Murder in the Air

by Bill Crider

  “I’ll be great at this,” Benton said. “Sherlock Holmes is nothing compared to me.”

  “You don’t want to get confused. If you feel loyal to Qualls because of your friendship, you might make a misjudgment.”

  “Being confused can be the first step toward realizing what is and what isn’t the true reality.”

  “Yeah,” Rhodes said, wondering if he’d made a terrible mistake in asking for Benton’s help. “Right.”

  23

  Rhodes went home and played with the dogs for a while. Sometimes when he was in his backyard, he could almost imagine that Clearview, and all of Blacklin County for that matter, was really as quiet and peaceful as it seemed on the surface. But then he’d think about the rock pit. It had a placid surface, too, but right below it had been a dead man, and the dead man had floated to the top soon enough.

  Ivy came outside when she got home, and Rhodes told her about Hal Gillis.

  “I was wrong, then,” Ivy said.

  “Probably,” Rhodes said. “Unless somebody killed him in revenge for his killing Hamilton.”

  “How likely is that?”

  “Not very.”

  “If someone thought he killed Hamilton, it could have happened that way.”

  “Possible,” Rhodes said. He didn’t like the idea of having two killers on the loose. “But not likely.”

  Ivy wasn’t one to give up easily. “How about this one. Hal lied to you that morning at the rock pit. He knew more than he told. He saw something or someone, but he kept quiet about it. Maybe he wasn’t sure, so he asked somebody something, and it backfired on him.”

  Rhodes had considered that possibility. “Or he tried a little extortion.”

  “That wouldn’t have been like him.”

  “No, but people are strange. They can do things that seem way out of character when a murder is involved.”

  The more Rhodes thought about it, the better he liked the idea of Hal’s having held back some bit of information. He might even have asked the killer to come by and see him that morning because of the scheduled interview. Hal would have wanted to make sure that he was right, or it was even possible that he had used the upcoming interview as a threat to extort more money. If either of those had been the case, things hadn’t worked out at all the way Hal had planned.

  “Do you have any clues besides the bow and arrows in Hal’s house?” Ivy asked.

  Rhodes shook his head. “I think that’s a false clue.”

  “How can a clue be false?” Ivy asked.

  “I think that stuff was planted by someone to confuse the investigation, to throw us off the track.”

  “Is it working?”

  “It must be,” Rhodes said. “I’m pretty confused.”

  “Do you have any suspects?”

  “More than I need.”

  Ivy shivered. “It’s cold out here. Let’s go somewhere and eat.”

  “Where would you like to go?” Rhodes said.

  “Barbecue,” she said. “Max’s Place.”

  “That’s not very healthy,” Rhodes said, secretly happy not to have another vegetarian meal in store.

  “Man does not live by pasta and vegetables alone, and neither does this woman. Don’t you like barbecue?”

  “As long as it’s not chicken,” Rhodes said.

  The phone rang while they were getting ready. Ivy answered it and called Rhodes.

  “It’s Mr. Burns,” she said.

  Rhodes took the phone. Burns started talking as soon as he said hello.

  “So now Hal Gillis is dead,” Burns said. “This is getting out of hand, Sheriff. It’s been out of hand ever since somebody shot my tire. Now we have bodies all over the place. What are you going to do about it?”

  “Catch whoever’s behind it,” Rhodes said.

  “It’s that Robin Hood,” Burns said. “You have to stop him.”

  “Maybe it’s terrorists,” Rhodes said. “Out to wreck the economy of the county.”

  “That’s not funny, Sheriff.”

  “No, I guess not.”

  “You quit making jokes and put a stop to this. It’s making all of us look bad.”

  Burns didn’t care how bad Rhodes looked. He was more interested in making sure his own constituents voted for him next time around.

  “I’ll get it taken care of,” Rhodes said.

  “You’d better,” Burns told him.

