Taking the Fifth (18 page)

He answered grudgingly. “Tuesday’s was about the judge in Tukwila who’s got three DWI convictions. Thursday’s was all about overcrowding in the jail. Tomorrow’s is about people stealing parking meters from downtown Seattle.”

My radar came on with a little warning pip. I don’t like it when murder trials are conducted in the newspapers, especially when the trial is in full swing before a suspect is even arrested. This smacked of a frame-up to me, of someone wanting to put Jasmine Day so firmly in front of our noses that we wouldn’t look beyond her.

Part of making a successful frame-up work is to make it seem plausible, to get people to buy the story. How better to do that than to engage the help of the local media? You get them to do your job for you, have them print the story for you so it will seem logical and reasonable.

Maybe you could engage a local cop too, if you could find one dumb enough to fall into the trap. That brought me up short. Was somebody using both Max and me as fall guys? I didn’t like the possibility, but it was there all the same.

If that was the case, who was behind it? Max’s description of that week’s column material didn’t sound like such hot stuff to me. It didn’t sound like something that would capture the imagination of someone who had just blown into town. What would make an outsider think that someone writing columns about stolen parking meters or DWIs might be interested in solving a murder?

They wouldn’t. If someone was indeed trying to frame Jasmine Day, it had to be somebody local, someone who knew Maxwell Cole well enough to be sure he would snap at the bait.

“I don’t know who the blonde is,” I said, “but you can bet I intend to find out.”

I turned and headed for the crime-lab door, knowing full well that Maxwell Cole couldn’t follow me inside. Don Yamamoto, head of the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab, had thrown Max out long ago, telling him to get lost and not come back.

“J. P., you’re lying to me,” Max protested over my shoulder. “You come back here and tell me the truth.”

The funny thing was, if I had known the truth right then, I might very well have told him.

Inside the crime lab, I found Don Yamamoto himself seated in a small, cluttered private office. Stripped down to his shirtsleeves, with a knotted tie hanging loose around his neck, he was poring through papers from a disorderly jumble of file folders strewn across the desk in front of him. Standing up when I tapped on the glass window of his office, he came toward me holding out his hand.

“I wondered when you’d show up, Beau. Did you get Jan’s message?”

I shook my head. “I just got in. I haven’t been upstairs yet.”

“She had to leave early. She called upstairs looking for you just before she went off duty.”

“I’ve been out.”

Yamamoto smiled. “That’s okay. I don’t suppose she’ll mind if I jump the gun and give you the news first. She did a first-rate job. She got hold of the import/export company that deals with the shoe manufacturer and traced the shoes to a—”

“Don’t tell me, let me guess. To a shoe store in Beverly Hills.”

Don Yamamoto frowned. “If you never got Jan’s message, how’d you know that?”

“Just lucky, I guess. Go on.”

“Anyway, when she found out the customer’s name, she ran a few of the prints we found on the shoe through our new fingerprint identification system. We got a match.”

“Of course you did. They’re her shoes.”

I’ve known Don Yamamoto for a number of years, and I’ve never seen him flustered. But he was this time. It showed all over.

“You know about Jasmine Day, then?” he demanded. “About her priors? Jan got one of the guys upstairs to run a check on her.”

“Jasmine doesn’t make a secret of her past,” I said. “Were any of her prints bloody?”

“No, but…”

It was too easy, the finger was pointing too clearly. My warning pip got stronger. “No buts, Don. The killer was wearing gloves.”

Don looked at me and shook his head. “You mean to tell me you don’t think she did it? There’s the wig and the shoes and the prints, but you still don’t think it’s her?”

When he said the word shoes, everything that had been bothering me came into focus. The shoes. The killer had used the shoes to pummel Richard Dathan Morris. Jasmine wouldn’t have needed shoes as a weapon, wouldn’t have stooped to that, not when she had a perfectly good foot handy.

A flood of relief rushed through my body. I hadn’t wanted it to be her, and now I was sure. Jasmine hadn’t killed Richard Dathan Morris, but who had? Someone wearing her costume, the one Morris had stolen.

I came back to the present to find Don Yamamoto staring at me, waiting for me to answer.

