Dismissed With Prejudice (9780061760631)

by Jance, Judith A.

  “When she was working as a hooker?” I asked innocently. I’ll be damned if I was going to let Ames think he was the only one holding any cards in this particular game.

  “That’s right. She had evidently lost her entire family and wanted to come to this country in the worst way. Machiko says now that she thought at first that Lamb loved her. Once they were here in the States though, he turned mean and abusive. He beat her constantly. She didn’t dare leave or ask for help because he told her that if he divorced her, she’d be deported and sent back to Japan.”

  “What does the sword have to do with all of this?”

  “It was her most prized possession, her only possession. A gift from her grandfather. He told her never to draw it unless she intended to use it, but that if it became necessary, she should use the sword to defend her honor or her life.

  “One day Lamb came home drunk. He accused Machiko of hiding money from him. While he was looking for the money, he found the knife. He had never known about it before, had never seen it. Machiko had brought it with her, concealed in her luggage. Lamb came after her with the knife. He had it out of the box and was threatening her with it, demanding to know what else she had hidden away in the house. And that’s when Tadeo Kurobashi happened to show up. He was out delivering groceries.”

  “And killed the husband?”

  “Unintentionally. With Machiko’s sword,” Ames added. “Tadeo was trying to disarm him but in the struggle, Lamb went down, fatally wounded. Machiko was terrified that without Lamb, she’d be shipped back to Japan. Kurobashi was scared, too. It was such a short time after the war. He was afraid he’d be facing lynch-mob mentality, not justice. He didn’t think anyone would believe he had acted in self-defense, so he and Machiko disposed of the body. Kurobashi came back for it that night in his grocery truck. They carted the body out to Ballard and dumped it into Salmon Bay, where it was found a week later.”

  “And no one ever suspected?” I asked.

  “Think about it,” Ames said. “It was just after the war. Lamb was a lowlife to begin with, a thug, married to a Japanese woman, an ex-prostitute he had brought home with him. The spoils of war, as it were. I don’t think anybody cared very much.”

  “No,” I said quietly. “I don’t suppose they did.” I thought about it for a moment. “So why did the Kurobashis keep the sword hidden all those years?”

  “Out of some form of irrational fear that they’d be found out,” Ralph Ames answered. “For years it was in the safe at Kurobashi’s office. Until last week.”

  “What happened last week?”

  “I don’t know, but whatever it was, it made Kurobashi change his mind. He called Machiko late Sunday morning and told her that he had decided to go ahead and sell the sword. He said they would use whatever proceeds they got from it to start a new company.”

  “Where’s Machiko now?” I asked.

  “Archie put her up down at the Four Seasons. That’s fairly close to the Public Safety building, where we’ll be meeting with Dr. Yamamoto tomorrow.”

  “The Four Seasons! Isn’t that a little steep?” I asked. “How can she afford it?”

  “She can’t. Archie’s paying for it. Cost of doing business and all that.”

  “Making sure he gets first dibs to handle the sword?”

  “That too,” Ames replied. “He wouldn’t be doing it if he didn’t think it would be worth it in the long run for both of them.”

  I was feeling more than moderately irritable with Ames and Archibald Winter both. Ames sounded smug. Not only had he stepped into my business with Dr. Wang, here he was, along with his high-toned friend, messing around in more of my business, solving a murder, a forty-year-old one at that, an unsolved murder nobody had looked at in years.

  “Is Machiko going to go to the memorial service tomorrow afternoon?” I asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Ames replied. “At least she didn’t mention it. Our appointment with Dr. Yamamoto is scheduled for eleven. Before that we’re meeting with Chris Davenport. He’s anxious for Machiko to sign off on some of the bankruptcy proceedings, and I’m not sure that’s wise.”

  “What have you done, Ames, taken another chick under your protective wing?”

  “I just don’t want to see her rushed into something that wouldn’t be advantageous, considering the situation with Archie and the sword.”

  Outside I heard the deep-throated honking of a horn announcing the arrival of the ferry. “I’ve gotta go,” I said quickly. “Once I get to Seattle, I’ll stop by Harborview long enough to see if there’s anything I can do for Dana Lions, then I’ll be home. See you in the morning.”

