by Bill Crider
“You sure you don’t want to stay?” Skelly said. “This might get rowdy again.”
“I don’t think so,” Rhodes said. “I need to get back to the jail.”
“Well, all right, if you think so.”
“I’m sure things will go just fine,” Rhodes said. He wanted to get out of there and have a Dr Pepper and maybe a bologna sandwich.
He stopped at the first place he came to, a GasQuik store, which had Dr Pepper in cans and some kind of packaged sandwiches that were full of various kinds of lunch meat and cheese. He preferred Dr Pepper in bottles, and he knew that the sandwich would taste like cardboard, but he didn’t have time to go home.
While he was eating the sandwich, which tasted more like cellophane than cardboard, he thought of something that he should have thought of before. He knew that he would have to go back to the funeral home to check it out, but he decided to go to the jail first, to see if anything had come up. The funeral home could wait. After all, he didn’t want to interrupt the services. They had already been interrupted enough.
Rhodes finished his Dr Pepper and sandwich, got in his car, and drove on over to the jail.
Chapter 8
Several thousand had happened at the jail during Rhodes’s absence. The most obvious evidence of this was that Hack and Lawton were waiting for him, both wearing looks of eager anticipation.
“He don’t look so bad,” Lawton said. “Not near as bad as I thought he would, from the way you talked.”
“He looks better now,” Hack said. “I bet he’s cleaned up some.”
“Never mind that,” Rhodes said, cutting them off. “What about that call to Dallas?”
“I took care of it,” Hack said. “Didn’t take long. They prob’ly just looked in their computer.”
“So what did you find out?”
“That Clayton doesn’t own a gun of any kind, much less a .38. For whatever that’s worth.”
Rhodes knew it wasn’t worth much. Guns were easy to come by in Texas—at garage sales, flea markets, and even burglaries like the ones that had been occurring at the lake. These weren’t guns obtained through proper channels, and none would be registered to the current owner, if they were registered to any owner at all. Thinking about this, Rhodes got still another idea that would have to be checked out.
The thought slipped from his mind as he looked at Hack again. He could tell that the two men weren’t through with him yet—not by a long shot.
“There’s something else, isn’t there?” Rhodes said.
“I guess you could say that,” Lawton said. “I guess you could say there’s something else. Ain’t that right, Hack?”
“That’s right,” Hack said. “You could sure say there’s something else.”
Rhodes had forgotten whose turn it was to work him over, so he just waited.
“Miz Sterling called,” Hack said at last, watching Rhodes’s face.
Rhodes tried not to give anything away. “Oh,” he said. Miss Sterling was a retired school teacher who lived on her retirement check and spent a great deal of her time calling the sheriff’s office. “What did she want this time?”
“Says there’s a peepin’ tom in the neighborhood,” Hack told him. “Says he’s been lookin’ at her for a long time now, and she wants something done about it.”
“She’s gettin’ to be afraid of him, she says,” Lawton put in. “Says that—”
Hack took over again. “Says that she thinks he might do something to her, and she wants you to get over there right away.”
Why me? Rhodes thought, but he knew the answer. Everyone else was on patrol and too far away. Or that’s what Hack would tell him, anyway.
“You might want to clean up a little first,” Lawton said. “You still don’t look as good as a sheriff oughta.”
Rhodes ignored him and went out to the car.
Lawton was right behind him. “Hack and I been wonderin’ how you got so banged up. Now I guess I know.” He was looking at the car.
“I had an accident,” Rhodes said. He got in the car.
As he drove away, he could see a look of pure joy on Lawton’s face. He was really one up on Hack now, and Rhodes knew he would have to tell them the whole story sooner or later.
On his way to the Sterling house, he reflected that one of the real problems with life was that you never had time to concentrate all your abilities on the really major problems. There were always the little, niggling things that came up and drained your energies.
Like right now. He had a murder on his hands. That was the major thing, but there were the burglaries, which were a major item in themselves and seemed to be tied in to the murder. If Clayton was telling the truth, then the murder suspects included the burglars and a man named Washburn, who Rhodes hadn’t even met and who didn’t live in the county. If Clayton wasn’t telling the truth, and there was no particular reason to believe that he was, then he could be added to the list of suspects. That gave Rhodes two suspects living outside the county, along with the burglars. And then there were the thefts at Ballinger’s. While not as big a problem as the burglaries, and certainly not as big as the murder, the thefts were definitely something to think about. Particularly if you were Clyde Ballinger.
But you couldn’t devote yourself to thinking about those things all the time, especially if you’d done something foolish like wrecking one of the county cars and knew you’d be called to account for that. You couldn’t even worry much about that, since you had to go see what was the matter with Mrs. Sterling.
Mrs. Sterling was glad to see Rhodes at her door. “Come on in, Sheriff,” she said.
The front room was furnished like Rhodes expected of a retired teacher. There was a free-standing bookcase loaded with old textbooks with titles like Adventures in Literature and The Literature of Britain. The magazines on the coffee table included National Geographic, U.S. News and World Report, and Mature Years, and looked as if they had been lined up with a T square.
