Dismissed With Prejudice (9780061760631) (14 page)

“What about the sword?”

“A sword? You mean like in Knights of the Round Table?”

“No,” Big Al said, consulting his notes. “They call it a
tanto
, a samurai short sword, very old and very valuable. It looks more like a large knife than
what we think of as a sword. Did he ever mention it to you?”

“Never.”

“And you never saw one in his office, didn't know he owned such a thing?”

“No, I didn't, but you say it was valuable? How valuable?”

“Very,” I replied.

“It's strange Tadeo never brought it up when we were going over the financial difficulties. If nothing else, it sounds like an asset that at least would have bought him a little more time.”

I was listening intently to everything Davenport had to say, but in the back of my mind, I was still thinking about the wild card in the deck—Clay Woodruff.

“Where does Woodruff live?” I asked.

“Port Angeles,” Davenport answered without the slightest hesitation. “In a place called the Ritz Hotel. He owns that and the tavern under it.”

Glancing at his watch, a Rolex, Davenport grabbed the briefcase and swung it off his desk. “I'm sorry. It's late and I really must go. If you need more info, we'll have to arrange another meeting.”

“Bum's rush again,” Big Al said good-naturedly when we were once more in the elevator. “So what now?”

It was late, almost four. “I'll tell you what. You go check on the DataDump folks, and I'll head back to the department and do the paperwork.”

Big Al's jaw dropped three inches. “You've got to be kidding. Since when do you do paperwork?”

“Since right now. When I finish, I'll go grab something at Vito's.”

“How come?”

“Because that's where Chip Kelley hangs out.”

Allen Lindstrom shook his head in mock disbelief. “You sure as hell won't get any argument from me. If you're doing paperwork, I'm by God taking you up on it. I'm outta here.” And with that, he took off and left me standing on the sidewalk outside 1201 Third.

When I got back to the department, the fifth floor was relatively quiet. Working slowly, I hunted and pecked my way through the necessary forms and reports. Watty stopped by my desk just as I was finishing up. Naturally, with someone watching me, I screwed up.

“Get out of here,” I said, handing him the stack of papers. “You always fuck up my typing.”

He scanned through the reports. “How does it look?”

“Beats me. My best guess is that this Woodruff character over in Port Angeles could shed some light on all of it if we could just talk to him. I tried calling the number Mrs. Oliver gave us, but no one answered, and there's no listing for the Ritz Hotel.”

Watty sighed and rubbed his chin. “Sounds like somebody'll have to take a run over there.”

“That's about what I figured.”

“By the way, George Yamamoto stopped by today. He wanted me to let you know that he's having a memorial service for Tadeo Kurobashi at four o'clock on Saturday afternoon.”

“He is.” So George Yamamoto was going ahead with a memorial service for his friend despite Machiko Kurobashi's express wishes to the contrary. “Where will it be?”

“In Waterfall Park at Main and Occidental. George said both he and Kurobashi lived right around there after the war.”

While we talked, Sergeant Watkins had stepped back a pace or two. I stood up to leave as well, taking my jacket off the back of my chair. I tried to put it on, but the sleeve hung up on the splints. In order to untangle it, I had to reach up the sleeve with my other hand.

With Watty standing there watching my clumsy efforts, I felt like I was making a damned spectacle of myself. So I was already defensive
before
he opened his mouth to ask the question.

“When do you go back to the doctor to have those bandages changed? They look like hell.”

“When I get around to it.”

That kind of curt answer wasn't at all what Watty deserved, but he shrugged it off and walked away leaving me shamefaced and once more painfully aware of the constant throbbing in my fingers.

In the busy days since Monday, except for the inconvenience of zipping my pants or starting a car
or putting on my socks and shoes, I had managed to stop focusing all my attention on my damaged hand. The steady pain had receded into the background of my consciousness along with the nagging worry of not knowing exactly how the accident had happened. But Watty's question had brought it all back to the forefront.

My reaction was strictly out of frustration and reflex. Without considering the consequences, after Watty left, I slammed my hand into the desk and then stood there in shock, almost doubled over by the pain. Amazed and humbled by the pain. I've been shot before without having it hurt that much.

Slinking out of the office, I climbed down the four flights of stairs to the ground level. From past experience, I suspected that my face was probably gray with pain, and I didn't want to have to explain it to whoever might be in the elevator.

