by Bill Crider
“This chair’s mine,” Mack said, taking the one nearest the fire. “You can sit in the other one. Then you can tell me who killed Overton.”
The floor creaked when Rhodes sat in the chair.
“I didn’t say he was killed,” he told Mack.
“Well, he should have been. How did he die, then?”
“He burned to death in his car sometime last night or early this morning. It might have been an accident, or it might not.”
Mack glanced down at a thick paperback book lying on the floor beside his chair.
Rhodes noticed the glance and said, “What are you reading?”
“Charles Dickens. I don’t own a TV set. Wouldn’t have one of them in the house. So I read a lot. You get you a book by Dickens, you’ve got plenty of good reading.”
Rhodes had read a book by Dickens once when he was in junior high school. He’d even given a book report on it. David Copperfield. It had taken him a long time to get to the end of it.
“I always liked Charles Dickens,” he said.
Mack looked surprised. “You read Dickens?”
“David Copperfield. It was sort of based on Dickens’s life.”
Rhodes hoped he was remembering that part right. It had been a long time since that book report. Since about the time the Edsel was new, most likely.
Mack rocked forward and picked up the book by his chair. He rocked back and held up the book so Rhodes could see the cover.
“This is Bleak House,” Mack said. “It’s a mystery in a way. You might like it. There’s a man who dies by spontaneous combustion.”
Rhodes wondered if Hack had read the book. And then he wondered if Mack Riley might have gotten the idea for killing Overton from it.
“Things like that happen,” Mack said. “Spontaneous combustion, I mean. The policeman in this book’s named Bucket, by the way. Inspector Bucket.”
Rhodes didn’t want to get into a literary discussion. “I understand that you knew Pep Yeldell.”
“Another common thief. Not on quite the same scale as Overton, but a thief nevertheless.”
“So you knew him?”
“Know him? I threatened to horsewhip him. As I’m sure you know. Otherwise you’d be discussing Charles Dickens with someone else tonight.”
Rhodes didn’t think there was much chance of that. He would have bet that Mack was the only person in Clearview who’d read Dickens in years. Unless they still required book reports in junior high school these days. Rhodes wasn’t sure about that.
“How much did he take you for?” Rhodes asked.
“Yeldell? Or Overton?”
“You can start with Yeldell.”
“I know what you think.” Mack dropped the book to the floor. It struck with a solid thump. “You think I’m an old fool, and I guess I am. I got taken not once but twice. But the first time was different.”
“How?”
“I let Yeldell do some work on a car of mine. He did body work for Bull Lowery, but he was a shade-tree mechanic, too. He’d put on a muffler for me once, and he changed my plugs a time or two. He did just fine both times, so I let him do a brake job. He said he’d put on new pads and get the rotors turned, and he’d do it all for about half what a regular mechanic would charge.”
“But it didn’t work out?”
“The brakes were worse after he worked on them than they were before. I took the car back two or three times, but he could never seem to get them fixed. They squealed like a cat was under the car somewhere. I finally took it in to the Ford place, and they told me that the pads were worn out and the rotors needed turning. Yeldell hadn’t done a damn thing to it. He charged me for parts and work that he never did.”
No wonder Yeldell and Overton had been such good buddies, Rhodes thought. They had developed a similar approach to business entrepreneurship. He wondered who had learned from whom.
“You can see why I said what I did,” Mack said. “I was just trying to warn other people away from Yeldell. No need for somebody else to get cheated.”
“And Overton? What did he do?”
“He suckered me in on a paint job. Came by looking at roofs in the neighborhood, but mine’s in pretty good shape, and I told him so. He looked around inside a little and said he noticed that the walls were pretty bad, and they were. Used to have wallpaper on them, but that all came down long ago. I had the walls Sheet rocked and painted then, but the paint was dirty and faded by the time Overton saw it. So I asked how much he’d charge to paint them. He gave me a good price.”
“And you paid him in advance,” Rhodes said.
