by J. A. Jance
“Slow,” I said, kissing her hello. “Very slow. What about you?”
“Pretty much the same,” she said. “There’s a lot of material here.”
Todd roused himself from his computer and sent an unabashedly admiring look in Mel’s direction. “If you want me to hang around and work on this over the weekend…” he began.
But Mel jumped in to send him packing. “No,” she said. “You go right ahead with your plans. We have more than enough here to keep us busy all weekend. Besides,” she added, pointedly glancing at her watch, “we have an engagement this evening. If we don’t head out soon, we’ll be late.”
Todd Hatcher took the hint. “All right, then,” he said, closing his computer and starting to stuff it into his backpack. “I’ll go. Should I take the abstracts or leave them?”
I shrugged. Mel said, “Leave them. We may have time to work on them over the weekend.”
“All right,” Todd agreed. “But if you need anything, call me. And here’s a fax number. If you have more notes for me to add to the spreadsheet, you can fax them down to me.”
Mel ushered him to the door.
“You’re sure you don’t want me to…” he began.
“No,” Mel said firmly. “Take the weekend off, Todd. You work too hard.” Once he was outside the apartment she looked at her watch. “Better hurry,” she told me.
We went into our separate bathrooms to shower and dress. I hadn’t tried on the tux after it had been altered-not with Lars Jenssen waiting out in the car-but the changes had been done expertly enough that the tux fit perfectly, sleeve length, shoulders, and all. At twenty after six Mel appeared in my bedroom door looking gorgeous in a long black beaded dress with a slit that showed a length of exquisitely formed leg. She held up a single-strand pearl necklace.
“Can you fasten this?” she asked.
Complying, I brushed her perfumed shoulder with my lips as I did so. “You’re beautiful,” I told her. “Poor Todd. The guy was practically salivating every time he looked at you.”
“I noticed,” Mel said.
“Did he tell you about his parents?” I asked.
“What about them?”
We were in the elevator and on our way to the car and I was starting to tell her the story when we were interrupted by a phone call from Jeremy letting me know they were safely back in Ashland.
“Good,” I said. “Glad to hear it.”
I thought that would be the end of the conversation, but it wasn’t.
“She’s upstairs right now,” he added. “Putting the kids to bed, but I don’t know what to do with her, Beau. She cried all the way home.”
“Kayla?” I asked, remembering that traveling with cranky preschoolers can seem like a long-term jail sentence at times.
“No,” Jeremy said tersely, “Kelly. I kept asking her what was wrong, but she wouldn’t tell me or couldn’t tell me. From Seattle to here, she just cried and cried.”
I felt a rush of impatience. It seemed to me that sometimes twenty-something daughters and tantrum-throwing toddlers had a lot in common. After all, I hadn’t put all kinds of roadblocks in the way of Kelly’s romance with Jeremy, one that, to all outside observers, had seemed destined to fail. Now here she was raising hell over my relationship with Mel. It didn’t seem fair. If I was willing to treat her as an adult, didn’t I deserve the same courtesy? And eight straight hours of crying seemed to be overdoing it.
“Look, Jeremy,” I said. “This makes no sense. Kelly’s mother and I divorced years ago. Karen’s been dead for almost four years now, and I can’t for the life of me imagine why, all of a sudden, Kelly should take such an intense dislike to Mel. I mean, last weekend everything was hunky-dory. Now, less than a week later, Mel is evil personified. How can that be?”
“I don’t understand it either,” Jeremy agreed miserably. “Gotta go.” He hung up, just like that. Obviously Kelly had finished putting the kids to bed.
“What was that all about?” Mel asked as we climbed into the Mercedes.
I shook my head. “Kelly’s still mad at me, I guess, but she’ll just have to get used to it. I’m not giving you up.”
Mel gave me a radiant smile. “Good,” she said. “I’m glad to hear it.”
“Now tell me about tonight,” I said. “What am I in for exactly?”
