Trial by Fury (9780061754715) (9 page)

S
ister Eunice spent the next half hour on her knees on the floor of that visiting room, pasting the pieces of Bambi Barker back together and forever putting an end to my lean/mean stereotyping of Catholic nuns. Sister Eunice may have been every bit as angular as Sister Marie Regina, but she was anything but heartless. She held Bambi close, rocking her gently like a baby and murmuring small words of comfort in her ear.

There was nothing for me to do but sit and wait for the storm of emotion to blow over. Sister Eunice must have gotten tired of my just hanging around, because finally she ordered me out of the room, sending me on a mission to bring back a glass of water. When I returned, Sister Eunice had engineered Bambi back onto a chair.

“Here now,” she urged soothingly, taking the glass from my hand and holding it to Bambi's lips. “Try some of this.”

Bambi took a small sip, choked, and pushed the glass away. “I'm all right.”

“Are you sure?” Sister Eunice asked.

“I'm sure,” Bambi mumbled.

It was time to start, but I approached Bambi warily. “I have to ask you some questions, Miss Barker.”

She nodded numbly, without looking up. “So ask.”

“Do you know anything about what happened to Darwin Ridley?”

Bambi Barker raised her head then and looked at me. “It was just a game,” she said.

“A game?” I asked, not comprehending. “What do you mean, a game?”

“A game, a contest.”

I felt really lost. “I don't understand what you're talking about. What was a contest?”

She shot a quick glance in the direction of Sister Eunice, who sat with her hands clasped in her lap, nodding encouragingly. “Don't pay any attention to me, Bambi,” Sister Eunice said. “You go right ahead and tell the man what he needs to know.”

Bambi took a deep breath and looked back at me. “Each year the cheerleaders have a contest to see…” She paused and looked at Sister Eunice again.

“To see what?” I urged impatiently.

“To see who can get one of the teachers in bed. It's, you know, a tradition.”

My jaw must have dropped about three feet. At first I didn't think I'd heard her right. But I had. A tradition! The last time I had heard the word tradition, Bob Payson was telling me about the basketball team and Girl Scout cookies. So while the boys were worrying about nice little civilized traditions of the tea and crumpet variety, the cheerleaders were busy balling their favorite teacher. Jesus!

My mother once told me that girls are born knowing what it takes boys fifteen years to figure out. About then I figured fifteen years wasn't nearly long enough.

“The same teacher?” I asked, finding my voice. “Or a different one each year?”

She shrugged. “Sometimes the same. Usually not.”

“Somebody keeps track from year to year?”

She nodded. “It's in one of the lockers in the girls' dressing room. Written on the ceiling. But it was just a game. Nothing like this ever…” She broke off and was quiet.

“Now let me get this straight. Each year somebody on the cheerleading squad seduces one of the teachers, and then you write his name down on a list?”

She nodded.

“Was there a prize for this game?”

“At the beginning of the year, everybody puts fifty dollars into a pot. When the winner brings proof, she gets the money.”

“Proof? What do you mean, proof?”

“I mean, like you couldn't just say you did it, you know? You had to have proof. A picture, a tape, or something.”

Fifteen years? Hell, forty-three years wasn't enough. I glanced at Sister Eunice. She continued sitting with her hands serenely clasped, her eyes never leaving Bambi's face. Maybe living in a convent with high school kids had taught Sister Eunice a whole lot more about the world than I had given her credit for.

It was all I could do to keep from grabbing Bambi Barker by the shoulders and shaking her until the braces flew off her teeth. “I take it you won this year?” I asked dryly.

“Yes.” When she answered, her voice dropped almost to a whisper. My question had brought back the reality of the consequences of that nasty little game, as well as a little reticence.

“And the proof?”

“A picture. One of my friends took it.”

“So how did your father get it?”

“I don't know, I swear to God.”

“And who sent one to Joanna Ridley? Your father?”

