Breach of Duty (9780061739637)

by Jance, Judith A.

  Let it go, Beaumont, I told myself. MYOB.

  nine

  Even though I had long since stopped paying attention to him, Max was still at my side and still yakking away, too drunk to notice that he was mostly talking to himself.

  “Hey, Maxi, old sport,” I told him, interrupting his sodden monologue. “What say we call it a night. Let me call you a cab.”

  That brought him up straight. “Like hell!” he snorted. “I don’t need a goddamned cab! Whaddya think I am, drunk or something? I’m totally capable of driving myself home.”

  And wrapping yourself around a dozen telephone poles in the process, I thought. Faced with his angry reaction, I knew there was no sense arguing. Instead, I led him outside into the cool night air. “If a cab doesn’t suit you, how about a ride home in a nice Porsche 928?”

  He stopped and stood swaying, eyeing me crookedly. The movement of the planet must have been too much for him. As he dipped to one side, I caught hold of one arm to keep him from pitching off the sidewalk into the street. “Which one?” he asked. “That cute little red Porsche ol’ what’s-her-name gave you?”

  I nodded. “It’s not exactly the same one Anne Corley gave me. It’s a replacement, but yes, it’s close enough.”

  “How about letting me drive it my own self?”

  “Sorry, Max,” I said, opening the passenger door and pouring him inside. “Not tonight. Maybe some other time.”

  As I drove Max to his house on top of Queen Anne Hill, I realized that something I had said earlier really was true. I was working my own program—the eighth step. That’s the one that involves making a list of the people I had harmed and making amends to them all. Maxwell Cole was one of those people. I’d pulled several stunts on him through the years, the most flagrant of which had been stealing Karen Moffitt right out from under his nose. Giving him a ride home obviously wouldn’t make up for that, but it was a start, a step in the right direction.

  Max lives on Bigelow Avenue, a winding street lined with lushly leafed chestnut trees. I stopped in front of his place and then left the 928 idling while I went around to the passenger’s side to help him out. As I led him up onto the front porch of the Tudor-style house that had once belonged to his parents, Max fell into a fit of maudlin weeping. “I really appreciate this, J.P.,” he croaked. “I just don’t know how to thank you.”

  Within minutes he had drifted from one extreme to the other, from being pissed about being offered a ride home to being absurdly grateful. Mood swings go with the territory.

  “It’s all right,” I told him. “I did it for me as much as I did it for you. What’s your phone number, Max?”

  “Why?” he asked, after he gave it to me.

  “Do you have a machine?”

  “Sure. Why do you need to know that?”

  “Never mind,” I told him.

  I watched him fumble a set of keys out of his pockets and then I waited through his interminable struggle of putting the key in the lock. Once the door finally opened, he stumbled inside. Once again, it took several tries before he managed to relock the dead bolt from the far side of the door. Only when I heard the lock hit home did I turn and walk away.

  Back in the car, I picked up my cell phone and dialed the number Max had given me. He had turned on the lights in a room which, due to the frosted windows, I assumed to be a bathroom. I wasn’t surprised, then, when no one answered and his voice mail switched on.

  “This is Maxwell Cole. I can’t come to the phone right now. Please leave a message…”

  “Max,” I said. “This is J. P. Beaumont. In case you can’t find your car this morning, you might try checking the parking lot at the Hurricane Cafe.”

  That was all I said. When Max sobered up in the morning, I doubted he would remember where he had left his ugly orange Volvo. I know how those kinds of things can sneak up on you. After all, it happened to me once or twice, too. Maybe even more than once or twice, but then who’s counting?

  On the way back down Queen Anne, I tried calling Sue’s home number. She had told me to call when I finished up. If I reached her on my way home, calling at eleven was marginally better than eleven-fifteen. Because her son Jared seems to spend most of his waking hours with a phone glued to his ear, I was accustomed to having to dodge my way through the teenage phone screen. As soon as Sue’s voice mail switched on, I gave up and dialed her pager instead.

