A Romantic Way to Die Page 8

  Ruth and Rhodes walked over to see Ballinger standing just inside the door. He was gripping a .38 pistol in both hands, pointing it through the open door of the embalming room.

  “Come on in,” Ballinger said, stepping into the embalming room so the officers could enter through the back door.

  When they went inside, Rhodes looked into the embalming room. Somehow the place always bothered him, with its faint chemical smell and its easily cleaned porcelain and stainless steel glittering under the lights.

  But what he noticed this time was the man who cowered in one corner. There was something on the floor in front of him, something that Rhodes was pretty sure was Larry Tietz’s finger.

  Ballinger stood off to one side, pointing his pistol at the man on the floor.

  “I guess you’re licensed to carry that thing,” Rhodes said.

  “Sure am,” Ballinger told him. “Took the course and everything. Glad I did, too.”

  “You can put it up now,” Rhodes said, and Ballinger stuck the .38 in the waistband of his pants.

  “Is that Larry Tietz’s finger?” Ruth said.

  “It is,” Ballinger said. “That young fella there cut it off. What’s the penalty for mutilating a corpse?”

  Rhodes said he wasn’t sure. “But we don’t have to worry about that. The judge will know.”

  The man on the floor looked up at them. He needed a haircut, and his clothes were dirty.

  “Hack said he was trying to smoke the finger,” Rhodes said. “Why?”

  “Ask him,” Ballinger said.

  Rhodes did.

  “It’s not my fault,” the man said. He nodded at Ballinger. “It’s his.”

  “How’s that?” Rhodes asked.

  “The son of a bitch locked up his embalming fluid, that’s how.”

  Rhodes looked at Ballinger.

  “Well, he’s right about that,” Ballinger said. “I lock it up, all right. Because of people like him. I don’t know how these rumors get started.”

  “What rumors?” Ruth asked.

  “The ones about how smoking cigarettes soaked in embalming fluid can get you high,” Ballinger said. “I had some calls from around the state. Some acquaintances told me they’d had some break-ins, so I started locking the fluid up in a closet. That’s why he couldn’t get at it.”

  “It doesn’t explain the finger, though,” Ruth said.

  “Sure it does. He couldn’t smoke a cigarette soaked in the stuff, so he decided that he’d try smoking a finger. I guess he thought there’d be plenty in there.”

  “Didn’t work, though,” the man said glumly. “Finger didn’t draw worth a damn.”

  He stuck out a foot and nudged the finger, which rolled an inch or two across the tiled floor and then came to a stop. Rhodes noticed that the end that had been cut from the hand was scorched.

  Ballinger rolled his eyes.

  “You know I don’t lock up until late,” he said, “just in case someone wants to come in and view one of the clients. I was outside when I heard some noises in there. There wasn’t supposed to be anyone here for a viewing, and my clients don’t usually do much moving around. So I got the pistol and came over to check. That’s when I saw our friend, sitting on the floor in here and sucking on that finger like it was a Dutch Masters. Do they make those anymore?”

  Rhodes said he didn’t know, though he thought cigars were a little more upscale than that these days.

  “What are you going to do about the finger?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Ballinger said. “Maybe I can reattach it. Will you need it for evidence?”

  Rhodes said that he hoped not.

  “Well, I’ll see what I can do. But you better get that guy out of here before the family finds out what he did. Larry had a son who played college ball, guard or tackle or something in the line. He’s gotten a little bit soft, but he’s still big as a house. He’d kill anybody who chopped off his daddy’s finger like that.”

  Rhodes looked down at the man in the corner and asked his name.

  “Charlie. I don’t want some big son of a bitch mad at me. I didn’t mean any harm. I just wasn’t thinking.”

  Now there was an understatement, Rhodes thought. He said, “All right, Charlie. You can get up now. We’re going to take you to the jail. Nobody will bother you there.”

  Charlie stood up. He looked down at the finger and said, “All I wanted was a little smoke.”

  “You should have stuck to nicotine,” Ruth said.

  Charlie gave her a stern look.

