Improbable cause

CHAPTER 18

That night after work I finally got myself up to Bailey’s Foods on Queen Anne Hill to buy some groceries. I also made a foray across the street to the state liquor store to restock my depleted supply of MacNaughton’s. Bailey’s has installed one of those yuppie salad bars, so I treated myself to a huge taco salad-the kind my mother never used to make.

I went straight home and ate a medium-elegant dinner, served at my new glass-and-brass dining room table. I ate the salad from the chinette deli plate and drank my glass of chilled Vouvray from crystal stemware. It’s no surprise that after dinner I ended up falling asleep in my recliner. I spend more time there than I do in my bed.

I have no idea what time I fell asleep, but I know when I woke up-eleven. The phone on the table beside me was ringing its head off. I caught it just before the answering machine did.

“Hello,” I mumbled.

“So it is you,” a woman’s voice announced. I’m not sure how she recognized my voice from that one-word grunted greeting. I sure as hell didn’t know who she was, but I could hear the tiny telltale beeps that said she was calling from the security phone downstairs in the lobby.

“Who is this?” I asked.

“Darlene,” she answered.

“Darlene who?” I couldn’t recall anyone by that name. “I think maybe you’ve got the wrong apartment,” I said.

“Darlene from across the street, remember?” she asked, sounding offended. “The one who brought you your pork chop sandwich the other night. Are you going to let me in or not?”

Darlene from across the street. It finally made sense-the bartender from Girvan’s.

“I’ll buzz you in,” I said. I pressed the entry code on my phone, realizing as soon as I did so that I had failed to tell her what floor. As a security measure, Belltown Terrace has no listing of the tenants’ names and apartment numbers either on the reader-board or in the lobby.

I was sure the phone would ring again, and I wasn’t disappointed.

“Where the hell are you?” she demanded before I even had a chance to say hello.

“Twenty-fifth floor,” I replied. “Turn left as you get off the elevator.”

I pulled my jacket back on, straightened my collar, slipped shoes back on my feet, and went out to the hallway to meet her.

The twenty-fifth floor happens to be the penthouse floor. The interior design is slightly more upscale than the elevator lobbies on the other residential floors. It’s supposed to make a statement. It evidently worked. Darlene Girvan popped her head out into the elevator lobby, looked around, and whistled.

“I’ll be go-to-hell,” she said.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“You really do own a piece of this place, don’t you! I thought the other night you were just bullshitting that creep from Texas.“ Unceremoniously, she shoved a brown paper bag in my direction.

“I brought dinner,“ she said.

I didn’t have the heart to tell her I’d already eaten. Besides, it seemed like a long time ago, hours I think.

“Thank you,” I said. “How about a drink?”

“Thought you’d never ask,” she replied.

“What do you like?”

“What have you got?”

“MacNaughton’s,” I answered.

“That’ll do.” With that she marched into my apartment and took over. She went straight to the kitchen, found two plates, and laid out two gigantic, pork chop sandwiches with their fat sesame-seed-dotted buns, one for her and one for me.

“Quite a place you have here,” she commented over her shoulder as she prowled through my cupboards searching for glasses. I brought the MacNaughton’s into the kitchen from the bar and set it on the counter.

“It’ll do,” I said.

She grinned at that. “You think you’re cute, don’t you.”

“Hardly,” I told her. “It’s tough for cops to be cute. It goes against the image.”

Darlene laughed aloud and handed me my drink. As she did so, her fingers brushed against mine in a way that couldn’t have been accidental. I took a trial sip. MacNaughton’s and water, just the way I like it-heavy on the booze, light on the water.

“Actually,” she said, “that’s really why I came here to talk to you.”

I was still thinking about her fingers. My face must have been totally blank as I tried to sort out what she was really saying.

“Your job,” she said, looking at me over the rim of the glass as she sipped her own drink.

“You are that

Detective Beaumont, aren’t you? The one who works for homicide? How can a cop afford to live in a place like this?“

Before I could answer she did an abrupt change of subject that left me standing with one foot in the air. “Can these plates go in the microwave? The sandwiches should probably be zapped for thirty seconds or so.”

“Sure,” I said.

I stood there stupidly, holding my drink, while she keyed in the microwave instructions. “Nice layout,” she said.

