Injustice for All

by J. A. Jance

  “I'm not sure. It's just a thought.”

  We walked together as far as Fourth and Lenora, then split up. I went up to my apartment, mulling Ames' words along with thawing chickens, hungry cats, and extra keys.

  CHAPTER

  31

  Once more I had a face full of shaving cream when the phone rang. It was Peters looking for a good pediatrician. In order to register the girls for school, they had to have a complete set of vaccinations. New Dawn believed in prayer, not science. As I tried to keep shaving cream out of the receiver, I considered growing a full beard.

  I returned to the bathroom and had barely put razor to chin when the phone rang again. I jumped and left a good-sized nick. I'm sure I sounded exasperated when I answered. “Is this Detective Beaumont?” The voice was female, sultry, and dripping with the honeyed accents of the Deep South.

  “Yes,” I answered tentatively.

  “My name's Colleen Borden with Armour Life Insurance.” I steeled myself for the inevitable pitch. Various estate planners and financial advisors had crawled out of the woodwork ever since my windfall. “Ah'd like to make an appointment with you.”

  “I'm not interested in any life insurance. I'm going to live forever.” It was the line that had given me the most luck in getting rid of pushy bastards.

  “Ah'm not tryin' to sell you somethin,' Mr. Beaumont.” She sounded clearly affronted. “Ah'm not a salesman. Ah'm a claims inspector.”

  That caught my attention. “A claims inspector?”

  “Yes. Ah investigate death claims.”

  “Whose claim are you investigating?”

  “That's why Ah want to see you. Ah'll be comin' to town tomorrow and wondered if maybe we could get together for dinner, say at the Westin, the Palm Court, at six.”

  “How will I know you?”

  “The reservation will be in my name.”

  She hung up. I spent the next few minutes taking the phone apart and prying Colgate Instant Shave out of the holes with a toothpick. A death-claim inspector. I wondered which one. There were any number of deaths in need of inspecting.

  I finished my shave on the third try. I was almost late by then. I hit the elevator with a tiny piece of tissue stemming the flow of blood on my chin.

  Manny and Al were hard at work on the list when I got to my desk. I settled down with my portion of it, wishing Peters were there to lighten the load. Manny took off about eleven to oversee Sandra's composite drawing, while Al and I grappled with the list until our eyes burned.

  Manny came back about two, practically walking on air. He had two drawings. Each pictured a clean-cut, ordinary-looking kid. It gets me when a cold-blooded killer looks like the kid next door or maybe even is the kid next door.

  But it wasn't the drawings that had Manny excited. Sandra had come up with one other tiny scrap of information. The white car had carried a bumper sticker. She couldn't remember the whole thing, just that some of the letters had been funny, maybe backwards or upside down. The only one she remembered for sure was a K, and maybe a backwards E.

  A frat rat! From a house with kappa in it and maybe a sigma. Sandra, bless her little heart of gold, had saved our eyesight. Instead of having to go through the computer printout listing every car on campus, she had narrowed our investigation to the much smaller world of sororities and fraternities. A quick consultation with Ma Bell's Yellow Pages told us the university boasted only ten Greek houses with kappa in their names.

  Manny, Al, and I drove to what we call Never Never Land in two separate cars. If Seattle is a liberal egg, then the University of Washington is the yolk, although the kids there now are far more conservative than the students of, say, the sixties or seventies. They still do drugs, and they still live in an aura of permissiveness where some students literally get away with murder, but it's a hell of a lot better than it used to be.

  We didn't notify the campus police. It wasn't necessary. Greek Row isn't on campus proper.

  Parking places are at a premium. We finally parked in front of two separate fire hydrants on Seventeenth NE. Manny and Al took one side of the street, and I took the other, wishing the whole time that Peters were there to back me up instead of sitting in a doctor's office somewhere waiting to have his kids vaccinated for polio, tetanus, typhoid, and God knows what else.

  I was the one who got lucky, if you can call it that. Kappa Sigma Epsilon at 4747 Seventeenth NE was a white, New England-style building. I remembered it as an old-line, socially prominent Eastern fraternity. Like fraternities in general, it had fallen on hard times. The paint was chipped and peeling, and a couple of broken windows were patched with plywood.

