Murder Among the OWLS (4 page)

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Authors: Bill Crider

BOOK: Murder Among the OWLS
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“So Mrs. Harris had a gas well?” Rhodes said.
“Not yet,” Francine said. “But she owned a good bit of property in the south part of the county where there's a lot of drilling. Her husband bought it years ago just for speculation. He never realized a thing from it, but Helen would have. Or she
thought
she would. She told everybody all about it at an OWLS meeting. Some of the property had very good leases on it, and one of the big gas companies started drilling on the property only a few days ago. Helen just knew it was going to be a good well.”
Rhodes didn't keep up with all the drilling activity, and Ivy hadn't been to an OWLS meeting in a while. So he hadn't known about Helen's good fortune. Which was now the good fortune of whoever might be her heir. That was something else Rhodes would have to consider if the death wasn't accidental.
“Maybe Alton Brant is in her will,” Francine said, interrupting Rhodes's thoughts. “I didn't look at it, naturally. I just signed where she showed me. But maybe Alton killed her for the money. I wouldn't be surprised if that was it, not in the least.”
Rhodes said he didn't think anyone had killed Mrs. Harris, that her death was probably just an accident.
“I don't doubt it. She was always too careless about climbing on things.”
The thought of Mrs. Harris's heirs reminded Rhodes of something. “Wasn't she related to Leonard Thorpe? I seem to remember hearing that sometime or other, but I don't know how they're related.”
“He's not a Harris,” Francine said, as if she knew all about it. “He's a cousin, related to Helen on her mother's side.”
She didn't seem to want to talk about Thorpe, which wasn't surprising. He lived in Clearview's only trailer park, out past the city limits on the west side of town. It wasn't called a trailer park, of course. It was the Tranquility Mobile Home Park. It usually lived up to its name, but not always. Some of the people who lived there were interesting characters, and Leonard was definitely part of that group, except that
interesting
wasn't precisely the right word. Rhodes had dealt with him more than once when he'd disturbed the public tranquillity.
“I think you need to investigate the alley-walker,” Francine said.
“The alley-walker?”
“You know who I mean. I forget his name. He's always walking the alleys and snooping in the trash. He can be scary.”
Billy Joe Byron,
Rhodes thought, and he felt something that might have been his conscience give him a jab in the ribs. He'd had dealings with Billy Joe, too. He'd made a decision that he'd never regretted, though he'd never been certain that it had been the right one. The situation, when he thought about it, was uncomfortably similar to the one with Mrs. Harris, or it could be. Rhodes hoped it wasn't.
“The alley-walker might have done it,” Francine said. “Or it could have been some tramp.”
Rhodes hadn't heard that last word in years. He said, “Have you seen any tramps around lately?”
“I really don't recall. Do you really think some tramp might have killed Helen?”
“I don't think anybody killed her. I was just wondering who might have visited her this morning. If anybody did.”
“I wish I could help, but I spend most of my time on the computer. I don't see much of what's going on outside.”
Rhodes thought that might be a familiar story these days, even among people Mrs. Oates's age, though she seemed to know a lot about Alton Brant's visits.
“I'm writing a book,” she said. “A romance novel. Vernell Lindsey is my inspiration. I think people need a little more romance in their lives, and I believe I can bring it to them with my book.”
“I hope your book is a big success.” Rhodes stood up and thanked her again for the Dr Pepper. “If you think of anything else, or if you remember seeing anybody, call the office.”
“I'll be sure to do that. I just can't imagine that Helen is dead. She always seemed so alive.”
“I used to see her mowing that lawn.”
“Yes.” Francine shook her head in disapproval. “She shouldn't have done that. Very unladylike.”
Rhodes said he appreciated Francine's help and started to leave. But he turned back at the door to ask if Francine wanted a cat.
“You mean Helen's cat?”
“That's the one. Somebody will have to take care of it.”
Francine looked away from Rhodes. She twitched slightly and rubbed her arms as if fleas were hopping around on her skin underneath the shirtsleeves.
“I don't like cats,” she said. “Cats are sneaky and hateful. Just turn it over to your animal control officer.”
Rhodes was sure that Speedo would have agreed with her characterization of cats.
“They're dirty, too,” Francine continued, “and they have fleas. I've never understood how a woman with Helen's habits was able to have one in the house with her.”
Rhodes started to say that the cat had lived inside and wasn't likely to have fleas, but he didn't think Francine would be convinced. He left to see if he could get any better information from someone else along the block.
He didn't.
BACK AT THE HARRIS HOUSE, RHODES FOUND THAT MRS. HARRIS'S body had been removed. Because he wasn't sure about the circumstances of her death, he'd considered having it sent to the Southwest Forensics Laboratory for autopsy, but Dr. White had been doing autopsies for the county for years, and Rhodes figured he could handle this one, too. So far, nothing had proved too tricky for him.
