That Friday morning, when I paused outside the door and peeked in through the window, there was only one person in the room. Not surprisingly, June Miller had chosen the captain's chair as the one in which to sit.
To say the woman was striking would do June Miller a serious disservice. Even sitting down, I could tell she was a tall woman with chin-length white-blond hair, a lithe, slim body, a long, elegant neck, and the erect bearing of a West Point graduate. Her hands were gracefully draped over the ends of the armrests. Her long, slender fingers-one studded with a very impressive diamond-curled slightly around the wood as if she were half asleep. Yet, the moment I pushed open the door, she was on her feet and wide awake, hand outstretched. A pair of startling ice-blue eyes sought mine.
"Are you Detective Beaumont?" she asked.
"Yes. What can I do for you?"
"I came to tell you that he didn't do it."
Mrs. Reeder, my senior English teacher at Ballard High School thirty years ago, used to be a stickler for faulty pronoun reference. I remember the speech pretty much verbatim, even after all these years, because she delivered it often-on an average of once a week.
"You hounds," Mrs. Reeder would shriek, striking terror in our hearts and rapping her knuckles on the chalkboard for emphasis. "You must not use a pronoun unless a noun clearly precedes it. Unless one naturally follows the other, what you write becomes so much babble. People can't make heads nor tails of it."
In this case, that same edict should have applied to speaking as well as writing. I had no idea what June Miller was trying to tell me. "Who didn't do what?" I asked.
"The man you're looking for," she returned with an exasperated furrowing of her smooth brow. "The one whose sketch is in the newspaper this morning. I'm telling you he didn't do it-didn't do any of the things the article hints he did."
I motioned June Miller back into the seat she had vacated and then settled into an adjoining one myself.
"You make that statement as if you know it for a fact," I said.
"Oh, yes," she agreed, nodding. "I do know it."
"How?" I asked.
"Because he told me," June Miller answered staunchly, as though the matter were already settled once and for all. "Because he said he didn't do it, and I believe him."
"Does this person have a name?" I asked.
June Miller nodded. "His name's Lorenzo," she said. "He happens to be a friend of mine."
"Lorenzo what?"
"Do I have to tell you that? His last name, I mean."
The truth is, she did. It's a felony to withhold information in a homicide case, but I sensed that this was no time to play scare tactics.
"It would be helpful," I said, leaning back in the chair. "What brought you here so early this morning, Mrs. Miller?"
She glanced at the floor, chewing on her lip. "Maxwell Cole gave me your name," she said. "John and I know him. I guess you know John is my husband?"
I nodded but didn't comment.
"We met Max years ago at a campaign function, and we've more or less stayed in touch. I called him last night to ask his advice. He told me you had some connection to all this-that you were the person I should talk to."
It was funny that June Miller could slice through the "special assignment" bullshit and reach Maxwell Cole in Olympia when J. P. Beaumont couldn't. Of course, I had a feeling that there were any number of bureaucratic, red-tape tangles that June Miller could cut her way through without ever having to resort to use of her husband's political prestige.
"And how does Maxwell Cole happen to know so damn much about my case assignments these days?" I asked, attempting to control my irritation. It wasn't right for me to allow fallout from his and my longstanding animosity to land on an innocent downwinder named June Miller.
"He said he was at a party given by Ron and Bonnie Elgin. Something about a charity auction. From the way he talked, I thought you were there, too."
Thanks to June Miller, I now had a name to attach to the leak Captain Powell wanted plugged. Unfortunately, the name was mine. And when the good captain came around looking to lop off heads, mine would be first to roll. The fact that the leak was inadvertent wouldn't help my cause in the least. Bonnie Elgin must have mentioned it to some of her party guests when she got off the phone from talking with me. It was my fault for not cautioning her to silence.
It was not yet eight o'clock in the morning, but already this was feeling like a very long day. "I wasn't at the party in person," I said, "but go on."
"Of course, I already knew about Gunter Gebhardt's murder," June Miller continued. "In fact, I more or less expected someone to come talk to me about it before now, but according to Max, I guess you've been too busy following other leads to get around to interviewing the neighbors."
"Neighbors?" I sat up straighter. "Wait just a minute. Where do you live?"
"On Culpeper Court. Right across from the Gebhardts' house. We just had our house remodeled."
"So you knew Gunter and Else Gebhardt?"
June Miller dropped her gaze and pursed her lips before replying. "We aren't exactly best friends," she said.
"What does that mean?"
Raising her chin, June Miller's eyes met and held mine without flinching. "Gunter Gebhardt was a…" She paused, searching for the right words, then shook her head. "He wasn't a very nice neighbor," she said lamely, leaving me with the impression that she had backed away from saying something much stronger.
"I'm not all that grief-stricken that he's dead, either. Of course, I'm sorry for Else and Kari."
"You know them fairly well then?"
June nodded. "Before she left home, Kari used to baby-sit for my son, Brett. I know this will be hard on Kari and her mother, but don't expect me to shed any tears for that unpleasant man. I won't, not at all."
Every time she mentioned Gunter, June spoke with such carefully controlled vehemence that it made me wonder what was behind it. "I take it you and Gunter had some difficulties?" I suggested.
She ran her hand over her already smooth hair, then took a deep breath before she answered. "He threatened to hurt Barney, to get rid of him."
I was sure she had just told me her son's name was Brett. "Who's Barney?" I asked.
"Our dog. A terrier. We named him Barney as a joke. You know, after the guy who used to be on TV-Barney Miller?"
"I see," I said.
"Threatening Barney would have been bad enough all by itself, but Brett and the dog were right there together. You see, Barney's batteries had run down…"
"His batteries?"
Had I missed something? At first I had thought we were discussing a real dog, but the only ones I know that require batteries are the little stuffed ones toy stores sometimes set to yapping in shopping malls.
"For his collar," June Miller explained. "We have one of those invisible fences. There's a battery on Barney's collar. If he crosses a certain line in the yard, the collar zaps him with a little shock. But it only works as long as the batteries are charged. We're supposed to replace them every four months, but every once in a while, I'll get a pair that runs down sooner than the four months.
"Barney's a smart dog. I don't know how he knows when the batteries are running low, but he does. As soon as they quit, he's out of there. Once I found him all the way up on top of Greenbrier, headed downtown.
"Anyway, this one time, Barney got away. Brett saw him go. He ran inside to get the leash. By the time he came back outside, Barney was across the street, leaving a doggy calling card in Gunter Gebhardt's precious front lawn. I came home a few minutes later. I had just run up to the store to pick up a couple of things for dinner. Brett's old enough to leave alone every once in a while, for a few minutes at a time, anyway. It never occurred to me that anyone here in the neighborhood would think of hurting the dog or deliberately scaring my child."