by J. A. Jance
“I guess.”
“What’s eating you?”
“Everything and nothing.” Ralph kept looking at me, but his fingers started moving again, speeding over the keyboard with incredible dexterity without his having to look at either the screen or the keys. Ames is now and always will be a far better typist than I am.
“By the way,” I added. “I talked to Ron Peters in Seattle today.”
Ralph’s nimble fingers never missed a stroke. “What did he have to say?”
“I’m in some kind of hot water as per usual. Fraymore sent an official letter of complaint to Seattle P.D. in regard to my continued interference with his homicide investigation. Tony Freeman in I.I.D. handed the problem over to Ron.”
Ames shook his head. “That was fast. Fraymore must have written it and faxed it overnight. I had a feeling our behavior was offending the local constabulary. Don’t feel picked on, Beau. Gordon Fraymore would complain about me, too, if he could just figure out where to send the paper.”
Somehow, knowing I wasn’t the only target for Fraymore’s ire did make me feel a little better.
“I take it you’ve had your hands slapped?” Ralph asked.
“Officially, yes. Peters passed along Tony Freeman’s verbal message, which was, ‘You’re on vacation. Act like it.’”
“And unofficially?”
“Ron’s going to dig around up there in Seattle and see what, if anything, he can find out that might be of help.”
“I’ve always liked Ron Peters,” Ralph said. A moment later, he paused in his typing and frowned. “What are you up to today?”
“Not much. I guess I’ll hang out at the hospital. Worry.”
“I’ve got some legwork that needs doing, but I don’t want you to wind up in any more trouble.”
“Legwork’s something I’m good at. If you’ve got something for me to do that will keep me occupied, let me at it. We’ll worry about trouble later.”
“You’re sure?”
“What kind of legwork?” I returned.
Ralph reached over and shuffled through an already impressive stack of rolled-up fax-generated paper. Pulling out one sheet, he handed it to me. “I don’t have time to chase this down myself. It’s going to take all morning to prepare for the arraignment. On the other hand, I don’t see how Fraymore could possibly object to your doing this, since it has nothing whatsoever to do with the murder investigation, per se.” He paused and then added, “It may end up having some bearing on our defense, however.”
Glancing down at the paper, I was riveted by what I saw there—the names Roger and Willy Tompkins, along with a street address in Walla Walla.
“You want me to go see them?”
Ralph nodded.
“To talk to them, or to punch that guy’s lights out?”
“Talk,” Ralph said. “Definitely nothing but talk. We’ve got to learn whether or not these people will try to make any kind of trouble when it comes to sorting out long-term custody arrangements for Amber. If they’ll be reasonable, so will we. If they try to make things difficult, I’ll blow them clean out of the water.”
“Long-term custody?” I asked. “That sounds like you think we’ll lose and that you’ve already given up.”
“We have to be prepared for every contingency,” he returned darkly. Ralph Ames is not a man prone to discouraging words. Clearly, things weren’t going well.
“Fraymore’s evidence is that solid?”
Ralph nodded. “It’s solid all right. And there’s no reason for him to lie to me about it.”
“Have you given any thought to the possibility that we might be dealing with a carefully planned, well-thought-out frame?”
“Frame?” Ralph repeated.
“I spent all night thinking about it, and I talked it over with Ron. There’s something about this whole thing that doesn’t ring true. It’s too pat.”
“You think Fraymore’s crooked?”
“No. I didn’t say that. Misguided, maybe. Overzealous, perhaps. What if he’s being suckered by somebody else?”
“All I can say is that somebody went to a hell of a lot of trouble,” Ralph replied.
“But wouldn’t you?” I asked. “If you wanted to get away with murder, you’d do whatever was necessary.”
We were both quiet for a few moments. Finally, Ralph shook his head. He wasn’t buying it. Tired of arguing, I let it go.
“How’s Tanya holding up?” I asked finally.
“All right, except…”
“Except what?”
