Downfall

by J. A. Jance

  Summoned by the unmistakable scent of baking waffles, Joanna donned her robe and headed in that direction, only to come to a sudden halt in the living room. Most of the ceiling was covered with an array of brightly colored helium balloons, bunches and bunches of them, all tied together with strings.

  “How many balloons did you buy?” she asked Butch when she reached the kitchen doorway.

  “Morning, gorgeous,” he said with a smile as he looked up from his steaming waffle iron. “I bought as many as Safeway had on hand. I believe that’s called cornering the market. I wanted them here at the house before the funeral rather than having to go pick them up afterward.”

  “Good idea,” Joanna said. “I should have gone along.”

  “Not enough room,” Butch said. “It turns out that balloons take up a lot of space, especially when you’re transporting them in a vehicle.”

  Dennis sat at the table staring at her. “Mommy,” he said finally. “What happened to your face? You look awful!”

  “Out of the mouths of babes,” Butch said with a grin.

  “I was out hiking and I fell down,” Joanna answered. It was a long way from the truth but it was close enough to do the job.

  “Did you see the balloons?” Denny continued enthusiastically, paying no attention at all to his mother’s truth-dodging explanation. “Do you know how long it takes to fill that many balloons? A long time. They ran out of . . . What’s it called again, Daddy?”

  “Helium,” Butch answered, setting a plate with a waffle on it directly in front of Denny’s place at the table and a mug of tea in front of Joanna’s.

  “They ran out of helium,” Dennis finished. “Good thing they had another . . .”

  “Bottle,” Butch supplied. “It looks like a tank, but I believe they call them bottles.”

  “When we let them loose, will Grandma Eleanor and Grandpa George be able to see them?” Dennis wanted to know.

  “Yes, they will,” Butch answered preemptively, before Joanna could say otherwise. “Of course they will.”

  When Joanna’s waffle came, she ate it gingerly, chewing on the left side of her mouth only. There were definitely some loose teeth on the other side.

  “The service starts at eleven,” Butch said. “What time do you want to leave the house?”

  “Probably around ten,” Joanna answered. “There are always last-minute details that need to be attended to.”

  Jenny appeared in the doorway, wearing PJs and sniffing the air. “Waffles? Goody. I love waffles.”

  “If Mom and I go uptown early, can you get Dennis ready and bring him along?”

  “Sure thing,” Jenny said. “No problem.”

  Minutes later, Joanna excused herself and headed back to the bedroom. She had to admit that the salve had helped some with the swelling. She did the best she could with makeup, but there was no way to cover up the worst of the damage. She dug her only black suit out of the closet and put it on. She was able to zip the skirt most of the way, but she couldn’t fasten the button. She used a safety pin to close the placket, but the jacket was two inches shy of closing around her ample middle.

  Yes, she thought, appraising herself in the mirror. No way Mom would ever give me a passing grade on this outfit.

  Butch came in just then to get ready, too. “Do you know what you’re going to say?”

  “Pretty much,” she said. “I wrote something down. It’s on my iPad.”

  “You won’t need your iPad,” he told her, handing her the freshly pressed lace-edged handkerchief Dennis had given her for Mother’s Day. “All you have to do is speak from your heart.”

  Joanna and Butch drove from the house to the mortuary mostly in silence because, right then, filling the car with words simply wasn’t necessary. While Butch negotiated with one of Norm Higgins’s sons about the best place for them to park and who would ride in the limo from the mortuary to the cemetery, Joanna went inside the chapel.

  Marianne Maculyea was already on hand. Had the final arrangements been left to Eleanor, no doubt she would have chosen the pastor from her church, First Presbyterian, to officiate. The problem was, the new minister, Reverend Donald Graham, had come on board after George and Eleanor had left town for their summer-long RV adventure. He would have been a complete stranger to them, just as he was to Joanna.

