Trial By Fury

CHAPTER 16

I put Joanna Ridley in her car and told her to go on home, that I'd call her as soon as I knew anything.

As she started the Mustang, I motioned for her to roll down the window. "Don't forget to put your phone back on the hook," I told her. She gave me a half-hearted wave and drove away.

I started the Porsche and rammed it into gear. My first instinct was to find Maxwell Cole, beat the crap out of him, and find out who the big mouth was, either in the crime lab or in Seattle P.D. Somebody had leaked the information.

I drove straight to the Post-Intelligencer's new digs down on Elliott, overlooking Puget Sound. Eight o'clock found me standing in front of a needle-nosed receptionist who told me Maxwell Cole wasn't expected in before ten. I should have known a slug like Cole wouldn't be up at the crack of dawn.

Rather than hang around the newspaper and cool my heels, I went down to the Public Safety Building. I stopped at the second floor and stormed into the crime lab.

Don Yamamoto, head of the Washington State Patrol's crime lab, is a criminalist of the first water. He's one of those second-generation Japanese who, as a kid, was incarcerated along with his parents in a relocation camp during World War II. He spent all his spare time during the years they were locked up reading the only book available to him-a Webster's unabridged dictionary-and he came out of the camp with a far better education than he probably would have gotten otherwise.

He's a smart guy, smart and personable both, well respected by those who work for and with him. The receptionist waved me past without bothering to give me an official escort. As usual, the door to Yamamoto's office stood open. I knocked on the frame.

"Hey, Beau, how's it going?" he asked, looking up from a stack of paperwork on his desk.

"Not well," I answered. "We've got troubles." I laid it on the line to him. He listened without comment. When I finished, he sat back in his chair, folding his arms behind his head.

"I think you're wrong, Beau. That story didn't come from this office. None of my people go running off at the mouth."

He got up and led the way to the evidence room. He stopped at the doorway long enough to examine the log. "Only two people actually handled that photograph," he said. "One was Janice Morraine, and the other is Tom Welch. Either of those sound like people who'd be messing around with the likes of Maxwell Cole?"

I shook my head. I knew them both fairly well. I had to agree with their chief's assessment.

"So how did Max get the story?"

"Why don't you go straight to the horse's mouth and ask him that question?" Don suggested.

"I tried that. He wasn't in."

"So try again."

I turned on my heels and walked out of his office. Standing in the elevator lobby waiting for the door to open, I was surprised when the door behind me opened. Don Yamamoto followed me into the corridor. "But you'll let me know if you find out something I need to know, right?" he asked.

Don Yamamoto trusted his people implicitly. Up to a point.

I chuckled. "Yes," I answered. "I'll let you know."

It was eight-forty when I reached Peters' and my cubicle on the fifth floor. Peters glanced meaningfully at his watch. Having a partner can be worse than having to punch a time clock. Time clocks don't expect explanations.

"Get off it," I told him before he had a chance to open his mouth. "I got back from Portland at three this morning, and I've been up working since six, so don't give me any shit."

"My, my, we are touchy this morning," Peters said with a grin. "So tell me what you learned in Portland."

I did. All of it. By the time I finished telling him about the cheerleading squad's nasty little rite of passage, he wasn't nearly as cheerful as he had been. In fact, he was probably wondering about the advisability of having daughters.

"I talked to all those girls," he said. "They seemed like nice, straight, clean-cut kids."

"You can't tell a book by its cover, remember?"

"Right, so what do we do? Tackle Wheeler-Dealer? Go have a heart-to-heart talk with Molly Blackburn? Read the writing in the locker?"

I got up and glanced over the top of the cubicle walls to the clock at the end of the room. It was five to ten. "All of the above," I told him, "but not necessarily in that order. We're starting with Maxwell Cole, bless his pointed little head."

We dropped the Porsche off at my place and took a departmental crate to the P.I. It turned out Maxwell Cole's pointed head was nowhere within striking distance. The same scrawny receptionist gave me an icy smile and told me Mr. Cole was out on an assignment. She had no idea when he'd be back. Lucky for him.

We left there and drove to Mercer Island, figuring we'd make a brief visit to Wheeler-Dealer Barker's home on our way to his dealership in Bellevue. The address jotted in Peters' notebook led us to a stately white colonial on a lot that seemed to be several sizes too small. A multinote chime playing "The Yellow Rose of Texas" announced our arrival. A plain, small-boned woman wearing a long honey-colored robe came to the door.

Her mousy blonde hair was still damp from a shower, and her face was devoid of makeup. Her nose was shiny, her eyes red-rimmed. This was a lady who had been having a good cry in the privacy of her own home. She looked up at us anxiously.

"Are you Mrs. Barker?" I asked. " Mrs. Tex Barker?" I held out my identification so she could read it.

"I'm Madeline Barker," she returned.

"May we come in?"

She stepped away from the door uncertainly before finally motioning us inside. We entered a large, well-appointed vestibule, complete with a huge bouquet of fragrant spring flowers.

"What is it?" she asked.

I think I had expected Mrs. Wheeler-Dealer Barker to speak with a thick southern drawl. I would have thought she'd offer us coffee with chicory and maybe a mess of grits or black-eyed peas. I was dismayed to discover that all trace of her origins had been eradicated from Madeline's manner of speech. Grits and chicory were nowhere in evidence.

