by Bill Crider
“I wonder if whoever painted that was giving weed a chance,” Ivy said.
“You have to understand the symbolism,” Rhodes told her.
“Why don’t you explain it to me?”
“The local pillow factory exploded.”
“There’s no pillow factory here.”
“You have to use your imagination.”
“I see,” Ivy said. “Or maybe not. What about that one?”
Ivy pointed to a painting that looked to Rhodes as if it might just be a solid red square, but when he squinted he saw that there was a fine white diagonal line across it. He wondered if that was one of the defaced paintings, but Ivy said it wasn’t.
“It’s supposed to be like that. It makes you wonder whether it’s two red triangles or a red square divided into two triangles.”
“I see,” Rhodes said, though he didn’t.
“I read something about a painting like that not long ago,” she said. “Except that it was solid blue and had a wider white line that was painted down the middle. It was also a lot bigger than that one.”
“I didn’t know you read articles about art,” Rhodes said.
“I don’t, usually. This one caught my eye because of the picture and because of the price it brought at auction.”
Rhodes looked at the red painting again. He didn’t think he’d pay much for anything like that, but maybe someone would.
“How much?” he asked.
“I can’t remember exactly,” Ivy said, “but it was more than forty million dollars.”
Rhodes thought he might not have heard her correctly. “Forty dollars?”
“Forty million.”
“That settles it,” Rhodes said. “I went into the wrong profession.”
Ivy laughed. “Maybe not. It takes a lot of talent to sell something for forty million dollars. There’s Ruth Grady. I’m going to talk to her while you do whatever it is that you came here for.”
“Eating,” Rhodes said, though he was still thinking about the forty million dollars.
“You don’t really expect me to believe that.”
“Watch and see,” Rhodes said. He was never going to make forty million dollars, so he might as well eat. He headed for the buffet table.
While the food was an attraction, it wasn’t the main one. What interested Rhodes even more was that three of his suspects were standing near one end of the table, talking in low voices. Don McClaren gripped Eric Stewart by his upper arm and leaned in close, saying something Rhodes couldn’t hear. McClaren’s hand was so big that it easily encircled Stewart’s arm. Both men’s faces were red. Marilyn Bradley stood beside McClaren as if she were taking his side in whatever discussion was going on. They paid no attention at all to Seepy’s singing or to Rhodes’s approach.
Rhodes thought that as long as he was by the table, he might as well see what the major snacks were, proving to Ivy, if she was watching, that he’d been telling the truth.
After he’d gotten some major snacks, he could interrupt the discussion. He saw sliced cheese with several kinds of crackers nearby, sliced ham rolled up and secured with toothpicks, little quesadillas, pizza rolls, chicken wings, deviled eggs, celery stuffed with pimiento cheese, and some kind of dip surrounded by raw broccoli, cauliflower, and carrots. There were other things, too, but that would do for a start. Major snacks, indeed. There were also cookies.
Rhodes got himself a napkin and a plate. He filled the plate and looked to see if the three suspects were still engaged in conversation. They were. He drifted in that direction. McClaren and Stewart paid no attention to him, so he stopped nearby, hoping to listen in.
He didn’t get to hear much, but maybe it was enough. He was sure he heard McClaren whisper something about a head on a shelf. Then Marilyn Bradley saw Rhodes and poked McClaren in the ribs.
McClaren’s head jerked, and he saw Rhodes standing close by. Stewart took advantage of McClaren’s lapse of attention to free his arm.
“Good to see you, Sheriff,” Stewart said, sounding as if he meant it. “We were just talking about the success of the art conference. The mayor made a wonderful little speech.”
Rhodes looked around and saw Clifford Clement, who was wearing a suit that cost more than Rhodes’s monthly salary. The mayor was talking to Ruth and Ivy. Jennifer Loam had joined them. Rhodes wondered if he was charming them. Not a chance, he thought.
“Dr. Benton’s quite a singer, too,” Stewart went on.
“I can see you’re listening closely.”
