Improbable Cause (17 page)

“It isn’t a trick, Larry. I’ll prove it. We’re in the garage right now. There are three of us.”

“Beaumont!” Perez howled. “What are you trying to do?”

“We’re in the garage,” I repeated, plunging ahead. “I’m with two guys from the Emergency Response Team. I’m giving them my gun.”

Perez stepped away from me. “What? Are you crazy?”

“Unlock the door. I’m coming in unarmed, Larry. Just me, do you understand? You won’t be able to talk to me anymore. I’m turning off the intercom.”

I put my .38 on the workbench beneath the telephone and started toward the door with the key to the inside door clenched tightly in my fingers. “Okay, guys, let me through.”

Howell was standing in front of the door. “You can’t do this. Logan will shit a brick.”

“Let him,” I said. “I’ve got to end this before it gets worse. You two stay here.”

They could have stopped me, if they’d put their minds to it. After all, there were two of them and only one of me. They had guns; I didn’t. But there’s a certain understanding that’s usually unspoken among cops, a mutual respect, that says when to back off. Howell and Perez knew that Larry Martin was mine. Grudgingly, Howell stepped aside to let me pass, holding out his hand for the key.

“You’ve got five minutes,” he said tersely. “After that we come in with the tear gas.”

“It’s a deal,” I said, giving him the second key.

I made my way through the warehouse and showroom. The place was well lit yet eerily silent except for the soft swish of my shoes on the thick carpeting. Standing outside the door to Richard Damm’s private office, I whipped off my jacket, revealing the empty shoulder holster under my arm. I tried the doorknob. It was still locked.

“Let me in, Larry. It’s Beaumont. Hurry. There’s not much time.”

After what seemed an eternity, the lock clicked. I turned the knob and opened the door a crack. The room was totally dark. I stopped and shut one eye, hoping to help ease the visual transition.

“Turn on the light so you can see I’m unarmed. I just want to talk to you.”

“Come in first. Put your hands up.”

Martin’s voice came from behind the wall next to the door. With my knees shaking, I stepped into the room and stopped. Behind me the door swung shut. I was still holding my breath when the lights came on.

The room was a shambles. The fish tank had been smashed to bits. The carpeting was soaked and littered with shards of glass and pieces of decorative shells and plants that had once decorated the bottom of the tank. All the booze bottles had been shoved off the shelves of the bar and lay in a shattered, soggy heap on the floor. A huge hole had been beaten into the face of Richard Damm’s big screen television set.

“Turn around slowly,” Larry Martin ordered. “Keep your hands up.”

I turned. The first thing I noticed was his face. Three separate lines of stitches fanned the length of his cheek from scalp to chin. He was lucky he hadn’t lost an eye. He was standing there in a big league batter’s stance with an old wooden baseball bat aimed at my head.

My initial reaction was to laugh. When you’re expecting the muzzle of a rifle, a baseball bat is a welcome surprise. My relief was overwhelming. Cindy was nearsighted all right, so much so that the wooden bat must have looked like a gun to her. I canned the laughter, though, because the baseball bat was still a hell of a lot more weapon than I had, and Richard Damm’s shattered haven gave mute testimony to Larry Martin’s ability to use it.

“What do you want?” Larry asked.

“Where’s Richard Damm?” I asked.

“Over there on the couch.”

“Is he all right?”

“Sit up and show him, Dick,” Larry ordered.

I glanced over my shoulder. Richard Damm sat up, his face peeking over the back of the couch. His skin was a pasty, unhealthy shade of gray.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

He nodded feebly.

“Can he go?”

“I guess,” Larry said.

With no further prompting, Richard Damm scrambled to his feet and picked his way through the debris.

“Thank you,” he whispered hoarsely to me on his way past. “Thank you so much.”

“Don’t thank me. Go out through the garage.”

Richard Damm nodded and left. “Where’s the intercom?” I asked. “Turn it on and tell them he’s coming out.”

“You go first,” Larry Martin said. “It’s over by the couch.”

I led the way. A remote control for the intercom was on the coffee table. I leaned down and picked it up. “You tell them,” Larry commanded.

He didn’t have to say it twice. I sat down and punched the control button. “This is Beaumont,” I announced. “Hostage coming out through the garage door. Acknowledge.”

