That Old Scoundrel Death

by Bill Crider

  “Yes. He said he was Bruce Wayne and—”

  Rhodes looked at Andy, who grinned.

  “Are you sure?” Rhodes asked.

  “I might be old, but I can still hear,” Wanda said. “I can remember pretty good, too. Bruce Wayne, that’s what he said.”

  Rhodes let it go. “What else did he tell you?”

  “That he was interested in the history of the school. Said his grandmother went to school here and that he’d like to look around for a while. I have a key to the building, so I let him in. I never saw him come out, but when I came over here late yesterday evening to lock up and check on him, his car was gone.” She pointed to the dead man. “But when I came back today, there he was.”

  “I didn’t see a car,” Rhodes said.

  “It was here yesterday,” Wanda said. “I don’t know what happened to it. I might’ve been watching TV when he left.”

  “What kind of car was it?”

  “I don’t know anything about cars. They all look alike to me and have since the sixties. It was gray, and that’s all I know about it. Just about all cars are that color now. I can remember when there were two-tone cars and even three-tone cars. I had one myself, a nineteen fifty-nine Ford that I bought secondhand. It was baby blue on the bottom and had a white top.”

  Rhodes thought he’d gotten all the information he was going to get from Wanda, so he said, “I appreciate your help with this. You can go on back home now and let us work the crime scene. I might have to talk to you again about things, and if you think of anything else that would help, call the sheriff’s department.”

  “I’ll do that,” Wanda said. “I need to lock up when you leave, so stop by and let me know.”

  Rhodes told her he would, and when she was gone, Andy said, “She’s a talker.”

  “But not a very helpful one,” Rhodes said. “Bruce Wayne?”

  Andy shook his head. “I’ve already taken photos and emailed them to the jail. We’d better have a look at him. He might be wearing a Batman suit under his clothes.”

  Rhodes pulled a pair of nitrile gloves from his back pocket. He had a box of them in the Tahoe and had brought a pair for Andy, but the deputy had his own. Rhodes went to the body and examined the bloody spot behind the right ear.

  “Shot,” he said. “Small caliber. Won’t be an exit wound. The bullet will still be in there. Must have scrambled his brain.”

  “No brass,” Andy said. “I looked around already. Revolver, or somebody who was careful.”

  Rhodes nodded and turned the body over. A tingle ran up his spine when he saw the man’s face.

  “His name wasn’t Bruce Wayne,” Rhodes said.

  “You know him?” Andy said.

  “We met yesterday. He said his name was Cal Stinson, but I’m not sure that’s true any more than Bruce Wayne was. Hack couldn’t find any record of him.”

  Rhodes felt diminished by any man’s death, even if it was someone he didn’t know. The feeling was magnified in this case because he’d just talked to the man the day before. Feelings didn’t matter now, however, because Rhodes had a job to do. He began to look through the dead man’s pockets. He found nothing, no wallet, no cell phone, no car keys.

  “You think he was robbed and his car stolen?” Andy asked.

  “Could be,” Rhodes said, but he didn’t really believe it. That didn’t fit with the chalk mark.

  He wondered where Kenny Lambert had been the previous evening. He hadn’t been in jail more than a few hours before he’d bonded out and gotten his truck off the impound lot. He could easily have been in Thurston that evening.

  “If it wasn’t that, what else could it have been?” Andy asked.

  Rhodes said he didn’t know and added, “It’s always better not to form any opinions before you investigate, and speaking of that, I’ll let you work this scene while I look around the building.”

  “There’s not much of a scene,” Andy said.

  “I know. Just do what you can. Call Hack and have him send the Justice of the Peace to declare this man dead, and get the EMTs here after you’ve done your job.”

  Andy looked at the body. “I don’t think I’ll find anything.”

  “Remember, don’t form opinions too soon,” Rhodes said.

  “Okay, but it looks to me like he started to write on the blackboard and somebody stepped up behind him and shot him.”

  Rhodes thought the same thing, and said so. “But,” he added, “I’m keeping my options open.”

