More Perfect Union (9780061760228)

by Jance, Judith A.

  “He didn’t? How do you know that?”

  “The jumpers end up with their clothes all screwed up. Either they’re torn to shreds or wrapped around their necks, depending on how they hit the water. If they go off one of the high bridges, the Freeway or Aurora, their clothes are usually torn to pieces on impact.”

  Derrick signaled Donna and ordered another round. With the drink in hand, he stared moodily into it, shaking his head. “Jesus. That’s what you call them really, jumpers and floaters?”

  “You got any better ideas?”

  “No.”

  There was another pause when Donna brought our food. For late on a Saturday night, the place was practically deserted except for a few sing-along types gathered around the organ at the far end of the room. Derrick waited until Donna walked away.

  “So what happens next when you find a body like that?”

  “We try to determine how he died and get a positive identification. Then we notify the next of kin.”

  “You have to do that?”

  I nodded.

  “How old do you think he was?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. Thirtyish. Somewhere around there.”

  “And how do you go about finding next of kin?”

  “What’s with all the questions, Derrick? Have you decided you want to be a cop when you grow up?”

  Derrick shook his head. “Nothing like that. I don’t know what it is. I can’t seem to get him out of my mind. It must be awful, having to talk to families like that, having to find them and tell them.”

  “It’s no picnic,” I said. “You’re certainly right about that.”

  The conversation had set me to thinking about the dead man too. I remembered the sunlight glinting off his brass belt buckle. “He was an ironworker,” I remarked offhandedly.

  Derrick looked thunderstruck. “One of those guys who builds tall buildings? The ones who walk out on those high beams? How in the hell did you figure that out—his build maybe?”

  I laughed. “His belt buckle,” I said. “He was wearing one that said ‘Ironworker’ on it.”

  “Oh.” Derrick sounded disappointed, as though he had wanted my answer to be more exotic or complex, something brilliant out of Sherlock Holmes. It occurred to me then that Parker was getting his eyes opened about the reality of being a cop the same way I was learning about the reality of movies and movie stars. The lesson was clear: nobody has life completely sewed up. Not even Derrick Parker.

  There was another lull in the conversation. I was thinking about Paul Kramer and about what an arrogant bastard he was, when Derrick interrupted my train of thought.

  “You must really like it,” he said.

  “Like what?” I asked, puzzled. He had lost me.

  “What you do. I mean, I’ve seen your place, your car. You’re not stuck being a cop because you have to be. You must get a kick out of tracking things down, out of figuring out what really happened.”

  His comment made me laugh out loud. It was the other side of the coin, the same thing Kramer had said only turned around so it was a compliment instead of an insult. I had never given the matter much thought, but Derrick was right.

  “I do like it,” I told him. “When I finally break the code and know who did what to who, when I figure out how all the pieces fit together, I’m on top of the world. Not even a screw-up prosecutor losing the case later in court can take that away from me.”

  Derrick got up abruptly and signaled for the waitress. “I’m paying tonight,” he said.

  Donna brought the check and Derrick Parker paid for both our meals. He left a sizable tip on the table when we walked out. “It’s nice to go someplace and not be hounded for autographs,” he said.

  The cast for Death in Drydock was staying in the Sheraton at Sixth and Pike. I dropped Derrick there and went home to Belltown Terrace. I was alone in the elevator all the way from P-4, the lowest level of the parking garage, to the twenty-fifth floor. Late at night, riding alone in the elevator is like being in a decompression chamber. I could feel the residue of the day’s hassles dropping away from me. By the time I opened the door to my apartment, I was home. And glad to be there.

  The red light on my answering machine showed there had been a number of messages while I was out, but it was after one in the morning, far too late to return any calls, so I didn’t even bother to play them back. Instead, I poured myself a nightcap and settled into my recliner.

  I was as bad as Derrick Parker. My mind was restless. No matter what, it kept coming back to the dead man in the water. The fact that he was none of my business didn’t make any difference. It’s not your case, Beaumont, I tried telling myself. He’s not your problem. But the dead man wouldn’t go away.

