Too Late to Die

by Bill Crider

  “That’s not from the Bible, is it?” said Rhodes as he stepped to the door and opened it.

  “No,” Mrs. Barrett said. “No, that’s not from the Bible. That’s from me.”

  As he drove away from the Barrett house, Rhodes thought again about Ivy Daniels. He hoped she didn’t feel like Mrs. Barrett, and he was pretty sure that she didn’t. He and Claire had shared a very satisfying sex life both before and after the birth of Kathy, and he had never seen anything irreligious about that.

  In a matter of seconds he was back on Thurston’s main street, and he parked at Hod’s store. He got out and went in. Hod was sacking groceries and didn’t look up, so Rhodes stepped to the loafer’s bench. “Bill Tomkins been in today?” he said.

  Larry Bell bent over and spit into his Styrofoam cup. “Yeah, Sheriff. He was in earlier.”

  “Guess he’d be home, then, by now,” Rhodes said.

  “Don’t know about that. Said he was goin’ fishing this morning.”

  “At the lake or around here?”

  “Round here. I think he’s probably at that tank used to serve the Thurston Gin.”

  “Any fish in there?”

  “Bass, mostly. Used to be some cats in there, but I haven’t heard of anybody takin’ one of them in years. Lots of little perch, too, but nobody cares ‘bout them.”

  “Pretty good bass?” Rhodes was not merely making conversation. He had a real love of fishing for bass, but he seldom got the chance.

  “Not bad. Old Bill took one out of there last week, ought to’ve gone three-four pounds.”

  There hadn’t been a cotton gin in Thurston for forty years, but everyone still referred to the Thurston Gin Tank, a body of water about a tenth of a mile square (not round, as most stock tanks in the area), with a smaller connecting tank beside it.

  Up north, they call them “ponds,” Rhodes thought as he drove up. He remembered some kids from New Jersey who had visited his family while he was growing up. He had offered to take them fishing in a local tank. “In a tank?” they had asked, incredulous. “You can’t fish in a tank!” Turned out they thought a tank was a big iron barrel. Well, the Gin Tank was hardly that.

  The sides of it were dammed around with earth, ten feet higher than the surrounding pasture. Johnson grass, berry vines, milkweed, Bermuda grass, and who knew what else grew in profusion over the pasture and the dam. Willow trees that no one had planted had grown up all over the dam, looking for the water that they needed so desperately in the heat of the summer months. On one side of the dam, the east side, there was a break that was bridged by several rotting planks. Water flowed under the planks from one tank to the other.

  The old gin property was not fenced. It covered several acres of land just off the main road, within sight of the stores and homes of Thurston. The family that owned the land had long since moved to the city, but they refused to sell the property. They held out fond hopes that one day oil or gas would be discovered in the Thurston area, not a very likely possibility to Rhodes’s mind, so they kept the land and paid their taxes with regularity. In the meantime, they had no intention of putting out any money on upkeep; the land was unfenced, and anyone who wanted to fish in the tank was welcome to do so.

  Rhodes drove up as near the dam as he could get and parked his cruiser, leaving behind him two lines of crushed grass and weeds. He couldn’t see anyone on the dam, but there was the old gray Chevrolet that Tomkins had driven up to Barrett’s store the other day parked not far from a big hackberry tree. Rhodes got out of the car and started up on the dam. Beggar lice stuck to his pants legs, and he was sure that chiggers were leaping from the Johnson grass by the thousands to bury their heads in his flesh. It made him itch just to think about it, but there was nothing he could do.

  When he got to the top of the dam he looked around. Tomkins was on the other side of the tank, in a shady spot between two willow trees. There was a camp stool nearby, but Tomkins was standing up with a cane pole under his left arm. With his right hand he was putting a large shiner on a hook. As Rhodes watched, he tossed the shiner out into the tank. After it hit and sank, a red and white plastic cork bobbed on the surface of the water.

  Rhodes was mindful of the fisherman’s etiquette that required him to remain silent to avoid scaring the fish. Rhodes wasn’t sure he believed that noise made any difference, but he walked as silently as he could around the dam to where Tomkins was. By the time he got there, Tomkins was seated on the folding stool and casting a spinner bait into the tank with a cheap black rod and Zebco 33 reel.

