Bill Crider - Dan Rhodes 08 - Winning Can Be Murder

  WINNING CAN BE MURDER

  Book Eight of the Dan Rhodes Mysteries

  By Bill Crider

  A Gordian Knot Mystery

  Gordian Knot is an imprint of Crossroad Press

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  Digital Edition Copyright 2014 / Bill Crider

  Cover images courtesy of:

  Nicolas Raymond (Texas flag image)

  DISCOVER CROSSROAD PRESS

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  Meet the Author

  BILL CRIDER is the author of more than fifty published novels and numerous short stories. He won the Anthony Award for best first mystery novel in 1987 for Too Late to Die and was nominated for the Shamus Award for best first private-eye novel for Dead on the Island. He won the Golden Duck award for “best juvenile science fiction novel” for Mike Gonzo and the UFO Terror. He and his wife, Judy, won the best short story Anthony in 2002 for their story “Chocolate Moose.” His story “Cranked” from Damn Near Dead (Busted Flush Press) was nominated for the Edgar award for best short story.

  Check out his homepage at: http:// www.billcrider.com or take a look at his peculiar blog at http://billcrider.blogspot.com

  Book List

  Novels:

  The Sheriff Dan Rhodes Mystery Series

  Too Late to Die

  Shotgun Saturday Night

  Cursed to Death

  Death on the Move

  Evil at the Root

  Booked for a Hanging

  Murder Most Fowl

  Winning Can Be Murder

  Death by Accident

  A Ghost of a Chance

  A Romantic Way to Die

  Red, White, and Blue Murder

  “The Empty Manger,” (novella in the collection entitled Murder, Mayhem, and Mistletoe.)

  A Mammoth Murder

  Murder Among the O.W.L.S.

  Of All Sad Words

  Murder in Four Parts

  Murder in the Air

  The Wild Hog Murders

  The Murder of a Beauty Shop Queen

  Compound Murder

  The Carl Burns Mystery Series

  One Dead Dean

  Dying Voices

  …A Dangerous Thing

  Dead Soldiers

  The Truman Smith Mystery Series

  Dead on the Island

  Gator Kill

  When Old Men Die

  The Prairie Chicken Kill

  Murder Takes a Break

  The Sally Good Mystery Series

  Murder Is An Art

  A Knife in the Back

  A Bond with Death

  The Stanley Waters Mystery Series (Willard Scott, Co-Author)

  Murder under Blue Skies

  Murder in the Mist

  Stand-Alone Mystery and Suspense Novels

  Blood Marks

  The Texas Capitol Murders

  Houston Homicide (with Clyde Wilson)

  House-Name Spy Fiction

  The Coyote Connection (a Nick Carter book, in collaboration with Jack Davis)

  Western Novels

  Ryan Rides Back

  Galveston Gunman

  A Time for Hanging

  Medicine Show

  Outrage at Blanco

  Texas Vigilante

  As Colby Jackson:

  Dead Man’s Revenge

  Gabby Darbins and the Slide-Rock Bolter

  Horror Novels (all published under the pseudonym “Jack MacLane”)

  Keepers of the Beast

  Goodnight, Moom

  Blood Dreams

  Rest in Peace

  Just before Dark

  Books for Young Readers

  A Vampire Named Fred

  Muttketeer

  Mike Gonzo and the Sewer Monster

  Mike Gonzo and the Almost Invisible Man

  Mike Gonzo and the UFO Terror

  Short Story Collections:

  The Nighttime is the Right Time

  WINNING CAN BE MURDER

  Chapter One

  On certain late fall evenings in most small Texas towns, Sheriff Dan Rhodes thought, you could actually smell football in the air. It smelled like the first cool days of the season and burning leaves and popcorn and roasted peanuts and leather.

  You could hear it, too. You could hear the bands tuning up in the grandstand and then playing “Them Basses” and “March Grandioso” and the school fight song. You could hear the play-by-play announcer’s echoing voice reminding everyone to make a trip to the concession stand sponsored by the Band Boosters Club for a refreshing soft drink before the game.

  And of course you could see it. You could see the dust motes drifting through the headlights of the last cars arriving at the field, and you could see the haze of yellow light that hung over the field itself, often the only place in town where any lights were on, since everyone was at the game.

  Some people said that high school football was almost as important as religion to people in Texas, but Rhodes knew better than that. It was more important. People just didn’t want to admit it.

  Rhodes, however, didn’t think that Billy Graham at the height of his powers, or even a tag-team duo of Graham and Billy Sunday, could have filled the high school stadiums in every city and town in Texas for ten weeks every fall, not for fifty or sixty years in a row; but high school football could. And did. It didn’t even matter whether the home team had a winning record. The crowds came out just the same.

  On this particular fall evening, practically everyone in Clearview, and for that matter in most of Blacklin County, with the exception of the sheriff, was riding the wave of the kind of elation that comes to small towns only occasionally in their history — when the high school team is headed for the state play-offs.

