Bill Crider - Dan Rhodes 07 - Murder Most Fowl (19 page)

“Ruth’s out down around Thurston,” Hack said. “I guess you could go, if you want to.”

“Somebody has to,” Rhodes said.

Hack didn’t see why. “You seen Weathers’ fence line lately?”

Rhodes admitted that he hadn’t, or if he had, he hadn’t noticed it.

“Posts’re saggin’, wires’re all loose, some of ’em draggin’ the ground. That bull’s not missin’. It’s prob’ly out roamin’ the road. Next thing you know, there’ll be a wreck called in, and there’ll be one dead bull.”

“Whose pasture is next to Weathers’ on the side where the fence is so bad?”

“Lemme see.”  Hack thought about it. “On that side, it’s Milt Pugh.”

“Pugh run any cattle?”

“Yeah, and I can see what you’re gettin’ at. Might be more fun over there than out in the road. Well, that’s a registered bull Bill has. I guess Milt won’t be makin’ any complaints about the calves he gets. You goin’ out there anyhow?”

“Have to keep the voters happy,” Rhodes said.

O
n the way out of town, Rhodes drove past McDonald’s. The golden arches were located on the highway only a couple of blocks from Wal-Mart, another example of progress in Clearview, and they reminded Rhodes that he hadn’t had any lunch.

It was too late to go home for a healthy slice of wheat bread, he told himself. What could be easier than to drive by the McDonald’s window and pick up a burger and some fries?  Sure, he’d eaten that sandwich at Hod Barrett’s store yesterday, and, yes, he’d gone to the Jolly Tamale last night, but he’d had so much exercise he must certainly have burned off all the extra calories he’d consumed.

The rationalization was satisfying, but the burger wasn’t. Rhodes kept thinking how much better the hamburgers had been when he was a kid. They were thick and hot and greasy, wrapped in some kind of plain white paper. This one was tasteless and bland, though the fries weren’t bad.

Rhodes finished the burger and drove on to Bill Weather’s place. He told himself that he was going to have to stop thinking about the way things used to be. The next thing he knew, he’d be chaining himself to the doors at McDonald’s.

I
t took Rhodes about twenty minutes to locate Weathers’ bull, who was looking pretty content among Milt Pugh’s heard of white-face heifers. He helped Weathers drive the bull back to the right pasture and then admonished Weathers to get his fence fixed.

“Milt Pugh might be the next one to call me,” Rhodes said. “Or he might decide to shoot him a bull. If that doesn’t happen, somebody might run into him and sue you. From the looks of your fence, they’d have a might good case.”

That wasn’t what Weathers wanted to hear, but he agreed to take care of his fence right away.

Rhodes was on his way back to Clearview when Hack came on the radio.

“Miz McGee’s here at the jail,” he told Rhodes. “She wants to talk to you.”

“What about?”

There was a pause, and Rhodes thought he could hear Hack and Miz McGee talking in the background, though there was a good deal of static on the radio and he couldn’t be sure.

After a few seconds, Hack said, “It’s about roosters.”

“I’ll be there in five minutes,” Rhodes said.

He didn’t speed, but all the same it didn’t take him quite that long.

M
iz McGee looked the same as always, and Rhodes wondered how she could stand the heat with the wool cap and the sweater. Maybe her metabolism wasn’t like everyone else’s.

Lawton was the first to see Rhodes come through the door, so he got in the opening remarks.

“Miz McGee’s been doin’ a little private detective work,” he said.

“She can talk for herself,” Hack said. “You’re always tryin’ to hog the glory.”

“What glory?” Lawton asked. “All she did was talk to some rooster-fighters.”

“That’s more’n you did,” Hack pointed out.

“Is not. I talked to Gad Pullens. He just wouldn’t tell me anything. I don’t remember you bringin’ in any information the sheriff could use.”

Rhodes interrupted them. “Never mind all that. I want to hear what Mrs. McGee has to say.”

She was sitting quietly in a cane-bottomed chair by Hack’s desk watching a rerun of
The People’s Court
, paying no attention to Hack and Lawton’s argument.

Rhodes rolled his desk chair over and sat down beside her. She reluctantly turned away from the TV set. Judge Wapner seemed to interest her a lot more than any case Rhodes might be involved in.

“Now, Rhodes said when he had her attention, “what did you have to tell me?”

