Judgment Call (28 page)
Authors: J. A. Jance
“Leaves two rings behind and takes the cell phone?” Joanna asked. “That doesn't make sense.”
The M.E.'s van arrived. As Machett and his helper prepared to transport the body, Myron Thomas came hurrying across the parking lot. He stopped abruptly when he reached the boundary of crime scene tape laid out in a wide circle around Maggie Oliphant's Mark VIII.
“Folks are getting restless in there,” he said. “Is there a way to start letting some of them leave? My people need to get into the dining room so they can start cleaning up.”
“Right,” Joanna agreed. “We can't keep everybody waiting all night.” She turned to Jaime. “As people leave, ask them if they've had any dealings with Maggie in the last two weeks or so. Anyone who says yes, we'll contact later for a more detailed interview. We'll talk to the Plein Air participants after everyone else leaves.”
“Sounds good,” Jaime said.
With Joanna posted at one entrance to the dining room and Jaime at the other, people began to file out of the room. It took the better part of an hour for most of the guests to be allowed to leave. Several of the women who had served on the Plein Air committee were noted as needing follow-up interviews, but none of them or any of the other guests admitted having seen anything unusual.
Once the other guests had been handled, Jaime took responsibility for interviewing the artists as well as the major playersâEleanor Lathrop, Michael Coleman, and Myron Thomas. He did that upstairs in Myron's office, while Joanna handled the spouses and significant others at the golf pro's desk in the pro shop.
Joanna's introductory query about recent dealings with Maggie Oliphant was enough to take most of the spouses and significant others out of the equation since Maggie's focus had been directed primarily at the artists. The only real exception to that came when the last person in line, Michael Coleman's wife, Sheri, took her seat in front of Joanna.
“This isn't my first rodeo,” Sheri said with a smile. “Michael does several of these events in any given year. He takes them in stride, while the organizers end up being nervous wrecks. That seemed to be the case with Maggie Oliphant. She was wound very tight to begin with, and she seemed to become more so as the week went on.”
“Was there anything in particular that set her off?”
“I heard her apologizing to Michael several times, saying she had discovered that one of the people in the master classes had gotten in under false pretenses. He didn't have the skill or background necessary to take advantage of the kind of instruction Michael was giving them.”
Joanna remembered hearing Eleanor's side of what must have been a similar conversation.
“Did she mention anyone in particular?”
“Not really. Just that she was embarrassed about it and didn't want Michael wasting his efforts on someone who had no business being in the class to begin with. She was afraid that if the guy's stuff at the juried show tomorrow is really bad that it would somehow reflect badly on Michael.”
“Would it?”
“No, but Michael suggested that if she was really worried she might consider giving the guy the option of bowing out of the show gracefully.”
“To not have his work in the juried show?” Joanna asked.
“Exactly.”
“How did that turn out?”
“Maggie didn't sayâat least not to me. She might have mentioned it to Michael.”
“If one of the participants was really unqualified, wouldn't Michael have been able to notice based on the work they did during the week?”
“That's the thing,” Sheri said. “Most of the artists haven't shown what they've been working on to anyone else. Their stuff for the show is supposed to be dropped off at Horace Mann tomorrow morning at ten. It'll take an hour or so to get it all hung. Then the judges will come in to view what's on the walls and make their decisions. The end-of-conference show starts at two in the afternoon.”
“Isn't that the point?” Joanna asked. “Didn't they come here to get help from Michael and from their fellow artists?”
“Most of the people here are still at the point where they worry that someone will steal their ideas or try to copy their work. They haven't figured out that if you point a group of artists at the same rock and tell them all to paint the same thing, what's going to come out of that exercise will be as many different paintings as you have people doing the painting.”
“Hasn't anyone explained that to them?”
Sheri laughed. “That's not something you can tell someone. They have to learn it on their own.”
“That was the only specific thing you heard her being upset aboutâthat at least one of the participants didn't measure up?”
“The rest of it was all logistical detailsâwhere were people staying, where were they having meals, whether anybody needed anything. She was excellent at sorting out all those little items.”
“Did you see any confrontations between her and anyone else?”
“Only the man hereâwhat's his name, the owner?”
“Myron Thomas?”
“Yes, I heard her on the phone with him several times during the week, adjusting the number of guests as people who were late about RSVPing finally got around to doing so. He evidently wanted to shut down the guest list. She wanted to include as many people as possible.”
That gave Joanna something to think about. Until that moment, she had neglected to see that Myron Thomas might need to be considered as a suspect.
“What about at dinner tonight?” Joanna asked.
Sheri frowned. “I never saw Maggie tonight, not once. I was surprised that your mother was asked to take such a commanding role. I don't think any of us had met her before she came up and introduced herself during the cocktail hour. That's not to say she didn't do a good job,” Sheri added quickly. “It's just that there's usually a whole bunch of people making something like this come together, while Maggie had struck me as something of a lone ranger.”
“My mother is more of a background person,” Joanna said. “I admit, I was a little surprised, too.”
By the time Joanna and Sheri emerged from the pro shop, Michael Coleman was still there waiting for his wife, while everyone else had gone home, including George and Eleanor.
“Myron and Detective Carbajal are in the kitchen, interviewing the waitstaff and kitchen help,” Michael explained. “He said we can go, that he'll be in touch with us at the hotel tomorrow morning if anything else is needed. Your husband went home, too. He said he expected someone would give you a ride home if you need one.”
“Yes,” Joanna said with a weary smile. “That's one of the advantages of being sheriff. When I need a ride, I get a ride.”
