Bill Crider - Dan Rhodes 07 - Murder Most Fowl (17 page)

When Rhodes came out from behind the building, he saw that the parking lot was filled with cars. Both the discount house and the supermarket were doing a land-office business. If he were to drive through downtown Clearview, he thought, there wouldn’t be five cars parked on the street. He decided not to go that way.

R
hodes drove between the two wooden Indians, neither of which had improved in appearance since his last visit, and onto Press Yardley’s property. As he got out of the car, he saw Yardley in the emu pens. Yardley’s dog was sniffing around the outside of the fence, but he looked up when he heard the car and came running over as soon as Rhodes got out.

The dog jumped up on Rhodes, who rubbed his head before shoving him aside and walking over to the pens. The dog, not at all offended by Rhodes’s cavalier treatment, followed the sheriff, running beside him, in front of him, and once getting between his legs and nearly tripping him up. He never stopped barking.

The emus paid the dog’s yapping no more attention than they had the first time Rhodes had visited. Rhodes still thought it was strange to see such odd birds in the middle of Texas. Wally Henry’s roosters were a lot more familiar.

Yardley met Rhodes at the fence. He didn’t look especially happy to see who his visitor was.

“Good morning, Sheriff,” Yardley said, not sounding as if he meant it. “Found out anything about my missing emus yet?”

“Maybe,” Rhodes said. “I’m not absolutely sure. I’ve found something else, too.”

“What’s that?”

“Your pistol,” Rhodes said.

Yardley’s face fell even farther.

“You want to tell me about it?” Rhodes asked.

Yardley didn’t appear to have anything to say. He stood in his pen, watching one of the emus scratching in the dirt. The dog stopped barking and resumed its sniffing along the fence line. Rhodes watched the dog for a second, then looked at Yardley.

“Did you shoot Lige?” Rhodes asked.

“No,” Yardley said, after what Rhodes thought was too long a pause. “I didn’t. I tried to, but I didn’t.”

“What happened?” Rhodes asked. “Did you catch him stealing the emus and take a shot at him?”

“No. Of course not. I’d never have called you here if that had been the case. I’m not even sure he’s the one who took them.”

“Why did you shoot him, then?”

“I
didn’t
shoot him. I said I tried to. There’s a difference.”

“All right,” Rhodes said. “Why did you try to?”

“It’s a long story,” Yardley said. “Let’s go in the house, and I’ll tell you about it.”

Y
ardley had half a pot of coffee sitting on the coffee maker in the kitchen. He pulled the carafe off the machine and held it up.

“Want a cup?” he asked Rhodes.

Rhodes, who preferred to get his caffeine from Dr Pepper, declined.

“I think I’ll pour one for myself,” Yardley said. “Have a seat at the table, Sheriff.”

Rhodes sat at the round oak table while Yardley got a thin china cup and saucer out of the kitchen cabinet. The table was at the end of the kitchen beside a sliding glass door. Rhodes looked through the door; he could see the emus walking around in the pen. The dog was nowhere in sight.

The cup and saucer clinked when Yardley put them on the table. Then he sat in the chair opposite Rhodes. He took a sip of the coffee.

“Obviously Lige and I had our differences, Sheriff,” Yardley said, putting the cup down. “But I didn’t kill him.”

“Tell me about your differences.”

“Well, you know about the guineas.”

“They made noise,” Rhodes said. “They bothered you.”

“They
are
noisy,” Yardley said.

Rhodes agreed. He’d heard them himself only recently.

“Anyway,” Yardley went on, “it all started with the guineas.”

“
What
started with the guineas?”

“Me and Ray—” There was a catch in Yardley’s voice, and he had to stop for a second. He took another sip of coffee. “Me and Rayjean,” he finished.

“What about you and Rayjean?” Rhodes asked, wondering if Ivy could have been right.

“We were … having an affair.”

Well, well, Rhodes thought. Ivy
had
been right. Rhodes remembered the Victoria’s Secret catalog. He’d thought that Rayjean Ward had been trying to find a little lacy something to help hold her marriage to Lige together, and he’d felt sorry for her. But maybe it hadn’t been that at all. Instead, maybe she’d been thinking about finding some new ways to please Press Yardley.

