Murder Among the OWLS (21 page)

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Authors: Bill Crider

BOOK: Murder Among the OWLS
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“You don't know anything about me and Truck,” Lily told him, evading his eyes.
“I know more than you think.” Rhodes stretched the truth a little. “I know you're the one who took Thorpe a pistol and some clothes the other day when he escaped from custody at the hospital. You drove him to the Tumlinson place, too.”
Lily twitched as if someone were pinching her at every other word, but she didn't admit anything.
“I'll have to check with Truck,” Rhodes said, “but I'm betting he can confirm that you were out of the house when someone was seen at Thorpe's trailer getting the pistol and clothing. There's a witness, too, someone who lives in the trailer next to Thorpe's. You might as well go ahead and tell me about it.”
He hadn't really expected Lily to be that easy, and she wasn't. She didn't say a thing.
“I know something else, too.”
Lily gave no sign that she'd even heard him.
“I know you stole from Truck, from the business here. You were the bookkeeper, so it would've been easy for you. I know you gave the money to Thorpe. Truck must know it too, or he'd be here now.”
Lily started to cry.
RHODES HANDED LILY A FEW MORE TISSUES, THINKING THAT HE had made a lucky guess, even though it had been based on the facts at hand.
It should have been evident to just about anybody that Lily and Truck were having problems of some kind. When there are troubles in a marriage, Rhodes knew that money was more than likely to be one of the causes, if not the major one. Hack had just told Rhodes that Lily worked on the books for Truck. What if she'd been taking a little of the money for herself all along, squirreling it away for a rainy day or in case an old lover came calling and needed a little help? That would explain the trouble, if Truck had found out what she'd done. Thorpe had gotten the money for the Royal Rack from somewhere, and the way Rhodes saw it, Lily was the best bet.
“We'll check out your car, too,” Rhodes told her, ignoring her
occasional sobs as best he could. “If you drove to the Tumlinson place, there'll still be traces of the soil from there on your car's undercarriage and on the tires. If you've watched
CSI,
you know how easy it is to get a match on that sort of thing.”
Rhodes himself had no idea, really, how easy it would be, but he figured that if Lily was a television watcher, the mere mention of the
CSI
magic would be enough to throw a scare into her.
“If Thorpe does recover,” Rhodes went on, “he'll be able to corroborate everything for us. He'll be glad to cooperate to make it easier on himself.”
“He'd never do that.” Lily's voice was muffled because her face was buried in the tissues Rhodes had given her.
“Maybe not. It won't matter. We'll check Truck's books, and I think there'll be plenty of evidence there to prove what we suspect about the money.”
“Leo never had a chance in life,” Lily said, lifting her face and crumpling the tissues in one hand. Her eyes were red. “If that Helen Harris had ever helped him out, he could have done big things.”
Rhodes didn't believe that. He considered Thorpe a smooth-talking con man who got by as best he could without ever exerting himself too much, doing odd jobs to earn a little money and mooching off others, probably the Harrises and any gullible women he could find, to get more.
“The Royal Rack was his big chance,” Lily said. “He knew the place was a gold mine, and he'd be set up for the first time in his life with a real moneymaker.”
“An illegal moneymaker. Illegal gambling in the back room isn't a good way to get a start on running a legitimate business.”
“I didn't know about the gambling. Not until …” Lily stopped
herself and clamped her mouth shut, pinching her lips into a straight line.
“Until you drove him to the Tumlinson place?”
“You don't know what Truck was like,” Lily said, veering off onto another path entirely. “Look at this place.”
She waved a hand in an arc that took in the entirety of the office. Rhodes had to admit that it was shabby.
“He could have done so much better,” Lily continued, “but all he could do was talk about how great high school had been, how he'd been a big football star and how everyone had cheered him week after week.”
