Middle Of Nowhere b-7

by Ridley Pearson

  "You and your squad need to be back on the floor tomorrow before this hits the fan."

  "It's the perfect bluff, I'm telling you. A couple lieus leak this and they get thirty, forty percent of us back with nothing more than a phone call."

  "Phil Shoswitz was guild secretary. Whose side do you think he's on?" Boldt said, "Don't double guess this, John. The information is good. We need to work the call tree, and we need to do it tonight. Phil thinks we should avoid our home lines."

  "Oh, this is precious." LaMoia snorted and shook his head and looked Boldt over, trying to read him. He asked tentatively, "You buy this?"

  Boldt knew to leave it alone. It was the only way to convince his obstinate sergeant. As much as he wanted to argue his case, he returned to LaMoia's reason for the meeting. "Schock and Phillipp are Vice. Why are they sitting on a guy like Chapman?"

  "Are they?" LaMoia asked. "Vice? You're Homicide, Sarge, but are you at the moment?"

  "One cop watching another? What, they got handed an I.I.?" Internal Investigations had been wiped out by the Flu same as Burglary. It wasn't out of the question, no matter how unlikely. I.I. was a closed unit-a dreaded assignment. But it only made sense that these investigations would have to continue in spite of the Flu. He considered this possibility. "We need to know who Chapman was looking for."

  Saddled by obvious reservation, LaMoia informed Boldt, "Maria got hooked up to something first day of the Flu, Sarge. She wouldn't talk about it-and we talked about everything. I got pissed off, partly 'cause she wouldn't talk, partly because she wouldn't join us in the sickout. Basically, Sarge, she threw me out. Next time I see her she's got her head screwed down to that bed."

  "I.I.?" Boldt asked.

  "It might explain why she wouldn't discuss whatever it was," LaMoia suggested. The unit operated under strict secrecy acts. The explanation satisfied Boldt. LaMoia added, "Let me sniff out Chapman. You chat up Maria about that case. With me involved, it would only get her pissed off again. Hispanics and temper, Sarge! I'm telling you!"

  "The call tree."

  "I'll think about it."

  "Thanks again for the call," Boldt repeated. "I would have missed that crime scene."

  "What are you talking about, Sarge?"

  "The call. Putting me on to the assault."

  "The only call I made was from the bar," LaMoia said.

  "Earlier?" Boldt asked.

  LaMoia shook his head. "Wasn't me."

  Boldt's gut twisted. Who had wanted him to see two badly beaten officers? And much more important: Why? So he could help out with the investigation, or as a warning of how close he had come to incurring the same fate?

  CHAPTER 20

  Boldt placed the call from his cell phone, disturbing Phil Shoswitz at home. Boldt's former boss had the kind of contacts within the department that John LaMoia had in the private sector. LaMoia could come up with any and all information on a suspect or witness, be it financial, tax-related, insurance or medical. He had "Deep Throats"-sources within institutions and industries-that would have made government agents blush. Shoswitz had formed similar relationships within SPD-ironically, in large part, due to his many years of guild service-and had ways of turning gossip into hard fact. He knew the scuttlebutt in the department's vehicle garage as well as the chief's social calendar. Exactly as Boldt needed.

  Recognizing Boldt's voice immediately, Shoswitz said, "You're supposed to be working that phone tree."

  "Already in motion. What about Schock and Phillipp's condition?" Boldt asked.

  "Word is both are going to pull through, although Schock may lose the eye. Phillipp won't be completing any full sentences for a week or so, but he'll be back on the job." Shoswitz already had the full medical re ports on the two and understood Boldt wanted this information first.

  Boldt said cautiously, "I need to know if they had drawn I.I. duty as a result of the Flu. I hear they may have followed a fellow officer into that bar."

  "I can ask around, but I won't get confirmation, Lou. Not if it's I.I."

  "And that lack of confirmation will tell us what we need to know."

  "Not necessarily."

  "I read this wrong, Phil. Blue on blue. I was thinking we were getting roughed up in order to cut our numbers, strengthen the effect of the Flu. And sure, maybe a brick through a window. Some rookie pissed off his paycheck isn't coming in and drinking too much. But assaults? Sanchez? Schock and Phillipp?" He left himself out of it. "Would we do that kind of damage to each other over guild politics?"

