Minor in Possession

by J. A. Jance

  I may have dozed again for a little while. The next time I opened my eyes, I had left Joey Rothman far behind and found myself wondering what to do with this unexpectedly unstructured day. At Ironwood Ranch, every moment had been measured and accounted for. Now, here I was in a strange limbo where I wasn’t exactly on vacation, wasn’t exactly in treatment, and couldn’t very well go home, not when Detective Reyes-Gonzales had given me strict orders to hang around. Maybe Ralph Ames would have some brilliant idea. Besides, I wanted to have a heart-to-heart chat with him and let him know about the dark underbelly of Ironwood Ranch.

  I headed for the shower. Later, when I came back out to get dressed, I was chagrined to discover that I was down to my last clean set of underwear. The only socks I had left were the mismatched pair consisting of one blue and one black. It was time to do laundry. It was past time to do laundry.

  Once I was dressed, I gathered up the small pile that contained my newest dirty clothes and went in search of a washer/dryer and coffee, not necessarily in that order.

  In the kitchen, on Ralph Ames’ snow-white Corian countertop, I found an insulated carafe filled with hot coffee, a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice, and a note. The note, written in Ames’ precise script, told me that unfortunately he had a prior commitment that would keep him busy most of the day, but that he’d be back late in the afternoon. Together we’d do something about dinner.

  So I was on my own, for the whole day. Knowing that, I had no reason to rush into doing the laundry. I opened a sliding pocket door off the kitchen far enough to see that the room behind it was indeed the laundry. It smelled rotten in there. The penetrating stench seemed dreadfully out of place, especially in Ralph Ames’ otherwise immaculate house. Quickly I dropped my bundle on the floor and shut the door again to keep the foul odor locked inside, then I turned to the serious business of coffee.

  Awkwardly, holding the carafe with my arm, the glass of orange juice in one hand, and an empty cup in the other, I pushed open a sliding glass door with my shoulder and ventured out onto the patio to soak up some of Arizona’s much-touted autumn sunshine. It was high time.

  I settled down at a glass-topped patio table beside the pool and leaned back in the chair, with my eyes closed at times, feeling the warmth of the bright, brassy sun on the side of my face. Behind me I heard the usual city sounds—muted tires scrubbing on pavement, the sporadic rumble of occasional trucks, and once the blaring squall of a passing ambulance. The city was there all right, at my back and out of sight behind the glaring white stucco of Ralph Ames’ rambling house, while before me loomed the rugged majesty of Camelback Mountain.

  Ames had mentioned it to me once or twice, talked about how he considered himself privileged to live with that giant mound of red rock and its occasional internal grumblings as one of his closest neighbors. Sitting there quietly, sipping the sweet pulpy orange juice, I gradually came to understand what he had meant. A soothing, almost palpable silence drifted down the jagged sandstone cliffs like a veil of dense fog, wrapping itself around me and, for a brief while, blocking out all the disquieting circumstances of the past few days.

  I may have actually slept for a moment or two, but finally, I roused myself and poured a cup of steaming coffee. Alternating the hot coffee with cool sips of orange juice, I sat for more than an hour, allowing myself to think about each of the players in turn, considering them individually and collectively:

  Joey Rothman, a dead creep with no socially redeeming value, had evidently believed I was really some kind of undercover supercop sent to nail his ass. He had believed it enough, despite Kelly’s protestations to the contrary, that he had sicced his pet rattlesnake on me. He hadn’t tried to put the touch on Kelly in his search for investment capital, but I wondered how many others besides Louise Crenshaw and Rhonda had been approached in his quest for quick cash.

  Rhonda Attwood, Joey’s mother, seemed convinced that he was responsible for the attempt on my life, but despite the fact that nothing in her son’s grubby life made his death seem worthy of revenge, and despite good advice to the contrary, Rhonda persisted in the illogical notion she could or should single-handedly take on whoever was responsible for her son’s death. There was a good chance that her bungling around in the case would backfire and drive the killer or killers to ground.