  The few inbound cars were already unloaded and the cars waiting in line behind me were already starting their engines as I reached my vehicle. Barely missing the previous ferry guarantees you a front-row seat on the next one. I drove all the way to the restraining chains at the front of the ferry and settled deep into the Porsche’s chilly leather seat for the thirty-minute ride to Seattle. I leaned back against the headrest and closed my eyes, but I didn’t sleep. I didn’t even doze.

  I was still plucked by what I regarded as Ames’ and Winter’s interference in my case, even though, at the same time, I was dazzled by all the information those two interlopers had managed to glean. If any or all of it was true, then the dynamics of Tadeo and Machiko’s marriage were much different from what I had supposed and from what other outsiders had assumed. I found myself examining the Kurobashis’ marriage through a prism of new information.

  George Yamamoto had seen Tadeo’s total absorption in Machiko, had watched it draw Tadeo’s affections away from his sister Tomi. He had tried to understand it, finally explaining it to himself as some kind of sexual entrapment, a web of eroticism only a street wise prostitute could weave.

  Now I felt certain that Machiko’s fascination for Tadeo had been far less complicated than that, far less sinister. I saw it as the simple magnetism that often draws the strong to the weak, the powerful to the helpless. Tadeo had literally wrested Machiko from certain death at the hands of her brutal husband. That act had bound the two of them together in such a symbiotic, mutually dependent relationship that even Kimiko, their well-loved child, had not been able to penetrate it, much less understand it.

  What Kimiko had seen as a prison, Machiko had viewed as a haven, a refuge. The father, the villain Kimiko regarded as her mother’s ruthless jailer and dictator, had chosen to alienate his daughter, to go without speaking to his only child for nine long years, rather than reveal his own terrible secret, a secret he and his wife had shared and lived with and carried together for more than forty years.

  So what had changed? What event had, in a single day, triggered such a fundamental change in Tadeo Kurobashi’s life? What had made so great a difference that he had been willing, after all those years, to sell the sword? He must have known that Machiko’s sword was indeed two-edged, that it held the promise of bringing them much needed financial relief, but that it also carried the threat of bringing with it questions and an investigation that might reopen that forty-year-old nightmare.

  That weekend, something had made such a profound impression on Tadeo Kurobashi that he had been willing to risk revealing the desperate act he and Machiko had kept hidden for so long.

  There was only one thing I knew for sure about that Friday. It was the day Clay Woodruff had called and left a message for Tadeo Kurobashi with Bernice Oliver. Was that call the catalyst? Was that what had sparked Tadeo’s sudden change of heart, or was it something that happened later at the meeting in Port Angeles on Sunday?

  I had no way of knowing, and no way of telling which side Woodruff was on, to say nothing of which way he might have pushed Tadeo. Woodruff had claimed that he was doing something for a friend, a final favor. Maybe that had been a lie, something Woodruff threw in to keep me off guard. If so, it had worked like a charm. Clay Woodruff had outfoxed me six ways to Sunday. He had gotten away clean without my having any idea where
to look for him.

  Frustrated with thinking about how stupid I was, I went back to thinking about Tadeo Kurobashi, struggling to come to grips with this changed vision of him, to understand how this newly revised and heroic version was tied in with a gangster named Aldo Pappinzino in Chicago, Illinois. No matter how I shoved the pieces around on the board, I couldn’t see a connection.

  The ride from Winslow is a relatively short one. I stayed in the car, watching as Seattle’s nighttime cityscape slowly crystallized and emerged from the ghostly glow of cloud-shrouded lights in the distance. In thirty time-warping minutes, I traveled from sleepy rural backwoods to the heart of a metropolis still alive with its late-night diversions, from towering, darkened forests to nighttime skyscrapers whose lights beckoned like so many burning candles.

