Taking the Fifth (9780061760891)

by Jance, Judith A.

“They were worried about Jasmine’s…You know…” He paused and looked at me as though expecting me to read his mind.

  I shook my head. “Her what?” I asked.

  “About her reputation,” he added.

  “What about it?”

  “She used to be a rock star, you know, several years back.”

  Dan Osgood used “you know” the way some people use “ah.” Actually, I didn’t know at all, but I nodded, pretending I did.

  “About a year or so ago now, she hooked up with one of the surviving big bands. It’s taken a while, but she’s gradually making the switch to pop, singing a lot of old-time songs from the thirties, forties, and fifties, cashing in on the baby-boomer nostalgia trip.”

  “And she’s doing all right at it?”

  Osgood shrugged, a noncommittal gesture that didn’t quite measure up to his public-relations position. I rephrased the question.

  “How are ticket sales?” I asked.

  “So-so,” he replied glumly.

  “Not that great?”

  He nodded. “I told ’em they’d be better off doing one show on Friday night, but nobody ever listens to me. They insisted on two shows or nothing.” He looked at me and brightened. “I could give you a couple of comps,” he added. “Great seats. Front row center.”

  Osgood took two tickets out of his top drawer and pushed them across the desk toward me. I looked at them without picking them up.

  “This couldn’t possibly be construed as a bribe, could it, Mr. Osgood?”

  His jaw dropped. “Detective Beaumont, of course not! My job is public relations. I mean, you’re going to be there, aren’t you, talking to people?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “I just thought it would be easier if you had tickets. That way, you could come and go as you pleased.”

  “You mean without having to show my badge.”

  He shrugged. “Well, actually, that’s right. It would create less of a disturbance.”

  I couldn’t argue with his premise. Having Homicide cops wandering in and out of any event does tend to put a damper on people having fun. I picked up the tickets and shoved them into my jacket pocket.

  “All right,” I said.

  “But you’ll keep a low profile during the performance, won’t you?” Osgood insisted. “You know, we’ve got another show tomorrow night, and if there’s any trouble…”

  I put up a hand to silence him. “Trust me,” I said. “There won’t be any trouble. Now take me to see that carpenter guy—what’s his name?”

  “Dale. Alan Dale.”

  Osgood led me through a rabbit warren of stairs and hallways, getting us back to the theater without ever leaving the building or having to walk past the crabby lady in the ticket booth. We entered through a door just off stage right.

  The Fifth Avenue was originally one of those huge old movie houses that flourished in the days of studio-held theaters. Over the years it had fallen into disrepair and had been scheduled for demolition until a group of civic- and arts-minded types had gotten together under the banner of saving and refurbishing it. The interior is done in a garish Chinese style complete with huge gilt dragons, equally huge crystal chandeliers, and plush red carpets and seats. If I had gone to all that trouble to decorate in such an overblown, nostalgic style, I wouldn’t have wanted to book a show that remotely resembled a rock concert either.

  All the theater except the stage itself was shrouded in darkness. On stage, an almost transparent piece of material with a cityscape painted on it hung halfway to the floor. A man stood underneath, peering up into the cavern above and behind the heavy red curtain, shading his eyes from the bare bulb glare of overhead stage lights. At the front of the stage, several people were busy working on what seemed to be a raised platform built over the stage itself, covering the front of it with pieces of gold foil material.

  “Can you get it?” The man in the middle of the stage was speaking into the air above him to someone we couldn’t see.

  “Almost. Almost. Give me a break,” a voice answered.

  As we stepped up onto the stage, I, too, peered through the glare of lights to see where the voice was coming from. A man clung to a truss some twenty feet above us. With one hand he held himself in place while with the other he struggled with a complex rope connection of some kind.

  “That’s Ray Holman, the flyman,” Osgood explained to me, pointing to the man on the truss. All the word “flyman” did for me was give rise to a whole series of visions of low-grade science-fiction movies. My blank stare must have registered. “He flies whatever parts of the set have to go up and down,” Osgood added.

