Bill Crider - Dan Rhodes 09 - Death by Accident (22 page)

Computers again, Rhodes thought.  Hack would be proud.

“If a part’s out there,” Lowery went on, “Tuffy can get it for you.  I tell you what, you bring that car in, and I’ll give you a free estimate.  You won’t find a better price in town, either.  I can promise you that.  What I can’t promise you is whether it’ll run.  I don’t do mechanic work.”

“But you can take care of everything else.”

“That’s right.  It’d be a pleasure to work on that ugly old car.  You just leave it to me.”

Rhodes said that he’d probably do that.

Chapter Thirty-Five

R
hodes was on his way to Tuffy West’s junkyard when Hack called on the radio.

“Ivy wants you to phone her,” he said.  “She says you’ve been holding out on her.”

“Holding out about what?” Rhodes asked.

“She didn’t tell me that.  I’m just the old dispatcher.  Nobody ever tells me anything.”

Rhodes could tell from Hack’s tone that the dispatcher’s feelings were hurt, and he thought he could guess the reason why.

“Ivy told you about me getting shot at, didn’t she,” Rhodes said.

“I ain’t sayin’ she did, and I ain’t sayin’ she didn’t.  Course, it’d be your place to tell me about somethin’ like that.  If you wanted me to know about it, that is.”

“I didn’t feel like talking about it.”

“That’s just fine with me.  It ain’t none of my business.  If you want to keep ever’thing a secret, you just keep it a secret.  It’s all the same to me.”

“I’ll tell you about it later,” Rhodes said.

“Can if you want to.  Don’t have to, though.  I wouldn’t want you to put yourself out any.”

“Did Ivy say where she was?”

“She’s at work.  You got the number?”

“I know what it is,” Rhodes said.

R
hodes stopped at a pay phone and called Ivy.

“Why didn’t you tell me about Kara West’s make-over?” Ivy asked.

“I guess I forgot,” Rhodes said, wondering why Ivy cared.  He hoped she wasn’t thinking about coloring her hair.  “Where did you hear about it?”

“At the Hair Barn.  That’s where I get all the news.”

The Hair Barn was the shop where Ivy got her hair washed, cut, and blown dry.  Rhodes had never understood the appeal of the name.  It sounded to him like the name of a place where hair was stored in bales, like hay.  But the name aside, Ivy was right about one thing:  If you wanted the news — the
real
news — about Clearview, the Hair Barn was a more reliable source than either the newspaper or the radio station.

“I forgot this was hair-cut day.  Are you thinking about getting braces?  You sure don’t need them.”

“I’m not thinking about anything like that.  I’m thinking about why Kara West got a make-over.”

“Her husband just died.  She probably wanted to do something to make herself feel better.”

“Maybe.  But I think a woman usually does something like that for other reasons.”

“What other reasons?”

“A man,” Ivy said.

“I never thought about that,” Rhodes admitted.  “She seemed genuinely sad that John was dead.  I felt sorry for her.  I thought she was just trying to make herself feel better.”

“You can be sad even if you have somebody else lined up,” Ivy told him.  “And you can get a make-over for another man as well as for yourself.”

Rhodes could feel his clothes soaking up the damp cold.  He rubbed his hand across his face and wiped the moisture on his jacket.

“That’s a comforting thought,” he said.

“I’m not trying to comfort you.  I’m just saying that it might throw a new light on those accidents of yours.”

“Kara West couldn’t have killed those three men,” Rhodes said.  “She might have run over John, but she wasn’t strong enough to have killed Pep.”

“How strong do you have to be to hit somebody in the head with a tree limb?”

Rhodes thought about that for a second.  “Good question,” he said.

R
hodes drove out of town to Tuffy West’s wrecking yard.  The wide front gate was open, and Rhodes could see the tangle of old cars that the fence was supposed to hide.  Tuffy hadn’t gone to the expense of paving the entrance, or any of the rest of the yard for that matter, so the county car splashed through wide, dark puddles as Rhodes drove inside.

Rhodes parked beside Tuffy’s wrecker and went inside the building.  Tuffy was inside behind the high counter watching a little TV like the one Hack had at the jail.  He had it turned up loud, and Rhodes could hear Rod Roddy yelling for someone to “come on down.”  Rhodes had heard that Roddy was from Ft. Worth originally, but he didn’t know whether that was true.

