by J. A. Jance
Joanna nodded.
“Well, welcome to the neighborhood.”
A cocktail waitress with a tray laden with empty glasses showed up at her station several seats away. While Butch Dixon hurried to take the used glasses and fill the waitress’s new orders, Joanna sipped her Diet Pepsi and surveyed the room. On first glance the Roundhouse appeared to be respectable enough, and, unlike the truck stop, no one tried to proposition her. She had finished one drink and was started on the other before Butch paused in front of her again.
“How’re you doing?” he asked.
“Fine. Is the food here any good?”
“Are you kidding? We were voted Best Bar Hamburgers in the Valley of the Sun two years in a row. Want one? I can bring it to you here, or you could move to the dining room.”
“Here,” she said.
“Fries? The works?”
After fighting sleep all morning, Joanna had skipped lunch at noontime in favor of grabbing a nap. Hungry now, she nodded.
“Have the Roundhouse Special then,” Butch said, writing her order down on a ticket. “It’s the best buy. How do you want it?”
“Medium.”
He nodded. “And seeing as how you’re new, I’ll throw in the Caboose for free.”
“What’s a Caboose?” Joanna asked.
“A dish of vanilla ice cream with Spanish peanuts and chocolate syrup. Not very imaginative, hut little kids love it.”
He came back a few moments later and dropped a napkin-wrapped bundle of silverware in front of her. “Just move here?” he asked.
There seemed to be a slight lull among the customers at the bar right then, and Joanna decided it was time to make her move. For an answer, Joanna shook her head and then pulled one of her business cards from her jeans pocket. She handed it to him.
“I’ll only be here for a few weeks. I’m attending police academy classes at the APOA just down the road,” she said.
“Oh, yeah?” he said, shoving the card into his pocket without bothering to look at it. “Some of those folks show up here now and then. For dinner,” he added quickly. “Most of ‘em hang out in the dining room rather than in the bar, if you know what I mean. I guess they’re all afraid of what people will think.”
Joanna took a breath. “Actually, I came here today to talk to you.”
“To me?” Butch Dixon echoed with a frown “How come?”
“It’s about Serena Grijalva,” Joanna said quietly
Butch Dixon’s eyes hardened and the engaging grin disappeared. From the expression on his face, Joanna expected him to tell her to get lost and forget the Roundhouse Special. Just then someone a few stools down the bar tapped his empty beer glass on the counter.
“Hey, barkeep,” the impatient customer muttered. “A guy could thirst to death around here.”
Dixon hurried away. Thinking she had blown her chances of gaining any useful information, Joanna sat forlornly at the bar with her half-empty glass in front of her and wondered if there would have been a better way to approach him. Eventually, he came back with a platter laden with food.
“How come the sheriff of Cochise County is interested in Serena Grijalva?” he asked. “And why bother talking to me instead of Carol Strong, the detective on the case? Besides, you won’t want to hear what I have to say any more than she did.”
“This isn’t exactly an official inquiry,” Joanna answered. “I just wanted to check some things out.”‘
“Like what?”
“According to what it said in the paper, you were one of the last people to see Serena alive.”
“That’s right,” Butch Dixon answered. “Me and Serena’s ex-husband and a whole roomful of other people. Serena and her ex were having themselves a little heart-to-heart. We all heard them. You can see how private it is in here.”
Once again Butch was called down the bar while Joanna bit into her hamburger. That one bite told her that the Roundhouse Special lived up to its glowing advance billing.
Butch came back to stand opposite Joanna’s stool “How’s the burger?”
“It’s great. But tell me about Serena and Jorge Grijalva. They were having a fight?”
“Do you ever read Ogden Nash?” Butch asked.
Joanna was taken aback. “No. Why?”
“If you’d ever read ‘I Never Even Suggested It,’ you’d know it only takes one person to make a quarrel.”
“Only one of them was fighting? Which one?”
