Bill Crider - Dan Rhodes 09 - Death by Accident (3 page)

Rhodes walked around to the back, where Ruth was looking around a blue Chevy S-10.  He rustled through ankle-deep leaves that had fallen from a huge burr oak tree.

“Find anything?” Rhodes asked.

“Not a thing.  Maybe we should vacuum these leaves.”

“I don’t think we have to,” Rhodes said.  “If there had been another car in here, it would be easy to tell.”

Yeldell’s truck had crushed a path through the leaves, but there was no sign that another vehicle had been there.

“Anything in the truck?” Rhodes asked.

“A couple of cardboard beer cartons.  Lots of empties in the bed of the truck.”

It was about what Rhodes had figured.

“You know what worries me about this?” Ruth asked.

“That it looks like an accident,” Rhodes said.  “And that makes one too many accidents around here lately.”

“That’s right,” Ruth said.

“But the two accidents don’t have anything in common,” Rhodes said.  “This one’s a drowning.”

“That’s different from the other one, all right,” Ruth said.

Rhodes nodded.  In the other one, a man had exploded.

Chapter Four

T
he man was John West, and he had exploded a little more than two weeks earlier on a county road outside of Clearview at around 2:00 a.m.

“Two-oh-three exactly,” David Grice had told Rhodes.  “I put my glasses on and looked at that little digital clock I got at Wal-Mart’s when I heard him blow up, and I called your office right after that.”

Hack had taken the call and phoned Rhodes, who drove to the scene.  West’s clothes had burned away, and his body was a blackened mass.  The grass in the bar ditch had burned in a circle around him.

Grice, who lived in a farm house a few hundred yards down the road, had been waiting by the ditch when Rhodes arrived.

“Good thing we had us a little rain here last week,” Grice said when Rhodes shined his light on the body.  “Otherwise, he’d likely have burned up my whole pasture.  What do you think’d make a fella blow up like that?”

Rhodes said that he didn’t know.

“Smells terrible, too,” Grice said.  “Sort of like a barbecue, but off a little if you know what I mean.”

Rhodes knew.  He felt a little sick at his stomach.  He’d seen dead men before, but never one who’d been burned so badly.

“Made a pretty considerable noise when he blew up,” Grice said.  He didn’t seem bothered by the smell.  “Course I had the window up a little crack, couple or three inches.  I like to get a little air in the room, even if it is the fall of the year.  That’s why I heard him, I guess.  You ever hear of a fella blowin’ up like that before?”

Rhodes never had, and it was not until the next day that he figured out what had actually happened.  He had found the remains of a gasoline can near the scene.

Ruth Grady had been with him that time, too.

“So you think a car hit him while he was carrying the gas can?” she asked.

“That’s right,” Rhodes said.  “It hit the can first, probably, then him.  When the can burst, a spark from the metal must have set off the explosion.  The gas got all over West, and he burned up.  The impact of the crash is what killed him, though.”

By that time they had identified the body.  It was easy after they got a call from West’s wife to say that he was missing.

But what West’s wife hadn’t been able to tell them was where West had been and why he was carrying a gas can.

“Obviously his car had run out of gas,” Ruth said.

“That’s the logical answer,” Rhodes said.  “But where’s his car?”

They had searched both sides of the road several miles, more than the distance West was likely to have walked, but there was no car to be found.

“What about the car that hit him?” Ruth asked.  “Surely it was damaged.”

Rhodes agreed that it must have been.  “If we see it, we’ll know it.  And maybe it’ll be taken to a body shop.  I’ll put out the word for anyone who sees it to give us a call.”

But there hadn’t been any calls, and the investigation seemed to have reached a dead end.  According to his wife, Kara, and the family’s friends, West had no enemies and no reason to be out on a county road alone late at night with a gas can in his hand.

Rhodes had questioned West’s wife, at length, but she could tell him nothing more than the fact that West hadn’t come home from work.  He often worked late at the little auto parts store he owned, she said, because he had trouble finding reliable help and had to keep the books and do all the restocking and inventory himself, after he’d closed the doors for the day.

It hadn’t taken Rhodes long to find out that West didn’t have any trouble at all finding reliable help or at least help that he trusted to take care of things at the store.  A young man named Jerry Tate did most of the things West’s wife believed West was doing after hours, while West took off for an evening of drinking with his friends.