I made it to the car and sat there for several minutes waiting for the pain to subside enough so I could start the car. What should I do? Go to another doctor? Which one? Where?

I gave up having a family physician when I gave up having a family. The times I've gotten hurt since, it's alway been on the job. The medics have dragged me down to Harborview Hospital and the Emergency Room folks have glued me back together. But I couldn't very well turn up at that same ER and say please fix this, because the questions on the form would be a nightmare: When
did it happen? How did it happen? Who treated it initially?

It was a helluva lot easier to handle the pain than it would be to bluff my way through the goddamned form. Defeated, I reached through the steering wheel and used my left hand to turn the key in the ignition. Ignoring the pain as best I could, I headed for Vito's up on Madison, a restaurant and bar with the dubious distinction of being called the drinking man's annex to the King County Courthouse.

Vito's may not be the closest watering hole to the cop shop and the courthouse, but it's far and away the most popular. It's where the lawyers and judges and detectives all go to hang out and rub elbows and tip a few when work is over for the day.

Judge Chip Kelley and I go back a long way. When I was starting out on the force, he was a flunky in the King County prosecutor's office. For years, since long before he was a judge, Chip Kelley has carried an invisible but unbreakable lease on a table in the far back corner of Vito's bar. I recognized his unique laugh the moment I stepped through the door into the darkened room.

It was the middle of the after-work rush. The place was crowded, but Kelley and two of his compatriots were at the usual table, cackling together over some ribald joke. Kelley stopped laughing when he saw me.

“I'll be damned! If it isn't the old lonesome stranger himself, J. P. Beaumont. Long time no see,
Beau. Sit down. What the hell happened to your hand?”

Without waiting for a response, Kelley stole a vacant chair from an adjoining table and shoved me into it, summoning the cocktail waitress with his other hand. “You still swilling that rotten MacNaughton's?” he asked.

The other questions hadn't merited answers. This one did. I gave the waitress a grateful nod while Kelley ordered another round for the whole table. Everybody else was drinking martinis.

“Hey, Beau, you know these two guys?”

I did, but he introduced us anyway. Chip Kelley was on a roll.

“So what brings you to this joint? I thought you ran more to the Doghouse these days.”

“I came to see you,” I said. “It's easier than trying to make an appointment.”

The drinks came and he tipped his glass in my direction. “
Salut
. Here's to not having to make appointments. So what can I do for you?”

One of the reasons I don't hang around Vito's anymore is that Chip can drink me under the table any day of the week and still sound sober as a judge, if you'll forgive the expression.

“I understand you were the judge in a patent infringement case that went to trial several months ago.”

Kelley nodded. “Probably. Seems like a couple of those turn up every year. And if it's still in the appeals process, I may not be able to comment.”

“Let me ask you about it in theoretical terms then, no names.”

“All right.”

Observing Vito's long-standing and inviolable rules of order and without ever leaving the table, the other two men drifted tactfully into a quiet discussion of golf scores, leaving us with as much privacy as if we had physically moved to another room.

“Go on,” Chip urged.

“Let's suppose that this guy invented something on his own time while he was working for somebody else, and suppose he offered it to his employer. The employer didn't want it, in fact refused it outright, but when the poor schmuck who invented it began developing and marketing the product on his own, the former employer filed suit saying that the patent really belonged to him, that the guy had done the work while working as an employee on company time.”

“So?” Chip asked.

“So eventually the poor schmuck loses in court. Damages, court costs, the whole ball of wax are awarded to the former employer. But supposing there was a witness to that same conversation between the schmuck and the employer, a witness who could testify to that effect, that the product had been offered to the employer and subsequently turned down, and that the development didn't happen during work hours.”

“So what's the problem?”

“At the time of the trial, the witness was nowhere to be found.”

Kelley considered the situation for a few moments. Finally he shrugged. “I don't know all the extenuating circumstances here, but off the cuff I'd say that without the witness, the schmuck would be SOL. With the witness, the case would probably go the other way. I would have dismissed it with prejudice so the ex-employer couldn't jack him around anymore. I take it this missing witness has now been found? Is he willing to testify?”

“I can't say.”

“Well then, I don't know what the exact judgment was, but there may be nothing to stop the schmuck from reopening the case and filing a countersuit of his own.”

