Dead Wrong (4 page)

Joanna bit back the urge to apologize. She was,
after all, simply doing her job, and a new baby was going to make
it worse.

“Anyway,” Butch added,
“don’t stay out too late. You’ll wear yourself
out. How was the shower?”

“You knew about the shower, too?”
Joanna asked. It seemed that everyone had known about it.

“Who do you think sent the note to school so
Eva Lou could spring Jenny?”

“The shower was great,” Joanna said.
“Lots of goodies. Come to think of it, they’re still in
the car.”

“Don’t worry about unpacking
them,” Butch said. “Let Jenny do it. Or wait until I
get home on Sunday.”

“Butch,” Joanna cautioned, “I may
be pregnant, but I’m not an invalid.”

“And I don’t want you to be,
either.”

“Have fun,” Joanna said.

“I will,” Butch returned.
“Don’t work too hard.”

Joanna closed her phone. “He’s worried
about you?” Jaime asked.

“I guess.”

“I remember how it was when Delcia was
pregnant with Pepe,” Jaime said. “I kept worrying and
worrying. Delcia was fine the whole time. I was a wreck.”

Joanna laughed. “Sounds familiar,” she
said.

They were quiet for a few minutes before Jaime
asked, “Is this what you always wanted?”

“Having a baby?” Joanna asked.

“No. Being a cop,” Jaime said with a
laugh. “Because of your dad, I mean.”

“I was proud of him,” Joanna returned,
after a moment’s thought. “I thought what he did was
important, and I thought he treated people fairly. And I was proud
of Andy, too, but I never really thought about being a cop myself,
not until after Andy’s funeral when someone suggested that I
run in his stead. So I
guess you could say I
stumbled into it. Now, though, I can’t imagine doing anything
else.”

Jaime nodded. “Me, either,” he
said.

Anna Marie Crystal’s house was a modest
bungalow on Short Street, a block-long fragment of street a single
block off Fry Boulevard, Sierra Vista’s main drag. It was a
small clapboard affair with a screened-in front porch. Tucked in
behind a collection of strip malls, the house resembled some of the
older houses from up in Old Bisbee. It was easy for Joanna to
assume that it predated the reopening of Fort Huachuca in the early
fifties. The yard, surrounded by a four-foot chain-link fence,
looked clean and well tended in the glow of the security lights
from the loading docks of the businesses across the street.

With Jaime walking just behind her, Joanna opened
the gate and made her way up to the porch, where a single yellow
light illuminated an old-fashioned buzzer-style bell. As soon as
she punched it, a small dog began barking furiously inside the
house.

“Fritz,” a woman’s voice ordered
from behind the front door. “Quiet now. Come here!” And
then a moment later, “Who is it?”

“We’re police officers,” Joanna
responded. “I’m Sheriff Brady. Detective Carbajal is
with me. May we come in?”

Several locks clicked before the inside door opened
cautiously to reveal a gray-haired woman clutching what appeared to
be a tiny silky terrier mix in one arm. A high-volume television
set blared somewhere in the background.

“Police?” she asked, peering out at
them. “What’s wrong? Has something happened—a
robbery or something? With all the people coming and going from
that 7-Eleven on the corner, you just never can tell.”

“Are you Mrs. Crystal?”

The woman nodded.

“It’s not a robbery,” Joanna
assured her. “But we do need to speak to you.”

After unhooking the screen door, Anna Marie took
Joanna’s proffered ID wallet and carried it back inside the
house. She put the dog on the floor and then studied Joanna’s
ID in the illumination from an overhead light. Meanwhile the dog
raced back to the screen door and resumed barking. Joanna held the
screen door shut to keep the dog from bursting outside.

“Fritz,” the woman ordered. “Stop
that right now. Come here.”

Fritz, of course, paid no attention. Finally the
woman returned to the porch, scooped the dog back into her arms.
“He doesn’t mind very well,” she said.
“Wait right here while I lock him in the kitchen.”

Returning from incarcerating the animal, Anna Marie
Crystal held the door open. “Sorry about that,” she
said. “He’s a little spoiled. Come in.”

Joanna and Jaime entered a room that reeked of
years of uninterrupted cigarette smoking. The massive green glass
ashtray on the coffee table was full, but not to the point of
overflowing. There were doilies everywhere—beaded ones on the
coffee table and on the end tables and crocheted ones on the backs
of the couch and chairs. A bookshelf against one wall was lined
with what looked like a complete collection of Reader’s
Digest Condensed Books.