Ruth Grady was still going through the house, and she had only one question for Rhodes. It was about the bookshelf Rhodes had noticed earlier.
“Do you think something's missing?” Ruth asked.
Rhodes didn't see how she could tell. On some shelves he could name, it would be easy to see if something had been moved because the lack of dust would reveal where it had been sitting. These shelves were spotless.
“Look.” Ruth counted off the items on each shelf.
“Ten on all of them,” Rhodes said when she finished. “Except the top one.”
“That's right. You can tell by looking around the house that Mrs. Harris was a particular person. Very precise. So shouldn't there be ten things on every shelf?”
Rhodes didn't know. It seemed likely, but it wasn't a certainty.
“There's no empty space,” he said.
“It wouldn't take much to nudge a couple of things around. Like these two.” Ruth moved a rusty belt buckle and a corroded penny. “See?”
Rhodes nodded. “Why those two?”
“Look a little closer.”
Rhodes got his reading glasses from his pocket. He hated using them, and he'd even thought about having Lasik surgery until someone told him that it wasn't always successful. He put the glasses on and looked at the shelf again. He had to bend down until his nose was almost touching the wood, but he finally saw a tiny scratch. He straightened and put the glasses back into his pocket.
“So?” he said.
“You don't think Mrs. Harris would stand for a scratch like that, do you? She'd have taken care of it as soon as she noticed it.”
“
If
she noticed it,” Rhodes said, but he knew that people like Mrs. Harris always noticed things like that, no matter how small, no matter how bad their eyesight.
“I think it's a fresh scratch,” Ruth said. “I think something's missing, and I think whoever took it made that scratch.”
It was pretty far-fetched, Rhodes thought, but no more than the assumptions he'd already made. He felt as if he was getting way ahead of himself. He'd have to sit down and think everything over.
Maybe there was nothing missing at all. Maybe Mrs. Harris had simply had an accident, after all.
“Why would anybody as clean as Mrs. Harris keep junk like this around in the first place?” Ruth asked.
Rhodes told her about the metal-detecting club. “I think these things were souvenirs from some of her treasure hunts.”
“Well, I think one thing is missing, but I could be wrong.”
It was one more item for Rhodes to add to his list of suspicions. He asked Ruth if she'd gone through Mrs. Harris's desk.
“Not yet.”
“Let's have a look, then,” Rhodes said, and they went into the room where the desk stood.
A piece of plate glass had been cut to cover the wooden top of the desk. The glass was spotless, of course, and so clean that it was hard to tell it was even there. Pictures were beneath it, and Rhodes recognized Mr. and Mrs. Harris in one of them. They had been young and on vacation somewhere. They stood in front of a mountainous backdrop that Rhodes didn't recognize.
He opened one of the two desk drawers. A manila folder lay inside, along with a couple of ballpoint pens. Black lettering on the outside of the folder told Rhodes that it held
Membership Lists.
He opened the folder. Inside were several sheets of notebook paper, each one with a neatly printed heading, with block letters large enough for Rhodes to read without putting on his glasses. The one on top said
OWLS.
The one beneath it said
Rusty Nuggets,
which Rhodes assumed was the name of the metal-detecting club. The next said
Red Hats.
He didn't look at the others.
“Bring all of these with you when you're finished,” Rhodes told
Ruth, putting the folder back into the drawer. “We need to make copies.”
Ruth said she'd bring it, and Rhodes opened the other drawer, which held several more folders, all of them labeled in Helen Harris's careful printing. One held
Bills.
Another was for
Canceled Checks
. Rhodes flipped through the folders until he came to one labeled
Last Will and Testament.
“We'll need a copy of this, too,” Rhodes said, handing her the folder. “If it's a murder investigation, that is.”
“It seems to be,” Ruth said.
Rhodes returned the folders to their places. “We'll just go along pretending it is until we know better.”
Before he could say more, he was interrupted by Speedo, who was barking in the backyard.
“He's hungry,” Rhodes said. “I was going out to feed him this morning, but I never got around to it. Come to think of it, there's a cat at my house, and he might be hungry, too.”
Ruth gave him a quizzical look. “A cat?”
Rhodes shook his head. “It's a long story. You finish up here and we'll talk about this back at the jail.”
On his way out of the house, Rhodes stopped in the kitchen and picked up the bowl of dry cat food. Feeling guilty for taking anything at all from a crime scene before the investigation was complete, he called out to Ruth to let her know what he was doing.
“They never do things like that on
CSI,
” she said.
Rhodes didn't answer. He went out into the backyard, where Speedo was barking at a squirrel in a pecan tree. Speedo lost interest in the squirrel as soon as he noticed Rhodes and ran over to him.