  “Don’t encourage me,” he said. “Don’t you know that stuff’ll kill you?”

  13

  IT TOOK A WHILE TO GET CHARLIE BOOKED AND PRINTED, AND when they’d finished it was almost time for Rhodes to go back to Obert. He went home first, however, for a quick bite to eat and to let Ivy know where he’d be.

  Yancey bounced around Rhodes’s heels like an animated dust bunny while Rhodes sat at the kitchen table and ate what appeared to be a hot dog.

  “You’d never know it was made from tofu, would you?” Ivy said.

  Rhodes said that he wouldn’t, without adding that he wasn’t even sure what tofu was. He did know that the hot dog didn’t taste even vaguely like it had been made from meat, and he felt a lot less guilty about having eaten the pizza for lunch.

  After going outside for a quick romp around the yard with Speedo, with Yancey yipping and yapping and rollicking right along with them, Rhodes got back in the county car and headed for Obert.

  He arrived just in time for the fight.

  He could hear shouting from inside the dormitory when he got out of the car. He’d taken only a couple of steps when the door sprang open and two women came tumbling out, locked together like they were involved in a Battle Royal on the WWF Smack-down. Rhodes tried to get out of the way, but they slammed into him, and the three of them went down in a pile on the damp grass, with Rhodes on the bottom.

  He was aware of being punched, scratched, and kicked, but there wasn’t much he could do about it, being pinned to the ground. He tried to get his hands underneath himself and push himself to his knees, but there was too much squirming and pummeling going on for him to get any leverage.

  After a few seconds, however, some of the weight was pulled away, and he managed to roll to the side and stand up. He brushed himself off and saw that Carrie Logan, Belinda Marshall, and several other women were trying to hold Vernell Lindsey and Serena Thayer. The latter two women were straining toward each other like pit bulls on leashes, and they were slowly pulling Carrie and Belinda along while yelling crude insults that Rhodes thought were highly unlikely to appear in their novels.

  The rest of the women from the dorm were jumping around and acting like cheerleaders. There was so much confusion that Rhodes couldn’t tell who was there and who wasn’t. He didn’t know much about writers’ conferences, but he was pretty sure the participants in this one were getting more than their money’s worth. The general noise level was so high that he wished he’d been wearing earplugs. He tried to get someone’s attention, but no one was paying him any mind. Everyone was too intent on the fight.

  Someone touched Rhodes’s arm from behind. It was Chatterton, who looked as if a vampire had drained all his blood. Or maybe it was just the light from the dormitory windows that made him look so pale.

  “This is just terrible,” Chatterton said. He had to put his mouth near Rhodes’s head and shout to make himself heard. “You have to stop it.”

  Rhodes was about to say he’d give it a try when the two women broke free and lit into one another again. There was more screaming, hair-pulling, kicking, and even a little biting.

  “Sheriff!” Chatterton said. “Do something!”

  Rhodes stepped up behind Vernell and grabbed her right wrist just as she drew it back to give Serena a quick punch to the face.

  For some reason he didn’t suspect Vernell of having especially good reflexes, and she surprised him. She went with the flow
, letting Rhodes pull her around, and at the end of the turn, she smacked him on the side of the head with a hard left fist, digging in with the knuckle.

  Rhodes was jarred, but he didn’t let go. He was sorry he hadn’t when Serena jumped on Vernell’s back. Serena locked her long legs around Vernell’s waist, clamped her left arm around Vernell’s throat, and grabbed a hank of hair with her right hand.

  Vernell staggered backward, with Rhodes still holding her right wrist and following right along. He was afraid that if he let go, the two women would fall and hurt themselves.

  Not that they weren’t doing a pretty good job of that already. Serena was trying to yank Vernell’s hair out by the roots, while Vernell was slamming her left elbow into various soft portions of Serena’s anatomy.

  What the heck, Rhodes thought, and let go.

  The two women wobbled backward and bumped up against the dormitory wall, then fell to the grass. Rhodes walked over to them, surrounded by women yelling encouragement to the combatants.

