Partner In Crime

Eleven

IF YOU’RE A STRANGER IN TOWN and want to dig up a few pertinent details about someone local, it’s a good bet to go where his friends might possibly hang out, keep a low profile, and listen like crazy. Which is why I left Treasure Trove Antiques and headed immediately for the Blue Moon.

As far as I could tell, Brewery Gulch is actually a street rather than a gulch. It looked a bit bedraggled and worn around the edges. In fact, it could easily have doubled for an old-time movie set. Brewery Gulch evidently did once boast a working brewery. In fact, there was a decrepit building bearing a sign that said brewery. But professional beer making in Bisbee, Arizona, had long since passed into oblivion. A single restaurant survived inside the brick-fronted hulk, but little else.

Other buildings along Brewery Gulch were similarly ramshackle. Many storefronts exhibited faded for rent signs. Others were entirely boarded up. Not so the Blue Moon Saloon and Lounge. That establishment was hopping. Thirty or so big, honking Harleys sat angle-parked outside along the curb. I’m an officer of the law. I don’t generally feel welcome in places of business frequented by bikers.

Looking at the building, I saw no reason the Blue Moon, unlike its nearest neighbors, hadn’t closed down years ago. I stepped inside, hoping the place wouldn’t fall down around my ears.

My eyes had to go from bright sunlight to hardly any light at all. When my pupils finally had adjusted, I saw that the interior of the Blue Moon was in better shape than the exterior. Reasonably new linoleum covered the floor. Pedestal cocktail tables scattered throughout the room were jammed with leather-clad, chain-wearing bikers, all of them drinking and smoking. A few were clearly well on their way to being drunk while others were just gearing up. Ironically, the atmosphere reminded me of a Twelve-Step biker bar a friend of mine used to run up on Eighty-fifth in Seattle’s Greenwood District. This establishment, however, was definitely not alcohol-free – not even close.

Beyond the tables, a magnificent wooden bar that dated from the eighteen hundreds ran the length of the long, narrow room. The bar, like the tables, appeared to be fully occupied except for a single seat three stools from the end wall, where dreary, painted-over windows obscured all trace of outside light.

Grabbing that one empty stool, I immediately understood why it had been left unoccupied. My neighbors to the right were two crippled old geezers who looked like escapees from a low-rent retirement home. Two walkers were stowed in what I had thought to be available leg space. Unfortunately, I noticed the walkers the hard way – by banging my kneecap, full force, into the handle of one of them.

“Sorry about that,” the guy nearest me said. “Let me haul that thing out of your way.”

“No,” I said, rubbing my bruised knee. “It’s fine where it is.”

“Hate having to drag that thing around with me everywhere I go, but it beats being locked up at home.”

“What can I get you?” someone asked.

I turned away from the old man to find myself facing what had to be the Blue Moon’s greatest asset – a killer blond bartender. She was a gorgeous young woman whose lush good looks would have turned heads at a Miss America Pageant.

“O’Doul’s,” I replied.

“Sure thing,” she said. I watched as she walked briskly away. My obvious admiration didn’t pass unnoticed.

“Look but don’t touch,” my neighbor advised. “Angie’s happily married, and she don’t take nonsense off nobody.”

I scanned the room for evidence of another bartender, cocktail waitress, or bouncer who might lend Angie a hand if the band of bikers started acting up. I saw no one. Filling glasses at the distant tap, Angie seemed totally unruffled by her roomful of tough customers. Obviously Angie was more than just a pretty face. And body.

When she returned with my bottle of alcohol-free O’Doul’s, Angie brought along two brimming glasses of beer. She set those in front of my neighbors, picked up their two empties, and then turned to me.

“That’ll be three bucks,” she said.

I pulled a ten out of my wallet and handed it over. As she walked back down the bar to the cash register, my neighbor leaned over to me. “It’s getting close to the end of the month,” he confided in a beery-breathed whisper. “Angie’s real good about carrying me an’ Willy till our checks catch up with us the first of the month, if you know what I mean.”

