Anne Corley was a long time ago but it was only a few months since my ex-wife, Karen, had died of cancer. I had a pretty good idea of how much Larry was hurting right at that moment, but I also knew what he was feeling now was nothing compared to what he’d feel before long. It would get worse, much, much worse, before it got better.
I reached out and shook his hand. “You do it one day at a time,” I told him. “And you make the most of every minute you have.”
“Thanks,” he said. “We intend to.”
On my way back to our cubicle, I noticed there was none of the usual banter drifting from the doors I passed. It was as if Larry Powell’s unexpected farewell address had hit all of us where we lived. Knowing about Marcia Powell’s illness reminded us, all too disturbingly, of our own mortality.
Being partners is a whole lot like being married—with none of the side benefits. When I stepped into the cubicle, Sue glanced at me over her shoulder and gave me “the look”—one that was unmistakable to any man who’s ever been married.Are you okay? it said. Do you want to talk about it?
Naturally the answer I should have given to both questions was No, I’m not okay and Yes, I need to talk about it. But I didn’t. Instead, I walked over to the computer and switched it off. “Come on, Sue,” I said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
“Where are we going?” Sue asked.
“We’re going to do our jobs and try to figure out who the hell turned poor old Agnes Ferman into a shish kebab.”
Two
Until Sue and I had driven there the previous Tuesday, I had never heard of Wingard Court North. Number 706 sits right on the banks of beautiful Bitter Lake—some might call it Bitter Pond—in the far north end of Seattle. It was far enough off the beaten path that when we took the call we’d had to haul out our Thomas Guide to help with navigation.
Agnes Ferman had lived and died in an unpretentious neighborhood made up of summer cottages that had, over time, been transformed into year-round middle-class housing. The lots were such that, even in the current world of greedy real estate, developers would be hard-pressed to knock one down and put a megahouse/no-lot dwelling in its place. On Wingard Court, developers would need at least two lots to do that. Maybe that’s why so many of those original houses were still around.
On the way there, I drove the departmental “bulgemobile,” otherwise known as a Caprice. Since Sue and I obviously weren’t going to talk about what was going on with Larry and Marcia Powell, she reached into her purse, pulled out her ragged spiral notebook and began reviewing her notes on the Ferman homicide, covering everything that had happened once I left town.
These days we’re all supposed to carry around little laptop computers which the city, after great debate, purchased for use by its law enforcement officers. And we do carry them—far more than we use them. Both Sue’s and mine were safely stowed in the trunk of the Caprice we were currently driving. That’s where they usually ended up—in whatever trunk happened to be available.
Computers are good for lots of things, but not in the world of homicide investigations. For detectives, nothing beats a notebook and pencil. They’re portable, cheap, accessible, never have those pesky General Protection Faults, and they take no time at all to boot up. In my opinion, if a cop wants to go really high tech, all he has to do is invest in a ballpoint pen, which is exactly why Sue was reading to me from her trusty notebook.
“According to what I have here, Agnes was sixtyseven years old at the time of her death. She was a widow. Her husband died several years ago—1993. No children, but her survivors include a brother and a sister. The brother—Andrew George—lives in Everett. Hilda Smathers, the sister, lives somewhere up around Marysville. She’s the one who provided the ME’s office with the name of Agnes Ferman’s dentist. His records confirmed identification of the body. At the family’s request, no services are scheduled.”
“The old guy who reported the fire, the one who was out of bed because his dog needed to take a leak. What’s his name again?”
“I have no idea what the dog’s name is,” Sue responded dryly. “The man’s name is Malcolm Lawrence.”
“Right. Have you talked to him?”
“Not since you and I did Tuesday afternoon,” Sue replied.
“That means nobody’s interviewed him since the money was found?”
“Right. Marian Rockwell may have spoken to him. If so, she didn’t mention it in her report.”
“Let’s start with Malcolm,” I told her. “After that, we’ll talk to some of the other neighbors as well. And if we finish canvassing the neighborhood early enough, we’ll head up north to see the brother and sister.”
