by Bill Crider
“I always have to ask questions,” Rhodes said. “That’s my job. I may want to talk to you again, but don’t say anything to anybody about this just yet.”
Sizemore didn’t respond to that. He got into his truck and slammed the door.
Rhodes stepped aside, and Sizemore backed out of the parking spot, hardly looking to see if Rhodes had moved out of his way. He didn’t wave good-bye to Rhodes as he drove away, but Rhodes’s feelings weren’t hurt.
Rhodes started to go back into the shop, but he stopped when he saw the justice of the peace drive into the parking lot.
Rhodes had met his wife, Ivy, when she was running for the office of justice of the peace. She’d lost the race, and Rhodes thought the major reason was that in Texas it was the job of the JP to make the declaration of death at the scene of a crime, auto accident, or other fatal event. Rhodes believed that at the time Ivy had run, most of the people in the county weren’t ready to elect a woman to do that kind of job. Things had changed, maybe even enough so that Ivy could win if she chose to run again, but so far she hadn’t mentioned giving it a try.
Gerald Elsner was the man who’d defeated Ivy. He was a former cattle rancher who’d decided he’d had enough of worrying about too much rain or too little, putting out hay and feed in the winter, wondering if beef prices would ever go up enough for him to make a decent living. He’d sold his cows, moved to town, and run for office. He still liked to wear jeans, boots, and a Stetson, and that hadn’t hurt him in his political career, short as it was.
“What you got, Sheriff?” he said, getting out of his big Dodge pickup. He left his Stetson on the seat. “Something wrong with Lloyd?”
“That’s for you to say,” Rhodes told him and led the way into the shop.
It didn’t take long for Elsner to declare that Lloyd Berry was indeed dead.
“Lloyd was a good guy,” Elsner said as he and Rhodes stood outside the shop. “Can’t imagine why anybody’d want to do that to him. That barbershop chorus he organized was really popular. You ever heard them?”
Rhodes said that he had.
“I love that harmony stuff,” Elsner said. “I hope they don’t stop singing now that Lloyd’s gone.”
Ruth Grady’s car came into the lot.
“I guess you won’t be needing me anymore,” Elsner said. “You catch whoever killed Lloyd, Sheriff.”
“I’ll do my best,” Rhodes said.
“Election’s next year,” Elsner said.
Rhodes thanked him for the reminder, wondering if a western-style hat would improve his popularity. Not that it would matter, since hats made Rhodes look more like Buck Benny than Roy Rogers.
“Are you thinking about the election already?” Ruth asked, having overheard Elsner’s final comment.
“I’m trying not to,” Rhodes said. “Seems like everybody else is, though.”
“Not Lloyd Berry.”
“No, Lloyd’s not thinking of anything.”
“We’d better see what we can find out, then,” Ruth said, and they went inside.
5
“YOU HAVE ANY IDEAS?” RUTH SAID AFTER THEY’D GONE OVER the scene carefully.
“Just one,” Rhodes said. “I think Lloyd got into an argument with somebody. Things got out of hand, and whoever was arguing with him picked up the wrench and hit him.”
“Must have been a pretty good argument,” Ruth said, “considering the way it ended. But there wasn’t a fight.”
Rhodes agreed. The plants were all in their places, nothing knocked over other than a small ceramic pot of ivy that lay not far from Berry’s head. Rhodes figured it had been on the counter and had gotten swept off when the killer grabbed the wrench. The pot had landed on the mat and was unbroken. Dirt had spilled out around the edges and onto the mat.
“It wasn’t a robbery, either,” Ruth said.
They’d looked in the cash register. There wasn’t much money in it, but there was enough to convince them that none had been taken.
“Do you think Darrel Sizemore killed him?” Ruth asked.
“It’s a possibility,” Rhodes said.
“He’s kind of short, don’t you think?”
“You mean too short to swing that wrench up and hit Lloyd in the side of the head? I don’t think so. The handle on the wrench is long enough for Darrel to swing it like a baseball bat. He’s got enough reach to do the job.”
“Would he have called it in after he did it?”
