Proof of Life

by J. A. Jance

  “You mean as in not letting her know he was gay?” I asked.

  Amelia favored me with a searching look. “That aspect of Max’s life has always been a closely guarded secret,” she said. “In fact, I’m surprised to hear you know about it.”

  I suspect she was hoping that I’d shoot off my mouth and reveal my sources. I didn’t, however, and eventually Amelia continued.

  “Max saw himself as a writer first and foremost. He kept his sexual orientation quiet because he didn’t want to be pegged as a gay writer. It probably doesn’t matter as much nowadays as it did when he first went to work for the P-I, but if word had gotten out back then, it likely would have impacted everything he wrote. I have a feeling that under those circumstances, some of the people who showed up at his funeral out of gratitude for his stories might not have been there.”

  “Erin’s going to have to know the truth at some point,” Mel said.

  “Yes, she is,” Amelia replied, “and with any luck I won’t be the one to tell her.”

  I had a sinking feeling that I’d be the one left doing the dirty work, which would add yet one more stunning betrayal to Erin’s already overwhelming collection of same.

  “Let’s go back to last Friday night for a moment,” I suggested. “That was the sole purpose of your getting together with Max that night—to discuss the buyout?”

  “As I said, he and I were friends—pals, even. We’ve known one another for years, and we tried to go out for an elegant dinner every so often—once a month or so. Over the course of the evening, we talked about a lot of things, but I could tell he was upset and uneasy about something. It wasn’t until he caught sight of you across the dining room that he finally got around to telling me about the book he was working on.”

  “About Tangled Web?”

  “I hadn’t known about it before then. He said that in the course of researching it, he had stumbled onto something he hadn’t expected to find, something that might, as he put it, end up having serious repercussions in the here and now.”

  “Serious as in his being afraid someone might come after him?”

  Amelia nodded. “That was my impression. I told him if that was the case, he needed to go to the cops. He said that was the whole problem—that the bad guy was someone who used to work for Seattle PD and probably still carried a lot of weight around there. After a while, though, he got this sort of thoughtful look on his face and said that you’d been away from the department long enough that maybe you could help.”

  “I wish I could have,” I said. “He stopped by our table on his way out of the restaurant and hinted that there was something he wanted to discuss, but we never had a chance to go into it. Did he give you any more details—anything at all?”

  Amelia thought about that for a moment. “He did say something odd. That if he’d had any idea where it was going to lead, he never would have talked to that drunk.”

  “Did he say which drunk?”

  “No.”

  One of the waitresses hurried over and whispered something in Amelia’s ear. “Sorry,” she said. “There seems to be a problem out front. I’m going to need to go take care of it. If there’s anything else . . .”

  “That’s all for the time being,” I said. “You’ve been most helpful.”

  “You really don’t think his death was an accident?”

  The accident part was seeming less likely all the time, but I couldn’t come right out and say that.

  “We’re working on it,” I told her.

  “I hope you get the bastard who did it and string him up by his toes,” Amelia said fervently, wiping away a tear before it managed to ruin her mascara. “Max spent months doing hand-to-hand combat with lung cancer and fought his way back from the edge. He deserved better than this. He deserved to have more time.”

  With that, Amelia Rourke rose to her feet, plucked a small beaded purse off the table, and then sashayed toward the entrance on what looked to me like dangerously high heels.

  “Look at those Jimmy Choos!” Mel exclaimed in admiration. “I’d kill to have a pair like that. I wonder where she got them.”

  Not wanting to stay for the show, we followed Amelia out to the lobby, where bar customers clustered around the window, watching whatever was happening outside. “What’s going on?” I asked the bartender.

  “Some young punks are out there causing trouble,” he explained. “You should probably wait a little while before you leave. I’ve already called the cops.”

  Mel didn’t say the words “We are cops” aloud. She didn’t have to, because she was already out the door with me two steps behind her. Jack, the bouncer, was fully engaged. He had one hooded kid in an armlock, holding his face pressed against the back of the ticket booth while two more hoodie-wearing thugs whaled away at his back. No weapons were visible, but plenty of fists were flying. It turned out, however, that Mel’s and my assistance was totally unneeded. We arrived on the scene just as Amelia grabbed one of the hoods, pulled that guy out of the melee, and then decked him with a powerful left hook.

  The kid’s eyes rolled back in his head, and he crumpled to the worn terrazzo floor. Worried Amelia might come after him too, the other kid immediately backed off. That’s all they were—three kids hopped up on something and out looking for trouble.

  “Let him go, Jack,” Amelia ordered. “The cops will be here in a couple of minutes. If these guys know what’s good for them, they’ll grab their friend, Mr. Sack of Potatoes there, and make themselves scarce.”

  Which they did, by the way, in a hell of a hurry!

  “You all right, Jack?” Amelia asked.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Thanks for the help.”

  “You’ll tell the cops that they got away?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Will do.”

  “All right then,” Amelia said, snapping her purse shut. “It’s almost showtime. I’d best get back inside.” She nodded in our direction on her way past. “Sorry about that,” she said. “Occasionally things do get a little too exciting around here.”

