Tombstone Courage jb-11

by J. A. Jance

  “Awhile. I don’t know exactly. I don’t remember.”

  “And where did you go after that?”

  As soon as Burton Kimball realized he was actually under suspicion, he snapped. “That’s none of your damn business, Ernie. Now get the hell out of here. And the next time you open your big mouth around me, you’d better either be apologizing or reading me my damn rights. Understand?”

  Without another word, Ernie Carpenter scooped up the dog tags and beat it for the door. Burton sat frozen at his desk until the heavy outside door slammed shut behind the retreating detective.

  Only after it closed did Burton get up. He staggered around the desk and pushed the knob that locked his office door from the inside.

  Then, like a dazed sleepwalker, he groped his way blindly back to his desk. He dropped heavily into the chair and sat there, staring straight ahead while his fingers clung desperately to the polished edge of his desk. It was almost as if his white knuckled grip was all that was keeping him from being flung far into lifeless, timeless space.

  Eventually, the all-enveloping, childlike whimper he had been trying so desperately to suppress managed to work its way to the surface. Forty-five years after the fact, the little boy who had never once cried aloud over his father’s desertion or his mother’s death put his arms on the desk, laid his head on his arms, and sobbed.

  Afterward, he just sat there, dry-eyed and with out moving, totally unaware of the passage of time. Finally, an unexpected knock on the door startled him out of his painful reverie.

  “Go away, Maxine,” he growled. “I don’t want to talk to anybody.”

  “It’s me,” Linda Kimball replied tentatively.

  “Maxine called to see if you’d come home yet. She said she thought something was wrong. I decided to come see for myself. Can I come in?”

  “Come ahead.”

  “I can’t. The door’s locked.”

  Burton got up and stumbled around the desk.

  Even though he hadn’t had a drop of liquor since Tuesday at the Blue Moon, he felt as though he’d been drinking. As though he were drunk.

  When Linda Kimball saw her husband’s ray aged face, she put her hand to her mouth. “Burton!” she exclaimed. “What is it? What’s wrong?

  Burton shook his head and blundered back to his desk. “You won’t believe it,” he said. “Never in a million years.”

  “Yes, I will,” Linda insisted. “Tell me.”

  Joanna PICKED up Jenny from the Bradys’ house at six and drove straight home. She couldn’t wait to strip out of her good clothes and the cumbersome bulletproof vest that had rubbed the skin under her arms until it was raw.

  While Jenny went to her room to do homework, her mother set about cooking dinner. It seemed strange to look forward to an entire evening at home, an evening with no speeches to write or give, no campaign strategy meetings to oversee.

  The sudden sense of decompression was almost palpable. For the first time in months, Joanna Brady had only one job to do instead of two.

  While searching the refrigerator for leftover vegetables to put in the roast-beef hash, she discovered two forgotten Tupperware containers shoved into the far back corner of the bottom shelf. One contained a few desiccated and no-longer-green peas. The second, filled with some kind of mystery food, sported a brilliant layer of fuchsia-colored mold and exuded a powerful odor that somehow reminded her of the glory hole. And at that moment she didn’t want to think about the glory hole or Harold Patterson or Thornton Kimball.

  Firmly shutting the lids on the two containers, Joanna tossed them into the sink, promising to clean both them and the refrigerator right after dinner. It was time to start paying attention to the little things again, to catch up on some of the domestic housekeeping chores that-in the after math of Andy’s death-had been allowed to fall victim to disinterest and neglect.

  Jenny came to dinner promptly when called and slipped silently into her usual place in the breakfast nook. “How was school today?” Joanna asked cheerfully, trying to bridge mealtime’s now-customary silence as she filled Jenny’s plate.

  “Okay, I guess,” the child answered, ducking her chin and not meeting her mother’s questioning gaze. “How was work?”

  What should she answer? Joanna wondered Should she talk about finding Harold Patterson’s body? Should she tell Jenny the old man had possibly been murdered or protect her from that knowledge? Harold had always been one of the kind old men who bought Girl Scout cookies from Jenny’s makeshift stand in front of the post office. He wouldn’t be doing that anymore. Ever. Was Jennifer Brady tough enough to deal with the awful details of one more violent death in her small circle of acquaintances?