Mack rocked back and forth a few times. “Fool that I was, I did. And if anybody should have known better, it’s me. I’ve dealt with painters and Mr. Fix-its for a long time, but he was the first one that ever took me. He never painted but two rooms, and those looked like they’d been done by a horse dipping its tail in a paint can and slinging it around. I was out nearly a thousand dollars, and I had to have it all done again.”
“But you didn’t threaten to horsewhip Overton.”
“The hell I didn’t. It’s just that nobody heard me. I went over to his house and told him right to his big flat face what I thought of him. Didn’t do a damn bit of good, though.”
“You could have reported him.”
“And what would have happened? He’d pay a twenty-five dollar fine or sit in jail a day or two. I still wouldn’t have my money back.”
Rhodes looked at the window. There wasn’t much to see outside. It was too dark. But he could hear the wind sighing around the house.
“I didn’t kill either one of them,” Mack said. He spread his hands, looked at the palms, and clasped them together. “I admit I was mad enough to do it at the time, but I didn’t. I never killed anybody in my life, except in Korea in the war, and I’m not even sure about that. I was just shooting in the dark, mostly.”
“And I guess you didn’t know John West, either.”
“What’s he got to do with this?”
“He knew Yeldell. Yeldell and Overton were best friends.”
“You’ve got three men dead by accident, don’t you?” Mack said. “That sounds like a lot, all right, but I didn’t kill ’em.”
“Maybe not. Where were you the night West died?”
“When was that?”
Rhodes told him.
“Then I was sitting right here in this room. I was reading Our Mutual Friend about that time. There’s a drowning in that one, if you’re thinking I’ve been getting ideas from books.”
“I don’t think that,” Rhodes said, but along with the spontaneous combustion, it was enough to make a man wonder.
Although Rhodes talked to Riley for several more minutes, he got no more information from him. In fact, the longer they talked, the more stubborn Riley became, and Rhodes got the distinct impression that Riley wasn’t telling all he knew.
But that was to be expected. If you were the sheriff, people lied to you now and then. Rhodes was used to it. He didn’t like it, but he knew that he usually found out the truth sooner or later.
He told Riley that he had to be going, and Riley had no objections.
“You’re barking up the wrong tree talking to me,” Riley said as he showed Rhodes to the door. “I’d help you if I could, but I just don’t know a thing.”
Once more, Rhodes got the feeling that he was being lied to, but he forgot about it when he got to the car and Hack came on the radio, telling him that he’d better get himself out to the County Line.
“I think maybe there’s a riot goin’ on,” Hack said.
Chapter Twenty-Four
“Buddy’s already on the way out there,” Hack said. “I tried to get you at home, but Ivy said you were out investigatin’. I’m glad I caught up with you because from what I could tell, Buddy’s gonna need some help. You better step on it.”
Rhodes said that he would. If someone at the County Line had actually called in a disturbance, there was bound to be big tro
uble. The owners of the honky tonk didn’t like having outsiders settling any little squabbles that happened to arise in their establishment. In most cases, they preferred to let the participants settle things themselves and then send the losers to the Emergency Room. Sometimes the winners had to go, too. But now and then things got completely out of hand and someone called the law. This looked to be one of those times.
So Rhodes hurried. He even turned on the siren.
When he got to the County Line, he could see immediately that things had indeed gotten out of hand. In the glare of the floodlights that illuminated the parking lot, little knots of men and women were pushing and shoving and slugging one another with fists and the occasional longneck beer bottle.
They were rolling in the white rock chips that topped the parking lot, sprawling across car hoods, and flailing around in pickup beds. The siren and the strobing light bar didn’t bother them at all. Rhodes was pretty sure that no one ever noticed them. It would be hard to hear with the wind and all the shouting that was undoubtedly going on. It was one of the biggest fights Rhodes had ever seen.
And Rhodes knew that it was just the spill-over. Whatever was going on inside the building was bound to be worse.
