Taking the Fifth (9780061760891)

by Jance, Judith A.

  “Mrs. Morris, what exactly was your son doing, do you know?”

  “He was working undercover, of course.”

  “But you knew about it?”

  “Richard told me everything. We were very close.”

  “What about his roommate—did he know about it too?”

  Mrs. Morris shrugged. “I don’t know. I suppose Jonathan knew. We never discussed it.

  “He was so happy,” she said suddenly, and just as suddenly she dabbed at her eyes. “He was finally getting to do what he’d always wanted to do. You know, he wanted to be a police officer from the time he was little.”

  “Is that so?” I ventured.

  “For a long time I thought it was just a stage. You know, most little boys go through a period when they want to be a cowboy or a doctor. I thought that eventually Richard would grow out of it, but he never did.”

  “For some of us it takes longer,” I said.

  Mrs. Grace Simms Morris smiled at me thinly through her tears. “You know, Rich would have loved you,” she declared.

  Knowing what I did about Richard Dathan Morris and his sexual preference, I wasn’t sure what to make of that statement. For a few moments the two of us sat uncomfortably in the room, the cop from Homicide and the victim’s mother, with nothing to say to one another. Finally, I broke the silence.

  “You said he told you everything. Did he tell you what he was doing for the DEA?”

  Suddenly, Mrs. Morris sat up a little straighter. My question had given her son the credibility he’d been denied elsewhere. “Cracking a drug ring, what else?” she answered huffily.

  “He told you that?”

  “He said it had something to do with cocaine, lots of it, and the theater. But that’s all he said. He wouldn’t tell me any more. He said it would be too dangerous for me to know more than that. I was very proud of him and glad to help him too.”

  “Help?”

  “I kept some things for him. He sent them to me, and I put them in my safety deposit box in Bellingham.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “Envelopes. I didn’t look inside them. I’m not a prying mother. He just said he wanted me to keep them in case…in case…” She broke off.

  I was impatient, but I managed to keep quiet until she regained her composure and could go on. “In case something like this would…”

  For several minutes she sobbed brokenly. Finally, she got up, walked over to the dresser, and looked at herself in the mirror. Carefully she wiped a rivulet of mascara off her cheek.

  It occurred to me that Grace Simms Morris was careful to maintain her appearance under even the most trying circumstances. I wondered if other kinds of appearances were equally as important to her.

  “Did you know Jonathan Thomas?” I asked.

  “Of course I knew Jon. He was a wonderful young man. It was so tragic what happened to him.”

  I thought for a moment that she was referring to his murder. She soon disabused me of that notion. “I can’t understand why they don’t keep better track of the people who donate blood these days, but I guess it could happen to anybody.”

  “People who donate blood? You mean Jonathan Thomas contracted AIDS through contaminated blood?”

  Grace Simms Moms gave me an arch look. “Why, of course. How else would he have gotten it?”

  How else indeed!

  “Jon and Rich were very devoted to one another,” she continued. “Such good friends.”

  “Friends?” I asked.

  “The very best of friends,” she assured me openly. “From the time they met in college. Why, that must have been ten years ago now. Time seems to fly these days, doesn’t it?”

  I nodded, but I didn’t answer. Talking with Mrs. Morris was like stepping into quicksand. If Richard Dathan Morris hadn’t seen fit to come out of the closet with his mother while he was alive, I didn’t want to be the one to bring him out now that he was dead. I didn’t have much respect for the dead, but I did for the living.

  “You said he sent you envelopes to hold for safekeeping. When did he start doing that?”

  She stopped to think for a moment. “Several months ago, I don’t know exactly. I’ll be able to tell for sure when I get them out. The envelopes all have postmarks on them.”

  “I’m sure you’re not the prying type, Mrs. Morris, but mothers have ways of knowing things, even things they’re not supposed to know. Don’t you have some idea about what might be in those envelopes?”