“We hear you,” Perez answered.

“And I need more time. Make it ten from right now.”

“Ten it is.”

I looked up at Larry Martin. He was standing there staring at me like I had just stepped off another planet.

“A dental pick?” he asked. “You said a dental pick?”

I nodded.

“But where’d it come from? How did it happen?”

“You don’t remember seeing one?”

“No.”

“Tell me again what happened.”

“She screamed once. I heard her and went looking. When she screamed the second time, I was right outside the door.”

“The door to her husband’s office?”

“That’s right. She came running out with him right behind her. I tried to stop him. We struggled there, in the hallway. She tried to go out the other door, the door in the room where I had been working. He broke away from me and went after her again. I got there just in time to see him grab up my kicker and start toward her. That’s when he got me with it. He would have hurt me real good, if she hadn’t hit him.”

“You said she hit him with a vase?”

Martin nodded. “He started to fall. Toward me. We were over in the corner. The kicker fell out of his hand. It almost hit me again, but I ducked out of the way. I caught him before he fell.”

“And you dragged him over to the chair?”

Martin nodded. “By then the blood was running in my eyes. I could barely see.”

I remembered the unblemished whiteness of the carpet in Dr. Nielsen’s hallway. No blood had dripped on that.

“How’d you get outside then?” I asked.

“We went out the back way, through the garage.”

“But I thought LeAnn couldn’t open that door. That’s what she said.”

“She found a key in the drawer by the door. She let us out that way. I wanted to stop and grab my tools, but she said we’d better get out of there before he came to, that we’d come back later and get the tools.”

“How?”

“She kept the key.”

“And did you go back?”

“We couldn’t.”

“Why not?”

“She forgot she didn’t have a garage door opener. She said she’d left it in a car she doesn’t have anymore.”

I could relate to that. There’s nothing quite so thoroughly closed as an electronic garage door when you’re in the car and the garage door opener isn’t.

Martin let the tip of the bat drop to the floor, then he sank wearily onto one arm of the couch.

“Larry, if you didn’t kill him, why’d you do this?”

“LeAnn told me he was dead. I figured it happened when she hit him, and that you’d come looking for me. I tried to leave town, but Damm wouldn’t give me my check. I came over here to get it. We got in a beef. Cindy must’ve panicked and called 911.”

I nodded. “Go on.”

“When I heard the sirens, I lost it. I figured I was going to jail for murder, either that or they’d shoot first and ask questions later.”

“Beaumont?” Howell’s voice came over the intercom. “Time’s up.”

I pressed down the control button. “I’m placing you under arrest, Larry,” I said, loudly enough so Perez and Howell could hear. “Give me the bat.”

“Not for Nielsen’s murder? For this?”

“That’s right, Larry. For this. Give me your bat.”

He handed it to me. “It’s not mine,” he said.

“It’s not?”

“It’s Dick’s.”

I looked down at the bat in my hand and then back at Larry. “Where was it?”

“He pulled it out from under the couch when I came in the room. When I told him I wanted my money, he came after me with it. He said he’d burn the mother-fucking place down before he’d give me one thin dime. I wasn’t about to just stand there and let him knock the shit out of me.”

“If you didn’t have the bat, what were you carrying when you came in? Cindy said she thought you were packing a gun. That’s why she called 911.”

“It was part of the kicker extender. She said he wouldn’t let me have my check until I brought back all my tools. The extender’s all I had left. Everything else was still locked up in Nielsen’s office. See? It’s over there in the corner.”

I looked where he pointed. A yard-long, chrome-plated, steel tube lay in front of the kitchen sink.

“There’s one thing about it,” I told him. “You sure as hell know how to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

He nodded his head sadly. “It’s the story of my life,” he said.

I pressed down the button on the intercom. “All clear, guys,” I announced to Howell and Perez. “You can come on in now.”

Howell and Perez were understandably wary as they entered the room, Uzis at the ready. With his eyes riveted on Larry Martin, Howell stumbled over a plastic garbage pail in the middle of the room. Water slopped over the top of it, splashing onto Howell’s foot. He jumped back as though he’d been shot.

“The fish from the aquarium,” Larry explained. “I saved as many of them as I could.”

