by J. A. Jance
“Speaking of husbands,” Charles said. “I also checked on your old pal Rick Austin.”
“What about him? Where’s he?”
“Deceased. Katherine—she was still Faith back then—married him shortly after she left you. That was followed by a time when they both did a serious amount of coke. She ended up in rehab, cleaned up her act, and left him high and dry. Austin blew his brains out after she left.”
Karma’s a bitch. Much as I thought Rick deserved everything he got, I couldn’t help having a moment of sympathy for the guy. After all, there but for the love of Grandma Hudson would go I.
“By the way,” Charles said, “I managed to lay hands on the vic’s telephone records.”
“How did you do that?”
“Don’t ask, don’t tell. Harold can subpoena them later if he needs to, but it’s always better to know what they’re going to say before you do that. I’ve got the dates and times for all the calls that were placed from the pay phone downstairs. I’ve also got a record of the call to her cell phone that was placed from the swimming pool pay phone at the Talisman at 2:05 A.M..
“Katherine took the call. It lasted for over three minutes. Twenty minutes later she is seen on surveillance tapes leaving her building. That’s the last record I’ve been able to find of her, although I’ve got someone in Vegas looking at the surveillance tapes of all the hotels along the Strip. Talk about looking for a needle in the haystack, but we have a little better idea of what we’re looking for now. It’ll turn up. As for the Talisman? What a dog of a hotel! They may have surveillance cameras hanging on ceilings all over the place, but that’s just for show. The problem is, not one of them works.”
“In other words, the surveillance tape that might have caught the killer and exonerated me doesn’t exist?”
Charles nodded. “That’s the way it looks. So, are you ready to take a ride?”
I wasn’t so sure. My most recent experience with being given a ride hadn’t turned out very well.
“Where to?”
“I want to show you something.”
“Can’t you just tell me?”
“Showing’s better than telling. Come on.”
Not particularly happy about it, I headed for the stairs. Out in the parking lot I was surprised to discover that Charles’s ride was a fire-engine-red Corvette. Not brand new, but new enough to make a statement. The man may have hit bottom years earlier, when Tim O’Malley’s daughter had walked out on him for another woman, but that had most likely been the beginning of a long upward path for which Pop O’Malley was most likely largely responsible. I wondered what Tim would think if I called him by that handle, too. Somehow I suspected that he wouldn’t mind.
As Charles and I headed down Highway 60 and turned onto the 101, I was dying to ask where we were going, but I stifled. Both highways were clotted with late afternoon traffic. Inching along in the HOV lane, we drove across the near north end of the city—not the real north end because the city has now expanded northward far beyond where those traditional boundaries used to lay. On the far side of Scottsdale and still on the 101, we turned south, exiting toward downtown Scottsdale on East Chaparral, just north of Camelback. Charles turned left onto Scottsdale Road, drove past Goldwater, and pulled into a parking garage at Fashion Square. Instead of parking in a space on one of the lower levels, he drove all the way up to the roof and pulled into a spot at the far edge of the lot, looking north.
“What do you see?” he asked.
I looked at the mid-rise across the street. It obviously housed high-end condos. The spacious balconies were filled with plants in wildly colorful pots and furnished with equally high-end deck chairs and tables. The grounds around the base of the building were meticulously landscaped with towering palms, a carpet of lush green grass, and flower beds thick with recently planted petunias. Clearly this was a building where the residents weren’t the least bit concerned about the high cost of water in the Valley of the Sun.
“It’s a building,” I said grumpily, annoyed at being forced to play a guessing game. “Condos for the rich and famous.”
“Rich and infamous maybe,” Charles replied with a sly grin. “Who do you suppose lives here?”
“I have no idea.”
“Your cleaning lady,” he said. “Marina Ochoa. That’s not the name she goes by here. Folks in the condo complex know her as Maria Fuentes, but believe me, this is where the woman known to you as Marina Ochoa lives. By the way, she doesn’t have any kids. None at all.”
