Once outside the door I noticed Al was shaking his head. “We may do it all right,” he said, “but not today. It’s past quitting time. We’re having company for dinner. Molly’ll have my ears if I get home much later than this. I’m already in deep shit.”
We drove back to the Public Safety Building. Al took off from the parking garage without bothering to come upstairs. I was in no particular rush to get home, however, so I stopped by our cubicle long enough to try calling the three numbers Marilyn McDougal had given us. Shelter directors must keep bankers hours because at ten to five not one of the three was in her office. I left messages with my name and both telephone numbers and headed home.
A man’s home is his castle, right? It’s supposed to be a haven of tranquility where he can recover from the slings and arrows that the world and his job throw at him, right? And since I live in the penthouse of one of Seattle“ s newest condominiums, it should have been true. But when I got off the elevator and saw the two distinct puddles dripped on the carpet outside my front door, I knew there was trouble afoot.
Ron Peters, my partner until March when he was badly injured, was still confined to the rehabilitation floor at Harborview Hospital. His dippy ex-wife had disappeared into thin air while on a religious mission to South America. As far as his kids were concerned, that left things pretty much up to me.
I had moved Peters’ two young daughters, Heather and Tracie, as well as their live-in baby-sitter, Mrs. Edwards, into a vacant unit several floors below mine. It was a hell of a lot easier for me to pay the extra rent than it was to run back and forth across Lake Washington to their house in Kirkland. Mrs. Edwards is by and large a fine baby-sitter, but during Mrs. Edwards’ occasional naps, the girls tend to get into mischief.
I’m sure the mischief is mostly inadvertent on their part. In fact, when they left the swimming pool with Mrs. Edwards sound asleep in a deck chair, the plan was simply to raid my refrigerator for the sodas they knew I keep there as special treats.
But the sodas had somehow evolved into ice cream floats that had overflowed and slopped all over my kitchen floor. They were both down on their hands and knees trying to mop up the mess when they heard my key in the lock. One of them jumped and the remains of her float disappeared entirely under the drip tray of my refrigerator.
If it had been ten years earlier, if it had been my own kids, Kelly and Scott, I probably would have raised hell. I’ve evidently mellowed with age. I helped clean up the mess, fixed the tearful Heather a replacement float, and went in search of the still slumbering Mrs. Edwards.
“Oh dear,” she said when I shook her awake. “I must have dozed off. They didn’t get into any trouble, did they?”
“No trouble at all,” I said. Did I say mellow? Soft in the head is more like it. I didn’t even chew Mrs. Edwards out for sleeping on the job. She looked worn out. Besides, both Heather and Trade swim like fish.
I left the girls with Mrs. Edwards on the sixth floor and went back up to my apartment. I dialed Ron Peters’ number at Harborview. He answered on his speaker-phone.
“How’s it going?” I asked.
“Can’t complain,” he replied. “How about you?”
“Big Al and I got sent out on that murder in the Regrade today, the one in the dentist’s office.”
“What does it look like?”
“Domestic violence probably. The husband was a first-class shit. We think maybe the wife hooked up with a carpet installer to do him in.”
“Same old story. We’ve heard it dozens of times,” Peters said. “Anything I can do to help?”
During the months of confinement, Peters had functioned behind the scenes as the third man on Al’s and my team, using the telephone to track down leads we didn’t have time to pursue ourselves. It was a way of letting him keep his hand in.
“As a matter of fact there is,” I told him. “You can check around with the local emergency rooms and see if someone came in Saturday or Sunday with some bad scratches. Deep cuts, probably, made with the teeth of a carpet kicker.”
“Ouch,” Peters said. “I’ve seen those before. They’re wicked.”
“You’ve got that right,” I said. “The van the guy was driving had blood all over it, but he’s disappeared. Maybe you can help us get a line on him.”
“I’ll do my best. By the way, how are the girls?”
“They’re fine. They were here just a while ago. I invited them up for an ice cream float. We all had a good time. I probably spoiled their dinners.”
There was a pause. “Thanks,” Peters said. He sounded about half choked up.
“Don’t make a big deal out of it, Peters,” I told him. “It’s just like taking the girls to see
Bambi.
I needed an excuse so I could have a float, too.“
CHAPTER 8
The bachelor life doesn’t have a lot to recommend it, especially if you’re a lousy cook. One exception, however, is the ability to kick off your shoes in the middle of the living room and take a nap right after work, without anyone telling you that you need to mow the lawn or haul the garbage cans out to the street.
I’m what’s known as a world-class sleeper. If left undisturbed, these afternoon naps of mine can sometimes last right on through to morning. Unless the phone rings, which it did. Right at nine o’clock.
“Detective Beaumont, please,” a woman’s voice said. It was a crisp, businesslike voice I didn’t recognize.
“Yes,” I mumbled, trying not to sound as groggy as I felt.
“My name is Alice Fields. I’m the executive director of Phoenix House. You left a message for me to call you. I was going to wait until morning, but then I had another call tonight from Marilyn McDougal.”
My stupefied brain cells finally woke up and snapped to attention. “Oh yes, Miss Fields. Thanks for returning my call.”
“Mrs.
Fields,“ she corrected firmly. She spoke with a sharp Midwestern twang that made her sound as though she had just stepped off the train from Minneapolis-Saint Paul.
“I understand you’re looking for a woman who may possibly be a resident in our shelter.”
J. P. Beaumont wasn’t much of a poker player, but neither was Alice Fields. I was bright enough to figure out that she wouldn’t be calling me four hours after quitting time if she didn’t know LeAnn Nielsen from a hole in the wall, if she didn’t give a damn.
“Might be a resident” like hell! That’s what I thought, but I didn’t say it aloud. “Did Marilyn tell you that LeAnn Nielsen’s husband is dead?” I asked.
There was a sigh, a long weary sigh. “Yes, she told me. She also said that you’re in charge of the murder investigation. What I want to know is this: is his wife under suspicion or not?”
“At this stage, the whole world is under suspicion.” It was half truth, half quip. It met with icy rejection.
“In that case, Detective Beaumont, I don’t believe we have anything further to discuss.”
“No, wait. Right now we need to reach LeAnn for two reasons, the most important of which is to tell her of her husband’s death. We’ve held off releasing his name pending notification of next of kin, but that doesn’t mean one of the television or radio stations might not get it from another source and put it on the air.”
“What’s the other reason?” Alice Fields asked.
“We’ll need to ask her some questions, to see if she can shed any light on the case.”
“Which is another way of saying she is a suspect.”
I wasn’t making much of a dent in Alice Fields’ suit of armor. “We know she was expected at her husband’s office shortly before he died. She may have seen or overheard something that would be of help to us in solving the case.”
There was dead silence on the other end of the phone. It lasted so long that I began to wonder if Alice Fields had hung up on me.
“Do you know where the Hi-Spot Cafe is?” she asked at last. “It’s in the Madrona district, at Thirty-fourth and Union.”