Murder Among the OWLS Page 7

  Jennifer snapped off her recorder and stood up. Brant started to rise as well, but she told him not to bother.

  “Thank you for your time, Sheriff,” she said. “You, too, Mr. Brant. I hope you like the story in tomorrow’s paper.”

  “I’m sure it will be up to your usual standard,” Rhodes said without irony. He did like Jennifer’s writing.

  Jennifer walked to the door.

  “Hang on a minute,” Rhodes said. “You wouldn’t like to have a cat, would you? Already housebroken. Just needs a good home.”

  “I have a dog,” Jennifer said, and left.

  “I have a dog, too,” Rhodes told Brant. “Two of them. You know Helen’s cat pretty well, I guess.”

  “That cat and I never did get along. I can’t take it, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Don’t be too hasty. You might change your mind.”

  “I might,” Brant said, getting Rhodes’s hopes up. “But I doubt it. I have a dog, too, a dalmatian.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yes.” Brant paused. “That reporter’s awfully young.”

  “And good at her job. I’m not sure I want to read her story.”

  “Maybe I should just have told her the truth.”

  “If you did that, and if she printed it, some people might think you should be charged with a crime.”

  “They could be right.”

  Rhodes nodded. He could think of several charges that might be brought against Brant, but he didn’t see any reason for them. Not at the moment.

  “It still doesn’t make sense to me that Thorpe would have killed Mrs. Harris,” he said.

  “Why not? You saw how violent he can be.”

  “There’s something you don’t know.”

  “What?”

  “There’s not a will leaving the money to Thorpe.”

  “You mean she changed it again? But that can’t be. She’d have asked me to witness it.”

  “I don’t mean she changed it again,” Rhodes said. “I mean it’s gone.”

  Chapter 9

  ACCORDING TO BRANT, HELEN HARRIS HAD WRITTEN HER WILL out by hand, following a form she’d found in some library book.

  “She didn’t think she needed a lawyer,” Brant said. “She didn’t want to spend the money, and she didn’t have a complicated estate. So she thought a holographic will would be fine. I witnessed her signature.”

  “As careful as she was, I’d have thought she’d want more than one witness,” Rhodes said.

  “Naturally. Francine Oates was the other witness. I suppose Helen thought we were both upstanding citizens.”

  “No question about that. Did Mrs. Harris have a safe-deposit box.”

  “I’m sure she didn’t. You’d be surprised how much the rent on those things can be, even in a small town like Clearview.”

  “She should have had an extra copy of the will,” Rhodes said.

  “I’m sure she intended to make one. There’s a photocopier at the public library. She might not have gotten around to it, though.”

  “Where would a copy be if she’d made one?”

  “I have no idea. She might have given one to me, but I don’t have it. Francine Oates, maybe.”

  Rhodes thought he’d have to check on that, even though Francine hadn’t mentioned having one.

  “How does any of this affect Helen’s death?” Brant said.

  Rhodes didn’t know. “We’ll find out if it does, eventually.”

  Brant wasn’t too happy with that answer, but he and Rhodes parted on good terms, with Rhodes warning him to stay away from Leo Thorpe.

  “I’ll stay away from him as long as I know justice is going to be done,” Brant said. “Otherwise, I can’t promise you anything.”

  Rhodes didn’t like that answer, but he figured it would do.

  When Rhodes got back to the jail, Hack and Lawton looked about as happy as he’d ever seen them. He knew that meant trouble.

  Even worse, they didn’t ask him about the incident at the mobile-home park, about which they would have been abnormally curious at almost any time. Their lack of interest was a sure sign that they were up to something. Rhodes didn’t have to wait long to find out what it was.

  “There he is,” Hack said to Lawton as Rhodes walked to his desk. “Just look at him.”

  “A fine figure of a man,” Lawton said.

  “Practically a movie star,” Hack went on.

  Lawton nodded. “Cary Grant.”

  “Too sissy. Not any of those little short fellas like you see these days, either. Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, and like that. John Wayne, maybe.”

  “Clint Eastwood,” Lawton suggested. “Lee Marvin.”

