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

by J. A. Jance

Nothing? I looked at him in astonishment. As far as I know, assaulting a police officer is a felony in every state of the union. Only when we were outside in the parking lot did he speak again.

  “I wanted an impartial observer. What do you think?”

  “I don’t understand any of it.”

  “What don’t you understand?”

  “If she wasn’t involved in the murders, why is she still lying through her teeth about her parents?”

  Fraymore stopped beside the Mercury. “Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”

  “What now?”

  “You packing?” he asked casually.

  Gordon Fraymore was talking guns, not suitcases. I nodded. “Why do you ask?”

  Without answering, he opened the trunk of the Montego and rummaged around in it, eventually hauling out a Kevlar vest, which he handed over to me.

  “We’re going to stop by that potluck supper and pay a call on Mrs. Connors. You’d best put this on.”

  If I were anything other than a crazed homicide cop, I would have told him to put the damn thing away, that a good woman was waiting for me to take her out to dinner, and that it was his job, not mine, to pay a courtesy visit on Madam Marjorie Connors. Instead, I slipped out of my jacket and started unbuttoning my shirt.

  “Lead the way,” I said.

  We drove through last-minute, pre-theater traffic and reached the church at ten after eight. Several cars were just then in the process of leaving the parking lot. Only a few vehicles remained, including an aging Chevrolet Suburban, brown and tan, with its mirror held on by layers of duct tape. Sunshine, her long leash attached to the front bumper, lay on the pavement directly in front of the truck. She was sound asleep.

  “Are you a betting man?” Fraymore asked.

  “Not particularly.”

  “Ten to one that thing’s loaded with suitcases and boxes.”

  “No bet,” I said.

  And it’s a good thing I didn’t. When I hopped out of the car long enough to press my face against the darkened glass on one of the back panels, I saw that the back of the Suburban was packed to the gills. Among the suitcases and boxes was a fiberglass airline doggie crate. Both Marjorie and Sunshine were leaving town.

  I returned to the Montego and leaned in the window. “You called that shot,” I said.

  Fraymore kept his eye on the entrance to what I knew to be the church social hall. He nodded. “Looks like we got here just in time,” he said. “Get in. We’ll park and wait.”

  By eight-fifteen traffic on the main drag had reduced appreciably as most playgoers settled into their seats. I was glad of that. For a cop, staging any kind of armed confrontation on a busy street is a terrifying proposition.

  “How do you want to handle this?” I asked. Since it was inarguably Fraymore’s show, I intended to take orders from him.

  “First we talk,” he said.

  “And then?”

  “If she doesn’t pay attention, we punt.”

  Great plan. Not long on strategy, but Fraymore was in charge; I was just along for the ride. I wasn’t ecstatic about being stuck in a vehicle with no possibility of radio contact. If we ran into trouble, there’d be no calling for help or backup. All those anxious thoughts drummed through my head as we sat there, but for a change I surprised myself and kept my mouth shut.

  Marjorie Connors and two other women came strolling out of the church basement about twenty-five after eight. The three of them ambled to the middle of the lot, where they stopped long enough to chat briefly and exchange hugs. I’m sure Marjorie must have seen the Montego parked nearby, but she gave no indication. As soon as the other two women started toward their own car, she struck out for the front of the Suburban. She knelt beside the dog and began unfastening Sunshine’s lead.

  By then both Gordon Fraymore and I were out of the Montego. As we approached, Sunshine lurched to her feet. I expected another spurt of frail barking, but the dog kept quiet. Only when Fraymore was within a matter of feet did Marjorie appear to notice him, but instead of addressing him, she spoke to the dog.

  “Come on, girl,” she said, tugging on the leash. “Let’s go for a ride.”

  “Evening, Marjorie,” Detective Fraymore drawled. “I wanted to talk to you about the fire out at your place this afternoon. Do you have a minute?”

  The woman’s startling violet eyes met Fraymore’s and held them without wavering. Meantime Sunshine hobbled forward. She stopped directly in front of Gordon Fraymore. Reflexively, and without bothering to look, he reached down and began to ruffle the old dog’s lank ears. I should have tumbled right then, but I didn’t.

