Taking the Fifth (23 page)

“What are all like what?” I asked.

“The other trunks,” she answered. “They all have false bottoms.”

“Are they full or empty?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I didn’t check.”

We looked at three more trunks. One was for costumes and two were for instruments. Bertha was right. They all had false bottoms, and they were all empty.

Alan Dale had followed along. He scratched his head. “Jesus Christ! How could I have been so stupid? This must have been going on the whole time and I never had an inkling.” Angrily, he shoved his hands in his pockets and walked toward the edge of the stage. I went after him.

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I might just as well go ahead and start the load-out. I don’t know where they’re going to take the stuff or who’s going to pay for it, but I’ve got to get it out of here, and I can’t keep the stagehands on duty all night.” He looked around. “Where the hell is Ray?” he asked.

“Ray Holman?” I asked. “Is he missing?”

Dale shook his head. “Probably didn’t think we’d start this soon and snuck off to have a beer.”

The head carpenter summoned his crew. “Okay, you guys, let’s strike this sucker, starting with the band shell.”

Ray Holman’s being gone bothered me a whole lot more than it seemed to bother Alan Dale. I went back to the dressing room where B. W. Wainwright had taken charge. “You ought to send someone out to check the rest of the trunks,” I told him. “It looks to me like they’ve all got false bottoms.”

Glancy and Dick were dispatched to take care of that. I looked at the closed door to Jasmine’s dressing room. I knew she was in there, and I wanted to go and talk to her, to reassure her and tell her not to worry, but I thought better of it. Moments later, Alan Dale came pounding on the door to the common area.

“Beaumont, can you come here for a minute?”

“What’s going on?” I asked as we walked away from the dressing rooms.

“You’d better come take a look at this.”

“What is it?”

“Just come look.”

He led me to the back of the stage, where the pedestal used to support the band shell stuck up out of the decking like the empty stump of a tree. The band shell had been removed to one side and was being dismantled by several stagehands.

“You got a strong stomach?” Dale asked, handing me a flashlight.

“Strong enough,” I replied. “Why? What’s going on?”

“Crawl under there and take a look.”

I got down on my hands and knees and crawled along the worm-gear track. As soon as I put my head under the decking, I smelled the unmistakable odor of human feces and blood and death. The decking had somehow contained it, kept it bottled up. It wasn’t necessary to go any farther to know there was a body under there. I shone the light along the track until I saw the outline of a man’s shoe. Then I crawled back out from under the decking. Alan Dale was standing there waiting for me.

“Do you know who it is?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I turned around as soon as I saw the shoe.”

“Me too,” I said. “I’ve got to call the department. They’ll have to get a team over here.”

“Help yourself to the phone,” Dale told me. “You know where it is.”

I started for the phone with the head carpenter trailing behind me. “Looks to me like he got bound up in the worm-gear drive. That’s about where it ran off the track. Shouldn’t we try to get him out?” he asked.

“No. It’s too late for that. He’s dead; I’m sure of it. Doc Baker from the medical examiner’s office and the crime-scene investigators from the crime lab have got to be here when we uncover him. Is it possible it’s Ray Holman?” I asked.

“Maybe,” Dale said.

I dialed Sergeant Lowell James’s desk directly. There wasn’t much point in going through 911.

“Hello, Sarge, this is Beau.”

“It’s about time you called in. We’ve had complaints from parking enforcement about your car. I understand it’s still parked in front of the theater with its emergency lights flashing.”

“That’s what this is,” I countered, “an emergency.”

“For two hours?”

“Look, Sarge, do you want me to report this homicide, or are you going to climb my frame about parked cars?”

“What homicide?” James snapped.

“Beats the hell out of me. We’ve got an unidentified body under the decking on the stage of the Fifth Avenue Theater. And the DEA guys are here. They’ve already arrested two people on drug charges and are looking for a third.”

“The DEA? How’d they get called into this, and why weren’t we notified?”

“Would you do me a favor and just call Doc Baker’s office? And contact the crime lab. We can handle all this paper-pushing bullshit later.”

“Right,” James said. “We’ll handle it, all right.”