“Yes, there is,” I said.

“What's that?”

“He's dead.”

“Oh.” My answer had a visibly sobering effect on Judge Chip Kelley. “Maybe the heirs can file a suit, then,” Kelley suggested after a moment. “It's been done.”

“That's all I needed to know.” I finished my drink and pushed back my chair.

“Hey, you can't go yet. You've only had one. Aren't you going to have something to eat?”

“I'm too tired to eat, and one drink is more than enough. Thanks for the help.”

Ignoring Chip's squall of protest, I made my way out the door into the clear fall evening. It
was a long way from Moscow, Idaho, to Vito's, and it had been a long, long day. All I wanted to do was spend a quiet evening at home in my recliner.

Dream on, you fool. I should have known better.

M
Y HAND STILL HURT LIKE HELL AS
I
RODE
upstairs in the Belltown Terrace elevator. My plan was to go to bed early and try to get some sleep, but I knew that idea was screwed the minute the elevator door opened and I smelled the garlic.

Ames was inside my apartment and up to one of his culinary shenanigans. Several times now I've accused him of being a closet Italian with heavy investments in a multinational garlic-growers cartel. He denies it, but whenever Ralph Ames starts dabbling in the gourmet kitchen he helped design for me, he goes crazy with the garlic.

I stood outside the door for a moment, wondering if there was any way I could gracefully get out of dinner by pleading a combination of illness and fatigue. Then I heard voices. Not only was Ames cooking dinner, he had invited company.

Ralph popped his head out of the kitchen when he heard the door open. “There you are. I was hoping you'd get here in time to eat. Come on out to the kitchen. I want you to meet a friend of mine.”

Plastering a reasonable facsimile of a smile to my face, I went into the kitchen disguised as Mr. Congeniality himself.

The place was in total uproar. Generally speaking, Ralph Ames is a very precise, well-contained individual, but he lets his hair down completely when he cooks Italian. His preferred method is to start with enough boiling water to deliver several babies. He continues from there, cutting and chopping with increasingly wild abandon. The majority of the ingredients end up in the pots, but debris tends to fall where it may and stay there.

Once the cooking is over, Ames has the enviable ability to turn out the lights in the kitchen, shut the door on the chaos, and go into the dining room, where he eats with obvious enjoyment, without giving the least thought to the disaster area he's left behind. My whole problem with cooking is that I hate cleaning up, and I never forget, not even for a minute, that the mess in the kitchen is sitting there, waiting for me. Waiting and congealing. I still don't have nerve enough to leave one of my cooking catastrophes for Florence Cooper, my cleaning lady, to straighten up.

Tonight Ames' culinary masterpiece was linguini primavera. The pasta had boiled over on the stove, leaving a huge dark brown stain across and around the burner. Both the pasta and the sauce had evidently progressed through a series of smaller pots to larger ones, so that the whole counter was littered with empty but nonetheless dirty cooking
utensils. And at the far end of the kitchen sat a man I didn't know, a man with a glass of wine in his hand.

He didn't sit so much as he lounged, his back against the partially opened kitchen window. He appeared to be about Ralph's and my age. His short gray hair was tightly permed into a frizzy halo. He wore a yellow silk shirt with the top two buttons unfastened, revealing an expanse of tanned chest as well as a single gold chain. His shoes were expensive and polished to a mirror shine. On his face was a look of bemused detachment as he observed Ralph's frenetic meal preparations.

Ames stopped in the middle of the room, waving a slotted spoon in one hand. “Beau, I'd like you to meet an old college chum of mine, Raymond Archibald Winter, III. This is my friend and client, Detective J. P. Beaumont.”

Winter put down his wineglass, held out his hand, and grinned a white-toothed, wolfish grin. “How do you do, Detective Beaumont. My friends call me Archie. Any friend of Aimless is a friend of mine.”

“Aimless?” I asked, puzzled.

“That's what we used to call old Ralphy here when we were in school together. He was always too damn serious. We tried to lighten him up a little, you know?”

I almost choked, stifling a hoot of laughter. “Did it work?”

Winter grinned again. “Not at all. At least not
for him. Did for me, though. You should have turned the tables and called me that, Ralphy. I've been through at least a dozen careers since I left law school. Never gets boring that way, though. I'm still having fun.”

