CAR AND BODY OF LOCAL MURDER VICTIM RECOVERED
FROM LAKE WASHINGTON.
Shooting victim found locked in trunk of his car.
The story identified the victim as James R. Slade, twenty-four, an ex-convict wanted by the police for questioning in regard to the murder of eighteen-year-old May Tang, a prostitute. A spokesman for the county police reported what Baird already knew, that they would have to wait for an autopsy to determine how and when the man died.
The heavy green line circled the article twice, as if it had been scrawled in anger. Next to it, covering half the page, was a large, forceful exclamation point, all of which suggested that it was Ellen’s work, not Kathy’s. But then its authorship was beside the point. What mattered was that, come nightfall, he was going to have to face them both and play the Great Innocent again. Though he hated the very idea of it, he didn’t expect it to be difficult, since he himself could barely believe that he had actually killed someone.
Yet he put his performance off as long as he could, calling on all his customers that day and stopping at Bramante’s at eight o’clock for a few drinks and a roast-beef sandwich. It was too dark in the ristorante to see anyone very well, which was exactly what he wanted, peace and quiet while he ate. He couldn’t remember if he had told anyone at Leo’s the name of the man stalking Kathy, which was another reason he had chosen not to go there, not wanting to spend the evening discussing Jimbo’s gruesome departure and what a remarkable stroke of luck this was for good old Jack Baird.
After paying his bill, he scooted out of the soft plastic booth, felt his way toward the front door, and started for home. When he got there, he found Ellen and Kathy in the family room, watching a network movie on television. Kathy, fresh from the shower, had her wet hair tied in a towel turban and was wearing a light yellow robe cinched even tighter at the waist than Lee Jeffers could have tolerated. She was sitting on the carpeted floor, painting her toenails. Ellen was in her usual chair, her legs tucked under her while she toiled away on a new cable-knit sweater. She was wearing her white jogging suit, evidently having just come home from a power walk.
Baird started to light a cigarette, then thought better of it. “Well, I saw the morning paper,” he said. “I can’t say I was saddened by the news.”
Since Kathy was still ignoring him most of the time, he was surprised to see her look up at him now, with a rueful smile. “Me either, Daddy. I suppose I should be ashamed to admit it, but I’m glad he’s dead. I can hardly believe it, though. He seemed so—I don’t know—indestructible.”
“Apparently he wasn’t.”
Ellen spared him a glance. “You’re home early,” she said. “Your playmates all busy tonight?”
Baird ignored the question. “You been out jogging?”
“Walking. I told you I don’t jog anymore. Old knees. Old everything. But then I guess you already decided that.”
“Great to be home.” He sat down on the couch, starving for a cigarette.
“Who do you think did it?” Kathy asked.
“Slade? I don’t know. He was involved in drugs, I understand. Maybe he owed money. Something like that.”
“Detective Jeffers tell you that?” Ellen asked.
Baird shrugged. “Her or Lucca. I don’t remember.”
“Lucca didn’t seem like the sharing type.”
“You never know.”
“That’s for sure.”
Baird sat there watching his wife’s fingers manipulating the knitting needles, the effortless speed so at odds with the woman herself, who as usual sat perfectly still, perfectly relaxed, her handsome face almost expressionless. He moved a pillow to the end of the couch and stretched out.
“Maybe there’ll be something about Slade on the news,” he said. “You know, the police have been looking for him for some time. The woman that was raped in Ravenna—the hospital finally found the hair and semen samples from the rapist. Misplaced them somewhere. So the police were going to bring him in and test him for a match.”
On the floor, Kathy shivered. “Just the thought of him makes my skin crawl.”
“Well, you don’t have to worry about him anymore,” Ellen said. “Just a thousand other creeps.”
“That’s a pleasant thought,” Baird said.
“It’s an unpleasant reality,” she shot back.
Kathy unwound the towel on her head and began to dry her hair with it. “Well, it wasn’t necessary, Mother,” she said. “It’s not as though we didn’t already know it.”
