Improbable cause jpb-5 Read online

  Now, though, all trace of both Model T’s and fire extinguishers had been obliterated. The place sported a brand-new coat of brilliant yellow paint, and the company’s name, emblazoned in six-foot-tall block letters, ran the entire length of the building. The only reminder that the shell was a relic from a bygone era was the old-fashioned metal grillwork in each of the small glass windows.

  We parked in a “customer only” parking place and went inside the compact showroom. It was ten to three when an eager salesman zeroed in on us. We must have looked like live ones. “Can I interest you in some carpet today?” he asked, rubbing his hands together.

  I shook my head. “Actually, we’re here looking for the owner. Is he in?”

  The man shrugged and glanced down at his watch. “Mr. Damm isn’t available right now, not for ten minutes or so.” He pointed toward one side of the room, where we saw a counter with a woman sitting behind it. “That’s Mr. Damm’s secretary. You’ll have to talk to her.”

  We walked over to the counter. The secretary was a reasonably attractive sweet young thing in her early twenties. She had that funny, nerve-wracking blink of people who have yet to master the art of comfortably wearing their contact lenses. The most noticeable thing about her, however, were her fingernails. They were at least two inches long. Each. It crossed my mind that typing couldn’t be a major part of her job description. A brass plate on the counter told us her name was Cindy.

  “We’re here to see Mr. Damm,” I said when she looked up at me and blinked.

  “Was he expecting you?” she asked.

  “No, we’re here on police business.” I held out my ID. She took it, holding it close to her face to read it. Even with the contacts, she must have been terrifically nearsighted.

  “He’ll be out in about…” She held her watch up to her face. “In about five minutes now. You can talk to him then. If you’d like to have a chair…”

  She motioned us into two blue side chairs across from the counter, and we settled down to wait. It wasn’t long before a tiny alarm on the secretary’s watch went off. She got up and hurried to a door halfway down a short hallway behind her. I had known there was a doorway there, and from the outside it looked ordinary enough. When she opened it, however, I could tell it was anything but ordinary.

  The inside of the door was covered with fur. Fake white fur. The kind you’d expect to find on a soft, stuffed Easter bunny in some little kid’s Easter basket. The secretary disappeared into a room, closing the door behind her.

  I nudged Al. “Did you get a load of that?”

  He rolled his eyes and shook his head. “This must be our lucky day,” he said.

  Moments later the secretary reappeared. “Mr. Damm will see you now,” she announced. “In his office. This way, please.” Since she stood holding the fur-lined door open and motioning for us to enter, that had to be the place. We got up and walked inside.

  Outside the door, the interior of Damm Fine Carpets looked like any other fluorescent-lit, modern storefront and warehouse, but walking through the door into Richard Damm’s office was like entering another world. I had never seen an office anything like it. It was dark for one thing, the heavy, oppressive darkness of a dim bar or darkened theater when you first come in from outside and your eyes haven’t adjusted to the light.

  Big Al and I stopped long enough to get our bearings while the door swished shut behind us. The better part of the wall to the right of the door was made up of a huge, dimly lit fish tank complete with a wide variety of colorful fish. Beside the aquarium, in one corner of the room was a small fountain where beads of water cascaded down in a circle around a statuette of a naked lady.

  At the far end of the room was a seating area-a conversation pit I think they call them-facing a complex home entertainment center. The back of a man’s head was barely visible over the top of the couch. He was seated directly in front of a color television set that was playing the credits to some afternoon program. On either side of the set were a series of four VCRs, all of them with red lights glowing.

  By now, our eyes had adjusted to the light enough so that details of the room gradually became clearer. The secretary had called it an office, but there was no sign of a desk or a file cabinet. Directly across from us was a fully equipped, well-stocked bar, and to our left was a tiny efficiency kitchen. The place didn’t look like an office at all. It was a home away from home.

  There were no windows in the room. The carpeting, plush white, not only covered the floor, but ran halfway up the walls wherever walls were visible. It reminded me of a padded cell. For all I know, it was a padded cell.