That's how it was in Texas, Rhodes thought. Once you'd had the kind of adulation a really good high school player received, it was hard to forget it. For some it was impossible. Rhodes had plenty of reason to know about high school football, both as a player, though not nearly as successful as Truck had been, and as a lawman, having investigated the murder of a popular coach. Lots of people still blamed Rhodes for the team's losing the state championship that year.
“We got married not long after he came back from college,” Lily said. “We were young, and we thought life would be wonderful forever.” She looked around the office again. “You can see how wrong we were.”
Rhodes didn't think Truck would see it quite that way. By all accounts, Truck loved his business, buying and selling, making deals, setting his own hours, having coffee at Franklin's when he pleased and just leaving a note on the door. He could regale his customers and his friends at the drugstore with the tales of his football prowess, and they'd always listen. Rhodes didn't see the Royal Rack as a big step up from that.
“Leo was going to pay me back the money as soon as he got established. He promised.”
Oh,
Rhodes thought.
Of course a man like Thorpe would never tell a lie about a little thing like that
.
“I could have put it back in the accounts, and Truck would never have known. It would all have worked out if you hadn't interfered.”
Rhodes wasn't so sure of that.
“I would never have married Truck if Leo hadn't dumped me. He regretted it later, though.”
Rhodes wondered how she knew that. His skepticism must have shown on his face because Lily said, “He told me himself.”
Just like he promised to repay the money,
Rhodes thought.
Who could doubt him?
“Why did he dump you?” he asked.
“Another woman, I'm sure.” Lily smiled reminiscently. “He does like the women. He knows how to treat us.”
That was a side of Thorpe that Rhodes had never seen, though he'd heard enough about it lately. Mrs. Gomez might not agree, however.
“Who was the other woman?”
“I have no idea. He never told me. He likes to keep things like that a secret.” She frowned. “Do you think he'll be all right?”
“The doctors don't really know yet.”
“I'm sure he'll recover. He has so much to live for.”
She must have meant herself, and maybe the Royal Rack, but Rhodes didn't want to ask.
“So your argument with Helen Harris wasn't really about what she found on the metal-detecting club's trip to the Tumlinson place,” he said.
“Of course it was. What else could it have been about?”
“Thorpe.”
“She didn't know about me and Leo. We kept it a secret from everybody. Leo was good at keeping secrets. So was I. We couldn't have a scandal.”
Lily's face changed after she said it, and Rhodes thought she was going to start to cry again. No doubt she was thinking that there was going to be a scandal now, for sure, and she was absolutely right. Things were going to be even worse when she admitted that she'd killed Helen Harris.
 
Later at the jail, Rhodes didn't have to worry about Hack and Lawton's questions about what Jennifer Loam had to tell him. They forgot all about it when Rhodes brought in Lily Gadney. Brant's secret was safe for the time being.
Ruth Grady served as the matron and got Lily booked, printed, and locked up, all of which took a while. Ruth was still in the cell block, and Rhodes hadn't had a chance to ask her about the lab work she'd wanted to tell him about.
“So she confessed to ever'thing,” Hack said to Rhodes after Ruth had led Lily away. “No wonder those two women wrote a book about you. You really are one crime-bustin' lawman.”
“You forgot
handsome,
” Rhodes said.
“Well, I didn't forget, exactly.”
“I forgive you. Anyway, I didn't get her to confess to everything.”
“Same thing as. Aidin' and abettin', assault on an officer, and all the rest.”
“Not all,” Lawton said. “She didn't admit that she killed anybody.”
“She did it, though,” Hack said. “I've seen plenty of guilty folks walk through that door, and she's got the look if anybody ever did.”
Rhodes wished he could be as sure about that as Hack. Although he'd talked to Lily for another half hour in the office at Truck's Trucks, she'd continued to insist that she had nothing to do with Helen Harris's death.
On the other hand, she had no alibi for the morning of the murder. Truck had gone to work early, as he always did, not long after seven o'clock, and Lily had been home alone. She told Rhodes that she'd eaten breakfast, watched television, and cleaned house, but no one had seen her, no one had called her, no one could vouch for her.
