Dead in the Rose City: A Dean Drake Mystery (11 page)

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Homicide detective Lew O’Malley headed the
interrogation and murder investigation that had me in hot water. As
Irish as St. Patrick’s Day, he was forty-three pushing sixty, blue
eyed, a shade over six feet, and thick around the middle. What
little hair O’Malley had left was brown and swept sideways across
his pate. He had one of those hidden-upper-lip bushy mustaches that
made him seem as if he would have been right at home in the Old
West.

As good or bad fortune would have it,
depending on how you looked at it, O’Malley also happened to be my
partner before I called it quits as a cop. Since then, we had more
or less gone our separate ways. Cops usually stuck together, while
ex-cops were basically left to fend for themselves. I still liked
to think of O’Malley as a distant friend. Or, at the very least, a
friendly adversary.

It was an awkward interrogation in a hot
room. Neither of us really wanted to give an inch, but admittedly
O’Malley had me at somewhat of a disadvantage. After all, he
represented the side of the law, while I was there as a murder
suspect.

I tried as best as I understood it myself to
explain the circumstances that led to my being in bed with the as
yet unidentified dead woman. If I were in O’Malley’s shoes, I
wondered if I would believe my own story.

He contemplated my account curiously while
keeping his distance, having said to me earlier with his nose bent
out of shape: “What the hell have you been rolling around in,
Drake? You smell like crap!”

I blamed it on the scotch and the arresting
assholes who refused to let me borrow my host’s shower before
bringing me in.

O’Malley lit a cigarette, tilted his head,
eyed me with some misgiving, and said: “Let me see if I have this
right, Drake. You say you met this sultry blonde named Catherine
Ashley Sinclair at Jasmine’s, took her to bed, and then she hired
you to get the goods on her wealthy, cheating husband.” He blew
smoke condescendingly at me. “How am I doing so far?”

“So far you haven’t missed a beat,” I said,
feeling sick to my stomach. My head still pounded as well. I’d been
duped by Catherine, and probably Gregory Sinclair, to take the fall
for the murder of his girlfriend. Though I knew there was still a
lot to this tale of seduction, betrayal, and homicide that I wasn’t
even privy to, and I sure as hell didn’t intend to wait till the
Second Coming to get to the bottom of it. Unless, of course, the
law locked me up and threw away the key. At this point, that was a
distinct possibility.

O’Malley sucked on the cigarette. “So you dug
up proof on the cheating husband, screwed the wife some more, and
came running to the rescue when she called you to say that her
husband—Sinclair—was trying to kill her?”

I nodded reluctantly.

“And that’s when you heard a shot, ran into
the bedroom, and were clubbed on the head before you knew what hit
you.”

“That’s how it went down,” I muttered lamely.
Instincts and the knowledge that comes when you work with a guy for
five years told me that O’Malley’s play-by-play account was really
designed to incriminate rather than clear me.

He had something else on his mind he was
holding back. And this kept me on the edge of my chair,
wondering.

O’Malley continued his methodical
interrogation, which he almost seemed to be enjoying. “And when you
woke up, you found yourself intoxicated, lying in bed next to the
dead blonde woman that you photographed having an affair with
Catherine Sinclair’s husband?”

I nodded, and O’Malley glanced at a
notepad.

“And that’s when Cornwell and Muncie showed
up?”

“It’s all in my statement,” I told him
laconically. My voice sounded hoarse from the alcohol, while my
head refused to let me forget the induced headache and
hangover.

O’Malley gave me a spare-him-the-wiseass
routine. “I want to hear it from your mouth,” he demanded, bridging
his brows grimly. “Look, D.J., we may go back a long ways, but I
still have to do it by the book. Believe me, this is one time you
can’t afford not to cooperate.” He paused, studying my reaction.
“It’s still not too late to have your attorney present—”

I balked at that for now, wanting to keep
this as unofficial as possible. That seemed like my best bet for
maintaining my innocence of everything, except maybe stupidity and
being turned on by a nice looking, sexy blonde. Inside, I was as
unsettled as I’d been in some time. And with good reason.

I confirmed and reconfirmed everything in my
statement.