  Andy nodded. “Right. It’s getting hot in here. Would it be all right if I opened the windows?”

  “I don’t see why not,” Rhodes said. “Just be careful not to mess up any clues.”

  Andy nodded. “I’ll be careful.”

  “So will I,” Rhodes said, and headed for the door.

  Chapter 5

  Rhodes wondered what Cal Stinson or Bruce Wayne or whatever his name really was could have been looking for in the old school building. Maybe Andy was right and Stinson had been killed for his money and his car, but if that were true, who’d done it? Someone who’d wandered into the building and seen Stinson as a target of opportunity? Or someone who was living or hiding in the building? Rhodes had a little experience with people living in abandoned buildings, but he thought that if anyone had been living here, Wanda Wilkins would’ve spotted him. She claimed she didn’t spend all her time watching the building, but she’d have known if someone were staying inside. Rhodes didn’t quite believe she watched so much TV that she wouldn’t know if someone went into the building, either. He wondered why she hadn’t seen whoever had killed Stinson and taken the car. It was possible the killer had waited until after dark to take the car, which might explain that part of the riddle, but Rhodes was still suspicious.

  And what about Kenny Lambert? He lived in the area. Could he have seen Stinson’s car and stopped for a little talk and a bit of revenge? Rhodes had kept Kenny’s pistol, which was now safely stowed at the jail, but Kenny could have gotten another weapon with no trouble. He might even have had one at home.

  Finding out who Stinson was had become more important than ever. Blacklin County was small, and while everyone seemed to know everyone else, that wasn’t the case. People drifted in and out all the time. Even the ones that stayed didn’t always become known, even to their neighbors. It was the people who’d lived there all their lives who knew each other, along with the people who came in and made themselves a part of the community. Otherwise it was easy enough to lead an anonymous life, keeping a distance from everybody, shopping in the crowds at Walmart, and staying out of trouble. Cal Stinson must have been like that, but where had he come from, and what was he doing in Blacklin County? Rhodes needed to know.

  He hoped he might find an answer in the school building, so he started at the front, looking in the two offices on either side of the entrance. Both rooms were divided into inner and outer offices. The outer offices were for the gatekeepers, and the inner ones for the principal and the superintendent. Rhodes knew this because faded signs over the doorways told him that a principal named Burkett and a superintendent named Martin had once occupied those offices. That had been a long time ago, and the offices showed no signs of their presence now, or anybody’s presence. Bare walls and dusty floors were all Rhodes saw.

  After looking in the empty offices, Rhodes went down both hallways and looked in the classrooms, which were all bare. The plaster on the walls was stained brown in spots by water leaks, and the wall in one room was badly cracked in the corner. Rhodes took a look at the crack and saw that it went all the way through the wall.

  The next room he looked into had been a chemistry lab. The lab counters were still there, with sinks and gas outlets that Rhodes was sure hadn’t worked in generations. The counters were covered in dust that hadn’t been disturbed for years.

  Rhodes checked out the auditorium next. The theater seats had been removed, and the stage curtain was gone as well. Rhodes saw no sign that anyone had been i
nside the place recently. Dark gray spiderwebs drooped from the light fixtures high above the floor.

  On a hallway behind the auditorium on a lower level about halfway underground was the old cafeteria. There were no tables, but the serving counter was still there, now rusty and useless. Rhodes remembered just how a cafeteria had smelled when he was in school, but there was no odor of burgers or corn dogs or Friday tuna in this one, just the smells of mold and age.

  Rhodes left the cafeteria and looked into the restrooms on either side of it. The urinal in the men’s room was on the floor, and the stall doors were missing. So were the toilets. In the women’s room, the toilets were also gone, and so were the stall walls.

  The boiler room was between the men’s room and the cafeteria. The huge boiler was still there, rusty and inoperable. Rhodes wondered when it had last been put to use, but he couldn’t remember when the school had closed.

