I turned back to Nick. “We’ll take this,” I told him, pocketing the case.
He nodded. “You bet. I sure as hell don’t need it.”
“Tell us once more exactly what happened when you found the van this morning.”
“Like I told you, it was parked outside in the sun, right next to the building. I was gonna bring it inside and gas it up when I saw the mess on the front seat. I opened the windows to air it out a little while I got the other vans on the road. Then, as soon as I got caught up, I cleaned up what I could and took it down to the detail place, the one down on Westlake.”
“You cleaned it yourself initially? What with?”
Wallace shrugged. “Rags,” he said. “And paper towels too. I used up practically a whole roll.”
“Where are they?”
“Where’s what?”
“The rags you used. The paper towels.”
“The paper’s over there in the trash. It don’t go out until tonight some time. And the towels are on the bottom of the laundry basket.”
“Could you get them for us?”
He paused, looking at us for a long moment. “Homicide, huh?” he said, musing to himself. At last he nodded his head as though he’d made up his mind. “I guess,” he said. “Whadya want ”em in? Another laundry bag be okay?“
“That’ll be fine,” I told him.
So we stood there and waited while Nick Wallace rummaged through first a laundry cart and then a fifty-gallon trash container. He stuffed his findings into a canvas laundry bag. When he was finished, he pulled the rope drawstring shut and brought the bag over to us.
He handed it over, then led us to the garage doors, opening one of them with an electrical switch on the wall just inside. Nick Wallace wasn’t about to be disturbed by unannounced visitors coming and going at will. He was sole keeper of the doors, both front and back.
I turned back to him, once Big Al and I were standing outside in the lot. “Thanks for all your help,” I told him, “but there’s one more thing.”
Nick was already shutting the door behind us. He had to reverse the procedure and open the door again high enough so we could see him. He looked impatient.
“What now?” he asked.
“Where does Larry Martin usually park his car?”
He pointed. “Over there, under the billboard.”
The billboard was one of those new state-of-the-art ones, an ad for some kind of fresh ground coffee that included a huge cup with what looked like steam rolling off it. One of my drinking buddies down at the Doghouse works for Ackerly Communications. He told me the steam is really a chemical reaction caused by dropping something called voodoo juice into a powder. It makes an interesting billboard, though, if you like that sort of thing. Under this particular one sat several parked cars.
By the time I turned back to Wallace to ask him another question, the garage door was all the way shut and Damm Fine Carpets’ resident mechanic had disappeared, locked safely away in self-imposed solitary confinement.
Al took the bag from my hand. “I’ll lock this stuff in the trunk before we go take a look at Martin’s parking place.”
That’s what we did. With the laundry bag safely stowed in our car, we went back to the steaming billboard and prowled around under it. There were six cars parked there in all, but no red VW bug.
“This must be the Damm Fine Carpets employee parking lot,” Al observed.
We scrambled around in the hot dusty gravel for ten or fifteen minutes, but found nothing that seemed out of place, nothing that appeared to have anything to do with Dr. Frederick Nielsen’s murder.
“Do you think Nielsen’s wife set him up?” Al asked finally as we abandoned our search of the parking lot.
“Could be,” I said, “but how?”
“Let’s go back inside and ask around.”
So we walked back in the front door of Damm Fine Carpets. The same eager salesman started toward us but quickly backed off when he recognized us. We went straight to Cindy at the counter.
“Can you tell us who Dr. Frederick Nielsen ordered his carpet from?” I asked.
“I guess,” she said. “Do you know the invoice number?”
“No. It was supposed to be installed on Saturday.”
She hefted a huge three-ring binder from a shelf under the counter and leafed through several dozen pages of yellow carbon copies. She had to lean over the counter to read what was written on the papers.
“Here it is,” she said at last, pointing with one of her crimson talons. “It was a special phone-in order. Mr. Damm took it himself.”
“I see,” I said. “One more thing. Can you tell us anything at all about Larry Martin. Did he have a girl friend, that you know of?”
Cindy shrugged. “I wouldn’t know about that,” she said.
“Maybe we’d better go talk to Damm about the order,” Al suggested.
“Oh no,” Cindy objected. “Not right now. He’s in conference. He’s not to be disturbed.”
“Have him call us when he’s done,” I said, scribbling my home phone number on one of my cards and handing it to her. “We need to ask him a few more questions.”
We left then. Big Al Lindstrom was fuming by the time we got to the car.
“Conference my ass!” he exclaimed. “That SOB’s probably sitting in there watching dirty movies and jacking off.”
“It’s no skin off our teeth,” I reminded him. “It isn’t illegal you know. They now have definite clinical proof that masturbation doesn’t cause blindness.”
Al glowered at me as if my sense of humor was wearing thin on his straitlaced, Scandinavian sensibilities.
“Isn’t it almost time to go home?” he asked plaintively.
“Almost,” I told him. “Just as soon as we get a line on LeAnn Nielsen.”
CHAPTER 7
We stopped by the crime lab to drop off our bag of bloody towels. Janice Morraine took it from me, glanced inside, then closed it back up.
“Thanks,” she said, wrinkling her nose in distaste at the smell. “Where’d this come from, a dry cleaners?”
“A Damm Fine Carpets van,” I replied.
“You don’t need to get pissed off about it, Beau.”
People in the crime lab tend to be somewhat defensive at times. “I’m not pissed,” I explained. “It’s Damm Fine Carpets. D-A-M-M. The owner’s name is Richard Damm. It’s part of the Nielsen case.”
“Oh,” she said.
I filled out the lab request and handed it to her. Jan signed the bottom of the form.
“What are we looking for?” she asked.
“Blood,” I answered. “Can you type blood even if it’s been diluted with cleaning solution?”
“That depends,” she said.
“See if it matches up with what came in on that carpet kicker from the crime scene on Second Avenue, will you?”
She nodded. “Knowing you, I suppose you want it yesterday, right?”
“You got it.”
Al and I walked up the three flights of stairs between the crime lab and the fifth floor. There, in our cubicle, he took charge of the paperwork while I got on the horn to Sergeant Bob Daniels at the Community Services Section over at Eighteenth and Yesler.
Daniels is the commander of the twenty or so community service officers, that strange branch of Seattle P.D. that’s neither fish nor fowl. Daniels told us we’d need to come to talk to the nighttime supervisor of the CSOs.
The concept of CSOs is fairly new on the scene. They’ve only been around for the last few years, and I’m one of the die-hard old-timers who resisted the idea tooth and nail when they first talked about instituting it. In my book, cops are cops and social workers are social workers and never the twain shall meet.
But CSOs turn out to be a little of both without quite being either. They aren’t sworn police officers. According to the procedures manual, they’re supposed to relieve street cops of a lot of the landlord disputes, juvenile runaways, utility turnoff problems, domestic violence, and other noncriminal crap that eat up law enforcement time without taking any hardened criminals-routine killers, drug dealers, and other professional bad guys-off the streets.