So Angie wasn’t above running a tab. The practice was most likely illegal, but it was something the two guys at the end of the bar really appreciated.

“You from around here?” I asked.

The man’s loud burst of laughter was punctuated by an equally loud belch. “You hear that, Willy?” he demanded, clapping his buddy on the shoulder.

“Hear what?” Willy asked.

“This fella wants to know if we’re from around here.”

Willy grinned at that, and they both laughed uproariously. Since they thought my question utterly hilarious, I took that to mean they were natives.

Angie returned with my change and laid it on the polished surface of the bar. “Are these guys bothering you?” she asked, giving my two bar mates a searing look.

“No,” I said. “Not at all.”

She raised a warning finger. “You and Willy behave yourselves, Arch,” she said. “You bother any of the other customers and you two are out of here.”

“Yes, ma’am,” a seriously chastened Archie replied. “We’ll be good.”

“Wha’d she say?” Willy asked.

“We got to behave,” Archie shouted.

“Right,” Willy agreed, raising his glass. “Absolutely.”

It seemed unlikely that I would glean any useful information from this pair of doddering old drunks, so I turned hopefully toward my neighbors on the other side. No luck there. The person next to me – someone I had actually thought to be a guy – turned out to be a leather-booted, leather-jacketed babe whose face was almost as well-tanned as the cowhide she wore on the rest of her body. When I glanced in her direction, the man next to her glowered back at me in the mirror. Resigned, I returned to Archie.

“Who owns this place?” I asked.

Archie frowned. “Why’d you want to know?”

I shrugged. “Maybe I’m thinking about making some investments around town,” I offered. “Maybe I’d like to buy it.”

“No way!” Archie glowered. “The Blue Moon’s not for sale.”

“Wha’d he say?” Willy asked. The man must have been stone- deaf. As far as I could tell, that was his only line.

“If you know it’s not for sale, you must be the owner then,” I remarked casually.

“Angie and her husband own it,” Archie allowed, nodding toward the shapely blonde. “Bought it off Bobo Jenkins a couple of months ago, and it’s a good thing, too. Bobo was tired of running it. Can’t blame him there. Workin’ too hard’s not good for you. ‘Sides, I hear he’s thinking about running for mayor. You ask me, he’d do a helluva job. If I ever get a chance, you can bet I’ll vote for him, too.

“Bobo might’ve just closed up the place and walked away. Locked the door and throwed away the key. Lucky for us, Angie come along and saved our bacon. She and that husband of hers offered to buy it off him, and he sold, just like that. The place runs a little irregular now. You can’t always count on it being open.”

“Does Angie’s husband work here, too?” I asked.

Archie sipped his beer and shook his head. “Hacker’s an odd duck. He’s a Brit and a bird-watcher besides. Does something with birds. I’m not sure what. So when he goes out into the boonies to do whatever it is he does, Angie sometimes shuts the place down and goes with him. Who can blame her? They’re newlyweds, after all. Why shouldn’t she? But that’s mostly during the week. Weekends the place is open regular, like it should be.

“It’s like I told my good friend Willy here. So what if we can’t always count on the hours? It’s better than having no Blue Moon at all. Me and Willy’ve been coming here for what, forty years now? I’d hate like hell to see it shut down and boarded up.”

“What?” Willy asked.

“Never mind,” Archie told him. “Just drink your beer. The man’s deaf as a post, you see,” Archie explained unnecessarily to me. “Too many years of working with dynamite in the mines. You ever been in a mine?”

“No,” I said. “I never have.” And never wanted to, either, I thought.

“They’ve got theirselves a underground tour over across the way, in case you’re interested,” he suggested. “Takes you right back into the mountain.”

“Thanks, but no thanks,” I said.

What I really wanted was information about Bobo Jenkins. If I could manage to prime Archie’s pump, I guessed he’d turn out to be a veritable fountain of information, some of which might be useful.

“I hear there’s been some trouble around town the last few days,” I suggested innocently.

