Tombstone Courage

by J. A. Jance

  “Do you ever go to yard sales?” she asked.

  “Not often,” Joanna answered. “I usually don’t have either the time or the money.”

  “I shouldn’t go to them myself, but I do,” Linda said. “It’s one of those things that drives Burton crazy. He really disapproves. He says it’s not dignified for people in our position to go around buying other people’s cast-off junk, but I can’t help it. One of my hobbies is refinishing antiques, and going to those private sales is how I’ve found some of my very best pieces. Do you remember when Grace Luther died?”

  Joanna nodded. At the time ninety-six-year-old Grace Luther passed away, her death had been the talk of the town. Since it happened while Hank Lathrop was still sheriff, Joanna knew more of the gory details than she probably should have. Everyone in town had thought Grace was up in Tucson visiting her niece, but it turned out the niece had brought her back to Bisbee and left her off at home. Somehow word of her return didn’t get passed along to Grace’s at-home caregiver.

  While everyone in Bisbee continued to believe that Grace was out of town, the old lady was actually dead as could be, lying flat on her back in her own bed with the thermostat cranked up to eighty-some degrees. The corpse was three weeks old and pretty well cooked by the time people realized something was wrong and broke into the house. It wasn’t a pretty sight. Or smell. After investigating the scene, Hank Lathrop had come home and burned all the clothes he had been wearing.

  Afterward, there was a protracted battle among a bunch of feuding heirs, including the scatter-brained niece who had dropped the old lady off at home without letting anyone know. For years, while lawyers battled back and forth, the house sat vacant—boarded up but crammed full of a century’s worth of junk.

  “I went to that estate sale,” Linda Kimball continued. “The house was a shambles—stacked with trash from floor to ceiling. But there were some treasures buried in there as well. In fact, I found that wonderful ivory-inlay table I still have in my living room. And down in the basement, I found everything from her husband’s office.”

  “That’s right,” Joanna said. “I remember that, too. Wasn’t Dr. Luther a dentist with an office somewhere in Upper Lowell?”

  Linda nodded. “Right where the open-pit mine is now. Doc Luther was already dead in the early fifties when they tore the building down to make way for Lavender Pit. Grace had Phelps Dodge haul all her husband’s equipment and everything else from his office down to her house in Warren. They loaded it into her garage and basement—chairs, drills, and everything—and there it stayed. I don’t think that woman ever in her life threw anything away.”

  Once again Linda Kimball reached for her purse. This time she extracted a small white envelope.

  “This is the part that’s so embarrassing,” she said. “I still can’t believe I did it. Promise me you won’t tell Burton. He’d have a fit.”

  “Tell him what?”

  “While I was down in the basement that day—the day of the sale—I was rummaging around looking for antiques when I came across a huge stack of Dr. Luther’s old files that had been dumped out of a file cabinet. I knew he was the dentist Burton had gone to as a young child. I thought it might be fun to have his earliest dental records, just as sort of a keepsake. But while I was looking, I found this—and I stole it.”

  With visibly trembling fingers, Linda Kimball handed the envelope over to Joanna, who hesitated only a second before ripping it open. Inside was a yellowed three-by-five card. The cardboard was stiff and brittle and turning brown around the edges. Printed on both sides were old-fashioned dental records, complete with predrawn diagrams of human teeth. Handwritten comments as well as arrows pointing to fillings and cavities had been added to the margins.

  As she looked at the diagram, it was a moment before Joanna noticed the name written at the top of the card.

  “Thornton W. Kimball’s dental records!” Joanna exclaimed.

  “I know it’s not like modern X rays or anything,” Linda Kimball was saying, almost apologetically, “but I thought it might help.”

  “It’ll help, all right. If you don’t mind, I’ll go to work on it right away.” Joanna reached out and punched the button on her intercom.

  “Yes?” Kristin was still all ice.

  “Have Dispatch raise Ernie Carpenter on the radio. Find out where he is and tell him to stay there. Tell him I’m bringing him something important.”