The Colemans walked away, leaving Joanna alone in a dining room that had been stripped bare. The dishes and tablecloths were gone. Left behind was a roomful of scarred banquet tables. On a tall cocktail table near the denuded podium sat an immense coffeemaker and a few clean cups and saucers.
Joanna helped herself and waited. With her minimal skills in Spanish, she knew she'd be less than no help in the kitchen. The kitchen at the Rob Roy was definitely a place where English took a backseat, and Jaime's fluent Spanish would do far more good than Joanna's textbook Spanish.
It was almost one in the morning before Jaime and Myron emerged from the kitchen.
“I thought you'd be gone by now,” Jaime said.
“So did I. Now you're stuck taking me home.”
“You mean Dave is stuck taking us both home,” Jaime said. “I got dropped off, too. He came in his Tahoe.”
Jaime turned to shake hands with Myron. “Thanks for all your help. It's been a tough way to end what must have started out as a nice evening. I'm glad you were there when I was asking the questions,” Jaime added. “If it hadn't been for you, the guys in the kitchen wouldn't have given me the time of day.”
“I'm a little surprised to hear that they did,” Joanna said.
“They're so worried about immigration coming along and checking their papers that their first response was no response. Myron runs a tight ship. He told them that having someone die in the parking lot was bad for business. If they wanted to save their jobs, they needed to help out.”
“Did anyone see anything?”
“Maybe. One of the guys who was out on a smoking break around seven said he thought he saw a man get into the Lincoln. It was parked close enough that he could see the man walk up to the car but too far away to see who it was. He walked up, did something to the door, then got inside.”
“As in maybe used the keypad?”
“Most likely,” Jaime agreed. “We saw no evidence of any kind of forced entry. So he might have used the keypad or he might have had a key.”
“That would mean someone Maggie knew.”
They walked up to where Dave Hollicker was finishing loading the Tahoe.
“That's where the phone records will play a critical role,” Jaime said. “Fortunately, Judge Moore was one of the guests here tonight. We were able to get him to sign off on a search warrant for Maggie Oliphant's telephone records. Dave says he'll fax it in to her telephone provider first thing tomorrow morning.” Jaime paused long enough to glance at his watch. “Actually later this morning,” he corrected, “after we all get some sleep.”
It was after two o'clock in the morning when Dave dropped Joanna at High Lonesome Ranch. Tired and more than ready to hit the hay, she expected the house to be dark when she came home. Instead, she found Butch at the kitchen table with her father's journals spread out on the table in front of him.
“Still awake?” she asked.
“Couldn't sleep,” he said. “I can write about dead bodies, but I don't usually look at dead bodies. How do you manage?”
Joanna shook her head. “I don't really think about it; I just do it.”
She sat down across the table from him. “What are you doing with my father's journals?”
“I remembered what you told me about Abigail Holder tonight as we were driving to Rob Roy Links. When I couldn't sleep, I decided to look up the date you mentioned. Look at this. It's your father's journal entry from August 5, 1968.”
He slid the book over to Joanna. Joanna's first venture into her father's journal had turned up the unwelcome news that he had been romantically involved with his secretary, Mona Tipton. Eventually D. H. Lathrop had made the decision to stay married because he hadn't wanted to lose his daughter. Learning those sordid details about a man Joanna had considered perfect had come as a shock. It had forced Joanna to readjust her long-held notions about who her parents had been. Since that jarring discovery, Joanna had mostly left the books alone. They sat, untouched except for occasional dusting, on the bookshelves in the home office that was currently Butch's work space rather than hers. Now, though, looking down and seeing her father's familiar scrawl on the page of his journal was almost like hearing his voice, speaking to her from across the years:
Freddy Holder died today, and it shouldn't have happened. We were just finishing lunch. He went down into an old stope, one we weren't using anymore. He went in by himself, and the whole damned thing came down on top of him. Just that one stope. Nothing happened in the main shaft, although it scared the hell out of all of us. It took more than an hour to dig him out. The way he looked, with his skull bashed in, it was probably already too late when we started to dig.
I asked our foreman, Mad Dog Muncey, what the hell happened, why'd he let Freddy go into one of those old stopes? He said Fred probably needed to take a dump and went into the stope to do it. I said, “Didn't you tell him not to go?” He said, “Freddy Holder's all growed up and he don't have to ask nobody for permission to do nothing. Just because he was too damned lazy to walk his ass to the shit car don't make it my fault.” Mad Dog is a crass asshole. Always has been; always will be. I hope he wasn't the one who gave poor Abby the news. They've only been married a couple of months.
Joanna finished reading the entry. “That's about the same story Abby recounted when Deb and I talked to her.”
“Right,” Butch said. “Now look at this.”
The entry was dated three days later:
The mine inspectors came through today. First time I've ever seen Wayne Stevens come into Campbell Shaft, or in any of the shafts, for that matter. They blew the whistle to let us know that bigwigs were coming down the hoist. He was wearing boots and coveralls and a hard hat on his head. The way he was glad-handing the guys, you'd have thought he was a regular politician out there hunting for votes, but what he was really doing was running interference and making sure that the only person the mine inspectors talked to was Mad Dog.
After they left, though, the shift bosses came around to have what they called a quiet word. It turns out they supposedly found evidence that Freddy was high-grading and that was why he went into the stopeâto hide that day's stash of turquoise and malachite. I don't believe it for a minute. If somebody told Mad Dog to plant evidence on his own mother, I doubt he'd give it a second thought. So since Freddy is supposedly a thief, on Mad Dog's say-so, word has come down from on high that Mr. Stevens will be looking for any possible accomplices, and that anyone who shows up at Freddy's funeral will be considered suspect. That SOB! Freddy was his son-in-law, his daughter's husband! I hope Wayne Stevens rots in hell.