Bill Crider - Dan Rhodes 09 - Death by Accident

by Bill Crider

  “But not the night John got killed.”

  “Not that I remember. But they could’ve met somewhere else that night. If John got killed when you say he did, he didn’t go home. He might’ve gone to some other club, had some more to drink. Maybe Pep was there. Why, you think somebody killed Pep?”

  “It could have been an accident,” Rhodes said.

  “I expect so. Pep wasn’t what you’d call a careful man. I’ve seen him get in fights, take on two or three guys at a time if he had a drink or two in him.”

  Rhodes didn’t often get called out to The County Line when there was a fight. The management liked to settle things without resorting to calling the law. But he’d been there a time or two, when things got out of hand. He didn’t recall that Pep had been involved, however.

  “Did Pep fool around with other men’s wives?” Rhodes asked.

  Tuffy straightened and crossed his arms over his chest. “I wouldn’t know about that. You don’t see a whole lot of weddin’ rings out at The County Line.”

  “What about Gary Heckethorn? You know him?”

  “Seen him couple of times. I know him to talk to. Why?”

  “He’s Yeldell’s cousin. He was with him at The County Line now and then.”

  “You’re tryin’ too hard, Sheriff,” Tuffy said. “I don’t think John knew Heckethorn any better’n I did, and we didn’t know Pep Yeldell very well, either. I don’t think John’s killin’ has anything to do with Yeldell.”

  Rhodes was pretty sure he agreed with West, but he still didn’t like the idea of two accidental deaths so close together, and he didn’t like the fact that he was no closer to finding West’s killer than he’d been when the accident happened.

  “You let me know when you find out somethin’ you can get your teeth into, hear?” Tuffy said.

  Rhodes promised that he would.

  Clyde Ballinger’s funeral home had once been one of Clearview’s finest homes, a family mansion with a swimming pool, tennis courts, and landscaped grounds that covered an entire block. But times had changed. The last member of the family that owned the house and property had died, and Clyde had bought the old estate for his business. He had his office in back of the funeral home, in a little brick building that had been the servants’ quarters.

  Rhodes didn’t know about the rest of the building, but the room where Clyde had his office was cluttered with the old paperback books that Clyde bought at garage sales. They generally didn’t cost him more than a quarter, and he argued that they gave him a lot more entertainment than some fat new novel that he’d have to pay six-ninety-nine for.

  He was sitting at his desk reading something called China Coast by Don Smith when Rhodes came in.

  “Is that a good one?” Rhodes asked.

  “Darn right,” Ballinger said, putting a thin slip of paper in the book to mark his place. He closed the book and looked at the back cover. “It says here, ‘a real nose-busting adventure.’ Now is that the kind of thing that makes you want to read a book or not?”

  “I’m not sure,” Rhodes said.

  “Well, it makes me want to read it.” Ballinger put down China Coast and picked up another book that lay on his desk. “I found this one today, too.”

  He held it up so Rhodes could see the cover. A Fiend in Need by someone named Milton K. Ozaki.

  “They don’t write ’em like this anymore,” Ballinger said, giving the book a little shake for emphasis.

  “I’ll bet they don’t,” Rhodes said.

  Ballinger put the book down. “You probably didn’t come by to talk about great literature, though, did you?”

  “Not today,” Rhodes said.

  Ballinger looked at the ceiling. “Or football?”

  “Especially not football.”

  “Guess you must want to talk about Dr. White’s report on Pep Yeldell, then.”

  “You guess right.”

  Ballinger opened a desk drawer and took out a small stack of papers.

  “Got it right here. He finished a little while ago.”

  He handed the papers to Rhodes, who started reading. Ballinger watched for a second, then picked up China Coast and opened it to his place.

  After a while, Rhodes said, “So Yeldell drowned.”

  Ballinger marked his spot in the book again. “That’s what Dr. White said. Water in his lungs.”

  “What about the bump on his head?”

