Bill Crider - Dan Rhodes 07 - Murder Most Fowl (21 page)

It was a high-roofed corrugated tin building with tall garage doors on both sides. There were two large fans in wire cages, one at each end of the building, humming and pushing the hot air around. The concrete floor was covered with dark stains, and most of the light came through the open doors.

Curtis Fisher was a dried-up little man whose snuff-colored skin made him look as if he spent most of his time outside rather than inside a garage.

A trouble light hung from beneath the hood of an old Plymouth Fury and illuminated Fisher’s features as he poked around under there. There was an oil-stained red cloth on the fender beside him. A socket wrench and three spark plugs were lying on the cloth.

While Rhodes watched, Fisher took the wrench and tightened a plug that he had begun screwing into place with his fingers. When he finished, he put the wrench back on the cloth and turned to Rhodes.

“Yessir, Sheriff. What can I do for you?  One of the county cars actin’ up?”

“We’re not having car trouble,” Rhodes said. “I just wanted to talk to you.”

Fisher looked around the garage. There was one other mechanic who worked in the shop, but he was nowhere to be seen.

“What about?” Fisher asked.

“I’ve been trying to talk to all the men who were at that cockfight at Lige Ward’s place,” Rhodes told him. “You’re one of them.”

“Who told you that?”

“Like I said, I’m talking to everyone who was there. Several of them mentioned you.”

Fisher picked up the socket wrench and slapped it into his palm a couple of times. Then he laid it back down.

“People talk too much,” he said.

“Or not enough,” Rhodes said. “Cockfights are against the law.”

“That mean you’re goin’ to arrest me?”

“Not this time. I’m just looking for information.”

“I don’t like talkin’ about folks. What they do is their own business if they ain’t hurtin’ nobody else. A little rooster fight don’t hurt anybody.”

Rhodes didn’t see any need to mention what it did to the roosters. Fisher would have the same view that Wally Henry did, and Rhodes had heard that already. Some minds couldn’t be changed.

“People can get hurt if they get in a fight among themselves,” he said. “Sometimes people can even get killed.”

“You’re talkin’ ’bout Lige, I guess.”

“That’s right.”

“He didn’t get killed at that rooster fight, if that’s what’s botherin’ you.”

“I know that. But there was another fight that day, and it wasn’t between two roosters.”

Fisher picked up the wrench again. “Oh. Yeah. There was. But it didn’t last long. Lige broke it up.”

“What was it about?”

“Wally Henry thought he’d been cheated. He lost one of his best roosters.”

“Roosters get killed at those fights all the time.”

“You’d be surprised. It don’t happen all that often.”

“But it did this time.”

“Sure did. But Wally, he thought it was a cheat.”

“Was it?”

“Hell, how would I know?”

“I thought maybe everybody knew,” Rhodes said.

“Nobody knew. Lige broke things up, and people looked around some, but there wasn’t any proof of anything. ’Course, by then the other fella’d had hold of his rooster for a minute or two. Plenty of time to hide the evidence.”

“Who was the other fella, by the way?”

“Don’t know,” Fisher said. “Never saw him before.”

“Now why is it that I don’t believe that?” Rhodes asked.

“You might’s well.”

“I don’t think so. I know better. I know that there’s not a different crowd every time there’s a cockfight. It’s the same people, or nearly the same, every single time. There aren’t that many who’re interested.”

Rhodes took his pictures out of his pocket and shuffled through them. Then he held one up.

“Well?” he said.

Fisher looked for a moment as if he weren’t going to say anything. Then he started to put the wrench back on the fender. He let go too soon and the wrench slid off the fender to the floor, where it bounced with a clear ringing sound that echoed off the tin walls.

“Okay,” he said when the echoes died. “That’s him. But I don’t know his name, and that’s the truth.”

“That’s all right,” Rhodes said. “I do.”

M
ichael Ferrin lived about a half-mile out of Clearview at the top of a sandy hill just off the road to Obert. The tires of the county car churned up a white cloud as Rhodes drove up the hill. The car would need washing, but not as badly as the one Ruth was driving along behind him.

Ruth was there because Ivy had insisted after one of Rhodes’ recent escapades that he never again go out to make an arrest without back-up. He’d nearly been mowed down by a tree-whacker.

