Improbable cause jpb-5

by J. A. Jance

  They were several years old, but they still looked brand new. The outside paint was waxed and polished to a high gloss. If they had ever been dented or scratched, the damage had been carefully rubbed out and repainted. On my way to the one van, I walked past the other and managed to catch a glimpse of what was under the hood. The engine had been steam-cleaned. It could have come fresh from the factory that very day.

  When we reached Larry Martin’s van, the one with the open doors, we found that the cleaning solvent smell was emanating from there. It was industrial-strength carpet and upholstery cleaner.

  The entire interior of the van had been custom carpeted. I guess that shouldn’t have surprised me. After all, it was a carpet company’s vehicle. The outside of the van looked perfect until I walked around to the other side and discovered that the door on the rider’s side had been badly smashed.

  “What do you think happened here?” I asked.

  Nick Wallace poked his head out from under the hood of the other van. “You talkin” to me?“ he asked.

  “Yes. I said what do you think happened here?”

  “Looks to me like he ran it into a post of some kind. Not only that, the stupid son of a bitch bled all over it like a stuck hog without ever bothering to try to clean it up. He just parked it out there on the lot and took off. It was hotter’n hell around here yesterday. The sun cooked it up real good. It was a real mess when I opened her up this morning.”

  “Did you clean it up yourself?”

  “Some. But there’s a detail place down on Westlake that’s got a steam-cleaning process that’s better on floor mats and upholstery than anything I can do by hand. I took it down there first thing.”

  “Did anyone tell you to do it?” I asked.

  “Tell me? You mean like order me to get it cleaned up?”

  I nodded.

  “Look,” he said. “When it comes to the trucks, I’m the boss, see? I got it cleaned up, and I’ll straighten out the door, too, when I get half a chance.”

  “Didn’t it cross your mind that with all that blood maybe you should report it to the police?” I asked.

  Wallace left what he was doing and walked over to us, wiping his hands on the towel dangling from his hip pocket. “Why should I?” he asked.

  “Why not? If one of your vehicles shows up covered with blood, it seems reasonable to me that you might think it would be of interest to us.”

  Al nodded his head in agreement.

  “Look, fellas,” Nick Wallace said, drawing himself erect. “I got myself a fine job here, understand? Mr. Damm pays me a fair amount of money to keep all his trucks running and looking good. He don’t pay me to butt my nose into other people’s business, no-sir-ee. The trucks come in broke down, I fix ”em. They come in dirty, I clean ‘em up. I don’t ask no questions, I don’t hassle nobody, and I get a paycheck every single Friday.“

  That speech probably comprised more words than Nick Wallace had ever strung together at one time in his whole life. There was no point in antagonizing the man. We needed him. Since both the exterior and the interior of the van had been washed, and since we couldn’t see the bloodstains in the van for ourselves, we would have to depend on Nick Wallace’s recollections and goodwill for details about the condition of Larry Martin’s truck when it was found that morning.

  “Would you mind telling us a little more about it, then?” I asked, in my most conciliatory manner. “Detective Lindstrom and I are here investigating a homicide. We have reason to believe that this truck was somehow involved.”

  “There was blood all over the seat,” Wallace answered.

  “Both sides?”

  He nodded. “Both sides, driver’s and rider’s.”

  “What about the door handles?”

  “Both of them were bloody, too. Beats me how he managed to make that much of a mess without ending up dead himself.”

  I looked at Big Al. “Maybe there were two people in the van,” I suggested.

  “Could be,” he agreed.

  I turned back to Wallace. “After Larry Martin brought the truck back here, how did he leave?”

  “In his car, I guess,” Nick answered. “I mean, it ain’t here this morning.”

  “What kind of car?”

  “A VW bug, ”68 or “69 probably. Runs real good for as old as it is.”

  “A bug? What color?”

  “Red. Bright red. I helped him repaint it just a few months ago.”

  “You wouldn’t happen to remember the license number, would you?” It was a hopeless question. I knew it when I asked. Nick Wallace shook his head in reply.

