by J. A. Jance
Once I placed all the calls, I went back to my voice-mail number and changed my answering announcement, deleting all the parts of my recording that revealed anything at all about my name and profession. I wasn’t much looking forward to shepherding Chief Rankin on this little excursion in the first place, and I especially didn’t want the guys we were meeting to know who was attached to that particular Seattle PD extension number.
While I sat waiting for someone to call me back, I started creating a small mountain of reports. Captain Freeman had made it clear that the work Sue Danielson and I were doing for him was in addition to whatever we were doing for the Weston Family Task Force. That meant regular reports would be required in two different directions.
Half an hour passed, then an hour. I was beginning to think I had struck out completely when the phone rang.
“Yes,” I answered.
“You’re on,” said a voice. “Where? When?”
“The back room at the Doghouse,” I said. “Eleven o’clock.”
“Who all’s gonna be there?” the guy asked.
“Chief Rankin and myself,” I answered. “That’s all. Just the two of us. How about you?”
“If there’s two of you, then there’s two of us. We be six altogether.”
“You’re calling for everybody?”
“That’s right, man. RSVPing, as they say. You got a problem with that?”
I just didn’t expect the gangs to be quite that well organized. “No. No problem at all. We’ll be there by ten-thirty or so. That way, we won’t all show up at once. That might make quite a stir.”
“You gots that right. Just us being there will cause a stir as you call it. If somebody notices the chief of police, all those television stations will send out their Minicams, turn it into a media event.”
“I wouldn’t want that to happen,” I said, “and neither would the chief.”
“Not my chiefs, neither,” he answered. “We all play it real cool. Right?”
“Right.” We all do.
The idea of sitting down in the same room with the ad hoc leadership committee of several warring street gangs didn’t sound cool to me. Chilling was a lot more like it. Already I could feel the rank-smelling, fear-drenched sweat gathering in my armpits. I picked up the phone and dialed up to the chief’s—my chief’s—office. He answered before the end of the first ring.
“What is it?”
“An appointment. We go to the Doghouse early, at ten-thirty. The others come later. I’m going to go home, grab a shower, and pick up my car. It’s probably best if we don’t show up in a city-owned vehicle.”
“Yep. You’re right about that.”
“Are you going to go home first, or do you want me to come back here to pick you up?”
“Here,” he said. “I’d rather wait here.”
I got to the house about nine-thirty. I hoped Curtis Bell would be long gone. I was in no mood to talk to him, and I was right.
“You’re home early,” Ralph commented.
“Not to stay. I’m going to shower and leave again. Did you and Curtis get everything ironed out?”
“No. Not really. He left right after you called, but I think we may want to do something about single-premium life policies for your kids. It’s a way of passing them a substantial amount of money without them having to pay inheritance or gift taxes.”
“I thought you said I’d have to pay a rating.”
“Only if we buy insurance on you. If we buy it on your children, then it’s no problem.”
“Right now, I’m going to shower, then I’ve got a hot date.”
“Really.”
“It’s hot all right, a regular Who’s Who of street gangs in Seattle.”
“Sounds fascinating,” Ralph said, sounding for the world like everyone’s favorite Vulcan, good old Mr. Spock from Star Trek.
“Fascinating?” I echoed. “I just hope it won’t be fatal.”
CHAPTER 18
CHIEF RANKIN WAS NOT THE LEAST BIT happy. While I had been busy writing reports and taking a shower, he had been reading tear sheets from newspapers and magazines all over the country regarding the Seattle Police Department’s handling of the Ben Weston murders. To hear him tell it, most of the accounts were written by a bunch of bleeding-heart liberals who laced what they wrote with an undertone of implied bigotry. The assumption was that the (predominantly white) officers of Seattle PD were doing precious little to solve the tragic murders of this now highly visible African-American family.
Rankin’s grousing about the slanted stories surprised me. I know what comes out in newspaper stories usually grates on my nerves—most reporters are a bunch of bleeding-heart liberals—but I always assumed the brass had tougher hides than us mere mortals, that they, as political animals, could take all that media crap with a grain of salt. Evidently not.
