by J. A. Jance
“What do you do for a living?” I asked. By asking questions first, I thought I could at least direct the flow of conversation.
“I’m an accountant. You?”
But that’s the problem with casual conversations. Every answer evolves into another question, tit for tat.
“I’m a cop,” I answered.
“Oh,” the guy grunted. Not, What kind? Not, Where? Just, Oh, and since he didn’t ask for any more specifics, I didn’t offer them. An old loose-jawed guy one seat over asked Gray Suit for a light, which he didn’t have, but the two of them struck up another conversation, leaving me out of it. With the life-and property-threatening flood surging past outside, everyone in the room found it easy to talk to strangers. While Gray Suit was preoccupied, I asked the bartender for a pay phone. He directed me to one in the grungy yellow hallway between the dining room and the bar, but when I picked up the handset, the phone was dead.
“Phone’s out of order,” a dishwasher said unnecessarily as he trudged past me lugging a huge plastic tub laden with dirty dishes.
“I noticed,” I said, and made my way back into the bar, where a third glass of tonic had reserved my place. I had just hunkered onto the stool and was in the process of raising the glass to my lips when someone spoke directly behind me.
“If this isn’t cozy. What are you two doing, sitting around comparing notes?”
I recognized the icy voice. Instantly. It was Karen, my ex-wife Karen, on a rampage. Stunned, I turned to look at her, almost spilling the full drink down my front. What the hell was she doing here?
Carefully I set my drink back down on the bar. When in doubt, attack, so I took the initiative. “I thought you were going to the meeting.”
There was such blazing fury in her eyes that I almost would have preferred tangling with the rattlesnake in Dolores Rojas’ glass jar.
“Meeting? You’re damned right I’ve been to a meeting, but I’m here to tell you you’ve suckered me for the last time, Jonas Piedmont Beaumont.”
“Karen,” I said reasonably, “it’s not what you think.”
“It isn’t? I’ll tell you what I think. The kids and I took a full week out of our lives. We came all the way over here and squandered our time willingly, on the assumption that we were doing you a favor, helping you get well. That’s what all the counselors told us on the phone when they were begging us to come. Just now we’ve spent a good hour and a half attending a goddamned Al-Anon meeting, while you’re already back in the bars and drinking again.”
“Karen, I…”
But before I could say anything more, the man in the gray suit, who seemed almost as surprised as I was, managed to find his voice.
“Honey,” he said, standing up, “I think I can explain everything.”
She glared at him, her face awash in tearful anger. “You’d better get started then, David, unless you prefer his company to mine.”
With that, Karen Moffit Beaumont Livingston turned on her heel and swept regally out of the Silver Spur Saloon, with gray-suited David, her second husband, trailing miserably behind. Somehow sensing incipient danger, people in the crowd parted, stepping aside to let them pass.
The bartender came by and collected David Livingston’s abandoned glass. “Who was that?” he asked, pausing for a moment to polish the top of the bar in front of me.
“My ex,” I replied grimly. “And her second husband.”
I couldn’t exactly call David Livingston Karen’s new husband. After all, he had been around for some time now, ten years in fact, although I personally had never before laid eyes on the man. From the way he handled his glass, from the way he stowed away the Bud, I wondered if Karen had screwed up and reeled in a second drinker. It happens; at least that’s what the counselors say.
“Did you know who he was?” the bartender asked, staring at me curiously.
“I do now,” I said.
The bartender grinned and shook his head. “You look like you could use something stronger.” He set a glass of amber-colored liquid on the counter in front of me. “On the house,” he added.
I sat there looking at it for several moments, debating whether or not I should pick it up, when somebody tapped insistently on my shoulder. I turned around expecting to find Dave Livingston standing there ready to punch my lights out. Instead, Shorty Rojas peered up at me.
He motioned his head toward the door. “Come on,” he said. “I got somebody who wants to talk to you.”
