Bill Crider - Dan Rhodes 07 - Murder Most Fowl (18 page)

Blood? Rhodes wondered. Could be. Lige could have been shot right on this spot. Rhodes would have to get some soil samples and have them checked. It might not help him find Lige’s killer, but any information he could get would be a help.

He went back to his car, got a couple of evidence bags, and dug some of the soil up with his pocket knife. He put the earth in the bags and sealed them, then wrote the information on the tags.

After that, he kept looking. Not far away he found a bush with several broken limbs. It looked almost as if someone had fallen into the bush. The leaves and sticks around the bushes looked disturbed, but Rhodes really couldn’t tell much from them. For all he knew their appearance might have been natural.

But maybe not. There could have been a struggle. The whole area looked suspicious, now that Rhodes was eyeing it more critically. It was as if someone had taken a lot of trouble to make it look as if there hadn’t been a struggle there.

Rhodes’ ankle was hurting a little, so he walked over to a thick-bodied pecan tree and sat down, resting his back against the trunk. He was beginning to put together in his mind a picture of what might have happened on the night Lige was killed.

Lige had gone to Press Yardley’s and taken the emus. If Yardley was telling the truth, he had either been with Rayjean or the dog hadn’t alerted him. Either way, he didn’t know that anyone had been there until the next day.

Lige might have needed the money the emus would bring him, but it was just as likely he saw stealing them as a way to get a little revenge against Press Yardley.

After loading the emus into his camper, maybe getting kicked in the chest while doing so, Lige drove over to King’s. He unloaded the birds there.

Then King had paid him, or not paid him, and Lige had driven to the cockpit, where someone had shot him and taken the money if Lige had gotten the money in the first place.

Had it been King who did the shooting?  Why not shoot Lige at the emu pens if he was going to stuff him in the portable toilet?  It would have been much easier that way.

And what about the pistol? Apparently Michael Ferrin had picked it up somewhere near the portable toilet. Had King or someone else dropped it there?

It seemed to Rhodes that whoever had shot Lige would have made a pretty diligent search for the pistol if he dropped it, but maybe not. Maybe the killer was too scared by what had happened to stick around and look for the pistol.

Nard King didn’t strike Rhodes as being overly panicky. He certainly didn’t appear too worried over the fact that he couldn’t find any bill of sale for his emus. But that didn’t mean he might not panic in a more serious situation.

In Rhodes’ estimation, Wally Henry wouldn’t panic at all.

Press Yardley, on the other hand, probably would.

But if the person who shot Lige had panicked, who had put the leaves and the tree branch over the dirt?

There was an answer to that question, and it came to Rhodes quickly.

The person who shot Lige came back. Rayjean had surprised him, and he had killed her.

Would Press Yardley have killed her, even to cover up murder?  Why not?  Rhodes had only Yardley’s word that Rayjean and the former antique dealer were having an affair. Yardley could have confessed to confuse the issue.

Wally Henry was certainly lying about several things, and Nard King was almost certainly lying about the emus. Why shouldn’t Press Yardley be lying, too?  He’d lied about going for groceries; there was no reason he couldn’t be lying again. Maybe Hal Keen was lying as well.

And then there was the filed gaff he’d found in Lige’s pants. Where did that fit in?  Or did it?  Maybe Lige had been carrying it around, planning to slip it into a fight when the time seemed right. It was a puzzler, all right

In all the stories Rhodes had listened to, in all the things he’d found out, Rhodes was sure there was something that would give the killer away, some little thing that wouldn’t show up on Hack’s computer and couldn’t be located in all the files that Hack had access to. All Rhodes had to do was sort out the stories and figure out what that little thing was.

His mind didn’t seem to work quite as fast as the computer, nor as efficiently, so it might take him a while. But he was sure he would get to the answer sooner or later.

Rhodes sat there under the tree and looked around. He might not be getting any closer to a solution to the murders, but it was nice just to sit there out of the sun and relax for a minute.

He could hear something scraping in the leaves a little distance behind him—a raccoon maybe, or an armadillo—and there was a squirrel sitting and watching him from about twenty yards away, its head tilted to one side.

