Breach of Duty (9780061739637) (4 page)

“You were telling us about Agnes Ferman and the man who came by to check on her.”

“Right. Drives one of those fancy new cars. A Lincoln, I think. Town Car maybe? A big one anyway although not as big as the old clunker Agnes used to have.”

Sue was busy taking notes, so I didn't. “And he only came by that once?”

“I only saw the car that once,” Malcolm said. “The person may have been here more often than that but if he was, I didn't see him.”

“Getting back to Monday night. You didn't notice any unusual activity?”

“Well,” Malcolm frowned. “Now that you mention it, there was a car here during the evening. Early on. It was brown, I think. Dog-turd brown.”

“Any idea what kind?”

Malcolm shook his head. “I'm not sure. It was one of them little foreign jobs and I can't keep 'em straight in my head any more 'cause they all look alike. I'm pretty sure, though, that I've seen this one before. Belonged to one of her relatives, I think.”

“When did it leave?”

“Seven-thirty or eight. Fairly early.”

“And you didn't see anything else?”

“Nope.” He shook his head. “Not that night. Not until morning when I saw the fire.”

“What time did you go to bed?”

“Right after the news. Ten o'clock news, that is. Eleven o'clock may be fine for young whippersnappers like you and the lady here, but us oldsters need our rest. Except for Agnes, that is. She was always a night owl herself. Read books all night long, one right after another.”

He stopped abruptly. “Is there something wrong?” I asked.

“I was thinking about them books and it really struck me. What Agnes loved most especially was murder mysteries. Read stacks of them. She'd bring 'em home from the library half a dozen at a time. In fact, she told me once that she was thinking about writing one herself someday. But now, of course, she's dead and the same thing's happened to her. Murder, that is.”

I glanced at Sue. I hadn't mentioned the word murder and neither had she. “What makes you think Agnes Ferman was murdered?” Sue asked.

Malcolm attempted a long-but-futile suck on his cigar. Fortunately for all concerned, the foul-smelling thing had gone out. “Maybe that's what it said in the paper,” he said, glowering at the dead cigar.

I have a long-running feud with all kinds of members of the media—both print and electronic—but even my old fraternity brother Maxwell Cole wasn't likely to label a death homicide until somebody from the department issued an official statement to that effect.

“What did it say?” I asked.

Malcolm shrugged. “That she died under mysterious circumstances. As far as I'm concerned, a fire by itself ain't mysterious at all. But now, with you two showing up and flashing around badges that say homicide all over them, you don't have to be no rocket scientist to be able to put two and two together. Right?”

“I suppose,” I agreed.

Across the street, the screen door to the Lawrences' house opened violently one more time and Becky Lawrence stamped out to the top step. “Are you coming or should I throw it out?” she demanded.

“Maybe we should talk to your wife,” Sue Danielson suggested. “She might have seen or heard something that night that you missed.”

“You're welcome to,” Malcolm said, “although I'm not sure now's the best time. She can be a holy terror, especially when she's in one of her moods like she is today. Besides, I can tell you she didn't see or hear nothing. Old as she is, Becky still sleeps like a baby. She pops one of her pills, takes out her hearing aids, and doesn't hear a thing. That includes sirens. She never woke up that morning until after it was all over. I don't know what would happen if our house ever caught on fire. I'm afraid she'd sleep right through the smoke alarm, even though it's right there in the bedroom with us.”

“Malcolm!”

“All the same,” Sue said, smiling sweetly. “It's probably still a good idea for us to talk to her.”

“When?” Lawrence asked.

“How about now?”

He shrugged. “Suit yourselves, then,” he said dubiously, “but if I was you, I'd wait until later in the day. Bec's not much of a morning person. I do need to get going, though,” he added. “If I don't hop to it when she tells me, she'll make my life hell for the rest of the day.” Yanking on the leashes, he pulled the two waiting dogs to their feet. “Come on, guys,” he said. “Off we go.”

When we reached the porch of the house across the street, Lawrence stopped with one hand on the screen door. “You'll have to wait out here,” he said. “Bec don't hold with having strangers in the house. I'll send her out to talk to you.”

Malcolm Lawrence and the two dogs disappeared inside. “Believe me,” Sue said, as the door banged shut behind him. “If I had to be married to that old coot, I wouldn't be much of a morning person either.”

Moments later, Becky Lawrence opened the door. Her housecoat had disappeared as had the curlers, although the curls themselves hadn't exactly been brushed out. “Whaddya want?” she demanded, glaring up at me.

Sue stepped into the breach. “We're homicide detectives with Seattle PD,” she said. “We wanted to know if you could add anything to what your husband told us about Agnes Ferman.”

Faced with a woman investigator, Becky Lawrence's features softened a little. “Don't rightly know,” Becky said. “Depends on what he already told you,” she said, jerking her head toward the front door.