  She smiled. “You mean like knowing what’s in your Christmas present before you ever unwrap it?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re right. Rich said that he never could surprise me. I don’t think he would have sent me drugs. That would have been illegal. I think he sent me information, things he didn’t want to fall into the wrong hands. But I don’t know who to give them to now.”

  “Did you tell that man at the DEA about them?”

  “Mr. Wainwright?” I nodded.

  “Certainly not. Why should I? He was rude to me. I’d show them to you, if you wanted me to.”

  “What exactly did this Mr. Wainwright say to you?”

  “It wasn’t so much what he said as how he acted. He treated me like I was a crazy old woman who didn’t know what I was talking about. He said he was certain there was no one here in Seattle working as a CI.” She paused. “Do you know what that means?”

  “A cooperating individual,” I explained. “An informant.”

  She pulled herself up straight. “Why, that louse!” she exclaimed. “Imagine him calling my son that. An informant. Rich was a hero, Detective Beaumont. He wasn’t an informant.”

  I didn’t take the trouble to explain the finer points of law enforcement to Mrs. Grace Simms Morris. I stood up and handed her one of my cards. “If I came to Bellingham next week, would you be willing to show me what’s in the safety deposit box?”

  “Certainly, Detective Beaumont. I’d be happy to. You mean you’ll come even if the DEA won’t?”

  I nodded and her face crumpled. “Thank you,” she said.

  “Would you like me to try talking to the DEA for you?” I asked.

  “If you think it would help,” she said.

  “It might,” I said, but I didn’t much believe it. I’ve dealt with more than my share of grieving mothers in my time. I figured Wainwright at the DEA must have done the same.

  CHAPTER 16

  WHEN I GOT BACK TO THE CAR, I SAT FOR several minutes pondering. On the one hand, I had to agree with Tom Riley’s assessment of Grace Simms Morris as a dingy broad with a case of motherly selective blindness. But still, what she had said about her son had the ring of truth to it. At least she believed it was the truth.

  That took me back to Richard Dathan Morris, the victim. Was he a narc working for the DEA as his mother claimed, or was he the lowlife described by Tom Riley? Or did the answer lie somewhere in between? Without knowing more about Morris, without understanding what had made him tick, it was impossible to get a fix on the relationships of all the other characters in the drama.

  If Morris had indeed been working for the DEA, and if he had somehow uncovered Jasmine’s involvement in a cocaine ring, that would have been a reason to waste him. That’s the way things work in the drug trade. Narcs and dealers play that way. For keeps.

  My mental gymnastics were taking me nowhere. I still didn’t know enough about any of the players to make a sound judgment. Turning the key in the ignition, I decided to head for lower Queen Anne Hill and the local office of the DEA. Why not check with Wainwright myself? Maybe he’d tell me something he couldn’t or wouldn’t tell a murder victim’s mother.

  I was there by four-fifteen, standing in an outside office trying to work my way past the agent of the day. When I told Roger Glancy what I wanted, he was more than a little reluctant to take me to the agent in charge.

  “Look,” Glancy said, handing me back my ID, “do we have to go over all this again? Somebody else was just in h
ere raising hell about the same thing.”

  “Who? A woman?”

  Glancy nodded. “She looked nice enough to begin with, but by the time she left, she was pitching a fit all over the office, just about bouncing off the walls and screaming bloody murder. She claims it’s all our fault that her son is dead.”

  “Maybe it is,” I said quietly. “Now, are you going to let me see Wainwright or not?”

  “He’s busy.”

  “Interrupt him.”

  Reluctantly, Glancy got up and led the way down a short hallway and past a secretary’s desk. He stopped in front of a door with a polished brass nameplate on it that read B. W. WAINWRIGHT, AGENT IN CHARGE. Glancy knocked.

  “Come in,” someone called from inside.

  Glancy led the way into B. W. Wainwright’s private office, where an affable-looking man in his mid-forties was seated behind a large desk. Wainwright, sandy haired and wearing tortoiseshell glasses, looked more like an accountant than a drug buster, and the papers on his desk were arranged in precise, well-organized stacks.