Call it fate, call it superstition, but I had the uncanny feeling that somebody was looking over my shoulder, watching out for me, making sure I didn’t take that first drink. That Somebody had nothing to do with Shorty Rojas.
I waved my thanks to the bartender with an apologetic shake of my head. “Some other time,” I said, and followed Shorty out into the street. His truck was nowhere in sight.
“Who is it?” I asked, figuring that Calvin Crenshaw had changed his mind and was ready to call the sheriff’s department.
“Joey Rothman’s mother,” Shorty said. “She wants to talk to you.”
“Marsha? What does she want with me?”
“Not his stepmother,” Shorty answered. “His real mother.”
“Where did she come from?” I asked.
I knew vaguely that Joey Rothman’s mother existed, but she had been conspicuously absent during Joey’s family week.
“She drove down from Sedona this afternoon. She just got in a little while ago.”
“Where’s Sedona?”
“North of here, a hundred miles give or take. She tried coming down the Black Canyon Highway, but she had to backtrack and come around the other way because of the river.”
Karen had told me about the kinds of pressure Ironwood Ranch personnel had exerted on her in order to get her and my kids to drive over from Cucamonga. If Joey’s mother lived only a hundred miles away, how had she managed to resist the hard sell and stay away from Joey Rothman’s family week?
“Where is she now?” I asked.
“I left her back at your motel and told her I’d come find you.”
“Why?”
“Didn’t figure she’d be able to pick you out in this crowd.”
“But what does she want with me?”
Shorty shrugged. “Beats me. I just follow orders. Lucy told me to bring her to you, and that’s what I’m doing.”
A decrepit-looking, dark-colored Fiat 128 was parked in front of my unit at the Joshua Tree Motel. Shorty’s looming pickup stood guard behind it.
“That’s her,” he said. “I’ll leave you two alone to talk. I’ve got to get back home.”
He hurried into the Ford and it turned over with its customary roar. Tentatively, I approached the Fiat and knocked on the driver’s window. There was a lone woman sitting inside the car. She opened the window a crack.
“Are you Joey’s roommate?” she asked.
“Yes,” I answered. “My name’s Beaumont. J. P. Beaumont.”
“And you’re the cop, right?”
“Yes.”
“Will you help me?” I assumed she meant would I help her get out of the car. I reached for the door handle but the door was locked. She made no move to unlatch it.
“We can talk in my room if you want to, Mrs. Rothman.”
“My name is Attwood,” she corrected. “Rhonda Attwood. I took back my maiden name when I divorced Joey’s father. But before I get out of the car, I want your answer, yes or no. Will you help me find the man who killed my son?”
“That’s a police matter, ma’am,” I said politely. “This isn’t my jurisdiction. It’s not my case.”
“That’s not what I heard.”
She was peering up at me through the open crack of window with a look that was almost conspiratorial while the glow of the halogen streetlight behind her made a lavender halo of her lush blonde hair.
“Maybe you’d better tell me what you heard,” I said guardedly. “This is all news to me.”
“Joey said he
thought you were a plant, a narc working undercover. I’m sure that’s why he tried to kill you.”
Women drive me crazy. They’re forever trying to tell you things while leaving out vital details, those critical specifics that make what they’re saying understandable.
“Why who tried to kill me? Lady, you’re talking in circles.”
“Joey, of course. My son. Who did you think? Ringo belonged to him, you know.”
“I don’t know anything of the kind,” I responded irritably. “Besides, who the hell is Ringo?”
“The snake. Joey’s rattlesnake. I ought to know. I lived in the same house with that damned thing long enough that I’d recognize Ringo anywhere, even in somebody else’s glass jar a hundred miles from home.”
Understanding dawned. Joey’s snake.
“You’re right,” I said. “You’d better come inside. We need to talk.”
“But will you help me?” she insisted. “I’m not getting out of the car unless I have your word of honor.”
At that point, I would have agreed to almost anything. “Yes,” I told her. “You have my word.”