  “It was okay, too,” Joanna answered finally, choking on the distancing words and pained by the strained formality between them. Would she and her daughter ever be easy with one another again?

  They both picked at their food. The hash had smelled so enticing to Joanna as she cooked it, but in her mouth the food turned to tasteless sand.

  Finally, giving up, she put down her fork. “I’ve been thinking about what you said,” Joanna ventured tentatively. “About what would happen to you if something happened to me.”

  Jenny, too, put down her fork and regarded her mother through unblinking china-blue eyes. “You mean if you died?” she asked.

  Joanna, dismayed by the child’s directness, struggled on.

  “If a man has two eyes, he doesn’t have to worry that much about going blind. If he loses one, then he starts worrying about losing the other as well. If he worries about it too much; if he lets that fear of going blind become the whole focus of his life, he may stop enjoying the things he can still see with that one good eye. He ends up forgetting that even if the worst happens, even if he loses the sight in that second eye, it doesn’t mean his life is over.”

  “He could always get a guide dog,” Jenny suggested helpfully. “Erin Wallace, one of the girls in my class, is training one of those. A golden retriever puppy. It’s her 4-H project.”

  Joanna smiled. “It’s the same thing with us,” she continued. “You’re so scared about what might happen next, about what might happen to me, that it’s keeping you from enjoying life around you. I don’t think you’d be nearly as worried about me and my new job if you still had both parents. But you don’t. You only have one. It’s a problem, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Jenny agreed, almost in a whisper.

  “So, I’ve been trying to find a solution; a way so that if something really did happen to me, you’d have a place to go and someone dependable to take care of you.”

  “Not Grandma Lathrop,” Jenny protested at once, giving her long blond hair a defiant toss “She treats me like a baby. She still thinks I should be in bed by seven o’clock.”

  “And not Grandma and Grandpa Brady, either,” Joanna added. “They’re wonderful, and they love you. But they’ve already raised one child, and that’s enough. They shouldn’t have to raise another. It’s a lot of work.”

  Jenny nodded in agreement, chiming in with another surprisingly apt observation. “They’re nice but they’re too old.”

  “What would you think about Jeff and Marianne?” Joanna asked carefully. “I haven’t spoken to them about it yet, because I wanted to check with you first, to see what you thought of the idea.”

  “Do Jeff and Marianne even want kids?” Jenny asked.

  “I’m sure they do.”

  “Why don’t they have any, then?”

  “Maybe they can’t,” Joanna replied, knowing from things Marianne had told her in confidence that it was the truth. “Maybe they’ve tried, and they just aren’t able to.”

  “You could ask them,” Jenny suggested.

  “No, that’s private, something to be discussed just between them.”

  Jenny picked up her fork and began drawing aimless lines through the remaining hash that was turning to a ketchup-laden crust on her plate. For once, Joanna managed to stifle the overwhelmi
ng urge to tell Jenny not to play with her food.

  “So what do you think of the idea?” Joanna asked. “Of asking Jeff and Marianne?”

  “Would they let me keep my dogs?”

  “I don’t know. That would be up to them when the time came, something you three would have to talk over and decide on.”

  For some time, Jenny sat thinking. Finally, she shrugged. “I guess it would be okay. That way, I’d have parents to take care of me, and they’d have a child, even if I wasn’t their very own. We’d be like each other’s guide dog, right?”

  “Right.” Joanna nodded.

  Just then Sadie, the bluetick, sprang to her feet and hurried to the door, growling low in her throat while the hackles rose on the back of her neck. Tigger, the pit bull, whose hearing wasn’t as keen, quickly followed suit. It was several minutes before the vehicle Sadie had evidently heard crossing the cattle guard bounced into the yard.

  Joanna was waiting on the back porch when Linda Kimball’s Jeep Cherokee stopped in front of the gate. Dressed in high heels, Linda climbed down and made her way over the uneven side walk to where Joanna was standing.