  I knocked and waited. Finally a wide-eyed kid answered the door. I pulled out the two sketches. “I wondered if you could help me. Do you recognize either of these guys?”

  He looked at the pictures, then back at me. “You a cop?” he asked.

  I pulled out my ID. Five years ago, a kid at the university wouldn't have given me the time of day. That's what I expected now. I was wrong.

  He nodded, pointing. “That's Howard Rayburn. The other's Vince Farley. Howie's upstairs. Want me to get him?”

  Sometimes you make a decision that you spend the rest of your life regretting, playing it back over and over; wondering, if you had done something differently, would disaster have been averted. At that moment in the vestibule of Kappa Sigma Epsilon I made one of those bad decisions.

  I didn't know what I was up against, and I didn't want to go in without a backup. “No, thanks,” I said. “I'll be right back.” I hurried to the grass median and waited until I saw Manny coming back down a sidewalk. I motioned for him to come. He in turn called Al.

  “What have you got?” Manny demanded.

  “Looks like they both live there. Only one is home.”

  “Want me to radio for more units?” Al asked. I nodded. He loped off toward their car. I motioned Manny to cover the back door, while I returned to the front porch. This time I did't bother to knock. I met the same kid, coming down the stairs.

  “I told Howie you were here,” he said helpfully.

  It was the worst thing he could have done, but I hadn't told him not to. “What room?” I said, taking the stairs three at a time.

  “Turn left. Third door on the left.”

  I drew my .38 as I dashed down the hall. The third door on the left was ajar. I tapped on it, but there was no answer. I pushed the door open, but nothing happened. Cautiously I looked inside. No one was there. A dresser drawer sat open with half its contents spilled onto the floor. Someone had left the room in a hell of a hurry.

  I flew back down the hall to the vestibule at the bottom of the stairs. The same kid was still standing there. When he saw my Smith and Wesson, his jaw dropped.

  “Did he come this way?” I demanded.

  Incapable of speech, he shook his head.

  “Is there another way down from up there?”

  He nodded dumbly.

  “For chrissake talk to me! Where is it?”

  “The fire escape comes out down by the kitchen.”

  I raced in the direction he pointed. I came to the backdoor and looked outside long enough to see Manny crouched behind a dumpster. I turned around and almost ran over the kid who had trailed behind me down the hall.

  “If he didn't get out here, where else could he be? Is there a basement?”

  This time he pointed to a darkened stairway leading down from the kitchen. I heard wailing sirens as backup units charged through traffic. Sprinting to the bottom of the stairs, I paused on a musty landing before dashing down a narrow hall. I checked rooms as I went—laundry room, boiler room, bicycle room, poolroom. All of them were empty.

  If Howie hadn't made a run for it before Manny got to the dumpster, he was still hiding somewhere in the building. The question was Where.

  I had started up the stairs to begin a systematic, room-to-room search when I remembered chapter rooms. Every fraternity had one—at least they used to�
��a secret room hidden somewhere in the house, where the whole fraternity gathered for formal meetings and initiations. I went back to the poolroom. One wall curved in a semicircle.

  “Where's the chapter room?” I snapped. “There?”

  The boy nodded.

  “Where's the entrance?”

  He opened the door to a seemingly small closet which became a black-walled stucco room, an Aeolian cave for initiation rites. He pointed toward a small door. I motioned him away from it and knocked. No answer. I tried the doorknob. It turned in my hand. I pushed the door open, but stayed outside.

  “Howie?” I asked into the blackened room.

  There was no answer, but I could sense another person's presence. Maybe I could smell his terror, hear his heart thumping. I knew he was there.

  “Police, Howie. We know you're in there. Give yourself up.”

  Still there was no answer.

  “Come on out, Howie. We know all about you and Vince. It's no use.”

  I heard a half-sob. “I didn't do it.” His voice was a choked whisper. “I made him leave, but he said I was an accessory after the fact.”

  “Come on out, Howie. We can talk about it later.”

  I stood with one eye closed, hoping to adjust my vision to the deeper darkness of the other room. It didn't help.

