Ivy came out of the house and joined Rhodes. He could hear Yancey yipping behind the closed door.

  “Your dog is feeling left out of things,” Rhodes said.

  “I don’t want him to come out here and get run down by some crazy driver,” Ivy said. She pointed at the tree. “Like the one that did that.”

  “He did it to avoid hitting a squirrel,” Rhodes told her.

  “Maybe there’s some good in everybody, but was that really the smart thing to do?”

  “Happens all the time,” Rhodes said. “People don’t think about what’s going to happen to them in a situation like that. There’s not time for them to think. They react instead, and the natural reaction is to try to avoid hitting the squirrel.”

  “Sometimes you wind up hitting the tree, though. It might be sad to hit a squirrel, but it’s sadder to injure yourself and tear up your car.”

  “The squirrel doesn’t think so.”

  Ivy shook her head. “I’m not so sure squirrels think. Maybe what they do is reacting, too.”

  Rhodes didn’t respond. He looked at the damaged pecan tree.

  “I can almost see the wheels turning in your head,” Ivy said. “Is that tree really that important to you?”

  “It’s not the tree,” Rhodes said.

  “What, then?”

  “Just thinking.”

  “That’s always a good thing.”

  “Nope,” Rhodes said. “Not always.”

  Chapter 22

  No emergencies worthy of Rhodes’s attention occurred for the rest of Sunday, so he was able to spend some time with Ivy, the dogs, and the cats. Ivy and the dogs seemed glad to have him around. The cats were indifferent, which Rhodes knew was only to be expected. Cats, or at least these two, were always indifferent.

  He got an early start on Monday after a romp with Speedo and Yancey. Both dogs were perky because it had gotten cooler again overnight, although there was no wind this time, just a crisp fall day with bright sun and low humidity. If every day were like that, Rhodes wouldn’t mind. Some people said they’d get bored with the sameness, but Rhodes didn’t think he would.

  When Rhodes got to the jail, Hack didn’t even have any exciting incidents to tell him about or any stories to draw out at great length. After the car chase with Latham, things had calmed down considerably. Pert and Latham had both been booked and then bonded out. Rhodes hoped they’d settle their differences in a gentlemanly manner, though he didn’t really hold out much hope for it. Latham would probably blame the wrecked car on Pert, and that could be the beginning of a whole new feud.

  “Only thing that happened was late yesterday afternoon,” Hack said. “We got a call about Old Man Everett again.”

  Everybody in town referred to Russell Everett as Old Man Everett. He was a couple of years younger than Hack, but Rhodes chose not to point that out. He was glad that Lawton was working back in the cellblock, for Lawton surely would have pointed it out, and that would’ve started another argument that might’ve gone on endlessly.

  “What’s Mr. Everett done this time?” Rhodes asked, hoping for a straight answer.

  “Put chocolate chips in his yard.”

  Rhodes wasn’t sure he’d heard that right, and he didn’t consider it a straight answer. “Chocolate chips?”

  “Chocolate chips is what I said. Your hearin’ startin’ to get bad?”

  “I was just surprised. I don’t think we’ve ever had a case of somebody putting chocolate chips in his yard, and I’m pretty sure there’s no law against it.”

  “Might be in this case. It was Charlotte Chandler that called. She’s always walkin’ her dog down the sidewalk in front of Old Man Everett’s house. Old Man Everett don’t like that dog.”

  “He doesn’t like any dogs,” Rhodes said.

  They’d had calls about Everett more than once because he’d be standing on his lawn with a water hose when people walked their dogs by his house. He’d never squirted anybody, but it was clear that he was threatening to do so. His complaint was that people allowed their dogs to use his lawn as a restroom and then didn’t pick up the results. He was tired of it, so he brought out the water hose.

  The implied threat hadn’t worked, though, because nobody took him seriously except Charlotte Chandler. She’d called the sheriff’s department and said that if Old Man Everett squirted her or her dog, she was going to file charges against him for assault. Rhodes had gone out for a little talk with Everett, who’d said he’d stop standing there with the hose but that he’d “by God find another way to stop those damn dogs from messing up my lawn.”

