Taking the Fifth (4 page)

When our search was completed, we took Tom Riley over to the medical examiner’s office. His positive identification of Richard Dathan Morris was pretty much routine. When it was over, we returned to the house with Riley, where he gave us the name and address of Morris’s widowed mother, a Mrs. Grace Simms Morris, who lived ninety miles or so north of Seattle in Bellingham.

Riley left the house when we did, taking with him the newly orphaned cat. We assured him that after conferring with Jonathan Thomas’s doctor we would notify his parents of the death. The nurse seemed grateful to be relieved of that particular duty.

Doc Baker had been involved in a conference call when we stopped by to make the identification, but he had left word that he wanted to see us, both Al and me, ASAP. So back we went to the medical examiner’s office in the basement of Harborview Hospital on First Hill.

“It was a fall that killed him,” Baker began, regarding us inscrutably as we seated ourselves in his office.

“A fall? What fall?” I demanded.

Doc Baker shoved Richard Dathan Morris’s file folder in my direction, reached into his desk, and pulled out some paper clips, which he began to pitch toward the chipped blue vase that always sat in his windowsill. Tossing the clips offhandedly as he spoke, he nonetheless hit the lip of the vase with almost total accuracy.

“Not the fall, actually. Hitting the ground was what killed him.” The medical examiner smiled, amused by his own black wit.

“The holes in his head and chest had nothing to do with it?”

“Nope. Superficial damage only. Nothing fatal.”

“Could you tell what made them?” Al asked.

“A little bird told me the crime-scene investigators found what appears to be a bloodstained high-heeled shoe in the area. That would certainly be consistent with the kinds of injuries we found. We found a piece of rubber in one of the wounds that may very well be the tip of the heel. We gathered some other trace evidence as well, bits of foreign materials, from those puncture wounds. We’ll have to see if any of them matches up with what the crime lab finds on the shoe.”

Baker paused and shook his head wonderingly. “She must be some kind of broad.”

“What do you mean?”

“The holes weren’t fatal, but still, it takes a hell of a lot of strength to push the tip of a heel into someone’s body far enough to make a hole, especially if that person is fighting back.”

“Was he?” I asked.

“I’d say so,” Baker answered.

“Scratches? Tooth marks?”

The medical examiner shook his head, his mane of white hair fluttering in the resultant breeze. “No bite marks, but we found scratches, lots of them. Most of them appear to have been inflicted by the victim rolling around in a blackberry bramble. None that we could definitely attribute to fingernails.”

“Drugs?” Al asked.

Baker had exhausted his supply of paper clips. Now he paused and rummaged in his desk for more ammunition. “Preliminary findings say no. We’re running some additional tests though. Those take time. That’s all we’ve got so far.”

Baker waited impatiently until I finished a brief scan of the contents of the folder. When I looked up, he was holding out his hand for me to give the folder back. His message was clear: Here’s your hat. What’s your hurry?

Big Al and I took the hint and got up to leave.

“By the way,” I added casually, pausing with my hand on the doorknob. “I still need the name and telephone number of Jonathan Thomas’s attending physician.”

“The hell you do! What kind of wild hair’s up your butt, Beau? Why are you so goddamned interested in that guy? Get his number from my secretary on your way out.”

“Did you find any AIDS antibodies in Richard Dathan Morris?” I asked innocently.

Baker’s face clouded. “We didn’t look. Why?”

“Maybe you should. He was Jonathan Thomas’s roommate.”

With that, I closed the door to Doc Baker’s office. Behind us a paper clip pinged off the vase and ricocheted into the windowpane, followed by a rumbled oath.

“You screwed up his concentration,” Al said with a half-assed grin.

We stopped by the secretary’s desk long enough to pick up the name of Jonathan Thomas’s personal physician, a Dr. Wendell Johnson of the Capitol Hill Medical Group on Broadway.

Stepping outside into the still-brilliant sunlight, Big Al looked up at the blue sky overhead. He stretched and yawned. I read him loud and clear. It was time to go home. Past time to go home.

“Maybe she killed him in self-defense,” he suggested wearily, moving toward the car. “He attacked her, and she hauled off her shoe and beat the living crap out of him. How does that grab you?”

