Bill Crider - Dan Rhodes 07 - Murder Most Fowl (5 page)

When he came back, Rayjean was more composed, and Rhodes thought he could get away with a few questions.

“Can you think of anyone who might have wanted to hurt Lige?” he asked. “Anyone who might have had a fight with him recently?”

“Did somebody hurt him?” Rayjean asked. “You haven’t told me what happened.”

Ivy looked at Rhodes. He decided he’d better open up a little.

“It looks as if someone may have shot him,” he said. “But we’re not sure of that. It could have been something else entirely.”

“I can’t believe that,” Rayjean declared. “Everybody liked Lige. He was a well-respected merchant when we had the store, and people still remember that.”

“What about the neighbors?  Any quarrels?”

“No, never. Everyone around here liked Lige.”

Rhodes thought he detected a little uncertainty in her answer.

“What about Press Yardley?” he asked.

“Press?” she said, a little too quickly Rhodes thought. “Why he and Lige were friends. He’d never hurt Lige.”

“Didn’t he get upset by your guineas?”

“Oh, there was that, but it didn’t mean anything. I’d really rather not talk about it anymore, Sheriff, if that’s all right with you. Maybe later I can think better.”

Rhodes said that would be all right. He would talk to her again before the funeral.

“W
hat do you think?” Ivy said when she and Rhodes were in the county car again.

“About what?”

“Did she do it?”

“What makes you think that?”

“The wife’s always the first suspect in a case like that, isn’t she?”

“A case like what?” Rhodes asked.

“You know. The husband is drinking too much, leaving her alone. He had to close his store, and he probably wasn’t much fun to have around the house all the time.”

Rhodes smiled. “I guess I shouldn’t be considering retirement anytime soon.”

“It wouldn’t bother me,” Ivy said. “Not as long as I didn’t give up my job.”

“At least you don’t have to worry about elections,” Rhodes said. “Anyway, I don’t think she killed him.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t think she was strong enough to put him in that portable toilet.”

“What if he was already in there?”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Rhodes admitted.

“And what about the emus?” Ivy said. “Could that be connected?”

That was something that Rhodes
had
thought about. Yardley was right next door to Lige, after all.

“We’ll see,” he said.

P
ress Yardley had called himself an antique dealer before he quit to go into the emu business, though Rhodes thought a more accurate term would have been “junk dealer.”  He had kept a few items from his store and he sold something now and then, things like churns, doorstops, lightning rods, and whatever else he had picked up cheap and could sell at a hefty profit.

There was a barbed wire fence around Yardley’s property, and the open gate was flanked by two remnants of the antique trade, huge wooden Indians, both nearly ten feet tall. They had once been brightly painted, but the paint had mostly faded or flaked off by now, and one of the Indians had been attacked by termites. He looked as if he might have a bad case of smallpox. A hand-painted sign beside him said,

ANTIQUES FOR SALE

MONDAY-SATURDAY 9:00-5:00

CLOSED ON SUNDAY

There was another sign, too, that said, “BEWARE OF THE DOG.”

R
hodes pulled up beside the house and stopped. The emus didn’t seem disturbed at all by the noise of the car, but a large collie dog, no doubt the one to beware of, ran out from the garage and started barking. The barking didn’t bother the emus any more than the car had.

The dog ran to the car and jumped up on the door. He put his paws on the window glass and continued to bark. He looked to Rhodes to be about three-fourths collie and one-fourth something unidentifiable.

Rhodes sat in the car until Press Yardley came out of the garage and called off the dog. The animal trotted over to Yardley and tried to jump up on him and lick his face. Yardley put a knee into his stomach and took him to the garage, where he clipped the dog’s collar to a chain that was attached to the garage wall.

“He wouldn’t hurt you,” Yardley said when Rhodes got out of the car. Yardley was a soft, round man with short arms and short legs. “He damn sure didn’t hurt whoever it was that got my emus.”

“Didn’t he bark?” Rhodes asked.

“If he did, I didn’t hear him.”

“When were they stolen?”

Yardley didn’t know, exactly. “Probably last night. I went into Obert for a few minutes. Had to buy some groceries. It could’ve been then.”

