by J. A. Jance
“And then what happened?”
“I had asked Virginia to speak to Don Wolf. She waited for a while for him to come back through the parking lot. When he didn’t, she finally went to check, thinking he might have left the park somewhere north of where she was waiting. That’s when she found the gun. It was right there just off the jogging path, near where Latty stood for a moment or two when she came back alone. Virginia picked up the gun, realized it had been fired, and assumed the worst.”
“That Latty had shot him?”
Grace closed her eyes and nodded.
“What happened then?”
“She went back to her car, called me on her car phone, and asked me what I wanted her to do.”
“Grace,” Suzanne Crenshaw interjected urgently. “I really think…”
“Now, Suzanne,” Grace Highsmith said, as stubborn in her own way as Latty Gibson was in hers. “Now that I’ve started, I’m going to finish. Damn the torpedoes, if you’ll excuse the expression. As soon as Virginia told me what kind of gun it was, I knew it was ours—mine. At least I was afraid it was. I needed time to think, to decide what to do. I asked Virginia to hold on to the gun and to call me again as soon as she found out for sure whether or not Don Wolf was dead. She did just exactly what I asked. She was back there on the pier when the body was found the next morning.”
“Miss Highsmith,” I said, “willfully concealing evidence in a homicide investigation constitutes a felony.”
“Oh, I know all that,” she replied airily. “That’s what I have you for, isn’t it, Suzanne?”
The attorney nodded grimly but said nothing.
“Wait a minute,” Tim Blaine said, opening his mouth for the first time in the course of the interview. “When Latty left, why didn’t Virginia Marks follow her?”
It was a good observation—one I wished I had made myself.
“I already told you. Because Virginia’s assignment that night was to talk to Don Wolf, to conclude my negotiations with him.”
“Negotiations for what?”
“To present him with my offer.”
“What offer?”
“A payoff,” Grace Highsmith said. “Or maybe it’s called a bribe. I’m not sure which is which. Whatever you want to call it, I was prepared to give the man money if he would promise to get out of Latty’s life and stay there.”
“How much money?” Tim Blaine asked.
“One hundred g’s,” Grace Highsmith said. “I believe that’s how the tough guys always say it in the movies. I’ve never been quite sure why they use that term. What does the letter g have to do with a thousand dollars?”
By then, I was a grizzled veteran of Grace Highsmith’s little surprises. Tim Blaine wasn’t. When she said that, the stunned look on his face probably wasn’t all that different from the look on mine the day before when she had dumped the .32 auto out of her purse onto the linen tablecloth in Azalea’s Fountain Court.
I could have told Grace that g refers to grand as in thousand, but I didn’t feel like making any more contributions toward her growing criminal vocabulary.
“Back to Virginia Marks for a moment,” I said. “Even after you knew Don Wolf was dead, Virginia kept working for you. Why was that?”
Grace shrugged. “By then, I assumed we needed to know everything we could about him in case Suzanne needed information on him to mount Latty’s defense. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem as though there was much to find out.”
“That’s what Virginia’s trip to California was all about?”
Grace nodded.
“Did she learn anything important?”
“Not really. I only talked to her briefly on the telephone. She said she had learned a few things, but that she’d get back to me later on today with the details. I wasn’t all that excited about it because it sounded to me as though it was mostly more of the same.”
“The same what?”
“The same old nothing,” Grace answered. “At least, nothing much. She never did have any luck tracing his background prior to his going to work for D.G.I. last June. She said it was almost like he was dropped onto this planet, fully grown and fully educated, at age thirty-two. Virginia thought maybe he might be part of the federal witness protection program.”
The slight discrepancy was so small that it almost sailed right past me without my noticing. “Wait a minute,” I said, “did you say last June?”
Grace nodded, “Yes.”
“But I thought…” The people in the shop stayed quiet while I thumbed through my notebook, looking for the notes from my interview with Bill Whitten. And once I found them, I spent more time searching through and deciphering my hasty scribbles until I found the exact reference.
