by J. A. Jance
“This has nothing to do with money!” Kelly exclaimed, her voice trembling with outrage. She seemed on the verge of tears. “It’s bad enough that we have to come all the way from Ashland to Seattle with a month-old baby in the car. Is it asking too much to expect that we’d get to spend some time with you instead of being carted off to a hotel like a bunch of strangers?”
Let it be said that Mel and I had just finished squandering the better part of three reasonably pleasant days in my daughter’s company. On the face of it, her sudden antipathy made very little sense.
“Scott and Cherisse will be staying there, too,” I offered lamely. “And it’s only a couple of blocks from here.”
From Kelly’s point of view the hotel could have been on Pluto. “It’s all about Mel, isn’t it,” she raved on. “Mel this and Mel that. She’s shacked up with you there and has you completely under her thumb. Mel’s doing this because she doesn’t want to share you with anyone, not even with your granddaughter, who’s crazy about you, by the way!”
By now this amounted to the most bizarre conversation I’d ever had with my daughter-in terms of turning tables, that is. Because the truth of the matter was, having my children come stay at Belltown Terrace with Mel and me when we were obviously living in sin was a big deal-in my book, anyway. And I suspected it was in Mel’s, too. Of course I could have pointed out that Kelly and Jeremy hadn’t exactly tied the knot in a timely fashion. In actual fact, Kayla’s birthday predates her parents’ wedding anniversary by several months.
People say that there’s nothing worse than a reformed drunk, and the situation here was probably similar. Maybe now that Kelly had finished sowing her wild oats, she wanted her father to shape up and do the same. It occurred to me that Kelly’s great-grandmother, Beverly Jenssen, had been of the same opinion. DNA will out.
On the other hand, I wasn’t about to send Mel packing back to her apartment in Bellevue for the duration of the kids’ visit, either.
“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” I said soothingly. “I won’t be going in to work. We’ll be able to spend plenty of time together.”
“We will not!” Kelly insisted. With that, she hung up on me. I didn’t call her back. There wasn’t much point.
Mel came home a little while later. She whipped out of her work clothes, put on a jogging suit and sneakers, and dragged me with her down to the running track.
Belltown Terrace is one of the few buildings in Seattle actually constructed under an interesting, short-lived, and amazingly complicated set of residential/mixed-use zoning rules. The bottom five stories are office building. The sixth floor-including the rooftop of the office building-is a common recreation area for the taller residential structure. It includes a party room, a swimming pool and hot tub, an exercise room, as well as a sport court. Much of the outdoor rooftop area is devoted to gardens, which Mel tells me include an award-winning collection of hydrangeas. (Since I know zero about flowers and/or gardens, I more or less have to take her word for this.)
A rubber-mat-covered running track runs the full perimeter of the sixth floor-about a quarter of a mile in all. When the building was first built, this running track was supposed to be a big selling point, and maybe it still is, but what looks and sounds good on paper sometimes misses the mark when it comes to actual delivery.
What the architects and planners had failed to take into consideration was the wind-tunnel effect from nearby high-rise buildings. Even in the dead of summer you can be out on the Belltown Terrace running track with a chill gale blowing into your teeth. Since this was March and a long way from the dead of summer, it was downright frigid out there.
I’ve often said that my major form of exercise is jumping to conclusions. Mel had set out to change that. At least three times a week she dragged me, usually kicking and screaming, down to the running track, where she literally ran circles around me while I walked. (All knees are not created equal.)
Afterward, sitting in the hot tub, she leveled a blue-eyed stare in my direction.
“What’s wrong?” she said. “You’re a million miles away. Are you thinking about Beverly?”
I was sad about losing Beverly, but what was really bothering me right then was the fact that Mel’s good deed of making hotel reservations for Kelly and Scott was about to blow up in both our faces. I knew I’d have to tell Mel about the situation with Kelly eventually, but not right then. I nodded and sighed as convincingly as I could manage.
