More Perfect Union (9780061760228) (19 page)

“Tell you what?” Kramer asked, pausing there.

“That I'm a couple of bubbles out of plumb,” I answered.

Kramer let it drop. “Gibson already left company headquarters in Toronto. He's catching the
red-eye back to Vancouver tonight. We'll have to try to locate him in the morning if we want a look at that film. What did you find out from Missing Persons?”

I told him briefly what I had learned from Detective Jacobs. Paul Kramer shook his massive head. “It still doesn't make sense. If Martinson ran off, I'd lay odds it's got more to do with the ironworkers and those goddamned tapes than it does with his wife.”

It hurt like hell to admit Kramer might be right, but his supposition certainly tallied with mine.

“Whoever the lady was on the phone in Toronto,” Kramer continued, “she said Gibson is due back at work here in Seattle tomorrow morning by seven. Either at the job site or in their temporary headquarters in the Arcade Building. Want to meet there about seven-fifteen?”

“In the office?”

Kramer shook his head. “Let's meet outside first. By the fountain at Second and Union.”

“All right, but I'll have to be back home by ten-thirty. I've got a date for lunch.”

I'm not sure why I said it that way instead of coming right out and telling him that taking Tracie and Heather to Bumbershoot was a prior commitment. By then we had been working together for several hours with no recurrence of our ongoing feud.

A look of barely concealed contempt washed
over Kramer's face. “By all means, don't let this case screw up your social life.” With that, he turned on his heel and stalked away.

Good riddance, I thought. If he's still looking for playboy cop symptoms, I'll give him one every now and then. Just for drill.

R
alph Ames has been on an Italian food kick for as long as I've known him. By the time I got home that night, he had invited Heather and Tracie to dinner and had enlisted their help in making a gigantic batch of spaghetti. The three of them were already eating when I put my key in the lock.

My kitchen was a shambles. Some charred remains, vaguely recognizable as slices of French bread, sat on the counter giving mute testimony to at least one failed batch of garlic toast. A thin dusting of Parmesan cheese covered the floor. More dirty cooking pots than I could possibly own were scattered throughout. Whoever was volunteering for KP duty was in deep trouble.

I poured myself a MacNaughton's and water and carried it with me to the table. Heather beamed as Ames put a plate stacked high with spaghetti in front of me.

“We got to help, Unca Beau. He let us,” she lisped happily. Her triumphant grin was missing two front teeth. “I got to stir, and Tracie fixed the bread.”

With a slight warning shake of his head, Ralph Ames passed me a basket full of garlic bread which was only somewhat less charred than the discarded batch still in the kitchen.

I took a bite and nodded appreciatively at Tracie. “Delicious,” I said.

She ducked her head and wrinkled her nose. “It's a little burned. I forgot to set the timer.”

“It's fine,” I told her.

The kids were excited and overflowing with news, babbling to Ames and me about their father's upcoming wedding, their new dresses, the foibles of poor Mrs. Edwards, and our planned outing to Bumbershoot the next day. I tried to stay with the flow of conversation, but my mind kept wandering back to Logan Tyree and Jimmy Rising and Angie Dixon. At least one of those three cases was now officially mine.

I must have been on my third or fourth MacNaughton's by the time the kitchen was mucked out and the girls had gone back downstairs. Finally, mercifully, the apartment was quiet. I leaned back in my ancient recliner, resting my head, closing my eyes. But as soon as I did, it all came back to me—Logan Tyree, Jimmy Rising, and Angie Dixon. Names with questions and no answers.

Sitting up, I wrestled the Seattle telephone
book out of the drawer in the table next to my chair. I checked the K's and found there was only one Don Kaplan, a Donald B. Kaplan on N.E. 128th. I dialed the number. It rang and rang, and nobody answered.

Ralph Ames came into the living room from the kitchen just as I put the phone back in its cradle. He looked at me quizzically.

Instead of answering his unasked question, I got up and poured myself another drink, offering him one in the process. Ames shook his head.

“I was calling someone from Martin Green's party,” I explained. “Remember me telling you about the man on the balcony, a guy named Don Kaplan? He's not home right now, but if he shows up there before it gets too late, I'll stop by and see him tonight.”

I sat back down in my recliner. A little too hard. Some of the MacNaughton's slopped into my lap. I wiped it off.

“It's already too late, Beau,” Ames said.

“What do you mean? It's just barely ten.”

“It's too late for driving. Look at yourself. You're in no condition to drive, much less question a potential witness.”

