Taking the Fifth (19 page)

I went into the kitchen and found both the phone and the phone book. I called Far West Cabs. The fact that it was that particular company was a stroke of pure luck. Years before, I had been assigned the case of a Far West cabbie who was murdered and dumped in Green Lake. I had broken the case within days and sent the cabbie’s wife’s boyfriend to Walla Walla on a charge of second-degree homicide. The wife ended up spending some time in the slammer as well.

Ever since, any help I needed from Far West came through on the double. This was no exception. The dispatcher on duty was the same one who had been there the night before.

“This is Detective Beaumont,” I said. “I’m working a case and need some help.”

“You bet,” he replied. “If we’ve got it, you can have it.”

“It’s about a fare from the night before last. Actually sometime after midnight, I don’t know where she was picked up, but a Far West cab dropped her off in the one-thousand block of Bellevue Avenue East sometime after midnight, so it was really very early in theA.M . yesterday. A barefoot blonde, wearing a long blue dress and white gloves.”

“Oh, him,” the dispatcher said. “We’re looking for him too.”

“Pardon me?” I asked, sure that I hadn’t heard correctly.

“I said we’re looking for him too. He left one of his shoes in the cab.”

“A blue shoe?”

“That’s right. I’ve got it right here in the lost-and-found.”

“But you said ‘him.’”

“Sure I said ‘him.’ The driver picked him up at the Edgewater. All those drag queens go down there for the female-impersonator acts. The drivers don’t much care to pick ’em up, if you know what I mean, but a fare’s a fare.”

“It was a man?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Go check the shoe,” I ordered. “Is it a Cole-Haan, size 8½B?”

The dispatcher was off the line for a moment or two; then he came back. “You must be psychic, Beaumont. That’s what it is, size 8½B. What do you want me to do with it?”

“Hang onto it until somebody from the department comes to get it. Unless the owner shows up. In that case, call 911 and have somebody come pick him up.”

“No shit?”

“No shit. This guy’s a killer. He’s two up on us already.”

The dispatcher whistled. “This is serious, isn’t it? Anything else I can do to help?”

My mind was leaping from one direction to another. It was a frame. The killer, disguised as Jasmine Day, had first murdered Richard Dathan Morris, then taken a cab to the house to murder Jonathan Thomas. Why? And how had he left there?

Supposing he had gone there in search of cocaine—coke Morris had either stolen or planned to sell. There had been plenty of time for the killer to make a leisurely search. After all, he knew Morris wasn’t coming back.

So the killer searched the house, but maybe he had been squeamish about touching the sick man’s bed. Maybe that’s why he hadn’t found it. Or maybe Jonathan Thomas woke up and recognized him.

The light came on. That had to be it. If Jonathan Thomas had recognized whoever was there, that explained why he had to die. The killer might not have been willing to risk letting Jonathan’s disease run its natural course. If Thomas had recognized him and told the nurse, Riley would have listened, would have believed him, and would have told someone else.

“Hello, are you there?” The dispatcher interrupted my train of thought. “I said, is there anything else I can do to help?”

“Yes, there is. Do you know the other dispatchers, the ones who work for other companies?”

“Sure.”

“Call them. See if anyone went to that same address later that night and picked up someone else. If so, find out where they took him. Can you do that?”

“No problem.”

“How long will it take?”

“Maybe fifteen minutes or so. There aren’t very many of us at that time of night.”

“Look,” I said, “it’s important. If you could check it out and get back to me here, I’d really appreciate it.”

I gave him Mavis Davis’s telephone number. When I hung up the phone and turned around, Corky was there in the kitchen doorway, standing with one front paw poised in the air, eyeing me distrustfully. The moment I stepped away from the phone, he started barking again, so hard that he literally bounced up and down with every bark.

Mavis came to the doorway and grabbed him up again. “Are you finished?” she asked.

“No. I’ve left word for someone to call me back here, if it’s all right with you. What you told me is really important. We’re having it checked out right now.”

“Checked out. You mean you don’t believe me?”

“It’s not that. I’ve found the cab company that brought…” I paused. “That brought her to the house,” I said carefully. “Now we have to see if anyone else picked her up and took her away later on.”

