Trial By Fury

CHAPTER 24

The Foster Golf Course in Tukwila was the only place a couple of rank amateurs could get a toehold and a tee time on a sunny Saturday afternoon in March. We chased balls for eighteen holes' worth and were more than happy to call it quits. Ames wanted a hamburger. Just to be mean, I dragged him to what used to be Harry and Honey's Dinky Diner, until Honey ran Harry off and removed his name from the establishment. We had cheap hamburgers before returning to my apartment late in the afternoon.

On the kitchen counter, the little red light on my new answering machine was blinking cheerfully, announcing a message. Grudgingly, I punched the play button and waited to see what would happen. The machine blinked again, then burped, whirred, and beeped.

"Beau, I just…" a voice began, followed by the dial tone and then an operator's voice announcing, "If you wish to place a call, please hang up and dial again. If you need help, hang up and dial your operator."

Ames came out of the bathroom and wandered into the kitchen just as I punched the play button again. "Who was it?" he asked.

"I don't know. I think it's Peters," I told him. "He sounded funny, though. Hang on a minute. I'm playing it again."

When I heard the message the second time, I was sure the caller was Peters, but once more he was cut off, practically in mid-word.

"That's all?" Ames asked. "Are there any other messages?"

"No, just this one."

I picked up the phone and dialed Peters' number in Kirkland. Tracie, Peters' older daughter, answered the phone instantly. Disappointment was evident in her voice when she realized I wasn't her father.

"Oh, hi, Uncle Beau. Is my daddy with you?" she asked.

"No, he's not."

"When will he be home?"

"I don't have any idea, sweetie. Let me talk to Mrs. Edwards."

"She's taking a nap. I'm taking care of Heather for her. Should I wake her up?"

"No, never mind. She's probably tired. I'll call back later." I hung up.

"He's still not there?" Ames asked.

"No, and that message on the machine has me worried."

Ames nodded. "Me, too. Mind playing it again?"

I did. It proved to be no different from the first two times we had heard it. The message simply ended in mid-sentence with no reason given.

"You're right. It sounds strange," Ames commented after the message had finished playing. "He seemed upset."

"That's what I thought, too. I've got a bad feeling about all this."

"Why not try the department once more," Ames suggested. "Maybe he showed up there while we were out playing golf."

I tried, but no such luck. No one had heard from him. For a long time I stood with the phone in my hand, my dialing finger poised above the numbers, wondering what I should do. There was a big part of me that wanted to go on living in a fool's paradise, believing that everything was hunky-dory, that Peters was just getting his rocks off with Andi Wynn and didn't care if the sun rose or set. But there was another part of me, the partner part of me, that said something was wrong. Dead wrong.

I finally dialed Sergeant Watkins at home. Watty has been around Homicide two years longer than I have. He's virtually unflappable. "What's up, Beau?" he asked when he knew who was on the phone.

As briefly as possible I summarized what I knew, that Peters had stayed out all night, that he had been fine when he dropped off the departmental vehicle at nine, that he had been seen on the fifth floor in the company of a young woman, and that he had left an abortive message on my answering machine at home.

"So what are you proposing?" Watty asked when I finished my recitation.

"File a missing persons report for starters," I said.

"Missing persons or sour grapes?" he asked.

"Watty, I'm serious about this. It's not like him to go off and not bother to call home."

"Now look here, Beau. Let's don't hit panic buttons. You know as well as I do how long it's been since Peters' wife took off. And you know, too, that he's had his hands full with those two kids of his. In other words, he hasn't been getting any. Give the guy a break."

"But Watty…"

"But Watty nothing. We don't accept missing persons reports for at least twenty-four hours. You told me yourself that Andy Taylor saw him at nine o'clock last night. Nine o'clock is still a good five hours away. If you go ahead and file a report, he'll probably show up and be pissed as hell that you're advertising his love life all over the department."

"But…" I tried again.

"No, and that's final."

Watty hung up and so did I.

"I take it he didn't think much of the idea," Ames observed mildly.

"Right."

I paced over to the window and stared down at the street below. It was Saturday and the area of the city around my building was like a deserted village. No cars moved on the street. No pedestrians wandered the sidewalks. Only a live bum kept company with the bronze one in the tiny park at the base of what I call the Darth Vader Building at Fourth and Lenora.

"So what are you going to do?" Ames asked. "Are we just going to sit around here and do nothing?"

"No, we're not," I replied. "I'm going to go to Candace Wynn's place, pry that worthless bastard out of the sack, and knock some sense into him. After that, I'll hold a gun to his head and make him call his kids."

Ames nodded. "Sounds reasonable to me," he said.

"Are you coming along, or not?" I asked.

