“All right, all right. What’s going on here?”
“There’s a body under the decking,” I told him. “We left it there until you got here.”
Doc Baker walked to the back of the stage. He looked at the space between the decking and the floor; then he looked at his own wide girth. There was no way he would fit.
“Get somebody to take this thing apart,” Baker ordered. “How long will it take to dismantle it?”
“The whole thing?” Alan Dale asked.
“No, just enough so we can see to work.”
About ten minutes or so,” Dale told him, “if all you want me to do is open a lid over the track.”
Dale started to summon the lounging stagehands who were clumped in a subdued group on the far side of the stage. I’m sure he intended to put them to work on the decking, but Baker squelched that idea in a hurry.
“No. Just you,” he said to Dale. “I don’t want any unnecessary fingerprints.”
“It’ll take a lot longer,” Dale said.
“That’s all right,” Baker returned. “It’ll be worth it.”
Alan Dale pulled a small battery-operated drill from his tool belt and slid under the decking. We heard the rat-a-tat-tat of the power drill as it loosened the bolts. Meanwhile, Doc Baker sauntered over to us.
“I don’t know why you guys didn’t have brains enough to take up that decking before I got here. Nobody could have gotten under there.”
I managed, barely, to keep my mouth shut. None of the smart-ass remarks I could have laid on Doc Baker right then made it past my lips. Of course, he was right. It would have made a hell of a lot more sense for us to have gone ahead and had Dale raise the planking before Baker got there, but I’ve worked with the medical examiner too many years not to know that that would have pissed him off too. Nobody pleases Doc Baker in the middle of the night. It was far better for him to have made the decision himself after he got there, even if everything was delayed a good forty-five minutes.
After several long minutes, Dale finally raised one corner of a section of decking. “Have somebody come take this, will you?”
Two of the stagehands came over, but they did so with considerable reluctance. By now, everyone who was still in the theater knew there was a body lurking under the decking, and no one was eager to be the one to uncover it.
Baker directed the stagehands to take the section of decking and lean it against the back wall. A few minutes later, another section came off. As the lid opened up, the stench became more pronounced. Only in the movies do people die with their eyes and mouths closed. Only there is death a sanitary, odorless, painless process.
When the last section of decking came off, Alan Dale erupted from the opening and made for the fresh air outside the alley door on the other side of the stage. For two cents, I would have joined him.
Impervious, Doc Baker hopped down from the decking into the opening and motioned for the photographer to follow. I saw the look of horror on her face, but she eased her way into the opening behind him. Soon intermittent flashes from the camera told us she was doing her job.
Sergeant James, Agent-in-Charge Wainwright, and I moved slowly to the edge of the opening. It was bad, as bad as anything I’ve ever seen. It was Dan Osgood. His face was recognizable, but that was about all.
The worm-gear drive, moving in its track like the spiral center piece in a meat grinder, had pushed the body ahead of it, even as the gear itself had torn into him. Eventually his body had been caught between two supporting struts that stood on either side of the track. The pressure of the body, stuck between the struts, had created enough countervailing stress to force the worm gear from its track.
It was a terrible way to die, a horrifying way to die. Doc Baker pulled himself up out of the hole onto the decking, shaking his shaggy head.
“Why didn’t he try to get away?” I asked.
“Hands and feet were both tied,” Doc Baker answered. “Not only that, it looks as if he was probably out cold.”
“Drugged?” I asked.
Baker nodded. “I imagine.”
Now the photographer, too, was climbing out of the pit. In the stark light of the stage, her face was ashen, but there was no other visible sign of distress. “I’m done, Dr. Baker,” she said, moving past us to the sidelines.
“I’ve been told we’ve got a positive ID,” Baker said to Sergeant James. “Is that true?”
The sergeant looked at me. “What do you think, Beau?” he asked.
“It’s Dan Osgood, all right,” I answered. “Is his wife still down at the department?”
Sergeant James shook his head. “No. I sent her to her mother’s in a cab a while ago.”
“You working this case, then?” Doc Baker asked me.
Sergeant James answered for me. “No. Beau and Big Al already have their hands full.” He turned to the DEA agent in charge. “Wainwright, are you going to want this to be a joint investigation?”
Wainwright nodded. “All right, then,” James continued. “You’ll be working with Detectives An-dress and Cunningham here. I’ll be the liaison between you and each pair of detectives working one of the related homicides. I think that’s the best way to handle it.”
“Makes sense to me,” Wainwright agreed. “Is the crowd pretty much dispersed out there?”
“It’s not bad. There are reporters hanging around, but that’s about all.”
It was agreed that Jasmine and Waverly should be taken down to the department to be booked and questioned. I stood to one side and watched as Roger Glancy led Jasmine out of the dressing room. To avoid the reporters, they took them out through the side door that led back into the Skinner Building, the same door Dan Osgood had used to take me into the theater for the first time the previous afternoon. It seemed like eons ago.
Jasmine Day walked out with her head held high. Waverly looked like a whipped dog. Once they were gone, I went looking for Alan Dale. He was sitting in the common area outside the dressing rooms. He didn’t look any too healthy. He had his head in his hands and looked a picture of despair.
