houses in Clearview. The furniture was shabby, and the TV set was an old one with a little box on top that allowed the Wileys to get reception by way of their antenna until they bought a new high-definition set. The room smelled of smoke, and Rhodes knew his clothes would, too, by the time he got out of there.
“That Lynn’s always been trouble,” Jimmy said, his voice almost a whisper. “Sandra would’ve let her go long ago if she hadn’t brought in the customers.”
“She must have lost a few, too,” Rhodes said.
“Sure, but she was a good draw. You know how it is. People like to be around somebody like her, young and saucy.”
It had been a long time since Rhodes had heard anybody described as saucy, if he ever had, but it seemed apt for Lynn.
“I didn’t really come here to talk about Lynn,” Rhodes said. “It’s Jeff Tyler this time.”
Sandra started coughing. She stubbed out her cigarette in an ashtray that was already overflowing, got out another one, and lit it.
“She’s nervous about all this,” Jimmy said. “She knows smoking’s not good for her. Me either, for that matter, all that secondhand smoke coming in. What about Tyler?”
“He was Lynn’s after-hours appointment yesterday,” Rhodes said.
“She always cut his hair,” Sandra said. “He wouldn’t let Lonnie do it.”
“You think Lonnie was jealous of Lynn?” Rhodes asked.
Sandra blew out a plume of smoke. “You know about Lonnie?”
“Everybody knows,” Rhodes said.
“Then you know he didn’t have anything to be jealous of. Jeff didn’t like women any more than Lonnie does.”
“Seems to me that Lynn was better about keeping secrets, though,” Rhodes said.
Jimmy wheezed what might have been a chuckle. “You can say that again.”
Rhodes didn’t say it again. Instead he asked Jimmy what he meant.
“I mean just what I said. You know about her and men. She sure kept that stuff secret.”
Rhodes knew that, but it sounded as if Jimmy had something else in mind. Becaus
e of that whispery voice, it was hard to tell. Could Jimmy have been one of those men Lynn had kept secret? Not in his condition, surely.
“Life’s not what it used to be,” Jimmy said. “Used to, you could trust people. Remember how it was, Danny, back when we were playing for the Catamounts? Never had to lock a door in this town back then. People kept their word, and a handshake was as good as anything you might put on paper. Not anymore.”
“Maybe we just remember it that way,” Rhodes said.
“You think it’s just because I’ve been sick and I’m getting old,” Jimmy said. “That’s not it. The world has changed, and not for the better if you ask me.”
Rhodes believed that at least a few things were better now, but he hadn’t come there to argue with Jimmy about that.
“One thing that’s changed,” Jimmy continued, “is that now we got illegals coming into town and living in old hotels and killing people. There wasn’t any of that back then.”
“I don’t know that those men who stayed in the hotel were illegals,” Rhodes said, “and I don’t think they killed anybody.”
“You didn’t check out their status?”
“That’s a job for the federal government,” Rhodes said. “I’ll find out later if they have their green cards, and if they don’t, I’ll notify ICE. The problem is that it might be a while before ICE gets around to doing anything, and they’ll be bonded out. They might be bonded out already.”
The truth of the matter was that Rhodes and his small department had their hands full just doing the things that the county expected of them, and enforcing the federal laws was an imposition on them. The state legislature was threatening to pass a law requiring local officers to ask about residence status, despite almost universal opposition from every law enforcement department there was. Rhodes would do what he was required to do, but until the law forced him, he was going to stay out of it as much as he could.
“You mean those killers might be out there walking the streets?” Jimmy asked. He was getting worked up, and his voice got even huskier. “I know they’re the ones who killed Lynn. Bound to be. Nobody else could’ve done it.”
“We’re getting sidetracked,” Rhodes said. “What I need to hear is what Jeff Tyler had to do with Lynn Ashton.”
“Nothing except that she cut his hair,” Sandra said. “Do you think the same person killed both of them?”
“If it was the same one,” Jimmy said, “it was those illegals. I’ll bet they were the ones. Have you tried to find any evidence that they did it, or are you in favor of letting them back out to terrorize the town?”
Sandra mashed out a cigarette and put a hand on Jimmy’s arm. “You better calm down. You’re going to have a stroke or something. You know what the doctor said.”
Jimmy didn’t calm down. “I thought we had good law in this town. I though Danny Rhodes was a good sheriff, but he can’t see the truth when it’s staring him in the face.”
Rhodes could see he wasn’t going to get any further here. He stood up and said, “If you can think of anything that would help, give me a call. I have everybody on the force working on this. We’re doing the best we can.”
Jimmy didn’t say anything. Sandra reached for another cigarette. Rhodes found his own way out.
* * *
On his way to the reclamation center, Rhodes called Hack to check in.
“Guillermo and Jorge bonded out,” Hack said. “I bet we never see ’em again.”
“Maybe not,” Rhodes said, thinking that Jimmy wouldn’t be happy about that. “Who went their bail?”
“It was the AAA Bail Bonds guy. He didn’t do much talkin’.”
“All right. Anything else?”
“Mayor Clement’s been callin’ ever’ five minutes. He’s really in an uproar. You might wanna go by and see him. Jennifer Loam called, too. She said she had something already.”
