Failure to appear jpb-11

by J. A. Jance

"She's also your ex-wife. Divorces notwithstanding, mothers expect to go to their daughters' weddings. Period."

  "So?"

  "So, in case you haven't noticed, I'm not interested in a one-night stand or even a several-month stand with you, Mr. J.P. Beaumont. I'm not that kind of girl. I like you a lot, but if there's ever going to be anything permanent between us, then we'd better make damn sure that if we're invited to Kelly and Jeremy's wedding, Karen and Dave Livingston are, too."

  Just like that, I got the picture. Talk about a slow learner! So when we went to see The Majestic Kid that afternoon, I sat up and paid attention, and not just because my future son-in-law was playing a lead role. I figured since this was a play about a girl who kept bailing her boyfriend out of the drink, then I needed to take lessons.

  During intermission, Alex excused herself. I thought she was going to the rest room. Instead, she must have used a phone. When she sat back down beside me, she squeezed my arm.

  "It worked," she said. "I checked with Kelly. She and Jeremy talked it over on the way home. Karen and Dave are invited to the wedding after all."

  "Hot damn!" I breathed. By then I understood Karen's presence at the wedding was in my own best interest.

  "Well," she hedged. "It's not all smooth sailing."

  "Why not? What do you mean?"

  "They want you to make the phone call."

  "Me!" I choked. "I have to do all the dirty work?"

  Alex smiled and nodded. "I told Kelly you wouldn't mind at all. That's what fathers are for. We'll call Karen as soon as the play is over and before we meet Dinky for dinner."

  I watched the second act of The Majestic Kid, but I can't say I enjoyed it very much. Alex, of course, savored every minute of it. Why wouldn't she? She didn't know Karen Moffit Beaumont Livingston. I did.

  Expecting the immediate outbreak of World War III, I wasn't willing to use a public pay phone to call Rancho Cucamonga. After the play, we took the Porsche, drove to a shady parking place near a park, and called on my cellular phone. I did try Dave's number at work but ended up with voice mail. Taking a deep breath, I dialed the Livingstons' home number.

  I hoped Dave would answer, but of course he didn't. "Hello, Karen," I said. "it's Beau."

  Her guard came up just like that. "What do you want?"

  Karen didn't used to be that defensive, and I don't blame her, not anymore. It's a perfectly understandable device to keep from being hurt again. Since she wasn't that way back in the old days when we were first married, I have to accept some of the responsibility for how she is now. Being married to an alcoholic isn't a bed of roses, so I'm willing to shoulder some of the blame. Some, but not all.

  "I've found Kelly," I heard myself blabbing into the phone. "She's in Ashland, Oregon, and she's okay… No, she's fine, really. Karen, listen to me. No, I'm telling you, she's all right."

  Karen was crying into the receiver so hard I wasn't sure if she heard a word I said. I looked over at Alex for help and encouragement. She nodded, urging me forward, but she didn't offer any other help. In this deal, I was strictly on my own.

  I forged ahead. "Karen," I said reasonably, "calm down and listen. This is important. Kelly is getting married on Monday. Tomorrow. I'm calling to see if there's any way you and Dave and Scott can make it up here on such short notice."

  The words had the same effect as a bucket of cold water. "Married?" Karen sputtered. "She can't do that."

  "Yes, she can."

  "Who's she marrying?"

  "A boy named Jeremy Cartwright."

  "When?"

  "I already told you. The wedding's set for two-thirty tomorrow afternoon here in Ashland, Oregon." I paused and took a deep breath before I said the rest. "Kelly's pregnant, Karen."

  I held the phone away from my ear during the angry tirade that followed, but sooner than I would have expected, Karen grew oddly silent.

  "Look," I said. "I know this hurts like hell, but you'll have to decide whether or not you want to be part of it."

  Seven hundred and fifty miles away, the telephone receiver clattered noisily onto a tabletop in Rancho Cucamonga. That in itself was a pretty definitive answer. I figured it was a final one, but a moment later Dave Livingston came on the phone.

  "Thanks for saving my ass and not letting her know I called you," he said. "I'll handle things on this end. Where can I call you once she comes around?"