He parked the car and got out. The north wind whipped the dust off the parking lot and drove it against his pants legs, along with the greasy wrapper from somebody’s hamburger. He shut his eyes for a second while he reached down to pull the paper off his leg. Then he walked forward, shoving his way through a tight clump of men who were butting each other in the forehead and screaming creative obscenities.
Rhodes pulled at them, trying to separate them, but it was no use. He might as well have been invisible for all the attention they paid him. He thought about getting his shotgun out of the car and firing off a few rounds to get their attention, but he decided that he’d better go inside first. Buddy must be in there somewhere. His county car was parked not far from where Rhodes had parked his own.
Rhodes had been in one near-riot at the County Line recently, but it paled in comparison to the one he walked into. There were more people, for one thing, and they were considerably more energetic. It looked like a climactic fight scene from one of John Wayne’s later movies, North to Alaska maybe, or McClintock.
The band at the back of the dance floor was still playing, safe for the time being behind its chicken wire screen. Rhodes couldn’t hear the tune, whatever it was. The fighting was too noisy.
Women were fighting women, women were fighting men, men were fighting men, and Buddy was standing on the bar, his mouth moving and the tendons on his neck standing out. Rhodes couldn’t hear him any more than the brawlers could.
The bartender, a very large man named Zach, was standing under a neon Coors sign, his arms crossed and a look of sad resignation on his face.
A beer bottle flew toward Rhodes’s head. He moved quickly to one side, and the bottle shattered on the door frame. That did it. He turned and went back outside. For just the fraction of a second he thought about driving his car right through the doorway, siren yowling and lights flashing.
But he wasn’t sure the county’s insurance would cover the damages, and he was sure the Commissioners wouldn’t like the idea even a little bit, so he walked on back to the car, shoving aside a couple of men who had locked each other in an mutual unbreakable bear hug. The shove sent them bouncing off a pickup, and they lost their balance, falling to the parking lot. They grunted and groaned, but neither one relinquished his hold.
Rhodes opened the car and got in. He unlocked the shotgun from its stand, checked to see that it was loaded, and got back out.
He didn’t want to fire the shotgun outside to begin with. By the time he got everyone’s attention, he might be out of shells. He’d save that for later.
He walked to the open door of the County Line, avoiding a threesome of free-swinging cowboys who tumbled out just as he got there, and stepped inside.
Buddy was still up on the bar, but this time so was someone else Rhodes recognized.
Yvonne Bilson. She was struggling to get her foot out of the grasp of someone who was trying to drag her back into the fray. Rhodes couldn’t see who it was.
Zach caught sight of Rhodes and the shotgun about then, and Rhodes saw the bartender’s eyes widen.
Rhodes smiled and aimed the gun at the ceiling. He looked up just to make sure there was no one hanging from the rafters. There wasn’t, so he pulled the trigger.
The noise wasn’t deafening — the County line was too spacious for that. But the boom echoed off the walls and got the attention of the less energetic fighters.
It got Buddy’s attention, too. He increased the volume of his yelling, and Rhodes could almost hear him. He fired off another round, and as flakes of plywood drifted down from above, the fighting slacked off considerably.
Rhodes could hear the faint sound of the siren from outside, and he could also hear the band for the first time. The shotgun hadn’t discouraged them. They were playing their version of the Faron Young classic “Wine Me Up.” It wasn’t bad, though Rhodes didn’t think it was nearly as good as the original. But then he had always been partial to Faron Young, who was sometimes billed as “The Singin’ Sheriff.”
Rhodes loosed off one more blast, and the fighting pretty much came to a stop. People began getting up off the floor, crawling out from under tables, straightening their clothes, and even shaking hands.
Buddy stopped yelling, hopped down from the bar, and picked his way through the crowd. Rhodes tossed him the shotgun and said, “You go on outside and see if you can calm them down out there. I have to talk to somebody.”
Buddy nodded, ejected the empty shell, and went through the door.
Rhodes kept his eyes on Yvonne as he pushed through the mob and over to the bar. She had broken free of whoever had a hand on her, and she was about to slide off the bar and make a run for it.
