Bill Crider - Dan Rhodes 08 - Winning Can Be Murder (16 page)

T
he Keltons lived in a house that was a lot different from the one Hayes Ford had bought with his gambling money.  It was more like Rhodes’ own house, a wood-frame building that was well-maintained but that had seen better days.

There was a large white sign with blue and gold lettering in the front yard.  It said:

A FIGHTING CLEARVIEW CATAMOUNT LIVES HERE!

YEA, JAY!

HE’S GREAT — NO. 38!

There were similar signs in the yards of every player on the team.  The cheerleaders painted them before the season and drove around town in a pickup truck unloading them at the players’ homes.  Rhodes wasn’t sure that all of them had little rhymes on them, though maybe they did.

He knocked on the front door.  The knock was answered by Mr. Kelton, who asked Rhodes to come in.  He was taller than Rhodes and fence-post thin.  He was holding the Sunday comics section of some big-city paper in his hand, and he was wearing a pair of reading glasses that Rhodes suspected came from Lee’s drugstore, or maybe Wal-Mart.

“Martha’s back in the kitchen, cooking supper,” Kelton said.  “What’s going on, Sheriff?  Is this about that restraining order the Garton coaches were going to get against us?”

The smell of frying chicken almost made Rhodes weak in the knees.  The peanut butter and crackers he’d eaten earlier hadn’t done much in the way of satisfying his hunger.

“It’s not the restraining order,” he said.  “I’d like to talk to Jay for a few minutes if I could,” he said.

“Is it about the coach?”

“Yes, sir, it is.  But Jay’s not involved in that.”  Rhodes hoped he was telling the truth.  “This is something that has to do with the team.”

“What about the team?”

“It’s just a rumor I’ve heard,” Rhodes said.  “I’d rather just talk to your son about it and then let him tell you if he wants to.”

Kelton plainly wanted to know more, but he said, “Well, I guess that would be all right.  He’s in his room.  I’ll call him.”

“Don’t do that,” Rhodes said.  “I’d rather talk to him in his room if you’d just show me the way.”

They crossed the den and turned down a short hall.  Kelton tapped lightly on a door with the tip of his index finger and waited.  When there was no answer, he pounded on the door with the heel of his right hand.

“Headphones,” he said.

Rhodes nodded, and in a moment the door opened.  Jay Kelton stood there with a questioning look on his face.  He was as tall as his father, but his shoulders were wider.  He was wearing a tight Clearview T-shirt, and Rhodes could see that he’d been doing a lot of weight training.  There was a scab on the bridge of his nose, and Rhodes wondered if he’d gotten scratched when he made the late hit on the Garton player.  His stomach was flat as a plate, for which Rhodes envied him just a little, even though he knew that Jerry Tabor had been right about that:  When Jay came back to his twenty-five-year reunion, his stomach wouldn’t be nearly as flat as it was now.

“What’s up?” Jay asked.  A pair of headphones hung around his neck, and Rhodes could hear the faint strains of music coming from them.

“The sheriff wants to talk to you,” Kelton said.  “He’ll tell you what it’s about.”

“In your room if you don’t mind,” Rhodes said.

“Sure,” Jay told him.  “Come on in.”

Rhodes stepped through the door into the room.  The walls were covered with posters that made Rhodes realize he had lost touch with the music world a long time ago, though he thought he might be able to name the category that some of the bands displayed on the walls belonged to.  Hack, who kept up with that sort of thing for some reason, had explained it to him:  “Matted hair, that’s grunge.  Teased hair, that’s metal.”

Then Rhodes saw that one poster was a huge picture of Kiss.  Maybe the world hadn’t passed him by after all.

Or then again, maybe it had.  Rhodes looked around the room.  When he was growing up, Rhodes had never known a kid with his own telephone, much less his own telephone, his own TV set, his own computer, and his own CD player.  Of course, no one had owned a computer or a CD player when Rhodes was growing up.

“You wanna sit down?” Jay asked, turning off the CD player and taking off the headphones.

The only chair in the room was at the computer desk.  Rhodes pulled it out and sat in it.  Jay sat on his twin bed, under a poster of Pearl Jam. 
Grunge
, Rhodes thought, looking at the group’s hair.

“You wanted to talk to me?” Jay asked.