  Even though Joanna considered the interview over, when she looked back at Linda Kimball, the other woman had not yet moved.

  “Is there something else?” Joanna asked.

  Linda nodded. “I’ve tried all afternoon to put myself in Burton’s shoes. Which do you think is worse?” she asked.

  “Which what?” Joanna returned.

  “Knowing or not knowing? Is he better off thinking his father is still alive somewhere and that he deserted his wife and his unborn son? Or is he better off knowing for sure his father is dead? That he left and didn’t come back because he didn’t have a choice, because he was lying dead in a glory hole on Harold Patterson’s ranch?”

  Joanna pondered carefully before she answered. “That’s a tough call,” she said finally, “but I think most people would rather know the truth, however painful it might be.”

  Linda Kimball groped for her purse and hefted it into her lap. “That’s what I decided, too,” she said. “This afternoon. But that’s why I wanted to bring the envelope today. I wanted someone else to have it, before I had a chance to change my mind.”

  As Linda left the room, the intercom buzzed. “Ernie’s down working in the glory hole on the Patterson ranch. He wants to know can it wait?”

  “It can’t wait. Tell him to keep on doing what he’s doing. I’ll come find him. What about a car, Kristin? Did you get one for me?”

  “All that’s available today is a five-year-old Blazer. Body’s good; engine’s a little rough. That’s what Danny from Motor Pool says.”

  “I only want to know two things. Does it run, and is it equipped with a working radio?”

  “Danny says yes.”

  “Good. Tell him to bring it around as soon as he can. I’d like to have it here in under five minutes, with the engine running and a full tank of gas. And Kristin?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thanks for taking care of the car,” Joanna said. “Good job.”

  Twenty-Eight

  WHEN JOANNA rushed out of the office in search of Ernie Carpenter, she grabbed the stack of unopened mail and took it along with her. The Blazer with the Sheriff’s Department insignia on the door was a long way from new, but that didn’t bother her. After all, it was several years newer than her old Eagle.

  Once on the Rocking P, she drove straight to the glory hole without turning off at the house. As she went past, though, she caught a glimpse of Ivy’s Luv parked by the front gate. Seeing it made her wonder if Ivy would really go through with her hasty wedding plans. By getting married within days of her father’s death, Ivy would be committing one of those breaches of small-town etiquette that would expand into legend with countless retellings.

  Where hasty marriages were concerned, Joanna Brady was one of the few people in town prepared to give the benefit of the doubt to Yuri Malakov and Ivy Patterson’s late-blooming, whirlwind romance. After all, Joanna and Andy had raised gossiping eyebrows years earlier with their own rushed wedding. That union had certainly worked out fine in the long run.

  A rushed marriage was probably fine, but the possibility of murder was not. Personally, Joanna wanted to believe in the idea of two people living happily ever after, but a determination on whether or not the newlyweds would ride off into the sunset on a honeymoon or end up in prison at Florence would have to be left in Ernie Carpenter’s capable hands. It was up to him and to a judge and jury.

  This time when Joanna arrived at the glory hole, there was a whole collection of vehicles parked around it. She had to leave the Blazer a fair distance away and then tiptoe ove
r the rocky ground in her city-slicker black pumps. High heels that were only marginally safe on flat sidewalk surfaces were downright dangerous on the splintery shale.

  Three young deputies lounged around the hole. Ostensibly, they were running spotlights and lugging equipment, but mostly they leaned on fence posts with their hands in their pockets and chewed the fat. As soon as Joanna drove up, they all made an obvious pretense of looking busy.

  “Hey, Detective Carpenter,” one of them called down into the hole. “Sheriff Brady’s here.”

  “What are you waiting for then?” Ernie grumbled back. “Winch me up so I can talk to her and get it over with.”

  While Joanna watched, a filthy, mud-caked specter rose up out of the glory hole. The bandbox detective who had sat taking notes in her office only hours earlier now looked and smelled like a battle-weary infantryman in night camouflage. Once out of the harness, he strode over to the van where a makeshift washbasin had been set up on the tailgate. Cursing her wretched shoes, Joanna tripped after him.

