Improbable Cause

by J. A. Jance

  Al and I moved back to the living room couch to wait while Rachel carried dirty dishes and leftovers from the dining room into the kitchen.

  While we sat there waiting for her to finish, I kept wondering how I'd paint my way back out of the obstruction-of-justice corner I was in. I envisioned Gray Panthers coming out of the woodwork to protest and make my life miserable once they got wind that I'd so much as threatened to lock her up. Not only that, I know from experience that Seattle Police Department brass listen with a very attentive ear when senior citizens start protesting. Pissing off the elderly, particularly the vocal elderly, is bad for public relations. Every reporter in Seattle would have a field day.

  Several minutes passed. Several long minutes. Eventually, it registered in my brain that although water was still running in the kitchen, I was no longer hearing the accompanying clatter of rinsing plates and silverware. I got up and hurried to the kitchen with Big Al right on my heels.

  The kitchen was empty. The faucet was running full blast, but Rachel Miller was long gone. She had slipped out the open back door with the noise of the water masking her movements.

  We went outside, dashed up the grassy lawn to Fremont Avenue, and looked in both directions. Rachel Miller was nowhere in sight.

  "I'll be a son of a bitch!" Big Al muttered.

  Those were my sentiments exactly.

  CHAPTER 5

  Rachel Miller got us good. Al and I had been snookered, plain and simple. Without exchanging a word, we walked back to our car, got in, and drove away. It wasn't something either one of us wanted to discuss or write down in a report or even remember. It was the oldest trick in the book, and a couple of homicide squad veterans had no excuse for being taken in by it.

  "I guess you don't want to call Sergeant Watkins and put out an APB on the lady." Big Al's comment was laced with sarcasm.

  "We'll just let it pass," I said.

  "We sure as hell will," he agreed.

  If word of the incident leaked out, I knew we'd be the laughingstock of the department, enduring weeks of pointed ribbing from all the other detectives on the fifth floor of the Public Safety Building. Neither one of us was tough enough for that. No way Jose!

  We drove up and down the streets of the neighborhood, trying to spot Rachel Miller, but there was no sign of her. She had vanished completely, totally, although the Buick and the U-Haul remained parked exactly where Daisy had left them. Knowing that Rachel had not only ditched us but that she'd done it on foot rubbed salt into the wound.

  We stopped at the stop sign at Forty-eighth and Fremont and waited for the break in traffic. "Why do you think she took off like that?" I asked. "It doesn't make sense."

  "It does to me," Al grumbled.

  "What do you mean?"

  "It's exactly what you'd expect from a dame kooky enough to love that stupid bird." Al was still packing a grudge against Buddy. He wasn't any too happy with me, either.

  "So what do you want to do now?" he asked. "Try getting a line on the wife, go back to Cedar Heights and talk to the neighbors, or track down the carpet installer?"

  It was an impressive list of possibilities. Multiple choice. I picked one.

  "Let's stop by the carpet company on the way back downtown. I remember seeing it down by the Fremont Bridge. It's on our way."

  Behind us a car honked impatiently for us to move. We were blocking traffic. Al glowered at the driver in his rearview mirror, but he turned left and got back on Fremont going south.

  I could remember back when the Damm Fine Carpets building used to house a fire extinguisher company, although I had forgotten the exact name. I had driven past it for years, and I remembered hearing stories that the place had originally served as a Model T Ford assembly plant.

  Now, though, all trace of both Model T's and fire extinguishers had been obliterated. The place sported a brand-new coat of brilliant yellow paint, and the company's name, emblazoned in six-foot-tall block letters, ran the entire length of the building. The only reminder that the shell was a relic from a bygone era was the old-fashioned metal grillwork in each of the small glass windows.

  We parked in a "customer only" parking place and went inside the compact showroom. It was ten to three when an eager salesman zeroed in on us. We must have looked like live ones. "Can I interest you in some carpet today?" he asked, rubbing his hands together.

  I shook my head. "Actually, we're here looking for the owner. Is he in?"

  The man shrugged and glanced down at his watch. "Mr. Damm isn't available right now, not for ten minutes or so." He pointed toward one side of the room, where we saw a counter with a woman sitting behind it. "That's Mr. Damm's secretary. You'll have to talk to her."

  We walked over to the counter. The secretary was a reasonably attractive sweet young thing in her early twenties. She had that funny, nerve-wracking blink of people who have yet to master the art of comfortably wearing their contact lenses. The most noticeable thing about her, however, were her fingernails. They were at least two inches long. Each. It crossed my mind that typing couldn't be a major part of her job description. A brass plate on the counter told us her name was Cindy.

  "We're here to see Mr. Damm," I said when she looked up at me and blinked.

  "Was he expecting you?" she asked.

  "No, we're here on police business." I held out my ID. She took it, holding it close to her face to read it. Even with the contacts, she must have been terrifically nearsighted.

