Judgment Call

by J. A. Jance

  Because Joanna knew Bisbee’s cityscape intimately, as only a native-born resident would, she knew the sights and could see where things worked and where they didn’t. One artist had attempted but not quite captured the untidy clutter of Brewery Gulch and OK Street buildings, huddled in stark contrast to the steep sides of the red shale hill with Bisbee’s school letter, B, standing delineated in white limestone.

  An attempt to paint the front facade of the Copper Queen Hotel didn’t quite work because the perspective was out of whack, making the hotel appear larger than the buildings in front of it. Several paintings focused on the town’s sole statue, the figure of a copper-covered, bare-chested miner known as the Iron Man. All of those were crookedly out of kilter. A painting of Lavender Pit did a better job of capturing the actual subject matter, but the immense and decaying hole with its collapsing walls and levels was hardly a thing of beauty, and Joanna found herself wondering why anyone would bother.

  The painting of San Jose Peak rising in purple mountain’s majesty out of the dusty plain of Sonora, Mexico, was nothing short of stunning. That one, painted from what was evidently the top of Vista Park, was easily the best of the bunch. A close second was a painting of the cliff-covered limestone hillock generations of Bisbee kids had called Geronimo. With a distinctive double hump at the top of the peak, Geronimo looked like a gray Valentine gone bad, looming over the reddish brown flattened expanse of the tailings dump.

  Of all the paintings, that was the one Joanna liked the most, perhaps because climbing Geronimo had been a triumph of her youth when she and Marianne Maculyea had conquered it together during a daring junior high school mountain-climbing expedition.

  The painting at the end of the hall, the last one Joanna viewed, was also an odd man out. All the others, although often imperfectly executed, were nonetheless clearly representational. This one was not. Here three wide stripes of paint covered the whole canvas. It was reddish brown on the bottom, gray in the middle, and blue on top. There was no definition; no shading, no telling details. A slightly darker smudge in the reddish part might have been a shadow or it could have been the vague outline of a house. It was impossible to tell.

  As far as Joanna was concerned, there was nothing in the picture that made it work, nothing that made it speak to her. The title printed on the card said: LIMESTONE CLIFFS SOUTH OF BISBEE. The name scratched in yellow in the lower-right-hand corner was “Richard Reed.”

  Joanna was still studying the painting when her mother walked up behind her. “Don’t say it,” she said. “I already know. If this is art, then so is second-grade finger painting. I’m almost embarrassed to put it up, but I have to since he came and paid good money to be here.”

  “Is this the same guy Maggie Oliphant was complaining to you about on the phone yesterday when I stopped by the house?”

  Eleanor nodded. “That’s the one. I told Maggie that in the future we need to have prospective artists give us a portfolio of their work prior to their being accepted into one of the master classes. After all, if you want to maintain any kind of quality, the process of being admitted to something like this should be more like auditioning for a part in a drama production than just forking over fifteen hundred bucks for tuition and walking into the conference sight unseen. That’s what we’ll do next year.”

  “We?” Joanna asked.

  Eleanor gave her a look. “Yes, we,” she said. “Somebody has to keep this thing running. What happens to the kids if we don’t? Poor Maggie. She was always totally focused on the bottom line and on bringing in as much money as possible, but if we expect to create any kind of credibility in the art world, we’re going to have to insist on an official selection process instead of simply doing a cattle call.”

  “Which is how this guy got in?” Joanna observed, nodding toward the painting.

  Eleanor nodded. “Exactly. Richard Reed evidently signed up at the very last minute, just days before the Plein Air conference began, but he wouldn’t have made it to first base—at least not as far as his art is concerned.”

  “Wait,” Joanna said, tuning in to her mother’s sarcasm. “What do you mean by that?”

  Eleanor shook her head. “There’s no fool like an old fool. Maggie was a little over the hill—aren’t we all—and having a younger man pay attention to her was most likely more than she could resist. Putting a little romance in someone’s life never hurt anybody. Look what it did for me.”

