by Bill Crider
“If you don’t mind, Sheriff,” she said, “I’ll pour Ralph’s drink first. I’m sure he’s thirsty after that little workout of his.”
She poured the lemonade and handed it to Oliver, who took a long swallow.
“That was great,” he said. “Julia, if you were called to testify in court, would you say that Sheriff Rhodes killed Jay Beaman in self-defense?”
Julia handed Rhodes a glass of lemonade and said, “I most certainly would. That Jay Beaman was like a wild man. I’m sorry you had to kill him, though, Sheriff. That was a terrible thing.”
Rhodes set his glass down on the tray and said, “I didn’t kill anyone. I think you did.”
Julia’s eyes widened. “Me? Me?”
“You,” Rhodes said.
She moved jerkily toward her husband’s chair. She bumped the table and knocked the pitcher and two glasses to the grass. They were made of plastic, so they didn’t break. One of the glasses bounced off the pitcher and landed on the ice cubes that had spilled out.
Oliver stood up and took his wife in his arms.
“You shouldn’t say things like that,” he told Rhodes. “You’ve upset Julia, and that upsets me. You’ll have to leave now.”
Rhodes wasn’t going anywhere. He said, “Sorry to upset you, Julia, but Jay Beaman didn’t die when his head hit the wall. According to the autopsy, he was already dead when he fell.”
Dr. White hadn’t actually said that, but Rhodes was sure he would have if he’d thought of it.
“That’s baloney,” Oliver said. “His head hit the wall, he died, end of story.”
“No,” Rhodes said, “that’s only the beginning. He didn’t die when his head hit the wall. He died when he was poisoned. And you poisoned him.”
Julia had started sobbing into Oliver’s shoulder.
“You’re just making things worse,” Oliver told Rhodes. “If you don’t leave here on your own, I’ll have to make you.”
Rhodes didn’t move. He said, “You did it with the ribs. That last little plate you put down right by him. Nobody else was anywhere near through eating, so you didn’t have to worry about somebody grabbing them.”
“You’re nuts. Why would I do that?”
“Because he was going to tell all about how you got your house, your driveway, your barn, probably your tennis court here.”
“And how was that?”
“By using county materials and county workmen. I might not be able to prove the part about the poison, but I can prove the rest.”
Julia started crying harder, and Rhodes figured it was because she knew exactly what her husband had been up to. It would have been almost impossible to keep it secret from her, although Rhodes wasn’t sure about the poisoning. She might not have known about that. He’d accused her only to get a reaction from Oliver.
“The materials weren’t hard to steal,” Rhodes said. “You just had them delivered to a work site and took them from there. Nobody would question it if you took your own stuff. Probably no one even noticed. I don’t know how you got the county workmen to do the job, and maybe you didn’t. Maybe you just used your own men instead, when they were supposed to be working on a road. And then you let the county pay for the time. That should be pretty easy to prove, too.”
Julia pulled away from her husband and, still crying, ran to the house. Rhodes watched her go, then turned back to Oliver.
“Don’t blame me for what your wife is going through,” Rhodes said. “It’s not my fault. It’s yours. And it’s only going to get worse. Your murder trial is going to be harder on her than it is on you.”
“You son of a bitch.”
“You should get together with Yvonne Bilson,” Rhodes said.
“I never murdered anybody,” Oliver said. “You try digging up anything between me and Beaman. Question everybody at his place. I don’t care. I’m innocent.”
Rhodes was tired of the denials. He was about to tell Oliver to come along with him to the jail when Buddy Ferguson walked around the house.
“What’s going on, Sheriff?” Buddy asked. “Need any help with this fella?”
Buddy was thin, puritanical, and devoted to his job. There was nothing he liked better than arresting lawbreakers.
“I don’t need any help,” Rhodes said. “I’m sure Mr. Oliver will cooperate.”
“Like hell I will,” Oliver said, swinging his tennis racket and hitting Rhodes in the face with a solidly credible backhand.