  She called me back before I even hit the bottom of the hill. “Doesn’t your son know there’s school tomorrow and he ought to be in bed?”

  “Jared is in bed,” she told me.

  “Oh,” I said. “When the voice mail came on, I thought…”

  “It was me,” she said. “After three screaming phone calls from Richie, I finally took the phone off the hook and left it there.”

  I heard the ragged catch in her voice as she finished the sentence. Now that I was paying attention, I noticed she sounded stuffy. Either she was dealing with a terrible allergy attack or she’d been crying.

  “Sue,” I said. “Are you all right?”

  She took a deep breath. “I’m fine,” she said. “It’s been a hell of a night, that’s all.”

  I had planned to call her and bring her up to speed, but her voice sounded so bleak that I wondered if a phone call was enough. “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Cleaning house like a madwoman.” She laughed without humor. “That’s what my mother used to do whenever she and Dad had an argument—she’d clean the place like there was no tomorrow. I just figured out that I’m doing the same thing, but at least when Richie gets here the damned house will be spotless. What about you?”

  “I just finished paying a late-night visit to the Hurricane Cafe,” I told her. “Ran into some friends of yours, Don Atkins and Barry Newsome. If you’re not on your way to bed in the next couple of minutes, maybe I could stop by and tell you what went on. That way I won’t be in danger of being called a Lone Ranger tomorrow morning.”

  “Sure,” she said. “Come on by. There’s not much sense in going to bed. I’ve been so upset all evening that I wouldn’t be able to sleep anyway.”

  “Well, since you’re not planning on sleeping, let me add one little bit of bad news. When I got down to the department tonight, after you called, Captain Powell’s temporary replacement was moving into the Fishbowl. His initials are P.K.”

  For a moment there was nothing on the air but stunned silence. “You’re kidding! Not Kramer.”

  “I wish I were kidding, but I’m not.”

  “What the hell is the brass thinking?” she demanded. “How dare they put that officious jackass in charge even for a day.”

  “I’m sure it was easy. We can talk more when I get there, but we’re probably better off discussing it in private rather than on the fifth floor with a dozen little ears to hear.”

  In the preceding year or so, both Sue and I had been granted the dubious honor of working with Detective Paul Kramer on a one-to-one basis. Together she and I were privy to more about the man than almost anyone else in Homicide.

  When I arrived at Sue’s house in the Fremont neighborhood a few minutes later, she was sitting on the front porch. “Where’s the vacuum cleaner?” I asked. “I thought you’d still be at it.”

  “I shut it off,” she said. “Now I’m too mad to vacuum. What’s the matter with those people? Kramer’s not even a good detective. How could they possibly promote him?”

  “He’s a number cruncher,” I explained, sitting down beside her. “And this is the golden era of number crunchers. All we’ll have to do to keep Kramer happy and off our backs is to show him cases that get cleared in a timely fashion.”

  “Cleared and timely and holding up in court aren’t necessarily one and the same,” Sue responded.

  “Right,” I said. “But he’s going to be looking for percentages. By the time those half-assed cases fall out in court, he’ll be long gone. Guys like Kramer are always angling for the next promotion long before they g
et settled into the desk on their current one.”

  “Still,” Sue said. “If anyone was going to be promoted, I think it should have been you.”

  Her vote of confidence, while gratifying, made me laugh aloud. She looked up at me, her face serious and frowning in the glow of a corner streetlight. “What’s so funny about that?” she asked.

  “My grandmother’s of the same opinion you are,” I told her. “Grandma would like to see me promoted, too. Only she’d like me to skip the captain and major ranks altogether and go directly to chief. Believe me, I know my limitations. It wouldn’t be a good fit.”

  “But doesn’t it bother you to be skipped over?” she asked.

