Outlaw Mountain : A Joanna Brady Mystery (9780061748806)

by Jance, Judith A.

  “I had to head-butt my way out of trouble today,” Joanna said.

  George grinned. “Was that before or after you shot the tire?”

  “Before,” Joanna replied, digging through her purse to retrieve her compact. She rubbed some of the powdery cake makeup onto her face and added a dash of lipstick for good measure, but another check in the mirror proved that her makeup efforts had done little to disguise the damage.

  “That’s as good as it gets,” she said, closing the compact. “I’m not a very good example, am I?” she added. “Jenny’s been suspended from school for fighting. I’m her mother and supposedly a grown-up, but just look at me. Not only that, Mother’s going to have a fit.”

  “Let her,” George said. “It won’t be the first time. Besides, you were only doing your job.”

  Joanna settled into the front seat of George’s new county-owned car, a Dodge Caravan with temporary plates and the new-car smell of new leather. How he had managed to finagle leather out of a tight-fisted county budget was more than Joanna could understand. When he switched on the ignition, however, none of the dash lights lit up. He had to lean forward and squint to read the shift dial as he moved the van into gear.

  “Brand-new car,” George complained. “The dealer made me a good deal—maybe even a little too good. But here it is less than a week after I drove it off the lot, and I’m having some kind of mysterious problem in the electrical system. It’s probably just a fuse. I was supposed to take it into the dealer today, but I ended up having to go to Tombstone instead. So this afternoon, I tried calling to switch the appointment to tomorrow, and the place is closed.”

  “On Friday?” Joanna asked. “Is it a holiday or something?”

  “No, according to the message on the answering machine, it must be more serious than that. The announcement says the dealership is closed until further notice. For service work, there’s a referral number to a dealer up in Tucson.”

  “Wait a minute,” Joanna said. “Where did you buy this vehicle?”

  “Fort Apache Motors in Sierra Vista.”

  “From Ross Jenkins?”

  “Do you know him?”

  “Know him! He’s the guy who took a shot at me today—the one who’s in the hospital right now having his bowel sewn back together.”

  “Small world,” George marveled. “Well, small county, anyway. But still, why would they close the dealership?”

  “He was on his way out of town,” Joanna replied. “To Rio de Janeiro. I’ll bet he stripped the dealership clean of money before he went.”

  Once the two detectives and the prosecutor had locked themselves in the interview room with Dena Hogan, Joanna had deliberately stayed away. If and when it came time to testify about what had happened on Kino Road that afternoon, Joanna didn’t want to have muddied the waters by being involved in the interview. She had written up a full report of what had happened from her point of view and would let that stand on its own. Still, it seemed that this new bit of information was something Ernie and Jaime needed to know.

  “I need someone to go tap on the interview room door,” she told the desk clerk who answered her phone call. “I need to talk to either Detective Carpenter or Detective Carbajal.” “The double Cs,” as the two detectives were sometimes called.

  Ernie came on the phone a few moments later. “What’s up?”

  “You may want to find out if Dena knows what happened to Ross Jenkins’ auto dealership,” Joanna suggested. “According to George Winfield, it’s shut down until further notice.”

  “Will do.”

  “How’s it going with Arlee?”

  “Sounds to me as though he’s going to strike a deal. I think Dena will cop a plea for Alice Rogers. By the time Ross Jenkins gets out of the hospital, he’ll wish he hadn’t.”

  “If she’s ready to admit to Alice Rogers, what about Clete? Has she said anything about that?”

  “Not so far. If Ross Jenkins took out his brother-in-law, maybe he did that one on his own. I’d better get back in there so I don’t miss something important. Anything else?”

  “No,” Joanna said. “That’s all. See you in the morning.” She turned off the phone.

  “You sound tired,” George said after a moment. “It’s been a rough week around here, even without getting engaged.”

  “Have you done the Clete Rogers autopsy yet?” Joanna asked.

  George shook his head. “That’ll have to wait until tomorrow morning.”

  “Any initial observations?”