I’m sure my jaw dropped. “You’re kidding.”
“Wish I was,” Charles answered. “I got the license of her work car from the surveillance tapes at your security agency. That’s an old Buick, and she doesn’t park it here. She’s got a sweet little SLK that she drives back and forth between Scottsdale and Peoria. The Buick is what she drives when she comes to see you. She keeps it parked, complete with her vacuum cleaner and tray of cleaning supplies stowed in the trunk, in a garage over in Peoria just a few blocks from the Roundhouse.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “How could she possibly afford to live here?”
“I’m sure her boyfriend pays the freight. Does the name Jeffrey Jones sound familiar?”
My jaw dropped again. Or maybe still. “She’s hooked up with the hotel developer, the one who’s trying to buy me out?”
“That’s right. One and the same. I believe that’s what Jones and Ochoa have been after this whole time—they’ve been trying to get the goods on you for months now. Jones must have finally realized that he wouldn’t be able to convince you to sell at what he wanted to pay, so he sent Marina to you along with her hard luck story in order to gain access to your private life. One or the other of them came up with the brilliant idea that if you were in jail facing homicide charges with the possibility of a long prison sentence, you might be more inclined to be reasonable.”
“But I thought . . .”
“I know what you thought,” Charles said. “You believed Marina’s sob story about being an illegal immigrant and about her working her poor little fingers to the bone in order to support her poor fatherless children. Guess again. Her parents immigrated from Mexico long before she was born. She’s a U.S. citizen with an honors degree in history and English from ASU. She went on to get an MBA from Thunderbird over in Glendale. That’s where she and Jeffrey hooked up. He divorced his first wife—his starter wife—shortly thereafter.”
“But she worked for me for months,” I objected.
“True,” Charles agreed, “and they must have been looking to make a huge score, considering she was willing to do that much hard physical labor just to have unlimited access to your private life. Believe me, the Maria Fuentes who lives here has a cleaning lady of her own. The really good news for us is that before she and Jeffrey became a couple, Maria spent several years working in the securities field. That means her fingerprints are on file. I’m hoping the criminalists dusting your file folders for prints will not only find hers, but they’ll find them where we need them.”
“Finding her prints won’t mean anything,” I objected. “She cleans my apartment. Her fingerprints are bound to be there.”
“In your apartment maybe, but not on the file folders containing your private documents. I can’t imagine you expected her to dust the file with your divorce decree in it on a regular basis.”
“But what if she wore gloves?” I objected, thinking about the gloves Charles put on his hands before touching my computer keyboard.
“Crooks like these are arrogant,” Charles said. “It won’t ever have occurred to them that we’re this smart. She’s probably been snooping through your computer the whole time she’s been working for you, looking for something they could use to bring you to heel. Then two things happened. First they found out that Faith Dixon had turned into Katherine Melcher who was living i
n Las Vegas. Then you decided to go to Vegas for that writing convention. What’s it called again?”
“Bouchercon.”
“Yes, Bouchercon. At that point they must have thought they hit the jackpot because it all seemed to fall into place. At some point along the way your sweet little Marina made a copy of your car keys—the trunk key anyway. I checked the tapes. The week of October fifteenth, the week Katy Melcher died, Marina cleaned your apartment on Thursday rather than Friday. I’m pretty sure she and Jeffrey drove to Vegas together the next day to scope out the situation. I’m sure they used the old Twelfth Step ruse to lure Katy out of the house at that hour of the morning. According to Katy’s widower, she took late night calls from addicts trying to kick their drug and alcohol habits.”
That was way more than I could get my head around. The idea of Faith or Katy or whoever she was going out on a late night mission of mercy and being murdered for it seemed utterly unlikely.
“What about the threatening phone calls?” I asked.
“They came on days when Marina Ochoa would have been working for you. They must have figured that would make your situation a slam dunk. Threatening calls come from the victim’s ex before she’s murdered? What could be better?”
