Bill Crider: Shotgun Saturday Night

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.”