Taking the Fifth (9780061760891)

by Jance, Judith A.

  “I have to talk to you,” I said.

  “Get out.”

  “Jasmine, it’s important,” I insisted.

  She jerked up the zipper on the jumpsuit and turned toward me; she moved toward me, her body wound tight, like a panther preparing to spring.

  I crouched, ready to defend myself. “Don’t try it,” I warned her. “I know those moves too.”

  “You son of a bitch, I said get out!” She spat out the words, anger seething in every syllable.

  “Jasmine, I’ve got to talk to you. Someone’s trying to pin two murders on you.”

  “I’ll give you two guesses who that might be, and he’s standing right here in this room. You’ve got two murders now? You must have been busy today. You’ve added another one since I talked to you this afternoon.”

  “Lisen to me, please.”

  “I won’t listen to you. You’ve done enough already. You’ve wrecked the tour. No one will touch me now that Westcoast’s been burned. I’m finished, washed up. Are you happy?”

  “No, I’m not happy, Jasmine. Who’s after you?”

  “What do you mean, who’s after me? Why should I care who they hire next?”

  “I’m not talking about the tour. Who’s got a grudge against you? Who would be out to get you?”

  “No one.”

  “Somebody is. Think for a minute. Any old boyfriends hanging around, maybe somebody with a jealous wife?”

  “I already told you. I don’t know of anybody like that.”

  At least she was listening to me now, answering my questions. I had finally gotten her attention, even though she continued dressing. “Do you remember when one of your costumes was stolen, that first night here, while they were doing the load-in?”

  She nodded. “What about it?”

  “We found it tonight, in a dumpster at Dan Osgood’s house.”

  “What does that mean? I don’t understand.”

  “You remember Dan Osgood?” She nodded. “What do you know about him?” I continued.

  Jasmine looked at me and made a face. “You mean other than the fact that he set me up with you?” Her voice dripped with sarcasm.

  “He’s done a hell of a lot more than that,” I told her. “From what we’ve been able to noodle out so far, he wore your costume later on that night when he met Richard Dathan Morris down by the market. Osgood probably killed Morris first, then he went to Morris’s house and killed his roommate.”

  Jasmine looked dazed, puzzled. “He murdered them while he was wearing my clothes?”

  “That’s right. So it would look like you did it.”

  “But isn’t that the costume they said Morris stole? If he took it, why was somebody else wearing it?”

  “I don’t have an answer for that yet. Have you had any problems with anyone working on the show, Jasmine? Alan Dale, for example, or Ed Waverly?”

  She shook her head. “No. None at all.”

  I went back to a question I had asked her before, hoping this time I’d get a better answer. “You’re sure there aren’t any extracurricular activities that might be causing difficulty, like with wives or girlfriends?”

  “No.”

  “What about the guys with the comp tickets?”

  Her mouth hardened when she answered, but I couldn’t help the way my mind worked. “No,” she said coldly.

  “By the way, is anyone using those tickets tonight?”

  “Someone’s there, but I told Ed I was finished. If the tour’s over, so’s the public-relations campaign.”

  “Did you see Dan Osgood here at all today?”

  “I tried calling him from the hotel, but they said he wasn’t in yet. When I got here, I couldn’t find him.”

  “What did you need him for?”

  “I wanted to give him a piece of my mind.” She shook her head. “I don’t believe any of this. It doesn’t make sense. What’s going on?”

  “Drugs,” I answered. “Drugs are what’s going on. I think Morris stumbled onto what is evidently a major cocaine network. They took him out before he could do anything about it.”

  She finished lacing the first boot and stared at me in disbelief. “What kind of network?”

  “A distribution network, Jasmine. Sales. In a big way. And I think they’ve been using your tour as a front.”

  “My tour? Using me and my name to sell drugs?”

  At my nod, her face went rigid. “And because of my past, you assumed…”

  “It was more than just your past that suckered me in. They’ve gone to great lengths to make it look as if you were personally involved in the murders.”