That’s how homicide investigations work. We start by talking to the neighbors—to people who live or work near the scene of the crime and who may have seen something out of the ordinary around the time the murder took place. From there we gradually expand the inquiry to include relatives, friends, and as many known associates as possible. Interviewing relatives can often be the tricky part of the deal since, more than occasionally, the person nearest and dearest to the victim also happens to be the murderer.
According to Sue’s notes Malcolm Lawrence had spotted the fire and reported it right around 5:30 A.M. By the time responding fire units arrived, the house was fully engulfed. That meant the arsonist had come and gone sometime earlier. In the middle of the night, there’s not much hope of a neighbor being up and seeing something, but it does happen. On the other hand, I’ve had more than one case solved by an alert newspaper-delivery kid who was smart enough to pay attention to what was going on around him—to an unfamiliar vehicle or to unusual activity in an otherwise sleeping neighborhood.
“Let’s be sure to check with the newspaper carrier,” I said.
“Right,” Sue agreed, scribbling a note. “I meant to do that on Friday, but I ended up cataloging serial numbers instead.”
We pulled up in front of what was left of Agnes Ferman’s house. On Tuesday an old battered Lincoln had been sitting on the parking strip. “Where’s the car?” I asked.
“I had it towed into the garage so we could check it for prints.”
We had no sooner parked the Caprice where the Lincoln had once been when the front door of the house across the street opened. An elderly man I recognized as Malcolm Lawrence appeared on the porch along with two amazingly fat dachshunds. Barking like mad, the dogs reminded me of a pair of powerful but noisy tugboats. So short that their swollen bellies seemed to drag on the ground, they nonetheless moved fast enough and with enough force that Lewis was swept along in their wake, across the porch, down the steps, and then up the walkway. Ineffectually hauling back on the leashes and ordering the dogs to heel, Lawrence came dragging along behind them like some kind of hapless human dogsled. By then the two ugly mutts and their pointy, sharp little teeth were almost within striking distance of my ankles.
I suppose the idea of an armed homicide cop being worried about a pair of yappy little dogs sounds like some kind of joke, but of all the dogs known to man, dachshunds are my least favorite—with good reason.
In all my life, I’ve been bitten only once—by an obnoxious little wiener dog named Snooks. The dog nailed me square on the ankle. He sliced right through a new pair of dress socks hard enough to draw blood. Unfortunately, throttling Snooks on the spot wasn’t an option since he happened to belong to a cute girl I’d just met at school—a girl named Karen Moffitt. Snooks’ unprovoked attack came on the occasion of my stopping by the Moffitt house to take Karen out on our first date.
From that evening on, for the next five years, including the first two years Karen and I were married, Snooks and I were the bane of each other’s existence. Eventually he was old and frail, farting and incontinent, but he never stopped barking at me whenever I came into the house. As far as Snooks was concerned, I was the eternal interloper. And I must confess that the animosity was absolutely mutual. I despised him every bit as much as he did me.
All of this flashed through my mind as Malcolm Lawrence came tottering toward us. I don’t know if it showed on my face, but I was wondering what the departmental position would be if one of Seattle’s finest drop-kicked somebody’s beloved pet into the next county. Or maybe even plugged the shin-chewing little rat dog with my regulation 9mm. Not good, I decided. Not good at all.
About the time I was considering beating a hasty retreat back to the car, both dogs veered off in that direction themselves. They made a beeline for the Caprice’s rear left tire where they almost tipped themselves ass-over-teakettle in their eagerness to raise their legs high enough to take aim at the city’s steel-belted radials.
“Tuffy! Major!” the old man exclaimed, jerking again on the leashes. “You cut that out. Right now. Sit!” he added. “Sit and behave yourselves.” Surprisingly enough, both dogs sat. Thankfully, they even shut up.
“You’re the two detectives, aren’t you,” Malcolm Lawrence said, peering up at us through a pair of thick glasses covered with cloudy fingerprints and dotted with flakes of dandruff. The heavy prescription made his rheumy eyes seem enormous. “Aren’t you the same ones I talked to the other day?”