  There is no silence quite as stark as that between hunter and hunted. The two of us were alone in a frozen universe. The small click of a released safety catch shattered the silence.

  “Throw it down,” I commanded. “Come out with your hands up.”

  Instead, Howard Rayburn, age nineteen, put the gun to his head and blew his brains out.

  CHAPTER

  32

  I was sick as I walked through the process. Howie Rayburn was almost the same age as my own son, Scott. The media showed up outside, including the ubiquitous Maxwell Cole. I stumbled across him when I went outside with the medical examiner's team.

  He waved to me, but I ignored him. It's a double standard. No one had been particularly interested when Teresa Smith burned to death. She wasn't as newsworthy as someone who might have lit the match. I returned to the building without acknowledging him.

  Nobody could tell us where Vince Farley was. We sealed off both Rayburn's and Farley's rooms until Al came back with search warrants. By late afternoon we knew more about Vince Farley than we wanted. His father owned a string of racetracks all over the Southwest. Vince was flunking out of school. He kept a little the scrapbook. We found clippings, not only of the three incidents in Seattle, but also one from lowa City, lowa. Same MO. Vince Farley himself was nowhere to be found.

  Howard Rayburn's mother, a widow, showed up. She appeared to be a nice lady—shocked, disbelieving, grieving, hurt. Al talked to her; I didn't. Couldn't.

  The afternoon turned sunny, the blue clarity of the sky mocking what was going on below. We worked the rest of the afternoon. It was dark before we got back downtown and started writing reports; midnight before I came home and took a long shower, trying to wash away the day's filth. I fell into bed but couldn't sleep. I finally got up and administered a bottle of medicinal McNaughton's. It worked; I slept.

  I stumbled to my desk at eight the next morning—sick, hung over, exhausted. Peters called to touch bases. “You guys got a line on Farley?” he asked.

  “Not yet.” I sighed wearily. “We've got a dragnet out, but it hasn't turned up anything. We heard rumors late last night that he might have crossed into Canada. His mother is divorced and lives in Toronto.”

  “That means extradition?”

  “Fat chance, right?”

  “Right,” Peters echoed. “So what are you doing today?”

  “We'll be back at the U, interviewing fraternity brothers. We didn't get to all of them last night.”

  And that's what we did. All day long. Back downtown late in the afternoon, we tried to put some international tracers on Vince Farley. Still no luck. We heard through the grapevine that his father's attorney was raising hell with the Chief about his son's name being plastered all over the media. It was the age-old story.

  Poor little rich kid fucks up, and Daddy's attorneys ride to the rescue.

  I got back to my apartment about five-thirty. I sat down in the chair long enough to take off my shoes. I made the mistake of leaning back, intending to rest my eyes a minute. The next thing I knew, it was six-thirty and the phone jangled me awake.

  “Hello,” I mumbled into the phone.

  “Detective Beaumont, am Ah to understand you're standin' me up?” An angry Southern belle is anything but sultry.

  “I'm sorry,” I stammered. “I'll be right there.”

  “Ah've already been waitin' a whole half-hour.”

  “No, really, I'm only a couple of minutes away.”

  The Palm Court maître d' greeted me with a knowing smile. “You must be Mr. Beaumont. Right this way, please.”

  I had been far too preoccupied during the preceding thirty-six hours to give Ms. Colleen Borden from Armour Life Insurance Company any thought. Had I done so, I'm sure I wouldn't have pictured a platinum blonde in her late forties with an hourglass figure and a crimson smile. Her hair was pulled back ballerina-style and covered with a broad, brimmed fedora. A well-cut lavender dress, softly draped, showed her figure to good advantage. At the base of her throat lay a gleaming diamond pendant. Her eyes were a startling shade of violet, set in a timeless face.

  The waiter held my chair. I slipped into it while she gave me a shrewdly appraising onceover. “Well now,” she drawled, “Ah don't believe anybody told me you were quite this cute, Detective Beaumont. Seein' you in the flesh maybe Ah'm not so mad at you for fallin' asleep.”