I reached down to take hold of the door handle, but Rhonda Attwood didn’t wait long enough for me to prove myself a gentleman. She had already unlocked the door, opened it herself, and was getting out.
She straightened up and looked around uncertainly. She was a medium-sized woman, five-five or so, with a dynamite figure.
“Which is your room?” she asked.
“Right here. The one with the burned-out porch light.”
She started toward the door. If she felt any concern about entering a strange man’s motel room alone at night, it certainly didn’t show. She paused on the unlit doorstep and waited for me.
I closed the car door behind her, first checking to be sure both doors were properly locked. They weren’t, and so I locked them. After all, I’m from the big city.
She laughed at my precautions. “Thanks, but I’m sure the car would have been fine,” Rhonda Attwood said, as I opened the door to let her in. “Nobody’s going to bother stealing a broken-down old wreck like that.”
Considering Ringo’s unannounced presence in my room at Ironwood Ranch earlier in the day, potential car thieves were the least of my worries.
“Better safe than sorry,” I murmured.
I glanced around the room nervously, trying not to appear too obvious about it, but checking for snakes just the same. Right about then I felt a certain kinship with the little old ladies in this world who are forever checking in their closets and under beds, searching for prowlers.
Maybe I was being paranoid, but I wanted nothing more at that moment than to be out of Arizona and back home in Seattle, where the rattlesnake population is exceedingly low.
And where Karen Moffit Beaumont Livingston can’t make unscheduled surprise appearances.
CHAPTER
9
In terms of quality, the Joshua Tree Motel is a long way from, say, the Westin Bayshore, and I was embarrassed to show anyone, especially an unknown lady, into that dingy hovel of a room, but Rhonda Attwood appeared to be totally unaffected by the bleak surroundings. Without waiting to be invited, she settled herself at the spindly-legged kitchen table with its chipped and mottled gray Formica top.
Seeing her out of the car and in the light, I was startled by her uncanny resemblance to Marsha Rothman. At forty-one or so, Rhonda was a good ten years older than her husband’s second wife, but they were both uncommonly attractive women—small-boned, narrow-shouldered, blue-eyed blondes with similarly delicate facial features and classic profiles. Both wore their hair in below-the-ear bobs, but Marsha’s flawless honey blonde was courtesy of Lady Clairol herself. No hair dared wiggle out of place in Marsha Rothman’s chiseled, precision cut. Rhonda’s seemed more nonchalant, breezy, and genuine. The ash blonde was highlighted by marauding streaks of premature silver from Mother Nature’s own paintbrush.
“What’s the matter?” she asked, settling back against the ragged plastic-covered chair and regarding me curiously. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“It’s just that you’re so much alike,” I mumbled in confusion.
Her lips curled into a tight smile with just a hint of rancor. “You mean Marsha and me? You’re not the first to mention it, and I don’t suppose you’ll be the last. JoJo Rothman never drew a faithful breath in his life, but he’s certainly true to type.”
“JoJo?” I asked.
“He goes by James now. He got rid of JoJo when he got rid of me. He always picks blue-eyed blondes, but I’ve got some bad news for Marsha Rothman. She’s going to lose her gravy train. JoJo ditched me around the time I hit thirty. She’ll reach that soon enough herself. He’ll give her the slip then, too. Women age, you see. JoJo doesn’t.”
She paused for a moment, unabashedly meeting my gaze and giving me an opportunity to study her more closely. Everything about Rhonda Attwood seemed contradictory. Her skin glowed with a healthy, wholesome vitality that showed little assistance from makeup of any kind. A softly feminine pink angora cardigan was worn over a garish Powdermilk Biscuit T-shirt and faded, belted jeans. Her feet were shod in much-used waffle-stomping hiking boots with thick leather thong laces.
A complex woman, I thought, internalizing the full paradoxical effect. Rhonda Attwood was pretty, not beautiful, but capable of making a stunning appearance. At the moment she simply chose not to.
