Joanna Brady 01 - Desert Heat (v5.0)

by J. A. Jance

  Then, too, there was always the possibility that Dayton Smith wasn’t at all what he seemed. Maybe he was really a cutthroat in disguise, one who would strangle her with his bare hands and disappear with the contents of her beach bag.

  “Why Bisbee?” he prodded a second time.

  Angie fought her way out of her reverie. “I have friends there,” she said. “They’d probably let me stay with them.”

  “Call ’em up,” Dayton Smith said. “Have ’em meet us in Benson. That’s on my way and it’s only fifty miles or so from Bisbee.”

  “I can’t call,” she lied. “They don’t have a phone.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  His pie came, topped with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. He cleaned his plate enthusiastically while the gold band on his wedding ring winked at Angie in the warm fluorescent light.

  “You’re sure you’re not hungry?” he asked. “I’d be glad to buy if you’re short of cash.”

  “I’m not hungry,” she said. “Thanks.”

  When he finished eating and after the waitress brought his filled thermos, they headed out into the parking lot. There were dozens of other trucks scattered throughout the lot, and Angie realized at once that now was the time to act. If Dayton Smith went bad on her afterward, at least here she’d have a chance to call for help.

  He took her hand and helped her up into the tall cab where she settled in the middle of the seat instead of staying on the far side. When Dayton climbed into the cab beside her, she didn’t move away. Instead, she reached out and put one suggestive hand on his upper thigh.

  “Would you give me a ride to Bisbee, even if it’s out of your way?” she asked. “I could make it worth your while.”

  He reached down and took her hand. Firmly, he removed it from his leg and placed it back in her lap. “Move on over,” he ordered. “You’re in the way of the gearshift.”

  For the first time in all the years since she left home, Angie Kellogg felt herself blushing. His turn down had made her feel like the two-bit whore she was.

  “You mean you don’t want me?” she asked incredulously. “I’m good. I’m real good.”

  Dayton Smith slammed the truck into gear. “I’ll just bet you are,” he muttered.

  “Let me out then,” she squawked at him. “I’ll go back and find someone else, someone who does want me. I’m going to Bisbee, dammit, and I’m going there tonight.”

  “Settle down,” he barked. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t take you, did I? Hell, girl, you don’t have to fuck me just to get a ride. It’s not that far, only fifty miles or so out of my way.”

  Angie Kellogg wasn’t used to openhanded kindness. She blinked in surprise. “You mean you’ll take me for nothing?”

  “Not for nothing,” he countered. “I like your company, and you look like you could use a little help. I’ve got a daughter of my own who’s about your age. So sit back and relax. Next stop is Bisbee, okay?”

  Grateful and mystified both, Angie Kellogg settled back into the seat while the huge truck rumbled swiftly through the starlit desert night.

  “What’s your name?” Dayton Smith asked eventually.

  “Tammy Sue Ferris,” Angie said without missing a beat.

  “Well, Tammy Sue,” Dayton Smith said, settling back into the driver’s seat. “Tell me where you’re from.”

  “California.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-three.”

  His face had an otherworldly glow in the greenish reflected light from the dashboard. As Angie answered his question, she felt almost as though he weren’t real, as though she was talking to some kind of ghost.

  “And what do you do for a living?”

  Somehow she no longer felt like lying. “Do you really want to know?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m a whore,” she said unexpectedly, surprising herself. “I have been for ten years.” If she thought her answer would shock him, it didn’t.

  “And this Tony character was your pimp?”

  “More or less,” she replied. “Tony doesn’t fit into any definite categories.”

  “You’re away from him now,” Dayton Smith said forcefully. “Stay that way. Get a job, get married, have children. In other words, have a real life.”

  “I don’t know how,” she said in a small voice. “I don’t know how to do anything else.”

  “I wasn’t born driving this truck, honey,” he told her. “I took lessons, got myself a license. That’s what you’re gonna have to do, too. Go back to school and learn typing or shorthand or whatever it is they teach girls nowadays. Maybe even computers, but at twenty-three, you’ve got your whole life to live. Don’t screw it up.”

