Taking the Fifth (9780061760891)

by Jance, Judith A.

  “We don’t know, Mr. Riley. That’s what we’re trying to find out, why we came here in the first place. If you could just tell us whatever you can remember about last night, it would be a big help.”

  Tom Riley walked over to the couch and sat down, rubbing his eyes wearily. “He worked yesterday,” he said.

  “Morris did? Where?”

  “At the Fifth Avenue, from eight in the morning until ten last night. At least, that’s what he said.”

  “At the Fifth Avenue. The theater?”

  Riley nodded. “That’s right. He was doing a load-in.”

  “Load-in?” It wasn’t a term I recognized.

  “A setup for a bus-and-truck show. He’s a stagehand.”

  “For a what?” It seemed like Riley was speaking a foreign language.

  “You know, one of those traveling road shows.”

  “Do you know which one?”

  “No idea. Some singer, I guess. I didn’t pay any attention. Rick’s such a blowhard that I don’t listen to half of what he says.”

  “What time did he come home?”

  “Around ten. I was just finishing putting Jon down. You know, giving him his medications, that sort of thing.”

  Somehow, in the constant opening and closing of the front door, the cat had wandered back into the house. It chose that moment to insinuate itself into Tom Riley’s lap, where it curled up comfortably. For several long moments Riley sat there, absently stroking it, as if drawing some comfort from the cat’s silent presence.

  The man sitting quietly with the contented cat in his lap was far different from the one who had taken a murderous lunge at me in the bedroom a short time before. Over the years, I’ve learned to pay attention to animals and how they react to people. They seem to have a phenomenal way of sorting the good from the bad, of attaching themselves to kind, compassionate people and avoiding the ones who are mean and aggressive. That fat, sleek cat was giving Tom Riley a hell of a good character reference.

  “May I ask you a professional question, Mr. Riley?”

  He started quickly, the way a person does when he’s fallen asleep in church or when his mind has wandered during the course of a conversation. “Pardon me?”

  “I’d like to ask you a professional question.”

  “All right.”

  “Did anything about Jonathan Thomas’s condition last night lead you to believe that he would die before morning?”

  He shook his head. “Not really. He was weaker than he had been. That was to be expected, but I didn’t think it was that bad. It’s been bothering me all day. I should have paid closer attention. I should have known the end was that close.”

  “What about his breathing—had it changed at all?”

  “No.”

  “If you had known the end was near, would you have left or would you have stayed all night?”

  My question cut right to the bone. Tom Riley’s gaze met mine, but his lower lip trembled. “I would have stayed,” he murmured.

  “How long were you Jonathan’s nurse?”

  “Five months.”

  “That’s a long time,” I said gently. “Obviously you cared deeply about your patient. But why are you so opposed to an autopsy?”

  “He didn’t want it. Gave specific orders. Besides, hadn’t he suffered enough indignity?” Riley asked.

  “What if he was murdered?”

  “Why would anyone bother to murder someone with only a week or so to live? That was all he had, at the most.”

  “What if they didn’t want him to suffer?”

  “You mean a mercy killing? Euthanasia?”

  “It’s not unheard of. Would Rick Morris have been capable of something like that?”

  “Are you kidding? He’s the most selfish person I ever met.”

  “What about Jonathan’s parents?”

  Riley shook his head. “I never met them. Jon told me they disowned him a year or so ago.”

  “What about you?”

  The last question, out of the blue, was calculated to blindside Tom Riley, to shock him into some kind of admission, if possible, or to reveal a reaction that would tell us he was hiding something. It didn’t work.

  “I wouldn’t have left him to die alone,” he said quietly.

  It was an odd reaction. Innocent people yell like mad when you accuse them of something they didn’t do. Guilty ones hide out in side issues. I had expected a hot denial to my blunt accusation. Instead, Riley had merely deflected my question.

  I was silently mulling over Riley’s oblique response when Al stepped into the conversation. “You said you didn’t know his parents, that they had disowned him. Do you know where they are, what their names are?”

