by J. A. Jance
“You mean you don’t?”
“No, dammit. All I know is her son was my roommate and he got himself killed. When they shut down the bridge in Wickenburg tonight, she gave me a ride here to Prescott. Let me tell you, she may be a nice lady, but as a driver she’s scary as hell.”
Ralph Ames looked at me and shook his head sadly. “She’s developing quite a reputation throughout the state as one of the most up-and-coming young water-colorists. As far as I’m concerned, she’s still terribly underpaid, but she’s also very, very talented. She does such marvelous work and yet here you are complaining about her driving?”
“Somehow water-coloring didn’t come up in the course of conversation. Survival takes precedence over aesthetics. Now shut up and take me home, Ralph. I’m dead on my feet.”
CHAPTER
11
When I woke up it was two o’clock in the afternoon. I lay there for a while on the huge bed in Ralph Ames’ guest room, looking out the window and across a pristine backyard swimming pool at the huge mass of ocher sandstone that forms the hump of Phoenix’s famed Camelback Mountain.
There was a discreet tap on the door. “Come in.”
Ames entered wearing a three-piece suit but playing butler. He handed me a snazzy cordless phone. “Telephone for the birthday boy,” he announced.
Birthday? Was today my birthday? Somehow the arrival of my birthday had gotten lost in the frenetic shuffle of the past few days.
“Hello?”
“Dad? Is that you? Are you all right?”
It was Scott. His voice sounded tight and worried. “Of course I’m all right, Scotty. Where are you?”
“Home,” he said. “In California. We all drove home to Cucamonga last night. I don’t know what you said to Mom. She was furious. I’ve never seen her that mad. I don’t think Dave had ever seen her like that, either.”
“She thought I was out drinking.”
He hesitated. “Were you?”
“No. It was all a big misunderstanding. Your mother saw me in a bar and jumped to the wrong conclusion.”
“That’s what Dave tried to tell her,” Scott said ruefully, “all the way home, but she wouldn’t listen. Anyway, I just called to wish you a happy birthday.”
“How did you know I was here?”
“I didn’t. I called Mr. Ames to see if he could tell me where you’d gone, and he said you were right there in his house, that you were still asleep.” He paused. “Is it true that you found a rattlesnake in your cabin and that’s why you left?”
“Yes, it is.”
“You didn’t drop out of the program because of us, did you? Decide not to finish because of anything else that happened, I mean, like with Kelly or anything?”
“Somebody tried to kill me, Scott, and the people at Ironwood Ranch weren’t the least bit interested in finding out who that person was. Calvin Crenshaw threw me out rather than call the sheriff and report it.”
“Oh,” Scott said. He sounded relieved.
“And I’m planning to go back,” I added with considerably more conviction than I felt. “As soon as all this business gets straightened out, I’m going to make them take me back into the fold. You just wait and see.”
“Good. I’ll tell Kelly. She was afraid you wouldn’t go back. Oh, and one other thing.”
“What’s that?”
“Yesterday, when we were in that private conference with Burton Joe, he told us all about that other girl, Michelle, about her being pregnant and everything. It seemed like he really was on your side. He told Kelly she was being unreasonable. Anyway, Kelly wants you to know that she’s not mad at you anymore.”
“Good. Tell her I’m not mad at her, either.”
There was something else I wanted to say, a question I wanted to ask, but I hesitated. In the past few days, Scotty had more than demonstrated his loyalty. I didn’t want to push him away again, but I needed information. Despite the strictures against tattling, he was the only person I could turn to.
“Did Kelly say anything about what went on?”
“What do you mean, Dad?”
“Between her and Joey.”
“Like did they go to bed together or something?”
His answer was far more blunt than my question. “No, that’s not what I meant,” I backpedaled. “I was wondering if he might have said something to her that would be helpful in the investigation. Is Kelly there? Can you put her on the phone?”
“Sorry, she’s not here. I’m back at school.”
“When you talk to her, tell her to give me a call, would you?”
“Sure thing, but I don’t know when I’ll talk to her again. You could call her at the house.”
