Amateur Night

by K. K. Beck

  Jane called her. Of course, there was no answer. She was probably at work. Instead, she called the office of William James Carlisle, DDS. She left her name and number and said very firmly, “It concerns a legal matter.” She wanted to get a look at him, talk to him, gauge whether or not he knew his son was involved. Maybe try to find out where his son was hiding. The Fletchers had made him sound like a monster. She didn't want to let him know she was looking for Sean. She'd probably already gone too far with Dorothy.

  Jane already felt a little sorry for Dr. Carlisle. After talking to the mothers of Kevin and Dorothy, Jane felt pity for the parents of rotten adolescents, and she also felt some of the terror and dread that must accompany being a parent. Once you had a child, Jane thought, your vulnerability to heartbreak became unfathomable— part of a big gamble you took that also increased your capacity for joy.

  Presumably, Sean had a mother too. She wasn't in the phone book, though. There was just the two listings for Dr. Carlisle, office and residence, and Jane had called his office assuming he was at work.

  He called her back within half an hour. He had a firm, amiable voice.

  “Dr. Carlisle,” she said, “My name is Jane da Silva, and I'm working for an attorney named Calvin Mason.”

  “This doesn't have anything to do with the Fletchers, does it?” demanded the doctor with irritation.

  Bingo, thought Jane. “No,” she said, managing to sound puzzled. “Mr. Mason represents a young man who was convicted of murder, using a weapon stolen from your home.”

  “Oh yes, of course,” the dentist sighed.

  “We're doing some investigation for a possible appeal,” she said, “and I wonder if I could come and ask you just a few questions about the weapon.”

  “Well, I could give you maybe fifteen minutes between patients,” he said dubiously. “But I went over all that with the police.”

  “Fine,” said Jane, mowing right over his ambivalence. “How does this afternoon look?”

  * * *

  Dr. Carlisle's was the only name on the door, but his offices were huge. There seemed to be a half dozen patients being worked on simultaneously, their chairs arranged throughout a suite of rooms that flowed into each other. Attractive young women, hygienists, presumably, were bent over them, murmuring cheerfully as chamber music piped through the area.

  Jane met Dr. Carlisle in a small office at the very back. He turned out to be a very handsome man with the devastating combination of a tanned, boyish face and dark hair with gray at the temples. He had a quick, wide smile and a long-lashed appraising squint that was almost flirtatious. If Sean was as charming as his father, poor Dorothy hadn't stood a chance.

  “So what's the problem,” he said, indicating a guest chair, and flopping down casually behind a small desk. He was wearing an aqua-colored uniform that looked like something a surgeon might wear in the operating room, all cotton, just a little crinkly. Much sexier than the traditional white coat. Jane bet he knew it too.

  “You know, I never did get that gun back.” He acted like it was her fault, but teasing. He was good, all right. She tried to enjoy it without getting sucked in.

  She smiled. “I'm sure your insurance company compensated you for it. And the stereo and the VCR.”

  “Yeah. I was just kidding.”

  “I came to ask you if you ever had any idea who might have stolen that gun.”

  “Nope,” he said. “I have to assume it was the kid that used it to kill that woman on First Hill.”

  Jane was struck by the fact that he didn't seem to feel bad that his gun had killed a woman. She knew just what he'd say if someone brought that up: “Hey, I didn't steal it. I didn't pull the trigger.” The Dr. Carlisles of this world were supremely confident. It's what made them attractive.

  “This was a standard burglary?” she said, wondering what that meant. “You came home and found out you were ripped off?”

  “That's right. My wife and I were out of town actually. At a cosmetic dentistry conference in San Francisco. The kids were at school. The burglary was a daylight thing. It was the first time we'd left them alone. Kind of scary. My wife was pretty upset.”

  “Most residential burglaries are committed by teenagers,” she said, vaguely remembering having read something like this somewhere and wondering if it were true. “A lot of them actually have some connection to the victim. They're parents of friends or something.” She'd learned that from Mrs. Shea. “We'd like to ascertain if Kevin Shea, our client, really did steal that gun. Do you think anyone your children knew could be involved?” Not for the first time, she wondered what the hell she was doing here bothering people with stupid questions. What was he supposed to say?

  She glanced over behind him. There was a family grouping. A pretty wife, kind of shy and soft-looking, and two teenage children, a boy and a girl. The girl looked soft and pretty like her mother, but with a little more backbone. The boy, presumably Sean, was handsome and a little cocky-looking. As Mrs. Shea had said, he had great teeth. Of course, his father was a dentist.

  He followed her gaze. “I have teenage kids, but they're not exactly hanging out with thugs and losers. I got great kids.”

  “They look very nice,” said Jane. “How old are they?”

  “Melissa is fifteen, and Sean's seventeen.”

  “You don't think they might have had a party or something while you were gone? Maybe this Kevin was involved somehow. Kids do stuff like that,” she said.

  “Not my kids,” he said with satisfaction. “I never had any trouble with them.”

