Taking the Fifth (27 page)

It all made sense to me then, although I hadn’t seen it before. It was written all over Alan Dale’s haggard face. He was like a faithful old hound dog, hanging around outside his owner’s door, waiting for a table scrap or maybe, if he got really lucky, a pat on the head. I wondered if Jasmine Day had ever noticed. If not, maybe Mary Lou Gibbon would be smart enough to figure it out.

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s see what we can do.”

They released Jasmine Day at five o’clock in the morning. I was waiting in the lobby when they brought her out. Alan Dale held his arms open for her, and she fell into them as if she belonged there. She was crying; I’m not sure why. Dale held her so tight I was afraid she’d break, but she didn’t.

“Are you still staying at the Mayflower?” I asked finally.

He shook his head. “I checked us both out. I’m unemployed, remember? I can’t afford it on my own nickel.”

“Come home with me, then,” I said. “I’ve got lots of room.”

Sergeant James dropped us off at Belltown Terrace.

Nobody can say I’m a sore loser. Without any discussion, I let Alan Dale and Jasmine take my room, while I ended up on the couch in the living room. As I stretched out full length, I was grateful that Michael Browder, my decorator, had insisted I buy an eight-foot sofa. By then, it was already getting light.

I slept the sleep of the dead. I woke up when somebody landed on my chest hard enough to knock the wind out of me. The alarm clock next to my head was still chirping, but I hadn’t heard it.

Tiny arms wrapped themselves around my neck, and a warm face buried itself under my chin.

“Who are those two guys in your bed, Unca Beau?” Heather Peters demanded. “And how come you weren’t at the airport to meet us?”

It took a minute to clear the fog out of my head and figure out who and where I was. “Those people are friends of mine,” I told her. “One of those guys is a lady, Heather. She’s just got a short haircut.”

“Can I have my hair cut that way? Please, can I? Then the boys couldn’t pull it anymore. I hate it when Mrs. Edwards braids my hair.”

“We’ll have to ask your father about that,” I told her. “I don’t think he’d approve.”

CHAPTER 27

WHEN ED DONALDSON OF THE LOS ANGELES office of the DEA showed up late that night, the rest of the pieces began to fall into place.

According to him, Richard Dathan Morris really had been working undercover for the DEA, but out of the Los Angeles office, not out of Seattle. Westcoast Starlight Productions had been under suspicion for some time, but Donaldson had also been aware of something amiss in the Seattle office.

Richard Dathan Morris, after he’d been turned down in Seattle, had tried the L.A. office. The opportunity had been too good to miss all the way around. Donaldson had hired Morris on the spot and put him to work undercover, but he had done it outside all usual channels so no hint of it could possibly leak back to the Seattle DEA. Morris hadn’t had any trouble making contact with Osgood, who, unknown to his wife, hung out on the gay side of town when she wasn’t looking.

No one in L.A. had known of Morris’s death until Friday morning, and Donaldson had ordered the Westcoast arrests in L.A. without notifying Seattle until it was absolutely necessary. Unfortunately, once Morris had obtained the tape naming Wainwright, he had never gotten a chance to contact Donaldson. Unable to reach Donaldson by phone, he had at least had the presence of mind to mail the tape to his mother in Bellingham.

On Sunday, Donaldson went to Bellingham and took charge of Ray Holman. Ray, of course, blamed it all on B. W. Wainwright, who wasn’t there to defend himself. And maybe that was true.

Wainwright had evidently had some hint that things were beginning to come unraveled. According to Holman, he had come up with the idea of Jasmine Day’s tour with the sole purpose of framing her. Ed Waverly, in too deep to prevent it, had helped ensnare Jasmine. No one had ever intended that the show would be a hit. That had been a surprise benefit.