Ivy was right, of course, and Rhodes should have been taking back-up all along, but with a department the size of Blacklin County’s it just wasn’t always feasible, especially when Rhodes believed that most of the people he was going to confront would come along with him peacefully.

Unfortunately, the cooperation of felons had not generally lived up to Rhodes’ expectations. And he didn’t want to wind up being fed to a bunch of roosters, whether they belonged to Wally Henry or Michael Ferrin.

Except that Ferrin didn’t have any roosters, at least not that Rhodes could see. That was too bad, since Rhodes’ whole reconstruction of what had happened at the cockfight and afterwards depended on Ferrin having some cocks. Rhodes was sure he remembered seeing feathers in the back of Ferrin’s pickup, feathers that could have come from a rooster carried in a cage.

If Ferrin did have any roosters, however, they weren’t out in the open like Wally Henry’s.

Of course Henry’s were stags, not fully grown cocks, or so he said, and therefore there was nothing wrong with having them on display. Real fighting roosters were another matter.

Ferrin’s house was set back a short distance from the road. It was a fairly new red-brick structure with a wide black satellite dish in the side yard. The Toyota pickup was parked in the garage. Rhodes could see the word
YO
on the tailgate.

Rhodes eased his car into the driveway and stopped. Ruth Grady parked behind him, and they got out.

“You think he’s home?” Ruth asked.

“There’s his truck,” Rhodes said, pointing to the garage. “And it’s after five. He wouldn’t still be at work. Maybe he didn’t hear us drive up.”

“Or maybe he’s not in the house,” Ruth said. “There’s an old barn back there.”

Ferrin’s house had been built on the site of an older home that had been demolished. There was nothing left of the place except an old well housing that was overgrown with vines and half-hidden by a tickle-tongue tree, that and the old barn in back. The barn was made of rusted tin and looked as if a good breeze would blow it over. The tin roof was peeled back in several places, revealing the wooden studs, and a couple of sections of tin were missing altogether.

“Let’s go see if he’s in the house before we check the barn,” Rhodes said.

He went by the garage first and looked into the pickup bed. The beer cans were still there, along with the dirt and the feathers that Rhodes had remembered. Rooster feathers, Rhodes was pretty sure.

Feathers, boots, a young man and his buddies at the cockfight, three young men wearing Western clothes and talking to Lige at the Palm Club. It all fit together, and it had all led Rhodes to believe that he’d been considering the wrong suspects. There was someone else who’d had contact with Lige, or Lige’s dead body, that Rhodes had been overlooking all along.

He left the truck and went to the front door. Ruth stood behind him near the door. There was a lighted doorbell button, and Rhodes pushed it. He heard a chime sound faintly inside the house. No one came to see who was there.

“I guess you were right about the barn,” Rhodes said. “Let’s go check it out.”

He started around the house. Ruth walked along beside him and drew her sidearm.

“You won’t need that,” Rhodes said, glancing over at her.

“Maybe not,” she said. “But I like to have it handy just in case.”

Rhodes didn’t say any more. Ruth had pulled him out of a tight spot once, and there had been more times than one when he had wished for a weapon that he didn’t have.

The barn door was open, and Rhodes could hear the roosters before he got to the barn. There weren’t many of them, but he was glad to know they were there. It made him feel better about his theory.

When they reached the barn, Rhodes motioned to Ruth to wait outside. He went through the door and saw Ferrin, who had his back to the door. He was holding a rooster and feeding it something with an eye dropper. The other end of the barn was open, and there was a large object there, covered with a dirty tarp.

“I didn’t know you kept roosters,” Rhodes said.

Ferrin wheeled around, keeping his grip on the rooster, which looked bug-eyed and frightened, though it didn’t make a sound. For all Rhodes knew, all fighting cocks looked that way.

“You ought to know better than to sneak up on a man like that, Sheriff,” Ferrin said. His eyes looked a little like the rooster’s. “Is this a social call or do you have something to say to me?”

“I wouldn’t say it was a social call,” Rhodes said.

“What’s it about then?”

“Murder,” Rhodes told him.

“Murder?  You’re joking, right?”

“I’m not joking.  You killed Lige Ward, and you killed his wife, Rayjean.”

Ferrin took a step forward. “Now wait a minute, Sheriff. You’ve got the wrong guy. I never killed anybody. Sure, me and the fellas shot up that little outhouse, but that dead man was already in it. We didn’t know that.”