  “Got enough trouble remembering my own,” he said.

  “Was there anything unusual in the van when you opened it up?” I asked. “Anything out of place, or anything there that shouldn’t have been?”

  “Well, the tools were missing. I went straight in and reported that to Mr. Damm. I figured he ought to know about that right away.”

  “Anything else?”

  Wallace shifted uneasily from foot to foot as though fighting some private interior battle.

  “I don’t suppose it matters none,” he said at last. “Even if Larry shows back up here, Mr. Damm’s sure to fire his ass.”

  “What doesn’t matter?” I asked.

  “It’s against the rules to have anybody who doesn’t work for us riding in a company truck,” he said.

  “And you think somebody who didn’t belong there was in Larry Martin’s truck?”

  “You said so yourself.”

  “But I didn’t say it was someone who wasn’t authorized,” I countered. “You’re the one who said that.”

  Nick turned and walked away from us, picked up something from his workbench, and then came back, holding a small brown object in his hands. He gave it to me.

  It was a plastic card case, the freebie kind they give you with business-card orders. Under the clear plastic laminate inside the cover was a Washington state driver’s license with a woman’s picture on it. I didn’t recognize the picture, but I recognized the name-LeAnn Patricia Nielsen.

  Without a word, I passed the license to Al.

  “Where’d this come from?” he demanded.

  Nick Wallace looked down at his feet. “I found it in the van. Under the front seat. On the driver’s side.”

  Nick Wallace’s terse words put a whole new light on the case. If LeAnn Nielsen had been in the bloodied van, there was a good chance that she and Larry Martin were somehow involved together. Maybe together the two of them had plotted to get rid of her husband. Permanently.

  I turned back to Nick. “We’ll take this,” I told him, pocketing the case.

  He nodded. “You bet. I sure as hell don’t need it.”

  “Tell us once more exactly what happened when you found the van this morning.”

  “Like I told you, it was parked outside in the sun, right next to the building. I was gonna bring it inside and gas it up when I saw the mess on the front seat. I opened the windows to air it out a little while I got the other vans on the road. Then, as soon as I got caught up, I cleaned up what I could and took it down to the detail place, the one down on Westlake.”

  “You cleaned it yourself initially? What with?”

  Wallace shrugged. “Rags,” he said. “And paper towels too. I used up practically a whole roll.”

  “Where are they?”

  “Where’s what?”

  “The rags you used. The paper towels.”

  “The paper’s over there in the trash. It don’t go out until tonight some time. And the towels are on the bottom of the laundry basket.”

  “Could you get them for us?”

  He paused, looking at us for a long moment. “Homicide, huh?” he said, musing to himself. At last he nodded his head as though he’d made up his mind. “I guess,” he said. “Whadya want ”em in? Another laundry bag be okay?“

  “That’ll be fine,” I told him.

  So we stood there and waited while Nick Walla
ce rummaged through first a laundry cart and then a fifty-gallon trash container. He stuffed his findings into a canvas laundry bag. When he was finished, he pulled the rope drawstring shut and brought the bag over to us.

  He handed it over, then led us to the garage doors, opening one of them with an electrical switch on the wall just inside. Nick Wallace wasn’t about to be disturbed by unannounced visitors coming and going at will. He was sole keeper of the doors, both front and back.

  I turned back to him, once Big Al and I were standing outside in the lot. “Thanks for all your help,” I told him, “but there’s one more thing.”

  Nick was already shutting the door behind us. He had to reverse the procedure and open the door again high enough so we could see him. He looked impatient.

  “What now?” he asked.

  “Where does Larry Martin usually park his car?”

  He pointed. “Over there, under the billboard.”

  The billboard was one of those new state-of-the-art ones, an ad for some kind of fresh ground coffee that included a huge cup with what looked like steam rolling off it. One of my drinking buddies down at the Doghouse works for Ackerly Communications. He told me the steam is really a chemical reaction caused by dropping something called voodoo juice into a powder. It makes an interesting billboard, though, if you like that sort of thing. Under this particular one sat several parked cars.

