Rattlesnake Crossing : A Joanna Brady Mystery (9780061766183)

by Jance, Judith A.

  He paused, then sighed. Again Joanna started to speak, but he waved her off and continued. “You’re so busy down here, Joanna. There’s your work and your friends and there’s Jenny to take care of. I was afraid I’d get lost in the shuffle. That if I was always two hundred miles away, you’d put me out of your mind and never give me a second thought. Now that I think about it, after living through the last two days, it may not be all that easy catching up with you with both of us living in the same town.

  “But I want to give it a chance, Joanna,” he murmured. His eyes darkened in the soft glow of the candle on the table. “I’m a two-time loser in the love-and-war department. I want to get it right this time. I promise not to rush you, not to push you, but please, let me be here. We’ll be friends to begin with. We’ll have an opportunity to get to know one another. I’ve already met some of the people in your life, but this will give me a chance to get to know them better. Like Jeff Daniels and Marianne Maculyea, for instance. They both seem like very nice people, and today is the first time I’ve ever been able to talk to Jeff one-on-one. That’s what we need to do, Joanna. We’ll let some time pass, and then we’ll see where things go from there. Fair enough?”

  When Butch stopped talking, a sudden wave of silence washed across their table and swallowed it whole. He was right, of course, and Joanna knew it. Had he broached his plan to her in advance, she never would have agreed to it. She had liked the status quo and wouldn’t have minded if things had gone on that way indefinitely. She had enjoyed the idea of having a boyfriend, but she had wanted to dodge the complications that would have arisen from having him too close by. She could talk to Butch—she loved talking to him about anything and everything—but because he had been safely out of sight most of the time, she hadn’t had to examine her own heart and feelings too closely. She had felt she could be friends with Butch Dixon without being disloyal to Andy—to Andy’s memory.

  “Well,” Butch said finally, “can’t you say something?”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Try,” he said. The eyes he turned on her were bleak and almost devoid of hope. He had the forlorn look of a convicted felon waiting for the judge to issue an order of execution.

  “It’s just that…well…I’m surprised, is all.”

  “But you don’t hate me for doing it?”

  “No, of course I don’t hate you. I’m glad for you.”

  He settled back in his chair with a sigh of relief. “That’s all I need to know for right now,” he said. “Don’t say another word. Give yourself some time to get used to the idea. In the meantime, let’s eat some of this food before it gets cold. It’s been a long time since Daisy’s.”

  Joanna picked up her fork, but she didn’t touch her food. “Speaking of Daisy’s, there are people around, like Marliss Shackleford, for example, who are going to make a huge deal of this. You just don’t know what it’s like to live in a small town…”

  “That’s all right. I have a pretty thick skin, and I suspect Sheriff Joanna Brady does, too.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “I hope so.” The waiter walked by. Joanna raised her hand enough to catch his eye. “I’ve changed my mind. I think I’m going to have a margarita after all. Blended,” she added. “No salt.”

  “I believe I’ll have one, too,” Butch Dixon told the waiter. “Make mine the same way.”

  Despite a somewhat rocky start, Joanna and Butch went on to have a good dinner. Maybe that one margarita did make a difference. They talked about Jenny and her visit to her creepy cousins in Oklahoma. They talked about Eleanor and George Winfield and postcards Joanna had received from the pair of honeymoon cruisers. They talked, too, about Joanna’s late-afternoon run-in with Marliss Shackleford.

  They followed dinner and that one margarita apiece with several cups of coffee. By eleven o’clock, they were on their way back to University Medical Center when Joanna’s cell phone rang.

  “I have some bad news and I have some worse news,” Dr. Fran Daly said. “Which do you want first?”

  “Start with the bad,” Joanna said.

  “I was right about Clyde Philips having AIDS,” she said. “He had a full-blown case of it, but there’s no sign in his blood work that he was undergoing any kind of treatment. So you were right, too. He probably hadn’t been to a doctor. Let’s hope his ex-wife…”

  “Belle,” Joanna supplied.

