On the way to his house I told him about the contents of Joanna Ridley's trunk. "The rope was coiled on top?" he asked.
"Yes."
"And she could tell looking through the rope that those were the clothes he wore the day he died?"
"That's right."
"Doesn't it strike you as odd?"
"Why should it?"
"It seems to me that one way of knowing what's inside a closed container is to be the one who put it there."
"Joanna Ridley didn't do it," I replied.
He didn't talk to me much after that. I couldn't tell what was going on, if he was mad because I thought he was too smashed to drive home or if he was pissed because I wasn't buying his suspicions about Joanna Ridley.
As we drove into his driveway, I said, "I'll come get you in the morning if you like."
"Don't bother." His tone was gruff. "I'll catch a bus downtown. This is only the suburbs, Beau. Despite what some people think, it isn't the end of the earth."
He got out and slammed his door without bothering to thank me for the ride. I was too tired to worry about what ailed Peters. My three hours of sleep had long since fallen by the wayside. I needed to fall into bed and get some sleep.
It's hell getting old.
CHAPTER 20
My alarm went off at seven, and the phone went off exactly one minute later. It was Ames, chipper and cheerful Ames, calling me from Arizona and wondering whether or not I would pick him up at the airport at one that afternoon. I blundered my way halfway through the conversation before I remembered the real estate closing for Belltown Terrace was scheduled for three-thirty.
"Shit! I never wrote it down in my calendar."
"Wrote what down? What's the matter, Beau?"
"The closing. It's scheduled for the same time as Darwin Ridley's funeral."
"Do you have to go?"
"I ought to, but maybe I could ask Peters. He shouldn't mind."
"Good. After the closing, we need to go see the decorator, too. He's been calling me here in Phoenix. Says he can never catch you."
"Look, Ralph, I don't spend my time sitting around waiting for the phone to ring."
"You should get a machine, an answering machine with remote capability."
"Will you lay off that answering machine stuff? I'm not buying one, and that's final."
"Okay, okay. See you at one."
Even riding the bus from Kirkland, Peters beat me to the office. His unvarying promptness bugged the hell out of me at times, particularly since, no matter what, I was always running behind schedule. He was seated at his desk with his nose buried in a file folder. He was obviously scanning through the material, looking for one particular item.
"What are you up to?" I asked, walking past him to get to my desk.
"Here it is," he said. He dropped the file folder, grabbed his pen, and copied some bit of information from the folder into his pocket notebook.
"Here's what?" I asked. I confess I was less interested in what he was looking for than I was with whether or not there was coffee in the pot on the table behind Margie's desk. There was-a full, freshly made pot.
"Rimbaugh. That's his name."
"Whose name? Peters, for godsake, will you tell me what you're talking about?"
"Remember Monday afternoon? We talked to all those old duffers who are part-time security guards down at Seattle Center? Dave Rimbaugh is one of them. He was assigned to the locker rooms."
"So?"
"So I've got this next-door neighbor who works for Channel Thirteen. In the advertising department. I called him last night after I got home and asked him if he could locate a picture of Wheeler-Dealer Barker for us. He called just a few minutes ago. Said he'd found one and when did we want to come by to pick it up."
"Why go to the trouble? What's the point? We already know Barker was there. He told us so."
"Sure he did. He said he was there at halftime, but what if he was there later, too? Maybe he came back or, better yet, maybe he never left"
Picking up my empty coffee cup, I sauntered over to the coffee table mulling Peters' hypothesis. It was possible, I supposed, but it didn't seem plausible. I came back with coffee and set my cup down on the desk.
"Well?" Peters asked.
I shook my head. "I don't think so. Barker isn't our man."
"Why not?"
"Gut instinct."
Just that quick, Peters got his back up. "Right. Sure it is. You know, Beau, sometimes I get tired of working with the Grand Old Man of Homicide. You're not always on the money. I think Barker's it, and I'm willing to invest some shoe leather in proving it. You coming or not?"
He didn't leave a whole lot of room for discussion. We got a car from the garage, a tired Chevette without as much zing to it as the Dodge we'd driven the day before-no zip and a hell of a lot less legroom. I wonder sometimes if the ratings would be the same if the guys on "Miami Vice" drove Chevettes.
We stopped by Channel 13's downtown office. The receptionist cheerfully handed over a manila envelope with Peters' name scrawled on the front. Inside was an eight-by-ten glossy of Tex Barker himself, without the cowboy hat and grinning from ear to ear. There were several other pictures as well, eight-by-tens of people I didn't recognize.
Peters shuffled through them, looked at me, and grinned. "See there? What we've got here is an instant montage."
One of the realities of police work these days is that you never get to show witnesses just the person you want them to see. You always have to show a group of pictures and hope they pick out the right one. Going by the book can be a royal pain in the ass. I gave Peters credit for taking care of it in advance.
Dave Rimbaugh's address was off in the wilds of Lake City, about a twenty-minute drive from downtown Seattle. Peters drove. As we made our way up the freeway, Peters glanced in my direction. "Tell me again about the stuff you found in the back of Joanna Ridley's car. You said it was her flour container?"
"That's right. Out of the storeroom at the end of her carport."
"They're dusting it for prints?"
"The container and the trunk for certain. They said yesterday they're going to try to work out a deal with the county to run the contents past the county's YAG to see if they can raise anything there."
"YAG? What the hell's a YAG?"
"Their new laser printfinder. Janice Morraine was telling me about it. They use it to raise prints on all kinds of unlikely surfaces-cement, rumpled tinfoil."
"Off rope and clothing, too?"
"Not too likely, but possible. She said there's a remote chance. I've also called for a tech to go over Joanna Ridley's house for prints."
"Any idea when the container was placed in the car or any sign of forced entry?"
I shook my head. "The killer had Darwin 's keys, remember? House keys and car keys, both."
"I had forgotten," Peters said thoughtfully.
"She's going to have all her locks changed today, just in case."
Peters nodded. "That's probably wise."
We were both quiet for a moment. It was as good a time as any to bring up my scheduling conflict between the real estate closing and Darwin Ridley's funeral.
"By the way," I said casually, "Ralph Ames is flying in this afternoon. I pick him up at the airport at one. We're supposed to close on Belltown Terrace at three-thirty this afternoon. Do you think you could handle Ridley's funeral by yourself?"
I more than half-expected an objection, for Peters to say that he needed to be home with his kids. It's an excuse that packs a whole lot of weight with me. Had he used it, I probably would have knuckled under, given Ames my power of attorney, and had him stand in for me at the closing.