  By the time I turned back to Wallace to ask him another question, the garage door was all the way shut and Damm Fine Carpets’ resident mechanic had disappeared, locked safely away in self-imposed solitary confinement.

  Al took the bag from my hand. “I’ll lock this stuff in the trunk before we go take a look at Martin’s parking place.”

  That’s what we did. With the laundry bag safely stowed in our car, we went back to the steaming billboard and prowled around under it. There were six cars parked there in all, but no red VW bug.

  “This must be the Damm Fine Carpets employee parking lot,” Al observed.

  We scrambled around in the hot dusty gravel for ten or fifteen minutes, but found nothing that seemed out of place, nothing that appeared to have anything to do with Dr. Frederick Nielsen’s murder.

  “Do you think Nielsen’s wife set him up?” Al asked finally as we abandoned our search of the parking lot.

  “Could be,” I said, “but how?”

  “Let’s go back inside and ask around.”

  So we walked back in the front door of Damm Fine Carpets. The same eager salesman started toward us but quickly backed off when he recognized us. We went straight to Cindy at the counter.

  “Can you tell us who Dr. Frederick Nielsen ordered his carpet from?” I asked.

  “I guess,” she said. “Do you know the invoice number?”

  “No. It was supposed to be installed on Saturday.”

  She hefted a huge three-ring binder from a shelf under the counter and leafed through several dozen pages of yellow carbon copies. She had to lean over the counter to read what was written on the papers.

  “Here it is,” she said at last, pointing with one of her crimson talons. “It was a special phone-in order. Mr. Damm took it himself.”

  “I see,” I said. “One more thing. Can you tell us anything at all about Larry Martin. Did he have a girl friend, that you know of?”

  Cindy shrugged. “I wouldn’t know about that,” she said.

  “Maybe we’d better go talk to Damm about the order,” Al suggested.

  “Oh no,” Cindy objected. “Not right now. He’s in conference. He’s not to be disturbed.”

  “Have him call us when he’s done,” I said, scribbling my home phone number on one of my cards and handing it to her. “We need to ask him a few more questions.”

  We left then. Big Al Lindstrom was fuming by the time we got to the car.

  “Conference my ass!” he exclaimed. “That SOB’s probably sitting in there watching dirty movies and jacking off.”

  “It’s no skin off our teeth,” I reminded him. “It isn’t illegal you know. They now have definite clinical proof that masturbation doesn’t cause blindness.”

  Al glowered at me as if my sense of humor was wearing thin on his straitlaced, Scandinavian sensibilities.

  “Isn’t it almost time to go home?” he asked plaintively.

  “Almost,” I told him. “Just as soon as we get a line on LeAnn Nielsen.”

  CHAPTER 7

  We stopped by the crime lab to drop off our bag of bloody towels. Janice Morraine took it from me, glanced inside, then closed it back up.

  “Thanks,” she said, wrinkling her nose in distaste at the smell. “Where’d this come from, a dry cleaners?”

  “A Damm Fine Carpets van,” I replied.

  “You don’t need to get pissed off about it, Beau.”

  People in the crime lab tend to be somewhat defensive at times. “I’m not pissed,” I explained. “It’s Damm Fine Carpets. D-A-M-M. The owner’s name is Richard Damm. It’s part of the Nielsen case.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  I filled out the lab request and handed it to her. Jan signed the bottom of the form.

  “What are we looking for?” she asked.

  “Blood,” I answered. “Can you type blood even if it’s been diluted with cleaning solution?”

  “That depends,” she said.

  “See if it matches up with what came in on that carpet kicker from the crime scene on Second Avenue, will you?”

  She nodded. “Knowing you, I suppose you want it yesterday, right?”

  “You got it.”