  "You think she will?"

  "Yeah," Dave said. "I'm sure of it."

  I looked down at the phone in my hand. There really wasn't any place for him to return a call. Alex and I had play tickets for the Elizabethan. I had no intention of spending the remainder of the afternoon and evening in the car waiting for the telephone to ring.

  "Call my home number in Seattle," I said. "Leave a message for Ralph Ames."

  "Who's he?"

  "My attorney. If you have trouble with airline connections or anything like that, call Ralph and let him go to work on it. He'll sort it out."

  "You have an attorney who handles airline arrangements?" Dave asked. "It must be nice."

  "He's a friend," I explained. "Call him if you need help."

  I hung up and looked at Alex. "Way to go," she said.

  Then I dialed my home number in Seattle. Ralph still wasn't there, but he would be soon. He'd pitch in and do whatever needed doing. I left a message. Maybe voice mail isn't all bad. After that, I put down the phone and turned to Alex. "Okay. I've done my duty. Now what?"

  She glanced at her watch. "We've just got time to meet Dinky for dinner."

  "Where?"

  "It's a surprise."

  "Great. I love surprises." I turned the key. "Which way?"

  "Back through town then north past the light. Stop at the phone booth."

  "Stop at a phone booth? Are you putting me on?"

  "That's what the directions say," Alex said. "I've got them written down right here. It says there's no sign outside, just a three-by-five card on the door. Dinky says it's an old gas station, but the food's great."

  "Sure it is," I said, unconvinced. "Every old gas station serves great food. They've all turned into AM/PM Minimarts. What are we having? Ho-Ho's?"

  "Beau," Alex declared firmly, "Dinky would never steer us wrong."

  At the intersection, I turned left on Siskiyou Boulevard. "Wanna bet?" I said.

  Fortunately, we didn't bet. The food at Cowboy Sam's New Bistro probably would have been excellent, if we had actually stayed around long enough to eat any of it. We drove to an ancient, porticoed gas station north of town. The only distinguishing feature visible from the road really was a phone booth, but the inside of the building had been remodeled into a series of small, intimate lace-curtained dining rooms. The several glossily enameled wooden tables-I counted only eight-were already filling up.

  The proprietor, who must have been Cowboy Sam himself, led us to a table where Dinky Holloway was already seated and waiting. Even to someone who had only seen her once, she didn't look quite right. To Alex it must have been even more apparent that something was dreadfully wrong.

  "Dinky, what's going on? You look terrible."

  Dinky gave Alex a wan smile. We started to sit down. The way the table was arranged, I headed for the chair that was next to the wall, but this was a very old gas station. The low, sloping ceiling was too short for me to stand upright next to the wall. There seemed to be a lot of that going around in Ashland: first the sloping bathroom ceiling at the Oak Hill B now the same kind of construction at a converted gasoline station. I was beginning to think Ashland was built by and for midgets.

  Alex and I quickly traded seats while Denver Holloway studied me with a frankly assessing look. "Are you really as trustworthy as Alex says?" she asked.

  I glanced at Alex. "I'd like to think so, why?"

  Dinky reached into a cavernous purse and extracted a semi-clear plastic container, the kind you get from video stores.

  "What's that?" I asked.

  She put it down on the
table and then pushed it to the center as though she didn't want it too near her.

  "Just what it looks like," she answered. "A videotape. It showed up in my inter-office mail this afternoon."

  Since Denver Holloway was regarding the container with the kind of guarded wariness most people reserve for a coiled rattlesnake, it seemed possible she was leaving something unsaid.

  "What kind of videotape?" I asked.

  "Filth."

  "Filth?" I repeated, not sure I had heard her correctly. "As in porno flick?"

  She nodded grimly. "It came today along with this." She pushed a piece of paper across the table. Typed on it was the following: Dinky, Someone like this is a liability to the Festival and will drive away donors. Get rid of her as soon as possible. Monica.

  "As soon as I read it, I went storming down to Monica's office and bitched her out. I'm a director with some artistic integrity. I'll be damned if I'll be threatened by some hotshot golden girl pulling the purse strings."