  "He'll be out in about..." She held her watch up to her face. "In about five minutes now. You can talk to him then. If you'd like to have a chair ..."

  She motioned us into two blue side chairs across from the counter, and we settled down to wait. It wasn't long before a tiny alarm on the secretary's watch went off. She got up and hurried to a door halfway down a short hallway behind her. I had known there was a doorway there, and from the outside it looked ordinary enough. When she opened it, however, I could tell it was anything but ordinary.

  The inside of the door was covered with fur. Fake white fur. The kind you'd expect to find on a soft, stuffed Easter bunny in some little kid's Easter basket. The secretary disappeared into a room, closing the door behind her.

  I nudged Al. "Did you get a load of that?"

  He rolled his eyes and shook his head. "This must be our lucky day," he said.

  Moments later the secretary reappeared. "Mr. Damm will see you now," she announced. "In his office. This way, please." Since she stood holding the fur-lined door open and motioning for us to enter, that had to be the place. We got up and walked inside.

  Outside the door, the interior of Damm Fine Carpets looked like any other fluorescent-lit, modern storefront and warehouse, but walking through the door into Richard Damm's office was like entering another world. I had never seen an office anything like it. It was dark for one thing, the heavy, oppressive darkness of a dim bar or darkened theater when you first come in from outside and your eyes haven't adjusted to the light.

  Big Al and I stopped long enough to get our bearings while the door swished shut behind us. The better part of the wall to the right of the door was made up of a huge, dimly lit fish tank complete with a wide variety of colorful fish. Beside the aquarium, in one corner of the room was a small fountain where beads of water cascaded down in a circle around a statuette of a naked lady.

  At the far end of the room was a seating area—a conversation pit I think they call them—facing a complex home entertainment center. The back of a man's head was barely visible over the top of the couch. He was seated directly in front of a color television set that was playing the credits to some afternoon program. On either side of the set were a series of four VCRs, all of them with red lights glowing.

  By now, our eyes had adjusted to the light enough so that details of the room gradually became clearer. The secretary had called it an office, but there was no sign of a desk or a file cabinet. Directly across from us was a fully equipped, well-stocked bar, and to our left was a tiny eff
iciency kitchen. The place didn't look like an office at all. It was a home away from home.

  There were no windows in the room. The carpeting, plush white, not only covered the floor, but ran halfway up the walls wherever walls were visible. It reminded me of a padded cell. For all I know, it was a padded cell.

  Richard Damm didn't bother to get up. "Come on in," he called. "I always watch 'General Hospital' during lunch, but it's over now."

  He was fiddling with a remote control. The program credits disappeared and a movie came on. He had evidently stopped a video in midstream, because the action was already well in progress.

  It was one of those Debbie-Does-Dallas kinds of porno flicks, one the first amendment never should have protected in the first place. I thought Big Al's eyes were going to pop right out of his head when he saw what was happening on the screen.

  I suppose I shouldn't make fun of Al. I wasn't exactly immune myself. When the sound track got too graphic, Damm finally turned off the volume, but not the machine. Without bothering to take his eyes from the movie, he motioned for us to sit down. "I'm Richard Damm," he said shortly. "What can I do for you?"

  The owner of Damm Fine Carpets was your basic low-brow voyeur with all the class and style of a K-Mart blue-light special. He was probably in his mid to late fifties with a luxurious headful of wavy silver hair and a matching mustache. A closer examination revealed that the mustache was his. The hair wasn't.

  He was definitely not a staid, three-piece-suit, coat-and-tie man. He was wearing a gaudy blue-and-white Hawaiian shirt with white slacks and turquoise boat shoes. The top three buttons on his palm-tree-covered shirt were unbuttoned, exposing far too much of a totally hairless chest. He wore not one but three long gold chains and lots of sickly sweet froufrou water. I figured the chains were as phony as the hair. The bony remains of a Kentucky Fried Chicken lunch sat on the coffee table in front of him.

  "Help yourself to a drink," he suggested.

  "No thanks," I said. "We're on duty."

  "Coffee, then? It's already made."

  "No thank you. Nothing. We're in a hurry." I was trying my best to keep the questions on track, to keep my mind from wandering away from the point of our visit, but Debbie and her antics with the men from Dallas were interfering with my train of thought.

  "We're looking for one of your employees," I said.

  For the first time, Richard Damm glanced away from the writhing living-color bodies on his television screen. He seemed mildly interested. "Which one?" he asked.

  Al and I sat down side by side on the couch. "Larry Martin," I answered.

  Richard Damm sighed, punched his remote control, and froze a mass of naked, nubile bodies in midscrew. "That little shit," he said. "I'm looking for him, too."

  "He didn't come to work today?"

  "That's right. He left a note saying that he was taking this week off. The whole goddamned week, when I've got twenty-three installations scheduled. He can take the rest of his life off, for all I care. If he shows his face around here again, I'll fire his ass."