“A real slick layout.“

The way she said it, she could have been talking about the kitchen, but I don’t believe that’s what she meant. There was another whole level to Darlene Girvan’s conversation, one that had nothing to do with kitchens-or pork chop sandwiches either, for that matter. When the sandwiches came out of the microwave, she carried them to the table while I trailed along behind, carrying the drinks.

“You said you wanted to talk to me about homicide?” I asked after we were seated.

She took a bite out of her sandwich and nodded. “Sure,” she said. “Henry told me you wanted to talk to me.”

“Henry?”

She shook her head impatiently, making me feel like a first-class dummy. “Henry Calloway, the manager at Cedar Heights. That’s where I live.”

“Oh, him,” I said. “So we’re neighbors.”

“That’s right. Come on over and borrow a cup of sugar anytime.”

If we were going to play double entendre, I was definitely out of my league. I went searching for solid ground.

“I don’t remember seeing you when we went through the building.”

“I work at night and sleep during the day. I’d have killed Calloway if he’d let you guys wake me up early.”

“But he told you I wanted to talk to you?”

She nodded. “That’s right. He said you wanted to talk to anyone who might have seen something out of the ordinary on Saturday afternoon. Here I am.”

“I gave him my phone number at the department. How’d you find me here?”

She grinned. “Easy. When he told me your name, I remembered it from the other night. I wondered if maybe you two were related or something. I tried calling the department, but you weren’t in. Then I tried looking you up in the phone book. You weren’t listed. Nobody named Beaumont was. That’s what made me figure you really were a cop. I mean, cops don’t usually put their phone numbers out there in front of God and everybody. Maybe I should give up tending bar and become a detective. What do you think?”

“We’ll take it under advisement,” I said.

“So that’s when I came over here looking for you,” she continued. “I tried first this afternoon right after I woke up, but you weren’t home.”

“Tried what?”

“I came over here to talk to you. I called on the phone from downstairs, but you weren’t home. When the answering machine came on, I hung up. I don’t talk to answering machines. I hate answering machines. They piss me off.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, trying to pull the threads of her story into some understandable, cohesive whole. “Start over again from the beginning. Why did Calloway tell you to get in touch with me?”

“Because I asked him when he was going to get off his ass and post speed-limit signs in the parking garage like he’s supposed to.”

Maybe that answered my question for her, but it didn’t help me at all.

“I don’t understand what speed-limit signs and Henry Calloway have to do with me.”

“Because he almost ran me down, goddammit.”

“Who did?”

“Some little asshole wearing a brown hat almost ran me down in the parking garage about one-thirty Saturday afternoon. I mean, I almost died. I was carrying two bags of groceries. You know, bread and eggs and cigarettes, and I dropped one of the bags trying to get out of the way. Broke most of the eggs. Bruised my hip, too. Want me to show you?”

“No thanks. Later maybe.”

I could feel the quick catch of excitement in my throat. It was the right time. And the Cedar Heights garage was the right place. “Go on,” I urged.

“Anyway, he must have opened the garage door from the second or third level, because it was already open when he came around the corner. He didn’t have to wait for it. Otherwise, I’d have caught up with that sucker, dragged him out of his fancy little car, and beaten the holy crap out of him.”

“What kind of car?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Beats me. Some kind of foreign job. Not cheap, I don’t think, but I can’t say for sure. We never had any of those in Butte, Montana, when I was growing up, I can tell you that. I know Fords from Chevys from Buicks, but I can’t tell one foreign car from another. Can you?”

“Sometimes,” I said. “Did you get the license number?”

“Only the first three letters. KRE something.

That’s all I could see. He knocked me flat on my ass.“

“Three letters. Did you get any of the numbers?”

“Goddammit, I was sitting there on a pile of broken eggs, and you think I should have gotten the whole fucking license number? What do you think I am? You ready for another drink?”

Darlene got up abruptly and went to the kitchen, taking both our glasses with her. While she was gone, I managed to marshal my thoughts into some kind of reasonable order. I had asked Henry Calloway to report anything unusual. A hit-and-run in a private, secured garage right around the time of the murder was most unusual indeed. Calloway had been right-on-the-money to send Darlene Girvan in my direction.

