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  A more perfect union

  ( J P Beaumont - 6 )

  J. A. Jance

  J. A. Jance

  A more perfect union

  CHAPTER 1

  "Cassie, for God's sake! What the hell's the body doing out there already? I didn't call for the body. We're not set up yet."

  Speaking through a megaphone from his perch on a raised boom, movie director Sam "The Movie Man" Goldfarb's voice echoed through the wooden maze of Lake Union Drydock like God himself speaking from the mount.

  Cassie was Cassie Young, a punk-looking young woman who served as Goldfarb's right and left hands. She scurried toward the base of the director's boom as she raised a hand-held radio to her lips.

  Because I'm a homicide cop, my ears pricked up when I heard the word "body." For the past two weeks I'd been trailing around Seattle, dutifully mother-henning a Hollywood film crew. Officially, I was on special assignment for Mayor Dawson's office, acting as technical advisor to His Honor's old Stanford roommate and buddy, Samuel Goldfarb. Unofficially, I was doing less than nothing and felt as useless as tits on a boar.

  My short venture into the moviemaking business had certainly stripped away the glamour. As far as I can tell, movies are made by crowds of people who mill around endlessly without actually doing anything. I mean nothing happens. They take hours to set up for a scene that takes less than a minute to shoot, or else spend hours shooting a scene that amounts to two seconds of film footage. The whole process was absolutely stultifying. I hated it.

  My initial spurt of "body"-fueled adrenaline disappeared quickly. After all, movies are totally make-believe. On a film set, nothing is really what it seems. I naturally assumed that this was more of the same. Leaning back against a workbench in the pipe shop, I shifted my weight to one foot as I attempted to ease the throbbing complaints of the recently reactivated bone spur on my other heel.

  I had been whiling away the time by chatting with a garrulous old duffer named Woody Carroll. Woody was a retired Lake Union Drydock employee on tap that day to keep a watchful eye on the cast and crew of Death in Drydock. His job was to make sure we didn't do any damage to company property in the course of our Saturday shoot.

  Woody told me that he had worked as a carpenter for Lake Union Drydock both before and after World War II. He had been there steadily from the time he got home from a Japanese POW camp in the Philippines until he retired in 1980. He was full of countless stories, and his tales had kept my mind off the bone spur for most of the day. Hiding out from a blazing sun, we had retreated into the gloomy shade of the pipe shop. Seattle was sweltering through an unusually hot, dry August. People who live in the Northwest aren't accustomed to heat.

  "I don't know what to think of these young 'uns today," Woody Carroll drawled, picking up his train of thought and resuming our conversation as though nothing had happened. He had been complaining bitterly about the quality of some of the younger employees around the drydock. "They'd rather buy and sell stuff to put up their noses than do an honest day's work. It just beats all."

  Outside I could see Cassie Young returning her radio to her pocket. Now, shading her eyes with one hand, she called up to Goldfarb where he remained enthroned on the boom.

  "The shop says they're still working on the body. It isn't ready yet."

  "Well, what the hell do you call that? It's right in the way of the next shot. Get it out of there, for God's sake! What do you think I pay you for? And where's Derrick's stuntman? I need him. Now!"

  Goldfarb had pointed toward a spot in the water near where steep wooden steps led up the wingwall of the drydock. They had been using the boom to shoot a fight scene on the narrow steps with the navy minesweeper Pledge looming in the background. Two of the movie's name-brand stars, Derrick Parker and Hannah Boyer, still clung to two-by-four handrails some twenty feet above the solid planking of the pier.

  As the entire crew jumped in response to Goldfarb's barked commands, Cassie Young carefully picked her way across a snarled tangle of electrical cords toward the place Goldfarb had indicated.

  I didn't much like Cassie. She was a scrawny, red-haired, postadolescent who went in big for the spiked, new-wave look. She wore a thick layer of white pancake makeup. Her eyelashes dripped with heavy, black mascara. She could easily have been mistaken for a refugee from a school for mimes. Looking at her made me grateful she wasn't my daughter, although she and Kelly were probably much the same age.

