Bill Crider - Dan Rhodes 09 - Death by Accident (8 page)

“You know I can’t do that.”

“Then you’ll just have to finish the job for free.  Either that or be arrested.  Which do you want to do?”

“I’ll finish the damn job.”

“Good.”  Rhodes moved his hand off Overton’s back and moved away.  “You can stand up now.”

Overton stood up and glowered at Rhodes.

“I think you made me strain my back, bendin’ me over like that.”

“I’m sure it’ll heal fast,” Rhodes said.  He looked toward the driveway.  “That’s a nice-looking car you have under that tarp.”

Overton glanced in the direction of the car.  “That car belonged to my daddy.  He loved that old car.  Took good care of it right up till the day he died.”

“I could tell it was in good shape,” Rhodes said.

“It needs some body work and a new paint job.  But one of the last things Daddy did after he put it up on the blocks was to drain the oil out of the crankcase and put the tires in storage.  I still got those tires.  Genuine wide white sidewalls on ’em.”

Rhodes was impressed.  “I don’t suppose you’d like to sell the tires and car along with them.”

“I wouldn’t mind sellin’ it, tires and all” Overton said, “It’s just stuff that’s takin’ up room, and I’ll never have the money to get it fixed up right.”

Rhodes started to ask him how much he wanted for it.

He didn’t get a chance, however, because Overton said, “But much as I’d like to get rid of it, I sure as hell wouldn’t sell it to you.”

Chapter Twelve

A
disappointed Rhodes was headed home when he got a call from Hack on the radio.

“Ty Berry’s here at the jail,” Hack told him.  “Says he has to talk to you.”

Rhodes had planned to go by his house, feed his dog, and maybe even have a quiet supper with Ivy.  Well, he thought, he could still do all that if Berry didn’t keep him too long.

“Tell him I’ll be there in five minutes,” he said, and turned the car toward the jail.

B
erry was sitting by Rhodes’s desk when the sheriff arrived.  He stood up when Rhodes entered the room.

“I’m glad you could get here so soon,” he said.  He looked over at Hack, who was watching the early news on his little Sony.  “Is there somewhere that we can talk?”

“We can talk right here,” Rhodes told him.  “Anything you can say to me, you can say in front of Hack.”

Hack nodded, but said nothing, apparently intent on a story about an alligator that was caught crossing a highway down near Houston.

“All right, then,” Berry said. 

He sank back in the chair, and Rhodes walked over to his desk and sat down.

“What’s the trouble?” Rhodes asked.

“I got a phone call a little while ago from someone who’s not a member of the Clearview Historical Society but who knows a lot of them.  He says there’s a plot afoot to move the Burleson cabin to town tonight and put it in the city park.”

Several questions immediately occurred to Rhodes.  He asked the first one:  “Why not the courthouse lawn?”

Berry pulled a wrinkled handkerchief from his shirt pocket, took off his Catamount cap, and wiped his balding head.  He stuck the handkerchief back in his pocket and put his cap back on.

“If you think that was a hard question,” Rhodes said, “how about this one: who called you?”

“I suppose I can tell you that.  It was Mack Riley.”

Rhodes knew Mack.  He was a cranky old codger, too ornery to join either the Sons and Daughters of Texas or the Historical Society because neither of them would let him run the show.  When he was younger, he had by all accounts been a real hellion, getting into one fight after another.

But age or wisdom or both had supposedly reformed him, and now the only fights he got into were fights that used words.  He was a self-appointed expert on the history of Blacklin County and a frequent contributor to the Clearview
Herald
’s letters-to-the-editor column.  His letters usually condemned either the Society or the Sons and Daughters for some misguided project or what Riley saw as a distortion of history in an article written by one of their members.

“Mack’s on your side?” Rhodes said.

“This time he is,” Berry said.

“OK.  I’ll take your word for it.  Now, tell me why the city park.”

“Mack says it’s because the county commissioners would never allow anyone to just set the cabin on the courthouse lawn and get away with it.  They’d have it hauled off the next day.”

Rhodes worked closely with the commissioners.  They could be as cranky as Mack Riley when the occasion demanded it, and he didn’t imagine they’d be any too happy to see the Burleson cabin parked on the courthouse lawn.  Riley was probably right about their reaction.

