Shotgun Saturday Night

Chapter 4

Rhodes drove the county car across Long Bridge, a rickety wooden structure that really wasn’t very long at all. It had gotten its name from a certain Mr. Long, who had built the original bridge at this crossing nearly a hundred years ago. Rhodes knew this because he’d once read a book on the history of Blacklin County. He doubted that there was anyone else in the county-well, maybe there were two or three others-who either knew, or cared. Most of them didn’t even know the bridge was there.

The Kersey place was a quarter of a mile past the bridge. There was a barbed wire fence with what people called a “gap” in it, a gate made of barbed wire that looked like part of the fence. Off the road twenty or thirty yards was a house.

Rhodes got out of his car and opened the gap, then got back in and drove through. He didn’t bother to close it.

The house was old and weathered. It had been painted once, no doubt, but that had been many years ago. No trace of the original color remained. The boards were weathered a uniform light gray. The roof looked to be in pretty fair shape; it was probably no more than thirty or so years old. Nearly all the windows that Rhodes could see had glass in them, except for one on the front corner, which had a pane missing.

The house was small, probably four rooms, Rhodes guessed, and small ones at that. Out back there was another very small house, which Rhodes recognized immediately as the privy. It was made of the same weathered boards as the main house.

Beside the house, under the scanty shade of a huge mesquite tree, there was a black motorcycle. Rhodes knew nothing at all about motorcycles, but he could see the Nighthawk on the gas tank, along with the word Honda. From what he recalled of The Wild One, Marlon Brando had ridden a Harley-Davidson.

The house sat up on wooden blocks, and as Rhodes stepped toward the porch, a brownish dog that must have had a Collie in its ancestry came out from the cool shadows beneath the house. It gave a half-hearted growl and its fur ruffled slightly, but that was all. It looked at Rhodes incuriously for a moment, then turned around, got down on its belly, and crawled back under the house. “Mighty fine watchdog I got myself there,” said a voice from the front doorway. Rhodes, whose attention had been on the dog, looked up. A man pushed open a half-collapsed screen door and looked back at him.

The man was big, that was all Rhodes thought at first. His shoulders were so wide they almost filled the doorway. He was wearing only a pair of black shorts, so that Rhodes could see the full expanse of his chest. He was also handsome, and Rhodes thought he looked a little like Reg Park in Hercules in the Haunted World.

There was a difference, though. This man’s hands were hard and rough, and the calluses and creases were black from ground-in grease and carbon, the way a mechanic’s hands are likely to get. He looked perfectly capable of dismantling an engine with his bare hands and maybe a small screwdriver.

“Your name Buster Cullens?” Rhodes asked.

“That’s right,” the man said, making no move to step out onto the porch. He didn’t appear the least impressed by Rhodes’s badge. “What’s yours?” His voice, instead of the deep bass that would have seemed appropriate to Rhodes, was thin, high and nasal. He sounded like Arnold Stang.

“I’m Sheriff Dan Rhodes. I’d like to talk with you for a minute.”

Cullens stepped onto the porch. “All right,” he said. “Talk.”

“I’d like to talk to Wyneva Greer, too, if she’s here,” Rhodes said.

The man just looked at him. His eyes were black and set deep in their sockets.

Rhodes looked back. He didn’t particularly care for macho games, but he could play them if he had to.

After about a minute, Cullens turned his head and yelled through the screen door. “Wyneva! Come out here if you’re decent.”

The screen door opened and a woman came out. Rhodes wasn’t sure she was decent. She had on a pair of cut-off jeans, cut off so high that they must have hurt her when she walked. She was also wearing a faded denim vest. But she wasn’t wearing a shirt. Rhodes looked down, then to the side. Then, deciding that she was playing a game too, he looked up.

Her hair was long and black, and her face was very pretty in a tough sort of way. She shrugged her shoulders, and her breasts jiggled behind the faded denim.

“So talk,” Cullens said.

Rhodes cleared his throat as quietly as he could. “A neighbor of yours got himself killed last night,” he said.

Cullens laid a proprietary arm on the woman’s shoulders. “Sorry to hear that,” he said. “Who was it?”

“Bert Ramsey,” Rhodes said, looking at the woman, who gave no sign that the name meant anything to her. “I think Miss Greer knew him at one time. I’d like to know if you two saw or heard anything unusual last night.”

Cullens didn’t answer the question. “How’d he die?” he asked.