  Al and I walked up the three flights of stairs between the crime lab and the fifth floor. There, in our cubicle, he took charge of the paperwork while I got on the horn to Sergeant Bob Daniels at the Community Services Section over at Eighteenth and Yesler.

  Daniels is the commander of the twenty or so community service officers, that strange branch of Seattle P.D. that’s neither fish nor fowl. Daniels told us we’d need to come to talk to the nighttime supervisor of the CSOs.

  The concept of CSOs is fairly new on the scene. They’ve only been around for the last few years, and I’m one of the die-hard old-timers who resisted the idea tooth and nail when they first talked about instituting it. In my book, cops are cops and social workers are social workers and never the twain shall meet.

  But CSOs turn out to be a little of both without quite being either. They aren’t sworn police officers. According to the procedures manual, they’re supposed to relieve street cops of a lot of the landlord disputes, juvenile runaways, utility turnoff problems, domestic violence, and other noncriminal crap that eat up law enforcement time without taking any hardened criminals-routine killers, drug dealers, and other professional bad guys-off the streets.

  Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that domestic violence isn’t a crime. And I’m not implying that there’s that much more of it now than there used to be. Like child abuse, it’s finally being reported more these days. And DV cases take time, lots of it.

  As the number of reported incidents increases, some of the old domestic violence myths are gradually biting the dust. DV doesn’t happen only in blue-collar families on payday Saturday nights. Rachel Miller hadn’t said as much in so many words, and Debi Rush had flat-out denied it, but I suspected LeAnn and Frederick Nielsen’s big gracious house on Green Lake had been the setting of some ugly scenes most people prefer to relegate to the wrong side of the tracks.

  But to get back to the community service officers. They are called to reported cases of domestic violence, the ones where someone- usually a woman-has had the crap beaten out of her. The CSOs take over where street cops leave off. Once the initial police report has been taken, they provide moral support for the victims, as well as transportation to a local safe house.

  I was vaguely aware that safe houses existed, in Seattle, three of them by actual count, but this was my first experience at trying to find someone who was staying in one. I was surprised to find myself run
ning smack into a brick wall, a petite red-haired brick wall whose name was Marilyn McDougal.

  There are always rumors downtown of street cops and detectives running afoul of the CSOs, but this was the first time I had tangled with one. It turned out that all those rumors were fact, not fiction.

  If I had seen Marilyn McDougal on the street, I might have thought her cute, but I’d hate to think what would have happened to anyone dumb enough to call her that to her face. They wouldn’t do it twice, that’s for damn sure. She was like a little bull terrier, all growl and teeth and determined as hell.

  She sat there, dwarfed by the bulk of her regulation-sized desk. Her brown, lightweight summer uniform was open at the collar. With horn-rimmed glasses pushed up into curly red hair like some offbeat crown, she regarded me with a kind of regal disdain.

  “Of course we don’t give out that information,” she said archly in answer to my question about the location of the various shelters in Seattle.

  “What do you mean you don’t give it out?” I demanded. “Not even to fellow cops? Aren’t we playing on the same team?”

  She smiled a chilly smile. “Let me remind you that we’re not all cops, Detective Beaumont. There happen to be a few cops who beat their wives, too, you know,” she added.

  “I’m not one of them,” I snapped back. “I’m not even married.”

  Unruffled, Marilyn McDougal looked meaningfully from me to the wide gold band on Big Al Lindstrom’s ring finger. “He is,” she said, “but it doesn’t matter if you are or aren’t. We don’t divulge the shelters’ locations to anyone. That’s a closely guarded secret. Besides,” she added, “you haven’t said why you want to know.”

  No, I hadn’t said why, deliberately hadn’t said why, and wasn’t going to if I could help it. After all, if Marilyn McDougal was reluctant to talk to us then, how much more reluctant would she be once she knew we were working a homicide investigation, once she figured out that one of her little safe-house chicks, LeAnn Nielsen, was a prime suspect.

  “But CSOs do deliver the women to these safe houses, don’t they? Isn’t that your job?” Al tried attacking the problem from the flank.