by J. A. Jance
Turning away from the window, Joanna surveyed the room. Although her dormitory accommodations and the main room at the Hohokam were similar in size, shape, and layout, there were definite differences. The hotel room had two queen sized beds instead of a single narrow one. In plan of a narrow student desk, there was a small round table with two relatively comfortable chairs on either side of it. The uniformly plastered walls of the hotel room were dotted with inexpensively framed prints. Except for the one mirrored wall in the dorm room, the walls there were totally bare.
It was in the bathroom, however, where the difference between hotel and dorm was most striking and where, surprisingly, the Hohokam Resort Hotel came up decidedly short. The hotel bathroom contained a combination bathtub/shower rather than both shower and tub. Not only that, there were no Jacuzzi jets in the tub, although a guest brochure on the table did say there was a hot tub located in the ground-floor recreation area.
After unpacking what little needed unpacking, Joanna sat down at the table and completed the letter she had started writing to Jenny two days earlier. When that was finished, Joanna tore it out of her notebook, folded the pages together, and placed them into an official Hohokam Resort Hotel envelope. Writing Jenny’s name on the outside, Joanna left it on top of the pillows on one of the two beds. Then she lay down on the other and tried reading.
Her assignment in The Law Enforcement Handbook brought her fully awake only when the book slipped from her grasp and landed squarely on her face. That’s it, she told herself firmly. No more homework. Time to go downstairs and have some coffee.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
It was almost sunset when Joanna ventured downstairs, where cocktails were being served in the posh, leather-furnished lobby. Even though she wasn’t particularly cold, she dropped into a comfortably oversized chair within warming range of the glass-enclosed fireplace. For a while she simply sat there, alternately mesmerized by the flaming gas-log or watching holiday travelers come and go. Eventually, though, she flagged down a passing cocktail waitress who graciously agreed to bring her coffee.
Then, with coffee in hand, Joanna settled in to wait for Jenny and the Gs to arrive. She smiled, remembering Butch Dixon’s wry comment that Jenny and the Gs sounded like some kind of rock band. What an interesting man he was. With a peculiar sense of humor.
Guiltily, Joanna reached into her purse and extracted the folded pages she had stowed there and forgotten after he handed them to her. Unfolding them, she found pages that were covered with small, carefully written lines that told the story of Serena Grijalva’s last visit to the Roundhouse Bar and Grill.
Jorge showed up here first that evening. I didn’t know his name then, although I had seen him a couple of times before and I knew he was Serena’s former husband. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for the guy. He’d show up now and then and hand over money—child support presumably—and she’d give him all kinds of crap. That night she went off the charts about some truck he’d just bought.
With a circular bar, the Roundhouse doesn’t offer much privacy. I remembered Serena talking to one of the guys in the bar a few weeks earlier about getting a restraining order against her soon-to-be‑ex. I didn’t want any trouble, so I kept a pretty close watch on them that night. All Jorge kept talking about was whether or not she’d let him take the kids home to his mother’s over Thanksgiving weekend. He offered to come pick them up, drive them to Douglas, and bring them back home again on Sunday, but she just kept shaking her head, saying no, no, no.
Things were fairly calm for a while, then she found out about the truck and all hell broke loose. She was screaming at him, calling him all kinds of names, and he just sat there and took it. Serena was the one causing the disturbance, so I finally eighty-sixed her and told her she’d have to leave.
He had already given her the money. She took it out of her purse, counted it, took some out—twenty bucks maybe—and threw it back down on the bar. “I’m worth a hell of a lot more than that,” she said, and stomped out.
He must have sat there for ten minutes just staring at the money on the bar. Finally he picked it and put it back in his shirt pocket. That’s the time a lot of guys will settle in and get shit-faced drunk. I wouldn’t have blamed him if he had. In fact, I offered to buy him a drink, and he asked for coffee, It was fairly quiet with only a few of the regulars around, so Jorge and I talked some.
