Shoot Don't Shoot

by J. A. Jance

  “You read Agatha Christie?” Joanna asked.

  “Among other things,” he replied.

  “I’m talking about the jail cook, down in Bisbee,” Joanna continued, turning back to Leann. “He quit sometime between dinner last night and breakfast this morning. He took off without giving notice and without making any arrangements for breakfast this morning, either. Not only that, he stole all the Thanksgiving turkeys in the process.”

  “I’ve been stung like that a time or two,” Butch Dixon put in sympathetically. “Fly-by-night cooks. Don’t you just hate it when that happens? It sounds to me like being a sheriff is almost as bad as running a bar and restaurant. What are you going to do about it?”

  Phil arrived with the drinks. After Joanna and Leann gave him their lunch order, Joanna went on to explain about the Ruby Starr/Burton Kimball solution to the Cochise County Jail Thanksgiving dinner dilemma.

  “Isn’t the term ‘undeserving poor’ from My Fair Lady?” Butch asked. “I think that’s what Liza Doolittle’s father calls himself.”

  Joanna and Jenny sometimes watched tapes of musicals on the VCR. Since My Fair Lady was one of Jenny’s all-time favorites—right after The Sound of Music—Joanna knew most of the dialogue verbatim. Undeserving was exactly what Liza’s father had called himself.

  Joanna looked at Butch Dixon with some surprise. Most of the men around Bisbee—Andy Brady included—didn’t sit around dropping either Agatha Christie titles or lines from plays into casual conversation, especially not lines from musicals.

  “Agatha Christie? Lerner and Lowe? That’s pretty literary for a bartender, isn’t it? My mother always claimed that you guys were only marginally civilized.”

  Dixon grinned. “Mine told me exactly the same thing. No wonder I’m such a disappointment to her.”

  Once again Joanna returned to her story. “The upshot of all this is that one of the jail inmates—a lady who allegedly took after her husband with a sledgehammer on Monday—is currently serving as interim cook in the Cochise County Jail. Just wait until the media gets wind of that. There’s one particular local reporter, a lady of the press, who’ll have a heyday with it.”

  Butch chuckled. “You might give her a friendly warning, just for her own protection. It sounds to me as though anybody who gets on the wrong side of your pinch-hitting cook does so at his or her own risk.”

  Joanna and Leann both ended up laughing at that. They couldn’t help it. When their food came, Butch Dixon stood up. Tearing several sheets out of the yellow pad, he folded them and handed them over to Joanna, who tossed them into her purse. Then Dixon excused himself, leaving the two women to enjoy their meals.

  When lunch was over, Joanna dropped Leann back at the APOA campus. Joanna felt a moment of guilt as Leann climbed out of the car. “This place looks really lonely. Are you sure you wouldn’t like to come over to the hotel and spend the afternoon there?”

  Leann shook her head. “Thanks for the offer, but I’ll be fine,” she said. “I’ve got plenty of homework to do. After the way Dave Thompson climbed all over us this morning, I want to be prepared for Monday morning. Thanks for suggesting the Roundhouse for lunch. That hamburger was great.”

  Two was still an hour too early to show up at the hotel, but Joanna went there anyway.

  The afternoon was perfect. With blue skies overhead and with the temperature hovering somewhere in the eighties, it was hard to come to terms with the idea that this was the day before Thanksgiving. Bisbee’s mountainous climate lent itself to more seasonal changes. November in Bisbee usually felt like autumn. This felt more like summer.

  Outside the automatic doors, huge free-standing pots and flower beds were ablaze with the riotous colors of newly planted bedding plants—marigolds, petunias, and snapdragons. Inside the lobby, a totally unnecessary gas-log fire burned in a massive, copperfaced fireplace. Scattered stacks of pumpkins and huge bouquets of brightly colored mums and dahlias spilled out of equally huge Chinese pots. Looking around the festive lobby, Joanna allowed a little holiday spirit to leak into her veins. This wasn’t at all like High Lonesome Ranch at Thanksgiving, and that was just as well.

