Read Name Withheld : A J.p. Beaumont Mystery (9780061760907) Online
Authors: Judith A. Jance
Name Withheld : A J.p. Beaumont Mystery (9780061760907) (3 page)
Twenty-fifth-floor penthouses are swell. The views are spectacular, as long as you don't have to walk all the way up. I was upset when I left the lobby. By the time I staggered up to my door and stuck the key in the lock, I was winded and furious. As the door swung open, I could hear the drone of the television set coming from the den. The air was thick with the smell of freshly popped microwave popcorn.
I charged into the den to find the two innocent-looking wretches sitting side by side and cross-
legged on the floor. A stainless-steel bowl of popcorn nestled between them.
“All right, young ladies. What exactly have you two been up to?”
Tracy's eyes grew wide. “What do you mean? We popped some popcorn,” she murmured. “Just like you said we could.”
“I'm not talking about popcorn. Which one of you has been fooling around with soap in the Jacuzzi?” I demanded, forgetting completely that we live in a country where peopleâeven kidsâare presumably innocent until proven guilty.
Heather flounced to her feet and stood there glaring back at me, both hands planted on her hips. “Don't you yell at my sister!” she commanded, looking irate enough to tear me apart. If I hadn't been so bent out of shape, her pint-size fury might have been comical. But her outraged reprimand was enough to make me realize I
was
yelling.
I took a deep breath. They were both there; they were safe. Why the hell was I so upset?
“All right, all right,” I said. “I'll calm down. Just tell me the truth. Which one of you put soap in the Jacuzzi?”
“We didn't, Uncle Beau,” Tracy answered. “We were both right here watching TV the whole time. Honest.”
“But somebody ran soap through a hot tub,” I said. “The fire department's downstairsâon your floor, by the wayâtrying to clean it up.”
“Come on, Tracy,” Heather said, her voice stiff
with disgust. “Let's get our stuff and go.”
“You're not going anywhere,” I objected. “Your parents still aren't home.”
Heather glared at me. “Why should we stay here?” she demanded. “You're mad at us for something we didn't do.”
As Heather hurtled out of the den with Tracy on her heels, I followed them. While they turned in to the spare bedroom to retrieve their stuff, I continued down the hall to the master suite and bath. The glass shower stall was flecked with drops of water from my morning shower, but the Jacuzzi itself was bone dry. Unused. The only wet thing in the bathroom was my own still-damp towel.
Flushing with embarrassment and contrite as hell, I hurried back down the hall to the spare bedroom, where they were gathering their overnight stuff into a pair of shopping bags.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Hold up. I'm sorry. I can see now that you didn't do it.”
Heather wasn't in a mood for accepting apologies. “But you
thought
we did,” she stormed. “I'm leaving anyway.”
“Heather, please,” I begged, “I made a mistake.”
But she wouldn't let up. “You made Tracy cry.”
“I didn't mean to. It's just thatâ”
“Something was wrong, so you thought we did it. Because we're kids.”
“Yes, but I don't think so anymore. Really. I'm sorry. I apologize.”
I'm convinced Heather Peters will be a heartbreaker when she grows up. She relented, but not all at once. She glanced coyly up at my face through eyes veiled by long blond lashes. “Cross your heart?”
“And hope to die,” I returned. “Sorry enough to take you both to lunch, anywhere you want to go.”
“Even McDonald's?”
“Even McDonald's, but only if you promise not to tell your dad that I took you there.”
The shameless little imp grinned in triumph. “Well, all right then,” she conceded.
When we left the apartment, the elevators still weren't working. We had to walk down twenty-four flights of stairs, but going down was a whole lot easier than climbing up. When we stepped outside the lobby, the news crew was still there. The reporter was busy interviewing Dick Mathers. Dick and his wife, Francine, are Belltown Terrace's resident managers.
Dick is one of those people who is incapable of talking without waving his hands in the air. He gave me what felt like an especially baleful glare as the girls and I walked past him, but I disregarded it. Some days I seem to feel more paranoid than others. And seeing the news crew gathering info about a flood of soapsuds, I knew for sure it really was a slow news day in Seattle.
In fact, I never gave the incident another
thought, not during lunch at McDonald's, and not during the afternoon the girls and I spentâalong with hundreds of other peopleâat the sunny but cold Woodland Park Zoo.
When we came back to the condo, everything seemed to be under control. The fire truck and news cameras were gone. The elevator was working properly. When I dropped Heather and Tracy off at their unit on the seventh floor, Ron and Amy were back from their big night out. They both said they'd had a great time. As I closed the door to their apartment and headed for my own, I breathed a sigh of relief. The girls were home, safe and sound. No problem.
