A Romantic Way to Die

by Bill Crider

  “Who did she kill?”

  “Henrietta,” Rhodes said. “And maybe Terry Don.”

  “What about that shotgun?”

  “Ms. Arnot’s just about to give that to me,” Rhodes said, reaching out. In the distance he heard the ambulance siren yowling.

  Jeanne heard it, too, and she took her eyes off Rhodes for a fraction of a second.

  As soon as she did, Rhodes took two steps forward and grabbed the shotgun just as Jeanne pulled the trigger.

  34

  VERNELL FELL BACKWARD, JEANNE’S HAND STILL TANGLED IN her hair. Luckily for Vernell, Rhodes had managed to jerk the shotgun from under her chin, so Vernell’s head was still attached to her body.

  Rhodes had also wrenched the shotgun from Jeanne’s hand, and he was afraid he might have broken her finger with the trigger guard. He wasn’t too sorry about it, however.

  Vernell had dragged Jeanne down with her. Rhodes tossed the shotgun to Ruth and knelt down, straddling Jeanne. He untangled Vernell’s hair from Jeanne’s fingers while Jeanne writhed under him like a snake having a seizure. It wasn’t easy, but he managed to keep her pinned.

  When her hair was free, Vernell sat up and took a few deep breaths, all the while rubbing herself under the chin. Ruth Grady covered her with the shotgun, and the ambulance whined past, gravel spinning under its tires and lightbar flashing, headed for Quentin’s place.

  “You have some handcuffs?” Rhodes asked Ruth.

  “Sure,” Ruth said. “But who am I supposed to use them on?”

  “This one,” Rhodes said, nodding down at Jeanne. “You can put the gun away. She’s not going anywhere.”

  Ruth lowered the shotgun and handed Rhodes a pair of plastic cuffs.

  “Help me out,” he said.

  Ruth laid the shotgun down and took hold of one of Jeanne’s arms that was trapped by Rhodes’s knee. Rhodes slid back and grabbed the other arm. Jeanne thrashed and screamed, but Rhodes and Ruth got the cuffs on and drew them tight.

  Rhodes stood up and looked over at Vernell, who was sitting on the grass, still rubbing under her chin and staring wide-eyed at Jeanne Arnot.

  “You want to tell me what’s going on?” Ruth said. “I thought we were going to arrest Vernell.”

  “Nobody was going to arrest Vernell,” Rhodes said. “Ms. Arnot was going to kill her.”

  Vernell took a deep, gasping breath. Rhodes didn’t blame her.

  “Why?” Ruth asked.

  “Because Ms. Arnot’s the one who killed Henrietta and Terry Don Coslin. She was trying to put the blame on Vernell by claiming to be an eyewitness to Vernell’s leaving Henrietta’s room.”

  “I get it,” Ruth said. “It’s hard to contradict anyone when you’ve been killed while struggling with your captor.”

  “That’s right,” Rhodes said.

  “But you didn’t believe her,” Ruth said.

  “No. She might have been able to explain Henrietta, but she couldn’t have explained Terry Don, and she couldn’t have explained her missing whistle chain.”

  “Whistle chain?”

  “Vernell borrowed the whistle,” Jeanne said, talking fast from her awkward position on the ground. “She said she broke it. I don’t know what happened to it.”

  “Nice try,” Rhodes said. “But I don’t believe you.”

  “A jury will believe me.”

  She sounded so convinced that Rhodes almost believed her himself.

  “Believe you about what?” Ruth asked. “About the chain?”

  “It’s a long story,” Rhodes said.

  Jeanne Arnot changed her story later, after she had been a guest of Blacklin County for about ten hours in one of the few jail cells reserved for female prisoners. In Jeanne’s new account, Terry Don was the one who had killed Henrietta. Jeanne claimed that she had no idea what they were arguing about but that she had opened the door just as Terry Don pushed Henrietta into the dresser. She said that she knew it was wrong to protect Terry Don, but he had cried and begged her.

  “Terry Don and Henrietta shoulda locked the door to that room,” Hack said.

  “Is that what you and Miz McGee do?” Lawton asked. “Lock the door?”

  Hack, Lawton, Rhodes, and Ruth Grady were sitting in the jail the morning after Jeanne Arnot’s arrest, and Rhodes was in the middle of recounting his latest conversation with her. Hack didn’t take kindly to Lawton’s comments and started to get out of his chair, but Rhodes put up a hand and stopped him.

