Taking the Fifth (9780061760891)

by Jance, Judith A.

  That has to be the comps, I thought. So it was a setup. The whole thing. Maybe even the whole tour.

  “After that, that’s when one of them says Wainwright’s a genius. You know, I rode all the way home with that man in a plane. I almost got sick when I heard that.”

  “Me too,” I echoed. “What else?”

  “Then they talk about the money, lots of it, and then later, they say that with Wainwright running the show, nobody had to worry about what L.A. was doing. That’s it.”

  I tried to keep my voice calm. “You’re sure that’s what they said: ‘With Wainwright running the show’?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. Are you calling me a liar, Detective Beaumont?”

  “No, I just wanted to be sure. Mrs. Morris, do you understand how important this is?”

  “I certainly do,” she answered. “If the man from the DEA is selling drugs, who can be trusted?”

  “He’s not just a man from the DEA, Mrs. Morris. He’s the guy running the DEA here in Seattle. He’s scared and dangerous, like a cornered rattlesnake. Are you there by yourself?”

  “I’ve locked all the doors,” she said. “Closed all the windows.”

  “Listen to me. I’m going to call the Bellingham police department. I’m going to ask them to come get you and put you in protective custody—do you understand?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Don’t open the door to anyone but a uniformed police officer, and whatever you do, don’t let that tape out of your possession, not even for a minute, is that clear?”

  “Shh,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I thought I heard a noise.”

  A wave of gooseflesh ran down my legs, and a torrent of helpless rage washed through my body.

  “Turn off the lights,” I ordered. “Hide the tape somewhere, and don’t hang up the phone. I’m going to be off the line for a minute.”

  I pressed the switch hook and got a dial tone on my other line, thanking Ralph Ames for his insistence that I have two lines on my phone. My hand shook as I dialed the operator. “This is a matter of life or death,” I said. “Get me the Bellingham Police Department.”

  The dispatcher sounded sleepy when he came on the phone. “It’s an emergency,” I said. “Send everything you’ve got to 1414 Utter Street. Hurry! There’s an armed robbery in progress at that address.”

  “I’ll have to get your name and address,” the dispatcher said.

  They always want to fill in all the forms. They always want the paperwork right. I wanted to rage at him, yank his ears through the telephone, but the only weapon I had at my disposal was to keep calm, to force him to get on track.

  “My name is J. P. Beaumont. I’m a detective with the Seattle Police Department. I was talking long distance with Grace Simms Morris when somebody started trying to break into her house.”

  “How do you know…”

  I depressed the switch hook one more time, turning on the three-way calling. I heard shattering glass and a woman’s scream. A moment later, the line to Grace Simms Morris went dead.

  “Are you there?” I shouted at the dispatcher. “Did you hear that?” But he was off the line too.

  I sat there, strangling the phone with hopeless impotence, remembering all my other failures, counting them up: Ann Corley and Ginger Watkins and, yes, Ron Peters too. Maybe that’s my cross to bear in life, to always want to help, but to never quite measure up, never be there quite on time to do any good, always to miss the mark.

  Suddenly the dispatcher was back on the line. “We have officers at the scene, Detective Beaumont. We had a patrol car that was only two minutes away.”

  “Is she all right? Is she still alive?”

  “I don’t know. Stay on the line. I’ll let you know as soon as I find out.”

  He went away again, and I sat on hold, uttering an urgent prayer for Mrs. Grace Simms Morris and for J. P. Beaumont too, that for once in my life I might be the knight on the white horse who wouldn’t be too late. The minutes loomed into what seemed like hours before he came back on the line again.

  “We have a suspect in custody,” the dispatcher said. “And an ambulance is en route.”

  “Is she okay?” I demanded. “Is she still alive?”

  “Mrs. Morris is okay,” the dispather said. “She threw a vase at him and broke a window. It cut him pretty good, but the medics say he’ll make it.”

  I felt a war whoop rising in my throat. I wanted to dance and sing and throw a vase through my own window. But I stifled the impulse. Twenty-four stories is a long way for broken glass to fall. I managed to get control of myself.

