Booked for a Hanging

by Bill Crider

  Rhodes had not realized just how serious Graham’s financial troubles were. Suicide now seemed more likely, but there was one thing Rhodes wanted to check. He had another question for Marty Wallace first, however.

  “What about this book he was supposed to have, the one by Poe. Tamerlane.”

  “He might not have had it,” Marty said. “I never saw it How did you know about that?”

  “Someone told me. Is that what you were looking for here in the office?”

  She actually blushed. “Yes. I thought it might be here. If it was, then it was mine, wasn’t it?”

  “Only if you’re named the heir,” Rhodes said. “I haven’t heard about the will yet.”

  “It had better be mine,” she said. Her face took on a hard look that made her only slightly less attractive.

  “I’m sure it will be,” Rhodes said. “But I’ll have to ask you to leave now. I have a few more things to do up here.”

  “I wanted to get settled in the house, anyway,” she said, moving past him and out into the large room. Her hips swayed to a rhythm that only she could hear. Rhodes tried not to watch. He told himself that he was a married man.

  Somehow he didn’t think that little fact would bother Marty Wallace one little bit.

  Chapter 6

  When Marty Wallace had gone down the stairs, Rhodes went to the spot where Graham had been hanging. He looked at the scaffolding that lay in the floor where it had fallen over. Ruth had already checked it for prints, so Rhodes didn’t mind touching it. He pushed it upright, and then began assembling the loose pieces.

  It didn’t take long to get it back together. When it was completed, Rhodes lifted up a board and put it across the top. Then he climbed up. It was a rickety and shaky structure; he didn’t like climbing it, and he didn’t like standing on the board when he got on top. Nevertheless, he stood there.

  That was when he was certain that Simon Graham had not hanged himself, no matter what his various financial and personal problems might have been.

  Someone else had killed Graham.

  Even standing atop the scaffolding, Rhodes could not reach his hand as high as Graham’s head had been. He couldn’t reach it even standing on his toes and stretching as far as he could. It was still a foot or so out of his reach.

  There was no way that Graham could have climbed up there, slipped the noose over his head, and kicked the scaffolding out from under himself. Not considering where his head had been. Someone else had given him a lot of help.

  More than he’d wanted, probably.

  Rhodes climbed back down. He hadn’t proved anything scientifically, but he was convinced. Someone besides Graham had hurriedly set up the scaffolding, not bothering to measure distances, in order to give the impression that Simon Graham had committed suicide. Which he hadn’t. Rhodes disassembled the scaffolding and stacked it neatly.

  “Are you the sheriff?” a man’s voice said from behind him just as he finished.

  Rhodes turned around. This place was getting as busy as an Interstate highway. Ruth might as well never have put up the police line ribbon.

  “I’m Sheriff Rhodes,” he said. “Didn’t you see the ribbon on the porch?”

  The man was big, taller than Rhodes and much thicker from the neck down. He wasn’t fat, either. His knit shirt stretched across his chest and bulged over his biceps; he looked like he’d had the complete Charles Atlas course. He had a short blonde brush cut, and Rhodes wondered if he liked Arnold Schwarzenegger movies.

  For the second time that morning, Rhodes found himself sucking in his stomach and wishing he could keep himself on some kind of exercise program.

  “I’m Mitch Rolingson, Simon’s partner,” the man said. He didn’t look any more like a rare book dealer than Marty Wallace had. “I didn’t think the police line applied to me.”

  Rhodes wondered what the world was coming to. Apparently no one thought anything applied to them if it told them not to do something they wanted to do.

  He could almost understand Claude and Clyde’s lack of compliance. From what Miz Coates had said, their family situation wasn’t the kind to encourage obedience to the law. But Mitch Rolingson and Marty Wallace should have known better.

  “Did you happen to see Miss Wallace on your way up here?” Rhodes said.

  “Sure did. She was the one who said it would be all right to come on up.”

  Rhodes nodded. Naturally. Why not? “She say anything else?”

