“Oh, certainly,” Wendy said. She sounded a bit annoyed. “It would take me at least a day to find that information. The payroll records from that time period are in storage.”
“I understand,” I said. “But we really don’t need exact dates or amounts. We just need to verify that Melody was working for the restaurant in that time range.”
She sighed. “I do have all the records in Quick Books. Let me see what I can do.” I heard her fingers clicking on the keyboard. “What’s her last name?’
“Melody Jones,” I said, stealing Karen’s original last name, since she wasn’t using it.
“I don’t have any records of any employees named Jones,” said Wendy, after a few minutes.
“Can you search by first name? I think she was married at the time but might have gone back to using her maiden name.”
“Oh, here it is. Yes, I see paychecks in 1979 for Melody Peters.” Wendy hesitated. “Is this going to increase our rates?”
“Not at all,” I assured her. “The incident was so far in the past. We are not planning to re-open the case. It’s just an internal audit to verify that there are no loose ends before we make a final disposition.”
“I do remember it vaguely,” Wendy offered. “The poor thing was taking the morning deposit to the Mutual Bank at the time of the Weevil bank robbery. She was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“That’s terrible,” I said. “Thanks so much for your cooperation. It means a lot to us.”
Before I had even hung up the phone I had typed Melody’s name into my database. It quickly spit out the information I needed. Melody hadn’t gone far. According to the credit record in front of me, she had defaulted on several bank accounts, credit cards and utility bills. Her current address was on Capitol Hill. A quick search on Google established that she lived in the high-rise low-income building which was only a few blocks from my apartment. Most of the occupants, I knew, had various physical or mental disabilities. Possibly Melody had never recovered from the trauma.
After a quick breakfast and some play time with the ferrets, I headed out to find Melody. The low-income building stuck out like a sore thumb in a mostly residential neighborhood. Nine stories tall, it towered above the two-story brick apartment buildings and wooden duplexes built at the turn of the century. The roots of old black locust trees had heaved up the sidewalk in front of the building.
The front door was locked, but you could find the residents names on a directory beside the door. I found Melody Peters in Room 606 and buzzed her.
“Come on up,” she said, before I even introduced myself. I heard the glass door buzz and I let myself in. The foyer was deserted, except for a poster that warned residents not to let anyone inside the building unless they knew them personally. Melody presumably didn’t feel paranoid.
The elevator creaked its way to the sixth floor slowly. The hall was bleak: carpeted in grey industrial carpeting. One window at the end of the hall let in some of the morning’s sun but exposed the stains on the carpet. Apartment 606 was about halfway down the hall on the left. I knocked.
“Hey, come on in!” a voice shouted.
I turned the knob and walked in. The apartment was hazy with smoke and reeked of marijuana. Reggae music played on the stereo. Bob Marley was telling me that every little thing was going to be all right. A blanket had been thrown over the one window, damping all the light. A woman sat with her back to me at a round table under a chandelier which provided the only light. It shone down on the blond dreads heaped up on top of her head. She was a big woman. Her body overflowed the confines of the chair and she had trouble twisting around to see me.
“Who are you?” she asked. She had cloudy blue eyes.
“Rachel Stern,” I said. Sometimes I’m honest. “You must be Melody.”
“Where’s Shelley?” she asked, furrowing her brow.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Damn, I told you, girl. You got to be more careful,” said a creaky voice. I turned and saw an older black man sitting hunched up on a sofa. He wore a crocheted yellow-green-and-red beret and his face was a mass of wrinkles.
“Well, damn it! It don’t usually take Shelley this long to do the shopping,” said Melody. I could see that she was bent over a shoebox, full of green leaves. A pile of rolled joints were lined up to her right. “I’m hungry.” She giggled. “Got the munchies.”
“Watch it, girl!” said the old man. “She could be the fuzz.”
“What?” I said. “Look, I’m not a cop. I’m a private investigator.” I pulled out my card and showed it to Melody, who turned around and showed it to the old man. He kept it, pinched between his long fingers. He seemed to be her guard dog.
“Call the number, Melody,” he suggested. “Check her out.”
I didn’t point out that I could have set up a recording to pretend to be me. That was something I frequently did when gathering information. Instead I waited patiently while Melody dialed my business number and listened to my message. “Rachel Stern, private investigator,” it said. “Please leave a message.”
“She seems legit,” she said, frowning, after hanging up. She looked at me. “What kind of information do you want? I don’t rat out my friends.”
“I’m researching a bank robbery that happened years ago,” I said.
Melody’s whole demeanor changed. She straightened up. Her eyes got wide. She began to shake. Her flesh quivered.
“What’s up, girl?” asked the old man.
“It’s what landed me here,” she told him. She looked at me. Her eyes narrowed. “Who sent you?”
I could sense this was the pivotal moment but without knowing her story I didn’t know which version to offer. I decided since the truth was working for me so far I would continue with it. “I was hired by a lawyer who’s representing Ellie Foley. She was the only one of the robbers who survived. She’s been a federal fugitive ever since.”
