Bill Crider - Dan Rhodes 08 - Winning Can Be Murder

by Bill Crider

  Rhodes said he’d be sure to do that. Then he asked Deedham about Hayes Ford.

  “That bookie? I know who he is, but I don’t know him. What’s he got to do with all this?”

  Rhodes wondered how much he should tell Deedham. He didn’t want to give away too much, but at the same time he had to keep the coach talking.

  “I saw someone talking to him before the game Friday night. I think it might have been Brady Meredith.”

  “Jesus,” Deedham said. “Brady wasn’t that dumb, was he?”

  “You tell me,” Rhodes said.

  Deedham looked at the scaly green wall, then up at Rhodes. “That would be dumber than steroids. We’d forfeit everything if Brady was betting on the games.”

  Rhodes decided to let Deedham know a little more about his thinking on the subject. “What if Brady was shaving points?”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “It’s just a thought,” Rhodes said.

  “Well, you can forget it.”

  Deedham closed his mouth in a tight line and sat silently. Rhodes sat down and watched him. The room grew uncomfortably quiet.

  After several minutes had passed, Deedham said, “You know something, Sheriff? You might be right.”

  “About the points?”

  “If you think about what happened at the game, it could look that way. And there were a couple of other things earlier in the season.”

  “The Westico game,” Rhodes said.

  Deedham looked surprised. “That’s right. And the one with Fondrell.”

  “But you didn’t know about any connection between Brady and Hayes Ford?”

  “No. And it’s hard to believe that he’d be talking to him before the game.” Deedham thought for a while. “But come to think of it, he disappeared from the sidelines while the team was going through its pre-game drill. He showed up again just in time for the school song.”

  That fit with what Rhodes had observed in the stadium parking lot before the game. Brady, if it had been Brady talking to Ford, hadn’t really been taking much of a risk. Most everyone arrived for the game on time. As Rhodes recalled, there had been no one else around, and it was dark. He had noticed the two men himself only by accident.

  “Someone killed Ford earlier today,” Rhodes said.

  Deedham’s jaw dropped. “You don’t think it was me, do you?”

  “I hope not,” Rhodes told him.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “So you just let him go?” Ivy asked.

  She and Rhodes were sitting on the living room couch, watching a late movie on one of the cable channels. It was Across the Wide Missouri, with Clark Gable and Ricardo Montalban, who was playing an Indian. Rhodes had seen it before. As he recalled, Gable was eventually going to run out of ammunition for his cap and ball rifle, but being a clever frontier type, old Clark would fire the rifle with the ramrod in its barrel, sending it to pierce Montalban’s chest.

  “I let him go,” Rhodes confirmed. “There wasn’t enough evidence to charge him with anything, and I really don’t think he did it. He was too convincing.”

  Rhodes took a handful of popcorn from the bowl on the coffee table. It was air-popped, with no butter or salt, and it was about like eating the styrofoam peanuts that shippers used for packing. Rhodes preferred his popcorn greasy and salty, although he supposed the plain stuff was better than nothing. But not much better.

  “What about Rapper?” Ivy asked.

  Ivy had met Rapper on the biker’s previous visit to Blacklin County. She knew enough about him to know he was capable of murder.

  “Rapper’s a different story,” Rhodes said. “But maybe his involvement didn’t go any farther than trying to sell steroids to Deedham.”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  “I’m not sure. There’s one thing on his side, though, and if I could talk to him, I might be able to clear up things up.”

  “I can’t think of a single good thing about that man. Tell me what’s on his side.”

  Rhodes was tired of Gable. He reached for the remote and changed the channel. He by-passed the woman selling cubic zirconia earrings and the man selling exercise equipment. He stopped on a channel where Ghidrah, the three-headed monster, was flapping around on the ground, battling it out with Rodan, Godzilla, and Mothra. There was a huge dust cloud forming around all the rubber monsters. Rhodes smiled. That was more like it. He reached for another handful of popcorn.

  “I don’t see how you can watch that stuff,” Ivy said.

