Tombstone Courage

by J. A. Jance

  “Why, hello, Mrs. Gonzales,” Joanna said, “I had heard you were working here.”

  The woman smiled and nodded. “Me and my husband both. He retired from P.D. up in Morenci. We came home to Bisbee, but he was driving me crazy at home all day. Now we’re both working again, and it’s better.”

  “You’re lucky to have him around to drive you crazy,” Joanna said, hoping the twinge of envy she felt didn’t come across as bitterness.

  “I know,” Isobel said, nodding and leaning on her dust-free mop. “That’s what I keep telling myself. Miss Baxter is out front.”

  Joanna hurried the way she’d been directed. The sunny front patio, warm and sheltered from the wind, was far different from the way she remembered it. For one thing, it seemed smaller, but better, too. The once-bare edges of the terrace were lined with huge pots filled with exotic and unidentifiable growing things, plants Joanna had never seen before and whose origins she could only guess. The rough-hewn picnic tables and home-grown barbecue were gone, replaced by patio furniture that looked too expensive to leave out in the weather.

  A woman with a short-cropped pageboy under a large straw hat sat at the table reading a book.

  “Miss Baxter?” Joanna asked.

  The woman looked up without closing her book. “That’s right. Amy Baxter,” she said curtly. “I must inform you, Sheriff Brady, that Holly’s attorney has been called out of town again this morning. Since he won’t be able to be in attendance, I’m afraid you won’t be able to see Holly. It simply wouldn’t be responsible of me to let you talk to her under those circumstances.”

  “May I sit down?” Joanna asked, letting her hand fall on the back of one of the chairs.

  “Certainly. Excuse me. I didn’t mean to seem rude. Can I get you something—coffee, tea?”

  “I’m fine, thank you. What circumstances do you mean, Miss Baxter? What exactly did you think I wanted to see Holly Patterson about?”

  “The other night, naturally. I read the article in the paper, so I’m well aware of the part you played in averting a terrible tragedy, but still, with the possibility of litigation…”

  “I’m not here about the other night,” Joanna interrupted. “I came to talk to Holly about her father. Harold Lamm Patterson has been found.”

  Amy Baxter breathed a sigh of relief. “Really. You can’t imagine how happy I am to hear that. Holly’s been in a state of perpetual crisis ever since he turned up missing.”

  “I’m afraid it’s not good news,” Joanna hastened to add. “He’s dead. I’m here to give her the benefit of an official next-of-kin notification.”

  Amy Baxter’s face fell. “Oh, my God. That’s terrible. She’ll be devastated. She’s held herself somehow responsible for his disappearance; now I’m afraid…What happened? Was it an accident? A heart attack? What?”

  “If I could just speak to Holly, please.”

  “Of course. I’ll go get her right away.” Amy Baxter started toward the house. “Actually, if you don’t mind, it might be better if we went up to her room. She’s somewhat unstable at the moment, and I’m afraid…”

  “I don’t mind,” Joanna said.

  Amy Baxter stood up. “This way,” she said.

  The interior of the house was magnificent. Outside of pictures in home-decorating magazine articles, Joanna had never seen a more beautiful home—polished hardwood floors, covered here and there by deeply luxurious Oriental rugs. The supple leather furniture blended subtly with the Mission-style interior details into a combination that was both elegant and comfortably inviting. Discreet track lighting on the twelve-foot ceilings accented huge oil canvasses of boldly painted flowers, many of which resembled the plants growing in the pots outside on the patio.

  “Pauli’s really very good, isn’t he?” Amy Baxter said, as Joanna admired a particularly vivid piece at the top of the winding staircase.

  “Pauli?” Joanna repeated stupidly, thinking that must be the name of some artist or school of artists well known enough that she should have recognized the name on hearing it.

  Amy laughed. “Paul Enders, the painter. He’s a costumer really; he only paints for a hobby. We all call him Pauli. This is his house,” she continued. “He’s letting us stay here until this situation gets straightened out. As you’ll soon see, the privacy we’ve enjoyed here has been a real blessing.”

