by J. A. Jance
I called Wall Street Tower. When no one answered the phone in Marty’s room, I drove straight to the Five-Spot and parked on the street at a parking meter that had an astonishing thirty-nine minutes still left on it. Darting inside out of the rain, I spotted Marty sitting alone in a booth at the far end of the room, absently stirring a cup of coffee while staring down at the black-and-white-tiled floor.
“Hey, Marty,” I said. “How’s it going?”
“Who is it?” he asked, holding out a tremulous hand. “Can’t see the way I used to, you know. This damned macular degeneration.”
“Beaumont,” I said. “J. P. Beaumont.”
Martin Woodman’s hand may have trembled when he offered it to me, but his grip was as bone-crushingly firm as ever.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “I remember you. From Seattle PD. You’re with that new outfit now, aren’t you, the one from the AG’s office? What’s its name again?”
“Special Homicide Investigation Team.”
He nodded sagely. “That’s right. SHIT. Hell of a name, if you ask me. Wouldn’t have gotten away with calling it that back in the old days, never in a million years. Have a seat, J.P. What can I do for you?”
Marty’s vision may have been going, but his mental faculties were as sharp as ever.
“I’m looking for William Winkler,” I said without preamble. “I was wondering if he’s still around.”
“Wink? Oh, sure. Lives at a retirement home over in West Seattle. It’s not that good a place, but it’s the best he could afford. Wink’s cantankerous as hell, but then he always has been. I’m guessing his son put him there when he and his wife couldn’t take care of him anymore or when they couldn’t stand being around him.”
“Health’s no good?” I asked.
“Hell,” Marty replied. “At our age, if you’re still alive, you shouldn’t complain. Doesn’t do any good, anyway. What do you want him for?”
“I’m following up on a case of his from a long time ago. I wanted to see if he could shed any light on it.”
Marty Woodman frowned. “You know he left the department…”
“Under a cloud?” I supplied. “Yes, but all this went on quite a while before that. You wouldn’t happen to have his address or telephone number, would you?”
“I do, but it’s back at my apartment. If you wouldn’t mind walking me over there. They keep trying to get me to use this.” He picked up a white cane and tapped it impatiently on the floor. “But it’s hard teaching an old dog new tricks. So usually, when I’m ready to go back home, I call the reception desk and they send someone over to walk me there.”
As we walked through the rain across the plaza and into the lobby of Wall Street Tower, I wondered how someone as blind as Marty Woodman would be able to find and decipher an address or phone number, but I shouldn’t have worried. Marty’s one-bedroom apartment was tiny and immaculate. Most of the living room was occupied by an enormous dining-room table, the surface of which was almost completely covered with an array of complicated computer equipment and a snarl of cables.
Standing next to the CRT, Marty clapped his hands once and the familiar start-up screen appeared. “Works just like one of those clickers,” Marty said with a grin. “One clap turns it on, two turn it off. When I told Footprinters I was going blind, some of them came over and jury-rigged this sound-and-voice-activated outfit together for me. They didn’t want me to quit working, especially since nobody else wants to do what I do. Have a chair,” he added. “This shouldn’t take too long. I call her Joyce, by the way.”
And it didn’t take long at all. In order to access his database, he spoke into some unseen microphone. His voice-recognition software responded in the form of a computer-generated female voice. Marty’s “Joyce” sounded just like the woman who has spent years annoying everyone unfortunate enough to venture into the phone company’s version of voice-mail hell. Before long Joyce was reeling off Wink Winkler’s telephone number along with an address on Thirty-fifth in West Seattle. I jotted them down as she delivered them.
“You get all that?” Marty asked.
“Yes, I did. Thanks. But you were wrong.”
Marty frowned. “About what?”
“You said you were too old to learn new tricks. Obviously you have.”
The frown disappeared. Marty gave the top of his CRT an affectionate pat. “Modern science is a miracle, isn’t it? Without her I’d be just plain useless.”
