Taking the Fifth (8 page)

We made one more assault, up 150th. This attempt brought us closer than any of our previous forays, but it ended in a necker’s knob turnaround blocked by a wrought-iron electronically operated gate. It was apparent that the road beyond the gate led up to the posh development on top of the hill. While we paused to assess the situation, a lady driving a silver BMW opened the gate and drove out. Before the gate could shut again, Al and I scrambled out of our vehicle and sprinted through the opening.

We found ourselves walking just below the crest of the hill. When we topped it, the view was dazzling. To the north was Mount Baker, to the east the forested hills of Snoqualmie Pass, to the south stood the graceful, snow-covered face of Mount Rainier, and to the west lay Seattle, its buildings surrounded by shimmering water against a background of snow-denuded mountains on the Olympic Peninsula.

Al stopped in his tracks and did a complete 360-degree. “What the hell do you have to pay for a view like this!”

“Plenty,” I told him, not adding that my own view from the penthouse in Belltown Terrace wasn’t much different from The Summit’s.

It turned out we were already on Summit Drive. It curved this way and that, meandering like a country road. Except it wasn’t. The place was a beehive of activity, with construction vehicles parked here and there around houses in various stages of completion. A backhoe was noisily digging the footings of one while roofers tacked cedar shakes onto the raw wooden roof of another. No one challenged us as we sauntered along, looking for 16318.

The house would have been difficult to miss. It was huge, a mansion by any standards, situated on a lot that gave it a commanding view from every room, including, I’m sure, bathrooms and closets. The front porch was ablaze with a collection of brass pots filled with brilliantly blooming plants.

Stepping onto the porch, I rang the bell. A few moments later, the door was opened by a dark-haired young woman wearing a maid’s uniform. “Yes?” she said questioningly.

I handed her my card. “We’re with the Seattle Police Department,” I said. “We’d like to speak to either Mr. or Mrs. Thomas.”

“Mrs. Thomas just left,” the woman said, gesturing toward the road.

“What about Mr. Thomas? Is he home?”

“Yes, but he’s busy.”

“This is important,” I said. “It’s about his son.”

“I don’t have a son,” a voice boomed behind her. The young woman started visibly. “It’s all right, Sarah. You may go.”

With a compliant nod, Sarah retreated from the open door. We found ourselves peering into a rose marble foyer where a thin, stooped man stood at the foot of a curving stairway. I was surprised to find that the source of that robust voice was this frail-looking old man. I saw at once that there was a remarkable similarity between the now-dead Jonathan and his father, William Thomas. Months of wasting illness had aged the younger man until the two men looked more like brothers than father and son.

William Thomas shuffled toward us, leaning heavily on a gnarled cane, and looked up at us through bushy gray eyebrows. “Who are you and what do you want?” he demanded.

“We’re with Seattle P.D.,” I repeated. “We were told that you are Jonathan Thomas’s father.”

“Was,” he corrected bitterly. “No more.” He reached out as if to close the door. I caught it with the toe of my shoe and edged into the doorway.

“We’re with Homicide, Mr. Thomas. Your son is dead. We came to tell you.”

It was a brutal way to break the news, but I wasn’t of a mind to be especially kind. You don’t find most parents denying their child’s very existence when you come to notify them that something has happened to that child.

“Dead?” he asked stupidly. “Did you say dead?”

I nodded. William Thomas reached out a bony hand and grasped my jacket lapel, shaking me with surprising vigor. “Did he repent?” he asked. “Did he pray for forgiveness of his sins?”

“I don’t have any idea. I’m sorry.”

Thomas turned from me and shuffled away from the door, shaking his head.

“What a waste,” he mumbled. “What a terrible, shameful, sinful waste.”

We followed him into a magnificent sunlit living room. He sat down at the end of an opulent sofa, using the arm of the couch as well as the cane to ease himself into a sitting position. He was still shaking his head.

“It’s God’s scourge,” he said, reaching for a white Bible that lay on a polished cherry wood end table beside his couch. He moved the book into his lap, stroking it with his hand, letting his fingers trace the pattern of the gold-embossed lettering. “For the wages of sin is death,” he continued as though we weren’t in the room.

“You knew your son was ill?” I asked.

