by Bill Crider
Rhodes supposed it was nice to have some life in the downtown area again, but he hated to see the buildings go. They’d been there all his life, and their decline and fall reminded him uncomfortably of what the passing of time could do to both buildings and people. He told himself that while change was inevitable, that didn’t mean he had to like it, especially when it meant getting older and losing his forelock.
He got out of the car at the precinct barn, and the sun shot through his thinning hair like a molten bullet. It was almost enough to make Rhodes wish he wore a hat. But he didn’t like hats, and in fact he was probably the only sheriff in Texas who didn’t wear a felt Stetson in the fall and winter and a straw hat in the spring and summer. He wondered if there was a rule about not wearing a straw hat after Labor Day.
Rhodes thought he heard sirens in the distance. Probably another grass fire, he thought. He hoped it wasn’t a bad one.
He looked out at the precinct barns. Drums of weed-killing poison were stacked along one wall, and pest strips hung from the ceiling. Rhodes thought the strips had been outlawed years earlier, and these were probably leftovers. Bulldozers, tractors, mowers, and road graders sat under a long tin roof, though Rhodes supposed that some of them were out at work. He was glad he wasn’t driving one of them. Some of them had little umbrella canopies that provided little or no protection from the sun and none from the heat. Others had nothing at all.
The inside of the precinct office was so cool compared to the outside that it chilled the sweat on Rhodes’s skin. He felt for a second as if he’d walked into a meat locker.
Mrs. Wilkie sat behind her desk, tapping away on a computer keyboard. She looked up when Rhodes came in and gave him a professional smile.
“Good morning, Sheriff,” she said. “Hot enough for you?”
“Not really,” Rhodes said. “I generally like it when it’s about ten degrees warmer. Really does my circulation good.”
Mrs. Wilkie looked at him as if he might have lost his mind. She said, “I guess you’re here to see Mr. Allen.”
“That’s right. Is he here this morning?”
The door to Allen’s office was open, and he had obviously been listening. Without waiting for Mrs. Wilkie to announce Rhodes he came out, shook hands, and told Rhodes to come on in. When they were inside, Allen closed the door.
They sat down and talked for a while about inconsequential things. Rhodes asked about Allen’s children, of whom there were, as best Rhodes could recall, seven. Two were in college, and five were still living at home. But one of those was about to go away to college in the fall.
“College is expensive these days,” Rhodes said.
“What isn’t?” Allen said.
The talk turned to the Fourth of July festivities, and Rhodes admitted that he wouldn’t be entering the three-mile fun run again. The fun run had been instituted ten years earlier, and so far Rhodes had an unbroken string of ten years when he hadn’t been a part of it. He was shooting for at least twenty-five. He thought that fun run was an oxymoron, like jumbo shrimp and Internet privacy.
“You used to be able to run,” Allen said. “‘Will-o’-the wisp Dan Rhodes’ is what they called you in the Herald, I think.”
In his one moment of glory as a high school football player, Rhodes had run a kickoff back for a touchdown, gaining him a nickname that only very few people remembered. Shortly after that run, he’d been injured, and his athletic career had come to an inglorious end.
“That was a long time ago,” he said. “I don’t think they call anybody will-o’-the-wisp these days.”
“No,” Allen said. “I’m not sure anyone under the age of forty would know what it meant. They’d probably call you ‘Ramblin’ Rhodes’ now. But I have a feeling you didn’t come here to talk over old times at Clearview High.”
Rhodes wished he had. He said, “No. It’s about something I heard from a reporter.”
Allen leaned back in his desk chair and crossed his arms over his chest.
“Jennifer Loam,” he said. “I should have known. What did she tell you about me?”
“About you? Nothing. She accused me of using inmates to paint my house.”
“What a crock. Roy Dean Turner did that.”
“I’m glad you noticed. Can I call you as a witness?”
“You’re kidding. She’s not going to print some crazy story about you using inmate labor, is she?”
