James Allen lived on one of the country roads between Clearview and Thurston in a house like the one that Jack built. Allen had started out in a small five-room house when he’d first married, and then he and his wife had begun having children on a yearly basis. They’d stopped after seven, but Allen had kept adding rooms onto the sides and back of his house for years. Anyone familiar with the original dwelling could still discern part of the front of the house, but that was about all.
Allen had been a bulldozer operator who had gone into partnership with his brother and soon found himself making a lot of money in heavy equipment jobs. He needed the money to finance his housing additions, but within a few years he was making a comfortable living even beyond his basic needs. That was when he decided to run for county commissioner.
People in the country around Clearview knew him and liked him, and he won his precinct handily. He and Rhodes had gone to school together, played football together, and even dated some of the same girls. He was Rhodes’s best friend among the commissioners.
He was mowing his front yard as Rhodes drove up. “Can’t you get one of the boys to do that?” Rhodes asked as he stepped out of his car.
Allen grinned and killed the mower. “I need the exercise,” he said. “Besides, all those boys are too tired after being out half the night chasing girls. What can I do for you, Dan?”
“I guess you’ve heard about that Terry Wayne hiring Billy Don Painter,” Rhodes said.
“Yep. Heard it from the man himself,” Allen said.
“Let’s go sit down.”
They walked over to two aluminum lawn chairs webbed with colorful green and yellow plastic strips. The chairs were situated under a tall pecan tree, but the sun had shifted since they were placed there. Rhodes and Allen each took a chair and moved it back nearer the trunk of the tree, into the patchy shade of its branches. Rhodes sat and took a deep breath. He loved the smell of new-mown grass, especially if he hadn’t had to mow it himself.
“What do you think will happen?” Rhodes said.
“The usual,”‘ Allen responded. “The judge will call a special meeting of the commissioners, and we’ll all piss and moan about the situation, and then we’ll support the sheriff’s department one hundred percent just like we always do.”
Rhodes laughed. “Yeah, I know how that support goes. It sounds fine in the paper, but off the record I’m going to get my butt chewed.”
“Off the record you probably will. There’s two or three men who don’t think too much of Johnny Sherman, and they weren’t happy when he hired on with the department. They may use this little scrape as an excuse to get his job.”
“There’s never been any question about his work before,” Rhodes said stiffly.
“I know that, and so does the rest of the court,” Allen said, “but some of them remember when Johnny was a kid. He had a few problems back then. Little things, mostly, but there were one or two times when things got more serious.”
“That must’ve been when I was out of the county, then,” Rhodes said. “I never heard about them. Not even privately.”
“They weren’t the kind of things anybody’d want to bring up, exactly,” Allen told him. “In fact, you could kind of say they were covered up, in a way.”
“What kind of way?”
“The kind of way things get covered up. Johnny was a good ball player, and the team was in the district race. So what if he got into a few fights? It’s true that the other boys involved never wanted to press charges, and that they even refused to say that Johnny started the fights when it came right down to it, but one of them was beat up pretty bad. He was on the football team too, but he was only a second-stringer, so nobody worried too much about him except maybe his folks. He didn’t play any more ball that year, that’s for sure.”
Rhodes tipped his chair back and thought about what Allen had said. “Why didn’t anybody tell me this when Johnny came around about a job?”
“Letting bygones be bygones, I guess you could say. Giving Johnny a chance to show he’d changed.”
“But now we’ve got some people who’re thinking he hasn’t changed, and they’ll be saying that they knew all along he was no good. They’ll be saying they tried all along to keep me from hiring him.” Rhodes sighed. He’d been through things like this before, on a smaller scale. It was a part of his job that he didn’t like, any more than he liked slapping backs and shaking hands, the kind of things that Ralph Claymore was so good at. Maybe Claymore would make a better sheriff than I do, at that, Rhodes thought.
“It won’t be as bad as all that,”‘ Allen said. “At least I hope it won’t. If we can just prove that Johnny didn’t start that fight and that Terry Wayne and his buddy are just two drunks lookin’ to take the county for some money in a false suit, everything will be all right.
“And if we can’t prove that?” Rhodes asked.
“Don’t even think like that, especially out loud,” Allen said. “It’s bad luck.”
Rhodes got out of his chair. “You’re right,” he said. “I’ve got to have a positive attitude. Thanks for talking to me, James.”
Allen stood and put out his hand, which Rhodes shook. “Don’t worry about it,” Allen said. “Everything will work out fine.”
“I know,” Rhodes said as he started for his car. “I won’t worry about it.”
But of course he did.
Chapter 12
The county courthouse had always looked to Rhodes like a smaller version of the Kremlin, but he’d never mentioned the resemblance to anyone. He wasn’t sure there was anyone in Blacklin County who could appreciate the irony. He liked the old building himself, and he hated to think what might happen to it if some of the good citizens of the county started trying to give it a facelift to remove any suspected communist influence.
He walked up the broad walk under the shading pecan trees, up the wide front steps past the usual crowd of courthouse loafers, and through the pneumatic glass doors which were one of the only modern features of the building. They had been added a few years back when the building had been air-conditioned, and Rhodes still regretted both additions-the doors and the air-conditioning. With its thick stone walls and twelve-foot ceilings, the courthouse had always seemed to him cool and comfortable even in the summertime.
His shoe heels struck echoes from the marble floors as he walked down the hall to the stairs. He mounted the stairs, turned left into a corridor much narrower than the main halls, and came to his own private office. Like most sheriffs of Blacklin County, Rhodes spent most of his time either at the jail or on the road. No one ever called the courthouse office without calling the jail first, and no one ever came by the office looking for the sheriff because he was never there. Unless, of course, he wanted to be alone.
Rhodes wanted to be alone. The Terry Wayne business had him worried, and the two murders in Thurston had him even more worried. Allen hadn’t mentioned the murders. After all, there was no real pressure from the murders yet. Jeanne Clinton and Bill Tomkins weren’t from prominent families, so the county fathers weren’t taking any particular interest in them. But Rhodes knew that the murders were being talked about, and they certainly bothered him. He didn’t like for things to happen in his county unless he could take care of them.
He unlocked the door to his office. The top half was of pebbled glass, with the words “County Sheriff” somehow inlaid in gold letters. Rhodes’s name was not on the door, which saved the county the expense of changing glass after elections. That reminded Rhodes of his own prospects in the upcoming election. Obviously two unsolved murders were not helping him, not to mention the Terry Wayne case. Besides, Ralph Claymore was an imposing opponent, and Rhodes felt honor bound not to mention Claymore’s involvement with Jeanne Clinton unless it became apparent that the involvement was more than it seemed at present.