Murder Among the OWLS Read online

  “Then I hope he recovers soon, so he can confess.”

  Rhodes agreed that would make things much easier. He talked to Brant a while longer without finding out anything more, so he left again. This time he was going to have to go to the jail and face Hack. Probably Lawton, too. He wondered what he was going to tell them about Brant.

  Chapter 24

  LUCKILY RHODES THOUGHT OF SOMETHING ELSE TO DO BEFORE he’d gotten even a block away from Brant’s house. He called Hack and asked about Truck.

  “He’s doin’ fine. Lawton says he seems to like it here.”

  “It’s about time we got a prisoner who appreciated how hard we work to make people feel at home. What I want to know is, who’s taking care of Truck’s Trucks.”

  “That would be Lily. She worked out there for a couple of years after she quit teaching school, and she still goes in about once a week to work on the books. Truck says she might not know as much about the business as he does, but she can do all right.”

  “I’m going out there to talk to her.”

  Before Rhodes could sign off, Hack said, “When’re you comin’ back here?”

  “As soon as I can,” Rhodes said, not meaning a word of it.

  “Ruth’s been in the lab all day. She’s got some stuff for you.”

  It could have been a ruse, but Rhodes didn’t think so. “Tell her to write up a report in case she’s gone when I get back.”

  “She always does her reports. You better come hear what she has to say.”

  “I’ll be there. Later.”

  Rhodes mulled over what he knew, or thought he knew, about Thorpe. He’d escaped from the hospital, and when he did, he must have had someplace in mind to go. He got clothes, he got a gun, and someone took him to the Tumlinson place. It had to be someone who liked him, someone who’d do him a real favor, knowing it was breaking the law.

  Maybe an old girlfriend would do something like that. Maybe someone with whom he’d revived an old romance. Lily and Truck seemed to Rhodes to have problems. If Truck was willing to stay in jail rather than bonding out, something was wrong.

  Rhodes also wondered about Thelma Rice. If she was telling the truth, she wasn’t really much of a suspect. But what if she wasn’t? She’d worked with Helen Harris, she’d known Thorpe, and she’d been aware of his romances. It wasn’t impossible that her dislike of men might stem from a bad experience, and judging from everything he knew about Thorpe, a relationship with him would most likely be a bad experience. That didn’t explain why Thelma would want to kill anyone other than Thorpe, however. Besides, to hit someone in the head with a stool, Thelma would have had to stand on a stool herself. Rhodes couldn’t rule her out completely, but she didn’t seem to be one of the better suspects.

  Then there was Alton Brant, who seemed a less likely suspect than some of the others. Nevertheless, Rhodes couldn’t get past the idea of Brant losing his temper with Mrs. Harris when confronted with his lie about his military rank. Rhodes didn’t know that anything like that had happened, but he didn’t know that it hadn’t.

  There were other mysteries aside from who had killed Mrs. Harris, too. The mysterious object she’d found during the metal-detecting trip was one of them. Her refusal to tell what it was rankled a lot of people.

  And what about the financing for the Royal Rack? Where did Thorpe get the money for that? Rhodes was convinced that Thorpe hadn’t come by it on his own. He’d had help, no question about it. So who had helped him?

  The missing will was another piece of the puzzle that didn’t fit anywhere. Who took it? Why?

  Rhodes was still worrying over all those things when he pulled into the lot at Truck’s Trucks. A Ford Explorer was parked next to the little office building, and Rhodes assumed it belonged to Lily.

  The car lot was full of mud puddles from the rain, and Rhodes watched his step when he got out of the car, which was already a mess on the inside. Most of the mud had dried, but he’d put towels over the seat before leaving home to keep his clothes clean.

  Lily was inside the office, dressed for work in a blue shirt and jeans. Her purse with the big butterfly on the side looked a little incongruous sitting on the rolltop desk. She was wearing some kind of perfume that Rhodes didn’t recognize, which didn’t make it unique. Rhodes thought that the perfume, whatever it was, was like the purse. It didn’t belong in the little office.

  “Oh,” Lily said when Rhodes walked in. “It’s you. What do you want?”

