Dead to Rights

by J. A. Jance

True to her word, Jenny was waiting on the porch when Joanna stopped in front of the Bradys’ neat duplex. In her arms she carried a bundle of pink yarn that turned out to be one of Eva Lou Brady’s down-soft broomstick-lace afghans.

  In the Blazer, Jenny held the afghan against her mother’s face. “Isn’t it soft? I’ll bet the baby’s going to love it.”

  “I’ll bet she is, too.”

  At the parsonage up Tombstone Canyon, Marianne Maculyea was just loading her overnight bag into the VW when Joanna pulled up and stopped behind her. Jenny was out of the car almost before it stopped, carrying the bulging, bunny-covered diaper bag in one arm and the afghan in the other. As soon as Marianne saw them, she burst into tears.

  “See?” Jenny said helpfully. “The straps are long enough so you can carry it over your shoulder. Like this.”

  Laughing through her tears, Marianne slipped the diaper bag on one arm. “I guess this makes it real, doesn’t it?”

  Crying too, Joanna reached over the beaming Jenny to hold Marianne close.

  “Have you named her yet?” Jenny asked.

  “Not so far. Sarah’s always been my first choice,” Marianne replied. “But Jeff and I agreed we wouldn’t name her until we both had a chance to get to know her.”

  “Oh,” Jenny said.

  “Promise you’ll call the minute you get back to town,” Joanna urged.

  “I will,” Marianne said. “And thank you. Thank you for the bag and all the stuff you’ve put in it. But most of all, thanks for being my friend.”

  The two women hugged once more. “It takes a friend to have one,” Joanna said.

  She and Jenny stayed long enough to wave Marianne out of the driveway, then they set off for breakfast at Daisy’s. Marianne’s good news seemed to have put a golden haze over the whole morning. Jenny was bright and chatty.

  “I’m sorry I’ve been so busy,” Joanna said as Jenny plowed through that morning’s stack of French toast. “Maybe after I’ve been doing this job awhile longer, I won’t feel like I have to be everywhere and do everything.”

  “It’s all right,” Jenny said brightly. “It’s not like I’m a baby or anything.”

  “No,” Joanna agreed. “You’re not a baby at all.”

  They were almost at school before Joanna remembered to tell her daughter about Butch Dixon. “By the way,” she said, “a friend of mine from up in Phoenix has invited the two of us out for pizza tonight.”

  “What friend?” Jenny asked.

  “Butch Dixon. Remember the man you met up in Peoria?”

  “The one with the restaurant with all the toy trains?”

  “That’s right,” Joanna said. “What do you think?”

  “I love pizza,” Jenny said.

  Joanna laughed. “So do I,” she agreed.

  She walked into her office right on time, only to be greeted by the sound of raised voices. Out in the other room, Dick Voland and Frank Montoya were going at it hot and heavy. She opened her door and walked directly into the melee.

  “All right, guys,” she said. “What seems to be the problem? And how about if we come into my office to hash this out over three civilized cups of coffee.”

  Stiff-legged, like squabbling little boys separated by a school principal, the two men came into Joanna’s office and took seats at either end of her desk.

  “Chief Deputy Voland has deputies stationed in every damned hospital from here to Phoenix,” Frank began. “I keep trying to tell him, we can’t pay for that kind of staffing without blowing the budget come the end of the year.”

  “And I keep trying to tell Mr. Montoya that these U.D.A.s are our responsibility. The two that are on life support—one at Tucson Medical Center and the other at University—aren’t much of a threat for taking off. But that’s not true of most of the others—the ones who weren’t so badly injured. The hospital administrators expect some help on this one. They’re worried about the safety of their other patients.”

  Joanna sometimes suspected Voland of empire-building, of playing the old my-department-is-more-important-than-your-department game. “Wait a minute,” she said. “These guys are just ordinary wetbacks—field hands mostly, right?”

  “Right,” Voland agreed.

  “Not an ax murderer in the bunch?”

  “Probably not,” Voland allowed. “At least not as far as we’ve been able to ascertain up to now.”

  “So why would they pose a threat to any of the other patients?”

  “What if they just walk out?”

  “What if?”