  Riley got up and left the room. He returned, carrying a manila file folder. He opened it, shuffled through several pages, then picked out one and read from it. “Their names are Dorothy and William B. Thomas. They live over in Bellevue.” He handed the paper to Al, who scanned it and made a few brief notes in his notebook.

  “Jon kept the folder by his bed,” Riley continued. “He made notes in it about what he wanted done, what mortuary, what kind of service, who was to be notified—that kind of thing. Including no autopsy,” he added, glancing meaningfully at me.

  Al finished making his notes; then he gingerly handed the paper back to Riley like it was a loaded hand grenade. Unconsciously, he rubbed his hand on his pants. It was clear the very idea of AIDS scared the living crap out of Big Al Lindstrom.

  “Was he still lucid at the end?” I asked.

  “Sometimes.”

  “The boys from Narcotics will be here in a few minutes to pick up the package. Is it possible that Jonathan was masterminding a drug ring of some kind from his sickbed?”

  “Jon? Are you kidding? He wouldn’t have done something like that. Never. I knew him.”

  “What about Rick?”

  Riley shrugged. “He’s another story,” he said.

  “You mean he could have been into selling drugs?”

  “I don’t trust him any farther than I can throw him. He could be into anything.”

  “Including dealing drugs?”

  Riley nodded.

  “What time did you get here this morning?”

  “Seven-thirty or so.”

  “And what was the place like when you got here?”

  “It was a mess, a pigsty.”

  I looked around the somewhat shabby living room. It wasn’t nearly the mess it had been when I had first seen it through the parted curtains. “Who straightened it up?” I asked.

  “I did,” Riley answered. “Sometimes Jon would want me to wheel him out here. He complained that the bedroom was boring. I didn’t want him to see the place like that. It would have upset him. Besides, I looked in on him and thought he was asleep. I cleaned up while I was waiting for him to wake up.”

  “It wasn’t a mess when you left here last night?”

  He shook his head. “I figured Rick had invited people over during the night. He’s never learned to pick up after himself.”

  “And he never will,” I added quietly.

  Riley frowned and gave me a searching look. “What do you mean, he never will?”

  “We believe that Richard Darthan Morris was the victim of a homicide late last night, down near the Pike Place Market.”

  I watched carefully to see what kind of shock value my words might have on Tom Riley, R.N. If I expected an overreaction, I was in for a real disappointment.

  “Good riddance,” he said quietly.

  And that was all.

  CHAPTER 4

  TWO DETECTIVES FROM NARCOTICS stopped by a short time later and took charge of the package we’d found in Jonathan Thomas’s bedroom. By then, Tom Riley had decided to be more cooperative. He allowed us to go through the place pretty thoroughly. I guess we all expected to find a collection of drug paraphernalia somewhere on the premises. No such luck. The only drug-related equipment was that found with the sickroom supplies
in a cabinet to which Riley claimed to have the solitary key.

  When our search was completed, we took Tom Riley over to the medical examiner’s office. His positive identification of Richard Dathan Morris was pretty much routine. When it was over, we returned to the house with Riley, where he gave us the name and address of Morris’s widowed mother, a Mrs. Grace Simms Morris, who lived ninety miles or so north of Seattle in Bellingham.

  Riley left the house when we did, taking with him the newly orphaned cat. We assured him that after conferring with Jonathan Thomas’s doctor we would notify his parents of the death. The nurse seemed grateful to be relieved of that particular duty.

  Doc Baker had been involved in a conference call when we stopped by to make the identification, but he had left word that he wanted to see us, both Al and me, ASAP. So back we went to the medical examiner’s office in the basement of Harborview Hospital on First Hill.

  “It was a fall that killed him,” Baker began, regarding us inscrutably as we seated ourselves in his office.

  “A fall? What fall?” I demanded.

