Sick Man

by Paul Spencer

  I shook my head at him.

  “Yes, I’m ready,” Tony said. He repeated a phone number to me, and I typed it into my phone. “And could you confirm the spelling of her last name, please? Thompson? With a ‘p’? Thank you. You’ve been very helpful. I’ll call you back when the investigation is complete.”

  Tony hung up and smiled again. “Easy.”

  “Nice work.”

  “I’m just getting started.” His phone rang. He looked at the screen, then pinched the bridge of his nose. He stood up to leave. “Order me another beer if the waitress comes by.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “It’s probably better if you don’t overhear this call.”

  “Tony, I just sat here while you impersonated a government official. Do you have any idea how many laws you broke?”

  “No, really, Mick. I don’t want you to hear this call.”

  “Okay, whatever.”

  Tony walked out the connecting door to the Hotel Monaco’s sprawling lobby. He was still gone when our food arrived, so I started in on my club sandwich. They got the bacon right, nice and crispy. Busy hotels were usually a good place for the classics. They didn’t stay in business long if they weren’t.

  I ran some searches on my phone while I ate. Diane Thompson was in the white pages, so I didn’t have any trouble coming up with her address. I didn’t find much else. For such a common name, there were surprisingly few hits. Still, her address was all we needed for now. I nibbled on some fries and thought some more about what to do next.

  I had almost finished eating when Tony came back. He didn’t look happy.

  “You okay?” I said.

  “Yeah. Family business.”

  He started eating before I could respond . His bowl of mussels must have been getting cold, but that didn’t seem to slow him down. He methodically piled empty shells in his side dish. I knew better than to interrupt, so I picked at a couple of cold fries and let him finish. When the last shell was emptied, he dipped his crostini in the sauce and took one final bite.

  “Your family business didn’t hurt your appetite,” I said.

  “Those were good mussels. It would be a crime to let them go to waste.”

  “Glad you enjoyed it. You ready to go see Diane Thompson?”

  “Yeah,” he said, and a brief dark look crossed his face again. “Let’s get the check and go pay her a visit.”

  Chapter 14 – Playing the Fool

  Diane lived in an old brown Colonial style place, just south of Belmont. Like a lot of older homes in Southeast Portland, it had been converted into apartments. This one had four separate front doors. Diane’s was the one on the right. I pressed the buzzer and stepped back, the wooden porch creaking under my feet. Nothing happened.

  “Do you think she’s home?” Tony said. “Maybe we should have called first.”

  “No, I want her to be off balance.” I pressed the buzzer again, and held my finger down this time. Eventually, I heard someone moving around inside, so I took my finger off the buzzer. The door opened, and a woman blinked up at us. I smelled marijuana smoke.

  “What do you want?”

  “Diane Thompson?” I said.

  “Yeah. Who are you?”

  “We need to talk to you,” I said. “It’s about Aaron Jones.”

  “Are you guys the police? Because I already talked to the cops about it.”

  “I’m an investigator, ma’am,” Tony said. “Can we come inside?”

  She looked over her shoulder. “I’m not sure,” she mumbled. “It’s kind of –”

  “It’s important.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Give me a minute.” She left the door open and went inside. Tony and I took our time following her. She was bent over a coffee table, picking up an ashtray and a plastic bag. She gathered them up and disappeared through another door, then came back a moment later.

  Diane was a small woman, maybe five feet three, slim and pretty. She wore plaid pajama pants and an Oregon State sweatshirt. It didn’t look like she had any makeup on, and her short blonde hair was messy. The apartment was tidy though, with sparse, modern furniture and decoration. It looked like a page from an Ikea catalog. A large rectangular leather couch dominated the living room. Diane sat on it and hugged her knees. I sat in the matching armchair opposite, and Tony stood next to me.

  “Look, it’s medical pot, okay?” she said. “I’ve got a card and everything. It’s for my anxiety.”

  “We’re not interested in that,” I told her. “We need to talk to you about Aaron.”

  “Yeah, well, I told the cops everything I know already.”

  “Let’s try again anyway. Start with Friday night. Aaron texted you before he went to Holman’s, right?”

  “Yeah, he asked me to go with him, but I said no. I hate that place. It’s a shithole.”

  “And you two had been arguing?”

  “Sort of. We were supposed to go to a movie after work a couple of days ago, and he didn’t show. He said he forgot, but I didn’t believe him. I was still mad at him.” She sniffed, and tears welled up in her eyes. “It all seems so stupid now.”

  I grabbed a box of Kleenex from the coffee table and held it out to her. “Did you hear from him after he invited you to Holman’s?”

  She took a tissue and blew her nose. “Yeah, he texted me later and said he got into a fight or something. He said he was okay, though.”

  “Was there anything else?”

  “He asked if he could come over here, but I said no.”

  “Did he say where he was going?”

  “No. I just assumed he’d go home.”

  “How long had the two of you been dating?”

  “About nine months, I think.”

  “Was Aaron religious?”

  “Not any more. He told me he used to be part of some church, but he left. He hated talking about it. Every time I asked him about it, he’d get really pissed. My mom’s a Christian, and he even yelled at her when she brought it up.”

