by Bill Crider
“Considering how much he’s probably had to drink by that time of the morning, I can see how he might come to that conclusion,” Rhodes said.
“Yeah, I guess,” Hack said. “But I don’t take much to gettin’ woke up at that time of mornin’ to hear some drunk tellin’ me about how somebody is tryin’ to poison him with beer.”
“So what came of it?” Rhodes asked.
“Not much. Turns out some fella down the road from Turner had borrowed a six pack off him a week or so back and just returned it. Since nobody was home, he just left it on the steps. Turner recalled that about the time he got home and called the guy.”
“He come back?”
Hack laughed. “He surely did. He was so afraid we’d send the stuff off to be analyzed that he came back to get it. I ‘spect it’s been drunk by now. Anyway, it’ll never last till night.”
Rhodes agreed. He checked a few reports and decided to take another trip to Thurston. He was just about to leave when Billy Don Painter walked in.
Billy Don Painter was the nearest thing to a hotshot lawyer in Blacklin County. He’d graduated from the law school at Austin and managed to pass the bar on his second try. A couple of times early in his career he’d gotten lucky with juries and managed to get a couple of men off when nearly everyone had thought he didn’t have a prayer. Ever since, he’d had the reputation of the man to get if you were really in trouble or if you wanted to win a big suit.
Women seemed to find him attractive, or maybe it was his money they liked. At any rate, he’d been married three times to progressively younger brides. The current one was about twenty-three. Billy Don was close to fifty himself.
No one in Clearview had ever seen Billy Don Painter without a jacket and tie. He didn’t buy the suits locally, either. They were expensive and conservative. His ties always matched. He was tall and trim and looked good in his clothes. He’d always reminded Rhodes of a tall James Mason, with a Texas drawl.
“Mornin’, Sheriff,” he said as he strolled into the jail. He always entered a room as if he owned it and anyone else there was merely visiting. “How you all doin’ this fine day?”
“I’m fine, Mr. Painter,” Rhodes said. “What can we do for you?”
“Not me, Sheriff, not me. You can do nothin’ for me. It’s my client, Mr. Terry Wayne, for whom you can do something.”
Rhodes had known it was coming as soon as Painter had stepped in the door. Painter hadn’t had a hot case in nearly a year now, and a good police brutality contest would get him back in the public eye, where he loved to be.
“And what is it I can do for poor Mr. Wayne?” Rhodes asked.
“Why, you can give him justice. Fire that brutal deputy of yours and see to it that the county recompenses Mr. Wayne for the terrible physical suffering that he has undergone.”
“He looked pretty healthy to me the other night,” Rhodes said.
“That was before I had him examined by a doctor,” Painter said. “He has suffered serious internal injury to his vitals, and this county is responsible.”
“Well, I guess that could be a matter of opinion,” Rhodes said. “I guess the county could hire a doctor, too.
“You had better do so, then,” Painter told him. “I am on my way at this moment to the office of the district attorney to file charges against you, your deputy, and the commissioners of this county. Unless we can come to some settlement, of course.”
“Of course,” Rhodes said. “Naturally you’ve consulted with the commissioners about this.”
“Naturally,” Painter said.
Fine, Rhodes thought. That’s just fine. He wondered why the telephone wasn’t ringing at that very moment. He didn’t say anything, however.
Painter stood and looked at Rhodes for a second or two. Then he turned to go. “See you in court, Sheriff,” he said.
Not if I see you first, Rhodes thought, then chided himself for acting like an adolescent. Still, he couldn’t bring himself to respond.
After the lawyer had left, Hack broke the silence. “Never a dull moment,” he said. “Hard to remember what I did for fun before I took up this here law enforcement career.”
“I’m glad the county could help you out,” Rhodes said.
It was funny how big things could drive little things out of your mind. Rhodes hadn’t even thought about the robbery of Hod Barrett’s store until he drove up to the door. It would make a good excuse to begin his talk with Hod.
Barrett was inside, counting out change for a customer. “. . And twenty-five makes a dollar,” he said, putting a quarter into the hand of a woman in a cotton print dress. “You come again, now, Miz Barney.”
