by J. A. Jance
Johnny Bickford's address on West Mercer led me to the bottom floor of a small eight-unit condominium complex on the view side of Queen Anne Hill. In this case, the view wasn't all that great, unless you happen to be a fan of grain terminals, which I'm not.
I rang the bell. The blonde who answered the door was almost as tall as I am. She wore a white, long-sleeved robe edged with something soft and furry, along with a matching pair of high-heeled, backless slippers. The outfit looked as though it had been copied from a 1930s Bette Davis movie. So did the foot-long cigarette holder.
"You must be Detective Beaumont."
I nodded, handing her one of my cards. After giving me a coy look, she immediately tucked the card into her bra. "Won't you come in?"
I stepped into a black-and-white room: white leather couch, chair, and carpet; black lacquered furniture. Huge black-and-white oils of nothing recognizable covered the walls. A silver tray laden with a french-press coffeepot, coffee cups, saucers, and spoons as well as cream and sugar was waiting on the coffee table.
"Won't you sit down?" Johnny offered. "And how do you take your coffee, black or with cream and sugar?"
"Black will be fine," I said.
Johnny motioned me onto the couch and then took a seat on a nearby straight-backed chair. She sat primly erect, shoulders not touching the chair, knees close together, legs demurely crossed at the ankle. And that was part of what gave her away. Modern-day ordinary women seldom pay that much attention to the finer points of posture and deportment. Not only that, the hand that passed me my cup and saucer wasn't exactly fragile and feminine.
Robe and slippers be damned, Johnny Bickford wasn't a woman at all, or rather, wasn't all woman.
"I meant to go jogging first thing this morning," he/she was saying. "Here it is, only the second of January and I'm already breaking one of my New Year's resolutions, but I just couldn't bear to go back down the waterfront after what happened there yesterday. The problem is, I'm not in good enough shape to run up and down the hills in this neighborhood. Besides, I barely slept last night. Nightmares, you know. That poor man. Do you have any idea who he is?"
"Not yet. We're working on it. Tell me, Johnny, where were you when you first saw the body?"
"I had just come up through Myrtle Edwards Park, and I was more than a little winded." Johnny laughed, the sound more of a donkey's bray than anything else. "That's not entirely true. I'm fairly new to this jogging thing, and I went out on Pier Seventy to watch the water traffic and to catch my breath. I was coming back down the pier to head home when we saw him. He wasn't floating, really. He was sort of pushed up against one of those old dead-head logs down along the edge of the water. Then a tugboat or something came by, fairly close to shore. The wake was enough to jar him loose. He disappeared under the dock."
"You said we. Was someone there with you?"
"There was a lady in a wheelchair on the dock with me. I mean, we were on the dock at the same time, although we weren't actually together, you see. She was the one who spotted the body first, although I was the one who called it in because I was the one with a phone in my pocket."
"This other lady, did you get her name?"
"No."
"And you called from your cell phone?"
Johnny nodded. "I carry my trusty little cellular phone with me at all times. I used to live up on Capital Hill, you see," he/she said. "Up there, I worried about gay bashing, especially late at night. Downtown here, it's mostly ordinary muggers and homeless lowlife panhandlers. They don't give a damn if you're gay or straight. I'd have to call them equal-opportunity criminals," Johnny said with another raucous hoot of laughter.
"I guess you would," I agreed, although I didn't find the joke particularly funny.
There was a momentary lull in the conversation. Johnny Bickford looked thoughtful. "I suppose the poor man committed suicide, didn't he? Jumped off a bridge or something? You have to be feeling terribly low to just go ahead and end it all that way."
It was interesting to me that one of the first people on the scene still thought John Doe had jumped off a bridge, while that television reporter there at the scene had specifically asked and had already somehow known that the victim had been shot. How did she know that? I wondered in passing before turning my attention back to Johnny. It didn't seem all that out of line to let the star witness know a little more about what was really going on.
"It doesn't appear to be suicide," I said. "We're investigating the case as a homicide."