O’Malley remained unconvinced. “This lady who
hired you—Catherine Sinclair—are you sure it wasn’t the same woman
you woke up next to, with your underwear stuffed halfway down her
throat?”

“Give me a damned break, O’Malley!” Vexation
raged in my voice. “I’m not blind and I’m not lying. Whoever the
hell she is, she is not the woman I was working for!”

Or slept with
.

The resentment I was beginning to feel for
O’Malley was growing in leaps and bounds. This was Dean Jeremy
Drake he was talking to. His ex-partner. And one time friend. Not
some idiot too stupid or drunk to know the difference between the
two women.

Knowing I was up to my ass in hot water, a
cool head prevailed when I looked O’Malley in the eye. I told him
in a controlled voice: “Look, I know it all sounds crazy, even to
me, but everything I’ve told you is true! I never met the dead
woman face to face until after she was dead.”

O’Malley lit another cigarette. “Why do you
suppose this Catherine Sinclair would set you up for the murder of
her husband’s lover?”

I blinked with bafflement. “If I knew that, I
wouldn’t be sitting here. Maybe she needed a patsy to get rid of
the woman she felt threatened by. And I was the perfect candidate.
That way she got to keep the money and the man—”

Even that suggestion was hard for me to
swallow. Or maybe I just didn’t want to think I was anybody’s
perfect candidate to take a murder rap. I didn’t figure Catherine
to be capable of murder. But what did I know about her, other than
what she wanted me to believe? Someone set me up. From where I sat,
she was the first person to come to mind.

“But why at her own house?” Smoke streamed
from O’Malley’s wide nostrils. “Wouldn’t it have made more sense if
this woman you say is Catherine Sinclair killed her husband’s
mistress somewhere where the Mrs. was less likely to be a
suspect—like maybe at your place?”

“Maybe Catherine had her reasons for wanting
to see the other woman dead in her own bed,” I suggested, though
such reasons escaped me at the moment. “Poetic justice or something
like that,” I tossed out weakly.

O’Malley dragged on his cigarette, studying
me very much like a man who had just been condemned.

Tired of waiting to see where this was all
headed, I made O’Malley’s face and said: “Look, I’ve told you
everything I know, O’Malley. If you think you have enough to charge
me, do it. If not, I’m outta here—”

He stepped up to me, dropped the cigarette on
the floor after one last puff, squashed it with his foot, and said
bleakly: “All right, Drake. I’m gonna give it to you straight. Your
story doesn’t hold up worth a damn. There is no other woman—at
least not by the name of Catherine Ashley Sinclair.” He paused. “At
the morgue, the housekeeper identified the dead woman as none other
than Catherine Ashley Sinclair.”

“What—?” My lower lip dropped several inches.
“But that’s impossible.”

“It’s not only possible,” stated O’Malley
brutally, “it’s true! Her driver’s license verified the I.D. If
this is the woman you say you took pictures of with Gregory
Sinclair, you photographed him having an affair with his own wife!”
O’Malley blew his nose nosily into a discolored handkerchief. “It
gets worse—” he said ominously, and I wondered how it could.

I was about to find out.

“From what we’ve been able to put together so
far, Catherine Sinclair was the money bags of the family rather
than her husband, as you claim you were led to believe. Apparently
she was born on an easier street than you or I will ever know. So
you see, it doesn’t figure that you would have been hired to spy on
a supposedly wealthy man who stood to lose far more than he gained
in the event of a divorce.”

Damn!
I cursed under my breath. What
type of dark and deadly game had I gotten myself into?

My thoughts quickly turned to the real source
of my troubles—the woman who led me to believe she was Catherine
Ashley Sinclair. If she wasn’t the real thing, much less dependent
upon a prenuptial agreement for her life’s blood, then who the hell
was she?

The obvious answer seemed to be Gregory
Sinclair’s real mistress/lover. It made sense the more I thought
about it, though I’d never in fact seen them together. With the
rich wife out of the way, the two of them could get all her money
and still have each other without missing a beat. It wouldn’t be
the first time greed and lust led to murder. But that still didn’t
account for all the weird things about this situation I found
myself in.

