Taking the Fifth (9780061760891)

by Jance, Judith A.

  “Piss up a rope,” I told him and left the crime lab. Neither one of us was going to change the other’s mind.

  I was excited as I went up the three flights of stairs to my office. I felt I’d stumbled onto something important, but I didn’t know what to do with it or how to come up with some corroborating evidence. I sat down in my cubicle and stared briefly at the wall, trying to decide what to do next.

  I was torn. Part of me wanted to go and try to talk with Jasmine Day, to see if she knew of any enemies in her past or present who might be out to get her. The other part of me wanted to talk to Mavis Davis and find out what she had to say.

  Mavis Davis won the toss. I started for the garage and ran smack into Sergeant Lowell James. “I was just looking for you, Beau. What’s happening? I’ve gotten no report from you.”

  “I’m on my way to interview a woman on the Morris case,” I said. “A new witness.” I told him about Mavis Davis, neglecting to say that she actually was a witness in the wrong murder. I convinced myself it was a case of careful editing rather than outright lying.

  “Where’d you find her?” he asked.

  “Maxwell Cole turned her up and came by to tell me.”

  “You’re shitting me. Maxwell Cole? The Maxwell Cole from the P.I.?”

  “That’s the one.”

  Sergeant James shook his head. “Will wonders never cease?” he said.

  I started on down the hall. “Remember,” Sergeant James called behind me, “I want a full written report before you go off duty tonight, understood?”

  “Right,” I answered. “You’ll have it.”

  I wondered what it would say.

  CHAPTER 18

  IT WAS SIX O’CLOCK WHEN I FOUND MAVIS Davis’s house just up from the Harvard Exit Theater. The only reason I was able to find a parking place was that the movie didn’t start for another hour.

  The house was a tiny place, unfenced but with wrought-iron bars on every window and door. As soon as I rang the bell, a small dog started yapping inside, the hoarse, rasping bark of an old, frail dog.

  A tiny peephole window opened in the door just at eye level. “Who is it?” a woman asked sharply.

  “Miss Davis? I’m Detective J. P. Beaumont with the Seattle Police Department.” I held my identification up to the window so she could see it.

  “What does it say?” she asked. “I can’t read it.”

  “It says I’m a detective with the Seattle Police Department. I’d like to talk to you.”

  “I suppose you talked to that other man, the one who was here earlier.”

  “That’s right. Maxwell Cole from the P.I. gave me your name and address. May I come in?”

  She sighed. “Oh dear. I told him I didn’t want to get mixed up in any of this. I should have kept quiet.”

  I felt awkward, leaning over to speak to her through the small opening. And it was difficult to understand her, since the dog was still carrying on its ear-splitting yammering in the background.

  “If I could just speak to you for a few minutes, Miss Davis, it would be very helpful. I have to ask you a few questions about what you saw.”

  “Mrs. Davis,” she snapped. “I haven’t been ‘Miss’ for a long time.”

  The peephole window slammed shut. A moment later, I heard her begin working her way down the door, unlocking a series of four deadbolts before the knob finally turned and the door opened.

  Instantly the dog darted out, making a dive for my nearest ankle. Mrs. Mavis Davis grabbed him and scooped him up into her arms on the second attempt. By then he had only grazed my sock. The dog was an ugly, dun-colored miniature poodle with wildly protruding eyes and several missing teeth.

  When I first saw her, Mavis Davis was also toothless, but once she had retrieved her dog, she held him with one arm, reached into her apron pocket with her other hand, and popped a pair of dentures into her mouth.

  “Shh, now,” she said to the dog. “It’s all right, Corky. This man is a policeman. He isn’t going to steal anything.”

  Corky remained unconvinced. He continued to bark.

  Mavis Davis stepped to one side and motioned me into the house. As I walked past, Corky made another lunge for me. This time he grabbed for my elbow. The only thing that saved my jacket was the dog’s lack of teeth. The woman sat down in a rocking chair and patted the dog lovingly.

  “Corky worries about me, you see,” she said fondly. “We live here alone. He’s my only protection.”

