Bill Crider - Dan Rhodes 07 - Murder Most Fowl (16 page)

Of course there were quite a few questions left unanswered by that theory.

Why did Press let Lige unload the emus in King’s pen?

Why was he at the cockpit when he killed Rayjean?

And if he hadn’t been buying groceries, where had he been?

And why had he lied about it?

All of which made it more important than ever to get the ballistics report back from the lab. Rhodes had to know whether the .38 he’d taken from Michael Ferrin had fired the shots that killed Lige Ward.

Rhodes thought it was time to go have a talk with Press Yardley even though he didn’t have the report yet. He was almost out the door when the phone rang.

“It’s for you,” Hack called. “Miz Appleby.”

Rhodes walked back over to the phone. “Hello, Mrs. Appleby,” he said. “What can we do for you today?”

“It’s Claude and Clyde,” she said. “They’ve got something to tell you.”

“All right,” Rhodes said.

“They’re not here,” Mrs. Appleby said. “Are you going by Wal-Mart’s anytime today?”

“I could do that,” Rhodes said, wondering why.

“They both got summer jobs there yesterday,” Mrs. Appleby told him. “Stock boys.”

“That’s good,” Rhodes said. This was turning out to be like a conversation with Hack.

“Anyway, what they have to tell you has to do with Wal-Mart’s,” she said. “They didn’t want to talk to me about it.”

That explained a lot. “I’ll go by there in a few minutes and talk to them,” Rhodes said.

“I hope it’s important,” Mrs. Appleby said. “I don’t like to have them bothering you for nothing.”

“I’m sure it’s important,” Rhodes said. “I’m glad to do it.”

“Thank you, Sheriff. They really are good boys, you know.”

“I’m sure they are,” Rhodes told her, though he wasn’t. “I’m glad they’ve got jobs.”

“I am, too. They’re working in the back, in the warehouse area.”

“I’ll stop by and see them,” Rhodes promised.

R
hodes pulled up near the loading dock in the back of the Wal-Mart store and stopped the car. By the time he was out the door, Clyde (or Claude) was heading toward him. Rhodes was pretty sure it was Clyde.

“I been watchin’ for you,” Clyde said. “Let’s us go over there.”  He pointed to a stack of empty cardboard boxes that had held TV sets.

Rhodes followed him over to the stack. Clyde kept on going and went behind the boxes before he stopped.

“I didn’t want anybody to see me talking to you,” he explained when Rhodes joined him. “Don’t want to get in bad on the job the first day.”

“That’s all right,” Rhodes said. He was used to that attitude. “What did you want to tell me?”

“It’s about that cockfight,” Clyde said. “The one me and Claude said we didn’t go to.”

Rhodes was gratified to see that he had identified the right twin.

“What about the cockfight?” he asked.

Clyde looked over the top of the boxes, then back at Rhodes. “We didn’t exactly tell the truth about that.”

For some reason that bit of news didn’t come as a much of a shock to Rhodes.

“So you did go,” he said.

Clyde shook his head. “Not exactly. We weren’t invited, and we don’t like to push in where we’re not wanted.”

Rhodes thought that Clyde wasn’t telling the whole truth again. Both Clyde and Claude had a way of turning up in a lot of places where they weren’t supposed to be and where no one had invited them.

“How can you ‘not exactly’ go to a cockfight?” Rhodes asked.

“It was like we sort of watched it from the trees,” Clyde said. “We couldn’t see much.”

“You must have seen something. Otherwise you wouldn’t have wanted to talk to me.”

“Yeah. But we didn’t know what we seen until yesterday.”

Rhodes thought for a second that maybe it was him. Maybe everyone was somehow making perfect sense and he just wasn’t catching on. But it did seem that more and more of his conversations were composed mostly of
non sequiturs
.

“Yesterday was a long time after the fight,” he pointed out.

“Sure,” Clyde agreed. “I know that.”

“So why didn’t you find out what you’d seen until then?”

“We had to get the job here first.”

That didn’t make any more sense than anything else Clyde had told him.

“What does this job have to do with the cockfight?”

“Nothing,” Clyde said.

At least Rhodes was well trained in this kind of discussion, so he had no difficulty in holding up his end of it.

“Then why did you want to talk to me?”

“Well, it’s about who we saw at that cockfight. Except we didn’t know we saw him until yesterday.”

“I see,” Rhodes said, though he didn’t see at all.