Anna Marie was a tall, scrawny woman with an
ill-fitting set of dentures. She motioned the two officers onto an
old-fashioned sectional that was far too big for the size of the
room, then hurried across the room, where she used a knob to switch
off the blaring television set. “Now then, Sheriff
Brady,” she said determinedly, “tell me. What’s
this all about?”

Jaime looked questioningly at Joanna. Nodding, she
took the
lead. “Detective Jaime Carbajal
is one of my homicide detectives,” she said. “I’m
afraid we may have some bad news for you.”

“Homicide?” Anna Marie repeated, her
gaunt face paling. “You mean someone’s been
murdered?”

“Yes,” Joanna said. “The body was
found early this morning on Border Road between Paul’s Spur
and Bisbee Junction. The victim has been identified as Bradley
Evans, your former son-in-law.”

The skin of Anna Marie’s face tightened into
a grimace, revealing a glimpse of the angular skull beneath her
wrinkled flesh. For a moment she said nothing. “So he’s
dead then?” she asked at last. “That no-good son of a
bitch is finally dead?”

“Yes,” Joanna said.

“What happened?”

“He was stabbed to death.”

“Good!” Anna Marie exclaimed bitterly,
taking a seat in a wingback chair across from them.
“It’s about damned time! Bradley Evans murdered my
daughter. Why on earth would you think hearing he’s dead
would be bad news for me? It’s what I’ve been praying
for every day of my life since 1978. Twenty-five years to life! He
murdered Lisa and her baby and all he got was twenty-five years!
How the judge could give him that and then look at himself in the
mirror I can’t imagine!”

With her hands shaking, Anna Marie shook a
cigarette out of a packet of Camels on the coffee table, lit it,
and then pulled the ashtray within easy reach.

“So you weren’t close?” Joanna
asked.

Anna Marie blew an indignant plume of smoke into
the air. “Close!” she exclaimed. “Don’t
even think such a thing! Of course we weren’t
close.”

“But he listed you as his next of
kin.”

“Well, I’m not. I’m no kin of his
at all.”

“He also named you as the beneficiary of his
group life insurance policy. It’s a small death benefit,
but—”

“Just because he put my name down on a piece
of paper doesn’t mean I have to take the money!” Anna
Marie declared. “Blood money is what I call it. He probably
thought that by leaving me something I’d forgive him for what
he did, but I won’t. Not ever. No matter what. I hope he rots
in hell.”

It wasn’t at all the kind of next-of-kin
notification Joanna had expected. Instead of a grieving relative,
she was faced with this daunting old woman whose whole body
bristled with righteous indignation.

“So he hasn’t been in touch with you
since his release?” Joanna asked.

“Absolutely not. He wouldn’t dare. If
he’d shown up here, I would have shot him myself. I have a
gun, you know. An old thirty-aught-six. My husband used to hunt. I
kept the gun after he died. I know how to use it, and believe me,
if Bradley Evans had turned up anywhere within range, I would have
plugged him full of lead. They’d have had to drag him off my
porch in one of those zip-up body bags.”

Listening to the old woman rant, Joanna had no
doubt that she meant every word. Anna Marie Crystal’s fury
with her daughter’s killer was still white hot more than two
decades after Lisa Marie Evans’s death.

“Tell me about your daughter,” Joanna
said.

Anna Marie blew another cloud of smoke. Her face
softened. “She was such a sweet, sweet girl,” she said.
“She met Bradley over at the bar that used to be right there
by the main gate. You remember the one.”

“The Military Inn?” Joanna offered.

Anna Marie nodded. “Right. That’s the
one. It wasn’t a good
place for her to
hang out. I told her that, too, but she wasn’t about to
listen. She was twenty-one and working for the dry cleaner’s
just up the street. She liked going there after work to relax. It
was a place where she and her friends could meet guys, and they
did.”

“Did she and Bradley Evans meet
there?”

“Yes. He was still in the army then. They got
married only a couple of months after they met. Another bad idea. I
told her she didn’t know enough about him. He was from
somewhere else—Oklahoma or Texas maybe. Didn’t seem to
have any family to speak of. That’s always a bad sign. Either
the family’s bad or the one who’s on the outs is bad.
It’s all the same. One way or the other it spells trouble,
but Lisa thought Brad—as she called him—was the
greatest thing since sliced bread. Nothing her father or I said
could convince her otherwise.”

