Name Withheld

by J. A. Jance

  She smiled. “You tell me.”

  “Are you suggesting that I’m some kind of dirty old man and that I’m interested in the girls for some kind of immoral purpose?”

  Hilda Chisholm raised an eyebrow. “Aren’t you?” she returned.

  Calmly, she removed a notebook from her briefcase and thumbed it open. “For starters,” she said, “let me ask you this, Mr. Beaumont. Did you or did you not pay money—your own personal money—to fund a good deal of the mission that sent Constance Peters to Central America three and a half years ago?”

  “She was Roslyn Peters then,” I told her. “And that was a contribution. A charitable contribution.”

  “I’m sure it was,” Hilda smiled again. “Arranged by a man named Ralph Ames, I believe. Who exactly is he?”

  “Ralph? He’s my attorney.”

  “Your personal attorney?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you keep him on retainer?”

  “Yes.”

  “And why would an ordinary homicide detective need to have a personal attorney on retainer?”

  “My reasons for having an attorney on retainer are none of your business, Ms. Chisholm. Although they could be. I’m sure Ralph would be more than happy to help me take you to court. Defamation of character is no joke, and I’m not going to take it lying down. And based on that, I think you’d better leave.”

  It took every bit of self-restraint I could muster to keep from leaping out of the recliner and simply throttling the woman on the spot.

  Hilda Chisholm, however, made no move to leave. “But, Mr. Beaumont,” she said, “I was sure you’d want to give me your side of the story.”

  “No,” I returned, “I don’t think so. I’m not going to dignify this ridiculous process by according it the benefit of two sides. In addition, as long as I have an attorney available to protect my interests, I don’t intend to say another word to you until he is present.”

  “Your insisting on the presence of an attorney indicates a certain reluctance on your part, Mr. Beaumont. An unwillingness to cooperate. It makes it sound as though you have something to hide.”

  “I’m a police officer,” I reminded her. “You’re accusing me of a serious crime—a felony. Not having my attorney present at the time of questioning is a violation of my constitutional rights.”

  “This is simply an informal inquiry,” she said.

  “Like hell it is,” I retorted. “Now get out of here.”

  “Very well, Mr. Beaumont,” she said, carefully returning her notebook to the briefcase and closing the lock with a sharp snap. “But I will have to say in my report that you were uncooperative and abusive. Cursing is considered abusive, you know.”

  “You can put any damned thing you want to in your report, but only if you’re out of my apartment within the next thirty seconds. Otherwise, you’ll be writing that report with two broken arms.”

  “And I’ll have to report that as a threat,” she responded.

  “No, Madame Chisholm,” I said, “that was no threat. It’s a goddamned promise!”

  She retreated as far as the doorway before she paused long enough to deliver her parting shot. “I suppose you know Captain Freeman?”

  “Tony Freeman, of Internal Investigations?”

  “Yes, that’s the one. I have an appointment to discuss this matter with him tomorrow morning at nine o’clock. I expect he’ll be taking some action pending the outcome of my investigation, of course.”

  Thankfully, she left then. And it’s a good thing, too. If she had stayed one second longer, there’s a good possibility I might have done something I would have regretted for the rest of my life.

  Fifteen

  I brooded over Hilda Chisholm’s visit all the way to Bellevue. Once there, I found my way to the Grove on Twelfth. Following Virginia Marks’ directions, I parked beneath the building in a spot designated VISITOR. Then I locked the door to the Porsche and walked over to the elevator. There, almost on top of the elevator, sat the powder-blue Crown Victoria complete with its Braun Chair Topper. At least she’s here, I thought.

  After consulting the listing next to the door, I punched the proper number into the security phone and waited for her phone to ring. It did. Several times. On about the sixth ring, the same old voice mail recording I had heard before came on once again, inviting me to leave a message at the sound of the tone.