Rhodes felt the waffle pattern of the strings as they stung him and impressed themselves on his cheek. He stumbled to the side, stepped on the lemonade pitcher, and fell.
He heard Buddy yell, “Freeze!” and then the shooting started.
35
RHODES PUSHED HIMSELF UP AND SAW OLIVER RUNNING A SERPENTINE path toward the barn, slipping and sliding, with mud flying up around his feet.
Buddy was firing his pistol into the air. Rhodes was relieved. He’d thought Buddy was shooting at Oliver.
Apparently, so did Oliver, who was moving pretty well for a middle-aged contractor, Rhodes thought.
“That’s enough shooting,” Rhodes said, standing up. “I don’t think you slowed him down any.”
“Nope,” Buddy said holstering his pistol, a big .357 magnum, “but he was sure moving along, wasn’t he? You want me to go after him?”
“We’ll both go,” Rhodes said, and they started across the tennis court.
Oliver had a good head start, and he got to the barn by the time Rhodes and Buddy had crossed the court and gotten back onto the lawn. As it turned out, the lawn didn’t extend all the way to the barn. Beginning about ten yards from the tennis court, there was an expanse that was mostly weeds and mud. Rhodes thought it was a miracle that Oliver hadn’t fallen.
Buddy and Rhodes were about halfway to the barn when Rhodes heard the sound of a motor starting.
“Come on,” he said, and started running.
His feet slipped and slued, but he didn’t fall, not even when he got almost to the barn and a large black pickup came roaring out at him.
The truck had an extended cab and four doors. It couldn’t get much traction on the mud after leaving the barn, and the back wheels spun freely, throwing up a geyser of mud behind the truck, which moved slowly in Rhodes’s direction.
Rhodes dodged out of the way, and when the truck passed him, he stepped into the mudbath that was being flung up behind it and grabbed hold of the tailgate. He had to run to keep up with the pickup, and mud splattered all over him, slapping wetly into his clothes and even his face. But he kept his grip on the tailgate until he could get a foot on the bumper and pull himself into the truck bed.
He was getting used to being covered with mud, but he was getting tired of having to clean the bathroom. Oliver would have to pay for that, Rhodes told himself. He moved along the bed until he got to the back window of the cab. Even if it had opened, which it didn’t, Rhodes was sure he couldn’t have crawled through it. In spite of all the tofu cheese he’d eaten, he just wasn’t slender enough. He thought about smashing the window with his pistol butt, but that didn’t seem like such a good idea. There was no telling what Oliver would do.
Standing up, Rhodes put his hands on top of the cab and looked to see where they were heading. The truck had passed by Buddy and was almost back to the house, and its tires were digging deep ruts through Oliver’s beautifully kept lawn. He didn’t seem to care. Rhodes wondered if the county had been unwittingly paying for the upkeep of the yard, and if so, for how long.
Oliver must have thought that he’d left Rhodes and Buddy behind because he stopped the truck at the back of the house and jumped out.
“Stop right there,” Rhodes said, pulling his pistol and bracing his arms on top of the cab.
Oliver looked back in surprise, said, “You son of a bitch” again, and ran inside the house.
Rhodes didn’t shoot. He put his gun away and climbed out of the truck bed. Only a year or so ago, he would have jumped out, but he w
asn’t as limber and flexible as he once had been.
Buddy came running across the tennis court.
“Why didn’t you shoot him?” Buddy asked.
“Same reason you didn’t,” Rhodes said. “He’s unarmed, and he deserves a trial.”
“What for, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“He killed Jay Beaman.”
“Dang. I thought you killed Jay.”
Rhodes was getting tired of hearing that. He said, “I didn’t kill anybody. Jay didn’t die because of our fight. He was poisoned.”
“Well, I’ll be a blue-nosed gopher.”
Rhodes thought that Buddy watched too many old Gabby Hayes westerns on television. He said, “Go around front and be sure he doesn’t leave that way. I’ll go in the back.”
“You be careful.”
“Don’t worry,” Rhodes said. “I will.”