  Surprisingly enough, when Joanna approached the desk, she discovered that her room was ready after all. Joanna checked in. Refusing the services of a bellman for her single suitcase, she took a mirror-lined elevator up to the eighth-floor room she and Jenny would share for the next three days. She put down her suitcase and walked over to the picture window overlooking Grand Avenue. Across a wide expanse of busy roadway and railroad track, Joanna had a clear view of the APOA campus.

  Turning away from the window, Joanna surveyed the room. Although her dormitory accommodations and the main room at the Hohokam were similar in size, shape, and layout, there were definite differences. The hotel room had two queen-sized beds instead of a single narrow one. In place of a narrow student desk, there was a small round table with two relatively comfortable chairs on either side of it. The uniformly plastered walls of the hotel room were dotted with inexpensively framed prints. Except for the one mirrored wall in the dorm room, the walls there were totally bare.

  It was in the bathroom, however, where the difference between hotel and dorm was most striking and where, surprisingly, the Hohokam Resort Hotel came up decidedly short. The hotel bathroom contained a combination bathtub/shower rather than both shower and tub. Not only that, there were no Jacuzzi jets in the tub, although a guest brochure on the table did say there was a hot tub located in the ground-floor recreation area.

  After unpacking what little needed unpacking, Joanna sat down at the table and completed the letter she had started writing to Jenny two days earlier. When that was finished, Joanna tore it out of her notebook, folded the pages together, and placed them into an official Hohokam Resort Hotel envelope. Writing Jenny’s name on the outside, Joanna left it on top of the pillows on one of the two beds. Then she lay down on the other and tried reading.

  Her assignment in The Law Enforcement Handbook brought her fully awake only when the book slipped from her grasp and landed squarely on her face. That’s it, she told herself firmly. No more homework. Time to go downstairs and have some coffee.

  16

  It was almost sunset when Joanna ventured downstairs, where cocktails were being served in the posh, leather-furnished lobby. Even though she wasn’t particularly cold, she dropped into a comfortably oversized chair within warming range of the glass-enclosed fireplace. For a while she simply sat there, alternately mesmerized by the flaming gas-log or watching holiday travelers come and go. Eventually, though, she flagged down a passing cocktail waitress who graciously agreed to bring her coffee.

  Then, with coffee in hand, Joanna settled in to wait for Jenny and the Gs to arrive. She smiled, remembering Butch Dixon’s wry comment that Jenny and the Gs sounded like some kind of rock band. What an interesting man he was. With a peculiar sense of humor.

  Guiltily, Joanna reached into her purse and extracted the folded pages she had stowed there and forgotten after he handed them to her. Unfolding them, she found pages that were covered with small, carefully written lines that told the story of Serena Grijalva’s last visit to the Roundhouse Bar and Grill.

  Jorge showed up here first that evening. I didn’t know his name then, although I had seen him a couple of times before and I knew he was Serena’s former husband. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for the guy. He’d show up now and then and hand over money—child support presumably—and she’d give him all kinds of crap. That night she went off the charts about some truck he’d just bought.

  With a circular bar, the Roundhouse doesn’t offer much privacy. I remembered Serena talking to one of the guys in the bar a few weeks earlier about getting a restraining order against her soon-to-be-ex. I didn’t want any trouble, so I kept a pretty close watch on them that night. All Jorge kept talking about was whether or not she’d let him take the kids home to his mother’s over Thanksgiving weekend. He offered to come pick them up, drive the
m to Douglas, and bring them back home again on Sunday, but she just kept shaking her head, saying no, no, no.

  Things were fairly calm for a while, then she found out about the truck and all hell broke loose. She was screaming at him, calling him all kinds of names, and he just sat there and took it. Serena was the one causing the disturbance, so I finally eighty-sixed her and told her she’d have to leave. He had already given her the money. She took it out of her purse, counted it, took some out—twenty bucks maybe—and threw it back down on the bar. “I’m worth a hell of a lot more than that,” she said, and stomped out.

  He must have sat there for ten minutes just staring at the money on the bar. Finally he picked it up and put it back in his shirt pocket. That’s the time a lot of guys will settle in and get shit-faced drunk. I wouldn’t have blamed him if he had. In fact, I offered to buy him a drink, and he asked for coffee. It was fairly quiet with only a few of the regulars around, so Jorge and I talked some.