  Cassie and I had crossed swords on numerous occasions during the course of my two-week stint of involuntary servitude on the set of Death in Drydock. I had a tough time taking her seriously. The feeling was mutual.

  According to Captain Powell, my main assignment as technical advisor was to make sure Goldfarb didn't portray the Seattle Police Department as "a bunch of stupid jerks." I had quickly learned, however, that trying to tell Sam Goldfarb anything he didn't want to hear was like talking to a brick wall. Every time he had his pretend cops doing something unbelievably stupid, I squawked bloody murder. For all the good it did me. Cassie Young didn't mince any words in letting me know that I was to keep those opinions to myself. I was a technical advisor all right. In name only.

  For the past week, I had called Captain Powell every morning at eight o'clock, begging him to let me off the hook and pull me from the assignment. No such luck. He kept telling me that the mayor wanted me on the set, and on the set I'd stay.

  Still mildly interested in whatever had plucked Goldfarb's nerves, I watched as Cassie reached the edge of the dock and knelt down to peer over the side. Her knees had barely touched the wood when she sprang back as though she'd been burned. She covered her mouth with one hand, but still the muffled sound that escaped her lips was as bloodcurdling a scream as I'd heard in years. The wrenching sound echoed back and forth through the otherwise eerily silent wooden buildings.

  For days I had lurked in the background of the process, staying out of the way of cameras and equipment. Now, the sound of Cassie's scream galvanized me to action. No matter what, I'm first and foremost a cop. In emergencies, we're trained to react. It's a conditioned response as natural as breathing. Without giving it a second thought, I started toward Cassie on a dead run, ignoring the quick stab of pain in my injured heel.

  "Quiet on the set," someone boomed through a megaphone, but Cassie kept on screaming, pointing hysterically toward the water. I reached her and grabbed her by the shoulders just as the megaphone boomed again. "For God's sake, somebody catch Hannah! She's going to fall."

  Cassie barfed then. I managed to swing her away from me just in time, then I held her by the waist while she heaved her guts out on the dock.

  Between barfing and screaming, I prefer the latter.

  At last Cassie straightened up and leaned heavily against me while her whole body quivered with terrible shudders. I held her, patting her gently on the back, soothing her as best I could, while I attempted to peer over her shoulder and see into the water, but we were too far from the edge of the dock. The angle was wrong.

  "What is it?" I demanded finally, holding her at arm's length. "What's down there?"

  Shaking her head from side to side, she seemed totally incapable of speech, but as soon as I took a step toward the edge of the dock, she came to life and fought me tooth and nail. Her ability to speak returned as well.

  "No, no!" she protested, twisting her wrists to escape my grip. "I can't look again. Please don't make me look again, please."

  By then, one of the electricians was standing beside us. I handed Cassie off to him, then went to the edge of the pier to see for myself.

  As soon as I did, I understood why Cassie Young had fought my attempt to drag her back.

  A corpse floated there in t
he water, or rather, what was left of a corpse. Although Lake Union has no natural currents to speak of, heavy boat traffic on the lake creates a lot of water movement. This movement, mimicking current, had left the body with its legs straddling a wooden piling.

  I could tell the corpse was that of a man, but I could make out little else. The bloated body floated low in the water. What was visible could hardly be called a face. His features were distorted and out of focus where skin slippage and feeding fish had done their ugly work. His hair, slicked down against his scalp, was dark and shiny, matted with oil from the lake.

  Horror movies manufacture phony death masks all the time. Cassie Young was in the movie business. I found it surprising that she took it so hard, that she was so shocked and shaken, but of course horror-movie masks are done in the name of good clean fun. This wasn't fun or make-believe.

  This was real-all too real.

  I turned around to assess the situation. It was as though everyone on the set was frozen in place. Nobody moved. Nobody said a word. On the top surface of the wingwall stood a cluster of men, grouped in a tight circle around what I assumed to be a stricken Hannah Boyer. I was grateful someone had managed to catch her and drag her to safety. If a twenty-foot fall doesn't kill you, it cripples you up real good.