“So they got married?”

“Eloped,” Anna Marie said. “Ran
off to Vegas and got married in one of those awful wedding chapels.
I couldn’t believe it. Neither could my husband. He was
crushed. He’d always planned on walking his little Lisa down
the aisle. It broke his heart when she died. He never got over
it.”

“You said Bradley was still in the army when
he and Lisa met?” Joanna asked.

Anna Marie nodded. “Barely. He was about to
get out. After he did, he managed to land some kind of job with the
phone company. It was a good thing, too. A couple of months later,
Lisa turned up pregnant. With him working for the phone company, at
least she would have had maternity benefits. She didn’t have
any benefits at all from the dry cleaner’s, even though she
had worked there since her junior year in high school.”

“What happened?”

“You mean why did he kill her?” Anna
Marie asked.

Joanna nodded.

“I have no idea. I thought Brad was a bit of
a rounder. For sure he drank way too much, but he always seemed to
behave around Lisa, and I thought he loved her.”

“Was there someone else involved?”
Joanna asked.

“You mean like did Lisa have someone on the
side? No way. She loved Bradley to distraction. I can’t say
the same about him. I suppose Bradley could have had a girlfriend.
I’ve wondered about that over the years, but I don’t
know for sure.”

“They seemed happy together?”

“As happy as newlyweds are when they’re
young and not making enough money. But Lisa was excited about being
pregnant. She was never very interested in school. She did all
right in high school, but she wasn’t the least bit interested
in going off to college. She told me once that all she wanted to do
was meet a nice man, get married, and raise lots of
babies.”

“Did Bradley want the baby?”

“Who knows? I sure as hell didn’t ask
him,” Anna Marie put in. “I mean, in those days, with
the pill and all, if people got pregnant and it was after they got
married, you assumed it was because they wanted to, but Bradley was
a real good-time boy. On Saturdays, when he was off work and Lisa
was at the dry cleaner’s, he’d go hang out at the bar
and play pool until it was time for them to go home. He had a
company car during the week, so they only had the one car—his
pickup truck—on the weekends. So he’d take her to work
and then he’d come back and pick her up when she got off in
the afternoon.

“The last time I talked to her was that
Saturday morning, the day she was killed. Lisa loved fried chicken,
especially my fried chicken. I called her at work to see if she and
Brad wanted to come over for a chicken dinner on Sunday. Fried
chicken and
pecan pie—Lisa’s two
all-time favorites. She said she’d talk to Brad and let me
know. I never heard her voice again. Sunday morning, about nine
o’clock, a deputy sheriff showed up. He told me that
they’d found Brad drunk out of his gourd somewhere up by
Bisbee. He told me that they hadn’t found a body, but there
was enough evidence of foul play that they were afraid something
had happened to Lisa. And they never did find her. Brad went to
prison without ever letting on what he had done to Lisa and her
baby. Claimed he was drunk and didn’t remember.”

Joanna heard the words and wondered if that
“deputy sheriff” had been her father.

“They never did find her,” Anna Marie
repeated, grinding out the stub of her cigarette and looking off
into the distance somewhere over Joanna’s and Jaime’s
shoulders. “I always thought it would have been better if
they had. If we could have found Lisa and the baby and buried them,
maybe that would have made things better. ‘Closure’ is
what they call it. These last few years, TV has been full of
pictures of that awful Scott Peterson and that Hacker guy from Salt
Lake, but at least those poor families found their daughters’
bodies. At least they had something to bury. Two months after Brad
went to prison, my husband, Kenny, drove his pickup truck out to
the San Pedro, parked alongside the river, drank a bottle of
bourbon, and then put a bullet through his head. Left a note. Said
that with Lisa gone, he just couldn’t see any point in going
on. I didn’t blame him, either. I would have done the same
thing, if I’d had guts enough. The cops even kept
Kenny’s gun. Said they needed it for evidence.”

There was a plaintive whimper from behind the
kitchen door, followed by a persistent scratching. Without another
word, Anna Marie got up and rescued Fritz from his prison. When the
old woman returned, she collapsed into her chair as deflated as if
she’d been a balloon suddenly devoid of
air. She seemed utterly exhausted.