Murder Among the OWLS Page 20

  “It didn’t happen exactly like that.”

  “That’s what it will sound like, even in a straight account. You might as well get used to your new role.”

  Rhodes didn’t like the idea of having a new role or of having a role at all. He just wanted to do his job.

  “Will you be at Helen Harris’s funeral tomorrow?” Jennifer asked.

  Rhodes said that he would. He didn’t like funerals, but he nearly always went.

  “Do you think Mrs. Gadney will be there?”

  “No,” Rhodes said, “I don’t. What are you going to do about Alton Brant? Write a story about his masquerade or forget about it?”

  “I’m not going to forget about it, but I’m not going to write a story. Not for the time being, anyway. The editor didn’t think it would serve any useful purpose to run one.”

  Rhodes supposed Brant’s assumption of rank had been innocent enough.

  “We won’t be doing any more interviews with him on Veterans Day, though,” Jennifer said.

  “That’s probably a good idea.”

  “Yes. It probably is.”

  The rest of Rhodes’s afternoon, what was left of it, was taken up with routine things, the most interesting of which was a stolen-car caper that Buddy worked, although the car hadn’t actually been stolen.

  “It was just a sale gone bad,” he explained to Rhodes.

  “That ain’t what Dora Aman told me when she called it in,” Hack said. “She said it was stolen right out from under her.”

  “You told me that, too,” Buddy said. “Which is why I wound up chasing Ron Alvarez about five miles down County Road 178. You know Alvarez?”

  Rhodes said he didn’t, and Hack shook his head.

  “Has a little place out close to Obert. Cuts hay and does some shredding. He was trying the car out, so he says, when I got after him. Nice little Chevy. Clean. Low miles. Runs like the dickens, even on that dirt road. Good suspension, too. Didn’t bounce all over the place.”

  “You sound like you’re sellin’ it yourself,” Hack said.

  “Just trying to give you an idea of what happened and why. Anyway, I came up behind him and put on the siren. He took off. Maybe he wanted to see if he could get away just for the fun of it. He couldn’t, so he finally pulled over. I talked to him about the car, and he said that it was his. Claimed he’d bought it from Dora Aman this afternoon and paid her cash money for it.”

  “Did he have any proof of that?” Rhodes asked.

  “He sure did. He had the title with Dora’s signature on the back. He was telling the truth. He’d bought that car fair and square.”

  “So how come she said he’d stole it?” Hack said.

  “I went back to her place and asked her about that. She hemmed and hawed and finally said she’d changed her mind and didn’t want to get rid of the car. It was in such good shape that it was probably better than a new one.”

  “She admitted that she’d sold it to him, though?” Rhodes said.

  “Yeah, but she claimed she called him and said she’d changed her mind and wanted it back. He said no way, so she reported it as stolen. She says that if he wouldn’t let her change her mind, it was the same thing as stealing. She wanted me to arrest him and lock him up, and she wanted her car back.”

  “What did you tell her?” Hack said.

  “That I gave him a speeding ticket.”

  “I bet that didn’t satisfy her.”

  “It sure didn’t. Just made her madder. She says she’s gonna sue Alvarez, and me, too.”

  “What did you say to that?”

  “I told her to get a good lawyer.”

  “Who’d you recommend?” Hack said.

  “You know we don’t do that kind of thing.”

  “Yeah, I know. I’ll tell you who I’d get if it was me.”

  Rhodes had a feeling he knew what was coming next.

  “Who?” Buddy said.

  “Randy Lawless,” Hack said. “Who else?”

  Chapter 27

  WHEN RHODES GOT HOME THAT EVENING, THE CAT WAS STILL there in the same place in the kitchen near the refrigerator. As far as Rhodes could tell, it hadn’t moved more than a couple of inches since the last time he’d seen it that morning.

  “He gets up and walks around,” Ivy said, a little defensively, Rhodes thought, when he commented on it. “He doesn’t just lie in one spot all day.”