“Here it is. According to what Bill Whitten told me, Don Wolf went to work for D.G.I. in early October.”
“No,” Grace said. “You’re wrong about that. I’m sure Virginia told me he started working for D.G.I. much earlier than that, way back last summer sometime. Virginia didn’t say exactly, but it sounded as though it was a consulting job of some kind. I’m sure she would have addressed that issue in her report if she’d ever had a chance to deliver it. She usually faxed me a written copy a little in advance of our face-to-face. That gave me a chance to think about it beforehand and to make note of any questions.”
Tim and I exchanged glances. Most likely, he was thinking about Virginia Marks’ missing computer. I know I was.
“But she didn’t fax you anything last night after she got back to town?”
“No. Not as far as I know. She might have. There was a whole stack of paper in the tray this morning. It looked to me like it mostly had to do with shipments to and from the shop.”
The bell over the door jangled noisily, and in walked Latty Gibson. She paused just inside the door and looked questioningly from face to face.
“Why are you still here?” she demanded, settling her gaze on me. “What’s going on?”
“We were just talking to your Aunt Grace,” I said. “We had to ask her some questions as well.”
“Are you done now?”
Tim was already on his way to the door. “Yes,” he said. “Now that you mention it, I think we are pretty much finished, aren’t we, Detective Beaumont?”
“Evidently,” I said dryly.
Nodding to each of the ladies in turn, I followed Detective Blaine out into the street. “Isn’t she something!” Tim Blaine was saying as I caught up with him.
“I’ll say,” I agreed. “I’ve only known her for two days, but I can tell you that Grace Highsmith is full of surprises.”
“I wasn’t talking about Grace,” he said. “I mean Latty. She’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met. How could that son of a bitch do that to her! I swear, if he weren’t dead already…”
As I said before, the late Don Wolf was amazingly unlamented. Even people who never met him were glad he was dead. It should have been enough to give the guy a complex. “You and everybody else,” I said.
“I believe somebody’s out to get her,” Tim continued. “They’re trying to frame her. Maybe Virginia Marks was even in on it. That business with her finding the gun is just too much of a coincidence.”
Cops aren’t ever supposed to mix business with pleasure. With good reason. The people who turn up involved in homicide cases—suspects and witnesses alike—are supposed to be off limits, especially when it comes to romantic entanglements. The prohibition makes perfect sense. Once an investigator has a personal connection to someone involved in the case, his perspective and judgment both become clouded, and his impartiality flies right out the window.
Assuming the mantle of wise old man, I made a futile attempt to give Tim Blaine the benefit of my own hard-won experience. When I set out to pop his romantic bubble, I was speaking from the unenviable position of first-hand experience. Of being able to say, “Do as I say, not as I do.” After all, years ago, when I fell for one of my own prime suspects, that relationship had come within inche
s of being fatal—for both of us.
“Tim,” I said, “would you mind if I gave you a word of advice?”
“What’s that?” he asked.
“Forget about Latty Gibson, at least for the time being.”
“Forget about her? Are you kidding?”
“No,” I said. “I’m not kidding at all. I’m as serious as I can be. And I’m telling you this for your own good.”
Our eyes met for a moment as we stood there on that sunlit sidewalk. “I’ll take it under advisement,” he agreed grudgingly. “But I’m not making any promises.”
He turned toward his Ford, reached down, and wrenched open the door. “See you around,” he added, before climbing in and slamming the door shut behind him.
In other words, “Screw you!” As I watched him drive away, I realized I had never told him about the real implications of Latty leaving her coat with the gun in it somewhere on the premises of D.G.I. That was all right, though. Blaine was a Bellevue police officer, and Bill Whitten was in Seattle.
The day before, Captain Powell had threatened to add more personnel to the case if, after twenty-four hours, Kramer, Arnold, and I weren’t making measurable progress. As far as I could tell, we weren’t. That meant that if Powell had carried through on his promise to increase the body count, we’d be able to draft someone to go to D.G.I. and collect the missing coat.