Stewart ignored that. “He writes his own songs, you know. A very talented guy.”
“So he keeps telling me,” Rhodes said. He bit into a piece of quesadilla and got a taste of grilled chicken and cheese. “Food’s good, too.”
“I have to go now,” McClaren said. His voice was strained. “I need to make sure the guests are all taken care of.”
He walked away. Rhodes didn’t see any reason not to let him go. He’d catch up with him later. It was Stewart that he wanted to have a few words with at the moment. Marilyn Bradley, too.
He didn’t get the chance to talk to either of them, however, because Lonnie Wallace walked up. Lonnie was wearing Western garb, as usual, but tonight he had on a dark suit with Western-cut jacket and a string tie.
Rhodes bit into a pizza roll. It didn’t really taste much like pizza.
“I’ve been wanting to talk to you, Sheriff,” Lonnie said. “How’s the food?”
“Fine,” Rhodes said.
Seepy Benton had begun another song that sounded familiar to Rhodes, like an old Gene Autry song from some movie Rhodes had seen on TV years ago. The chorus was something about being back in the classroom again. Rhodes wondered if it was on YouTube.
Lonnie wasn’t interested in the song. Rhodes didn’t think Lonnie even heard it.
“Eric told me about the bust you found in the antiques shop,” Lonnie said. “He says you think it’s a clue.”
“Could be,” Rhodes said. “It’s being checked for fingerprints.”
No need to tell them that it had already been checked and found wanting. That was the kind of information Rhodes didn’t like to have floating around.
“It was in my store,” Lonnie said, “but I don’t know how it could’ve gotten there.”
Rhodes waited a few beats to see if Stewart would have anything to say. When he didn’t, Rhodes said, “I don’t know, either. I was hoping you might have some idea.”
Lonnie took a step backward. “Me? How would I know?” He paused. “You don’t think I put it there, do you?”
“I hope you didn’t,” Rhodes said, “but you still do consignment sales, don’t you? I thought maybe somebody gave it to you and asked you to sell it for them.”
“We don’t do many consignments now,” Stewart said. “Too much paperwork.”
“That’s right,” Lonnie said. “Someone else put the bust there. I had nothing to do with it. Neither did Eric.”
Rhodes wondered if they thought the bust had simply materialized in the store, but he remembered what McClaren had said the previous morning about locking the place up.
“Did you lock the gallery after yesterday’s little episode?” Rhodes asked.
“No,” Stewart said. “Not today, either. We didn’t think Burt would come back and spray anything, what with him being dead.”
Sarcasm didn’t really become Stewart, Rhodes thought.
“What about stealing from the antiques store? Did you lock the door between here and there?”
“No,” Stewart said, with a glance at Lonnie.
“Who’d want to steal anything from there?” Marilyn asked. “It’s not really valuable.”
“Nobody, maybe,” Rhodes said, “but somebody must have put something there today.”
“Not necessarily,” Lonnie said. “We have some artsy stuff back there. Maybe the bust had been there for a while and nobody noticed.”
“A bust of a NASCAR driver isn’t art,” Marilyn said as if insul
ted by the very idea. “There must be hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe. Art is unique and irreplaceable, the single product of the creative mind.”
“That’s right,” Stewart said. He gave Marilyn a glance. “About how easy it would be to put it there or how long it could’ve been there, I mean. We discussed that this morning, Sheriff. Remember?”
“I remember,” Rhodes said. “By the way, what was Don McClaren so upset about?”
“Upset?” Stewart said. “Don?”
“I thought he was going to pull your arm off a minute ago,” Rhodes said.
“Oh, that,” Stewart said. “I’d just told him and Marilyn about the bust being in the back, and Don was upset, all right. He said that if word got out that there was a clue to the murder hidden here, people would all walk out of the party and go home. The conference would be ruined and we’d never have another one. He said that the college would be the one to suffer because it was helping to sponsor this, and that might affect his job. I can sympathize. Jobs teaching art are hard to find.”
