by J. A. Jance
She giggled. “You’ve already shown me your view. We were here last Sunday afternoon, remember?”
“Maybe so,” he replied, “but it’s so much better at night. Come on.”
The move toward the window took them off at an angle and outside camera range. For a moment, the tape was quiet while neither Don Wolf nor the girl made a sound.
“Notice anything different about the room?” Bill Whitten asked.
With people out of the picture, the view of the room was essentially the same as I had seen earlier from the doorway of Don Wolf’s office—a shot showing the backs of the two captain’s chairs facing the desk, the desk itself, and the credenza beyond it.
“Well?” Bill Whitten asked me impatiently. “Do you see it or not?”
As I tried to see what he meant, Latty was murmuring, “I see what you mean—it is very beautiful, especially with all the lights on in the buildings. It looks…”
Her voice faded away, muffled by what sounded like a kiss. An interval of impassioned necking followed. Trying to ignore the panting and the breathless moans, I continued to study the room, trying to find whatever it was that Bill Whitten’s question implied was out of place. It took a while, but finally I spotted it.
“His wife’s picture is missing.”
“That’s right,” Whitten returned. “I have that on film, too, by the way. Don put it away in the top drawer of his credenza on Wednesday afternoon, just before he left work. That proves he must have been planning to bring her here all along.”
“It doesn’t prove anything,” I corrected, “although it may suggest that he was planning to bring someone here with him.”
By now, the necking had escalated into a series of sexually aroused groans and whispers. I’m no Peeping Tom. Listening to or even watching somebody else make out isn’t my idea of a good time.
“Look,” I said impatiently. “Is there any point to all this?”
“Just wait,” Bill Whitten replied. “You’ll see.”
Latty suddenly reappeared on the screen. Her lipstick was smeared, her hair in disarray. “Donnie, we’ve got to stop now while we still can,” she said breathlessly.
“But I want you.”
“I know you do. And I want you, too. But not like this. I already told you that, and we agreed. Let’s quit now, please,” she begged. “Take me home before we end up doing something we’ll both regret.”
Don Wolf followed Latty into camera range, his arms outstretched. “Oh, baby, don’t do this to me. Don’t tell me to stop, not now. Please. Just let me hold you.”
Trying to pat her hair back in place, she slipped away from him and headed for the door. Don Wolf caught her by one arm and yanked her back to him.
“Ouch!” she cried out in surprise. “Donnie, that hurt. Let me go!”
But he gave no sign of having heard. “Please, baby,” he murmured again, clasping her in his arms and pressing her against his chest. “Please don’t leave me like this. I want you so much it hurts—so much that it’s driving me crazy. I want—”
“No!” she said firmly, placing both hands on his shoulders and bodily prying herself away from him. “Let’s don’t get carried away. I don’t—”
A demanding kiss cut off Latty’s objection in midsentence. Don’s encircling arms tightened around her once more, pinioning her against him. When she struggled to get loose, the two of them weaved back and forth, swaying jerkily like a pair of awkward dancers.
“Please, Don, don’t,” she said again, once she finally succeeded in freeing her lips from his. “That’s enough now. No more.”
There was a clear note of annoyance in her objection, but no alarm, no panic. Not yet, although there certainly should have been.
“Don!” This objection was firmer than the previous one, but she still wasn’t actually fighting him. “Donnie, what are you doing? Stop it!”
But he didn’t stop. Catching her off balance, Wolf effortlessly shoved Latty backward between the two captain’s chairs in front of the desk. Latty’s backward movement stopped abruptly when her hip slammed into the edge of the desk behind her. Yelping in pain, she sank back against the desk, trying to steady herself while at the same time attempting to separate herself from Don Wolf’s overpowering embrace.
For a moment, it almost worked. In fact, he seemed to back off. He thrust her away from him. Further unbalanced by this unexpected shove, Latty fell back on the surface of the desk with a head-cracking thump. As she fell, he reached out and caught the bodice of her dress in one knotty fist. What followed was a terrible rip as the fragile material tore down the middle.