  “How do you do it?” she asked irritably.

  “Do what?” he asked, bending over and carefully soaping his hands, then sloshing the dirt off his grubby face.

  “One minute you look like you just stepped out of Gentlemen’s Quarterly. The next you look like you haven’t changed clothes in years.”

  “Oh, that,” Ernie Carpenter said with a short laugh. “It’s a trick I learned from my wife. Whenever she was expecting, she always kept a packed suitcase by the front door. I keep two changes of clothes in my car at all times, because in this line of work, you never know what’s going to turn up. Speaking of which, I take it something did.”

  Joanna nodded and pulled the white envelope out of her pocket. “Look what someone brought to my office earlier this afternoon. I thought you’d want to see it.”

  Drying his hands on a paper towel, Ernie took the offered envelope, opened it, and removed the three-by-five card. He read it without comment, then slipped the card back in the envelope.

  “That’s fine,” he said without showing more than minimal interest. “It’s bound to make the coroner’s identification job that much easier.”

  “You think it’s him then?” Joanna asked, disappointed that Ernie’s level of excitement didn’t match her own.

  “I’m sure of it,” he answered, opening a nylon fanny-pack that was strapped around his waist. “As soon as I saw these, I was pretty sure that’s who it was.”

  He removed something from the bag, dunked it in the water, and then dried it with a towel. “Look at this,” he said.

  Joanna held out her hand, and Ernie dropped something into it. At first she thought it was the beaded brass pull chain from some old light fixture. Despite the rinsing it was still green and crusted over with muck. Eventually, she realized it was actually two chains, a larger one and a smaller, with the small one strung through the larger. Each chain held a single rectangular piece of metal. A sharp notch had been cut in the long side of one of the pieces.

  “What is it?” Joanna asked.

  “Look closer,” Ernie said.

  Holding the tarnished metal up to her eyes, Joanna was barely able to make out the faint letters that had been etched into the metal: THORNTON WILLIAM KIMBALL along with a series of numbers.

  “His World War II military dog tags?” Joanna asked.

  She looked down at the muddy pieces of metal in her hand. Sadly, she rubbed one finger along the sharp notch that, in wartime, would have been jammed between a dead soldier’s lower front teeth to serve as identification. Just as Linda Kimball feared, this was the pitiful ending of Burton Kimball’s long-cherished dream of one day being re-united with his runaway father.

  “What are you going to do about it?” she asked.

  Ernie rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Conceivably, somebody else could have been wearing Thornton Kimball’s dog tags, but I doubt it. And with those dental records, it’ll be a piece of cake to confirm.”

  He glanced back toward the glory hole where his assistants were beginning to dismantle the winch and lights. “I’m about done here,” Ernie continued. “After I clean myself up, do you want me to notify Burton Kimball about what’s going on, or would you rather do it?”

  Joanna’s energies were stretched thin. Too much had happened in too short a time. “No,” she said, “you do it.” Feeling suddenly tired, she started back toward the Blazer.

  “By the way,” Ernie called after her. “I did what you suggested. I tried running Yuri Malakov past the Multi-Jurisdiction guys and INS with their fancy-schmancy computer.”

  “Did they have any information?”

  “Yes, evidently, but it’s off-limits. I found that very interesting.”

  “What do you mean, ‘interesting?’”

  “It means Yuri Malakov is in their goddamned database for some reason or another, but nobody’s allowed to ask about him. Or, if they do, they’re not to be given a straight answer.”

  Joanna frowned. “That doesn’t make sense. Aren’t we all working the same side of the fence?”

  Ernie Carpenter looked down on her and shook his head sadly, as if surprised by her naïveté.

  “No ma’am,” he said. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say that. As a matter of fact, I’d say we haven’t even gotten around to agreeing on a survey for the fence line, to say nothing of building the damn thing and settling which side everybody’s on.”