  Other than raising an ungodly racket, I don’t know what good the dog could possibly have done her. He grew quiet finally, and lay in his owner’s lap, glaring menacingly at me.

  I looked around the room then. It was filled with old-fashioned furniture covered with fancywork and doilies. In the corner sat an old cabinet-style radio that probably hadn’t worked in years.

  Keeping one restraining hand on the dog, Mavis reached over and picked up a skein of yarn and some crochet work from a nearby table. Next she perched a pair of narrow-lensed reading glasses on her nose. Resting her needlework project on the dog’s back, she begin crocheting, peering at me from time to time over the upper rim of her glasses. She was a scrawny woman, in her seventies or so, with narrow, angular features and a hooked nose.

  “So what do you want, Mr….?”

  “Beaumont,” I supplied. “Detective Beaumont. I want to talk to you about what you saw night before last.”

  “You mean when I was out walking Corky?”

  “Yes.”

  “’Twasn’t much. Just a woman getting out of a cab, late at night. Happens all the time.”

  “Except this time she was going into a house where a murder took place a short time later,” I said. “Did you get a good look at her?”

  “I already told that other man. She was blonde, and she was all dressed up too, in a long blue dress, white gloves, and no shoes.”

  “She was barefoot?”

  “If you’re not wearing shoes, young man, then you’re barefoot, seems to me,” Mavis answered crossly.

  “Tell me exactly what happened.”

  “Corky woke me up about twelve-thirty. He used to make it through the night without needing to go out, but he’s been sick lately. Getting old, maybe, just like me. When he has to go, he has to go. So we went out. I had my bag and my pooper scooper. It’s the law, you know.”

  I nodded. “Yes, I know,” I agreed.

  “Anyway, he has this favorite place, so we went there. It’s on the parking strip, a block or so the other side of Harvard. I was standing waiting for him to finish when the cab drove up.”

  “Drove up where?”

  “To that house, the little one there between those two big apartment buildings. Do you know the one I mean?”

  “Yes. go on.”

  “Anyway, this woman got out of the back seat. I noticed her because you don’t often see people that dressed up in this day and age. You just see kids with long hair and ragged clothes or jeans, and nothing matches.”

  “What about the woman?”

  “Oh, yes. She got out of the cab, went up to the window, and paid the driver, and then went into the house.”

  “You say she went into the house? Was the door open?”

  “No.”

  “So how did she get in?”

  “She had a key. I watched her unlock the door and go inside.”

  “Did you see anything else?”

  Mavis Davis shook her head. “No. By then Corky was finished, so I cleaned up after him and we came home. I was cold.”

  “What time was that?”

  “About a quarter to one, maybe. I wasn’t sleepy anymore, so I stayed up and worked for a while. It was two or so before I went back to bed.” She smiled. “It doesn’t matter what time I go to bed, since we can sleep as late as we like, right, Corky?”

  Corky gave a miniature growl in reply. He had never taken his ugly eyes off me.

  “Do you know the name of the cab company?” I asked.

  Mavi
s shook her head. “I take the bus most of the time, or I walk. I don’t pay any attention to taxis. All I know is it was green.”

  “Light green or dark green?”

  “Oh, you know, that funny light green chartreuse color.”

  I did indeed know. That could only be one of the Far West taxis.

  “And you say she walked up to the window to pay her fare.”

  “That’s what I said,” Mavis answered.

  That struck me as odd. I’ve been in lots of cabs with women, especially when I lived at the Royal Crest and went places with my neighbor Ida and some of her retired pals. They always paid the fare while they were still in the cab, passing the money to the driver before they got out.

  “Would it be possible for me to use a phone?” I asked. “Maybe I could call the cab company and get a line on the driver.”

  Mavis shrugged her shoulders and nodded toward the kitchen. “It’s out there, on the wall. The light’s just inside the door.”

  The moment I stood up, Corky had another fit. I don’t know how anyone could keep, much less love, a dog as obnoxious as that.

