Dead to Begin With Read online

  “You gonna arrest me?” Elaine asked.

  Rhodes hefted the hammer. “That depends on Lonnie. You broke his doorknob. You going to press charges, Lonnie?”

  Lonnie looked doubtful. “I … I guess not.”

  “Harvey’ll pay for the doorknob,” Elaine said.

  “Well, all right then,” Lonnie said. “We’ll just forget it ever happened, but it better not happen again.”

  “Harvey will make sure of it,” Rhodes said. “I’ll talk to him.”

  “So will I,” Ruth said. “Come on, Elaine. I’ll take you home.”

  They left together. Elaine seemed perfectly happy to go with her. Rhodes hoped Elaine didn’t have another mood swing on the way back to Wesley.

  “Thanks, Sheriff,” Lonnie said when the two women had left.

  Conversation started up all around the beauty shop as the customers and beauticians resumed what they’d been doing. Rhodes knew that the incident would be talked about all over town within an hour or two. He was glad that Jennifer Loam hadn’t been there. She had an Internet news site called A Clear View of Clearview, and she also had what Rhodes considered an irritating habit of exaggerating a lot of things that happened in the town and the whole of Blacklin County. He remembered clickbait headlines along the lines of SHERIFF BATTLES JURASSIC TURTLE! and THE CROCODILE FIGHTER OF CROCKETT’S CREEK. It had been an alligator, not a crocodile, but nobody seemed to care. Rhodes supposed it didn’t make much difference, but since Jennifer didn’t mind making the switch, there was no telling what she’d say about Elaine’s little escapade. At least there wouldn’t be video, unless someone in the shop had been using a cell phone to take some. Rhodes hadn’t noticed.

  “That ended better than I thought it would,” Eric said. He shook his head. “Nobody got hurt.”

  “I’m glad,” Lonnie said. “I wouldn’t want anybody to get hurt, especially me or my customers, and that includes Elaine. Thanks again, Sheriff.”

  “Deputy Grady’s the one you should thank,” Rhodes said. “She’s the one who got Elaine calmed down.”

  “Well, you kept her busy until the deputy could get here,” Lonnie said. “If it hadn’t been for you, I’d have lost more than a doorknob.”

  He gave Rhodes a critical look that made Rhodes a little self-conscious. He tried to push some of his wayward hair back into place.

  “You want a haircut on the house?” Lonnie asked. “I could give you what we call the Brad Pitt cut. Looks tousled all the time but still looks really good. What do you think, Eric?”

  “He’s definitely the Brad Pitt type,” Eric said. “A little taller than Brad, though.”

  Rhodes didn’t think he was the Brad Pitt type at all.

  “I don’t know about that thin spot in the back of your hair, Sheriff,” Eric said. “That might not work with a Brad Pitt cut. Lonnie, you got any of that protein hair fiber stuff you sprinkle on thin spots?”

  Lonnie frowned. “I don’t carry it. I don’t think it looks good.”

  “Why not?”

  “Mainly because it looks like you sprinkled iron filings on your head.”

  “I’ll pass on the sprinkles and the haircut for now,” Rhodes said. “I have to get back to crime-fighting.”

  “And I need to go get a doorknob for this place,” Eric said. “I have some nice brass ones in the antique store. I’ll be back in a jiffy to install it.”

  He and Rhodes went outside.

  “I had a cap around here somewhere,” Rhodes said.

  Eric pointed to the street where something lay like roadkill. “That it?”

  “That’s it,” Rhodes said. “Somebody ran over it.”

  He went to pick it up. The bill had a greasy tire track across it, and gravel and dirt were ground into the crown. Now Rhodes had another reason not to like caps. He slapped it against his leg to get some of the dirt and gravel off.

  “See you later, Sheriff,” Eric said, and started to walk back to the antique store.

  Rhodes looked around for a trash can but didn’t see one, so he jammed the cap in a jacket pocket and went to the Tahoe. Before he got settled behind the wheel, the radio crackled.

