Cursed to Death

by Bill Crider

  Ruth Grady was waiting when he got to the jail, and she went to the car with him to get the prisoner. Betsy didn’t try to escape. Instead she went docilely into the building.

  Rhodes charged her with assaulting an officer and sent her to the partitioned-off “women’s cell” to be searched.

  “Damn,” Hack said when Ruth and the prisoner were gone. “You look like you’ve been kicked in the snoot by a mule.”

  Rhodes looked down at his shirt. There was dried blood on it, and he could feel the blood in his nose.”At least Ruth was polite enough not to mention it,” he said.

  “Prob’ly afraid for her job,” Hack said. “You better get cleaned up. Ivy’s comin’ down here.”

  Rhodes touched his nose. It felt big and tender, like a very overripe tomato. “What for?” he asked.

  “Bringin’ some presents, she said.”

  Rhodes wondered if his nose was broken. Probably not. It didn’t hurt enough for that. But it was definitely damaged. “All right,” he said. “I’ll try to wash some of this off.”

  He went into the restroom in back of the office. He managed to wash most of the blood off his face and out of his nose, but of course it wouldn’t come out of his shirt. The cold water felt good on his face, so he stuck his whole head under the faucet and let the water run through his hair and over his neck.

  He came out, drying his face and hair with a dark brown towel.

  “Prob’ly the only clean towel we got,” Hack said.

  “Hard to tell for sure,” Rhodes said.

  “Yeah,” Hack said. “That’s why I got the brown ones. I imagine we got a big wash load of ‘em in the hamper, though.”

  Rhodes knew what he meant “I’ll take care of it,” he said.

  As he was putting the towel back on the rack, Ivy walked in, her hands full of presents.

  “It’s Miz Santy Claus,” Hack said. He got up from his chair. “Let me help you with those.”

  Together they stacked the presents under the tree while Rhodes watched. The ones wrapped in foil sparkled in the light.

  When they were finished, Ivy turned and looked at Rhodes. “‘What happened?” she asked.

  “That’s what I asked him,” Hack said. “He got snippy with me.”

  Ivy walked over to Rhodes and put her hand on his cheek. “Santa’s nose is supposed to be like a cherry,” she said. “Not a tomato.”

  Rhodes laughed. “It should look more like a cherry in a couple of days. Right now it feels like a basketball.”

  “We get a lot of tough customers,” Hack said.

  “Don’t listen to him,” Rhodes said. He told her about the encounter with Betsy Higgins.

  “You ought to be more careful,” she said. “We want you to be around to open your presents.”

  “We’re drawing names,” Rhodes said. “You didn’t have to bring so many.”

  “They aren’t much. Just a little something for everybody I know. Besides, I like buying presents.”

  “More than I can say for some folks,” Hack said. He was sitting in his chair again.

  “The crowds aren’t too bad yet,” Ivy said. “I don’t much like shopping when the crowds get bad.”

  “Me either,” Hack said. “A fella ought not to leave things to the last minute.”

  “That’s what I always say,” Rhodes said.

  Hack gave a dry laugh.

  Rhodes was trying to think of something more to say when Lawton came into the room. “Deputy Grady needs to see you,” he said in a firm, businesslike tone. Whenever he talked like that, Rhodes knew there was something wrong.

  “What is it?” Rhodes said.

  “I can’t say,” Lawton said. “She needs you in the cells.”

  “I guess I’d better go see, then,” Rhodes said. “I’ll be right back.” He followed Lawton through the door.

  “She’s in the women’s cell,” Lawton said.

  Rhodes walked past him, stopped to look at Swan, who was lying on his bunk with his face turned to the wall, and moved on down the corridor.

  Ruth Grady was waiting for him outside the cell. “Sheriff, I think you’d better search this prisoner.”

  “Uh . . . what do you mean?” Rhodes was always slightly embarrassed in conversations like this. “You know I can’t search a female prisoner.”

  “That’s the problem,” Ruth said.

  “What? I don’t understand,” Rhodes said.

