Murder Among the OWLS

by Bill Crider

  “Leo was going to pay me back the money as soon as he got established. He promised.”

  Oh, Rhodes thought. Of course a man like Thorpe would never tell a lie about a little thing like that.

  “I could have put it back in the accounts, and Truck would never have known. It would all have worked out if you hadn’t interfered.”

  Rhodes wasn’t so sure of that.

  “I would never have married Truck if Leo hadn’t dumped me. He regretted it later, though.”

  Rhodes wondered how she knew that. His skepticism must have shown on his face because Lily said, “He told me himself.”

  Just like he promised to repay the money, Rhodes thought. Who could doubt him?

  “Why did he dump you?” he asked.

  “Another woman, I’m sure.” Lily smiled reminiscently. “He does like the women. He knows how to treat us.”

  That was a side of Thorpe that Rhodes had never seen, though he’d heard enough about it lately. Mrs. Gomez might not agree, however.

  “Who was the other woman?”

  “I have no idea. He never told me. He likes to keep things like that a secret.” She frowned. “Do you think he’ll be all right?”

  “The doctors don’t really know yet.”

  “I’m sure he’ll recover. He has so much to live for.”

  She must have meant herself, and maybe the Royal Rack, but Rhodes didn’t want to ask.

  “So your argument with Helen Harris wasn’t really about what she found on the metal-detecting club’s trip to the Tumlinson place,” he said.

  “Of course it was. What else could it have been about?”

  “Thorpe.”

  “She didn’t know about me and Leo. We kept it a secret from everybody. Leo was good at keeping secrets. So was I. We couldn’t have a scandal.”

  Lily’s face changed after she said it, and Rhodes thought she was going to start to cry again. No doubt she was thinking that there was going to be a scandal now, for sure, and she was absolutely right. Things were going to be even worse when she admitted that she’d killed Helen Harris.

  Later at the jail, Rhodes didn’t have to worry about Hack and Lawton’s questions about what Jennifer Loam had to tell him. They forgot all about it when Rhodes brought in Lily Gadney. Brant’s secret was safe for the time being.

  Ruth Grady served as the matron and got Lily booked, printed, and locked up, all of which took a while. Ruth was still in the cell block, and Rhodes hadn’t had a chance to ask her about the lab work she’d wanted to tell him about.

  “So she confessed to ever’thing,” Hack said to Rhodes after Ruth had led Lily away. “No wonder those two women wrote a book about you. You really are one crime-bustin’ lawman.”

  “You forgot handsome,” Rhodes said.

  “Well, I didn’t forget, exactly.”

  “I forgive you. Anyway, I didn’t get her to confess to everything.”

  “Same thing as. Aidin’ and abettin’, assault on an officer, and all the rest.”

  “Not all,” Lawton said. “She didn’t admit that she killed anybody.”

  “She did it, though,” Hack said. “I’ve seen plenty of guilty folks walk through that door, and she’s got the look if anybody ever did.”

  Rhodes wished he could be as sure about that as Hack. Although he’d talked to Lily for another half hour in the office at Truck’s Trucks, she’d continued to insist that she had nothing to do with Helen Harris’s death.

  On the other hand, she had no alibi for the morning of the murder. Truck had gone to work early, as he always did, not long after seven o’clock, and Lily had been home alone. She told Rhodes that she’d eaten breakfast, watched television, and cleaned house, but no one had seen her, no one had called her, no one could vouch for her.

  Rhodes’s theory was that Mrs. Harris had found out about Lily and Thorpe. She’d confronted Lily, who’d picked up the stool and hit her. Rhodes could speak from personal experience about Lily’s ability with a handy object used as a club. She had plenty of power to kill somebody with the right weapon, and the stool was certainly right for the job. Now all he had to come up with was a reason for Lily to be at the Harris house at the time of the murder.

  Then something else occurred to him. It was possible that Thorpe hadn’t been lying about paying Lily back. He’d planned to do it as soon as he got his inheritance from Mrs. Harris. She wasn’t likely to die anytime soon, so Thorpe could well have decided to hurry her along. Lily might even have helped him.

