Bill Crider - Dan Rhodes 07 - Murder Most Fowl (2 page)

“That’s just all right with me,” Ward said. “I told you I was willin’ to go.”

“What’s the charge?” Rayjean demanded, menacing Rhodes with the sign. “Since when is it a crime to stand up for what’s right?”

“You’ll have to come, too,” Rhodes told her.

Rayjean drew back the sign. “You bet I will. That way we can
both
sue you for false arrest.”

“I’m takin’ my chain with me,” Ward said. “You can’t take my chain away from me.”

“I’ll have to confiscate it,” Rhodes said, gathering it up. “It’s evidence.”  He looked at Ward. “Are you coming?”

“I guess,” Ward said. “Come on, Rayjean.”

The two of them walked ahead of Rhodes out to the county car. Some of the crowd trailed along behind, while others went on into the store to get their light fixtures or bolt cutters or whatever it was they thought they needed.

Rhodes put the chain in the trunk of the car. Then he took Rayjean’s sign and put it in there as well. After that, he got the Wards seated in the back and closed the doors.

Before he got into the car himself, Rhodes turned to say a few words to the people who had come out of the store to watch.

“You can all go on back inside,” he said. “Nothing else is going to happen here.”

Hal Keene was standing in the door to the entranceway. “We’ve got a special on Sam’s Cola,” he told the crowd. “You’ll need to stock up on it for the hot summer days that’re coming up.”

The word
special
worked like magic, and forgetting about the Wards, the rest of the crowd turned back toward the store, everyone eager to get a good deal on Sam’s Cola.

“I’d like to talk to you a minute,” Rhodes told Keene as the manager started to follow the crowd back inside.

“What?” Keene said. “You want me to go down and swear out a complaint?  I’ll be glad to.”

“I’d just as soon you didn’t,” Rhodes said. “What I want you to do is take the outside handles off those exit doors, like I told you to the last time Lige did this. You don’t need handles there, anyway.”

Keene looked miffed. “He’d just chain himself to the entrance doors if I did that.”

“Maybe not,” Rhodes said. “I’ll have a little talk with him.”

Keene pulled a handkerchief out of his back pants pocket and wiped his face and the top of his head. “Lot of good that’ll do.”

“We’ll see,” Rhodes said.

He left Keene and went back to the car. When he got in, he turned to the Wards, speaking to them through the screen that separated the front and back seats. “Disturbing the peace, creating a nuisance —”

“What’re you talkin’ about?” Ward said.

“The charges,” Rhodes told him. “You asked about the charges.”

“No, he didn’t,” Rayjean said. “I did. Anyway, those things are just picky little misdemeanors. You can’t keep us in jail for ’em.”

She was right, so Rhodes didn’t bother to answer her. He started the engine and turned on the air-conditioner. The cool air hit him in the face, drying the sweat. He put the car in gear.

“Wait a second, Sheriff,” Ward said before the car got rolling.

Rhodes turned in the seat. “What’s the matter?”

“Look at the parking lot,” Ward said. “Not a vacant parkin’ space in sight. People so thick you couldn’t stir ’em with a stick.”

Rhodes admitted that the lot was crowded.

“Now look over there at that grocery store,” Ward said. “Covered up, right?”

The supermarket was almost as crowded as the discount store. There was hardly a vacant space in its parking lot, either.

“Remember what it used to be like downtown on a Saturday?” Ward asked. “Two big grocery stores, the A & P and a Safeway, both of ’em doin’ a land office business, with the Piggly Wiggly goin’ strong too. Not to mention the mom and pop stores all over town. How many of those are left?”

Rayjean didn’t give Rhodes time to answer. “Just one,” she said. “Where the Safeway used to be, but it’s an H.E.B. now. All those little stores, there’s not a one of them left.”

“That’s right,” Ward said. “And you remember Duke and Ayres and Perry Brothers?  Gone. And the J. C. Penney?  That’s gone, too, just a vacant buildin’ there in the middle of the block. There were four drug stores, but there’s just one of ’em left. And the Western Auto’s gone. Used to be, you could hardly walk on the sidewalks downtown on a Saturday, but you go down there now, there won’t be a single soul. They’re all out here at the Wal-Mart.”

“And what about that preacher?” Rayjean asked. “The one that used to set up on the corner downtown and set that speaker out on his car hood and preach all afternoon. You think anybody’d listen to him if he set up out here?”

