Damage Control (14 page)

There was a tap on the doorjamb. Joanna looked up to find Frank Montoya standing in the doorway. “Sorry I’m late,” he said. “Overslept. Did you need something?”

“Come in,” Joanna said. “Have a seat. I wanted to talk to you about my mother.”

“What about her?” Frank asked.

“She and George seem to be having a bit of a wrangle,” Joanna said. “And she seems to have taken off without letting anyone know where she went. Since I haven’t heard from George this morning, I’m assuming she didn’t come back home overnight. He’s not wild about doing a missing person report and neither am I, so since you always seem to have plenty of backdoor sources, I was wondering if you had any secret way—short of a court order, that is—of tracking her cell phone calls or maybe her credit card activity.”

Instead of answering, Frank gave Joanna a long, searching look. Then, shaking his head, he flopped into one of the captain’s chairs on the far side of her desk. He sat there studying his shoes, like an errant kid unceremoniously summoned to the principal’s office.

“What?” Joanna said.

Frank raised his gaze and looked Joanna in the eye. “I know exactly where your mother is—or at least where she was up until about forty-five minutes ago. But I’m not sure I should tell you. There are some things you’re better off leaving alone.”

Joanna was dumbfounded. “You know where my mother is, but you’re not going to tell me?”

“I don’t want to tell you,” Frank said. “I probably will, but I don’t want to.”

“What the hell is going on?” Joanna demanded.

Frank sighed. “Is it possible your mother is having an affair?”

“An affair? My mother?”

Frank nodded miserably.

“What would make you say such a thing?”

“You know the Westmoreland Hotel out on Highway 92?”

Joanna nodded. She knew a little about the Westmoreland. It was a nice enough place. She’d been to a couple of Kiwanis meetings there—in the restaurant part. For rubber-chicken fare, the food had been more than decent.

“I saw your mother’s car parked there when we checked in last night,” Frank said. “It was still there this morning when I left to come to work a little while ago.”

There were two things in Frank’s statement that didn’t compute—the part about Joanna’s mother’s car being parked at a Sierra Vista motel and the part about Frank spending the night there.

“We?” Joanna asked.

For the first time, Frank glanced at her and grinned. “I finally got lucky,” he said.

Over the years Frank Montoya had endured plenty of teasing for being a confirmed bachelor. Maybe that was about to change.

“Dr. Marcowitz,” Frank continued, looking a little sappy. “Dr. LuAnn Marcowitz. She’s the new ER doc at Sierra Vista Community Hospital. Well, relatively new. We met a few months ago when I did that presentation for the Sierra Vista Chamber of Commerce. She was the one appointed to introduce me, and the two of us really hit it off. We’ve been having fun ever since. She’s divorced, with her mother and a couple of kids at home. LuAnn was on call last night, but it wasn’t all that busy at the hospital.
We were able to get away for a few hours without raising any red flags with her mother and the kids. That’s why we went to the Westmoreland. I didn’t expect to see anyone there I knew. I’m sure your mother thought the same thing.”

“I’m sure,” Joanna told him. Without another word, she pulled her phone book off the credenza behind her and began thumbing through the pages.

“What are you doing?” Frank asked.

“I’m going to call the hotel.”

“Don’t do that,” Frank urged. “Can’t you just leave it be?”

“Would you?”

“Probably not.”

Moments later, the hotel operator answered. “I was wondering if Eleanor Winfield is still registered there,” Joanna said.

“Yes, she is. Would you like me to ring her room?”

“No, thanks,” Joanna said. “No need.” She put down the phone and picked up her purse, all in one smooth motion.

“But what about the morning briefing?” Frank began. “With everything that’s gone on before—”

“You handle it, please,” Joanna said. “This won’t take long. I’ll be back as soon as I can. In fact, I can probably read my mother the riot act and be back here long before you’re done.”

The Explorer she had taken home the day before had only the lamest of air-conditioning, so Joanna had stopped by the garage and retrieved her Crown Victoria on the way into the office. Heading for the highway, she was tempted to use her lights and siren, but she didn’t. Instead, she turned the air-conditioning to full blast and hoped the cool air would help calm her down.

