by Bill Crider
“She’s the one to tell me that,” Rhodes said.
“Oh, hell, all right,” the man said. He reached out a hand that you could lose a basketball in and opened the door.
Rhodes stepped inside, glad to get out of the wind and cold. The house, however, was unpleasantly warm.
“My name’s Swan,” the man said. “Phil Swan.” He didn’t offer to shake hands, for which Rhodes was grateful. “I’ll get Betsy.”
He went through a doorway at the back of the room, and Rhodes looked around. Martin had apparently furnished his rental houses, at least this one, with items he picked up at garage sales. There was an old floral couch with sagging cushions, a platform rocker with the patterned cover so worn that the foam rubber showed through, a coffee table with the varnish worn off three of the legs, and a what-not shelf that listed slightly to the left. There weren’t any what-nots on it, just a couple of issues of Prevention, which Rhodes thought pretty strange reading for a witch.
Betsy Higgins came into the room. Swan was right behind her. She was wearing pretty much the same outfit Tammy had described, a bulky cable-knit sweater and a long black skirt that dragged the floor. The only thing that surprised Rhodes was her size. She looked like she might just be able to stand in Swan’s hand, being no more than five feet tall, if that, and thin as a tenpenny nail.
“What can I do for you, Sheriff?” she asked. Her voice was thin and whiny.
“Where’s your TV set?” Rhodes asked.
“It’s in the bedroom,” Swan said. “That’s where we like to watch.”
Rhodes wondered if Swan had had any trouble carrying the set in from the car. He didn’t think so. “That’s good,” he said. “Miz Higgins, I’ve got to ask you about what happened down at Dr. Martin’s office.”
“I demanded my TV set back,” she said. “He had no right to take it—”
“Damn straight,” Swan said. “He tries anything like that again, I’m gonna wring his pipsqueak neck.”
He flexed his huge hands. Rhodes didn’t have any doubt he could do what he said. Probably wouldn’t have to use more than his thumb and first finger, if Rhodes recalled Martin’s neck rightly.
“I’m sure we can settle things a little more calmly than that,” Rhodes said. “I understand you folks are a little behind in the rent.”
“Don’t matter,” Swan said. “He ain’t got no right to come in and take folks’ belongings away. That’s . . . stealing.”
“He might think that failure to pay the rent is a little like stealing, too,” Rhodes said.
Swan raised his hands and clenched them, as if he’d like to wring Rhodes’s pipsqueak neck right then. Rhodes tried not to step backward.
“We’ll pay,” Betsy Higgins said. “I told him we’ll pay.”
“You know how some people are,” Rhodes said. “They like to see the color of your money.”
“I told him,” Betsy said.
“Now about what else you told him . . .” Rhodes said.
“I didn’t tell him anything else,” she said.
“Now, Miz Higgins,” Rhodes said. “‘Everybody in the office has a different story from that.”
“You sayin’ you don’t believe her?” Swan asked, stepping forward lightly, balancing on the balls of his feet like an athlete.
Rhodes held his ground. “I’m saying that there are four or five witnesses who don’t agree with her.”
“Maybe they’re lyin’.” Swan’s face was hard and weathered. He’d done a lot of outside work at one time or another. His coarse black hair looked as if he’d combed it with his fingers.
“I don’t think they’d lie about something like this,” Rhodes said. “I’d like to hear what Miz Higgins has to say.”
“Oh, all right.” Her own hair was stringy and brown, with a few streaks of gray. “I may have put a curse on him.”
“ ‘May have’?” Rhodes said.
“I’m not sure. Sometimes when I get mad, I do things like that. I don’t really mean anything by it.”
“It sounded pretty serious to Dr. Martin,” Rhodes said. “Serious enough for him to call the law.”
“That skinny little . . .” Whatever else Swan had wanted to say was lost in a deep growl.
“It’s all right, Phillip,” Betsy said, laying a hand on his huge arm. Then she turned to Rhodes. “I didn’t give him a really severe curse, you know.”
“Not really,” Rhodes said.
“I cast a minor spell on him. It’s all in the mind, really. The power of suggestion. If he’s got a strong mind, he’ll be all right.”
