by Bill Crider
It was possible, but Rhodes didn’t believe it.
And if that wasn’t possible, who was left?
Nobody. Nobody else cared that much about winning.
Except maybe the members of the Catamount Club.
And then the whole picture shifted in Rhodes’ head and he thought he had the answer.
The Del-Ray Chevrolet Company was located a few blocks from the courthouse and just a block away from what was left of the Clearview business district. The big Wal-Mart at the edge of town had drawn most of the potential customers away from the downtown, and there were as many vacant buildings as there were occupied ones.
Del-Ray wasn’t a modern dealership. It had been in the same building for as long as Rhodes could remember. There was room for one car in the showroom; all the other new models were parked on vacant lots beside the building and across the street from it.
The used-car lot was a block farther along. It looked a little cheap and gaudy, with ropes of red and yellow plastic flags that snapped in the late-afternoon breeze.
The office was a little pre-fab metal building in the middle of the lot. To get to it, Rhodes had to walk by cars with “All Power!” and “Fully Loaded!” and “Make us an Offer!” whitewashed on the windshields.
He’d gotten about halfway to the office when Jerry Tabor, still wearing his letter jacket, came out to meet him.
“Looking for a good used car, Sheriff?” he said. “I can put you in one for a just a little bit down and only a few dollars a month. Probably for less than your phone bill if you use long distance much.”
“I’m not really in the market for a car,” Rhodes said. “I just wanted to talk to you.”
“We could go in the office,” Tabor said.
Rhodes asked if the manager was there.
“Harry always leaves a little early,” Tabor said. “I stick around in case a customer comes in.”
He looked around hopefully, as if thinking a hot prospect might arrive at any minute, but there was no one in sight.
“This won’t take long,” Rhodes said.
“Sure. Great. Let’s go.”
Tabor led Rhodes to the office, which was divided into two tiny compartments by a thin partition. The whole thing smelled strongly of smoke. There was an overflowing ashtray on Tabor’s desk.
“Have a seat, Sheriff,” Tabor said, going behind his desk and sitting down.
Rhodes sat in the wooden chair beside the desk. He looked in the ashtray. There were quite a few Marlboro butts, and in fact there was a red and white pack of Marlboros lying in the middle of the desk.
“You smoke?” Rhodes asked.
Tabor laughed weakly. “Only when I’m nervous. About a sale or something.”
“Then you won’t need to now,” Rhodes said.
“I guess not,” Tabor said, but he didn’t sound convinced. “What did you want to talk about.”
“About you killing Brady Meredith.”
Tabor sat very still for almost a minute. Then he reached for the Marlboro pack, saying, “Maybe I do need a cigarette after all.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Rhodes didn’t object, and Tabor lit up. After he exhaled, he picked up the ashtray and dumped its contents into a wastebasket under his desk. His hand was a little shaky, and the ashtray clinked against the side of the wastebasket.
“You must have me confused with somebody else,” he said, replacing the ashtray on the desk. “I didn’t kill anybody.”
“I think you did,” Rhodes said. “I just wish I’d thought about it sooner.”
Tabor tapped his Marlboro on the edge of the ashtray. His hand trembled.
“Why would I kill anyone?” he asked.
“How many cars have you sold in the last month or so?” Rhodes asked. “A lot more than usual?”
“I guess so, but what does selling cars have to do with anything?”
“A lot, if you look at it in the right way. For years no one has paid much attention to you, and I know for a fact that you haven’t been setting the woods on fire as a car salesman since you got on here at Del-Ray. But now you’re a local celebrity. Everyone knows who you are. You get invited to speak to the football team and at the pep rallies at the high school. You were even asked to speak at Meredith’s funeral. I think you enjoy the attention, and the longer the team keeps on winning and stays in contention for the state title, the more attention you get. People come by to talk to you here at the lot. Some of them even buy cars.”
Tabor crushed out his cigarette and looked at the butt. Rhodes waited for a few seconds, but Tabor didn’t say anything.
Rhodes said, “This afternoon I remembered that you didn’t show up for the Catamount Club on Saturday, and that reminded me of something else. When Meredith left the field on Friday night, you were following him. I wonder if he happened to run into Hayes Ford in the parking lot. He’d gotten pretty careless about meeting Ford, and you might have seen him. You might even have overheard them talking. And you would have known what a conversation between a coach and a known gambler would mean if the wrong people found out about it.”
“I never saw them,” Tabor said. “It never happened.”
“Something like it did,” Rhodes said. “And then you went home for your pistol. I wouldn’t be surprised if you didn’t still have it at home. A professional would have gotten rid of it, but you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t think like that.”
“I don’t have a pistol,” Tabor said, his voice so low that Rhodes hardly heard him.
“Sure you do. And we’ll find it. Anyway, I think you followed him when he left the field house and used the pistol to persuade him to drive down to the woods below the stadium. Then you had a little talk and found out for sure that Meredith had been betting on the games. He was shaving points, too, but maybe you didn’t know about that.”
