Desert Heat (22 page)

‘‘Can we?”

Joanna shook her head. “I don’t know if we can for sure, but we’re certainly going to try.”

“And then those boys will have to take it k, won’t they.”

There was a tough ferocity about Jennifer’s loyalty to her father that made Joanna smile in spite of herself. “Yes,” she agreed. “They’ll have to take it back, and so will Adam York.”

“Who’s he?” Jenny asked.

“Never mind,” Joanna answered.

“Will I have to stay here in the office until the bell rings?”

“No. You’re corning with me. I have lots of errands to run, and you’ll have to come along.” Joanna handed her daughter a tissue. “Here,” she said. “Blow your nose and dry your face. Did I ever tell you about the time I got sent to this very same principal’s office?”

Jennifer blew her nose with a bellowing, foghorn effect that belied her small size. “You?” she asked disbelievingly. “I didn’t think you ever got in trouble.

“It was in the fourth grade,” Joanna told her. “During arithmetic. The boy behind me was new to town. He didn’t stay long, but I never forgot his name—Kasamir Moulter. He copied all the answers off my paper. Mrs. Fennessy gave us both F’s.”

“How come she did that? If he copied your paper, he should have been the one in trouble, not you.”

“She thought I gave him the answers.”

“Even though it wasn’t true?”

“Even though.”

“Couldn’t you prove it was his fault?”

“How? It was his word against mine. Mrs. Fennessy believed him.”

“That wasn’t fair,” Jennifer protested.

“Two against one isn’t fair,” Joanna countered.

Jennifer looked up at her mother for a long time before nodding in understanding. “I’m ready to go,” she said. “Will I come back to school tomorrow?”

Joanna shook her head. “I don’t think so. Mrs. Evans doesn’t want you in school for a day or two. She seems to think you’re a menace to society.”

For the first time, a hint of a smile played around the corners of Jennifer’s mouth. “I am, too,” the child said stoutly. “I did it just the way you taught me. You would of been proud Inc.”

“Would
have,”
Joanna corrected. “Come on.”

They found Nina Evans in the hall. “I’ll take Jenny home for now,” Joanna told the principal. “And I may keep her home tomorrow as well, but when she comes back, you might spread the word that if anyone else hassles her about what happened, they’ll end up dealing me.”

Holding jenny by the hand, the two of them marched down the hall. “Where are we going?” Jenny asked in a small voice.

“Did you eat any lunch?”

“No.”

“First we’ll go by Daisy’s and split a pasty,” Joanna said. “Then we’ll start working our through the list.”

Daisy Maxwell, the original owner of Daisy’s Cafe, had been retired for twenty years and dead for ten, but the restaurant she started still reflected her initial menu as well as the ethnic diversity of Bisbee’s mining camp origins when miners from all over the world had flocked to Arizona’s copper strikes. Along with the usual standbys of hamburgers and sandwiches, Mexican food, Cornish pasties and Hungarian goulash were featured as daily specials at least once a week. Grits were usually available, upon request, with breakfast.

Between the two of them, Joanna and Jenny wiped out most of the huge platter-filling pasty with its flaky outside crust and steaming beef-vegetable stew interior. Afterward they made a series of stops—at the mortuary, the florist, Marianne and Jeff’s—making sure the arrangements were solidified for the funeral on Saturday afternoon. They went by the Sheriff’s Department and spoke briefly with Dick Voland and Ken Galloway, both of whom readily agreed to be pallbearers. Joanna had wanted to speak to Walter McFadden about doing a eulogy, but they were told he had taken the afternoon off and had gone home early.

Everywhere they went—in shops and offices, on the street—people stopped them to murmur their condolences and to ask if there was anything they could do to help.

“Most people are pretty nice, aren’t they?”

Jennifer commented after the fifth such encounter.

Joanna nodded. “Most of them are,” she agreed.

It was late in the afternoon before they finally stopped by First Merchant’s Bank. Sandra Henning, the manager, was working with one of the tellers when Joanna and Jenny walked into the lobby. She looked up when they came through the door and then looked away again, but not before Joanna noticed a crimson flush creep across Sandy’s stolid features.

That’s odd, Joanna thought. She and Sandy weren
^’
t especially good friends, but they had lunched together on occasion and had worked various school and civic committees together. Joanna led Jenny over to the two chairs in front of Sandy’s desk.