“The pre-gathering gathering is in the Presidential Suite up on the thirty-fourth floor of the Sheraton,” Mel told me. “That’s for SASAC board members and their spouses and/or partners only. It’s the time when we all stand around having drinks and congratulating ourselves on what a great job we did. Then, at eight, we’ll go downstairs for the fund-raising banquet itself. That’s in the ballroom.”
My tux, which had fit perfectly only a few short minutes before, suddenly felt too tight. “I’m going to a cocktail party?” I groused. “Oh, goody.”
“I talked to the catering staff,” Mel assured me. “They’ll definitely have nonalcoholic beverages available.”
“Right,” I muttered. “I can just imagine. God save me from the nincompoop who invented virgin margaritas.”
Back in my drinking days I pretty much regarded myself as the life of any given party-after I’d had a couple of shots of McNaughton’s, that is. Give me enough booze, and I’d overcome my natural aversion to small talk. I could chitchat away with the best of them, and swap off-color jokes with wild abandon. I always thought my party behavior above reproach, although, if my first wife were still alive, I’m sure Karen would have a few choice words on the subject.
Riding the elevator up to the Sheraton’s Presidential Suite without having had the benefit of any liquid courage I found myself having second thoughts about the whole thing-second thoughts and very damp palms. Mel must have been reading my mind, or maybe she noticed my hands were so sweaty I could barely manage the elevator buttons.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “It’s going to be fine.”
And it was. I stepped into the spacious but crowded room and discovered, to my immense relief, that I was properly attired. Thanks to Mel’s timely intervention, my tuxedo held its own with every other tuxedo in the room. That definitely improved my outlook. And Mel didn’t just measure up to the other women-she outshone most of them. That made me feel even better.
She knew everyone, of course, and was immediately caught up in first one conversation and then another. Wanting to make myself useful, I wandered over to the bar and ordered a tonic with a twist for me and a glass of Merlot for her. Then I settled in by the windows and stared out over the surrounding glowing high-rises to the distant darkened mass of Elliott Bay, twinkling now with moving ferries and a border of reflected city lights.
“Great view, isn’t it?” someone said.
I turned to look. The man standing beside me was about my age and size. Since there were no conveniently placed tables, he, too, was holding two drinks-a rocks glass with an amber liquid that was probably Scotch and a glass of white wine.
“Name’s Beaumont,” I told him. “J. P. Beaumont. Since we both seem to be functioning as window dressing at the moment, I guess we’ll have to shake hands later.”
The man chuckled. “Cal Lowman,” he said. “You’d think they’d be able to spring for a couple of tables at things like this so we wouldn’t have to stand around looking like a pair of idiots. I always wanted to be a drink stand when I grew up, didn’t you?”
Cal Lowman was a name I recognized. He was a senior partner with one of the big-deal corporate law firms in town-Henderson, Lowman, Richards, and Potts.
I grew up on the wrong side of the tracks in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood, raised by a single mother who supported us by working as a seamstress. She made a meager living by sewing knock-off copies of designer dresses for Seattle’s social elite. All through grade school I had to endure endless teasing over showing up each day in one or another of my mother’s homemade shirts. Eventually I fought back, winning some and losing some and being sent to the principal�
�s office on an almost daily basis. The fights didn’t stop for good until I was in high school and was old enough to get an after-school job at the local theater. Only then did I achieve the pinnacle of sophistication by showing up at school in a store-bought shirt.
But America’s a great place. Here I was, decades later, having a tuxedo-clad male bonding conversation with one of Seattle’s prime movers and shakers.
“Your wife’s on the board?” Lowman asked.
This is one of the reasons I’m no good at chitchat. If I couldn’t explain Mel Soames’s position in my life to my children, how would I manage with this stranger? Mel most definitely was not my wife, but the more dispassionately accurate U.S. Census Bureau term, POSSLQ-a person of opposite sex sharing living quarters-just didn’t do it for me. And we were both far too long of tooth for the old standby terms of boyfriend/girlfriend to apply.
“Mel Soames is my partner,” I said finally. “And yes, she’s on the board.”
