by Bill Crider
“No, but I’m the sheriff. I could just arrest the whole bunch of you.”
Somebody muttered something about the next election. Rhodes figured he was losing votes, but that was nothing new.
“I’m not going to arrest anybody, but, like I said, practice is over. I don’t have time to fool with you. I’ll just let you all go on home. Except for you, Cecil. I need to talk to you. The rest of you can get your stuff and leave.”
Rhodes stood at the podium and listened to the mumbling and grumbling as the men gathered up their music, but before anyone could leave, Max Schwartz spoke up.
“We can all go to my restaurant,” he said. He was still wearing his big cowboy hat. “We can have an afterglow.”
“What’s that?” Rhodes said.
Schwartz turned to address Rhodes. “We sit around and sing, maybe have some cobbler and ice cream.”
People seemed to like the idea. Seepy Benton said, “How can there be an afterglow when we haven’t even glowed?”
That was exactly the kind of question Seepy would ask, Rhodes thought.
“What difference does it make?” Rhodes said.
Benton looked hurt. “Besides,” he said, “we should do something to remember Lloyd by. He was our director, after all.”
“We can honor him by singing,” Max said.
That seemed to satisfy Seepy, and he left the room without saying anything more. The other members of the group followed him, except for Cecil, who stayed in his chair, and Schwartz.
“You going to come out for some barbecue later, Sheriff?” Max said. “We’ll sing something for you.”
“I’ll think about it,” Rhodes said.
Schwartz settled his hat on his head and left. Rhodes went over and closed the door.
“So what happens now?” Cecil said. “You bring out the rubber hoses?”
Cecil was a solid man with calloused hands and a wind-reddened face. He was outside more often than not, and Rhodes figured he didn’t go in for lotions.
“I don’t think the Senior Center has any rubber hoses,” Rhodes said. “I’d have to take you to the jail for that.”
Cecil didn’t appear quite sure whether Rhodes was joking, which was fine with Rhodes.
“From what was going on here, I gather you’ve heard about Lloyd,” he said.
“Yeah,” Cecil said. “That’s what started the fight. Royce Weeks accused me of being the one that killed him.”
“That’s why you threw the chair?”
“Yeah. Weeks provoked me.”
Rhodes could see how Weeks might be able to do that. On the other hand, throwing a chair out the door seemed to be a bit of an overreaction.
“I was trying to hit him with it,” Cecil said by way of explantion. “Not throw it. It slipped out of my hands.”
“You realize he could press charges for that.”
“He won’t, though. He started it, and everybody that was here will swear to that. He was feeling guilty and trying to cover up for it.”
“Guilty for what?” Rhodes said.
“He’s the one that paid for that singing valentine for Lindy Gomez.”
Rhodes wasn’t convinced of that. He needed some kind of proof.
“Do you know that for sure?”
Cecil looked amazed that Rhodes would even have to ask. “Who else would’ve done it? Weeks has been out to get me for years, and he thought this would be the way, maybe break me and Faye Lynn up. He’s almost done it before.”
So there was no proof, just suspicion. Rhodes needed more than that.
“I know that Royce, Lloyd, and Darrel were in the quartet,” he said. “Who sang baritone?”
“Wade Turner.”
Rhodes knew Turner vaguely. He’d been pushing and shoving with the others earlier.
“How did the payment for the valentine get to Lloyd, anyway?”
“It was in a letter, supposedly from me. Even the signature was printed. An obvious fake.”
Maybe, Rhodes thought, or the printed signature could have been a way for Cecil to have a plausible excuse if word got out that he’d sent a valentine to Lindy. Rhodes didn’t think Cecil would admit it, so he went in another direction.
“Let’s talk about alligators,” he said.
Cecil seemed taken aback by the abrupt change in subject. “Alligators? What about alligators? What do alligators have to do with anything?”
Rhodes told him.
“Well, it might have been across the road from my place, but I don’t have an alligator. I’ve never had an alligator. Besides, what if I did have one? Is there any law against it?”