  “Let’s hope she hasn’t been to bed with him in the too-recent past.”

  “Let’s hope,” Joanna agreed. “You’ll probably be hearing from her before I do. She’s supposed to call you about releasing the body and making funeral arrangements.”

  “Do you want me to tell her?” Fran asked, “Or do you want to do it? You’ve obviously met the woman. I haven’t.”

  “Maybe not,” Joanna said, “but in this instance, I don’t think your being a stranger is as important as the fact that you’re a doctor. I think it’ll be better if that information comes from a physician. If nothing else, you can at least advise her to have herself checked out.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” Fran said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “If that’s the bad news, what’s worse?” Joanna asked.

  “I was wrong about his committing suicide,” Fran answered. “I found blunt-instrument trauma to the back of his head.”

  “Couldn’t he have fallen and injured himself that way?”

  “Not six or seven times. None of those blows looked like enough to kill him, but they probably rendered him unconscious. The bag and the belt were probably added later to finish the job. I’d say you’d better check both of them for prints.”

  “We will,” Joanna said. “I’ll have my evidence techs go to work on them first thing tomorrow morning. What about time of death?”

  “Sunday night or Monday morning. The room was cool enough that it slowed decomposition.”

  The call ended a few seconds later, and she switched off the phone.

  “Bad news, huh?” Butch asked.

  Joanna nodded. “Very bad news,” she replied. “For several people,” she added. “One of our recent murder victims turns out to have had AIDS, and there’s a good chance he didn’t know it. That means that most likely none of the people who’ve been hanging around with him knew it, either.”

  “Too bad for them,” Butch observed.

  After that, Butch and Joanna drove for several blocks in silence.

  “Life used to be much simpler, didn’t it?” Butch Dixon said at last. “Back in the old days, I mean.”

  “Yes,” Joanna agreed. “Much simpler.”

  They reached the hospital parking garage a few minutes later. “Just let me out here,” she said.

  “Are you going back up?”

  Joanna thought about it. “No,” she said finally. “I think I’ll just get in my car and go home.”

  “Drive carefully,” Butch said.

  “You, too.”

  “See you tomorrow, then,” he added. “Maybe we can get together after work and I can show you the house.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I’d like that.”

  Sitting there with her fingers on the door handle, Joanna was wondering what to say next when Butch leaned over and kissed her. It was a gentle kiss, but one that was spiced with a combination of tequila, salt, and cilantro and more than a trace of salsa. It was a soul-warming kiss that drew her into it, and before Joanna thought about it, she was kissing him back.

  SEVENTEEN

  WHEN JOANNA left University Medical Center, she had every intention of going straight home. But as she drove down I-10 toward Benson, she couldn’t get what Belle Philips had said out of her mind: “Talk to Ruben Ramos.”

  Because of the Arizona Organization of Chiefs of Police, Joanna did know a little about Benson’s police chief, Ruben Ramos—the broad outline, at any rate. She knew, for example, that he was Benson-born and-bred. He had started out as a lowly patrolman in Benson, joining the city police force right aft
er high school and commuting on a part-time basis to the university in Tucson, where he had eventually earned a degree in criminal justice. He had risen through the ranks and had been chief for five or six years. Other than that, she knew almost nothing.

  Turning off the freeway, she started down the hill into Benson. A few seconds later, she spotted a city patrol car parked off to the side of the road just beyond the bowling alley. She drove past, then reconsidered. After making a U-turn in the middle of the highway, she drove back up the hill to the patrol car.

  “Can I help you, lady?” the officer asked, shining a flashlight in Joanna’s eyes without bothering to set foot outside the comfort of his air-conditioned vehicle.

  Joanna whipped out her badge. “I’m Sheriff Brady,” she said. “I was wondering if it would be possible to talk to Chief Ramos.”

  “Is this important? After all, it’s the middle of the night.”