The poor bastard. Anyone who’d try to rescue dying goldfish sure as hell wasn’t a candidate to shove a dental pick into somebody’s throat. I was convinced, but I didn’t bother to test the idea on Howell and Perez. They weren’t buying.

Perez whipped out a pair of handcuffs and put them on Martin, while Howell handed me my Smith and Wesson. “Thought you might want this back eventually,” he said.

I put my .38 back in its holster and went to the door to retrieve my discarded jacket. By the time I came back, Perez was reading Larry Martin his rights.

“I’ll give Logan the all clear,” Howell said.

When we walked out the door of Damm Fine Carpets a few minutes later, the street outside was wall-to-wall people—relieved police officers, eager reporters and television crew members, and a whole slew of just plain folks—ell of them craning their necks to catch a glimpse of the crazed killer, Larry Martin— the guy who’d gone to the trouble of trying to save Richard Damm’s worthless goldfish.

Larry walked beside me with his head bowed, his hands handcuffed behind his back. My heart went out to him. I knew how that felt from firsthand experience. Since I had helped get him into the mess, I figured I’d better do what I could to get him out.

While Perez locked Larry in the back of a patrol car, I went to find Captain Logan. “Look,” I said. “I think we’re making one hell of a mistake. Martin told me Damm attacked him with a baseball bat as soon as he walked into the office.”

“Wouldn’t you? He was carrying a gun.”

“It wasn’t a gun. He was carrying a carpet kicker extender, one of his tools. That secretary’s blind as a bat. She couldn’t tell the difference. Where’s Damm? Ask him.”

“Medic One packed him off to Group Health in an ambulance. He was complaining of chest pains.” Logan started to walk away from me, then he turned back, looking annoyed.

“Now, see here, Beaumont,” he said. “Are you suggesting that after this joker threatened to burn down a building, after he held his boss hostage for an hour and a half and tied up the entire western half of Seattle in a gigantic traffic jam, after all that, are you trying to tell me I should let him walk away scot-free?”

“He’s not a killer,” I argued. “He even saved the damn goldfish in there.”

Logan snorted. “Big fucking deal. I’ve got probable cause to arrest him on assault with a deadly weapon, minimum, and maybe kidnapping as well. You do what you want with the murder charge you’re working on, but this one is mine. I’m locking him up. Understand?”

“How about taking him down to Harbor-view for psychiatric observation?”

Dick Logan shook his head. “What’s the matter with you? Has everyone on the fifth floor gone soft on crime these days?”

“I’m telling you, Dick, that murder charge isn’t going to stick, and the assault one won’t, either. Cover your butt. Send him to Harbor-view. Don’t put him in jail.”

For a long time Captain Logan stood there staring at me. Right up until he opened his mouth, I couldn’t tell which way it was going to fall.

Perez came up to us a moment later. “We’re ready to take him downtown,” he said.

Logan answered Perez without taking his eyes off me. “Take him down to Harborview,” he said. “Put a guard on him. Tell ”em he’s there for psychiatric observation.“

Perez’s mouth dropped. He started to object, but Logan stifled him.

“That’s an order,” he snapped.

Perez beat a hasty retreat. I backed away, too. “I’ll take my car and go there too.”

“You do that,” Logan said. “I think you’re going to have some tall explaining to do if Sergeant Watkins ever catches up with you.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” I answered.

Logan swung away from me, once more speaking into his mike. “Okay, you guys, let’s see what we can do to get traffic moving again. It’ll be rush hour before long.”

I was in no hurry to run into Watty. I beat it up the hill to Fulton, grabbed my car, and headed for Harborview without bothering to tell anyone else where I was going.

Logan hadn’t been kidding about the traffic. It was a mess. As I threaded my way through it, I had plenty of time for thinking, but only one question to work on.

If Larry Martin and LeAnn Nielsen hadn’t killed Dr. Frederick Nielsen, who the hell had?

One question. Zero answers.

By the time I got to Harborview and found a parking place, Martin had already been admitted and placed in the psychiatric ward under a police guard. I was his first visitor. He was lying flat on the bed staring up at the ceiling when I walked into the room. He looked over at me.

“It’s a hell of a lot better than jail,” he said. “I thought that’s where they were taking me.”