JP Beaumont 11 - Failure To Appear (v5.0) Read online

  What followed was a long silence. As the gulf between us grew wider, I felt a dull ache in my gut. Alexis Downey and I were having our first major disagreement—one that couldn’t be walked around or ignored or swept under a rug. It wasn’t over something inconsequential like lumpy futons or man-hating cats. We were staring into the fundamental differences between us, grappling with disparities that arose out of who we were, what we did, and what we believed.

  I was seven years older than Alex. I had been a cop for almost twenty years, more than half her lifetime. Cops see too damn much.

  “Well,” she said finally, shaking her head and steadfastly pulling us back from the edge of the cliff. “I still think for blackmail to work, Tanya would have to have money.”

  The thought came to me then—a sudden, clear inkling of what else Martin Shore might have wanted from Tanya Dunseth. Just thinking about it made me feel incredibly old. And dirty. And right back on the edge of the precipice.

  “Not necessarily,” I said. “Maybe he wanted something else.”

  “What?”

  Alex still didn’t understand, and I didn’t want to tell her, didn’t want her to have to know some of the things I know—the ugly things all cops learn sooner or later because they have to. Because they don’t have a choice. Alex sat there, her eyes holding mine, waiting for me to say something.

  “The streets aren’t the only things that have deteriorated over the last few years,” I said. “Other things have gotten worse as well.”

  She frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Choosing my words carefully, I tried my best to explain it without having to come right out and draw Alexis a picture.

  “Years ago, eleven- or twelve-year-olds were young enough for this kind of filth. Not anymore. In terms of perpetrators getting away with it, the best candidates for sexual abuse and exploitation are still female children under the age of three. They can’t testify, can’t say who did it or what they did.”

  As she grasped what I was saying, Alex’s eyes widened in horror. She studied me searchingly for some time after I finally shut up. “You mean Shore would try to blackmail Tanya to let him use her baby the same way? To make a movie?”

  “It happens,” I answered miserably. “I swear to God, Alex, this kind of crap goes on all the time. You have no idea.”

  “You’re right,” she spat back at me, suddenly furious. “I guess I haven’t! And I don’t think I want to, either!”

  Without another word, she stormed out of the shop. I made no attempt to stop her. She needed to be alone for a while. So did I. It’s no wonder so many disillusioned cops end up divorced and living alone. Who can live with them? According to the suicide statistics, they can barely stand to live with themselves.

  I don’t know how long I sat there. Eventually, one of the kids waiting tables came over and took away the remains of both root-beer floats. When he asked me if I wanted anything else, I looked up at him stupidly. The second time around I finally managed to order coffee. He must have thought I’d gone crazy.

  Beating yourself up is simple, especially when you’ve had as much practice at it as I have. In retrospect, I could see exactly what I’d done wrong. Of course I should have kept quiet about my suspicions. Of course I shouldn’t have brought up any of it. I was a dumb-ass bum for even mentioning such a thing. But I had, and now I couldn’t take it back. The damage was done, and I couldn’t see any way in hell to make it better.

  Unless, I thought, brightening suddenly at the prospect—unless I could somehow come up with some other theory and prove myself wrong. For people who are expert self-castigators, it’s easy to recognize how being totally wrong can turn into a walk-away victory. And if, in order to prove myself sufficiently wrong, I had to bend a few rules, so what? It wouldn’t be the first time.

  And that’s how I really ended up getting involved in Gordon Fraymore’s case. Personally involved, I mean. Not because I particularly wanted to, and not, God help me, because I wanted to make his life miserable. Not at all. What I really wanted was to find some way to redeem myself in Alexis Downey’s eyes.

  I had trotted out only one of my pet theories. I had plenty more where that came from. The first one had been ugly enough to drive Alex away from me and out into the night. There were no guarantees that the real answer, whatever that might be, wouldn’t be even worse. But if it meant not losing Alex permanently, I had to make the effort.

  So I sat there all by myself and drank cup after cup of coffee. I tried to think my way into Gordon Fraymore’s case the same way I’d be trying to think myself into one of my own if I were back home in Seattle and officially assigned to a new homicide investigation. Only here there was an added dimension. My only access to the killer was through what I had learned or could learn from Detective Gordon Fraymore.

