by Bill Crider
Benton said everything with a straight face. Rhodes was never sure when he was joking.
“Do they get a lot of those calls at the college?” Ruth said. “Alligator emergencies?”
“I think mine was the first,” Benton said. “But now that it’s over, I’d better go on to work. I can just about make it for my eleven o’clock class.”
He went back to his house and drove away in his Saturn. Rhodes told Ruth that she could write up the report on the gator incident, though he wasn’t sure it was over.
“I’ll stay around and see if I can turn anything up,” he said. “A clue, maybe.”
“You’re going onto Marsh’s property without a warrant?”
“I have reason to suspect that the alligator might have come from there because of the stock tank. Anyway, we’re not even sure a crime has been committed. You might say I’m paying Marsh’s property a friendly visit.”
“We might say that,” Ruth said. “If we were ever asked.”
“And I don’t think we will be.”
Ruth nodded. She got in her patrol car and left, and Rhodes walked across the road.
Marsh hadn’t had any work done on his barbed-wire fence in years. The posts tilted and the wire sagged. There was no gate, just a cattle guard, and that wasn’t needed, since Marsh didn’t have any cattle or any other kind of livestock. Rhodes crossed the cattle guard, careful not to get his foot caught.
The rutted road, which hardly deserved to be called a road, led past the remains of the old barn, so Rhodes turned aside to have a look inside what was left of the building.
There was nothing much to see. The door to the little storage area had fallen to the ground, and most of it had rotted away. The rest of the barn had a dirt floor, upon which lay some pieces of wood that might once have been part of a hayrack. Rhodes couldn’t see any signs that an alligator had been in residence, so he went on up to the house.
The screen door no longer had any screen in it, and all the windows were broken. A spiderweb hung suspended between the posts on either side of the top step, and Rhodes brushed it away, wiping the sticky webbing on his pants.
The view wasn’t improved by the removal of the web, and Rhodes didn’t trust the porch not to collapse beneath his weight. So he walked around and looked into the house through the broken windows. He saw trash on the floor of one room, some cans with no labels and a few mildewed magazines, and thought maybe someone had stayed there for a while, but if so it had been long ago, and certainly the room hadn’t been home to an alligator.
Having found no clues, Rhodes strolled down to the stock tank. The low dam was almost bare of trees. A couple of straggly willows sprouted from the yellowish dirt, their green leaves stirring in the light morning breeze.
Rhodes walked around the dam and stood on the edge of the tank. It was no more than thirty yards to the other side. Green algae floated on top of the water around the edges of the tank, and a turtle poked its head up to look at Rhodes with a beady black eye.
If there had been an alligator there, at least one turtle had escaped his jaws, Rhodes thought. He couldn’t see any claw marks in the earth along the sides of the tank or on the dam. There was no slick place where a gator might have slid into the water after spending a quiet day on the bank while soaking up the sun. Maybe the gator hadn’t ever been there at all. It was nothing more than a random alligator that had encountered a random chicken.
How likely was that? Rhodes wondered. Not likely at all, really. The alligator had come from somewhere. So had the chicken. Well, as long as nobody complained about missing chickens or about being menaced by an alligator, there was no reason the sheriff had to worry about it.
At one time Rhodes might have had his fishing rod in the trunk of the county car. Over the last couple of years, however, he’d pretty much given up fishing. Otherwise, he might have made a few casts into the tank, just in case there were some fish worth catching. Not that he thought there were. The water was muddy, and there was too much algae.
Rhodes went on back to the county car. He tried to put the alligator out of his mind, but he couldn’t help but wonder about it and where it had come from. Sooner or later, he thought, he’d find out.
Back at the jail, Rhodes found that Hack and Lawton had already figured out why Rhodes had wanted to know if there had been any complaints from Royce Weeks.
“You thought that alligator came from Cecil Marsh’s place,” Hack said. “And you thought maybe Cecil was gonna set it on Lloyd’s chickens.”
That was close enough, so Rhodes didn’t bother to go into the details. He just nodded.