  “How’re they biting?” Rhodes asked, hunkering down by Tomkins.

  “So-so,” Tomkins wheezed in his asthmatic way. “Stringer’s over there.” He indicated a stick anchored in the mud.

  Rhodes walked over to the stick and saw that a nylon line was tied to it. He pulled up the line. As it emerged from the slightly muddy brown water, he saw, and felt, the fish. There were three, the line running through their gills and mouths. Two were fairly small, but the third weighed about three pounds. The water rolled off their scales, making them shine in the rays of the sun that came through the willow branches.

  “Nice mess of fish,” Rhodes said, lowering them back into the water. “I wouldn’t mind catching a few like that myself.”

  Tomkins reeled in his spinner bait, but he didn’t make another cast. “I get the feelin’ you didn’t come out here just to talk about the fishin’,” he wheezed.

  “That’s, right, Bill, I didn’t.” Rhodes turned to face him. At the same time his eyes caught a brief glimpse of something shiny in a grove of trees about a hundred yards away, something that he barely glimpsed over Tomkins’s head. It was easy to see the trees, because Tomkins was seated in a gap between the two willows, and their branches and leaves were quite thin. Rhodes dismissed the shine, not even sure that he had seen it.

  “I hear you’ve been telling some folks that Jeanne Clinton had quite a few visitors at night while Elmer was out,”

  Rhodes said. “Now, you mentioned Hod Barrett to me, and then you hushed. If there was ever anybody else, though, you’d better tell me now. I’d hate to think you were hiding evidence of a crime from me.”

  Tomkins laid down his rod and reel. “Just a minute, Sheriff,” he said. “You just hold your horses. I might’ve had a good reason for not tellin’ you who else was there.”

  Rhodes shook his head. “No such thing, Bill. There’s no good reason for hiding something when murder’s involved. I know you went by there, and Hod did. Now I want to know who else.”

  Tomkins spit in the tank, then rubbed his hand over his face. “All right, I’ll tell you. But you’ll see why I didn’t at first. I knew you’d find out. See, one of the others that stopped by to see Jeanne was your election opponent, Ralph Claymore.” He paused to I take a deep, rough breath. “I just didn’t see how it would do you or Mr. Claymore either one any good for me to bring that up.”

  “One of the others, Bill? One of them? It’s beginning to sound like Jeanne was holding open house whenever Elmer cut out for work.” Rhodes shifted his weight and leaned a little forward. “It might make a man wonder if somebody who was seeing her got just a little jealous, maybe. Maybe he could have gotten so upset that he decided to do something about it.”

  Tomkins jumped up from his camp stool, angry. Rhodes thought he looked a little like Walter Brennan taking on Richard Crenna in an episode of The Real McCoys.

  “You got no call to say that, Sheriff! Jeanne was just a sweet, nice girl. Let me tell you who.”

  He never got to tell who because a number of things happened almost simultaneously. Rhodes, no matter how much he tried later, was never able to get the sequence exactly straight in his mind.

  He saw the flash again in the grove of Ames, that was for sure. He remembered a few willow leaves and maybe part of a branch falling, and he was pretty sure that he heard the two rifle shots. What he remembered most, though, was the way that Bill Tomkins’s head just seemed to sort of c
ome apart, and how Tomkins dropped like a rock, rolled a couple of times, and came to a stop in the water, with the red stain seeming quite brown as it widened around him.

  Chapter 8

  Rhodes was up over the tank dam and running toward the grove of trees almost before his eyes had time to take in the details of Tomkins’s death. He ran through the chest-high Johnson grass without a thought of either cuts or chiggers. He didn’t break any land speed records, but when he arrived he could hear that someone else was still scrambling around in there.

  Sounds in the woods can be deceptive, and Rhodes paused to listen. He wasn’t sure just which direction to take, so he plunged straight in, drawing his .38 as he did so. A twig lashed across his open eye, and tears began to flow. “Damn,” he said, stumbling a bit as his foot caught in a thorn-covered vine that grew along the ground. He put the pistol back in its holster and used his hands to help clear his way.

