Taking the Fifth (10 page)

Behind me, the door opened and a woman almost as wide as the doorway itself marched purposefully into the room. She took one look at me and stopped cold. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, mister?” she demanded.

“I was just…”

She waddled over to me and stuck her face close to mine. “You were just nothing! Get out of here before I call the cops.”

I got moving. She didn’t have to tell me twice.

CHAPTER 10

THE NAPIHAD TAKEN DURING PEEWEE Latham’s act now served me in good stead. I didn’t sleep at all during the second act. Neither did anybody else.

The act opened with the revolving band shell turning and moving forward just to the right of center stage, bearing with it the sixteen-piece backup orchestra.

From the other side of the stage, a golden grand piano moved smoothly to center stage. On it, draped in a lush blues singer pose, lay Jasmine Day.

From the moment she appeared, Jasmine had the audience’s rapt attention. The skin-tight jumpsuit revealed everything and nothing. No hint of excess flesh wiggled under the sleek material. When she slid gracefully off the piano to sing her second number, she looked ten feet tall and bulletproof. It was funny; she hadn’t seemed nearly that tall or imposing when she was standing next to me in her dressing room.

Jasmine was nothing short of a human dynamo. She threw every ounce of her body and being into the songs she sang, and the audience loved it. Halfway through the set though, in a distinct change of pace, she brought out a simple wooden stool and sat down to talk.

She told us how glad she was that her stay at Betty Ford’s rehabilitation center had given her a chance to shake the drugs that had been destroying both her life and her career and how grateful she was for the enthusiastic response audiences all over the country were giving her new show. This show. The one she was sharing with us.

It was a homey little chat, relaxed and ingenuous, and it accomplished just what it was calculated to do: it put an already friendly audience even more squarely in Jasmine Day’s corner. J. P. Beaumont included.

I’ll confess that my mind wandered a little near the end of the show. I was worried about where I’d take Jasmine Day for dinner and how I’d explain my relationship with Dan Osgood if the question came up. I’m still not sure why I was so reluctant to tell her I was a cop. In retrospect I chalk it up to male pride, to wanting to preserve the illusion that she was going with me by choice rather than by necessity as a side effect of my job.

As soon as the curtain rang down for the last time, I dashed home to change clothes before the appointed meeting with Jasmine Day. I made two phone calls from my apartment. One was to the department, leaving word for Al, if he called in from the hospital, that I was going on surveillance and would be in touch with him later. I didn’t divulge the exact nature of that surveillance. Call it a sin of omission.

The other call was to the Canlis Restaurant up on Aurora Avenue. I made a late dinner reservation for two.

After a hasty shower, I put on clean clothes and was in front of the Mayflower Park Hotel just at ten-thirty.

The Mayflower Park isn’t one of Seattle’s brand-name hotel giants. It’s smaller and more personal than the Sheratons and Westins of the world. In the course of the last few years, it has been totally refurbished, making it long on quality but without quite the snob appeal of some of the other downtown hotels.

I walked inside the cool, brick-floored lobby and liked what I found. The lobby was comfortably furnished and quiet except for the occasional sound of muted laughter that drifted in from Oliver’s, the candlelit hotel lounge off to the right of the registration desk.

An efficient young desk clerk greeted me cheerfully.

“Jasmine Day,” I said.

“Oh, are you Mr. Beaumont?” the clerk asked.

“Yes.”

“Miss Day left word for you to go on up to her room. Sixth floor. To the right after you step off the elevator and all the way to the end of the corridor.”

As I stepped into the elevator I felt like an imposter, as if I had no right to be there, but Jasmine was the one who had assumed we were going to dinner. I decided my best strategy was to shut up and enjoy it.

I knocked on the door at the end of the corridor. It was opened by Jasmine Day herself. She was wearing a variation on a man’s white racer-backed tee shirt, except that it had an intricate rhinestone design bordering the neck and shoulders. The shirt came down to her knees and was cinched in just above her hips by a loose-fitting gold lamé belt.

Her long legs were encased in a pair of very close-fitting tights that ended just above well-formed ankles. Her shoes, three-inch hooker heels, were made of delicate gold lamé straps.