  I thought about it. “Some,” I admitted at last. “It’s not the first time I’ve helped train a fast-tracker who ended up being my superior officer. If I really wanted a promotion, I’d have gone after one, but I think I’m far better suited to being a mentor than I am a boss. Besides, who knows what’ll happen when Kramer moves up or out? Maybe it’ll be your turn then.”

  “Mine?” Sue asked.

  “Sure,” I said. “You’re a good detective. It won’t be long before you’re promotable yourself. Kramer notwithstanding, the brass doesn’t always pick jackasses. When you turn captain on me, somebody else will shake his head and say, ‘Poor old Detective Beaumont. He taught her everything he knew, and now she’s ordering him around.’”

  For the first time a ghost of a smile appeared in the corners of Sue Danielson’s lips. She seemed genuinely surprised by my praise—surprised and pleased. “Do you really mean that?”

  “You bet I do,” I assured her. “Now, tell me about Richie and the kids. What’s going on?”

  The smile disappeared and she sighed. “I spent half the night fighting with the kids and the other half screaming at Richie on the phone.”

  I tried to imagine Sue screaming at anyone. I had worked with her for months, long enough to appreciate the fact that she seldom raised her voice.

  “I take it he took exception to your laying down the law about spring break?”

  She nodded. “The last thing he said to me was ‘I’ll see you in hell first.’ That’s when I took the phone off the hook and left it off.”

  A cold chill that had nothing to do with the weather passed over my body. “That sounds like a threat,” I said.

  Sue nodded. “He thinks he can still boss me around, but it isn’t going to happen.”

  For almost a minute we sat on the steps, thinking and not speaking. The threat of bodily harm may have come over a telephone handset and in Richie Danielson’s voice, but it sounded a distinct warning bell. I wondered if the real origin of that threat didn’t lie somewhere else—in the set of bones Sue had lugged back from Bellevue and delivered to the ME’s office. Darla Cunningham had claimed that whatever happened wouldn’t necessarily seem to be related. It struck me now that David Half Moon had somehow drafted Sue’s ex-husband, Richie, to be the bearer of the shaman’s bad tidings. Those thoughts all crossed my mind, but they sounded so kooky, that I wasn’t sure how to go about saying them.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t see him at all,” I suggested. “Sounds to me as though it might be better if you and the boys weren’t even here when he shows up.”

  “I’m not running away,” Sue said determinedly.

  “Not again. Richie Danielson may have chased me out of one house, but he isn’t driving me out of this one. And I’m not going to let him get away with playing uproar, either. That’s what this whole trip was designed to do—throw our lives into turmoil.”

  “How did the kids take the news?” I asked.

  “Not at all the way I expected,” she said. “I explained to them what the two school principals said when I talked to them—that since these wouldn’t be excused absences, they wouldn’t be allowed to make up the work. I thought Jared would give me the most grief, but it turned out to be Chris. He was heartbroken. He finally cried himself to sleep about an homage.”

  Sighing again, she stood up and rubbed her arms. “Now that I’m not working, it’s chilly out here. Come on inside. I’ll brew us up a cup of tea.”

  I followed her into her little rented house. The vacuum cleaner and a basket stocked with cleaning supplies sat in the middle of a seemingly spotless living room. In the kitchen the refrigerator door was covered with a dozen handmade paper Easter eggs. I sat down at the small, cloth-covered kitchen table while Sue set a copper-bottomed teakettle on a burner.

  “So tell me,” she said, changing the subject. “Who was the woman who came to the department to see us tonight? What was her name again?”

  “Cunningham,” I supplied. “Darla Cunningham.”

  “What did she want and why was it so urgent?”

  Good luck, I told myself before launching off into it. Either she’ll believe me or she won’t.

  “What do you know about Native Americans?” I asked.

  “Not much,” she admitted, lighting a cigarette. “I’ve eaten fry bread at the Puyallup fair. And I took an alternative U.S. history course. Naturally, I was properly appalled. The whites screwed the Indians six ways to Sunday.”

  “Did that course you took happen to mention anything about medicine men or shamans?”

