Improbable Cause (9 page)

I’m sure the mischief is mostly inadvertent on their part. In fact, when they left the swimming pool with Mrs. Edwards sound asleep in a deck chair, the plan was simply to raid my refrigerator for the sodas they knew I keep there as special treats.

But the sodas had somehow evolved into ice cream floats that had overflowed and slopped all over my kitchen floor. They were both down on their hands and knees trying to mop up the mess when they heard my key in the lock. One of them jumped and the remains of her float disappeared entirely under the drip tray of my refrigerator.

If it had been ten years earlier, if it had been my own kids, Kelly and Scott, I probably would have raised hell. I’ve evidently mellowed with age. I helped clean up the mess, fixed the tearful Heather a replacement float, and went in search of the still slumbering Mrs. Edwards.

“Oh dear,” she said when I shook her awake. “I must have dozed off. They didn’t get into any trouble, did they?”

“No trouble at all,” I said. Did I say mellow? Soft in the head is more like it. I didn’t even chew Mrs. Edwards out for sleeping on the job. She looked worn out. Besides, both Heather and Trade swim like fish.

I left the girls with Mrs. Edwards on the sixth floor and went back up to my apartment. I dialed Ron Peters’ number at Harborview. He answered on his speaker-phone.

“How’s it going?” I asked.

“Can’t complain,” he replied. “How about you?”

“Big Al and I got sent out on that murder in the Regrade today, the one in the dentist’s office.”

“What does it look like?”

“Domestic violence probably. The husband was a first-class shit. We think maybe the wife hooked up with a carpet installer to do him in.”

“Same old story. We’ve heard it dozens of times,” Peters said. “Anything I can do to help?”

During the months of confinement, Peters had functioned behind the scenes as the third man on Al’s and my team, using the telephone to track down leads we didn’t have time to pursue ourselves. It was a way of letting him keep his hand in.

“As a matter of fact there is,” I told him. “You can check around with the local emergency rooms and see if someone came in Saturday or Sunday with some bad scratches. Deep cuts, probably, made with the teeth of a carpet kicker.”

“Ouch,” Peters said. “I’ve seen those before. They’re wicked.”

“You’ve got that right,” I said. “The van the guy was driving had blood all over it, but he’s disappeared. Maybe you can help us get a line on him.”

“I’ll do my best. By the way, how are the girls?”

“They’re fine. They were here just a while ago. I invited them up for an ice cream float. We all had a good time. I probably spoiled their dinners.”

There was a pause. “Thanks,” Peters said. He sounded about half choked up.

“Don’t make a big deal out of it, Peters,” I told him. “It’s just like taking the girls to see

Bambi.

I needed an excuse so I could have a float, too.“

The bachelor life doesn’t have a lot to recommend it, especially if you’re a lousy cook. One exception, however, is the ability to kick off your shoes in the middle of the living room and take a nap right after work, without anyone telling you that you need to mow the lawn or haul the garbage cans out to the street.

I’m what’s known as a world-class sleeper. If left undisturbed, these afternoon naps of mine can sometimes last right on through to morning. Unless the phone rings, which it did. Right at nine o’clock.

“Detective Beaumont, please,” a woman’s voice said. It was a crisp, businesslike voice I didn’t recognize.

“Yes,” I mumbled, trying not to sound as groggy as I felt.

“My name is Alice Fields. I’m the executive director of Phoenix House. You left a message for me to call you. I was going to wait until morning, but then I had another call tonight from Marilyn McDougal.”

My stupefied brain cells finally woke up and snapped to attention. “Oh yes, Miss Fields. Thanks for returning my call.”

“Mrs.

Fields,“ she corrected firmly. She spoke with a sharp Midwestern twang that made her sound as though she had just stepped off the train from Minneapolis-Saint Paul.

“I understand you’re looking for a woman who may possibly be a resident in our shelter.”

J. P. Beaumont wasn’t much of a poker player, but neither was Alice Fields. I was bright enough to figure out that she wouldn’t be calling me four hours after quitting time if she didn’t know LeAnn Nielsen from a hole in the wall, if she didn’t give a damn.

“Might be a resident” like hell! That’s what I thought, but I didn’t say it aloud. “Did Marilyn tell you that LeAnn Nielsen’s husband is dead?” I asked.

