Bill Crider - Dan Rhodes 09 - Death by Accident (2 page)

“Any idea who that is?” Rhodes asked, looking down at the body, which was floating face down.

“I haven’t tried to get a look,” Berry said.  “He … he was at the bottom of the pool, but I pulled him up.  I don’t know why I did it.”

Berry looked a little queasy, and Rhodes didn’t blame him.  It wasn’t every day that you found a dead man, much less one that had been in the water for a while.

“After I pulled him up, he sort of floated,” Berry said.  “I didn’t do anything else.  I thought you’d want me to leave things pretty much like I found them.”

Rhodes nodded.  “You were right.”

His knees cracked as he knelt down to look at the body which had sunk back under the water for about six inches.  It was that of a man who had been wearing only a pair of jockey shorts, and it was tangled in a practically new rope, one end of which was tied to a dead-looking tree limb that floated several feet away in the pool.  The rope that wasn’t twisted around the body had absorbed enough water to sink, but it hadn’t pulled the limb under.

“Looks like he was swinging over the water on that rope,” Berry said.  “The limb broke, and he fell in and drowned.  Maybe the limb hit him on the head.  And he was probably drunk.”

“Why do you say that?” Rhodes asked.

“Why else would he be swimming out here at this time of the year?  That water’s cold!”  Berry jammed his right hand back into his jacket pocket and shook his head.  “And it’s dangerous to swim alone, here or anywhere.  Do you think he couldn’t read the sign?”

Berry took a step and whacked the red-and-white warning sign with his hand.

“Do you think it wasn’t big enough for him to see?  Or do you think he even looked at it?”

“He probably just ignored it,” Rhodes said.

“That’s right,” Berry said.  “He ignored it, and now he’s dead.  I tried to tell everyone that this would happen if we cleaned up the pools.  I tried to get them to agree to drain them, but would they listen to me?  Hell, no.”

He stalked away and stood looking angrily out over the pool.  “And now what’s going to happen?”  He didn’t wait for Rhodes to answer.  “I’ll tell you what’s going to happen.  First of all, everybody’ll blame the Sons and Daughters for this.  They’ll say that we should’ve built a fence around the pool or something stupid like that.  Never mind that the pool’s been here for ninety years without anybody drowning in it.  And then somebody’ll sue us, sign or no sign.”

The breeze shook brown leaves out of the pecan trees, and they spiraled down toward the water.  Rhodes stood up.  His knees cracked again.  He wished they wouldn’t do that.

“You know what Bob Dylan said in the sixties?” Berry asked.

Rhodes remembered quite a few things that Bob Dylan had said, but he didn’t know which one of them Berry was referring to.

“Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man?” Rhodes guessed.

Berry shook his head.  “He said that everybody must get stoned.  Remember?”

Rhodes said that he remembered.

“I thought you would.  But he wouldn’t say that these days.  You know what he’d say?”

Rhodes looked down at the body and shook his head.

“He’d say everybody must get sued,” Berry told him.

“Maybe no one will sue.  There was a warning sign here, after all.”

Berry laughed, but it wasn’t a happy sound.  “That woman sued McDonald’s when she spilled the coffee in her lap, didn’t she?  Surely you read about that.  You’d think anyone would know coffee was hot, but she got a judgment for millions.  Oh, we’ll get sued, all right.”

Rhodes decided that he might as well agree.  “Maybe so.  But that doesn’t really matter right now.  What matters is that we’ve got a dead man here.  Any idea where his clothes are?”

“Right over there,” Berry said, pointing to where the bath house had once stood.  Only part of the foundation remained.  “Behind that tree.”

Rhodes walked over to the tree Berry had indicated.  Sure enough, the clothes were there — a pair of faded Wrangler jeans, a pair of cheap roping boots, a western shirt, socks, a belt with a buckle the size of a hubcap, and a t-shirt that had been white at one time but that now had a distinct yellowish tinge.  Nothing was folded.  It was as if everything had simply been tossed there as someone undressed.

He looked back at Berry.  “Any idea where that rope was tied?”

“In one of those trees close to you, I guess,” Berry said.

Rhodes looked around.  There were several pecan trees towering over him.  All of them had limbs that stretched out over the pool.

“You could run along the bank there,” Berry said.  “Then you could grab the rope and keep right on going, swing out over the water and drop straight down and in.  Not a good thing to do if you’re drunk, though, but of course a jury won’t consider that.  They’ll just award the family eighty million dollars and go home to watch themselves on TV.”

