Damage Control

by J. A. Jance

  What is she thinking? Joanna asked herself as she drove, several miles over the limit, toward the coming confrontation. How was it possible for her mother to sink so low? Most likely that was why Eleanor had come up with that bogus charge about George and Madge. The best defense was always a good offense. As for George? He was a good man—a fine man. He certainly didn’t deserve to be treated like that. And who was the low-down scum her mother was hanging out with? Was it someone Joanna knew? Someone from the Presbyterian Church, for instance? That would be rich. And incredibly hypocritical, but hadn’t hypocrisy been Eleanor Lathrop’s watchword all her life?

  Instead of cooling down, Joanna found herself feeling more and more outraged. As the mother of a sometimes challenging teenager, Joanna now understood that in the years following Hank Lathrop’s death, she had put her mother through hell. She had been out of control, determined to do things her own way. That was one of the reasons she had turned up pregnant without first being married to Andy. Her mother had pitched a fit at the idea of her daughter having a “shotgun” wedding.

  For years after that—all during Joanna’s marriage to Andy and even after his death—Eleanor had continued to anguish over what she considered to be her granddaughter’s “unseemly premature” arrival. After Joanna had endured her mother’s criticism all that time, it had come as a total shock to her when she had learned, a few years earlier, that she had an older brother—that her parents had had their own out-of-wedlock baby, a boy who had been given up for adoption long before Eleanor and D. H. Lathrop’s much-later marriage.

  That’s you in a nutshell, isn’t it, Mom, Joanna thought bitterly, turning the air-conditioning in her cruiser a few degrees lower. You’re always a good one for “Do as I say, not as I do.”

  By the time she arrived at the Westmoreland Hotel, a steely chill had settled over Joanna. Somehow the roles between mother and daughter had reversed. Joanna was now the grown-up and Eleanor the out-of-control teenager disregarding the rules and not caring who might be hurt in the process. Joanna had thought briefly about calling George but decided to put that off. She would tell him what she knew, but only when she knew all of it. He deserved that much—the whole story, with no holds barred.

  Joanna found Eleanor’s Buick parked in a prominent position at the end of the first row in the hotel’s spacious parking lot. In front of God and everybody, Joanna thought, just like Frank said it would be.

  She pulled into a ten-minute loading zone and then hurried into the lobby. “I’m here to see my mother,” Joanna said to the young man standing behind the registration desk. “Eleanor Winfield.” She wondered about that. Why had Eleanor registered in her own name? Why not under the name of the man—whoever he might be?

  “Of course, Sheriff Brady,” the man said with a smile, plucking Joanna’s name off the badge pinned to her uniform. “Room 222. Take the elevator upstairs. Second room on the right.”

  “Thanks,” Joanna said, hoping that the smile she gave him in return for the information didn’t look as forced as it felt. She rode up in the elevator with her heart beating hard in her chest. Now that she was here, what would she say? Frank was probably right. She shouldn’t have come. It was stupid. She should let her mother do whatever she wanted to do. She should let her mother go straight to hell.

  There was a prominently displayed DO NOT DISTURB dangling from the doorknob of room 222. For an indecisive moment, Joanna stood in front of that closed door and listened for the sound of voices coming from inside. All she heard was the low drone of a television set—Diane Sawyer and her pals on Good Morning America.

  How normal, Joanna thought. They’re cuddled up in bed watching the morning news.

  With that, she pounded on the door.

  “Who is it?” Eleanor called from inside. “If it’s housekeeping, can’t you read the sign? Come back later.”

  “It’s me, Mom,” Joanna said. “Open the door and let me in.”

  It took a moment for Eleanor to unfasten the security locks and fling open the door. She was wearing her own terry-cloth robe and she looked astonished. “What on earth are you doing here?” she demanded.

  Joanna swept past her mother into the room. “I could ask you the same thing.”