Just then the woman we had met days earlier at the California Pizza Kitchen arrived on the scene. She was dazzling in a strapless green silk gown topped by an amazing emerald necklace. “Hello, there,” she said to me. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this.” Then, reaching past me, she collected the glass of wine Cal Lowman had been holding.
“So you’ve already met my Anita?” Cal asked with a possessive smile.
As I said, Cal was about my age. Mel is fifteen years younger than I am, and this delectable piece of arm candy was far younger than that.
I brushed off my conversational skills as best I could and tried to measure up. “Briefly,” I said. “But I’m not up on exactly what you do.”
“I’m retired,” Anita told me, sipping her wine. “And trying to make the world a better place. That’s why I started the SASAC in the first place.” She turned to Cal. “Okay,” she said, “time to go to work. There’s someone I want you to meet.”
She dragged him away so unceremoniously that I was surprised Cal didn’t object. Their abrupt departure left me wearing the conversational equivalent of two left feet.
About that time Mel showed up and relieved me of her glass of wine. “So let me guess,” I said, nodding in Anita and Cal’s direction. “Now that Anita’s hooked up with a sugar daddy like Cal Lowman she can forgo working for a living and can afford to devote herself to charity.”
Mel gave me a bemused look. “There you go,” she said. “You’ve fallen back into that age-old trap of gender stereotyping. You’ve got this story upside down and backward. If anybody’s a sugar daddy, it would have to be Anita. She left Microsoft at age thirty-three with a pocketful of loot. That’s where she met Cal-at Microsoft. She plucked him off Microsoft’s team of corporate legal beagles and took him home to play house. A lot like you and me, babe; only, in our case, you’re the one with the moolah. Anita could probably buy and sell Cal Lowman a dozen times over.”
That’s when it came home to me. Times had changed; women had changed. My second wife, Anne Corley, had died and left me with an armload of money, but tux or not, I was still that unsophisticated hick from Ballard. No amount of money in the world was going to fix that.
“And plan on being nice,” Mel added. “I’m pretty sure we’re seated at the same table.”
Convinced I had somehow bungled that initial encounter, I was dreading sharing dinner with Cal and Anita, but then I got lucky. When we went down to the cavernous ballroom and made our way through to the table directly in front of the speaker’s podium, I caught sight of someone I actually knew-Destry Hennessey.
I had encountered Destry years earlier, when she had been a lowly criminalist working on a master’s at the U. Dub during the day and toiling away in Seattle PD’s crime lab by night. Once she earned her degree, she had taken a job somewhere else-I wasn’t sure where. Sometime in the course of the last several years, Destry had returned to the West Coast as the newly appointed head of the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab.
I went up and shook her hand. “Des,” I said, “long time no see. What are you doing here?”
“I’m the speaker,” she said. “I hate doing public speaking. In terms of phobias, it’s supposed to be right up there with fear of dying. With a room this big I can tell you I’m scared to death.”
“You’ll do fine,” I said.
“Thanks,” she said. “It’s nice to have a friend in my corner.”
When I went to introduce her to Mel, I was surprised to learn they already knew each other. “We’re both on the SASAC board,” Mel explained. “We roomed together at a retreat down in Mexico last fall.”
“Funny,” I said. “You never mentioned it.”
Mel shook her head. “You and I weren’t exactly an item back then, remember?”
While the two of them chatted I checked out our table, where I was dismayed to discover someone had taken the liberty of assigning seats. The good news was that Destry was on my right. On my left was a dragon lady named Professor Rosemary Clark, who, I soon learned, turned out to be the University of Washington’s distinguished professor of women’s studies. Since the good professor was far more interested in talking to Cal Lowman than she was to me, Destry and I spent dinner exchanging small talk.
We brought each other up to date on what had happened in our lives since we’d last crossed paths. After leaving Seattle PD she had worked for several years as second in command for the state crime lab in Massachusetts. However, her kids, now in high school, and her husband had all hated living on the East Coast. When the opportunity had arisen for her to come back home to Washington as head of the state patrol’s crime lab, she had jumped at the chance.