He told me about his kids, asked me if I knew them. I didn’t have the heart to tell him how much those poor kids were left to their own devices. Serena would leave them alone in the laundry while she came over here and spent the afternoon cadging drinks. On more than one occasion, when she was in here partying, I took sandwiches and soft drinks out to the kids because I knew they had to be hungry. I didn’t tell him that, either. After all, what good would it do for the poor guy to know about it? There wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it, other than maybe calling child protective services and turning her in.
He must have stayed for another hour or so, drinking coffee. And I remember wondering why the hell Serena’s attorney had gone to all the trouble of swearing out a restraining order on the poor guy. He struck me as beaten down and heartbroken, both. There wasn’t anything violent about, him, not that night. And he didn’t seem to be in any hurry to leave. In fact, from the way he kept hanging around and watching the door, I think he was hoping Serena would change her mind, come back, and take him up on whatever that twenty was supposed to entail.
She didn’t though. He left around eleven-thirty. The next thing I knew, he’d been arrested for murder. When Detective Strong came around asking questions, I tried to tell her about Serena—about what she was like. It was no use. Seemed to me that the detective had already made up her mind and decided that Jorge was guilty, whether he was or not.
I’ve thought about him a lot since then, pitied him. Serena played the poor son of a bitch like a violin, giving him a piece of ass or not, depending on her mood at the time and whether or not he forked over.
Reading back over this, it sounds pretty lame. If being a sometime whore and a bad mother were capital offenses, there would be a whole lot more orphans in this world. Bad as she was, Serena didn’t deserve to die. However, I for one remain unconvinced that Jorge did it. All I can go by is the fact that he never raised either his hand or his voice under circumstances when a lot of men would have.
Thoughtfully, Joanna folded Butch Dixon’s handwritten pages and returned them to her purse. She knew that the way a man behaved toward a woman in a roomful of witnesses wasn’t necessarily an indication of how he would behave in private. By his own admission, there was at least one domestic violence charge on Jorge Grijalva’s rap sheet.
But in other respects, Butch’s observations and Jorge Grijalva came surprisingly close to Joanna own conclusions. Jorge despised Serena for her whoring and yet he hadn’t been able to let her go, hadn’t been able to stop caring.
The picture of Serena that emerged in the bartender’s story was far different from and more complex than the impression of near sainthood that had been part of the revivallike atmosphere at MAVEN’s candlelight vigil. There Serena had been cast as a beautiful, helpless, and blameless martyr to motherhood and apple pie. Butch Dixon’s vision conceded her beauty, but saw her as a troubled, manipulative young woman, as a chronically unfaithful wife, and as a less than adequate mother.
Butch’s essay stopped one step short of holding the dead woman partially responsible for her own murder. His sympathetic portrayal of Jorge was compelling. It played on Joanna’s emotions in exactly the same way the testimonies of the various survivors had caught up the feelings of all the attendees at the vigil. Sitting there reflecting, Joan could see why. Dixon’s editorializing on Jorge’s behalf would be of no more help to a homicide detective than the blatantly emotional blackmail of MAVEN’s dog-and-pony show. Both in their own right were convincing pieces of show business—full of sound and fury and not much else.
Joanna shook h
er head. MAVEN could rail that Jorge Grijalva was evil incarnate and his deceased wife a candidate for sainthood. Butch Dixon cool tell the world that Serena Grijalva was a conniving bitch. Depending on your point of view, both were victims.
For Joanna, the real victims were the kids who seemed destined to endure one terrible loss after another. And if the plea bargain ...
“Mom, we’re here!” Jenny crowed from the open doorway.
Lost in thought, Joanna hadn’t even noticed when Jim Bob Brady’s aging Honda Accord pulled to a stop under the portico. Joanna rose to greet her visitors. Jenny met her halfway across the room, tackling Joanna and latching onto her waist with such force that it almost knocked her down.
“Wait a minute,” Joanna said. “You don’t have to be that glad to see me.”
Bending to kiss the top of Jenny’s head, Joanna stopped short. One look at Jenny’s hair was enough to take her breath away. The smooth, long blond
tresses were gone. In their place stood a fuzzy white Little Orphan Annie halo, a brittle, tow‑headed Afro. Jenny’s assessment on the telephone had been absolutely right—her hair was awful. Joanna swallowed the urge to say what she was thinking.
