Authors: J. A. Jance
I DROVE TO THE DEPARTMENT WITH MY mind in a turmoil. Cole-Haan, size 8½B. I tried to convince myself that the evidence was strictly circumstantial, but I couldn’t. I don’t believe in Santa Claus or blind coincidence. Cops who do don’t live very long.
Sergeant Watkins was deep in conference with Captain Powell. I hung around outside the fishbowl until they broke it up and Watty came outside.
“How’s it going, Beau?” he asked. “You look beat.”
“Thanks,” I told him. “Nothing like a vote of confidence. I’m shot to shit.”
“Did you get the message from Janice Morraine? She’s evidently got something for you. She called a few minutes ago and raised hell because you weren’t available.”
“I hope you reminded her that I work swing shift,” I said.
“So does she,” Watty returned.
Some arguments are winnable and others aren’t. This one wasn’t. Without bothering to go to my desk, I took a quick hike down the back stairway to the crime lab on the second floor.
I found Janice Morraine there in the lab, hunkered down over her microscope.
“How’s it going, Jan?” I asked.
She straightened up, rubbing her back. “Depends. If you’re asking about my sex life, it doesn’t. If you’re asking about work, we’re making progress.”
“Work,” I said. “Did you get that trace evidence from Doc Baker?”
She patted her microscope. “Yup. It’s right here.”
“And what is it?”
“It’s a hair,” she said. “A nice, long synthetic blonde hair. Top quality,” she added. “It’s so good, it was impossible to tell it wasn’t real until I got it under the microscope. The crime-scene investigators picked up one just like it from the Pike Place Market parking lot yesterday afternoon. All we have to do now is find that wig. It must be a beaut.”
There was a sick feeling in my gut that said I might know the exact whereabouts of that very wig, that when last seen it had been firmly attached to the head of Jasmine Day as she walked out of my apartment and slammed the door shut behind her. I didn’t let on.
“You’re sure they match?”
“Of course I’m sure. Synthetics are a hell of a lot easier to match up than natural fibers.”
“Thanks, Janice,” I said, backing away from her table. “You’ve been a big help.”
“Thanks, Janice,” I said, backing away from her table. “You’ve been a big help.”
“Any time,” she said with a smile. “That’s what I get paid for.”
Back upstairs, I found a message waiting for me from one of the guys on night shift. He had taped it to my phone so I would be sure not to miss it. Reverend Laura Beardsly of the Pike Street Mission wanted me to drop by and see her as soon as possible. The message was marked urgent.
The Pike Street Mission is only a block from the Pike Place Market and six blocks from the Mayflower Park Hotel. There was just time enough to go see Reverend Laura before my scheduled meeting with Alan Dale. At nine-fifteen, I pulled into a thirty-minute parking place on First Avenue in front of a defunct office-supply store. Two minutes later, I was pushing open the alley entrance to the Pike Street Mission.
Reverend Laura Beardsly has been the director of the mission for several years. She’s lasted longer than any of the do-gooders who have preceded her. They mostly burned themselves out trying to rescue ungrateful wretches who didn’t particularly want to be rescued.
Reverend Laura, a raw-boned, plain-looking woman, has built quite a following among Seattle’s street people. She has a reputation for helping people when they want help, without unnecessary moralizing or haranguing. And she has brains enough to leave them alone the rest of the time. I first met her when Peters and I were working a bum-bashing case where a college student got his rocks off by setting fire to drunks in downtown alleys.
It wasn’t an auspicious beginning, but in the period of time since then, Reverend Laura had established a good working relationship with the department in general and with Peters and me in particular. When she hollered, we listened.
Reverend Laura’s mission, housed in what used to be one of Seattle’s seedier taverns, seemed to be thriving, at least from a user’s point of view. I knew the overnight shelter was usually full even though the treasury was not. The mission’s telephone had long since been disconnected for nonpayment, which is why I couldn’t phone, why it was necessary to stop by in person.
The “born-again” tavern occupies the subbasement of an office building. It opens, by means of a steep, narrow stairway, onto a stretch of alley that fills up with rats and drunks every night as soon as the sun goes down.