Jasmine Day tossed her head impatiently, loose blonde hair shimmering across her shoulders. “Well, are you going to come inside, or are you going to stand out there gawking all night?”

Hastily I went inside. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude.”

Jasmine Day shut the door behind her. She leaned against it for a fraction of an instant looking up at me. “That’s all right,” she said resignedly. “I suppose I should be used to it by now.”

Briskly, she walked past me into the room. Near the window was a seating area made up of two plush apricot chairs and a matching couch. Between them, on a glass coffee table, sat a single cup of coffee. She picked it up and took a sip, studying me carefully over the rim of the cup.

“So you’re a friend of Dan Osgood’s,” she said noncommittally.

I made no reply to her comment. I glanced around the room uneasily. It was evidently a suite. There was nothing in sight that remotely resembled a sleeping area. A round conference table in one corner was buried beneath several bouquets of flowers as well as a basket of fruit and an unopened bottle of champagne.

“Fans,” she explained. “I guess they enjoyed the show.”

She had finally given me a conversational opening I figured I could handle. “So did I,” I ventured. “You throw everything you’ve got into your performance.”

“Not everything,” she said evenly. “There are some things I hold back.”

The coffee cup rapped sharply against the glass-topped table as she set it down. “That’s why I wanted to talk to you here before we went to dinner.”

She motioned me toward the unoccupied chair opposite her. I moved mechanically toward the chair, conscious of her unblinking eyes riveted on my face, aware of the almost hypnotic effect her voice had on me.

“We have to go over the ground rules,” she said quietly.

“Over what?”

“The ground rules.” She smiled, seeming to enjoy my obvious discomfort. “You see, every so often the guys who end up with Ed Waverly’s comp tickets think it’s a package deal, that if we go to dinner, I’ll be dessert.”

“Miss Day, I…”

She held up a hand, effectively silencing me. “So this is what we’ll do. We’ll go have a quiet little dinner someplace. You talk and I’ll listen, or vice versa. Then you bring me back here and I’ll come up to my room alone, all right?”

“Right,” I said, nodding in agreement.

Jasmine Day smiled brightly in return, revealing a dazzling array of perfectly formed, straight white teeth. “Good,” she said, “but just in case you forget, there’s one more thing I should mention.”

“What’s that?”

“There’s a brown belt hanging in my closet. It doesn’t have anything to do with my wardrobe.”

It was a moment or two before her hands-off-or-else meaning soaked into my thick skull, but I finally got the picture.

“Let’s go, then,” I said abruptly, getting up. “Our dinner reservation is for ten forty-five. The kitchen closes at eleven-thirty.”

As we rode down in the elevator, Jasmine Day casually reached out a hand and took my arm. I suddenly felt as if I was caged up with a lioness who had momentarily sheathed her claws. It didn’t improve my already limited ability as a conversationalist.

“So what do you do, Mr. Beaumont?” she asked.

For whatever reason, I still didn’t want to tell her I was a cop. “I work for the city,” I hedged somewhat lamely.

We were outside near the car by then. “You must be doing all right,” she commented, idly running a finger along the edge of the Porsche’s open sunroof while she waited for me to unlock the door.

“Not bad,” I replied.

It was small-talk time, and I’ve never been good at small talk. Instead, I concentrated on driving. I put the 928 through its paces, cruising down Olive and up Sixth Avenue to Aurora, skimming through traffic lights just as green turned amber.

As we glided effortlessly up the long, steep hill on Aurora, I glanced in Jasmine Day’s direction. Her face was impassive in the intermittent glow of street lights.

“Do you always drive this fast?” she asked.

I eased up slightly on the accelerator. “Not always. Only when I’m nervous.”

She laughed then, a light-hearted, breezy laugh. “So I make you nervous? That’s refreshing for a change. Most men think they’re God’s gift to women.”

I turned off Aurora into the Canlis Restaurant’s covered portico, where valet-parking attendants were eager to assist us. Two young men in white lab coats leaped to open our doors. One relieved me of my keys in exchange for a ticket, while the other gave Jasmine Day a hand getting out of the car. I was fully conscious of the envious looks that followed us through the door.

