Shoot, Don't Shoot (29 page)

“Sure thing,” Carol said.

They started at the flooring warehouse, which was located in a small industrial complex along with five or six other businesses—all of them shut down for the holiday. Using flashlights from Carol’s glove compartment, they searched all the Dumpsters in the area. All of them had trash in them, which meant there had been no pickup that day. But there were no panties anywhere to be found. In one Dumpster, they came across several manila envelopes, but none of them were Juanita Grijalva’s.

In the next hour and a half, they went south and searched through three more industrial neighborhoods with similar results.

“I give up,” Carol said finally as she banged shut the heavy metal lid on the last Dumpster. “The running track’s right here, so if we were going to find them, it seems to me we would have by now. What say we clean up and see about having some dinner.”

Joanna looked bedraggled, but she was feeling better. The activity had done her a world of good. The idea that Dave Thompson might have tried to kill her had rocked her, but at least she wasn’t sitting around doing nothing. “God helps those who help themselves.” That was something else Jim Bob was always saying. Tracking through dusty back parking lots and wrestling with Dumpsters meant Joanna Brady was helping herself.

“Now that you mention it, I’m hungry too, but I still don’t want to go back to the hotel while there’s a chance everyone will still be down in the dining room,” Joanna said. “Not with a run in my pantyhose and smelling like this. My mother would pitch a fit.”

“Who said anything about a hotel?” Carol Strong responded. “Besides, if you’re game, we still have some work to do.”

She drove straight to the Roundhouse Bar and Grill, where the parking lot was jammed full of cars.

“What are we going to do?” Joanna asked. “Talk to Butch Dixon?”

“I don’t know about you,” Carol Strong replied, “but my first order of business is to wash my hands. Second is get something to eat. I’m starved. I’ve only been here a couple of times, but some of the guys down at the department were saying this place puts on a real Thanksgiving spread.”

At seven o’clock, the bar wasn’t very full, but the entryway alcove that led into the dining room was packed full of people, most of them with kids, waiting for seating in the restaurant. “Name please,” a young woman asked.

Joanna looked at the hostess, looked away, and then did a double take. The young woman was dressed in a Puritan costume, complete with a long skirt and a ruffled white apron.

“It’ll be about forty-five minutes for a table in the dining room, or you can seat yourself in the bar.”

“My aching feet say the bar will be fine,” Carol Strong said. “But first I need to use the RR.”

When they walked into the bar a few minutes later, Butch Dixon was standing behind the bar, gazing up at an overhead TV monitor with rapt
attention. Only when they got closer did Joanna realize that he, too, was dressed in a Puritan costume, complete with breeches, socks, and buckled shoes.

As they came toward him, he glanced away from the set. “Oh, oh,” he said. “My two favorite female gendarmes. You haven’t come to arrest me, have you?”

“Arrest you?” Carol Strong returned. “What for?”

“Video piracy,” he answered with a grin. “I know it says for home use only, but it turns out this is my home. I live upstairs, so that makes this my living room. We have a few important customs around here. One is that on Thanksgiving, the wait staff, me included, dresses up. They can choose between Puritan or Indian, it’s up to them. And in the bar we have continuous screenings of my favorite Thanksgiving movie—
Planes, Trains, and Automobiles
. It’s just coming up on the best part, where John Candy sets the car on fire. What’ll you have to drink, Diet Pepsi?” he asked, looking at Joanna.

She nodded.

“I’ll have one of those, too,” Carol Strong said. “Wait a minute. She didn’t give us menus. I’d better go get one.”

“No need. Everybody gets the same thing today,” Butch Dixon said. “Turkey, dressing, and all the rest.” He went down the bar and returned with the two soft drinks.

“How much does it cost?” Carol asked.

Butch shrugged. “Whatever,” he said.

“Whatever?”

Butch waved toward the crowded dining room. “Some of these people won’t be able to pay anything at all. No problem. That’s the way it is around here. If you can pay, fine. If you can’t pay, that’s fine, too. Let your conscience be your guide.”

He looked up at the television set. “You’ve to watch this. The part with the jacket always cracks me up.”

The food was delicious. The movie was a scream. Joanna laughed so hard she was almost sick. But during the last few frames when Steve Martin drags a hapless John Candy—his unwanted and yet welcome guest—home for dinner, Joanna found herself with tears in her eyes.