Rhodes thanked Hack and hooked the mic. He was near the Beauty Shack, so he pulled into the parking lot and stopped. He didn’t see any movement behind the dusty windows, not that he thought it likely that Jorge and Guillermo would be going back there. They hadn’t had anything to go back for.
Rhodes dug his cell phone out of his pocket. He didn’t have any affection for cell phones, but he’d started carrying one. Sometimes it came in handy, but he didn’t give the number out to anybody other than Ivy, Hack, and the deputies.
He called Jennifer Loam first. Now she’d have his number, too. He shrugged off that thought and asked what she’d learned.
“I started doing some digging on the reclamation center,” she said. “I found out who owns it.”
“You work fast.”
“So I’ve been told.”
“And the owner is?”
“There are several, but the main one is the surprise.”
“Surprise me, then,” Rhodes said.
“Clifford Clement,” Jennifer told him.
* * *
Instead of going to the reclamation center, Rhodes headed for the mayor’s office. He realized on the way there that he’d missed lunch, as happened all too often, but it was too late to do anything about that now.
The inside of the city hall was cool, and the air smelled like the air in the courthouse. Rhodes didn’t know what it was about old public buildings, but they all seemed to smell the same.
Alice King ushered Rhodes right into Clement’s office and closed the door behind him. Clement sat behind his desk, and he looked both angry and depressed. He stared at Rhodes and didn’t say anything, so Rhodes took a seat and stared back at him.
After a few seconds, Clement got tired of the staring game and said, “Have you found out who killed Lynn?”
“Not yet,” Rhodes said. “I’m working on it.”
“You’d better be. Things are getting serious.”
“How serious would that be?”
“It turns out that my wife knew more than I thought she did about my private life.”
Rhodes wasn’t sure how much of a private life a married man was supposed to have, at least as far as his wife was concerned. Maybe Clement had different ideas about that sort of thing.
“You told me that you were having differences,” Rhodes said.
“I thought the differences were about what she suspected,” Clement said, “not what she knew.” He scratched his beard. “She knew a lot more than I thought.”
Rhodes figured this was the time to test one of his own theories. “You mean she knew about more than just Lynn. She knew about the blackmail.”
Clement started, then recovered himself. “Who said anything about blackmail?”
“I did,” Rhodes said. “Didn’t you hear me?”
“I don’t like your jokes, Sheriff.”
“Hardly anybody does, but sometimes I can’t help myself. Why don’t you tell me about the blackmail.”
“I thought you already knew.”
“Not enough,” Rhodes said. “You broke off with Lynn, but was it because she had someone else, or was it because she tried to get money from you?”
Clement thought about that. Rhodes waited, doing some thinking of his own, about Clement’s wife and the possibility that she might get violent if she thought someone was trying to steal her husband.
“It was the money,” Clement said after a while. “I have to tell you something about Lynn. She was fun to be with, she was pretty, she was young.”
“We’ve gone over all of that,” Rhodes said.
“There’s more. She wasn’t exactly blackmailing me. I suspected Fran knew something was up, but I didn’t care. Like I said, we were having differences. So when Lynn started asking for money, I didn’t really mind. She said she had bills to pay, car payments, that kind of thing. I was glad to help. Somehow Fran found out.”
“I take it that Fran wasn’t glad.”
“No, she wasn’t. Not at all. She hadn’t said anything about it to me, though. She was holding it back. Then Lynn was killed.”
Rhodes wond
ered if Fran had stopped holding it back and gone by to see Lynn. He needed to talk to Fran.
“She think you did it?” he asked Clement.
“She might have,” Clement said. “I didn’t, though. I told her that.”
“Did she ask if you killed Lynn?”
“No,” Clement said. “Naturally the murder came up when I got home yesterday, though. I didn’t kill Lynn, so I told her that.”
“Did she believe you?”
“I’m not sure. Do you believe me?”
“I’m not sure, either,” Rhodes said.
“Damnation,” Clement said. He leaned back in his chair. “What can I do to convince you?”
“Good question,” Rhodes said. “Let’s start with the Environmental Reclamation Center.”
Clement sucked in a breath. “What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. The junkyard with a fancy name that’s a few blocks from here. The one that you’re the part-owner of.”
Clement didn’t bother to deny it. “How did you find that out?”
“Good police work,” Rhodes said with a straight face. “Now tell me all about it.”
“I don’t know anything about it. It’s just something I have a monetary interest in. An investment. You know.”
Rhodes didn’t know. He didn’t have a lot of investments.
“That’s all it was,” Clement went on. “A way to make a little money. I didn’t look at it too closely.”
“Somehow I doubt that. You’re too smart to invest in something you don’t know anything about.”
Rhodes sat and listened to the air conditioner hum somewhere in the bowels of the building while Clement decided how much he was going to say.
“All right,” Clement said after a while. “I do know something. I thought it was a good investment because it was good for the environment and because I thought I could make a little money.”
Not exactly the kind of responsive answer Rhodes had hoped for. “Who are the other owners?”
“Some men from Houston. I met them when we did the deal. That’s all I know about them.”
“You know there’s been some trouble there now and then,” Rhodes said. “Don’t you?”
“I don’t have anything to do with the way the place is run,” Clement said.