I might ask.
'I love you, Kelly.'
Her relief was apparent even over the phone. 'I love you, too, Daddy. Bye.'
For a long time, I lay there on the bed, thinking about Joey Rothman and his fruitless quest for money. He hadn't asked Kelly, but he had tried accumulating cash in at least two other places. From the sound of it, his relationship with Kelly had been nothing more than a cover for intelligence-seeking about me, but with Rhonda and Louise, he sounded as though he was gathering getaway money. Rhonda was probably right. In all likelihood he would have moved elsewhere and then reinvested his capital right back in the same business-whatever that was.
I may have dozed again for a little while. The next time I opened my eyes, I had left Joey Rothman far behind and found myself wondering what to do with this unexpectedly unstructured day. At Ironwood Ranch, every moment had been measured and accounted for. Now, here I was in a strange limbo where I wasn't exactly on vacation, wasn't exactly in treatment, and couldn't very well go home, not when Detective Reyes-Gonzales had given me strict orders to hang around. Maybe Ralph Ames would have some brilliant idea. Besides, I wanted to have a heart-to-heart chat with him and let him know about the dark underbelly of Ironwood Ranch.
I headed for the shower. Later, when I came back out to get dressed, I was chagrined to discover that I was down to my last clean set of underwear. The only socks I had left were the mismatched pair consisting of one blue and one black. It was time to do laundry. It was past time to do laundry.
Once I was dressed, I gathered up the small pile that contained my newest dirty clothes and went in search of a washer/dryer and coffee, not necessarily in that order.
In the kitchen, on Ralph Ames' snow-white Corian countertop, I found an insulated carafe filled with hot coffee, a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice, and a note. The note, written in Ames' precise script, told me that unfortunately he had a prior commitment that would keep him busy most of the day, but that he'd be back late in the afternoon. Together we'd do something about dinner.
So I was on my own, for the whole day. Knowing that, I had no reason to rush into doing the laundry. I opened a sliding pocket door off the kitchen far enough to see that the room behind it was indeed the laundry. It smelled rotten in there. The penetrating stench seemed dreadfully out of place, especially in Ralph Ames' otherwise immaculate house. Quickly I dropped my bundle on the floor and shut the door again to keep the foul odor locked inside, then I turned to the serious business of coffee.
Awkwardly, holding the carafe with my arm, the glass of orange juice in one hand, and an empty cup in the other, I pushed open a sliding glass door with my shoulder and ventured out onto the patio to soak up some of Arizona's much-touted autumn sunshine. It was high time.
I settled down at a glass-topped patio table beside the pool and leaned back in the chair, with my eyes closed at times, feeling the warmth of the bright, brassy sun on the side of my face. Behind me I heard the usual city sounds-muted tires scrubbing on pavement, the sporadic rumble of occasional trucks, and once the blaring squall of a passing ambulance. The city was there all right, at my back and out of sight behind the glaring white stucco of Ralph Ames' rambling house, while before me loomed the rugged majesty of Camelback Mountain.
Ames had mentioned it to me once or twice, talked about how he considered himself privileged to live with that giant mound of red rock and its occasional internal grumblings as one of his closest neighbors. Sitting there quietly, sipping the sweet pulpy orange juice, I gradually came to understand what he had meant. A soothing, almost palpable silence drifted down the jagged sandstone cliffs like a veil of dense fog, wrapping itself around me and, for a brief while, blocking out all the disquieting circumstances of the past few days.
I may have actually slept for a moment or two, but finally, I roused myself and poured a cup of steaming coffee. Alternating the hot coffee with cool sips of orange juice. I sat for more than an hour, allowing myself to think about each of the players in turn considering them individually and collectively:
Joey Rothman, a dead creep with no socially redeeming value, had evidently believed I was really some kind of undercover supercop sent to nail his ass. He had believed it enough, despite Kelly's protestations to the contrary, that he had sicced his pet rattlesnake on me. He hadn't tried to put the touch on Kelly in his search for investment capital, but I wondered how many others besides Louise Crenshaw and Rhonda had been approached in his quest for quick cash.