  While the grove was not a forest in any sense of the word, it was nevertheless dense, a reminder of what all the country around Thurston must have been like at one time, before the cotton farmers moved in and cleared all the land. Or most of the land. Occasionally, someone would have more space than he needed, or someone would just happen to like a little woods. In such cases a stand of trees would remain, and even an acre or two of trees could seem like a forest when a man was trying to run through it.

  Rhodes soon realized that he had little chance of catching up with anyone except by sheer accident, but he kept on. Sometimes he got lucky.

  Unfortunately, this was not one of the times, and after fifteen minutes of blundering about, ripping his pants leg and getting an angry scratch across the back of his hand besides, Rhodes gave up and went back to the tank.

  Tomkins still lay where he had fallen, and Rhodes felt a real surge of regret tinged with guilt. He hadn’t for a minute really suspected that the scrawny Tomkins had killed Jeanne Clinton. He’d only been trying to stir him up and maybe get Tomkins to tell him something he could use. Instead, he’d gotten him killed. It was obvious that whoever had been hiding in the trees was waiting for a shot at Tomkins, who couldn’t be seen over the top of the dam as long as he was sitting down. But when he’d jumped up, angry at Rhodes’s insinuations, he’d become a target.

  Even worse, in one way, was the fact that Tomkins had been just about to give Rhodes another name. He’d never do that now.

  Rhodes pulled the body out of the water and into the shade of the willow tree, thinking of an old folk song that he’d heard The Weavers sing on the radio when he was young: “Bury Me Beneath the Willow.” He felt sorry for Bill Tomkins, but there was nothing he could do for him now. He pulled the fish stringer out of the water, pulled the cord through their gills and mouths, and released them. Each one held itself motionless for a second or two, then twitched and was gone. Then he turned to go into town and make the necessary calls.

  He used the telephone in Hod Barrett’s store. Larry Bell was at the counter. “Sure, Sheriff, you’re welcome to use the phone,” he said. “I don’t think old Hod would mind.”

  “Where’s Hod?” Rhodes asked as he dialed.

  “Don’t know,” Bell said. “He just asked me to take over for a while. I do it every now and again when he needs to step out. He’s been gone about an hour now, so I expect he’ll be back pretty quick. What’s up?”

  “Never mind,” Rhodes said, as the justice of the peace answered his ring.

  It took the rest of the morning to get things straight at the crime scene, but Rhodes learned a little in the process. He found, eventually, two brass cartridge cases near a huge hackberry tree, and there was enough scuffing on the trunk to indicate that someone had recently climbed it. There was a broad limb where someone could have sat and had a good view of the gap between the willows at the Gin Tank.

  The casings were for a .30-.30, but that didn’t mean much. Probably every male in Thurston had a deer rifle, and probably every one of those rifles was a .30-.30. The casings were made by Remington, which was even less of a clue.

  Rhodes questioned most of the residents of the nearby houses, but none of them had heard the shots or noticed anything out of the ordinary, like a man running along the road with a rifle in his hand, though to tell the truth, such a sight was not so rare in Thurston as an outsider might think it to be.

  So Rhodes drove back to Clearview with another corpse on his hands and too many more unanswered questions to count. He’d called Hack on the telephone, again avoiding the radio for whatever good that would do, so he didn’t bother to go by the jail. He stopped for a quick hamburger, and then headed for Ralph Claymore’s house.

  Claymore was a gentleman rancher, and he was just as likely to be at home as not. Years ago, he had discovered the benefits of the U. S. Government’s generous soil bank program and found that he could make more money not growing cotton than he could make by actually growing the stuff. He’d gradually begun buying up all the land he could and putting that in the soil bank, along with what he’d already owned.

  Uncle Sam was making the payments, and Claymore was taking it easy instead of getting all hot and sweaty in the fields. After that, Claymore saw the advantages that were open to a thinking businessman. He traded in cattle and horses, and as often as not he came away the winner in any deal that he was involved in. As the years went by, he began to accumulate a sizeable bank account, to drive bigger and bigger cars, and to wear double-knit jeans instead of the old cotton overalls he’d started in.