“Sure,” Rhodes said. “Remorse can set in pretty fast.”
Ruth nodded. “Maybe. What about the Rollin’ Sevens?”
“What about it?”
“Do you think there’s a connection?”
Rhodes thought about that for a couple of seconds before answering. “You mean Lloyd might have known something he shouldn’t have?”
“Well, you never have found out who runs that place, have you?”
Rhodes had to admit that he hadn’t. The space was leased from the owners of the strip center, but the signatory of the lease was merely a legal representative of whoever the real operator was. Finding that out had so far been more trouble than it had been worth. Berry’s death might have changed that.
“Or it could be that he saw something,” Ruth said. “One of the robberies, maybe, when he was staying here at night. He could have seen a face, gotten a license number.”
“If he did,” Rhodes said, “he never called it in.”
“All right, but what if somebody just thought Berry had seen something. It might amount to the same thing.”
“We’ll have to keep that in mind,” Rhodes said. “Anything else?”
Ruth said there wasn’t, so they worked the scene, looking for anything that might be a clue. Aside from the wrench, which they tagged and bagged, they found nothing.
“There’re going to be fingerprints all over this place,” Ruth said, “but maybe nobody touched the wrench except Lloyd and whoever hit him. That doesn’t mean we’ll get any usable prints, though.”
Rhodes knew that. He didn’t put much stock in prints anyway, because they were no help at all unless other prints that matched could be found in some database somewhere. That wasn’t often the case.
“You can dust the counter and the cash register while you’re here. I’ll call Hack and let him know he can send the ambulance. Then I’m going to take a look upstairs.”
The wooden stairway to the second story was located on the outside of the building, in the back. Rhodes went through the plant room and out the back door to reach it after calling Hack. The paved area behind the buildings was bare except for the trash bins. A fence ran along the edge of the paving and separated the strip center from the fields beyond. There wasn’t much to see. A few cows grazed about a hundred yards away, but they had no interest in Rhodes, if they even noticed him at all. He suspected that they didn’t. Cows weren’t among the most alert creatures he’d dealt with. Certainly not as alert as the alligator had been.
Rhodes climbed the stairs and tried the door at the top. The door was unlocked. That was no surprise. It wasn’t likely that anyone would break in with Berry working downstairs.
The door opened onto a room that held a single bed, a leather recliner, and a TV set. The TV set was a new flat-screen model. Rhodes hadn’t noticed a satellite dish on the roof, but he was sure there was one. Otherwise, Berry wouldn’t have had such a fancy set. A short nightstand stood by the bed. A clock and lamp sat on top of it. The bed was made and the room was clean. Rhodes looked through the nightstand. The drawers held only a TV schedule and a paperback book, something by Joe Lansdale. Rhodes remembered that someone had mentioned Lansdale to him when he was working another case, but he didn’t remember what had been said. At any rate, he was sure the book wasn’t a clue.
The little kitchen and bathroom were equally clean, and there was no sign that anybody had used either of them for a while. If Rhodes had been hoping for some kind of clue, it quickly became obvious that he wasn’t going to find
one. He went back downstairs. The ambulance was parked in front, and two men were removing Berry’s body. Rhodes stood outside with Ruth and let them do their job.
“What about the next of kin?” Ruth said. “He wasn’t married, was he?”
“Not now,” Rhodes said. “His wife died a long time ago in a car wreck. They didn’t have any kids, and he never remarried. We’ll find out if he had any kin that we need to notify. You can look into that.”
“The chorus will miss him.”
“Darrel will tell them.” Rhodes thought about his warning to Sizemore. “Maybe he already has.”
The EMTs loaded Lloyd’s remains into the ambulance and left.
“Who gets to do the interviews?” Ruth said.
“We both do.”
“You’re not going to be a sexist and ask me to take the nail salon, are you?”
“No. I’ll start at Rollin’ Sevens, and you can start next door at the check-cashing store. Whoever gets to the nail salon first gets to do the interviews.”