“Something about it doesn’t seem right to me,” I mumbled. “I don’t like it when all the pieces fall into place without a fight.”

It sounded half-assed and feeble, but it was better than blurting out what was really going through my mind and admitting to Don Yamamoto that the real reason I knew Jasmine hadn’t done it was that I had seen the lady in action, and she’d scared the living shit right out of me.

Don Yamamoto scratched his thinning black hair and shook his head. He looked as if he didn’t much believe me, and I didn’t blame him. On the surface it didn’t sound very plausible to me either.

“A frame-up?” he asked with a scowl. “Maybe it’s time to think about early retirement, Beau. The benefits are real good.”

“Piss up a rope,” I told him and left the crime lab. Neither one of us was going to change the other’s mind.

I was excited as I went up the three flights of stairs to my office. I felt I’d stumbled onto something important, but I didn’t know what to do with it or how to come up with some corroborating evidence. I sat down in my cubicle and stared briefly at the wall, trying to decide what to do next.

I was torn. Part of me wanted to go and try to talk with Jasmine Day, to see if she knew of any enemies in her past or present who might be out to get her. The other part of me wanted to talk to Mavis Davis and find out what she had to say.

Mavis Davis won the toss. I started for the garage and ran smack into Sergeant Lowell James. “I was just looking for you, Beau. What’s happening? I’ve gotten no report from you.”

“I’m on my way to interview a woman on the Morris case,” I said. “A new witness.” I told him about Mavis Davis, neglecting to say that she actually was a witness in the wrong murder. I convinced myself it was a case of careful editing rather than outright lying.

“Where’d you find her?” he asked.

“Maxwell Cole turned her up and came by to tell me.”

“You’re shitting me. Maxwell Cole? The Maxwell Cole from theP.I.? ”

“That’s the one.”

Sergeant James shook his head. “Will wonders never cease?” he said.

I started on down the hall. “Remember,” Sergeant James called behind me, “I want a full written report before you go off duty tonight, understood?”

“Right,” I answered. “You’ll have it.”

I wondered what it would say.

CHAPTER 18

IT WAS SIX O’CLOCK WHEN I FOUND MAVIS Davis’s house just up from the Harvard Exit Theater. The only reason I was able to find a parking place was that the movie didn’t start for another hour.

The house was a tiny place, unfenced but with wrought-iron bars on every window and door. As soon as I rang the bell, a small dog started yapping inside, the hoarse, rasping bark of an old, frail dog.

A tiny peephole window opened in the door just at eye level. “Who is it?” a woman asked sharply.

“Miss Davis? I’m Detective J. P. Beaumont with the Seattle Police Department.” I held my identification up to the window so she could see it.

“What does it say?” she asked. “I can’t read it.”

“It says I’m a detective with the Seattle Police Department. I’d like to talk to you.”

“I suppose you talked to that other man, the one who was here earlier.”

“That’s right. Maxwell Cole from theP.I . gave me your name and address. May I come in?”

She sighed. “Oh dear. I told him I didn’t want to get mixed up in any of this. I should have kept quiet.”

I felt awkward, leaning over to speak to her through the small opening. And it was difficult to understand her, since the dog was still carrying on its ear-splitting yammering in the background.

“If I could just speak to you for a few minutes, Miss Davis, it would be very helpful. I have to ask you a few questions about what you saw.”

“Mrs. Davis,” she snapped. “I haven’t been ‘Miss’ for a long time.”

The peephole window slammed shut. A moment later, I heard her begin working her way down the door, unlocking a series of four deadbolts before the knob finally turned and the door opened.

Instantly the dog darted out, making a dive for my nearest ankle. Mrs. Mavis Davis grabbed him and scooped him up into her arms on the second attempt. By then he had only grazed my sock. The dog was an ugly, dun-colored miniature poodle with wildly protruding eyes and several missing teeth.

When I first saw her, Mavis Davis was also toothless, but once she had retrieved her dog, she held him with one arm, reached into her apron pocket with her other hand, and popped a pair of dentures into her mouth.

“Shh, now,” she said to the dog. “It’s all right, Corky. This man is a policeman. He isn’t going to steal anything.”

Corky remained unconvinced. He continued to bark.