  He turned to the man on the stage. “Alan, this is Detective Beaumont from Seattle P.D. He wants to talk to you.”

  “People in hell want ice water too,” Alan Dale replied without looking away from the man above us.

  Osgood glanced fitfully at my card, which he still held. “He’s with Homicide. He only wants to talk with you for a few minutes.”

  Alan Dale turned on him then. Jasmine’s head carpenter wasn’t a big man, but he was tough. Standing on that undressed, empty stage, he was in his element. This was his territory.

  “I don’t give a shit where he’s from or what he wants. I’ve got a curtain in a little over five hours. I’m not talking to Saint Peter himself until this son of a bitch of a scrim goes up and down like clockwork. We’ve still got to reweld the track on the revolve.”

  With that, his focus returned to the man on the truss. “You got it now, Ray?”

  “Close,” Ray called down. “Almost.”

  Dan Osgood stuck his tail between his legs and began to slink away across the stage, but I held my ground. When Alan Dale lowered his eyes to the stage, I was still standing there.

  “Look,” I said, “you’ve got a job to do and so do I. One of the stagehands who worked here yesterday was murdered last night. I have to ask you a couple of questions about him, that’s all.”

  “Murdered?” Alan Dale appeared mildly interested. “Which one?”

  “His name was Morris.”

  “Rick Morris, that little creep?”

  I nodded. “That’s the one.”

  “He’s worked for us before. I felt like murdering him myself,” Alan Dale said. “I caught the little shit going through one of the trunks instead of unloading it. I fired his ass on the spot. Gave him his check and told him to hit the road.”

  “Hey, Alan,” Ray called down from up above us. “Stop your jawing and try pulling the rope. I think I finally got ’er.”

  Alan Dale strode away from me to a wall covered with a mass of block-and-tackle gear. He chose one rope seemingly at random, released it, then gave it a long, hard pull. The transparent curtain rose soundlessly into the air until it stopped smoothly at the bottom of the truss.

  “Hot dog! Now if we can just get the worm gear working on that goddamned turntable, we’ll be in great shape.”

  Somehow the flyman made it to the stage floor in far less time than I would have thought possible. Maybe he really could fly, but as he walked past us, beads of sweat covered his forehead. He stopped long enough to wipe his face dry with one grimy sleeve.

  “Whoever designed this motherfucker ought to have to put it up and strike it every other day for the rest of his natural life.”

  With that, Ray stalked toward the back of the stage, where a golden band shell stood cloaked in semidarkness. When he reached it, he turned and called back to Alan Dale. “You coming or not? Drag that welding lead over here.”

  “I’ll be right there.” The head carpenter bent over to pick up a welding lead from the floor in front of him, but a voice, calling his name over a backstage intercom, stopped him before he had taken two steps toward the band shell.

  “Alan? Alan, are you there?”

  Alan Dale sighed, stopped, and turned toward the speaker that was mounted beside the bank of ropes. “Yeah, Ed. I’m here. Whaddaya need?”

  “I’m on my way to s
ee Jasmine. She wants to know if you’ve got the revolve fixed. Did the parts come?”

  Alan glanced back at the band shell. “All except the goddamned clutch. The supplier’s out of them. He’s trying to find one.”

  “Can you make it work? We don’t want what happened in Portland to happen here.”

  “I can make it work. It won’t be great, but it’ll work.”

  “Good,” the man on the intercom replied. “I’ll tell her.”

  With a weary sigh, Alan Dale started once more toward the band shell with me right behind him. He stopped me, shaking his head.

  “Look, can’t I talk to you later? I’m busier’n a one-legged man at an ass-kicking contest. I could talk during the show or after, since we’re doing a two-night stand. But right now…”

  I could see Alan Dale had a problem. So did I. It was almost time to report in to the department for the beginning of our shift. Big Al and I still hadn’t taken care of the notification of next of kin, and that had to take priority. We had let it go far too long as it was.

  “Sure, that’ll be fine, but one more question before I go. You said Morris was going through a trunk. Do you remember which one?”

