by Bill Crider
The door opened, and Dr. White came in. Rhodes stood up.
“Keep your seat,” Dr. White said. “Sorry to keep you waiting.”
“That’s okay,” Rhodes said, sitting back down. “What kind of news do you have that you couldn’t talk about on the phone?”
Dr. White settled into the leather chair and leaned back comfortably.
“Oh, I could talk about it,” he said. “I just didn’t think it would be a good idea. It’s pretty unusual.”
“Is it about a crime?”
“It’s about Jay Beaman.”
“Oh,” Rhodes said. He felt the muscles tighten in his shoulders. “Is it good news or bad news?”
“Nothing would be good news for Jay Beaman.”
“I’m afraid I didn’t really have Jay in mind,” Rhodes said. “I was more worried about myself.”
“In that case, it’s probably good news. You didn’t kill Jay Beaman.”
Rhodes’s muscles relaxed a bit. He’d been worried that Dr. White would tell him that the blow on Beaman’s head had been the cause of death.
“He had a heart attack, I guess,” Rhodes said.
“You should never guess about these things. That’s why you asked me to be careful during the autopsy.”
“You’re always careful. I know that, and I didn’t mean to imply that you weren’t. I just wanted to be sure that you didn’t overlook anything.”
“I don’t blame you. And you were right to caution me. It’s a good thing I was careful. Otherwise, I might have thought that Beaman died from colliding with that rock wall. I was there. I saw it happen. It would be a natural conclusion, except that his head was hardly affected.”
“So that’s not what did it,” Rhodes said.
“Correct.” Dr. White’s manner was grim. “But it wasn’t a heart attack, either.”
“It wasn’t?”
“No. What you said made me stop and think about my methods. We’re a small town, and I don’t always do as complete a job as I could. Maybe not even as complete as I should, because, as you pointed out, I usually think I know the cause of death, and that can make a man get careless. In Grat Bilson’s case, I did check for smoke in the lungs so we’d know whether he died in the fire, of course. But the back of his head was caved in, after all. Checking was the logical thing to do.”
Rhodes couldn’t quite figure out where the doctor was going with all this, but he didn’t want to interrupt.
“Anyway,” Dr. White continued, “I didn’t want to be careless this time, so I ran a lot of tests that I wouldn’t ordinarily fool with. It’s a good thing I did, too, or I’d have missed it completely.”
Rhodes still didn’t understand what Dr. White was getting at. He said, “Missed what?”
“The cause of death. It was obvious, but only if I ran the tests.”
“But it wasn’t a heart attack?”
“No.”
“Stroke? Aneurysm?”
“No and no. It wasn’t anything in the usual way of things. I’d never seen anything like it.”
“What, then?” Rhodes asked.
“Poison,” Dr. White said. “Jay Beaman was poisoned.”
Rhodes couldn’t think of anything to say. He just sat there, looking at Dr. White.
“I’m surprised he was able to fight you for as long as he did,” the doctor continued. “But then he had only a tiny dose. It was ingested. The poison used is so deadly that it will kill on contact with the skin. It doesn’t take much to kill someone using that method, but ingestion will work just as quickly. Believe me, it’s powerful stuff.”
“I believe you,” Rhodes said. “What is it?”
“Dichlorovinyl dimethyl phosphate. DVDP for short. In almost its purest form. It’s easy to make it if you know how. You could mix it up on your back porch if you wanted to, but you’d have to be very, very careful. It’s a good thing not many people want to do it, or we’d have a lot more dead people around.”
Rhodes hadn’t thought Dr. White was so cynical.
“You think people would go around poisoning everybody in the county?” he asked.
“No. Of course not. People would kill themselves mixing it up. It’s extremely toxic.”
“What are the ingredients?”
Dr. White told him, and Rhodes thought things over for a few seconds. Then he said, “You’re sure that’s what killed Jay Beaman.”
“No question about it. You’re officially off the hook if that’s what’s worrying you.”
