Breach of Duty (9780061739637) (10 page)

“Let's see. I believe you picked up the bones a week ago last Sunday, didn't you?” I said, bluffing and watching for a reaction. I got one, too. Next to me on the bench, Barry Newsome squirmed uncomfortably.

“Did you go out to the reservation looking for them on purpose?” I continued. “Or did you stumble over them by accident?”

Barry's eyes flicked away from my face and settled on his partner's. Don Atkins shot him a single warning glance. It was enough to cause Barry to settle back in his seat. “I don't have any idea what you're talking about when you say reservation,” he said. “Like we already told that other detective. We found the bones in Seward Park and…”

“It's what you told my partner,” I said, cutting in. “But it's not true, and you know it. The bones came from somewhere out on the Kitsap Peninsula, from a sacred Indian burial ground. I want to know how that happened. Did you find them yourselves or did someone else lead you to them, someone who knew where and what they were?”

This time, when Barry Newsome opened his mouth as if to answer, Don Atkins headed him off. “Shut up, Barry,” he snarled. Barry stifled.

But Newsome's obvious discomfort was enough to keep me interested. “Look,” I continued, trying to strike a reasonable tone. “As you no doubt saw from my ID, I'm with the Seattle PD's Homicide Unit. That puts grave robbing and Kitsap County both outside the range of my official jurisdiction. However, I have it on good authority that the Seward Park bones belong to a powerful medicine man—a shaman—named David Half Moon. According to my Native American sources, anyone coming in contact with Mr. Half Moon's remains is in, pardon the pun, grave danger. Taking that into consideration, wouldn't it be best for all concerned if his bones were returned to their proper resting place as soon as possible? You two could facilitate that by simply coming clean and telling me where they came from. With corroboration from you, I'd be able to make arrangements to have the ME's office release Mr. Half Moon's remains to his people.”

Don Atkins reached into his shirt pocket, pulled out a cigarette, and lit up. “Barry and I have nothing more to say to you, Detective Beaumont,” he said, feigning casual indifference. “If you have any further questions, you're welcome to take them up with our attorney, Troy Cochran with Owens, Milton and Cochran. In the meantime, I'd…”

“Why, J.P., long time no see,” a familiar voice interrupted. “What brings you here? Seems just like old times.”

A cloud of vermouth, diluted only slightly by the haze of smoke, blew past my face. I looked up to see my old nemesis from the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
—a bleary-eyed columnist named Maxwell Cole—standing leering over me. Drunk or sober, Max is one of the last people on earth I ever want to see.

“Look, Max. I'm busy right now. Do you mind?”

Disregarding my objection, Max reached across me to drop a load of cigarette ashes into the brimming ashtray the young blond had pushed aside. He looked like hell. His tie was loose and his shirttail hung out of his pants. The wax on his handlebar moustache had given up the ghost leaving the long, wispy ends trailing limply down the front of his shirt. He straightened up and stood swaying, gazing wistfully around the room.

“Not exactly like the old days around here,” he mumbled. “But still, it's a good enough place to come tipple a few on occasion.”

I guessed he had tippled several more than a few, but I also know from personal experience that there's no point in arguing with a drunk. “Max,” I said patiently, “why don't you go wait in the bar. I'll join you in a minute. Matter of fact, tell the bartender that you'll have one of what I'm having—on me.”

“Okeydokey,” Max responded cheerfully. Taking the hint, he staggered toward the bar while I turned back to Don Atkins.

“You know who that is, don't you?” I asked. Atkins shook his head. “His name is Maxwell Cole,” I continued. “You probably recognize the name because he's the crime columnist with the
P.-I
. Max and I go back a long way. We were fraternity brothers at the U-Dub years ago. Now that I think about it, even though grave robbing may be outside the realm of my personal responsibility and jurisdiction, it certainly wouldn't be outside Max's. With a little bit of direction, I wouldn't be surprised if he came up with a wonderful human interest piece on Mr. Half Moon. A story like that would most likely attract the attention and unwanted scrutiny of any number of local Native American activists. They'd rain down around Bloodlust's ears and make your life hell. It's possible they might even follow you on your travels around town or picket your place of business. They might also suggest publicly that people boycott your role-playing dramas. I know that's just a hobby for you guys, but I have a feeling that most of the people who come on those middle-of-the-night adventures pay good money to be there.”

“That's blackmail,” Atkins said at once.