“I hope not. But Ms. Loam is checking out all the angles before she absolves me. You commissioners are another matter.”
Allen grinned ruefully. “How well I know.”
“So she’s talked to you?”
“Among others. I’m not the main suspect.”
“Who is?”
“I don’t know for sure,” Allen said. “But I can tell you who Loam spent the most time with.
“I think I already know,” Rhodes said. “She let it slip.”
Allen raised his eyebrows and said, “She doesn’t strike me as the kind to let anything slip.”
“I sort of tricked her. She was upset about the way she was treated by one of the commissioners, and I asked her for a name.”
“And she told you.”
“Yes. I’m not sure she realized it.”
“Not that you’d try to trick me,” Allen said, “but why don’t you tell me the name.”
“You’ll tell me if I’m right?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“Jay Beaman,” Rhodes said.
Allen nodded. “That would be the one.”
“I wonder what she has on him?”
“Maybe nothing at all. She thought she had something on you, remember?”
“She seems to think she has better evidence in Beaman’s case. Which reminds me: she said her ‘source’ was going to provide her with pictures of the inmates painting my house. I wonder if she was promised something like that in Beaman’s case.”
“You mean she might not have the evidence yet?” Allen said.
“I thought from what she said that she’d seen the evidence on the commissioner,” Rhodes said. “But now I think I could have been wrong.”
“Let’s hope so. We really don’t need any scandals around here.”
Rhodes had a cynical feeling he knew why Allen felt that way. Commissioners were generally about as secure in their positions as any politician ever got. Some of them spent decades on the job without ever having an opponent. They managed to build up so much money on campaign contributions that a newcomer didn’t really have a chance to compete. About the only thing that an incumbent had to fear was some kind of scandal.
Before Rhodes could put his thoughts into words, there was a timid knock on the office door. Allen got up, walked around his desk, and opened the door. Rhodes turned his head to see Mrs. Wilkie standing there.
“I hate to interrupt,” she said, “but there’s a phone call for the sheriff.”
“He can take it in here,” Allen said.
Mrs. Wilkie nodded and said, “Line one.”
Allen went back to the desk and picked up the telephone. He handed the receiver to Rhodes. There was a clear plastic button on the base, with a blinking red light inside. Allen pressed the button.
“Hello,” Rhodes said. “This is the sheriff.”
“I know who it is,” Hack said. “I’m the one who phoned you.”
“What’s the trouble?” Rhodes asked.
“Fire,” Hack said.
Rhodes remembered the sirens he’d heard earlier.
“I don’t usually get called about fires,” he said.
“You do when they’re bad ones.”
“How bad is this one?”
“Somebody’s dead,” Hack said. “That bad enough for you?”
“It’ll do,” Rhodes said.
5
RHODES DROVE OUT OF TOWN TOWARDS MILSBY, WHICH BY COINCIDENCE was the area in which Mrs. Wilkie lived. Milsby had been a town once, but there wasn’t much left of it now, just an old school buil
ding, the ragged remains of a couple of stores, and some houses. Rhodes hoped Clearview wouldn’t look like that in another fifty years. He didn’t think it would. Even if everything else passed away, there would always be the Wal-Mart.
Milsby was also the place where Rhodes had more than once encountered a biker named Rapper, a man who’d caused more than his share of trouble in Blacklin County, though he’d never served time in jail for any of it. Rhodes wondered if Rapper was back and if he had anything to do with the fire. It seemed unlikely. While Rapper hadn’t done any jail time, he’d suffered quite a bit on each of his forays into Rhodes’s territory.
Before he got to Milsby, just after he passed the Clearview city limits sign, Rhodes saw a fireworks stand, one of many safely located in an unincorporated area of the county, where fireworks were legal. The stand was little more than a tin shed, painted yellow—and most of the year it was closed—with two wings that folded in from each side enclosing the interior. The word FIREWORKS was painted on the wings in black, and there was a picture of an exploding firecracker at each end of it.