“That was too easy,” Lawton said. “There’s more to it, I’ll bet.”
Rhodes shook his head, a gesture almost guaranteed to drive Lawton and Hack up the wall. They’d be sure he was keeping something back from them.
“Anything going on that I should know about?” he said.
“Maybe,” Hack said, and Rhodes realized he’d made a mistake. He’d given them back the upper hand.
“Better tell me about it,” he said.
“Got a call about a man gettin’ him some exercise,” Hack said. “Nothin’ wrong with that, I guess.”
Rhodes knew better. No one would call about a man getting exercise.
“Jumpin’ jacks,” Lawton said. “I never could do those when I was a kid. Didn’t have any coordination to speak of.”
“Me neither,” Hack said. “Couldn’t chew gum and walk down the street at the same time.”
Lawton nodded. “Speakin’ of the street . . .”
“What about the street?” Rhodes said.
Hack frowned. He didn’t like being brought back to the subject too quickly.
“That’s where the man was exercisin’,” he said. “In the street.”
“Traffic hazard,” Lawton said. “Right downtown.”
Clearview didn’t have a police department to patrol the downtown. The city contracted with the sheriff’s department to enforce the law in the city limits, while also taking care of the county. Rhodes had more bosses than anybody needed.
“Not a lot of traffic downtown,” Hack said, “but he was still a hazard.”
The sad truth was that not much was left of Clearview’s downtown area. Most of the businesses that had been there had long since closed their doors. Some of them had migrated out on the highway near the giant Wal-Mart, while others had simply faded away. Many of the old buildings had fallen down or been demolished.
“Where downtown?” Rhodes said.
“Out in front of the Lawj Mahal,” Hack said.
Rhodes had given the name of the Lawj Mahal to the big new law offices of Randy Lawless, the most successful attorney in the county. The offices were located in what had once been the heart of downtown, and the sparkling white building that housed them occupied about half of an entire block, the rest of which was given over to a paved parking area.
“So he wasn’t in the street,” Rhodes said.
“Parking lot,” Hack said. “Same thing. Still a traffic hazard.”
“Private property.”
“Endangerin’ the public, no matter where he was,” Lawton said. “Not to mention endangerin’ himself. Especially since he wasn’t dressed right.”
Rhodes was afraid to ask what that meant, so he said nothing. Hack and Lawton looked at him, waiting to see how long it would take him to break. He lasted about half a minute. Maybe less.
“All right, I give up. Tell me the rest of it.”
Hack grinned and leaned back in his swivel chair. “Well, when Lawton says he wasn’t dressed right, he’s kind of exaggeratin’. He was hardly dressed at all. Wasn’t wearing anything but a jockstrap.”
“Weather’s a little too cool for a man to go buck naked, I guess,” Lawton said.
“And a fella can run faster if he’s not wearin’ pants,” Hack said. “You take Tarzan. He never wore pants, and he could move pretty good.”
“Who responded to the call?”
Rhodes said, hoping to get things back on track.
“Buddy,” Hack said. “Didn’t catch the fella, though.”
“Lucky for him,” Lawton said.
Buddy might not have been descended from Cotton Mather, but he held some of the same views, and the exerciser would have gotten quite a lecture had Buddy caught up with him.
“How did he get away?” Rhodes asked, trying to visualize a nearly naked man running through the nearly deserted streets of downtown.
“Must have had a car parked somewhere close,” Hack said. “Time Buddy got there, he was long gone. What you think he was doin’ those jumpin’ jacks for?”
“Some kind of protest, maybe,” Rhodes said. “Or just trying to get in shape. We’ll have to ask him if we catch him.”
“Don’t think we will,” Hack said. “He won’t try it again.”
“You never know,” Rhodes said.
The phone rang, and Hack answered.
Rhodes could hear only one side of the conversation, but he could tell it was about something a lot worse than a nearly naked man doing jumping jacks.
Hack turned around and said, “It’s Lloyd Berry. He’s at his shop, and he’s dead.”