My false sense of well-being lasted well into the eveningâalmost to bedtime. Ron Peters called upstairs at a quarter to ten.
“We've got trouble,” he said. “Can I come up?”
“Sure.”
He was there within minutes, looking distraught. “Ron, what's the matter?”
“It's Roz,” he said. “She's back in town. She's staying at her mother's place down in Tukwila.”
“So?”
“Did you leave the girls alone today?” he asked.
“Only for a little while,” I told him. “I was on call. A body floated up under Pier Seventy, and Iâ”
“Roz called me about something on the evening news. She said the reporter was interview
ing Dick Mathers, the manager, over something about soapsuds when you and the girls came out of the building. He blamed the âtwo little girls who live in the building' for the problem. He said he believed they'd been left without adequate supervision. RozâI mean Sister Constanceâwanted to know if there were any other girls who live here besides Heather and Tracy. I told her no, they're the only ones, but that anybody who said they'd been left alone was lying because they'd been with you the whole time. But if you were out⦔
“Look, Ron, the girls were fine while I was gone. And believe me, they had nothing whatever to do with all that soap.”
“You should have heard her on the phone. There's going to be trouble over this.”
Again, since Roz Peters wasn't
my
ex-wife, it was easy for me to wax philosophical. “Come on, Ron, don't hit the panic buttons. It's no big deal. After all, what could Roz possibly do with a bunch of soapsuds?”
The answer, of course, was a whole lot different from what I thought. Roz Peters, otherwise known as Sister Constance, had every intention of turning a little molehill of soapsuds into a mountain of trouble. It pains me to say that I never saw it coming.
But then, I never do.
I
was pretty much feeling on top of things when I headed to the department the next morning. A yellow Post-it note was plastered on the wall next to the entrance to my cubicle by the time I got there. “See me,” it said. It was signed, “L.P.”
The
L.P
. in question, Captain Larry Powell, is even more of a troglodyte than I am. I've gradually moved into the modern era enough so that I can tolerate voice mail. I've gradually learned to hunt and peck my way around a computer keyboard. There are even times when I've found a fax machine downright useful. Larry, on the other hand, has come only as far as Post-it notes. That far and no further.
“What gives?” I asked, sauntering up to the open door of the captain's fishbowl office.
“I hear you took on yesterday's floater. Any
progress on that one so far?”
“Not yet. It's still early. That's what I'll be working on this morning.”
“Is it something you'd mind handling alone?”
Did Br'er Rabbit mind being thrown in the briar patch?
“No problem,” I said, trying not to let Larry see the grin that threatened to leak out through the corners of my mouth. “Why? What's happened to Sue? Aren't she and I partners anymore?”
Detective Sue Danielson has been my partner for several months now. She's young and fairly new to Homicideâa transfer in from Sex Crimesâbut she's also a capable investigator. I knew she had taken her two boys and gone to visit her folks in Ohio over the holidays, but I also knew that her sons were due back in school that morning.
“She's stuck in Cincinnati with chicken pox.”
“Traveling with kids is always so much fun,” I said sympathetically.
“It's not the
kids
who are sick,” Larry Powell told me. “It's Sue.”
“Chicken pox? At
her
age?”
“Evidently,” Larry observed dryly.
When Jared Danielson had come down with chicken pox early in December, Sue had said she remembered being sick with the same thing back when she was a child. I mentioned that to Larry.
“Evidently, she was mistaken,” he replied. “And from what I hear, right this minute she's one sick little lady. It'll be several days before she
stops being contagious and can get on an airplane to come back home.”
“Tough break,” I said, “but don't worry about me and Mr. John Doe. The two of us will get along fine without her.”
The captain nodded. “I figured as much, but if you need help, let me know.”
“Sure thing,” I told him.
Larry's phone rang just then. He waved me out of his office, dismissing me. Before heading back to my cubicle, I took a little detour down to Missing Persons. There I found Detective Chip Raymond moving stacks of paper back and forth across his desk.
“Looks like a giant game of solitaire,” I said.
Chip glanced up at me balefully and shook his head. “Don't I just wish. Where the hell do all these people go?”
“Away?” I offered.
Detective Raymond didn't appreciate my helpful suggestion. “Cut the cute, Beaumont,” he said. “Whaddya want?”
“Any of those MPs got a tattoo saying
MOTHER
on a right wrist?”