He put the headphones on the desk.  He had innocent brown eyes, and the kind of easy-going confidence that Rhodes had seen in a lot of young athletes, the kind of confidence that came from knowing that you were special, that you had skills that mattered, that everyone in your class looked up to you because of what you could do on a football field or on a basketball court.  For some reason, kids who could balance a chemical equation or explain the binomial theorem usually didn’t have that kind of confidence at all.  Maybe it was because no one had ever put a sign in their yards.

“I wanted to ask you something about the team,” Rhodes said.  “Something that I hope you’ll keep in confidence.”

Jay slumped back against the wall, completely at ease.  “I can keep a secret, sure.”

Rhodes wished he believed him.  In his experience, hardly anyone could keep a secret.  But it didn’t really matter; in fact, it might do some good if the team knew that someone was interested in finding out about steroids.  It might put a little fear in them, if anything could, which was doubtful.  And fear sometimes made people talk.

“I’m glad to hear it,” Rhodes said.  “Here’s the problem.  There’s a rumor going around that some of the players have been using steroids.”

Jay leaned forward.  “That’s a bunch of crap.  Who told you that?”

“Nobody in particular.  It’s something that’s going around, that’s all.”

“Well, it’s crap.  Why would anybody do that?  It’s crazy.  Steroids turn your balls to wood.  Everybody knows that.”

Rhodes hadn’t known that.  He’d have to remember to avoid steroids at all costs.  No need to take any chances, even if it wasn’t true.

“It has other effects, too,” Rhodes said.  “It helps you bulk up.  Builds up muscle, makes you a little more aggressive for the game.”

“Turns you into a maniac, that’s what Coach Meredith always said.  Man, he was always preachin’ against drugs like that.”

Rhodes wondered if Meredith was the one who’d passed along the information about the effect of steroids on one’s gonads.  Oh, well.  Whatever worked.

“Besides,” Jay went on, “if the UIL caught anybody takin’ a drug like that, we’d be out of the play-offs in about half a second.  Probably have to forfeit all our games.  Boy, those Garton assholes would love that!”

Young people these days were also considerably less inhibited in their language around their elders than Rhodes remembered his generation having been.  While
assholes
would have been a perfectly acceptable word among one’s peers, it would have been nearly impossible to say it in front of an adult.  Jay Kelton, however, didn’t even seem to notice that he’d said anything unusual.

“So no one that you know of takes steroids?” Rhodes asked.

“That’s what I’ve been sayin’.”

“And the coaches have never mentioned them?”

“I told you that Coach Meredith was always preachin’ about them, didn’t I?”

“Favorably, I meant.”

Jay’s eyes flicked to Rhodes left.  Rhodes turned his head slightly and saw nothing more interesting than a Candlebox poster.  He looked back at Jay, who was now meeting his eyes.  But it was too late.  Rhodes knew he was about to hear a lie.

“Nobody was ever favorable about drugs,” Jay said.  “That would be stupid.”

Rhodes didn’t know exactly what approach to take.  There were some people who didn’t take very well to being called liars, and Jay Kelton looked like one of them.

“What about Coach Deedham?” he asked.

“Who told you that?”  Jay slid off the bed and stood up.  “That’s a damn lie.  Coach Deedham never said a thing about any drugs, and I’ll whip the one who says he did.”

“I was just asking a hypothetical question,” Rhodes said.  “Let’s just forget that I brought it up.”

“Fine.  Let’s do that.”

Jay sat back down on his bed and leaned against the wall.  But this time his back was stiff and his arms were crossed in front of his chest.  Rhodes was certain his sudden burst of hostility was inspired by a genuine feeling of outrage, not steroids.

“I’m glad to know that the coaches were so strongly against drugs,” Rhodes said, getting out of the chair.  “I thought it was just a false rumor, and it’s good to hear the truth.”

“Yeah,” Jay said.  “It was a false rumor.”

“I appreciate your being so honest with me,” Rhodes told him.  “You can tell your father about this, but I hope you won’t mention it to anybody else.”

“I told you, I can keep a secret.”

“That’s right.  Thanks for your help.”

Rhodes left Jay scowling in his room, sitting under the Pearl Jam poster.

“Was the boy any help?” Mr. Kelton asked when Rhodes returned to the den.

“I think so,” Rhodes said.  “We’ll see.”

