More Perfect Union (9780061760228) (21 page)

She picked up the phone and dialed a number. “This is Kath,” she announced flatly into the phone. “Are you all booked up at the moment or could I come over and use the machine for a few minutes.” She paused. “They're due at four o'clock? We should be done long before then. See you in a few minutes.”

Without a word, she unwound the film and lurched out of the chair. She swept out of the room, down the stairs, and out of the building,
leaving us to follow. She walked at a surprisingly rapid pace back up Second to Bell and then down to First Avenue where she led us into a derelict-looking building.

Derelict on the outside only. Inside, the reception area was comfortably if not lavishly furnished. Kath waved briefly at the receptionist then led us through an open door into another dimly lit room, one half of which was filled with a huge console complete with knobs, dials, buttons, and monitors, several showing wave forms only. The centerpiece was a massive television screen.

A man was seated on a high stool in front of the console. He turned as we entered. He too was holding a coffee cup in one hand and a cigarette in the other. They must be film-editor occupational hazards.

“Hi, Jack,” Kath Naguchi said. “Thanks for working us in.”

“What's up?” Jack asked. “It sounded pretty urgent on the phone.”

Kath handed him a videotape. “These gentlemen are interested in seeing some of this. It's the Masters Plaza tape.”

Jack looked at us questioningly, but Kath Naguchi offered no introductions, and we didn't volunteer any of our own.

He shrugged. “Okay. If you say so. It's not a freebie, though. It's gonna cost you.”

“You guys are paying?”

I nodded.

Jack got up and headed into another small room that opened off the one we were in. As the door swung open, I felt the cool rush of air-conditioning and glimpsed several stacks of humming electronic equipment that filled the room with a low-pitched semi-silence.

“Have a seat while we get set up,” Kath ordered before she disappeared into the other room behind Jack.

Looking behind me I discovered a raised platform with two short love seats on it, love seats with ashtrays on or near all available flat surfaces. We sat waiting until Kath and Jack emerged from the other room.

For some reason I had expected Kath would be the one actually running the film, but Jack resumed his seat on the stool while Kath stood at his side. Paul Kramer had evidently been under the same impression.

“You mean you're not going to run it?” he asked.

Kath Naguchi laughed, a hoot that was half chuckle and half smoker's rattling cough. “Are you kidding? Nobody touches this baby but the master or one of his authorized disciples.”

Jack laughed at that. “Where is it, Kath?” he asked.

“About six minutes in,” she told him.

Jack twirled knobs this way and that, adjusting for light and color. At last he was satisfied. “This should be pretty close,” he said.

Once more shadows raced across the screen,
showing the passage of a day until the same frame was again frozen on the screen. Once more Angie Dixon, a tiny pin of a figure near the bottom right-hand corner of the picture, was an ungainly bird caught in a deadly free-fall toward the sidewalk far below. I tried not to think about that.

“Zoom in on the lower left-hand corner,” Kath ordered.

“Like this?”

The figure of Angie Dixon grew larger. “Again,” Kath said. Twice more the process was repeated. Each time Angie Dixon grew larger, and each time there was a pause while Jack adjusted the light and colors. As soon as he did it the third time, I recognized the picture that had been in the paper.

“Again?” Jack asked.

Kath nodded.

Once more the process was repeated. Now Angie Dixon filled the entire screen. At that level, there was some fuzzing of the picture, but not enough to disguise the look of horror on the woman's face as she plummeted to earth. Sickened, I turned away. I live with death far too much to want to see a detailed portrait of it in living color.

“Isn't that what you wanted?” Kath asked with as much emotion as a saleslady selling a pair of shoes. The picture was just that to her—a picture and nothing more.

“Can you do the same thing to some of the
other frames just before and just after this?”

“Sure,” she said. “No problem.” She turned to Jack. “Let's try just before.”

Jack nodded and called up another frame. “This is the one. See anything you want me to zoom in on?”

Kath moved closer to the large screen and scrutinized one corner of it intently. “Try up here near the top,” she said.

He did. Once the adjustments had been made for light and color, it was possible to make out that there were two small figures standing close together.

“This one would have been taken four minutes before the other one?” I asked.

Kath nodded.

“Do it again,” she said, pointing. “Right here.”

Jack zoomed in again. Now there were clearly two figures showing on the screen.