I thought about the way Karen had looked at me in the Silver Spur Saloon. I didn’t want to have to fight my way through a verbal war zone without having a guarantee of actually speaking to Kelly on the phone.
“No, I don’t think so,” I told Scott. “Give her this number. I’ll wait for her to call me.”
“Kelly’s not bad for a girl,” Scott said as a brotherly afterthought. “She just has terrible taste in men.”
They were words to chill the cockles of a father’s heart. “I noticed,” I said bleakly.
“Come on, Dad,” Scott said. “It’s your birthday. Cheer up. She’ll probably grow out of it.”
As I hung up the phone, I was feeling better. After all, Scott had given me a very real gift for my forty-fourth birthday—himself. I felt closer to him, in fact, closer to both my kids, than I had in years.
I was still holding the phone in my hand when Ralph Ames returned to my room carrying a tray laden with a coffeepot, cups and saucers, and two glasses of freshly squeezed orange juice.
“What exactly did you do to Louise Crenshaw?” he asked pointedly, pouring me a cup of coffee in a handsome cup and saucer with geometric borders designed to look like some brand of Indian pottery.
“I never did anything to her.”
Ralph Ames shook his head. “You’re on the lady’s list, Beau, and I’m not talking Christmas cards here.”
“What do you mean?”
“I called Ironwood Ranch this morning to see what we’d have to do to get you readmitted. You’ll have to go back, you know. If you don’t complete the program, the insurance won’t pay, which isn’t all that big a deal, but it could cause trouble with the Seattle P.D. since you’re down here on sick leave. When I talked to her, though, Louise Crenshaw said not only ‘No’ but ‘Hell no.’ She doesn’t want you back up there, period. As far as she’s concerned, it’s all your fault.”
“What’s all my fault?”
“Everything. The whole mess.”
“How can that be? I didn’t do anything. I was supposed to be a second victim, remember? Somebody planted a rattlesnake in my room.”
“Mediawise, all hell is breaking loose, and as far as the Crenshaws are concerned, you’re a convenient scapegoat. If only you’d turned in your handgun…If only you’d taken care to secure your car keys…If only you’d reported Joey Rothman’s curfew violations…”
“Don’t tell me she’s blaming all of it on me?”
“And that’s barely scratching the surface,” Ames replied dryly. “I’m telling you, the lady’s mightily provoked. You have to understand, I’m sure the Crenshaws are looking at all this adverse publicity in the long term—how it’s going to affect their viability in the treatment center community.”
“What adverse publicity?”
“According to Louise, the Joey Rothman story is headline news all over the state because of the prominence of his family. Both sides,” Ames added.
“Terrific,” I said.
Ames nodded. “Not only that, now someone has leaked the snake story to the press as well. They’re saying it’s one successful homicide and one not so successful.”
“What’s wrong with that?” I demanded. “It’s the truth, isn’t it? That’s better than newspapers usually do.”
“Louise
Crenshaw is categorically denying the snake story, saying the snake was obviously an unfortunate refugee from the flood and that he inadvertently strayed into an occupied cabin.”
Ralph Ames allowed himself another slight smile. “Actually, in terms of adverse publicity, I don’t think it matters that much if the snake was a stray or if it was deliberately planted. Either way, Ironwood Ranch doesn’t sound like the super-safe, squeaky-clean kind of place you’d want to send your addicted husband or wife or child, whatever the case may be.”
“Who leaked the story?” I asked.
“Nobody knows.”
“They didn’t mention me by name, I hope.”
“Or the snake either, thank God,” Ralph added. “If they’d done the story with names included, the wire services would be jumping on it, and Captain Powell would be reading it in Maxwell Cole’s column in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer tomorrow morning at breakfast.”
“And you expect me to count my blessings?”
“Something like that. It could be worse.”
We sat there silently for a few moments, both of us sipping our coffee and lost in our own private thoughts. The more I considered the situation with Louise Crenshaw, the more puzzled and offended I became.
