J. Jance: Minor in possession

Louise Crenshaw wore sobriety like the full armor of Christ. Her nails ended in long sharpened talons polished to a brilliant magenta. She consistently wore the kinds of dress-for-success costumes that would have been far more appropriate for hawking securities on Wall Street than they were for riding roughshod over a herd of hapless recovering drunks. Rumor had it that she had come to Ironwood Ranch as one of the first fulltime counselors, married her boss Calvin Crenshaw without much difficulty, and immediately assumed the throne.

The lady's age was difficult to determine. Her skin had that transparently fragile and stretched look that comes from having had more than one meaningful encounter with a plastic surgeon. Even the most skillful face-lift technique hadn't entirely erased the road-map ravages caused by years of hard drinking and chain smoking.

Her husband, Cal, was a pudgy dough-boy of a man whose group-session drunkalogue chronicled years of failure at everything from running an auto dealership to selling computerized office products. He had finally sobered up and was wanting to help others do the same when his mother died leaving him sole owner of the aging Ironwood Ranch. Cal had decided to turn his inheritance into a treatment center. To hear him tell it, he was well on his way to screwing that up as well when Louise came along at just the right time and saved his bacon.

Cal himself seemed content to hover vaguely in the background while his front-office wife appeared to be everywhere at once-overseeing admissions, dropping in and out of group-session discussions, personally directing everything from how the laundry was run to what went on in the kitchen.

Louise was a formidable woman, particularly when crossed, but I was provoked enough myself that morning that I was actually relishing the approaching confrontation when I heard her high heels beating an angry staccato down the tiled hallway toward the office where I waited.

"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.