Driving there gave me time for reflection. According to Tom Riley, Richard Dathan Morris had been a totally reprehensible character. And by all accounts, Jonathan Thomas had been on the brink of death. So why worry about who killed someone as obnoxious as Morris? And why try to ascertain whether or not Thomas had been murdered or had simply succumbed to the inevitable outcome of his disease?
Why? Because it’s my job. Because murder victims are murder victims no matter what, even if they’re dying. It’s the principle of the thing, pure and simple. If people, no matter how well intentioned, are allowed to kill at will, to rid the land of people they deem unsuitable or to arbitrarily set a timetable to put others out of their misery, the very foundations of our civilization begin to erode.
I’ve spent most of my adult life working on the premise that murder is murder, that perpetrators must be brought to account in a court of law, and that included whoever killed Richard Dathan Morris and, possibly, Jonathan Thomas.
As I drove, I also kicked myself for not having been more observant. All Peters had to do was say it to convince me that he was right. And he hadn’t even been in Thomas’s house. Peters’s theory about Tom Riley’s sexual preference was what Sherlock Holmes would have termed a brilliant deduction. So what the hell was the matter with me?
The fact that I had missed it was unsettling enough. Had I not seen it because there were no overt signs? Or because I simply hadn’t wanted to see it? Was it a case of selective blindness or burying my head in the sand?
As a happily heterosexual male I’m uncomfortable around gays, prejudiced against them. I was propositioned a couple of times when I was younger, and those experiences left a long-term bad impression that I’m only now beginning to sort out.
Over the years, my way of handling that prejudice had been to deal with gays as little as possible. Michael Browder, the interior decorator who had just finished helping me design and furnish my new condominium, was the first gay I had worked with for any extended period of time. He was a gay without any of the exterior trappings, with none of the supposedly typical mannerisms I had come to expect. In short, Browder was a nice guy who had forced me to come face to face with some of my own deep-seated feelings of intolerance.
Now this series of encounters with Richard Morris, Jonathan Thomas, and Tom Riley was more of the same. They were ordinary people, some good and some bad, just like everybody else.
Tom Riley, if Peters and I were correct, was another homosexual minus the lisping, simpering silliness of the stereotypes. He may have been minus those things, but, I was now convinced, he was gay nonetheless. So now I tried to unravel what possible bearing Tom Riley’s sexual preference had on my case.
Had there been some kind of triangle involved? That might account for some of Tom Riley’s atypical reactions. Maybe his pronounced dislike of Richard Dathan Morris was symptomatic of old-fashioned jealousy, just as Ron Peters had suggested. Nevertheless, I had a hard time using the word “jealousy” in a male-only context.
I was so lost in thought that I drove straight by the address Tom Riley had given us. I made a U-turn and drove back to it, parking on the street in front of the house.
The place was situated on Alki Avenue itself, far enough east of the lighthouse to be out of the high-rent district. Riley’s apartment turned out to be in the basement of a wooden house, living space converted from what had once been a two-car garage. There was a tiny deck outside the sliding glass door with hardly enough room for the single deck chair that sat there in isolated splendor. Only one person at a time could sit on the minuscule deck and view the northern tip of downtown Seattle across Elliott Bay.
As I walked up to the door, I heard someone inside playing a piano. The tune was an old familiar melody, but it was too much like classical music for me to be able to identify it. When I knocked, the piano playing stopped abruptly and Tom Riley slid open the door. He was cradling his newly adopted blue-eyed cat.
“What do you want?” he asked. His tone of voice, his body language, his manner all said he was not delighted to see me, but then I’m used to that. Being a Homicide detective would never rate high in a popularity contest.
“I’ve got to talk to you, Mr. Riley. May I come in?”
“Haven’t we talked enough already?”
“No.”
Reluctantly he stepped aside far enough to let me into the room. Once I was inside and the door was closed, he carefully put the cat down on the floor. The animal crouched on all fours and began scratching his chin on Riley’s shoelaces.
“He’s not used to the neighborhood yet,” Riley explained, looking down at the cat. “I’m worried he might get out and run away.”