Without Due Process

by J. A. Jance

  “The night of the murders, someone got into Ben Weston’s directory. Whoever it was went through all his files. My guess is that the critical one, the one no one wanted us to see, is missing.”

  “The floppy’s gone too?”

  For the first time in the entire meeting, Kyle Lehman was on his toes, both interested and irate. “You’re saying that somebody broke into one of my secured computers? I’ll break the SOB’s neck. How’d he get the password? How’d he get verified?”

  Freeman smiled. “I thought you’d be interested in knowing about this. We are too. How long will it take?”

  Lehman looked at his watch. “I don’t know, but I’ll get started right away. Which one do you want done first, the car analysis or the missing files?”

  “The files.”

  “Good. I would have done that first anyway.”

  Without waiting for Freeman to call a halt, Kyle Lehman careened out of the room. The senseless slaughter of five people didn’t bother him one bit, and the fact that Seattle PD was infected with crooked cops had made no visible effect either, but the idea that someone had broken into his precious computer system lit a fire under Kyle Lehman’s scrawny butt.

  Freeman turned to Captain Powell. “Larry, I want you to run interference for Beaumont and Danielson, and I want you to help me sort the misinformation we’ll be feeding to the task force. Detective Danielson, you’re to check with Kramer, visit the Crime Lab, the M.E.’s office, and anywhere you can think of. Your assignment is to gather up any new information that may have come in during the course of the day. I want the information regathered by you rather than taking whatever Kramer has at face value. What’s going into the Weston Family Task Force may very well have been tainted somewhere along the way. See what I mean?”

  Sue nodded, and Freeman turned to me. “As for you, now that you’ve delivered Detective Lindstrom, I need you to do something else. You’re the one who hangs around the Doghouse Restaurant so much of the time, aren’t you?”

  My reputation for having that particular home away from home has long been cause for departmental teasing. The Doghouse is a downtown Seattle twenty-four-hour hangout with a reputation for deep-fried everything and a flock of old-fashioned waitresses who would most likely deck anyone who had balls enough to try calling one of them a waitperson.

  In the middle of the night the Doghouse attracts late-night carousers of all varieties, as well as a fair selection of the city’s good guys and bad guys who tend to congregate there. Inside those four walls, everybody knows who’s who, and, believe me, they all mind their manners. The Doghouse is neutral territory, and the rules are simple. Inside, good guys don’t bother bad guys and vice versa, and nobody but nobody hassles the waitresses.

  “What about it?”

  “Don’t they have a funny little back room down there? A relatively private room?”

  “Yes. The back room, where ham radio operators meet occasionally and every once in a while a group of cartoonists.”

  “Good. I want you to set up the summit meeting there for Chief Rankin and the official emissaries from each of the gangs. I want to know what those creeps have to say, and I want to know tonight.”

  “Tonight? How the hell…”

  “I’m sure you’ll be able to manage it. As soon as you get it set up, let the chief here know what time. He’ll be up in his office, waiting for your call.”

  Captain Freeman peered around the room. “Everybody have a handle on their task assignments?”

  “I’ve got a question,” Chief Rankin put in. “I’ve got police departments from all over the state calling to say they’re sending official representatives to the funeral on Saturday. What do I do about them?”

  “Nothing. Let them come,” Freeman replied.

  “What if Weston was one of the bad apples—”

  “Then we find it out after the funeral and not before,” Freeman interrupted. “Because if Ben Weston gets anything other than a hero’s burial, we’ve blown our own cover. Any other questions?”

  There were none. With general nods of agreement, people took the hint. Rankin and Powell left together, followed by Sue and myself. Before I made it through the doorway, though, Freeman called me back.

  “You were raised in Ballard, weren’t you, Detective Beaumont?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not too many Jewish people in Ballard, would you say?”

  “Hardly any.”

  Tony Freeman got up and came around his desk. He stopped only a step or two away from me. “How much do you know about Jews?” he asked.

