Dismissed With Prejudice (9780061760631)

by Jance, Judith A.

  “It does sound like blackmail,” I conceded, “but she can’t prove it.”

  “She won’t have to. Newspapers don’t require proof.”

  “Does she know about the memorial service?”

  George nodded his head. “I told her. She didn’t say anything about it.”

  “But she isn’t coming?”

  “No.”

  Dozens more questions swirled in my head, but they could wait. Between asking then and asking later, I chose later. George was having a tough enough time as it was. I got up, walked to the door, and opened it.

  “Will you be coming to the memorial service?” George asked.

  “What time is it again?”

  “Four o’clock. In that little place called Waterfall Park at Main and Occidental.”

  “I’ll be there,” I said.

  George nodded. I left the room, closing the door softly behind me. Unfortunately, George Yamamoto regarded even a hint of scandal as a serious assault on his personal honor.

  When I got back upstairs, there was a Federal Express envelope lying facedown on my desk. I opened it and shook out the contents—a single piece of paper, a copy of the composite drawing of a darkly handsome man in his mid-thirties. I picked up my phone and dialed Andy Halvorsen in Colfax to see if he had received his copy. He had.

  “Just a few minutes ago. In fact, I was about to call Pamela Kinder in Spokane to see if she can pick this guy out of a montage of pictures. I’ve spent half the morning on the phone with Alvin Grant, that detective in Schaumburg. He’s excited as hell.”

  “Excited? What about?”

  “When he saw the composite, he thought it looked familiar. He worried it all night, and this morning he finally figured out where he knew that face from. He came up with both fingerprints and a mug shot. He’s sending us copies of the prints, and he’s pulling strings to get the latent prints they lifted off Lions’ Visa card run through Cook County’s Automated Fingerprint Identification System. He’ll call and let us know what happens with that.”

  “So who is it? Anybody we know?”

  “You and I don’t know him from Adam, but Grant does. His name’s Lorenzo Tabone. He’s a small-time thug, not too bright, who’s suspected of doing occasional contract work for somebody named Aldo Pappinzino.”

  “Never heard of him either. Who’s that?”

  “A major Mafia don. Runs a branch of the mob that’s headquartered in Chicago.”

  “And how exactly does this Alvin Grant propose to catch him?”

  “He says they’ve got a stakeout on the place where Tabone lives, and Grant thinks it just might work. Tabone’s got no way of knowing we’re on to him. It was nothing but an accident that the security guard caught the guy with the Visa card, and having Grant recognize him is more blind luck, more than we could have hoped for. By the way, Grant’s got a real hard-on for these characters, for anybody connected with the Pappinzinos. Anything he can do to help, he’s up for it.”

  “How come?” I asked. If somebody volunteers and says he’s covering my backside, I want to know how he got there. I’ve learned the hard way not to accept allies on blind faith alone.

  “Grant’s best buddy from high school, a guy he went through the police academy with, got taken out by a Pappinzino hit man. The guy was doing a drug surveillance for the DEA. Got shot in the back of the head execution-style while he was sitting in his car. The guy who did it got off on a technicality. You know how it works.”

  I did indeed.

  Halvorsen sounded different somehow. He had evidently worked back East long enough that even talking to Alvin Grant on the telephone had injected a hint of Chicago accent into his eastern Washington twang.

  “So what are you doing?”

  “Me? Like I said, I’m going to go see Pamela Kinder. After that, I’ll go by Sacred Heart. I may be able to see Kimiko. The doctor said it’s a possibility. How about you?”

  “We spent most of yesterday working on another case, but we picked up a lead to a friend of Kurobashi’s who lives over in Port Angeles. If I can get away this afternoon, I’ll go over there and talk to him.”

  “Sounds good,” Halvorsen said. “Let me know if you find out anything, and I’ll do the same.”

  Big Al came back from his ordeal in Captain Powell’s office in a blue funk.

  “What’s Max up to this time?” I asked.

  “He’s trying to come up with a reason why it’s all our fault.”

  “That Hubert Jones OD’d?”

  “That’s right.”

  I laughed. “If anyone can pull that one off, Maxwell Cole is it. Want to go have lunch?”