  She glanced around. While the place was clean enough and serviceable, it certainly wasn’t the Ritz. And, other than her mother, as far as Joanna could see, the room was empty. A single cup of self-serve room-brewed coffee sat on the coffee table in front of a sagging couch. The bed had clearly been slept in, but on one side only. The other side was still much as the housekeeping maid had left it, with the bedding smooth and the bedspread still covering a hard slab of foam pillow.

  “So where is he?” Joanna demanded. “Did he stand you up? Lose his nerve at the last minute and didn’t show?”

  “Where’s who?” Eleanor asked with a puzzled frown. “Who are you talking about?”

  “Your paramour,” Joanna said with a snarl. “The person you’re meeting here.”

  Eleanor’s eyes widened in what seemed to be genuine astonishment. “You think I’m here to meet a man? You think I’m having an affair?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  For an answer and much to Joanna’s dismay, Eleanor Lathrop Winfield began to laugh. What started as a small giggle evolved into full-throated, almost hysterical, laughter. Doubled over and with tears dribbling down her cheeks, Eleanor staggered backward and dropped onto the couch. After a few moments, though, the laughter stopped as suddenly as it had begun.

  “No,” Eleanor said finally. “No, I’m not. There’s no one here but me.”

  “But why?” Joanna asked. “What are you doing here, then?”

  “Running away,” Eleanor answered. “I wanted to see what it would feel like to just kick over the traces and do something wild for a change. Go to a bar, pick up a man, take him home, and notch my bedpost with him. Why not? Everyone else does it.”

  “George hasn’t,” Joanna asserted. “He hasn’t done anything wrong.”

  Eleanor studied her daughter’s face. “What makes you say that?”

  “I asked him,” Joanna said. “I asked him straight-out if there was anything going on between him and Madge Livingston. He told me no, not with her and not with anyone else, either.”

  “And you believed him?”

  “Yes,” Joanna said. “Of course I did. Why wouldn’t I? Whatever’s wrong right now, I know that he loves you, Mom. He’s worried about you and wants you back.”

  “You expect me to believe that, too?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  Eleanor rose abruptly from the couch. She walked over to the window, pulled the curtain aside, and stared out into the parking lot. A draft of stale air from the window-mounted air conditioner wafted across the room.

  “It wasn’t fair of George to give you your father’s journals,” Eleanor said without turning away from the window. “He shouldn’t have done that without asking me.”

  For a moment Joanna felt as though she had fallen through a crack in the conversation. Months earlier, in a fit of garage cleaning, George Winfield had stumbled across D. H. Lathrop’s collection of leather-bound diaries in boxes of books Ellie had consigned to the garbage dump. Rather than tossing them, George had handed the diaries over to Joanna. The connection between those and what was going on now left Joanna mystified.

  “What do Dad’s diaries have to do with any of this?” she asked.

  “Everything,” Eleanor said. “Have you read them?”

  “I read some of them,” Joanna allowed. “I was working one of Dad’s cold cases then, and I scanned through the volumes that were related to that. But after that, once Dennis was born and I went back to work, there hasn’t been time to even think about them. Why?”

  “I tried to protect you from all of that, but now that it’s all out in the open, or will be out in the open, what’s the use? Once you get around to reading them, maybe you’ll understand.”

  “Understand what?” />
  “Didn’t you ever wonder why Mona Tipton didn’t come to your father’s funeral?” Eleanor asked.

  Mona Tipton had been Hank Lathrop’s secretary. An exotic creature with a ballerina-style hairdo and dark, luminous eyes, she had been stationed at a wooden desk just outside Hank’s office up at the old courthouse. Joanna seemed to remember that Mona, born and raised in Bisbee, had left town shortly after high school to pursue a career of some kind back east. She had returned years later to help care for her aging parents. Somewhere along the line she had gone to work for the sheriff’s department and had worked there for years.

  Yes, Joanna knew that Mona Tipton had been a fixture of D. H. Lathrop’s work life, but she wasn’t someone whose presence had raised any alarms. Mona had simply been there, one of the colorful cast of characters—the various deputies and investigators and crooks—who had peopled Hank Lathrop’s existence. As a consequence, Eleanor’s question about Mona Tipton now, years after the fact, caught Joanna completely off guard.

