Murder in Four Parts

by Bill Crider

  While Rhodes was thinking about that, Cecil came back into the room with the same glass of water. The ice was mostly melted, and the napkin was soaking wet.

  Cecil handed the glass to Rhodes, who dutifully took a drink.

  “Gambling,” Cecil said. “I should have known.”

  Faye Lynn couldn’t very well accuse him of eavesdropping. After all, she’d done the same thing. She said, “Would it be better if I’d been having an affair with Royce? Why didn’t you just ask me about those stuffed animals?”

  “I don’t know,” Cecil said. He looked at Rhodes. “What would you have done?”

  “Hard to tell,” Rhodes said. “I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have gone out and tried to kill some chickens, though.”

  Cecil didn’t think that was funny. “Why don’t you write me a ticket and be done with it? Faye and I need to talk.”

  “Sounds like a good idea to me,” Rhodes said.

  Rhodes left the Marshes there to hash out their problems, which now included a citation for Cecil, and drove to the jail. Duke Pearson had brought in the shotgun and filled Hack in on the details of the encounter, saving Rhodes no end of trouble and giving him a chance to ask Pearson what he’d learned from Royce Weeks. Duke’s report didn’t add anything to what Rhodes already knew, and Duke left to make another run by Happy Franklin’s place.

  Hack filled Rhodes in on some of the other things that had happened that day. The only one of interest was that Happy Franklin’s mother had called just after Pearson took off to see about Weeks and Marsh. She’d claimed that someone kept trying to tear her house down, so she was just going to have to move.

  “She ever called about that before?” Rhodes said.

  “Not that I remember. She’s called about stampedin’ cattle, and once about a pack of wild dogs, but that’s about it.”

  “It could be that someone’s prowling around out there,” Rhodes said. “Did you tell Duke?”

  Hack gave him a hurt look. “You think I’m too old for the job and my memory’s shot? ’Course I told him. He’s on his way out there right now, ain’t he?”

  Rhodes ignored the sarcasm. “Did she mention Happy?”

  “Said he was out in that workshop of his. Barn’s more like it. He oughta be in the house with her, especially after dark.”

  “Especially after somebody’s taken a couple of shots at him,” Rhodes said. “I wonder who Happy’s gotten so upset.”

  “Don’t know. I’m just the dispatcher. I don’t get paid to worry about stuff like that.”

  “What about our prisoners?” Rhodes said.

  “What prisoners? Carr bonded out, and Randy Lawless came by and bonded out the Eccles boys.”

  “I thought they were planning to stay.”

  “I think Randy convinced ’em that was a bad idea. Anyway, they’re gone.”

  “I’m gone, too,” Rhodes said, thinking it was time he got home.

  He was halfway to the door when the radio crackled. It was Duke, letting Hack know that he was at the Franklin house and that he thought something was going on. Rhodes stopped to listen.

  “Somebody tryin’ to tear the house down?” Hack said.

  Duke said something that Rhodes couldn’t hear, and Hack said, “The sheriff’s right here. Want me to send him out there for backup?”

  Again Rhodes didn’t hear the answer, but he didn’t have to. He knew what it would be.

  “Tell him I’m on the way,” he said.

  22

  THE RAIN STARTED JUST BEFORE RHODES GOT TO HIS CAR. IT wasn’t much of a rain, just enough to be annoying. Rhodes got in the car and turned on the wipers. They smeared the dust around for a few seconds before clearing the windshield. As soon as he could see, Rhodes took off.

  Driving toward Franklin’s place, he thought over what Weeks and the Marshes had told him. He knew he’d failed to follow up on something that might have been important, but he couldn’t think what it was. He hoped Cecil and Faye Lynn got their problems worked out. Maybe all they really needed was to have a good talk to get things out in the open. Or not. Rhodes didn’t feel qualified to be a marital counselor.

  Cecil’s problems with Royce Weeks weren’t going to go away no matter how much talking got done, even if Faye Lynn convinced Cecil that his ideas about her having an affair with Royce were wrong.

