“You say she went into the house? Was the door open?”
“No.”
“So how did she get in?”
“She had a key. I watched her unlock the door and go inside.”
“Did you see anything else?”
Mavis Davis shook her head. “No. By then Corky was finished, so I cleaned up after him and we came home. I was cold.”
“What time was that?”
“About a quarter to one, maybe. I wasn’t sleepy anymore, so I stayed up and worked for a while. It was two or so before I went back to bed.” She smiled. “It doesn’t matter what time I go to bed, since we can sleep as late as we like, right, Corky?”
Corky gave a miniature growl in reply. He had never taken his ugly eyes off me.
“Do you know the name of the cab company?” I asked.
Mavis shook her head. “I take the bus most of the time, or I walk. I don’t pay any attention to taxis. All I know is it was green.”
“Light green or dark green?”
“Oh, you know, that funny light green chartreuse color.”
I did indeed know. That could only be one of the Far West taxis.
“And you say she walked up to the window to pay her fare.”
“That’s what I said,” Mavis answered.
That struck me as odd. I’ve been in lots of cabs with women, especially when I lived at the Royal Crest and went places with my neighbor Ida and some of her retired pals. They always paid the fare while they were still in the cab, passing the money to the driver before they got out.
“Would it be possible for me to use a phone?” I asked. “Maybe I could call the cab company and get a line on the driver.”
Mavis shrugged her shoulders and nodded toward the kitchen. “It’s out there, on the wall. The light’s just inside the door.”
The moment I stood up, Corky had another fit. I don’t know how anyone could keep, much less love, a dog as obnoxious as that.
I went into the kitchen and found both the phone and the phone book. I called Far West Cabs. The fact that it was that particular company was a stroke of pure luck. Years before, I had been assigned the case of a Far West cabbie who was murdered and dumped in Green Lake. I had broken the case within days and sent the cabbie’s wife’s boyfriend to Walla Walla on a charge of second-degree homicide. The wife ended up spending some time in the slammer as well.
Ever since, any help I needed from Far West came through on the double. This was no exception. The dispatcher on duty was the same one who had been there the night before.
“This is Detective Beaumont,” I said. “I’m working a case and need some help.”
“You bet,” he replied. “If we’ve got it, you can have it.”
“It’s about a fare from the night before last. Actually sometime after midnight, I don’t know where she was picked up, but a Far West cab dropped her off in the one-thousand block of Bellevue Avenue East sometime after midnight, so it was really very early in the A.M. yesterday. A barefoot blonde, wearing a long blue dress and white gloves.”
“Oh, him,” the dispatcher said. “We’re looking for him too.”
“Pardon me?” I asked, sure that I hadn’t heard correctly.
“I said we’re looking for him too. He left one of his shoes in the cab.”
“A blue shoe?”
“That’s right. I’ve got it right here in the lost-and-found.”
“But you said ‘him.’”
“Sure I said ‘him.’ The driver picked him up at the Edgewater. All those drag queens go down there for the female-impersonator acts. The drivers don’t much care to pick ’em up, if you know what I mean, but a fare’s a fare.”
“It was a man?”
“That’s what I said.”
“Go check the shoe,” I ordered. “Is it a Cole-Haan, size 8½B?”
The dispatcher was off the line for a moment or two; then he came back. “You must be psychic, Beaumont. That’s what it is, size 8½B. What do you want me to do with it?”
“Hang onto it until somebody from the department comes to get it. Unless the owner shows up. In that case, call 911 and have somebody come pick him up.”
“No shit?”
“No shit. This guy’s a killer. He’s two up on us already.”
The dispatcher whistled. “This is serious, isn’t it? Anything else I can do to help?”
My mind was leaping from one direction to another. It was a frame. The killer, disguised as Jasmine Day, had first murdered Richard Dathan Morris, then taken a cab to the house to murder Jonathan Thomas. Why? And how had he left there?
Supposing he had gone there in search of cocaine—coke Morris had either stolen or planned to sell. There had been plenty of time for the killer to make a leisurely search. After all, he knew Morris wasn’t coming back.