Once inside, we were shown to a small candlelit table next to a window. A waiter appeared almost as soon as we were seated. Cautioning us that the kitchen would be closing in less than forty-five minutes, he suggested that we order our food at the same time we ordered drinks.

Jasmine opted for straight tonic while I asked for a MacNaughton’s and water. We ordered Canlis salad, prepared at our table, and Hawaiian grilled steaks, medium rare. When the waiter left with our order, Jasmine turned her attention to the window.

“What’s the big black spot down there?”

“Lake Union,” I said, looking out and down at the dark smudge of unlit water with its border of reflected lights. Off to the left we could see the northern tip of the Aurora Bridge, while in the other direction, toward the east, headlights winked across the I-5 span at the far end of the lake.

I played tour guide. “The bridge you see way down there, the tall one, is where the freeway crosses the Montlake Cut. That leads into Lake Washington. Have you ever been in Seattle before? Do you know anything about it?”

She turned away from the window and rested her chin on her hand, regarding me seriously. “I did a concert at the Coliseum once, back in the old days. I opened for The Living Dead. Ever hear of them?”

I shook my head.

“That doesn’t surprise me. The band broke up several years ago after the drummer OD’d and the lead singer got sent up for dealing.”

The waiter returned to place our drinks in front of us. Jasmine Day remained silent until he was well out of earshot. “I guess I’m lucky that I lived long enough to grow up. A lot of the singers and musicians I started out with didn’t make it this far.”

I took a sip of my drink and leaned back in my chair, wondering how old she was. Thirty maybe, if that. “How did you get out of Jasper?” I asked.

She smiled, a quick, amused smile. “I started out singing solos in the First Baptist Church when I was seven years old. I’ve got a whole flock of relatives back in Texas who’d be more than happy to tell you that it’s been all downhill ever since. They’re convinced I’m going to hell in a handbasket.”

“Are you?”

She shrugged. “Maybe. Anyway, Mary Lou Gibbon sang her heart out at weddings and funerals and potluck dinners and saved her money so she could get the hell out of Jasper.”

“And you’re Mary Lou Gibbon, of course,” I said.

“You bet. Little Miss Goody-Two-Shoes. Or at least that’s who I was supposed to be. I sang hymns in church. I taught myself rock out in the garage where nobody could hear me. When I was sixteen, I bought myself a one-way ticket to New York.”

“And the rest is history.

She nodded. “That’s right.”

The waiter returned, pushing a cart with the salad ingredients carefully assembled on it. Next to a large wooden bowl lay a copy of the souvenir program from Jasmine Day’s conceit. The waiter leaned close to her.

“Excuse me, madame,” he said apologetically, “but the woman over there wanted me to ask if you would mind autographing her program. She said they’ve just come from your show and she loved it.”

“I’d be delighted,” Jasmine said, picking up the program. She nodded slightly in the direction of the lady three tables away, who gave her a tiny, self-conscious wave.

The waiter handed Jasmine a pen. She thumbed through the program until she found her picture. Then, instead of signing it, she got up, walked over to the table, and chatted with her embarrassed but delighted fan. Jasmine signed her name with an expansive flourish and returned the program to its owner.

Meanwhile, watching the transaction, I took a long pull on my MacNaughton’s and wondered what the hell I was doing there.

Jasmine returned to the table smiling. “It’s always nicer if you can sign it to them personally,” she said.

The waiter was obviously conscious of Jasmine’s attention as he created our salads. There was an almost electric sensuality about the lady, and the waiter was no more immune to it than I was.

“So how did Mary Lou Gibbon become Jasmine Day?” I asked, once the waiter had served our individual salads and walked away.

“On my back.”

It was a no-nonsense reply, and it left no room for misinterpretation. It caught me off guard, with a mouthful of salad. A large piece of romaine lettuce went down the wrong way and stuck crosswise in my throat. I choked and coughed, trying to jar it loose.

“I take it that’s not a career path you approve of,” she said mockingly.

I didn’t say anything in return because I still couldn’t talk.

“I slept my way to the top once,” she said quietly and added in a determined tone, “This time, I’m doing it right.”

That statement was open to interpretation, but I didn’t have nerve enough to ask.