Once the chief finished complaining about the media, he went on to look a gift ride in the mouth and gripe about my Porsche. According to Rankin, his personal car is a two-year-old Buick Riviera. Without knowing any of my history, he seemed offended by the very existence of my aging and much repaired guard red Porsche, and I wasn’t inclined to enlighten him. By the time we got to the Doghouse parking lot, I was wishing I’d left him to walk, but that was only the beginning. It got worse.
I opened the front door of the restaurant to let him go first. He stepped inside, then turned back to me. “My God, it’s so smoky in there how can anybody see?”
The Doghouse, smoke and all, is a Seattle institution, but Rankin, as a relatively recent transplant, had clearly never set foot inside the place. Diana, the hostess, came up to me smiling her usual welcome. “Hi, Beau. You’re in the back room tonight?”
I nodded, and she led the way past the usual line of hopefuls waiting to do their bit for the state coffers and buy their weekly collection of lottery tickets.
“There’d better be a nonsmoking section,” Chief Rankin was saying under his breath.
I almost choked, and not because of the smoke either. If you want to sit in a nonsmoking section, don’t bother going to the Doghouse. Period. Because they are mandated by law, there are two designated nonsmoking tables in the middle dining room, but the entire rest of the restaurant is so totally permeated with residual smoke that it doesn’t make much difference.
The back dining room, with seating for a maximum of fifteen, is used primarily as a day-to-day club room for ham radio operators whose faded collection of QSL cards, showing contacts and call signs from around the world, decorates the equally faded walls. Here, too, stale cigarette smoke lingered heavily in the air. On the far side of the room is the only window in the entire restaurant that actually opens. Rankin hurried over and yanked it open, allowing in a whiff of fresh air. Chilly fresh air.
“How many will there be?” Diana asked me.
“Eight altogether.”
She deposited a set of menus on the table and retreated, leaving Chief Rankin and me alone. Moments later Lucille, one of the nighttime waitresses, popped her head into the room. “Chili burger, Beau?” I nodded. “Want me to take your order, or wait for the others?”
“We’ll eat now,” I said. “There may not be time later.”
“How about you?” she said to Chief Rankin, who had picked up a menu and was regarding it with obvious distaste.
“What do you recommend, Detective Beaumont?” he asked. “You must know your way around the menu. You seem to be on a first-name basis with everyone in the place.”
It was bad enough being the chief’s guide dog here to begin with. I wasn’t about to stumble into the trap of suggesting anything. “It’s all about the same,” I told him.
Rankin scratched his head. “I guess I’ll try the salmon,” he said grudgingly, “if it’s not too greasy.”
In the Doghouse, at that hour of the night, them’s fightin’ words. Lucille peered at me over her glasses as if to say, “Where’d you find this live one?” “You bet,” she said aloud, and disa
ppeared.
The back room isn’t big, so Rankin paced back and forth in front of the open window. “Do you think they’ll show?” he asked.
“They’ll be here.”
“I wouldn’t do this in Oakland in a million years,” he continued, “not without a whole squad of sharpshooters to back us up. Coming here by ourselves is irresponsible, crazy. I never should have let Freeman talk me into it.”
Lucille came in to deliver Rankin’s dinner salad. She set the bowl of semi-wilted lettuce on the table. He looked at it but didn’t sit down. “Are there sulfites on that salad?” he asked.
Lucille smiled at him with a benevolent, sixtysomething, peroxide-blonde smile. “Honey, I couldn’t tell you. They only pay me to deliver this food. I never see what goes into it before the cook hands it over.”
I’d never seen Lucille put on her dumb-blonde act before. She’s a savvy lady who can work her way through a racing form in ten minutes flat. Rankin didn’t have sense enough to quit while he was ahead.
“I’d better not eat any then,” he said. “I’m allergic to sulfites.” Lucille swept the offending salad bowl off the table and marched from the room.