  Allen Lindstrom nodded. It was time. We went to the Doghouse. Big Al had lunch; I had breakfast.

  “You know,” Big Al said thoughtfully, chewing his way through a Bob’s Burger, “you ought to try getting up a little earlier in the mornings and start having breakfast before you come to work. Molly says it’s a whole lot better for you.”

  I smiled and nodded and ate my bacon and eggs without bothering to tell Big Al what I had been doing that morning that had caused me to miss breakfast.

  I didn’t figure it was any of his business.

  CHAPTER 16

  BY THE TIME I WAS READY TO HEAD ACROSS the great water to Port Angeles, it was after four. I probably should have taken a departmental car, but between driving a Porsche 928 and a Dodge Diplomat, there’s really no contest. However, I did stop by Captain Powell’s fishbowl long enough to get a verbal okay from him.

  “If you put a dent in that little hummer of yours while you’re over there,” Powell warned, shaking his finger in my face, “you’d better not plan on vouchering it.”

  “No problem,” I told him, fool that I am.

  Lemmings rushing to the sea have nothing on Seattlites bent on escaping the city and going across Puget Sound on sunny Friday afternoons. With my usual finesse and timing, I managed to be stuck smack in the middle of the worst of the traffic. At the ferry terminal I bought a ticket to Winslow and maneuvered the 928 into the proper line.

  The ferry Walla Walla is a huge, cavernous affair. When it was ready for loading, row after row of cars started their engines and drove onto the car decks. For a while, it looked as though I would make it, but I didn’t. Loading stopped three cars away, leaving me near the head of the line for the next ferry—an hour later. The Washington State Ferry System is nothing if not implacable. No amount of whining, pleading, or dashboard pounding would fix it. And so, I sat there in my car, doing a slow burn, with nothing to do but think.

  Halvorsen’s report of his conversation with the detective in Illinois had had a disquieting effect on me. It had stayed in the back of my mind and nipped away at me all afternoon. Now, sitting there trapped in the ferry line, I let out all the stops and stewed about it in dead earnest.

  In order to find a killer, a cop sometimes has to put himself in the place of either the victim or the killer, and sometimes both. In this case, I had thought I was coming to grips with Tadeo Kurobashi, with who he was and what made him tick. But now, Alvin Grant’s talk about Lorenzo Tabone and Aldo Pappinzino showed me that there was a giant blind spot in my perception of the dead man.

  Tadeo Kurobashi’s connection with a Chicago-based Mafia boss was something that didn’t fit and didn’t make sense, something I couldn’t get a handle on. Had Kurobashi been involved in the drug trade as Andy Halvorsen had suggested? Even as I asked the question, I discarded it. Nothing in Tadeo Kurobashi’s life had hinted at drugs. To all appearances he had been a hardworking entrepreneur, brought to his knees by a conspiracy of less than honest competition.

  And if the mob was involved, as they evidently were, what did they want? Was the Mafia branching out and going high-tech these days? Had Tadeo invented some kind of electronics wizardry valuable enough to the criminal element that they were willing to kill in order to lay hands on it? If so, what was it and had they already gotten it? Sitting there in the line with the setti
ng sun glaring in my face, my frustration level went up yet another notch or two.

  I wished I could be in two places at once. Kimiko Kurobashi, unwittingly or not, probably held the key to everything I didn’t know, and by now, Detective Halvorsen should have finished interviewing her. What had she told him, and would it help us find her father’s killer? As my need to know went over the top, I reached for my car phone, dialed the Whitman County sheriff’s department, and asked to speak to Detective Halvorsen.

  “Sorry, he’s sick. He’s gone home for the day,” the dispatcher told me.

  “Home!” I yelped. “I thought he was on his way to Spokane.”

  “I know he was planning to, but he called in sick early this afternoon.”

  “Do you have his home number?” I asked.

  “I’m not allowed to give it out.”

  Of course he wasn’t allowed to give it out. I had the number myself, in my jacket, in the backseat. It just wasn’t easily accessible. I found it though, and a minute or so later, Halvorsen’s phone was ringing. It had rung seven or eight times, and I was about to hang up when he finally answered.