  What disappointed Rhodes was that Yancey, who had come bouncing to the door to meet him, seemed to have come to accept the cat as a permanent resident. Yancey’s behavior had reverted to exactly the way it had been before the cat had arrived, with all the same nervous energy and barking.

  That wasn’t the only thing that disappointed Rhodes. The other was that the cat seemed perfectly at ease with Yancey’s antics. When Yancey bounced over to him and barked right in his face, the cat didn’t turn a hair.

  “They’re good friends now,” Ivy said.

  Rhodes said he was glad to hear it.

  “I can tell.” Ivy gave him a look that was heavy with suspicion. “Have you been trying to give Sam away again?”

  Rhodes denied it, but Ivy didn’t believe him.

  “Well, maybe I mentioned to a couple of people that he was available, but nobody took me up on the offer.”

  “It’s just as well. Sam has a home here now.”

  Ivy looked over and smiled at the cat, who was lying there purring while Yancey barked around her ankles.

  Maybe having a cat wouldn’t be so bad, Rhodes thought, and then he sneezed.

  “Don’t start that again. You’re not allergic to Sam. You can’t fool me.”

  “I’m not trying to fool anybody,” Rhodes said, stifling another sneeze. He’d skimped on lunch, and he was feeling a little peckish. “What’s for supper?”

  “I thought it might be nice of you to take me out.”

  “Mexican food?” Rhodes tried not to sound too hopeful.

  “That sounds good.”

  It sounded good to Rhodes, too.

  Later that night, trying to sleep, Rhodes thought about the case against Lily Gadney. It wasn’t a good one, and it left too many things unexplained. Thorpe was looking like a better suspect all the time.

  Ruth Grady had gotten some soil samples from beneath Lily’s Explorer, and she’d gone out to the Tumlinson place for samples near the house. She’d run some tests tomorrow, although the samples didn’t look at all similar to Rhodes. Everything from under the Explorer looked like black gumbo, while the clay from the Tumlinson place was almost white.

  Even the lack of a match wouldn’t have bothered Rhodes so much if he could figure out what had happened to the will. He couldn’t, however. It hadn’t turned up anywhere, and it didn’t seem likely to.

  With all that running through his head, Rhodes couldn’t get to sleep for a long time, and when he started to drift off, he thought about the cat, which he was sure would jump up on the bed at any minute and glue itself to his back.

  It didn’t happen, however, so to keep himself from worrying about it, Rhodes got up and went to the kitchen for a drink of water.

  The cat wasn’t in its usual spot. Rhodes looked around the room and didn’t see it anywhere, so he stepped out onto the small enclosed porch. He could see Yancey’s basket, where the little dog was sound asleep.

  In the basket with him was the cat, also asleep. As Rhodes stood there watching, it raised its head and opened its eyes, looking directly at Rhodes. It wasn’t smiling, but Rhodes thought it would have been if it could have.

  After a second Rhodes said, “You think you’ve won, don’t you?”

  The cat gave him another smug look, then lowered its head and closed its eyes. Yancey never moved.

  Rhodes went back to bed and eventually fell into a fitful, unsatisfactory sleep.

  The funeral was held at the “new” First Methodist Church, which had been around for something like forty-five years, as opposed to the “old” First Methodist Church, which had
been around for forty years or so longer.

  The old church was in fact no longer a church. It had been sold to a nondenominational group when the new church was built, but that hadn’t lasted long, and the building had been used since then for a number of purposes, none of them related to religion. It had even been a coffeehouse at some point in the early 1970s.

  The new church was, of course, no longer new, except in comparison to the old one, but it had been well cared for and showed few signs of age.

  Rhodes and Ivy arrived a little late and sat in a pew near the back after signing the register. Rhodes wasn’t sure why they’d bothered to sign. As far as he knew, Mrs. Harris’s only relatives were her brother in Montana and Thorpe, who couldn’t have cared less who attended the funeral, even if he’d been conscious, which he wasn’t. Rhodes had called the hospital to check before he’d gone by to pick up Ivy at the insurance office.

