Death on the Move

by Bill Crider

  Ivy took a drink of ice water. Rhodes would have preferred Dr Pepper—he hadn’t had one all day—but he thought it might look bad to have Dr Pepper with a meal, so he was drinking water, too.

  “None,” he said. “We’re going to get a printout of the names of people who bought those trucks, but I don’t know how much that will help, unless of course it turns out that someone who lives right around here is on the list. That would narrow it down. And of course I’ll talk to Clayton. He might have some information for us.”

  “Is he a suspect?”

  “When a wife is murdered, the husband is always a suspect,” Rhodes said. “Hard to believe he’d just stash her right there in his own house, though.”

  “What about the problem at Ballinger’s?”

  Rhodes shook his head. “That one really bothers me. I’d think it was just the family trying to cash in if Tom Skelly hadn’t told me that he put the jewelry on Mrs. Storm himself. I’ve got to talk to the people who work there, cleaning up and so on. I’m convinced that Tom and Clyde wouldn’t take anything, no matter what it was.”

  “I don’t know,” Ivy said. “That Clyde Ballinger has pretty strange reading habits. I remember that time I was in his office, and some of those books of his were very unusual. Guerrilla Girls was one of them. And he reads a lot of mystery novels. Maybe he got the idea from one of them.”

  She had just about finished her steak and potato. Rhodes noticed that she ate the skin of the potato, and he was glad. He thought that was the best part, himself.

  “He may read those things, but they don’t give him any ideas,” Rhodes said. “Except that he thinks we ought to be solving crimes down here in Blacklin County the same way they do in somewhere called Isola.”

  “Isola?”

  “It’s a place in those books he reads. It’s a lot like New York City.”

  “And he thinks we ought to be like that?”

  “Not exactly. He just admires the crime-fighting efficiency of the police force there.” Rhodes did, too, for that matter. He had read one of the books himself, and he thought it wouldn’t be bad to be as good as the men of the 87th. Or the eight-seven, as they probably called it.

  “I think you do just fine,” Ivy said. “Is there any dessert?”

  Rhodes hadn’t thought about dessert. “Uh, no,” he said. “I’m trying to watch my weight.”

  Ivy laughed as she got up from the table. “I don’t know why you worry about that so much. You look just fine.”

  Rhodes sneaked a downward glance. He couldn’t see his belt buckle, but there wasn’t really that much of an overhang, he guessed. Besides, he was sitting down, and that always made him kind of spread out more than was really natural.

  He stood up and started to gather up the plates.

  “If you treat me right, I might give you a hand with the dishes,” Ivy said.

  Rhodes was grateful for her help. He was generally pretty clumsy with plates and glasses, yet another reason why he preferred bologna sandwiches. You could eat them off a paper towel or a napkin and not feel bad about it. In fact, they were better if you ate them that way.

  It didn’t take long to get things squared away, but Rhodes dreaded the job of cleaning the oven. He didn’t often broil anything, and when he did, it seemed to make a big mess, what with all the popping and splattering. He made a firm resolution to stick to sandwiches as much as possible.

  He washed and Ivy dried. When everything was put away, they went in to watch the movie.

  Rhodes turned off the timer and pushed the rewind button.

  “What’s this one about?” Ivy said. She was perfectly willing to watch the movies with him, but she’d not heard of most of them before. Neither she nor her late husband had been movie buffs.

  “James Cagney plays a gangster,” Rhodes said. “Goes to prison, breaks out. He has this thing for his mother.”

  “You’re kidding?” Ivy said as she made herself comfortable on the couch. “James Cagney?”

  “That’s right. It’s pretty good, though. This is the colorized version. I kind of want to see how the ending looks.”

  It didn’t look very good at all. The color was so washed out that in fact the ending would have been more spectacular in the original black and white. Rhodes was very disappointed.

  He didn’t consider the evening a total loss, however. No evening spent on the couch with Ivy Daniel could ever be called that.