If the dead woman was the real Catherine
Ashley Sinclair, why was she secretly meeting Gregory Sinclair at
such out of the way places as a dumpy motel across the river in
neighboring Vancouver, Washington?

Speaking of the bereaved husband, I asked:
“Where was Sinclair when the murder occurred?”

“He’s still unaccounted for,” said O’Malley
nonchalantly. “Don’t worry, we’ll find him, assuming he’s still
alive—”

O’Malley flashed me a doubtful look. I met
his eyes man-to-man, hostility building up inside me like a volcano
threatening to explode. “What the hell are you trying to say,
O’Malley? You think I killed Gregory Sinclair?” My mouth became a
straight line.

“Did you?” He glared.

“No, I didn’t! No more than I killed
Catherine Sinclair—” I breathed in deeply. “Why would I kill a man
I didn’t even know?”

I had a feeling O’Malley was not listening to
anything that contradicted what he wanted to believe. He walked
back and forth as if he had lost his direction while retrieving
another cigarette.

“I’ll tell you what some of the guys around
here think,” O’Malley said. “They think that you got involved with
a wealthy, beautiful
white
woman and decided you wanted more
of her money and more of her. When she refused to leave her husband
for you, you got drunk, stupid, beat her face to a bloody pulp, and
strangled her. Then you came up with this cockamamie story of
another woman to try and save your ass from a death sentence for
aggravated murder.”

I shot up from my chair with indignation and
disappointment, if not total surprise. It wasn’t enough that people
I used to work with were railroading me. They were using age-old
stereotypes to try and do it.

“Why does it always have to come down to a
racial thing?” I asked O’Malley, standing an inch from him and
around four inches above him. “It’s getting really old. Why can’t a
black man romance a white woman without it meaning he’s got
ulterior motives?”

O’Malley turned dark pink, backing away, as
if he wanted no part of this. “What you do and who you do it with
has never been a concern of mine,” he stressed. “You know that,
D.J.” His eyes averted the heat of my glare. Our differences aside,
I’d never known O’Malley to be a racist, though the word prejudice
did come to mind from time to time. “But we live in America and
people talk,” he said defensively, “especially when it crosses
racial lines and ends up deadly.”

“Whatever happened to innocent until proven
guilty?” I had a feeling that so-called presumption supposedly
afforded all criminal suspects had somehow become lost in the
shuffle.
At least as it related to me
.
“Or does that
go out the damn window when it concerns an ex-cop trying to make a
living as a private eye?”

“That was
your
choice,” O’Malley
reminded me, his voice full of bitterness.

“Damned right,” I responded tartly. “That
doesn’t make me a cold-blooded killer stupid enough to bury myself
in circumstantial evidence. Think about it—”

For the first time, O’Malley seemed to
remember we once rode together and needed each other about as much
as two homicide detectives could. He took a drag on the cigarette.
“Cool down, Drake,” he said, smoke pouring from his mouth like an
overheated engine. “I didn’t say everyone in the department had you
convicted and given a lethal injection. As far as I’m concerned,
this is just standard procedure for a murder investigation and
nothing more.” He added apocalyptically: “You haven’t been charged
with anything—yet.”

It was the
yet
that worried me. In cop
jargon that usually meant the charges were a mere formality,
needing only the right person to say
book him
. The best I
could hope for was that it didn’t happen before I could get to the
bottom of the deepening mystery that started out as a routine
cheating spouse case and ended up with my head on the chopping
block.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Gregory Sinclair came charging at me like a
man possessed. He had disrupted my less than friendly chat with Lew
O’Malley, and seemed bent on rearranging my face. But I wasn’t in
the mood to have my appearance altered. So I blocked his swing with
my forearm.

“You son of a bitch!” he roared. “You
murdered my wife!” His contorted facial expression matched his
convincing performance.

My eyes became slits. “No, I didn’t murder
your wife,” I responded sharply. “But maybe you did—”

Once again Sinclair made like an avenging
devil, out of control, and tried to rip my throat out.

But this time O’Malley and another detective
came between us. This did not stop Sinclair from trying to get at
me. Or, for that matter, me at him.