  Ironworker. What was it about ironworkers? There was something about ironworkers that had been trying to nose its way into my consciousness ever since Merrilee Jackson had read the word to me off the glinting belt buckle. The thought had been there, poking around the edges of my mind, but with all the hubbub of the afternoon and evening, I hadn’t been able to make any connections.

  Now though, as I sat in the comfortable silence of my living room with the icy glass of MacNaughton’s in my hand, it finally came to me.

  Someone in my building. Someone from the ironworkers’ local across the alley had rented a unit in Belltown Terrace. I knew it because, as one of the members of the real-estate syndicate which owns the building, I am apprised of comings and goings of tenants. I remembered the lady who handles rentals laughing and telling me that the new renter’s vertical commute would be longer than his horizontal one since his office was in the Labor Temple across the alley at First and Broad. I tried to remember what else she had said about him. He was one of the union bigwigs, a business agent or something, not one of the regular working stiffs.

  I felt better then, relieved somehow. It was a bit of information I could pass along to Manny and Kramer. Well, to Manny, anyway. Paul Kramer was a prick. I wasn’t going to lift a finger to help him.

  After two weeks it was good to know that no matter how long my exile in La-La Land might last, I was still a detective at heart. My mind would still work away at solving puzzles, even when it wasn’t supposed to. With that knowledge, my body finally began to unwind.

  I was going to have one more drink, but I never got around to it. I fell asleep in my chair without bothering to get up and pour that last MacNaughton’s.

  And without having anyone there to tell me it was time to wake up and go to bed.

  CHAPTER

  4

  Ron Peters woke me at seven o’clock on Sunday morning. It was a good thing, but not quite good enough. I was supposed to be on the set by six-thirty.

  Peters and I were partners until a car accident broke his back and put him in Harborview Hospital on a semipermanent basis. By then he had been confined there for five long months and had finally worked his way onto the rehabilitation floor. The doctors said there was no way he’d ever be a detective again, but the department had cleared the way so that whenever he was ready to come back to work, on either a full-or part-time basis, a place would be waiting for him in the Public Information Office. Try as I might, I can’t remember to call it Media Relations.

  Despite his injury, things were starting to look up for Ron Peters. He had fallen hard for Amy Fitzgerald, his physical therapist. Fortunately, the feeling was mutual. The two of them were busy planning a late September wedding that would include Peters’ two daughters, Tracie and Heather, as dual flower girls. They were all four counting the days.

  While Ron was hospitalized, I had installed the girls along with their live-in baby-sitter, Mrs. Edwards, in an apartment on the eighteenth floor of my building. It was a lot easier for me to keep and eye on things with them seven floors down than it was to trundle back and forth across ten miles of bottlenecked Lake Washington bridge traffic.

  “What are you up to?” Ron asked cheerfully. He is disgustingly bright-eyed and bushy-tailed early in
the morning.

  “Still asleep,” I muttered. I’m not a rise-and-shiner, never have been, never will be. “What time is it?”

  “Seven,” he answered. “Aren’t you working this morning? I thought they were scheduled to shoot all weekend long.”

  “Shit! You’re right. I’m late.” I struggled to sit up. The foot of the recliner dropped with a resounding thump.

  “This won’t take long,” he said. “I need a favor.”

  “What’s that?”

  I paused long enough to let my head clear, more than half resenting the fact that Peters sounded bright as a new penny. That’s one thing about hospitals that has always puzzled me. If patients in hospitals are supposed to be there to rest and get well, how come nurses wake everybody up at the crack of dawn, feed them, take their temperatures, and then leave them to spend the rest of the day doing nothing? At least they get an early start on it.

  Peters had taken to this regimen like a duck to water. He’s been an early riser for as long as I’ve known him, and once the morning hospital routines were completed, he would invariably give me a call. I was his connection to an outside world of work and family that was otherwise closed to him. His calls were so regular that I had almost quit bothering to set my alarm clock.

