Minor in Possession (8 page)

“Would if I could,” Shorty replied, “but the phones are out of order. Have been for a while. Half an hour or more. I tried calling Jaime just as soon as I got back from your cabin. I wanted to ask him what to do with your friend.”

“What do you mean what to do with it?”

Shorty tossed his cigarette. “Hell, man, if I turn it loose here, the damn thing will die. It's probably never lived in the wild. Besides, it doesn't belong here. This isn't its territory. I thought maybe Jaime could keep it in the museum, but I couldn't reach him. Incidentally, you want to see him? Not Jaime, the snake, I mean. I put him in one of Dolores' big gallon jars.”

I didn't much want to see the snake, and yet I did, too. Shorty led me inside. On the floor just inside the door sat a commercial mustard jar with the snake coiled up in the bottom. A series of air
holes had been punched into the jar's lid. The snake must have been at least three and a half to four feet long. Folded back upon itself to accommodate the shape of the jar, its exact size was difficult to discern. It was a deep charcoal gray, black almost, with no markings of any kind. The rattles, somewhat lighter in color, stood upright almost like an antenna in the center of the coil. The snake regarded me malevolently while its wicked-looking forked tongue flickered in and out.

An involuntary shudder shook me, bringing me back to the problem at hand. “I've got to talk to the Crenshaws,” I said. “Would you take me to their place?”

Shorty glanced at his watch. “You're not going to the meeting? The vans will be leaving in a few minutes.”

“Goddamnit, Shorty. Person or persons unknown tried to kill me this afternoon. It's about time someone at Ironwood Ranch took that news seriously. I sure as hell do.”

I doubt Shorty Rojas had ever quite come to grips with the essential differences between wrangling horses for a dude ranch and doing the same thing for a rehab joint. He hailed from a simpler, less complicated time long before the red-taped vagaries of the Louise Crenshaws and Lucy Washingtons of the world reigned supreme. People were people to Shorty Rojas, regardless of whether they were dudes or drunks.

I'm sure he shouldn't have, but when I asked him for a ride, he looked at me appraisingly, then
shrugged. “Don't suppose it'll hurt nothin' if I take you there. When you finish, I can still drop you off at the meeting later.”

I followed Shorty outside to an elderly Ford pickup parked ten yards up the hill. “Get in,” he said. “She ain't pretty, but she'll get us there.”

The pickup fired up after only one try. It slipped and slid some in the muddy track. As we started up the hill, an unopened can of Coors rolled out from under the seat and banged against the side of my shoe. When I reached down to pick it up, it was icy cold.

“Sorry about that,” Shorty said sheepishly as I handed it back to him and he returned it to its place under the seat. “I like to have a cool one of an evening.”

“No problem,” I returned.

We sailed out of the parking lot just as people were beginning to climb into vans for the ride to the meetings in town.

The Crenshaws' house was located near the outskirts of Wickenburg, on a high bluff overlooking the highway. When we pulled up in front, Shorty stopped the pickup and turned off the engine. “Wait here,” he said, climbing out of the truck and starting up the walk. There was no porch light shining on the flagstone patio, but there were lights on inside the house. The porch light came on moments after Shorty rang the bell.

Calvin was the one who came to the door, stepping back in surprise when he saw who it was. They talked for a few moments before Shorty mo
tioned for me to get out of the truck and come to the door.

“Mr. Beaumont, what are you doing here?” Calvin Crenshaw demanded when I stepped into the light.

“Who is it, Cal?” Louise Crenshaw called from out of sight somewhere inside the house.

“It's nothing, hon. I'll handle it,” he said, moving as if to close the door behind him before Louise got a look at who it was.

“Please,” he began hurriedly, “my wife has been through too much already today. She can't handle any more…” But he was too late. Louise Crenshaw appeared in the lighted doorway before he managed to pull the door shut behind him.

At least someone who resembled Louise Crenshaw stood there. She wore a long blue robe and held a glass in one hand. I thought at first it might be Louise's much older sister, or maybe even her mother, but then I realized that for the first time I was seeing the real Louise Crenshaw, one washed clean of all her war paint. Her sallow face looked like a death mask, a pale reflection of the woman I'd argued with early that morning.

As soon as she recognized me, however, the look of cold fury that further disfigured her face left her identity unmistakable. It was Louise Crenshaw, all right. The one and only.

“What are
you
doing here?” she inquired imperiously.