  “Looks like he was hit by a tree limb. It’s all in there about the little pieces of tree bark in the scalp.”

  “I saw it. Dr. White saved the bark, I’m sure.”

  “He’s got it all bagged and tagged. Took blood samples, too. Those are ready to go to the lab.”

  “I’ve got a tree limb in the evidence locker at the jail that I want to try to match up to the bark from Yeldell’s scalp,” Rhodes said. “Anything I missed in this?”

  “Nope. Dr. White says Yeldell was most likely drunk and drowned when he got hit by that limb. You know who hit him with it?”

  “It fell out of a tree,” Rhodes said.

  “Oh. Well, in that case, what you’ve got is an accident.” Ballinger thought about that for a second. “Seems like we’re having a lot of those around here lately.”

  “Accidents happen,” Rhodes said.

  “You have to wonder about that hit-and-run, though.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, it looks like if it was an accident, whoever did it would come forward, tell the truth, and get it over with.”

  “Not if whoever did it was drunk or driving recklessly at the time.”

  “You find any sign of that at the scene?”

  “No,” Rhodes said. “But that road’s not the kind that takes tracks.”

  “You never know about accidents like that, I guess,” Ballinger said.

  “Eventually you do,” Rhodes told him. “If you keep after it.”

  “And you’re going to keep after it, am I right?” He picked up China Coast. “That’s what the tough guys always do.”

  “I’m not a tough guy,” Rhodes said. “But I’m not going to quit.”

  Ballinger smiled. “I didn’t think you would.”

  Chapter Ten

  When Rhodes wanted to think things over, he usually went to his office in the county courthouse, a building that he thought vaguely resembled the Kremlin but that the few tourists that came to Blacklin County seemed to think was well worth photographing. The building was old, Rhodes had to admit that, but he didn’t see the beauty of it.

  What he liked about it was the fact that it was quiet, especially on the floor where his office was located, away from the courtrooms and the noise of the really busy offices, like that of the tax assessor-collector, which was down in the basement. He liked the wide marble halls and the high ceilings, too. There had been some talk about modernizing the building, lowering the ceilings and blocking the windows to reduce the cost of heating and cooling, but so far nothing had come of it. Rhodes hoped that nothing would. He figured it was worth a few dollars to preserve a little of the dignity of the past.

  Another thing Rhodes liked about the courthouse was the Dr Pepper machine, where he could actually get a Dr Pepper in a glass bottle. Of course he’d already had one Dr Pepper that day, but it hadn’t been a very good one, so he figured it didn’t count. He’d skip the cheese crackers with peanut butter this time, though.

  He put his two quarters in the old green Dr Pepper machine, pushed the button, and took the glass bottle when it slid out. He opened it and went to his office to drink it.

  He closed the door behind him, sat in the swivel chair, and put his feet up on his desk.

  What he had was two accidents with not very much connecting them other than the fact that the two dead men might have known one another slightly. That wasn’t exactly strange in Blacklin County. Though Rhodes and Ivy hadn’t known anyone in the Dairy Queen, it wasn’t unusual at all for either of them to run into quite a few people they knew nearly any day of the w
eek. Blacklin County didn’t have the population of metropolitan Houston, after all.

  So why did Rhodes think the two accidents might be connected? There was no real reason at all. It was just a feeling he had, a hunch. It was almost like a physical itch that he could feel right between his shoulder blades in that place that was just out of reach when you tried to scratch it.

  Hack would tell him that a hunch didn’t mean a thing and that the modern lawman should rely on the kind of information he could call up from his computer or get analyzed in the crime lab. But Rhodes had played hunches before and gotten good results. There were some things you couldn’t analyze in a lab.

  Rhodes drank the Dr Pepper and thought about West and Yeldell. West sold auto parts, and Yeldell worked in a body shop. Another tenuous connection, hardly worth thinking about, and it probably didn’t mean a thing.

  But it did, somehow. Rhodes wasn’t sure how, but he could feel that itch again. It had to mean something. All he had to do was find out what.

