Shoot / Don't Shoot

“Rats,” he returned.

Joanna laughed again. “Besides, not everybody liked our performances nearly as much as you did. Dave Thompson, the morning lecturer, climbed all over us about it this morning.”

“That’s right,” Leann put in on her own. “He seems to think he’s running a convent instead of a police academy. He wants his students to live cloistered lives with no outside distractions.”

“That would be a genuine shame.” Butch Dixon grinned, looking at Joanna as he spoke. “Not only is this lady good-looking, she’s a real mind reader, too. I was just about to finish my opus here and was wondering how to get it to her. The next thing know, she shows up on my doorstep.”

“This is Butch Dixon,” Joanna explained to Leann Jessup. “I asked him to write me a brief summary of what he could remember from the night Serena Grijalva died. Mr. Dixon here was one of the last people to see her alive.”

“When you say it that way, you make me sound like a prime suspect,” Butch Dixon returned darkly. “I hope I’ve remembered all the important stuff, although I don’t see what good it’s going to do. I gave the exact same information to that first homicide detective when she came around asking questions ­right after it happened. As far as I can tell, it didn’t make a bit of difference.”

“You didn’t tell me you were conducting your own independent investigation,” Leann said accus­ingly Joanna.

Joanna shrugged and tried to laugh it off. “I can’t afford to advertise it, now can I? And God knows I shouldn’t be doing it, especially since there’s more than enough going on in my own little bailiwick. One case in particular could be called the Case of the Missing Cook.”

“Are we talking about a real cook?” Leann asked. “It sounds like one of those Agatha Christie pries.”

“That’s ‘The Adventure of the Clapham Cook,’ “ Butch Dixon said in a casual aside without bothering to look up from his pen and paper.

“You read Agatha Christie?” Joanna asked.

“Among other things,” he replied.

“I’m talking about the jail cook, down in Bisbee,” Joanna continued, turning back to Leann. “He quit sometime between dinner last night and breakfast this morning. He took off without giving notice and without making any arrangements for breakfast this morning, either. Not only that, he stole all the Thanksgiving turkeys in the process.”

“I’ve been stung like that a time or two,” Butch Dixon put in sympathetically. “Fly-by-night cooks. Don’t you just hate it when that happens? It sounds to me like being a sheriff is almost as bad as running a bar and restaurant. What are you going to do about it?”

Phil arrived with the drinks. After Joanna and Leann gave him their lunch order, Joanna went on to explain about the Ruby Starr/Burton Kimball solution to the Cochise County Jail Thanksgiving dinner dilemma.

“Isn’t the term ‘undeserving poor’ from My Fair Lady?” Butch asked. “I think that’s what Liza Doolittle’s father calls himself.”

Joanna and Jenny sometimes watched tapes of musicals on the VCR. Since My Fair Lady was one of Jenny’s all-time favorites—right after The Sound of Music—Joanna knew most of the dialogue verbatim. Undeserving was exactly what Liza’s father had called himself.

Joanna looked at Butch Dixon with some surprise. Most of the men around Bisbee—Andy Brady included—didn’t sit around dropping either Agatha Christie titles or lines from plays into casual conversation, especially not lines from musicals,

“Agatha Christie? Lerner and Lowe? That’s pretty literary for a bartender, isn’t it? My mother always claimed that you guys were only marginally civilized.”