Archie took a sip of beer and then slammed his glass onto the bar, splashing beer in every direction. “Boy howdy!” he exclaimed. “If that ain’t the truth! Poor old Bobo. Me and Willy’ve knowed that man for years and years, ever since he come to town and bought this joint. In all that time, he wasn’t never sweet on anybody before that Shelley Baxter woman showed up. They just seemed to click, know what I mean?

“Not that I’m prejudiced or nothing,” he continued, “but I like it when whites stay with whites, blacks stay with blacks, and Mexicans stay with Mexicans. That’s how God Almighty meant for things to work. But there weren’t hardly no black women in town for Bobo to hook up with, so he was sort of a lone wolf. Then she turned up and put a smile on his face.”

If Archie wasn’t prejudiced, then Willy wasn’t deaf, either. I kept my mouth shut and let him talk.

“But now Bobo’s girlfriend, this Shelley, up and died at her place down in Naco. That’s Naco, Arizona, not Naco, Sonora, you see. So what do the cops do? This morning they haul poor ol’ Bobo’s ass into the sheriff’s office for questioning. Like they think maybe he did it. Like maybe he’s responsible for what happened to her. I was telling Angie a little while ago, it’s all so much BS. I didn’t use that word, of course, not in front of the lady. But between you and I, that’s what it is. All bullshit – and knee-deep, too.

“Bobo Jenkins may be what they call a African-American, and strong as a mule, but he’s definitely not the violent type. Wouldn’t hurt a fly. Willy and me, we’ve seen him break up some pretty bad fights in this place over the years. Bobo’s so big he could scare shit out of you by just lookin’ at you crooked, but I never saw him hurt nobody – not even when they were raising hell and really deserved it.”

Once Archie got started talking, there was no turning him off, but I was no longer paying attention. I was thinking about a closed-mouthed lady sheriff named Joanna Brady, damn her anyway! All the while she was playing coy with me, her detectives were questioning a suspect. That’s all right. The next time I saw her, I planned to ask her straight out what her investigators had learned in their interview with Bobo Jenkins. And I intended for “next time” to be soon. Now, if at all possible.

Angie had left my change lying on the bar, and so had I. Now I left a dollar tip and pushed the remainder over to Archie.

“Take this,” I said. “You and Willy have one on me. It’ll help tide you over until next month’s checks arrive.”

Archie looked at the money gratefully, as though he’d just won a lotto jackpot. He gave me a heartfelt grin. “Thanks,” he said. “Thanks a lot.”

For a change Willy didn’t bother asking what had been said. He’d seen the money pass along the bar and had figured out on his own what that meant.

“Thanks, fella,” he mumbled, once again raising a glass that still had a few modest dregs of beer in it. “You’re a gentleman,” he said. “A gentleman and a scholar.”

WHEN A DRY-EYED JENNY EMERGED from Dr. Ross’s back office, she was carrying Sadie’s blanket and collar. “Ready?” she asked.

“Which car do you want to ride in?” Butch asked.

“I’ll go with Mom,” Jenny said.

Butch nodded. “You two go on, then,” he said. “I’ll stay here to settle up with Dr. Ross.”

Joanna unlocked the Eagle, and they both climbed in. “Dr. Ross asked if we wanted to bring Sadie home to bury her,” Jenny said. “I told her no. There’ve been too many funerals. I didn’t want another one. That’s okay with you, isn’t it?” she asked.

“Jenny, sweetie, whatever you decide,” Joanna said. “It’s entirely up to you.”

“Okay, then,” Jenny said. She settled back in the car seat and closed her eyes. “Will you tell the Gs?” she asked.

“Yes,” Joanna said. “I’ll be glad to,” although “glad” wasn’t at all the right word.

Several times on the drive home, Joanna had to brush unbidden tears out of her own eyes. Sadie had been a beloved family pet. But it was more than just losing Sadie. Joanna was losing her daughter as well, losing her baby. Because Jenny must have known what was coming when she went racing back into the house to get Sadie’s blanket. Even then, she was thinking about Sadie first – putting the dog’s comfort and well-being before her own.