“I missed you, sweetie,” she said. “How are you doing? How was the trip?”
“The trip was fine, and I missed you, too,” Jenny said breathlessly. “But is the pool still open? Is it too late to go swimming?”
So much for missing me, Joanna thought wryly. She glanced at her watch. “The pool doesn’t close for almost two hours yet, but don’t you want something to eat first?”
“We ate in the car,” Jenny answered. “Anyway, I’d rather swim.”
“Go help Grandpa with your luggage first,” Joanna urged. “Then we’ll talk about it. You need to check with the desk and order your videos.”
Jenny’s eyes widened. “Videos? Really?”
Joanna nodded. “They have some kind of special deal. Children under sixteen get to order videos from a place just up the street. Two for each day we’re here. They even deliver.”
Jenny grinned. “This is a nice place, isn’t it’?” She turned and raced back out to the car.
Eva Lou had entered the lobby as well, walking up behind Jenny. She smiled fondly after her granddaughter, then turned to Joanna and gave her daughter-in-law a firm hug. “I can’t believe all the flowers out there,” the older woman said, glancing back at the entrance. “How can that be when it’s almost the end of November?”
Looking after Jenny, Joanna wasn’t especially interested in flowers. “What I can’t believe is the permanent,” she grumbled. “How could my mother do such a thing?”
“Don’t be upset,” Eva Lou counseled. “Eleanor was just trying to help.”
“Help!” Joanna countered. “Don’t make excuses for her. She had no right to pull this kind of stunt the minute my back was turned.”
“It’s only hair,” Eva Lou said. “It’ll grow out. It was all an honest mistake. I think Helen and your mother got so busy talking that Helen forgot to set the timer for the solution. I know she felt terrible about it afterwards. She sent home three bottles of conditioner. Jenny’s gone through the better half of one of those, although I’ll admit it doesn’t seem to be doing much good.”
“Not much,” Joanna agreed. “But you’re right. The only thing that’s going to fix that mess is time.”
By then Jim Bob had unloaded an amazing stack of suitcases onto a luggage cart. He and Jenny came into the lobby with the bellman trailing in his wake, aiming for the registration desk. Joanna caught up with him before he got there. She planted a quick kiss on her father-in-law’s cheek.
“Registration’s already been taken care of,” she said, handing two keys over to the bellman. “Mr. And Mrs. Brady are in eight-twenty-seven. The little girl and I are in eight-ten. They’re not adjoining rooms, but at least they’re on the same floor.”
Jim Bob gave her a searching look. “You didn’t pay for the room already, did you? It looks to me like this place is probably pretty pricy.”
“Are you kidding?” Joanna returned with a laugh. “I’m getting six weeks of free babysitting out of this deal. If you stack that up against a three-night stay at the Hohokam, I’m still way ahead of the game.”
“I’m not a baby,” Jenny said firmly, frowning. “I’m nine and a half.”
“You’re right, Jenny. Excuse me,” Joanna agreed, then turned back to Jim Bob Brady. “Six weeks of child care then, but it’s still a bargain. Is anybody hungry?”
“I packed some sandwiches to eat on the way,” Eva Lou said. “We’re certainly not starving.”
Joanna nodded. “All right, then,” she said. “We’ll let Jenny swim for a while. We’ll go out later for dessert.”
“As in Baskin-Robbins?” Jenny asked eagerly.
“Probably.” At that Jenny clapped her hands in delight.
As the Bradys followed the bellman toward the elevator, Joanna turned to Jenny. “Did Grandma tell you that Ceci Grijalva is coming to town to see us on Friday?”
It was Jenny’s turn to nod. “That’s why we brought along an extra suit.” Jenny’s blue eyes filled with concern. “Did you tell her what I said?”
“Yes, but I thought she’d get more out of it if she heard it from you in person. We pick her up at ten o’clock on Friday morning.”
They stopped by the concierge desk long enough to make arrangements for Jenny’s videos. Joanna also increased the Thanksgiving dinner reservation from four to six.