  “Did he ever say why he was so angry?”

  “Not directly, but he’d kind of mumble things when he got mad about it. Something about his little sister, I think. I would have asked him more, but he just got so pissed off every time it came up.”

  “Was there anything strange about his behavior recently?”

  “No. Well, kind of. A couple of times lately, he’d sneak off and make a private phone call. He’d be really angry afterwards. I don’t know who he was calling.”

  “You sound like you were afraid of him. Was he violent with you?”

  “No, nothing like that!” She took another Kleenex and dabbed at her eyes. “I just hated seeing him upset.”

  “Did he ever tell you about his criminal record?”

  “What? No. He didn’t have a criminal record!”

  Tony folded his arms. “Mr. Jones was a registered sex offender, ma’am.”

  “That’s crazy! Wait, who are you guys again?” She pointed a finger at Tony. “You said you were a cop.”

  “I said I’m an investigator. Mr. Jones never told you about his child pornography convictions?”

  “I can’t believe I’m hearing this.” Tears streamed down her face now. “I want you to leave. Get out. Both of you!”

  Tony started to say something, but I held my hand up to him. “It’s okay,” I said, “we’re leaving. Sorry to disturb you, Ms. Thompson.”

  I stood up and left, and Tony followed me out. We got back in my car and drove off. Neither of us spoke for a while. Who had Aaron been calling when he was sneaking off to make calls? Why was he so angry? There had to be something going on. Aaron could get grumpy at times, but I don’t think I’d ever seen him truly angry. We needed to find out who was on the other end of those secret phone calls.

  “Where to now?” Tony said eventually.

  I thought about our options. There was one other lead I wanted to follow up on. “Get your phone out. Look up Servants of Christ. Do they have a chur
ch near here?”

  Tony took out his phone and tapped away at the screen.

  “Oregon City, off of Molalla Avenue,” he said. “Take Stark to 205, and we can be there in a half hour.”

  “All right, let’s go. I just want to take a look at the place. Maybe go inside and see if anyone remembers what went down with Aaron.”

  Tony nodded. “Sure. How do you want to play it?”

  “Good question. The cops will have been there already. You’ve got to figure Malone sent someone out right after Casey got off the phone. We should steer clear of that angle.”

  “Maybe you pose as Aaron’s uncle or something? Pretend you came out there to let them know he’s dead?”

  “Might work. They’re going to be suspicious if the cops have been there already, though.”

  “Yeah, I know. Let me think about.”

  “Okay.” We drove east in silence for a mile or two, the old homes of southeast Portland gradually transforming from gentrified to run down, then giving way to a commercial wasteland east of 82nd. As we swung on to the freeway, I changed the subject. “What did you make of Diane Thompson?”

  “Not much, man. Dopey stoner.”

  “I don’t know. I got the feeling she’s pretty sharp. She seemed genuinely upset about Aaron, too. It can’t be easy, turning your boyfriend away and then finding out he got whacked. That one thing she said was interesting. About Aaron making secret phone calls.”

  “I’d love to know what that secret was.”

  “Yeah. Maybe it was related to his priors. I’m not surprised he never told her about that.”

  “Me neither. Would you tell your girlfriend that you’d been convicted of messing with little boys?”

  As we headed south down I-205, I tried to think of ways to approach a visit to the church. I hadn’t been inside one since my wedding day, and that didn’t exactly fill me with good memories. Giving Sarah the fancy white wedding she so desperately wanted had cleaned me out and maxed out my credit cards. I didn’t care at the time. The illusion of love will do that to you. I paid it all off just in time to take out a mortgage on a big West Hills house we couldn’t afford. That and Sarah’s incurable shopping addiction had kept me poor the whole time we were together. Now she had the house, and I had an alimony bill as the frosting on the cake.

  Maybe we’d find out something useful at the church. I needed to know more about Aaron’s crimes, and who might be connected to them. Diane was no help, and the victims’ names weren’t in the police reports. It was worth a try. If we did come up with anything, I could have Casey feed it to Buchanan and Malone. I felt a glimmer of hope. If we could help find whoever killed Aaron, maybe I could put this mess behind me and get on with my life. It wasn’t much, but it was all I had.

  I got off the freeway and headed south on Cascade Highway, through the south end of Clackamas. Locals called it Clackistan, and it wasn’t hard to see why. Run down light industrial facilities lined both sides of the road. Blue and gray wood buildings, many of them boarded up. Faded signs, sagging fences. We drove for a couple of miles, then turned right on to Molalla.

  Tony glanced at his phone.

  “Slow down,” he said. “It’s right up here.”

  I drove past a large self-storage facility. Tony pointed out the window. “This is it.”

  The building he indicated was a two-story light brown structure at the back of a large parking lot immediately north of the storage facility. There were five or six cars in the parking lot. I parked in the back half of the lot, with a sparse hedge between us and the front door. We could see through it, but it would be hard for anyone on the other side to see that there was anyone in the car.

