Her Final Breath (The Tracy Crosswhite Series Book 2) (28 page)

The waitress departed. Dan slid into the booth. Music filtered down from overhead speakers, classic ’80s rock—Steve Perry from Journey singing “Don’t Stop Believin’,” which Dan thought might have been the theme to his senior prom. “What time do you need to pick up your son?”

Bingham checked her watch. “I have about forty-five minutes.” Her gaze flicked around the bar before again settling on him. “You said this has to do with Beth?”

“You knew her well?”

“We were best friends since high school.”

“I’m sorry about what happened to her.”

“Who do you work for, Mr. O’Leary?”

“Call me Dan. I’m sorry. I can’t reveal my client at the moment,” he said. “I can tell you that I’m going back through the file and trying to follow up on a few things. I noticed that, well, it appears that the police detectives never called you back.”

Bingham shook her head. Her hands remained wrapped around the glass of ice water, her thumb carving lines in the condensation. “No, they didn’t.”

“You had something you wanted to share with them?”

Bingham started to answer but stopped when the waitress returned with Dan’s beer. She set it on a coaster. “Anything from the kitchen?” the waitress said.

“I think we’re good,” Dan said, though he was starving and hadn’t eaten since breakfast.

Bingham waited until the waitress had departed. “I can’t get involved in anything,” she said. “I mean, I can’t be a witness or testify in court or anything.”

“Okay.”

“I mean, if this goes further and you go to court for something, I can’t . . . I can’t testify.”

“Okay. Why don’t you just tell me what you wanted to tell the police.”

Bingham settled back against the leather and dropped her hands onto the table. As she spoke, she picked at her fingernails and cuticles. “My husband and I own a printing and marketing company in town. We do a lot of work here for the schools and the church. My husband’s a bishop in the Mormon Church. Are you familiar with the Mormon Church?”

Dan smiled. “I saw the play when it came to town.”

Bingham didn’t smile. “I was Catholic before I converted. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

“I think so,” Dan said. “You converted to Mormonism when you got married.”

“I converted
to get
married. Dale wouldn’t marry someone who wasn’t a Mormon. His family wouldn’t allow it. He doesn’t know anything about what I’m about to tell you, and he can’t find out. He . . . can’t . . . find . . . out.” She looked past Dan, as if to be sure the couple in the booth behind them wasn’t eavesdropping. Then she took a breath, struggling to calm herself. “Sorry, it’s just . . .”

“Take your time,” Dan said, understanding now why Bingham had chosen a bar. It was unlikely she’d run into anyone from her church community.

Bingham sipped her ice water and set the glass down. “Like I said, Beth and I were best friends in high school. We partied pretty hard with another friend back then. None of us went to college. I worked as a receptionist, and Beth was doing some bookkeeping. We went out a lot, just about every night.”

It confirmed what Beth Stinson’s employer had suspected. “That wouldn’t have been unusual for people your age back then,” Dan said.

Bingham took another sip of water and another deep breath. “One night, we’d been drinking and getting high, and out of the blue, Beth says, ‘Let’s go to a strip club.’”

Dan felt as if a rock dropped in his stomach.

“At first I thought she was joking,” Bingham said, “but she wasn’t. She was serious. There was this club that had just opened in Shoreline, and everyone was going crazy about it. It had been in the paper and on the news. Beth wanted to check it out. I was like, ‘What?’ But she kept saying it would be fun to just see, you know, what it was like. So finally I said, ‘What the hell,’ right? So we went. We just sat in one of the booths in the back, and when the women came around, Beth started talking to them, asking them all types of questions about how much money they made and how much they worked. Some of them were making a couple hundred bucks a night—more on the weekends. They were making way more than us. Back then minimum wage was nothing. One of the dancers looked us over and said, ‘You should dance. With your figures, you’d make a lot of money.’ The men apparently preferred women who were well-endowed. Beth fit that mold. Me, not so much.”

Dan was furiously working through his conversations with Beth Stinson’s former employer and with Wayne Gerhardt, as well as trying to remember the information he’d learned from the police file. Stinson’s employer had said Stinson worked Monday through Friday. Wayne Gerhardt had told Dan he’d made the service call on a Saturday, but that Stinson had moved her new car because she had to get to work.

