“Me either. It’s guys like him who make it tough on everybody else.”
“You’d better tell us about it,” I suggested.
“Like I said, I hired him about five years ago, fresh out of the slammer. I let him work in my warehouse. It was like my civic duty, know what I mean? One of those work-release arrangements. It looked to me like it was working out fine.”
“He’s worked for you the whole time, then?”
Richard Damm nodded. “He handled the warehouse job for a couple of years, and then asked if he could start doing installations. He could make a lot more money doing that. I figured what the hell. He was a good enough worker. Turned out I was right. At least it looked that way at the time. He was a little slow at first, but he caught on.”
“What did he get sent up for?” Al asked.
“Vehicular manslaughter. DWI. He came out of the joint sober and went straight to AA. Hasn’t had a drop since, as far as I know.”
“How about lately? Any unexplained absences before this morning?”
Damm shook his head. “Not so as you’d notice. But he screwed up a truck over the weekend. My mechanic is pissed as hell about that, and I’ve been waiting all morning to hear whether or not he got that dentist’s office finished before he took off.”
“Dr. Nielsen’s office?” I asked.
Richard Damm seemed surprised. “That’s right. How’d you know about that? Nielsen’s a son of a bitch to work for. I call him ”Mister Got Bucks.“ He’s just like an old woman- fussy as hell. If Larry took off without completing that job, Nielsen’ll have my ass. I tried calling his office a couple of minutes ago. No answer.”
And there isn’t going to be, I thought. I said, “What makes you think Martin didn’t complete the job?”
“You wanna know what I really think?” Richard Damm demanded.
“Yes.”
“I think he went out on the town Friday night, fell off the wagon, and got himself in some kind of hassle. Maybe even skipped town. If he did, he took off with enough of my tools to be able to get himself another job wherever the hell he ends up.”
I happened to know that most of Larry Martin’s tools, minus the kicker that was down at the crime lab, were still in Dr. Frederick Nielsen’s office, but I didn’t tell Richard Damm that. I wasn’t about to tell him anything I didn’t have to. For some reason-maybe the phony hair, maybe the phony smile-Richard Damm rubbed me the wrong way.
“You always jump to these kinds of conclusions when one of your employees doesn’t show up for work on a Monday morning?” I asked.
Richard Damm’s whole manner changed abruptly. “I’m not stupid,” he said. “I had one of my guys drive by to check on him. His car wasn’t there, and nobody answered the door. That’s all I know.”
“You said something about him screwing up one of your trucks,” Al mentioned. “Tell us about that.”
“One of my installation vans. It’s a mess.”
“What about it?”
“He musta gotten in some kind of fight, that’s what we figure, or maybe an accident. All I know is there was blood all over the place, and one of the doors is bashed in. I guess I should be grateful, though. At least he didn’t steal it.”
“You say there was blood in the van?”
“You deaf or what? All over the seat, all over the floor.”
“We’d better have a look at it,” Big Al said, getting up and starting toward the door. “Where is it?”
“Nick took it down to Westlake to have it cleaned up and detailed. He’s probably back by now. It had been sitting out in the sun for a day and a half at least. Those stains really set up good. Nick says he doesn’t know if they can save the upholstery or not. He may have to tear it all out.”
“Who’s Nick?”
“Nick Wallace, my mechanic. We’ve got a whole fleet of vans. He’s in charge of keeping them all on the road.”
“And where is he?”
“Out back, in the garage. That’s usually where he is, him and his trucks-his babies he calls ”em. He couldn’t treat ‘em better if they all belonged to him personally, know what I mean?“
I got up and followed Al toward the fur-lined door. “So where’s the garage?”
“Straight through the warehouse. You’ll have to ring the bell for him to let you in.”
I stopped in the doorway door and turned back toward the room. The movie had returned to life on the television screen with all the moanings and pantings turned back up to full volume.
“Do you know Larry Martin’s address?”
Enthralled once more, Damm didn’t bother to look up. “Not off the top of my head. Get it from Cindy, my secretary. Tell her I said she should give it to you.”
“We may be back,” I added.
“Sure thing. I’ll be right here.”
Cindy gave us Larry Martin’s address and phone number up in Lake City, then she directed us through the warehouse to the garage at the far end of the building. She assured us that was where we’d find Nick Wallace.
“Do you believe that little shit?” Big Al asked as we made our way through canyons of carpet rolls. “Damm must not be getting any, or he wouldn’t have to watch that crap on TV.”
I certainly wasn’t getting any at the moment. The X-rated action on Richard Damm’s television set had made me painfully aware of my own particular lack.
“Probably not,” I said, and let it go at that.
Big Al is forever telling me that I need to get hooked up with some nice, warm-blooded Swedish girl like his Molly.
He could very well be right.
CHAPTER 6
Just as Richard Damm had warned us, we had to ring a bell to gain admittance to Nick Wallace’s garage. The door was locked from the inside. He came to open it himself. Nick was an older man, somewhere in his late sixties I’d say, with a ruddy complexion and thinning gray hair. He was wearing a pair of bright blue coveralls with a greasy towel hanging from one back pocket.
He opened the door, all right, but just a crack, enough for him to see us but not enough for us to step inside.
“Yeah?” he said gruffly. “Whadya want?” Al, leading the way, held out his ID. “Detectives Lindstrom and Beaumont. We’re with Seattle P.D. Homicide,” he explained. “We’d like to talk to you about one of your vans.”
Nick Wallace’s watery blue eyes narrowed slightly behind his thick wire-rimmed glasses. “Which one?”
“The one Larry Martin was driving Saturday,” Al said. “The one with the bloodstains.”
“Oh, that one,” Nick said. He opened the door a little wider then and allowed us to come inside, reluctantly admitting us to his sanctum sanctorum.
And that’s exactly what it was. I suspect Nick Wallace of being an original, card-carrying member of
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Entering his small shop in the back of Damm Fine Carpets was nothing short of a religious experience. He had every tool imaginable, from small milling lathes to complex electronic testing equipment. It was one of those workrooms that had a place for everything and everything in its place.
I’m the kind of messy mechanic who hates to work on cars. I do it only when absolutely necessary, and I never have the right tool for the right job. Oh, I may have it, but I can never lay my hands on it when I need it.
Through the years I’ve counted my lack of mechanical aptitude as a real character flaw, chalking it up to laziness and sloth as well as growing up with no mechanically inclined father living in the house. At the time of my divorce, it was one of the reasons Karen gave for throwing me over for the chicken conglomerate accountant from Cucamonga. She said she was tired of having to do her own oil changes.
Now I’ve got that Guard Red Porsche. I’ve looked under the hood of my 928, but I’ve never had guts enough to tackle anything I’ve found there. At this point, I’d a whole lot rather pay somebody who knows what he’s doing than screw up something by attempting to do it myself.
Besides, there’s no place to work on a car in the basement parking area of a downtown condo.