Rhodes shrugged. “Not that I know of. It’s not a good idea to have dangerous animals roaming loose, though.”
“I wouldn’t put it past Weeks to plant an alligator on me. On my land, I mean. Did you ask him?”
“No,” Rhodes said.
He didn’t plan to, either. No matter how odd the feud between the two men was, Weeks wouldn’t go that far. Probably.
“Did you happen to drop in on Lloyd today?” Rhodes said.
Cecil stood up. “You’re about to make me mad, Sheriff.”
“You going to hit me with a chair?”
Cecil sat back down. “No, I wouldn’t do that, but I don’t like being accused of killing anybody.”
“I didn’t accuse you of anything. I just asked a question.”
“Then the answer is no.”
“You worked in Obert today. You had to drive right by Lloyd’s shop.”
“Faye Lynn told me you’d come snooping around. I don’t like that.”
“Just doing my job.”
“Yeah, and I’ll bet you liked it. Anyway, Lloyd’s shop was out of my way, and I didn’t go by there. I went straight to work. Did anybody say I was at Lloyd’s?”
“No,” Rhodes said. “Nobody said that.”
“It’s a good thing, because it would have been a lie. You ought to be talking to Darrel, not me, anyway.”
“Why?” Rhodes said, though he knew what Cecil would say.
“Because they’ve been fighting over the music. Darrel thinks Lloyd might have been dipping into the till.”
Rhodes hadn’t known after all, or not everything. No one had mentioned that Darrel thought Lloyd might be taking money from the group’s coffers.
“Is that what he said?”
“Not in so many words, but it’s what he meant.” Cecil stood up again. “Maybe I was the only one who took it that way, though. Can I go now?”
“Why not?” Rhodes said.
“One thing I can say for you,” Ivy told Rhodes when he came out of the practice room.
“What’s that?”
“When you promise entertainment, you deliver. It wasn’t quite as musical as I’d thought it would be, though.”
“Sorry about that.”
“No, you’re not. You think it’s funny.”
Rhodes knew there were times when it was best to keep quiet. This was one of those times.
“That’s all right,” Ivy said. “I think it was kind of funny, too. Are we still going to eat barbecue?”
“Sure. I think I can still promise you musical entertainment, too.”
“Great,” Ivy said. “I hope I don’t get hit by a flying chair.”
“I can’t promise that,” Rhodes said.
When Rhodes and Ivy walked into Max’s Place, they saw Jackee behind the counter and heard a close-harmony version of “Amazing Grace” coming from the big room that was reserved for private parties. Rhodes had never heard it sung quite like that. He took a look inside. Most of the people from the practice were there, but not Cecil Marsh. Rhodes thought that was a good thing. Much less chance of a fight starting.
After the group finished “Amazing Grace,” they started in on “My Wild Irish Rose.”
Max Schwartz looked over and saw Rhodes. He stopped singing and came to the door. “How does it sound?”
“Good,” Rhodes said. “Who’s directing
?”
“We don’t need a director for an afterglow. We just sing polecat songs. Except for ‘Amazing Grace.’ That was our tribute to Lloyd.”
“What are polecat songs?” Ivy said. “Those sound smelly.”
“Think barber poles,” Max said. “Polecat songs are the ones that every barbershopper knows by heart. You run into three barbershoppers in Alaska, and along with yourself you’ll have a quartet that can sing those songs.”
“Speak for yourself,” Rhodes said.
“You could join us, Sheriff. We’ll take anybody.”
Rhodes wondered if Schwartz meant that the way it sounded. He hoped not.
“I think I’ll just have some barbecue,” he said.
Max waved at Jackee. “Show them to the best seat in the house.”
Jackee came out from behind the counter with a couple of menus.
“Right this way, Sheriff,” she said with a smile. “Every seat in Max’s Place is the best seat in the house.”
Rhodes glanced back at Max, who was grinning with pride.
“I didn’t even have to tell her to say that,” Max said. “She’s a natural.”