“What about the e-mail from Deeny?” I asked.
“That’s apparently legit,” Charles said. “Because of the phone calls, Katy Melcher really was worried that you were coming after her.”
“In other words, Marina and Jeffrey expected that the local cops would focus on me to the exclusion of anyone else.”
“Exactly,” Charles Rickover agreed. “It might have gone just that way had it not been for Pop. Without him, you would have been a goner. Had you decided to forgo a public defender in favor of hiring your own defense attorney, you would have been forced to sell the Roundhouse to the first available buyer just to cover legal fees. You’d be amazed to know how much a top flight homicide defense team costs these days.”
Evening was settling in. Across the street, lights switched on in various units as people came home from work or whatever it was they did during the day.
“So what happens now?”
“The two cops from Las Vegas . . .” he paused.
“Detectives Jamison and Shandrow,” I supplied.
“They may be a bit slow on the uptake, but they’re not stupid. Bright and early tomorrow morning, I expect Harold will point them in the right direction. It may take a few weeks to straighten all this up, but sooner or later your name will be cleared, as though nothing ever happened, and Jeffrey and Maria Fuentes will be up in Vegas facing first degree murder charges—both murder and conspiracy to commit. They’re the ones who are goners now.”
Rickover reached down, turned the ignition, and the Corvette rumbled to life.
“Where to?” he asked. “Back home?”
“If you don’t mind, I’d like to stop off in Sun City on the way. I need to see Tim O’Malley and tell him thank-you.”
“Great,” Charles said. “I was hoping you’d say that.”
When Tim let us into his house that night, I shook his hand and said, “Thank you, Pop. It was the first time I ever called him that—the first but not the last.
“How on earth did you find all those guys?” I asked. “Harold, Roger, Matt, and even old Charlie here.”
Charles Rickover and I had been through enough together that I thought my calling him Charlie was . . . well . . . long overdue.
Tim and Charlie both grinned. “You’ve heard of how cops used to be called the Thin Blue Line?” Tim asked.
I nodded.
“Our little group calls itself the Old Blue Line,” Tim said. “Some of us are thinner than we ought to be and others are wider, but when one or the other of us has a problem and runs up the flag, we all come on the double.”
“Thank you,” I said again. “More than you know.”
Pop served us iced tea and apologized that he’d already eaten his TV dinner and didn’t have any food to offer. I said I knew a place where we could find some grub if we needed it.
Later, as we were leaving, Pop gripped my hand with both of his. “Aggie would be so happy about this,” he said, “so very happy.”
And I knew it to be true. Grandma Agatha Hudson would have been pleased as punch.
I took Charlie back to the Roundhouse and treated both of us to the biggest and best steaks we had in the kitchen. When I came upstairs, much later, there was no sound from the guest room and no sign of a light under the door, either. I tiptoed past, hoping not to disturb Harold Meeks. He had worked his tail off for me that day, and he deserved a good night’s sleep.
It turns out, so did I. I crawled into bed and slept like a baby. It was ungodly early when I woke up the next morning. Staring at the clock, I saw it was 5:30 A.M. What had awakened me was the unaccustomed sound of people talking away in my apartment. Out in the main room I discovered Harold Meeks was up, dressed in his preferred courtroom attire, and chatting up an enthralled Matty, who had just brought his breakfast up from the kitchen—two fried eggs and a double helping of bacon along with his own pot of freshly brewed coffee.
“It’s about time you showed up,” Harold growled at me. “We’ve got places to go and things to do.”
“I’ll need to see if I can rent a car,” I said. “I didn’t have time to do that yesterday.”
He shook his head as though dealing with a recalcitrant toddler. “I’ve got a driver and a limo,” he said. “We’ll take that. And when we leave here, I’d like you to bring along my two suitcases. By later this afternoon I think we’ll have this little difficulty well in hand and I’ll be able to go back home.”
