Taking the Fifth (9780061760891)

by Jance, Judith A.

  Osgood was still congratulating himself on his good taste when we reached the turntable. The band shell sat like a gigantic wedding cake, balanced on what seemed to be a single metal leg that disappeared into the raised wooden platform beneath it. Alan Dale was walking around the turntable checking the bolts underneath, followed by a slightly built, balding man. I recognized Ed Waverly from his picture in the program.

  “You’re sure it’ll work?” Waverly asked.

  Alan Dale stopped and turned on him, looking as though he wanted to bash Waverly over the head with his wrench.

  “Look, Ed,” Dale said with an air of forced tolerance. “I told you it would work, and it will. This’ll do for tonight and tomorrow. The clutch will be waiting for us when we get to Vancouver. We can fix it when we do the load-in there. Meantime, we’re leaving the safety plate off so if something does go wrong with the track, it won’t be so hard to fix it.”

  I turned to Osgood. “That’s Ed Waverly, right?”

  Osgood nodded. I turned back, intending to introduce myself to the road-show manager, but he was already halfway across the stage. Instead I caught Alan Dale’s eyes. “Can you talk to me now?”

  “How about tomorrow morning?” he asked. “Say ten-thirty or so at the Mayflower?”

  There was no point in alienating him. “Sure,” I said and went looking for Waverly. I was too late. He’d already gone back out front, where there were people waiting for him. Frustrated, I decided to try talking to Jasmine Day herself.

  To my surprise, I discovered that once I was backstage, no one questioned my presence or my reason for being there. I wandered off toward the dressing rooms. There was a small common area where the musicians were already lounging. I made my way through the crush to a door with a removable plastic nameplate that said, in an elegant script, Jasmine Day. I knocked.

  “Who is it?”

  I opened the door. Inside, Jasmine Day had changed from the blue dress into a black silk jumpsuit. She was standing with one foot on the seat of a chair, lacing up a high-topped boot that ended just below her knee. She glanced at me over her shoulder and returned to the boot.

  “If it isn’t Sleeping Beauty,” she said.

  “I beg your pardon?” Thinking she must be speaking over my shoulder to someone else, I glanced behind me. No one was there.

  She finished lacing the second boot and turned toward me, tying and smoothing a heavy gold belt around her waist.

  “Call it morbid curiosity,” she said, sauntering past me. She walked up to a light-studded dressing-room mirror, wiped a smudge of mascara from her cheek, and applied a fresh coat of lipstick.

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “Oh?” she replied, checking the line of lipstick. “You’re sitting in the road manager’s comps, front-row center. Divine right of kings and all that. I always check during PeeWee’s act to see what I’m going to be stuck with after the show. I checked on you, just before I went on. You were sawing logs.”

  An embarrassed flush crept up my ears. She saw it and laughed.

  “You’re blushing. This the first time you’ve been caught sleeping in a theater?”

  Before I could answer, there was a knock on the door behind me. It swung open, narrowly missing me. I moved out of the way. A stagehand stuck his head into the dressing room. “Five minutes, Miss Day,” he said.

  She nodded and turned back to me. “So who are you?” she asked. “An old crony of Ed Waverly’s?”

  I had been reaching for one of my cards. I dropped it, letting it fall back into my jacket pocket.

  “I know Dan Osgood,” I replied.

  She shrugged and gave me an openly appraising once-over. “Well, at least you’re under seventy and not half bad-looking, for a change. So where are you taking me for dinner?”

  That caught me off guard. Dinner? The flush got worse. My nose probably could have glowed in the dark. I didn’t remember mentioning dinner.

  “It’s a surprise,” I mumbled, amazed by my own quick thinking. Being around beautiful women usually paralyzes both my tongue and my brain, in that order.

  She laughed aloud at that. “I like surprises,” she said. There was another quick knock on the door. “I’ve gotta go,” she added, darting past me on her way out of the room. She paused momentarily with her hand on the doorknob.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Beaumont. J. P. Beaumont. My friends call me Beau.”

