ON MY WAY BACK TO THE DEPARTMENT I slipped into a noontime brown-bag AA meeting in a downtown Methodist church. It’s not a meeting I attend often, so I could come and go without being trapped into a long-drawn-out post-meeting conversation as sometimes happens. When I got back to the fifth floor, Curtis Bell was comfortably ensconced at my desk chatting earnestly with Big Al Lindstrom. Curt looked cheerful, Big Al thunderous.
Curt scrambled out of my chair as soon as I appeared in the doorway. “Didn’t mean to take over your desk,” he apologized, “but I’ve been playing phone tag with that attorney of yours. I wanted to check with you and see if we’d be able to get together some time over the weekend. The attorney sounded like he wanted to be in on the appointment.”
“Watch out for this guy,” Big Al warned. “If you ask me, he’s nothing but a goddamned ambulance chaser. He even tried to get an appointment with me.”
Curtis shrugged off Detective Lindstrom’s comment as though it was nothing more than a good-humored dig, but from the sour expression on Big Al’s face I guessed he wasn’t really kidding.
“Whatever it takes to get people to listen to reason,” Curtis said with an easy grin. “After all, there’s nothing like a couple of bullets whizzing past a guy’s ears to give him a sense of his own mortality, right, Beaumont?”
“No doubt about it,” I said, and meant it.
“So what’s this guy’s name? Your attorney?”
“Ralph Ames.”
“Yeah, him. He said we’d either have to do it sometime over this weekend, or we’d have to wait a whole month.”
“That’s right. He’s only here until Monday or Tuesday this trip. I forget which.”
“I don’t understand why he has to be included in the first place. What’s the big deal? I mean, can’t the two of us just get together and talk?”
“Believe me, if it’s got something to do with me and money, Ralph Ames is in on it from the very beginning, or it doesn’t happen. That’s what I pay him for.”
“Well okay then,” Curtis agreed reluctantly. “When?”
“Hold on,” I told him. “I’ll call Ralph and ask.”
Picking up the phone, I dialed my home number. It was shortly after one, and I wondered if Ralph might once more be entertaining his noontime lady friend. The phone rang, but instead of reaching either Ralph or my answering machine, my eardrum was pierced by a high-pitched, raucous screech. Thinking I must have dialed wrong, I tried again only to have the same thing happen.
“What’s the matter?” Big Al asked. “Nobody home?”
“My phone must be out of order.”
I dialed the operator and told her about the difficulty on my line. “Before I report the trouble to Repair, sir, let me try it for you,” the operator said.
This time, I had brains enough to hold the phone away from my head before another ear-splitting squawk came zinging through the receiver.
“You must have left your fax machine hooked up,” the operator told me.
“Fax machine?” I echoed. “I don’t even own a fax machine, so how could it be hooked up? There must be some mistake.”
The operator’s tone grew a bit testy. “Sir,” she said, “there is no mistake. If the number you gave me is correct, then, whether or not you own a machine, there is definitely one attached to your telephone outlet at the present time.”
Good old “Gadget Ralph” was obviously up to his old tricks again. “No doubt you’re right,” I told the operator. “It is hooked up, and I probably do own it. I just didn’t know I owned it.”
“That’s quite all right, sir,” she returned, sounding slightly mollified. “Glad to be of service.”
“Well?” Curtis asked when I put down the phone.
“You’ll have to wait for me to get back to you, after I get hold of Ralph and check his schedule. Until then, I can’t make any promises. And as far as I’m concerned, if this case heats up over the weekend, my own schedule may go out the window. I could end up working the whole time.”
Curtis nodded. “I understand Ben Weston’s funeral is tomorrow. It sounds like the brass are treating his death like a line of duty, so I guess the force will be out in force regardless of…” Catching sight of the expression on Big Al’s face, Curtis Bell backed away from the pun and allowed his voice to dwindle uneasily away.
“Regardless of what?” Allen Lindstrom demanded.
“You know. Everyone’s talking about it—about Ben and whatever it was he was up to.”
“Get your butt out of here,” Big Al ordered. “Who the hell are you to say it wasn’t line of duty?”
