Dismissed With Prejudice (9780061760631)

by Jance, Judith A.

  My knee was right there beside his crotch, itching to turn him into a tenor. Maybe even a soprano.

  “I’ve got more on you than you know, you worthless little shit! After what you did to Kimi…”

  “I didn’t do that, I swear. It was Tabone. It was all Tabone’s idea.”

  “Don’t bother to confess,” I told him. “I don’t want to hear it, slimebag. I haven’t read you your goddamned rights.”

  I pulled him to his feet. He stood there swaying, pulling at his throat as though I really had been choking him. I pushed him toward the wall and started to retrieve my gun when he whirled on me, aiming a vicious kick at my head. Even though I dodged to one side, the toe of his foot still caught my cheekbone. I lost my balance and fell. On my hand. My right hand. My broken fingers screamed with newfound pain.

  Up until then I hadn’t been mad. Not really mad. Not with the black-blooded rage that filled me now. He had scrambled up the steps toward the gate and was tugging at it, but the gate was locked with a lock that required a key on either side. It wouldn’t budge.

  With my left hand, I grabbed his leg and twisted it. I’m not often surprised by my own strength, but adrenaline does wonders. Davenport went down hard, yelping with pain. I fell on top of him, pinning him to the dusty wooden plank floor.

  Our faces were only inches apart as he struggled to get loose, bucking and pitching in a futile attempt to throw me off while I hung on desperately, with my one good hand knotted in a handful of shirt directly under his Adam’s apple.

  “Listen, creep. Tell me one thing. Who used the bottle?”

  “Tabone,” he squeaked. “I swear to God, it was Tabone. I only watched.”

  And that was when I hit him. Right in the braces. With my splints. The braces popped apart, twanging like so many broken guitar strings, turning the inside of his mouth to hamburger. He screamed in pain and grabbed for his mouth as blood spurted from between his lips. He wasn’t fighting anymore. Gingerly, I got off him and stood up. He rolled over on his side, coughing and spitting blood.

  “Too bad, creep.” I said, backing away. “Looks like you’ll have to be rewired.”

  I left him lying there. He wasn’t going anywhere. Retrieving my gun, I went into the third room, where I pounded loudly on the gift shop door. When the guide opened it, she looked me up and down in stunned surprise. Covered with muck and dust and blood, I could have stepped right out of Nightmare on Elm Street.

  “What?” she demanded irritably. “You again?”

  I nodded. “I think maybe you’d better call 911. There’s a guy out here who’s hurt. He’ll need an ambulance.”

  “What about you?” she asked.

  “You’re right,” I answered. “Have ’em send two.”

  CHAPTER 22

  IT TOOK A LONG TIME TO GET THINGS sorted out that afternoon. After all, I wasn’t even on duty. As they hauled Davenport away in an ambulance, he was screaming police brutality and I was claiming self-defense. Without witnesses, no one was going to prove it one way or the other.

  I never did get back to Waterfall Park. I had a long cut on my jaw where Davenport’s toe had connected with my face, and I had to go up to Harborview and have it stitched shut. We were in adjoining emergency-room cubicles. Evidently they were still trying to stop Davenport’s bleeding. Somebody finally shoved a fistful of gauze into his mouth and shut him up.

  Ralph Ames came to the hospital to take me home. As we pulled into Belltown Terrace’s garage he said, “By the way, we’re having a little din-din.”

  I had stitches in my face, my clothes were still caked with blood and dirt. “We’re not having company tonight,” I groaned.

  “Just a few people,” Ames answered. “Archie’s cooking.”

  How many is a few? I wondered, grumpily figuring I was in for another dose of Italian food, but when we got upstairs, there was no telltale odor of garlic lingering in the hallway.

  As soon as we came into the apartment, a tiny ball of brown-haired braids and knobby knees flung itself at my legs.

  “Unca Beau, Unca Beau,” Heather Peters squealed. “Are your fingers all right? Are they? Daddy said they’re broken. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. I just wanted to put one more balloon in the car.”