Mavis Davis stepped to one side and motioned me into the house. As I walked past, Corky made another lunge for me. This time he grabbed for my elbow. The only thing that saved my jacket was the dog’s lack of teeth. The woman sat down in a rocking chair and patted the dog lovingly.

“Corky worries about me, you see,” she said fondly. “We live here alone. He’s my only protection.”

Other than raising an ungodly racket, I don’t know what good the dog could possibly have done her. He grew quiet finally, and lay in his owner’s lap, glaring menacingly at me.

I looked around the room then. It was filled with old-fashioned furniture covered with fancywork and doilies. In the corner sat an old cabinet-style radio that probably hadn’t worked in years.

Keeping one restraining hand on the dog, Mavis reached over and picked up a skein of yarn and some crochet work from a nearby table. Next she perched a pair of narrow-lensed reading glasses on her nose. Resting her needlework project on the dog’s back, she begin crocheting, peering at me from time to time over the upper rim of her glasses. She was a scrawny woman, in her seventies or so, with narrow, angular features and a hooked nose.

“So what do you want, Mr….?”

“Beaumont,” I supplied. “Detective Beaumont. I want to talk to you about what you saw night before last.”

“You mean when I was out walking Corky?”

“Yes.”

“’Twasn’t much. Just a woman getting out of a cab, late at night. Happens all the time.”

“Except this time she was going into a house where a murder took place a short time later,” I said. “Did you get a good look at her?”

“I already told that other man. She was blonde, and she was all dressed up too, in a long blue dress, white gloves, and no shoes.”

“She was barefoot?”

“If you’re not wearing shoes, young man, then you’re barefoot, seems to me,” Mavis answered crossly.

“Tell me exactly what happened.”

“Corky woke me up about twelve-thirty. He used to make it through the night without needing to go out, but he’s been sick lately. Getting old, maybe, just like me. When he has to go, he has to go. So we went out. I had my bag and my pooper scooper. It’s the law, you know.”

I nodded. “Yes, I know,” I agreed.

“Anyway, he has this favorite place, so we went there. It’s on the parking strip, a block or so the other side of Harvard. I was standing waiting for him to finish when the cab drove up.”

“Drove up where?”

“To that house, the little one there between those two big apartment buildings. Do you know the one I mean?”

“Yes. go on.”

“Anyway, this woman got out of the back seat. I noticed her because you don’t often see people that dressed up in this day and age. You just see kids with long hair and ragged clothes or jeans, and nothing matches.”

“What about the woman?”

“Oh, yes. She got out of the cab, went up to the window, and paid the driver, and then went into the house.”

“You say she went into the house? Was the door open?”

“No.”

“So how did she get in?”

“She had a key. I watched her unlock the door and go inside.”

“Did you see anything else?”

Mavis Davis shook her head. “No. By then Corky was finished, so I cleaned up after him and we came home. I was cold.”

“What time was that?”

“About a quarter to one, maybe. I wasn’t sleepy anymore, so I stayed up and worked for a while. It was two or so before I went back to bed.” She smiled. “It doesn’t matter what time I go to bed, since we can sleep as late as we like, right, Corky?”

Corky gave a miniature growl in reply. He had never taken his ugly eyes off me.

“Do you know the name of the cab company?” I asked.

Mavis shook her head. “I take the bus most of the time, or I walk. I don’t pay any attention to taxis. All I know is it was green.”

“Light green or dark green?”

“Oh, you know, that funny light green chartreuse color.”

I did indeed know. That could only be one of the Far West taxis.

“And you say she walked up to the window to pay her fare.”

“That’s what I said,” Mavis answered.

That struck me as odd. I’ve been in lots of cabs with women, especially when I lived at the Royal Crest and went places with my neighbor Ida and some of her retired pals. They always paid the fare while they were still in the cab, passing the money to the driver before they got out.

“Would it be possible for me to use a phone?” I asked. “Maybe I could call the cab company and get a line on the driver.”

Mavis shrugged her shoulders and nodded toward the kitchen. “It’s out there, on the wall. The light’s just inside the door.”

The moment I stood up, Corky had another fit. I don’t know how anyone could keep, much less love, a dog as obnoxious as that.