JP Beaumont 11 - Failure To Appear (v5.0)

by J. A. Jance

  A man from Budget was waiting for me to sign off on the paperwork on the car. Afterward, he and Ralph left together. Alex stood in line until I finished up with the car-rental business before she had her crack at me.

  Women are funny that way. When something bad happens, they can’t seem to decide whether to hug your neck because they’re glad to see you or chew your ass because you’re a stupid jerk who never should have pulled such a dumb stunt in the first place. She took the ass-chewing option, but it was probably the nicest bawling-out I’ve ever had.

  When it was time for me to go take my bath, Alex disappeared into the kitchen to finish feeding Amber. I didn’t want to talk about Amber or what was going to happen to the child within the next day or two. Some things are better left unsaid.

  Out of habit, I undressed the same way I always do—emptying my pockets one by one onto the dresser and bedside table. The last thing I took out were the faxes from Ron Peters that I’d been carrying around with me all day long.

  I filled the tub as full as I dared and dumped in a handful of bath gel. I felt a little silly crawling into a tub full of bubbles, but silly gave way to luxury as the hot-water soak relaxed the muscles I’d strained and pulled trying to drag Guy Lewis and Tanya Dunseth out of harm’s way. In the end, I lay there with my eyes closed, enjoying every moment of it. Finally, though, when my skin was wrinkled and shriveled and when the water grew too tepid, I climbed out and toweled myself dry.

  Then, with the towel still draped around me, I sat down on the edge of the bed and picked up the faxes. My intention was simply to glance through them. Before I came upstairs, Alex had made it clear that she was still holding me to the promised dinner. She had even located a substitute baby-sitter. At that point, I didn’t have a thought in my head of standing her up.

  Ron Peters had said he was sending ten or twelve pages. In actual fact, there were eleven. Seven of them were strictly text, with several articles from various sources pasted together on the same page. Because of the nature of fax machines, particularly gray-scale resolution, the reproduction on the four photos wasn’t high quality. The print in the various articles and in the captions under the photos was legible enough, but the pictures themselves were primarily unrecognizable blobs of light and dark.

  So I settled for scanning the articles and reading the captions on the pictures—Daphne and Guy Lewis at a benefit for the Bagley Wright Theater, Daphne and Guy picking up the keys to the Bentley, and Guy mugging with actors from the Rep at some special event for Children’s Hospital. The last picture in the batch was of Margaret Lewis at a Humane Society auction holding a puppy named Sunshine, the high-priced golden Lab she had just adopted.

  My eyes stopped moving. So did my brain. Sunshine? The caption said “Sunshine”! I read it again, and the name hit me like a swift slap in the face! Another dog named Sunshine? Or could this be the same Sunshine I knew—the cataract-blinded, stiff old dog who formerly held sway on Marjorie Connors’ front porch? If so, what the hell was she doing in a newspaper photo with Maggie Lewis?

  I held the paper up to the bedside lamp and tried to squint some details into the fax-generated globs of light and dark. The woman in the picture was very heavyset and wearing a dark-colored dress, probably an evening dress of some kind, but there was no way to discern a single detail about the woman herself. The specific features of her face had been scrubbed away by a technology that allows for amazing speed at the expense of detail. The puppy was a vaguely dog-shaped blob superimposed on the much darker surface of the woman’s clothing.

  A wave of gooseflesh ran down my leg. If Sunshine was Live Oak Farm’s Sunshine, then was Marjorie Connors also Maggie Lewis? For the second time that day, I felt as if I couldn’t quite gather a lungful of air. This time the disability had nothing to do with liquid-propane gas displacing oxygen.

  Dropping the towel, I scrambled into my skivvies, pants, socks, and shoes. I was still buttoning my shirt as I scurried downstairs. I raced into the family room and commandeered Florence’s telephone and phone book both. Luckily, Ashland is a small town. In Seattle, homicide cops can’t afford to have listed telephone numbers. In Ashland they do.