  “I apologize for just showing up like this, but I couldn’t call before I left home,” Linda said as Joanna ushered her inside. “I told Burt I was going to a PTA officer’s planning meeting.”

  It was one of the ironies of Joanna’s Craftsman home that most guests, even strangers, arrived through the side yard and back door while the front porch and official entryway remained virtually unused. Embarrassed by piles of unwashed laundry, Joanna led her visitor through the laundry room and kitchen and on into the living room. “Can I get you anything?” Joanna asked. “Coffee, tea?”

  “You wouldn’t happen to have any Postum, would you?”

  “No.”

  “Well, nothing then. I just need to talk to you.

  I need to talk to somebody.”

  “What about?”

  “About Burton. Do you have any idea what’s going on?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Ernie Carpenter came by the office and showed Burton his father’s dog tags. Said they’d found those with the skeleton up in the glory hole. Ernie mentioned the dental records, I guess, but he didn’t talk about them very much.”

  “What’s the problem then?” Joanna asked. “I thought that’s what you wanted, for someone to figure out for sure whether or not the body belonged to Burton’s father and to tell Burton with out letting on that some of the information came from you.”

  “That’s true, but it’s not all,” Linda said. She sat down on the couch but remained stiffly upright, nervously running her good hand back and forth across the already smooth material of her skirt.

  “What else?” Joanna asked.

  Linda Kimball took a deep breath. “Ernie Carpenter seems to think Burt may have had some thing to do with Uncle Harold’s death. He asked Burt where he was on Tuesday afternoon. They had a big fight, you know.”

  “Who did?”

  “Burt and Uncle Harold. Earlier in the day. Over Uncle Harold’s proposed settlement with Holly.”

  “So where was Burt? Did he tell you?”

  Linda sighed. “He went to a bar. He hasn’t done that in years, not since the night before we got married. He says he stayed there most of the afternoon.”

  “Which bar?”

  “The Blue Moon. Up the Gulch. But now you’re asking about it, too. I’m telling you, Burton Kimball didn’t kill his uncle Harold. Surely, you believe that, don’t you?”

  “Linda,” Joanna cautioned, “what I believe and what I don’t believe aren’t important. Homicide detectives like Ernie always ask questions. It’s their job. The mere fact that they’re asking some one questions doesn’t necessarily mean they think that person is guilty of any crime. By talking to lots of people, interviewing them and asking questions, they get to the bottom of what really happened.”

  “That’s exactly what I want Ernie to do,” Linda Kimball declared. “I want him to get to the bottom of it and find out what really happened, because if he doesn’t…”

  Sobbing, she broke off. Unable to continue, she went searching in her purse for that same thin packet of tissues, just as she had done earlier that same afternoon.

  “Linda,” Joanna said kindly. “I don’t under stand. What’s wrong?”

  Linda shook her head. “I’ve been married to Burton Kimball for a long time. I know him almost as well as I know myself, but I’ve never seen him the way he was tonight. I can’t stand seeing him like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Afraid.”

  “Afraid of what?”

  “Of himself,” Linda answered. “He’s afraid he did it.”

  “Did what?”

  “He thinks he murdered Uncle Harold and that he doesn’t remember it because he was drunk. Of course, that’s just ridiculous. Burton would never do such a thing. He’s the kindest man in the world. I can’t stand seeing him so upset.”

  “Upset about his father? Upset about being a possible suspect in a homicide investigation?”

  “Both, I’m sure,” Linda assented. “Finding out about his father has been a terrible shock, but I don’t think that’s the real problem.”

  “What is?”

  Linda Kimball’s double chins trembled dangerously. “I’m afraid he’s making this whole thing up, building a case and blaming himself in order to save Ivy.”

  “How and why would he do that?” Joanna asked.

  The other woman stared vacantly off into space for several long seconds. “We met while Burt was in law school, and I was still an undergraduate. Burt refused to get married until after he was out of law school and on his way to having a practice. We’ve had a very good marriage, but I’ve always known about the competition.”

