“You got a warrant?”
“Not at the moment,” I returned mildly, “but I’m wondering how this place would measure up if somebody happened to schedule a surprise inspection from the Health Department?” When he didn’t reply, I pressed my advantage. “Who?” I insisted.
“Benjamin Smith.”
“How long has he been here?”
The clerk shrugged. “A couple of months, I guess. Pays his rent right on time every week.”
“Where does he work?”
“He’s a laborer down at that new stadium they’re building. The Kingdome, I think it’s called. What do you want him for?”
“Girl trouble,” I said quickly. “As in underage. Might be better for your relationship with the Health Department if he didn’t know that anybody had come by asking about him.”
Visor Man nodded vigorously. “My lips are sealed,” he said.
I ducked back outside. By then, Larry had caught up and was waiting in the front seat of the car with Watty. I climbed into the back. “The clerk says our guy’s name is Benjamin Smith. That may or may not be an alias.”
“So if he is our guy,” Larry said, “what do we do now? Even if we can get his prints and connect him to the Doghouse crime scene, that still won’t be enough to let Pickles off the hook. It’ll be his word against Smith’s word. Might be enough for reasonable doubt, but I’m not sure. We need to find a way to corroborate Pickles’s version of the story.”
I thought about that. Presumably there had been three people present when Lulu McCaffey was gunned down. We had found two of them. Now we needed to locate the third. The blond guy was the one who had usually shown up in the establishments marked by the bead pattern on the map in my garage. When it had become clear that the light-haired guy was doing dine-and-dash with a collection of different pals, I had given up carrying the short guy’s sketch and focused instead on the tall one. Now I had a hunch.
“Do either of you have that other Doghouse composite?” I asked.
“I think so,” Watty said. “Hand me the notebook there on the backseat.” I gave it to him. He rummaged through it for several long minutes before finally handing me what I wanted.
“Wait here,” I said. “And open the door so I can get out.”
With the new sketch in hand, I hurried back into the lobby. When the desk clerk looked up and saw me, he gave a disgusted sigh. “You again,” he said.
I held up the drawing. “Have you ever seen this guy?”
“Sure,” he said. “That’s Fred—Fred Beman. Everybody called him Cowboy Fred.”
“Does he live here, too?” I asked.
“Used to. Left sometime in July.”
“Do you know where he went?”
“He’s in Walla Walla,” the clerk said. “Went back home to the family farm. At least, that’s what he said he was going to do when he left here With these guys, you can never tell how much is truth and how much is fiction.”
“Did he leave a forwarding address?”
The clerk turned away from me and pulled a long, narrow file box out of the bottom drawer of a file cabinet behind him. Inside the box was a collection of three-by-five cards. After thumbing through them, he pulled out one and handed it to me. All that was on it was a phone number and a P.O. box number in Walla Walla.
It wasn’t much, but it was a start.
Detectives Watkins and Powell and I went straight back to the department and looked up Frederick Beman. There were two Frederick Bemans listed. The composite sketch was surprisingly close to the younger one’s Department of Licensing photo. His driving record included three DUIs. He’d had a pickup once, but that had been totaled during one of the DUI incidents. The DMV showed no current vehicles listed in his name, although there were several listed for his father, Frederick Beman, Sr., who owned a horse ranch somewhere outside Walla Walla.
“Looks like we’re going to Walla Walla,” Larry Powell said.
“When?” I asked.
“Right now.”
I glanced at my watch. It was after four in the afternoon. “How are we going to do that?”
“We’re going to drive,” Larry said. “We’ll take turns. You go check out a car. Make sure it has a full tank of gas. I’ll clear it with the captain.”