And not just because of John Candy, either. It had something to do with family and with reconciliation and with forgiveness. Something to do with Eleanor Lathrop and Bob Brundage.

“Great dinner,” Joanna said to Butch when he came to take their empty dessert plates. She turned to Carol. “I think I’d better go back to the hotel now,” Joanna said. “After missing dinner, I probably have a little fence-mending to do.”

Carol nodded. “That’s probably a good idea. We’ll both think about this overnight and then put our heads together tomorrow morning. What do you say?”

“What time?”

“Not before noon,” Carol said. “I’m going to need my beauty sleep.”

They were headed for the door when Butch called after Joanna. “You haven’t seen Dave Thompson around today, have you? I would have thought he’d be in for dinner by now.”

Carol and Joanna exchanged looks. “We’d better tell him,” Carol said, turning back.

And so they did.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

 In the backseat of the Blazer the next morning, Jenny was babbling to Ceci Grijalva. “And so this man comes to see us. It turns out he’s my uncle. Grandma Lathrop wants me to call him Uncle Bob, but I’d rather call him Colonel Brundage. Uncles should be someone you know, don’t you think?”

“I guess,” Ceci mumbled.

Joanna and Jenny had picked Ceci up from her grandparents’ no-frills trailer park in Wittmann at ten o’clock on the dot. They were now in the process of driving her back to the Hohokam, where Bob Brundage and Eleanor Lathrop were suppose to join them for an early lunch in the coffee shop before Bob caught a plane back to Washington D.C.

With Bob running interference, Joanna had almost managed to work her way back into her mother’s good graces. Still, she wasn’t looking forward to the ordeal of a mandatory lunch. Requiring Joanna’s attendance was Eleanor’s method of exacting restitution from her daughter for being AWOL from the previous evening’s Thanksgiving festivities.

Joanna found it ironic that, with the notable exception of Eleanor, no one else seemed to have missed her at all. Adam York had come to the Hohokam, stayed for dinner, and left again without Joanna ever laying eyes on him, although she had talked to him late that night after they both had returned to their respective hotels. It sounded as though Adam had made the best of the situation. He had spent most of the dinner chatting with Bob Brundage. The two of them had hit it off so well that they had agreed to try to get together for lunch the next time Adam traveled to D.C.

“The company gets to choose what we do,” Jenny was earnestly explaining to Cecelia. “Do you want to watch movies or swim?”

“What movies?” Ceci responded. “I can’t go swimming because I don’t have a suit.”

“Yes, you do,” Jenny told her. “Grandma Brady brought one along for you. I think it’ll fit. And when we get to the hotel, we can choose the movies. What do you like?”

“I don’t care,” Ceci said. “Anything will be all right.”

Driving along, Joanna only half listened to the chattering girls. More than what was being said, she focused on Ceci Grijalva’s tone of voice. The lethargic hopelessness of it was heartbreaking. It seemed as though the little girl’s childhood had been stretched to the breaking point. At nine years of age, all the playfulness had been ripped out of her.

“Oh, I almost forgot,” Jenny continued. “Did you know you were on TV?”

“Me?” Ceci asked. “Really?” For the first time, there was a hint of interest in her voice.

“Yeah, really. You were on the news. Mom has a tape of it. I saw it last night after dinner. We can watch that, too, if you want.”

“I’ve never been on the news before.”

“I have a couple of times,” Jenny said. “It’s kinda neat. At first it is, anyway.”

Cecelia Grijalva’s eyes were wide as they walked into the lobby. “I’ve seen this place, but I’ve never been inside it before.”

“Come on,” Jenny said. “I’ll show you the pool first, and then I’ll take you up to the room.”

While the girls wandered off for a quick tour of the hotel, Joanna headed back to the room. She felt tired. She’d been awake much of the night, worrying about whether or not Dave Thompson had acted alone. Up in the room, she found the telephone message light blinking. On the voice-mail recording, she heard Lorelie Jessup.

“I just now came home from the hospital,” Lorelie said. “Kim brought me here so I could sleep in a bed for a while. From your call this morning, I thought you’d want to know that Leann’s doing better, but she’s still not able to talk. They’ve upgraded her condition to serious. I did speak with her doctor. He says that with the kinds of injuries received, it’s unlikely she’ll have any recollection of events leading up to what happened. He says short-term memory is usually the first casualty, so I doubt she’ll be able to help you. If you need to talk to me, here’s my number, but don’t call right away. It’s ten o’clock. I’m going to bed as soon as I get off the phone.”

