by Bill Crider
Max Schwartz hadn’t gone in for originality in renaming the restaurant after he took it over. He’d told Rhodes that he might change the name when he decided what kind of restaurant it was going to be, but so far he hadn’t. What he’d decided on as a specialty was barbecue. It would be hard to compete in that market, Rhodes thought, but Max was going for a more upscale customer than the other two barbecue spots in town, so it might work out for him.
“Know anybody who had it in for Berry?” Rhodes said.
“Sure, everybody’s heard about it.”
“Not me,” Rhodes said.
“I meant everybody around here. Maybe word hasn’t gotten out to town yet.”
“Tell me who it is,” Rhodes said.
Wilks leaned forward. The desk chair squealed.
“Somebody named Cecil Marsh,” Wilks said.
6
RHODES HADN’T EXPECTED TO HEAR THAT NAME. HE’D PLANNED to talk to Marsh about the alligator, so this would give them another topic of discussion.
“What about Marsh?” he said, jotting in his notebook.
“It’s a pretty good story,” Wilks said. He leaned back in the chair, which squealed again. “You know how a quartet from that barbershop chorus goes out every year on Valentine’s Day and sings to people’s sweethearts?”
Rhodes nodded. He’d had the quartet sing for Ivy. He knew he wasn’t very romantic, so it was something different for him. He’d thought she’d like it, and he’d been right. The quartet not only sang a couple of songs but also gave her a rose and a card.
“You have to pay,” Wilks said, “but I hear it’s worth it.”
“It is,” Rhodes said. “What does it have to do with Cecil Marsh and Lloyd Berry?”
“Well, Marsh paid the quartet to sing to somebody, but it wasn’t his wife. He said it was just a friend, and maybe it was. Anyway, Berry told Marsh they’d do it on the q.t., but apparently he let the cat out of the bag, and Marsh’s wife found out. Marsh got into quite a screaming match with Berry at the shop yesterday.”
“You were there?”
“I heard about it from Kasey down at the Check-In.”
That was the check-cashing place. Rhodes figured Ruth would be getting all the firsthand information if Kasey was on duty, so he moved on.
“Who did Marsh have the quartet sing for?”
“I didn’t hear that part of the story. Sure wasn’t his wife, though.”
Marsh was more careless than Rhodes would have guessed, and he trusted his friends more than he should have. Or maybe Berry hadn’t been his friend.
“Did Lloyd ever come down here and try the machines?” Rhodes asked.
“I just told you the only times I ever saw him were at Max’s Place.”
“That’s not exactly what you said.”
“Well, it’s what I meant.”
Rhodes made a note. “So he’s never been here.”
“I didn’t say that. I said I never saw him here. I’m not here twenty-four hours a day, and I don’t stand here looking at people all the time when I’m here, either.”
“Do you know if Lloyd ever witnessed any robberies here?”
“We haven’t had any robberies.”
“Not inside, maybe, but there have been some outside. The department’s investigated them.”
“I don’t know what Berry saw or didn’t see. I told you I only spoke to him a couple of times. And I don’t keep up with what goes on outside. That’s not in my job description.”
He’d kept up with the gossip on Berry and Marsh, but there was no need to mention the contradiction to him, Rhodes thought. He talked to Wilks for another ten minutes but got no further information. He stood up, tucked his notebook and pen back in his pocket, and thanked Wilks for his time.
“If you think of anything that might help me out,” Rhodes said, “I’d appreciate a call.”
Wilks stood, too. “Sure, anytime I can help, I’ll let you know.”
Wilks tried to sound as if he meant it, but Rhodes knew Wilks wouldn’t call him even if the murderer walked into Rollin’ Sevens and confessed. He opened the door and let himself out of the office.
He was surprised to see that hardly anyone was left in the gambling room. People must have thought he’d start taking names when he came out of the office.
He looked around. All three people still in the room were men, and Rhodes knew all of them. Lance and Hugh Eccles were cousins, but they looked enough alike to be brothers, with their red hair that stuck out from under their Astros caps, their freckled faces, and their broad shoulders.