  He told me about his kids, asked me if I knew them. I didn’t have the heart to tell him how much those poor kids were left to their own devices. Serena would leave them alone in the laundry while she came over here and spent the afternoon cadging drinks. On more than one occasion, when she was in here partying, I took sandwiches and soft drinks out to the kids because I knew they had to be hungry. I didn’t tell him that, either. After all, what good would it do for the poor guy to know about it? There wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it, other than maybe calling child protective services and turning her in.

  He must have stayed for another hour or so, drinking coffee. And I remember wondering why the hell Serena’s attorney had gone to all the trouble of swearing out a restraining order on the poor guy. He struck me as beaten down and heartbroken, both. There wasn’t anything violent about him, not that night. And he didn’t seem to be in any hurry to leave. In fact, from the way he kept hanging around and watching the door, I think he was hoping Serena would change her mind, come back, and take him up on whatever that twenty was supposed to entail.

  She didn’t though. He left around eleven-thirty. The next thing I knew, he’d been arrested for murder. When Detective Strong came around asking questions, I tried to tell her about Serena—about what she was like. It was no use. Seemed to me that the detective had already made up her mind and decided that Jorge was guilty, whether he was or not.

  I’ve thought about him a lot since then, pitied him. Serena played the poor son of a bitch like a violin, giving him a piece of ass or not, depending on her mood at the time and whether or not he forked over.

  Reading back over this, it sounds pretty lame. If being a sometime whore and a bad mother were capital offenses, there would be a whole lot more orphans in this world. Bad as she was, Serena didn’t deserve to die. However, I for one remain unconvinced that Jorge did it. All I can go by is the fact that he never raised either his hand or his voice under circumstances when a lot of men would have.

  Thoughtfully, Joanna folded Butch Dixon’s handwritten pages and returned them to her purse. She knew that the way a man behaved toward a woman in a roomful of witnesses wasn’t necessarily an indication of how he would behave in private. By his own admission, there was at least one domestic violence charge on Jorge Grijalva’s rap sheet.

  But in other respects, Butch’s observations about Jorge Grijalva came surprisingly close to Joanna’s own conclusions. Jorge despised Serena for her whoring and yet he hadn’t been able to let her go, hadn’t been able to stop caring.

  The picture of Serena that emerged in the bartender’s story was far different from and more complex than the impression of near sainthood that had been part of the revivallike atmosphere at MAVEN’s candlelight vigil. There Serena had been cast as a beautiful, helpless, and blameless martyr to motherhood and apple pie. Butch Dixon’s version conceded her beauty, but saw her as a troubled, manipulative young woman, as a chronically unfaithful wife, and as a less than adequate mother.

  Butch’s essay stopped one step short of holding the dead woman partially responsible for her own murder. His sympathetic portrayal of Jorge was compelling. It played on Joanna’s emotions in exactly the same way the testimonies of the various survivors had caught up the feelings of all the attendees at the vigil. Sitting there reflecting, Joanna could see why. Dixon’s editorializing on Jorge’s behalf would be of no more help to a homicide detective than the blatantly emotional blackmail of MAVEN’s dog-and-pony show. Both in their own right were convincing pieces of show business—full of sound and fury and not much else.

  Joanna shook her head. MAVEN could rail that Jorge Grijalva was evil incarnate and his deceased wife a candidate for sainthood. Butch Dixon could tell the world that Serena Grijalva was a conniving bitch. Depending on your point of view, both were victims.

  For Joanna, the real victims were the kids who seemed destined to endure one terrible loss after another. And if the plea bargain…

  “Mom, we’re here!” Jenny crowed from the open doorway.

  Lost in thought, Joanna hadn’t even noticed when Jim Bob Brady’s aging Honda Accord pulled to a stop under the portico. Joanna rose to greet her visitors. Jenny met her halfway across the room, tackling Joanna and latching onto her waist with such force that it almost knocked her down.

  “Wait a minute,” Joanna said. “You don’t have to be that glad to see me.”

  Bending to kiss the top of Jenny’s head, Joanna stopped short. One look at Jenny’s hair was enough to take her breath away. The smooth, long blond tresses were gone. In their place stood a fuzzy white Little Orphan Annie halo, a brittle, towheaded Afro. Jenny’s assessment on the telephone had been absolutely right—her hair was awful. Joanna swallowed the urge to say what she was thinking.

