by J. A. Jance
“Right,” I said. “It isn’t. Now back to your wheelchair lady. You aren’t planning to write anything about her, are you?”
Our conversation was like a fast-moving game of Ping-Pong with first one player on the offensive and then the other. It was my turn to spike the ball over the net. That comment immediately put Maribeth George on the defensive.
“I was,” Maribeth said after a pause.
“Please don’t,” I said. “Not right away. If you run it prematurely, there’s a chance it could jeopardize the investigation.”
“Which one?” she asked.
I shook my head and didn’t answer. “Maybe both?” she asked. The woman was downright dangerous. “What about after you make an arrest?”
“At that point,” I said, “you’re welcome to broadcast anything you want. You’ll wait then?”
She nodded. “I suppose,” she said.
I started to walk away, then turned back to her with one last question. “There were a lot of people down at Pier Seventy yesterday morning. Why do you think the wheelchair lady picked you out of the crowd as the person to talk to—or did she talk to lots of people and you’re the only one who’s bothered to come forward?”
Maribeth shrugged and laughed a surprisingly self-deprecating laugh. “You know how it is when you’re a media babe,” she said with a grin. “Lots of people feel like they know you even though you don’t know them. I’ve been a frequent and almost daily guest in thousands of homes since I came back to Seattle last summer. She probably thinks of me as a friend of the family.”
“Media babe?” I repeated, not quite believing my ears. “I would have thought…”
Maribeth laughed aloud. When she did, I noticed that her teeth were white and straight. “That the words media babe aren’t exactly politically correct,” I added.
“You’re right,” she agreed. “They aren’t, and I’d strongly recommend against you using them in public, especially if there are female reporters anywhere within hearing distance. It’s like African Americans and the N word. When blacks use it on other blacks, they usually do so with impunity. If you or I were to use it, all hell would break loose.”
“What would happen if I called you a media babe?”
She grinned again. “You know about hell, fury, and women, don’t you?”
I’m not used to joking around with reporters, but I laughed in spite of myself. “I feel the same way about outsiders who call detectives dicks,” I told her.
“See there?” she said.
Phil Grimes disappeared into the building. We could both see that the group that had surrounded him was starting to break up. “Hey, Maribeth,” the cameraman called. “Where’d you run off to?”
“Gotta go,” she said to me. “See you around.”
She trotted off to rejoin her cameraman, and I climbed into my car. Glancing at my watch, I was surprised to see that the afternoon was half shot. It was already after three. Other than finding a second body, I had accomplished very little. I still had done nothing at all about contacting Don Wolf’s next of kin or about finding some kind of foolproof verification for Lizbeth Wolf’s I.D. Bearing all that in mind, I headed straight for the office.
On my way to my cubicle in the Public Safety Building, I had to walk directly past Sergeant Watkins’ desk.
“Wait a minute,” Watty said. “Don’t go down there without taking this with you.”
He handed me a large white envelope with D.G.I.’s return address printed in the upper right-hand corner. The words HANDLE WITH CARE—CONTAINS VIDEOTAPES had been handwritten in huge block letters across the top of the envelope. No doubt these were the tapes Deanna Compton was going to copy and send me.
Watty looked up at me and grinned. “What is it?” he asked. “One of those Blockbuster evenings?”
“Not exactly,” I told him. “I don’t think any of these will be quite that good.”
As I continued down the hallway I ripped open the envelope and shook out the contents. A typed memo fell into my hand along with the three tapes.
To: Detective J. P. Beaumont
From: Deanna Compton
Enclosed please find copies of the tapes you requested. I have cued them all to what I believe are the pertinent spots so you won’t have to go scrolling through the whole thing.
If I can be of any further assistance, please be sure to let me know.
Deanna Compton,
for Bill Whitten
For a moment, I considered calling Designer Genes International and letting Bill Whitten know what was going on, that Don Wolf’s wife was most likely dead right along with her husband. But I decided against it. Just because Audrey Cummings didn’t think Bill Whitten was capable of shooting someone didn’t mean I had to agree. As far as I was concerned, Whitten was still a suspect.
With the tapes and note still in hand, I bypassed my own office in favor of one of the small conference rooms at the end of the hall. There, I plugged the first tape into the slot of the VCR. I had a one-in-three chance of picking the right tape first time up to bat, and I won big.
True to her word, Deanna Compton had cued the tape to the right place. When the tape came on the screen, Latty and Don Wolf were standing in the elevator. Wolf was standing next to the controls, and Latty was pressed into the far corner, with as much distance between the two of them as was humanly possible in that confined space.
I watched the whole sequence. The whole time they were in the elevator they maintained an absolute silence. “One down, two to go,” I said, pulling the useless tape out of the VCR and inserting another.
The second tape was the one with the rape on it. There was no need to watch that one again. I ejected it, and inserted the third. This time, the screen held two separate, side-by-side images. Both cameras were mounted from much the same position over the front entryway door of D.G.I., but they were aimed in opposite directions. One looked out on the driveway and the busy street beyond. The other focused on the front door of the building. The readout in the corner of the screen said: DECEMBER 28, 12:06:32 A.M. That meant this was from Thursday morning, less than ten minutes after Don Wolf’s assault on the girl named Latty.
