Amateur Night Read online

  Amateur Night

  K. K. Beck

  Chapter 1

  Jane da Silva had been making a concerted effort to cheer herself up with a low budget shopping fling at a place she thought of affectionately as the teen tart store. And while Jane knew she shouldn't really be spending any money on clothes right now, and conversely, that if she was, she certainly deserved to do it somewhere better than this place, she had managed to assemble a collection of cotton knit items in bright colors that sort of worked because they didn't pretend to be expensive. She also thought she could carry them off reasonably well through sheer force of personality. And the things she'd chosen were basic enough so that it didn't really matter that, at thirty-seven, she was about twenty years older than the store's target market.

  It was too bad, however, that she had to run into Bucky Montcrieff, of all people, as she was coming out of the place laden down with big, crinkling white shopping bags of cheap chic.

  Bucky Montcrieff, the ultimate consumer and devotee of perfect tailoring and natural fabrics, didn't even bother to look anything but horrified and embarrassed for her. But then Bucky, tall, handsome, mid-thirties and not without a certain oozy charm, wasn't a particularly nice person.

  He peered past her and into the store, over the electronic gate meant to catch shoplifted merchandise with buzzers and alarms. At the counter, a teenage girl in black wrinkled rayon, with hennaed hair and a Morticia Addams complexion, slouched sullenly. Grunge rock, a Seattle specialty, droned away. Jane thought she could smell the oily, chemical scent of polyester wafting out of the place.

  “Did you buy something in there?” he said tactlessly.

  “Sometimes I think too much good taste can be a vulgar thing, don't you?” she said with a big smile. Unfortunately, Bucky was someone she had to be nice to.

  Bucky worked in his uncle's law firm, Carlson, Throckmorton, Osgood, Stubbins, etc., which happened to be the law firm that had drawn up Uncle Harold's eccentric will.

  “I'm really sorry the trustees didn't give you your uncle's money,” he said. “I've been thinking about you.”

  It had been a couple of weeks since Jane had appealed to the board of trustees of Uncle Harold's quaintly named Foundation for Righting Wrongs. The way the will was set up, Jane had to find some hopeless case to solve as a kind of nonprofit detective before she could cash in on her inheritance. The trustees, a group of querulous old men, cronies of Uncle Harold, had bounced her first effort on a technicality.

  “I thought I'd give it another try,” she said, trying to sound brave and cheerful and insouciant. She was determined that Bucky, elegant, handsome, well-heeled, overperfumed and overconfident Bucky, wouldn't feel sorry for her.

  “I know, but you really tried so hard, and you got beat up and everything,” he said. “You must be pretty discouraged. I feel sorry for you.” A look that closely resembled sympathy passed over his smooth brow.

  “I'm fine, really,” she lied, wondering if Bucky wanted her to start sniffling a little and collapse on his shoulder. She wouldn't give him the satisfaction. She deflected his halfhearted offer of coffee, and tried not to let the encounter unsettle her. When he'd first met her, and it looked like she was coming into a fortune, he'd been extremely attentive. Bucky was clearly one of those smug people who don't like to be around failure, she thought. They were often the same people who'd made it with a great deal of help from their relatives.

  Well, Uncle Harold had tried to help her. It was out of respect for him, she felt, that the board had given her a few thousand dollars to tide her over, but it had occurred to her she might have to get some kind of job if another suitable hopeless case didn't come up soon. She imagined herself holding a sheaf of oversized menus and saying, “Smoking or non?” in a dignified voice to restaurant patrons. Which wouldn't be the end of the world. As long as she didn't have to do it forever. Jane was plagued by habitual restlessness.

  She went back home—home being Uncle Harold's gloomy old house on Capitol Hill. The board let her live there for now. It was an asset of the foundation. If Jane found a case the board liked, she planned to completely redo the place. Refinish the nice wood details, now covered in dark varnish; prune the overgrown camellias and let in some light; get rid of the pink Formica counters in the kitchen.

  On the porch, she heard the phone ring, and managed to get inside and pick it up in about three rings. “Jane? Calvin Mason here.”

  “Oh,” she said breathlessly.

  Her adrenaline was still pumping from the experience of standing on the porch shifting packages and jamming the key into the lock while the phone rang within the house.

  “You still looking for a hopeless case?”

  “Desperately,” she said. She didn't have to put on an act for Calvin like she did for Bucky.

  “There might be some new evidence in a case of mine. I represented this guy who was convicted and now a juror says we all overlooked something.”

  “Sounds wonderful,” she said.

  “Maybe. You want to know what I feel? Deep in my heart? Speaking as the guy's attorney, and as a human being? There's no doubt in my mind. My client is clearly guilty as hell.” He cleared his throat. “To tell you the truth, I guess I used the case as an excuse to call just to see how you were doing.”

  “I'm doing okay,” she said. “And you don't need an excuse. But you know I'd like to come up with another little project for those trustees. Tell me more about the juror.”

  “I got a phone call from her this morning. She said she'd been thinking about the case. Happens all the time. They think you want to rehash everything, when all you want to do is try and collect a fee and get on to something else. Something hopefully a little more profitable.”