  Chapter 5

  Rhodes always went down to the jail on Sunday mornings to check on things. Saturday nights brought in an assortment of inmates picked up on charges ranging from creating a disturbance to DWI. Most of the offenses were minor, and most of the offenders would see the judge on Monday, pay a fine, and go home.

  The jail was hardly ever crowded, except on Sundays, a situation that had led the governor to consider paying the smaller counties to house prisoners for some of the larger ones. Those large jails were filled to overflowing because the Texas Department of Corrections didn’t have room in the prison units for any more prisoners. As a result, prisoners were being released from the TDC units with some regularity, just to take in new offenders. Some criminals were serving very short sentences, and citizens were complaining. No matter how much they complained, however, Rhodes hoped he wouldn’t have to be taking in prisoners from places like Harris or Dallas. His jail wasn’t equipped for it, and neither was his staff.

  It was a bad day to be in jail, if there ever could be a good one. The sky was thickly overcast, and the gunmetal clouds seemed almost low enough to touch. The temperature was in the high twenties and not likely to get any higher, which meant that the cells would be unpleasantly cool. The wind was still blowing hard and would be screeching through the cracks and crevices, of which there were plenty.

  Hack, however, looked fairly comfortable. He was wearing an old gray pullover sweater with holes in the front, either torn or eaten by moths, Rhodes wasn’t sure which, and a red-and-black plaid flannel shirt.

  “Anything exciting going on?” Rhodes asked.

  “Not much,” Hack answered. “We had the usual run last night, nothin’ special to speak of. Nothin’ we needed to bother you about.”

  Rhodes thought he detected the hint of a smile with the last sentence, but he wasn’t sure. It wasn’t worth commenting on, anyway.

  Rhodes went to his desk and read through most of the reports. Nothing seemed to warrant any special attention, though there had been a domestic disturbance that could have turned nasty. Then he went through the stack of reports filed by the owners of the homes at the lake, concentrating on the descriptions of stolen property. One of the men, Miles Emmit, had been more thorough than the others. He had brought with him Polaroid prints of most of the items that had been in his house. Rhodes paid special attention to those things that he might recognize later—a .44 Colt revolver with checkered grips, a VCR with a wired remote. He was going through the photos when the phone rang.

  It was Clyde Ballinger. “You caught those thieves yet?” he asked.

  Rhodes didn’t have to ask which thieves he meant. “No,” he said. “Who do you have cleaning up over there?”

  “We can talk about that when you get here,” Ballinger said. “It’s happened again.”

  Ballinger and Tom Skelly were in Ballinger’s office when Rhodes got there. “I just can’t figure it out,” Ballinger said. “You try to run an honest business, you do the best you can, and this is what you get—ripped off.”

  “Who is it this time?” Rhodes said.

  “Mrs. Minnie West,” Skelly said.

  “I don’t think I know her,” Rhodes said.

  “Lived out in Milsby. Her husband’s Woody West,” Skelly said.

  Rhodes didn’t know him either.

  “Never mind that,” Ballinger said. “Tell him what happened.”

  “She came in Friday night,” Skelly said. “In fact, she was in the Blessed Assurance room yesterday when you were talking to the Storms. I went in to look a
t her this morning, since the funeral’s supposed to be this afternoon, and that’s when I noticed.”

  “Noticed what?”

  “That her damn jewelry was gone, that’s what,” Ballinger said. “He called me and I came right down. There’s no doubt about it. It’s gone, all right.”

  “What’s missing?” Rhodes said.

  “Earrings again,” Skelly said. “Wedding band. A couple of other rings, too. One of them had diamonds in it, or what looked like diamonds.”

  Rhodes looked at them. “Does her husband know?”

  “Hell, no,” Ballinger said. “Not yet. I guess we’re going to have to tell him, though. It wouldn’t be right just to bury her without letting him know.”

  Rhodes wondered if Ballinger had considered taking the chance.

  “Besides,” Skelly said, “he might notice.”

