by Bill Crider
A song by John Conlee came on next. Rhodes thought Conlee’s “Rose-Colored Glasses” was one of the great country songs, though the singer hadn’t come up with one nearly so good in quite a while. This one was something about suburban living, and Rhodes mentally tuned it out and tried to concentrate on the burglary-in-progress that he had interrupted.
He could be almost certain now that there was an active gang of thieves operating in the area. He wondered just how many people had been in the truck. He really hadn’t had time to look carefully, or even to catch a glimpse of the license plate. There had been a driver and someone in the seat beside him, but Rhodes hadn’t seen either of them clearly.
It was also obvious that the thieves were nearing the end of their stay in Blacklin County, or at least in this section of it. The house where they had been spotted was hardly worth the effort. Rhodes was afraid that if he didn’t stop them soon they would be long gone. In fact, his interruption of their efforts could have made them skittish, and they might decide to take off even sooner. It would now be clear to them that the law was breathing down their necks.
The car ran just fine all the way back to town, with the exception of a slight scraping noise when Rhodes turned a tight corner. The noise was bothersome, but Rhodes didn’t think it meant much. Just the tire touching the fender, he told himself. Nothing to be concerned about. He preferred to believe that it wasn’t scraping enough to damage the tire—or at least not enough to damage it too much.
“Good Lord,” Hack said when Rhodes walked into the jail. “What happened to you?”
“It’s a long story. You don’t want to hear about it.”
“I sure do,” Hack said. “You look like you went a couple of rounds with a buzz saw. But I ain’t got time to hear anything now. You get over to the funeral home. Clyde Ballinger just called. There’s big trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?”
Rhodes didn’t feel like going over to the funeral home again. He wanted to go home and take a hot bath, eat some lunch, which he had forgotten to do again, and rest. At least his wrist was feeling better. He had forgotten about his vow to take a few minutes exercise on the stationary bike.
“He didn’t say, but he sounded fairly desperate. There was a lot of noise in the background, like people yellin’ and goin’ on real loud. Not the kinda behavior you oughta have at a funeral parlor, if you ask me.”
“Can’t somebody else go?” Rhodes said.
“Maybe in an hour or so, but not right now. Ever’body on duty’s too far off to get there. Except for you.”
“And that’s why they pay me the big money,” Rhodes said. “Right?”
Hack didn’t smirk. He wasn’t capable of smirking. He did look very self-satisfied, however.
“That’s right,” he said. “You’re the High Sheriff.”
“Right,” Rhodes said.
The hot bath would have to wait.
Chapter 7
Rhodes could see about fifteen cars parked outside the funeral home as he approached. He drove to the rear and parked, entering through the back door. He could hear the ruckus Hack had mentioned. It sounded as if it might be coming from the direction of the Peace and Grace Room, so Rhodes headed that way.
There were twenty-five or thirty people in the room, and all of them were talking very loudly. The only quiet one, Rhodes thought, was the late Miss Storm, who still lay in her casket at the front of the room. The casket was open, and Rhodes could see Miss Storm’s face staring placidly up at the ceiling. Everyone appeared to be dressed in his or her Sunday best, and Rhodes suspected that they were all there for Miss Storm’s funeral service, which had apparently been interrupted for the shouting match.
Jack Storm and his wife were standing near the casket, talking to Clyde Ballinger or—more accurately—shouting at him. Storm’s face was even redder than when Rhodes had seen him the day before, and that made his hair seem even whiter. He was standing toe to toe with Ballinger, wagging a thin finger in the funeral director’s face. His mouth was open, and he was clearly expressing a strong opinion, which Rhodes could not hear because of all the other noise and milling around. Storm’s wife was standing behind him, clearly giving him all her moral support, but her mouth was closed. She was apparently satisfied to let her husband do the talking.
Ballinger looked like a man who was trying his utmost to keep from exploding. As Storm continued to rant and wave his finger, Ballinger seemed to swell almost visibly. His chest expanded in his expensive suit, and even his face had begun to puff up.
