Amateur Night

by K. K. Beck

  “Know anything about that murder over in the University District,” he said softly. “That office manager?”

  “Best lead they've got is some guy who was seen in the building that day. The manager saw him. Apparently, she let the killer in, he strangled her, dragged her body into the bedroom, went through the desk, and left through the back door, out onto a terrace. Hard to know if anything's missing, because she lived alone.”

  He was squeamish enough to drag the body out of sight before he went through her stuff, thought Calvin. An amateur touch, maybe?

  “Have they had the funeral?” said Calvin. He thought vaguely about dropping by. You could learn a lot at funerals. He didn't want to run into any homicide detectives, though. The last thing he wanted was for anyone to know he was involved in any way with this case. He thought again about Jane da Silva. He'd been an idiot to let her get involved. He never should have told her about that juror.

  “No funeral,” said Carol. “She belonged to that Christian Science Church in the U District.”

  “Brick. With Greek columns,” said Calvin.

  “But they don't have funerals. Death's an illusion anyway, or something.” Carol shrugged. “They just cremated her.”

  Behind him, the chatty woman was on again about her cousin's kid's ears. “She had stitches in both ears, but her insurance didn't cover it. They said it was cosmetic. You'd think if they were about to get sliced clean through it would be covered. I mean, it could get all infected and stuff.”

  Two wires connected in Calvin's head and produced a spark. He needed to find out more about Jennifer. Maybe he could call someone at that church.

  Chapter 26

  As she walked back out down the hall of the Regency and out to her car, it occurred to Jane that while she had been indignant as hell that Bob hadn't believed her, she had lied through her teeth the moment she walked in his office. Her only true statement had been the finale; she really didn't care what Brenda did for a living.

  She felt in her purse for her keys as she walked. She was excited now. This could well be the Brenda she was looking for. A dancer. Even that sleazy Cornishman had said she might turn up in a stripper bar.

  Should she try to get in touch by phone? Would that be her way of getting a leg up on Johnson? After all, he'd phoned Brenda the herbalist when he'd been slowed down.

  Johnson had a head start of just a few minutes, really. And he was probably smugly assured that Bob hadn't told her anything. Port Hardy, she knew, was the northern tip of the island. It would take hours to get there. She had a good chance of catching up.

  Should she be warning Brenda?

  But what if that meant she missed Brenda herself, if Brenda made herself scarce or refused to see her? Jane ran a few sample conversations through her mind. “Something's happened to Jennifer.” It would only scare her. The best thing to do would be to find her, get her confidence, then try and find out what she knew about the day Jennifer had picked up her prescription at the Cox Pharmacy.

  Maybe she didn't know anything at all. In which case, Jane had been spinning her wheels. But whatever happened, Jane had to find out what Johnson was after.

  Johnson, no doubt, was on the road now, heading north. She wished she knew what he was driving. She could keep an eye out for him.

  But Johnson wasn't on the road. He was leaning against her car, his arms crossed over his chest.

  He came straight to the point. “You didn't have to turn me in to the police back there in Tofino,” he said. “If you had a problem, you should have talked to me about it.” He had a slightly aggrieved tone, as if he were going to say, “I thought we were friends.”

  “I'm sorry,” she said. “But it seemed like a good idea at the time. You didn't have to tell Bob there that I was some kind of an antistripper crusader.”

  “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” he said.

  “I suppose that line about having had 'a good look at what she has to offer' was a good idea too,” she said. She reminded herself just how sleazy that was. And what a betrayal, somehow, of the springs and the rain forest and the swirl of the hot water mixing with the icy waves.

  “Okay,” he said. “That was tacky. But I was pretty steamed. I thought we were going to have dinner together, and you sneaked away. I felt like a fool, you acting all one with nature and like you were having a peak spiritual experience when you were just grilling me and then deciding to set me up. This may come as a shock to you, but I enjoyed being with you and I wanted to spend more time with you.”

  “Well, you got out of the clutches of the police, any way,” she said, realizing how unattractively sulky she sounded.

  “That's right. They were going to put me on a chain gang in the Yukon, but I convinced them I didn't have anything to hide. Maybe I can convince you too. If you give me a chance. Which is more than you have so far.”

  “So you weren't the guy at the Moorish Court Apartments?”

  He sighed. “I went there. I questioned Jennifer Gilbert. She was alive when I left. I didn't know she'd been killed until the Mounties paid me a call. I spoke with the Seattle police, and I'll be meeting with them as soon as I finish up here,” he said rather formally. He looked puzzled. “What I don't understand is what you have to do with all of this.”

  “We've been over all of this.”

  “The Seattle police didn't seem to know what you have to do with this either,” he said.

  “You told them about me.”

  “Of course I did,” he snapped. “This is a homicide investigation.

  Jesus Christ.”