Tate had one of the flattest flat-top haircuts Rhodes had seen since he was about twelve years old.  He imagined you could have set a glass of water on the top of Tate’s hair and it wouldn’t wobble.

Tate said that he didn’t know where West went after work, and he didn’t care.

“He pays me to work in the store, and that’s what I do,” Tate told the sheriff.  “So that’s what I do — I work in the store, and I don’t ask any questions about where he goes after he leaves here.  He pays me overtime to stay and get all the ducks in a row, and I’m glad to do it.  The only reason I know where he goes is that somebody told me about seeing him at some club one night.”

“Who told you that?”

“I don’t remember,” Tate said, and Rhodes could see that he wasn’t going to get any more out of him.

It didn’t really matter.  Knowing West’s habit, Rhodes was able to find out in only a few hours that West liked to hang around with his brother, Tuffy.  Tuffy drove a wrecker and owned a wrecking yard on the outskirts of Clearview.  He spent a lot of his time in places like The County Line, a honky tonk that Rhodes knew only too well, thanks to his recent investigation of the murder of one of Clearview High’s assistant football coaches.

Tuffy hadn’t been any help when Rhodes asked about his brother.  Rhodes drove out to the wrecking yard to talk to him.  The yard was surrounded by a high sheet metal fence that had rusted badly, and it was filled with the bodies of wrecked cars, jumbled together as if the yard had been the scene of a gigantic destruction derby.  Some of them had rusted as badly as the fence.

Occasionally a car crusher could come by and flatten some of the wrecks like cards in a deck, after which they would be stacked on a trailer and hauled away.

Tuffy met Rhodes outside the door of the sheet metal building that served as both an office and a parts department.  John sold new parts, and Tuffy sold used ones.

“I don’t know a thing about what John was doing that night,” he told Rhodes.  “We had a couple of beers at The County Line, talked about the football team a little, and then he left.”

He paused and gave Rhodes a significant look.  “I thought our boys were on their way to state, but I guess that’s all over with.”

It wasn’t exactly Rhodes’s fault that the Clearview Catamounts hadn’t won their play-off game after the coach’s murder, but a lot of people seemed to blame the sheriff.  Their attitude was that he should have solved the murder instantly instead of taking a couple of days.  Then the team would have had time to settle down and get ready for the game.

Rhodes didn’t want to talk about it.  He said, “Where did he go when he left The County Line?”

Tuffy shrugged.  “I figured he went home.”

“Was he driving his car?”

Tuffy scratched at a scab under his right ear.  He was wearing a greasy Dallas Cowboys cap, jeans, and a dirty shirt covered with a paisley pattern.  His hair was cut so short on the sides that his scalp showed through, but he had sideburns that extended below his ear lobes.

“I guess he was.  He wouldn’t have walked all the way out there.”

“Did he ever run out of gas that you know of?”

“John?  Hell, I never could get him to top off his tank.  He’d run it down till it was nearly dry.  I told him that the fuel pump’d pick up all kinds of trash off the bottom of the tank if he kept on like that, but he didn’t listen.  He said the gas gauge didn’t work right anyway, but I knew that for a lie.”

“Did he leave The County Line with anyone?”

“Not that I know of.  Went off by himself, like always.  He didn’t have a woman or anything like that, if that’s what you’re thinking.  He didn’t run around on Kara.  He just needed to get out of the house now and then.  You a married man, Sheriff?”

Rhodes said that he was.

“Then you know what I mean.  Man needs to get off to himself every now and then.  I was married once myself, but it didn’t take.”

Rhodes didn’t really know what Tuffy meant about the need to get off by himself.  Rhodes had recently married for the second time, and he wasn’t looking for ways to get away from Ivy.  In fact, he wished he could find a way to spend more time in her company.

“I’d just as soon Kara didn’t find out about where John and me was, though,” Tuffy said.  “It wouldn’t do her any good to know he was out drinkin’ when he could’ve been home with her.”

Rhodes didn’t make any promises.

“Do you have any idea why he might have been out there on that county road?” he asked.

“Not the least one.  That’s a long way from his house, and he didn’t know anybody out that way.  Who was it found him?”