  I didn’t want to leave a message. I wanted to talk to this woman in person. And for good reason. Virginia Marks, a detective who certainly should have known better, had nonetheless conspired with Grace Highsmith to conceal evidence in a homicide investigation. To my way of thinking, not only did I have a reason to talk to Virginia Marks; I also had a scheduled appointment, so she, by God, owed me the common courtesy of answering her goddamned door. A glance at my watch told me I was five minutes early. Still, my old door-to-door-salesman instincts were already sending me the message that I was about to be stood up.

  For a few minutes, I stayed where I was, standing next to the security phone and the elevator door. Three residents came by and let themselves into the locked elevator with keys. The last one, an elderly gentleman, gave me a particularly questioning look. “Can I help you with something?” he asked.

  “It’s all right,” I said vaguely. “I’m just waiting for someone.”

  Rather than continue standing there looking like an idiot, I retreated to the Porsche. Five minutes passed; fifteen; then twenty. Every five minutes or so, I would climb out of the car, walk over to the phone, and dial her up again. Each time when there was no answer in Virginia Marks’ apartment, I let it get to me that much more.

  I say it, but I’m not talking about just one it. That it was all-encompassing—including everything and nothing. It was Virginia Marks for messing with the evidence and then standing me up when I knew damned good and well she was up in her apartment and simply not answering her phone. It was Karen Beaumont Livingston for having the bad manners to up and die on me. It was a pushy bureaucrat named Hilda Chisholm for accusing me of being a goddamned child molester. It was Grace Highsmith for being a dotty little old lady who carried a gun in her purse that turned out to be a damned murder weapon. And for Paul Kramer for being a gossipy, loose-mouthed son of a bitch.

  All of those things taken together added up to quite a load.

  Half an hour went by; thirty-five minutes; forty. I was still getting in and out of the car every five minutes to check on my appointment, and every five minutes, there still wasn’t any answer. Finally, all those its became too much. Too damned much!

  There were tools I could have used if I had wanted to avail myself of them. My cellular phone was right there in the car. My AA sponsor, Lars Jenssen, was literally only a phone call away. But I didn’t care, and I didn’t call.

  Around ten or so, cold and disgusted, I decided to go somewhere and buy myself a cup of coffee, because by then, I had made up my mind that no matter how long it took, I was going to wait out Virginia Marks. I was far too stubborn to give up and go home. I had an appointment, by God, and I wasn’t leaving before Virginia Marks shaped up and answered her phone. And since I was right there practically in the middle of downtown Bellevue, I decided to walk to wherever I was going to get that cup of coffee.

  Bad decision.

  There was a bank on the corner of Twelfth and Bellevue Way, and a strip shopping mall of some kind beyond that. But the very next place on the left-hand side of the street was a restaurant—one of those barbecued-rib joints. Drawn by the warm aroma of meat cooked over an open flame, I stepped inside.

  Compared to outside, the restaurant was warm and inviting. A young, smiling hostess hurried to the front podium to inform me that the kitchen was just closing. “That’s all right,” I said, “all I want is a cup of coffee.”

  “In that case,” she said, “would you mind sitting at the bar?”

  “Not at all,” I answered. “No problem.”

  I grabbed a stool at the near end of t
he bar, and there on the counter right in front of me, as if it were fate itself, I saw an old, dear friend of mine—a bottle of MacNaughton’s.

  “Did I hear you say coffee?” the bartender asked, hurrying toward me.

  “No,” I said, “I changed my mind. Give me a Mac and water.”

  And that was all there was to it. No drumrolls. No lightning flashes, just, Give me a Mac and water. The bartender who served it up to me was totally innocent of any wrongdoing. He had no way of knowing that this was my first drink in over two years.

  In zoos you always see signs that say, DO NOT FEED THE ANIMALS. Maybe alcoholics should all be required to wear tattoos that say, NO BOOZE, PLEASE. I AM A DRUNK.

  In Alcoholics Anonymous, I’ve often heard stories about people plotting out a game plan for falling off the wagon—planning the where, why, and when of it in great gory detail and well in advance of the actual event. For me, there was no planning. Until I saw the bottle of MacNaughton’s sitting there on the counter staring back at me, I hadn’t realized I wanted a drink—hadn’t anticipated having one or even thought about it much. But when that first taste of booze touched my tongue—when that first long gulp of alcohol blasted into my long-sober system, it tasted great.

