by Bill Crider
“You’re sure it wasn’t you she started in on?”
“Of course I’m sure. What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about you sneaking over there and taking a shot at Mrs. McGee.”
“You must be crazy, Sheriff. Why would I do a thing like that?”
“That’s what I’d like to know,” Rhodes said, but he didn’t find out, despite spending another thirty minutes talking to Washburn. He went back to the car knowing little more than he had before.
Ivy was silent most of the way back into town. When they were nearly to Rhodes’s house, she said, “You don’t think Mrs. McGee could have killed anyone, do you?”
Rhodes thought about it for a second. “She took a shot at Washburn. She took some more shots at someone tonight.”
“I keep thinking of some of the things she said last night,” Ivy said.
“What things?”
“She kept wondering if we were warm. She said we ought to keep wrapped up in this cold weather.”
Rhodes wasn’t sure he got the point.
“Don’t you see? Wrapped up. That woman you found was wrapped up in the tape.”
“That’s a different kind of wrapping,” Rhodes said, but he could see the point. Suppose Mrs. McGee had killed someone. Accidentally, of course. Seeing the body lying there, exposed, she might very well be seized with the desire to be sure that it was protected against the cold. Suppose that for some reason Mrs. Clayton had come over to Mrs. McGee’s late at night, or even early. To borrow a cup of tea, or whatever. The old woman might have mistaken her for a burglar and shot her.
But how could you explain the fact that the body was nude under the tape? Mrs. McGee certainly wouldn’t have stripped it.
All right, say Mrs. McGee was snooping around the Clayton house, saw something that frightened her, and cut loose with a volley of pistol fire. Say Mrs. Clayton was in the middle of some illicit act with someone. Washburn? Someone else? The someone else might have fled, leaving Mrs. McGee alone with the corpse.
It was possible, Rhodes decided, but there were plenty of other options. He still liked the idea that the burglars were caught in the act and committed murder to protect themselves, but suddenly he realized that there was a big flaw in that reasoning. He was going to have to settle himself down and think the whole thing through again.
“She might have done it,” he finally told Ivy. “I’m just not sure. I’m not sure about anything in this mess.”
Ivy patted his arm. “Don’t worry. You’ll figure it out.”
He wished he could be as confident as she was.
Chapter 16
Lawton was leaning on a broom near the radio table when Rhodes walked into the jail the next morning. He and Hack had clearly been involved in a discussion. They turned at the sound of the opening door.
“Ella Click,” Hack said.
Rhodes looked around to see if someone else was walking in behind him. “What?” he said.
“Ella Click,” Hack repeated. “Works over in the county clerk’s office.”
It’s too early in the day for this, Rhodes thought, but he said, “What about her?”
“She won,” Lawton said.
“Good,” Rhodes said. “Exactly what did she win?”
“The pool,” hack told him. “She had February twenty-eighth. Just missed it by one day. Unless you’ve changed your mind. You ain’t changed your mind have you?”
“Haven’t decided to put it off a while? Move it to a warmer month, like April?”
“No,” Rhodes said.
“Well, I guess that’s it, then. Ella Click is the winner.”
“She’s all right,” Lawton said. “I know her mama. She used to be Ella Mitchum before she got married. Married Sam Click, and they got two kids. Sam works for the Highway Department. Started out wavin’ one of those little flags like they do when they’re workin’ on the road, and moved on up to a pretty good job. But they can use the money.”
“Sure they can,” Hack said. “What would a couple of old reprobates like you and me do with all that money? Just spend it wastefully on big cigars and hard liquor.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Lawton said. “But I could sure use me a new TV set. Old one of mine’s got a line that runs right through the middle of the picture. Little black line, kinda wavy. Sometimes it runs right through the face of that guy who does the news on Channel Four.”
“All right,” Rhodes said. “I’m sorry you two didn’t win the money. I didn’t even know there was a pool. If anyone had told me about it, maybe I could have arranged for a date more in line with the ones you picked.”
