Taking the Fifth (9780061760891)

by Jance, Judith A.

  Curtains covered most of the window, but toward the bottom, below the intricate frosted design, the curtains parted slightly. Through the narrow opening I could see the disorderly shambles inside. Clothes were strewn everywhere. Trash littered the floor next to an overturned garbage can. A wicker chair lay on its side near the door.

  “Ransacked, you think?” Al asked when I stepped back from the window and told him what I had seen.

  “Can’t tell. Maybe, or maybe Richard Dathan Morris was just a first-class slob.”

  We had no search warrant and no reason to disregard proper channels for obtaining one. Besides, searching the house was premature until we had at least verified Doc Baker’s preliminary identification. We decided to canvass the neighborhood in hopes of gleaning some useful bit of information about Richard Dathan Morris.

  We worked our way through a series of nearby apartment buildings one by one, including those on either side of Morris’s house as well as the one directly across the street. No luck. Nobody knew anything, or if they did, they weren’t talking. We unearthed no connections between the surrounding apartment dwellers and their deceased neighbor in the derelict little house.

  Shoe-leather work takes time. Walking and talking and fishing for information isn’t an instantaneous process. An hour and a half or so later, we emerged from the semidarkness of the last apartment-building foyer and blinked our way into blinding morning sunlight. Walking side by side and squinting into the unaccustomed sunlight, we headed for the car, only to dodge out of the way of a speeding minivan. It almost took a chunk out of Al’s kneecap as it skidded to a stop in front of our vehicle.

  “Hey, watch it,” Al cautioned the driver, who bounced out of the van and hurried around to the back of the vehicle, where he pulled open a cargo door.

  “Sorry about that,” he said.

  We got into our car. Al was driving. He started the motor and looked out the back window to check oncoming traffic. Meanwhile, I watched as the driver of the van and his helper removed a stretcher from the van and started purposefully toward the small house, carrying the stretcher between them.

  “Al, take a look at that.”

  They carried the stretcher onto the porch, knocked, and then stood waiting. Moments later the front door swung open and the cat sauntered outside. In our absence, someone had come home and let the cat in. The door opened wider, revealing a young man wearing a white uniform of some kind. There was a short conversation; then he motioned the two men to bring their stretcher into the house.

  “We’d better check this out,” I said.

  Al nodded and shut off the engine. We scrambled out of the car and were on the porch almost before the door finished slamming shut behind the men with the stretcher. When I knocked, the man in the white uniform returned to open the door.

  He was maybe five ten or so, with short, clean-cut hair that reminded me of a fifties flattop. His narrow, handsome face had a gaunt look to it. Dark shadows under his eyes said he wasn’t getting enough food or sleep or both. A name tag on the breast pocket of his white uniform told us he was Tom Riley, R.N.

  “Detective J.P. Beaumont, Seattle P.D.,” I said, holding out my ID.

  “Nobody called for any cops,” Riley said abruptly. He turned away and slammed the door behind him.

  “Guess he doesn’t care much for police officers,” Al muttered.

  “Did you see that?” I asked.

  “See what?”

  “The mess. Inside. Somebody cleaned it up.”

  “Maybe we’d better try again,” Big Al said. This time he knocked.

  When the door opened the second time, I positioned myself so I could peer into the room over the shoulder of Tom Riley, R.N. Behind him I caught a glimpse of the driver and his helper busily dressing for what looked like a field trip into an operating room. Both had put on surgical masks and germ-free booties and were in the process of donning rubber gloves.

  “I’m Detective Al Lindstrom with Seattle P.D.’s homicide squad—” Al began.

  The nurse cut him off. “I already told you. We don’t need any cops.”

  “We’re here concerning a homicide—”

  “This isn’t a homicide, for God’s sake,” Riley interrupted. “Don’t you understand plain English?” He tried to shut the door again, but my foot got in the way. Thank you, Fuller Brush. I worked my way through college selling brushes door to door, and some of the training still proves useful.