“But the city council’s different,” Berry said.  “Mack says they haven’t done a thing for that park in years except let it to go to hell in a handbasket.  They’ll hardly even pay for someone to cut the weeds in the summer.  If the Society puts the cabin there and promises to take care of the upkeep, maybe even keep up the whole park, the council will let them leave the cabin for as long as they want to.”

That too sounded about right to Rhodes.  The council would do just about anything to save money, even the little bit of money they spent on mowing the park two or three times a year.

“Where did Mack get his information?”

“He didn’t say.  But he knows a lot of people, and he’s a good listener.  People like to talk to him.”

Rhodes figured that Berry would have mentioned the drowning to Riley, so he said, “Did Mack have anything to say about Yeldell?”

Berry took off his cap again, but he didn’t wipe his head.  He just put the cap on his knee and left it there.

“He thinks the same thing I do.”

“What’s that?”

“That it would be just like Faye Knape to put that rope in the tree and then suggest to Yeldell that he go swimming out there.”

The rope’s being tied to a rotten limb could be explained by the fact that someone wanted the limb to break, but Rhodes found it hard to believe that Faye Knape was that someone.  And he didn’t think that Faye and Pep Yeldell moved in the same social circles.

“Are you making an accusation?” he asked.

Berry looked down at his cap.  “I don’t know,” he said.

“It seems pretty unlikely to me that Faye Knape would know someone like Pep Yeldell,” Rhodes said.  “And depending on a rotten limb to break and kill someone seems a whole lot more unlikely than that.”

“It’s not so unlikely if the someone was drunk.  Yeldell liked to drink.”

“Let me see if I’ve got this right,” Rhodes said.  “Faye Knape doesn’t want the Old Settler’s Celebration to be a success, so she climbs one of the tallest pecan trees on the grounds.  Then she ties a rope to a rotten limb in the hopes that some intoxicated man, or a woman would do, I guess, will come along, swing on the rope, get hit in the head by the falling limb, and drown in the pool.”

Hack made a sound that might have been a cough or a laugh, and Berry looked over in his direction.  Hack was staring hard at a slick-haired anchorman and didn’t appear to notice.

Berry turned back to Rhodes.  “It sounds ridiculous when you say it that way, but it could have happened.  And then there’s Grat Bilson.”

Grat was the vice-president of the historical society.  He was a former Clearview Catamount football player now in his middle forties but still in commendable condition.

“What about him?” Rhodes asked.

“Well, he could climb that tree, for one thing.”

“Maybe,” Rhodes admitted, “but it still sounds ridiculous.”

“How about this then,” Berry said.  “When Pep Yeldell was in high school, he stole Bilson’s car.”

“Check on that, Hack,” Rhodes said.

“Check on what?” Hack asked, as if he hadn’t been listening to every word.

Rhodes told him, and Hack went to work on his computer.  It didn’t take long.

“Joy ridin’,” Hack said.  “The car wasn’t hurt.”

“But it gives Bilson a motive for murder,” Berry said.  “He’s the kind of man who holds a grudge.”

Rhodes didn’t agree.  “It sounds pretty thin, and the method is still ridiculous.”

Berry took his cap off his knee, smoothed down what was left of his hair, and fitted the cap on his head.

“I don’t think you care about Pep Yeldell,” he said.  “Or about the Burleson cabin.”

“I don’t know that there’s much I can do about either one of them.  Dr. White’s autopsy report indicates that Yeldell died by accident.  As for the cabin, I’m not sure that the Historical Society would be breaking any law by moving it.”

Berry’s face turned red.  “How can you say that?”

Rhodes didn’t answer; he asked another question.  “Who owns the cabin?”

Berry opened his mouth, then shut it.

“Your bunch paid for the restoration,” Rhodes said.  “But that doesn’t make you the owners.  Do you have a deed to it?”

“Well, no, but that’s not the point.”

“What
is
the point, then?”

“The point is that they’re going to move it!”

“Maybe they have a deed to it.”

“They don’t.  They can’t!”

“They might.  Have you tried to find out?”

Berry stood up.  “Sheriff, I hope you’re not counting on my support in the next election.  I could never vote for a man who won’t uphold the law.”

“I’m doing my best,” Rhodes said.

“Well it’s not good enough.”

Berry stalked away, his shoulders rigid.  He tried to slam the door, but it had an automatic closer on it.