Aside from that there was nothing to hear and no other living thing to see. There was no noise from the road, and even the guineas were quiet. There were just the trees and the heat and the shade. Rhodes could almost imagine that he was back in a simpler time, when there weren’t any big discount centers sitting on the edge of small towns next to huge supermarkets, their parking lots filled with cars while the former business district stood deserted; a time when men didn’t start stealing their neighbor’s emus out of a need for money or a need to prove they were still capable of some kind of action.

Rhodes pushed himself away from the tree and stood up. The squirrel scurried away, and Rhodes watched it disappear behind a tree. His ankle was feeling better now. He started back to the county car.

It was all right to feel nostalgic every once in a while, he thought, but there was no use getting carried away. Even before the discount stores had come in, the small towns had been dying. And people had been stealing from their neighbors as long as there had been people and neighbors. Otherwise there wouldn’t have ever been a need for sheriffs.

Rhodes got in the car. He thought he’d better go talk to Nard King.

Chapter Thirteen

J
oe Bates and his crew were making good progress on King’s new house. Rhodes could hear the hammers banging as he got out of his car.

King wasn’t anywhere in sight. He didn’t seem to be the kind who had to supervise every movement of the men who were working for him. Rhodes went to the old house where King was staying and knocked.

It wasn’t long before King was looking out through the screen.

“Oh,” he said. “It’s you.”

“You must’ve forgotten to call me about those bills of sale,” Rhodes said. “So I thought I’d better stop by and have a look at them.”

“Don’t have ’em,” King said. He didn’t offer to open the screen. “I’ve looked all over the place. Can’t find hide nor hair of ’em.”

“Did you look in all your drawers?” Rhodes asked.

“Drawers?”

“You said you stuck things in drawers,” Rhodes reminded him. “That’s why you can’t find them sometimes.”

“Oh. Yeah. I do that, all right. But I looked. Looked in ever’ drawer in the house. Didn’t find ’em.”

“Well, that really doesn’t matter,” Rhodes said. He took a pad and pencil out of his pocket. “You can just tell me who you bought them from. I’ll get in touch with the original owner and verify the sale.”

“Can’t do that,” King said.

“Why not?”

“’Cause I don’t have to do that. Not unless you got good cause to think those emus are stolen, I don’t. You got anybody that can identify ’em?  Got anybody can point out any identifying marks?”

Rhodes didn’t have anyone who could do any of those things, and he suspected that King knew it. Emus all looked pretty much alike, and even if Press Yardley swore that he recognized the birds there was no way he could prove it.

“Well, sheriff?” King said.

“There’s something else,” Rhodes said.

“What’s that?”

“You never asked much about Lige Ward’s murder. Maybe you haven’t heard where his body was found.”

Nearly everyone else in the county had heard, of course, but King was a newcomer. He wouldn’t be plugged into the gossip circuit yet, and he didn’t pal around with the workmen.

“That’s right,” King said, confirming Rhodes’ suspicion. “I haven’t heard. Don’t know that it’s any of my business, either.”

“It was in a portable toilet,” Rhodes said. “The one that was stolen from your yard.” He turned and pointed to the outhouse that had been hauled out to replace the stolen one. “Right over there.”

King seemed to shrink in on himself just a little. He pushed open the screen door.

“I guess you’d better come in,” he said.

T
hey sat at the same card table they’d sat at during Rhodes’ first visit. Only the book on the table was different, though not very different. The new one was called
The Turncoat
, and the cover looked pretty much like the one on the other book King had been reading.

“Just because you found a body in that outhouse doesn’t mean I had anything to do with it,” King said. “It wasn’t
my
outhouse.”

“I know that,” Rhodes told him. “I was just thinking, though. What if a man stole some emus for me and then I didn’t want to pay him?  We might get in a fight.”

“You sayin’ Ward stole emus?” King asked. “Not for me, he didn’t. I bought those birds fair and square.”

“I’m just thinking aloud.”

“Anyway, Lige Ward was a sight bigger than me. I’d never try to fight a fella that big.”

Rhodes looked at King’s well-muscled arms. “You get in pretty good shape unloading freight for a few years.”

“Not in good enough shape to fight a man the size of Ward.”

