By the time they left, I found myself thinking about Angie Dixon. Linda Decker's comments were the first real link between Logan Tyree and Angie Dixon. I had theorized that there might be a connection, but now I knew for sure it existed. Logan and Angie had indeed known each other. Enough to make Linda jealous. Enough that Angie had confided in Logan about the tapes. Why did she find it necessary?

  And if Linda was right, if Angie had been pushed, who had pushed her? Suddenly, the haunting picture from the paper came back to me as clearly as if I were holding it in my hand. In my mind's eye, I once more saw Angie Dixon plunging to her death. A comic-book light bulb clicked on over my head as I realized the picture might hold the key to the puzzle.

  Adrenaline coursed through my body-adrenaline and questions. How many pictures were on that roll? How often were the pictures taken? And was there a chance, even a remote one, that another shot, taken earlier or later, might provide a clue as to what had gone on in the minutes before and after Angie's fatal plunge?

  Getting a look at that film, prying it loose from whoever owned it was something only officialdom could accomplish, and officialdom would go to work on it only if I filled Manny Davis and Paul Kramer in on what was happening. It was time to straighten up and fly right, no matter how much I didn't want to do it.

  I left the Arboretum and drove back downtown, conscious as I drove that it was after lunch and I had eaten nothing since Ralph Ames' midnight fettucini. The 928 headed for the Doghouse on automatic pilot.

  The Doghouse is disreputable enough that no one raised an eyebrow at my purple bruises. It's the kind of place that says "Breakfast Anytime" and means it. That's what I had-bacon, eggs, toast, and coffee. Plenty of coffee. I didn't try calling the department until after I had finished eating. I believe it's called avoidance behavior. When I finally couldn't think of another plausible excuse to put it off any longer. I used the pay phone near the pinball machines.

  I asked for Manny Davis. He wasn't in. I asked for Paul Kramer. He was. Too bad.

  "Detective Kramer speaking."

  "Hello, Paul. This is Beaumont."

  Behind me some guy was racking up a huge score on the Doghouse's primo pinball machine. A group of enthusiastic buddies was cheering him on.

  "Who?" Kramer demanded. "I can't hear you. There's too much noise in the background."

  "Beaumont," I repeated, raising the volume. "I need to talk to you."

  He paused. A long pause. "So talk. I'm listening."

  At least he didn't hang up on me. I took a deep breath. "Not on the phone. I want to talk in person. To both you and Manny."

  "Manny's busy. He's in court this afternoon."

  "Well, to you then."

  Behind me the pinball crowd cheered again.

  "What's that? I can't hear you."

  "To you then. Can you meet me?"

  "Where?"

  "Do you know where the Doghouse is at Seventh and Bell?"

  "I know it," he answered. "What are you doing, out slumming, Beaumont?"

  So that's how it was. He hadn't hung up on me, but we hadn't exactly kissed and made up, either. I didn't say anything.

  "When?" Kramer demanded.

  "As soon as you can get here."

  He hung up and I went back to my table. My plate and dirty silverware had been cleared away. Left were a freshly poured cup of coffee and a newspaper with the unworked crossword puzzle folded out. The waitresses at the Doghouse take good care of me. That's one of the reasons I go there. It's got nothing to do with gourmet cuisine.

  The crossword puzzle contained only three unfinished words by the time Detective Paul Kramer strode up to the table twenty minutes later.

  "You wanted to see me?" he asked, easing his sizable frame into the booth across from me.

  I set the nearly finished puzzle aside. "Wanting is probably overstating the case," I said. Kramer made as if to rise. "Sit," I ordered. He sat.

  Jenny, the waitress, came to the table just then and offered him coffee which he accepted with a grudging nod. We sat without speaking until she finished pouring it and walked away, leaving us alone.

  "What do you want? This ain't no pleasure trip for me, Beaumont, and I'm damned if I'm going to sit here while you dish out insults."