“You mean she didn’t live in that house?”

“No.”

Mavis shook her head disapprovingly. “You know, in my day, young women weren’t allowed to go gallivanting around town at all hours of the day and night. It’s no wonder they get into such trouble nowadays, is it?”

“No,” I agreed. “It’s no wonder at all.”

She offered me coffee. I accepted, grateful to have something to do while we waited for the phone to ring. It was actually only ten minutes later when the call came through. Mavis answered it and then handed the receiver to me.

“This is Larry down at Far West,” the guy said. “This Detective Beaumont?”

“Yes.”

“Well, a Yellow Cab picked a guy up from there about three-thirty yesterday morning. Took him to 6886 Greenwood Avenue North. I talked to the driver. He remembers him real good.”

“How come?”

“The guy wasn’t wearing any shoes.”

“Larry, thanks. I’ve gotta run.”

My hand shook with excitement as I pressed down the receiver button. I was finally getting somewhere, making progress. I dialed direct to Sergeant Lowell James’s desk in the department.

“Where’ve you been, Beau? We’ve got people looking all over for you.”

“Never mind that. I’m onto something. Where’s theCole’s? ”

Cole’sis a reverse directory that makes it possible to locate people by address or phone number rather than by last name. It’s a bill-collector’s bible. It’s good for detectives as well.

Sergeant James went off the line momentarily. “I’ve got it,” he said when he returned. “Now, what’s the address you want?”

I gave it to him. Greenwood Avenue North, number 6886. While I waited for him to look up the information, I entertained myself by tapping a pencil impatiently on the wall beside the phone. The noise set Corky off again. If he’d been my dog, I would have strangled him on the spot.

“Got it,” Sergeant James said. “The name’s Osgood, Daniel P. Osgood.”

“Holy shit!”

“Who is he? What’s going on?”

“Get me a backup team and get them there pronto. I’ll meet them at that Greenwood address in…” I paused long enough to look at my watch. “In fifteen minutes.”

“Who is Daniel P. Osgood?”

“The man who killed Richard Dathan Morris and Jonathan Thomas.”

“The man? I thought we were looking for a woman.”

“Look, are you going to get me some help or not?”

“They’re on their way,” Sergeant James told me.

“Me too.”

I hung up the phone, thanked Mavis Davis for her help, and dashed for the door with Corky right on my heels.

I didn’t look back to see whether or not the door slammed on his nose. It was supposed to.

CHAPTER 19

ITURNED THINGS OVER IN MY MIND AS I drove to Osgood’s address on Greenwood North. It was beginning to make sense, all of it. I re membered how Dan Osgood had acted the first time I met him, how he had turned my card over and over in his fingers, how he had blanched when I mentioned visiting the murder victim’s parents. I had seen it then, but it hadn’t registered. It did now.

Osgood had to be the local connection between whoever was importing the coke and Richard Dathan Morris. He was also the connection between Morris and the Fifth Avenue Theater, the one who had arranged the work calls, who had seen to it that Morris worked the Fifth Avenue shows.

Was it possible that someone connected with Westcoast Starlight Productions was the supplier? If so, who was in charge? Who called the shots?

To begin with, there was Jasmine Day, the one I was supposed to think was it. But planted evidence aside, Jasmine didn’t have the necessary continuity. This was her first tour with Westcoast. I wanted to believe that she was nothing more than a pawn, unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. But a dangerous pawn, I cautioned myself, remembering the hole in the wall beside my head. A nitroglycerine pawn.

So who else was there at Westcoast? Most of my dealings had been with Alan Dale, the head carpenter/stage manager. He had claimed to be the one who fired Morris for poking around where he shouldn’t have been. Had he fired him first and killed him later? Dale had seemed more than slightly upset when I implied that maybe Jasmine was back on drugs. I remembered him glaring at me in the hallway outside Jasmine Day’s room. Was there something else going on between them, something more than the obvious professional relationship?

