Damage Control

by Robert Dugoni

  “Are you Detective Logan?”

  Logan had not seen the man come in the front door and deduced that he had entered near the oyster bar. His head was enormous, even for his considerable girth. With a flat nose, prominent ears, and a receding hairline, he looked like a large sow in a suit.

  “Yes,” Logan said.

  The man motioned to the restaurant. “I have a table at a booth in the back.” Logan followed him through the restaurant, which was in full lunch swing. Waiters in long white aprons and black ties dodged one another, carrying plates of calamari and oysters. Logan detected the smell of butter and garlic. It made his mouth water. The man climbed stairs to an elevated seating area and slid into a booth. He picked up a drink that looked like Scotch and took a drink. The ice rattled in the glass—the man’s hands were shaking. Logan hung his coat on a hook outside the booth and slid in the opposite side, watching as the man combed at imaginary hair on the front of his head, pressing down the few strands remaining. His scalp glistened with beads of perspiration. Logan didn’t want to rush the man, but he had a feeling that nothing would get said unless he started.

  “You indicated on your message that you might know Laurence King?”

  The man shook his head. “No.” He took another drink from the glass, finishing it and leaving the ice. “I didn’t know the name until I read it in the paper.” Again he paused. “I might know something about who killed him … maybe … I don’t know.”

  Logan nodded, patient. “Why don’t you tell me what you know?”

  The man leaned across the table, lowering his head. “This has got to be in confidence. It has to be confidential. Anonymous. You know? I work over at the Federal Building as a clerk for an administrative judge.”

  “I understand,” Logan said, making no promises.

  The man sat back, his face flushed. “I’m married. I have a wife and three daughters. I’m a lector in the parish, and I’m on the PTA board at my kids’ school,” he added as if making a list. “I can’t be a part of this. I can’t testify or anything.”

  Again Logan did not commit. He now suspected he knew how the man had come into contact with Laurence King. “Just tell me what you know. Let’s start with that.”

  The man seemed to gather himself. “I, um, I might have been there.”

  “Been where?” Logan asked, wanting the man to be definitive.

  “At the motel—at the Emerald Inn.”

  Logan nodded. “You were with someone. ”

  “It’s sort of a … a thing I have for … well, I mean, my wife won’t, you know.” The man pointed under the table and made a face.

  “Your wife won’t give you a blow job?”

  The man let out a burst of air. “No. It’s more than that. We don’t really have sexual relations anymore. She says it’s something genetic—her mother was the same way. She’s become paranoid about germs and things, you know, like Howard Hughes got. Anyway… I heard about this bar off the highway where, you know, you can find a woman. And then you go to this motel.”

  “And you were there the night King was killed.”

  The man leaned forward, whispering. “I was in the room next door.”

  “All right, Mr.…” Logan tried to make it sound casual. He had deliberately waited to ask the man’s name, not wanting to spook him, but the man’s eyes widened in fear nonetheless.

  “Do you need my name?”

  “It would help if I had something to call you.”

  The man alternately bit at and licked his lower lip as if coveting the last morsel of food on someone else’s plate. He sounded almost apologetic when he said his name. “It’s Jack. Jack Ruby.”

  Logan chuckled. “You don’t have to make up a name.”

  Ruby raised a hand and rolled his eyes. “I’m not making it up. That’s my name. And please, no jokes. I’ve heard every one you could think of. If I had a dime for every time someone asked if I’m related to the Jack Ruby, I’d be rich.”

  “All right, I promise no jokes.” Logan reached across the table, and the man gave his hand a perfunctory shake. “Just tell me what you saw and heard.”

  “Okay.” Ruby took a breath as if preparing himself for an arduous task. “Like I said, I’m in the room next door, and I hear some things.”

  “Tell me what you heard.”

  “Well, not a lot. I mean…” He leaned forward again, blushing. “I like it when they talk—when they, you know, give me a little something for the effort.”

  Logan eased him along. “We all like a little encouragement.”