  “Yes,” George Winfield said. “Some readily visible contusions. Those are always possible signs of a struggle. Been dead since sometime last night. It sounds to me like you’re thinking that whoever killed Alice also killed her son.”

  “That’s the way it looks,” Joanna told him. “Right up until Ross Jenkins tackled me, Clete was our prime suspect in Alice’s death. So now Cletus Rogers is innocent, but he’s also dead.”

  “Who stood to benefit most from Alice’s death?”

  “Her children,” Joanna said. “Clete and his sister, Susan. There’s also a brand-new husband, if he’s still alive, that is. Farley Adams disappeared sometime Sunday afternoon and hasn’t been heard from since.”

  “Her husband!” George exclaimed. “I was under the impression that she was a widow.”

  “So was everybody else, including her kids. According to Alice’s sister, Jessie Monroe, Adams and Alice were already married. Jessie even has a wedding picture to prove it. But when Alice talked to her daughter and son-in-law about Adams on Saturday night, she didn’t exactly play straight with them. At that point Alice claimed she was only thinking about marrying the man.”

  “Let me get this straight,” George Winfield mused. “If Alice Rogers died prior to marrying again, her two kids would have split the take fifty-fifty. And if Clete had been fingered for Alice’s murder, then Susan and Ross Jenkins would have taken the whole wad.”

  “That’s about it,” Joanna agreed.

  “Ungrateful kids. Do you think the daughter was in on it?”

  “Susan Jenkins?” Joanna thought about it. “Maybe, but it doesn’t seem likely that she’d throw in with her husband and her husband’s mistress in a plot to murder her own mother. Still, stranger things have happened. And this is a strange bunch. I feel like we kicked over a rock and a whole den of vipers came slithering out from underneath. These are people who took bribes, cheated on their spouses, used drugs, and didn’t blink an eye when it came time to kill someone. They’re a dishonorable, despicable lot without a conscience among them. Just knowing that people like that exist makes me sick. Makes me feel dirty.”

  George pulled over behind Butch Dixon’s Subaru and switched off the engine. “Look, Joanna,” he said, “the fact that people like that do exist is the reason you have your job and I have mine. If there weren’t any bad people in the world, there wouldn’t be any need for cops, or for medical examiners, either. Now come on. We’re here. Let’s go have dinner.”

  Eleanor Lathrop Winfield lived up to her reputation. She was appalled by her daughter’s black eyes and didn’t mince any words in saying so. The fact that Joanna had earned her injuries in the process of apprehending two possible murderers did nothing to mitigate Eleanor’s tongue-clicking disapproval. Jenny thought her mother looked neat—like somebody wearing a Halloween costume. Butch stayed close, held Joanna’s hand and said very little.

  Joanna tried to let herself be caught up in the celebration, but it didn’t work. For the first time in his life, Jim Bob Brady had gone out and purchased champagne, although, when it came time for the before-dinner toast, he and Eva Lou joined Jenny and Junior in drinking sparkling cider. Still, even the champagne failed to lift Joanna’s mood.

  The things that had happened to her in the past few days—the evil and greed she had seen at work in other people—had changed her somehow, had set Joanna apart. She was no longer sure she could accept anyone at face value. When she walked in the door, Junior
had greeted her with effusive delight. Now his greeting itself was tinged with sadness. After all, Junior was stuck in Bisbee for one reason and one reason only—he, too, had been betrayed by someone who should have been trustworthy and wasn’t.

  After dinner, as Jenny passed around slices of Eva Lou’s incomparable pumpkin pie topped with mounds of homemade whipped cream, Joanna’s cell phone rang. Eva Lou looked at it as Joanna dragged it out of her purse. “If I had a rooster that sounded like that,” she said, “he’d be looking to get turned into Sunday dinner.”

  Excusing herself, Joanna went into the living room to take the call. “Joanna,” Ernie Carpenter said, “I think we have a problem.”

  Not another one. “What now?” Joanna demanded.

  “Dena Hogan’s starting to go gunny-bags on us.”

  “Gunny-bags? What does that mean?”