Ralph Ames frowned as he stirred the bubbling pot of linguini. He seemed to be taking a dim view of his friend's teasing. He certainly didn't encourage it. “The mail's in on the table,” he said. “Dinner will be ready in about fifteen minutes.”

“Time enough to shower?” I asked.

“As long as you get a move on.”

Suddenly I found myself looking forward to dinner. Anybody who could get away with calling Ralph Ames “Aimless” or “Ralphy” couldn't be all bad. With a cheery wave in Archibald Winter's direction, I said, “I'll be right back,” and ducked out of the kitchen. I paused long enough to collect the mail, then headed for the shower, shuffling through the letters as I went.

They were mostly department-store bulk flyers with a small core of first-class mail, most of them bills. At the top of the stack was an envelope from Swedish Hospital. The next one came from a place called Orthopedics Associates with a street address on Madison. With a happy but silent “Eureka,” I ripped open the envelope from the hospital. It was a bill all right, inarguably exorbitant, with a computer printout detailing emergency room charges, X-rays, and splints. The second one, equally outrageous, was from a doctor I had never heard of
before, someone named Herman Blair, for professional services rendered.

Never in my life have I been so happy to receive two outrageously expensive bills. After smashing my hand on the desk, it had continued to throb without a hint of letting up. I was beginning to have a niggling worry in the back of my mind that maybe the problem with my hand was something more serious than I had supposed. That thought combined with the ongoing pain had finally convinced me that I would see a doctor the next day, no matter what. Now, thanks to the bills, I at least knew which doctor to call for an appointment.

Taking the telephone number from the top of the billing statement, I went to the bedroom phone and dialed. It was after five. Naturally, the doctor's office was closed, but his answering service took the call.

In theory, answering services are supposed to protect doctors and other important people from being pestered by insignificant people—patients in this case. The lady on the phone was determined to give me the brush off. I was equally determined not to be brushed. After all, I had been searching unsuccessfully for Dr. Blair for the better part of a week. In the end, my inherent stubbornness paid off.

“Give me your number,” the woman snapped at last. “I'll see if the doctor can call you back.”

He did. Within minutes, but he, like his answering service, was none too cordial.

“You know, Mr. Beaumont, you were supposed to be in my office early Tuesday morning to have those bandages changed and get the hematomas drilled. What happened?”

“I was out of town on a case,” I said lamely. “Get what drilled?”

“Your subungual hematomas. That's what's causing all the pain. Drilling will relieve it. I couldn't do it the other night. They hadn't filled up that much yet.”

“Filled? With what?”

“With blood. It's pooled under your nails just like I told you it would, remember?”

I didn't remember, but I said, “Right,” and tried my best to make it sound convincing.

“So how bad is it?” Blair asked, after a pause.

Real men don't eat quiche, and they don't whine to their doctors, either. “Not that bad,” I said.

“Can it wait until morning? Otherwise you're looking at another emergency room charge.”

“It can wait.”

“Be at my office at nine sharp tomorrow morning. We'll take care of it then. Meantime, take a couple of aspirin if you need to. By the way, who's your regular doctor?”

“I don't have one.”

“A man your age ought to,” he said. “See you tomorrow. Nine o'clock.”

“Yes,” I replied meekly. “I'll be there.”

Feeling like I'd been thoroughly put in my place by Dr. Herman Blair, I climbed into the shower, got
dressed, and finally ventured out into the dining room to see if dinner would be any less demeaning.

Somehow, the very word
Sotheby
exudes an aura of staid men wearing understated suits and conservative ties. Raymond Archibald Winter, III, with his yellow silk shirt and expensive gold chain, didn't at all resemble my idea of a Sotheby's oriental artifacts guru. He looked more like the Hollywood stereotype of a big-hitting movie producer.

He may not have looked the part, but Winter was obviously knowledgeable in the area of ancient Japanese artifacts. He spoke of them with the easy assurance of someone whose expertise is unassailable.

“It's a genuine Masamune all right,” he said, holding a newly filled wineglass up to the light and gently swirling the golden liquid. We were drinking some kind of French wine whose name I couldn't pronounce and didn't recognize. I had one glass. It was very dry and seemed dangerously close to champagne. I worried about doing a repeat performance of Sunday's boondoggle.

“You've seen it then?” I asked.

