by G. M. Ford
She nodded. “Blew his heart up like a cherry bomb.” She raised a restraining hand. “Not that he was long for this world in any case,” she added. “That man was a medical mess.”
“How so?”
“Long-term malnutrition, dehydration, heart, liver, and kidney disease. You name it, and it was about to kill him.” She started to say something else but stopped herself.
“What?” I prodded.
“Perhaps you should see for yourself,” she said with a sigh.
I followed her back through the swinging door, down the polished corridor, into the land of the dead. Just like you saw it on TV. Big white room. Three autopsy stations. A collection of oversized steel drawers lined the walls, like giant vegetable crispers.
She stalked across the room to a drawer marked 14-A.
Instead of reaching for the drawer, however, she picked the phone from the wall. “Ronald,” she said. “Bring us in the personal effects for Fourteen-A.”
She pushed aside a black plastic cart. Spread about the top of the cart was a collection of broken, yellowed bones. The top two-thirds of a skull. A lower jaw. What looked like a femur and a tibia and several ribs. I nodded at them.
“Those look like they’ve seen better days,” I commented.
Rebecca nodded. “About six hundred years ago,” she said, “they probably looked pretty good on some local Indian.”
“Indian, huh?”
She nodded. “They’re too degraded to determine anything more specific, but they’re definitely Native American.”
“You can tell that? From something that old?”
Rebecca had always been the girl with all the right answers. I figured I’d give her a chance to show off. She likes that.
“The proportions of the skull and the size of the eye and nose openings determine race,” she said.
“How’d you end up with them?”
“Tugboat company was digging some new footings down on Harbor Island. Came upon those about six feet down. They were thinking it might be foul play so they called us.” She pulled the surgical mask up over her face. “Guess what happened then?” she said with a twinkle in her eyes.
“What?”
“The Duwamish Tribe tried to claim the bones.”
“And?”
“Well, first of all, Leo, as you well know, Harbor Island is manmade. So whoever this guy was, he must have been from somewhere upriver and washed down with the silt they used to create the island. And secondly, if the U.S. was to allow the Duwamish to claim the bones, they’d be opening themselves up to that whole Indian burial ground fiasco, and the next thing you know, the Duwamish would own the Port of Seattle. And we both know that’s not going to happen.”
She pulled a fresh set of latex gloves from the dispenser on the wall and pulled out drawer 14-A.
Black body bag, zipped all the way up. She pulled the zipper about a third of the way down and peeled the black rubber back. “That him?” she asked.
I nodded. He’d been dead long enough that his skin had collapsed onto his bones. Everywhere you looked, there was a sharp edge. Made him look like he’d been assembled from spare parts. I leaned in closer, trying to conjure up some landscape, or sound or smell or song . . . anything to give me a hint where I’d seen that haggard face before, but I came up dry.
Rebecca pulled the zipper down another foot and pointed to a pile of puddled skin next to his left hip. “He used to be a much bigger man,” she said.
I must have looked confused.
“Heavier,” she said. “Way heavier than he was at the time of his death.” She consulted the chart. “When we got him from Lewis County, he’d been dead approximately seven and a half hours. He weighed one hundred seventy-three pounds and was six foot five inches tall.” She pointed at the loose pile of waist flesh again. “Judging from that, I’d hazard a guess he must have, at one time, weighed somewhere in the vicinity of . . . say . . . two-seventy or so.”
“How old do you think he was?” I asked.
She made her “I hate guessing” face. “He had the body of a seventy-year-old,” she said disgustedly. “But if I had to guess, I’d say he was about our age. Mid-forties someplace.”
I spent another coupla minutes trying to put weight on him with my mind but couldn’t conjure up an image. I still had no idea how this man had come to know my name.
She pulled one of his hands out of the body bag. “His hands suggest he used them for a living,” she said. She was right. His hands were big and calloused. The kind of workingman’s hands that never got all the way clean.
She walked to the far end of the drawer, where Ronald, a light-skinned North African man, had wheeled a white plastic cart and now stood awaiting further instructions. Atop the cart, the dead man’s clothes were laid out as if he were still wearing them. A much-laundered denim work shirt with no label of any kind. A well-worn pair of Carhartt work pants, blown out at the knees and skillfully patched with brown leather. That and a pair of Kmart work boots, size 13, dusty and worn at the heels. No phone, no pool, no pets.
