by Bill Crider
Tabor couldn’t have done it any better if Meredith had been the Gipper, and Rhodes noticed that Bob Deedham had a satisfied smile on his face. He wondered if Deedham had helped Tabor with the speech.
The players were still milling around the room and around Tabor when Jasper Knowles finally noticed Rhodes. He made his way through the team and came over to the sheriff.
“I sure hate for you to have to talk to the boys now,” he said. “They’re feelin’ too good to have you question them about Brady.”
“I don’t think I’ll bother them, then,” Rhodes said. What with the new murder, he wasn’t sure he needed to.
“I sure appreciate that, Sheriff,” Knowles said. He looked back at the celebration. “I didn’t mean for Jerry to bring up Brady, though. I don’t think it’s right to use a man like that after he’s dead.”
“I know,” Rhodes said. “I heard you tell Deedham yesterday.”
“Bob’s that way, though. He’d use his own grandmother if it’d get him another win. Maybe that’s what coachin’s all about, but I never felt that way, myself. Anyway, you don’t want to hear about that. Have you found out anything new about the murder?”
Rhodes told him about Hayes Ford.
“Lord knows, that’s awful! Who did it?”
“I don’t know yet. But I suspect it’s tied to Brady some way or another.”
Knowles looked over at Kenner and Deedham, who were now talking to Jerry Tabor.
“You don’t think any of us had anything to do with it, do you?”
“I don’t know what to think,” Rhodes said. “When I do, I’ll let you know. Right now, I just want to talk to Roy Kenner for a minute.”
“Roy? He didn’t know Hayes Ford.”
“Maybe not. But I have to talk to him anyway.”
“There’s a room right over there, then,” Knowles said. “You want me to send him over?”
“You might as well,” Rhodes said.
Chapter Thirteen
“And you don’t think Roy Kenner had an affair with Terry?” Ruth Grady asked Rhodes.
Rhodes told her he didn’t think so. They were in his office in the courthouse, the one he rarely used. It provided a lot more privacy than the jail, however, especially on Sunday, when no one else was in the building, and Rhodes didn’t want to be interrupted. To make up for missing lunch, he was drinking a Dr Pepper and eating some peanut butter and crackers that he’d gotten from a vending machine.
“Roy admitted that he actually went out with her a time or two,” Rhodes said. “Which is more than Brady Meredith ever did, if we can trust his wife. But Roy says that’s all it amounted to. He just took her dancing.”
“At The County Line?”
“Roy’s not that dumb.” Rhodes took a drink of Dr Pepper. “He took her all the way to the next county. He didn’t want to run into anyone he knew. Like Brady.”
“So where does that leave us?” Ruth asked.
Rhodes honestly didn’t know. “Here’s what I thought at first. There were three reasons why someone might have killed Brady Meredith. One was jealousy; Bob Deedham qualified. I’m not so sure he still doesn’t.
“The second one was money. Maybe he was supposed to have shaved some points in the game. Ford would have paid him off for that, but Knowles overruled him. So Ford either killed him or had him killed. I have to admit that one wasn’t too likely, since Ford doesn’t seem like the type to kill anybody. He might have it done, though.”
“By somebody like Rapper,” Ruth said.
“That’s right. Or Rapper could have been involved in the third plot I worked out, the one where Brady was feeding steroids to the team. But that doesn’t seem very likely now. Brady didn’t like drugs in any form.”
Rhodes ate his last cracker and threw the crinkly plastic wrapper in the trash can.
“That still left me with a couple of theories, though. Jasper Knowles and Brady had been having trouble all year, but after I talked to Jasper, I ruled him out. He didn’t seem especially upset with Brady. He wasn’t as upset as his wife was.”
“And now that Ford is dead, we have a whole new ball game,” Ruth said.
“That’s right. Now we have to fit him into it for sure. Do you have any ideas?”
Ruth hesitated. “Do they have to be new ideas?”
“The old ones are fine,” Rhodes said. “IF they can fit the new situation.”