Mrs. Sterling herself was a formidable lady and reminded Rhodes of some of the teachers he had experienced as a child. At about five-eight and in the neighborhood of a hundred and eighty pounds, she looked capable of eliciting a fearsome respect from her pupils. Her thick gray hair was piled up on her head in a roll and held in position with a number of huge plastic hairpins, the kind Rhodes’s grandmother had used. He suspected that Mrs. Sterling had rarely had discipline problems in her classes.
“What seems to be the trouble, Mrs. Sterling?” Rhodes asked.
“He’s watching me,” she said.
“Who?” Rhodes said. “Dan Rather? The newsman?”
She nodded. “That’s the one.”
Rhodes didn’t get it. “Are you sure it’s not just someone who looks like him?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “It’s him. There’s no doubt about that.”
“How can you be so sure?”
Mrs. Sterling looked at Rhodes as if he were the one not making sense. “Why they say his name all the time. It’s him, all right.”
“Uh . . . who says his name?”
“I don’t know that.” Mrs. Sterling sounded impatient. “What difference does that make?”
“Uh . . . none. None. You’re sure he’s watching?”
“Of course I’m sure. I wouldn’t have called if I weren’t sure. Have I ever called you when I wasn’t sure?”
She has me there, Rhodes thought. She was always sure, even the time when she called about the man shooting electronic rays into her house. He had been a line repairman for the electric company.
“He watches me at the same time every day,” Mrs. Sterling went on. “The same time.”
Rhodes saw a remote-control device on the coffee table with the magazines. In one corner of the room there was a fairly new RCA ColorTrak set.
“At five-thirty?” Rhodes asked.
“Why, that’s right. How did you know?”
“Just a hunch. He watches you?”
“Every move I ma
ke. He stares right at me, sitting there in his pullover sweater like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. But he’s watching me. He can see me even when I’m in the kitchen.”
Rhodes stepped over to the TV set. From where he stood he could look through a connecting door and into the kitchen. He could see the porcelain sink and part of the counter top.
“I want it stopped,” Mrs. Sterling said. “I don’t want him watching me anymore.”
“I’ll tell you what, Mrs. Sterling,” Rhodes said. “I don’t think he’ll watch you if you don’t turn on your TV set at five-thirty.”
“You’re sure?”
“Pretty sure.”
Mrs. Sterling looked relieved. Then she thought of something. “But how will I keep up with the news?”
Rhodes thought of a happy news team that spent so much time looking at one another they wouldn’t bother Mrs. Sterling. He told her the channel. “Try watching that at six o’clock instead,” he said.
“Well, if you think it will help,” she said.
“If it doesn’t, give me a call,” he said, and immediately regretted it.
“Oh, I will, Sheriff. I will,” she said, as she ushered him out the door.
He knew that wasn’t an idle promise.
Before he went back to the jail, Rhodes drove by the funeral home. The service for Miss Storm was over, and the funeral party had moved on to the cemetery for the graveside ceremony. Tom Skelly hadn’t gone with them, however, and Rhodes asked about events after the earlier altercation.
“It went all right,” Skelly said. “There were no more outbursts, anyway.”
“Good,” Rhodes said. “I need to pick up something.”
“What’s that?”
“The tape off that body that came in yesterday. I want to get it fingerprinted.”
“You want to fingerprint the tape?”
“Right. The sticky side of it especially.”
They went into the room where Dr. White had worked. Sure enough, he had laid the tape out neatly—or as neatly as possible.
“I don’t think you’ll be getting any prints off the sticky side,” Skelly said. “There’s too much already stuck to it.”
“I’ll send it off to a forensic lab,” Rhodes said. “It’s something I have to try.”
Rhodes had brought in several large evidence bags, and he tagged and bagged the tape while Skelly watched.
“There’s one other thing,” Rhodes said when he was finished.
“What’s that?”
“You have a register for people to sign if they attend the funeral,” Rhodes said. “Do they sign one if they come in for a viewing?”
“Sure,” Skelly told him. “Lots of times people can’t make it to the funeral or don’t want to come, so they just view the body. Sometimes the family’s here and sometimes not. We get everybody to sign in.”
“I’d like to look at the Storm and West registers,” Rhodes said.
“Sure,” Skelly said. “Why?”
“I’m not sure. I can tell you more after I have a look.”
“Why don’t you go out to Clyde’s office and wait. I’ll bring the registers out there,” Skelly said.
While Rhodes waited he thumbed through some of Ballinger’s books. He was reading the first page of The Diamond Bikini when Skelly came in with the registers.
“That’s a pretty funny book,” Skelly said when he saw what Rhodes was reading. “It’s about this guy named Uncle Sagamore, and he—”
“Not you, too,” Rhodes said, putting the book back on the shelf.
Skelly looked sheepish, an expression Rhodes found incongruous on the funeral director’s normally respectably solemn face. “Well, Clyde’s always telling me how good they are. So I read one or two, and by golly, he’s right. They are pretty good. Anyway, here’s those registers you wanted to look at.”
