Justice Denied

by J. A. Jance

  “Do you have any proof that Pastor Mark might be responsible for LaShawn’s death?” I asked.

  “I know he’s a dangerous man,” Elaine responded. “He went to prison for murder.”

  “LaShawn went to prison, too,” I pointed out.

  “Yes,” she agreed. “But he was innocent.”

  “How about you?” I asked. “You went to prison for armed robbery. Are you dangerous?”

  It was probably unfair of me to bring up Elaine Manning’s checkered past. Listening to her speak, it seemed clear she was smart enough. As far as I could tell, it appeared that in her case, the King Street Mission had worked its magic.

  “That was different,” she said at once. “I got into drugs when I went to college—into them in a big way—and I stayed screwed up for a long time. I was high as a kite and looking for my next hit when I robbed that Krispy Kreme. I don’t do drugs anymore, Mr. Beaumont. I don’t do them at all.”

  I believed her on that score, just as I believed she could very well be right about Pastor Mark’s being responsible for LaShawn Tompkins’s murder. But if I wanted to prove it, I would have to have someone else besides Sister Elaine telling the story and making the connections.

  Elaine Manning’s concerns about Pastor Mark sounded good, and they might have convinced me, but whether she was well-spoken or not, a jury looking at her most likely wouldn’t look beyond the fact that she was a convicted felon. Unsupported allegations from a reformed armed robber/druggie wouldn’t carry much weight on a witness stand. I doubted they’d make the grade with Ross Alan Connors, either.

  As I left Renton and headed home, it was after four-thirty, and I was in the throes of Friday-afternoon rush-hour traffic. After half an hour of stop-and-go driving just to make it from the Renton entrance onto I-5 up to Boeing Field, I finally bailed and resorted to using side streets. By then they weren’t much better, but at least they gave me the illusion of movement. I had visions of getting home late and finding Mel dressed and ready to go to the shindig. I shouldn’t have worried.

  On the way I called Detective Jackson to let him know I had connected with Elaine Manning. He was not a happy camper. “You mean, after I went chasing that woman all over God’s creation you ended up tracking her down after I left the funeral?”

  “What can I say? I just lucked out.”

  “What’s the deal?” he said, grumbling. So I told him what Elaine had told me, ending by letting him know that I had cleared the way for him and Ramsdahl to stop by and see her the next day. That made him a little less grumpy.

  “All right, then,” he said. “You think she’s credible?”

  “I think she definitely believes Pastor Mark Granger had something to do with LaShawn Tompkins’s death.”

  “We’ll take a closer look at his alibi, then,” Jackson said. “And we’ll also start looking around at some of his associates.”

  “Did he talk to you?”

  “Are you kidding? His attorney wouldn’t let him say a word. But thanks for the help, Beau. I appreciate it.”

  “Any luck tracking that nun that was seen in the neighborhood the night LaShawn was shot?” I put the question out there just to let him know that I knew and to see what he’d do about it.

  “Not much,” he said. “We’ve been looking into it, but nothing so far.”

  “You let me know if you do,” I said, “and I’ll do the same.”

  When I finally walked in the door at a quarter to six I was astonished to find Mel dressed in the clothing she had worn to work much earlier that morning. She glanced up at me from the kitchen counter, where she and Todd were still hard at work.

  “How’s it going?” she asked.

  “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.”

  “Yo
u’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.”