  Damm got up, walked to the kitchen, and came striding back with a stack of Styrofoam cups and a coffeepot. "A hell of a lot of thanks a guy gets for trying to help."

  In his agitation, Damm must have forgotten I had told him we didn't want coffee. Truth be known, he probably hadn't been listening. He poured coffee into three cups, passed one each to Al and me, then flopped back down on the couch with his own. He punched a button on the remote control and the bodies on the screen resumed their impossible contortions.

  "What do you mean, 'thanks'?" I asked.

  Richard Damm shook his head. "Larry's been straight for five years, give or take. I figured he had his act together, that I could trust him. But now this."

  He lit a cigarette and pulled a brimming ashtray within easy reach.

  "Straight?" I asked. "I don't understand."

  "Me either. It's guys like him who make it tough on everybody else."

  "You'd better tell us about it," I suggested.

  "Like I said, I hired him about five years ago, fresh out of the slammer. I let him work in my warehouse. It was like my civic duty, know what I mean? One of those work-release arrangements. It looked to me like it was working out fine."

  "He's worked for you the whole time, then?"

  Richard Damm nodded. "He handled the warehouse job for a couple of years, and then asked if he could start doing installations. He could make a lot more money doing that. I figured what the hell. He was a good enough worker. Turned out I was right. At least it looked that way at the time. He was a little slow at first, but he caught on."

  "What did he get sent up for?" Al asked.

  "Vehicular manslaughter. DWI. He came out of the joint sober and went straight to AA. Hasn't had a drop since, as far as I know."

  "How about lately? Any unexplained absences before this morning?"

  Damm shook his head. "Not so as you'd notice. But he screwed up a truck over the weekend. My mechanic is pissed as hell about that, and I've been waiting all morning to hear whether or not he got that dentist's office finished before he took off."

  "Dr. Nielsen's office?" I asked.

  Richard Damm seemed surprised. "That's right. How'd you know about that? Nielsen's a son of a bitch to work for. I call him 'Mister Got Bucks.' He's just like an old woman— fussy as hell. If Larry took off without completing that job, Nielsen'll have my ass. I tried calling his office a couple of minutes ago. No answer."

  And there isn't going to be, I thought. I said, "What makes you think Martin didn't complete the job?"

  "You wanna know what I really think?" Richard Damm demanded.

  "Yes."

  "I think he went out on the town Friday night, fell off the wagon, and got himself in some kind of hassle. Maybe even skipped town. If he did, he took off with enough of my tools to be able to get himself another job wherever the hell he ends up."

  I happened to know that most of Larry Martin's tools, minus the kicker that was down at the crime lab, were still in Dr. Frederick Nielsen's office, but I didn't tell Richard Damm that. I wasn't about to tell him anything I didn't have to. For some reason—maybe the phony hair, maybe the phony smile—Richard Damm rubbed me the wrong way.

  "You always jump to these kinds of conclusions when one of your employees doesn't show up for work on a Monday morning?" I asked.

  Richard Damm's whole manner changed abruptly. "I'm not stupid," he said. "I had one of my guys drive by to check on him. His car wasn't there, and nobody answered the door. That's all I know."

  "You said something about him screwing up one of your trucks," Al mentioned. "Tell us about that."

  "One of my installation vans. It's a mess."

  "What about it?"

  "He musta gotten in some kind of fight, that's what we figure, or maybe an accident. All I know is there was blood all over the place, and one of the doors is bashed in. I guess I should be grateful, though. At least he didn't steal it."

  "You say there was blood in the van?"

  "You deaf or what? All over the seat, all over the floor."

  "We'd better have a look at it," Big Al said, getting up and starting toward the door. "Where is it?"

  "Nick took it down to Westlake to have it cleaned up and detailed. He's probably back by now. It had been sitting out in the sun for a day and a half at least. Those stains really set up good. Nick says he doesn't know if they can save the upholstery or not. He may have to tear it all out."

  "Who's Nick?"

  "Nick Wallace, my mechanic. We've got a whole fleet of vans. He's in charge of keeping them all on the road."

  "And where is he?"

  "Out back, in the garage. That's usually where he is, him and his trucks—his babies he calls 'em. He couldn't treat 'em better if they all belonged to him personally, know what I mean?"

  I got up and followed Al toward the fur-lined door. "So where's the garage?"

  "Straight through the warehouse. You'll have to rin
g the bell for him to let you in."

  I stopped in the doorway door and turned back toward the room. The movie had returned to life on the television screen with all the moanings and pantings turned back up to full volume.

  "Do you know Larry Martin's address?"

  Enthralled once more, Damm didn't bother to look up. "Not off the top of my head. Get it from Cindy, my secretary. Tell her I said she should give it to you."

  "We may be back," I added.

  "Sure thing. I'll be right here."