  “So what did she say?”

  “She wants to come in and talk to me tomorrow. Like I say, she thinks everybody overlooked something. I thought you might like to be there. It might be something you can do something with. Because there's no way I'm going to devote any time to this lousy case.”

  “What kind of case was it?”

  “It was,” said Calvin, sighing audibly over the phone, “my one and only murder case. So I feel obligated to listen to what juror number ten has to say, even though I can't imagine anything she'd say that would change my mind about Kevin.

  “A lot of jurors hate to convict,” he continued. “They look hard to find some reason not to. I remember her. A sweet-looking older woman with a big soft face. I pegged her for a bleeding-heart type the minute I clapped eyes on her.” He paused, and said casually, and Jane thought a little shyly, “If you want me to brief you on the case, why don't you come by for a beer later? Maybe a pizza or something?”

  “Okay,” said Jane. Calvin Mason was one of the handful of people in town who knew what she was doing here in Seattle in the first place. She could relax around him. She didn't have to come up with some story about her life, which, on the surface of it, seemed rather blank just now. And she liked Calvin, a lawyer with a scruffy little practice who made an extra buck here and there as an investigator for more well-heeled lawyers—like Bucky.

  Jane felt a certain kinship with Calvin Mason. They both lived a little bit on the edge. And he'd been sweet to her during her last attempt to get her hands on Uncle Harold's money. Of course, she'd said she'd pay him when she cashed in, but she never did cash in, and he seemed to take it pretty well. Failing to collect money was, she had gathered, a lifelong habit of his. It was something else she had in common with him, but she was determined to get tougher about her life. She'd made a vow not to be broke anymore after forty. If Calvin's case panned out, she could live a respectable life, forget about the teen tart store and get herself some cashmere sweaters for fall.

  * * *

  Calvi
n Mason's office, in the Fremont district, was actually unit number three in the Compton Apartments, a twenties brick building that he also managed. The living room had some comfortable old upholstered pieces and a large battered desk flanked by twin army surplus file cabinets. It was a comfortable room, not as grim as Bucky had once described it to Jane (“a pathetic little office with a Murphy bed and a degree from Matchbook U”), especially as it had recently been painted.

  Calvin Mason was in his thirties, with thick curly dark hair, horn-rimmed glasses and a somewhat bearlike quality. He had an intelligent, watchful face that also looked as if it could be transformed fairly easily into amusement.

  “Pizza's on its way,” he said when she arrived, popping open a can of Rainier beer for himself and pouring one for her into a prefrosted glass, a hospitable touch she found charming. He ripped open the top of a bag of Chee-tos. “Hors d'oeuvres,” he said, pouring it into a salad bowl and setting it down on the coffee table. Then he flung himself into a big easy chair, swallowed some beer, leaned back and closed his eyes. “I mean, the guy was good for it. I knew that from the word go. Everybody knew it, except him.” He opened his eyes and looked at her. “Been shopping?”

  Jane was sitting forward on the sofa. She had changed into bright yellow pants and a large dark turquoise T-shirt. The shirt still had the store folds in it.

  She was a little embarrassed that he'd figured out she'd been shopping, because of the money she still owed him from her last aborted case.

  “Ten-dollar sale,” she said airily. Actually, while the shirt had been ten dollars, the pants were $19.95—still undeniably cheap. Anyway, she did intend to take care of him as soon as she could, and she'd already told him so, so there didn't seem any point in saying it again. Jane believed constant apologizing just irritated people.

  Calvin Mason didn't seem to have connected her shopping with his lack of payment. “You look nice,” he said, with a shiny-eyed look of wistful appreciation. Jane hadn't decided whether Calvin was actually attracted to her—there were flickers of it, like just now—or whether he was just one of those appealing men who seem to be slightly in love with all women.

  He closed his eyes again. “Anyway, Kevin was all messed up on drugs. As usual. He was a drug pig. Uppers, downers, never quite getting the dosage right. That's why he was knocking over a pharmacy in the first place. He says he can't remember what happened between the time he sauntered into the place and the time he dropped his gun in plain view with his fingerprints on it right in the middle of the store. The cops came and found him sitting on a curb a few blocks away with a bad case of the shakes. We're not talking about a criminal mastermind here.”

  “Sounds good and hopeless,” Jane said.

  “It's hopeless, all right,” he said. “Even his mom swears he's guilty, for God's sake. I delicately suggested she take out a second mortgage on her house to finance an appeal, but she said there wasn't any point in it.” He grabbed a handful of Chee-tos and shrugged. “I had to agree with her.”

  “Poor guy,” said Jane.

  “Who? Me or my client?”

  “Well he's the one in the slammer. What was the sentence?”

  “Twenty to life. He's in Monroe.”

  “That part sounds good and hopeless,” she said. Springing someone from a grim penal institution. Surely the board would be touched by that. “But I'm a little unnerved by the fact that his lawyer and his mother have abandoned all hope. Tell me exactly what happened.”