  Rhodes wondered if there’d ever been a time when people were glad to see him show up anywhere. At one time there had been, he was sure. But if that was the case, those times were few and far between since he’d been elected sheriff. Even fewer lately, it seemed.

  Well, if people wanted to be unfriendly and suspicious of him, then Rhodes might as well give them a reason.

  “Leo Thorpe. Your old boyfriend.”

  Lily’s face turned red. “You bastard.” She grabbed the handle of her big purse.

  Before Rhodes quite knew what was happening, she’d swung the purse in a short arc and smashed it against the left side of his head.

  Rhodes might have been able to block the blow if he’d been expecting something, but he was taken completely off guard, which he figured was what he deserved for not easing into things as he usually preferred.

  The purse was heavy, as if Lily had put a couple of pistons from an old car in it. Rhodes staggered sideways and fell against a wooden, four-drawer filing cabinet that stood by the wall. It was evidently full of important papers because it didn’t move so much as an eighth of an inch when he hit it.

  He propped himself up with one arm on a stack of papers on top of the cabinet just before Lily hit him again, on top of his head this time. His arm slipped off the cabinet, and he slid down to the floor, half turning to get his back against the cabinet.

  Lily swung the purse at him again. Rhodes ducked almost all the way to the floor, and the purse hit the side of the filing cabinet with a resounding thud. Lily moved the cabinet farther than Rhodes had. The papers on top sailed in all directions and floated around the room like paper airplanes.

  Rhodes tried to get up, using the cabinet for support. His foot slipped, and he slid back down, giving Lily an opening. She tried a new tactic, an uppercut swing, with the purse coming from about floor level to smack into his chin.

  Or that’s what it would have done if Rhodes hadn’t turned his head slightly to the side so that the purse hit his jaw on the side instead. As his head bounced off the wooden cabinet, he thought he’d be wearing a butterfly tattoo on that jaw for a while to match the other one.

  All the hard work she was doing began to take a toll on Lily. She had to slow down and get her breath, giving Rhodes a chance to try to stand up again. This time he was successful, and he moved away from her. He hoped nobody found out that he was getting beaten half to death by a woman with a purse. Hack and Lawton in particular would never let him live it down. He couldn’t even imagine what Ivy would have to say, but he knew it wouldn’t be complimentary.

  It didn’t take Lily long to recover, and she came at Rhodes again. This time he was ready for her, and when she swung the purse at him, he grabbed hold of it with both hands. Lily had a death grip on the handles, and he couldn’t jerk it away from her, so he just stepped to the side and kept on pulling as hard as he could, letting first the purse and then Lily go right on past him. When they did, he released his grip.

  As Rhodes let go of the purse, Lily’s momentum carried her out the door and across the narrow porch. She leaned forward and her arms windmilled as she tried to keep her balance. The purse flew out of her hand. She missed the porch steps with her foot and went sprawling in front of them. The purse landed in a puddle not far from her. Rhodes figured the butterfly would never be the same.

  He followed Lily outside and sat on the porch with his feet on the steps. He was a bit winded and thought that it might be a good idea to put in a few more hours, or at least minutes, on his sta
tionary bike every week.

  After a minute or so Lily pushed herself up, squirmed around, and sat on the ground, facing away from Rhodes. She looked around and saw her purse, but she didn’t make any attempt to get it. Her shoulders shook, and Rhodes thought she might be crying. She could also have been laughing, but Rhodes didn’t think so. Whatever she was doing, he didn’t intend to interrupt. Since he never knew what to say to someone who was crying, or laughing, for that matter, he sat and waited for her to finish.

  It took a while, but that was fine with Rhodes. It gave him time to catch his breath. When he was sure that Lily was finished doing whatever it was she’d been doing, he went and picked up her purse, brushing off the mud and water as best he could. He wiped his hand on his pants, which didn’t do them any good. Then he walked to where Lily sat, looking dejected and filthy. She didn’t have anything to say. Rhodes offered her his hand.

  She glanced up at him and took it. He pulled her to her feet. She had mud all down the front of her shirt and jeans, but she didn’t make any move to brush herself off. Rhodes didn’t give her the purse. He thought it might be safer if he held on to it for a while. Safer for him.