  Winning a state championship meant something to a town. You could tell it when you saw the signs erected at the city limits of every town whose team had won one. Some of the school colors on the signs were faded by time, the metal flecked with rust, but the signs were still there:

  WELCOME TO MEXIA

  HOME OF THE MEXIA BLACKCATS!

  TEXAS HIGH SCHOOL STATE 3-A FOOTBALL CHAMPIONS

  1988!

  A state championship was something that up until this year people in Clearview had only dreamed of. The Clearview High team had never won one. A team had come close once, in 1949, and people still talked about it at Lee’s drugstore on Saturday mornings where the town’s biggest fans met the coaches for coffee and hashed over the previous evening’s game. They remembered the players’ names, their numbers, and all the ways in which the big game had gone wrong for Clearview.

  The game had been played somewhere in the Texas Panhandle, and while Rhodes had once known the name of the winning school well, he could no longer recall it. He had been too young to go to the game, but his father had gone and had talked about what had happened for weeks afterward. Clearview had lost, fifty-four to seven.

  “When those Panhandle boys ran out on the field,” he’d said, “I thought they were going to kill our boys.”

  “You don’t mean that,” Rhodes’ mother said. “You shouldn’t exaggerate so much.”

  She was standing at the stove, Rhodes recalled, wearing a white apron with blue stitching as she fried chicken in a heavy iron skillet.

  “I do mean it,” his father said. “I really thought they were going to kill our boys.”

  Rhodes’ father always came into the
kitchen to talk to his wife while supper was being prepared. Sometimes they listened to One Man’s Family on the radio, but mostly they talked.

  “They were so big,” he went on, “they made our boys look like pee-wee leaguers. I swear there were two or three of ’em that looked like they were thirty years old. Every one of them probably has to shave twice a day with an Eversharp Schick.”

  Rhodes’ mother turned over a piece of chicken in the skillet with a long two-pronged fork. Grease popped and hissed.

  “It’ll be a long time before we get that far in the play-offs again,” Rhodes’ father said, shaking his head. “A long, long time.”

  It had been longer than anyone had really thought, more than forty years, but it looked as if the time had come at last, the time for Clearview to erase the memory of a humiliation that had lasted for generations.

  Which explained why everyone in town, everyone in the whole county, was elated.

  Except Rhodes. To the sheriff, the fact that the Clearview Catamounts had won every district game except the last, the one that was being played this evening, meant something quite different, especially on Friday nights.

  It meant minors consuming alcoholic beverages; it meant too many arrests for DWI; it meant gambling, often enough right out in the open, right out in the parking lot near the stadium; it meant fights at every club in town; it meant making sure that the rivalries on the field didn’t spill across the sidelines, onto the benches and into the stands; it meant pulling his deputies in from patrol on Friday nights so they could police the parking lot and the stadium.

  It also meant a considerable bit of worry about something that so far as Rhodes knew had never happened anywhere in Texas. If anyone wanted to burglarize on a large scale, a Friday night like this one would be the perfect time. There probably were more deserted homes in most small towns than there were occupied ones.

  In fact, Rhodes wondered why whole towns hadn’t been looted before now. Even the stores and banks were practically begging to be robbed. Maybe, he thought, it hadn’t happened because all the crooks were football fans, too. They were probably at the games.

  Even if they were, Rhodes still didn’t like the possibilities, though he had to admit to himself as he walked toward the stadium that he did like the games, and this one promised to be a good one.

  The Catamounts had won all their district games to this point by an average of something like twenty points. Their opponents tonight, the Garton Greyhounds, who were favored to win by a touchdown, were also undefeated in the district, and they had outscored their opposition by an even wider margin than the Catamounts, thanks to a running back who had averaged nearly two hundred yards a game and had college recruiters from California to Florida and all points north drooling on their scouting reports.

  Now the last car was parked and Rhodes could hear the cheers of the crowd building in intensity. Any second now, the Garton band would play its school song, which would be followed by the Clearview song and then “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It was time for Rhodes to make a last circuit of the stands and then meet Ivy at the main gate. If he hurried, he might make it in time for the kick-off.

  Rhodes was delayed on his way to the grandstand, however, but the sight of two men standing near the fence that surrounded the stadium. They were at the far north end, and with the lights directed at the field and away from the parking lot, they were almost hidden in the gathering darkness.

  Rhodes recognized one of them anyway: Hayes Ford, a short, sharp-featured, mousy man who was Clearview’s leading gambler, not that anything had ever been proved against him.

  Everyone knew that Ford took bets on the Friday night games, but no one had ever been able to catch him at it. One year Rhodes had even brought in an undercover officer from a neighboring county, and he had attempted to place a bet with Ford. But the rodential gambler had seemed somehow to sense the presence of law and had refused to take the proffered money. In fact, he had pretended to have no idea of what the officer was suggesting, as if he were shocked — shocked! — to hear that someone might actually be placing wagers on a sporting contest.

  Rhodes thought about that episode as he started toward the men, who were now in close conversation. If a bet was being discussed right now, maybe there would be money exchanged. And if there was, maybe Rhodes would see it.

