“What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to write down everything you can remember about the night Serena Grijalva died. I’m sure you’ve already given this information to the investigating officers, but since mine isn’t an official inquiry, I most likely won’t have access to those reports. There’s no real rush. I’ll come by tomorrow or the next day and pick it up.”
“Wednesday’s the day before Thanksgiving Butch said, pocketing the card once more. “I suppose you’ll be going home for the holiday?”
Joanna shook her head. “No, Jenny and the Gs are coming up here for the weekend. We’ve a got super-duper holiday weekend package at that brand-new hotel just down the street.”
“The Hohokam?” Butch asked. “It’s only been open a couple of months. I’ve never been inside. It’s supposed to be very nice.”
“I hope so,” Joanna said.
“And who all did you say is coming, Jenny and the Gs? Sounds like some kind of rock band.”
Joanna laughed. “That’s my daughter and her grandparents, my in-laws. Ever since she was able spell, Jenny’s called them the Gs.” She paused for a moment. “Speaking of names, where did Butch come from?”
Running one hand over the bare skin on his shiny, bald skull, Butch Dixon grinned. “My real we was Frederick. People called me Freddy for short. I hated it; thought it sounded sissy. So when as six, my uncle started teasing me about my new haircut, calling me Butch. The name stuck. I’ve been Butch ever since, and I wore my hair that way for years, back when I still had hair, that is. When it started to disappear, I gave Mother Nature a little shove in the right direction. What do you think?”
Joanna smiled. “It looks fine to me. I’d better be heading back,” she said, standing up. “I’m taking you away from your other customers.... “
“Customer,” Butch corrected, holding up his hand.
“And I’ve got a reading assignment to do before class in the morning.”
“And I’ve got a writing assignment,” he said patting his shirt pocket. “I’ll start on it first thing tomorrow morning. Do you want me to call you when it’s finished?”
“Please. And in the meantime, if anything comes up that you think is too important to wait, give me call.”
“Sure thing,” Butch Dixon said. “You can count n it.”
By the time Joanna drove back into the APOA parking lot, it was past eleven. Checking the clerestory windows on both the upper and lower breezeways, she saw that some were lit and some weren’t. It was possible some of her classmates were still out. Others might already be in bed and asleep.
Stopping off at the lower-floor student lounge, Joanna found the place deserted. She made straight for the telephone. It was far too late to phone High Lonesome, but Frank Montoya had told her that he never went to bed without watching The Tonight Show.
“How are things going?” she asked, when he answered. “I tried calling earlier, but neither you nor Dick Voland could be found.”
“Well,” Frank said slowly, “we did have our hands full today.”
“How’s that?”
“For one thing,” he replied, “somebody sent a petition signed by sixty-three prisoners as that you fire the cook in the jail.”
“Fire him? How come?”
“They say the food’s bad, that they can’t eat and that he cooks the same thing week after week.”
“Is that true?” Joanna asked. “Is the jail food ally as bad as all that?”
“Beats me.”
“Have you tried it?”
“No, but ...”
“These guys are prisoners,” Joanna said. “We supposed to house and feed them, but nobody said it has to be gourmet cuisine. You taste the food, Frank, and then you decide. If the food’s fit to eat, tell the prisoners to go piss up a rope. If the food’s as bad as they say, get rid of the cook and find somebody else.”
“You really did hire me to do the dirty work, didn’t you?” Frank complained, but Joanna heard the unspoken humor in his voice and knew he was teasing.
‘What else is going on down there today?”
‘The big news is the fracas at the Sunset Inn out over the Divide.”
The Mule Mountains, north of Bisbee, effectively cut the town off from the remainder of the state. In the old days, the Divide, as locals called it, was a formidable barrier. Now, although modern highway engineering and a tunnel had tamed the worst of the steep grades, the name—the Divide—still remained.
The Sunset Inn, an outpost supper club on the far side of the Divide, had changed ownership and identities many times over the years. It had reopened under the name of Sunset Inn only two months earlier.
“What happened?” Joanna asked.
“From what we can piece together this is a pair of relative newlyweds, been married less than a year. It turns out the husband’s something of a slob who tends to leave his clothes lying wherever they fall. His wife got tired of picking up after him, so she took a hammer and nailed them all to the floor wherever they happened to fall. He tore hell out of his favorite western shirt when he tried to pick it up. Made him pretty mad. He went outside and sliced up the tires on his wife’s Chevette.”
“Thank God it was only the tires,” Joanna breathed. “I guess it could have been worse.”
Frank laughed. “Wait’ll you hear the rest. One of our patrol cars happened to drive by in time to see her taking a sledgehammer to the windshield of his pickup truck—unfortunately with him still inside. She’s in jail tonight on a charge of assault with intent, drunk and disorderly, and resisting arrest. The last I heard of the husband, he took his dog and what was left of his truck and was heading back home to his mother’s place in Silver City, New Mexico.”
The way Frank told the story, it might have sounded almost comical, but Joanna was living too close to what had happened in the aftermath of similar violence between Serena and Jorge Grijalva. Right that minute, she couldn’t see any humor the situation.
“I’m sorry to hear it,” Joanna said. “Especially with a young couple like that. It’s too bad they didn’t go for counseling.”
“Did I say young?” Frank echoed. “They’re not young. He’s sixty-eight. She’s sixty-three or so, but hell on wheels with a sledgehammer. The whole time the deputy was driving her to jail, she yelling her head off about how she should have known better than to marry a bachelor who was also a mama’s boy. Mama, by the way—the one he’s going home to—must be pushing ninety if she’s a day.”
Joanna did laugh then. She couldn’t help it. “I thought people were supposed to get wise when they got that old.”
“I wouldn’t count on it,” Frank advised. “So that’s what’s happening on the home front. What about you? How’s class?”
“B-O-R-I-N-G,” Joanna answered. “It’s like being thrown all the way back into elementary school. I can’t wait for Thanksgiving vacation.”
“And is Dave Thompson still the same sexist son of a bitch he was when I was there a couple of years ago?” Frank asked.
“Indications are,” Joanna answered, “but I probably shouldn’t talk about that now. You never can tell when somebody might walk in.”
“Right,” Frank said. “Well, hang in there. It’s bound to get better. What about Jorge Grijalva?” he asked, changing the subject. “Did you have time to check on him?”
“I just came home from seeing him a few minutes ago.”
“What do you think?” Frank asked.