“Wouldn’t have been no fun that way,” Lawton said. “Besides, me and Hack ain’t cheaters. We just wanted to win fair and square. Ain’t that right, Hack?”
“That’s right. ‘Course if you was to have given us a little hint, like a friend might do, just some little hint about when you was plannin’ to set the date, well, we mighta—”
“I said I was sorry,” Rhodes told them. “Let’s just forget it.”
“I’ll try,” Lawton said. “But ever’time I see that little black line runnin’ down that news fella’s face . . .”
Rhodes decided his only course was to ignore them. He went over to his desk and looked down the list of U-Truck-’Em buyers again. There was no name on there that even resembled Melvin Holcomb, but he had some other options in mind.
Then the phone rang.
Hack answered, as usual. “Sheriff’s office.”
He listened for a few seconds. “Yeah, he’s here. Just a minute.” He put his hand over the receiver. “It’s that Clayton fella.”
Rhodes picked up the phone on his desk. There was only one line into the jail, though they did have two phones. Hack hung his up.
Clayton was plainly upset. “I want to know two things, Sheriff,” he said. “I want to know if you’ve caught my wife’s killer, and I want to know why you’ve been telling Washburn what I said to you about him. I thought that what I said to you would be kept in confidence.”
“I’m still working on your wife’s murder,” Rhodes said. “One of the people I questioned was Washburn, and to get him to talk I had to tell him a few things. How did you happen to find out that I’d talked to him?”
“He called me, that’s how!” There was a slight hiss on the phone line, and it made Clayton’s voice sound more petulant than it probably was. “He wanted to know why I’d told you that he had a motive to kill Sula. That was just speculation, naturally. I didn’t mean to imply that he was the killer.”
“Of course not,” Rhodes said. “He probably just misunderstood the way I told him about it. By the way, he told me that he did see your wife about the time she was killed.”
“Ha!” Clayton said. “He did do it, didn’t he?”
And this was the guy who didn’t mean to imply anything, Rhodes thought. “He also told me that she was going to go back to Dallas and try to patch things up with you.”
There was a brief pause, and Rhodes listened to the hissing of the wires.
“She didn’t make it, did she?” Clayton said.
“No,” Rhodes said. “I don’t guess she did.”
“She’ll be buried today,” Clayton said. “That’s probably why I’m so upset. But I do want you to find her killer, Sheriff—soon.”
“I’m doing my best,” Rhodes said.
“See that you do.” Clayton hung up without saying good-bye.
Rhodes looked at the phone thoughtfully, then went back to studying the list of van buyers. After a while he found what he was looking for, but he wasn’t sure how much good it would do.
He spent the rest of the day writing reports and worrying about the next commissioners’ meeting, which was coming up in a week. He was going to have to tell them about the car wreck, but he thought that things would be all right. The car was still running, though it looked bad. He needed to take it to the repair shop so that the insurance adjuster could go by
for a look at it when he was in town. Rhodes could use his pickup the next day when he went to the flea market.
Colton was a town that came alive only on the weekends, when its population doubled or tripled, and its streets were crowded with cars and pedestrians, most of them making their way to the flea market grounds on the edge of town. On the drive up, Rhodes had passed or been passed by ten or twelve pickups loaded down with items being carried to the sale. Old dressers, couches, bicycles, swing sets, desks, headboards for all kinds of beds, dogs, chickens, you name it. Rhodes thought the highway must have looked like it did in the Thirties, when the dust bowl farmers were heading for California.
Rhodes himself didn’t go directly to Colton. He stopped at the county seat for a visit with the local sheriff, Link Castle. They had met once or twice at statewide sheriffs’ meetings. Rhodes wanted Link to call the Colton police chief and introduce him.
The county jail was quite a different sight from the one in Blacklin County. It was only two years old, and it had no windows on the outside. All the windows faced the exercise yard on the inside courtyard of the rectangular stone building.