  It was Hack Jensen. “You need to get over to the opera house, Sheriff. Looks like there’s trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?” Rhodes asked.

  “Jake Marley’s dead,” Hack said.

  Chapter 2

  The Clearview Opera House was in what had once been Clearview’s downtown area. Rhodes supposed it was still the downtown, except there wasn’t really a downtown anymore. The businesses that had once made up the central business district had long since either closed for good or moved out to the highway, especially the area around Walmart. That area of the town was lively. There were dollar stores, a big grocery store, and lots of new businesses. Not in the old downtown, though. Some of the buildings still stood, but others had either fallen down or been demolished. For a while the whole place had resembled a ghost town, but now some buildings, like the combination antique store and art gallery where Eric worked, had been what people called repurposed, and the area was beginning to take on a semblance of new life.

  While most of the old buildings hadn’t been restored to their former state of good repair, a couple had, including a flower shop. Others, like a beauty shop, a thrift store, and even a church, were in buildings that had hardly been improved at all in the last forty or so years. There was, however, a new senior citizens’ center, and the big white law office that Rhodes called the Lawj Mahal was another recent addition, having replaced four or five of the older buildings.

  And there was the opera house. It was squeezed into a narrow space between an empty building that had once been the biggest department store in town and another one that had been a drugstore. Rhodes wasn’t sure when the last opera had been performed in Clearview. For all he knew there might never have been an opera in the theater. The name might have been chosen for its grand sound rather than its literal meaning. The building was a relic of Clearview’s oil boom days, when the town wanted to appear cultured instead of rowdy and lacking in refinement. After the boom the theater, like the town, had fallen on hard times, closing its doors sometime in the early 1940s.

  A couple of years later someone had opened the building again, with a movie screen installed on the stage. The movie theater had been in operation for only a few years before television had come along. Clearview wasn’t in an area where TV was easily accessible, so the theater hadn’t had any competition until sometime in the middle 1950s. More and more people started putting up tall antennas that brought in stations from Dallas, and they began to stay at home watching old movies that had once been in color on tiny screens that showed them in black-and-white. It didn’t seem to matter to anyone that the experience wasn’t the same. Business at the theater continued for a while, but then it began to taper off. A new manager came along and tried some gimmicks to bring in the customers, without much success. After a few more years of struggling, the theater closed for good. The front had been boarded up, and what was behind it had been forgotten by just about everyone. Clearview’s prosperous times were far behind it now, and the building had sat vacant for longer than a good part of the population of Clearview had been alive.

  The previous summer, however, Jake Marley had taken an interest in the old building. Marley was the grandson of one the men who had become wealthy during the oil boom days, the last living remnant of one of the families who’d struck it rich. He had continued living in Clearview, while the other descendants of the people who’d made bushels of money from black gold had either died or moved far away to live their comfortable moneyed lives in other states, or even other countries: California, Florida, Hawaii, the Bahamas.

  Marley was widely regarded as an eccentric misanthrope. He was past sixty and had never married. His parents had died years ago, one from pneumonia and one from cancer of some kind, and his sister, who had been a couple of years older, had died in a one-car rollover acciden
t when she was a teenager, nearly fifty years ago. Marley lived a reclusive life in the family home, a large stone house almost ninety years old now, located just outside of town. He’d never taken any interest in civic matters and didn’t seem to care a bit about whether the town disappeared or prospered, an attitude that many in the town considered selfish, and maybe it was.

  Marley was much talked about but seldom seen around town. He didn’t attend church, and when he shopped at Walmart he did it late at night when hardly anyone else was there. Sometimes he was spotted at the Dairy Queen drive-through or sitting alone in the Jolly Tamale having the #1 Dinner, but he didn’t socialize or have any friends, not even among the people he’d gone to school with. He’d lived in Clearview all his life, but no one really knew him.

  Rhodes had heard several rumors about how Marley had occupied his time before deciding to renovate the theater. Some said he was writing a book about his family history. Others claimed he spent his evenings at nightclubs in a nearby city, romancing younger women. Some claimed that he was addicted to online gambling. Still others believed that under an assumed name he wrote a blog where he published scandalous stories involving thinly disguised versions of certain citizens of Clearview.

