by J. A. Jance
“What’s it worth to you?” he asked.
I had no intention of putting a parking attendant on the city payroll as an informant. “How about if I don’t let my partner here run over your toes on the way out?”
Glancing at Peters, who sat there gunning the motor, the attendant mulled the idea, then reached into a pocket and retrieved a tattered notebook. He flipped through several pencil-smudged pages before stopping and holding the notebook at arm’s length.
“Yup, three of them Friday night, four on Saturday, and one on Sunday. Sunday’s real slow.”
“Where to?” I asked.
He stuffed the notebook back in his pocket. “Like I said. That’ll cost you.”
It’s a wonder some people are smart enough to get out of bed in the morning. He was standing directly in front of a green-and-white sign that said “Violators will be towed. At owner’s risk and expense. Lincoln Towing.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “We’ll figure it out.”
“It’s about time,” Peters grumbled when I finally got into the car. “Where to?”
“Lincoln Towing,” I told him. “Over on Fairview. They towed eight cars out of the lot over the weekend. Maybe one of them belongs to the victim.”
Peters put the car in gear, shaking his head in disbelief. “Come off it, Beau. Doc Baker said he was dumped here. After he died. Why would his car be left in the lot?”
“Humor me. Unless you’ve got a better idea.”
He didn’t. We drove through what Seattlites jokingly refer to as the Mercer Mess, a city planner’s worst nightmare of how to stall traffic getting off and on a freeway. It’s a tangle of one-way streets that circle this way and that without any clear direction.
Lincoln Towing actually sits directly in front of traffic exiting Interstate 5 and coming into the city. At the Fairview stoplight, Lincoln Towing’s Toe Truck, a tow truck fitted out as a gigantic foot complete with bright pink toes four feet tall, may very well be the first sight some visitors see as they drop off the freeway to enter Seattle.
Lincoln’s Toe Truck lends a whimsical bit of humor. As long as you’re not one of Lincoln Towing’s unwilling customers. Then it’s no laughing matter.
The man who got out of a taxi and stomped his way into the Lincoln Towing office directly ahead of us wasn’t laughing. He was ready to knock heads.
“What the hell do you mean towing me from a church parking lot! It isn’t Sunday. I was just having breakfast down the street.”
A girl with a wholesome, scrubbed appearance greeted his tirade with a sympathetic smile. “The lot is clearly marked, sir. It’s private property. We’ve been directed to tow all unauthorized vehicles.”
He blustered and fumed, but he paid. By the time he got his keys back, it was probably one of the most expensive breakfasts of his life. He stormed out of the office. The clerk, who had continued to be perfectly polite and noncommittally sympathetic the whole time she was taking his money, turned to us. “May I help you?”
I opened my ID and placed it on the counter in front of her along with the list of license plate numbers from our surly parking lot attendant. “We understand you towed these cars over the weekend. They’re all from the Bailey’s Foods lot on Queen Anne Hill.”
She picked up the list and looked it over. “What about them?”
“Could you check them against your records. See if there was anything unusual about any of them?”
She went to a computer terminal and typed the license numbers into it. A few minutes later she returned to the counter, shaking her head. “Nothing out of the ordinary about any of them, except one.”
“Which one?”
“A Buick. It came in early Saturday morning.”
“What about it?”
“It’s still here.”
“That’s unusual?”
She smiled. “Sure. Most of them are like that guy who just left. They get here by taxi half an hour to an hour after the car. They can’t wait to bail it out.”
“But the Buick’s still here, and that’s unusual?”
“Not that unusual,” she replied. “Sometimes you run into a drunk who takes a couple of days to sober up and figure out where he left the car. That’s probably what happened here.”
“Which Buick?” I asked.
She pointed. “The blue one. The Century. Over in the corner.”
“Mind if we take a look?”