  “That left hook was something,” I told Mel as we made our way back to the car. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “The brass knuckles helped,” Mel said.

  “What brass knuckles?”

  “The ones Amelia put back in her purse after she KO’d the kid.”

  Brass knuckles? Really? Talk about being put in my place! I had noticed Amelia snapping the purse shut, but I had missed the brass knuckle bit completely. Maybe my much-vaunted situational awareness isn’t all it’s cracked up to be after all.

  CHAPTER 21

  SATURDAY MORNING FELT LIKE WE WERE STARTING TO get the hang of things as far as having a dog in the family was concerned. Mel took Lucy for a walk and another run in Myrtle Edwards Park while I drank coffee and did crossword puzzles. After she showered, we left Lucy at home and walked over to the Five Points to have a late breakfast at the counter.

  “So who’s the powerhouse cop Max was so scared of?” Mel asked, while we waited for our order.

  I had spent much of the night, with Mel slumbering peacefully beside me, pondering that very question.

  “Beats me,” I told her. “I know there were a few bad apples back then. There always are, but the problem is, none of them were connected to the Marcia Kelsey investigation.”

  “Are you going to ask Kramer?”

  Mel had had the distinct misfortune of interacting with Detective Kramer several years earlier, and she didn’t like him any more than I did.

  “Not if I can help it,” I told her.

  Back home after breakfast, Mel resumed her paperwork challenges while I settled down with my phone to do some work of my own.

  On the off chance that the investigation into Max’s death did end up turning into a homicide case, it was time for me to work on establishing alibis for both Erin and her son. I started with the management for her apartment complex. The young man I spoke to was surprisingly accommodating when I asked h
im for copies of the building’s overnight security footage for the previous Saturday night and Sunday morning.

  “Do you just want the parking lot footage for her building, or the interior footage as well?” he wanted to know. His cordial response was jaw-dropping. I had expected him to tell me to a) take a hike, b) talk to the company’s lawyer, or c) show up with a search warrant.

  “Both, please. If you don’t mind.”

  “No problem,” he said agreeably. “Just tell me where to send it. It’s usually boring as hell around here on Saturday mornings. At least this gives me something useful to do.”

  Once I gave him my information, I dialed the number Erin Howard had given me for her son’s cell phone.

  “You’re the guy who’s helping my mom, right?” Christopher Cassidy asked once I finished introducing myself.

  “That’s correct.”

  “Thank you for that. Uncle Max’s death has been really hard on her. I offered to come home and help out—you know, just be there for her—but with all the snow in the pass, she wouldn’t hear of it.”

  “It turns out maybe you can help, even without coming home,” I told him.

  “I can, really? How?”

  “It turns out that your mother is Max’s primary heir. As such, she, and ultimately you, stand to reap substantial financial benefits from his death. As long as everyone accepts the premise that Max’s death was accidental, there’s no problem. However, if this eventually turns into a homicide investigation . . .”

  “We’ll both be suspects,” Christopher concluded.

  “Exactly.”

  “My mother would never do something like that!” he declared vehemently. “Uncle Max was like a father to her. Mom would never hurt him, and neither would I!”

  “I’m sure that’s all true, but we’ll need a way to prove it.”

  “How do we do that?”

  “I’m in the process of obtaining security footage that should confirm that it would have been physically impossible for your mother to have been involved in what happened. Now I need to do the same for you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Where were you on the night Max died?”

  “Here in Pullman.”

  “Can you prove it?”

  “I work in the CUB in the food court,” he said, “at the Subway. I didn’t get off work that night until after we finished cleaning up, a little after ten.”

  I don’t speak fluent Wazoo, but I suspected that the CUB was some kind of student union building on the WSU campus. As for the driving distance from Pullman to Seattle? It is, as one of my AA friends likes to call it, “a fur piece.” In good weather, it’s a five-hour drive for a hot-shoe young driver. Under winter weather driving conditions the trip through Snoqualmie Pass there is usually accumulated snow and ice on the roadway. There’s also the increased possibility of both weather-related accidents and intermittent Department of Transportation traffic closures due to avalanche control. Taking our recent flurry of inclement weather into consideration, that five-hour drive now probably averaged more like eight to ten. No way Christopher Cassidy could have gotten off work at 10 P.M. and ended up in Seattle in time to set fire to Maxwell Cole’s house.

  “Do you happen to have a time sheet showing exactly when you clocked in and out?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And a manager who will verify you were there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good,” I said. “That’s all I needed to know.”

  “What about my mom?” Christopher asked. “Doesn’t she need an alibi, too?”

  “She does, but as I said, I’m reasonably sure she has one, and I’m in the process of verifying it.”

  Christopher heaved a relieved sigh. “Good. I’m glad she has someone to help her with all this.” He paused for a moment before asking a question that surprised me. “Did you really save my mom’s life once?”

  My own pause before answering matched the one that had preceded the question. “Yes,” I said finally, “I did.”

  “What was that all about? She mentioned something about a crazy girl who was trying to kill her. Is that true? And if so, who was she, and why was she after my mom? Could it maybe have something to do with her family? I mean, Mom never talks about any of her relatives. I don’t even know if there are any. Do I have grandparents out there somewhere or maybe some cousins?”