Ames shook his head. “It’s hard to explain. I can’t quite put my finger on it. She seems almost drifty and vague at times, as though she can’t quite grasp the reality of all this, as if it isn’t quite getting through. Other times she’s totally on track.”
“She’s probably just feeling overwhelmed,” I suggested.
“Maybe,” Ralph agreed. “But there’s something else that bothers me. I’ve thought about it ever since last night. I was there in the room when she told Detective Fraymore the same story she told us. I listened to the whole thing again, Beau. It was almost verbatim. Like a prepared speech.”
“All of it?” I asked.
“Word for word.”
I felt a slight tinge of worry. Most people don’t use the exact same words to tell a story the second time. There are always some changes, some slight variations. Unless what’s being delivered is a canned speech, lines of dialogue delivered by a consummate actress. Were Ralph Ames and J.P. Beaumont being played for suckers one more time?
In my present mood, that question wasn’t one I cared to sit around contemplating. I got up and walked over to the telephone jack.
“If I can commandeer the phone away from your fax machine for a few minutes, I’ll see what kind of connections are available between here and Walla Walla.”
Armed with my Frequent Flyer number, I started checking for flights. What I found out in a nutshell was that you can get to Walla Walla from Ashland, but it isn’t necessarily easy. There are really only two decent connecting flights per day—one in the early morning, which I’d already missed, and one in the late afternoon, which required an overnight stay. I went ahead and booked that one. With Amber most likely spending another night in the room with Alex and me, I couldn’t see that it made a hell of a lot of difference.
I had no more than finished booking the flight and putting down the phone when it rang again. “Should I answer it?”
Ralph shrugged. “Go ahead. If it’s for me, find out who it is and take a message.”
“Hello.”
“Beau, is that you?”
It was Ron Peters, calling from Seattle. I had told him where Ralph was staying in case he couldn’t locate me, but I was surprised to have him call back so soon.
“What’s up?”
“I thought you’d like to know that I’ve just solved the mystery of where Guy Lewis disappeared to.”
“You found him? Is he back home in Seattle?”
“Not quite. He never made it this far,” Ron Peters answered. “In fact, he never made it past Medford.”
The way he said it made it sound permanent. Not another murder, I thought. “Don’t tell me. Is he dead?”
“No, but it’s a miracle he isn’t. God knows he should be. The Medford cops and the state police acting together picked him up at six o’clock Sunday morning, drunk as a skunk, and driving his Miata northbound on southbound I-5 at ten miles an hour. He blew a point-two-nine on the breathalizer and was so out of it that they took him to a hospital to dry out instead of throwing him in the drunk tank.”
I was thunderstruck. How could Guy Lewis end up that smashed within eleven hours of our attending an N.A. meeting in the basement of that Ashland church? “Good work, Ron,” I said.
“Wait a minute. You haven’t heard the half of it. By Monday evening, he was sober enough to post bail. He was about to be released from the hospital, when that cop you told me about, Detective Fraymore, sho
wed up to tell Lewis that his wife had been murdered. As soon as he heard, he went into some kind of coronary arrhythmia. It must not have been all that serious, but they kept him there under observation. He’s been in the hospital ever since, but he’s due to be released late this morning or early this afternoon.”
Fumbling for paper and pencil, I jotted down the name and address of the hospital in Medford. “Have you had a chance to do any checking on the rest of it?” I asked. “Anything on either Shore or Daphne?”
“You want it all, and you want it right now, don’t you? I’m working as fast as I can, Beau. I can only do so much. Try practicing a little patience.”
I’m nothing if not an ungrateful wretch. “You’re right, Ron. This is great. It’s a big help.”
A few words later, we hung up, and I gave Ralph the news. He didn’t seem surprised or even all that interested when I told him, but then he hadn’t spent the first part of Saturday evening at the N.A. meeting with a then-sober-and-proud-of-it Guy Lewis. I had. After ten years of sobriety, what had blown him off the wagon?
