Read Taking the Fifth for Free Online Page A

the interminable stack of circles from P-4 to the garage entrance.
    Tom Riley had listed his address as being in West Seattle. I took the Alaskan Way Viaduct south and drove across the soaring Spokane Street Bridge. I’ve always thought the new bridge should have been named in honor of the old Norwegian ship’s pilot who broke the old one and was later murdered. His widow was eventually convicted, but I’ve always fantasized that the killer was really some revenge-minded commuter stuck in the subsequent years of traffic jams.
    Seattle is a deep-water port, and there are few places around the city that have readily accessible salt water beaches. Alki, in West Seattle, is one of those places. It resembles a California beach town far more than it does an ordinary Seattle neighborhood. It comes complete with cruising teenagers, too much traffic, and a constant feud between visitors and residents over the surplus of garbage and the critical shortage of parking places.
    Driving there gave me time for reflection. According to Tom Riley, Richard Dathan Morris had been a totally reprehensible character. And by all accounts, Jonathan Thomas had been on the brink of death. So why worry about who killed someone as obnoxious as Morris? And why try to ascertain whether or not Thomas had been murdered or had simply succumbed to the inevitable outcome of his disease?
    Why? Because it’s my job. Because murder victims are murder victims no matter what, even if they’re dying. It’s the principle of the thing, pure and simple. If people, no matter how well intentioned, are allowed to kill at will, to rid the land of people they deem unsuitable or to arbitrarily set a timetable to put others out of their misery, the very foundations of our civilization begin to erode.
    I’ve spent most of my adult life working on the premise that murder is murder, that perpetrators must be brought to account in a court of law, and that included whoever killed Richard Dathan Morris and, possibly, Jonathan Thomas.
    As I drove, I also kicked myself for not having been more observant. All Peters had to do was say it to convince me that he was right. And he hadn’t even been in Thomas’s house. Peters’s theory about Tom Riley’s sexual preference was what Sherlock Holmes would have termed a brilliant deduction. So what the hell was the matter with me?
    The fact that I had missed it was unsettling enough. Had I not seen it because there were no overt signs? Or because I simply hadn’t wanted to see it? Was it a case of selective blindness or burying my head in the sand?
    As a happily heterosexual male I’m uncomfortable around gays, prejudiced against them. I was propositioned a couple of times when I was younger, and those experiences left a long-term bad impression that I’m only now beginning to sort out.
    Over the years, my way of handling that prejudice had been to deal with gays as little as possible. Michael Browder, the interior decorator who had just finished helping me design and furnish my new condominium, was the first gay I had worked with for any extended period of time. He was a gay without any of the exterior trappings, with none of the supposedly typical mannerisms I had come to expect. In short, Browder was a nice guy who had forced me to come face to face with some of my own deep-seated feelings of intolerance.
    Now this series of encounters with Richard Morris, Jonathan Thomas, and Tom Riley was more of the same. They were ordinary people, some good and some bad, just like everybody else.
    Tom Riley, if Peters and I were correct, was another homosexual minus the lisping, simpering silliness of the stereotypes. He may have been minus those things, but, I was now convinced, he was gay nonetheless. So now I tried to unravel what possible bearing Tom Riley’s sexual preference had on my case.
    Had there been some kind of triangle involved? That might account for some of Tom Riley’s atypical reactions. Maybe his pronounced dislike of