  There wasn’t anything obvious to indicate the building was a church. No crosses, no signs with the latest message from the Lord above. Just a glass door and a couple of neatly-trimmed bushes at each side.

  “Are you sure this is the place?” I said.

  “Yeah, this is it, man.”

  “They aren’t exactly advertising their presence.”

  “Maybe they aren’t taking new members,” Tony said.

  “Let’s go inside.”

  “No, not yet,” he said. “Let’s sit here, get a feel for the place. See if we can see anyone coming or going.”

  “Okay, no problem.”

  We sat in the car, waiting for something to happen. A car or two occasionally rolled by on Molalla Avenue, but nobody entered or left the building. After about half an hour, I was getting fidgety.

  “What do you think, Tony? Should we go inside now? I’m getting sick of waiting.”

  Tony laughed. “I can tell you’re not an investigator.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This isn’t waiting. I’m used to sitting and watching a place for hours. Give it a while longer, will you?”

  The glass door opened before I could reply. A family of four came out, parents and two girls about six years old, followed by a tall thin man in a black suit. They stood as a group, the parents nodding somberly while the man in the suit spoke to them. When he finished talking, the man leaned forward and rested his right palm briefly on each girl’s head. Then he straightened up and kissed the mother and father each on the lips. Neither of them seemed surprised. The mother and children turned and walked towards a car parked near the door. The man in the suit leaned forward and whispered something in the father’s ear, then patted his arm. The father nodded meekly and went to join his family in the car. The man in the suit watched them drive off, then went back inside.

  Tony looked at me, his eyes wide. “Holy shit. Was the dude in the suit who I think he was?”

  “Yeah,” I said, and sighed. “That’s Arnold Larsen.”

  Chapter 15 - Setback

  I started the car and drove off. I couldn’t see any point in going into the church now. Larsen would recognize me immediately, so I couldn’t pretend to be someone else. And I didn’t have a good excuse for snooping around, or my interest in Aaron Jones. Besides, an idea was forming in my mind.

  “Do you think he could have done it?” Tony said.

  “I was thinking the same thing,” I replied. “Larsen is one angry motherfucker. I know that all too well. But killing? I don’t know. Timing seems off, too. Why now? He must have known about Aaron messing with the kids for a while.”

  “Yeah, but he’s got a reason to be pissed at you too.”

  “Yeah, but again, it’s old news. Still, I hope Buchanan and Malone take a good look at him.”

  “Do you think we should tell them?”

  “Not yet. They know about the church. Let’s give them a day or two to find him themselves. It sure would be a weight off my mind.”

  “No kidding.”

  I drove us back to my place. Tony didn’t say much as we went, and that was fine with me. I still didn’t think Larsen was the killer, but his being involved might not be a coincidence. He and I were connected, thanks to the two high-profile cases I’d represented him on. And I’d never met a man more full of hate and anger.

  Despite what I’d said to Tony, I was impatient for Buchanan and Malone to make the connection to Larsen. The more I thought about it, the more the idea of him being involved somehow made sense. I couldn’t just call them and tell them, but there had to be a way to nudge them in that direction. Maybe I could talk to Casey, have her do it again. Or we could come up with some other way of drawing Larsen out, making him tip his hand.

  We got back to my neighborhood, and I parked around the corner from my place on 26th. My phone rang just as I shut off the car. It was Detective Buchanan.

  “Wray, we need to talk,” he said.

  “Okay, Detective,” I said. “But make it quick. I’m in a hurry.” Tony was halfway out of the car when I said “Detective.” He raised his eyebrows and sat back down.

  “You better be in a hurry to explain yourself,” Buchanan said. “Because you are in a shitload of trouble for that stunt you and da Costa pulled at Diane Thompson’
s place today.”

  “We didn’t pull any stunt. And what I do on my own time doesn’t matter to you.”

  “Like hell it doesn’t matter. How do you think I feel when my boss gets a call from a witness in a murder investigation, crying about a big dude and a Mexican pretending to be cops and threatening her?”

  “I’m trying to find out who wants me dead, Detective. That means talking to people involved. And I don’t care if your boss gets upset about it.”

  “The only thing you need to care about right now is convincing me not to arrest you for witness tampering and impersonating a police officer.”

  “Yeah, that’s much more important than actually finding the killer.”

  “I’m waiting. Either you tell me what happened at Diane Thompson’s place, or you get arrested. Your choice.”

  I resisted the urge to throw my phone away in frustration. “Nothing happened,” I said through gritted teeth. “Tony and I went to see her, asked her a few questions. Tony told her he’s an investigator. Neither of us said anything about being cops. We talked for a few minutes, then we left. Satisfied?”

  “Far from it. Stay away from this investigation.”

  “With all due respect, you can go fuck yourself, Detective. I’m going to protect myself, since you obviously can’t be bothered to do it. When you get done worrying about your boss’s feelings, you might want to talk to Arnold Larsen. I think you remember him.” I hung up and rubbed my face. My phone rang again immediately. I checked the caller. Buchanan. I killed the call without answering and looked over at Tony.

  “Let’s go to Holman’s,” I said. “I need a drink.”