  Joanna wasn’t sure if Ernie’s round-about answer was simply patronizing or if it was meant to make fun of her. Either choice made her hackles rise.

  “Get to the point,” she snapped irritably.

  “The point is,” Ernie answered, “if Yuri Malakov’s name is punched into that computer but nobody’s willing to talk about him or say why he’s in there, then I sure as hell wouldn’t want my daughter to marry the sonofabitch, and I’ll bet money Harold Patterson didn’t want Ivy to tie the knot with him, either.”

  Burton Kimball sat brooding in his darkened and deserted office. Everyone else had gone home. Even the ever-loyal, ever-vigilant Maxine had finally abandoned ship at six o’clock. Linda had called twice to check on him and to ask when he was coming home. He kept telling her soon now, that he was working on an important project that had to be finished before court the next day.

  That was an outright lie. The surface of his desk was empty except for a sheen of blank despair.

  Burton felt as though his life was whirling out of control. As the gold hands on his watch edged closer to seven, his depression deepened. He had deliberately stayed around the office all afternoon, hoping Ivy would call, hoping she would relent and invite him to the wedding. But she hadn’t and it was too late now.

  In a few minutes Ivy Patterson would marry that Russian nobody, and Burton Kimball wouldn’t even be there to see it.

  How do you go about losing your best friend? he wondered. Things had changed once he and Linda had married and come back to Bisbee to live and establish his practice. Aunt Emily was already a total invalid by then, and Ivy had been charged with her mother’s day-to-day care. He and Linda had tried to help out, but there wasn’t that much they could do. The old, loving Aunt Emily had been replaced by a stranger, an irascible tyrant who yelled orders from her hospital bed. She hurled insults as well as physical objects—vases; books; glasses—at anyone foolish enough to venture near her.

  Ivy had carried that whole burden and it had worn her down, changed her, aged her. And today Burton was feeling the weight of his own responsibility in that regard. He should have done more to help; should have paid more attention.

  Burton had grieved over Aunt Emily during her illness and rejoiced at her death, when she was finally released from her dreadful physical and mental incapacities. And he had thought some how, that after it was all over, he and Ivy would go back to being best friends, the way they had been before. That hadn’t happened. They had drifted along for years, still all right, not quarreling but not as close as they had once been, eithe
r. All that had changed once Holly Patterson had reappeared on the scene.

  Somehow, logically or not, Ivy seemed to hold Burton responsible for her sister’s sudden return. At first Ivy and Burton had been united once again, going nose-to-nose with Harold over how best to handle the complexities of the Holly situation. Ivy had seemed satisfied with Burton’s strategy until two days earlier when the whole thing had blown up in his face and Harold had gone off to make his fateful offer. Burton now felt that Ivy was holding him entirely responsible. For everything.

  A discreet knock on Burton’s outside window made him jump. Looking through the darkened glass, he saw Ernie Carpenter standing there, motioning to be let into the building.

  “What’s going on?” Burton asked, as he opened the entryway door.

  “I just talked to your wife,” Ernie explained. “She said you were working late. I hope you don’t mind the interruption.”

  Burton led Ernie back to his private office. Switching on the light revealed his damningly empty desktop. It was clear Burton wasn’t really working and that he hadn’t been.

  “I was actually just finishing up and about to go home,” he said lamely, going over to his door and making a show of taking his jacket off the hanger. He draped his tie around the back of his neck. “I have a few minutes. What can I do for you?”

  “Sheriff Brady told me you were out at the Rocking P earlier today,” Ernie said.

  Burton nodded. “That’s right. Why?”

  “You already know about the other body in the glory hole?”

  “Yes. Unfortunately, I do. I think the shock of finding out about that pretty much unhinged Ivy. It’s probably some poor old wetback who fell into the hole before Uncle Harold got around to fencing it up.”

  “I doubt it’s a wetback,” Ernie Carpenter said firmly. “In fact, I expect to have a positive I.D. within days.”