  “Costumes, I think, but I don’t really remember. That’s not my job. I told Waverly.”

  “Who’s Waverly?”

  He jerked his head in the direction of the intercom. “You said one question. That’s two. Ask Osgood.” With that, Allan Dale left me and headed off, presumably to work on his revolving band shell.

  “Who’s Waverly?” I repeated when Dan Osgood slunk back up beside me on the stage.

  “Ed Waverly. He’s Westcoast’s road manager.”

  “And where would I find him?”

  “At the hotel, I guess. He said he was on his way to see Jasmine.”

  “Which hotel?”

  “The Mayflower Park, over on Olive. That’s where they’re staying. Why? Do you have to see him too?”

  “I will eventually, but not right now. First I’ve got to track down two sets of parents so I can tell them their sons are dead.”

  A sallow look spread over Dan Osgood’s highbrow face. I had meant to shock him, wanted to shock him. I don’t know why.

  I guess the devil made me do it.

  CHAPTER 8

  I MET AL AT THE DEPARTMENT AND WE made a dash for the freeway, just minutes ahead of afternoon rush-hour traffic on the Mercer Island Bridge. Doc Baker’s office had confirmed Jonathan Thomas’s ID with his attending physician. Tom Riley had given us Jonathan Thomas’s parents’ address and told us that Mr. and Mrs. William B. Thomas lived in Bellevue in an area called The Summit.

  No one from downtown should ever try to find an address on the other side of Lake Washington without taking along the essentials—lunch, a map, and a compass, for starters. It’s not that it’s the boonies—it’s the burbs, and suburban planners, with the clever little cul-de-sacs they love, should all draw mazes for kids’ magazines. In this case, we only had a map. While Al drove us across the Interstate 90 Bridge, I attempted to locate The Summit on my four-year-old map. It didn’t exist.

  The address said 16318 Summit Drive, so we took the 148th Street exit and stopped at a gas station to ask directions. The young attendant was as obliging as could be. “Sure,” he said, pointing to a clear-cut hilltop with only a few lonely, spindly trees and a smattering of rooftops showing on it. “That’s it, right up there.”

  “How do we get there?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Beats me. I can ask my boss.”

  The boss, a transplant from some corner of the Middle East, barely spoke English, but he communicated clearly enough that he didn’t know where The Summit was, nor did he care.

  We retreated to the car and attempted, logically enough, to drive to the place. It seemed straightforward enough, since The Summit was clearly visible to us from where we were. It happens to be one of those places you can’t get to from here. Three attempts ended in dismal failure, with us wandering blindly through a series of pricey suburban dead ends. We stopped once more and asked directions of a bathrobe-clad lady out walking a pair of golden retrievers. She wasn’t able to help us either. That’s one of the mysteries about Bellevue. Nobody knows where anything is or how to get there.

  We made one more assault, up 150th. This attempt brought us closer than any of our previous forays, but it ended in a necker’s knob turnaround blocked by a wrought-iron electronically operated gate. It was apparent that the road beyond the gate led up to the posh development on top of the hill. While we paused to assess the situation, a lady driving a silver BMW opened the gate and drove out. Before the gate could shut again, Al and I scrambled out of our vehicle and sprinted through the opening.

  We found ourselves walking just below the crest of the hill. When we topped it, the view was dazzling. To the north was Mount Baker, to the east the forested hills of Snoqualmie Pass, to the south stood the graceful, snow-covered face of Mount Rainier, and to the west lay Seattle, its buildings surrounded by shimmering water against a background of snow-denuded mountains on the Olympic Peninsula.

  Al stopped in his tracks and did a complete 360-degree. “What the hell do you have to pay for a view like this!”

  “Plenty,” I told him, not adding that my own view from the penthouse in Belltown Terrace wasn’t much different from The Summit’s.

  It turned out we were already on Summit Drive. It curved this way and that, meandering like a country road. Except it wasn’t. The place was a beehive of activity, with construction vehicles parked here and there around houses in various stages of completion. A backhoe was noisily digging the footings of one while roofers tacked cedar shakes onto the raw wooden roof of another. No one challenged us as we sauntered along, looking for 16318.

