“Nice mess of fish,” Rhodes said, lowering them back into the water. “I wouldn’t mind catching a few like that myself.”
Tomkins reeled in his spinner bait, but he didn’t make another cast. “I get the feelin’ you didn’t come out here just to talk about the fishin’,” he wheezed.
“That’s, right, Bill, I didn’t.” Rhodes turned to face him. At the same time his eyes caught a brief glimpse of something shiny in a grove of trees about a hundred yards away, something that he barely glimpsed over Tomkins’s head. It was easy to see the trees, because Tomkins was seated in a gap between the two willows, and their branches and leaves were quite thin. Rhodes dismissed the shine, not even sure that he had seen it.
“I hear you’ve been telling some folks that Jeanne Clinton had quite a few visitors at night while Elmer was out,”
Rhodes said. “Now, you mentioned Hod Barrett to me, and then you hushed. If there was ever anybody else, though, you’d better tell me now. I’d hate to think you were hiding evidence of a crime from me.”
Tomkins laid down his rod and reel. “Just a minute, Sheriff,” he said. “You just hold your horses. I might’ve had a good reason for not tellin’ you who else was there.”
Rhodes shook his head. “No such thing, Bill. There’s no good reason for hiding something when murder’s involved. I know you went by there, and Hod did. Now I want to know who else.”
Tomkins spit in the tank, then rubbed his hand over his face. “All right, I’ll tell you. But you’ll see why I didn’t at first. I knew you’d find out. See, one of the others that stopped by to see Jeanne was your election opponent, Ralph Claymore.” He paused to I take a deep, rough breath. “I just didn’t see how it would do you or Mr. Claymore either one any good for me to bring that up.”
“One of the others, Bill? One of them? It’s beginning to sound like Jeanne was holding open house whenever Elmer cut out for work.” Rhodes shifted his weight and leaned a little forward. “It might make a man wonder if somebody who was seeing her got just a little jealous, maybe. Maybe he could have gotten so upset that he decided to do something about it.”
Tomkins jumped up from his camp stool, angry. Rhodes thought he looked a little like Walter Brennan taking on Richard Crenna in an episode of The Real McCoys.
“You got no call to say that, Sheriff! Jeanne was just a sweet, nice girl. Let me tell you who.”
He never got to tell who because a number of things happened almost simultaneously. Rhodes, no matter how much he tried later, was never able to get the sequence exactly straight in his mind.
He saw the flash again in the grove of Ames, that was for sure. He remembered a few willow leaves and maybe part of a branch falling, and he was pretty sure that he heard the two rifle shots. What he remembered most, though, was the way that Bill Tomkins’s head just seemed to sort of come apart, and how Tomkins dropped like a rock, rolled a couple of times, and came to a stop in the water, with the red stain seeming quite brown as it widened around him.
Chapter 8
Rhodes was up over the tank dam and running toward the grove of trees almost before his eyes had time to take in the details of Tomkins’s death. He ran through the chest-high Johnson grass without a thought of either cuts or chiggers. He didn’t break any land speed records, but when he arrived he could hear that someone else was still scrambling around in there.
Sounds in the woods can be deceptive, and Rhodes paused to listen. He wasn’t sure just which direction to take, so he plunged straight in, drawing his.38 as he did so. A twig lashed across his open eye, and tears began to flow. “Damn,” he said, stumbling a bit as his foot caught in a thorn-covered vine that grew along the ground. He put the pistol back in its holster and used his hands to help clear his way.
While the grove was not a forest in any sense of the word, it was nevertheless dense, a reminder of what all the country around Thurston must have been like at one time, before the cotton farmers moved in and cleared all the land. Or most of the land. Occasionally, someone would have more space than he needed, or someone would just happen to like a little woods. In such cases a stand of trees would remain, and even an acre or two of trees could seem like a forest when a man was trying to run through it.
Rhodes soon realized that he had little chance of catching up with anyone except by sheer accident, but he kept on. Sometimes he got lucky.
Unfortunately, this was not one of the times, and after fifteen minutes of blundering about, ripping his pants leg and getting an angry scratch across the back of his hand besides, Rhodes gave up and went back to the tank.
Tomkins still lay where he had fallen, and Rhodes felt a real surge of regret tinged with guilt. He hadn’t for a minute really suspected that the scrawny Tomkins had killed Jeanne Clinton. He’d only been trying to stir him up and maybe get Tomkins to tell him something he could use. Instead, he’d gotten him killed. It was obvious that whoever had been hiding in the trees was waiting for a shot at Tomkins, who couldn’t be seen over the top of the dam as long as he was sitting down. But when he’d jumped up, angry at Rhodes’s insinuations, he’d become a target.
Even worse, in one way, was the fact that Tomkins had been just about to give Rhodes another name. He’d never do that now.
Rhodes pulled the body out of the water and into the shade of the willow tree, thinking of an old folk song that he’d heard The Weavers sing on the radio when he was young: “Bury Me Beneath the Willow.” He felt sorry for Bill Tomkins, but there was nothing he could do for him now. He pulled the fish stringer out of the water, pulled the cord through their gills and mouths, and released them. Each one held itself motionless for a second or two, then twitched and was gone. Then he turned to go into town and make the necessary calls.
He used the telephone in Hod Barrett’s store. Larry Bell was at the counter. “Sure, Sheriff, you’re welcome to use the phone,” he said. “I don’t think old Hod would mind.”
“Where’s Hod?” Rhodes asked as he dialed.
“Don’t know,” Bell said. “He just asked me to take over for a while. I do it every now and again when he needs to step out. He’s been gone about an hour now, so I expect he’ll be back pretty quick. What’s up?”
“Never mind,” Rhodes said, as the justice of the peace answered his ring.
It took the rest of the morning to get things straight at the crime scene, but Rhodes learned a little in the process. He found, eventually, two brass cartridge cases near a huge hackberry tree, and there was enough scuffing on the trunk to indicate that someone had recently climbed it. There was a broad limb where someone could have sat and had a good view of the gap between the willows at the Gin Tank.
The casings were for a.30-.30, but that didn’t mean much. Probably every male in Thurston had a deer rifle, and probably every one of those rifles was a.30-.30. The casings were made by Remington, which was even less of a clue.
Rhodes questioned most of the residents of the nearby houses, but none of them had heard the shots or noticed anything out of the ordinary, like a man running along the road with a rifle in his hand, though to tell the truth, such a sight was not so rare in Thurston as an outsider might think it to be.
So Rhodes drove back to Clearview with another corpse on his hands and too many more unanswered questions to count. He’d called Hack on the telephone, again avoiding the radio for whatever good that would do, so he didn’t bother to go by the jail. He stopped for a quick hamburger, and then headed for Ralph Claymore’s house.