Amateur Night

by K. K. Beck

  But on the phone, when Mr. Cox called yesterday, another George Cox had made himself evident. He was very angry.

  “I don't appreciate your sneaking around, sending some woman to talk to Mike, trying to get evidence to get that little bastard out of jail,” he said.

  “I'm sorry,” said Calvin, trying to disassociate himself from the whole thing. “Mrs. da Silva is a friend of the family, and naturally they want to do what they can to help the boy.”

  “It's just ridiculous. What do they think? That he didn't do it?”

  “It appears,” said Calvin, “there may have been a witness.”

  “A witness! That's ridiculous. Why didn't they come forward? The coward went in there and killed my wife.”

  “I'm sorry to upset you. In fact”—Calvin congratulated himself on his diplomacy here—“it was because we didn't want to disturb you that we didn't approach you directly.”

  Cox snorted. “Don't you think I have a right to know what's going on? If you're fooling around opening this all up again, I want to know about it. We need to sit down and have a little talk.”

  “Um, all right. Perhaps I can come by. I don't want to inconvenience you, Mr. Cox.” Calvin also didn't particularly want Mr. Cox to find out his office was his living room. Which was why he found himself sitting on a large leather sofa, across a burnished metal coffee table, staring into the face of a scowling George Cox.

  Calvin wasn't quite prepared for Mr. Cox's apartment. He had imagined a cozy little boxy house somewhere in Ballard or the North End, with a crocheted afghan draped over the sofa, with maybe a little dog, and AstroTurf on the patio.

  Instead, George Cox had a big apartment on Queen Anne Hill with a fabulous view of downtown, a cluster of black and silvery high rises, and the water of Puget Sound beyond, backed by low forested islands softened by mist.

  The rooms in the apartment were full of new furniture—big square pieces, and there were no feminine touches. Sitting on a twin sofa opposite him, George Cox looked more like a man in a waiting room than the man who lived here.

  It was clear Mr. Cox had started his life from scratch. Calvin had an aunt who'd done the same thing when her husband died. Sold up everything and moved into a condominium in Arizona.

  The only personal touch was a mounted sailfish hanging over a massive black marble fireplace.

  “Thank you for meeting with me,” Calvin said. “I am very sorry about your wife, Mr. Cox, and I really appreciate your taking the time with me now.” The leather felt cold.

  Mr. Cox nodded impatiently. He was around sixty, with a narrow, pale face, glasses, and a few strands of thinning sandy hair. He wore a carefully ironed plaid shirt and a pair of khaki trousers with neat creases.

  Pharmacists, thought Calvin, always seemed to look neat. He couldn't remember ever having seen a sloppy one. They had to be meticulous and careful about detail, after all. One wrong drop and they could kill someone. And get sued, thought Calvin, with a lawyer's concern for liability overriding any regret over a pointless death. He decided meticulousness was something he could use.

  “It may seem odd to you that we're pursuing something so carefully, and well after the trial,” he said. “But we have to be sure of every detail, and make sure we've given our clients our best shot.”

  “Yeah,” said Mr. Cox in a brusque, get-to-the-point way. He seemed a little calmer than when he'd called. “But I warn you, there's certainly no doubt in my mind what happened to Betty.”

  “Yes, I understand,” said Calvin. He decided to launch right into it. “Your pharmacy was small, wasn't it?”

  “Yes.” He seemed somewhat surprised at the question. “But it was very profitable, let me assure you. We had a lot of business from the medical building.”

  Calvin hadn't meant to cast aspersions on his business. “Of course,” he said.

  “In fact, Mike should make a pretty good living out of it,” added Cox.

  “I'm sure that's true,” Calvin said. “What I meant was, it was a small area, so it must have been easy to keep straightened up.”

  “It was always straightened up. In the pharmacy business, everything has to be organized. A place for everything and everything in its place.” Cox crossed his arms and legs, sat back and looked quizzical.

  “Naturally, Mr. Cox. That's why we were surprised to see a magazine on the floor in one of the photographs used at the trial.”

  “Photographs?” Now Mr. Cox looked slightly alarmed. Calvin was afraid he was thinking about the photographs taken of his dead wife at the crime scene.

  “Of the weapon,” Calvin said quickly. “On the floor, where it was dropped. You see, there was a magazine there, facedown on the floor. Next to the chair where someone might wait for a prescription.”

  “Customers would often read a magazine while they were waiting,” he said. “It annoyed Betty no end.” He chuckled fondly. “She always watched the nickels and dimes, and she wanted them to buy the magazine.”

  “Still, didn't they usually put them back in the rack afterward?”

  “Oh, sure. Once in a while they might forget and leave it by the register, I suppose. I don't quite see what you're getting at.”

  “We were wondering,” said Calvin, who had begun to think he looked like a jerk and that he'd come on a fool's errand, “whether or not there'd been someone in that chair when all this happened. Maybe they were frightened and ran out of the store, leaving the magazine there on the floor.”

  “I don't think so,” said Mr. Cox. “Wouldn't they have called the police? That's it? That's your big breakthrough?”