“You didn’t leave anyone here to watch the birds?”  Rhodes asked. It was a legitimate question; there were some emu owners who wouldn’t even think about leaving home without posting an armed guard.

“Of course not,” Yardley said. “I live off the main road, and nobody ever comes by here. I didn’t think anyone even knew I had emus.”

“Somebody did,” Rhodes pointed out. “When did you find out the birds were missing?”

“Just this afternoon. I came out to look at them and noticed that they weren’t all in the pen. I thought some of them might be in the barn there.”

He pointed to a low building that didn’t look much like a barn to Rhodes. It was connected to the pens and the birds could go in and out.

“But they weren’t in the barn,” Rhodes said.

“No, they weren’t. And they aren’t anywhere on the place. You’ve got to do something, Sheriff. Those birds were worth a lot of money.”

“Were they a breeding pair?”

“No, thank goodness. But there were two females. I want them back.”

Rhodes looked at the gravel drive. Not much chance of tire tracks there, but the ground over by the pens was soft. If whoever had stolen the birds had driven to the fence, there might be an impression. Or maybe there were footprints. He walked over to look.

“Don’t go over by the gate,” Rhodes told Ivy, who was coming along to look at the emus. “There might be some prints there.”

Ivy turned aside and walked up to the fence well away from the gate. She put her fingers in the wire and looked through the fence at the emus. Most of them were about as tall as she was, and some of them were even taller. They had grayish-brown feathers and partially bald heads that looked almost blue. One of them made a noise that sounded a little like a bass drum.

“What are they good for, anyway?” she asked Yardley, who had followed Rhodes to the fence.

“Good for?  You mean you don’t know?”  Yardley appeared astonished to hear that there was anyone who hadn’t heard all about emus.

“I really don’t,” Ivy said. “I thought you could tell me, if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind. They’re pretty interesting, actually. For one thing, you know how everyone always tells you that some kind of meat you’ve never tried before tastes like chicken?”

“Yes,” Ivy said. “I’ve been told that about rattlesnake and alligator both. Are you saying that emus taste like chicken?”

“Nope. That’s the best part. They’re birds, but they
don’t
taste like chicken. They’ve got red meat that’s more like beef except that it’s higher in protein and lower in cholesterol and fat. And their hide’s good for leather, just like a cow’s. Not only that, they’ve got a strip of fat that runs down their backs. You can render that down and use it in cosmetics. Cures arthritis, too.”

Ivy watched the big birds stalking around. They weren’t much to look at, though if Yardley was telling the truth, it was no wonder that everyone wanted to raise them.

“Are they hard to take care of?” she asked.

“Nope. They don’t need much acreage to roam around in, they don’t get any diseases, and the females can give you as many as forty chicks a year if you’re lucky. Besides that, it costs about forty dollars a month to feed one. Try to feed a cow for that.”

“But what do you do with them?  I know you said the meat is good and that you can make cosmetics from the fat—”

“Don’t forget about curing arthritis,” Yardley said.

“—and cure arthritis, but I haven’t seen any emu meat for sale in the stores. I haven’t seen any advertisements for emu-based skin creams or arthritis cures. And I don’t think I’ve ever seen any emu-skin boots.”

Yardley sighed. “I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that the only people making any money from emus are the ones who sell them to people like me. But you’re wrong.”  He thought about it. “Well, I guess you’re partially right. But you just wait. In five or six years, there’ll be slaughterhouses all around to take advantage of the meat and the hides. And another thing. I hear that some scientists are trying to transplant emu corneas in human eyes. And it’s working!  If that’s right, everybody in the state will be trying to get into the business.”

“It looks to me like everybody is trying to do that now,” Rhodes said, joining them at the fence.

“Not everybody. It’s a breeder’s market right now, though, that’s for sure. I was going to sell a couple of my females to Nard King, but —”

“What’s the matter?” Rhodes asked.

“You know Nard King?”

“I don’t think so.”

“He lives on down this road, about a half a mile past Lige Ward’s place. Bought the old Garrett place about a month ago to put in an emu farm. I wonder if he decided that he could get those birds cheaper by stealing them than by paying for them. He might have, if he’s got his pens finished yet.”