  At the top of the stairs, Amy Baxter turned to the right and led the way down a long corridor to the back of the house.

  “There are better rooms, and Holly could have had any one of them,” Amy said apologetically, “but for some strange reason, this is the one she wanted.” Amy stopped in front of a closed door and knocked. “Holly,” she called. “Are you in there? May we come in?”

  Joanna heard no answering response, but Amy went ahead and tentatively twisted the old-fashioned knob on the door. The knob turned in her hand, and the door shifted open without protest.

  The interior of the room was dark and stiflingly hot compared to the rest of the house, with the look and smell of a sickroom. In the far corner, near tall, drapery-shrouded windows, sat a high-backed rocking chair, creaking slowly back and forth.

  “Holly,” Amy said tentatively. “There’s someone here to see you.”

  “Tell them to go away,” Holly muttered. “I don’t want to see anybody. Leave me alone.”

  “It’s Sheriff Brady,” Amy explained. “She came to talk to you about your father.”

  The rocking ceased abruptly. Suddenly, Holly lurched to her feet. Out of a stark, pale face two deeply troubled eyes stared at Joanna. “Where is he?” Holly demanded. “Tell me where he is. I have to see him. He was supposed to make arrangements for a settlement. He promised. But then he disappeared. No one knows where he is.”

  “I’m afraid your father won’t be able to carry through on any promises,” Joanna said quietly.

  “He’s dead. He died sometime between Tuesday night and now. They’ll be able to fix the time better once they do the autopsy.”

  “My father dead?” Holly Patterson repeated slowly, sinking back into the chair as though her legs no longer had the capability of supporting her. “He’s dead?”

  “Yes, you see…”

  Holly Patterson doubled over, as with a sudden attack of appendicitis, clutching her abdomen and sobbing. “Nooooooo. He can’t be dead. I won’t let him. I never wanted him dead. Never!”

  Amy Baxter moved forward quickly and knelt beside the chair. “It’s okay, Holly. Hush now. Everyone knows it’s not your fault.”

  “Oh, but it is,” Holly groaned. “Don’t you understand? It is my fault. All of it. I didn’t want him dead. I just wanted him to tell me to my face that he was sorry for what he did to me. That’s all. I never should have come back to this terrible place. Never!”

  “Please, Holly,” Amy begged, “don’t take it all on yourself. You didn’t do it.”

  “How did he die?” Holly was asking, her mouth still muffled by her hand. “Please don’t tell me he committed suicide. I can stand anything but that.”

  Joanna could see no sense in pulling punches. Better to let all the bad news out at once and give her a chance to start assimilating it while she had someone like Amy Baxter there to help as needed.

  “We’re investigating his death as a possible homicide,” Joanna answered carefully. “I wanted you to hear that from someone in an official capacity….”

  “You mean he didn’t kill himself then?” Holly asked, suddenly sitting up straight and pulling her hand away from her face. “You mean someone else did it?”

  “That’s the way it looks….”

  Holly Patterson let out a long sigh. “Thank God. I couldn’t have stood it if he had done it himself. It would have driven me crazy, but if somebody else did it…”

  “Good girl,” Amy said, rubbing the back of Holly’s neck as if to remove some of the tension. “Let it go. Don’t hold on to it.”

  Holly Patterson closed her eyes and leaned back into the n
eck rub. “I should go see Mother about this,” she whispered softly. “Mother will know what to do.”

  Amy caught Joanna’s eye, shook her head, and held the fingers of one hand to her lips while she continued massaging Holly’s neck with the other.

  “You can’t go see your mother, Holly. I’ve already explained that to you. Your mother is dead, remember? She died five years ago. We’ve been over to the cemetery and seen her grave.”

  “But I saw her. The other day in town, remember?”

  “That was your sister, Ivy. She looks just like your mother used to look when you last remember her.”

  “That can’t be my sister. Ivy’s a little girl. She’s a baby.”

  “Of course she is,” Amy said soothingly. “A little baby. Why don’t you rest awhile now, Holly? When you wake up later, maybe we can make better sense of this.”