“I don’t know why not.” She shrugged and called over the intercom for someone to escort us. A young fellow in green Lincoln Towing coveralls led us to the car. We peered in through the windows. An athletic bag sat on the floor of the backseat. An airline identification tag was still attached to the handle. It was turned in the wrong direction for us to read it.
“Would it be possible for you to open it up so we could see the name on that tag?”
“Well…” The young man hesitated.
“It could be important,” I urged. “Something may have happened to the driver.”
He glanced from me to the window of the office over my shoulder. “Okay by me,” he said.
He opened the front car door, reached in, and unlocked the back. Using a pen rather than a finger, and careful to touch only the smallest corner of the name tag, I flipped it over. The name Darwin Ridley was written in heavy felt-tipped pen along with an address and telephone number in Seattle’s south end.
I read them to Peters, who jotted them down. Nothing in the car appeared to have been disturbed.
“Thanks,” I said to the Lincoln Towing guy and backed out of the car.
“No problem,” he said, then hurried away.
Peters scowled at the name and address. “So what now? Motor Vehicles?”
I nodded. “And check Missing Persons.”
Peters shook his head. “I still think you’re way out in left field. Dead men don’t drive. Remember? Why would the car turn up in the same parking place as the corpse? It doesn’t make sense.”
“The car’s been here since Saturday morning. Nobody’s come to claim it. Something may have happened to the owner, even if it isn’t our victim.”
“All right, all right. No use arguing.”
“Besides,” I said, “you’ve got nothing better to do this afternoon.”
We returned to Lincoln Towing’s office and dropped off a card, asking the clerk to please notify us if anyone came to pick up the Buick. Then we headed for the Public Safety Building, where Peters went to check with Missing Persons while I dialed the S.P.D. communications center for a registration check from the Department of Motor Vehicles. I also put through an inquiry to the Department of Licensing on a driver’s license issued to Darwin Ridley.
I’ve reluctantly come to appreciate the value of computers in police work. By the time Peters finished with Missing Persons, I knew via computer link that the Buick was registered to Darwin T. Ridley and his wife Joanna. The address on the name tag and the address on the vehicle registration were the same.
Peters, shaking his head, came to sit on the edge of my desk, his arms folded obstinately across his chest. “Missing Persons’s got nothing. What a surprise!”
Margie, our clerk, appeared from nowhere. “Did you guys pick up your messages?”
She had us dead to rights. We shook our heads in silent, sheepish unison. “So what else is new? The medical examiner’s office called and said they’ve finished the autopsy. You can go by and pick up preliminary results if you want.”
“Or even if we don’t want, right?” Peters asked.
“Right,” she answered.
We headed out for the medical examiner’s office. It’s located at the base of Harborview Medical Center, one of several medical facilities in the neighborhood that have caused Seattle locals to unofficially revise First Hill’s name to Pill Hill.
Doc Baker’s receptionist led us into his office. As usual, we found him tossing paper clips into his battered vase. He paused long enough to push a file across his desk.
&
nbsp; Peters picked it up and thumbed through it. “Death by hanging?”
Baker nodded. “Rope burns around his wrists and ankles. I’d say somebody hog-tied that poor son of a bitch and lynched him. Hanged by the neck until dead.”
“You make it sound like an execution.”
Baker tossed another paper clip into the vase. “It was, with someone other than the state of Washington doing the job—judge, jury, and executioner.”
“Time of death?”
“Two o’clock Saturday morning, give or take.”
“Any identifying marks?”
He sent another paper clip flying. This one bounced off the side of the vase and fell to the floor. “Shit!” Baker bent over to retrieve it. “Not so as you’d notice,” he continued. He tried again. This time it landed in the vase with a satisfying clink. “Surgical scar on his left knee that would be consistent with a sports injury of some kind.”
“Nothing else?”
“Nothing. Not even dental work. Didn’t have a single filling in his head.”
“Got good checkups, right up until he died.”
Baker glowered at Peters. “That’s pretty unusual for a man his age.”