I had to agree with him there. Modern science was a miracle. “You’re right,” I said. “It’s downright amazing, but you might think about giving that cane of yours a try, too.”
“Why?” he asked. “So I can walk in front of a bus?”
“Never mind,” I said.
When I left, Marty walked me as far as the door. “I don’t know what kind of a case you’re working,” he said, “but don’t be too hard on poor old Wink. He did all right when he first left the department-had a lot of helpful connections and made some good investments, but then things started falling apart. Drank too much, gambled too much, his marriage broke up. You know the drill.”
I nodded. It was an end-of-career path for far too many of the cops I knew.
“He and his son wound up owning a place called Emerald City Security, a moderately successful rent-a-cop company,” Marty continued. “That went on until a few years ago. I’m not sure of all the details, but when the dust settled, the kid had the company and Wink ended up with next to nothing.”
“I’ll bear all that in mind,” I said.
As I rode down in the elevator, I realized that the very existence of Marty Woodman’s computer setup was one of those things where what goes around comes around. For a change it had happened the right way. After all the years Marty had spent making sure Footprinters weren’t forgotten, it was nice to know that they had returned the favor.
People who live in Seattle have two constant sources of complaint. We’re forever whining about either the weather or the traffic, or both. It seems to me that people who don’t like the weather should leave. That by itself would probably go a long way toward fixing the traffic woes. And then, the next time our elected officials ask for money to fix the roads, the complainers who stay on should all belly up to the bar and offer to pay their fair share.
All this is to say that the drive to West Seattle, which should have taken about twenty minutes in the middle of the day, ended up taking an hour and twenty minutes. I hadn’t called ahead to say I was dropping by because I didn’t want to give Wink Winkler an opportunity to tell me not to. Besides, I didn’t want to give him too much time in advance to wonder about why I was paying him a visit.
Even from the street, Home Sweet Home Retirement Center looked depressing. Someone had carved a steep wheelchair ramp up the bank between the street and a tiny front yard that was a sea of melting snow and mud and punctuated with cigarette butts. A second ramp, a makeshift plywood travesty covered with frayed indoor-outdoor carpeting, went from yard level to a rickety front porch. A hand-stenciled sign on the door casing announced “All Visitors Check with Front Desk,” but of course there was no one manning the dingy front desk. The place smelled of mold and mildew and years of bad cooking, but a current health inspection certificate was prominently displayed behind the desk as if defying anyone to question the center’s good reputation.
Home Sweet Home made Marty Woodman’s digs at Wall Street Tower and Lars and Beverly Jenssen’s cozy apartment at the Queen Anne Gardens seem downright palatial.
There was a bell on the desk. I rang it three times before anyone appeared, then a door opened and a tiny Asian woman stepped through a swinging door. She looked old enough and frail enough to be one of the residents, but she was wearing a baggy flowered uniform and carried a broom with a handle that was a foot taller than she was.
“Yes?” she asked.
“I’d like to see William Winkler.”
“One moment,” she said and disappeared.
I cooled my heels fo
r the better part of five minutes before the door opened again. This time a heavyset, bulldog-faced black woman stepped into the office alcove. “What do you want?” she demanded.
“I’m here to see William Winkler.”
“Is Mr. Winkler expecting you?”
“No,” I said. “It’s a surprise.”
“Our guests don’t like no surprises,” she said. “Can I tell him what this is about?”
I have a problem with gatekeepers. I’ve always had a problem with gatekeepers. If and when I get to heaven, I’ll probably end up arguing with Saint Peter himself.
“It’s a private matter,” I said, handing her one of my cards. “If you don’t mind, I’d rather discuss it with Mr. Winkler directly.”
The woman held the card at arm’s length to read it. “All right,” she said with a sigh as she stuffed the card into her pocket. “This way.”