“Somebody tried to kill me today,” I answered reasonably enough, I thought, considering the cir
cumstances. “In my cabin. Naturally, Lucy Washington wouldn't let me report it without your permission, so I'm here to find out what you intend to do about it. In case you haven't noticed, the phones aren't working.”

“You say someone tried to kill you?”

Louise Crenshaw's question was couched in a dismissively sarcastic mode, derogatory but still slyly coy, almost like her old bitchy self.

“Come now, Mr. Beaumont. Surely your imagination is playing tricks on you. If you were female, I'd say you were overwrought, but men don't get overwrought. Or do they?”

“I'm not overwrought, as you call it. Somebody planted a damn rattlesnake in my cabin this afternoon. It's a wonder I didn't step on it in the dark.”

Louise laughed then, uproariously, almost hysterically. Calvin Crenshaw hurried to his wife's side, a worried frown on his face.

“Come on inside, Louise. You really must sit down.”

She pulled away from his grasp. “I'm all right, Calvin, but I want this man out of here. Now.”

“We'll talk about this tomorrow,” Calvin said to me, turning as if to take Louise back into the house.

“No, we
won't
,” I insisted before he could hustle her inside. “We'll talk about it now! Tonight. Don't you understand? I'm telling you, somebody tried to kill me.”

Calvin Crenshaw stubbornly shook his head. “Rattlesnakes are part of the natural order of
things around here, Mr. Beaumont. They do turn up occasionally, especially when it rains.”

“That's what I'm trying to tell you. Shorty says the snake isn't from around here, that it must be somebody's pet.”

Louise came to life and spun around, her eyes wide. “Who says?”

“Shorty Rojas. He came to my cabin and caught the snake with a stick. It was in my closet.”

Louise's face went suddenly slack. “You're right, Cal,” she said weakly. “I want to go lie down, please.”

“Sure, hon. Right away.” Cal turned back to us. “Wait right here.”

As gently as if she were a damaged porcelain doll, Calvin Crenshaw led his wife into the house, closing the door behind them. He was gone for several minutes. The longer he stayed away, the longer I had to wait, the more aggravated I became. When he finally returned to the door, though, I noticed a subtle change in the man. He was grim-faced but determined.

“Louise and I have talked it over. Our clients have had enough disturbances for one day. You're to go back to the ranch, Mr. Beaumont. Tomorrow we'll decide what's to be done.”

My mouth must have dropped open half a foot. “Tomorrow? Are you crazy? I'm talking attempted murder here. Homicide. I'm not going back to that cabin, and I'm sure as hell not staying there until there's been a full police investigation.”

“Then you won't be going back at all.” Calvin
Crenshaw spoke with a quiet assurance I had never seen in him before. “That being the case, Mr. Beaumont,” Calvin continued, “I suggest you have Shorty here take you back to the ranch to pick up your belongings. If you hurry, you may be able to catch the Greyhound into Phoenix.”

“Wait a minute. Pick up my belongings? Does that mean you're throwing me out?”

“If you're not prepared to do as you're told, Mr. Beaumont, you don't leave us any choice. We have a treatment center to run, and we must look to the welfare of all our clients.”

“What the hell do you expect me to do? Forget that someone tried to kill me? Go back to my cabin and act like it never happened? You expect me to
sleep
there?”

Beside me on the porch, Shorty Rojas shifted uneasily, but Calvin Crenshaw gave him a warning head shake that stifled any objection Shorty might have had. I couldn't blame him. I had no doubt that if he had crossed this newly transformed Calvin Crenshaw, his job would be on the line.

“It's up to you, Mr. Beaumont,” Calvin said, turning back to me, relaxing a little now that he felt he was once more in control. “If you go back to the ranch tonight, you're welcome to stay. If you leave Ironwood Ranch without permission, however, you won't be coming back.”

Aggravation and mystification turned to rage. “That remains to be seen, Mr. Crenshaw,” I replied, barely holding my temper in check. “I will
be back, in the morning, along with someone from the Yavapai County Sheriff's Department. If anybody goes near my cabin between now and then, you can tell them for me that they're running the risk of becoming prime suspects in a felony investigation.”

“Good night, Mr. Beaumont,” said an unperturbed Calvin Crenshaw, closing the door in my face as deliberately as if I'd been a pushy door-to-door salesman.

I turned to Shorty. “What the hell got into him?”