  Rhodes didn’t know whether any of the speculation was true. If anyone had seen the blog, it was always a friend of a friend. No one had ever seen Marley at a nightclub in any other city, except possibly that same friend of a friend.

  Why Marley had emerged from his self-imposed solitude after many years was a mystery that nobody had asked him about. They couldn’t ask because before he’d started the work on the theater, they never saw him, and now that he was out in public and doing something to improve the town, they didn’t want to offend him and send him back into seclusion.

  All anyone knew for sure was that Marley had decided to restore the Clearview Opera House and establish some kind of community theater there. His announced plan had been to have Harry Harris, an English teacher at the local community college, write a play for the theater’s grand opening, which was to be at Christmas of the following year. The play was to be a Texas version of A Christmas Carol. A lot of work remained to be done on the building, but everyone was confident that another year was plenty of time to have it ready for the opening.

  Rhodes wondered what would happen to those plans now, since if what Hack had told him was accurate, Jake Marley was lying dead on the stage of the opera house. It was Marley’s money that was being used for all the expenses. Rhodes didn’t know a thing about Marley’s will, but he figured there were likely to be problems.

  Rhodes drove the two and a half blocks from the Beauty Shack to the opera house in under a minute and parked in front. There was never a shortage of parking around there.

  Rhodes’s wife, Ivy, along with some other members of the community, was involved with the restoration of the old building, so Rhodes knew a bit about it and had visited a couple of times to see what progress had been made. The work had started with the front of the building. The theater marquee that had once jutted out over the entrance had long since disappeared and had not yet been replaced, but the box office and entrance doors had been found in fair shape behind the graffiti-covered boards that hid them. The box office and lobby had cleaned up nicely, but that was all that had been accomplished so far.

  The interior of the theater was still intact but not in such good shape as the lobby had been. Many of the seats were in terrible condition. Rats had chewed on them, and the old leather had cracked where it hadn’t been chewed. The springs showed through the leather in most of the seats. Water had leaked in on some of them. All would have to be replaced.

  The movie screen was long gone. The heavy velvet curtain had been in place, but it had been removed for cleaning and repair. The prop room was still filled with old props and clothing, and the scenery flats just needed a good going over to remove dust and grime. Taken all together, it was a job that would require quite some time, even if Jake Marley were alive to supervise and provide the funds, and he wasn’t alive, not anymore.

  Or so Hack had said. Rhodes needed to find out for himself, so he went into the lobby. It hadn’t been recarpeted, but the candy counter had a new glass front, and the old popcorn machine stood at one end of it looking almost ready for business. Just for a second Rhodes imagined that he could see candy bars lined up behind the glass and smell fresh popcorn popping. The actual smell wasn’t so pleasant. A scent of must and mildew still hung in the air.

  Doors opened into the theater on each side of the counter. Rhodes pushed open the one on his right and entered the auditorium, with the cold air from the lobby right behind him, not that the interior of the building wasn’t cold already. It didn’t have a heating system that worked. That was one more thing that had to be remedied. Rhodes let the door swing shut behind him.

  The auditorium had a wide center aisle and narrow aisles on each side. A light with one bulb hung above the stage. That light was burning, for reasons that Rhodes didn’t want to think about at the moment, but the house lights weren’t on. Too much electrical work was needed before they could be used. The first time Rhodes had looked into the theater, some light had come in through small holes in the roof, but those had been repaired. Now several battery-powered LED floodlights sat on the stage. All were turned on. One of them was angled upward toward the grid deck high above the stage, and the others showed a figure lying a little to the left of the center of the stage. A woman sat in a front-row seat on the center aisle.

  When Rhodes came in, the woman stood up and turned around. “Is that you, Sheriff?”

  “It’s me,” Rhodes said, walking down the slightly slanted aisle to the foot of the stage. There was a narrow orchestra pit, and Rhodes wondered how many instrumentalists it could have accommodated.