  “Who is it?” I asked. “Who’s the suspect?”

  “Just a minute,” the dispatcher said. “I’ll check.” Once more he was off the phone. Soon he was back. “His ID says his name’s Holman, Ray Holman. Does that mean anything to you?”

  Jubiliation died in my throat. “It sure as hell does. Is he alone?”

  “They found a rental car. No one else was in it.”

  I took a deep breath. “Listen to me. This is vitally important. Holman isn’t in this alone. He’s got an accomplice named Wainwright who works for the DEA. Mrs. Morris has evidence, incriminating evidence, that they’ll do anything to lay their hands on.”

  “The DEA, really?” the dispatcher said.

  “You’ve got to get Mrs. Morris out of there,” I said. “Put her in protective custody. Lock the tape in a safe, and don’t let anybody near either one of them—you got that?”

  “Yes, sir,” the dispatcher said. “I’ll get right on it.”

  I gave him my number. “Call me back here when you’ve got it done,” I ordered. “Leave a message on my machine. I won’t be here, but I’ll be able to get my messages.”

  “Right,” the dispatcher said. “Will do.”

  I opened the drawer in the table that held the answering machine and took out the remote that Ames had also given me. He had told me someday I’d thank him for being able to pick up my messages without having to be home.

  That day had just come. Maybe I’d like Ames better if he wasn’t always right.

  CHAPTER 24

  NATURALLY, B. W. WAINWRIGHT WASN’T in the phone book. Neither was Roger Glancy. That was hardly surprising, however. Neither is J. P. Beaumont.

  I called the department and asked for Sergeant James, only to be told he had left for home some fifteen minutes before. I hated calling his home and waking his family, even though he was probably still awake, but there was no choice.

  Lynita James answered on the second ring. “Just a minute,” she said sleepily. “He’s brushing his teeth.”

  “It’s Beau,” I said when he came on the line.

  “What the hell are you doing calling me at this hour?” he demanded.

  “There wasn’t any choice. Wainwright’s the ringleader.”

  “He’s what? Come on, Beau. Have you been drinking, or what?”

  “Wainwright’s the mastermind behind the whole Westcoast operation and he’s been running it from a catbird seat in the DEA. The whole thing just blew sky high. Richard Dathan Morris sent a tape to his mother, naming names, and Ray Holman just showed up to try to get it back. He’s in custody in Bellingham. Now all we’ve got to do is lay hands on that other son of a bitch.”

  James was convinced. “So what do you need, Beau?”

  “Just tell me this. Does somebody have Roger Glancy’s phone number?”

  “Sure, I’ve got it. I’ve got all their numbers. I told you I was the liaison, remember?”

  “Do you have it there?”

  “It’s in my briefcase, in the car. Just a minute.” He put down the phone, and I could hear Lynita grumpily questioning him about what was going on. Being married to a cop is hell.

  Sergeant James came back on the phone. “I’ve got it, but I was just thinking. What if Glancy’s in on it?”

  “I’m worried about that too, but it’s a chance we’ll have to take. Glancy’s na
me wasn’t mentioned anywhere on the tape.”

  “Are you going to call him, or do you want me to?” James asked.

  “Let’s call him together,” I said. “Give me the number and I’ll patch us in.”

  From the way he answered the phone, I knew we had awakened Roger Glancy out of a sound sleep. “This is Detective Beaumont with Seattle police, and Sergeant Lowell James.”

  “Who?” Glancy mumbled.

  I repeated the names. “Oh, that’s right. I remember now. What’s happening?”

  “Roger,” I said slowly, “this may be hard to follow, but we need you to give us Wainwright’s address. Better yet, we need you to take us there.”

  “What do you mean? How come?” Glancy was still struggling to wake up and not entirely succeeding. I figured I might as well douse him in the face with cold water.

  “We have reason to believe he’s working the other side,” I said quietly. “We think he’s the one who’s been running the Westcoast operation.”

  “Oh, come on. You guys are shitting me.”