  And that’s how, a whole week later, I finally discovered what had happened to my hand. The fingers were still broken, but how they got that way was no longer a mystery, and consequently, they weren’t quite such a mental problem for me either.

  “It’s all right, Heather,” I said. “They’re going to be fine.”

  Heather grabbed my hand, studied it, and then looked up at me with a serious frown on her face. “The bandage is kinda dirty, isn’t it?”

  “It certainly is,” I told her, “and so am I. You wait right here while I go shower.”

  When I came back from the bathroom a few minutes later, Tracie Peters, who has made it her business to know where everything goes in my house, was busily helping her new stepmother set the table.

  “It’s nice of you to have us up like this,” Amy said, “especially considering what you’ve been through this afternoon.”

  “No problem,” I told her. “Anybody want a drink?”

  Ralph Ames was doing the bartending honors. He handed me a MacNaughton’s, and I retreated to the living room, where Clay Woodruff and Machiko Kurobashi, sitting together on the window seat, were deeply involved in a quiet conversation with Ron Peters, who was ensconced in his wheelchair.

  As soon as she saw me, Machiko pulled herself up and limped over to me on her cane. She was still wearing the silk kimono, which emphasized her severely bruised and battered face.

  I put down my drink. She grasped my good hand and held it, pumping it gratefully.

  “Thank you,” she said. “For what you do for me. For what you do for Kimiko. So I not go to jail.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said. I was tempted to add that it had been a pleasure to punch Chris Davenport’s lights out, but I knew better than to admit that aloud to anybody, not even Kimiko Kurobashi’s mother. As of that moment, the department was considering my actions in apprehending Davenport as use of reasonable force, and I didn’t want anyone to think otherwise.

  Clay Woodruff was standing directly behind Machiko with his hand extended as well. “Hope I didn’t damage the lock on your car,” he said. “If I did, let me know. It’s just that once I knew Tad was dead, I had to go to his daughter, and I wasn’t about to let you or anybody else stop me.”

  “But why did he come to you?” I asked.

  “Once Tad realized the reason I hadn’t testified was that I hadn’t been called, he began to put things together. He told me on Friday that he had begun to suspect that Davenport was cheating him. He said he was going back to Seattle to find out for sure.

  “On Sunday morning, he showed up in Port Angeles again. This time he brought along a whole set of floppies, one of which he said would disable the virus. The rest were copies of his company records as well as his research on the new product. He gave them to me for safekeeping and made me promise that if anything ever happened to him, that I would go to Kimi immediately and help her develop and market that product.”

  “Which is?”

  “A spread spectrum multiplexer.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “It’s brand-new technology that will make local area networks far more affordable by allowing more than one network on the same set of cables.”

  “I see,” I said, although I didn’t understand more than a word or two of what he said. Observing Ralph Ames’ enthusiastic nod of approval, I figured whatever it was must be pretty good.

  “What about that other thing we were talking about earlier?” Peters asked. “The device Mr. Kurobashi made for the man in the chair.”

  “I’m sure Tad never intended to market it, but I’ll bet that kind of medical assistance computer program is a commercially viable product.”

  Ron Peters was nodding in agreement. “It sounds like
a godsend to me, something that could make life easier for lots of folks.”

  “It’s totally separate from Blakeslee’s product line. You could go ahead with that without having to wait to finish settling the RFLink problem in court,” Ralph Ames commented. “And it has the potential to grow into being a good, solid business in its own right.”

  Woodruff had passed his glass to Ralph for a refill, and now he sat staring thoughtfully at the newly replenished drink. “Tad was the most creative guy I ever knew,” he said quietly. “Believe me, if it can be done, I’ll make it work. I owe him that much.”

  The determination in Woodruff’s voice made it sound not only possible, but likely. However, Ralph Ames had brought up a touchy subject.

  “What about Blakeslee?” I asked.

  Ames grinned. “I was talking about that with Clay here a few minutes before I went to pick you up. We’ll handle Mr. Blakeslee. No problem.”

