Bill Crider - Dan Rhodes 09 - Death by Accident (12 page)

Rhodes had taken the whistle out of the toy, which was shaped like a frog, so Speedo wouldn’t accidentally choke on it, but Speedo didn’t seem to miss the whistle.  He liked the toy anyway.

Rhodes threw the rubber frog, and Speedo charged off after it.  He over-ran it, skidded to a stop, spun around, and grabbed the toy in his mouth.  Instead of taking it to Rhodes, however, he put it on the ground between his front legs and waited expectantly.

Rhodes walked over slowly, as if he had nothing better to do.  Speedo wasn’t fooled.  His eyes followed Rhodes’s every move.

Rhodes pretended to be completely uninterested in the frog.  He looked up at the bare trees and the dark sky, then turned away.  Speedo remained frozen in place, and Rhodes quickly turned back, bending down and reaching for the toy.

Just before Rhodes’s fingers touched it, Speedo snatched it up and ran for the other side of the yard.  When he got there, he put the frog down on the grass and waited.  Rhodes obliged him, and they went through the entire routine again.

And again.  After about ten minutes of the game, Rhodes was getting tired.  Not Speedo.  He would have kept it up all day if Rhodes had been willing.

Rhodes rubbed the dog’s head and went to sit on the back steps where he could be out of the wind.  Speedo, knowing that the game was over, left the frog in the grass and came over to sit by Rhodes.

“What do you think, Speedo?” Rhodes said.

Speedo, who apparently found the question a little vague, kept quiet.

“Here’s the thing,” Rhodes said.  “We have three accidents.  Or that’s what they seem like.  The hit-and-run, that’s a crime for sure.  The other two aren’t so easy to figure.”

Speedo looked at Rhodes and gave a friendly growl.

“That’s what I think, too,” Rhodes said.  “There’s no reason why there has to be a connection between one or the other of them, but I think there is one.  I think somebody killed all three of those men.”

Speedo didn’t comment.  He got up and walked over to his food bowl and nosed around in it.  There wasn’t much there, but he ate what he could find.  Then he went to his water dish and started lapping noisily.

“I don’t even know if it’s the same somebody,” Rhodes said.  “It could be that somebody read about the hit-and-run and then decided to kill the other people and make the killings look like accidents.”

Speedo came back to the steps and sat down.  He put his head on Rhodes’s knee.

“What would you do if you were me?” Rhodes asked, rubbing Speedo’s head.

Speedo wagged his tail.  It lashed against Rhodes’s ankle and against the step.

“I don’t think wagging my tail would help,” Rhodes said.  “But thanks for the advice.”

R
hodes decided to take a look at Overton’s house.  Maybe there would be something there that would give Rhodes a place to start.  He also wanted to check on the dog he’d heard barking.  He didn’t want it to go hungry or mess up the house.  And then there was the Edsel …

There was a gray Ford Tempo parked in Overton’s driveway, so Rhodes went to the door and knocked.  The dog started barking, and a heavyset woman with graying hair came to the door.  Her eyes were red, as if she might have been crying.

Rhodes told her who he was, and she said that she was Alma Burkett, Overton’s sister.  Rhodes would have guessed that.  Her face was flat, like her brother’s, though her nose was more prominent.  Rhodes had asked Ruth Grady to get in touch with the sister, who was Overton’s only living relative, as far as Hack could discover.

“Have you talked to my deputy?” Rhodes asked, just to be sure.

“Yes.  She came by the house.  I thought I should come over here and see if there was anything I could do.”

Rhodes looked over her shoulder into the dim interior of the house.  He still couldn’t see the dog, which had stopped barking.

“I wonder if I could come in,” he said.

“The house is a mess.  Randy wasn’t a very neat person.”

It was a mild shock to hear her call Overton
Randy
.  It was hard for Rhodes to imagine a man like Overton having a nickname.

“I don’t mind a little mess,” Rhodes said.  “I’d like to look around, see if there’s anything that might help me in my investigation.”

“Your deputy said that Randy had died in an accident.”

“It might have been an accident,” Rhodes said.  The wind was blowing through his pants legs as if they were made of cheesecloth.  “Or it might not.  Could I come in?”

Mrs. Burkett moved aside, and Rhodes stepped into the house.  He didn’t have to go far to realize that Mrs. Burkett hadn’t been exaggerating:  Overton wasn’t a very neat person.