  She smiled. “All right, Beau. Pick me up at the hotel about half an hour after the show.”

  She hurried out and left me standing there in the dressing room, feeling like I’d just been picked up and put down by a very selective tornado. I looked around me. The blue dress was slung carelessly over a brass-framed dressing screen. Two black shoes lay side by side in front of the screen, discarded and forgotten where Jasmine Day had hastily kicked them off.

  Behind me, the door opened and a woman almost as wide as the doorway itself marched purposefully into the room. She took one look at me and stopped cold. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, mister?” she demanded.

  “I was just…”

  She waddled over to me and stuck her face close to mine. “You were just nothing! Get out of here before I call the cops.”

  I got moving. She didn’t have to tell me twice.

  CHAPTER 10

  THE NAP I HAD TAKEN DURING PEEWEE Latham’s act now served me in good stead. I didn’t sleep at all during the second act. Neither did anybody else.

  The act opened with the revolving band shell turning and moving forward just to the right of center stage, bearing with it the sixteen-piece backup orchestra.

  From the other side of the stage, a golden grand piano moved smoothly to center stage. On it, draped in a lush blues singer pose, lay Jasmine Day.

  From the moment she appeared, Jasmine had the audience’s rapt attention. The skin-tight jumpsuit revealed everything and nothing. No hint of excess flesh wiggled under the sleek material. When she slid gracefully off the piano to sing her second number, she looked ten feet tall and bulletproof. It was funny; she hadn’t seemed nearly that tall or imposing when she was standing next to me in her dressing room.

  Jasmine was nothing short of a human dynamo. She threw every ounce of her body and being into the songs she sang, and the audience loved it. Halfway through the set though, in a distinct change of pace, she brought out a simple wooden stool and sat down to talk.

  She told us how glad she was that her stay at Betty Ford’s rehabilitation center had given her a chance to shake the drugs that had been destroying both her life and her career and how grateful she was for the enthusiastic response audiences all over the country were giving her new show. This show. The one she was sharing with us.

  It was a homey little chat, relaxed and ingenuous, and it accomplished just what it was calculated to do: it put an already friendly audience even more squarely in Jasmine Day’s corner. J. P. Beaumont included.

  I’ll confess that my mind wandered a little near the end of the show. I was worried about where I’d take Jasmine Day for dinner and how I’d explain my relationship with Dan Osgood if the question came up. I’m still not sure why I was so reluctant to tell her I was a cop. In retrospect I chalk it up to male pride, to wanting to preserve the illusion that she was going with me by choice rather than by necessity as a side effect of my job.

  As soon as the curtain rang down for the last time, I dashed home to change clothes before the appointed meeting with Jasmine Day. I made two phone calls from my apartment. One was to the department, leaving word for Al, if he called in from the hospital, that I was going on surveillance and would be in touch with him later. I didn’t divulge the exact nature of that surveillance. Call it a sin of omission.

  The other call was to the Canlis Restaurant up on Aurora Avenue. I made a late dinner reservation for two.

  After a hasty shower, I put on clean clothes and was in front of the Mayflower Park Hotel just at ten-thirty.
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br />   The Mayflower Park isn’t one of Seattle’s brand-name hotel giants. It’s smaller and more personal than the Sheratons and Westins of the world. In the course of the last few years, it has been totally refurbished, making it long on quality but without quite the snob appeal of some of the other downtown hotels.

  I walked inside the cool, brick-floored lobby and liked what I found. The lobby was comfortably furnished and quiet except for the occasional sound of muted laughter that drifted in from Oliver’s, the candlelit hotel lounge off to the right of the registration desk.

  An efficient young desk clerk greeted me cheerfully.

  “Jasmine Day,” I said.

  “Oh, are you Mr. Beaumont?” the clerk asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Miss Day left word for you to go on up to her room. Sixth floor. To the right after you step off the elevator and all the way to the end of the corridor.”

  As I stepped into the elevator I felt like an imposter, as if I had no right to be there, but Jasmine was the one who had assumed we were going to dinner. I decided my best strategy was to shut up and enjoy it.