  “I don’t have much time, or anything to say, either,” she answered with casual unconcern. “As you know, I wasn’t home when the fire started.” She tugged on the leash again. “It’s late, girl. Come on. It’s a long drive.”

  Leading the dog, she walked around the Suburban and opened the door on the rider’s side. Sunshine made one feeble attempt to crawl in by herself, but then she settled back on her haunches and waited patiently for help. Marjorie Connors leaned over, picked up the dog, and bodily boosted her up onto the bench seat. Then she closed the door and started around to the other side.

  “We know all about you, Marjorie,” Fraymore said, speaking slowly and deliberately. “Including the fact that you were once married to Guy Lewis.”

  Had I been Marjorie, that single all-encompassing revelation would have stopped me cold, but she didn’t even break her stride. Straightening her shoulders, she thrust one hand determinedly into the pocket of her leather jacket and kept walking. Pure survival instinct, years of working the streets, warned me she had a gun.

  “Please, Marjorie,” Gordon Fraymore said haltingly, and with far more gentleness than I would have thought possible. “Please don’t make me do this.”

  She stopped, turned around, and looked at him then. There was a moment—a vivid, electric, breathtaking moment—when everything I didn’t understand suddenly whirred into focus like a scene in the viewfinder on one of those new electronic cameras. It happened when I finally allowed my senses to make the obvious connections—to see the abject way Gordon Fraymore was looking at her. When I let myself hear the heartbreak and desperate pleading in his voice.

  Marjorie Connors and Gordon Fraymore were lovers.

  And in that moment, when I realized the truth, I finally understood why Fraymore had dragged me along to the hospital, why he had issued me the bullet-proof vest.

  For several seconds, no one moved. We all three stood there, frozen in place like life-sized pieces of art in public places. Marjorie’s right hand never left her pocket. She kept her gaze focused on Fraymore’s face, but she seemed impervious to the look of stark entreaty that was written there.

  “I’m leaving now, Gordon,” she said firmly, the way a mother speaks to a recalcitrant child. “We all have to do what we have to do. If you want to stop me, you’ll have to shoot.”

  With that, she climbed into the Suburban, shut and locked the door behind her, and started the engine. She jammed the gearshift into reverse and peeled out of the parking place, then she sent the truck barreling forward. Fraymore and I were left standing in a shower of gravel and a cloud of dust.

  For another moment, Gordon Fraymore still didn’t move. Ashen-faced, he stared after the fleeing truck, then slowly he let out his breath.

  He sighed. “We’d better go get her and bring her back,” he said grimly.

  Several blocks away a fanfare of pealing trumpets from the Elizabethan announced the beginning of the outdoor show. Onstage there would be plenty of action and fighting. Fake blood would flow during well-choreographed swordplay, but no one would die. After the performance, all the players—the ones who survived the plot as well as those who didn’t—would appear onstage for curtain calls and much-deserved applause.

  Down here in the church parking lot, real lives were on the line. None of us would be using fake bullets. Ours were all too real. When the action was o
ver, there was a better-than-even chance that one or more of us would be either badly hurt or dead. But we weren’t worthy of pealing trumpets. And when the action was over, I doubted we’d be rewarded with a round of applause, either. It didn’t seem fair.

  “Why’d you let her go, for God’s sake?” I demanded as we headed for the Montego. “Why didn’t you try to stop her?”

  Gordon Fraymore shook his head. “You saw it. She had a gun. I couldn’t risk it, not here on the street in the middle of town. It’s too dangerous. Someone else might get hurt.”

  That may sound like a lame excuse, but he was right. When you’re confronted by that kind of situation, the safety of innocent bystanders takes precedence over every other consideration.

  Back in the car, we tore across the parking lot toward the street, only to see Marjorie Connors’ Suburban a good three blocks away, speeding south. Without benefit of either lights or siren, hot pursuit was out of the question.