“I will, Mr. Barrett,” the woman responded, picking up the small brown sack that held her purchases. She stepped by Rhodes without noticing him.
It was quiet in the store, especially for a Saturday morning. There was no one on the loafer’s bench, and no one else in the store. “Where is everybody?” Rhodes asked.
“That damn Safeway in Clearview is havin’ a big sale,” Barrett said. “Won’t be anybody in here today unless they run out of bread and milk. I might just as well close up.”
“Can’t be that bad,” Rhodes said.
“Bad enough,” Barrett said. “At least I ain’t been robbed in a day or two, though.”
Given his opening, Rhodes asked, “Tell me a little bit more about that robbery, Hod. What with Jeanne getting killed and all, I really didn’t get to ask you everything I needed to know.
“What else could I tell you?” Hod asked. “You saw the break-in. I told you what was taken.”
“You didn’t tell me exactly what was taken,” Rhodes said. “You just said ‘smokes and beers,’ as I remember.”
Barrett came out from behind the counter and led Rhodes to the back of the store. In front of the stacks of Northern tissue was an opened case of Merit Menthol 100s. “Got about six cartons out of here,” Barrett said. “They got a few six packs of Lone Star, too. As far as I can tell, that’s all they got. Like I said, probably just some kids out to get somethin’ for free.”
“Probably,” Rhodes said. “By the way, Hod, where were you yesterday morning? I came in here to use your telephone, and Larry Bell was minding the store.”
“He does that for me every now and then,” Hod said, “I had to go to the house for a minute, and I was deliverin’ an order or two. I’m not like a Safeway. If my customers can’t come to me, I’ll go to them. Not that that keeps them from going to Clearview when they have the time.”
It sounded likely, and it might even be true, Rhodes thought. “Have you talked to your wife about your going over to the Clintons’ house?” he asked.
Hod brought up his hands, then jammed them in his pockets. “I don’t want to talk to you about that no more, Sheriff. I said more than I ever wanted to say already. You got to believe that has nothing to do with me or my wife now. Jeanne’s dead, and I’m sorry. Real sorry. But now I got to go on and maybe find somebody else to talk to. But that somebody won’t be my wife.”
“I may need to talk to her again,” Rhodes said.
“You just go right ahead, Sheriff. I expect you’ve done all the damage you can do me in that way,” Barrett told him.
“Before I do,” Rhodes said, “there’s one more thing I’d like to ask you. Think about it before you say anything, because it won’t be obvious. If it was, you’d already have told me. But did you ever see anyone else at Jeanne’s when you went there? Or maybe somebody just hanging around there at night?”
Barrett shook his head. “Never.” ‘
“Are you sure? There were others there from time to time, whether you knew it or not. Bill Tomkins certainly knew.”
Barrett jerked his hands from his pockets. “That damn silly Tomkins didn’t have no more sense than a possum eatin’ persimmons. He told all kinds of tales here in the store about one thing or another, but nobody ever paid him no mind.”
“I believe he was telling the truth a
bout this,” Rhodes said. “One man he saw has already admitted it. . besides you, I mean. He was telling the truth about you, too. Come to think of it, your wife may have heard about you from Tomkins.”
“That’s enough of that, Sheriff,” Barrett said. “Plumb enough. I got a store to run here, and you ain’t helpin’. I never saw anybody around Jeanne’s, and that’s that. Bill Tomkins was a gossip and a fool, and anybody else in town would tell you the same.” He stepped around Rhodes and went back to the front of the store.
Rhodes watched him go. The screen doors opened, and someone came in, handing Barrett an order list which he started to fill by going around to the shelves on the left wall. Rhodes went on out the back door.
The cooler was still on the ground where it had fallen. Hod probably hadn’t had time to get his wife to build a new stand for it. Rhodes looked at the opening thoughtfully. Someone had nailed boards to the window facing from the inside. Maybe Barrett had done that himself.
