Trial by Fury

by J. A. Jance

  It was only as I sat there in solitary silence, chewing on my roast beef, that I realized I had never asked Bambi Barker how much her prize was for screwing Darwin Ridley. On second thought, I was probably better off not knowing.

  Thinking about it spoiled my appetite. I didn’t finish the sandwich.

  CHAPTER

  15

  There was a lot to think about on the way home. Bambi Barker had shaken me. I couldn’t help wondering how I would have felt if I had discovered that my own daughter, Kelly, had been pulling something like that when she was in high school. Would I have taken the time to find out that the girls had been playing the teacher for a fool, or would I have jumped to the opposite conclusion?

  There could be little doubt of the answer to that one. J. P. Beaumont has been known to jump to conclusions on occasion. Somebody by the name of Wheeler-Dealer Barker could very well suffer from the same malady.

  In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I figured there was a better-than-even-money chance that Bambi’s old man had jumped to his own erroneous and lethal conclusions. We needed to know his whereabouts on Friday night and Saturday morning, while Bambi was locked in her room at home and her mother was standing guard.

  Knowing of Molly Blackburn’s existence helped answer one puzzling question. The idea that a father would have mailed out such a compromising picture of his own daughter had never made sense to me. I couldn’t imagine any father doing such a thing, not even in the heat of anger. I had gone along with that suggestion when no other possibilities had presented themselves, but it made far more sense that the picture might have been part of a blackmail scheme, a complicated, two-sided deal aimed at wresting money from both families involved, the Barkers and the Ridleys.

  It seemed likely that a copy of the picture had arrived at the Barker home sometime Friday morning. That was probably what had tipped off old Wheeler-Dealer. Joanna’s had arrived days later. That was somewhat puzzling. Why the delay? If you’re going to blackmail two different sets of people, why not do it simultaneously? Or maybe they had been mailed at the same time and the postal service had screwed up.

  My questions defied any attempt to find answers, but they served to fill up the long straight stretches of interstate. There was hardly any traffic on the freeway at that time of night. Just me and a bunch of eighteen-wheelers tearing up the road. I made it back to Seattle in a good deal less time than the three hours it should have taken.

  I dropped into bed the minute I got to my apartment. It was three A.M. when I turned out the light and fell asleep.

  Fifteen minutes later the phone rang, jarring me out of a sound sleep. “Please stay on the line,” a tinny, computerized female voice told me. Within moments, Ralph Ames’ voice sputtered into the receiver. He sounded like somebody had just kicked him awake, too.

  “What do you want?” he demanded in a groggy grumble.

  “What do you mean, ‘What do I want’? You called me, remember?”

  “Oh, I must have forgotten to turn that damn thing off when I went to bed.”

  “What damn thing?” I wasn’t playing with a full deck in this conversation.

  “My automatic redialer.”

  An automatic redialer! Ralph Ames’ ongoing love affair with gadgets was gradually becoming clear to me. If my phone had been ringing off and on all night, it was probably quite clear to Ida Newell, my next-door neighbor, as well.

  “That’s just great,” I fumed. “I went to bed fifteen minutes ago, Ralph. What’s so goddamned important that you woke us both up?”

  “Your closing on Belltown Terrace. It’s reset for Friday, three-thirty. Can you make it?”

  I took a deep breath. “Sometimes you really piss me off. It’s three o’clock in the morning. You expect me to have a calendar in my hand?”

  “If you had an answering machine…”

  “I don’t want an answering machine.” I rummaged through the nightstand drawer for pen and paper and wrote down the time and place for the real estate closing. “There,” I said. “Is that all? Mind if I get some sleep now?”

  “Be my guest,” Ames replied, then hung up.

  A scant three hours later, the phone rang again. Once more I shook the fog out of my head. Eventually, I recognized Al Lindstrom’s voice. Big Al, as we call him, is another detective on the homicide squad. He generally works the night shift.

  “What do you mean calling me at this hour?” I’m crabby when I don’t get my beauty sleep.