"It's about your husband," I told her. "Your husband and your daughter."

I said nothing more. A mixture of distress and confusion washed over Madeline Barker's face. Reflexively, she clenched her fists tightly and shoved them deep into the pockets of her robe.

"What about them?" she asked, her voice cracking as she struggled to maintain an outward show of calm.

"Would you mind telling us exactly what went on here Friday afternoon?"

She turned her back on us then and walked as far as the doorway into the next room. Stopping abruptly, she leaned against the wall for support, her breath coming in short panicky gasps.

Peters moved toward her. He spoke in a gently reassuring manner. "We're trying to resolve a homicide, Mrs. Barker. Darwin Ridley's. As I'm sure you know, your daughter was involved to some degree. We need to find out exactly…"

Madeline Barker suddenly found her voice and swung around to face us. "You don't think…Bambi couldn't have done it. She was here, in her room, all night. She never went out."

"We're aware of that. You see, we've already talked to your daughter."

"Oh," she said. "Then what are you doing here? Why are you still asking questions?"

"Was your husband here all night, too?" I asked.

She paled suddenly and retreated farther into the living room, instantly creating a larger physical buffer zone between my question and her.

"What do you mean?" she demanded. "You think Tex had something to do with it?"

"If you'd just answer the question, Mrs. Barker. Was your husband here in the house with you all night or was he gone part of the time?"

Madeline Barker pulled herself stiffly erect. "I won't answer that," she said. "I don't have to."

There are times when no answer speaks volumes. This was one of those times. Tex "Wheeler-Dealer" Barker had not been home all night the night Darwin Ridley died, of that we could be certain. That gave Barker two of the necessary ingredients for murder-motive and opportunity. When had he left the house and what time had he returned? Those were questions in need of answering. For right then we seemed to have taken a giant step toward getting some answers.

Peters did what he could to soothe Madeline Barker's ruffled feathers. "You're absolutely right, Mrs. Barker. You don't have to answer that question if you don't want to," he told her reassuringly.

The questioning process, conducted in pairs, is a subtle game. Peters and I had learned to play it well, using one another as foils or fall guys with equal ease. The slight nod he gave me said we were shifting to Good Cop/Bad Cop, and I was the bad guy.

"Could you tell us about the picture, then, Mrs. Barker?" I asked.

"Picture?"

"You know which picture, Mrs. Barker. We've seen it, and I'm sure you have, too."

I've learned over the years that if someone doesn't want to talk about one thing, you give them an opportunity to talk about something else. They fall all over themselves spilling their guts. Madeline Barker was happy to oblige.

She made no further attempt to pretend she didn't know what we were talking about. "It came in the mail," she admitted. "About ten o'clock that morning."

"Here? To the house?"

She nodded. "It was addressed to both of us, so I opened it. I couldn't believe my eyes. Bambi's always been such a good girl."

"Was there anything else in the envelope besides the picture?" I asked. "A note maybe? A demand for money?"

"No. Nothing. Just the picture. That awful picture."

"Where is it now?" Peters inquired.

"It's gone," she replied.

"Gone?"

" Tex told me to get rid of it. I burned it."

"And the envelope?"

"That, too. In the kitchen sink. I ran the ashes down the garbage disposal. That's what it was," she added. "Garbage."

"Let's go back to when you opened the envelope," I put in. "What happened then?"

Madeline Barker took a deep breath. "I was so upset, I didn't know what to do. So I called Tex. At work."

"And what did he do?"

"He came right home."

"To look at the picture?"

"Yes."

"And then what?"

"He went to school to get Bambi. To bring her home."

"He was angry?"

"Angry! He was crazy. Bambi wasn't like Faline. Bambi was never a problem. She was always a good student, always popular, easy to get along with. And then this. I was afraid Tex would have a heart attack over it. He already has high blood pressure, you know."

"What happened when he brought her here?"

"There was a fight, a terrible fight. She said she was going to the game no matter what we said, that we couldn't stop her."

"And that's when he locked her in her room?"

Madeline nodded, then turned an appraising look on me. For the first time I think she realized that we had already heard the story once from Bambi, that we were simply verifying information we already knew.

"Who came up with the idea of sending her to Portland?" I asked.

"I did," Madeline answered firmly. "We've fallen away from the church, but I wanted her away from that man. I wanted her out of town. I called my sister. She's in a convent in Texas. She helped us arrange it."

We didn't stay much longer after that. Madeline Barker had told us as much as she could, or at least as much as she would. There was no need to pressure her any more than we already had.

Once back in the car, Peters turned on the engine, then paused with his hand on the gearshift. "She still thinks Darwin Ridley seduced her daughter." Neither one of us had bothered to mention that it was the other way around.

I shrugged. "It won't be long before she finds out differently, especially with the likes of Maxwell Cole hanging around."

Peters drove us away from the Barker house. "That raises another question, doesn't it?"

"What does?"

"The picture. Why wasn't there a note? That bothers me. Blackmail requires communication-two-way communication. According to what Joanna Ridley told us, there wasn't a note with her picture, either. How can it be blackmail?"

"How should I know? These are a bunch of school kids. Maybe they don't know all the ropes yet. They're just talented amateurs trying to break into the big time."

"They've broken into it, all right," Peters commented grimly. "Murder's pretty big time."

I allowed as how that was true.