Improbable Cause (10 page)

“What’ll you have?”

“Can a guy get something to eat in here?” I asked. “Or do I have to go into the dining room?”

“What’dya want? A sandwich?”

I nodded.

“Ever been in Butte, Montana?” she returned, looking at me with her head cocked to one side, a hand resting on her hip.

“No,” I said. “I never have.”

“You’re not Jewish, are you?”

Now I was convinced I was losing my mind, but I shook my head. “Fallen-away Presbyterian,” I told her.

She grinned then. “Boy, do I have a treat for you,” she said. “Now, what’ll you have to drink?”

“MacNaughton’s and water,” I said, “light on the water. But what the hell kind of sandwich am I getting?”

“Specialty of the house,” she answered. “A pork chop sandwich just like they make ”em at Pork Chop John’s back home in Butte.“

The priorities were definitely on straight. She poured my drink and served it before she disappeared to place the order for my sandwich. I tested the drink. It was fine—strong enough to help me forget Detective Ron Peters and his broken neck.

While I sipped my drink, I looked around the room. I suspected most of the crowd was from some kind of impromptu office party that had started early and run late. Most of the people seemed to know one another, and they were all having a hell of a good time. It was beginning to wind down though. A few people filtered out of the bar.

The pork chop sandwich, when it came, was enough to make me wish I’d been born and raised in Butte, Montana. It was terrific. I plowed through it like I hadn’t seen solid food in a week. When I pushed the plate away, the bartender was back.

“Did your mother always make you clean your plate like that?” she asked with a grin. “If you’re still hungry, I can order you another one, or how about dessert?”

I shook my head. “One sandwich is enough, but I do want another drink.”

“You new around here?” she asked when she brought the MacNaughton’s. “I don’t remember seeing you in here before.”

“I just moved into the neighborhood,” I said. I didn’t offer any more specifics. I wasn’t wild about making polite conversation. All I really wanted to do was savor my drink in peace.

Someone down the bar signaled for another drink and the bartender went to get it. Next to me a man got up and walked away. A newcomer, a woman, pounced on the vacant stool like her life depended on it. A man I took to be her escort planted himself firmly between the woman and me. He was tall and blubbery with a hairline that had receded almost as much as his chin. His companion was a frowzy, dated blonde whose skirt was about fifteen pounds too tight.

I don’t usually object to tight skirts, but this one wrinkled and bunched where it should have been smooth. And I don’t object to women getting older, either. The bartender was a prime example of someone who was comfortable with life in her forties. The dame next to me was dressed like she was fourteen and looked like a worn fifty.

She instantly endeared herself to me by hauling out a package of those long brown cigarettes, lighting one, and striking a fake glamour pose with the cigarette up in the air like a Statue of Liberty torch gone bad. Naturally the smoke blew directly into my face.

I would have moved down the bar, but by now the troops from the

Marguerite

had arrived and the place had filled back up. There was nowhere to go.

About that time my seatmate’s companion, still standing between us, began shooting off his mouth. As soon as he started chipping his teeth, I knew he was smashed.

“I tell you, Mimi, when I was here in ”80 you could see the Space Needle from right here. From right here where I’m standing, I swear to God. Where the hell do these goddamned developers get off putting up buildings like that god-awful pile of shit that ruins the view for everybody else?“

Gesturing with his drink, a Jack Daniel’s and water, he pointed toward Belltown Terrace, my building. As he did so, the better part of his drink slopped out of the glass and ran down my trousers. He set his glass on the bar and grabbed a damp napkin, using it to mop halfheartedly at the wet trail running down my leg.

“Sorry about that, old buddy,” he said. “Didn’t mean to spill all over you.”

“That’s all right,” I answered, gritting my teeth.

“But did you ever see such an ugly building? I mean, I come here all the way from Abilene. When I’m in Seattle, I want to be able to see the Space Needle. That’s why we came here to have a drink, isn’t it, Mimi. I told her I knew a place where we could have a drink and see the Space Needle all at the same time. Isn’t that right?”

Mimi nodded. “That’s right, Buster. That’s what you said.”

Buster straightened up and tossed the napkin on the counter. “Hey, barmaid. Fix this gentleman a drink, would you? I spilled my drink on his leg, The least I can do is buy him one. What’re you having, fella?”