  “Want to go back inside now?”

  Lily nodded, and they started back, Rhodes keeping a firm grip on her elbow. When they were inside, Rhodes let her sit at the desk in a wooden chair with rollers. He sat in one of the other two chairs in the office, a straight-backed wooden one with a woven seat.

  Rhodes held the big purse in his lap and looked inside it. Lily didn’t say anything or try to stop him. He found all kinds of things inside: a checkbook; a zippered makeup bag that held a couple of lipstick tubes and a compact; a key ring heavy with house keys, car keys, and others that Rhodes didn’t recognize; a hairbrush; two combs; tissues, some of them stained with lipstick; reading glasses; sunglasses with a broken lens, probably broken when the purse had been used as a weapon against Rhodes; and a well-stuffed wallet. No pistons. Maybe it was the keys that were so heavy. Or the billfold. Or all of it together.

  Rhodes set the purse on the floor. “You pack quite a punch.”

  Lily just looked at the floor.

  “I know you don’t feel like talking. I don’t blame you. Maybe if I read you your rights, you’d feel better about it.”

  Lily shook her head to let him know that hearing the Miranda rights wouldn’t have much effect on how she felt.

  “I have to do it anyway if I’m going to arrest you.”

  Lily’s head jerked up. “Arrest me?”

  “Assaulting an officer, for starters.” Rhodes ran though the Miranda list while Lily looked at him incredulously.

  “You’re really going to arrest me, put me in the jail with Truck?”

  “Not with Truck. We don’t let men share cells with women.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Just a little lawman joke.”

  “It wasn’t funny. Anyway, you can’t arrest me for an assault you provoked. It wasn’t my fault.”

  “I don’t think a judge would see it that way. He’d want to know why you reacted so violently to the mention of Leo Thorpe’s name. To tell you the truth, I’m interested in that myself.”

  “That’s my business.”

  “No, it’s not. There’s been a murder, remember? You’re involved in it, whether you like it or not, since you had an argument with the victim. Now it turns out that you have a bad reaction to the mention of her cousin’s name, and it also happens that you had an affair with him years ago.”

  Lily’s face reddened. She wasn’t blushing, however. She was angry. Rhodes was glad she didn’t have the purse in her hands. “Who told you that?”

  “No one you’d know,” Rhodes lied. “I just found it out by digging around.”

  “I never had an affair with anybody,” Lily said, but her voice lacked conviction.

  “Have you heard what happened to Thorpe last night?”

  Lily looked blank, and Rhodes realized that she didn’t know about Thorpe’s condition.

  “I hate to have to be the one to tell you.” Rhodes went through the story with her.

  Before he was finished, Lily had tears in her eyes. Rhodes didn’t give her the purse, but he handed her a couple of tissues from it. She dabbed at her eyes and asked if Thorpe was going to live.

  “I don’t know. Even if he does, he might be in a coma for a long time.”

  As soon as he said it, he knew it had been a mistake. Now Lily could keep her mouth shut, and he might never prove anything against her.

  Unless he could make her think he knew more than he actually did. Several things had occurred to him while he was getting knocked around and later when they’d been outside. He thought he might as well give them a try.

  “You and Truck have been having problems, haven’t you.”

  Lily didn’t answer.

  “It’s easy enough to see. He’d rather stay in jail than be at home with you. That says a lot, right there. If you were getting along, he wouldn’t do that, and you wouldn’t stand for it.”

  “You don’t know anything about me and Truck,” Lily told him, evading his eyes.

  “I know more than you think.” Rhodes stretched the truth a little. “I know you’re the one who took Thorpe a pistol and some clothes the other day when he escaped from custody at the hospital. You drove him to the Tumlinson place, too.”

  Lily twitched as if someone were pinching her at every other word, but she didn’t admit anything.

  “I’ll have to check with Truck,” Rhodes said, “but I’m betting he can confirm that you were out of the house when someone was seen at Thorpe’s trailer getting the pistol and clothing. There’s a witness, too, someone who lives in the trailer next to Thorpe’s. You might as well go ahead and tell me about it.”