Tossing Don Wolf’s jacket over my shoulder, I crossed the street to my own car. At three o’clock in the afternoon, there was already a traffic jam on Main Street in Old Bellevue. With the interview over, I reached down to check my pager. I wasn’t particularly concerned when I realized it wasn’t there on my belt where it belonged. I reasoned that I had probably left it on the bathroom counter earlier when I stripped out of my clothes for that quick shower. But that was no great loss. If people who knew me were trying to reach me, they were probably used to the idea that I didn’t return calls instantly.
As I waited for my turn to go play in the gridlock, I checked the recall button on my cell phone. Naturally, there was a call.
At first, I thought my caller might be Ralph, but when I tried reaching him at Belltown Terrace, there was no answer. Next, I checked in with the department.
“Sergeant Watkins here,” Watty said, answering his phone.
“Did Kramer ever show up?” I asked.
“As a matter of fact, he did. But before I put him through to you, I’ve got a bone to pick with you, Detective Beaumont. Where’s your pager?”
“Oops,” I said, hoping this sounded like news to me. “It’s not here. I must have misplaced it.”
“Right,” Watty answered. “You win the booby prize. And I just happen to know where you left it.”
“Where?”
“A housekeeper found it at the Silver Cloud Motel over there in Bellevue. I told her to leave it at the desk, that you’d come by and pick it up. At least it was on. I checked with the person who called.”
“Look, Watty,” I said, hoping to mollify the man. “I’m just a couple of minutes from there right now. I’ll go straight over and pick it up.”
“And if I were you, in the future, I’d be a whole lot less careless with departmental equipment. Now, do you still want to talk to Detective Kramer?”
“No, thanks,” I said. “Not necessary. I’ll see him when I get back down there. Tell him I’m on my way.”
“Oh, one more thing,” Watty said, before I could hang up. “Lori’s looking for you.”
“Lori?”
“You know, Lori Yamaguchi, who works in the latent fingerprint lab. She didn’t say what she wanted, but she said to have you come see her as soon as you’re back downtown.”
“I’ll go right away,” I said.
“But not until after you retrieve your pager.”
“I wouldn’t think of it,” I said.
I gave a generous tip to the desk clerk at the Silver Cloud who handed over the pager, and I left an equally hefty one for the housekeeper who had found it. Unwittingly, those two people had saved my life. If I had lost the pager for good, both Sergeant Watkins and Captain Powell would have had my ass.
Twenty-five minutes later, with Don Wolf’s jacket still slung over my arm, I was standing leaning against the counter in the reception area of King County’s Fingerprint Lab. When the receptionist told me Lori was on the phone, I told her I’d wait, and helped myself to a chair. Sitting there waiting and with nothing in particular to do, I picked up the jacket and started going through the pockets.
One pocket after another yielded nothing but pocket lint. Until I reached the last one, the lower inside pocket. There, tucked into smooth lining, was a single tiny scrap of paper that had been folded once, twice, and yet again into a tiny square no bigger than a respectable spitwad. When I unfolded it, the resulting piece of paper was no bigger than an inch square. The printed message on the paper was equally tiny.
“Donnie,” it said, “see you at the apartment at six.” It was signed with the initials, “D.C.” A heart had been drawn around the outside of the two letters and a whimsical pair of happy faces had been made of the insides of both letters.
I studied the note for sometime. D.C. Who’s D.C.? I wondered. And then it hit me. D.C.—Deanna Compton. Bill Whitten’s secretary!
“Detective Beaumont?”
I looked up. Lori Yamaguchi was smiling at me in a way that said she had spoken to me more than once without my hearing.
“Yes? Oh, hello, Lori. Sorry I didn’t hear you. I was thinking about something else.” Carefully, I refolded the piece of paper and dropped it inside my shirt pocket. “What’s up?”