“What it is,” Clyde said, “is that we saw this guy there, but we didn’t know who he was till we got this job.”

“Oh,” Rhodes said.

“We’d never seen him before,” Clyde said. “To us, he was just another guy at the cockfight. But then we saw him again yesterday. He talked to us before he hired us.”

“Who is he?” Rhodes asked. He had a premonition that he wasn’t going to like the answer.

“It was Mr. Keene,” Clyde said. “He’s the manager of the store here.”

Rhodes had been right. He didn’t like the answer, but now the conversation made a lot more sense. He had another question for Clyde, however.

“There was someone else there I’d like to ask you about,” he said.

“Ever’body was wearing caps and hats,” Clyde said. “We couldn’t see too many faces.”

“You don’t need to have seen his face,” Rhodes told him. “Just his hair. He wears it in a long pigtail, nearly to his waist.”

“Oh, yeah,” Clyde said. “Yeah. We saw a guy like that.”

“You’re sure?” he asked.

“Big guy?” Clyde said. “Has a beard?  He was there, all right. Looked like he had a rooster in the fight.”

There probably weren’t two men in Blacklin County who fit that description. Henry had been at the fight, all right, and he had lied about it. Rhodes wasn’t surprised.

C
lyde went back into the warehouse. Rhodes stayed outside to think for a minute. Wally Henry was still his strongest suspect in the Wards’ murders, but Press Yardley seemed to be tied up in things somehow. And now it looked as if Hal Keene might have a stronger motive for murder than the simple fact that Lige Ward had chained himself to the front doors of Wal-Mart a couple of times.

Lige might have indulged in a little blackmail on the side. He might have threatened to expose Keene as someone who took part in illegal activities. Rhodes knew that Keene was a member of several civic organizations that wouldn’t like having one of their members getting unfavorable publicity by being arrested for betting on cockfights. And Rhodes suspected that the Wal-Mart hierarchy might not take kindly to one of their store managers who got mixed up in gambling and cockfighting. It wasn’t the kind of thing that looked good on a resume.

Lige couldn’t have exposed Keene’s part in those things without exposing his own, however, and Rhodes didn’t think that any kind of threat would be enough to drive Keene to murder. Nevertheless, because of the connections between the two men, Rhodes thought that he’d better have a talk with Keene.

He stepped from behind the boxes and walked into the warehouse area. He saw Claude pushing a dolly loaded with exercise equipment still in the boxes. Clyde was getting another stack ready to be moved, and there was a gangly teenager stacking some large but obviously not heavy cardboard boxes whose contents weren’t labeled. No one else was working in the warehouse.

There were a few sales clerks and register operators on their break in another part of the huge room, gathered at some tables near soft drink machines that offered Sam’s Cola. There was a candy machine, too, along with a coffee maker on a table littered with disposable cups, plastic spoons, and packets of sweetener and creamer.

Keene’s office was set off from the rest of the room, well away from the break area. There was a large window in the side wall so that Keene could see and be seen, so Rhodes could see the manager in his office sitting at the desk.

Rhodes knocked on the door, and Keene said, “Come in.”

Rhodes went inside and closed the door behind him. “Good morning, Mr. Keene,” he said.

“Good morning, Sheriff. I saw you out there in the warehouse. Is there something wrong?  I hope nobody’s chained to the doors again.”

“Not that I know of,” Rhodes said. “But I would like to talk to you for a minute about Lige Ward.”

Keene indicated a plastic lawn chair near the desk. “It’s not fancy, but it’s comfortable. Have a seat.”

Rhodes sat. The chair didn’t seem to him to be as comfortable as advertised.

“Now, what about Lige?” Keene asked. “I’m sorry to hear he got himself killed, but I’m not really surprised. He was a little loony, if you ask me.”

“We all have our little quirks,” Rhodes said, shifting in the plastic chair. It scraped on the floor beneath him.

Keene chuckled. “I guess we do at that.”

“Some of us like cockfighting, for instance,” Rhodes said.

Keene stopped chuckling.

“You must have known it would come out sooner or later that you were there,” Rhodes said. “More than one person saw you.”

“Who else have they told?” Keene asked.

“Nobody, as far as I know. Why?”

“Because I can’t have it getting out that I was there. Don’t you see, Sheriff?  I’m a respected member of the community. I can’t have people knowing I was at a cockfight.”

