Ghost of a Chance (5 page)

The train passed by, and soon the only sound Rhodes could hear was that made by the rain. He wondered if he’d imagined the two figures darting across the clearing.

He walked out of the trees and into the clearing. The rain was still falling, though it was slackening up some. Rhodes looked for tracks in the grass, but he couldn’t find any. Grass didn’t take tracks well, and the rain didn’t help. The only thing he found was an old cellophane-wrapped package that had held Camel cigarettes. It was empty and the colors were faded. It didn’t look as if it had been dropped there at any time in the recent past.

He stuck the pack in the pocket of his raincoat and looked at the trees on the other side of the clearing. They went on for about a quarter of a mile. It would take a long time to search through them, more time than he had, but he could at least take a look.

He didn’t find a thing, just dead leaves underfoot and rain dripping down from above. There were no houses within half a mile of the trees, and from what Rhodes could see, there was no activity at any of them.

He squished and squashed his way back to the county car, jumping the ditch again, and then drove along the road until he came to a place where he could turn around. There was nothing in the fields along the road, and not a single car had passed since Rhodes had been in the vicinity.

His raincoat was drenched, and his clothes were sticking to him. He had made a cold, damp spot where he sat in the front seat of the county car.

He decided it was time to go home.

The rain had finally stopped by the time Rhodes got home, but it was still dark and overcast. There was no more thunder and lightning, however, and Rhodes figured that the weather front had moved on to the south.

He parked the county car in the driveway and checked in the back yard to make sure that his main dog, Speedo, whose real name was Mr. Earl, was doing all right. Speedo poked his nose out of the Styrofoam igloo that served as his doghouse and barked once in greeting, but elected to stay inside. Rhodes didn’t blame him.

As he reached his back door, Rhodes heard a frenzied barking from inside the house.

“All right, Yancey,” Rhodes said. “Hold it down. It’s only me.”

The barking continued. Yancey, a Pomeranian that Rhodes had acquired in the course of an investigation, was fiercely protective of his territory. Or else he just liked to bark. Rhodes wasn’t sure which.

Rhodes had been afraid that Speedo might consider Yancey an intruder, which would have been unfair to Yancey, considering that Rhodes had also acquired Speedo in the course of an investigation. Somehow, he seemed to accumulate dogs; it wasn’t a deliberate strategy.

At any rate, Speedo and Yancey had gotten along just fine, maybe because Yancey was a house dog and Speedo was a yard dog. But even when they were together, they seemed to have a high old time. Yancey didn’t appear to notice that he was about a tenth of Speedo’s size. For that matter, Speedo didn’t seem to notice, either.

Rhodes opened the door and stepped inside. Yancey
swarmed around his ankles, nipping at them and barking.

“Knock it off,” Rhodes said. “I’m the master here. You’re the dog.”

Yancey ignored him, as always, but soon got tired of barking. He walked away a short distance and sat down by the washing machine, staring at Rhodes suspiciously.

Rhodes took off his raincoat and draped it over a chair back. Then he undressed and dropped his clothes in a sodden heap on the floor by the washing machine. Yancey barked at the heap.

“Hush,” Rhodes said, heading for the bathroom.

Yancey stopped barking, which was a relief. He turned from the pile of clothes and followed Rhodes.

Rhodes toweled off and went into the bedroom to get dry clothes. He had just finished dressing when the phone rang. Rhodes picked it up.

“Hello,” he said.

“Sheriff? This is James Allen.”

Allen was one of the county commissioners, probably Rhodes’s best friend among the group. He’d had almost nothing to say at the meeting where Ty Berry had appeared, but Rhodes knew exactly what the subject of this call would be.

“I hear that Ty Berry got himself killed in the Clearview Cemetery,” Allen said.

“You heard right,” Rhodes told him, no more surprised that Allen knew than that Hack had known. By now, probably half the county knew.

“You know what people are going to say about us,” James said.

Rhodes knew that the
us
referred to both the commissioners and to Rhodes himself, and he knew pretty much
what people would be saying: that the commissioners should have hired some deputies to patrol the cemeteries; that because they hadn’t, Rhodes or one of the deputies should have been there anyway; and that because of what hadn’t been done, Ty Berry’s death was all the fault of the commissioners and the sheriff’s department.

None of that was necessarily true, but that was what people would say. And after they’d said it enough, they’d believe it.

“I know,” Rhodes said.

“Well, what are you going to do about it?”

“I’m going to find out who killed Ty Berry.”

“And how soon are you going to do that?”

“As soon as I can.”

“I hope that won’t be too long,” Allen said.

“So do I,” Rhodes told him.

6

A
FTER ALLEN HUNG UP, RHODES WENT INTO THE KITCHEN.
Yancey was sitting expectantly by the table.

“You’ll just have to eat out of your bowl,” Rhodes said. “Besides, you wouldn’t like what I’m going to eat.”

Rhodes didn’t much like it himself, as far as that went. His wife, Ivy, had recently discovered a form of fake baloney made of some kind of vegetable mixture. Rhodes suspected there was tofu in there somewhere. However, there was no fat, and Ivy had insisted that a sandwich made from it tasted just as good as the real thing. It didn’t to Rhodes, and the low-fat Miracle Whip didn’t, either. Put a slice of fake cheese, also made with tofu, on the sandwich, and Rhodes supposed you had a really healthy lunch, but one that he found about as tasty as the afternoon newspaper.

