Breach of Duty (9780061739637)

by Jance, Judith A.

  “After high school they went their separate ways, never seeing each other again, not until last Sunday night.”

  “This Sunday?” I asked.

  Darla shook her head. “No,” she said. “Sunday a week ago. That’s when David Half Moon appeared to my father in a dream.”

  I said nothing, but I must have shifted slightly in my seat. Darla paused. “You don’t like all this mystical stuff very much, do you, Detective Beaumont?” she said. I said nothing. “Neither do I,” she continued. “I teach physics at the University of Washington. If some of my colleagues knew I was here telling you this strange story, I’d be laughed off the tenure track so fast it would make my head spin.”

  “Go on,” I urged. “You were saying about your father’s dream.”

  “David Half Moon appeared to my father just as he was long ago when they were both boys. That’s how my father recognized him. He said that some Anglo boys had taken him from the tribal burial grounds into the city. He said it was my father’s duty, as David’s friend and as a fellow shaman—professional courtesy, if you will—to bring his bones back where they belonged.”

  “Excuse me, but I don’t understand what all this…”

  “Wait,” Darla ordered. “Let me finish. On Monday and Tuesday of that next week, my father tried to telephone his old friend. When he couldn’t find him, he contacted some of the elders of the Suquamish tribe. That’s the same tribe Chief Sealth—the man Seattle was named after—was from, by the way. When my father finally spoke to someone who had known David Half Moon, he learned for the first time that his friend died more than ten years ago of lung cancer.

  “David Half Moon’s dying wish was that his remains should be accorded all the ancient customs. The People did that for him. As a shaman he, along with his most prized possessions, were loaded into a canoe, then the canoe was raised up into the branches of a tree somewhere out on the Kitsap Peninsula.”

  For a moment, all I could see was Beverly Piedmont, flinging my grandfather’s ashes off the back of The Lady of the Lake. “You mean they didn’t actually bury him.”

  “No,” Darla Cunningham said quietly, firmly. “We may call it a burial ground, but that’s not the way we do it.”

  We. The word resonated in a strange and powerful way. My rational just-the-facts-ma’am world was thrown topsy-turvy by her use of a “we” that could at the same time encompass both a professor of physics at the U-Dub and an old shaman who had been sent on a dream-inspired search for a long-lost and long-dead friend. This was mystical all right, more so than I was prepared to swallow.

  “Did anybody bother to go check his canoe to see if the bones were still where they had left them?” I asked. As soon as the words were out of my mouth they sounded flip and somehow disrespectful, but Darla didn’t seem to take offense.

  “Tribal burial grounds are strictly off-limits,” she explained. “The People don’t go there. It’s too dangerous.”

  “Dangerous?” I asked. “Why?”

  “Because the spirits of the dead—especially the spirit of a dead shaman—can be very powerful. And unpredictable. People who come in contact with the possessions or the bones of a dead shaman are subsequently at risk themselves. Things happen to them. The white man’s world might not see that connection, but it’s there all the same.”

  I thought about Audrey Cummings telling me that the investigator who had been working on the Seward Park case was out sick. I wondered what was wrong with him. Probably nothing, I told myself. Still, it was enough to make me worry.

  “So Monday and Tuesday your father attempted to track down his school chum and discovered that he was dead. Then what?”

  “Wednesday morning early he had another dream. In this one, there were children, running up and down in a park, playing field hockey. When my father got closer, he realized that the sticks they were using were bones—David Half Moon’s bones. His empty skull was the ball. Later, when the game was over, a woman came there—an Anglo woman. She took the bones away from the children and put them in a metal box.”

  I thought about Sue Danielson retrieving the bones from the role players—if young ghouls could be considered children—and turning the remains over to the guys from the ME’s office. The investigators, in turn, would have slipped them into a metal locker—one in a bank of refrigerated body-sized drawers. The hair on the back of my neck seemed to stand on end. Was it possible that Sue Danielson was the Anglo woman Henry Leaping Deer had seen in his dream?

  “Did your father say what the woman looked like?” I asked.