  Sergeant James stepped into the fray. “Look, Glancy, this isn’t a joke, and we’ve got to move on it. Where does Wainwright live?”

  “Windermere,” Glancy answered. “He lives on Ivanhoe, a few blocks north of Children’s Orthopedic Hospital.”

  “All right, meet us at the southwestern corner of University Village. You can lead us to the house. That’ll be faster than having us all bumble around in a residential neighborhood at this hour of the night.”

  “Who all’s coming?” Glancy asked.

  “I’ll be there,” Sergeant James said. “Detective Beaumont and probably a couple of squad cars. But no lights and no sirens.”

  “Right,” Glancy said. “I can make it in fifteen.”

  “Fifteen it is,” James responded. “See you there, Beau,” he added.

  I splashed some cold water on my face. It was going to be another long night.

  It was a good thing I looked at the gas gauge when I got back in the Porsche. It’s a good car, but it doesn’t run on fumes. I was close enough to the appointed meeting place that I was able to stop at a self-serve place on Denny, fill up, and still be at University Village on time.

  As I drove north on Interstate 25 my sense of outrage heated up and boiled over. I’m a cop who happens to work in Seattle, not L.A., not New York or Chicago. I know about what goes on in those other jurisdictions, about the graft and corruption that turn law-enforcement officers into monsters and worse. And I know what it’s like to be a cop in a city where cops are looked on as something lower than the scum of the earth.

  But Seattle’s different. That’s one of the reasons I like it. Crooked cops aren’t tolerated here, and B. W. Wainwright was a crooked cop of the first water. My gut instinct said to treat him like the vermin he was, take him out, blot him off the face of the earth. I patted my .38 Smith and Wesson for luck, just to know it was available in case I got a chance to use it. And I fully intended to use it if I could.

  Sergeant James and Roger Glancy were already in the parking lot when I got there. From the look of things, James had managed to convince Glancy that we weren’t jacking him around, that Wainwright had been living two decidedly different lives.

  Glancy seemed shaken, disoriented, almost. I would have felt the same way if someone had just told me that Sergeant Lowell James robbed banks on the weekend for fun and profit. When someone you’ve worked with and respected falls from grace, it’s hard to know how to go on.

  “Do you just want to show us the house and then back off?” James was asking Glancy. “This is hard enough as it is.”

  Roger Glancy shook his head. “If what you’re saying is true, we’ve all been played for a bunch of fools. I want to get a little of my own back.”

  It made perfect sense to me.

  Because we were afraid Wainwright might recognize Glancy’s car, he rode with me in the Porsche. We led the way.

  “Damn,” I said as I started the car. “I’ll bet nobody thought to get a search warrant.”

  Glancy patted the breast pocket of his coat. “Don’t count on it,” he said. “I’ve got a neighbor who’s a judge. His kid died of an overdose at seventeen. He told me to come see him any time of the day or night and he’d sign one for me. He lives two houses away. It only took a minute.”

  I looked at Glancy with new respect. He wasn’t along for the ride, and I’m willing to bet he was grappling with his own set of crooked-cop demons.

  He directed me off Sand Point Way a few blocks north of Children’s Orthopedic. I could see the wisdom of Sergeant James’s strategy the moment we turned off the arterial. The short blocks didn’t follow any particularly logical pattern. You simply had to know where you were going.

  “Is Wainwright married or divorced?” I asked.

  “Divorced,” Glancy answered. “It happened just before he transferred in here three years ago. According to him, she wiped him out.”

  I glanced around at the imposing houses, gracious colonials and low-slung brick ramblers. “It looks like he landed on his feet,” I said.

  “I’ll say,” Glancy replied grimly.

  We didn’t say anything more. The house was a two-story job without a light or car showing. The three-car caravan parked and Glancy directed us around the place, arousing the ire of at least two neighborhood dogs. When we were sure all possible avenues of escape were cut off, Glancy and I approached the front door.

  I stood to one side, and Glancy rang the bell. There was no answer. He waited only half a minute or so before he kicked the door in with a one-shot DEA technique that put this particular Seattle cop to shame.

