Bill Crider - Dan Rhodes 09 - Death by Accident Read online

  “It’s not approved by the American Heart Association, either,” she had told him.

  So Rhodes had begun to try to eat a slightly more healthy diet, and while he still didn’t eat a regular lunch, he at least ate one lower in fat and calories. Most of the time. There was only so much a man could stand.

  He also tried to spend a little time every day on his stationary bike, but he didn’t always have time for that, any more than he had time for lunch.

  Still, over the course of the last few months he’d lost a few pounds, and he was almost able to see his belt buckle when he looked straight down. Not quite, but it was a small belt buckle, not one of those giant models like the one on Pep Yeldell’s belt. Anyway, he was working on it. Give him another month or two, and he’d be able to see it, all right.

  “Where would you like to eat?” Ivy asked, picking up her purse from the floor by her chair.

  Rhodes thought about it. He’d had cereal and fruit with skim milk for breakfast, and for supper the previous evening Ivy had made vegetable sandwiches with broccoli, melted low-fat mozzarella cheese, sun-dried tomatoes, mushrooms, and red and green bell pepper.

  He’d had about all the healthy diet he could stand for a while.

  “How about a bacon cheeseburger?” he said. “They’re on special at the Dairy Queen.”

  “On special?” Ivy said.

  “A dollar ninety-nine. Not including fries. We wouldn’t have to get fries.”

  “What about a Heath-Bar Blizzard?”

  “I guess we could have one of those,” Rhodes said. “But only if you insist.”

  Ivy grinned. “I insist,” she said.

  The Dairy Queen was crowded at noon, but Rhodes didn’t mind. He was just glad it wasn’t Bean Day. Beans and cornbread were fine, and they were also low in fat. But today his mouth was set for a bacon cheeseburger.

  He parked near the red and white sign, and they went inside. Rhodes took a deep breath, inhaling the reassuring odors of bacon and burgers frying on the grill, chicken strips and potatoes frying in deep vats of grease. He could practically feel the plaque accumulating on the walls of his arteries. He also thought he could feel the waist band of his pants tighten around his waist, but he didn’t care. It was a bacon cheeseburger or nothing.

  Ivy found a booth while Rhodes ordered. He paid for the food and took the numbered slip that the young woman behind the counter handed him.

  “Two-seventeen,” he said, sliding onto the bench across the table from Ivy, who was looking over the crowd.

  “Do you know anyone in this place?” she asked.

  Rhodes looked around.

  “I recognize a face or two. But I don’t really know any of them.”

  “Me neither,” Ivy said. “And I grew up here. Where do all these people come from?”

  Rhodes didn’t know. It was a question that had often puzzled him. There was no industry in Clearview, and there wasn’t much farming. The cotton gin had closed more than thirty years ago.

  “Some of them work at the power plant, I guess,” he said, referring to the large coal-burning facility on one end of the county. “And some of them have always lived here without us knowing them. Some of them work in Dallas or Waco and commute. It’s not that bad a drive. Some of them ranch, maybe, or have small farms. A lot of them are probably retired. It’s just that we don’t get out much. No wonder we don’t know anyone.”

  “They know who you are, though,” Ivy said.

  Rhodes supposed that was true. He didn’t wear a uniform or dress in any way that would call attention to himself. He didn’t even wear a ten-gallon hat like a lot of sheriffs did, but people knew who he was.

  “It goes with the job,” he said.

  “Speaking of the job, what’s been happening?”

  Rhodes told her about Pep Yeldell.

  “Another fatal accident? That makes two.”

  “You’re thinking that it’s too much of a coincidence, aren’t you?” Rhodes said.

  “Maybe it comes from living with a lawman. Have you found out whether there’s any connection between Yeldell and the other one? John West?”

  “Not yet. I’m going over to Ballinger’s and talk to Dr. White later. Maybe he’ll tell me that it was just an accident, that Yeldell had been drinking and just fell in the pool.”

  “Does that mean you think Yeldell was drunk?”