  Ruby rubbed a graying mustache above an upper lip too small for his face. Logan thought the man might have a heart attack right there in the booth. “Right. Encouragement. So I’m, well, you know, with this woman, and I hear… and then I hear the guy next door banging on the walls, telling us to keep it down. She tells me to ignore them, to do my thing, and she just keeps talking louder, you know, but I’m losing my concentration, and I can’t… and then… then I hear what sounds like an argument.”

  “Did you hear what they were saying?”

  “I could only hear one … one voice. He’s saying he wants more money. He wants fifteen thousand dollars. I remember that. And then I hear him say … he says … ‘We didn’t sign on for killing nobody.’?”

  Logan tried not to overreact. “You heard that? You’re certain?”

  Ruby put up a hand as if swearing on a witness stand. “I couldn’t make that up, Detective Logan. And I’m thinking of getting the hell out of there, but the woman, you know, she just tells me to keep going and… well, I was right about to… you know… give her the Cheez Whiz when all of a sudden I hear two sounds like firecrackers going off. Bam. Bam.”

  Ruby’s voice carried above the din of the restaurant. He caught himself and lowered farther in the seat. If the man could have blended into the upholstery, Logan was sure he would have. “Hell, I didn’t know what to do. Everything just started happening. The woman’s kicking and yelling for me to get off her. Then I hear a third pop, and it sounds like it’s coming right through the wall. I guess I must’ve panicked, because next thing I know, I’m standing on the balcony in my socks, pulling up my pants and trying to zip my fly. And that’s when I see him.”

  “Laurence King?”

  Ruby lifted his gaze from the table. “No. Not King. This guy… He’s standing on the deck, and I’m staring at him face-to-face.”

  Now Logan leaned forward. “Face-to-face with who?”

  Ruby looked up. “The guy,” he said, more emphatic. “The killer. I mean… I assume he was the killer. He had a gun in his hand.”

  Logan felt his pulse quicken. “Do you remember what he looked like?”

  Ruby sat back and shook as if overcome by a chill. He wiped a green napkin across his perspiring forehead. “Yeah, I can describe him. I’ll never forget it. It was night, but he was wearing sunglasses. I remember that. The kind that wrap around.”

  “What else besides the sunglasses?”

  “He had short hair, not necessarily a crew cut, but short.”

  “What color?”

  “Blond. Dirty-blond.”

  “How tall?”

  “Six foot, maybe an inch more or less. Well built, stocky. He was in good shape, I think. He was wearing one of those bomber-type leather jackets—brown, you know, with the collar, and … and he looks at me. I mean he stares me right in the face, you know, and I think I’m done for. That’s it, right there. I’m going to get killed for sure because I’ve looked this guy right smack-dab in the face.” Ruby leaned forward again, his voice straining and hushed as if he were gasping for air. “But you know what he does? He smiles.” Ruby’s eyes widened in amazement. “Can you believe that? The guy smiles. Then he puts a finger to his lips like it’s our little secret, and he turns and walks away. Can you believe that? He just turns and walks away.”

  Jack Ruby had dodged a bullet. Unfortunately, that didn’t get Logan any closer to finding the killer, and unles
s it did, all of this information was for naught. “You’re lucky, Jack.”

  Ruby put up a hand, swearing on an invisible Bible. Then he put the hand to his heart. “You don’t have to tell me. I thought maybe my name was an omen, you know, that maybe the guy was going to stick the gun in my gut and pull the trigger—like the real Jack Ruby did. But the good Lord was looking out for me that night. That was Jesus there who made the man turn and walk away, and he was telling me to go and sin no more. And I haven’t. I’ve sworn off them for good. No more. Not even one. It was a sign, it was. A sign from God. I believe the Lord saved me and is telling me to do the right thing. That’s why I’m here, to do the right thing. I’m doing the right thing in telling you, right?”

  “You’re doing the right thing. But what made you come forward now instead of when it happened?” Logan asked.

  Ruby sat back and let his gaze roam the table before fixing it back on Logan. “Well, it’s like I said. I was pretty scared, and well, having a family and all, but then… well… then I saw him again.”