  “Maybe Ruth has somethin’ for you,” Hack said, breaking into Rhodes’s thoughts. “She said she found some fingerprints at the Harris place. You need to talk to her.”

  Rhodes said he planned to do exactly that as soon as he had an opportunity. While he was waiting for her, he worked on his reports. He’d gotten most of them done before Ruth came back.

  “Here she is,” Hack said, just in case Rhodes hadn’t noticed. “Maybe she’s got the answers you’re lookin’ for.”

  It would be nice to think so, but Rhodes had never had a case that was solved by fingerprints or, for that matter, by any exotic method. Things like that were possible, he knew, but not very likely in real police work in a small Texas county.

  People who liked to think that crime labs in reality were like the ones shown on popular TV shows should take a tour of any real lab, even the ones in big cities. Most of them were underfunded, and Rhodes didn’t know of a one that had attained the almost supernatural status of those presented weekly on the cop shows. He’d read a lot of newspaper accounts of the woes of the Houston police department’s crime lab, and the situation there, which had been years in the making, was almost like a comedy of errors, except that it wasn’t at all funny. Overturned convictions abounded thanks to the many faulty results that had been used in evidence. After years of work, during which time testing had been farmed out to private firms, the lab still wasn’t up and running again.

  So Rhodes wasn’t depending on anything that Ruth had learned to sew up the case for him. He just wished she could give him enough help to convince Lily to confess.

  “I hope you’re going to tell me that you found a hidden security camera in the Harris house,” he told Ruth. “It would be great to have some clear pictures of the killer. Color or black-and-white. I don’t care which.”

  “I wish I had something like that for you,” Ruth said, “but I don’t have anything nearly that good.”

  Rhodes would have been amazed if she had. He asked what she did have.

  “Fingerprints.”

  “Not many, I’ll bet.”

  “You’d win. How did you know?” Before Rhodes could answer, she said, “Oh.”

  “Oh?” Hack said, listening in as always. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You ever visit Helen Harris?” Rhodes said.

  “Nope. Never had the pleasure.”

  “If you’d seen her house, you’d know why there aren’t any fingerprints. It’s clean. Really clean.”

  “I didn’t say there were no fingerprints,” Ruth said. “There were some, where you’d expect.”

  “On the stool?”

  “Yes, on the legs, and on the handle of the gate in the fence, too. There’s a problem, though.”

  Rhodes knew what the problem was. Fingerprints are fine if you have a set to match them with. If not, they’re worthless. To get a match, the fingerprints have to exist in the databases or be available some other way. Lily Gadney had just been printed, so Ruth could do a comparison. If the prints didn’t belong to Lily, they’d have to do a search by computer. Brant had been in the service, so his prints would be on record. They might be the only ones of all those concerned.

  That wasn’t the only problem, however, as Ruth let him know quickly enough. There were no complete prints, only partials, and partials were harder to match.

  “The surface of the stool is rough wood,” Ruth said. “Powdering doesn’t work so well on it. Even the spray isn’t that good, so
what I have isn’t going to be easy to match with anything.”

  “What about the gate handle?”

  “It’s rough and rusty. Same problem. A tough job getting a match.”

  Rhodes hadn’t expected much more. “What about the lightbulb? The broken one, too.”

  “They have Mrs. Harris’s prints on them. It was an easy match.”

  Rhodes had known that the rest wouldn’t be easy.

  “Now what?” Hack said.

  “That’s simple enough,” Rhodes told him.

  Hack shook his head. “I don’t see how.”

  “Me neither,” Ruth said.

  “We’ll just have to get somebody to confess.”

  “Who?”

  “I’d settle for anybody. I’d like to work on Thorpe, but he’s not going to be able to confess to anything for a long time, if ever.”

  “Sure was inconsiderate of that fella to shoot him,” Hack said. “Who does that leave you with besides Lily?”