  Michelle, the dead man’s pregnant “fiancée,” had been jilted twice—once by Joey’s behavior with Kelly and once by a bullet fired from my .38. I had asked Kelly if she had known about Michelle, and now I wondered if Michelle had known about Kelly. If so, what had been her reaction? On the surface, Michelle Owens had seemed insubstantial, almost a will-o’-the-wisp, and yet pulling the trigger on a handgun doesn’t require much physical strength. Anger does wonders for itchy trigger fingers.

  That brought me back to the lieutenant colonel, father of the pregnant non-bride. He was a definite possibility, having both motive and opportunity, but there was part of me that hoped it wasn’t him. The two of us were too much alike, had too much in common.

  Finally, I came around to the Crenshaws, those wonderful horrific folks, scum parading under the guise of small-town middle-class respectability. Louise had snared the unsuspecting Joey for an insignificant sexual dalliance, with her impotent husband watching from the sidelines and urging her on. No wonder those two had been totally impervious to Joey’s clumsy blackmail attempt. Of the three, I had a tough time choosing who was the most reprehensible.

  And here was I, poor old J. P. Beaumont who never did anything to anybody, involved in this mess all the way up to my eyeteeth, stuck in the middle of this rogue’s gallery briar-patch. The more I tried to get away, the deeper I sank, trapped in muck, hoping against hope that Detective Reyes-Gonzales would find a way to bring this impossible muddle to some kind of satisfactory conclusion. With any kind of luck, the lady would be good at her job.

  Maybe I was no longer a prime suspect, but until Detective Reyes-Gonzales straightened things out, she wasn’t likely to let me get on an airplane and go back home. The prospect of hanging around Arizona indefinitely with nothing to do but wait wasn’t one I relished.

  With that thought in mind, I put down my emptied coffee cup and went to start the washing machine. The smell in the laundry room hadn’t gotten any better. Shorty Rojas or whoever had gathered up my personal effects from the cabin at Ironwood Ranch had evidently dumped my wet sandbagging clothes into the laundry bag and tied the damn thing shut. Anyone who’s ever had the misfortune of forgetting a wet bath towel in a clothes hamper for a day or two knows what I’m talking about. There was another smell, too, hovering in the background, but the odor of the moldy clothes was so overpowering that at first I couldn’t quite identify the other one.

  My mother always insisted on sorting clothes into three stacks—whites, light-colored, and dark-colored. After first locating a large plastic bottle of bleach and pouring some into the filling washing machine, I began the sorting process. The ones on top, still dank and wet and shot through with sand, came out first and fell into a sodden heap. I left them there, figuring I’d wash those separately.

  Next came a fistful of socks and underwear. I sorted out the socks. Loose sand had sifted down from the wet things at the top of the bag. When I shook a T-shirt to get rid of the sand, something small and white came free from the material and flew across the room like a guided missile, landing with a tiny soft thud several feet away on Ralph Ames’ surgically clean kitchen floor. Not wanting to leave a mess, I went to retrieve whatever it was, and it turned out to be a mouse. A dead white mouse. A reeking dead white mouse.

  For a sickening moment I was back in the cabin at Ironwood Ranch looking down at a regurgitated pile of fur and tail. I’m not scared of dead mice, but if a mouse could be concealed in my dirty clothes bag, I wondered what else could.

  Dreading what I might find, I left the mouse where it was and went back to the laundry room. Gingerly I shook out the entire bag, emptying the contents onto the floor and then k
icking through the resulting heap to see if there were any other unwelcome surprises. There weren’t. The only things left in my dirty clothes bag were moldy, dirty clothes.

  By now the machine was full of hot soapy water, agitating wildly because no clothing had been added. I gathered up the white clothes, stuck them in the machine, and closed the lid before going back to the kitchen to deal with the mouse.

  I located a plastic sandwich bag and put the mouse inside, lifting it by its tail when I picked it up. The plastic didn’t succeed in containing all the odor, so I took bag and mouse outside and placed the malodorous package on the patio table.

