Of All Sad Words (11 page)
It had been a long day, and Rhodes was tired. He didn’t feel like dragging information out of Benton the way he had to drag it out of Hack and Lawton.
“Tell me what it is,” he said.
“One of the things we learned in the academy is that one part of an investigation is learning about the victim’s associates.”
“I’m the sheriff,” Rhodes said. “Remember?”
“So you’d know all that, I guess. I teach math, and sometimes I tend to forget what people know.”
Next, Rhodes thought, I’ll be getting a lecture on the importance of fractions.
“You know that Mr. Kergan’s wife is dead?” Benton said.
Rhodes had heard that. “I know. You mentioned something about associates.”
“That’s right, I did. I’ve been singing here for the last three Fridays, and I’ve seen some of the people who come and go. Some of them don’t even eat here. They just go into Mr. Kergan’s office, along with Mr. Kergan. After awhile, they come back out and leave.”
“What people?”
“I didn’t know all of them, but I knew two of them.”
“And sooner or later you’re probably even going to tell me who they are.”
Benton gave a rueful grin. “I do tend to take my time about telling things. It’s one of my little failings, not that I have many of them. My students mention that one on the evaluations now and then.”
Rhodes wondered what it would take to move Benton along to the point. Something must have shown in his face, because Benton held up his hand as if to ward off a blow.
“The Crawfords,” Benton said. “That’s who I was talking about. Larry and Terry Crawford. They’d come into the restaurant, and Mr. Kergan would take them to his office. They’d leave later without eating. So obviously they weren’t here for the food.”
“Obviously,” Rhodes said.
“I’ll tell you who else was here, too. You know the commissioners?”
“I’m the sheriff, remember?”
“Maybe it’s because I’m a teacher, but I tend to overexplain things, even when it’s not necessary. Of course you know the commissioners. There’s one of them who doesn’t like me much. He thinks I’m a pest.”
“Imagine that,” Rhodes said.
Benton looked at Rhodes and shook his head. “I’m not a pest. I just want people to do their jobs and mow the ditches now and then.”
“Right,” Rhodes said. “What do the ditches have to do with this?”
“One of the people who spends time in Mr. Kergan’s office is the commissioner for my district.”
“Mikey Burns.”
“That’s the one,” Benton said.
Benton was right about having some interesting information, Rhodes thought. He considered apologizing but decided not to. It might give Benton the idea he was being more helpful than he actually was.
“And there’s a woman, too,” Benton continued. “I don’t know her name, but I know she works with computers. She’s been out at the college a time or two, talking to some of the IT people.”
“What’s she look like?”
“She’s short, and she has blond hair. Not old. Not young. Kind of cute.”
“Mel Muller,” Rhodes said, though he wasn’t sure.
Benton shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“Don’t worry,” Rhodes said. “I’ll find out.”
Rhodes sent Benton away, then told Ivy to take the Edsel home and go to bed.
“How will you get home?”
“Duke will take me.”
Duke Pearson was the deputy who’d responded to one of the calls Rhodes had made.
“Are you all right?” Ivy asked.
“Just bruised.”
“And not as clean as a weasel, either.”
“It’s a hazardous job.”
“But somebody has to do it.”
“Right. I’ll try not to wake you up when I get in.”
“You’d better wake me. I want to know you’re home.”
Rhodes promised he’d wake her if that was what she wanted, and Ivy drove away.
Rhodes went inside the restaurant to make sure that Kergan’s office was sealed. It was.
Duke Pearson was just about finished with his questioning of the employees. The server whom Rhodes had talked to earlier was waiting his turn in the foyer, while Duke was talking to one of the cooks in the big dining room. Rhodes called the server over and asked his name.
“Ralph Meadows. Everybody calls me Scooter.”
Scooter was about twenty, Rhodes guessed. He had brown hair that was cut very short, a wide face with a big nose, and ears that stuck out a little too much. He still looked a little shocked at what had happened.
“All right, Scooter,” Rhodes said. “How long have you been working here?”
“Ever since the place opened. I live in Thurston, and Mr. Kergan knows my daddy. Knew him, I guess I should say. I still can’t believe he’s dead.”
“Your father’s Henry Meadows?”
“That’s right. You know him?”