  “Not much. I’ve met a few over the years, but…”

  “Detective Beaumont, the Jewish religion passes from mother to child. I may not look Jewish to you, but I am because my mother is. Do you have any idea what the word ‘schmuck’ means?”

  “No-good jerk, I guess. Why?” I couldn’t figure out what he was driving at.

  “Not in Yiddish,” Captain Freeman said without a trace of a smile. “In Yiddish it means something else entirely, ‘penis’ to be exact. My mother is a gentle woman, Detective Beaumont. I only remember her hitting me once, and that was when, as a smart-mouthed twelve-year-old, I used the word ‘schmuck’ at the dinner table. I would appreciate it if you didn’t use that word in my presence. I find it offensive. Thanks.”

  With that, he ushered me out the door and closed it behind me. Sue Danielson was waiting for me by the elevator. I was blushing beet red and hoping she wouldn’t notice.

  “What was that all about?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “I could be wrong,” I said, “but I think I’ve just had my ass chewed.”

  CHAPTER 17

  WHEN I GOT BACK DOWN TO THE FIFTH floor, I picked up my phone and heard the stuttering dial tone that meant I had voice-mail messages. Two of the three calls were from Ralph Ames. As he was my houseguest, it seemed to me I owed him some kind of explanation, at least enough to let him know that duty called and that work had overtaken my responsibilities as host. I figured he was a big boy, fully capable of rustling up some suitable evening’s pastime including some suitable evening’s companionship as well. As far as I could tell, he was doing fine on the companionship score without any help from me.

  I dialed home, wondering if the phone would work this time or not. Ralph answered after the second ring.

  “Don’t wait up for me,” I told him. “Things are heating up around here. It looks like it’s going to be another long one again tonight.”

  “Too bad. Curtis Bell is here right now. We finally managed to touch bases late this afternoon. I told him to come on over, that you’d be home eventually. He was hoping to see you. In the meantime he’s been giving me some preliminary figures. I’m finding them quite interesting.”

  Captain Freeman’s painful vocabulary lesson was still ringing in my ears, so I didn’t call Curtis Bell what I might have called him a mere half hour earlier.

  “Look,” I said, “I’m up to my eyeteeth in a case right now. How come he has so much free time when nobody else does? Anyway, I don’t have time to see that pushy bastard, and I wish he’d lay off.”

  Ralph Ames laughed. “Give him a break, Beau. He’s a salesman, working on commission. What do you expect?”

  “Maybe if he’d bust his butt down at the department more, he wouldn’t need to moonlight. Not only that, I more than halfway expected him to make the appointment at a time when we could both see him.”

  I probably sounded almost as disagreeable as I felt, but as the alleged owner of the money that was about to get spent, it didn’t seem like asking too much that I be consulted right along with Ralph Ames. And since I was already in a complaining mode, I moved right along to the telephone situation.

  “By the way, Ralph, what’s all this about a fax machine on my phone? I tried calling home earlier today and couldn’t get through. The operator said I must have left my fax hooked up to the phone. Have I missed something, or do I own a fax machine?”

&nbs
p; Ralph laughed. “Actually, you do,” he said, “I bought it for you the other day as a surprise, a sort of bread-and-butter gift, and had the woman who sold it to me come and install it yesterday at noon. I was afraid you’d show up and catch us in the act. I’ll bet you still haven’t had time to go into the study to see it, have you? It’s a real beaut, Beau.”

  “But why do I need a fax, Ralph?” I countered.

  “Once you get used to having it, you won’t know how you got along without it. I used it today to get some background information on Curtis Bell’s company. He seemed to be quite impressed.”

  A fax installer? That’s who Ralph had escorted into the apartment when I thought he was bringing home a noontime something else? If so, when had he had time to pick up the lady who loved Bentleys, and how did she fit into the picture?

  “You never fail to surprise me, Ralph, and that’s the truth. Get what you need from Curtis. We’ll talk insurance later. And by the way, thanks for the fax. I think.”