  More aggravating than that, Rhodes was no closer to finding out who’d killed Lloyd Berry, but right now he was worried about what was going on with Happy Franklin. He couldn’t figure out why anyone would shoot at Happy or prowl around his house after dark. Maybe Duke had caught the prowler, and Rhodes would get his questions answered.

  It didn’t work out like that, however.

  Rhodes saw that there was a light on in the barn, so he drove there and parked beside Duke’s car. Duke and Happy were inside talking. Rhodes got out and joined them.

  “What’s going on?” he said.

  “We don’t know,” Duke said. “Happy didn’t hear anything or see anything. His mother swears she did, though.”

  Rain rattled down on the tin roof of the barn, sounding much louder than it would if they’d been inside a shingled building.

  “My mother’s not exactly the best witness in the world,” Happy said. “She sees and hears things that aren’t there.”

  Rhodes remembered a time before Happy had moved back home. Mrs. Franklin had called the sheriff’s department to report that someone had sabotaged her washing machine. As it turned out, the only problem had been that the load of clothing in the machine was unbalanced. Rhodes had redistributed the load, and all was well. He didn’t think that this was a repeat of something similar, though.

  “Those bullet holes are there,” Rhodes said, pointing at the wall.

  “Yeah, they are,” Happy admitted. “I’m not saying nobody was here. I’m just saying I didn’t see them. Didn’t hear them, either.”

  “What about you?” Rhodes asked Duke.

  “I didn’t see anybody, but I heard somebody running through those mesquites out back of the barn when I got here.”

  “Are you sure you didn’t hear anything?” Rhodes said to Happy.

  “I can barely hear you with that rain beating on the roof. How could I hear anybody outside?”

  Rhodes believed him. “How’s your mother’s hearing?”

  “Her hearing’s not a problem. She can hear a dust mite walk across a powder puff.”

  Since she was under an insulated roof, she might have heard something Happy hadn’t. She might have seen something, too.

  “You go talk to her, Duke,” Rhodes said. “I’ll check the pasture.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Rhodes was sure. He didn’t like getting wet, and he knew it would make Ivy unhappy with him, but, as much as he hated to admit it, he liked being the one who got to do the more dangerous jobs.

  “There’s probably not anyone there,” he said. “I’ll check it out and come right back.”

  “Probably not anyone anywhere,” Happy said. As I said, “my mother’s not the most reliable witness.”

  “We’ll ask her anyway,” Rhodes said. “Go on and talk to her, Duke.”

  Duke left the barn, and Rhodes got his flashlight from the car. He put on a rain slicker while he was at it. It wouldn’t help a lot, particularly below the knees, but it would be better than nothing. It might even be thick enough to keep him safe from mesquite thorns.

  After checking to be sure that Happy was still safely in the barn, Rhodes slogged off through the mesquites. Their wet leaves brushed his face, and he tried to avoid running directly into one of the trees.

  The heavy clouds made it difficult to see where he was going, but he didn’t want to turn on the flashlight and give anyone a warning or make himself a target. His training was that if you used the light, you held it out to the side so that if someone shot at the light, you’d be safely out of the way. The problem with that was in trusting in the fact that whoever did the shooting could hit what
he aimed at, and Rhodes wasn’t that trusting. He’d always thought that someone shooting at the light would miss and hit him.

  Whoever had shot at Happy earlier that day hadn’t even come close. Just the kind of person who’d miss the flashlight by a mile.

  Rhodes got to the railroad tracks without falling down or getting scratched by a thorn, a major accomplishment. On the other hand, he hadn’t seen or heard anyone, which wasn’t much of an accomplishment at all.

  He decided it was time to risk the flashlight. He held it well away from him and turned it on.

  The yellow beam reflected from the raindrops, but it wasn’t strong enough to cut through the darkness. It didn’t reveal anything. No car sat beside the road. No one was hiding in the ditch. The only sound was the pattering of the rain on Rhodes’s slicker.

