Death on the Move

by Bill Crider

  “I still got my gun,” she said. “You don’t have to worry about me. Fibber taught me how to use it before he died.”

  Rhodes hoped her husband had been a good teacher and wished the old woman didn’t seem so eager to use her pistol. She might use it on the wrong person.

  “Did you know the Claytons, by any chance?” he said.

  “Never saw ‘em,” she said. “Folks out here aren’t very sociable. I mostly sit on my porch or watch TV.” She looked over to a corner of the room, where there was an old console color TV set with a rounded picture tube. Rhodes hadn’t seen very many of those lately.

  “You saw the moving van go by while you were outside?” he said.

  “That’s right. In the fall and winter I can see the road real good. I know a lot about who comes and goes around here.”

  “Didn’t you think that van was an unusual sight?”

  “Nope. You never can tell what you might see, and people move in and out all the time.”

  “You saw it during the day, though? Not at night?”

  “I sit out on my porch a lot when it’s pretty weather. But that’s in the daytime, not at night. Sometimes in the summer I can sit out there till right past sunset, but it starts to get cool about that time and I have to come in.”

  There were days in the summer when the temperature in Blacklin County stayed in the nineties until ten o’clock in the evening or later, but Rhodes didn’t think it was worth mentioning. Besides, he’d noticed that the room wasn’t quite as warm as he’d first thought. The old house wasn’t well insulated, and he could feel an occasional cold breath of air on the back of his neck. He was glad of that. It probably meant that at least Mrs. McGee wouldn’t suffocate.

  “So you wouldn’t have seen the van if it came by here after dark?”

  Mrs. McGee looked at Rhodes as if he were particularly stupid. “That’s what I said.”

  “And you didn’t hear anything out of the ordinary, like a gunshot?”

  “I don’t hear much that goes on when I’m in the house,” she said. “I can hear that wind whinin’ out there, but that’s about all.”

  They both listened to the wind for a minute as it buffeted the house and whistled in the cracks.

  “How do you like living out here?” Rhodes asked.

  Mrs. McGee laughed. “What you mean is, why does an old woman like me want to live all the way out here by myself? Am I right?”

  “I guess so,” Rhodes said. He smiled sheepishly.

  “Listen,” she said. “I got me a good car parked out in the back, and I can go into town whenever I want to. Truth is, I don’t want to much. Mostly I like to sit out here on my porch and look at things. Trees. Birds. Squirrels. Things like that. I like ‘em a lot better than most of the people I see in town.”

  Rhodes had to admit she had a point. He told her to take care of herself and went back to town.

  Chapter 4

  When Rhodes walked into the jail, Lawton was looking almost happy, which Rhodes interpreted as a bad sign. The only thing that could have cheered Lawton up after his previous besting by Hack would be something that Rhodes wasn’t going to like hearing about.

  Hack was sitting by the radio. He turned when Rhodes walked in. Hack was smiling too, and Rhodes decided that Hack was going to let Lawton bring up the latest disaster in order to make up for what had occurred earlier. Though there was a form of competition between the two old men, they were really friends, and neither wanted the other to feel bad for long.

  “All right,” Rhodes said. “What is it?”

  “You want the good news or the bad news?” Lawton said.

  Rhodes knew for sure that he was in for it then. “Who’s got the good news?” he said.

  “I do,” Lawton told him.

  “All right,” Rhodes said. “Let’s have it.”

  Lawton pretended to look carefully around the office. “Ruth ain’t around, is she?”

  As a matter of fact she wasn’t. Rhodes wondered where she might have gotten off to, but knew he would find out sooner or later.

  “I don’t see her,” Rhodes said.

  “Me neither,” Hack said.

  “I guess it’s okay, then,” Lawton said. “You remember that little item that got stolen from Dr. Packer’s last week?”

  Rhodes knew then why Lawton had made the show about looking for Ruth. There were certain things that neither he nor Hack liked to talk about in front of her, even if she had seen and experienced nearly everything that a law officer could. And that covered a lot of territory.