  “Don’t get your sweat hot, Beau. I’ve got someone on the line. She wants to talk to you. Real bad.”

  “Look, Al. I’ve barely gotten into bed. Can’t you take a message?”

  “She wants to talk to you now.”

  “Jesus H. Christ. Who is it? Can’t you get her name and number? I’ll call her back as soon as I get to the office.”

  “Just a minute. I’ll ask” While he was off the line, I tried, with limited success, to rub my eyes open and unscramble my brain.

  Eventually, Al returned to the line. “Says her name’s Joanna Ridley. Says you can’t call her. She wants to meet you in half an hour at the tennis courts in Seward Park”

  “I’m still in bed, Al. I can’t meet her in half an hour. Tell her I’ll call her later.”

  “It’s too late.”

  “Why?”

  “She hung up.”

  “Shit!” I rolled out of bed. “Thanks a whole hell of a lot,” I growled.

  “Don’t chew my ass,” Al returned. “I’m just doing my job.”

  He slammed the phone down in my ear. I grabbed my nightstand telephone book and located Joanna’s number, but when I finally dialed it, the line was busy. I tried several more times, but the line remained busy, leaving me to conclude that Joanna was serious about my not calling her back She had evidently left the phone off the hook.

  I gave my pillow a reluctant farewell pat and headed for the shower. Exactly eleven minutes later, the Porsche and I shot out through the building garage entrance onto Lenora.

  Morning fog was thick as velvet as I drove up Boren and out Rainier Avenue. At six twenty-five traffic coming into the city was already picking up, but I was driving against it. I wondered as I drove why Joanna had refused to see me at her house, and why she had picked such an early hour in a deserted city park for our meeting.

  Seward Park sits on a point that juts out into Lake Washington. On a clear day, Mount Rainier sits majestically above the water, framed on either side by the house-covered ridges of South Seattle and Mercer Island. That particular morning, however, there was no hint that a mountain lay hidden out there. Invisible behind the fog, it lurked in a blanket of silence that was broken only by the occasional huffing of an early morning jogger.

  I saw Joanna Ridley’s Mustang right away, tucked into a parking place against the tennis court fence. The driver of the Mustang, however, was nowhere in sight. Parking the Porsche next to Joanna’s car, I set out looking for her.

  Blooming dogwood and daffodils lined the park’s entrance. I walked along a hedge of Photinia, its new growth crimson above the older green leaves. The startling spring colors stood out in sharp relief against the shifting gray fog. The grass was heavy with dew, sponging down beneath my feet as I walked along the breakwater.

  The park seemed a lonely, desolate place for a new widow. The idea of suicide fleetingly crossed my mind. I wondered if Joanna had decided to end her own life. The thought had no more than entered my mind, however, when I spotted her near the water.

  Wearing a huge sweater, she stood on the rock breakwater, profiled against the gray of both the fog and water behind her. A light breeze blowing off the lake pressed the sweater’s soft material around the bulge in her middle, accentuating her pregnant figure. Unaware of my approach, she peered down from her perch at something in the water below her, something I couldn’t see. When I finally got close enough to look below the breakwater, I found she was watching a flock of hungry ducks out bumming for handouts.


  “You wanted to see me?” I asked.

  Without warning, she whirled and sprang at me, clenching both fists as she did so. She moved so fast I was surprised she didn’t lose her footing on the slippery, wet grass. Just in time I realized she was bringing a haymaker up from her knees, putting the full force of her body behind it. If she had landed that blow, it would have sent me flying.

  My reflexes may not be what they used to be, but they were still good enough to save my bacon. I dodged back, away from her doubled fist, which whizzed past my face within an inch of my nose. She came scrambling after me, her face a mask of hard, cold fury.

  I had seen a similar version of that look once, that night in the Dog House after we left the medical examiner’s office. That look was mild compared to this. Right then, Joanna Ridley appeared to be entirely capable of murder.

  “It’s about time you got here, you son of a bitch!”

