A Romantic Way to Die

by Bill Crider

  “I just wanted to ask you something.”

  “And that’s all?”

  “That’s all.”

  Serena didn’t look as if she believed him. She said, “Let me ask you something first.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Would you have shot me last night?”

  “Of course not.”

  “But you pointed a gun at my head.”

  “I pointed it over your head. I haven’t shot too many people, and I wouldn’t want to add you to the list.”

  “Thank you. I guess.”

  “You’re welcome. Now what about letting me ask my questions?”

  “It’s your turn.”

  “Good,” Rhodes said, but then he changed his mind about asking. He had something he wanted to tell her first.

  He was about to say it when the van from the Round-Up appeared. It stopped in front of the dormitory, and Sam Blevins got out of the cab.

  “Seems like you’re always around at mealtimes, Sheriff,” he said. “I’ll be glad to give you a sandwich if you want one. Sell you one, I mean.”

  “I might take you up on that,” Rhodes said. “Later.”

  “There’ll be plenty,” Blevins said.

  Two more men joined him. They opened the back doors of the van and began unloading large covered trays. They handed one to Blevins, who carried it inside. The men followed him in with another tray and a large plastic bag full of smaller bags of potato chips.

  “You were going to ask me something,” Serena reminded Rhodes.

  “That’s right, but first I want to say that nearly everyone I’ve talked to here has lied to me because they wanted to give someone else an alibi for the time of Henrietta’s murder. I don’t think you’re the exception.”

  Serena batted her eyes, a tactic that Rhodes thought would have been more effective had the light been better.

  “Why, Sheriff,” she said. “Whatever do you mean?”

  “You vouched for Jeanne Arnot. But I’ve been thinking about it, and what the two of you said didn’t seem quite right.”

  “Why not? It sounded fine to me.”

  “Jeanne said something about how you didn’t mind if she smoked, and she implied that you were with her. You didn’t contradict her, but you never actually said that you were with her. I think that’s because she was smoking outside the building, and you were inside it.”

  “There’s no smoking inside,” Serena said.

  “I know that. But that’s not the point.”

  “What’s the point, then?”

  “The point is that you weren’t with Jeanne when you said you were.”

  “What if I wasn’t?”

  “That’s an easy one. Then she was somewhere else.”

  “Oh, all right. It doesn’t matter, I suppose. You’re right. She was outside, smoking a cigarette. But she’d been talking to me just a few minutes earlier, so I know she didn’t kill anybody. She couldn’t just walk away from a conversation with me and go kill a woman.”

  “Maybe,” Rhodes said.

  He wished he could remember if Jeanne had walked up to the fight between Serena and Vernell after it was all over. If she had, she might possibly have been in the main building with Terry Don and might be the key to the whole thing. But Rhodes hadn’t been in a position to see who came strolling up to join the crowd.

  And then he realized that it didn’t matter. Everything unknotted in his head, and he was almost sure he knew what had happened to both Henrietta and Terry Don. The answers had been there all along, but they’d all been kinked and tangled, like knots in a rope. But now it was as if Rhodes had tied the rope to one thing and pitched it away from him. As it glided through the air, all the knots and kinks disappeared. And when it landed, it lay perfectly straight between one point and the other.

  “Sheriff?” Serena said, waving a hand in front of his eyes. “What are you looking at?”

  “A picture,” Rhodes said.

  “A picture? Of what?”

  “A killer,” he told her.

  31

  RHODES LEFT SERENA STANDING IN FRONT OF THE DORMITORY and went back inside. Blevins had set the sandwich trays on a table, and everyone had helped herself. Rhodes could see that some of the sandwiches had ham on them, and some had what looked like roast beef. As far as he could tell, there weren’t any vegetarian specials. Several people were sitting there eating and chatting, but the others were all in their rooms, or visiting in the rooms of friends.

  Rhodes went down the hall to Vernell’s room. The door was open, and Carrie and Vernell were sitting on their beds, eating ham sandwiches and potato chips out of small bags.

  “I have to talk to Vernell,” Rhodes told Carrie, who gave him a stricken look.