“Ralph,” I said finally. “Louise Crenshaw is crazy. She’s got to be. None of this is the least bit logical.”
“Who says women have to be logical?”
“Don’t make jokes, Ralph, I’m serious. She’s given every indication of hating my guts since the first day I checked into that damn place. She as good as said right then and there that I’d never make it, and she’s been riding me hard ever since.”
“Sometimes there’s no accounting for personal animosities,” Ames suggested.
“I can buy that, but in the last two days, her reactions as far as I’m concerned have been totally out of proportion to what’s been going on. Joey Rothman was my roommate. Luck of the draw. I sure as hell didn’t ask for him. He’s dead, and frankly I don’t care that much one way or the other. But Louise Crenshaw is carrying on like Joey was the Second Coming himself. How come?”
“I don’t know,” Ralph said, standing up and moving toward the door, taking his half-filled coffee cup with him. “Get up and shower, Beau. We’ve got things to do.”
“What am I supposed to wear?”
“I almost forgot to mention it, Louise had someone pack up your stuff. She sent it down with somebody named Shorty. He dropped it off about an hour ago. The dirty clothes are out in the laundry. The suitcase is in the closet. Shorty said for me to tell you that the sandbags held.”
“Wait a minute. You mean the Crenshaws sent my luggage? Before or after somebody from the sheriff’s department went over the room?”
“I wouldn’t know about that,” Ralph answered. “Shorty didn’t say. Neither did Louise. Get a move on, Beau. I have to go by my office for a little while. After that, we have dinner reservations between five-thirty and six. It’s a good thing Scott called. Otherwise I might not have remembered your birthday.”
Fuming with frustration, I crawled out of bed and headed into the shower. Over my objections, Louise and Calvin Crenshaw had ordered someone to pack my things and send them to Phoenix. There was no point in calling Ironwood Ranch to raise hell or to check to see if anyone from the sheriff’s department had gone over my room searching for evidence. They hadn’t Louise hadn’t let it happen.
Ringo was gone, let loose to starve in the desert somewhere, and my room had been stripped clean of all personal belongings. Any trace of evidence my attempted killer might have left behind would have disappeared as well. If, after our talk in Prescott, Detective Reyes-Gonzales went looking for something, there wouldn’t be anything left to find.
The problem with credibility is that once gone, it’s hard as hell to regain. I didn’t much relish the idea of some bright female homicide detective in Prescott, Arizona, thinking about J. P. Beaumont as a complete fruitcake.
I stood in Ralph Ames’ steaming shower and vowed that one way or another Calvin and Louise Crenshaw were going to have to eat their words. Somehow I’d force them to admit that I had indeed been the victim of an attempted homicide. Once they agreed to that sticky stipulation, once they admitted that, they might take me back as a client. They might have thrown me out once, but I’d graduate from their pukey little program or know the reason why.
I was still lost in thought as I stepped out of the shower and toweled myself dry. Something was out of kilter with Calvin and Louise Crenshaw, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was. It was enough of a thought to file away for later consideration. After all, that’s what we homicide detectives look for—things that are slightly out of place.
Just then a light tapping on the door cut short the thinking process. Ralph was champing at the bit and ready to go. I hurried into my most respectable shirt and sport jacket. Ralph had brought along one of his own ties, which he tossed in my direction. “You’ll need it,” he said. “For dinner.”
Ralph, my friend as well as my attorney, drives an automotive anachronism, a huge whale on wheels—a white Lincoln Town Car. Unlike Rhonda Attwood’s Spider, the Lincoln had plenty of headroom and legroom both, even for the likes of me. The smooth gray leather interior was plush and classy enough to suit even the most fastidious of clients, but as one who is making heavy monetary contributions to Ralph Ames’ personal lifestyle, I appreciate the fact that he buys American. (After all, the Porsche 928 was given to me.) I don’t want to pay the freight on the kind of conspicuous consumption that thrives on Mercedes or Jaguars.
