Taking the Fifth(18)
“You mean you’ve never heard of her?”
I shook my head. “Never.”
Peters sighed. “You’re hopeless, Beau. Jasmine Day, the singer.”
“What about her?” I still didn’t know who she was, but I didn’t tell Peters that.
“She’s playing the Fifth Avenue. Tonight and tomorrow night. That’s the show your victim must have been working on when he was killed, the one he was doing the setup for. Get the paper, would you? It’s there on the tray table.”
I picked up a newspaper that had been folded open to the entertainment section. The first thing that caught my eye was a quarter-page ad that said, “Jasmine Day is taking the Fifth Avenue by storm.” The ad copy went on to say that tickets were still available for her two Seattle “comeback concerts.” Pictured was a woman with a face framed by cascades of long, blonde hair. It was almost a Dolly Parton look, except in certain areas where Jasmine Day was somewhat less endowed than Dolly is.
“Who is she?” I asked.
“A pop singer. Had a great rock career going until she got busted for drugs. She’s been a patient in Betty Ford’s rehab place down in Rancho Mirage.”
“That’s why they’re calling it a comeback concert?”
“That’s right. But maybe Betty Ford’s cure didn’t take. If memory serves, Jasmine Day was into coke in a big way.”
Suddenly it began to make sense to me. So that was the connection—that was why Peters had been so frantic to get hold of me.
“And they’re only in town tonight and tomorrow night?”
“That’s right. I figured somebody should get cracking on it.”
“You called that shot. I’m on my way.”
I was impatiently punching the elevator button when Amy Fitzgerald caught up to me in the hallway.
“You’re not angry with him, are you?” she asked.
“Of course I’m not.”
She breathed a sigh of relief. “I was afraid you would be. It’s hard for others to be understanding sometimes when people in Ron Peters’s condition are so…so imperious,” she added finally.
“No. Don’t worry about it. It was important.”
She smiled then, a warm, engaging smile, just as the elevator stopped and the doors opened. “I was happy about it, really,” she said. “It’s the first time he’s shown any interest in anybody but himself.”
The door closed before I could tell her that I wholeheartedly agreed.
CHAPTER 7
THE FIFTH AVENUE THEATER SITS ON THE street for which it was named, just across from the slender, curved base of the Rainier Bank Tower. The box office was open and doing a brisk business when I got there a few minutes after two.
While I waited in line, I studied the life-size posters of Jasmine Day that were displayed around the ticket booth. Huge black-and-white stills showed a lithesome lady of indeterminate age, wearing a skin-tight dress and singing into a handheld microphone. The way her sultry lips grazed the mike was nothing short of provocative.
“May I help you, sir?” The impatience in the ticket seller’s voice jarred me out of my reverie and told me it wasn’t the first time she had asked.
“Yes. I’m here to see someone with the show.”
“We still have tickets for this evening’s performance.”
“No; I want to see someone with the show, someone who’s in charge.”
“You’ll have to go to the administrative office, if you want someone important,” she said icily. “Next.”
The woman standing behind me shouldered her way to the window.
“But where do I go?” I asked.
I watched the ticket seller consider whether or not to tell me where I should go and what I should do when I got there. She finally decided against it and simply answered my question. “Down the street to the building entrance. It’ll say Skinner Building. Up on the second floor.”
Leaving her to sell tickets in peace, I made my way to the front office, which wasn’t nearly as plush as the theater itself. It was old-fashioned, functional, and filled with people who didn’t seem particularly interested in helping me. If I wasn’t there to buy a ticket, I didn’t exist.
Eventually I was shown into a small cubicle where an equally small but much younger public relations type was seated at a desk. He reached across to shake my hand and said his name was Dan Osgood. The fact that my business card said Homicide seemed to make him somewhat nervous. He continued to finger the card the whole time we talked, standing it first on one end and then on the other.
“We’re really nothing more than a landlord, Detective Beaumont. Westcoast has rented the place, you know—hired their own crew, brought in their own musicians. Of course, our people are selling tickets and doing the concessions, but the production company takes care of everything else.”