Murder in Four Parts Page 2

  “You may be strong,” Rhodes said, “but you’re not deputized. This is county business.”

  “I’m the one who found the alligator.”

  “Right, and you called us to take care of it. Which is what we’re going to do.”

  Benton might have argued the point, since Ruth was listening to every word, but just then Alton Boyd drove up in a dusty white van with the county insignia on the side.

  Boyd pulled the van off the road as much as he could and parked behind Rhodes’s county car. Boyd, the county’s newly appointed animal control officer, was a bandy-legged man with thinning blond hair concealed by a gimme cap. He had broad shoulders and a thick waist, and his face was seamed with wrinkles, though he wasn’t much past forty.

  Boyd’s job ran to rounding up stray cattle, dogs, and cats rather than capturing alligators. Lately Rhodes had been sending him out to corral Vernell Lindsey’s goats, which were notorious for jumping her fence and getting into the neighbors’ yards.

  “What we got here?” Boyd said around the unlit cigar he had clamped in his teeth.

  Until Boyd had been hired, Rhodes had thought there were no more cigar smokers in Blacklin County. In fact, maybe there weren’t. Rhodes had never seen Boyd actually smoke anything. Apparently Boyd was satisfied just to have something to chew on.

  White Owl was the brand he preferred. Boyd took a lot of kidding about that, but he always insisted that you didn’t have to pay a lot of money for a quality cigar.

  “We have an alligator,” Rhodes said. “In the ditch.”

  Boyd took a look. “Sure enough. I thought Hack was about halfway kidding me.” He studied the gator for a couple of seconds. “Could be a crocodile, I guess.”

  “No,” Ruth said. “It’s an alligator, all right. You can’t see its teeth.”

  Benton smiled. Rhodes kept quiet.

  “Sure enough,” Boyd said, as if he’d known it all along. “So Hack was right.”

  Hack had probably enjoyed relaying the information about the alligator to Boyd, Rhodes thought. Hack got a kick out of the unusual.

  “Let me get my stuff,” Boyd said.

  “You have stuff for alligators?” Rhodes said.

  “Duck tape.”

  Boyd opened the back of his van and stepped inside. When he returned, he had a roll of duct tape in one hand and a couple of coiled lariats in the other.

  “Rope him, tie him up, tape his mouth shut, throw him in the back of the van,” he said.

  Somehow Rhodes didn’t think it would be that easy. He wasn’t confident about Boyd’s ability with a rope, not when it came to alligators.

  “Don’t you have some kind of pole with a loop on the end to catch animals with?” he said.

  “Nope. Just use the straight old lariat rope.”

  “I can rope,” Benton said.

  Rhodes should have been expecting that. He said, “You can’t help. You’d open the county up to a lawsuit if something happened to you. The commissioners would have my hide if you got hurt.”

  “I wouldn’t get hurt. I can do a hundred—”

  “We know,” Rhodes said. “A hundred push-ups. It doesn’t matter. You might be strong, but you’re still a civilian.”

  “I’m more than a civilian. I went to the academy.”

  That was true. Rhodes had started a Citizens’ Sheriff’s Academy, and Benton had been one of the first graduates. The academy had seemed like a good idea at the time Rhodes thought of it. Since then he’d had some second thoughts. Several of them.

  “There’s nothing official about the academy,” Rhodes said. “You’ll just have to watch.”

  Benton moved aside, but Rhodes could see he wasn’t happy about it.

  “We know you could handle the gator by yourself, Seepy,” Ruth told him, and Benton brightened. “It’s just it’s our job.”

  “All right,” Benton said. “But if you need my help, just say the word.”

  Boyd handed Rhodes one of the lariats. “You want to rope the head or the tail?”

  Rhodes looked at the rope. He’d last handled a rope about the time he’d last seen an alligator.

  Ruth Grady took the rope from Rhodes’s hand. “I’ll rope the head,” she said. “When he starts thrashing around, Alton can get the tail.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Boyd said, as calm as if he were about to rope a fence post.

  He tossed Rhodes the duct tape. Rhodes caught it cleanly.

