by J. A. Jance
Dedication
For Dale
Contents
Dedication
The Old Blue Line
Announcement Page
About the Author
By J. A. Jance
Copyright
About the Publisher
The Old Blue Line
I KNEW THE two guys were cops the moment Matty walked them over to their booth. I usually work the bar in the afternoons and early evenings, but the daytime cook had turned up sick. In my experience, it’s easier and better for my customers to bring in a substitute bartender than it is to bring in a substitute cook. Besides, that’s where I started out in this particular restaurant—as a short order cook—and it wasn’t much of a hardship for me to be back running the kitchen. As the two newcomers walked past, I had just put up an order and was waiting for Danielle to come pick it up.
Given that the Arizona Police Academy is just up the street, we get a lot of cops at the Roundhouse Bar and Grill. There’s always a rowdy crew of newbies—the trainees. They tend to show up in groups and hang out together in the bar in the evenings after class. Next come the instructors. They’re mostly older guys, some of them long retired from active police work, who tend to arrive for meals mostly in ones or twos. Not thrilled with retirement, they’re glad to get out of their houses for a while and have a chance to hang out in the restaurant, drinking coffee, chewing the fat, and talking over old times.
These two gents looked to be somewhere in the middle—too old to be trainees and too young to be instructors. They were both middle-aged and severely overdressed for Peoria, Arizona. It may have been the beginning of November, but it was still plenty hot in the Valley of the Sun. These guys were decked out in a way that set them apart from the rest of my regular customers—white shirts, ties, and jackets, the whole nine yards. Yes, and cop shoes, of course. I can spot those a mile away.
After they were seated, one of them said something to Matty—a question, most likely. She looked at me over her shoulder before she answered. When she gave the men their menus, they glanced at them, shook their heads, and immediately handed the menus back. As Matty headed for her hostess station she rolled her eyes in my direction. I knew what she meant. People who come into restaurants at lunchtime and occupy booth space without ordering anything more than coffee are not high on anybody’s list in the restaurant biz.
I had taken a new order down from the wheel in the pass-through and was starting on two plates of burgers and fries when my cell phone rang. After answering it, I perched it on my shoulder and held it in place with my jaw so I could talk and still use my hands to cook. It’s not easy doing two things at once, but in restaurant kitchens, sometimes you have to.
“They’re cops,” Matty explained unnecessarily. “Said they’d like to have a word with you.”
In my experience, cops who want to “a word” usually want a lot more than that. “What did they order?” I asked.
“They’re just having coffee.”
“Right,” I said. “I thought so. It’s lunchtime. In that case, they can take an old cold tater and wait until I’m good and ready to deal with them.”
It was almost an hour later before the kitchen finally slowed down. I ventured out into the dining room, wiping my hands on my apron as I went. My overdressed friends were still drinking coffee.
“You wanted to see me?” I asked.
Just then one of my model trains zipped by overhead. In keeping with the Roundhouse name and theme, multiple trains run on tracks laid on a shelf that a previous owner had hung high on the walls of both the dining room and bar. The tracks come complete with tunnel entrances painted on the partition that separates the two rooms. There are three trains in all—two freight and an old fashioned passenger—all of them running at the same time. People often worry about the trains colliding, but they needn’t. That’s because the shelf holding the tracks is built so close to the ceiling that it’s impossible for an onlooker from below to see that there are actually three separate tracks.
“What’s the deal with the trains?” one of the visitors asked.
“I happen to like trains,” I told him with a shrug, “and so did one of the previous owners. That’s why he named the joint the Roundhouse, that and the fact that the bar in the other room is actually round. I was told you wanted to have a word. What about?”
The guy who was evidently the lead reached into his pocket, pulled out an ID wallet and held it up for my inspection, allowing me to see both his badge and his name—Detective Andrew Jamison of the Las Vegas Police Department.
“I’m Detective Jamison and this is my partner, Detective Shandrow,” he explained, pocketing his ID. “We’re here investigating the death of a woman named Katherine Melcher.”
“Never heard of her,” I said.
“I believe you and she were married at one time.”
“Then there’s some kind of mistake,” I told him. “My ex-wife’s name was Faith.”
“She changed it,” Jamison replied. “As I said, her name was Katherine, but she mostly went by Katy.”
“She’s dead?” I repeated. “Faith is dead? You’re kidding. What happened to her?”
“She was murdered, Mr. Dixon,” Jamison said. “This is a homicide investigation. Are you sure you want to discuss it here?”
I looked around the room. The biggest part of the lunch rush was over, but there were still plenty of diners in the joint, most of them watching with avid curiosity while the drama played itself out. Behind the counter, Danielle had just clipped another incoming order onto the wheel.
“Sorry,” I said. “My cook called in sick. I’ve got a kitchen to run. The afternoon cook comes on at four. I can talk to you then, but I don’t see why I should. What does any of this have to do with me? Faith and I have been divorced for years. She married someone else—my former best friend, actually—so why are you talking to me?”