Rhodes made his way through the crowd. He recognized a few of the people vaguely but hoped he wouldn’t be called on to speak their names. They were people he had seen around the town and possibly even met, but with whom he wasn’t well acquainted.
“Excuse me,” he said, brushing by a portly man in a gray pinstripe.
The man was saying something very loudly about the color of the rouge on Miss Storm’s face. “Too red! They always get it too red here!”
He was talking to a tiny woman, no more than five feet tall. She was swathed in black and had on a black hat with a short black veil. Rhodes hadn’t seen a woman in a hat in quite some time, but this woman was old enough to have worn the hat when it was first in style.
She didn’t quite seem to understand the portly man’s remarks. “Red! I’ll have you know that Jane Storm was a member of the D.A.R. for thirty-five years! She was a better American than anybody in this whole room!”
She looked menacingly at the man from under the short veil, and his hands went up as if to protect himself from her.
Rhodes pressed on and into the middle of another argument, this one between two thin women wearing identical fur jackets. Or maybe the fur was not real. Rhodes never was sure these days. The women looked as much alike as their jackets, and he wondered if they were twins.
“They say Clyde Ballinger stole all her jewelry, every last piece of it,” the one on the right said. “Went right in her house and took it out of her dresser drawers. She always kept it in her dresser drawers, right under her—” She saw Rhodes and clamped her mouth shut in a thin red line.
“Clyde Ballinger never did such a thing,” the other woman, the mirror image, said, ignoring Rhodes. “That Tom Skelly, he might, but Clyde never would.”
As Rhodes moved by them, he gathered that the theft of the jewelry was the general topic of the conversation all over the room. He didn’t have time to listen in, however, as the discussion near the casket seemed to be heating up. Storm had stopped waving his finger and was now tapping Ballinger in the chest with it, forcing the funeral director backward. Ballinger thrust up a hand, but Storm ignored it and continued to poke with his bony finger.
Rhodes thought that Ballinger might make a stand, but before he could, it was too late. The funeral director’s calves struck the edge of the dais and he lost his balance. His arms flailed the air momentarily, but he was unable to save himself. Rhodes stretched out his arm as if to catch him, but the sheriff was still a good ten feet away. There was nothing he could do except watch in horrified fascination as Ballinger tumbled backward into the casket.
He didn’t strike hard, but he hit the casket with enough force to dislodge it from its base. As Ballinger fell onto the dais, the casket began to wobble.
Rhodes pushed two or three people aside, trying to get there in time, but there was no way that he could. The casket’s support had already begun to collapse, starting at its foot. The box turned sideways, dumping Miss Jane Storm’s mortal remains right beside Clyde Ballinger, who lay there as if stunned.
He probably was, Rhodes thought, mentally if not physically.
If the crowd had been noisy before, they were virtually hysterical now. Rhodes could hear women sobbing, men yelling, and Mrs. Storm, Jack’s wife, screaming. Rhodes couldn’t understand what she was saying, which was probably just as well.
He reached the dais and stepped up, trying to think of some way to quiet the crowd. For some re
ason he drew his pistol, though he certainly was not even remotely considering firing it. The weight of it hurt his sore wrist, but he raised his hand anyway. Maybe it would give him the look of authority.
“My God,” someone screamed. “He’s got a gun!”
“Maniac! Maniac! Hit the floor!”
There was the clatter and crash of folding chairs being knocked this way and that and the thud of bodies falling to the carpeting. In the next instant, the only people Rhodes saw still standing were Tom Skelly, whom he had not noticed before, and the very short woman. Skelly was staring at him openmouthed, but the woman was advancing on the dais, her hands balled into tiny fists.
“Go ahead and shoot, you cowardly sonofabitch,” she said, stepping over the portly man, whose rear end stuck up in the air for a distance that looked half her height. “Shoot a poor defenseless little old lady, if you dare. But you better shoot straight, or I’ll bust your teeth out.”
