Murder Among the OWLS Read online

  “Everybody leave,” Rhodes said. “Right now. Get back in your homes and stay there until this is over.”

  He heard a lot of grumbling, but people began to move away, except for one man. Alton Brant was back, walking calmly through the crowd with a long-handled shovel. Rhodes thought he knew what Brant had in mind, and he decided not to discourage him.

  “What’s all this about, anyway, Mr. Thorpe?” Rhodes said. “Why are you after Brant?”

  “I like that mister. Nice and polite. But it doesn’t change the fact that what this is about is my business. Now you and your deputy just back off, and we’ll call it quits.”

  Rhodes’s skin was stinging a little where the saw had scraped him. He wondered if Thorpe really believed he’d back off.

  “You know I can’t do that. I have to enforce the laws, and you’ve broken about ten of them.”

  “I’m gonna break me a few more before I’m done here.”

  By that time Brant was directly behind Thorpe and not more than ten feet away. The noise of the saw was more than loud enough to cover his approach as long as Thorpe was concentrating on Rhodes.

  “You can’t just cut somebody into pieces and then walk away,” Rhodes said.

  Thorpe grinned. “I don’t give a damn what happens after I cut him up. You can lock me in your hoosegow and throw away the key for all I care.”

  “You wouldn’t like it there,” Rhodes said, wondering how long it had been since he’d heard the word hoosegow.

  Thorpe opened his mouth to say something further, but he didn’t get a word out before Brant slammed the metal scoop of the shovel into the back of his head. The shovel landed with a satisfactory clang, and Thorpe pitched forward.

  As he did, the chain saw flew from his limp fingers, straight at Rhodes.

  The saw stopped operating as soon as Thorpe released the trigger, which made it less dangerous but still capable of causing serious damage.

  Rhodes dodged aside, and the saw hit the hood of the county car, sliding up to the windshield, removing the white paint and leaving a long, jagged metallic scar.

  The scar bothered Rhodes almost as much as Thorpe’s lying facedown about four feet away from him. He’d have to explain the scar to the county commissioners, who wouldn’t be happy about having to pay for it.

  Thorpe moaned, and Rhodes turned to look at him. He twitched a little, moaned again, and lay still.

  “I hope I didn’t hit him too hard,” Alton Brant said.

  “Did you dent the shovel?” Rhodes said.

  Brant turned the shovel in his hands and looked at the bottom of the scoop. “Nope. Not in the least.”

  “We’d better call the ambulance, anyway,” Ruth Grady said, walking over to stand beside Rhodes. “We don’t want to take any chances with him and get sued.”

  “If anybody gets sued, it’ll be me,” Brant said. “I’m the one who hit him.”

  “He’s the kind who’ll sue anybody that’s handy,” Rhodes said. “Especially the county.”

  The commissioners wouldn’t like that, either, Rhodes thought, so it was best not to let it happen. He told Ruth to call for the ambulance.

  “Want me to get the first-aid kit for your back?”

  Rhodes told her that his back would be okay. “Just a scratch.” Then he looked around and saw that most of the crowd had left, either to avoid being sued or because all the fun was over. Even the two dogs were gone.

  One of the few people still hanging around was the man who’d spoken to Rhodes earlier. He looked at Rhodes but didn’t speak. He turned and walked away.

  Rhodes didn’t have time for him at the moment. He knelt down and checked to make sure that Thorpe was breathing and that he had a pulse. Satisfied that Thorpe was doing all right, Rhodes stood up to talk to Brant.

  “What was that all about?” He motioned to the chain saw with his thumb. The saw still lay on the hood of the county car, right next to the windshield at the end of the ugly scratch.

  “It was my fault,” Brant said, and Rhodes knew he wasn’t talking about the scratch.

  Brant’s gray hair was cut so close to the top of his head that only a bit of stubble showed. He appeared to be almost bald, but Rhodes could see that he actually had a lot of hair, or would if he’d let it grow. His voice had an edge of command that might long ago have ordered soldiers into battle. Or maybe not. Rhodes didn’t remember if Brant had been an officer during the war.