The inside of the house was pleasantly cool after all the humidity outdoors, and Rhodes could feel the sweat drying on his body almost immediately.
The kitchen, where Rhodes found himself, wasn’t just cool. It was spotlessly clean, and Rhodes almost felt guilty about the fact that he was depositing mud on everything he touched and everywhere he stepped.
He would have felt even guiltier if there hadn’t been muddy footprints on the tile floor already, put there by Oliver as he’d passed through.
So the mud, Rhodes told himself, was all Oliver’s fault. If Oliver had just cooperated, the house would have stayed clean.
Positioning himself at the side of the stairs so that he couldn’t be seen from the second floor, Rhodes called out to Oliver to come down.
There was no reply, not that Rhodes had been expecting one. He decided that he’d have to go up.
Rhodes climbed to the top, pausing when he got there.
“Oliver?” he said. “You might as well come on out. We’ve got the house surrounded.”
Maybe, he thought, I’m the one who’s been watching too many old westerns on TV.
Oliver stepped out of one of the rooms at the end of the hallway. He was still dressed in his whites, though they were somewhat muddy now. And he was no longer holding his tennis racket.
He was holding instead a 12-gauge automatic shotgun, and he was pointing it right at Rhodes.
“Back off, Sheriff,” he said. “I’m going down those stairs, and Julia’s going with me.”
Julia was standing behind him, looking as frightened as anyone Rhodes had ever seen, her eyes still red from crying, though now she was silent.
“You don’t want to get into a shooting match with me,” Rhodes said. “I might hit Julia.”
As soon as he said it, Julia gave a little screech and disappeared back into the room where she’d been hiding.
“Now you won’t hit her,” Oliver said, not looking to see where she’d gone.
“I might hit you, though,” Rhodes said.
“I don’t think so. After the buckshot takes you apart, there won’t be enough left of you to pull the trigger of that pistol.”
Rhodes knew that Oliver wasn’t exaggerating. A good load of double-ought buckshot could make a pretty big mess of a person, especially at close range, and Oliver looked crazy enough to shoot. Things had been going along pretty well until Buddy walked up, Rhodes thought, and then Oliver had panicked. Suddenly the prospect of actually going to jail must have seemed all too real, and now Oliver had become desperate.
“Why don’t you just put the pistol down on the floor and get out of the way,” Oliver said. “I can pick it up as I leave, and you won’t get hurt.”
“You can’t leave,” Rhodes said. “My deputies are outside waiting for you.”
“There’s only one deputy out there. You know it, and I know it. He can’t watch the front and the back at the same time, so I’ll find a way to get by him. Now put the gun down before I have to shoot you.”
Rhodes tried to decide just how desperate Oliver was. He’d already killed one man, and he might think he didn’t have anything to lose by killing another.
“Killing a police officer while he’s performing his duty is a capital offense,” Rhodes said. “You might get off with life for killing Beaman.”
“I don’t much care,” Oliver said.
Rhodes could see that he was sweating in spite of the air-conditioning. That wasn’t a good sign, but Rhodes wasn’t going to step aside. He got ready to jump, just in case Oliver made up his mind to fire. It was one thing to poison somebody. It was something else again to shoot a man who was looking you in the eye, or so Rhodes told himself. And he wondered how much good it would do him to jump. Not much, if the buckshot didn’t come out of the barrel in a tight pattern. If it spread fast, it could clear the entire hallway.
“All right,” Oliver said. “You brought this on yourself.”
Oliver’s eyes narrowed, Rhodes jumped, and Oliver pulled the trigger.
36
THE SHOTGUN BLAST BOOMED OFF THE WALLS, AND THE BUCKSHOT tore a gigantic hole in the ceiling of the hallway.
The gun was pointing upward because Julia Oliver had come out of hiding and shoved her husband hard in the back. And not a moment too soon, as far as Rhodes was concerned.
Rhodes bounced off the wall, and when Oliver brought the weapon back down level, Rhodes was on him. He grabbed the barrel of the gun and jerked it out of Oliver’s hands.