  Rhodes turned to face them. “All right, you two. What’s going on?”

  Hack smiled and looked at Lawton. “I never knew anybody famous before, Lawton. Did you?”

  “Not like a close friend or anything. I saw Roy Rogers once at the rodeo down in Houston.”

  “Seein’ somebody at a rodeo don’t count. I’m talking about somebody you see every day, not knowin’ that he’s a celebrity.”

  “Nope,” Lawton said. “Never knew anybody like that.”

  “Till now,” Hack said.

  “That’s right. Not till now.”

  “Hang on a minute. I forgot somebody. We knew Terry Don Coslin.”

  “Sure enough. We knew him, all right. I’d forgot all about him.”

  Terry Don Coslin was a onetime Clearview resident who’d become famous as a model for paperback romance-novel covers. He’d come home for a visit and come to a bad end. But for a little while, he’d been every woman’s favorite fantasy.

  “Terry Don was pretty famous, all right,” Hack said. “Too bad he’s not still around. He’d be perfect.”

  “Perfect for what?” Rhodes said, though he was well aware that asking Hack and Lawton such a question was as likely to extend their routine as to put a stop to it. More likely, as a matter of fact.

  “Perfect for the cover,” Hack said.

  Rhodes tried to resist, but he couldn’t. “What cover?”

  “The book cover,” Lawton said. “That’s what.”

  Rhodes wanted to say, “Oh. Of course. I see what you mean.” He knew it would confound them.

  But he couldn’t say it. He said exactly what they expected. “What book cover?”

  “The one that ought to have you on it,” Hack said.

  Rhodes remembered something like that from his high school English classes. It was called a circular definition. He didn’t think it would do any good to remind Hack of that, so he simply repeated his earlier question in a different tone of voice.

  “What book cover?”

  Hack must have recognized the tone change because he quit smiling. “The cover of the book those two women wrote.”

  At last something was making sense, of a sort. Rhodes didn’t have to ask which two women. “You mean Claudia and Jan.”

  “Yep, that’s the two.”

  Claudia and Jan had shown up in Blacklin County a couple of times, once at a writers’ workshop where Terry Don Coslin had appeared, and once when a set of mammoth bones had been uncovered in a creek bed. Both times, they’d become peripherally involved in murder.

  “I thought they were writing a magazine article,” Rhodes said.

  “Maybe so, but it’s not an article they called about. It’s a book about … now let me be sure I got this exactly right. I don’t want to mess it up. You can help me out if I go wrong, Lawton.”

  Lawton grinned and nodded while Hack picked up a piece of paper from his desk. He looked down at the paper, then looked back at Rhodes. “One of those women, either Claudia or Jan, I’m not sure which one it was, called here and told me that this book of theirs is about ‘a handsome, crime-bustin’ sheriff.’” Hack looked up from the paper and grinned at Rhodes. “That would be you.”

  Rhodes’s stomach felt as if it had been hollowed out, and he hoped his face wasn’t turning red. The last time
they’d been in Clearview, Claudia and Jan had mentioned a book like that, using those exact words, but he’d thought they were only kidding. They’d even told him that he would be the model for their main character. That had been a joke, too, or so he’d thought. It was looking as if he’d thought wrong.

  “What you got to say about that?” Hack asked. “Cat got your tongue?”

  “I didn’t know about any book,” Rhodes said.

  “Course you didn’t. They just got the word about it. They’re plumb tickled to death about it. They got themselves an ‘agent,’ and he’s the one sold the book for them. It’s coming out sometime next year, they say. It’ll be in Wal-Mart and all like that. You know. Like Vernell’s books. So that’s why Lawton and I are so happy. We can tell ever’body we know the handsome, crime-bustin’ sheriff in that book up close and personal, and we see him just about ever’ day.”

  Rhodes didn’t know what to say. He imagined the sheriff on the book cover looking the way Terry Don had on the romance-novel covers, shirt open to the navel as if it didn’t have any buttons, long, black, wavy hair, his chiseled face looking deep into the eyes of a beautiful woman who leaned in the crook of his arm and stared soulfully back at him, his chest ridged with muscle.