  “Not necessarily. He got drunk often enough. But we won’t know about this time until later. We’ll have to send blood samples off to the pathology lab, and we’ll be lucky to get results in a week.”

  “So how will you know if it was an accident?”

  Rhodes started to tell her, but the woman from behind the counter came to their booth. She was carrying a red tray that held two cardboard baskets and two tall paper cups.

  “Number two-seventeen?” she said.

  “That’s us,” Rhodes said, sliding his receipt across the table.

  The woman put the tray on the table. Each basket held a bacon cheeseburger wrapped in white paper. There were two small paper containers of salt and one of pepper beside the burgers, along with a paper-wrapped plastic straw.

  “Get you anything else?” the woman asked.

  “No thanks,” Rhodes told her.

  “No fries? Onion rings?”

  “Not today,” Ivy said.

  The woman shrugged. “Enjoy your meal.”

  Rhodes pulled the paper off his straw and stuck it in through the plastic lid on the cup. Then he took a drink. Dr Pepper from a machine was never as good as when it came from a bottle or can. It always seemed to lack an essential ingredient — syrup or fizz or something.

  The bacon cheeseburger was much more satisfying.

  Ivy let him eat about half of it before she asked again, “So how will you know if it was an accident?”

  “It depends on what Dr. White finds. If Yeldell didn’t have water in his lungs, that means he didn’t drown. He was killed some other way and dumped in the pool.”

  Ivy wiped mustard from the corner of her mouth with a paper napkin. “What if he did drown?”

  “Then it was probably an accident. Just a case of a bad combination of a rotten tree limb and a man who’s had too much to drink.”

  “Who put that rope there, anyway?” Ivy asked.

  “That’s a good question. Ty Berry thinks Faye Knape did it, in hopes that something like the Yeldell thing would happen. That way the Sons and Daughters of Texas would be discredited, and it would be easier to get the Hunter cabin moved to the courthouse lawn.”

  “Do the commissioners want it there?”

  “I don’t think so. No one’s said so, anyway.”

  “Then I don’t see why Faye would put a rope in a tree. I’ll bet someone just put it there for fun and didn’t take it down.”

  That was what Rhodes thought, too, but he said, “There’s someone else who wouldn’t mind seeing the Sons and Daughters discredited and putting a stop to that celebration they have planned for the summer.”

  “Who’s that?”

  Rhodes told her about Brother Alton.

  “He’s certainly become righteous since that emu business,” Ivy said. “Did you remind him of that?”

  “No. Righteous seems to agree with him. The church is taking in quite a bit of money. They’ve got a new roof, new paint, clean windows.”

  He didn’t mention the problems with the roof.

  “I think putting a rope in a tree would be a pretty silly way to try to stop a celebration,” Ivy said.

  “Me too,” Rhodes said. “There’s another thing that bothers me about that rope, too.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Why would anyone tie a rope around a rotten limb?”

  “I don’t know. Do you?”

  “Maybe,” Rhodes said.

  Chapter Eight

  The Heath Bar Blizzard was even more satisfying than the bacon cheeseburger, and Rhodes felt excessively virtuous because he ordered only a small one.
He finished it quickly and waited for Ivy to finish hers.

  “I don’t see how you can eat ice cream so fast,” she said, taking a small bite from the red plastic spoon.

  “It’s easy. I don’t bother to chew it. I just swallow it straight down.”

  “That’s not true, and you know it. A sheriff shouldn’t lie to one of his constituents.”

  “Are you sure you voted for me?”

  “I will next time. I promise.”

  When Ivy had finished her Blizzard, Rhodes put everything on the plastic tray and took it to the wastebasket. He dumped the trash in the wastebasket and put the plastic tray on top.

  “What now?” Ivy asked.

  “Time to go back to work,” he said.

  Ruth Grady was waiting at the jail when Rhodes got there. Pep Yeldell’s parents had died years before in a car wreck in West Texas, but the county was full of Yeldell’s aunts, uncles, and cousins. Ruth had been talking to some of them.

  “They don’t know much about him,” she said. “He wasn’t big on family. He worked at Lowery’s Paint and Body, he liked to go out and have a good time, and they’re sorry he’s dead. That’s about all they could tell me.”