  She stepped toward me with the limping gait of someone with one shoe off and one on. She stopped only inches from my face. “You said ‘to make it look like.’ Does that mean you no longer suspect me?”

  “Of the murders? No, I don’t.”

  “What about the drugs?”

  “The jury’s still out on that.”

  Her face went stony and she swung away from me. She snatched up the waiting boot and jerked it onto her foot.

  There was a knock on the door. “Five minutes, Miss Day.”

  “Leave me alone,” she said wearily. “Just go away and leave me alone. I’ve got a show to put on.”

  When she bent over to slip on the second boot, the neckline of the jumpsuit fell open, offering a brief glimpse of what lay underneath. A glimpse and a reminder.

  “Jasmine, let me help you. Let’s try to get to the bottom of this together.”

  Her fingers were busy lacing the boot. She didn’t look up at me. “Fat chance,” she said. “You’ve helped me enough already. Ed told me from the beginning that if there was any trouble, it would be my ass.”

  She finished with the boot and straightened up abruptly, but she didn’t look in my direction as she stalked over to the dressing table and picked up a pot of makeup. With a practiced hand she began to touch up her face. When she finished, she set the makeup back on the counter, her eyes defiantly meeting and holding mine in the reflection in her mirror.

  There was another knock on the door. “Curtain, Miss Day.”

  She stood up. “I’d better go,” she said.

  “I have a witness who says the killer let himself into the Morris-Thomas house with a key to the front door. I’m willing to bet the key to that house is here, either in your dressing room or your purse, or in your hotel room.”

  Without a word, Jasmine opened a wire drawer underneath the Formica top of the dressing table and pulled out a small, white, beaded clutch bag. She unsnapped the top and held the purse upside down above the table.

  A collection of junk tumbled out of it onto the counter. There were several tubes of lipstick, some unidentified makeup containers, a nail file, a hodgepodge of loose change, an open checkbook with some paper money visible inside it, a few slightly used tissues, and a collection of credit-card receipts. There were also some keys, a single hotel room key along with two other separate key rings.

  She looked down at the pile and frowned. “That’s not mine,” she said.

  “What’s not yours?”

  She started to reach for one of the two key rings, a chain with a Greenpeace Save-the-Whales charm on it. I caught her hand in midair.

  “Don’t touch it,” I commanded.

  For a moment our eyes met. Then she nodded quietly and allowed her hand to drop to her side.

  There was another urgent pounding on the door. “Jasmine, where the hell are you?” Alan Dale shouted. “It’s time. You’re on.”

  “I’m coming,” she answered. She started for the door.

  “Break a leg,” I told her.

  She stopped, her hand on the knob, and turned to look at me. All the anger and rage had drained from her face. She gave me a wan imitation of a smile.

  “Are you going to come watch?” she asked. “Since it’s my farewell performance, I plan to put on one hell of a show.”

  “I’d like to,” I said. “If you don’t min
d.”

  She grinned, ruefully. “I don’t mind.”

  Jasmine Day opened the door then. The members of the orchestra were fidgeting with their instruments, tuning them, checking them out, making noise to cover the fact that the second act was slow in starting.

  I watched as she took a deep breath and squared those slender shoulders. She did a final check, her hands smoothing the material of her jumpsuit, patting the wig to be sure it was in place, straightening her collar.

  She seemed to grow taller as she stood there, becoming somehow more imposing. Westcoast Starlight Productions might have canceled the tour, but there was no doubt in my mind that Jasmine Day was every inch a star. I watched her go, striding with feline grace toward the piano I knew waited for her on the other side of the stage.

  Using my own keys as a lever, I turned the Greenpeace charm over. On the back of it was Richard Dathan Morris’s name and phone number. I located an evidence bag in my inside jacket pocket and stuck the key chain in that. If there were any prints on the keys, I didn’t want to risk ruining them by carrying the key chain around unprotected. I was just finishing shoving the contents of Jasmine’s purse back where they had come from when Alan Dale bounded into the room.

