“Just a spur-of-the-moment thing, huh?” Lucca said.
“That’s right. A couple of days earlier he had burglarized our house. He took my daughter’s favorite teddy bear—you know, from her childhood, a sentimental thing—and he stuck it to the fireplace mantel with one of our kitchen knives. You people couldn’t prove it was him, though. You couldn’t find anything.”
“So you decided to take matters into your own hands.”
“I decided to warn him again.”
“And when you found him inside, was he alone?”
“No, he was with one of his gay friends. A Lester somebody.”
“Lester Wall?”
“Could be. I don’t remember.”
“And eventually the two of you—you and Slade—you left together, is that right?”
“That’s right.”
“Where’d you go?”
“Drinking. And we had dinner.”
“Drinking and dinner, huh?” Lucca pushed back his chair and got up, smiling, shaking his head. “Now that is passing weird, you know? Just straight-out weird. Imagine, here you are, this straight arrow in your forties, a businessman, no criminal record at all, clean as a hound’s tooth. And you go out drinking and dining with this twenty-four-year-old ex-con with a rap sheet as long as my arm—a drug-dealing male prostitute, a rapist and possible murderer, a guy you say just burglarized your house and kept terrorizing your daughter. And you go out drinking and dining with him?”
Baird shrugged. “Same reason I said before. I thought that maybe if he got to know me, and if I could get through to him, make him understand that my daughter was off limits, that if he ever touched a hair of her head…”
When Baird failed to finish the thought, Lucca prompted him. “You would what?”
“I would kill him.”
The sergeant said nothing for a few moments, letting the words hang in the air like the stench of cordite after a bombing. He was standing behind his chair, staring raptly down at Baird. When he finally spoke, his voice was soft, almost apologetic.
“And did you kill him, Jack?”
“Of course not. He never touched my daughter.”
“I see.”
Again Lucca offered Baird a cigarette, and again Baird took it. The sergeant lit a match. Baird leaned into the flame.
“After Gide’s,” Lucca said, “where did the two of you go?”
“First, a chicken-and-ribs place south on Rainier. Slade liked fat, I gathered. The drumsticks must have weighed five pounds apiece. We went to a couple of downtown bars next, then I dropped him back at Gide’s, so he could pick up his car. That must’ve been around nine or ten.”
Lucca turned his chair around and sat down, straddling it. He put his hands on the chair back and lowered his chin onto his hands, looking up at Baird like a whimsical child. Baird wanted to reach out and take him by the nose, pull him yelling and kicking across the table.
“You didn’t go anywhere else?” the sergeant asked.
“No.”
“Like, say, you didn’t go to a strip joint called the Oolala?”
Baird did not respond, just sat there trying not to show anything. It was like trying to hide the fact that one had been kicked hard in the face.
“The Oolala,” Lucca repeated. “You never went there?”
“No,” Baird said. “I’ve never even heard of it.”
Lucca smiled. “Well, geez, that’s kind of weird too. There’s a stripper there who remembers table-dancing that night for Slade and a second guy who fits your description to a T. What do you make of that?”
“A case of mistaken identity.”
“You weren’t there, huh?”
“No.”
The sergeant sat up straight now, still smiling slightly, crookedly, a man definitely enjoying himself. “Then you won’t mind giving her a look-see, I take it? In a lineup.”
Baird thought of refusing. He knew it was time to pull back and call his attorney, but he also knew that ultimately he was going to have to stand in Lucca’s lineup, no matter how strenuously he or his lawyer might object. Even more than that, though, he needed to know who was going to view the lineup, one of the other dancers or Satin herself. He needed to know if he was going to suffer a bloody nose or a bullet in the heart.
“Sure,” he said. “Why not?”
Lucca grinned. “You’re a real plunger, right?”
“Could be.”