I smiled back at him. “No, it's not,” I said. “It's called getting the job done. You think it over,” I added. “Max doesn't seem to be in any condition to write anything at the moment, so I probably won't actually give him the information until tomorrow. Say around noon. Unless somebody calls before then and gives me a good reason not to.”

Pausing long enough to extract a few business cards from my wallet, I dropped them on the table. “My phone numbers,” I explained. “If you don't get through to me directly, feel free to leave a message. I'll get right back to you.”

With that, I got up from the booth and left them. The two girls, out of the rest room, were hanging around the pinball machines as I headed to the bar. “You can go back now,” I told them. “Your friends and I are all done with our little chat.”

Back at the bar, Maxwell Cole was looking at his
latte
with all the distaste of a tree-hugger faced with a clear-cut. “You don't expect me to drink this shit, do you J.P.?”

What I had told the two creeps at the booth about my history with Max was true as far as it went. Our acquaintance dated all the way from college days. However, I had left out a few telling details, including the fact that a mutual antagonism dated from those old college/fraternity days, as well. My first wife, Karen, had been dating Max when I stole her away from him. Later on, our career choices—mine as a cop and his as a journalist—kept us on opposite sides of the fence. Our views on truth, justice, and the American way just didn't jibe. They still don't.

In my postdivorce binge-drinking days, Max and I had frequented some of the same watering holes. I found it disconcerting to discover that on occasion we still did.

“A little milk and coffee mixed in with whatever else you're drinking isn't going to kill you,” I said.

Max picked up the cup, examined it as though it might be poison, and then set it down without tasting it. “I suppose,” he said with just a hint of sarcasm, “that since you're on the wagon now, you expect everyone else to be, too.”

That wasn't true. One of the things I had vowed when I first ventured into AA was that I wouldn't turn into one of those proselytizing AA fanatics. I'm neither a hypocrite nor a spoilsport. I actually enjoyed my drinking days. At least I did, up to a point. The only reason I quit was because my doctor gave me a choice between my liver or the booze. End of story. People who knew me back then sometimes assume I've turned into some kind of moralizing prude. That's not true, either. All I really want to do is live long enough to see my granddaughter, Kayla, grow up to be the spitting image of her mother and grandmother.

In feeding Max a
latte
, I was doing the same thing—protecting my butt. Being forced to share the streets of Seattle's Denny Regrade with a driver too drunk to walk straight didn't make sense for long-term survival—his, mine, or anybody else's. I figured pausing long enough for him to consume a nonalcoholic coffee drink would give me a chance to assess the situation. In the process I'd try to determine if Max was actually sober enough to drive home or if he needed to be stuffed in a cab and sent there.

“Shut up, Max, and drink your drink,” I told him. “I'm working my own program here, not yours or anybody else's.”

I picked up my now-cold cup and tasted the contents. There's hardly anything less appealing than a dead
latte
. “Hey, barkeep,” I said to Mr. Greenjeans. “Hit me again, too.”

He glowered at me, but he turned to comply. By the time my second one came, Max had lit another cigarette and was hunched over his cup in typical barfly fashion. “Do you know my old buddy here, Mr. Greenjeans?” he asked.

“We've met,” I said. “But we're not exactly best pals.”

“Know where he got his name?”

“No idea. From his parents, I'd imagine.”

Max laughed, slapping his pant leg as he did so. “That's where you'd be wrong, J.P. Wrong, wrong, wrong.” He paused and frowned. “Or else maybe you'd be right. I'm not sure which.”

The whole issue seemed a no-brainer. I couldn't see how Max could find it so puzzling. He continued. “Jimmy told me once, that Captain Kangaroo…You remember him, don't you, good old Captain Kangaroo? You know, the guy with the weird haircut?”

“Yes,” I said, “I remember.”

“Jimmy said that when he was little watching
Captain Kangaroo
in the morning was the nicest part of his day. That as soon as his old man rolled out of bed, he came looking for the kids with a belt and some excuse or another to beat the crap out of them. Out of Jimmy especially, I guess. Jimmy told me that once he was old enough, he went straight down to the courthouse to have his name changed. Cost him four-hundred bucks. He said he tried for Kangaroo, but the judge wouldn't go for it. So he settled on Mr. Greenjeans instead. Cute, huh?”

“I'll say.”