Now that everyone—well, nearly everyone—was on the floor, the room was remarkably quiet.
“It’s all right,” Rhodes said in a loud voice. “I’m the sheriff. You people have been disturbing the peace, and I’m going to see that this matter is straightened out.”
He looked to the back of the room. “Tom, I want you to clear everyone out of here except for Clyde and the Storms. We need to talk. Take them down to some other room and keep them quiet.”
Skelly walked to the front, trying to maintain a dignified bearing. Under the circumstances, he did a pretty good job of it. When he got there, he began speaking in hushed but sonorous tones, directing everyone to rise and go down the hall to the right and gather in the Sweet Repose Room.
There was a great deal of shifting and mumbling, but gradually everyone got to his feet and began to leave the room, except for the tiny woman, who stood with her fists clenched as she glared at Rhodes.
“Go ahead and shoot me,” she said. “But if you do, the members of the D.A.R. will tear you to pieces.”
“No one is going to shoot anyone,” Tom Skelly said soothingly. “Now come along, Miss Tremont.”
Miss Tremont continued to glare at Rhodes for a moment, then turned to follow the others. Clyde Ballinger had managed to sit up and was holding his head in his hands when Jack Storm jumped for him. He got his hands on Ballinger’s shoulders, forcing him backward and bumping his head on the casket. It made a hollow bonging noise.
Rhodes holstered his sidearm and bent down to separate them. “Stop it, you two,” he said. “Let’s have a little dignity here. It’s your sister’s funeral, after all, Mr. Storm.”
Mrs. Storm let out a wail. “Yes! And just look at the poor thing!”
Rhodes had to admit that it wasn’t a pretty sight. Miss Storm’s hands and arms had been crossed on her breast, but now they had flopped out to her sides. Her carefully arranged hair was mussed, and a spray of flowers had somehow fallen across her legs.
“I want you and Jack to go sit down,” Rhodes told Mrs. Storm. “As soon as Mr. Ballinger and I get this straightened up, I’ll want to talk to you. Face the back of the room, why don’t you.”
Mrs. Storm reluctantly obeyed, and Rhodes gave Jack a little prod to help him on his way.
When they were seated, Rhodes knelt down and put his hand on Ballinger’s shoulder. “You OK?” he asked.
Ballinger shook his head, more to clear it than to indicate a negative answer. “I think so.” He looked around him. “What a mess. We’ll never recover from this. Never.”
“Sure you will,” Rhodes told him. Privately, however, he had his doubts.
“Let’s see if we can do something about the mess,” Ballinger said, standing up.
Together they righted the sawhorses and rearranged the flowing material that served to cover them and act as a border around the casket. Then the two of them lifted the casket up and placed it on the sawhorses—no easy job for two men—but Storm evidently hadn’t bought one of the deluxe models. It was painful to Rhodes’s wrist, but he didn’t say anything. He didn’t want to call attention to what they were doing.
Then they had to deal with the late Miss Storm, and there was just no dignified way to do it. Rhodes looked at the body and then at Ballinger. Ballinger looked at Rhodes.
“You’re the expert,” Rhodes said at last.
He glanced at Mr. and Mrs. Storm. They sat with their stiff backs turned on the scene.
“All right,” Ballinger said, after a glance of his own in the same direction. “You grab her feet. I’ll get the shoulders.”
Rhodes moved the spray of flowers and pulled down Miss Storm’s gown. Then he took hold of the ankles.
Ballinger took her shoulders and they lifted.
Miss Storm sagged a little in the middle. She was heavier than she looked, but they managed to get her up over the edge of the casket and inside it again.
Ballinger smoothed out the lining. “We’ll never recover from this,” he said again.
“What happened?” Rhodes asked.
“You want my side or their side?” Ballinger looked out at the Storms.
“Both, I guess,” Rhodes said. “Let’s go talk to them.” They stepped down from the dais and walked to where the Storms sat in rigid silence.
