Name Withheld

by J. A. Jance

  “Why, to Don Wolf’s murder, of course,” Grace Highsmith said with a smile. “It was premeditated, you see. I planned it well in advance.”

  Suzanne Crenshaw’s jaw dropped. “Grace!” she exclaimed. “You can’t say that.”

  “I most certainly can,” Grace Highsmith replied archly. “Detective Beaumont hasn’t read me my rights yet. As long as that’s the case, I can say anything I please.”

  Twelve

  While Suzanne Crenshaw stared daggers in my direction, the waiter, with his continuing knack for perfect timing, returned once again.

  “Have something nice, Suzanne,” Miss Highsmith advised. “I ordered the grilled cheese because it happens to be my favorite. And since this may be my last meal on the outside, I’m going to have some dessert. You go ahead and have whatever you want. It’s my treat.”

  Suzanne perused the menu and settled on the grilled salmon, a mixed greens salad, and a flute of the free champagne. Once the waiter left with her order, Suzanne stood up. “Come with me, Grace,” she said. “I believe we both need to go powder our noses.”

  Grace started to object, then didn’t. The two women went off to the rest room together. When they returned, Grace was as sprightly as ever, while a tight-lipped Suzanne Crenshaw was even more grim.

  “You can read me my rights now, Detective Beaumont,” she commanded. “Let’s get on with it.”

  Obligingly, I pulled out my handy-dandy pocket cheat sheet and read Grace Highsmith her rights. The lack of privacy in the room disturbed me enough that I flubbed one or two of the familiar lines. That was no problem, however, since Grace knew the whole routine by heart and was able to prompt me with the correct verbiage whenever necessary.

  When we finished with that, she gave me another cheery smile while I returned the card to my wallet. “That wasn’t so bad now, was it, Detective Beaumont?”

  Doggedly self-conscious, I dragged my scruffy notebook and ratty pencil out of my pocket. Miss Highsmith frowned disapprovingly.

  “You mean you aren’t going to tape-record my confession? I thought all police officers carried those cute little miniature recorders.”

  “We usually record confessions down at the department, so they can be properly transcribed and signed at a later time. At this point, I merely want to ask a few questions.”

  “I see,” Grace sniffed. “I suppose you’ll do that after you take me in. I thought we’d be going straight to the confession right now. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have bothered dragging Suzanne away from her office.”

  Suzanne Crenshaw’s mixed greens salad arrived at the table. “Well,” Grace Highsmith urged the moment our waiter’s back was turned, “let’s get on with it.”

  “Where do you live?” I asked.

  “I have a little place up above Juanita, just down the hill from Juanita Drive,” she said. “It was our family’s summer place when I was a little girl. Now I live there full time.”

  Over a forkful of salad, Suzanne Crenshaw sent me a withering look. “Miss Highsmith’s home is on Holmes Point Drive on the shores of Lake Washington, between Champagne Point and Denny Park,” the attorney said.

  The way Suzanne made that pronouncement implied that Grace Highsmith’s Holmes Point Drive address alone should have commanded considerable respect from a lowlife homicide cop. I didn’t really need Suzanne Crenshaw’s help in that regard. I had pretty well figured out on my own that the lady seated in the booth next to me was an old-school, old-guard, old-money, and thoroughly remarkable woman.

  “And what exactly was your relationship to Don Wolf?”

  “Mine?” Grace hooted. “Good gracious! How can you even ask such a dull-witted question, Detective Beaumont. Of course, I had no relationship with that…” She paused, groping for a word. “That…slimeball…is that the proper term, Suzanne?”

  Chewing her salad greens, Suzanne Crenshaw simply nodded.

  “Slimeball of a man,” Grace finished.

  “How did you know him then?”

  “I didn’t know him,” Grace corrected firmly. “I knew of him. I only saw him in person that one time down near Pier Seventy, and that was certainly enough.”

  “What about his wife?” I asked.

  “Once again,” Grace Highsmith replied. “I know about Lizbeth Wolf, but of course, I’ve never met her in person.”

  “Never?”