  “Not much. Just that you’re investigating Simon’s death. She says you think it could be murder.”

  “It could be,” Rhodes said.

  Rolingson looked through the window. “Hard to believe something like that could happen around here.”

  “It can happen anywhere,” Rhodes said. No one seemed to care very much that Simon was dead or to mourn his passing. Mild surprise seemed to be the strongest reaction.

  “Could I get into the office?” Rolingson said, looking past Rhodes at the open door.

  “Not right now,” Rhodes told him. “I want to ask you a few questions, though.”

  Rolingson shrugged. “Go ahead.”

  “I understand that you were the one who located a lot of the books that Graham sold. Did you know that any of them were forgeries?”

  Rolingson’s face darkened and he clenched his fists. “Are you making some kind of accusation?”

  “No. Just asking a question.” Rhodes pulled the magazine out of his back pocket and showed it to Rolingson. “It’s just something that I read about in here.”

  “That damned article,” Rolingson said. “It’s caused a lot of trouble, and it’s all lies. Most of it, anyway. It should’ve been published in one of those scandal rags you buy in supermarket checkout lines.”

  “They must have gotten their information somewhere,” Rhodes said. “This is a little more solid than something about a tribe of Eddie Cantor look-alikes being discovered in Brazil.”

  Rolingson snorted. “Not by much.”

  “But enough so that a big-city newspaper published it. They wouldn’t do that without the legal department giving it a thorough going-over.”

  “OK, maybe so. There was a little trouble one time with a forgery, but that wasn’t my fault. Simon was the one who found the letters, not me.”

  “What letters?”

  “The ones in the article. Those Byron letters.”

  “It wasn’t a book?”

  “Hell, no, it wasn’t a book.” Rolingson gave Rhodes a suspicious look. “I thought you said you read the article.”

  “I skimmed it,” Rhodes said. If people could cross his police line without thinking about it, he could lie to them with a clear conscience.

  “Well, it was letters. Nobody tries to forge books anymore. Old Thomas Wise did it pretty well, but he was about the last one, and that was a long time ago. Be a lot harder to get away with something like that these days. And damned if his forgeries aren’t worth pretty good money now, if you could get your hands on one.”

  Rhodes looked over at the pile of lumber where Claude and Clyde had been hiding. He was tired of standing. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s sit down over there.”

  Rolingson followed him over and they sat. The room was getting much hotter as the sun kept streaming in through the glass of all the windows. Only a couple of the panes were missing, not enough to give any effective cross ventilation. There was a film of perspiration on Rolingson’s forehead.

  “Tell me about the letters,” Rhodes said.

  “I don’t know where Simon got them. Byron letters aren’t all that uncommon, you know.”

  Rhodes didn’t know, but he nodded.

  “What made these different were that they were to Byron’s wife, Annabella Milbanke, after their divorce. They made explicit some things about Byron’s relationship with his half-sister, Augusta, that everybody already knew about but that no one had really been able to prove before. These letters proved it. They boasted about it.”

  Rhodes
remembered Byron from high school. He could even have quoted a couple of lines from “So We’ll Go No More A-Roving” if Rolingson had asked him, which didn’t seem likely. But he didn’t remember anything at all about anyone named Augusta. From the way things sounded, Byron’s relationship with his half-sister was not exactly the kind of thing that high school teachers would have mentioned in Rhodes’ day.

  “I suppose that made the letters especially valuable,” he said.

  “Of course it did. They created a big stir; they were going to be the basis for a scholarly book. Simon got a shit-pot of money for them.”

  “Too bad they turned out to be forgeries,” Rhodes said.

  “Damned right,” Rolingson said, pushing his right fist into his left palm and making the muscles of both arms bulge alarmingly. “If he hadn’t had to pay back the money he got for those letters, Simon wouldn’t have been in such bad shape.”

  “He had to pay back the money?”