  "Don't underestimate what a desperate man will do," Shoswitz cautioned.

  "Six months into a strike, maybe. But one week? Does that make sense? And so carefully executed to look like muggings. The things are textbook, Phil."

  "Your point?"

  "I could use a little help here," Boldt prodded. "I've got two Vice cops poking around a bar and apparently following a Property sergeant. What's that about?"

  "I'll ask around," Shoswitz confirmed. "But if they were I.I., about the best we'll get is a denial. We'll be working hunches is all."

  "I have another source I can work," Boldt told him. "Sanchez may be able to fill in some of this."

  "I thought she's comatose."

  "So does everyone," Boldt said. "Right now, that's the one advantage I've got."

  It was too late to visit Sanchez at the hospital. She'd be medicated and fast asleep. But it wasn't too late to grab onto a few limbs and start shaking the tree. Whoever had committed the assaults would have fresh blood to hide, might even have defensive wounds to show for their efforts.

  Boldt called Gaynes and Matthews and caught them up on the assaults, as well as Shoswitz's alert about the surprise health inspections. He put them onto the task of firing up the departmental phone tree and to start making calls. Gaynes rallied without complaint, a soldier in the trenches.

  Daphne, as ever, ferreted out Boldt's true intentions: to question Ron Chapman at his home. She refused to allow him to go at it alone, and informed him she was bringing a stun stick along as backup. He knew better than to argue with her, or to admit that he'd welcome her company. He picked her up at her houseboat, and they drove to Chapman's together, using the drive time to prepare.

  "The two of you at this hour, it's not social," Chapman said, shutting the door behind them. He had made no effort to keep them out. Perhaps, Boldt thought, he didn't want to eat alone.

  "Little late for dinner, isn't it, Ron?"

  Chapman lived in a studio apartment with a partial view of Pill Hill. He had the TV going and a Stouffer's microwave meal on a folding table in front of the room's only chair-a La-Z-Boy recliner. He'd been widowed several years earlier, and the dust bugs and dirty windows confirmed a life of a man turned within. To Boldt, the room felt sad and depressed, crowded with too many snapshots of the late wife. Some people couldn't let go. Chapman suddenly struck him that way, and Boldt found it odd that his attitude about a man he'd known for years could change with a single look inside that man's home. If there had ever been joy here, it now rested in the urn that held his wife's ashes.

  Chapman didn't offer them seats, in part because the only two chairs were at a small table that framed the galley kitchen's doorway, and there didn't seem to be any more room for them elsewhere.

  "Little late for a house call, isn't it, Lieutenant? Strange times, these."

  "You hear about Schock and Phillipp?"

  "Rudy Schock?"

  Daphne said calmly, "They were assaulted tonight."

  "Not far from the Cock and Bull," Boldt supplied.

  Ron Chapman carried an extra thirty or forty pounds on his Irish bulldog looks. It wasn't easy for such soft flesh to remain so absolutely still. Then, at once, he returned to his dinner like a dog to its bone.

  "You were at the Cock and Bull tonight, Ronnie. What's that about?"

  "A guy can't buy himself a drink?" Chapman complained, working on the dinner in the small plastic tray. "Since when?"

  "What d
o Schock and Phillipp mean to you?"

  The man glanced up, as hot as his prepared dinner. "Who says they mean anything?"

  "Why play games?" Boldt asked. "Are you into something here? Tell me I'm wrong."

  "You're wrong."

  "Convince me," Boldt said.

  "I've got my dinner to eat."

  Daphne asked, "Are you afraid of them?"

  Chapman stiffened.

  She clarified, "I'm not talking about Schock and Phillipp. I'm talking about whoever did that to them. Are you afraid of those people?"

  He wouldn't look up from his food. "Way I heard it, they were mugged. A street assault. Why should I be afraid of that? Their bad luck is all."

  She said, "You don't have to swing the baseball bat to be guilty of assault. There's conspiracy. There's intent. You want to think about that."

  Boldt said, "Next to Narcotics, Property is probably easily the most tempting duty of all of 'em. You guys are carefully hand-picked. Doesn't mean temptation doesn't win out now and then. There's a heck of a lot of goods on those shelves."

