MY PAGER WOKE ME UP AN HOUR OR SO later. Lack of sleep left me feeling as rummy and miserable as any honest hangover I’ve ever encountered. The call, when I returned it, was from none other than the Weston Family Task Force commander, Sergeant Watty Watkins himself.
“Beau, where are you?”
“In bed. Asleep actually. I was up all night, remember?”
“You and everybody else. You’re not the only one whose tail is dragging. I’m headed home myself in a few minutes, but I wanted to touch bases with everyone first. I heard from Doc Baker that you got the positive IDs handled. Good work. Anything else turn up that I should know about?”
I tried to sweep some of the cobwebs out of my poor, befuddled brain.
“Did Doc Baker mention the two separate hair samples and the possible dog bite?”
“He told me about both of those,” Watty acknowledged. “Anything else?”
Only one other item stood out in my mind as being important enough to mention. “Emma Jackson, the one boy’s mother, believes Ben Weston might have been screwing around on the side. She thinks his death may be somehow related to that.”
There was a pause while Watty mulled over what I had told him. “No kidding. That doesn’t sound like Ben Weston to me. What exactly did this Jackson woman say?”
“Remember, she’s a long-term friend of the family, a childhood chum of Shiree Weston’s. She claims that in the past few months Ben’s been coming and going at all hours of the day and night. She says Shiree assumed it was another woman and had talked to her about it, complained about it.”
“What do you think?” Watty asked.
“I think there are a whole lot of other possibilities besides another woman. Besides, a jealous husband might have a beef with Ben, but not with the entire rest of his family. It just doesn’t add up.”
“Maybe not,” Watty replied, “but you’d better check it out anyway and see if there’s any truth to it. If there does turn out to be another woman involved, then we’ll look for a possible connection.”
Watty paused. Through the receiver I could hear the scratching of pen on paper as he made notes. “Do you want to mention all this to Detective Kramer or should I?” he asked.
“It’ll all be in my report when I get around to writing one, but be my guest. You go right ahead and tell him if you want to,” I said. The less I had to talk to Paul Kramer, the better I liked it.
“Will you be coming back in to the department?”
“Eventually, I suppose. I had planned on getting a little more sleep first. Anything important going on that you think I should know about?”
“Everybody’s in pretty much the same shape you are—worn-out and barely upright. Several of the guys are trying to catch a little shut-eye while we wait for some of the preliminary test results. Both the Crime Lab and Doc Baker’s crews are hard at work. Kramer has a squad of officers out surveying the Weston neighborhood to see if anyone saw or heard something out of the ordinary last night.”
By rights, I should have been part of the neighborhood survey, but considering the number of people involved, I supposed dividing up the investigative territory made sense.
“I’ve scheduled the first official task force meeting tomorrow morning at eight,” Watty continued. “Don’t be late, but don’t push yourself to come back in tonight, either. We’ll all be better off if everybody gets some rest and takes a fresh run at this thing in the morning. In other words, do what you can, but don’t kill yourself.”
“Right,” I replied. “I’ll make a point not to.”
“By the way,” Watty added. “Speaking of which, we lucked out on that score, didn’t we. I’m real happy that slug didn’t have your name on it.”
“That makes two of us,” I told him, and meant it.
After Watty hung up, I lay there on my back, unable to fall back asleep and wondering what to do next. How long did discretion dictate that I stay out of the way and give Ralph Ames and company clear sailing? Were they up and dressed and out, or would I walk down the hall and stumble across something indiscreet that would embarrass us all?
But then I remembered Ralph’s totally nonjudgmental response a few months earlier at his home in Arizona when the shoe had been firmly on the other foot, when Rhonda Attwood, Ralph’s other overnight guest, had unaccountably turned up in my room at breakfast time.
Totally unflappable as usual, Ralph had fixed coffee and juiced a bunch of oranges, serving both juice and coffee without so much as a single snide editorial comment. If Ralph Ames could be that cool, that cosmopolitan, I decided, so could I. Determined to be totally blasé about the whole situation, I staggered out of bed and headed for the kitchen, where I had plenty of Seattle’s Best Coffee but absolutely no tree-ripened oranges.
I banged around in the kitchen, making as much noise as possible. Despite the rattling and clattering, no one emerged from the guest room. Ralph Ames and his lady friend were evidently either dead to the world, or they had vacated the premises while I was asleep.
On the dining room table I discovered an early-afternoon city edition of The Seattle Times with its full, three-column-wide, front-page account of the tragic Weston family murders. While I waited for the coffee, I scanned through the article. There wasn’t much in the story that I didn’t already know.
Various luminaries in city government as well as prominent members of the African-American community were quoted expressing their shock, dismay, and outrage. Speculation was pretty evenly divided between those who regarded the murders as racially motivated hate crimes and those who saw in the deaths the specter of escalating gang warfare. Neither possibility did much for Seattle’s much-vaunted national reputation for livability.