  “Excuse me,” the driver said, clearing his throat. “We’re a little pressed for time. If you could just show us where the deceased is, we’ll get started.”

  For a moment, I thought maybe I was losing my mind. What deceased? Whose body? I was under the impression we had just bundled up Richard Dathan Morris’s body and sent him off to the medical examiner’s office for an autopsy. How could he be in two places at once?

  As though forgetting us entirely, Riley swung away from the door without closing it. He nodded slowly, making a visible effort to control himself. “Right,” he managed. “This way.”

  He walked across the room and disappeared down a darkened hallway, followed by the two men and their stretcher. For a brief moment, Al and I paused on the front porch, exchanging questioning glances. We hadn’t exactly been invited into the house, but we hadn’t exactly been ordered to stay out either.

  Al shrugged his shoulders. “Why not?” he said.

  We hurried through the front door and followed the stretcher down the hallway. At the far end of the hall a bedroom door stood open.

  That’s where we all ended up, inside that darkened bedroom. The room was incredibly hot and stuffy. The windows were shut and heavily curtained, and the stifling atmosphere was thick with the medicinal odors of long illness. Riley went to the window, raised the curtain, and opened the window itself, allowing a hint of fresh air into the room.

  “The sunlight hurt his eyes,” he explained. “And he was always so cold.”

  A hospital bed stood in the middle of the room, occupying most of the space. On it lay the blanket-covered figure of a man. The patient lay on his side with his face turned away from us. Seen from the doorway, he appeared to be asleep. It was only when I stepped to the foot of the bed so I could glimpse his face that I encountered the unnatural pallor, the open-eyed, slack-jawed, frozen mask that indelibly separates the living from the dead.

  One thing was certain the moment I saw him: this dead man wasn’t our dead man. Richard Dathan Morris was still safely in the hands of the medical examiner. That made me feel better. At least I wasn’t slipping.

  The driver looked at Riley. “If you’d like to go back out to the other room and wait…” he offered.

  “No. I’m all right,” Riley answered. “Go ahead.”

  Totally focused, Tom Riley, R.N., stared at the corpse. A series of expressions played over the nurse’s face, a combination of sorrow, revulsion, and something else, some other ingredient I couldn’t quite identify.

  The driver turned to me, ready to ask Al and me if we were going or staying. Silently, I shook my head. We weren’t budging, but I didn’t want him calling Riley’s attention to us either. I don’t think it had dawned on him yet that we were in the bedroom too.

  Deliberately, cautiously, the two men placed the stretcher beside the bed. They approached the corpse warily, like little kids afraid of a bogeyman. It was almost as though they expected the dead man to jerk awake, sit up, and grab them.

  I’ve seen more than my share of mortuary types in my time. They’re usually in and out in a jiffy; wham, bam, thank you ma’am, the less time spent the better. These two were taking their time, taking care, making sure each movement was slow and meticulous. Something was definitely out of whack, but I couldn’t tell what it was.

  “Can we wrap him in these sheets?” the driver asked, directing his query to Riley.

  The nurse nodded. “Sure. Go ahead.”

  Reaching down, the driver gently moved a pillow out from under the dead man’s head,
shoving it to the far side of the bed. It tottered there briefly, then fell to the floor.

  My vast experience with pillows tells me that they usually fall silently. This one didn’t. It landed on the room’s hardwood flooring with a resounding thump.

  I was standing at the foot of the bed. I took one more step to the side so I could see the pillow. A plastic package of some kind had slipped halfway out of the pillowcase onto the floor beneath the bed, right beside Tom Riley’s foot.

  Instinctively, I moved toward the package. Cops are trained that way. If something doesn’t make sense, check it out. Ask questions. Get answers. I was quick, but Tom Riley was quicker.

  Enraged, he lunged at me, bellowing with anger. “What are you doing here? I told you to get out!”

  That must have been the first moment he realized we were in the room. I saw him charge toward me, but it was too late to make any evasive maneuver. We collided in midair with such force that it knocked the wind out of us both. We fell to the floor in a tangled heap. Riley made one futile grab for my neck, but he came up empty-handed when Al Lindstrom lifted him bodily into the air.