Tom Riley, Jonathan’s nurse, wasn’t the only one who thought Richard Dathan Morris was a scuz. He had played the part well. It was only when he was caught in the costume trunk that he came to Waverly’s and Wainwright’s attention. They had assumed initially that he was only trying to cash in on the coke concealed in the bottom of the trunks. But then Holman discovered the tape recorder. The incriminating tape was gone, but Holman and Osgood knew what had been said, and Richard Dathan Morris was on his way out.

Since Osgood had been the one who had brought Morris into the group, Wainwright assigned him the task of getting rid of him and finding the missing tape. They had him use Jasmine’s costume, hoping we’d discover it. After all, it fit right in with the rest of the scenario.

Osgood managed to murder Morris, but he bungled the job of finding the tape. When Jonathan Thomas woke up and found him in the bedroom, Osgood was forced to get rid of Jonathan too.

The problem with Osgood was that he really was only a pusher. He didn’t do murder the way some people don’t do windows. It must have bothered him. When we started to get too close, he tried to bail out, attempting to bargain with Wainwright for either some money or some cocaine to help him relocate and start over.

Osgood had met Ray at the Fifth Avenue between five-thirty and six. By then, Wainwright and Holman knew things were falling apart. Ray was there packing up the coke. When Osgood showed up, Ray took care of him. Holman had rented a car in downtown Seattle. He took the coke down to Boeing Field and loaded it into Wainwright’s car. They had planned to leave town as soon as Wainwright got back from Bellingham with the damning evidence.

But by the time Wainwright got back to town, he knew the tape wasn’t in the collection of evidence he had picked up from Mrs. Grace Simms Morris. So Wainwright made one more futile attempt at damage control.

He sent Ray to Bellingham to try one more time to get the tape while he himself put in an alibiing appearance at the Fifth Avenue Theater. And Ray muffed it. He seriously underestimated Grace Simms Morris. She chucked him over the head with that vase, and he’s on his way to the electric chair. Of course, it’ll be years before he exhausts all his avenues of appeal, but with any kind of luck he’ll pay, eventually.

The National Air Transportation Safety Board investigated Wainwright’s crashed Tomahawk. They finally determined that, in attempting to keep from hitting the radio towers, Wainwright lost control of the plane and hit the tree. They said the load in the passenger seat probably shifted. Too bad.

Donaldson, Sergeant James, Watty Watkins, and I spent all Sunday afternoon on the phone. At two-thirty on Monday, three hundred and fifty law-enforcement officers from all over the state of Washington showed up at Bellingham’s First Lutheran Church for Richard Dathan Morris’s funeral. It was everything Mrs. Grace Simms Morris had wanted for her son.

Six agents from the DEA, all of them—including Roger Glancy—wearing black arm bands, served as pallbearers. Richard Dathan Morris wasn’t what you could call a cop’s cop, but we all had to salute him for what he had done. Working under almost impossible conditions, without any help or backup, he had single-handedly put B. W. Wainwright and his friends out of business. There wasn’t one police officer at that funeral who wasn’t grateful.

When Donaldson took the folded American flag from the coffin and handed it to Mrs. Morris, she turned to me and dissolved into tears. I held her and let her cry on my shoulder. It was the least I could do. At last Mrs. Morris looked up at me and said, “Richard would have just loved you.”

Knowing what I did about Richard Dathan Morris’s sexual preference, I didn’t quite know how to take that remark, but I finally decided to accept it in the manner in which it was intended, as a sincere compliment.

Maxwell Cole tackled me after the funeral and demanded to know why I had lied to him about Jasmine Day. I told him I hadn’t. Then he wanted to know why, if I hadn’t lied, was the lady in question staying in my apartment. I told him that was none of his business.

It was several days later before I got back up to Harborview to see Peters. Mrs. Edwards and the girls had just left, and Amy Fitzgerald was sitting close to the head of Peters’s bed. She wasn’t wearing her uniform.

“How’s it going?” I asked.

“Better,” he said. “Lots better.”

Feeling like I was intruding on a private conversation, I walked over to the washbasin. The mirror was plastered with Peters’s entire collection of gaudy postcards. The girls had given up on me and delivered them to him in person.