Hear, hear, Baird thought. It seemed forever since anyone had sided with him about anything. And it buoyed him as the newscast began now and he had no idea what it would reveal—in fact would not have been greatly surprised to see his own picture suddenly appear on the screen while a sonorous voice-over told the world that Jack H. Baird, local paper salesman and budding philanderer, was the main suspect in the case.
But there was other, fresher mayhem to report: a drive-by shooting in West Seattle; a gang fight in Tacoma, leaving two dead; and forest fires burning all along the West Coast, due to the long, dry summer. But finally there he was: old Jimbo Slade, standing before a height chart and holding up his mug-shot number, probably in California, after the assault on his benefactor. The voice-over said that the body found in the trunk of the car hauled from Lake Washington the previous day had been identified as that of James R. Slade, a twenty-four-year-old ex-convict employed as a dishwasher in a Seattle restaurant. On the screen, Baird saw the Impala coming out of the water again. Then the camera cut to the same Asian reporter from the previous night; only now he was standing in daylight on the curving lane with the same chunky, elderly black maid from whom Baird had sped away. For the moment, he stopped breathing.
“Barry, this is Alma Jessup. She works as a live-in maid in the house just below here, around the curve. She remembers hearing something on the night of August twenty-fourth, a Monday.” He thrust the mike at her.
“Yes, I sure did hear something that night!” the old woman yelled into the mike. “I remember cuz my employers, the Feldmans—real nice people, by the way—they give me a little birfday party the night before. And my birfday is August twenty-three. Anyway, I woke up close to two a.m., and I hear this car on the road—you know, gravel crunching, cuz the car is moving kind of slow like. And then it stops and I hear the door open and close, then nothin for a second or two. Then there’s a kind of bumpin sound and finally a splash. Well, I thought someone just threw somethin away, you know—an old TV or somethin like that—and I wasn’t gonna lose no sleep over it. So I went back to bed. But I guess I was wrong.”
The reporter turned to the camera. “So, Barry, if what Mrs. Jessup heard was in fact the real thing, that places the murderer here on the night of August twenty-fourth—actually two A.M. on the twenty-fifth—which was just about three weeks ago, very close to the medical examiner’s estimate of time of death. And incidentally, the autopsy also revealed that Slade had been shot twice in the chest as well as once in the head. And he was shot while he was in the trunk. The police found shells from the gun, though not the gun itself. So progress is being made.”
In the studio, the female anchor had a question. “Do the police have any suspects yet, Mark?”
Mark smiled. “Jean, if they do, they’re not telling me.”
“All right, and thanks, Mark,” Barry contributed. “Good report.”
Baird felt strange lying there on the couch as if nothing unusual had happened. The old black woman had probably just put a noose around his neck and thrown open the trapdoor. By establishing the time of the killing so exactly, she had made it necessary for him to invent an alibi. Though he had never considered himself much of a racist, at the moment he wouldn’t have minded burning a cross on the old woman’s lawn.
“God, it gives me the creeps, seeing him,” Kathy was saying. “Even on TV. That same look. So repulsive.” She shook her head in revulsion.
“A crazy man,” Baird said. “I guess
he hated women.”
He reached out and touched Kathy’s neck, and she scooted closer, inclining her head toward him, just as in the old days. And he was moved. It had been so long since she had let him come close—in fact not once since he’d broken down in her bedroom. He edged his fingers up into her hair.
“Well, as your mother said,” he told her, “you don’t have to worry about him anymore.”
“And thank God for that.” She got to her feet. “I guess it’s bedtime for me.”
Standing with her legs locked, she bent down like a ballerina and kissed Baird on the forehead. He knew he should have been content with that, but he found himself reaching out and holding her there a second longer while he raised up and kissed her on the cheek.
She smiled warmly. “Good night, Daddy.”
“Good night, honey.”
She went behind Ellen’s chair then and brushed her lips against her mother’s cheek.
Ellen did not respond.