“Heard you’re working for SHIT now,” she said.
I nodded, glad that for once I was dealing with a fellow bureaucrat who didn’t have to make a joke of the agency’s name.
“How do you like it?” she asked.
“Not bad,” I said. “Ross Connors is a pretty squared-away guy.”
As we started in on the salad course, I asked Destry about the talk she would be delivering.
“It’ll be on our DNA pilot program,” she said.
Her answer left me entirely in the dark. “What pilot program?” I asked.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re here at the major donor table, so I figured you knew all about it. SASAC is paying the freight for a full-time DNA profiler in the crime lab. There’s so much DNA evidence coming in now that we’re falling further and further behind. If we raise enough money tonight, we may be able to fund another one. Someday we may be able to start making progress on that backlog of rape kits that have sat untested in evidence rooms for years on end.”
DNA’s impact on crime solving has changed significantly in the last few years. Cold cases that were once deemed unsolvable were now being cleared as new techniques came online.
“With all this high-tech stuff,” I said, “pretty soon old-time detectives like me will be completely obsolete.”
Destry Hennessey laughed and patted my hand. “That would be a shame,” she said.
“Why?”
I thought she’d say something about society losing the benefit of our law enforcement experience and cunning and skill, and maybe even our flat-out stubbornness, but she didn’t.
“Because some of you old guys are so darned cute,” she said with a smile.
I did not want to be cute! And I certainly didn’t want to be old! What I really wanted was get up and stalk out of the ballroom without waiting around for the main course or for Destry Hennessey’s upcoming speech, either. But I didn’t. My mother raised me to be more of a gentleman than that-at least she tried to. So I plastered a phony smile on my face, chatted civilly with the professor when called upon to do so, and stayed right where I was.
I’m doing this for Mel, I thought glumly. And she damned well better appreciate it!
CHAPTER 13
If you fall in love when you’re young, you stake a claim on that other person’s life. You want to know ever
ything about them. But Mel and I fell in love later. We both had a past-maybe more than one each-and we arrived at the conclusion that the other person’s past wasn’t anybody else’s business. For one thing, you can’t change the past. And since we couldn’t change what had happened to us before we met, it didn’t make sense to go into all of that in any great detail, either. To that end we made a mutual and conscious decision to live in the present. We didn’t go digging around in each other’s personal history. So far that had worked for us.
But just because we didn’t sit around jawing about our pasts didn’t mean there was some big secrecy program going on, either. For instance, Mel knew about what had happened to Sue Danielson because Sue’s death was work related. And I’m sure she could have found out about Anne Corley’s death for the same reason. It had been big news in all the local newspapers at the time. Mel is, after all, a detective. I have no doubt she had picked up bits and pieces both good and bad about my relationship with Karen by paying attention to what my kids said about our marriage and subsequent divorce.
Mel’s and my unspoken agreement did mean that Mel hadn’t ever asked me about the whys and wherefores of my going to AA, although, come to think of it, that’s pretty obvious. It also meant that I hadn’t ever delved into her involvement with SASAC, although I have to admit to a certain amount of curiosity. My hands-off attitude on that score ended the night of the dinner at the Sheraton.
There was a lot about the evening that made me uncomfortable. For one thing, there was a whole “Male Evil; Woman Poor Victim” theme to the event that rankled. Yes, I know that most victims of sexual assault are women, the major exception, of course, being generations of traumatized and equally victimized altar boys. But it turns out the villains there are also male, so being a nonabusing heterosexual male in that particular Sheraton ballroom was not a comfortable fit.
Still, I was expected to sit there and share the guilt and blame while a lineup of women revealed a litany of abuse that was enough to curl your hair. As a man, I was automatically under indictment. Whatever had happened to those women was somehow my fault. I was also expected to haul out my wallet and make a sizable donation to the cause, which included the funding of a twenty-four-hour rape hotline and Internet site, funding for victim advocates and victim counseling, as well as continuing to fund the rape-kit examination project that was, it turned out, Anita Bowdin’s special focus.