Taking the Fifth (15 page)

“They’ve got a follies there. The whole cast is made up of female impersonators. When I heard that, I figured Morris must have lifted the costume before I caught him. My guess is he hid it somewhere and came back to get it later. He probably wanted to play dress up.”

“But was he wearing the costume when whoever it was saw him at the Edgewater?”

“No.”

“And you didn’t go?”

Dale shook his head. “There are a few of us on this show who aren’t AC/DC. I happen to be one of them.”

“Who saw him there, then? At the Edgewater. Do you remember?”

“It was one of the local guys, but I don’t know which one. I see so many, they all look alike. I’d know him if I saw him, but I don’t remember his name. I can get it for you tonight, if that’s soon enough.”

“That would be a big help.”

The waitress brought the bill. I took it and paid off both our coffees. “Is that all?” he asked as the waitress walked away. “I should probably go back to my room and grab a quick nap if I want to be on my toes tonight.”

“Did I understand you to say that a replacement pair of shoes came today?”

“That’s right. Via Federal Express. They brought them right to my door.”

“Your door? You mean here in the hotel?”

“Where else?”

“Could I see them?”

The hostility that had gradually drained out of his voice came back all at once. “Why?”

“I just want to see them, that’s all.”

I followed Alan Dale out of the restaurant, through the lobby, and up to his room on the eighth floor. His room was definitely not a suite. On the table sat a bulky, unopened Federal Express envelope. He tossed it to me. “What’s this all about?” he asked.

Instead of answering, I tore open the outer envelope. A crimson shoe box dropped onto the table. Inside the box, under a covering layer of tissue, two cobalt blue shoes lay nestled together. Cole-Haan shoes, size 8½B.

They were duplicates of another shoe I’d seen before, although these didn’t have any bloodstains on them.

I replaced the lid on the box and handed it to Alan Dale. “Thanks,” I said. “You’ve been a big help.”

“Think nothing of it,” he replied.

When I left the head carpenter’s room, I went back down to the lobby and asked the desk for Ed Waverly’s room. I was told he and Miss Day had just left the hotel in a limo on their way to an appearance on a local television talk show. They weren’t expected back until sometime after four. I tried checking on the rest of the cast and crew, but they had gone, as a group, on a ferry ride.

I left my name and my number at the department for Ed Waverly. It was time for me to go on duty, although I felt as if I’d already been at work for a long time. All day and all night.

Before heading for the department though, I went to the bank of pay phones near the desk and called the Executive Inn. I was told Mrs. Morris was out and I should try again later. At least she hadn’t checked out. I was remiss in not being more aggressive about tracking her down, but there are only so many hours in a day, I told myself.

On the way up to the fifth floor of the Public Safety Building, I stopped off at the crime lab. I wanted to turn in the glassine bag containing the hair from my apartment.

I found Janice Morraine standing in the elevator lobby next to a knee-high metal ashtray, smoking a cigarette. Janice is the only smoker in the crime lab, and she’s exiled to the lobby whenever she needs a fix.

“You’re here almost as much as I am,” I said.

“That’s nothing to brag about,” she retorted.

With no further comment, I handed her the bag from my pocket. She opened it and peered inside.

“What is this, another sample from our ubiquitous blonde wig?”

“What do you mean, ubiquitous?”

“Bill Foster, one of the other criminologists, just gave me one from that other crime scene. The one up on Capitol Hill?”

“Jonathan Thomas?” I asked.

“I don’t remember the name. The OD up on Bellevue. The guy with AIDS. All I can say is,” Janice added, “this must be one very busy lady.”

“She’s busy, all right,” I replied grimly.

“Where did it come from?”

“I’d rather not say.”

Janice Morraine gave me a long, appraising look before she bent down to snuff out the butt of her cigarette in the ashtray. We’ve worked around one another for a long time—years, in fact. Janice Morraine probably knows me better than she ought to.

“That’s just as well,” she said. “There are some things I’d rather not know.” She dropped the glassine bag into her lab-coat pocket. “Anything else?”

“Not at the moment.”

“I’d better get back to work,” she said.

Janice Morraine walked away, leaving me standing there alone in the hall wondering if I was as screwed up as she seemed to think.