  I had expected our encounter to begin on a somewhat more cordial note. After all, I wasn’t even late. I stepped back again, just to be on the safe side, staying well out of reach.

  “What the hell’s going on, Joanna? What’s wrong?”

  Her right hand shot toward the pocket of the voluminous sweater. My first thought was that she was going for a gun.

  Once burned, twice shy. The last time I got burned by a lady with a gun, I came within inches of checking out for good.

  With adrenaline pumping from every pore, I bounded forward and grabbed her wrists, pinning them to her sides before she had a chance to draw. Like a desperate, captive bird she struggled to escape my grasp. We must have stood like that for half a minute or so before I realized that what she had in the pocket of her sweater was nothing more than a rolled-up section of newspaper.

  She was still pulling against me with all her might when I let go of her wrists. She fell away from me toward the breakwater and would have fallen backward into the lake if I hadn’t caught her. We fell to the ground together in a tumbled heap.

  The fall knocked the wind out of her. For a moment she was silent, her dark eyes staring up at me in mute rage. When she caught her breath, she screamed. “Get away from me, you bastard. Get away!”

  “Are you all right? Are you hurt?” I tried to break through her anger, but she didn’t hear me. She kept right on screaming.

  Suddenly, I was lifted off the ground. Someone grabbed me by the back of my shirt the way a mother dog grabs a puppy to carry it. Except puppies don’t wear ties with knots that block their windpipes. I dangled in midair, coughing and choking.

  From behind me, I heard someone say, “Hey, lady. This guy botherin’ you?”

  Joanna Ridley didn’t answer him. I swung around, trying to break his hold, but the guy had arms like a gorilla. I couldn’t lay a hand on him. I was about to black out when he dropped me to the ground like a sack of potatoes. I lay there for a moment, stunned and gasping, trying to force air back into my lungs. When I looked up, a giant of a man was gently helping Joanna to her feet.

  “I’m a police officer,” I sputtered. I reached for my ID, but my pocket was empty. The leather case had evidently fallen out in the course of the struggle.

  “Yeah, and I’m Sylvester Stallone,” he returned. Joanna Ridley was on her feet and mercifully quiet. “You all right, lady?” he asked. “You want somebody to take you home?”

  I crawled around on my hands and knees in the grass, searching for my ID. Finally, I located it, resting against a rock, just below where Joanna and I had fallen. I clambered to my feet and staggered over to where they stood. At six three, I’m no piker when it comes to size, but this guy made me look like a midget. Muscles bulged under his oversized T-shirt and rippled down his legs from under the skimpy running shorts he wore.

  I tried to show him my ID, but he brushed me aside. “Get away from her before I call the cops.”

  “Goddamn it, I am a cop. Detective J. P. Beaumont, Seattle P.D. Homicide.”

  “No shit? Since when do cops go around beating up pregnant ladies in parks?”

  I wouldn’t have convinced him, not in a million years, but right then Joanna Ridley stopped her silent sobbing and, surprisingly, spoke in my defense. “It’s all right. I fell down. He caught me.”

  The man bent down and looked her full in the face. “You sure, now? I can throw his ass in the water if you want. You say the word and I’ll drown this sucker.”

  “No. Really. It’s all right.”

  He stepped away then, reluctantly, looking from one of us to the other as if trying to figure out what was really going on. “Okay, then, if you say so.” Without another word, he turned on his heel and jogged away from us, running shoes squeaking on the wet grass.

  Warily, I approached Joanna. “What’s wrong? Tell me.”

  Once again, she reached into the pocket. When her hand emerged, she was holding the newspaper. She was under control now, but her eyes still struck sparks of fury as she slapped the newspaper into my outstretched hand.

  “I thought you said you’d keep it quiet.”

  “Keep what quiet?”

  “About what happened. I thought I could trust you, but you took it straight to the newspaper.”

  “Joanna, what are you talking about?”

  “The picture.”

  “My God, is the picture in here?” Dismayed, I unrolled the newspaper.