  Outside of that troublesome paternity matter, thought Jane. “That's wonderful,” she said. She leaned over confidentially. “In my work, I run into a lot of parents who can't say that.”

  Dr. Carlisle preened a little. “I set limits and I stick to them,” he said. “Of course, they're almost grown up now. Sean's away at college.”

  “And he's only seventeen.”

  “He skipped a grade,” said the dentist. “He wasn't being challenged. He got bored.”

  “I see. Where's he going to school?”

  He looked slightly uncomfortable. His confidence slipped a notch, and to Jane's amazement, he lost his charm instantly. Suddenly he looked a little ferrety around the eyes, and his scrub suit looked silly. “The University of the Pacific. In Stockton, California,” he said.

  Jane nodded, and thanked him for his time. On her way out, she passed his framed undergraduate diploma. It was from the University of the Pacific, in Stockton, California. Either Sean really was attending his father's alma mater, or this was the first place that popped into his head.

  That evening, around seven, Jane tried Jennifer Gilbert's number again. This time, there was an answer.

  Jane introduced herself, and established that she was indeed talking to Jennifer Gilbert. The voice was one of those constricted, mincing female voices, typical of a certain kind of resolutely middleclass, genteel, self-effacing woman. It was a childlike voice coming from the head, through the nose, without any air in it at all, as if the head and the body were severed. It sounded tight and timid. Jane had seen plenty of attractive women (all Americans, for this particular quirk of speech seemed to afflict no other nationality) who, upon opening their mouths and coming out with that constricted little voice, lost their appeal instantly.

  Jane launched right into her pitch in a confident, superior sort of way, emboldened by the implied passivity of that voice.

  “I'd hoped to be able to come and see you,” she said. “I'm working for a lawyer, representing a young man convicted of murder.”

  Jennifer produced a Minnie-esque squeak.

  “Maybe you know about this case,” said Jane, with the air of someone who was in the habit of juggling a half dozen murder cases. “A pharmacist named Betty Cox was shot.”

  “Yes?” said Jennifer.

  “And while she was shot, she was typing a label for a prescription.”

  “It wasn't mine,” said Jennifer.


  “What?” said Jane sharply.

  “I mean, I wasn't there,” said Jennifer. “The police called me a long time ago. I've already told them. I phoned it in. Why is this coming up again?”

  There was a click on the line. “Just a second,” said Jennifer. “I've got another call.” She came back after what seemed like three minutes. “I'm really busy now,” she said. “I'm advertising for a roommate and I'm getting a lot of calls. I can't talk to you anymore.”

  “Can I come by and ask you a few questions?” said Jane, trying now to sound gentler.

  “No! Please, I don't want to get involved. I don't know anything about this.”

  “Well, an innocent man may have been wrongly convicted,” said Jane, trying to sound dramatic and succeeding a little too well, she thought. “If I could just ask you a few questions—”

  “I can't,” said Jennifer. “You guys have to stop bugging me.” Then Jane heard a gasp that sounded like a sob. “I can't help you.” She hung up.

  Chapter 9

  Fortunately, that click on the line had offered her an opening wedge. Jennifer was advertising for a roommate. The next day, Jane took a long, drizzly walk down to Broadway and picked up a Seattle Weekly. That, she figured, was the most logical place to look for her ad. And even though she had the address and phone number, reading the ad would provide some verisimilitude.

  She stopped to read some of the other ads, which presented a bleak picture of urban life—lonely hearts ads from self-described paragons yearning for sex, love or affection; support groups forming for survivors of a variety of psychic batterings and social ills; clerical jobs for artsy organizations at insultingly low salaries, hinting at the compensatory glamour.

  It was there, all right, under WANTED TO SHARE. Jane recognized the phone number. In her lengthy ad, Jennifer described herself as a “Quiet professional woman,” her apartment as “a spacious U District apartment in charming, historic building, close to campus and bus lines” and her ideal roommate as “a responsible, female, non-smoker, friendly and open to communication. Cats okay.” Jennifer volunteered the use of her car, and the rent was three hundred dollars, including utilities. Jennifer seemed eager to please, and, it seemed, wanted a friend as much as a roommate.

  Jane didn't dare call. Her voice would give her away. But she counted on the fact that when you talked to someone on the phone you invariably created a physical appearance to go with it, and in Jane's experience it never matched the real person at all. If Jane showed up in person, with some story about having heard about the apartment from someone on the bus, but not having the phone number, she bet she could worm her way in.

  She might even sign up as Jennifer's roommate if she thought it would help. It wouldn't take long to get the truth out of her. Jane was slightly horrified at the thought of going through Jennifer's things, but she knew she could do it if she thought it would help.

  Uncle Harold, she reflected, would never have stooped to such subterfuge, but damn it, he'd been rich. It wasn't her fault he'd made a desperate woman out of her by dangling a fortune in front of her.

  That evening, she went to Jennifer Gilbert's building in the University District. It was fabulous, a Moorish pile from the twenties, all beige stucco and curly red roof tiles, with big terracotta pots of fan palms and geraniums at the entrance. Jane had driven by and admired it many times.