  After that, they didn’t talk much more. At ten o’clock, Dayton Smith helped Tammy Sue Ferris check into the last available room in Bisbee’s Copper Queen Hotel. When she stepped away from the desk, Dayton was standing halfway across the lobby with both hands stuffed in his hip pockets. He smiled at her.

  “You’ll do fine,” he said. “I’m sure of it.” He reached out, took one of her hands in both of his, and shook it warmly. “You be careful of the people you meet and keep the jacket. You need it worse than I do. If you ever turn up in Dallas give me a call. I’m in the book. The wife and I would like to have you over for dinner. She cooks a mean fried chicken.”

  With that, Dayton Smith turned and shambled out the door, leaving Angie Kellogg alone. Riding up to the third floor in the creaking elevator, she found herself wiping tears from her eyes. Dayton Smith was probably the nicest man she had ever met, but she couldn’t understand why watching him walk out the door and down the steps had made her cry.

  Fifteen

  THE LONG, polished hardwood hallway of Greenway School still smelled exactly the way Joanna remembered it—dusty and lightly perfumed with hints of sweaty-haired children and overripe sack-lunch fruit. Worried about her daughter, Joanna walked swiftly toward the principal’s office. As far as Joanna knew, this was the first time Jennifer Brady had been sent to the office for even the smallest infraction.

  Nina Evans, the five-foot-nothing fireplug of a woman who was the school principal, met Joanna in the hallway. “I’m glad I was finally able to locate you,” Mrs. Evans said irritably. “I didn’t expect to find you at work today.”

  School principals had never been high on Joanna’s list of favorite people, and Nina Evans was no exception. Joanna found herself bridling at the apparent rebuke in the woman’s tone of voice.

  “What seems to be the problem?” Joanna asked.

  “Oh, you know how children are,” Nina Evans said quickly. “I’m sure the boys didn’t mean any harm.”

  “Which boys?”

  “Jeffrey Block and Gordon Smith. According to what I’ve been able to learn, they evidently started it. Regardless of provocation, though, I simply can’t allow students to resort to violence. That’s no way to teach problem-solving. It’s a short step from that kind of youthful behavior to starting wars.”

  Joanna was in no mood to hear an educational lecture on the political correctness of nonviolence. “What provocation?” she asked.

  “No doubt Jennifer was feeling sensitive,” the principal continued, “and I don’t blame her. It’s always difficult for children to be in school after a traumatic event like this. In fact, I’m not at all sure it was wise of you to send her to school today, considering what she’s been through.”

  With her arms folded smugly across her chest, Nina Evans stood looking up at Joanna. There could be no mistaking her attitude of reproach and disapproval. The two boys may have started the day’s altercation, but Nina Evans was holding Jennifer primarily responsible. Somehow, the fight was all Jennifer’s fault, and, through Jenny, ultimately Joanna’s.

  Battling to control her temper, Joanna felt her jaws tighten and her face grow hot. “I didn’t send Jenny to school today,” she said firmly. “She came today of her own accord, because she wanted to. In fact, she begged me to let
her. Now, tell me exactly what happened.”

  Nina Evans replied with a noncommittal shrug. “At morning recess the boys were evidently teasing Jennifer and saying naughty things to her. She waited until noon and then punched them out when they were all three supposed to be on their way to the lunch-room.”

  “Both of them at once?”

  The principal nodded. “That’s what I’ve been told. Jeffrey’s parents took him over to the dispensary to have his thumb looked after. Gordon Smith’s mother picked him up about half an hour ago. Jennifer’s the only one still here. I didn’t want to send her home with someone else without first having a chance to discuss the situation with you in person. It’s far too serious.”

  “I want to see her,” Joanna said. “Where is she?”

  “In my office. You can go on in if you want.”