But Shorty Rojas didn't answer. He pulled his cowboy hat down low on his forehead and turned away from me, walking quickly back toward his pickup.

“Sorry about that, Mr. Beaumont,” he said. “Come on. I'll drops you in town, then I'd better get home and see what the river's doing. It'll be cresting pretty soon now.”

I stopped long enough to look back at the house just in time to see the living room and kitchen lights go out. The message was clear. Calvin Crenshaw was shutting the place down and going to bed. J. P. Beaumont and his problems weren't important enough for the Crenshaws to lose any part of their good night's sleep.

Deep in the interior of the house another light went off, a hall light this time, while behind me the engine of Shorty's pickup roared to life.

I stood there for a moment longer, angry and puzzled both. Before my very eyes, Calvin Cren
shaw, the lamb, had turned into a lion. A tough-minded lion at that. I had been there, seen it happen, and yet I had no idea what had caused it. What the hell had I missed?

It had something to do with Louise Crenshaw, Joey Rothman, and me. Of that much I was certain, but I'd be damned if I had the foggiest idea what the connection was.

Joey Rothman wasn't talking, so Louise Crenshaw would have to. Whether she wanted to or not.

W
ickenburg, Arizona, a one-horse town with a non-snowbird stable population of about 4,500, is divided more or less in half by the usually dry bed of the Hassayampa River. On this dark October night, with the river half a mile wide and flowing bank to bank, the division was much more serious than usual.

As Shorty drove us down toward the town's single stoplight where two secondary highways intersect, it was clear there was some kind of major problem on the roadway. It looked for all the world like a big-city traffic jam, on a somewhat smaller scale than the ones we have in Seattle.

“Bridge must be closed,” Shorty muttered, stopping the truck and getting out.

“Sounds like home,” I said.

“I'll go check it out. Wanna come?”

“No thanks. I've had more than enough of the Hassayampa River for one day,” I told him.

The trip downtown from Crenshaw's house had been a conversational wasteland. Shorty Rojas hadn't wanted to talk, and neither had I. As we
drove, however, I made up my mind that I'd get to Phoenix that night, one way or the other, and enlist the help of my attorney, Ralph Ames, in doing whatever needed doing. After all, he was the one who was ultimately responsible for my being at Ironwood Ranch in the first place. It was only fair that he help me fix the problem.

Shorty came back to the pickup and wheeled it around in a sharp U-turn. “Water's scouring out the bridge supports,” he said. “Probably be closed most of the night. The deputy says they've still got one or two rooms up at the Joshua Tree Motel over on Tegner. It's nothing fancy, but it'll be better'n nothin'.”

“Any place at all will be fine,” I said. “Thanks for all your help, Shorty. Not only for the ride tonight, but also for what you did with Jennifer this afternoon. Having her go along when you moved horses was just what the doctor ordered.”

“Poor little tyke,” Shorty agreed. “Felt real sorry for her. Dropped her off with her mother when I saw Mrs. Rothman packing the boy's things out of the cabin and loading them into the car. As I walked away, Jennifer was getting her ass chewed because her uniform was wet. That's one mean mama,” he added.

“Don't worry about it,” I said. “From the delighted look on Jennifer's face when you put her down on the saddle in front of you, I'm sure she thinks the ride was worth it.”

We drove to the Joshua Tree Motel, four blocks from downtown Wickenburg proper. Shorty let
me out and drove away, reaching under the seat for the no longer cool Coors. Even though beer isn't my drink of choice, it was still thoughtful of him to wait until I was out of the truck before he opened it.

The Joshua Tree Motel turned out to be a barely habitable relic from another era. I found myself standing in front of a run-down office where a faded but hand-lettered cardboard vacancy sign still leaned against the glass in one corner of a bug-speckled window.

The place consisted of a series of crumbling stucco edifices, cabins I suppose, that must have dated from the earliest days of motels. Or before. The AAA rating, if one ever existed, had fallen by the wayside years ago. Tiny arched carports, far too narrow for many contemporary vehicles and ideally suited to Model Ts, were attached to every free-standing unit. Inside the office all available flat surfaces were covered with price-tagged, church-holiday-bazaar-type bric-a-brac and handicrafts.

At the counter, a pillow-faced, cigarette-smoking manager pushed a leaky pen and registration form in my direction while announcing that the Joshua Tree didn't take American Express—only Mastercard, Visa, or cash. I paid cash, twenty bucks, and considered myself lucky.