Where his head should have been, a zip-lock bag now rested. It had something inside, but I couldn’t make out what it was. I pointed. “May I?” I asked.
“You can take that stuff with you,” she said. “He’s officially a John Doe.”
I shook the bag out onto the table. It wasn’t much. Twenty-three cents, a ferry receipt dated the day before yesterday, and an old-fashioned skeleton key.
Rebecca anticipated me. “That’s it,” she said. “That’s all he was carrying.”
“This guy’s seen hard times,” I said, as much to myself as to her.
Rebecca agreed, with a bit more vigor than was customary for her.
She had something she wanted to tell me, so I shut up and waited for her to get around to it. She nodded at Ronald. “Help me turn him over,” she said.
With practiced ease, they rolled the corpse over.
I think I may have gasped. I could feel Rebecca’s eyes boring a hole in the top of my head, but couldn’t pull my gaze from the guy’s back. I’d never seen such a collection of scars in my life. Little scars, going this way and that. More of em than you could count, covering every square inch of him.
Rebecca reached out and slid the zipper to the bottom of the rubber bag. The scars continued. His back, his buttocks, the back of his thighs. All of them covered with a maze of interconnected scar tissue. “Jesus” was all I could think to say.
“Jesus indeed,” she said.
Ronald made the sign of the cross.
“Thank you, Ronald,” she said, pointing at the pile of Indian bones on the cart. “Box those up and store them in number four.”
Ronald rolled the cart ahead of him, headed for the door.
I waited until he was gone.
“You got any idea how he might have . . .” I pointed again. “I mean how he got those and you know . . . like what that might be from?”
“I’ve never seen anything quite like it before.”
“Could they be burns?” I tried.
She shook her head. “Not a chance.” She pointed at his back. “They’re overlaid,” she said. “This happened in stages.”
I found myself at a loss for words.
“If you had to guess . . .” I finally squeezed out.
She made her “You must be kidding me” face. “For the record?”
I showed a palm. “No. No. Just between us,” I said quickly.
She wanted to refuse but couldn’t. Despite my many failings, I am, without question, real good at keeping my mouth shut, and Rebecca knew it.
“Were I forced to hazard a guess . . . I’d say he’d been whipped.”
“Whipped?”
“Over an extended period of time, I’d say,” she added.
“Whipped?”
She used one of my own jokes on me. “Is there an echo in here?” she asked.
“This is the twenty-first century. People don’t . . . they don’t . .
.”
Took me a coupla minutes to collect my thoughts and lower jaw. She walked me up to the lobby, where she had Margot rustle me up copies of the postmortem photos. When I turned back to thank her, she was gone.
I was still trying to wrap my mind around the body in the morgue when I turned downhill onto Louisa Street, heading for the Eastlake Zoo. The Seward School loomed lithic on my right as I stood on the brakes and eased my way down the uneven surface.
Sometimes, less is more. In old neighborhoods like this, when the city wanted you to slow down, all they did was not pave over the century-old cobblestones. Loosened by a hundred years of relentless rain, thrust skyward here and there by massive tree roots, the stones became an axle-shattering mogul course, where a speed of more than two mph virtually guaranteed you’d be utilizing your AAA membership.
I slid the car to a stop along the curb on Eastlake Avenue and checked my teeth for loose fillings. The dashboard clock said it was nearly two P.M. Drunks are habitual people. They make the same mistakes over and over, because they’re hardwired that way. If they could do something else, they would, but they can’t, so they don’t.
This time of day, finding “the Boys” didn’t present much of a problem. They were right where they always were. Working up the beginnings of their daily mega buzz. By midnight, they’d be wrecked and wretched, stumbling toward whatever flop they’d set up the night before, hoping for a few hours’ shut-eye before hitting the reset button. Whoever said that our society has a leisure class at both ends of the social spectrum was all over it. The minute my eyes began to adjust to the dim lights, I could make out the silhouette of Nearly Normal Norman towering over the snooker table. I heard Red Lopez laugh that goofy laugh of his as I started along the bar. Mick the bartender gave me a friendly nod as I sauntered by.