“Mr. Lawrence told us about spotting the fire. That made us wonder if you or anyone else might have seen anything out of the ordinary Monday night or Tuesday morning.”

Becky Lawrence paused for a moment, mulling over the question. When she spoke, ill-fitting dentures rattled loosely in her head. “I didn't see nothin' before I went to sleep, and there wasn't nothin' out of line later when I got up along about midnight to drain my radiator. That's the problem with getting older—leastwise it is for me. Have to get up and down time and again overnight to use the bathroom.”

“So you say you saw nothing unusual that night?”

“Nope. Not a thing.”

“Were you and Agnes friends?” Sue asked.

“Hardly.” Becky shrugged. “We was neighbors. Agnes weren't what you'd call friends with nobody from around here. Acted sort of high and mighty, which was kinda funny. I never could understand her bein' snooty, considering she never did nothin' but work as somebody else's fetch and carry. No. Me and her wasn't friends.”

“When's the last time you saw her?”

Becky Lawrence's eyes narrowed. “To talk to her, you mean?”

Sue nodded.

“Must've been Sunday a week or so before she died. Came over with a pile of dog shit in a paper bag and dumped it right in the middle of our front yard. Right here beside the front step. I asked her what the hell she thought she was doing? She said Major and Tuffy had left some calling cards in her yard and she was just returning the favor. Made me mad as hell. Our dogs do their jobs right out in our own backyard. The mess she brung over here wasn't even theirs. These are little dogs and that crap was way too big.”

That seemed like as good a time as any to put in my two cents' worth. “Mrs. Lawrence,” I said. “A sizable sum of money was found hidden in Mrs. Ferman's garage. Did she ever talk to you about money?”

“Are you kidding? The way that woman talked, you'da thought she was one step away from the poorhouse, from bein' one of them bag ladies you see all the time downtown. Agnes was forever saying how tight things were and asking to borrow stuff—like tools or lawn mowers—rather than forking over money to buy one of her own. And like as not, if she borrowed a tool, she borrowed the man that went with it as well. After her husband Lyle passed on—and he was a good man, by the way. Far better'n Agnes deserved, if you ask me. After Lyle died, her grass would of growed hip deep if Malcolm and some of the other men in the neighborhood hadn't taken pity on her and mowed it. Agnes may have had all kinds of money in her garage, but she was tight as hell. She never paid nobody nothing for mowing that grass. Not one red cent, not even for gas to put in the mower.”

“It sounds as though you didn't like her much,” I observed.

Becky Lawrence sniffed. “You could say that. Agnes Ferman's gone. If you ask me, the whole neighborhood's lucky to be shuck of her.”

A
s Detective Danielson and I headed north toward Everett on I-5, there wasn't a whole lot of conversation. Sue seemed to be brooding while I started thinking about something she had said earlier. “No services,” I said. “Doesn't that strike you as odd?”

“What?” Sue asked, sounding as though my question had summoned her back from a million miles away.

“No services,” I repeated. “When my grandfather died, my grandmother chose not to have a funeral. She said that most of their friends were already gone and, at their ages, there were far too many funerals. But Jonas Piedmont was in his nineties when he died. My grandmother and I were the only close relatives in the area. On the other hand, Agnes Ferman was only in her late sixties. That's relatively young by comparison, and she has both a brother and a sister right here in the Seattle area.”

“Maybe the whole family has an aversion to funerals,” Sue suggested. “I don't like them very much myself.”

With that, Sue turned away and continued to stare out the window. Since she didn't seem interested in talking, I shut up and drove. Traffic moved along smoothly until just north of the I-5/I-405 interchange at Mill Creek. There a combination of express-lane construction and a multivehicle fender bender turned the freeway into a parking lot.

I stopped the Caprice behind a diesel-belching eighteen-wheeler, switched off the engine, leaned back against the headrest and closed my eyes. I was about to doze off when Sue woke me. “Fifty years,” she muttered.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Those people back there—the Lawrences. How did they stay married for more than fifty years? I barely made it to six.”

In the months Detective Danielson and I have worked together, I've come to appreciate the fact that she's definitely not a Chatty-Kathy type. Until that morning, I didn't ever remember her saying anything about marriage one way or another. I knew she was divorced, but as far as personal life was concerned, she had never mentioned anything beyond talking about her two kids—Jared, a rebellious, obnoxious thirteen-year-old, and Christopher, an easy-going, sweet-tempered eight.

Had I been paying attention, the sharp edge of bitterness in Sue's voice should have warned me to be wary. Judging from past experience, I figured her brooding silence most likely had something to do with Jared. His special form of parental torture seemed to include using weekends to declare open season on his mother.

