Minor in possession jpb-8

by J. A. Jance

  My mouth must have dropped open half a foot. "Tomorrow? Are you crazy? I'm talking attempted murder here. Homicide. I'm not going back to that cabin, and I'm sure as hell not staying there until there's been a full police investigation."

  "Then you won't be going back at all." Calvin Crenshaw spoke with a quiet assurance I had never seen in him before. "That being the case, Mr. Beaumont," Calvin continued, "I suggest you have Shorty here take you back to the ranch to pick up your belongings. If you hurry, you may be able to catch the Greyhound into Phoenix."

  "Wait a minute. Pick up my belongings? Does that mean you're throwing me out?"

  "If you're not prepared to do as you're told, Mr. Beaumont, you don't leave us any choice. We have a treatment center to run, and we must look to the welfare of all our clients."

  "What the hell do you expect me to do? Forget that someone tried to kill me? Go back to my cabin and act like it never happened? You expect me to sleep there?"

  Beside me on the porch, Shorty Rojas shifted uneasily, but Calvin Crenshaw gave him a warning head shake that stifled any objection Shorty might have had. I couldn't blame him. I had no doubt that if he had crossed this newly transformed Calvin Crenshaw, his job would be on the line.

  "It's up to you, Mr. Beaumont," Calvin said, turning back to me, relaxing a little now that he felt he was once more in control. "If you go back to the ranch tonight, you're welcome to stay. If you leave Ironwood Ranch without permission, however, you won't be coming back."

  Aggravation and mystification turned to rage. "That remains to be seen, Mr. Crenshaw," I replied, barely holding my temper in check. "I will be back, in the morning, along with someone from the Yavapai County Sheriff's Department. If anybody goes near my cabin between now and then, you can tell them for me that they're running the risk of becoming prime suspects in a felony investigation."

  "Good night, Mr. Beaumont," said an unperturbed Calvin Crenshaw, closing the door in my face as deliberately as if I'd been a pushy door-to-door salesman.

  I turned to Shorty. "What the hell got into him?"

  But Shorty Rojas didn't answer. He pulled his cowboy hat down low on his forehead and turned away from me, walking quickly back toward his pickup.

  "Sorry about that, Mr. Beaumont," he said. "Come on. I'll drop you in town, then I'd better get home and see what the river's doing. It'll be cresting pretty soon now."

  I stopped long enough to look back at the house just in time to see the living room and kitchen lights go out. The message was clear. Calvin Crenshaw was shutting the place down and going to bed. J. P. Beaumont and his problems weren't important enough for the Crenshaws to lose any part of their good night's sleep.

  Deep in the interior of the house another light went off, a hall light this time, while behind me the engine of Shorty's pickup roared to life.

  I stood there for a moment longer, angry and puzzled both. Before my very eyes, Calvin Crenshaw, the lamb, had turned into a lion. A tough-minded lion at that. I had been there, seen it happen, and yet I had no idea what had caused it. What the hell had I missed?

  It had something to do with Louise Crenshaw, Joey Rothman, and me. Of that much I was certain, but I'd be damned if I had the foggiest idea what the connection was.

  Joey Rothman wasn't talking, so Louise Crenshaw would have to. Whether she wanted to or not.

  CHAPTER 8

  Wickenburg, Arizona, a one-horse town with a non-snowbird stable population of about 4,500, is divided more or less in half by the usually dry bed of the Hassayampa River. On this dark October night, with the river half a mile wide and flowing bank to bank, the division was much more serious than usual.

  As Shorty drove us down toward the town's single stoplight where two secondary highways intersect, it was clear there was some kind of major problem on the roadway. It looked for all the world like a big-city traffic jam, on a somewhat smaller scale than the ones we have in Seattle.

  "Bridge must be closed," Shorty muttered, stopping the truck and getting out.

  "Sounds like home," I said.

  "I'll go check it out. Wanna come?"

  "No thanks. I've had more than enough of the Hassayampa River for one day," I told him.