  “The veterinarian’s,” Rhodes said. “It was an ejaculator.”

  Lawton looked around the room again. It was a small room, cluttered with three desks, six chairs, and a gun cabinet. There was no place where Ruth could have been hiding.

  “That wasn’t all they took,” Lawton said.

  “I know that,” Rhodes said. “Mostly they took drugs. But that was what you were talking about, wasn’t it?”

  Hack interrupted before Lawton could answer. “I never could figure out just why a man would want to take drugs that were supposed to be used on horses or somethin’.”

  “Some of those drugs can affect humans in strange ways. Some of them are powerful aphrodisiacs, for instance. But never mind. What about that ejaculator?” Rhodes asked.

  “They found it,” Lawton said.

  Rhodes waited patiently. He knew that both Lawton and Hack were hoping that he would ask who they were, but he was determined to wait them out. A minute passed before his nerve cracked.

  “Who is this they?” he said.

  “Miz Sunday’s little girls, Suzanne and Sarah,” Lawton said.

  “Oh,” Rhodes said.

  “See,” Hack said, “the way we figger it, the thief just took that thing because it was layin’ around. He didn’t know what it was or anything—”

  He broke off. Lawton was glaring at him from across the room.

  “Uh, anyway,” Hack said. “Never mind.”

  Lawton picked up the theory. “He didn’t know what it was or anything, so he just chucked it out when he was drivin’ down the road. It landed in the bar ditch in front of Miz Sunday’s house, and that’s where those two little girls found it.”

  “How old are the little girls?” Rhodes said.

  “Suzanne must be eleven now,” Lawton said. “Little Sarah’s about eight.”

  “So they probably didn’t know what it was any more than the thief did,” Rhodes said.

  “Maybe not,” Lawton said, “but their mama sure did. She was brought up on a farm, and she was mighty upset that a ‘jaculator had wound up in the bar ditch in front of her house, I’ll tell you.”

  “Is that where Ruth went?”

  “Yep,” Lawton said. “I ain’t at all sure it’s right, her pickin’ up evidence like that. I mean . . . well . . .”

  “She’ll be all right,” Rhodes said. “Did any of those homeowners come by yet?”

  “Not yet,” Hack said. “I guess you’ll have to deal with ‘em if they show up now.”

  “And that’s the bad news,” Rhodes said.

  “No,” Hack said. “That not the bad news.”

  Rhodes hadn’t really thought so. He had hoped so, though. “Okay,” he said. “Tell me the bad news, then.”

  “That Officer Ferguson called back from Dallas,” Hack said.

  Rhodes waited. This time he was determined not to be the one to speak first.

  Hack finally gave in. Being second had made him less patient than Lawton. “She said they knew about that Clayton fella, all right.” He paused again and waited.

  Rhodes waited too.

  Hack relented. “He didn’t have a record, but he’d been in to the station before.”

  This time Rhodes didn’t wait. “Why?” he said.

  “It was about his wife,” Hack said. “Seems he turned in a missing persons report on her.”

  Somehow, Rhodes wasn’t surprised. “When was that?”

&
nbsp; “January second,” Hack said.

  Exactly three weeks before. Dr. White would be pleased, Rhodes thought.

  The door of the jail swung open, and the wind grabbed it, swinging it hard into the wall. A fat man about five feet six inches tall stood in the doorway. “What’s this about my house being robbed out at the lake?” he demanded.

  Rhodes sighed. It was time to deal with the public again.

  When Rhodes got home it was after six o’clock. Speedo, his dog, whose real name was Mr. Earl, was in the backyard, waiting patiently to be fed. The cold weather didn’t bother Speedo much. In fact, he seemed to enjoy it. Rhodes got the bag of Ol’ Roy out and fed him, then went into the house.

  He walked into the living room, where the TV set was. Sitting on top of it was the brand new VCR that Ivy Daniel had given him for Christmas. He had often thought about buying one, but never had. He liked to tell himself that old movies, the kind he preferred to watch, were best viewed at the time of night the TV stations deigned to show them.