"Oh, my goodness!" Johnny Bickford exclaimed, clutching his/her throat. "How awful!"
I'm surprised he/she didn't simply faint dead away at the news. I'm glad it didn't happen, however, because I'm not sure what my response should have been if he/she had.
I had been asking questions and filling in the contact report as I went. At the top of the form officers are expected to circle the appropriate title-Mr., Mrs., Ms., or Miss. Stumped, I left that one blank while I went on taking the information.
I asked all the usual questions, but other than having found the body, there didn't seem to be that much more Johnny Bickford could add to what I already knew. When we finished and I handed the paper over to Johnny for a signature, his/her eyes went directly to the top of the form and stayed there for some time. Finally, taking the pen I offered, he/she signed the paper with an overstated flourish and handed it back.
Looking at the top of the form I saw that the word Ms. had been circled in a bold, heavy-duty line. While I surveyed the form, Johnny Bickford observed me with a defiant stare.
"Even though I've never been married, Miss doesn't really apply to someone in my situation," Johnny Bickford said. "I couldn't choose ‘None of the Above' since that one wasn't listed. Ms. will be far more suitable after the first of February. That's when I'm scheduled for the next step in my sex change."
"I see," I said awkwardly, since the pause in the conversation made it necessary for me to say something.
Johnny Bickford simpered at me over the brim of his/her coffee cup, and then took another dainty sip of coffee. "Do you?" he asked. "My doctor doesn't believe in doing it all at once. He says Rome wasn't built in a day."
"No," I agreed, wishing I sounded less stupid than I felt. "It certainly wasn't."
Carefully, I set down my own cup and saucer on the table and gathered up my paperwork. "I'd best be going," I said.
"Can't I talk you into staying for another cup of coffee?" Johnny Bickford asked with a flirtatious smile. The look alone was enough to make me want to bolt for the door.
"No," I stammered uncomfortably, getting to my feet. "No, thank you."
"Too bad." Johnny said. "I think you're awfully cute."
I was already on my feet when Johnny reached into the pocket of his white robe and pulled out a tiny, four-inch-long scrap of newspaper article and handed it over to me. Quickly,
I scanned through it: BODY FOUND AT PIER 70
The body of an unidentified man was found floating in the water near Pier 70 New Year's Day, spotted by an early-morning jogger.
Dr. Audrey Cummings, King County Assistant Medical Examiner, stated that the man had died as a result of undetermined causes.
Seattle police are investigating.
When I finished reading the brief article, I started to hand it back to Johnny Bickford. "Would you sign it, please?" he asked.
"Sign it?" I repeated, not quite comprehending. "You mean autograph it like it was a baseball card or something?"
Johnny beamed and nodded. "Exactly. I want to send it to my folks back in Wichita. I'm not mentioned by name, of course, but they'll be thrilled to know that I was the jogger in question. And having a real detective's signature on it will make it that much better. My mother is a big fan of true crime."
What the hell? I thought. "Where do you want me to sign?"
"Anywhere."
Doing my best to mimic a doctor's prescription handwriting, I scrawled my signature across the body of the article and then handed it back.
>
"Thanks," Johnny said gratefully. "If you don't mind, I'll send your card along with the article. You have no idea how much this will please my mother. She would have liked me to be a policeman, you see. I've never quite had the courage to explain to her why that wouldn't work."
I made for the door and Johnny followed. As I started down the steps, he was standing in the doorway, carefully holding the front of his robe to keep it from yawning open. I have no idea how one goes about staging a series of sex-change operations, but I have to admit, Johnny Bickford did have a figure.
He must have understood my questioning glance. He smiled. "They don't call them WonderBras for nothing," he said.
I was still blushing when I closed the car door and shoved the key into the ignition. I kicked up a spray of wintertime, road-sanding grit as I backed out of the driveway and headed downtown.
I was just starting south on Fifth Avenue when a call came in for me on the radio. "Sergeant Watkins wants to know what's wrong with your pager," the dispatcher said. "He's been trying to reach you for the past fifteen minutes."