As I finished filling out the form, the office door opened again to admit a harried young father trailed by three obnoxious little kids. The father eagerly snatched up the Joshua Tree's only re
maining room. It was, he told me with obvious relief as he began filling out his own registration form, the last available room in town. While the three children raced around the office, screeching with joy at being let out of the car and manhandling the handicrafts, I retreated to the welcome safety and solitude of my own threadbare room.

Clearly most of the furnishings, interior design, and plumbing were still the original equipment. The room reeked of years of cigarette smoke, mold, and benign-to-active neglect. Dingy wallpaper peeled away from the walls and ceiling. The fitfully meager spray of lukewarm water from the shower head hit me somewhere well below the shoulder blades, but even the short, tepid flower with a tiny sliver of nondescript soap was better than no shower at all.

Putting the same clothes back on, I tried the phone, an ancient black model with no dial, but was told by the manager that the phones in Wickenburg were all out of order. That wasn't exactly news.

Unable to reach Ames, I sat there being frustrated for several minutes before I realized that part of what was wrong with me was hunger. My afternoon of unaccustomed physical labor hadn't been followed by dinner. I had walked out on my plate of roast beef and mashed potatoes. That was a problem with an accessible solution, so I left my room and walked the four blocks back down to Wickenburg's main drag, where the entire three-block area between the stoplight and the bridge
was full of parked cars and milling people.

If a town is small enough, I guess any excuse for a party will suffice. This sociable group, made up equally of stalled travelers and curious locals, laughed and talked and carried on like a spirited crowd eagerly anticipating a dazzling Fourth-of-July fireworks display. There's nothing like the possibility of a collapsing bridge to bring out the local thrill-seekers.

Center Street, Wickenburg's main thoroughfare, was lined with several restaurants, all of which were doing land-office business. Every visible table was fully occupied, and each restaurant doorway held a queue of people waiting to be seated. I chose a place at random, the Silver Spur, and managed to work my way across the threshold and into a crowded vestibule.

Before reaching the hostess, however, I found myself standing in line directly behind the young couple from the motel with their three screaming banshees. Life is too short. Stumbling over the man behind me, I managed to elbow my way back outside. A few feet farther up the street was another door, still part of the Silver Spur, but this entrance opened into the bar. Saloon, the sign said. It was noisy inside, noisy and crowded, but it was my kind of place. There were no kids within hearing distance. Not a one.

Counselors at Ironwood Ranch had issued all kinds of dire warnings and predictions about what would happen to clients foolhardy enough to attempt returning to the bar scene. Bars were,
to quote Burton Joe, “bad medicine,” and those who went back were “tempting fate.” If drunks wanted to recover, if they wanted to lead lives of upstanding sobriety, they needed to change their ways, their habits, and their friends in order to find other things to do with their time besides drink.

But I was no longer a client at Ironwood Ranch. Calvin Crenshaw had thrown me out. Tempting fate or not, I wanted a place where I could eat in peace without some hyperactive kid spilling a glass of Coke down the back of my neck or dropping a ketchup-laden French fry on my sleeve. The hell with Burton Joe. I pushed open the swinging door and went inside.

At first the place seemed almost as full as the restaurant had been, but then two people got up and left. I set off through the crush, aiming at one of the two empty stools at the far end of the polished mahogany bar. I jostled my way through the crowd of happy imbibers and reached one of the two stools just as a middle-aged man in a natty three-piece suit claimed the other.

“This seat taken?” I asked.

“No. Help yourself.”

When the bartender came by, I ordered a hamburger and a glass of tonic with a twist. I might have returned my backside to the familiar world of barstools, but, Burton Joe aside, that didn't mean I had fallen off the wagon.

I sat there fingering my drink, looking around the bar, and feeling a little out of place. It was as
though I had been away from bars and drinking for a long time, although in actual fact it had only been just shy of a month. I glanced at the man next to me. Sitting there among Wickenburg's casually dressed tourists and cowboy-type locals, he looked ill at ease in his citified gray suit and dandified paisley tie. Meanwhile, I felt as though the indelible aura of Ironwood Ranch still clung to my body. I couldn't help wondering if it showed, like some kind of religious stigmata.

“Where are you from?” I asked, turning to the man seated next to me and thinking that a little friendly conversation might make both of us feel less uncomfortable.