“We got a hit on those fingerprints of yours, the ones Audrey Cummings sent over.”
I stood up and tried to seem less disorganized and distracted than I felt. “Really? That was just a shot in the dark. What kind of hit?” I asked.
“Not just one,” Lori added. “There are seven in all.”
“Seven,” I echoed.
“That’s right,” she said. “It turns out, your dead guy is a probable serial rapist with a trail of unsolved attacks in jurisdictions all over California. Same M.O. each time. He’d make an appointment with a real estate agent to go look at houses, and then…”
“Rape them?”
“Right. There might very well be more than just the seven,” Lori said. “It could be the same thing happened in other places and that one way or another they didn’t end up in the data bank.”
“But who is he?” I asked.
Lori looked at me blankly. “What do you mean, who is he?” she asked. “Don Wolf, of course. Since you were the detective on the case, I figured you already knew his name. Audrey Cummings said—”
“That’s all you have on him then?” I interrupted. “No arrests, no prior convictions?”
Right that minute, I didn’t attempt to explain to Lori Yamaguchi that as far as anyone else had been able to discover, the guy named Don Wolf had no known history prior to his sudden appearance in Lizbeth Dorn’s life down in California some months earlier.
“Nothing. If there had been, I should have been able to find some record of it. I suppose it’s possible that he fell through a crack somewhere along the line and his prints just didn’t get entered into the AFIS computer. That automated fingerprints identification system is expensive and time-consuming, you know.”
Lori was justifiably proud of her work, of having made the vital connection. No doubt she expected me to be either more grateful or else more impressed. Maybe both. But at the moment, that folded piece of paper with Deanna Compton’s damning initials on it was burning a hole in my shirt pocket. Somebody else besides Latty Gibson had maybe been messing around with Don Wolf, and I wanted to pay her a visit.
“Look, Lori,” I said. “Thanks a whole bunch. Don’t think I’m not appreciative, because I am. I owe you lunch. No, more than that, I owe you dinner. But right now, I’ve got to go. Send me a detailed report on all this, would you?”
“You don’t owe me anything, Detective Beaumont,” she said, as I gathered up Don Wolf’s jacket and headed for the door. “I was just doing my job.”
With a quick wave over my shoulder, I darted out the door, realizing as I went that it’s people like Lori Yamaguchi who, as opposed to the Hilda Chisholms of the world, give a whole different meaning to the word bureaucrat.
Twenty
My mother always used to say, “A wise man changes his mind. A fool never does.”
I had told Watty I was on my way back to the department. And I meant to go straight there. I even made it as far as the Third Avenue lobby of the Public Safety Building. But as I stood there waiting for a fully-loaded, rush-hour elevator to disgorge its mass of humanity, I was puzzling over what implications Deanna Compton’s note might have for the cases I was investigating.
I kept remembering the Deanna Compton I had met two days earlier at Designer Genes International. She had seemed suitably startled when Bill Whitten delivered news of Don Wolf’s death, but she had handled the resultant requests for information in a coolly efficient, businesslike fashion. I could recall nothing at all in her demeanor that would have indicated anything more than a business-colleague relationship with the dead man. That meant one of two things. Either Deanna Compton wasn’t the D.C. in question, or, if she was, she had gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal any kind of inappropriate reaction to the news from me and from her boss, Bill Whitten.
What I needed to do was find some way to verify whether or not Deanna Compton and D.C. were one and the same. That was where my thought process stood when an elevator finally arrived and its door opened. And by the time the last of the passengers filed off and dodged past those of us waiting in the crowded lobby to get on, I realized that I had in my possession a tool that might make that verification possible: the videotapes—Bill Whitten’s security tapes. If the surveillance camera switched on whenever someone had walked into Don Wolf’s office, then Deanna Compton was bound to have made an appearance somewhere on the footage that was still in my den. If I could show a picture of Deanna Compton to Jack Braman, manager of the Lake View Condominiums…