“Beth called me the next day to talk about what the dancers had said, about us being able to make a lot of money,” Bingham said. “She wanted to go talk to the manager. I wasn’t going to do it, but Beth could be pretty persuasive when she wanted something. She’d thought it all through. She said we could dance under assumed names and that some of the dancers wore wigs. She said no one we knew would likely go there anyway. So finally, just to get her to stop talking about it, I said I’d go with her when she talked to the manager, but only for support. We went the next day. I think it was a Saturday. I remember that we smoked a joint in Beth’s car before we went in. The interview was nothing. All the manager wanted to know was our ages and whether we had criminal records. Then he pointed to a pole and said, ‘Have at it.’ So Beth went over and just started swinging and spinning. She’d done gymnastics in high school and was really good. He hired her on the spot. Then he looked at me and said, ‘Your turn.’ I told him no, but he said, ‘Just give it a shot. What the hell. You’re here.’ I still wasn’t going to, but then Beth started in again and I was pretty high, so I just did what Beth did, being silly, acting stupid, you know?”

“And he offered you a job also,” Dan said.

“I’d run up some pretty sizable debt, and I really wanted to get out of my parents’ house, you know? And I guess if I’m being honest, the thought of being a dancer was kind of exciting.”

“What was the club called?” Dan didn’t dare take out a notepad, afraid Bingham might bolt like a skittish horse.

“Dirty Ernie’s. Beth and I worked the same shift, you know, to get over our nerves—my nerves, really. Beth didn’t seem nervous at all. We went after work and danced until around eleven or twelve, depending on the crowd. It was topless only. Beth was better than me, less inhibited. Men started coming in and asking her for table dances and lap dances. Because the club was new, it was pretty popular and Beth started to make a lot of money. She was talking about quitting her bookkeeping job. I wasn’t making that much. I didn’t like doing the private dances, and that’s really where they make their money.”

“What stage name did Beth use?” Dan asked.

“Betty Boobs.” Bingham paused and sighed, as if out of breath. Tears trickled down her cheeks. Dan pulled a brown paper napkin from the dispenser and handed it to her. “I have a lot of guilt about this,” she said, wiping her eyes, struggling to get the words out. Her chest shuddered. Dan gave her time to compose herself. After another moment, Bingham blew her nose and reached for more napkins. “Beth started bringing some of the men home.” The words spilled out of her mouth as if she’d been holding them in for years and no longer could. Dan’s mind was churning with questions, but he wanted to let her finish what she’d come to say.

“She’d started renting a house in North Seattle, and she’d bring them there. It wasn’t all the time. And it wasn’t just anybody.” Bingham wiped at her tears. She looked physically exhausted and emotionally drained. “I mean, she knew the men from the club.”

Dan prodded gently. “What happened, Celeste?”

“I went to the manager and quit. I told Beth she should quit too, but . . . she liked the money too much. We kind of had a fight about it and fell out of touch for a while.”

“So when you heard that Beth had been murdered, you thought it was one of the men she’d brought home with her.”

Bingham nodded. “But then no one ever came to talk to me. And I read in the paper they had a suspect and that the guy pled guilty. I figured I’d never have to tell anyone about it. You know, why embarrass our families? I’d moved back home with my parents, and I was attending AA meetings twice a week. I met my husband about six months after Beth died. He doesn’t know any of this. He
can’t
know any of this.”

“Did you know Wayne Gerhardt? Was he one of the men Beth brought home?”

“I didn’t know him. I’d never seen him at the club. You get to know the regulars, you know?”

“And he wasn’t one of them.”

“No.”

Sensing there was something else, something more Bingham wanted to say, that she hadn’t come to the bar just to tell Dan that she and Beth used to dance, Dan said, “Can I ask you something, Celeste?” She nodded. “Why’d you agree to talk to me? Why not just tell me you didn’t remember why you’d called the police and just leave it at that?”

She nodded. “Are you familiar with Alcoholics Anonymous?”

“Somewhat.”

“Step nine in the treatment is making amends. You make amends unless it could injure someone. I don’t want to hurt my husband or my children, Mr. O’Leary. I have four kids. I have a good life, a good community. But it’s always bothered me, the thought that maybe that man didn’t do it.”