The third man was Travis Fair, and he was even bigger than the cousins. All three were gypsy truckers. Hugh and Lance owned their rig together, and Travis had one of his own. Rhodes assumed they were relaxing on one of their days at home by doing a little gambling.
The problem was, they didn’t look relaxed.
“Hey, fellas,” Rhodes said as he started across the room.
Lance and Hugh moved in front of him. Travis stayed where he was, off to the side.
“What’s the problem, Sheriff?” Hugh said.
“Nothing about gambling,” Rhodes said. “You don’t have anything to worry about.”
“We weren’t worried. Were we, Lance.”
“No,” Lance said. He grinned at his cousin. “We weren’t worried.”
They might not have been worried, but they weren’t moving, either.
“You know, we don’t do anything wrong in here,” Hugh said. “Ain’t that right, Lance?”
“That’s right,” Lance said.
Travis didn’t say anything. He didn’t move. He didn’t grin. He just stood and watched.
“It’s like family here,” Hugh said. “All of us get together and have a little fun, not bothering anybody, not hurting a thing. Just having a nice sociable time. I can’t see why the law doesn’t allow that.”
“It does allow it,” Rhodes said. “As long as that’s all that’s going on.”
“Well, then, you ought not to come here and scare folks off,” Hugh said. “It’s not right. It’s not good for the business. Some of those folks you scared might not ever come back.”
Rhodes wondered if Hugh had been hired as the new PR man for Rollin’ Sevens or if he was upset about something.
“You work here?” Rhodes said.
“That’s pretty funny, Sheriff. Right, Lance?”
“Right,” Lance said, but he wasn’t laughing.
Neither was Travis, who might as well have been a statue for all the moving or talking he’d done so far.
“Well?” Rhodes said. “Do you work here or not?”
“No,” Hugh said. “I don’t work here. I got my own rig that I hire out and drive. I bet you knew that, Sheriff. I just come here on my time off. But I don’t like it when you chase away my friends.”
Rhodes could have said that he hadn’t chased anyone away, but it would have been like talking to one of the video machines. Hugh took a step toward him.
“You don’t want to start any trouble, Hugh,” Rhodes said.
“Trouble? I’m not starting any trouble. I’m just relaxing in the Rollin’ Sevens, or I was until you came along. You sure messed up my day, Sheriff.”
Rhodes wondered if Wilks was watching from his office. If he was, he wouldn’t be making any calls for help. He was probably enjoying the show.
“If you’d take off your badge,” Hugh said, “Lance and I could show you a thing or two about having a good time.”
Rhodes’s badge holder was on his belt, and he had no intention of taking it off, not that he was averse to having a good time.
“What about Travis?” he said. “He doesn’t look like he’s having much fun.”
“Travis? He won’t bother you. He’s just here to watch. You gonna take off the badge?”
“No,” Rhodes said. “I’m not.”
Hugh gave him a shocked look. “I never took you for a sissy, Sheriff.”
“I’m sorry if
I’ve destroyed your illusions,” Rhodes said.
“Huh?”
“Never mind. If you’ll get out of my way, I’ll leave and forget you threatened me.”
“Now hang on a second,” Hugh said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I never made any threats. I asked politely, and you wouldn’t go along with me. So now I’ll have to try something else. Take his badge off him, Lance. That way I can do what needs doing.”
For a second Rhodes didn’t think Lance would obey, but then the big man took a step forward and reached out as if to grab the badge off Rhodes’s belt.
Rhodes took hold of Lance’s wrist and pulled. Lance had already started forward and was too surprised to resist. So Rhodes used the man’s momentum and yanked him right on past before letting go.
Hugh didn’t seem to know what to do next, so Rhodes turned around and put his foot on Lance’s rear. He gave the redhead a shove that sent him stumbling toward the back of the room, then spun back to face Hugh, who had made up his mind to take a roundhouse swing.