  He was still laughing when I hung up. The other call was from my favorite criminalist, Janice Morraine. She had left two numbers, both in the Crime Lab and one at home as well. The Crime Lab said she had gone home for the day, so I tried reaching her there.

  “Beaumont here, Janice,” I said when she answered. “What’s up?”

  “I wondered if you’d had a chance to see my analysis of the hair you found. I gave it to Detective Kramer late this afternoon. Since you and Big Al were the ones who discovered the hair in the first place, I thought you might be interested in seeing the results.”

  “I haven’t seen them yet,” I told her. “I’ve been tied up in meetings until just a few minutes ago. If Detective Kramer’s been trying to find me to hand over a report, he hasn’t had any luck.”

  Of course, there wasn’t much likelihood of Kramer looking for me for any reason other than to tell me to drop dead. I figured hell would freeze over completely before he would voluntarily pass along any information at all, but I couldn’t very well say that to Janice Morraine.

  “It looks as though he’s gone home, so why not tell me about it yourself?”

  “It’s a plant,” she answered at once.

  “A plant?” I repeated dubiously. “It sure as hell looked like hair to me.”

  “Don’t joke around, Beau. This is important. The hair you found stuck between Shiree Weston’s fingers was placed there on purpose after she was dead. I’ve checked it out. The hairs don’t all match. My assessment is that the hair was taken from somebody’s brush, a brush several different people had used. Black hair,” she added, “as in race, not color. All of it. It could match up with hair from the family members themselves. I’ll be checking on that tomorrow, but I doubt it.”

  I was barely listening to her. Instead, I was remembering how Junior Weston had described the man he had seen struggling with his sister. He had said that the man was a white man with skin tones very much like my own, that Bonnie Weston’s killer was a white man wearing gloves.

  “That means whoever did it meant for us to go looking for a black perpetrator, doesn’t it?”

  “Right,” Janice replied, “and with feelings in the city running so high, I didn’t want to risk not letting you know about this.”

  “That’s what they were counting on,” I mused, “that everyone in Homicide would be so strung out that we wouldn’t pay close enough attention, that we’d go after any kind of slipshod evidence just to make an arrest.”

  “Wrong!” Janice Morraine returned. Her single-word vehemence made me laugh.

  “Right,” I said.

  Whoever the killers were, they hadn’t taken the likes of Janice Morraine and Tony Freeman into consideration. Or me either, for that matter.

  “Anything else interesting come up on your end?” I asked.

  “Not really. I spent the whole afternoon working on the hair problem. Once I finish checking the Weston samples, I’ll probably be doing something else tomorrow.”

  “Same case, though?” I asked.

  “Are you kidding? Word filtered down from George Yamamoto. For right now, the Weston case is the only game in town. Everything else takes a backseat.”

  “You’ll keep me posted?”

  “What do you think?” she replied.

  That’s what’s nice about having a working history with someone. Janice Morraine’s and my relationship, rocky though it may be at times, goes well beyond the official guidelines people like Kramer would like to impose. In fact, that was probably precisely why she had called me in the first place.

  “Thanks, Janice. I appreciate it.”

  “No prob,” Janice said. “If anything important comes up, I’ll be in touch.”

  I put down the phone. A plant, I thought. The kinds of people who blow one another away over a line of heroin or a lump of crack cocaine don’t usually bother leaving behind a trail of manufactured evidence. Most of the time, people routinely involved in those kinds of crimes are already so well versed in the criminal injustice system, they could probably give the state bar exam a run for its money.

  Habitual criminals know full well, from vast personal experience, that it doesn’t take much effort or even a particularly good lawyer to beat almost any rap we cops may manage to lay on them. Why bother with leaving behind a trail of phony evidence when a well-placed plea bargain makes that whole charade unnecessary?

  As far as I was concerned, in the case of the Weston family murders, planted evidence turned the process into a whole new ball game. If we had renegade cops, including at least one white one, they were going to great lengths to point suspicion at black suspects, and parts of the task force investigation were probably exploring those very possibilities. If the street gangs all knew that none of their people were responsible, no wonder they were in an uproar and wanted a summit meeting with Chief Rankin. Their turf was being invaded, their supremacy challenged.