We drove first to Ralph’s office, a brass-and-glass high rise at Indian School and Central, an area that seems to be close to but not exactly in downtown Phoenix. I’m not sure there is a downtown Phoenix, but the city had plenty of mid-afternoon stop-and-go traffic without a freeway or bridge anywhere in sight.
I’m accustomed to the steep, tree-studded glacial ridges of Seattle and the Pacific Northwest. Driving through Phoenix, I was struck by the unremitting sameness of it all. The city seemed brown and flat, an endless panorama of urban blight. Here and there, on the periphery, stark rocky ramparts, blue and gray in the distance, rose up abruptly from the desert floor into a hazy, smoggy sky. I had been in Arizona for more than a month, but the desert still had an alien look about it, alien and forbidding and full of snakes.
When we reached his office, Ralph disappeared into his inner sanctum, leaving me to linger in the finely appointed reception area, where I used the phone to negotiate a temporary peace treaty with Alamo Rent A Car.
It wasn’t easy. They were not happy to hear that their vehicle was in the hands of the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department as part of the evidence in a murder investigation, and they weren’t eager to rent me a substitute vehicle, either. The first three people I spoke to insisted that I was responsible for daily charges regardless of whether or not the vehicle had been impounded by a law enforcement agency, and none would agree to place a clarifying phone call to Detective Reyes-Gonzales. Finally, on the fourth try, I connected with a supervisor who did make the call. With some additional prodding, she reluctantly allowed as how I could have a Subaru station wagon if I came back to Sky Harbor International Airport that evening to pick it up. I told her I’d be there.
When Ralph emerged from his office an hour later, he was wearing a self-satisfied smile that put me on guard as soon as I saw it.
“What are you grinning about?” I asked.
“Oh, nothing,” he said offhandedly, which worried me that much more. “We have an early dinner reservation. We’re meeting someone.”
“Who?”
“It’s a surprise.”
The surprise got unwrapped as soon as we pulled into the parking lot of Vincent’s on Camelback. The car idling roughly in front of us under the valet parking canopy was a familiar one, a dark green Fiat Spider.
“Rhonda Attwood’s here too?” I asked.
Ralph Ames grinned smugly
. “That’s right. She called and left a message this morning. When I got back to her this afternoon with the information she needed, she said she wanted to speak to you as well. I suggested that she meet us here.”
“Information? She asked you for information? What kind?”
“You know I can’t answer those kinds of questions, Beau. She asked me to make some simple inquiries for her, that’s all.”
Ralph’s suddenly choosing to duck behind a curtain of professional confidentiality surprised me. Since when had Rhonda Attwood become a client of his?
“You know what she’s up to, don’t you?” I asked.
“Up to? She’s trying to bury her son, and not getting a whole lot of cooperation from her former husband,” Ames replied confidently, as though he hadn’t a doubt in the world that he knew the whole truth of the matter. I had been too worn out on our trip down from Prescott to Phoenix to give him many of the disturbing details from my hours alone with Rhonda Attwood, but I could see now that I should have warned him.
“Don’t get mixed up with her,” I said.
The parking attendant parked the Fiat and came back for the Lincoln. Ames got out and handed him the keys.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked me over the car’s roof as the attendant got inside to drive it away.
“She’s dangerous, for one thing,” I said.
Ames shook his head in obvious disbelief.
“Look, what if I told you she’s another Anne Corley waiting to go off? What would you think of that?”
“I’d say you have an overly active imagination,” Ralph Ames said, and started for the entrance.
“Ralph, wait. She told me so herself last night.”
“She’s arranging a funeral, Beau. Come on.”
The small anteroom, furnished with a few chairs and a polished burled maple desk, was decked with bouquets of freshly cut flowers. We were met at the door by a lovely blonde hostess carrying a leather-bound reservation book. She cooed happily over Ralph the moment she saw him.
“Ah, Mr. Ames. So good to see you again. One of your guests has already arrived and been seated. If you will please follow me, I’ll take you directly to your table. Vincent is busy with the grill right now, but he’ll try to stop by your table in a few minutes, before we get too busy.”