  “Then we lose whatever case we have against the driver.”

  “No, we don’t,” Joanna argued. “The accident was witnessed by an officer from the Arizona Department of Public Safety. He has most of it recorded on video. Even if all the walking wounded were to take off for parts unknown or were deported back to Mexico compliments of the I.N.S., we would still have the ones who are physically incapable of leaving.”

  “You’re saying I should pull the guards?” Voland asked.

  “Dick, Frank is right,” Joanna said. “I don’t think the board of supervisors is bluffing on the budget business. If we don’t take their threats seriously, if we don’t do everything possible to curtail all unnecessary overtime expenditures, come next fall we’re going to be in a world of hurt.”

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll pull them, every last one of ’em, but I’m going to lodge a formal, written protest. I’m going to say in writing that I disagreed with that decision.”

  “You go right ahead and do what you have to do,” Joanna told him.

  “And if one of them disappears, or if there’s any other problem, it’s on your head.”

  “I accept full responsibility,” Joanna said.

  He stood up and stormed off to the door, meeting Kristin Marsten, who was on her way into the room with three cups of coffee. Voland grabbed one of them and huffed off to his own office, leaving Kristin to bring the others inside for Joanna and Frank. Frank waited until Kristin had gone out and shut the door before he said anything.

  “What the hell’s the matter with that guy?” Frank Montoya demanded. “He’s been a complete jerk all week long.”

  “Give him a break,” Joanna said. “I think he’s having a tough time of it right now.”

  “If you ask me,” Frank Montoya said, “he’s always having a tough time of it.”

  “Let it go, Frank,” Joanna said. “Now, besides the disaster up by Tombstone, what else happened overnight?”

  Without Dick Voland present, Frank went ahead with the morning briefing. “Nothing much,” he said, checking the printed contact sheets himself. “We had so many deputies dragged out of their cars and standing guard duty in hospitals that coverage was a little light county-wide. That’s why I was trying to tell Dick…”

  “Don’t beat a dead horse, Frank,” Joanna warned. “Go on.”

  “Naturally the press is waiting for me to make some kind of statement about this latest incident. As of today, Cochise County is two ahead of Pima in terms of homicide victims for the year. That’s an unwelcome statistic, especially in view of the difference in population. So far this morning I’ve had several calls from Tucson and Phoenix stations, radio and television both, asking what’s going on down here. Everybody seems to think we’re wallowing around in a pool of murder and mayhem.”

  “Whatever you do,” Joanna cautioned, “don’t let them talk to my mother. Eleanor Lathrop shares that opinion.”

  “Are you going to the Buckwalter funeral?” Frank Montoya asked, abruptly switching gears.

  “Ernie will be there working, of course,” Joanna said. “But I think I’d better put in an appearance as well.”

  Frank nodded. “By all means,” he said.

  Just then there was a knock on Joanna’s door. Ernie Carpenter opened it a crack and stuck his head inside. “Did you know about this?” he asked, waving a piece of paper in the air.

  “What is it?”

  “A c
ourt order. Bebe Noonan has gotten herself a lawyer and has formally requested a DNA sample from Bucky Buckwalter’s body as part of a paternity suit.”

  “I did know about it,” Joanna said. “So did Dick Voland.”

  “She’s pregnant with Bucky’s baby?”

  “That’s right.”

  “If you knew about it and Dick knew about it, why the hell didn’t I?”

  “I found out yesterday afternoon. I told Dick on the way over to Tombstone last night, but with all the mess over there, I guess we both forgot about it.”

  “Thanks a lot,” Carpenter muttered. “Thanks a whole hell of a lot.” With that he, too, stalked out of the office.

  Joanna looked at Frank and grinned. “Well,” she said. “I’m two for two. Aren’t you going to stomp out and slam the door shut as well?”

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “Whatever the provocation, I think it’s bad form to slam doors until after everyone in the office has had a chance to finish at least one cup of coffee.”