  For some strange reason, the situation reminded me of the time years before when, at Karen's insistence, I had taken Scott to a local diner to administer the obligatory birds and bees talk. My son had been full of teenage resentment, angry and embarrassed both. In the end, the talk could in no way be called an unqualified success. We both went home frustrated and neither of us mentioned it again.

  Now, with Detective Paul Kramer sitting across the table from me, I felt the air charged with the same kind of irritation and arrogance, the same counterproductive determination to miscommunicate. But that was where the similarity ended. With Scott and the birds and the bees, adult complacency had been on my side. I had known I was right and that time would bear me out. With Kramer I had no such delusions. He was right and I was wrong, and he didn't waste any time beating around the bush before he let me know it.

  "Who the hell do you think you are that you can go messing around in my case?"

  "I'm sorry," I said.

  It wasn't what he expected. My two-word apology didn't derail him altogether, but it threw a real monkey wrench in his attack.

  "Logan Tyree's our case," he went on. "Manny's and mine. You've got no business screwing with it."

  "I know."

  Kramer stopped and sat with his head cocked to one side, like someone who's afraid he's been suckered too far into enemy territory. "What did you want to see me for then?" he demanded.

  Biding my time, I took a careful sip of my coffee. "Why'd you become a cop, Kramer?" I asked evenly.

  "What is this, an occupational aptitude test?"

  "Just tell me."

  He shrugged. "It's something I have to do, that's all."

  "You want to make the world a better place to live in?" I suggested.

  "Something like that." He frowned. "What kind of deal is this, Beaumont? I'm here because I'm pissed as hell, and you sit there making fun of me."

  "I'm not making fun of anybody, Kramer. I've never been more serious in my life."

  Reluctantly, Kramer settled back in the booth, holding his cup while he studied me warily. He said nothing.

  "And how long do you plan to be in homicide?" I asked.

  "Me? As long as it takes."

  "As long as it takes for what?"

  "To be promoted out." At least we had cut through the bullshit. He was being honest.

  "So you see homicide as a stepping-stone to bigger and better things?"

  "There's nothing wrong with the," Kramer said defensively.

  "I never said there was. What were you doing seventeen years ago?"

  "Seventeen years ago?" He laughed. "I was thirteen and in the eighth grade down in Tumwater. What does that have to do with the price of peanuts?"

  "Because seventeen years ago, I was just starting out in homicide. Fresh up from robbery, same as you are now."

  "So?"

  "It's my life's work, Kramer. I've never wanted to do anything else. I never saw homicide as a springboard. I do the job. I like it. I'm good at it.

  "A few days ago, you called me a playboy cop. It hurt me real good, but I've been doing some thinking. It's true. I've got more money right now than I'll ever know what to do with. I could quit the force tomorrow and never have to work another day in my life, but you know what? I don't know what the hell I'd do with myself if I quit. There isn't anything else I'd rather do except maybe drink too much and die young."

  Kramer shifted in his seat. "Why are you telling me all this? What's the point?"

  "The point is, we're on the same team, Kramer. Different motivations maybe, but we work the same side of the street. Logan Tyree's death is important, far more so than anyone's figured out. Solve it, and you'll be a hero. Screw it up, and your time in homicide gets that much longer."

  "Does that mean you know something we don't know?"

  "Maybe," I said.

  "You can't do this, Beaumont," he protested. "You can't withhold information and you know it."

  "I'm not withholding anything. That's why I called you here, to tell you what I know. But I want in on it."

  Kramer looked astonished. "You're going to ask Watty to put you on the case?"

  I shook my head. "No, Kramer. You are."

  "Why would I? And why do you want on the case?"

  "Because I give a shit about Jimmy Rising and Linda Decker and Logan Tyree and Angie Dixon. Because I want to see the creeps who did this off the streets."

  When I mentioned Angie Dixon's name, a spark of excitement came to life in Kramer's eyes. "The woman who fell. Did she have something to do with the others?"