Then there was Ray Holman, the guy on the truss high above the theater stage whom Osgood had called the flyman. I had seen him working, but I had heard very little from him. He had seemed to be a taciturn man with his head always buried in some piece of equipment or other, someone who was always around but who blended into the woodwork. What was going on behind that silent, workaholic mask of his?

And then there was Ed Waverly. What about him? He was the one Jasmine credited with giving her a chance when nobody else would, the one who had been willing and able to put together a tour for her when she came out of treatment and wanted to change career directions. Waverly didn’t seem like such a hot prospect to me, but I couldn’t afford to ignore anyone.

That left Bertha, Big Bertha the costume lady, as the only other permanent member of the company I had spoken to directly. Big Bertha had been formidable enough when she had chased me out of Jasmine’s dressing room during intermission the night before, but it looked to me like she spent a hell of a lot more time pushing food than pushing drugs.

The upshot was that when I hit Greenwood Avenue North some fifteen minutes later, I had made zero progress. I still had way more questions than I had answers.

My two backup detectives were already in place and waiting for me. So was Sergeant Lowell James. In one hand he held a bona fide search warrant with Dan Osgood’s address filled in in the appropriate blank. James never told me how he managed to get a search warrant that fast, and I never asked.

The sky had cleared, although the ground was still wet. It was one of those early summer Seattle evenings when it seems like afternoon will go on forever. Greenwood Avenue is enough of an arterial so that no one paid any attention to the extra two or three cars parked here and there along the street within a block or two of 6886.

Detectives Hawkins and Maynard, the backup team, circled the block to cut off any chance of an exit through the rear door, while Sergeant James and I cautiously approached the front. It was a modest white frame house with a small front porch. There was no fence and no shrubbery, only a narrow patch of grass badly in need of cutting.

Sergeant James stood to one side while I moved to the door. With my hand raised to knock, I paused. From inside the house came the sound of a woman weeping. I listened for a moment or two, then tried the old-fashioned bell button next to the door. Nothing happened. There was no ring, and the sound of weeping continued unabated. After waiting a moment or two longer, I gave a sharp rap on the wooden door frame. The weeping ceased abruptly, and the hardwood floor creaked as someone came to the door.

The woman who swung open the door was in her late twenties or early thirties. Her appearance was disheveled. She wore a pair of faded jeans and a paint-splattered sweatshirt. Her nose and eyes were red, her face was wet, and her shirt showed damp spots where tears had dripped off her face onto her clothing.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“Police,” I answered, peering over her shoulder to see if there was anyone behind her in the room. There didn’t seem to be. “We’re looking for Daniel Osgood.” I handed her the search warrant.

Her hand clutched it. She crumpled it without bothering to look at it and backed away from me into the room.

“He’s not here,” she answered.

“Do you know where he is?”

She shook her head from side to side. New tears coursed down the wet paths on her cheeks. “He’s gone. He left me for good.”

“You mean he moved out?” I asked.

I motioned Sergeant James into the house. He came through the door cautiously. He, too, glanced warily around the room before moving forward. While he crept from room to room making sure there was no one else in the house, I turned to the weeping woman.

“I begged him not to go,” she said. “I told him that I forgave him, but he said he was going all the same.”

“Forgave him for what?”

She looked down at her hands, and her lower lip trembled. “There’s another woman,” she said. “I suspected for a long time, but the other night I knew for sure. He came home late. I could tell he had showered. His hair was still damp. He had used some other kind of soap, and he smelled of perfume.”

I couldn’t help feeling some compassion for her. This was a woman with blinders on. If she was devastated by the idea that her husband was messing around with another woman, I wondered what would happen to her when she figured out he was a drug-dealing murderer to boot.

“Do you have any idea where he would have gone?” I asked. “Relatives? Friends?”

She shook her head. “I suppose he went to work. There’s a show down at the Fifth Avenue Theater. He couldn’t afford to lose his job.”

“What did he take with him?”

“Just a suitcase.”

“Only one?”

“That’s all I saw.”

“What was in it?”

“I don’t know. He was just zipping it up when I came into the bedroom. He didn’t expect me home from work that early. He was going to leave me a note. He wasn’t even going to tell me good-bye.” She burst into tears again.