More Perfect Union (9780061760228)

by Jance, Judith A.

  There was plenty of stewing to do. Over the years, I’ve been in varying degrees of hot water on occasion, but that’s not unusual among detectives. As a breed we’re the ones who ask the questions, who ferret out information people often don’t want us to have. It’s a world that attracts pragmatists—self-starters with strong streaks of independence.

  I had been reprimanded before, called on the carpet and brought back to heel, but never anything like this. Watty’s words had gutted me, hit all my professional cop buttons, and left me empty, with nothing to say in my own defense because I knew damn good and well he was right. I had been out of line, off the charts.

  Pouring myself a cup of coffee, I took it out on the balcony and stood looking down at the street far below, hoping the sound of morning commuter traffic hurrying down Second Avenue would help lessen the sting of Watty’s departing words, but it didn’t. Nothing could. Because for everything Watty had said, I could add three more burning indictments of my own.

  Of course I should have gone to Manny Davis and Paul Kramer and told them what I had found out, what I suspected. Of course I shouldn’t have driven to Pe Ell to question Linda Decker alone. Going without a backup was stupid. Inexcusable.

  The personality conflict between Kramer and me was like a couple of little boys duking it out on a playground, fighting over who ruled a small square of gravel turf or who got the biggest swing. But I had let that little-boy game overshadow my professional judgment.

  Professional? Who the hell was I to call myself a professional?

  The phone rang, interrupting the self-flagellation. I was sure it was Kramer, and I started rehearsing my apology as I went to pick up the receiver. Instead it was Peters, calling from the hospital.

  “So you made it back all right after all.” He sounded relieved.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I should have called you last night, but it was too late. Sorry.”

  “Don’t worry about that. How are things?”

  “Watty was just here and reamed me out good. I deserved it.”

  “One thing to be thankful for, though. At least the papers didn’t name names this morning. They called you an ‘unidentified off-duty Seattle Police officer.’”

  “So it’s in the paper today?”

  “Front and center.”

  “Great. Did the article say anything about Linda Decker’s brother?”

  “The one who got burned? Only that he’s in the burn unit down here at Harborview. Critical condition. Intensive care. You know what that’s like.”

  “One step away from the Spanish Inquisition.”

  Peters laughed ruefully. “Something like that,” he said. “I assume Watty told you hands off?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” I allowed.

  Peters knew me well enough to sense that what I said was only the tip of the iceberg, but he didn’t press the issue. Instead, he went on to something else. “Has Maxine gotten hold of you to arrange a schedule for Bumbershoot?” he asked.

  I had forgotten all about the outing I had promised Peters’ girls. “No,” I said guiltily. “She hasn’t caught up with me. I’ve been a moving target.”

  “Maxine called here yesterday and said that she heard that kids get in free on Friday. She wondered if it would be possible for you to take them then. She’s got a doctor’s appointment in the early afternoon. Otherwise, she’ll have to locate another sitter.”

  “Tell her that’ll be fine. By tomorrow afternoon, I’m sure time will be hanging heavy on my hands. Tell her to send them up here about eleven. We’ll eat lunch over at Seattle Center.”

  “Okay,” he said, “I’ll let her know.” He paused. “Don’t kick yourself too much, Beau. You never would have done it if I hadn’t been egging you on from the sidelines, remember?”

  “Sure,” I said, and we hung up.

  I know Peters was trying to make me feel better, but it didn’t work. When you’ve been flat on your back in bed for six months, you’re allowed some lapses in judgment. When you’re still supposedly dealing with a full deck, when you’re still walking around upright, carrying a badge and packing a loaded .38, it’s a whole different ball game.

  Ames came out of the bedroom again. He was dressed in a suit and tie, briefcase in hand. He found me sitting in the chair by the telephone, staring off into space. He set the case down on the table for a moment and stood there looking at me.

  “You could always quit, you know,” he said.

  “Quit?”

  “The force. You don’t need to work if you don’t want to.”