“You have a few years on him. Sometimes that’s enough for a good little man to beat a good big man.”

King reached out and put a hand on the book. “You ever think about writin’ fiction, Sheriff?”

“Or maybe you didn’t have a fight,” Rhodes said. “Maybe when Lige was unloading the emus, he dropped a pistol and didn’t know it. You could have picked it up, followed him home, and shot him. That would be a good way to get your money back.”

“I didn’t shoot him, Sheriff, no matter what you think. Those stories of yours are just getting wilder and wilder. This guy could learn a few things from you.”

King held up the book for Rhodes’ inspection. The author’s name was Adam Rutledge.

“I know you had Lige steal those emus,” Rhodes said.

“I never did. You don’t have any proof of that, so you might as well leave me alone.”

Rhodes felt just about as frustrated as he ever had, but King was right. There just wasn’t any proof. That was the trouble with this whole case. There wasn’t any proof of anything.

R
hodes drove back to the jail. Hack and Lawton were watching
The Young and the Restless
, but Hack snapped off the TV set when he noticed that Rhodes was looking at them.

Rhodes didn’t say anything about the TV. “Did Ruth call in?”

“More’n once,” Hack said. “She didn’t find anybody that’d seen that GMC.”

That was too bad. Rhodes had really hoped to put Wally Henry on the scene.

“Any trouble today?” he asked.

“Not that much,” Hack said. “We had a few calls, but nothing that Ruth couldn’t handle.”

“Little case of desertion,” Lawton said quickly, before Hack could get it in.

Hack stared at him.

Rhodes sighed and sat down at his desk. “You want to tell me about it?”

“Nothin’ to it,” Hack said. “It wasn’t really desertion. Got a call from a woman at Terry’s Shell station out on the highway.”

“It was abandonment, then,” Lawton said. “She said she’d been abandoned.”

“I’m the one answered the phone,” Hack said. “I guess I know what she said.”

Rhodes wished he hadn’t asked. He could just have read Ruth’s report later. But since he
had
asked, he had to carry through.

“What did she say, then?”

“She said she’d been abandoned,” Hack told him.

That was exactly what Lawton had said, of course, but Rhodes didn’t bother to point that out. It wouldn’t have done any good.

“Who abandoned her?” he asked.

“Her husband,” Lawton and Hack said together, each trying to beat the other.

They looked at one another for a few seconds. Lawton blinked first.

“It was her husband,” Hack said. “He’s the one who abandoned her.”

“At Terry’s?” Rhodes said. It seemed like a strange place to abandon anyone.

“He didn’t really abandon her,” Hack said. “Forgot her, is more like it.”

“She went to the restroom,” Lawton explained. “And he paid up and drove off without her.”

“She felt like she needed the sheriff’s office for something like that?” Rhodes asked.

“Well,” Hack said, “it looked like he wasn’t going to come back.”

“Yeah,” said Lawton. “But he did.”

“‘Cause we called the highway boys,” Hack said. “That’s why. They caught up with him and told him he’d forgot something. That was the first he’d thought of her. He turned right around, of course, but he’d already been gone nearly an hour, and it was another hour before he got back to Terry’s.”

“If it’d been me, I don’t know if I’d’ve come back,” Lawton said. “I think he should’ve just kept on going.”  He looked over at Hack. “Course I don’t know as much about women as some people here.”

“You sure don’t,” Hack said. “But this time you’re right about it. He’d’ve been better off to just keep movin’ on. I don’t know where those two were headed, but I bet it’s gonna be the longest drive that fella ever took.”

“At least if he turns up dumped out by the side of the road, dead in the bar ditch, we’ll know who to look for to arrest,” Lawton said. “Ain’t that right, Sheriff?”

Rhodes agreed that he was right. It was too bad finding out who killed Lige Ward hadn’t been that easy.

R
hodes talked again to Wally Henry, but Henry was as obstinate as ever. Rhodes knew he wasn’t going to get anything from Henry, who would no doubt be bonded out soon. The sheriff needed a break, but he wasn’t getting any.

Rhodes spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon catching up on reports, both writing and reading them. Then Hack got a call from Bill Weathers, who said his bull was missing. He wanted someone to come out to investigate.