  “That’s not the point,” Ballinger said. “The point is, we’re responsible. His wife was in our care, and we’re responsible for what happens to her. Ballinger’s has always given the best of care.”

  After that speech, Rhodes’s faith was restored. Ballinger surely hadn’t ever considered burying the woman without informing her husband of the loss. Rhodes wondered if sometimes he was too suspicious.

  “What about the hired help?” he said.

  “That might’ve been a pretty good idea when it was just Miss Storm,” Skelly said. “But not now.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m pretty sure the jewelry was all on Mrs. West last night when I left,” Skelly said. “And now it’s gone. There wasn’t anyone here last night except for old Don Spooner, who’s kind of our night watchman, and he wasn’t here when the other stuff went missing. So unless he’s working as somebody’s partner, it’s not anybody who works here.”

  That didn’t sound promising. “Who else would have access to the jewelry, then?” Rhodes said.

  Ballinger looked glumly at his partner and shook his head. “That’s the problem,” he said. “Nobody does.”

  “Then where did it go?” Rhodes said.

  “That’s your job,” Ballinger said. “You tell us.”

  “Are there any other bodies in there that I should know about?” Rhodes said.

  “No,” Skelly told him. “You’re not going to try to say they’re stealing from each other, are you?”

  Rhodes didn’t bother to answer. He didn’t blame the two men for being upset.

  “There’s bound to be a logical answer,” Ballinger said. “I just hope you can figure it out.”

  “I’ll keep working on it,” Rhodes said.

  But he didn’t have any very good ideas. To tell the truth, he didn’t have any ideas at all. He left the two partners with their worries and went back to the jail. Ted Clayton was waiting for him when he got there.

  Clayton was a big man, with broad shoulders and a deep chest. He had rugged features and a firm grip and reminded Rhodes of someone who might have played football in his younger days.

  “Glad to meet you, Sheriff,” Clayton said. “Sorry I was so hard to find yesterday, but I was working. I sell insurance, and there’s never a day off if you have a prospect to visit.”

  Rhodes offered Clayton the chair by his desk and both men sat down.

  “What kind of insurance do you sell?” Rhodes asked.

  “I know what you’re probably thinking,” Clayton said. “The Dallas police have already been over some of this with me. You mind if I smoke?”

  Rhodes didn’t mind. He rummaged through the papers on his desk and came up with a glass ashtray surrounded by what looked like the world’s smallest tractor tire. He had gotten it somewhere for nothing; it was an advertising gimmick.

  Clayton brought a package of Marlboro Lights out of his shirt pocket and lit one with a navy blue Bic. “The thing is,” he said, “I don’t sell life insurance. If Sula, that’s my wife, was anything, she was underinsured. I sell health insurance to small businesses, do a little workman’s comp, things like that. The firm I work for sells life insurance, sure, but that’s not my line.”

  He blew out a nervous stream of white smoke. “I know what the law usually thinks in a case like this, and like I said, the Dallas police have already talked to me. Right off they started asking me about insurance and things, especially after they found out that I sold it. But all I had on Sula was a small policy for ten thousand.”

  Rhodes watched him tap his cigarette on the edge of the tractor tire. “That’s not very much for a man in the business,” he said.

  Clayton looked around the office. Hack was bent over the radio as if working on some part of it. Rhodes knew he was listening to every word, but Clayton seemed reassured.

  “Look,” Clayton said, “I wouldn’t want my boss to hear me say this, but I don’t really believe in life insurance. That’s why I don’t sell it. I figure it’s a gamble, and win or lose, you lose. That’s why I stick to health insurance. Now that’s a necessity these days, what with the high cost of medical care, and it’s something I can sell because I believe in it. Life insurance? Uh-uh.”

  Rhodes decided to change the subject before Clayton sold him a policy for major medical. “What happened between you and your wife?” he said.

  Clayton tapped ash off the end of the cigarette, then looked around the room again. Hack was still hunched over the radio.