In recent years, pagers, along with laptop computers and Kevlar vests, have all been added to the ordinary police detective's tools of the trade. There are circumstances in which all of them offer some advantage. As far as I'm concerned, when it comes to pagers, though, the bad far outweighs the good. It's a real annoyance, especially when I'm in the middle of a complicated witness interview, to have a pager buzzing away in my pocket, telling me that I really need to be talking to someone else. A pager can be almost as obnoxious as the phone company's little custom-calling gimmick-"Call Waiting." Call Interrupting is more like it.
Having been issued a brand-new pager, I do buckle under and wear it, but that doesn't mean I always keep the infernal thing turned on, especially not in interview situations. I try to be conscientious about turning it back on once I'm through talking to witnesses. In my hurry to leave Johnny Bickford's place, however, I had completely forgotten to do so.
"What's he want?" I asked.
"Something about Chip Raymond needing to get in touch with you. He says it's important. Want me to patch you through to Watty?"
Not particularly, I thought. Besides, if Chip was trying to reach me, that probably meant someone had turned up who looked like a possible match with Mr. Floater John Doe. "Can you put me through to Detective Raymond?"
"No can do. Watty, yes. Detective Raymond, no."
"Put me through to Sergeant Watkins, then," I said. "I might as well get it over with."
But when Watty's voice came through the radio, he didn't say a word about the pager, not at first. "Detective Raymond wants you to meet him at thirty-three hundred Western ASAP. The name of the company is D.G.I., ‘Designer Genes International.'"
"Do you have a suite number?"
"No, it's a brand-new building. According to Chip, the same outfit evidently owns the whole thing."
"Did you say D.G.I.? I'm assuming that's not jeans, as in Levi's?" I asked.
"Right," Watty replied. "The other kind: G-E-N-E-S, as in DNA. It's one of those new bioengineering companies. Some kind of cancer research."
"Did Chip give you a name of the man he thinks is my guy?"
"Yeah. Wolf. Don Wolf. He's the operations manager there. Newly transferred up from California."
"Okay," I told Watty. "If you can raise Chip, either by phone or radio, tell him I'm on my way."
"That shouldn't be too difficult," Watty told me. "Unlike some people who shall remain nameless, Detective Raymond actually uses his pager. On a regular basis."
I didn't miss the sarcasm in Watty's voice. As official reprimands go, it was relatively harmless. If he had actually ordered me to keep my pager on at all times, I probably would have done so, but it would have been compliance under duress. Sergeant Watkins is smart enough to know that he gets the best work out of his people when he lets them use their own judgment in non-life-threatening situations.
Riding herd on a bunch of homicide detectives has to be a whole lot like being a parent and, no doubt, almost as thankless. Watty Watkins is a past master at doing both-raising kids and running detectives. His hand on the reins is sometimes light, sometimes firm. He gets what he wants by alternately ordering and cajoling. Nobody in the department has ever accused the man of not giving a damn.
I reached down and switched on my pager. "All right, all right," I muttered. "It's on."
"Good."
"And I'm sorry."
"That's okay, Beau," Watty said. "These things happen."
That was all there was to it. Clearly, I was in the wrong. Watty and I both knew that, but once I had apologized, he didn't waste both his time and mine by rubbing my nose in it. If I had been in his shoes, I doubt I would have exercised the same kind of restraint.
It all goes to show why Watty's the sergeant, and I'm not. It might also explain why after all these years, he's still married to his first wife.
That's not luck at all. It's because he's one hell of a nice guy.
Three
These days the traffic lights on Seattle's Fifth Avenue are supposedly timed to benefit drivers who actually observe the speed limit. Theoretically, a driver ought to be able to go from the upper end of the Denny Regrade to the International District at the far end of the downtown area with only one or two stops along the way.
While I'd been on the radio, I had come south, sailing along with traffic. Beyond University, however, just about the time I realized I needed to go someplace other than back to the Public Safety Building, forward progress ground to a halt. For the next two interminable blocks, Fifth Avenue was coned down to a single left-hand lane. The numbskull directing traffic wouldn't allow a right-hand turn on Seneca, not even for a homicide cop who had slapped a portable blue flasher on top of his vehicle.