  “I haven’t told her yet,” she said.

  “Told me what?” Vernell asked.

  “Nothing,” Rhodes said. “Why don’t you go to the front room, Carrie, and eat with some of the others.”

  Carrie stood up with her sandwich in her hand, but she looked as if she’d lost all interest in eating it. There was a can of Dr Pepper on the nightstand, and she took that, as well. Then she walked out of the room without another word. She left the bag of potato chips behind.

  “What’s going on, Sheriff?” Vernell asked.

  Rhodes closed the door and sat down on the bed opposite Vernell.

  “We have to talk about Henrietta,” he said. “I think there are some things you need to tell me.”

  Vernell put her half-eaten sandwich beside a can of Pepsi that sat on a napkin on the nightstand.

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “I’ve already told you everything I know.”

  “Then I’ll tell you something,” Rhodes said. “Here’s the way I think it happened.”

  “Wait,” Vernell said. “Are you accusing me of murder?”

  “No. I think it was an accident.”

  Vernell looked relieved, but she didn’t reach for her Pepsi. She said, “You’re right. It was an accident. It could have happened to anyone.”

  “But if it was an accident,” Rhodes went on, “why didn’t you just say so?”

  “Because … because it might have hurt someone.”

  “You,” Rhodes said. “It might have hurt you.”

  Vernell sat up a little straighter. She looked a lot less relieved than she had only seconds before.

  “Just hold on, now, Sheriff,” she said. “What are you saying? Do you think I killed Henrietta?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You sure were coming close.”

  “Not exactly. I was just wondering if I was right about you. And I think I am.”

  “How do you mean? I didn’t kill anybody!”

  “You did something just as bad, though, didn’t you.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

  “I think you do. You didn’t kill Henrietta, but you saw who did. And you didn’t tell me. You got Carrie to lie for you instead.”

  Vernell looked at the closed door. She said, “Damn that Carrie! I should have known she couldn’t keep her mouth shut.”

  “She didn’t want to tell me,” Rhodes said. “And she didn’t really have to. I already knew she was lying.”

  “You can’t prove that.”

  “I think I can. Let me tell you what you saw. Then you can tell me if I’m right.”

  Vernell just stared at him, looking stubborn as a statue.

  “You told Carrie that you had to go to the bathroom,” Rhodes said. “Maybe that’s true, or maybe it’s not. Maybe you heard something in Henrietta’s room and wanted to get your ear to the door to hear it a little better. Your room is certainly close enough for you to have heard something.”

  “I went to the bathroom,” Vernell said. “And that’s the truth. I was in there when the yelling started, and that’s the truth, too.”

  “I guess that’s possible,” Rhodes said. “But if it’s true, you didn’t stay in the bathroom. You came out
in time to see someone leaving the building through that back door.”

  Vernell dropped her eyes and looked for her Pepsi. She picked it up, brought it to her mouth, then put it back down on the napkin without taking a drink.

  “I didn’t see the killer,” she said. “Besides, it was an accident, like you said.”

  “If you didn’t see the killer,” Rhodes said, “who did you see?”

  “Jeanne Arnot.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Rhodes said.

  “How did you know?”

  “She took you on as a client. She said she could get you a lot of money for your next book. Chatterton told me that everyone knows about it.”

  “What does that prove?”

  “It doesn’t prove anything. She could have wanted you for a client because you’ve written a really wonderful book. But the timing would seem to indicate that it might be something else.”

  “I have written a wonderful book,” Vernell said. “You’ll see.”

  “I read your first one, and it wasn’t bad,” Rhodes said. “It was pretty good, in fact. But it didn’t make a lot of money, did it?”

  “I didn’t have Jeanne Arnot as an agent then. It would have done a lot better if I had.”

  “You’re not going to have her now, either,” Rhodes said.

  “Oh, yes I am. She promised.”

  “It won’t be an easy promise for her to keep, though.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because,” Rhodes said, “she’s going to be in prison.”