  After checking oncoming traffic, Fraymore turned carefully onto the street and followed the Suburban at a speed that gave little hope of our ever catching up. We were in the detective’s lovingly maintained Montego. He drove the aging Mercury as if it were made of spun glass that would shatter at the slightest jar. Had we been in Fraymore’s city-owned Lumina, it would have been a different story. Cop cars are disposable items, meant to be rode hard and put up wet.

  While Fraymore drove, there was nothing for me to do but worry. “How dangerous is she?” I asked.

  Fraymore didn’t answer right away. “Three people are dead so far,” he returned gloomily. “You tell me.”

  CHAPTER

  20

  Riding in the car with Fraymore was an emotional nightmare. I knew exactly what he was thinking, what he was feeling, because I had walked in his shoes once. Dreading what was to come, I was scared witless, not just for me but for all of us. The situation was every bit as dangerous as walking into a house filled with highly volatile liquid-propane gas.

  We followed Marjorie south and out of town, across the freeway, and past the turnoff to the charred remains of Live Oak Farm. She was speeding, but not as much as I would have expected. Even without hot pursuit, we maintained some visual contact.

  “Are you going to stop and call for backup?” I asked as we passed what I knew to be both the last gas station and the last telephone booth on the outskirts of town.

  “You are my backup,” Gordon Fraymore responded.

  I do ask stupid questions.

  Outside the car, dusk was fast approaching. Fraymore flipped on the headlights. We swept out through rolling pastureland, around the end of what was evidently a small lake, then up a steep grade laced with switchback curves, and into the mountains, a lower spur of the Cascade Range. Neither the Suburban nor the Montego were particularly good at cornering on the steep, winding road. When Marjorie Connors increased her pace, Fraymore didn’t, despite the fact that she was pulling well ahead of us. At times the Suburban’s taillights disappeared completely in the deepening twilight.

  “We’re going to lose her,” I warned.

  Fraymore shook his head. “No. I think I know where she’s going.”

  After that we rode for almost half an hour in absolute silence while paved road gave way to loose gravel. I don’t know what Fraymore was thinking, but I was remembering the horror of finding Anne Corley at Snoqualmie Falls and quailing from what was to come with every atom of my being.

  Beyond the fringe of oak trees and well into ponderosa pine, Fraymore turned left onto a dirt road that meandered off into the forest. By then it really was dark. A thick layer of pine needles littered the meagerly lit road before us. There were no visible tracks, no way to tell whether or not another vehicle had come this way for months on end, but Gordon Fraymore pushed on. In the reflected glow of the dashboard, his broad face was a study in grim determination and total despair.

  To my credit, I didn’t try to tell him everything was going to be all right. This was no time for sugar-coated platitudes. We both knew imminent disaster awaited us around each and every fast-approaching curve.

  A half-mile or so later, Fraymore turned off yet again, this time onto a nearly invisible track barely wide enough to accommodate the width of his Montego. By then I found myself hoping he was wrong—that he didn’t know Marjorie Connors nearly as well as he thought he did. With any kind of luck, we’d end up stuck out in these thick woods. It would fall to someone else to bring Marjorie Connors down—someone who, unlike Gordon Fraymore, didn’t care so damn much.

  But then, through a canyon of towering trees, the high beam of the Mercury’s headlights bounced off the reflectors on the back of Marjorie’s parked Suburban. Without thinking, I reached for my automatic and shifted it into a jacket pocket to make it more readily accessible.

  Fraymore noticed. “Remember,” he cautioned. “First we talk.”

  What else could he say? After all, he loved the woman.

  “We already tried it your way. She drove off and left us. She’s crazy, Gordon. The death toll already stands at three. You said so yourself. We can’t let it go any higher.”

  Fraymore said nothing more, but I followed his lead and left the automatic in my pocket. When he shut off the engine, I felt naked and vulnerable, sitting there waiting for my eyes to adjust to the lack of light.

  “There’s a cabin off to the right on the other side of the Suburban,” he told me, “about ten yards up a little path. Right around the truck there’s a picnic table. My guess is that’s where we’ll find her. You go right; I’ll go left.”

  “Any idea what she’s carrying?”