“I don’t believe you came here to tell me about your former husband’s marital difficulties with his present wife,” I said, tentatively, trying to bring her back to the subject at hand.
She nodded, allowing herself to be herded. “You’re absolutely right, Mr. Beaumont. I came because I need your help. I came to talk to you about Joey. About my son, and, as I said outside, to ask for your help.”
Until she spoke Joey Rothman’s name aloud, there had been little outward evidence of the grieving mother about her. Her distress was muted and kept firmly under control. People who succeed in not showing emotions under these circumstances come from the two opposite ends of the grieving spectrum. Either they genuinely don’t care about what happened or they’re afraid to show it for fear it will tear them apart.
“I’m sorry about what happened,” I said, trying to smoke out which definition applied.
She looked at me appraisingly. “I suppose you think I ought to cry or something, don’t you,” she said.
“We’re all different,” I assured her. “No two people react in exactly the same way.”
She nodded thoughtfully. “I’m sure most mothers do cry, but I can’t anymore. You see, I used up all my tears years ago. Maybe Joey finally died last night, at least his body did, but he’s been gone a long, long time. The only thing left for me to do is bury him. After that, I plan to get even.”
Her voice was low and husky and deadly serious.
“Get even?” I asked, playing dumb. “What do you mean?”
“I think you know what I mean. Like in the Old Testament. An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. I’m going to find whoever did this to him, and I’m going to take them out.”
Her words seemed totally at odds with a lady of her demeanor, but there was a chilling certainly about them, a dogged, unemotional resolve, that put me on edge. Determined women who decide to even scores scare hell out of me.
“That’s a job for professional police officers,” I cautioned.
Unblinking, she stared at me. For a scary moment or two I wondered if maybe that was why she had come looking for me. Maybe she was operating under the misapprehension that I was somehow personally responsible for her son’s death. She had laid a narrow purse on the table in front of her. With tension tightening across my shoulders, I gauged how thick the bag was and wondered if it was big enough to hold a handgun. Unfortunately, the answer was yes.
“I had nothing to do with Joey’s death,” I said.
She arched one finely shaped eyebrow. “Oh? Convince me.”
“Convince you of what? That I’m not a narc? That I’m a drunk, dammit, just like everybody else at Ironwood Ranch? We’re all drunks or addicts, one way or the other. Believe me, I wasn’t there on some kind of undercover assignment. I was there under protest, on doctor’s orders.”
“That’s not what Joey thought,” she countered.
“I don’t give a damn what Joey thought. He was wrong.”
“He said you didn’t seem that sick to him, that you made his suppliers nervous.”
“I made them nervous? That’s a laugh. Why the hell would he tell you something like that?”
“He was afraid you’d do something that would blow the whole operation. He thought he might have to leave the state for a while until things blew over.”
“But he wasn’t afraid you’d turn him in,” I suggested.
“Evidently not,” she replied, but the piercing blue-eyed gaze never left my face.
“When did Joey tell you all this?”
“Last night,” she said.
“What time?”
She paused before she answered, her blue-eyed gaze cool and assessing. When the answer came, it seemed as though she had reached a decision about me.
“Eleven o’clock maybe. It was fairly late, but I didn’t notice the time exactly. He called to ask me for money and a place to stay after he got out.”
“He asked you for money? How much?”
“Ten thousand dollars. He said he wanted to go somewhere and start over.”
I whistled. “That’s a lot. Did you agree to give it to him?”
“Are you kidding? I may have been his mother, but that doesn’t make me stupid. I knew what my son was.”
“And what was that?”
She smiled bitterly. “A liar and a cheat. A chip off the old block.”
“You mean like his father?”
She nodded again. “JoJo uses people too. I’m sure Joey had absolutely no intention of starting over someplace else. Not really. That was a lie to see if I would bite. He would have used the money to bankroll himself into some other deal, and if he got caught again, I’m sure his father could have fixed it again.”