  “You have a dispatcher, don’t you?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Have Dispatch call Chief Ramos on the phone. Tell him I have to talk to him and that I’ll be glad to come by his house if need be. Tell him it’s about his son.”

  With a shrug of his shoulders, the officer reached for his radio. After several exchanges back and forth, he returned it to its clip. “The chief says he’ll come here. He wants you to wait.”

  That struck Joanna as odd. Had she been awakened in the middle of the night by a fellow law enforcement officer needing to speak to her in person, she would probably have asked him to stop by the house or the department. A middle-of-the-night rendezvous in a deserted summertime parking lot would not have been her first choice.

  A minute or two later, an emergency call of some kind came in. With lights flashing, the patrol car sped off to answer it, leaving Joanna alone in the lot. She waited there for another five minutes or so until an unmarked, two-year-old Crown Victoria pulled up beside her. She recognized Ruben Ramos as soon as he rolled down the window.

  “Let’s cut to the chase,” he said without preamable. “What’s Frankie done now?”

  “I’m sure by now you’ve heard about Clyde Philips—”

  “Look,” Ramos interrupted, “when you’re a cop, you raise your kids under a damn microscope. And with three of the four, it worked fine. But Frankie’s something else. I just didn’t want it on his record, okay? The kid’s got a hard enough row to hoe without that.”

  “You didn’t want what on his record?”

  “It wasn’t that big a deal,” Ramos continued. “Booze only, no drugs, nothing like that. If there had been drugs there, too, well, that would have been another story. But kids have been getting adults to buy their booze ever since Prohibition went out the window. Frankie was drinking. So what? He would have had a Minor in Possession and that would have been the extent of it. And Clyde would have been charged with providing alcohol to a minor and maybe an open container. I talked to a few people,” Ruben added. “And the paperwork ended up not going anywhere. Maybe it was illegal. Hell, I know it was illegal, but I don’t know too many fathers who wouldn’t do that for one of their kids. If they could, that is.”

  Taken aback, Joanna realized there was a yawning gulf between what she had come to discuss with Chief Ruben Ramos and what he thought she had come to discuss. “You think that’s what this is all about?” she asked. “That I asked to see you because your son was caught in possession of alcohol?”

  “Isn’t it?”

  Joanna shook her head.

  Ruben stared at her, his eyes narrowing. “Wait a minute here, you don’t think Frankie had something to do with what happened to Clyde Philips, do you? You can’t be serious. It couldn’t be.” He looked incredulous.

  “Tell me about the MIP,” Joanna said.

  “Somebody put you up to this, somebody who’s out to get me,” Ramos muttered. “Who is it? Somebody on the City Council? I probably shouldn’t even be talking to you without having an attorney present.”

  “Chief Ramos, I am not out to get you. I’m dealing with a series of homicides—four, to be exact, including Clyde Philips. A serial killer is loose in Cochise County. I need your help and your son’s help as well.”

  “What kind of help?”

  “You’ve told me yourself that Frankie had some connection to Clyde Philips. I suspect the killer did, too. All I want from your son is for him to give us the names of some of Clyde’s other pals. Was there anyone besides Frankie involved in the incident where your son wasn’t arrested?”

  Ramos shook his head. “No, it was just the two of them. They were driving back to Frankie’s place and Clyde missed a turn. They went into a ditch. No damage. According to what I was told, Clyde wasn’t all that drunk. It wasn’t that big a deal. At least that’s what Eddy said.”

  “Eddy?” Joanna repeated. “You mean Eddy Sandoval?”

  “Come on, Sheriff Brady,” Ruben Ramos said. “Don’t climb Eddy’s frame about all this. He and I go back a long way. He knew about some of the problems Alicia and I have had with Frankie. He was just trying to help out.”

  Joanna wasn’t impressed. “Look, Chief, if I’ve got a deputy looking the other way at drunk-driving offenses, then my department has a serious problem, one I need to address. But for right now, catching a killer takes precedence over everything else. Just tell me what happened.”