The inside was even more different. There were four men and a woman in the office, all of them wearing gray uniforms. One of the men sat at a desk where he could watch several television monitors. One showed the exercise yard, the others the various cellblocks. Another of the men was doing paperwork at his desk. The woman was the dispatcher, and she sat at the controls of a much more modern radio than the one Hack used. It was the third man who caught Rhodes’s eye. He was tapping away on a computer keyboard, and as he tapped letters appeared on the small monitor in front of him. Hack would have loved it.
The fourth man was Link Castle, who looked like he was in training to be Rod Steiger’s stand-in for a scene from In the Heat of the Night. He was a little older than Steiger, a little heavier, and a little balder, but the resemblance was there. He had a bluff heartiness about him that was all on the surface. The softness and heartiness hid the steely core of the man that Rhodes had heard speak about criminal investigation in a way that would have done the FBI school proud. He talked like a parody of a Texan, but anyone who took him for a fool would be sadly mistaken.
He shook Rhodes’s hand and introduced him to the others. “This here’s Sheriff Dan Rhodes,” he said. “A famous lawman from down to the south a little ways. He’s caught more killers in the last year or so than Sam Spade his own self.”
The deputies turned from their work to say hello, then got busy again. Rhodes didn’t think they were too impressed with him, which suited him just fine. He was always uncomfortable when people expected too much from him.
“Come on over here and have a seat,” Castle said.
He led Rhodes to a big steel desk with a slick plastic top that was almost bare of papers. Rhodes envied the neatness of the place and wondered how Castle managed to keep his desk so clean. They sat in comfortable chairs that didn’t squeak and were covered in what Rhodes assumed to be real leather. Obviously, Castle’s county was not feeling the effects of the depressed Texas economy, or at least not very much.
“What can I do for you, Sheriff?” Castle said after settling himself into the chair and leaning back. “You didn’t really say when you called.”
“I’m looking for some people who burgled a few houses down in my area,” Rhodes said. “I think they just might be up in Colton today, and I wanted to get the cooperation of the local law. I thought you might call the police chief up there and tell him I’d like to meet him.”
“He’ll be hanging around the flea market,” Castle said. “If there’s any crime in Colton, that’s where it’ll be from now to Monday.”
“That’s where I’m headed,” Rhodes said. “I’d be glad to meet him there.”
“I can call the office, have him paged. He could meet you there if you give him a time.”
“How long does it take to drive?”
“You can make it in another fifteen minutes, easy. You might have trouble finding a place to park, but if you’re in an official vehicle you can just drive right on the grounds.”
“I’m in my own pickup,” Rhodes said.
Castle looked at him suspiciously. “Don’t make much sense to come on official business in your own private ride,” he said.
Rhodes didn’t want to explain about the wreck. “County car’s out of service,” he said.
“Oh. Well, in that case you’ll just have to pay to park. Seems like half the people in Colton make a few bucks by chargin’ the shoppers to park in their yards. But it ain’t like it was Saturday. You ought to be able to park fairly close to the main gate. The office is right inside, little gray buildin’ made out of cinderblocks. I’ll call ahead and have Ed meet you. Ed Hamilton, that’s the chief.”
“Fine. I’d appreciate that,” Rhodes said. They shook hands again and he left.
It took Rhodes a little longer than fifteen minutes to get to Colton because of the traffic. The weather had warmed still more, though a new cold front was expected in a day or two, and the sky was blue and sunny. People appeared eager to shop for bargains while the good weather held.
Rhodes parked in a vacant lot and paid three dollars for the privilege. He had to walk two blocks to the main gate, but on the way there he passed the overflow booths. There was no longer enough room on the official grounds for all the sellers, and they lined the streets all around the market. Down one street there were hundreds of animals for sale, dogs mainly, but Rhodes thought he saw a few cats, and there were a lot of rabbits and chickens. Men wandered through the crowd with rifles slung carelessly over their shoulders, the clips or breeches removed. They generally carried the rifles by the barrel, with the butts sticking up in the air. Sometimes they would have a revolver or two or three stuck in their belts.