  Rhodes had to admit that it wasn’t exactly Art. Not only that, it was probably the direct ancestor of a show like the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, and Rhodes didn’t understand how anyone could watch that.

  “I don’t either,” he said. “I just sort of like it.”

  “To each his own. What about Rapper?”

  “Well, the first time I talked to him, when I got into that little scuffle with Nellie, I gave him a chance to get out of the county, just pack up his tent and go. He didn’t like the idea. In fact, he’s still around. I think that if he’d killed Meredith, he’d have left without much of an argument. Why take the chance of getting mixed up in a murder again?”

  “He got away with it once,” Ivy said.

  “He was lucky, and he knows it. All he lost was part of a few fingers. But he wouldn’t be that lucky again, and he surely wouldn’t make it so easy for me to find him by hanging around places like The County Line.”

  “So you think he was just after the money that he thought Bob Deedham owed him?”

  “That’s what I think now, but I could be wrong. I’m not crossing him off my list.”

  “Who else is on that list?”

  “Well, there’s Deedham for one. I don’t think he did it, but I’m not absolutely certain. And then there’s Goober Vance. I just added him.”

  “What about Terry Deedham and Nancy Meredith? I thought that when a man was murdered, you always suspected the wife and the girlfriend.”

  “I do. But there’s a problem with suspecting them. To tell you the truth, there’s a problem with all of them.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “I can’t tie any of them to Hayes Ford, and I’m certain that the two murders are connected. So what did any of my suspects have to do with Ford?”

  On the TV screen, the monsters were now crushing cardboard buildings that were apparently supposed to represent Tokyo, a city that Rhodes figured must have been wiped out by monsters about a hundred times in the movies. The celluloid citizens must have gotten pretty tired of rebuilding.

  Ivy had a suggestion about how to tie one of the suspects in Meredith’s death to Hayes Ford. “Nancy Meredith might have wanted to get rid of Ford to save her husband’s reputation.”

  “That would explain the stolen records, all right,” Rhodes admitted. “But why would she kill Brady?”

  “Hey, I can’t do all the work for you,” Ivy said. “The popcorn bowl’s empty, and you’ve probably seen this movie three times. Don’t you think it’s about time for bed?”

  Rhodes said that he guessed so, but what with one thing and another it was a long time before he got to sleep. Just as he was about to drift off, he heard Speedo barking, and then he thought there was the sound of motorcycles, dim and far away.

  The next morning Rhodes was up and out on the job early. Hack had called to say that there was going to be trouble because J. D. Spence was on his way to town.

  J. D. was somewhere in the neighborhood of ninety-five years old. No one knew exactly how old he was because J. D. had never said. He’d been in an automobile accident about five years previously. It hadn’t amounted to much, just a bent fender, but Rhodes had discovered that J. D. had no driver’s license. There was no way the old man could have passed the test to get one. His eyesight was poor because of his cataracts, and his coordination was worse than his eyesight, so Rhodes had forbidden him to drive.

  Spence had defied the prohibition, driving to town a couple
of times in his 1963 Ford Falcon, and Rhodes had been forced to ticket him. Since then Spence, who lived about two miles outside of Clearview, had taken to coming into town on his old riding lawn mower.

  “Ms. Hatley phoned to warn us,” Hack told Rhodes. “She went out to get her paper and saw Mr. Spence rattlin’ down the county road stirrin’ up the dust. You might wanta drive out that way and see if you can get him turned around.”

  There wasn’t any law that Rhodes could find that would keep a man from riding his lawn mower to town. You didn’t need a license to drive one.

  The trouble was that when he got to town, Mr. Spence got in the way of the regular traffic. And he didn’t always bother to follow the traffic laws. More than once, he’d driven right up on the sidewalk and practically mowed down the pedestrians. The noise from the mower’s clattery old engine frightened any children who happened to be around, and once Mr. Spence had driven right through the big double doors at the H.E.B. Rhodes had caught up with him in the produce department.

