“TELL ME JUST THIS ONE THING,” BIG Al said, as we climbed into the car for the return drive to the department. “How the hell does someone who got sent up for drugs manage to get licensed and bonded to run a shredding company?”
“Don’t ask,” I responded. “You don’t want to know and neither do I.”
“Are you going to head on over to Port Angeles today?” he asked.
Baseball teams have designated hitters. In Big Al’s and my partnership, I’m the designated traveler. Allen Lindstrom lives to eat, and he’s especially partial to his wife’s brand of home cooking. He doesn’t like to go anywhere if he can’t be back in time for dinner. Other than Ralph Ames, I’ve seldom met a bachelor whose dinners were worth going home for. Mine certainly aren’t, so if traveling is optional, I go and Big Al stays home.
“That’s the plan,” I said, except the plan didn’t work according to schedule. Going to Port Angeles to see Clay Woodruff that Thursday afternoon got shoved aside by something else.
Before we made it all the way inside the garage at the Public Safety Building, we were dispatched back out and sent to one of the city’s better-known crack houses over on East Yesler. There, sometime during the night, in a filthy apartment that reeked of urine and vomit and human feces, a young hotshot drug addict named Hubert Jones had OD’d on heroin. He had fallen onto a bare mattress on the floor in one corner of what passed for a living room—a dying room in this case—and had been left lying where he fell. It was morning before any of his drugged-up pals bothered to call in a report.
The dead man’s driver’s license revealed that he had turned twenty-one just two months earlier. When we started asking questions about him and about what had happened during the night, nobody in the house knew anything, heard anything, or saw anything.
These were people who had fried their brains on drugs but whose bodies hadn’t yet given up the fight. From what we could ascertain, Hubert Jones had died alone in a room filled with at least two dozen partying zombies, none of whom had bothered to notice. With cretins like that for friends, Hubert Jones had no need of enemies.
It’s hard for cops to get emotionally involved in cases like that. It’s hard to care. We all get them, though, and far too often. With anti-drug hysteria running at a fever pitch, police jurisdictions all over the country, hounded by the press, are under tremendous pressure to do something. Exactly what, nobody’s sure.
And so, when another case crops up, we go through the motions. We ask all the usual questions and write down the usual non-answers. We visit the grieving next-of-kin, usually and painfully the parents, and do what we can, with our questions and our forms, to make sense out of the tragedies of their children’s amputated lives. Sometimes we find out who’s at fault; more often, we don’t. When we’re finished, we go home or else we move on to the next case. After a while, all OD’s look alike, and it’s hard to give a rat’s ass. You’re just grateful as hell that it isn’t your own kid being packed off to the morgue.
On that particular day, Hubert Jones’ squalid death took precedence over Tadeo Kurobashi’s murder, over my going to Port Angeles to talk with Clay Woodruff. More than the critical forty-eight hours had passed since Tadeo’s death, and the odds against our actually finding his killer were going up exponentially.
By the time we finished the next-of-kin visit, it was quitting time, and quit we did. Hubert Jones’ wretched life and meaningless death sure as hell weren’t worthy of our working overtime. All I wanted to do was go home and put my feet up.
My emotional battery had just about run down. The days of almost round-the-clock work and concentration had drained me, and I found myself filled with a vague sense of uneasiness. It wasn’t anything physical. Thanks to Dr. Blair, my hand was feeling much better. There was, however, on the periphery of my mind, the nagging knowledge that I hadn’t done as I’d been told and gone to see Dr. Wang.
Sitting in the recliner, I noticed how quiet the apartment was. Far too quiet. Ames had left a message on the answering machine saying that he and Winter were driving over to eastern Washington to visit with Machiko Kurobashi at Honeydale Farm. I missed the kind of creative uproar that seems to accompany Ralph Ames wherever he goes. And I missed having Peters’ kids popping in and out unannounced in hopes of snagging some forbidden treat. And I missed having someone there to talk to. And I was restless as hell.
About six, I picked up the phone, dialed the Mercer Island Police Department, and asked to be put through to the chief. The words police chief didn’t used to make me think of sex. Ever. But that was before I got to know Marilyn Sykes. Before I really got to know her.