  “A couple of people at least, but Lily’s a better bet. I need to get her to admit her part in it.”

  “How you gonna do that?” Hack said.

  Ruth looked at Rhodes expectantly. “Do you have an answer for him?”

  “Sure.”

  “What’s the answer then?” Hack said.

  Rhodes shrugged. “The answer is, I don’t know.”

  “Bull corn,” Hack said.

  Ruth smiled. “There’s one more thing.”

  Rhodes asked what it was.

  “Mrs. Gadney wants a lawyer.”

  “Perfect,” Rhodes said.

  “And she wants Randy Lawless.”

  “Thanks,” Rhodes said. “You just made my day.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. What do I do next?”

  “You check out Lily’s Explorer. It’s at Truck’s Trucks. See if you can find some soil samples that match the mud at the Tumlinson place.”

  “Where’s the Tumlinson place? I’ll have to go there, too.”

  Rhodes told her how to get there.

  “What if the soil’s just like the soil all over the county?”

  “Let’s hope it’s not,” Rhodes said.

  “It’s prob’ly not,” Hack said. “Mostly white clay down there, and sticky old black gumbo around here.”

  “That would make it easy,” Ruth said. “If we can get a match, it would help the case.”

  Rhodes agreed and added, “We need all the help we can get.”

  “Amen,” Hack said.

  Chapter 26

  RANDY LAWLESS WAS THE MOST SUCCESSFUL LAWYER IN BLACKLIN County by just about any measurement Rhodes could think of. His clients were likely to escape conviction, he was rich, and he’d even served a couple of terms in the state legislature.

  He was good-looking, he was tall, he had thick, black hair, and he drove an Infinti. His wife, Barbara, was an officer in just about every club in town and the star of an amateur theatrical production every year.

  Lawless could even joke about his name, and often did, especially in court and especially before opposing counsel could work in some kind of snide remark.

  If pressed, Rhodes might have admitted that Lawless was a pretty good lawyer, but he would have hated to do it, and he would never have said it to Lawless except as a joke.

  “My client says you threatened her and then beat her,” Lawless told Rhodes. “You could be in real trouble. Police brutality is a grievous offense.”

  “I like the way you can keep a straight face when you say things like that,” said Rhodes, who also liked the use of grievous. “It’s no wonder you do so well with juries.”

  “Don’t try to change the subject, Sheriff. This is serious business.”

  They were in Rhodes’s courthouse office, which is where Rhodes had told Lawless he’d be when the lawyer had asked for a meeting. Lily was already free on bond, and not a high bond at that. She hadn’t been charged with murder, only with embezzlement.

  Lawless looked at ease in his thousand-dollar suit. His custom-made cowboy boots had probably cost even more. Rhodes felt downright ratty by comparison.

  “I know how serious it is,” Rhodes said. “I don’t suppose Lily mentioned that she hit me with her purse.”

  He was sorry he said it as soon as he saw Lawless smile.

  “That’s going to sound great in a courtroom,” Lawless said.

  “I’ll have to get you on the stand as soon as I can.”

  “I thought you told me the case would never come to trial.”

  “That was before I heard what your testimony was going to be. I wouldn’t want the county to miss out on hearing how the sheriff let a woman with a purse get the drop on him.”

  Rhodes fingered the place on his jaw where decorations on Lily’s purse had made an indentation. He decided that he didn’t like Lawless now any more than he ever had. Less, in fact.

  “As you know, my client claims she’s not guilty of the charge you’ve filed against her, much less of the murder you’ve accused her of committing. If you’ll have a talk with her husband, you’ll find out that he’s going to withdraw any charges of embezzlement. It was all a misunderstanding.”

  Lawless had talked with Truck, and Lawless was one smooth operator. He wasn’t going to get Lily off that easily, however, not if Rhodes could help it.

  “We’ll see how it goes,” Rhodes said. “This has just started.”

  Lawless stood up. Rhodes wondered how much his tie had cost. More than Rhodes had spent on ties in his lifetime, most likely.