Chip Raymond left off sorting papers and turned to a computer. He typed a series of commands on the keyboard, and then sat frowning at the display, waiting for an answer. When it came, he shook his head. “Not so far,” he said. “One of yours?”
“Is now,” I nodded. “He's a New Year's Day floater.”
“I'll keep a sharp lookout and let you know right away if anybody matching that description turns up. What else can you tell me about him?”
I gave him the same information Audrey Cummings had given me, then Detective Raymond went back to sorting his morass of paper. I stood in the doorway of his cubicle for a moment, watching. “I seem to remember someone saying that the age of computers was the beginning of the end of paper; that we'd all be living in a paperless society by now.”
Raymond nodded. “I remember people saying that, too,” he said, morosely surveying the stacks of paper littering his desk. “I think I want my money back.”
Laughing, I went back to my own office. The amount of paper I had to contend with was downright modest compared to Chip's.
That day, the fifth floor where the Homicide Squad resides was in a state of relative bedlam if not downright siege. Everybody was milling around, trying to get organized as to how best to deal with the caseload generated by a flurry of year-end violence: two alcohol-related vehicular homicides; an apparently fatal domestic violence case; and two Rainier Valley drive-by shootings that, although not fatal, still fell into Homicide's jurisdiction. No wonder Captain Powell had asked me if I'd mind working the case alone.
The first order of business was to track down the lady jogger who had reported finding the floater's body to 911. I've learned that more often
than not, the “innocent” people who “discover” the bodies aren't nearly as innocent as they ought to be. It's as though they get so antsy waiting for their crime to be discovered that they go ahead and report it themselves, just to get it over with. So I was somewhat skeptical when I tried calling Johnny Bickford's number a little later that morning.
When a man answered, I asked to speak to Johnny Bickford. He coughed, cleared his throat, and said, in a clearer and higher-pitched voice, “Yes.”
“Are you Johnny Bickford?” I asked.
“I was last time I checked,” the voice returned. “Who's this?”
Johnny Bickford had to be a die-hard smoker. “Detective J. P. Beaumont, with the Seattle P.D.,” I answered.
“Oh, hi there,” she returned in an almost welcoming croon. “This has to be about the man in the water. I expected a call yesterday.”
“I tried,” I said. “Nobody was home. In my business, there's not much point in leaving messages.”
“I don't see why not,” Johnny said. “I would have called you back right away.”
“Well,” I said, “would it be possible for me to drop by today, maybe later this morning?”
“Certainly. How soon?”
“Say fifteen minutes?”
“That barely gives me time to get decent, but that'll be fine. Do you drink coffee, Detectiveâ?”
“Beaumont,” I supplied. “And yes, I do. A cup of coffee would be great.”
Johnny Bickford's address on West Mercer led me to the bottom floor of a small eight-unit condominium complex on the view side of Queen Anne Hill. In this case, the view wasn't all that great, unless you happen to be a fan of grain terminals, which I'm not.
I rang the bell. The blonde who answered the door was almost as tall as I am. She wore a white, long-sleeved robe edged with something soft and furry, along with a matching pair of high-heeled, backless slippers. The outfit looked as though it had been copied from a 1930s Bette Davis movie. So did the foot-long cigarette holder.
“You must be Detective Beaumont.”
I nodded, handing her one of my cards. After giving me a coy look, she immediately tucked the card into her bra. “Won't you come in?”
I stepped into a black-and-white room: white leather couch, chair, and carpet; black lacquered furniture. Huge black-and-white oils of nothing recognizable covered the walls. A silver tray laden with a french-press coffeepot, coffee cups, saucers, and spoons as well as cream and sugar was waiting on the coffee table.
“Won't you sit down?” Johnny offered. “And how do you take your coffee, black or with cream and sugar?”
“Black will be fine,” I said.
Johnny motioned me onto the couch and then took a seat on a nearby straight-backed chair. She
sat primly erect, shoulders not touching the chair, knees close together, legs demurely crossed at the ankle. And that was part of what gave her away. Modern-day ordinary women seldom pay that much attention to the finer points of posture and deportment. Not only that, the hand that passed me my cup and saucer wasn't exactly fragile and feminine.
Robe and slippers be damned, Johnny Bickford wasn't a woman at all, or rather, wasn't all woman.
“I meant to go jogging first thing this morning,” he/she was saying. “Here it is, only the second of January and I'm already breaking one of my New Year's resolutions, but I just couldn't bear to go back down the waterfront after what happened there yesterday. The problem is, I'm not in good enough shape to run up and down the hills in this neighborhood. Besides, I barely slept last night. Nightmares, you know. That poor man. Do you have any idea who he is?”