I had been so preoccupied with the dogs that I hadn’t looked at the man on the other end of the leash. During the intervening days since I had last seen him, I had forgotten how much Malcolm Lawrence resembled George Burns. If he ever entered an Oh, God! look-alike contest, Lawrence would undoubtably walk away with first prize. The stooped, wiry octogenarian came complete with a sharp, pointed chin, pursed lips, and the half-smoked stub of an ever-present cigar.
“Right,” I said, pulling out my ID. “We did talk to you before. My name’s Detective Beaumont. This is my partner, Detective Danielson.”
Lawrence barely glanced in Sue’s direction. “I forget. Which one are you with?” he asked. “The police or the fire department?”
“We’re with the Seattle PD,” I told him.
“Good,” he said, nodding and puffing on the cigar and then holding it up in the air between two stubby, nicotine-stained fingers. “If you ask me, that girl they sent out here from the fire department last week didn’t have much on the ball. Wouldn’t tell us nothing about what was going on. We had to read in the paper that the fire weren’t no accident. Poor Agnes. Who’d’ve ever thought somebody’d want to do her like that?”
Behind Lawrence’s back, Sue raised one questioning eyebrow. I knew what she was thinking. So was I. If Lt. Marian Rockwell didn’t have much on the ball, I’d hate to see someone who did.
“As I recall, you’re the one who reported the fire.”
“Right,” Malcolm said. “I sure was. The flames was just shooting up into the air something awful. Right through the roof. I couldn’t hardly believe my eyes. After I called 911, I ran over and pounded on the front door trying to wake Agnes up. She didn’t hear me though. At least, she didn’t answer. Maybe she was already dead, for all I know. I tried the door, but it was locked. About then the fire truck showed up and they made me get out of the way. I came back over here and stood on the porch. I watched until my legs gave out and I had to go inside to sit down. It’s a crying shame getting old. Just wait, Detective. You’ll see. It’ll happen to you before you know it.”
There were times I thought it already had. “How well did you know Agnes Ferman?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Pretty well, I guess. We’ve been neighbors a long time—twenty years or so. She and her husband—Lyle was his name—bought this place musta been in the early to midseventies, I suppose, when old Mrs. Twitty finally croaked out. They bought this because it was close to where Agnes worked. Lyle was a painter—a house painter, not an artist. He worked out of his van so it didn’t much matter to him where he lived, but Agnes was still working for them rich people on the other side of the bluff.
“If you ask me, for somebody being married, it’s a funny kind of arrangement. At least it was back then. Agnes lived-in except for her days off, while Lyle was here baching it by himself most of the time—doing his own cooking and laundry. Like I said, he was a house painter. That’s what got him, by the way—lead-based paint wrecked his liver. So, up until Agnes retired a few years back, she was only here on her days off.”
“How long ago was that?”
“When she retired? Six years, maybe seven,” Malcolm said. “She finally quit when Lyle got so bad that he couldn’t be left here by himself. He’s been gone for a while, now, but I forget exactly how long.”
Today not too many people have live-in help anymore, but Wingard Court was within spitting distance of one of Seattle’s most high-brow neighborhoods—the Highlands. An exclusive community that lies just north of the Seattle city limits. There, buffered from the rest of the world by the green expanses of the Seattle Golf and Country Club and protected by a series of manned security gates, people with enough money can do what they want without the lower classes being able to see how the other half lives.
In the old days—when I was growing up in Ballard—having live-in servants in the Highlands was the rule rather than the exception. That’s probably reversed now, but since the Ferman residence was physically nearby, that was my first guess.
“She worked for someone in the Highlands?” I asked.
Malcolm shook his head. “Nope. Not in the Highlands, but real close by. Below it. Somewhere down the hill from there, although I can’t say exactly where.”
“Do you happen to know the family’s name?”