“Don!” she shrieked. “What have you done to my dress?”
I found myself gripping the arms of my chair. I felt like I did when I was a terrified little kid, sitting in a darkened theater next to my mother, watching Snow White about to take a bite of that terrible poisoned apple.
Don’t take it, don’t take it! I had willed silently to the lovely cartoon figure on the screen, while my tiny fingers had clutched the sticky armrests in helpless desperation. But no amount of little-boy urging had saved Snow White from her fate back then. And now, my adult gut-wrenching horror did nothing to save Latty from what was coming.
Don Wolf fell on her like an enraged beast, slapping her into submission, tearing off her panty hose and panties, prying her flailing legs apart with his body. Crying out, she squirmed and fought beneath him, but the smooth, polished wood of the desk worked against her. She could gain no purchase. There was no escape. Don Wolf was stronger than she was.
When it was all over, when Latty lay nearly naked and sobbing on the desk, the indifferent caption on the screen said 12:01. The entire incident, from beginning to end, had taken less than fifteen minutes.
It seemed much longer.
Five
My collar was too tight. There wasn’t enough air to breathe in Bill Whitten’s darkened office. “Damn!” I said. “What a good-for-nothing shit!”
“Pretty rough, isn’t it,” Whitten said.
I had seen worse, but still…“Is that it?” I asked.
Whitten shook his head. “No, wait.”
“You mean there’s more?”
Back on the screen, Latty was sobbing and struggling to sit up. “I’m going to leave now,” she gasped. Her lower lip was bleeding and starting to swell.
“Oh, my God, Latty,” Don Wolf said, as though waking from a stupor at the sight of the blood. “What have I done?”
He reached out one hand as if to help her. She cringed away from him. “Don’t touch me,” she screeched. “Get away.”
“But, baby,” he whined. “Please. I never meant to hurt you, I swear. I just got carried away and—”
“Shut up!” she hissed furiously. “I’m going to walk out of here and you’re not going to stop me.”
“Latty, I can’t believe I did this to you. I’m sorry, so sorry. Please don’t go. Please say you’ll forgive me.”
“I’m going to walk out,” Latty continued, as if he hadn’t said a word. She stumbled to her feet. When she did so, her torn dress fell away from her body. She grabbed the frayed edges of material and tried to hold them together. Swaying unsteadily on her feet, she finally located her shoes and slipped them on. Then she reached out, snagged Don Wolf’s jacket off the desk, and wrapped it around her shoulders. I could see the reflexive chattering of her teeth, but somehow, she wasn’t crying any longer. In fact, considering what had just happened, she seemed astoundingly calm. And cold sober.
By then, Don Wolf had moved across the room so he was standing between her and the door; between her and the lens of the camera as well. He was tucking in his shirt, zipping his pants.
“Don’t go, Latty. Not like this.”
“Call me a cab,” she returned doggedly.
“I’ll take you home, Latty. I promise I won’t touch you again. Honest.”
He moved toward her, but she recoiled, stopping only when the desk was safely interposed between
them.
“I told you, don’t touch me! Don’t you ever come near me again!” she commanded. “Call a cab.”
Shrugging, he picked up the phone and punched out a number from memory. “My name’s Don Wolf,” he said. “I need a cab at thirty-three hundred Western.” He waited for a moment, listening. “That’s right,” he said. “It’s an office building, not an apartment. Just pull up by the front door. We’ll be waiting in the lobby.”
He put down the phone. “The cab should be here within fifteen minutes.”
“I’ll be waiting in the lobby,” Latty corrected, struggling to keep her voice under control. “You stay right here until after I’ve gone.”
“But Latty,” he objected, “I—”
“Just shut up!” she seethed. “Don’t you say another word. I never want to hear your voice again, not ever!”
“But I have to ride downstairs with you,” Don wheedled, sounding both apologetic and conciliatory. “The elevator is locked. You need me to run the keypad.”
