J. Jance - Trial By Fury

It was only as I sat there in solitary silence, chewing on my roast beef, that I realized I had never asked Bambi Barker how much her prize was for screwing Darwin Ridley. On second thought, I was probably better off not knowing.

Thinking about it spoiled my appetite. I didn't finish the sandwich.

There was a lot to think about on the way home. Bambi Barker had shaken me. I couldn't help wondering how I would have felt if I had discovered that my own daughter, Kelly, had been pulling something like that when she was in high school. Would I have taken the time to find out that the girls had been playing the teacher for a fool, or would I have jumped to the opposite conclusion?

There could be little doubt of the answer to that one. J. P. Beaumont has been known to jump to conclusions on occasion. Somebody by the name of Wheeler-Dealer Barker could very well suffer from the same malady.

In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I figured there was a better-than-even-money chance that Bambi's old man had jumped to his own erroneous and lethal conclusions. We needed to know his whereabouts on Friday night and Saturday morning, while Bambi was locked in her room at home and her mother was standing guard.

Knowing of Molly Blackburn's existence helped answer one puzzling question. The idea that a father would have mailed out such a compromising picture of his own daughter had never made sense to me. I couldn't imagine any father doing such a thing, not even in the heat of anger. I had gone along with that suggestion when no other possibilities had presented themselves, but it made far more sense that the picture might have been part of a blackmail scheme, a complicated, two-sided deal aimed at wresting money from both families involved, the Barkers and the Ridleys.

It seemed likely that a copy of the picture had arrived at the Barker home sometime Friday morning. That was probably what had tipped off old Wheeler-Dealer. Joanna's had arrived days later. That was somewhat puzzling. Why the delay? If you're going to blackmail two different sets of people, why not do it simultaneously? Or maybe they had been mailed at the same time and the postal service had screwed up.

My questions defied any attempt to find answers, but they served to fill up the long straight stretches of interstate. There was hardly any traffic on the freeway at that time of night. Just me and a bunch of eighteen-wheelers tearing up the road. I made it back to Seattle in a good deal less time than the three hours it should have taken.

I dropped into bed the minute I got to my apartment. It was three A.M. when I turned out the light and fell asleep.

Fifteen minutes later the phone rang, jarring me out of a sound sleep. "Please stay on the line," a tinny, computerized female voice told me. Within moments, Ralph Ames' voice sputtered into the receiver. He sounded like somebody had just kicked him awake, too.

"What do you want?" he demanded in a groggy grumble.

"What do you mean, ‘What do I want'? You called me, remember?"

"Oh, I must have forgotten to turn that damn thing off when I went to bed."

"What damn thing?" I wasn't playing with a full deck in this conversation.

"My automatic redialer."

An automatic redialer! Ralph Ames' ongoing love affair with gadgets was gradually becoming clear to me. If my phone had been ringing off and on all night, it was probably quite clear to Ida Newell, my next-door neighbor, as well.

"That's just great," I fumed. "I went to bed fifteen minutes ago, Ralph. What's so goddamned important that you woke us both up?"

"Your closing on Belltown Terrace. It's reset for Friday, three-thirty. Can you make it?"

I took a deep breath. "Sometimes you really piss me off. It's three o'clock in the morning. You expect me to have a calendar in my hand?"

"If you had an answering machine…"

"I don't want an answering machine." I rummaged through the nightstand drawer for pen and paper and wrote down the time and place for the real estate closing. "There," I said. "Is that all? Mind if I get some sleep now?"

"Be my guest," Ames replied, then hung up.

A scant three hours later, the phone rang again. Once more I shook the fog out of my head. Eventually, I recognized Al Lindstrom's voice. Big Al, as we call him, is another detective on the homicide squad. He generally works the night shift.

"What do you mean calling me at this hour?" I'm crabby when I don't get my beauty sleep.

"Don't get your sweat hot, Beau. I've got someone on the line. She wants to talk to you. Real bad."

"Look, Al. I've barely gotten into bed. Can't you take a message?"

"She wants to talk to you now."

"Jesus H. Christ. Who is it? Can't you get her name and number? I'll call her back as soon as I get to the office."

"Just a minute. I'll ask" While he was off the line, I tried, with limited success, to rub my eyes open and unscramble my brain.

Eventually, Al returned to the line. "Says her name's Joanna Ridley. Says you can't call her. She wants to meet you in half an hour at the tennis courts in Seward Park "

"I'm still in bed, Al. I can't meet her in half an hour. Tell her I'll call her later."

"It's too late."

"Why?"

"She hung up."

"Shit!" I rolled out of bed. "Thanks a whole hell of a lot," I growled.

"Don't chew my ass," Al returned. "I'm just doing my job."

He slammed the phone down in my ear. I grabbed my nightstand telephone book and located Joanna's number, but when I finally dialed it, the line was busy. I tried several more times, but the line remained busy, leaving me to conclude that Joanna was serious about my not calling her back She had evidently left the phone off the hook.

I gave my pillow a reluctant farewell pat and headed for the shower. Exactly eleven minutes later, the Porsche and I shot out through the building garage entrance onto Lenora.

Morning fog was thick as velvet as I drove up Boren and out Rainier Avenue. At six twenty-five traffic coming into the city was already picking up, but I was driving against it. I wondered as I drove why Joanna had refused to see me at her house, and why she had picked such an early hour in a deserted city park for our meeting.

Seward Park sits on a point that juts out into Lake Washington. On a clear day, Mount Rainier sits majestically above the water, framed on either side by the house-covered ridges of South Seattle and Mercer Island. That particular morning, however, there was no hint that a mountain lay hidden out there. Invisible behind the fog, it lurked in a blanket of silence that was broken only by the occasional huffing of an early morning jogger.

I saw Joanna Ridley's Mustang right away, tucked into a parking place against the tennis court fence. The driver of the Mustang, however, was nowhere in sight. Parking the Porsche next to Joanna's car, I set out looking for her.

Blooming dogwood and daffodils lined the park's entrance. I walked along a hedge of Photinia, its new growth crimson above the older green leaves. The startling spring colors stood out in sharp relief against the shifting gray fog. The grass was heavy with dew, sponging down beneath my feet as I walked along the breakwater.

The park seemed a lonely, desolate place for a new widow. The idea of suicide fleetingly crossed my mind. I wondered if Joanna had decided to end her own life. The thought had no more than entered my mind, however, when I spotted her near the water.

Wearing a huge sweater, she stood on the rock breakwater, profiled against the gray of both the fog and water behind her. A light breeze blowing off the lake pressed the sweater's soft material around the bulge in her middle, accentuating her pregnant figure. Unaware of my approach, she peered down from her perch at something in the water below her, something I couldn't see. When I finally got close enough to look below the breakwater, I found she was watching a flock of hungry ducks out bumming for handouts.