Twenty minutes later, Sergeant James and I were waiting near the back of the Fifth Avenue’s stage when Doc Baker came huffing up to us, his tie flapping loose around his neck, his white hair standing on end. The same young female photographer was trailing behind him.

“All right, all right. What’s going on here?”

“There’s a body under the decking,” I told him. “We left it there until you got here.”

Doc Baker walked to the back of the stage. He looked at the space between the decking and the floor; then he looked at his own wide girth. There was no way he would fit.

“Get somebody to take this thing apart,” Baker ordered. “How long will it take to dismantle it?”

“The whole thing?” Alan Dale asked.

“No, just enough so we can see to work.”

About ten minutes or so,” Dale told him, “if all you want me to do is open a lid over the track.”

Dale started to summon the lounging stagehands who were clumped in a subdued group on the far side of the stage. I’m sure he intended to put them to work on the decking, but Baker squelched that idea in a hurry.

“No. Just you,” he said to Dale. “I don’t want any unnecessary fingerprints.”

“It’ll take a lot longer,” Dale said.

“That’s all right,” Baker returned. “It’ll be worth it.”

Alan Dale pulled a small battery-operated drill from his tool belt and slid under the decking. We heard the rat-a-tat-tat of the power drill as it loosened the bolts. Meanwhile, Doc Baker sauntered over to us.

“I don’t know why you guys didn’t have brains enough to take up that decking before I got here. Nobody could have gotten under there.”

I managed, barely, to keep my mouth shut. None of the smart-ass remarks I could have laid on Doc Baker right then made it past my lips. Of course, he was right. It would have made a hell of a lot more sense for us to have gone ahead and had Dale raise the planking before Baker got there, but I’ve worked with the medical examiner too many years not to know that that would have pissed him off too. Nobody pleases Doc Baker in the middle of the night. It was far better for him to have made the decision himself after he got there, even if everything was delayed a good forty-five minutes.

After several long minutes, Dale finally raised one corner of a section of decking. “Have somebody come take this, will you?”

Two of the stagehands came over, but they did so with considerable reluctance. By now, everyone who was still in the theater knew there was a body lurking under the decking, and no one was eager to be the one to uncover it.

Baker directed the stagehands to take the section of decking and lean it against the back wall. A few minutes later, another section came off. As the lid opened up, the stench became more pronounced. Only in the movies do people die with their eyes and mouths closed. Only there is death a sanitary, odorless, painless process.

When the last section of decking came off, Alan Dale erupted from the opening and made for the fresh air outside the alley door on the other side of the stage. For two cents, I would have joined him.

Impervious, Doc Baker hopped down from the decking into the opening and motioned for the photographer to follow. I saw the look of horror on her face, but she eased her way into the opening behind him. Soon intermittent flashes from the camera told us she was doing her job.

Sergeant James, Agent-in-Charge Wainwright, and I moved slowly to the edge of the opening. It was bad, as bad as anything I’ve ever seen. It was Dan Osgood. His face was recognizable, but that was about all.

The worm-gear drive, moving in its track like the spiral center piece in a meat grinder, had pushed the body ahead of it, even as the gear itself had torn into him. Eventually his body had been caught between two supporting struts that stood on either side of the track. The pressure of the body, stuck between the struts, had created enough countervailing stress to force the worm gear from its track.

It was a terrible way to die, a horrifying way to die. Doc Baker pulled himself up out of the hole onto the decking, shaking his shaggy head.

“Why didn’t he try to get away?” I asked.

“Hands and feet were both tied,” Doc Baker answered. “Not only that, it looks as if he was probably out cold.”

“Drugged?” I asked.

Baker nodded. “I imagine.”

Now the photographer, too, was climbing out of the pit. In the stark light of the stage, her face was ashen, but there was no other visible sign of distress. “I’m done, Dr. Baker,” she said, moving past us to the sidelines.

“I’ve been told we’ve got a positive ID,” Baker said to Sergeant James. “Is that true?”

The sergeant looked at me. “What do you think, Beau?” he asked.

“It’s Dan Osgood, all right,” I answered. “Is his wife still down at the department?”

Sergeant James shook his head. “No. I sent her to her mother’s in a cab a while ago.”

