Red, White, and Blue Murder

by Bill Crider

  Rhodes tried the door, and the knob turned in his hand. He wasn’t surprised. Hardly anyone in a town like Thurston bothered locking the door. There hadn’t been a major crime there in quite a while, and only a few minor ones. Not counting armadillo hunters.

  Rhodes went into the house, which looked just as cluttered as it had the last time he’d seen it. There was no one lurking about in the front room, but he could hear someone moving around upstairs.

  The house had been cool on Rhodes’s last visit, but it wasn’t cool now. The air conditioner was turned off, and the place was hot and stuffy. And dusty. Beaman probably hadn’t dusted in years. Rhodes took a breath, and it was like breathing through cloth.

  He went up the stairs. When he reached the top, he looked down the hallway. The door to one room was open. Rhodes stood where he was and said, “This is the sheriff. Come on out, Ms. Fenton.”

  The noise in the room stopped, but no one came out. No one said anything, either.

  “Ms. Fenton?” Rhodes said.

  Still no answer. Rhodes walked down the hallway to the door, but he didn’t show himself to the person in the room. He was beginning to have a bad feeling about things. He drew his pistol.

  “Ms. Fenton?” he said.

  He heard something, but it wasn’t a reply. It was the sound of a window being opened.

  He stepped into the doorway, his pistol close to his body, and said, “Stop right there.”

  Linda Fenton was halfway out the window.

  “I thought all you cops said freeze,” she said.

  “Maybe they do on TV,” Rhodes said. “I wouldn’t know. I don’t watch much TV. Come on back in. You’re just going to fall and hurt yourself if you try to go out that way. This is the second floor, after all.”

  Linda came back into the room. She turned and looked at Rhodes.

  “There’s a back-porch roof right under this window. I wouldn’t fall too far.”

  “You still might hurt yourself. I wouldn’t want that to happen.”

  “Why not?”

  “I need some information from you.”

  Linda looked at Rhodes and for the first time seemed to recognize him.

  “I remember you,” she said. “You’re the guy from the fireworks stand.”

  “The sheriff,” Rhodes said.

  “Kinda cute, for a sheriff. Most lawmen I’ve been around looked more like the back end of a horse.”

  Flattery from an arsonist, Rhodes thought, putting a hand to his hair. Maybe it wasn’t thinning, after all.

  “We need to have a talk,” he said, looking around the room. There was a rumpled bed, a dresser, and a small night table. There was a pillow on the bed, but it didn’t have a pillowcase. The case was on the floor, and it looked lumpy. Rhodes figured it was full of things that Linda had taken from the dresser and night table.

  “All that stuff belongs to me, you know?” Linda said.

  “What stuff?”

  “The stuff in the pillowcase.”

  Rhodes was really getting tired of women who could read his mind. He said, “I’m sure it’s your stuff. But I might have to check it out anyway.”

  “Go ahead. Doesn’t matter to me. If you’re not embarrassed, I won’t be, either.”

  Rhodes wondered what might be in the pillowcase. He figured he could find out later.

  “Let’s just leave it there right now,” he said. “We can go downstairs and talk.”

  “Fine with me. You don’t need that gun, though. I’ll go quietly.”

  Rhodes holstered the pistol and gestured to the doorway.

  “After you,” he said.

  27

  LINDA FENTON’S STORY WAS THAT SHE HAD BEEN SAVED BY THE TEXAS Department of Criminal Justice.

  “I stopped smoking, for one thing, you know?” she said. “Smoking gives you wrinkles, and it’s not good for your health, but I was smoking two packs a day when I went in the joint. You wouldn’t believe how much tobacco costs in that place since they made it illegal. So I quit smoking. Look at this face.” She put a hand to her cheek. “Smooth as a baby’s butt. You’d never guess how old I am.”

  Rhodes wasn’t going to fall into that trap. He said, “Probably not.”

