doesn't.'
She paused for a moment, unabashedly meeting my gaze and giving me an opportunity to study her more closely. Everything about Rhonda Attwood seemed contradictory. Her skin glowed with a healthy, wholesome vitality that showed little assistance from makeup of any kind. A softly feminine pink angora cardigan was worn over a garish Powdermilk Biscuit T-shirt and faded, belted jeans. Her feet were shod in much-used waffle-stomping hiking boots with thick leather thong laces.
A complex woman, I thought, internalizing the full paradoxical effect. Rhonda Attwood was pretty, not beautiful, but capable of making a stunning appearance. At the moment she simply chose not to.
'I don't believe you came here to tell me about your former husband's martial difficulties with his present wife,' I said, tentatively, trying to bring her back to the subject at hand.
She nodded, allowing herself to be herded. 'You're absolutely right, Mr. Beaumont. I came because I need your help. I came to talk to you about Joey. About my son, and, as I said outside, to ask for your help.'
Until she spoke Joey Rothman's name aloud, there had been little outward evidence of the grieving mother about her. Her distress was muted and kept a firmly under control. People who succeed in not showing emotions under these circumstances come from the two opposite ends of the grieving spectrum. Either they genuinely don't care about what happened or they're afraid to show it for fear it will tear them apart.
'I'm sorry about what happened,' I said, trying to smoke out which definition applied.
She looked at me appraisingly. 'I suppose you think I ought to cry or something, don't you,' she said.
'We're all different,' I assured her. 'No two people react in exactly the same way.'
She nodded thoughtfully. 'I'm sure most mothers do cry, but I can't anymore. You see, I used up all my tears years ago. Maybe Joey finally died last night, at least his body did, but he's been gone a long, long time. The only thing left for me to do is bury him. After that, I plan to get even.'
Her voice was low and husky and deadly serious.
'Get even?' I asked, playing dumb. 'What do you mean?'
'I think you know what I mean. Like in the Old Testament. An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. I'm going to find whoever did this to him, and I'm going to take them out.'
Her words seemed totally at odds with a lady of her demeanor, but there was a chilling certainty about them, a dogged, unemotional resolve, that put me on edge. Determined women who decide to even scores scare hell out of me.
'That's a job for professional police officers,' I cautioned.
Unblinking, she stared at me. For a scary moment or two I wondered if maybe that was why she had come looking for me. Maybe she was operating under the misapprehension that I was somehow personally responsible for her son's death. She had laid a narrow purse on the table in front of her. With tension tightening across my shoulders, I gauged how thick the bag was and wondered if it was big enough to hold a handgun. Unfortunately, the answer was yes.
'I had nothing to do with Joey's death,' I said.
She arched one finely shaped eyebrow. 'Oh? Convince me.'
'Convince you of what? That I'm not a narc? That I'm a drunk, dammit, just like everybody else at Ironwood Ranch? We're all drunks or addicts, one way or the other. Believe me, I wasn't there on some kind of undercover assignment. I was there under protest, on doctor's orders.'
'That's not what Joey thought,' she countered.
'I don't give a damn what Joey thought. He was wrong.'
'He said you didn't seem that sick to him, that you made his suppliers nervous.'
'I made them nervous? That's a laugh. Why the hell would he tell you something like that?'
'He was afraid you'd do something that would blow the whole operation. He thought he might have to leave the state for a while until things blew over.'
'But he wasn't afraid you'd turn him in,' I suggested.
'Evidently not,' she replied, but the piercing blue-eyed gaze never left my face.
'When did Joey tell you all this?'
'Last night,' she said.
'What time?'
She paused before she answered, her blue-eyed gaze cool and assessing. When the answer came, it seemed as though she had reached a decision about me.
'Eleven o'clock maybe. It was fairly late, but I didn't notice the time exactly. He called to ask me for money and a place to stay after he got out.'
'He asked you for money? How much?'
'Ten thousand dollars. He said he wanted to go somewhere and start over.'
I whistled. 'That's a lot. Did you agree to give it to him?'
'Are you kidding? I may have been his mother, but that doesn't make me stupid. I knew what my son was.'
'And what was that?'
She smiled bitterly. 'A liar and a cheat. A chip off the old block.'
'You mean like his father?'
She nodded again. 'JoJo uses people too. I'm sure Joey had absolutely on intention of starting over someplace else. Not really. That was a lie to see if I would bite. He would have used the money to bankroll himself into some other deal, and if he got caught again, I'm sure his father could have fixed it again.'
'You mean the plea-bargained MIP?'
'That's right. His father's a big-time developer with lots of friends in high places.'
'What exactly did they catch him doing?'
'When he got sent to Ironwood Ranch? I suppose he was dealing drugs, but I'm not sure. JoJo passes information along to me only on a need-to-know basis, and he doesn't think I need to know much.'
'It doesn't sound like you approve of the plea arrangement.'
'I don't,' she returned coldly, 'but no one bothered to ask my opinion. If my son really was a drug dealer, he should have been in jail, not at Ironwood Ranch. I know they call it a hospital, a treatment center, but it looks more like a resort to me.'
I couldn't help feeling a certain grudging admiration for this tough-minded woman. In my experience, most mothers of punks opt for whatever plea bargains are available when their little boys get caught doing what they shouldn't. That made Rhonda Attwood a very unusual specimen. Mentally ticking off what I had learned so far, I went back to something she had said earlier, while we were still outside, her unflinching assumption that Joey had tried to kill me by turning his pet rattlesnake loose in or cabin. That too wasn't exactly standard mother-of-scumbag behavior.
'So you think Joey tried to kill me?'
'Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it was nothing more than a practical joke and he was only trying to scare you.'
'It worked,' I said grimly. 'It scared hell out of me.'
She laughed ruefully. 'I know how you feel. Joey turned Ringo loose in my house once as well. It was a full week before I found him hiding behind the detergent in the laundry room. Joey claimed it was all a joke, that he wanted to see what I'd do.'
'Nice kid,' I interjected. 'I'd have moved out of the house, or moved him out.'
'I couldn't, at least not then. I tried to get him into counseling, though, but his father wouldn't hear of it. He said there was nothing wrong with him.'
She closed her eyes and seemed to wander far away from the Joshua Tree Motel. I watched her for a moment, marveling once more at what a tough, remarkable woman she was. Eventually I dragged her back to the present.
'Supposing it wasn't a joke. Why would I have been the target?'
'I'm sure it was just like what he said on the phone. The suppliers thought you were a narc and they told him to get rid of you.'
'Instead, someone got to him first.'
Rhonda nodded pensively while a shadow of grief flitted briefly across her face, then her blue eyes hardened