  Everett took good care of his lawn. It was one of the greenest in town, if not the greenest. Everett fertilized every spring, and if it didn’t rain, he watered. He cut his own grass and did his own edging. Someone had once told Rhodes that he’d seen Everett out in the yard edging his driveway with a pair of scissors, but Rhodes didn’t believe that. It might’ve been true, however. Everett was mighty proud of that grass, and his threat about finding another way to stop the dogs had been a serious one.

  Apparently the other way was chocolate.

  “Charlotte says dogs like chocolate,” Hack said.

  “So do I,” Rhodes said, who wouldn’t have minded a bit of it at that very moment.

  “Yeah, ever’body likes it, but it’s bad for dogs, accordin’ to Charlotte. She says it’ll kill ’em.”

  Being the owner of two dogs, Rhodes had read about the effects of chocolate on creatures of the canine persuasion, so he knew a little about the subject.

  “It depends on the size of the dog and the kind of chocolate,” he said. “Ms. Chandler has a Shih Tzu, so it wouldn’t take much, not nearly as much as it would take for Ms. Bettinger’s Great Pyrenees, for example.”

  “That Bettinger dog’s the size of a Shetland pony.”

  “At least. Can’t Ms. Chandler keep her Shih Tzu under control? It’s not any bigger than Yancey.”

  “Name’s Horace,” Hack said.

  “Whose name?”

  “That dog’s name. Horace. Mighty funny name for a dog.”

  “Wasn’t that the name of Ms. Chandler’s first husband?”

  “Believe it was. Name makes more sense now. Anyway, she ain’t got no more control of that dog than she had of the original Horace, and she’s worried about other dogs, too. She ain’t the only one goes by Old Man Everett’s place.”

  “Is the problem solved?” Rhodes asked, hoping he wasn’t going to have to deal with it.

  “For now it is,” Hack said. “Duke went out and talked to Old Man Everett, and he cleaned up the chocolate chips. Duke made him run the lawn mower over the yard, too, and that chopped up whatever was left pretty good. Dog’d be hard-pressed to find any of it. Who knows what Old Man Everett’ll come up with next, though.”

  “Not me,” Rhodes said, “but we’ll worry about that when it happens.”

  “Be easier if folks would clean up after their dogs,” Hack said.

  “Most do.”

  “That ain’t what Old Man Everett says.”

  “He’s a little bit biased.”

  “A lot biased, I’d say. You gonna hang around here today, or you got somethin’ in mind?”

  “I’m going to try to get a handle on Jake Marley’s death,” Rhodes said.

  “You got any good ideas?”

  “I have some ideas, but I don’t know how good they are. I have to talk to everybody again. I followed up on that suggestion you made about looking for the old arrest records. I found out that Al Graham had a couple of arrests for reckless driving. Might be something to look further at.”

  “Am I gonna get a raise?”

  “I’ll be sure to mention to the commissioners what a great job you’re doing.”

  “That’ll do the trick, all right,” Hack said.

  “Sure it will,” Rhodes said.

  * * *

  Aubrey Hamilton’s real estate office was out on the highway in a small four-building strip center located practically in the Walmart parking lot. It was a good location, Rhodes supposed, since if there was one place everybody in town went, it was Walmart. To get there from just about anywhere in town, you had to drive past the little strip center, and the business with the biggest sign was Aubrey’s. It was white with red letters that said:

  AUBREY HAMILTON REAL ESTATE

  BUY SELL TRADE

  WHATEVER YOU WANT, WE HAVE IT

  Besides the real estate office, the center contained a fabric shop, a computer repair shop, and a vacancy where there had once been a TV repair shop. Even the location hadn’t saved that business. Nobody in Clearview repaired TV sets anymore, or much of anything else. When one stopped working, people just bought a new one. Rhodes supposed that was easier than the old way of doing things, but it seemed wasteful to him.

  Two cars were parked in the lot of the strip center, including Aubrey’s Chevy Malibu with the magnetic signs on the doors advertising her business. The lack of cars wasn’t unusual since it was early, and people who worked in the center also had a parking area in back.