  Unlike Terry Don, however, the sheriff character would have a couple of Glocks belted to his waist, or maybe an assault rifle under his free arm. Or he’d have Glocks and an assault rifle both.

  “Yes, sir, Sheriff,” Lawton said. “You’ll look real good on that book cover.”

  The trouble with that idea was that Rhodes didn’t look a thing like a cover model. Sure, he tried to exercise now and then on his stationary bike, and, yes, Ivy tried to keep him on a healthy diet. Even at that, however, his chest would never be ridged with muscle, nor would his stomach ever be as flat and rock hard as Terry Don’s had been. Those Blizzards Rhodes would occasionally sneak at the Dairy Queen might have something to do with it, he thought.

  “I’m not going to be on the book cover,” he said, “and Claudia and Jan didn’t tell you that I would.”

  “Well, no,” Hack admitted. “They didn’t say that in so many words, but I figured that if the book was about you, handsome and crime-bustin’ and all that, they’d naturally want your picture on the front of it.”

  “The book’s not about me.”

  “Sure it is. That’s what she said, whichever one of ’em it was.”

  “No, she didn’t.”

  “Well, maybe not exactly, but that’s what she meant, all right. She said you were the ‘inspiration’ for the book, and she wanted you to be the first one to know about it.”

  “Seems as if I’m not the first, though,” Rhodes said.

  “You can’t blame us for that,” Hack said, trying out his bland-and-innocent look. “It’s not our fault you’re never here. If you stayed around the office more, you’d be the first to find out stuff.”

  “Yeah,” Lawton said, “but you gotta remember that he has to be out there bustin’ crime to protect the good citizens of the county.”

  “Right,” Rhodes said. “From chain-saw killers and the like.”

  Hack had been ready to say something else about the book, but the words didn’t come out. He sat there with his mouth half-open.

  Lawton’s eyes widened. His mouth worked, and Rhodes could tell he was trying not to ask what he was dying to know. It took a couple of seconds, but his curiosity won out in the end.

  “You gonna tell us about that?”

  Rhodes looked as if he didn’t understand. “About what?”

  “The chain-saw killer,” Hack said. “Nobody said anything to me on the phone about a killin’.”

  “That’s because there wasn’t one,” Rhodes said, enjoying himself. It wasn’t often he could turn the tables on Hack and Lawton so soon after they’d had their way with him.

  “Well, what was there, then?” Hack said. He was no better at keeping quiet than Rhodes had been. “You gonna tell us or not?”

  Rhodes could have made them suffer, but it wasn’t worth it in the long run, so he told them about the episode at Tranquility. They were disappointed that it hadn’t been more exciting, but Lawton said that a picture of the sheriff in a backless shirt might make a good book cover.

  Hack agreed and said it was nice that the handsome, crime-bustin’ sheriff had taken another hardened criminal off the streets.

  “I don’t think he was ever on the streets,” Rhodes said. “He pretty much stayed around his trailer.”

  “Shows what you know,” Hack said, and that comment gave him back the upper hand because of the implication that he knew something that Rhodes didn’t.

  “You’d better tell me,” Rhodes said, using his no-nonsense voice so it wouldn’t take all day to get an answer.

  “Leo Thorpe gets around,” Hack said. “Ain’t that right, Lawton ?”

  “Why are you pickin’ on me?” the jailer said. “You think I hang around with that kind of fella? What is there about me that would give you an idea like that?”

  “You’re the one told me about it, how Leo owned the place,” Hack said. “That’s all I’m sayin’. You don’t need to get your dandruff up about it.”

  “I’m not gettin’ my dandruff up. I’m just wonderin’ if you think I’m some kind of hooligan that hangs out with toughs all the time.”

  “Lawton,” Rhodes said, hoping the no-nonsense voice would work better this time.

  Lawton gave Hack a final glare, then said to Rhodes, “You know about the Royal Rack?”