“David Grice.”

“Yeah.  I read his name in the paper.  I never heard of him before, and I bet you John never did, either.”

“What time did he leave The County Line?”

Tuffy scratched at the scab again.  Rhodes was afraid it might come off.  It didn’t, but when he was finished with his scratching, Tuffy looked at his fingertips to make sure.  There was grease under his nails, but no blood.

“I don’t know about the time for sure,” he said.  “Maybe sometime around nine.  Things were just getting going.”

“And you don’t have any idea who might have hit your brother and left the scene.”

“If I did, I’d tell you.  I want that son of a bitch caught and put behind bars, Sheriff.  My brother and I were real close.”  Tuffy held up his crossed fingers.  “Just like that.  So you find that son of a bitch and put him where he belongs.”

“I’ll find him,” Rhodes said, but so far he hadn’t done it.

Chapter Five

“D
o you think the two accidents are connected?” Ruth Grady asked.

Rhodes looked off into the trees to the south of the Burleson cabin.  There was one that was filled with bright reddish-orange fruit.  Persimmons, Rhodes thought.  He hadn’t eaten a persimmon in years.

“I don’t much like coincidences,” he said.  “Not that two accidents like these are necessarily a coincidence.  People drown.  People get killed by hit-and-run drivers.”

“Not very often,” Ruth said.  “Not in Blacklin County, anyway.”

She had a point.  Rhodes couldn’t remember the last hit-and-run he’d investigated before West’s death, and the last drowning had been years before.

“But the accidents weren’t anything alike,” he said.  “A hit-and-run and a drowning.  They couldn’t be more different.”

“It still bothers me,” Ruth said.

It bothered Rhodes, too.

R
hodes drove back to the jail to do the paperwork on Pep Yeldell.  When he got there, Hack and Lawton, the jailor, were waiting for him, Hack at his desk and Lawton leaning on a broom, both of them wearing expectant looks.

Rhodes figured that they wanted him to tell them about Yeldell’s death, and he decided that he wouldn’t.  Whenever they knew something, he had to drag it out of them like a man pulling a stump out of swampy ground that just didn’t want to let go.  So he went to his desk, put on his reading glasses, and started to write.

“What you need,” Hack said after a while, “is a computer in your car.”

Rhodes didn’t say anything.  Hack, who was somewhere in his seventies, probably the latter part of them, was the one who had complained for a long time before Rhodes was finally able to persuade the county commissioners get a computer for the department.  But Hack still wasn’t satisfied.

“If you had one in the car,” Hack said, “you could enter your reports right there on the scene.  Save ’em on a disk, and you’d have ’em ready to print out when you got back here to the office.”

“Sounds like a good idea to me,” Lawton said. 

The jailer was as old as Hack, but Hack had seniority in the department and didn’t like for Lawton to try to steer the conversations.  Rhodes stayed quiet, waiting for Hack to ask about the body at the Old Settlers’ Grounds.

But Hack didn’t ask.  He said, “I got a call while you were out there investigatin’.”

Rhodes sighed, took off his glasses, folded them, and slipped them in his pocket.  He should have known.  There could have been only two reasons why Hack wouldn’t have been asking about the body.  One was that Hack already knew something, which was highly likely, especially if the ambulance crew had talked on the radio.  And the other, even more likely, was that Hack knew something new, something that Rhodes didn’t know.

“Who called?” Rhodes asked, hoping for a quick answer but knowing that it wasn’t going to be that easy.

“Friend of yours,” Lawton said.

Hack said, “I’m the one took the call.”

“I know it,” Lawton said.  “I was just tryin’ to be helpful.”

Rhodes tried not to smile.  The last thing that either of them wanted to be was helpful, at least not until they’d had their fun.

“A friend of mine?” he said.

“Preacher friend,” Lawton said.

Hack twisted in his chair to glare at him.  “You didn’t take the call.  I took it.  I’m the one knows who called.”

“I didn’t say any different.”

“Who called?” Rhodes asked, trying to stall the argument.

Hack turned back to him.  “Brother Sterling from the Freewill Church of the Lord Jesus is who called.  You and him had a little round when you were foolin’ with that emu rustlin’ business.”