Butch chuckled. “You might give her a friendly warning, just for her own protection. It sounds to me as though anybody who gets on the wrong side of your pinch-hitting cook does so at his or her own
Risk.”
Joanna and Leann both ended up laughing at that. They couldn’t help it. When their food came, Butch Dixon stood up. Tearing several sheets out of the yellow pad, he folded them and handed them over to Joanna, who tossed them into her purse. Then Dixon excused himself, leaving the two women to enjoy their meals.
When lunch was over, Joanna dropped Leann back at the APOA campus. Joanna felt a moment of guilt as Leann climbed out of the car. “This place looks really lonely. Are you sure you wouldn’t like to come over to the hotel and spend the afternoon there?”
Leann shook her head. “Thanks for the offer, but I’ll be fine,” she said. “I’ve got plenty of homework to do. After the way Dave Thompson climbed all over us this morning, I want to be prepared for Monday morning. Thanks for suggesting the Roundhouse for lunch. That hamburger was great.”
Two was still an hour too early to show up at the hotel, but Joanna went there anyway.
The afternoon was perfect. With blue skies overhead and with the temperature hovering somewhere in the eighties, it was hard to come to terms with the idea that this was the day before Thanksgiving. Bisbee’s mountainous climate lent itself to more seasonal changes. November in Bisbee usually felt like autumn. This felt more like summer.
Outside the automatic doors, huge free-standing pots and flower beds were ablaze with the riotous colors of newly planted bedding plants—marigolds, petunias, and snapdragons. Inside the lobby a totally unnecessary gas-log fire burned in a massive, copperfaced fireplace. Scattered stacks of pumpkins and huge bouquets of brightly colored mums and dahlias spilled out of equally huge Chinese pots. Looking around the festive lobby, Joanna allowed a little holiday spirit to leak into her veins. This wasn’t at all like High Lonesome Ranch at Thanksgiving, and that was just as well.
Surprisingly enough, when Joanna approached the desk, she discovered that her room was ready after all. Joanna checked in. Refusing the services of a bellman for her single suitcase, she took a mirror-lined elevator up to the eighth-floor room she and Jenny would share for the next three days. She put down her suitcase and walked over to the picture window overlooking Grand Avenue. Across a wide expanse of busy roadway and railroad track, Joanna had a clear view of the APOA campus.
Turning away from the window, Joanna surveyed the room. Although her dormitory accommodations and the main room at the Hohokam were similar in size, shape, and layout, there were definite differences. The hotel room had two queen sized beds instead of a single narrow one. In plan of a narrow student desk, there was a small round table with two relatively comfortable chairs on either side of it. The uniformly plastered walls of the hotel room were dotted with inexpensively framed prints. Except for the one mirrored wall in the dorm room, the walls there were totally bare.
It was in the bathroom, however, where the difference between hotel and dorm was most striking and where, surprisingly, the Hohokam Resort Hotel came up decidedly short. The hotel bathroom contained a combination bathtub/shower rather than both shower and tub. Not only that, there were no Jacuzzi jets in the tub, although a guest brochure on the table did say there was a hot tub located in the ground-floor recreation area.
After unpacking what little needed unpacking, Joanna sat down at the table and completed the letter she had started writing to Jenny two days earlier. When that was finished, Joanna tore it out of her notebook, folded the pages together, and placed them into an official Hohokam Resort Hotel envelope. Writing Jenny’s name on the outside, Joanna left it on top of the pillows on one of the two beds. Then she lay down on the other and tried reading.
Her assignment in The Law Enforcement Handbook brought her fully awake only when the book slipped from her grasp and landed squarely on her face. That’s it, she told herself firmly. No more homework. Time to go downstairs and have some coffee.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
It was almost sunset when Joanna ventured downstairs, where cocktails were being served in the posh, leather-furnished lobby. Even though she wasn’t particularly cold, she dropped into a comfortably oversized chair within warming range of the glass-enclosed fireplace. For a while she simply sat there, alternately mesmerized by the flaming gas-log or watching holiday travelers come and go. Eventually, though, she flagged down a passing cocktail waitress who graciously agreed to bring her coffee.
Then, with coffee in hand, Joanna settled in to wait for Jenny and the Gs to arrive. She smiled, remembering Butch Dixon’s wry comment that Jenny and the Gs sounded like some kind of rock band. What an interesting man he was. With a peculiar sense of humor.
Guiltily, Joanna reached into her purse and extracted the folded pages she had stowed there and forgotten after he handed them to her. Unfolding them, she found pages that were covered with small, carefully written lines that told the story of Serena Grijalva’s last visit to the Roundhouse Bar and Grill.
Jorge showed up here first that evening. I didn’t know his name then, although I had seen him a couple of times before and I knew he was Serena’s former husband. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for the guy. He’d show up now and then and hand over money—child support presumably—and she’d give him all kinds of crap. That night she went off the charts about some truck he’d just bought.
With a circular bar, the Roundhouse doesn’t offer much privacy. I remembered Serena talking to one of the guys in the bar a few weeks earlier about getting a restraining order against her soon-to-be‑ex. I didn’t want any trouble, so I kept a pretty close watch on them that night. All Jorge kept talking about was whether or not she’d let him take the kids home to his mother’s over Thanksgiving weekend. He offered to come pick them up, drive them to Douglas, and bring them back home again on Sunday, but she just kept shaking her head, saying no, no, no.
Things were fairly calm for a while, then she found out about the truck and all hell broke loose. She was screaming at him, calling him all kinds of names, and he just sat there and took it. Serena was the one causing the disturbance, so I finally eighty-sixed her and told her she’d have to leave.
He had already given her the money. She took it out of her purse, counted it, took some out—twenty bucks maybe—and threw it back down on the bar. “I’m worth a hell of a lot more than that,” she said, and stomped out.
He must have sat there for ten minutes just staring at the money on the bar. Finally he picked it and put it back in his shirt pocket. That’s the time a lot of guys will settle in and get shit-faced drunk. I wouldn’t have blamed him if he had. In fact, I offered to buy him a drink, and he asked for coffee, It was fairly quiet with only a few of the regulars around, so Jorge and I talked some.
He told me about his kids, asked me if I knew them. I didn’t have the heart to tell him how much those poor kids were left to their own devices. Serena would leave them alone in the laundry while she came over here and spent the afternoon cadging drinks. On more than one occasion, when she was in here partying, I took sandwiches and soft drinks out to the kids because I knew they had to be hungry. I didn’t tell him that, either. After all, what good would it do for the poor guy to know about it? There wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it, other than maybe calling child protective services and turning her in.
He must have stayed for another hour or so, drinking coffee. And I remember wondering why the hell Serena’s attorney had gone to all the trouble of swearing out a restraining order on the poor guy. He struck me as beaten down and heartbroken, both. There wasn’t anything violent about, him, not that night. And he didn’t seem to be in any hurry to leave. In fact, from the way he kept hanging around and watching the door, I think he was hoping Serena would change her mind, come back, and take him up on whatever that twenty was supposed to entail.