  Rhodes pulled the Tahoe into a spot in front of Aubrey’s office and got out. The windows of the former TV repair shop were clean on the outside but dusty on the inside. Rhodes was a little surprised no one had opened a new business there, since it was a good location, but new businesses were risky in Clearview, no matter where they were.

  Looking through the window of the real estate office, Rhodes saw that Aubrey was inside at her desk, talking on the telephone. It was an old landline like the one in Rhodes’s office at the courthouse. He went on inside, and she waved him to a seat with her free hand. He sat down to wait until she finished the call.

  It didn’t take long. She hung up, folded her hands on the desk, and asked what she could do for Rhodes.

  “I was wondering if you’d thought of anything else that might help me,” he said. “When you talked to Jake, he must have made conversation about things not related to the theater now and then.”

  Aubrey looked almost at Rhodes, but he thought it was more likely that she was looking out into the parking lot. “I don’t remember that he did.”

  “Nothing about his old friends, people he knew when he was growing up, his sister who died in an accident?”

  Aubrey looked thoughtful. “He may have said something about what the building was like in the old days, now that you mention it. I think he went to the movies there with his friends.”

  That was possible. Jake would’ve been just old enough to see a movie there before the place closed down for good, but he’d have been too young at the time to remember much about it. There wouldn’t be any connection to what happened to his sister.

  “He didn’t mention seeing any of those old friends lately?” Rhodes asked.

  Aubrey looked directly at him. “Sheriff, why are you asking about his friends? Do you think one of them killed him?”

  “I don’t know what to think. That’s why I’m asking.”

  “I see. You’ve put me in a bad position. I don’t want to get anybody into trouble.”

  “It’s not like we’re talking about a parking ticket,” Rhodes said. “This is a lot more serious.”

  “I know, but still…”

  “Nobody will ever know it came from you,” Rhodes told her.

  “All right, then. I remember now. He did talk about at least one of them.”

  Rhodes was used to this kind of circuitous conversation, thanks to spending so much time around Hack and Lawton.

  “Which one?” he asked.

  “Ed Hopkins.”

  “Did Jake mention what they talked about?”

  “It was the building,” Aubrey said, and stopped.

  “What about the building?” Rhodes asked after a second or so.

  “Ed was upset because Jake hadn’t come to him and asked about finding the heirs and making the deal.”

  “Ed mentioned to me that he needed a sale,” Rhodes said.

  Aubrey nodded. “So did I. You might have noticed that Clearview’s not growing a lot. Any sale we can get is a sale we need.”

  Rhodes wasn’t disappointed that Ed had lied to him. He’d gotten used to being lied to. People nearly always lied to the law if it served their purposes, and their purposes were often to keep from being suspected of a crime. Ed was likely to have been the one who’d called Glenda Tallent. Maybe he’d asked her not to say anything about his having talked to Jake.

  “So you got a good price for the building,” Rhodes said.

  “Not really. It’s old and in bad repair. I didn’t do too badly, though. The fact that Jake really wanted it helped.”

  “He didn’t mention having talked to any of his other old friends? What about Al Graham?”

  “He works on cars, doesn’t he?”

  “That’s him.”

  “Jake wouldn’t need him. He always had a practically new car.”

  Rhodes thought about that. He asked a few more questions but got nothing useful in return. It appeared that the only person Jake had been in touch with, or at least the only one that Aubrey knew about, was Ed Hopkins. Rhodes figured it might be worth his time to have another little chat with Ed.

  He thanked Aubrey for her time and drove to Ed Hopkins’s office. This time Ed was sitting at his desk as Rhodes walked in. Ed didn’t look pleased to see Rhodes, which wasn’t surprising. Nobody liked to have even one visit from the sheriff, and a second visit within a couple of days was even less likely to be welcome.

  “Sheriff,” Ed said.

  It wasn’t much of a greeting, but Rhodes took it as an invitation to have a seat. When he was more or less comfortable, he said, “I’ve been talking to Aubrey Hamilton.”