There were newspapers on the floor, and there were socks and undershirts scattered here and there.  Some were on the floor, and some were in chairs and on the couch.  Rhodes smelled the strong odor of stale cigarette smoke mingled with the unpleasant aroma of unwashed clothes.

“I wish I could help you,” Mrs. Burkett said.  “But I don’t know what it is that you’re looking for.”

Rhodes wasn’t sure, either.  But he said, “Business records.  Did, uh, Randy keep accounts or tax records?”

Looking at the living room, Rhodes didn’t have much hope of finding anything.  If Overton kept records at all, they were most likely in complete disarray.

“He had a little bedroom that he used for an office,” Mrs. Burkett said.  “It’s right over there.”

She pointed at a door that was half open, and Rhodes started toward it.  When he reached it, he pushed it open, and a dog charged out, yelping in what was no doubt supposed to be a threatening manner.  It was hard for a dog that looked like a dust mop to be threatening, however, and Rhodes laughed aloud.

“It’s just Yancey,” Mrs. Burkett said.  “He’s a Pomeranian.  He won’t hurt you.”

“I didn’t think he would,” Rhodes said, as the dog sank its teeth into the bottom of his pants leg and wagged its head from side to side, growling viciously, or as viciously as it could with a mouth full of cloth.

“You stop that, Yancey,” Mrs. Burkett said.  “I’m sorry, Sheriff.  He just doesn’t like strangers.  I don’t know what I’m going to do with him now that Randy’s gone.”

Yancey let go of Rhodes’s pants, barked, and ran back into the office.

“You could take him home with you,” Rhodes said.  “He doesn’t look like he’d eat a lot.”

“Oh, I could never take him home.  My husband, his name’s Walter but everyone calls him Wally, he doesn’t like dogs.  He doesn’t like cats, either.  He doesn’t like any animals at all.  He won’t have them around.  I’ll have to take Yancey to the pound.”

Rhodes didn’t much care for that idea.  The pound was clean and well-managed, and there were quite a few kind-hearted people in Clearview, but it was by no means a certainty that someone would adopt Yancey.

“Don’t you have any friends who’d like to have him?  He’s a feisty little guy.”

“I’m afraid not.  Most of the people I know have pets already, and the ones who don’t wouldn’t want one.”

“Give it some thought while I see what’s in the office,” Rhodes said.  “Maybe you can think of somebody.  Or maybe your husband would know someone.”

“Wally wouldn’t want to be bothered.  He just doesn’t like animals at all, and he won’t care what happens to Yancey.  One reason he and Randy didn’t get along was because of Yancey.”

“Your husband didn’t get along with Randy?”

“No.  When I called and told him Randy was dead, he didn’t shed a tear.”

“Where does he work?”

“He drives a truck for Franklin Brothers.  This is his week out of town.”

“Oh,” Rhodes said.

That let out Wally as a suspect.  Franklin Brothers was a big wholesale beer distributor, and their drivers went practically all over the state.

Rhodes pushed open the door to Overton’s office.

“If you need any help with Yancey, just call me,” Mrs. Burkett said.

Rhodes didn’t think he’d need any help.  What could a Pomeranian do to him, after all?

Chapter Nineteen

A
Pomeranian could surge out from under a desk and try to bite a hole in Rhodes’s ankle, for one thing.

Rhodes shook the dog off before he destroyed a sock and turned on the light in the room.

The mess was worse than he had expected, and the smell of stale smoke was much stronger than it had been in the other room.  There was a small desk littered with papers and magazines, and an overflowing ashtray sat on top of a
Playboy
.  There were papers on the floor, too, and in the chair at the desk.  Rhodes wondered where Overton sat.  Probably on top of the papers.

Rhodes picked up some of the papers and looked at them while Yancey stood four or five feet away, barking at him.

“Hush, Yancey,” Rhodes said.

To his surprise, Yancey did just that.  The dog walked over to the corner, where something that might once have been a towel lay in a mangled yellow heap.  Yancey walked around on the fabric a couple of times and then lay down, his paws stretched out in front of him and his eyes on Rhodes.

The papers that Rhodes had picked up weren’t of any interest.  They consisted of form letters asking if Overton wanted gold credit cards (“No Annual Fee, Ever!”), offers to put siding on his house if he would allow the company to use the house as a “demonstrator” for the rest of the neighborhood, proposals to lend Overton money by mail (“No Credit Check!”), and attempts to sell Overton insurance — term life insurance, automobile insurance, hospitalization, workman’s compensation, and even Medicare supplements.  Overton hadn’t been nearly old enough to worry about Medicare, but that didn’t bother the direct mailers.

