During the months of confinement, Peters had functioned behind the scenes as the third man on Al’s and my team, using the telephone to track down leads we didn’t have time to pursue ourselves. It was a way of letting him keep his hand in.
“As a matter of fact there is,” I told him. “You can check around with the local emergency rooms and see if someone came in Saturday or Sunday with some bad scratches. Deep cuts, probably, made with the teeth of a carpet kicker.”
“Ouch,” Peters said. “I’ve seen those before. They’re wicked.”
“You’ve got that right,” I said. “The van the guy was driving had blood all over it, but he’s disappeared. Maybe you can help us get a line on him.”
“I’ll do my best. By the way, how are the girls?”
“They’re fine. They were here just a while ago. I invited them up for an ice cream float. We all had a good time. I probably spoiled their dinners.”
There was a pause. “Thanks,” Peters said. He sounded about half choked up.
“Don’t make a big deal out of it, Peters,” I told him. “It’s just like taking the girls to see
Bambi.
I needed an excuse so I could have a float, too.“
CHAPTER 8
The bachelor life doesn’t have a lot to recommend it, especially if you’re a lousy cook. One exception, however, is the ability to kick off your shoes in the middle of the living room and take a nap right after work, without anyone telling you that you need to mow the lawn or haul the garbage cans out to the street.
I’m what’s known as a world-class sleeper. If left undisturbed, these afternoon naps of mine can sometimes last right on through to morning. Unless the phone rings, which it did. Right at nine o’clock.
“Detective Beaumont, please,” a woman’s voice said. It was a crisp, businesslike voice I didn’t recognize.
“Yes,” I mumbled, trying not to sound as groggy as I felt.
“My name is Alice Fields. I’m the executive director of Phoenix House. You left a message for me to call you. I was going to wait until morning, but then I had another call tonight from Marilyn McDougal.”
My stupefied brain cells finally woke up and snapped to attention. “Oh yes, Miss Fields. Thanks for returning my call.”
“Mrs.
Fields,“ she corrected firmly. She spoke with a sharp Midwestern twang that made her sound as though she had just stepped off the train from Minneapolis-Saint Paul.
“I understand you’re looking for a woman who may possibly be a resident in our shelter.”
J. P. Beaumont wasn’t much of a poker player, but neither was Alice Fields. I was bright enough to figure out that she wouldn’t be calling me four hours after quitting time if she didn’t know LeAnn Nielsen from a hole in the wall, if she didn’t give a damn.
“Might be a resident” like hell! That’s what I thought, but I didn’t say it aloud. “Did Marilyn tell you that LeAnn Nielsen’s husband is dead?” I asked.
There was a sigh, a long weary sigh. “Yes, she told me. She also said that you’re in charge of the murder investigation. What I want to know is this: is his wife under suspicion or not?”
“At this stage, the whole world is under suspicion.” It was half truth, half quip. It met with icy rejection.
“In that case, Detective Beaumont, I don’t believe we have anything further to discuss.”
“No, wait. Right now we need to reach LeAnn for two reasons, the most important of which is to tell her of her husband’s death. We’ve held off releasing his name pending notification of next of kin, but that doesn’t mean one of the television or radio stations might not get it from another source and put it on the air.”
“What’s the other reason?” Alice Fields asked.
“We’ll need to ask her some questions, to see if she can shed any light on the case.”
“Which is another way of saying she is a suspect.”
I wasn’t making much of a dent in Alice Fields’ suit of armor. “We know she was expected at her husband’s office shortly before he died. She may have seen or overheard something that would be of help to us in solving the case.”
There was dead silence on the other end of the phone. It lasted so long that I began to wonder if Alice Fields had hung up on me.
“Do you know where the Hi-Spot Cafe is?” she asked at last. “It’s in the Madrona district, at Thirty-fourth and Union.”
“I don’t know it, but I’m sure I can find it.”
“Meet me there tomorrow morning at nine,” Alice Fields said decisively.
“How will I know you?” I asked. I’m a veteran of enough missed connections that I’ve finally learned to ask important questions before
I go looking for someone I don’t know at a place I don’t know either.
“I’m short, white hair, glasses-” she began, then she stopped. “I have a better idea. Tell them you want to sit at the round table. That room’s far enough off the beaten path that we’ll have some privacy, especially on a Tuesday morning.”
She hung up without bothering to wait for me to say yes or no and without saying goodbye, either. I realized later that I hadn’t asked her if she’d be bringing LeAnn Nielsen along to the Hi-Spot Cafe. It was just as well. She wouldn’t have told me anyway.
My ice cream float was long gone. I was starving. I padded out to the kitchen in hopes of finding food, but before I could lay hands on the refrigerator door handle, the phone rang again.
“Hi there, Beau.” It was Ron Peters, speaking to me from the echoing distance of his handless speaker- phone. “I didn’t wake you, did I?”
“Don’t worry about it. You’re not the first. I had another call a minute ago. That’s the one that woke me up.”
“What are you doing sleeping at this time of night? It’s not that late. Besides, I thought you’d want to know what I found out.”
“Who found out?” I recognized Amy Fitzgerald’s voice speaking in the background.
Peters laughed. “Excuse me. What Amy found out.”
Amy Fitzgerald had been Peters’ physical therapist during the months he had been confined in Harborview Hospital. She was still his physical therapist as far as I knew, but by now she was also quite a bit more than that. Her off-duty hours seemed to revolve around Ron Peters’ room.
“About Larry Martin?” I asked.
“That’s right. A woman brought him in to Harborview Emergency Room on Saturday afternoon about one- thirty. He said he was a carpet installer and that one of his tools had fallen on him. They put twenty stitches in his face and head.”
“Twenty stitches? That’s some cut,” I said. “It must have fallen from a long way up.”
“Amy says there would have been a lot of blood. I guess facial cuts bleed like crazy.”
“There was blood all right,” I said. “What about the woman? Was she hurt?”
“She was covered with blood, too. One of the ER nurses said one eye was swollen shut, but she wouldn’t give her name and refused to accept any treatment. The nurse figured it was a domestic quarrel of some kind, but the woman didn’t want to let on for fear of having one or the other of them wind up in jail. She denied the man was her husband.”
Peters was referring to a recent Washington State statute that requires law enforcement officers to attempt to ascertain who’s the primary aggressor in domestic violence cases and to lock up the responsible party. It’s a law that works a hell of a lot better on paper than it does in real life.
“She was telling the truth there,” I said. “If that was LeAnn Nielsen, her husband’s dead.”
I stretched the kitchen phone cord across to the refrigerator and browsed for food. There wasn’t much to be