  * * *

  Rhodes and Ivy drove to Max’s barbecue restaurant, which wasn’t far from Seepy Benton’s house, and parked in the big parking lot. Rhodes could smell the mesquite smoke before he even got out of the car. Lots of barbecue places used applewood these days, while others used hickory, but in Texas, mesquite was still the thing for a lot of barbecuers.

  “Is Seepy Benton performing tonight?” Ivy asked as they walked to the entrance.

  “I don’t think so,” Rhodes told her. “No barbershop singing, either.”

  Max Schwartz was a member of the local barbershop chorus, and he’d been one of those who’d asked Rhodes to join. The group met at the community center, but now and then they’d come out to Max’s Place and sing in the big room that he rented out for parties.

  “That’s good,” Ivy said. “We can use the quiet. I think we need to talk some more.”

  “What about?”

  “The murders,” she said.

  Max Schwartz greeted them when they got inside the restaurant. Rhodes heard the Kingston Trio singing “John Hardy” over the restaurant’s speakers. Schwartz was a fan of the trio, and he featured them at his other local enterprise, a music store.

  “You have to pay royalties on that music,” Rhodes said.

  “Don’t I know it,” Schwartz said. “Are you working for ASCAP now?”

  “Just reminding you of the law.”

  “As if I needed reminding.”

  Schwartz had been a lawyer before moving to Texas to try his hand at some new enterprises, at both of which he’d been successful, at least so far. He’d taken to wearing a big Stetson hat at the restaurant because he thought it went with his decor, which changed from time to time, though its theme was always Western. Tonight Rhodes saw a couple of posters advertising Roy Rogers movies complemented by a display of saddles and bridles resting on stacked bales of hay. Rhodes wondered if the Kingston Trio would give way to the Sons of the Pioneers in Schwartz’s affections.

  “Where’s the live entertainment tonight?” Ivy asked as Schwartz led them to a table.

  “Benton’s too busy with his teaching to come in except on Friday evenings. I haven’t signed up anybody else. We’re doing all right without anything.”

  “I think you’re on the right track,” Rhodes said, not that he had anything against Benton’s singing.

  “Best table in the house,” Schwartz said, pulling out a chair for Ivy. “I recommend the ribs, but the brisket’s fine, too. The secret’s in the sauce.”

  It was the same thing he said every time, but maybe he had a point.

  When they were seated comfortably, Schwartz left to go to the lobby and wait for the next customer. He believed in the personal touch almost as much as he believed in his sauce.

  After the server had brought the menus and taken their orders, Rhodes asked Ivy what she wanted to talk about.

  “About Hal Gillis and all the rest of it,” she said. “You need to relax and think about the whole situation. Maybe there’s some little something you’re overlooking that’s the key to the whole thing.”

  If there was, Rhodes didn’t know what it could be. The only thing that had nagged at him was the feeling that he’d missed something from the very beginning. Maybe talking it over with Ivy in a different setting would help. He was willing to give it a try.

  “The main problem is that I don’t know where either killer went,” Rhodes said. “There’s just not much way anybody could get from the rock pit back to town without somebody seeing him, and if a getaway car had been parked alongside the road anywhere clo
se by, somebody would have seen it and said something about it after reading about the murder.”

  “Not everybody reads the paper,” Ivy said.

  Her mention of the paper reminded Rhodes of the missing article about the chicken farm, but that was just a distraction at the moment.

  “Somebody would have reported a car, anyway,” Rhodes said. “You don’t just see an abandoned car on a county road and not call someone about it.”

  Ivy said she wasn’t so sure. “Besides, there has to be another way to leave that place. Could the car have been hidden somewhere?”

  “Somebody could’ve parked down by the river,” Rhodes said, “but there haven’t been any cars there in a long time. I checked.”

  The server brought their plates then: lean brisket, beans, and potato salad, with the sauce on the side, which was the way Rhodes preferred it. They began to eat, and Rhodes thought things over.

  After his third or fourth bite of the tender brisket, he said, “I have an idea.”

  “Let’s hear it,” Ivy said.

