The Undertaker's Widow (29 page)

“I think that Martin Jablonski was paid to murder you, Senator,” Quinn concluded. “When he failed and you were arrested for your husband's murder, I was set up. Now that I've double-crossed the blackmailers, they're trying to frame me for Reston's murder and kill me. But I'm not the main focus of these people. You are. And that means that you're also in danger.”

“Judge, I can't begin to thank you for the sacrifices you've made for me. I owe you everything. Quite possibly my life.”

Quinn looked down, embarrassed. Crease thought silently for a moment. Then she blew an angry plume of smoke into the air and said, “Benjamin Gage has to behind this. He and Junior are the only people I can think of who hate me enough to want me dead, and Junior is too stupid to dream up a scheme this complex.”

Brademas nodded. “I drew the same conclusion.”

He turned to Quinn.

“Benjamin Gage's administrative assistant is a man named Ryan Clark. He's an ex-navy SEAL. As soon as you told us that a man in scuba gear snatched the Chapman woman I thought of Clark. Pulling off a fake abduction underwater would be a piece of cake for someone with Clark's skills.”

“How did he do it?” Quinn asked. “I never saw Andrea surface for air.”

“She wouldn't have to. There's an emergency breathing apparatus attached to all air tanks. She could have used the one on Clark's tank while they were underwater.”

“What do you think we should do next, Judge?” Crease asked.

“I think that the key to discovering the person behind this plot is learning the true identity of Andrea Chapman or Claire Reston or whatever her real name is. If we find out who she is, we might be able to find a link between her and the people who are after us.”

“Jack can trace her, Judge,” Crease said. “He was a Portland Police officer before he came to work for my husband's company. We knew each other on the force. He still has contacts in the bureau.

“Jack, can you get copies of the investigative reports of the murder at the Heathman? We need to know the identity of the murdered woman and where she lived. Then we can try to find out how she got mixed up in this.”

“I'll have the information by tomorrow afternoon,” Brademas assured his boss.

“Good. Why don't you also think about the information that Judge Quinn has given us and see if you can come up with any other avenues of investigation?”

Brademas left and Crease turned to Quinn. “It looks like we're both in more trouble than we ever wanted to be.” Crease sighed heavily. “If the latest polls hold, my political career will be over. The only way I can save it is by proving that I was framed. Otherwise, people will always believe that I hired Jablonski and beat the rap on a technicality.”

“It might help if I went public and told everyone about the blackmail attempt.”

“It would only help if we can prove that we were both set up and who is behind this conspiracy. Otherwise, anything you say will sound like an attempt to exonerate yourself in the Reston murder. Besides, going public would destroy your career and I couldn't let you do that for me.”

“My career is over, anyway. I'm stepping down from the bench tomorrow. When I was attacked, I was
going back to the courthouse to write my letter of resignation.”

“Don't do that. You're a good judge. If you resign from the bench, you're letting the bastards who set us up win. It took guts to rule for me. It was the right thing to do. Let Jack and me work on this. And don't give up hope. That's what you'd be doing if you resign.”

When Quinn walked into Stanley Sax's chambers, the presiding judge took a hard look at the yellowish purple bruise that spread across the left side of Quinn's face.

“Are you okay?”

“Physically, I'm fine. Emotionally … that's something else.”

“I can imagine. You're the talk of the courthouse. First that ruling in
Crease
, then this attack in the garage.”

“I want to take some time off, Stan.”

“That makes sense. How long do you want?”

“I cleared my desk when I thought that the
Crease
trial would take most of the month. I can take a few days off without disrupting the work of the court. I'll write memos in all of my cases so that any judge you assign will be able to get up to speed easily.”

“All right. Being attacked like that has to be frightening. Go home and rest. Call me next week and let me know how you feel. Maybe you and Laura should head for the coast. Lily and I used to rent a little bungalow in Cannon Beach and watch the storms with hot buttered rums and a good fire.” Sax smiled. “A little romance is a great remedy for the blues.”

Sax's reminder of his empty marriage hurt, but Quinn faked a smile and said, “Thanks for the advice and for being so understanding.”

Sax waved off Quinn. The judge left Sax's chambers
and headed for his own. Fran Stuart examined Quinn's face. Before she could ask, Quinn said, “This looks pretty bad, but I'm fine.”

Fran handed Quinn a stack of messages. As Quinn thumbed quickly through the stack to see if there was one from Crease or Brademas, his secretary said, “Most of these are from friends asking if you're okay or from reporters who want to interview you. There was also a call from an Officer Ramirez. He wanted to set up an appointment for this afternoon so he can get a statement about the attack.”

Quinn looked at his watch. It was a little after three. He could probably fit in Ramirez around four-thirty. Quinn started toward his office.

“And your wife called several times.” Quinn's heart jumped. “She wanted you to call her as soon as you got in.”

Quinn had been too exhausted physically and emotionally to call Laura after his visit to Ellen Crease. Her calls made Quinn anxious. Was she calling to reconcile or to ask for a divorce?

“Oh,” Fran said, “there was one unusual call. It came in ten minutes ago. A woman named Denise Ritter. She said it was urgent. She wanted to talk to you about that woman who was murdered at the Heathman Hotel. She said that she's the woman's sister.”

“Her sister?”

“Yes. She sounded very upset.”

“Thank you, Fran.”

Quinn thumbed through his messages until he found the slip with Ritter's phone number. It had a Seattle area code. The phone rang twice, then a woman answered.

“Is this Denise Ritter?” Quinn asked.

“Yes?”

“This is Judge Richard Quinn.”

Quinn could hear breathing on the other end of the phone.