  Rhodes left the boiler room and went up to the second floor. Along the front hallway were two large rooms, one of which had been the library. Parts of the old bookshelves still lined the walls, but there was nothing else there.

  The other room might have been a study hall, and at the far end of it a few wooden desks from another era were stacked up against the wall. Rhodes took a look at the desks, which were so old that they came from a time when boys must still have been allowed to carry pocketknives to school. The tops of the desks that he could see were decorated with carved graffiti. A lopsided heart had A.J. + F.R. inside it, and Rhodes wondered what had happened to the two people with those initials. They might still be alive. Were they married, and if so were they married to each other? He didn’t have a clue about that, and the desks had no clues to anything else for him.

  The other classrooms on the floor were empty, and while Rhodes didn’t find any more cracks that looked on the outdoors, many of the walls had large cracks that ran from the ceiling almost to the floor. It was no wonder that some people believed the building needed to be replaced. It would cost a lot of money to repair it, if it could even be repaired, and money wasn’t in large supply in a small town like Thurston, which had a population of around five hundred.

  And yet Rhodes could understand why some people wanted to save the building. It was easy to develop a sentimental attachment to something that had meant something to you in the past or that had been an important part of the community, like the old City Hall in Clearview. Mayor Clement didn’t want to move out of his office, and he didn’t want the building to be torn down. His reasons might not have made sense to everybody, but they seemed sound enough to Rhodes.

  The floors of the hallway were dusty, and Rhodes saw what might have been evidence of someone’s passing there. Not footprints, more like scuffings in the dust, as if someone might be trying to disguise footprints. Rhodes couldn’t be sure.

  There was one more room that he needed to look into. It was above the cafeteria, and he entered it from the landing of the staircase leading to the second floor. At one time it had served as the school’s gym, and although it was much smaller than a regulation basketball court, it had a hardwood floor and rusty metal basket rims hung from wooden backboards at either end. No traces of the nets remained.

  In Rhodes’s high school the gym had smelled like sweat and dirty socks, with a tinge of disinfectant thrown into the mix. This one smelled like the rest of the building, moldy, except that the smell was even stronger here. The heat in the room was stifling, and that might have added power to the smell. Narrow windows high along the only outside wall let in light but no air.

  To Rhodes’s left was the shower room, and as he stood looking around, he heard something from that direction. He didn’t think the sound was made by anything human, given that there were no tracks in the dust that covered the gym floor, but he had to check it out. And because he was the cautious sort, he took his Kel-Tec PF9 from his ankle holster. He’d been criticized for carrying his pistol in such a hard-to-reach place, but he didn’t like to wear it openly. He’d also been criticized because it was a small, lightweight weapon, but it held seven 9mm cartridges, and Rhodes believed that if he ever met anybody he couldn’t handle with that kind of firepower, he probably couldn’t do any better even with a .44 Magnum.

  The shower area had no door, and Rhodes stopped at one side of it to take a quick look inside. He saw nothing other than a barrier wall placed to conceal the showers. The noises were louder.

  Rhodes went to the barrier, walked to the end, and took another quick look. Light came from windows like those in the gym proper and allowed Rhodes to see what was making the noise. Rats, big ones, the size of small kittens. Four of them. They skittered around on the concrete floor, chattering and squealing as if looking for something. Rhodes wondered if they’d come up through the decrepit plumbing or if they’d gotten in some other way. Not that it mattered. If they were looking for a way out or some water to drink, he couldn’t blame them. It was so hot in the gym that he felt as if he were being baked like a biscuit. At any rate, he wasn’t interested in the rats, and they weren’t interested in him. He backed out of the shower area and into the gym, where he stopped and put the pistol back in the ankle holster.

  The rats, their stomachs dragging, could have moved the dust in the hallway around, and it was quite possible they’d been out there. Rhodes hoped they didn’t make their way down to the body on the first floor before the ambulance came. He didn’t think it was likely.