  About that time the front door crashed open and Heather led Archie Winter into the apartment. Holding the platter high over his head, Archie carried a fragrant load of still smoldering barbecued ribs. So much for Italian food.

  It was a quiet dinner. Tracie and Heather’s unabashed interest in everything Machiko said and did made the meal less difficult for her and for everybody than it would have been otherwise. There’s something life-giving about children, even in a time of mourning, something that helps people see beyond their immediate losses. Looking at them I was reminded once more of the final words on Tadeo Kurobashi’s computer, and I had to agree with them. A child is indeed “one more hope.”

  Late that evening, long after everyone but Ames had gone home, I had a call from the department. Just as I suspected, DataDump’s handcart had been found near the railroad track a few blocks south of Industry Square. With the cart, officers discovered five bags of confetti—the paper stuff, not the shredded floppies.

  Sunday afternoon Ralph Ames and Archibald Winter III left for Sea-Tac at the same time. Before leaving town, the two of them had come up with a program to provide interim financing to hold MicroBridge together and keep Kimi and Machiko above water until such time as the Kusumi family sword could be released for final sale. Ames’ preliminary negotiations with Blakeslee had made things look a lot more manageable.

  We put Archie on a United flight bound for New York and then walked to another terminal where Ralph would catch his Alaska flight to return to Phoenix.

  “By the way,” Ames said, as we waited in line in the departure lounge for him to hand over his ticket and board the plane. “I almost forgot. Dr. Wang’s office called yesterday. You have an appointment scheduled for ten tomorrow morning.”

  With that, he handed his ticket to the flight attendant and disappeared down the jetway without giving me a chance to argue. I spent the afternoon alternating between being pissed and being appreciative, but Monday morning at ten, I dutifully presented myself in Dr. Lee Wang’s reception room. He prodded and poked, asked me a bunch of pointed questions and took an almost equal number of blood samples. I answered the questions honestly, because there didn’t seem to be much point in doing anything else. When he was through with me, Dr. Wang told me to come back on Friday.

  That was the beginning of a long, busy week. In a search of Chris Davenport’s car, crime lab investigators discovered a few stray pieces of floppy disk confetti although it was impossible to prove conclusively that the debris was actually material from MicroBridge. Why he took the computer disk bag and left the shredded paper, no one has ever been able to figure put.

  The most damning evidence was found in his basement. One part consisted of a pair of bloodstained shoes. The blood turned out to be O negative, the same blood type as Tadeo Kurobashi’s.

  The other was a computer, a new computer still in its original container. The serial number matched the one still on file at the computer store where Tadeo Kurobashi had purchased his daughter’s graduation present. We had that smarmy lawyer dead to rights.

  In Illinois Alvin Grant was busily working his part of the problem. He called me Wednesday morning.

  “What are you finding out?” I asked.

  He laughed. “Aldo Pappinzino must be going soft in the head. From what I’ve been able to piece together so far, his youngest daughter fell in love with somebody outside the mob, a young guy who just graduated from college with a degree in electronics. They want to live in Seattle, and Chris Davenport was delegated to find a company the old man could buy for them as a wedding present. Bargain basement prices, of course, and Davenport targeted MicroBridge.

  “It almost worked, except for one thing—Kurobashi wouldn’t give up. He held on way longer than anybody expected. The wedding is two weeks from now. Pappinzino was getting antsy, so he sent Tabone out to apply a little pressure either to Kurobashi or Davenport, whoever needed it most.

  “By the way, Tabone’s been up on several suspected rape charges, same kind of MO as the one out there, but he’s always been able to weasel out of it before. His extradition hearing is scheduled for two weeks from now. I want to see him try to duck this one.”

  The whole story was finally coming clear in my mind. “So when Tadeo figured it out, he enabled the virus and destroyed all his own company’s records in order to keep them from falling into the new owner’s hands?”

  “That’s the way I see it,” Grant agreed. “Probably with both Tabone and Davenport right there in the room and helpless to stop it.”