The coffee still wasn’t finished when a key turned in the lock and Ralph Ames sauntered in, grinning broadly from ear to ear. He was clearly inordinately pleased with himself, and I was discreet enough not to let on that I knew the real origins of that grin. Remembering Rhonda Attwood, I offered him coffee without even so much as the smallest sarcastic remark.
“Been here long?” he asked.
“Nope. Just walked in a few minutes ago.”
“Oh,” he said. “Good. I see you found the copy of the paper I left you. I figured you’d want to see it. How’s the case going?”
“Not bad, I guess. Things are always slow at this stage of the game while we wait for results from the various labs. Detective Kramer supposedly has a bunch of detectives out canvasing the nearby neighborhood. So far as I know, nothing much has turned up. I’ll find out more once I get back down to the department.”
“You must be beat,” Ralph said. “Aren’t you going to try to sleep for a while?”
I didn’t want to tell him I’d already done that. Hurrying to the counter after the coffeepot and another cup, I hoped my face wouldn’t give me away. Lying has never been one of my long suits.
“No,” I said. “I’m in pretty good shape, all things considered. I just came home to put my feet up for a few minutes and to have some decent coffee.”
That was true as far as it went, but it was also somewhat dishonest. Next to Ron Peters, Ralph is probably my best friend, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that I knew what he’d been up to at lunchtime. I’m not the type to whack somebody on the shoulder and congratulate him for getting lucky in my guest room when he thought I was safely at work. I noticed he didn’t mention it to me either. Men may have the reputation for bawdy locker room score-keeping-type talk, but in my experience we’re a whole lot more reticent about personal disclosures than women are—Emma Jackson and Shiree Weston being prime cases in point.
I stood by the counter lost in thought, staring down at the two newly filled coffee cups sitting there steaming in front of me.
“What’s going on?” Ralph asked. “Is something the matter?”
“Nothing,” I told him, bringing the cups back to the table. “Nothing important.”
The phone rang just then. The caller was none other than Detective Paul Kramer himself, sounding excited.
“Beaumont, give me that Jackson woman’s phone number, will you,” he said. “Watty told me you had it. I need to talk to her right away.”
I knew from his voice that Detective Kramer was on to something. “Why? Did you find something to corroborate her story?”
“Not exactly,” he returned, suddenly turning coy. “I just want to hear whatever it is she can tell us about him.”
Like hell he did. “What exactly did you find, Kramer?” I insisted. As the one person at Seattle PD in sole possession of Emma Jackson’s phone number, I had myself some bargaining room and I was prepared to play hard to get.
Kramer paused, pondering whether or not to let me in on his little secret horde of knowledge. When someone’s that wound up, a few seconds of silence is the best ploy in the world.
“Did you know Shiree Weston worked for the Mount Zion Federal Credit Union?” he asked.
Of course I didn’t know that. I had been unofficially benched from the real investigation, sidetracked into something that should have been a dead end, but maybe my part of the job wasn’t such a dead end after all.
“So?” I said, unable to fathom how Shiree Weston’s job with a credit union might have anything at all to do with the price of peanuts.
“After I talked to Sergeant Watkins this afternoon,” Kramer continued, “I decided to take a look at Ben Weston’s desk here at the department. What I discovered was very interesting.”
“What?”
By then I knew nothing would keep Paul Kramer from blabbing his news to the world. Even to me, although under most circumstances, I would have been his very last choice of audience.
“Loan applications!” Kramer crowed.
At first I thought lack of sleep was screwing up my hearing. “Loan applications?” I asked. “What’s the big deal about that?”
“So far I’ve found he cosigned on three different student loans, and they’re not with his wife’s credit union either. Plus there’s another one that’s filled out but not signed. Does the name Ezra T. Russell mean anything to you?”
“Not that I can think of.”
“How about Knuckles Russell?”
That one did ring a bell. Knuckles Russell was a rising young star in the ranks of the Black Gangster Disciples, an upstart gang that rivals both the Bloods and the Crips when it comes to pieces of Seattle’s gangland turf.
“You mean Knuckles Russell of the BGD?” I asked, using the accepted shorthand for the Black Gangster Disciples.
“You got it. And the application lists Ben Weston’s address as Russell’s home address. Same way on the other three. I’ve got someone checking rap sheets on the others right now.”
“So what are you saying?”
“That Ben Weston got himself into something heavy, something that had nothing to do with screwing around behind his wife’s back. Gambling maybe, drug payoffs of some kind. Who knows? Whatever it was, I figure he ran short of cash and borrowed money to make ends meet. By doing it with student loans, nobody would come after him right away to start making payments. Sounds like a hell of a scam to me. What do you think?”
What I was thinking was how grateful I was that Big Al Lindstrom was nowhere within earshot. Kramer should have been too.
“So give me that woman’s address,” Kramer continued. “I want to find out if she knows anything about all this.”
“You’re right,” I said. “We should see what she has to say. Where are you, the department?”
“Yes, but…”
“Be down in front of the Third Avenue entrance in fifteen minutes,” I told him. “I’ll stop by and pick you up.”