Rhodes thought that it was a little late for Keene to start worrying about that now. And he wondered if he hadn’t been wrong. Maybe Keene
would
kill to keep people from finding out about his participation.

“Why did you go then?” he asked.

Keene got up and walked around his desk. He looked out the window as if afraid someone in the warehouse might overhear him. Rhodes looked out, too. There was no one nearby, and no one seemed interested in the office.

“I don’t know why I went,” Keene said. “Curiosity, I guess. I didn’t even know that Lige Ward was involved until I got there. Somebody who comes to the store here a lot happened to mention the fight to me. I’d always heard about things like that, but I’d never seen anything like it except in the movies, so I thought I might go, just to see what it was all about.”  He shook his head. “It was a mistake.”

“Because someone saw you?”

“Because it was terrible. It wasn’t exciting. It was just bloody.”  Keene’s face seemed to pale a little at the thought. “I had to leave before anyone else. I couldn’t take it.”

“Didn’t you think that someone might see you there?” Rhodes asked.

“I thought that if they did, they wouldn’t say anything. After all, they were doing the same thing I was.”

“But you didn’t know that Lige would be there. He might have decided to say something, since he’s not one of your biggest fans. Why didn’t you leave as soon as you saw him?”

“I don’t think he even recognized me,” Keene said. “I stood back from the rest, didn’t talk to anyone. I didn’t think
anyone
recognized me.”

“What about the person who mentioned it to you?”

“He wasn’t even there,” Keene said. “His name’s Gad Pullens. He sits in the lobby and watches the customers come and go. I talk to him now and then.”

“And you’re sure Lige didn’t see you?”

“I’m sure. He never even looked my way.”  Keene had been looking down, but now his head snapped up. “Surely you don’t think I had anything to do with killing him. I swear to you, Sheriff—”

“You sell pistols here?” Rhodes asked.

“Yes, we do, but—”

“Do you own a pistol?”

“No. No. My wife would never allow one in the house, not even for self-protection. She thinks they’re dangerous.”  Keene paused, looking out the window again. “She doesn’t like hunting, either. She thinks it’s cruel to animals. She doesn’t have to know I went to the cockfight, does she, Sheriff.”

“We’ll see,” Rhodes said. “Sometimes these things have a way of getting out.”

“But I didn’t kill Lige Ward!  I didn’t even stay till the end of the first cockfight that day. I walked back to my car and left.”

“You have access to handguns, you and Ward didn’t get along, and you were seen not too far from where he was killed,” Rhodes pointed out.

“That doesn’t prove anything!”

Rhodes admitted that it didn’t. “Did you see Lige after the fight?”

“He didn’t make it a habit to visit the store,” Keene said.

“I don’t mean as a customer. Did he come by and talk to you, say anything about the fight?”

“What do you mean?  I told you he didn’t see me. Why would he say anything about the fight to me?”

“I was just wondering,” Rhodes said.

“Look, Sheriff. I didn’t kill anybody, and I didn’t see Lige Ward again after the fight. I was at home with my wife the night he was killed. We watched TV and then went to bed. I didn’t leave the house.”

“Will your wife verify that?”

“Of course she will, if she has to. But I hope you won’t have to ask her. Can’t you just take my word for it?”

Rhodes didn’t laugh. He said, “It’s not that I don’t trust you. It’s just that I don’t make a habit of taking people’s word for something when a crime is involved, especially a crime like murder.”

“I guess I can understand that. But I didn’t do anything, Sheriff.”

“I don’t think you did,” Rhodes said. “It’s just that I don’t like coincidences.”

Keene went back to his chair and sat down. He moved a few papers around on his desk and then looked at Rhodes.

“I wish I’d never gone to that cockfight,” he said.

“I don’t much blame you,” Rhodes said.

Chapter Twelve

L
eaving Wal-Mart, Rhodes was convinced that Keene was telling the truth, just as he had been convinced that Wally Henry was lying.

The trouble was, as Rhodes had told Keene, the sheriff didn’t like coincidences, and this case was full of them. First Brother Alton had turned up at the scene of Rayjean Ward’s murder, and now it appeared that Keene had been at the cockfight. Brother Alton had been at the creek when Lige’s body was found, and Keene had been on the outs with the Wards. And while Rhodes didn’t think either of the men was a murderer, there was a nagging little doubt at the back of his mind, a little voice saying something like “you never can tell.”