  “The river,” Rhodes said. “I should’ve thought of it before. Somebody could have put a boat down by the bridge or anywhere along there and hidden it in the brush on the riverbank. It’s not far from the rock pit to the bridge, and it would be easy to get there without being seen by cutting through the fields. Get in the boat, and you’d be home free.”

  “Where would home be?”

  The river flowed south to one of the big lakes, where there were plenty of places to park a pickup. Row downstream, put the boat in the truck, and drive away. Who’d see you? Nobody, most likely. The hard part would be rowing up to the bridge in the first place, but it could be done easily enough since the river wasn’t flowing rapidly, if at all.

  “Sounds reasonable,” Ivy said when Rhodes had explained it. “You have barbecue sauce on your shirt.”

  Rhodes wiped off the sauce with his napkin and got a fresh one out of the dispenser in the middle of the table.

  “I think I’ll have dessert,” he said. Schwartz had a serve-yourself cobbler and ice cream bar in the restaurant. “Do you want cherry cobbler or peach cobbler?”

  “See if there’s any apple tonight,” Ivy said.

  There was, and Rhodes got a heaping bowl for her, with vanilla ice cream on top. For himself he got a bowl of cherry cobbler with plenty of ice cream as well.

  They didn’t talk while they ate dessert, but when they were finished, Ivy said, “Somebody could have walked away from Hal Gillis’s tank even more easily than somebody walked away from the rock pit. Now all you have to do is figure out who it was. I knew talking it over would help.”

  “Right. Now that the hard part’s over, I rush right out and make an arrest.”

  “Who are you going to arrest?”

  “I wish I knew,” Rhodes said.

  * * *

  Rhodes wasn’t in the mood for a movie when he got home, though the cobbler had cheered him up some. He sat on the couch and looked through the paper again, hoping that he’d get some ideas from the article about the demonstration at the chicken farm. He would have settled for one idea, for that matter, but nothing came to him. He was about to give Abbott and Costello a try when the phone rang.

  The caller was Jennifer Loam.

  “I think I’m in trouble,” she said. She sounded nervous and upset.

  “What kind of trouble?” Rhodes asked.

  “The bad kind.”

  “Just because you didn’t get your article on the chicken farm done today?”

  “That’s part of it, but it’s more complicated than that. I need to talk to you.”

  “Come on over,” Rhodes said. “Ivy will make some coffee.”

  He didn’t drink coffee himself, but it seemed essential to some people, and he thought it might help Jennifer.

  “I don’t want to come there. We should meet somewhere that nobody will see us.”

  “Nobody will see us here except Ivy, and she won’t tell anybody.”

  “You don’t understand,” Jennifer said. “I might be followed. If I am, I don’t want anybody to know I talked to you. Can you meet me somewhere? You’d need to be there when I got there.”

  “A public place?”

  “That would be fine, as long as it’s somewhere that it wouldn’t be suspicious for us to run into each other. This isn’t a pass, Sheriff. It’s business. Not that you aren’t attractive, but you’re a little too old for me.”

  Rhodes’s feelings weren’t hurt. After all, it was only the truth.

  “We can meet at Walmart,” Rhodes said. “I’ll be where the books and magazines are. If anybody’s following you, it’ll look like a coincidence that we’ve met.”

  “Good. I’ll be there in half an hour.”

  Rhodes hung up and told Ivy that he had to go out.

  “Where to this time?” she asked.

  “Walmart. I’m meeting Jennifer Loam.”

  “You’re much too old for her.”

  “So she told me. This is business, though, not pleasure. She made that clear.”

  Ivy grinned. “When will you be home?”

  “Good question,” Rhodes said. “One of many I don’t have an answer for.”

  “I’ll see you when you get here, then. Be careful.”

  “Nobody would hurt me in Walmart,” Rhodes said.

  “Don’t count on it,” Ivy told him.

