Lying in vait jpb-12

by J. A. Jance

  Why did I want to take Beverly Piedmont to the Four Seasons? Maybe it was a way to distance myself from the horrors I'd been hearing about all afternoon. But also, I think, it had something to do with pride.

  I had been to the Georgian Room on several occasions with Ralph Ames, and I wanted to take Beverly Piedmont someplace nice. Maybe it was showing off, and maybe it was nothing more than a misguided desire on my part to pamper her, to make my grandmother feel as though there was still someone in her life who cared about her, someone she could lean on if she ever needed to do some leaning.

  Once I had her in the car headed back downtown, I began to have misgivings. Since I didn't have any viable alternatives in mind, I stuck to the original plan with the exception of parking in the garage off Fifth and Seneca instead of driving up to the posh front entrance and using the valet parking.

  The trouble started as soon as we walked up the stairs from the lobby to the entrance of the Georgian Room. We stopped beside the maitre d's station behind a laughing, somewhat noisy group of well-oiled diners. There were several men in tuxes and women in long, sequined gowns, and from what conversation we overheard, they were evidently on their way to the opera.

  Beverly Piedmont looked down at her plain but neat coat and dress. "I shouldn't be here," she whispered self-consciously. "I'm not dressed well enough."

  "You're fine," I said reassuringly, urging her forward.

  The unfailingly polite maitre d' took her modest wool coat and showed us to a linen-covered table, where he graciously helped my grandmother into her chair. While she examined the elegant room, I stole a glance at the menu. These were definitely not King's Table prices. If she caught a glimpse of the toll, she'd balk, and we'd be out of there in a flash.

  Before she even had a chance to look at the menu, I shifted hers out of reach, closed mine, and waved away the sommelier.

  I knew from being there with Ralph that the Georgian Room always has available an elegant fixed-price dinner, from soup to nuts, literally. The set five-course dinner offered the advantage of taking all the options out of ordering. The food was bound to be good, and it would keep my grandmother from reading the menu too closely. It would also keep me from trying to explain what any of the listed food actually was. Despite the name Beaumont, French and I are not exactly on speaking terms.

  My menu sleight-of-hand may have been a slick maneuver, but Beverly Piedmont has a few jumps on me in terms of years and experience. She didn't fall for any of it.

  "This place is very expensive, isn't it?" she observed, watchfully examining the room while she picked at her squash-soup appetizer.

  "It's all relative," I said.

  "I'm not a blind date, Jonas," she chided gently. "You don't have to impress me."

  Touche. She had me dead to rights. Neither of us said a word while the busboy whisked the appetizer dishes out of the way of a waiter poised to deposit our entrees.

  "Your grandfather was not a mean man; he just had no idea how to bend," Beverly Piedmont said. "In retrospect, I can see that what he did to your mother was heartless. It was only days after your father died in that motorcycle accident that Jonas and I found out our daughter was pregnant. He wanted her to give you up, and she refused. They had a terrible fight. I have to say your mother gave as good as she got. After that, there was no turning back for either one of them. And not for me, either.

  "Through the years, it broke my heart to know that my only grandson was growing up right here in Seattle, almost under my nose, and yet I couldn't have anything to do with him. With you. I suppose I could have ignored your grandfather's wishes-done something underhanded and gone behind his back-but that's not the kind of person I am.

  "I'm an old woman now, Jonas," she continued. "I never got to hold you when you were a baby or to save your first tooth in my jewelry box or to watch you unwrap your very first Christmas presents. Or any Christmas presents at all, for that matter. Now that I'm alone, I want to make up for lost time. I promise not to be a pest, but I do want to spend time with you, to get to know about who you are and how you think.

  "And there are things I want to tell you, about what your mother was like when she was a little girl. About the places we lived when she was growing up and the things we did. Does that make any sense?"

  I nodded. That's all I could manage.

  "The food is very nice here," she went on, "but you don't have to take me to fancy restaurants. We could go someplace like Zesto's or Dick's Drive-In, or we could just sit at the house and talk. Mandy would like that. I swear that dog is lonely, too."

