Of All Sad Words (4 page)

Rhodes recalled that Benton had mentioned playing the guitar when he was doing the fighting crane pose, or whatever it was. Thinking it over, Rhodes wondered if Benton had been trying to impress Ruth Grady. Rhodes knew nothing much about Ruth’s private life. He didn’t think she was dating anybody. Rhodes thought it might be because a lot of men were intimidated by a woman who carried a pistol and worked for the sheriff’s department. Somehow, however, he didn’t think Benton was the type to be intimidated by anything.

At any rate, if Benton played guitar, it was perfectly natural that he might be at a music store that just happened to be owned by another member of his academy class. The fact that Benton was there didn’t have to have anything at all to do with the destruction of the Crawfords’ mobile home or the death of Terry Crawford.

It didn’t have to have any connection to what the judge had warned Rhodes about earlier.

Vigilantes? It just wasn’t possible.

Chapter 4

RHODES DIDN’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT GUITARS, BUT HE DID KNOW the difference between an acoustic guitar and an electric one. Schwartz had several of both kinds hanging on the walls of his store. He also had posters advertising a variety of other instruments, which he no doubt hoped to sell to members of the Clearview Catamount marching band and stage band. The biggest poster of all didn’t picture an instrument. It was an ad for a long-ago concert by the Kingston Trio, all the members of which were dressed in striped shirts.

Some kind of folk music came from a couple of big speakers on the walls, a song about a long black rifle. Rhodes didn’t know if the song was by the Kingston Trio or not.

Schwartz’s black Lab was asleep in a back corner. The music didn’t seem to bother him, and he didn’t even look up when Rhodes came in.

Schwartz wore a shirt similar to the ones in the Kingston Trio poster, but his was mostly pink, with gray stripes. He was middle-aged and had the spread to prove it, though his hair was still thick and black. He wore glasses with black plastic frames, the kind that Rhodes had last seen in a photograph of Buddy Holly.

Schwartz held an acoustic guitar and was showing C. P. Benton what might have been a chord. Rhodes wasn’t sure. His musicianship wasn’t any better than his biblical scholarship.

“Hey, Sheriff,” Schwartz said when Rhodes came in. “I was just teaching C.P. a song. ‘Everglades’ is the name of it. You know it?”

Rhodes shook his head, so Schwartz strummed a few bars and sang the words. Benton sang, too, keeping more or less to the tune in a rumbling bass. Rhodes thought that the song on the speakers might be causing him trouble.

“Turn off the music,” Schwartz called to someone Rhodes couldn’t see. “It’s great, but it’s interfering.”

The music stopped after a couple of seconds. Benton and Schwartz started to sing again.

To Rhodes, what they sang sounded something like an old Everly Brothers song, though he couldn’t have said which one. Maybe if Schwartz and Benton had been better singers, he could have figured it out.

When they were finished, Schwartz put the guitar down on a counter and said, “Benton tells me that the Crawfords’ meth lab blew up.”

“It was a mobile home,” Rhodes said, looking at Benton. “Not a meth lab.”

Schwartz looked contrite. “I should have said
alleged
meth lab. I’ve only been selling guitars for a year, and I’ve already forgotten all my legal training.”

“You and Benton didn’t happen to go out that way earlier today, did you?” Rhodes said.

“Why would I do that?” Schwartz asked, raising his eyebrows and furrowing his brow. “I hope you don’t think I had anything to do with blowing up that meth—that
alleged
meth lab.”

“It’s about more than blowing things up,” Rhodes said. “Terry Crawford’s dead.”

Benton, who had been looking at the guitar on the counter, turned around. He looked a little pale.

“I just told Max that the Crawfords were probably all right. I didn’t know one of them was dead.”

“He wasn’t killed in the explosion,” Rhodes said.

Schwartz’s wife, Jackee, came into the room from the office in the back of the store. Her blond hair was cut short, and she had light blue eyes.

“Who wasn’t killed?” she said.

“Terry Crawford,” Benton told her. “But he
was
killed.”

“Not in the explosion, though,” Max said. “It happened some other way.”

Jackee looked a little confused, and Rhodes didn’t blame her. He said, “The Crawfords’ mobile home blew up today. Terry was killed, but he didn’t die in the mobile home.”

“How did he die, then?”

“Somebody shot him.”

Jackee nodded. “I’m not surprised.”