  “Soon’s we get him secured,” Boyd said, “you tape that snout of his shut. You be careful. These fellas are stout. Not to mention mean.”

  “I’ll help get him secured,” Benton said. “Did I mention that I know several alligator-wrestling techniques?”

  “Probably,” Rhodes said, “but you’ll still have to stay out of the way. If I get in trouble, you can yell advice.”

  “I have some right now.”

  Rhodes nodded. He wasn’t surprised. “What is it?”

  “Don’t try to tape the snout until they have the tail secured. That tail is powerful enough to break every bone in your body with one swipe.”

  “Thanks,” Rhodes said. “That makes me feel a lot better about this.”

  “I’m always happy to assist the law,” Benton said.

  “Assist by standing a little farther away, then,” Rhodes told him.

  Benton moved another couple of feet away from the edge of the ditch, and Ruth Grady moved in on the alligator, shaking out a loop in the lariat with her right hand.

  The alligator might have been watching her, but Rhodes couldn’t tell. It didn’t move, and its snout was flat on the ground. It could as well have been a statue for all the animation it displayed.

  “I’ll get his attention,” Benton said, moving forward.

  “Stop right there,” Rhodes said. “We just want him to lift his head, not attack us.”

  Benton looked insulted. “I wasn’t going to agitate him.”

  Rhodes suspected there was a fine line between getting the gator’s attention and agitating it, and he didn’t trust Benton not to cross it.

  “You just stay where you are and let us handle this. That’s why the county pays us the big bucks.”

  While they were talking, Ruth walked along the top edge of the ditch to a spot where she could look down at the gator. The ditch was only three feet or so deep, and she dropped the loop of the lariat down in front of the gator’s snout.

  The gator paid no more attention than if a gnat had landed nearby. Ruth dragged the loop right up to the snout, ready to slip it on at the first opportunity.

  Rhodes didn’t think the gator would cooperate, and it didn’t. It just sat there, still as a stone. Ruth waited, but Rhodes had a feeling that when it came to waiting nobody in the group was as good as the gator.

  Alton Boyd couldn’t do anything at his end of the gator, either. The gator’s meaty tail lay flat against the ground.

  “Now what?” Rhodes said.

  “He has to move sometime,” Boyd said, but Rhodes wasn’t so sure of that.

  “I could get his attention,” Benton said.

  He opened his mouth, and Rhodes thought he was going to yell. Instead, he made a high-pitched noise that sounded like a flying saucer in one of the bad old movies that Rhodes used to watch on TV.

  Whatever the sound was, it worked. The gator raised its snout an inch or so above the ditch and moved its head to the side. Ruth slipped the loop over the snout and pulled it tight.

  Rhodes wasn’t sure what happened after that. It was as if he’d been watching a paused picture on a TV screen when someone had suddenly switched it to fast-forward.

  The gator rolled over and over. Leaves flew up from the ditch, whirling as if caught in a tornado. Something white as snowflakes circled wildly among the leaves. Clods of dirt and grass spattered the sides of the ditch.

  Ruth struggled to hang on to the rope that twisted in her hands, while Boyd juked around on his bandy legs, attempting to get into position to lasso the t
hrashing tail.

  Benton yelled something that Rhodes couldn’t hear because of the commotion in the ditch.

  Boyd threw his loop and missed. The gator continued to flip itself. If anything, it was flipping faster than before.

  Boyd retrieved his loop and tried again. This time, whether by luck or skill Rhodes couldn’t tell, Boyd caught the tail. He pulled the loop tight and ran backward to pull the rope taut.

  The gator, as if it sensed what was about to happen, stopped flipping and planted itself firmly in the bottom of the ditch. Just as Boyd tightened the rope, the gator whipped its tail up and to the right. Boyd’s feet slid out from under him. He yelped, and the White Owl flew out of his mouth. It spun through the air and landed somewhere in the grass near the ditch.

  Boyd hung on to the rope, and the gator flicked its tail to the left, dragging Boyd through the grass. Rhodes dropped the duct tape and ran to help. He grabbed hold of the rope a few feet in front of Boyd just as the gator slung its tail again. Rhodes dug in his heels, and with the weight of Boyd behind him was able to keep the muscular appendage from moving more than a couple of feet.