  He got up and left his office, putting the empty Dr Pepper bottle in the rack by the side of the machine as he passed by.

  Mrs. John West, whose first name was Kara, lived in a modest house in one of the newer areas of Clearview, a section of the town that had been developed about twenty years previously when it appeared that there might be some renewed interest in drilling for oil and gas in the area.

  In the early part of the century, Clearview had gone through an oil boom that the older members of the community still remembered with both fondness and regret, and the tall drilling rigs that remained behind had been a constant reminder of the boom to everyone else until fairly recently. The wells had been drilled so quickly that no one bothered to take down the rigs, which had rusted in the old fields until someone finally got the idea of selling them for scrap.

  The new boom hadn’t happened, of course. A few gas wells were successfully drilled, but there wasn’t much oil, and gas wasn’t selling for anything that would make a man rich, not unless he was lucky enough to get several wells in the same unit. Rhodes didn’t know of anyone who’d been that lucky.

  The houses that had been built in anticipation of the town’s growth had been kept up pretty well by the people who bought them, though a few of them were obviously abandoned, probably owned now by mortgage holders in some place like California. Yellowing newspapers lay in yards that hadn’t been mowed very often the previous summer and were now covered in tall dead or dying grass.

  Kara West lived in a house that had once been in pretty bad shape, but her husband had fixed it up after they bought it, and it had gotten even nicer since his death. He might have been playing around on her, but he had believed in heavy life insurance, a quarter of a million dollars’ worth.

  When Mrs. West answered the door, she looked much happier than she had when Rhodes had last seen her several days after the funeral. She had been wearing an old black dress then, still in mourning, and she had been crying quite a bit.

  Now she was wearing a new dress, her hair was stylishly cut and several shades blonder, and she obviously hadn’t cried for quite a while. Thinking of the funeral and of the change in Mrs. West reminded Rhodes of something else.

  “You go to Brother Alton’s church, don’t you?” he said.

  “Yes,” Mrs. West said. “Is that what you came here to ask me?”

  “No, but I was thinking today that someone had made some generous donations to Brother Alton. That was a nice thing to do.”

  “I’m not saying I gave any money to the church. That’s between me and the Lord and the I. R. S.”

  “I know,” Rhodes said. “Could I come in for a minute?”

  Mrs. West opened the door and Rhodes stepped through onto a newly-tiled floor. Then he followed Mrs. West into a room with new carpet, a new couch, and two new wing chairs. There was a huge projection TV set on one wall.

  “You’ve done some remodeling,” Rhodes said.

  “I had a little money for the first time in my life,” Mrs. West said, “and I’d lost my husband. So I decided to change things around a little.”

  Rhodes didn’t blame her, but for the first time he wondered about all that insurance money. He supposed he should have been suspicious right from the first, but Mrs. West’s grief had seemed genuine at the time. She had spent the whole funeral crying on Tuffy’s shoulder.

  Mrs. West asked Rhodes to have a seat, so he took one of the wing chairs. It was more comfortable than it looked. Mrs. West sat on the couch, behind a new coffee table.

  “Have you found something new about John?” she asked.

  “Not exactly,” Rhodes said. “But there’s been another accidental death.”

  “A hit-and-run?”

  “No. A drowning. A man named Pep Yeldell. Did you know him?”

  “No,” Mrs. West said, with no hesitation. “I never heard of him.”

  Rhodes wondered why she didn’t at least have to think about it for a second. So he said, “Your husband knew him, I think.”

  “I’ve found out a few things about John, myself,” Mrs. West said. “He knew a lot of people that I didn’t know. Most of them were women.”

  So liking women was something else that West and Yeldell had in common. Rhodes wondered if it meant anything. Rhodes also wondered who Mrs. West had been talking to. So he asked her.

  She evaded the question. “No one in particular. Some of the people at the church have been kind enough to tell me a few things. I wonder why you didn’t tell me, Sheriff.”