  “This is Detective Beaumont of Seattle P.D.,” Glancy was saying.

  Wainwright pushed the glasses up on top of his head and rubbed his eyes wearily. “I wasn’t aware we had an appointment.”

  “We don’t,” I said. “I stopped by because I need your help.”

  “With what? You working a narcotics case?” he asked.

  “Homicide,” I answered. “Drug-related.”

  “Show me one that isn’t.”

  “It’s about Richard Dathan Morris.”

  “Not him again.”

  “What do you mean, again?”

  “I just finished having a run-in with his mother. She’s got some wild idea that he was working for us.”

  “Was he?”

  “No.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure, Detective Beaumont. I happen to be in charge here. I know who works for us and who doesn’t.”

  I noticed the condescension in his manner of speech, the hint of arrogance that said he was wasting his time talking to me, a lowly detective from a municipal police department. It set my teeth on edge, the same as it must have done to Mrs. Grace Simms Morris.

  “You mean, as the agent in charge, you not only know all the agents under you but all the local CIs as well?”

  Our eyes met and held, each of us assessing the other. “That’s precisely what I mean,” he said, levelly. “We have to keep pretty close tabs on our cooperating individuals. Otherwise they end up dead.”

  “Richard Dathan Morris is dead,” I reminded him. “Isn’t there a chance that someone down the chain of command might have taken on another informant without letting you know about it?”

  “No. No chance. I run this outfit, Detective Beaumont. Make no mistake about it. Those who don’t play by the rules, by my rules, don’t stay.”

  “And there’s no record of Richard Dathan Morris in your personnel files.”

  “No.”

  “Did he ever apply to work for you?”

  “Not so far as I can tell. I looked through the inactive application files after Mrs. Morris left here, but I didn’t see any mention of him.”

  “So once she left your office, you did at least check.”

  “Detective Beaumont, Mrs. Morris is a woman under a great deal of stress. I checked, but just so I could tell her honestly that we showed no record of her son in this office. None whatsoever.”

  “Doesn’t it seem a little unusual for someone like Mrs. Morris to come up with that kind of story?”

  “Are you kidding? It happens all the time. Parents don’t want to think their kids are involved with drugs. They’ll come up with any harebrained rationalization to make it look like what is, isn’t.”

  “How do you explain the envelopes, then?”

  Wainwright frowned. “What envelopes? She never mentioned any envelopes.”

  Of course she hadn’t mentioned them, because B. W. Wainwright had acted like a turkey, had treated her exactly the same way he was treating me. I said, “The ones Richard Dathan Morris sent to his mother before he died. The ones she keeps in her safety deposit box in Bellingham.”

  “She didn’t say anything to me about that.”

  “She didn’t think you’d believe her.”

  “Did she tell you what’s in the envelopes?”

  I shook my head. “No. And I didn’t have time to go look at them today either. I’ve got my hands full as it is, and my partner’s off today. I told her we’d come up next week and take a look.”

  “In other words, you think there’s something to the story.”

  “Yes. Mrs. Morris said envelopes, not packages. She seems to think her son sent her information—names, dates, places, deals. Things he needed held for safekeeping.”

  Wainwright nodded slowly. “I suppose that’s possible, but if he wasn’t working for us, who was he working for? Seattle P.D., maybe?”

  “I’ll check that out. If he wasn’t connected to you or our department, he might have been freelancing and stumbled into something big, something he couldn’t handle.”

  “Freelancing is dangerous,” Wainwright said.

  “Dangerous, hell,” I told him. “In this case, it was downright fatal. Twice.”

  “You mean the roommate? I heard about that.”

  I nodded. “I was the one who found the cocaine in his pillowcase.”

  “Then you’re also the one who insisted on an autopsy. That was good police work.”

  “Thanks,” I said, but I wanted to get back to the subject at hand, back to Richard Dathan Morris and his mother. “What are you going to do about Mrs. Morris?”