  “Hello?” He sounded funny—distant, hesitant.

  “Andy? This is Beau, in Seattle. Are you all right?”

  “She’s gone,” he managed. His words were slurred. He sounded drunk.

  “Gone?” My heart rose to my throat. Kimiko dead too? Had someone gotten to her in the hospital, or had she fallen victim to some unforeseen medical complication?

  “How can that be?” I demanded. “I thought she was getting better, that the doctors said she was going to be okay.”

  “Doctors? What doctors?”

  “Kimiko’s doctors, goddamnit. Halvorsen, are you drinking or what?”

  “Who said anything about Kimiko? Monica’s gone. She left me. Went home to her mother. I can’t believe it. How could she? I mean, she’s why I divorced Barbara. I gave up my kids because of her.”

  Monica was gone, not Kimiko. My relief was almost overwhelming. “So Kimiko’s all right? Did you talk to her?”

  “No, I came home to tell Monica I was on my way to Spokane and found her packing to leave. I tried to talk her out of it, but she wouldn’t listen. Wouldn’t even talk to me.”

  The poor bastard doesn’t know when he’s well off, I thought. I said, “That’s too bad, Andy. I’m sorry to hear it. What are you going to do?”

  “Beats the hell out of me. Wait here, I guess. See if she changes her mind and comes back.”

  I didn’t tell him not to hold his breath. Going to her mother’s was probably nothing but a smoke screen. My guess was that Monica’s shopping around had zeroed in on somebody more to her liking and closer to her own age.

  The next ferry had pulled into the Colman dock and was disgorging its load of vehicles. Around me, people were returning to their cars, starting their engines.

  “Look, Andy,” I said. “I’ve gotta go. The ferry’s here and I’m going to have to hang up. Don’t try to do anything tonight. You’re in no condition, but tomorrow get your ass to Spokane and go to work. It’ll be good for what ails you, take your mind off your troubles.”

  “You’re probably right,” Andy Halvorsen mumbled, but he didn’t sound convinced. I replaced the phone in its holder, started the car, and rumbled up the gangway onto the car deck. Front and center.

  It’s an eighty-seven-mile trip from Seattle to Port Angeles, part of it by ferry and the rest on narrow two-lane secondary roads that meander through the forests of the Kitsap Peninsula, Bainbridge Island, and the Olympic Peninsula. It sounds rural, and it is, but it’s also full of traffic, particularly on Friday nights. I didn’t make very good time.

  The various port and sawmill towns that dot the Washington coastline—Port Angeles, Port Townsend, Raymond, Sequim—are as similar as peas in a pod. I’ve always maintained that you could get drunk in one, wake up in another, and never know the difference.

  Port Angeles is built on two levels. The upper one is the town proper. Regular houses are there along with churches, grocery stores, and the trappings of small-town life and business. The lower one is a duke’s mixture of tourist traps and lowbrow hotels, taverns, cafes, and restaurants that cater to freighter crewmen, sawmill workers, derelicts, and, occasionally, legitimate tourists. The shops do a land-office business in used books and made-in-Washington gewgaws.

  The first person I asked for directions, a teenager pumping gas at a Texaco station, had never heard of the Ritz Hotel. I had expected an establishment with that kind of name to have a certain amount of stature in town and to be something of a landmark. The second person I asked, a grizzled drunk with a rolling gait and a pint bottle of vodka stashed in his hip pocket, nodded and pointed.

  “Right up there, fella. Right over Davey’s Locker. You got a quarter for a cup of coffee?” I tossed him a quarter, knowing full well he’d put it to bad use.

  Davey’s Locker turned out to be a tavern on the street level of a long, narrow, two-story frame building whose blackened shingles were rotting with age. The street outside was empty, so I parked directly in front. The tavern, its front windows painted an opaque blue, took up the entire bottom of the building except for the width of a steep, dilapidated stairway that led up from a single door in one corner of the front of the building. Gilt letters stenciled on the glass proclaimed somebody’s small joke on the world—THE RITZ HOTEL. Ritz indeed! It looked like an over-the-hill flophouse. A condemned over-the-hill flophouse.