Jimmy Greenjeans came back down the bar and slammed the change on the counter in front of me. He was obviously unhappy that after going over to tackle Atkins and Newsome I had returned to his bar. Now that I knew those two creeps better, I didn't much blame him. More than anything, though, I felt sorry for the guy—sorry that he had somehow gotten mixed up in a game that put him in danger from a long-dead Indian shaman and sorry, too, that he had grown up in a situation where an hour-long weekday television program was the only thing that had offered his young life any respite from misery. That kind of home situation went a long way toward explaining his green hair, his alternative lifestyle, and his somewhat unfortunate attitude.

On the face of it, I had come to the Hurricane Cafe in hopes of contacting the role-play ringleaders, which I had done. Secondarily, I guess I had wanted to check out Mr. Greenjeans to find out for myself whether or not anything Darla Cunningham had told me was on the level. Now that I had done that—now that I had met the man with the green hair, the one Henry Leaping Deer claimed was in danger—where did my duty lie? Should I pass along Darla's message and try to warn him? Or should I forget it?

I tried to put myself in Jimmy Greenjeans' place. If someone I didn't know came into my place of work—the department, for example—hassled me about something I had done or said and then went totally against my wishes in talking to someone I wanted left alone, I probably wouldn't be feeling especially warm and cuddly toward that individual a few minutes later. And then, if that same person, now in the company of a babbling drunk—which Max Cole inarguably was—tried to tell me that I was in danger of being harmed by the angry spirit of a deceased medicine man, I probably would have thrown the guy ass-first out the door.

Let it go, Beaumont,
I told myself.
MYOB.

E
ven though I had long since stopped paying attention to him, Max was still at my side and still yakking away, too drunk to notice that he was mostly talking to himself.

“Hey, Maxi, old sport,” I told him, interrupting his sodden monologue. “What say we call it a night. Let me call you a cab.”

That brought him up straight. “Like hell!” he snorted. “I don't need a goddamned cab! Whaddya think I am, drunk or something? I'm totally capable of driving myself home.”

And wrapping yourself around a dozen telephone poles in the process,
I thought. Faced with his angry reaction, I knew there was no sense arguing. Instead, I led him outside into the cool night air. “If a cab doesn't suit you, how about a ride home in a nice Porsche 928?”

He stopped and stood swaying, eyeing me crookedly. The movement of the planet must have been too much for him. As he dipped to one side, I caught hold of one arm to keep him from pitching off the sidewalk into the street. “Which one?” he asked. “That cute little red Porsche ol' what's-her-name gave you?”

I nodded. “It's not exactly the same one Anne Corley gave me. It's a replacement, but yes, it's close enough.”

“How about letting me drive it my own self?”

“Sorry, Max,” I said, opening the passenger door and pouring him inside. “Not tonight. Maybe some other time.”

As I drove Max to his house on top of Queen Anne Hill, I realized that something I had said earlier really was true. I
was
working my own program—the eighth step. That's the one that involves making a list of the people I had harmed and making amends to them all. Maxwell Cole was one of those people. I'd pulled several stunts on him through the years, the most flagrant of which had been stealing Karen Moffitt right out from under his nose. Giving him a ride home obviously wouldn't make up for that, but it was a start, a step in the right direction.

Max lives on Bigelow Avenue, a winding street lined with lushly leafed chestnut trees. I stopped in front of his place and then left the 928 idling while I went around to the passenger's side to help him out. As I led him up onto the front porch of the Tudor-style house that had once belonged to his parents, Max fell into a fit of maudlin weeping. “I really appreciate this, J.P.,” he croaked. “I just don't know how to thank you.”

Within minutes he had drifted from one extreme to the other, from being pissed about being offered a ride home to being absurdly grateful. Mood swings go with the territory.

“It's all right,” I told him. “I did it for me as much as I did it for you. What's your phone number, Max?”

“Why?” he asked, after he gave it to me.

“Do you have a machine?”

“Sure. Why do you need to know that?”

“Never mind,” I told him.

I watched him fumble a set of keys out of his pockets and then I waited through his interminable struggle of putting the key in the lock. Once the door finally opened, he stumbled inside. Once again, it took several tries before he managed to relock the dead bolt from the far side of the door. Only when I heard the lock hit home did I turn and walk away.

Back in the car, I picked up my cell phone and dialed the number Max had given me. He had turned on the lights in a room which, due to the frosted windows, I assumed to be a bathroom. I wasn't surprised, then, when no one answered and his voice mail switched on.

“This is Maxwell Cole. I can't come to the phone right now. Please leave a message…”

“Max,” I said. “This is J. P. Beaumont. In case you can't find your car this morning, you might try checking the parking lot at the Hurricane Cafe.”