  The trip downtown from Crenshaw's house had been a conversational wasteland. Shorty Rojas hadn't wanted to talk, and neither had I. As we drove, however, I made up my mind that I'd get to Phoenix that night, one way or the other, and enlist the help of my attorney, Ralph Ames, in doing whatever needed doing. After all, he was the one who was ultimately responsible for my being at Ironwood Ranch in the first place. It was only fair that he help me fix the problem.

  Shorty came back to the pickup and wheeled it around in a sharp U-turn. "Water's scouring out the bridge supports," he said. "Probably be closed most of the night. The deputy says they've still got one or two rooms up at the Joshua Tree Motel over on Tegner. It's nothing fancy, but it'll be better'n nothin'."

  "Any place at all will be fine," I said. "Thanks for all your help, Shorty. Not only for the ride tonight, but also for what you did with Jennifer this afternoon. Having her go along when you moved horses was just what the doctor ordered."

  "Poor little tyke," Shorty agreed. "Felt real sorry for her. Dropped her off with her mother when I saw Mrs. Rothman packing the boy's things out of the cabin and loading them into the car. As I walked away, Jennifer was getting her ass chewed because her uniform was wet. That's one mean mama," he added.

  "Don't worry about it," I said. "From the delighted look on Jennifer's face when you put her down on the saddle in front of you, I'm sure she thinks the ride was worth it."

  We drove to the Joshua Tree Motel, four blocks from downtown Wickenburg proper. Shorty let me out and drove away, reaching under the seat for the no longer cool Coors. Even though beer isn't my drink of choice, it was still thoughtful of him to wait until I was out of the truck before he opened it.

  The Joshua Tree Motel turned out to be a barely habitable relic from another era. I found myself standing in front of a run-down office where a faded but hand-lettered cardboard vacancy sign still leaned against the glass in one corner of a bug-speckled window.

  The place consisted of a series of crumbling stucco edifices, cabins I suppose, that must have dated from the earliest days of motels. Or before. The AAA rating, if one ever existed, had fallen by the wayside years ago. Tiny arched carports, far too narrow for many contemporary vehicles and ideally suited to Model Ts, were attached to every free-standing unit. Inside the office all available flat surfaces were covered with price-tagged, church-holiday-bazaar-type bric-a-brac and handicrafts.

  At the counter, a pillow-faced, cigarette-smoking manager pushed a leaky pen and registration form in my direction while announcing that the Joshua Tree didn't take American Express-only Mastercard, Visa, or cash. I paid cash, twenty bucks, and considered myself lucky.

  As I finished filling out the form, the office door opened again to admit a harried young father trailed by three obnoxious little kids. The father eagerly snatched up the Joshua Tree's only remaining room. It was, he told me with obvious relief as he began filling out his own registration form, the last available room in town. While the three children raced around the office, screeching with joy at being let out of the car and manhandling the handicrafts, I retreated to the welcome safety and solitude of my own threadbare room.

  Clearly most of the furnishings, interior design, and plumbing were still the original equipment. The room reeked of years of cigarette smoke, mold, and benign-to-active neglect. Dingy wallpaper peeled away from the walls and ceiling. The fitfully meager spray of lukewarm water from the shower head hit me somewhere well below the shoulder blades, but even the short, tepid shower with a tiny sliver of nondescript soap was better than no shower at all.

  Putting the same clothes back on, I tried the phone, an ancient black model with no dial, but was told by the manager that the phones in Wickenburg were all out of order. That wasn't exactly news.

  Unable to reac
h Ames, I sat there being frustrated for several minutes before I realized that part of what was wrong with me was hunger. My afternoon of unaccustomed physical labor hadn't been followed by dinner. I had walked out on my plate of roast beef and mashed potatoes. That was a problem with an accessible solution, so I left my room and walked the four blocks back down to Wickenburg's main drag, where the entire three-block area between the stoplight and the bridge was full of parked cars and milling people.

  If a town is small enough, I guess any excuse for a party will suffice. This sociable group, made up equally of stalled travelers and curious locals, laughed and talked and carried on like a spirited crowd eagerly anticipating a dazzling Fourth-of-July fireworks display. There's nothing like the possibility of a collapsing bridge to bring out the local thrill-seekers.