  The first person to move was Woody Carroll, who hurried toward me as fast as his seventy-year-old legs would carry him. He stopped beside me and looked into the water.

  "Call 911," I ordered. "Have 'em send an ambulance for Hannah and a squad car for him." Without a word of protest, Woody nodded, turned, and hurried away toward a phone which was visible near the base of the wingwall.

  Lake Union Drydock consists of some 500,000-odd square feet, all of it sitting over thirty-five feet of water. Walking or driving, you have to cross a city-owned moat to get there. The various shops and docks are thrown together in a crazy-quilt, hodgepodge pattern. The company has been in continuous existence and use since 1919. Buildings and docks have been added whenever and wherever the spirit moved, giving the whole place a haphazard, thrown-together appearance.

  Looking now at the maze of buildings and docks, I wondered how emergency vehicles would ever manage to find us. We were clear out near the base of the largest drydock.

  Woody picked up the receiver of the phone. No sooner had he spoken into it than a shrill whistle sounded, sending five short sharp blasts into the air. Woody put the phone down and hurried back to me.

  "You'd better go meet them and direct them here to us," I told him. "Otherwise they'll never be able to find us."

  Woody laughed. "Those other guys I told you about are already on their way. That's what the whistle's for. Don't worry. They'll find us."

  Woody had informed me earlier that a skeleton safety crew was playing cards upstairs in an employee locker room. I hadn't thought we'd need them. Now I was more than happy they were there.

  Goldfarb, down from his overhead perch, stormed up behind me. "What's going on, Beaumont?" he demanded. "We've got a movie to shoot. We're losing the light."

  In the days I had been on the set I had found Goldfarb to be an altogether disagreeable little man who put his bad temper on a pedestal and called it "Artistic License." I had watched over and over as the whole crew leaped to satisfy his slightest whim. But that was movie business. This was police business, my business-maybe homicide.

  The crew suddenly came unstuck. They edged forward, trying to catch sight of whatever was under the dock. I shooed the nearest ones away.

  "Get your people out of here, Mr. Goldfarb. We've got emergency vehicles on the way." Even as I spoke, I heard the thin wail of an approaching siren.

  "Cops?" Goldfarb screeched, his voice becoming shrill. "You mean somebody's called the cops?"

  "That's exactly what I mean, Mr. Goldfarb," I returned.

  Goldfarb wasn't my boss, and I had developed a certain immunity to the director's ravings. He was a chronic complainer, always bitching and moaning, always at the top of his lungs.

  "You can't do that, Detective Beaumont," he roared back. "You can't bring cops in here and order me to clear out my people."

  "Watch me," I said. I turned to Woody. "Do it."

  He did, quickly and effectively, leaving Sam "The Movie Man" Goldfarb hopping from foot to foot in total frustration.

  "Cassie, can't you stop this?" he wailed. From bellowing one minute, Goldfarb was reduced to whining the next. "Robert Dawson's going to hear about this," he continued to me. "I'll see you fired before the day's over."

  Hizzoner can stick it in his ear, I thought. I said, "Be my guest. You do that."

  Seattle's Medic One has some of the best response times in the country. An aid car was the first emergency vehicle to appear on the scene. It rattled noisily over the wooden planks and jerked to a stop. I hurried to meet it and directed the medics to the stairs. "The woman's up there," I said, pointing. "On the wingwall."

  "Great," the driver replied, shading his eyes and evaluating the perpendicular wall with its steep wooden staircase. "What's wrong with her?"

  "Fainted probably."

  He drove the aid car as close as he could to the bottom of the steps. He and his partner leaped from their vehicle just as a Seattle P.D. squad car pulled up on the dock behind me. Two uniformed officers got out, a man and a woman.

  The man was a guy named Phil Baxter. I had seen him around the department before, although I had to check his name tag before I could remember his name. The woman was a young black with the name "Jackson" pinned to the breast pocket of her blue uniform. She was new to me.

  "What's going on here?" Baxter demanded of no one in particular. "Who's in charge?"