  “I don’t want you accidentally pushing Lawton into a desk,” Rhodes told Hack. “We don’t need any more customers in the cells right now.”

  “Well, then, he better watch his mouth is all I can say,” Hack said.

  Lawton tried to look contrite but without much success.

  “It could’ve happened that way,” Ruth Grady said, changing the subject.

  “Could have,” Rhodes said. “But it didn’t.”

  “How does she explain Terry Don?” Ruth wanted to know.

  “It wasn’t just the begging and pleading. She also says that she loved him and that since it had been an accident, after all, she wasn’t really doing anything wrong by protecting him. The part about the accident might even be true, but I don’t think Terry Don did anything except run away. I think Ms. Arnot was jealous. She and Henrietta got into an argument over Terry Don, and that was that.”

  “I meant how does she explain killing Terry Don,” Ruth said.

  “Oh. Well, she says he asked her to meet him on the third floor of the college’s main building to talk about things, and then he tried to kill her.”

  “That doesn’t explain the whistle chain.”

  “She had a police whistle on a chain earlier,” Rhodes said. “I saw it. Later it was on her key ring. Her story is that when Terry Don attacked her, she grabbed the whistle to call for help. They struggled, and he fell out the window.”

  “I hate to say this,” Ruth said, “but that sounds pretty likely. Otherwise, why would she have had the whistle?”

  “I think Terry Don threatened to turn her in,” Rhodes said. “Or maybe he made some kind of demand about getting on book covers. Whatever he said, she got mad about it. There was another argument, and Terry Don got a little too physical. That’s when she got out the whistle. Terry Don made a grab for it, she pushed him, and out the window he went. She hung on to the whistle, but he broke the chain, and it made that mark on his finger when it pulled out of his hand.”

  “So she didn’t really kill anybody on purpose,” Ruth said.

  “That’s her story,” Rhodes said.

  “And she’s stickin’ to it, I’ll bet,” Hack said. “I would if I was her. She might even get off if the jury believes her.”

  “It’s going to be a little harder for her to explain why she tried to blow up the building with me in it, though,” Rhodes said.

  “I guess Hack forgot about the explosion,” Lawton said. “When you get to be his age, you start havin’ little lapses like that.”

  “I’ll lapse you,” Hack said, starting to rise.

  “Not here,” Rhodes said, and Hack plopped back into his chair.

  “What about the explosion?” Ruth asked.

  “Ms. Arnot got back to the dorm and noticed that part of the chain was missing,” Rhodes said. “She came back to look for it, and I was there, so she slugged me with the bucket.” He touched the back of his head, which was still a little tender. “She couldn’t find any of the chain, though, so she decided to get rid of all the evidence, if there was any. I just happened to be in the way.”

  “Lucky for you that old building has such high ceilings and lots of windows,” Hack said. “That explosion could’ve been a whole lot worse.”

  “It was bad enough,” Rhodes said. “It’s going to take a lot of money to get the building back in shape.”

  “Do you think Chatterton will do it?” Ruth asked.

  “I’m not sure. I’m going to see if maybe the historical societies won’t
pitch in and help. Maybe they can get a grant of some kind.”

  “They’ll be lucky if they do.”

  “Speakin’ of luck,” Lawton said, “you were mighty lucky that Claude Appleby happened to be there.”

  “You won’t get any argument from me about that,” Rhodes said.

  “Too bad he didn’t see anything,” Ruth said. “He might be the one who could convict Ms. Arnot for sure.”

  “Vernell will take care of that for us,” Rhodes said. “She’s our eyewitness. But Claude saw something, all right. He’s just not talking. Yet.”

  “You think he will?”

  “We’ll see,” Rhodes told her.

  The Wal-Mart parking lot was crowded, but Rhodes managed to get a place right down front when a Ford Bronco pulled out just as he drove up. He parked and went inside, past the jewelry and the videos and the dog food, and found Claude in the sporting goods department.

  “Time for your break?” he said.

  Claude didn’t look at all surprised to see Rhodes. It was almost as if he’d been expecting him.

  “Let me get Eddie,” he said.

  They sat in the storeroom again, and Rhodes asked Claude why he hadn’t told the whole truth the first time.

