by J. A. Jance
“You mean the plea-bargained MIP?”
“That’s right. His father’s a big-time developer with lots of friends in high places.”
“What exactly did they catch him doing?”
“When he got sent to Ironwood Ranch? I suppose he was dealing drugs, but I’m not sure. JoJo passes information along to me only on a need-to-know basis, and he doesn’t think I need to know much.”
“It doesn’t sound like you approve of the plea arrangement.”
“I don’t,” she returned coldly, “but no one bothered to ask my opinion. If my son really was a drug dealer, he should have been in jail, not at Ironwood Ranch. I know they call it a hospital, a treatment center, but it looks more like a resort to me.”
I couldn’t help feeling a certain grudging admiration for this tough-minded woman. In my experience, most mothers of punks opt for whatever plea bargains are available when their little boys get caught doing what they shouldn’t. That made Rhonda Attwood a very unusual specimen. Mentally ticking off what I had learned so far, I went back to something she had said earlier, while we were still outside, her unflinching assumption that Joey had tried to kill me by turning his pet rattlesnake loose in our cabin. That too wasn’t exactly standard mother-of-scumbag behavior.
“So you think Joey tried to kill me?”
“Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it was nothing more than a practical joke and he was only trying to scare you.”
“It worked,” I said grimly. “It scared hell out of me.”
She laughed ruefully. “I know how you feel. Joey turned Ringo loose in my house once as well. It was a full week before I found him hiding behind the detergent in the laundry room. Joey claimed it was all a joke, that he wanted to see what I’d do.”
“Nice kid,” I interjected. “I’d have moved out of the house, or moved him out.”
“I couldn’t, at least not then. I tried to get him into counseling, though, but his father wouldn’t hear of it. He said there was nothing wrong with him.”
She closed her eyes and seemed to wander far away from the Joshua Tree Motel. I watched her for a moment, marveling once more at what a tough, remarkable woman she was, Eventually I dragged her back to the present.
“Supposing it wasn’t a joke. Why would I have been the target?”
“I’m sure it was just like what he said on the phone. The suppliers thought you were a narc and they told him to get rid of you.”
“Instead, someone got to him first.”
Rhonda nodded pensively while a shadow of grief flitted briefly across her face, then her blue eyes hardened once more in the harsh light from the overhead fixture.
“You have to understand, Mr. Beaumont, Joey Rothman was my son, but I lost him years ago. I had to emotionally disassociate myself or be a party to my own destruction. No. I didn’t promise him the money, and I told him he wasn’t welcome to come live with me, either. I couldn’t afford to be drawn into his machinations.”
Hers was an odd perspective. She seemed to differentiate between her loss of Joey and his death. They were two separate and distinct occurrences. For some reason, his death hurt her less than whatever had happened years earlier, although the anguish in her voice was real enough.
“How did you lose him?” I asked, following her lead.
She shrugged hopelessly. “That question has plagued me for years. The divorce, I guess, although sometimes it seems like the trouble started well before that. At the time of the divorce, I couldn’t take him, not in good conscience. I didn’t have the money. I never would have been able to provide for him financially the way JoJo could—private schools, the swimming pool, his friends.”
“Money isn’t everything,” I said.
“If you don’t have any, it seems like it. If I had fought for it hard enough, the court probably would have ordered JoJo to pay child support, but collecting it would have been something else. It was easier to give in. By my letting his father have custody, Joey was able to have some continuity in his life, to stay in the same school system, have the same friends. It hurt like hell, but at the time I thought I was doing what was best for all concerned.”
She paused and bit her lower lip. Talking about her divorce and losing custody still bothered her. She smiled sadly. “I wish you could have seen Joey when he was little, when he was smart and kind, both. He was only five when he rescued a Gila monster that came washing by on a piece of driftwood during a flash flood. I was standing on the bank and watched him do it. He managed to catch the branch as it floated by and drag it to high ground.”