Scooter seemed surprised that anyone would know his father, but Rhodes had met the man a couple of times. He was the only thing resembling a mechanic in Thurston and did minor car repairs in the shell of an old building that had once housed a service station. There was no service station in Thurston now, just a couple of gas pumps at a little convenience store out on the main highway that bypassed the town.
“Not well. He got you this job?”
“Yeah. He talked to Mr. Kergan about it. I guess I don’t have a job now, though.”
Rhodes didn’t know what would happen to the restaurant. Kergan wasn’t married, and Rhodes didn’t know about the next of kin.
“Has anybody told Miss Muller?” Scooter asked.
“Melanie Muller?” Rhodes said.
He’d told Benton he’d find out, but he hadn’t known it would be quite so easy.
“I think that’s her name. She does computer stuff. I think she and Mr. Kergan were pretty good friends.”
“You mean they were dating?”
“Do old people date?”
Kergan was around fifty. Rhodes figured that to Scooter that was about the same as being around a hundred.
“Sometimes they do,” Rhodes said. “Just for company. Somebody to watch TV with. You know.”
“I guess,” Scooter said. He looked doubtful. “Anyway, Miss Muller was here a lot, and she ate for free.”
“Did she spend any time in Kergan’s office with him?”
“She went in there sometimes. They closed the door.”
Rhodes asked a few more questions, the standard ones about enemies or people that Kergan might have had trouble with in the restaurant, but Scooter was no help. He didn’t know a thing about Larry and Terry, though he thought “two guys who looked alike” had been in several times to talk to Kergan.
“Do you think I should come to work tomorrow?” Scooter asked when the interview was over.
“I don’t think you need to bother,” Rhodes told him.
Duke Pearson drove Rhodes home when the interviews were completed. He’d been with the department for only a few months. For years, he’d worked as a deputy in a small county in West Texas, but his wife was from Clearview, and they’d moved there to take care of her mother, who was in the first stages of Alzheimer’s.
Pearson was a burly man with graying hair that he combed back on the sides. He smiled a lot, and people seemed to like him. He was also good at his job, and Rhodes was glad to have him in the department. Unfortunately, he hadn’t found out much from the people he’d interviewed, not even as much as Rhodes had found out from Scooter.
“I got the feeling they didn’t want to talk about their boss even if he was dead,” Pearson said. His voice was gravelly. “I don’t know if that means anything.”
Rhodes didn’t know for sure, either, but he thought it might.
“Something was going on at the restaurant,” Rhodes said. “I don’t know what it was—yet.”
He brought Pearson up to date on the Crawfords.
“So you don’t think Kergan’s death was an accident?” Pearson said.
“Let’s say it’s highly unlikely.”
“And you think the Crawfords are tied into it?”
“If I were a betting man, which I’m not, I’d lay good odds that they were.”
“Anything you want me to be looking for tonight?”
“That truck,” Rhodes said. He described it again. “If you see it, call it in. Follow it if you can. Don’t try to stop it.”
“After seeing what happened to Kergan, I’m not likely to stand in front of it, if that’s what you mean.”
“That’s what I mean,” Rhodes said.
It was late when Rhodes got home, well after midnight. Speedo wanted to play, but Rhodes wasn’t up to it. His chest hurt, and he wanted to take a bath and go to bed. He found Speedo’s ball and threw it for the dog to fetch a couple of times, but that was all the fun he could stand.
“Sorry, Speedo,” he said. “Maybe in the morning.”
Speedo stood and watched him as he went in through the back door, but when Rhodes looked back outside, the collie was already in his igloo.
Sam was still in the kitchen, sleeping on the floor near the refrigerator. Yancey was nowhere to be seen.
Rhodes went into the bathroom and took off his shirt. A big area in the middle of his chest had turned an ugly yellowish color, and it was starting to turn purple in places. It would be even more colorful in the next day or so.
While he showered, Rhodes thought about everything that had happened that day. There was a lot to think about, and he wondered just how Mikey Burns and Melanie Muller fit into the puzzle whose pieces he was pushing around. And Kergan. What the heck was going on at Dooley’s? What did the Crawfords have to do with it?
Rhodes’s brain wasn’t functioning at peak efficiency, and he kept thinking there was something he’d seen that day that was out of place, a puzzle piece that might fit if he could only figure out what it was.