The barbecue was better than Rhodes had expected, and the beans and the slaw weren’t bad, either. He wanted the cobbler and ice cream, but he refrained. He had enough trouble buttoning up his pants as it was.
“It’s the sauce,” Ivy said as they were leaving. “It’s really good.”
“It’s Max’s secret recipe,” Rhodes told her.
The chorus was still singing as they left. The song was “Sweet Adeline.”
“Nice harmony,” Ivy said.
Rhodes nodded, wondering when the next fight would break out.
12
RHODES AND IVY MADE IT HOME IN TIME FOR THE TEN O’CLOCK news. A story from Houston caught Rhodes’s attention.
One problem in dealing with the eight-liners was that if law enforcement did prove that illegal gambling was going on, the machines were confiscated. In cities like Houston, there wasn’t enough space to store them, so places like Rollin’ Sevens were fairly safe even if they didn’t follow the law.
“Not anymore,” said the newscaster, a telegenic young woman with long black hair. “A Houston judge has given permission to the Harris County Sheriff’s Department to destroy the confiscated machines. Here’s what’s happening.”
Her image was replaced with film of a giant claw picking up an eight-liner and crushing it, then dumping the remains into a truck to be hauled away.
“I’ll bet you wish you could do that,” Ivy said.
“Not especially. The only place in town is following the law. Or at least I think it is, and a lot of people enjoy it.” Rhodes thought of the Eccles cousins. “Some of them are protective of the place.”
“You don’t think gambling hurts people?”
“I know it does. Some of the ones in Rollin’ Sevens don’t have the money to throw away. I don’t like it that they do, but unless somebody’s breaking the law, I can’t shut the place down. If Wilks steps over the line, though, I will.”
“How will you know if he does?”
“Somebody will tell me,” Rhodes said. “Somebody always does.”
The first thing Rhodes did the following morning was call the jail and ask Hack if Ruth had located a next of kin for Lloyd Berry.
“Your friend Randy Lawless called,” Hack said.
Rhodes wasn’t sure what that had to do with his question. Hack was up to his usual tricks.
“Is Randy related to Lloyd?” Rhodes said, knowing that he wasn’t.
Randy Lawless was the defense attorney who had built the Lawj Mahal. He and Rhodes had met in court more than once, always on different sides.
“Nope, not related, but he knows who is.”
“How does Randy know that?”
“He’s a lawyer.”
“So?”
“So he’s Lloyd’s lawyer, or he was. I guess he still is even if Lloyd’s dead. Those lawyers can hang on even after their client’s gone. So he’s still representin’ Berry.”
“I get it,” Rhodes said.
“I figgered you would, you bein’ a professional lawman and used to workin’ with clues and all like that. Anyway, Lawless has Lloyd’s last will and testament, and he’s the executor. The sole beneficiary is some cousin in Hawaii. You think he came down here and killed Lloyd for his inheritance?”
Rhodes didn’t think so, and he knew Hack didn’t, either.
“So that’s that,” Hack said. “Everything’s all taken care of. Lawless will see to the buryin’ and notification of the next of kin.”
“That doesn’t mean everything’s taken care of.”
“It will be when you arrest somebody for killin’ Lloyd. You comin’ in to the jail now?”
“Not yet,” Rhodes said. “I have a lot of things to do first.”
“That’s why they pay you the big bucks,” Hack said before hanging up.
One thing Rhodes had to do was pay a visit to Lloyd Berry’s house. He didn’t know what he expected to find, but you never could tell when something helpful might turn up. Rhodes just hoped he’d know that something and its significance if he saw it. He called up a friendly judge and asked him to fill out a search warrant just to be on the up-and-up. After picking up the warrant, he drove to the house.
It was as old as the ones owned by Marsh and Weeks, though in a different part of town. A couple of big cottonwood trees loomed up in the backyard, and dark green arborvitae shrubs flanked the front steps.