  Frank did leave Joanna’s office fairly soon after that. Between then and nine-fifteen, when it was time for her to leave for Bucky Buckwalter’s funeral, Joanna at last had some time to make a little progress on the paper debris that covered her desk. As she shuffled through the messages once again, she threw away the ones from her mother and Marianne Maculyea. When she rediscovered the one from Larry Matkin, the mining engineer, she tried to return the call. He had left only one number, however, and there was no answer.

  At thirty-five years of age and a height of six feet six, Little Norm Higgins was both the youngest and the largest of Norm Higgins’ three sons. He collected Joanna Brady at the door of Higgins Funeral Chapel and Mortuary. Taking her arm and speaking in low, respectful tones, he led her to the third row of seats, a place evidently reserved for dignitaries unrelated to the deceased. She was seated between Agnes Pratt and Alvin Bernard, Bisbee’s mayor and chief of police, respectively.

  Agnes had a tendency to develop skin cancer. On doctor’s orders, she always wore hats, although the wide-brimmed, flowered and/or feathered affairs she favored might not have been exactly what her dermatologist had in mind. The one she preferred to wear to funerals was an enormous black straw contrivance with a velvet ribbon and single peacock feather. Over time the feather had become quite bedraggled.

  Her Honor inclined her head as Joanna slipped past her into an empty seat. “So sad,” Agnes murmured. “So very sad.”

  Seated as close as she was to the front of the chapel, it was impossible for Joanna to see who all was present. From the noise level it was clear that the place was jammed to the gills. Joanna wondered if the attendance was due to Bucky’s prominent position in the community or if, somehow, word had already leaked out that the murdered vet was about to become a posthumous papa.

  Shortly before the Reverend Billy Matthews from the First Bible Baptist Church took to the podium, Little Norm was forced to go to the front of the chapel. There, in his whispery, bowling announcers’ voice, he urged people to move closer together in order to allow a few more attendees to squeeze in at the end of each cushioned pew.

  As the organist droned on and on, playing something mournful but totally unrecognizable, Joanna wondered how Billy, pinch-hitting for Marianne Maculyea, would be able to pull together a meaningful service. If Terry Buckwalter wasn’t particularly grief-stricken over her husband’s death, would anyone else be?

  It turned out that the answer was yes. Any number of people had been touched and saddened by Bucky’s passing, and a few of them were willing to come forward and say so. The selection of speakers wasn’t exactly standard funeral fare, but they all did well.

  First to step forward was an adorable little girl named Winnette Jeffries who also happened to be Agnes Pratt’s great-granddaughter. Barely able to see over the podium, a breathless Winnette told how Dr. Buckwalter had saved her puppy after someone had fed the animal poison.

  Maggie Dodd, one of Bisbee’s most outspoken animal-rights activists, told about how the Buckwalters had saved numerous strays from the fate of lethal injection by offering an adoption service alternative to the local animal shelter.

  Last of all was Irene Collins. She tottered up the steps to the podium to give a tearful account of how, on the last day of his life, Bucky Buckwalter had removed a stuck chicken bone from the throat of Irene’s poor little kitty, Murphy Brown.

  Knowing some of the background, Joanna wasn’t surprised that the speakers stressed Bucky’s skill as a vet rather than mentioning his interpersonal relationships with human beings. Terry Buckwalter, dressed in a properly conservative navy-blue suit, sat in the first row almost directly in front of Joanna. The widow listened to the various speakers with no show of emotion at all. Bebe Noonan, on the other hand, seated on the far side of the chapel in the same row as Joanna, sobbed uncontrollably from the moment the service started until it was over.

  It was only then, when people congregated outside, trying to decide who would be going from the chapel to the Ladies’ Aid’s luncheon, that Eleanor Lathrop managed to catch up with her daughter.

  “What a wonderful service,” Eleanor crooned. “Very uplifting, for a funeral. Terry’s holding up remarkably well, but did you see how devastated that poor little Bebe Noonan was? Why, the way she carried on, you’d have thought her heart was broken. Bucky must have been a wonderful boss for her to be that torn up over his death.”

  Joanna looked at Eleanor then, shocked to realize that, for the first time in her life, she knew the whole story behind something while her mother had less than a glimmer. For once Joanna’s personal knowledge had outpaced even Helen Barco’s incredibly reliable gossip mill. That realization made Joanna feel odd somehow, and old as well. In that instant, it seemed as though their roles were suddenly reversed—as though Joanna were the mother and Eleanor Lathrop the innocent child in need of protection. Not only did Joanna know what was going on, she wasn’t at liberty to say.