  Boyd, still hanging on, pulled himself upright. He and Rhodes together were able to draw the rope tight and immobilize the tail.

  Now that the gator wasn’t flopping around, Ruth was able to tighten up on the rope she held. The gator struggled against the ropes but found that it couldn’t flip itself now. It kept trying for a minute that seemed to Rhodes more like a quarter of an hour.

  Seeing that it wasn’t getting anywhere, the gator subsided into a sullen stillness, turned half on its side.

  “I told you I could get his attention,” Benton said.

  “What was that noise you made?” Ruth asked.

  “Just a noise. Alligators hear best in the thousand-hertz range, so that’s what I tried for.”

  Ruth looked impressed. Benton tried to look modest, which Rhodes thought was an effort for him.

  “You think you have him?” Rhodes asked Boyd.

  “Sure. He’s not going anywhere.”

  Rhodes hoped not. He let go of the rope and located the duct tape. He picked it up and walked to the gator’s head. The gator didn’t seem to care that he was there, so Rhodes bent down and wrapped its snout with the sticky duct tape. He rounded the snout at least ten times. He didn’t care what Benton had said about the weakness of the muscles. He wanted to be sure the gator’s mouth didn’t come open when they took the rope off.

  When he was sure the tape wasn’t going to come loose, he straightened and said, “What next?”

  “We gotta get him in the van,” Boyd said. “You want to hold this rope?”

  The answer to that was no, but Rhodes said, “Why not?”

  He went back to where Boyd stood and took hold of the rope, careful to keep the tension on.

  Boyd left him there and looked around for his cigar. When he found it, he brushed it off against his pants. After a brief inspection of its surface, he stuck it back in his mouth. Then he got two more ropes from the van.

  “What are those for?” Rhodes said.

  “Gotta tie his legs up with something.”

  Rhodes looked at the claws on the gator’s feet. They looked capable of slashing a small tree in half. Or of opening a man’s belly from top to bottom.

  “Just how did you plan to do that?”

  “It’s easy,” Seepy Benton said from his place well away from the action. “Alligators tire easily. This one’s probably so tired he can hardly move.”

  “It better be,” Rhodes said, but he needn’t have worried.

  Either the gator was tired or it just didn’t care anymore. Boyd bound the feet without much trouble and went back to the van again. This time he returned with a stout wooden pole.

  “Is that a ten-foot pole?” Benton asked.

  “Wouldn’t poke a gator with anything shorter,” Boyd said. “Just kidding,” he added when he saw Rhodes’s look of alarm. “We’re gonna use this to carry him.”

  First he tied the rope Rhodes held to the pole while Rhodes kept the pressure on. After Boyd was satisfied with the knots, he tied Ruth’s rope to the pole.

  “Now we hoist him up and get him in the van,” Boyd said. He looked at Rhodes. “I think we should let the civilian help with this part.”

  “I can handle one end by myself,” Benton said.

  “You’d better just help me instead,” Rhodes said. “I need somebody strong.”

  With the gator trussed, helpless, and not much interested in fighting, they hoisted him up with Benton and Rhodes at one end of the pole and Boyd and Grady at the other. It wasn’t easy, but they managed to struggle up out of the ditch and get him stashed in the van. When they laid him on the floor, the gator gave a couple of halfhearted flops and then lay still.

  “Now what?” Rhodes said.

  “I called a zoo in Waco on the way here,” Boyd said. “They told me if we really did have a gator, they’d take him. I’ll just run him over there right now. Prob’ly take the rest of the day to get ’er done, though.”

  Rhodes didn’t think the county commissioners would mind if Boyd spent his day getting rid of the gator.

  “Go right ahead,” he said.

  Boyd nodded and slammed the doors on the van.

  “I’ll call in if I get back early,” he said.

  Rhodes nodded, and Boyd left.

  “A job well done,” Benton said as if he’d handled it all by himself. “What I’d like to know is, where did that alligator come from?”

  “I’d like to know what the white stuff flying around was,” Rhodes said.