What is she thinking?
Joanna asked herself as she drove, several miles over the limit, toward the coming confrontation. How was
it possible for her mother to sink so low? Most likely that was why Eleanor had come up with that bogus charge about George and Madge. The best defense was always a good offense. As for George? He was a good man—a fine man. He certainly didn’t deserve to be treated like that. And who was the low-down scum her mother was hanging out with? Was it someone Joanna knew? Someone from the Presbyterian Church, for instance? That would be rich. And incredibly hypocritical, but hadn’t hypocrisy been Eleanor Lathrop’s watchword all her life?

Instead of cooling down, Joanna found herself feeling more and more outraged. As the mother of a sometimes challenging teenager, Joanna now understood that in the years following Hank Lathrop’s death, she had put her mother through hell. She had been out of control, determined to do things her own way. That was one of the reasons she had turned up pregnant without first being married to Andy. Her mother had pitched a fit at the idea of her daughter having a “shotgun” wedding.

For years after that—all during Joanna’s marriage to Andy and even after his death—Eleanor had continued to anguish over what she considered to be her granddaughter’s “unseemly premature” arrival. After Joanna had endured her mother’s criticism all that time, it had come as a total shock to her when she had learned, a few years earlier, that she had an older brother—that her parents had had their own out-of-wedlock baby, a boy who had been given up for adoption long before Eleanor and D. H. Lathrop’s much-later marriage.

That’s you in a nutshell, isn’t it, Mom,
Joanna thought bitterly, turning the air-conditioning in her cruiser a few degrees lower.
You’re always a good one for “Do as I say, not as I do.”

By the time she arrived at the Westmoreland Hotel, a steely
chill had settled over Joanna. Somehow the roles between mother and daughter had reversed. Joanna was now the grown-up and Eleanor the out-of-control teenager disregarding the rules and not caring who might be hurt in the process. Joanna had thought briefly about calling George but decided to put that off. She would tell him what she knew, but only when she knew all of it. He deserved that much—the whole story, with no holds barred.

Joanna found Eleanor’s Buick parked in a prominent position at the end of the first row in the hotel’s spacious parking lot.
In front of God and everybody,
Joanna thought,
just like Frank said it would be
.

She pulled into a ten-minute loading zone and then hurried into the lobby. “I’m here to see my mother,” Joanna said to the young man standing behind the registration desk. “Eleanor Winfield.” She wondered about that. Why had Eleanor registered in her own name? Why not under the name of the man—whoever he might be?

“Of course, Sheriff Brady,” the man said with a smile, plucking Joanna’s name off the badge pinned to her uniform. “Room 222. Take the elevator upstairs. Second room on the right.”

“Thanks,” Joanna said, hoping that the smile she gave him in return for the information didn’t look as forced as it felt. She rode up in the elevator with her heart beating hard in her chest. Now that she was here, what would she say? Frank was probably right. She shouldn’t have come. It was stupid. She should let her mother do whatever she wanted to do. She should let her mother go straight to hell.

There was a prominently displayed
DO NOT DISTURB
dangling from the doorknob of room 222. For an indecisive moment, Joanna stood in front of that closed door and listened for the
sound of voices coming from inside. All she heard was the low drone of a television set—Diane Sawyer and her pals on
Good Morning America.

How normal,
Joanna thought.
They’re cuddled up in bed watching the morning news.

With that, she pounded on the door.

“Who is it?” Eleanor called from inside. “If it’s housekeeping, can’t you read the sign? Come back later.”

“It’s me, Mom,” Joanna said. “Open the door and let me in.”

It took a moment for Eleanor to unfasten the security locks and fling open the door. She was wearing her own terry-cloth robe and she looked astonished. “What on earth are you doing here?” she demanded.

Joanna swept past her mother into the room. “I could ask you the same thing.”

She glanced around. While the place was clean enough and serviceable, it certainly wasn’t the Ritz. And, other than her mother, as far as Joanna could see, the room was empty. A single cup of self-serve room-brewed coffee sat on the coffee table in front of a sagging couch. The bed had clearly been slept in, but on one side only. The other side was still much as the housekeeping maid had left it, with the bedding smooth and the bedspread still covering a hard slab of foam pillow.

“So where is he?” Joanna demanded. “Did he stand you up? Lose his nerve at the last minute and didn’t show?”