I didn’t much like the answer I gave myself.

CHAPTER 15

SERGEANT WATSON WAS GUNNING FOR ME when I stepped through the doorway on the fifth floor. “Beau, Captain Powell wants to see you, pronto.”

That kind of summons to Captain Powell’s fishbowl is much the same as being twelve and getting sent to the principal’s office. One look at the captain’s face told me he was kicking ass and taking names.

When I walked into his office, Captain Larry Powell was sitting at his desk, thumbing through a thick stack of papers in front of him.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“Shut the door,” he replied without looking up. I knew right then I was in deep shit. I shut the door and waited.

“What the hell have you been doing with your time that you haven’t bothered to notify Richard Dathan Morris’s next of kin?” he demanded.

The best defense was to go on the attack. “Look,” I said. “There are only so many hours in a day. We’ve been tracking her. The neighbors said she was out of town. They weren’t able to say where she’d gone. I finally left a message for her last night, but I still haven’t been able to make a connection.”

Powell finally looked up at me. “Doug and Larry did,” he said. Detectives Doug Manning and Larry Hicks worked Homicide on the day shift; obviously, they were the team Sergeant Watkins had assigned to the Jonathan Thomas case.

“How come?”

“Because she showed up this morning at the house up on Bellevue, that’s how come. When she found out what had happened, they had to call an aid car for her.”

“So where is she now—in a hospital? I tried calling her hotel a little while ago, and she wasn’t there.”

“Don’t waste your time looking for her now. In other words, what you’re telling me is that you knew where she was staying last night, but you didn’t bother to get word to her.”

“Look, Captain,” I said. “There wouldn’t be a murder for Doug and Larry to investigate if Big Al and I hadn’t spent half the day battling the system and tracking down Thomas’s parents to get this agreement on the autopsy. If it weren’t for us, someone would have gotten away with murder in this town.”

I was hot now. I hadn’t exactly been lying down on the job. I felt as if I’d been living and breathing Richard Dathan Morris for days.

“Not only that,” I continued, “most of the people involved in this case will be leaving Seattle tonight as soon as Jasmine Day’s concert is over at the Fifth Avenue Theater. They’re on their way to Vancouver, B.C. When I finish up with the people who are leaving the country, I’ll get around to the people who aren’t.” With that, I turned on my heel and started out of the room.

“And Al is off tonight?”

“Yes, he’s off tonight. His grandson had emergency surgery last night. The kid almost died. Big Al spent the night at the hospital with his wife. Of course he’s not coming in.”

“Great—” Powell began, but I slammed the door behind me, cutting off whatever else he might have said. I ran into the night-shift Homicide squad leader, Lowell James, in the corridor on my way back to my desk.

“What’s going on?” he asked. “How come Powell had you in the fishbowl? I heard he’s mad enough to chew nails.”

“He needs a fucking Ping-Pong ball,” I snapped. “And I’m it.”

James followed me to my desk and leaned against a corner of it, crossing his arms. “Maybe you’d better tell me what’s going on.”

“Powell is ripped because I didn’t notify Morris’s next of kin before his mother showed up at another crime scene and found out on her own.”

“Have you talked to her yet?”

“No. And I never will, if people don’t get off my case and give me a chance to go to work.”

James uncrossed his arms and backed away from my desk. “I can take a hint,” he said. “Don’t let me stand in your way.”

He started away from my desk but stopped long enough to say, “By the way, I guess you heard the results on the Thomas autopsy. You were right. It was a cocaine overdose.”

“I know,” I said and let it go at that.

As soon as Sergeant James left, I picked up the phone and dialed the Executive Inn one more time. They said Mrs. Morris was in but that she wasn’t taking calls, not from anybody. I went down to the garage and checked out a car to pay her a personal visit.

The desk clerk at the Executive Inn wasn’t the least bit happy about telling me where Mrs. Grace Simms Morris’s room was. “Something terrible has happened to that poor woman,” the clerk said. “She wants to be left alone.”

I held my identification so the clerk could read it. “I know what’s happened to her,” I said. “That’s why I have to talk to her.”

Reluctantly, the clerk picked up the phone and dialed a number. “This is the desk, Mrs. Morris,” she said apologetically. “There’s a detective down here who insists on seeing you.”