  Beverly Piedmont put down her fork and then fumbled in her purse until she located a white lace-edged handkerchief, which she used to dab at her eyes.

  It's a funny thing about Adam's apples. On special occasions, mine swells until it is approximately the size of a basketball. When that happens, I find it very difficult to talk. Impossible even. Rather than embarrass us both, I reached into my pocket and dragged out my notebook.

  On the first blank page, one just beyond my hastily scribbled notes about Hans Gebhardt and Sobibor, I wrote myself a note. I put it in a spot where I was sure to stumble across it first thing the following morning.

  "CALL KELLY," I wrote, printing my daughter's name in large capital letters. "INVITE TO T-DAY DINNER."

  Who says you can't learn from someone else's mistakes?

  19

  Sue Danielson and I had agreed to drive to the Ballard Fire House in separate vehicles. It was later than it should have been when I dropped my grandmother off at her house and headed that way.

  Back when I was a kid, the Ballard Fire House was still just exactly that-a firehouse. That was its raison d'etre from the old horse-drawn fire-engine days back in the early 1900s. Sometimes in the early seventies, the firemen moved into more modern quarters, and the old firehouse was transformed into a trendy sort of night-club/restaurant. It has operated in that guise ever since.

  The Fire House was evidently a popular place. I had to park two blocks away. When I reached the entryway alcove, I found both Sue Danielson and June Miller waiting for me. Former congressman Miller was nowhere in evidence, and I had to look twice before I recognized Sue.

  I'm used to seeing Detective Danielson in her work mode down at the department, dressed in what passes, I guess, for women's business attire-skirts, blazers, sensible heels-if heels can ever be said to be sensible, that is-and in blouses so prim, they leave absolutely everything to the imagination. The outfit she wore salsa dancing had barely any blouse and even less skirt. As soon as I saw her legs, I realized with a shock that I'd never noticed them before. It made me wonder if I'm getting old.

  Dressed as she was, Sue was no slouch, but next to June Miller, I could see why Sue might have felt a bit drab in comparison. The wife of the former congressman was pencil-slender, but still curved in all the right places. She wore a sophisticated long black dress with an attention-capturing, knee-high slit up one side. Inch-wide straps ran across otherwise bare shoulders. She didn't walk. When she moved, she glided.

  While I stopped at a table and forked over the cover charge, June and Sue went on inside and staked a claim to a spot three tables from the dance floor and right on top of the bank of electronics handled by the band's chief soundman.

  I caught up with the women just as the band began revving up. "Your husband won't be joining us?" I shouted to June over the cacophony.

  She shook her head. "Not tonight," she yelled back, followed by something totally incomprehensible.

  "What?"

  "Brett's having some friends for overnight."

  More's the pity, I thought.

  A cocktail waitress came by, and we ordered drinks-tall 7-Ups with lime all around. No wonder there was a cover charge. The Ballard Fire House wasn't making any money on drinks at our table, and it turned out that most of the others were pretty much the same way. Whether the drinks had booze in them or not, people tended to nurse them rather than swill them down. As far as I
could see, most of the people came there to dance, not to drink.

  And I do mean dance with a capital D.

  People hit the dance floor the moment the band-a twelve-member, all-male outfit named Latin Expression-finished tuning up and struck the first note of the first number. Thanks to Ralph Ames, I've been in enough Mexican restaurants to have a nodding acquaintance with mariachi music, which generally sounds to me like Polish polka with a south-of-the-border twist. And the words "salsa dancing" had made me think that what I was in for was a group of round, sausage-shaped guys wearing sombreros and glitzy Cisco Kid costumes. Wrong.

  These were good-looking young men in white shirts, splashy up-to-the-moment ties, and double-breasted suits. The two backup singers were as energetic and as well orchestrated as the Supremes. The three singers belted their hearts out in what sounded to me like Latino-beat rock, and I never understood a single word-for two reasons:

  Number one: Everything except the between-song patter was in Spanish. Listening to it reminded me of a disastrous recent date with Alexis Downey where I had been force-fed a Chinese-made art flick. Alexis had assured me in advance that we were attending a must-see film with some of her friends and that she knew I was going to love it. I didn't come close to loving it-I didn't even like it, and I don't think English subtitles would have helped.