“Wait a minute. Can’t you just give me the address? I’ll go talk to her myself.”
That was exactly what Kramer was angling for—to see Emma Jackson alone. I was equally determined not to give in, not to be cut out of the picture any more so than I already was, but I didn’t come straight out and tell my supposed cohort that I didn’t trust him any further than I could throw him.
“No,” I said reasonably enough. “Emma Jackson’s already been through hell today. She’s not the easiest person to deal with in the first place, and she already knows me. I’d better come along.”
“If you insist,” Kramer allowed grudgingly. “See you in fifteen.”
Ralph Ames was still sipping his coffee when I got off the phone. “Heading back out?” he asked. I nodded. “Any plans for dinner?”
“Not that I can think of. After last night, I’ll be lucky if I’m still on my feet come dinnertime. Why?”
“There’s someone I want you to meet,” he said, “and if you don’t mind, I thought I’d whip up something on the barbecue.”
I tried my best to suppress a knowing grin. So he was going to bring the lady in question out from under wraps and introduce her around after all. That might be worth struggling to stay awake for.
“Make it early,” I said. “I’ll try to be home by six. If we eat by seven or so, it won’t matter if I crash right after dinner, will it?”
“No,” Ralph replied, poker-faced as ever. “I don’t suppose it will.”
I started toward the door. “By the way,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind. I took the liberty of calling that life insurance agent back. I left a message for him to get in touch with me. I’m not certain he’s the best man for the job, but it seems to me we ought to be exploring some of your options. After all, he did call to ask for an appointment.”
“I already told you. If I’ve got to pay a rating or whatever the hell they call it, I’m not buying a dime’s worth of insurance no matter what you say.”
“The least we can do is give him a fair hearing.”
“I’ll tell you what. You give old Curtis Bell all the fair hearings you like. I’m going to work.”
Ralph and I both know that on less than two hours’ worth of sleep I’m never going to win any congeniality awards. Fortunately, he isn’t the kind of friend who holds grudges.
By the time I was back out on the street, the afternoon had turned blustery and cold with a chill wind blowing in off Puget Sound. When Kramer and I got to Emma Jackson’s place, a half dozen cars were parked nearby. We were about to knock on the door when it opened and a broad, imposing man barred our way. His face seemed familiar, but I couldn’t quite place him.
“May I help you?” he asked in a bass voice that sounded like it was coming from a loudspeaker instead of a human chest.
“I’m Detective Beaumont,” I answered, “and this is Detective Kramer from the Seattle Police Department. We’re here to speak to Dr. Jackson.”
“I’m not sure Emma’s up to seeing anyone just now,” he told us. “Wait here. I’ll go check.”
He turned back into the apartment and left us standing on the little concrete porch. “Wasn’t that Reverend Walters?” Kramer asked.
“Reverend Walters?” I repeated.
“You know. Reverend Homer Walters of the Mount Zion Baptist Church.”
Reverend Walters of the Mount Zion Baptist Church is almost as much of a Seattle institution as the church itself. No wonder he looked familiar.
A few moments later he reappeared in the doorway, shaking his head. “No,” he said gravely, peering at us across the tops of his silver wire-rimmed glasses. “Emma’s on her way to bed now. We’ve been here doing a little planning for the funeral. With this many people involved, we have to get started right away.”
“What do you mean, this many people?”
“We have a very full schedule this weekend, so we’ll be funeralizing them all—Ben and Shiree and all those poor little children—at two o’clock on Saturday afternoon. They’re all members of the Mount Zion Church, you see, so we’ll be sending them off together. If we do it on Saturday, people who want to come won’t be missing any work.”
Detective Kramer cleared his throat. “Excuse me, Reverend Walters, but these are all homicide cases. It might be better if you made your plans for later, say sometime next week. That would give us a little more time for lab work, that kind of thing.”
Reverend Walters was already shaking his head.
“Even Sunday might be better,” Kramer said.
The Reverend Homer Walters pulled himself up to his considerable height. “Sunday is a day of worship, young man. I don’t do funerals on Sunday, and people have to work on Monday. Saturday will be just fine.”
Kramer seemed taken aback and for good reason. In homicide cases there are often innumerable delays before bodies can be released to families and funeral homes for preparation and burial.
“Have you discussed this with anyone down at Seattle PD?” Kramer asked, trying to move the burden on to someone else’s shoulders.
“I have not,” Reverend Walters declared, “and I don’t intend to. Emma Jackson, Harmon Weston, and I have discussed the situation with the Lord. He’s the only one who matters, you see. I am sure He will provide whatever laboratory time is necessary between now and then. The Lord does provide, you know.”
With that, the Reverend Homer Walters gently closed the door and went back inside, leaving a perplexed Detective Paul Kramer looking as though he had been run over by a truck—a gentle, Christian truck maybe, but a Mack nonetheless. It did my heart good to see it.
Amen, brother, preach on.