  For some time I stood looking down at it, trying to sort out what it meant. It was a clue of some kind, a message, but where had it come from and what was it trying to tell me? How had it gotten in my laundry bag? Who would have put it there, when, and why? Inarguably, the mouse had something to do with Joey Rothman, his rattlesnake Ringo, and hence the murder itself. But what? And what did all of that have to do with me?

  Feeling more than a little silly, I went back into the house, picked up the kitchen telephone, and dialed information to get the number of the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department in Prescott. What the hell was I doing? Calling a goddamn homicide detective to report finding a dead mouse, for Chrissake? But gut instinct told me that the mouse was somehow related to Detective Reyes-Gonzales’ case, and I couldn’t afford to piss her off by withholding information no matter how trivial that information might seem at first glance.

  The dispatcher told me the detective wasn’t in. As a matter of fact, she was on the road, possibly somewhere between Wickenburg and Phoenix at that very moment. I left my name and phone number on the off chance that sooner or later Detective Reyes-Gonzales would check in with him.

  “If it’s an emergency of some kind, I can try patching you through,” he offered helpfully.

  An emergency? About a dead white mouse? Not likely. Not even I had that much nerve.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said quickly, giving him my name and number. “And don’t go to any extra trouble. But if you do hear from her, tell her I called. There’s no big rush.”

  I hung up the phone, drained the final cup of coffee from the carafe, and paced around in the kitchen, thinking and trying to decide what to do. Sitting still and doing nothing would drive me crazy. Homicide cops are action junkies, but in this instance, taking any kind of action at all could get me in a whole shit-pot of trouble.

  I kept thinking about the dead mouse, cooking now in its plastic bag on the sunny patio table, and Ringo, the rattlesnake, starving to death somewhere on the banks of the swollen Hassayampa River. A dead mouse and an equally dead snake. Suddenly those two thoughts collided in my head, and a light bulb came on. Surely Marsha or JoJo Rothman would know when and how Ringo left their house. Why hadn’t I thought to ask them about it earlier?

  Quickly I searched through Ames’ white laminated kitchen cabinets until I located a drawer full of telephone books. The number for James and Marsha Rothman listed a Carefree address. I dialed. Jennifer Rothman answered on the second ring.

  “Hello, Jennifer, this is Detective Beaumont, from Ironwood Ranch. Remember me?”

  “I know you. You’re the one who helped me get to ride the horse.”

  “That’s right. Are either one of your parents home?”

  “No, they both had to leave for a while. The babysitter is here, but she’s watching television. Cartoons. Want to talk to her?”

  I tried to conceal my disappointment. A cartoon-watching babysitter wasn’t going to be much help. I started to ask Jennifer when her parents would be home and to tell her that I’d call back later, when I thought better of it. Maybe Jennifer herself could provide some of the information I needed.

  “Jennifer,” I said casually, “do you remember Joey’s snake?”

  “Ringo? Sure, I remember him. Sometimes Joey let me feed him. I did it while he was gone.”

  Of course. I couldn’t believe my luck. “You mean you took care of Ringo while Joey was away at Ironwood Ranch?”

  “My brother showed me how to do it,” she answered proudly. “And he paid me, too. Twenty bucks. I was always real careful, though. Rattlesnakes are poisonous, you know. I always thought Ringo was kind of creepy. I like kittens.”

  “When’s the last time you saw Ringo?” I asked.

  “The night Joey came to say good-bye.”

  “He what?”

  “When he came to say good-bye and to get his books. It was in the middle of the night and he woke me up. He had Ringo in a bag. He said he was leaving, that I wouldn’t ever see him again. Did he know he was going to die, Mr. Beaumont? Do people know they’re going to die before it happens?”

  Her distress radiated through the phone lines. My questions had reopened a painful wound.

  “Sometimes they do,” I answered.

  There was a pause. Someone was speaking in the background, on the other end of the line. I heard Jennifer say, “No, it’s for me. It’s a friend of mine,” followed by another pause.