  “Thorpe was the one with the chain saw,” Rhodes pointed out. “That wasn’t your fault.”

  “No, but I’m the one who started it all.” Brant’s face became mournful. “I came out here and accused him of killing Helen.”

  “Now why would you do a thing like that?”

  “I don’t know. It was a stupid stunt. I should have known he wouldn’t take it well.”

  “You probably didn’t figure on the chain saw, though.”

  Brant tried to grin, but it didn’t quite work. “No, I didn’t figure on that. I’m just glad he didn’t have a gun.”

  “He probably has one somewhere or other in his trailer.”

  “If he does, I was lucky we were outside when I accused him and it wasn’t handy.”

  “And the chain saw was?”

  Brant indicated a small metal toolshed next to Thorpe’s trailer. The door was open, and Rhodes could see a rake and a hoe leaning against the back wall. A couple of aluminum chairs with green webbing were folded up and leaning on the hoe and rake.

  “The chain saw was in there,” Brant said. “I don’t think it would be a good place to keep a gun.”

  Rhodes wondered why Thorpe would need a chain saw at all. Maybe he used it to cut wood in the winter, but there was no fireplace in the trailer.

  “You’re lucky he didn’t cut off your arms,” Rhodes said.

  “So are you. Thanks for stepping in.”

  “Just doing my job. Why did you think he might have killed Mrs. Harris?”

  “She was about to come into money,” Brant said. “Gas money. There were going to be gas wells drilled on her property, and they’d have made her wealthy.”

  Rhodes wasn’t sure what that had to do with anything, but he didn’t ask. He just let Brant keep on talking.

  “Thorpe bothered Helen a lot. He needed money all the time, and some of the ways he tried to make it weren’t legal. But I guess you know that.”

  “The poker games,” Rhodes said.

  “Yes, and a few other things that Helen talked him out of. Well, I say she talked him out of them, but it was more the money she gave him that did it.”

  Rhodes thought they were getting off the track, even if he wasn’t sure what the track was.

  “If she was giving him money, why would he kill her?” he said.

  “That wasn’t the reason. He wanted more than she was giving him, and killing her would have been a way to get it. He would have inherited the mineral rights to her property.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I witnessed her will,” Brant said.

  Chapter 8

  THE AMBULANCE ARRIVED AND TOOK THORPE AWAY. HE’D REGAINED consciousness, but he wasn’t doing any talking. He probably didn’t feel like it.

  Rhodes took the chain saw off the hood of Ruth’s car and put it in the toolshed. Ruth followed the ambulance to the hospital in the county car with the intention of taking Thorpe to jail if nothing was wrong with him. If he was seriously concussed, she’d stay to watch his room until she was relieved. She would also question him when he was feeling up to it, if he ever was.

  That left Rhodes to finish with Brant and to do any further investigation into Helen Harris’s death for a while. Rhodes suggested to Brant that they go to the courthouse to finish their discussion.

  “We’ll have more privacy there,” Rhodes said.

  He could almost feel the stares of the people in the trailers, although he couldn’t see anybody at the windows.

  Brant agreed that privacy might be a good idea. Rh
odes didn’t want to go to the jail because he was afraid that Jennifer Loam might come looking for him there, and he didn’t want her to find him talking to Brant.

  “I’ll meet you there in half an hour,” Rhodes said, thinking that he needed to get on another shirt. It didn’t look good for the sheriff to be walking around in a torn shirt with a bare, scraped back.

  At home Rhodes looked for Yancey and found him under the bed. The cat was in the kitchen, lying near the refrigerator.

  “He hasn’t hurt you has he?” Rhodes asked the dog.

  Yancey didn’t answer, and he didn’t come out from under the bed. Rhodes wondered if the cat might not be useful. It had the ability to keep Yancey quiet for unprecedented lengths of time.

  Rhodes left Yancey and went back to the kitchen. He took off the ripped shirt and hid it in the bottom of the kitchen trash can under a couple of plastic wrappers where he hoped Ivy wouldn’t find it. He didn’t want to worry her unnecessarily.