  “I know,” she said thickly, feeling dumb and rather sick. Why hadn't she talked to the Seattle police? Calvin Mason had tried to get her to. Instead she'd disappeared.

  And why? The answer was rather shameful. So she could solve a hopeless case, like some kind of sorority girl pledge initiation stunt. And get those nasty old trustees to give her lots of money to buy pretty things. And so she could prove to herself that she wasn't just a hopeless case herself, an empty stylish shell, hoping to find some sort of substance within, some area of competence, the ability to right a wrong, set things right, give some sort of shape to a messy, petty, shabby little world.

  “Look,” he said earnestly, impatiently, entreatingly, his head to one side. “You can come with me. He told me where Brenda is. We can talk in the car. I'll tell you what I'm doing, and you can tell me what you're doing.”

  Maybe she should. She imagined his nice brown hands on the wheel while she sat with her head tipped back in the seat, eyes closed, her tired voice explaining everything. Maybe he could help her make some sense of it all. Maybe he could tell her what to do.

  Right now, she wanted someone to tell her what to do.

  “You seem to be mixed up in something that's over your head,” he said in a soft voice.

  That softness almost pulled her in, but it gave her an icy little chill of wariness at the same time.

  “I don't know,” she said. Could she really be contemplating getting in the same car with him and driving off into the wilderness?

  “You haven't got much choice,” he said. He stepped away from her car and stood next to her. “This is your car, isn't it?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “In case you hadn't noticed,” he said, “someone slashed all four tires. A pretty thorough job.” He looked genuinely puzzled. “You have any idea who might have done that?”

  “You bet I do,” she said. Her face tightened with anger. “I should call the cops. Again.”

  “I guess that means you're on your own,” he said. “But if I were you, I'd worry about whoever did that to your tires.”

  An hour later, she'd bought three new tires and had them and the spare mounted, and she headed for the TouristInfo office. She figured she may as well get herself a reservation (a “booking” in Canadian) at some place in Port Hardy. All she needed after what she'd been through was to spend the night in the bus station or something.

>   The clerk there made a few phone calls for her, and while she waited she amused herself by checking out the TOURIST ALERT memo on the bulletin board. The man from Winnipeg was still being enjoined to call his sister. And Dietrich Himmelman of Stuttgart and the Gauthiers from Nice and the lady from Yonkers were there too, just as they'd been in Tofino. She skimmed further down the list, and was startled to find her own name. Jane da Silva of Seattle. Call Calvin.

  Excusing herself from the counter for a minute, she rushed out to a pay phone. What could he have to tell her? She prayed he'd be home.

  His machine was on. “I can't come to the phone right now,” he said, “but leave a message at the tone and I'll get back to you.” To Jane's delight, however, there was more. He'd left a personalized message for her on his machine. It was good to hear his voice, even on tape. “If this is Jane, where the heck have you been? Thought you'd like to know I've got a rendezvous with the little father planned. And, your friend Arthur's late tenant was a Christian Scientist. A devout one. Think about it. Call when you can.”

  She went back to the counter, pleased that she had a reservation and eager to hit the road. Good for Calvin Mason. His message was clear, even though he'd avoided using names. He'd found that weasel Sean. And Arthur's late tenant was clearly Jennifer.

  After thinking about it for a while, she had to agree Calvin had stumbled on to something of potential significance.

  Later, after she had headed north, through acres of forest in various stages of development, she thought again about Steven Johnson.

  It occurred to her that if he'd wanted to disable her car, he could have been much slicker about it. He could have pulled the distributor cap or drained the tank. There was something fierce about the sight of those tires with their jagged cuts. Maybe he had been trying to scare her.

  She thought about that on the long drive north. The road hugged the coast for a while, past totem poles, signs for salmon resorts, fast-food restaurants and the occasional strip mall, then at Campbell River turned off past a huge paper mill into a real freeway cut straight through heavily timbered mountains.

  Here she felt she had left civilization behind, and in fact there was very little between here and Port Hardy at the northern tip of Vancouver Island, except three hours behind the wheel and about a billion trees.

  The scenery was in various stages of growth. There were areas of thick, dense forest interspersed with burntover clear cuts. In between were sections of varying heights, neatly labeled by the timber company. HARVESTED 1926, HARVESTED 1949, HARVESTED 1968.

  The signs and the stands of uniform fir trees were a reminder to anyone from a city far away who had formed a vague impression of greedy, land-raping timber companies slashing and burning, that trees were a renewable resource. They just took a long time to grow back.

  But when they grew back, they looked like a neat, dull crop rather than an artful landscape of mixed species illuminated by slanting shafts of light dancing with red cedar dust.

  The clear cuts had a bleak, creepy appeal of their own. In between the charred stumps with their gnarling roots grew a feverish assortment of scrubby undergrowth—the kind of growth familiar to anyone who had ever weeded a garden bed in the wet Pacific Northwest, where any bare ground doesn't stay bare too long.