I could feel the rush of excitement in my veins. “Again,” I said, not waiting for Kath to give Jack his marching orders. I had abandoned the love seat and was standing next to Kath Naguchi. On the monitor two people were plainly visible, standing side by side near the edge of the building. There was some distortion in the lengthened faces, but they were both recognizable. One of the two was clearly Angie Dixon. The other was familiar as well.

“Hey, wait a minute. I know him.”

Kramer bounded off the love seat to stand be
side me. “Who is he?” he demanded.

“Martin Green.”

“Martin Green?” Kramer echoed. “Who the hell is he?”

“The executive director of the ironworkers' local here.”

“And you know him?” Kramer demanded.

“He lives in my building.”

“What about him?” Manny asked, stepping forward so he too could see.

I tried to quell the rising excitement I felt but I didn't want to blurt out anything more in front of the two outsiders. “Let's take a look at the next frame,” I said quickly.

“The one after the fall shot?” Jack asked.

I nodded.

With Kath Naguchi's help, we examined several more frames of film both before and after Angie Dixon's fall, as well as pictures taken at approximately the same time by the other camera.

There was nothing else unusual, only the unmistakable presence of Martin Green.

“Would you like a hard copy of this?” Jack asked when we finally told him we were finished.

“What do you mean, hard copy?” Kramer asked.

Kath Naguchi sighed. “Do you want a copy of the tape or not? It'll only take a few minutes.”

“Yes, we do,” I answered.

Once more Kath and Jack disappeared into
the back room. Paul Kramer rounded on me. “Now tell me. Who the hell is Martin Green?”

“The guy Linda Decker suspects is responsible for Logan Tyree's death.”

Manny whistled. “Hot damn! And maybe this one too?”

“Let's don't jump to conclusions,” I cautioned, “but it could be. It just could be.”

W
hen you're fighting in the dark, any connection is better than no connection. And that was the way with this. If Martin Green had been on the iron with the doomed Angie Dixon only minutes before her fatal fall, then it was possible he had something to do with her death. However, we had all been cops too long for any of us to accept that premise at face value.

By the time we were back out on the street, we figured there was probably some perfectly legitimate reason for Green's presence on the Masters Plaza job site. Not only that, we'd made a joint decision to go ask him about it. With that in mind, we headed for the Labor Temple.

There was an election of officers going on in one of the union locals, and parking was at a premium. Kramer and Manny parked in a loading zone on Clay, while I pulled into the first floor of Belltown Terrace's garage and grabbed the first available spot.

The weather had turned wet again and it was raining hard by the time I dashed across the alley that separates the Labor Temple from my building. Paul Kramer was just giving his card to the ironworkers' receptionist when I caught up with them. She gave me a funny look as though trying to place someone she vaguely knew.

“May I help you?” she asked.

“I'm with them,” I told her.

She picked up her phone and spoke into an intercom. “Someone's here to see you,” she announced.

“Who is it?” he asked. “I'm busy.”

“They're detectives,” she answered.

Her quiet announcement brought Martin Green to the door of his office in a hurry. The broken glass had been replaced. The receptionist handed him Detective Kramer's card. Green glanced down at it and then up at us, his eyes traveling briefly from face to face until he stopped at mine. He frowned.

“Beaumont, isn't it? From Belltown Terrace?”

I nodded. “That's right.”

“To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“We need to ask you a few questions.”

“You're with these other gentlemen?” he asked, waving Kramer's card.

“Yes, I am.”

“What kind of questions?”

“About Angie Dixon.”

He frowned again and cocked his head to one
side. “All right. Come in. Kim, hold all my calls, will you?”

Green ushered us into his office and then he had to step back outside to bring along an extra chair. “What about Angie Dixon?” he began, not waiting until he was seated before he asked the question. “I thought that was all settled, that her death had been ruled accidental. Has something changed?” Since we knew each other however briefly, his statements were addressed to me.

I took the ball. “When's the last time you saw her?”

“Minutes before she died.”

Green answered evenly, without a moment's hesitation. His straightforward manner surprised me. There was no outward show of concern that our placing him at the scene of Angie Dixon's possibly non-accidental death might mean he was under suspicion.

“What were you doing there?”

“I needed to talk to her,” he answered.

“You must have needed to real bad, to track her down at a job site on a Sunday morning.”

Martin Green didn't respond, but he met my gaze with unblinking indifference.

“Why was it so important for you to see her?”