“I can vouch for that,” Marilyn said. “Even a part-time job is hard to find. I know. I’ve tried. I thought winning a ribbon here might help my chances, but now that’s not going to happen, thanks to the terrible Collins man.”
“I don’t like to have my store associated with a murder,” Lonnie said. “It’s bad enough at the Beauty Shack.”
“It hasn’t hurt your business there,” Rhodes said.
“People like to look good,” Lonnie said, “no matter what they have to go through. Sitting in a place where someone died won’t stop them, maybe, but buying antiques is different.”
Seepy Benton was now singing something about opening up your heart. Nobody much cared. Rhodes wished that the people he was talking to would open up their hearts and tell him something helpful. Maybe they already had and he just didn’t know it yet.
Clifford Clement walked up before Rhodes could ask anything else. Rhodes didn’t mind. He couldn’t think of anything else to ask anyway.
“You were right about the meth bust, Sheriff,” Clement said. “Everybody’s talking about it. Good work.”
“He’s right,” Lonnie said. “I saw it on Jennifer Loam’s Web site before I came tonight. She says that you took on three armed meth cookers and a pack of dogs, single-handedly.”
It took a second for that to sink in.
“That’s not anywhere near the truth,” Rhodes said when it did.
“Well, your deputy was there, too,” Clement said. “She mentioned that, but you’re the one who led the charge. Dogs barking, bullets flying, the meth house about to explode…”
“Just like a chapter in a Sage Barton thriller,” Lonnie said.
Rhodes suppressed a groan.
“Those are wonderful books,” Marilyn said. “Everyone knows you’re the model for Sage Barton, Sheriff.”
“Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental,” Rhodes said. “It says that in every book.”
“They have to say that,” Clement said. “Lawyers can cause all kinds of trouble if you use real people. But we all know the truth.”
“Isn’t there going to be a Sage Barton movie?” Lonnie asked. “I think I heard that there was.”
“I heard that, too,” Clement said. “I hope it’s true. It would really put our little town on the map. Maybe they’d even film it here, put Sheriff Rhodes in a small role.”
“Why not have him play himself?” Stewart asked.
“They’d need a big-name star to carry the picture,” Clement said. “George Clooney, maybe.”
“Did you ever wonder about Sage Barton’s initials?” Rhodes was desperate to change the subject.
“No,” Lonnie said. “Why should we?”
“I know the answer,” Marilyn said. “Shall I tell them, Sheriff?”
“Please do,” Rhodes said.
“His initials are S. B.,” Marilyn said. She looked around, saw Seepy, and pointed discreetly. “Just like his. He says he’s the model for Sage Barton.”
That wasn’t exactly what Benton had said, as Rhodes recalled, but he didn’t see any reason to correct things. The conversation was going in a much better direction now.
“Seepy Benton as Sage Barton?” Lonnie said. “You must be joking.”
Marilyn shrugged. “I’m not the one who said it. You could ask him about it.”
“I don’t think so,” Lonnie said as Ivy, Ruth, and Jennifer walked up.
“How’s the food?” Ivy asked Rhodes, who wondered why people kept asking him that.
“My plate’s empty, so I must like it,” he said.
“You deserve some good food,” Ruth said. “I’ve just been hearing about how you took on a big gang of meth cookers all by yourself.”
Rhodes looked at Jennifer. “You didn’t really tell her that, did you?”
Jennifer smiled. “Not exactly. I showed her the Web site, and she read it.” Jennifer took a smart phone out of her purse, punched a few buttons, and handed the phone to Rhodes. “Here, you can see for yourself.”
Rhodes took the phone. Jennifer had called up A Clear View for Clearview on the phone’s Web browser, and the headline at the top said, “Sheriff Shuts Down Meth Lab, Battles Miscreants.”
That was all Rhodes needed to see. He handed the phone back to Jennifer.
“Miscreants?” he said.
“You could look it up.”
“I know what it means. I just thought it was a fancy word for those knotheads.”
“Just good journalism.”