That was all I said. When Max sobered up in the morning, I doubted he would remember where he had left his ugly orange Volvo. I know how those kinds of things can sneak up on you. After all, it happened to me once or twice, too. Maybe even more than once or twice, but then who's counting?

On the way back down Queen Anne, I tried calling Sue's home number. She had told me to call when I finished up. If I reached her on my way home, calling at eleven was marginally better than eleven-fifteen. Because her son Jared seems to spend most of his waking hours with a phone glued to his ear, I was accustomed to having to dodge my way through the teenage phone screen. As soon as Sue's voice mail switched on, I gave up and dialed her pager instead.

She called me back before I even hit the bottom of the hill. “Doesn't your son know there's school tomorrow and he ought to be in bed?”

“Jared is in bed,” she told me.

“Oh,” I said. “When the voice mail came on, I thought…”

“It was me,” she said. “After three screaming phone calls from Richie, I finally took the phone off the hook and left it there.”

I heard the ragged catch in her voice as she finished the sentence. Now that I was paying attention, I noticed she sounded stuffy. Either she was dealing with a terrible allergy attack or she'd been crying.

“Sue,” I said. “Are you all right?”

She took a deep breath. “I'm fine,” she said. “It's been a hell of a night, that's all.”

I had planned to call her and bring her up to speed, but her voice sounded so bleak that I wondered if a phone call was enough. “What are you doing?” I asked.

“Cleaning house like a madwoman.” She laughed without humor. “That's what my mother used to do whenever she and Dad had an argument—she'd clean the place like there was no tomorrow. I just figured out that I'm doing the same thing, but at least when Richie gets here the damned house will be spotless. What about you?”

“I just finished paying a late-night visit to the Hurricane Cafe,” I told her. “Ran into some friends of yours, Don Atkins and Barry Newsome. If you're not on your way to bed in the next couple of minutes, maybe I could stop by and tell you what went on. That way I won't be in danger of being called a Lone Ranger tomorrow morning.”

“Sure,” she said. “Come on by. There's not much sense in going to bed. I've been so upset all evening that I wouldn't be able to sleep anyway.”

“Well, since you're not planning on sleeping, let me add one little bit of bad news. When I got down to the department tonight, after you called, Captain Powell's temporary replacement was moving into the Fishbowl. His initials are P.K.”

For a moment there was nothing on the air but stunned silence. “You're kidding! Not Kramer.”

“I wish I were kidding, but I'm not.”

“What the hell is the brass thinking?” she demanded. “How dare they put that officious jackass in charge even for a day.”

“I'm sure it was easy. We can talk more when I get there, but we're probably better off discussing it in private rather than on the fifth floor with a dozen little ears to hear.”

In the preceding year or so, both Sue and I had been granted the dubious honor of working with Detective Paul Kramer on a one-to-one basis. Together she and I were privy to more about the man than almost anyone else in Homicide.

When I arrived at Sue's house in the Fremont neighborhood a few minutes later, she was sitting on the front porch. “Where's the vacuum cleaner?” I asked. “I thought you'd still be at it.”

“I shut it off,” she said. “Now I'm too mad to vacuum. What's the matter with those people? Kramer's not even a good detective. How could they possibly promote him?”

“He's a number cruncher,” I explained, sitting down beside her. “And this is the golden era of number crunchers. All we'll have to do to keep Kramer happy and off our backs is to show him cases that get cleared in a timely fashion.”

“Cleared and timely and holding up in court aren't necessarily one and the same,” Sue responded.

“Right,” I said. “But he's going to be looking for percentages. By the time those half-assed cases fall out in court, he'll be long gone. Guys like Kramer are always angling for the next promotion long before they get settled into the desk on their current one.”

“Still,” Sue said. “If anyone was going to be promoted, I think it should have been you.”

Her vote of confidence, while gratifying, made me laugh aloud. She looked up at me, her face serious and frowning in the glow of a corner streetlight. “What's so funny about that?” she asked.

“My grandmother's of the same opinion you are,” I told her. “Grandma would like to see me promoted, too. Only she'd like me to skip the captain and major ranks altogether and go directly to chief. Believe me, I know my limitations. It wouldn't be a good fit.”

“But doesn't it bother you to be skipped over?” she asked.