  “I think she’s coming off drugs,” Ernie said. “We found a bag of white powder in her purse that may be heroin. If she’s an addict, we don’t want her going through detox while she’s locked in a cell in the Cochise County jail. What do you suggest?”

  Joanna was still haunted by the mentally disturbed woman who had taken her own life in a county jail cell several months earlier. If Dena Hogan was crashing after months of heroin use, she might well be a danger to herself and others. Joanna didn’t know the medical ramifications of heroin detox, and she didn’t want to find out, either—not firsthand.

  “We put her in a hospital under guard.”

  “Which one?” Ernie asked. “County? The Copper Queen?”

  This was one of those situations where Dick Voland would have known exactly what to do, but Dick wasn’t around to ask anymore. This time Joanna Brady was on her own.

  “If it’s going to be on the department’s nickel, it better be County,” she decided. “No matter what, it’s going to be expensive. I guess we’d better see if they have a bed available.”

  “And what about transportation?” Ernie asked. “Do we send her there by ambulance or have a deputy drive her in a patrol car?”

  Damn Dick Voland anyway! Joanna thought. “Look,” she said. “I’m at my in-laws’ house right now. I’ll have somebody give me a ride back over to the department, and I’ll sort all this out from there.”

  “Do you want Jaime or me to stay on it?”

  “No. You’ve already put in a full day. Did Arlee and Dena strike a deal?”

  “Yes. Murder two, immunity from everything else, and she agrees to testify against Ross Jenkins in the Alice Rogers case.”

  “What everything else?”

  “It sounds like we’ve landed smack in the middle of a whole slew of recreational drug users. Dena says she can give us dealer info, provided she serves her time under an assumed name at an out-of-state facility.”

  “I don’t understand,” Joanna said. “She’s a lawyer. Why is she so willing to cop a plea? Why’s she turning state’s evidence?”

  “She’s broke,” Ernie said.

  “Broke!” Joanna echoed. “How can she be? She drives a Lexus.”

  “It’s leased and she’s behind in the payments. Same goes for her house and the rent for her office.”

  “What about her husband?”

  “I don’t think he has a clue, at least he didn’t before today. She says he’s always turned his paycheck over to her and left her to handle the bills. Sounds like she’s been handling them all right. Her drug habit has been eating up every penny they both made, and then some. The same is true for Ross Jenkins. He’s broke, too. He was looking for a quick influx of cash from Alice’s estate to bail him out of the hole. Then, presumably, he and Dena would have ridden off into the sunset.”

  “Nice guy. What about Mark Childers and Karen Brainard? Did Dena tell you anything about them? Were they in a financial bind as well?”

  “Same deal.”

  “And Monica Foster?”

  “Apparently she’s not in on it. Dena referred to Monica as Miss Goody Two-shoes. Monica doesn’t do drugs. Paul Brainard and Rex Hogan don’t either. What I can’t figure out is how come straight-shooters end up getting stuck with people who aren’t? What is it, wishful thinking?”

  “That, or out-and-out stupidity.”

  Jenny tiptoed into the living room. “Mom,” she whispered, “are you going to come have your pie or not?”

  “I have to go, Ernie,” she told him. “You go on home. I’ll come by in a little while and handle the Dena Hogan paperwork. You don’t need to worry about it. And tomorrow—”

  “Tomorrow Jaime and I will both go straight to Tombstone,” Ernie told her. “In the morning we’ll finish interviewing Clete Rogers’ neighbors. Since Dena Hogan denies any involvement in that case, we need to find something that will link Ross Jenkins to Clete’s death. Then, in the afternoon, we’ll attend Alice’s funeral. That’ll take place at the Episcopal church in Tombstone at two tomorrow afternoon. Visitation is tonight at Garrity’s, down in Douglas. One of us had planned to make an appearance there as well, but there are only two of us, and Jamie and I can only be in so many places at once.”

  “Mom!” Jenny insisted.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow, Ernie. I’ve got to go.” Joanna ended the call while Jenny skewered her with an accusing stare.

  “Are you going back to work?”

  “Yes. I have to.”

  “Well, can I stay here then? I know the Gs will let me.”