Seconds later, the elevator door opened. Latty and Don Wolf came across the lighted lobby toward the door. Wolf was still dressed in his shirt sleeves; Latty still clutched his oversized jacket around her ruined clothing.
As they came toward the lobby door, a sudden movement from the other part of the screen caught my eye. Glancing there, I expected to see the arrival of a cab. Instead, the driveway area where the cab would naturally have stopped was empty. Puzzled about the unidentified movement, I flipped the remote control to rewind.
Because I don’t watch television all that much, I’m not nearly as handy with what Heather calls clickers as Ron’s two girls are. Naturally, I overshot the mark and came to a stop with the readout showing DECEMBER 27, 11:45:50 P.M. I had rewound beyond the place where I wanted to stop by almost twenty-five minutes.
“Damn!” I muttered aloud. “Too far.”
I was about to fast-forward the tape when a car slid into the camera’s viewfinder and stopped in front of the building. The headlights went off, but no one got out. From everything Bill Whitten had said, I had assumed Don Wolf and Latty had been alone in the building, but here, only a few minutes before the two of them had appeared on the screen in Don Wolf’s office, someone else had made a midnight call on the headquarters of Designer Genes International.
Because the screen was separated into two simultaneous images, the picture on the department’s twenty-one-inch viewing screen was very small. I leaned closer, trying to ascertain what I was seeing. And when I did, I could barely believe my eyes.
The car was an older-model Crown Victoria, vintage 1988 or so. In the distorted mercury vapor lighting, the vehicle appeared to be lavender. A car that old—what used-car salesmen always call “reliable transportation”—is the kind of vehicle that blends. It’s old enough not to be out of
place in some neighborhoods and new enough to fit into others. What set this one apart, however, was the distinctive, clam-shaped attachment that had been fitted to the vehicle’s roof. I recognized it at once, because, except for the color, it was almost a carbon copy of the one on Ron Peters’ Buick.
If it weren’t for Ron, I wouldn’t have known anything at all about Braun Chair Toppers. These units, resembling old-fashioned, top-of-car luggage carriers, are specially designed for carrying wheelchairs. They come complete with motorized lifts that raise or lower chairs as needed.
I know for a fact there aren’t all that many Brauns around Seattle these days, because people who need wheelchair capability tend to go after one of those newer-model minivans—ones that come with either lifts or ramps. Ron Peters had bought the Braun after a single look at prices on the vans had thrown him into an almost terminal case of sticker shock. The Chair Topper had provided him with a relatively inexpensive way of converting his old sedan into a wheelchair-carrying mode of transportation. It had worked so well, in fact, that when his Reliant died an awful death as a result of a car chase through the Sea-Tac Airport parking garage, he was able to move the Chair Topper from the dead Reliant to its secondhand Buick replacement within a matter of days.
Seconds and minutes ticked away in real time while I continued to watch the video of the Crown Victoria parked in front of D.G.I. I desperately wanted to catch a glimpse of the person driving the wheelchair-equipped car. After all, Maribeth George had just told me that a woman in a wheelchair seemed to know a good deal about this case.
Get out, I found myself silently urging the unseen driver. Get out of the car and let me take a look at you.
But no such luck. Nobody moved. Occasionally, cars and headlights slid past on Western, but the parked car didn’t move, the doors didn’t open. Then, at exactly 12:07:00, and with no discernible warning, the headlights flashed on. The Crown Victoria pulled away from the curb, paused for several seconds, and disappeared onto Western. On the other half of the screen, Don Wolf and Latty were just emerging from the elevator. So the movement that had caught my eye had been the Crown Victoria leaving, not a cab arriving.
Moments later, two people came out through the building’s front door. They stepped out to the edge of the driveway, almost to the same spot where the Crown Victoria had been parked earlier. Latty was crying again, but as far as I could tell, no words were exchanged during the next eight minutes while they waited for the cab. They were both underdressed for the weather. Looking at the shivering, weeping girl pictured on the screen, the father part of me couldn’t help wondering where the hell she had left her damn coat.
Finally, a Yellow Cab pulled up to the curb. Naturally, Wolf darted out and opened the door. Ignoring him, Latty walked around to the other side of the cab and let herself into the car.
As I switched the tape to rewind, I felt a surge of relief. Latty had gotten into a cab that had taken her somewhere—to an address. And with an address and a description, I’d be able to learn Latty’s last name.
Now we’re getting somewhere, I told myself gleefully. Now we’re finally getting somewhere.
Eight
For several minutes after I clicked off the VCR, I sat without moving in the darkened fifth-floor conference room. I had replayed the front-entrance sequence several times. I had even played the beginning of the rape tape to double-check the exact time Don Wolf and Latty had arrived at his office.
There was no doubt in my mind that those several occurrences were somehow interrelated. The Crown Victoria had parked in front of the building about two minutes prior to Don Wolf and Latty’s appearance in his office. Assuming they had parked in the garage under the building and maybe necked a little on the way inside, then it was conceivable that whoever was at the wheel of the Victoria had followed them to the building. And the fact that the unseen driver had gunned away from the curb just as the elevator door opened meant that whoever it was hadn’t wanted to be spotted.