Sometimes, in situations like that, in the minutes after something awful happens, anger is the only force capable of holding hysterics at bay. Or maybe anger is just another form of hysterics—one that allows people to function for a time before they fall apart. I wondered how long Latty’s anger would carry her.
Wolf stepped aside, clearing a path to the office door. Latty stood leaning against the desk, seeming to gather strength even as she clutched Don Wolf’s oversized jacket closed around her. Finally, she straightened and lurched toward the door. I know it was only an illusion of camera placement, but for a disconcerting second as she moved forward, she seemed to be looking directly into my eyes. The girl on the screen was a pale ghost of the one who had entered laughing minutes before. In the course of those few brutal minutes, something in Latty’s carefree spirit had been shattered, possibly forever. Her face was frozen into a hollow mask; her eyes, empty. The desolation written there almost broke my heart.
Just inside the door she paused and moved to one side. “If you have to run the elevator, you go first. But if you touch me again, I swear to God I’ll kill you.”
“I won’t,” Don Wolf agreed instantly. “Not ever. I promise.”
He moved toward the door as well, buckling his belt as he walked. He stopped just within camera range and turned to look around the room. Maybe he was checking to see if anything was out of place. Nothing was. When he turned back to the doorway, there was the damnedest smirk on his face. The son of a bitch looked as though he was proud of himself.
That single passing glimpse, captured for all time on Bill Whitten’s hidden camera, made me want to puke. As a homicide cop, I’m haunted by murder victims. Finding the killers and bringing them to justice becomes a holy crusade. Right then, however, with Don Wolf’s smirk still lingering in the air, I had the sense that justice had already been served. Someone had taken care of Don Wolf. In the process, his killer had saved the state of Washington a considerable amount of time, trouble, and expense.
“I told you he wasn’t a nice guy,” Bill Whitten said.
Bill Whitten was obviously a master in the art of understatement. The security system on screen switched off the light. Shadowy darkness returned to the screen, everywhere but in the caption box in the bottom left-hand corner. There the stark white letters read: DECEMBER 28, 12:04:20 A.M.
Whitten switched off the VCR. “So do you want a copy or not?” he asked.
Unaware that I had been holding my breath, I let it out. I may have been short on motivation for finding Wolf’s killer, but my duty was nonetheless clear. “Yes,” I said.
From an evidence standpoint, the tape meant nothing. In order for a recording to stand up in a court of law, at least one of the people being recorded must have given permission. Otherwise, the recording constitutes an illegal wiretap, information from which is generally inadmissible. I was relatively sure neither Don Wolf nor Latty had any knowledge as to the camera’s existence, so neither of them could be deemed to have given consent.
Right at that moment, however, I was looking for probable cause rather than a conviction. In showing probable cause, the rules are a little less stringent.
“You’ll most likely want to see these other two tapes as well,” Whitten added, jerking his head in the direction of the other two plastic holders Deanna Compton had placed on his desk. “I’ll have those copied at the same time.”
“What are they? Don’t tell me he did it again,” I said.
Bill Whitten shook his head. “I figured you’d want to see them just for the sake of completeness,” he replied. “One is from the ride down in the elevator. The other is from the cameras stationed outside the front entrance of the building. He sent her home in a Yellow Cab, by the way.”
“What about New Year’s Eve? Was he working that night?”
“He was for a while, up until around eleven.”
“Doing what?” I asked.
“Who knows?” Whitten shrugged. “Getting ready to chop me off at the knees, I imagine.”
In response to Bill Whitten’s keyboard commands, the TV monitor slid back into the cabinet, the doors in front of it closed, and the blinds opened, filling the room with the unexpected light of watery, midwinter sunshine. Watching this process I remembered what Whitten had said to me earlier, in the car, about him being a prime suspect.
“Is there any truth in Don Wolf’s charges?” I asked. “That you were diverting funds?”
Whitten’s somber gaze met mine across a vast expanse of polished desk. “There are diversions and then there are diversions,” he said.