“OK. How about this: Brady wasn’t feeding steroids to anyone. Someone else was, and Brady found out. That’s why he was killed.”
“That might fit Rapper back into things,” Rhodes said. “And it might even fit with another idea that I didn’t mention, that one of the team got a little hyped up on drugs and killed his coach. I didn’t ever like that one very much, but it’s still possible. It doesn’t explain Ford, though.”
“So maybe it all goes back to the gambling. Have you got any way to find out more about that?”
“I can talk to Clyde Ballinger, but he wasn’t much help the first time. It might be a good idea to talk to some of the other Catamount Club members.”
“How about this idea,” Ruth said. “Brady Meredith needed to give up gambling, or maybe pay off his bets with Ford. One way to do that would be to blackmail some of Ford’s other clients. That might help explain the missing records.”
“Brady killed Ford and stole the records, then someone else killed Brady?”
“Why not?”
“Because Ford was killed about twenty-four hours after Brady.”
“All right, try this. The client killed Brady to stop the blackmail, then killed Ford to get the records and make sure no one tried it again.”
“What kind of customer would pay blackmail?” Rhodes asked. “Ford wasn’t a big-timer. He didn’t take any bets for over a thousand dollars or so.”
“Someone who had a lot to lose would pay. Is there anyone like that around town? What about in the Catamount Club?”
Rhodes couldn’t think of anyone, but it wouldn’t hurt to look into that angle.
“You take Gerald Bonny and Ron Tandy,” he said. “I’ll talk to the others.”
“Oh, fine. Give me the lawyer.”
“Gerald’s easy to talk to, and he’s made a lot of money lawyering. Tandy’s been selling real estate for years. They’re the ones most likely to have the money, and maybe even something to lose. I’m not sure how much good it would do either of them if people knew they were betting on high school games.”
Ruth got up. “Well, we’ll see. Shall I go by the jail after I’m done?”
“That’s a good idea. Don’t take any calls from Hack before you’re finished, either. Tell him to get Buddy instead.”
“All right. Before I go, tell me one thing.”
“What’s that?” Rhodes asked.
“Is there anyone mixed up in all this that you suspect more than the others?”
“Bob Deedham,” Rhodes said.
“Why?”
“Because I don’t like him much.” Rhodes had to laugh at himself. “That’s not a very good reason, is it?”
“It’s about as good as anything else we’ve got,” Ruth said.
After she was gone, Rhodes drank the last of his Dr Pepper and telephoned Clyde Ballinger. Ballinger didn’t want to come to the court house, but Rhodes reminded him that it was much more private than anywhere else they could talk.
“I don’t know what else I can tell you,” Ballinger said.
“We’ll talk about that when you get here.”
“Damn,” Ballinger said. “OK. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
“I’ll be waiting,” Rhodes said.
Ballinger wasn’t happy when he arrived.
“I know what this is about,” he said. “And I told you that I didn’t do any betting with Hayes Ford, and I didn’t kill him, either.”
“I didn’t say you did,” Rhodes told him.
“Well, it’s a good thing. Because I didn’t.”
“You didn�
��t happen to bring a report from Dr. White did you?” Rhodes asked.
Ballinger’s anger left him all at once. He reached in his coat pocket.
“I did.” He put the report on Rhodes’ desk. “I thought you might need it.”
Rhodes glanced through the report. As he’d suspected, Ford had been shot with a .32, just like Meredith. He’d get a comparison made between the bullets, but he thought he already knew what the final report would tell him. He also learned that Ford had been dead about eight hours and had just brushed his teeth before he was killed.
“Two murders,” Rhodes said. “You can see why I might need a little information.”
“I can see, all right.” Ballinger sat down across from Rhodes. “But I just don’t have any.”
“Maybe you know more than you think. You said that nobody in the Catamount Club ever bet very much. Are you sure about that?”
“I’m not sure, but if anyone did, it was kept pretty quiet.”
“What would the reason for that be?”