  He should have known better. He hadn’t gone more than a few steps before Ford looked up and glanced in the sheriff’s direction. As soon as he saw who was coming toward him, he said something to the other man, who immediately walked away in the direction of the high fence that surrounded the field. When he got to the fence, he turned in the direction of the end zone, though Rhodes didn’t think he would be admitted to the field through that entrance.

  The man was considerably taller than Ford, probably well over six feet, but that was all Rhodes could tell about him. He couldn’t see the man’s face.

  Rhodes didn’t see any use in going after him. He would probably go on around to the other side of the field and enter the stands on the other side, mingling with the crowd before the sheriff could get to him. So Rhodes kept on walking toward Ford, who stood waiting patiently, his hands in the pockets of a dark-colored windbreaker.

  When Rhodes got a little closer, he could see that the jacket was blue trimmed in gold, and he knew that on the back there would be a gold bobcat head surrounded by gold letters spelling out “Clearview Catamounts.” One thing you had to give Ford credit for. He had school spirit.

  “Who’s your money on?” Rhodes asked just as the Garton band struck up the school song. The notes were muffled by the grandstand between the bands and the parking lot.

  “I don’t know what you mean, Sheriff,” Ford said, ducking his head and brushing at his pointy little nose. “That’s a kind of insulting question to ask a fella. I don’t put my money on anybody. I’m just a fan like you.”

  “Sure you are,” Rhodes said. “Who was that you were just talking to?”

  Ford looked around. “Talking to? There’s nobody around here to talk to.”

  “You know what I mean, Ford.”

  Ford ducked his head again. “Oh, you must be talking about that fella that was here before you walked up. Just a friend, Sheriff. Nobody you’d know.”

  Rhodes didn’t push it. He knew it wouldn’t do any good. “Why don’t we go in to the game?” he asked.

  Ford was about to answer, but there was a huge cheer from the stands as the Greyhound band finished playing.

  “We better just stand here,” Ford said as the cheering died down and the strains of the Clearview alma mater drifted into the night air. “Wouldn’t be respectful to walk while the school song’s being played.”

  Rhodes didn’t see it that way. He left Ford, who was singing the Clearview school song in a ragged baritone, and started toward the main gate.

  Ivy wasn’t at the gate when Rhodes got there. She had gone on into the stadium. Rhodes got to his seat just in time for the “Star Spangled Banner,” which he sang along to, though he had never been able to hit the high notes.

  “I thought you weren’t going to make it,” Ivy said as cheers erupted around them.

  They sat down on the hard wooden bench. Most of the people around them were still standing, yelling loudly and waving Catamount pennants. The cheerleaders were on the other side of the field, bouncing around in front of the student section of the bleachers, but that didn’t affect the crowd’s enthusiasm.

  “I wouldn’t miss the kick-off,” Rhodes said.

  The teams ran on the field and the Greyhound kicker set down the tee.

  Rhodes gave a satisfied nod. “We’re receiving.”

  Ivy smiled at him. “Are you thinking about ‘Will-o’-the-wisp Dan Rhodes’ again?”

  “I never think about that guy,” Rhodes told her.

  But that wasn’t true. He did.

  Probably everyone who had ever played football had memories of at least one special game, and the one Rhodes recalled was
the first of his junior year, in fact his very first varsity game. It was also his last varsity game, his last game of any kind, but that was beside the point.

  The point was that in those days, Rhodes had been slim and fast, neither of which he was now, and he had been the Clearview Catamounts’ kick return man.

  He remembered every single thing about the opening kick-off of that first game: the way the ball sounded when the kicker’s foot struck it, the way the ball turned over in the lights as it arced toward him, and the way the ball stung his hands and nearly knocked him down when he caught it. People who’ve never taken in a kick-off have no idea how hard the ball hits when it comes down.

  In spite of the force with which the ball struck him, Rhodes caught it cleanly and started straight up the field. From the stands the field might look cluttered up with players, but down on the grass it wasn’t like that at all. Twenty-two teenagers don’t take up a lot of room, and a football field is a hundred yards long and fifty yards wide, five thousand square yards when you figure it up. There can be a lot of gaps between teenagers, and Rhodes found every one of them. He zigged and he zagged, he hip-faked and dodged, and suddenly he was in the open, running for his life.

  No one caught him until the instant he crossed the goal line, when two players crashed into him from behind. He’d been fast, but there were others who were faster. They hadn’t kept him from scoring, though.

  Rhodes was so elated by the touchdown that he didn’t even feel his leg break. He hadn’t even known it was broken until he tried to stand up and found that he couldn’t do it. The trainer and the assistant coach had finally strapped him to a stretcher and carried him off the field.

  The story in the newspaper the next day referred to him as “Will-o’-the-wisp Dan Rhodes” and called him the hero of the game, which the newspaper called a “defensive struggle.” Clearview had won by a score of only six to nothing because in the excitement of the kick return followed by the injury the Clearview kicker had missed the extra point.