“Because of this,” Jamison said. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a piece of paper, unfolded and handed it over. It was a printed out version of an e-mail. The time stamp said it had been sent on October 15 at 2:00 A.M., Mountain Standard Time, a little over two weeks earlier. I scanned through the text.
Dear Deeny,
If anything ever happens to me, tell them about Butch. He’s been calling me lately. He’s never forgiven me for leaving him, and I’m afraid he’ll do almost anything to get even.
Katy
Deeny. Short for DeeAnn, maybe? I remembered that Deeny had been a grade school chum of Faith’s, and I also believed she was an attendant at our wedding, but that was all I knew. Obviously no matter what Faith’s name was now, she and Deeny had stayed in touch.
“According to Ms. Hallowell—DeeAnn Hallowell—Katy had complained to her that you were harassing her by phone—that you’d been threatening her.”
The whole idea was preposterous. “You think I did this?” I demanded, rattling the paper in the cop’s face. “You think I’m responsible for Faith’s murder?”
“Are you?” Jamison asked mildly, but watched me closely as he did so. “Less than a day after Katherine Melcher wrote this, she was dead. Could you tell us where you were on the night of October fifteenth?”
I could barely make sense of it. Faith was dead, but her name was Katherine Melcher now? Who the hell was Melcher? Where had he come from? And what had become of Rick Austin, my supposedly best friend, who had run off with Faith and married her the moment our divorce was final?
I handed Jamison back the computer printout, and that’s when I saw the trap because, on the night in question, I had been in Las Vegas
attending a mystery writers’ convention—a thing called Bouchercon. I had driven up and back, stayed at the Talisman, where I had a coupon, rather than at the convention hotel out on the Strip. I had registered under the name people call me, Butch Dixon, rather than under my real name, Frederick Wilcox Dixon, because I was worried someone would notice the F.W. Dixon connection and think I was somehow related to the woman, masquerading as a man, who wrote all those old Hardy Boys books I devoured as a kid.
If Faith or Katy or whatever her name was now had died that night, and if she had accused me in advance of doing the deed, I knew I was in deep caca.
“Duty calls,” I told the two cops. “I’ve got food to cook. You’ll have to excuse me.”
I spun on my heel and made for the kitchen. On the way, I stuffed both hands deep in my pockets. I could feel they were shaking, something I didn’t want the visiting detectives to see.
At the end of the counter I had to dodge around Matty to get by. “Hey,” she said. “Are you all right? Is something wrong?”
“Everything’s fine,” I muttered as I hustled past her, not much caring if she believed me or not. I snapped the order off the clip and slapped it down on the prep table. Two chili burgers with onions and cheese. I stuck two patties on the grill and stirred the pot of chili that was simmering at low heat over a burner.
Faith was Katy now, and she was dead? Maybe she had changed her name to Katy because she realized the utter hypocrisy of being called Faith while, at the same time, being utterly faithless. Maybe the irony was too much, even for her. I said her new name aloud, just to try it out. “Katy.” If I learned to call her that, maybe it would help me maintain the distance I had managed to create between my hurt back then and my new life now.
Dead or alive, I was still a long way from over what the woman had done to me. She had wiped me out—emotionally, financially, and any other “ly” word you care to mention. She had made off with all our savings, maxed out our credit cards, and then filed for a divorce claiming spousal abuse. She had been allowed to stay in our condo on the condition that she keep up the maintenance and payments. She didn’t, keep up the payments, that is. When she finally got around to selling it, the court decree ordered her to split the proceeds with me. Naturally, that didn’t happen, either. Instead, she and my good friend Rick lived in our unit rent free for months without making any of the necessary payments. They moved out only when they were evicted, having lost the place to foreclosure. In other words, I didn’t get a dime.
And then, to add insult to injury, Faith and my mother stayed in touch. More than in touch. They were pals. Even though the ink on the divorce decree was barely dry when Faith and Rick married, my parents nonetheless attended the wedding. Talk about feeling betrayed. Had I still been in Chicago, I think my head would have exploded, but by then I had taken my sad story to my grandmother—my mother’s mother—and thrown myself on her mercy.
My grandmother, Agatha, and her daughter, Maggie, could not be less alike. My mother is your basic self-centered shrew. Grandma Hudson, on the other hand, was a wise and loving person—a giving person. She and Gramps had moved to Sun City years earlier, while I was still in school. A few months after they bought a place there, Grandpa took sick and died. Once he was gone, Grandma Hudson announced that she had no intention of sitting around waiting to die. Instead, she went looking for a business to run.
When she bought the restaurant, it was already called the Roundhouse. Having been badly managed, it was a run-down wreck, just up the street from the railroad tracks. She was able to buy it for a song because the previous owner just wanted to get out from under it. At the time, Peoria, Arizona, was a sleepy little burg miles from its boisterous neighbor Phoenix.
Grandma Hudson fixed the Roundhouse up and ran it by herself for ten years. She and Gramps had paid cash for their duplex home in Sun City. Once she bought the restaurant, she rented out the Sun City unit, reserving it as her “toes up” house when it came time for that. Instead, she chose to live in the two bedroom apartment above the restaurant.