  For the first half hour or so, I was on top of the world. Invincible. Nothing at all mattered. Nothing, including the fact that I hadn’t had a bite to eat in more than ten hours.

  “Ready for another?” the bartender asked sometime later.

  That, of course, was the critical moment. If I could have walked away from the second drink, even more so than the first, I might have been all right. But it turns out that I’m an alcoholic. Saying no wasn’t an option.

  “Sure,” I said, shoving my empty glass across the bar. “Why the hell not?”

  By the end of the second drink, all the other things I had been worrying about and agonizing over disappeared off the face of the earth. They simply went away. I have no idea how many drinks I drank, because I don’t remember much after I watched with grave interest while the bartender poured my third.

  During most of my adult life, I prided myself on my tolerance for booze. When it came to drinking somebody under the table, I was usually the last man left standing in any given room. Maybe, without my noticing, that legendary tolerance may have been dropping some before I ever went into treatment. Inarguably, between then and the time I took that first drink in Bellevue, somebody pulled a dirty trick on me. It turns out that I couldn’t hold my liquor anymore, not worth a tinker’s damn.

  From the time I took the first sip of the third drink to the time I woke up in what turned out to be the Silver Cloud Motel just up the street, I don’t remember a thing—not a damned thing. And when I did wake up—when I finally came to my senses and opened my aching eyes—I wished I hadn’t, because I was sick as a dog—more hung over than I’ve ever been in my whole life. Barely able to stand, I lurched into the bathroom and barfed my guts into the toilet.

  Then, as I staggered back to bed, I realized that midnight had come and gone without my ever calling Dave Livingston down in Rancho Cucamonga the way he’d asked me to. Once again, I’d screwed up and let my family down. As usual.

  Filled with revulsion and self-loathing, I looked at my watch. It said it was eight o’clock in the morning on Thursday, January 4. I was lying stark naked on the bed of a strange motel room with no knowledge of how or when I’d come to be there. The only thing I did know for sure was that since it was eight A.M., I was now late for work.

  Slowly and shakily, feeling like an old man, I showered and managed to clamber back into my stinky clothing. Aware that I was checking out of the place without benefit of luggage, I felt like an errant schoolboy when I walked up to the desk in the lobby.

  “Why, good morning, Mr. Beaumont,” a cheery young female desk clerk said to me, looking at the number on my key and comparing it to the name on her computer screen. “I hope you slept well.”

  “Oh, yes,” I stammered, hoping I sounded more convincing than I felt or looked. “It was fine.” I glanced outside, but there was no sign of a parking lot in front of the motel.

  “Can I help you with something?” the young woman behind the desk wanted to know.

  Embarrassed, my ears turned red. “I seem to have misplaced the parking lot,” I said.

  She smiled tolerantly, as though having overnight guests lose the parking lot was a commonplace occurrence. “It’s around back,” she said.

  “Thanks.”

  I found the lot with no further difficulty, but my Guards Red Porsche wasn’t there, either. Not only had I misplaced the parking lot, I had also lost my car.

  I walked back to the front of the motel. I was standing there looking blankly to the right and left, up and down Twelfth, trying to figure out what the hell to do next, when a Bellevue city cop came steaming by in a black-and-white, lights flashing and siren screeching. When he jammed on his brakes, skidded, and slowed, and then bounced into the parking garage underneath the Grove on Twelfth, I suddenly remembered very clearly exactly where I had left my missing 928.

  About that time, a second cop car came screaming by and turned into the Grove’s garage entrance, exactly the same way the first one had. As soon as the second patrol car disappeared into the building, I started getting a very bad feeling in the pit of my stomach—a feeling that had nothing whatever to do with the fact that I was as blindly hungover as I had ever been in my life.

