Bill Crider - Dan Rhodes 07 - Murder Most Fowl (8 page)

There was a light breeze from the west, and Rhodes waited by the car for a minute to enjoy it. It was very quiet in the country. Rhodes thought he heard a car whoosh by on the main road, but that might have been his imagination; he was a good three-quarters of a mile from the pavement. There was also a mechanical clanking that Rhodes couldn’t quite identify.

He could hear some birds down in the woods as they settled into the trees for the night, and somewhere in the distance a dog barked. Probably at Press Yardley’s house.

There was a light in the front room of King’s house, and Rhodes stepped up on the porch. The door opened before he could knock and a man peered at him through the screen.

“What do you want?” he said.

Rhodes identified himself and explained that he was there to ask about some stolen emus.

“Well, come on in then,” King said. “If you’re the sheriff, there’s no use in you having to stand out there on the porch. Nobody’s stolen any of my emus, though.”

He pushed open the screen and Rhodes walked into the living room. The floor was bare except for a couple of throw rugs. A window-unit air-conditioner clanked and clattered. That was the noise that Rhodes had heard in the yard but had been unable to identify. It was much louder in the house.

There was no couch in the room, only a card table and four folding chairs. There wasn’t even a TV set. A paperback book called SONS OF LIBERTY was splayed spine up on the table. A pair of half-glasses lay by the book.

King noticed Rhodes looking around the room. “I don’t have much furniture yet,” he said. “I just bought this place, and I didn’t want to buy anything right off. I’m waiting until I get the new house finished.”

King looked to Rhodes to be about fifty-five. He was thin, with a tanned, wrinkled face, and he looked as if he’d spent a lot of time outdoors. He was wearing jeans and a plain cotton short-sleeved shirt. His hands were calloused, and his arms were corded with muscle.

“When did you move to Obert?” Rhodes asked.

King walked over to the card table and pulled out a chair. “Have a seat. No use to stand up.”

Rhodes went over and sat. King sat on the other side of the table and pushed the book out of his way.

“I’ve been here about a month,” King said. “I moved down from Dallas. Worked at Super-Tex Freight Lines there for thirty years, mostly doing local deliveries. I retired a couple of months ago and decided to invest in an emu ranch.”

“Why emus?” Rhodes asked. He was genuinely curious.

King leaned forward on the table. “Well, that’s kind of interesting. I was thinking about cattle, to tell the truth. I grew up around cattle, and I always thought I’d like to have me a little ranch when I retired. So I went down to that big livestock show they have in Houston every year to see about getting started in the cattle business. While I was there, I saw this ostrich booth.”

“Ostriches?”

“Right. There’s a lot of ostrich ranches in Texas, but I thought better of that. They’re too much trouble. They’re bigger than emus, and they can hurt you if you’re not careful. Kick the devil out of you; kick harder than emus, even. And they’re not as resistant to disease.”

“So you went with emus.”

“Right. There was a booth there about them, too. I’m just getting started, but I’ll have me a pretty good ranch here before long, soon as I can get me some more birds.” King looked at Rhodes sharply. “What’s this about some birds being stolen, anyway? Happen around here?”

Rhodes told him about Yardley’s emus.

King was thoughtful. “Yardley, huh?  I talked to him about buying some of his stock, but he didn’t much want to sell.”

“How well do you know your other neighbors?” Rhodes asked.

“The Wards?  Just well enough to talk to. I haven’t seen much of ’em but they seem like nice folks. Mr. Ward doesn’t like being retired as much as I do.”

Rhodes told King about Lige’s death. King reacted with surprise.

“Dead?  Why I just saw him —” King broke off.

“When did you see him?”

King looked at the Revolutionary soldier portrayed on the spine of SONS OF LIBERTY as if the man were incredibly interesting.

Then he looked back at Rhodes. “Well, I don’t remember, exactly, but it must’ve been just the other day.”

“He was killed last night,” Rhodes said. “You didn’t see him then, by any chance?”

“Nope. Sure didn’t. I was here reading this book last night.”  King reached over and pulled the book across the table. “I didn’t see anybody all night. How’d he get killed?  Car wreck?”

“I’m not sure,” Rhodes said. He didn’t see any reason yet to tell King that he was sure Ward had been murdered.