“Well, that’s great. I like a plunger. Fact is, I’m kind of one myself. I believe in something, I go all out. Like after our little talk Saturday, I didn’t watch no football game, I can tell you that. I went home and laid down and I looked up at the ceiling for it must’ve been two hours. And I kept thinking: How in the sweet name of Jesus did it happen? How do we get from you two sitting together at Gide’s, talking and drinking like friends, and finally leaving together to go have dinner and do some more drinking—how do we get from that to Jimbo Slade winding up in the trunk of his car at the bottom of Lake Washington, with three bullet holes in him? How the devil do we get from Gide’s gay little fern bar to that bluff over in Juanita?” He shook his head dolefully. “And nothing comes. I just couldn’t figure it. If Jimbo thinks you’re gonna waste him, he ain’t gonna go barhopping with you then, is he? No way. So I kept at it, kept staring up at that dirty ceiling of mine, and finally I have to settle for the obvious.
“I tell myself, well, this fella Baird, he obviously snookered the guy in some way, no bolt out of the blue or anything like that, just the simplest, most logical explanation possible. And what I finally figured was that somehow you got Slade thinking the two of you had something in common—a bond of some kind. But what in Jesus’ name could it have been, huh? Because what Jimbo Slade seems to dig most is not just scaring women shitless, and not just fucking them against their will. No, what he digs is slashing and beating and sodomizing till they’re half dead, like the girl who worked at Seafirst. And that sure ain’t your scene, is it, Jack?
“But I say to myself, hey, this Baird ain’t just your average paper salesman, you know? I figure this Baird, maybe he’s even cool enough to snooker Slade into believing he’s got some offbeat tastes of his own—like, say, watching. Because Jimbo wouldn’t believe—in fact no one would believe, even I wouldn’t believe—you’d go the whole route with him. You know, share the blood lust and all that.”
The sergeant paused there, apparently to let it all sink in. His eyes, magnified, looked bright, even feverish. He stood up and lit another cigarette. Dragging, he looked down at Lee, who continued to sit at the table as if she were the accused no less than Baird.
“What’s that, Detective?” he asked. “Did I take the words right out of your mouth?”
Lee looked embarrassed. “Word for word,” she said.
Lucca shook his head ruefully and turned back to his primary quarry. “So I say to myself: If that was it—if that was how you gained the man’s confidence—if that was why he was letting you hang with him, thinking of you now as some kind of audience, a one-man fan club, then my next step is to check our hit list for that night—the night he bought it, according to the old maid and your stolen watch. So I check the list to see what unlucky females were assaulted that night, especially on the Eastside—and what do I come up with? This loony-tunes attack on a stripper named Satin. Two guys. One she never sees who starts beating her to a pulp. And the other who seems to make the first one disappear, then leans down and says, ‘Honey, you gonna be all right. Just hang on.’”
Baird wanted to cross his arms on the table and lay his head down. He felt a great weariness in his mind and heart, so much so that he considered giving in and confessing everything to this inhumanly dogged and prescient policeman. He wanted to tell him yes, that he was guilty and proud of it and that he was ready now to sign a confession and accept his punishment. But in the end it was his weariness that saved him. He just sat there, staring at the sergeant, saying nothing.
“I figure it this
way,” Lucca said. “That you kept giving him rope, and he kept taking it. And finally, when he had enough, when you had your proof—when you saw he was every bit as sick and vicious as you figured he was—you whacked him.”
Baird shrugged. “It’s an interesting theory.”
“Ain’t it, though? And ain’t it neat we can test it right here today, with that sexy little stripper, Satin? You ready for her, Jack?”
“Why not?” Baird said again. He couldn’t think of anything else to say.
They took Baird downstairs to a room adjoining the lineup room. He waited there in the company of a uniformed officer for forty minutes while Lucca assembled the other members of the lineup, who straggled in one and two at a time, most of them detectives. The last two were still putting on ties and tucking in their blue shirts, presumably uniformed officers changing into street clothes.
