by J. A. Jance
It was actually quite a bit longer than a little while. I drove and cussed and took one wrong turn after another. The thing I’ve learned about Mercer Island is that no address is straightforward. The Roanoke Inn is an in-crowd joke, set off in the dingleberries at the end of a road that winds through a seemingly residential area. By the time I got there, it was almost nine o’clock. I was ready to wring Peters’ neck.
The building itself is actually an old house, complete with a white-railed front porch. Inside, it was wall-to-wall people. The decorations, from the plastic scenic lamp shades with holes burned in them to the ancient jukebox blaring modern, incomprehensible rock, were straight out of the forties and fifties. I had the feeling this wasn’t stuff assembled by some yuppies trying to make a “fifties statement.” This place was authentic. It had always been like that.
In one corner came a steady jackhammer racket that was actually a low-tech popcorn popper. I finally spotted Peters and Andi Wynn, seated cozily on one side of a booth at the far end of the room. A pitcher of beer and two glasses sat in front of them. Peters, with his arm draped casually around Andi’s shoulder, was laughing uproariously.
I had known Peters for almost two years. I had never heard him laugh like that, with his head thrown back and mirth shaking his whole body. He had always kept himself on a tight rein. It was so good to see him having a good time that I forgot about being pissed, about it being late, and about my getting lost.
I walked up to the booth and slid into the seat across from them. “All right, you two. What’s so funny?”
Peters managed to pull himself together. He wiped tears from his eyes. “Hi, Beau. She is.” He ruffled Andi Wynn’s short auburn hair. “I swear to God, this is the funniest woman I ever met.”
Andi Wynn ducked her head and gave me a shy smile. “He’s lying,” she said. “I’m perfectly serious.”
That set him off again. While he was convulsed once more, Andi signaled for the bartender. “Want a beer?”
I looked at Peters, trying to assess if he was smashed or just having one hell of a good time. “No thanks,” I said. “Somebody in this crowd better stay sober enough to drive.”
The bartender fought his way over to us. I ordered coffee and, at Peters’ insistence, a plate of the special Thursday night Roanoke spaghetti. The spaghetti was all right, but not great enough to justify Peters’ rave review. I wondered once more exactly how much beer he had swallowed.
“What’s going on?” Peters asked, getting serious finally. “It took you long enough.”
“We found something in Joanna’s car,” I said. “I took it down to the crime lab.”
Peters frowned. “What was it?”
I didn’t feel comfortable discussing the case in front of Andi Wynn. “Just some stuff,” I told him offhandedly. “Maybe it’s important, maybe not.”
Peters reached for the pitcher, glanced at me, and saw me watching him. “I went off duty at five o’clock,” he said in answer to my unspoken comment. Leaning back, he refilled both his and Andi’s glasses from the pitcher.
“We waited a long time. It got late and hungry out. We finally decided to come here. What do you think? It’s a great place, isn’t it?”
I wouldn’t have called it great. It was nothing but a local tavern in the “Cheers” tradition, with its share of run-down booths, dingy posters, peeling paint, and loyal customers planted on concave barstools.
“I was telling Ron that we used to come here after school,” Andi said. “Darwin, me, and some of the others.”
When she called him Ron, it threw me for a minute. I tended to forget that Peters had a first name. And it surprised me, too, that in the time since I’d left them to go with Joanna Ridley, Peters and Andi had moved from formal address to a first-name basis. I felt like I’d missed out on something important.
“Is that right? When was that?” I asked, practically shouting over the noise of a new song blaring from the jukebox.
“Last year,” she answered.
I swallowed the food without chewing it, gulped down the coffee, and rushed them out the door. Andi’s pickup was parked outside. I got in to drive the Dodge while Peters walked Andi to her truck, opened the door for her, and gave her a quick goodnight kiss. Andi started her engine and drove away. Peters returned to our car looking lighter than air.
That kiss bugged me. I distinctly remembered Ned Browning calling her Mrs. Wynn, not Miss Wynn. What the hell was Peters thinking of?
