Improbable cause

CHAPTER 13

Something that always amuses me whenever I watch television or movie police dramas is the Hollywood version of the car chase scene. They make it look so easy. Traffic melts out of the hero’s way, letting him ride to the rescue just in time. Whatever doesn’t move is either crashed through or jumped over.

In real life, traffic doesn’t magically disappear, and municipalities frown on having their vehicles used in demolition derbies. That’s just not the way it works in real life. And it’s not the way it worked on Aurora Avenue that afternoon, either.

By the time I neared Green Lake, Aurora Avenue was stopped dead. One inattentive driver had rear-ended another, snarling the flow in both directions. So much for Big Al Lindstrom’s impromptu traffic advisory.

The City of Seattle is separated into sections by a string of interconnected lakes and channels-Lake Washington, the Montlake Cut, Lake Union, the Lake Washington Ship Canal, and Salmon Bay.

Damm Fine Carpets was on one side of the water. Naturally, I was on the other. With the Fremont Bridge closed to all traffic, I had no choice but to cut all the way across to Fifteenth in Ballard and cross the Ship Canal on the Ballard Bridge. Then I headed back toward Fremont on Nickerson.

And all the time I drove, my mind was racing. My justifiable homicide theory was pretty much out the window. Innocent people don’t panic and take hostages. LeAnn Nielsen had warned Larry Martin, and he had snapped. That meant the two of them were in it together. I knew where Larry Martin was. All of Seattle knew where Larry Martin was, but what about LeAnn?

Damn. I had let her walk out of the Hi-Spot Cafe with Alice Fields without getting so much as an address or phone number. If Sergeant Watkins was pissed now, it would be worse when I gave him that bit of information.

Just past Seattle Pacific University I ran into a roadblock. A uniformed police officer told me that a command post had been set up at the top of the hill on Dexter, just above the intersection where Dexter, Westlake, Fremont, and Nickerson converge. Now I was on the wrong side of Damm Fine Carpets from the command post. Some days are like that.

The patrolman let me pass. I eased my vehicle through a crowd of dismayed people. Some of them were from small neighboring businesses, including the beer-drinking late-lunch crowd from the 318 Tavern across the street, who mingled with stunned evacuees from a service in progress at the funeral home half a block away. It was certain to be one of the most memorable memorial services any of those people ever attended.

I inched around on steep, North Queen Anne side streets, trying to reach the command post. Finally, I gave up on driving altogether, parked on Fulton, and walked the last few blocks. There was the usual collection of news media types and curiosity seekers. They stood congregated just outside yet another set of barricades. I dashed through the gauntlet as fast as I could, looking neither right nor left.

When I broke free of the crowd, I had a clear view of the garage entrance to Damm Fine Carpets. There, parked under the steaming cup of billboard coffee, tucked in among several other vehicles, sat a bright red VW bug.

The backseat was stacked to the gills with boxes. A heap of clothing occupied the rider’s seat.

Larry Martin was there, all right.

Captain Dick Logan was speaking crisply into a hand-held microphone as I approached the command post vehicle. His barked orders were issued in a clipped but unperturbed manner.

“You’ve got everybody out of the funeral home now?” he asked into the mike.

“Affirmative on that. What next?”

“Hold tight until I verify that all the other buildings are empty. I’ll get back to you,” Dick said. He looked up then and saw me standing there. He raised one bushy black eyebrow. “It’s about time you showed up, Detective Beaumont. I understand from Sergeant Watkins that this guy’s a suspect of yours.”

I nodded.

“What do you know about him?“

“Not much,” I answered.

“Is he dangerous?”

“I don’t know. I can’t say. I thought he was pretty much an innocent bystander.”

“Like hell!” said an angry voice behind me. I swung around. There was Watty, his face grim, his mouth a thin, taut line. “You sure know how to pick ”em, Beaumont.“

I turned back to Logan. “Do you know if Martin’s armed?” I asked.

“Not for sure. The secretary said that she thought he was, but she couldn’t be positive.”