  “I didn’t think it would do any good,” Claude said. “I didn’t want to get anybody in trouble.”

  “She was already in trouble,” Rhodes said.

  “I know,” Claude said, “but it was dark, and I couldn’t see her face. I couldn’t pick her out of a crowd for love or money.”

  “Just tell me what you saw, then.”

  “Well, I was out walking around. I wasn’t looking in any windows or anything like that. I swear.”

  Rhodes nodded and said he believed him.

  “I didn’t see the man fall,” Claude said. “I just heard it when the window broke. By the time I looked, he was already on the ground.”

  “But somebody came along.”

  “It was a woman,” Claude said. “That’s all I could tell. She bent down over him for a second, and that’s all there was to it.”

  That must have been Jeanne, checking for pieces of the chain, Rhodes thought. He said, “You didn’t go have a look?”

  “After she left I did.”

  “But you didn’t call me.”

  Claude looked at those interesting shoes of his.

  “I should’ve, I guess. But I figured, what good would it do? The guy was dead, and I didn’t know why or anything. For all I knew it was just an accident.”

  “You hung around for a while, though.”

  “Well, I saw you and Deputy Grady, so I knew something was going on. I guess you’re glad I was there.”

  “I’m glad,” Rhodes said. “I wish you’d seen who set the fire, though.”

  “I told you the truth about that part,” Claude said.

  “I’m glad to hear it,” Rhodes said.

  “Am I goin’ to jail again?”

  “I don’t think so, Claude, but I do wish you’d learn to stay in your own house at night. If you don’t, Billy Quentin’s going to blow you apart with his shotgun one of these nights.”

  “He told me you’d confiscated it,” Claude said. “Evidence.”

  “That’s right. But he may get it back someday.”

  “He and I are sorta friends now,” Claude said. “After I called that ambulance for him and all. And Grover already liked me.”

  Rhodes sighed. “Just stay home, Claude. Promise me.”

  “Yessir,” Claude said.

  As Rhodes was leaving the store, he stopped by the paperback rack. The writing workshop was over now, and he supposed all the writers, prepublished and otherwise, were home or heading in that direction. They’d have plenty of stories to tell, for sure.

  He looked over the romance novels and spotted one by Serena Thayer. Love’s Wildest Hour. There was a woman on the cover with long blond hair and a buckskin shirt, but she was secondary to the man, who was obviously Terry Don Coslin, who was holding her to his rock-hard pecs. His own fringed shirt was open to the navel, and his long hair was tossed by an invisible breeze. He was smiling confidently down into the woman’s eyes, the way he’d smiled up at the stars behind Billy Quentin’s house.

  Rhodes took the book to the check-out stand to pay for it, and the cashier said, “That’s Terry Don Coslin on that book cover. He was here in the store just the other day, and he signed a book for me.” She put Rhodes’s book in a plastic bag and handed it to him. “I just can’t believe he’s gone.”

  Rhodes took the bag. He thought about Terry Don and his great good looks, of all the book covers that he’d been on and of all the ones he’d posed for that were yet to appear.

  “I think he’ll be around for a while,” Rhodes said.

  ALSO BY BILL CRIDER

  SHERIFF DAN RHODES BOOKS

  A Ghost of a Chance

  Death by Accident

  Winning Can Be Murder

  Murder Most Fowl

  Booked for a Hanging

  Evil at the Root

  Death on the Move

  Cursed to Death

  Shotgun Saturday Night

  Too Late to Die

  PROFESSOR CARL BURNS MYSTERIES

  A Dangerous Thing

  Dying Voices

  One Dead Dean

  OTHERS

  Murder Is an Art

  The Texas Capital Murders

  Blood Marks

  A ROMANTIC WAY TO DIE. Copyright © 2001 by Bill Crider. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.

  An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.

  www.minotaurbooks.com

  eISBN 9781466819542

  First eBook Edition : April 2012

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Crider, Bill.

  A romantic way to die / Bill Crider.—1st ed.

  p. cm.—(Sheriff Dan Rhodes books)

  ISBN 0-312-20907-X

  1. Rhodes, Dan (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Love stories—Authorship—Fiction. 3. Male models—Fiction. 4. Sheriffs—Fiction. 5. Texas—fiction. I. Title.

  PS3553.R497 R66 2001

  813’.54—dc21

  2001041805

  First Edition: November 2001