“Is she gone?” he asked.
I nodded. “Don’t worry about her. We’ll bail her out tomorrow.”
“We?” he asked.
“That’s right,” I answered. “All they can charge her with is possession with intent.”
“What about me?” he asked.
“What about you?”
“I’m the one who killed him. I was the one who pulled the switch on the worm gear.”
“You didn’t know he was under there, did you?”
Alan Dale shook his head. “No, but I remember smelling a funny odor during the second act. I didn’t have time to check it out. I should have. Maybe he wasn’t dead yet.”
“Don’t beat yourself up, Alan. He was already dead, believe me.”
“You’re sure it’s Osgood?”
“I’m sure, all right. It ran through his gut, not his face.”
“Do they have him out of there yet?” Dale asked.
“Not yet,” I told him. “This stuff takes time.”
“And you do this for a living?” he asked.
“Every day,” I said.
I left Dale sitting there and went outside looking for Ray Holman. I didn’t find him. Instead, I came across the photographer, sitting off by herself in the middle of the front row of seats. Like Dale, she looked sickened and worn.
“Thinking about getting into another line of work?” I asked.
“The thought had crossed my mind,” she said.
“Mine too,” I told her.
CHAPTER 23
I ENDED UP OFFERING THE PHOTOGRAPHER a ride home. For a change, my attempt to be suave and urbane didn’t backfire. When we stepped outside the theater, my car was still there, the flashers were still flashing, and the engine turned over on the first try. Sometimes things do work out all right.
We took the departmental car back to the Public Safety Building. I talked to Sergeant Jame
s from the garage and told him I was beat, that I’d have to do the paperwork the next day. He let me off the hook. I bailed the Porsche out of the twenty-four-hour garage at the bottom of James Street, and we headed home.
The photographer’s name was Nancy Gresham. I’d had nothing to eat for a long time, so long that even the dead breakfast Jasmine and I had left uneaten on my dining-room table was beginning to seem palatable.
Since Nancy lived in an apartment on the north side of Queen Anne Hill, it was natural for us to stop off at the Doghouse for something to eat. That’s one of the advantages of being a devotee of twenty-four-hour dives. They’re always open when you need them.
“I take it you come here a lot,” Nancy observed when everyone in the place, including the cook and the busboy, greeted me by name.
“It beats cooking,” I said.
When the waitress came to take our order, she smiled at Nancy Gresham’s insistence on separate checks. So did I.
Although I thought I was hungry, when the food came I picked at it, pushing it around on my plate without eating any of it. There was a leaden weight in my gut, one I couldn’t ditch or explain, one I couldn’t manage to shove any food past. I guess I wasn’t exactly a barrel of fun.
“Someone told me the guy back there in the theater was the suspect you were looking for in those other two murders, the one down by the railroad track and the other one up on Capitol Hill,” she said over coffee. “So you’ve closed two cases tonight. It seems to me congratulations are in order.”
“I don’t feel much like celebrating,” I told her dourly.
“Why not?”
“Because something’s out of whack. Something’s wrong and I can’t tell what it is.”
“Maybe you’re feeling cheated.”
“Cheated?” I repeated the word, puzzling over it. “How so?”
“You didn’t get to take him in. Somebody robbed you of the arrest. Doesn’t that bother you?”
She was on the money, but I didn’t let on. “Not particularly,” I said. “Should it?”
She smiled behind her cup. “That’s not what I’ve heard.”
“What exactly have you heard, and where?”
“You’re something of a legend, you know. They say that you sleep and eat your job, and that you don’t give up. Incidentally, you’ve got quite a reputation around the department, especially among the raw recruits. The story goes that J. P. Beaumont is only one small step below godliness.”
That made me laugh. “Your over-the-hill legend seems to have feet of clay,” I said. “You should have seen me this afternoon.”
She cocked her head to one side and looked at me. “Why?”
“Because Jasmine Day could have kicked shit out of me, if you’ll pardon the expression, and I never even saw it coming.”
“Don’t do that,” she said sharply.
“Do what?”
“Don’t apologize for talking like a cop. I’m one too, remember?” She got up abruptly, taking her check with her. I caught up with her at the cash register.
“I didn’t mean to offend you.”
“Don’t talk down to me,” she said. “My ears won’t fall off if I hear those words.”
She paid for her own breakfast and opened her own car door, but she accepted my ride home and gave me a thank-you peck on the cheek, which only served to puzzle me that much more. I drove home to Belltown Terrace pondering man’s age-old question of what is it that women really want.
I walked into my apartment without bothering to turn on any light. The only light in the room was the blinking red one, counting off the messages on my answering machine. Any other time, I might have been tempted to ignore it, to go to bed and take the messages off the machine in the morning, but too much had happened in the last few days. There were too many loose ends hanging that needed tying up, and I didn’t dare ignore anything that might give me a lead.
I counted five messages in all. I sat down in the recliner, eased it back, and pushed the playback button. The first one was from Mrs. Grace Simms Morris.