  A younger man, who was enrolled in the conference. That’s when Joanna realized that she had met Richard Reed. Two days earlier, he had been the man at the cash wrap in Daisy’s Café, the one who had given her first the leer and then the unexpected compliment. And yes, he was definitely closer to Joanna’s age than he was to Maggie Oliphant’s or Eleanor Lathrop Winfield’s.

  “You’re saying there was something going on between Maggie and this guy?”

  “Of course,” Eleanor sniffed. “You can’t look at that painting and tell me there wasn’t.”

  “Did you mention this to anyone last night during the interviews?”

  “Why would I? Just because Maggie is dead doesn’t mean I have to drag her reputation through the mud. Besides, I know good and well Richard Reed can’t be the killer.”

  “I don’t know that for sure; how do you?”

  “Because of the time. Maggie was killed at seven thirty-five. That was when I was at the podium, introducing the artists. Richard Reed was right there in the audience with the rest of the participants.”

  “The timing of Maggie’s death was a deliberate holdback, Mother. How did you find out about it?”

  “Dr. Machett told George and George told me.”

  By then, though, the alarm bell ringing in Joanna’s head overcame her momentary annoyance with her mother and with George Winfield. She remembered that Jaime Carbajal had said something about interviewing one of the Plein Air painters at the same time he was speaking to Debra Highsmith’s neighbors.

  Reed’s painting didn’t reveal any details, but based on title alone, it was likely that he was the one who had been out in San Jose Estates, painting away, just up the street from Debra Highsmith’s home. Reed was also a late enrollee with negligible artistic skill. Was being a bad artist enough to merit putting him on a list of possible murder suspects? No, but the fact that he had been in the vicinity of the crime scene meant that he should at least be given a second look.

  “Who handled enrollment for the conference?” Joanna asked.

  “Maggie did all of that.”

  “With help or without it?”

  “Without,” Eleanor answered.

  “She has an application for each enrollee?”

  “I’m sure she does. They’re probably here in the office if you want to take a look at them.”

  One of Eleanor’s worker bees trotted up with some kind of time-critical question about where the judges should be and when. Joanna waited while Eleanor finished putting out that particular logistical fire.

  “Where were we?” Eleanor asked at last.

  “You were going to show me the enrollment forms.”

  “Oh, right. This way.”

  Eleanor led her daughter into the room that had once been the principal’s office. Joanna stopped in the doorway and looked around the grubbily appointed room. The massive wooden desk and oddball collection of wooden filing cabinets looked old and hard used enough to have been original equipment when the school first opened somewhere in the early twentieth century. A broken-down stool on wheels provided make-do seating for whoever was working at the desk.

  “I don’t see a telephone,” Joanna said, looking around.

  “Maggie didn’t want to have to spring for a landline,” Eleanor said. “She conducted all business over her cell.”

  Joanna nodded.

  Eleanor opened several drawers in one of the filing cabinets. Eventually, after riffling through a set of folders, she pulled one out.

  “Here’s the file for this year’s Plein Air,” El
eanor said, handing it over. “Knock yourself out. I need to go deal with organizing the judges.”

  Joanna sank down on the stool, opened the file, and laid the stack of applications out on the surface of the desk. Considering that the artist in residence, Michael Coleman, was from Sedona, it wasn’t surprising that most of the applicants came from towns in Arizona—one each from Prescott, Lake Havasu, Kingman, and Nogales. There were three from Scottsdale, two each from Sun City West, Mesa, and Gilbert. One hailed from Santa Fe, New Mexico, and one from Palm Springs, California. The California application for Richard Reed was dated April 12.

  Joanna plucked her cell phone out of her pocket and dialed Deb Howell’s desk in the bull pen. Obviously, she had yet to make it home.

  “Did Maggie Oliphant’s phone records ever come in?” Joanna asked.

  “Her phone and her phone records,” Deb answered. “I was about to pack up and go home with them. Why?”

  Joanna consulted Richard Reed’s application. “Here’s a number for you.” She read it off. “It’s the cell phone listed for one of the Plein Air painters. When’s the first time you see this number on her phone records?”