  It wasn't how I had expected our conversation to start. I mumbled an apology. She held up her hand. “No, now Ah don't want to hear another word about it. We'll just have ourselves a little drink and a little dinner. Then, if you still feel like apologizin', maybe we can work somethin' out.” She gave me a sly grin. I would have had to be blind, deaf, and dumb not to have known what she meant.

  I put a bland smile on my face and ordered a hair-of-the-dog McNaughton's. “What can I do for you?”

  She took a long sip of Southern Comfort. “Mah daddy owns Armour Life Insurance Company,” she drawled. “And his daddy owned it before that. We're not very big, but we're solid.”

  She paused and gave me a dazzling smile. “Years ago, Daddy called me into his office. He doesn't have any sons, you see, and he says, ‘Cody.’ That's what he calls me. ‘Cody, Ah want you to come into the business so you'll know how to run it when the time comes, but Ah don't want you out sellin' none o' this stuff. That's too hard a life for a little lady. What Ah'd like you to do is make sure that when we pay a claim it's on the up and up.' And that's what Ah've been doin' ever since.”

  “What does this have to do with me?”

  Instead of answering my question, she motioned to a waiter who hovered in the background. “You decided what you want?” she asked. “Ah do believe Ah'll have the pheasant. Ah just love pheasant.” Without looking, I nodded, and she ordered two of them. She turned back to me, the smile once more in place.

  “Why do you suppose Homer and Darrell Watkins turned you down when you made them such a right tolerable offer?”

  With that, any notion that Colleen Borden was a lightweight went right out the window.

  “Ames says they found another investor.”

  “Ralph Ames is your attorney, the one who was handlin' your deal?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have any idea where that man is?”

  “Ames? Why, no. He said he'd head back to Phoenix tomorrow, but I don't know where he's been today.”

  “Ah've hung around here all day long, hopin' to run into him, left him messages. He hasn't returned a single call, not one.”

  “That's not like him,” I said contritely, as though both Ames and I had been remiss. “Have you tried in the last few minutes?”

  “Ah
left word that he should join us.” As if on cue, the maître d' hurried to our table. “Excuse me, Miss Borden. There's a gentleman outside who says his name is Mr. Ames. Should I show him in?”

  “Oh, by all means. Do have him come in.”

  There was a flurry of activity around our table as a third place was set. Ames followed the maître d' uncertainly, as though not sure what to expect. I stood to introduce them. It was comical to see. Ames fell into those violet eyes and never knew what hit him.

  “Ah'm very pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr. Ames,” Cody drawled. “Ah've been doin' my very best to find you all day long.”

  “I'm sorry to be so difficult,” Ames apologized. “I've been out in Kirkland helping a friend of ours. I was actually…” Ames paused and cleared his throat. “Interviewing babysitters. He has to have one by Monday, you know.”

  Colleen nodded seriously, as though she understood perfectly.

  “And then,” Ames continued, Colleen's undivided attention making him babble, “once we got the girls registered for school, we had to take them shopping for clothes, shoes, lunch pails, bedding, everything.”

  I burst out laughing. The very idea of Ralph Ames, attorney extraordinaire, interviewing nannies and dragging tykes through Nordstroms and The Bon on a full-scale shopping marathon struck my funnybone, especially since he was so dead serious about it. Colleen took offense at my laughter. That moment sealed Ralph Ames' fate.

  “Mr. Beaumont, Ah think it's perfectly wonderful that Mr. Ames has been helpin' his friend, and Ah don't see any reason for you to be laughin' at him.”

  Ames turned an interesting shade of red and took a long sip of the Southern Comfort that Colleen had ordered for him. By the time we were into the main course—three pheasants instead of two—Colleen Borden knew as much about Peters' custody fight as confidentiality would allow.

  Then, just when I thought we were never going back to Armour Life Insurance Company, Colleen delicately laid down her fork, turned her violet-eyed charm full on Ames, and said softly, “Supposin' we get down to business.”

  Cody Borden was the consummate iron fist in a velvet glove. “To begin with, Ah've talked to Hal Huggins. He's a nice man, but Ah don't believe he's ever been involved in an insurance case of this magnitude.” She blinked a long blink with her very long eyelashes. “You see,” she drawled, “we're talkin' about three million dollars altogether.”