  Al shoved Riley against a wall and held him there with his feet dangling several inches off the ground. We don’t call Al “Big Al” for nothing. His arms are thick as tree limbs, and he’s as strong as the proverbial ox. He was evidently one hell of a wrestler in his youth. Even now he’s no slouch.

  As soon as I was sure Riley was permanently out of commission, I reached under the bed far enough to lift the pillowcase and uncover the package. It was about the size of an ordinary brick, wrapped in clear plastic, and carefully taped shut.

  I’ve never worked Narcotics, but I’ve seen enough stuff to recognize drugs when I see them. It looked like cocaine, deadly, compact, powdery cocaine. It could have been powdered sugar, but people don’t generally hide powdered sugar in their pillows. And they don’t generally die over it either.

  Riley found his voice again, sputtering over Al’s restraining arm. “Don’t you touch anything, you bastard. You’ve got no right to be here. Get out, goddamn it! Out!”

  Studying the package, I ignored Riley’s outburst. “Looks like coke to me,” I said to Al.

  The guys from the mortuary stood watching us stupidly, as if we were a traveling vaudeville show there for no other reason than their personal entertainment and benefit.

  “Hey, Roger,” one whined to the other. “Are we moving this guy or not?”

  “Not!” I barked. “You don’t touch him or anything in this room until I talk to the medical examiner’s office.”

  At that Tom Riley renewed his struggle, kicking and fighting to get free of Al Lindstrom’s viselike grip. “You do as you were told,” he roared at the driver. “The medical examiner already knows about it.”

  I walked over to where Al held Riley with his back to the wall, chinning him effortlessly on one solid forearm.

  “Doc Baker? How does he know about it?” I demanded.

  “I called him. Almost an hour ago. As soon as I found the body.”

  “Why isn’t he here, then?” It was hard to believe the medical examiner’s office was backed up that far. Surely they could have dispatched someone in less than an hour.

  “Because he doesn’t have to be.” Riley sounded calmer now, almost rational.

  “Since when is Doc Baker too good to check out an OD?”

  Riley stared at me incredulously. “You think that’s what it is? An overdose?”

  I answered his question with one of my own. “Don’t you? When we find a dead man with half a pound of cocaine hidden in his pillowcase, we can usually draw some pretty logical conclusions.”

  Something strange happened to Tom Riley’s face then. It contorted suddenly. At first I thought he was going to burst into tears.

  I was wrong. Instead he began laughing, a strangled, air-gulping, rib-breaking, all-consuming laugh.

  As I stood in that stuffy, confining bedroom with a man dead on the bed behind me, Tom Riley’s eerie, unnatural laughter made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.

  At last he grew quieter and regained enough composure so he could talk. “Jon didn’t OD,” he declared firmly.

  “He didn’t? What did he die of, then?” I demanded.

  “AIDS.”

  Tom Riley’s single-word answer crackled through the silent room like heat lightning in a tinder-dry forest. Al Lindstrom’s stranglehold collapsed and Tom Riley, a limp, boneless rag doll, slipped silently to the floor.

  “AIDS! Holy shit!” Big Al muttered, a stricken expression on his face.

  Tom Riley took one look at Big Al’s face and began to laugh again.

  Al Lindstrom didn’t think it was funny.

  I didn’t either.

  CHAPTER 3

  DOC BAKER’S MOOD HADN’T IMPROVED any by the time I got him on the phone. Over his secretary’s strenuous protests, I had insisted that he be called away from an autopsy-in-progress.

  “Beaumont, you jerk, what did you say the name was?”

  “Thomas. Jonathan Thomas.”

  “Sure. His nurse called in earlier this morning. I already had the notice from the attending physician. My people told Riley to go ahead and have them move the body.”

  “Just like that? Without bothering to send somebody over? Without checking?”