  Center Street, Wickenburg's main thoroughfare, was lined with several restaurants, all of which were doing land-office business. Every visible table was fully occupied, and each restaurant doorway held a queue of people waiting to be seated. I chose a place at random, the Silver Spur, and managed to work my way across the threshold and into a crowded vestibule.

  Before reaching the hostess, however, I found myself standing in line directly behind the young couple from the motel with their three screaming banshees. Life is too short. Stumbling over the man behind me, I managed to elbow my way back outside. A few feet farther up the street was another door, still part of the Silver Spur, but this entrance opened into the bar. Saloon, the sign said. It was noisy inside, noisy and crowded, but it was my kind of place. There were no kids within hearing distance. Not a one.

  Counselors at Ironwood Ranch had issued all kinds of dire warnings and predictions about what would happen to clients foolhardy enough to attempt returning to the bar scene. Bars were, to quote Burton Joe, "bad medicine," and those who went back were "tempting fate." If drunks wanted to recover, if they wanted to lead lives of upstanding sobriety, they needed to change their ways, their habits, and their friends in order to find other things to do with their time besides drink.

  But I was no longer a client at Ironwood Ranch. Calvin Crenshaw had thrown me out. Tempting fate or not, I wanted a place where I could eat in peace without some hyperactive kid spilling a glass of Coke down the back of my neck or dropping a ketchup-laden French fry on my sleeve. The hell with Burton Joe. I pushed open the swinging door and went inside.

  At first the place seemed almost as full as the restaurant had been, but then two people got up and left. I set off through the crush, aiming at one of the two empty stools at the far end of the polished mahogany bar. I jostled my way through the crowd of happy imbibers and reached one of the two stools just as a middle-aged man in a natty three-piece suit claimed the other.

  "This seat taken?" I asked.

  "No. Help yourself."

  When the bartender came by, I ordered a hamburger and a glass of tonic with a twist. I might have returned my backside to the familiar world of barstools, but, Burton Joe aside, that didn't mean I had fallen off the wagon.

  I sat there fingering my drink, looking around the bar, and feeling a little out of place. It was as though I had been away from bars and drinking for a long time, although in actual fact it had only been just shy of a month. I glanced at the man next to me. Sitting there among Wickenburg's casually dressed tourists and cowboy-type locals, he looked ill at ease in his citified gray suit and dandified paisley tie. Meanwhile, I felt as though the indelible aura of Ironwood Ranch still clung to my body. I couldn't help wondering if it showed, like some kind of religious stigmata.

  "Where are you from?" I asked, turning to the man seated next to me and thinking that a little friendly conversation might make both of us feel less uncomfortable.

  "California," he answered, spinning a newly filled beer glass around and around between the palms of his hands while he stared deep into its depths. I recognized the gesture as a drinking man's version of examining tea leaves.

  "Get stuck by the flood?"

  He shook his head and smiled ruefully. "If you can believe it, right here in Wickenburg is where I wanted to be. It really does seem like the end of the earth. I drove over from the coast this afternoon, planning to surprise my wife and kids, but they're not in their rooms, so I guess the joke's on me. I left a note saying that I'd wait here until they got back."

  There was a hint of marital disharmony in his answer, and I was happy he spared me the gory details. Friendly conversation I could handle. Shoulder crying, no way.

  My hamburger came. I doctored it with liberal doses of mustard and ketchup and ordered another tonic with another twist. The noise level in the room went up a notch as still another group of revelers-locals or stranded tourists, I couldn't tell which-crowded into the already packed bar.

  "Do you have floods like this often?" the guy in the suit asked, erroneously assuming I was on my home turf.

  I started to tell him that I wasn't from Wickenburg any more than he was, but that would have necessitated explaining where I was from and what I was doing there.

  "They're calling it a hundred-year flood," I answered, quoting my local fountain of knowledge, Shorty Rojas. "Personally, I've never seen one like it," I added with what I thought was artful candor.

  The hamburger was all right, if you don't mind fried lettuce, and the French fries were soggy with grease, but food is food if you're hungry enough. I downed the main course and ordered a dish of vanilla ice cream for dessert. It was the first time in years I had ordered ice cream in public. Watching me curiously, the man next to me ordered another Bud.