‘We’ll sit here and wait for Mrs. Henning to finish,” Joanna said.

It was several minutes before Sandy Henning came out from behind the tellers’ line. She approached her desk uneasily, nervously smoothing her skirt and putting her hands in and out of the pocket on her fuchsia blazer.

“I’m so sorry about Andy,” Sandra Henning said as she eased her heavy bulk into her chair. “And the thing about the DEA, too. We to give them the information they asked for, Joanna. They had a court order. My hands were tied.”

“Don’t worry about it, Sandy. I know how those things work, but I did want to talk to you, one bureaucrat to another, to see if you can help me figure out where that ninety-five-hundred-dollar deposit came from.”

At once the flush returned, and the color of Sandra Henning’s face soon matched the brilliant hue of her blazer. “You mean nobody’s told you?”

“Told me what?” Joanna asked.

Sandy’s eyes swung away from Joanna’s face to that of the little girl who was sitting in the chair with her legs swinging free listening to their conversation.

“Why don’t you go ask one of the tellers for a Candy Kiss, Jenny?” Sandra Henning suggested. “Peggy, the lady down at the end of the counter, usually has a dish of them at her window.”

Jenny looked to her mother for permission, Joanna nodded. “Go ahead,” she said, “the go on outside and wait in the car. I’ll be they in a minute.”

With a shrug, Jenny did as she was told, Both women watched until the child was safely out the door then Joanna turned back to Sandra Henning. “What is it?” she asked, “What aren’t you telling me?”

Sandy ducked her chin into her ample breast. “When Andy brought the money in, Joanna, he had a woman with him.”

“What woman?”

“I don’t know. He never introduced us. Well, that’s not exactly true. He told me her name was Cora.”

“Cora who? I don’t know any Coras.”

“He didn’t tell me her last name, Joanna, but…”

“But what?”

“I thought somebody else would tell you,” Sandy said miserably. “I didn’t want to have be the one.”

A light came on in Joanna’s head. “But you told Ernie Carpenter about her, didn’t you.”

“Yes. And the man from the DEA as well. They asked.”

“Well, now I’m asking,” Joanna said, fighting to stay calm. “Maybe you’d better tell me, too.”

“She wasn’t a nice woman, Joanna,” Sandra said quickly. “And not from around here, either. We don’t see women like that very often.”

“Like what?”

“You know, short leather skirt, boots, big hair, lots of makeup. She was laughing and hanging on Andy, whispering in his ear.”

“They came to the bank together?”

“No. Actually, she was here first. She drove up and waited outside. He came a few minutes later. When he got out of his truck, she hurried over to him, gave him a big hug and a kiss and the envelope.”

“What envelope?”

“The one with the money in it. The ninety-five-hundred dollars in cash. They counted it all out together, right here at my desk.”

Joanna took a deep breath. “I see,” she said. Sandra Henning waited, as though she had no idea what else to say.

“You say she drove up to the bank?”

“That’s right. In one of those cute little Geo Storms, one of the turquoise blue ones. It had Nevada plates. I noticed that much.”

“How old was she?”

“Not very old. Early twenties.”

Joanna nodded. She felt queasy. The lunch-time pasty that had tasted so good hours earlier was a leaden mass in her gut, groaning and wanting to rebel. It was all too much. Everywhere she turned, someone new was accusing Andy of something else. Could any of it be true? She had thought she knew Andy as well as she knew herself, but all around her were people telling her she was a fool, and blind besides.

A storm of tears came bubbling to the su r-face. Joanna wanted to duck out of the bank before they struck. She didn’t want to make a scene in public, any more so than she already had.

“Cora,” she murmured, standing up. “Cora from Nevada, a girl with no last name.”

Sandra met Joanna’s eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“Believe me,” Joanna returned, stumbling blindly away from the desk. “So am I.”

Outside, Jenny was waiting in the car. “What’s the matter?” she asked, as soon as she saw her mother’s face. “Did Mrs. Henning say something mean?”

“I’m okay,” Joanna said.

“But you’re crying.”

“I’m all right.”

Jenny settled back in the car seat and crossed her arms. “Are we going home now?”

Joanna gripped the steering wheel and ought about the question. Finally she shook her head.

“No,” she said. “We have to make one more op along the way.”

“Where?” Jenny asked.

“Before we go home, we’re going to go see Sherriff McFadden.”