“It is sad,” Mel agreed. “Especially for Lars. Widowers often don’t fare too well when they’re left on their own.”
Which gave me something else to worry about entirely.
“How was your afternoon?” I asked in an attempt to change the subject.
Mel frowned. “More interesting than it should have been,” she said. “I started tracking down locations on those released sex offenders. I just barely scratched the surface, but already two of them are dead.”
“Dead?” I asked.
Mel nodded. “One suicide and one accident. It’s too bad I didn’t know about this over the weekend. We could have stopped off in Roseburg on the way coming or going and made some inquiries. Feet on the ground instead of phoners.”
“What’s in Roseburg?”
“Outside of Roseburg, actually,” she said. “A guy named Les Fordham got sent to prison for molesting his girlfriend’s twelve-year-old daughter. When he got out he went to live in southern Oregon. That’s where he was from originally. Got a job working in a sawmill there and seemed to be doing all right. Then, last summer, for no apparent reason he turned on the gas on his stove and ended up blowing himself to kingdom come. Started a mini forest fire in the process. Fortunately it rained like hell the next day, and the fire didn’t turn into a major one.”
“And the accident?” I asked.
“You may remember it,” Mel said. “The guy’s name was Ed Chrisman. He was living up in Bellingham. Got all drunked-up on a Sunday afternoon last December. The investigators theorized that he stopped off at one of the rest areas on Chuckanut Drive to take a leak. It was cold, so he left the car running while he got out to do his business…”
“I remember,” I said. “He also left his car in gear. It hit him from behind while he was standing there with his fly unzipped. Knocked him off the edge of a cliff into the water. The car went into the drink right along with him-on top of him, as I recall. Smashed him flat.”
Mel nodded. “That’s the one. Nobody bothered to report him missing until several days later. With the weather the way it was, his vehicle wasn’t found at the foot of the cliff until almost a week after it happened. The transmission was still in gear when they fished it out of the water.”
“Sounds like he was still in gear, too,” I said.
I admit, it was a tasteless joke-but dying with your pants unzipped is a tasteless joke. Mel glared at me. “Not funny,” she said.
“No,” I agreed. “I suppose not. But if those two guys were already dead, how come they’re still on Ross’s sex-offender list?”
“I believe that’s why Ross has me updating the list.”
“Right,” I said. “Makes sense to me. Sounds like me and missing persons. Now let’s go see about dinner.”
CHAPTER 6
One of the things Mel and I share in common is that we’re both terrible cooks. Yes, we can make coffee. And toast on occasion. And, according to Ron Peters’s girls, I could brew a mean cup of hot chocolate in my day. So we don’t eat at home, unless it’s carry-out or carry-in, as the case might be. Mostly we go out. Fortunately, since the Denny Regrade is full of restaurants, trendy and otherwise, we’re in no danger of starving to death.
Our current favorite is a little French place called Le P’tit Bistro two blocks up the street. I know, I know. Over the years I’ve developed a well-deserved reputation for unsophisticated dining, and some of my old Doghouse pals would choke at the very idea of me hanging out in a French dining establishment. But now that the Regrade has morphed
into Belltown, that’s how much things have changed around here in the past few years. Maybe that’s how much I’ve changed, too.
I’m guessing Le P’tit Bistro comes close to being the French approximation of an old-fashioned diner. The food doesn’t put on airs, and neither does the waitstaff. Just for the record, real men do eat quiche-and crepes, too, for that matter.
“Maybe I should stay in Bellevue while the kids are here,” Mel suggested as she sipped a glass of red wine. I was having Perrier. As I said, the place is French.
It was almost as though Mel had implanted a listening device in my head and overheard my disturbing conversation with Kelly. “No way!” I responded.
Mel ignored me. “With the funeral and all,” she continued, “emotions are bound to be running high, and daughters can be…well, let’s just say they can be a little territorial.”
“Did Kelly say something to you about this?” I demanded.