  I knocked on the door at the end of the corridor. It was opened by Jasmine Day herself. She was wearing a variation on a man’s white racer-backed tee shirt, except that it had an intricate rhinestone design bordering the neck and shoulders. The shirt came down to her knees and was cinched in just above her hips by a loose-fitting gold lamé belt.

  Her long legs were encased in a pair of very close-fitting tights that ended just above well-formed ankles. Her shoes, three-inch hooker heels, were made of delicate gold lamé straps.

  Jasmine Day tossed her head impatiently, loose blonde hair shimmering across her shoulders. “Well, are you going to come inside, or are you going to stand out there gawking all night?”

  Hastily I went inside. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude.”

  Jasmine Day shut the door behind her. She leaned against it for a fraction of an instant looking up at me. “That’s all right,” she said resignedly. “I suppose I should be used to it by now.”

  Briskly, she walked past me into the room. Near the window was a seating area made up of two plush apricot chairs and a matching couch. Between them, on a glass coffee table, sat a single cup of coffee. She picked it up and took a sip, studying me carefully over the rim of the cup.

  “So you’re a friend of Dan Osgood’s,” she said noncommittally.

  I made no reply to her comment. I glanced around the room uneasily. It was evidently a suite. There was nothing in sight that remotely resembled a sleeping area. A round conference table in one corner was buried beneath several bouquets of flowers as well as a basket of fruit and an unopened bottle of champagne.

  “Fans,” she explained. “I guess they enjoyed the show.”

  She had finally given me a conversational opening I figured I could handle. “So did I,” I ventured. “You throw everything you’ve got into your performance.”

  “Not everything,” she said evenly. “There are some things I hold back.”

  The coffee cup rapped sharply against the glass-topped table as she set it down. “That’s why I wanted to talk to you here before we went to dinner.”

  She motioned me toward the unoccupied chair opposite her. I moved mechanically toward the chair, conscious of her unblinking eyes riveted on my face, aware of the almost hypnotic effect her voice had on me.

  “We have to go over the ground rules,” she said quietly.

  “Over what?”

  “The ground rules.” She smiled, seeming to enjoy my obvious discomfort. “You see, every so often the guys who end up with Ed Waverly’s comp tickets think it’s a package deal, that if we go to dinner, I’ll be dessert.”

  “Miss Day, I…”

  She held up a hand, effectively silencing me. “So this is what we’ll do. We’ll go have a quiet little dinner someplace. You talk and I’ll listen, or vice versa. Then you bring me back here and I’ll come up to my room alone, all right?”

  “Right,” I said, nodding in agreement.

  Jasmine Day smiled brightly in return, revealing a dazzling array of perfectly formed, straight white teeth. “Good,” she said, “but just in case you forget, there’s one more thing I should mention.”

  “What’s that?”

  “There’s a brown belt hanging in my closet. It doesn’t have anything to do with my wardrobe.”

  It was a moment or two before her hands-off-or-else meaning soaked into my thick skull, but I finally got the picture.

  “Let’s go, then,” I said abruptly, getting up. “Our dinner reservation is for ten forty-five. The kitchen closes at eleven-thirty.”

  As we rode down in the elevator, Jasmine Day casually reached out a hand and took my arm. I suddenly felt as if I was caged up with a lioness who had momentarily sheathed her claws. It didn’t improve my already limited ability as a conversationalist.

  “So what do you do, Mr. Beaumont?” she asked.

  For whatever reason, I still didn’t want to tell her I was a cop. “I work for the city,” I hedged somewhat lamely.

  We were outside near the car by then. “You must be doing all right,” she commented, idly running a finger along the edge of the Porsche’s open sunroof while she waited for me to unlock the door.

  “Not bad,” I replied.

  It was small-talk time, and I’ve never been good at small talk. Instead, I concentrated on driving. I put the 928 through its paces, cruising down Olive and up Sixth Avenue to Aurora, skimming through traffic lights just as green turned amber.

