J. Jance - A more perfect union

Woody Carroll had pulled out a pencil and was making a series of calculations in the margin of the newspaper. "How tall do you suppose forty-three stories are?" he asked me.

I shrugged. "I don't know. In a commercial building each story is probably ten feet or so, give or take. And the lobby level is often taller than that, say fifteen feet, somewhere around there. Why? What are you doing?"

For a moment Woody didn't answer me, but concentrated on what he was doing, his brows knit in deep furrows. Finally he glanced up at me. "She must have been doing about a hundred fourteen miles an hour when she hit the ground."

"A hundred and fourteen?" I asked. "That's pretty damn fast. I've been a cop for a long time, and I've pulled my share of pulverized automobile victims from wrecked cars. At fifty-five it's bad enough. I'm glad I wasn't there to scrape her off the sidewalk."

Woody nodded. "Me, too," he said.

I poured myself another cup of coffee. Math has never been my strong suit. It took me a minute or two to realize that Woody Carroll, without the benefit of so much as a pocket calculator, had just solved a fairly complicated mathematical problem.

"How'd you do that, by the way? You never struck me as a mathematician."

Woody grinned. "Snuck that one in on you, didn't I. It's simple. I thought I told you, I was a bombardier in the Pacific during World War II. I never got beyond geometry in high school, but the Air Force gave me a crash course after I enlisted. I cut my teeth on those Norden bomb sights. Did I ever tell you about that?"

"As a matter of fact, you didn't."

Woody was just getting ready to launch into one of his long-winded stories, when someone came looking for him. "Hey, Woody, they need you to help direct trucks in and out so they can load up and get out of our way."

Carroll got up and handed me the paper. "See you later," he said. "It's been a pleasure working with you, Detective Beaumont."

Left standing there alone, I didn't want to look at the newspaper in my hand, but I was drawn to it nevertheless. The picture repulsed me. The very idea repulsed me. I suspected that someone had made a nice piece of change, selling the developers' fortuitous snapshot of Angie Dixon's death to the newspapers. The editor who used it and the person who provided it were both scumbags in my book-but, inarguably, the picture would sell newspapers.

After all, look who was reading it. I was. Reluctantly. Furtively. As though hoping I wouldn't be caught. I usually make it a point not to read newspapers, especially in public.

The article went on to discuss Seattle's poor showing in the construction industry's accident statistics, how the city was tenth in the nation for number of construction deaths per billion dollars' worth of new construction. There was even a quote, attributed to Martin Green, Executive Director of Ironworkers Local 165, saying that part of the problem was due to a lack of building inspections by the state.

Martin Green. The name leaped out at me. I wondered if it wasn't the same irate Mr. Green from the lobby of Belltown Terrace. Probably.

I sat down and read the entire article again, and then, out of boredom, I read the whole paper. On the back of the front page of the last section, just before the want ads, was a much smaller article, a brief obituary about Logan Tyree, the victim of a boating accident, whose body had been pulled from Lake Union on Saturday afternoon. That one told me nothing I didn't already know.

I was almost finished with the crossword puzzle when Cassie Young came looking for me.

"There you are, Detective Beaumont. I couldn't find you anywhere." My work on the set that morning had evidently redeemed me in her eyes and she had restored me to the rank of detective. "Are you coming to dinner tonight?"

"I don't know. This is the first I've heard anything about it. What is it, a command performance?"

"Something like that," she replied dryly, ignoring the derision in my response. "Mr. Goldfarb said for you to meet us at Gooey's, the bar at the Sheraton. Seven o'clock. We'll all go together from there."

Derrick Parker came up behind her just as she finished speaking. "Go where?" he asked. The miracle-working makeup had been removed. He had looked fine during the filming, but now he was a wreck.

"Dinner tonight. You're invited too, Derrick. Are you coming?"

"That depends," Derrick waffled. "Can I bring a date?"

"Suit yourself." Cassie turned and started away.

"Hey, wait a minute," I called after her. "Does that mean we're dismissed? School's out for the summer?" She didn't dignify my question with a reply. I watched her walk away. "For someone her age, she doesn't have much of a sense of humor," I remarked to Derrick Parker.

He was watching her as well. Her punk red hair looked like a rooster's comb in the glaring sunlight. "Nobody in the movie business can afford to have a sense of humor," Derrick told me, "least of all if they're assistant to someone like Goldfarb."

Without further discussion, he and I started toward my car. On the way I handed him the newspaper section with the page containing the article on Logan Tyree folded out. "Thought you might be interested. That's the guy we pulled out of the water the other day," I said.

"So you found out who he was?"

"Somebody did," I answered.

Derrick scanned the article as we walked. "You were right about him not being a jumper. It says here his boat burned. That's funny. He didn't look burned to me."

"It exploded first," I explained. "He was probably blown clear by the force of the blast. I've seen people come through things like that with hardly a scratch. He must have hit his head on the cabin roof on the way out, or maybe he struck something in the water."

"The article said he was thirty-seven," Derrick continued. "That's only two years older than I am."

Derrick Parker must have been feeling twinges of his own mortality. I notice symptoms of that occasionally myself, especially the morning after the night before, so I didn't have a whole lot of sympathy. "If you think that's bad, you should read what's on the front page," I told him. "She was only twenty-eight."

He read the construction accident article while we drove and, sure enough, he felt even worse. We went by my apartment so Derrick could retrieve his bottle of Glenlivet, then I took him back to the hotel. He said he was planning to take a nap. That seemed like a helluva good idea to me, too. As soon as I got home, I flopped across the bed fully clothed and fell asleep.

Peters called at six. "I gave you time enough to get home before I called," he said. "Did you see it?"

"Did I see what?"

"The article in the paper about the woman who fell off Masters Plaza yesterday morning."

"I saw it. What about her?"

"Don't you think it's a hell of a coincidence for two ironworkers to die in separate accidents in less than a week?"

Usually I'm the one who jumps to conclusions. I wondered briefly if Peters hadn't been in bed too long and his brain was going soft. "Wait a minute here," I cautioned. "Logan Tyree died in a boating accident. Angie Dixon fell off a building in front of God and everybody. How can the two be related?"

Peters didn't waste any time in throwing his best punch. "Tyree's ex-girlfriend left town."

"So what?"

Peters went right on, totally ignoring my question. "I was talking to Manny a little while ago, just passing the time of day. I asked how it was going. Manny said he and Kramer talked to Mrs. Tyree and then went to Bellevue looking for the girlfriend. She's split. Gone. Moved out along with her two kids. They talked to the girlfriend's mother."

"When did she leave?"

"This morning, I guess, not long before Manny and Kramer got there."

"Where are you going with all this?" I asked. "Did the mother act as though there was any problem?"