Boldt nodded.
“How big?”
Boldt indicated the size: smaller than a quarter, bigger than a nickel. Berenson loved puzzles.
Berenson speculated. “Not poker chips … whistles-they must make green whistles-jewelry?” he asked. “Some kind of jewelry? A trinket, a key chain, something like that?”
“Jewelry, maybe.” Boldt liked this idea.
They didn’t talk for a while. One of the barflies signaled Bear, and the bar owner served him another drink. Boldt went over to the stage, climbed up and opened the piano, and played a long, rambling mood piece in E minor. It released him.
In the corner, he saw a stack of six backgammon boards and a matching number of Monopoly games. And there was Bear, in a chair, arm resting on the stack of board games, eyes closed, listening.
Bear said, “You could have done it for real, you know? The music. You’re that good, Monk.”
“I’m not that good-you’re just that stoned-and I can’t feed a family on what you pay.” It was a sensitive issue; perhaps Bear had forgotten; perhaps not, Boldt thought. Boldt had taken a two-year leave of absence following the Cross Killer investigation; only Daphne had possessed the persuasive techniques to lure him back to the department. For those two years he had been a good father and a better husband. He had been a happy hour jazz pianist, and Liz had brought home the paycheck. Those times seemed like a decade ago, instead of the five years it had been.
Bear was a little too stoned. He leaned his weight on the stack of board games, and the pile went over and onto the floor, spilling with a racket. “Hey,” Bear said, his lap piled with play money, “I’m rich.” He held up the money. “I’ll give you a raise.”
Boldt knocked off the trumpet fanfare that starts a horse race.
“Then again,” Bear said, down on his hands and knees to clean up the mess, “maybe you won, not me.” He threw something toward the piano player, and Boldt caught sight of it out of the corner of his eye in time to lean back, swipe the air with his large right hand, and snag whatever it was.
He glanced down into his open palm and saw there a small green plastic cube in the shape of a building, complete with a peaked roof, used to mark the purchase of a house on the Monopoly board: green … plastic….
Boldt said, somewhat breathlessly, understanding the significance of the find, “A house!”
“A game,” said Berenson.
Boldt pocketed the small green house, gave his friend an appreciative hug on the way out, and headed directly to the police lab, where he met up with Bernie Lofgrin, who, anxious to leave for the day, nonetheless understood the possible importance of the rush job that Boldt requested.
With the sergeant looking on, Lofgrin ran a comparison analysis of the melted green plastic sent by mail and that of the game piece delivered by the sergeant. He did so on the lab’s Fourier Transform Infrared Spectrophotometer, a device Boldt could name only with a struggle and which Lofgrin referred to by its initials, FTIR. The results offered the first real sense of progress: The two green pieces of plastic were identical in chemical composition; he had a match. The torch was sending melted Monopoly houses as part of his threats. Boldt tried to reach Daphne, hoping to connect some kind of psychological significance to the find-he had a lead and he wanted to run with it; he felt an urgency, a need to follow this to completion-but she didn’t answer, either at her houseboat or at the Adler mansion.
As Boldt headed home, he barely focused on Aurora Avenue, slowing when the red taillights brightened, speeding up as they grew distant, following the other cars but not entirely conscious of them. His focus was on Steven Garman and Daphne’s suspicions that he knew more than he was letting on. He pulled into the drive and sat quietly behind the wheel for several long minutes.
Liz’s car was there-and suddenly he was flooded with an entirely different set of suspicions and concerns.
29
Daphne knocked on the door of the purple house with the neon sign in the window and then hurried off the front porch to get a look down the driveway. She was uncomfortable to be a white woman, alone, in that neighborhood. Seattle was not a racially tense city like some other American cities, but gangs were of increasing concern: Asian against Asian, black against black. Women were occasionally gang-banged, sometimes to death. Car jackings were on the rise. And there was Daphne, white, attractive, driving a red Honda Prelude with aluminum mags, suddenly well aware of the ghetto surroundings.
He was small, and he was fast. A white boy, ten or twelve years old. He dodged around the corner of the house, froze as he saw Daphne, and then took off like a shot.
The front door came open and Emily Richland stood there in a black pants dress with an embroidered yellow robe over her shoulders. It took her a second to locate Daphne in the driveway.
“Is he your son?” Daphne asked.
“Leave him out of this,” Emily protested.
“Is he?”
“No.”
Daphne approached the woman, who stepped back inside and made an attempt to shut the door. “I wouldn’t,” Daphne warned.
Emily considered this and hesitated, the door still partially open.
“I haven’t heard from you,” Daphne told her.
“I haven’t heard from him.”
“How do I know that?” Daphne asked.
“I would call you.”
“Would you? I don’t think so.” Daphne forced her way inside and closed the door. “Who’s the boy?” she asked, pushing past the psychic into the lavishly painted room. “And don’t play with me, or you and the boy will end up downtown, having your pictures taken and rolling your thumbs and forefingers in little boxes. The press loves to destroy people like you.”
“You do whatever it is you have to do. You’re pathetic. You know that? He hasn’t been back. I would have called.”
“You con people for a living. How am I supposed to trust you? The boy is part of it,” Daphne said, keeping the boy’s role in the foreground. The boy was clearly the wild card, the way to get at the woman. “Maybe you lied about this man with the burned hand.”
“No, he was here.”
“Maybe I can help the two of you,” Daphne offered. She caught a flicker of what looked like hope in the woman’s eyes. “Is he from a bad home? A runaway?”
Emily looked hateful. “You leave him out of this.”
“I’ll do that. I’ll leave him out of it, but you’re going to have to help.” She wandered around the bizarre room, dragging her finger along the naked women painted there. “City Services would be interested in talking to the boy.”
“Don’t do this.”
“Help me!”
“How can I? You don’t believe me. He has not been here. Do you ever listen, or do you just like to threaten?”
The question stung Daphne, though she hid it by looking at the murals. She removed a photograph of Steven Garman from her pocket, crossed the room, and handed it to the psychic. “Is that the man?” she asked. “Look closely,” she said as Emily began to shake her head. “Forget the face hair. Look at the eyes, the shape of the head.”
“Absolutely not. Not even close.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive.”
“You would swear to that in a court of law?” With each question, Daphne studied the woman’s face, putting little value in her words. But what she saw there was discouraging. Emily Richland had never seen the man before. Daphne felt crushed. She had convinced herself that Garman could have created the burned hand for himself as a disguise for the sessions with the psychic.
“It’s not him. Not even close.”
From sour to sweet: Daphne produced a hundred-dollar bill. “I need an exact description. You withheld some details last time, didn’t you?” Every snitch did so, in order to collect more money a second time. Emily regarded the money carefully but seemed reluctant to accept it. Daphne said, “Or maybe the boy can fill in some of the blanks.”