He handed Rhodes two leather-bound books, which Rhodes put on the desk and opened. He ran his finger down the list of names in the Storm book and then in the West book. He still wasn’t sure what he was looking for, and whatever it was, he didn’t find it.
“When you give these books to the Storms and the Wests,” he told Skelly, “I want you to ask them to go over the lists very carefully, looking for the names of people they never heard of. If there are any, tell them to let me know as soon as possible.”
“Why would someone they never heard of sign the registers?” Skelly asked.
“Maybe to steal their jewelry,” Rhodes said. “You didn’t happen to see the same people in both rooms at any time, did you?”
Skelly gave it some thought, but he couldn’t come up with anything. “I don’t think so,” he said.
“Well, it was just a shot,” Rhodes said. “Be sure to get those registers to the families and tell them to go over them. Today or tonight, if possible.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Skelly said.
Rhodes thanked him and went back to the jail.
Hack was not in a particularly good mood, because Lawton had scooped him, so Rhodes had to calm things by relating the entire episode to them.
“Told you you shoulda had a backup,” Hack said self-righteously. Rhodes could tell that saying it made him feel better.
“You were right,” Rhodes said. “Either one of you know anything about the country down below the sound end of the lake?”
“There’s some folks livin’ in those parts that you don’t want to mess with, I know that much,” Hack said. “You ever done much travelin’ back in there?”
“Not to speak of,” Rhodes said.
“Just as well,” Hack said, and Lawton nodded agreement. “There ain’t no votes in that part of the county, or anything else but trouble.”
“How do you mean?”
“There was a book out a long time ago, right after the War, seems like,” Hack said.
Rhodes knew he meant World War II. For Hack, that was the War.
“Tobacco Road,” Hack said. “You ever read it?”
Rhodes admitted that he hadn’t.
“I saw the movie, though.”
“Me, too,” Hack said. “These people I’m talkin’ about—the ones down below the lake—well, they live like that. In shacks like that, or worse.”
“I’ve seen ‘em,” Lawton said. “He’s right about it.” Rhodes had seen them, too, now that he thought about it.
“There’s a whole nest of ‘em back in there,” Hack went on. “They don’t live that way because it’s the best they can do. They live that way because they like it. I guess you could say they’re the closest thing to outlaws we got in this day and age.”
Rhodes was thinking that he should have looked there for the truck in the first place, but it was easy to forget the existence of places like that, as long as there was no trouble. The people Hack had described weren’t outlaws in the sense that they were constantly in trouble with the law—only in the sense that they had chosen to live outside the regular stream of life, making their own rules and regulations. They probably had never paid taxes, never voted, never done any of the usual little things most citizens took for granted. Rhodes wouldn’t have been surprised if they owned one or two license plates among them, which they would change from truck to truck or car to car whenever they took a trip into town.
“I guess I should go down there and look around,” Rhodes said.
“I wouldn’t go today,” Hack said. “It’s gettin’ too late, and after dark you could come into some real trouble.” He looked at Rhodes’s torn pants and the scratch on the back of his hand. “Not that you don’t do a pretty good job of that in the broad daylight.”
“I’ll wait,” Rhodes said. “And when I go, I won’t go alone.”
“They won’t bother you, ‘less you bother them,” Lawton said. “What’ve you got in mind?”
“I’m just going to look for the truck,” Rhodes said. “I guess it would be too much to hope for that the name of the truck buyer would be the name of somebody living back down there.”
“If some of them bought a truck, you can bet their name won’t be on the list. Or on the title, either,” Hack said. “And if they know you saw the truck, which they surely do, you won’t find it anywhere around. You can count on that.”
“It’s too good a truck to get rid of completely, though,” Rhodes said. “They might just try to hide it.”
“They might be better at hidin’ than you are at findin’, though,” Lawton said. “When they see that county car, that truck’ll be long gone.”
Lawton was right, Rhodes knew. One of the reasons there was never any trouble from that area of the county was that the people there took care of it themselves and never exposed it to the view of the rest of the world. It was entirely possible that anyone causing trouble there would simply disappear from sight, never to be seen again. It was suddenly quite plausible that the burglars could also be killers.
With that thought in mind, Rhodes ended the conversation. He spent the rest of the afternoon working on a report about the wrecked car, wondering how he could make it look reasonable to the commissioners.
Chapter 9
“So,” Ivy said. “When do you think we should get married?”
“Uh,” Rhodes said. It was the best he could do under the circumstances. He found himself wondering why she had started her sentence with the word so. He had heard lots of people on TV begin sentences that way, but he had never heard anyone in Texas do it. He wondered if they had been watching too much TV. Then he realized that his mind was seeking refuge in irrelevancy and tried to drag it back to the subject at hand. Marriage. How had that come up?
They were at his house again, watching The Hired Gun, in which Rory Calhoun was playing a gunfighter hired to track down Anne Francis. Rhodes had always liked Calhoun. He had even read a book Calhoun had written, a Western novel published by some paperback company in California. He wondered if Calhoun was still writing books. It had been quite a while since he read that one, and he couldn’t recall the name of it. Probably Ballinger would know. He might even have a copy. Rhodes would have to ask him about it the next time he saw him.