involved.”
“There was blood all over the seat,” Wallace answered.
“Both sides?”
He nodded. “Both sides, driver’s and rider’s.”
“What about the door handles?”
“Both of them were bloody, too. Beats me how he managed to make that much of a mess without ending up dead himself.”
I looked at Big Al. “Maybe there were two people in the van,” I suggested.
“Could be,” he agreed.
I turned back to Wallace. “After Larry Martin brought the truck back here, how did he leave?”
“In his car, I guess,” Nick answered. “I mean, it ain’t here this morning.”
“What kind of car?”
“A VW bug, ”68 or “69 probably. Runs real good for as old as it is.”
“A bug? What color?”
“Red. Bright red. I helped him repaint it just a few months ago.”
“You wouldn’t happen to remember the license number, would you?” It was a hopeless question. I knew it when I asked. Nick Wallace shook his head in reply.
“Got enough trouble remembering my own,” he said.
“Was there anything unusual in the van when you opened it up?” I asked. “Anything out of place, or anything there that shouldn’t have been?”
“Well, the tools were missing. I went straight in and reported that to Mr. Damm. I figured he ought to know about that right away.”
“Anything else?”
Wallace shifted uneasily from foot to foot as though fighting some private interior battle.
“I don’t suppose it matters none,” he said at last. “Even if Larry shows back up here, Mr. Damm’s sure to fire his ass.”
“What doesn’t matter?” I asked.
“It’s against the rules to have anybody who doesn’t work for us riding in a company truck,” he said.
“And you think somebody who didn’t belong there was in Larry Martin’s truck?”
“You said so yourself.”
“But I didn’t say it was someone who wasn’t authorized,” I countered. “You’re the one who said that.”
Nick turned and walked away from us, picked up something from his workbench, and then came back, holding a small brown object in his hands. He gave it to me.
It was a plastic card case, the freebie kind they give you with business-card orders. Under the clear plastic laminate inside the cover was a Washington state driver’s license with a woman’s picture on it. I didn’t recognize the picture, but I recognized the name-LeAnn Patricia Nielsen.
Without a word, I passed the license to Al.
“Where’d this come from?” he demanded.
Nick Wallace looked down at his feet. “I found it in the van. Under the front seat. On the driver’s side.”
Nick Wallace’s terse words put a whole new light on the case. If LeAnn Nielsen had been in the bloodied van, there was a good chance that she and Larry Martin were somehow involved together. Maybe together the two of them had plotted to get rid of her husband. Permanently.
I turned back to Nick. “We’ll take this,” I told him, pocketing the case.
He nodded. “You bet. I sure as hell don’t need it.”
“Tell us once more exactly what happened when you found the van this morning.”
“Like I told you, it was parked outside in the sun, right next to the building. I was gonna bring it inside and gas it up when I saw the mess on the front seat. I opened the windows to air it out a little while I got the other vans on the road. Then, as soon as I got caught up, I cleaned up what I could and took it down to the detail place, the one down on Westlake.”
“You cleaned it yourself initially? What with?”
Wallace shrugged. “Rags,” he said. “And paper towels too. I used up practically a whole roll.”
“Where are they?”
“Where’s what?”
“The rags you used. The paper towels.”
“The paper’s over there in the trash. It don’t go out until tonight some time. And the towels are on the bottom of the laundry basket.”
“Could you get them for us?”
He paused, looking at us for a long moment. “Homicide, huh?” he said, musing to himself. At last he nodded his head as though he’d made up his mind. “I guess,” he said. “Whadya want ”em in? Another laundry bag be okay?“
“That’ll be fine,” I told him.
So we stood there and waited while Nick Wallace rummaged through first a laundry cart and then a fifty- gallon trash container. He stuffed his findings into a canvas laundry bag. When he was finished, he pulled the rope drawstring shut and brought the bag over to us.
He handed it over, then led us to the garage doors, opening one of them with an electrical switch on the wall just inside. Nick Wallace wasn’t about to be disturbed by unannounced visitors coming and going at will. He was sole keeper of the doors, both front and back.
I turned back to him, once Big Al and I were standing outside in the lot. “Thanks for all your help,” I told him, “but there’s one more thing.”
Nick was already shutting the door behind us. He had to reverse the procedure and open the door again high enough so we could see him. He looked impatient.
“What now?” he asked.
“Where does Larry Martin usually park his car?”
He pointed. “Over there, under the billboard.”
The billboard was one of those new state-of-the-art ones, an ad for some kind of fresh ground coffee that included a huge cup with what looked like steam rolling off it. One of my drinking buddies down at the Doghouse works for Ackerly Communications. He told me the steam is really a chemical reaction caused by dropping something called voodoo juice into a powder. It makes an interesting billboard, though, if you like that sort of thing. Under this particular one sat several parked cars.
By the time I turned back to Wallace to ask him another question, the garage door was all the way shut and Damm Fine Carpets’ resident mechanic had disappeared, locked safely away in self-imposed solitary confinement.
Al took the bag from my hand. “I’ll lock this stuff in the trunk before we go take a look at Martin’s parking place.”
That’s what we did. With the laundry bag safely stowed in our car, we went back to the steaming billboard and prowled around under it. There were six cars parked there in all, but no red VW bug.
“This must be the Damm Fine Carpets employee parking lot,” Al observed.
We scrambled around in the hot dusty gravel for ten or fifteen minutes, but found nothing that seemed out of place, nothing that appeared to have anything to do with Dr. Frederick Nielsen’s murder.
“Do you think Nielsen’s wife set him up?” Al asked finally as we abandoned our search of the parking lot.
“Could be,” I said, “but how?”
“Let’s go back inside and ask around.”
So we walked back in the front door of Damm Fine Carpets. The same eager salesman started toward us but quickly backed off when he recognized us. We went straight to Cindy at the counter.
“Can you tell us who Dr. Frederick Nielsen ordered his carpet from?” I asked.
“I guess,” she said. “Do you know the invoice number?”
“No. It was supposed to be installed on Saturday.”
She hefted a huge three-ring binder from a shelf under the counter and leafed through several dozen pages of