  Wainwright looked clearly affronted. “Do about her? I’m not going to do anything about her. Not one blessed thing! Look, Detective Beaumont, you and I are in pretty much the same business. Do crackpots ever call you up and give you information that isn’t worth a plugged nickel?”

  “Occasionally.”

  “Believe me, that’s what we’re dealing with here. In spades. I’d bet money on it. Mrs. Morris lost her son in a drug deal gone sour. She wants desperately to paint him as a hero so she can feel better and look people straight in the eye, so his death won’t seem like such a waste. I’m willing to let her believe whatever she wants to believe, but I’m not squandering one more minute of my agency’s time or resources on this scam.”

  “Any other ideas, then?” I asked. “If he wasn’t working for us and he wasn’t working for you, who was he working for?”

  “Another dealer. They’re like sharks. Big fish eat little fish. It happens all the time.”

  Wainwright got up and showed me to the door. The interview had come to a close. “Thanks for your help,” I said, holding out my hand.

  “It was nothing,” Wainwright said. “Any time.”

  I wasn’t much the wiser for my interview with B. W. Wainwright, but the conversation had given me food for thought.

  Supposing Richard Dathan Morris had been freelancing, supposing he had found something big. The package of coke we’d found in Jonathan Thomas’s pillowcase wouldn’t have been worth much more than $25,000 on the street. What if Morris had stumbled into a conspiracy, into something much larger and more complex than that one simple package of cocaine? What if he had unearthed a major distribution network? Who else would be involved? Who else, that is, besides Jasmine Day?

  It was time to beard the lioness in her den, time to have a little heart-to-heart chat with the lady. After all, now that she knew I was a cop, I might just as well go ahead and be one.

  I headed back downtown. Afternoon traffic was moving at a snail’s pace. The closest parking place to the Mayflower Park Hotel was several blocks away. I didn’t call ahead to announce my visit, not even from the lobby phone. There was no sense in giving Jasmine any advance notice.

  I had a fleeting sense of déjà vu when I found myself once more pausing outside her door on the sixth floor, once more knocking fo
r admittance.

  “Who is it?” she called.

  “Detective Beaumont,” I answered. This was, after all, an official visit.

  The door flew open without the slightest delay. Mary Lou Gibbon was the one who opened the door. The trademark Jasmine Day wig was nowhere in evidence. The face before me was distorted into a mask of cold fury.

  “Why, you no-good son of a bitch! You have the nerve to show up here? The brass-plated balls to come knocking on my door like you owned the goddamned place?”

  She was wearing something like a pair of powder blue silk pajamas and matching high-heeled sandals. The angry face that looked up at me had been scrubbed clean of all makeup, creating an incongruous mixture of innocence and rage.

  “May I come in?” I asked. “I have to talk to you.”

  “About what?”

  “Drugs,” I said. “Cocaine in particular. And Richard Dathan Morris.”

  “You’re the one who did it, aren’t you!”

  “Did what?”

  “Started the rumors.”

  “What rumors?” I asked, genuinely puzzled.

  “Westcoast’s pulling out of the tour. Tonight’s the last concert.”

  “Pulling out?”

  “Yes, goddamn it. Pulling out. It’s over. Finished. The deal I made with Ed Waverly was that I keep my nose clean. Word got back to California that one of the stagehands was killed and that drugs were involved. They pulled the plug on me just like that.”

  Tears welled up in her eyes. “Get out of here, you asshole. Get away from me.”

  The tears got to me. They always do. The man and the cop in J. P. Beaumont went to war, the man’s natural tenderness toward a woman he’s bedded battling with the cop’s revulsion toward someone who may be capable of cold-blooded murder. The cop won.

  “I’ve got a witness who places you at the scene of the crime,” I said. “Someone who saw you do it.”

  “Saw me do what?” she asked.

  “Look, Jasmine, this isn’t some simple little possessions scrape that your lawyer can bail you out of and nobody will be the wiser.”

  “What are you talking about?”