Taking the Fifth(71)

Wainwright nodded. “All right, then,” James continued. “You’ll be working with Detectives An-dress and Cunningham here. I’ll be the liaison between you and each pair of detectives working one of the related homicides. I think that’s the best way to handle it.”

“Makes sense to me,” Wainwright agreed. “Is the crowd pretty much dispersed out there?”

“It’s not bad. There are reporters hanging around, but that’s about all.”

It was agreed that Jasmine and Waverly should be taken down to the department to be booked and questioned. I stood to one side and watched as Roger Glancy led Jasmine out of the dressing room. To avoid the reporters, they took them out through the side door that led back into the Skinner Building, the same door Dan Osgood had used to take me into the theater for the first time the previous afternoon. It seemed like eons ago.

Jasmine Day walked out with her head held high. Waverly looked like a whipped dog. Once they were gone, I went looking for Alan Dale. He was sitting in the common area outside the dressing rooms. He didn’t look any too healthy. He had his head in his hands and looked a picture of despair.

“Is she gone?” he asked.

I nodded. “Don’t worry about her. We’ll bail her out tomorrow.”

“We?” he asked.

“That’s right,” I answered. “All they can charge her with is possession with intent.”

“What about me?” he asked.

“What about you?”

“I’m the one who killed him. I was the one who pulled the switch on the worm gear.”

“You didn’t know he was under there, did you?”

Alan Dale shook his head. “No, but I remember smelling a funny odor during the second act. I didn’t have time to check it out. I should have. Maybe he wasn’t dead yet.”

“Don’t beat yourself up, Alan. He was already dead, believe me.”

“You’re sure it’s Osgood?”

“I’m sure, all right. It ran through his gut, not his face.”

“Do they have him out of there yet?” Dale asked.

“Not yet,” I told him. “This stuff takes time.”

“And you do this for a living?” he asked.

“Every day,” I said.

I left Dale sitting there and went outside looking for Ray Holman. I didn’t find him. Instead, I came across the photographer, sitting off by herself in the middle of the front row of seats. Like Dale, she looked sickened and worn.

“Thinking about getting into another line of work?” I asked.

“The thought had crossed my mind,” she said.

“Mine too,” I told her.





CHAPTER 23




I ENDED UP OFFERING THE PHOTOGRAPHER a ride home. For a change, my attempt to be suave and urbane didn’t backfire. When we stepped outside the theater, my car was still there, the flashers were still flashing, and the engine turned over on the first try. Sometimes things do work out all right.

We took the departmental car back to the Public Safety Building. I talked to Sergeant James from the garage and told him I was beat, that I’d have to do the paperwork the next day. He let me off the hook. I bailed the Porsche out of the twenty-four-hour garage at the bottom of James Street, and we headed home.

The photographer’s name was Nancy Gresham. I’d had nothing to eat for a long time, so long that even the dead breakfast Jasmine and I had left uneaten on my dining-room table was beginning to seem palatable.

Since Nancy lived in an apartment on the north side of Queen Anne Hill, it was natural for us to stop off at the Doghouse for something to eat. That’s one of the advantages of being a devotee of twenty-four-hour dives. They’re always open when you need them.

“I take it you come here a lot,” Nancy observed when everyone in the place, including the cook and the busboy, greeted me by name.

“It beats cooking,” I said.

When the waitress came to take our order, she smiled at Nancy Gresham’s insistence on separate checks. So did I.

Although I thought I was hungry, when the food came I picked at it, pushing it around on my plate without eating any of it. There was a leaden weight in my gut, one I couldn’t ditch or explain, one I couldn’t manage to shove any food past. I guess I wasn’t exactly a barrel of fun.

“Someone told me the guy back there in the theater was the suspect you were looking for in those other two murders, the one down by the railroad track and the other one up on Capitol Hill,” she said over coffee. “So you’ve closed two cases tonight. It seems to me congratulations are in order.”

“I don’t feel much like celebrating,” I told her dourly.