  Unfortunately, while Jane didn't know what Johnson was driving, he knew what she was driving. She had considered renting a car in Nanaimo, but then she decided she'd waste valuable time filling in a lot of paperwork.

  She was close to Brenda now, she knew it, and she felt more and more that Brenda knew something that would help her. She corrected herself. Something that would help Kevin, anyway. It was funny how little she thought about Kevin. He wasn't really important—just a means to an end. Who knew what he was up to now? Watching TV or sitting around in his cell or weaving baskets or making license plates. Jane imagined that prison life must be like combat as she had heard it described: long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of terror.

  Which, she reflected, as raindrops slammed onto her windshield, caught some of the spirit of her own enterprise. The road seemed interminable, and now that the rain seemed to be coming down in sheets, feeding all those thirsty trees, there was a real monotony to the drive. It was a monotony made worse by a squeak from the wipers.

  A passing truck with a load of peeled logs threw a tidal wave over the window and she couldn't see a thing for a second. She fiddled with the wiper control and set it for the maximum number of sweeps. The squeaks speeded up too.

  Finally, although she knew she was in a race to get north, she seized on a rare roadside sign that indicated a restaurant as an excuse to stop. It was the first evidence of human habitation she'd seen for miles.

  Her nerves were getting frayed and she hoped the rain would settle down a little while she had a cup of coffee and maybe a sandwich.

  She turned off the road and went down a short spur toward a lone white building with some gas pumps in front. She kept her head down, the rain beating on the back of her head, as she picked her way through the dirt and gravel turning to mud of the parking lot. She nearly collided with a group of men coming out; from her crouched stance, she got a brief impression of plaid shirts, jeans and work boots.

  Inside, she shook herself like a wet dog. The air was warm and full of the sweetish smell of Canadian cigarettes. Some innocuous, vaguely countrified Muzak played. The place was full of loggers, hunched over their coffee and talking with animation. The walls were lined with rough-hewn planks, and there were blown-up photographs of old turn-of-the-century tinted photos of life in the woods. Lumberjacks with handlebar moustaches standing with quiet pride next to gigantic stumps; steam locomotives pulling cars full of logs through the woods, groups of unsmiling men shouldering axes and carrying giant saws. Back then they got through acres of virgin timber with hand tools, thought Jane, but their great-grandsons, drinking coffee around her, looked plenty tough still.

  She had a cup of coffee and a grilled cheese sandwich and wondered just what she would say when she met Brenda MacPherson. Maybe it would make sense to just tell the truth. A novel approach. Jane was ashamed at the sneaky pleasure she took in making up convincing lies when she was running around doing Uncle Harold's work. Maybe she should tell Brenda that Jennifer had been killed. Brenda would see how important it was that she help if she could.

  Brenda the stripper seemed an unlikely roommate for the prim young woman Arthur the landlord had described, but surely she would feel some sense of responsibility to her old friend. And Brenda needed to know too that Johnson was looking for her.

  Jane put down her coffee. What the hell was she sitting here for? The sooner she got to Brenda, the less chance Johnson would have to come up with some smarmy lies of his own. She threw some bills on the table and went back outside.

  Hunched over under the rain, her eyes scrunched into slits, she didn't notice as she slid behind the wheel. It was only after she started the engine and tried to back out the car that she realized there was something terribly wrong.

  She got back out and into the rain. The new tires were practically sitting on their rims. And it wasn't that they hadn't been properly mounted or anything. The tires had the same angry, jagged cuts in the rubber that had appeared before, outside the Regency in Nanaimo.

  Chapter 27

  It was at this point that Jane felt like bursting into tears. She looked through the blinding rain to see if Steven Johnson were here. Across the parking lot, barely visible through the rain, was a car with a male occupant. He appeared to be reading a road map. She wasn't sure. It could have been Johnson.

  All that time in Nanaimo she'd spent buying tires, sitting in the shop having them mounted—it was all for nothing. She felt like going over to that car, peering in to see if he was hiding behind that road map, and then pounding on the car window and shrieking at him.

  How could she have thought he was attractive? Right now, she hated herself. She was a weak and foolish woman, suscept
ible to any kind of flattery. If she hadn't been so determined to find herself a hopeless case, she'd probably have slept with him. And would he have cut her up like he cut up her tires?

  In Nanaimo, okay, it might have been some vandal. But to have the vandalism repeated here, when no one knew who she was on this damn island besides Johnson—it was too much.

  She shuddered at the thought that they'd sat naked together in that warm water. What was the matter with her? She was barely sane, flirting with danger like this.

  As she often did when things seemed unbearable, she thought of Bernardo, her husband, who had wrecked his car and killed himself, making her a widow when she was twenty-seven years old. If he were here, as he should have been, he could protect her. Instead she was a rather pitiful creature, trying to do hard things without the steel to follow through on them.