“Did you recognize the car? Does it belong to one of the residents of the building, then?” I asked as she came back to the table.

“I wasn’t on the residential side,” she said. “What made you think I was there?”

“You live there, don’t you? As I understand it, the residential parking lot is under the residential tower.”

“I do live there, but we have an extra car. There aren’t enough parking places in the residential garage, so we lease an extra space on the commercial side.”

“Tell me exactly what happened,” I said.

“I went up the hill to the store. When I came back, I stopped on P-l, the first level, to unload the stuff into a cart. It was Saturday afternoon. I figured I was probably the only person in the place, so I stopped right beside the elevator door.

“All of a sudden, I hear a crash and then this car comes screaming up from downstairs like a bat out of hell. I mean, he was moving! I heard him coming from down below, his tires were squealing like mad. I tried to get out of the way, but as he came around the corner, he skidded. He was coming so fast, I thought he was going to hit me or the wall. I had to jump straight up to get out of his way.”

“You say it was a man wearing a hat?”

She nodded. “It’s not very well lit in the garage on weekends, but it looked to me like maybe a state patrol hat.”

“Are there any state patrol officers living or working in your building?”

Darlene shook her head. “Henry doesn’t know of any. I already asked. So anyway, I figured, since whoever it was had a garage door opener, I’d be able to go down to the garage this week and find the car. I was going to leave a nasty note for the son of a bitch. But the car never showed up. I didn’t think that much about it until today when I talked to Henry. He said maybe it had something to do with the murder.”

“He could very well be right,” I said. “You’re sure you only remember the first three letters of the license number. KRE. Was it a Washington license?”

“I’m sure of that. Not one of the new ones. An old one, green and white.”

“And the car. Can you remember anything at all about it?”

“It was dark colored. Maybe black or navy blue. I couldn’t be sure. And like I told you, it was foreign. I prefer American cars myself.”

“Was there anything at all distinctive about the car, anything that would help you identify it if you saw it again?”

“The back bumper looked like hell. He must have put it in the wrong gear when he took it out of park and smashed into the wall. That’s all I saw.”

“Can you remember anything about the man who was driving?”

“He wore glasses. I remember they caught the light as he came around the corner. That’s it.”

There was a short silence. I was trying to decide if there were any other questions I should ask. It was hard to concentrate, however. Darlene Girvan was looking at me speculatively.

“Henry’s right, isn’t he? The car does have something to do with the murder.”

“Possibly,” I answered. “And you can bet I’m going to get busy and check it out the first thing in the morning.”

“What are you going to do between now and then?” she asked.

Instantly we were back into one of Darlene Girvan’s multilayered conversations, and I was losing ground.

“Sleep,” I said. “I’m going to sleep. I’ve had a hell of a day. As a matter of fact, I’ve had a hell of a week.”

“And will you be sleeping by yourself?”

I still don’t know quite how to navigate the shoals in this modern, Women’s Lib world where women are free to ask for what they want. It catches me off guard whenever it happens.

“For the time being,” I said.

“You’re not interested?” she asked.

“I never said I wasn’t interested. Wary’s more like it. Once burned, twice shy.”

“You’ve been burned?”

“On occasion.”

“So I wasted my pork chop sandwich?”

“I wouldn’t say wasted,” I told her. “You’ve certainly got my attention.”

She set her glass down in the middle of her plate. “I’m in the market for more than attention,” she said, getting up. She took both our plates to the kitchen and put them in the sink.

“I’d better be going, then,” she said. “They’ll be looking for me.” She walked to the door and paused there, with her hand on the knob.

“I don’t seem to handle rejection very well,” she said thoughtfully. “I’m not used to being turned down.”

I’m sure she wasn’t used to it. I wasn’t used to doing it, either. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. “Don’t worry about it,” I told her. “I’m just basically shy when it comes to women.”

“Not gay?”

“Definitely not gay. Shy,” I repeated.

“So this isn’t a permanent turndown?”

“No.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well, in that case, you know where to find me in case you get over it.” She left then, quickly, closing the door behind her.

More stupid than shy, I thought, standing there in the entryway, staring at the closed door.

A hell of a lot more stupid.