  Beside the railroad tracks and off to his left, the remains of an old roundhouse loomed in the darkness like the ruins of Dracula’s castle. The roundhouse hadn’t been in use in over sixty years, Rhodes was sure, probably a lot more than that. The tracks had long since been torn up and either melted down or used elsewhere, and Rhodes suspected that hardly anybody in Clearview even remembered the roundhouse was there. It was the only hiding place around, other than the thick mesquites, so Rhodes thought he’d have a look. He turned off the flashlight and started toward the rubble.

  He hadn’t gone far before he heard something, a scraping noise as if someone had started running on the other side of the roundhouse.

  Rhodes started to run, too. Big mistake. The ground was uneven, and before he’d gone twenty yards, he stepped on a stick that somehow flipped up between his legs, tripping him. He fell into a shallow depression that had begun filling with water. He dropped the flashlight and splashed around looking for it. By the time he found it and got up, whoever had been running away, if indeed there had been anybody, was long gone.

  Rhodes stood where he was for a while. He didn’t think he could get any wetter. Cold water had gotten under the slicker and into his shoes. His socks were soaked.

  He wasn’t quite sure what he was waiting for, but after a couple of minutes, he heard a car start somewhere down the road. A couple of headlights appeared, and then the car sped past. Rhodes couldn’t even tell what make it was, much less read the license plate. The red taillights disappeared in the murk of the night.

  Rhodes thumbed the button that turned on the flashlight. He pointed the light at the ground and picked his way back to the barn, being careful not to fall into any more puddles.

  “She heard somebody outside a window,” Duke was telling Happy when Rhodes walked in. “She thinks he was ripping boards off the house with a hammer. That’s all she knows.”

  “Maybe the first part of that is true,” Happy said. “I don’t think the last part is. We’d be able to tell if any boards were missing. She does have dementia, after all.”

  “Somebody was here, though,” Duke said. “There are tracks in the mud. Did you see anybody, Sheriff?”

  “I got a glimpse of somebody, I think, but he got away.” Rhodes looked at the water pooling at his feet. “I fell in a puddle, and he got away.”

  The rain had slowed almost to a stop outside, but it still made noise on the tin roof.

  “I don’t get it,” Happy said. “Why would anybody come creeping around here? I don’t know that many people in town. I’ve never had a problem with anybody except Billy Joe Byron, and you say it’s not him.”

  “He can’t drive, and he doesn’t have a gun,” Rhodes said. “Whoever’s slipping around has a car. And a gun. Maybe you’ve offended somebody by accident.”

  “I wish I knew who it was so I could apologize.”

  “I don’t think he wants an apology,” Duke said. “Not the way he’s acting.”

  “What does he want, then?” Happy said. “If he’d tell me, maybe I’d give it to him.”

  It occurred to Rhodes that maybe Happy had hit on the problem.

  “Have you picked up anything valuable lately?” he said. “Anything that somebody would want back?”

  “Not that I know of, and nobody’s asked for anything. Wouldn’t they ask instead of trying to kill me?”

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Duke said.

  Rhodes wasn’t sure now that anyone was trying to kill Happy. It was more like someone was trying to scare him. They discussed it a little longer, but they couldn’t come up with anything helpful. Duke agreed to drive by the house and to check the back road every half hour or so, though Rhodes didn’t think anyone would be coming back that night. It was too wet and too dark. Nevertheless, he didn’t want to take any chances. After they’d settled on that plan, Rhodes went home.

  The ten o’clock news was just starting when Rhodes walked into his house. Rhodes had hoped Ivy might be in bed already, but she was waiting for him. So was Yancey, who went into his happy dance, skittering around Rhodes’s feet as if greeting someone who’d returned from six months’ travel.

  “You’re wet,” Ivy said.

  “It’s raining,” Rhodes said. “Or it was.”

  “Not that much,” Ivy said.

  Rhodes decided he might as well tell her the whole story. Just as he’d thought, she got a good laugh from the part where he fell down.

  “Here I am,” she said, “worrying about you getting your head blown off, and the worst thing that happens is that you fall in a puddle. Serves me right. You, too.”

  Rhodes knew that Ivy worried about him. She’d gotten better about it since the first few months of their marriage, but she’d never gotten used to the fact that he was sometimes in danger.