  “Mona?” she repeated. “I seem to remember you told me she had a conflict of some kind. Wasn’t she out of town at the time of Dad’s funeral?”

  “There was a conflict, all right,” Eleanor declared hotly. “I told her if I saw her anywhere near the funeral home or the cemetery, I’d use your father’s pistol to plug her full of holes. And I’m telling you right now, if George’s precious Madge Livingston doesn’t mind her p’s and q’s—if she so much as looks at me sideways—I’ll make her the same offer.”

  CHAPTER 9

  THE STARTLING REVELATIONS ABOUT JOANNA’S FATHER AND THE clear threat Eleanor had directed at Madge Livingston left Joanna staring at her mother in slack-jawed amazement.

  “Surely you don’t mean any of that!” Joanna exclaimed.

  “Don’t I?” Eleanor returned. “Try me. You should know by now that I never say things I don’t mean. Come to think about it, what are you doing here? How did you find me?”

  Joanna wasn’t about to blow Frank’s cover by giving away his part in her Find Eleanor operation, so she ignored her mother’s questions. “You need to talk to George about all this,” she said doggedly. “You seem to have a serious communication problem at the moment. You two should probably talk to someone—to a counselor, maybe—and get things sorted out.”

  “Talking to counselors is a waste of money,” Eleanor said.

  “Compared to going to prison on a homicide charge, counselors are dirt-cheap,” Joanna returned.

  Eleanor looked at her daughter and actually smiled. “I suppose if I did that, it would put you and George in a real bind.”

  “Mother!”

  “And now that I have his attention,” Eleanor added, “I suppose I should give the old coot a call. It’s nice to know he’s been worried about me for a change.” With that, Eleanor abandoned the window. She returned to the couch, picked up her purse, and rummaged through it until she found her cell phone, turned it on, and dialed. “Good morning, George,” she said a moment later. “How are you?”

  Having been astonished by her mother’s behavior twice in as many minutes, Joanna did the only reasonable thing she could do—she left. Out in the car, she turned on the ignition and the air-conditioning but sat in the parking lot for several long moments before ever putting the vehicle in gear.

  She had been fifteen when her father was struck and killed by a drunk driver while changing a tire for a stranded motorist. Joanna and her mother had never been on the best of terms. Joanna had been a daddy’s girl. When Hank Lathrop died, it seemed to her that Eleanor had simply closed the book on him and on everything that had gone before. Joanna had been wild with grief. Her mother, on the other hand, had been dry-eyed and distant.

  In the months that followed, Eleanor certainly hadn’t tarnished her husband’s memory. She hadn’t spoken ill of him to Joanna. In fact, she hadn’t spoken of him at all. Joanna had taken that to mean that her mother had cared for her husband too little or not at all, and it had resulted in ever-worsening relations between mother and daughter. In Joanna’s mind, Eleanor turned into public enemy number one while her dead father morphed into something close to perfection itself.

  In all the intervening years, Eleanor had never once hinted that her husband might have strayed from his wedding vows. Not until now.

  Is any of this true? Joanna wondered. If her father had indeed been carrying on a passionate affair with his secretary at the time of his death, would he have been so naive as to write about it in his diary? Eleanor had certainly implied as much. And if all that was true, wasn’t it possible that the uncaring mask Eleanor had shown to the world on the occasion of Hank’s death might well have been calculated to conceal how much she had cared for him rather than how little?

  Joanna’s ringing cell phone jarred her out of her reverie. “You’ll never believe it,” Dave Hollicker announced. “I found the owner of that locket.”

  “Good work, Dave,” Joanna said, switching gears. “How’d you manage that? Police stolen property reports?”

  Dave laughed. “Nothing that organized. Since Wanda Mappin was living in Tucson at the time she disappeared, I logged on to the Internet. I went to the Tucson section for Craig’s List and checked out the Lost and Found page. And there it was, right there, complete with a picture. It’s the same one, all right, only in the photo none of the diamonds is missing. There’s even a five-hundred-dollar reward.”