Rhodes pulled up two chairs.
“You don’t look so good, Sheriff,” Storm said. “Been in a fight?”
“You mean, besides this one?” Rhodes said.
“Wasn’t a fight. Just a disagreement.”
“That’s what I want to hear about,” Rhodes said. “The disagreement. Who would like to start?”
“It was all his fault,” Storm said, with an accusatory look at Ballinger.
“I don’t agree with that,” Ballinger said.
“There’s the problem, all right,” Rhodes said. “Except that neither one of you is being very specific about just what you don’t agree on.”
“I’ll try to explain, Sheriff,” Ballinger said. “You see, yesterday after you left, I talked to Mr. Storm about the funeral. I told him that while I had a great deal of faith in you as a lawman, I didn’t think that it would be possible even for you to solve the problem of who stole his sister’s jewelry in one day. And I told him that the funeral really should go on as scheduled. When he left, I thought he understood.”
Storm was turning redder, but he didn’t say anything.
“Is that how it was?” Rhodes asked.
“Nope, it wasn’t,” Storm said. “The way it was, I thought he’d be sure we were satisfied before he done anything. But he didn’t make sure. He just went right ahead with the funeral.”
Ballinger couldn’t restrain himself at that point. “But you showed up here for the funeral, right on time. All your friends were here. Why didn’t you tell them it was all off if you thought it was?”
“Well, when you didn’t call me one way or the other, I thought things had been made right,” Storm said. “I thought you must’ve got some more jewelry and replaced Jane’s, or something like that. It’s your fault it’s gone, that’s for sure.”
“I’m not admitting that,” Ballinger said. “But even if I did, and even if I do have a legal responsibility, I only filed the insurance claim yesterday. I don’t see how you could expect me to have made any replacements this soon.”
“Thought you mighta done it out of your own pocket,” Storm said. “That’s what you oughta do, if you cared about your business.”
“Now you listen to me,” Ballinger said.
“I ain’t gonna listen to you. It’s all your fault.” Storm was getting worked up again.
His wife plucked gently at the sleeve of his suit jacket. “Jack? Is Sis all right?”
It seemed to be the first that Storm had thought of his sister. He looked toward the dais. “She looks fine,” he said. “Why don’t you go check on her.”
Mrs. Storm walked off in the direction of the casket.
“Look,” Ballinger said. “I’m sorry we had this misunderstanding, but the only decent thing t
o do is to go on with the funeral. If we ever do recover the jewelry, we can decide then what to do with it. But right now, the important thing is to get this over with and go on with our lives.”
Storm got a stubborn look on his face, and his mouth set in a firm line. Rhodes thought it was time for him to break in.
“Clyde’s right,” he said. “It’s possible that the thieves are long gone from here, and your sister’s jewelry with them. They might have melted it down and sold it to some gold dealer by now.”
Storm was horrified. “They better not have,” he said.
“It’s a possibility that you should consider,” Rhodes said. “I think you should go on with the services. Everyone’s here, everything’s ready. It’s the best thing to do.”
“Well . . .” Storm said.
Ballinger saw that he had a chance. “Believe me, Mr. Storm, the sheriff’s right. Let’s get it done.”
Storm gave in. “All right,” he said. “But you better do what you can to get that jewelry back, Sheriff. It’s important to me.”
“I will,” Rhodes said.
“And you better get to checking on your insurance,” Storm told Ballinger. “I’m gonna have satisfaction, one way or the other.”
“Don’t you worry,” Ballinger told him. “One way or the other, you’ll get it.”
“I’ll go get everyone,” Rhodes said. He left the two men together and went to find Skelly and the others.
Skelly had everyone calmed down, and the minister who was to conduct the funeral was reading some soothing verses from the Psalms—maybe it was Proverbs. Rhodes wasn’t sure. Rhodes explained the situation to Skelly and told him that he would be leaving.