  “Never.”

  “Let’s go back to what you said about seeing Don Wolf.”

  Grace’s unblinking gaze met and held mine. “What about it?”

  “When was that exactly?”

  “Why, when I killed him, of course,” Grace Highsmith snapped. “Don’t be coy, Detective Beaumont. It doesn’t become you.”

  Convinced that every ear in the room had to be trained on the conversation at our table and wondering how all this would play in local newspapers, I backed off a little. “Maybe you could tell me what brought Don Wolf to your attention.”

  “Latty, of course. My niece.”

  “What’s Latty’s full name?”

  Grace glanced at Suzanne. “Do I have to answer that?”

  Suzanne Crenshaw grimaced and then nodded her head. “Look,” she said. “As you know, this entire meeting is in direct opposition to my best advice. But since you’re obviously determined to go through with it, Grace, you’d better go ahead and answer.”

  “Sibyl Latona,” Grace said. “I think you’ll agree that’s a perfectly awful name! Her mother—my actual niece, and a disagreeable one at that—was a Greek and Roman mythology major at the University of Washington back in the late sixties before she dropped out of school. She’s the one who stuck that poor little baby girl with such a ridiculous handle. Sibyl alone would have been bad enough. Latona has to do with a goddess who changed men into frogs or some such women’s lib nonsense. Latty’s grandmother—my sister—and I were the ones who shortened it to Latty. That’s unusual, too, but at least it’s something a person can live with. Life can be very tough on children with unusual names.”

  Having grown up bearing the onus of an unusual name myself—Jonas Piedmont Beaumont—I felt more sympathy for somebody stuck with a name like Sybil Latona than Grace Highsmith could possibly have realized.

  “What’s Latty’s last name?” I asked.

  “Gibson,” Grace answered.

  “And where does she live?”

  “Over the shop,” Grace said. “There’s a little apartment up there. It’s not very posh, but after all those years of living in a bus, Latty is very appreciative of even the most primitive accommodations. At least this has indoor plumbing, which is more than you can say about what she lived in before.”

  “A bus?” I asked.

  “Abigail Gibson, Latty’s mother, is something of a free spirit,” Suzanne Crenshaw put in helpfully. “Latty’s younger years were spent as a vagabond. She grew up being shuttled all over North America in a converted school bus which Abby insisted on driving back and forth from Alaska to Mexico City.”

  “Where did Latty go to school?” I asked.

  “She didn’t,” Grace answered shortly. “Abby home-schooled the poor child. My niece was a very early advocate of that, although the term home schooling would seem to imply having a proper home in which to do it. For my money, a converted school bus doesn’t qualify.”

  “I see,” I said.

  Grace eyed me speculatively. “Do you, Detective Beaumont?” Then she shook her head. “No, I don’t believe you do. You can’t possibly. Schooling requires a whole lot more than just learning vocabulary words and rules of punctuation. Real education is far more complicated than that. It’s where children hone their communication skills. It’s where they learn the rules of socialization. It introduces them to the real world. My niece, Abigail, tripped out early and hasn’t touched down on the real world in years.”

  “Drugs?”

  “I’m sure there were drugs early on, of course. Now Abby’s just evolved into one of those permanent kooks. She’s tota
lly irresponsible. She’s never worked a day in her life. She lives off her trust fund, and still has friends with one-word names like Moonbeam or Rainbow.”

  Suddenly, reflected in Grace Highsmith’s straight-backed disapproval, I caught a glimpse of generations of Highsmith familial warfare in which rebellious daughters were evidently the rule rather than the exception. If Grace and her sister’s generation had given rise to permanent hippies, Latty Gibson would turn against her own upbringing and evolve into an ultra-right-wing, conservative, card-carrying Republican.

  “As I said,” Grace continued, “Latty never attended a regular school. As a consequence, she’s grown up lacking the most rudimentary skills for getting along with other people. Not surprisingly, she sees herself as the consummate outsider. Now that she’s older, I’ve been trying, in some small way, to give her the opportunity to see and experience how normal people live. Have you ever met my niece, Detective Beaumont? Latty, I mean.”