He started at my question. “Ill? You call that ill? That’s not an illness. It’s a pestilence, visited on the wicked, on those who have willfully turned their faces from the Lord.”

William Thomas looked across the room and stared out the huge window at the expanse of city and mountain at our feet. His rheumy old eyes were reddened, but there were no tears of sadness. His hand, resting on the Bible, trembled with some inner tremor. The old man may have disowned his son, but he wasn’t letting him go to the devil without a fight.

“I don’t believe Jonathan died of AIDS,” I said quietly.

Slowly William Thomas swung toward me, an almost electrical charge of interest crossing his face. It was as if I had thrown him a lifeline. “You what?”

“Detective Lindstrom and I are with the Homicide squad,” I said. “We’re investigating your son’s death as a possible murder.”

“You think he was murdered?” Thomas asked.

I nodded. “We’d need you to request an autopsy to verify it, but…”

“He didn’t die of AIDS?” he asked incredulously, having to verify over and over what I’d said, as if he hadn’t quite heard me correctly the first time.

“That’s what we think, but because of the nature of your son’s illness, the medical examiner is reluctant to do an autopsy. You or someone in your family will have to request it.”

Forgotten, the Bible slipped to the floor as the old man used the crook of his cane to pull a telephone within reach. “Who do I call?” he demanded. “I’ll do it now. This very minute.”

I read him Dr. Wendell Johnson’s number. His hand shook violently as he punched the numbers. He sat impatiently, drumming his fingers on the table, as he waited for the call to be answered. “This is Jonathan Thomas’s father,” he said into the phone.

Evidently, in the space of a minute, Jonathan Thomas was no longer disowned.

“I want to talk to the doctor,” William Thomas continued. There was a pause. “That’s all right. I’ll wait,” he said.

While William Thomas sat on hold, an oppressive silence settled over the room. I looked around at the expensive, tasteful furnishings—the gleaming wooden tables; the burnished brocade of the sofa and chairs; the elegant pieces of crystal set here and there; the lustrous, broad-leafed plants.

It struck me as ironic that Jonathan Thomas, shut out of this house while he lived, was being welcomed back as a prodigal son only after he was dead. It was a hell of a price to pay. I wondered where, in the Good Book, it said that murder was more acceptable than AIDS.

Maybe it wasn’t in the Good Book at all, but it certainly was in William B. Thomas’s mind. More macho, maybe, and less dishonorable.

“This is Jonathan Thomas’s father,” he said again into the phone. “I understand you were treating my son. Yes, yes. I know. Two detectives are here with me now. They said they need an autopsy, that I should call you to request it.”

Again there was a pause. “What do you mean, it isn’t necessary? It is if I say so, and I want one.”

Dr. Johnson used every means at his disposal to attempt to dissuade the old man, but Jonathan’s father held on like a bull terrier. From hearing his side of the conversation, it was clear we were offering a cause of death that wasn’t AIDS, and William Thomas wasn’t letting it out of his grasp.

At last the doctor agreed, and Thomas turned to us in triumph. By then I understood why Jonathan had preferred to spend his last days in a squalid little house on Bellevue Avenue rather than in this sumptuous mansion.

His father was a bigot of the first water.

“They’ll do it,” Thomas said to us. “Tomorrow morning, probably. Is that soon enough?”

I nodded. “That’s plenty of time.”

Big Al cleared his throat. “When did you disown your son?” he asked.

William Thomas’s eyes shot from me to Al. “Why do you ask that?”

“We’re trying to put together a background profile.”

The answer evidently satisfied him. “A year and a half ago,” he replied. “On Christmas Eve. He said he had something to tell us, that he had to be honest with us. It almost killed his mother. We were better off not knowing.”

“Did you know his…” I stopped and rearranged what I was going to say. “Did you know his roommate?”

“Richard? Sure, we knew him. They had been friends, we thought, since college. We didn’t have any idea…”

“You didn’t understand the real nature of their friendship?”

“Absolutely not. Not until that night.”

“And what happened?”

“I threw him out of the house, right then.”

“This house?”

He shook his head. “A different house. Over in Sahalee. We got rid of it. I couldn’t stand to stay there afterward.”

“You said you knew about his illness.”

“That’s why he told us.”

“Because he was dying?”

