'How dare you!' she demanded shrilly as she strode into the office and slammed the door behind her. I may have been spoiling for a fight, but she was the one who set the tone of our meeting.
'How dare I what?' I asked, striking a deliberately provoking, nonchalant pose.
Louise Crenshaw bristled, infuriated that much more by my offhand attitude. Setting her mouth in a thin, grim line, she stepped around to the other side of a plain oak desk and sat down facing me. She was making a supreme effort to control herself, but the results weren't entirely successful. I noticed that her brightly tipped fingers closed tightly over the ends of the chair armrests even as she leaned back to regard me with a studied look of arch contempt.
'You're a bully, Mr. Beaumont, and you know it. How dare you browbeat Lucy Washington into letting you call the sheriff's department?'
The previous night's lack of sleep hadn't left me feeling particularly charitable toward anyone, most especially Louise Crenshaw. During our verbal battle over whether or not to report the car incident, Lucy Washington had invoked Louise's name over and over. According to Santa Lucia, Mrs. Crenshaw had decreed an unwritten but nonetheless inviolable rule that she and only she was to notify the authorities of any irregularities involving Ironwood Ranch and its residents. But at four-thirty that morning the Crenshaw answering machine had been the only one in the household taking phone calls.
I had finally overruled Lucy Washington's objections by simply picking up the telephone and making the forbidden call myself.
'Let me point out that my car had been stolen, Mrs. Crenshaw. Why the hell shouldn't I report it?'
'Oh, come now, Mr. Beaumont. Stolen? Aren't we being a bit melodramatic? Joyriding is more like it. After all, I understand the car is safely back in the parking lot this morning. I believe it was already there by the time you made your forcible phone call to Deputy Hanson up in Yarnell. Isn't it far more likely that Joey just borrowed it?'
My temper flared not only at her tone but also at her holier-than-thou attitude. 'No, he didn't borrow it,' I replied shortly, 'because the word ‘borrow' implies my giving permission, which I most certainly did not. He took the keys out of my desk without asking. I don't know where he went with it, but according to the rental agreement, it's been driven several hundred miles since I picked it up at the airport. I drove straight here. That couldn't be more than seventy-five miles at the outside.'
She frowned. 'Your family is here this week. Isn't it possible one of them used the car?'
'They came in their own cars,' I replied. 'And I haven't been anywhere near the Grand AM since I checked in other than to walk by it in the lot on my way to Group.'
The magenta nails moved swiftly from the armrest to the desktop, where she tapped them thoughtfully.
Sitting there eyeball to eyeball with Louise Crenshaw, I somehow failed to mention the. 38, and not because it slipped my mind, either. At the moment the fact that Joey Rothman had fired my Smith and Wesson worried me a whole lot more than the idea of his taking the car, but what was the point of bringing it up? I figured there'd be enough hell to pay if and when Madame Crenshaw discovered that the gun existed at all. In the meantime, what she didn't know didn't hurt her.
'Speaking of Deputy Hanson, where the hell is he?' I grumbled. 'He told me he'd be here between six-thirty and seven, and it's already after seven. How far are we from Yarnell anyway?'
Louise sat up in her chair, rested her elbows on the desk, folded her hands together, leaned her chin on them, and smiled an icy smile.
'I called Mike's office this morning as soon as I learned what was going on. It seemed to me that the situation didn't merit his making a special trip.'
'Are you telling me you told him not to come?' I sputtered.
Louise gave me another chilly, condescending sneer. 'If you'll just allow me to finish, Mr. Beaumont. I told Mike I didn't think it was necessary for him to make a special trip down here just for this, but he said he was coming to Wickenburg anyway. In fact, he would have been here by now, but the dispatcher said there's been another incident of some kind, an emergency situation down-river a mile or so. He'll stop by here when he's finished with that.'
We sat there for some time glaring at one another. Louise Crenshaw was somebody who thrived on playing power games with other people's lives. Not only playing, but playing and winning. I've no doubt she was personally effective in treating some of the patients who came through Ironwood Ranch, but for those who crossed her, for those who didn't take her word for the gospel and who fought back, she was bitch on wheels.
Finally, conceding at last that I wasn't going to break the long silence, Louise crossed her arms. 'So where is he?' she asked.
'Who, the deputy? You tell me.'
'I don't mean the deputy. Where's Joey Rothman?'
'Beats hell out of me. By this time, he's probably sound asleep in his own little beddy-bye. I'm not in the habit of policing his nighttime forays.'
'He's not there. Cal just went up to check.' She paused and cocked her head to one side. 'What do you mean ‘nighttime forays'? You said before that there are several hundred unaccounted miles on your car. Are you saying he's done this before, been out past curfew and left the premises?'
'Joey Rothman is always out after curfew,' I said, taking real pleasure in the two small blotches of color that suddenly appeared on Louise Crenshaw's pallid cheeks. 'Maybe you should tell Cal to try looking in Michelle Owens' cabin,' I suggested helpfully.
She sat bolt-upright in her chair then with both hands clenched around the edge of her desk. 'What do you know about that?' she demanded.
I shrugged. 'You know. The usual gossip-that Michelle Owens is knocked up and that Joey's the soon-to-be- daddy.'
She paled at that and sat up straighter. 'That's not exactly gossip. That's inside knowledge. The results of Michelle's pregnancy test weren't known until late last night. How did you find out?'
'Word gets around,' I said shrugging noncommittally.
'You're not going to tell me where you heard it?'
I didn't see any reason to drag Guy Owens into the discussion. Worrying about his daughter, he already had enough on his mind. 'No,' I replied, standing up. 'Is that all?'
'It isn't all,' Louise Crenshaw returned sharply. 'Not by any stretch of the imagination. If Joey Rothman has been out of his cabin past curfew every single night, why haven't you reported it before this?'
'In case you haven't noticed, being your brother's keeper went out with Cain and Abel.'
'Mr. Beaumont, Joey Rothman is here for treatment.'
'So am I, lady,' I pointed out. 'My treatment and nobody else's. I'm not paying good money to come here and baby-sit some young punk who's walking around with his brains in his balls, someone who told me Ironwood Ranch should be renamed Mustang Ranch II, if you get my meaning, Mrs. Crenshaw.'
She met my gaze with a brittle stare. 'That will be all, Mr. Beaumont.'
'You're damned right that's all, because I'm tired and hungry. I'm going to go have breakfast. When the deputy gets here, call me.' With that, I stalked out of the office, leaving Louise Crenshaw sitting alone at her desk in isolated splendor.
As I walked toward the dining room and smelled the enticing odors coming from the kitchen, I realized just how hungry I was. Good food is a major part of Ironwood Ranch's treatment program. The idea is that addicts shove all kinds of unhealthy substances into their bodies while neglecting most other forms of nourishment. I had expected the normal tasteless institutional fare, but the cook, a short but exceedingly wide and usually smiling Mexican lady named Dolores Rojas, wasn't the normal institutional cook.
Dolores and her husband, a bowlegged cowboy named Shorty, had been at Ironwood Ranch for twenty years. Her domain was the kitchen, while he ran the stables. Her responsibility was to feed everybody, while his job was as general handyman in addition to looking after the small string of saddle horses that were still used for occasional client trail rides and outings. On the side he boarded and trained a small number of privately owned animals. Dolores and Shorty lived in a modest but immaculate trailer parked down the hill near the stable.
Breakfast wasn't actually served until eight, but I had fallen into the habit of coming down earlier than that for a jolt of Dolores' eye-opening coffee. I would stand there on the sidelines and watch her unhurried but purposeful mealtime preparations. It was through these early morning chats with Dolores Rojas that I had learned