  “Competition?” Joanna frowned, offended by the idea that someone as seemingly upstanding as Burton Kimball might be two-timing his wife.

  “Ivy,” Linda Kimball answered simply. “He’s always worried about her more than anyone else in the whole world. He’s always tried to take care of her, to protect her.”

  “You don’t mean…?”

  “Oh, no,” Linda answered quickly. “Nothing nasty or improper-nothing like that. If he hadn’t cared about her so much, I’m sure he wouldn’t have blabbed to her about Harold wanting to make a settlement. And then, abracadabra, before Harold can make good on what he said, before he can change any of his other arrangements, Harold Patterson is murdered. And who benefits from those changes not being made? Ivy, that’s who! No one but Ivy.”

  “You think your husband is lying about what happened? You think he’s deliberately shifting blame to himself in order to protect her?”

  “No,” Linda Kimball returned somberly. “I think he really believes he did it. He was drunk and doesn’t remember, so now he thinks he was functioning in a blackout. No, he’s absolutely convinced of his own guilt. If I’d been smarter, I would have seen it coming a long time ago.”

  “Seen what coming?” Joanna asked, still in the dark.

  “Don’t you understand?” Linda Kimball pleaded, her voice cracking with suppressed tension. “I’m afraid. Scared to death. And I don’t know what to do.”

  “Please, Linda,” Joanna said, shaking her head. “You must be leaving something out. I don’t understand what you’re talking about, what you’re afraid of.”

  “That if it comes to a choice between Ivy and me, he’ll choose her.”

  “Come on, be serious. That’s ridiculous. You’re married to the man, for God’s sake. You’re the mother of his children. Ivy is just Burt’s cousin. How could he possibly choose her over you?”

  “If Ernie arrests him, if Burt… How is it they say that on TV? Fall? Rap? That’s it, the rap. If Burt takes the rap, Ivy is home free. And if it came to that, I don’t think Burt would lift a finger to help himself. He as good as told me so tonight in his office. And what happens then? Whoever really murdered Harold Patterson
gets away with it, and all because Burton is looking out for his precious Ivy!”

  “Linda,” Joanna began, “believe me, that’s not going to happen.”

  “Oh, yeah? I can even tell you how. Burton says that since he was blind drunk at the time it happened, the worst any judge in the state would give him is probably second degree. He’s sure he’ll be able to plea-bargain that down to simple manslaughter.”

  “You’re serious about this, then, aren’t you?” Joanna said, with sudden understanding.

  Linda nodded. “I’m serious all right, and so is Burt. He loves the kids and me, I’m sure of it. Being abandoned when he was a baby. Feeling like, except for Ivy Patterson, he was all alone in the world. Those things that happened to him when he was a child still have a powerful hold on him. I’m afraid he’d sacrifice Chris and Kim and me in a minute to save her. We wouldn’t starve, I suppose. I could always go back to teaching school, and the church would help us. But still…”

  They sat quietly for a few moments while the draining dishwasher whirred noisily in the kitchen. Jennifer had long since loaded the dishes and disappeared into her own room.

  “Why did you come to me with this?” Joanna asked finally. “Ernie Carpenter is the detective on the case. Why didn’t you go straight to him?”

  Linda shrugged. “I don’t know. I already talked to you about it this afternoon. It just seemed easier. I thought maybe another woman would understand better. A man might jump to the wrong conclusion. He might think something awful was going on between Ivy and Burton. It’s just not like that. My husband is a very honorable man. After what’s…”

  Linda glanced at her watch, then hurriedly rose to her feet. “I’d better get going,” she said. “Those meetings hardly ever last much over an hour. I don’t want him being suspicious.”

  “You still haven’t said what you expect me to do.”

  “I thought if I could get you to see through to what’s really going on, then maybe you could help keep Ernie on track. I wonder if maybe that boy friend of Ivy’s has anything to do with it. Maybe they’re getting married in such a hurry so they can’t be forced to testify against one another.”