  “I don’t know if I ought to say,” Clayton said. “I still don’t know if that’s really her that you found at my place, do I?”

  “No,” Rhodes said. “You don’t. But it seems like a very good possibility.”

  “Will I have to identify her?” Clayton said, a quaver in his voice.

  Rhodes thought about the way Dr. White had described the condition of the body. “No,” he said. “That probably won’t be necessary. We’ll have to request your wife’s dental records, and we can make the identification that way. Do you know the name of her dentist.”

  Clayton thought about it for a minute and then came up with the name. Rhodes had him write it on a piece of note paper.

  “I don’t know the address, though,” Clayton said. “Just the name of the street.”

  “That ought to be enough,” Rhodes said. “We can call him on the phone.”

  Clayton wrote the street name on the paper.

  “What makes you so sure it’s really my wife that you found?” Clayton said, crushing out his cigarette and lighting another one.

  “She was in your house,” Rhodes said. “She’s been missing for three weeks. It seems to be a logical conclusion that it’s her body.”

  Clayton sighed and leaned back in his chair. “I guess I ought to tell you about it, then,” he said.

  Rhodes didn’t say anything, just looked at him encouragingly.

  “I looked for her down here, you know,” Clayton said. “First thing.”

  “No,” Rhodes said. “I didn’t know that.” He wondered why the Dallas cops hadn’t gotten in touch with him.

  “I didn’t tell anybody. It was something I didn’t want to talk about. But I checked here before I went to the police. She wasn’t here then.”

  “Maybe you just didn’t look carefully enough,” Rhodes said, thinking of where he and Ruth Grady had found the body.

  “I just can’t believe she’s dead,” Clayton said. “And that the house has been robbed. Do you think that whoever stole all my stuff is the one who killed her?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out,” Rhodes said. “You say you searched for her here?”

  “Yes.”

  Clayton looked as if he might have more to say on that subject, so Rhodes waited him out. One thing he had to say for working with Hack and Lawton—it had taught him patience.

  Clayton took a long drag on his cigarette and sighed out the smoke. “I guess I might as well tell you about it,” he said. “You’d find out anyway, and it just might be that the sonofabitch killed her.”

  Rhodes kept waiting. Sometimes that worked better than prodding.
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  “It’s that fella Washburn,” Clayton said. “The one that owns the house next to mine.”

  “What about him?”

  “He’s a smooth character,” Clayton said. He crushed out his Marlboro and reached for another one. Then he thought better of it and shoved the pack back in his pocket. “He put the moves on Sula.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “She’s a good-looking woman, Sheriff. Or she was, if that’s really her over at your funeral parlor. Men were attracted to her, but she never paid them much attention, until that Washburn came along.”

  “What was so special about him?” Rhodes asked. He was trying to remember if he had talked to Washburn the day before and decided that he hadn’t. Ruth must have been the one to interview him, and she must have done it after Rhodes had gone home. He made a mental note to check over Washburn’s property inventory very carefully.

  “I don’t know that he was so special,” Clayton was saying when Rhodes turned back in to him. “He didn’t look like anything special to me, but then what do I know? I still don’t know why women like that fella on Moonlighting so much. He doesn’t look much to me either.”

  Rhodes had seen Moonlighting only once, but he agreed with Clayton.

  “Anyway,” Clayton went on, “she liked him. He had a way of kidding around that she thought was real cute. And he was good looking, I guess, if you like his type.”

  “What type is that?”

  “Sort of greasy and smiley,” Clayton said. “I guess you know what people think of insurance salesmen. Well, he looks like what most people think an insurance salesman would look like. Gives the profession a bad name.”

  “Is he from around here?” Rhodes said.

  “No. He just stays in that house on the weekends sometimes, like we did. I think he’s from Houston.”

  That would make it harder for Rhodes to talk to him, especially if he had driven up only the day before to discuss the burglaries. It was a pretty good drive up to Clearview from Houston.

  “So he and your wife were interested in one another,” Rhodes said.

  “I guess you could put it that way.”