  Darla shook her head. “By the time he called me about it on Thursday, he could no longer remember exactly what she looked like. He did say he was sure the dream—the game—took place in Seattle. That afternoon, when I read a piece in the paper about the Seward Park incident, I called my father up and told him about it. Even while I was reading it to him, he was sure the two things were connected.”

  I wasn’t entirely convinced, but still, Darla was making a pretty good case of it. “For the moment, let’s assume your father is right,” I conceded. “Let’s say that the remains up in the ME’s office really do belong to your father’s dead friend. What are you going to do about it? Why are you here? And why did you claim that talking to me was a matter of life and death?”

  “Because it is,” Darla returned. “I thought I had made that clear. A shaman’s power doesn’t end with death, Detective Beaumont. Every person who has come in contact with those bones or possessions is now in grave danger as well. My father sent me to sound the alarm. He isn’t necessarily concerned about whoever took the bones in the first place—the ones who carted them away from the burial grounds. They’ll get whatever they deserve. His concern is that others are now involved, people who are really innocent bystanders. Unfortunately, they, too, came in contact with the bones.

  “According to my father one of them is a young man with green hair. The other is the woman I told you about before—the Anglo woman who took the bones away from the kids. I’m here to warn those people in particular, to tell them to be careful and take extra precautions.”

  “Just them?” I asked. “A woman and a man with green hair?”

  “Those are the two my father mentioned, although there may be others, as well. He wanted me to let them know that if they’d like his help, they can come down to see him in Taholah. He’ll do whatever he can for them.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s a purification process,” she said. “A ceremony. If someone wants to avail himself of it, I’m sure my father would do it.”

  She fell silent then. There were voices outside in the corridor as another pair of detectives walked by. Long after their voices disappeared, Darla and I sat without speaking. I don’t know what she was thinking. For my part, I was mulling over her words. She had delivered her father’s offer with the same kind of conviction a doctor might have employed when announcing some dire diagnosis, one in which the prognosis for long-term survival isn’t good.

  “You’re convinced the Seward Park bones belong to David Half Moon, aren’t you,” I said at last.

  Darla nodded. “Yes.”

  “But you weren’t sure of that when you first came here.”

  “No,” she agreed. “That’s true. My father was convinced, but I wasn’t.”

  “What changed your mind?”

  She frowned. “I’m not sure. It happened while you were talking on the telephone.”

  “With Audrey? The woman from the ME’s office?”

  Darla nodded. “Before you even said anything, I knew my father was right.” She paused. “Believe me, Detective Beaumont. I understand that there’s no rational explanation for any of this. I’m a scientist, for god’s sake. A mathematician. But I’m also Indian. What’s worrying me now is that if my father was right about one thing, he may be right about the others as well. Is Detective Danielson the woman who took the bones away from Seward Park?”

  “Yes.”

>   Darla Cunningham stood and held out her hand. “Please tell her from me to be careful.”

  “I will,” I told her. “You can count on that.”

  Darla started toward the doorway. I made as if to follow, but she stopped me. “Don’t bother,” she said. “I can find my way back out. That’s something we Indians are supposed to be good at—we all have an inborn sense of direction.”

  She laughed then, a kind of bell-like musical laughter that seemed to bring people together rather than closing them out. Her gentle humor made fun of everyone who pokes fun at another race or culture—Darla Cunningham included.

  “How did you go from Leaping Deer to Cunningham?”

  Darla laughed again. “I married a Redcoat,” she said.

  “A redcoat?” I repeated.

  She nodded. “Hal’s English. He teaches anthropology at the U-Dub.”

  “That’s where I can reach you if I need to—at the university?”

  She nodded. “There or at home. We’re in the phone book.”

  Darla left then. I sat for a moment or two thinking, then I switched on the computer. It was still working its way through that interminable boot-up procedure when Paul Kramer poked his head in the door.

  “What a looker,” he said. “Who was that?”

  “A Native American lady,” I said.

  “Really. So what did Pocahontas want?”