  The church was full, as Rhodes had expected it would be. He saw most of the OWLS sitting together on what some people called “widows’ row,” even though not all the OWLS were widows. Quite a few of Mrs. Harris’s former students were scattered around the church. Rhodes recognized them because they were younger than most of the others.

  Because Mrs. Harris had no family members, Alton Brant was the only person sitting on the pew reserved for relatives. He was wearing a suit, not a military uniform.

  Rhodes thought the funeral was acceptable, which meant a closed coffin, a short eulogy, a few scriptures, and no sermon at all. He knew there’d be a few complaints about the closed coffin afterward. Some people always wanted to know if the dead person “looked natural,” but Clyde Ballinger always put the top down if there were no instructions to the contrary.

  Rhodes was pleased that the songs played before the funeral were old gospel tunes that he recognized, and they were played at the proper upbeat tempo, not some lugubrious pace that made them sound depressingly mournful.

  After the service, the casket was wheeled out and placed in the back of the black ambulance for transportation to the cemetery, and Clyde Ballinger ushered Alton Brant into the front seat of a black limo for the trip. Rhodes saw the OWLS standing together nearby, having gone over to offer some comfort to Brant.

  These days not everyone wore black to funerals, but Thelma Rice did. Even fewer people wore hats, but Thelma had one on. It was black and small, nothing at all like the red one she’d had on the time Rhodes had seen her at the club meeting.

  “It’s nice to see you, Sheriff,” Thelma said when Rhodes walked over to the group. “You, too, Ivy, even if your husband has been arresting our club members.”

  Ivy smiled, and Rhodes said he was sorry about the arrest but that was his job. Some of the other OWLS edged away from him, as if they thought he might arrest them, too. Francine Oates was among them, but Rhodes made it a point to speak to her.

  Francine Oates wore a gray pantsuit. Rhodes could remember a time, not so long ago by his reckoning, when women wouldn’t have considered wearing pants to a funeral, but times had changed. He could even remember when women would never have considered leaving the house for even a shopping trip without panty hose, but now bare legs were the thing. Rhodes wouldn’t have been surprised to see someone at the funeral wearing flip-flops, though certainly not among the OWLS.

  Rhodes didn’t know the rules about jewelry at funerals, if there were any rules. Francine wore gold earrings, plain circles that matched her wedding band. She didn’t have much to say to Rhodes, and he didn’t want to press her, not at the moment. Still, he wanted to talk to her again to see if she’d remembered anything more about the morning Mrs. Harris had died.

  “I have a question for you, too,” she said when he mentioned having something more to say to her. “But this isn’t the time for it.”

  Rhodes said he’d drop by her house later in the afternoon, and she said that would be fine.

  “Are we going to the cemetery?” Ivy said.

  “All right,” Rhodes said.

  The graveside service was short, if not sweet. The sky was blue, the sun was warm, and a light breeze ruffled the edges of the tent set up near the open grave. Rhodes could smell the damp earth that was piled by the side of the hole, covered with fake green turf that did nothing at all to disguise what was beneath it.

  The minister read the twenty-third psalm and said a prayer. Alton Brant choked back tears as the coffin was lowered into the ground, and Rhodes heard some sobs from the others gathered under the tent. Not many, however. Helen Harris had been well enough liked, but she’d had few close friends other than Brant.

  After the coffin was lowered and people had begun to leave, Rhodes said a few words to Alton Brant.

  “Thorpe should be in that coffin, not Helen,” Brant said. “It’s not right that you haven’t done anything about him.”

  “He’s not what you’d call a free man,” Rhodes said. “He’s still in a coma.”

  “How much of a chance do the doctors give him?”

  “They haven’t been specific. It could go either way.”

  “I want him to recover and stand trial.”

  Rhodes decided not to mention his suspicions about Lily Gadney. Besides, he was beginning to think Brant might be right about Thorpe.

  “He hasn’t even been accused yet,” Rhodes said.

  “Well, he should be. You need to do your job and find the evidence against him.”

  Rhodes didn’t have a snappy answer for that one, so he just went to join Ivy, who was talking to Thelma Rice.