Relieved that Leann was better, Joanna erased the message and replaced the receiver. But, she knew that the doctor was most likely right. The critical hours both immediately before and after a severe trauma or a skull-fracturing accident can often be wiped out of a victim’s memory banks. That meant Leann Jessup would probably be of little or no help in establishing the identity of her attacker.

Jenny’s electronic key clicked in the door lock and the girls bustled into the room. Jenny gave Ceci a quick tour of the room and then dragged her back to the television set. “We’ll watch the news tape before we go to lunch and
Snow White
after,” Jenny said, expertly shoving a tape into the VCR. Clearly, she was enjoying the opportunity to boss the listless Cecelia around. “And we’ll go swimming right after lunch.”

“You’d better get with it, then,” Joanna said. “It’s only a few minutes before we’re supposed to meet Grandma Lathrop and Colonel Brundage.”

As Jenny fooled with the tape, running it backward and forward to find the right spot, Joanna watched Ceci Grijalva closely, worrying about the child’s possible reaction to the emotionally wrenching material she was about to see.

“In our lead story tonight,” the television anchor said smoothly into the camera, “longtime ASU economics professor Dean R. Norton was arraigned this afternoon, charged with first-degree murder in the slaying of his estranged wife, Rhonda Weaver Norton. Her partially clad body was found near a power-line construction project southwest of Carefree late last week.

“Here’s reporter Jill January with the first of two related stories on tonight’s newscast. Later on this half hour, Jill will be back with another story concerning a local group determined to do something about the increasing numbers of Valley homicide cases resulting from domestic violence.”

The picture on the screen switched to the figure of a young woman standing posed, microphone in hand, on the steps of a building Joanna instantly recognized as the Maricopa County Courthouse. Only when the camera zoomed in for a close-up did she realize the reporter was the same young woman who had thrust a microphone in Joanna’s face as she and Leann Jessup were filing out of the MAVEN-sponsored vigil.

The photographed face of a good-looking young woman flashed across the screen. “A month ago, Rhonda Weaver Norton moved out of the upscale home she shared with ASU economics professor Dean Norton,” Jill January said. “She moved into a furnished studio apartment in Tempe. At the time, Rhonda told her mother that she feared for her life. She claimed that her husband had threatened to kill her if she went through with plans to leave him.”

While what looked like a yearbook head-shot of a balding and smiling middle-aged man filled the screen, the reporter continued talking. “This afternoon, Professor Norton was arraigned in Maricopa County Superior Court, charged with first-degree murder in the bludgeon slaying of his estranged    wife. Rhonda Norton had been missing for three days when her badly beaten body was found by a Salt River Project utilities installation crew working on a power line south of Carefree.

“Judge Roseann Blacksmith, citing the gravity of the case, ordered Professor Norton held without bond. Trial was set for February eighteenth.

“Rhonda Norton’s mother, well-known Sedona-area pastel artist Lael Weaver Gaston, was in the courtroom today to witness her former son-in-law’s arraignment. She expressed the hope that the prosecutor’s office would seek either the death penalty or life in prison without possibility of parole.

“At the Maricopa County Courthouse, I’m Jill January reporting.”

When the reporter signed off, the picture returned to the studio anchor. “In the past eleven months, sixteen cases of alleged domestic violence          have resulted in death. Because the accused is a well-known and widely respected college professor, the Norton homicide is the most high-profile of all those cases. Later in this news-cast, Jill January will take us to a candlelight vigil that is being held on the steps of the capitol building this evening to focus attention on this increasingly difficult issue. In other news tonight . . .”

With lightning fingers running the remote control, Jenny fast-forwarded the video through weather and sports, stopping only when Jill January’s smiling face reappeared on the screen.

“The crime of domestic violence is spiraling in Phoenix just as it is in other parts of the country. Domestic violence was once thought to be limited to lower-class households. Increasingly, however, authorities are finding that domestic violence is a crime that crosses all racial and economic lines. Victims and perpetrators alike come from all walks of life and from all educational levels. Often, the violence escalates to the point of serious injury or even death. So far this year, sixteen area women have died as a result of homicidal violence in which the prime suspects have all turned out to be either current or former spouses or domestic partners.