Ralph and I talked a minute or two longer, then I told him I was going to head back to Oak Hill, tell Florence I’d be away overnight, pick up an extra key, and leave a note to that effect for Alex. I didn’t mention the hospital address on the piece of paper I’d shoved in my pocket. I didn’t say I might go there to see Guy Lewis, because at the time I left Ralph’s room at the Ashland Hills, I still didn’t know for sure I would.
For one thing, if Gordon Fraymore ever found out I went to see Guy, my ass would be in a sling for certain—not only with Fraymore, but also now with straight-shooting Tony Freeman back home in Seattle. Freeman wasn’t the type to rave and carry on, but when he said, “Act like you’re on vacation,” he expected people to pay attention.
As I left Ashland heading north, Guy Lewis bothered me more and more. What would make somebody fall off the wagon after being sober that long? I wondered. God knows I had come close to slipping myself that very day. In retrospect, I could see how emotional overload about Kelly and Jeremy had almost sucked me into a relapse, but I had pulled myself back from it. In the past two days, even though things had continued to spiral downward, I hadn’t been in nearly the same jeopardy of taking that first drink as I had been when I ventured into the smoky bar of the Mark Anthony. Guy hadn’t been as lucky.
That brought me to another question. How long had Guy Lewis been sober? Ten years stuck in my mind. Something about his first wife leaving him about the same time he dried out.
Between Saturday night and six o’clock Sunday morning, something had pushed Guy Lewis off the edge of a very steep emotional cliff. Old habits die hard, and he had set out to drown his sorrows. In those few hours, he had downed enough booze to require a doctor’s care just to regain consciousness. I don’t call that slipping. It’s more like crashing and burning.
Had Lewis been drinking at the party? I didn’t remember smelling booze on his breath when we chatted in the Members’ Lounge or seeing him drinking hard stuff later on at the Bowmer, although he could have been. Drunks are cagey that way. They drink and drink, and it’s all invisible—up to a point.
Whatever caused it, once he was drunk, he must have decided to leave town, with or without Daphne in the car. Again the question came to mind—was Daphne Lewis still alive at the time Guy headed north?
I was in a 928 equipped with a working cellular phone, so I dialed Ron Peters’ extension at the department in Seattle. He didn’t answer, and I didn’t dare leave a message on his voice mail—not after being told in no uncertain terms to butt out.
And then another thought hit me. Peters had said that when Fraymore came to the hospital to deliver the bad news about Daphne, Guy had suffered some kind of coronary disturbance. That meant one of two things. The first choice was the most obvious: News of his wife’s murder had so shocked Guy Lewis that his heart went gunny-bags on him.
Option number two was that Guy already knew Daphne was dead because he personally had something to do with her murder. If that was the case, finding himself trapped in the same room with the man sworn to find his wife’s killer might very well have scared the living piss out of him. It would have scared me.
So which was it? Number one or number two? As optometrists are so fond of saying: Which is clearer? This? Or this? I didn’t have an answer right then, but I was going to find out.
I’m learning. When I pulled off the freeway in Medford, I stopped at the first gas station and asked for directions. I didn’t want to waste any time at all being lost.
CHAPTER
14
I’ve heard stories about people who age overnight, but Guy Lewis was a true flesh-and-blood example—the first one I ever observed with my own eyes. I found him sitting in a wheelchair in the lobby at Rogue River Medical Center. His skin was sallow; the muscles and skin of his body seemed to have collapsed in on his bones.
“Hello, there, Guy. Could you use a lift?”
He looked up at me out of dull eyes that had no spark of life left in them. “Oh, it’s you, Mr. Beaumont. I’m waiting for a cab. I can walk, but I have strict orders from that idiotic nurse over there not to step out of this thing until the cab gets here.”
“Where are you going?”
“The Red Lion,” he said. “Out along the freeway. I screwed up the undercarriage on my Mazda. They had to order in a special part from L.A. It’ll be ready later this afternoon.”
“If you want, I can take you wherever you’re going.”
He nodded gratefully. “I’d sure appreciate it. This place makes my skin crawl.”