  Having looked into all the rooms and found nothing, Rhodes had one more thing to check out. He left the gym and went back up to the second floor, where at the end of the hall a tall window led to the fire escape. He saw a locking mechanism, but it wasn’t engaged, so he put his hand on the horizontal rail on top of the lower sash and pushed up. The window went up easily, without a squeak or any sound at all, leaving an opening about four feet high.

  Rhodes looked at the windowsill. The dust on it hadn’t been disturbed, but someone could step through without touching it. He had to stoop to get through, but he didn’t touch the dust, and he stepped outside with no trouble. He stood on the landing of the fire escape and looked around. As hot as the day was, it wasn’t as hot as the inside of the building. Rhodes’s damp shirt clung to his back, but the faintest of breezes came around the corner and cooled it a bit.

  A chinaberry tree grew over part of the landing and up to the top of the building. Rhodes had seen a lot of those trees in his youth, but now they were regarded as an invasive species and no one wanted them around.

  The fire escape was rusty with age but still solid. Rhodes pulled the window down until it closed, and started down the iron steps. There were no counterweights, so the steps went right down to a cracked concrete landing that was littered with fallen chinaberries. It would be quite easy for someone to get into the building by way of the fire escape and to get out the same way.

  Rhodes searched around the bottom of the fire escape but found nothing but chinaberries, some of which were crushed as if they might have been stepped on. He looked up from the chinaberries and across the lot behind the school and peeled off the nitrile gloves. His hands had never been sweatier. He stuck the gloves in his back pocket.

  The lot in back of the school was overgrown with dead weeds, and beyond it were open fields. Rhodes walked around both sides of the building, but he found nothing more of interest. The closest houses on either side were a couple of blocks away. He went back to the front, where he saw an ambulance and a black Ford. The EMTs and the JP had arrived.

  Inside the room where the body was, the EMTs, a man and woman that Rhodes didn’t know, sat at the table near the front. A gurney stood by the table.

  The JP for the precinct and Andy were looking at the body. Rhodes knew the JP, a woman named Kelly Randolph. Once upon a time Rhodes’s wife had run for JP, but her being a woman had doomed her chances. Times had changed.

  Kelly was tall and slim with short black hair and a narrow face. She turned to look at Rhodes with brown eyes that didn’t mi
ss much.

  “He’s dead, Jim,” she said.

  Rhodes had never seen Star Trek, but he understood the reference.

  “You don’t know who he is?” Kelly asked.

  “Not yet. He called himself Cal Stinson when I met him yesterday, and he told the woman who lives across the street that he was Bruce Wayne. I have a feeling both names are fake.”

  “Fake, maybe, but imaginative.”

  “I guess you could say that.”

  “I did say that, and now my work here is done. It’s hot in here, and I’m leaving. I’ll certify the death of an unidentified person if you think that’s best.”

  “For now it is,” Rhodes said.

  Kelly nodded. “Then that’s what I’ll do. See you later, Sheriff.” She looked at Andy. “You, too, deputy.”

  “Sure,” Andy said, but she was already out the door by the time he got it out.

  “Find anything?” Rhodes asked him.

  “Nothing. If there was anybody in here with him, he didn’t leave a trace.”

  “We can let the EMTs have the body, then,” Rhodes said, and motioned for them.

  They got up and pushed the gurney forward. Rhodes watched them lift the body and lay it on the gurney.

  “Take it to Ballinger’s,” Rhodes said.

  Ballinger’s Funeral Home was where the autopsy would be done since Blacklin County was lucky enough to have a retired doctor who was qualified to perform them.

  “Will do,” the male EMT said as they wheeled the body from the room.

  “This just isn’t right,” Andy said when he and Rhodes were alone. “I learned in the academy that the perp always brings something into the scene and always takes something away. There’s just nothing here at all that was brought in, not that I could find. Maybe those CSI people on TV could find out who he is from that piece of chalk, what with all the tech they have.”

  “What we can do is check the window leading to the fire escape for fingerprints,” Rhodes said. “We have the tech to do that. Check the fire escape, too.”