Minor in possession

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 reach 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.

I waved my thanks to the bartender with an apologetic shake of my head. "Some other time," I said, and followed Shorty out into the street. His truck was nowhere in sight.

"Who is it?" I asked, figuring that Calvin Crenshaw had changed his mind and was ready to call the sheriff's department.

"Joey Rothman's mother," Shorty said. "She wants to talk to you."

"Marsha? What does she want with me?"

"Not his stepmother," Shorty answered. "His real mother."

"Where did she come from?" I asked.

I knew vaguely that Joey Rothman's mother existed, but she had been conspicuously absent during Joey's family week.

"She drove down from Sedona this afternoon. She just got in a little while ago."

"Where's Sedona?"

"North of here, a hundred miles give or take. She tried coming down the Black Canyon Highway, but she had to backtrack and come around the other way because of the river."

Karen had told me about the kinds of pressure Ironwood Ranch personnel had exerted on her in order to get her and my kids to drive over from Cucamonga. If Joey's mother lived only a hundred miles away, how had she managed to resist the hard sell and stay away from Joey Rothman's family week?

"Where is she now?" I asked.

"I left her back at your motel and told her I'd come find you."

"Why?"

"Didn't figure she'd be able to pick you out in this crowd."

"But what does she want with me?"

Shorty shrugged. "Beats me. I just follow orders. Lucy told me to bring her to you, and that's what I'm doing."

A decrepit-looking, dark-colored Fiat 128 was parked in front of my unit at the Joshua Tree Motel. Shorty's looming pickup stood guard behind it.

"That's her," he said. "I'll leave you two alone to talk. I've got to get back home."

He hurried into the Ford and it turned over with its customary roar. Tentatively, I approached the Fiat and knocked on the driver's window. There was a lone woman sitting inside the car. She opened the window a crack.

"Are you Joey's roommate?" she asked.

"Yes," I answered. "My name's Beaumont. J. P. Beaumont."

"And you're the cop, right?"

"Yes."

"Will you help me?" I assumed she meant would I help her get out of the car. I reached for the door handle but the door was locked. She made no move to unlatch it.

"We can talk in my room if you want to, Mrs. Rothman."

"My name is Attwood," she corrected. "Rhonda Attwood. I took back my maiden name when I divorced Joey's father. But before I get out of the car, I want your answer, yes or no. Will you help me find the man who killed my son?"

"That's a police matter, ma'am," I said politely. "This isn't my jurisdiction. It's not my case."

"That's not what I heard."

She was peering up at me through the open crack of window with a look that was almost conspiratorial while the glow of the halogen streetlight behind her made a lavender halo of her lush blonde hair.

"Maybe you'd better tell me what you heard," I said guardedly. "This is all news to me."

"Joey said he thought you were a plant, a narc working undercover. I'm sure that's why he tried to kill you."

Women drive me crazy. They're forever trying to tell you things while leaving out vital details, those critical specifics that make what they're saying understandable.

"Why who tried to kill me? Lady, you're talking in circles."

"Joey, of course. My son. Who did you think? Ringo belonged to him, you know."

"I don't know anything of the kind," I responded irritably. "Besides, who the hell is Ringo?"

"The snake. Joey's rattlesnake. I ought to know. I lived in the same house with that damned thing long enough that I'd recognize Ringo anywhere, even in somebody else's glass jar a hundred miles from home."

Understanding dawned. Joey's snake.

"You're right," I said. "You'd better come inside. We need to talk."

"But will you help me?" she insisted. "I'm not getting out of the car unless I have your word of honor."

At that point, I would have agreed to almost anything. "Yes," I told her. "You have my word."

I reached down to take hold of the door handle, but Rhonda Attwood didn't wait long enough for me to prove myself a gentleman. She had already unlocked the door, opened it herself, and was getting out.

She straightened up and looked around uncertainly. She was a medium-sized woman, five-five or so, with a dynamite figure.

"Which is your room?" she asked.

"Right here. The one with the burned-out porch light."

She started toward the door. If she felt any concern about entering a strange man's motel room alone at night, it certainly didn't show. She paused on the unlit doorstep and waited for me.

I closed the car door behind her, first checking to be sure both doors were properly locked. They weren't, and so I locked them. After all, I'm from the big city.

She laughed at my precautions. "Thanks, but I'm sure the car would have been fine," Rhonda Attwood said, as I opened the door to let her in. "Nobody's going to bother stealing a broken-down old wreck like that."

Considering Ringo's unannounced presence in my room at Ironwood Ranch earlier in the day, potential car thieves were the least of my worries.

"Better safe than sorry," I murmured.

I glanced around the room nervously, trying not to appear too obvious about it, but checking for snakes just the same. Right about then I felt a certain kinship with the little old ladies in this world who are forever checking in their closets and under beds, searching for prowlers.

Maybe I was being paranoid, but I wanted nothing more at that moment than to be out of Arizona and back home in Seattle, where the rattlesnake population is exceedingly low.

And where Karen Moffit Beaumont Livingston can't make unscheduled surprise appearances.