Improbable Cause (7 page)

Cindy gave us Larry Martin’s address and phone number up in Lake City, then she directed us through the warehouse to the garage at the far end of the building. She assured us that was where we’d find Nick Wallace.

“Do you believe that little shit?” Big Al asked as we made our way through canyons of carpet rolls. “Damm must not be getting any, or he wouldn’t have to watch that crap on TV.”

I certainly wasn’t getting any at the moment. The X-rated action on Richard Damm’s television set had made me painfully aware of my own particular lack.

“Probably not,” I said, and let it go at that.

Big Al is forever telling me that I need to get hooked up with some nice, warm-blooded Swedish girl like his Molly.

He could very well be right.

Just as Richard Damm had warned us, we had to ring a bell to gain admittance to Nick Wallace’s garage. The door was locked from the inside. He came to open it himself. Nick was an older man, somewhere in his late sixties I’d say, with a ruddy complexion and thinning gray hair. He was wearing a pair of bright blue coveralls with a greasy towel hanging from one back pocket.

He opened the door, all right, but just a crack, enough for him to see us but not enough for us to step inside.

“Yeah?” he said gruffly. “Whadya want?” Al, leading the way, held out his ID. “Detectives Lindstrom and Beaumont. We’re with Seattle P.D. Homicide,” he explained. “We’d like to talk to you about one of your vans.”

Nick Wallace’s watery blue eyes narrowed slightly behind his thick wire-rimmed glasses. “Which one?”

“The one Larry Martin was driving Saturday,” Al said. “The one with the bloodstains.”

“Oh, that one,” Nick said. He opened the door a little wider then and allowed us to come inside, reluctantly admitting us to his sanctum sanctorum.

And that’s exactly what it was. I suspect Nick Wallace of being an original, card-carrying member of

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Entering his small shop in the back of Damm Fine Carpets was nothing short of a religious experience. He had every tool imaginable, from small milling lathes to complex electronic testing equipment. It was one of those workrooms that had a place for everything and everything in its place.

I’m the kind of messy mechanic who hates to work on cars. I do it only when absolutely necessary, and I never have the right tool for the right job. Oh, I may have it, but I can never lay my hands on it when I need it.

Through the years I’ve counted my lack of mechanical aptitude as a real character flaw, chalking it up to laziness and sloth as well as growing up with no mechanically inclined father living in the house. At the time of my divorce, it was one of the reasons Karen gave for throwing me over for the chicken conglomerate accountant from Cucamonga. She said she was tired of having to do her own oil changes.

Now I’ve got that Guard Red Porsche. I’ve looked under the hood of my 928, but I’ve never had guts enough to tackle anything I’ve found there. At this point, I’d a whole lot rather pay somebody who knows what he’s doing than screw up something by attempting to do it myself.

Besides, there’s no place to work on a car in the basement parking area of a downtown condo.

Considering all this, I was somewhat envious of the shipshape conditions in Nick Wallace’s private domain. He could have given Rachel Miller and her sister lessons in housekeeping. There wasn’t as much dust visible in all of Nick’s garage as there had been on Rachel’s collection of salt and pepper shakers. The shiny concrete floor had no telltale grease spots. For that matter, the place didn’t even smell like a garage. There was only the mildly pungent odor of some kind of cleaning solvent.

At the moment, there were just two vans in the shop. One of them was obviously in for a tune-up. Its hood stood open, and a new set of spark plugs lay on the rolling mechanic’s chest nearby. The other van sat in the far corner with both front doors wide open.

Nick Wallace went back to the one van and stopped dead in front of the open hood. “Whoever designed this sucker never planned on changing the plugs.” It was a complaint aimed at the universe in general, not at us in particular. Once he had voiced it, however, Nick resolutely bent over and began resetting the plugs.

“What is it you want to know?” he asked without looking up.

“Which van is it?” I returned.

He jerked his head in the direction of the van with the open doors. “That one,” he said. “I’m still trying to dry it out.”

I’ve seen a few carpet installation vans in my time. They’re usually dented and dinged. Mostly they look neglected, like they’re lucky if somebody bothers to feed them gas and oil occasionally. That, however, was not the case with the Damm Fine Carpets fleet of vans. Not if the two currently parked in Nick Wallace’s garage were any indication.