  To my surprise, the battered door wasn’t locked. I pushed it open and looked up a steep flight of scarred linoleum-covered stairs. Both the walls of the stairway and the ceiling as well had been covered with what looked like old egg crates. I recognized the wall covering as a poor man’s version of make-do soundproofing. A single naked light bulb hung from a twisted brown cord high above the stairs.

  Attached to the wall on the downstairs landing was a pay telephone. The number was printed on the face of the phone, but when I reached for my notebook to check that number against the one taken from Tadeo Kurobashi’s message pad, I realized I had left my notebook on the seat of the car. I stood there wavering for a moment, wondering if I should go back out and get it right then, or wait.

  I decided to wait. My life is like that, made up of small and seemingly inconsequential decisions that come back later and nip me in the butt.

  “Hello?” I called up the stairs.

  Nobody answered, but just then a gigantic burst of music rumbled down the stairs like an avalanche, with bass notes so loud that they vibrated the wooden hand rail I was holding.

  “Hello,” I called again, but there was no answer. No one could possibly have heard me above that earsplitting racket.

  The music stopped momentarily and then started again at the exact same note. It sounded as though an entire symphonic orchestra must be rehearsing in the dim upstairs reaches of the Ritz Hotel.

  I climbed to the top of the stairs, covering my ears with the palms of my hands in an effort to filter out some of the music. The noise level reminded me of a rock concert. The music, more classical than rock, was nothing I recognized.

  The upstairs landing was soundproofed just as the stairs had been, and so was the long narrow corridor that led from the top of the stairs to the far end of the building. I had expected that the corridor would be lined with a long row of doors leading to separate rooms. Instead, only two doors were showing in the entire hallway, one at the far end of the building and the other directly in front of me. I waited until the next lull in the music and pounded on the door as soon as it was quiet.

  The man who opened the door was in his mid to late thirties, six-foot-five at least, with long flowing chestnut hair. I know women who would kill to have hair like his, women who have paid a hundred dollars a crack for permanents and dye jobs in futile attempts to duplicate that look.

  In the old days this guy would have worn rope sandals and been called a Jesus freak. Instead, he wore earphones and carried an op
en laptop computer. I looked beyond him, expecting to see a roomful of people. Instead, I saw a huge room filled with all kinds of computer equipment. Clay Woodruff was an electronics junky. A hacker.

  “Are you Clay Woodruff?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Whaddaya want?” he demanded, holding one of his earphones away from his head. “Can’t you see I’m busy?”

  “My name is J. P. Beaumont. I’m with the Seattle Police. May I come in?”

  “Come back later. I’m working on a deadline.”

  He punched a few keys on the computer and closed his eyes to listen. Again a blast of music exploded around me. I waited. He was evidently playing only a short passage on some kind of complicated synthesizer, and I figured he’d stop the music again before long. When he did, I was still standing in the doorway.

  “Not enough bass,” he muttered loudly when he once more shut off the music. “Ever since those kids messed with my stuff, I haven’t been able to get enough bass.”

  “It sounds like there’s more than enough bass to me,” I yelled, in order to be heard through his earphones.

  Clay Woodruff looked at me in surprise, as though I had materialized out of thin air. “I’m here concerning Tadeo Kurobashi,” I added, still shouting.

  Woodruff’s thick, bushy eyebrows came together in a frown. “What about him?” he asked.

  “He’s dead.”

  In one swift motion, Woodruff peeled off his earphones and put them on a table beside the door. “You’re kidding. When? How?”

  “Last Sunday night, after he came here to visit you.”

  I pulled out my ID and handed it to him. Woodruff looked at it carefully, then gave it back to me, closed the lid to his computer, and switched it off.

  “Let’s go downstairs,” he said. “We’ll talk there.”

  He closed and locked the hallway door behind him, put the key in his pocket, and then carried the laptop with him, stuffed under one arm like an oversized book. We had to go out on the sidewalk before we could go into the tavern. I stopped at the car long enough to retrieve my notebook, then he led the way into Davey’s locker. “Beer?” he asked.