  I could see he needed to know the answer. As far as that was concerned, he was just like me, but I deliberately left him hanging without directly answering his question.

  "I want in because I'm a good cop, Kramer. Because I've discovered things you need to know. I want this case solved. I want it every bit as much as you want to be Chief of Police."

  I finished what I had to say and shut up. The cards were all on the table now. The question was, would he pick them up or not? There was a long silence. I was determined to wait him out. Selling Fuller Brush taught me that much. After you've made your pitch, keep quiet. The first one to open his mouth loses. I waited. The silence stretched out interminably.

  "You want it that bad, do you?" Kramer said at last.

  I nodded. "That bad."

  "Then you'd better tell me what you know."

  Eating crow was as simple as that.

  CHAPTER 18

  When we left the Doghouse an hour and a half later, we had hammered out rough guidelines for an uneasy alliance. Kramer had called Watty, and Detective J. P. Beaumont was now officially part of the investigation into Logan Tyree's death. It was a big improvement over the other alternative of being flat-out fired.

  We took Kramer's car and drove to the Northwest Center on Armory Way. The receptionist summoned Sandy Carson from the micrographics department. When she arrived, she was still blonde and still willowy, but she looked like hell. Her eyes were red. I'm sure she had been crying.

  "I didn't want any visitors out in the shop today," she explained. "Everyone's still too upset about Jimmy. But Linda called and told me you'd be coming by. She said for me to give you this." She handed me a large brown interdepartmental envelope with its string fastener firmly tied.

  "Who actually took the pictures?" I asked.

  "Jimmy did. I supervised, of course."

  "And do you have any idea what became of the originals?"

  She shook her head. "I gave them to Logan when he came by and picked Jimmy up one day. He asked me to keep the copies here. He said he thought that would be safer."

  "Do you remember when that was?"

  "Several days before he died."

  "And did you go to the police with it?"

  "There wasn't any point. Everyone said it was an accident."

  I glanced at Kramer, but I didn't say anything. There was no sense rubbing his nose in it.

  "Any idea where we should go to take a look at these?" I asked.

  Kramer nodded. "I know a place."

  He drove us to the Seattle Times building on Fairview and pulled into the parking lot. "I know people here," he said. "They'll let us use their fiche reader. Not only that, maybe I can get a line on that Masters Plaza film."

  One of my objections to the new breed of law enforcement officers is their total preoccupation with the media. These cops want to solve crimes, all right, but they also want the publicity. They want to be sure their names are spelled right in the papers, pronounced right on the eleven o'clock news. Old war-horses like Big Al Lindstrom and me don't give a damn what the media have to say one way or the other.

  In this case, however, Detective Paul Kramer's cozy friendship with the Third Estate paid off. Kramer's buddy in the news department hooked us up with someone from photography. He said the picture of Angie Dixon had come to the paper through a local free-lance film editor. The guy at the Times wasn't sure exactly how that had transpired, and the person who had handled the transaction wasn't in, but he was able to tell us that the company actually doing the filming was a small outfit called Camera Craft in the Denny Regrade.

  Kramer's buddy also let us use a microfiche reader. It didn't do us any good. The fiche showed nothing but accountant's tapes, some with barely legible notations on them. Without the accompanying journals, they were worthless.

  Kramer leaned away from the viewer long enough to let me take a look. "None of this makes sense," he said. "These aren't something worth killing for. Are you sure this is what Linda Decker thought they were after?"

  "Positive."

  "So what now? Go down to Camera Craft?"

  "Seems like."

  We were told that the owner of Camera Craft was grabbing a late lunch at the Rendezvous, a small restaurant just up the block. We followed him there. Like other places in the Regrade, the Rendezvous has a checkered past. In the old days it was a private screening house where local movie distributors could get a sneak preview of Hollywood's latest offerings. For years now, it has been a blue-collar hangout. The private dining area still boasts a minuscule stage and a battered projection screen, holdovers from days gone by. Occasionally some shoestring drama company will stage a production there.

