Another little zinger. This guy isn’t easy to like, Joanna thought. Stuffing the keys in her pocket, she started toward the door.
“Class starts at eight-thirty sharp in the morning,” Dave Thompson said to her back. “Not eight thirty-five or eight-thirty-one, but eight-thirty. There’s coffee and a pickup breakfast in the student lounge. It’s not fancy—cereal, toast, and juice is all—but it’ll hold you.”
Joanna turned back to him. “You’ll be in class?”
He raised the bottle to his lips, took a swallow, and then grinned at her. “You bet,” he said “I teach the morning class. We’ve got a real good-looking crop of officers this time around.”
Joanna started to ask exactly what he meant by that, but she thought better of it. Her little go-round with Peewee Wright at the truck stop earlier that afternoon had left her feeling overly sensitive. Thompson probably meant nothing more or less than the fact that the students looked as though they’d make fine police officers.
“Any questions?” Thompson asked.
Joanna shook her head. “I’d better go drag my stuff in from the car and unpack. I want to put everything away, shower, and get a decent night’s rest.”
“That’s right,” he said. “Wouldn’t do at all for you to fall asleep in class. Might miss some important.”
As Joanna hurried out the door and headed for her car, she was suddenly filled with misgivings. If Dave Thompson was indicative of the caliber of people running APOA, maybe she had let herself in for a five-and-a-half-week waste of time.
After lugging the last of her suitcases into the room and looking around, she felt somewhat better. Although the room wasn’t as large or as nice as Dave Thompson’s, it was done in much the same style with floor-to-ceiling mirrors covering one wall of both the room and the adjacent bath. The ceilings weren’t nearly as high as they were in the office unit, and the floor was covered with a commercial grade medium-gray carpet. The bathroom, however, was luxury itself. The floor and counter tops were polished granite. The room came complete with both a king-sized Jacuzzi and glass-doored shower. All the fixtures boasted solid brass fittings.
Looking back from the bathroom door to the modest pressboard dresser, desk, headboard, and nightstand, Joanna found herself giggling, struck by the idea that she was standing in a cross between a castle and Motel 6.
Joanna spent the next half hour emptying her suitcases and putting things away. Her threadbare bath towels looked especially shabby in the upscale bathroom. When she was totally unpacked, she treated herself to a long, hot bath with the Jacuzzi heads bubbling full blast. Lying there in the steaming tub, supposedly relaxing, she couldn’t get the Grijalva kids out of her mind. Ceci and Pablo. They were orphans, all right. Twice over. Their mother was dead, and their father might just as well be.
Sighing, Joanna clambered out of the tub into the steam-filled room and turned on the exhaust fan, hoping to clear the fogged mirrors. The first whirl the blades brought a whiff of cigarette smoke to her nostrils. A moment later it was gone. Obviously, her next door neighbor was a smoker.
After toweling herself dry, Joanna pulled on a robe. By then it was only nine o’clock. Instead of getting into bed, she walked over to the desk and picked up Juanita Grijalva’s envelope, which she had dropped there in the course of unpacking. Settling at the desk, she emptied the envelope and read through all the contents, including rereading i. articles she had read earlier that afternoon in the truck stop.
This time, she took pen and paper and jotted notes as she read, writing down names and addresses as they appeared in the various articles. The Grijalvas—Antonio Jorge, Ceci, and Pablo; Jefferson Davis and Ernestina Duffy of Wittmann; of Peoria Detectives Carol Strong and Mark Hansen; Butch Dixon, bartender of the Roundhouse Bar and Grill; Anna-Ray Melton, manager of the WE-DO-YU-DO Washateria; Madeline Bellerman, Serena’s attorney.
Those were the players in the Serena Grijalva case—the ones whose names had made it into the papers. If Joanna was going to do any questioning on her own, those were the people she’d need contact.
It was after eleven when she finally put the contents back in the envelope, climbed into bed, and turned off the light. As she lay there waiting for sleep to come and trying to decide what, if anything, she was going to do about Jorge Grijalva, another faint whiff of cigarette smoke wafted her room.
Her last thought before she fell asleep was that whoever lived in the room next door had to be a chain smoker.
Joanna woke early the next morning, dressed, and hurried down to the lounge, hoping to call Jenny before she left for school. Unfortunately there was a long line at the single pay phone. All her classmates seemed to have the same need to call home.
While she waited, Joanna helped herself to coffee, juice, and a piece of toast. A newspaper had been left on the table. She picked up the paper and read one of the articles. A power-line installation, crew, working on a project southwest of Carefree, had stumbled across the decomposing body of a partially clad woman. Officers from the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department were investigating the death of the so-far unidentified woman as an apparent homicide.
Joanna’s stomach turned leaden. Some other as yet unnamed family was about to have its heart torn out. Unfortunately, Joanna Brady knew exactly that felt.
“You can use the phone now,” someone said.
Joanna glanced at her watch. Ten after eight. “That’s all right,” she said. “My daughter’s already left for school. I don’t need it anymore.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Within minutes of the beginning of Dave Thompson’s opening classroom lecture, Joanna was ready to pack her bags and go back home to Bisbee. Her first encounter with the bull-necked Thompson hadn’t left a very good impression. The lecture made his stock go down even further.
Listening to him talk, Joanna could close her eyes and imagine that she was listening to her chief deputy for operations, Dick Voland. The words used, the opinions voiced, were almost the same. Why had she bothered to travel four hundred miles round-trip and spend the better part of six weeks locked up in a classroom when she could have the same kind of aggravation for free at home just by going into the office? The only difference between listening to Dave Thompson and being lectured Dick Voland lay in the fact that after a day of wrangling with Dick Voland, Joanna could at least go home to her own bed at night. As far as beds were concerned, the ones in the APOA dormitory weren’t worth a damn.
The man droned on and on. Joanna had to fight lay awake while Dave Thompson paced back and forth in front of the class. Joanna had spent years listening to Jim Bob Brady’s warm southern drawl. Thompson’s strained down-home manner of speech sounded put on and gratingly phony. Waving an old-fashioned pointer for emphasis, he delivered a drill-instructor-style diatribe meant to scare off all but the most serious-minded of the assembled students.
“Look around you,” he urged, waggling the pointer until it encompassed all the people in the room. “There’ll be some faces missing by the time we get to the end of this course. We generally expect a washout rate of between forty and fifty percent, and that’s in a good class.”
Joanna raised her eyebrows at that. The night before, Dave Thompson had said this was a good class. This morning, it evidently wasn’t. What had ringed his mind?
“You may have noticed that there aren’t any television sets in those rooms of yours,” Thompson continued. “No swimming pool or tennis courts, either. This ain’t no paid vacation, my friends. You’re here to work, plain and simple. You’d by God better get that straight from the get-go.
“There may be a few party animals in the crowd. If you think you can party all night long and then drag ass in here the next morning and sleep through the lectures, think again. Days are for classwork, and nights are for hitting the books. Do make myself clear?”