“I know Dan Osgood,” I replied.
She shrugged and gave me an openly appraising once-over. “Well, at least you’re under seventy and not half bad-looking, for a change. So where are you taking me for dinner?”
That caught me off guard. Dinner? The flush got worse. My nose probably could have glowed in the dark. I didn’t remember mentioning dinner.
“It’s a surprise,” I mumbled, amazed by my own quick thinking. Being around beautiful women usually paralyzes both my tongue and my brain, in that order.
She laughed aloud at that. “I like surprises,” she said. There was another quick knock on the door. “I’ve gotta go,” she added, darting past me on her way out of the room. She paused momentarily with her hand on the doorknob.
“What’s your name?”
“Beaumont. J. P. Beaumont. My friends call me Beau.”
She smiled. “All right, Beau. Pick me up at the hotel about half an hour after the show.”
She hurried out and left me standing there in the dressing room, feeling like I’d just been picked up and put down by a very selective tornado. I looked around me. The blue dress was slung carelessly over a brass-framed dressing screen. Two black shoes lay side by side in front of the screen, discarded and forgotten where Jasmine Day had hastily kicked them off.
Behind me, the door opened and a woman almost as wide as the doorway itself marched purposefully into the room. She took one look at me and stopped cold. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, mister?” she demanded.
“I was just…”
She waddled over to me and stuck her face close to mine. “You were just nothing! Get out of here before I call the cops.”
I got moving. She didn’t have to tell me twice.
CHAPTER 10
THE NAP I HAD TAKEN DURING PEEWEE Latham’s act now served me in good stead. I didn’t sleep at all during the second act. Neither did anybody else.
The act opened with the revolving band shell turning and moving forward just to the right of center stage, bearing with it the sixteen-piece backup orchestra.
From the other side of the stage, a golden grand piano moved smoothly to center stage. On it, draped in a lush blues singer pose, lay Jasmine Day.
From the moment she appeared, Jasmine had the audience’s rapt attention. The skin-tight jumpsuit revealed everything and nothing. No hint of excess flesh wiggled under the sleek material. When she slid gracefully off the piano to sing her second number, she looked ten feet tall and bulletproof. It was funny; she hadn’t seemed nearly that tall or imposing when she was standing next to me in her dressing room.
Jasmine was nothing short of a human dynamo. She threw every ounce of her body and being into the songs she sang, and the audience loved it. Halfway through the set though, in a distinct change of pace, she brought out a simple wooden stool and sat down to talk.
She told us how glad she was that her stay at Betty Ford’s rehabilitation center had given her a chance to shake the drugs that had been destroying both her life and her career and how grateful she was for the enthusiastic response audiences all over the country were giving her new show. This show. The one she was sharing with us.
It was a homey little chat, relaxed and ingenuous, and it accomplished just what it was calculated to do: it put an already friendly audience even more squarely in Jasmine Day’s corner. J. P. Beaumont included.
I’ll confess that my mind wandered a little near the end of the show. I was worried about where I’d take Jasmine Day for dinner and how I’d explain my relationship with Dan Osgood if the question came up. I’m still not sure why I was so reluctant to tell her I was a cop. In retrospect I chalk it up to male pride, to wanting to preserve the illusion that she was going with me by choice rather than by necessity as a side effect of my job.
As soon as the curtain rang down for the last time, I dashed home to change clothes before the appointed meeting with Jasmine Day. I made two phone calls from my apartment. One was to the department, leaving word for Al, if he called in from the hospital, that I was going on surveillance and would be in touch with him later. I didn’t divulge the exact nature of that surveillance. Call it a sin of omission.
The other call was to the Canlis Restaurant up on Aurora Avenue. I made a late dinner reservation for two.
After a hasty shower, I put on clean clothes and was in front of the Mayflower Park Hotel just at ten-thirty.
The Mayflower Park isn’t one of Seattle’s brand-name hotel giants. It’s smaller and more personal than the Sheratons and Westins of the world. In the course of the last few years, it has been totally refurbished, making it long on quality but without quite the snob appeal of some of the other downtown hotels.