There were seven men in all, and once they were together, Baird could see that they didn’t constitute a fair lineup. Only one of them was Baird’s age and height, but he was twenty pounds heavier and had thinning gray hair. The others appeared to be in their thirties or late twenties, possibly because Lucca had wanted men with a full head of hair and no paunch, like Baird. But whatever the sergeant’s reasons, the result was the same: a lineup in which no one but Baird could possibly have met Satin’s description. Yet he was reluctant to complain about it, reasoning that if Satin did identify him and if the lineup was indeed unfairly constituted, his lawyer might be able to convince the judge to throw out the girl’s testimony, if the case were ever to come to trial. Whereas, if Baird complained now, Lucca might simply disband the present group of men and round up another, fairer group—one more difficult for a lawyer to protest later.
So he said nothing. And finally they were told to enter the lineup room. He was fourth in line as the group filed onto the narrow stage and turned to face a bank of bright lights. He was relieved to see the snout of another TV camera up in a corner of the room, for it meant that there would be an incontrovertible record of the lineup. Lucca or a prosecuting attorney could not very easily change the lineup’s makeup out of whole cloth later on, in the event it was challenged in court.
Like the other men, Baird just stood there, staring into the brightness. In time, over on intercom, Lucca told one of the other men to stand in profile. Then he told Baird to do the same. Finally he dismissed everyone but Baird, and the other men filed out. When they were gone, the sergeant appeared in the doorway and asked Baird to follow him, which he did. They went through a second door into the viewing room, where Satin stood waiting, looking both vulgar and stunning in orange sunglasses and a skintight, lime-green pantsuit with a bolero jacket. Lee was standing off to the side, her attitude still that of a spectator more than a participant.
When Baird entered the room, Satin had involuntarily moved back a step. Now, to compensate, to show that she was cool and unafraid, she struck a sexy, casual pose, moving her weight onto one leg and running her fingers back into her long, thick hair. Like a referee, Lucca moved between the two of them, though not so far that he blocked their view of each other.
“All right now, Jack,” he said, “I want you to say a certain line to Miss Dean. And in your natural voice, okay?”
“Why not?”
Lucca then gave him the words to say, and Baird repeated them, in a monotone. “Honey, you’re going to be all right. Just hang on.”
Lucca grimaced. “That’s your natural voice? Come on, Jack, give me a break.”
“So I’ll do it again,” Baird said.
“And natural this time, okay?”
Baird recited the words again, again in a monotone, only this time raising his voice slightly. Looking disgusted, Lucca told Lee to take Baird into the other room, which she did, leaving the door partially open behind them. As a result, Baird was able to watch as Lucca pressed Satin for an answer. The girl shrugged and shook her head, and Lucca turned first one way and then the other, as if he were trying to avoid a pesky fly. When he spoke to her again, he got the same response.
Lee had been watching too. “Looks like you could be off the hook,” she said.
In the other room, Lucca opened a second door for Satin, who left hurriedly, without saying anything more, without even looking at the sergeant, whose face had turned an angry, splotchy red.
“I’ve never seen that girl before,” Baird said to Lee.
The detective regarded him coolly. “Is that a fact?” she said.
Baird knew that boxers often had no memory of being knocked out, so he wasn’t surprised that Satin had not been able to identify him. As he understood it, trauma often wiped the slate clean in both directions, before and after, how long depending on the severity of the trauma. Still, the girl somehow had managed to remember the words he’d spoken to her after Slade’s attack, as she lay on her back on the sidewalk. Though it was an anomaly he could not explain—why she would remember his words but not his person—he was thoroughly willing to live with it.
Oddly, when he first saw her in the viewing room, he thought he had detected something like recognition in her eyes behind the orange shades, just a millisecond of connection, maybe even compassion, and then it was gone. In any case, he almost loved the girl for disappointing Lucca so greatly. And in the days that followed the interrogation, he thought of her often. In his wilder moments, he even considered going to the Oolala and paying her to dance just for him.
