on her face. That’s it, she told herself firmly. No more homework. Time to go downstairs and have some coffee.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
It was almost sunset when Joanna ventured downstairs, where cocktails were being served in the posh, leather-furnished lobby. Even though she wasn’t particularly cold, she dropped into a comfortably oversized chair within warming range of the glass-enclosed fireplace. For a while she simply sat there, alternately mesmerized by the flaming gas-log or watching holiday travelers come and go. Eventually, though, she flagged down a passing cocktail waitress who graciously agreed to bring her coffee.
Then, with coffee in hand, Joanna settled in to wait for Jenny and the Gs to arrive. She smiled, remembering Butch Dixon’s wry comment that Jenny and the Gs sounded like some kind of rock band. What an interesting man he was. With a peculiar sense of humor.
Guiltily, Joanna reached into her purse and extracted the folded pages she had stowed there and forgotten after he handed them to her. Unfolding them, she found pages that were covered with small, carefully written lines that told the story of Serena Grijalva’s last visit to the Roundhouse Bar and Grill.
Jorge showed up here first that evening. I didn’t know his name then, although I had seen him a couple of times before and I knew he was Serena’s former husband. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for the guy. He’d show up now and then and hand over money—child support presumably—and she’d give him all kinds of crap. That night she went off the charts about some truck he’d just bought.
With a circular bar, the Roundhouse doesn’t offer much privacy. I remembered Serena talking to one of the guys in the bar a few weeks earlier about getting a restraining order against her soon-to-be?ex. I didn’t want any trouble, so I kept a pretty close watch on them that night. All Jorge kept talking about was whether or not she’d let him take the kids home to his mother’s over Thanksgiving weekend. He offered to come pick them up, drive them to Douglas, and bring them back home again on Sunday, but she just kept shaking her head, saying no, no, no.
Things were fairly calm for a while, then she found out about the truck and all hell broke loose. She was screaming at him, calling him all kinds of names, and he just sat there and took it. Serena was the one causing the disturbance, so I finally eighty-sixed her and told her she’d have to leave.
He had already given her the money. She took it out of her purse, counted it, took some out—twenty bucks maybe—and threw it back down on the bar. “I’m worth a hell of a lot more than that,” she said, and stomped out.
He must have sat there for ten minutes just staring at the money on the bar. Finally he picked it and put it back in his shirt pocket. That’s the time a lot of guys will settle in and get shit-faced drunk. I wouldn’t have blamed him if he had. In fact, I offered to buy him a drink, and he asked for coffee, It was fairly quiet with only a few of the regulars around, so Jorge and I talked some.
He told me about his kids, asked me if I knew them. I didn’t have the heart to tell him how much those poor kids were left to their own devices. Serena would leave them alone in the laundry while she came over here and spent the afternoon cadging drinks. On more than one occasion, when she was in here partying, I took sandwiches and soft drinks out to the kids because I knew they had to be hungry. I didn’t tell him that, either. After all, what good would it do for the poor guy to know about it? There wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it, other than maybe calling child protective services and turning her in.
He must have stayed for another hour or so, drinking coffee. And I remember wondering why the hell Serena’s attorney had gone to all the trouble of swearing out a restraining order on the poor guy. He struck me as beaten down and heartbroken, both. There wasn’t anything violent about, him, not that night. And he didn’t seem to be in any hurry to leave. In fact, from the way he kept hanging around and watching the door, I think he was hoping Serena would change her mind, come back, and take him up on whatever that twenty was supposed to entail.
She didn’t though. He left around eleven-thirty. The next thing I knew, he’d been arrested for murder. When Detective Strong came around asking questions, I tried to tell her about Serena—about what she was like. It was no use. Seemed to me that the detective had already made up her mind and decided that Jorge was guilty, whether he was or not.
I’ve thought about him a lot since then, pitied him. Serena played the poor son of a bitch like a violin, giving him a piece of ass or not, depending on her mood at the time and whether or not he forked over.