Tuffy looked up from the TV when Rhodes walked across the oily concrete floor to the counter.  When he saw who his visitor was, he turned off
The Price Is Right
and smiled.

“You caught the bastard that killed my brother yet?” he asked.

“Not yet,” Rhodes said.  “But I’m working on it.”

“Good.  What can I do for you, then?”

“I bought an Edsel,” Rhodes told him.  “I was wondering how hard it would be to get parts for it.”

“An Edsel, huh?  Well, it won’t be easy gettin’ parts for her, I can tell you that.  Not as hard as you might think, though.  Most of the parts are interchangeable with parts from old Fords and Mercurys.  Those old Edsels are mighty popular with collectors right now.  I don’t know why, ’cause they’re so ugly — sorry if that hurts your feelin’s, Sheriff, but they are.”

Rhodes didn’t care what Tuffy West thought about the Edsel’s appearance.  He just wanted to know about the parts.

“I got me a computer, and I’m in touch with places all over the U. S. A.,” Tuffy continued.  So if the parts are out there, I can find ’em for you.”

“I don’t know what I’ll need yet,” Rhodes said.  “I haven’t really looked at the car very carefully.”

“Is it that one Randy Overton had?”

“That’s the one.”

“It was in pretty good shape.  His daddy took care of it, and it’s been under that tarp ever since.”

“You called him ‘Randy,’” Rhodes said.  “Were you two pretty good friends?”

Tuffy narrowed his eyes.  “I knew him.  Lots of people knew Randy.”

“But how many people knew Overton, Yeldell, and John West?” Rhodes asked.

“Plenty, I bet.  Why?  What difference does it make?”

“It wouldn’t make any difference if they hadn’t all been killed,” Rhodes said.

Tuffy shrugged.  “Accidents happen.”

“Sure they do.  But your brother wasn’t an accident.”

“I wasn’t talkin’ about John.  I was talkin’ about the other two.”

“Those weren’t accidents,” Rhodes said.

“Yeah?  What makes you think so?”

“Somebody killed them,” Rhodes said.  “Somebody who knew all three of them.  Somebody who’s lied to me about them two or three times already.”

“You better not be talkin’ about me,” Tuffy said.

“I am, though,” Rhodes said.

Rhodes had thought about things for a long time after hanging up the pay phone.  He’d stood out in the weather until his pants legs were wet and sticking to him the way they had when he’d climbed out of the pool at the Old Settlers’ Grounds.

Eventually he’d gone over everything that people had said to him, and he’d realized that Tuffy had been lying right from the start.

It was the brother-in-law business from the Ma and Pa Kettle debate that had bothered Rhodes.  Tuffy was Kara West’s brother-in-law, the one on whose shoulder she’d been crying so hard at the funeral.  Rhodes should have been suspicious then.  He should have known it was Tuffy all along.

“You told me that John left the County Line alone,” Rhodes said.  “But he didn’t.  He left with you.”

“Who says?” Tuffy asked through clenched teeth.

“That doesn’t matter,” Rhodes said, hoping that Yvonne Bilson would be willing to testify in court.  “You also told me that you didn’t remember whether you saw Pep that night.  But according to my witness, you did see him.”

“That’s a lie,” Tuffy said.

“We’ll have to let a jury decide that,” Rhodes said.  “Besides, there’s more.”

“There can’t be.”

“There’s Pep.  Did you let him have a look at John’s Cherokee to see if he could fix it?  It might have brought more if you sold it in Mexico or somewhere than if you just broke it down for parts.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Then why did you take those shots at me yesterday.”

Tuffy tried to look surprised.  He wasn’t very good at it, and his voice rose a little.

“Me?” he asked.

“You,” Rhodes said.  “I figure Mrs. West called you right after I left her house.  She must have told you I knew about Pep and John being friends.  You were probably already planning to come over.  She was dressed for a visitor, and I wasn’t the one she was expecting.”

Tuffy opened his mouth as if he were going to say something, maybe deny something.  But no words came out.

Rhodes waited for a second, then said, “You must have gone over to Mack Riley’s looking for me. I told Mrs. West that’s where I was headed.  Maybe you were planning another little accident for me, maybe not.  But you got your chance when I went to the Old Settlers’ Grounds.”

“That’s a bunch of crap.”  Tuffy was no better at sounding convincing than he was at sounding surprised.  But he kept trying.  “I never did anything.”