“Have you made voice contact yet?”

Logan shook his head. “Not so far.”

“What about the secretary? Where is she?”

Logan gestured with his head. “Over there, in one of the patrol cars. I had a detective take her statement.”

“Let me talk to her,” I said.

“Suit yourself,” Logan replied while his radio crackled with another report.

As I walked from the command post to a cluster of other police vehicles, I was aware of the television cameras following me. I resent doing this job in the glare of television lights. It makes me feel like an insect on a slab of glass under a microscope. All I can do is squirm helplessly while my every movement is examined and recorded.

I wonder sometimes how reporters would like it if the tables were suddenly turned, if we cops took the cameras away and pointed them in the other direction for a change. Would they enjoy being scrutinized while they do their jobs? I doubt it.

Cindy, Richard Damm’s secretary, was sitting in the backseat of a patrol car. It was hot, and the back door of the patrol car was wide open. I leaned down and looked inside. She was still blinking as much as ever, but the contacts were gone. In their place was a pair of incredibly thick-lensed glasses. She had evidently been crying. Both her nose and eyes were bright red.

“Hello, Cindy,” I said. “Remember me?”

“Detective Beaumont,” she wailed. “What’s going on? No one will tell me anything.”

“Why don’t you tell me what you know first?”

“Larry called in around a quarter to twelve. He told me he was quitting and he needed his check. I talked to Mr. Damm. He said not to give Larry anything until we got word from Nick about the damage to the van and until Larry returned all his tools. When I gave him the message, he went crazy. He said he’d see about that, that he’d take his money out of Mr. Damm’s hide if he had to. Fifteen minutes later, he showed up and barged into the office.”

“Captain Logan told me you thought he was armed.”

She nodded. “He was carrying something. It could have been a gun.”

“Could have been? You don’t know for sure?”

“No,” she answered. “My vision’s not that good.”

“What happened then?”

“He went inside and I heard them arguing. I remembered that you had been looking for him. I was scared, especially when I heard breaking glass. I thought maybe Mr. Damm was in danger, so I tried opening the door. It was locked from the inside. Larry yelled at me. He said to go away and leave them alone.”

“When you were there outside the door to the office, could you hear Mr. Damm at all?”

Cindy shook her head. “I’m not sure. I heard something about burning the place down. That’s when I called the police. Did I do the right thing?”

“I’m sure you did,” I reassured her.

“What if Mr. Damm is lying in there dead?” With that, she buried her face in her hands and burst into tears. There was no sense in trying to talk to her anymore, at least not right then.

“You stay here,” I told her. “I’ll come back and tell you just as soon as we know anything.”

I straightened up and looked around. I wasn’t looking for anyone in particular, but when I caught sight of Nick Wallace, I wanted to talk to him. He was standing by himself on a ragged patch of grass on the other side of Dexter, gazing longingly at the corrugated iron door on his precious garage. With hands resting on the hips of his blue coveralls and chin hanging dejectedly on his chest, he looked like someone who had just lost his best friend.

“Hey, Nick,” I called to him as I approached. “How’s it going?”

He turned and looked at me, shaking his head. “Not worth a shit,” he said. “Three of my vans are inside. They wouldn’t let me move ”em out. And all the tools too. I’ve got first-rate tools in there. It would take years to replace ‘em. One of the cops told me he’s threatening to burn the place down.“

I could see that Nick was a whole lot more concerned about his vans and his tools than he was about his job. Who says pride in workmanship is dead?

“He won’t burn it down,” I said. “Not if we can help it.”

I glanced across the street at Damm Fine Carpets, its grilled windows blindly reflecting back the noonday sun, making the building look like an impregnable fortress. Even close up, the small windows were far too high to give any hint of what was going on behind them.

Suddenly, I had an idea. “Is the inside door locked, the one from the garage into the warehouse?”

“Of course it’s locked. What do you think I am, some kind of dummy?”

“Does Logan know that?”

“Who’s he?”

“Captain Logan, the guy over there with the van. He’s in charge of the Emergency Response Team.”