  “Can’t hold likin’ to have a good time against a man,” Hack said from his desk, where he was watching a soap opera on his tiny TV set. “A workin’ man needs to get out for a little fun now and then.”

  “How’s Miz McGee getting along?” Ruth asked.

  Miz McGee was the woman that Hack had been squiring around for the last few months. He didn’t like to talk about her in the office when Lawton was around because Lawton was likely to make light-minded remarks. But the jailor was upstairs cleaning a cell, and Hack didn’t mind talking.

  “She’s just fine,” Hack said. “We might rent us a video tonight if we can find a good one.”

  “What’s good these days?” Ruth asked.

  “I’d like to see that one with the Stealth Bomber in it,” Hack said. “Broken Arrow, it’s called. I’ve liked that John Travolta ever since he played in that movie they filmed down in Houston.”

  “Urban Cowboy?”

  “That’s the one. They filmed that at Mickey Gilley’s night club. You ever been there?”

  “No,” Ruth said. “Have you?”

  “Yeah. I was down in Pasadena to visit a cousin of mine one time, and we went out there.”

  Throughout this conversation, Rhodes sat at his desk, wondering if Ruth, in only a few short months, had become as adept as Hack and Lawton at avoiding the topic at hand.

  But Ruth had only been making conversation and cultivating Hack. She turned her attention to Rhodes and got back to the subject.

  “That liking a good time I mentioned? The thing about Yeldell is that he liked women quite a bit. Maybe even more than Hack does.”

  Hack laughed. “I doubt that,” he said, and turned back to his soap opera.

  “Yeldell didn’t draw the line at married women, either,” Ruth said. “According to one of his cousins, there’re quite a few married men who won’t be too upset to hear the news of the drowning.”

  “What cousin would that be?” Rhodes asked.

  “Gary Heckethorn. He works at the Mini Market out on the Thurston highway.”

  “Did he give you any names?”

  Ruth handed Rhodes a piece of paper torn from a small spiral notebook. “I wrote them down.”

  Rhodes glanced at the paper. He didn’t recognize any of the names. He folded the paper and stuck it in his shirt pocket.

  “Did Heckethorn say whether Yeldell knew John West?” he asked.

  “He said West’s name was familiar, but that’s all. He said maybe West was somebody Yeldell met out at The County Line. Heckethorn went there with Yeldell some, and he says they might have met West there. But he’s not sure. They met a lot of people at The County Line.”

  “We might have to talk to Heckethorn again,” Rhodes said. “And Tuffy West.”

  “I wish we could find John West’s car,” Ruth said. “That still worries me.”

  It worried Rhodes, too. There was no reason for the car not to have turned up by now. He had put out an A. P. B. on it, but it hadn’t been reported.

  “That car could be in Russia by now,” Hack said. He turned off his TV set, no longer interested in the soap opera. “I read an article in the paper just the other day about how all the big-time Russian criminals have come over here to the U. S. A. now that the Soviet Union’s collapsed. They’re gonna be bigger than the Mafia, is what the article said. One thing they’re doin’ is stealin’ cars and sendin’ ’em clear back over there to Russia. What kinda car did West have?”

  “It wasn’t a car, exactly,” Rhodes said. “It was a Jeep Cherokee.”

  “There you go, then,” Hack said. “That’s the very model those Russians like the best of all. It’s prob’ly mushin’ through the snow drifts up there in Siberia right now.”

  Somehow Rhodes found it hard to believe that a car stolen in Blacklin County, Texas, could have found its way to Russia. Mexico, maybe, but not Russia.

  “If it sat out on one of those county roads very long,” Hack said, “it was fair game for anybody that came along and wanted it. It’d be just like some Russian gang to take it. I haven’t trusted Russians since they pulled the wool over F. D. R.’s eyes at Yalta after World War Two.”

  “I looked for the car that night,” Rhodes said. “It wasn’t anywhere around.”

  “Must not’ve looked very good,” Hack said.