  He had a momentary flashback to his high school days when for a time he’d been known as Will o’ the Wisp Dan Rhodes, thanks to having run back a kickoff for a touchdown in the opening football game of the season. In those long-gone days he and several of the other football players for the Clearview Catamounts had perfected the art of running down the center aisle of the high school auditorium and jumping onto the stage. Rhodes didn’t think it would be a good idea to try that little stunt in this theater now, or anywhere else ever again for that matter. Besides, the stage at his high school hadn’t been fronted with an orchestra pit.

  The woman who had spoken was Aubrey Hamilton. Hack had told Rhodes that she was the one who’d found the body. He’d told her not to touch anything and not to call the paramedics until Rhodes got there if she was sure Marley was dead.

  She’d told Hack there was no doubt about it.

  “I’m glad you’re here, Sheriff,” she said. Her voice quavered slightly. “I didn’t know who to call or what to do. I’ve never found a dead person before, and it’s very spooky to sit in an old place like this with one with a dead person in front of me.”

  Aubrey was a Realtor. She’d worked in an office run by a man named Ed Hopkins for a while and then opened her own one-person firm. She was about forty, and it appeared to Rhodes that she’d been crying. Rumor had it that although she was a good bit younger than Jake Marley, she might have been the only person who had known him even a little bit before he began his theater project. She was the one who’d gotten in touch with the owners of the building and arranged its sale to Marley, and she’d been in touch with him throughout the negotiations. She wore gray pants, a gray jacket, and a white blouse, very businesslike. Her sensible shoes appeared to Rhodes to have rubber soles, but they looked good with the outfit. Her smooth brown hair hung just about to her collar. Rhodes was sure that the cut wasn’t a Brad Pitt, and it didn’t look like Elaine’s classic bob, so Rhodes had no idea what to call it. To him it was just a haircut.

  “You did the right thing by calling Hack,” he said. “You sit back down, and I’ll go have a look.”

  Aubrey sat down, and Rhodes walked to the right-hand side of the auditorium, w
here a short stairway at the end of the orchestra pit led to the stage. When he got on the stage, he looked around but saw nothing unusual aside from the body. Some scenery flats leaned against the wall in back. The back door that led to the alley behind the theater was closed. It was a heavy metal door, which was one reason the theater had never been broken into.

  Rhodes went to Marley’s body, the lights casting his long shadow across the stage. Marley was dead, all right, as dead as the dime Dr Pepper or the five-cent bag of popcorn. Rhodes knelt down on one knee to have a look, careful to keep his shadow off the body. He recognized Marley’s profile, the hawk nose, the close-cropped gray hair, and the one bushy eyebrow that he could see. There was what looked like a slight contusion above the eyebrow. The skin was torn, and there was a dab of blood.

  Rhodes wondered if he’d ever get accustomed to death. He’d seen many dead bodies, too many of them, and every time he felt a kind of sadness come over him. Some people reached out and embraced life, and some people, like Marley, shut themselves away from it, but they all came to the same end.

  It wasn’t as if Rhodes had known Marley. He’d hardly ever spoken to him, but the death of any person took something out of the world that couldn’t be returned, no matter what the person had been.

  Rhodes looked around the bare stage. More and more often these days he was remembering little things from his high school classes. His former teachers would have been proud of him. At the moment he was recalling a play he’d read, something by William Shakespeare, that said people strutted on the stage of life for a little while and then were silent forever after. And besides that, their lives hadn’t amounted to anything anyway. Marley hadn’t even gotten his chance to strut. He’d waited too long to come out onstage and try to make his life mean something. Maybe Shakespeare had a point, but Rhodes didn’t like it.

  Rhodes looked back at Marley’s body. The most likely cause of death would be a heart attack, but the odd angle of Marley’s neck indicated that a heart attack most likely had not been involved. Rhodes also knew why Aubrey had been so sure that Marley was dead. It was obvious from that odd angle that his neck was broken. As a result, his brain would have stopped his heart and breathing, and Marley, while he wouldn’t have died instantly, would not have lived long, seconds maybe but no more.