“Heart attack?” Lawton said.
“Nope. Looks like somebody’s killed him.”
4
BERRY’S FLORAL WAS IN A STRIP SHOPPING CENTER THAT A COUple of optimistic local businessmen had built years earlier in the belief that Clearview would grow toward the west, just a short distance north of where two highways intersected. They’d made a drastic miscalculation, though they’d had no way of knowing it at the time. Their mistake had been to build on the side of town opposite the one where Wal-Mart would put up the big box that attracted shoppers the way a bright light attracted insects. As a result, the shopping strip had been home to a number of failed businesses over the years.
The floral shop, however, had managed to hang on through the bad years, and now things were improving. A community college in another county had established a branch campus in Clearview, and their new buildings weren’t far south of the strip. A restaurant belonging to the late Jerry Kergan and now owned by Max Schwartz wasn’t far from the college campus, and it helped draw people to the area as well.
The strip itself was home to the floral shop, which anchored one end; a check-cashing enterprise that also sold money orders and did small loans; a nail salon; Tom’s TomToms, which sold and rented GPS receivers; and Rollin’ Sevens, which behind its blacked-out windows housed a number of what were called eight-liners, near cousins to video slot machines. The machines were legal in Texas under certain conditions, and Rollin’ Sevens was the busiest place in the strip. Rhodes had received quite a few complaints about the place, but so far he hadn’t been able to prove it wasn’t playing by the rules.
As far as Rhodes was concerned the main problem wasn’t with the gambling itself, whether it was legal or not, but in the occasional robbery that occurred near the place. People going in always had money, and they were often careless.
At the moment, however, Rhodes wasn’t interested in gambling or robberies. The death of Lloyd Berry was a considerably more serious matter.
Rhodes parked the county car in front of Berry’s shop in a spot marked FLORAL CUSTOMERS ONLY on the curb in faded black paint. Next to him was Darrel Sizemore’s little blue Chevy S-10 pickup. Business wasn’t booming. The only other cars on the center’s parking lot were clustered at the other end, where Rollin’ Sevens was located.
The floral shop was unique among the strip’s buildings in that it was the only one to have a second story. Berry had gotten permission from the owners and added it just after moving in. He’d once told Rhodes he needed living quarters because he’d found himself working so late at certain times of the year: just before the high school prom, the week of the football homecoming game, and before big weddings and funerals. Instead of going home at one or two o’clock in the morning, Berry would just go upstairs, where he had a bed, a TV set, and a small kitchen and bathroom. Rhodes had driven by there more than once late at night and seen a light in the second-story window.
No light was on there now, but the fluorescent lights inside the shop were on. Rhodes went through the front door. A bell rang in the back.
The shop was filled with Easter decorations, baskets with plastic eggs of all colors and pink and yellow bunnies, crosses with ivy twined on them, even some inflatable bunnies.
There were also potted plants and flowers, most of which Rhodes couldn’t identify. He was familiar with ivy and chrysanthemums, and there were some roses in a cooler. The place smelled of earth and the sweetish mingled odors of the flowers. Darrel Sizemore stood by the counter in the back of the shop.
“Hey, Sheriff,” he said.
His deep voice quavered, which was unusual for a man as confident as Sizemore was. Rhodes figured the feet sticking out from behind the end of the counter were the problem, or rather what the feet were connected to.
“Hey, Darrel,” Rhodes said. “Want to tell me what happened?”
Sizemore took a deep breath. He was about five and a half feet tall, but he looked smaller in the shop, standing next to the high counter. He had a high, wrinkled forehead and ears that stood out from the sides of his head.
“I’m the treasurer of the Clearview Chorus,” he said. “Lloyd asked you to join, I think.”
Rhodes nodded. He believed in letting witnesses tell things their own way, even if it took them a little time to get started.