“Not yet. We're working on it. Tell me, Johnny, where were you when you first saw the body?”
“I had just come up through Myrtle Edwards Park, and I was more than a little winded.” Johnny laughed, the sound more of a donkey's bray than anything else. “That's not entirely true. I'm fairly new to this jogging thing, and I went out on Pier Seventy to watch the water traffic and to catch my breath. I was coming back down the pier to head home when we saw him. He wasn't floating, really. He was sort of pushed up against
one of those old dead-head logs down along the edge of the water. Then a tugboat or something came by, fairly close to shore. The wake was enough to jar him loose. He disappeared under the dock.”
“You said
we
. Was someone there with you?”
“There was a lady in a wheelchair on the dock with me. I mean, we were on the dock at the same time, although we weren't actually together, you see. She was the one who spotted the body first, although I was the one who called it in because I was the one with a phone in my pocket.”
“This other lady, did you get her name?”
“No.”
“And you called from your cell phone?”
Johnny nodded. “I carry my trusty little cellular phone with me at all times. I used to live up on Capital Hill, you see,” he/she said. “Up there, I worried about gay bashing, especially late at night. Downtown here, it's mostly ordinary muggers and homeless lowlife panhandlers. They don't give a damn if you're gay or straight. I'd have to call them equal-opportunity criminals,” Johnny said with another raucous hoot of laughter.
“I guess you would,” I agreed, although I didn't find the joke particularly funny.
There was a momentary lull in the conversation. Johnny Bickford looked thoughtful. “I suppose the poor man committed suicide, didn't he? Jumped off a bridge or something? You have to
be feeling terribly low to just go ahead and end it all that way.”
It was interesting to me that one of the first people on the scene still thought John Doe had jumped off a bridge, while that television reporter there at the scene had specifically asked and had already somehow known that the victim had been shot. How did she know that? I wondered in passing before turning my attention back to Johnny. It didn't seem all that out of line to let the star witness know a little more about what was really going on.
“It doesn't appear to be suicide,” I said. “We're investigating the case as a homicide.”
“Oh, my goodness!” Johnny Bickford exclaimed, clutching his/her throat. “How awful!”
I'm surprised he/she didn't simply faint dead away at the news. I'm glad it didn't happen, however, because I'm not sure what my response should have been if he/she had.
I had been asking questions and filling in the contact report as I went. At the top of the form officers are expected to circle the appropriate titleâ
Mr., Mrs., Ms
., or
Miss
. Stumped, I left that one blank while I went on taking the information.
I asked all the usual questions, but other than having found the body, there didn't seem to be that much more Johnny Bickford could add to what I already knew. When we finished and I handed the paper over to Johnny for a signature, his/her eyes went directly to the top of the form and stayed there for some time. Finally, taking
the pen I offered, he/she signed the paper with an overstated flourish and handed it back.
Looking at the top of the form I saw that the word
Ms
. had been circled in a bold, heavy-duty line. While I surveyed the form, Johnny Bickford observed me with a defiant stare.
“Even though I've never been married,
Miss
doesn't really apply to someone in my situation,” Johnny Bickford said. “I couldn't choose âNone of the Above' since that one wasn't listed.
Ms
. will be far more suitable after the first of February. That's when I'm scheduled for the next step in my sex change.”
“I see,” I said awkwardly, since the pause in the conversation made it necessary for me to say something.
Johnny Bickford simpered at me over the brim of his/her coffee cup, and then took another dainty sip of coffee. “
Do
you?” he asked. “My doctor doesn't believe in doing it all at once. He says Rome wasn't built in a day.”
“No,” I agreed, wishing I sounded less stupid than I felt. “It certainly wasn't.”
Carefully, I set down my own cup and saucer on the table and gathered up my paperwork. “I'd best be going,” I said.
“Can't I talk you into staying for another cup of coffee?” Johnny Bickford asked with a flirtatious smile. The look alone was enough to make me want to bolt for the door.
“No,” I stammered uncomfortably, getting to my feet. “No, thank you.”
“Too bad.” Johnny said. “I think you're awfully cute.”
I was already on my feet when Johnny reached into the pocket of his white robe and pulled out a tiny, four-inch-long scrap of newspaper article and handed it over to me. Quickly, I scanned through it:
BODY FOUND AT PIER
70
The body of an unidentified man was found floating in the water near Pier 70 New Year's Day, spotted by an early-morning jogger.
Dr. Audrey Cummings, King County Assistant Medical Examiner, stated that the man had died as a result of undetermined causes.
Seattle police are investigating.