“No, sir. You got me again. Couldn’t tell you that, but I do know she worked for the same people for a long time. They treated her real fine—just like one of the family. Took her on fancy trips with them, and all like that. I believe she gets a retirement check from them real regular. In fact, someone from there—a son, I believe—come around not too long ago to check on Agnes—just to see how she was doing and to make sure she was all right. That’s what Agnes told me anyway. Must be real decent folks.”
Back across the street, the screen door on the front of Malcolm Lawrence’s little house burst open. A woman in a housecoat and curlers appeared on the porch. It had been years since I had seen a woman wearing curlers. I was surprised to discover somebody still made them.
“Malcolm, what on earth is taking you so long?” the woman demanded in a shrill voice. “You told me you were going out to walk the dogs for just a minute. Your coffee’s poured and it’s getting cold.”
Without answering, Malcolm jerked his head in the woman’s direction. “That’s the wife,” he explained. “Becky. Been married to her for over fifty years, but she’s still the jealous type. She don’t much like it for me to be outside chewing the fat with somebody without her knowing exactly what’s going on.”
“Well?” Becky Lawrence shouted again when her first attempt to reel in her husband elicited no visible response. “Are you coming in or not?”
“Give me a minute, Bec. Can’t you see I’m busy?” Malcolm returned sharply. “I’m talking to this here detective.” Becky disappeared behind a slammed door and Malcolm turned back to me. “She can’t stand to have me out of her sight for even a minute. Where were we again?”
“You were telling us about Agnes Ferman and the man who came by to check on her.”
“Right. Drives one of those fancy new cars. A Lincoln, I think. Town Car maybe? A big one anyway although not as big as the old clunker Agnes used to have.”
Sue was busy taking notes, so I didn’t. “And he only came by that once?”
“I only saw the car that once,” Malcolm said. “The person may have been here more often than that but if he was, I didn’t see him.”
“Getting back to Monday night. You didn’t notice any unusual activity?”
“Well,” Malcolm frowned. “Now that you mention it, there was a car here during the evening. Early on. It was brown, I think. Dog-turd brown.”
“Any idea what kind?”
Malcolm shook his head. “I’m not sure. It was one of them little foreign jobs
and I can’t keep ’em straight in my head any more ’cause they all look alike. I’m pretty sure, though, that I’ve seen this one before. Belonged to one of her relatives, I think.”
“When did it leave?”
“Seven-thirty or eight. Fairly early.”
“And you didn’t see anything else?”
“Nope.” He shook his head. “Not that night. Not until morning when I saw the fire.”
“What time did you go to bed?”
“Right after the news. Ten o’clock news, that is. Eleven o’clock may be fine for young whippersnappers like you and the lady here, but us oldsters need our rest. Except for Agnes, that is. She was always a night owl herself. Read books all night long, one right after another.”
He stopped abruptly. “Is there something wrong?” I asked.
“I was thinking about them books and it really struck me. What Agnes loved most especially was murder mysteries. Read stacks of them. She’d bring ’em home from the library half a dozen at a time. In fact, she told me once that she was thinking about writing one herself someday. But now, of course, she’s dead and the same thing’s happened to her. Murder, that is.”
I glanced at Sue. I hadn’t mentioned the word murder and neither had she. “What makes you think Agnes Ferman was murdered?” Sue asked.
Malcolm attempted a long-but-futile suck on his cigar. Fortunately for all concerned, the foul-smelling thing had gone out. “Maybe that’s what it said in the paper,” he said, glowering at the dead cigar.
I have a long-running feud with all kinds of members of the media—both print and electronic—but even my old fraternity brother Maxwell Cole wasn’t likely to label a death homicide until somebody from the department issued an official statement to that effect.
“What did it say?” I asked.
Malcolm shrugged. “That she died under mysterious circumstances. As far as I’m concerned, a fire by itself ain’t mysterious at all. But now, with you two showing up and flashing around badges that say homicide all over them, you don’t have to be no rocket scientist to be able to put two and two together. Right?”
Breach of Duty (9780061739637) Page 3