  “She said you were here. You’ve got more nerve than a bad tooth! There’s a phone call for you, asshole. Take it and then get the fuck out of here before I clean your clock.”

  With that, he grabbed the purse out of my hand, tossed it onto the counter, then turned and stomped out of the dressing room. I followed him back to the side of the stage where, next to the curtain pulls, a wall-mounted phone showed a blinking line on hold. I picked up the receiver.

  “Hello.”

  “Detective Beaumont?” a woman’s voice asked. She sounded relieved.

  “Yes.”

  “Just a minute. Let me put Ron on the phone.”

  There was a momentary shuffling and then I heard Peters say, “Thanks, Amy. Beau?”

  “Yeah. I’m here.”

  “I’ve been calling all over town looking for you. Have you heard the news?”

  “What news?”

  “The DEA made a major drug bust in L.A. this afternoon.”

  “So?”

  “At Westcoast Starlight Productions.”

  “No shit!”

  “They arrested fourteen people at the corporate headquarters, and the news broadcast says they have warrants out for at least sixteen more. Evidently they have people scattered all over the country. KIRO Radio did a news flash here about half an hour ago. Somebody must have tumbled to the fact that Jasmine Day’s show is a Westcoast production.”

  “I’m a son of a bitch,” I said.

  On stage, the orchestra was beginning the second-act overture. Alan Dale came up to me. “Get off the phone,” he said. “You can’t talk here when the show starts.”

  “I’ve gotta go, Peters,” I said. “Intermission’s over. Thanks for the tip.”

  I put the phone down. Alan Dale was in the process of herding me down the steps when we both heard raised voices coming from the dressing-room area behind the stage. The head carpenter’s concern for maintaining silence on the stage overcame his eagerness to run me off. He turned toward the noise, and I followed him.

  Big Bertha Harris, a fat pit bull of a woman, was standing in front of the dressing-room, barring the way of two well-dressed men who towered over her.

  “No way are you going in there,” she was saying. “I don’t care who you are.”

  “Hey, you guys,” Alan Dale called. “Knock off the noise. The show’s started.”

  They all three turned to look at us. I recognized one of the two men right away. He was Roger Glancy, agent of the day for the DEA.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  Glancy looked surprised to see me. “I could ask you the same thing. We’ve come to arrest Jasmine Day.”

  “You what?” Alan Dale exploded. He moved toward Glancy and attempted to bring a haymaker up from the floor. I caught Dale’s arm in midswing and pulled him back.

  Glancy regarded the head carpenter warily. “Who’s this?” he asked. “We’ve got warrants for Jasmine Day, Dan Osgood, and Ed Waverly.”

  Dale shook his arm loose from my hand. Without another word, he stalked away from us.

  “His name’s Alan Dale,” I told Glancy. “He’s the head carpenter.”

  “Let him alone, then,” Glancy said. “He’s not on the list.”

  Glancy turned his attention back to Big Bertha. “We’ve got a search warrant here. Now, either you get out of the way, or we’ll move you out of the way.”

  Silently Bertha stepped to one side. She had heard enough. She wasn’t fighting anymore. Glancy motioned the other man into the dressing rooms.

  “You guys are a little late in making your move, aren’t you?” I asked. “My partner just called. He says it’s already been on TV.”

  Glancy nodded grimly. “Nobody’s been able to raise Wainwright on his pager. He may be up in his plane and out of range. We were supposed to be here by six, but it was after seven when L.A. finally reached me. It took time for me to get the local warrants signed.”

  “Goddamn it! There goes the son of a bitch again!” I heard Alan Dale’s oath and looked in his direction. He was frantically motioning several stagehands to follow him onto the stage where the band shell was sitting. It had stopped halfway down the stage and halfway into its turn.

  With the orchestra continuing to play, Alan Dale, Ray Holman, and the rest hurried onto the stage and muscled the heavy piece of equipment into position. From the wings I watched while Jasmine, already draped on the piano and bathed in the spotlight, waited silently for them to finish.