“I don’t know if anybody told him or not,” Nick replied with a shrug. “Nobody asked me.”

An idea was beginning to form in my head. “When you talk to Mr. Damm, how do you do it?”

Nick was incensed. “What do you think? I open my mouth and the words come out, just like I’m doing with you.”

“No,” I said. “You don’t understand. Do you go to his office or what?”

“I call him on the intercom.”

“You don’t have to go through his secretary?”

“Hell no. You think I should have an appointment to tell him somebody’s clutch went out?”

“Come with me, Nick. I need your help.”

We hurried over to the van. Captain Logan had deployed his men. Now he stood with a bullhorn in hand, ready to establish voice contact.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Let me try something.”

“What?”

“Give me a chance to go in there and talk to him.”

“No way,” Logan replied. “It’s out of the question.” He noticed Nick Wallace standing behind me. “Who’s he? What’s he doing here? Get him back on the other side of the barricades.”

“He works in there,” I said. “He runs the garage. He can let me in the back way. I can talk to Martin on his intercom.”

“I told you no, Beaumont. I’m not endangering his life or yours.”

“How many of your men have ever been inside this building?” I asked.

“None,” Logan replied.

“Well, I have. I was in there yesterday afternoon, as a matter of fact. I happen to know there’s an interior door between the warehouse and the garage. It’s always locked from this side.”

“Jesus Christ!” Logan exploded. “Why didn’t someone tell me that before?”

“There’s an intercom, too,” I added. Logan was listening now, his heavy eyebrows knitted in concentration.

“An intercom connected to that room, the one he’s in?” he asked.

“That’s right. I’ve been in there too.”

Logan looked at me for a long minute, then ducked his head into the van. “Hand me a couple of those bulletproof vests,” he ordered.

He came back out of the van holding two vests. He handed one to me and gave the other to Nick. “Wear this if you’re going to be here,” he said to Wallace. Logan turned back to me. “What if he’s had time to break through the door into the garage?” he asked.

“It’s a risk I’m willing to take,” I told him, shrugging my way into the vest.

Logan shook his head. “I hate to do it, but at least you know where to look. That’s more than my guys do. You’re not going in by yourself, though. I’ll send Howell in with you. Howell and Perez.”

“Fine,” I said. “Let’s do it.”

“I can’t go?” Nick asked, disappointed.

“No,” I answered, “you can’t, but give me your keys.”

He pulled a long, heavy key chain out of his pocket and handed it to me. There must have been at least twenty-five keys on it. I gave it right back to him.

“Take off the two I need,” I said. “One for the outside door and one for inside.”

While Wallace struggled to extricate the keys, I looked back at the building. The yellow walls were blank and forbidding. Logan was right: there had been plenty of time for Martin to have broken into the garage if he wanted to. And if he had, we could be walking straight into a trap.

Don’t think I wasn’t scared. I was. Cops are human. They don’t put their lives on the line without being scared. But if anyone was going to go into Damm Fine Carpets and talk to Larry Martin, I was the one to do it. I was the only officer at the scene who knew the first thing about the inside of that building. Besides, it was my erroneous presumption of Larry Martin’s innocence that had gotten us into the mess in the first place.

Nick finally handed me two loose keys. I slipped the key to the inside door into my coat pocket and kept the outside one in my hand.

“Where’s the intercom, Nick?” I asked.

“Over on the workbench, right beside the telephone.”

“And how do I work it?”

“Just press down on the white button and call. He’ll be able to hear you.”

“And will I be able to hear him?”

“Only if he presses the button in his office.”

By the time I turned back around with the keys, Officers Howell and Perez were lined up and ready to move out.

“No heroics, now, Beaumont,” Logan cautioned. “Just get my guys close enough to that room so they can lay down a couple of tear-gas canisters. That’s all you need to do. You got that?”

“Got it,” I said.

With Nick Wallace’s key in one hand and my. 38 Smith and Wesson in the other, I couldn’t cross my fingers.

I crossed my toes instead.