  That ride and that view always have a soothing effect on me, and this time was no exception. As I drove off the ferry, I was no longer nearly as pissed with Ames and Winter as I had been when I had boarded the boat in Winslow. Driving up the hill toward the Medical Examiner’s Office, I felt a sudden burst of energy, a second wind. If “Aimless” Ames and his buddy wanted to muck around in forty-year-old murders, let ’em. My job was to deal with the murders in the here and now. Specifically with the murder of Tadeo Kurobashi. Tadeo and, secondarily, that of David Lions. He was mine too. By proxy. Because I said so.

  In trying to talk to Dana Lions, I would be in direct competition with other cops from other jurisdictions. Detectives from the King County Police would be there. I was sure they would want me to take a number and get in line.

  I had news for them. They were coming into this case from way behind go. They were just beginning to wonder who had killed David Lions. I already knew. All I needed was one tiny smidgen of evidence to prove it.

  With any kind of luck, Lorenzo Tabone would have made a slip, one seemingly insignificant mistake, that would give me something to remember him by, something that would buy him a one-way ticket to the gallows, Washington State’s still extant but rarely used form of capital punishment.

  CHAPTER 18

  WHEN I GOT TO THE MEDICAL EXAMINER’S office, three people were grouped and talking in low voices in the small reception area outside Doc Baker’s door. Two were women, one about my age and the other much younger, no more than twenty-five. All three looked up at me questioningly as I came through the door.

  “Detective Beaumont,” I announced.

  As soon as I said that, the younger woman leaped from her chair and hurled herself toward me. She was a tiny woman, only about five feet, but when she crashed into me, I almost lost my balance. I grabbed at a chair to keep from sprawling on the floor.

  “Detective Beaumont, thank God you’ve come.” She threw her arms around me and buried her head in my chest as though I were some long-lost relation. “I told them you were coming,” she sobbed, clinging to me like a burr.

  The man stepped forward with a puzzled frown on his face. “I’m Detective Hal Forbes,” he said, “and this is my partner, JoAnne Reece. We’re with the King County Police. Miss Lions here was telling us that you’re already involved in this case. Is that true?”

  I nodded. “Sort of. I’m working the Tadeo Kurobashi case,” I said as I pried Dana Lions’ arms loose from around my waist, walked her over to a chair, and helped her sit back down.

  For the first time, I got a good look at her. She was wearing a bright orange jumpsuit with the words ST. HELEN’S FLYING SERVICE emblazoned in blue embroidery on the breast pocket. Her hair, so red that it almost matched her uniform, was short and curly. Her vivid green eyes were swollen from weeping.

  I took one of her small hands in mine. “Is it your father?”

  She swallowed hard, nodded, and said nothing.

  “Wait a minute,” Forbes said. “Isn’t Kurobashi the man who was found dead in his office on Fourth Avenue South sometime this week?”

  “That’s the one,” I replied.

  “I remember now,” Forbes continued. “And there was something later on about his wife and daughter being attacked over in eastern Washington?”

  “You got it.” I glanced down at Dana before I spoke again. She wasn’t going to like hearing what I had to say, but I went ahead with it anyway.

  “I’ve been working with Detective Halvorsen from the Whitman County Sheriff’s Department over in Colfax. He’s in charge of the assault case. We believe that Mr. Lions’ aircraft was used to create a diversion to cover up the attack on the Kurobashi women.”

  “No!” Dana exclaimed. She pulled her hands free from mine and covered her face. “My father wouldn’t do that. It isn’t true. This is all a mistake.”

  “There’s no mistake, Dana,” I said gently. “He may not have had a choice, he may have been forced into participating, but he was there, and so was the helicopter.”

  “Didn’t have a choice?” Dana asked. “What do you mean?”

  Detective Forbes looked at Dana, but he spoke to me. “Sounds like we’re all over the map on this one. Somebody dead here, somebody attacked in Colfax, the body found by Lake Kachess.”

  I didn’t bother to tell him that I had just come back from Port Angeles, where Clay Woodruff had left me in the dust. Why make things more complicated than they already were?

  Dana’s eyes, bright as emeralds, pierced into mine. “You still haven’t said what you meant.”

