by Bill Crider
“Prob’ly gone for another hot dog,” Lawton said. “Never did know a fella to eat so much at a football game.”
“The band boosters need the money,” Rhodes said. “You don’t need to drive on the field this time. Just turn on the siren. Maybe that’ll do the trick.”
“It better do it quick, or those folks’ll have the goalpost down on the ground,” Lawton said.
Rhodes looked at the goalpost. There were several men standing on the crossbar, holding to the uprights and rocking the post back and forth, while others were at the support pole, pushing against it and giving all the help they could to the men up on the crossbar.
“I’ll take care of that,” Rhodes told Lawton. “You just run the siren.”
Two of the men jumped off the crossbar when they saw Rhodes coming. Then the siren wailed, and the crowd at the base began to scatter. Practically everyone had run off in one direction or another by the time Rhodes got there, and the others quickly followed. They didn’t want to get arrested. The goalpost was still standing, though it might have been listing a bit to the left. That was good enough for Rhodes.
Rhodes turned toward the middle of the field, and he was gratified to see that Ruth Grady was already there. She had managed to get the fans to put Coach Knowles down and had even made some headway with the mob surrounding the players in the middle of the field. Rhodes went to help her out, and before too long they had everyone at least backed up to the fence if not back in the grandstand.
The players eventually calmed down enough to get the kick-off teams on the field, and the rest of the game was anti-climactic. After the obligatory delay-of-the-game penalty, the Clearview kicker squibbed the ball on the ground, and a Greyhound picked it up on the twenty yard line. He ran to the left, avoided a couple of tacklers, circled back to the right, and then was overrun by half the Clearview team as time expired.
Yet another giddy celebration began, but Rhodes didn’t feel like stopping this one. If the goalpost was pulled down, the school district would just have to buy a new one. What Rhodes was worried about now was the victory celebrations that were sure to ensue. He was afraid that it was going to be a long night.
Rhodes could remember a time when the Clearview business district would have been humming on the Saturday morning after a game, but that had been a long time ago, before Wal-Mart had built on the outskirts of town.
Now most of the downtown businesses were quiet, most of them practically deserted. The only real signs of life were outside the stores, where the Clearview cheerleaders were busy washing the windows, replacing the spirit slogans that had been painted the week before with new ones.
One they hadn’t gotten to yet showed some kind of dog, which Rhodes supposed represented the Garton mascot, impaled on a spit above a roaring fire. Under the fire the words “Grill the Greyhounds” were painted in blue and gold. It wasn’t going to be easy to top that one.
Rhodes was headed to Billy Lee’s drugstore, the only place that had a crowd of any kind inside. That was because Lee’s was the gathering spot for an informal group known as the Catamount Club, composed of the team’s biggest boosters, mostly local businessmen who had been waiting for years for something like the previous evening’s game. The membership had varied over time, but some of the men had been coming to the drugstore for decades.
They were in the back of the drugstore when Rhodes arrived, sitting around a rickety wooden table that was located just to the left of the high counter that separated the pharmacy from the rest of the store. There were cigarette burns on the edge of the table, but they weren’t recent. None of the men smoked now, though several of them had in the past. There was a thirty-cup coffee pot on a smaller table, and each of the Catamount Clubbers had his own cup with his name painted on it in blue and gold.
Ron Tandy, a real estate agent, was the leader of the group. He had been one of the founding members, and he was one of the few people in town who still remembered Rhodes’ will-o’-the-wisp days. He had a fringe of white hair around his head, watery blue eyes, and smooth pink cheeks. The other men at the tables were Tom Fannin, who owned a couple of convenience stores; Gerald Bonny, a lawyer; Jimmy Bedlow, who managed a Bedlow’s Department Store; and Clyde Ballinger, the director of Clearview’s largest funeral home. Jerry Tabor wasn’t there, though Rhodes knew he was a regular.