I climbed Peters’ frame about it as soon as he got in the car. “Isn’t she Sadie, Sadie married lady?” I asked.
“Divorced,” Peters said. And that was all he said. No explanation. Not even a lame excuse.
I stewed in my own juices over that for a while before I tackled him on the larger issue of the Roanoke Inn. “It’s a good thing you left the car where it was when you decided to go drinking. We’d have one hell of a time explaining what we were doing hanging out in a tavern in a departmental vehicle at this time of night.”
“Wait a minute. Who’s the guy who was telling me just the other day that I needed to lighten up a little, to stop being such a stickler for going by the book?”
“I didn’t mean you should overreact,” I told him.
I took Peters to his own place in Kirkland rather than dropping him downtown to drive his Datsun back to the east side. I didn’t know how much beer he had drunk, and I wasn’t willing to risk it.
When I told him I was taking him home, he gave a noncommittal shrug. “I’m not drunk, Beau, but if it’ll make you feel better, do it.”
On the way to his house I told him about the contents of Joanna Ridley’s trunk. “The rope was coiled on top?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“And she could tell looking through the rope that those were the clothes he wore the day he died?”
“That’s right.”
“Doesn’t it strike you as odd?”
“Why should it?”
“It seems to me that one way of knowing what’s inside a closed container is to be the one who put it there.”
“Joanna Ridley didn’t do it,” I replied.
He didn’t talk to me much after that. I couldn’t tell what was going on, if he was mad because I thought he was too smashed to drive home or if he was pissed because I wasn’t buying his suspicions about Joanna Ridley.
As we drove into his driveway, I said, “I’ll come get you in the morning if you like.”
“Don’t bother.” His tone was gruff. “I’ll catch a bus downtown. This is only the suburbs, Beau. Despite what some people think, it isn’t the end of the earth.”
He got out and slammed his door without bothering to thank me for the ride. I was too tired to worry about what ailed Peters. My three hours of sleep had long since fallen by the wayside. I needed to fall into bed and get some sleep.
It’s hell getting old.
CHAPTER
20
My alarm went off at seven, and the phone went off exactly one minute later. It was Ames, chipper and cheerful Ames, calling me from Arizona and wondering whether or not I would pick him up at the airport at one that afternoon. I blundered my way halfway through the conversation before I remembered the real estate closing for Belltown Terrace was scheduled for three-thirty.
“Shit! I never wrote it down in my calendar.”
“Wrote what down? What’s the matter, Beau?”
“The closing. It’s scheduled for the same time as Darwin Ridley’s funeral.”
“Do you have to go?”
“I ought to, but maybe I could ask Peters. He shouldn’t mind.”
“Good. After the closing, we need to go see the decorator, too. He’s been calling me here in Phoenix. Says he can never catch you.”
“Look, Ralph, I don’t spend my time sitting around waiting for the phone to ring.”
“You should get a machine, an answering machine with remote capability.”
“Will you lay off that answering machine stuf
f? I’m not buying one, and that’s final.”
“Okay, okay. See you at one.”
Even riding the bus from Kirkland, Peters beat me to the office. His unvarying promptness bugged the hell out of me at times, particularly since, no matter what, I was always running behind schedule. He was seated at his desk with his nose buried in a file folder. He was obviously scanning through the material, looking for one particular item.
“What are you up to?” I asked, walking past him to get to my desk.
“Here it is,” he said. He dropped the file folder, grabbed his pen, and copied some bit of information from the folder into his pocket notebook.
“Here’s what?” I asked. I confess I was less interested in what he was looking for than I was with whether or not there was coffee in the pot on the table behind Margie’s desk. There was—a full, freshly made pot.
“Rimbaugh. That’s his name.”
“Whose name? Peters, for godsake, will you tell me what you’re talking about?”
“Remember Monday afternoon? We talked to all those old duffers who are part-time security guards down at Seattle Center? Dave Rimbaugh is one of them. He was assigned to the locker rooms.”