Yardley went on with his story. “Before I ever called you about the guineas, I went over to Lige’s place to talk to him about them, to see if we could work something out. He wasn’t there, so I talked to Rayjean. We seemed to hit it off, but nothing came of it.”

“Something must have,” Rhodes said.

“That was later. The guineas kept on making noise, and they were roosting in the woods closer and closer to my house, so I finally called you. After you talked to him, Lige came over and threatened me. I told him to leave me alone. He just laughed, and then I told him I had a gun.”

Yardley stopped talking and drank some more coffee.

“That’s it?” Rhodes said. “I thought you tried to shoot him.”

“That was later, too. Rayjean came over here the next day to apologize, and we hit it off again. She was having a hard time with Lige. He was going out and drinking and getting into fights. She needed someone to talk to.”

“She must have needed more than that,” Rhodes said.

“There’s no need to be crude, Sheriff. It wasn’t the way you think.”

Rhodes resisted the urge to ask exactly how it was. He didn’t want to be accused of being crude again. Besides, he figured it
was
pretty much the way he thought it was. There weren’t too many possible variations on the theme.

“That’s where you were the night Lige was killed,” Rhodes said. “With Rayjean. You didn’t go into Obert for groceries, because you can’t buy groceries in Obert at night.”

Yardley smiled ruefully. “I thought of that after I told you. I wasn’t sure you caught it.”

Rhodes didn’t see any need to tell him that Ivy had been the one to catch it.

“Lige was gone off again, ‘honky-tonking,’ Rayjean called it. So she phoned me and I went over for a while.”

“It doesn’t look very good for you,” Rhodes said. “Your pistol has turned up, and it’s the same caliber as the gun that killed Lige. Now Rayjean is dead, within walking distance from your house. You admit you were with her on the night Lige was killed. And you say you tried to shoot Lige.”

“I guess it looks pretty bad, all right. I wouldn’t shoot anyone, though. You must know that, Sheriff.”

Rhodes wasn’t sure what he knew anymore. “Tell me about shooting Lige.”

“
Trying
to shoot him. I missed.”

“Tell me about missing him, then.”

“He found out about me and Rayjean,” Yardley said. “He came over here one day and banged on the door. I thought he was going to break it down. He was yelling and banging and making threats, so I got the pistol out of the closet before I went to the door.”

“When was that?” Rhodes asked.

“The day before he got shot.”

“I see,” Rhodes said.

Yardley shoved the cup and saucer aside. “That makes it look even worse for me, doesn’t it? But you haven’t heard the whole story yet.”

“All right. Tell me.”

“Well, I took the pistol to the door and opened it. Lige came bustin’ in and shoved me to the floor. He didn’t give me a chance to say a word, just put his hand on my chest and shoved. That’s when I tried to shoot him.”

“But you missed,” Rhodes said. “Is that right?”

“I didn’t even pull the trigger. I was ashamed. I’d been fooling around with the man’s wife. He had a right to push me around. I raised up the gun and pointed it at him, but I couldn’t pull the trigger. I just said I was sorry and put the gun on the floor.”

“What did Lige do then?”

“I thought he was going to beat me to a pulp, but he didn’t. He yelled a lot and stormed around the room and called me a lot of names, and then he picked up the pistol. He told me that if I ever came near his wife again, he’d shoot me with my own gun. I believed him.”

Rhodes thought about the bruise on Lige’s chest.

“He shoved you. But you didn’t shove back?  You didn’t hit him at all?  Say, in the chest?”

“I didn’t even move,” Yardley said. “I just sat there. You should’ve heard him. I was too scared to fight.” He thought about what Rhodes had said. “Why?  Had he been in a fight?”

“He looked like it,” Rhodes said.

“Probably the emus,” Yardley told him.

“The emus?”

“They can kick like a mule. Well, they can kick, but not really that hard. An ostrich can, though. An ostrich can kick hard enough to kill you if he catches you right. But an emu can kick you pretty good if it tries. If you were trying to stuff one in the back seat of a car, it might thump you a good one.”

Or in the back of a truck, Rhodes thought. Maybe that
was
how Lige had gotten bruised.

“So Lige took your pistol and left,” he said.

“That’s exactly right. I never saw him again after that.”  Yardley looked out through the glass door as if Lige might be standing out in the back yard.