Rhodes knocked Hugh’s arm away with his left and began a turn as he grabbed the front of Hugh’s shirt in his right hand. He kept on turning and threw Hugh in the same direction Lance had been traveling.
Lance had managed to stop himself before he hit the wire bin of stuffed animals, but as he got himself steadied, Hugh crashed into him. The cousins did a clumsy little belly-to-back dance and then hit the bin. It collapsed under their weight, and they fell to the floor with stuffed animals all around.
Rhodes looked over at Travis, who still hadn’t moved. But now he was grinning.
“I hope you enjoyed the show,” Rhodes said.
Travis gave a fractional nod. “It was better than Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd.”
He and Rhodes watched the cousins flail around in the pile of stuffed animals before finally getting back to their feet. There was no sign of Wilks. The door to the back room remained closed. Maybe Wilks was playing solitaire on his computer or had gone out into the alley for a smoke. Or maybe he was hoping Hugh would break Rhodes’s nose or some other part of his anatomy.
“Are you gonna arrest anybody?” Travis said. “You could charge ’em with assault on innocent animals.”
“I don’t have time to fool with them,” Rhodes said. “Try to keep them out of trouble.”
“I’ll try, but it’s not easy.”
Hugh and Lance looked at their shoes, or maybe at the stuffed animals at their feet, and avoided Rhodes’s eyes.
“You two should know better than to pick a fight with a trained lawman,” Rhodes said. “Don’t do it again. Next time I might have to shoot you.”
Hugh’s head jerked up. “You wouldn’t do that, would you?”
“I might,” Rhodes said.
His Dirty Harry act was working better than he’d expected. He decided to leave while he was ahead, without even asking Hugh if he felt lucky. Try as he might, though, he couldn’t resist at least one final gesture. He pointed his finger at Hugh and snapped down his thumb.
“Bang,” he said.
Hugh gratified him by flinching. Rhodes took a last look at the signs advertising the door prizes, turned, and went outside, where he ran smack dab into the blonde who was standing there and almost knocked her flat.
7
RHODES REACHED OUT AND GRABBED HER ARM, HOLDING ON while she steadied herself.
“You sure are in a big hurry, Sheriff,” she said.
“Sorry about that,” Rhodes said. “What are you doing here?”
“I think you know,” she said.
She was right. He did know. She was Jennifer Loam, a reporter for the Clearview Herald. The truth of the matter was that she was the reporter, the only one the paper had, and a good one besides. Rhodes expected her to leave Clearview any day and go to work for a bigger paper in a bigger town. So far she’d surprised him by staying. That was good for the paper, and it was good for the town. Rhodes wasn’t sure how good it was for his department, though. She was so on the ball that she got the news about crimes almost as fast as he did, and as soon as she got the news, she was on the scene.
“Well?” Jennifer said.
“Well, what?”
“Well, why don’t you tell me why I’m here?”
“Lloyd Berry,” Rhodes said. “And I don’t have any comment.”
“What about ‘The Sheriff’s Department is on the case, and an early arrest is expected at any moment’?”
Rhodes had never said anything like that in his life.
“You know better,” he said.
Jennifer smiled. “And you know you’re going to have to tell me something sooner or later. I’m going to interview the people in this shopping center first, though. I have a feeling they’ll have more to say than you will.”
Rhodes looked toward the other end of the center. He didn’t see Ruth, who was probably in the nail salon by now.
“Just don’t get in our way,” he said, feeling a little like he’d suddenly become Hugh Eccles.
“Now, Sheriff, you know me better than that.”
“I know you, all right,” Rhodes said. “You can start down there at the Check-In, unless you’d like to see what you can get out of Mr. Wilks and his eight-liners.”
“I don’t think anybody in charge of illegal gambling would want to talk to a reporter.”
“It’s legal gambling,” Rhodes said. “As far as I can tell. That’s something you could investigate.”
“I might just do that, but I think the murder’s more important right now. I’ll see you later.”
She started toward the other end of the center, and Rhodes went into Tom’s TomToms.