  42

  DANA STARTED WITH the most recent news articles and worked backward using a combination of different search engines that included the words “Meyers,” “Senator,” and “Elizabeth Adams.” She had no trouble finding articles in the Post-Intelligencer and Seattle Times archives—the couple had become Seattle’s darlings, and with Meyers’s announcement that he intended to run for president, he had been in the news even more than usual. The public, it seemed, could not get enough of the attractive couple. Local and national papers printed an array of articles that ranged from Meyers’s bold ideas on domestic economic policies and foreign affairs to the types of food he and his wife preferred. When the Times ran an article detailing the color schemes Elizabeth Meyers had chosen to decorate their home in the Highlands—an $18 million gated compound—there was a run on the wallpaper patterns and paint selections.

  With long dark hair and an olive complexion, Elizabeth Meyers contrasted sharply with her husband’s beach-boy good looks. The articles described her as shy and demure in public, which also contrasted with his charismatic charm. It was no wonder she evoked memories in both appearance and demeanor to a young Jacqueline Kennedy, and the fact that she was just thirty-five encouraged the comparisons. Dana realized that Elizabeth, maybe even more than her husband, was the reason why the national publications had dubbed the campaign, “A Return to Camelot.”

  Dana wasn’t sure what exactly she was searching for in the articles, but William Welles’s description of the Elizabeth Meyers he had met continued to resonate. She suspected somewhere in the articles there was a clue to her brother’s death that would lead to the man who had him killed. She made notes on a yellow legal pad, trying to find some connection, some common theme, but at the moment saw none. Saturday night Meyers and his wife would kick off his fund-raising campaign at a five-thousand--dollar-per-plate dinner at the Fairmont Olympic Hotel in downtown Seattle, but it had already been a busy week. He had campaigned in California, Oregon, and Arizona before returning to Seattle to dedicate a youth sports field that would bear his family’s name. At each event, faithfully at his side, stood his wife.

  The doorbell rang. It sounded like the outdoor wind chimes. Dana recalled that Logan had sent a police officer to watch the house. She walked across a suspended bridge—which shook like her office floor when Marvin Crocket roamed the hallways—and down the spiral staircase to the entryway. The water-fall cascaded into the pond, and she saw the flick of a red-orange tail of a carp. In the entry stood something much uglier and predatory.

  43

  JACK RUBY HAD perspired through his blue cotton dress shirt, and all the ice water in the pitcher on the table was not going to cool him down. He’d stained the collar, underarms, and sleeves. Like a leaky faucet, great globules of perspiration formed on his forehead as quickly as he wiped it with his handkerchief. Logan feared they’d have to wrap the overweight man in cold damp towels, to keep him hydrated, the way they wrapped whales that beached themselves.

  It wasn’t the temperature that was making Ruby sweat. The room in the Seattle Police Department’s renovated downtown headquarters on Fifth Avenue was air-conditioned. It was the man’s nerves. Ruby wanted to do the right thing. He just didn’t want anyone to know he was doing the right thing. He apparently had convinced himself, or really wanted to believe that he could profess his sins and leave the booth as if stepping from a church confessional, completely absolved, free to go and sin no more, anonymous except in the eyes of God. Instead, he was sitting in a stiff wooden chair, fidgeting with a ballpoint pen and sweating buckets.

  Logan paced an area to Ruby’s right, waiting while two uniformed officers argued about the various hookups between the television and the VCR. There was a lively discussion regarding the definition of the terms “input” and “output” and whether they referred to the cable to the VCR or the cable to the television. As the discussion lingered, Logan tried to calm Ruby with casual conversation, but he’d barely spoken a word since Logan slid from the booth at McCormick’s and told Ruby they were taking a ride together. On one level, Logan felt sorry for the man. He didn’t view Ruby as a hypocrite, as some might. He saw him as a God-fearing family man 95 percent of the time and a sinner the other 5 percent. It was the other 5 percent that usually got people in trouble. That was universal. The 5 percent was when people succumbed to human weakness or did something plain stupid. The 5 percent had put Jack Ruby in contact with a prostitute and the Emerald Inn. It should have gotten him killed. Unfortunately, in an investigation with little for Logan to hang his hat on, he couldn’t pardon the man. Ruby was the stroke of luck he needed—what every investigation eventually needed. To Logan, Ruby had been in the right place at the right time, no less a gift from the same God whose benevolence Ruby now undoubtedly sat questioning.