  Compared to Darla’s gentle good humor, Kramer’s lame joke fell flat. “I wouldn’t make fun of her if I were you,” I told him irritably. “She’s a professor of physics at the University of Washington.”

  “So she’s a smart Indian instead of a dumb one,” he said. “You still haven’t told me what she wanted.”

  “She came here to give me a tentative ID on the Seward Park bones. It sounds like the dead man is an old Indian guy from the Kitsap Peninsula who died of lung cancer sometime back in the eighties. His name was David Half Moon.”

  “If he’s from the Kitsap Peninsula, how did his bones wind up in Seward Park?” Kramer asked.

  The computer was finally booted up and ready to work. I consulted my notes from Audrey Cummings and typed in the case number. “That’s what I’m about to find out,” I said. “My guess is, if I apply a little pressure to one of our dungeons-and-dragons jerks, I’ll find out they also rob graves.”

  Once the file was called up, I sat there and started scanning. It seemed reasonable that Kramer would take the hint and leave. He didn’t. “I hope this checks out,” he said finally. “It’ll be great if we can clear one case my first day at the helm. What about the other one you and Sue are working—the North-End arson?”

  “We’re on task,” I said. “We interviewed several people today, and we’ll do more tomorrow.”

  “Let’s clear that one, too,” Kramer said. “We’ve got the momentum here. Let’s keep it going.”

  He left then—finally, leaving me with the impression that I had been listening to a member of a cheerleading squad rather than Captain Powell’s successor. Staring at the empty doorway he had just vacated, I realized how different we were and why he had been promoted and I hadn’t been. For him it was a game—a numbers game with the score rising or falling depending on the cases that ended up in the cleared column. For me it’s different—more personal. I bring to this job the firm conviction that no one should be allowed to get away with murder.

  That’s as true for Agnes Ferman as it is for anyone else, I told the empty doorway. Clear it my ass!

  Eight

  The guy who had called in the initial Seward Park incident was one James Greenjeans. Sue’s written report listed his home address as an apartment on Boren on Capitol Hill and his place of work as bartender at the Hurricane Cafe.

  Not part of the usual role-playing group, he had been invited along as a last-minute, fill-in replacement for a ticket-paying no-show. Apparently, none of the other participants had been disturbed when one of the so-called directors had emerged from a clump of bushes brandishing what he later bragged was a real human bone. Bowing to peer pressure, Mr. Greenjeans had kept his mouth shut at the time. Later, once he got back home—around 4:30 in the morning—he had called 911 and reported the incident.

  According to Sue’s report, the two guys who were in charge, were a pair of good friends now turned partners. Despite being high school dropouts, Don Atkins and Barry Newsome had nonetheless turned a youthful interest in video games into lucrative career paths. Now in their late twenties, they worked together as freelance graphic designers, creating blood-and-guts graphics for one of the Eastside’s computer-game manufacturers. Their free-time hobby and part-time moneymaker was a company called Bloodlust. That enterprise consisted of creating and directing live-action participatory costume dramas, complete with role-playing ghouls, zombies, and vampires, at various locations all over the Pacific Northwest.

  When confronted by Sue Danielson with James Greenjeans’ claim, they had reluctantly produced three bones—the ones Sue had later delivered to the medical examiner’s office. Under questioning, they both claimed they had stumbled across the bones in a blackberry bramble in Seward Park, but subsequent searches by detectives, uniformed officers, and Explorer Scouts had failed to unearth any additional remains. That would make sense if one bought Darla Cunningham’s assertion that the bones had been imported to Seward Park from an Indian burial ground somewhere in the wilds of the Kitsap Peninsula.

  When I finished reading Sue’s report, it was only nine o’clock. Rather than going straight home, I decided to try calling Mr. Greenjeans’ home number to see if he could give me any additional information. A breathless and youthful female voice answered the phone. “Jimmy’s not here right now,” she told me.

  “Do you know where I could find him?”

  “At work, I suppose,” she said, and slammed the phone down in my ear.