Curtis Bell looked at the other man appraisingly. “Come on, Al. Lighten up. I didn’t mean anything by it. People are talking, that’s all. Everybody down in CCI is hoping you guys will find something that will exonerate him. Ben Weston was one hell of a guy. Nobody wants to see his name dragged through the mud.”
But Big Al was in no mood to be placated. “Like hell they don’t. Get the fuck out of here, Curtis, and quit gossiping. We’ve got work to do. Besides, aren’t there rules against conducting private business on company time?”
“Hey, I’m off duty this morning,” Curtis Bell returned, but he edged toward the door all the same. “Call me, Beau. About the appointment, I mean. After you hear from Ralph Banes.”
Ralph Banes indeed!
As Curtis took off down the hallway, we heard the sounds of a slight scuffle followed by a mumbled apology. Moments later, Ron Peters and his wheelchair appeared in the doorway. He waved at Big Al and nodded to me. “What on earth did you two say to that guy?” Ron asked. “He almost ran me down.”
“I told him to get out of my face,” Big Al said morosely. “And he did.”
Ron studied Big Al for a long moment. “I probably would, too,” he said. “How are you doing, Al?”
Detective Lindstrom dropped his gaze and stared at the floor. “All right, I guess,” he said.
“They told me upstairs that you were handing out the tape. I could have gotten it from somebody up there, but I’m a fifth floor kind of guy, Al, and I wanted to wear fifth floor tape. I also wanted to tell you how sorry I was.”
Big Al nodded his thanks and reached into his pocket, where he retrieved his somewhat depleted roll of tape. He tore off a hunk and passed it to Ron, who dutifully stuck it to his own badge.
“And as for you,” Peters said, turning to me, “I’m real happy that bullet didn’t come any closer. If it had, we’d all be wearing two pieces of tape instead of just one.”
“That’s an old joke, Ron. I’ve already heard it once this morning from Captain Powell. Let’s just leave it at that, shall we?”
Ron Peters looked from Big Al to me and back again. “Well, it’s certainly not sweetness and light around here, is it. I take it you two are up to your eyeballs in this Weston case?” he asked.
“Actually, we’re not,” I told him. “You’re looking at the Weston Family Task Force second string. I’m about to write a report on my interview with the mother of the one unrelated victim. That’s my part of the case, and I’m expected to stick to it. And, as you’ve already heard, Al’s assignment today is to hand out black tape. He’s locked out of the investigation because he was friends with several of the victims, and I’m sidetracked because Paul Kramer hates my guts.”
“Sounds almost as political as working in Media Relations,” Ron said with a halfhearted grin that wasn’t really funny.
Ron and I had been partners in Homicide before a permanent spinal injury put him in his chair. After long months of rehabilitation, he had come back to the department as a Media Relations officer, but I knew he longed to be back home with the detectives on the fifth floor, where the action is. I couldn’t blame him for that. For my money, working with murderers is often a whole lot less hazardous to your health than working with reporters.
“By the way,” Ron said, “that’s another reason I’m here. My job. It seems Maxwell Cole has turned over a new leaf. He says he understands the Weston Family Task Force guidelines. For a change, he’s not trying to go around them. He wants me to get a quote from you—a direct quote, if possible—about how it feels to have dodged out of the way of that stray bullet yesterday morning.”
Max is an old fraternity brother turned columnist and long-term media adversary. He went to work for the local morning rag, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, about the same time I hired on with the Seattle Police Department. We’ve been on each other’s backs and down each other’s throats ever since. He’s the least favorite practitioner of my least favorite profession.
“Max wants a direct quote?” I asked.
Ron nodded. “You know him. He wants something short and punchy, but fit for publication in a family newspaper.”
“Tell him ‘good.’”
“Good?”
“That’s right. You asked me how it feels, and you can tell him my answer is ‘good.’ Period. That should be short and punchy enough for Maxwell Cole.”
Ron Peters grinned, a real grin this time. The shadow of a smile even flickered across Big Al’s somber face.
“Somehow I don’t think it’s exactly what he had in mind,” Ron said, “but it’ll have to do.”
I figured that now that he had what he wanted, Ron would head straight back upstairs. Instead, he moved his chair closer to our desks. “Okay, you two,” he said. “All bullshit aside, I want you to tell me what’s really going on.”
