Leaving Maynard and Hawkins to work with the port police, I drove back to Seattle alone. So near and yet so far. I was frustrated. Instinct and logic said Osgood would try to make a break for it, and with his car out of commission, the airport was our best bet.
I wanted to be there when the net closed in on him. I wanted to make the arrest personally. It’s an occupational disease with detectives. We all want that, to be on hand when the quarry’s brought to ground.
But in this case, there was another overriding consideration: Dan Osgood hadn’t been working alone. And whoever his accomplice was, it had to be someone connected with Westcoast Starlight Productions, someone who, at that very moment, was down at the Fifth Avenue Theater working Jasmine Day’s concert.
I glanced at my watch. The search at the airport had taken longer than I realized. It was nearly nine. The first act would be nearly over. Almost time for intermission. Almost time for Jasmine Day to meet whoever might be sitting in those two front-and-center seats.
I felt a little stab of jealously then, an unreasonable pang because I wasn’t sitting there and somebody else was, somebody else who would be going out with Jasmine Day after the show, and later…
I didn’t let myself think about later. There wasn’t any point in it.
CHAPTER 20
THE MARQUEE LIGHTS OUTSIDE THE THEATER were brightly lit. I pulled over beside the curb and stopped, leaving the car, with its emergency flashers blinking, sitting in a passenger load-only zone.
An usher stopped me cold at the door. I flashed my ID in her face, but she was adamant. It isn’t often someone earning minimum wage gets to wield any kind of power. She was getting a real bang out of it.
Finally, alerted by the disturbance we were making at the entrance, the house manager showed up to shush the noise. He told her to let me in.
“I still haven’t seen Dan,” he said, once we were inside the lobby.
“I’ve got to talk to some of the other people backstage, then,” I said.
He glanced at his watch. “Intermission is in about three minutes. Why don’t you wait here until the lights come up?” He led me to a door that opened onto one of the aisles. When I stepped inside, the sudden darkness was disorienting. I stopped a step or two inside the door and waited.
The stage seemed far away from me. On it, bathed in a brilliant spotlight, Jasmine Day stood singing. She was wearing the blue dress and the white gloves and the blue shoes.
As she sang, she threw her head back. One hand held the microphone, but the other arm was outstretched as if to embrace the audience. The mane of blonde hair shimmered and gleamed in the spotlight. I wondered how many people besides me knew that under that wig was a little girl named Mary Lou Gibbon whose hair was practically shaved off because of a sick kid she had known twenty years earlier in seventh grade. And I wondered, too, how many people besides Ed Waverly, Jasmine, and J. P. Beaumont knew that the tour would end with that night’s performance.
I brought myself up sharply. I couldn’t afford to have my concentration diluted. I was impatient, anxious for the song to be over, ready to get on with the task at hand. Somebody was trying to pin a double homicide on the lady on stage, somebody who was probably in the theater at that very moment. I had to lay hands on that sucker, find him and nail him.
Jasmine’s song ended. The audience broke into tumultuous applause. A red velvet curtain rang down briefly and then sailed back up, allowing Jasmine to take another bow. After a third curtain call, the house lights came up and I looked around.
The huge auditorium was nearly full. People had taken the newspaper critic’s advice. They had come to the show, and they were enjoying it enormously. When the clapping ended, the audience was still energized, buzzing with enthusiastic anticipation for the second act.
As people began streaming up the aisle toward the lobby, I took a deep breath and started in the other direction. A lady stepped heavily on my toe, her foot reminding me of my last encounter with a foot—with Jasmine Day’s foot. I wondered if she’d let me get close enough to talk with her.
It was the same old story. I had to fight my way past the same security guard to get backstage, only this time I didn’t have Dan Osgood to help me. When I pitched a fit and brandished my ID under his nose, the guard finally relented and allowed me up the stairs and onto the stage.
I had just entered the dressing-room area when the door to Jasmine’s room swung open and Ed Waverly came out. His face was grimly set. Without seeing me, he strode to the back of the stage, where Alan Dale and several others were shifting the band shell into position.
I stopped at the door with my hand poised to knock, but at the last minute I changed my mind. There was no sense in giving Jasmine a chance to refuse to let me in. So without knocking, I tried the knob, half expecting the door to be locked. It wasn’t. The door swung open.