Rhodes didn’t think it was worth mentioning that Blacklin County had never had a trial that merited television coverage and wasn’t likely to.  He didn’t think Berry would be comforted.

“You seem mighty worried about a lawsuit,” he said.

“Hell, yes.  Wouldn’t you be?”

“I’m more worried that a man’s dead here.”

“Through his own damn fault.  If he’d stayed home and stayed sober, he’d still be alive.”

Rhodes wasn’t so sure about that.  Several things were bothering him.  For one, it didn’t seem likely that anybody, drunk or sober, would suddenly decide to go to the Old Settlers’ Grounds for a swim all by himself, much less decide to go for a swim where no one had been accustomed to swimming for fifty years or more.  How had he gotten here, anyway?  And where had that rope come from?

“Did you see his car?” Rhodes asked.

Berry walked over to where Rhodes was standing under the tree.  “Yeah.  That’s why I came down to the pool.  I was out here checking on the Burleson cabin.  There’s a pickup parked behind it, little Chevy S-10.  I looked around, but I didn’t see anybody, so I came down here.  That’s when I found him and called the jail.”

“How’d you call?”

Berry pulled a cellular phone out of his pocket and held it up without saying anything.  Then he put it back.

“Do you come out here often?” Rhodes asked.

“At least once a week.  I have to check on the Burleson cabin, like I said.”

The Burleson cabin was the central issue in a feud between the Sons and Daughters and another organization, the Clearview Historical Society.  The Society claimed that the cabin, supposedly the oldest structure in the county and supposedly built by Cletus Burleson, one of the very first settlers, had been moved from near Clearview to the Old Settlers’ Grounds in the early part of the century.

The Society members, prodded by Faye Knape, their president, wanted the cabin brought back to Clearview and set up on the grounds of the county courthouse where they thought it belonged and where they hoped it might be more of a tourist attraction than it was hidden off in the country.  The Sons and Daughters believed that if they didn’t keep a close watch, the Society would sneak out to the Grounds in the dead of night to spirit the cabin away.

“Do you look around the Grounds every time you’re here?” Rhodes asked.

“Every time.  We’ve put a lot of work into this place, and we’re going to revive the Old Settlers’ Days celebration next summer.  We want to be sure everything’s in top shape.”

“Did you ever see a rope hanging from one of these trees?”

Berry looked over his shoulder at the body, then back at Rhodes.  “What if I did?”

Uh-oh, Rhodes thought.  No wonder Berry was worried about a lawsuit.  He’d known the rope was there and hadn’t done anything about it.

“If you did,” he said, “it might mean that someone had been swimming here before.  You should have reported it, or taken it down.”

“It was just a rope in a tree,” Berry said.  “I didn’t think anything about it.”

Maybe, Rhodes thought, but more likely Berry just hadn’t thought it was worth fooling with.  And certainly he hadn’t thought anyone would drown.

Rhodes looked at the jeans on the ground.  There was a bulge in the right-hand back pocket, and Rhodes reached down to take out the billfold.  He flipped it open to look at the driver’s license in its clear plastic holder.

“Peter Yeldell,” he said.  “You know him?”

Berry shook his head.  “Heard of him.  Never met him, though.  You?”

Rhodes nodded.  He’d heard of Peter Yeldell, all right.  Better known as Pep, Yeldell had been in trouble for most of his thirty-one years.  Little things, usually.  Joyriding and minor in possession of alcohol when he was a kid, DWI, abusive language, and assault when he got a little older.  Rhodes had arrested him once or twice and the deputies a lot more than that.

“I hear something up there,” Berry said, looking up toward the road.  “Somebody’s coming.”

Rhodes stuck the billfold back in the jeans.  “That would be the ambulance,” he said.

Chapter Three

R
hodes sent Berry up the hill to keep the ambulance away.  He didn’t want anyone else down there while he was investigating the crime scene.

But it hadn’t been the ambulance that they’d heard.  It was Ruth Grady, one of the deputies.  She was short and stout and utterly dependable.

“Hack gave me a call,” she said as she came down the hill.  “He thought you might need some help with the crime scene.”

“He was right,” Rhodes said, glad that Hack had made the call.  Hack hadn’t taken to the idea of a woman deputy at first, but Ruth had won him over quickly.  “Where’s Berry?”