  There was a whole lot I could have told him about those crippling family dynamics, but I didn’t want to. “It’s not my place,” I said. “You’ll need to ask your mom.”

  An incoming-call alert came in. “I’ve got another call, Christopher,” I told him. “But if you think of it, have your manager text me a copy of your time cards from last week.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Will do.”

  I switched over to the other call. “Hey, Beau,” Al Thorne said. “How’s it hanging?” Even if I hadn’t recognized the voice, his customary greeting was unmistakable.

  “Good,” I said. “How about you?”

  “Well, sir,” he said, “it looks like I owe you that sawbuck after all.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We got a hit on the prints off that extension cord just like you said we would.”

  “Great,” I told him. “Who is it?”

  “His name’s Duc Nguyen, a lowlife gangbanger, a full-fledged member of the Local Asian Boys from down in Columbia City.”

  “Are you going to go talk to him?” I asked.

  “Can’t,” Al said. “Nguyen just happens to be dead as a doornail. Turned up as a victim of a hit-and-run down in Pioneer Square just a few hours after Maxwell Cole corked it. Estimated time of death for this guy is approximately five A.M.”

  “If it happened the same day Max died,” I suggested, “that probably means it’s not an accidental hit-and-run, either.”

  “Probably not,” Al agreed.

  “Can you send me a mug shot?”

  “Sure thing,” Al said, “but I don’t know how much good that’s going to do you. Since there’s already an ongoing vehicular homicide investigation, the prints I found are bound to start connecting the dots back to the Cole situation. That’s why I’m calling—to give you a heads-up. I told the crime lab that when I went to the Cole residence with the building inspector, I noticed that some of the electronics seemed to be among the missing and was concerned that looters might have been in and out of the house after we sealed it up. That’s the excuse I used for asking them to run the prints.

  “The prints tell us that one way or the other, Nguyen was in Cole’s house, and now he’s dead, too,” Al continued. “That means the cause of that fire is starting to look more and more suspicious.”

  “Suspicious enough for you to stop labeling the incident as accidental?” I asked.

  “Yup,” Al answered. “That’s it exactly. My next call will be to Homicide to advise them of the change in status and put them on the case.”

  “No doubt my name is bound to come up in the course of one or the other of those investigations.”

  “Or in both,” Al added. “At least that’s how I see it. I’d take it as a huge favor if, when you talk to the detectives, you somehow fail to mention that you were with me at the crime scene yesterday afternoon.”

  “As in withhold evidence?”

  “Maybe just a tiny bit of evidence.”

  “All right then,” I said with a chuckle. “What they don’t know won’t hurt them.”

  “As long as you didn’t touch anything.”

  That was both a statement and a question. “Believe me,” I assured him, “I kept my hands to myself the whole time.”

  “Good-o, then, Beau,” Al said, sounding relieved. “Best for all concerned if nobody talks out of turn.”

  He hung up. I couldn’t help but be grateful that Al was in ABS rather than Homicide. If I’d had to work with him for any length of time, I probably would have been clichéd to death years ago.

  Moments later, my phone di
nged with an arriving text that included both a rap sheet and mug shot for Duc Nguyen, age twenty-three. He was a surly-looking kid who, despite his tender age, already had prior arrests for armed robbery, assault, and . . . wait for it . . . attempted arson. In the first two instances, he’d been given a suspended sentence. In the arson case—a fire at a local smoke shop—he’d done six months in the King County Jail.

  The smoke shop was an establishment in the Rainier Valley that was, as the media likes to say, “known to law enforcement.” In the Seattle Metro area, Rainier Valley is considered to be the Wild West. It’s a location where an assortment of gangs—Asian, black, Samoan, and Hispanic—constantly duke it out, vying for supremacy.

  But what was the connection? Rainier Valley gangbangers seldom venture far outside their designated territories. In that regard, the distance between the hood and Queen Anne Hill was almost infinite. Given Nguyen’s history of arson and the fact that his prints had been found at the crime scene, it was certainly conceivable that he was behind the fire at Maxwell Cole’s home. So had this been arson for hire then? If that was the case, was it possible that whoever had ordered the hit on Max had taken out Nguyen as well? The likelihood that Max’s death had been an accident was growing more remote by the minute.

  It was getting on toward time for me to head down to Seattle PD. With Mel still preoccupied with paperwork, I took Lucy downstairs for another walk. While she was getting busy, I was free to think about my two linked homicides, because, regardless of my lack of jurisdictional authority, that’s how they seemed to be now—mine.

  I had just picked up a steaming pile of dog poop and tied the bag shut when my phone rang with Scott’s name in the caller ID. I managed to drop the bag into the designated container before I answered.

  “Dad?”

  “Hey, Scott,” I said. “How are you feeling? What’s up?”

  “Are you sitting down?”

  I didn’t feel like filling him in on the gory details. “No, I’m actually out for a walk,” I said.

  “You’re not going to believe this, never in a hundred years.”

  He sounded beyond excited. I had a feeling I knew exactly where this was going, but I played dumb. “What?”