Mercer Island is one of Seattle’s suburban neighbors, an independent bedroom community in the middle of Lake Washington with its own city government. Marilyn Sykes, the Mercer Island police chief, and I have a sometime thing going. Like me, she works too much and plays too little. She answered the phone in her office on the second ring.
“It’s six o’clock. Why are you still working?”
“Do you have any better ideas?”
“Actually I do. What are you having for dinner?”
She laughed. “Lean Cuisine. Again. As usual.”
“How about leftover linguini primavera?”
“At your house? If you’ve got leftovers, that must mean Ralph Ames is still in town.”
“In Washington, but not in town.”
“Is that a hint?”
“An invitation,” I corrected.
“Are you sure you’re up to it? How are the fingers?”
The damn fingers again! “Now that they’ve stopped hurting, they’re fine,” I answered. “Believe me, I never felt better.”
“So I don’t need to bring over a pot of chicken soup?”
“No. Your toothbrush.”
“I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” she said.
And she was. That’s one of the reasons I like Marilyn Sykes. She doesn’t require engraved invitations or lots of advance notice.
We never did get around to the linguini. When I woke up at six o’clock on Friday morning, Marilyn was plastered against my back, one hand wrapped around my middle, snoring softly. I felt the soft swell of breast against the skin of my shoulder blade and the arousing tickle of her pubic hair against my butt.
We’ve been around one another enough now that I no longer wake up in a blind panic, trying desperately to figure out who’s in bed next to me. I know upon waking and without looking that it’s Marilyn, and I’m grateful to have her there. We’ve never discussed the fact that she snores. I probably do too.
I lay there for a while, delighted to notice that my fingers weren’t throbbing. Between Marilyn’s capable ministrations and Dr. Blair’s red-hot paper clip, I was feeling a whole lot better. A gentle euphoria slipped over me as I relived the previous evening’s activities. Neither Marilyn nor I had anything to apologize for in the screwing department. On that score alone, I felt downright terrific. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I thought Dr. Blair must have had his wires crossed. It wasn’t possible for someone who felt this good to be sick. Enlarged liver, my ass! Enlarged something else.
Marilyn stirred in her sleep. A hand grazed my chest.
“Awake?” I asked, turning to face her.
“Mmmmmm,” she answered.
I couldn’t tell if that meant yes or no. “Which is it?” I asked.
“Depends on the question.”
She snuggled comfortably against my chest, nuzzling into the curve of my neck. Totally un-police chief like behavior.
“What time do you have to be at work today?” I asked.
“Eight. I told them last night that I might be running late.”
“Oh no, you won’t. I have to be at work at eight, too. Do you want breakfast?”
“Not exactly,” she said.
“Me neither,” I said, eating myself on top of her. She pulled my face down to hers and gave me a lingering kiss. A demanding kiss.
When I drew back from her lips, Marilyn’s eyes were open, and she was smiling. “Good morning,” she whispered.
“Don’t talk,” I said, and buried myself inside her, which is why, without ever having breakfast, I was ten minutes late to work and Marilyn Sykes was twenty. The good thing about being chief of police is that not many people have nerve enough to ask a police chief where she’s been or what she’s been doing, and even if they had asked, Marilyn Sykes is the type who probably would have told them.
I wasn’t that lucky. Big Al was waiting for me, and so was Sergeant Watkins.
“You working banker’s hours these days?” Watty demanded.
Watty and I have had numerous run-ins of late, particularly since my series of hassles with Paul Kramer, one of the newer detectives on the squad. I’ll admit, I haven’t been busting my butt to mend fences, but then neither has Watty.
“Doctor’s orders.” I answered with a tiny white lie, and Watty didn’t question it. With a disgusted shrug of his shoulders, he walked away.
“I’ve got a message here for you,” Big Al said. “George Yamamoto wants to see you right away.”
“Where are you going?”
“To see Captain Powell.”
“What about?”
“Maxwell Cole is doing a feature on Hubert Jones’ mother. He wants to interview one of the detectives. Powell says I’m elected.”
“Thank God for small favors,” I responded.