“It’s not that,” Rhodes said. He looked at his watch. It was five minutes after two o’clock. “Mind if I use your telephone?”
“Help yourself. Punch nine for an outside line.”
Rhodes called the jail and got Hack on the line.
“Is Jennifer Loam still there?
“She sure is, Sheriff. I was just explaining to her how you took sick all of a sudden and had to rush off to the doctor’s office. I guess that’s where you are right now.”
“As a matter of fact, I am,” Rhodes said. “Put Jennifer on the phone.”
Rhodes heard mumbling in the background, and then the reporter said, “Yes, Sheriff?”
“I’ve just been talking to Dr. White,” Rhodes said. “I want you to wait there at the jail for me. I’ll be there in five minutes.”
“Are you going to give me a story?”
“No,” Rhodes said. “You’re going to give me one.”
33
WHEN RHODES GOT BACK TO THE JAIL, IT HAD STOPPED RAINING completely. The clouds were gone, the sun was shining, and there appeared to be steam rising from the sidewalk. Rhodes knew it wasn’t really steam, but it made him feel uncomfortable just the same. Because of the high humidity, it seemed much hotter than it had even on the hottest of the dry days. By the time Rhodes had walked from his air-conditioned car to the door of the jail, his shirt was sticking to his back as if he’d been rained on again.
As soon as he got inside, Rhodes asked Lawton if there was a vacant cell away from the ones holding prisoners.
“We got one like that,” Lawton said.
“Good,” Rhodes said. “Show me where it is. Come on, Ms. Loam.”
They followed Lawton, who opened the cell. Rhodes told Lawton to go on back to the office and sit with Hack. As soon as Lawton had left, Rhodes asked Jennifer to go inside the cell and sit on the cot while he checked the neighboring cells to make sure that they were indeed empty.
“This is a terrible place,” Jennifer said when Rhodes returned. She looked around at the stone walls, the barely adequate sanitary facilities, and the barred windows. “I’m not sure I want to sit on that cot.”
“It’s clean,” Rhodes said. “Courtesy of Blacklin County.”
“I think I’d prefer to stand anyway. It’s awfully hot in here, isn’t it?”
“That’s what the prisoners think,” Rhodes said. “Hack believes they’ll file a lawsuit.”
“That would be a good story,” Jennifer said.
Rhodes could see why she’d think so, but he didn’t want to talk about that. She said, “Why don’t you tell me what we’re doing here?”
“It was the most private place I could think of that we could get to quickly. I want you to tell me a few things, and I don’t want any evasive answers.”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“I think you do. You were working on your big story, and you were talking to Grat Bilson a lot. You even knew about a so-called bribe that Jay Beaman was supposed to have taken. I think you knew more about the commissioners than you told me.”
Jennifer looked down at the cell floor, which was no more attractive than the rest of the place.
“Not a lot,” she said after a few seconds had gone by.
“A little, then. You shouldn’t have held anything back. This is a murder investigation. You’ll have to tell me what you know.”
“No, I don’t. I don’t have to tell you anything. You guessed who my source was, but I didn’t eve
n have to confirm that.”
“Look,” Rhodes said, with more patience than he was feeling, “the only reason you’re alive now is that phone call you got about me, the one telling you I was using inmates to paint my house.”
“Are you trying to scare me?”
“No. I’m just trying to impress you with how important this is.”
“What does that phone call have to do with anything?”
“When did you get the call?” Rhodes asked.
“I don’t like for people to answer a question with a question,” Jennifer said.
“I wasn’t answering you. I was asking you a different question. Now tell me. When did you get that call?”
Jennifer opened her purse and got out her notebook. She flipped through a few pages, then stopped.
“Well?” Rhodes said.
“July second, not long before I called you.”
“There’s the problem,” Rhodes said. “When you got that call, your source was already dead.”
“Oh,” Jennifer said. “But if Mr. Bilson was dead, who called me?”