“Well, I’m sorry to hear it. Like I said, he and his wife seem like nice folks.”

Rhodes brought the subject back to the emus. “What about those four emus of yours that I saw in the pens out there?  Where did you buy them?”

It was cool in the room, but King was sweating. “Different places. It’s hard to find any for sale around here.”

“You have the bills of sale?” Rhodes asked.

“That’s right. I have the bills of sale. Sure do.”

“Where are they?”

King looked around the room, then looked back at the book. He reached out and turned the book around. He looked at it a second before turning it back.

“They’re around here somewhere. I probably stuck ’em in a drawer.”

“Why don’t you see if you can find them?” Rhodes suggested.

“It might take a while,” King said. “I don’t really try to keep up with stuff like that. I’m not real businesslike. I just stick things someplace. Probably in a drawer.”

It was Rhodes’ turn to look around the room.

“There don’t seem to be a lot of drawers to stick things in,” he observed.

“You should see the kitchen,” King said. “Cabinets and drawers all over the place. And the bedroom. It’s a real mess. I have a dresser in there, and a desk, too.”

“I’d still like to see those bills of sale,” Rhodes said. “Even if it is a little trouble to find them.”

King stood up. “Right. Well, if you’ll come back tomorrow, I’ll have ’em for you. It’s just that I can’t put my hand on ’em right this minute.”

Rhodes stood up as well. “All right. I’ll be back tomorrow.”

“Right. I’ll have those bills of sale for you, too.”

“I’m sure you will,” Rhodes told him.

A
fter he left King’s place, Rhodes drove back to the main road and on up the hill into Obert, past the old college and down a gravel road to the Appleby house. It was fully dark now, and Rhodes’ headlights burned a tunnel down the road.

The Applebys had been involved in the cattle rustling case that Dr. Slick had helped Rhodes with, not to mention a murder at the old college building on the hill. They were what Rhodes supposed the newspapers would call a “dysfunctional family,” but they were getting along better now that Mr. Appleby was residing in one of the state penitentiary units.

Mrs. Appleby hadn’t found a job yet, but Twyla Faye, the daughter, was working as a checker at the supermarket next to Wal-Mart, and Claude and Clyde, the twins, were planning to get back into school in the fall.

The Applebys were at home, as Rhodes had thought they would be. Mrs. Appleby was glad to see the sheriff, and she tried to get him to eat some supper.

“We just finished,” she said. “There’s some fried chicken left, and some cream gravy.”

Rhodes hadn’t had any fried chicken or cream gravy in months. Probably years. And now that he’d married Ivy, he wasn’t likely to have any. She was a big believer in eating healthy foods, which was why he had tried to get her to settle for a dinner at the Jolly Tamale.

Rhodes was strongly tempted by the offer of the fried chicken. But he’d noticed lately that it was slightly easier to get his belt buckled in the mornings, so he thought that he might actually have lost a pound or two. With regret, he declined the offer.

“Well, then, is this a social visit, or did you have some news for us?”

“No news,” Rhodes told her. “I just needed a little information, and I hoped the twins might be able to help me out.”

“They will if they can,” Mrs. Appleby said. “Claude! Clyde! You two come in here.”

Rhodes knew that Mrs. Appleby would see to it that the twins cooperated. They owed him a favor; he’d managed to keep them out of jail by minimizing their part in the recent Obert crime spree.

The twins came in from another room. They were big, moon-faced young men, and Rhodes couldn’t tell them apart. But that was all right. For what he wanted, he didn’t have to know which one he was talking to.

“Sheriff Rhodes wants to say somethin’ to you,” Mrs. Appleby told her sons. “He says he needs a little help, and I told him you’d be glad to give it to him.”

Claude and Clyde stood there looking at Rhodes. They might have appreciated what he’d done for them, but you’d never know it by looking at them.

“I’d like to talk to them alone,” he told Mrs. Appleby.

“Why sure, I understand. I’ll just go in the other room and watch TV with Twyla Faye. You call me if you need anything.”

“I will,” Rhodes said.

When she’d gone into the other room, he turned his attention to the twins, who were still looking at him. Now that their mother was out of the room, a certain amount of wariness had entered their gaze.

“There’s nothing for you to be worried about,” Rhodes told them. “This isn’t about you.”