  At the start of a case, I usually try to do a mental sort, drawing a picture of who all the players are and trying to see how they’re interconnected. Because most people are killed by someone they know, that process often leads directly to the killer or to people who know the killer.

  To that end, I grabbed a folded napkin out of the holder and began drawing little X’s and O’s all over it. At the center of the diagram were Tanya and Amber Dunseth. In a circle around them were Martin Shore, Jeremy, Kelly, Monica Davenport, Dinky Holloway, and me. I was about to quit when I realized there were two other people I needed to add, equal O’s on the same line—Daphne and Guy Lewis.

  I closed my eyes and tried to remember exactly how it had been when Daphne and Guy had stepped inside the Members’ Lounge prior to the donors’ party. There had been no mistaking Tanya Dunseth’s intense reaction. My only problem was figuring out which of the two she’d been reacting to—Gordon or Daphne.

  And then something clicked in my mind and gave me my first little glimmer of hope. Guy Lewis. Here was a man who’d already discarded one wife and was having trouble hanging on to number two. Was it possible he was in the market for yet another trophy wife, or maybe just a trophy plaything? I had thought his wave was intended for me, but I wondered now if perhaps it had been intended for Tanya. Maybe he knew more about Tanya Dunseth than just her roles on stage.

  Filled with purpose now, I shoved my coffee cup aside, stuffed the napkin into my pocket, and headed for the Mark Anthony. Alex had told me the Lewises were staying there. This time I had no trouble ignoring the smoke, laughter, and pulsing music from the bar. I hurried to the nearest house phone.

  “Guy Lewis, please.”

  “Is he a registered guest?”

  “Yes.”

  There was a long pause. “I’m sorry, Mr. Lewis checked out this morning.”

  I put down the phone. Disappointed, I was conscious of the smoke and the sounds in a different way now, but I hurried back out into the street before they had a chance to ensnare me. Outside, I was momentarily undecided.

  The first few playgoers were just now trickling down the hill from the theaters. Soon it would be a river of people. Seeing them, I decided to go back to Oak Hill. Alex and I had only one house key between us, and Alex had taken that one with her. If I went home now, maybe one of the other guests would take pity and let me inside the house as they returned from the plays. Maybe I could ask Florence for a duplicate. Otherwise, I’d have to go looking for someplace else to stay.

  I found the Porsche where we’d left it parked. Seeing it, I was awash with guilt at the idea of Alex walking all the way home in the dark by herself. That night I was a living, breathing guilt magnet.

  I drove back to the B & B. Except for a night-light burning in the living room, the place was dark, including the windows in the Iris Room up under the eaves. Either Alex was asleep or she hadn’t come home. No other cars were parked beside the house. That meant I was the first one home.

  Discouraged, I got out of the car. The weight of the world bore down on my shoulders as I walked up the steps.

  “Beau? Are you all right?”

  Alex spok
e to me out of a gloom of shadows. I walked toward the sound of her voice. She was seated on a swing at the far end of the porch, wrapped snugly in one of the blankets from our bed.

  “I waited up to let you in,” she said. “I knew you didn’t have a key.”

  “Thanks.” I sat down gingerly on the far end of the swing. “I’m sorry about tonight. I never should have…”

  “Don’t apologize,” she said. “I was shocked by what you said, but maybe you’re right. Maybe Amber is what Martin Shore wanted.”

  That sounded very much like forgiveness. I gave myself permission to hope.

  Alex continued, “So I thought to myself, if that’s the case, she probably did kill him, and she’s going to need a good lawyer, so I went ahead and called Ralph.”

  “You called Ralph Ames?”

  “Who else? I hope you’re not mad at me. He was the first lawyer I thought of, and I know he’s good. And I happened to know where to reach him after hours.”

  “Oh, he’s good all right,” I agreed. “What did he say?”

  “He said he’d be here tomorrow for the wedding, and we could talk about it then. If he can’t handle it himself, I’m sure he’ll recommend someone. He says he’ll fly into Medford first thing. He’ll be here around nine.”