Rankin sat now, looking dejectedly at his hands. “I came up here hoping to get away from gangs, you know. My wife doesn’t want me having to work around them. She’d have a fit if she knew I was waiting here in a dive, meeting a bunch of them for dinner, without even any kind of bodyguard.”
“I won’t tell if you don’t,” I assured him.
We sat quietly for a few minutes. It seemed to take forever for the minute hand on my watch to move from one slash mark to the next. Eventually, Lucille reappeared laden with two platters of food. She set the chili burger in front of me and slung the other one onto the table, where it came to rest in front of Chief Rankin. He stared down at it, dismay written on his face.
“This doesn’t look like salmon,” he said.
“It’s ham,” Lucille told him firmly. “We’re out of salmon.”
With that she flounced from the room before a stunned Chief Rankin had a chance to reply. It was all I could do to keep from laughing aloud. Rankin had violated one of the prime unwritten rules of Doghouse behavior—offending a waitress—and Lucille had seen to it that he was suitably punished.
I think he would have gone after her, but just then the door opened again, and our guests sauntered into the room.
I’ve been told all my life that America is a melting pot. The Hispanics may have given rise to the general theme of cool macho dudeness, but urban blacks have elevated it to an art form, and these six dudes were the coolest of the cool.
They came wearing the uniforms and colors—blues, reds, and blacks—of their three diverging armies. They wore leather and gold chains and three-inch Afros with shaved spots over some ears. They stalked into the room, but there was no elbowing, no jabbing or jibing or trading of insults. They filed in silently with all the solemnity of young men attending a funeral. Behind veiled eyelids, they sized each other up, but no one said a word.
Our guests were a disturbing-looking bunch, and the dead silence made it even worse. It got scarier still when the last to arrive peered into the room and then went away, returning with a large leather briefcase, a Hartmann. He set the case on the floor near the door with a resounding thump. The case was big enough to hold a whole arsenal of handguns and other death-dealing weapons. My tie suddenly felt a full inch and a half too tight.
Lucille followed the case into the room, order pad in hand, no-nonsense mask on her face. “Who all’s eating?” she demanded.
One of the six seated himself directly across the table from Rankin. Staring at the chief with undisguised, malevolent hatred, he assumed the role of spokesman. “Depends on who’s payin’,” he said.
Despite his premeeting case of nerves, Chief Rankin seemed to have recovered his equanimity. He met the young man’s gaze. “I am,” he said. “Have whatever you want.”
Lucille turned to the person closest to her. He may or may not have been twenty-one. Unlike Rankin, he had obviously been a guest of the Doghouse on numerous previous occasions. Without needing to consult the menu, he ordered a Bob’s Burger and a beer, but the spokesman squelched the latter.
“No drinkin’,” he rasped, aiming his smoldering gaze on the offending henchman. “No beer. We’re here to take care of business.”
No one spoke while Lucille continued taking orders. At last she left the room. “It might be nice if we started with introductions,” Chief Rankin began. “I’m Chief of Police—”
“No introductions,” the leader interrupted. “We don’t need no introductions. We don’t need no nicey-nice. We’re here to talk business.”
“What kind of business?” Rankin asked.
“Look, I got me a business. I go to work every day. It’s a capitalist business. Sometimes I got merchandise to sell. Sometimes I buy. It’s a free country, and my business is s’posed to make me a profit, but I’m in this squeeze play, man. I’m gettin’ it in the shorts from both ends. I don’t mind payin’ protection. Like I said, it’s a free country. Cops got to make a profit too. What I do mind is gettin’ squeezed even after I pay my protection. That’s not cool, brother. That is not the American way.”
Rankin looked at him in amazement. “You’ve been paying protection money to officers in my department?”
The leader leered back at him. “I sure as hell ain’t been payin’ it to the United Way!”
“Who are they? I want their names!”
“Whoa now, I tell you that, I’m breakin’ my word, and all that money I spent on protection goes down the drain.”