  24

  Rhodes stood in front of the book rack in Walmart, thumbing through a paperback copy of The Doomsday Plan and marveling anew at the adventures of Sage Barton. The guy was everything that Rhodes wasn’t, and the book’s cover was a perfect example of that. It showed Barton crouched behind some kind of all-terrain vehicle at the edge of a forest as villains half hidden in the trees blazed away at him with a variety of weapons, maybe even including an M-16. Barton was grinning as if he were having the time of his life.

  Rhodes wondered how anyone could think the character was based on him, not that he wasn’t flattered that some people did think just that.

  A male employee in a blue Walmart vest came up to him and saw what Rhodes was reading.

  “That Sage Barton really is something,” the man said. “I hear he’s a lot like you, Sheriff.”

  Here we go again, Rhodes thought.

  “Not counting all the guns, the fistfights, and the women, sure,” Rhodes said. “Other than that, we’re practically identical.”

  The man laughed. “The women go for him in a big way, all right. You sure you never have that trouble?”

  “Never,” Rhodes said, and about that time Jennifer Loam walked up and put a hand on his arm.

  “Never?” the man asked. He wiggled his eyebrows and laughed. “I wouldn’t say that, Sheriff.”

  Rhodes put the book back on the rack, and the employee went away. Rhodes hoped he wouldn’t start any rumors.

  “This is too public,” Jennifer said. “I shouldn’t have agreed to meet you here.”

  “Just say hello and go on your way,” Rhodes said. “Head for the stockroom. I’ll talk to you in there.”

  “Can we do that?”

  “They know me here. We won’t have a problem.”

  Jennifer left, and Rhodes picked up another book. He had no idea what it was, and though he pretended to look at it, his eyes followed the reporter. It was still early enough for Walmart to have a number of customers, but as far as Rhodes could tell, they were all intent on their shopping. Nobody seemed to have any interest in Jennifer Loam, but there were too many people around for Rhodes to be absolutely sure.

  Loam disappeared into the stockroom. Rhodes waited a bit longer, then followed. He went down a long aisle with clothing on one side and groceries on the other. Right past the section of baby clothes and diapers were the big double doors to the stockroom. Rhodes pushed through them. Jennifer was waiting just inside.

  “Are you sure this is all right?” she asked.

  “I didn’t see anybody following you,” Rhodes said.


  “That’s not what I meant. The sign on the doors says this area is restricted to employees only.”

  “I can go pretty much anywhere,” Rhodes said. “Who’s going to arrest me?”

  “An ambitious deputy, maybe. It would make a good story for the paper.”

  Whatever was bothering Jennifer, she hadn’t lost her sense of humor. Rhodes looked around. There were a couple of men working over on one side of the big storage area, unpacking cardboard boxes. Another man was assembling a bicycle nearby, but no one else was around.

  “Let’s go over there,” Rhodes said, pointing.

  He led Jennifer to a spot in the back of the stockroom near the delivery doors, where they stepped behind a row of ten-foot-tall stacks of wooden pallets.

  “Nobody’s going to bother us here,” Rhodes said. “Now tell me about this trouble you’re in.”

  “I don’t know if I should,” Jennifer said.

  Rhodes wasn’t surprised. The symptom wasn’t new to him. It was a little like buyer’s remorse. Jennifer was sorry now that she’d ever said anything about having a problem, and she regretted having called him. Maybe she knew she hadn’t been followed and thought that she’d let her imagination run away with her.

  “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” Rhodes said.

  Most of the time that statement was all it took to get people to launch into the story they had to tell. It didn’t work with Jennifer.

  “You don’t understand,” she said. “This is an ethical issue with me.”

  “Ethics?”

  Rhodes was surprised. That was one word he hadn’t expected to hear.

  “That’s right. Ethics. All reporters have them, some more than others.”

  Rhodes heard the double doors open and close. He couldn’t hear the man working on the bicycle now, so he figured the job was done.

  “I know that,” Rhodes said, “but I didn’t think you’d called me about ethics. I thought you were in trouble.”

  “I am,” Jennifer said. “Or I think I am. I could be. It’s hard to explain.”

  “Give it a try,” Rhodes said. “You can stop whenever you think you’re about to compromise your ethical code.”