“She was a hero, that’s what!” said Melody. She was shaking harder than ever. She groped for an orange pill bottle that sat at the edge of the table, twisted off the white plastic cap, and shook out one of the blue pills inside. She looked at it in her palm for a minute, then shook out another one, and tossed them both into her mouth. No liquid. I’m always impressed by people who can swallow pills without water. Probably she had a lot of practice.
She saw me watching her and said, “For my anxiety. I got it bad.” She waved her hand at the herb in front of her. “The weed helps too. Except when it makes me paranoid.”
“It’s about time, isn’t it?” said the old man.
“Oh yeah!” Melody fired up a joint. She had a little trouble, since her hand was shaking so much, getting the flame from the lighter to the tip of the joint, but she finally got it going and took a couple of hearty draws. “Want some?” She offered it to me. I shook my head. It had been a long time since I smoked weed. I gave it up years ago when I got sober.
Melody passed the joint to the old man, who disappeared behind a cloud of smoke. He reminded me suddenly of the Caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland. Maybe I was already getting high from the fumes in the apartment.
I shook my head to clear it. “You said she was a hero?”
“Yeah!” said Melody. She got the joint back and took another toke, this time more slowly and thoughtfully. “She was the one that put us all in the bathroom so we would be safe.”
She let the smoke out of her lips in a curtain so that it passed slowly over her face, seeming to blur and soften the edges.
“Tell me about that,” I said.
Melody tried to hand the joint back to the old man, but he waved it away. “I’m good,” he said. “That there is some powerful shit.” He closed his eyes and sank back into the blankets and pillows on the couch until he almost seemed to become one with it. I really needed to get the story and get out of there as soon as possible. I felt like my perceptions were being altered by the secondhand smoke
Melody put the joint
down, gently, in the ashtray in front of her.
“It was just an ordinary day,” she said. “I was taking the lunch till to the bank, like I always did.” She looked at me. Her eyes seemed bluer than they had before. “I was a waitress at a nearby restaurant.” I nodded. “And suddenly these people with masks on their faces burst into the bank and started yelling. They were carrying huge guns and wearing masks that made them look like Ronald Reagan. It was a nightmare!”
Her eyes seemed to roll up in her head and for a moment I thought I had lost her.
“Then one of them—it was a woman, we could tell by her voice—said, ‘I’m getting the civilians out of the way,’ and she directed all of us to go behind the counter, and down a hall into a bathroom.” She sounded thoughtful. “She seemed to know where it was.”
Melody was not shaking as much as before. She stared into space, as if the scene was replaying in front of her. “She told us to stay there and lock the door. We would be safe. And just as she said that, and turned to go back, we heard, “Police! Don’t move!” and then all hell broke loose. Gun shots! Screams!” She began shaking again.
“Go slow,” I said. “Take deep breaths.” I knew PTSD when I saw it. I had counseled several clients with PTSD. “You don’t have to tell me everything. We can stop whenever you want.” But I didn’t want her to stop.
She didn’t. She was lost in the story now. “She came back into the bathroom with us and locked the door. Then she started looking for a way out. There was a window but it had bars on it. Then she saw a grate above the stalls, and she worked at getting that off, picking at the screws with her fingers. Just as the police started battering down the door, she got the grate off and wriggled into that tiny space and disappeared.” Melody shuddered. “I would have died rather than go into a space that small.” She didn’t seem to realize the irony of her words. “Before she left, she peeled off her mask and she left behind her gun. That’s what got the mom in trouble.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, she went to pick it up—I guess she was afraid her daughter might grab it thinking it was a toy—just as the police came busting into the room. They shot her.”
“The police shot her?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“But that’s not what the news stories said.”
Melody sighed. “What do you think they’re going to say? The police shot an unarmed woman in front of her little girl.”
“But surely there were witnesses.”
“The other lady was hiding in one of the stalls. She didn’t see nothing. They took me and put me in an interrogation room and they kept me there overnight. They kept asking me over and over again what I saw. They accused me of helping Ellie escape, told me I would be an accessory to like six counts of murder, told me the death penalty was on the line.” She was shaking again.
“Right after you experienced this terrible trauma,” I said.
“Yeah! I mean I had just seen this woman die right in front of me. Her blood was splattered all over me. But the more I tried to tell my story, the more they threatened me. I had to tell the story the way they wanted it.”
“What did they want you to say?”
“They wanted me to say that the robber shot Mrs. Miller. That I saw her do it. But I wouldn’t say that. It wasn’t true. They had psychiatrists come and tell me that sometimes you remember things wrong after a trauma. But I wasn’t remembering it wrong. That’s why I don’t trust them.”
“Who? The police?”
“No, the psychiatrists!
“So you’ve never gotten counseling for your PTSD? You know they have some new treatments that are pretty amazing in terms of relieving the anxiety and reducing the amount of flashbacks—”
“Yeah. Not for me! They even locked me up for a while. Gave me all these drugs. They said it was for my anxiety but I think it was truth serum.”
OK, so maybe Melody was paranoid.
“But,” she shrugged, “they wouldn’t have gotten anything out of me but the truth. Because I know what I saw. The police killed that woman right in front of her little girl.”