  “Oh, I can tell you that,” Benton said. “It was chicken feathers.”

  “Uh-oh,” Rhodes said.

  3

  SEEPY BENTON’S HOUSE WAS JUST OUTSIDE OF TOWN AND nowhere near the homes of Cecil Marsh and Royce Weeks. However, Marsh owned the property just across the road, where there was a dilapidated old house and a barn that listed far to one side and seemed about to fall down. On the other side of the barn was a stock tank. The stock tank was just about the right size to keep an alligator comfortable. Rhodes figured there’d be plenty for the gator to eat: turtles, mudcats, maybe a few little perch.

  But no chickens.

  “Where do you think a chicken came from?” Benton said. “I don’t keep chickens, and I don’t know of anybody who has them around here.”

  Rhodes didn’t think the chicken had come from around there.

  “Cecil Marsh owns that land across the road, right?” Rhodes asked, just to be sure.

  Benton nodded, and Rhodes told Ruth to get Hack on her shoulder radio and ask if there’d been a complaint from Royce Weeks.

  “What kind of complaint?” she said, and then, “Oh.”

  Rhodes didn’t think Cecil Marsh was the kind of man who’d steal his neighbor’s chickens and transport them to his little place in the country to feed them to an alligator. Still, with the way things were going in the Great Chicken Controversy, it could have happened.

  Ruth engaged in a crackly conversation with Hack. Rhodes could hear Ruth’s side of it, but he couldn’t make out what Hack was saying.

  Ruth listened to Hack’s final comments and signed off. She grinned at Rhodes.

  “He hasn’t heard anything from Weeks,” she said. “He wanted to know why you were asking.”

  Hack and Lawton couldn’t stand not knowing what was going on, and in fact they liked nothing better than finding out things before Rhodes did. Then they’d make Rhodes wheedle the information out of them. Rhodes was glad to have the upper hand for once.

  “You didn’t tell him, did you?” he said.

  Ruth shook her head. “I told him it was confidential.”

  Rhodes liked that. “Good.”

  “I hate to interrupt,” Benton said, “but what’s going on?”

  Ruth explained about Marsh and Royce Weeks being on different sides regarding the keeping of chickens within the city limits.

&n
bsp; “I heard something about that,” Benton said, “but I didn’t pay much attention since I don’t live inside the city. I think getting an alligator out here and feeding a chicken to it would be going a little far to make a point.”

  Rhodes thought so, too, but you never could tell what people might do to prove a point or just to antagonize someone else. Marsh and Weeks had pushed the limits for years.

  “Have you ever seen an alligator around here before?” he asked.

  “No,” Benton said, “but there are plenty of tanks around here where one could hide out. An alligator could live in this climate. He wouldn’t be very comfortable in the winter, but he could survive.”

  It was a warm day in April. The alligator had survived the winter in good shape, it seemed to Rhodes.

  “Somebody would notice an alligator if it was in a tank,” Ruth said.

  “Maybe not,” Benton said. “They’re pretty quiet, and most of the stock tanks are out of sight of the road.”

  “What about Cecil Marsh’s place?” Rhodes said, gesturing with his thumb. “Anybody ever visit over there?”

  “I haven’t seen anybody, but I’m not at home all the time.”

  Rhodes supposed it was possible that the alligator had been somewhere else, miles away, and had just wandered to the ditch in front of Benton’s house, but that didn’t explain the chicken feathers. It didn’t seem likely that the meeting of the chicken and the gator had been a coincidence, although it was possible. There were chickens all over Blacklin County, and one might have wandered into the gator’s path.

  Rhodes wanted to know what that path had been, but it wouldn’t be easy to track. It hadn’t rained for a while, and if the gator had flattened any grass in its travels, it was no longer obvious. Rhodes supposed the reptile had been in the ditch for a while.

  “You didn’t see the gator yesterday?” he said.

  Benton shook his head. “But then I wasn’t looking for him. I just happened to glance over that way when I was leaving for class this morning, or I wouldn’t have seen him at all.”

  “You didn’t go to class, did you?”

  “No, I called your office, and then I called the college to let them know I wasn’t coming in. I told them it was an alligator emergency.”