Rhodes wondered about who had broken in. Kids, young kids, would have taken more candy than anything, and teenagers would have taken a lot more beer. Hungry people would have taken food.
Rhodes began to feel that he was looking at a jigsaw puzzle, with the pieces scattered all over a table. If he could just push the pieces around until they began to look like something, he might be able to assemble them. In fact, his mind was pushing them around right now, and he wasn’t too pleased with the picture that he thought might result when the assembly was done. He kicked at the wooden frame. It was time for him to go see James Allen.
James Allen lived on one of the country roads between Clearview and Thurston in a house like the one that Jack built. Allen had started out in a small five-room house when he’d first married, and then he and his wife had begun having children on a yearly basis. They’d stopped after seven, but Allen had kept adding rooms onto the sides and back of his house for years. Anyone familiar with the original dwelling could still discern part of the front of the house, but that was about all.
Allen had been a bulldozer operator who had gone into partnership with his brother and soon found himself making a lot of money in heavy equipment jobs. He needed the money to finance his housing additions, but within a few years he was making a comfortable living even beyond his basic needs. That was when he decided to run for county commissioner.
People in the country around Clearview knew him and liked him, and he won his precinct handily. He and Rhodes had gone to school together, played football together, and even dated some of the same girls. He was Rhodes’s best friend among the commissioners.
He was mowing his front yard as Rhodes drove up. “Can’t you get one of the boys to do that?” Rhodes asked as he stepped out of his car.
Allen grinned and killed the mower. “I need the exercise,” he said. “Besides, all those boys are too tired after being out half the night chasing girls. What can I do for you, Dan?”
“I guess you’ve heard about that Terry Wayne hiring Billy Don Painter,” Rhodes said.
“Yep. Heard it from the man himself,” Allen said.
“Let’s go sit down.”
They walked over to two aluminum lawn chairs webbed with colorful green and yellow plastic strips. The chairs were situated under a tall pecan tree, but the sun had shifted since they were placed there. Rhodes and Allen each took a chair and moved it back nearer the trunk of the tree, into the patchy shade of its branches. Rhodes sat and took a deep breath. He loved the smell of new-mown grass, especially if he hadn’t had to mow it himself.
“What do you think will happen?” Rhodes said.
“The usual,”‘ Allen responded. “The judge will call a special meeting of the commissioners, and we’ll all piss and moan about the situation, and then we’ll support the sheriff’s department one hundred percent just like we always do.”
Rhodes laughed. “Yeah, I know how that support goes. It sounds fine in the paper, but off the record I’m going to get my butt chewed.”
“Off the record you probably will. There’s two or three men who don’t think too much of Johnny Sherman, and they weren’t happy when he hired on with the department. They may use this little scrape as an excuse to get his job.”
“There’s never been any question about his work before,” Rhodes said stiffly.
“I know that, and so does the rest of the court,” Allen said, “but some of them remember when Johnny was a kid. He had a few problems back then. Little things, mostly, but there were one or two times when things got more serious.”
“That must’ve been when I was out of the county, then,” Rhodes said. “I never heard about them. Not even privately.”
“They weren’t the kind of things anybody’d want to bring up, exactly,” Allen told him. “In fact, you could kind of say they were covered up, in a way.”
“What kind of way?”
“The kind of way things get covered up. Johnny was a good ball player, and the team was in the district race. So what if he got into a few fights? It’s true that the other boys involved never wanted to press charges, and that they even refused to say that Johnny started the fights when it came right down to it, but one of them was beat up pretty bad. He was on the football team too, but he was only a second-stringer, so nobody worried too much about him except maybe his folks. He didn’t play any more ball that year, that’s for sure.”
Rhodes tipped his chair back and thought about what Allen had said. “Why didn’t anybody tell me this when Johnny came around about a job?”
“Letting bygones be bygones, I guess you could say. Giving Johnny a chance to show he’d changed.”