  The Royal Rack was a pool hall. Located just inside the city limits, it claimed to be a place that was “fun for the whole family,” although Rhodes couldn’t imagine the family that would have fun there. The Addams Family, maybe.

  “I’m the sheriff,” Rhodes said.

  “Yeah. So you’d know.”

  “He’s been there a few times himself,” Hack said. “In the crime-bustin’ line of duty, of course.”

  “What does this have to do with Thorpe?”

  “I guess you don’t know as much as you think you do,” Lawton said. “Not meanin’ any disrespect, you understand.”

  Rhodes sighed, said he understood, and asked what it was that he didn’t know.

  “Leo Thorpe owns the Royal Rack.”

  That was indeed information that Rhodes didn’t have. He said, “How do you know?”

  “He hangs out there,” Hack said.

  “Lawton? Or Thorpe?”

  “Both of ’em.”

  “There’s nothin’ wrong with likin’ to shoot a game of pool now and then,” Lawton said. “When I get off work, I like to relax, and I don’t have a girlfriend like some people.”

  The reference to Miz McGee made Rhodes smile. She hadn’t been a girl in fifty or more years.

  “Come to think of it,” Lawton said, “you ought to take her for a game of pool now and then. She might enjoy it.”

  “Sure,” Hack said.

  “Don’t get off the subject,” Rhodes said. “How do you know Thorpe owns the pool hall?”

  “I heard him say so. It was sort of an accident. He hangs around there a lot, and he was talkin’ to somebody about the place. Told him he was the new owner.”

  “When was this?”

  “’Bout a week ago, maybe a little bit more. I just happened to overhear him.”

  Rhodes wondered how Thorpe had gotten the money to buy the pool hall, but Lawton didn’t have the answer to that one. Rhodes didn’t know if the pool hall had anything to do with Mrs. Harris’s murder, but it was something to check into. He concluded his conversation, if that’s what it had been, with Hack and Lawton and started writing a report on the mobile-home-park incident.

  He was almost finished when the telephone rang. Hack took the call and listened for a while, occasionally looking over at Rhodes. When he hung up, he said, “You’d better get out to the hospital. Your prisoner’s escaped.”

  Chapter 10

  AS HE DROVE TO THE HOSPITAL,
RHODES TOLD HIMSELF THAT HE didn’t think of Thorpe as “his” prisoner. Thorpe was Ruth Grady’s prisoner, or he had been, and Rhodes couldn’t imagine a situation in which Ruth would let a prisoner escape. It just wasn’t like her to do that. She hadn’t been hurt, Hack said, but she hadn’t explained anything, either.

  Rhodes parked in the hospital visitors’ lot and went inside through the front door. The scene in the combination lobby/waiting room was chaotic. The room was crammed with people—men, women, and children—most of them talking loudly and waving their arms. The young receptionist behind the desk looked harried and helpless. A couple of Pink Ladies moved around the edges of the group. Both of them were red-faced and angry. Ruth was there, trying to calm everyone down and not succeeding.

  It didn’t take Rhodes long to size things up. Most of the people in the room belonged to a single large extended family: the Browns.

  Nobody knew for sure just how many Browns there were. They were clannish, few of them had any visible means of support, and they kept their business, whatever it was, to themselves. They were also prolific, and it was hard to say just how many children each of the adults might have had because they didn’t often all gather in one place at the same time.

  Some of them liked to gather in the hospital waiting room, however, because of its many benefits. It was air-conditioned in summer and warm in winter, it had quite a few seats (uncomfortable ones, to be sure, but seats all the same), it had television, and best of all it had free coffee and doughnuts.

  A place like that was made to order for the Browns, who liked anything that was free, and the more of it, the better. There had been a couple of minor disturbances at the hospital during the winter when the Browns had eaten all the doughnuts before eight o’clock, and Rhodes had gone out to quell the impending riots. He’d explained to the Browns that the amenities were for people who had family members in the hospital and that both the ill and the people who cared about them deserved a little respect. If the Browns didn’t understand anything else, they understood about family, and Rhodes thought the problem had been solved. As was the case more often than he liked to think about, he’d obviously been wrong.