  “It just as well could be,” Joanna replied grimly.

  I scanned down the page, the front page of the last section of the newspaper. The local news section. There on the bottom four columns wide, was Maxwell Cole’s crime column, “City Beat.” The headline said it all:

  “Sex Plus Race Equals Murder.”

  I scanned through the article quickly, while Joanna Ridley watched my face. When I finished reading, I looked up at her. I was sickened. There could be no doubt from the article that Maxwell Cole had indeed seen the photograph of Darwin Ridley and Bambi Barker. All of Seattle could just as well have seen it. The article left little to the imagination. The only thing it didn’t mention was Bambi Barker’s name. Knowing Maxwell Cole, I figured Wheeler-Dealer’s money and position in the community had something to do with that.

  I took Joanna Ridley by the arm and led her to her car.

  “Where are you going?” she asked as she half-trotted to keep up with me.

  “To find Maxwell Cole,” I told her. “If I don’t kill him first, you can have a crack at him.”

  CHAPTER

  16

  I put Joanna Ridley in her car and told her to go on home, that I’d call her as soon as I knew anything.

  As she started the Mustang, I motioned for her to roll down the window. “Don’t forget to put your phone back on the hook,” I told her. She gave me a half-hearted wave and drove away.

  I started the Porsche and rammed it into gear. My first instinct was to find Maxwell Cole, beat the crap out of him, and find out who the big mouth was, either in the crime lab or in Seattle P.D. Somebody had leaked the information.

  I drove straight to the Post-Intelligencer’s new digs down on Elliott, overlooking Puget Sound. Eight o’clock found me standing in front of a needle-nosed receptionist who told me Maxwell Cole wasn’t expected in before ten. I should have known a slug like Cole wouldn’t be up at the crack of dawn.

  Rather than hang around the newspaper and cool my heels, I went down to the Public Safety Building. I stopped at the second floor and stormed into the crime lab.

  Don Yamamoto, head of the Washington State Patrol’s crime lab, is a criminalist of the first water. He’s one of those second-generation Japanese who, as a kid, was incarcerated along with his parents in a relocation camp during World War II. He spent all his spare time during the years they were locked up reading the only book available to him—a Webster’s unabridged dictionary—and he came out of the camp with a far better education than he probably would have gotten otherwise.

  He’s a smart guy, smart and personable both, well respected by those who work for and with h
im. The receptionist waved me past without bothering to give me an official escort. As usual, the door to Yamamoto’s office stood open. I knocked on the frame.

  “Hey, Beau, how’s it going?” he asked, looking up from a stack of paperwork on his desk.

  “Not well,” I answered. “We’ve got troubles.” I laid it on the line to him. He listened without comment. When I finished, he sat back in his chair, folding his arms behind his head.

  “I think you’re wrong, Beau. That story didn’t come from this office. None of my people go running off at the mouth.”

  He got up and led the way to the evidence room. He stopped at the doorway long enough to examine the log. “Only two people actually handled that photograph,” he said. “One was Janice Morraine, and the other is Tom Welch. Either of those sound like people who’d be messing around with the likes of Maxwell Cole?”

  I shook my head. I knew them both fairly well. I had to agree with their chief’s assessment.

  “So how did Max get the story?”

  “Why don’t you go straight to the horse’s mouth and ask him that question?” Don suggested.

  “I tried that. He wasn’t in.”

  “So try again.”

  I turned on my heels and walked out of his office. Standing in the elevator lobby waiting for the door to open, I was surprised when the door behind me opened. Don Yamamoto followed me into the corridor. “But you’ll let me know if you find out something I need to know, right?” he asked.

  Don Yamamoto trusted his people implicitly. Up to a point.

  I chuckled. “Yes,” I answered. “I’ll let you know.”

  It was eight-forty when I reached Peters’ and my cubicle on the fifth floor. Peters glanced meaningfully at his watch. Having a partner can be worse than having to punch a time clock. Time clocks don’t expect explanations.