Mel shrugged. “Not in so many words,” she replied. “She didn’t have to. I got the message.”
That’s another thing about women. You’re damned by what they do say and you’re damned by what they don’t say. For a guy, it’s lose/lose either way. It would have been nice to be able to change the subject again-to talk with Mel about something easy, like murder and mayhem and who blasted LaShawn Tompkins to smithereens, but that would have gotten me in trouble with Ross Connors, so I soldiered on.
“Look,” I said, “it’s bad enough that we have to play hide-and-seek with the guys at work, but I’m damned if I’m going to play the same game with my kids. You’re in my life because I want you in my life. Everybody’s just going to have to get used to it-Kelly and Scott included.”
Under the circumstances that seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to say, but the next thing I knew Mel was crying, mopping away tears and mascara with her cloth napkin while the lady who’s the co-owner of the restaurant shot daggers at me from her station behind the dessert case. Some days you really can’t win.
Mel was pretty quiet-make that dead-quiet-the rest of the time we were eating. I thought I was in more trouble with her than I was with the lady at the restaurant. On our two-block walk back to Belltown Terrace, however, Mel slipped her arm through mine, then leaned into my shoulder. “I think that’s one of the nicest things anybody’s ever said to me,” she said.
We went home. It was still early, but we went to bed anyway, and not to watch Fox News Channel, either. Later, with Mel nestled cozily against my side and sleeping peacefully, I lay awake for a long time. I realized that there were many things I was more than willing to give up for the sake of my children, but Melissa Soames wasn’t one of them. With a smile on my face I finally drifted off to sleep as well.
My mother was perpetually whipping out little aphorisms in the hope, I suppose, of turning me into an upright citizen. Some of them are still imprinted in my brain: “Save the surface and you save all.” “A stitch in time saves nine.” “God helps those who help themselves.” At four o’clock the next morning, when I was wide awake and Mel wasn’t, the saying that came most readily to mind was “Early to bed; early to rise…” I was up early, all right. Not wanting to awaken Mel, I bailed out of bed. Out in the living room I dredged my laptop out of my briefcase, booted up, and logged on.
Less than two months ago I had been down in the morgue at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer personally combing through brittle rolls of old microfiche on the trail of a case that had been cold for more than fifty years. Between then and now, though, SHIT had entered the information age. Ross Connors had sprung for an agency-wide subscription to LexisNexis, which meant that with my secret password (well, maybe “doghouse” isn’t all that secret), the whole world of cyber news and public records was open to me without my having to do all the searching myself. With a click of a mouse, as they say.
In reality it took a little more than that, but before long I had the information on LaShawn’s payout from the state-$250,000. Not that much, considering he’d been wrongfully imprisoned for seven years. And much less when you took into account the fact that his attorney probably walked off with half the settlement. Etta Mae had told me her son had spent his money on fixing up her house. The house on Church Street wasn’t large, but remodeling anything costs a bundle these days. It seemed safe to assume that there probably wasn’t a whole lot of LaShawn’s windfall left for anyone to fight over. Which probably took money out of the murder-motive equation.
Next I went looking for Elaine Manning, LaShawn Tompkins’s girlfriend at the King Street Mission. She had been sentenced to prison in North Carolina for robbing a Krispy Kreme. A doughnut shop, for God’s sake? And then, after some kind of difficulty inside the prison in Raleigh and for some inexplicable reason, she was shipped off to Washington State to complete her sentence. People who watch Cops on TV are always amazed that the crooks are so amazingly stupid. It’s no surprise to me. And someone who would use a weapon to rob a Krispy Kreme most likely wasn’t a mental giant.
On to Pastor Mark Granger, the head of the mission. His story was a little less typical because he was maybe a little smarter than that. Came from a good middle-class background. Got screwed up on drugs in college and went to prison for second-degree murder from a drug deal gone bad when he was twenty years old. Got a mail-order degree-in divinity, of all things-while he was still in prison. So Pastor Mark really was a pastor.