  Richard Damm didn’t bother to get up. “Come on in,” he called. “I always watch ”General Hospital‘ during lunch, but it’s over now.“

  He was fiddling with a remote control. The program credits disappeared and a movie came on. He had evidently stopped a video in midstream, because the action was already well in progress.

  It was one of those Debbie-Does-Dallas kinds of porno flicks, one the first amendment never should have protected in the first place. I thought Big Al’s eyes were going to pop right out of his head when he saw what was happening on the screen.

  I suppose I shouldn’t make fun of Al. I wasn’t exactly immune myself. When the sound track got too graphic, Damm finally turned off the volume, but not the machine. Without bothering to take his eyes from the movie, he motioned for us to sit down. “I’m Richard Damm,” he said shortly. “What can I do for you?”

  The owner of Damm Fine Carpets was your basic low-brow voyeur with all the class and style of a K-Mart blue-light special. He was probably in his mid to late fifties with a luxurious headful of wavy silver hair and a matching mustache. A closer examination revealed that the mustache was his. The hair wasn’t.

  He was definitely not a staid, three-piece-suit, coat-and-tie man. He was wearing a gaudy blue-and-white Hawaiian shirt with white slacks and turquoise boat shoes. The top three buttons on his palm-tree-covered shirt were unbuttoned, exposing far too much of a totally hairless chest. He wore not one but three long gold chains and lots of sickly sweet froufrou water. I figured the chains were as phony as the hair. The bony remains of a Kentucky Fried Chicken lunch sat on the coffee table in front of him.

  “Help yourself to a drink,” he suggested.

  “No thanks,” I said. “We’re on duty.”

  “Coffee, then? It’s already made.”

  “No thank you. Nothing. We’re in a hurry.” I was trying my best to keep the questions on track, to keep my mind from wandering away from the point of our visit, but Debbie and her antics with the men from Dallas were interfering with my train of thought.

  “We’re looking for one of your employees,” I said.

  For the first time, Richard Damm glanced away from the writhing living-color bodies on his television screen. He seemed mildly interested. “Which one?” he asked.

  Al and I sat down side by side on the couch. “Larry Martin,” I answered.

  Richard Damm sighed, punched his remote control, and froze a mass of naked, nubile bodies in midscrew. “That little shit,” he said. “I’m looking for him, too.”

  “He didn’t come to work today?”

  “That’s right. He left a note saying that he was taking this week off. The whole goddamned week, when I’ve got twenty-three installations scheduled. He can take the rest of his life off, for all I care. If he shows his face around here again, I’ll fire his ass.”

  Damm got up, walked to the kitchen, and came striding back with a stack of Styrofoam cups and a coffeepot. “A hell of a lot of thanks a guy gets for trying to help.”

  In his agitation, Damm must have forgotten I had told him we didn’t want coffee. Truth be known, he probably hadn’t been listening. He poured coffee into three cups, passed one each to Al and me, then flopped back down on the couch with his own. He punched a button on the remote control and the bodies on the screen resumed their impossible contortions.

  “What
do you mean, ”thanks“?” I asked.

  Richard Damm shook his head. “Larry’s been straight for five years, give or take. I figured he had his act together, that I could trust him. But now this.”

  He lit a cigarette and pulled a brimming ashtray within easy reach.

  “Straight?” I asked. “I don’t understand.”

  “Me either. It’s guys like him who make it tough on everybody else.”

  “You’d better tell us about it,” I suggested.

  “Like I said, I hired him about five years ago, fresh out of the slammer. I let him work in my warehouse. It was like my civic duty, know what I mean? One of those work-release arrangements. It looked to me like it was working out fine.”

  “He’s worked for you the whole time, then?”

  Richard Damm nodded. “He handled the warehouse job for a couple of years, and then asked if he could start doing installations. He could make a lot more money doing that. I figured what the hell. He was a good enough worker. Turned out I was right. At least it looked that way at the time. He was a little slow at first, but he caught on.”