  "There's cash on those shelves," Chapman said. "Jewels. Weapons. And as far as I know it's all still there, Lieutenant. Go ahead and check."

  "You came to that bar looking for someone. Two officers right behind you were assaulted. What if I told you they were following up on a case that was being worked by Sanchez just before her assault?"

  Daphne turned her attention to Boldt, angry at not having been included in on this.

  Chapman wouldn't take his head out of his dinner.

  Boldt said, "Maybe I've got it wrong. Maybe you were doing a favor for Schock, or Phillipp. Wearing a wire? Making a contact?"

  "It wasn't like that!" the man objected heatedly, fork in mid-air.

  Daphne picked up on Boldt's lead. "The rumor mill is brutal," she said.

  "You can't do something like that to me! Label me a squirrel for I.I.?" He thought this over and flushed. "It's not funny, Lieutenant. Especially not the way things are going right now."

  "Let's take you out of the equation, Ron. That's what I'm suggesting. Let's put Schock and Phillipp working the Cock and Bull-it isn't their usual bar, or yours either, Ron." He let this sink in. "They're looking to work someone. That leaves me asking who. Who in your opinion, might they have been looking for up there?"

  "I know what you're asking," Chapman said. "And you got this all tangled up."

  "So help me untangle it."

  "I was in for a drink is all."

  "And Schock and Phillipp? A drink as well?"

  "I didn't talk to them. Wouldn't know."

  "Sergeant," Daphne said calmly, "you've stayed on through the Blue Flu. Precious few others have been so… bold as to do so. If you hadn't stayed on, others who've never worked Property would have been assigned to that duty. But you stayed. One could almost imagine you're protecting Property from outside eyes. And now these assaults.. Sanchez, Schock, and Phillipp. Someone even showed up in Lieutenant Boldt's backyard uninvited. You want to talk about mistakes? That was a mistake. You know the lieutenant's reputation as an investigator. Do you think he's going to let this go… four brutal assaults?"

  "You two do what you have to. You come to whatever it is by yourselves," Chapman suggested. "Leave me out of this."

  Boldt craned forward. "But then there is something, right, Ron? Something to leave you out of?"

  "You're tangling this all up."

  Boldt repeated slowly. "So… help… me… untangle.. it."

  "Dinner's getting cold."

  Daphne said, "We can be convinced otherwise. Tell us it was Schock and Phillipp doing the dirty work. Tell us they pursued you into that bar. What do they have on you? What do you have on them?"

  "I'd like it if you left now," the man said.

  Daphne stepped closer to Chapman. Boldt admired her technique. "He's Property, Lou. There have to be people who owe him favors." To the subject she said, "Is covering for someone the right way to play this?" "It's not like that!" Chapman shouted. "Now leave!"

  Twenty minutes later Boldt pulled the Chevy to a stop at the end of the dock that led to Daphne's Lake Union houseboat. He escorted Daphne to her front door. He wasn't going to add her to the list of assaults.

  "So we know Chapman's caught up in something," the psychologist said.

  "Yes, we do."

  "But not what, nor to what degree."

  "No."

  "So what's next?"

  "I go back to John for an update. You start working the phone tree. We save as many people as we can before the axe falls."

  "And if John has something, you'll call?"

  "Your line'll be busy," he said, "from all that calling you'll be doing."

  "Lou…"

  For a moment, the connection between them was everything, and he had to remind himself of Icarus's perilous journey too close to the sun, or that even the most loyal husband remained subject to the laws of gravity. They paused at the front door to her houseboat, and for one awkward moment it felt to him as if they might kiss; then he turned and left.

  John LaMoia lived on the third floor of a waterfront loft that thirteen years earlier had been a drug lab in the heart of a gang-controlled neighborhood. The lab had been busted by police, including a wet-behind-theears patrolman who, when the raid was concluded, noted the spectacular view on the other side of the painted-over windows. LaMoia had never forgotten that view, nor the neighborhood, because of the repeated radio calls taking him there: disruptions, street wars, stabbings. He bought low, well ahead of the gentrification that followed, restored the interior, installed security, and scraped the paint off the windows, so that now he commanded views of the waterfront-the piers and tourist restaurants on Alaskan Way-as well as Elliott Bay's sublime gray-green waters and the whitecapped peaks of the Olympics beyond.