“He’s just getting started on the building?” Rhodes said.

“Yes, but it’s going to be a big operation when he’s done. He’s getting a lot of pens built already, and he was looking around for some birds. A lot of birds. I don’t think he could get as many as he wanted in one place, so he’s been talking to a lot of owners. As many as he wants, the price would add up.”

“Could you identify your emus if I found them?”

“I think so,” Yardley said, but he didn’t look too sure of it.

“I guess I’d better talk to King, then,” Rhodes said.

Yardley agreed. “I think that would be a good idea.”

“I’ll do it. There’s something else I want to do, too. I’ll be sending a deputy out to make some casts of impressions around this fence. Don’t go walking around out here until that’s done.”

“You found something?” Yardley said.

Rhodes was noncommittal. “Maybe. I’ll let you know. Meanwhile, you need to keep a better watch on these pens.”

“Maybe I should just buy a better dog.”

“Or you could get some guineas,” Ivy said.

It was a hot day, and Yardley’s round face was already red, but now it got redder still. “Don’t talk to me about guineas. I’ve had to listen to those stupid birds of Lige Ward’s cackling day and night for years.”

In fact, Rhodes remembered, it was the noise from the guineas that had prompted Yardley’s calls to the Sheriff’s Department to complain about his neighbor.

“If it was up to me,” Yardley continued, “there wouldn’t be any guineas left in the world.”

“They might scare away a bird rustler,” Rhodes said.

 “I’d rather have rustlers, then. Don’t talk to me about any guineas.”

Rhodes and Ivy got into the county car and drove through Yardley’s gate. As they passed the wooden Indians, Ivy started humming “Kaw-Liga.”

“You’re dating yourself,” Rhodes told her.

“I was thinking about the Charlie Pride version,” Ivy said. “Not the one by Hank Williams.”

“Oh.”

“So who’s showing his age now?”

“Me, I guess,” Rhodes said.

Ivy changed the subject. “Do you think he did it?”

“Did what?  Stole his own emus?”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Ivy said. “I meant, do you think he killed Lige Ward?”

“You mean you don’t think Lige’s wife did it?”

Ivy made a fist and hit Rhodes in the shoulder. “Maybe she did. But Mr. Yardley got really upset when I mentioned those guineas.”

Rhodes had to admit that she was right. “But I don’t think he’d kill somebody just because those birds were too noisy.”

“You never know about some people,” Ivy said.

Rhodes nodded. She was right about that, too.

Chapter Four

R
hodes didn’t go directly to King’s place. That would have to wait. Instead he took Ivy home, told her that he probably wouldn’t be back in time for supper, and drove to Clyde Ballinger’s funeral home, a huge red-brick building that had once been Clearview’s most impressive mansion. The green lawn was shaded by tall oak trees, and there was a metal statue of a mountain lion or some such animal in the front yard.

Ballinger had his private office in the small house in back of the main building. He regarded the office as his special place, and he didn’t allow many visitors to enter it. Rhodes was one of those who had the privilege.

Rhodes knocked on the door and went in without waiting for an answer. He knew that Ballinger would be on the premises, what with a “client” having been sent by the Sheriff’s Department.

He was right. Ballinger was sitting at his old wooden desk, his feet propped up on top of it, reading a book. Ballinger, who loved old paperback mystery and crime novels that he bought at garage sales, was always reading when he got the chance.

The funeral director put his feet down when he saw Rhodes and stuck a piece of paper in the book he had been reading before closing it.

“Hey, Sheriff,” he said. “You’re causing more trouble, I see.”

“I’m not the one causing it,” Rhodes said. “I’m just trying to keep up with it.”

“You’re causing it for
me
,” Ballinger pointed out. “That’s what I meant. And now I’m about to cause it for you.”

“How?” Rhodes asked.

“You can’t get an autopsy done here anymore, that’s how.”

Ballinger was short and fat, and he was usually smiling and happy, the exact opposite of everyone’s idea of a funeral director. But today, he wasn’t smiling. He didn’t look at all happy, either.

“Why not?” Rhodes asked. “What’s the matter?”

“Dr. White says he’s not going to do it anymore. He says that it’s too dangerous.”