Tacoma Stories

by Richard Wiley

  “Weren’t no confession anyway,” said Perry, “’cept on how her body got over to Winnie’s grave.”

  Susan fingered a message she’d found taped to her door. Clement Page had called. “I think they have an offer for us,” she said. “How about I see what’s up before we talk?”

  She picked up her phone to call Clement Page at about the same time that, back across town, Beverly Packer picked up hers to call her husband, Bill.

  “Hey,” she said when Bill answered, “did Richie call you?”

  “Yep,” said Bill, “and so did your mom. Richie told me what happened in court just now, and your mom told me what happened last night.”

  Bill had been asleep when Beverly got home the night before, and he’d left for work before she woke up. Bill owned a garage.

  “Mom wants me off the case and now so does Clement. Should I fight it, Bill, or cave like a wuss?”

  “How are you gonna fight it? Doesn’t what Clement says go?”

  Bill had grease on his thumb and little finger, so he held them away from the phone. It made him look like he was pantomiming a phone call.

  “Usually it does, but I’ve got an ace up my sleeve, which I’m thinking of pulling out,” Beverly said.

  Bill didn’t ask what her ace was since he knew she didn’t have one.

  Meanwhile, Clement Page hadn’t called Susan Blake with a plea offer but with word that Beverly was off the case and he would be opposing Susan now. He said it was a courtesy call, but Susan knew a come-on when she heard one. Clement was famous for hitting on women who opposed him.

  “Thanks for the warning, but how about we talk about his innocence?” she said.

  That made Clement laugh. “I’ll recommend the minimum sentence if he pleas out,” he told her. “That means he might not die in jail.”

  “Come on, Clem, give me something I can work with here.”

  She knew that saying “Clem” would appeal to him.

  “I don’t know the case yet. Let me catch myself up on it, and then we can talk about it over drinks,” he said.

  “Works for me,” said Susan.

  When she got off the phone, she and Perry went over again what he remembered from the night of the murder, what he’d told the police, and why he had been at the Wilcox grave in the first place.

  “You knew her when you were kids, but the last time you saw her was years ago? That’s your story?”

  “It’s my story ’cause it’s true. Winnie was kind to me when others wasn’t, kind to her family’s pets after they died, digging ’em proper graves and such.”

  “Do you have a thing for graves, Perry? Did you wander around when you were up there, look at other people’s names and dates?”

  “Yeah, but only so I could let Winnie know who her neighbors was. I suppose you think that’s nuts.”

  “I think a lot of us would like to talk to those we once loved. But tell me the ‘when’ and ‘where’ of it one last time, and why you dragged Katie over to Winnie’s grave.”

  “First off, I didn’t drag her; I carried her. I seen her lyin’ across the way ’bout eight o’clock but left her alone ’cause I thought she was asleep. Kids was always fooling around up there, so I figured maybe Katie was tired.”

  “You recognized her as Katie, as the girl you talked to over the fence to her backyard?”

  “Not till I went over to her.”

  “I don’t know, Perry, if I spied a sleeping girl in a cemetery, I think I’d worry I might scare her if I woke her up.”

  “Which is why I didn’t go earlier. Not till I thought she’d get in trouble for stayin’ out late.”

  “But you just said you didn’t know it was Katie.”

  “Any kid might get in trouble for a thing like that.”

  “Okay, what happened when you did go over there?”

  “I knew the grave she was lyin’ on belonged to a man named Jonathan Fleming, whose wife come up there sometimes. I even thought it might be her sleepin’ there. Grief makes a person do funny things.”

  “First you say you were worried about Katie and now you say it might’ve been Jonathan Fleming’s wife?”

  “That thought only fluttered by; I knew it was a kid all right. I weren’t wearin’ shoes, so I went over quiet and nudged her with my toe. That’s when I saw she was dead and I shoulda called the cops.”

  “Why didn’t you? It would have saved us all a lot of trouble.”

  “You ever been to Egypt, Ms. Blake, or seen King Tut at one of his traveling shows?”

  “Haven’t been to Egypt, but I saw King Tut when he came to Seattle that time.”

  “So you know what a sarco-gophus is? Them carved-out depictions of folks?”