  “I missed you, sweetie,” she said. “How are you doing? How was the trip?”

  “The trip was fine, and I missed you, too,” Jenny said breathlessly. “But is the pool still open? Is it too late to go swimming?”

  So much for missing me, Joanna thought wryly. She glanced at her watch. “The pool doesn’t close for almost two hours yet, but don’t you want something to eat first?”

  “We ate in the car,” Jenny answered. “Anyway, I’d rather swim.”

  “Go help Grandpa with your luggage first,” Joanna urged. “Then we’ll talk about it. You also need to check with the desk and order your videos.”

  Jenny’s eyes widened. “Videos? Really?”

  Joanna nodded. “They have some kind of special deal. Children under sixteen get to order videos from a place just up the street. Two for each day we’re here. They even deliver.”

  Jenny grinned. “This is a nice place, isn’t it?” She turned and raced back out to the car.

  Eva Lou had entered the lobby as well, walking up behind Jenny. She smiled fondly after her granddaughter, then turned to Joanna and gave her daughter-in-law a firm hug. “I can’t believe all the flowers out there,” the older woman said, glancing back at the entrance. “How can that be when it’s almost the end of November?”

  Looking after Jenny, Joanna wasn’t especially interested in flowers. “What I can’t believe is the permanent,” she grumbled. “How could my mother do such a thing?”

  “Don’t be upset,” Eva Lou counseled. “Eleanor was just trying to help.”

  “Help!” Joanna countered. “Don’t make excuses for her. She had no right to pull this kind of stunt the minute my back was turned.”

  “It’s only hair,” Eva Lou said. “It’ll grow out. It was all an honest mistake. I think Helen and your mother got so busy talking that Helen forgot to set the timer for the solution. I know she felt terrible about it afterwards. She sent home three bottles of conditioner. Jenny’s gone through the better half of one of those, although I’ll admit it doesn’t seem to be doing much good.”

  “Not much,” Joanna agreed. “But you’re right. The only thing that’s going to fix that mess is time.”

  By then Jim Bob had unloaded an amazing stack of suitcases ont
o a luggage cart. He and Jenny came into the lobby with the bellman trailing in his wake, aiming for the registration desk. Joanna caught up with him before he got there. She planted a quick kiss on her father-in-law’s cheek.

  “Registration’s already been taken care of,” she said, handing two keys over to the bellman. “Mr. and Mrs. Brady are in eight-twenty-seven. The little girl and I are in eight-ten. They’re not adjoining rooms, but at least they’re on the same floor.”

  Jim Bob gave her a searching look. “You didn’t pay for the room already, did you? It looks to me like this place is probably pretty pricy.”

  “Are you kidding?” Joanna returned with a laugh. “I’m getting six weeks of free babysitting out of this deal. If you stack that up against a three-night stay at the Hohokam, I’m still way ahead of the game.”

  “I’m not a baby,” Jenny said firmly, frowning. “I’m nine and a half.”

  “You’re right, Jenny. Excuse me,” Joanna agreed, then turned back to Jim Bob Brady. “Six weeks of child care then, but it’s still a bargain. Is anybody hungry?”

  “I packed some sandwiches to eat on the way,” Eva Lou said. “We’re certainly not starving.”

  Joanna nodded. “All right, then,” she said. “We’ll let Jenny swim for a while. We’ll go out later for dessert.”

  “As in Baskin-Robbins?” Jenny asked eagerly.

  “Probably.” At that Jenny clapped her hands in delight.

  As the Bradys followed the bellman toward the elevator, Joanna turned to Jenny. “Did Grandma tell you that Ceci Grijalva is coming to town to see us on Friday?”

  It was Jenny’s turn to nod. “That’s why we brought along an extra suit.” Jenny’s blue eyes filled with concern. “Did you tell her what I said?”

  “Yes, but I thought she’d get more out of it if she heard it from you in person. We pick her up at ten o’clock on Friday morning.”

  They stopped by the concierge desk long enough to make arrangements for Jenny’s videos. Joanna also increased the Thanksgiving dinner reservation from four to six.