Rhodes put the form letters back on the desk.  He wondered what kind of person kept things like that.  Rhodes received much the same kind of mail practically every day, both at home and at his office, but it always went directly into the trash can, sometimes without being opened.  Overton must never have thrown anything away.  There wasn’t even a trash can in the room as far as Rhodes could see.

Moving the ashtray, Rhodes picked up the
Playboy
.  June 1993.  Maybe there was a whole collection of
Playboy
somewhere in the house, or maybe this was the only issue that Overton had ever bought.  Rhodes started to put the magazine down when he saw the red corner of a spiral notebook sticking out from under a copy of
Texas Monthly
.

Rhodes pulled out the ledger book and put the
Playboy
in the chair.  Then he opened the notebook and flipped through the pages.  Each page was headed with the name of one of Overton’s customers, and there was an accounting, written in pencil in an awkward scrawl, of what Overton had received from each one of them, along with a record of the materials he had bought for each job.

Overton had cheated Brother Alton’s church, all right.  The evidence was right there.  And he’d cheated a lot of other people, too.  Some more than others.

There were several names and amounts that interested Rhodes more than the others.

Grat Bilson.  Unless Overton had done magnificent work for him, something that Rhodes doubted very much, Bilson had been cheated out of more than two thousand dollars on a room remodeling job.

Mack Riley.  He’d been cheated out of nearly nine hundred dollars on an interior painting job.  Of course there was Overton’s labor to figure in, but nine hundred dollars to paint two rooms and a hall seemed excessive.

Bull Lowery.  Overton had charged him five thousand dollars to roof his house.  As far as Rhodes could see, Overton hadn’t bought enough shingles to roof a room, much less an entire house.  But maybe Overton’s records were as sloppy as his housekeeping.

Ty Berry.  Overton had remodeled his kitchen at a cost of four thousand dollars.

There were plenty of other names, but those were the interesting ones.  Three of them were connected in one way or another to the Old Settlers’ Grounds where Yeldell had died, and the other was Yeldell’s boss.

The records went back nearly three years.  In every case, Overton had spent next to nothing on his materials, buying the cheapest available and usually not buying enough to complete the job.  And if the way he kept up his own house was any indication, he wasn’t really capable of doing the work he’d been hired to perform.

Rhodes had dealt with people like Overton before.  They weren’t basically dishonest.  They advertised in the newspaper that they did “handyman” jobs, and when someone called and asked if they could remodel a kitchen or put on a roof, they said “sure,” because they needed the work and because they didn’t think it would be too hard.

Later, when they saw that they’d gotten in over their heads, they always promised to make things right.  And sometimes they actually tried to do that, time after time, but they simply couldn’t, either out of incompetence or laziness or both.  So they quit answering their telephones or went off to East Texas for a few weeks to stay with relatives.  Eventually the people who had hired them gave up and found someone else to do the work and do it right.

They rarely came to the sheriff because they knew he wouldn’t be able to do anything, not really.  It was pretty much like Brother Alton had said.  Getting a judgment against a deadbeat didn’t mean anything if the deadbeat couldn’t pay.  Having him arrested for a misdemeanor like deceptive business practices didn’t help matters, either.  So they accepted their losses and chalked them up to experience.

Usually.  Now and then things got a little out of hand.  Someone would catch the deadbeat in the Wal-Mart parking lot and want to fight him.  Or someone would call and threaten the deadbeat’s wife or dog, and then it was the deadbeat who showed up at the jail, wanting someone arrested.  People had to be really angry to make threats like that.

Rhodes wondered if anyone ever got angry enough to kill.

He closed the notebook and went into the other room.  Yancey followed him.  Mrs. Burkett wasn’t there, but Rhodes could hear her in the kitchen.

He went in there, with Yancey trailing along behind him.  Mrs. Burkett was standing beside a sink filled with dirty dishes.  On the stove there was an iron skillet about half full of grease.  Overton probably cooked his bacon in there every day but poured out the grease about once a month.  There were dirty dishes on the little wooden table, too, and on the sink counter.  The smell was even worse than in the other rooms.  Rhodes didn’t think he’d want to eat a meal there.