  The structure, which looked as if it had been flown up from Southern California, was flanked on either side by dull tall apartment buildings.

  There was a line of door buttons, and she found J. GILBERT and pushed it. Even the buttons looked original—black Bakelite plastic. Initial J. Gilbert, combined with the architecture of the building, made her think of John Gilbert, the twenties movie star. She peered through the glass doors, trimmed with wrought iron, into a lobby lined with orange and blue tiles.

  Neither Jennifer Gilbert nor John Gilbert responded. She stood there in silence for a moment more and finally decided that it was probably better to wait a day so her voice wouldn't be fresh in Jennifer's memory. She'd come back tomorrow.

  She spent the next day trying to find Sean Carlisle. The registrar's office at the University of the Pacific in Stockton said he wasn't registered there. Jane was almost disappointed, because she'd come up with an elaborate lie about confirming a student loan, intended to weasel an address out of them, but on reflection, finding out he wasn't there at all was progress. Dr. Carlisle was lying about his son's whereabouts.

  Assuming that he'd be at work, drifting congenially among the many chairs in his office like someone mingling at a cocktail party, Jane decided she could easily swing by his house for a look around.

  It was a big square turn-of-the century house on Capitol Hill, cheery pale yellow, with white trim and white columns on the porch, not far from Uncle Harold's house. It was a nice-looking house, the kind of thing you could imagine on a Christmas card with a wreath on the door and about a foot of snow glistening on the roof.

  Once she pulled up in front, she realized there wasn't much she could do. In the movies, she'd sit out in front with a newspaper all day, watching the household's comings and goings, which sounded excruciatingly boring and conspicuous too.

  Instead, she went over to a deli on Fifteenth Avenue, bought herself a double tall latte and used the pay phone. “Is Sean Carlisle there?” she said to the young female voice that answered.

  “No,” it replied, sounding disappointed the call wasn't for her.

  “I found his wallet,” said Jane, “and I want to make sure it's the right place. His address is on the driver's license.”

  “He's not here. He won't be for weeks,” she said. “I thought his wallet was here. He won't need a driver's license where he's going.” There was a sisterly sneer in this last.

  Jane tried to keep the eagerness out of her voice, and attempted to phrase the next question carefully, in hopes of finding out exactly where the hell the little bastard was. She heard an older female voice in the background. “It's someone for Sean. They found his wallet,” hollered the young girl.

  She came back on the line. “Here's my mom.”

  There was a rustling noise as the receiver was passed over. “Can I help you?” said a frosty little voice.

  “I found a wallet that I think belongs to Sean Carlisle,” said Jane.

  “There's some mistake,” said the woman sharply. “Who is this?”

  “Then he's not here?”

  “No!” said the woman. “May I ask who's calling?”

  “I must have made a mistake,” said Jane hanging up. She didn't care particularly what the Carlisles thought about this odd phone call. She'd figured that they'd assume it was Dorothy and her mother after them, or maybe the outraged relative of some other young female, seduced and abandoned.

  Maybe Sean was in jail. Where else wouldn't you need a driver's license? She put in a call to Calvin Mason and left a message on his tape. “Could you pretend to be an ambulance-chasing lawyer— big stretch, I know—and call the jail and see if Sean Carlisle is in it?” she said into the machine. She wasn't sure if Sean was a minor or not, or if there was a city jail and a county jail or what, but she assumed Calvin would figure it all out.

  It wasn't until much later, when she was in bed reading, that he called back. “He's not in jail,” said Calvin. “Or if he is, he isn't in King, Snohomish or Pierce counties. Is this Kevin's old pal Sean, the one I wasn't sure existed?”

  “I think so,” said Jane. “He fits Kevin's mother's description. And, interestingly enough, his father's gun killed Mrs. Cox.” She tried to keep the smugness out of her voice.

  There was a pause. “Damn,” said Calvin. “I didn't find him. If I had, I could have used that fact in my defense. Not that I don't still think Kevin did it, but still...”

  “Don't feel bad. I found him because he knocked up his girlfriend, Mrs. Shea noticed, and I traced her through the birth certificate.”

  “Go over that again?”

&n
bsp; Jane explained what she'd done. “So you see, I couldn't have found him the way I did until Dorothy had little Charlie.”

  “But you haven't found him yet,” said Calvin.

  Chapter 10

  The next day, Jane went back to Jennifer Gilbert's apartment house, leaned on the buzzer for a while, and stood, frustrated, reading the other names in the row. To her surprise, the bottom button read A. NAZIMOVA, MANAGER.

  It had to be some kind of a joke. Alla Nazimova, an old movie vamp, had owned and operated the Garden of Alia in Los Angeles, the classic Hollywood apartment complex that had tenants like Robert Benchley and Humphrey Bogart and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Jane had never seen the old place before it was torn down, but it too, she knew, had Moorish architecture, like this place.