  “I looked good. And Ruth looked with me the next day.”

  “Too late by then. Russians already had it.”

  “I thought the Russians were pretty much confined to the eastern part of the country,” Ruth said.

  Hack gave her a pitying look. “That’s what they’d like you to believe.”

  “Let’s assume just for a minute that the Russians don’t have the Cherokee,” Rhodes said. “What else could have happened to it?”

  “Somebody’s got it,” Hack said. “You can laugh about the Russians if you want to, but somebody’s got that car. It’s too nice a ride to be sittin’ in some bar ditch somewhere.”

  That was a point Rhodes could agree with.

  “Maybe we’ve just been looking in the wrong places,” Ruth said.

  That was another point Rhodes could agree with. He just didn’t know where else to look.

  Ruth didn’t either, but she had another idea.

  “What if he was with someone that night? Have we considered that possibility?”

  “No,” Rhodes said. “But if he was with someone, why was he carrying a gas can?”

  “It didn’t have to be his car that ran out of gas,” Ruth said.

  Chapter Nine

  “I already told you,” Tuffy West said. “I was with John at The County Line that night. We had a couple of beers, maybe three, and that was it. John left. I thought he was headed home.”

  “And you didn’t see Pep Yeldell that night?”

  “Don’t remember,” Tuffy said.

  They were inside the multi-purpose building that sat near the front of Tuffy’s wrecking yard. It smelled of oil and the old tires that were stacked high along one wall. Tuffy was behind a high wooden counter that looked as if it had been built about the time F. D. R. was getting fooled by Hack’s Russians at Yalta. Behind him, wooden shelves reached all the way to the ceiling. They were crammed with all sorts of used auto parts: generators, distributors, carburetors, thermostats, radios, tape players, and hundreds of other grease-and-oil-covered items that Rhodes couldn’t identify. There was a wooden step ladder leaning against the shelves.

  There was a Pontiac Firebird sitting nearby on the concrete floor. The fenders were accordioned, and the front bumper was pushed up almost to the passenger compartment. Rhodes hadn’t worked the wreck, but Ruth had told him about it. Drinking and driving don’t mix.

  On past the Firebird there was another car with its hood raised high, its engine held abov
e the empty engine compartment on a chain hoist.

  “But you did know Yeldell?” Rhodes said.

  Tuffy shrugged. “Everybody knew Pep. He was around out there a lot of the time.”

  “Who was he with?”

  “Different people.”

  “Women?” Rhodes asked.

  “Most of the time. He was a pretty good-lookin’ guy, you know? And there are a lot of ladies out there tryin’ to find somebody to have fun with.”

  “He won’t be out there anymore,” Rhodes said.

  Tuffy said, “Why not?”

  “He drowned last night. Out at the Old Settlers’ Grounds.”

  “What the hell was he doin’ out there?”

  “Swimming. At least that’s what it looks like he was doing.”

  Tuffy moved a scratch pad out of his way and leaned his forearms on the counter.

  “That’s a damn shame. Pep was a good ol’ boy. Knew how to have a good time,” he said. He looked over at the Firebird, then back at Rhodes. “Was he by himself out there?”

  “Looks that way,” Rhodes said.

  “You wouldn’t think old Pep’d go out there for a swim by himself. You sure there wasn’t some woman with him?”

  “I’m not sure of anything at this point,” Rhodes said. “I’m just trying to find out what I can.”

  That was basically the way Rhodes got things done. Hack could talk all he wanted to about modern crime detection methods and computers, but Rhodes still believed that talking, listening, and thinking were more likely to get him to a solution than all the computers in the world. He knew he might be fooling himself, but usually he got results.

  He hadn’t gotten very far with locating John West’s killer, however, as Tuffy reminded him.

  “I don’t see how this is helpin’ you find out who ran over John,” Tuffy said.

  “If he and Yeldell knew each other, there might be some connection between their deaths,” Rhodes said.

  “Hell, they knew each other. I told you that. I said that everybody knew Pep, and everybody included John. They weren’t what you’d call best friends, but they’d drink a beer now and then.”