“So?”
“So I’ve got this next-door neighbor who works for Channel Thirteen. In the advertising department. I called him last night after I got home and asked him if he could locate a picture of Wheeler-Dealer Barker for us. He called just a few minutes ago. Said he’d found one and when did we want to come by to pick it up.”
“Why go to the trouble? What’s the point? We already know Barker was there. He told us so.”
“Sure he did. He said he was there at halftime, but what if he was there later, too? Maybe he came back or, better yet, maybe he never left”
Picking up my empty coffee cup, I sauntered over to the coffee table mulling Peters’ hypothesis. It was possible, I supposed, but it didn’t seem plausible. I came back with coffee and set my cup down on the desk.
“Well?” Peters asked.
I shook my head. “I don’t think so. Barker isn’t our man.”
“Why not?”
“Gut instinct.”
Just that quick, Peters got his back up. “Right. Sure it is. You know, Beau, sometimes I get tired of working with the Grand Old Man of Homicide. You’re not always on the money. I think Barker’s it, and I’m willing to invest some shoe leather in proving it. You coming or not?”
He didn’t leave a whole lot of room for discussion. We got a car from the garage, a tired Chevette without as much zing to it as the Dodge we’d driven the day before—no zip and a hell of a lot less legroom. I wonder sometimes if the ratings would be the same if the guys on “Miami Vice” drove Chevettes.
We stopped by Channel 13’s downtown office. The receptionist cheerfully handed over a manila envelope with Peters’ name scrawled on the front. Inside was an eight-by-ten glossy of Tex Barker himself, without the cowboy hat and grinning from ear to ear. There were several other pictures as well, eight-by-tens of people I didn’t recognize.
Peters shuffled through them, looked at me, and grinned. “See there? What we’ve got here is an instant montage.”
One of the realities of police work these days is that you never get to show witnesses just the person you want them to see. You always have to show a group of pictures and hope they pick out the right one. Going by the book can be a royal pain in the ass. I gave Peters credit for taking care of it in advance.
Dave Rimbaugh’s address was off in the wilds of Lake City, about a twenty-minute drive from downtown Seattle. Peters drove. As we made our way up the freeway, Peters glanced in my direction. “Tell me again about the stuff you found in the back of Joanna Ridley’s car. You said it was her flour container?”
“That’s right. Out of the storeroom at the end of her carport.”
“They’re dusting it for prints?”
“The container and the trunk for certain. They said yesterday they’re going to try to work out a deal with the county to run the contents past the county’s YAG to see if they can raise anything there.”
“YAG? What the hell’s a YAG?”
“Their new laser printfinder. Janice Morraine was telling me about it. They use it to raise prints on all kinds of unlikely surfaces—cement, rumpled tinfoil.”
“Off rope and clothing, too?”
“Not too likely, but possible. She said there’s a remote chance. I’ve also called for a tech to go over Joanna Ridley’s house for prints.”
“Any idea when the container was placed in the car or any sign of forced entry?”
I shook my head. “The killer had Darwin’s keys, remember? House keys and car keys, both.”
“I had forgotten,” Peters said thoughtfully.
“She’s going to have all her locks changed today, just in case.”
Peters nodded. “That’s probably wise.”
We were both quiet for a moment. It was as good a time as any to bring up my scheduling conflict between the real estate closing and Darwin Ridley’s funeral.
“By the way,” I said casually, “Ralph Ames is flying in this afternoon. I pick him up at the airport at one. We’re supposed to close on Belltown Terrace at three-thirty this afternoon. Do you think you could handle Ridley’s funeral by yourself?”
I more than half-expected an objection, for Peters to say that he needed to be home with his kids. It’s an excuse that packs a whole lot of weight with me. Had he used it, I probably would have knuckled under, given Ames my power of attorney, and had him stand in for me at the closing.
Instead, Peters surprised me. “Sure, no problem. What about the memorial service after the funeral? Want me to handle that, too?”