I finally managed to turn west on Madison. Once out of the southbound gridlock, I made it back north with no further hassle. The Denny Regrade is a flat area north of Seattle's downtown proper that has been carved from where Denny Hill used to be. It ends at the bottom of Queen Anne Hill. Denny Avenue runs on a diagonal across the northern end of the Regrade, providing a logical boundary. Logic disappears, however, in a sudden curve where, for no apparent reason other than to bedevil newcomers, Denny transforms itself briefly into a street called Western.
With three lanes of traffic roaring past, I ducked into a passenger load zone outside the building marked 3300 Western and tried to get my bearings. When I first moved back into the city, that block had been the site of a once-fine steak house. In its later years, the place degenerated into a singles-scene joint before shutting down altogether. For years, a fading billboard had promised that a hotel would soon be built on the property. Obviously, that plan had come adrift, because a spankingly new six-story glass-fronted office building sat there now.
The six-foot-tall brass letters that said D.G.I. were easy to spot. So was the fountain, closed down for the winter, that graced a front-door plaza. What wasn't easy to find was parking. Just then, Chip Raymond sauntered out through the door, waving me around to the north end of the building, where I found a discreetly camouflaged entrance to an underground garage. Chip beat me back inside and waved me into a slot marked VISITOR.
"Have you been waiting long?"
Chip shook his head. "As soon as the report came in by phone, I figured the guy was probably your floater. I didn't want to go charging in here to check it out without having you along. When Watty couldn't find you right off, I grabbed some lunch on the way-a hamburger from Dick's. I bought two. You want one?"
"No, thanks. I'm fine. What have you got?"
Chip unfolded a computer-generated piece of paper and read off the information. "Name's Don Wolf. Donald R. Moved up here from La Jolla, California, a couple of months ago to assume the position of operations manager at Designer Genes International. Thirty-eight years old. Six feet one inch tall. Weighs about one eighty-five, one ninety. Blond hair. Blue eyes. Tattoo on right wrist
that says MOTHER."
"Way to go, Chip. It sounds like my guy, all right."
"According to the man who called in the report-"
"Who was that?" I asked.
"Somebody named Bill Whitten," Chip answered. "He's the CEO of D.G.I. He said he and this Wolf character were supposed to have a meeting yesterday afternoon, and Wolf didn't show."
"For good reason," I said.
Chip nodded. "There was supposed to be another meeting this morning-at seven. When Wolf didn't show for that one either, Whitten started trying to track the guy down. The call was put through to my desk at ten o'clock, just a little while after you left the department."
"Wait a minute," I said. "Doesn't that strike you as soon? Family members would report it in less than twenty-four hours. But that seems early for people at work."
Chip nodded. "The same thought crossed my mind, but that's before I learned about his car. Wolf is nowhere to be found, but his car is right here in the garage. It's that white Intrepid over in the corner. I took a quick look at it and couldn't see anything wrong. Anyway, the situation seemed thorny enough that I didn't want to go upstairs to see Whitten without having somebody from Homicide along with me."
"Good call, Chip," I told him. "Let's do it."
We stepped into the elevator and rode up one floor to the lobby, where a sweet young thing was "womaning" a reception desk and switchboard. By mutual if unspoken agreement, Detective Raymond was the one who presented his credentials. There was no need to bring up the word homicide until we had a positive identification.
"We need to see Bill Whitten, please," Chip said. "I believe he's expecting us."
Moments later, we were back in the elevator riding up to the sixth floor. The interior walls of the elevator were covered with some kind of upholstered material that still reeked of new dye. Because of my involvement with the syndicate that bought Belltown Terrace, I know a little about the development and relative cost of downtown Seattle real estate. This particular six-story building-underground parking garage, upholstered elevator, and all-hadn't come cheap. An operation like this represented a big chunk of investment capital, especially considering that Designer Genes International was the building's sole occupant.