The door wasn’t locked. Rhodes didn’t think anything about that. Some of the older people in Clearview, and even middle-aged ones like Berry, didn’t bother to lock their doors. They didn’t lock their cars when they shopped, either. They thought living in a small town was still the same as it had been when they were kids, when there was hardly any crime and neighbors looked out for neighbors.
As much as he’d have liked to agree with them, Rhodes didn’t think Clearview, or anywhere else, had ever been like that in anything more than people’s imagination. He supposed it was only natural that people liked to look back and remember things as having been better than they were now, but Rhodes had seen the old files in the jail, reports going back to times before he was born. He also remembered some of the things that his parents had told him about. If those sources were to be believed, Clearview had never had a Golden Age.
Still, no one had been into Berry’s house and taken anything. Rhodes stood in the small living room and looked around. An old TV set on a stand was hooked up to a cable box, a VCR, and a DVD player. A coffee table in front of a couch had a few magazines lying on top. Kiplinger’s, Popular Science, Reader’s Digest. A little stand under a lamp held a pot of ivy with yellowing leaves. There was nothing in the room that looked like a clue.
Rhodes went through the rest of the house. He had no more luck than he’d had in the living room. The only thing of interest was in a small bedroom that Berry had made into a kind of home office with a desktop computer hooked to a printer and scanner.
Rhodes hadn’t seen anything in the house that Berry could have been selling on eBay, so he figured the computer had other uses. E-mail, maybe. Or just Web surfing. Rhodes didn’t do any of that himself, but he knew what it was.
He knew just enough about computers to find the switch that turned the machine on. He waited until the desktop appeared and then clicked on the Outlook Express icon. The window opened, and Berry’s e-mail began to download. Rhodes looked through it and saw nothing personal, only the usual spam messages promising great wealth, cheap Viagra, or an enlarged penis. Rhodes thought that if anyone ever figured out how to combine those three scams, they’d have a real moneymaker.
Closing the e-mail program, Rhodes clicked on the Firefox icon and brought up Berry’s Google home page. No clues there, unless learning that Berry liked to play Bejeweled was a clue. It probably was, but not to the murder. The quote of the day was from somebody named Scott Adams. Rhodes
thought he’d heard the name, but he couldn’t remember where.
Rhodes clicked on BOOKMARKS in the toolbar, hoping that Berry had left some kind of trail that might lead to his killer, but knowing that it wasn’t likely.
The drop-down menu listed only a few sites that Berry had considered worthy of saving. Three of them were for big-city newspapers, two were Internet-only news sites, and the others were related to flowers and floral arranging. Nothing Rhodes saw was going to be of any use to him, and he closed the menu.
If there was anything on the computer that would be helpful, Rhodes knew he was going to need someone else to find it. He’d reached the limit of his expertise.
He called Hack on the telephone in the kitchen and asked what Ruth was doing.
“She’s workin’ a car wreck down around Thurston. Nobody hurt, but a couple of real upset drivers. You need me to get in touch with her?”
“Never mind,” Rhodes said. “I’ll get somebody else.”
Thinking that Benton would be at the college, he called the switchboard and asked for Benton’s office. Benton answered on the first ring.
“Benton’s the name, and math is my game. What can I do for you?”
Rhodes told Benton who he was and said that he needed some computer help.
“In person or over the phone? The charge is the same for both.”
“And how much would that be?”
“I’ll give you the famous lawman discount.”
“I’m sure you will.”
“Which means I’ll do it for free. After all, I’m practically a lawman myself.”
The academy that Benton had attended was no more likely to have turned him into a lawman than his math classes were likely to produce another Einstein, but Rhodes would be glad to have his help.
“Since it’s free,” he said, “can you come to Lloyd Berry’s house, or do you have a class to teach?”
“I’m doing office hours now,” Benton said. “I’m sure the dean would be happy to let me leave campus to assist in the enforcement of the law. We would be enforcing the law, wouldn’t we?”
“Close enough.”
“Good. So what’s the address of that Berry house?”