  I went into the kitchen and found both the phone and the phone book. I called Far West Cabs. The fact that it was that particular company was a stroke of pure luck. Years before, I had been assigned the case of a Far West cabbie who was murdered and dumped in Green Lake. I had broken the case within days and sent the cabbie’s wife’s boyfriend to Walla Walla on a charge of second-degree homicide. The wife ended up spending some time in the slammer as well.

  Ever since, any help I needed from Far West came through on the double. This was no exception. The dispatcher on duty was the same one who had been there the night before.

  “This is Detective Beaumont,” I said. “I’m working a case and need some help.”

  “You bet,” he replied. “If we’ve got it, you can have it.”

  “It’s about a fare from the night before last. Actually sometime after midnight, I don’t know where she was picked up, but a Far West cab dropped her off in the one-thousand block of Bellevue Avenue East sometime after midnight, so it was really very early in the A.M. yesterday. A barefoot blonde, wearing a long blue dress and white gloves.”

  “Oh, him,” the dispatcher said. “We’re looking for him too.”

  “Pardon me?” I asked, sure that I hadn’t heard correctly.

  “I said we’re looking for him too. He left one of his shoes in the cab.”

  “A blue shoe?”

  “That’s right. I’ve got it right here in the lost-and-found.”

  “But you said ‘him.’”

  “Sure I said ‘him.’ The driver picked him up at the Edgewater. All those drag queens go down there for the female-impersonator acts. The drivers don’t much care to pick ’em up, if you know what I mean, but a fare’s a fare.”

  “It was a man?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Go check the shoe,” I ordered. “Is it a Cole-Haan, size 8½B?”

  The dispatcher was off the line for a moment or two; then he came back. “You must be psychic, Beaumont. That’s what it is, size 8½B. What do you want me to do with it?”

  “Hang onto it until somebody from the department comes to get it. Unless the owner shows up. In that case, call 911 and have somebody come pick him up.”

  “No shit?”

  “No shit. This guy’s a killer. He’s two up on us already.”

  The dispatcher whistled. “This is serious, isn’t it? Anything else I can do to help?”

  My mind was leaping from one direction to another. It was a frame. The killer, disguised as Jasmine Day, had first murdered Richard Dathan Morris, then taken a cab to the house to murder Jonathan Thomas. Why? And how had he left there?

  Supposing he had gone there in search of cocaine—coke Morris had either stolen or planned to sell. There had been plenty of time for the killer to make a leisurely search. After all, he knew Morris wasn’t coming back.

  So the killer searched the house, but maybe he had been squeamish about touching the sick man’s bed. Maybe that’s why he hadn’t found it. Or maybe Jonathan Thomas woke up and recognized him.

  The light came on. That had to be it. If Jonathan Thomas had recognized whoever was there, that explained why he had to die. The killer might not have been willing to risk letting Jonathan’s disease run its natural course. If Thomas had recognized him and told the nurse, Riley would have listened, would have believed him, and would have told someone else.

  “Hello, are you there?” The dispatcher interrupted my train of thought. “I said, is there anything else I can do to help?”

  “Yes, there is. Do you know the other dispatchers, the ones who work for other companies?”

  “Sure.”

  “Call them. See if anyone went to that same address later that night and picked up someone else. If so, find out where they took him. Can you do that?”

  “No problem.”

  “How long will it take?”

  “Maybe fifteen minutes or so. There aren’t very many of us at that time of night.”

  “Look,” I said, “it’s important. If you could check it out and get back to me here, I’d really appreciate it.”

  I gave him Mavis Davis’s telephone number. When I hung up the phone and turned around, Corky was there in the kitchen doorway, standing with one front paw poised in the air, eyeing me distrustfully. The moment I stepped away from the phone, he started barking again, so hard that he literally bounced up and down with every bark.

  Mavis came to the doorway and grabbed him up again. “Are you finished?” she asked.

  “No. I’ve left word for someone to call me back here, if it’s all right with you. What you told me is really important. We’re having it checked out right now.”

  “Checked out. You mean you don’t believe me?”

  “It’s not that. I’ve found the cab company that brought…” I paused. “That brought her to the house,” I said carefully. “Now we have to see if anyone else picked her up and took her away later on.”