“Serena was screaming like a banshee. I guess she had a restraining order on him or something, hut he acted like a gentleman. Didn’t threaten her or anything. Didn’t even raise his voice. I felt sorry for the poor guy. All he was asking was for her to let the kids come to his mother’s for Thanksgiving dinner. It didn’t seem all that out of line to me.”
Again Butch was summoned away, this time by the cocktail waitress again. When he finally returned, Joanna was done with her hamburger. He picked up the empty platter and stood holding it, eyeing Joanna.
“I don’t care what the detectives and prosecutors say, I still don’t think he did it. After she stomped out the door, he sat here for a long time, all hunched over. He had himself a couple more drinks and both of those were straight coffee. He said he had to drive all the way back to Douglas to be there in time to work in the morning. Does that sound like someone who’s about to go knock off his ex-wife?”
Thoughtfully, Butch Dixon shook his head. “I’ll go get your ice cream,” he added. “You want coffee or something to go with it?”
“No. I’m fine.”
He walked away, carrying the dirty dishes. Joanna watched him go. That made two different people who were convinced of Antonio Jorge Grijalva’s innocence—a poetry-quoting bartender and the accused’s own mother.
Butch Dixon returned with the dish of ice cream. “Did the prosecutor’s office talk to you about any of this?” Joanna asked.
Dixon shook his head. “Naw. Like I said, the detective just brushed me off. She claimed that she had enough physical evidence to get a conviction.
“Like what?”
“She didn’t say. Not at the time. Later I heard about a possible plea bargain, and it pissed me off I wanted to see him fight it. I even called up his public defender and offered to testify. He wasn’t buying. I hate plea bargains.”
Thoughtfully, Joanna carved off a spoonful of ice cream. “There are two primary reasons for so many plea bargains these days. Are you aware of what they are?”
Butch rolled his eyes. “I have a feeling you’ going to tell me.”
“The first one is to keep the system moving. If the case is reasonably solid, the prosecutors may decide to go for a lesser sentence just to spare themselves the time and aggravation of going to trial.”
“And the second reason?”
“If the case is so weak they don’t think they’ll be able to get a conviction, they may go for a plea bargain as the best alternative to letting the guy walk. Maybe that’s what’s happened here.”
“Wait a minute,” Butch said. “Do you think that’s possible? Maybe the case is weak and that’s why they’re going for a plea bargain?”
“It isn’t really my case, but that’s what I’m trying find out,” Joanna said. “If it’s a strong case or if it isn’t.”
“Well, I’ll be damned!” Butch Dixon exclaimed, beaming at her. “I figured you were just like all the others. You let me know if there’s anything I can do to help, you hear?”
Joanna nodded. “Sure thing.”
He had paused long enough that now he was behind in his duties. Joanna finished her ice cream nil waited for some time, hoping he’d drop off her check. Finally, she waved him down. “Could I have my bill, please?”
“Forget it,” he said. “It’s taken care of.”
“What do you mean?”
“You ever been divorced?”
Joanna shook her head.
“I have,” Butch Dixon said. “Twice. Believe me, no matter what, the m
an is always the bad guy. I get sick and tired of men always getting walked on, know what I mean?”
“What does that have to do with my not paying for my hamburger?”
“Any friend of Jorge Grijalva’s is a friend of mine.”
CHAPTER NINE
Walking from the bar into the parking lot, Joanna was surprised by how warm was. Bisbee, two hundred miles to the south and east, was also four thousand feet higher in elevation. November nights in Cochise County had a crisp, wintery bite to them. By comparison, the evening air in Phoenix seemed quite balmy.
Once in the Blazer, Joanna sat for some time, not only considering what she had heard from Butch Dixon, but also wondering about her next move. Obviously, Butch was no more a disinterested observer than Juanita Grijalva was. Something in the bartender’s own marital past had caused him to be uncommonly sympathetic to Jorge Grijalva’s plight. Had he, in fact, called the man’s public defender with an offer to testify on Jorge’s behalf? That’s what Dixon claimed. In an era when most people don’t want to get involved, that in itself was remarkable.