  Ed fiddled with some papers on his desk and said nothing, so Rhodes continued. “She tells me that you’ve talked to Jake recently. I seem to remember that you said you hadn’t.”

  Ed looked up from his papers. “Did I say that? I don’t remember. I might’ve talked to him, but if I did, it wasn’t about anything of any consequence.”

  “I think it might have been consequential. You argued with him about the building. You were upset that he’d gone to Aubrey and hadn’t come to you.”

  “I told you I could’ve used the sale. I didn’t think it was important that I’d mentioned it to Jake. If I did.”

  “I asked about that specifically, but we’ll let that go for a minute. I want to know how long you talked and how upset you were by the time you finished.”

  Ed shoved his papers aside. “Now just a damn minute, Sheriff. Whatever Jake and I said to each other is my own personal business. It was just between us. You don’t need to know about it.”

  “Jake’s dead,” Rhodes said. “I believe somebody killed him, and I’m conducting a murder investigation. So I do need to know about what you said. I can’t force you to tell me, but it’s going to make you look pretty bad if you don’t. I’ll bet you know that.”

  Ed leaned back in his chair and sighed. “I know how it must sound. That’s why I didn’t tell you in the first place. I knew you’d think I had something to do with Jake’s death, and I didn’t. I haven’t even been in that theater since they started work on it.”

  “If that’s true, you don’t have a thing to worry about,” Rhodes said. “Tell me something. Where were you the morning Jake died?”

  “Right here in this office, working, as usual.”

  “Nobody else was here?”

  “Well, what do you think? I’ve told you how slow business is. About the only person who’s been here this week is you. I was working on contacts that morning, figuring out who might be selling and who might be buying and how I might get in on something. Not that it did me any good.”

  Rhodes wondered why Ed didn’t just retire. Like the others who’d known Jake, he was old enough. Maybe business had never been good enough for Ed to build up any retirement funds or to have much coming in from Social Security.

  “Not much of an alibi,” Rhodes said.

  “It’s what I have. I’d lie if I thought it would do me any good, but you’d figure that out. Then I’d really be in trouble, wouldn’t I?”

  “You got that right,” Rhodes said.

  * * *

  Rhodes decided to stop by the theater before he went to see Al Graham. Being inside the building again might give him some ideas, although he already had a lot of those. He just didn’t know how the bits and pieces of the puzzle that were jumbled in his head all fit together, or even if they did fit together. He didn’t want to go to the courthouse to think things over because of Jennifer Loam’s aggravating habit of tracking him down there and asking about his investigations. The theater would be more private unless someone saw the Tahoe parked in front. Even that wouldn’t matter, because he was going to lock the door.

  The only problem was that he’d have to stop by the jail. The sheriff’s department had keys to all the downtown buildings, and they were kept where whoever was on duty could get one if it was needed. Retrieving one meant seeing Hack again, and while Rhodes didn’t mind seeing him, he didn’t have time for a long-winded conversation about chocolate chips or anything else of that nature. But he needed the key, so he’d have to chance it.

  He got lucky. When he entered the jail, Hack was on the phone to someone about some kind of dispute between neighbors. Rhodes couldn’t tell what kind of dispute, and he didn’t want to know. He grabbed the key and got out of there before Hack could try to send him to solve the caller’s problem. Hack would just have to dispatch one of the deputies. Rhodes didn’t have the time.

  When he got downtown, it occurred to Rhodes that he could park in the lot across the street from the theater. That was the lot for Randy Lawless’s law offices, and even Jennifer Loam wouldn’t be suspicious to see the Tahoe parked there. Rhodes and Lawless could be discussing some of the finer points of the law for all Jennifer would know.

  After he parked the Tahoe, Rhodes looked around to be sure no cars were coming. When he saw that no one was around, he got out of the Tahoe and hustled across the street. He got across and into the theater quickly without being seen, at least by anyone passing by. Someone in another building might have caught a glimpse of him, but that didn’t matter. Rhodes unlocked the door, went inside, and locked the door behind him.