  With adrenaline pounding through our systems, we made a quick survey of the house, moving from room to room warily, covering one another. The place was empty. The clothes closet had been gutted. Underwear and sock drawers had been hastily emptied. B. W. Wainwright had left in a hurry, and wherever he was going he didn’t plan to come back any time soon.

  When we got back to the living room, Glancy paused and sniffed the air. “Do you smell smoke?” he asked.

  I followed suit. There was indeed the acrid smell of paper smoke lingering in the air. We both headed for the fireplace. I felt the bricks under the mantel. They were still warm to the touch.

  “He hasn’t been gone long,” I said.

  Glancy got down on all fours and moved the fireplace screen out of the way. There was a stack of curled ashes, the remains of individual papers. Wainwright had been in too much of a hurry to be thorough. One envelope was only partially burned. In the upper left-hand corner, still plainly visible, were the initials RDM.

  “Don’t touch them,” I told him. “The crime lab may be able to pull something usable from this.”

  Sergeant James came in the front door. “Nothing?” he asked. I nodded.

  Glancy rocked back on his heels. “So where the hell is he?”

  “He has a private plane, isn’t that true?” James asked.

  “It’s usually parked at Boeing Field,” Glancy said.

  “I’ll bet it isn’t tonight,” James commented thoughtfully.

  Both Glancy and I looked at him. “What makes you say that?” I asked.

  “Think about it; if you had come back from Bellingham, knowing that your life was about to blow up in your face, would you park your plane where you usually park it?”

  “By God, he’s right,” Glancy said. “That’s why he had someone call a cab for him when he left the Public Safety Building.”

  “When was that? He left before we did. Maybe a little before midnight.”

  “Does he have one car or two?” I asked.

  “One, as far as I know. A BMW. Why?”

  “Because if he caught a cab home, he probably took another cab when he left here to go back to the plane.”

  “That doesn’t do us a whole hell of a lot of good, does it?” Glancy sounded discouraged.

  “Don’t give up. We’ve got one more card.”


  By this time, I had memorized the Far West Cab Company number. I went to the phone and dialed. Larry was still there. “It’s Beaumont again,” I said. “Can we do this one last time?”

  “You bet. The other guys are getting a real charge out of this. We feel like we’re playing cops and robbers.”

  “You are,” I told him. I gave him B. W. Wainwright’s address.

  When he came back on the line, Larry was laughing. “You’re closing in on him. He’s in a Yellow even as we speak.”

  “A Yellow Cab? Where?”

  “They picked him up from the address you gave me and took him down to Boeing Field. While he was there, the driver called his dispatcher to say he was heading from Boeing to the Skyport Airfield in Issaquah, so he was quitting for the night. Skyport’s evidently only a mile or two from where the cabbie lives.”

  “How far ahead of us are they?”

  “The dispatcher says they left Boeing Field about ten minutes ago, is all.”

  “Larry, thanks. I owe you.”

  I dropped the phone and raced for the door. “Come on, you guys. There isn’t minute to lose.”

  “Why not? Where are they?”

  “In a Yellow Cab somewhere between Boeing Field and the Issaquah Skyport.”

  “How’d you do that?” Glancy asked wonderingly as we climbed into the Porsche.

  “It pays to know people in high places,” I told him. “And taxi dispatchers are pretty close to the top of the list.”

  CHAPTER 25

  WE CAME FLYING THROUGH THE MONTLAKE underpass that leads from Interstate 5 to Highway 520 and the Evergreen Point Bridge. It was two o’clock in the morning, and it should have been clear sailing.

  It wasn’t.

  As soon as we topped the rise, I saw the traffic backup and hit the brakes. The problem was there was no alternative, no other way to get across the great water. Interstate 90 was closed for the weekend because of work being done on the Mercer Island Bridge. Now we were stuck in a massive backup because a couple of drunk teenagers leaving a rock concert had kamikazied into the railing on the eastern high-rise part of the Evergreen Point Bridge.