They were several years old, but they still looked brand new. The outside paint was waxed and polished to a high gloss. If they had ever been dented or scratched, the damage had been carefully rubbed out and repainted. On my way to the one van, I walked past the other and managed to catch a glimpse of what was under the hood. The engine had been steam-cleaned. It could have come fresh from the factory that very day.

When we reached Larry Martin’s van, the one with the open doors, we found that the cleaning solvent smell was emanating from there. It was industrial-strength carpet and upholstery cleaner.

The entire interior of the van had been custom carpeted. I guess that shouldn’t have surprised me. After all, it was a carpet company’s vehicle. The outside of the van looked perfect until I walked around to the other side and discovered that the door on the rider’s side had been badly smashed.

“What do you think happened here?” I asked.

Nick Wallace poked his head out from under the hood of the other van. “You talkin” to me?“ he asked.

“Yes. I said what do you think happened here?”

“Looks to me like he ran it into a post of some kind. Not only that, the stupid son of a bitch bled all over it like a stuck hog without ever bothering to try to clean it up. He just parked it out there on the lot and took off. It was hotter’n hell around here yesterday. The sun cooked it up real good. It was a real mess when I opened her up this morning.”

“Did you clean it up yourself?”

“Some. But there’s a detail place down on Westlake that’s got a steam-cleaning process that’s better on floor mats and upholstery than anything I can do by hand. I took it down there first thing.”

“Did anyone tell you to do it?” I asked.

“Tell me? You mean like order me to get it cleaned up?”

I nodded.

“Look,” he said. “When it comes to the trucks, I’m the boss, see? I got it cleaned up, and I’ll straighten out the door, too, when I get half a chance.”

“Didn’t it cross your mind that with all that blood maybe you should report it to the police?” I asked.

Wallace left what he was doing and walked over to us, wiping his hands on the towel dangling from his hip pocket. “Why should I?” he asked.

“Why not? If one of your vehicles shows up covered with blood, it seems reasonable to me that you might think it would be of interest to us.”

Al nodded his head in agreement.

“Look, fellas,” Nick Wallace said, drawing himself erect. “I got myself a fine job here, understand? Mr. Damm pays me a fair amount of money to keep all his trucks running and looking good. He don’t pay me to butt my nose into other people’s business, no-sir-ee. The trucks come in broke down, I fix ”em. They come in dirty, I clean ‘em up. I don’t ask no questions, I don’t hassle nobody, and I get a paycheck every single Friday.“

That speech probably comprised more words than Nick Wallace had ever strung together at one time in his whole life. There was no point in antagonizing the man. We needed him. Since both the exterior and the interior of the van had been washed, and since we couldn’t see the bloodstains in the van for ourselves, we would have to depend on Nick Wallace’s recollections and goodwill for details about the condition of Larry Martin’s truck when it was found that morning.

“Would you mind telling us a little more about it, then?” I asked, in my most conciliatory manner. “Detective Lindstrom and I are here investigating a homicide. We have reason to believe that this truck was somehow involved.”

“There was blood all over the seat,” Wallace answered.

“Both sides?”

He nodded. “Both sides, driver’s and rider’s.”

“What about the door handles?”

“Both of them were bloody, too. Beats me how he managed to make that much of a mess without ending up dead himself.”

I looked at Big Al. “Maybe there were two people in the van,” I suggested.

“Could be,” he agreed.

I turned back to Wallace. “After Larry Martin brought the truck back here, how did he leave?”

“In his car, I guess,” Nick answered. “I mean, it ain’t here this morning.”

“What kind of car?”

“A VW bug, ”68 or “69 probably. Runs real good for as old as it is.”

“A bug? What color?”

“Red. Bright red. I helped him repaint it just a few months ago.”

“You wouldn’t happen to remember the license number, would you?” It was a hopeless question. I knew it when I asked. Nick Wallace shook his head in reply.

“Got enough trouble remembering my own,” he said.

“Was there anything unusual in the van when you opened it up?” I asked. “Anything out of place, or anything there that shouldn’t have been?”

