Dismissed With Prejudice (9780061760631)

by Jance, Judith A.

  “While he was in custody, we managed to convince the little puke that he needed to do a composite drawing of the guy who unloaded the card,” Grant continued. “He had to finish before we let him out. I offered to FAX it to Halvorsen, but he said the resolution on their machine isn’t very good. So I’m sending it Fed Ex. He said you might want a copy as well.”

  “I do,” I said. “Send it the same way. To my attention at Seattle P.D. They’ll see that I get it.”

  On my way to Dr. Blair’s office, I called Big Al on the car phone to tell him I’d be late. At 8:15, a full forty-five minutes early, I was sitting in the waiting room of Orthopedic Associates, conscious of nothing but the throbbing pain under my bandage. A brusque, businesslike nurse took me into a treatment room at 8:55 and expertly removed the bandages and splints, clicking her tongue in disapproval at the grimy condition of the bandage.

  She left the room briefly, and for the first time, I got a look at my fingers. They were ugly, more purple than black and blue, and wildly swollen. The nails were blackened by the pools of blood trapped beneath them. The nurse came back in and caught me examining my nails.

  “Pretty bad, aren’t they? Wait a few days until the swelling goes down. They’ll look like a matched set of pancake turners.”

  There’s nothing like a little cheer and comfort from a lady in white.

  When Dr. Blair finally appeared, he looked a whole lot more like Santa Claus than some of the department store models I’ve seen lately, but personality-wise, he was anything but jolly, and certainly no better than his surly nurse. He studied my fingers through thick bifocals.

  “What’s the matter with them?” I asked.

  “Nondisplaced ungual tuft fractures,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  He looked up at me, briefly meeting my gaze. “They’re broken,” he said with no trace of a smile. He turned to the nurse. “Bring me a paper clip, would you please?”

  “A paper clip?” I yelped. That didn’t sound very medicinal to me. “What are you going to do?”

  “Drill ’em,” he relied casually. “Like I told you on the phone. It’s the blood under your nails that’s causing the pain.”

  He turned to a small cupboard beside me, reached into a drawer, and brought out a cigarette lighter.

  “What’s that for?” I asked warily.

  Dr. Blair didn’t answer. The nurse returned to the treatment room and silently handed him a paper clip. He straightened it with utmost concentration. Once it was flat, he held it with a hemostat and began heating the straightened end with the lighter. When the end of the paper clip was glowing red hot, he took hold of my hand and pressed the hot metal to one of my blackened nails. I winced, expecting some pain while the paper clip sank easily through the nail as though it were melting plastic.

  When the hole went all the way through, the trapped blood squirted into the air. “It doesn’t hurt because the blood cushions the pain,” he explained.

  I couldn’t help wishing he had told me that before the operation rather than after it. I may be a homicide detective, and legend has it that homicide detectives are all tough macho types, but I was feeling more than a little queasy by the time he finished burning through the third nail.

  When he was done with the last one, Dr. Blair retrieved the splints and began to rebandage my hand. “Just how much do you drink, Detective Beaumont?” he asked.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “How much?”

  “No more than anybody else.”

  “When I talked to you on the phone last night, you sounded as though you had never heard that these hematomas needed to be drilled. And a few minutes ago, you seemed surprised to find out that the fingers were broken. We went over all of that Sunday night. In fact, I gave you a piece of paper, a form with written follow-up instructions on it.”

  “I don’t remember seeing it,” I said.

  “You stuck it in the pocket of your tux.”

  I remembered the tux then, a rental that had been returned with the other wedding party duds on Monday morning. The Belltown Terrace concierge had handled the transaction.

  “No wonder I couldn’t find it,” I said. “The paper must have gotten sent back to the rental company.”

  Dr. Blair wasn’t paying much attention to my excuses. Finished with the bandage, he said, “Take off your shirt, loosen your belt, and lie down here on the table. I want to check something.”