  Ruben Ramos sighed. “It was June,” he said. “Right after school got out. Frankie had just graduated. Not top in his class. Not even in the top half, but he did graduate. And I told him—I told all my kids—that as long as they were going to school, they had a place to stay. And the other three all took me at my word. They all graduated from college. One of ’em is even working on a doctorate at San Jose State. But Frankie wasn’t having any of it. He said he didn’t want to go to college, and he sure as hell wasn’t athletic enough to get himself a scholarship the way my other son did. So I told him fine, do it your way. But I also told him that once he was out of high school, he was out of the house, too. I thought that as soon as he had to cut it in the big, cruel world, maybe he’d come to his senses and get his education same as I did.”

  Ramos paused, shook his head, then continued. “So Frankie graduates and he gets himself this little nothing job working for a roofing contractor. I told him the morning after graduation that he had two weeks to find a place to live. And he did, too. Next thing I knew, he was living in this wreck of a mobile home over in Pomerene. The place is a dump, but it was the best he could afford. He told me Clyde Philips owned the place and he was letting Frankie work off part of the rent by doing odd jobs around his gun shop—cleaning, sweeping, that kind of thing. The good thing about it was Frankie could work there at nights or on weekends when he wasn’t doing his regular job.

  “Alicia and I were real happy about that—more power to him. He was making his own way, maybe learning something useful. I was happy about it right up until Eddy Sandoval called me because he’d found Clyde and Frankie in that ditch, with Frankie drunker’n a skunk. Eddy called me as a favor and asked me what I wanted him to do about it. I told him if he could see his way clear to let it slide, I’d really appreciate it.”

  “Then what happened?” Joanna asked.

  “I talked to Frankie about it. I tried to explain to him what a stupid thing that was for him to pull. I told him a Minor-in-Possession conviction would screw up his insurance premiums and all that other stuff for years to come. He just sat there with that damned nose ring on his face, staring at me like I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about, like I was some kind of moron. That’s the problem with kids—they always think they know so much more than their parents do.

  “I just gave up after that. I told him if it happened again, he was on his own. I wouldn’t lift a finger to help him. And that’s that,” Ruben finished. “The long and the short of it. I’ve barely seen him since then. Neither has his mother.”

  For a time, Joanna didn’t know how to respond. Despite Ruben’s protestations of hav
ing washed his hands of responsibility for his son, he was obviously still very concerned. He had volunteered the story of Frankie’s MIP thinking that was behind Joanna’s midnight visit. She agreed the man had every reason to be worried about his son, but not for any of the reasons he thought. Compared to the specter of AIDS, dodging a moving violation was trivial. And what was worrying Joanna right then was what other things Frankie might have done for Clyde Philips besides sweeping in order to work off his rent. Was he only a part-time janitor, or was there a sexual relationship as well?

  “Tell me about your son,” she said at last.

  Ruben shrugged his shoulders. “What else do you want to know?”

  “What’s he like?”

  In the dim light of the bowling alley parking lot, Joanna saw the pained expression that flitted across Ruben Ramos’ broad features. “I wanted Frankie to grow up,” he said hopelessly. “All I wanted was for him to be a man. People used to tell me how sweet he was. I didn’t want him to be sweet. I didn’t want my son to be a sissy, but he is.”

  “What about Clyde Philips?” she asked. “What did you know about him?”

  “Nothing much,” Ruben replied. “He owned a gun shop and he’s dead. I hear he liked to party—at least he used to a while back. I’ve been told that in the last little while he had let up on the drinking. I figured liver damage probably got to him. That’s what happens to guys who hit the sauce real heavy. And the night of the wreck, Frankie claimed Clyde hadn’t had all that much to drink.”

  “Clyde Philips didn’t have liver damage,” Joanna said quietly. “He had AIDS. The medical examiner called me with the autopsy results just an hour or so ago.”

  For a moment Ruben Ramos didn’t make the connection. “You mean AIDS—the disease queers get?” he asked.