  In the fifteen years since Joanna’s eighth grade graduation, the Greenway School principal’s office had altered very little. Personnel changes had occurred because elementary school principals come and go, but the same gray metal desk still sat in one corner of the room with the same old-fashioned wooden bench sitting across from it.

  On the wall above the bench hung the familiar, but now much more faded, print of George Washington. The print, too, was exactly the same. Joanna remembered the cornerwise crack in the glass. She remembered how she had sat on the wooden bench herself and craned her neck to stare up at George Washington’s face on that long-ago spring afternoon when her fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Fennessy, had sentenced Joanna Lathrop to a day in the principal’s office.

  Jennifer glanced up nervously as the door opened. Seeing Joanna, she dropped her eyes and stared at her shoes. “I’m sorry,” she said at once.

  Joanna walked across the room and sat down on the bench beside her daughter. “Tell me about it,” she said quietly. “What did those boys say to you?”

  For a time the child sat with her head lowered and didn’t answer. Joanna watched as a fat, heavy tear squeezed out of the corner of Jennifer’s eye and coursed down her freckled cheek before dripping silently off her chin.

  “Tell me,” Joanna insisted.

  Jennifer bit her lower lip, a gesture Joanna recognized as being very like one of her own.

  “Do I have to say it?” the child whispered.

  “Yes.”

  “They said Daddy was a crook,” Jennifer choked out at last. “I told them they’d better take it back, but they wouldn’t, so I beat ’em up. Daddy wasn’t even a black hat, Mom, so why would they say such a thing?”

  Joanna draped one arm across Jennifer’s small shoulder and pulled the child close. Milo had told her the town was choosing up sides. Now she understood far better what he had meant. Unfortunately, some of the first stones thrown had landed squarely on Jenny.

  “What happened to Daddy didn’t just happen to us, you know,” Joanna said slowly, groping for words. “We’re not the only people who are trying to figure out what happened and what’s going to happen next. Everyone else is, too. Those boys were probably just repeating things they had heard at home from their own parents.”

  “You mean everybody’s talking about it? About us?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “And they all think Daddy was a crook?”

  It was hard enough for Joanna to cope with the flurry of disturbing rumors. It hurt her even more to realize that Jennifer would have to deal with them at her own level as well. She swallowed the lump in her throat.

  “Not everyone believes that, Jenny,” she answered quietly, “but some people do. You’ve got to try to not let it bother you.”

  “But it does,” Jennifer whispered fiercely. “It really does. It made me so mad, I wanted to knock Jeffrey Block’s teeth out. All I did was hurt his thumb.”

  For a moment they sat side by side without speaking. “But it isn’t true, is it?” Jennifer asked forlornly, with a trace of doubt leaking into her questioning voice.

  Joanna squeezed her daughter’s shoulders and held her tight. “No,” she declared, “but it’s up to us to prove it.”

  “Can we?”

  Joanna shook her head. “I don’t know if we can for sure, but we’re certainly going to try.”

  “And then those boys will have to take it back, won’t they.”

  There was a tough ferocity about Jennifer’s loyalty to her father that made Joanna smile in spite of herself. “Yes,” she agreed. “They’ll have to take it back, and so will Adam York.”

  “Who’s he?” Jenny asked.

  “Never mind,” Joanna answered.

  “Will I have to stay here in the office until the bell rings?”

  “No. You’re coming with me. I have lots of errands to run, and you’ll have to come along.” Joanna handed her daughter a tissue. “Here,” she said. “Blow your nose and dry your face. Did I ever tell you about the time I got sent to this very same principal’s office?”

  Jennifer blew her nose with a bellowing, foghorn effect that belied her small size. “You?” she asked disbelievingly. “I didn’t think you ever got in trouble.

  “It was in the fourth grade,” Joanna told her. “During arithmetic. The boy behind me was new to town. He didn’t stay long, but I never forgot his name—Kasamir Moulter. He copied all the answers off my paper. Mrs. Fennessy gave us both F’s.”