“In the event of an independent audit of the company books, do you think you’d be exonerated?”
“That depends on the CPA,” Whitten answered casually, but not quite casually enough. Something in the way he looked at me—the tiniest flicker of an eyelid perhaps, put me on edge and on point. Before I could say anything further, however, he reached out and tapped the keyboard once more, unlocking the door to his office. He immediately pushed a button on his phone.
“Yes, Mr. Whitten?”
“Deanna, I need you to make copies of these three tapes for Detective Beaumont. He’ll need them as soon as possible.”
“I may not be able to do that until after lunch,” she said.
Whitten glanced at me. “Do you want to wait?” he asked. “Or would you rather have them delivered later on today?”
I checked my watch. The morning was already almost gone, and I had barely made a start. “It might be better to have them delivered.”
Whitten spoke back into the intercom. “Whenever you get around to it will be fine,” he said. Then he turned his attention on me. “I suppose you’ll need to see both his apartment and his car, won’t you?”
“Yes, but—”
He punched the intercom again. “Deanna, you’ll also need to call the manager over at Lake View. Even though you can’t tell Jack Braman what’s happening, you can let him know that Detective Beaumont will be stopping by. Jack should let him into the apartment. We’ll fax written permission if he needs it. And call the dealer on the car lease and see if he can make arrangements for a duplicate key on Don’s Intrepid.”
“Right away,” Deanna answered.
“Why is it you have access to Don Wolf’s apartment?” I asked.
“D.G.I. owns it,” Whitten replied. “Don leased it from the company temporarily in order to facilitate his move up from California. Lake View is on Lake Union, just south of the Fremont Bridge. Do you know where that is?”
“I can find it. Now about these tapes…”
“Yes?”
“If the taping was done without consent, and if word about them gets out, you could end up having an invasion-of-privacy problem on your hands.”
“With the girl?”
“Possibly.”
Whitten shrugged. “I guess we’ll just have to cross that bridge when we come to it. I look at it this way: With Don Wolf dead, sooner or later you’d
come looking for me because of what was going on between the two of us. If nothing else, the tape shows that I’m not the only one who had a problem with good ol’ Mr. Don Wolf. I may be a good solid suspect, but at least I’m not the only one.”
I did my job then—the job I’m paid to do. Even though my motivation was lacking, even though Don Wolf wasn’t a prince among men, I was still obligated to investigate his murder. As I pulled out my low-tech notebook and pencil, I glanced back over my shoulder toward what I was sure was a dummy thermostat near the door.
“Are we being taped?” I asked.
Whitten grinned. “We could be if you want to be.”
“No, thanks,” I said. “I’ll pass.”
I spent the next hour asking Bill Whitten all the customary questions: about where Don Wolf had come from prior to joining D.G.I.; about how long he had been there; and about exactly what were his duties and responsibilities. As Whitten and I talked, there was one thing I couldn’t quite understand, one thing that didn’t really add up. Bill Whitten was the founder of D.G.I. Everything I had seen and heard led me to think he was the brains behind the whole operation. Why, then, would he have been so spooked by the arrival of Don Wolf, a Johnny-come-lately?
The only thing I could figure was that there must have been some merit to Don Wolf’s charges of fiscal irresponsibility. Diversions, as Whitten had called them. And if a company-owned condo on Lake Union was part of D.G.I.’s “research” holdings, then the late and unlamented Don Wolf may have had a point. But rather than bearding the lion in his den, I made up my mind to check with Audrey Cummings. Since she had obviously known the man on sight, she might also know some of the side issues that would help me make sense of what was going on with D.G.I.
When I had dredged everything I could out of Bill Whitten, I left his office and stopped by Deanna Compton’s desk, where she had evidently handled everything.
“The tapes still aren’t ready,” she said. “The car dealer is sending a messenger over with a key, and the manager at Lake View is expecting you to drop by a little later. Just buzz the manager’s number, and he’ll let you in. Now, is there anything else?”