“I’m not sure about the other two,” Rhodes said. “But you did.”

It was hot in the barn and dust swirled in the light of the late-afternoon sun that came in through the open spaces in the roof. There was sweat on Ferrin’s upper lip.

“You’ve got me mixed up with somebody else,” he said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I was with Kyle and Larry when Ward was shot.”

“No you weren’t. I didn’t remember until later, but you admitted that you went out to get beer. Those two were so drunk, they didn’t know how long you were gone. It’s not a five-minute drive from here to Obert. You had time to kill Lige, all right.”

“Are you supposed to be asking me this stuff without some kinda warnin’?”

“I’m glad to see that young people take such an interest in the law,” Rhodes said.

He got a card from his pocket and read off the Miranda warning. Ferrin listened with amusement.

“Just like on TV. But you’re all wrong about me, Sheriff.”

“I wish I was. But I’m not. I should’ve thought of it sooner, when Burl Griffin told me about the three men Wally Henry jumped at the Palm Club. That was the second time Lige had to pull him off you.”

“What if he did?” Ferrin asked.

“Wally was mad, but Lige persuaded him to go on home. Then he came back in and talked to you. I think he showed you something like this.”

Rhodes pulled the gaff that Lawton had made from his pocket and let Ferrin have a look at it.

“I never saw that before,” Ferrin said.

Rhodes thought the rooster’s eyes bulged a little more and wondered if Ferrin was squeezing it too tightly. He stuck the gaff back in his pocket.

“He wanted money from you, I guess,” Rhodes said. “Either you paid him, or he was going to tell Wally Henry that you used this gaff in the cockfight. Wally was already convinced that you did. That’s why he fought with you the first time.”

“You’ve sure got a good imagination, Sheriff,” Ferrin said.

“People keep telling me that. I wish I did, but I’m not making any of this up. I should have known it all came back to the gaff. Why else would Lige have been carrying it?”

“Beats me. Anyway, if I killed Lige, how did I do it?”

Rhodes wasn’t too clear on that, but he thought he had a pretty good idea.

“You went by his place after you told your buddies you were going for more beer. Maybe you just wanted to be sure about where he lived. But I think you happened to see him at Press Yardley’s emu pens, or maybe at Nard King’s. You figured he was up to something illegal, considering the time of night, so you stopped to make a bargain with him. You’d keep quiet if he would. He didn’t want to talk where he was and take a chance on getting caught by Yardley or on letting King know that he’d been seen, so he told you to drive on to his place and meet him at the cockpit. When he came, the two of you got in a scuffle, he lost the pistol he was carrying, and you shot him.”

Ferrin thought a second and then said, “That’s the craziest thing I ever heard.”

“Could be. But killing Mrs. Ward was nothing like that.”

“Why would I kill her?  She wasn’t trying to blackmail me like you say her husband was.”

“I think it was an accident,” Rhodes told him. “I think you switched the gaffs in the pit and hid the filed ones there. Maybe you buried them in the sand. I think Lige found one of them and the day after you killed him, you went back for the other one. Rayjean heard those guineas clattering when you drove by and went to see who was in her woods. Maybe you were scared; maybe you didn’t mean to hit her quite so hard. Or maybe you did.”

“You sound convinced I did it,” Ferrin said.

“I am. You were smart, though. Who’d ever believe that the person who killed Lige would be dumb enough to go shooting at the very outhouse he hid the body in?”

“That’s what I say. That’s so far-fetched,
I
sure don’t believe it.”

“It took me long enough to catch on,” Rhodes said. “I never even considered that you’d done it until I started hearing about Wally Henry fighting a young fella, or three young fellas at the Palm Club. But it was a pretty good plan. If bullets from that gun were in Lige, well, your pals were with you when you found it. They could vouch for that. All of you were shooting. Naturally a bullet or two might go through the walls. How were your buddies to know you’d planned it all along?

“I was too drunk to plan anything that night. You know that.”

“It had to be that way.” Rhodes paused. “You know, if you’d left Lige where he fell, you might’ve gotten away with it, but I think you were scared. You thought you had to hide the body, and then you realized you hadn’t hidden it very well. Besides, your fingerprints might be on the outhouse. After you moved it, that didn’t matter so much. There was a reason for them. Just three young guys, drinking and having a good time.”