“Detective Beaumont, I just wanted to call you and thank you for talking to Mr. Wainwright for me. He called just a few minutes ago, and he’s coming over to pick me up. He never would have listened to me if it hadn’t been for you. I really appreciate it.”
I was no longer reclining. I sat up straight and punched the rewind button. Wainwright hadn’t said anything to me about talking to Mrs. Morris. And I remembered him saying distinctly that he had no intention of talking to her. I replayed the message, but it still said exactly the same thing.
This time, when the message finished, I let it go on. The next three messages were from Peters and Amy. Two of the calls were nothing but attempts to find me. The third one left detailed information about the DEA bust in L.A. But it was the fifth message, the last one, that put the frosting on the cake.
It was Grace Simms Morris again, or at least someone who sounded like her, but the voice was so tremulous, so indefinite, that I had to turn up the volume on my recorder to hear her.
“Please, Detective Beaumont, call me the moment you get home. I don’t care what time it is, just call me. It’s urgent. I thought about calling your office, but I don’t dare. I don’t know who to trust. Please call.”
She had left her number and I called her back immediately. Mrs. Morris must have been sleeping with the phone in her lap. She answered after only half a ring.
“Detective Beaumont?” she said, before I had a chance to open my mouth. “Is this you?”
“Yes, it is. What can I do for you? You sounded upset.”
Suddenly she was blubbering into the phone, sobbing in my ear. “I didn’t know what to do, whom I should call. It’s terrible, just terrible.”
“What are you talking about? What’s wrong?”
“It’s him,” she said. “Wainwright.”
“What about him?”
“He called me at the hotel, a little while after you left. He told me he was sorry, that there had been a terrible mistake. He said he understood now how valuable the evidence was that my son had provided, and would I go with him right then to get it.”
“Wainwright said that?” I asked incredulously.
“Yes, yes. He said we’d have to hurry to get to the bank before it closed. He said to be ready, that he’d pick me up and fly me to Bellingham so we could be there before the bank closed at six.”
“And did you make it?”
“Yes. We were at the bank about twenty minutes before six. I got the stuff out of the safety deposit box and handed it over to him. There must have been twenty envelopes in all. It seemed like that many, but I don’t know exactly. I didn’t count them.”
“What did Wainwright do with them? Did he show you what was inside?”
“No. He sent me home in a cab. We had taken a cab from the airport into town. He said he’d take charge of the evidence, see that it got into the proper hands.”
Mrs. Grace Simms Morris paused to blow her nose. Over the phone, it wasn’t exactly a ladylike sound. I’m sure she would have been embarrassed to know she sounded like a foghorn trumpeting in my ear.
“I still don’t understand why you’re so upset,” I said.
“Just wait a minute. I’m coming to that. The cab dropped me off at my house. There was so much mail piled up that I didn’t feel like looking at any of it right away. I went around the house and opened windows and unpacked and started a load of wash before I picked up the mail.”
She had been rushing forward. Now she paused, as if to draw breath.
“Have you ever gotten a letter from someone after they’re dead?” she asked. “I mean, a letter someone wrote before they died, and you didn’t get it until after you knew they were gone?”
“I guess I have,” I said. “At least once.”
“It’s a weird feeling, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I agreed.
“Well, when I finally sat down to do the mail, there was an envelope fr
om Richard, one that he had mailed on Wednesday afternoon. I knew it was from him because of the handwriting, and for a long time I couldn’t bring myself to open it. I just sat there and held it. Finally, I had to open it, had to know what it said.”
“What did it say?”
“There was no letter, just a note telling me to put this away along with the other stuff at the bank.”
“This what? What was it?”
“A tape. A cassette tape.”
“So what did you do?”
“I was a little angry at Mr. Wainwright,” she confessed. “I mean, it would have been polite for him to at least show me what was in those envelopes after I had kept them for all that time. But he didn’t bother. So I decided to listen to the tape. I wanted to know what it was that Richard was doing. I needed to know. Can you understand that?”
“Yes. So did you listen to it?”
“Yes.” Her voice dropped. Her answer was almost a whisper. “It’s him,” she said. “Wainwright.”
“Tell me,” I commanded.
“I heard these two men talking. They said nobody had to worry about getting caught, since Wainwright was running the show. I’m scared, Detective Beaumont. What should I do with this tape? What if he comes back here looking for it?”
My mind was racing. “Does he know you have it? Did you call him?”
“No. I wanted to hear it first, and then, afterward…”
“You’re sure they were talking about drugs?”
“Do you want me to play it for you?”
“We can try it.” She tried, but I couldn’t understand what was being said. There was too much interference. “Just repeat it for me in your own words,” I told her. “Tell me what it says as best you can. Can you make out any names?”
“Yes, I think so. One seems to be named Dan, and the other is Ray. Yes, that’s it.”
“Shit!” I said.
“Pardon me?”
“Never mind,” I said. “I just sneezed.”
“I don’t understand this, but first Dan asks if the setup is working, and Ray says yes. That she’s gone out with all the dealers, and that when they pull the rug out, it’s going to look as if she was doing it all on her own.”
Taking the Fifth (9780061760891) Page 19