“Stay right there, Mrs. Bilson,” Rhodes called. “I want to talk to you in a minute.”
He looked down at the floor, and there was Grat, who was unconscious. Rhodes didn’t know who had hit him, but he was willing to put money on Yvonne.
“If your husband comes to, tell him I want to talk to him, too,” Rhodes said.
He had been afraid the trouble at the County Line might knock him out of his chance to talk to any of the other people on his list, but there were Grat and Yvonne Bilson almost as if they’d been waiting for him. They hadn’t, of course, and Yvonne obviously didn’t want to talk to him in the least, but he wasn’t going to let her get away. He couldn’t tell about Grat, who still wasn’t conscious, but he figured Grat wasn’t going to want to talk to him, either. It didn’t matter. Rhodes was going to talk to him anyway.
First, however, he wanted to talk to Zach and find out how the fight had gotten started.
The bartender remembered Rhodes from his other visits, and to the sheriff’s surprise he reached under the bar and brought out a can of Dr Pepper.
“Were you expecting me?” Rhodes asked.
“Nope. I was hoping I’d never see you again, if you want to know the truth. But since you always ask for this stuff, I thought I’d be ready just in case. I don’t like for someone to ask for a drink I don’t have. Unless it’s one of those import beers. I don’t mind not having those things. But they make Dr Pepper right here in Texas.”
Rhodes reached into his back pocket for his billfold and heard the roar of a shotgun from the parking lot.
“I didn’t think he’d have to use it out there,” Zach said. “I hope he didn’t have to shoot anybody.”
“Buddy wouldn’t do that,” Rhodes said, laying a dollar bill on the bar. “He’s a trained lawman.”
Zach ignored the bill. “The drink’s on the house.”
“Take the money,” Rhodes told him. “I wouldn’t want to be obligated.”
Zach took the bill and put it in the cash register. Rhodes popped the can and took a drink. The Dr Pepper was icy cold, which was
the best way to drink it if you had to drink it from a can. Yvonne watched him drink, and Rhodes put down the can to smile at her. She didn’t smile back.
Rhodes turned to look at the crowd. Things were getting back to normal. Tables were set upright and one couple was already on the dance floor. The band was playing another old song that Rhodes recognized, “He’s in the Jailhouse Now.”
“Webb Pierce,” Rhodes said.
Zach, who was either too young to remember Webb Pierce or ignorant of his country music heritage or both, said, “Huh?”
“Never mind. What got the fight started?”
Zach nodded toward Yvonne. “She did.”
“You son of a bitch,” Yvonne said.
Rhodes tried to remember what Ty Berry had said. Something about a limited vocabulary. He had Yvonne pegged, all right.
“What happened?” Rhodes asked Zach.
“Nothing more than usual, at first. She was in here dancin’ with some guy, when her husband came in. He didn’t like it, and he grabbed her. The guy she was dancin’ with didn’t like that, so he slugged her husband. My bouncer got there about that time, and they both slugged him. Put him out like a light. I think he’s still on the floor out there somewhere.”
Rhodes looked back. There was a small group of people standing over someone, trying to pull him to his feet. His knees were rubbery, and he couldn’t quite make it. Each time they got him to a standing position, he slid back to the floor.
“That him?” Rhodes asked.
“Yeah,” Zach said. “He’s been hit before. He’ll be all right.”
The shotgun boomed outside.
“Buddy must be getting serious with them out there,” Rhodes said.
Zach frowned. “I hope he’s not sending them home.”
“That’s what he’s doing,” Rhodes said, “if I know Buddy. And I do.”
“Damn. I hate to lose paying customers.”
“They’ll be back,” Rhodes said.
Zach didn’t look convinced. “Maybe. People don’t like to be sent home. It’s not good for customer relations.” He sighed. “Anyway, after those two flattened Roy, the whole place went crazy. But at least no one drove any motorcycles through here this time.”