“If you’re not going to name names, why are we here then? What’s the point?”
“The point is, I want to stay in business. Most black folks leave us alone and most white folks do the same. Some of ’em get in our way, and we kill ’em, but most of ’em leave us alone, and that’s cool, man. That’s good for business. Except now, everybody’s thinkin’ we did this murder thing, that we killed Ben Weston and all those little kids.”
He paused and snapped his finger. “Ben Weston? I coulda smoked that mother in a minute, but I didn’t—not him, not his woman, and not those kids, neither.”
For the first time, he looked away from Rankin and stared hard at me. “I give orders. I say shoot to kill. They kill. I say scare the shit out of ’em. The bullet hits the mirror. Understand?”
I understood all right. It was as blatant a confession as I’ve ever been given, yet I knew there wasn’t a damn thing I’d ever be able to do about it. Still, it wasn’t a time to back off.
“Who were you trying to scare?” I asked. “Ben Weston or me?”
“Ben Weston busts my homeys. I been paying One-Time for protection so me and my boys don’t go down, but he’s doin’ it anyways, hidin’ ’em, makin’ ’em forget what they’s s’posed to do. So I’m gonna scare Ben Weston, scare him real good, excepten he’s dead already and my homey’s too damn dumb to figure it out.”
Lucille came into the room and delivered the food, studiously ignoring Chief Rankin. By mutual unspoken agreement, all discussion ceased until she went out, once more closing the door behind her. When she left, Rankin resolutely picked up his knife and began attacking the cold ham steak solidifying on his plate. When no one else spoke, I finally put in my own two cents’ worth.
“You said you were going to help us,” I said quietly. “Do you know who killed Ben Weston?”
My counterpart lifted his hand and the young man nearest the briefcase hefted it onto the table. My heart skipped a beat as I wondered if now was when the guns would come out and the shooting would start, but no one made a move to open it.
“You know a homey named Knuckles Russell?” the speaker asked.
I nodded. “I know him.”
“You see this case here? It’s his, but somebody stole it. Been gone two maybe three months, and Knuckles is all pissed off ’cause it’s from his mother. Then yesterd
ay morning it shows back up at the place where Knuckles use’ to live. Like magic, now you see it now you don’t.”
“He must have brought it back.”
My opponent shook his head. “That motherfucker walks on my turf, I’d smoke him, and he knows it. But it’s his all right. His bag and his shit.” He shoved the case down the tabletop, stopping it when it was directly in front of me.
“Open it, One-Time,” he said to me. “Open it and see for yourself.”
I flipped the latches on the case and lifted the lid. The only thing visible inside was a pair of sweats, red sweats, that had been crammed into it. But there was something else in there as well. It came out and wafted heavily through the room. Homicide cops smell that smell all the time—the sickeningly overpowering odor of rotting dried blood.
In a roomful of menacing Bloods, Crips, and BGD, there are some words you don’t say if you want to leave the room alive. “Blood” is one of those words. Keeping my mouth shut, I closed the lid on the briefcase and looked back at the spokesman, who was regarding me levelly across the table. When I didn’t look away, he picked up his Bob’s Burger and took a huge bite.
“You say the briefcase showed up where Russell used to live. Does that mean he doesn’t live there anymore?”
“That’s right.”
“Where does he live now?”
The leader shrugged. “Who knows? Ask Ben Weston.”
“Ben Weston’s dead,” I pointed out. “Did Knuckles Russell kill him?”
“Knuckles didn’t dis Ben Weston.”
“So who did?”
“That’s your job, One-Time. You find that out, ’cause most folks thinks we did it, and that makes it tough to do business. Understand?”
And then I understood why the gangs had called for a meeting. It all boiled down to public relations. Most of the time they operated with impunity, without direct, active, or vocal opposition from the African-American community at large. The slaughter of Ben Western’s family, with the accompanying media presumption that street gang activity was somehow ultimately responsible, had galvanized the black silent majority into being not nearly so silent.