  “I was searching the prisoner’s clothing,” Ruth said. “This was in the bra.”

  She showed Rhodes a handful of toilet paper.

  “I still—”

  “Betsy Higgins isn’t a female prisoner,” Ruth said, tossing the paper aside. “So you ought to be the one to search him.”

  “Oh,” Rhodes said. “You mean—”

  “That’s right,” Ruth said. “That woman in there is a man.”

  Chapter 12

  It took a while to get things sorted out and settled down. Lawton had immediately run downstairs to tell Hack, being for the first time in years one up on his friend.

  “You gonna put ‘em in the same cell?” Hack asked Rhodes. “Make it mighty hard on Lawton, here, to do his job.”

  “No, I’m not going to have them in the same cell,” Rhodes said. “And before you ask, I’m not going to leave Betsy in the women’s cell, either.”

  “Betsy?” Hack said.

  “Actually his name’s Barney. Short for Bernard.”

  “No wonder Swan didn’t want to press any charges,” Hack said. “Well, I guess some fellas get that way in prison.” He looked at Ivy out of the corner of his eye, and Rhodes could tell that he was uncomfortable with the tone of the conversation.

  Ruth had explained things to Ivy, however, and she didn’t look uncomfortable at all. “People do funny things for love,” she said.

  “Like the nursing home,” Ruth said, and then had to tell that story.

  Rhodes was thinking while the talking was going on. No wonder Swan and Betsy—Barney—had wanted to get away. And Hack was right. No wonder Swan hadn’t wanted to file any charges. In a place like Blacklin County, homosexuality and transvestitism were virtually unknown and not looked upon with favor. Anyone discovering their little secret would make things very hard on them.

  Had Martin known? Was that why they were so eager to run? Rhodes would have to question them about that later, when they were more inclined to talk. Right now Swan refused to move, much less say anything, and Betsy—Barney—wasn’t having too much to say either.

  Rhodes wondered about Martin. Could he have found out something? So far there wasn’t anything that Rhodes had found out about him to make the sheriff doubt that Martin would take advantage of the situation if he could and maybe engage in a little light blackmail. Or maybe a little heavy blackmail, enough to cause someone to kill him.

  And that brought to mind another thought. Barney Higgins could hardly be the person to whom Mrs. Martin had referred as “that bitch.” Or then again, maybe he could. It wasn’t so much a matter of correctness as a matter of usage. Maybe Barney was “that bitch.”

  It was all a little too complicated, and besides there were all those presents under the tree to worry about. It was time to go home.

  Rhodes went by Ivy’s house and ate a cold roast sandwich while she talked about her plans for Christmas. Rhodes got more and more depressed, thinking that his plans were going to be based on everyone else’s. He wondered if his daughter, Kathy, would come home. She was enjoying her teaching job, but she tried to be with her father every year at Christmas.

  Then Ivy started talking about the relationship between Swan and Higgins, and between Miz White and Mr. Stuart.

  Rhodes wondered if there was something in her talk that was aimed at him, but it really didn’t seem that way.

  “I don’t see anything wrong with it,” Ivy was saying. “I mean, two old people like that. What harm could there be in letting them have a room together? And what difference does it make about Mr
. Swan and Mr. Higgins, really? They were just trying to have some kind of a life together.”

  Rhodes knew that Ivy was right, and he wondered why it was harder for him to accept one idea than the other. That was one of the things that he liked about Ivy: she put things in a perspective that helped him clarify his own thoughts and feelings. But if that was true, why couldn’t he clarify his feelings about her?

  Except that he knew that his feelings were clear. There was just something in him that kept him from acting on them, or at least from carrying his actions to their logical conclusion.

  Ivy’s words broke in on his thoughts. “What kind of life do you think the Martins had?”

  “Not as good as they wanted people to think,” Rhodes said. “They had that big house and all the gadgets that money could buy, but there was something missing. Hard to say what it was exactly.”

  And maybe that was what he was afraid of, he thought. His life with Clare, before her death, had been complete. There had been trouble, sure what life lacked trouble?—but nothing they couldn’t handle together. Maybe he was afraid to try to find that kind of life again, afraid that it wouldn’t be the same or that it just wouldn’t work.