  Rhodes reached down, grabbed both Vernell’s wrists, and wrenched her away from Serena. Quite a bit of Vernell’s hair remained behind, clutched in Serena’s fist.

  “Hold her,” Rhodes said, shoving Vernell in Chatterton’s general direction and turning to Serena, who was now up and shuffling toward him in a crouch, hands ready to claw out his eyes.

  Rhodes wished for a police whistle again. Maybe he should start carrying one. He hoped that Jeanne Arnot would use hers, but she didn’t.

  Well, he had something that would make more noise than a whistle if his pistol hadn’t dropped out of the holster in the first fall of the match. It hadn’t. He drew it out and pointed it at a spot about three feet over Serena’s head. She saw the gun and came to a sliding stop about a foot away from him.

  “You wouldn’t dare,” she panted.

  “Yes he would,” Vernell shrieked from behind him. “Shoot her, Sheriff! Shoot her!”

  Rhodes had no intention of shooting anyone, but he did want the fighting to stop. So he stood there, gun in hand, waiting for Serena to calm down. It took a while, but eventually her breathing slowed and she straightened her posture.

  Her shirt was torn, her blond hair looked as if it had been restyled with a broken stick, and there were long scratches on her cheeks. She wouldn’t be posing for any glamour shots for a while, Rhodes thought.

  He holstered his pistol and turned around to have a look at Vernell. Chatterton had his hands clamped around her arms, and she was struggling to throw him off. Fortunately, he was stronger than he seemed.

  Vernell looked even worse than Serena. Her hair was hanging in her face, which had been rubbed into the dirt, and there was something that might have been a spider clinging to her cheek. Rhodes thought it might be a false eyelash.

  “What brought all this on?” Rhodes asked, and everyone started talking at once.

  Rhodes got out his pistol again and fired it into the air twice.

  Things got very quiet.

  “That’s better,” Rhodes said. “Let’s just have one person talking at a time. Who knows how all this got started?”

  No one said a word for a few seconds, and it was so quiet that Rhodes could hear Vernell’s raspy breathing. Finally Chatterton spoke up.

  “I’d tell you, Sheriff, but I don’t know. I just sort of walked into it like you did.”

  “What about you, Ms. Arnot?” Rhodes said.

  Jeanne Arnot was standing on the edge of the group watching the goings-on with an amused grin. She hadn’t joined in the cheerleading as far as Rhodes could remember, but she seemed to be enjoying things now.

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “Vernell and Serena were talking, and all of a sudden they were at each other’s throats. You’ll have to ask them.”

  “That’s right, Sheriff,” Carrie Logan said. “It all happened pretty quickly. I don’t think anybody knows what started it.”

  “Somebody does,” Rhodes said. “I think Mr. Chatterton and I will take Ms. Lindsey and Ms. Thayer over to the president’s house for a little conversation. The rest of you can go about your business.”

  Rhodes waited until the writers and prospective writers started to drift back into the dormitory. Then he took Serena’s arm.

  She shook him off and said, “I’ll go. Just don’t touch me.”

  “You can let go of me, too,” Vernell told Chatterton. “I’m not going to run away.”

  “Good,” Rhodes said. “Let’s go.”

  They were about halfway there when something occurred to Rhodes, something he should have thought of earlier.

  “Where’s Terry Don Coslin?” he asked.

  14

  NOBODY SEEMED TO KNOW WHERE TERRY DON WAS. IT BOTHERED Rhodes a little that Terry Don never seemed to be around when things happened. Of course he’d been there when Billy Quentin started shooting, but not when Henrietta died and not when the fight broke out. Rhodes looked around the crowd to see who else was missing.

  “Where’s Lorene Winslow?” he asked.

  “Right here,” Lorene said from the back of the crowd.

  Rhodes couldn’t tell whether she’d just walked up or whether she’d been there all along.

  “Have you seen Terry Don?” he asked her.

  “I haven’t seen him since dinner,” Lorene said.

  Neither, apparently, had anyone else.