She might not have been, but her answer gave Rhodes a little jolt.

“Why not?” he asked.

Jackee’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Rhodes looked at Max, who shrugged. He didn’t want to talk about it, either.

“This is a murder investigation,” Rhodes said, though he wasn’t absolutely certain. It was always possible that Crawford had shot himself. If that was the case, Ruth would find the gun and let Rhodes know. For the moment, he was treating the death as a homicide.

“Then I guess we’d better tell you,” Max said. “The Crawfords like to think of themselves as guitar players. They were in some honky-tonk band when they were young, but I don’t think they knew more than three chords.”

“That’s all you need,” Benton said. “C, F, and G. They’ll get you through nearly anything.”

“Maybe you,” Schwartz said. “Not a real player.”

Benton looked hurt. “I write my own songs. Some of them are pretty good.”

Schwartz didn’t seem impressed. “Who says?”

“Everybody who’s heard them.”

“Your mother?”

“Actually, she doesn’t like them very much.”

Rhodes wondered just when he’d lost control of the interrogation he’d started. From just about the first sentence, he thought. He wondered if they were nervous, oblivious, or trying to distract him. That’s what they might do if they were guilty of something.

“About the Crawfords,” he said. “Remember them?”

Schwartz and Benton looked at him as if he’d just wandered in and interrupted their conversation. It was Jackee who spoke up.

“Those two came in one morning when Max wasn’t here. They clowned around a little at first and then started talking about guitars and prices. I’m not much of a salesperson, but I told them what I knew. I could tell they weren’t really interested. They joked around some more, and then they made some suggestive remarks.”

Max’s face reddened. “Nobody makes suggestive remarks to Jackee but me.”

“And he doesn’t make them all that often,” Jackee said.

Rhodes thought she was trying to calm her husband with humor. “What did the Crawfords say?”

“It was Terry,” Max said. His face was still red, and his hands were clenched at his sides. His voice was loud. “It’s a good thing I wasn’t here.”

The noise woke the black Lab, which had slept through everything so far. The dog stirred around and lifted his head to see what was going on.

“Max,” Jackee said. She put a hand on his arm.

Schwartz took a deep breath and let it out slowly. His hands unclenched.

“Sometimes I get a little carried away,” he said. “I don’t mean anything by it.”

Jackee removed her hand. “Max is a softy down deep, but he doesn’t like it when I’m threatened.”

Somehow they’d moved from suggestive remarks to threats. Rhodes felt a little lost.

“‘Threatened’?” he asked.

Back in the corner, the Lab lowered his head and closed his eyes.

“Let me start over,” Jackee said. “The Crawfords came in. They looked at a couple of electric guitars, the cheapest ones we have.”

Max pointed to a couple of guitars hanging on the wall. “Those little Johnson novice models aren’t bad. Under a hundred and fifty dollars.”

“You can get one at Wal-Mart for a lot less,” Benton said.

“Sure, if you want something like that. These are cheap, but good.”

“Never mind,” Rhodes said. “Let her finish.”

“I’m sorry,” Benton said, but he didn’t look sorry to Rhodes.

“I got one of the guitars and handed it to them,” Jackee said. “They took it and asked me if I’d ever noticed how the body of a guitar was shaped like a woman. They started stroking it.”

She stopped and looked at Max, but he was breathing normally, so she went on.

“You’d have to have been here,” she said. “You’d have to have seen their faces, the way they looked at me.”

“I can imagine,” Rhodes said.

“Then one of them—maybe it was Terry; it’s hard to tell them apart—said I must be here in the store alone a lot. He said he’d like to come for a visit sometime.”

Rhodes assumed that was the threat she’d mentioned.

“That’s when I came in,” Max said. “I told the Crawfords to get out of here and not to come back.”

“What did they say to that?” Rhodes asked.

“They said it was a free country. They said they’d come in whenever they wanted to.”

“You know, you could have reported this to me.”

“They didn’t make any overt threats. They didn’t say anything that couldn’t be made to sound innocent if we’d tried to get a restraining order.”

“Did they ever come back?”

“No,” Schwartz said. “I told them that it was a free country all right and that if they ever came back, I was going to feel free to beat the hell out of them.”

He stopped and looked at the floor, as if realizing that he might have said too much.