“But you saw Rayjean again,” Rhodes said. “You must not have been scared for long.”

“I only saw her,” Yardley said, still looking out into the yard. “We didn’t do anything. I told her that Lige knew about us and that I couldn’t see her again.”

“How did she take the news?”

Yardley turned to look at Rhodes. “She didn’t like it any better than I did, but we knew Lige was right. We planned never to meet again after that night.”

Rhodes almost believed him.

“That was the last time I saw her,” Yardley said.

He got up, put the coffee cup and the saucer in the sink, and ran water in the cup. Then he sat back down.

“There’s one thing I’d like to know,” he said.

“Just one?” Rhodes said.

“For now. Can you tell me?”

“That depends on what it is.”

“Where did you find the pistol?  Did Lige have it?”

“No,” Rhodes said. “It was someone else.”

“Nard King,” Yardley said. “He probably took it away from Lige and killed him with it.”

“I didn’t say that Lige was killed with your pistol,” Rhodes reminded him.

Yardley looked surprised. “You sure implied it.”

Rhodes couldn’t help what people thought he was implying. He was more interested in the possibility that Yardley was right about Nard King.

“Why do you think King would shoot Lige?”

“It’s obvious, isn’t it?” Yardley said.

“Not to me,” Rhodes told him. “Unless you’re assuming that thieves fall out. That doesn’t happen as often as you might think.”

“Maybe King didn’t want to pay for the emus once he had them,” Yardley suggested. “Or maybe Lige tried to hold him up for more money.”

Rhodes didn’t say so, but Yardley’s ideas were at least as likely as most of the things Rhodes had come up with so far. The difference was that Yardley might just be trying to save his own neck by offering up some plausible theories that put the blame on someone else.

“There’s one problem with those ideas,” Rhodes said.

“What?”

“Nard King didn’t have the gun,” Rhodes said.

W
hen Rhodes was through talking to Yardley, he went back outside to his car. He was almost there before the dog bounded up and tried to jump on him again. Rhodes took the time to pat the dog before getting in the car and calling Hack on the radio. He wanted to find out whether the ballistics report had come in.

“Nope,” Hack said.

“Well, let me know if it does,” Rhodes said, disappointed.

“We don’t need it,” Hack said. “Not right now, anyway.”

Here we go again, Rhodes thought. “Why not?” he asked.

“‘Cause I called the lab,” Hack said. “That’s why.”

“And what did they say?” Rhodes asked, relieved to get a straight answer for once.

“You sure you want me to tell you?” Hack asked. “Ever’ scanner in the county’s tuned in to us right now.”

“Just give me a yes or a no,” Rhodes said, wondering if it was possible for Hack to do something that simple.

He hemmed and hawed for a few seconds, but finally he did it. “All right, then. The answer is yes.”

Rhodes signed off. The slugs that had killed Lige Ward had come from Press Yardley’s pistol.

R
hodes didn’t go directly to Nard King’s. Instead he drove down to the Ward place. As the guineas scattered in front of his car near the house alerting the neighborhood, he thought about Rayjean and Press Yardley. You just never knew what might be going on behind closed doors.

Rhodes drove on down to the cockpit and got out of the car. There wasn’t much of a breeze; the trees were nearly still, and while it was cooler in the shade of the trees than it had been by Yardley’s emu pen, Rhodes could feel the heat filtering through the almost motionless leaves along with an occasional ray of sun.

Lige’s pickup was still parked where it had been, and for the first time Rhodes wondered what it was doing there. Why wasn’t it at the house? Had someone killed Lige elsewhere and driven the truck here, or had Lige been killed right around this very spot?

Rhodes walked around the truck in widening circles, trying to find something that would give him a hint about what had happened on the night of Lige’s death. He had searched the area earlier, but he hadn’t had much of an idea of what he was looking for. Now he did.

After about five minutes, he found it.

There was a rotten branch that had fallen from an old pecan tree. Underneath it was a thick covering of dead leaves, whereas there were few leaves at all elsewhere in the area. It was as if someone had scraped the leaves together and put the tree limb on top of them.

Rhodes moved the dead branch aside and kicked away some of the leaves. The dirt beneath them didn’t look much different from the dirt to either side, except that in places it seemed just a little darker.