“A Gila monster?” I asked. “Aren’t they just as dangerous as snakes?”
She laughed then. The memory of that experience seemed to ease her pain. “That one wasn’t. It was so pale I thought it was dead, but Joey said it would be all right. And sure enough, after the sun warmed it and it dried out, it got up and wandered away.
“And that was the beginning of Joey’s interest in snakes and lizards. He pored over books, begged us to take him to zoos and museums. He wanted to be a herpetologist when he grew up. A herpetologist or a writer. He caught Ringo that same year, up near our summer cabin in Pinetop. The snake was just a baby then. Joey dragged it home in a quart jar. I didn’t find out until years later that it’s illegal to keep snakes in captivity, but by the time I figured it out, it was too late. I didn’t live there anymore. It was no longer any of my concern. Marsha said he could keep it.”
“I see,” I said.
“Do you?” she demanded, her voice rising until it verged on shrill. “I’m not so sure I do. Marsha got everything—JoJo, Joey, the house, although they have a different house now—with another child they needed a bigger one—and the cabin in Pinetop.”
To say nothing of the snake, I thought. I said, “Where did she come from?”
“Marsha? She was my babysitter once.” There was no concealing the bitterness in her answer. “I had begged JoJo to let me go back to the university and get my degree. Marsha lived two houses up from us in Paradise Valley. She was still in high school when they started screwing around behind my back. It took me three years to figure out what was going on. I’m a slow learner.”
“Nice guy,” I said. “Like father, like son.”
“I’ve wondered sometimes if Joey didn’t know about it before I did. I asked him once. Of course he denied it, but that’s about when he started going haywire. By the time I got the divorce, even if I had gotten custody, I’m not sure it would have made any difference. I think by then the damage with Joey was already done. Besides, by then I had too many problems of my own.” Close to tears, she stopped, swallowing hard.
“Giving up isn’t a crime,” I said.
She smiled gratefully. “Thank you for saying that, Mr. Beaumont. Maybe it isn’t, although I’ve blamed myself for years. I tried to get him back later, after I got through school and was back on my feet financially and emotionally, but whenever he came to stay with me, he lied and stole and cheated. At first I chalked it up to genetics. Later on I told myself it was because of the drugs. It would kill me if I had to think that it was my fault.”
I tossed her the nearest, handiest platitude. “I’m sure it wasn’t.”
“Maybe not. I hope not,” she added.
Rhonda Attwood sat quietly for a moment before continuing. “So that’s how it happened. I locked Joey out of my heart so he couldn’t hurt me any more, the same way I locked out his father. And now, I don’t have anything else to lose. Nothing.”
“And with nothing left to lose, you’re forming a one-woman posse, is that it?”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s illegal for one thing and dangerous for another.”
“I don’t have any faith in the criminal justice system, Mr. Beaumont. They let my son off, and they’ll let his killers off the same way. That’s why I came to you for help.”
“You haven’t been listening, dammit. I can’t help you. You need to go to the detective on the case. The one fro
m Prescott. Talk to her.”
“A lady detective?”
“Her name’s Delcia Reyes-Gonzales. She’s with the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department up in Prescott. She seems to know her stuff. I ought to talk to her myself and let her know where I am.”
Abruptly, Rhonda Attwood stood up. “Let’s go, then,” she said.
“Go where?”
“I’ll take you there, to Prescott. We’ll talk to the detective together, if that’s what you want.”
“Now?”
“Yes. Why not? They say the phones here could be out of order all the rest of the night. I want to get moving on this.”
That wasn’t exactly what I’d had in mind, but it did give me a way to get out of Wickenburg. “Tell me one thing,” I said. “What exactly do you intend to do once you catch up with these characters, the drug suppliers or whoever the people are you think are responsible for Joey’s death? What are you going to do then? You said earlier that you planned to ‘take them out.’ You didn’t really mean that, did you?”
“Didn’t I?” she returned.