“Probably not,” Rhodes said. He wasn’t too sure that anyone had listened to the preacher even in the old days.

“The world’s changed,” Ward said. “And it ain’t changed for the better, you can bet on that. There’s not any downtowns anymore. There’s not anywhere that you can go and walk around and see your friends. There’s not anywhere a man can set up a small business and sell to his neighbors. The big boys have put a stop to all that.”

“Maybe so,” Rhodes said, “and maybe it’s not all for the good. But that doesn’t mean you can go chaining yourself to the doors and try to drive away the customers.”

Ward sighed. “I guess you’re right about that. I guess we can’t ever go back to the way it was.”

“No,” Rhodes said. “We can’t.”

“It’s a damn shame, though,” Ward said. “Don’t you think it’s a damn shame, Sheriff?”

It was a good question, and Rhodes was sorry that he didn’t have an answer for it. He backed the car up and drove out of the parking lot.

“I
don’t see why you just let ’em go like that,” Hack Jensen said. He was the dispatcher for the Blacklin County Sheriff’s department, and he liked to have a say in the way things were done. Seeing the Wards get off with a visit to the Justice of the Peace and a fine didn’t sit right. “That Lige Ward’s been nothin’ but trouble since he closed his store. He oughta get himself a job. That way he’d have somethin’ to do instead of causin’ problems for other folks.”

Hack had a point, Rhodes thought. Not only had Ward chained himself to the Wal-Mart doors twice now, he’d been in a fight at the Palm Club one Saturday night, and Rhodes had gone out to Ward’s place in the country twice, responding to complaints by Ward’s neighbor, Press Yardley.

“Hack’s right,” Lawton said. Lawton was the county jailor, and Rhodes knew he was in trouble as soon as Lawton took Hack’s part. Most of the time, the two old men didn’t agree on anything. “Lige is headin’ for trouble.”

Hack nodded. “You better listen to what we’re tellin’ you, Sheriff.”

Lawton leaned his broom against the wall. “Yep. If you don’t do somethin’ about Lige now, he’s gonna get in some real trouble later on, if he’s not already.”

“Do you know something I don’t know?” Rhodes asked.

“Hah,” Hack snorted. “Don’t we always?”

“Like what?” Rhodes said. He was genuinely curious. Though Hack and Lawton seemed to spend their lives in the jail, they actually got around more than Rhodes did, and they often heard things that people wouldn’t tell the local sheriff.

“Well,” Hack said, “like this here computer.”  He looked fondly at the monitor and the big gray box it sat on. “I kept tellin’ you for years that we needed one, but you wouldn’t listen. You were just like Lige, tryin’ to keep on livin’ in the past. I was right, though. You — “

“He’s not talkin’ about any computer,” Lawton said. He was no more fond of the computer than Rhodes was. He was upwards of seventy, but with his round, unlined face he looked like a slightly overage cherub. “He’s talkin’ about important stuff. Like Lige Ward.”

That was more like it, Rhodes thought. “That’s who I was talking about, all right,” he said.

“I’m not the one implied that I knew anything about Lige,” Hack said, looking hurt. “And I bet Lawton don’t know anything, either. He just likes to run his mouth.”

“I’ve heard a few things,” Lawton said. “When you don’t spend all your time hangin’ out with wild women, you hear a few things.”

“You take that back,” Hack said, standing up. He was as old as Lawton, but he was tall and thin, with a thin brown moustache. “Miz McGee ain’t no wild woman.”

Now that things were back to normal, Rhodes relaxed. “If you two can quit jawing at each other, maybe one of you could tell me what it is you know about Lige Ward.”

Hack sat down. “I can’t tell you a thing. I spend all my time hangin’ out with wild women. You’ll just have to ask Lawton. He’s just jealous, anyhow.”

“I ain’t jealous,” Lawton said. “I don’t care how you spend your time. It don’t mean a thing to me.”

“Never mind that,” Rhodes said. “Tell me what you’ve heard about Lige.”

Lawton got a thoughtful look on his face. Rhodes waited expectantly, while Hack looked at his computer monitor as if maybe there was something there in the glowing letters that Rhodes couldn’t read from across the room.

“I can’t remember,” Lawton said after a minute.

Hack laughed. “I may be runnin’ with wild women, but at least I ain’t lost my mind yet. You’ve got Oldtimer’s Disease, Lawton, that’s what you’ve got.”