  Alex looked at me and rolled her eyes. "That's one meeting I'm glad I missed. What happened?"

  "Monica denied it," Dinky continued. "Said she'd never seen any videotape, and that she hadn't sent the note, either."

  "What happened then?"

  "I went back to my office to play the tape."

  "And?"

  Dinky's face crumpled. "It's awful. I've never seen anything like it. When I realized what it was, I turned it off."

  Whatever Denver Holloway had seen, it had rocked her to the very core. There are only a few things guaranteed to produce that kind of appalled reaction in decent, law-abiding folks.

  "Snuff film or kiddie porn?" I asked.

  Dinky swallowed hard. "I couldn't believe what I was seeing, and she wasn't even that old. It's monstrous." She paused before continuing in a small, constrained voice. "Ever since, all I've been able to think about is what'll happen to her now, and what about the baby?"

  Alex reached out and put a comforting hand on Denver Holloway's wrist. "The girl in the video is someone you know?"

  Dinky nodded, her face a pasty white. Two gigantic tears spilled from her highly magnified eyes and dribbled slowly down her pale cheeks. "It's Tanya," she whispered miserably. "Tanya Dunseth-my Juliet. She must have been only eleven or twelve, but I recognized her instantly. I'd know that profile anywhere. What's going to happen to her?"

  Full of brisk reassurance, Alex patted the back of Dinky's hand. "Nothing's going to happen to Tanya, and no one's going to hold it against her. She's the one who's been victimized. After something like that, it's even more of a wonder that she's been able to do what she's done. What a remarkable young woman!"

  "But you don't understand," Dinky added shakily. "I recognized the man, too. The one in the videotape. He's younger than his picture in the paper today, but I never forget a face. It's him all right."

  Suddenly, it all came together for me. "Martin Shore?" I asked in astonishment. "Martin Shore is the one on the tape?"

  Dinky nodded.

  "The dead man," Alex said, shaking her head. "I can't believe it."

  "It's true," Dinky replied, her face suffused with grief. "I don't know what to do."

  "This is important," I said at once. "We have to take the tape to Detective Fraymore, no question."

  Dinky shook her head. "I was afraid that's what you'd say. Why?"

  "Because it's against the law to conceal evidence in a homicide investigation, that's why. We're talking motive and opportunity here. I, for one, don't want to be charged with being an accomplice after the fact, and neither do you."

  By now the restaurant had filled up. During our low-voiced, highly charged discussion, I had twice waved off the proprietor of Cowboy Sam's New Bistro. Now he approached us more determinedly. "Would anyone here care to see the wine list?" he asked.

  I took several twenties out of my billfold and fanned them out on the table. Then, using a cloth napkin to protect any possible fingerprints, I picked up the box containing the videotape.

  "The lady isn't feeling well," I said to Cowboy Sam, nodding in Dinky's direction at the same time. For her part, Denver Holloway did indeed look violently ill. "I'm afraid we won't be able to stay for dinner. Not tonight."

  CHAPTER 7

  Other people went to see Shrew in the Elizabethan that night. Alex and I didn't. Instead, we accompanied Dinky Holloway and spent most of the early evening closeted in Ashland's surprisingly modern city hall along with Detective Gordon Fraymore. He listened to what Dinky had to say in total silence. When she finished, he used a handkerchief to preserve fingerprints when he picked up the tape.

  "Right back," he said. "I'm going to take this down the hall and have a look-see." He was gone a long time-half an hour or more. Back in the office again, he placed the tape in the middle of his cluttered desk.

  "Looks like Shore all right," he muttered. "I thought there might be somebody else in the film as well, maybe another male we might have seen before or possibly even another kid. They sometimes do that-use more than one, but not this time."

  "You watched the whole thing, didn't you?" Dinky said accusingly. "That's disgusting." Alex nodded in grim agreement, her lips pursed into a thin line of protest.

  The expressions on both their faces said neither one of the women was buying Fraymore's excuse for watching the movie. I think they thought he was down the hall getting his rocks off. I wasn't fond of Gordon Fraymore, but I knew what he was up to. I didn't fault him for watching whatever was in that video because, unlike Dinky and Alex, I knew why he was doing it-because it was his job.