“Maybe. I don't know. I've never seen him so mad. He was crazy.”

“When did he find out?”

“Friday. Friday morning. He came to school to get me. I thought he was going to kill me right there in the car.”

“He threatened you?”

“He hit me.” One hand strayed to her lip as if in unconscious remembrance of that slap across the face. Tears appeared in the corners of her eyes. Deftly, Sister Eunice reached out and wiped them away with a lacy handkerchief.

“Did he threaten Mr. Ridley?”

“I think so.”

“You think?”

“He said he was going to do something, but I didn't know what it was. It sounded bad.”

“Do you remember what it was?”

She rubbed her eyes and more mascara flaked off and landed on her face. “It was something like…It ended with
ate
. Something
ate
.”

You don't have to work
The New York Times
crossword puzzle every day to be able to figure that one out.

“Castrate?” I asked. “Was that it?”

She nodded. “That's it. What does it mean?”

“Cut his balls off,” I growled. I was in no mood to pull any punches or mince any words for Bambi Barker. She didn't deserve it, but I was aware of an uncomfortable shifting in Sister Eunice's otherwise tranquil presence.

Bambi Barker gulped and swallowed hard.

“That didn't happen,” I added. “If that's what you're worried about. Somebody just strung Darwin Ridley up on the end of a rope.”

Bambi dissolved into tears once again. When Sister Eunice reached out as if to comfort her, I stopped her hand. The nun looked me in the face for a long moment, then nodded in acquiescence and allowed her hand to drop back into her lap.

Suddenly, I realized Sister Eunice and I were coconspirators in the process. She wasn't merely observing. Sister Eunice was actively helping. What her motives were wasn't clear to me at the time, although it occurred to me that maybe she was bent on saving Bambi Barker's immortal soul.

We waited together until Bambi's sobbing quieted and eventually died away altogether. Only then did Sister Eunice reach out again, this time to take Bambi's hand. “Is it possible that your father did this terrible thing?” she asked.

You could have knocked me over with a feather. I don't suppose genteel Catholic nuns routinely conduct homicide interrogations, but Sister Eunice was a down-home killer at asking questions. She put the screws to Bambi directly, holding her eyes in an unblinking gaze,
offering the girl no opportunity to look away or avoid the issue.

“He could have,” Bambi whispered finally.

“All right, then,” Sister Eunice said. Her voice was calm and firm. “You must tell Detective Beaumont here everything you know that could possibly be helpful.”

“But I don't know for sure,” Bambi protested.

“Tell us exactly what went on Friday,” Sister Eunice urged quietly.

“After I left school?”

“Where did you go, home?”

Bambi nodded. “We went to the house. Mom was home, waiting.”

That prompted a question from me. “Your mother knew about it, before you got there?”

“Everybody knew about it. There was a huge hassle, and Dad locked me in my room.”

“How long were you there?”

“Until Saturday morning. Then they woke me up and told me to pack because I was coming here.”

“They both brought you down?” I asked.

“We had to bring two cars. Mom drove one. They left it here.” Bambi Barker's pout returned.

“For you?”

“No. It was, you know, like a gift to the school.”

I get a little ego hit every time one of my
hunches turns out to be correct, even when it's not particularly important. It's good for my overall batting average. Sister Marie Regina O'Dea's shiny new Taurus station wagon bribe gave me a little rush of satisfaction.

I said, “How nice. So they drove you down and checked you in. I take it you weren't especially thrilled to come here.”

Bambi glanced in Sister Eunice's direction. “I didn't have a choice.”

“Why not?”

“He said he'd disown me.”

“Would he?”

“He did Faline.”

“Who's that?”

“She used to be my sister.”

Faline. Bambi. Obviously somebody in the Barker family was a Walt Disney fan. “Used to be your sister?” I asked. “What do you mean by that?”

“He threw her out three years ago. No one's heard from her since.”

“Why did they send you here? Why this school?”