“And what’s that?” I asked.
“How old? Oh, thirty-nine, forty. Right around there.”
“Anything else?”
“Last meal must have been about noon. We’re working on stomach contents.”
“Drugs?”
“Morphine, as a matter of fact. Not a lethal dose, but enough to knock him colder than a wedge.”
“A junkie, then?”
Baker shook his head. “No way. We found only the one puncture, in his buttocks. Very difficult to self-administer, if you ask me. No other needle marks.”
“How much did he weigh?” I asked, thinking of the driver’s license information in the notebook I carried in my pocket. I didn’t pull it out and look at it though, for fear of tipping my hand prematurely.
“Two twenty. Six foot four. Big guy.”
“Anything else?” I asked.
Baker lobbed another paper clip into the vase. “The killer took his time. Hanging victims don’t come out squeaky clean. This guy was hosed down before somebody wrapped him up in the tarp.”
“Any identification on the tarp?”
“Sure, Beau, the tarp had a goddamned serial number on it! What do you think?”
I shrugged. “It could happen.”
“One more thing,” Baker added. “We found some flakes in his hair.”
“Dandruff?” Peters asked.
Baker glowered. “Blue flakes. We’re sending them down to the crime lab. It could be from whatever the noose was tied off to.”
We’d pretty much worn out our welcome with Baker. “Great,” I said, getting up. “Let us know if you find out anything more. We’ll do the same.”
I led the way. Once outside the building I paused long enough to take the notebook out of my jacket pocket and check my notes. Darwin Ridley’s weight was listed as two ten and his height was listed as six four.
“Well?” Peters asked.
“It’s possible. Weight is off by ten pounds, but lots of folks fudge on weight by a pound or two.”
“So what do we do?” Peters glanced at his watch. “We can either go by that address down in Rainier Valley, or we can go back up to Queen Anne and see if any of the residents are home now. Can’t do both. Tracie and Heather have a dental appointment right after work.”
“Cavities?” I asked.
“Two each. No perfect checkups in our family. I’ll need to be on the Evergreen Point Bridge by four-thirty to beat the worst of the rush.”
By working in Seattle and living on the east side of Lake Washington in Kirkland, Peters seemed to spend the better part of half his life parked on the floating bridges, going in one direction or the other. It was almost three o’clock.
“Let’s go back to Queen Anne and see if we can find out anything more. I can check Ridley out by myself after you leave.”
Peters scratched his head. “You know, every time you say that name, it seems like it’s one I should recognize, but I just can’t place it.”
“Ridley?”
He nodded. “It’ll come to me eventually.”
We walked back to the car. Little patches of midafternoon sun had broken through the clouds and rain. It felt almost like spring as we once more tackled the questioning process on Queen Anne Hill. A few more people were home, but it didn’t do us much good. They hadn’t heard or seen anything unusual, either.
It was frustrating but certainly not unexpected. I decided a long time ago that only people with a very high tolerance for frustration survive as homicide detectives.
I’ve worked Homicide the better part of twenty years. I must qualify.
CHAPTER
3
Peters bailed out of the office at about four-fifteen. Taking kids to dentists was one part of parenthood I had brains enough not to envy. I completed our share of paperwork and handed it over to Margie for typing.
I decided to walk back to my apartment and take my own car down to Rainier Valley to check on Darwin Ridley. People who know Seattle only from television weather reports assume we live under unfailingly gray and dreary skies. The network weather reports never mention that our clouds often burn off during the day, giving us balmy, springlike afternoons, while the rest of the country remains frozen in the grip of winter.
This was one of those afternoons. If it hadn’t been for the departmental issue .38 in my shoulder holster, I would have stripped off my jacket and slung it over my arm as I sauntered down a noisy Third Avenue. From either side of the street and from below it as well came the rumbling sounds of construction, the jackhammer racket of a city changing and growing. Harried pedestrians bustled past, blind and deaf to the process.