  “Police officers aren’t allowed to receive rewards,” Joanna told him. “Now whose is it? And where do they live?”

  “The guy’s name is Logan,” Dave replied. “Richard Logan. I already tried calling, but there was no answer. I left word on the machine as to who I was, what I wanted, and why. I asked him to call me back ASAP. It’s midmorning, so he’s probably at work right now, but since he’s offering a reward, I’m guessing he’ll be in touch as soon as he gets the message.”

  “Any idea where he lives?”

  “I looked him up, using his licensing info,” Dave said. “He lives on Second Street, just east of Campbell. Once I had a name and address, I contacted Tucson PD to see if they had a stolen property report that matched. Came up empty there, so until Mr. Logan calls us back, we’re pretty much stuck in neutral.”

  So am I, Joanna thought guiltily, putting her own vehicle in gear. She eased into traffic on Highway 92 and headed back toward Bisbee.

  “Let me know if you hear anything,” Joanna said. When that call ended, she phoned Kristin to let her secretary know she was on her way. “What’s happening? Is the briefing over?”

  “As far as I know it hasn’t started,” Kristin told her. “Frank postponed it until after the preliminary hearing on those two sisters, which only started a couple of minutes ago. He thought someone representing the department ought to be in the courtroom—just in case.”

  “I agree completely,” Joanna said. She was about to hang up when she thought of something else. “Do you have a phone book handy?”

  “Sure,” Kristin said. “What do you need?”

  “Look up Tipton for me, if you don’t mind. Mona Tipton.”

  “No Mona per se,” Kristin said. “There is an M. Tipton, on Quality Hill, up in Old Bisbee. Do you want the number?”

  “Not right now,” Joanna said. “I’m driving. I don’t have any way of writing it down.”

  “I’ll leave it on your desk,” Kristin said.

  “Thanks,” Joanna told her. I think.

  But what would she do with Mona Tipton’s phone number once she had it? Call her? What business was it of hers? Joanna had grown to adulthood thinking that her father could do no wrong, but that was before she knew of her parents’ out-of-wedlock teenaged pregnancy. Now, if Eleanor’s accusations of her husband’s infidelity proved to be true, then D. H. Lathrop’s otherwise supposedly spotless reputation for perfection pretty well evaporated.

  Part of Joanna’s difficulty with her mother had always been based on her belief that her mother hadn’t really loved Hank al
l that much. Now it seemed likely that Eleanor had been so crushed by her first husband’s betrayal that it was still affecting her relationship with George Winfield.

  Once again Joanna’s ringing cell phone summoned her from her thoughts.

  “Did you find her?” Frank Montoya asked.

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “She’s all right. She was talking to George when I left, so maybe things are better. What’s up?”

  “The preliminary hearing just ended.”

  “And?”

  “They both pled not guilty. No surprise there. Judge Cameron set bail at a hundred thou each. Larry Wolfe posted same for his wife, so she’s out. At the moment Samantha Edwards is still in our lockup. She was represented by a public defender, so maybe she’s having a problem finding someone to post her bond.”

  “At least we’re rid of one of them,” Joanna said.

  “Don’t count on it,” Frank returned. “I overheard Larry Wolfe, Sandra’s husband, and her attorney out in the hallway. They’re hoping to file a suit charging police brutality.”

  “But we’ve got dozens of witnesses who saw the two women attack Deputies Brophy and Butler.”

  “You’re right. We have plenty of witnesses for that,” Frank agreed. “But the Wolfes are alleging that you personally engaged in brutality when you locked Sandra up with her assailant.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Joanna declared. “I locked Sandra up with her sister. And we have the jail tapes that prove nothing went on between them while they were in our custody.”

  “It may seem ridiculous to you and me,” Frank agreed, “but then you and I aren’t personal injury lawyers. Where are you right now?”

  “Crossing the San Pedro on my way back to the office.”