It turns out there are lots of King Street missions in this country. The one in Seattle was housed in what had once been a derelict flophouse near the railroad. In the mid-nineties it had been purchased and refurbished by an outfit called God’s Word, LLC. My searches on them led me from one blind real estate trust to another. Only lawyers’ names appeared on the documents I was able to track down. Whoever was behind God’s Word was anonymous and fully intended to stay that way. Goody Two-shoes ex-cons are suspicious enough, but I can accept that they exist. Anonymous do-gooders? Not likely. Those are, again as my mother would have said, scarce as hens’ teeth.
I was still looking for traces of God’s Word when I heard the toilet flush. It’s one of those newfangled power-assisted things that sound like somebody is strangling a cat. The racket gave me enough warning that I was able to log off LexisNexis. By the time Mel started the coffee and came into the living room, I was perusing the online edition of the Seattle Times.
“Good morning,” she said, kissing me hello. “You’re up early. Why do you insist on reading those things online? The paper’s right out in the hall. All you have to do is open the door, pick up the paper, and take off the rubber band.”
“I seem to remember you prefer finding your newspapers in pristine condition,” I replied. “I’m only thinking of you.”
“Thanks,” she said.
When it comes to lying, I’m getting better all the time.
Mel collected her papers. Then she went over to the window seat, wrapped a throw around her shoulders, and settled down in one corner to read the headlines and await the end of the coffee-brewing cycle. On a clear day someone sitting in the window seat can see Mount Rainier to the south and east and the Olympics to the north and west, with a vast display of water and/or city in between. This was March. The only thing visible was rain-lots of it.
“Did you get the flowers?” she asked.
The puzzled look on my face must have been answer enough.
“For Beverly’s funeral,” she reminded me. “You were going to order more, right?”
“Right,” I said. “But Ballard Blossom isn’t open right now. It’s too early. I’ll have to call later.”
“And then you should probably drag home some groceries. The kids will be here at least part of the time.”
“What kind of groceries?” I asked.
“You know. The usual. Sodas, cereal, milk, bread, peanut butter, animal crackers.”
“Where the hell do they keep animal crackers these days?”
“Same place they always have, but when you get to the store, as
k,” she said patiently. “Someone there will be able to tell you.”
Mel left for work a little past seven. I went back to surfing the net, where I was still trying to track down principals in God’s Word when Ross Connors called me at home a little after eight.
“Sorry to hear about your grandmother,” he said. “Harry told me you weren’t coming in.”
Since he had called on my home number and not on my cell, I had already figured that out. “Thanks,” I said. “But I’m still working. It would be a hell of a lot easier on me if I could talk to Mel about this Tompkins situation. I don’t like sneaking around on her. It feels like cheating.”
“Indulge me,” he said. “I’m not ready to start connecting the dots yet. What have you found out on LaShawn so far?”
“According to Detective Jackson at Seattle PD, it could be nothing more or less than an old-fashioned love triangle with both LaShawn and Pastor Mark from King Street Mission going after the same girl.”
“Who also happens to be missing at the moment,” Ross supplied.
In other words, I wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t already know. So why did he need me?
Ross answered the question without my asking it. “Find her,” he said. “There is nothing that would make me happier than to know LaShawn Tompkins is dead because he fell in love with the wrong girl.”
This was not a throwaway comment. There was an urgency in Ross’s voice that I recognized. Something was going on-something Ross was not yet prepared to divulge-and LaShawn Tompkins’s murder, inconsequential as it might seem in the big scheme of things, was somehow the tip of that iceberg.
“You know,” I said, “it might be easier to fix this problem if I knew what the hell was really going on.”
“Just find the girl,” Ross said. “Find Elaine Manning. Maybe this is nothing more than what Kendall Jackson says it is, a love story gone awry, and maybe I’m just over the hill, full of crap, and pushing panic buttons for no reason. That’s what I’m hoping.”