No, Jenny wasn’t Joanna’s baby anymore. She was a thoughtful, caring, wonderful, surprisingly mature person who put others’ needs ahead of her own. She could probably give me lessons, Joanna thought bleakly. And grateful as she was for all that – for the kind of human being Jennifer Ann Brady was becoming, there was a tiny corner of Joanna’s heart that wanted to turn back the clock so Jenny could once again be the cute, cuddly little girl she had been before.

Once out of the car at home, Tigger raced around the Eagle several times, sniffing eagerly. “He’s looking for her, isn’t he?” Jenny said.

Joanna nodded. “Yes. I suppose he is.”

Jenny called the dog to her and knelt down to hug his neck. “Come on, boy,” she said finally. “Let’s go get Kiddo. We’ll go for a ride.”

Alone, Joanna went into the house. While Jenny was with Dr. Ross, she had called in to the department to let Frank and Dispatch both know what was going on, that she would be out of radio, phone, and pager contact for the next little while. When she picked up the phone, the broken beeping of the dial tone announced that there were messages waiting. For a change she didn’t bother checking them. Instead, she dialed her former in-laws’ number.

“How terrible for Jenny,” Eva Lou Brady said when she heard the news. “Do you want Jim Bob and me to come out and spend some time with her? We’d be glad to.”

“No,” Joanna said, “that’s not necessary. She’s handling it amazingly well. She’s out saddling up Kiddo right now. A long ride will do both her and Tigger a world of good.”

“Sounds just like her daddy,” Eva Lou offered. “That’s the way Andy always was, too. Whenever there was a crisis, he’d go off by himself to think things over and come to terms with whatever it was. Don’t you worry about Jenny, Joanna.” Eva Lou added. “She’s one tough little cookie. She’ll be fine.”

Joanna’s next call was to her own mother. “Oh, dear,” Eleanor Lathrop Winfield said. “Is Jenny all right?”

“She’s fine,” Joanna said.

“That’s the problem with having dogs,” Eleanor went on with barely a pause. “You just get used to them and before you know it, they get old and die on you. Of course, Jenny can always get another one. Heaven knows there are enough unwanted dogs in this world, although why you’d want to have two, I can’t imagine.”

Joanna Brady closed her eyes and wished her mother could somehow be different than she was.

“I just heard Butch drive up,” Joanna said. “Have to go.”

“All right,” Eleanor said. “You let Jenny know I’m thinking about her.”

You may be thinking about her, Joanna thought grimly, but we’re all better off with her not knowing what you’re thinking.

Butch came into the house and dropped his keys on the counter. “I thought we’d bring Sadie home and bury her somewhere out here on the ranch, but Dr. Ross said Jenny didn’t want us to. So I let it go. What do you think?”

“Jenny told me she was tired of funerals.”

“You can hardly blame her for that,” Butch replied. “Where is she?”

“Out riding,” Joanna told him. “She took Tigger along. I thought it was probably the best thing for both of them.”

Butch nodded. They were standing in the kitchen with their arms wrapped around each other when the phone rang.

“Don’t answer,” Butch said. “Let it go to voice mail.”

“I’d better not,” Joanna said, pulling away. “I’ve been unavailable all afternoon. It could be important.”

She plucked the cordless phone off the counter. “Brady/ Dixon residence,” she said.

“Sheriff Brady?” Dave Hollicker asked. He sounded excited.

“Hi, Dave,” she told him. “How’s it going? Are you back from Tucson already?”

“No, I’m still here. At the crime lab. But I’ve got something for you.”

“What?”

“Ever hear of sodium azide?”

“Never. What is it?”

“It’s the propellant they use in cars to make air bags work. It ignites, and the resulting explosion inflates the bag.”

“So?”

“It’s a white, odorless compound that resembles salt. Or sweetener. And it dissolves readily in liquids.”