The wings were opened before Christmas each year, and they were kept open until January first. They were also opened several weeks before the Fourth of July, as they were now, and an array of explosive materials was revealed: cherry bombs, bottle rockets, Roman candles, firecrackers, sparklers, and whistlers, all wrapped in colorful paper and ready for lighting.
Rhodes could remember the times he’d popped firecrackers as a kid, doing dangerous things like putting them under cans or holding them until the fuse nearly burned down and then throwing them. It had seemed like an innocent pastime, but he was lucky he hadn’t been injured. He was lucky he hadn’t started a fire.
There was a banner hanging over the stand that said BUY 1, GET 5 FREE! It sounded like quite a bargain, and Rhodes wondered how the owner of the stand could make any money. But he was making money, all right. He wouldn’t be there in that heat if he weren’t.
Two cars were parked in front of the stand. Rhodes supposed he could call a deputy and have the cars followed. If they went back into Clearview, the drivers could be fined, since fireworks were illegal within the city limits. But by the time a deputy arrived, the cars would be gone.
Rhodes couldn’t make out the face of the worker under the canopy of the stand, but whoever it was gave the sheriff an ironic salute as he drove by.
Rhodes nodded and kept going. He wondered what the man thought about the fire. Or if he even cared.
The county car’s air conditioner wasn’t set on recirculate, and Rhodes could smell the fire long before he got to it, the acrid odor of smoke from burned grass, trees, and fence posts filling the car.
When Rhodes topped a little hill, he could see that the fire wasn’t entirely out. The three Clearview fire trucks were on the scene, and the pumper truck must still have had a little water left in it. Rhodes could see a silver stream spraying out over the line of flames in the grass. There were men slapping at stray flames with wet burlap bags.
The fire had destroyed several acres, now scorched black, and burned an old frame house that stood on one side. A small metal shed had been spared, but nothing much was left of the house. Some charred boards were still upright, and the singed bricks of a chimney were scattered around the yard. The roof had mostly fallen in.
There was something else left, too, according to what Hack had told Rhodes, but that was inside the house.
Rhodes drove into the gate and stopped the car near one of the fire trucks. He got out. The burned grass crunched under his feet, and ash puffed up around his shoes.
The fire, what was left of it, was a good distance away, but the thought of it made Rhodes feel even hotter. He started sweating immediately.
Gary Parker, the fire chief, saw Rhodes and came over. He was a big man with a brown, seamed face and watery blue eyes. Sweat was running down his face, which was streaked with soot, and Rhodes thought he must be basting in his own juices inside the heavy fire-fighting clothing.
“Wasn’t much we could do,” Parker told Rhodes. “Deserted area like this, it didn’t get called in till the house was about gone. Somebody passing by used a cell phone.”
“How’d it start?” Rhodes asked. “Any ideas?”
Parker turned and pointed toward the road.
“Well,” he said, “you can see that it burned toward the fence line, even got some of the posts. But it didn’t get to the bar ditch. We got here before it could.”
He turned back and indicated the line where the men were still fighting the remaining flames.
“And over there it almost got to that little woods. But we’ve pretty much stopped it.”
“What does that tell us?” Rhodes asked.
“Have to do a complete investigation, naturally,” Parker said. “Even then we might not know for sure. But it looks like it started in the house.”
“There’s a body in the house?”
“That’s right. Burned pretty bad. We left him there for you.”
“What about an ambulance?”
“Should be on the way,” Parker said, and almost as soon as he spoke, Rhodes heard a siren in the distance.
“There it comes now,” Parker said. “It’s not for that guy in there, though.”
“Who, then?”
“George Dobbs. One of my guys. Heat was too much for him. He passed out. He’s lying in the shade of one of the trucks right now.”
“He going to be okay?”
