Free A Mammoth Murder by Bill Crider Page A

means of support but who could somehow afford to pass the time in games of chance and skill. Not that there was any gambling going on there. Rhodes would have been shocked to learn that was the case.
    Colley hadn’t been there, though, and Rhodes wondered again what business might have kept him from going to hunt for Bigfoot tracks with Bud Turley.
    â€œWhat about his house?” Rhodes said. “Did you have time to get a look at it?”
    â€œIt’s not a house,” Ruth said. “It’s a trailer.” She told Rhodes where it was. “And I didn’t get by there. There was a little car wreck out on the highway, and I helped clear it.”
    â€œI’ll go by there later today, then,” Rhodes said.
    They searched the store diligently for clues, but there were none. The killer had not thoughtfully left a Dr Pepper bottle with
his fingerprints on it sitting on the counter, nor had he left any other sign that he’d ever been there.
    â€œI wish I’d thought about talking to Louetta yesterday,” Rhodes said. “She might still be alive if I had.”
    â€œOr she might not,” Ruth said. “She might not have remembered a thing, but the killer would have paid her a visit anyway. Besides, this might not even be connected to Colley’s murder.”
    â€œYou don’t really believe that, do you?”
    â€œNo,” she said. “I don’t think I do.”
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    Rhodes had missed lunch again, so he stopped by the Dairy Queen when he got back to town. He figured that a Blizzard wouldn’t hurt him, not as long as nobody, and by nobody he meant Ivy, found out about it. He had one with crushed Heath Bar mixed in. If that wasn’t nutrition, he didn’t know what was.
    He talked to the counter workers about Larry Colley, but they didn’t know much about him other than that he was a regular customer and preferred his burgers without onions and his Blizzards with crumbled Butterfinger. None of the patrons in the place knew Colley at all. Or so they all said.
    After he finished his Blizzard, Rhodes went by the jail. It was getting close to four o’clock, and he still wanted to see Bolton and Colley’s other ex-wife. He also wanted to go and have a look at Colley’s place of residence, that trailer on a lot just outside of town.
    When Rhodes went inside the jail, Hack and Lawton were waiting for him. He knew they wanted all the details about Louetta Kennedy’s death, and he also knew that he didn’t have time to
make them drag the details out of him the way they would have done if they’d known something he didn’t know.
    So he just told them everything as quickly as he could and then asked if anything had happened in his absence, hoping that they’d do him the favor of responding as concisely as he had.
    He should have known better.
    â€œWe got a couple of calls,” Hack said, looking over at Lawton, who looked down at the floor.
    Rhodes waited, but of course Hack didn’t say what the calls were about. Rhodes knew that if he waited forever, Hack wouldn’t tell him outright. He’d have to ask. So he did.
    â€œImportant calls?” he said.
    â€œYou could say that.”
    â€œDo you want to tell me about them?”
    â€œOne of them was from somebody callin’ about Vernell’s goats.”
    Vernell Lindsey wrote romance novels and was doing fairly well for herself by all accounts. Her sales had soared after she’d held a writers’ workshop on the old college campus near Obert. The sales hadn’t been a result of her improved writing abilities, however. They’d come about because a famous cover model had been murdered in the course of the event. It was the kind of publicity that money couldn’t buy. Vernell got an interview in Romantic Times, and sales skyrocketed.
    Vernell was considered by nearly everyone in Clearview to be a little eccentric, though not