  Gordon Fraymore’s wife answered the phone and made it quite clear that she didn’t appreciate having her husband called away from his evening meal, especially on his day off.

  “What’s up?” Fraymore asked, when he learned who I was.

  “How well do you know Marjorie Connors?”

  “Some,” he said guardedly. “Why?”

  “I think you’d better come over here right away,” I said. “I believe we have a problem.”

  Alex came through the room and asked me what was going on. “I’ll tell you in a minute,” I said. “First I need to call Ralph.”

  The Ashland Hills operator told me Ralph was in the dining room. Someone would have to go find him. While I waited, I could hardly contain myself. Was that what this was all about, then? Was Marjorie Connors nothing more than a woman scorned who had enlisted Tanya Dunseth in a long-term, complex, and exceedingly lethal form of revenge? It was hard to believe, but I was beginning to believe it was true.

  I took the picture out of my pocket and examined it again. The news photo wasn’t dated, but if it was from late in her marriage to Guy Lewis, that meant Sunshine would be twelve to fourteen years old. And it also meant that Sunshine was Maggie Lewis’ Achilles’ heel. The woman might have changed everything else about herself—her name, her friends, her past—but she had cared too much to leave the dog behind. Or to change the old dog’s name. Or to put Sunshine down.

  And then I finally understood why, on that particular day, Sunshine had been missing from her customary place on the front porch at Live Oak Farm. Marjorie Connors had taken Sunshine along to meet Ames in order to save the old dog’s life.

  Ralph Ames came on the line. “What’s happening?” he asked cheerfully.

  “Three questions,” I said. “Who initiated the meeting between you and Marjorie Connors this morning?”

  “She did. She called early, right around seven. She asked if we could get together later on, sometime between ten and noon at the Mark Anthony. Why?”

  “Next question. Did she have her old dog with her?”

  “Sunshine? As a matter of fact, she did. She talked to the desk clerk about it. He agreed that the dog could sit with us as long as we stayed in the lobby. Beau, what’s going on?”

  “One last thing. When the house blew up, they say people heard it for miles. Did you?”

  “Well, of course.”

  “Was Marjorie with you—at the time of the blast, I mean?”

  Ralph Ames paused for a moment. “Why no, now that you mention it, I don’t believe she was. I believe she had just excused herself to go to the ladies’ room.”

  “Bingo!” I said. “I’ve gotta go, Ralph. Gordon Fraymore is just now driving into the yard.”

  CHAPTER

  19

  Fraymore and I sat in his Mercury outside Oak Hill B & B while I told him in considerable detail everything I knew—or thought I knew—about Guy and Daphne Lewis. And about the fact that there was a good chance the woman everyone in Ashland knew as Marjorie Connors was, in actuality, the original, cast-off version of Mrs. Guy Lewis.

  I wasn’t sure how or when it happened, but somehow, in the course of revealing this new information, Fraymore and I moved away from our former mutual antagonism into a spirit of grudging cooperation. He listened carefully to everything I said, nodding occasionally.

  “Could this friend of yours in Seattle send down the original of that picture so I could have a look at it?”

  “I’m sure he’d be happy to,” I answered. “If he shipped it counter-to-counter, we’d have it by midmorning.”

  I looked down at the seat, instinctively searching for the presence of a cellular phone. The Montego didn’t have one. “That’s all right,” Fraymore said, starting the engine. “We’ll call from my office.”

  When Fraymor
e had arrived at Oak Hill, I had expected to talk to him for several minutes and then go right back inside. I assumed that once I gave him the information, it would be up to him to take action. Fraymore, however, seemed disinclined to let me loose. I certainly hadn’t planned on going along with him, but as we drove toward his office, I still expected I’d return in plenty of time to keep my dinner date with Alex.

  After calling Ron Peters and making arrangements for him to ship the photo, I again expected to head back home. Nothing doing. Instead, Fraymore picked up the phone and made a series of offhand, almost casual calls. In Seattle, the first one would have been an official inquiry to the Department of Motor Vehicles. Then, armed with the suspect’s vehicle license number, an all-points bulletin would have been issued.

