by Bill Crider
“Do you look around the Grounds every time you’re here?” Rhodes asked.
“Every time. We’ve put a lot of work into this place, and we’re going to revive the Old Settlers’ Days celebration next summer. We want to be sure everything’s in top shape.”
“Did you ever see a rope hanging from one of these trees?”
Berry looked over his shoulder at the body, then back at Rhodes. “What if I did?”
Uh-oh, Rhodes thought. No wonder Berry was worried about a lawsuit. He’d known the rope was there and hadn’t done anything about it.
“If you did,” he said, “it might mean that someone had been swimming here before. You should have reported it, or taken it down.”
“It was just a rope in a tree,” Berry said. “I didn’t think anything about it.”
Maybe, Rhodes thought, but more likely Berry just hadn’t thought it was worth fooling with. And certainly he hadn’t thought anyone would drown.
Rhodes looked at the jeans on the ground. There was a bulge in the right-hand back pocket, and Rhodes reached down to take out the billfold. He flipped it open to look at the driver’s license in its clear plastic holder.
“Peter Yeldell,” he said. “You know him?”
Berry shook his head. “Heard of him. Never met him, though. You?”
Rhodes nodded. He’d heard of Peter Yeldell, all right. Better known as Pep, Yeldell had been in trouble for most of his thirty-one years. Little things, usually. Joyriding and minor in possession of alcohol when he was a kid, DWI, abusive language, and assault when he got a little older. Rhodes had arrested him once or twice and the deputies a lot more than that.
“I hear something up there,” Berry said, looking up toward the road. “Somebody’s coming.”
Rhodes stuck the billfold back in the jeans. “That would be the ambulance,” he said.
Chapter Three
Rhodes sent Berry up the hill to keep the ambulance away. He didn’t want anyone else down there while he was investigating the crime scene.
But it hadn’t been the ambulance that they’d heard. It was Ruth Grady, one of the deputies. She was short and stout and utterly dependable.
“Hack gave me a call,” she said as she came down the hill. “He thought you might need some help with the crime scene.”
“He was right,” Rhodes said, glad that Hack had made the call. Hack hadn’t taken to the idea of a woman deputy at first, but Ruth had won him over quickly. “Where’s Berry?”
“I told him to stay up there, wait for the ambulance,” Ruth said. She looked at the floating body. “Anybody we know?”
“Pep Yeldell,” Rhodes told her. “You’ve brought him in a time or two.”
Ruth nodded. “I sure have. Mostly for drunk and disorderly. What do you think happened here?”
“It looks like an accident. Pep got drunk, decided to come for a swim, and took a swing over the water on that rope. The limb broke, and he drowned.”
“You think the limb hit him on the head?”
“That’s one of the things we’ll have Doctor White check,” Rhodes said. White did the autopsies for the county, saving a lot of money and time that would have been wasted if the body had to be sent to Dallas or Waco.
Ruth bent down to get a better look at the rope. “Yeldell was alone?”
“That’s what it looks like. His truck’s up there behind the Burleson cabin. We’ll check it later.”
They photographed the scene, then searched the area around the pool thoroughly and found nothing, not even so much as a beer can. Rhodes wondered about that and then remembered that Ty Berry came out every week. He probably policed the area each time. There was nothing at all to indicate that there had been anyone with Yeldell.
“Let’s check out the truck,” Rhodes said at last. “Maybe there’s something there.”
“Better take that rope with us,” Ruth said.
Rhodes agreed, and he knelt down by the side of the pool to unwind the rope from Yeldell’s body.
“I wonder how he got so tangled up,” he said.
“He might have twisted around in the air when the limb broke,” Ruth said.
“I guess we’ll take the limb, too,” Rhodes said. “We might need it later.”
He stood up and pulled the freed rope toward him hand over hand, looping it as he gathered it in. The limb coasted over the top of the water, making ripples that spread across the pool and slapped gently against the concrete. When the limb got almost to the edge of the pool, Rhodes bent down and picked it up.
“Ready?” Ruth said.
Rhodes hefted the waterlogged rope and the tree limb. “Let’s go.”
They climbed the hill to where Ty Berry waited by the ambulance, which had arrived while Rhodes and Ruth were doing the crime scene. Rhodes stopped to talk; Ruth went on toward the Burleson cabin.
“Find anything?” Berry asked, looking at the rope and limb that Rhodes carried.
“No,” Rhodes said. “This is just the stuff we already knew about.”
He put the rope and limb in the trunk of the county car and then told the ambulance attendants that it was all right for them to get the body.
“Take it to Ballinger’s Funeral Home, and tell Clyde to give Doctor White a call.”
One of the attendants nodded and they went down the hill.
“Is there any need for me to stay around here?” Berry asked.
Rhodes told him that there wasn’t.
“I guess I’ll go on back to town, then. See about a lawyer. Get ready for the lawsuit.”
“Let’s hope there won’t be one,” Rhodes said.
“If the family doesn’t bring one, Faye Knape probably will,” Berry said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if she were behind this whole thing.”
“Do you think she had something to do with Yeldell’s death?” Rhodes asked.