  “Nobody shot at me,” he said. “Nobody even hit me with anything.”

  “You look like somebody tried to drown you.”

  Rhodes looked down and saw water was oozing out of his shoes and dripping off his pants. Yancey stopped larking around and lapped at the water droplets that beaded up on the floor.

  “You don’t know where that’s been,” Rhodes told him.

  Yancey kept right on lapping the water. Sam walked over to see what was going on. Yancey saw him and ran to the other side of the kitchen. Sam sniffed the water and walked back to his usual spot. He turned around a couple of times and lay down, resting his chin on his front paws and looking at Yancey with his yellow eyes. Yancey whimpered. Rhodes sneezed.

  “You’re going to catch cold,” Ivy said.

  “Not me. It’s not the cold and wet that causes problems. It’s viruses. A prisoner told me that today.”

  “He’s right, but if you get wet and cold, you help out the viruses. You need to take a hot shower and get to bed.”

  “I’m not sneezing because of viruses, either. It’s that cat. I’m allergic to him.”

  “You’re not allergic to Sam. It’s all in your mind.”

  She always said that. Rhodes wasn’t convinced.

  “It’s the cat,” he said.

  “Even if it is, you need a hot shower.”

  “My gun got wet. I have to clean it.”

  “You can clean it after we shower,” Ivy said.

  “Well,” Rhodes said, “Since you put it that way . . .”

  23

  THE WEATHER FRONT PASSED THROUGH DURING THE NIGHT, AND the next morning was bright and dry. Rhodes went to the jail with the feeling that during the course of the past couple of days he’d gathered pretty much all the information he needed, but he still hadn’t put it into any coherent order. Hack and Lawton were no help.

  “Guess you heard about Elvis,” Hack said when Rhodes walked in.

  “I heard long ago,” Rhodes said. “He’s been dead for years. I’m not that far behind the times.”

  “Not that Elvis,” Lawton said, and Rhodes knew he was in trouble even though it was still early in the morning. Still, he had to ask.

  “Which Elvis are we talking about then?”

  “The one that lives with old Miz Coggins,” Hack said.

  “Oh,” Rhodes said. “That Elvis.�
�

  The Elvis that lived with Ms. Coggins wasn’t a person, even though Ms. Coggins might have considered him one. Elvis was a neutered male dog, a mixed breed. Nobody knew just which breeds were mixed in him, but there were several, none of them attractive except to Ms. Coggins.

  “Elvis’s got woman trouble,” Lawton said.

  Rhodes didn’t see how that was possible, considering Elvis’s neutered state, but again he couldn’t resist asking.

  “What kind of woman trouble?”

  “Not the kind you think,” Hack said.

  “I’m not thinking of any particular kind. I was just wondering.”

  “Woman’s stealin’ him blind,” Lawton said, earning a dirty look from Hack.

  “What can a woman steal from a dog?” Rhodes said.

  “Food,” Hack said. “That’s what.”

  “A woman’s eating dog food?” Rhodes said. He knew how unlikely that sounded, but stranger things had happened in Clearview. “Is it canned food or dry food?”

  “You’re gettin’ the wrong idea,” Hack said.

  And it was no wonder, Rhodes thought. With those two, it was a miracle that he ever got the right idea.

  “Why don’t you tell me exactly what’s going on,” he said, and to his surprise, Hack did.

  “It’s a female dog that’s stealin’ his food,” Hack said. “Miz Coggins puts it in a bowl on the back porch, and this female dog comes around ever’ mornin’ and eats it. Elvis is scared of her, won’t go around his bowl till she’s gone. By then, all the food’s gone, too, Miz Coggins says.”

  “Elvis’s gettin’ all shook up over it,” Lawton said, and that was enough to get him dirty looks from both Rhodes and Hack.

  “Did you send Alton to catch the female?” Rhodes said.

  “Won’t work,” Hack said. “That dog’s not a stray. Miz Coggins knows who she belongs to. It’s Lew Chandler.”

  “Why doesn’t she call Lew?”

  “Says it’s up to us to be sure Lew’s dog don’t get out.”