Fortunately, his wild moments were few and far between. His day at police headquarters, and especially his forty minutes in the holding cell, had affected him strongly. Within minutes of being dropped off at his house by Sergeant Lucca, he was on the phone to his lawyer neighbor, Tom Dagleish. Dagleish then phoned a local criminal lawyer, Abe Steiner, whom Baird met with the next morning. Steiner at first was anything but impressive: an old, small, potbellied man with about a dozen black-dyed hairs running from one temple to the other, like cracks in his liver-spotted pate. He wheezed and coughed and squirmed uncomfortably in his sumptuous leather desk chair. And he tied down the finances first, saying that he charged one-fifty an hour and that he would need a two-thousand-dollar retainer just to look into the case. Also, if Baird was indicted and the case went to trial, he could expect to pay upward of sixty-thousand dollars for the attorney’s services.
Baird reminded Steiner that he was only being investigated at this point. Getting out his checkbook and beginning to write, he suggested that he pay an initial retainer of one thousand dollars and five thousand more if and when he was indicted. And if the case went to trial, he would continue to pay in increments of five thousand, with a forty-thousand-dollar ceiling.
“I couldn’t do more than that,” he said. “I’m not a lawyer or doctor, just a paper salesman.”
Steiner made a face, as if he’d bitten into a lemon. “I bet you don’t give your paper away,” he said.
“It’s not my paper, Mister Steiner. I don’t own it.”
Shrugging and shaking his head, looking sorely put upon, the attorney finally agreed. “All right, all right—one thousand now and forty tops. I hate to bargain.”
“Me too.”
Steiner squirmed and sat back, steepling his hands. “So what did you do, Mister Baird? Who was it they say you killed? Just tell me your story.”
Baird spent the next hour in the lawyer’s office, giving him a detailed account of Slade’s harassment of Kathy and of his own attempts to discourage the man. Steiner kept firing questions at him, all to the point, no less incisive than Lucca’s had been. And essentially Baird gave him the same story he’d given the sergeant, the only difference being that he admitted he had accompanied Slade to the Oolala on a Saturday in August—though still omitting the vital fact that he also had been there with Slade the night of the killing, nine days later.
He conceded to Steiner that he probably should have admitted this to Lucca—the first visit to the strip club—since there were other dancers and employees who might possibly remember hi
s having been there together with Slade, and that if Lucca questioned them, the truth would probably come out.
Steiner made his lemon face again. “Unimportant, unimportant. A suspect naturally wants to look as innocent as he can, and he fudges here and there. So the two of you were there together—so what? That don’t put you with him the night of the murder, or the alleged night, I should say. How can they know? A stopped watch? What bullshit. It could’ve stopped anywhere, anytime—they don’t know any more than we do. And the autopsy—a body that long in the water, they’re lucky if they pick the right week the guy bought it, for Christ sake. It’s a lotta bullshit. They got nothin on you but motive.”
“That’s good to hear.”
Steiner shrugged, as if to say it was nothing, that any fool could have told Baird the same thing.
“Just to be sure I understand Lucca’s case,” he said, “lemme lay it out for you, make sure I’ve got it straight. Slade had a history of sex crimes and was the chief suspect in the Ravenna rape. Then he starts stalkin your daughter and even burglarizes your house. When the police don’t do nothin about him, you go it alone. You follow him, you meet him, you threaten him, and finally you develop this kind of weird rapport with the guy—the object being to give him enough rope to hang himself. He winds up dead. Lucca shows his mug shot to the dancer, Satin, who was assaulted the alleged night of the murder, just a couple miles away. And she says, yeah, she danced for him and another guy the Saturday before the killin. So Lucca brings you in, expectin her to I.D. you as the guy with Slade at the Oolala, and then a couple days later as one of her two assailants. Right so far?”
“Close enough.”
“But she don’t, so he’s got to release you. But you figure he’ll keep digging until he finds someone else at the strip club who will be able to I.D. you there on that Saturday night.”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Okay, let’s say he does,” Steiner said. “So what? What does he gain? It still don’t put you together with Slade on the night of the killin. And it sure as hell don’t put you on that bluff at two in the morning, givin Slade the old heave-ho. And one more thing—even if this Satin had identified you as one of her assailants, what good does that do Lucca? She didn’t see the second guy. She don’t know him from Adam. He could’ve been Slade, or he could’ve been Tiny Tim—she don’t know. So she can’t put you two together, as I see it.”
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