  “Well, it is a possibility we'd like to check out,” said Calvin, feeling more and more foolish. “I was wondering if you knew whose prescription label Mrs. Cox was typing at the time.”

  “I haven't a clue,” said Mr. Cox. He was getting testy again. “After everything that happened, it was the last thing on my mind.”

  “Naturally,” said Calvin, wondering how he could end the interview and get out of the apartment. “But would there be any record of it?”

  “I don't know,” said Mr. Cox.

  “Maybe Mr. Nguyen has the records,” said Calvin. “It's all on computers, isn't it?”

  “Well he has all the records, naturally,” said Mr. Cox. “But I don't see the point, really.”

  “Could I ask him?” said Calvin.

  “I'd rather you didn't,” said Mr. Cox mildly. “To be quite honest, I don't really see why I should help the man who killed Betty. It's been over a year now. I want to put it all behind me, get on with my life. And there's the whole area of confidentiality.”

  “I would think that you'd like to be absolutely sure,” said Calvin.

  “I am sure,” said Mr. Cox. “There's no doubt in my mind.”

  Calvin frowned. Perversely, he was becoming a little irritated with Mr. Cox. The advocate in him swelled up in his chest. What made Cox so sure? What if that little slime Kevin were innocent? Calvin didn't believe it for a minute, but he thought Cox should cooperate, on the off chance an innocent man was serving a long sentence for the murder of his wife. But then he reminded himself that Cox was behaving like every other relative of a victim he'd met. They wanted it all over with, and they wanted the perpetrator to be punished. They wanted finality, not loose ends.

  “Well maybe the name on that prescription label is in the police report,” said Calvin.

  “I wouldn't know about that,” said Mr. Cox.

  Calvin rose and gazed over at the fish mounted on the wall. Cox followed his gaze. His face broke into a smile. “Isn't that a beauty? Eighty pounds. Got that down in Cabo San Lucas.”

  It was incredibly blue. Calvin tried, without much success, to imagine Mr. Cox engaged in a Hemingwayesque battle with a fierce fish.

  At the door, Mr. Cox's manner softened. “You know,” he said, “pharmacists live with holdups. There's always the possibility some thug or addict will shoot you. That's why we had the gun. It made Betty feel safer. But I al
ways thought if it happened, it would happen to me. Not Betty.” He shook his head sadly.

  “I'm sorry,” said Calvin, who again felt pretty lousy for having disturbed the guy.

  “I'm getting used to it,” Cox said. “We met in pharmacy school, you know. We worked side by side for over thirty years.” He shook his head. “If Betty'd had her way we would have been at it for fifty. She never wanted to retire.”

  Calvin nodded sympathetically.

  “But there was no way I could go on without her. We had all our little routines down pat. I sold it to Mike for nothing down, just to get out of it. I couldn't do it without her.”

  He bent his head down a little and rubbed his forehead. “I thought I'd go in and help Mike out a few days a week, just to get him up and rolling. Turns out I couldn't even bear to do that.”

  “Very understandable,” said Calvin, who wished Cox would shut up and let him go. He felt more comfortable around the nasty Cox than the grieving one.

  “My life changed overnight. And after the trial, and them sending that kid to prison, it felt like the last bad part was over too. That's why I don't want to help you.” He shook his head. “That's what you have to go on? That there was a magazine on the floor? Is there anything else?”

  “No,” said Calvin. “It could well be there's nothing to it at all. We just want to make sure.”

  “Seems pretty thin to me,” said Mr. Cox, with another shake of his head. “I'd appreciate it if you called off this woman. I don't want her bothering Mike or any of my old customers. What did you say her name was?”

  “Jane da Silva,” said Calvin. Right now, he was mad at her himself. Just because of her, he'd been up here bothering this old man.

  Chapter 5

  Jane blessed Dorothy's parents for naming her Dorothy. There weren't that many of them giving birth in Seattle a year ago. Most Dorothys were probably well beyond ovulation. She must have been named after someone—a grandmother maybe. Or after Dorothy in Oz. After eliminating a Dorothy Chang, who had a little girl at Swedish Hospital, there was just one in the births column of the Seattle Times.

  Jane was back in the periodicals room, becoming a regular like a couple of disreputable old men smelling of tobacco, sour wine and urine who sat at long tables reading day-old newspapers, while Jane worked a few feet away with the microfiches.

  Working on the assumption Dorothy was in bad physical shape, and a good candidate to give birth prematurely, she'd started at what Mrs. Shea had estimated to be the girl's seventh month. In a way, Jane felt relieved the baby hadn't arrived early, even though it meant going through more newspapers. She had already begun to worry about Dorothy. She liked her name, for one thing. In fact, she found herself absurdly happy when she found the announcement. A Dorothy Fletcher gave birth on June 10 of the previous year. A boy. No father's name. Northwest Hospital.

  Getting the birth certificate was easy. She walked a few blocks south down to the Public Safety Building and paid eleven dollars. There was Dorothy's address, her age (fifteen) and her address in the Wallingford neighborhood. The baby's name was Charles. The father's name was Sean Carlisle.

