Bill Crider - Dan Rhodes 07 - Murder Most Fowl (23 page)

“And you didn’t see anyone else at the cockpit, anyone that might’ve killed Lige?”

“Not a soul. ’Course all I wanted was to get out of there. I wasn’t lookin’ behind the trees.”

Besides, Ferrin said, it hadn’t been his idea at all to steal the outhouse. He had brought back the beer, and Larry and Kyle wanted to go riding around. Ferrin had driven them out to Obert, but they were the ones who insisted he turn down the road by King’s; and they were the ones who wanted to steal the building. They thought it would be fun, and they were so emphatic that Ferrin, who wasn’t as drunk as they were, hadn’t seen any way to refuse. He found the pistol near the outhouse, but he didn’t remember whose idea it had been to shoot holes in the portable building. It was fun; any of them might have thought of it.

Everything else had been pretty much the way Rhodes reconstructed it. Lige had contended at the Palm Club that he didn’t want to see Ferrin get hurt, but he had the evidence that Wally Henry had been cheated, and everyone knew that Wally didn’t have much patience with cheaters. So Ferrin had grudgingly agreed to pay Lige off, though he really didn’t intend to do it.

Ferrin had been looking for Lige’s house when he spotted him at Yardley’s. He’d driven out there because he was a little drunk, and he thought he might just do some damage to Lige’s house or property in revenge for Lige’s shakedown attempt. Seeing Lige taking the emus, Ferrin thought he might get off the hook by having something on Lige, so he stopped. They agreed to meet at the cockpit. Ferrin went, got shoved around, and left.

“I didn’t shoot him,” Ferrin insisted. “He was alive when I left there.”

Rayjean Ward’s death was something else again, and Ferrin regretted having caused it.

“I didn’t mean to hurt her,” he said. “She came runnin’ down there all excited and wanted to know what I was doin’. I told her I was just lookin’ for something, but she didn’t believe me. She started yellin’ and tryin’ to hit me, so I hit her back. I didn’t mean to hit her hard enough to kill her, but she was goin’ wild. I just swung my hand to keep her off me. That’s self-defense, right?”

“I’m not a lawyer,” Rhodes said, scratching a fire ant bite on the back of his leg.

“I guess I better get me one, then,” Ferrin said, but he’d talked too much already.

L
ige and Rayjean Ward were buried the next day in a little country cemetery not far from where they had lived most of their lives. It was in a quiet grove of cedar trees just off a dirt road, and it was surrounded by a wrought iron fence that needed paint. No sounds from the highway reached there; the only noises were the trills of the birds and the wind in the cedars. There weren’t many graves, not more than thirty, and a few of them dated back to the last century.

There was nothing new or modern about the place. It wasn’t lighted at night, and there wasn’t even a sign to call attention to it. The members of the cemetery association paid someone to keep the weeds cut and the grass mowed, but there was nothing they could do about the monuments, some of which were so old that the inscriptions were weathered almost away. Rhodes thought it was probably the kind of place Ward would have wanted to be buried, a long way from discount centers and supermarkets.

There weren’t many mourners, and most of those who were there were people who remembered the Wards from their days at the hardware store, old customers come to pay their last respects. Rhodes and Ivy were there because Rhodes thought he owed it to the Wards. He knew there was nothing he could have done to prevent the murders, but somehow he felt a sense of responsibility. Probably because of all that dog food he’d bought at Wal-Mart, he thought.

It was a hot day, but the shade of the cedars kept things from being too unpleasant. Still, Rhodes was uncomfortable because he was wearing an Ace bandage on his ankle, and the bandage was making him itch. He tried to ignore the itching and listen to the preacher.

Brother Alton conducted the funeral and led the hymns. The sunlight flashed off the lenses of his glasses as he spoke and sang. The songs were “We’re Marching to Zion,” which Rhodes liked because it didn’t drag and because Brother Alton did the bass part on the chorus, and one about coming to the garden alone, which Rhodes could have done without. Much too slow.

Press Yardley and Nard King were there, too, though Rhodes noticed that they avoided standing anywhere near one another. As the mourners were leaving, Ivy went to speak to Rayjean’s sister, while Rhodes walked over to Yardley, who was wiping his eyes with a handkerchief.

“I don’t want to talk about this,” Yardley said, folding his handkerchief and putting it back into the inside pocket of the dark suit coat he was wearing.