  Grant’s theory made sense to me. It must have driven those two bastards up the wall to be so close to getting what they wanted and then to watch the object of all their cheating and scheming disappear before their very eyes. In the intervening days I had talked to a couple of computer experts who had told me that any misguided attempt by Davenport or someone else to retrieve the information would only have made the virus work that much faster.

  “And the verse on the computer made them think that Kimi might know the answer?”

  “No, I don’t think either one of them could have read it. It’s more likely that they knew she had been there that night, maybe even saw Kimi leaving her father’s office earlier in the evening and erroneously assumed that Tadeo had entrusted her with backup copies of the material he was destroying.”

  There was a pause. The case was at the point now where we had to turn loose of it and hand it over to the prosecutors. We were both worrying about the outcome.

  “Are we going to nail all those crooks?” I asked, “or are they somehow going to slip through the cracks?”

  “Not if I can help it,” Grant answered. “We may not get ’em all on everything, but we’ve put a big chink in Aldo Pappinzino’s armor. Somebody somewhere is going to be willing to make a deal in order to save his own skin, you wait and see.”

  I’m doing just that. And so is Alvin Grant. It takes time. We’re keeping our fingers crossed.

  On Thursday I had a call from Andy Halvorsen. He was phoning from his ex-wife’s apartment in Spokane to tell me that Kimi had been released from Sacred Heart and was on her way to Honeydale Farm with Rita Brice.

  “How’re you doing?” I asked him.

  “Better,” he said. “Much better.” He didn’t elaborate on what that meant, but considering where he was calling from, I drew my own conclusions.

  Late Friday afternoon I went to see Dr. Wang. He’s a slight man with gray hair, steel-rimmed glasses, and a heart to match.

  “You have liver damage, Mr. Beaumont,” Dr. Wang said bluntly. “Either you quit drinking or you die, it’s just that simple.”

  Maybe that’s why Drs. Wang and Blair get along so well. They have matching bedside manners. Brutal bedside manners.

  “That doesn’t give me much choice, does it?”

  “No,” Wang said. “It doesn’t. Let me caution you, though, whatever you do, don’t try to quit on your own. For a man who has been drinking the quantities you have for as long as you have, you must be under a doctor’s care when you stop ingesting alcohol. Med
ically unsupervised withdrawal from alcohol can be very dangerous, even worse than from heroin. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Perfectly,” I said.

  “You go home and think it over. I’ll call you on Monday to see what arrangements should be made.”

  Big deal! Dr. Wang was giving me the whole damn weekend to think it over. That was mighty generous of him.

  I went home. I poured myself a MacNaughton’s and sat down in the recliner. After all, this was doctor’s orders. He had told me very clearly not to try quitting on my own.

  I was sitting there with the drink in one hand and looking at the bandages on the other when the phone rang. I suspected it would be Ralph Ames calling to check up on me, and I almost didn’t answer.

  “What’s happening?” he asked.

  “I feel like shit.”

  “What did the doctor say?”

  “That I’ve got liver damage. That I have to quit drinking or die.”

  “Where?”

  “Where what? My liver’s right where it’s supposed to be. Where the hell do you think it is?”

  “I mean where are you going to go for treatment?”

  “How should I know? Wang must have some ideas. He told me to call him on Monday.”

  And that’s when Ames took over. “Look, Beau,” he said kindly. “You shouldn’t go for treatment up there in Washington. That would be a bad idea. You’re too likely to run into people you know, people off the street. I know of a place down here, near Wickenburg. It’s called Ironwood Ranch.”

  “That sounds like a dude ranch.”

  “It used to be. Not anymore. It’s tops. I know several people who’ve been through their program. Let me go to work on it and find out how soon they can fit you in.”

  “Okay,” I said. “You do that.”

  And somehow, as I said the words, the anger I had felt about Ames and his interference in my life changed into something a little closer to gratitude.

  Aimless Ames is a real friend, no question about it, and I’m damned lucky to have him.