Rhodes had an idea of what she meant. She didn’t seem to have very much faith in her own magical powers, or whatever they were. If Martin believed she could put a curse on him, then he might be affected, but Rhodes couldn’t see him being seriously hurt.
“All the same,” he said after he’d thought about it, “it might be better if you avoided cursing people—or putting spells on them—around here. It might get you into trouble.”
“As long as he stays out of my house,” she said.
“As far as that goes,” Rhodes said, “you’d better pay the rent. I’d hate to have to come back here to serve an eviction notice.”
“Damn right, you’d hate it,” Swan said. “You’d hate it so bad . . .”
Once more Betsy Higgins laid a hand on his arm. “We’ll pay, Sheriff. Is that all you wanted to know?”
“I guess it is,” Rhodes said. “Thanks for your time.”
He turned and went back outside into the cold.
Chapter 2
Sometimes on a slow day Rhodes liked to slip home in the middle of the afternoon and watch the Million Dollar Movie, but today he thought he’d better check in at the jail. He didn’t like to talk much on the radio, since practically everybody in the county had a Radio Shack police scanner and had learned all the codes. Besides, he didn’t know if there was a code for witchcraft.
The jail was old, but at least it was warm. In the office section, at any rate. The cells sometimes got uncomfortable, but Lawton, the jailer, provided prisoners with extra blankets at night if they asked for them.
When Rhodes walked in, Lawton and Hack Jensen, the dispatcher, were discussing the weather.
“I wish this wind would lay,” Hack said.
“So do I,” Lawton said. “We could use the eggs.”
The two old men wheezed with laughter, and Rhodes joined in, not because the joke was funny but because it was so old. He had heard them use it a thousand times, but it never seemed to fail to tickle them.
Or maybe they just told it to aggravate him. He was never quite sure. They both knew that they were indispensable to the county, working for next to nothing just so they would have something to do. Both were long past retirement age, but Lawton was a certified jailer, and Jensen kept things under control while the sheriff was out, taking calls and seeing that something was done about them.
They were complete opposites in appearance, Jensen tall and thin, Lawton short and stout, and one of their chief pleasures was withholding as much information from Rhodes as they could, right up until he would be almost about to lose his temper.
He knew the game, and they played it expertly. Usually he just went along with it, thinking of them as a comedy team. If Bob Hope and George Burns could do it at their ages, why not Jensen and Lawton?
Rhodes told them briefly about the Martin episode. “Either of you ever heard anything about him or that Betsy Higgins?”
“Never heard of her,” Hack said. “I’ve heard a little about that tooth dentist, though.”
“Me, too,” Lawton said.
Rhodes didn’t say anything. He knew better than to push them. It only made them worse.
The two old men looked at one another, as if deciding who would get to tell. It was usually Hack, and this time was no exception. “That little old house on Taylor Street ain’t the only property he owns, not by a long shot.”
“That’s right,” Lawto
n said. He brushed at his thinning hair as he spoke. Until very recently it had still had a few streaks of brown in it, but it was totally white now. “And that business with the TV? That’s not the first time something like that’s happened.”
It was always a surprise to Rhodes that these two knew a lot more of the county gossip than he did, despite the fact that they were hardly ever out of the jail. Maybe people just talked more freely to them than they did to the sheriff.
“No, sir,” Hack said. “Not the first time.”
They looked expectantly at Rhodes. He looked back. He thought of two old tomcats, one stringy and one hefty, looking at a bowl of food after a couple of days going hungry.
Finally Hack said, “Hear he like to’ve got into a fight a time or two with Little Barnes.”
“Big Barnes, too,” Lawton said. “Big Barnes said he’d whip Dr. Martin’s butt so bad he’d have to stand up to sleep.”
Big Barnes was Little Barnes’s father, and both of them were known to be rowdy. In fact, both of them had been inside the jail a time or two, though no charges had ever been filed.
“Little Barnes rents that old Williams place out at Mt. Roma,” Hack said. “Been runnin’ a few cows on it, growin’ a little garden. I hear he does all right, but he ain’t gettin’ rich. Maybe not rich enough to pay the rent every month.”