The clerk listened for a moment, then looked at me. “Are you with the DEA?” she asked.

I had already shown her my identification, which said I was with Seattle P.D., not the Drug Enforcement Agency, but evidently that hadn’t sunk in. “I’m with Homicide,” I answered. “I’m investigating the murder.”

She repeated what I’d said to Mrs. Morris. “All right,” the clerk said finally, setting the phone down. “She says you can go on up. It’s room 338, just to the right of the elevator.”

When I got off the elevator, the door to room 338 was already standing open. A woman was waiting in the doorway.

My first impression of Grace Simms Morris was that she was maybe forty-five years old. Her skin was smooth and translucent. Later I was forced to revise that assessment upward when she told me she had been thirty when Richard, her twenty-seven-year-old only child was born. Evidently Grace maintained her fragile beauty with the help of a skilled plastic surgeon.

Grace Simms Morris was a well-preserved, small-boned woman with a head of champagne blonde hair that couldn’t have come from anything but a bottle. She was dressed in a rose-colored suit that was simply but elegantly cut. That kind of simplicity doesn’t come cheap. Grace Simms Morris had money.

“You’re sure you’re not with the DEA?” she demanded in a breathless, little-girl rush of words as I stepped off the elevator.

“I’m sure,” I assured her, showing her my ID. She held it up close to her face and read through a pair of narrow reading glasses perched on her nose. Studying her as she read, I admit I was somewhat shocked. From what the clerk and Captain Powell had said, I expected to find Mrs. Morris hysterical, at the very least. She was far more indignant than tearful.

“I don’t understand why they’re doing this,” she said.

“Why who’s doing what?” I asked.

“Why the DEA is pretending they don’t know who my son was or what he was doing.”

“What was he doing?”

“Working for them,” she snapped.

A door opened down the hall and two people walked toward the elevator. Quickly Mrs. Morris pulled me into her room. “I don’t want anyone to overhear,” she whispered conspiratorially. “Maybe they still have to keep it a secret because they haven’t made all the arrests yet.”

You could have knocked me over with a feather. “Your son was working for the DEA?” I must have looked as incredulous as I sounded.

“Of course he was, although that Mr. Wainwright said it wasn’t true.”

“Who’s Mr. Wainwright?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I don’t know. He’s someone at the DEA office here in Seattle. I tried to talk to him, but he gave me the brush-off. I don’t like it when men treat me that way.”

Mrs. Morris walked away from me. She settled herself on the edge of the bed gracefully, smoothing her skirt over her knees. Then she motioned me toward a chair.

“This is very hard for me, Detective Beaumont,” she said. “I’m all alone, and Richard was my only child. I tried to get Mr. Wainwright to understand that.”

“Understand what?”

Mrs. Morris seemed to talk in circles. We weren’t getting anywhere.

“Detective Beaumont, since my son was a law-enforcement officer who was killed in the line of duty, I want to plan a fitting law-enforcement funeral for him. You know, with the uniformed officers carrying the casket, that kind of thing. But how can I if his supervisors don’t have the common decency to come forward and tell what happened?”

“Mrs. Morris, what exactly was your son doing, do you know?”

“He was working undercover, of course.”

“But you knew about it?”

“Richard told me everything. We were very close.”

“What about his roommate—did he know about it too?”

Mrs. Morris shrugged. “I don’t know. I suppose Jonathan knew. We never discussed it.

“He was so happy,” she said suddenly, and just as suddenly she dabbed at her eyes. “He was finally getting to do what he’d always wanted to do. You know, he wanted to be a police officer from the time he was little.”

“Is that so?” I ventured.

“For a long time I thought it was just a stage. You know, most little boys go through a period when they want to be a cowboy or a doctor. I thought that eventually Richard would grow out of it, but he never did.”

“For some of us it takes longer,” I said.

Mrs. Grace Simms Morris smiled at me thinly through her tears. “You know, Rich would have loved you,” she declared.

Knowing what I did about Richard Dathan Morris and his sexual preference, I wasn’t sure what to make of that statement. For a few moments the two of us sat uncomfortably in the room, the cop from Homicide and the victim’s mother, with nothing to say to one another. Finally, I broke the silence.