  Claymore’s house was about a quarter mile outside of Clearview on a well-maintained county road. The commissioners always seemed to be able to get Claymore’s road taken care of. The house, like Claymore himself, had an impressive appearance. It was long and low, made of adobe brick, with a red tile roof, probably the only tile roof in Clearview, Rhodes thought. The yard, though not up to the standards of Hod Barrett’s wife, was neat enough. There was a long gooseneck trailer in the paved drive, with a Lincoln nearly as long parked bide it.

  Rhodes wondered why anyone in his right mind would want to drive a county Plymouth when he could be driving his own Lincoln. He pulled in behind the trailer and parked the car.

  Claymore’s doorbell played “The Eyes of Texas.” Or maybe it was “I’ve Been Workin’ on the Railroad,” but Rhodes wouldn’t have bet on it. He wondered if the voters of Blacklin County knew about that doorbell, but somehow he doubted that it was a valid campaign issue.

  The door was opened by Claymore’s wife, who unfortunately looked more like his mother. She was one of those women who had gone gray with a vengeance and who was also small and rather frail. Add to that a dry skin that wrinkled early, and you got a woman who looked older than her years. She seldom appeared with Claymore at any of his campaign speeches. “Why, it’s Sheriff Rhodes,” she said.

  “Hello, Mrs. Claymore,” Rhodes said. “I’d like to speak to your husband if he’s in.”

  “Of course,” she said, opening the door all the way and stepping to the side. “Come right in. I’ll call Ralph.”

  She proceeded to do exactly that in a voice much stronger than Rhodes would have expected. Her voice echoed in the entrance hall, and if Claymore was in the house he must have heard it. In fact, he appeared almost at once.

  Ralph Claymore at home was just like Ralph Claymore anywhere else—except for the hat. He had on the western shirt, the boots, the belt with the big silver buckle, but no hat. His black, wavy hair was in stark contrast to his wife’s sullen gray.

  If Claymore was surprised to see Dan Rhodes in his hall, he didn’t show it. He stuck out his right hand and grabbed Rhodes’s hand, pumping it as if Rhodes were one of his favorite constituents. “Dan, Dan, good to see you,” he said heartily. “Come on in. Dora can make us some coffee.”

  “No coffee, thanks,” Rhodes said to Mrs. Claymore. “I just need to talk to Ralph here about the campaign.”

  “Of course, of course,” Claymore said. “Come on down to my study. We can talk there. Dor
a’s not really very interested in my electioneering, are you, honey?”

  Dora shook her gray head, and Claymore began steering Rhodes away. “You just go on in the den and watch a little TV, honey,” he said. “I think it’s about time for Family Feud now, and you know how you hate to miss that one. Mr. Rhodes and I won’t be long.”

  Dora obediently wandered off in the direction of what Rhodes assumed to be the den, and Claymore guided him down the hall to the study.

  When they stepped through the door, Rhodes wondered just what it was that Claymore studied. There was a huge oak desk with a glass top, and behind it was a wall covered with a built-in bookshelf that ran the length of the room, a good twelve feet. But there were relatively few books on the shelves. It looked to Rhodes as if Claymore owned the complete works of Louis L’Amour, and very little else in the realm of literature. The rest of the shelf space was taken up by western bric-a-brac—rusty spurs, lengths of maybe fifty different kinds of barbed wire mounted on boards, mounted pistols, stirrups, rifles (some new, some old, and at least one .30-.30), and even an old hat or two.

  Rhodes turned and looked around the room. On the other walls there were several framed pictures, all of them on western themes. None of the pictures was a Remington, but there was at least one that was a pretty good imitation. There were what looked like Indian rugs on the hardwood flooring.

  Claymore went behind the desk and sat in his brown leather executive chair. “Make yourself comfortable,” he said to Rhodes. “Have a seat.” He gestured to a hard-bottomed wooden chair that sat near the desk.

  Rhodes hadn’t been tricked into the teacher/student relationship in years. “I’ll stand, I think,” he said. “There are a couple of questions I’d like to ask you.”

  Claymore leaned back and laced his fingers behind his neck. “Ask away, but before you get started, let me tell you that what happened the other night in Mushy had nothing to do with me. I don’t work that way. I’m trying to run as clean a campaign as I can, and I wouldn’t stoop to mud-slinging of any sort, as I’m sure you wouldn’t.” Though Claymore’s voice was as deep and convincing as ever, Rhodes thought he detected a slight quaver in it.