  "Looks like he is," Goldfarb said disgustedly, pointing at me.

  I answered with no further prompting. "A body," I told Phil. "Over there. In the water."

  Baxter walked to the edge of the dock and looked down. Sheer force of habit made me follow. It was still there, slapping against the wooden piling as the wake of a landing float plane rippled across the lake.

  As the body rose and fell, a large decorative brass belt buckle glinted briefly in the sun, just under the water's surface. There was a design on it of some kind, and some printing as well. I squinted my best middle-aged squint. Try as I might I couldn't make out the letters.

  "Can you read what it says on that buckle?" I asked Baxter.

  He too squinted. "Not from here," he answered.

  I hadn't noticed, but his partner, Officer Jackson, had followed us. "It says ‘Ironworker,'" she remarked quietly.

  I glanced back at her in some surprise. She was several feet farther away than I was, and she was able to read it when neither Baxter nor I could. "My vision's twenty-ten," she explained with a smile that made me feel ancient.

  For the first time Officer Baxter looked me full in the face. "Why, excuse me, Detective Beaumont. I didn't recognize you. How'd homicide get here so fast? I was just getting ready to call you guys."

  "Go ahead and call," I told him. "I'm not here representing homicide."

  "You're not?"

  I didn't want to go into all the gory details of why I was there. "Trust me on this one," I said. "Call Harbor Patrol and have them send somebody out."

  Baxter turned to his partner. "Do that, would you, Merrilee?"

  With a nod, Officer Jackson headed back toward the patrol car.

  I felt a tap on my shoulder. When I turned, there was Derrick Parker. "Hey, Beau. What's going on?" he asked tentatively. "Hannah really got an eyeful. She fainted dead away."

  "How is she?"

  "Hyperventilating. She was coming around, but she had a relapse as soon as the medics showed up. Hannah's got the hots for guys in uniform."

  Derrick Parker wasn't the least bit fond of his female costar. He and I had chummed around together some while he had been in Seattle. We shared similar tastes, although his ran to Glenlivet rather than MacNaughton's. He seemed to enjoy slumming in some of my favorite watering holes. The waitress
es at the Doghouse still hadn't tumbled to the fact that he was a genuine celebrity. Parker said he wanted to keep it that way.

  "Who was he?" Parker asked, nodding toward the water.

  "The dead man?" I shrugged. "That's up to the medical examiner and the detectives on the case."

  "But you're a detective, aren't you?" Parker objected.

  "This isn't my case. I'm doing a movie, remember?"

  Officer Jackson came back to where we were standing. She gave Derrick Parker a small, tentative smile. I'm sure she recognized him, but when she spoke, Merrilee Jackson was strictly business. "They're all on their way."

  "All?" I asked.

  "Someone's coming from the medical examiner's office. So are two detectives. Davis and Kramer."

  It wasn't exactly by the book, but Officer Jackson had taken a little initiative, and calling everybody at once would probably save time.

  I nodded. "Good," I said. "By the way, we haven't been introduced. I'm Detective J. P. Beaumont, and this is Derrick Parker."

  She held out her hand. "Merrilee Jackson," she said, shaking my hand, but flashing Parker a wide grin. "I'm glad to meet you."

  Merrilee Jackson didn't comment aloud on Derrick Parker's star status, and neither did Baxter. They had other things to worry about. A crowd of movie crew members was edging closer. "We'd better get these people moved back out of the way," Baxter said. "The M. E.'s van will need to pull up close to the water."

  They had barely turned their attention to crowd control when another car with lights flashing and siren blaring pulled onto the dock. Detective Manny Davis got out on the rider's side and strode over to me while Detective Paul Kramer stopped to talk with Officers Jackson and Baxter.

  "How's it going, Beau?" Manny asked with a chuckle. "How soon are we going to see your name in lights?"

  "Cut the comedy, Manny."

  "But I heard you were enjoying the movie business."

  I glowered at him.

  "Okay, okay," he said. "No big. What have we got, fish bait?"