Mrs. McGee tugged on her sweater. “Hack was talkin’ to me the other day about the cockfights. He said you were lookin’ for somebody who knew about things like that.” She turned to Hack. “That’s right, isn’t it?”

“That’s right,” Hack said. “You go ahead and tell the sheriff what you found out.”

She turned back to Rhodes. “Well, I know this woman, Polly Fisher. Her husband, his name’s Curtis, has a fightin’ rooster. So I talked to her. She told me Curtis was at a rooster fight at Lige Ward’s not so long ago.”

She paused as if waiting for either approval or permission to go on.

“That’s exactly the kind of information I was looking for,” Rhodes said. “Did she say anything else?”

“She told me there was a big fight that day. Lige had to break it up.”

Rhodes was a little confused for a moment, but then he sorted it out.

“You mean there was a fight between the men, not the roosters?”

“That’s right. One of the men was terrible upset. Killing’ mad, she said. Curtis told her he’d never seen anything like it in his life.”

“What was the fight about?” Rhodes asked.

“She didn’t tell me that. I don’t think she knows. Curtis didn’t want to talk much about it. Just said how awful it was and that was all. She didn’t want him goin’ to any more cockfights, and he told her he’d do what he pleased.”

Rhodes asked a question before she got too far off track.

“Did she say who that man was?  The one who got so mad?”

“Yes she did. Curtis told her that much. It was a man named Wally Henry.”

Rhodes looked at Hack, who was shaking his head.

“Bonded out over an hour ago,” he said. “Got him a ride and went home.”

Chapter Fourteen

M
rs. McGee hadn’t been able to find out who Wally Henry had fought with.

“Just some young fella Curtis didn’t know,” she said.

She also didn’t think that Curtis would talk to the sheriff or anybody else about what had happened.

“Polly asked me not to tell Curtis that she’d talked to me. Curtis don’t like folks to know he goes to rooster fights. You won’t have to tell him, will you?”

Rhodes said he’d keep Curtis out of things if he could, but he wasn’t making any promises. He was getting a little tired of people trying to cover up their illegal activities.

But even if he kept Curtis Fisher’s secret, just knowing about that fight was something to think about. Rhodes wondered why Clyde hadn’t mentioned it.

He thanked Mrs. McGee for her time and for getting the information for him. Then he left on another trip to Thurston.

He now had three people who had seen Wally Henry at the cockfight, if you counted both Clyde and Claude. It was possible that Hal Keene had seen Henry as well. Rhodes had already been sure that Henry was lying about not being there, but the fight was something new. Clyde hadn’t said a thing about it, and neither had Keene, though Keene probably hadn’t hung around long enough to see it. Maybe the twins hadn’t either, but then again maybe they had. With them, you could never be too sure about what they knew and what they didn’t.

Rhodes drove into Henry’s yard and parked by the GMC. Henry was with the roosters, but he left them as soon as he saw the county car. He moved fast and was beside the car almost before Rhodes could get out.

“Look here, Sheriff,” Henry said. “You can just get right back in that car and get off my property. I’ve paid my bail and you don’t have any business with me now.”

“Yes I do,” Rhodes said. “I have three eyewitnesses who’ll swear that they saw you at Lige Ward’s cockfight. You lied about that.”

Rhodes was doing some lying of his own now, since it was far from a certainty that any of the three he was thinking of would swear to anything, but he figured it was about time he took the offensive. He was tired of pussyfooting around. If Curtis Fisher didn’t want to go to court and swear who he’d seen at a cockfight, that was just too bad. And the same went for Claude and Clyde. Hal Keene, too, if it came to that.

“Eyewitnesses?” Henry said. “I don’t b’lieve it. Bring ’em on. I got a right to face my accusers.”

“Not until we get to court,” Rhodes said. “They also tell me you got in a fight with somebody there.”

“Buncha damn liars is what they are,” Henry said, but Rhodes detected a slight quaver in the high voice.

Rhodes pressed his advantage. “In fact, you got in a fight at the Palm Club, and Lige Ward had to break that one up, too. It seems to me you’re getting in an awful lot of fights lately. And it seems mighty convenient that Lige Ward is always there to break them up. Now I want to know two things. Who were you fighting with, and why?”

“I don’t have to tell you a damn thing.”  Henry turned his back on Rhodes and started to walk toward his stags. “I got some roosters to take care of.”