“No, no. Nothing like that. She wouldn’t have had anything to do with it directly. But who put that rope up there in that tree? Think about it. It was on a dead limb. She’d know that someone would be sure to try a swing on it, and if they didn’t get killed, they might get hurt. I wouldn’t put it past her to have put that rope there.”
It sounded pretty far-fetched to Rhodes, and he said so. For one thing, he couldn’t imagine Faye Knape climbing a tree.
“You don’t know that woman if you think she wouldn’t do it,” Berry said. “She’s a maniac.”
Rhodes knew that Faye Knape was obsessive about the history of Clearview, but he didn’t think she was a maniac.
“She’s just a little eccentric,” he said.
“Hah. I’ll bet she’s mixed up in this. You’ll see.”
“If she is, I’ll find out,” Rhodes said, but Berry didn’t hear him. He was already on his way to his truck.
The Burleson cabin didn’t look like anything special. It sat up on blocks sawed from some kind of tree trunk, and it was made of hand-hewn logs that had weathered to a light gray color over the years. The mortar that had been used to fill the cracks was mostly gone. There had been a chimney at one time, but it had long since disappeared. The hole in the wall had been boarded up sometime in the past. There was no glass in the windows, and most of the rough wood shingles were missing from the roof.
Rhodes walked around to the back, where Ruth was looking around a blue Chevy S-10. He rustled through ankle-deep leaves that had fallen from a huge burr oak tree.
“Find anything?” Rhodes asked.
“Not a thing. Maybe we should vacuum these leaves.”
“I don’t think we have to,” Rhodes said. “If there had been another car in here, it would be easy to tell.”
Yeldell’s truck had crushed a path through the leaves, but there was no sign that another vehicle had been there.
“Anything in the truck?” Rhodes asked.
“A couple of cardboard beer cartons. Lots of empties in the bed of the truck.”
It was about what Rhodes had figured.
“You
know what worries me about this?” Ruth asked.
“That it looks like an accident,” Rhodes said. “And that makes one too many accidents around here lately.”
“That’s right,” Ruth said.
“But the two accidents don’t have anything in common,” Rhodes said. “This one’s a drowning.”
“That’s different from the other one, all right,” Ruth said.
Rhodes nodded. In the other one, a man had exploded.
Chapter Four
The man was John West, and he had exploded a little more than two weeks earlier on a county road outside of Clearview at around 2:00 a.m.
“Two-oh-three exactly,” David Grice had told Rhodes. “I put my glasses on and looked at that little digital clock I got at Wal-Mart’s when I heard him blow up, and I called your office right after that.”
Hack had taken the call and phoned Rhodes, who drove to the scene. West’s clothes had burned away, and his body was a blackened mass. The grass in the bar ditch had burned in a circle around him.
Grice, who lived in a farm house a few hundred yards down the road, had been waiting by the ditch when Rhodes arrived.
“Good thing we had us a little rain here last week,” Grice said when Rhodes shined his light on the body. “Otherwise, he’d likely have burned up my whole pasture. What do you think’d make a fella blow up like that?”
Rhodes said that he didn’t know.
“Smells terrible, too,” Grice said. “Sort of like a barbecue, but off a little if you know what I mean.”
Rhodes knew. He felt a little sick at his stomach. He’d seen dead men before, but never one who’d been burned so badly.
“Made a pretty considerable noise when he blew up,” Grice said. He didn’t seem bothered by the smell. “Course I had the window up a little crack, couple or three inches. I like to get a little air in the room, even if it is the fall of the year. That’s why I heard him, I guess. You ever hear of a fella blowin’ up like that before?”
Rhodes never had, and it was not until the next day that he figured out what had actually happened. He had found the remains of a gasoline can near the scene.
Ruth Grady had been with him that time, too.
“So you think a car hit him while he was carrying the gas can?” she asked.
“That’s right,” Rhodes said. “It hit the can first, probably, then him. When the can burst, a spark from the metal must have set off the explosion. The gas got all over West, and he burned up. The impact of the crash is what killed him, though.”
By that time they had identified the body. It was easy after they got a call from West’s wife to say that he was missing.
But what West’s wife hadn’t been able to tell them was where West had been and why he was carrying a gas can.
“Obviously his car had run out of gas,” Ruth said.
“That’s the logical answer,” Rhodes said. “But where’s his car?”
They had searched both sides of the road several miles, more than the distance West was likely to have walked, but there was no car to be found.
“What about the car that hit him?” Ruth asked. “Surely it was damaged.”
Rhodes agreed that it must have been. “If we see it, we’ll know it. And maybe it’ll be taken to a body shop. I’ll put out the word for anyone who sees it to give us a call.”
But there hadn’t been any calls, and the investigation seemed to have reached a dead end. According to his wife, Kara, and the family’s friends, West had no enemies and no reason to be out on a county road alone late at night with a gas can in his hand.
Rhodes had questioned West’s wife, at length, but she could tell him nothing more than the fact that West hadn’t come home from work. He often worked late at the little auto parts store he owned, she said, because he had trouble finding reliable help and had to keep the books and do all the restocking and inventory himself, after he’d closed the doors for the day.