“Who’s coming to dinner?” Jenny asked as they, too, headed for the elevator.
“Leann Jessup,” Joanna answered. “She’s a new friend, someone I met here at school. And Adam York, the DEA guy from Tucson. You remember him, don’t you?”
Jenny nodded. “He’s the guy who thought you were a drug dealer.”
“Well, he’s a friend now, and so is Leann.”
“Are you fixing the two of them up?” Jen asked.
Joanna was stunned. She wasn’t quite ready for Jenny’s inquiring mind to take on the world of male/female relations.
“What a strange thing to say. No,” Joanna declared firmly. “Nobody’s fixing anybody up.”
“So Mr. York isn’t her boyfriend?”
“No. He doesn’t even know her.”
“Is he your boyfriend, then?”
“Jenny,” an exasperated Joanna said. “As far as I know, Adam York isn’t anybody’s boyfriend. He’s a friend of mine and a colleague. What’s all this stuff about boyfriends?”
“But why does he want to have Thanksgiving dinner with us?” Jenny asked.
Jonnna shrugged. “It’s a holiday. Maybe he doesn’t want to be alone. Besides, I’ll be happy to see him again.”
“Why can’t he have dinner with his own family?” Jenny asked.
“Look,” Joanna said. “Adam York is one of the people who encouraged me to run for office. He’s also the one who suggested I come up here and take this course. He probably just wants to see how doing.”
“Are you going to marry him?” Jenny asked pointedly.
“Marry him!” Joanna exclaimed. “Jenny, for heaven’s sake, what in the world has gotten into you? Of course I’m not going to marry him. Whatever put that weird idea into your head?”
Jenny frowned. “That’s what happened to Sue Espy. Her parents got a divorce when we were in second grade. Her mother asked some guy named Slim Dabovich to come for Thanksgiving dinner last year. Now they’re married. Sue likes him, I guess. She says he isn’t like stepfathers you see on TV. I mean, he isn’t mean or anything.”
Joanna almost laughed aloud. “Just because Sue’s mom married the guy she asked to Thanksgiving dinner doesn’t mean I will. Now, do you want to go swimming or not?”
In advance of the holiday, Dave Thompson had stocked up on booze. Fighting a hangover from the previous night’s excess, he went looking for hair of the dog the moment the last of the students and instructors left campus. By nine-thirty that
night, he had been drinking steadily for most of the afternoon and evening. And not just beer. Booze—the real hard stuff—was the only thing that could dull the pain on a night like this. Dave knew that if he drank long enough and hard enough, eventually he would pass out. With any kind of luck, by the time he woke up again, part of Thanksgiving Day would already be over and done with. He would have succeeded in dodging part of the holiday bullet, one more time.
For a real binge like this, he tried to confine his drinking to inside his apartment, but each time he needed a cigarette, he went outside. That was pretty funny, actually—that he still went outside to smoke. Irene had been a very early and exceptionally militant soldier in the war against secondhand cigarette smoke. She had never allowed him to smoke inside either the house or the car. Her prohibitions had stuck and turned into habit. Despite Irene’s betrayal—despite the fact that she had been gone all these years—Dave Thompson continued to smoke outside the house.
It would have surprised Irene Thompson to realize that over time her former husband had found some interesting side benefits to smoking out of doors that had nothing at all to do with lung disease. People didn’t expect someone to be standing outside in a yard or patio at night for long stretches of time. Dave Thompson had seen things from that vantage point, learned things about his neighbors and neighborhood that other people never even suspected. As a matter of fact, it was something he had seen through the kitchen window of their old house, back in Chandler that had signaled the beginning of the end of Dave’s marriage. If it hadn’t been for that one fateful cigarette, he might never have found out what was really going on with Irene. He might have gone right on being a chump for the rest of his life.
Dave didn’t look at his watch, but it must have been close to ten when he staggered outside for that one last cigarette. He knew he was drunk, but it was a fairly happy drunk for a change. He laughed at himself when he bounced off both sides of the doorway trying to get through it. Since he wasn’t driving, though, what the hell?