Minor in possession

CHAPTER 9

In terms of quality, the Joshua Tree Motel is a long way from, say, the Westin Bayshore, and I was embarrassed to show anyone, especially an unknown lady, into that dingy hovel of a room, but Rhonda Attwood appeared to be totally unaffected by the bleak surroundings. Without waiting to be invited, she settled herself at the spindly-legged kitchen table with its chipped and mottled gray Formica top.

Seeing her out of the car and in the light, I was startled by her uncanny resemblance to Marsha Rothman. At forty-one or so, Rhonda was a good ten years older than her husband's second wife, but they were both uncommonly attractive women-small-boned, narrow-shouldered, blue-eyed blondes with similarly delicate facial features and classic profiles. Both wore their hair in below-the-ear bobs, but Marsha's flawless honey blonde was courtesy of Lady Clairol herself. No hair dared wiggle out of place in Marsha Rothman's chiseled, precision cut. Rhonda's seemed more nonchalant, breezy, and genuine. The ash blonde was highlighted by marauding streaks of premature silver from Mother Nature's own paintbrush.

"What's the matter?" she asked, settling back against the ragged plastic-covered chair and regarding me curiously. "You look like you've seen a ghost."

"It's just that you're so much alike," I mumbled in confusion.

Her lips curled into a tight smile with just a hint of rancor. "You mean Marsha and me? You're not the first to mention it, and I don't suppose you'll be the last. JoJo Rothman never drew a faithful breath in his life, but he's certainly true to type."

"JoJo?" I asked.

"He goes by James now. He got rid of JoJo when he got rid of me. He always picks blue-eyed blondes, but I've got some bad news for Marsha Rothman. She's going to lose her gravy train. JoJo ditched me around the time I hit thirty. She'll reach that soon enough herself. He'll give her the slip then, too. Women age, you see. JoJo doesn't."

She paused for a moment, unabashedly meeting my gaze and giving me an opportunity to study her more closely. Everything about Rhonda Attwood seemed contradictory. Her skin glowed with a healthy, wholesome vitality that showed little assistance from makeup of any kind. A softly feminine pink angora cardigan was worn over a garish Powdermilk Biscuit T-shirt and faded, belted jeans. Her feet were shod in much-used waffle-stomping hiking boots with thick leather thong laces.

A complex woman, I thought, internalizing the full paradoxical effect. Rhonda Attwood was pretty, not beautiful, but capable of making a stunning appearance. At the moment she simply chose not to.

"I don't believe you came here to tell me about your former husband's martial difficulties with his present wife," I said, tentatively, trying to bring her back to the subject at hand.

She nodded, allowing herself to be herded. "You're absolutely right, Mr. Beaumont. I came because I need your help. I came to talk to you about Joey. About my son, and, as I said outside, to ask for your help."

Until she spoke Joey Rothman's name aloud, there had been little outward evidence of the grieving mother about her. Her distress was muted and kept a firmly under control. People who succeed in not showing emotions under these circumstances come from the two opposite ends of the grieving spectrum. Either they genuinely don't care about what happened or they're afraid to show it for fear it will tear them apart.

"I'm sorry about what happened," I said, trying to smoke out which definition applied.

She looked at me appraisingly. "I suppose you think I ought to cry or something, don't you," she said.

"We're all different," I assured her. "No two people react in exactly the same way."

She nodded thoughtfully. "I'm sure most mothers do cry, but I can't anymore. You see, I used up all my tears years ago. Maybe Joey finally died last night, at least his body did, but he's been gone a long, long time. The only thing left for me to do is bury him. After that, I plan to get even."

Her voice was low and husky and deadly serious.

"Get even?" I asked, playing dumb. "What do you mean?"

"I think you know what I mean. Like in the Old Testament. An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. I'm going to find whoever did this to him, and I'm going to take them out."

Her words seemed totally at odds with a lady of her demeanor, but there was a chilling certainty about them, a dogged, unemotional resolve, that put me on edge. Determined women who decide to even scores scare hell out of me.

"That's a job for professional police officers," I cautioned.

Unblinking, she stared at me. For a scary moment or two I wondered if maybe that was why she had come looking for me. Maybe she was operating under the misapprehension that I was somehow personally responsible for her son's death. She had laid a narrow purse on the table in front of her. With tension tightening across my shoulders, I gauged how thick the bag was and wondered if it was big enough to hold a handgun. Unfortunately, the answer was yes.