“He’d never do that, though,” Jackee said. “They’d knock his glasses off, and he can’t see three inches in front of him without them.”

Rhodes looked over at the dog. “What about him?”

“He’s lazy,” Jackee said. “When he’s awake, he loves everybody. He wouldn’t hurt anybody, any more than Max would. The Crawfords could tell that about him. He lay there asleep the whole time.”

“Max should learn the martial arts,” Benton said, striking a pose. “I’m quite an expert myself.”

“Really?” Schwartz said. “Where’d you learn? Watching old Chuck Norris movies?”

Benton appeared not to notice the sarcasm. “I learned from Shen Chuan at Professor Lansdale’s school in Nacogdoches.”

“I don’t think Shen Chuan has all those funny poses.”

“Well, I added those myself, to impress people and maybe avoid a fight. My body is a lethal weapon, and I don’t want to hurt anybody if I don’t have to.”

“Really?”

“Really. I could teach you a few things.”

“Too late,” Rhodes said.

“Why’s that?”

“Terry Crawford’s already dead.”

Chapter 5

AFTER HE LEFT THE MUSIC STORE, RHODES WENT BACK TO the jail. Hack Jensen and Lawton, the jailer, already knew about Terry Crawford, thanks to Rhodes having called Ruth Grady to the crime scene. They would have dragged all the details out of Rhodes, but they had other things to talk about.

Unfortunately, even in a place as small and quiet as Blacklin County, there were things other than major cases that had to be dealt with. A man’s death was important, and a terrible thing, but the sheriff’s department couldn’t stop and concentrate on that one thing. The regular crimes and annoyances demanded at least a little attention.

Hack could hardly wait to bring one of the annoyances to Rhodes’s attention.

“Mikey Burns called,” he said as soon as Rhodes came through the door.

Burns was the commissioner in whose district the Crawfords lived.

“What did he want?” Rhodes asked, knowing he’d never get a straight answer from Hack. The dispatcher and Lawton sometimes seemed to Rhodes to derive most of their pleasure in life by making him drag information from them. They had a physical resemblance to two comedians from the past, Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, but their act was a bit different.

“We’re behind the times,” Hack said. He was chubby but not soft, and though he was well past normal retirement age, his hair was still black. “That’s what it is.”

Rhodes knew they were behind the times. They were supposed to have video cameras installed in all the county cars by now, but they didn’t. Rhodes blamed the commissioners, who hadn’t appropriated the money that he’d requested in the budget he’d prepared for them. The commissioners, on the other hand, blamed the taxpayers. Burns was the one who’d said the public wouldn’t stand for any tax increases, so something had to be cut from the budget. For the last two or three years, the cut had been the video cameras.

“Is it the car cameras?” Rhodes asked.

“Nope,” Lawton said. He was leaning against the wall by the door to the cell block. He was nearly as old as Hack, but thinner. He had a little mustache and slicked-back hair. “Not this time.”

“You’re gettin’ warm, though,” Hack said.

“A new crime lab?” Rhodes asked, knowing it was a ridiculous guess. The county crime lab was so primitive that they sent everything that needed to be analyzed or tested to the state lab, and the expense of bringing it up-to-date would be astronomical. Mikey Burns would never allow it. Even if he would, the county couldn’t afford it. Supposedly, Burns had someone working on a federal grant proposal that would help out with funding, but Rhodes hadn’t seen anything to prove it.

“That ain’t it,” Lawton said. “You’re gettin’ colder.”

Hack turned and looked at Lawton, who was overstepping his authority in the game. As the dispatcher, Hack was the official purveyor of information, and he didn’t like it when Lawton tried to cut in.

“It’s the Web site,” Rhodes said. “That’s it, isn’t it?”

Hack looked disappointed, as if the game had ended too soon, and Rhodes knew he was right.

“What did he say about it?” Rhodes asked.

“He said we were about the last department in the state without a Web site. He said he was gonna bring it up at the next meeting of the commissioner’s court. He didn’t say, but you know who he’s gonna blame.”

“The sheriff,” Rhodes said.

“Remember, he didn’t say that.”

He didn’t have to. Burns didn’t much like Rhodes, and Rhodes didn’t really blame him, considering what had happened to James Allen, Burns’s predecessor in the precinct office. Allen had been Rhodes’s friend for years, but that friendship had come to an end, along with Allen’s tenure as a commissioner.