It wasn't the first nudge Ames had given me on the subject of drinking, not just counting drinks that night in particular, but drinking in general. He had mentioned my alcohol consumption on several earlier occasions, and I always resented it. I resented it now. Just because
I had a drink or two or three in the evening after work didn't make me an alcoholic in my book. I thought he was overreacting and told him so.

“So what are you, my mother?”

“I'm your attorney, Beau. I'm concerned about you.”

“Get off it, Ralph. If I want to drink too much, I'm not hurting anyone but myself.”

Ames shrugged and dropped it for the moment. “What's bugging you tonight? All evening long when the girls tried to talk to you, it was like there was nobody home. You barely paid attention.”

“This is beginning to sound a whole lot like a lecture,” I countered. “I've been thinking about the case, that's all.”

“The case,” he echoed. “What case? And why do you want to talk to Don Kaplan? When I left this morning, I understood you were on vacation until Tuesday morning. Whatever happened to that?”

“I got Watty to put me on it after all,” I said.

“The case he gave you strict orders to leave alone on pain of being fired.”

I nodded. “That's the one.”

Ames shook his head in disgust. “You drink too much and you work too hard. Definitely type-A behavior, Beau. Typical type A. Heart attack material. You'd best mend your ways, or you won't be around long enough to enjoy your money.”

Our conversation probably would have dete
riorated further into an all-out quarrel if the phone hadn't rung just then. It was Linda Decker.

“I talked to Sandy Carson,” she said. “She told me she gave you the tapes. Did you look at them? Did they help?”

She sounded so eager it was hard to answer her. “We looked at them all right,” I said slowly, playing for time, scrambling for the right thing to say.

I was hedging. I didn't want to have to tell Linda Decker that the information she had guarded with her life, the information that had cost her Logan Tyree, her mother, and maybe her brother, was essentially worthless. It's one thing to pay a price. It's something else to discover that the price was meaningless.

“We're still evaluating the information,” I said at last.

She sighed. I could sense her disappointment. “What are you doing now?” she asked.

I glanced down at the drink in my hand and found myself wondering exactly how many MacNaughton's there had been in the course of the evening. I couldn't remember exactly, and now, suddenly it seemed important, not because of Ames but because of me. Maybe Ralph Ames was right to be worried.

“Just taking it easy,” I said in answer to Linda's question.

“I don't mean right this minute,” Linda
Decker responded. “I mean what are you going to do next?”

“We're following up on the disappearance of Wayne Martinson.”

“Wayne? Do you think he was involved?”

“Maybe, maybe not,” I replied. “And then tomorrow we'll have a look at the pictures of Masters Plaza, to see if those tell us anything.”

“That's all?”

“For right now.” I heard Linda Decker's sharp intake of breath. For the loved ones, the ones left grieving and waiting, I'm sure the way cops have to work must seem incredibly cumbersome, agonizingly slow.

It's true. It is.

There was nothing more I could or would tell Linda Decker right then, so I changed the subject. “How's Jimmy?” I asked.

There was a long pause before she answered. “I don't know,” she said softly. “He may not make it through the night, but at least the sons of bitches didn't get the tapes,” she added fiercely. “Thank God for that.”

“That's right,” I agreed as consolingly as I could manage. “At least they didn't get the tapes.”

I put down the phone and sat there looking at it. For a time I forgot I wasn't alone in the room.

“Who was that?” Ames asked.

The sound of his voice startled me, and I
jumped. All the potential rancor in our previous discussion faded from mind. It never occurred to me to tell Ralph Ames to mind his own business.

“Linda,” I answered. “Linda Decker, wondering how things are going.”

“And the tapes?” he pressed.

I shook my head. “They're nothing really, justsome accountant's tapes. Angie Dixon, the woman who fell off the building, insisted that they were part of a long-term swindle inside the union—bribes, kickbacks, that kind of thing. The problem is, we've only got the tapes, not the journal entries. Without those, we can't prove a thing.”

“What are you going to do about it?” Ames asked.

Pointedly placing my empty glass on the table, I looked Ralph Ames in the eye. “Sleep on it,” I said. “Go to bed and see if any bright ideas surface in my subconscious.”

Of course, when I finally did manage to wrestle my nighttime demons into submission, I was too exhausted for any inspiration to pay me a nocturnal visit. There were dreams—disjointed, fragmented, ugly dreams in which I almost but not quite found something that didn't want to be found.

There were no flashes of psychic brilliance, no illuminating insights into the problem at hand. When the alarm went off at six the next morning I woke up with a throbbing hangover, no closer
to solving the problem than I had been the night before when I fell into bed in a booze-induced stupor.