  The house would have been difficult to miss. It was huge, a mansion by any standards, situated on a lot that gave it a commanding view from every room, including, I’m sure, bathrooms and closets. The front porch was ablaze with a collection of brass pots filled with brilliantly blooming plants.

  Stepping onto the porch, I rang the bell. A few moments later, the door was opened by a dark-haired young woman wearing a maid’s uniform. “Yes?” she said questioningly.

  I handed her my card. “We’re with the Seattle Police Department,” I said. “We’d like to speak to either Mr. or Mrs. Thomas.”

  “Mrs. Thomas just left,” the woman said, gesturing toward the road.

  “What about Mr. Thomas? Is he home?”

  “Yes, but he’s busy.”

  “This is important,” I said. “It’s about his son.”

  “I don’t have a son,” a voice boomed behind her. The young woman started visibly. “It’s all right, Sarah. You may go.”

  With a compliant nod, Sarah retreated from the open door. We found ourselves peering into a rose marble foyer where a thin, stooped man stood at the foot of a curving stairway. I was surprised to find that the source of that robust voice was this frail-looking old man. I saw at once that there was a remarkable similarity between the now-dead Jonathan and his father, William Thomas. Months of wasting illness had aged the younger man until the two men looked more like brothers than father and son.

  William Thomas shuffled toward us, leaning heavily on a gnarled cane, and looked up at us through bushy gray eyebrows. “Who are you and what do you want?” he demanded.

  “We’re with Seattle P.D.,” I repeated. “We were told that you are Jonathan Thomas’s father.”

  “Was,” he corrected bitterly. “No more.” He reached out as if to close the door. I caught it with the toe of my shoe and edged into the doorway.

  “We’re with Homicide, Mr. Thomas. Your son is dead. We came to tell you.”

  It was a brutal way to break the news, but I wasn’t of a mind to be especially kind. You don’t find most parents denying their child’s very existence when you come to notify them that something has happened to that child.

  “Dead?” he asked stupidly. “Did you s
ay dead?”

  I nodded. William Thomas reached out a bony hand and grasped my jacket lapel, shaking me with surprising vigor. “Did he repent?” he asked. “Did he pray for forgiveness of his sins?”

  “I don’t have any idea. I’m sorry.”

  Thomas turned from me and shuffled away from the door, shaking his head.

  “What a waste,” he mumbled. “What a terrible, shameful, sinful waste.”

  We followed him into a magnificent sunlit living room. He sat down at the end of an opulent sofa, using the arm of the couch as well as the cane to ease himself into a sitting position. He was still shaking his head.

  “It’s God’s scourge,” he said, reaching for a white Bible that lay on a polished cherry wood end table beside his couch. He moved the book into his lap, stroking it with his hand, letting his fingers trace the pattern of the gold-embossed lettering. “For the wages of sin is death,” he continued as though we weren’t in the room.

  “You knew your son was ill?” I asked.

  He started at my question. “Ill? You call that ill? That’s not an illness. It’s a pestilence, visited on the wicked, on those who have willfully turned their faces from the Lord.”

  William Thomas looked across the room and stared out the huge window at the expanse of city and mountain at our feet. His rheumy old eyes were reddened, but there were no tears of sadness. His hand, resting on the Bible, trembled with some inner tremor. The old man may have disowned his son, but he wasn’t letting him go to the devil without a fight.

  “I don’t believe Jonathan died of AIDS,” I said quietly.

  Slowly William Thomas swung toward me, an almost electrical charge of interest crossing his face. It was as if I had thrown him a lifeline. “You what?”

  “Detective Lindstrom and I are with the Homicide squad,” I said. “We’re investigating your son’s death as a possible murder.”

  “You think he was murdered?” Thomas asked.

  I nodded. “We’d need you to request an autopsy to verify it, but…”

  “He didn’t die of AIDS?” he asked incredulously, having to verify over and over what I’d said, as if he hadn’t quite heard me correctly the first time.