  “It’ll take some time to find the first call, but that number isn’t hard to find. It shows up in the phone record several times. Wait a second.” Deb paused. “I just counted them,” she resumed. “Make that seventeen calls in the past week. Calls from Maggie to that number and calls from that number to Maggie’s phone. From the looks of it, that’s more than Maggie talked to anyone else at the conference. That would indicate a certain level of personal involvement.”

  “Yes,” Joanna agreed. “It certainly would.”

  “Where’s Reed from?” Deb asked.

  “Palm Springs. That’s what he lists as his residence on the application.”

  “The area code on his cell phone says L.A., but maybe he bought the phone in L.A. and that’s why it got assigned an L.A. number,” Deb said. “What’s really interesting is that now that I have the phone itself, I’m looking at a whole cluster of calls—six in all, two each to three different numbers—that were placed late yesterday afternoon from Maggie’s phone to various numbers in the 760 area code. I happen to know that’s the area code for Palm Springs because I just looked it up. The only way I know about these calls is because we found the phone. None of them would show up on the billing information I got from her cell phone provider.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because none of them went through. That made me curious, so I tried dialing them myself. All three of them go directly to a recording that says the number you have reached is not in service at this time.”

  Nonexistent numbers? Joanna’s alarm bell started ringing even more urgently. “Read them to me, please,” she said.

  Deb did, dictating the numbers aloud while Joanna compared them with the information listed on Richard Reed’s Plein Air application. The first turned out to be Richard Reed’s home number. The second was his work number. The third one was the number of his emergency contact.

  “If the phone numbers on his application are all bogus, everything else about him is probably bogus as well,” Joanna said. “Look back through and see if you can locate the first time Reed’s cell phone shows up in Maggie’s call history.”

  There was a long pause on Deb Howell’s end of the line. In the background, Joanna heard papers shuffling. “Okay,” Deb said. “Here it is. As far as I can tell, the first call from that number is dated April tenth.”

  “The application is dated two days later,” Joanna said. “So Richard Reed called one day, had the application faxed to him, and enrolled two days later.”

  “How did he pay?” Deb asked. “Visa? MasterCard?”

  “The application is marked cash.”

  “How much is the tuition?” Deb asked.

  “Fifteen hundred bucks.”

  “So what did he do?” Deb asked. “Send fifteen one-hundred-dollar bills in a FedEx envelope? Show up in person?”

  The unorthodox method of payment, combined with the bogus phone numbers and Richard Reed’s apparent lack of artistic skill, shifted into a disturbing pattern. “I know you were expecting to go home,” Joanna said, “but I think we need to have a talk with this guy.”

  “Where are you?” Deb asked.

  “I’m up at Horace Mann. The reception is due to start at two. Why don’t you come here? We’ll track Mr. Reed down and ask him a couple of questions.”

  “Do you know where he’s staying?”

  “Not yet, but I will by the time you get here.”

  When Joanna ended her call to Detective Howell, she immediately dialed Margaret Mendoza, her records clerk. “Here’s a date of birth for you,” Joanna said, reading off the information from Richard Reed’s Plein Air application. “The name is Richard Loren Reed. Date of birth is November 25, 1975.”

  “Do you have a place of birth?”

  The Plein Air application didn’t ask for that. “No,” Joanna said. “Only what’s supposed to be a current address, 3242 South Calle de Maria, Palm Springs, California.”

  In the background Joanna could hear the clerk keyboarding the address information into her computer.

  “No such address,” she said a moment later. “There’s no 3200 block on South Calle de Maria in Palm Springs. Are you sure you gave me the correct address?”

  “I read it right off his application,” Joanna said. “But since the phone numbers weren’t legit, it’s not too surprising. I wonder how much else about him is also phony-baloney.”

  She waited a while as Margaret’s fingers clattered on her keyboard.

  “I’ve got one Richard Loren Reed in the database,” the clerk reported. “His date of birth is July 5, 1923, not November 25, 1975. So they’re definitely not the same guy.”