Rhonda Attwood, Joey's mother, seemed convinced that he was responsible for the attempt on my life, but despite the fact that nothing in her son's grubby life made his death seem worthy of revenge, and despite good advice to the contrary, Rhonda persisted in the illogical notion she could or should single-handedly take on whoever was responsible for her son's death. There was a good chance that her bungling around in the case would backfire and drive the killer or killers to ground.
Michelle, the dead man's pregnant 'fiancee' had been jilted twice-once by Joey's behavior with Kelly and once by a bullet fired form my. 38. I had asked Kelly if she had known about Michelle, and now I wondered if Michelle had known about Kelly. If so, what had been her reaction? On the surface, Michelle Owens had seemed insubstantial, almost a will-o'-the-wisp, and yet pulling the trigger on a handgun doesn't require much physical strength. Anger does wonders for itchy trigger fingers.
That brought me back to the lieutenant colonel, father of the pregnant non-bride. He was a definite possibility, having both motive and opportunity, but there was part of me that hoped it wasn't him. The two of us were too much alike, had too much in common.
Finally, I came around to the Crenshaws, those wonderful horrific folks, scum parading under the guise of small-town middle-class respectability. Louise had snared the unsuspecting Joey for an insignificant sexual dalliance, with her impotent husband watching from the sidelines and urging her on. No wonder those two had been totally impervious to Joey's clumsy blackmail attempt. Of the three, I had a tough time choosing who was the most reprehensible.
And here was I, poor old J.P. Beaumont who never did anything to anybody, involved in this mess all the way up you my eyeteeth, stuck in the middle of this rogue's galley briar-patch. The more I tried to get away, the deeper I sank, trapped in muck, hoping against hope that Detective Reyes-Gonzales would find a way to bring this impossible muddle to some kind of satisfactory conclusion. With any kind of luck, the lady would be good at her job.
Maybe I was no loner a prime suspect, but until Detective Reyes-Gonzales straightened things out, she wasn't likely to let me get on an airplane and go back home. The prospect of hanging around Arizona indefinitely with nothing to do but wait wasn't one I relished.
With the thought in mind, I put down my emptied coffee cup and went to start the washing machine. The smell in the laundry room hadn't gotten any better. Shorty Rojas or whoever had gathered up my personal effects from the cabin at Ironwood Ranch had evidently dumped my wet sandbagging clothes into the laundry bag and tied the damn thing shut. Anyone who's ever had the misfortune of forgetting a wet bath towel in a clothes hamper for a day or two knows what I'm talking about. There was another smell, too hovering in the background, but the odor of the moldy clothes was so overpowering that at first I couldn't quite identify the other one.
My mother always insisted on sorting clothes into three stacks-whites, light-colored, and dark-colored. After first locating a large plastic bottle of bleach and pouring some into the filling washing machine, I began the sorting process. The ones on top, still dank and wet and shot through with sand, came out first and fell into a sodden heap. I left them there, figuring I'd wash those separately.
Next came a fistful of socks and underwear. I sorted out the socks. Loose sand had sifted down form the wet things at the top of the bag. When I shook a T-shirt to get rid of the sand, something small and white came free from the material and flew across the room like a guided missile, landing with a tiny soft thud several feet away on Ralph Ames' surgically clean kitchen floor. Not wanting to leave a mess, I went to retrieve whatever it was, and it turned out to be a mouse. A dead white mouse. A reeking dead white mouse.
For a sickening moment I was back in the cabin at Ironwood Ranch looking down at a regurgitated pile of fur and tail. I'm not scared of dead mice, but if a mouse could be concealed in my dirty clothes bag, I wondered what else could.
Dreading what I might find, I left the mouse where it was and went back to the laundry room. Gingerly I shook out the entire bag, emptying the contents onto the floor and then kicking through the resulting heap to see if there were any other unwelcome surprises. There weren't. The only things left in my dirty clothes bag were moldy, dirty clothes.
By now the machine was full of hot soapy water, agitating wildly because no clothing had been added. I