“Ms. Ritter?”

“I'm sorry. Maybe I shouldn't have called.”

“Is this about the woman who was murdered?”

“Yes. Marie is … was my sister.”

Quinn heard the woman's breath catch. Then he heard a sob.

“Are you all right?”

“I'm sorry. I … I flew down this morning on the shuttle to identify Marie's body.”

“That must have been awful.”

“The detectives were very kind, but …”

Ritter's voice trailed off and Quinn heard her blowing her nose. She apologized again.

“Ms. Ritter, why did you call me?”

“The detectives showed me a picture of you and Marie on a beach.”

“You told them that the woman in the pictures was Marie?”

“Yes.”

“Did they seemed surprised?”

“Now that you mention it, they did.”

“What did they ask you when you said that?”

“They wanted to know if Marie had ever mentioned you, but they wouldn't tell me why they were asking.”

Ritter hesitated. Then she said, “Judge, Marie and I weren't close. Especially these past few years. I was hoping you could tell me what went wrong. How this happened.”

“Ms. Ritter, I would like to talk with you about Marie, too. If I took the shuttle to Seattle, would you meet with me tonight?”

The shuttle touched down a little after six
P.M
. Twenty minutes later, the cab Quinn hired at Sea-Tac Airport rounded a curve on the freeway and the judge saw the massive, glass and concrete structures that dominated Seattle's city center. Seattle had its share of interesting architecture: the Space Needle towered over everything, and the Pike Place Market, a collection of ramshackle stalls, shops and restaurants seemingly held together by glue, tottered on a hillside overlooking Elliott Bay. However, Seattle's buildings were nowhere near as spectacular as its geography. The “Emerald City” sat on a narrow strip of land between Puget Sound and eighteen-mile-long Lake Washington. Massive Mount Rainier dominated the landscape east of the city, and to the west were the jagged peaks of the Olympic Mountains.

Shortly after reaching the city, the cab turned off the interstate and traveled downhill toward the Pioneer Square Historic District, an area of late-Victorian and early-twentieth-century buildings that had been built up after the Great Fire of 1889. Day and night, the district swarmed with crowds attracted to its galleries, restaurants, antique shops and theaters. Denise Ritter had agreed to meet Quinn in an espresso bar at First and James near the original Pioneer Square. Quinn spotted the totem pole in the square before he located the café, a dark and narrow space squeezed between a gallery featuring Native American art and an occult bookstore. Toward the back of the espresso bar, a woman wearing a peasant dress nervously scanned the door.

Denise Ritter bore little resemblance to her sister. She was five nine and stoop-shouldered. Her hair was black like Marie's, but it was frizzy and collected behind her in a barrette, and her blue eyes hid behind thick, tortoiseshell glasses. Behind the thick lenses, Ritter's
eyes were red from crying. When she noticed Quinn walking toward her, Ritter seemed to pull into herself. It took Quinn a moment to realize that Marie had modeled her Claire Reston persona on her real sister.

“I'm Richard Quinn,” the judge said when he reached Ritter's table. Ritter held out her hand self-consciously and Quinn took it. The skin felt cold and she looked exhausted.

“Are you all right?” Quinn asked as he sat down.

“No,” Ritter answered frankly. “Seeing Marie like that was really hard for me.”

She could not go on and Quinn was relieved when a skinny waiter in jeans and a T-shirt walked up to the table. Quinn asked for coffee. Ritter was nursing a latte.

“I appreciate your willingness to meet with me, under the circumstances,” Quinn told Ritter.

“I'm doing this as much for me as for you. Marie was my sister. What I don't understand is your interest.”

“What did the police tell you about me?”

“That you knew Marie.”

“Did they say that I was a suspect in Marie's death?”

The question startled Ritter. She shook her head while examining Quinn more closely.

“And Marie never mentioned me to you, or talked about a judge that she knew?”

Ritter looked down at the tabletop. “I rarely talked to Marie about her business.”

“What exactly did you understand Marie's business to be?”

Ritter sighed sadly. “Marie was a call girl, Judge. A prostitute.”

Quinn should have been shocked, but he wasn't. If you wanted to hire a woman to seduce a man, seeking the services of a professional made sense.

“Did Marie work in Seattle?”

“Yes.”

“Did she ever work in Portland?”

“I don't know. She never told me she did, but I disapproved of Marie's … lifestyle and she knew it, so it was rare for her to discuss her profession with me.”

“I want you to know that before today I did not know that Marie was a prostitute,” Quinn said firmly. “She told me that she designed belts. I thought she worked in the fashion industry. Did she ever do anything like that?”

“Marie! Not that I knew of.”

“Would you mind talking about your sister?”

Ritter brushed at her eyes. Her lower lip trembled.

“Marie was two years younger than me. She was always rebellious. I was a good student. Marie was at least as intelligent as I am, but she barely passed. She was into drugs, boys. My parents tried everything. Eventually, they gave up. When she was eighteen, Marie was arrested for prostitution and my parents kicked her out of the house. She wasn't really living at home then, anyway. After that, they wouldn't have anything to do with her.”

“Do your parents know that Marie is dead?”

“No. I haven't told them. I don't know what to say. They wrote Marie off years ago.”

“How close were you to your sister?”

“That's hard to answer. We saw very little of each other when I was at college and graduate school. After I moved back to Seattle to take a teaching job we started meeting a little more, but there wasn't any plan to it. Sometimes she would just drop by or she'd call on the spur of the moment and we'd go out for dinner. A lot of the times when she called I thought it was because she was lonely, but, if I asked her, she would always pretend to be upbeat and tell me how great her life was.”