"I had nothing to do with Joey's death," I said.

She arched one finely shaped eyebrow. "Oh? Convince me."

"Convince you of what? That I'm not a narc? That I'm a drunk, dammit, just like everybody else at Ironwood Ranch? We're all drunks or addicts, one way or the other. Believe me, I wasn't there on some kind of undercover assignment. I was there under protest, on doctor's orders."

"That's not what Joey thought," she countered.

"I don't give a damn what Joey thought. He was wrong."

"He said you didn't seem that sick to him, that you made his suppliers nervous."

"I made them nervous? That's a laugh. Why the hell would he tell you something like that?"

"He was afraid you'd do something that would blow the whole operation. He thought he might have to leave the state for a while until things blew over."

"But he wasn't afraid you'd turn him in," I suggested.

"Evidently not," she replied, but the piercing blue-eyed gaze never left my face.

"When did Joey tell you all this?"

"Last night," she said.

"What time?"

She paused before she answered, her blue-eyed gaze cool and assessing. When the answer came, it seemed as though she had reached a decision about me.

"Eleven o'clock maybe. It was fairly late, but I didn't notice the time exactly. He called to ask me for money and a place to stay after he got out."

"He asked you for money? How much?"

"Ten thousand dollars. He said he wanted to go somewhere and start over."

I whistled. "That's a lot. Did you agree to give it to him?"

"Are you kidding? I may have been his mother, but that doesn't make me stupid. I knew what my son was."

"And what was that?"

She smiled bitterly. "A liar and a cheat. A chip off the old block."

"You mean like his father?"

She nodded again. "JoJo uses people too. I'm sure Joey had absolutely on intention of starting over someplace else. Not really. That was a lie to see if I would bite. He would have used the money to bankroll himself into some other deal, and if he got caught again, I'm sure his father could have fixed it again."

"You mean the plea-bargained MIP?"

"That's right. His father's a big-time developer with lots of friends in high places."

"What exactly did they catch him doing?"

"When he got sent to Ironwood Ranch? I suppose he was dealing drugs, but I'm not sure. JoJo passes information along to me only on a need-to-know basis, and he doesn't think I need to know much."

"It doesn't sound like you approve of the plea arrangement."

"I don't," she returned coldly, "but no one bothered to ask my opinion. If my son really was a drug dealer, he should have been in jail, not at Ironwood Ranch. I know they call it a hospital, a treatment center, but it looks more like a resort to me."

I couldn't help feeling a certain grudging admiration for this tough-minded woman. In my experience, most mothers of punks opt for whatever plea bargains are available when their little boys get caught doing what they shouldn't. That made Rhonda Attwood a very unusual specimen. Mentally ticking off what I had learned so far, I went back to something she had said earlier, while we were still outside, her unflinching assumption that Joey had tried to kill me by turning his pet rattlesnake loose in or cabin. That too wasn't exactly standard mother-of-scumbag behavior.

"So you think Joey tried to kill me?"

"Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it was nothing more than a practical joke and he was only trying to scare you."

"It worked," I said grimly. "It scared hell out of me."

She laughed ruefully. "I know how you feel. Joey turned Ringo loose in my house once as well. It was a full week before I found him hiding behind the detergent in the laundry room. Joey claimed it was all a joke, that he wanted to see what I'd do."

"Nice kid," I interjected. "I'd have moved out of the house, or moved him out."

"I couldn't, at least not then. I tried to get him into counseling, though, but his father wouldn't hear of it. He said there was nothing wrong with him."

She closed her eyes and seemed to wander far away from the Joshua Tree Motel. I watched her for a moment, marveling once more at what a tough, remarkable woman she was. Eventually I dragged her back to the present.

"Supposing it wasn't a joke. Why would I have been the target?"

"I'm sure it was just like what he said on the phone. The suppliers thought you were a narc and they told him to get rid of you."

"Instead, someone got to him first."

Rhonda nodded pensively while a shadow of grief flitted briefly across her face, then her blue eyes hardened once more in the harsh light from the overhead fixture.

"You have to understand, Mr. Beaumont, Joey Rothman was my son, but I lost him years ago. I had to emotionally disassociate myself or be a party to my own destruction. No. I didn't promise him the money, and I told him he wasn't welcome to come live with me, either. I couldn't afford to be drawn into his machinations."