  “I suppose,” Joanna said. “I don’t want to wear out your welcome, but we’ll ask.”

  “Well,” Eleanor sniffed as Joanna resumed her seat. “What is it now? Another crisis, I suppose?”

  Joanna looked around the table. Everyone else was finished with dessert. Hers was the only piece of pie left on the table. She took a bite. It was delicious, but she felt self-conscious eating after everyone else had finished.

  “Mom has to go back to work,” Jenny announced. “So can I—may I stay here again? Please?”

  “It’s fine with us,” Eva Lou said.

  “Thanks,” Joanna said, then she turned to Butch. “Do you mind giving me a ride over to the department? I need to pick up a car. Both the Crown Victoria and the Blazer are out of commission at the moment.”

  “Sure,” Butch said. “Finish your pie and we’ll go right away. Maybe Junior can stay here until I get back.”

  “That’ll be fine, too,” Eva Lou said.

  Butch and Joanna left the Bradys’ house a few minutes later. At the stop sign at Cole Avenue and Arizona Street, Butch Dixon stopped, reached over, pulled Joanna as close as the seat belt would allow, and kissed her on the cheek.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “I’m sure I look awful, but really, I’m fine.”

  “You were amazingly quiet during dinner. You barely said a word. I was afraid you were upset about something.”

  “I am upset,” she admitted. “I’ve spent a week dealing with people who are liars and cheats at best; druggies and murderers at worst. George gave me a little buck-up talk in the car, but it didn’t help very much. I still feel like the world is full of dirtbags, and they’re winning. People like Eva Lou and Jim Bob Brady never lied or broke a promise in their lives, but they’re the exception, Butch. They’re not the rule. The problem is, how do I bring Jenny up in a world where people like Dena Hogan and Ross Jenkins may end up running things?”

  “We already live in that kind of world,” Butch said.

  “And the only thing you can do to change it is to keep on doing what you’re doing.”

  “Even if it keeps me out late at night? Even if it makes me feel betrayed?”

  “Even if it means you have to keep on taking chances. I don’t want to lose you, Joanna. And the idea that you had to go toe-to-toe with those creeps today drives me crazy. But I also know what’ll happen if you quit. You’ll be in exactly the same kind of fix as Marianne Maculyea. So where are you going now?”

  “Down to Douglas to make arrangements to che
ck a prisoner into the mental ward at County Hospital. She’s coming off drugs of some kind, and I don’t want her detoxing in one of my jail cells.”

  “Can’t somebody else handle that?” Butch asked. “What about Frank Montoya or Dick Voland? Isn’t that what they get paid to do?”

  “Frank has gone home, and Dick Voland doesn’t work for me anymore,” Joanna said quietly.

  “He doesn’t? Since when?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “What do you mean? How did that happen?”

  “He was waiting for me out at the ranch when I got home after Kiwanis,” Joanna explained. “He was drunker ’an nine hundred dollars and pissed because I had gone and gotten myself engaged to you when all the time he was waiting for me to give him the go-ahead so he could ask me out.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me about this earlier?” Butch asked.

  “I didn’t have a chance.” Joanna paused. “No, that’s not true,” she added. “I didn’t want to tell you. I was afraid you’d be upset, and I didn’t want to worry you.”

  “You fired him?”

  “He gave me his resignation, and I accepted it.”

  “At the ranch,” Butch said. “While you were there alone.”

  “I handled it,” Joanna said.

  “What if he comes back tonight? What if he’s there now, waiting for you?”

  Joanna grinned. “He’ll have a long wait, then, won’t he?”

  Her lame attempt to diffuse the sudden tension didn’t work.

  “You know what I mean, Joanna,” Butch continued. “If Voland is so obsessed over losing you that he quit his job, it’s serious. You may think he’s just going to go away and leave you alone, but he won’t. I know how these guys work—how they think.”

  “Butch, please—”

  “No. You shouldn’t be out at the ranch by yourself. You should come stay at my house, or else Junior and I can come there.”

  “That isn’t going to work.”

  “At least let me ride down to Douglas with you. Or let me follow you down and back. That way I can be sure you’re all right.”