So, in addition to his mother, Jorge Grijalva has at least one other partisan, Joanna thought. Despite Butch Dixon’s professed willingness to do so, however, he would never be called to a witness stand to testify. Plea bargain arrangements don’t call for either witnesses or testimony. There would be no defense, and that seemed wrong. Somehow, without Joanna quite being able to put her finger on the way he had done it, Butch Dixon had caused the smallest hairline crack to appear in her previous conviction that Juanita Grijalva was wrong. Maybe her son was about to plead guilty to a crime he hadn’t committed.
It was only seven o’clock. The sensible thing to do would have been to head straight back to the dorm and put in a couple of hours reading the next day’s assignment. Instead, Joanna reached into the glove compartment and pulled out the detailed Phoenix Thomas Guide Jim Bob Brady had insisted she bring along. Even as she did it, Joanna knew what was happening. She was wading deeper and deeper into the muck. Inevitably. One little step at a time. Just like the stupid dire wolves at the La Brea tar pits, she thought.
Switching on the overhead light, she studied the map until she located the Maricopa County Jail complex at First and Madison. Then, she turned on the Blazer’s engine and pulled out of the parking lot, headed for downtown Phoenix.
Accustomed to Cochise County’s almost nonexistent traffic, Joanna was appalled by what awaited her once she turned onto what was euphemistically referred to as the Black Canyon Freeway. Even that late in the evening, both north and southbound traffic was amazingly heavy. And once she crossed under Camelback, southbound traffic stopped altogether. From there on, cars moved at a snail’s pace due to what the radio traffic reports said was a rollover semi, injury accident at the junction I-10 and I-17. That wreck, along with related fender-benders, had created massive tie-ups all around the I-17 corridor, the exact area Joanna had to traverse in order to reach downtown.
Continuing to try to decode the traffic reports, Joanna was frustrated by the way the information was delivered. The various freeways were all referred to by name rather than number, and most of them seemed to be named after mountains—Superstition, Red Mountain, Squaw Peak. If an out-of-town driver didn’t know which mountains were which and where they were located, the traffic ports could just as well have been issued in code.
Most of Joanna’s experience with Phoenix came from an earlier, less complicated, non-freeway era. At Indian School she left the freeway, resorting to surface streets for the remainder of the trip. She navigated the straightforward east-west/north-south grids with little difficulty once she had escaped the freeway-related gridlock.
She reached the jail late enough that there was plenty of on-street parking. After locking her Colt 2000 in the glove compartment, she stepped out of the Blazer and looked up at the lit facade of an imposing building.
Had Joanna not been a police officer, she might have liked it better. The Maricopa County Jail had received numerous architectural accolades, but for cops the complex’s beauty was only skin deep. The portico and mezzanine above the lighted entrance were eminently attractive from an aesthetic point view. Unfortunately, they were also popular with a number of enterprising inmates, several of whom had used those selfsame architectural details as a launching pad for well-planned escapes. Using rock climbing equipment that had been smuggled into the jail, they had rappelled down the side of the building to freedom.
Joanna stood on the street, eyeing the building critically and knowing that her own jail shared some of the same escape-prone defects. Old-fashioned jails—the kind with bars on the windows—may not have been all that aesthetically pleasing, but at least they did the job.
Shaking her head, she walked into the building. Immediately upon entering, she was stopped by a uniformed guard seated behind a chest-high counter. “What can I do for you?” he asked, shoving his reading glasses up on top of his head and lowering his newspaper.
“I’m here to see a prisoner,” Joanna said.
The guard shook his head, pulled the glasses back down on his nose, raised the paper, and resumed reading. “Too late,” he said without looking at her. “No more visitors tonight. Come back tomorrow.”
Joanna removed both her I.D. and badge from her purse. She laid them on the counter and waited for the guard to examine them. He didn’t bother.
He spoke from behind the paper without even looking at them. “Like I said. It’s too late to see anybody tonight.”