Joanna felt her pulse quicken. “I suppose it’s also poisonous?” she asked.

“Very,” Dave agreed. “More poisonous than cyanide.”

“And tasteless?”

“I wouldn’t know about that,” Dave answered. “And I don’t know how you’d find out for sure. Who’d be willing to taste it, and how would they tell us what they’d found out after they died? But since it evidently ended up in Rochelle Baxter’s iced tea and since she emptied the glass without noticing, we pretty much have to assume it’s tasteless.”

“If sodium azide is that deadly, how come she didn’t die right away?”

“Ingested poisons don’t work until they’re assimilated into the bloodstream. If you breathe it in, it can kill almost instantly. I’m lucky I just got woozy when I did. Otherwise, you’d be having another Fallen Officer funeral in a day or two,” Dave went on.

“Thank God,” Joanna said. “But tell me, where would somebody get this awful stuff?”

“That’s the really bad news,” Dave Hollicker replied. “The answer is, almost anywhere. It’s not a controlled substance, so you could buy a whole barrel of it if you wanted. You could also rip the air bags out of your car and claim somebody stole them. Or else you could go to your local junkyard. If a car wrecks and the air bags are deployed, it’s not a problem. Once the air bag inflates, what’s left after the sodium azide oxidizes is totally harmless. It’s the undeployed air bags with their canisters of unused sodium azide that are the problem.”

“Don’t junkyards strip the air bags out and sell them?” Joanna objected. “My understanding is that they can be parted out and reused.”

“That’s how everybody assumed it would work,” Dave said. “In actual practice, it’s not that simple. People don’t want to ride around in a vehicle where their life and the lives of their loved ones depend on the effectiveness of somebody else’s secondhand air bag. And, if death or injury occurs in a vehicle fitted with a used air bag, there’s always a potential liability problem. All of which leaves this country with millions of unrecycled air bags sitting in junkyards everywhere.”

“The sodium azide is loose, then?” Joanna asked.

“No. It comes in little aluminum canisters about the size of tuna-fish cans. I’m guessing there are stacks of dozens of those little hummers sitting on used-parts shelves in junkyards in Cochise County alone.”

“Wait a minute,” Joanna objected. “You’ve told me this is a deadly poison. Do you mean somebody could just walk in off the street and pick a can of it off a shelf?”

“You ever been to a junkyard, boss?” Dave Hollicker asked.

“Not recently.”

“Well, that’s pretty much how they work. Around here, junkyards are long on self-service.”

“Can sodium azide be traced?”

“You mean have the manufacturers put markers in it the way they do with explosives?”

“Exactly.”

“I suppose it’s possible, but I’m guessing the automobile industry would be dead-set against it.”

“Because they don’t want to admit the stuff is a potential problem?”

“You’ve got it,” Dave agreed.

“Great,” Joanna said. “It’s readily available, totally untraceable, and deadly.”

“And that’s what was in those tampered sweetener packets that Casey and I brought back from Latisha Wall’s place down in Naco. I’ve got the DPS crime lab’s printed analysis right here in my hand.”

“Have you told anyone else about this?” Joanna asked.

“Not yet. I’ve been cooling my heels around here all day waiting for test results. They dissolved some and ran it through an ion chromatograph. That’s what I have right now – a preliminary report and a tentative identification of sodium azide. They’ll do a confirmation test using mass spectrometry. The lab manager told me we won’t have tentative results on that for another day or so. Official results will take another week. The criminalist I talked to says they can use the same technique on vomit samples if Doc Winfield sends them along, but that takes up to two weeks longer. I thought you should be the first to know.”

“Thanks for calling,” Joanna said. “I’ll get on the horn and tell everyone else.”

“Do you want me to come by the office with this when I get back to Bisbee, or can it wait until tomorrow?”

Joanna thought about the board of supervisors meeting and the looming overtime issue. “No, since it’s just a preliminary copy, have the lab fax one to the department tonight. Nobody will be able to work on it before tomorrow or Monday anyway. Good work, Dave,” she added. “You and Casey deserve a lot of credit for being on top of this.”