  This, however, was Ashland, a place where people knew their neighbors. Without having to consult Motor Vehicles, Gordon Fraymore already knew the kind of car Marjorie Connors drove. He directed his officers to be on the outlook for an ’85 brown-and-tan Suburban with a permanently dinged right front-door panel and a rearview mirror that was attached to the frame of the car by massive amounts of duct tape.

  Within minutes of passing along this somewhat folksy description, Fraymore’s small-town law-enforcement grapevine located the vehicle in question. A downtown church—the same one where the N.A. meeting had been held the previous Saturday—was hosting a hastily organized emergency potluck dinner to feed and collect donations for the burned-out victims of the Live Oak Farm fire. According to Gordon Fraymore’s informant, Marjorie Connors was believed to be in attendance.

  The detective assimilated the information and stood up abruptly. “It figures she would be,” he said, nodding in satisfaction. “It would call too much attention to her if she wasn’t. Let’s go.” He headed out of his office, and I followed.

  “Where to? The potluck?”

  “Not just yet. We’ll start with the hospital. I want to talk to Tanya Dunseth one more time.”

  “Tanya,” I echoed. “Why her? She’s never told the truth, not once in her life.”

  “Maybe she’s been telling some of the truth all along,” Gordon Fraymore said with a thoughtful frown. “Maybe we just weren’t smart enough to pick up on it.”

  We? There was that fateful word “we” again. I let the questionable usage pass. Obviously, I was included in whatever was going down, but Fraymore said almost nothing on the way to the hospital. When we reached Tanya Dunseth’s room, he motioned for me to follow him inside.

  Tanya, wearing a hospital-issue gown, lay on her raised bed watching a mute television set.

  “Hi there, Tanya,” Gordon Fraymore said easily when she glanced in our direction. “Mind if we ask you a couple of questions?”

  “What kind of questions?” she asked.

  Strictly speaking, Tanya should have thrown us out without giving us the time of day. Most homicide suspects, from casual killers to perpetrators of fatal domestic violence, know the drill all too well. Few of them are first-time offenders. They’ve been picked up before for something, although their previous offenses may not have been murder. Some of them know more about their rights than the cops who arrest them. Habitual offenders can and do recite the Miranda warning without the necessity of any prompting.

  Since she didn’t send us packing, it crossed my mind that maybe Tanya didn’t know all that much about the process, at least not from personal experience. I was sure Ralph Ames had given her strict orders not to answer questions without his being present. But then he wasn’t charging her for his services. Free advice is always easy to ignore.

  “Do you know why we’re here?” Fraymore asked.

  Tanya shrugged. “I suppose it’s the same as this afternoon. You think I killed Guy Lewis. You seem to think I killed everybody.”

  Her direct reference to the investigation was an answer in itself. It’s the kind of forthright response that usually comes from suspects who are actually innocent. Guilty ones generally affect an air of total mystification. They can’t think of a single reason why an investigator might possibly come to them asking questions. They have zero idea what has happened or what the investigation might concern.

  “Did you?” Fraymore asked straight out. Ralph Ames would have been outraged and rightly so. Tanya answered all the same.

  “No,” she answered firmly. “I did not. I didn’t even know the man. Why would I kill him?”

  “You knew his wife,” Fraymore prompted.

  Tanya nodded. “I knew Daphne, but not him.”

  “How did you hook up with Marjorie Connors?” The abrupt change of subject stymied Tanya momentarily.

  “Marjorie? Why are you asking about her, and what do you mean, ‘hook up’?”

  “Just that. She didn’t advertise in the paper for people to come live with her, so how did you end up out on her farm?”

  “She came to me.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t remember exactly. I was pregnant with Amber at the time. I was about to be evicted because I couldn’t afford my rent. I didn’t know what to do or where to turn. I knew her slightly from working with her in the theaters. One day, out of the blue, she offered to help me.”

  “Sort of like yesterday when she showed up with enough money to post your bond?”