  Rolingson looked at Rhodes. “You really skimmed that article fast, didn’t you? Yeah, he had to pay it back. The University of Texas didn’t want any more forgeries.”

  “Any more?”

  “Yeah, they’ve got most of Wise’s. Anyway, the bad part was that they didn’t catch on that the letters were forged right at first. Wise they knew about, but not this deal. Somebody had done a hell of a job, and the UT people wanted to believe in the letters. It took a while, and even at that they might never have suspected if someone hadn’t put a bee in their bonnet. By that time, Simon had spent a lot of the money they paid him. He had to use everything he had and borrow a lot more to pay them back.”

  “Couldn’t he have put them off?”

  “If he’d done that, they’d have ruined him. When you deal in rarities, you’ve got to be completely above suspicion if you ever want to sell another book. Any hesitation, and Simon would’ve been dead.”

  Rolingson paused and looked up at the rafters. “Excuse my poor choice of words. Is this where he did it?”

  Something about Rolingson’s look bothered Rhodes. “It’s where someone did it,” Rhodes said. “What about this Tamerlane? Did you find that for him?”

  “No. That is, I might have. It could have been in a lot I bought at auction, but I haven’t ever seen it. I’d love to, though.” Rolingson’s eyes strayed again to the open door in the back wall.

  “What about Hal Brame?” Rhodes said.

  “That butthole. What’s he got to do with anything?”

  “He’s here,” Rhodes said. “He was going to look at that book, Tamerlane. Maybe he was going to buy it, if it was genuine.”

  “The hell he was.” Rolingson’s face darkened the way it had when Rhodes had mentioned the forgeries.

  “Well, he didn’t exactly say he was going to buy it. Just that it was for sale and that he wanted to see it.”

  Rolingson’s face slowly returned to normal. “Maybe. I’m not even sure Simon would let that little worm look at it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Who do you think hinted to the University that those Byron letters were forged?” Rolingson said.

  Rolingson didn’t have much more to tell. He said that he would be staying in Clearview if Rhodes needed him, and then he left. Rhodes watched him cross the room with his athlete’s walk and went back to his inspection of the office.

  He didn’t find any more than he had found earlier, except that he understood more about at least one of the books on the shelves. It was a collection of the letters of Thomas J. Wise, and there were several volumes of Byron’s letters as well. Rhodes wasn’t interested in reading the no-longer-private correspondence of the two long-dead men, however. He had been hoping to find a copy of Tamerlane, but he should have known that he wouldn’t. The open door pretty much assured that something as valuable as that would be gone, unless, of course, it had been very well hidden.

  He wondered how many people in Blacklin County would have known its value. He could think of only three, none of whom was a resident, and one of them was at the Lakeway Inn, although that didn’t mean he couldn’t have visited the college earlier.

  Rhodes decided that there wasn’t much more he could learn in the old building. He had never put a lot of stock in clues, anyhow, for the same reason that he didn’t think as highly of the computer as Hack did. Rhodes relied more on talking to people, trying to separate the lies from the truth, and trusting his instincts.

  Before he went down the stairs, he walked over to one of the tall windows and looked out over the pasture that Claude and Clyde had been crossing when they ran away. There were cattle grazing in the pasture, and all around them there were the white birds that had suddenly appeared in the county some years ago. Cattle egrets, people called them. They lived off the insects that the cattle stirred up in their meanderings over the pasture, and there were always a great number of them around any herd.

  Over near the barbed-wire fence by the road there were several cows standing together, well away from the others. Ten of them, by Rhodes’ count. That was interesting, he thought.

  It was time to pay a visit to the Applebys.

  The gravel road that wound down the hill and past the Appleby place was lined with trees that grew at the edge of the bar ditches, and their limbs practically touched the sides of the county car. Or they would have, had it not been for one of the county’s new purchases.

  Rhodes referred to it as the tree-whacker, and the county commissioners were quite proud of it. It was a larger version of a power lawnmower, and the blades could be used to cut low brush or lifted and turned at a ninety-degree angle to chop the limbs off the trees growing by the road.