“California,” he answered, spinning a newly filled beer glass around and around between the palms of his hands while he stared deep into its depths. I recognized the gesture as a drinking man's version of examining tea leaves.

“Get stuck by the flood?”

He shook his head and smiled ruefully. “If you can believe it, right here in Wickenburg is where I wanted to be. It really does seem like the end of the earth. I drove over from the coast this afternoon, planning to surprise my wife and kids, but they're not in their rooms, so I guess the joke's on me. I left a note saying that I'd wait here until they got back.”

There was a hint of marital disharmony in his answer, and I was happy he spared me the gory details. Friendly conversation I could handle. Shoulder crying, no way.

My hamburger came. I doctored it with liberal doses of mustard and ketchup and ordered another tonic with another twist. The noise level in the room went up a notch as still another group of revelers—locals or stranded tourists, I couldn't tell which—crowded into the already packed bar.

“Do you have floods like this often?” the guy in the suit asked, erroneously assuming I was on my home turf.

I started to tell him that I wasn't from Wickenburg any more than he was, but that would have necessitated explaining where I was from and what I was doing there.

“They're calling it a hundred-year flood,” I answered, quoting my local fountain of knowledge, Shorty Rojas. “Personally, I've never seen one like it,” I added with what I thought was artful candor.

The hamburger was all right, if you don't mind fried lettuce, and the French fries were soggy with grease, but food is food if you're hungry enough. I downed the main course and ordered a dish of vanilla ice cream for dessert. It was the first time in years I had ordered ice cream in public. Watching me curiously, the man next to me ordered another Bud.

“What do you do for a living?” I asked. By asking questions first, I thought I could at least direct the flow of conversation.

“I'm an accountant. You?”

But that's the problem with casual conversa
tions. Every answer evolves into another question, tit for tat.

“I'm a cop,” I answered.

“Oh,” the guy grunted. Not, What kind? Not, Where? Just, Oh, and since he didn't ask for any more specifics, I didn't offer them. An old loose-jawed guy one seat over asked Gray Suit for a light, which he didn't have, but the two of them struck up another conversation, leaving me out of it. With the life-and property-threatening flood surging past outside, everyone in the room found it easy to talk to strangers. While Gray Suit was preoccupied, I asked the bartender for a pay phone. He directed me to one in the grungy yellow hallway between the dining room and the bar, but when I picked up the handset, the phone was dead.

“Phone's out of order,” a dishwasher said unnecessarily as he trudged past me lugging a huge plastic tub laden with dirty dishes.

“I noticed,” I said, and made my way back into the bar, where a third glass of tonic had reserved my place. I had just hunkered onto the stool and was in the process of raising the glass to my lips when someone spoke directly behind me.

“If this isn't cozy. What are you two doing, sitting around comparing notes?”

I recognized the icy voice. Instantly. It was Karen, my ex-wife Karen, on a rampage. Stunned, I turned to look at her, almost spilling the full drink down my front. What the hell was she doing here?

Carefully I set my drink back down on the bar. When in doubt, attack, so I took the initiative. “I thought you were going to the meeting.”

There was such blazing fury in her eyes that I almost would have preferred tangling with the rattlesnake in Dolores Rojas' glass jar.

“Meeting? You're damned right I've been to a meeting, but I'm here to tell you you've suckered me for the last time, Jonas Piedmont Beaumont.”

“Karen,” I said reasonably, “it's not what you think.”

“It isn't? I'll tell you what I think. The kids and I took a full week out of our lives. We came all the way over here and squandered our time willingly, on the assumption that we were doing you a favor, helping you get well. That's what all the counselors told us on the phone when they were begging us to come. Just now we've spent a good hour and a half attending a goddamned Al-Anon meeting, while you're already back in the bars and drinking again.”

“Karen, I…”

But before I could say anything more, the man in the gray suit, who seemed almost as surprised as I was, managed to find his voice.

“Honey,” he said, standing up, “I think I can explain everything.”

She glared at him, her face awash in tearful anger. “You'd better get started then, David, unless you prefer his company to mine.”

With that, Karen Moffit Beaumont Livingston turned on her heel and swept regally out of the
Silver Spur Saloon, with gray-suited David, her second husband, trailing miserably behind. Somehow sensing incipient danger, people in the crowd parted, stepping aside to let them pass.

The bartender came by and collected David Livingston's abandoned glass. “Who was that?” he asked, pausing for a moment to polish the top of the bar in front of me.