Billy Lee, the owner of the drugstore, oversaw the whole thing from behind the high counter that separated the pharmacy from the rest of the drugstore. He never had much to say, but he heard everything that went on.
The center of attention was of course Jasper Knowles, and Rhodes arrived just in time to hear Tandy ask him what was on everyone’s mind. “Why did Meredith take that punch at you, Coach?”
“Yeah, what was that all about?” Tom Fannin asked. Fannin was about forty, his hair just beginning to go grey at the temples.
Clyde Ballinger looked up and saw Rhodes. “Wait a minute, fellas. Here’s the law. You want some coffee, Sheriff?”
Rhodes declined. He wasn’t a coffee drinker. He preferred Dr Pepper at any time of the day or night.
“Well, pull up a chair,” Ballinger said. “You might be interested in this.”
Rhodes sat down and waited for Knowles’ answer to the question. The coach looked uncomfortable. He took a sip of coffee and looked around at the group of men at the table.
“I don’t know much about it,” he finally said.
“You don’t expect us to believe that,” Bedlow said. “You were there. You were the one he took a swing at.”
Bedlow was a snappy dresser, even on Saturday morning, but then he managed a department store. He was wearing a pair of gray no-iron Dockers, black Rocksport loafers with tassels, and a white shirt with a button-down collar. Most of the other men had on jeans and cotton shirts, except for Ballinger, who was wearing a suit. He was always wearing a suit. Rhodes sometimes wondered if he slept in one.
“You might as well believe it,” Knowles said. “It was sort of crazy down there.”
“What do you mean, crazy?” Gerald Bonny asked, as if he expected Knowles to supply some kind of legally acceptable definition.
“I mean crazy,” Knowles said, setting his cup on the table. “Brady was acting crazy, and then he tried to hit me.”
“There’s crazy, and then there’s crazy,” Tandy said. “We still don’t know what you mean.”
“I mean Brady didn’t seem to know what the hell was goin’ on out there. Maybe it was all the excitement, or maybe he just lost it, but he was tryin’ to get me to send in the kickin’ team.”
There was a moment of stunned silence as the men absorbed the enormity of what Knowles had said.
Billy Lee leaned over the pharmacy counter and broke the silence. “You mean he wanted to kick the point instead of going for two when we were behind in penetrations? But that’s crazy!”
“That’s what I’ve been tryin’ to tell you!” Knowles looked around the table. “And that’s why he punched me, I guess. I wouldn’t call for the kicker. I was goin’ for the two all the way. Maybe Brady thought I was goin’ to lose the game for us. Maybe he thought we were ahead in penetrations, but he should’ve known better. Frankie was keepin’ the stats, and he had it all down.”
Frankie was Knowles’ son, the third-string quarterback. He was a fixture on the bench. He always carried a clipboard, and he never got into the games.
“So Brady punched you because he thought you were going to lose the game.” Clyde Ballinger said. “I guess that makes sense.”
“Maybe it does,” Bedlow said. “But I’m not so sure. Where is Brady, anyway? He’s usually here on Saturdays.”
“Maybe he was embarrassed,” Tandy said. “I damn sure would be if I’d pulled a stunt like that. You going to fire his ass, Coach?”
“Well, I don’t know about that,” Knowles said. “Brady’s a good man with an offense. If he apologizes, I guess there’s no harm done. Lord knows, there’s been times when I wanted to throw
a punch at him when some play he sent in didn’t work.”
“But you never did,” Ballinger said. “Did you?”
“Lord no. I wouldn’t do a thing like that.”
“And that’s the point,” Ballinger said. “Brady should’ve known better.”
Knowles wasn’t so sure. “Like I said, we’ll have to talk it over. I expect he’ll apologize, and then we’ll see.”
“What about that fight after Jay Kelton tackled that Garton kid?” Fannin asked. “I heard on the radio station when I was coming over here that the Garton coaches are really hacked off about their player gettin’ kicked out of the game. They say Kelton should’ve been kicked out, too. They say they’re gonna get some kinda restrainin’ order and then sue to have the refs’ decision overturned and get their boys in the district game instead of us.”