  “Sarcophagus, yes …”

  “I ain’t sayin’ Katie looked like Winnie. I don’t know what Winnie looked like as a grown-up person, but I knew her kid face, and that night Katie looked like Winnie would have if she’d died young. So I carried Katie over so Winnie could have a sarco-gophus. Maybe it was crazy, but I wanted Winnie’s goodness to show itself aboveground one more time.”

  That stopped Susan Blake. He’d answered her questions, but how could she take that into court? He was watching for signs of ridicule, so she asked him casually, “How come you weren’t wearing shoes?”

  “’Cause you don’t wear shoes when you go into one a them Egyptian mosques. It’s how you show respect.”

  “So if you did what you said you did, who killed Katie Smothers and left her on Jonathan Fleming’s grave?”

  Perry said he didn’t know and asked her to take him to Richard’s house.

  BEVERLY WAS STANDING IN RICHARD’S KITCHEN with her mother when Susan Blake dropped Perry off. That alone should have told her that fighting her removal from the case was a bad idea. She should be removed; she was too close to it.

  She hadn’t meant to stay at Richard’s this late, so she hid in the pantry while Richard greeted Perry and showed him to his room. And when he came back downstairs, Beverly was gone.

  “Are you surprised by how hard she’s taking this?” he asked Donna, Beverly’s mom. “All these years, who has been the levelheaded one among us if not that daughter of yours?”

  “I’m not at all surprised,” said Donna. “This case has caught the public eye like nothing since the Frugal Gourmet. And you know it’s more complicated than simply having Perry in the family. There are too many weird connections…. We both knew Winnie as kids, for crying out loud.”

  “Winnie, my god,” said Richard. “They quoted her sister in the paper, calling Perry a pervert and a lowlife. Only the good die young, I guess.”

  When his phone rang, he answered to hear Bill ask for Beverly, then say that he’d found a letter she had written, resigning from the prosecutor’s office. He said if she didn’t get home soon, he would go out looking for her.

  “That Bill always was a snoop,” said Donna when Richard hung up.

  “Maybe I should go look for her,” said Richard. “It’s odd she’s isn’t home yet. It isn’t that long a drive.”

  “If she doesn’t get there soon, I’ll go,” said Donna. “She’s probably watching the Canada geese down on Ruston Way. And speaking of geese, Perry will be up with the chickens, so you should get some sleep.”

  That was Donna’s way of saying Richard wasn’t Beverly’s father. She didn’t say it often, but each time she did so, it stung.

  When he went upstairs again and saw Perry asleep on his bed instead of in it, he found an old family afghan, covered him with it, then sat in a rocking chair by the window. Perry had simply been a kid in the neighborhood before they found out about the affair between Richard’s father and Perry’s mother, and though they’d tried to act like brothers after they found out, it hadn’t lasted long. And now here he was, dead to the world in Richard’s house. When Donna asked him why he’d come forward not only with bail but with the offer of a place for Perry to stay, Richard had said he was doing it for his father, though that wa
s probably a lie. His father had never embraced the fact that Perry was his son. When his father died, in fact, Richard hadn’t looked for Perry, nor had he looked for him when Perry’s mother died the next year, alone and decrepit in Perry’s old house. So whatever had been between them had long ago run its course…. Still, there was no question he’d felt compelled to offer Perry a place to stay.

  When Richard stood up from the rocking chair, the chair kept rocking, as if it were nodding to itself.

  THE BAR CLEMENT PAGE ASKED SUSAN BLAKE to meet him in had a “lounge-around” feeling to it, with windows that looked out onto the street. And it wasn’t a sports bar, so you could hear yourself think.

  Susan didn’t see him when she walked in, so she ordered a beer and paid for it. She wouldn’t let him buy her anything. Indeed, after her talk with Perry, she wished she hadn’t agreed to meet him, for it now seemed a cheap sort of move, another round in the game she sometimes liked to play when she ought to be fighting for her client. She decided that if Clement didn’t show up by the time she finished her beer, she’d go home. She drank down a quarter of it and looked at her phone. Seven minutes after nine. She finished the beer and ordered another one.