  As soon as Rhodes turned off the blacktop onto the gravel, he saw Mr. Spence coming. He pulled over to the side of the road to wait for the approaching lawn mower, parking with two wheels on the gravel and two on the slanting shoulder. He rolled down the window and made himself comfortable.

  After a couple of minutes, Mr. Spence chugged up beside him, stopped, and cut the lawn mower’s engine. Spence had once been a sizeable man, but old age had shriveled him. His skin was wrinkled and loose, and his eyes were a pale, faded blue. He had on a sweat-stained gray felt hat, a plaid shirt, and a worn pair of black corduroy pants.

  “Heighdy, Sheriff,” he said. “Looks like it’s gonna be a nice day.”

  Rhodes agreed. There were only a few scraps of cloud in the sky, and the temperature was already into the fifties.

  “I got a little touch of the arthritis, though,” Spence said.

  Rhodes said that maybe the sun would help.

  “Might. Might not. Anyway, I’m glad I run into you. I was comin’ into town to see you about a couple of things.”

  “What things?” Rhodes asked.

  “One thing’s that injunction or whatever you call it that those Garton sonsabitches’re filin’ against our boys. I heard about it on the radio first thing this mornin’, and I knew I had to come into town and find out about it.”

  “Do you follow the games?” Rhodes asked.

  “Hell, yes. I been followin’ the games ever since I was just a kid myself. I used to be in the grandstand ever’ Friday night, and when I couldn’t be there or the games was out of town, I’d listen on the radio. All I can do now is listen on the radio, though, since somebody won’t let me drive to town anymore.”

  He gave Rhodes a hard look, squinting his watery eyes under his hat brim.

  “That injunction’s not going to amount to anything,” Rhodes said. “No judge is going to overrule an official that was right there on the field.”

  “I didn’t think so,” Mr. Spence said. “But these days you never can tell. Too many lawyers is what I say. Anyway, I sure wish I could’ve seen that game. It must’ve been somethin’. But a fella that can’t drive can’t go to the games.”

  “I’m sure you could find someone to take you to the home games,” Rhodes said. “And if you can’t, I can. If you want me to, I’ll ask around.”

  “Now that’d be real nice of you. ’Specially since you’re the one won’t let me drive. I’d’a never thought that Will-o’-the-wisp Dan Rhodes would’ve kept an old man away from the football games.”

  Rhodes was a little embarrassed that Mr. Spence remembered his one moment of fame. To change the subject he said, “What was the other thing you wanted to see me about?”

  “Other thing?”

  Mr. Spence looked vague. He took off his hat and wiped his hand across the top of his bald head. He put the hat back on, pressing it down so that it mashed down on the tops of his ears, making them stick out at a funny angle.

  “You said you wanted to see me about a couple of things,” Rhodes told him. “One was the injunction. What was the other one?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  Mr. Spence smiled broadly. He still had a great many of his teeth, but there didn’t seem to be any two of them together, giving his smile a snaggle-toothed charm.

  “The other thing was somethin’ that woke me up last night,” he said.

  “And what was that?” Rhodes asked.

  Mr. Spence smiled again. “Motorsickles,” he said.

  Rhodes drove about a hundred yards past Mr. Spence’s house and turned down a one-lane dirt road that was lined with leafless trees. Their branches reached out and almost scraped the county car, and Rhodes wondered if the tree-whacker would be coming down that way in the spring. It did a good job of cutting back the limbs that stretched toward passing cars, but Rhodes wasn’t fond of the tree-whacker, having come a little too close to getting whacked by it himself at one time. He’d just as soon not see it again.

  According to Mr. Spence, the narrow, tree-lined road led to an abandoned house that had just about fallen to pieces.

  “But the barn’s in pretty good shape,” Mr. Spence said. “The folks who owned the place, the Pearsons they was, I think, they didn’t put much stock in takin’ care of their house, but they did just fine on the barn.”

  Rhodes and Mr. Spence both figured that the motorcycles meant someone might be using the barn to bunk in.