  When the broken band shell was finally facing the audience, the conductor give a slight nod in the direction of the piano player and Jasmine Day. She nodded back in acknowledgment.

  The first number was “Sophisticated Lady.” I don’t think I had ever heard the lyrics to that song before, but I did then. That night, every nuance of disillusionment and hurt was clear to me as Jasmine Day sang her heart out. She was that sophisticated lady, mourning for what was lost—not a man, but a dream.

  As far as I knew, no one had told her that Roger Glancy was waiting in the wings with a warrant for her arrest. But she sang as if she knew he was there, as if it was all over and this was her last chance to take wing with an audience. She cast a spell with her music, one that held me enchanted, watching and listening.

  Roger Glancy, however, was evidently immune to her magic. Halfway through the second number, he tugged at my sleeve and motioned me toward the dressing room. “Detective Beaumont,” he whispered. “You’d better come take a look at this.”

  CHAPTER 21

  IN JASMINE’S DRESSING ROOM A HUGE trunk stood empty, its contents spilled carelessly on the floor. I was sure it hadn’t been there the night before when I was in the dressing room. It probably had been there while I was talking with Jasmine earlier, during the intermission, but I didn’t remember it. My mind had been occupied with other issues.

  Glancy urged me forward, and I walked over to the trunk and looked inside. A false bottom had been removed and stood leaning against the outside of the trunk. At first glance, the bottom surface seemed to be covered with clear plastic. Only a closer examination revealed that it was really plastic-covered white bricks that filled the entire bottom surface of the trunk. White bricks of cocaine, no doubt, packed in so tightly that a dime couldn’t be shoved into the cracks between them.

  “They’re three deep,” the other DEA agent was saying to Roger Glancy. “I’d say there’s at least a million dollars’ worth right here.”

  The third man hurried into the room. “We’ve got Waverly,” he announced. “We picked him up out in the lobby, but there’s no sign of Osgood anywhere. I understand he never showed up for work today.”

  Glancy nodded. “Okay, keep Waverly under wraps in one of the dressing rooms.”

  “Seat
tle P.D. has already issued an APB on Osgood,” I told them. “We want him too. We’ve checked the airport and his house, but so far there’s no sign of him.”

  Glancy turned back to his men. “Leave two people with Waverly and have the others block every possible exit.” He turned to the agent who had searched the dressing room. “Okay, Dick, you go to the other side of the stage and wait there. I’ll be on this side. Let’s just make damned sure she doesn’t slip through our fingers.”

  “Right,” Dick answered, melting through the door.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. Glancy paused and looked at me. He must have thought I was talking to him, but I was actually speaking to Big Bertha, who had followed us into the dressing room and stopped right inside the door.

  “Where’d this trunk come from? It wasn’t here last night.”

  Bertha struggled to find words. Her chest was heaving as though she couldn’t quite catch her breath. I was afraid she was having a heart attack. “They usually put it in the dressing room during the final performance. That way we can start the load-out as soon as the show is over.”

  “And where was it when it wasn’t in the dressing room?” I asked.

  She pointed. “Out there in the common room.”

  “Locked?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is this Jasmine’s private trunk?”

  “No one on this show has a private trunk,” Bertha declared.

  I turned to Glancy. “It isn’t Jasmine’s trunk,” I said.

  He glared at me. “So what does that prove? It’s in her dressing room now, isn’t it? Her name was on the door when we came in.”

  “Somebody’s been trying to frame her,” I said. “I’m convinced of it.”

  Glancy looked at me and shook his head. “You may be convinced of it, pal, but I’m not. And the judge who signed this warrant isn’t either. She’s in it up to her eyeballs.”

  “Yes, but…” I began.

  “No buts, Detective Beaumont. We’re arresting the little lady the moment she sets foot off stage.”

  With that, Glancy walked out of the room, leaving me alone with Big Bertha. “Who has a key to this dressing room?” I asked.