I followed her down a narrow corridor to the back of the house. Along the way we went past a series of rooms, all of them with their doors propped open. A television game show blared from one. In others I caught sad glimpses of aged residents sitting quietly in chairs positioned next to grimy windows. There were no bars on the windows, but the inmates of Home Sweet Home were as much prisoners in their individual rooms as if they were incarcerated felons sentenced to solitary confinement. And William Winkler’s existence was no different from that of any of his fellows.
Because his room was at the very back of the house, he had two dirty windows instead of the usual one. His view consisted of a dilapidated garage and a moss-encrusted block wall, so having those two windows didn’t offer much of a benefit. And since his chair was positioned with its back to both windows, I doubt Wink spent much time savoring the view. He sat dozing in a vinyl-covered recliner that resembled the leather one back home in my condo, but stuffing poking through holes on the arms testified to years of very hard use. A walker with traction-enhancing tennis balls on the feet was parked within easy reach next to his chair.
“Mr. Winkler,” my escort said. “Someone’s here to see you.”
Startled awake, he gave me a sour look. “Who are you?” he demanded querulously. “I suppose you’re some lawyer that jerk of a son of mine has sent around to hassle me some more, right? He can’t wait for me to die. Cheated me out of my own company. Now he wants to declare me incompetent so he can have control of whatever pittance I have left. How’s that for gratitude?”
Having been warned that Wink was somewhat cantankerous, I wasn’t surprised by his initial tirade. “My name’s Beaumont,” I said. “J. P. Beaumont. Marty Woodman said I could find you here.”
“Oh,” Wink said, softening a little. “Marty sent you? That’s different then. Have a chair.”
The black woman had lingered in the room during this exchange. Now, evidently satisfied that I was an approved visitor, she left Wink and me alone. Next to the bed sat a single chair. I picked it up and dragged it over closer to Wink’s.
“What do you want?” he asked once I was seated.
“I work for the Washington State Attorney General’s office with the Special Homicide Investigation Team. I’m looking into one of your cold cases from years ago.”
Wink’s countenance brightened with a hint of interest. “One of mine,” he muttered. “Which one?”
“From May of 1950,” I said. “Madeline Marchbank. Her friends called her Mimi.”
That brief flicker of interest went away, not because it burned itself out but because Wink Winkler slammed the door shut on it. “Don’t recall it at all,” he said firmly.
There’s a new technology out these days, a new kind of lie detector-or rather truth detector. It measures the way a subject’s brain waves react to familiar information. Lie detectors measure respiration, blood pressure, and galvanic skin responses when the interviewee gives untruthful answers to questions. The problem with that is that experienced lie-detector subjects can sometimes train themselves to outwit the old machines. With this new equipment measuring involuntary brain waves, it’s impossible to trick the brain into reacting to familiar information as though it were unfamiliar.
I may not be new technology, but I operate on a similar system. I could see from that initial involuntary reaction that Wink Winkler remembered exactly who Madeline Marchbank was as well as what had happened to her. If he was prepared to lie about it more than fifty years later, I wondered why.
“Madeline was a young woman who was supposedly murdered by an intruder in her home with her mother confined to a bed in a nearby room,” I explained smoothly, going along with the program that Wink remembered nothing. “But now a new witness has surfaced,” I added. “An eyewitness who saw the whole thing and says the initial attack occurred outside the house, near the back porch. It’s possible the victim was still alive when she was carried into the house, where she died.”
“You say all this happened way back in 1950?” Wink asked, still playing dumb. “Where’s the supposed eyewitness been all this time? If she knew about this, why didn’t she come forward years ago?”
She! I caught the slip almost as soon as it was out of Wink’s mouth. I had made no mention that the newly discovered witness was female, but Winkler already knew that. That meant that regardless of whether or not he had questioned Bonnie Jean Dunleavy, he had known about her existence all along. Not wanting to reveal that he had tipped his hand, I glossed it over as well as I could.
“Let’s just say she’s been out of touch,” I said.