  “You’re right about that, Sheriff. I hope you know what you’re getting into.”

  Rhodes knew all right. He’d dealt with Lawless a few times, and Lawless hadn’t always come out the winner. Rhodes had the edge, in fact, which he was sure didn’t sit well with Lawless.

  “I’ll see you later, Sheriff. After I’ve had time to gather the facts and show you how wrong you are.”

  “I’m looking forward to that,” Rhodes said, smiling.

  Lawless smiled back. His teeth were depressingly perfect, a fact made all the more depressing because they were so obviously his own teeth.

  “I just bet you are.” Lawless turned to leave.

  “I have one question for you before you go.”

  Lawless turned back. “I’m not promising an answer.”

  “This isn’t a legal question. I just wondered if you had a cat.”

  “No. I don’t have a pet.”

  “Then you need one. I have Helen Harris’s black cat at my house, and I’m trying to find him a good home.”

  “Then you’re asking the wrong man. I don’t much like cats, and my wife likes them even less than I do. She says she’s allergic to them.”

  “I’ve heard that’s purely psychological,” Rhodes said.

  “I’m not saying it’s not, but I’m not going to be the one to tell my wife that. If you want to do it, be my guest. Is that all you wanted to know?”

  Rhodes said that it was, and Lawless left without offering to shake hands, which was fine with Rhodes, who didn’t care to shake hands with him anyway.

  Rhodes slumped back in his chair and wished he had something to prove that Lily was guilty, but he didn’t. Ruth was working on the prints, but from what she’d told Rhodes so far, the only identifiable ones on the stool legs belonged to Mrs. Harris. Things weren’t shaping up the way Rhodes had hoped.

  There was a knock on the door. Before Rhodes could say “Come in,” Jennifer Loam opened the door and stepped inside.

  “Just the man I’ve been looking for,” she said.

  Rhodes fought the urge to slip even lower in his chair. He stood up. “What can I do for you?”

  Jennifer sat down and got out her little recorder. “You can tell me all about the big fight you had with Leonard Thorpe and about how you captured Lily Gadney.”

  Rhodes sat back in his chair. “You don’t really want to hear it.”

  “Oh, but I do.”

  Rhodes told her, bein
g careful to say nothing to indicate that Lily Gadney was guilty of any particular crime. She was just “a person of interest” as the current phrase had it.

  “You disappoint me, Sheriff. I never thought I’d hear you use that kind of government-speak.”

  Rhodes was a little disappointed in himself, too. “I got carried away. I wanted to make sure you knew she wasn’t accused of murder. She has a good lawyer.”

  “Not Randy Lawless.”

  “He’s the one.”

  “That should be a lot of fun. The editor will love it. We’ll sell a few extra papers.”

  Rhodes said he was always glad to do what he could to assure the financial stability of the free press.

  “Off the record,” Jennifer said, ignoring his comment, “do you think she killed Mrs. Harris.”

  “Off the record would mean that you’d turned off the recorder.”

  Jennifer clicked it off. “Well?”

  “I think it’s a good possibility, but only because I don’t have any other suspects. She claims she’s innocent.”

  “Maybe she is.”

  “Maybe. I’m not going to close the investigation, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Can I print that?”

  “I’d rather you didn’t. If there’s someone out there who’s guilty, he might be thinking he’s off the hook. Thinking like that is what gets people caught.”

  “So you don’t think Mrs. Gadney did it?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “I’m never sure what you’re up to, Sheriff.”

  Rhodes said that he wasn’t ever sure, either.

  “And I never know when you’re being serious.”

  “Most of the time,” Rhodes said, “but not always.”

  “See? That’s what I’m talking about.”

  “Sorry,” Rhodes said, though he wasn’t. “I’ll try to do better when we’re on the record.”

  Jennifer smiled. “I have enough of that now to write a good story. The handsome, crime-busting sheriff mud-wrestling the hardened criminal and then saving his life. That will sell some papers all by itself.”