Rhodes hadn’t heard that little bit of news, and apparently no one else had, either.
“Those coaches ought to be ashamed,” Gerald Bonny said. “Taking something like that to court. The game’s supposed to be played on the field, not in a courtroom.”
“Right,” Fannin said. “A courtroom’s where you get those million-dollar whiplash lawsuits.”
Bonny was insulted. “I don’t do that kind of work.”
“If those Garton coaches take us to court, are you going to represent our side of things?” Bedlow asked him.
“Damn right. That’s different. I won’t charge a dime. You can count on me, Coach.”
“A lawyer taking a case for free?” Ballinger said. “Now I’ve heard everything.”
The phone in the pharmacy rang, and Lee answered it. He listened a second and said, “It’s for you, Sheriff.”
Rhodes got up and stepped to the counter. Lee handed him the phone.
“Hello,” Rhodes said.
It was Hack Jensen. “You better get over here, Sheriff,” he said. “We got us a little trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“Buddy Reynolds has found a dead man. Says it’s Brady Meredith.”
“I’m on my way,” Rhodes said.
Chapter Four
If Blacklin County’s jailer looked like Lou Costello, the dispatcher looked like Bud Abbott. He was sitting at his desk by the radio when Rhodes walked into the jail office. The little Mega Watchman TV set was tuned to The Price Is Right, but Hack wasn’t watching it.
“All right,” Rhodes said. “What’s this about a dead man?”
“I told you,” Hack said. “Buddy says it’s Brady Meredith. That don’t mean it is, but Buddy wouldn’t say it if he wasn’t pretty sure he was right.”
That was true. Buddy had his faults as a deputy, but saying things out of turn wasn’t one of them.
“Besides,” Hack said, “the body’s in a car. I checked the license plate on our computer, and it matches Meredith’s. Computer’s a right handy thing to have around the office for things like that.”
“I know,” Rhodes said.
He didn’t want to get into an argument about technology with Hack, who had argued for years that the county was far behind the rest of the world as far as keeping up with the latest scientific advances went.
“And another thing,” Hack said.
“What?”
“Nancy Meredith called right after Buddy did. Said that Brady didn’t come home after the game. Wanted to know if we’d heard anything about an accident, which of course we ain’t. I didn’t say anything about Buddy’s call or the car with the body in it.”
“Where’s the car?” Rhodes asked.
“Down behind the football field. You know those trees by that little creek? Couple of kids were down there huntin’ with their B.B. guns and ran across the car. They saw somebody in it and got worried when he didn’t move, so they told their mamas, and their mamas called me. I sent Buddy.”
“Did he call you on the radio after he got there?”
Hack gave Rhodes a look. “You mean did it go out over the air about Brady Meredith bein’ dead so ever’body that has a scanner could hear about it?”
“I’m sorry,” Rhodes said. “I should have known better than to ask.”
“You sure as shootin’ should’ve. Soon’s he called in, we switched to a private channel.”
Rhodes was glad they’d remembered to do it. When the news got out, there was going to be a sensation. He hadn’t mentioned anything about it to the members of the Catamount Club, not because they wouldn’t find out but because there was no need to upset them if the body turned out not to be Brady.
“I’d better get down there,” Rhodes said. “Has everybody been called?”
This time, Hack didn’t even bother to answer. He just shook his head sadly.
“Sorry again,” Rhodes said. “I’ll call after Buddy and I look over the scene.”
“Figgered you would,” Hack said.
When the new high school had been built on the edge of town ten years earlier, the football stadium had been on the other side of Clearview. The school board had looked into the cost of a new stadium and had discovered that it would be cheaper to move the old one to the new school.
The stands had been dismantled, moved, and reassembled, so that the stadium now looked exactly as it had when Rhodes had been playing for the Catamounts. Seeing it in its new location was always a little disorienting, however.