“My mother's sister is a member of the Order of St. Agnes in Texas. She's the one who suggested it.”

I changed the subject abruptly, hoping to throw her off guard. “Tell me about Coach Ridley.”

“What about him?”

“How long had it been going on, between the two of you?”

“There was nothing going on, really. I, like, pretended, but it was just a game. I already told you.”

“But when did it happen?”

“You mean when did we take the picture?” I nodded, and she shrugged. “Only last week.”

“Where?”

“It's a place up on Aurora, in Seattle. A motel.”

“How come he didn't see the flash?”

“Molly was outside, using her dad's camera. It doesn't need a flash.”

I didn't have nerve enough to look at Sister Eunice right then. I probably could have, though. She deals with teenage kids all the time. She's probably used to it. Me, I'm just a homicide cop. Right then, homicide seemed a hell of a lot more straightforward. The whole scenario of Darwin Ridley being led like a lamb to the slaughter because of some stupid adolescent game shocked me, offended me.

And I thought I'd seen everything.

“Who's Molly?” I asked.

“A friend of mine. My best friend. Molly Blackburn.”

“Also a cheerleader?”

Bambi nodded. “She lives right up the street from us. Will she get in trouble, too?”

I made a note of Molly Blackburn's name and address. Molly Blackburn, the budding photographer. Or maybe Molly Blackburn, the budding blackmailer—whichever.

“I can't say one way or the other,” I told her.

It was almost midnight when Sister Eunice led Bambi Barker back to her room. Bambi had started down the hall when Sister Eunice poked her head back in the door of the visiting room and asked me to wait long enough for her to return.

When she did, she ushered me out of the visiting room and down the long, empty corridor to a tiny kitchen and lounge. There she poured me a cup of acrid coffee that tasted like it had been in the pot for three weeks.

“Will you be returning to Seattle tonight, Detective Beaumont?” she asked.

I scratched my head and glanced at the movable cat's-eye clock above an equally dated turquoise refrigerator. It was well after eleven. We had spent a long, long evening with Bambi Barker. “It's late, but I suppose so.”

“And you're a man of honor?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, you won't be talking to
The Oregonian
before you leave Portland, will you?”

“I told Sister Marie Regina that as long as you helped me, I'd keep my mouth shut.”

Sister Eunice looked enormously relieved. “Good,” she said. “I'm very happy to hear it.”

So much for Bambi Barker's immortal soul. Sister Eunice had become my ally for far more worldly reasons than to keep Bambi's soul safe from hell and damnation. She had done it to keep Sister Marie Regina's Taurus station wagon off the editorial page. Situational ethics in action.

I took the rest of the coffee to drink in the car, remembering the old Bible verse about judging not and being without sin and all that jazz. After all, I had fired the first shot. And I couldn't argue with the results. I had gotten what I wanted from Bambi Barker.

As I started the Porsche, I realized how hungry I was. When I reached downtown Portland, I stopped off at a little joint on S.W. First, a place called the Veritable Quandary. I remembered it from the mid-seventies as a little tavern where they made great roast beef sandwiches and you could play pickup chess while you ate. Unfortunately, the eighties had caught up with it. The easygoing tavern atmosphere had evolved into a full-scale bar scene. The chessboards and magazines had long since disappeared. The sandwich was good, though, and it helped counteract Sister Eunice's bitter coffee.

It was only as I sat there in solitary silence, chewing on my roast beef, that I realized I had
never asked Bambi Barker how much her prize was for screwing Darwin Ridley. On second thought, I was probably better off not knowing.

Thinking about it spoiled my appetite. I didn't finish the sandwich.

T
here was a lot to think about on the way home. Bambi Barker had shaken me. I couldn't help wondering how I would have felt if I had discovered that my own daughter, Kelly, had been pulling something like that when she was in high school. Would I have taken the time to find out that the girls had been playing the teacher for a fool, or would I have jumped to the opposite conclusion?