  Suddenly it became blazingly clear why Richard Reed had paid his enrollment fee in cash instead of with a check or credit card. These days banks didn’t establish checking accounts without some form of verifiable identification.

  “Thanks,” Joanna said to her clerk.

  Hanging up, she immediately went looking for her mother, who was dealing with some kind of issue over the layout of various refreshment tables.

  “What now?” Eleanor asked impatiently. “Can’t you see I’m really busy here?”

  “I’m busy, too,” Joanna answered. “I need to know where Richard Reed is staying. It’s urgent.”

  “You still think he may have something to do with Maggie’s death?”

  “He may,” Joanna answered. And a whole lot more besides, she thought.

  “All right, then,” Eleanor said. “I’ll get you a copy of the class roster, but I don’t see how he could have done it when he was right there in the banquet room along with everyone else.”

  But Joanna did. If Richard Reed was the killer, he didn’t need to suspend the laws of physics. All he had to do was change the time on the watch before he destroyed it.

  CHAPTER 22

  AGAIN ELEANOR SHUFFLED THROUGH ONE OF THE FILE DRAWERS in what had been Maggie Oliphant’s office. Eventually she came away with a class roster that listed each participant’s name, city of origin, accompanying guest, and lodging arrangements for the week. Richard Reed was listed as a solo, and he was staying at a place called Miner’s Camp Lodge.

  “Where’s this?” Joanna asked.

  “Above OK Street,” Eleanor said. “It’s a B and B, minus the second B. They don’t serve breakfast, and it’s a bit grim. As the old song says, ‘no phone, no pool, no pets.’ It’s lodging only.”

  “There isn’t anything above OK Street,” Joanna objected.

  “There may not be any streets above OK Street,” Eleanor corrected, “but there are houses, and that’s what these are—refurbished miners’ shacks that are accessible by stairs only. The rates at Miner’s Camp are dirt cheap for that very reason. If you’re lugging your own suitcase up B Hill to get to your room, the higher you go, the more affordable the rate.”


  “Thanks, Mom,” Joanna said, taking the paper. “Now, can you make me a copy of this?”

  “I’ve got things to do,” Eleanor said. “You’ll have to do that yourself. The copy machine is over by the window.”

  It took what seemed like a very long time for the ancient copy machine to come on and spit out a copy of the roster. Once it had, Joanna hurried to the door of the school as Deb Howell pulled up outside in her Tahoe.

  “Where to?” Deb asked as Joanna climbed into the patrol car and fastened her seat belt.

  “Miner’s Camp Lodge on OK Street.”

  “That’s where Richard Reed is staying?”

  “Supposedly,” Joanna said. “At least according to the roster Maggie had in the file.”

  Shaking her head, Deb put the Tahoe in gear. “That property—including the main house, a parking lot on OK Street, and three additional cabins—was listed for sale when I bought my new place at the far end of Brewery Gulch. I didn’t realize someone was dumb enough to buy it.”

  “They not only bought it,” Joanna said, “they’re evidently running it.”

  Since the Brewery Gulch/OK Street part of Bisbee was Detective Howell’s home turf, she had no difficulty navigating to the parking lot at Miner’s Camp Lodge, where a series of threatening signs insisted that parking was for REGISTERED GUESTS ONLY. ALL OTHERS TOWED AWAY AT OWNER’S EXPENSE.

  On a street where parking was at a premium, a lot that would have held six cars held only one, a wizened VW bug with enough rust damage on the underside to indicate it was a recent arrival from much snowier climes.

  “It looks like they’re not exactly doing land-office business,” Joanna said as Deb pulled into a spot in the almost deserted lot. “Leave your flashers on just in case.”

  The building next door, another aging wooden structure, boasted a sign that said OFFICE along with an arrow that pointed up a steep set of stairs. Before they could start up them, however, a woman appeared on a landing ten steps above them. She was dressed from head to foot in Spandex and looked like she was ready to take off on a bicycle at a moment’s notice.