But he couldn’t. It was too late, and he was too tired. He dried off and got in bed beside Ivy.
“Were you planning to wake me up?” she said as he lay down.
“I was going to wait till you started snoring. Then I was going to prod you a little.”
“I don’t snore,” Ivy said.
“Only in a very genteel way.”
“I’m going to prod
you
if you say that again.”
“I think I’ll just go to sleep,” Rhodes said.
“I’m glad you’re home.”
“Me, too,” Rhodes said.
THE NEXT MORNING BEGAN WELL. RHODES’S SHOULDER AND chest didn’t hurt as much as he’d thought they would, and he figured they’d be fine in another day or so. He went into the backyard and played with Speedo and Yancey, who took turns chasing the ball and bringing it back to him. They never really wanted to let him take it from them, and part of the game was to let them growl and shake their heads when he tried to remove it.
It was already getting warm, so Rhodes didn’t lark around with the dogs for long. He let Yancey back into the house and drove to the jail.
The day started to go downhill when he arrived there. Hack extracted all the details about the previous night’s events at Dooley’s from Rhodes while he was writing up his report and then informed him that Ruth hadn’t found any prints on the whiskey jars.
“They must’ve wiped ’em, or used gloves,” Hack said.
Rhodes wasn’t surprised. Crawford wasn’t entirely stupid.
But that wasn’t all. Hack also told Rhodes, after a bit of coaxing, that there’d already been several calls that morning, one of which concerned an infestation of possums in Mrs. Hallie Owens’s attic.
“Been chewin’ on the wires up there,” Hack said. “Miz Owens is afraid they might cause a fire. You’re supposed to go there and evict ’em.”
“Why me?” Rhodes said.
He took off the reading glasses he’d had to put on to do the report and stuck them back in his shirt pocket.
“Because you’re the high sheriff,” Lawton said. “It’s your job.”
“That’s right,” Hack agreed. “Miz Owens asked for you in person because she voted for you in the last election, and she figures you owe her.”
“Send Buddy,” Rhodes said.
“He’s at the courthouse checkin’ on Jamey Hamilton’s car registration. After that, he’s got to call those Dodge dealers and talk to some welders. He’s already checked the reports on stolen vehicles. Nothing about any old truck in them. Anyway, he won’t have time to climb up in any attics.”
“Have you heard from Ruth?”
“She’ll be doin’ her patrol, but her wrist is still hurtin’. No use for you to try sendin’ her. She couldn’t do the climbin’.”
Rhodes wasn’t going to do any climbing, either, not if he could help it. His chest was too sore.
“Call Mrs. Owens and tell her we’ll send somebody out there later. Buddy’s bound to finish with that other stuff pretty soon.”
“Miz Owens is gonna be mighty disappointed when you don’t show up,” Hack said. “She asked for you specially.”
“But if you don’t go by her place, maybe you can handle the loose donkey,” Lawton said, and Hack gave him a hostile stare.
“What loose donkey?” Rhodes said.
“The one at the car wash,” Hack said, taking over. “I don’t know if somebody was washin’ it or not, so don’t ask me that. All I know is we got a call, and there’s a loose donkey at the car wash.”
“Could be a mule,” Lawton said. “Lots of people can’t tell the difference.”
“Donkeys’re colored different, usually,” Hack said. “Sound different for sure.”
Rhodes wasn’t interested in a lesson in donkey and mule identification.
“What this county needs is an animal-control officer,” he said.
“Commissioners won’t go for it. You’ve been doin’ too good a job.”
Rhodes knew Hack was right. He said, “Call Franklin Anderson about the donkey.”
Anderson was a cowboy for hire. He worked on several ranches around the area, and he occasionally did jobs for the sheriff’s department.
“He’ll want to know who’s gonna pay him.”
“The owner will.”
“And if we can’t find the owner?”
“The county will.”
The county had a fund for that kind of thing, but it wasn’t a lot of money. The commissioners preferred it when the owner could be found and made to pay Anderson’s fee.
“Maybe you could adopt it,” Hack said. “You got a way of pickin’ up animals on the job.”
“Two dogs and a cat are more than enough. I don’t think Speedo would like sharing the backyard with a donkey.”