And there was the reason Bingham was sitting in the booth like a penitent in a confessional. Guilt.

“He said he did it,” Dan said.

The tears started to roll again. This time, Bingham made no effort to wipe them away.

“What aren’t you telling me, Celeste?”

Her chest heaved. She took another sip of her water. “I’d talked to Beth that day. We’d started talking again on the phone, you know, just checking in, trying to get past what we’d said to each other. And I asked about maybe going out later that night, after she got off work. But she said she had a date.”

“Maybe her date was with Gerhardt.”

She shook her head.

Dan was trying not to rush the conversation. “Why not?”

“Because I was worried about her, you know? And I told her to be careful. I said I wouldn’t know what I’d do if anything happened to her, and she told me not to worry. She said that it was okay . . . ,” Bingham’s chest shuddered. “She said it was okay because . . . because the guy was someone
I
knew, and that he was a nice guy.”

CHAPTER 40

T
racy didn’t see Dan’s Tahoe parked in the driveway or in the street. The police cruiser from the Southwest Precinct arrived as the garage door rattled open. She thought about asking the officer to come inside while she checked the house, then decided against it. She was a cop, with a gun. What was he going to do that she couldn’t?

She took out her Glock as she stepped into the house and did a sweep of the entire upstairs before returning to the kitchen. She set the Glock on the counter, retrieved the leftover pasta from the refrigerator, and poked at cold noodles with a fork while her brain continued to mull the seeming inconsistencies in the evidence—from Bankston failing his polygraph, to Taggart’s fingerprint showing up in Veronica Watson’s motel room, to Beth Stinson’s murder nine years earlier.

Exhausted, and her aches and pains crying out for a soothing, warm shower, she put the pasta back in the refrigerator and realized Roger had not greeted her. It was really not like him. She walked through the house calling his name, thought she heard soft mewing, and stopped to listen. She opened the door to the garage but didn’t find him. When she called out, she heard him respond, and followed the sound into the dining room but still didn’t see him. “Roger?”

She heard him a third time, this time more distinctly, and followed the sound to the top of the stairs leading to the lower level. The deadbolt was turned to the left, in the locked position. “Roger?”

His mewing grew in volume and intensity. A black paw swiped at her from beneath the door.

Tracy stepped back into the kitchen and retrieved her Glock. She was thinking of the raised toilet seat, which she hadn’t asked Dan about. He’d been staying at the house; it was possible he’d gone to the lower level or the backyard, but for what? He didn’t bring the dogs with him. Then she thought,
Maybe he went down to adjust the light sensor.
It was possible Dan had left the door open and Roger had seen it as an opportunity to explore.

Roger clawed at the bottom of the door again, sounding annoyed. Tracy stepped down to the landing, clicked the deadbolt straight up, turned the doorknob, and yanked open the door, aiming into the darkened room. Roger darted past her and up the stairs, a black blur. Gun raised, Tracy reached around the wall and slapped at the switch. Recessed lights illuminated the L-shaped leather couch and an older-model projection table that faced a large television screen on the back wall.

Tracy looked across the room to the door leading outside. Like the door at the bottom of the stairs, the deadbolt was engaged. She closed the interior door, reapplied the bolt, and hurried back up the stairs.

Roger paced the kitchen counter, making a fuss about wanting to be fed. “Well, don’t go places you shouldn’t and this won’t be a problem.” Tracy picked him up. “Maybe I should have named you Houdini, huh? How did you get down there?”

Roger whined at her, annoyed and in no mood to play. “Okay. Okay.” She popped open a can of food, spooned a dollop on a plate, and watched Roger eat while she called Dan’s cell. He didn’t answer. She ended the call without leaving a message and walked to the bathroom and shut and locked the door. She set the Glock and her phone on the counter and gingerly slid off her clothes. Her knee was red but not swollen. Her ankle hurt, but not as bad as she’d feared it might. It was her collarbone, where Taggart had kicked her, that was bothering her most. The reflection in the mirror showed signs of bruising. About to toss her jeans in the dirty-clothes pile, she checked the pockets for cash and found the message slip the officer staffing the tip line had handed her just before Tracy had left the Cowboy Room to talk with Michael Melton. That reminded her that she’d also failed to call back Bennett Lee, who was likely pitching a hissy fit.