“With what?”
“With the task force. Believe me, I know the party line. I’m in charge of disseminating the party line—that Ben Weston and his family died in an apparently gang-related multiple homicide. But scuttlebutt has it that Ben himself is being investigated for some allegedly illegal financial activities—conduct unbecoming an officer, they’re calling it. I want to know the straight scoop.”
Big Al Lindstrom cut loose with one of his half English-half Norwegian streams of profanity. Having grown up in the Ballard section of Seattle, I may not know enough adolescent Norwegian to be able to cuss fluently in a second language, but I understand it well enough.
“Hold it down, Al,” I cautioned. “You don’t want Kramer or Watty to hear you carrying on like this.”
“But isn’t it just what I told you? If this gets out, and it’s bound to, they’ll end up trying Ben in the press, even though he’s the one who’s dead, for Christ’s sakes! They’ll make out like it’s all his fault that somebody killed him.”
“Maybe gangs did do it,” I told Ron, “but, if so, it sure as hell wasn’t the usual gang-type hit.”
Ron Peters nodded. “That’s what I thought,” he said. “Unless the gangs have hired some retired Marine Corps drill instructor to do their dirty work.”
“You’ve seen Baker’s autopsies then?”
“I probably wasn’t supposed to, but, yes, I have. And I’ve seen some of Kramer’s stuff too, and that’s what’s got me so puzzled. Why’s he so hot and bothered about that bank loan stuff? I mean, if I were a police officer who was going to risk breaking the law, I’d sure as hell pick something more lucrative than student loans.”
“What are you saying?” I asked.
Ron Peters looked me right in the eye. “I’m convinced those loan applications are legitimate,” he answered. “They’re too damn corny not to be. Have any of those kids been found yet?”
“Not as far as I know.”
“But I thought Detective Danielson was working on that.”
“She was, but she struck out completely when she got as far as the various registrars’ offices. They stonewalled her. Now Kramer’s pulled her away from that to go talk to some stray paperboy, an alleged witness, down at Garfield.”
“And he didn’t assign anybody else in her place with the colleges?”
“I doubt it.”
“Why not?”
“Because it was my idea, for one thing,” I told them. “Like I said before, Kramer hates my guts.”
Big Al nodded. “There’s always that, Beau,” he agreed, “but that’s not all. Kramer doesn’t want to see his pet theory blown out of the water. Those loan applications are the only chinks he can find in Ben Western’s armor, and he doesn’t want to let loose of them.”
“Maybe,” Ron Peters asserted quietly, “someone will have to pry them out of his hands.”
Saying that, Ron reached behind his chair, opened the knapsack that hangs there for ease of carrying things, and pulled out a sheaf of paper—thirty pages or so of continuous-feed computer printout. He handed the papers over to me.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Last summer, a reporter from the Los Angeles Times called and asked me about the gang-related data base he had somehow heard we were working on up here. Supposedly, it was a data base analysis of local and visiting gang members and their various arrests and activities. He wanted to know how much of Seattle’s gang problem had been imported from California and Chicago.
“I don’t know how a reporter from L.A. heard about it, because I had a hell of a time tracking it down. As far as I could discover, no one had been officially assigned to do that kind of study and Ben Weston wasn’t exactly going around bragging about it, but eventually the trail led me to him. It turned out he was working on the project at home, on his own computer, on his own time.”
“That was well before he transferred into CCI, wasn’t it?” Big Al asked.
Ron Peters nodded. “Right. One of those labors of love, I guess. When I asked him about it, he showed me this—a preliminary copy of what he had done so far—but he told me he wanted to keep a low profile, that he didn’t want a lot of publicity on the project. So I squelched the story with the reporter, and since he didn’t need it back, I ended up keeping this. I had forgotten all about it until this morning. When I remembered, I had to dig through months of accumulated paper to find it. I’ve spent the last hour and a half going over it with a fine-tooth comb.”
“And?”
“Remember, this go-down is nine or ten months old. Between then and now, Ben transferred into the gang unit and started working on a similar but officially sanctioned project on a full-time basis. I’m sure he must have used the information he had previously gathered as a starting point, but I’m sure he’s added a great deal.”
“Have you looked at what’s there now?”