“Someone else, someone who wanted to discredit your story. It’s like I said when you told me about the call. If that part of your story is wrong, then why should anyone believe the rest of it? You couldn’t print the story. Your source was unreliable.”
“But the person who called sounded like Mr. Bilson.”
“Did you take the call on your cell phone?”
“Yes.”
“Sometimes the reception can break up,” Rhodes said. “Was it like that?”
“It could have been. I don’t remember.”
Rhodes thought that it had. Or that the breaking up had been faked.
“Maybe he was scared to kill you,” Rhodes said. “Your death would have been awfully hard to explain. It would have made someone, maybe me, dig even deeper. I might have found out some of the things that you already know. So he decided to discredit your source instead.”
“I told you that I don’t really know all that much,” Jennifer said.
“But you do know something, don’t you? Probably something related to what I was accused of. That would make sense. Plant a false story about something similar to what was really going on, and you cast doubt on anyone who accuses you of having done the same thing.”
“But who would do that?”
“I think that’s pretty obvious.”
“The killer?” Jennifer said.
“Right. And he’d kill you, too, if he thought you were a danger to him.”
“But why kill Mr. Beaman?”
“Let’s talk about what you know, first. To make sure you’re really not in any danger.”
“I’m not in danger because I don’t know that much. Just one little thing.”
“It’s connected to that bribe, isn’t it,” Rhodes said.
“Yes. It wasn’t a bribe so much as a quid pro quo. That means—”
“I know what that means,” Rhodes said. “I might look like an ignorant jerk, but I’m not.”
“Sorry.”
“Never mind. Bilson thought Jay was doing something for Ralph Oliver, didn’t he. Something that involved using county materials or county workers.”
Jennifer looked him over. “I guess you’re not an ignorant jerk after all.”
“Thanks,” Rhodes said.
“You don’t have to be sarcastic. Anyway, you’re right. That’s all it was. Mr. Bilson thought that Beaman used county materials and maybe even some workers to help build Ralph Oliver’s house. Have you seen that place?”
Rhodes said that he had.
“It’s like something out of some old movie.”
“I know,” Rhodes said. “Gone with the Wind.”
“I was thinking of Hannibal.”
“That was the Biltmore estate,” Rhodes said, feeling his age. His hair was thinning, all right, no doubt about it. For him, Gone with the Wind was an old movie; for Jennifer Loam, Hannibal was.
“What’s the Biltmore estate?” Jennifer asked.
Rhodes wondered what they were teaching in journalism schools these days, but maybe it was just another sign of his age that he knew who the Biltmores were and Jennifer didn’t.
“Never mind,” Rhodes said. “It doesn’t matter. We seem to have drifted off the subject.”
“We?”
“All right, I drifted off the subject. What was the subject, by the way?”
“That house of Ralph Oliver’s,” Jennifer said. “The cost of building a place like that is tremendous, and have you seen that curved driveway?”
Rhodes said that he’d seen it.
“How much would something like that cost? And how much concrete would it take?”
Rhodes didn’t know. He asked what that had to do with anything.
“The county has plenty of concrete. Suppose that some of those road contracts bought items that never went into roads. Suppose they went into the building of Mr. Oliver’s house and driveway and barn instead.”
“Exactly what I was saying. You have the proof?”
“No, but I’m working on it.”
“Good,” Rhodes told her. “You keep working. If you can get the proof, we’ll put him away.”
Jennifer seemed to think that was an excellent idea, and she was even happier when Rhodes led her out of the cell and back to the office.
She seemed to be in a hurry to leave and get back to her story, and Rhodes didn’t try to keep her any longer. He’d confirmed his suspicions, and he didn’t want Jennifer to know what he was going to do next. If she’d known, she would probably have insisted on going along with him.
As soon as she left the jail, Rhodes told Hack to call for some backup.
“Get Buddy Ferguson,” he said, “or Ruth. It doesn’t matter. Whoever’s the closest.”
“That would be Buddy. He’s probably somewhere around Milsby about now. It’ll take him a while to get there, though. Why do you think you’ll need him?”