  “She was a strange sort of woman,” Ivy said.

  “Who?” Rhodes asked, wondering for a second if she’d read his thoughts and was talking about Clare, who hadn’t been strange at all

  “Mrs. Martin.”

  “You knew her?” This was something Rhodes hadn’t considered.

  “Only to talk to at work. They had their insurance with us. There was something about the way she looked, the way she dressed. . . .”

  It occurred to Rhodes that he hadn’t seen Mrs. Martin dressed for going out of the house. “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “Old-fashioned, like her hair. She dressed like someone who still loved old clothes and couldn’t stand to get rid of them.”

  Rhodes thought about the Martins, the way the wife looked and the way the husband worked, busily accumulating money. Maybe he worked so hard because he didn’t like going home. Dentists didn’t get called out from home as often as doctors, so Martin had taken on the rent property as a way of escaping, of getting away. Long hours at the office, then his spare time spent on buying, furnishing, repairing.

  And if you had any spare time left over . . . who would you be fooling around with?

  “You think they had problems at home?” Rhodes asked.

  “I don’t know,” Ivy answered. “Anything’s possible. You can’t ever really know what goes on inside a house.”

  Rhodes agreed, thinking of Swan and Higgins. They’d had him fooled, anyway. Then he told Ivy about what Mrs. Stone had overheard, and what he’d thought.

  Ivy laughed. “Well, Betsy Higgins is not in the picture, unless Dr. Martin was more unusual than most people around here. It would be an awful coincidence if he were.”

  Rhodes agreed again. “But that doesn’t leave me very much to go on,” he said. “For all I know, Martin could be standing right outside the door, laughing up his sleeve at me.”

  “I think you ought to question his office staff,” Ivy said.

  “You think one of them . . .”

  “I know it’s a cliché,” Ivy said. “Doctors and nurses, that kind of thing. But I was thinking that most women, and most men for that matter, usually fall for someone close by if they fall for anyone at all. Where would Dr. Martin meet anyone?”

  “There’s a word for that, isn’t there?” Rhodes asked. “Starts with a p.”

  “Propinquity,” Ivy said.

  “That’s the one,” Rhodes said. And then he remembered something that had been said, the thing that had bothered him a little while rolling around somewhere at the back of his mind.

  He and Ivy watched part of the late movie, Rear Window. Rhodes drove home, wondering if Mrs. Martin had found out about her husband and chopped him up, burying him in the flowerbeds that Mrs. Stone had seen her working in. He guessed he’d have to take a look around.

  The warm days were over. When Rhodes went out to feed Speedo the next morning, the temperature was close to freezing and there was a north wind that cut right through to the bone.

  Speedo didn’t seem to mind. In fact; he seemed to enjoy the change. He ran around the yard, occasionally stopping to pounce on an old Nike running shoe that he’d found somewhere and brought home. He grabbed the shoe and shook it violently.

  “Good boy,” Rhodes said. “If it were a rat, you’d break his back for sure.”

  Speedo tossed the shoe aside and dashed around the yard some more.

  “I wish I enjoyed this as much as you do,” Rhodes said. “But I don’t.” He poured the dry dog food into Speedo’s bowl and went back into the house for a warmer coat.

  When he came back out, he threw the Nike a few times so that Speedo could chase it. When they both got tired, he got in the car and drove to the jail.

  It had been a quiet night. Hack had gotten a report on Phil Swan, who had served five years for armed robbery. It was the only conviction he had, and he’d been out of prison for six years now.

  “If a man stays clean for that long, he might be all right,” Hack said.

  “Maybe,” Rhodes said. “We can hold them on the assault charges for a while, though.” Armed robbery wasn’t too far removed from burglarizing a house and killing the occupant. “I don’t guess you’ve had any word on anybody finding a body anywhere around.”

  “Not a peep,” Hack said.

  “All right,” Rhodes said. “I’ll check in with you later.”