We canceled the cab dispatch. I brought the Porsche around, and a very brusque, businesslike nurse supervised Guy Lewis’ transfer from wheelchair to automobile. The man breathed a sigh of relief when the door closed, effectively shutting the nurse out and us in.
“You saved my life,” he breathed. “If I’d been stuck in that lobby for another ten minutes, I would have gotten up and gone looking for the nearest bar.”
“We both know that’s a bad idea,” I told him.
“Yes,” he said. “I guess we do.”
On the way to the hospital, I had considered dozens of possible ways to begin asking the necessary questions, but that was before I saw how frail Guy seemed. How could a man who looked as though he would be bowled over by a strong breeze hold up under one barrage of questions after another—not only from me, but also from Gordon Fraymore? Studying him, I wondered if the incident of arrhythmia was more life-threatening than I’d been led to believe.
“What brings you to Medford?” he asked, eyeing me suspiciously. “Twelfth-stepping?”
I shrugged, uncomfortable with his use of A.A. jargon. I hadn’t come calling on Guy Lewis in a single-minded effort to save him from Demon Rum.
“After a fashion, I suppose. I have a plane to catch later on, around five. That left me with an hour or two to kill.”
“How did you know I was here?”
“One of my friends in Seattle. The story about Daphne was in the papers up there this morning. I don’t know how he found out about you.”
When Guy heard my answer, he made a strange, strangled sound—a choking, hiccuping noise. I looked at him anxiously, thinking maybe the heart problem had returned. Instead, he slouched against the far car door, sobbing.
At last he pulled himself together. “She’s dead,” he said brokenly. “I don’t know how I’ll get through all this—making the arrangements, planning a funeral. Some things you never expect to do. Look at me. I’m twenty-three years older than she was, and overweight besides. I don’t exercise, and I’ve had a heart condition for years. I’m the one who should be dead.”
With that he broke down again. To hear Guy’s anguished sobs and see his quaking body was to experience misery made manifest. Daphne Lewis might have had much to answer for in this life, but her passing had left behind a man stricken by the rampant paralysis of grief. It was impossible not to be touched by his
overwhelming suffering—touched and awed.
I believe younger people—those in their twenties and thirties—assume passion will more or less disappear over time. They expect that, with age, raw emotion gradually slips out of our lives, gliding silently from view the way a molting snake abandons the shell of last year’s useless skin. Here was Guy Lewis—a heavyset, balding man in an improbably gaudy orange Hawaiian shirt—weeping uncontrollably. At his age—the far end of fifty—one might expect anguished passion to surface as only a rare comic anomaly.
But there was no pretense in the sorrow that etched Guy’s face, no playacting in the way he huddled miserably in my car, no phoniness to his hurt. For all Daphne’s faults, Guy Lewis had loved his second wife—loved her wildly, with-holding nothing. And that’s when I realized something about his arrhythmia episode—something an empathetic doctor might possibly have already recognized. What had been observed medically on high tech EKG monitors was nothing more or less than the outward symptom of a newly broken heart.
When we arrived at the Red Lion, Guy was still in no condition to talk, so I left him in the 928 under a shaded portico and used my own AmEx card to check him in. I explained to the big-eyed young desk clerkette that Mr. Lewis had lost his wife and that the remainder of the check-in procedures would have to be handled when he was better able to deal with them.
As soon as we made it into the room, Guy disappeared into the bathroom for a much-needed shower, while I called room service to order coffee and sandwiches. I know enough about the internal workings of hospitals to realize that they routinely plug you full of decaf and call it the real thing. It’s no wonder people come out of hospitals feeling worse than when they went in. They’re all suffering from severe caffeine withdrawal.
When Guy Lewis emerged from the shower, he may have felt better, but his looks hadn’t improved. The room-service food was already waiting on the table. He sat down in front of one of the two cracked-pepper meat-loaf sandwiches. He looked at it distractedly, making no move to pick it up. I poured a cup of coffee and bodily placed it in his hand.