  I started toward the street just as a third squad car barreled down Bellevue Way and turned in on Twelfth, cutting across a double yellow line and through cars stopped in the left-turn lane. With a final squawk of the siren, that car, too, rocketed into the Grove’s underground parking.

  One cop car is bad. Two are worse. Three in a row means very bad news for someone. And somehow, I knew that one of those someones was going to be me.

  Call it instinct, call it fate, or say that I’ve been in this business far too many years, but long before I jaywalked across the street at midblock, I knew that Virginia Marks was dead. Drunk or sober, there are some things longtime homicide detectives simply don’t have to be told.

  Walking into another guy’s deal is always a tough call. That’s especially true when you’re not on your home turf, when you’re hungover as hell, and when you’re dragging around in yesterday’s wrinkled, smelly clothing.

  Halfway down the garage I could see the top of Virginia Marks’ powder-blue wheelchair carrier towering over the roofs of other nearby vehicles. Just inside the garage entrance, a young, uniformed police officer headed me off at the pass.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” he said. “There’s been a problem in the building. We’re not letting anyone inside just now.”

  Shaking my head, I flipped open my I.D. “I’m a fellow police officer,” I said. “Seattle P.D. I’m concerned that whatever has happened here may have something to do with a case I’m currently working on.”

  The young officer checked over my I.D., looked at me questioningly, shrugged, and then said, “Do you mind waiting here while I check with my sergeant?”

  “Go right ahead.”

  A call on the officer’s radio brought a sergeant on the double. He emerged from the same elevator where I had spent so much time waiting for Virginia Marks to answer her phone the night before. Looking anything but friendly, the sergeant hustled across the floor of the garage to the entrance where his conscientious young patrol officer was still barring my way.

  “Detective Beaumont?” he asked. I nodded. “I’m Sergeant Orting. We’re investigating a possible homicide. Officer Ryland here tells me you think our case may have something to do with one of yours?”

  Orting hadn’t stopped until he was almost on top of me. When he did, he was close enough that he evidently got a good whiff of my breath, which must have still smelled like the dregs in the bottom of a whiskey barrel. Frowning, he stepped back out of harm’s way while the expression on his face gave a whole new meaning to the words Give a guy som
e breathing room.

  I stepped back, too. “Two cases actually,” I said, “but it depends on who’s dead.”

  Orting crossed his arms and looked even less affable than he had before. “Supposing you tell me.”

  “Virginia Marks?” I asked.

  “How is it you’d just happen to know that?”

  “Lucky guess?” I returned.

  Orting shook his head. “Try again.”

  “I had an appointment to see Virginia Marks last night, but she never showed.”

  “What time?”

  “Nine o’clock. I waited around until almost ten. When she still hadn’t buzzed me in, I finally gave it up as a lost cause.”

  As we talked, Orting and I had started walking toward the elevator. We were almost there when the door opened and three men came out. Plainclothes or not, two of them had the unmistakable look of homicide detectives on the job. The third was the elderly gentleman who had questioned my presence in the garage the night before. Talking animatedly and waving his hands for emphasis, he was right in the middle of a sentence when he saw me and stopped short.

  “That’s him,” he said, pointing directly at me. “That’s the guy I was telling you about, the one who was hanging around down here in the garage right around nine o’clock.”

  “This is Detective Beaumont,” Orting said, short-circuiting the necessity of an instant replay of his own set of questions. “He’s with Seattle P.D. He claims he had an appointment with Virginia Marks last night regarding some cases he’s working on, but that she stood him up. This is Detective Tim Blaine and Detective Dave Dawson.”

  While Orting answered the question, I pulled out a pair of business cards and gave one to each of the Bellevue detectives.

  “But I’m telling you, this was the guy,” the man was insisting, practically jumping up and down. “I knew from the way he was skulking around that he was trouble.”

  The guy was like a broken record, and he kept right on, hammering away in that same vein. Meanwhile, one of the cops, after examining my card, reached out and shook my hand. “I’m Detective Blaine,” he said. “What is it you’re working on?”