“I don’t recall your asking me that question straight out,” Butch returned easily. “Besides, if you had asked, I probably wouldn’t have told you. I don’t even tell wives and girlfriends who comes and goes around here. Why would I tell anyone else?”
“You don’t tell? Why not?”
Dixon smiled. “Client/counselor privilege.”
“You’re no lawyer, are you?”
Dixon shook his head.
“Since when do bartenders have the protection of client privilege?”
“You’re right,” he said. “It probably wouldn’t hold up in court, but I do try to protect the privacy of my clientele, for business reasons if nothing else. Dave was one of my broken birds. I was hoping that eventually he’d get his head screwed on straight. And he was working on it. That’s why this so-called suicide crap doesn’t wash. Ol’ Dave maybe imbibed a bit more than was good him...,’
“A bit?” Joanna questioned, raising an eyebrow.
Butch shrugged. “So okay, maybe a lot more than was good for him. It’s bad business for me to run down the drinking habits of some of my very best customers. It doesn’t pay. But still, mentally, I’d say Dave was in much better shape in the last few months than he was when he first started coming here. And if he drank too much, at least he was responsible about it. If he was planning to tie one on, he always had me keep his car keys. If I asked for them, he always handed them over without any argument. Whenever he ended up too smashed to drive, I’d keep his car here overnight and get someone else to drive him back home.”
“Did he talk about his wife much?” Joanna asked. “About his ex-wife?”
A curtain seemed to fall over Butch’s face. He didn’t answer right away. “The man’s dead,” Butch said finally. “It doesn’t seem right for us to be picking him apart when he isn’t even buried yet.”
“Don’t go invoking client/bartender privilege on me again,” Joanna said. “Dave Thompson is dead all right, and I’m trying to find out who killed him.”
“Hey, barkeep.” Three stools down the bar, a grizzled old man raised his glass. “Medic,” he said.
Butch hurried away to fill his thirsty customer’s drink order. He returned to where Joanna was sitting with a thoughtful expression on his face.
“As in murder?” he asked. “That’s right.”
Butch shook his head. “What the hell’s going on? First Serena Grijalva and now Dave Thompson. Does someone have a grudge against my customers, or what?”
Joanna reached in her purse and pulled out the videotape. “That’s what I was hoping you could tell me. Would you take a look at this and see if there are any other familiar faces on it?”
“You think someone’s knocked off more of my customers? If that’s the case, before long, I’ll be out of business completely,” Butch said. But he took the video and slipped the tape into the VCR that sat on the counter behind the bar. “What is it?” he asked as the television set blinked over from an afternoon talk show to the tape.
“The news,” Joanna answered. “From Tuesday night.”
“Oh, that,” he said. “I think I already saw it.”
Moments later, the now-familiar face of the studio anchor came on the screen introducing the equally familiar reporter, Jill January. As the taped newscast ran its course, Joanna watched Butch Dixon’s face for any sign of recognition. There wasn’t any in the first segment. Both Rhonda and Dean Norton’s flashed across the screen without any noticeable response from Butch. That changed when Ceci Grijalva’s face appeared in the second segment.
“Damn!” he said. “That poor little kid. What’s going to happen to her?” Then later, when Joanna’s name was mentioned, he looked and nodded. “I’ll bet this is the part I saw already.”
The taped Joanna Brady was just beginning to answer Jill January’s question when Butch Dixon clicked the remote.
“Wait a minute. Let me play that back. I don’t want to miss anything.”
The action on the screen slipped into reverse. Joanna Brady and Leann Jessup were walking, backward up the aisle at the end of the vigil rather than down it.
“Hey, looky there,” the old man down the bar exclaimed, squinting up at the television set. “Isn’t that there Larry Dysart?”
“Where?” Butch asked.
The old man pointed. “Right there, over that one broad’s shoulder. Nope, now he’s gone.”
Butch grabbed the remote and stopped the action once again. “Where?” he said.
“Right there,” the old man said. “Wait’ll they get almost up to the camera. See there?”
“I’ll be damned,” Butch said. “It is him. And he looks like he’s all bent out of shape. That sly old devil. He never once said anything about going to the damn vigil. If he had, I would have made arrangements to go along with him.”
Joanna felt a sudden clutch in her throat. “What did you say his name was?”
“Larry. Larry Dysart.”
“He’s a regular here, too? Did he know Serena?”
“Sure.” Butch nodded.
“Was he here the night Serena died?”
“I’m pretty sure he was,” Butch answered.
“If Larry’s a regular, then he knows Dave Thompson as well?”
“As a matter of fact, Larry drove Dave home several times. Larry doesn’t drink booze anymore, so I could always ask him to drive somebody home without having to worry about it. He never seemed to mind.”
“And what exactly does Larry Dysart do for a living?” Joanna asked. There was a tremble of excitement in her voice, but Butch Dixon didn’t seem to notice.
“As little as possible. He’s a legal process server. It was a big comedown from what he might have expected, but he never seemed to carry a grudge about it.”
Joanna fought to keep her face impassive, the way her poker-playing father had taught her to do. This was important, and she didn’t want to blow it. “Carry a grudge about what?” she asked.
“About his mother giving away the family farm,” Butch answered. “And I mean that literally. In the old days, his grandfather’s farm—the old Hackberry place—was just outside town here, outside Peoria. It was a big place—a whole section of cotton fields. If Larry had been able to talk his mother into selling it back when he wanted her to, he would have made a fortune. Or else she could have held on to it. By now it would be worth that much more. Instead, she and Larry got in some kind of big beef. She ended up giving most of it away.”
“Who to?” Joanna asked.
“TTI,” Butch answered. “Tommy Tompkins International. Tommy was one of those latter-day Armageddonists who believed that the world was going to end on a certain day at a certain hour. Before that happened, however, his financial world collapsed. He and his two top guys ended up the slammer for income tax evasion.
“Now that I get thinking about it, I believe the APOA dormitory is right on the spot where the house used to be. That’s where Larry lived with his mother and stepfather back when he was a kid. The stepfather died young, and Larry and his mother went to war with each other. They patched it up for a while after she got sick. Since she was the one who’d donated the land to TTI, she was able to wangle her son a job running security for Tommy back in the high-roller eighties, when he had the whole world on a string. Then everything fell apart. When the dust cleared, the world didn’t end as scheduled, Tommy was gone, and the property went into foreclosure. All Larry was left with was a bad taste in his mouth and what he had inherited directly from his grandfather.”
“What was that?”
“The old Hackberry house on Monroe.”
“Where’s that?” Joanna asked. “In downtown Phoenix?”