  A uniformed officer knocked on the door and handed Logan three VCR tapes. “These are the newscasts for the major networks the past three nights. For what it’s worth, Giacoletti says he remembers the story this guy’s talking about and thought it was on a couple nights ago. Said he always watches CBS because they have the better newscasters. He thinks the story came on right before the sports.”

  Logan flipped through the tapes to the one marked CBS. “Great. Now all I need to do is find someone with an IQ high enough to figure out how to work the damn VCR.”

  DANA CONTEMPLATED RUNNING but fought against that instinct. She couldn’t run—not with her ribs pounding a steady ache from no more physical effort than taking a breath. The man standing on Michael Logan’s entry would catch her before she reached the living room. And running would only tip him off that Dana knew he was not Detective Daniel Holmes. Logan had also told her the man who’d killed Laurence King was an excellent shot. He’d likely pick Dana off before she made it to the stairs. Her one chance was to remain calm and to remember that she possessed the one thing the man wanted—the earring. He wouldn’t kill her until he had it. And that gave Dana a chance.

  “Ms. Hill, I’m Detective Holmes. We met Saturday at your brother’s. The door was unlocked.”

  She did her best to force a smile. “Detective Holmes. Of course. I’m sorry. You surprised me. I was wondering how I recognized you.”

  He pointed to the bandage on her forehead. “You appear to have been hurt.”

  “Just a bump on the head from an accident.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “What can I do for you?”

  “Detective Logan asked that I stop by and make sure you’re doing all right.”

  Dana looked past him to the dark blue American-made vehicle. “Yes, he indicated there would be an officer here at any moment. Thank you, but I’m fine. There’s no need to trouble yourself.”

  “No trouble. I live out in this direction. I told Mike I’d be happy to come and get you.”

  “Get me?” She tried to disguise the tension in her voice.

  “Mike would like you to come wi
th me.”

  “Mike asked me to wait here.”

  The man shrugged. “Change of plans, I guess.” He looked up at the sky. “You might want to bring a coat. The weather has turned. Forecast indicates a storm is moving in.”

  Dark clouds had spread across the sky like a pool of spilled ink. Dana stepped back from the entry toward the staircase. “All right. Just let me get my coat—”

  The man stepped in. “Beautiful place Mike has here. It’s really something to behold.” He looked at Dana with hollow dark eyes. His grin brought the image of a jack-o’-lantern. “Oh, and Mike said something about bringing an earring with you. He said you’d know what he was talking about.”

  LOGAN HELD THE remote control, fast-forwarding through a story about a fire in Yellowstone National Park. Halfway through the first tape, Jack Ruby looked like a man with a heart condition waiting for a T-bone steak to hit the table—eager for the taste but nervous about what it could do to him. The tape hummed forward, the newscasters’ stuttered movements making them look like people in an old newsreel.

  Ruby finally spoke. “You understand why this could be so embarrassing. Something like this, well, it’s bound to generate a lot of publicity, and my three girls—”

  “Keep watching, Jack.” Logan pointed to the television. “I’ll do everything possible to protect your identity and your family.”

  “I’ll be kicked off the PTA board for sure, and I could never show my face in church again.” Ruby looked up at him like a bassett hound, jowls sagging, eyes forlorn.

  “Look on the bright side. You could very well be dead. And if not this time, maybe the next. Prostitutes aren’t the most upstanding citizens, and that motel has a history of violence.” Ruby grimaced as if in pain. To have escaped with his life didn’t appear to be much consolation to him. When the broadcast went to a commercial break, Logan handed Ruby the remote control. “If you see something familiar, pause it. I’m going to make a telephone call.”