Ruth thought it over. “I guess that’s fair. You aren’t taking Rollin’ Sevens because you think there’s going to be trouble, are you?”
“Not me,” Rhodes said. “You know I don’t like trouble.”
“Right. Neither do I. Have you had any lunch?”
“No. It won’t hurt me to miss it.”
It wouldn’t hurt him, and he’d missed a lot of lunches over the years. When he got the chance, however, Rhodes liked to sneak away and have a burger at McDonald’s or the Dairy Queen. Maybe even a Blizzard with little bits of a Heath Bar mixed in. Ivy liked for him to eat healthy, and he made an effort at home, most of the time. When he was working, it was a different story.
“I had something earlier,” Ruth said, “so we might as well get started.”
During the time Rhodes had been there, only a few cars had come to the strip to visit the other businesses. Nobody had come to Berry’s shop to see what was going on, and nobody from the other places had come out to see what was going on. Maybe they were too wrapped up in their own jobs to care, or maybe they weren’t curious.
Ruth went into the check-cashing store, and Rhodes headed down to Rollin’ Sevens. He felt bad about Lloyd’s death. Berry had, as far as Rhodes knew, been a good citizen, never in trouble, always willing to pitch in and help out when the town needed him. Now he was gone. It was a waste and a loss, or so it seemed. Rhodes knew well enough that sometimes in the course of an investigation, he’d uncover things that would change his picture of the people involved, and not for the better. He hoped it wouldn’t be that way this time.
The sidewalk was cracked where the ground had shifted under it. A plastic cup lay next to the curb in one spot, and a white paper napkin scooted across the parking lot. A couple of cars drove past on the highway and went on by the big pond that locals called the Brickyard Tank.
No other signs of anything resembling a brickyard remained, and for that matter Rhodes didn’t even know what a brickyard was. He guessed it was a place where bricks were made, and he supposed he could have asked somebody, but he’d never even thought about that. When he was a kid, what interested him was fishing, and he’d often gone to the Brickyard Tank with a cane pole and some grasshoppers that he’d caught in the tall grass nearby. He remembered clearly the time he’d caught a two-pound bass that had seemed much bigger. He didn’t recall that there had ever been any alligators spotted nearby. It was too bad, Rhodes thought, that life couldn’t remain that simple.
But it didn’t. Now any parent who let her son go fishing at a place like that without a life jacket and a couple of adult supervisors would probably get turned over to the CPS within minutes.
Rhodes found himself standing at the front door of Rollin’ Sevens. He wasn’t under any illusions about the place. Although he hadn’t seen anyone go into it or come out, he knew that everyone inside was well aware that he was around. If he’d been a gambler, like the people playing the eight-liners, he’d have bet ten dollars that everyone even knew that he was just about to join them. The blacked-out windows didn’t matter. They knew, and they’d all be on their best behavior. There’d be no signs of anything that wasn’t completely innocent. For some reason Rhodes thought of the scene in Casablanca where Captain Renault expressed his shock that illegal gambling was going on in Rick’s Café Américain.
The interior of Rollin’ Sevens didn’t resemble Rick’s in the least. There was no piano player, no orchestra, no happy couples sitting at tables enjoying a meal. All Rhodes saw under the harsh fluorescent lighting were people, most of them over fifty, sitting on tall red stools with short backs, staring at the big video machines that looked for all the world like slots. There were no clocks visible. The players ignored Rhodes as they fed coins into the eight-liners and hoped that Lady Luck would smile on them.
Little Las Vegas, Rhodes thought.
The machines had colorful screens and names like Bonus 9, Cherry Master, and Pirates of the High Seas. On the walls above the machines, a couple of signs proclaimed that there would be A DOOR PRIZE EVERY HOUR!
The law was never simple when it came to eight-liners, but a door prize was an acceptable way to get people into the place as long as the players didn’t get additional entries into the drawing according to credits they’d won on one of the machines.