  It was a done deal. Further comment seemed unnecessary.

  “And he said for you not to worry about Karen and Dave. That’s all handled. They’re meeting Scott and should be getting into Medford shortly after Ralph does. They’ll rent their own car. They should be here by noon.”

  The first of the other playgoers’ cars turned into the driveway. In the sudden wash of headlights, Alex leaned over and kissed me on the side of my neck.

  “What do you think?” she asked. “Is that okay? I worried I was overstepping the bounds.”

  “You didn’t overstep anything,” I answered. “And I think it’s more than okay. I think it’s great.”

  And right that minute, so was I.

  CHAPTER

  8

  I’m not one to spend time worrying about the future. When some people learn they’re about to become parents, they peer down a long time tunnel and see everything from front teeth falling out to learner’s permits, from Tee-ball games to high school graduations.

  My mother always told me that living in the future was borrowing trouble, and I believed her. Consequently, I never gave much thought to my daughter’s wedding day; never imagined how it might be with Kelly garbed all in white, in a church festooned with flowers, and all that. Karen had, so the way it turned out was a whole lot harder on her than it was on me.

  It didn’t start out all that badly. Ralph breezed into town and stopped at the Oak Hill Bed-and-Breakfast at five after ten the next morning. He dragged a loaded suitcase into the living room and set it down.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “I wasn’t sure you packed any suitable father-of-the-bride attire,” he said. “I brought some along just in case.”

  As a matter of fact, once I knew Dave Livingston and Karen would be in attendance, I had been concerned about clothes. For one thing, Dave Livingston is a natty dresser—he had turned up in Wickenburg, Arizona, wearing a three-piece suit, for God’s sake. I was sure he would show me up. Alex had taken me to task, telling me it was Kelly’s day, and it wasn’t a competition, but it had bugged me all the same.

  By the time I woke up that morning and thought about calling Ralph to have him bring along some other clothes, it was too late. He was already on his way. But that’s the kind of guy Ralph is—the kind of friend. He had figured it out and acted on his own without needing any coaching from me.

  After I carted the suitcase up to Alex’s and my room, we took Ralph, some mugs, and an extra pot of coffee and adjourned to the lawn chairs on Oak Hill’s secluded backyard deck.

  “So tell me about this friend of Kelly’s who’s in so much hot water,” Ralph said. “You all must have had an exceptionally busy time of it down here.”

  And so we told him. Ralph Ames listened patiently while Alex and I took turns recounting the various pieces of Tanya’s story—telling him about Martin Shore’s death and about the pornographic-film connection between Shore and the Festival’s rising young actress. We told him about the Henckels slicer that had disappeared from a Festival prop table only to show up later as a murder weapon. We did a joint rendition of what we could remember of Tanya Dunseth’s background, repeating as close to verbatim as possible what Kelly and Jeremy had told us. We were just in the process of recounting her economic rescue by Marjorie Connors when Florence, the retired schoolteacher/owner of Oak Hill B & B, came rushing out onto the deck.

  By then Florence had been informed of the father/daughter connection between her part-time maid, Kelly Beaumont, and me. Florence seemed somewhat flustered.

  “Sorry to interrupt, Mr. Beaumont,” she said, “but someone named Karen is at the front door. She wants to speak to you. She looks a lot like your daughter. Could it be Kelly’s mother?”

  It certainly could. Nodding and prepared for some unpleasantness, I got up and headed inside. As I walked past, Alex reached out and gave my leg an encouraging pat. “Want me to go along?” she asked.

  “No, I’m a big boy. I think I can manage.” All the same, I wasn’t looking forward to the coming encounter.

  I found Dave Livingston and Karen seated on the now-sunny porch swing where I’d discovered Alex concealed in shadows the night before. Karen is an attractive woman—always has been. She seemed to have lost weight since I last saw her, and that was fine. She had regained some of her girlish figure, but her face looked haggard. Her eyes were red and puffy, as though she’d spent most of the previous night crying. The skin on her cheeks seemed drawn too thin over her jawline, and dark smudges encircled her eyes. Standing next to her, Dave Livingston didn’t look so hot, either. They were both worn-out.