Sue Danielson and I are partners, but she's also a good ten years younger than I am. There are times when I can't stifle the almost fatherly feelings I have toward her. That's especially true when Jared is giving her hell. Having made my own mother's life plenty miserable when I was a teenager, I have a soft spot in my heart for single mothers. I figured the least I could do was offer Sue an opportunity to vent. She might not want a shoulder to cry on, but I could give her a place where she could let off a little steam.

“What'd he do this time?” I asked.

She swung around and glared at me. “Who?” she demanded.

“Jared,” I said. “Isn't he what's bugging you?”

There was a long pause before she answered. “Jared has nothing to do with it,” she said finally. “Not directly. Richie's coming home. His plane gets in tomorrow night at six.”

“Who's Richie?” I asked.

“My ex,” she said.

Until that moment, sitting stuck in northbound traffic on Interstate 5, I had never heard Sue refer to her former husband by name. The only thing I had known about the man prior to that was that he seldom if ever paid child support.

I've been a divorced father. I'm proud to say that I never missed a child-support payment, not even back when I was still drinking. I have a hard time understanding fathers who figure a divorce decree gives them carte blanche to walk out on both their kids and their responsibilities. Admittedly, children can be a real pain in the butt on occasion, but kids—even obnoxious teenagers—are people, too.

“You don't sound too happy about this impending visit,” I observed mildly.

Sue shot me a smoldering glance. “Happy?” she snapped. “Why should I be? I'm pissed as hell as a matter of fact. After not being in touch at all for over two years—not even a birthday card or a Christmas present for either one of the boys—now all of a sudden he calls up on the phone, acts as though nothing is amiss, and says he's coming down this week to take the kids to Disneyland. Not next week, mind you, when it's spring break and the kids could go without missing any school. No, it has to be this week or nothing. He wants to take them out of class for three whole days—Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.

“My first reaction was to take a page from the J. P. Beaumont lexicon and tell him to go piss up a rope—that he can see the kids if and when he sends me some of that back child support. But of course, he didn't leave me that option. The underhanded rat called the boys while I was still at work. The first I heard about it, the kids were already so excited they could barely stand it. Not only about seeing their dad again, but also about going on the trip. Believe me, without any child support, it's all I can do to keep food on the table and a roof over our heads. I sure as hell can't afford to take them on an outing like that. The best I've ever done is a weekend in somebody's borrowed condo over at Ocean Shores.”

My own daughter, Kelly, dropped out of school prior to high school graduation, although she's doing fine now. She picked up her GED and she's even started taking classes at Southern Oregon University down in Ashland. My son, Scott, just graduated from Stanford with a degree in electrical engineering. Personally, I've always been a big believer in education.

“Missing school doesn't sound like a good idea to me, either,” I told Sue. “It's not good for the kids and the school district isn't going to approve. Did you try asking your ex to reschedule for spring break? Maybe he just didn't realize…”

“Of course, I told him. But rules that govern other people don't necessarily apply to Richie Danielson. He says it's this week or nothing. The problem is, if I pull the plug on the trip for whatever reason, it'll hurt the kids that much more.”

It was easy to see that Sue was in a bind. If she nixed the trip at this stage, she would be cast as the villain of the piece—at least in the eyes of her two children.

“When did all this trip stuff come about?” I asked.

“Last week,” Sue answered. “After you left town for Lake Chelan, I guess.”

“Well,” I said. “If your ex can afford to take trips to Disneyland, he should be able to afford child-support payments, too. Have you ever thought about taking him back to court?”

“I tried it once. Didn't do any good. On paper, Richie claims he doesn't make a dime.”

“How does he support himself then?”

“He's into some kind of bartering business,” Sue explained. “Once he stopped being a church…”

“A church?” I interrupted. “When was he ever a church?”

“The year we got a divorce. He declared himself a church and didn't pay any income taxes. Two years later the IRS came after me for $2,500 in back taxes on money he earned while we were still married. I asked the lady from the IRS how come she was coming after me instead of him. I'll never forget what she said. ‘Honey,
you
have a job.'”

“And you had to pay?”

“Damned straight. Every dime plus interest. It took me two years to pay the whole thing off. That's when I found out he's in the bartering business. No cash ever changes hands. Richie says he put together a mattress deal with some hotel chain. Instead of getting money, he got this prepaid Disneyland package. I'm sure he underreports his income to the IRS. Since he doesn't have a bank account and earns no wages, there's nothing for the court to attach for back child support. Meantime, Chris and Tared think he's the greatest thing going.”

With a burst of diesel exhaust, the eighteen-wheeler ahead of us inched forward. I switched on the ignition in our Caprice and put it back in gear. “If you ask me,” I told her, “calling the son of a bitch a worm is giving him way too much credit or being far too hard on worms, one or the other.”

Sue looked across the seat and gave me a rueful smile. “Thanks, Beau,” she said. “I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks he's a creep.”