Rhodes wasn’t surprised. “I know you don’t, but I have to say a few things to you.”

Yardley followed the sheriff over to the shade of a tall cedar and looked back at the graves.

“I know what Rayjean and I did was wrong,” he said. “But it was Lige’s fault. He never touched her after the store closed down.”

“I thought you didn’t want to talk about it,” Rhodes said.

“You’re right. I don’t. What did you want to say to me?”

“It has to do with guineas,” Rhodes told him.

“Guineas?  Whose?”

“Lige’s. The thing is, Michael Ferrin admits that he killed Rayjean, but not Lige. I’ve been thinking about that. Why admit one murder and not the other?  It doesn’t make sense, not if you were guilty of both of them.”

“The talk is that he’s going for self-defense on Rayjean’s murder,” Yardley said. “Maybe he didn’t think he could get away with that on Lige.”

“Maybe,” Rhodes said. “But I was talking it over with Ivy last night, and she asked me something. She asked me why Rayjean didn’t hear the guineas.”

Yardley looked wary, but he kept his voice level. “When do you mean?”

“When Lige drove by the house the night he was killed. And when Ferrin followed him. Those guineas would’ve set up a clatter you could hear all the way to your house.”

“So what?  I don’t see the problem.”

Rhodes looked over at the other mourners. They were moving away from the grave now. Ivy was talking to Rayjean’s sister, and a few people were talking to Brother Alton, probably telling him what a nice funeral it had been. Ruth Grady was standing off to one side because Rhodes had asked her to come, just in case.

“I think you do see the problem,” Rhodes told Yardley. “If a woman was worried about her husband coming home, she’d hear the guineas. If a man were somewhere that he wasn’t supposed to be, he’d hear them, too. When Ivy and I left your house the day I came to check on your emus, she told me that you got really upset when she mentioned the guineas. You did hear them that night, didn’t you?”

“Maybe. I don’t remember.”

“You remember, all right. What if I were to tell you that Ferrin saw you walking down toward the cockpit that night?”

“He couldn’t have. I—”

“He couldn’t have?  Because you hid when you saw his truck?  How do you know he didn’t stop and look back when he got to the road?”

If Yardley had been a hardened criminal, he might have pulled it off. He’d lied pretty well so far. But he was just an ordinary man who’d gotten into a situation he could no longer control. His shoulders slumped and he looked at the ground.

“That was quite a story you told me about the gun,” Rhodes said. “It fooled me for a while, but you killed Lige, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” Yardley said, almost as if he were glad to get it off his chest. “I did.”

He rode back to town with Ruth in the county car. Ivy drove Yardley’s car, and Rhodes went back alone.

“I
can’t believe it,” Hack said. “We had him dead to rights from the minute my computer told us who that gun belonged to, and you let him off the hook.”

Lawton was on Rhodes’ side, most likely because he was tired of hearing Hack brag about his electronic marvel. “Mr. Yardley said Lige took the pistol away from him, remember?  How was anybody to know any different?”

“A lawman’s supposed to know when somebody’s lyin’,” Hack said. “The sheriff tells us all the time how that’s one thing that makes him different from the computer. Ain’t that right, Sheriff?  A computer can’t tell if somebody’s lyin’, but a man can.”

“Not always,” Rhodes said. “And the story he told made him look so bad, I figured at first that it had to be the truth. When a man lies, he usually doesn’t tell a story that puts him in such a bad light.”

He didn’t add that he had suspected Yardley’s story from the beginning. He didn’t think it would make any difference to Hack, and it probably wouldn’t.

But the truth was that Yardley had never lost his gun to Lige at all. The confrontation that Yardley described had taken place, but Lige hadn’t taken the gun from him. Yardley had never gotten it out of hiding that day. Instead he had denied everything to Lige. He swore that there was nothing going on between himself and Rayjean, and he had thought Lige was convinced.

Nevertheless, he’d taken the pistol along on his visit to Rayjean, just in case. When they’d heard the guineas, she asked him to go and investigate. He didn’t see Lige’s truck drive by, but he saw Ferrin’s, though of course he didn’t know who it belonged to. Rayjean was scared that someone was after something or somebody. So Yardley had gotten dressed and started walking down to the cockpit.