  The realization that Watty might fire me had shaken me to my very core, but the idea of quitting had never crossed my mind.

  “It’s what I’ve always done,” I said.

  Ames shrugged. “Maybe that’s reason enough to make a change. Lots of men your age do, you know,” he added quietly. He picked up the briefcase again and started toward the door. “What are you going to do today?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I said. “I’m going to have to think about it.”

  After Ames left, the silence in the room was oppressive. I felt restless, ill at ease. Unbidden, Jimmy Rising came to mind. I remembered how much he had wanted to go to work the day he missed the bus, how proud he had been of the thermos and the lunch pail. Well, he wasn’t going to work now. The micrographics department at the Northwest Center would have to do without him for awhile. Maybe forever. The burn unit at Harborview is good, but they can’t always work miracles.

  I wasn’t conscious of making the decision. Like an old war-horse that doesn’t have sense enough to quit, I got up, put on my holster and my jacket. With my hand on the doorknob I paused. Would going to the hospital to see Jimmy Rising be considered meddling in Paul Kramer’s case?

  No, goddamnit. Sergeant Watkins could fire my ass if he wanted to, but I was going to go to the hospital and pay my respects to Jimmy Rising come hell or high water.

  CHAPTER

  16

  When I got on the elevator at Harborview, force of habit made me push the button to floor four where Peters is instead of nine for the burn unit ICU. A couple of uniformed nurses who were also in the elevator were openly contemptuous when I got off, looked around in confusion, and then got back on before the elevator continued up.

  I’ve been in the burn unit before. I know the routine. Because recovering burn patients are so susceptible to infection, visitors are required to don sterile clothing before entering patients’ rooms. The problem was, whenever I’d gone there before, it was always as a police officer on official business which gave me the secret password for admittance.

  This time, I had no such magic wand. It was easy to tell which was Jimmy Rising’s room. A uniformed officer, crossed arms resting on his chest, was seated on a folding chair outside a closed door just up from the nurses’ station. When I asked about Jimmy Rising, the ward clerk, a scrawny man with an equally scrawny beard, eyeballed me thoroughly up and down. “Are you a member of the family?” he asked.

  “No, just a friend.”

  “Mr. Rising is in no condition to have visitors,” the ward clerk announced firmly. “Family members are allowed in for a few minutes each hour, but that’s all.”

  I stood there flat-footed with no possible argument or comeback. The guard glanced in my direction, and I gave him a halfhearted wave. What the threat of losing my job had failed to accomplish, hospital bureaucracy did without a moment’s hesitation.

  I must have looked crestfallen enough that the ward clerk took pity on me. “If you’d care to leave something for him, I’ll be sure it reaches him,” he offered.

  Nodding my thanks, I made my way back down the short hallway to the main corridor. Leave Jimmy Rising something? What? A note, a card, flowers? Before I knew it, I was standing in front of a gray-haired clerk in the gift shop on the main floor, and I still hadn’t made up my mind.

  “May I help you, sir?” she asked.

  “Some flowers, I guess,” I answered stupidly. />
  She pointed toward a refrigerated display. “What we have available is right there. Is this for an adult? A child?”

  I looked at the display. It was an uninspiring batch of tired flowers in equally tired receptacles—the milk-white, lumpy-glass kind so popular in hospitals, with one or two ceramic teddy bears thrown in for good measure.

  “An adult,” I said.

  “Man or woman? Does this person have any particular preferences?”

  She was trying hard to be helpful. The problem was, I didn’t know anything at all about Jimmy Rising’s preference in flowers. All I knew about him was what I had learned during that brief afternoon interview on his porch and the equally short ride to the Northwest Center in Seattle. I could still see him sitting there on the top step, carefully pouring orange juice into the cup from his thermos.

  And all at once it hit me. I knew exactly what Jimmy Rising needed. It had nothing at all to do with flowers.

  “Never mind,” I told the startled lady behind the counter. “I don’t think he likes flowers.”