  “You mean she didn’t live in that house?”

  “No.”

  Mavis shook her head disapprovingly. “You know, in my day, young women weren’t allowed to go gallivanting around town at all hours of the day and night. It’s no wonder they get into such trouble nowadays, is it?”

  “No,” I agreed. “It’s no wonder at all.”

  She offered me coffee. I accepted, grateful to have something to do while we waited for the phone to ring. It was actually only ten minutes later when the call came through. Mavis answered it and then handed the receiver to me.

  “This is Larry down at Far West,” the guy said. “This Detective Beaumont?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, a Yellow Cab picked a guy up from there about three-thirty yesterday morning. Took him to 6886 Greenwood Avenue North. I talked to the driver. He remembers him real good.”

  “How come?”

  “The guy wasn’t wearing any shoes.”

  “Larry, thanks. I’ve gotta run.”

  My hand shook with excitement as I pressed down the receiver button. I was finally getting somewhere, making progress. I dialed direct to Sergeant Lowell James’s desk in the department.

  “Where’ve you been, Beau? We’ve got people looking all over for you.”

  “Never mind that. I’m onto something. Where’s the Cole’s?”

  Cole’s is a reverse directory that makes it possible to locate people by address or phone number rather than by last name. It’s a bill-collector’s bible. It’s good for detectives as well.

  Sergeant James went off the line momentarily. “I’ve got it,” he said when he returned. “Now, what’s the address you want?”

  I gave it to him. Greenwood Avenue North, number 6886. While I waited for him to look up the information, I entertained myself by tapping a pencil impatiently on the wall beside the phone. The noise set Corky off again. If he’d been my dog, I would have stra
ngled him on the spot.

  “Got it,” Sergeant James said. “The name’s Osgood, Daniel P. Osgood.”

  “Holy shit!”

  “Who is he? What’s going on?”

  “Get me a backup team and get them there pronto. I’ll meet them at that Greenwood address in…” I paused long enough to look at my watch. “In fifteen minutes.”

  “Who is Daniel P. Osgood?”

  “The man who killed Richard Dathan Morris and Jonathan Thomas.”

  “The man? I thought we were looking for a woman.”

  “Look, are you going to get me some help or not?”

  “They’re on their way,” Sergeant James told me.

  “Me too.”

  I hung up the phone, thanked Mavis Davis for her help, and dashed for the door with Corky right on my heels.

  I didn’t look back to see whether or not the door slammed on his nose. It was supposed to.

  CHAPTER 19

  I TURNED THINGS OVER IN MY MIND AS I drove to Osgood’s address on Greenwood North. It was beginning to make sense, all of it. I remembered how Dan Osgood had acted the first time I met him, how he had turned my card over and over in his fingers, how he had blanched when I mentioned visiting the murder victim’s parents. I had seen it then, but it hadn’t registered. It did now.

  Osgood had to be the local connection between whoever was importing the coke and Richard Dathan Morris. He was also the connection between Morris and the Fifth Avenue Theater, the one who had arranged the work calls, who had seen to it that Morris worked the Fifth Avenue shows.

  Was it possible that someone connected with Westcoast Starlight Productions was the supplier? If so, who was in charge? Who called the shots?

  To begin with, there was Jasmine Day, the one I was supposed to think was it. But planted evidence aside, Jasmine didn’t have the necessary continuity. This was her first tour with Westcoast. I wanted to believe that she was nothing more than a pawn, unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. But a dangerous pawn, I cautioned myself, remembering the hole in the wall beside my head. A nitroglycerine pawn.

  So who else was there at Westcoast? Most of my dealings had been with Alan Dale, the head carpenter/stage manager. He had claimed to be the one who fired Morris for poking around where he shouldn’t have been. Had he fired him first and killed him later? Dale had seemed more than slightly upset when I implied that maybe Jasmine was back on drugs. I remembered him glaring at me in the hallway outside Jasmine Day’s room. Was there something else going on between them, something more than the obvious professional relationship?