“So he had a run-in with Dr. Martin?” Rhodes asked.
“That’s what I hear,” Lawton said. “Dr. Martin went out there to collect and kind of got ugly about it. Big Barnes was there helpin’ Little Barnes do some work on the fence. I think it was in the lease that Little Barnes was supposed to keep up the fence. Anyway, there was a pretty good row about it.”
“When did all this happen?” Rhodes asked.
“Month or so back,” Hack said.
“That’s all you know?”
“That’s it,” Hack said. “We don’t gossip around here much.”
“‘Too much work to do,” Lawton said. “Keepin’ these cells clean and all that.”
“Right,” Rhodes said. “Anything happen while I was out?”
“We had this runaway case,” Lawton said.
Hack looked at him. He felt that, as dispatcher, it was his right to relate all the day’s events, even if he’d already told Lawton about them.
“I think I better go sweep the cells again,” Lawton said, but he didn’t make any move to leave.
“It was a Miz Moffatt that called from out by Milsby,” Hack said. He stopped and waited for Rhodes to ask for more.
Rhodes sighed. “I take it she wasn’t the one who ran away.”
“Didn’t say anybody ran away,” Hack said.
Rhodes looked accusingly at Lawton. Set up again.
“I said it was a runaway case,” Lawton said. “Didn’t say anybody had done any runnin’.”
“I see,” Rhodes said. He didn’t, though.
“See, it’s this Miz Moffatt’s daughter that wants to run away,” Hack said. “Ruby, her name is Ruby Moffatt,” he added helpfully.
Rhodes had it figured out. “She wants us to keep her daughter from running off, right?”
“Not exactly,” Hack said.
Rhodes, who had been standing all this time, suddenly felt tired. He walked over to his desk and sat in the wooden chair. “What, exactly, did she want, then?”
“Her daughter, that Ruby, keeps threatenin’ to run away and go live with her daddy. He’s been separated from Miz Moffatt about three years now, got himself a cabin down by the Lake.”
Rhodes knew that the Lake was Blacklin Lake in the southern part of the county. “She wants us to call the father and see if he’ll take his daughter, then. If and when she runs away, I mean.” It was a situation that arose every now and then, certainly nothing new.
“It ain’t that,” Hack said.
“See, the way it is—” Lawton started, but he hushed up when he saw Hack’s glare.
“The way it is,” Hack said, turning away from Lawton and looking at Rhodes, “the way it is, she wants to know if we’ll provide an officer and a car for her. For Ruby, I mean.”
“What?” Rhodes said. He sat up straight in the chair.
“That’s exactly what I said,” Hack told him. “I said, ‘What?’ ”
“And what did she say?” Rhodes asked.
“She said Ruby didn’t have a car. Said they’d tried to get her one of them hardship licenses, since she ain’t but fourteen, but Ruby had some trouble passin’ the test.”
Rhodes thought instantly that Ruby must not be extremely bright, since some of the questions on the goading portion of the Texas Driver’s Test had always seemed to him designed for anyone to pass. Or at least anyone with any sense at all.
“So since Ruby didn’t have a car . . .” Rhodes said.
“. . . Miz Moffatt thought we might give her a ride,” Lawton said. Then he was out the door leading to the cells quicker than any man his age had any right to move.
Hack had come halfway out of his chair, but he settled back down. It always irritated him when Lawton got the punch line. “Yeah,” he said. “Miz Moffatt would sort of like for Ruby to run away, is the way I get it. ‘Nothin’ but trouble,’ I think she said.”
“So old dad gets her back, and everybody lives happily ever after,” Rhodes said.
“That’s right,” Hack agreed. “Just like in Cinderella.”
“Sure,” Rhodes said. “It always works like that.” He looked around the office, his eyes lighting on the gun rack. “Anybody cleaned those rifles and shotguns lately?”
“Not me,” Hack said. “Ain’t part of my job description.”