Hers was an odd perspective. She seemed to differentiate between her loss of Joey and his death. They were two separate and distinct occurrences. For some reason, his death hurt her less than whatever had happened years earlier, although the anguish in her voice was real enough.

"How did you lose him?" I asked, following her lead.

She shrugged hopelessly. "That question has plagued me for years. The divorce, I guess, although sometimes it seems like the trouble started well before that. At the time of the divorce, I couldn't take him, not in good conscience. I didn't have the money. I never would have been able to provide for him financially the way JoJo could-private schools, the swimming pool, his friends."

"Money isn't everything," I said.

"If you don't have any, it seems like it. If I had fought for it hard enough, the court probably would have ordered JoJo to pay child support, but collecting it would have been something else. It was easier to give in. By my letting his father have custody, Joey was able to have some continuity in his life, to stay in the same school system, have the same friends. It hurt like hell, but at the time I thought I was doing what was best for all concerned."

She paused and bit her lower lip. Talking about her divorce and losing custody still bothered her. She smiled sadly. "I wish you could have seen Joey when he was little, when he was smart and kind, both. He was only five when he rescued a Gila monster that came washing by on a piece of driftwood during a flash flood. I was standing on the bank and watched him do it. He managed to catch the branch as it floated by and drag it to high ground."

"A Gila monster?" I asked. "Aren't they just as dangerous as snakes?"

She laughed then. The memory of that experience seemed to ease her pain. "That one wasn't. It was so pale I thought it was dead, but Joey said it would be all right. And sure enough, after the sun warmed it and it dried out, it got up and wandered away.

"And that was the beginning of Joey's interest in snakes and lizards. He pored over books, begged us to take him to zoos and museums. He wanted to be a herpetologist when he grew up. A herpetologist or a writer. He caught Ringo that same year, up near our summer cabin in Pinetop. The snake was just a baby then. Joey dragged it home in a quart jar. I didn't find out until years later that it's illegal to keep snakes in captivity, but by the time I figured it out, it was too late. I didn't live there anymore. It was no longer any of my concern. Marsha said he could keep it."

"I see," I said.

"Do you?" she demanded, her voice rising until it verged on shrill. "I'm not so sure I do. Marsha got everything-JoJo, Joey, the house, although they have a different house now-with another child they needed a bigger one-and the cabin in Pinetop."

To say nothing of the snake, I thought. I said, "Where did she come from?"

"Marsha? She was my babysitter once." There was no concealing the bitterness in her answer. "I had begged JoJo to let me go back to the university and get my degree. Marsha lived two houses up from us in Paradise Valley. She was still in high school when they started screwing around behind my back. It took me three years to figure out what was going on. I'm a slow learner."

"Nice guy," I said. "Like father, like son."

"I've wondered sometimes if Joey didn't know about it before I did. I asked him once. Of course he denied it, but that's about when he started going haywire. By the time I got the divorce, even if I had gotten custody, I'm not sure it would have made any difference. I think by then the damage with Joey was already done. Besides, by then I had too many problems of my own." Close to tears, she stopped, swallowing hard.

"Giving up isn't a crime," I said.

She smiled gratefully. "Thank you for saying that, Mr. Beaumont. Maybe it isn't, although I've blamed myself for years. I tried to get him back later, after I got through school and was back on my feet financially and emotionally, but whenever he came to stay with me, he lied and stole and cheated. At first I chalked it up to genetics. Later on I told myself it was because of the drugs. It would kill me if I had to think that it was my fault."

I tossed her the nearest, handiest platitude. "I'm sure it wasn't."

"Maybe not. I hope not," she added.

Rhonda Attwood sat quietly for a moment before continuing. "So that's how it happened. I locked Joey out of my heart so he couldn't hurt me any more, the same way I locked out his father. And now, I don't have anything else to lose. Nothing."

"And with nothing left to lose, you're forming a one-woman posse, is that it?"

"Why not?"

"Because it's illegal for one thing and dangerous for another."

"I don't have any faith in the criminal justice system, Mr. Beaumont. They let my son off, and they'll let his killers off the same way. That's why I came to you for help."

"You haven't been listening, dammit. I can't help you. You need to go to the detective on the case. The one from Prescott. Talk to her."