“I came out here to talk to Lloyd about some of the money matters,” Sizemore said. “We don’t have a lot of money, and it seemed to me that Lloyd was spending too much on music. It’s expensive, and . . .” He paused and waved a hand in the air, dismissing what he’d said. “That doesn’t matter, though. When I came in I didn’t see Lloyd. Sometimes he’s in back, working on arrangements, so I started to go look for him. When I came to the end of the counter, I saw his feet.”
Sizemore turned and looked at the feet that Rhodes assumed belonged to Lloyd Berry. They were wearing running shoes with a big N on the sides.
“I thought maybe he’d had a heart attack,” Sizemore said, turning back to Rhodes. “Or a stroke. Something like that. I went behind the counter to see if I could help, and then I saw him.”
Sizemore paused again, but this time he didn’t look at Lloyd’s feet. He kept his eyes on Rhodes.
“One look and I could tell he hadn’t had a heart attack. It’s a lot worse than that.”
“You told Hack somebody had killed him.”
“That’s right. You’d better have a look for yourself.”
“All right.”
Sizemore moved farther down the counter, getting out of the way as Rhodes passed him.
Berry’s body lay on the floor on a black rubber mat that ran the length of the counter. Rhodes knelt down beside it. One look at Berry’s head and Rhodes could tell how Sizemore knew Berry hadn’t died a natural death. The left side of the head was crushed and bloody. Beside the body lay a heavy metal pipe cutter wrench. Rhodes wondered what something like that was doing in a floral shop.
Lloyd Berry had been alive, and now he was dead. In an instant. The deaths he investigated always made Rhodes sad. The waste of life bothered him in ways he couldn’t really explain, and it put a little hard knot of anger in his stomach, a knot that wouldn’t go away until he’d found out who’d committed the crime. Rhodes never let the anger surface, never let it interfere with his investigation, but it was always there.
He stood up and looked at Sizemore over the top of the counter.
“Did you see anybody else when you got here?” he asked.
Sizemore shook his head. “Nobody. Why would anybody kill Lloyd?”
Rhodes didn’t know the answer to that, but he knew there was a reason. There was always a reason, though never a good one. Maybe even Sizemore had one, but now wasn’t the time to bring that up, not yet.
“You know anybody that us
es a pipe cutter like that?” Rhodes said.
“Oh, that was Lloyd’s. You’d be surprised at some of the things he used around here. He has all kinds of tools. He’s got knives to cut rose stems with, and he uses hammers to mash the stems of the mums. They last longer in the vase that way. That wrench was to cut some of the artificial bushes he uses in cemetery arrangements.”
Sizemore stopped talking and looked at the floor for a second. When he looked up again, he said, “Lloyd talked to me about his work sometimes. I didn’t mean to ramble.”
“Did you call anybody besides my office?” Rhodes said.
Sizemore shook his head.
“I’ll call for an ambulance,” Rhodes said. “And a deputy. You can wait outside.”
“Thanks,” Sizemore said.
He went outside and seemed glad to go. Rhodes followed him out and got Hack on the radio. He told Hack that Berry was dead, all right, and told him to send a deputy.
“How about the JP and an ambulance?” Hack said.
“Better wait on calling the ambulance,” Rhodes said. “I have to work the scene.”
“So you’ll call the ambulance?” Hack said.
Rhodes said he would and signed off. Sizemore had let down the tailgate of the pickup and sat with his short legs dangling off. His feet were as small as a child’s. Sizemore’s head was down, as if he might be praying or thinking hard, but he looked up when Rhodes approached.
“Would it be all right for me to leave?” he said.
“Sure. You and Lloyd didn’t have any problems, did you?”
Sizemore stiffened. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Not a thing. Just wondering about that music business you mentioned. About how Lloyd was spending too much of the chorus’s money.”
“That was nothing. I didn’t even get to talk to Lloyd about it. Why did you bring that up?”
“Just wondering,” Rhodes said. “You can go on back to work now if you want to.”
“I do.” Sizemore jumped down off the tailgate. “Lloyd was my friend. I hope you don’t have some crazy idea that I had anything to do with that in there.”