“You working this case, then?” Doc Baker asked me.

Sergeant James answered for me. “No. Beau and Big Al already have their hands full.” He turned to the DEA agent in charge. “Wainwright, are you going to want this to be a joint investigation?”

Wainwright nodded. “All right, then,” James continued. “You’ll be working with Detectives An-dress and Cunningham here. I’ll be the liaison between you and each pair of detectives working one of the related homicides. I think that’s the best way to handle it.”

“Makes sense to me,” Wainwright agreed. “Is the crowd pretty much dispersed out there?”

“It’s not bad. There are reporters hanging around, but that’s about all.”

It was agreed that Jasmine and Waverly should be taken down to the department to be booked and questioned. I stood to one side and watched as Roger Glancy led Jasmine out of the dressing room. To avoid the reporters, they took them out through the side door that led back into the Skinner Building, the same door Dan Osgood had used to take me into the theater for the first time the previous afternoon. It seemed like eons ago.

Jasmine Day walked out with her head held high. Waverly looked like a whipped dog. Once they were gone, I went looking for Alan Dale. He was sitting in the common area outside the dressing rooms. He didn’t look any too healthy. He had his head in his hands and looked a picture of despair.

“Is she gone?” he asked.

I nodded. “Don’t worry about her. We’ll bail her out tomorrow.”

“We?” he asked.

“That’s right,” I answered. “All they can charge her with is possession with intent.”

“What about me?” he asked.

“What about you?”

“I’m the one who killed him. I was the one who pulled the switch on the worm gear.”

“You didn’t know he was under there, did you?”

Alan Dale shook his head. “No, but I remember smelling a funny odor during the second act. I didn’t have time to check it out. I should have. Maybe he wasn’t dead yet.”

“Don’t beat yourself up, Alan. He was already dead, believe me.”

“You’re sure it’s Osgood?”

“I’m sure, all right. It ran through his gut, not his face.”

“Do they have him out of there yet?” Dale asked.

“Not yet,” I told him. “This stuff takes time.”

“And you do this for a living?” he asked.

“Every day,” I said.

I left Dale sitting there and went outside looking for Ray Holman. I didn’t find him. Instead, I came across the photographer, sitting off by herself in the middle of the front row of seats. Like Dale, she looked sickened and worn.

“Thinking about getting into another line of work?” I asked.

“The thought had crossed my mind,” she said.

“Mine too,” I told her.

CHAPTER 23

I ENDED UP OFFERING THE PHOTOGRAPHER a ride home. For a change, my attempt to be suave and urbane didn’t backfire. When we stepped outside the theater, my car was still there, the flashers were still flashing, and the engine turned over on the first try. Sometimes things do work out all right.

We took the departmental car back to the Public Safety Building. I talked to Sergeant James from the garage and told him I was beat, that I’d have to do the paperwork the next day. He let me off the hook. I bailed the Porsche out of the twenty-four-hour garage at the bottom of James Street, and we headed home.

The photographer’s name was Nancy Gresham. I’d had nothing to eat for a long time, so long that even the dead breakfast Jasmine and I had left uneaten on my dining-room table was beginning to seem palatable.

Since Nancy lived in an apartment on the north side of Queen Anne Hill, it was natural for us to stop off at the Doghouse for something to eat. That’s one of the advantages of being a devotee of twenty-four-hour dives. They’re always open when you need them.

“I take it you come here a lot,” Nancy observed when everyone in the place, including the cook and the busboy, greeted me by name.

“It beats cooking,” I said.

When the waitress came to take our order, she smiled at Nancy Gresham’s insistence on separate checks. So did I.

Although I thought I was hungry, when the food came I picked at it, pushing it around on my plate without eating any of it. There was a leaden weight in my gut, one I couldn’t ditch or explain, one I couldn’t manage to shove any food past. I guess I wasn’t exactly a barrel of fun.

“Someone told me the guy back there in the theater was the suspect you were looking for in those other two murders, the one down by the railroad track and the other one up on Capitol Hill,” she said over coffee. “So you’ve closed two cases tonight. It seems to me congratulations are in order.”