  Number two: The music Latin Expression played at the Ballard Fire House was far louder than the small space could accommodate, which made it much too loud for me. I remember telling my mother once long ago that you can't have too much bass. Latin Expression proved me wrong. The deafening roar of the bass guitar thrummed in the tabletop and shivered the back of my chair. The decibel level may have turned my ears to mush, but it didn't seem to faze the dancers.

  They were there to dance, and dance they did. To every single song. There was none of this phony hanging back and waiting to see who would go first, or if the band would play fast tunes or slow ones or something in-between. People grabbed partners and headed for the dance floor as soon as the first note blasted through a pair of two-story-high collections of speakers stacked in the front corners of the room.

  Sue and June were old hands at this. Within minutes they both saw people they knew and recognized from other salsa-dancing venues. Guys stopped by the table long enough to shout dancing invitations to the two women. Soon both my tablemates were led onto the crowded floor, where they danced their hearts out to numbers that could have been rumbas or sambas or tangos or some variation on all of the above. Fortunately, no one asked me to dance.

  Everyone seemed to be having a good time. Everyone but me. Somewhere in the middle of the third number, someone turned on a red-and-yellow rotating spotlight that flashed across the gyrating figures on the dance floor and then splashed directly into my eyes. I was already tired, and blinking to dodge the flashes of light almost put me to sleep-in spite of the ear-shattering volume.

  In other words, salsa dancing wasn't my favorite. And it was odd to realize that a culture so alien to me was thriving right there in the middle of Ballard-what was once strictly white-toast Ballard-only blocks from the apartment where I had lived as a boy growing up. Times do change.

  I was truly lost in a crowd, a fifth wheel. While musical numbers followed one after another, I sat there all by myself with no one to talk to and nothing to do but watch. To keep myself occupied and awake, I tried putting all the little pieces together: salsa dancing and Sobibor. Two murders and a hit-and-run. Thousands of gold teeth and a gold wrench. And Nazi toy soldiers standing in rows.

  The sudden thought hit me with the force of a lightning bolt and left me feeling sick and shaken. What about those damn soldiers? I wondered. What if they weren't made of lead at all? What if they, like Bonnie Elgin's wrench, were made of solid gold?

  As soon as the thought crossed my mind, I was torn. On the one hand, I didn't want to miss the meeting with Lorenzo. On the other, I couldn't wait to get my hands on one of those soldiers in the basement of the Gebhardt house on Culpeper Court. Even considering it was almost eleven, I was sure Else would let me examine the soldiers for myself. Checking the metal content wouldn't require the professional services of someone like the crime lab's Janice Morraine. Just hefting them would be enough to tell me what I wanted to know. Or else I could scrape off some of the paint and see whether or not there was gold concealed beneath the enamel.

  My distress must have showed. June Miller came back to the table for a sip of 7-Up. She offered reassurance and counseled patience. "They'll be here pretty soon," she said. "Maria gets off work around eleven."

  There was no point fighting the music and trying to yell out an explanation. That was hopeless. Against my better judgment, I slouched deeper into my chair and listened to the boom of a complicated conga-drum solo. From then on, though, with my mind still working overtime, I kept one eye on the door. My vigilance was rewarded when, through the haze of cigarette smoke, I spotted a man and a woman who paused just inside the doorway.

  The two of them, a man in his thirties and a somewhat younger woman, entered the room cautiously, as though they expected the Ballard Fire House to be furnished with armed land mines rather than tables and chairs. The man looked like a young Cesar Romero. He wore gray slacks, an open-necked white shirt rolled up at the sleeves, and no tie. Walking with a noticeable limp, he went to the nearest corner and sank into a seat directly in front of the stacked speakers.

  Great, I thought. We'll never be able to talk there.