“That would be great.”
Dave Rimbaugh’s house was a snug nineteen-thirties bungalow dwarfed by the evergreen trees that had grown up around it. The woman who came to the door was almost as wide as the door itself. Her pug nose and the rolling jowls of her face made her look like a bulldog. A nearsighted bulldog wearing thick glasses.
“Davey,” she called over her shoulder. “Hon, there’s somebody here to see you.”
“Davey” wasn’t a day under seventy. He was a spry old man, as lean as his wife was fat. They were a living rendition of the old Jack Sprat routine. His face lit up all over when Peters showed his ID and told him who we were and what we wanted.
“See there, Francie. I told you I talked to a real detective on the phone, and you thought I was pulling your leg.” He led us into the living room. Every available flat surface in the room was full of glass and ceramic elephants of every size and description. Dave Rimbaugh noticed me looking at them.
“We’ve been collecting them for fifty-six years now,” he said proudly. “There’s more in the dining room. Would you like to see those?”
“No, thanks,” I told him quickly, stopping him before he could hurry into the next room. “I can see you’ve got an outstanding collection, but we’d better get to work. Business before pleasure, you know.”
“Good.” Rimbaugh nodded appreciatively. “Don’t like to waste the taxpayer’s money, right?”
“Right,” I said, sitting down on the wing-backed chair he offered me, while Peters sank into the old-fashioned, flower-patterned couch.
Rimbaugh rubbed his hands together in anticipation. “Now then, what can I do for you boys?”
Peters grimaced visibly at the term “boys.” It was clear “Davey” Rimbaugh regarded us as a couple of young whippersnappers. Doing his best to conceal his annoyance, Peters reached into a file folder and pulled out the fanfold of photographs. He offered them to our host.
“Take a look at these, Mr. Rimbaugh. See if there’s anyone here you recognize, anyone you may have seen at the Coliseum last Friday night.”
Dave Rimbaugh only had to glance through the pictures once before he pounced on Wheeler-Dealer’s smiling countenance. “Him,” he said decisively. “That’s him. He was there.”
Un
able to contain her curiosity, Francie Rimbaugh got up from the couch and came over to her husband’s chair. She stood behind him like she’d been planted there, leaning over his shoulder so she, too, could look at the picture in his hand.
“Why, forevermore!” she exclaimed. “I know him. Isn’t that the man on the television, the one on the late movies? I think he sells cars. Or maybe furniture.”
Dave Rimbaugh held the picture up to the light. “Why, Francie, I do believe you’re right. He looked familiar at the time, but I just couldn’t place him.”
He patted his wife’s rump affectionately and pulled her close to him. “Francie here, now she’s the one with the memory for faces,” he said. “Faces and names both.”
“Do you remember when you saw this man?” Peters asked. “It’s important that we know exactly when he was there.”
Dave Rimbaugh leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes, frowning with the effort of concentration. “All I remember is, I was drinking a cup of coffee at the time. Almost spilled it all over me when he rushed past. Said there was an emergency of some kind. Didn’t ask him what, just let him go through.”
“So what time was it?” Peters prodded. “Halftime? Later than that?”
“I don’t know if it was halftime or not. They play a whole bunch of games each day during the tournament. Let’s see. Wait a minute, I had only two cups of coffee that night. That was all that was left in the pot when I filled the thermos. When he almost knocked me down, I remember thinking it’s a good thing it’s almost time to go home, ’cause there isn’t any coffee left.”
I could see Peters was losing patience with trying to pull usable information out of the old man’s ramblings. “What time did you get off work?” I asked.
“Nine o’clock,” he said. “Isn’t that right, Francie? I was home by ten, wasn’t I?”
She nodded. “That’s right. We watched the early late movie together before we went to bed. The old one with Gary Cooper in it.”
“And how close was that second cup of coffee to the time you came home?”
“It was just before. Sure, that’s right. Must have been right around eight.” Rimbaugh looked at us triumphantly.