“Hardly,” I said. “Now, the best thing for you to do is to go to work and forget about him. Get out the map and figure out how to get where we're going.”

Obligingly, Sue hauled out the
Thomas Guide
. She opened it and leafed through several pages before finally settling on one. “We're looking for Harrison. From this it looks like we turn off the freeway at the Highway 2 exit. The problem is, it's confusing. I can't tell from this map exactly how the freeway exit works there.”

“At least these days there is a freeway,” I told her. “Back when I was growing up, I-5 was little more than a gleam in the eye of a few far-thinking urban planners. In the fifties Highway 99 was the only way to get from Seattle to Everett—stop and go all the way.”

“So what's changed?” she asked. “We're not setting what you'd call land-speed records here.”

It was true. The ongoing traffic backup was bad enough that it took another twenty minutes to reach the Highway 2 exit which, it turned out, was the wrong way to go after all. Whoever designed that particular exit is probably the same genius who stuck the city of Seattle with another poor excuse for a freeway exit, a lingering traffic jam-generating jumble that's commonly referred to as the Mercer Mess.

Highway 2 was indeed the closest exit to Harrison Avenue, but you can't get there from there. Instead, we shot out across the Hewitt Avenue Trestle and had to work our way back from somewhere up by Lake Stevens. Our second pass took us back down I-5 with no way to get off until we were well past downtown Everett. The third time was the charm. We went as far north as Marine View Drive and worked our way back south from there.

The residential area east of I-5 in Everett seems isolated from the rest of the city. And it is. Lopped off from town by freeway on one side and river on the other, that isolation shows in some houses far more than in others. The address Sue read off was in the 2400 block of Harrison Avenue in a group of dingy houses situated on long narrow lots with backyards bordering on the freeway right of way.

Mildred and Andrew George's modest little bungalow was covered with puke-green siding that dated from that long-ago time when conventional wisdom still preached that asbestos was our friend. A few of the brittle fireproof, weatherproof shingles had broken off, showing the black layer of tar paper underneath. The asphalt shingles on the roof must not have fared much better since most of the roof was covered by a large blue tarp. On that sunny late-April day having a leaky roof maybe didn't matter so much, but I knew the rains would be back soon—rains and wind, too. When those came, the tarp wouldn't do diddly-squat to keep the water out.

In the unrelenting gloom of that derelict yard, the only antidote was a pair of magnificent rhododendrons standing on either side of the sagging front porch. Their leafy green branches ended in huge magenta blooms the size of dinner plates. Maybe the house and yard had been allowed to languish in neglect, but the rhodies didn't seem to mind.

I had barely stopped the car when an elderly man about the same age as Malcolm Lawrence appeared in the side yard, plodding slowly toward the front fence. Initially, I thought he was coming to the gate to greet us. Instead, he jerked to a sudden stop a few feet beyond a metal clothesline pole. He turned around. Then, without even glancing in our direction, he started back the way he had come.

“Look,” Sue murmured. “That poor old man is tethered to a clothesline. I've never seen anything like it.”

By the time we were out of the car and standing near the closed gate, he came by for another pass. That's when I saw Sue was right. A leather harness of some kind had been fitted across his chest. The back of it held a leashlike tether the other end of which was, in turn, fastened to the clothesline wire with a padlock.

“Excuse me,” Sue called. “We're detectives with the Seattle Police Department. We're looking for Mr. George.”

Without raising his head or giving even the slightest acknowledgment, the man reached the end of the leash, jerked to a stop, and reversed course once again, disappearing behind the house. Sue and I exchanged glances.

“Talk about unlawful imprisonment,” I said. “What do you think a lawyer from the ACLU would make of that?”

Just then, the front door of the house burst open and a huge black woman flounced outside. “Who are you?” she demanded over the unrelenting roar of traffic that carried up the bluff from the freeway. With that kind of deafening and constant background noise, no wonder Harrison Avenue wasn't considered prime real estate.

“Why are you botherin' Mr. George?” she added.

“We wanted to talk to him,” Sue returned, opening the gate and leading the way onto a moldy concrete sidewalk. “It's about his sister, Agnes Ferman.”

The man I assumed to be Andrew George himself appeared again, head still down. He showed no interest whatsoever in the presence of two strangers on his front walk. In fact, he never looked up from the well-worn path—a trench almost—that had been trampled into the unkempt grass under the clothesline. I wondered how many hours a day he paced back and forth like that, never stepping out of the lines of his worn dirt track, never venturing onto the too-long grass of the unmowed lawn.

“Mr. George already knows about his dead sister,” the woman replied. “He knows and he don't know, if you get my meaning. He's been told but nothing much registers anymore. It won't do no good for you to try to speak to him about it, either. It might upset him. Besides, he don't talk much.”