I entered the lobby of the Royal Crest and experienced a twinge of regret. Within weeks I’d be moving into a new place at Second and Broad, leaving behind the apartment that had been my haven ever since the divorce. Maybe being over forty makes the prospect of change, even change for the better, extremely uncomfortable.
It was rush hour. Honking horns told me that traffic was heavy everywhere, including the usually free-moving Fourth Avenue. It didn’t make sense for me to leave my apartment and jump into the fray. I wasn’t in that much of a hurry.
Instead, I made a pot of coffee and flopped into my ancient leather recliner, a relic from my first marriage, and the only stick of furniture I had managed to salvage from the house in Sumner when Karen threw me out. The recliner was brown and stained and scarred with years of use—ugly but honest. I had served notice to the interior designer working with me on the new place that where I went, so did the recliner.
With a steaming mug of coffee for company, I settled back to mull the Bailey’s Foods case and try to get a handle on it. Being a detective with Homicide is very much like playing chess with a dozen opponents. The game requires anticipating all the moves, yours and the other players’ as well, without ever getting a clear look at the board or knowing exactly who all the players are.
Was Darwin Ridley the dead man? A routine check of police records had turned up nothing but a couple of unpaid parking tickets. Ridley appeared to be a fairly law-abiding man. The name and address in Rainier Valley provided a very slender lead. Only the slimmest circumstantial evidence suggested we were on the right track. My first move was simple: Ascertain whether or not Darwin Ridley was alive. If he was, that was that, and we could go barking up another tree.
If lightning did strike, however, and it turned out Ridley was our victim, then the game would become infinitely more complicated.
Grieving families must be handled with utmost care, for two reasons. First, the sudden violent death of a loved one is possibly the worst shock a family ever withstands. Survivors are faced with a totally unanticipated death that leaves them with a lifetime of unresolved feelings and unsaid good-byes.
The second reaso
n isn’t nearly as poignant. The killer may very well be lurking among those grieving relatives and friends. Most homicide victims are murdered by someone they know rather than by a total stranger. Separating real grief from phony grief is an art form in its own right.
So I sat there waiting for the traffic to die down and puzzling about an unidentified man by a grocery store dumpster who would never get the chance to flaunt his set of perfect teeth in some old folks’ home. And about a towed Buick Century, sitting forgotten in a corner of the Lincoln Towing lot. And about a man named Darwin Ridley, who was either dead or alive. By six o’clock, I was ready to find out which.
My Porsche was happy to be let out of the garage, but it protested being held to city speed limits. Or maybe it only seemed that way because I was hearing the call of the open road myself and wanted to be on a freeway going somewhere. Anywhere.
I found Ridley’s house with no trouble, a neat, old-fashioned brick Tudor, situated near Lake Washington but minus the high-priced view. There was a two-car carport attached to the house. In it, shining in the glow of an outdoor light, sat a sporty bronze-and-cream Mustang GT. The other half of the carport was empty. Early evening dusk revealed a well-tended front yard, trimmed by a manicured hedge. Several lighted windows in the house indicated someone was home. Pulling into the carport, I parked behind the Mustang.
The house looked peaceful enough, so much so that I almost dreaded ringing the bell. Whatever the outcome, having a homicide detective pay a call tends to disrupt a family’s ordinary evening routine. I more than half wished Darwin Ridley himself would open the door.
He didn’t.
Instead, an attractive black woman, still puffing with exertion, came to the door. Her hair was held back by a purple sweatband. A fine film of perspiration beaded her upper lip.
She flung open the door angrily, as if expecting someone she knew but wasn’t too happy with. Then, seeing a stranger, she slammed it almost shut.
“Yes?” she asked guardedly through the crack.
“I’m Detective Beaumont, Seattle P.D.” I held my ID up to the open slit of the door. “Are you Joanna Ridley?”