“I didn’t know anything,” Tabor said, but he had given up any pretense of conviction.
“And then you killed him,” Rhodes said. “You knew you had to kill Ford, too, because he probably kept records. Where are the records, by the way?”
“I burned them,” Tabor said, looking at the ashtray.
“That’s what I figured. You did pretty well, but you made a few mistakes. You wiped the car, but you forgot the ashtray. There’s DNA in saliva, Jerry, and there’ll be saliva on the cigarette butt you left there. We can put you in the car.”
“I didn’t mean to kill him,” Tabor said.
“I think you did,” Rhodes said. “On Saturday, you told the team that nothing could stop them. What could have stopped them before? Someone finding out about Brady’s gambling?”
“He shouldn’t have gambled. It was stupid. He was going to ruin everything.”
“Not if no one found out.”
“I couldn’t take that chance. There he was, right there in the parking lot, and Hayes Ford was yelling at him. I thought everybody in town would hear them. I went over and told them to shut up. It scared Brady, but Ford was mad and tried to keep talking. I got Brady away from him.”
“And told him you’d meet him after the game?”
“We needed to talk. But he told me to get away from him, that it wasn’t any of my business.”
“So you got the pistol.”
“Yes. But it was just for persuasion. I wasn’t going to kill him.”
“But you did,” Rhodes said.
Tabor picked up the Marlboro pack and stared at it as he turned it in his hands.
“He tried to take the pistol away from me,” he said finally. “It went off by accident.”
“It wasn’t an accident that you killed Ford.”
“No. I had to do it. He called me, Saturday afternoon after I talked to the team. He said he knew I’d killed Brady and that he was going to tell you unless I paid him off. He wanted a thousand dollars. I couldn’t afford to pay him a hundred dollars, much less a thousand. And he said he was going to tell about Brady, too. He had the records to back it up. I had to do somethi
ng.”
“How did he know you killed Brady?”
“He was just guessing. Maybe I said some things in the parking lot, but he didn’t know for sure. He couldn’t have.”
In a way, Rhodes felt sorry for Tabor. Winning had meant more to him than to anyone. For years he hadn’t had a life, and this year the Catamounts had given one back to him. To keep it, he’d killed two men.
“I guess we’d better go on over to the jail, Jerry,” Rhodes said.
Tabor looked at his watch. “I don’t get off for another half hour yet.”
Rhodes stood up. “I’ll talk to Harry for you.”
“I guess it’s all right, then. Can I have a minute to lock up the office?”
“Take your time,” Rhodes said.
No one was happy with the way things turned out, Jack Parry least of all.
“I can’t believe this,” he said when he caught up with Rhodes at the jail. “Jerry Tabor was a local hero. Why couldn’t you have arrested some bum who was just passing through town?”
“Because it wasn’t some bum who killed Meredith and Ford,” Rhodes told him.
“I know that. You know what I mean.”
Rhodes agreed that he did.
“There’s some good news, though,” Parry said.”
“What?” Rhodes asked.
“As far as anyone can find out, there’s no way to prove that Meredith was actually betting on the games. Ford’s records are gone, and Ford sure can’t testify.”
“What about Tabor?”
“The word is that he’s going to try to avoid a trial. But even if he’s tried and it comes out that his motive was to cover up for Brady’s gambling, it won’t matter. There’s still no proof. Is there?”
Rhodes admitted that there wasn’t. “But the Garton coaches might decide to file a complaint with the UIL,” Rhodes said. “They wouldn’t have any trouble getting most of the other coaches in the district to go along with them.”
“They might try it, but it wouldn’t do them any good. No proof.”
Rhodes thought that Parry was probably right. It was too bad, but Tabor, while he wasn’t going to get away with murder, was going to succeed in keeping the Catamounts in the play-offs.
“God knows how the team is going to deal with this,” Parry said. “With Jerry in jail and accused of murder, things are worse than before.”
“The team will probably surprise you,” Rhodes said. “I think they can handle it.”
Parry sighed. “I hope so. Are you going to be at the game?”
Rhodes said that he hadn’t thought about it. The game would be played out of town, at a neutral site.
“You should be there. God, I hope we win. It’ll mean a lot to Clearview. Maybe I’ll see you in the stands.”
“Maybe,” Rhodes said. But he didn’t think so.
The Sheriff Dan Rhodes Mystery Series
Too Late to Die
Shotgun Saturday Night
Cursed to Death
Death on the Move
Evil at the Root
Booked for a Hanging
Murder Most Fowl
Winning Can Be Murder
Death by Accident
A Ghost of a Chance
A Romantic Way to Die
Red, White, and Blue Murder
“The Empty Manger,” (novella in the collection entitled Murder, Mayhem, and Mistletoe.)
A Mammoth Murder
Murder Among the O.W.L.S.
Of All Sad Words
Murder in Four Parts
Murder in the Air
The Wild Hog Murders
The Murder of a Beauty Shop Queen
Compound Murder
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Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One