THE NEXT FEW days passed in a blur. Just as Charlie Rickover had predicted, once Harold pointed Jamison and Shandrow in the right direction, they ran with it. The woman named Marina Ochoa never came back to clean my apartment. She and Jeffrey Jones were arrested the following Wednesday. They fought extradition, but it didn’t work, despite the fact that they had hired a high profile defense guy from California. It wasn’t a surprise that Jeffrey suddenly had to liquidate his real estate holdings in order to pony up attorney’s fees.
Life seemed to get back to normal at the Roundhouse Bar and Grill. I hired a new cleaning lady—the sister-in-law of one of my dishwashers. (No, Helena isn’t an illegal, and her English is just fine, thank you very much.)
After jumping through all kinds of hoops, I finally got my Honda sedan back, and wished I hadn’t. The bloody bat had been found in the trunk, almost in plain sight, but the CSIs had torn the whole interior of the car to pieces looking for trace evidence. The car was already old before that happened. When the insurance adjustor looked at it, he shook his head, said it was totaled, and gave me a check that was just enough to buy myself a slightly used Honda Gold Wing.
Shortly after that, a new batch of police officer recruits turned up at the police academy next door. One day a couple of weeks later my life changed forever when a little red-haired ball of fire named Joanna Brady—the newly minted Sheriff of Cochise County—marched into the Roundhouse, stepped up to my bar, and ordered herself a Diet Coke.
While attending the academy, she was also in the process of looking out for some poor guy from Douglas, a guy name Jorge, who was about to be given the shaft.
As soon as I met her, I was done for. She may have been a lot slower to come around, but as far as I was concerned, it was love at first sight. The fact that she went out on a limb to bail Jorge out of a pot of hot water didn’t hurt things, either, at least not for me. Having recently been bailed out of my own pot of hot water, that was one thing about her that I really appreciated.
But what is it they say about once burned, twice shy? I had fallen head over heels once before, and I was determined that if Joanna was the one for me, I was going to take things slow and easy. I could se
e that she liked me—at least I thought she did—but that was about as far as things went before she finished up her academy training and went back home to Bisbee.
That’s when my life took another unexpected turn. In the middle of December a guy named Clark Ashton showed up at the Roundhouse with an offer to buy me out. He had bought up all of Jeffrey Jones’s properties as well as his permits and plans, and he was eager to get his new hotel building under way as soon as possible. We dickered back and forth for a time, but not that much, not that hard, and not that long, because Ashton wanted to buy, and by then I wanted to sell.
Bisbee’s a little over two hundred miles to the southeast from Peoria. When you’re head over heels in love, two hundred miles is entirely too much distance.
It took time for me to convince Joanna Brady that I was the new man in her life. She wasn’t an easy sell. And I didn’t tell her about someone trying to frame me for murder until much later in our relationship because I didn’t want to spook her. It wasn’t, in fact, until after Charlie called to let me know that Pop O’Malley had passed away in his sleep that I finally got up my nerve and told her the whole story once and for all.
“Tim O’Malley and his friends did all that?” she marveled once I had finished.
I nodded.
“And now I can’t even meet the man long enough tell him thank-you?”
“No, I’m afraid you can’t,” I said, shaking my head. “Sorry.”
“I’m sorry, too,” she told me, wiping a tear from her eye. “He and your Grandma Hudson must have been quite a pair.”
Thinking of the two of them together made me smile. “You’re right,” I said. “They certainly were.”
Next from J. A. Jance
An old woman, a hoarder, is dying of emphysema in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. While cleaning out her house, her daughter, Liza Machett, discovers a fortune in hundred dollar bills hidden in the stacks of books and magazines. Trying to discover the provenance of that money will take Liza on a journey all the way to Joanna Brady’s Cochise County. In the meantime, Joanna has problems of her own when a family friend is found dead in a limestone cavern near Bisbee. But are these seemingly unrelated cases more closely connected than they appear?