  “What did he get sent up for?” Al asked.

  “Vehicular manslaughter. DWI. He came out of the joint sober and went straight to AA. Hasn’t had a drop since, as far as I know.”

  “How about lately? Any unexplained absences before this morning?”

  Damm shook his head. “Not so as you’d notice. But he screwed up a truck over the weekend. My mechanic is pissed as hell about that, and I’ve been waiting all morning to hear whether or not he got that dentist’s office finished before he took off.”

  “Dr. Nielsen’s office?” I asked.

  Richard Damm seemed surprised. “That’s right. How’d you know about that? Nielsen’s a son of a bitch to work for. I call him ”Mister Got Bucks.“ He’s just like an old woman- fussy as hell. If Larry took off without completing that job, Nielsen’ll have my ass. I tried calling his office a couple of minutes ago. No answer.”

  And there isn’t going to be, I thought. I said, “What makes you think Martin didn’t complete the job?”

  “You wanna know what I really think?” Richard Damm demanded.

  “Yes.”

  “I think he went out on the town Friday night, fell off the wagon, and got himself in some kind of hassle. Maybe even skipped town. If he did, he took off with enough of my tools to be able to get himself another job wherever the hell he ends up.”

  I happened to know that most of Larry Martin’s tools, minus the kicker that was down at the crime lab, were still in Dr. Frederick Nielsen’s office, but I didn’t tell Richard Damm that. I wasn’t about to tell him anything I didn’t have to. For some reason-maybe the phony hair, maybe the phony smile-Richard Damm rubbed me the wrong way.

  “You always jump to these kinds of conclusions when one of your employees doesn’t show up for work on a Monday morning?” I asked.

  Richard Damm’s whole manner changed abruptly. “I’m not stupid,” he said. “I had one of my guys drive by to check on him. His car wasn’t there, and nobody answered the door. That’s all I know.”

  “You said something about him screwing up one of your trucks,” Al mentioned. “Tell us about that.”

  “One of my installation vans. It’s a mess.”

  “What about it?”

  “He musta gotten in some kind of fight, that’s what we figure, or maybe an accident. All I know is there was blood all over the place, and one of the doors is bashed in. I guess I should be grateful, though. At least he didn’t steal it.”

  “You say there was blood in the van?”

  “You deaf or what? All over the seat, all over the floor.”

  “We’d better have a look at it,” Big Al said, getting up and starting toward the door. “Where is it?”

  “Nick took it down to Westlake to have it cleaned up and detailed. He’s probably back by now. It had been sitting out in the sun for a day and a half at least. Those stains really set up good. Nick says he doesn’t know if they can save the upholstery or not. He may have to tear it all out.”

  “Who’s Nick?”

  “Nick Wallace, my mechanic. We’ve got a whole fleet of vans. He’s in charge of keeping them all on the road.”

  “And where is he?”

  “Out back, in the garage. That’s usually where he is, him and his trucks-his babies he calls ”em. He couldn’t treat ‘em better if they all belonged to him personally, know what I mean?“

  I got up and followed Al toward the fur-lined door. “So where’s the garage?”

  “Straight through the warehouse. You’ll have to ring the bell for him to let you in.”

  I stopped in the doorway door and turned back toward the room. The movie had returned to life on the television screen with all the moanings and pantings turned back up to full volume.

  “Do you know Larry Martin’s address?”

  Enthralled once more, Damm didn’t bother to look up. “Not off the top of my head. Get it from Cindy, my secretary. Tell her I said she should give it to you.”

  “We may be back,” I added.

  “Sure thing. I’ll be right here.”

  Cindy gave us Larry Martin’s address and phone number up in Lake City, then she directed us through the warehouse to the garage at the far end of the building. She assured us that was where we’d find Nick Wallace.

  “Do you believe that little shit?” Big Al asked as we made our way through canyons of carpet rolls. “Damm must not be getting any, or he wouldn’t have to watch that crap on TV.”