“You mean why keep it quiet? You know that as well as I do. This is a small town, and it’s all right if there’s one gambler around. But respectable people don’t gamble. They get in football pools, like I said, and they might play the lotto when there’s a big prize, but they don’t bet real money. That’s for crooks.”
“So if people found out that someone like Gerald Bonny had lost a few thousand dollars to Hayes Ford, they might just take their law business to someone else.”
“Probably. You don’t want some loser gambler drawing up your will.”
“Or selling you a house?”
“No. But Gerald and Ron didn’t kill anybody.”
“How do you know?”
Ballinger started to answer, then stopped to think about it. “Well, maybe they would. But I don’t think they would. I guess that’s why you’re the sheriff and I’m just the undertaker.”
Rhodes hadn’t heard anyone use the word undertaker in years, even before people had become politically correct.
“I thought you were a funeral director,” he said.
“All right, funeral director. That wasn’t what I meant.”
“I know,” Rhodes said. “What do you think about Jerry and Tom and Jimmy?”
“I think they’re about as likely to be killers as I am. And I’m not likely.”
“I feel pretty much the same way,” Rhodes admitted. “I was hoping that you’d come in and tell me that you’d thought it over and that you know about some big money changing hands.”
Ballinger shrugged. “If I could help you, I would. But I don’t know a thing.”
Rhodes tapped the report on the desk. “Thanks for bringing this over to me. If you think of anybody who might have had it in for Hayes Ford, give me a call.”
“You find somebody who’s lost a lot of money to him, then you’ll have the killer,” Ballinger said. “Not somebody who’s lost just once. Somebody who’s lost consistently.”
There was something in that idea, and Rhodes thought about it after Ballinger had gone. Somebody who was partners with Brady Meredith, say, might have a reason to kill both Meredith and Ford, Meredith for not having shaved the points, and Ford for getting a little too eager to collect.
Rhodes spent the rest of the afternoon turning it over in his mind, but he didn’t come up with anything. There were so many ways of putting the puzzle together that he couldn’t make it fit into any reasonable shape.
There were even a few pieces that he couldn’t fit in at all with his gambling theories, and one of them was Rapper. Nellie had already bonded out, so Rhodes couldn’t question him, and Rapper was nowhere to be found.
Maybe his presence in Blacklin County at this particular time was just an accident, but Rhodes didn’t think so. He didn’t think it was any more of a coincidence than anything else that was happening. He just couldn’t fit it into the puzzle.
The courthouse was always quiet, though sounds echoed off its marble floors and walls. But on Sundays it was like a tomb, cold and dark. Rhodes thought he might be better off if he went somewhere else to think.
As he walked to his car, he regretted not having talked to the football team. If there was any truth at all in the rumors about steroids, the team was where he’d most likely find the answers. Well, he didn’t need Jasper Knowles’ permission to talk to anyone. After all, he was the sheriff. He could go by and talk to some of the players at home, and he might as well start with Jay Kelton, the one who’d made the out-of-bounds tackle.
The Keltons lived in a house that was a lot different from the one Hayes Ford had bought with his gambling money. It was more like Rhodes’ own house, a wood-frame building that was well-maintained but that had seen better days.
There was a large white sign with blue and gold lettering in the front yard. It said:
A FIGHTING CLEARVIEW CATAMOUNT LIVES HERE!
YEA, JAY!
HE’S GREAT — NO. 38!
There were similar signs in the yards of every player on the team. The cheerleaders painted them before the season and drove around town in a pickup truck unloading them at the players’ homes. Rhodes wasn’t sure that all of them had little rhymes on them, though maybe they did.
He knocked on the front door. The knock was answered by Mr. Kelton, who asked Rhodes to come in. He was taller than Rhodes and fence-post thin. He was holding the Sunday comics section of some big-city paper in his hand, and he was wearing a pair of reading glasses that Rhodes suspected came from Lee’s drugstore, or maybe Wal-Mart.