“Sure. That kind of thing happens all the time when the weather’s like this. I haven’t lost anybody yet. Come close a couple of times, though.”
The ambulance pulled through the gate, and Rhodes saw someone motioning it over toward one of the fire trucks.
“Do you have any idea who owns this property?” Rhodes asked. He thought he knew the answer, but he wasn’t sure. If Parker didn’t know, Rhodes could check with Hack.
“Not the faintest,” Parker said. “Nice place, though. Good bass-fishing tank back in those trees.”
“Any way I can get a look at the body?”
“I guess it’s not too dangerous now. You don’t have to go inside the house. The whole wall on the side where the bedroom was is gone. You can look at him from there. You’ll have to put on some protective gear, though.”
“Do you have any to spare?”
“Yeah. I’ll show you where. Then I got to see about George. Wouldn’t want him to be the first one I lost.”
“Me neither,” Rhodes said.
The smell of wet, burned wood was strong, but not strong enough. Rhodes could still smell the faint but unmistakable odor of cooked flesh.
He stood in the soaked cinders and hoped he wasn’t going to pass out the way George Dobbs had done. It was hotter than hell’s back forty in the fire-fighting gear.
He could see well enough, however. Maybe too well. The burned body lay on what had once been a mattress. Under the remains of the mattress, which seemed to Rhodes to be still smoldering, was a mostly melted set of springs. Of the bed itself there was hardly a trace. The fire had been really hot at that point, and Rhodes wondered if it had started there. Smoking in bed, maybe. An old story, but one that was always in fashion.
The body wasn’t recognizable. It looked almost like a skeleton with papery black skin stretched over it, and the skin appeared so loosely attached that a good breeze might peel it right off the bones beneath. There were no eyes. The mouth was open, and Rhodes could see teeth. So the body could be identified, eventually. Rhodes had a feeling he’d find out who it was long before any dental records were looked at, however.
He moved a little closer and picked up a blackened stick. He knew that he shouldn’t poke around in the ashes too much. There was always the danger of stirring up a spark that would set the whole thing going again. But he saw something that he wanted to have a better look at, and raking it up with a stick would be a good bit safer than tromping around in the ashes in the overlarge pair of boots he’d borrow
ed. They slipped up and down on his heels, and he felt clumsy walking in them on level ground. So there was no way he was going into the cinders with them on his feet. He might fall, start a new fire, and be a cinder himself before anyone could do anything about it.
Using the stick, Rhodes pulled the object toward him. It appeared to be a bottle of some kind, most likely a whiskey bottle, judging from its shape. It wasn’t melted. Maybe it had been under the bed and partially protected from the worst of the fire.
He fished the bottle out of the ashes, poked the stick in the neck, and looked at it. A whiskey bottle for sure, he thought. Drinking and smoking in bed, it seemed like. Not a good combination.
Except why would somebody be drinking and smoking early in the day?
He thought he had an answer to that question. The drinking had been done during the night, and the smoking, too. Whoever had been in the bed could have been passing the time, waiting for daylight to go fishing in the little stock tank in the woods. It could take quite a while for a dropped cigarette to set a mattress afire.
Rhodes had seen enough. He wanted to talk to Hack, and he wanted to get out of the fire-fighting clothes. He figured that he’d probably lost ten pounds by now, but he’d gain it back as soon as he could find about ten Dr Peppers. He left the whiskey bottle where it was. Chief Parker could draw his own conclusions when he did his investigation. And of course the justice of the peace would have to come and pronounce the body dead. Rhodes didn’t have any doubts about that himself.
“That’s the old Parsons place,” Hack said, his voice sounding a bit crackly on the radio. “I remember when Norv Parsons ran cattle on those acres. That was a long time ago, though.”
Rhodes realized that time didn’t matter as far as the name of the place was concerned. It could change hands fifty times and people of Hack’s generation would still call it “the old Parsons place.”
“Who owns it now?” Rhodes asked.