  “You been living under a rock or something, Beau? Jonathan Thomas died of AIDS. AIDS! His doctor notified my office over a week ago that death was imminent.”

  “What does that have to do with whether or not you send somebody out?”

  “Look, when an attending physician tells us his patient is dying of AIDS, we believe him. We take his word for it. He gives us a written notification that he’s willing to sign the death certificate to that effect, and we let it go at that. We’re out of it, understand?”

  “But we found drugs hidden in his bed. It might have been an overdose. Or what if he was murdered?”

  “What if? He was dying.”

  “Doc, we need an autopsy here.”

  “You don’t need an autopsy, you want one. There’s big difference. And who the hell do you think is going to do it? My people don’t want to, I can tell you that much, and I don’t blame them a bit.”

  “But, Doc.”

  “Don’t you ‘But, Doc’ me. My office has a written procedure for cases like this, and we’re following it to the letter. If you want an autopsy, get the attending physician to do it. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going back to the autopsy I was doing before I was so rudely interrupted.”

  He slammed the receiver down in my ear. I turned to face the people in Jonathan Thomas’s living room who were waiting to hear Doc Baker’s answer.

  Riley stood with his arms across his chest, glaring at me. “Well?” he demanded.

  I nodded to the driver from the mortuary. “Go ahead and take him away,” I said. “But no embalming, and no other preparations until after I check with his doctor, is that clear?”

  He nodded. “You won’t get no argument from me.”

  I handed him my card. “My name’s Beaumont, Detective J. P. Beaumont. Now, where are you taking him?”

  The driver glanced at my card and pocketed it. “Ramsey and Son Funeral Home over on East Pine.”

  With that, he and his partner disappeared down the hallway. Al Lindstrom, Tom Riley, and I waited in the living room without exchanging a word until the two men returned, carefully carrying the body-laden stretcher between them.

  Riley went to the door and held it open for them while they gingerly maneuvered the stretcher through the doorway and down the front steps. Only after the body had been loaded into the van and the vehicle had disappeared around the corner did Riley come back inside.

  He glanced at Al and me in undisguised disgust. “Why are you still here?”

  “We want to talk to you about Richard Morris,” I said.

  Riley shrugged. “That worthless asshole? What about him? He should be home any minute. You can
talk to him yourselves.”

  “I take it he’s not a friend of yours?”

  Riley’s narrow lower lip curled downward in a sneer of absolute contempt. “Hardly. Jon should have thrown that creep out months ago.”

  “Why?”

  I didn’t volunteer the information that Richard Morris would never be coming home again. That’s not my style. Asking questions is a Homicide detective’s prime directive. Ask first; tell later. Take first; give later. Ask any detective’s wife. More likely, ask his ex-wife.

  Tom Riley hit us with an indictment of Richard Dathan Morris that bore a close resemblance to an ex-wife’s ravings. “Because Rick’s still out running the streets, for one thing, damn him. And because he doesn’t give a shit about anybody but himself. And because he wasn’t here last night when Jon needed him.”

  “Did you see him at all last night?” Al interjected.

  “He was here when I left. At eleven. Said he’d be home all night, the lying son of a bitch. I can’t believe he took off and left Jon here alone. So help me when I find him…” Riley let the remainder of his threat trail off unspoken.

  Suddenly Riley gave me a sharp look, as though he had finally realized the focus and direction of our questions. We hadn’t come about Jonathan Thomas after all.

  “Has Rick done something wrong?” he asked suddenly.

  Riley’s abrupt shift in demeanor didn’t escape me. He had been rude and short with me to the point of physical violence when I had attempted to interfere with the removal of Jonathan Thomas’s body. But now, once he understood my questions were really about Richard Morris, now that I had held out the possibility that Morris was in some kind of trouble with the law, Riley switched to being downright cooperative.

  Bearing this in mind, I, too, slipped into a different approach, addressing Tom Riley with far more deference and respect than I had used before. Respect is a useful tool, and when applied in reasonable proportions it inflates egos at the same time it loosens tongues.