“MacNaughton’s and water,” I said.

He made a face. “That slop?” he demanded, shaking his head. “If you’re going to drink Canadian, how about something decent, something with some class like Crown Royal or VO?”

“I happen to like MacNaughton’s,” I said, trying to stay reasonably civil.

Buster clicked his tongue. “No accounting for taste,” he said. He turned to the lady behind the bar. “MacNaughton’s for him and another Jack Daniel’s for me. What about you, Mimi? You ready for another one?”

“Why not?”

Why not indeed? Buster paid for the drinks with a fifty and pocketed every last dime of the change. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s an obnoxious, overbearing, tightfisted drunk. When he had tucked his bulging wallet safely away, he turned back to me.

“Tell me, what do you think about that building?” he asked.

He could have pointed to any other building in Seattle and it wouldn’t have mattered, but I happen to own a sizable chunk of Belltown Terrace at Second and Broad. Hoping to dodge some of Mimi’s cigarette smoke, I had stood up. Now one of Buster’s shoes came down hard on my toe.

“I like it,” I said firmly, moving my foot away.

He stared at me in shocked disbelief. “You’ve got to be kidding! You actually like that place?” Buster’s voice was rising in volume, and he was beginning to sway dangerously like a giant sequoia about to bite the dust. People turned curiously in our direction. “It’s got no class. I mean architecturally speaking, it’s a bunch of crap.”

Carefully I set my drink on the bar. “I like it well enough to own one fifth of it,” I said.

Most of the time I know better than to argue with a drunk, but by then I’d had several myself.

“Bullshit! You don’t mean you actually own part of that god-awful piece of junk?”

“Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it,” I returned.

The bartender came back down to where we were. With one clean sweep she cleared all the glasses off the counter in front of us. It was a precautionary measure. A wise precautionary measure.

“Like hell you own it!” He turned toward me while still pointing a drunken finger in the bartender’s face. “If you own that building, I suppose the little lady here owns this joint, too, right?”

“As a matter of fact, I do,” she replied briskly.

He gazed at her Wearily for a moment.

“Hey, wait a minute. You took my drink. I wasn’t finished with it.”

“You’re finished with it all right,” she said. “Cut off. Eighty-sixed.” She turned and called over her shoulder, “Hey, Bob, call this gentleman a cab, would you? We’ll pay.”

The maitre d“, a burly young man who looked to be in his thirties, popped his head around the doorjamb. ”Sure thing, Mom,“ he said.

Mom? Had he said, “Mom”? I glanced at the bartender in admiration. If that was true, she must have had him when she was twelve.

Moments later, the maitre d“ and two waiters showed up again to escort the protesting Mimi and Buster out of the place. The bar patrons got quiet long enough to watch the excitement, but the volume went back up as soon as the elevator door closed behind them.

“Sorry about that,” the bartender said, setting another drink in front of me. “This one’s on the house.” She stood there waiting while I took the first sip. “What’s your name?” she asked.

“Beaumont,” I said. “J. P. Beaumont. What’s yours?”

“Darlene,” she answered. “Is it true what you told him, that you own part of that building?”

“That’s right,” I said. “What about you? Does this joint belong to you?”

“You’d better believe it,” she said with a grin.

First liar doesn’t stand a chance.

Most people despise alarm clocks with abiding passions. I don’t have to—I have a telephone. I also have a collection of early-bird friends who think that as long as they’re up, everyone else should be, too.

The phone beside my bed jangled me awake, and I groped for it blindly.

“He did it again!” Peters announced when I finally fumbled the receiver to my ear. “That big bozo did it again.”

People who’ve been up for hours always expect me to come up to speed instantly. “Who did what?” I mumbled.

“Your old friend Maxwell Cole. He’s running off at the pen again or the word processor or whatever they use these days.”

Maxwell Cole is no friend of mine. Never as been. We met in college when we had the misfortune of being in the same fraternity at the University of Washington. He’s been a thorn in my side ever since. Currently, he’s a thrice weekly columnist for the local morning paper, the

Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Because of our respective jobs, we frequently stumble into each other. When that happens, you can count on the two of us being on opposite sides of any given issue.