  Calvin sighed. “He went into this little mom-and-pop pharmacy on First Hill. Pop was in the back room, mixing up a batch of something. Mom was at the counter typing a prescription label. He went in and tried to get some drugs. He displayed a weapon. Mom had been through it all before. She pulled out a big old Colt.45 from behind the counter. I guess he didn't look scary enough. He's a weasely little guy, and, like I said, he had the shakes.”

  “That should have scared her,” said Jane.

  “The lady fired a shot into the ceiling, but she got one from him right in the forehead. Then my guy panicked and ran off, dropping the gun on his way out. The husband ran in and found his wife dead and the weapon on the floor.”

  “And there were no witnesses? Was this broad daylight?”

  “That's right. It's not a big modern drugstore. Just a little hole in the wall that depends on prescriptions from nearby doctors' offices. They just have a prescription counter and a few odds and ends at the register. Key chains, candy bars, magazines.”

  Jane remembered that First Hill was full of hospitals and medical offices. Its nickname was Pill Hill. In fact, she'd been born there, at Swedish Hospital.

  “But anyone could have walked in while he was holding up the place,” she said.

  “That's right. Like I say, Kevin isn't exactly your criminal genius. I've been defending him for years. Ever since he racked up enough points as a juvenile to get into serious trouble. Meter picking was his specialty. But Kevin is nineteen now.”

  The doorbell rang and Calvin went to answer it. Jane dug in her purse for some cash. If she could afford new clothes and owed him money, the least she could do was spring for the pizza. He brushed her cash aside. “Never mind,” he said.

  “Anyway,” he continued, arranging the pizza in front of her on the coffee table and gently tearing apart the triangles, “I told him a million times as he got toward his eighteenth birthday that the stuff that was no big deal for a juvenile could be a big-time felony after his birthday. So what does he do? Goes out and kills an old lady.” He bit the point of a slice of pizza and paused for a second to savor the taste. “Hopeless enough for you?”

  Jane handed him a napkin and helped herself to pizza. “Definitely. What kind of a defense did you mount?”

  “Well, the results would indicate that it was a crummy defense,” said Calvin. “Not that I had much to work with. Kevin's story was that he blacked out. But he had some low-life friends waiting for him around the corner in a car. I hinted that perhaps they came in and did the deed. No one ever found them. I hammered away on that.” Calvin took on a Clarence Darrow pose and demanded indignantly, “'Why haven't we seen my client's companions in court here today?'” He sighed. “I intimated that when we'd tried to get the cops to find them, they'd thrown out the paperwork. Which was basically true.”

  The pizza was terrific. She realized she'd forgotten to eat lunch today. “Did you look for them?”

  “It was a little hard. Kevin hardly knew them. That's the kind of jerk he is. One white female, one white male. In their teens. He just knew them as Dorothy and Sean. Druggers. They provided the gun and said they'd wait for him at the corner. When they heard the shot, they must have taken off. Perfectly reasonable thing to do. So he sat there at the curb waiting for them, but the police found him instead.”

  Calvin polished off his first slice of pizza, then dived at the cardboard box for number two. “Then I carried on about the absence of powder burns. The prosecution clouded it all up with technical testimony and then speculated that he'd worn gloves and ditched them. It was very cold that day. In fact, it snowed that day.

  “I said if he'd had gloves, why were his prints on the gun, but they said he'd handled the gun before coming to rob the place. So I said, okay, he handled it, but that doesn't mean he fired it. I thought if anything would get him off, it would be the lack of powder burns.

  “Then we tried out the concept that because his shadowy companions had provided him with the gun, he didn't necessarily know it was loaded. The prosecutor chewed me up and spat me out. He said there wasn't any proof these people even existed, and certainly no testimony to indicate Kevin didn't know the gun was loaded. I knew I'd lost the jury when he pointed out that if Kevin thought it was empty, there wasn't much point in his pulling the trigger. They actually nodded. With self-righteous looks on their faces. Always a bad sign.”

  Jane clicked her tongue with sympathy. “Where did the gun come from?”

  “A residential burglary. It
was registered to a law-abiding dentist on Capitol Hill, and had disappeared along with his VCR and the stereo sometime previously.”

  “How did they find Kevin? You say he was sitting on a curb in a daze.”

  Calvin rolled his eyes to the ceiling. “It hardly ever snows in Seattle, right? But it snowed that day. Kevin left a big muddy footprint on the floor. And one right outside in the snow that pointed east. Inspector Clouseau could have found him. He just kept going east for about five blocks.”

  “It sounds pretty awful,” said Jane. “But I'd still like to hear what your juror has to say.”

  “You're hell-bent on this hopeless case thing, aren't you,” said Calvin with a sigh.

  “We've been over this before,” said Jane. “I may as well give it a try. What have I got to lose?”

  “I don't know. Your dignity? Jane, excuse me if I'm getting too personal, but you're a class act. You don't have to do this stupid stuff.”

  “I think,” said Jane, feeling herself stiffen defensively, “that I'm good at it.”