  “The girls have been bugging me about Bumbershoot,” he said. “It’s next weekend, you know. They’re dying to go, but Amy’s going to be out of town at a convention, and Mrs. Edwards just can’t hack it by herself. Having the girls in a crowd like that would be too much for her.”

  Bumbershoot is an end-of-summer celebration, a four-day extravaganza that takes place in Seattle over Labor Day weekend. It’s held at Seattle Center, the site of the 1962 World’s Fair. Bumbershoot is like a gigantic medieval fair, complete with food booths, fortune-tellers, street musicians, jugglers, name-brand entertainment, and a crowd of approximately 250,000. I could well believe Mrs. Edwards couldn’t hack going there with two little kids. I wondered if I could.

  Peters continued. “I told the girls the only way they could go was if you’d agree to take them, but that I’d have to check with you first, for them not to get their hopes up.”

  “Sure, I’ll take ’em.” I couldn’t believe I was saying it. Maybe it was guilt about my own kids that made me say yes. I remembered back when Kelly and Scott were little. I had worked event security at Bumbershoot for two of the three days. When I woke up Monday morning and Karen said that she wanted to take the kids and go Bumbershooting, she and I got in a hell of a fight. We ended up not going at all.

  Did I say maybe it was guilt? Of course it was guilt. Who am I trying to kid?

  “Thanks, Beau,” Peters said. “I figured you would.” I didn’t tell him why I was such a pushover.

  “They’ll be thrilled,” he continued. “I was afraid Heather would try to get to you before I had a chance.”

  “Nope,” I said, glancing at the still-flashing light on my answering machine. There were at least five messages waiting to be replayed. “This is the first I’ve heard anything about it.”

  “Good. I’ll tell Mrs. Edwards to get in touch with you to make arrangements.

  “How’s the movie going?” he asked, changing the subject. “Were you anywhere near where they pulled that body out of Lake Union yesterday?”

  I glanced at the clock. I was already late. It didn’t much matter if I got there later still. I took the time to tell Peters some of what had gone on the day before. As soon as I got to the part about the buckle, Peters stopped me short.

  “Hey, wait a minute. Remember that guy whose boat blew up last week out in the middle of Lake Union? I seem to remember the papers saying the owner of the boat was an ironworker. He was missing afterwards. They had divers down and were dragging the lake, but they didn’t find a body.”

  Peters’ more than adequate memory had been honed even sharper by the months of hospital confinement. He would devour newspapers, remembering almost verbatim everything he read. His comment jarred my memory as well. I had heard about the case and the missing body. I had forgotten that the missing victim was an ironworker.

  “I’ll bet you’re right, Peters. I wonder if Davis and Kramer have made the connection?”

  “Kramer?” Peters asked. “Paul Kramer from robbery?”

  Wanting to avoid going into detail about my hassle with Kramer, I had neglected to tell Peters the names of the homicide detectives assigned to the case. It was nobody’s business but my own, one I didn’t care to advertise.

  “That’s him all right,” I said. “What about him?”

  “He’s a first-class son of a bitch,” Peters growled. “When I was still in robbery, he almost caused me to quit the force. What’s he doing working in homicide?”

  Knowing I wasn’t the only one bothered by Paul Kramer made me feel less like the Lone Ranger. “He transferred up just in the last couple of weeks. What’s his problem?”

  Peters paused for a moment. “Paul Kramer wants to be Chief of Police someday, Beau, and he doesn’t give a shit who he has to step on to get there.”

  Suddenly, Detective Kramer’s action made a hell of a lot more sense to me. “Thanks for the info, Peters,” I said. “I’ll bear that in mind.”

  “You want me to call Manny and tell him about that boat?”

  I thought about that for a minute. And I thought about the guy in my building as well, the one who worked for the ironworkers’ local. “No,” I said finally. “I don’t think so. If this Kramer character is so goddamned smart, let him figure it out for himself. If it looks like they’re going to miss it altogether, then we can tell them. For all we know, somebody from Harbor Patrol has probably already passed the word.”