  “Why else would anybody be ridin’ out here on motorsickles?” Mr. Spence asked. “Ain’t another damn thing around here for miles, that I can see.”

  Mr. Spence hadn’t actually visited the barn in several years, but he thought it would provide a decent shelter.

  “That is it would if you don’t mind mice. Never knew an old barn that didn’t have mice in it. And where there’s mice, there’s gonna be them damn hognose snakes. I never did like a snake, not even a hognose snake, even if they do eat mice. But there prob’ly won’t be no snakes this time of the year, bein’s how it’s gettin’ on toward winter. So I guess it’ll be just mice. Mice like to come inside where it’s warm, just like people do.”

  Rhodes didn’t think Rapper and his friends would mind mice. He made Mr. Spence promise to turn his lawn mower around and go home, and then he headed for the Pearson place.

  The house was just about as Mr. Spence had described it. The porch was still intact, though it had folded in the middle. The faded walls of the house were intact as well, but they had sagged inward when the roof collapsed. Dull-red bricks from the chimney littered the ground on one side.

  The barn was about fifty yards behind what was left of the house. Probably the reason it was still standing was the fact that it had been built of sheet iron that was now covered with the gritty reddish-brown rust of age.

  The barn had a covered feeding area, but the wooden feeding trough that had once been there was now long gone. One of the support posts was missing, and the roof sagged down at one end. At the other end of the barn there was a large storage room that Rhodes knew would have a wooden floor built well up off the ground. That was where the mice would be, if there were any mice. That was also where Rapper and his friends would be staying.

  Rhodes knew Rapper was there, and probably Nellie as well. He could see two motorcycles parked under the overhang where the feeding trough had once been, and while he was far from an expert, the motorcycles looked to him like the same ones Nellie and Rapper had been riding at the Gottschalk farm. Born Too Loose and his pal must have left the county, or at least Rhodes hoped they had.

  Rhodes parked his car in front of the house where it couldn’t be seen from the barn and radioed Hack.

  “Has Ruth checked in this morning?” he asked.

  “She’s right here. You want to talk to her?”

  “No need for that. You know where the old Pearson place is, around the corner from where J. D. Spence lives?”

  “I guess I know where just about ever’ place in this county is. Why?”
<
br />   “There’s somebody staying there. I want you to send Ruth out here. I might need some back-up.”

  “I’m surprised you’d ask. And this is the second time lately. You must be gettin’ smarter in your old age.”

  “You can skip the editorial comment,” Rhodes said, and signed off.

  Rhodes knew that the smart thing to do would be to wait until Ruth arrived. Or then again, that might not be the smart thing to do. Rhodes looked at his watch. It was seven thirty. Right now there didn’t seem to be any sign of activity at the barn, but before too long Rapper or Nellie or both of them would be stirring around. It might be a good idea to tackle them before they had a chance to come to full alertness. If he waited too long, they might even decide to leave.

  It wouldn’t hurt to walk down to the barn and have a look at things, he told himself. He would be very quiet. Rapper and Nellie were probably still asleep. He could wake them and arrest them without a struggle.

  He was almost to the barn when the outside door of the storage room opened and Nellie stepped out. He saw Rhodes immediately and did an almost comical double take before he popped right back through the door that remained open, dangling on its sprung hinges.

  Bad idea, Rhodes thought. I’m not as smart as Hack thinks I am. I should have stayed in the car.

  But it was too late to worry about having lost the element of surprise. Rhodes drew his sidearm and walked steadily toward the closed door.

  He was still twenty yards away when he heard a loud slam. There was another door, this one leading to the feeding area. Nellie and Rapper both piled out, jumped on their bikes, and kicked them into life. The rumble of the engines reverberated off the sheet iron.

  The bikes roared out of the feeding area with dirt spurting from beneath their back wheels and headed straight for Rhodes. It was obvious that this time Rapper wasn’t going to turn back as he had at The County Line. He was going to run Rhodes down and flatten him into the pasture grass.

  Rhodes didn’t bother to fire a warning shot.

  He aimed at Rapper and pulled the trigger.