Ames shook his head. "I think you'd better take me over to Kirkland and drop me off at Peters' house. You've got a bad feeling about it, and so do I. Somebody should be there with his kids, just in case."

One look at Ames ' set expression told me his mind was made up. I shoved the paper with Andi Wynn's address into my pocket. "Good thinking," I agreed. "Let's get going." After I jotted down Candace Wynn's address from the file, Ames and I took off.

I didn't let any grass grow under my steel-belted radials as we raced across the Evergreen Point Bridge toward Kirkland. For a change there was hardly any traffic. The needle on the Porsche's speedometer hovered around seventy-five most of the way there. I screeched off the Seventieth Street exit on 405 and slid to a stop in front of Peters' modest suburban rambler.

I glanced at Ames. His ashen color told me we had made the trip in record time.

Heather and Tracie were out in the front yard tossing a frisbee back and forth. They dashed over to the car, pleased to see me and thrilled to see Ames. Ralph was the person who had bailed them out of their mother's religious commune in Broken Springs, Oregon. He is also one of the world's softest touches as far as little girls are concerned. They look on him as one step under Santa Claus and several cuts above the Tooth Fairy.

The two of them smothered him with hugs and kisses while he scrambled out of the Porsche.

"Call as soon as you can," he said, leaning back inside the car to speak to me. "I'll hold the fort here."

As I turned the car around in the driveway, he was walking up the sidewalk into the house with a brown-haired child dangling from each arm. Ames is my attorney, but he's also one hell of a good friend. He somehow manages to be in the right place at the right time, just when I need the help. No matter what was going on with Peters, Heather and Tracie couldn't have been in better hands.

Relieved, I flew back across the bridge. My mind was going a mile a minute, rehearsing my speech, the scathing words which would tell Detective Ron Peters in no uncertain terms that I thought he was an unmitigated asshole. In my mind's ear, I made a tub-thumping oration, covering the territory with pointed comments about rutting season and bitches in heat. In my practice run, Andi Wynn didn't get off scot-free, either. Not by a long shot!

The area west of the Fremont Bridge and north of the Ship Canal is a part of Seattle that hasn't quite come to grips with what it wants to be when it grows up. There's a dog food factory, a dry cleaning equipment repair shop, and a brand-new movie studio soundstage. Added into the mix are Mom-and-Pop businesses and residential units in various stages of flux, from outright decay to unpretentious upscale.

Andi Wynn's address was actually on an alley between Leary and North Thirty-fifth, a few blocks north of the dog food factory. The fishy stench in the air told me what they were using for base material in the dog food that particular day.

I remembered Andi had told us that she lived in the watchman's quarters of an old building. The place turned out to be an old, ramshackle two-story job with a shiny metal exterior stairway and handrail leading up to a door on the second floor. An oil slick near the bottom of the stairs testified as to where Andi Wynn usually parked her pickup truck. Right then, though, the Chevy Luv was nowhere in sight.

I parked the Porsche in the pickup's parking place and bounded up the stairs. Halfway to the top, I tripped over my own feet and had to grab hold of the handrail to keep from falling. I caught my balance, barely. When I let go of the rail, my hand came away sticky.

The paint on the handrail wasn't wet, but it was fresh enough to be really tacky. The palm of my hand had silver paint stuck all over it.

"Shit!" I muttered, looking around for somewhere besides my clothes or the wall to wipe the mess off my hand. I turned and went back down the stairs. Partway down the alley, an open trash can sat with its cover missing. Whoever had painted the rail had used that particular can to dispose of painting debris, from old rags to newspapers. I grabbed one of the rags, mudded off my hand, and started back up the stairs.

Pausing where I had tripped, I examined the damage l'd done to the fresh paint. There, clearly visible beneath the fresh silver paint, was a scar. A deep blue scar.

I'm not sure how long I stood there like a dummy, gazing at the smudge in the paint. My eyes recorded the information accurately enough, but my mind refused to grasp what it meant.

Blue paint. What was it about blue paint?

When it finally hit me, it almost took my breath away. Flakes of paint, blue metal paint, had been found in Darwin Ridley's hair! And around the top end of the noose that had killed him.

"Jesus H. Christ!" I dashed on up the stairs and pounded on the door. "Police," I shouted. "Open up!"

There was no answer. I'd be damned if I was going to ass around looking for some judge to sign a search warrant, or call for a backup, either.

The first time I hit the door with my foot, it shuddered but didn't give way. The second time, the lock shattered under my shoe. With my drawn.38 in hand, I charged into the tiny apartment.

Nobody was home.

J. P. Beaumont rides to the rescue, and nobody's there. It's the story of my life.