  Rhodes left Vernell sitting in the room with her sandwich and Pepsi and started back to the front of the dorm. While he was still in the hallway, he saw Carrie Logan, who was heading straight for him, still crying. Or crying again. Her head was down, and she didn’t see Rhodes. The hall was too narrow for him to get out of the way, and she was coming too fast for him to back up. So she ran right into him.

  Rhodes had been able to brace himself, so he didn’t fall. He didn’t even move much. Maybe a step backward, but that was all.

  Carrie looked up at him. Her eyes were red, and her makeup was a mess.

  “What’s the matter now?” Rhodes asked.

  “Oh, S-Sheriff. It’s all my f-fault. I shouldn’t have said anything, but I didn’t know it would make any d-difference. And now she’s run off.”

  “Who’s run off?”

  “The p-person Vernell saw in the hall, I guess. I d-didn’t mean to warn her. I just said that you were t-talking to Vernell about it, and she ran out the front d-door.”

  Carrie was still talking when Rhodes shoved past her, but he could no longer hear a word she said. He had his mind on other things.

  The way Rhodes had worked it out, Henrietta and Terry Don had arranged a little get-together in her room. While Lorene was talking to the writers, Henrietta would be fulfilling her high-school dreams.

  But Jeanne Arnot must have noticed that Terry Don had slipped away, and she’d gone to find him, either to see if she could fulfill some dreams of her own or to be sure he didn’t fulfill those of anyone else.

  Maybe she’d even spent a few minutes waiting in his room and smoking a cigarette that she’d tamped out in the ashtray, which she’d then dumped into the toilet and flushed away. At any rate, by the time she’d located Terry Don, he was already halfway to doing what Henrietta wanted. Jeanne must have gotten into the room, but by that time Terry Don had slipped out the window and started on his way, his clothes tucked underneath his arm.

  He’d gotten sidetracked, however, before he could sneak back to his own room, by Tom Chatterton, who’d been leaving the president’s house and going over to the dorm. Terry Don hadn’t been to Obert in years, if he’d ever been there even when he lived in Clearview, so it was easy enough for him to go astray while trying to avoid Chatterton and wander down behind the Appleby and Quentin houses, where he’d been seen running around in his skivvies and mistaken for a woman because of his long hair and his peculiar taste in underwear. Or at least it seemed peculiar to Rhodes and to Mrs. Appleby. In his haste to get back to where he belonged, Terry Don had dropped a sock, the one Rhodes had found later, and the one Terry Don had gone back to look for when Quentin decided to ventilate him with the shotgun.

  Jeanne Arnot was the one who’d argued with Henrietta and perhaps shoved her down, with the result that Henrietta had a serious depressed fracture of the skull and wouldn’t be writing any more manuscripts. Jeanne had then left by the back door and come in through the front as if she’d been at the main building all along, but Vernell had seen her leaving Henrietta’s room and used that fact to get herself a literary agent and the promise of a fat book contract in the future if things worked out.

  Terry Don must have had an inkling of what happened between Jeanne and Henrietta, and Jeanne had shoved him out the window of the main building. Rhodes was sure of that part, though he didn’t yet know just why. He was planning to ask Jeanne about all that.

  He should have realized that Jeanne had pushed Terry Don when he had seen the whistle on the key ring. It had been on a chain earlier, and Rhodes was betting that Terry Don had grabbed the chain and broken it as he fell, causing the burn on his index finger. And leaving a tiny link of the chain in the crack in the main building’s third floor. Jeanne had either found the link after bashing Rhodes in the head with a bucket, or she’d tried to dispose of it by blowing up the building.

  Rhodes would have liked to know what had happened to the rest of the chain. Did Jeanne have it, all except for a link or two, or had Terry Don carried it down with him? If he had, someone had taken it from his dead hand.

  Rhodes thought it was just barely possible that Claude Appleby might have done that. Claude had, after all, been pretty reluctant to talk about what he had or hadn’t seen, had or hadn’t done.

  Or maybe Jeanne had gotten the chain back.

  If he ever caught up with her, Rhodes thought, he’d ask her about that, too. But catching up with her might be a problem. Carrie had tipped her off, and Rhodes had no idea where she had gone.