“I told him to stay up there, wait for the ambulance,” Ruth said.  She looked at the floating body.  “Anybody we know?”

“Pep Yeldell,” Rhodes told her.  “You’ve brought him in a time or two.”

Ruth nodded.  “I sure have.  Mostly for drunk and disorderly.  What do you think happened here?”

“It looks like an accident.  Pep got drunk, decided to come for a swim, and took a swing over the water on that rope.  The limb broke, and he drowned.”

“You think the limb hit him on the head?”

“That’s one of the things we’ll have Doctor White check,” Rhodes said.  White did the autopsies for the county, saving a lot of money and time that would have been wasted if the body had to be sent to Dallas or Waco.

Ruth bent down to get a better look at the rope.  “Yeldell was alone?”

“That’s what it looks like.  His truck’s up there behind the Burleson cabin.  We’ll check it later.”

They photographed the scene, then searched the area around the pool thoroughly and found nothing, not even so much as a beer can.  Rhodes wondered about that and then remembered that Ty Berry came out every week.  He probably policed the area each time.  There was nothing at all to indicate that there had been anyone with Yeldell.

“Let’s check out the truck,” Rhodes said at last.  “Maybe there’s something there.”

“Better take that rope with us,” Ruth said.

Rhodes agreed, and he knelt down by the side of the pool to unwind the rope from Yeldell’s body.

“I wonder how he got so tangled up,” he said.

“He might have twisted around in the air when the limb broke,” Ruth said.

“I guess we’ll take the limb, too,” Rhodes said.  “We might need it later.”

He stood up and pulled the freed rope toward him hand over hand, looping it as he gathered it in.  The limb coasted over the top of the water, making ripples that spread across the pool and slapped gently against the concrete.  When the limb got almost to the edge of the pool, Rhodes bent down and picked it up.

“Ready?” Ruth said.

Rhodes hefted the waterlogged rope and the tree limb.  “Let’s go.”

They climbed the hill to where Ty Berry waited by the ambulance, which had arrived while Rhodes and Ruth were doing the crime scene.  Rhodes stopped to talk; Ruth went on toward the Burleson cabin.

“Find anything?” Berry asked, looking at the rope and limb that Rhodes carried.

“No,” Rhodes said.  “This is just the stuff we already knew about.”

He put the rope and limb in the trunk of the county car and then told the ambulance attendants that it was all right for them to get the body.

“Take it to Ballinger’s Funeral Home, and tell Clyde to give Doctor White a call.”

One of the attendants nodded and they went down the hill.

“Is there any need for me to stay around here?” Berry asked.

Rhodes told him that there wasn’t.

“I guess I’ll go on back to town, then.  See about a lawyer.  Get ready for the lawsuit.”

“Let’s hope there won’t be one,” Rhodes said.

“If the family doesn’t bring one, Faye Knape probably will,” Berry said.  “I wouldn’t be surprised if she were behind this whole thing.”

“Do you think she had something to do with Yeldell’s death?” Rhodes asked.

“No, no.  Nothing like that.  She wouldn’t have had anything to do with it
directly
.  But who put that rope up there in that tree?  Think about it.  It was on a dead limb.  She’d know that someone would be sure to try a swing on it, and if they didn’t get killed, they might get hurt.  I wouldn’t put it past her to have put that rope there.”

It sounded pretty far-fetched to Rhodes, and he said so.  For one thing, he couldn’t imagine Faye Knape climbing a tree.

“You don’t know that woman if you think she wouldn’t do it,” Berry said.  “She’s a maniac.”

Rhodes knew that Faye Knape was obsessive about the history of Clearview, but he didn’t think she was a maniac.

“She’s just a little eccentric,” he said.

“Hah.  I’ll bet she’s mixed up in this.  You’ll see.”

“If she is, I’ll find out,” Rhodes said, but Berry didn’t hear him.  He was already on his way to his truck.

T
he Burleson cabin didn’t look like anything special.  It sat up on blocks sawed from some kind of tree trunk, and it was made of hand-hewn logs that had weathered to a light gray color over the years.  The mortar that had been used to fill the cracks was mostly gone.  There had been a chimney at one time, but it had long since disappeared.  The hole in the wall had been boarded up sometime in the past.  There was no glass in the windows, and most of the rough wood shingles were missing from the roof.