  I shook my head. Seeing Latty Gibson in Bill Whitten’s surveillance video didn’t count as an official introduction.

  “She’s a very beautiful young woman,” Grace said. “And I’m not just saying that because she’s my niece. She’s lovely, but I don’t think that fact has ever dawned on her. When Abby became pregnant with Latty, back in the early seventies, she absolutely refused to marry the young man who was the baby’s father. Why she found him so repugnant, I’ll never know. He’s done all right for himself. He went on to become a very successful lawyer down in California. Now he’s a judge on the California State Court of Appeals. And he paid child support the whole time, although Abby never told Latty any of that. She made him out to be a complete monster which, I suppose, is typical.

  “Anyway, growing up in that kind of an atmosphere, with only sporadic influence from sensible people like her grandmother—Florence died several years ago—or me, you can imagine that Latty is quite confused when it comes to members of the opposite sex.”

  “And that’s where Don Wolf comes in?”

  “It certainly is,” Grace said.

  Raising a discreet finger, she signaled for yet another flute of champagne. In all my years of being a cop, I don’t think I’ve ever conducted an interview in quite such elegant surroundings or with quite so much bubbly. Champagne and homicide interrogations don’t generally go hand in hand.

  “Latty met him at one of those dance clubs downtown someplace just a few weeks ago. Right before Thanksgiving. As soon as she told me about him—you have to understand that Latty tells me things that she’d never dream of telling her mother—as soon as she told me about him, I knew it was serious. There are telltale signs you see, if you just know what to look for. A funny little glow young women get about them when they’re falling in love for the first or second time. I noticed it right away—the glow, I mean. The upturned corners of her mouth. And, of course, he was all she could talk about for days on end. She told me that he was as serious about her as she was about him, that he wanted a relationship.

  “I understand that word—relationship—is very big now,” Grace added with a thoughtful frown. “In my day, girls didn’t want a relationship; they wanted a wedding band. The really sensible ones still do.”

  “Let’s go back to Don Wolf for a minute,” I interjected, but I could just as well have saved my breath. Once Grace Highsmith launched herself into her story, nothing anyone else said could sidetrack her.

  “Years ago, I told Abby that I was leaving everything I own to charity—to Children’s Hospital. That is no longer true, of course. Since Latty came back to Seattle late last summer, I’ve reconsidered that position. The poor girl wasn’t born with a silver spoon in her mouth, although she certainly could have been. And due to the haphazard way she’s been raised, she didn’t have the advantage of a real education, either. I’ve been encouraging her to take courses at Bellevue Community College and that kind of thing. I picked up Dorene’s when a friend of mine retired due to ill-health. I’ve worked there part of the time because it’s fun and because I enjoy it. But I’m letting Latty manage it for me to give her a little on-the-job training in the world of business.”

  “About Don Wolf…” I hinted.

  “Oh, yes. I do tend to ramble a bit now and then. According to my will as it is currently written, Latty will be my sole beneficiary. That includes paying those ridiculous amounts Suzanne tells me are so-called generation-skipping taxes. That being the case—Latty being my sole heir, I mean—I was interested in learning more about this Don Wolf character. Latty kept hinting that she thought he was wonderful husband material, and I didn’t want her marrying some gigolo.

  “As far as I could tell, however, there were several bad signs. I knew he was new to town and quite a bit older than she was, so I did the only sensible thing—”

  “And hired a private detective,” I finished.

  This time, Grace Highsmith’s smile was nothing short of glowing. “Why, Detective Beaumont, how in the world did you know that?”

  “I am a detective, too, remember?”

  Grace laughed. “Why, yes, I suppose you are. Well, Virginia Marks comes from a longtime Eastside family. Her grandparents’ place was just down the road from ours—from our summer cabin, that is. Back then, the Marks family was fairly well to do, but then they ran into some bad investments and had to sell out far too early to reap the kind of financial benefit that would have been possible only a few years later. Both Virginia’s parents died while she was fairly young, and so she and her brother have pretty much had to shift for themselves. That’s not all that bad. Working is good for you, don’t you think?”