Reverend Laura, impervious to her surroundings, lives there twenty-four hours a day, sleeping on a simple cot in a room behind the chapel. Another room, off to the side of the chapel where the former establishment ran an illegal card room, has been converted into a six-cot dormitory where homeless derelicts can bed down for the night. The Spartan accommodations are free and available on a first-come, first-served basis.
A tinkling bell above the chapel door announced my arrival. Reverend Laura hurried down through the chapel to meet me, her work-roughened hand extended in greeting. Her buck-toothed smile was one of genuine welcome.
“Hello, Detective Beaumont. Thank you for coming,” she said. “I was afraid she’d changed her mind.”
“Who would change her mind?” I asked.
Reverend Laura didn’t answer. Instead, she turned and hurried back the way she had come. I tagged along behind her. When we reached the door to the bunk room, she stopped and opened the door.
“It’s time,” she announced in a businesslike tone that brooked no nonsense.
Inside, the group of ragged derelicts who had spent the night were busy gathering their meager possessions for yet another day on the street. Reverend Laura waited beside the door as they shuffled out one by one. Only when the last one had made his way down the aisle and out the door at the back of the chapel did she turn and continue on her way, leading me past the spare wooden pulpit at the front of the room and into her own private living quarters.
People who send their cast-off clothing to St. Vincent de Paul or who mail checks once a year to the Salvation Army pat themselves on the back for their generosity without ever being sullied by the grim realities of poverty. The donors to that kind of sanitary, twice-removed charity never see or touch or smell the recipients. Especially smell.
Reverend Laura, on the other hand, lives in the trenches next to her charges. At that very moment, her room reeked of the unmistakable odor of unwashed destitution.
At first glance, I thought the windowless room was empty, that the “she” Reverend Laura had mentioned had made a break for it and disappeared. On one side of the room a narrow, neatly made cot was pushed against a bare brick wall. On the other side sat a desk, an old, metallic green office discard, covered with several stacks of books and a disorderly scatter of papers.
In the middle of the room stood a single dilapidated chair, a small table, and an ancient floor lamp with a fringed antique shade. The dim glow of the lamp’s single bulb provided the only light in the musty, darkened room.
Reverend Laura followed me into the room and closed the door behind her. She moved past me into the shadows beyond the glow of the lamp.
“He’s here, Belinda,” she said gently. “The man I told you about. You must talk to him. Come on. He won’t hurt you.”
As my eyes adjusted to the light, I noted two shapeless lumps huddled against the far wall, near a door that presumably opened into a basement corridor of the office building above us. Drawn out by Reverend Laura’s coaxing voice as well as by her guiding hand, the two lumps moved in concert, slowly emerging from the concealing shadows into the light.
The first lump turned out to be a grocery cart stacked high with a collection of bulging plastic bags. The second figure was that of a woman, bulky and shapeless under multiple layers of clothing. I would have known her on sight, even without the ever-present grocery cart. I had seen her a hundred times before, but I had had no idea her name was Belinda.
For years she’d been a fixture in the sheltered plaza under Seattle’s monorail station. Depending on the direction of the wind and the rain, she and her cart with its collection of treasures could be found huddled against the wall of Nordstrom’s downtown clothing store or under the monorail entrance ramp itself. The ragged woman in her shapeless brown coat and scarf had stood out in a stark contrast to the well-dressed career ladies hurrying to buy lunch-hour shoes or purses in trendy downtown department stores.
But construction of Seattle’s new Westlake mall had temporarily closed the monorail station. A high, impenetrable chain-link construction fence now locked her out of her favorite haunt. Driving past once, I had noticed she was no longer there, but I didn’t know what had become of her, what new territory she might have staked out for herself. Now here she was, approaching me tentatively like a gun-shy dog, keeping the grocery cart strategically positioned between us.
“This is Detective Beaumont,” Reverend Laura explained. “He’s working on that case, the one you told me about. He needs your help.”
Belinda’s age was as indeterminate as her shape. She could have been fifty-five, she could have been seventy. Weathered, wrinkled cheeks collapsed over a dentureless mouth, but her eyes, set in grimy skin, were birdlike sharp and bright. They darted nervously from Reverend Laura’s face to mine. Had the minister’s sturdy frame not been blocking the way, I’m sure Belinda would have broken and made a dash for the door.