  With that, I beat it out the door and headed for the car. Smiling to myself, I made my way down to Jackson Street.

  Welch Fuel and Hardware has been doing business on Jackson for as long as I can remember. I first saw the store years ago when I was a rookie. Back then it was a hole in the wall next to a Safeway store. Gradually the neighborhood changed, transforming into Seattle’s less than malignant version of inner-city squalor. The grocery store had pulled out altogether, but not the hardware store. It had quietly expanded to include both buildings. While the neighborhood around it had slowly deteriorated, the store itself had unobtrusively prospered.

  The displays seemed crowded and jumbled. Just because some item was no longer manufactured didn’t mean it wasn’t still available in some hidden nook or cranny of the store. The clerks, all of them old hands, knew what they had and where to find it. When asked, one of them pointed me to an aisle halfway down the long room. “The lunch pails are over there,” he said. “You’ll find the thermoses there, too.”

  I found what I wanted without any trouble on a crammed shelf bulging with housewares. There was a huge shiny black lunch pail for $10.88 and a stainless-steel thermos for three times that. I took them both off the shelf and went up to the cash register.

  “You do gift-wrapping here?” I asked.

  The clerk gave me an odd look. I don’t know if it was because requests for gift-wrapping are that unusual or because my two black eyes, not black so much as deep purple, made me look like death warmed over.

  “Not here, we don’t,” he said at last.

  With no further comment, he rang up my two purchases and put them in a plain brown paper bag. They were still in the bag a few minutes later when I carried them up to the nurses’ station in the burn unit at Harborview. The same ward clerk was still on duty.

  “I see you found something,” he said.

  “Yes,” I answered. I took the thermos and lunch pail out of the sack and put them on the counter in front of him. He seemed dismayed by my choice. He was expecting flowers. I didn’t bother to explain. “Could I use a paper and pen to write a note?”

  “Sure,” he answered.

  I was just signing my name to a brief note when a woman’s voice interrupted me. “What are you doing here?”

  The voice was all too familiar. I had heard it before. I looked up quickly and almost dropped the pen. Linda Decker was standing right beside me, loosening a surgical mask that covered the lower half of her face. Without the gun she was much smaller than I remembered, but every bit as scary.

  “I brought him something,” I said evenly, unsure how she would react to my presence, much less to what I had brought. I folded the note and stuck it under the latch on the lunch pail. Warily I glanced over at Linda Decker. She wasn’t looking at me. She was staring at the lunch pail, tears welling up in her eyes.

  Without a word, she reached out and stroked the shiny metal handle. It was almost a mirror image of what Jimmy Rising had done that day on the porch. “He may not live to see them,” she managed.

  “It’s that bad?” I asked.

  She nodded. “Less than fifty-fifty.” She started crying in dead earnest then.

  Quickly the ward clerk came around the counter and put a protective arm around her shoulder. “Come on, Mrs. Decker,” he said quietly. “Let’s get you in where you can sit down and rest for a few minutes. You’ve had a long day of it.”

  Worried about who I was and what I was up to, the guard hurried over as well, but Linda waved him away and allowed the ward clerk to lead her down the hall. As he did so, he glared at me over his shoulder as though he believed I was somehow personally responsible. He didn’t order me to leave, however, and I followed them into a small waiting room around the corner. The room was windowless and crowded with furniture, the air thick with the smoke of a thousand despairing cigarettes. Still sobbing, Linda Decker sank onto one of the couches.

  The clerk stepped away from her and saw me at the door. “I think maybe you’d better go,” he said to me. “She needs to sit here and rest. She’s had a rough night.”

  With a shrug, I started to leave. There was no sense in arguing. “No, it’s all right,” Linda Decker mumbled through her tears, as she groped for a tissue. “Let him stay.”

  I don’t know who was more surprised, the ward clerk or J. P. Beaumont. The clerk shook his head dubiously. “All right. If you say so. What about the thermos and lunch pail?”