  “You’re right, Mother,” she said. “Bucky Buckwalter certainly was a boss in a million.”

  At Evergreen Cemetery, winter had turned the sparse grass yellow. As the vehicles in the funeral cortege emptied, Joanna stayed near the fringes of the group coalescing around Bucky Buckwalter’s open grave. In the funeral chapel Joanna had been so close to the front that it had been difficult to get any kind of an overview of what was going on. Maintaining a little bit of distance in the cemetery allowed for better observation.

  Bebe Noonan, dressed all in black, continued to carry on in chief-mourner fashion. Her behavior had already sparked several derogatory comments that, Joanna knew, would only get worse once the real story came out. As it was, her wild abandon of grief stood in marked contrast to Terry Buckwalter’s stony reserve. As far as Joanna was concerned, her long talk with Terry at the clinic the previous afternoon had eased some of her concerns about Terry’s possible involvement in her husband’s death. How Detective Carpenter was viewing the unmoved widow’s performance, however, was another question entirely.

  Joanna caught sight of Dr. Reggie Wade making his way toward Bebe Noonan. He spoke to her briefly for a few moments. When he finished whatever he had to say, Bebe threw herself into his arms, weeping with renewed vigor. Reggie, looking uncomfortable, held her for a moment before setting her aside and moving on.

  Reggie headed toward where Terry Buckwalter was standing, talking to someone else. It took a moment for Joanna to recognize who it was—Larry Matkin. No wonder Matkin had been unavailable to answer his phone. He had already been on his way to the funeral.

  Seeing him there, Joanna couldn’t help wondering why. Larry Matkin was a relative newcomer to town. What was his connection to Amos and Terry Buckwalter? The thought crossed her mind, but only briefly. It was quickly obscured as Reggie Wade walked up to Matkin and Terry. He moved between them and reached out to pat the widow’s shoulder. During the whole ordeal of the day, that simple gesture caused a crack in Terry Buckwalter’s unbending self-cont
rol. She looked up at Reggie and gave him a wan smile.

  Joanna recognized the entire pantomime—the wordless gesture, the answering smile. She herself had been the recipient of the same kind of awkward pats. They had come mostly from Andy’s buddies, from men who had found themselves helpless and tongue-tied in the face of Joanna’s awful loss. Seeing the whole scene reenacted there in the cemetery brought back far too much of Joanna’s own pain. She had to look away.

  Eva Lou arrived just then. “What is the matter with that girl?” Eva Lou Brady whispered to her daughter-in-law, nodding in Bebe’s direction. “Doesn’t she realize that she’s making a complete spectacle of herself?”

  Still almost strangling on her own flashback of grief, Joanna shook her head. “No,” she said. “I don’t think she does. And even if she did, I don’t think it would make any difference.”

  Eva Lou abruptly changed the subject. “Are you coming to the luncheon?” she asked.

  By then, all Joanna Brady wanted to do was escape the whole thing. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I’m so far behind that I really shouldn’t be away from the office that long.”

  Eva Lou peered at her closely. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You don’t look fine,” Eva Lou said. “You’re so pale that you look as though you might keel right over. You must be working too hard.”

  “Probably,” Joanna agreed.

  “Well, cut it out,” Eva Lou said severely. “It’s tempting to try to be everything to all people, but you can’t keep it up forever. It’s too hard on you. You forget to stop and smell the roses. As you know, when those roses are gone, they’re gone forever.”

  It was as close as Eva Lou Brady had ever come to bawling her out. Deservedly so. Joanna took Eva Lou’s hand and squeezed it. “That’s good advice,” she said. “I’ll try not to forget it.”

  Someone else arrived—Don and Louise Watson, bringing Jim Bob with them. After somber greetings all around, the four of them left Joanna where she was, and moved closer to where the other mourners were gathering around the casket-topped grave. There were only a few latecomers still straggling in when Ernie Carpenter sidled up to Joanna.