  As a consequence, Eleanor’s preferences simply didn’t apply. After all, funerals were for the living rather than the dead, and Joanna wanted someone she knew officiating at the ceremony and issuing the words of comfort. Of course, there was that other important part of the equation—the one that included Marianne’s troubled relationship with her own mother. That meant Marianne had a far better understanding of Joanna’s current storm of conflicting emotions than anyone else on the planet.

  “I heard what happened,” Marianne said, hurrying forward as if to wrap her arms around Joanna’s shoulders.

  “No hugs, please,” Joanna said, warning her away. “I hurt all over.”

  Since Marianne functioned as a local police and fire chaplain, it was hardly surprising that she was aware of what had gone on. Still, when she saw the stitches on Joanna’s face, she visibly recoiled.

  “How are you?”

  “I’m okay,” Joanna admitted. “A little stiff and sore, but you’re welcome to go ahead and tell me how awful I look. Everyone else does.”

  “Considering what you went through yesterday, you’re entitled to look the part,” Marianne said. “By the way, Marliss was on the phone early this morning complaining right and left that Tom Hadlock had scheduled a press briefing for eleven A.M. She was wondering if since she would be missing the service, could I possibly make arrangements to tape it. I told her no, by the way.”

  “Thanks,” Joanna said. “I suspect there may have been a bit of malice aforethought on my chief deputy’s part when he scheduled the briefing for the same time as the funeral. On the face of it, he’s giving news outlets from out of town a chance to get here on time. Even so, with that eleven A.M. start time, he may have been sticking it to Marliss just a little.”

  Norm Higgins appeared silently at her elbow. “May I show you to the family meditation room?”

  With a nod, Joanna allowed herself to be led away. She sat alone for several minutes, studying what she’d written of the eulogies on her iPad. When Jenny, Dennis, and Butch filed in a few minutes later, she turned the iPad off and put it in her purse.

  She’d do exactly as Butch had suggested, she decided—speak from the heart. And when in the course of the service, it came time for her to step forward, the iPad remained exactly where she had left it—stowed and closed in her purse.

  “My mother, Eleanor Lathrop Winfield, would be appalled to see me standing here like this today—bruised and battered and looking like, as she would have said, ‘something the cat dragged in.’ Some of you may have heard that there was a serious incident out on Geronimo last night. It came about as part of an investigation into several homicides. As sheriff, I was involved in that incident, and I’ve got the stitches and bruises to prove it. I remember a limerick I heard once:

  As a beauty, I’m not a great star;

  There are others more handsome by far.

  But my face—I don’t mind it,

  For I am behind it.

  It’s the people out front that I jar.

  “On behalf of my mother and her husband, George Winfield, I offer my apologies for how I look today, but in this case, what you see is what you get.”

  There was a small titter of laughter from the audience before Joanna continued. “What can I say about George? He was terrific. When he was appointed to be Cochise County’s first-ever medical examiner, he and I soon became trusted colleagues and later friends.

  “I was a bit surprised when he and my mother took up with one another. Mom had been a widow on her own for a very long time. When they put George’s name up as one of the ‘most eligible bachelors’ in a school district auction, I was surprised when Mom ponie
d up the kind of money she did. I thought it was a whim. Turns out it wasn’t. George and I were working a case and driving to Douglas on the day he happened to mention that he and my mother had eloped to Las Vegas the previous weekend. I didn’t total my patrol car that day, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.”

  Another whisper of laughter rippled through the room.

  “As I said earlier, my mother had been widowed for a long time when George showed up in her life. He put a smile on her face and a sparkle in her eye that I never remember seeing before. For that, I’m forever grateful.

  “And then there’s my mom—Eleanor. If any of you ever had the misfortune of tangling with her, you know she was a force to be reckoned with—a ‘my way or the highway’ kind of person. She was tough, yes, but she was tough because she had to be. I was fifteen when my father died, leaving her to finish raising a teenage daughter—a willful, stubborn, and defiant daughter, I might add—one you could easily call a handful. I can’t tell you how grateful I am that my daughter, Jenny, sitting there at the end of the second row, isn’t a chip off the old block—at least not off this old block. That’s something for which I count my blessings every day.