  Now he knew that he had been kidding himself. He hadn’t bought a VCR because he had a fear of technology, which if he were going to be honest about it was probably also the reason he had never really pushed the county commissioners about the computer that Hack seemed to think was such a necessity. It was a foolish fear. Rhodes had learned to program the VCR with very little difficulty, and the night before he had taped one of his favorite old movies, White Heat.

  There was one problem. It was a colorized version. He wondered if his dislike of the coloring of black-and-white movies was another example of his fear of technology, but he didn’t think so. He just didn’t think they looked very good. He had to admit that one he had seen, The Charge of the Light Brigade, hadn’t been too bad, but he wasn’t sure about White Heat. Still, there was a chance that the last scene, where the oil refinery blows up, might be really spectacular in color.

  Ivy was coming over to watch it with him, and he suddenly remembered that there was nothing to eat in the house. That is, there was nothing if you didn’t count the bologna in the refrigerator, and Ivy wouldn’t count that. She was constantly trying to get him to do something about his diet, but somehow he never seemed to have the time to put together a proper meal.

  Then it occurred to him that not only had he not bought anything for supper, he hadn’t eaten lunch, either. He realized that he was very hungry and wondered how it was that a man who hardly ever seemed to eat, and who was on the go most of the time, could develop a stomach that was beginning to bulge over his belt.

  The bicycle. He had promised himself he would do a few rounds on the exercise bike, but there wasn’t time now. He had to go out and find something to fix for supper in a short time. Ivy would be here by seven-thirty.

  Rhodes got in his own pickup, preferring not to take the county car to the grocery store. It wasn’t that anyone would say anything about it; he just didn’t think it was a good idea.

  Speedo wanted to go, so Rhodes let down the tailgate. The dog took a running start and jumped in the pickup bed.

  Rhodes slammed the tailgate shut. Speedo liked to put his front feet up on the side of the bed and hang his head over in the wind. Why even a dog would want to do that on a day like this one, Rhodes couldn’t figure out.

  Rhodes drove to the big Brookshire Brothers store and parked in the lot. He left Speedo in the pickup. There was a large sign in the store’s front window that said, “No Dogs Allowed except Seeing-Eye Dogs.” As far as Rhodes knew, there wasn’t a single seeing-eye dog in all of Blacklin County, but there the sign was anyway.

  Rhodes went into the store. He didn’t mind grocery shopping, though he was told that most men hated it. He simply never had time to do it; and when he did, only enough time to pick up something easy to fix, like bologna. Bologna didn’t require much fixing.

  He picked out a couple of steaks and some potatoes to bake. He wasn’t very good at salads, but he got a head of lettuce. Put a little salad dressing on it, and it would do. He hoped.

  Outside, once more, the wind felt even colder. It was going to be a really cold night. He hoped Speedo would be comfortable in his barrel and wondered if there was enough straw in it.

  Rhodes drove home slowly, thinking about the murdered woman. This was a case almost without clues. All he had was a .38 bullet. The house had been as clean as a preacher’s plate. Whoever was taking everything out of those places was extremely neat about it.

  The lack of clues in itself didn’t bother Rhodes much. He worked a lot more on his instincts than on clues, for one thing. He liked to talk to people and keep talking to them, until things began to come together. One of the problems in this case so far was that there wasn’t really anybody to talk to, except for Mrs. McGee, and she didn’t appear to know anything. You could never be sure about something like that, though. Rhodes would talk to her again. Sometimes people knew more than they thought they knew, or more then you thought they knew.

  He got home, romped around the yard with Speedo for a minute, then took the food in. It was too cold and windy to spend any more time outside than absolutely necessary.

  He turned on the oven, ran the steaks under the broiler, washed the potatoes, and wrapped them in foil. He stuck them in the oven with the steaks. It was his theory that you couldn’t cook either a steak or a potato too much. He would fix the salad after Ivy got there. He hoped he had time to wash up and get ready.

