J.A. Jance - Dead Wrong

“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.”

“Was there someone else involved?” Joanna asked.

“You mean like did Lisa have someone on the side? No way. She loved Bradley to distraction. I can’t say the same about him. I suppose Bradley could have had a girlfriend. I’ve wondered about that over the years, but I don’t know for sure.”

“They seemed happy together?”

“As happy as newlyweds are when they’re young and not making enough money. But Lisa was excited about being pregnant. She was never very interested in school. She did all right in high school, but she wasn’t the least bit interested in going off to college. She told me once that all she wanted to do was meet a nice man, get married, and raise lots of babies.”

“Did Bradley want the baby?”

“Who knows? I sure as hell didn’t ask him,” Anna Marie put in. “I mean, in those days, with the pill and all, if people got pregnant and it was after they got married, you assumed it was because they wanted to, but Bradley was a real good-time boy. On Saturdays, when he was off work and Lisa was at the dry cleaner’s, he’d go hang out at the bar and play pool until it was time for them to go home. He had a company car during the week, so they only had the one car-his pickup truck-on the weekends. So he’d take her to work and then he’d come back and pick her up when she got off in the afternoon.

“The last time I talked to her was that Saturday morning, the day she was killed. Lisa loved fried chicken, especially my fried chicken. I called her at work to see if she and Brad wanted to come over for a chicken dinner on Sunday. Fried chicken and pecan pie-Lisa’s two all-time favorites. She said she’d talk to Brad and let me know. I never heard her voice again. Sunday morning, about nine o’clock, a deputy sheriff showed up. He told me that they’d found Brad drunk out of his gourd somewhere up by Bisbee. He told me that they hadn’t found a body, but there was enough evidence of foul play that they were afraid something had happened to Lisa. And they never did find her. Brad went to prison without ever letting on what he had done to Lisa and her baby. Claimed he was drunk and didn’t remember.”

Joanna heard the words and wondered if that “deputy sheriff” had been her father.

“They never did find her,” Anna Marie repeated, grinding out the stub of her cigarette and looking off into the distance somewhere over Joanna’s and Jaime’s shoulders. “I always thought it would have been better if they had. If we could have found Lisa and the baby and buried them, maybe that would have made things better. ”Closure‘ is what they call it. These last few years, TV has been full of pictures of that awful Scott Peterson and that Hacker guy from Salt Lake, but at least those poor families found their daughters’ bodies. At least they had something to bury. Two months after Brad went to prison, my husband, Kenny, drove his pickup truck out to the San Pedro, parked alongside the river, drank a bottle of bourbon, and then put a bullet through his head. Left a note. Said that with Lisa gone, he just couldn’t see any point in going on. I didn’t blame him, either. I would have done the same thing, if I’d had guts enough. The cops even kept Kenny’s gun. Said they needed it for evidence.“

There was a plaintive whimper from behind the kitchen door, followed by a persistent scratching. Without another word, Anna Marie got up and rescued Fritz from his prison. When the old woman returned, she collapsed into her chair as deflated as if she’d been a balloon suddenly devoid of air. She seemed utterly exhausted.

Quickly Joanna rose to her feet. “We’ll be going then, Mrs. Crystal. I can see this has been very hard on you.”

“Thank you for letting me talk about Lisa,” Anna Marie said. “Most of my friends don’t have the patience for it. Talking helps me remember her. Otherwise she’d be forgotten completely.”

On an impulse, Joanna reached into her pocket and pulled out a business card. “Lisa must have been a wonderful daughter,” she said. “Anytime you want to talk about her, feel free to give me a call.”

Anna Marie studied the card for a moment and then looked at Joanna. There were tears in her eyes. “Thank you,” she said.

As Joanna stepped off the porch and into the crisp, clear night air, she breathed in deeply, cleansing the cigarette smoke from her lungs.

Twenty-seven years earlier her father had probably come to this very house to make a next-of-kin notification. Despite the long slow passage of time since then, the grief that had filled the little clapboard house remained as palpable and overwhelming as it must have been that fateful Sunday morning in 1978. Through all the intervening years, none of the hurt had disappeared. It was still trapped inside the house right along with Anna Marie Crystal’s collection of decades-old cigarette smoke.

“Whoa,” Jaime said, once they were back in his Tahoe. “I didn’t see that one coming.” The conversation with Anna Marie Crystal had struck Joanna as a fairly normal next-of-kin notification. “Which one is that?” she asked.

“You heard what the woman said-that if Bradley Evans had shown up on her doorstep she would have plugged him full of lead herself. She’s an old lady, all right, but it still sounds like possible motive to me. Having a gun and knowing how to use it can do a lot to equalize differences in age and sex.”

“She said plug, not stab,” Joanna corrected. “There’s a big difference.”

“Still,” Jaime objected. “According to Ernie, Doc Winfield theorized that our perpetrator could very well be a female.”

Joanna wasn’t convinced. “I don’t see it that way,” she said. “Even after all these years, Anna Marie Crystal is still heartbroken over her daughter’s loss-and why wouldn’t she be? She lost her daughter, her grandchild, and her husband all within a matter of months, but to her it must have seemed like it happened in one fell swoop. Given those circumstances, I think I would have hated Bradley Evans’s guts, too, but the woman doesn’t strike me as a killer. Still, it won’t hurt to check her out,” Joanna conceded. “Let’s see what if any kind of an alibi she had for when Bradley Evans was murdered.”