Damm Fine Carpets was on one side of the water. Naturally, I was on the other. With the Fremont Bridge closed to all traffic, I had no choice but to cut all the way across to Fifteenth in Ballard and cross the Ship Canal on the Ballard Bridge. Then I headed back toward Fremont on Nickerson.
And all the time I drove, my mind was racing. My justifiable homicide theory was pretty much out the window. Innocent people don’t panic and take hostages. LeAnn Nielsen had warned Larry Martin, and he had snapped. That meant the two of them were in it together. I knew where Larry Martin was. All of Seattle knew where Larry Martin was, but what about LeAnn?
Damn. I had let her walk out of the Hi-Spot Cafe with Alice Fields without getting so much as an address or phone number. If Sergeant Watkins was pissed now, it would be worse when I gave him that bit of information.
Just past Seattle Pacific University I ran into a roadblock. A uniformed police officer told me that a command post had been set up at the top of the hill on Dexter, just above the intersection where Dexter, Westlake, Fremont, and Nickerson converge. Now I was on the wrong side of Damm Fine Carpets from the command post. Some days are like that.
The patrolman let me pass. I eased my vehicle through a crowd of dismayed people. Some of them were from small neighboring businesses, including the beer-drinking late-lunch crowd from the 318 Tavern across the street, who mingled with stunned evacuees from a service in progress at the funeral home half a block away. It was certain to be one of the most memorable memorial services any of those people ever attended.
I inched around on steep, North Queen Anne side streets, trying to reach the command post. Finally, I gave up on driving altogether, parked on Fulton, and walked the last few blocks. There was the usual collection of news media types and curiosity seekers. They stood congregated just outside yet another set of barricades. I dashed through the gauntlet as fast as I could, looking neither right nor left.
When I broke free of the crowd, I had a clear view of the garage entrance to Damm Fine Carpets. There, parked under the steaming cup of billboard coffee, tucked in among several other vehicles, sat a bright red VW bug.
The backseat was stacked to the gills with boxes. A heap of clothing occupied the rider’s seat.
Larry Martin was there, all right.
Captain Dick Logan was speaking crisply into a hand-held microphone as I approached the command post vehicle. His barked orders were issued in a clipped but unperturbed manner.
“You’ve got everybody out of the funeral home now?” he asked into the mike.
“Affirmative on that. What next?”
“Hold tight until I verify that all the other buildings are empty. I’ll get back to you,” Dick said. He looked up then and saw me standing there. He raised one bushy black eyebrow. “It’s about time you showed up, Detective Beaumont. I understand from Sergeant Watkins that this guy’s a suspect of yours.”
I nodded.
“What do you know about him?“
“Not much,” I answered.
“Is he dangerous?”
“I don’t know. I can’t say. I thought he was pretty much an innocent bystander.”
“Like hell!” said an angry voice behind me. I swung around. There was Watty, his face grim, his mouth a thin, taut line. “You sure know how to pick ”em, Beaumont.“
I turned back to Logan. “Do you know if Martin’s armed?” I asked.
“Not for sure. The secretary said that she thought he was, but she couldn’t be positive.”
“Have you made voice contact yet?”
Logan shook his head. “Not so far.”
“What about the secretary? Where is she?”
Logan gestured with his head. “Over there, in one of the patrol cars. I had a detective take her statement.”
“Let me talk to her,” I said.
“Suit yourself,” Logan replied while his radio crackled with another report.
As I walked from the command post to a cluster of other police vehicles, I was aware of the television cameras following me. I resent doing this job in the glare of television lights. It makes me feel like an insect on a slab of glass under a microscope. All I can do is squirm helplessly while my every movement is examined and recorded.
I wonder sometimes how reporters would like it if the tables were suddenly turned, if we cops took the cameras away and pointed them in the other direction for a change. Would they enjoy being scrutinized while they do their jobs? I doubt it.
Cindy, Richard Damm’s secretary, was sitting in the backseat of a patrol car. It was hot, and the back door of the patrol car was wide open. I leaned down and looked inside. She was still blinking as much as ever, but the contacts were gone. In their place was a pair of incredibly thick-lensed glasses. She had evidently been crying. Both her nose and eyes were bright red.
“Hello, Cindy,” I said. “Remember me?”
“Detective Beaumont,” she wailed. “What’s going on? No one will tell me anything.”
“Why don’t you tell me what you know first?”
“Larry called in around a quarter to twelve. He told me he was quitting and he needed his check. I talked to Mr. Damm. He said not to give Larry anything until we got word from Nick about the damage to the van and until Larry returned all his tools. When I gave him the message, he went crazy. He said he’d see about that, that he’d take his money out of Mr. Damm’s hide if he had to. Fifteen minutes later, he showed up and barged into the office.”
“Captain Logan told me you thought he was armed.”
She nodded. “He was carrying something. It could have been a gun.”
“Could have been? You don’t know for sure?”
“No,” she answered. “My vision’s not that good.”
“What happened then?”
“He went inside and I heard them arguing. I remembered that you had been looking for him. I was scared, especially when I heard breaking glass. I thought maybe Mr. Damm was in danger, so I tried opening the door. It was locked from the inside. Larry yelled at me. He said to go away and leave them alone.”
“When you were there outside the door to the office, could you hear Mr. Damm at all?”
Cindy shook her head. “I’m not sure. I heard something about burning the place down. That’s when I called the police. Did I do the right thing?”
“I’m sure you did,” I reassured her.
“What if Mr. Damm is lying in there dead?” With that, she buried her face in her hands and burst into tears. There was no sense in trying to talk to her anymore, at least not right then.
“You stay here,” I told her. “I’ll come back and tell you just as soon as we know anything.”
I straightened up and looked around. I wasn’t looking for anyone in particular, but when I caught sight of Nick Wallace, I wanted to talk to him. He was standing by himself on a ragged patch of grass on the other side of Dexter, gazing longingly at the corrugated iron door on his precious garage. With hands resting on the hips of his blue coveralls and chin hanging dejectedly on his chest, he looked like someone who had just lost his best friend.
“Hey, Nick,” I called to him as I approached. “How’s it going?”
He turned and looked at me, shaking his head. “Not worth a shit,” he said. “Three of my vans are inside. They wouldn’t let me move ”em out. And all the tools too. I’ve got first-rate tools in there. It would take years to replace ‘em. One of the cops told me he’s threatening to burn the place down.“
I could see that Nick was a whole lot more concerned about his vans and his tools than he was about his job. Who says pride in workmanship is dead?
“He won’t burn it down,” I said. “Not if we can help it.”
I glanced across the street at Damm Fine Carpets, its grilled windows blindly reflecting back the noonday sun, making the building look like an impregnable fortress. Even close up, the small windows were far too high to give any hint of what was going on behind them.