“Thanks for sending the girls to California, Beau,” Peters said. “I know they had a terrific time. It’s hard for me to think of other people having fun when I’m lying flat on my back.”

“And feeling sorry for yourself,” Amy Fitzgerald added.

“That too,” Peters said.

I looked first at her and then back at Peters. “She doesn’t exactly pull any punches,” I said.

“I noticed,” Peters replied, but he didn’t sound as though he minded.

Amy glanced at her watch and stood up. “I’d better get going. It’ll be late by the time I get home.” She leaned over and kissed Peters’s cheek. “See you in the morning,” she said.

Amy paused briefly in the doorway to wave and then disappeared down the hall.

“She’s something else, don’t you think?” Peters asked.

I nodded.

“You remember the other day, when I hung up on you?” Peters continued. “When you were telling me about that nurse, the one who worked with the AIDS patient for free?”

“I remember. What about it?”

“I was afraid that that was what was going on with her. I’d been watching Amy for weeks, but I was afraid she just felt sorry for me.”

“That didn’t look like a very sorry lady to me.”

For a time, Peters was quiet. Finally he said, “Captain Powell came by to see me this afternoon.”

“Oh?” I deliberately kept my tone noncommittal. Before, Peters had been downright crabby about departmental visitors. “What did he have to say?”

“Did you know Arlo Hamilton is thinking about retiring?”

“No.”

“Larry wanted to know if I’d be interested in working in the Media Relations Department.”

I thought about the newspapers Peters devoured daily, about his photographic memory and his phenomenal ability to put names with faces. Whoever had come up with that job possibility was a real genius. I wanted to turn handstands all around the hospital bed, but I didn’t. I played my cards close to my chest for a change.

“So are you interested?” I asked distantly.

“It’s a job I could do in a chair if I had to,” he answered. “Or on crutches.”

When I left Peters’s room a few minutes later, it was all I could do to keep from dancing a jig in the hall. I was surprised to find Amy Fitzgerald standing next to the elevator.

“I thought you left,” I said.

“I was waiting for you. Did he tell you?”

“Did he tell me what?”

“About the public-information job.”

I nodded.

“Do you think he’ll take it?” she asked.

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“On you.”

She looked up at me, her eyes serious under long thick lashes. “No,” she said firmly, shaking her head. “It depends on him. He’s got to want it for himself.”

The elevator came then, and I rode down to the lobby with her, worrying about what she meant by that answer. My brotherly protective instincts rose straight to the surface. I didn’t want Peters hurt any more than he had already been. Maybe his first instinct was right and she was leading him on, hoping to get him back on his feet physically so she could drop him like a hot potato.

“What about you?” I asked. “Are your intentions honorable?”

She regarded me silently for a moment before she answered. “I don’t know.”

“Why?” I asked, blundering on with questions I had no business asking. “Because he’s broken? Because he’s hurt?”

She frowned. “Of course not, Detective Beaumont,” she answered archly. “I’ve never dated someone with children before. I’m not sure I’m ready for instant motherhood.”

With that she turned and walked away. I don’t think I’ll ever figure women out. Maybe I should just give up and stop trying.

Within days of the Westcoast closing, Jasmine Day got an offer to do another bus-and-truck show. This one is on the East Coast. A letter came from her today, telling me that she and Alan Dale will be getting married in September in Jasper, Texas, as soon as this tour ends. They wanted to know if I’d be willing to be best man.

I wired my answer back to the Mechanic Theater in Baltimore, Maryland.

I told them I wouldn’t miss it for the world.

About the Author

J. A. JANCEis theNew York Times bestselling author of the J. P. Beaumont series, the Joanna Brady series, three interrelated thrillers featuring the Walker family, andEdge of Evil . Born in South Dakota and brought up in Bisbee, Arizona, Jance lives with her husband in Seattle, Washington, and Tucson, Arizona.

www.jajance.com

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