"A lady detective?"

"Her name's Delcia Reyes-Gonzales. She's with the Yavapai County Sheriff's Department up in Prescott. She seems to know her stuff. I ought to talk to her myself and let her know where I am."

Abruptly, Rhonda Attwood stood up. "Let's go, then," she said.

"Go where?"

"I'll take you there, to Prescott. We'll talk to the detective together, if that's what you want."

"Now?"

"Yes. Why not? They say the phones here could be out of order all the rest of the night. I want to get moving on this."

That wasn't exactly what I'd had in mind, but it did give me a way to get out of Wickenburg. "Tell me one thing," I said. "What exactly do you intend to do once you catch up with these characters, the drug suppliers or whoever the people are you think are responsible for Joey's death? What are you going to do then? You said earlier that you planned to ‘take them out.' You didn't really mean that, did you?"

"Didn't I?" she returned.

It wasn't a reassuring answer. In fact, it was a downright crazy answer. Nice middle-aged ladies don't go up against big-time drug dealers, at least sane middle-aged ladies don't. Fortunately, I'm not a psychologist, and it wasn't my job to talk her out of it.

Still, crazy or not, Rhonda Attwood had wheels and she was offering me a one-way immediate departure ticket out of Wickenburg, Arizona. Maybe in Prescott I could rent another car and still get to Phoenix before morning to see old Mr. Fixit, Ralph Ames.

"So let's go," I said. "What are we waiting for?"

I knew at the time that I was misleading her some, offering an implied alliance that I had no intention of honoring, but I let her draw her own conclusions. If anyone asked me later, I'd tell them that I had just gone along for the ride. Literally.

It turned out not to be such a wonderful bargain.

Happy to escape my one-night sentence at the flea-bitten Joshua Tree Motel, I left the room key on the table, locked the door behind us, and followed Rhonda Attwood outside to her Fiat for what turned out to be one of the most hair-raising rides in a lifetime of hair-raising rides.

To begin with, my six-foot-three body was never intended to fit inside a 128 Spider. At first I thought I'd have to spend the entire trip sitting with my head cocked to one side. Fortunately, once the car was moving, the convertible's canvas top ballooned up enough that I was able to put my head into the bubble created by air movement. That way I could sit up straight, but it also cut my line of vision down to a few feet in front of the car and an acute angled view of what was directly outside the rider's window.

Highway 89 climbs abruptly up from the desert floor, winding around the flank of a mountain locals call Yarnell Hill. That's what they call it, but believe me, it's a full-fledged mountain.

Rhonda Attwood drove with the heater turned on high and the driver's window wide open. Wind whipping through her hair, she pushed the aging Fiat like a veteran sports-car-rally driver, coaxing more speed and life out of that old beater than she should have been able to.

My left shoulder was jammed against hers. There was only one spot in the V-shaped foot well big enough to hold my feet, and they promptly went to sleep. I felt like a horse with blinders on, for all I could see was the vast darkness falling away from the side of the car and the fast-dwindling lights of Wickenburg and Congress Junction twinkling fitfully in the valley far below.

Every time Rhonda swung around a bend in the road, the Fiat clung like a bug to the white line on the far outside edge. Vainly groping for a steadying handhold, I wondered what would happen if the wheels slipped off the blacktop. How far would the car plunge down the pitch-black side of the mountain before it came to rest on solid rock? Or maybe in the branches of some scruffy desert tree.

Twice, with no warning to me, we came around hairpin curves only to have Rhonda set the car on its nose because traffic was flagged down to only one lane. Looking out the driver's window as we crept past, I caught glimpses of muddy slides where stove-sized boulders-three-man-rocks they call them in the landscape business-had broken loose from the steep embankment and washed down onto the roadway to block the inside lane.

I don't like backseat drivers, and I most particularly don't like being one, especially when I'm hitching a free ride in somebody else's vehicle. At one point I mentioned offhandedly that the Yavapai County Sheriff's Department was most likely a twenty-four-hour operation and that they'd still be there once we arrived in Prescott, no matter how long we took making the drive. Rhonda didn't acknowledge the comment one way or the other, and she didn't ease her foot off the gas pedal, either.

So I shut up and hung on for dear life, remembering all the while what my mother always used to say: Beggars can't be choosers.