  Doc Baker shoved Richard Dathan Morris’s file folder in my direction, reached into his desk, and pulled out some paper clips, which he began to pitch toward the chipped blue vase that always sat in his windowsill. Tossing the clips offhandedly as he spoke, he nonetheless hit the lip of the vase with almost total accuracy.

  “Not the fall, actually. Hitting the ground was what killed him.” The medical examiner smiled, amused by his own black wit.

  “The holes in his head and chest had nothing to do with it?”

  “Nope. Superficial damage only. Nothing fatal.”

  “Could you tell what made them?” Al asked.

  “A little bird told me the crime-scene investigators found what appears to be a bloodstained high-heeled shoe in the area. That would certainly be consistent with the kinds of injuries we found. We found a piece of rubber in one of the wounds that may very well be the tip of the heel. We gathered some other trace evidence as well, bits of foreign materials, from those puncture wounds. We’ll have to see if any of them matches up with what the crime lab finds on the shoe.”

  Baker paused and shook his head wonderingly. “She must be some kind of broad.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The holes weren’t fatal, but still, it takes a hell of a lot of strength to push the tip of a heel into someone’s body far enough to make a hole, especially if that person is fighting back.”

  “Was he?” I asked.

  “I’d say so,” Baker answered.

  “Scratches? Tooth marks?”

  The medical examiner shook his head, his mane of white hair fluttering in the resultant breeze. “No bite marks, but we found scratches, lots of them. Most of them appear to have been inflicted by the victim rolling around in a blackberry bramble. None that we could definitely attribute to fingernails.”

  “Drugs?” Al asked.

  Baker had exhausted his supply of paper clips. Now he paused and rummaged in his desk for more ammunition. “Preliminary findings say no. We’re running some additional tests though. Those take time. That’s all we’ve got so far.”

  Baker waited impatiently until I finished a brief scan of the contents of the folder. When I looked up, he was holding out his hand for me to give the folder back. His message was clear: Here’s your hat. What’s your hurry?

  Big Al and I took the hint and got up to leave.

  “By the way,” I added casually, pausing with my hand on the doorknob. “I still need the name and telephone number of Jonathan Thomas’s attending physician.”

  “The hell you do! What kind of wild hair’s up your butt, Beau? Why are you so goddamned interested in that guy? Get his number from my secretary on your way out.”

  “Did you find any AIDS antibodies in Richard Dathan Morris?” I asked innocently.

  Baker’s face clouded. “We didn’t look. Why?”

  “Maybe you should. He was Jonathan Thomas’s roommate.”

  With that, I closed the door to Doc Baker’s office. Behind us a paper clip pinged off the vase and ricocheted into the windowpane, followed by a rumbled oath.

  “You screwed up his concentration,” Al said with a half-assed grin.

  We stopped by the secretary’s desk long enough to pick up the name of Jonathan Thomas’s personal physician, a Dr. Wendell Johnson of the Capitol Hill Medical Group on Broadway.

  Stepping outside into the still-brilliant sunlight, Big Al looked up at the blue sky overhead. He stretched and yawned. I read him loud and clear. It was time to go home. Past time to go home.

  “Maybe she killed him in self-defense,” he suggested wearily, moving toward the car. “He attacked her, and she hauled off her shoe and beat the living crap out of him. How does that grab you?”

  “It won’t hold water,” I countered. “If Morris was gay, why attack a woman?”

  Al shrugged. “Beats me.”

  Big Al Lindstrom is known around the department for his ultraconservative, middle-American, motherhood-and-apple-pie, Eagle Scout mind-set. I couldn’t resist taking a poke at him, just to see how he’d react.

  “Maybe Morris was AC/DC,” I added. “What if he was a switch-hitter and he and the woman were after the same guy?”

  Big Al made a face. “Just talking about it makes me want to puke. Let’s call it a day. We can tackle this mess again later. We’ll handle the notification of next of kin as soon as we come back on duty this afternoon.”