  “He ate at my table,” Chatterton said. “I had to check on some things, and when I got back he was gone. I assumed he went on back to the president’s house.”

  “I guess we’ll find out when we get there, then,” Rhodes said. “Come on.”

  Chatterton took the lead. Rhodes waited until Vernell and Serena had started walking, then fell in behind them.

  “I think this is stupid,” Serena said when they were halfway there. “I don’t know why you want to question us about a private disagreement. It’s none of your business.”

  “It’s about a murder case,” Rhodes told her. “That makes it my business.”

  “You don’t know what it was about. You don’t have a clue.”

  Rhodes supposed Serena was hoping Vernell would take the hint and keep her mouth shut. He didn’t think it would work out like that, however.

  When they got to the president’s house, Chatterton went inside first. Rhodes and the two women waited on the porch. Chatterton was back in only a few seconds.

  “There’s no one in there,” he said. “I don’t know where Mr. Coslin could be.”

  “We’ll worry about that later,” Rhodes said. “Why don’t you take Ms. Thayer into the kitchen. I’ll question Ms. Lindsey in the living room.”

  Chatterton led Serena away, while Rhodes and Vernell got situated. Vernell sat in a chair, but Rhodes preferred to stand.

  When Vernell was seated, Rhodes said, “Well?”

  “Well, what?”

  “Do you want to tell me what caused all the trouble, or are you going to let Ms. Thayer get her story on the record first?”

  Vernell thought it over. If she’d considered keeping quiet, she changed her mind. She couldn’t afford to have Serena giving an account that might make Serena look completely innocent.

  “There’s not really much of a story to tell,” she said. “We were just talking.”

  “Not when I saw you,” Rhodes said.

  Vernell didn’t say anything.

  “Something started that fight,” Rhodes said after a while. “I want to know what it was.”

  Vernell still didn’t say anything. Rhodes decided to wait her out this time. He wouldn’t talk if she didn’t.

  “It was about Terry Don,” she said at last.

  “What about him?”

  “About what she was trying to do. You said you read Henrietta’s book. Well, that part was true.”

  “Serena was really trying to get Terry Don to be on the covers of all her books?”

  “Not just that. She wanted him on her covers and nobody else’s.”

  Rhodes said h
e wasn’t sure what was wrong with that.

  “It was her methods,” Vernell said. “It wasn’t like people didn’t know. Henrietta was just repeating what everybody else had already said.”

  “That Serena was sleeping with him,” Rhodes said.

  “Of course. And she was getting possessive. That didn’t sit well with Terry Don. He wasn’t a one-woman man.”

  “So I gathered from what I read.”

  “Writers are terrible gossips,” Vernell said. “Even someone like Henrietta, who wasn’t exactly an insider, knew about Terry Don.”

  “Did Serena know about Henrietta’s manuscript?”

  Vernell looked at the floor.

  “Well?” Rhodes said.

  “I might have mentioned it to her.”

  “Before the fight?”

  “I guess you could say that.”

  “Do you want to be a little more specific about what you said and when you said it?”

  “Not really.”

  “Try it anyway.”

  Vernell sighed, then said, “I told Serena she was a character in a book that Henrietta had written. It didn’t seem to surprise her. I remember wondering if she’d heard about it from someone else. Anyway, I told her that I thought the character in the book was just like her. Only nicer.”

  “And then the fight started,” Rhodes guessed.

  “No. I should’ve let it go, but Serena smiled a smug little smile, and that made me mad. So I said that I thought Terry Don was too good for her.”

  “And that started things,” Rhodes said.

  “No. She just kept on smiling. So I said that I thought the book was right about her temper and that maybe she killed Henrietta because Terry Don still loved her. You know. From high school.”

  Rhodes waited.

  “And that’s when the fight started,” Vernell said. “She said I was a lying witch, except she didn’t say witch, and then maybe I slapped her.”

  “Maybe?”

  “Okay, so there’s no maybe. I slapped her. But she shouldn’t have called me that. She slapped me back, and then things got a little out of hand.”

  “And that’s the whole story.”