Rhodes went through the gate and saw the office immediately. It had a window on one side and a door in the front. The window was like the window of a fast-food restaurant. It slid open, and there was a broad ledge in front of it.
As Rhodes walked toward the office, he listened to the sounds around him. The whole area was tilled with the voices of the buyers and sellers, the sounds of country and rock music coming from speakers all around, the barking of dogs, the crying of children. It was almost like the midway of a carnival.
Some of the rock music was blasting away in the office. Rhodes leaned in the window to talk to a short blond woman who was sitting at a small desk, reading a paperback copy of something called Wild Night. He felt the window ledge pressing into his stomach and remembered that he hadn’t ridden the exercise bike in a long time, despite his promise to himself.
“I’m looking for Ed Hamilton,” he said.
The woman put down her book. “Who?” she said, cupping her hand behind her ear.
“Hamilton, Ed Hamilton,” Rhodes said as loud as he could without actually yelling.
“Oh, yeah. I paged him a while back. He ought to be coming along in a minute. You want me to try again?”
“If you don’t mind,” Rhodes said.
The woman didn’t actually sigh, but she appeared to want to. She reached for a chrome microphone on a stand and pushed a button. “Will Ed Hamilton please report to the main office,” she said. “Ed Hamilton, please report to the main office.”
Her words, amplified a hundred times, came out of speakers located right above Rhodes’s head. He resisted the urge to put his hands over his ears.
“He’ll be along,” the woman said. “Wears a black uniform. You can’t miss him.”
“Thanks,” Rhodes said.
He turned to scan the crowd, and the woman got back to reading her book. Rhodes watched the people milling around and tried to make out what was being sold at nearby tables. One of the main roads of the flea market ran down a steep hill, and in a few minutes Rhodes saw a man in black coming up it toward him. If Link Castle was Rod Steiger, Ed Hamilton was Warren Oates, leaning forward to climb the hill with just the right swag
ger and wearing just the right expression, an inch away from a sneer or a smile. He also wore his sidearm high on his waist. Rhodes waited until Hamilton had checked with the woman, then walked over and introduced himself.
“What can I do for you?” Hamilton said.
Rhodes explained who he was and why he was there.
“Penny didn’t say anything about that,” Hamilton said.
“I forgot to tell her who I was,” Rhodes said. “I’m sure she got a call from Sheriff Castle, though.”
Hamilton walked back over to the office and spoke to the woman through the window, then came back to Rhodes. “That damn Penny. She could’ve told me all that the first time. Now just what exactly is the problem, Sheriff Rhodes?”
Rhodes told him.
“Kinda shootin’ in the dark, aren’t you?”
Rhodes admitted that he was.
“Well, you might be able to find something out. Penny has a list of all the lots and who’s rented them. If whoever you’re lookin’ for is actually here, and if they rented a lot and didn’t just try to set up on the street somewhere, then she’ll have a record of it. We try to discourage that settin’ up on the streets, so I figure your main problem will be gettin’ the information you want from Penny. Let me go talk to her.”
Rhodes followed him over to the window and listened to him give Penny detailed instructions.
“You got that?” he asked her.
“Of course I got it. You think I’m dumb?”
“Not the least bit,” Hamilton said. He turned to Rhodes. “She’ll give you what you need. I’d go with you to look, but I got to check in with the office about now. You have any trouble, you just leave things alone and come after me. Penny can get in touch with me.”
It was clear to Rhodes that Hamilton thought he was on a fool’s errand and wouldn’t need any help for the simple reason that he wouldn’t find what he was looking for. Rhodes thanked him anyway and watched him walk out the main gate. Then he turned back to Penny.