“Just a minute,” Rhodes said. “I’m not through talking to you.”

Henry stopped, but he didn’t turn back. He just stood there, and for a while Rhodes thought the big man wasn’t ever going to move again. Finally he made up his mind, though. He turned around and faced Rhodes.

His face was pinched and his eyes were hard. “Let me tell you somethin’, Sheriff.”

“Go ahead. I wish you would.”

“I’m not so sure you want to hear what I have to say. What I want to tell you is this. Whoever I fight with is my business. It don’t have diddly to do with Lige Ward. It has to do with me and the man I’m mad at.”

“Lige Ward got killed the same night he broke up one of your fights,” Rhodes said. “Don’t you care about Lige?”

Henry shrugged his wide shoulders. “Why should I?  I didn’t ask him to butt in. He’s lucky I didn’t whip his ass while I was at it.”

“You’ve got a bad temper, Wally. Maybe you’re the one who killed him.”

“Well, I ain’t. Lige never done anything to me ’cept stick his nose in where it wasn’t needed a couple of times. I’d never kill a man that never hurt me. I might whip him, but I’d never kill him.”  He paused and gave Rhodes a hard look. “But if a man cheated me, then I’d kill him. If I got the chance. But I wouldn’t do it where you could ever find out about it.”

Rhodes didn’t know whether it was what Henry said or the way he said it. Maybe it wasn’t either one. Maybe it was just that everything he’d thought about and all the things he’d been told by everyone he’d talked to just shuffled themselves around in his head at just that point and all the pieces fell into their proper places just as if they’d been meant to all along.

He thought he knew who’d killed the Wards and why it had been done.

Thinking he knew was one thing. Proving it, however, was something different.

“I guess a lot of people feel like killing somebody at one time or another,” he told Henry. “You’re probably going to have to testify to that in court, by the way.”

“To what?  That I’d kill a man that cheated me?  I’d like to see you make me.” There was no quaver in Henry’s voice this time.

“I can make you. You’ll be subpoenaed, and if you don’t appear, I’ll come after you. You can testify in handcuffs just as well as not.”

“You’re bluffin’,” Henry said.

“You wish,” Rhodes said. “You go take care of your roosters now. I’ll be seeing you again.”

“Don’t be in no big hurry about it,” Henry said, but Rhodes could tell he knew he’d lost.

B
ack at the jail, Rhodes gathered up some photographs. He could still be wrong, but he didn’t think he was. Nevertheless, he had to get some corroboration before he went out and arrested anyone.

“You been thinkin’ about what I said?” Hack asked him.

“About what?” Rhodes wanted to know.

“‘Bout them video cameras. See, if you had one in your car, and you didn’t come back from Wally Henry’s place, we could run down there to Thurston and recover the car. Then we’d take out the tape and run it on a VCR and see if he chopped you up and fed you to the roosters.”

“What if he took the camera?  Or just took out the tape? After he fed me to the roosters, I mean. A man like that might even torch the car.”

Hack gave Rhodes a sorrowful look. “That’s just the way you are. Always lookin’ for the weak points. But we could prob’ly get him for theft if he did that. Maybe for destruction of county property, too. Wouldn’t you rest easier, knowin’ that the fella that murdered you’d been brought to justice by the miracle of modern technology?”

“I’d still be rooster food,” Rhodes pointed out. “There’s not much comfort in that.”

“Yeah, but the fella that did you in ’ud be in the clink. Justice ’ud be served.”

Rhodes didn’t see it that way. “For stealing a camera?  How long do you think he’d be in?  And you probably couldn’t prove he stole it anyway. He might get off scot free.”

“I swear,” Hack said. “You’re just about the worst I ever saw for not ever wantin’ to change things.”

“I haven’t chained myself to any discount center doors yet,” Rhodes said.

Hack muttered something about it just being a matter of time, but Rhodes didn’t stop to argue with him. He had other things on his mind.

Like identifying a killer.

T
he warehouse at Wal-Mart wasn’t a particularly busy place late in the afternoon. Clyde and Claude were there, but they weren’t doing much. It seemed to Rhodes that they were just trying to look busy, even though there was no work for them.

He ignored them and went straight to Keene’s office, but Keene wasn’t there. A woman came over from the break table to see if she could help Rhodes.