“Look, are you going to get me some help or not?”
“They’re on their way,” Sergeant James told me.
“Me too.”
I hung up the phone, thanked Mavis Davis for her help, and dashed for the door with Corky right on my heels.
I didn’t look back to see whether or not the door slammed on his nose. It was supposed to.
CHAPTER 19
I TURNED THINGS OVER IN MY MIND AS I drove to Osgood’s address on Greenwood North. It was beginning to make sense, all of it. I remembered how Dan Osgood had acted the first time I met him, how he had turned my card over and over in his fingers, how he had blanched when I mentioned visiting the murder victim’s parents. I had seen it then, but it hadn’t registered. It did now.
Osgood had to be the local connection between whoever was importing the coke and Richard Dathan Morris. He was also the connection between Morris and the Fifth Avenue Theater, the one who had arranged the work calls, who had seen to it that Morris worked the Fifth Avenue shows.
Was it possible that someone connected with Westcoast Starlight Productions was the supplier? If so, who was in charge? Who called the shots?
To begin with, there was Jasmine Day, the one I was supposed to think was it. But planted evidence aside, Jasmine didn’t have the necessary continuity. This was her first tour with Westcoast. I wanted to believe that she was nothing more than a pawn, unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. But a dangerous pawn, I cautioned myself, remembering the hole in the wall beside my head. A nitroglycerine pawn.
So who else was there at Westcoast? Most of my dealings had been with Alan Dale, the head carpenter/stage manager. He had claimed to be the one who fired Morris for poking around where he shouldn’t have been. Had he fired him first and killed him later? Dale had seemed more than slightly upset when I implied that maybe Jasmine was back on drugs. I remembered him glaring at me in the hallway outside Jasmine Day’s room. Was there something else going on between them, something more than the obvious professional relationship?
Then there was Ray Holman, the guy on the truss high above the theater stage whom Osgood had called the flyman. I had seen him working, but I had heard very little from him. He had seemed to be a taciturn man with his head always buried in some piece of equipment or other, someone who was always around but who blended into the woodwork. What was going on behind that silent, workaholic mask of his?
And then there was Ed Waverly. What about him? He was the one Jasmine credited with giving her a chance when nobody else would, the one who had been willing and able to put together a tour for her when she came out of treatment and wanted to change career directions. Waverly didn’t seem like such a hot prospect to me, but I couldn’t afford to ignore anyone.
That left Bertha, Big Bertha the costume lady, as the only other permanent member of the company I had spoken to directly. Big Bertha had been formidable enough when she had chased me out of Jasmine’s dressing room during intermission the night before, but it looked to me like she spent a hell of a lot more time pushing food than pushing drugs.
The upshot was that when I hit Greenwood Avenue North some fifteen minutes later, I had made zero progress. I still had way more questions than I had answers.
My two backup detectives were already in place and waiting for me. So was Sergeant Lowell James. In one hand he held a bona fide search warrant with Dan Osgood’s address filled in in the appropriate blank. James never told me how he managed to get a search warrant that fast, and I never asked.
The sky had cleared, although the ground was still wet. It was one of those early summer Seattle evenings when it seems like afternoon will go on forever. Greenwood Avenue is enough of an arterial so that no one paid any attention to the extra two or three cars parked here and there along the street within a block or two of 6886.
Detectives Hawkins and Maynard, the backup team, circled the block to cut off any chance of an exit through the rear door, while Sergeant James and I cautiously approached the front. It was a modest white frame house with a small front porch. There was no fence and no shrubbery, only a narrow patch of grass badly in need of cutting.
Sergeant James stood to one side while I moved to the door. With my hand raised to knock, I paused. From inside the house came the sound of a woman weeping. I listened for a moment or two, then tried the old-fashioned bell button next to the door. Nothing happened. There was no ring, and the sound of weeping continued unabated. After waiting a moment or two longer, I gave a sharp rap on the wooden door frame. The weeping ceased abruptly, and the hardwood floor creaked as someone came to the door.
The woman who swung open the door was in her late twenties or early thirties. Her appearance was disheveled. She wore a pair of faded jeans and a paint-splattered sweatshirt. Her nose and eyes were red, her face was wet, and her shirt showed damp spots where tears had dripped off her face onto her clothing.