As it was, I moved carefully and reassuringly toward her, holding out my hand over the cart. Belinda’s limp fingers were cold and damp to the touch.
“Hello,” I said. “I’m Detective Beaumont. My partner, Detective Lindstrom, and I are working this case together. If you have information that would help us, we’d appreciate whatever…”
Belinda turned away from me and fell against Reverend Laura, clutching fearfully at the younger woman’s blazer.
“But what if he doesn’t believe me?” she wailed. Her tongue tripped over toothless gums, making what she said slurred and difficult to understand. “What if he says I’m crazy, that I’m seeing things again? I don’t want to go back to that place. Please don’t let them send me back.”
“Shh. No one’s sending you anywhere, Belinda,” Reverend Laura reassured her. “I’ll see to it, but you must tell them what you saw night before last. Tell Detective Beaumont what you told me.”
Taking the old woman by her shoulders, Reverend Laura turned her around bodily until she was once more facing me.
“She was so pretty,” Belinda said.
“Who was pretty?”
“The woman. When I opened my eyes and saw her, it scared me. I thought she was a vision. An angel, maybe. I used to see angels all the time. That’s why they put me in the hospital.”
“And where did you see her, this pretty woman?” I asked, trying to keep my voice gentle so I wouldn’t frighten the bag lady further.
“I got here too late to spend the night,” Belinda went on, one hand tentatively motioning toward the redbrick wall of Reverend Laura’s monastic room. “The cots were all full, so I couldn’t stay. It wasn’t raining, so I decided to sleep down by the market.”
She paused as though searching for words. I felt my heartbeat quicken. A pretty woman. A blonde wig. The market. I kept my voice even, but it took tremendous effort. “What time was that?” I asked.
Belinda shrugged. “Ten. Eleven. Maybe later. I don’t know. There’s a place down there by the parking garage, near that gravel parking lot. I go there sometimes when the weather’s nice. I fell asleep. When I woke up, she was there.”
“Who was?”
“The lady. This pretty lady with long blonde hair and a long dress and long white gloves and high heels. She was standing there by the stairway, waving at someone who was coming up the stairs to the parking lot from the waterfront.”
Long white gloves too. I let the air in my lungs out slowly. “Could you see who was coming up the stairs?” I asked.
Belinda shook her head. “No, but it was a man.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I saw him when he got to the top of the stairs.”
“Is the parking lot lit?” I didn’t remember if there had been lights there or not, and I wondered how Belinda could have seen things in so much detail.
Belinda glared at me impatiently. “It was a full moon,” she said. “Anyway, this woman waved at him like she was waiting for him, and I could hear him coming up the steps toward her. She leaned down then. She took hold of the handrail and leaned down and reached for her shoe like she had a rock in it or something.”
She stopped. “Then what happened?” I asked, urging her to go on.
“So I saw him, but only for a second. When he reached the top where I could see him, the lady straightened up. She had taken both shoes off. All of a sudden she went after him, pounced on him like she was a cat and he was a mouse. For a minute I thought they were both going to fall back down the stairs, but somehow he got away from her. He tried to run, but she grabbed him by the knees and pulled him down. The next thing I knew, she was on top of him, pounding on him with the shoe. He tried to fight her off, but it was like…like…” Belinda hesitated again.
“Like what?” I insisted.
“You’ll think I’m making this up.”
“No. Just tell me what happened.”
“It was like she was too strong for him. And too quick. I thought it would never end,” Belinda added.
“Go on,” I said.
“All of a sudden he got real still, but she kept beating on him. Kept hitting him. I could hear it. It was awful, like somebody pounding meat to tenderize it.” She shuddered at the memory, and her whole body trembled.
“But she didn’t know you were there?”
“No. I held my breath. I didn’t want her to hear me, to know where I was hiding. Pretty soon she stopped and got up. She looked around like she was checking to see if anyone saw her. First she looked up toward the market, then back down toward the water. When she couldn’t see anybody, she started pushing him.”