His crime column, “City Beat,” burns me up every time I read it, so I don’t read it. At least I

try

not to, but there are some people, like Peters for instance, who feel compelled to bring it to my attention anyway. I’ve learned to put up with it the same way I used to choke down my mother’s occasional doses of castor oil when I was a kid.

I propped a pillow up behind me and peered at the clock. Seven-thirty. Plenty of time.

“What is it now?” I asked.

“The headline says, ”Murder Moves Uptown.“ ”

I was gradually coming to my senses. “Sounds catchy,” I said. “Maybe somebody should set it to music.”

“You won’t think it’s so funny when you hear what it’s about,” Peters growled. “How does Dr. Frederick Nielsen grab you?”

“Not by name! He didn’t put the name in there, did he?”

“He sure as hell did. Want me to read it to you?”

“That asshole! That goddamned stupid son of a bitch!”

“Do you want me to read it to you or not?”

“You could just as well.”

“ ”A little over a year ago, area dentist Dr. Frederick Nielsen closed his Pioneer Square office and moved uptown. He told his old neighbors that he was sick and tired of his patients being hassled by drunks and panhandlers and petty criminals. He said he was moving his practice to a nicer neighborhood in the Denny Regrade.

“ ”Dr. Nielsen’s patients won’t have to worry about petty crime anymore, because their dentist died Saturday afternoon, brutally murdered in his recently refurbished office on the ground floor of one of Seattle’s newer high-rise condominiums.

“ ”I can’t help wondering why Seattle P.D. has been keeping such a tight lid on this case. Maybe they don’t want people to know that it’s possible to be murdered in broad daylight in one of Seattle‘s posher downtown settings. After all, letting word out could be bad for business. Certainly it’s bad for developers and real estate magnates who are trying to sell the idea of downtown living to a largely indifferent suburban public.

“ ”Those suburbanites have every right to be indifferent. Why should they leave relatively crime-free neighborhoods in the north end or on the east side and come downtown where murders are almost routine?

“ ”For years the Seattle homicide toll has been about one a week. Fifty-two a year. It would be interesting to know exactly how many of those occur in the downtown core.

“ ”Seattle P.D. does acknowledge that Dr. Nielsen’s death is number thirty-one for this year. In case you don’t want to do the math yourself, that means we’re currently running five ahead of this time last year.

“ ”If murders are up that much, it seems reasonable that the police department would be doing something definitive about it. Are they? Not as far as I can tell.

“ ”A check with the Seattle P.D. media relations office revealed that only two homicide detectives are assigned to and actively working on the case of Dr. Frederick Nielsen. Those two, Detectives J. P. Beaumont and Allen Lindstrom, may be long-term homicide veterans, but they do not constitute the Seattle Police Department’s mounting a major, concerted effort to solve this case. Arlo Hamilton, Seattle P.D. public information officer, stated that so far there are no leads in Dr. Nielsen’s case. Not any. None.

“ ”Remember, I’m not talking here about a couple of nameless, drug-crazed addicts duking it out in a darkened alley between Pike and Pine at one o’clock in the morning. This is the bloody midday slaughter of a Seattle businessman who died in his downtown office at one o’clock on a sunny Saturday afternoon.

“ ”Broad daylight, folks.

“ ”And there aren’t any leads?

“ ”Come, come now, Seattle P.D. Certainly you can do better than that. Certainly you can afford to put more manpower into this case than just two measly detectives.

“ ”It’s ironic that Dr. Nielsen moved out of Pioneer Square to escape petty crime. Obviously it didn’t work. Crime—major, not petty— came right along with him, loaded into the moving van along with his office equipment and furniture.

“ ”Dr. Nielsen tried a geographical cure for crime. Geographical cures usually don’t work because they never deal with the underlying problem. In this case the bottom line is that crime is rampant in our city streets.

“ ”I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but I do have a suggestion or two. Maybe all the people who are planning to take a drive downtown to look at condominiums next weekend should call their real estate agents and cancel.

“ ”After all, if the mayor and the city council and the police department can’t make downtown Seattle safe to live in, if a law-abiding dentist can’t work there in his own office on a Saturday afternoon without putting his life in jeopardy, then maybe it’s time for people to vote with their feet, their moving vans, and their checkbooks.