  I certainly wasn’t getting any at the moment. The X-rated action on Richard Damm’s television set had made me painfully aware of my own particular lack.

  “Probably not,” I said, and let it go at that.

  Big Al is forever telling me that I need to get hooked up with some nice, warm-blooded Swedish girl like his Molly.

  He could very well be right.

  CHAPTER 6

  Just as Richard Damm had warned us, we had to ring a bell to gain admittance to Nick Wallace’s garage. The door was locked from the inside. He came to open it himself. Nick was an older man, somewhere in his late sixties I’d say, with a ruddy complexion and thinning gray hair. He was wearing a pair of bright blue coveralls with a greasy towel hanging from one back pocket.

  He opened the door, all right, but just a crack, enough for him to see us but not enough for us to step inside.

  “Yeah?” he said gruffly. “Whadya want?” Al, leading the way, held out his ID. “Detectives Lindstrom and Beaumont. We’re with Seattle P.D. Homicide,” he explained. “We’d like to talk to you about one of your vans.”

  Nick Wallace’s watery blue eyes narrowed slightly behind his thick wire-rimmed glasses. “Which one?”

  “The one Larry Martin was driving Saturday,” Al said. “The one with the bloodstains.”

  “Oh, that one,” Nick said. He opened the door a little wider then and allowed us to come inside, reluctantly admitting us to his sanctum sanctorum.

  And that’s exactly what it was. I suspect Nick Wallace of being an original, card-carrying member of

  Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

  Entering his small shop in the back of Damm Fine Carpets was nothing short of a religious experience. He had every tool imaginable, from small milling lathes to complex electronic testing equipment. It was one of those workrooms that had a place for everything and everything in its place.

  I’m the kind of messy mechanic who hates to work on cars. I do it only when absolutely necessary, and I never have the right tool for the right job. Oh, I may have it, but I can never lay my hands on it when I need it.

  Through the years I’ve counted my lack of mechanical aptitude as a real character flaw, chalking it up to laziness and sloth as well as growing up with no mechanically inclined father living in the house. At the time of my divorce, it was one of the reasons Karen gave for throwing me over for the chicken conglomerate accountant from Cucamonga.
She said she was tired of having to do her own oil changes.

  Now I’ve got that Guard Red Porsche. I’ve looked under the hood of my 928, but I’ve never had guts enough to tackle anything I’ve found there. At this point, I’d a whole lot rather pay somebody who knows what he’s doing than screw up something by attempting to do it myself.

  Besides, there’s no place to work on a car in the basement parking area of a downtown condo.

  Considering all this, I was somewhat envious of the shipshape conditions in Nick Wallace’s private domain. He could have given Rachel Miller and her sister lessons in housekeeping. There wasn’t as much dust visible in all of Nick’s garage as there had been on Rachel’s collection of salt and pepper shakers. The shiny concrete floor had no telltale grease spots. For that matter, the place didn’t even smell like a garage. There was only the mildly pungent odor of some kind of cleaning solvent.

  At the moment, there were just two vans in the shop. One of them was obviously in for a tune-up. Its hood stood open, and a new set of spark plugs lay on the rolling mechanic’s chest nearby. The other van sat in the far corner with both front doors wide open.

  Nick Wallace went back to the one van and stopped dead in front of the open hood. “Whoever designed this sucker never planned on changing the plugs.” It was a complaint aimed at the universe in general, not at us in particular. Once he had voiced it, however, Nick resolutely bent over and began resetting the plugs.

  “What is it you want to know?” he asked without looking up.

  “Which van is it?” I returned.

  He jerked his head in the direction of the van with the open doors. “That one,” he said. “I’m still trying to dry it out.”

  I’ve seen a few carpet installation vans in my time. They’re usually dented and dinged. Mostly they look neglected, like they’re lucky if somebody bothers to feed them gas and oil occasionally. That, however, was not the case with the Damm Fine Carpets fleet of vans. Not if the two currently parked in Nick Wallace’s garage were any indication.