  Beverly, meanwhile, wasn’t watching Canada geese down on Ruston Way but was at a market up on Proctor Street. She began eating the ice cream she’d been craving right there in the store while scanning the numbers in her phone for those of Susan Blake and Detective Triplet, the lead cop on Perry’s case. She wouldn’t call either of them tonight, of course, and surely not Susan until she’d officially resigned. But she didn’t have Susan’s number anyway, only Detective Triplet’s. She punched it in, knowing he wouldn’t be there, not this late. But he answered right away, saying, “Hi, Ms. Packer, what’s up with you tonight?”

  “Do you think we could talk?” she asked. “It’s about the Katie Smothers case.”

  If he knew she’d recused herself, he might turn her down she realized, but he said quite cheerfully, “Frisco Freeze in half an hour? I don’t have long.”

  She held her phone away from her in order to see the time. Nine-seventeen. “I haven’t had dinner yet,” she said.

  After she ended the call, she went home to put her ice cream in the freezer and pick up her resignation letter, which she would mail before meeting Detective Triplet. She hardly noticed that Bill wasn’t there.

  Meanwhile, back at the bar, when Clement Page finally did arrive, Susan was sitting in an easy chair near the bar’s front door.

  “So sorry!” he said. “I was talking with my boss about your erstwhile opposing counsel. Please now, what are you drinking? My treat.”

  “Only the bartender knows,” Susan said, “but how come she’s ‘erstwhile’? Did something happen to Ms. Packer?”

  He said only what he’d said on the phone, that she’d recused herself, then went to get their beer. While he was gone, Susan tried to sit properly, but the chairs were meant for sprawling, which was what, she often feared, her body was also meant for. She sometimes looked up sloth, expecting to see a photo of herself, but only got that three-toed animal.

  “Look,” she said when he got back, “I’m sorry about Ms. Packer, but why are we here? What do you have to offer?”

  “I just gave you what I have to offer,” he said, pointing at her beer.

  Good, he was pissing her off. He saw it and said, “Thing is, I read the case notes and think your client confessed. We’ll still lighten the sentence for a guilty plea, but otherwise it’s you and me, babe, facing off in court.”

  “If he confessed, I’ll eat my hat,” said Susan. “You all at your office … don’t you ever get tired of thinking everything anyone says is just the tip of the iceberg?”

  She was pleased with “eat my hat,” but he only pushed his beer mug across the gap between them, clicking it against hers.

  She wrapped her legs around each other when he sat down.

  WHERE WAS BILL AND WHY HADN’T BEVERLY NOTICED that he wasn’t home when she stopped to put away the ice cream and get her resignation letter?

  The answer was that for the past few weeks Bill had either stayed late at his garage or gone back to it in order to avoid confronting what he feared might be happening between himself and his wife. There was plenty for him to do at the garage. A ’54 MG roadster that Richard had given him sat under tarps. He meant to make it cherry again, but all he’d managed so far was to sit beside it drinking beer. And on this night, too, while Beverly met Detective Triplet, he took the tarp off the MG and picked up his notebook. There were drawings in the notebook, not of the repairs he had to make, but of the MG with Beverly in the driver’s seat, her scarf stretched out behind her in the wind. He got a can of Miller High Life, stepped over the MG’s sidewall, and sat down. Richard had done that years ago, making Bill like him right away. If not for Richard, in fact, he and Beverly wouldn’t have made it through Beverly’s college and law school. There were other men back then, but Beverly always returned to Bill; he was sure this was because she saw in him something like what her mother saw in Richard. Now, though, as he sat in Richard’s car, the old fear came back: that Beverly would leave him as soon as she discovered who he was.

  “IT’S A DOUBLE MEAT, DOUBLE CHEESE BURGER,” said Detective Triplet. “I can’t go a week without one. I got fries and coffee, too. If you want, we can eat in my car.”

  Beverly’d bought a regular burger and a strawberry milk shake she didn’t want. They walked across the parking lot to a police-issued Chevy, its seat pushed back to accommodate Detective Triplet’s height and bulk. They sat their drinks on the console and ate for a while in silence until he said, “Okay, shoot, Ms. Packer. What’s up?”