  When Rhodes got to the front room, it was buzzing with talk. Rhodes couldn’t make out any individual words because there were no more small-group conversations. Even though he didn’t know what was being said, Rhodes figured that people were talking about Jeanne Arnot’s sudden departure. Everyone was talking to everyone else all at the same time, except for Chatterton, who saw Rhodes and shoved his way over.

  “What’s going on, Sheriff?” he yelled.

  “Jeanne Arnot!” Rhodes yelled back, without explaining. “Where’d she go?”

  “Outside, but—”

  Rhodes didn’t wait to hear the rest. He pushed through the crowd, oblivious to the looks he was getting from those he elbowed and shoved. When he got outside, he looked around for Jeanne, but he didn’t see her anywhere.

  As he tried to spot the runaway agent, Rhodes remembered the last time he’d chased down a killer in Obert. He’d been in his car for a while, zinging along the county roads, and when he’d gotten out of the car, he’d been attacked by the killer, who’d commandeered the county tree whacker. It hadn’t been a good experience, and Rhodes hoped the tree whacker was nowhere around.

  It was pretty likely that Jeanne didn’t have a car, Rhodes thought. Someone would have had to pick her up at the airport in Waco or Dallas and drive her to Obert. Which meant that she must be on foot. There was nowhere she could go on foot, unless she walked to the highway and tried to hitch a ride, or unless she wandered in the wrong direction, the way Terry Don had done when he’d left Henrietta’s room. It was easy for someone from the city to get disoriented in a place like Obert’s Hill where there was only one landmark and where every direction was down.

  Rhodes looked toward the road to town and saw no one. He looked at the road that ran past the main building and down the hill past Quentin’s house. He didn’t see anyone there, either.

  Then he heard a dog barking, and almost immediately after that, he heard a sh
otgun.

  32

  RHODES TOOK OFF DOWN THE HILL, MAKING THE BEST TIME HE could. He was hampered both by the darkness and by the fact that he was still sore from the previous night’s adventures, but he made pretty good time since he knew more or less where he was going. Otherwise, he would have been in serious trouble, because the sky was cloudy and there were no lights to help him. The glow in the dormitory windows reached no farther than the grass just outside the building.

  The shotgun boomed again, and in the silence that returned after its blast had stopped echoing, Rhodes could hear Grover barking away. Rhodes had to give Grover credit. He was always on the alert.

  The shotgun thundered again, and Rhodes tried to pick up his pace. He didn’t want Billy Quentin to kill Jeanne, though considering his accuracy so far, it seemed unlikely that he was going to hit her. You never knew with a shotgun, though. The buckshot spread out quickly after a certain distance, and Rhodes had heard of cases where one little piece of shot in just the wrong place had been enough to kill someone.

  So he started yelling for Quentin to stop shooting.

  “This is the sheriff!” he shouted. “Don’t shoot!”

  Quentin was apparently determined not to allow any more sneaking window-peepers on his property whether they were doing any actual peeping or whether they included the sheriff within their ranks. He fired off another round.

  “Quentin!” Rhodes yelled. “Put down that gun or I’ll arrest you for reckless endangerment and attempted murder!”

  Quentin either wasn’t paying attention, didn’t care, or figured that dead men couldn’t arrest anyone. He kept right on blasting away, and in between the shots Grover kept on barking. Half the people in Obert must have been aroused by now, or they would have been had they lived within hearing distance. One advantage of a sparse population is that sometimes your nearest neighbors were half a mile away.

  Rhodes’s feet were getting heavy from mud he’d picked up as he ran, and he was slowing down more and more. That was probably a good thing, he thought, as he was getting very close to Quentin’s place. He came to a stop behind a tree, hoping that Quentin couldn’t hear him panting. It was unlikely that he could, thanks to Grover, who by this time had worked himself into a positive frenzy of barking, so Rhodes leaned forward with his hands on his knees and tried to catch his breath. He wondered why Grover wasn’t panting. He seemed able to bark continuously without ever having to pause to breathe.