“But now we’ve got some people who’re thinking he hasn’t changed, and they’ll be saying that they knew all along he was no good. They’ll be saying they tried all along to keep me from hiring him.” Rhodes sighed. He’d been through things like this before, on a smaller scale. It was a part of his job that he didn’t like, any more than he liked slapping backs and shaking hands, the kind of things that Ralph Claymore was so good at. Maybe Claymore would make a better sheriff than I do, at that, Rhodes thought.
“It won’t be as bad as all that,”‘ Allen said. “At least I hope it won’t. If we can just prove that Johnny didn’t start that fight and that Terry Wayne and his buddy are just two drunks lookin’ to take the county for some money in a false suit, everything will be all right.
“And if we can’t prove that?” Rhodes asked.
“Don’t even think like that, especially out loud,” Allen said. “It’s bad luck.”
Rhodes got out of his chair. “You’re right,” he said. “I’ve got to have a positive attitude. Thanks for talking to me, James.”
Allen stood and put out his hand, which Rhodes shook. “Don’t worry about it,” Allen said. “Everything will work out fine.”
“I know,” Rhodes said as he started for his car. “I won’t worry about it.”
But of course he did.
Chapter 12
The county courthouse had always looked to Rhodes like a smaller version of the Kremlin, but he’d never mentioned the resemblance to anyone. He wasn’t sure there was anyone in Blacklin County who could appreciate the irony. He liked the old building himself, and he hated to think what might happen to it if some of the good citizens of the county started trying to give it a facelift to remove any suspected communist influence.
He walked up the broad walk under the shading pecan trees, up the wide front steps past the usual crowd of courthouse loafers, and through the pneumatic glass doors which were one of the only modern features of the building. They had been added a few years back when the building had been air-conditioned, and Rhodes still regretted both additions-the doors and the air-conditioning. With its thick stone walls and twelve-foot ceilings, the courthouse had always seemed to him cool and comfortable even in the summertime.
His shoe heels struck echoes from the marble floors as he walked down the hall to the stairs. He mounted the stairs, turned left into
a corridor much narrower than the main halls, and came to his own private office. Like most sheriffs of Blacklin County, Rhodes spent most of his time either at the jail or on the road. No one ever called the courthouse office without calling the jail first, and no one ever came by the office looking for the sheriff because he was never there. Unless, of course, he wanted to be alone.
Rhodes wanted to be alone. The Terry Wayne business had him worried, and the two murders in Thurston had him even more worried. Allen hadn’t mentioned the murders. After all, there was no real pressure from the murders yet. Jeanne Clinton and Bill Tomkins weren’t from prominent families, so the county fathers weren’t taking any particular interest in them. But Rhodes knew that the murders were being talked about, and they certainly bothered him. He didn’t like for things to happen in his county unless he could take care of them.
He unlocked the door to his office. The top half was of pebbled glass, with the words “County Sheriff” somehow inlaid in gold letters. Rhodes’s name was not on the door, which saved the county the expense of changing glass after elections. That reminded Rhodes of his own prospects in the upcoming election. Obviously two unsolved murders were not helping him, not to mention the Terry Wayne case. Besides, Ralph Claymore was an imposing opponent, and Rhodes felt honor bound not to mention Claymore’s involvement with Jeanne Clinton unless it became apparent that the involvement was more than it seemed at present.
Rhodes walked over to a sagging leather office chair behind a completely bare oak desk. He sank into the chair, leaned back, and put his feet up on the desk top, which was inlaid with scratched and scarred black leather. Probably scarred by a lot of feet propped on it rather than a lot of hard work, Rhodes thought.
He wondered briefly how Ralph Claymore would be at investigating a crime like the murder of Jeanne Clinton. Whereas Rhodes had done most of the work himself, questioning everyone who looked as if he might be involved, Claymore would probably have laid all that kind of thing off on the deputies, preferring to talk to the judge and the commissioners, clapping them on the backs and assuring them that everything was being taken care of. Claymore could be very convincing, with his confident voice and manner. Even if he never caught the killer, he’d have the commissioners believing he had, and the whole thing would blow over in a week or two. By then, everyone would have forgotten all about it. It wasn’t the first time Rhodes had wished he could have a little of Claymore in himself, but he didn’t, and that was that.