  I nodded and then attempted to steer things back to the question at hand. “So you hired Virginia Marks to do a background check on Don Wolf. Then what happened? Did she discover anything important?”

  Grace Highsmith didn’t answer immediately. While she seemed to struggle with indecision, Suzanne Crenshaw reached out and grasped the older woman’s forearm. “Grace, if you’ve changed your mind…”

  “No, thank you, Suzanne,” Grace managed. “I’ll be fine in a minute. It’s just terribly difficult, you know. Terribly difficult.”

  She took a deep breath and looked at me. “Don Wolf raped my niece, Detective Beaumont. It happened last Wednesday night, around midnight, in his office in downtown Seattle.”

  “How did you find out about it?” I asked.

  “Latty told me, but I would have known even if she hadn’t. Virginia was following them that night, and she saw them coming out of the building afterward. Latty was crying. Her clothes had been torn to shreds. From the way Latty looked as they came out of the building, Virginia deduced what had happened. She reported the incident to me, and I asked Latty about it the next day. I told you before, my niece is quite incapable of lying. That’s another thing Abby never taught her—the art of telling a plausible fib when necessary. So she admitted the whole thing, even though it broke her heart to have to do it.”

  “What happened next?”

  “What do you suppose? I had my detective find out where that low-down worm would be and when I could catch him unawares. Then I went down to the shop, took the gun out of the drawer where we keep it—for protection, you see. And after that, I took care of him.”

  By then, Suzanne was shaking her head in obvious despair. “Grace, please…” she objected, but Grace ignored her completely.

  “Where did you find him?”

  “I had told Latty not to see him again, but she made arrangements to meet him down in Myrtle Edwards Park at eleven-thirty on New Year’s Eve. I followed Latty there, and when she left him alone, I shot him.”

  “Where?”

  “In the park. I already told you.”

  “Where exactly did you shoot him? In the face? The chest? The back of the neck?”

  “Does that matter?” Grace Highsmith asked. For the first time she looked slightly flustered.

  “Actually, it does. Especially in a confession.”

  Grac
e frowned. “I’m afraid I don’t remember exactly. I must have been too upset at the time.”

  That was the moment when, as far as Grace Highsmith’s so-called “confession” was concerned, the whole thing fell apart. In twenty-plus years of being a cop, I’ve been compelled to use deadly force on occasion. Each and every time, I’ve been what Miss Highsmith would have termed “upset,” but I’ve never had the good fortune of forgetting even one incident. I remember them all—in vivid, bloody color and in heart-stopping detail.

  Instead of mentioning that, I patted the pocket in which I had deposited the Seecamp. “Where did you get the gun, Miss Highsmith? I happen to know this particular weapon is very popular, and there’s a minimum of a year-long wait to purchase one of these new from the factory.”

  “That I simply won’t tell you,” Grace declared. “A gentleman friend of mine gave it to me, and I’m not about to involve him in this tawdry business. He’s a very nice man and doesn’t deserve to have his name dragged through the mud.”

  By then, Suzanne had eaten her way through the grilled salmon. The waiter took her empty plate and then stopped by with a fully loaded dessert tray. It contained the usual things one expects to find in a place like that—fresh mandarin orange sorbet, double chocolate cheese cake with a Bailey’s Irish Cream mousse, a coconut mousse tart, and a caramel apple cake.

  Suzanne took the chocolate mousse. When the waiter looked at me, I started to shake my head. “Oh, please join us for dessert at least,” Grace insisted. “You must have something. It’ll do you a world of good. Try the cake. It’s my absolute favorite. That’s what I’m having, along with a cup of decaf.”

  I’m a sucker for anything with caramel on it, so I knuckled under. “All right,” I said.

  When the cake came, it was nothing short of delectable. The single layer of rich, moist cake was covered by a caramel sauce and topped by a dollop of whipped cream. Grace Highsmith broke off a tiny forkful and put it in her mouth. As she did so, her eyes misted over for the first time.