Tom was Tom Fulton, a cheerful soul, always smiling. Rhodes wondered if he might not be entirely too cheerful. Surely nobody could be that chipper all the time. Take the name of his business. Fulton sold other kinds of GPS receivers besides TomToms, but Tom’s Garmins wouldn’t have had the same chipper ring to it. Fulton also sold other electronic gadgets, mainly cell phones. Tom’s Cells would have been a terrible name, Rhodes thought. It sounded like the name of a private jail.
“Need to find out where you are?” Fulton asked when Rhodes entered. “Just a little GPS joke, Sheriff. How are you?”
Rhodes said he was fine and asked if Fulton had heard about the death of Lloyd Berry.
Fulton appeared surprised, and his smile turned into a look of sad concern. “Lloyd’s dead? What happened?”
Rhodes gave him the short version and asked the same questions he’d asked Wilks. Fulton said he’d heard about the argument between Marsh and Berry from Kasey at the Check-In but hadn’t thought it amounted to much. “I passed it off as a little tiff between friends,” he said. “They probably got over it in ten minutes.”
Rhodes doubted Marsh’s wife would have gotten over it so easily, but he didn’t tell Fulton that theory. After all, Fulton might even be right. Rhodes would wait until he’d talked to Marsh and his wife to decide.
“How well did you know Lloyd?” Rhodes said.
“Just the way you know anybody else in the shops here. He came by now and then, but we weren’t what you could call friends. Just two guys who said hey when we saw each other. He hadn’t been by lately.”
While Fulton appeared much more willing to help Rhodes than Wilks had been, he didn’t come up with any more useful information.
Rhodes had one final question for him. “What about that door prize deal you have going with Rollin’ Sevens?”
The door prize being offered on the signs in the gambling room was a free rental of a GPS receiver, and Rhodes wondered about the connection.
Fulton had an explanation ready, as if he’d been expecting the question.
“Good publicity for both of us,” he said. “People get to try out a GPS for free, and if they like it, maybe they’ll buy one. So Wilks has his door prize, and maybe I get some new customers.”
“I thought everybody in Blacklin County knew where everything was.”
“Not everybody knows the back roads around here like you do, Sheriff. Besides, people don’t use these things just to find out where the roads go or where the Dairy Queen is.”
Fulton picked up a small Garmin from the counter and tapped it with his finger. He turned it so that Rhodes could look at the screen.
“See, here we are right here, but what if we wanted to find something that was hidden around here somewhere?”
“Something hidden?” Rhodes said. “Like what?”
“Could be anything. Likely nothing worth anything. More like a prize in a box of Cracker Jacks. The only value would be that you’d get to say you found it.”
Rhodes felt as if he’d missed part of the conversation somehow.
“I’m talking about geocaching,” Fulton said. “You’ve heard about it, haven’t you?”
“Vaguely,” Rhodes said.
“There are Web sites for geocaches all over the place. Last I heard, nearly half a million caches were registered. Lots of people like looking for stuff.”
“Hiding it, too, I guess.”
“That’s right, and they all need something to locate the caches with. That’s my business.”
“So there are things hidden in this county?”
“Plenty. I don’t know for sure about the county itself, but there are close to five thousand caches within a hundred miles of where we’re standing. That’s at last count. Could be more or less now. I’d guess more.”
Somehow, Rhodes thought, the latest fads were getting way ahead of him.
“So you can see why the door prize thing is a good idea,” Fulton said. “Heck, I’d give anybody who walked in a free trial if they asked for one, but this way Wilks gets to give a prize that’s not worth much, and I get a customer or two. I hope.”
“So it’s Wilks who runs Rollin’ Sevens?”
“I don’t know anything about that. He’s just the one I deal with.”
Rhodes talked to Fulton a bit longer before leaving. He wondered as he did why Jennifer Loam didn’t do a story on geocaching. It would be more uplifting than one about the murder of Lloyd Berry.
Ruth Grady came out of the nail salon just as Rhodes left Tom’s.