This time there was a pause, the kind of noticeable, momentary indecision that puts any detective worth his salt on red alert.

“She had something I needed,” Green answered blandly.

“And what might that be?” Kramer asked,
plowing into the process—the proverbial bull in a china shop.

Martin Green's eyes momentarily flicked from me to Kramer, as if assessing the weight of the interruption. By the time he answered, though, he was once more addressing me, closing out both Manny and Kramer. The two of us might have been alone in the room.

“Some tapes,” he answered quietly. “I believed she had some accounting tapes. I wanted them.”

The accounting tapes! Linda Decker's infernal tapes again. I tried not to let anything in my voice betray that we knew what tapes he was talking about, that we
did
have copies of them.

“And did she give them to you?”

“She was going to,” Martin Green answered. “She said she wouldn't be able to get them until the next day.”

“But instead, she died a few minutes later,” I prompted.

Green nodded.

“Did it occur to you that there might be some connection between her death and her agreeing to give you those missing tapes?”

“No. The people I talked to said her death was an accident, and I believed them.”

“And where were you the night Logan Tyree's boat blew up over on Lake Union?”

“The night Logan Tyree was killed? I was out of town.”

The fact that he spat out that detail right off
the top of his head alerted me further. Without careful reflection, people don't usually remember what they were doing on a certain day or at a certain time. Unless that time and date have some special significance.

“Where out of town?” I asked.

“Vancouver, B.C.”

“Is there someone who can verify that?”

“No.”

The abrupt certainty of his answer set more alarm bells clanging inside my head. “You're saying that you went to Vancouver that night, but no one saw you there.”

“Why are you asking me about that night?”

“Because I have someone who claims Logan Tyree had an appointment to see you the night he died.”

For the first time, Martin Green looked uncomfortable. “That's impossible. I wouldn't have scheduled an appointment with him. That's the night…” He broke off suddenly and didn't continue.

“That was the night what?” I prodded.

Green shook his head stubbornly. “I did see someone there, in Vancouver, but I won't bring her into it. She's married.”

“To someone else?”

“That's right.”

That struck me as ironic. Here was Martin Green claiming to be stuck with an unusable alibi. If the story was true, his reticence, for somewhat different reasons, was still the same as
mine with Marilyn Sykes—confidentiality.

“But why would I want to kill Logan?”

“For the same motive you might have to kill Angie Dixon,” I replied. “To get the tapes.”

“Don't you understand?” Martin Green demanded. “I
wanted
the tapes. I didn't
have
to have them.”

“Wait a minute. I thought you said you went to see Angie Dixon on the job because of the tapes.”

Martin Green shrugged. “It would be fine to have them, sort of the capper on the jug, but they're not essential. We can nail Martinson without them.”

So now the name Martinson had come up. He was the accountant, the erring husband, the ironworkers' bookkeeper who had disappeared on a fishing trip in the wilds of Alaska. Green seemed to be talking about the same puzzle pieces I already had in my possession, those Linda Decker had laid on me, yet there was a slightly different spin to them, a twist, that made them impossible to grasp and utilize.

“What do you mean, nail Martinson? I thought he was dead too. That's what I heard.”

Green snorted. “He'd like us all to think he's dead, but I'm not buying it. He and his friends have been looting this local for years. He's got money stashed somewhere, in Canada we think. All of them do. I've got a private detective agency working on finding him right now.”

“On finding Martinson? Why?”

Martin Green nodded. “As I said, we believe he's holed up somewhere in Canada. It was simpler for us to hire a private eye and send him after Martinson than it was to get you guys to go looking for him.”

A piece of the puzzle finally slipped into place. “So what our witness told us about bribes and payoffs in the union was true?”

“Unfortunately, yes. International received an anonymous tip about what was going on in Seattle. We put an independent auditing team on it, and they turned up all kinds of crap. International sent me out as a troubleshooter to try to get to the bottom of it, to find out who all was involved, that sort of thing. It's taken me months to even start scraping the surface. It's not just one or two guys, you know. It's a whole clique. They got themselves elected and then made sure they stayed that way. They've been real cagey about it.”

Cagey? Green was talking about the problem as though it was some kind of minor office scandal attributable to internal politics with no major consequences, no harm done. It was time for some shock therapy.

“They haven't been cagey at all, Mr. Green. They're killers, cold-blooded killers. Three people are dead so far. Another is in critical condition. Why didn't you call us in?”