  He hadn’t really expected Lily to be that easy, and she wasn’t. She didn’t say a thing.

  “I know something else, too.”

  Lily gave no sign that she’d even heard him.

  “I know you stole from Truck, from the business here. You were the bookkeeper, so it would’ve been easy for you. I know you gave the money to Thorpe. Truck must know it too, or he’d be here now.”

  Lily started to cry.

  Chapter 25

  RHODES HANDED LILY A FEW MORE TISSUES, THINKING THAT HE had made a lucky guess, even though it had been based on the facts at hand.

  It should have been evident to just about anybody that Lily and Truck were having problems of some kind. When there are troubles in a marriage, Rhodes knew that money was more than likely to be one of the causes, if not the major one. Hack had just told Rhodes that Lily worked on the books for Truck. What if she’d been taking a little of the money for herself all along, squirreling it away for a rainy day or in case an old lover came calling and needed a little help? That would explain the trouble, if Truck had found out what she’d done. Thorpe had gotten the money for the Royal Rack from somewhere, and the way Rhodes saw it, Lily was the best bet.

  “We’ll check out your car, too,” Rhodes told her, ignoring her occasional sobs as best he could. “If you drove to the Tumlinson place, there’ll still be traces of the soil from there on your car’s undercarriage and on the tires. If you’ve watched CSI, you know how easy it is to get a match on that sort of thing.”

  Rhodes himself had no idea, really, how easy it would be, but he figured that if Lily was a television watcher, the mere mention of the CSI magic would be enough to throw a scare into her.

  “If Thorpe does recover,” Rhodes went on, “he’ll be able to corroborate everything for us. He’ll be glad to cooperate to make it easier on himself.”

  “He’d never do that.” Lily’s voice was muffled because her face was buried in the tissues Rhodes had given her.

  “Maybe not. It won’t matter. We’ll check Truck’s books, and I think there’ll be plenty of evidence there to prove what we suspect about the money.”

  “Leo never had a chance in life,” Lily sa
id, lifting her face and crumpling the tissues in one hand. Her eyes were red. “If that Helen Harris had ever helped him out, he could have done big things.”

  Rhodes didn’t believe that. He considered Thorpe a smooth-talking con man who got by as best he could without ever exerting himself too much, doing odd jobs to earn a little money and mooching off others, probably the Harrises and any gullible women he could find, to get more.

  “The Royal Rack was his big chance,” Lily said. “He knew the place was a gold mine, and he’d be set up for the first time in his life with a real moneymaker.”

  “An illegal moneymaker. Illegal gambling in the back room isn’t a good way to get a start on running a legitimate business.”

  “I didn’t know about the gambling. Not until …” Lily stopped herself and clamped her mouth shut, pinching her lips into a straight line.

  “Until you drove him to the Tumlinson place?”

  “You don’t know what Truck was like,” Lily said, veering off onto another path entirely. “Look at this place.”

  She waved a hand in an arc that took in the entirety of the office. Rhodes had to admit that it was shabby.

  “He could have done so much better,” Lily continued, “but all he could do was talk about how great high school had been, how he’d been a big football star and how everyone had cheered him week after week.”

  That’s how it was in Texas, Rhodes thought. Once you’d had the kind of adulation a really good high school player received, it was hard to forget it. For some it was impossible. Rhodes had plenty of reason to know about high school football, both as a player, though not nearly as successful as Truck had been, and as a lawman, having investigated the murder of a popular coach. Lots of people still blamed Rhodes for the team’s losing the state championship that year.

  “We got married not long after he came back from college,” Lily said. “We were young, and we thought life would be wonderful forever.” She looked around the office again. “You can see how wrong we were.”

  Rhodes didn’t think Truck would see it quite that way. By all accounts, Truck loved his business, buying and selling, making deals, setting his own hours, having coffee at Franklin’s when he pleased and just leaving a note on the door. He could regale his customers and his friends at the drugstore with the tales of his football prowess, and they’d always listen. Rhodes didn’t see the Royal Rack as a big step up from that.