  It wasn't often that a blue-collar policeman like LaMoia celebrated a capital gains cut, but when Congress voted a lowering of the surcharge to twenty percent, John LaMoia threw a beer bash for fifty of his closest friends-mostly women.

  Boldt stepped inside, and LaMoia threw a lock behind him. It clicked into place with authority.

  He caught him up on the Chapman visit. "I wanted to go back over what you saw at the bar before you went to bed and lost the immediacy of the moment."

  "Worried my memory will slip? That sounds like something Matthews would say," LaMoia countered.

  "Does it?" Boldt questioned, distracted-even disturbed-by the comment. "The Flu," Boldt said apologetically, "has thrown us together round the clock. You know how it is."

  LaMoia said, "Hey… I was just teasing, Sarge."

  "Let's go back over who was there tonight at the Cock and Bull," Boldt said.

  "Sarge, it's a pub. Probably a hundred of us in there. All unemployed cops. You expect me to recite the roll call?"

  Boldt interrupted. "Anyone from Property at the bar?"

  "Property?"

  "Chapman clammed up, but he grew all nervous when I pointed out he didn't belong in that pub. Daphne and I are thinking we've got this one wrong. What if Schock and Phillipp were into something Ron Chapman found out about?"

  "Something inside Property," LaMoia said, connecting the dots. He nodded, "I suppose it could fall that way, couldn't it? What about Maria and the possible I.I. connection?"

  "Tomorrow morning," Boldt said. "Tonight we deal with the assaults while the blood's still fresh."

  LaMoia squinted his eyes shut. When Boldt had first started working with him, LaMoia had been a smoothfaced young loudmouth, smart but a little too sure of himself. Now the face showed ten years of rough road, and though the mouth still broadcast his unparalleled self-confidence, the eyes revealed a more practical, sea soned man. "What I remember," he said, squinting ever more tightly, "in terms of Property, is that Pendegrass and some of them guys were whooping it up over the race-a NASCAR qualifying heat-on account I was trying to hear about this unscheduled pit stop, and I couldn't hear nothing because of
their racket. And I'm trying to think now, but I gotta put Chapman's arrival right about then. Maybe I looked up and caught sight of him or something, you know? Maybe I had this little brain fart on account Chapman's still active and I'm thinking it was gonna be him getting the shit beat out of him, and how I'm not gonna let something like that happen, and what a pain in the ass it was going to be for all concerned. And then I'm thinking how stupid it is for Chapman to show his face at the Bull. You know? And then I'm wondering if maybe he took a brick the way you did, because there's been more of that, you know, and so maybe he's showing up pissed off and ready to settle the score or something, and that kinda leans me away from wanting to help him out too much. I mean, if a guy is stupid enough to walk into a room like that, maybe it's Darwin's law that he get the living shit beat out of him. But the point is, the pit stop was something to do with communications. Radio problems between the crew and the driver, and they didn't want to get into the final third of the race without communication-"

  "John…"

  "Which means I heard the explanation, Sarge. Get it? I heard the guy explaining the pit stop. Which means that Chuck Pendegrass and his riot squad had either shut up, cut out, or all gone to take a piss at the same time, which is technically impossible on account the men's room is only one urinal and a crapper, and there must have been three or four of them over there hooting it up." He repeated, "I got a hunch Pendegrass split the minute Chapman walked through that door. And let me just say that he and his buddies did not impress me as being ready to leave a few minutes before that."

  "When Chapman arrived, or Schock and Phillipp?" Boldt pressed.

  "You got me there. Maybe it was a minute later."

  "But Chapman didn't speak to Pendegrass?"

  "I can't say one way or another. Maybe Pendegrass shut up when he saw Chapman, same way Chapman caught my eye." He added, "Chapman caught a lot of people by surprise, Sarge."

  "So Pendegrass left when?"

  "No clue."

  "They could have talked," Boldt theorized. "For that matter, they could have simply made eye contact. Some kind of visual."