  “Just a minute, Dana. We’ll come back to that.” I turned to the other detectives. “Who found the body?” I asked.

  JoAnne Reece opened her notebook and paged through it. “A Cub Scout named Ryan Jacobsen,” she said. “He was on a father-and-son hike and camp out. Fortunately the father is an attorney. He made sure nobody disturbed anything.”

  “Physical evidence?” I asked.

  With a meaningful look in Dana Lions’ direction JoAnne Reece said, “Maybe.”

  That led me to believe that some physical evidence did exist, but the King County detectives didn’t want to discuss it in front of the victim’s daughter. I’d have to ask them about it later. Meanwhile, I sat down next to Dana and pulled my chair close to hers.

  “I’m going to ask you some questions, Dana, questions that may possibly be painful for you to answer.”

  She seemed to have gotten a grip on herself. “It’s all right. Ask me anything. I’ll do whatever I can to help.”

  “Did your father ever have any dealings with the Mafia?”

  “The Mafia!” Forbes exclaimed involuntarily, then he fell silent, watching me warily.

  “Just answer the question, Dana. Did he?”

  She shook her head. “Not that I know of. He had some friends that weren’t such nice people, but I never thought any of them were connected to the Mafia. Why?”

  “That Charles Smith, your cash-paying customer, had he ever chartered with you before?”

  “No. At least I don’t remember the name.”

  “Wasn’t it unusual for someone to call for a charter from Seattle? Why didn’t he use a company that was closer to him?”

  “I don’t know,” Dana replied. “I’ve asked myself the same question over and over all week long.”

  “What about the name Tabone, Lorenzo Tabone? Does that one ring any bells?”

  Dana Lions frowned. “It sounds familiar, but…” She shook her head. “No, I just can’t place it.”

  “He’s from Chicago,” I said, trying to jog her memory.

  “Wait a minute,” JoAnne Reece interrupted. “What’s going on here? I don’t understand what we’re talking about.”

  Dana Lions, her brows furrowed, was still thinking. “Lorenzo Tabone from Chicago?” she murmured. “I wonder…”

  “You wonder what?”

  “If that isn’t the name of the guy Dad told me about. Only he didn’t call him Lorenzo. Bones, I think it was. No, that’s not right. Bony. Bony Tabone.”

  Dana Lions’ recognition of Lorenzo Tabone’s name sent a shock through my system like a jolt of pure adrenaline or a shot of
straight MacNaughton’s, take your pick. The other two detectives, deferring to that reaction, faded quietly into the woodwork. Suddenly it was as though there were only two of us in the room—Dana and me. I pulled my chair around in front of her and sat with our faces only inches apart. With every particle of my being, I willed her to remember.

  “Who was he?” I demanded.

  Dana’s lower lip trembled. “Dad flew helicopters for the army. He must have loved it while he was doing it, but he got a general discharge from the service.” Her voice was hardly a whisper. “Less than honorable.”

  “So?” I asked. “What does that have to do with Tabone?”

  “It was something that went on while they were over there, in Vietnam. They were in the same outfit, platoon, or whatever. My father didn’t talk about it very much, and he never told me exactly what caused all the trouble. I guess I didn’t really want to know. But this Tabone guy had something to do with it. Dad always blamed him.”

  “Blamed who?”

  “My father blamed Bony, he called him, for getting him thrown out of the service.”

  “Was there any contact between them after that?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Did you ever see Tabone in person, or did your father show you any pictures?”

  “No.”

  “Would you recognize him if you saw him?”

  “No,” she said again. “I don’t think so.”

  “Too bad,” I said. “I just happen to have a composite drawing of Lorenzo Tabone on my desk down at the Public Safety Building.”

  I turned to Reece and Forbes. “You two are in luck. Tabone’s your man. I’ll have prints and a mug shot for you as soon as Federal Express delivers them to me tomorrow morning.”

  JoAnne Reece stood with her head cocked to one side with an incredulous look on her face. “Come on now, Detective Beaumont. What is all this? You expect us to believe you already know who the killer is? Somebody’s sending you prints and a mug shot in the morning mail, just like that?”