“Well, the tools were missing. I went straight in and reported that to Mr. Damm. I figured he ought to know about that right away.”

“Anything else?”

Wallace shifted uneasily from foot to foot as though fighting some private interior battle.

“I don’t suppose it matters none,” he said at last. “Even if Larry shows back up here, Mr. Damm’s sure to fire his ass.”

“What doesn’t matter?” I asked.

“It’s against the rules to have anybody who doesn’t work for us riding in a company truck,” he said.

“And you think somebody who didn’t belong there was in Larry Martin’s truck?”

“You said so yourself.”

“But I didn’t say it was someone who wasn’t authorized,” I countered. “You’re the one who said that.”

Nick turned and walked away from us, picked up something from his workbench, and then came back, holding a small brown object in his hands. He gave it to me.

It was a plastic card case, the freebie kind they give you with business-card orders. Under the clear plastic laminate inside the cover was a Washington state driver’s license with a woman’s picture on it. I didn’t recognize the picture, but I recognized the name—LeAnn Patricia Nielsen.

Without a word, I passed the license to Al.

“Where’d this come from?” he demanded.

Nick Wallace looked down at his feet. “I found it in the van. Under the front seat. On the driver’s side.”

Nick Wallace’s terse words put a whole new light on the case. If LeAnn Nielsen had been in the bloodied van, there was a good chance that she and Larry Martin were somehow involved together. Maybe together the two of them had plotted to get rid of her husband. Permanently.

I turned back to Nick. “We’ll take this,” I told him, pocketing the case.

He nodded. “You bet. I sure as hell don’t need it.”

“Tell us once more exactly what happened when you found the van this morning.”

“Like I told you, it was parked outside in the sun, right next to the building. I was gonna bring it inside and gas it up when I saw the mess on the front seat. I opened the windows to air it out a little while I got the other vans on the road. Then, as soon as I got caught up, I cleaned up what I could and took it down to the detail place, the one down on Westlake.”

“You cleaned it yourself initially? What with?”

Wallace shrugged. “Rags,” he said. “And paper towels too. I used up practically a whole roll.”

“Where are they?”

“Where’s what?”

“The rags you used. The paper towels.”

“The paper’s over there in the trash. It don’t go out until tonight some time. And the towels are on the bottom of the laundry basket.”

“Could you get them for us?”

He paused, looking at us for a long moment. “Homicide, huh?” he said, musing to himself. At last he nodded his head as though he’d made up his mind. “I guess,” he said. “Whadya want ”em in? Another laundry bag be okay?“

“That’ll be fine,” I told him.

So we stood there and waited while Nick Wallace rummaged through first a laundry cart and then a fifty-gallon trash container. He stuffed his findings into a canvas laundry bag. When he was finished, he pulled the rope drawstring shut and brought the bag over to us.

He handed it over, then led us to the garage doors, opening one of them with an electrical switch on the wall just inside. Nick Wallace wasn’t about to be disturbed by unannounced visitors coming and going at will. He was sole keeper of the doors, both front and back.

I turned back to him, once Big Al and I were standing outside in the lot. “Thanks for all your help,” I told him, “but there’s one more thing.”

Nick was already shutting the door behind us. He had to reverse the procedure and open the door again high enough so we could see him. He looked impatient.

“What now?” he asked.

“Where does Larry Martin usually park his car?”

He pointed. “Over there, under the billboard.”

The billboard was one of those new state-of-the-art ones, an ad for some kind of fresh ground coffee that included a huge cup with what looked like steam rolling off it. One of my drinking buddies down at the Doghouse works for Ackerly Communications. He told me the steam is really a chemical reaction caused by dropping something called voodoo juice into a powder. It makes an interesting billboard, though, if you like that sort of thing. Under this particular one sat several parked cars.

By the time I turned back to Wallace to ask him another question, the garage door was all the way shut and Damm Fine Carpets’ resident mechanic had disappeared, locked safely away in self-imposed solitary confinement.

Al took the bag from my hand. “I’ll lock this stuff in the trunk before we go take a look at Martin’s parking place.”