  “Just the same,” Peters said. “I think I’ll call the library and check out that story on the boat. I’d like to know more. For me.”

  I didn’t try to stop him. I was still so delighted to see Peters showing an interest in the world outside the confines of his hospital room that I refused to discourage him in any way. Besides, I wanted to know myself. After all, I’m a detective. I’ve been one of those a helluva lot longer than I’ve been a technical advisor.

  When I hung up the phone, I played back the messages on my machine. There was one message from Peters asking me to call him back, and four from Heather asking if I would please, please, please, please take them to Bumbershoot. The brat. She knows she has me wrapped around her little finger. I erased the messages and decided not to tell Peters that Heather had done her best to beat him to the punch.

  I went slinking onto the set a little after eight. I thought I could sneak in unobtrusively. No way. Cassie Young caught sight of me and lit into me before I was within ten feet of her.

  “Where the hell did you and Derrick go last night? He’s late this morning, too. We’re waiting to film the last fight sequence, the one between Derrick and the banker, and he shows up looking like something the cat dragged in.”

  “I didn’t do it,” I said. “I’m innocent. Parker was in perfectly good shape when I dropped him off at the Sheraton last night.”

  She glared at me and sniffed. “As if you’d know good shape when you saw it.” With that, Cassie Young turned on her heel and marched away. Woody Carroll eased up behind me. He was holding a styrofoam cup of steaming coffee.

  “She’s not having a very good day,” he said. Woody Carroll had truly mastered the fine art of understatement.

  I glanced enviously at his cup. “Where’d you get that?” I asked.

  He nodded toward a table near the stairs leading up to the locker room. “They’ve got coffee and doughnuts over there. You look like you could use some.”

  “Thanks,” I said, but I was getting tired of all the editorial comment, of everyone implying that I looked like I’d been run over by a truck. I did look like it, actually, but it had far more to do with working an eighteen-hour day than it did with anything I’d done after Goldfarb had finally closed up shop.

  Woody followed me to the table
where I helped myself to two fat doughnuts and a cup of thick, black coffee. “Is she always like that?” he asked.

  “Who?” I returned.

  “That woman—what’s her name?”

  “You mean Cassie Young?”

  Woody nodded.

  “As far as I can tell,” I told him. “I’ve known her exactly two weeks, and she’s been on a rampage the whole time.”

  “That reminds me,” Woody said. “Speaking of unreasonable people. Yesterday, when all those reporters were here, one of them wanted to talk to you. Insisted on it. Said he knew you, that you and he were old friends.”

  “Let me guess. His name was Maxwell Cole.”

  “So you do know him. I’ve read his column in the paper a couple of times. I guess I should have let him come to talk to you. I thought he was just giving me the business.”

  “He was. Max and I are old acquaintances. Fraternity brothers, not old friends. He was giving you that line so you’d let him on the set.”

  “You don’t mind that I didn’t let him through?” Woody asked, still unsure of my reaction.

  “Not at all.”

  “He said he wanted you to introduce him to some of the movie people so he could do a story about a real murder showing up at the same time they’re filming a fake one.”

  “If Maxwell Cole wants to be introduced to Cassie Young or Sam ‘The Movie Man’ Goldfarb, he’ll have to get somebody else to do the honors.”

  Woody looked at me closely. “You don’t like Cole much, do you.”

  “You could say that,” I replied.

  I couldn’t believe that worthless asshole Cole would try to pass himself off as a bosom buddy of mine, but then, after all these years, nothing Max does should surprise me. Once an asshole, always an asshole.

  The film crew had moved away from the wingwall area to another part of the drydock. They were out on a long, narrow wharf where a series of moored houseboats would provide the basis for a crashing climax in which Derrick Parker was supposed to track down the crooked banker, the real-estate developer’s killer.