She looked down at the table in front of her, picked up one of the joints, and lit it. This time her hand was not shaking as badly. I heard a soft noise from the sofa behind me but when I turned, I saw the old man had simply fallen over among the pillows and was snoring.
“Chet,” Melody said fondly. “He looks after me.”
“You don’t have any other relatives?”
“No, I lived with my mom right after it happened. I was a mess. Couldn’t sleep. Kept seeing things that wasn’t there. But then my mom got sick and couldn’t take care of the house. My caseworker got me in here. Disability just barely covers the rent. I get food stamps. I get by.”
A buzzer buzzed.
Melody heaved herself up from the table and shuffled over to a small intercom on the wall. “Hey, Shelley, come on in!” she said.
“I should go,” I said, getting up.
“No, you can stay.”
“But—” I waved my hand at the weed.
“Shelley doesn’t care if I smoke weed.”
Shelley appeared in the door, a slight young brown woman with high cheekbones and a wide smile. She was carrying two shopping bags.
“Melody! Sorry it took so long” she trilled as she walked into the room. There was a hint of an accent in her voice. Perhaps from some Caribbean country. “There were huge lines at the store.”
“Shelley,” said Melody. “This is Rachel. She’s—”
I cut her off, suddenly unsure about who Shelley might tell. “An old friend from when Melody worked at a restaurant,” I said. “We were just catching up.”
Melody looked confused but went along with my ruse. “Shelley’s my home care worker she said. “She does everything for me, since I can’t go out of the house.”
Shelley put the bags on the kitchen counter and began unpacking: bags of chips, frozen dinners, toilet paper, a six pack of coke.
“Throw me that there bag of pretzels!” Melody shouted.
Shelley tossed it over the open bar to Melody who caught it deftly and ripped it open with her teeth.
“You can’t go out of the house?”
“No, I’ve got agoraphobia.” She looked at me. “Do you know what that is?”
“Fear of the market place,” I said. “It means you don’t like being exposed.” I paused. “So you never go out of the house?”
She shook her head. “Never.”
“Never?”
“Well, maybe on a nice bright summer day, I might go down and sit on the bench right in front of the building, soak up a little sun. But it makes me nervous. I mean anybody could get to me there. I’d rather stay inside where I’m safe.”
Chapter 19
I left Melody my card and told her that she might be hearing from my friend, Joel Wiseman. I figured this new version of events would be supremely useful to Joel when negotiating with the authorities to secure the best deal for Ellie Foley when she emerged from underground. If I could believe Melody’s version. What with the untreated PTSD and the constant dope smoking, I wasn’t so sure. Still I was looking forward to sharing this information with Joel at our dinner date later in the evening.
There were documents waiting for me at Special Collections, so I decided to head back to the UW Campus. The librarians still had my order waiting and I went through the Vietnam war ephemera first, posters calling for rallies, photos of rallies, newspaper articles describing rallies. Boo Riley, Matt’s friend seemed to be at the forefront of most of them—not surprising since he had started the local chapter of Vietnam Vets Against the War—and in one photo, taken of him lounging on a sofa in the student union, he had his arm around the woman sitting beside him, in that heavy-armed v-position that always seems to me like a yoke, suggesting this woman is my property. And the woman was Ellie Foley. The caption even named her as one of the leaders of SDS on campus.
Farther down in the stack,
I came across the paperwork Boo had submitted to the University in support of his request to do put on an event on campus. He listed an address in Wallingford which seemed familiar to me. I wanted to look back at my notes, but, of course, I didn’t have notes any more. Fred Proctor had taken off with them.
“Do you have historical directories for the City of Seattle?” I asked the librarian. She directed me to the main branch of the library where I soon found them in the reference section. The directory for 1968 listed Riley, William at 4400 Latona. Also listed at that address: Robert Roth and Ellen Foley.
My intuition had turned out to be correct. Matt’s buddy Boo knew Ellie. Was probably in a relationship with her. He would make a good character witness.
I went home and got Boo’s current address off my computer. If I left right away I could make it to Bellingham and still get back in time for my dinner with Joel. And maybe I would even learn something that would further impress Joel. I didn’t stop to consider that I was doing research far beyond the scope of what he had requested.
As I was leaving the house, my phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number but then I thought maybe it was my dad calling from one of his burner cell phones. But it wasn’t my dad, it was Matt.
“Hey, Rachel,” he said. “Time for you to get a gun.”
“What?”
“I just bought a cell phone.” He gave a little chuckle. “I’m in the airport in San Francisco. On my way to Oakland. Going to hang out with Councilman Brown. Let him know what’s going on.”
“Did you talk to Tanaka?” I asked.
“What are you, my mom?”
“He wants you to call him,” I said.
“Anyway,” he went on, “if I’m going to embrace technology, then you should get a gun.”
“A cell phone is hardly technology, Matt, it’s—”
“Damn, I hate this thing,” he said. “Can’t really talk on it very well. Look, here’s my number.” He gave me the numbers. “Call me if you need me.”
Hard Rain Page 11