I thought about it. “Some,” I admitted at last. “It's not the first time I've helped train a fast-tracker who ended up being my superior officer. If I really wanted a promotion, I'd have gone after one, but I think I'm far better suited to being a mentor than I am a boss. Besides, who knows what'll happen when Kramer moves up or out? Maybe it'll be your turn then.”

“Mine?” Sue asked.

“Sure,” I said. “You're a good detective. It won't be long before you're promotable yourself. Kramer notwithstanding, the brass doesn't always pick jackasses. When you turn captain on me, somebody else will shake his head and say, ‘Poor old Detective Beaumont. He taught her everything he knew, and now she's ordering him around.'”

For the first time a ghost of a smile appeared in the corners of Sue Danielson's lips. She seemed genuinely surprised by my praise—surprised and pleased. “Do you really mean that?”

“You bet I do,” I assured her. “Now, tell me about Richie and the kids. What's going on?”

The smile disappeared and she sighed. “I spent half the night fighting with the kids and the other half screaming at Richie on the phone.”

I tried to imagine Sue screaming at anyone. I had worked with her for months, long enough to appreciate the fact that she seldom raised her voice.

“I take it he took exception to your laying down the law about spring break?”

She nodded. “The last thing he said to me was ‘I'll see you in hell first.' That's when I took the phone off the hook and left it off.”

A cold chill that had nothing to do with the weather passed over my body. “That sounds like a threat,” I said.

Sue nodded. “He thinks he can still boss me around, but it isn't going to happen.”

For almost a minute we sat on the steps, thinking and not speaking. The threat of bodily harm may have come over a telephone handset and in Richie Danielson's voice, but it sounded a distinct warning bell. I wondered if the real origin of that threat didn't lie somewhere else—in the set of bones Sue had lugged back from Bellevue and delivered to the ME's office. Darla Cunningham had claimed that whatever happened wouldn't necessarily seem to be related. It struck me now that David Half Moon had somehow drafted Sue's ex-husband, Richie, to be the bearer of the shaman's bad tidings. Those thoughts all crossed my mind, but they sounded so kooky, that I wasn't sure how to go about saying them.

“Maybe you shouldn't see him at all,” I suggested. “Sounds to me as though it might be better if you and the boys weren't even here when he shows up.”

“I'm not running away,” Sue said determinedly.

“Not again. Richie Danielson may have chased me out of one house, but he isn't driving me out of this one. And I'm not going to let him get away with playing uproar, either. That's what this whole trip was designed to do—throw our lives into turmoil.”

“How did the kids take the news?” I asked.

“Not at all the way I expected,” she said. “I explained to them what the two school principals said when I talked to them—that since these wouldn't be excused absences, they wouldn't be allowed to make up the work. I thought Jared would give me the most grief, but it turned out to be Chris. He was heartbroken. He finally cried himself to sleep about an homage.”

Sighing again, she stood up and rubbed her arms. “Now that I'm not working, it's chilly out here. Come on inside. I'll brew us up a cup of tea.”

I followed her into her little rented house. The vacuum cleaner and a basket stocked with cleaning supplies sat in the middle of a seemingly spotless living room. In the kitchen the refrigerator door was covered with a dozen handmade paper Easter eggs. I sat down at the small, cloth-covered kitchen table while Sue set a copper-bottomed teakettle on a burner.

“So tell me,” she said, changing the subject. “Who was the woman who came to the department to see us tonight? What was her name again?”

“Cunningham,” I supplied. “Darla Cunningham.”

“What did she want and why was it so urgent?”

Good luck,
I told myself before launching off into it.
Either she'll believe me or she won't.

“What do you know about Native Americans?” I asked.

“Not much,” she admitted, lighting a cigarette. “I've eaten fry bread at the Puyallup fair. And I took an alternative U.S. history course. Naturally, I was properly appalled. The whites screwed the Indians six ways to Sunday.”

“Did that course you took happen to mention anything about medicine men or shamans?”

“Are you kidding? It was a history course, all battles and broken peace treaties. Why?”

In the next few minutes, I gave Sue a brief outline of what Darla had told me including the spooky dreams that had led Henry Leaping Deer to investigate whether or not his boyhood chum was still alive and how another dream, one of children playing with David Half Moon's bones and skull, had led Darla to make a connection with the Seward Park role-players.

“That's so weird,” Sue said. “Not to mention tenuous. Yes, it's true Jimmy Greenjeans has green hair, but how could this Darla put what her father had said together with that single tiny blurb in the paper? How does that work?”