The twins looked at one another and then back at Rhodes. They didn’t look any less apprehensive.

“It’s about somebody else entirely,” Rhodes assured them. “All I want to know is whether you’ve heard about something that might be going on around here. There’s nothing wrong with hearing things.”

“What things?” the twin on Rhodes’ left asked. Rhodes thought that one was Claude, but he wasn’t quite sure.

“I wondered if you knew anything about a cockfight,” Rhodes said. “I heard there might have been one around here lately.”

If there was anyone in Obert who would know about a cockfight, it was Claude and Clyde. They had a way of getting around the town and finding out things.

They didn’t look as if they wanted to tell Rhodes anything, however.

“Cockfighting’s against the law,” the twin who might have been Claude said.

“That’s right. They’re against the law,” the other twin—Clyde?—said piously. “And we don’t have anything to do with stuff that’s against the law. We’ve learned our lesson.”

“I didn’t say you had anything to do with it,” Rhodes told them. “I just wondered if you might have heard something. There’s no law against hearing something.”

The twins looked at one another again. Rhodes wondered if there was anything to that old tale about twins being able to communicate with one another without talking.

“Maybe we heard something,” Clyde said. “But that’s all. We just heard something.”

Rhodes nodded to show that he understood. “Why don’t you just tell me what you heard, then?”

“We heard there was a cockfight out in the woods behind Lige Ward’s place last month,” Clyde said. “We heard that there was another one yesterday.”

“Did you hear the names of anybody that was at these fights?”

“No,” Claude said. “No names. Just that there was gonna be fights.”

It was possible that the twins hadn’t been at either fight. They might have been afraid of what would happen to them if there had been a raid. Even if they had been there, or if they had heard any names, Rhodes didn’t really expect them to tell him. It didn’t matter. Later, he might have to talk to them again about that, but for now he’d found out what he’d come to learn.

He thanked the twins, and they went back into the other room. Mrs. Appleby came out.

“Did they help you any?” she asked.

“They did,” Rhodes said.  “I appreciate it.”

“They’re good boys,” Mrs. Appleby said, as if she were trying to convince herself as much as Rhodes. “Are you sure you can’t stay and have a piece of that chicken? There’s a drumstick left, for sure.”

Rhodes could almost taste the batter on the drumstick, but he said, “I wish I could, but I’ve got to go home. My wife’s expecting me.”

Mrs. Appleby smiled. She’d met Ivy. “You tell her I said hello.”

“I’ll do that,” Rhodes said.

Chapter Six

I
t had taken a while for Ivy to get used to Rhodes’ being away from home so much at night, and Rhodes knew that she didn’t like it. She’d begun to accept it as a part of his job that he could do nothing about, however.

When he got in from Obert, she had supper waiting for him. It wasn’t fried chicken. It was a sandwich of sliced turkey breast on whole wheat bread. Rhodes would have preferred baloney, but he didn’t say so.

 He looked in the refrigerator for something to drink. He was hoping for Dr Pepper, but he knew there wouldn’t be any. There was skim milk and grape juice.

He chose the milk.

Ivy sat at the table with him while he ate. “I’ve been thinking,” she said.

“About what?”

“You know. About Lige Ward. Do you want to know what I think happened?”

Rhodes was agreeable. “Sure. You mean you already know who killed him?”

“What if Press Yardley and Mrs. Ward were having an affair? Did you think about that?”

Rhodes took a drink of milk. It was cold, but it didn’t have much taste. He set the glass back on the table.

“It never entered my mind,” he said.

“I don’t know why not. Mrs. Ward’s not that old, and I can imagine what it was like around that house. Lige was really bitter about having to close his store, and he probably took it out on her. She might’ve wanted to talk to someone about it, and Press Yardley was right there. Sometimes a sympathetic listener can become more than just a listener.”

Rhodes took a bite of the sandwich, which had a little more taste to it than the milk. It would’ve been even better with a few spoonfuls of Miracle Whip on it, but Ivy thought that Miracle Whip had too much fat in it. Rhodes had tried the new nonfat Miracle Whip, and he hated it. So now he was eating his sandwiches with mustard. He didn’t much like mustard, but without it the turkey tasted a little like typing paper.