  Holly nodded but said nothing. There was a minute or so of silence. By the end of it Holly was sound asleep.

  Amy turned to Joanna. “I could call Mrs. Gonzales, but if you don’t mind, would you help me get her back into the bed? She hasn’t been eating right, and she’s barely been sleeping at all during the night. After something like this during the day, though, she’ll nap for hours.”

  Holding Holly Patterson between them, Amy and Joanna wrestled the dozing woman from the chair to the bed, then Joanna followed Amy down both the hall and stairs.

  “What’s wrong with her?” Joanna asked.

  “What isn’t wrong with her is probably a better question,” Amy Baxter said. “It’s just what I was afraid of. Being here has been way too hard on her. You’re looking at a textbook case. Start with a dash of incest, add in a mostly dysfunctional family, stir in some recreational drug use and a fistful of self-loathing, and you end up with a very troubled woman.”

  “Ernie Carpenter is the homicide detective on her father’s case. He may need to talk to her. Do you think she’ll be able to handle answering questions?”

  Amy shrugged. “That’s anybody’s guess. He’s more than welcome to try, but I don’t know how much good it will do. Sometimes she’s better than others. Have him call first to see what kind of shape she’s in.”

  “She acts like she’s on drugs,” Joanna observed thoughtfully.

  Amy Baxter answered with a nod. “Not recently, though. She still suffers from flashbacks, occasional echoes of LSD from her misspent youth.”

  Amy Baxter and Joanna were standing at the bottom of the stairway with Amy Baxter’s hand still on the polished mahogany banister.

  “Thanks for all the help,” she said.

  “It was no trouble,” Joanna returned.

  “I hope you won’t think me too ungrateful, but I hope you never find out who did it. I’m glad that asshole father of hers is dead, and I’m hoping that whoever killed him gets away scot-free, because, whatever Harold Patterson got, that dirty old man deserved it!”

  “What exactly did he do to her?” Joanna asked reflexively.

  Amy Baxter had no business answering, but she did. “He raped her,” she answered, her words as brittle as shards of ice. “He raped his own daughter from the time she was two years old. So whatever happened to Harold Patterson is fine with me. He may be dead and out of the picture now, but you saw Holly upstairs. She’s an emotional cripple, and she’ll live with the damage he did to her for the rest of her life.”

  Leaving the sheriff to find her own way out, Amy turned and hurried back up the stairs. As Joanna drove out through Casa Vieja’s swinging iron gates, she was thinking about what Amy had said concerning Holly’s past drug use.

  Was Holly Patterson really having drug-related flashbacks, or were her mental problems something else entirely, something more closely related to what had gone haywire with her mother years ago? Had Emily Patterson’s mental instability passed genetically from mother to daughter?

  Actually, from what Joanna personally had seen and heard during the course of the last few days, all the Patterson women seemed to be several bubbles out of plumb.

  It was only after she had started down Cole Avenue toward the Warren Cutoff that Joanna remembered what she had forgotten to mention. Holly Patterson had been so upset by the news about her father that Joanna had failed to bring up the existence of that other victim.

  What exactly was the connection between those two bodies? Joanna wondered. Surely, more than sheer coincidence had caused both corpses to turn up in the same glory hole. But in order to discover the connection between them, it was necessary to understand the relationship between all the other pieces on the board.

  Joanna could have just left it alone. After all, it was Ernie Carpenter’s case. She could either go sit in her corner office and begin trying to understand next year’s budget, or she could try sticking her nose in where it didn’t necessarily belong.

  At the intersection of Cole Avenue and Arizona Street, it was decision time. If she drove down the Warren Cutoff, when she reached Highway 80, she could either go home or head back to the office. Or she could go straight up Cole Avenue and keep right on not minding her own business.

  After only a moment’s hesitation, she switched off her left-turn blinker and headed for Eleanor Lathrop’s favorite haven, Helene’s Salon of Hair and Beauty.