“Thanks, boss,” he said, “but isn’t that what you pay us to do?”

Joanna heard the unmistakable pleasure in his voice at having been given a compliment. “You’re right,” she returned. “That’s exactly why we pay you the big bucks.”

By the time she hung up, Butch had gone over to the fridge and pulled out a beer. “I can hear it already,” he said. “They’re sucking you back into work, aren’t they?”

“Not really,” Joanna said. “But now that we know what killed Rochelle Baxter, I have to tell people. I’ll make some calls. It won’t take more than a few minutes.”

She went into the living room. Butch, tired of having the dining-room table constantly littered with work-related papers, had redesigned the living room. Eva Lou Brady’s little fifties-era telephone table had been replaced by a secondhand cherry secretary, where Joanna’s papers could be spread out and the hinged desk surface closed up over them when necessary.

Joanna retreated there and picked up the phone. The first call she made was to Jaime Carbajal.

When Jaime’s wife, Delcia, said, “Hold on, I’ll get him,” Joanna glanced guiltily at her watch. It was only a few minutes past four. Good, she thought. At least it’s too early for me to be interrupting dinner.

When Jaime came to the phone, he sounded out of breath. “Pepe and I were out doing batting practice,” he said. “Frank told me earlier about Sadie. Is Jenny okay?”

“She’s fine,” Joanna returned. “In fact, she’s handling it better than I am at this point, but tell me about the interview with Bobo Jenkins. How did it go?”

“No surprises there,” Jaime said. “Bobo insists he had nothing to do with what happened to Latisha Wall. He claims the two of them were in love and that he had no reason to harm her.”

“Did he mention being afraid that she was about to break up with him?”

“He said something about it, but he claimed things were fine between them when he left her place on Wednesday night. As far as I’m concerned, that remains to be seen.”

“Did you let him know we found his prints on the sweetener packets?”

“No. That’s a holdback. I didn’t want to say anything about that until I had a chance to talk to both Dave and Casey.”

“Makes sense,” Joanna said.

“Did you ask Bobo about Dee Canfield?”

“Affirmative. He claims the last time he saw her was in the gallery on Thursday morning. He said you were there at the same time. He says he has no idea what happened to her afterward, and he has no clue where she and Warren might have gone.”

“He’s right,” Joanna said. “I was there when he was. Now what’s the deal on the search warrant?”

“Not yet,” Jaime said. “I finally found out why the judge didn’t come home last night. Mrs. Moore ended up in TMC with an emergency appendectomy. I talked to their house sitter. She says Judge Moore is supposedly coming back to Bisbee tonight. The soonest I’ll be able to get the warrant and serve it will be later this evening.”

“That’ll have to do, then,” Joanna said. “If you want someone along when you serve it, check with Frank.”

“Will do,” Jaime said. “Now, what about Dave Hollicker?”

The detective listened in silence while Joanna told him what the crime scene investigator had learned. “Does Frank know about any of this?” Detective Carbajal asked.

“He’s my next call.”

She tried Frank’s home number and got no answer. Next she called the department.

“He’s in,” Lupe Alvarez told her. “But he’s got someone with him at the moment. That guy from Washington.”

Beaumont again, Joanna thought. Good enough. Let Frank deal with him.

“Have Chief Deputy Montoya call me when he’s done,” Joanna said. “I’m at home. Anything else I should know about now that I’m available?”

“Yes,” Lupe said. “You’ve had three calls from someone named Cornelia Lester. She says she’s…”

Joanna remembered the name from the next-of-kin contact sheet in Latisha Wall’s file. “I know who she is. Is she here in town?”

“Yes. She’s staying at the Copper Queen, room five-twelve.”

Joanna picked up a pen. “Do you have the number?”

“Yes.”

“You’d better give it to me, then,” Joanna said, once again dreading the thought of having to speak to yet another grieving relative. “I’ll call her back while I’m waiting to hear from Frank.”