When it came to prizes awarded on the machines, things got a lot more complex. As Rhodes understood the Texas Penal Code, the prizes awarded, like stuffed toys, had to be worth less than ten times the cost of a play, or five dollars, whichever was less expensive. The five dollars had to be awarded in coupons, which had to be redeemed inside the place of business. Some owners tried to get away with giving a five-dollar coupon to be used at Wal-Mart, so the winner could go to the store, buy a pack of gum, and put the rest of the money in his or her pocket. That was illegal. Redeeming a coupon for a fuzzy animal at the place you’d won it, however, was acceptable.
Rhodes thought it was all too complicated and open to interpretation. It led to all sorts of clever attempts to get around the law, some of which were probably going on right in front of him, even though he was unable to spot them.
He stood in front of the closed door. Everyone continued to ignore him. He listened to the soft bings and bongs of the machines, the coins sliding into the slots, the murmur of people talking to themselves and their neighbors. After a minute or so, a door opened in the back of the room, and a man came out. He crossed the floor and said, “Afternoon, Sheriff. I’m Guy Wilks. What can we do for you?”
Rhodes wasn’t sure where the we came from, since Wilks didn’t have anyone with him. Wilks wore dark blue jeans that looked new, a white shirt, and white canvas shoes. His thick black hair was combed straight back from his forehead, which had a pasty pallor like a frog’s belly. Rhodes figured Wilks didn’t get outside much during the daylight hours, and he looked as if he’d had more than one mug shot made in his lifetime.
“We need to have a talk,” Rhodes said.
Wilks’s white forehead wrinkled. “What about?”
“Another tenant of this center.”
“I can’t help you there. I don’t know any of them. I keep pretty much to myself. Running this business is all I care about. I got to be on top of everything, be sure everything’s on the up-and-up, you know?” He grinned. “In case the law ever decides to drop in on me.”
He continued to smile to show that he was just kidding. Rhodes didn’t smile in return.
“Come on, Sheriff,” Wilks said. “Lighten up.”
“One of the other tenants has been murdered,” Rhodes said.
Wilks stopped smiling. “I guess that’s not so funny. Come on back to the office.”
He turned, and Rhodes followed him, feeling as if everyone in the place turned to watch as he passed by them. He could almost feel their gazes boring little holes in the back of his shirt. Rhodes wondered if they noticed how his hair was thinning out on the crown of his head. A hat like Elsner’s would make hi
m look funny, he thought, but it would at least cover the incipient bald spot.
Beside the doorway of the office stood a wire bin about four feet tall. It was full of small stuffed animals: cats, dogs, bears. Rhodes knew he was supposed to believe that everyone in Rollin’ Sevens had a lifelong dream of going home with several of the animals in the backseat of his car, but somehow he couldn’t quite picture it.
“Those are the prizes?” he said.
“You bet,” Wilks said without turning around. “People love ’em. It’s like those Beanie Babies were a few years ago, I guess. They collect ’em.”
“Right,” Rhodes said.
Wilks stood aside and let Rhodes pass by him. Then he closed the office door.
“You don’t believe me?” he said.
“I believe you. That’s not why I’m here anyway.”
“Yeah. You said something about a murder.”
Wilks moved around Rhodes and sat behind his desk, an old oak model that looked as if it had come from a thrift shop. The only things on it were a computer monitor and keyboard. There were a couple of other doors, one in the back of the office and one in the wall to Rhodes’s right.
“That’s right,” Rhodes said. “Lloyd Berry.”
“Runs the florist shop,” Wilks said, showing nothing. Rhodes thought he’d be a good poker player. “Who killed him?”
“That’s what I’d like to find out.”
“Well, I can’t tell you. How’d it happen?”
“I can’t go into details right now.”
“Secret lawman stuff, huh? Have a seat, Sheriff. You look tired.”
The only chair other than the one Wilks sat in was a wooden folding chair. Rhodes hadn’t seen one of those in a while. He didn’t feel tired, but he sat down and took his reading glasses from his shirt pocket. Then he got out a notepad and a ballpoint pen.
“You knew Berry?” he said.
“I knew who he was. Spoke to him a time or two, but never went in his shop. He ate lunch sometimes at Max’s Place. I go there now and then.”