  Twenty-Five

  WHEN JOANNA entered the beauty shop, Helen Barco stood stolidly behind the shop’s single chair twisting pink plastic permanent-wave curlers into a client’s hair while the woman handed her individual pieces of tissue-paper wrappers. Both women glanced up in surprise as Joanna made her entrance.

  “My land, girl!” Helen exclaimed. “Whatever did you do to your face?”

  In her hurry to dress that morning, Joanna had barely glanced in her own mirror. Now, seeing her battered reflection in Helen Barco’s brightly lit vanity, she was startled to see how readily apparent the damage was. Put simply, Sheriff Joanna Brady looked like hell.

  “It’s nothing much,” she said with a shrug. “Just a black eye.”

  “You call that nothing much?” Helen rolled her eyes. “People straight out of the emergency room look better than that. I know you don’t have an appointment, but if you can wait around a few minutes, maybe I could squeeze you in between Mrs. Owens here and my next lady. We should certainly do something about that eye of yours. What would your mother say?”

  “Thanks anyway, Helen,” Joanna answered, biting back a comment that was sure to go straight to her mother. “I really don’t have time today. I came by to ask a favor.”

  “What kind of favor? I’ve already donated a permanent and manicure to the senior citizen’s auction, if that’s what you’re here asking about.”

  “No. It’s nothing like that. You do get People magazine here, don’t you?”

  Helen nodded. “People, Good Housekeeping, and Ladies’ Home Journal. I tried that New Woman for a few months, but my ladies didn’t like it very much. They’re mostly older, you know, and don’t take to some of these newfangled ideas.”

  “Do you keep any of the back issues?”

  “Some. Why?”

  “Do you still happen to have the one with the article about Holly Patterson in it?”

  “Absolutely!” Helen answered. “I wouldn’t let that one out of my sight. It’s not every day that Bisbee gets that kind of coverage, thank the good Lord. Naturally, all the dealers in town sold out every last one of their copies. I was really lucky I had my subscription.”

  “Could I maybe borrow it from you?” Joanna asked. “I never had a chance to read it, and now I think I ought to.”

  “Sure,” Helen said. “As long as you promise to bring it right back. But how come you need to read it now? That was weeks ago. What’s going on?”

  Joanna knew from things her mother had told her over the years that Helene’s was a place where beauty often took a backseat to small-town gossip. It wouldn’t hurt Helen to have a real scoop for a change. It was possible that the useful flow of information might travel in more than one direct
ion. Besides, the next-of-kin notifications had already been completed.

  “We found Harold Patterson,” Joanna said. “He’s dead.”

  “No. Heart attack? Stroke?”

  “We’re not releasing any information on cause of death at the moment,” Joanna replied in what she knew Helen would consider a deliciously tantalizing nonanswer.

  Helen’s eyes widened. “Really? Why, forevermore! Who would have thought it! The strain musta been too much for the old duffer’s ticker for him to just up and keel over like that. You wait right here, Joanna. I’ll go get you that magazine.”

  Because flat lots are at a premium in Bisbee, Helen Barco’s house was built on a hill. The shop, built in what was formerly the garage, was in the basement, while the living quarters were upstairs. Huffing and out of breath from climbing stairs, Helen returned to the shop a few moments later and handed Joanna the dog-eared issue of the magazine. Written across the front cover in red Magic Marker were the words DO NOT REMOVE.

  “You’re sure you don’t mind if I take this?” Joanna asked.

  “Like I told you before, Joanna, honey,” Helen said. “You can take it wherever you like, just so long as you bring it back. I mean, after all, you’re the sheriff, aren’t you? If you can’t trust the sheriff…”

  Helen broke off in sudden confusion, thinking, no doubt, of Walter V. McFadden who hadn’t been nearly as trustworthy as he appeared.

  “Well, anyway,” she continued. “I’d sure like to have it back when you finish with it. That issue could end up being a collector’s item someday. You’re positive you won’t let me do something about that face of yours?”

  “No,” Joanna said, heading for the door. “Not today. I’m in too much of a rush.”