  Tanya looked at Fraymore long and hard before she nodded. “Sort of like that, yes.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Yesterday?”

  “No. Back then, when you first met her.”

  “She said she was new to town, but that she was thinking of starting a co-op, an inexpensive place for young actors to live. She said she had heard I might need a place like that.”

  “Did she ever tell you where or how she heard about you and your predicament?”

  “No. We never discussed it, but someone must have mentioned it to her.”

  “You and your daughter were her first tenants out at the farm?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about the other young people who lived there—the ones who came later? Did she go looking for them the same way?”

  Tanya shook her head. “Not really. I helped her find most of them. I posted notices on the bulletin boards at the Festival and at the grocery stores in town. Word gets around.”

  I was in the room, but I wasn’t sure why. Fraymore’s manner made it clear he regarded me as nothing more than a piece of furniture. Nonetheless, I paid close attention. I could more or less see where he was going with this line of questioning. The fact that Tanya claimed Marjorie had actively recruited her could have been significant, especially since all the other roomers had turned up by sheer happenstance. But whether or not that was credible depended on whether or not you believed a single word Tanya Dunseth uttered. I, for one, didn’t. Not by a long shot.

  “Let me ask you this,” Gordon Fraymore continued. “Did she ever ask about your past?”

  The whole time we had been in the room—the whole time Tanya had been answering Fraymore’s questions—her manner had been casual and composed. She had carried her part of the conversation as easily as if she had been fielding questions about the changing weather. Now there was a subtle change in her demeanor. She blinked and shifted her position on the bed. In an interrogation situation, that kind of body language shift sends out a clear signal of distress on the part of the suspect. It means the questions are circling in on something important.

  “No, why?” Tanya asked, feigning carelessness, but even her stage-trained voice evinced a slight tremor.

  “She never asked you about what you did before you came here? Never asked about your career in the movie business?”

  “Nobody knew about that!” Tanya shot back at him. She sat up in bed and glared at Gordon Fraymore while cracks spread across the surface of Tanya Dunseth’s smooth veneer. The striking change in her reminded me once more of her reaction when Daphne and Guy Lewis had walked into the Members’ Lounge.

  Gordon Fraymore nodded in my direction, acknowledg
ing my presence in the room for the very first time.

  “I believe you know Mr. Beaumont, here,” he said. “Why don’t you tell Miss Dunseth about your visit with Roger Tompkins in Walla Walla last night.”

  Tanya’s eyes panned from Fraymore’s face to mine. She seemed to gather herself into a smaller package while her fingers dug into the bedclothes. “I don’t want to hear,” she said defiantly. “Go away.”

  I was on. Fraymore had turned the spotlight full on me—with no advance warning and with no cue cards to tell me what he wanted me to say.

  Stalling, I cleared my throat. “I’m afraid my visit with Mr. Tompkins was very upsetting to them both, to him and to his wife,” I said, “especially since their daughter died back in…”

  “Get out!” Tanya interrupted. “Get out now! I don’t have to talk to you without Mr. Ames here. He told me I didn’t.”

  “But, Tanya…” Fraymore began.

  With no warning, Tanya grabbed her plastic water glass off the nightstand and fired it in the general direction of Gordon Fraymore’s head. He ducked out of the way. The glass missed his head, but it sprayed him with water before bouncing off the wooden door directly behind him. At the sound, the uniformed guard burst into the room, only to dodge out of the way of the next missile—the water pitcher itself—which flew on out into the hall and was followed shortly thereafter by a tissue box and the emesis basin.

  “Get out! Get out! Get out!” Tanya shouted.

  The guard started to draw his weapon, but Fraymore stopped him with a quick shake of his head. “It’s okay,” he said. “She’s just a little upset.”

  Upset? I couldn’t believe my ears, but Fraymore herded both the guard and me out of the room before I had a chance to object. We were met in the hallway by an irate nurse.

  “What in heaven’s name is going on in there?” she demanded.

  “It’s nothing,” Fraymore said decisively. “She’ll be all right once we’re gone.”