“It won’t hold water,” I countered. “If Morris was gay, why attack a woman?”

Al shrugged. “Beats me.”

Big Al Lindstrom is known around the department for his ultraconservative, middle-American, motherhood-and-apple-pie, Eagle Scout mind-set. I couldn’t resist taking a poke at him, just to see how he’d react.

“Maybe Morris was AC/DC,” I added. “What if he was a switch-hitter and he and the woman were after the same guy?”

Big Al made a face. “Just talking about it makes me want to puke. Let’s call it a day. We can tackle this mess again later. We’ll handle the notification of next of kin as soon as we come back on duty this afternoon.”

As Al walked away, I stopped and glanced up at the looming presence of Harborview Hospital behind us. My regular partner, Detective Ron Peters, was in Harborview, had been there for more than two months, recuperating from an accident. He was up on the fourth floor, the one they call the rehabilitation floor, where doctors and nurses were trying to glue his broken neck and his shattered life back together.

It wasn’t visiting hours, but over the weeks the nurses had come to know me well enough to let me pretty much come and go as I pleased.

“I’m going to stop by and see Peters,” I told Al. “How about if you take the car back to the department? I’ll hoof it down the hill when I’m ready.”

“Okay. Say hello to ol’ Ron for me, would you?”

I nodded, but I doubted a cheery greeting from Big Al Lindstrom would do much to lift the thick pall of depression that surrounded Ron Peters.

After the accident, the initial diagnosis of Peters’s condition had labeled him a C-6 Quadriplegic Incomplete, which meant, among other things, that although his neck was broken, the spinal cord itself hadn’t been severely damaged and there was reason to hope that he would eventually recover some, if not all, of his bodily functions.

But that thread of hope had also meant that for almost two months, Peters had been stuck in rigorous traction with steel bolts drilled into his skull supporting sixty pounds of weight. His neck injury meant he could choose to lie on one side or the other, but never on his back or his stomach. He was beginning to get some movement in his arms, but that was about it. Eventually was proving to be just that—eventually.

During his first month in the hospital they had kept Peters so doped up that I don’t think he cared what was going on around him. But now, as the long weeks of physical confinement continued, as he remained totally dependent on other people for his most basic needs, Peters had fallen into a bleak chasm of hopelessness.

The nurses told me that wasn’t at all unusual for someone in his condition, that he had to be shown there was a reason for him to go on living. I came by to visit regularly, but he rarely spoke in anything other than monosyllabic grunts.

Attempting to cheer him up, one day I brought along his daughters, six-year-old Heather and seven-year-old Tracie. I thought seeing his kids might give him the needed motivation to fight back, to try to get better. No such luck. Within minutes of their arrival, he asked them to turn on the television set and then proceeded to ignore them completely in favor of the nightly news. I had taken two heartbroken girls back to their temporary quarters in my downtown condominium.

Maxine Edwards, the girls’ regular baby-sitter, had comforted them as well as she could, soothing them and drying their faces. When subsequent visits weren’t any better, I finally took the bull by the horns and packed the three of them off to southern California for a two-week vacation.

It’s times like that when it’s nice to have money. I put in a call to Kelly, my college-age daughter, who lives in Cucamonga with her mother and stepfather. Since I was footing the bill, Kelly readily agreed to serve as tour guide and chauffeur for the duration of their visit.

I had received several delighted phone calls from the girls. They were having a ball. Disneyland, Universal City, and Knott’s Berry Farm would never be the same. But Peters had not been happy when he heard about the trip. In fact, he had been pissed as hell. We had exchanged ugly words over it. He said they shouldn’t have gone, since it wasn’t something he could afford to pay for himself. I told him he had placed the girls in my custody for as long as he needed them there, and I was more than prepared to handle all the accompanying expenses.

The girls had sent home a collection of gaudy postcards addressed to their father, all of them bearing clumsily scrawled notes telling him to get well soon. As a matter of fact, I was packing the whole batch of cards in my jacket pocket, had been for several days, while I put off going to the hospital and having what I expected to be a nose-to-nose confrontation with their father. I wasn’t looking forward to his reaction once he saw the cards.