It wasn’t a reassuring answer. In fact, it was a downright crazy answer. Nice middle-aged ladies don’t go up against big-time drug dealers, at least sane middle-aged ladies don’t. Fortunately, I’m not a psychologist, and it wasn’t my job to talk her out of it.
Still, crazy or not, Rhonda Attwood had wheels and she was offering me a one-way immediate departure ticket out of Wickenburg, Arizona. Maybe in Prescott I could rent another car and still get to Phoenix before morning to see old Mr. Fixit, Ralph Ames.
“So let’s go,” I said. “What are we waiting for?”
I knew at the time that I was misleading her some, offering an implied alliance that I had no intention of honoring, but I let her draw her own conclusions. If anyone asked me later, I’d tell them that I had just gone along for the ride. Literally.
It turned out not to be such a wonderful bargain.
Happy to escape my one-night sentence at the flea-bitten Joshua Tree Motel, I left the room key on the table, locked the door behind us, and followed Rhonda Attwood outside to her Fiat for what turned out to be one of the most hair-raising rides in a lifetime of hair-raising rides.
To begin with, my six-foot-three body was never intended to fit inside a 128 Spider. At first I thought I’d have to spend the entire trip sitting with my head cocked to one side. Fortunately, once the car was moving, the convertible’s canvas top ballooned up enough that I was able to put my head into the bubble created by air movement. That way I could sit up straight, but it also cut my line of vision down to a few feet in front of the car and an acute angled view of what was directly outside the rider’s window.
Highway 89 climbs abruptly up from the desert floor, winding around the flank of a mountain locals call Yarnell Hill. That’s what they call it, but believe me, it’s a full-fledged mountain.
Rhonda Attwood drove with the heater turned on high and the driver’s window wide open. Wind whipping through her hair, she pushed the aging Fiat like a veteran sports-car-rally driver, coaxing more speed and life out of that old beater than she should have been able to.
My left shoulder was jammed against hers. There was only one spot in the V-shaped foot well big enough to hold my feet, and they promptly went to sleep. I felt like a horse with blinders on, for all I could see was the vast darkness falling away from the side of the car and the fast dwindling lights of Wickenburg and Congress Junction twinkling fitfully in the valley far below.
Every time Rhonda swung around a bend in the road, the Fiat clung like a bug to the white line on the far outside edge. Vainly groping for a steadying handhold, I wondered what would happen if the wheels slipped off the blacktop. How far would the car plunge down the pitch-black side of the mountain before it came to rest on solid rock? Or maybe in the branches of some scruffy desert tree.
Twice, with no warning to me, we came around hairpin curves only to have Rhonda set the car on its nose because traffic was flagged down to only one lane. Looking out the driver’s window as we crept past, I caught glimpses of muddy slides where stove-sized boulders—three-man-rocks they call them in the landscape business—had broken loose from the steep embankment and washed down onto the roadway to block the inside lane.
I don’t like backseat drivers, and I most particularly don’t like being one, especially when I’m hitching a free ride in somebody else’s vehicle. At one point I mentioned offhandedly that the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department was most likely a twenty-four-hour operation and that they’d still be there once we arrived in Prescott, no matter how long we took making the drive. Rhonda didn’t acknowledge the comment one way or the other, and she didn’t ease her foot off the gas pedal, either.
So I shut up and hung on for dear life, remembering all the while what my mother always used to say: Beggars can’t be choosers.
CHAPTER
10
Unlike those in Wickenburg, the phones in Prescott were working. At midnight I awakened Ralph Ames out of a sound sleep. It served him right.
“What time is it?” he grumbled. “And why are you calling me at whatever ungodly hour it is!”
“I need your help, Ralph. Come get me.”
“Come get you! You’re not due to be out for another two weeks. Besides, what’s the matter with the rental car? I distinctly remember asking my secretary to make arrangements for one.”
“They’ve impounded the rental, Ralph. I’m in Prescott, not Wickenburg. Nobody rents cars in Prescott. Not only that, Calvin Crenshaw threw me out.”