  As we glided effortlessly up the long, steep hill on Aurora, I glanced in Jasmine Day’s direction. Her face was impassive in the intermittent glow of street lights.

  “Do you always drive this fast?” she asked.

  I eased up slightly on the accelerator. “Not always. Only when I’m nervous.”

  She laughed then, a light-hearted, breezy laugh. “So I make you nervous? That’s refreshing for a change. Most men think they’re God’s gift to women.”

  I turned off Aurora into the Canlis Restaurant’s covered portico, where valet-parking attendants were eager to assist us. Two young men in white lab coats leaped to open our doors. One relieved me of my keys in exchange for a ticket, while the other gave Jasmine Day a hand getting out of the car. I was fully conscious of the envious looks that followed us through the door.

  Once inside, we were shown to a small candlelit table next to a window. A waiter appeared almost as soon as we were seated. Cautioning us that the kitchen would be closing in less than forty-five minutes, he suggested that we order our food at the same time we ordered drinks.

  Jasmine opted for straight tonic while I asked for a MacNaughton’s and water. We ordered Canlis salad, prepared at our table, and Hawaiian grilled steaks, medium rare. When the waiter left with our order, Jasmine turned her attention to the window.

  “What’s the big black spot down there?”

  “Lake Union,” I said, looking out and down at the dark smudge of unlit water with its border of reflected lights. Off to the left we could see the northern tip of the Aurora Bridge, while in the other direction, toward the east, headlights winked across the I-5 span at the far end of the lake.

  I played tour guide. “The bridge you see way down there, the tall one, is where the freeway crosses the Montlake Cut. That leads into Lake Washington. Have you ever been in Seattle before? Do you know anything about it?”

  She turned away from the window and rested her chin on her hand, regarding me seriously. “I did a concert at the Coliseum once, back in the old days. I opened for The Living Dead. Ever hear of them?”

  I shook my head.

  “That doesn’t surprise me. The band broke up several years ago after the drummer OD’d and the lead singer got sent up for dealing.”

  The waiter returned to place our drinks in front of us. Jasmine Day remained silent until he was well out of earshot. “I guess I’m lucky that I lived long enough to grow up. A lot
of the singers and musicians I started out with didn’t make it this far.”

  I took a sip of my drink and leaned back in my chair, wondering how old she was. Thirty maybe, if that. “How did you get out of Jasper?” I asked.

  She smiled, a quick, amused smile. “I started out singing solos in the First Baptist Church when I was seven years old. I’ve got a whole flock of relatives back in Texas who’d be more than happy to tell you that it’s been all downhill ever since. They’re convinced I’m going to hell in a handbasket.”

  “Are you?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe. Anyway, Mary Lou Gibbon sang her heart out at weddings and funerals and potluck dinners and saved her money so she could get the hell out of Jasper.”

  “And you’re Mary Lou Gibbon, of course,” I said.

  “You bet. Little Miss Goody-Two-Shoes. Or at least that’s who I was supposed to be. I sang hymns in church. I taught myself rock out in the garage where nobody could hear me. When I was sixteen, I bought myself a one-way ticket to New York.”

  “And the rest is history.

  She nodded. “That’s right.”

  The waiter returned, pushing a cart with the salad ingredients carefully assembled on it. Next to a large wooden bowl lay a copy of the souvenir program from Jasmine Day’s conceit. The waiter leaned close to her.

  “Excuse me, madame,” he said apologetically, “but the woman over there wanted me to ask if you would mind autographing her program. She said they’ve just come from your show and she loved it.”

  “I’d be delighted,” Jasmine said, picking up the program. She nodded slightly in the direction of the lady three tables away, who gave her a tiny, self-conscious wave.

  The waiter handed Jasmine a pen. She thumbed through the program until she found her picture. Then, instead of signing it, she got up, walked over to the table, and chatted with her embarrassed but delighted fan. Jasmine signed her name with an expansive flourish and returned the program to its owner.

  Meanwhile, watching the transaction, I took a long pull on my MacNaughton’s and wondered what the hell I was doing there.