  “Put them in Jimmy’s room,” Linda Decker said. “Put them somewhere so he’ll be able to see them if he ever gets a chance.”

  The ward clerk gave me one last disparaging look and left. I stood there awkwardly, not knowing what to say or do, while Linda searched for another tissue and blew her nose. There was a coffee pot and a stack of styrofoam cups sitting on a table across the room. The light was on and the coffee smelled as though it had been there for hours.

  “Would you like a cup of coffee?” I offered.

  She nodded. “Please.”

  “Black?”

  She nodded again. I poured two cups and brought them back to where she was sitting on the couch. Her hand shook as she took the cup from me. “Thank you,” she said. The room was stuffy and hot, but she sat there shivering for several moments with both hands wrapped around the cup as though hoping to draw warmth out of the coffee and into her hands. She stared unseeing through a wavering column of steam.

  “I’m sorry about what happened,” she said, her voice almost a whisper. “Someone named Powell was here a little while ago. He said that you’re a good cop, that you wouldn’t be mixed up in anything crooked.”

  Under any other circumstance, a vote of confidence from Captain Larry Powell would have been welcome, but in this instance I was sorry to hear that he too had been dragged into the melee.

  “It’s all right,” I answered. “You don’t need to apologize. If I’d been in your shoes, I probably would have done the same thing.”

  She looked up at me, her face pained. “No, it’s not all right. That was my fault, and so is this. Jimmy went back to get Patches.” She broke off and put one hand over her mouth to stifle an involuntary sob.

  “Patches?” I asked.

  “A dog. A stupid stuffed dog that I gave him years ago. The firemen got him out of the house all right, but he broke away and went back after the dog. He was right in the doorway when the roof came down. He was completely engulfed in flames.”

  “Just because you gave him the dog doesn’t make you responsible.”

  “You don’t understand, do you.” It was an accusation.

  “I guess not.”

  “I used Jimmy as bait!” The last word was a cry of anguish torn from her body, one that left her doubled over and weeping. Unnoticed, the coffee spilled onto the floor beside her. I found a roll of paper towels and began to soak up the mess.

  “Bait?” I asked, when she finally quieted. “What do you mean, bait?”


  “Jimmy can’t lie,” she answered. “I knew if I told him where I was and if anyone asked him, he would tell them. After Logan and Angie, I figured I was next on the killer’s list. And I was ready for him, ready and waiting. But you came instead.”

  I nodded. She closed her eyes and put one hand over them, shaking her head as if to deny the reality of what had happened. “I didn’t think he’d hurt Jimmy and Mom. It never occurred to me.”

  My ears pricked up at the word “he.” Not some nameless, faceless, sexless entity. Not some vague numberless they. But he. One person—a single, identifiable, male, he.

  “Do you know who that person is?” I asked the question gently. I never considered not asking it. I’m a cop. They pay me to ask questions, but I was finally learning that for me asking questions is more than just a job. It’s as necessary as breathing, a cornerstone of existence, and this time I was asking for free.

  Slowly Linda Decker raised her head. Her eyes met mine and she nodded.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Martin Green.”

  I tried to contain my reaction. Martin Green. The ironworker union executive director who was busy creating a “more perfect union.” The same man who lived in my building and who had thrown a temper tantrum because his mother didn’t get to ride home from the airport in the Bentley.

  “Are you sure? Do you have any proof?”

  “The night he was killed, Logan had an appointment with Green to tell him about the tapes. He called and told me so. I begged him not to go. I told him it was too dangerous, that they wouldn’t tolerate someone messing up their little racket.”

  There were the tapes again, the tapes she had mentioned before.

  “What tapes?”

  “The accounting tapes. The ones Angie stole.”

  “Wait a minute. Angie Dixon? The woman who fell off Masters Plaza?” Linda Decker nodded. It was all coming together too fast. So there was a connection between Logan Tyree and Angie Dixon.

  “Angie didn’t fall,” Linda said grimly. “I can’t prove it, but I know she was pushed.”