SIXTEEN

Walter McFadden’s house sat at the top end of Arizona Street, less than half a block from where town gave way to open desert. Usually he wouldn’t have been there at five o’clock, but Dick Voland had already told Joanna that today McFadden had gone home early. When the Eagle turned onto Cole Avenue, his Toyota was parked in the carport be-hind the redbrick house.

As Joanna stopped near the back gate, she saw a bright yellow Frisbee come sailing off the shaded front porch and fly along just under the eaves of the house. At almost the same instant, a dog launched itself into the yard from three steps up. The dog chased the Frisbee and overtook it halfway across the back yard, leaping up and snagging it out of the air in a graceful, four-foot arch. With the Frisbee clenched tightly in its teeth, the dog tore back toward the front porch.

“Good catch,” Jennifer commented. “I wish Sadie did that good with Frisbees.”

“Well,”
Joanna corrected without thinking. “I wish Sadie did that
well.”

Walter McFadden stood up and sauntered off the porch to greet them, carrying an open can of Coors, a Silver Bullet, in one hand. He walked over to the gate with the dog at his heels.

“Howdy, Joanna, Jennifer. What can I do for you?”

“Can we come in?”

“Sure.”

Stories about the sheriff’s ugly mutt were legend in Bisbee. The dog, an improbable mixture of half-golden retriever/half-pit bull, had destined for destruction before Walter Fadden had come to the animal’s rescue. As a puppy, the dog had belonged to an escaped felon who was discovered and apprehended while living in an abandoned shack in Old Bisbee. When the man was picked and sent back where he belonged, the dog, a starveling pup, was sentenced to death and would have been put down if the sheriff, newly widowed and terribly lonely, hadn’t intervened.

“Are you sure the dog will be okay?” Joanna asked.

The sheriff grinned. “He’s fine. You don’t yr to worry about Tigger. He may be ugly as all sin, but he’s real sweet-tempered.”

Jennifer, following her mother into the yard, peered critically at the dog and made a face. “He is kinda ugly, isn’t he?” she agreed. “Why’d you name him Tigger? After Winnie the Pooh?”

Walter McFadden smiled and nodded. “That’s right. How’d you know?”

“When I was little,” Jenny said,
“Winnie the Pooh
used to be one of my favorite books.”

“It still is one of mine,” McFadden said, “al-though I don’t have anyone to read it to now that my own little girl is all grown up.”

“What kind of dog is it?”

“I always say that Tigger’s a pit bull wearing a golden retriever suit,” McFadden replied seriously. “I’m not sure which was which, but either his daddy or his mama must’ve been a pit bull. That’s where he gets the square nose and that godawful circle around his one eye. The rest of him’s pretty much golden retriever. I don’t know where the jumping comes from.”

“Can I try throwing for him?” Jennifer asked.

McFadden glanced quizzically in Joanna’ direction, and he picked up on her almost imperceptible nod. “You bet,” he said. “As much as you like. There isn’t anything Tigger like: better than having someone new throw the Frisbee for him. You do that, while I talk to your mama.”

McFadden handed the tooth-pocked Frisbee over to Jennifer and then led Joanna up onto the porch and motioned her into the old-fashioned metal lawn chair. “Care for a beer?” he asked. Joanna shook her head. “Is something the matter?”

“I found out where the money came from,” she said. “Sandra Henning down at the bank told me.”

“The woman, you mean?”

Joanna nodded, and McFadden took a long swig of beer. “Doesn’t mean much,” he said. ‘Question is, where’d she get it? The money, that is. And nobody’s been able to track her down so far, either.”

“Why didn’t you tell me about her?” Joanna asked.

“Fact of the matter is, I didn’t know about myself, not until I got back home yesterday afternoon. The DEA guys turned most of that stuff up when they got the court order to at your account. My department’s been playing catch-up ball ever since.”

“So everybody in town knew about her but me,” Joanna commented bitterly.

“Maybe there’s not that much to know,” adden suggested.

And maybe there is,” Joanna returned.

“What’s Ernie Carpenter after really, Waiter’ Andy’s dead. It’s bad enough to lose him, but is anyone interested in finding out who killed him or are they just interested in dragging his name through the mud? If Andy was having an affair, it hurts, hurts like hell to find out about it now. I would a whole lot rather not have known about it at all, but to my way of thinking, that doesn’t matter nearly as much as who killed Andy and why. Those preliminary autopsy results ...”