“Where’s who?” Eleanor asked with a puzzled frown. “Who are you talking about?”

“Your paramour,” Joanna said with a snarl. “The person you’re meeting here.”

Eleanor’s eyes widened in what seemed to be genuine
astonishment. “You think I’m here to meet a man? You think I’m having an affair?”

“Aren’t you?”

For an answer and much to Joanna’s dismay, Eleanor Lathrop Winfield began to laugh. What started as a small giggle evolved into full-throated, almost hysterical, laughter. Doubled over and with tears dribbling down her cheeks, Eleanor staggered backward and dropped onto the couch. After a few moments, though, the laughter stopped as suddenly as it had begun.

“No,” Eleanor said finally. “No, I’m not. There’s no one here but me.”

“But why?” Joanna asked. “What are you doing here, then?”

“Running away,” Eleanor answered. “I wanted to see what it would feel like to just kick over the traces and do something wild for a change. Go to a bar, pick up a man, take him home, and notch my bedpost with him. Why not? Everyone else does it.”

“George hasn’t,” Joanna asserted. “He hasn’t done anything wrong.”

Eleanor studied her daughter’s face. “What makes you say that?”

“I asked him,” Joanna said. “I asked him straight-out if there was anything going on between him and Madge Livingston. He told me no, not with her and not with anyone else, either.”

“And you believed him?”

“Yes,” Joanna said. “Of course I did. Why wouldn’t I? Whatever’s wrong right now, I know that he loves you, Mom. He’s worried about you and wants you back.”

“You expect me to believe that, too?”

“Yes, I do.”

Eleanor rose abruptly from the couch. She walked over to
the window, pulled the curtain aside, and stared out into the parking lot. A draft of stale air from the window-mounted air conditioner wafted across the room.

“It wasn’t fair of George to give you your father’s journals,” Eleanor said without turning away from the window. “He shouldn’t have done that without asking me.”

For a moment Joanna felt as though she had fallen through a crack in the conversation. Months earlier, in a fit of garage cleaning, George Winfield had stumbled across D. H. Lathrop’s collection of leather-bound diaries in boxes of books Ellie had consigned to the garbage dump. Rather than tossing them, George had handed the diaries over to Joanna. The connection between those and what was going on now left Joanna mystified.

“What do Dad’s diaries have to do with any of this?” she asked.

“Everything,” Eleanor said. “Have you read them?”

“I read some of them,” Joanna allowed. “I was working one of Dad’s cold cases then, and I scanned through the volumes that were related to that. But after that, once Dennis was born and I went back to work, there hasn’t been time to even think about them. Why?”

“I tried to protect you from all of that, but now that it’s all out in the open, or will be out in the open, what’s the use? Once you get around to reading them, maybe you’ll understand.”

“Understand what?”

“Didn’t you ever wonder why Mona Tipton didn’t come to your father’s funeral?” Eleanor asked.

Mona Tipton had been Hank Lathrop’s secretary. An exotic creature with a ballerina-style hairdo and dark, luminous eyes, she had been stationed at a wooden desk just outside Hank’s
office up at the old courthouse. Joanna seemed to remember that Mona, born and raised in Bisbee, had left town shortly after high school to pursue a career of some kind back east. She had returned years later to help care for her aging parents. Somewhere along the line she had gone to work for the sheriff’s department and had worked there for years.

Yes, Joanna knew that Mona Tipton had been a fixture of D. H. Lathrop’s work life, but she wasn’t someone whose presence had raised any alarms. Mona had simply been there, one of the colorful cast of characters—the various deputies and investigators and crooks—who had peopled Hank Lathrop’s existence. As a consequence, Eleanor’s question about Mona Tipton now, years after the fact, caught Joanna completely off guard.

“Mona?” she repeated. “I seem to remember you told me she had a conflict of some kind. Wasn’t she out of town at the time of Dad’s funeral?”

“There was a conflict, all right,” Eleanor declared hotly. “I told her if I saw her anywhere near the funeral home or the cemetery, I’d use your father’s pistol to plug her full of holes. And I’m telling you right now, if George’s precious Madge Livingston doesn’t mind her p’s and q’s—if she so much as looks at me sideways—I’ll make her the same offer.”