  I think the general public has come to accept the idea that objects equal evidence. The video case, the letter, the envelope, all might possibly contain trace evidence or latent prints that could prove valuable. What is less apparent is the importance of the tape itself and what information might possibly be gleaned from it.

  It's a lesson I learned the hard way back in the mid-seventies when I was a new guy to Homicide and there was no such thing as videotape. Vice brought in an especially ugly 16-mm snuff film that featured a twelve-year-old Seattle girl who had disappeared on her way home from school. I barfed my guts out the first time I saw it. My partner, a world-weary old guy named Bert Claggerhorn, sat us down in the film room, and we watched that damn movie over and over, hour after hour.

  Finally, I raised hell and said I'd be damned if I'd watch it one more time, and I didn't. But Bert went right on ahead without me. The amateurs who specialize in pornographic films are just exactly that-amateurs. They're not overly concerned about production values. After watching the film enough times, Bert finally noticed that an overlooked television set was playing in the background. Either the cameraman forgot to turn it off, or, more likely, he was using the volume to help mask the sounds of what he and his pal were doing.

  After spotting that one telling detail, Bert ordered blowups made, one from every foot or so of film. When the blowups came back, some of them showed soaps and afternoon game shows that can be seen on television sets anywhere in the country. But filming must have run long, with occasional pauses in the action. Toward the end, the programming carried on over into the evening news, and that's how Bert nailed those bastards.

  Studying the blowups, he was able to identify several newscasters and a weatherman who appeared only on the local Bellingham station. Armed with that knowledge, we zeroed in on the Bellingham area. Once we narrowed down the locale and trained the full focus of our investigation there, it didn't take long to flush out our two "movie-mogul" creeps. A bloodstained mattress, the same torn one that was clearly visible in Bert's blowups, was still on the bed. Eventually, those bloodstains were traced to the victim. Thanks to Bert's detailed study of that film, the killers were found and put away for good.

  Fraymore seemed bemused by the intensity of Dinky's reaction. "I'm conducting an investigation here, Ms. Holloway," he said. "I understand your abhorrence toward this particular film, but we have to be thorough. That movie gives
us something we didn't have before-motive."

  In view of the first skirmish in Fraymore's and my little turf war, I should have kept my mouth shut altogether, but keeping my mouth shut has never been one of my strong suits.

  "What are you going to do about Tanya Dunseth?" I asked the question straight out, recognizing my blunder as soon as Fraymore turned his narrowed gaze in my direction.

  "What business is that of yours?" he demanded.

  With Alex looking on, I didn't want to back down. I shrugged noncommittally. "I just want to know, that's all."

  Fraymore's thick neck bulged over his eighteen-inch collar. "Did I miss something here?" he asked. "Did I turn my back and all of a sudden you hired on as an investigator with the Ashland Police Department?"

  The sarcasm wasn't lost on me. There was no humor in his delivery. Fraymore was the local chief dog, and I was a mangy, out-of-town cur encroaching on previously marked territory.

  "I don't believe I have to remind you that you have no legal standing whatsoever in this jurisdiction, Mister Beaumont," Gordon Fraymore continued. "The City of Ashland has no letter of mutual aid on file with the City of Seattle. In other words, butt out. That badge of yours is no good here. Furthermore, I don't appreciate interference from visiting firemen. You just go on about your business-see some plays, get your daughter married off, do whatever it is you want to do while you're down here, but leave the law enforcement end of things to me."

  I may be slow, but I got the picture. "Right."

  Fraymore's and my verbal scuffle went right over Dinky Holloway's head. "You wouldn't really arrest Tanya, would you?" Dinky asked, as though it were only a remote possibility, if that.

  Listening with a cop's ear, I knew better. It wasn't just what Fraymore said, it was also how he said it. Tanya Dunseth was in deep trouble. Dinky might have regarded Tanya as a talented young actress and fine mother, as a valued cast member and fellow employee. Gordon Fraymore saw her as a suspected killer, plain and simple. In the world of homicide investigators, suspected killers become convicted ones. And that seemed the most likely outcome in this case.