Free Murder Among the OWLS by Bill Crider Page A

talk.
    When the shirt was taken care of, Rhodes got a paper towel and went to the bathroom. He soaked the towel with alcohol and rubbed his back as best he could. The alcohol stung, and Rhodes sucked his breath in between his teeth. Then he went back to the kitchen and hid the towel with the shirt.
    â€œOne of these days I’m going to get caught,” he told the cat, who didn’t seem to care in the least.
    Rhodes went to the bedroom and put on a clean shirt. Yancey
slipped out from under the bed. He didn’t yip or bounce, but he seemed marginally more chipper.
    â€œDon’t let him get the best of you,” Rhodes told Yancey, but he was afraid that the advice was too late.
    Â 
    The courthouse was only a couple of blocks from the jail. Rhodes parked in the back and waited for Brant to arrive. When he did, they both got out of their cars and went into the building. It was cool and quiet because the courts weren’t in session, and Rhodes’s office was on the second floor, away from some of the usual bustle.
    Rhodes seldom used the courthouse office, and he’d used it even less often in recent months because someone—he didn’t know who—had removed the old Dr Pepper machine, the one that had dispensed real glass bottles, and replaced it with one that gave you a much bigger plastic bottle. It might have been a bigger value for the money, but to Rhodes it didn’t add up. He would have paid extra for the glass bottles.
    Brant followed Rhodes into the office, and Rhodes was glad to see that things were clean and dusted. He trusted the cleaning staff to take care of things like that even though he didn’t show up much, and sometimes they let him down. This time, however, there were no spiderwebs.
    Rhodes sat behind his desk and Brant sat in a heavy wooden chair opposite him. Brant sat with his back straight, his feet on the floor, and his hands flat along his thighs.
    â€œYou say you witnessed Mrs. Harris’s will?” Rhodes said.
    â€œThat’s right. It couldn’t have been more than a couple of months ago.”

    Rhodes found that hard to believe. Someone who paid as much attention to details as Mrs. Harris would likely have made a will long ago. Rhodes said as much.
    Brant nodded. “She did make one a long time ago. This was a new one. She wanted to make some changes after she found out about the gas wells.”
    Brant’s face changed. He struggled to keep it straight and almost managed it. But not quite. He reached into a back pocket of his pants, brought out a handkerchief, and brushed at his eyes.
    â€œI apologize,” he said, folding the handkerchief and replacing it. “I used to have much better control of my emotions. I think it has something to do with getting older.”
    He hadn’t really looked old to Rhodes, not until that moment of vulnerability.
    â€œIt’s not fair, you see,” Brant said. “Helen has always gotten by on her teacher retirement, but ‘gotten by’ is all. She never had any nice things, she never got to travel, she never even got a new car.”
    Rhodes hadn’t looked in the garage, but come to think of it, he remembered that Mrs. Harris drove a very old, but very clean, Chevrolet. Rhodes himself occasionally drove an Edsel, but it wasn’t his main car. He’d bought it because it was so ugly that it was attractive to him.
    â€œThorpe was her only relative,” Brant said, “except for her brother up in Montana. He has plenty of money, Helen said, and because Thorpe was so dependent on her, she decided to leave him both the land and the mineral rights. Her earlier will left everything to charity, and I told her to leave it like that. She didn’t listen to me, and now she’s dead.”
    â€œYou still think Thorpe killed her?”

    â€œYes. That’s exactly the kind of thing he’d do. To get the money.”
    â€œHe’d get it eventually.