“I’m going to have a talk with Ralph Oliver, and he might not like what I have to say.”
“What’re you gonna say?” Hack asked.
“That he killed Jay Beaman,” Rhodes said.
34
NO ONE WAS SITTING ON THE PORCH OF THE OLIVERS’ HOUSE WHEN Rhodes arrived this time. He parked the county car and got out. The grass was, if anything, even greener than the last time he’d been there, as if it had been fertilized heavily.
Rhodes was about to step up on the porch when he heard something from around behind the house, a soft whoomp followed by the solid sound of a tennis ball being hit with a tautly strung racket.
Rhodes walked around the house on the soggy grass and spongy ground. His shirt stuck to his back in the steamy heat. When he got to the back, which was quite a hike, he saw both Olivers on their tennis court, which was painted almost the same color green as the grass.
Julia Oliver was sitting in a director’s chair beside the court. She was wearing a white visor, white shorts, white shoes, and a white shirt. She watched as her husband, who was also dressed all in white, tried to return the balls that were being shot to his side of the court by a mechanical ball launcher. The noise the launcher made reminded Rhodes just a little of the sound of the Roman candles that had been firing over his head only a couple of days earlier.
Rhodes stood quietly until the balls stopped coming out of the machine. Then he walked over beside Julia and said, “Good afternoon.”
“Oh, hello, Sheriff,” she said. She seemed as cool and dry as the star of a deodorant commercial. “It’s nice to see you again. Can I get you something to drink?”
Rhodes didn’t think she’d have said it was nice to see him if she had any idea why he was there, much less offered him a drink. He didn’t see any lemonade around, so he thought that accepting her offer might give him a chance to talk with her husband.
“I’d like some lemonade if you have it,” he said.
“I can mix some up in a jiffy,” she said. “
I’ll get glasses for all of us. I’m sure Ralph will need it.”
She got up gracefully and walked away just as her husband came over. He was wiping his face and hair with a thick white towel.
“This is as bad as living on the Gulf Coast,” he said. “I hate humidity like this.”
Rhodes said that he didn’t like it very much either.
Oliver tossed the towel on a chair beside the one his wife had vacated and said, “Did Julia go for something to drink?”
“That’s right.”
“Good. I need something cold for sure. What’s going on with you, Sheriff? Two visits in two days, that’s pretty unusual, considering you’ve never been here before.”
“I came here to talk to you about the murder of Jay Beaman,” Rhodes said.
Oliver laughed. He picked up the towel from the chair and wiped his face again, then sat in the chair with the towel across his lap. He looked up at Rhodes and said, “Murder? You’re kidding me, right?”
“I’m not kidding you.”
“Well, then, talk away. Everybody knows it wasn’t murder. It was plain as day that you killed Beaman in self-defense, but if you’ve been accused of murder, I’ll be glad to stand up for you. I was there, and I saw the whole thing. Beaman jumped you, and you just did what you had to do. Him hitting his head on that wall wasn’t your fault. It was just an accident.”
Oliver would have made a great salesman, Rhodes thought. Or maybe he was a salesman, in a way. He convinced people to do illegal things for him, and that was at least as hard as selling shoes or used cars. Rhodes was also pretty sure that Oliver had been making payments to various commissioners over the years to assure his getting plenty of road contracts. Bribing them, but convincing them that it wasn’t a bribe. A man would have to be pretty persuasive to do something like that.
“I didn’t kill Jay Beaman,” Rhodes said. “That’s why I’m here.”
“I know you didn’t kill him on purpose. I just said that.”
Rhodes was getting a little aggravated with Oliver, who wasn’t cooperating at all. He was supposed to break down under the sheriff’s steely glare and confess to everything. Instead, he wouldn’t even admit that anything had happened.
A door closed in the house, and Rhodes looked over to see Julia coming toward them with a pitcher of lemonade and three glasses on a tray. She crossed the grass to the court and set the tray on a little wooden table between the two chairs.