“I walked off the road, so no one would see me if they left,” he said. “Before I got there, the red truck drove back by, but I was lying in the weeds so the driver couldn’t see me. When he was gone, I walked the rest of the way. Lige was there.”

Yardley had tried to sneak away without being seen, but Lige heard him and caught up to him. They went back to the cockpit, with Yardley trying to explain what he was doing there and Lige adding two and two together.

“He was already mad,” Yardley said. “You could see it in his eyes. And when he made up his mind that he’d been right all along about me and Rayjean, he was ready to kill me. I pulled out the pistol, and he tried to grab it. I guess I pulled the trigger.”

Another self-defense plea, Rhodes thought, or maybe Yardley was trying for calling it an accidental shooting. Involuntary manslaughter.

“What about hiding the body?” he asked.

“That was my idea,” Yardley admitted. “I thought maybe Nard King would get the blame. He’s new around here; nobody knows him. Maybe people would think he caught Lige fooling around his emu pens.” Yardley gave a rueful laugh. “I went home and got my truck, put Lige in it and took him to the outhouse. I guess that’s when I lost the pistol. It was stuck in my belt, and it probably fell out when I was wrestling Lige into the outhouse. I never noticed it was gone until the next day, and then it was too late to go back and look for it.”

“So you didn’t know that Lige had stolen your emus?”

“Not then,” Yardley said. “I found that out the next day, too. Kind of ironic that Lige had been stealing from me while I was at his house with his wife.”

“You weren’t trying to implicate King because he was a thief, then?”

“No. But knowing what I know now, I wish he’d been blamed. It might’ve worked if those stupid kids hadn’t stolen the outhouse.”

Rhodes wasn’t so sure about that, but stranger things had happened. What he wondered now was why Yardley had reported his emus being stolen. Why bother to call attention to himself that way?

“I had to. Rayjean said we had to carry on as if nothing had happened. What would King have thought if I hadn’t reported the theft?  He knew they were stolen. He had ’em. And if it hadn’t been him, someone else would’ve known. So I had to report it. Otherwise, everyone would’ve been suspicious.”  He paused. “Do you think I’ll ever get them back?”

“No,” Rhodes said. “I don’t think so.”

T
wo days later, Rhodes was at the jail working on a report about a damaged electric gate. Someone driving down a county road had shot a hole through the control center, freezing the gate closed, and the owner wanted blood.

The telephone rang, and Hack answered.

“Sheriff’s Department,” he said, and then listened for a minute. “Stolen emus, huh? Seems like there’s a regular epidemic of that ’round here lately.” He listened some more. “All right. I’ll tell the sheriff, and he’ll send somebody out there.”

He started to hang up the phone, and Rhodes could hear a voice yelling on the other end. Hack put the phone back to his ear and listened.

Then he said, “Yessir, we’ll get right on it. We won’t keep you waitin’.”  He hung up and turned to Rhodes. “You wanta do this one?  You can put off that report for a while.”

That sounded like a good idea to Rhodes, except for the part about the emus. He’d had enough to do with stolen emus, not to mention roosters and guineas, to last him for a long time.

“Who was that?” he asked.

“That’s the part you’re gonna like,” Hack said.

“Good. Tell me who it was, then.”

“You don’t wanta guess?”

“No,” Rhodes said. “This is supposed to be a professional law enforcement operation. I don’t want to guess.”

“You don’t have to get huffy about it.”

Rhodes took a deep breath. “I’m not getting huffy. Now, who was it?”

“Nard King,” Hack said.

R
hodes looked at the emu pens. Some of the birds were still there. He asked how many were missing.

“Two,” King said. “And what’re you gonna do about it?” His face was red, as if his blood pressure was up quite a few points.

“Do you have the bills of sale?” Rhodes asked.

King exploded. “Hell no, I don’t!  I told you I didn’t! What difference does that make?”

“If you don’t have a bill of sale, you can’t prove you owned those birds,” Rhodes explained.

“You saw ’em!  They were right out there in the pens!”

“I saw some emus. But to tell you the truth I can’t tell one from the other. How can I identify them?”

“Some sheriff you are!” King said. “Letting a man’s emus get stolen right in front of your nose!”

“You’re probably right about that,” Rhodes said, knowing he’d surely lost a vote in the next election. “You ought to get a quieter air-conditioner. Then maybe you could hear what was going on around here.”