  “Look,” I objected, “I broke my fingers, not my ribs.”

  But you don’t argue with doctors, or at least I don’t. Obligingly, I lay down on the table and he poked me in the gut.

  “Did you know your liver is enlarged?” he asked after a few moments of prodding.

  “My what?”

  “Your liver’s down three centimeters. How long’s it been like that?”

  “I never knew it was,” I said.

  “You don’t have a regular doctor?” he asked again.

  “No.”

  He picked up a pad of paper and jotted a name and phone number on it. “This fellow’s an internist who works right here in the building. His name is Dr. Wang. Go see him. Today. He’ll need to do a complete workup on you. In the meantime, how long ago did you have a tetanus shot?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “If you don’t remember, it’s been too long. I’ll send the nurse back in to give you one, and then you go on upstairs to see Wang. I’ll call ahead and make sure they work you in.”

  I sat still long enough for the shot, but I didn’t go see Dr. Wang. Instead, I went out to the parking garage, sat in my car, and brooded. I’ve never liked being told what to do, and Dr. Herman Blair was one bossy son of a bitch. I was offended by the way he had treated me. He had acted as though my forgetting his damned follow-up form was some sort of major crime.

  I was offended, but worried too. More pissed than worried. Where the hell did some goddamned finger doctor get off telling me that my liver was enlarged? Enlarged liver? Me? Bullshit! Except for my hand, I was healthy as a horse.

  And even as I sat there, I began to notice that my hand didn’t hurt nearly as much as it had. Ugly as it had looked, Dr. Blair’s drilling and blasting must have done some good. In fact, now that I thought about it, my whole hand was feeling much better.

  And so, thumbing my nose at Dr. Blair, and to prove both to him and to myself that he was dead wrong, I started the car and drove to work. Let Dr. Blair put that in his pipe and smoke it.

  Big Al was on his phone and waiting on hold when I came into our cubicle.

  “What’d the doc say?” he asked. “How’re the fingers?”

  “They’re broken,” I said.

  He looked at me and shook his head. “I knew that, for Chrissake! The doc told us that in the emergency room the other night. What the hell do you think I am, deaf or just plain stupid?”

  I sat down at the desk and thumbed through the collection of inter-office junk mail that had collected in the in basket during my absence. Whoever Al was waiting for came back on the phone. While that person talked, Big Al nodded from time to time. Eventually he scribbled a note on a piece of paper and pushed it across the desk to me. On it were printed the letters MS.

  I looked at the note and tried to make sense of it. Ms. who? The note meant nothing to me. Finally Al hung up the phone.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “That’s what’s the matter with Bernice Oliver’s husband. MS—multiple sclerosis. He’s had it for years, and he’s gradually getting more and more crippled up.”

  “Who were you talking to?”

  “Some lady at RFLink. Mrs. Motormouth. I called to find out when Mrs. Oliver left there, and this woman was an hour-long fountain of information. She’s been with Blakeslee for years. She told me that Mrs. Oliver gave her two weeks notice the same day Tadeo Kurobashi got his walking papers. It evidently created quite a stir around there at the time. Interesting, don’t you think?”

  “It’s
something to check into. What about DataDump?”

  “They weren’t open last night, either, and there’s no answer on the phone this morning. What say we drive out there right now and have a look-see?”

  “Sounds like a plan,” I said.

  DataDump was located in a tired one-story building off N.W. 65th on Cleopatra Avenue. From the looks of it, the building contained both business and living quarters. The door was locked. An orange-and-black closed sign was tucked in the corner of one window.

  We looked around for vehicles, expecting to see DataDump’s mobile shredder parked somewhere nearby, but there was no sign of it. In fact, there were no visible vehicles of any kind parked near the modest storefront building. Inside, however, we could hear the steady patter of a droning television game show.

  There was a bell beside the door. Big Al rang it with a heavy hand. We waited a minute or so before he rang it again, even more insistently. This time, the television set switched off and the curtain behind the front window rustled as someone peeked out at us.