  “Damn right. Anyway, just stopping smoking didn’t solve all my problems. People don’t trust you if you’re a con. Just because you burned down a building, they think you might do it again, or do something even worse. Not the ones in the pen with you, but everybody else. I wanted to meet some people in the free world who wouldn’t treat me like dirt, so I put my picture up on that Web site to see what would happen. Jay Beaman wrote me a letter.”

  Linda had turned on the air conditioner, but the atmosphere in the room was still close. Rhodes looked around. The empty beer can was still on the coffee table, along with the half-full (or half-empty) glass of water and the ashtray. Rhodes would have been more comfortable at the jail, but he didn’t think Linda would feel the same way.

  “Did Jay tell you he was a county commissioner?” Rhodes asked.

  “In his very first letter. He said that meant we’d have to keep our relationship secret, you know? I let him know right off the bat that we didn’t have any relationship, and he wrote back that he hoped we might develop one. And would you believe it? We did.”

  “It wasn’t a very good idea,” Rhodes said. “It would have hurt him in the election if people found out.”

  “Nobody was going to find out. We were going to be careful. I wasn’t even living in this county.”

  “I know. I would’ve been notified if you had been.”

  “I did work at his fireworks stand, which I guess was a mistake, but it gave me something to do.”

  “I didn’t know he owned those stands until today,” Rhodes said.

  “That was another one of his secrets, not that there was anything wrong with owning them. It was a way to make money, you know? Commissioners don’t make all that much in salary in this county. But he said some people wouldn’t understand about that, so the stands were his little secret.”

  “Some of his fellow commissioners wouldn’t understand,” Rhodes said, thinking of James Allen. “That’s for sure.”

  “Well, it doesn’t matter much now, you know? I really hate it that you killed Jay. He was one of the few people who was nice to me.”

  “I didn’t kill him,” Rhodes said.

  “Right. All you did was bust his head.”

  Rhodes was tired of explaining his theory of how Beaman had died. He said, “Speaking of people being killed, Mrs. Bilson was pretty upset with you yesterday afternoon.”

  “She’s a crazy woman,” Linda said. “Jay told me about her. He never should’ve gotten mixed up with her, he said. It wasn’t his idea, anyway. It was hers. He got tired of her pretty fast.”

  “Her husband was murdered the other night,” Rhodes said. “His body was found after a house burned down.”

  “I heard about that. I didn’t burn the house down, though, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “I was thinking that he was investigating Jay Beaman and that he’d found out a lot of things about him that Beaman might not want anyone to know.”

  “If you mean me, you’re right. He didn’t want anybody to know about the two of us. But he didn’t have anything else to hide.” She paused. “Well, there were the fireworks stands. But aside from me and the stands, he didn’t care what people knew about him.”

  Rhodes didn’t think Jay Beaman would have been crazy enough to discuss all his business dealings, legal or illegal, with an ex-convict. In fact, if he’d had any sense at all, he would’ve been especially careful not to mention anything illegal. It wouldn’t have been logical for Beaman to have trusted Linda that much. On the other hand, it wasn’t logical for him to be involved with her in the first place, so he might have told her quite a bit.

  “Did he ever mention Grat Bilson to you?” Rhodes asked.

  “The dead man? Sure. He told me that Bilson was snooping a
round. He was jealous because Jay had been seeing his wife. What a dope, you know? From what Jay told me, everybody in the county had been seeing that woman.”

  “Not everybody,” Rhodes said.

  “Well, nearly everybody. Anyway, her husband was always coming around the precinct barn, talking to the workers, trying to get them to tell him stuff. Jay said he didn’t have any right to be bothering the workers like that, so naturally he tried to put a stop to it.”

  Rhodes thought it would also be natural to put a stop to it if there was something Beaman didn’t want his workers talking about.

  “What about bribes?” Rhodes asked.

  “Bribes? Jay didn’t ever say anything to me about any bribes. Not that it would be any of my business. It’s not like we were gonna get married or anything, you know? But he treated me like a decent woman, which is more than I can say for most people. Anyway, I don’t think he took bribes. Would he be living in a crummy place like this if he had money?”