  The owner of Camera Craft, Jim Hadley, wasn't in the Rendezvous' old screening room. He was hunched over a hamburger and fries at a small table in the back of the dimly lit main dining room. He was evidently a regular. When we asked, the cashier had no difficulty pointing him out to us.

  Kramer approached Hadley's table, flashed his ID, and introduced us both. Busy chewing, Hadley nodded us into chairs and swallowed a mouthful of hamburger. "What's this all about?" he asked.

  "The picture in the paper."

  "Oh," he said. "That one. It was a fluke, an absolute fluke. The odds of the camera going off just as she fell…It's like that guy taking pictures of Mount Saint Helens just as it exploded."

  "I understand your company is in charge of doing the filming for the Masters Plaza folks?"

  "That's right. We unload and load the cameras every morning, refocus, and reset the timers. After that they run all day and all night on their own. We've got a free-lance editor who supervises the film-to-tape transfer and then edits out all the night scenes and rough stuff."

  "What kind of transfer?"

  "You know, from film to videotape. That's where we do all the fine-tuning."

  "You said cameras. Does that mean there's more than one?"

  He nodded and swallowed another bite of his hamburger. "Two actually. Each of them is set to take one picture every four minutes-not at the same time, of course. One is set up right across the street in the Arcade building. The other's a block or so away. Now that they're up to the forty-second floor, the Arcade building isn't tall enough to show the whole building. The developer wants it for a corporate dog and pony production, a video to show what a hell of a good job they do."

  "Which camera took the picture that was in the newspaper?" I asked.

  "The one on the Arcade building. We keep that one focused on the raising gang. Putting up those beams is a lot more spectacular than most of the rest of it. It's certainly the most visual."

  "And the most dangerous," I added.

  Hadley shrugged. "That too, although it all looks pretty damn dangerous if you ask me."

  Kramer shifted impatiently in his seat. "So how did the picture end up in the newspaper?"

  "Our editor pulled a workprint that night. She's the one who noticed. She said she had some friends down at the Times, and she wondered if whether Darren Gibson would mind if she passed that one picture along. Of course he didn't mind. Publicity's publicity, especially if it's free."

  "Who's Darren Gibson?"

  "The local project manager for Masters Plaza. He said fine. Do it. Kath was way ahead of him."

  "Kath?"

  "Kath Naguchi. The editor I told you about. She figured he'd say yes. She was all set to pass it along to the Times as soon as he gave her the go-ahead. She was on her way down there within minutes. It was in the paper the next day."

  "What about the rest of the film?"

  Hadley shrugged. "Beats me. I suppose it's back at the shop where it belongs, along with the rest of the project."

  "Could we see it?" I asked.

  He shook his head. "Not without permission. The Masters and Rogers folks are paying us real good money to do this job. I'm not going to screw it up by showing you something I'm not supposed to."

  "Has anyone else asked to see it?"

  "No. Why would they?"

  "So, the editor made a print of that one picture?"

  Hadley shook his head. "She provided the film. I think the guys down at the paper did the actual blowup."

  "Did anyone make prints of any of the other frames, either before or after the one in the paper?"

  Hadley shook his head. "No. Not so far as I know. Like I said, she saw that one when she was doing the dailies."

  "Dailies?" Kramer asked.

  "It's a one-light print," I explained. "It tells what's on the previous day's shoot."

  Kramer glowered at me. "Movie talk?" he asked disgustedly.

  "You asked," I replied.

  He turned back to Hadley. "We're helping the Department of Labor and Industries on this case. How do we get a look at that film?"

  "I already told you. You've got to get permission from Masters and Rogers. They're the guys who write my checks. I wouldn't step on their toes on a bet."

  "And Darren Gibson is the person we'd need to talk to?"

  "Yes, but right now he's out of town. He was supposed to be in Toronto today. Back tomorrow most likely. I don't know if you'll be able to get hold of him or not."

 

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