  A moment later, the door was flung open. “Who are you and what do you want?”

  The woman at the door was probably only in her thirties, but she looked world-weary and bedraggled. Her long hair was lanky and unkempt with a streak of gray running through it that was far too plain to be a dye job. She wore a faded bathrobe and scruffy slippers. Her mouth had a hopeless downturned cast to it. “Can’t you read the sign? It says we’re closed.”

  “We’re police officers,” Big Al said.

  “Cops!” She jumped as she spat out the word and would have slammed the door in our faces if Big Al hadn’t caught it and held it open. Police officers weren’t the lady’s favorite people.

  “Are you the owner of DataDump?” Big Al asked.

  She nodded.

  “We’d like to talk to you then, if you have a minute.”

  She stepped aside, letting the door open a little wider but not inviting us inside. “What about?” she asked glumly.

  “A company called MicroBridge.”

  Her eyes dilated at the word. It takes real fear to make eyes do that in broad daylight.

  “What about it?”

  “You had someone working at a place called MicroBridge on Sunday night this last week, didn’t you?”

  “My husband, Dean.”

  “Would it be possible to talk to him?”

  “He’s gone.”

  “Do you know where he is or when he’ll be back?”

  “No.” We were getting answers, but we weren’t getting much information, and we wouldn’t either, not as long as she was scared to death. Somehow I had to relieve her fear enough so we could see what was behind it.

  “Do you mind telling us how you got the MicroBridge job?” I asked.

  “He called,” she said.

  “Who did?”

  “The owner. A guy named Kurobashi. He called Friday night after we were closed and left a message on the machine. Wanted us to do a job on Sunday. Offered to pay double.”

  “Double?”

  “You heard me, mister. That’s what I said.” She seemed to have summoned a fresh supply of courage from somewhere deep within her. She looked me squarely in the face. “Dean didn’t kill nobody,” she announced flatly.

  With that, she turned her back on us and walked away, moving to a battered desk across the room. She seated herself behind it.

  “Might just as well come on in,” she said wearily. “No sense standin’ around in the doorway.”

  “What do you mean, ‘Dean didn’t kill nobody’?”

  “That guy was already dead when Dean found him. He didn’t do it. You’ve got no right to chase after him.”

  “We just want to talk to your husband,” I said quietly. “To ask him some questions.”

  “Sure you do,” she said, sounding unconvinced. She plucked a cigarette from an open pack of Marlboros on the desk, lit it, and dropped the match into a heaping, stale-smelling ashtray. She took a long drag on the cigarette, and her face hardened.

  “Don’t you go fuckin’ with me, mister. I’m nobody’s dummy. It’s just like he said would happen, that you’d come here lookin’ for a way to pin it on him.”

  “You’re saying that your husband didn’t kill him, but that he saw the dead man?”

  “That’s right.”

  Big Al had extracted his notebook from his jacket pocket and was starting to jot down the information. “What’s your name please?” he asked.

  She jerked her eyes in his direction. “Chrissey,” she answered. “Chrissey Morrison.” There was a note of defiance in the way she said her name.

  “Did your husband say what time it was when he found the body?” I asked, trying to keep from saying anything that might sound accusatory.

  “No.”

  “When did he tell you this—after he got home?”

  She nodded.

  “What time was that?”

  Chrissey Morrison shrugged. “Midnight, one o’clock. I don’t know for sure. I was asleep.”

  “He told you, but he didn’t report it to the police? Why not?”

  Tears sprang to Chrissey’s eyes. “He was scared, that’s why.”

  “Scared of the dead man?” I asked.

  She turned and looked at me. The defiance drained away, leaving her haggard and hollow-eyed. “Of you,” she answered.

  “Of me? Or you mean of cops?”

  She nodded. “Of cops. Of all cops. Dean already done some time. He was scared shitless that if he reported it…”

  “What was he in for?”