  As Al walked away, I stopped and glanced up at the looming presence of Harborview Hospital behind us. My regular partner, Detective Ron Peters, was in Harborview, had been there for more than two months, recuperating from an accident. He was up on the fourth floor, the one they call the rehabilitation floor, where doctors and nurses were trying to glue his broken neck and his shattered life back together.

  It wasn’t visiting hours, but over the weeks the nurses had come to know me well enough to let me pretty much come and go as I pleased.

  “I’m going to stop by and see Peters,” I told Al. “How about if you take the car back to the department? I’ll hoof it down the hill when I’m ready.”

  “Okay. Say hello to ol’ Ron for me, would you?”

  I nodded, but I doubted a cheery greeting from Big Al Lindstrom would do much to lift the thick pall of depression that surrounded Ron Peters.

  After the accident, the initial diagnosis of Peters’s condition had labeled him a C-6 Quadriplegic Incomplete, which meant, among other things, that although his neck was broken, the spinal cord itself hadn’t been severely damaged and there was reason to hope that he would eventually recover some, if not all, of his bodily functions.

  But that thread of hope had also meant that for almost two months, Peters had been stuck in rigorous traction with steel bolts drilled into his skull supporting sixty pounds of weight. His neck injury meant he could choose to lie on one side or the other, but never on his back or his stomach. He was beginning to get some movement in his arms, but that was about it. Eventually was proving to be just that—eventually.

  During his first month in the hospital they had kept Peters so doped up that I don’t think he cared what was going on around him. But now, as the long weeks of physical confinement continued, as he remained totally dependent on other people for his most basic needs, Peters had fallen into a bleak chasm of hopelessness.

  The nurses told me that wasn’t at all unusual for someone in his condition, that he had to be shown there was a reason for him to go on living. I came by to visit regularly, but he rarely spoke in anything other than monosyllabic grunts.

  Attempting to cheer him up, one day I brought along his daughters, six-year-old Heather and seven-year-old Tracie. I thought seeing his kids might give him the needed motivation to fight back, to try to get better. No such luck. Within minutes of their arrival, he asked them to turn on the television set and then proceeded to ignore them completely in favor of the nightly news. I had taken two heartbr
oken girls back to their temporary quarters in my downtown condominium.

  Maxine Edwards, the girls’ regular baby-sitter, had comforted them as well as she could, soothing them and drying their faces. When subsequent visits weren’t any better, I finally took the bull by the horns and packed the three of them off to southern California for a two-week vacation.

  It’s times like that when it’s nice to have money. I put in a call to Kelly, my college-age daughter, who lives in Cucamonga with her mother and stepfather. Since I was footing the bill, Kelly readily agreed to serve as tour guide and chauffeur for the duration of their visit.

  I had received several delighted phone calls from the girls. They were having a ball. Disneyland, Universal City, and Knott’s Berry Farm would never be the same. But Peters had not been happy when he heard about the trip. In fact, he had been pissed as hell. We had exchanged ugly words over it. He said they shouldn’t have gone, since it wasn’t something he could afford to pay for himself. I told him he had placed the girls in my custody for as long as he needed them there, and I was more than prepared to handle all the accompanying expenses.

  The girls had sent home a collection of gaudy postcards addressed to their father, all of them bearing clumsily scrawled notes telling him to get well soon. As a matter of fact, I was packing the whole batch of cards in my jacket pocket, had been for several days, while I put off going to the hospital and having what I expected to be a nose-to-nose confrontation with their father. I wasn’t looking forward to his reaction once he saw the cards.

  It was time to go though. However tough it might be to face him, I couldn’t, in good conscience, put it off any longer.

  I rode an elevator up to the fourth floor. Peters’s roommate, a diving-accident victim, was gradually making the transition out of bed and into a wheelchair. He was out of the room when I got there. Peters was lying on his side, an open newspaper propped clumsily on the bed beside him.

  “How’s it going?” I asked, doing my best to sound jaunty and cheerful.