There could be little doubt of the answer to that one. J. P. Beaumont has been known to jump to conclusions on occasion. Somebody by the name of Wheeler-Dealer Barker could very well suffer from the same malady.

In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I figured there was a better-than-even-money chance that Bambi's old man had jumped to his own erroneous and lethal conclusions. We
needed to know his whereabouts on Friday night and Saturday morning, while Bambi was locked in her room at home and her mother was standing guard.

Knowing of Molly Blackburn's existence helped answer one puzzling question. The idea that a father would have mailed out such a compromising picture of his own daughter had never made sense to me. I couldn't imagine any father doing such a thing, not even in the heat of anger. I had gone along with that suggestion when no other possibilities had presented themselves, but it made far more sense that the picture might have been part of a blackmail scheme, a complicated, two-sided deal aimed at wresting money from both families involved, the Barkers and the Ridleys.

It seemed likely that a copy of the picture had arrived at the Barker home sometime Friday morning. That was probably what had tipped off old Wheeler-Dealer. Joanna's had arrived days later. That was somewhat puzzling. Why the delay? If you're going to blackmail two different sets of people, why not do it simultaneously? Or maybe they had been mailed at the same time and the postal service had screwed up.

My questions defied any attempt to find answers, but they served to fill up the long straight stretches of interstate. There was hardly any traffic on the freeway at that time of
night. Just me and a bunch of eighteen-wheelers tearing up the road. I made it back to Seattle in a good deal less time than the three hours it should have taken.

I dropped into bed the minute I got to my apartment. It was three
A.M.
when I turned out the light and fell asleep.

Fifteen minutes later the phone rang, jarring me out of a sound sleep. “Please stay on the line,” a tinny, computerized female voice told me. Within moments, Ralph Ames' voice sputtered into the receiver. He sounded like somebody had just kicked him awake, too.

“What do you want?” he demanded in a groggy grumble.

“What do you mean, ‘What do I want'? You called me, remember?”

“Oh, I must have forgotten to turn that damn thing off when I went to bed.”

“What damn thing?” I wasn't playing with a full deck in this conversation.

“My automatic redialer.”

An automatic redialer! Ralph Ames' ongoing love affair with gadgets was gradually becoming clear to me. If my phone had been ringing off and on all night, it was probably quite clear to Ida Newell, my next-door neighbor, as well.

“That's just great,” I fumed. “I went to bed fifteen minutes ago, Ralph. What's so goddamned important that you woke us both up?”

“Your closing on Belltown Terrace. It's reset for Friday, three-thirty. Can you make it?”

I took a deep breath. “Sometimes you really piss me off. It's three o'clock in the morning. You expect me to have a calendar in my hand?”

“If you had an answering machine…”

“I don't want an answering machine.” I rummaged through the nightstand drawer for pen and paper and wrote down the time and place for the real estate closing. “There,” I said. “Is that all? Mind if I get some sleep now?”

“Be my guest,” Ames replied, then hung up.

A scant three hours later, the phone rang again. Once more I shook the fog out of my head. Eventually, I recognized Al Lindstrom's voice. Big Al, as we call him, is another detective on the homicide squad. He generally works the night shift.

“What do you mean calling me at this hour?” I'm crabby when I don't get my beauty sleep.

“Don't get your sweat hot, Beau. I've got someone on the line. She wants to talk to you. Real bad.”

“Look, Al. I've barely gotten into bed. Can't you take a message?”

“She wants to talk to you
now
.”

“Jesus H. Christ. Who is it? Can't you get
her name and number? I'll call her back as soon as I get to the office.”

“Just a minute. I'll ask” While he was off the line, I tried, with limited success, to rub my eyes open and unscramble my brain.

Eventually, Al returned to the line. “Says her name's Joanna Ridley. Says you can't call her. She wants to meet you in half an hour at the tennis courts in Seward Park”

“I'm still in bed, Al. I can't meet her in half an hour. Tell her I'll call her later.”