  I glanced around, searching for my son, Scott. I caught sight of him—rangy, well-built, and full grown—still out in the driveway, lounging casually against a rented Lincoln Town Car with his hands shoved deep in his pants pockets. He nodded in my direction, but he made no move toward the porch. Smart boy, I thought. It was wise to stay out of range until it became clear whether or not pyroclastic blasts would be the order of the day.

  Before I stepped out the door, I pasted what was supposed to be a sincerely welcoming grin on my face, although I probably succeeded only in looking idiotic. “Hello, Karen,” I said.

  Secretly, I hoped she’d be impressed by the fact that I’d beaten the odds and stayed sober far longer than she or anyone else had expected. If she cared or even noticed, she didn’t say.

  Dave got up and ambled over to shake my hand. For some reason, he seemed genuinely happy to see me. Karen didn’t. She sat in the swing staring up at my face.

  “Hello yourself,” she said woodenly.

  It’s sad to realize how people change; hard to believe that a man and woman who once meant the world to one another can drift apart completely until they’re reduced to being virtual strangers; all but impossible to acknowledge that they can evolve so far from what they once were—lovers, sharing their innermost thoughts, dreams, and secrets—to alien beings with less than nothing to say to each other.

  “Great day for a wedding, don’t you think?” I asked, wanting to lighten things up and hoping no one would notice the sudden catch in my throat. Instant tears brimmed in Karen’s eyes just as they had in Kelly’s when we’d exchanged words on the farmhouse steps at Live Oak Farm two days earlier. Like mother, like daughter, I thought. I’ve always been a sucker for tears.

  “I wanted her to have a perfect wedding,” Karen choked. “I never wanted it to be like…like this!”

  Dave hurried back to Karen’s side. He sat down next to her and placed a comforting hand on her knee. “It’ll be all right, Karen. You’ll see.”

  “Well,” I said awkwardly, “I’m glad you came.”

  Karen swallowed hard. �
�I didn’t want to,” she retorted with some of her customary bite. “And I wouldn’t have, either, if Dave hadn’t insisted. He said if we didn’t make the effort now, we might lose Kelly for good.”

  Dave glanced up at me in a frank but silent appeal for help. His look touched me. For the first time, I realized that having spent years living with the same woman, the two of us had something in common, a bond. So do veterans of foreign wars.

  “That’s probably true,” I said. “About losing Kelly, I mean. I’m sure she’ll be delighted to see you.”

  After that, I floundered around some more, desperately searching for something sensible to say, something relatively noncontroversial. My mother always insisted weather was a safe topic, no matter what. Squinting up at the sun, I gave that a try. “I imagine you’ve heard that the ceremony’s going to be outdoors, at a place called Lithia Park,” I said. “It’s a good thing the weather’s so nice today.”

  “We haven’t heard a thing,” Karen responded icily, her voice taking on a sharp and all-too-familiar edge. “I suppose you’re paying for all this?”

  Allegedly, it takes two to make a quarrel. I’m not so sure. I was doing my best not to fight, but Karen’s baiting made it tough to keep from lashing out in return. It seemed to me she had a hell of a lot of nerve acting so pissed. What had I done?

  To be honest, probably a lot. I’ve never claimed to be the best of all possible husbands and fathers. When Karen left me to marry Dave—which she did with unseemly haste, I might add—she wiped me out financially. Took my money and ran, as the saying goes. I know from the kids that Dave makes good money and that he and Karen are pretty well off.

  When Anne Corley died much later, leaving me as the astonished sole beneficiary of her estate, I made no secret of my changed and much improved circumstances, and I wasn’t chintzy about sharing that money with the kids. Unlike some divorced dads, I never ducked my child support. So why was Karen so mad at me?

  At the time, I decided she was simply furious with the world in general, and I was the most likely target. Whatever the cause, over the years I’ve read all those sad letters in Ann Landers’ column, the ones about feuding former spouses routinely spoiling their children’s weddings. I was determined not to let that happen here. This particular wedding already had far too many strikes against it.