  “You goin’ shoppin’?” Hack asked, but Rhodes was already out the door.

  Apartment houses, as such, were relatively new in Blacklin County. There had always been duplexes, and people had always rented out rooms, but there had never really been any demand for actual apartments.

  Now there was. Rhodes wasn’t quite sure why. Maybe it was because in the 1980s people just couldn’t afford to buy a home, yet they preferred something a little fancier than a room in the house of some nice widow lady trying to earn a little extra money. Maybe people didn’t stay in one place long enough now to put down roots. Maybe the market in real estate was so bad that no one wanted to risk buying a house that he wouldn’t be able to sell later.

  For whatever reason, Clearview now had apartment houses. The one in front of which Rhodes was parked had been built only a year or so earlier on one of the roads leading out of town to the south. The road wasn’t well cared for, and most of the houses were old and run down, having been built fifty or sixty years earlier and passed on from owner to owner several times in the decades since. Most of them were covered in peeling paint, and the rusting hulks of thirty-year-old automobiles could be seen in more than one back yard, the weeds creeping up to window level.

  The apartment house looked out of place, being new, but it was nothing fancy. Just a two-story blocky structure shaped like a squared-off U, with a narrow balcony running around the inside. There wasn’t even a pool. There were sixty units, most of them occupied by singles—school teachers, workers from the cable plant, people just in town for a short while looking for a job.

  Carol Shamblin lived in number 24, on the ground floor.

  Rhodes knocked at the door, painted black, with cheap anodized tin numerals tacked just over the peephole. He was pretty early, but he didn’t want to wait too late in the day. He had a feeling that he might have waited too long already.

  He hadn’t, though. After only a short wait he heard a voice saying “Who is it?”

  It wasn’t a particularly cordial voice. In fact, it wasn’t very cordial at all. Rhodes realized that she didn’t recognize him.

  “Sheriff Dan Rhodes,” he said.

  There was a muffled noise behind the door, which Rhodes thought might have been someone saying “Oh, damn” under her breath. But he could have been mistaken.

  “What do you want?”

  Rhodes heard that clearly. “To talk,” he said. “I want
to ask you a few more questions.”

  The door still didn’t open. “What about?”

  “I’ll explain when I come in,” Rhodes said. He looked around the apartment house. No one was outside, and very few cars were parked beside his in the lot. Probably everyone had gone to work or was out looking for work. “It won’t take long.”

  “I’m not dressed.”

  “I can wait,” Rhodes said. “I don’t mind.”

  “Oh, all right.”

  He heard the sound of a chain being released from its slot; then the lock of the door clicked. He turned the handle and opened the door.

  Carol Shamblin walked over to the room’s cheap couch and sat down. She was wearing a long maroon dressing gown. Two or three days’ newspapers were scattered in front of the couch. There was a cup of coffee in a saucer sitting on the coffee table. A cigarette was balanced on the edge of a blue glass ashtray. The cigarette was half smoked and still burning. A thin edge of smoke rose from its tip.

  “I didn’t know you smoked,” Rhodes said.

  “I don’t, at the office,” Carol said. “It’s not good for customer relations.”

  As Tammy had said at Dr. Martin’s office, Carol was a big girl. Her white arms were thick and strong looking as they emerged from the short sleeves of the robe. Rhodes could easily imagine her helping carry the large TV set out of the office.

  “I just wanted to ask you one thing,” Rhodes said.

  Carol picked up the cigarette and thumped it on the edge of the ashtray. “What?” she asked. She inhaled smoke and blew it out in a slow, thin plume.

  Rhodes didn’t mind smoke. He had once thought that he might be a failure in law enforcement because he neither smoked nor drank coffee, but since he didn’t mind when others did, he’d gotten by just fine. “It’s about something that Tammy said yesterday,” he said.

  “I’m sure you’ve got a point to make, Sheriff,” Carol said. “But I can’t quite see what it is.”

  “She said something about how the office would be kept open because you could clean teeth like you did when you got there yesterday.”

  “So?” Carol thumped the cigarette again.