“I have a slug from the rifle that fired the shots,” Rhodes said.  “I’ll just have to match them to your .30-.30 to prove that you’re the one.”

“I don’t have a .30-.30.”

“Maybe not.  But I’d say the slug was about that size.  Maybe it wasn’t.  What kind of rifle do you have, anyway?”

“This kind right here,” Tuffy said, ducking down behind the counter and coming up with a rifle that he stuck right in Rhodes’s face.

Chapter Thirty-Six

R
hodes barely had time to jerk his head to the side before Tuffy fired.  Flame burned Rhodes’s eyes as the bullet zipped by him and into the stack of tires on the opposite wall.  Rhodes hit the floor and rolled.

Tuffy climbed up on the counter and worked the rifle’s lever action.  A brass shell winked in the air, and Tuffy aimed the rifle as Rhodes tried to stand and reach his pistol.  He didn’t get his hand on it because his foot slipped in a patch of oil.  He fell again, which might have been the reason that Tuffy’s next shot missed.  The bullet sparked off the concrete floor and whined into the tires.

Rhodes came up on his hands and knees, still trying to get his pistol out.

Tuffy didn’t want him to get it.  He was clearly beyond caring about whether Rhodes’s death appeared to be an accident.  He fired his rifle again.

Rhodes dived to his left, hit on his shoulder, and rolled under the same car that had been there on his last visit.  The engine was still hoisted out, hanging above the empty engine compartment on a thick chain.

It didn’t hang for long.  Tuffy ran to the hoist and released the catch.  There was a high-pitched squeal; the chain rattled, and the engine fell.

Rhodes was already slithering out from under the other side of the car when the engine struck the concrete with the sound of one boulder ramming another.

Tuffy cursed.  It would have been hard to explain just why Rhodes was under the car, but Tuffy could have come up with something.  Rhodes could practically hear him.

“God knows why that hoist let go.  The Sheriff was under there checking out something he wanted to see for that old Edsel he bought, and the chain must’ve slipped.  Maybe the catch was defective.  You could check it out.”

And of course by then the catch would be defective.  Tuffy would make sure of that.  Rhodes crouched beside the car, his pistol now in his hand, waiting for Tuffy’s next move.

It was very quiet, and Rhodes could hear the rain, falling harder now, drumming on the tin roof of the building.  Then Rhodes heard Tuffy starting the wrecker.

Rhodes jumped up and ran around the car.  When he got to the door, Tuffy leaned out of the wrecker and fired two rounds.  Rhodes heard something buzz just over his head, and Tuffy ducked back into the wrecker.

Rhodes stopped and brought his pistol up in a two-handed grip.  He fired twice, starring the wrecker’s windshield at just about the level of Tuffy’s head.  Tuffy had ducked out of the way, but the wrecker choked and died.

Rather than trying to start it again, Tuffy bailed out of the wrecker door and ran across the parking area, carrying the rifle in his right hand.

Rhodes went after him, splashing through the cold puddles.  If Tuffy got into the maze of old automobile bodies, he was going to be hard to find, but there was no way to stop him short of shooting him.

And there wasn’t much chance of shooting him.  A running man with adrenaline pumping through him might be able to hit something the size of an elephant, but anything smaller was just about impossible.

The rain began to fall even harder, throwing a gray curtain over the wrecking yard.  Rhodes could hardly see the junked cars as he ran past them, their hoods wide open like the mouths of giant metal birds in a weedy nest.

Tuffy ducked down a row where cars were stacked on top of one another two and three high, and Rhodes slowed down.  He was pretty sure that Tuffy wouldn’t just keep running.  Sooner or later he was going to stop and make a stand and take a few more shots.

Rhodes tried to think how many times Tuffy had fired the rifle already.  Three inside and twice outside, he thought.  If the rifle held six rounds like Mack Riley’s Marlin, Tuffy had one left.  Rhodes didn’t think Tuffy would have any extra rounds in his pockets, though he couldn’t be absolutely sure.  So there would be only one more shot.

Of course one could be enough.

Rhodes stopped beside the shell of an old white Plymouth with a vinyl-covered roof.  Atop it there was fairly new maroon Ford Crown Victoria that had been in a pretty bad accident.  The front end was crumpled almost all the way back to the driver’s compartment, the seats were missing, the wheels were gone, and the trunk was popped open.