  “My mother didn’t have a smooth, trouble-free life. She and my dad were high school sweethearts back in the day. When their romance got a bit out of hand, she ended up having an out-of-wedlock child—a baby boy she was forced by her parents to give up for adoption. That baby grew up to be my brother, Bob Brundage, seated next to Jenny.

  “After giving up that first child, she and my father waited until she no longer required parental consent to marry. At that point and despite her family’s disapproval, my parents did marry and finally, years later, had me, but I believe she always felt like a piece of her heart was missing. When Bob came looking for his birth family a few years ago, my mother welcomed him and his lovely wife, Marcie, with all her heart.

  “Some of you may still remember my dad, Sheriff D.H. Lathrop. When he left the mines to work in law enforcement, my mother wasn’t exactly thrilled. I spent years thinking that she didn’t want him to be a cop out of sheer contrariness. I’m older and wiser now. She didn’t want him to be a cop—or me either, for that matter—out of an abiding fear that she might end up losing us. Considering what almost happened yesterday, I can tell you those fears were not ill-founded.

  “Mother wasn’t just against my following my father’s footsteps into law enforcement—she was adamantly opposed. Even so, when push came to shove, she was right there door-belling, licking envelopes, and campaigning with the best of them. My mother and I may have wrangled from time to time, but she was always in my corner. She never came right out and said aloud that she was proud of what I do, but I know now that she was.

  “Last week, after a shooting incident on I-17 left George dead and Mother gravely wounded, I went to the hospital hoping to see her. I arrived thinking I’d be able to tell her good-bye, but I was too late. She was gone long before I ever reached her bedside. In speaking to one of her doctors, however, I learned that even though she was in terrible shape when they brought her into the ER, she roused herself enough to ask the doctors and nurses to give me an important message—something about a red dot. Because I’m in law enforcement, I understood the importance of that single clue. She was letting me know that she and George had been forced off the freeway by someone wielding a high-powered rifle with a laser sight.

  “Having that clue made it possible for me to help solve her murder and George’s, too, and giving me that deathbed clue was a true gift from Eleanor Lathrop Winfield to her daughter, the cop. It’s one I’ll always treasure.

  “George and Eleanor died within hours of each other. Both had lost previous spouses and spent years grieving over those losses before they found the courage to love again. Their time together was far too brief, but it was all good.

  “George had the words ‘Happy Trails’ painted on the back of their RV. Some of you may not recognize it, but I understand Happy Trails was the theme song from one of George’s favorite boyhood TV shows, one starring Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. The words ‘Happy Trails’ worked for Mom and George as they traveled back and forth from Arizona to Minnesota, and it still works for them now.

  “Happy trails, George and Eleanor. We’ll miss you.”

  CHAPTER 45

  THE POST-FUNERAL BARBECUE WAS A LOAVES-AND-FISHES KIND of affair. People hadn’t been asked to bring food, but they did anyway—and it was a good thing. So many people showed up that they had to park not only all up and down the ranch road, but also out onto High Lonesome Road as well.

  For Joanna, that afternoon and evening were nothing short of a revelation. If people thought she looked like hell, they mostly didn’t mention it. Instead, they came by and offered their condolences. That was to be expected. What amazed her were the countless number of people who told her stories about how Eleanor had been kind to them once when they’d been down on their luck; how she’d assisted a family whose two sons had died in a car wreck and had helped pull together funeral arrangements; how, when a small church in Naco, Sonora, burned to the ground, she’d organized a group to replace the organ.