He stared at me for some time without speaking. “Well, like I said, I don’t remember anything about it, so you’re barking up the wrong tree asking me.”
“You had a pretty good closure rate back in those days, didn’t you?” I asked.
“So what if I did?”
“It just seems odd to me that you don’t remember one you didn’t close.”
“Are you calling me a liar?” he demanded.
“No,” I returned. “Just surprisingly forgetful.”
“Wait till you’re my age,” he said. “See how much you remember.”
I took my leave then. There was no sense arguing with the man. No matter how much I didn’t want to, it looked as though I was going to have to go back to Paul Kramer with my hat in my hand and beg him for a look at the Mimi Marchbank evidence box. And since there’s no sense in putting off the inevitable, I headed straight for police headquarters. Once again I went through the whole check-in procedure. This time, though, rather than stopping off at Records, I went on up to Homicide on the seventh floor.
And was astonished. This was my first visit to Homicide since the move to the new building. And it wasn’t just the building that was new. No wonder all the old broken-down furniture had been abandoned in the basement of the Public Safety Building. All the furniture here was new. Somewhere a high-tech company had disappeared and some City of Seattle budget genius had used the resulting bankruptcy proceedings to furnish the new building-in cherry. Cherry cubicle dividers! Cherry desks! Cherry shelves! I felt like I’d landed in a cabinetry warehouse instead of a homicide squad.
I wandered through a sea of unfamiliar faces before someone called my name. “Hey, Beau,” Clarence Holly said, coming forward to shake my hand. “I thought you gave this stuff up.”
Clarence, who had been coming into Homicide from Patrol just as I was leaving, seemed happy to see me.
“Stopped by for old times’ sake,” I said. “Which way is Kramer’s office?”
“That way,” he said, pointing toward a wall of windows. “A room with a view. Don’t be such a stranger. Stop by later to visit.”
“I will,” I said.
Following Clarence’s nod, I headed toward the windows, ones that looked out on the wet expanse of Fifth Avenue, seven stories below. Kramer’s old office, the one we had called the Fishbowl, had been a glass enclosure that looked out on Homicide. This one, with Captain Kramer’s name on a nameplate beside it, had its back to the unit and its face-including a door and anothe
r interior window-looking toward the view. Kramer himself was nowhere to be seen, but the Marchbank evidence box was sitting in plain sight on the desk. So much for maintaining the chain of evidence.
I was standing outside the office, cooling my heels and looking down at the rain pelting the melting snow on Fifth Avenue, when my phone rang. It was Ralph.
“What’s up?” I asked. “You sound upset.”
“I am upset,” he growled back at me. “Ron just fired me.”
“He what?”
“Fired me. He told me he wants to plead guilty at the preliminary hearing, for God’s sake! When I told him that was a perfectly stupid idea, he told me to hit the road. You’ve got to talk to him, Beau. See if you can pound some sense into his head.”
I could barely believe my ears. “Ron is going to plead guilty? How can he do that?”
“Beats me. The only thing that makes sense is that he’s protecting someone,” Ralph said. “Or trying to.”
“Who?”
“I think maybe it’s Heather. I gather she’s been quite the handful lately-boy troubles, playing hooky from school, really, really didn’t want to be dragged down to Tacoma to live with her mother.”
Ralph didn’t say anything about possible drug use, and neither did I.
“So much so that she’d shoot her own mother to keep from going?”
“It’s the only thing I can think of,” Ralph continued. “By copping a plea, Ron probably hopes to forestall a more thorough investigation, one that would point suspicion in Heather’s direction. You’ve got to talk him out of this, Beau. Heather’s a juvenile. The worst she would end up with is a couple of years in Juvie. If Ron goes down for Rosemary’s murder, he’ll go away for good. A plea deal might take the death penalty off the table, but for an officer-related domestic-violence homicide, life without parole would be the next most likely possibility.”
The thought of Jared Peters growing up without his father made a hole in the pit of my stomach.
“I’ll go see him right away,” I said.
