Free Improbable Cause by J. A. Jance

of those new state-of-the-art ones, an ad for some kind of fresh ground coffee that included a huge cup with what looked like steam rolling off it. One of my drinking buddies down at the Doghouse works for Ackerly Communications. He told me the steam is really a chemical reaction caused by dropping something called voodoo juice into a powder. It makes an interesting billboard, though, if you like that sort of thing. Under this particular one sat several parked cars.
    By the time I turned back to Wallace to ask him another question, the garage door was all the way shut and Damm Fine Carpets’ resident mechanic had disappeared, locked safely away in self-imposed solitary confinement.
    Al took the bag from my hand. “I’ll lock this stuff in the trunk before we go take a look at Martin’s parking place.”
    That’s what we did. With the laundry bag safely stowed in our car, we went back to the steaming billboard and prowled around under it. There were six cars parked there in all, but no red VW bug.
    “This must be the Damm Fine Carpets employee parking lot,” Al observed.
    We scrambled around in the hot dusty gravel for ten or fifteen minutes, but found nothing that seemed out of place, nothing that appeared to have anything to do with Dr. Frederick Nielsen’s murder.
    “Do you think Nielsen’s wife set him up?” Al asked finally as we abandoned our search of the parking lot.
    “Could be,” I said, “but how?”
    “Let’s go back inside and ask around.”
    So we walked back in the front door of Damm Fine Carpets. The same eager salesman started toward us but quickly backed off when he recognized us. We went straight to Cindy at the counter.
    “Can you tell us who Dr. Frederick Nielsen ordered his carpet from?” I asked.
    “I guess,” she said. “Do you know the invoice number?”
    “No. It was supposed to be installed on Saturday.”
    She hefted a huge three-ring binder from a shelf under the counter and leafed through several dozen pages of yellow carbon copies. She had to lean over the counter to read what was written on the papers.
    “Here it is,” she said at last, pointing with one of her crimson talons. “It was a special phone-in order. Mr. Damm took it himself.”
    “I see,” I said. “One more thing. Can you tell us anything at all about Larry Martin. Did he have a girl friend, that you know of?”
    Cindy shrugged. “I wouldn’t know about that,” she said.
    “Maybe we’d better go talk to Damm about the order,” Al suggested.
    “Oh no,” Cindy objected. “Not right now. He’s in conference. He’s not to be disturbed.”
    “Have him call us when he’s done,” I said, scribbling my home phone number on one of my cards and handing it to her. “We need to ask him a few more questions.”
    We left then. Big Al Lindstrom was fuming by the time we got to the car.
    “Conference my ass!” he exclaimed. “That SOB’s probably sitting in there watching dirty movies and jacking off.”
    “It’s no skin off our teeth,” I reminded him. “It isn’t illegal you know. They now have definite clinical proof that masturbation doesn’t cause blindness.”
    Al glowered at me as if my sense of humor was wearing thin on his straitlaced, Scandinavian sensibilities.
    “Isn’t it almost time to go home?” he asked plaintively.
    “Almost,” I told him. “Just as soon as we get a line on LeAnn Nielsen.”

CHAPTER 7
    We stopped by the crime lab to drop off our bag of bloody towels. Janice Morraine took it from me, glanced inside, then closed it back up.
    “Thanks,” she said, wrinkling her nose in distaste at the smell. “Where’d this come from, a dry cleaners?”
    “A Damm Fine Carpets van,” I replied.
    “You don’t need to get pissed off about it, Beau.”
    People in the crime lab tend to be somewhat defensive at times. “I’m not pissed,” I explained. “It’s Damm Fine Carpets. D-A-M-M. The owner’s name is Richard Damm. It’s part of the Nielsen case.”
    “Oh,”