“It's too late.”

“Why?”

“She hung up.”

“Shit!” I rolled out of bed. “Thanks a whole hell of a lot,” I growled.

“Don't chew my ass,” Al returned. “I'm just doing my job.”

He slammed the phone down in my ear. I grabbed my nightstand telephone book and located Joanna's number, but when I finally dialed it, the line was busy. I tried several more times, but the line remained busy, leaving me to conclude that Joanna was serious about my not calling her back She had evidently left the phone off the hook.

I gave my pillow a reluctant farewell pat and headed for the shower. Exactly eleven minutes later, the Porsche and I shot out through the building garage entrance onto Lenora.

Morning fog was thick as velvet as I drove up Boren and out Rainier Avenue. At six twenty-five traffic coming into the city was already picking up, but I was driving against it. I wondered as I drove why Joanna had refused to see me at her house, and why she had picked such an early hour in a deserted city park for our meeting.

Seward Park sits on a point that juts out into Lake Washington. On a clear day, Mount Rainier sits majestically above the water, framed on either side by the house-covered ridges of South Seattle and Mercer Island. That particular morning, however, there was no hint that a mountain lay hidden out there. Invisible behind the fog, it lurked in a blanket of silence that was broken only by the occasional huffing of an early morning jogger.

I saw Joanna Ridley's Mustang right away, tucked into a parking place against the tennis court fence. The driver of the Mustang, however, was nowhere in sight. Parking the Porsche next to Joanna's car, I set out looking for her.

Blooming dogwood and daffodils lined the park's entrance. I walked along a hedge of
Photinia
, its new growth crimson above the older green leaves. The startling spring colors stood out in sharp relief against the shifting gray fog. The grass was heavy with dew,
sponging down beneath my feet as I walked along the breakwater.

The park seemed a lonely, desolate place for a new widow. The idea of suicide fleetingly crossed my mind. I wondered if Joanna had decided to end her own life. The thought had no more than entered my mind, however, when I spotted her near the water.

Wearing a huge sweater, she stood on the rock breakwater, profiled against the gray of both the fog and water behind her. A light breeze blowing off the lake pressed the sweater's soft material around the bulge in her middle, accentuating her pregnant figure. Unaware of my approach, she peered down from her perch at something in the water below her, something I couldn't see. When I finally got close enough to look below the breakwater, I found she was watching a flock of hungry ducks out bumming for handouts.

“You wanted to see me?” I asked.

Without warning, she whirled and sprang at me, clenching both fists as she did so. She moved so fast I was surprised she didn't lose her footing on the slippery, wet grass. Just in time I realized she was bringing a haymaker up from her knees, putting the full force of her body behind it. If she had landed that blow, it would have sent me flying.

My reflexes may not be what they used to be, but they were still good enough to save my
bacon. I dodged back, away from her doubled fist, which whizzed past my face within an inch of my nose. She came scrambling after me, her face a mask of hard, cold fury.

I had seen a similar version of that look once, that night in the Dog House after we left the medical examiner's office. That look was mild compared to this. Right then, Joanna Ridley appeared to be entirely capable of murder.

“It's about time you got here, you son of a bitch!”

I had expected our encounter to begin on a somewhat more cordial note. After all, I wasn't even late. I stepped back again, just to be on the safe side, staying well out of reach.

“What the hell's going on, Joanna? What's wrong?”

Her right hand shot toward the pocket of the voluminous sweater. My first thought was that she was going for a gun.

Once burned, twice shy. The last time I got burned by a lady with a gun, I came within inches of checking out for good.

With adrenaline pumping from every pore, I bounded forward and grabbed her wrists, pinning them to her sides before she had a chance to draw. Like a desperate, captive bird she struggled to escape my grasp. We must have stood like that for half a minute or so before I realized that what she had in the
pocket of her sweater was nothing more than a rolled-up section of newspaper.