There was a pop, and Oliver screamed. Rhodes thought that Oliver’s finger had caught in the trigger guard and gotten broken. Rhodes didn’t much care. His ears were ringing again, and he was beginning to think he’d have to start wearing ear protection as a normal part of his daily attire.
He thanked Julia for her help, but she was crying and probably didn’t hear, not if the shotgun blast had affected her in the same way it had affected Rhodes.
Oliver was bent over, holding his hands together between his thighs and moaning. Rhodes prodded him in the back with the shotgun and told him to go downstairs.
“You son of a bitch,” Oliver wailed. His voice sounded hollow and distant. “You broke my goddamned finger!”
“I’m sorry about that,” Rhodes lied. “But you were resisting arrest. Now let’s go down.”
Oliver went, stopping now and then to glare over his shoulder at Rhodes.
When they got to the bottom of the stairs, Buddy was standing there, his pistol trained on Oliver, who was still holding his hand and whimpering.
“I heard a gun go off,” Buddy said.
“Mr. Oliver tried to shoot me,” Rhodes said, holding up the shotgun. “He missed.”
“I can see that. But if mud was blood, you’d be a dead man.”
“Go upstairs and see about Mrs. Oliver. Try to get her to call a friend if she hasn’t already done it, somebody to come and stay with her for a while.”
“You taking this guy to jail?”
“Yes.”
“Why’s he all bent over like that?”
“I think he broke his finger.”
“Too bad,” Buddy said, but he was smiling and Rhodes could tell he didn’t mean it.
After Oliver was booked and locked up, Hack called Dr. White and asked him to come and have a look at Oliver’s finger. Just as he hung up the phone, Buddy came through the front door of the jail. He told Rhodes that Mrs. Oliver had called someone, and when she’d arrived, Buddy had left.
“Is Mrs. Oliver still upset?” Rhodes asked.
“I don’t think so. Seemed more relieved than anything. I wouldn’t be surprised if she was happy to have her husband behind bars.”
“You want me to call that reporter now?” Hack asked Rhodes. “She can write about how you’ve cracked another big case.”
“I don’t think you need to call anybody just yet,” Rhodes said.
“She’ll be mighty upset if you don’t let her know.”
“I’ll let her know when I’m ready,” Rhodes said. “I’m going home to clean up now.”
“Gotta admit that you could use it,” Hack
said. “You get any more mud on you, you can start your own pig sty.”
“I don’t mind the mud,” Rhodes said. “It’s the cleanup I don’t like.”
“That’s what a sheriff’s job is,” Buddy said. “Cleaning up. You go out and clean up the trash and bring it here.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Rhodes said. “But sometimes I don’t like that either.”
It was almost five o’clock when Rhodes finished bathing, changing clothes, and cleaning the bathroom one more time. He could have done what he had to do with the mud still on him, but he knew he’d feel better about things if he was clean. Not that he was going to feel good about any part of it, clean or not. He usually liked his job, but he didn’t like it very much at the moment.
He drove out to the precinct barn. Mrs. Wilkie was cleaning off her desk and getting ready to leave when he walked in.
“Why, hello, Sheriff,” she said. “Wasn’t that a nice rain we got today?”
Rhodes was glad she hadn’t asked if it was hot enough for him. He agreed that the rain had been nice and asked if Allen was in.
“I think he might be outside in the barn. You can just go on through his office if you want to. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind.”
Rhodes thanked her and walked through Allen’s office and out the door that led to the barn. Allen was standing by a dump truck talking to someone. When he saw Rhodes, he waved, said something to the man by the truck, and then walked over to join Rhodes, who was looking up at the roof.
“Good little rain we got this morning,” Allen said. “What are you looking at up there?”
“Those pest strips,” Rhodes said, pointing. “I thought those things were illegal.”
“They’ve been hanging up there for years,” Allen said. “We just never got around to taking them down.”
“I guess you probably even have some still in the original packages.” Something changed in Allen’s eyes. Rhodes wouldn’t have noticed if he hadn’t been looking for it. He was sorry to see it, however.