  “How come she did that? If he copied your paper, he should have been the one in trouble, not you.”

  “She thought I gave him the answers.”

  “Even though it wasn’t true?”

  “Even though.”

  “Couldn’t you prove it was his fault?”

  “How? It was his word against mine. Mrs. Fennessy believed him.”

  “That wasn’t fair,” Jennifer protested.

  “Two against one isn’t fair,” Joanna countered.

  Jennifer looked up at her mother for a long time before nodding in understanding. “I’m ready to go,” she said. “Will I come back to school tomorrow?”

  Joanna shook her head. “I don’t think so. Mrs. Evans doesn’t want you in school for a day or two. She seems to think you’re a menace to society.”

  For the first time, a hint of a smile played around the corners of Jennifer’s mouth. “I am, too,” the child said stoutly. “I did it just the way you taught me. You would of been proud of me.”

  “Would have,” Joanna corrected. “Come on.”

  They found Nina Evans in the hall. “I’ll take Jenny home for now,” Joanna told the principal. “And I may keep her home tomorrow as well, but when she comes back, you might spread the word that if anyone else hassles her about what happened, they’ll end up dealing with me.”

  Holding Jenny by the hand, the two of them marched down the hall. “Where are we going?” Jenny asked in a small voice.

  “Did you eat any lunch?”

  “No.”

  “First we’ll go by Daisy’s and split a pasty,” Joanna said. “Then we’ll start working our way through the list.”

  Daisy Maxwell, the original owner of Daisy’s Cafe, had been retired for twenty years and dead for ten, but the restaurant she started still reflected her initial menu as well as the ethnic diversity of Bisbee’s mining camp origins when miners from all over the world had flocked to Arizona’s copper strikes. Along with the usual standbys of hamburgers and sandwiches, Mexican food, Cornish pasties and Hungarian goulash were featured as daily specials at least once a week. Grits were usually available, upon request, with breakfast.

  Between the two of them, Joanna and Jenny wiped out most of the huge platter-filling pasty with its flaky outside crust and steaming beef-vegetable stew interior. Afterward they made a series of stops—at the mortuary, the florist, Marianne and Jeff’s—making sure the arrangements were solidified for the funeral on Saturday afternoon. They went by the Sheriff’s Department and spoke briefly with Dick Voland and Ken Galloway, both of whom readily agreed to be pallbearers. Joanna had wanted to speak to Walter McFadden about doing a eulogy, but
they were told he had taken the afternoon off and had gone home early.

  Everywhere they went—in shops and offices, on the street—people stopped them to murmur their condolences and to ask if there was anything they could do to help.

  “Most people are pretty nice, aren’t they?” Jennifer commented after the fifth such encounter.

  Joanna nodded. “Most of them are,” she agreed.

  It was late in the afternoon before they finally stopped by First Merchant’s Bank. Sandra Henning, the manager, was working with one of the tellers when Joanna and Jenny walked into the lobby. She looked up when they came through the door and then looked away again, but not before Joanna noticed a deep crimson flush creep across Sandy’s stolid features.

  That’s odd, Joanna thought. She and Sandy weren’t especially good friends, but they had lunched together on occasion and had worked on various school and civic committees together. Joanna led Jenny over to the two chairs in front of Sandy’s desk.

  “We’ll sit here and wait for Mrs. Henning to finish,” Joanna said.

  It was several minutes before Sandy Henning came out from behind the tellers’ line. She approached her desk uneasily, nervously smoothing her skirt and putting her hands in and out of the pocket on her fuchsia blazer.

  “I’m so sorry about Andy,” Sandra Henning said as she eased her heavy bulk into her chair. “And the thing about the DEA, too. We had to give them the information they asked for, Joanna. They had a court order. My hands were tied.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Sandy. I know how those things work, but I did want to talk to you, one bureaucrat to another, to see if you can help me figure out where that ninety-five-hundred-dollar deposit came from.”