  Rhodes was of the opinion that if there was enough traffic, the tree limbs would never get out over the road in the first place. The cars would keep them back.

  The county fathers didn’t see it that way. Or maybe they were just enamored of a new gadget. At any rate, they had bought the tree-whacker, and someone had been using it here. Rhodes could see the results, which were pretty much what you would expect. Tree limbs had been splintered and split, whacked off, and the clean wood showed like white, broken bones all along the road.

  When Rhodes had discussed the tree-whacker with Hack, the dispatcher had been all in favor of it. “Them trees won’t look so bad once they leaf out,” he said.

  Maybe. But right now they looked wounded, not to mention lopsided. The crew had not been along to pick up the mangled limbs, either, and they lay in the ditches, their few leaves withering and turning brown.

  Rhodes parked by one of the ditches and got out of the car. The Easter spell had brought with it several inches of rain two days before, and the ground was still soft and muddy, especially in the bottom of the ditch. Rhodes’ feet sank in as he pushed through the limbs and crossed the ditch to the fence. He carefully avoided the water in the ditch bottom.

  The cows he had seen from the window were standing nearby. He counted ten of them, six heifers and four calves, two of the heifers heavily springing. One of the heifers was missing her left horn, and all of them had split ears.

  There was nothing uncommon in that, but the fact that these cows were keeping themselves apart from the others in the pasture was unusual. Unless they were strangers to the herd, that is. That would make their standoffishness understandable. That, along with Oma Coates’ assurance that the Applebys were outlaws, was enough to convince Rhodes that he should have Adkins come out and take a look.

  He returned to his car and drove on to the Appleby house. It sat at the rear of a muddy lot that looked as if it had been trampled by a thousand hooves. The thick black mud was churned together with filthy hay, and there were wisps of baling twine mashed in as well.

  A long gray cattle trailer stood off to one side, near a dilapidated barn. The sides of the trailer looked to be made of thin iron pipe and bands of aluminum. It was the most expensive thing in the yard.

  Scrawny reddish chickens pecked in the mud around the barn. Rhodes hated to think wha
t they might be finding to eat in the thick goo, and suddenly his cereal breakfast didn’t seem so bad after all.

  There was a fence around the lot, but the wooden gate sagged open. There was a wooden sign nailed to the gate. Faded letters, hand painted in red, said that there were HORSES AND COWS FOR SALE. Rhodes didn’t see any horses, however.

  The house was shaded by two large hackberry trees and looked as if it had not been painted since about the time of the Hoover administration. Its roof drooped, and there were a lot of missing shingles. One of the windows had no screen, but someone had nailed hardware cloth across the opening.

  At that the house looked better than the barn. Its corrugated metal sides were streaked with rust, and they were peeling down from the top. Most of the roof was missing entirely.

  Rhodes stopped the county car in the gateway. He didn’t want to risk driving in the lot. He was afraid the car might sink in and never be seen again.

  There was a girl standing on the porch of the house watching him. She wore a shirt that was about two sizes too small, a pair of faded cut-off jeans, and rubber thong sandals. Rhodes was instantly reminded of the cover painting of a book he had seen in Ballinger’s paperback collection. Backwoods Hussy.

  He got out of the car. He could smell mud, soured hay, and manure. “Is Mr. Appleby at home?” he said.

  The girl shook her head. “He went into town.”

  Rhodes waited a minute, but the girl didn’t have any more to say. “Are you Mrs. Appleby?” he said.

  The girl gave Rhodes a look that wasn’t exactly a smile. He would have called it a smirk if he had been sure exactly what that was.

  “Mama’s not feelin’ so hot today,” she said. “I’m Twyla Faye.”

  Rhodes waited again. The girl looked at him. Finally he said, “I’d like to talk to Claude and Clyde a minute.”

  The girl turned to the house and yelled through the screen door. “Hey, hotshots, the high sheriff here says he wants to talk to you.”