“Of Ironwood Ranch? You’re kidding.” There was a pause. “Maybe I should have enrolled you in the Dale Carnegie course first. They’re the ones who teach you how to win friends and influence people.”
“This is no time for jokes, Ralph. I really need you to come get me.”
“Who said I was joking? Where are you, Whiskey Row?”
“I’m at the sheriff’s department, waiting to talk to a female homicide detective named Delcia Reyes-Gonzales. They’ve called her at home, and she’s on her way, should be here any minute. Did you get the name?”
“Detective Reyes-Gonzales,” Ralph Ames repeated. Then, with a sudden change of inflection that told I had his undivided attention, he added, “Did you say with homicide?”
“I certainly did.”
The sound of muffled movement told me Ralph was throwing off his covers and scrambling out of bed. “It’ll take me two hours or so to get there. This sounds serious, Beau. Are you all right?”
“I am now. My roommate’s dead, though. From what I can gather, I seem to be fairly high on the list of possible suspects.”
“Great,” Ralph said. “Make that a little less than two hours. I’m on my way.”
I put down the phone and turned back to the center of the lobby where Rhonda Attwood stood waiting. Just then Detective Reyes-Gonzales appeared at the opposite end of the room. She stepped forward swiftly and was gravely shaking hands with Rhonda when I joined them in the middle of the room.
“I’m so sorry about your son, Mrs. Attwood. I understand that the deputies weren’t able to reach you until late this afternoon,” Detective Reyes-Gonzales was saying.
Rhonda nodded. “I was out working all day. They were waiting for me at the house when I came home.” Rhonda turned to me, drawing me into their conversation. “I guess you already know Mr. Beaumont here.”
“Yes,” Detective Reyes-Gonzales said, nodding curtly in my direction. She didn’t appear to be overjoyed at the prospect of seeing me again. “We met earlier today, although I guess it’s yesterday now. Would you mind stepping into my office, Mrs. Attwood?”
I’m sure the invitation was directed to Rhonda alone, but when I started to drop back, Rhonda took my arm and led me along with her. Detective Reyes-Gonzales shrugged as though it didn’t much matter to her one way or the other. She conducted us through a secured door and into a compact two-desk office where she motioned Rhonda into the lone
visitor chair and left me standing, making no effort to bring me the extra chair from the other desk.
Her message was clear—just because I had entered the office with Rhonda Attwood didn’t necessarily mean I was welcome. Visiting detectives who might try to horn in on Detective Reyes-Gonzales’ case and/or territory could damn well stand. I got the chair myself and pushed it over next to Rhonda’s while the detective watched, sitting perched on the desk with her arms crossed and her head cocked to one side. As soon as I was seated, she asserted her authority by coming after me with no holds barred.
“I understand you were the subject of a number of interdepartmental communications last night, Detective Beaumont.” She said it carelessly enough, but I knew she was sniping at me, baiting me.
“Is that so?” I replied innocently, wondering if maybe Calvin Crenshaw had come to his senses after all and had decided to report the snake incident himself. “I’m certainly relieved to hear that.”
It wasn’t the answer she expected. Detective Reyes-Gonzales raised one impeccably arched eyebrow. “You are?”
“Absolutely. If I had known Cal was going to report it, I wouldn’t be here bothering you.”
She smiled, a belittling, patronizing smile. “Report what, the snake in your room, you mean?”
Her attitude was starting to irritate me. “Yes, the snake in my room! You’re damn right! Somebody was trying to kill me.”
“I think you’re overreacting, Detective Beaumont. Rattlesnake venom isn’t instantly fatal, you know. I haven’t yet been in direct contact with Mr. Crenshaw, but I was told to inform you, if you did by any chance happen to show up here, that the snake is safely on its way back to wherever it came from.”
“Gone back to where it came from?” I echoed. “What does that mean? How could it? Snakes don’t drive, do they?”