There was a sigh, a long weary sigh. “Yes, she told me. She also said that you’re in charge of the murder investigation. What I want to know is this: is his wife under suspicion or not?”

“At this stage, the whole world is under suspicion.” It was half truth, half quip. It met with icy rejection.

“In that case, Detective Beaumont, I don’t believe we have anything further to discuss.”

“No, wait. Right now we need to reach LeAnn for two reasons, the most important of which is to tell her of her husband’s death. We’ve held off releasing his name pending notification of next of kin, but that doesn’t mean one of the television or radio stations might not get it from another source and put it on the air.”

“What’s the other reason?” Alice Fields asked.

“We’ll need to ask her some questions, to see if she can shed any light on the case.”

“Which is another way of saying she is a suspect.”

I wasn’t making much of a dent in Alice Fields’ suit of armor. “We know she was expected at her husband’s office shortly before he died. She may have seen or overheard something that would be of help to us in solving the case.”

There was dead silence on the other end of the phone. It lasted so long that I began to wonder if Alice Fields had hung up on me.

“Do you know where the Hi-Spot Cafe is?” she asked at last. “It’s in the Madrona district, at Thirty-fourth and Union.”

“I don’t know it, but I’m sure I can find it.”

“Meet me there tomorrow morning at nine,” Alice Fields said decisively.

“How will I know you?” I asked. I’m a veteran of enough missed connections that I’ve finally learned to ask important questions

before

I go looking for someone I don’t know at a place I don’t know either.

“I’m short, white hair, glasses—” she began, then she stopped. “I have a better idea. Tell them you want to sit at the round table. That room’s far enough off the beaten path that we’ll have some privacy, especially on a Tuesday morning.”

She hung up without bothering to wait for me to say yes or no and without saying goodbye, either. I realized later that I hadn’t asked her if she’d be bringing LeAnn Nielsen along to the Hi-Spot Cafe. It was just as well. She wouldn’t have told me anyway.

My ice cream float was long gone. I was starving. I padded out to the kitchen in hopes of finding food, but before I could lay hands on the refrigerator door handle, the phone rang again.

“Hi there, Beau.” It was Ron Peters, speaking to me from the echoing distance of his handless speaker-phone. “I didn’t wake you, did I?”

“Don’t worry about it. You’re not the first. I had another call a minute ago. That’s the one that woke me up.”

“What are you doing sleeping at this time of night? It’s not that late. Besides, I thought you’d want to know what I found out.”

“Who found out?” I recognized Amy Fitzgerald’s voice speaking in the background.

Peters laughed. “Excuse me. What Amy found out.”

Amy Fitzgerald had been Peters’ physical therapist during the months he had been confined in Harborview Hospital. She was still his physical therapist as far as I knew, but by now she was also quite a bit more than that. Her off-duty hours seemed to revolve around Ron Peters’ room.

“About Larry Martin?” I asked.

“That’s right. A woman brought him in to Harborview Emergency Room on Saturday afternoon about one-thirty. He said he was a carpet installer and that one of his tools had fallen on him. They put twenty stitches in his face and head.”

“Twenty stitches? That’s some cut,” I said. “It must have fallen from a long way up.”

“Amy says there would have been a lot of blood. I guess facial cuts bleed like crazy.”

“There was blood all right,” I said. “What about the woman? Was she hurt?”

“She was covered with blood, too. One of the ER nurses said one eye was swollen shut, but she wouldn’t give her name and refused to accept any treatment. The nurse figured it was a domestic quarrel of some kind, but the woman didn’t want to let on for fear of having one or the other of them wind up in jail. She denied the man was her husband.”

Peters was referring to a recent Washington State statute that requires law enforcement officers to attempt to ascertain who’s the primary aggressor in domestic violence cases and to lock up the responsible party. It’s a law that works a hell of a lot better on paper than it does in real life.

“She was telling the truth there,” I said. “If that was LeAnn Nielsen, her husband’s dead.”

I stretched the kitchen phone cord across to the refrigerator and browsed for food. There wasn’t much to be found. In addition to the sodas and ice cream, Tracie and Heather had cleaned me out of English muffins, crackers, peanut butter, and cheese slices. They had also raided the fruit bowl. One lone banana remained, so ripe that it was fermenting in the peel. Banana liqueur on the hoof.