Now, after switching on the light, I pulled out my notebook and began to assemble a TO DO list.
Locate and notify Wolf next of kin.
Locate proper I.D. on Lizbeth Wolf.
Find Latty.
Find Wheelchair Lady.
Watch the ten o’clock news.
Rewatch the tapes on a big screen; license #???
Work on report.
Making TO DO lists is always far easier than doing TO DO lists, but I left the conference room and headed back to my cubicle to get started. My first call was to D.G.I. Bill Whitten wasn’t in, so I asked to speak to Deanna Compton.
“Detective Beaumont,” she said when I identified myself, “did you get the packet I messengered over to you?”
“Yes, thanks so much. I’ve taken a cursory look at the tapes, and I have a couple of questions for you. Does D.G.I. have any wheelchair-bound employees?”
“Wheelchair? No, none that I can think of. Why?”
“There was a car with a wheelchair rack parked in front of the building on the night Don Wolf took the girl up to his office. I was wondering if you had any idea who the vehicle might belong to and whether or not there was a legitimate reason for it to be here. For instance, could it belong to someone working on the janitorial crew?”
“If it does, I don’t know anything about it.”
“Let me ask you something else, then. On your personnel records, do you ask employees to list people who should be contacted in case of emergency?”
“Yes.”
“Could you check and see if Don Wolf listed anyone other than his wife?”
“You can’t find her?”
Time to duck and run. Right that minute I didn’t want to reveal to anyone even the most general details of the grisly remains we’d found waiting for us in Don Wolf’s condo. “Not at the moment,” I said. “I was hoping you could help me locate someone else.”
“Just a minute, please,” Deanna said. “I have his file right here.”
There was a long pause. I could hear paper shuffling on the other end while she looked through the file. “No,” she said eventually. “Lizbeth is the only one listed here.”
“I see.”
“Does it list a place of birth?”
“Tulsa, Oklahoma.”
I thought about that for a moment. Birth records generally stay put, but people don’t necessarily do the same. Trying to track down someone that way can be a time-consuming, tedious process. What I needed was a shortcut.
They say the only things in life that are certain are death and taxes. But right up there on the list, running a close third, are calls from college and university alumni associations. I think it’s virtually impossible to permanently dodge the armies of telephone-wielding fund-raisers who track their potential victims to the ends of the earth.
“Where did Don Wolf go to school?” I asked.
“His bachelor’s is from Stanford. MBA is from Harvard.”
With Deanna reading me the information, I jotted down the degrees Don Wolf had earned, his majors and minors, and the years in which the degrees were conferred. Obviously, at four o’clock in the afternoon, it was far too late to talk to anyone at Harvard. But there was a chance I could still reach someone down at Stanford.
In the past, I would have played it straight—called in, identified myself properly as a police officer, and then worked my way up the chain of command. Recently, though, my months spent in a tempestuous off-again/on-again relationship with a lady named Alexis Downey, a development officer who raises funds for the Seattle Repertory Theatre, has given me another perspective.
Alexis is an enticing handful, but she’s one of those women who, although she has a strong career track going, also has an audibly ticking biological time clock. We broke up completely when I finally convinced her that, at my stage of advancing middle age, I would never be willing to take a second crack at fatherhood. Being with Alexis has taught me a thing or two, not only about women, but also about how devious-minded and
cagey development officers can be.
Bearing that in mind, I approached the Stanford alumni office with what I knew would be irresistible bait. Once I had a likely candidate on the phone, I identified myself as Roger Philpott, an attorney with Bates, Philpott, and Orange. (I figured if I was going to try my hand at lying I could just as well have some fun with it.) I told the young woman on the phone that one of the university’s alums had died suddenly and there was a chance, if no other heirs could be located, that his entire estate would be left to the university.
“Is it a very big estate?” the young woman asked. The audible catch of excitement in her voice made me feel like a regular heel.
“It’s the biggest one I’ve ever handled,” I told her. That, at least, wasn’t a lie.
“Do you have his matriculation number?” she asked, and I knew I had her. I couldn’t provide a matric number, but I gave her everything else—the year Don Wolf graduated and the degree he’d received, and then I waited. And waited. And waited some more, listening to Muzak all the while. Finally, she came back on the phone sounding puzzled and disappointed.
“There must be some mistake,” she said. “I can’t find a Donald R. Wolf registered that year. In fact, the closest Donald Wolf I’ve found is a Donald B. who graduated in electrical engineering, but that was five years later than the date you gave me.”
“That’s strange,” I said. “Let me do some more checking and get back to you.”
I put down the phone and sat looking at it. If one statement on a job application isn’t true, chances are other things are false as well. I picked up the phone once more and redialed D.G.I.
“Do you have Don Wolf’s previous employment records?”
“I suppose,” Deanna said, sounding slightly impatient. “Just a minute.”
Again there was a period of paper shuffling before Deanna came back on the line. “Do you need complete addresses?”