  She went to the pay phones by the main entrance to call Calvin Mason. His machine was on. “I think I found Dorothy of Sean and Dorothy,” she said, with an ebullient feeling of being involved with a project that was moving forward. To keep it going, she added, “Could you find out the name of the dentist who'd had his gun stolen? The gun that killed Betty Cox?” Something Mrs. Shea had said had made it seem worth following up. She waited a little while to see if he was really there, lurking behind his machine.

  Her ebullience vanished. It was too bad not to be able to tell someone she might have found Sean and Dorothy, and gloat a little that she had succeeded where Calvin, and presumably the police, if they cared, had failed. Now she felt rather lonely.

  And maybe it was silly anyway. What if she had found them? There was nothing to guarantee they knew anything about the murder of Mrs. Cox.

  A dead end, she realized, would be pretty disheartening. She needed a hopeless case if she wasn't going to continue to be one herself. The trustees had given her five thousand dollars to live on and to take care of any expenses involved with finding a case to pursue. Thank God she'd managed to negotiate Uncle Harold's old Chevy out of them too. Even if she confined her shopping binges to the teen tart store, the money wouldn't last too much longer.

  She decided to stop by the video store on the way home. She'd get herself a nice classic—maybe a French one. The Algerian who ran the place had a lot of classic French films. Something with Jean Gabin.

  As she approached the store, it occurred to her that renting a VCR every time she needed a movie fix was becoming a false economy. Uncle Harold's house was too old-fashioned to have one. His stereo system only played LPs and the corners of the refrigerator were gently rounded.

  The best thing to do, she decided, would be to get herself a VCR. They couldn't cost that much. And so what if her money ran out a week earlier that way? At least she'd have the luxury of plenty of cozy old movies in the meantime.

  She proceeded to a discount electronics store and bought the model that happened to be on special, paying for it with cash. Uncle Harold, she imagined, if he'd ever gotten around to getting himself a VCR, would have spent a few hours at the library with back issues of Consumer Reports before doing anything so rash.

  Ever since she had come back to Seattle, she'd developed an irritating habit of wondering whether or not Uncle Harold would approve of her actions. It had started with her attempts to carry on his work. Now it was creeping into the rest of her life. Thank God he hadn't been hovering in her mind when she'd decided to buy all those frivolous shorts and T-shirts.

  As the hyper young man who'd sold her the VCR crammed it into the trunk of her car, it occurred to her for the first time that maybe she should pack it in. Get a real job. Never mind that she had frittered away her youth on a lot of fun jobs with no future, and had somehow found herself pushing forty without noticing it. The thought of a résumé was horrifying. “Last position: mediocre cabaret singer with limited range.”

  There was simply nothing to do but run by the video store and get a nice cozy old movie. Maybe a few chocolate eclairs were called for as well. Jane felt that carefully modulated self-indulgence was the best way to ward off depression.

  * * *

  Calvin Mason envied the detectives in books and on TV who had terrific sources in the police department. They never had any trouble finding out what the cops were up to. Even in real life, lots of investigators were ex-cops who had buddies on the force to tell them whatever they needed to know.

  Sure, in the books and the movies the helpful cops were always threatening to yank the detectives' licenses or arrest them or something, but they always caved in and handed over juicy files or even let the detectives tag along on an investigation because they actually liked them.

  Calvin Mason wasn't an ex-cop. He was a lawyer who beefed up his income a little with other ventures like collections, apartment management and investigations for more successful lawyers.

  In his rare appearances in court on criminal matters, he was a defense attorney, so he didn't have that nice clubby relationship he could have developed with the cops if he was a prosecutor. There was no getting around the fact that he'd spent some time attempting to trip up police officers on the witness stand and implying to juries that they were lying brutes who beat confessions out of defendants in elevators. It wasn't so much that he'd made enemies of the police officers he knew. It was more that in his dealings with them Calvin sensed they thought he was a jerk. The nicest thing they'd ever done for him was run a gratuitous warrant check on him.

  Which was why he was having lunch with Carol, a civilian employee of the Seattle police who was his not so confidential and definitely low level source in the department. Fortunately, Carol didn't ever expect a very expensive lunch. She had other needs.

  They were sitting in a
corner table at Denny's. Calvin was eating the Patty Melt and Carol had a chef's salad, which she was saturating with Thousand Island dressing. “I hope you can make it to Raymond's game this week,” she said in a voice that managed to sound pathetic yet demanding at the same time.

  “Be glad to,” said Calvin heartily. “How's he doing this season?” A Little League game was better than a science project.

  Carol sighed. “I'm worried about his self-esteem,” she said. “He's spent a lot of time on the bench this season.”

  Calvin shrugged. “There are lessons in life to be learned on the bench,” he said philosophically. Then, because he figured women always wanted everyone to be happy, and didn't understand the whole point of sports anyway, which was to kick ass, he added, “But those Little League coaches should give everyone a chance to play. It's supposed to be fun.”