Green's chin sank to his chest. He sighed. “International told me not to. They wanted to keep our investigation quiet, out of the media. Unions
have enough of a black eye right now without this kind of scandal being blown all out of proportion. We're losing membership right and left as it is.”

“Two of your members died here,” I pointed out. “Logan Tyree and Angie Dixon. Didn't it cross your mind that the information you had at your disposal might have helped us solve their murders?”

“But the papers said both deaths were accidental.”

A flashbulb of anger exploded in my head. “What the papers said!” I exclaimed. “For Chrissake, you mean you
believe
what you read in newspapers?”

He nodded. For the first time I wondered if Martin Green was as smart as I'd given him credit for being. He was our only solid lead. Suddenly I felt as though we were leaning on a bent reed.

“Wait a minute,” Manny Davis put in. “Let me get this straight. You said a few minutes ago that these tapes aren't essential to nailing these guys. If they were so important once, why aren't they important now?”

Green got up and walked over to a file cabinet in the corner of the room. He pulled a key from his pocket and unlocked it. My body tensed, shifting into that keen wariness that warned of the possibility of danger. I wondered if maybe he had a weapon concealed in the drawer. Instead of a gun, he extracted two maroon,
leather-bound accounting books from behind the files in the second drawer.

“Because we have these,” he answered, casually tossing the two books in my direction. “The journal entries. Martinson's so dumb that he left them in his office. It's all right there. The top one is the one Martinson handed in, the legal one. The second one is real. It's the one he kept for everyone else, for the creeps he worked with. None of them are listed by name, only by number. Once we put the squeeze on him, we'll be able to put names on these numbers and nail those SOBs.”

He was still standing up. Suddenly, he turned and rushed back to the file cabinet. “Wait a minute. I just thought of something.”

Quickly he rummaged through the top drawer and pulled out a file folder. It was jammed full of receipts and copies of credit card transactions. He thumbed through a small stack of onionskin papers. “Here it is,” he said triumphantly, handing me one of the receipts. “I have to keep all the receipts,” he added. “It's a company car.”

The receipt in my hand was from an Esso station in Langley, B.C. The gas had been sold by the liter, not by the gallon, and the date said August fourteenth, the day Logan Tyree's boat had blown sky-high. Martin Green's scribbled but legible signature was scrawled across the bottom of the receipt.

“You see, I got tied up here with a late meet
ing. By the time I finally headed north, I didn't think to check the gas tank. I almost ran out before I remembered. I realized it while I was waiting in line at the border crossing in Blaine. I got off at the first exit and found a gas station.”

“What was the meeting about?”

“Meeting?”

“The one before you left town. The one that made you late.”

“With Don Kaplan. I think you know him. He's in charge of our apprenticeship program. A number of women had either dropped out or were threatening to. If we lose very many more we'll be in a world of hurt with the EEOC and affirmative action. Federal and state contracts, that kind of thing. We had a meeting to see what could be done.”

“I thought Don Kaplan quit.”

Green laughed. “He quits every day at least once, but he's always back on the job the next morning.”

“And was one of the women who quit Linda Decker?”

“How'd you know that?”

“I'm a detective, remember? It's my job.”

“She was the first one to go. It's a shame, too. Hell of a little worker. She lifts weights, you know. Strong for her size. The guys didn't mind working with her. They figured she could take care of herself.”

“So why did she quit then?”

“I don't know. She came storming in here one
day, threw her union book in my face, and told me I could shove it up my ass.”

“That was it?”

“That's right. And that's why I was having the meeting with Don, to try to figure out exactly what was happening, to get a handle on it and fix it.”

“Was he able to give you any answers?”

“Not really.”

Green had said there was an entire clique involved. For the first time, I wondered about Don Kaplan.

“Is he in on it?” I asked.

Martin Green smiled and shook his head. “You've got to be kidding. Don in with Martinson? Never. He's absolutely straight-arrow.”

“What makes you so sure?”

Before I could stop him, Green grabbed his phone, picked up the receiver, and punched the intercom. “Kim, is Don still here?” He waited impatiently for her answer, drumming his fingers on the surface of his desk. “Send him in, would you? I want to talk to him.”

Martin Green settled back in his chair. “I've worked with Don Kaplan every single day for as long as I've been in Seattle. If he was mixed up in this business, believe me, I'd know it.”