Hung over or not, I knew as soon as I opened my eyes that something was different. For the first time in weeks, the sky outside my bedroom window was gray instead of blue. Seattle's cool cloud cover was back, announcing that summer had just about run its course. I went out on the balcony. A cool freshening breeze was blowing in off Puget Sound. Sniffing it cleared my head and made me feel better.

Let it rain, I thought. Labor Day or not, Bumbershoot or not, let it rain. I'm ready.

Dressing quickly, I skipped out of the house without bothering to make coffee or waken Ames. I made my way down Second with the other early-morning pedestrian commuters. They were smiling and nodding at one another in greeting. The heat was leaving, the sun was going back where it belonged, and real Seattlites were happy to have their customary weather back.

It was only five to seven when I got to Second and Union, but Paul Kramer was already pacing anxiously back and forth by the empty, drought-dried fountain next to the Arcade Building. Manny Davis, more relaxed, lounged easily against one wall watching Paul Kramer's impatient antics with some amusement.

When he saw me at last, Kramer breathed an exaggerated sigh of relief, turned on his heel,
and headed into the building. Manny waited until I reached him. “I figured you'd be on time. Kramer's got no faith.”

“He's got all kinds of faith,” I corrected, “in all the wrong things.”

The temporary Seattle headquarters for Masters and Rogers Developers was on the third floor of the Arcade Building in two small but posh offices that had been sublet from someone else. The woman at the front desk would have made a terrific ice princess. Flawlessly made up. Coldly beautiful. No smile. No discernible sense of humor.

“Mr. Gibson has someone with him just now. May I ask what this is concerning?”

“It's police business, Miss,” Manny offered. From the daggered look she gave him, Miss wasn't a term she found endearing.

She sat up straighter in her chair. “Mr. Gibson is meeting with some prospective tenants at the moment. He flew back from Toronto late last night especially for this meeting. I'm sure he'll be glad to talk to you once it's over, but I couldn't possibly interrupt him. It may take several hours. They're on a tour of the building right now.”

“Several hours!” Kramer yelped as though he'd been shot. The probability was high that the Masters Plaza pictures would reveal nothing new, yield nothing we hadn't already learned from other sources, but Kramer was young and impatient. He needed to feel like he was doing
something, getting somewhere. “We'll wait,” he said stubbornly. “However long it takes, we'll wait.”

He settled heavily into a chair next to a potted palm. Manny joined him and picked up a recent copy of
Forbes
that was sitting on an end table next to him.

The receptionist shrugged with studied disinterest and turned back to her computer keyboard. “Suit yourselves,” she said.

I've seen this kind of corporate guardian angel all too often. They regard themselves as the keepers of all comings and goings. Over the years I've learned you have to get around women like that, because you sure as hell aren't going to get through them.

I made a point of looking at the clock on the receptionist's desk, turning the face toward me so I could see it. “You can wait if you want to,” I said over my shoulder to Kramer and Manny. “I've got better things to do.” Without saying anything more, I made my way out of the office. When I stopped at the elevator, I glanced back. Paul Kramer was glaring sourly at me through the glass, muttering something to Manny. Suspicions confirmed, probably. Smiling, I gave them a breezy wave and disappeared into the elevator.

I dashed across Second on a flashing
DON'T WALK
signal and ran all the way to the construction gate and elevator at the opposite end of Masters Plaza. I managed to squeeze on the el
evator just as the door went shut, but the operator pointed at me and shook his head. “Where do you think you're going?”

“I'm with Mr. Gibson's party,” I said. “I had to stop and take a leak.”

The operator grinned. “Happens to the best of us, but you'll have to go back out to the tool shack and get a hard hat. I'll pick you up on the next trip.”

I did as I was told, knowing that if the operator ran into Gibson on the way, the jig was up, but he didn't. He came back for me.

“I dropped Mr. Gibson off on the thirty-seventh floor a few minutes ago,” the operator told me. “They said they'd work their way down from there. How about if I drop you at thirty-six?”

“That'll be fine,” I said.

As soon as I stepped off the elevator, the wind rushing through the open spaces between the concrete beams caught me and almost blew the hard hat off my head. What was a freshening breeze at street level was a whistling gale on the thirty-sixth floor. Someone had hung a huge piece of heavy plastic along the side of the building, but it was flapping loose in the wind.

Since my suit and tie had been good enough to get me past the elevator operator, I figured I was looking for a suit and tie group. What I saw on the thirty-sixth floor were plumbers, electricians, and carpenters without a pinstripe or knotted silk tie in sight.