She was still pulling against me with all her might when I let go of her wrists. She fell away from me toward the breakwater and would have fallen backward into the lake if I hadn't caught her. We fell to the ground together in a tumbled heap.

The fall knocked the wind out of her. For a moment she was silent, her dark eyes staring up at me in mute rage. When she caught her breath, she screamed. “Get away from me, you bastard. Get away!”

“Are you all right? Are you hurt?” I tried to break through her anger, but she didn't hear me. She kept right on screaming.

Suddenly, I was lifted off the ground. Someone grabbed me by the back of my shirt the way a mother dog grabs a puppy to carry it. Except puppies don't wear ties with knots that block their windpipes. I dangled in midair, coughing and choking.

From behind me, I heard someone say, “Hey, lady. This guy botherin' you?”

Joanna Ridley didn't answer him. I swung around, trying to break his hold, but the guy had arms like a gorilla. I couldn't lay a hand on him. I was about to black out when he dropped me to the ground like a sack of potatoes. I lay there for a moment, stunned and gasping, trying to force air back into my lungs.
When I looked up, a giant of a man was gently helping Joanna to her feet.

“I'm a police officer,” I sputtered. I reached for my ID, but my pocket was empty. The leather case had evidently fallen out in the course of the struggle.

“Yeah, and I'm Sylvester Stallone,” he returned. Joanna Ridley was on her feet and mercifully quiet. “You all right, lady?” he asked. “You want somebody to take you home?”

I crawled around on my hands and knees in the grass, searching for my ID. Finally, I located it, resting against a rock, just below where Joanna and I had fallen. I clambered to my feet and staggered over to where they stood. At six three, I'm no piker when it comes to size, but this guy made me look like a midget. Muscles bulged under his oversized T-shirt and rippled down his legs from under the skimpy running shorts he wore.

I tried to show him my ID, but he brushed me aside. “Get away from her before I call the cops.”

“Goddamn it, I
am
a cop. Detective J. P. Beaumont, Seattle P.D. Homicide.”

“No shit? Since when do cops go around beating up pregnant ladies in parks?”

I wouldn't have convinced him, not in a million years, but right then Joanna Ridley stopped her silent sobbing and, surprisingly,
spoke in my defense. “It's all right. I fell down. He caught me.”

The man bent down and looked her full in the face. “You sure, now? I can throw his ass in the water if you want. You say the word and I'll drown this sucker.”

“No. Really. It's all right.”

He stepped away then, reluctantly, looking from one of us to the other as if trying to figure out what was really going on. “Okay, then, if you say so.” Without another word, he turned on his heel and jogged away from us, running shoes squeaking on the wet grass.

Warily, I approached Joanna. “What's wrong? Tell me.”

Once again, she reached into the pocket. When her hand emerged, she was holding the newspaper. She was under control now, but her eyes still struck sparks of fury as she slapped the newspaper into my outstretched hand.

“I thought you said you'd keep it quiet.”

“Keep what quiet?”

“About what happened. I thought I could trust you, but you took it straight to the newspaper.”

“Joanna, what are you talking about?”

“The picture.”

“My God, is the picture in here?” Dismayed, I unrolled the newspaper.

“It just as well could be,” Joanna replied grimly.

I scanned down the page, the front page of the last section of the newspaper. The local news section. There on the bottom four columns wide, was Maxwell Cole's crime column, “City Beat.” The headline said it all:

“Sex Plus Race Equals Murder.”

I scanned through the article quickly, while Joanna Ridley watched my face. When I finished reading, I looked up at her. I was sickened. There could be no doubt from the article that Maxwell Cole had indeed seen the photograph of Darwin Ridley and Bambi Barker. All of Seattle could just as well have seen it. The article left little to the imagination. The only thing it didn't mention was Bambi Barker's name. Knowing Maxwell Cole, I figured Wheeler-Dealer's money and position in the community had something to do with that.