  Regaining control, she blew a languid plume of smoke into the air. “Drugs,” she answered casually.

  And suddenly I knew where I had seen that worn, dispirited look before, in the wives and girlfriends who follow their menfolk to prison and who live as outcasts in the small towns outside the prison walls, their own lives on hold until the husbands are released.

  Chrissey Morrison was a survivor, but there was no dignity in it, no victory. Dean was out now, and they were trying to go on, but his past still cast a shadow over everything they did. I didn’t know Dean Morrison, but I felt sorry for his wife.

  “Tell us exactly what Dean told you,” I urged.

  “He was there late afternoon and evening. Musta started about five o’clock or thereabouts. He said about nine or so he finished and come back to the office after runnin’ the shredder and found him like that, on the floor with a big old ashtray upside his head.” She paused. “From the way he was layin’, Dean knowed right away he was dead.”

  “What happened then?”

  “Dean said he started to call the cops, but changed his mind and came home. He didn’t want to get involved, figured they’d find a way to blame him for it. When I told him he should report it, he got mad as hell. He jumped in the truck and took off. I ain’t seen him since.”

  “Do you have any idea where he is? We just want to talk to him, to ask him some questions.”

  “No. He hasn’t called or nothin’. I thought maybe he’d be back today, bein’s it’s our anniversary and all, but he ain’t. Maybe he won’t never come back.”

  “We could put out a description of the truck,” I offered. “We could probably find him that way.”

  She cringed visibly at the prospect. “Don’t do that. Please don’t do that. He’d think you were arrestin’ him and I don’t know what would happen. He didn’t do nothin’. Just let him come home on his own.”

  “Did he tell you anything else about MicroBridge? Did he see anyone there? Talk to anyone?”

  “He said a woman come in while he was there, a young gal. He said he thought she was the dead guy’s daughter. Before he was dead. Dean said they started out talkin’ real nice like and ended up fightin’ somethin’ terrible.”

  “Did he tell you what they were fighting about?”

  “No. He said later on he thought he heard a car drive away while he was out in the truck. He figured that was her leavin’.
When he come back to the office to drop off the bill and the bags, that’s when he found the body.”

  “After the daughter left?” Big Al asked.

  Chrissey nodded. My mind caught hold of the word bags. I didn’t remember seeing any.

  “What bags?” I asked.

  “The bags of confetti. Our shredder makes confetti out of all them records and files and floppy disks that people want to get rid of. We always bring the bag back to the owner so he can be sure it’s properly disposed of. That way there’s never no question about what happens to it.”

  “How big was this bag?” Big Al asked.

  The woman looked at him. “Not bag,” she corrected. “Bags. Musta been several. Dean always takes along a big roll of them fifty-gallon trash bags. I don’t know how full they was, or how many. Depends on how much got shredded.”

  “You’re sure he said ‘bags’ plural?” I asked.

  “That’s right. Said they was too heavy to carry, so he dragged ’em back in from the truck on a cart, a little handcart. When he finished, he called to the guy, but there was no answer. He said he looked around the rest of the buildin’ but couldn’t find nobody else, so he come back to leave the cart and the bill there in the office. That’s when he found the body.”

  “What did he do then?”

  “Ran, I guess. Took off. He was so scared he left the cart right there where it was, and the bill too. Ran back to the truck and drove away. He went to a tavern a few blocks away and sat there and had himself a couple beers to calm himself down. Then he got to thinkin’ that maybe you cops would come lookin’ for him, so he went back, thought he’d get the bill and the cart, but the door to the dock was closed and locked. He couldn’t get back inside.”

  I glanced at Big Al. Bernard Rennermann had said the door to the loading dock was open. Not only that, Big Al and I had been all over the MicroBridge plant the morning Tadeo Kurobashi’s body was found, and neither one of us had seen a trace of a cart with trash bags full of shredded confetti. Or an ashtray either.

  “Tell us about the confetti. What’s it like?”