some preliminary figures. I’m finding them quite interesting.”
Captain Freeman’s painful vocabulary lesson was still ringing in my ears, so I didn’t call Curtis Bell what I might have called him a mere half hour earlier.
“Look,” I said, “I’m up to my eyeteeth in a case right now. How come he has so much free time when nobody else does? Anyway, I don’t have time to see that pushy bastard, and I wish he’d lay off.”
Ralph Ames laughed. “Give him a break, Beau. He’s a salesman, working on commission. What do you expect?”
“Maybe if he’d bust his butt down at the department more, he wouldn’t need to moonlight. Not only that, I more than halfway expected him to make the appointment at a time when we could both see him.”
I probably sounded almost as disagreeable as I felt, but as the alleged owner of the money that was about to get spent, it didn’t seem like asking too much that I be consulted right along with Ralph Ames. And since I was already in a complaining mode, I moved right along to the telephone situation.
“By the way, Ralph, what’s all this about a fax machine on my phone? I tried calling home earlier today and couldn’t get through. The operator said I must have left my fax hooked up to the phone. Have I missed something, or do I own a fax machine?”
Ralph laughed. “Actually, you do,” he said, “I bought it for you the other day as a surprise, a sort of bread- and-butter gift, and had the woman who sold it to me come and install it yesterday at noon. I was afraid you’d show up and catch us in the act. I’ll bet you still haven’t had time to go into the study to see it, have you? It’s a real beaut, Beau.”
“But why do I need a fax, Ralph?” I countered.
“Once you get used to having it, you won’t know how you got along without it. I used it today to get some background information on Curtis Bell’s company. He seemed to be quite impressed.”
A fax installer? That’s who Ralph had escorted into the apartment when I thought he was bringing home a noontime something else? If so, when had he had time to pick up the lady who loved Bentleys, and how did she fit into the picture?
“You never fail to surprise me, Ralph, and that’s the truth. Get what you need from Curtis. We’ll talk insurance later. And by the way, thanks for the fax. I think.”
He was still laughing when I hung up. The other call was from my favorite criminalist, Janice Morraine. She had left two numbers, both in the Crime Lab and one at home as well. The Crime Lab said she had gone home for the day, so I tried reaching her there.
“Beaumont here, Janice,” I said when she answered. “What’s up?”
“I wondered if you’d had a chance to see my analysis of the hair you found. I gave it to Detective Kramer late this afternoon. Since you and Big Al were the ones who discovered the hair in the first place, I thought you might be interested in seeing the results.”
“I haven’t seen them yet,” I told her. “I’ve been tied up in meetings until just a few minutes ago. If Detective Kramer’s been trying to find me to hand over a report, he hasn’t had any luck.”
Of course, there wasn’t much likelihood of Kramer looking for me for any reason other than to tell me to drop dead. I figured hell would freeze over completely before he would voluntarily pass along any information at all, but I couldn’t very well say that to Janice Morraine.
“It looks as though he’s gone home, so why not tell me about it yourself?”
“It’s a plant,” she answered at once.
“A plant?” I repeated dubiously. “It sure as hell looked like hair to me.”
“Don’t joke around, Beau. This is important. The hair you found stuck between Shiree Weston’s fingers was placed there on purpose after she was dead. I’ve checked it out. The hairs don’t all match. My assessment is that the hair was taken from somebody’s brush, a brush several different people had used. Black hair,” she added, “as in race, not color. All of it. It could match up with hair from the family members themselves. I’ll be checking on that tomorrow, but I doubt it.”
I was barely listening to her. Instead, I was remembering how Junior Weston had described the man he had seen struggling with his sister. He had said that the man was a white man with skin tones very much like my own, that Bonnie Weston’s killer was a white man wearing gloves.
“That means whoever did it meant for us to go looking for a black perpetrator, doesn’t it?”
“Right,” Janice replied, “and with feelings in the city running so high, I didn’t want to risk not letting you know about this.”
“That’s what they were counting on,” I mused, “that everyone in Homicide would be so strung out that we wouldn’t pay close enough attention, that we’d go after any kind of slipshod evidence just to make an arrest.”
“Wrong!” Janice Morraine returned. Her single-word vehemence made me laugh.
“Right,” I said.
Whoever the killers were, they hadn’t taken the likes of Janice Morraine and Tony Freeman into consideration. Or me either, for that matter.
“Anything else interesting come up on your end?” I asked.
“Not really. I spent the whole afternoon working on the hair problem. Once I finish checking the Weston samples, I’ll probably be doing something else tomorrow.”
“Same case, though?” I asked.
“Are you kidding? Word filtered down from George Yamamoto. For right now, the Weston case is the only game in town. Everything else takes a backseat.”
“You’ll keep me posted?”
“What do you think?” she replied.
That’s what’s nice about having a working history with someone. Janice Morraine’s and my relationship, rocky though it may be at times, goes well beyond the official guidelines people like Kramer would like to impose. In fact, that was probably precisely why she had called me in the first place.
“Thanks, Janice. I appreciate it.”
“No prob,” Janice said. “If anything important comes up, I’ll be in touch.”
I put down the phone. A plant, I thought. The kinds of people who blow one another away over a line of heroin or a lump of crack cocaine don’t usually bother leaving behind a trail of manufactured evidence. Most of the time, people routinely involved in those kinds of crimes are already so well versed in the criminal injustice system, they could probably give the state bar exam a run for its money.
Habitual criminals know full well, from vast personal experience, that it doesn’t take much effort or even a particularly good lawyer to beat almost any rap we cops may manage to lay on them. Why bother with leaving behind a trail of phony evidence when a well-placed plea bargain makes that whole charade unnecessary?
As far as I was concerned, in the case of the Weston family murders, planted evidence turned the process into a whole new ball game. If we had renegade cops, including at least one white one, they were going to great lengths to point suspicion at black suspects, and parts of the task force investigation were probably exploring those very possibilities. If the street gangs all knew that none of their people were responsible, no wonder they were in an uproar and wanted a summit meeting with Chief Rankin. Their turf was being invaded, their supremacy challenged.
I sat staring at my telephone and wondered how to go about setting up that meeting. The gang unit probably could have given me a hint-maybe even a phone number or two-but Captain Freeman had issued strict orders not to involve any other personnel without his advance approval. Chances are, my friendly neighborhood gangs had their own voice-mail arrangements and probably even fax machines, but I couldn’t reach out and touch them since I didn’t happen to know their numbers.
After several minutes of wishing I had a Ma Bell phone directory for crooks, I realized that maybe I did. Or at least, I had a friend who did. That very afternoon I had held in my hand Ron Peters’s hard-copy pages of Ben Weston’s preliminary gang member data base. I considered going to see Kyle and asking him for a look at Ben Weston’s most recent data base, but I reconsidered. Why bother him and take him away from what he was doing for Tony Freeman when Ron Peters could probably give me exactly what I needed?
As soon as the thought crossed my mind, I called Ron at home. Heather answered. “Hello, Uncle Beau,” she said, sounding very grown-up and businesslike. I missed the gap-toothed, lisping way she used to say “Unca Beau” before her newly sprouted permanent teeth came in. “Just a minute,” she said. “I’ll get my dad.”
Ron Peters came on the phone a moment later. “Hey, Beau, I was looking all over for you this afternoon but
