J. Jance - Improbable cause

“I certainly did.”

“How did they take it?” I asked.

“They were shocked, of course,” Dr. Leonard replied. “Very upset, both of them.”

“How upset were they? What did they say?” I asked.

Dr. Leonard paused, her face caught in the startled expression of someone who has just remembered something they had forgotten. “Why, forevermore!” she exclaimed. “I blanked it out completely until just this minute when you asked.”

“Blanked out what?”

“One of them swore about it. I was shocked. I’d never heard that kind of talk from any of them. She said he should be taken care of once and for all.”

“Could what she said possibly be construed as a threat? Tell me what she said,” I urged.

“You want me to repeat it exactly?” Dr. Leonard asked.

I nodded. “Word for word.”

Dr. Leonard sighed. “Let me think a minute. I believe she said, ”Somebody should kill that mother-fucking son of a bitch!“ ”

Even as she spoke the words, Dr. Leonard seemed as surprised to hear them coming from her own lips as she had been when Rachel or Daisy had used them the first time. From the looks and sound of Dr. Leonard, I doubted she personally allowed herself anything stronger than an occasional darn.

“Which one of them said it?” I asked. “Rachel or Daisy?”

She shrugged. “I’m not sure. They look so much alike that I can never keep them straight. The one said it. The other one said, ”Don’t be ridiculous.“”

“What happened next?”

“We talked for a while longer. They told me they’d see to it that Dorothy was taken care of, that they wouldn’t let any more harm come to her. I told them I’d release her on Tuesday morning, if they could pick her up then. They needed that much time to build a wheelchair ramp, rent a bed, and get Dorothy’s things moved into their house. After we finished making arrangements, they left.”

“Were they still upset?”

Dr. Leonard nodded. “Yes indeed. I heard them arguing in the hallway outside my door while they waited for the elevator, but I didn’t place any importance on it at the time.”

She was quiet for a moment. “That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it,” she added with a shrewd glance in my direction. “You think one of them may be…?” She left the remainder of the question unspoken.

I nodded. “Or both.”

“Oh, dear no. That would be dreadful. What in the world would happen to Dorothy?”

“Unfortunately, Dr. Leonard, that’s not my concern,” I said.

“It ought to be,” she replied stiffly.

When I left Dr. Leonard’s cluttered office a few minutes later, there were several patients waiting outside, waiting for their scheduled appointments.

Only when I stepped out of the Arnold Medical Pavilion into a gentle rain and the cool breeze did I remember that I was on foot. Big Al had taken the car to Olympia. I hopped across Madison and caught a Metro bus down the hill. On the way, I jotted down some notes on my meeting with Dr. Leonard.

Writing it down helped clarify my own thinking. Supposing Rachel and Daisy hadn’t suspected the real source of Dorothy’s broken hip until they learned about it from Dr. Leonard on Saturday morning. What if one or both of them had decided to take the law into their own hands and do something about it?

That sounded like motive to me.

The bus moved at a snail’s pace, and I was suddenly in a tremendous hurry. I finally jumped ship at Fourth and Madison, with my mind running at full throttle. Big Al might very well bring back official confirmation from the Department of Licensing, but I had a better idea. In order to do it, I planned to dash into the departmental garage, grab a car without ever showing my face in the Public Safety Building, and go straight to the Edinburgh Arms.

Nice try, but no time. Captain Powell and Sergeant Watkins were also in the garage lobby waiting for a car.

“Hey, Beau, what’s the hurry?” Sergeant Watkins asked as I rushed past them. “What’s happening? I hear Detective Lindstrom’s on his way to Olympia to pick up a partial license printout.”

“Right,” I answered.

“You seem to be in quite a hurry, Detective Beaumont,” Captain Powell observed. “Are you two on to something?”

“Maybe,” I said. “I just talked to Dorothy Nielsen’s doctor.”

“What for?”

“Look, Captain, I’m in a hurry. I need to check out a car. Can’t we talk about this later?”

“We’ll talk about it now,” Captain Powell said. “I want to know what’s going on.”

“I’ve got one detail to verify, but I’m checking into his aunts.”

Captain Powell shook his head in shocked disbelief. “His aunts? Those two nice ladies? Come now, Beaumont. I’ve had several dealings with Dr. Nielsen’s aunts in the past few days. In fact, one of them called me just this morning about the memorial service on Saturday. She sounded reasonable enough to me. They both did. Neither one of them strikes me as a cold-blooded killer, someone capable of using a dental pick as a hole punch on somebody else’s throat.”

“Perfectly reasonable or not,” I replied, “we’re within a hair of having probable cause to arrest them.”

“Improbable cause is a hell of a lot more like it,“ Powell returned derisively. ”We’ve got a perfectly good ex-con in custody, but you’d rather pin the murder on a couple of sweet little old ladies. You’re slipping, Beaumont. You are really slipping.“

Their car arrived just then. The two of them got in and drove away, leaving me standing there in the garage with smoke pouring out both my ears. So far the evidence I had may have been strictly circumstantial, but I knew in my bones we were finally on the right track.

My car came eventually, and I drove straight to the Edinburgh Arms. Instead of entering the driveway, I went around to the back of the complex and parked on the street near the long row of neat, brick garages. The doors all had a thick coat of fresh cream-colored paint, and the windows at the top of each door were uniformly clean and polished.

There were no numbers on the garages, no identification of any kind to tell which garage belonged to which unit, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to go ask.

I started at one end of the building and worked my way to the other, stopping at each door and standing on tiptoe to peer through the glass. I was about two-thirds down the row when I hit pay dirt.

Parked inside one of the garage stalls was an older model black BMW with a mangled rear bumper. The first two letters, the K and the R, were plainly visible, but the rest of the license plate was obscured by twisted chrome. No wonder Darlene could only remember the first three letters on the plate. That was all she could see.

I raced back to my car and headed downtown. As I drove, pieces of the puzzle swooped around and around in my head like airplanes waiting to land. The BMW had to be one of Dr. Nielsen’s cars. Whoever was driving it would have had the garage door opener for sure and possibly access to the office as well. Office keys and car keys often share the same key ring. That would explain how the killer had unlocked the dead bolt to get inside.

But Darlene had said the driver of the foreign car was a man. What about that? Suddenly I remembered how Daisy and Rachel had looked once they donned their khaki Woodland Park Zoo docent uniforms. The matching pith helmets had totally concealed their hair. From a distance, especially if they had been seated in a fast-moving car, either one of them could have been mistaken for a man. For that matter, in the dim light of the garage, a pith helmet could have passed for a Washington State Patrol trooper’s campaign hat.

After all, when the car had sped past her, Darlene Girvan was damn lucky just to be alive. I could hardly fault her powers of observation at a time like that.