“No. Just this, but even so, even from way last summer, two of the four names on the loan applications are already here.”
“No kidding. Which ones?”
“Dathan Collins and Leonard Washburn.”
I scanned through the list far enough to locate Dathan Collins’s name. The information on him gave his given name, his parents’ names and addresses, his street name, his gang affiliation, his schooling background, his girlfriend’s name and address as well as a brief synopsis of his rap sheet. The intelligence Ben Weston had collected was surprisingly thorough. I passed the papers on to Big Al, who studied them in turn before passing them back to Ron.
“This is pretty impressive,” I said. “It’s like the complete Encyclopaedia Britannica analysis of Seattle’s street gangs. Where’d he get all his information? Did he do all this on his own before he went to work for the gang unit?”
Ron nodded. “That’s right. It’s a hell of a lot of work. My guess is that the other two names will show up in the computer along with whatever else he’s done since then.”
“We’ve got to get a look at that file,” I said.
Ron Peters grinned. “My sentiments exactly. I tried, but it didn’t work. Ben’s stuff is stored in one of the department’s secured PCs. You can’t call it up without proper authorization—which I can’t get because I’m in Media Relations—and/or Ben’s personal identification number—which, of course, we don’t have either.”
“If it’s a number,” Big Al chimed in, “we can get it. That’s easy.”
“Easy? How come?”
“Ben Weston was a smart man, but he couldn’t remember numbers worth a shit. Most people can remember the numbers they use most often off the tops of their heads, but Ben had to have them all written down—his PIN from the bank, his telephone credit card number, even Shiree’s work phone number. He kept them all in that little directory in his Day-Timer. If he had to have an ID number to get in and out of the computer, we’ll find that one there, too, along with all the others. I’d bet money on it.”
“Great,” Ron Peters said. “So where’s the Day-Timer?”
There’s an old saying about how you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. With Homicide detectives, it’s just the opposite. You can kick them off the fifth floor, but you can’t necessarily get them out of the habit of being detectives. Ron may have been booted upstairs into Media Relations, but his mind and instincts were still those of a working homicide cop.
“Ask Janice Morraine,” I said. “The last I saw, there was a Day-Timer with Ben Weston’s initials on it lying on the floor of his bedroom.”
“I can’t ask Janice Morraine for the time of day,” Ron Peters replied. “I’m not a detective, remember? How about if one of you ask her?”
“No can do, either,” Big Al grumbled morosely. “I’m aced out of it completely—Captain Powell’s orders.” He glanced at me. “You’re not much better off yourself. You’re supposed to be doing Adam Jackson. Maybe you’d better pass it along to Kramer.”
“Like hell!” I said. The three of us stared at one another. In our own way, we were all benched second stringers. We had a perfectly good piece of information, but no above-board way of acting on it.
My telephone rang just then, and the caller was none other than Sue Danielson. “Hi, Beau. I wanted to get back to you. I talked to that kid, the one down at Garfield. He really is a witness, at least to your part of the incident, and I thought you’d like to know about it.”
“Any information at all is welcome,” I said. “Want me to come to you or do you want to come to me?”
“Neither. Not here on the floor, anyway. Detective Kramer would have a fit if he saw us together. I missed lunch today. How about if you meet me at that little Mexican joint on Marion, Mexico Lindo, I think it’s called.”
After my Little Cheerful threshing-crew-type breakfast, I wasn’t quite up to dos tocos or even uno for that matter, but the offer of information was irresistible.
“See you there in ten minutes,” I told her, hanging up and standing up, all in the same motion.
“So where are you going?”
“That was Sue Danielson on the phone. She wants to meet so she can tell me what some kid told her about the guy who took the shot at me.” As I said the words, the glimmer of an idea came into my head. “Who knows? Maybe we can arrange some kind of trade on this computer thing.”
Big Al looked surprised. “Are you sure? She’s Paul Kramer’s partner.”
“It’s not a social disease,” I countered. “You were stuck with him once for a case or two, and so was I. Remember how it felt?”
Allen Lindstrom nodded. “Coulda killed him myself.”
“I rest my case,” I returned. “I’m off to meet the lady for lunch. Wish me luck. The rest of us may be benched, but she’s not, at least not yet.”