It was time to go though. However tough it might be to face him, I couldn’t, in good conscience, put it off any longer.

I rode an elevator up to the fourth floor. Peters’s roommate, a diving-accident victim, was gradually making the transition out of bed and into a wheelchair. He was out of the room when I got there. Peters was lying on his side, an open newspaper propped clumsily on the bed beside him.

“How’s it going?” I asked, doing my best to sound jaunty and cheerful.

“About the same,” he said, not looking up.

“Any word about when you’ll get out of this ungodly contraption?” I patted the overhead traction frame.

“When they’re damned good and ready,” he replied morosely.

As usual, Peters wasn’t in a particularly conversational mood. I struggled to carry on my one-sided monologue.

“Big Al and I started a new case today,” I said, hoping to strike some small spark of interest. “Some gay creep got himself plugged full of holes from a high-heeled shoe and then got thrown down beside the railroad track. You know where the Burlington Northern Tunnel entrance is? There behind the Pike Place Market?”

I paused to give Peters an opportunity for comment. None was forthcoming. I plunged on.

“Eventually, we found this character was some kind of theater stagehand who had worked at the Fifth Avenue the day before. Anyway, we went to his house and discovered that his roommate died last night too, right there in the house. Doc Baker insists it’s just a coincidence, that the roommate died of AIDS. Since Baker says his death was expected, the medical examiner’s office refused to do an autopsy.”

“Why do you want one?”

Peters’s question startled me. Over the weeks, I had gotten used to carrying on totally one-sided conversations. Now, unexpectedly, he was showing a smidgeon of interest, a sign that he was emerging from his self-imposed isolation. I was so surprised, I almost forgot to answer his question.

“Oh, did I mention the drugs?”

“No.”

“When we got to the house, we found the nurse had called the mortuary to come pick up the body. When they moved his pillow, a half-pound brick that looked like solid coke fell out on the floor. The nurse flew into a rage and almost knocked the shit out of me. He would have too, if Al hadn’t stopped him.”

“You think the roommate was murdered too?”

“Absolutely. I don’t give a damn what Doc Baker says. I don’t believe in coincidences. One way or the other, it’s murder. I can feel it in my bones.”

“Drug dealers?”

I shook my head. “I talked to the detectives from Narcotics about that. As far as they know, Morris wasn’t a dealer.”

Peters snorted. “There are probably a few dealers here in town that Narcotics doesn’t know about.”

We both work for the same outfit, Seattle P.D., but Homicide and Narcotics aren’t always on the best of terms.

It was good to be bouncing ideas off Peters’s capable head again. I felt a sudden surge of excitement. Maybe, somehow, we were going to get him back.

“You say these guys were gay, both of them?” he asked. I nodded. “What about the nurse?”

“Riley? What about him?”

“Is he gay too?”

For a long moment I thought about Tom Riley, R.N. The question had never entered my mind until Peters brought it up. “I don’t know,” I said finally.

“I’m getting to be quite an expert on nurses,” Peters observed, with a hint of his old sense of humor. “If I were you, I’d check him out. Maybe it’s nothing more or less than an old-fashioned triangle.”

“Goddamn it, Peters, I’ll bet you’re onto something. I’ll get right on it.”

I was off the chair and out the door so fast I collided head on with a pretty young physical therapist who was coming into the room to work with Peters. I had seen her several times before. She was quick to laugh and had a ready smile.

“What’s the hurry?” she demanded, hands on her hips in mock anger once she had righted herself.

“Get that man jacked up and out of here, would you lady?” I said, wagging a finger at Peters in his bed. “I need him. If he can solve cases lying here flat on his back, Seattle P.D. can’t afford to have him out of commission.”

Her laughter was still ringing in the room behind me as I hurried down the hallway. In my excitement, I forgot to be tired or hungry. I also forgot I didn’t have a car with me.

I dashed out of the hospital and into the parking lot, groping in my pocket for my keys. They were there, all right, along with a whole collection of postcards.

Unfortunately, my Porsche was still safely tucked away in her berth in the parking garage at home. Some days are like that.

You have to take the bad with the good.

CHAPTER 5