By the time Faith finished cleaning me out and I came dragging my weary, demoralized butt to Arizona, Grandma Hudson was eighty-three years old. She took me in as a full partner in the business and let me share her upstairs apartment. Grandma hung around long enough to teach me the ropes before finally turning me loose while she went back to her place in Sun City to relax and retire. The problem is, she had no idea how to go about doing that. Once she hung up her apron and quit working for good, she only lasted three months. When she died, she left me as sole owner of a house I was too young to live in and a bustling restaurant in the middle of what was fast turning into a thriving community.
Matty stuck her head into the kitchen and startled me out of my unseeing stupor. “You might want to take a look at those hamburger patties,” she warned. “They’re starting to look like charcoal, and they smell worse.”
She was right. While standing there lost in thought with the spatula in my hand, I had let the two hamburger patties burn to such a crisp that I’m surprised the smoke alarm didn’t go off. I grabbed them off the grill, tossed them into the garbage, and started two more.
Pay attention, I told myself firmly, but that proved to be almost impossible. Once that initial order of chili burgers was up in the window, I called Rocky, the evening cook, and asked him to come in a couple of hours early, so I could deal with the cop issue. Serving decent food is my livelihood. I couldn’t afford to turn out slop just because someone was under the mistaken impression that I had knocked off my ex-wife. Fortunately, Rocky lives just over a mile away, so he was there in no time.
Twenty minutes after returning to the kitchen, I walked back into the dining room where the pair of visiting cops had yet to break down and order some lunch.
“How about if we go into the bar,” I suggested. “Early afternoons are quiet in there. We’ll have a little more privacy.”
While leaving the booth, the two detectives didn’t bother delivering the money for their check to Matty at the cash register. Instead, they left enough to cover their coffees and a very stingy tip on their table. I was not favorably impressed. Not only were these guys cops, they were cheap cops at that.
The booths in the bar date from a much earlier era. They’re Naugahyde cocoons that were built with privacy in mind. I don’t much like them because the servers can’t see inside them without standing directly in front of the table. The problem is, I don’t want to pony up the big bucks to tear them out and start over.
That afternoon, Amanda, one of my cocktail waitresses, was manning—well, womaning, I suppose—my usual bartending shift. She looked up questioningly as we came into the room. I shook my head, letting her know to leave us be. These guys had already spent the better part of two hours occupying one of my booths, with only two cups of coffee to show for the trouble. If they thought I was going to treat them to something else, they were mistaken.
I was not in a good mood. Faith had left me in a world of trouble when she left me years earlier. This sounded like same song second verse.
“What do you want?” I asked. “And should I have an attorney present for this discussion?”
“It’s just a friendly chat,” Jamison assured me. “No need to be all hot and bothered.”
“I am hot and bothered,” I told them. “In fact, I’m downright pissed. My wife left me, wiping me out financially in the process. She ran off with my best friend, cheated me out of my share of the proceeds of our condo, left me in a world of hurt for not paying taxes, and now she’s telling the world I’m the one who killed her? Please. If I were going to knock her off, I would have done it years ago—before she let our condo go into foreclosure and before I had to declare bankruptcy just to get out from under the mountains of credit card debt she ran up.”
“You sound angry.”
“You’re damned right I’m angry.
Now what do you need from me to get this straightened out? Besides, in cases like this, isn’t it always the husband who did it? What about her current husband? What about Rick Austin, her ex-husband and my ex-best friend, who also happens to be a wife-stealing bastard? What about him?”
“Our records indicate that Richard Austin and Katherine divorced three years ago when she first came to Vegas. The timing involved in the move would suggest that she came to Nevada and established residency for the purpose of obtaining a quick divorce from Mr. Austin.”
“Well well,” I said. “Fair enough. What goes around comes around. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. So let’s cut to the chase. How about telling me what happened?”
“Her husband, Cliff Melcher, reported his wife missing on the morning of October sixteenth when he returned home from a business trip. Her body was found two days later in her wrecked Cadillac Escalade, crashed into a gully northeast of Searchlight. The M.E. tells us she died of blunt force trauma that isn’t consistent with injuries due to a car crash. She was already dead when the car went into the wash. So far we have no known suspects, but we’re currently investigating all her known friends and associates.”
“Including her former husband?”
Jamison nodded.
“Does that mean I’m a suspect?”
“At this point you’re a person of interest,” Jamison conceded. “One of several, in fact.” He paused long enough to pull a tiny notebook and the stub of a pencil out of his jacket pocket. The gesture served notice that our friendly chat was no longer friendly—not in the least.
“Do you mind telling me where you were that weekend?”
There was no point in lying. I had no doubt that these two guys already knew exactly where I was the middle of October.
“I was in Las Vegas,” I said, an admission that I had the opportunity to commit the crime. The cops already knew I had plenty of motive. “I was there for a convention—Bouchercon.”
