Lost in concentration, I focused momentarily on Debi Rush-the obliging dental assistant, the lying dental assistant, all puns intended. On the lady who had been only too willing to offer Dr. Frederick Nielsen the cleaning and conjugal services his wife had declined to provide. On Debi Rush, the lady with the gangly, nervous, dental-student, dumb-shit husband.
The answer I had been looking for came to me in a sudden flash. Cuckolded husbands have plenty of motive. I know something about that from the injured-party side of the fence. If I’d ever had a fair crack at him, I cheerfully would have murdered Karen’s chicken ranching/egg conglomerate second husband. My heartbeat speeded up. Maybe I was on to something, but a voice interrupted my train of thought before the idea had a chance to jell.
“Hey, you can’t go in there.” It was the resident manager from Cedar Heights, still wearing his orange coveralls. He hurried out of the residential lobby next door, motioning for me to stay away. “The police told me not to let anyone go monkeying around here.”
“I am the police,“ I said. ”Detective Beaumont, remember?“ Reaching out to shake his hand, I tried to recall the man’s name, but it was gone, erased completely from my memory bank. Fortunately, he recognized me.
“Oh, I know you. You’re the detective, aren’t you? The one I talked to yesterday?”
“That’s right. Has anyone else been snooping around here?”
The man shrugged. “Some reporters, I guess, and a few television people. That’s about all.”
I was impatient to get away, to follow up on my latest brainstorm, but I delayed long enough to make polite conversation with the overeager manager. It’s called public relations.
“Have any of the tenants in your building reported anything unusual about last Saturday morning?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Not to me, they haven’t, but then, I go for weeks without seeing some of the people who live here. They’re in and out. Busy folks, you know.”
“I’m sure they are,” I agreed. “We need to talk to them, all the same. We should have done it today, but there was too much going on.”
“I heard all about that. In fact, you were on TV just a few minutes ago. That was something else, wasn’t it? They say the same guy’s a suspect in this case, too.”
I let it pass. Trying to explain otherwise about Larry Martin would have been too complicated, would have told too much.
“As I was saying, we should probably talk to the residents of the building and the commercial tenants as well. Would it be all right if my partner and I came around tomorrow morning to do that?”
The manager hedged a little. He was eager to help, but I could see he was torn. “I don’t know. I suppose it would be all right as long as I was with you. This is a security building. The residents don’t want a bunch of strangers wandering through the halls. They get real steamed up about that.”
I nodded. “I can understand that. I live in a secured building myself. Detective Lindstrom and I will be here sometime tomorrow morning ”
“Fine.” The manager nodded. “We’ll work it out. I’m on the reader-board in two places, under manager or under Calloway, either one. One of us will make the rounds with you, my wife or me.”
I was grateful he had finally supplied me with his name. “Thanks, Mr. Calloway,” I told him. “Is nine too early?” He shook his head.
As soon as Calloway walked away, I went back to Tom Rush. My mind lit on him like a vulture snagging a day-old road-kill. Why the hell hadn’t I thought about him before?
I remembered how eager he had been to escape the confines of Dr. Nielsen’s office while we were questioning Debi. He had been upset, shaken, hardly able to wait to get outside. I recalled that he had been tall, not necessarily strong, but that didn’t matter. Shoving a dental pick into an unconscious man’s throat doesn’t require tremendous strength. And certainly that particular instrument would fall easily to hand if the hand happened to belong to a dental student. He’d also know how to use an autoclave, turning, I sprinted away from Cedar Heights. I ran the remaining block to Belltown Terrace, dashed in the garage door, caught the elevator to P-4, and was in my Porsche heading out of the building less than a minute later.
I shouldn’t have bothered to run. It was a case of hurry up and wait. Traffic on Broad wasn’t slow, it was dead. Grid-locked. I had to wait through three complete stoplight cycles to get across the intersection at Second, and again at Denny. While I waited, I got out my notebook and checked on Debi Rush’s address-2139 Eastlake Avenue East.
When I got there, the place turned out to be a rundown, clapboard, multiunit building. It gave the impression of being a onetime motel that had been converted into apartments. It was badly in need of another dose of rehabilitation.
Faded green paint was blistered and peeling. Wooden steps creaked under my feet. The thin, straggly grass had turned brown during the weeks of exceptional heat. In short, it was exactly the kind of apartment building impoverished students have lived in forever-cheap and old but relatively close to the university.
Through a sagging screen door, I saw that the inside door was wide open. A radio blared rock music somewhere in the background, bellowing incomprehensible words over the hum of a room-sized fan that stood near the doorway.
I knocked on the door and Debi Rush herself appeared. Barefoot, she wore a halter top and a pair of short shorts. She was far too well endowed both above and below the belt for the combination to be remotely appealing, but she was cordial enough.
“Hello, Debi,” I said. “May I come in?”
She opened the door. “It’s hot in here. I was just making some lemonade. Would you like some?”
“Sure.”
She disappeared into the kitchen while I sat down on the ratty couch. Thankfully she switched off the music. Even with the fan, the room was unbearably hot and cluttered, too. Cluttered and dirty. The end table next to my elbow was gray with a thick layer of gritty dust. Evidently Debi’s cleaning and polishing fetish ended at Dr. Nielsen’s office door. The room was lined with bookcases of the classic brick-and-wooden-plank variety. One living room window had been covered with a vivid Mexican serape in a futile effort to block out the afternoon sun. These were definitely student quarters.
Debi came back into the living room carrying two tall glasses. “They say it’s going to get all the way up to ninety-five today. It’s a killer, isn’t it?”
People in other parts of the world laugh when Seattlites complain bitterly about ninety-five-degree weather, but ninety-five is no joke in a climate where very few buildings are air-conditioned. I mopped the sweat off my brow and wished I could take off my jacket.
Debi handed me a glass. “Of course, I don’t suppose you came here to talk about the weather,” she added.
She was right about that. I wasn’t interested in idle chit-chat. “As a matter of fact, I didn’t. Where’s your husband?”
She looked puzzled. “He isn’t here.”
“Where is he?”
“Still down at the university, I suppose. He likes to do his lab work in the afternoons when it’s too hot for him to study here.”
I was relieved to know Tom Rush was out of the house. I’d make a lot more progress with Debi if I talked to her alone. I got straight to the heart of the matter.
“Where was he Saturday afternoon?” I asked.
“Tom?” she asked, setting her glass down on the armrest and shifting uneasily in her chair.
“Yes, Tom,” I answered. “Do you have any idea where he was between noon and say two o’clock? Was he here?”
“I don’t understand. Why are you asking me about him?”
I refused to pussyfoot around with her. “Debi, you neglected to mention to us that you and Dr. Nielsen were having an affair,” I said.
She paled and swallowed hard. “I didn’t think it was important,” she responded after a long moment, her voice bleak and very small. At least she didn’t try to deny it. I’ll give her that much credit. “How did you find out?” she asked.