Rhodes had to admit that Cullens was smart. Either that, or he was completely innocent. He was certainly asking the right questions, the ones that made it appear as if he knew nothing at all about what had happened. Rhodes saw no harm in answering him.

“Someone cut him down with a shotgun,” Rhodes said, cutting a glance at Wyneva Greer out of the corner of his eye. She appeared completely unaffected.

“Too bad,” Cullens said, as if he didn’t feel it was too bad at all. In fact, he said it so casually it was as if death, or at least someone else’s death, was a matter that didn’t concern him in the least. “Naw,” he said then, “we didn’t hear a thing last night.”

“I suppose you were both here all evening?” Rhodes asked.

Cullens looked at Wyneva, and for the first time Rhodes saw an emotion flit briefly across her face. It was fear, he was pretty sure of that.

“Yeah,” Cullens said. “We were right here. That right, Wyneva?”

The woman nodded slowly. “That’s right,” she said. Her voice was low and husky. She didn’t meet Rhodes’s eyes.

“How’d you two come to be staying in such an out-of-the-way place, anyway?” Rhodes asked.

Cullens looked as if he might say it was none of Rhodes’s business, but if the thought had crossed his mind, he didn’t speak it aloud. “One of the Kerseys is a cousin of mine,” he said. “When I decided to come up here from Houston, he let me have the loan of it till I could get a good mechanic’s job somewhere. I haven’t found one yet.”

Rhodes looked again at Cullens’s hands. He might not have had a job, but it was a cinch that he’d been doing some mechanic work somewhere.

“Well,” said Rhodes, “I appreciate you all taking the time to talk to me. I might have to come back by in case I think of something else to ask.”

Cullens just looked at him, so Rhodes got in his car, started it, and drove to the gap. After he drove through, he looked back at the house. Cullens was still standing on the porch, watching him, but Wyneva was nowhere in sight. Rhodes closed the gap. The dog came out from under the house again, and Rhodes drove away.

On his way back to Clearview, Rhodes stopped at Bert Ramsey’s house again. This time he looked around the tractor shed, but he couldn’t find anything else of interest.

He took off his hat and waved it in front of his face, trying to stir up a little breeze. It was early afternoon, now, the hottest part of the day.

About three hundred yards in back of Ramsey’s house, there was a thick line of trees. Rhodes wondered just how far back Ramsey’s property ran, and he wondered if there might be a stock tank somewhere in those woods. He’d like to go bass fishing in a little tank that no one had tried out yet.

He’d also like to know a lot more about Bert Ramsey. It seemed to Rhodes that Ramsey had been around Clearview for at least ten years, doing odd jobs and such. And before that he was in the Army, or at least that was the way Rhodes remembered it. Say he was around thirty-five years old. Not particularly good-looking, weathered from plenty of hard work in the outdoors, quiet, never in trouble with the law.

How, Rhodes wondered, did a man like that manage to afford two new TV sets and two VCRs? How did a man like that manage to have nearly six thousand dollars in very large bills stuffed in his sock drawer? And why was he dead?

Rhodes settled his hat back on his head and walked to the car. He was a patient man, and he would start asking questions. He wanted to talk to Mrs. Ramsey again, and he wasn’t through with Buster Cullens and Wyneva Greer, not by a long shot. He often envied the big-city police departments that he read about, with their computers and ballistics experts-not that a ballistics expert would be any help with a shotgun killing. He had to work differently from them. He had to talk to people and sift the facts from the lies. If he was careful and if he kept it up long enough, he usually got results, even if he wasn’t in the 87th Precinct.

He got in the car and drove back to town.

Clyde Ballinger was ecstatic. “Boy, Sheriff Rhodes, this is a good one!” he exclaimed. “Carella and Hawes would love this! I mean, you’ve got hacked limbs, you’ve got a murder that’s connected, you’ve got-”

“Wait a minute,” Rhodes interrupted. He was beginning to regret stopping by Ballinger’s to check on how Ruth Grady was doing with her fingerprinting. “We don’t know that there’s any connection at all. In fact, there probably isn’t. We’ll know more when we get in touch with the owners of the old Caster place.”

“Come on, Sheriff,” Ballinger said. “There’s always a connection in cases like this. I remember one time when this dead woman-she was buck naked-was found right across the street from the 87th. And right after that, the guys started getting this weird series of clues about something that looked totally unrelated. Anyway-”

“Anyway,” Rhodes cut in, “this isn’t New York.”

“Isola,” Ballinger said.

“Whatever,” Rhodes said. “We’re just a small county where things like that don’t happen.”