  “Are you kidding? It was a history course, all battles and broken peace treaties. Why?”

  In the next few minutes, I gave Sue a brief outline of what Darla had told me including the spooky dreams that had led Henry Leaping Deer to investigate whether or not his boyhood chum was still alive and how another dream, one of children playing with David Half Moon’s bones and skull, had led Darla to make a connection with the Seward Park role-players.

  “That’s so weird,” Sue said. “Not to mention tenuous. Yes, it’s true Jimmy Greenjeans has green hair, but how could this Darla put what her father had said together with that single tiny blurb in the paper? How does that work?”

  “I don’t know how,” I agreed. “It would be real handy if people working Homicide had those kinds of skills. I suppose, though, that it’s the same kind of chance occurrence that makes a routine traffic stop lead to the arrest of a serial killer. The point is, the ME’s office says the bones really are Native American. I for one am convinced that they belong to David Half Moon and that we should try to get them sent home as soon as possible. I’m also worried that we should take her warning seriously—that anyone who handled those bones might be in danger, you and Jimmy Greenjeans included.”

  To my dismay, she laughed then. “Come on, Beau,” Sue said. “You’re a homicide cop. You may be falling for all this hocus-pocus, but I’m not.”

  “Right,” I said. “You must be from Missouri.”

  Sue gave me a puzzled frown. “No, I’m not,” she declared in all seriousness. “I’m from Ohio. I thought you knew that.”

  That’s one of the hazards of working with younger cops. Sometimes it seems as though we don’t even speak the same language. At that moment, this particular age-based breakdown in communications didn’t seem worthy of an explanation.

  “I did know that,” I said. “That you were from Ohio, I mean. It must have slipped my mind. Anyway, after hearing Darla’s warning and now listening to you talk about Richie, I’m worried, Sue. What if he tries to pull something? What if this Disneyland thing pushes him over the edge and he does something to you or the kids?”

  “He won’t,” she said.

  “He did it before,” I countered. “You told me so yourself.”

  “That was different,” she said. “I wasn’t armed then, and I wasn’t a trained cop, either.”

  I could have reeled off a few grim statistics about how many police officers a year are shot with their own weapons, but just then the teakettle started whistling. “What do you take in your tea?” she asked, pulling out a box of Celestial Seasonings Sleepytime. “Lemon and sugar?”

  “Both,” I said.

  We didn’t say much more until Sue had served the tea and was once again seated at the tabl
e. “So did you tell Mr. Greenjeans about all this medicine man…this shaman stuff?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “Why not? If I’m in danger from handling those bones, what about him? I might or might not be the ‘Anglo woman’ Darla Cunningham mentioned, but there can’t be much doubt about the guy with green hair.”

  “I didn’t think he’d believe me.”

  For the first time since I’d arrived at her house, Sue Danielson smiled a genuine smile. “I suspect there’s a lot of that going around. You worry too much, Beau. The boys and I will be just fine, and so will Mr. Greenjeans. Now, did you learn anything new when you talked to Newsome and Atkins?”

  “The name of their attorney. Troy Cochran of Owens, Milton and Cochran.”

  She shook her head. “It figures,” she said. “Troy Cochran is as big a jerk as his clients are. Speaking of which, you should see Newsome and Atkins’ house over in Bellevue. It’s one of those Architectural Digest numbers that looks like it was put together by a committee playing with Tinker Toys and building blocks. Inside was nothing but chrome and glass and leather. Do you think they’re just roommates or are they a couple?”

  “I’m sure the two little underage cuties who were with them weren’t thinking in terms of gay blades. Who knows? Maybe they’re switch-hitters.”

  “How old?” Sue asked.

  “The two girls? Fifteen at the outside.”

  Sue shook her head. “Makes me wish we could find a way to lock them both up, but if Darla Cunningham’s ID is correct, we just lost our homicide victim, so sending those guys to the slammer isn’t going to happen.”