Rhodes wasn’t convinced. “Besides, I didn’t battle anybody, and if I did, I had help. Did you read my report?”
“Yes, and I talked to your deputy, so the article is accurate. He’s mentioned in it. I just shortened the headline so it would sound good. The facts are all there in my story.”
“Possibly a little slanted, though.”
Jennifer looked around at everyone. “Do I seem like the kind of person who’d slant the facts?”
Everyone except Rhodes agreed that she didn’t.
“You can’t slant facts, anyway,” Jennifer said. “They’re the facts. They speak for themselves.”
“Sometimes the way you present them can slant them,” Rhodes said.
“I’d never do that. I leave that kind of thing to unprofessional Web sites.”
Rhodes knew when to quit arguing. Besides, how many people outside the county even looked at A Clear View for Clearview? There couldn’t be many, and everybody in the county already seemed convinced that he was the model for Sage Barton. Some of them, Mikey Burns being at the top of the list, wished that Rhodes would try to live up to the character of Barton, who’d never have hesitated to wipe out a few meth dealers with an M-16 or to bomb their meth house with a drone and leave a crater the size of an oil storage tank.
Rhodes was trying to think of a good way to end the conversation with Jennifer when he heard raised voices at one end of the gallery. He looked in that direction and saw that Don McClaren was having some kind of discussion with Dr. King, the dean of the community college. Marilyn Bradley was standing near them, looking as if she wished she were somewhere else.
Rhodes, on the other hand, wanted to be right there, listening in, so he excused himself to Ivy and the others, put his plate on the buffet table, and walked over.
Rhodes had seen Dr. King in stressful situations before, but he’d never see her lose her composure. Even when one of her faculty members had been killed on the college campus not so long ago, she’d remained in control of herself and the situation. Now, however, she was so upset that a strand of her black hair was out of place, something else Rhodes had never seen.
Rhodes couldn’t hear all of what was being said because Seepy Benton had begun a particularly loud version of “Gandhi Wore a Loincloth,” a number that Rhodes had heard him sing before. Maybe he thought it was appropriate to the situation and would calm things down, and maybe it would have if anybody had been
listening. Nobody was, however, least of all Don McClaren and Dr. King.
The gist of what Rhodes heard led him to believe that Dr. King had mentioned to McClaren that the college was in enough trouble already, what with that recent murder of a faculty member, and that another murder connected with that school, especially one that involved out-of-town guests, was the kind of thing that was likely to bring down the wrath of the board. The wrath, Dr. King had made clear, wasn’t going to fall on her, or if it did, it wasn’t going to remain there for long.
“I was trying to save the college,” McClaren said as Rhodes got closer, “not to cause it any more trouble.”
Rhodes was quite interested to hear that sentence. It sounded almost like a confession, but McClaren immediately qualified it. He hadn’t been talking about killing Collins.
“Several of us tried to have Collins arrested. If the sheriff had just followed through, Collins would be alive now, and everything would be fine.”
Rhodes didn’t feel a bit guilty for not having arrested Collins. Nobody had yet proved to Rhodes that Collins had vandalized the paintings. He was, no question, the most obvious suspect, but that didn’t mean he’d done it.
Rhodes stepped up to McClaren and said, “Are you claiming I didn’t do my job?”
“I’m sure he doesn’t mean that, Sheriff,” Dr. King said. “He’s upset because of the whole situation. You can hardly blame him. Some of the people whose paintings were damaged have complained to me about the art conference, and I’ve passed on that information to Mr. McClaren. It was his idea to get the college to help sponsor it, and he’s a bit upset, as you may have noticed.”
“Damn right I’m upset,” McClaren said. “I think you’re blaming me. None of this is my fault. I couldn’t have done a thing to prevent any of it. I can’t believe I’ve been singled out.”
“So you singled me out instead,” Rhodes said.
“No, I—” McClaren paused. “Okay, maybe I did single you out, but you have to admit that if you’d just arrested Collins, he’d be alive now.”