  "What do you do for a living?" I asked. By asking questions first, I thought I could at least direct the flow of conversation.

  "I'm an accountant. You?"

  But that's the problem with casual conversations. Every answer evolves into another question, tit for tat.

  "I'm a cop," I answered.

  "Oh," the guy grunted. Not, What kind? Not, Where? Just, Oh, and since he didn't ask for any more specifics, I didn't offer them. An old loose-jawed guy one seat over asked Gray Suit for a light, which he didn't have, but the two of them struck up another conversation, leaving me out of it. With the life- and property-threatening flood surging past outside, everyone in the room found it easy to talk to strangers. While Gray Suit was preoccupied, I asked the bartender for a pay phone. He directed me to one in the grungy yellow hallway between the dining room and the bar, but when I picked up the handset, the phone was dead.

  "Phone's out of order," a dishwasher said unnecessarily as he trudged past me lugging a huge plastic tub laden with dirty dishes.

  "I noticed," I said, and made my way back into the bar, where a third glass of tonic had reserved my place. I had just hunkered onto the stool and was in the process of raising the glass to my lips when someone spoke directly behind me.

  "If this isn't cozy. What are you two doing, sitting around comparing notes?"

  I recognized the icy voice. Instantly. It was Karen, my ex-wife Karen, on a rampage. Stunned, I turned to look at her, almost spilling the full drink down my front. What the hell was she doing here?

  Carefully I set my drink back down on the bar. When in doubt, attack, so I took the initiative. "I thought you were going to the meeting."

  There was such blazing fury in her eyes that I almost would have preferred tangling with the rattlesnake in Dolores Rojas' glass jar.

  "Meeting? You're damned right I've been to a meeting, but I'm here to tell you you've suckered me for the last time, Jonas Piedmont Beaumont."

  "Karen," I said reasonably, "it's not what you think."

  "It isn't? I'll tell you what I think. The kids and I took a full week out of our lives. We came all the way over here and squandered our time willingly, on the assumption that we were doing you a favor, helping you get well. That's what all the counselors told us on the phone when they were begging us to come. Just now we've spent a good hour and a half attending a goddamned Al-Anon meeting, while you're already back in the
bars and drinking again."

  "Karen, I…"

  But before I could say anything more, the man in the gray suit, who seemed almost as surprised as I was, managed to find his voice.

  "Honey," he said, standing up, "I think I can explain everything."

  She glared at him, her face awash in tearful anger. "You'd better get started then, David, unless you prefer his company to mine."

  With that, karen Moffit Beaumont Livingston turned on her heel and swept regally out of the Silver Spur Saloon, with gray-suited David, her second husband, trailing miserably behind. Somehow sensing incipient danger, people in the crowd parted, stepping aside to let them pass.

  The bartender came by and collected David Livingston's abandoned glass. "Who was that?" he asked, pausing for a moment to polish the top of the bar in front of me.

  "My ex," I replied grimly. "And her second husband."

  I couldn't exactly call David Livingston Karen's new husband. After all, he had been around for some time now, ten years in fact, although I personally had never before laid eyes on the man. From the way he handled his glass, from the way he stowed away the Bud, I wondered if Karen had screwed up and reeled in a second drinker. It happens; at least that's what the counselors say.

  "Did you know who he was?" the bartender asked, staring at me curiously.

  "I do now," I said.

  The bartender grinned and shook his head. "You look like you could use something stronger." He set a glass of amber-colored liquid on the counter in front of me. "On the house," he added.

  I sat there looking at it for several moments, debating whether or not I should pick it up, when somebody tapped insistently on my shoulder. I turned around expecting to find Dave Livingston standing there ready to punch my lights out. Instead, Shorty Rojas peered up at me.

  He motioned his head toward the door. "Come on," he said. "I got somebody who wants to talk to you."

  Call it fate, call it superstition, but I had the uncanny feeling that somebody was looking over my shoulder, watching out for me, making sure I didn't take that first drink. That Somebody had nothing to do with Shorty Rojas.