  He was worried about the dead woman, too. There didn’t seem to be much doubt about who she was, and when Ruth had come back with the ejaculator he had asked her to call Dallas and have them find Ted Clayton as soon as possible. Clayton was someone Rhodes wanted very much to talk to.

  Also, he had begun to wonder just how long the burglars had been operating around the lake. He supposed it was possible that they had been in the area for quite some time. The fact that no one had reported the truck meant very little. After all, it appeared to be just a normal rental truck, and for all Rhodes knew, it was. He put out the word to the other deputies to be on the lookout for it, however.

  As he was combing his hair, he heard a knock on the door. It was just as well. He had been standing there for at least two minutes, wondering if there weren’t a lot more hair in the comb than usual. He hoped he wasn’t going to start losing his hair. It was bad enough that he couldn’t seem to control his weight.

  He went to the door and let Ivy in. She looked very pretty to him, with her short, graying hair and her bright smile. He wondered why it was that on her, gray hair looked good. He was afraid that his own would turn that dirty yellow color that seemed to plague so many men.

  Ivy was wearing jeans and a Western shirt, and on the third finger of her left hand was the emerald ring that Rhodes had bought her for Christmas. The emerald had been a big disappointment to Hack and Lawton, both of whom had been thinking that Rhodes would buy her a diamond, but at least it was a ring. They would probably have killed him if he hadn’t given her a ring. Since both he and Ivy had been married before, he somehow felt that an emerald was more appropriate than a diamond. She had told him that she was having her other rings made into a dinner ring.

  Now that they were more or less officially engaged, at least in the eyes of the jail staff, Rhodes had been thinking very seriously of marriage—something that he realized he had been trying to avoid thinking about throughout most of his relationship with Ivy. Actually, he had thought of it, but mostly in a negative way. It was beginning to seem more and more like a good idea to him, however.

  “What’s that smell?” Ivy said as she came in the door.

  “Steaks,” Rhodes said. “I’m broiling some steaks and baking a couple of potatoes.”

  “Let’s check on them,” Ivy said.

  Rhodes followed her into the kitchen, where she rescued the potatoes and flipped over the steaks. “Shouldn’t be too much longer,” she said.

  “I like mine well done,” Rhodes said.

  “So do I,” Ivy told him, “but it still
won’t be long.”

  “Good,” Rhodes said. “I’ll fix the salad.” He got the lettuce out of the refrigerator, quartered it, and set two of the quarters on salad plates. “Lettuce wedges,” he said, getting a jar of salad dressing from the refrigerator. He always had salad dressing because he liked to spread it on the bread when he made bologna sandwiches.

  “They may be a little too big,” Ivy said. She got the knife and cut each of the wedges in half, returning the rest to the refrigerator.

  Rhodes rummaged around, looking for steak knives, finally finding them in the back of a drawer. He wasn’t comfortable in domestic situations, and he hoped that Ivy would offer to set the table. He was never sure which side of the plate to put the forks on. Unfortunately, she didn’t offer. She was busy checking on the steaks, so Rhodes set the plates and put out the silverware. He hoped he got it right.

  The steaks turned out to be very good, done just the way Rhodes liked them—no pink on the inside, but not completely dried out the way he usually cooked them when he had the nerve to try. It was probably a good thing Ivy had come when she did.

  While they ate, he told her about the missing jewelry at the funeral home and the burglaries at the lake. He also told her about the dead woman. He had gotten into the habit of discussing his cases with her, and in fact she had been very helpful to him more than once. She was a good listener and often made good suggestions. She even helped him interview witnesses on occasion.

  “What do you think?” she said. “The Clayton woman caught the thieves in the act and they killed her?”

  “It’s possible,” Rhodes said, trying to deal with his lettuce wedge. “They’re the kind who don’t leave any loose ends, that’s for sure. Those houses look like they’ve been gone over by a vacuum cleaner. That’s how clean they are. Whoever cleaned them out even crimped the ends of the copper tubing that attached to the refrigerator ice-makers.”

  “You have any ideas about who did it?”