  I sat staring at my telephone and wondered how to go about setting up that meeting. The gang unit probably could have given me a hint—maybe even a phone number or two—but Captain Freeman had issued strict orders not to involve any other personnel without his advance approval. Chances are, my friendly neighborhood gangs had their own voice-mail arrangements and probably even fax machines, but I couldn’t reach out and touch them since I didn’t happen to know their numbers.

  After several minutes of wishing I had a Ma Bell phone directory for crooks, I realized that maybe I did. Or at least, I had a friend who did. That very afternoon I had held in my hand Ron Peters’s hard-copy pages of Ben Weston’s preliminary gang member data base. I considered going to see Kyle and asking him for a look at Ben Weston’s most recent data base, but I reconsidered. Why bother him and take him away from what he was doing for Tony Freeman when Ron Peters could probably give me exactly what I needed?

  As soon as the thought crossed my mind, I called Ron at home. Heather answered. “Hello, Uncle Beau,” she said, sounding very grown-up and businesslike. I missed the gap-toothed, lisping way she used to say “Unca Beau” before her newly sprouted permanent teeth came in. “Just a minute,” she said. “I’ll get my dad.”

  Ron Peters came on the phone a moment later. “Hey, Beau, I was looking all over for you this afternoon but Margie said you never came back after lunch. Amy came up with a great idea.”

  “What’s that?”

  “She did her preliminary physical therapist work over at Central Washington University in Ellensburg. One of her girlfriends married a guy who’s the assistant registrar at the university there. We thought we’d take a run over to Ellensburg either tonight or early tomorrow morning, talk to them, and see what we can find out. We should be back in plenty of time to make Ben’s funeral at two. What do you think of that?”

  “Don’t ask me,” I told him, trying to keep the enthusiasm out of my voice, obeying the letter of Tony Freeman’s law but not the intent. “What I don’t know can’t hurt me, can it?”

  Ron laughed. “Gotcha,” he said
. “Mum’s the word, but if we could locate even just one of those missing kids, I’d feel like I was doing something real again and not just marking time. So why did you call, Beau? What’s up?”

  “Do you still have that copy of Ben Weston’s project?”

  “I sure do. I own it. He gave it to me months ago. Why?”

  “Does it have names, addresses, and telephone numbers on it by any chance?”

  “I think so. Hang on. I have it right here with me.” The sound of rustling papers came through the phone. “Some of them do. Not all, but some. What do you need?”

  “Phone numbers.”

  “Phone numbers?” Ron echoed. “Why the hell do you need gang members’ phone numbers, Beau? You planning on selling these guys tickets to the Bacon Bowl maybe?”

  The Bacon Bowl is a once-a-year, old-timers’ football game, a fund-raising rivalry played between teams of police officers from the Seattle and Tacoma areas who are really frustrated, over-the-hill jocks. I’ve got brains enough not to play football anymore, but I’m reasonably good at selling tickets.

  “Not likely,” I replied, “but I need those phone numbers all the same. I’d like even representation of Crips, Bloods, and BGD, as many numbers of each as you can give me.”

  “You don’t want much, do you. Why not try Directory Assistance?”

  “Why not give me a hard time?” I returned. “Just read me the damn numbers, would you?”

  In the end, I wound up with a list of fourteen names and telephone numbers—five Bloods, five Crips, and four BGD. I wasted no time working my way through the list and calling them all. Naturally, several of the numbers were no longer in service. Two people who answered sounded genuinely mystified and said the telephone number had only been assigned to them in the course of the last few months. Some of the others, however, seemed to know all too well what was going on.

  Each time someone answered, innocent-sounding or not, I left the same message: “Your top guy wants a meeting with our top guy,” I told them. “Have someone call this number to set it up. We want to schedule the meeting as soon as we can, tonight if possible.”