Maxwell Cole is a longtime acquaintance of mine, a crime reporter turned columnist, whose profession naturally puts him at odds with cops in general and me in particular. We can’t be in the same room together without setting off explosions. Powell probably figured, and rightly so, that any interview Maxwell Cole did with me would not reflect favorably on the Seattle Police Department.
Counting my blessings, I dashed down the stairway and into the crime lab to talk with George Yamamoto. As soon as I saw him, I knew something was wrong. George was sitting alone at his desk, staring at his phone. I knocked on his door frame twice before he heard me and looked up, his narrow face drained and haggard.
“Come in,” he said, motioning wearily. “Come in and close the door.”
“What’s the matter, George? You look beat.”
He cocked his head to one side. The slightest hint of a sardonic smile played around the corners of his lips. “Beaten? Maybe I am. Isn’t that Ralph Ames a friend of yours?”
“Yes.”
“A good poker player?” Yamamoto asked.
I shrugged. “I wouldn’t know about that. I don’t play poker.”
George nodded wisely. “I do. He’s a good bluffer. I believe I’ve just been blackmailed, Detective Beaumont, and unless I’m sadly mistaken, your friend Ralph Ames is behind it.”
“Ames? Blackmail? No way.” I almost laughed aloud, but George’s coldly humorless expression stifled the urge.
“There are many degrees of blackmail, Detective Beaumont, and this is probably fairly benign, but it’s blackmail nonetheless.”
“Jesus Christ,” I groaned. “What the hell is going on? I don’t understand any of this. And how you got the crazy idea that Ralph Ames is behind it—”
“He is,” George interrupted. “Ames and that Winter fellow.”
“What could Ralph Ames or Archie Winter possibly have on you?”
“Not them,” Yamamoto said quietly. “Machiko.”
“This doesn’t make sense.”
“Ames and Winter came here yesterday wanting to see the sword, and I showed it to them. Winter has solid credentials. He agreed with me that the sword is a genuine Masamune. Now, this morning, I have a call from Machiko Kurobashi telling me that if I don’t release the sword to her at once, she’ll go to the media with the story.”
“What story?”
“Conflict of interest. The newspapers will lap it up. She’ll tell them how I’m keeping the sword because of the long-standing feud between us.”
“But how can she get away with that if it’s not true?”
George Yamamoto leaned back in his chair, his fingertips templed in front of his nose. “But that’s where you’re wrong, Detective Beaumont. It is true. I thought the sword was Tadeo’s. One of the reasons I didn’t want to release it to her is that I didn’t think she deserved to touch it. Now Winter tells me the sword is rightfully hers. Her maiden name was Kusumi.”
I nodded. “I thought as much when Winter was talking about it the other night, when he told me that the other matching pieces had been found in the ruins of Nagasaki.”
“What exactly do you know about Machiko’s background?” George asked.
“Not much. Only what you told me, that she came to this country as a war bride, an occupation bride really, and that she married Tadeo after her first husband died.”
“She was a whore!” George Yamamoto declared vehemently, slamming his fist into his desktop. “Machiko Kurobashi was a no-good worthless whore!”
For a long moment it was silent in George Yamamoto’s small private office. In the outer lab, beyond the closed door, humming voices droned and telephones rang faintly. No one beyond the confines of his private office seemed aware of the outburst.
“You don’t know that for sure, do you, George?”
He nodded. “Yes, I know it for sure. I told you before about Tomi, my sister. When Machiko showed up out of nowhere and took Tadeo away, I wanted to find out about her. I had friends who were able to check into her background. They told me she was working the streets in Tokyo when she met and married her first husband. I reported what I had found out to Tadeo, but he said it didn’t matter. He married her anyway.”
George swung around in his chair and stared angrily out his office window, a dingy pane of water-splotched glass overlooking Third Avenue.
“I’ve run this department for years without a hint of scandal,” George said slowly, “and as long as I give her back the sword, that will continue to be true. No scandal. No problem. She claims she needs to borrow it for a day or two.”
“And if you don’t let her have it?”
“She goes to the papers.”
“It does sound like blackmail,” I conceded, “but she can’t prove it.”
“She won’t have to. Newspapers don’t require proof.”
“Does she know about the memorial service?”
George nodded his head. “I told her. She didn’t say anything about it.”
“But she isn’t coming?”
“No.”