“You ready to eat?” Rhodes said.
Speedo wagged his tail and looked hopefully at the bowl of food Rhodes was holding.
“Not this stuff. Let's go home and get you something of your own.”
On the walk back to the house, Speedo made his usual detours, but he didn't spend long on them. For his part, Rhodes couldn't enjoy the walk. The town was quiet and seemed peaceful enough, but Rhodes felt a hollow sadness inside because of Helen Harris's death. It seemed senseless to him, accident or not.
Looking at the houses he passed, he didn't think they seemed as peaceful as before. Any one of them might be holding secrets that no one outside ever imagined, and the secrets weren't always pleasant.
When they got to the backyard of his house, Rhodes left Speedo and went inside, but only after telling the dog that he'd be right back.
Speedo sat down in the shade of a pecan tree and thumped his tail on the grass, watching Rhodes until he was inside.
In the kitchen Rhodes looked around for Yancey, who should have come bouncing in to greet him. Yancey wasn't there, but the cat was. It wasn't going to bounce out and greet anybody. It lay under the table, stretched out to its full length and taking its ease as if it had lived in the house all its life. Yancey, Rhodes presumed, was still cowering under a bed somewhere.
Rhodes put the bowl of cat food he'd brought from Mrs. Harris's house down on the floor beside Yancey's water bowl. The cat (Rhodes still refused to use its name) heard the sound and got up slowly. Then it stretched, looked at Rhodes, stretched again, and walked over to the food. It sniffed it a couple of times and started to eat.
Rhodes sighed. He knew that he'd just made a big mistake. Feeding a cat was worse than naming it, much worse. Cats made themselves at home wherever the food was, and they didn't have a great deal of loyalty. Whoever fed them last was going to be blessed with their presence.
Rhodes sneezed, and the cat stopped eating to look up at him.
“It's not psychological,” Rhodes said, “and don't try to tell me that it is.”
The cat didn't try to tell him anything. It went right back to crunching the dry food between its teeth.
Rhodes got out the dog food and went into the backyard to feed Speedo, who was much more appreciative than the cat had appeared to be.
When Rhodes went back in the house, the cat was sprawled under the table again. Rhodes sneezed and put away the dog food. Then he sat down at the table. The cat wasn't disturbed. Rhodes thought about disturbing it, but he decided that wouldn't be a good idea. Instead he thought over everything he'd seen and heard that morning.
If Mrs. Harris's death was an accident, then someone would have to explain why the cat was in Rhodes's kitchen. Rhodes still didn't believe Mrs. Harris would have allowed it to go outside.
Rhodes, however, couldn't think of any reason why someone would have killed her. Maybe the will would give him a clue if Francine Oates's information about the gas wells was accurate. He had no reason to doubt that it was.
And it might be that something was missing from the bookshelf, as Ruth had pointed out, but Rhodes wasn't convinced of that. The scratch wasn't exactly powerful evidence, and there was no other indication that anybody had been in the house. Besides,
Rhodes couldn't imagine what might have been on the shelf to attract anyone's notice.
Another problem with the murder theory was that nobody Rhodes had talked to along the block had seen a car at the house, and nobody had seen anyone walking along the sidewalk or in the alley.
That didn't prove anything, either. People didn't keep a watch on the sparse traffic, and the alley was usually concealed by fences, trees, and bushes.
It would be best for all concerned if the autopsy proved that Mrs. Harris had simply had an unfortunate accident, but Rhodes couldn't rid himself of the nagging feeling that it hadn't been that way.
He heard a noise in the hallway and turned to see Yancey, who had established all kinds of records for keeping silent, peeking around the door facing. Rhodes started to tell Yancey not to worry about the cat, but before Rhodes could get the words out, the cat stretched, and Yancey was gone.
“You're a disruptive influence,” Rhodes told the cat, which took no notice of him at all.
Rhodes smiled. You had to give the cat credit for impudence. Or something like that.
Rhodes stood up. He'd have to go back to the Harris house and pick up a couple of things.
 
Ruth was taking photographs in the kitchen. Rhodes let her know that he was taking the litterbox and the scratching post. She said that would be all right.
Back at home, Rhodes installed the box and post on his own little
inside porch and pointed them out to the cat, who seemed bored with the whole thing.
“You just be sure you use the facilities I've provided instead of the floor or the furniture,” Rhodes said.
The cat yawned widely.
Rhodes sometimes wondered about his ability to communicate with humans, though he thought he did all right with dogs. On the other hand, he was absolutely convinced that he had no ability at all to communicate with cats.
It was time he went to the jail to see what else was going on in the town, so he told the cat to leave Yancey alone, reminded him again about the litterbox, and went out to the county car. He had a feeling it was going to be a long day.

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