  The woman, presumably his sister Maria, appeared to be several years younger. Her dark hair, crinkled as if newly loosened from tight braids, fell almost to her waist. She stood near the door, surveying the room with quick, nervous glances that betrayed her anxiety. Eventually, she must have spotted June Miller. That wasn't difficult, since June's blond hair glowed like a pillar of yellow flame among the other, mostly dark-haired dancers. As soon as June smiled and waved, the young woman turned to the man and nodded.

  June had given me strict orders not to approach either one of the newcomers until she personally cleared it with them. What I did do, however, was make my way, between songs, onto the dance floor, where I reclaimed Sue Danielson from the apparently pleasant clutches of a young Latino man with whom she had danced several dances.

  The man spoke little or no English, but he danced with the verve and flair of a professional. Invariably, he had returned Sue to our table with a courtly bow to her, and with a politely deferential nod to me as well. I did my best to return the favor when he relinquished Sue to me on the dance floor, but he seemed genuinely mystified when, instead of dancing away with her, I dragged her back to our table.

  "They're here?" she asked.

  "Just came," I answered. "Maria's the young woman standing just to the left of the door. Her brother's seated at the table right in front of the speakers."

  "Should I go get June?"

  "She said for us to stay put, remember?"

  June had spent much of the evening dancing with a balding gentleman who must have been close to sixty and who seemed to be the most capable dancer in the room. While I squirmed with impatience, a laughing and unconcerned June Miller danced two more interminable numbers with her smooth-move partner. Just when I was about to go cut in on him as well, the band finally took what I considered a well-deserved break.

  Instead of returning to our table, however, June hurried over to the new arrivals. After a moment's conference with Maria, June turned and beckoned to Sue and me.

  Carrying what little remained in our three drinks, we threaded our way across the room. As we neared the table, I was surprised, as I often am, by how closely the Identi-Kit artist had managed to capture Lorenzo's likeness.

  He wasn't a large man; but he was sleek, like a racehorse, and compactly built. Almost hidden behind the cloth of his unbuttoned shirt was a gold crucifix that glowed in the dim, overhead lights.

  Gold again, I thought. That particular commodity seemed to be everywhere at the moment.
>
  "Detective Sue Danielson and Detective J. P. Beaumont, this is Maria Hurtado and her brother, Lorenzo," June was saying.

  Maria, seated beside her brother, rose to her feet and then tentatively shook hands, first with Sue and then with me. Lorenzo didn't move, and he didn't offer his hand, either. His eyes stayed full on my face.

  "How do you do," he said formally.

  There were only four chairs at the table. I rustled up a fifth and then sat in that one with Sue and June on either side of me and with both the Hurtados facing us. From the way he watched me, I knew it was no accident that Lorenzo had chosen the chair he was seated on. From that vantage point, he could observe the entire room. Whatever the real story behind his brother's death back home in Guatemala, it had left Lorenzo Hurtado a cautious survivor.

  Still holding my gaze with his, Lorenzo used casual and unhurried movements to extract a package of cigarettes from his pocket. He offered the cigarettes around the table. When no one took one, he did so himself, shaking a cigarette loose from the pack, which he then returned to his pocket. He lit the cigarette with a steady, tremble-free match. June had told me Lorenzo was frightened of cops. If that was the case, he was doing a hell of a good job of covering it up.

  Once the cigarette was lit, Lorenzo was the first to speak. He did so slowly and deliberately, as if taking scrupulous pains so as not to be misunderstood.

  "I didn't do it," he said.

  "Didn't do what?" I asked, playing dumb.

  "I did not kill Senor Gebhardt, and I didn't see who did it, either."

  "But you were there when he was killed?"

  "Yes," Lorenzo said. And then, "No." And then, "Maybe."

  "Look, you can't have it both ways," I insisted. "Were you there or weren't you?"

  The lights around us reflected on the smooth, closely shaved skin of Lorenzo Hurtado's narrow face, capturing a slight involuntary tic. "I don't know for sure if I was there or not when Senor Gebhardt died," Lorenzo answered. "But he was still alive when I stepped onto the boat. I know that because I heard him."