“What about the jail commander?” Joanna said quietly. “You do have one of those, don’t you?
The guard lowered the paper and glanced furtively down at the counter. When his eyes focused on the badge lying in front of him, he frowned. “The commander went home already.”
“Then I’ll speak to whoever’s in charge.”
When he spoke again, the guard sounded exasperated. “Lady, I don’t know what’s the matter with you, but—”
“The matter,” Joanna interrupted, keeping voice firm but even, “is that I want to see a prisoner, and I want to see him tonight.”
With a glower, the guard folded his newspaper and tossed it into a cabinet under the counter. “What did you say your name was?”
“I didn’t say,” she said, “because you didn’t ask. But it’s Brady. Joanna Brady. Sheriff Joanna Brady from Cochise County.”
The word sheriff did seem to carry a certain amount of weight, even with a surly, antagonistic guard. “And who is it you want to see?” he asked grudgingly.
“Antonio Jorge Grijalva,” she answered. “He’s charged with murdering his wife.”
“Even if you get in, the guy won’t see you,” the guard said. “Not without his attorney present.
“I believe he will,” Joanna answered. “All you have to do is tell him his mother sent me.”
Shaking his head and muttering under his breath, the guard reached for the phone and dialed a number. Less than ten minutes later, with the help of the jail’s night watch commander, Joanna was seated in a small prisoner interview room. Peering through the scratched Plexiglas barrier, she watched as Jorge Grijalva, dressed in orange inmate rails and soft slippers, was led into the adjoining room.
Joanna had studied all the articles in Juanita’s envelope. She knew that Serena had been twenty-four when she died and that her husband was almost twenty years older. At first glimpse, the man in the next room seemed far older than forty-three. His face was careworn. He was small, bowlegged, and slightly stooped, with the spareness that comes from years of hard labor and too much drinking. Dark, questioning eyes sought Joanna’s as he edged way into the plastic chair.
Who are you?” he demanded, picking up the phone on his side of the barrier. “What do you want?”
Joanna didn’t hear the questions. He had asked them before she had a chance to pick up the receiver on her phone, but she knew what he wanted to know.
“I’m Joanna Brady,” she answered. “I�
��m the new sheriff down in Cochise County.”
“What’s this about my mother? Is something wrong with her?”
“No. Your mother’s fine.”
“Why are you here, then?”
“She wanted me to talk to you.”
Jorge leaned back in his chair. For a moment no thought he might simply hang up and ask to be returned to his cell. “Why?” he said finally.
“Your mother says you didn’t do it,” Joanna answered. “She says you’re innocent, but that you’re going to plead guilty anyway. Is that true?”
Jorge Grijalva’s face contorted into a scowl. “Go away,” he said. “I don’t want to talk to you. My mother’s a foolish old woman. She doesn’t know anything.”
“She knows about losing her grandchildren,” Joanna answered quietly. “If you go to prison for killing Serena, the Duffys will never let your mother see Ceci and Pablo again.”
In the garish fluorescent light, even through the scarred and yellowed Plexiglas window, Joanna could see the knuckles of his olive-skinned fingers turn stark white. For a long time, Jorge stared the table, gripping the phone and saying nothing. Then, after a time, he raised his gaze until his troubled eyes were staring directly into Joanna’s.
“My wife was a whore,” he said simply. “She sold herself for money and for other things as well. When I found out about it, I was afraid the same thing would happen to Ceci, to my daughter. I was afraid she’d turn Ceci into a whore, too. So I got drunk once and beat Serena up. The cops put me in jail.” He paused for a moment and studied Joanna before adding, “It only happened once.’
“And when was that?”
“Last year in Bisbee. Before she and the kids moved to Phoenix. Before she filed for a divorce.”
“What about now? What about this time?”
“I wanted the kids to come to Douglas for Thanksgiving. My mother hasn’t seen them since last spring. She misses them.”
“That doesn’t seem all that unreasonable. Why was Serena so angry then that night in the bar?”