  “Jennifer?” I asked. “Are you there?”

  “Yes,” she answered, her voice small, tremulous.

  “Tell me again what happened.”

  “I was asleep. Joey came into my room and woke me up. He had Ringo with him in a pillowcase that was tied shut. He told me that he came back for Ringo and his books. He said he was going away, so far away that I’d never see him again.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I didn’t want him to leave, and I started to cry. He said to keep quiet or I’d wake Mother and Daddy. So I kept quiet.”

  “And he left?”

  “Yes. He got his books and left.”

  “What books?”

  “You know. Like a diary. I always kept them for him.” She laughed. “He always said the best hiding place is in plain sight, and that’s where I kept them for him. On my bookshelf.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “Like I said, he took the books and the snake and left. The next morning, I tried to tell Daddy about it, but he said it was all a bad dream or I made it up. That Joey would be back as soon as he got out of the hospital and that I shouldn’t worry about it.”

  “Did you tell him about Ringo?”

  “No,” she answered. “I didn’t have a chance. He was in a hurry.”

  Again someone was speaking in the background on the other end of the line. “The babysitter wants to use the phone,” Jennifer said. “I have to go.”

  “Thank you,” I told her. “You’ve been a big help.”

  “Is Ringo dead too?” she asked suddenly. “Is he dead just like Joey?”

  “I don’t know,” I replied honestly. “He may be all right, but then again, I’m not sure.”

  “I didn’t like Ringo,” Jennifer said softly, “but I don’t want him to be dead. If he came back home, I’d take care of him, all by myself. No one would have to help me.”

  Jennifer Rothman was a little girl whose unappreciated goodness knew no bounds. My heart ached for her.

  “Do you want me to have Mother or Daddy call you when they get back?” she asked, her voice brightening once more. “They’ll be home pretty soon.”

  “No,” I answered. “That won’t be necessary, Jennifer. You’ve really been a big help.”

  CHAPTER

  14

  I put down the phone and stood looking at it for a long moment. Out in the laundry room, the washing machine rocked crazily into an uneven spin cycle, but I barely heard it. It was the morning after my forty-fourth birthday, and I was damn lucky to be alive.

  Joey Rothman had indeed tried to kill me. His mother’s worst suspicions were now confirmed by the innocent revelations of his adoring half-sister. But why? Had he been acting on his own authority or on somebody else’s orders? Was it because he had truly believed I was there working undercover, or was it due to some other reason entirely? It was impossible to tell.

  In twenty y
ears of police work, I had no doubt racked up more than my share of enemies, people who wouldn’t have blinked twice at the idea of Detective J. P. Beaumont being rubbed out of existence. Ostensibly, most of those people should have been in Washington State, preferably behind bars, but the justice system doesn’t necessarily work that way. Creeps get out of jail all the time. Sooner or later, they’re back on the street, most likely still harboring grudges against the people who locked them up in the first place. Was it some pissed-off penal system graduate who had hired Joey Rothman to do his dirty work? If so, how had he known where to find me? Although I suppose that’s a naive question. My checking into Ironwood Ranch had to be one of the worst-kept secrets of all time.

  The wobbling washing machine rocked to a stop. Grabbing the clean clothes out of the tub, I took a whiff of them before placing them in the dryer. The dose of bleach had done its magic—the moldy odor was gone. Restarting the washer, I poured in another cupful of bleach before adding the lightly colored clothing. So what if some of the colored things faded? I much prefer faded to smelly.

  When I came out of the laundry room, I could hear a voice speaking somewhere in the house. At first I thought Ames had returned, bringing someone with him. Then I recognized Detective Reyes-Gonzales’ disembodied voice saying, “I guess you must have gone out, so I’ll try back later.”

  Evidently I hadn’t heard the ringing telephone over the laundry room’s noisy equipment and running water. I dove for the phone and snatched it up. “I’m here,” I said quickly. “Don’t hang up.” I caught her just in time.

  “Detective Beaumont? Is that you?”