“Well, good night, you guys,” the girl said, on her way out of the room. “It’s good to see you together for a change.”
When she was gone, Ellen gave a sharp laugh, like a bark. “Ha!”
“I take it you don’t agree,” Baird said.
She wrinkled her nose. “Doesn’t matter. Not now. But I will say this—I seem to be coming up in the world. I think I actually felt her lips touch my cheek.”
“Does it ever dawn on you to kiss her back?”
“What? And make her jump? I’ve learned the hard way.”
“For what it’s worth, I agree with her. It’s nice to be back home. Here. With you.”
Ellen put down her knitting and turned to look at him, as if she’d heard a mysterious sound in the house. “Back home?”
“That’s what I said.”
“One night. What am I supposed to do, run over there and throw my arms around you? The wanderer has returned?”
“Whatever was bugging me, keeping me out drinking, I think it’s passed.”
She smiled in contempt. “No kidding.”
“That’s how I see it.”
“That it’s passed, huh? In other words, your little detective has kicked you out and now you expect to come back home and pick up where you left off—boring me stupid?”
For the moment, Baird had lost his voice. Until now, Ellen had never explicitly referred to Lee Jeffers as his lover.
“I don’t know what I expect,” he said.
“Good, because you’re not going to get it.” She was putting her knitting away now, getting ready to go upstairs to bed. And suddenly she smiled again, almost sweetly. “Your lady cop—let me guess what happened. She thought you were in love with her, when in fact you were only toying with the idea, trying it on, like new coat.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
Her only response to that was to give him a pitying look. Then she got up and left, her slippers scratching across the floor of the museum. She did not say good night.
Alone, Baird lit a cigarette and turned off the television. And despite an earlier decision not to drink any more that evening, at least not after having left Bramante’s, he decided that a few more vodkas couldn’t possibly hurt anything.
Lee Jeffers had been hating her job ever since that Sunday morning in the chicken-and-ribs joint, when Lucca had scolded her like a naughty child in front of Harrelson and the others. And it hadn’t lessened her resentment any, knowing that she had been in the wrong, had opened the door wide for Lucca to come bullying his way in, so goddamn eager to cut her down to size. She still didn’t understand what had possessed her, making that stupid remark to the pimp about getting him “off the hook.” The only explanation that made any sense was that she was so frustrated by Slade—so convinced of his guilt and so helpless to prove it—that she had temporarily lost her head. But what galled her the most was the swiftness of Lucca’s response, as if he had been waiting patiently all these months for just such an opportunity to jump all over her.
“See, fellas?” he’d seemed to say. “Affirmative action in practice. What a joke.”
And now there was the killing of Slade himself, an apparent professional hit. She was still embarrassed by her initial reaction the previous night, seeing the thing on television and going off half-cocked simply because Baird had seemed so calm about it, so indifferent to it. Now though, after having had more time to reflect, she realized how ridiculous it was to think he could have had anything to do with it: this nice, funny new friend of hers, this lover who got her off better than anyone since Marty. She couldn’t believe she had actually called him a liar when he left. Because of that she was doubly anxious to see him again and apologize, get down on her knees if she had to—though that, she reflected, would inevitably lead to other things. It was a thought that had her smiling as she reached her desk now, over an hour late, which meant she had missed Lucca’s daily sardonic briefing—a gift she owed to the bandit plumber, who had arrived late at her house, the racks on the sides of his old truck gleaming with acres of copper pipe.
Most of the detectives were already on the street, working their cases. A few were busy at their phones or catching up on paperwork, which was something Lee herself had no choice but to do. As she worked, she saw Lucca enter the bull pen from the corridor, being unusually attentive to a small, trim man wearing an expensive tan summer suit with a pink shirt, a wheat-colored tie and a pink-and-red kerchief stuffed just so in his jacket pocket, a touch of the raffish. His thinning hair looked tinted and his tiny shoes gleamed with polish. He moved tentatively, smiling nervously at Lucca, as if he wasn’t sure what to expect from him, kindness or abuse.