“Martha’s back in the kitchen, cooking supper,” Kelton said. “What’s going on, Sheriff? Is this about that restraining order the Garton coaches were going to get against us?”
The smell of frying chicken almost made Rhodes weak in the knees. The peanut butter and crackers he’d eaten earlier hadn’t done much in the way of satisfying his hunger.
“It’s not the restraining order,” he said. “I’d like to talk to Jay for a few minutes if I could,” he said.
“Is it about the coach?”
“Yes, sir, it is. But Jay’s not involved in that.” Rhodes hoped he was telling the truth. “This is something that has to do with the team.”
“What about the team?”
“It’s just a rumor I’ve heard,” Rhodes said. “I’d rather just talk to your son about it and then let him tell you if he wants to.”
Kelton plainly wanted to know more, but he said, “Well, I guess that would be all right. He’s in his room. I’ll call him.”
“Don’t do that,” Rhodes said. “I’d rather talk to him in his room if you’d just show me the way.”
They crossed the den and turned down a short hall. Kelton tapped lightly on a door with the tip of his index finger and waited. When there was no answer, he pounded on the door with the heel of his right hand.
“Headphones,” he said.
Rhodes nodded, and in a moment the door opened. Jay Kelton stood there with a questioning look on his face. He was as tall as his father, but his shoulders were wider. He was wearing a tight Clearview T-shirt, and Rhodes could see that he’d been doing a lot of weight training. There was a scab on the bridge of his nose, and Rhodes wondered if he’d gotten scratched when he made the late hit on the Garton player. His stomach was flat as a plate, for which Rhodes envied him just a little, even though he knew that Jerry Tabor had been right about that: When Jay came back to his twenty-five-year reunion, his stomach wouldn’t be nearly as flat as it was now.
“What’s up?” Jay asked. A pair of headphones hung around his neck, and Rhodes could hear the faint strains of music coming from them.
“The sheriff wants to talk to you,” Kelton said. “He’ll tell you what it’s about.”
“In your room if you don’t mind,” Rhodes said.
“Sure,” Jay told him. “Come on in.”
Rhodes stepped through the door into the room. The walls were covered with posters that made Rhodes realize he had lost touch with the
music world a long time ago, though he thought he might be able to name the category that some of the bands displayed on the walls belonged to. Hack, who kept up with that sort of thing for some reason, had explained it to him: “Matted hair, that’s grunge. Teased hair, that’s metal.”
Then Rhodes saw that one poster was a huge picture of Kiss. Maybe the world hadn’t passed him by after all.
Or then again, maybe it had. Rhodes looked around the room. When he was growing up, Rhodes had never known a kid with his own telephone, much less his own telephone, his own TV set, his own computer, and his own CD player. Of course, no one had owned a computer or a CD player when Rhodes was growing up.
“You wanna sit down?” Jay asked, turning off the CD player and taking off the headphones.
The only chair in the room was at the computer desk. Rhodes pulled it out and sat in it. Jay sat on his twin bed, under a poster of Pearl Jam. Grunge, Rhodes thought, looking at the group’s hair.
“You wanted to talk to me?” Jay asked.
He put the headphones on the desk. He had innocent brown eyes, and the kind of easy-going confidence that Rhodes had seen in a lot of young athletes, the kind of confidence that came from knowing that you were special, that you had skills that mattered, that everyone in your class looked up to you because of what you could do on a football field or on a basketball court. For some reason, kids who could balance a chemical equation or explain the binomial theorem usually didn’t have that kind of confidence at all. Maybe it was because no one had ever put a sign in their yards.
“I wanted to ask you something about the team,” Rhodes said. “Something that I hope you’ll keep in confidence.”
Jay slumped back against the wall, completely at ease. “I can keep a secret, sure.”
Rhodes wished he believed him. In his experience, hardly anyone could keep a secret. But it didn’t really matter; in fact, it might do some good if the team knew that someone was interested in finding out about steroids. It might put a little fear in them, if anything could, which was doubtful. And fear sometimes made people talk.