Winter nodded. “Ralph here finagled an appointment with George Yamamoto this afternoon, right after he picked me up from Sea-Tac. Mr. Yamamoto was kind enough to show us the sword. Extraordinary, finding it this way. It's like having a long-lost Michelangelo turn up in some little old lady's attic.”

He paused long enough to take a sip of wine. “I
wouldn't say the sword is priceless. Everything has its price. But it is exceedingly valuable, and it certainly shouldn't be sitting on some shelf in George Yamamoto's property room. He's aware of the sword's value, of course, and he seems to be taking some extra precautions, but we all know that evidence rooms aren't nearly as secure as they ought to be.”

“Not nearly,” I agreed.

“You see,” Winter continued, “we're talking about a museum-quality piece here, one that had long been thought lost. By rights it ought to be in a vault somewhere, preferably one that's climate and humidity controlled.”

“You know about it then?” I asked. “I mean, about this piece in particular?”

I had declined a second glass of Winter's wine and had switched back to my usual regimen of MacNaughton's and water. I congratulated myself on learning from my mistakes for once. At least I was reaping some small benefit from my champagne-induced disaster.

“Let's just say the sword was thought to exist, was believed to exist. I'm relatively sure it's part of a set that belonged to a family named Kusumi, an old and much-honored samurai family, who evidently refused to relinquish their weapons and sword furniture when ordered to do so in the mid eighteen hundreds. And I can see why. As far as sword makers go, Masamune was the master. I certainly wouldn't have wanted to part with it.”

“I know about Masamune,” I said. Arching one eyebrow, Winter regarded me quizzically over the rim of his glass.

“Do you know about things samurai?” he asked.

“Not really. Only enough to be dangerous. Tell me more.”

“My guess is that no one outside the immediate Kusumi family knew that the set still existed. The sword itself is over seven hundred years old, but I imagine the rosewood box dates from the time during the mid nineteenth century when the Kusumi family decided to conceal their treasures rather than give them up.

“You see, even though the handle design was lovingly copied on the cover of the box, the inlay work isn't nearly the same quality as that on the sword. In addition, a box like that would never have been part of traditional samurai sword furniture.”

“How do you know this particular set belonged to that particular family?”

“There is still written record of the set being designed and forged by Masamune for Yoshida Kusumi. The record, in the samurai archives of the University of Tokyo, includes a complete description of the handle design, but the set itself didn't come to light until two years after the end of World War II, when a number of pieces were discovered buried in radioactive rubble at Nagasaki. Only the metal pieces remained. If there were other boxes like the one here in Seattle, they were de
stroyed in the firestorm that swept the city after the explosion.”

“Nagasaki?” I blurted, remembering Machiko Kurobashi saying that she was originally from Nagasaki.

Winter looked at me questioningly. When I offered no explanation, he went on. “It's a miracle that the swords themselves weren't totally destroyed as well, although they were badly damaged. Once they were discovered, an extensive search was instituted to find any possible heirs, but as far as I know, no surviving family members were ever located. After undergoing decontamination, all the remaining pieces were reconditioned as much as possible and ended up at the Tokyo National Museum at Ueno.

“The curators there suspected that a matching
tanto
or short sword had existed at one time, but they assumed it had been lost if not earlier, then certainly at the time of the bombing.”

“You're convinced then, that this is part of the same set?”

Winter nodded. “Of course I'm sure. I've seen the other surviving pieces in Japan. They're not in nearly as fine shape as this one, but it's clearly the same set. I have only one question. Why the devil is that
tanto
sitting in Dr. Yamamoto's evidence room?”

“It's part of a murder investigation,” I explained. “It may not be
the
murder weapon, but it certainly was used to manipulate evidence at
the scene, and that makes it part of the official investigation.”

Winter waved his hand impatiently. “I understand that, Detective Beaumont, but how did it get here, to the States? How did it get from wartime Nagasaki to Seattle, Washington? Where has it been for the past forty plus years? And how did the dead man, this Kurobashi fellow, come to be in possession of it?”

I was struggling manfully to get a mound of slippery linguini to stay on my left-handed fork long enough to make the treacherous journey from plate to mouth. It wasn't working. I am not and never have been the least bit ambidextrous. Finally, disgusted with my clumsiness, I dropped my fork onto my plate and left it there. It was impossible for me to talk and manage the fork at the same time.