  “None whatsoever.”

  “Too bad,” I said.

  As I crawled out of the car and eased myself onto the ground, I couldn’t help wondering why it is women never tell men the really important things about them—the life-and-death things. A woman lets you know how she likes her steaks, what she takes in her coffee, and whether or not she despises fingernail polish, but who needs to know that?

  Gordon Fraymore may have known from the outset exactly where Marjorie Connors might go, but he didn’t have the foggiest idea what kind of gun she might use to kill him. Or whether or not she would. Damn Marjorie Connors anyway!

  I was halfway around the Suburban and wondering when I’d come face-to-face with a barking Sunshine, when I heard a sharp crack. I froze and held my breath, but it was only the crackle of dried twigs catching fire. Despite what I’d been through earlier that day at Live Oak Farm, the sound of a burning campfire was far more comforting than I would have thought possible. With the noise from the fire helping to conceal the sound of my approach, I edged around the front bumper to where I could see Marjorie toss an armload of wood onto a recently kindled fire laid in an outdoor river-rock fireplace.

  The flickering light allowed me to locate Sunshine lying curled up nearby. She was close enough to the flames to take instant advantage of their spreading warmth. No doubt the higher elevation and much cooler temperatures were tough on the frail old dog’s aged bones. I suspected Marjorie had started the fire more out of concern for Sunshine than to warm herself. Her regard for the dog was at once touching and revolting. How could she worry so about an ancient, worthless animal and yet show so little consideration for human life?

  Finished stoking the fire, Marjorie retreated to the neighboring picnic table just as Gordon Fraymore emerged into the light from a pool of shadows. “Hello, Marjorie,” he said softly.

  She showed no surprise. “Hello, Gordy,” she returned. “It’s all right. I’m not going to shoot you.”

  “I’m not going to shoot” should join “Go ahead and shoot me” on the list of most overused famous last words, but Gordon Fraymore took them at face value. He stepped nearer the table. A pebble rattled under his foot, and Sunshine raised her head.

  “It’s okay, girl,” Marjorie crooned reassuringly. “It’s only Gordy.”

  Sunshine thumped her tail in a brief welcoming tattoo. Then, seem
ingly unconcerned, she wearily put her chin back down on her paws and closed her eyes while Fraymore edged even closer. I could see that his own gun was still holstered, the damn fool.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Waiting for you. Having a drink. Care to join me?”

  “No, thanks. What’s in the glass?”

  A tall plastic glass sat on the wooden table in front of her. Next to it stood a bottle. “Gin,” she answered.

  “You don’t drink,” he observed.

  “I do sometimes.”

  Their voices were so subdued and dispassionate, that I wondered if I had made up the other part, if I had only imagined the charge of passion arc between them, but when Fraymore asked the next question, his voice cracked with pent-up emotion.

  “Why’d you do it, Marge?” he asked brokenly. “Why?”

  “I was getting even,” she answered with a shrug. “Guy threw me out. Once he saw her, he thought I was fat and ugly and old. You can fix fat, but there’s not much you can do about old and ugly, is there. Guy dumped me on the garbage heap like an old shoe—and for a slut like that!”

  “God in heaven! You didn’t have to kill them.”

  Marjorie paused long enough to pour more gin into the glass. “Didn’t I?” she returned scornfully. “If I didn’t, who would? You must know what they were by now, or you wouldn’t be here.”

  “It still wasn’t up to you,” Fraymore insisted doggedly. “Sooner or later, the law catches up with people like that.”

  “No, it wouldn’t,” she replied. “The statute of limitations ran out on most of Daphne’s criminal activity long ago, and although you may not be willing to do it yourself, there’s no law against ditching a worn-out wife.”

  Fraymore’s massive shoulders drooped. “Why didn’t you tell me what you knew? If you found out, it couldn’t have been that much of a secret.”

  Marjorie picked up the glass and took a long pull on it. “Oh, it was a secret all right. They really covered their tracks. I found out because I made it my business to find out, because I made it my life’s work. It took a long time. It took a lot longer to find the girl.”