  That’s one of the problems with young people today. No one has bothered to teach them the rudiments of proper telephone etiquette.

  I looked at my watch again. On the way back home to Belltown Terrace, the Hurricane Cafe would be only a block or two out of my way. I was torn, though, between wanting to talk to James Greenjeans and not wanting to set foot inside what I still regard as a Johnny-come-lately restaurant.

  The Hurricane Cafe came into existence as a direct result of the demise of one of my favorite long-time haunts—the Doghouse. The new place had been open for years now, but I hadn’t ventured inside out of what was probably misplaced customer loyalty. That was about to end. Don’t be a sentimental slob, I told myself finally, making up my mind. Just do your job.

  On my way to the elevators, I had to pass Chuck Grayson’s desk once more. It didn’t surprise me to see the desk sergeant in Kramer’s office. Kramer and Grayson were both totally engrossed in some aspect of unpacking. Neither of them noticed me as I slunk by. I figured it was best for all concerned if I didn’t let on I was there.

  On the way up 4th Avenue in the 928 I was thinking about Mr. Greenjeans’ improbable name. I wondered if Henry Leaping Deer’s dream landscape had somehow crossed its little psychic wires. Maybe the man’s colorful name had translated into a headful of green hair. After all, I told myself, nobody ever said dream interpretation was an exact science.

  It was Monday, a weekday night. Even so, verging on ten o’clock, the parking lot outside the Hurricane was full as were most of the on-street spaces in the near vicinity. I had to park over half a block away and walk. I did so with misgivings only partially attributable to nostalgia.

  One of the precepts of AA is accepting things you cannot change. Nonetheless, I sometimes find that ignoring them is my best bet. You really can’t go home again. Preserved in a haze of memory and with no current contradictory information, I had managed to keep the spirit of the old Doghouse alive and well exactly as it once was. Approaching the outside door, I knew I wouldn’t be able to play that game any longer. The restaurant had changed and so had I. There seemed to be a whole collection of ghosts being
summoned by this oddball investigation and those specters didn’t all belong to David Half Moon. Some of J. P. Beaumont’s demons were in attendance as well.

  When I first came to live in downtown Seattle’s Regrade neighborhood, I was a newly separated refugee from a marriage that had fallen apart in the distant suburban outpost of Lake Tapps. On my own and disinclined to do my own cooking, I gravitated to nearby round-the-clock joints. Over time I had settled on one in particular. The Doghouse, within easy walking distance of my Royal Crest condo, had become my home-away-from-home. There I had enjoyed the ready availability of food, booze, and camaraderie, not necessarily in that order.

  Long before I arrived on the scene, the Doghouse had been an institution in Seattle—a fixture. For sixty years it was a standard-bearer for cheap, mostly fried food, tough, battleaxe-style waitresses, and clouds of undiluted second-hand cigarette smoke. For me, the most important item in the bar had been an unending supply of MacNaughton’s. For other Doghouse regulars, though, the bar’s real attraction had been the resident electric organ along with a series of talented organists who had reigned over and provided accompaniment for nightly amateur and more or less drunken songfests.

  When economics and failing health finally forced the second generation of owners to close the place down, a lot of us old-timers had grieved the restaurant’s passing as much as if we had lost a good friend. I had been there along with the TV cameras and other diehard regulars the night they locked the doors for good. Months later, new owners had opened a new restaurant in the same location. I had heard rumors that the new place appealed to a far younger and much hipper clientele. As I walked up to the once-familiar glass front-door entrance, I wondered whether or not any of the other old guys had gone back in the meantime. If so, I was proud that J. P. Beaumont wasn’t one of them—not until now.

  Pushing open the door, my initial impression was that little had changed. There was a new layer of tile on the floor, but the thick pall of cigarette smoke that instantly assailed the nose was familiar. So was the noisy clatter of pinball machines that still lined the lobby area. The partition that had once separated the bar and lounge from the restaurant proper had been removed as had the organ. The orange upholstery in the booths had changed to something newer, but other than that the dimly lit, cavernous interior was much the same.