Just then the front door opened and closed. Moments later a middle-aged woman wearing lime green sweats and trendy Reebock running shoes entered the room. Carrying an armload of dry cleaning, she stopped cold when she saw us.

“I didn’t know you were expecting anybody,” she said.

“I wasn’t, Dorothy. Come sit here by me.”

He patted the seat next to him. Obediently she came to his side. Dorothy Thomas was a good twenty years younger than her husband. I put her age at about fifty-five, although if she’d had the help of a good plastic surgeon, she might have been older.

“These men are policemen,” William Thomas was saying. “They’ve come to talk to us about Jonathan.”

“Jonathan?” Unconsciously, her left hand went to her throat, the huge diamond on her ring finger glittering in the sunlight. “Is something the matter?”

“He’s dead,” Thomas told her.

She looked into her husband’s face, her eyes wide, but she didn’t fall apart. She didn’t give way to whatever it was she was feeling.

“May God have mercy on his soul,” she whispered.

I suspected that God would probably come across with a hell of a lot more Christian charity than either one of Jonathan Thomas’s pious parents could muster.

When we finally left, I was relieved to be outside that heartless shell of a house, happy that we had to walk some distance to the car. It gave me a chance to let off steam.

“Could you do that?” Al asked me as we walked.

“Do what? Throw my kid out of the house when I knew he was dying?”

Al nodded.

“I don’t think so,” I told him. “Not even if he was as queer as a three-dollar bill.”

CHAPTER 9

WHEN WE GOT BACK TO THE DEPARTMENT, we contacted the Bellingham police and asked them to dispatch officers and notify Richard Dathan Morris’s mother. Back in our cubicle, I finished my part of the paperwork and rested my head on my hands while I waited for Al to complete his.

I closed my eyes for a moment, hoping the fatigue would somehow magically disappear. It didn’t, and for good reason. A glance at the clock on the wall told me I was well into a second twenty-four-hour period with no sleep.

“Let’s go get some coffee and some food,” I told Al. “In that order. I’m ready to drop.”

On the way back downstairs, we stopped off at the Washington State Patrol crime lab to see what, if any, progress they were making. My old friend, Janice Morraine, had been assigned the high-heeled shoe.

“My preliminary analysis says the blood and hair we found on the shoe match that of the victim. We’ve taken some prints off the shoe, but no prints with blood on them. The blood has been smeared though.”

“The killer was wearing gloves?” I asked.

“Probably. It’s a fairly expensive shoe, by the way. Cole-Haan, size 8½B. And it’s seen some real hard use.”

“Cole what?” I asked.

“Cole H-a-a-n. They’re manufactured in Italy. I’ve got people tracking the batch number.”

“Think you’ll have any luck?”

Janice shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine, but the color is so unusual that I’m hopeful. My source over at Nordstrom’s says it’s possible they’re custom-made.”

“Anything else?”

“Doc Baker says he discovered some trace evidence on the victim. Some hair. We’ll have that tomorrow morning. We also sent investigators back up to the parking lot above where the body was found. They picked up some material, but we don’t know yet whether or not it’s related.”

“You’ll keep us posted?”

Janice glowered at me. “Of course not. Everything we find out we’re marking top secret and burying in a file drawer! What do you think?”

“Just checking, just checking.” I told her.

Big Al and I drove down to the waterfront and elbowed our way through the tourists to Ivar’s Clam Bar. We both ordered clam chowder and coffee. We took our food to the outdoor tables and ate while watching ferry traffic come and go.

“Storm’s blowing up,” Al commented, sniffing the air.

“How can you tell?”

“Can’t you smell it?”

I sniffed, filling my nostrils with creosote-laden salty air that told me nothing. Looking up, I could see both the moon and winking stars.

“You wait and see,” Al said. “It’ll be raining by morning.”

Back at the department there was a call waiting for us from Bellingham. Their officers had been unable to locate Mrs. Grace Simms Morris. Through talking with neighbors, particularly the one who was feeding her parakeet, they had determined that she was out of town. She had taken a short trip down the Oregon coast and was expected to return to Bellingham by Sunday evening at the latest. The neighbor had added that Mrs. Morris would probably stop off in Seattle for a day or two to visit with her son.