When I got off the elevator, the door to room 338 was already standing open. A woman was waiting in the doorway.
My first impression of Grace Simms Morris was that she was maybe forty-five years old. Her skin was smooth and translucent. Later I was forced to revise that assessment upward when she told me she had been thirty when Richard, her twenty-seven-year-old only child was born. Evidently Grace maintained her fragile beauty with the help of a skilled plastic surgeon.
Grace Simms Morris was a well-preserved, small-boned woman with a head of champagne blonde hair that couldn’t have come from anything but a bottle. She was dressed in a rose-colored suit that was simply but elegantly cut. That kind of simplicity doesn’t come cheap. Grace Simms Morris had money.
“You’re sure you’re not with the DEA?” she demanded in a breathless, little-girl rush of words as I stepped off the elevator.
“I’m sure,” I assured her, showing her my ID. She held it up close to her face and read through a pair of narrow reading glasses perched on her nose. Studying her as she read, I admit I was somewhat shocked. From what the clerk and Captain Powell had said, I expected to find Mrs. Morris hysterical, at the very least. She was far more indignant than tearful.
“I don’t understand why they’re doing this,” she said.
“Why who’s doing what?” I asked.
“Why the DEA is pretending they don’t know who my son was or what he was doing.”
“What was he doing?”
“Working for them,” she snapped.
A door opened down the hall and two people walked toward the elevator. Quickly Mrs. Morris pulled me into her room. “I don’t want anyone to overhear,” she whispered conspiratorially. “Maybe they still have to keep it a secret because they haven’t made all the arrests yet.”
You could have knocked me over with a feather. “Your son was working for the DEA?” I must have looked as incredulous as I sounded.
“Of course he was, although that Mr. Wainwright said it wasn’t true.”
“Who’s Mr. Wainwright?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I don’t know. He’s someone at the DEA office here in Seattle. I tried to talk to him, but he gave me the brush-off. I don’t like it when men treat me that way.”
Mrs. Morris walked away from me. She settled herself on the edge of the bed gracefully, smoothing her skirt over her knees. Then she motioned me toward a chair.
“This is very hard for me, Detective Beaumont,” she said. “I’m all alone, and Richard was my only child. I tried to get Mr. Wainwright to understand that.”
“Understand what?”
Mrs. Morris seemed to talk in circles. We weren’t getting anywhere.
“Detective Beaumont, since my son was a law-enforcement officer who was killed in the line of duty, I want to plan a fitting law-enforcement funeral for him. You know, with the uniformed officers carrying the casket, that kind of thing. But how can I if his supervisors don’t have the common decency to come forward and tell what happened?”
“Mrs. Morris, what exactly was your son doing, do you know?”
“He was working undercover, of course.”
“But you knew about it?”
“Richard told me everything. We were very close.”
“What about his roommate—did he know about it too?”
Mrs. Morris shrugged. “I don’t know. I suppose Jonathan knew. We never discussed it.
“He was so happy,” she said suddenly, and just as suddenly she dabbed at her eyes. “He was finally getting to do what he’d always wanted to do. You know, he wanted to be a police officer from the time he was little.”
“Is that so?” I ventured.
“For a long time I thought it was just a stage. You know, most little boys go through a period when they want to be a cowboy or a doctor. I thought that eventually Richard would grow out of it, but he never did.”
“For some of us it takes longer,” I said.
Mrs. Grace Simms Morris smiled at me thinly through her tears. “You know, Rich would have loved you,” she declared.
Knowing what I did about Richard Dathan Morris and his sexual preference, I wasn’t sure what to make of that statement. For a few moments the two of us sat uncomfortably in the room, the cop from Homicide and the victim’s mother, with nothing to say to one another. Finally, I broke the silence.
“You said he told you everything. Did he tell you what he was doing for the DEA?”
Suddenly, Mrs. Morris sat up a little straighter. My question had given her son the credibility he’d been denied elsewhere. “Cracking a drug ring, what else?” she answered huffily.