Across the room, at his desk, Joe Daniels winked at Lee and waggled his beefy hand, assuring her that he knew a faggot when he saw one. In response, Lee gave him a listless shrug, unimpressed that her friend had caught something a blind person could not have missed, there being a sudden effluvium of expensive perfume in the stale air. Puzzled, she watched Lucca usher the man into the office of the lieutenant, who was on vacation. Through the blinds on the office window, she could see the two of them together, Lucca surprisingly not taking the lieutenant’s desk but facing the man in one of two guest chairs, as if they were equals. The little man spoke with shy animation, using his hands, and Lucca kept nodding, as if he could not have been happier with what he was hearing.
Watching them, Lee would have bet all her new copper piping that the man had something to do with Slade’s murder. Though it was technically a county case, she knew Lucca would worm his way into it one way or the other, and for himself too, not just for the Metro Squad. There was simply no way the sergeant would leave such a plum for her to pick, even though it normally would have been hers, considering that she was already working on Slade’s case, albeit with Slade as a suspect, not a victim.
It worried her that Lucca might put Baird at the top of his list of suspects, simply because he had no one else and because he disliked him so much. If that happened, she knew she would have to walk an exceedingly fine line—on one side, praying that the sergeant wouldn’t find out about her relationship with Baird, and on the other, hoping that they wouldn’t uncover anything incriminating against him. Then too, she would have to stop seeing him, and that was going to hurt, much more than she would have expected a few weeks earlier. But she couldn’t help herself; she really liked the man, married or not. Even when he was like last night, so tightly wound, she loved his company. He made her feel good. He made her happy.
Trying to think about something else, she looked over at the lieutenant’s office again. Lucca was just getting up, holding a small tape recorder. He said something to the little man, then went out to the lieutenant’s secretary, Donna Warren, and gave her the recorder, probably so she could type up the man’s statement. Then he went over to the coffee stand and poured two cups, carefully sugaring and stirring one of them. Returning to the lieutenant’s office, he handed the sugared cup to the little ma
n, who gave it a tentative sip, then smiled at Lucca, who seemed relieved that he had pleased his new friend. While Donna typed, the two men went on talking.
After he escorted the little man out, Lucca came back to his desk. Spinning the chair around, he straddled it, then slid over to Lee’s desk, grinning like a wino with a full quart. For him, this was a performance so uncharacteristic that Lee wondered if he was having a breakdown.
“Guess who that was,” he said.
She barely looked up from her paperwork. “Tinker Bell?”
“You shouldn’t be so homophobic, Detective. No, that was Lester J. Wall, one of the most successful interior designers in the city—and a very close friend of the late Jimbo Slade.”
“One of his johns, you mean.”
“Not according to him. Anyway, he has just made a statement to the effect that our friend Jack Baird was with Slade again about a week before the murder.”
“So?”
“So hear me out, for Jesus Christ sake.” Lucca was not grinning now. “Wall claims Baird came into Gide’s—you know, the gay bar up on Capitol Hill—he came in and joined him and Slade at a table. Slade introduced him as Jack Baird and said they were both hot for the same girl and that Baird had threatened to blow his ass off with a shotgun. And Wall says he could see it was serious. He says it was obvious that there was bad blood between them, even though Slade pretended to be joking about it all. Baird said he had some extra money to spend and he wanted Slade to show him how and where. And later Wall saw them leave together.”
Lee leaned back in her chair, chewing thoughtfully on a pencil. It gave her real pleasure to seem unimpressed in the face of her partner’s rare bout of enthusiasm.
“I still don’t see the significance. It’s still a whole week in between, before the killing. What are you saying, that Slade and Baird were together for the whole week?”
Lucca’s face had begun to redden. “Don’t be so fucking obtuse, okay? First, Joe Daniels sees him with Slade at Harold’s strip joint—remember? Next, we go to his house and warn him to stay away from Slade. Then there’s the burglary at his house. And now, a week before the murder, the man is back at it again, trying to scare Slade off.”
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