It hadn’t taken Rhodes long to find out that West didn’t have any trouble at all finding reliable help or at least help that he trusted to take care of things at the store. A young man named Jerry Tate did most of the things West’s wife believed West was doing after hours, while West took off for an evening of drinking with his friends.
Tate had one of the flattest flat-top haircuts Rhodes had seen since he was about twelve years old. He imagined you could have set a glass of water on the top of Tate’s hair and it wouldn’t wobble.
Tate said that he didn’t know where West went after work, and he didn’t care.
“He pays me to work in the store, and that’s what I do,” Tate told the sheriff. “So that’s what I do — I work in the store, and I don’t ask any questions about where he goes after he leaves here. He pays me overtime to stay and get all the ducks in a row, and I’m glad to do it. The only reason I know where he goes is that somebody told me about seeing him at some club one night.”
“Who told you that?”
“I don’t remember,” Tate said, and Rhodes could see that he wasn’t going to get any more out of him.
It didn’t really matter. Knowing West’s habit, Rhodes was able to find out in only a few hours that West liked to hang around with his brother, Tuffy. Tuffy drove a wrecker and owned a wrecking yard on the outskirts of Clearview. He spent a lot of his time in places like The County Line, a honky tonk that Rhodes knew only too well, thanks to his recent investigation of the murder of one of Clearview High’s assistant football coaches.
Tuffy hadn’t been any help when Rhodes asked about his brother. Rhodes drove out to the wrecking yard to talk to him. The yard was surrounded by a high sheet metal fence that had rusted badly, and it was filled with the bodies of wrecked cars, jumbled together as if the yard had been the scene of a gigantic destruction derby. Some of them had rusted as badly as the fence.
Occasionally a car crusher could come by and flatten some of the wrecks like cards in a deck, after which they would be stacked on a trailer and hauled away.
Tuffy met Rhodes outside the door of the sheet metal building that served as both an office and a parts department. John sold new parts, and Tuffy sold used ones.
“I don’t know a thing about what John was doing that night,” he told Rhodes. “We had a couple of beers at The County Line, talked about the football team a little, and then he left.”
He paused and gave Rhodes a significant look. “I thought our boys were on their way to state, but I guess that’s all over with.”
It wasn’t exactly Rhodes’s fault that the Clearview Catamounts hadn’t won their play-off game after the coach’s murder, but a lot of people seemed to blame the sheriff. Their attitude was that he should have solved the murder instantly instead of taking a couple of days. Then the team would have had time to settle down and get ready for the game.
Rhodes didn’t want to talk about it. He said, “Where did he go when he left The County Line?”
Tuffy shrugged. “I figured he went home.”
“Was he driving his car?”
Tuffy scratched at a scab under his right ear. He was wearing a greasy Dallas Cowboys cap, jeans, and a dirty shirt covered with a paisley pattern. His hair was cut so short on the sides that his scalp showed through, but he had sideburns that extended below his ear lobes.
“I guess he was. He wouldn’t have walked all the way out there.”
“Did he ever run out of gas that you know of?”
“John? Hell, I never could get him to top off his tank. He’d run it down till it was nearly dry. I told him that the fuel pump’d pick up all kinds of trash off the bottom of the tank if he kept on like that, but he didn’t listen. He said the gas gauge didn’t work right anyway, but I knew that for a lie.”
“Did he leave The County Line with anyone?”
“Not that I know of. Went off by himself, like always. He didn’t have a woman or anything like that, if that’s what you’re thinking. He didn’t run around on Kara. He just needed to get out of the house now and t
hen. You a married man, Sheriff?”
Rhodes said that he was.
“Then you know what I mean. Man needs to get off to himself every now and then. I was married once myself, but it didn’t take.”
Rhodes didn’t really know what Tuffy meant about the need to get off by himself. Rhodes had recently married for the second time, and he wasn’t looking for ways to get away from Ivy. In fact, he wished he could find a way to spend more time in her company.
“I’d just as soon Kara didn’t find out about where John and me was, though,” Tuffy said. “It wouldn’t do her any good to know he was out drinkin’ when he could’ve been home with her.”
Rhodes didn’t make any promises.
“Do you have any idea why he might have been out there on that county road?” he asked.
“Not the least one. That’s a long way from his house, and he didn’t know anybody out that way. Who was it found him?”
“David Grice.”
“Yeah. I read his name in the paper. I never heard of him before, and I bet you John never did, either.”
“What time did he leave The County Line?”
Tuffy scratched at the scab again. Rhodes was afraid it might come off. It didn’t, but when he was finished with his scratching, Tuffy looked at his fingertips to make sure. There was grease under his nails, but no blood.
“I don’t know about the time for sure,” he said. “Maybe sometime around nine. Things were just getting going.”
“And you don’t have any idea who might have hit your brother and left the scene.”
“If I did, I’d tell you. I want that son of a bitch caught and put behind bars, Sheriff. My brother and I were real close.” Tuffy held up his crossed fingers. “Just like that. So you find that son of a bitch and put him where he belongs.”
“I’ll find him,” Rhodes said, but so far he hadn’t done it.