  The cat watched him through slitted eyes, and Rhodes figured it would tattle on him if it could talk.

  When the shirt was taken care of, Rhodes got a paper towel and went to the bathroom. He soaked the towel with alcohol and rubbed his back as best he could. The alcohol stung, and Rhodes sucked his breath in between his teeth. Then he went back to the kitchen and hid the towel with the shirt.

  “One of these days I’m going to get caught,” he told the cat, who didn’t seem to care in the least.

  Rhodes went to the bedroom and put on a clean shirt. Yancey slipped out from under the bed. He didn’t yip or bounce, but he seemed marginally more chipper.

  “Don’t let him get the best of you,” Rhodes told Yancey, but he was afraid that the advice was too late.

  The courthouse was only a couple of blocks from the jail. Rhodes parked in the back and waited for Brant to arrive. When he did, they both got out of their cars and went into the building. It was cool and quiet because the courts weren’t in session, and Rhodes’s office was on the second floor, away from some of the usual bustle.

  Rhodes seldom used the courthouse office, and he’d used it even less often in recent months because someone—he didn’t know who—had removed the old Dr Pepper machine, the one that had dispensed real glass bottles, and replaced it with one that gave you a much bigger plastic bottle. It might have been a bigger value for the money, but to Rhodes it didn’t add up. He would have paid extra for the glass bottles.

  Brant followed Rhodes into the office, and Rhodes was glad to see that things were clean and dusted. He trusted the cleaning staff to take care of things like that even though he didn’t show up much, and sometimes they let him down. This time, however, there were no spiderwebs.

  Rhodes sat behind his desk and Brant sat in a heavy wooden chair opposite him. Brant sat with his back straight, his feet on the floor, and his hands flat along his thighs.

  “You say you witnessed Mrs. Harris’s will?” Rhodes said.

  “That’s right. It couldn’t have been more than a couple of months ago.”

  Rhodes found that hard to believe. Someone who paid as much attention to details as Mrs. Harris would likely have made a will long ago. Rhodes said as much.

  Brant nodded. “She did make one a long time ago. This was a new one. She wanted to make some changes after she found out about the gas wells.”

  Brant’s face changed. He struggled to keep it straight and almost managed it. But not quite. He reached into a back pocket of his pants, brought out a handkerchief, and brushed at his eyes.

  “I apologize,” he said, folding the handkerchief and replacing it. “I used to have much better control of my emotions. I think it has something to do with getting older.”

  He hadn’t really looked old to Rhodes, not until that moment of vulnerability.

  “It’s not fair, you see,” Brant said. “Helen has always gotten by on her teacher retirement, but ‘gotten by’ is all. She never had any nice things, she never got to travel, she never even got a new car.”

  Rhodes hadn’t looked in the garage, but come to think of it, he remembered that Mrs. Harris drove a very old, but very clean, Chevrolet. Rhodes himself occasionally drove an Edsel, but it wasn’t his main car. He’d bought it because it was so ugly that it was attractive to him.

  “Thorpe was her only relative,” Brant said, “except for her brother up in Montana. He has plenty of money, Helen said, and because Thorpe was so dependent on her, she decided to leave him both the land and the mineral rights. Her earlier will left everything to charity, and I told her to leave it like that. She didn’t listen to me, and now she’s dead.”

  “You still think Thorpe killed her?”

  “Yes. That’s exactly the kind of thing he’d do. To get the money.”

  “He’d get it eventually. He’s younger than she was.”

  “Not by much. Not enough so that he’d want to wait.”

  Brant seemed convinced, but Rhodes thought that there must be other possibilities.

  “She didn’t have any enemies?”

  “Helen? Of course not. Everybody loved her. She was in a lot of clubs and groups. Ask anybody.”

  Rhodes heard a noise in the hallway outside his door. Then someone knocked.

  “Who’s that?” Brant asked.

  “I don’t have any idea.” But Rhodes did have an idea, or maybe it was a premonition. He stood up and went to the door. He opened it, and Jennifer Loam stood there looking up at him.

  “You can run,” she said, “but you can’t hide.”