“So what are you going to do now?” Peters asked impatiently. It had to be frustrating for him, lying there trapped in a hospital bed. He could help turn up the pieces of various puzzles but he was unable to manipulate them into place.

“I think maybe I’ve finally got a line on the wife,” I told him. “I have a meeting at nine tomorrow morning. If that works out the way I hope it will, I’ll be able to ask her some questions in person.”

It wasn’t much of an answer, but it was the best I could do under the circumstances. I told him I’d call him as soon as I knew anything more, and asked him to gather anything else he could. With that we signed off. I gave up searching for food in the kitchen and mixed myself a stiff drink instead, pouring the dregs of my last bottle of MacNaughton’s over ice and adding a drop of water.

Taking my drink with me, I walked back into the living room and settled down on the window seat overlooking Elliott Bay. It was a cloudless, still evening, the long, late dusk of a Seattle summer. As the sun gradually faded behind the Olympic Mountains, the water came to life with lights, mirroring back the glow of the city on one side and West Seattle on the other. Ferries moved sedately back and forth across the water, their lights shimmering both above and on the water’s surface. Behind them trailed inky black shadows where the chop erased all reflections from the glassy water.

The conversation with Peters had depressed me. Most of the time talking to him didn’t bother me, but that particular night, it got me good, right in the gut. Oh sure, I was thankful it was him and not me who was slowly learning to walk again, to feed himself, and put on his own clothes. But I railed at the unfairness of it, at the injustice, of a man Peters’ age, a man still with young children to raise, being locked up on the rehabilitation floor of a hospital for months so far.

If it had happened to me, it would have been different. At least my two kids were already grown, and I was financially set. But I was okay and Peters wasn’t. I was still walking around on my own steam. Ron Peters had a broken neck.

He could be in a wheelchair for increasingly long periods of time now, and Amy assured us that one day, with the help of braces and canes, he would walk again. But for the time being, his only avenue of escape and self-determination was to talk on the handless speaker-phone my attorney, Ralph Ames, had given him as a gift. It was that and that alone that allowed Peters to feel he was still a part of life outside his hospital bed, not only with his daughters, but also with the department.

I slugged down the last of my drink, hoping to wash the guilt away, trying not to think about it anymore. The homecoming blasts from the

Princess Marguerite’s

ship’s horn jolted me out of my reverie. Back from her daily excursion to Victoria, British Columbia, the ship was returning with a cargo of weary day-trippers. Flashbulbs winked from here and there on the deck as inexperienced photographers tried to use puny pinpricks of light to capture the approaching Seattle skyline. The

Marguerite

would dock at Pier 66, only a few blocks from where I live.

Glancing down at the street below, I saw a long line of cabs parked single file along Clay Street and turning onto Alaskan Way two blocks below. They would sit there and wait until the passengers cleared Customs and needed cabs. I wanted something to eat, and I wanted it fast, before hordes of

Princess Marguerite

tourists invaded the waterfront watering holes.

The strength of that one drink, combined with the fact that I hadn’t eaten, ruled out any possibility of driving. From my window, I saw candles blinking in the bar at Girvan’s Restaurant at First and Cedar, a block away. I had been inside it once when I was working a case, but I had never eaten there. It seemed as good a choice as any.

Pausing only long enough to put my jacket back on, I headed out to the elevator, rode down to the parking garage, and walked out through the side entrance on Clay.

The restaurant occupied the penthouse suite of the low-rise First and Cedar Building. I took the elevator up to the fifth floor and walked down a long hallway to the maitre d’s station. To my left was the dining room filled with quiet, late evening diners. On my right was a doorway. Through it I heard the raucous, comfortable din of a busy bar. That was far more to my liking than the sedate diners I could see in the restaurant. I waved aside the services of the maitre d“ and stepped into the bar.

It was busy, all right. Crowded even, for a Monday night. I zeroed in on the only vacant stool at the long bar. The bartender, a lady close to my own age, was a pint-sized brunette wearing a heavy squash-blossom silver-and-turquoise necklace over a long-sleeved blouse. She was there Johnny-on-the-spot before I was firmly settled on the stool.