  Rhodes was having a hard time deciding how much of Linda’s line to believe, but she had a point about the bribes. Maybe she was telling the truth about everything. Against his will, Rhodes found himself believing her.

  He warned himself that people who have been in prison are often very convincing liars, but he wasn’t sure that Linda had any reason to lie.

  “Jay and I liked to watch TV in here,” Linda said, looking around the untidy room. “Sometimes we’d have popcorn.”

  Rhodes found it hard to imagine Jay Beaman and Linda Fenton as a domestic pair, sitting on the couch, their feet propped up on the coffee table while they watched N.Y.P.D. Blue and ate popcorn out of a plastic bowl, but he supposed that was possible, like everything else Linda had told him. If Beaman didn’t have anything to hide, though, why had he gotten so upset when Rhodes mentioned Linda at the rib-eating contest? Was it simply because he didn’t want his little secret to get out and have some effect on his next election campaign?

  “Sitting here, it’s almost like he was in the room, you know?” Linda said. “I just can’t believe he’s gone.”

  Rhodes thought for a second that she might start crying, but she didn’t. She said, “Look over there. See that shadow? It could be Jay.”

  Rhodes turned to see what shadow she might be talking about. He didn’t see anything except the TV set. He was about to say so, but something very hard slammed into the back of his head. He tried to stand up, but he couldn’t feel his legs, and then he couldn’t feel anything at all.

  28

  IT WAS RAINING. RHODES COULD FEEL THE WATER DRIPPING ONTO HIS face, and he wondered how he’d gotten outside.

  He opened his eyes and got a blurry view of Beaman’s living room. The view was a bit skewed because Rhodes was lying on the floor. Jennifer Loam was dripping water onto his face from the glass on the coffee table.

  Rhodes started to sit up, but a sharp pain threatened to split his skull right down the middle. So he stayed where he was.

  “Are you okay?” Jennifer said.

  Rhodes said that, no, he wasn’t okay. Or that’s what he thought he said. From the look of concern on Jennifer’s blurred face, he might not have made much sense.

  “You really don’t look so good,” Jennifer said.

  Rhodes tried again to sit up. The pain wasn’t as bad this time, and he was able to lean against the chair he’d been sitting in. He put a hand to the back of his head and felt a sticky, tender knot.

  His vision was improving, and he noticed that the ashtray from the coffee table was lying on the floor nearby. He knew whose fingerprints would be on it. He wiped water off his face and thought about how he’d been conned.

  “I think someone hit you,” Jennifer said. “I think you might have a concussion.”

  Rhodes didn’t agree about the concussion. He had a headache, but his vision was fine again. He even thought he might be able to stand up, so he gave it a try.

  He was a little wobbly, but he didn’t fall down. He said, “Where’s Linda Fenton?”

  “Gone. Is she the one who hit you?”

  “Yes. With that ashtray over there. Where’s she gone?”

  “I don’t know. Deputy Grady and I were sitting in our cars, and we saw a pickup come driving out from behind the house. We were really surprised.”

  Rhodes was surprised, too. He said, “I thought Ruth let the air out of the tires.”

  “She did. That’s why we were so surprised. But the tires were okay when we saw the truck. I think Mr. Beaman must’ve had some of those little cans of flat-fixer in his truck.”

  Rhodes hadn’t thought about that possibility, but it made sense. Beaman was in charge of a lot of vehicles at the precinct barn, and he would have learned that it paid to be prepared for emergencies like flat tires. It would have taken Linda only a few seconds to inflate the truck tires at least partially with the cans of compressed air and gunk that stopped up any little holes.

  “Where’s Ruth?” Rhodes asked.

  “She told me to come see about you, and she went after the truck.”

  Rhodes tried walking a few steps. He was steadier than he’d thought he would be. He was fine, in fact, except for being embarrassed at having let Linda get the better of him. And except for a little buzzing in his head.

  “Which way did they go?” he asked.

  “Out of town.”

  “I know this is a small town, but there’s more than one way out of it.”

  “I’m directionally challenged,” Jennifer said. “I can never tell north from south. Or east from west, for that matter.”