  Rhodes hadn’t said anything to her because Tuffy West had told him that John didn’t run around on his wife, a case of a brother not wanting to sully the reputation of the deceased, Rhodes supposed. Or maybe Mrs. West had been misinformed.

  But he didn’t say that, either. He said, “I didn’t have any evidence of it.”

  “But you knew it?”

  “No. And I still don’t know that it’s true.”

  “Oh, it was true, all right,” Mrs. West said. “I’m certain of that. I was a fool for a long time, but I’m not quite so foolish now.”

  Rhodes looked around the room. “Your husband must have loved you. He left you well-provided for.”

  “Guilt,” Mrs. West said. “That’s all it was. Love didn’t have a thing to do with it.”

  Rhodes figured that if she were going to be bitter, he might as well take advantage of it. “Did anyone give you specific names?”

  Mrs. West’s blond hair shimmered when she shook her head. “No. But I don’t need the names. I don’t think I even want to know them.”

  “They might help me find out something about the accident.”

  “I don’t think so. John was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. It seems like he was in the wrong place a lot of the time, come to think of it. Have you heard anything at all about the Cherokee?”

  “Not a thing,” Rhodes said. “But I’m still looking.”

  “I don’t see how something that big can just disappear.”

  Rhodes didn’t see how it could either, not unless Hack was right and the Russian Mafia, or whatever it was called, had hijacked it to the former Soviet Union. But he didn’t see any need to mention that to Mrs. West.

  So he said simply, “It might have been stolen.”

  “But wouldn’t someone have found it by now?”

  “Not necessarily. Just change the license plates, and it could be awfully hard to locate.”

  “I hope you can find it,” Mrs. West said. “I really liked that car.”

  “I’ll find it,” Rhodes said with more confidence that he actually felt.

  Mrs. West smiled, and Rhodes was surprised to see that she was wearing braces. He knew that more and more adults were wearing them, but it wasn’t a common sight in Clearview.

  “Call me when you do,” she said.

  Chapter Eleven

  Randall Overton didn’t live in a house nearly as well-kept as Kara West’s, and his neighborhood wasn’t nearly as respectable, t
hough long ago it had been.

  Overton’s house was on a street of similar wood-frame houses, all of which had been built along about the time of the oil boom and none of which had been cared for particularly well in the years since. Most of them needed paint, most of them had much more dirt in their yards than grass, and most showed signs of general neglect: an old tire in the front yard, a car up on blocks in the oil-stained driveway, a wringer-equipped washing machine sitting on the sagging front porch, chickens scratching in the dirt behind a picket fence that was missing several pickets.

  Rhodes parked the county car in front of Overton’s house. It was the one with the car up on blocks in the driveway. Rhodes couldn’t tell what kind of car it was because it was covered by a cream-colored tarp.

  Whatever it was, it wasn’t Overton’s only vehicle. There was a shiny new Toyota truck parked behind it. The roofing business evidently paid pretty well. At least the kind of roofing business that Overton conducted.

  Rhodes was curious about the tarp-covered car. It didn’t look as if it could be a Jeep Cherokee, but you never knew unless you looked. He’d heard of a hit-and-run case in Houston in which the car had sat in an apartment parking lot for two years before somebody looked at it.

  So when he walked past the covered car, he lifted the tarp at the front for a look at the grille. He saw a vertical chrome fish-mouth, which could mean only one thing: he was looking at a 1958 Edsel. His curiosity got the better of him, and he lifted the side of the tarp. The Edsel was a four-door hardtop, red and white, one of the ugliest cars ever made in the eyes of some beholders.

  But not in the eyes of Rhodes. He was instantly in love. In Texas in 1958 fourteen year olds could get a “learner’s permit,” but Rhodes hadn’t been quite old enough even for that when Edsels appeared on the scene. Not that it mattered; to him they represented the high point of a decade in which Detroit seemed determined to make the gaudiest cars possible. He wondered whether Overton would sell the car or whether he was saving it for himself.