Rhodes's theory was that Mrs. Harris had found out about Lily and Thorpe. She'd confronted Lily, who'd picked up the stool and hit her. Rhodes could speak from personal experience about Lily's ability with a handy object used as a club. She had plenty of power to kill somebody with the right weapon, and the stool was certainly right for the job. Now all he had to come up with was a reason for Lily to be at the Harris house at the time of the murder.
Then something else occurred to him. It was possible that Thorpe hadn't been lying about paying Lily back. He'd planned to do it as soon as he got his inheritance from Mrs. Harris. She wasn't likely to die anytime soon, so Thorpe could well have decided to hurry her along. Lily might even have helped him.
“Maybe Ruth has somethin' for you,” Hack said, breaking into Rhodes's thoughts. “She said she found some fingerprints at the Harris place. You need to talk to her.”
Rhodes said he planned to do exactly that as soon as he had an
opportunity. While he was waiting for her, he worked on his reports. He'd gotten most of them done before Ruth came back.
“Here she is,” Hack said, just in case Rhodes hadn't noticed. “Maybe she's got the answers you're lookin' for.”
It would be nice to think so, but Rhodes had never had a case that was solved by fingerprints or, for that matter, by any exotic method. Things like that were possible, he knew, but not very likely in real police work in a small Texas county.
People who liked to think that crime labs in reality were like the ones shown on popular TV shows should take a tour of any real lab, even the ones in big cities. Most of them were underfunded, and Rhodes didn't know of a one that had attained the almost supernatural status of those presented weekly on the cop shows. He'd read a lot of newspaper accounts of the woes of the Houston police department's crime lab, and the situation there, which had been years in the making, was almost like a comedy of errors, except that it wasn't at all funny. Overturned convictions abounded thanks to the many faulty results that had been used in evidence. After years of work, during which time testing had been farmed out to private firms, the lab still wasn't up and running again.
So Rhodes wasn't depending on anything that Ruth had learned to sew up the case for him. He just wished she could give him enough help to convince Lily to confess.
“I hope you're going to tell me that you found a hidden security camera in the Harris house,” he told Ruth. “It would be great to have some clear pictures of the killer. Color or black-and-white. I don't care which.”
“I wish I had something like that for you,” Ruth said, “but I don't have anything nearly that good.”
Rhodes would have been amazed if she had. He asked what she did have.
“Fingerprints.”
“Not many, I'll bet.”
“You'd win. How did you know?” Before Rhodes could answer, she said, “Oh.”
“Oh?” Hack said, listening in as always. “What's that supposed to mean?”
“You ever visit Helen Harris?” Rhodes said.
“Nope. Never had the pleasure.”
“If you'd seen her house, you'd know why there aren't any fingerprints. It's clean. Really clean.”
“I didn't say there were
no
fingerprints,” Ruth said. “There were some, where you'd expect.”
“On the stool?”
“Yes, on the legs, and on the handle of the gate in the fence, too. There's a problem, though.”
Rhodes knew what the problem was. Fingerprints are fine if you have a set to match them with. If not, they're worthless. To get a match, the fingerprints have to exist in the databases or be available some other way. Lily Gadney had just been printed, so Ruth could do a comparison. If the prints didn't belong to Lily, they'd have to do a search by computer. Brant had been in the service, so his prints would be on record. They might be the only ones of all those concerned.
That wasn't the only problem, however, as Ruth let him know quickly enough. There were no complete prints, only partials, and partials were harder to match.
“The surface of the stool is rough wood,” Ruth said. “Powdering
doesn't work so well on it. Even the spray isn't that good, so what I have isn't going to be easy to match with anything.”
“What about the gate handle?”
“It's rough and rusty. Same problem. A tough job getting a match.”
Rhodes hadn't expected much more. “What about the lightbulb? The broken one, too.”
“They have Mrs. Harris's prints on them. It was an easy match.”

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