For just a second or two, he thought longingly about a hot roast beef sandwich and how good it would taste. But since he couldn’t have one, he made the healthy sandwich of vegetable products, ate it, and washed it down with tap
water. As far as he knew, there was nothing fattening at all in tap water. He’d tried diet Dr Pepper, but he couldn’t get used to it. For his money, Dr Pepper without the sugar just wasn’t Dr Pepper.

When he was done with the sandwich, he went out on the porch and dropped the wet clothes in the washer. Yancey was over on the other side of the porch eating, which he enjoyed even more than he did barking. He paid no attention at all to Rhodes, who turned on the washer, put in the soap, and told Yancey it was time to go outside for a while.

Yancey wasn’t enthusiastic. While Rhodes held the door open, he looked out at the puddles of water with what appeared to be vast suspicion.

“Fine,” Rhodes said. “If you don’t want to go, you don’t have to.”

Yancey immediately bounded outside, yipping and running over to Speedo’s igloo. Speedo came out, and they both charged around the yard chasing one another and splashing through every puddle they could find. Some of them they splashed through twice.

When Yancey was finished with his business, Rhodes let him back in the house. Speedo hung around expectantly, as if hoping that Rhodes would stick around for a romp. Rhodes apologized for not having the time, and left.

Back at the jail, Rhodes had to tell Hack and Lawton all about Ty Berry, though they already knew most of the story.

“I’ll bet it was that Faye Knape who killed him,” Hack said when Rhodes was finished.

Faye Knape was the immediate past president of the Clearview Historical Society, a group that was often in conflict with Ty Berry’s Sons and Daughters of Texas. Both groups wanted the same things, but they couldn’t always agree on how to get them. In fact, they could hardly ever agree on anything at all other than their basic goals. Rhodes sometimes thought that the disagreements were a result of each group’s desire to get the credit for whatever gains in historical preservation were made in the county.

Recently the two groups had at last found something to bring them together: the cemetery issue. Though none of the Historical Society members had been at the commissions’ meeting, they had written a letter to the Clearview
Herald
expressing their support for the Sons and Daughters’ campaign to save the cemeteries.

There was only one problem: Faye Knape didn’t agree with the rest of her organization’s members. She thought that Ty Berry was, as she put it, “grandstanding to get attention.” She didn’t believe that the looting was as serious as he said it was, she didn’t think that the county should be wasting its time and money on extra patrols, and she even hinted that Ty Berry might be ransacking the graveyards himself, just to draw attention to the Sons and Daughters.

“I’ll bet what happened is this,” Hack continued. “Old Faye went out there to the cemetery to confront Ty, and he stood right up to her. She wouldn’t like that. So she shot him.”

“Don’t sound likely to me,” Lawton said. “She’s a good-sized woman. She wouldn’t have to shoot him. She could’ve just squashed him like a fly.”

“It’s
flea
,” Hack said. “Squashed him like a
flea
. Ever’body knows you can’t squash a fly.”

“Can’t squash a flea, either,” Lawton said. “You ever try it? Those boogers are unsquashable, unless you get ’em between two hard places. Sometimes they can get away even then. I remember an old dog I had—”

“We ain’t talkin’ about your old dog, and we ain’t talkin’ about fleas,” Hack said. “We’re talkin’ about a man that’s been shot. And from what I hear, he was shot with a .22. Is that right, Sheriff?”

Rhodes admitted that the .22 was a possibility but not a certainty.

“And by the way,” he said, “where do you get all your information, anyhow?”

“I got my sources,” Hack said. “We ain’t talkin’ about that, though. We’re talking about a .22. Woman’s gun. Ever’body knows that.”

“Not all the time,” Lawton said. “Those big-time hit men for the Mafia, they like that .22 Colt’s Woodsman.”

“Mafia?” Hack was incredulous. “Big-time hit men? You been rentin’
The Godfather
again, am I right? That part three really bites the moose if you ask me.”

“Nobody asked you, though,” Lawton said. “And anyway, that part three’s not as bad as—”

“That’s enough,” Rhodes said, knowing that if he didn’t stop them they could go on all day like that. He was pretty sure they did it just to drive him crazy. “You can forget about the Mafia. I don’t think they’re involved in this. Blacklin County’s a little too far out of the way of things to get them interested. And you’d better forget about Miss Knape, too, at least until I’ve done some investigating. We
don’t go accusing people of murder on the basis of suspicion.”

Lawton leaned on his broom, grinning widely, and didn’t say a word.

“Humpf,” Hack said. “Well, if you don’t think it was Miz Knape who shot Berry, who do you think it was?”

“I don’t know,” Rhodes said. “Maybe it was whoever’s been taking things from the cemeteries. Maybe not. That’s what I’m going to find out.”

“I bet the commissioners want you to find out this afternoon,” Hack said. “If not sooner.”

For a second Rhodes wondered if Hack had tapped his home phone, but he knew that wasn’t the case. Hack just knew what the representatives of county government were like.

“You’re right,” he said. “Did you get me the number of Berry’s cousin?”

Hack handed him a piece of paper. “Here it is.”

“Thanks,” Rhodes said. “Now, if you two will hold it down, I have a phone call to make.”

7