“Looks like you lost a vote,” Hack said, looking at the door and no longer making a pretense of watching TV.

“It’s not the first one,” Rhodes said.

“Won’t be the last one, either.  You really gonna let them move that cabin to town?”

“We’ll see,” Rhodes said.

Chapter Thirteen

R
hodes was about to leave when Ruth Grady came in.

“I’ve been talking to Bull Lowery,” she said.

Bull was the owner of Lowery’s Paint and Body, where Pep Yeldell had worked.

“Dr. White seems to think Yeldell’s death was an accident,” Rhodes told her, describing what he’d read in the report.  “Did Bull give you any reason to doubt any of that?”

“It’s hard to say.  Did you know that Bull was Yeldell’s brother-in-law?”

Rhodes shook his head.  “I didn’t even know Yeldell was married.  Hack?”

“See what I’m tellin’ you about computers?” Hack said.  “You gotta have ’em.”

“Never mind the little lesson in life,” Rhodes said.  “Just check on Yeldell.”

In a few seconds Hack said, “Married to Cissy Lowery in 1993, divorced the same year.”

“It didn’t last very long,” Rhodes said.

“According to Bull, it lasted too long,” Ruth said.  “He says that Pep was an abuser.”

“Hack?”

Hack pecked at the keyboard.  “Nope.  Not a single complaint.”

“I didn’t think I remembered one,” Rhodes said.  “She never reported him.”

“There’s nothing unusual in that,” Ruth said.

Rhodes nodded.  “The only unusual thing is that she left him.  Usually abused women stay around way too long.”

“Don’t see why somebody’d hire a man who abused his sister,” Hack said.

Ruth had asked about that.  “He says that Yeldell was a good worker and that they kept things strictly business between them.  As long as Yeldell wasn’t anywhere near his sister, Bull didn’t worry about him.”

“He didn’t mind him gettin’ close to other women?” Hack asked.

“He didn’t think that was any of his business,” Ruth said.

Hack’s head wagged.  “Hard to account for the way some men think.”

“Apparently he was keeping his act clean,” Rhodes said.  “We haven’t had any complaints of that kind about him, and he’s been going around with quite a few women if what Ruth heard earlier is the truth.”

“Bull says it’s true.  Yeldell got around, all right.  Sometimes men don’t try anything like that on a woman until they’ve developed a really close relationship.  Don’t ask me why.”

Rhodes didn’t know either, but he knew she was right.

“Did he know anything about what Yeldell did last night?”

“He says Pep liked to go out to the County Line and have a few beers.  If Pep didn’t have a date, he could always meet someone out there.”

There was nothing new in any of that.  In view of the autopsy report, Rhodes wasn’t sure that it was worth his while to investigate Yeldell’s death any farther.  But he still had that itch between his shoulder blades, that little intuition that kept telling him something was wrong.  Maybe he’d go out to the County Line and ask a few questions.

“What about cars coming in for body work?” Rhodes asked.  “Has Bull seen anything suspicious?”

“Like a Jeep Cherokee?” Ruth asked.

“Like that, or like a car that’s dented on the front end from an unreported accident.”

“I asked about that.  But he says he hasn’t seen a thing like that.  Just the usual stuff.”

“Figgers,” Hack said.  “I’m tellin’ you, that Cherokee’s over there in Russia right now.  Prob’ly loaded with Levi’s when they shipped it, too.”

“You never can tell,” Rhodes said.

R
hodes didn’t get home in time to feed the dog or eat supper.  He did manage a phone call, but that was it.  Ivy said she’d take care of the dog and keep his supper warm. 

“What’s it going to be?” he asked.

“Vegetable soup.  With cornbread.”

“Low fat cornbread, I guess,” Rhodes said.

“As low as cornbread gets.  We have to make up for that bacon cheeseburger.  Not to mention the Blizzard.”

“I might be late,” Rhodes said.

“It won’t be the first time, will it?”

There was no reproach in the words, for which Rhodes was grateful.

“No,” he said.  “And it won’t be the last.”

“I knew what I was getting into when I married a man of action,” Ivy told him.  “So I don’t mind.  Much.  Just be sure I get my share of the action.”

“I promise.”

“I’ll hold you to it.”

“I hope so,” he said.