“Right,” Rhodes said. He knew who would have to clean the guns. They didn’t get used very often, and he liked to keep them in good working order in case of emergency. Come to think of it, he couldn’t recall just when the last emergency had been. Blacklin County covered a little over a thousand square miles, but was home to only around twenty thousand people. Crime there was not exactly rampant, and big-time crime was only something people learned about on TV.
“Any other calls?” Rhodes asked.
“Not that amount to nothin’,” Hack said. “The usual things: cows in the wrong patch, dogs scarin’ the neighbor’s kids.”
“Buddy and Ruth called in?”
“They haven’t had much to say. Patrol must be pretty quiet today. It’s Wednesday, after all.”
Hack was right; Wednesday was usually the quietest day of the week. After that, people started gathering their energy for the weekend, and things would get busier.
“I think I’ll go home and check on the dog,” Rhodes said. “Call me if anything comes up.”
“I’ll do that,” Hack said.
A couple of months before Rhodes had picked up Speedo, whose real name was Mr. Earl, while working on the murder of man who had turned out to be an undercover drug agent. It wasn’t that Rhodes had wanted a dog. It was just that he couldn’t stand by and see one abandoned.
Rhodes pulled up at his house and parked. The pecan tree, like the one behind Dr. Martin’s office, had lost most of its leaves, though a few thin brown stragglers still clung to the nearly bare branches. The wind was doing its best to tear them off. When Rhodes stepped out of the car, he crunched a pecan underfoot. He had picked up most of them as they had fallen, but some always managed to elude him. He moved his foot and looked down, but the nut was too mashed to bother with.
Speedo was in the backyard, pretty well sheltered from the wind in his new doghouse. It wasn’t a house, exactly, but it served the purpose. It was an old fifty-five-gallon drum that Rhodes had gotten from a local gasoline distributor and filled with hay that he’d bought at a feed store. All in all, it was a pretty comfortable place for a dog to lie up and stay warm.
When Rhodes walked into the back yard, Speedo raised his head and looked at him, but made no offer to move out of the barrel. Rhodes didn’t blame him. Speedo was at least some part Collie and had a pretty thick
coat of hair, but the way the wind was blowing his hair didn’t help much. Rhodes still had a fairly thick head of hair himself, but his head was so cold that he wished he was wearing a hat. Then he thought how he looked with a hat on, and decided that it was just as well he was bareheaded.
“You hungry, boy?” he asked the dog.
Speedo showed no interest in the query, putting his head back down on his paws.
Rhodes checked the food dish. It was nearly empty, so he got the sack of Ol’ Roy out of the garage and put some in the dish. Speedo still didn’t move. Rhodes took the sack back in the garage, and then looked at the water dish. The water was frozen.
“I’ll get you some fresh water,” he said. He hoped the hydrant would work. He had wrapped it with newspapers and burlap a few days ago. He turned the handle and water came out. He knocked the ice out of the bowl and let the fresh water run in. It was so cold that his hand felt frozen when he sloshed a little on it.
He set the dish down. “Better drink it while you can,” he said.
Speedo didn’t bother to look up.
Rhodes looked at his hands. They were red with cold. He thought he might look for his gloves before going back out. “See you later,” he called to the dog, then went on into the house.
Rhodes didn’t have central heating, but he had left all the natural gas space heaters on very low. It seemed quite warm in the house, but he knew it would seem cold if he stayed for very long.
He was tempted to go in and catch the end of the Million Dollar Movie, which he knew was Walk the Proud Land with Audie Murphy. Rhodes thought that Murphy was a vastly underrated actor, not that Walk the Proud Land was one of his better roles. One of these days, though, some critic was going to watch The Quiet American or The Unforgiven, and Audie would be rediscovered.
Instead of watching the movie, however, Rhodes walked into his bedroom. There it was, the new addition.
Standing not too far from his bed was a practically new Huffy Sunsprint stationary bicycle, which Rhodes had bought at a garage sale a week and a half before. Mr. Pollard, the former owner, swore that the mileage on the speedometer was the actual mileage (2153.3), and Rhodes had to admit that the bike was in excellent shape. Its sparkly brown paint didn’t have a chip, and the white rubber wheel seemed not to be worn at all. It was a bargain at twenty dollars.