The nearby high school building was of course very different from the one Rhodes had gone to school in. It was big and low and had no windows. The lack of windows was no doubt conducive to lower heating and cooling bills and therefore a wise economic choice, but Rhodes was pretty sure he would have gone crazy if he’d had to attend classes in a building with no windows. The old building had been hot in the fall and spring and cold in the winter, but at least you could look out the window if you got bored.
The stadium sat across an unpaved parking lot and down a little hill from the high school building. The town of Clearview hadn’t grown out to the school quite yet, though there were a few houses across the road. Behind the stadium, however, there were open fields and a thick stand of trees along a little creek that ran on south for about a quarter of a mile and then more or less disappeared. There was seldom any water in the creek, and even when there was, it barely covered the ground.
Rhodes drove past the stadium with hardly a thought about the previous night’s game. There was no road from the parking lot into the fields, though there was a rutted path where someone, probably one of the fields’ owners, occasionally drove into them.
Rhodes followed the ruts, the county car bouncing a little on the rough ground. He could see another white car down among the trees, and there was something darker beyond it, probably the car the body was in.
Rhodes stopped and got out when he reached Buddy’s car. A front had come through early in the morning, and the day was chilly, gray and overcast, with a heavy mist hanging in the air and among the limbs of the trees. Moisture dripped off the dead leaves. From farther away, a crow called and then was quiet.
“What have we got, Buddy?” Rhodes asked.
Buddy Reynolds was standing next to the dark-colored car, which Rhodes could now see was a navy blue Taurus. All the windows were up, but Rhodes could see that someone was inside, slumped over the steering wheel. It looked like Meredith, all right. Whoever it was had been shot in the right side of the head. There was blood on the driver’s window.
“Dead man in the front seat,” Buddy said. Buddy was a lean man with a narrow face that made him look meaner than he was. “Looks like Brady Meredith to me.”
“Have you touched anything?”
“Not a thing. I’ve been waitin’ for you. ’Course those kids trampled all over the grass around here. Be hard to tell if there’s been anybody else around.”
Rhodes shivered as a drop of cold water fell from a tree and hit him on the cheek. He brushed it off and said, “What about the car?”
“It’s Brady’s car. Hack checked it out on the computer.”
“I know. I meant have you looked it over.”
Buddy nodded. “Just from the outside, though. I thought I’d better wait on you.”
“All right, then. Let’s get to it.”
It took them most of the morning, and they didn’t find much. There were no fingerprints on the passenger side door handle. Someone had wiped it, along with most of the interior of the car.
“Somebody was in there with him,” Buddy said. “Must’ve been somebody he knew. Wonder how he got away?”
“Could have walked,” Rhodes said. “Could have had a car parked nearby. Hard to say.”
There were no other car tracks, however.
“Probably parked right up there by the stadium,” Buddy said. “Wonder how many cars were up there last night?”
Rhodes didn’t know. It didn’t matter. They’d never be able to tell which one the killer had been in. Unless there were some sort of tracks to follow back up to the parking lot.
But there weren’t. The mist in the air was all the rain they’d had for quite a while, and the ground was hard as a sidewalk.
“Too bad it didn’t come a good hard shower last night,” Buddy said. “We might’ve found some tracks if it had.”
“We’ll look anyway,” Rhodes said, knowing that it was probably useless.
Even if they found tracks, it would most likely be impossible to distinguish between any signs the boys had made and those the killer might have left. Sherlock Holmes would have probably found a couple of heel marks and been able to tell them everything but the killer’s hair color, but Holmes wasn’t one of Rhodes’ deputies.
They looked for nearly an hour, finding nothing, then vacuumed the car on the off chance that they might find some kind of fiber, some kind of dirt, some minute scrap of paper — anything that would give them a lead to the killer.
Rhodes didn’t have much faith in that kind of evidence, though. He depended more on talking to people and sifting through their stories, on finding out the possible motives and trying to discover who had the best one, on doggedly keeping after people until someone cracked.