  Rhodes pointed in the direction of Clearview and said, “That’s north.”

  Jennifer pointed to his right. “Then which way would that be?”

  “That would be east.”

  “They went east,” Jennifer said.

  “Thanks,” Rhodes said, and started to leave. But then he thought better of it and went back upstairs. The pillowcase was still on the floor of the bedroom.

  When he bent over to pick it up, Rhodes felt another pain shoot through his head, but it wasn’t severe. He straightened up, and the pain was gone again.

  Jennifer Loam watched him from the doorway as he set the pillowcase on the bed and started going through it.

  He discovered, to his surprise, that Linda hadn’t lied about the contents. Everything seemed quite likely to belong to her. There was some makeup, some skimpy undergarments, a pair of jeans, and a couple of shirts. The only suspicious item was a small Bose radio/CD player located at the bottom of the pillowcase. Rhodes doubted that it belonged to Linda, but maybe it did.

  “What is all that stuff?” Jennifer asked.

  “Some of Linda Fenton’s belongings,” Rhodes said. “She was gathering them up when I got here.”

  “Why did she leave them?”

  “I imagine she was in a hurry to get away.”

  “And why did she hit you?”

  “Probably because she thought I was going to arrest her instead of sending her on her way. I got the feeling she didn’t like jail very much.”

  “Were you?”

  “Was I what?”

  “Going to arrest her.”

  “I don’t know,” Rhodes said. “I didn’t have any real reason to. I just wanted to find out some things from her.”

  “Did you?” Jennifer said. “Find out some things, I mean.”

  “I found out it wasn’t a good idea to turn my back on her,” Rhodes said.

  When he got to the county car, Rhodes called Ruth on the radio and found out that she was in the area around the big lake in the southeastern part of the county.

  “I think I lost her,” Ruth said.

  Rhodes wasn’t surprised at the news. There were all kinds of little roads around the lake, most of them unpaved, and they wound among the trees and cabins for miles and miles of lakeshore.

  “I’m sorry, Sheriff,” Ruth said. “I guess I should have slashed those tires instead of just letting the air out.”

&nbs
p; “You don’t want to go committing misdemeanors,” Rhodes said.

  “I’m just mad at myself. She could be in Mexico by tomorrow.”

  “I’m as much at fault as anybody,” Rhodes said. “I let my guard down, and she conked me. That’s the only reason she got away.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. My pride is hurt, that’s all.”

  “I’m going to keep looking. She could have pulled into a driveway at one of the lake houses, or maybe she drove off into the trees.”

  The mention of the lake houses gave Rhodes an idea. He said, “Call Hack. Have him find out if Beaman had a lake house. If he did, you can check it out.”

  “Good idea,” Ruth said, and signed off.

  “You think she’ll find her?” Jennifer Loam asked.

  She was standing by the car, having listened in to Rhodes’s side of the entire conversation.

  “You never know,” Rhodes said.

  “Will it make any difference if she does catch her?”

  Rhodes wasn’t sure whether it would or not, so he just shrugged.

  “Let’s see,” Ivy said as she dabbed the back of Rhodes’s head with some kind of strong-smelling antibiotic. “You’re been hit by a folding chair and a few fists, killed a man, and been swatted with an ashtray. That’s a pretty impressive list of accomplishments for one day. And it’s only been dark for about half an hour.”

  She didn’t sound pleased, so Rhodes thought his best defense was to say nothing at all. He wanted to remind her that he hadn’t killed anyone, but he thought that some other time might be better.

  “At least you don’t need any stitches,” Ivy went on. “That’s about the best I can say for you. I don’t know how much longer you can go on getting yourself beaten up like this. Why don’t you take up a more sensible profession, like alligator wrestling?”

  Rhodes kept his mouth shut. If he could have thought of a clever retort, he would have made it, but he couldn’t come up with anything.

  “I don’t think there’s any need for a bandage,” Ivy said. “It would just get all messed up in your hair, anyway. Of course I could shave the back of your head if you really want a bandage. What do you think?”