  This was all news to Joanna. Her mother had always sniffed in disapproval at people who went around “tooting their own horns,” as she liked to say. In that regard, she had certainly practiced what she preached. Joanna had no idea how Eleanor had quietly woven herself into the fabric of the community. Yes, George had been a great guy—a wonderful guy—but Eleanor, her stern and perpetually disapproving mother, was the one the mourners remembered fondly. There were times when it seemed to Joanna as though they were talking about a complete stranger.

  Marliss showed up early on, with her hair standing on end and a brittle smile plastered on her face.

  “What a great turn out,” she said.

  “Yes, it is,” Joanna agreed noncommittally. She wasn’t sure where this conversation was going, but probably nowhere good.

  “I was so disappointed not to be able to attend the funeral itself,” Marliss continued. “It was horrid of Thomas Hadlock to set the press conference for the exact same time as the service. The least he could have done was throw the local media folk a bone so we could have had a head start on everybody else. I think he scheduled it that way deliberately, just to make us look bad.”

  Even though Joanna suspected that was indeed the truth, she nonetheless came down firmly in Tom Hadlock’s corner. “It’s been a tough couple of days around here,” she said. “I’m sure Chief Deputy Hadlock has been running to keep up right along with everyone else. He probably needed some extra time this morning to pull his remarks together.”

  “I suppose,” Marliss allowed disagreeably. “But I do wish the local cop shops could show us a little courtesy. Once in a while they might even hand us a scoop.”

  As a still-fuming Marliss started to walk away, Joanna remembered how her father always told her that carrots were more effective than sticks.

  “About that . . .” she called after her.

  Marliss stopped and turned. “About what?” she asked suspiciously.

  “About scoops, Marliss. You’re a journalist,” Joanna said. “Does that mean you don’t reveal your sources?”

  “Absolutely not,” Marliss declared. “I wouldn’t give out that information, no matter what—never in a million years—not even if they sent me to jail. Why?”

  “You know that lady from Sun Sites, the one who clobbered her husband with her pitching wedge?”

  “He died, didn’t he?” Marliss asked.

  “Yes, he did,” Joanna answered. “His wife’s in our lockup right now. The problem is I’ve heard rumors that Arlee Jones is considering offering her an election-year plea deal—manslaughter most likely, not even second degree.”

  “So?” Marliss asked.

  “Plea deals are shortcuts—ways to clear cases and win elections.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “That there’s a good possibility tha
t there’s more to the story than just a pitching-wedge crime-of-the-moment. I think some enterprising reporter might want to start doing a little digging, like maybe asking about how many times Hal Hopkins wound up in the hospital in the last several months—always with flulike symptoms which might or might not be similar to symptoms suffered by someone being given low doses of arsenic.”

  Marliss’s eyes widened. “Arsenic?” she asked. “Are you saying his wife was poisoning him?”

  “She might have been,” Joanna said, “and if that’s the case, shouldn’t she also end up being charged with attempted murder? Hal Hopkins’s death may have been nothing more than a spur-of-the-moment deal, but doesn’t the presence of arsenic in his system suggest a certain amount of premeditation?”

  “You’re serious about all this, aren’t you,” Marliss said.

  Joanna nodded. “But I’m taking you at your word. Remember, if it gets back to me that you let on I was the source of this information, I’ll make good on Chief Deputy Hadlock’s threat.”

  “Which threat is that?”

  “The one about your never being allowed to attend another departmental briefing. And make no mistake, Marliss, I can deliver on that threat for as long as I’m sheriff. Is that clear?”

  “Perfectly,” Marliss said. “I understand completely.”

  She trotted off, groping for her cell phone as she went. Joanna wasn’t aware that Tom Hadlock had been observing them from the sidelines until he appeared beside her.

  “What was that all about?” he asked. “Marliss was all over me this morning about how I’d scheduled the press conference when I did just to get under her skin and make sure she couldn’t attend the funeral. Which is true, by the way,” he added, “but I did it as a personal favor to you, to keep her out of your hair.”