Dozens more questions swirled in my head, but they could wait. Between asking then and asking later, I chose later. George was having a tough enough time as it was. I got up, walked to the door, and opened it.
“Will you be coming to the memorial service?” George asked.
“What time is it again?”
“Four o’clock. In that little place called Waterfall Park at Main and Occidental.”
“I’ll be there,” I said.
George nodded. I left the room, closing the door softly behind me. Unfortunately, George Yamamoto regarded even a hint of scandal as a serious assault on his personal honor.
When I got back upstairs, there was a Federal Express envelope lying facedown on my desk. I opened it and shook out the contents—a single piece of paper, a copy of the composite drawing of a darkly handsome man in his mid-thirties. I picked up my phone and dialed Andy Halvorsen in Colfax to see if he had received his copy. He had.
“Just a few minutes ago. In fact, I was about to call Pamela Kinder in Spokane to see if she can pick this guy out of a montage of pictures. I’ve spent half the morning on the phone with Alvin Grant, that detective in Schaumburg. He’s excited as hell.”
“Excited? What about?”
“When he saw the composite, he thought it looked familiar. He worried it all night, and this morning he finally figured out where he knew that face from. He came up with both fingerprints and a mug shot. He’s sending us copies of the prints, and he’s pulling strings to get the latent prints they lifted off Lions’ Visa card run through Cook County’s Automated Fingerprint Identification System. He’ll call and let us know what happens with that.”
“So who is it? Anybody we know?”
“You and I don’t know him from Adam, but Grant does. His name’s Lorenzo Tabone. He’s a small-time thug, not too bright, who’s suspected of doing occasional contract work for somebody named Aldo Pappinzino.”
“Never heard of him either. Who’s that?”
“A major Mafia don. Runs a branch of the mob that’s headquartered in Chicago.”
“And how exactly does this Alvin Grant propose to catch him?”
“He says they’ve got a stakeout on the place where Tabone lives, and Grant thinks it just might work. Tabone’s got no way of knowing we’re on to him. It was nothing but an accident that the security guard caught the guy with the Visa card, and having Grant recognize him is more blind luck, more than we could have hoped for. By the way, Grant’s got a real hard-on for these characters, for anybody connected with the Pappinzinos. Anything he can do to help, he’s up for it.”
“How come?” I asked. If somebody volunteers and says he’s covering my backside, I want to know how he got there. I’ve learned the hard way not to accept allies on blind faith alone.
“Grant’s best buddy from high school, a guy he went through the police academy with, got taken out by a Pappinzino hit man. The guy was doing a drug surveillance for the DEA. Got shot in the back of the head execution-style while he was sitting in his car. The guy who did it got off on a technicality. You know how it works.”
I did indeed.
Halvorsen sounded different somehow. He had evidently worked back East long enough that even talking to Alvin Grant on the telephone had injected a hint of Chicago accent into his eastern Washington twang.
“So what are you doing?”
“Me? Like I said, I’m going to go see Pamela Kinder. After that, I’ll go by Sacred Heart. I may be able to see Kimiko. The doctor said it’s a possibility. How about you?”
“We spent most of yesterday working on another case, but we picked up a lead to a friend of Kurobashi’s who lives over in Port Angeles. If I can get away this afternoon, I’ll go over there and talk to him.”
“Sounds good,” Halvorsen said. “Let me know if you find out anything, and I’ll do the same.”
Big Al came back from his ordeal in Captain Powell’s office in a blue funk.
“What’s Max up to this time?” I asked.
“He’s trying to come up with a reason why it’s all our fault.”
“That Hubert Jones OD’d?”
“That’s right.”
I laughed. “If anyone can pull that one off, Maxwell Cole is it. Want to go have lunch?”
Allen Lindstrom nodded. It was time. We went to the Doghouse. Big Al had lunch; I had breakfast.
“You know,” Big Al said thoughtfully, chewing his way through a Bob’s Burger, “you ought to try getting up a little earlier in the mornings and start having breakfast before you come to work. Molly says it’s a whole lot better for you.”
I smiled and nodded and ate my bacon and eggs without bothering to tell Big Al what I had been doing that morning that had caused me to miss breakfast.
I didn’t figure it was any of his business.