With Jaime walking just behind her, Joanna opened the gate and made her way up to the porch, where a single yellow light illuminated an old-fashioned buzzer-style bell. As soon as she punched it, a small dog began barking furiously inside the house.
“Fritz,” a woman’s voice ordered from behind the front door. “Quiet now. Come here!” And then a moment later, “Who is it?”
“We’re police officers,” Joanna responded. “I’m Sheriff Brady. Detective Carbajal is with me. May we come in?”
Several locks clicked before the inside door opened cautiously to reveal a gray-haired woman clutching what appeared to be a tiny silky terrier mix in one arm. A high-volume television set blared somewhere in the background.
“Police?” she asked, peering out at them. “What’s wrong? Has something happened-a robbery or something? With all the people coming and going from that 7-Eleven on the corner, you just never can tell.”
“Are you Mrs. Crystal?”
The woman nodded.
“It’s not a robbery,” Joanna assured her. “But we do need to speak to you.”
After unhooking the screen door, Anna Marie took Joanna’s proffered ID wallet and carried it back inside the house. She put the dog on the floor and then studied Joanna’s ID in the illumination from an overhead light. Meanwhile the dog raced back to the screen door and resumed barking. Joanna held the screen door shut to keep the dog from bursting outside.
“Fritz,” the woman ordered. “Stop that right now. Come here.”
Fritz, of course, paid no attention. Finally the woman returned to the porch, scooped the dog back into her arms. “He doesn’t mind very well,” she said. “Wait right here while I lock him in the kitchen.”
Returning from incarcerating the animal, Anna Marie Crystal held the door open. “Sorry about that,” she said. “He’s a little spoiled. Come in.”
Joanna and Jaime entered a room that reeked of years of uninterrupted cigarette smoking. The massive green glass ashtray on the coffee table was full, but not to the point of overflowing. There were doilies everywhere-beaded ones on the coffee table and on the end tables and crocheted ones on the backs of the couch and chairs. A bookshelf against one wall was lined with what looked like a complete collection of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books.
Anna Marie was a tall, scrawny woman with an ill-fitting set of dentures. She motioned the two officers onto an old-fashioned sectional that was far too big for the size of the room, then hurried across the room, where she used a knob to switch off the blaring television set. “Now then, Sheriff Brady,” she said determinedly, “tell me. What’s this all about?”
Jaime looked questioningly at Joanna. Nodding, she took the lead. “Detective Jaime Carbajal is one of my homicide detectives,” she said. “I’m afraid we may have some bad news for you.”
“Homicide?” Anna Marie repeated, her gaunt face paling. “You mean someone’s been murdered?”
“Yes,” Joanna said. “The body was found early this morning on Border Road between Paul’s Spur and Bisbee Junction. The victim has been identified as Bradley Evans, your former son-in-law.”
The skin of Anna Marie’s face tightened into a grimace, revealing a glimpse of the angular skull beneath her wrinkled flesh. For a moment she said nothing. “So he’s dead then?” she asked at last. “That no-good son of a bitch is finally dead?”
“Yes,” Joanna said.
“What happened?”
“He was stabbed to death.”
“Good!” Anna Marie exclaimed bitterly, taking a seat in a wingback chair across from them. “It’s about damned time! Bradley Evans murdered my daughter. Why on earth would you think hearing he’s dead would be bad news for me? It’s what I’ve been praying for every day of my life since 1978. Twenty-five years to life! He murdered Lisa and her baby and all he got was twenty-five years! How the judge could give him that and then look at himself in the mirror I can’t imagine!”
With her hands shaking, Anna Marie shook a cigarette out of a packet of Camels on the coffee table, lit it, and then pulled the ashtray within easy reach.
“So you weren’t close?” Joanna asked.
Anna Marie blew an indignant plume of smoke into the air. “Close!” she exclaimed. “Don’t even think such a thing! Of course we weren’t close.”
“But he listed you as his next of kin.”
“Well, I’m not. I’m no kin of his at all.”
“He also named you as the beneficiary of his group life insurance policy. It’s a small death benefit, but-”
“Just because he put my name down on a piece of paper doesn’t mean I have to take the money!” Anna Marie declared. “Blood money is what I call it. He probably thought that by leaving me something I’d forgive him for what he did, but I won’t. Not ever. No matter what. I hope he rots in hell.”
It wasn’t at all the kind of next-of-kin notification Joanna had expected. Instead of a grieving relative, she was faced with this daunting old woman whose whole body bristled with righteous indignation.
“So he hasn’t been in touch with you since his release?” Joanna asked.
“Absolutely not. He wouldn’t dare. If he’d shown up here, I would have shot him myself. I have a gun, you know. An old thirty-aught-six. My husband used to hunt. I kept the gun after he died. I know how to use it, and believe me, if Bradley Evans had turned up anywhere within range, I would have plugged him full of lead. They’d have had to drag him off my porch in one of those zip-up body bags.”
Listening to the old woman rant, Joanna had no doubt that she meant every word. Anna Marie Crystal’s fury with her daughter’s killer was still white hot more than two decades after Lisa Marie Evans’s death.
“Tell me about your daughter,” Joanna said.
Anna Marie blew another cloud of smoke. Her face softened. “She was such a sweet, sweet girl,” she said. “She met Bradley over at the bar that used to be right there by the main gate. You remember the one.”
“The Military Inn?” Joanna offered.
Anna Marie nodded. “Right. That’s the one. It wasn’t a good place for her to hang out. I told her that, too, but she wasn’t about to listen. She was twenty-one and working for the dry cleaner’s just up the street. She liked going there after work to relax. It was a place where she and her friends could meet guys, and they did.”
“Did she and Bradley Evans meet there?”
“Yes. He was still in the army then. They got married only a couple of months after they met. Another bad idea. I told her she didn’t know enough about him. He was from somewhere else- Oklahoma or Texas maybe. Didn’t seem to have any family to speak of. That’s always a bad sign. Either the family’s bad or the one who’s on the outs is bad. It’s all the same. One way or the other it spells trouble, but Lisa thought Brad-as she called him-was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Nothing her father or I said could convince her otherwise.”
“So they got married?”
“Eloped,” Anna Marie said. “Ran off to Vegas and got married in one of those awful wedding chapels. I couldn’t believe it. Neither could my husband. He was crushed. He’d always planned on walking his little Lisa down the aisle. It broke his heart when she died. He never got over it.”
“You said Bradley was still in the army when he and Lisa met?” Joanna asked.
Anna Marie nodded. “Barely. He was about to get out. After he did, he managed to land some kind of job with the phone company. It was a good thing, too. A couple of months later, Lisa turned up pregnant. With him working for the phone company, at least she would have had maternity benefits. She didn’t have any benefits at all from the dry cleaner’s, even though she had worked there since her junior year in high school.”
“What happened?”
“You mean why did he kill her?” Anna Marie asked.
Joanna nodded.
“I have no idea. I thought Brad was a bit of a rounder. For sure he drank way too much, but he always seemed to behave around Lisa, and I thought he loved her.”