“I don’t believe it,” Ballinger said. “I bet some guy has been hacking up bodies, and Ramsey was disposing of them for him. I bet his conscience got the better of him and he came to you. But he just couldn’t bring himself to tell the whole story. And then, when the hacker found out what Ramsey had done, he killed him. I bet that’s just the way it was!”

Rhodes sighed and changed the subject. “Why aren’t you assisting in the autopsy?” he asked.

“I don’t do that sort of thing much these days,” Ballinger said. “Always glad to allow the use of the facilities, though. Afraid you won’t learn much from this one.”

“I’m just hoping for an estimated time of death,”

Rhodes said. “Have you seen Deputy Grady today?”

“She’s in there doing her job. I haven’t bothered her.”

“I think I’ll just walk on over and have a word with her. See you later, Clyde.”

“Sure, Sheriff. As soon as I get in touch with Mrs. Ramsey and arrange for the funeral, I’ll let you know.”

“Thanks,” Rhodes said. He wasn’t sure that he’d learn anything by attending Bert Ramsey’s funeral, but he wasn’t going to take a chance by missing it. He left Ballinger’s office and walked over to the back room of the funeral home where Ruth Grady was working.

Clearview didn’t have a morgue, but the back room of Ballinger’s was close enough. It was quite cold; there was no danger of putrefaction. Ballinger had kept bodies in there for days, when necessary.

Ruth was just finishing her job. There was a neat stack of fingerprint cards on a small table, but all the various limbs had been replaced in their boxes. Rhodes wasn’t sure just how much good the prints would do. He could eventually send them through the necessary channels, but he couldn’t do it over the telephone, or whatever the big-city boys did. Besides, he was hoping to clear up the whole mess when he got in touch with the Adamses.

Ruth looked up when he walked in. “Hello, Sheriff,” she said, seemingly cheerful in spite of the grisly nature of her assigned job. “I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“Well, it was easy enough to get fingerprints and even footprints. That part’s OK. The bad news is that there aren’t any other prints. Not on the boxes, not on the plastic, not on the tape. Whoever did this was wearing gloves.”

“Surgical gloves, I’d bet,” Rhodes said. “Did you find any more of those tags?”

“Sure did.” She reached down to the table and picked up a stack of the yellow tags from beside the fingerprint forms. “I went ahead and wrote the names from the tags on a piece of paper and stuck it on the limbs.”

“Good job,” Rhodes said. “I’ll take this stuff back to the jail, and you can go out on patrol for a while. I’m going to give this Adams guy a call and see if he can tell us what’s going on.”

“Anything new on the disposal?” Ruth asked.

“No,” Rhodes said. “I’m sure I can get in touch with the state Health Department tomorrow and clear things up. That is, if all these things are legitimate.”

“I hope so. If there’s not a law against dumping something like this, there certainly ought to be.”

“Remember,” Rhodes said, “these boxes were on private property. That makes a difference.”

“Hack told me about Bert Ramsey,” Ruth said. “Any connection there?”

Rhodes concealed his surprise. It was hard for him to believe that Hack had told Ruth anything that he didn’t have to tell her. Maybe he was softening. “Not as far as I know,” he said. “There could be, but for now we’re going to treat this business as a separate incident. If we find a connection, then we’ll see.”

“Does that mean you have a suspect?”

“Not exactly,” Rhodes said, shaking his head. “I wouldn’t say I have much of anything yet. You managed to find yourself any informants?

Ruth nodded slowly. “Maybe,” she said. “One, anyway.”

In a small county, informants-Rhodes had never liked to call them snitches-were just as important as they were in New York. Or Isola. Wherever. It was true that much of the gossip of the county could be heard through Hack or Lawton, who seemed to pick it up from the air, but there was nevertheless an underside of society whose comings and goings weren’t part of the common talk. The more informants a deputy had, the better his (or her, Rhodes reminded himself) chances of picking up a piece of talk, a hint, a word or two, that just might prove to be the key to whatever case he was working at the time. Or even to a case that had almost been forgotten.

Rhodes didn’t ask who Ruth’s informant was. Each deputy cultivated his own sources, and each kept them private. Rhodes had a few sources of his own. Instead, he said, “See what you can find out about motorcycles.”

“Motorcycles?”

“Yeah. Motorcycles. I’d like to know who’s riding them these days.”

Ruth looked puzzled, but she said, “I’ll see what I can find out.”

“If you hear anything, let me know,” Rhodes said. He gathered up the cards and went back to his car. Ruth Grady was not far behind.