  “I’ve got two questions: Do you think Perry White is guilty, and did you think, when you interviewed him, that he confessed?”

  “He didn’t confess to the murder, but he did confess to moving Katie’s body,” Detective Triplet said. He reached around to grab a file. “‘Suspect insisted that he carried Katie to the Wilcox grave. Then he talked about King Tut.’ I’d say that adds up to some pretty substantial sanity questions.”

  Beverly sat there thinking about that for a while, then asked what his opinion was of Susan Blake. The expression on Detective Triplet’s face didn’t change, but his voice grew flat.

  “Whatever fishing’s going on here, I suggest you do it in the light of day,” he said. “I agreed to talk to you about the case.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Beverly. “Do you have some kind of beef with Susan Blake?”

  Both of them looked at their burgers, but she was the only one who smiled. “I don’t have a beef with her; I have a history with her,” he said.

  He picked up his coffee and sipped from it. When he put it back down, Beverly took it and sipped from it, too, making the warmth of the coffee invade them both.

  “I quit the case,” she said, “and since I called you, I have also resigned from the prosecutor’s office.”

  Detective Triplet took his coffee back, though he loved the fact that she’d sipped from it.

  “I only asked about Ms. Blake because … well, because I’m tired of putting people away, wouldn’t mind helping defend them for a while.”

  Was that the truth? If so, it hadn’t occurred to her until she said it.

  “Susan Blake has two gears,” Detective Triplet told her. “One is aimed at the acquittal of her clients and the other at the destruction of whoever gets too close.”

  He pulled out one of his business cards, found a pen, and wrote Susan’s cell phone number on the back of it.

  And then he reached across her to open her door.

  THE BAR WAS OTHERWISE EMPTY when the bartender said, “Last call.”

  “I’m done,” said Clement Page. “You, Ms. Blake?”

  “Three’s my limit,” said Susan, though by then she’d had four.

  The bartender gave them the bill.

  “A nightcap at my house?” Clement asked. “Not to be forwar
d, but I do have a terrific Bordeaux.”

  Susan waved him away and stood. She was about to step out into the rain but then looked back down at him.

  “How terrific is it?” she asked.

  2

  ON THE MORNING AFTER ALL THE BUSYNESS with Bill and Beverly, Detective Triplet, Susan Blake, and Clement Page, at Perry White’s request, Richard drove him out to visit some of their old haunts at Brown’s Point.

  “Do you remember that boulder that sat on the beach in front of yer house?” Perry asked. “More’n half buried and underwater when the tide come in?”

  “Remember it well,” said Richard. “We used to dive off of it.”

  They had already driven past where Perry’s house once stood and were parked near their old school bus stop. Rain was dotting Richard’s windshield and he didn’t want to get out of his car, hoped that he could get away with simply driving around a bit and going home. Brown’s Point hadn’t changed much, but he didn’t live there anymore.

  “Let’s go find it,” Perry said. “What’s with the tide? Is it in or out?”

  Richard had a tide app on his phone.

  “It’s more than halfway in,” he said. “And there’s a wind coming up.”

  The part about the wind was not on his tide app.

  “In Egypt, they revere old things, but here we tear ’em down,” said Perry. He cast a thumb back to where his house had been. Donna’s old house, across from it, was also gone. “Come on, man, let’s go,” he said. “This is what we come for.”

  They got out of Richard’s car and walked to the beach. Richard’s childhood home was off toward Dash Point and high up on a bank. The boulder Perry wanted to visit wouldn’t be visible until they got to it. Richard knew that something was up. He didn’t fear—yet—that Perry might get violent with him, but it was a fear he’d had often during their childhood.

  “Do you want to talk about the case?” he asked. “It won’t go further than us, no further than right here and now, Perry. I promise.”

  “Okay, then,” said Perry. “No one knows this, but over there in Egypt I had me a girlfriend who looked a lot like Winnie. When she died, too, there weren’t no sarco-gophus for her, so when I carried Katie over to Winnie’s grave, I was pretty much thinkin’, Two birds with one stone. I may not be good at much—no one thinks I am—but I know how to mourn those I loved. And I loved ’em both, Richie, one for all my life and the other for a while.”