  Rhodes didn’t ask how she’d tracked him down. She’d been to the courthouse office before, so it wasn’t surprising that she had figured he might be there. She’d probably seen his car parked behind the building.

  “Aren’t you going to ask me in?” she said.

  Rhodes opened the door wider and stepped back so the reporter could come inside. He closed the door behind her and went back to his desk. Brant stood up. Jennifer said hello to him and sat in a chair near his. When she was seated, Brant sat back down.

  “You two know each other?” Rhodes said.

  “I’ve interviewed Colonel Brant for the paper,” Jennifer said.

  Rhodes noticed that she used Brant’s military rank, which was probably important to the man, even though he hadn’t been in the service for years. Some ex-military people that Rhodes had known always liked to recall their time in the service. Brant was obviously one of those, because he brightened when she used the title.

  “She did a fine job of writing up the interview, too.” Brant smiled. “Didn’t misquote me a single time.”

  Rhodes thought of asking how many times she did misquote him, but this wasn’t the time for wisecracks.

  “I don’t suppose you came here to interview him again.”

  “No.” Jennifer got out her digital recorder. “I came here to ask about the quarrel at the mobile-home park.”

  “That was just a private misunderstanding,” Rhodes said.

  “Yes,” Brant said. “That’s all it was. It wasn’t anything your readers would be interested in.”

  “I’m sure.” Jennifer’s tone let them know she didn’t believe a word of it. “Just a man chasing another man around a mobile-home park with a chain saw. Nothing interesting about that at all.” She paused and put on a thoughtful look. “But if that’s so, why are you two hiding out in here? Just talking over old times?”

  “We’re not hiding out,” Rhodes said. “We had to straighten out a few things. All it boils down to is that Mr. Thorpe got hit with a shovel.”

  “My sources tell me there was a little more to it than that, but I’ll settle for your telling me how that happened.”

  “It was an accident. The shovel slipped out of Mr. Brant’s hand.”

  “Wow,” Jennifer said with a straight face. Rhodes thought she would have done well in one of Thorpe’s Texas Hold ’Em games. “The readers are going to love that one. Are you sure you can’t do any better?”

  “To be hon
est,” Brant told her, “I thought he’d killed Helen Harris.”

  Jennifer smiled a thin, meaningless smile at Rhodes. “I thought Mrs. Harris had an accident.”

  “That’s what I think,” Rhodes said, not mentioning that Brant didn’t feel the same way. For that matter, Rhodes wasn’t sure he felt that way, and Jennifer probably knew it. “However, it’s still under investigation.”

  “Right. That’s a nice noncommittal phrase, under investigation. What does it mean exactly?”

  “I’ll bet you know.”

  Jennifer thought it over, then gave Rhodes a grin. “It means that the snoopy girl reporter isn’t going to get anything else out of you. Am I right?”

  “I always said you were smart.”

  Jennifer turned in her chair. “What about you, Mr. Brant? Are you feeling any more cooperative than the sheriff.”

  “Not a lot, I’m afraid. I don’t want this to get in the paper. It’s an embarrassment to me.”

  “I’m sorry about that, but it’s my job to see that people are informed.”

  “We don’t want to stop you from doing your job,” Rhodes said. “But we don’t want to cause ourselves any unnecessary problems, either.”

  “I already know the details of the chain-saw fight,” Jennifer said. “I talked to someone at the mobile-home park about it. So it’s already going into the paper.”

  She said it matter-of-factly, as if to let Rhodes know there was nothing he could do about it, not that he’d have tried.

  “Fine,” he said. “People need to be informed about the things that are going on in their community.”

  “Even if it embarrasses them?”

  Rhodes looked at Brant, who said, “I suppose so.”

  “I’m glad you feel that way. And I’m glad the sheriff believes in the right of the people to be informed. That means I can interview Leonard Thorpe.”

  Rhodes tried not to show his surprise. “He’s a prisoner. You can’t talk to him.”

  “I was told that he’s a patient in the hospital.”

  “That, too. But he’s still a prisoner, and he’s under guard.”