It was Lawton’s turn to have his feelings hurt. “Don’t neither. I know I heard somethin’. I just can’t think of it right now.”  He looked over at Rhodes. “But it’ll come to me sooner or later.”

Rhodes nodded. “You let me know when you think of it.”

“Seems like it had somethin’ to do with chickens,” Lawton said.

But he didn’t think of what he’d heard until a few days later, and by then Rhodes had pretty much forgotten about the whole thing.

It all came back to him, though.

Chapter Two

R
hodes got the call on Sunday afternoon when he and Ivy were watching Randolph Scott, a particular favorite of Rhodes, on video tape. One of Ted Turner’s cable channels had run six or seven of Scott’s movies back to back, and Rhodes had recorded as many of them as he could get on a single tape. The one they were watching was
Decision at Sundown
.

“I never believed those rumors,” Ivy said, taking a handful of the air-popped corn from the bowl on the coffee table.

Rhodes took a handful too. He preferred his popcorn soaked with butter and then heavily salted, but Ivy insisted that there was far too much fat in such a concoction. So he settled for what he could get.

“What rumors?” he asked.

“You know,” Ivy said. “The ones about Randolph Scott.”

Rhodes had never heard any rumors about Randolph Scott. He asked again, “What rumors?”

Ivy shook her head, making her short hair dance. “Oh, you know. The rumors that he was gay.”

Rhodes sat up straight, nearly choking on his popcorn and forgetting all about the movie. “What?”

“Well, you know. He was rooming with Cary Grant, and there was that photo of the two of them, and Grant was wearing a woman’s dressing gown … .“

“You’re making this up,” Rhodes said.

Ivy laughed. “No, I’m not. It’s all true. I heard those rumors when I was in high school.”

“Well I didn’t,” Rhodes said. “And I don’t believe them.”

“Me neither,” Ivy said.

The phone rang then, and Rhodes was just as glad. Somehow he didn’t feel like watching TV anymore. Not that it made a bit of difference, even if Randolph Scott
had
been gay, which Rhodes didn’t believe for a minute, but still … .

“Hello,” he said.

“Sheriff?” It was Hack. “I wouldn’t bother you, but Ruth’s down at Thurston, and we got a little trouble you need to know about.”

Ruth was Deputy Ruth Grady. Even with her out of town, Rhodes knew Hack wouldn’t ordinarily call him at home on a Sunday afternoon if there weren’t some sort of emergency.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Got a call from down toward Sand Creek. Seems like there’s some shootin’ goin’ on.”

“What kind of shooting?”

“Didn’t say. Prob’ly just some kids hoo-rawin’ around. But there’s a baptizin’ in the creek today, and the shootin’s coming from pretty near that shallow place that Brother Alton likes to use.”

“I’m on the way,” Rhodes said.

S
and Creek was about a mile out of Clearview, and it was running just about full owing to the heavy rains at the end of May a week earlier, probably the last good rains before fall. The conditions weren’t the best for a baptizing, but the place that Brother Alton Downey of the Free Will Church of the Lord Jesus liked to use was about as safe as any. The bank sloped gently there, and even when the creek was full a man could pretty well immerse someone without getting out in the creek to where there was enough of a current to cause a problem.

Rhodes pulled off to the side of the county road and parked his car as close as he could to the wooden bridge that spanned the creek. There were several other cars already parked there, all of them belonging to the members of Brother Alton’s church. Brother Alton’s old black Cadillac Fleetwood was in front of all the others.

As soon as he opened his car door, Rhodes could hear gunshots.

He could see where they were coming from, too. There were three young men running awkwardly along the creek bank, and every time there was a clearing in the trees that lined the bank, the men stopped. One of the men would steady his right hand with his left and fire a shot or two through the opening in the trees, and all three men would jump and yell. Then the man who had fired the pistol would hand it to one of the others, who would take his turn at the next clearing.

They were shooting at a portable toilet that was floating right down the middle of the creek.

It looked to Rhodes a little bit like a silver bullet with its base submerged in the water. There were silver grills around the top near the roof, and there was some lettering on one side, but Rhodes couldn’t make it out.

What he could make out was the consternation on the faces of Brother Alton and those members of his small congregation who had gathered for the baptizing. They were standing calf-deep in the muddy water of the creek, hearing gunshots and looking at the silver outhouse that was about seventy yards away and bearing down on them.