“Well, I sure hope you catch whoever it was that killed Coach Meredith.  We’ve talked to Jay about it, tried to help him deal with it.  He seems all right, but you never can tell.”

Rhodes thought that in spite of their tendency to dramatize things, young people had a lot less trouble dealing with death than most adults thought.

“He seems fine,” Rhodes said.

“We don’t want him to be down for the game next weekend,” Kelton said.  “It’s a big one.”

Rhodes nodded.  “That’s right.”

“Then there’s that restraining order.  I sure hate it that those Garton folks are such bad sports.  I talked to Jay about that hit, and he says that he didn’t know that boy was out of bounds.  When you’re running down the field full tilt that way, you’ve got your eye on the ball carrier, not on the sideline.  There wasn’t any reason for Jay to get thrown out of the game.  I’m sorry there was a fight, but I sure don’t think there’s any need to carry this in front of some judge.  I say let’s keep football on the field and out of the courtroom.”

Rhodes thought that was a pretty catchy saying, but he didn’t think it would meet with much approval in Garton.

“From what I gather,” he said, “there’s not much likelihood of a judge ruling against the officials on a football game.  I think you can rest easy about that.”

“I hope so.  We don’t need any more distractions.”  Kelton glanced over his shoulder toward the kitchen.  “I think supper’s about ready.  You want a little fried chicken?”

The answer was yes, but Rhodes said, “No, thanks, I’ve got a lot of work to do.  I appreciate the offer, though.”

“Martha makes about the best fried chicken I’ve ever tasted,” Kelton said.  “I could snag you a piece to take with you.”

“No, thanks,” Rhodes said, hoping that his mouth wasn’t watering too obviously.  “I’ll eat later.”

“Well, you go on and catch whoever killed the coach, then.  I think it’ll be a big load off the team’s mind when that’s taken care of.”

“I’m sure it will be,” Rhodes said.

Chapter Fourteen

R
hodes thought it was a little strange that while everyone seemed to want him to find Brady Meredith’s killer, no one seemed to care much about Meredith himself.  They wanted the killer found so the team wouldn’t be affected for the big game, not because a man was dead or because they wanted to see justice done.

Rhodes also thought that he should have come up with the connection between Deedham and steroids a long time before now.  Deedham was, after all, the one coach of the four whom everyone had said would do anything to win.

It had been obvious from the first that Deedham cared more about winning than he cared about Brady Meredith’s death, more than he cared about his wife, more than he cared about anything or anyone.  If a coach was encouraging the use of steroids, Deedham was the most likely candidate.

As Rhodes drove back to the jail, he thought about how different Deedham and Meredith were.  On the one hand, there was Deedham, a coach who thought that winning was everything and would probably even give illegal drugs to his players in order to get a victory.  On the other hand, there was Meredith, a coach who presumably liked winning — what coach didn’t? — but who was so opposed to drugs that he didn’t even like caffeine in soft drinks.  There was certainly a potential for conflict between the two of them, maybe deadly conflict.

Rhodes wasn’t too clear on what Deedham might actually have said or done about the steroids, and he knew that he could never have gotten the truth from Jay Kelton, but he had gotten close enough to it to draw some inferences.

Deedham had certainly mentioned steroids at one time or another if Rhodes had read Jay Kelton’s reaction to his questions rightly, but whether any of the team members were actually taking the drugs was another question.  Judging by what Rhodes had heard from Jay, it seemed that Meredith’s philosophy had been influential enough to keep the Catamounts honest.

Rhodes hoped so, because Jay was right about one thing.  If anyone were caught using drugs, the team would be out of the play-offs, and all the coaches would lose their jobs.  It was too bad that Deedham would even consider such a risk, but Rhodes was convinced that he had.

So it was possible that Deedham had not been at The County Line to spy on his wife.  Maybe he had been there to talk to Rapper instead.

The possibilities that opened out from that idea were endless.  Meredith could have seen Deedham and Rapper, guessed their business, and confronted them.  That might make Rapper the killer, but it didn’t let out Deedham, who might have been angered because he’d seen Meredith with Terry.

Just exactly how Hayes Ford fit into that scenario, Rhodes wasn’t sure.  He’d have to work that out later.

When he arrived at the jail, Ruth’s car was already there.  The deputy was talking to Hack and Lawton when Rhodes went inside.