  “That Alton Brant was acting snippy, wasn’t he,” Thelma said. “You can’t blame him. He and Helen were very close. He visited her just about every day.”

  “What time of day?” Rhodes said.

  “You’re always working, aren’t you. I don’t know the time. I just know he visited her.”

  Ivy took Rhodes’s arm. “Sometimes I think you work too hard.”

  “It’s his job,” Thelma said. “That’s what he told me.”

  “You should have to live with him,” Ivy said, tugging Rhodes’s arm and steering him toward the car. “Time for us to go.”

  As they drove away, Rhodes looked back to see Alton Brant standing alone at the edge of the open grave. They’d wait until he left to start filling it in. The backhoe was parked at a discreet distance, but it was impossible not to see it. The operator was standing in the shade beside it, smoking a cigarette.

  He was a young man. Sooner or later, he’d be waiting to cover Rhodes’s grave, he or someone like him. Rhodes hoped it would be a lot later, and he thought of Helen Harris, who’d been rushed into the grave by a person or persons unknown. It might have been Lily Gadney, but Rhodes was growing less sure of that all the time. He wished again that Thorpe was conscious and talking.

  “Don’t worry,” Ivy said. “You’ll find out who did it.”

  “How did you know what I was thinking?”

  “I always know.”

  “If that’s true, I’d better be a lot more careful with my thoughts.”

  “That,” Ivy said, “would be a really good idea.”

  Chapter 28

  SOMETHING ABOUT THE FUNERAL WAS BOTHERING RHODES, BUT he couldn’t figure out what it was. When he parked at the insurance office to let Ivy out of the car, he asked if she’d noticed anything odd about the service.

  “No, I thought it was fine. Your friend Ballinger is going to get complaints about that closed casket, though. Maybe that’s what you’re thinking of.”

  “No, that’s not it. Anyway I’m sure there was a viewing at the funeral home. It was something else. Something was out of place.”

  “Well, I didn’t see it, and I have to go to work.”

  She got out of the car, and Rhodes watched her walk into the office. He still couldn’t figure out what was nagging at him, but maybe it would come to him later.

  It was a little soon to go by and talk to Francine Oates, so he stopped at the jail. Nothing was going on, but Ruth had left th
e results of the soil comparison test on his desk.

  “Not a match,” Hack said, saving Rhodes the trouble of reading it. “You’ll have to find yourself another suspect.”

  “Maybe not,” Lawton said. “How many cars you think Truck has on that lot of his? I’d guess about half of ’em run. She could’ve taken any of ’em. If this was the CSI, you can bet they’d check out ever’ car there, and they’d find the one that matched, too.”

  Rhodes didn’t see the point of checking all the cars. Hack was right. He’d have to find another suspect, not that he didn’t have a couple of them already. For all he knew, Thorpe had killed Mrs. Harris for the inheritance. Brant thought so. Brant himself might have done it, and it might be time to talk to Billy Joe Byron again.

  “How was the funeral?” Hack asked.

  “It was all right, as funerals go.”

  “I don’t like ’em, myself. Too sad, specially when you get to be my age and start thinkin’ it might be you next week lyin’ up there in the front of the church.”

  “Church might not let you in,” Lawton said. “They don’t take heatherns. You’d have to be buried out of the funeral home. That’d be all right. It’d be plenty big since nobody’d come anyway. Me and the sheriff’d be there, though. You could count on us. Unless we happened to be needed here at the jail or out on the street to do some crime bustin’. Otherwise, though, we’d be there. Right, Sheriff?”

  “Right,” Rhodes said. “You don’t have to worry about that, Hack. I’m pretty sure Ruth would come, too, and maybe Buddy, if I didn’t have to send them off on an investigation.”

  “You two are reg’lar Jerry Lewises,” Hack said.

  “Who’s that?” Lawton said. “Must’ve been before my time.”

  “Or after,” Hack said. “Maybe I should’ve said you were a reg’lar Eddie Cantor.”

  “Never heard of him.”