These were the remnants of my old man’s political machine. The last of those who hadn’t died in prison or blown their brains out in some sleazy hotel room in the days immediately following his death, when the empire began to crumble, and the chips, as they say, had begun to fall where they may.
During his four decades on the Seattle City Council, my dad, Big Bill Waterman, had parlayed a God-given propensity for graft, corruption, favoritism, nepotism, tax evasion, and money laundering into a considerable fortune, which he left to me, with the stipulation that I not see the bulk of it until I reached the ripe old age of forty-five.
That’s how I ended up being a PI. Trying to bridge the gap until the pile rolled in, which it did a year or so back. Nowadays, I take on cases that interest me and occasionally do favors for friends, but generally don’t work up much of a sweat at the detective business anymore.
My name went up from some dark corner of the bar and was greeted with wild hosannas. I’d like to imagine that my sparkling wit and charming personality elicited such a reaction, but truth be told, the fact that my presence was generally accompanied by a couple of free drinks might well have had something to do with it.
Billy Bob Fung got to his feet and wobbled off into the darkness so I could sit next to George, the de facto leader of this little band of bunglers. George Paris had been one of the bankers assigned to handling my old man’s money. Just far enough down the ladder to avoid prosecution, George had been summarily fired by the bank, jettisoned by his fashionable wife, and thrown into the windswept streets like yesterday’s newspaper. Twenty years of sharing an apartment with a telephone pole had left him a wizened wiseacre, with an acidic intelligence nearly as sharp as his tongue.
On George’s left, Ralph Batista had his head down on the table, taking a short siesta. Ralph had, at one time, been an official for the Port of Seattle. When my old man’s machine came apart, Ralph had done a deuce in County for his part in my father’s people-smuggling operation and, upon release, had thrown himself into a life of alcoholic debauchery with uncompromising zeal. These days he had a functional IQ of about sixty. If it weren’t for George looking out for him, he’d be dead as a herring by now.
“Hey, big fella,” George said as I sat down. He squinted and looked me over and grinned. “What happened to the beezer, kid?” he asked.
I’d lost the mile of tape, but my nose still looked a lot like an eggplant.
“Shaving accident,” I said.
The other denizens of the damp began appearing from the shadows. Heavy Duty Judy, Red Lopez, Bernardo, Farty Artie, Norman, Large Marge, Willy the Wimp, so named for his propensity for soiling himself in times of even moderate stress, Tommy and his new squeeze, a woman named Nancy, some little guy I’d seen in here before, couldn’ta weighed more than ninety pounds, and a few bottom-feeders who were new faces to me. They crowded around and tenderized me like a veal cutlet, pounding me on the back, throwing arms around my shoulders, and drooling in my ears.
“Where’s Harold?” I asked above the din. Harold Green had been a vital part of my old man’s political machine. High enough up the chain of command that he’d done eighteen months in prison for election fraud when the whole thing came apart.
“In the can, pulling thirty on a failure to appear,” George growled.
I pulled an eight-by-ten photograph from my coat pocket and laid it on the table. The guy from the morgue. Postmortem.
“Anybody know this guy?” I asked in a loud voice. My theory was that if this guy had been living as hard as it appeared he had, well . . . you know . . . birds of a feather and all of that. The ferry receipt said he’d been in Seattle earlier in the week. Anything was possible, I supposed.
“He don’t look so good,” Heavy Duty Judy commented.
“Tends to happen when you’re dead,” I said.
One by one, everybody slid over and had a peek at the photo. No go.
I caught Mick the bartender’s eye and made a circling motion with my hand. Give everybody one on me. Another cheer rose from the assembled multitude. I reached into my pocket to pull out my roll. The skeleton key from the dead guy’s pocket came out with the money and dropped on the table with a clank.
The little skinny guy whose name I couldn’t recall pointed at it.
“Baltimore,” he muttered.
“Charm City,” I said affably.
He shook his shaggy head. “Hotel Baltimore down in Jap Town.” He tapped the key with a filthy finger. “They got keys just like that.”
Jap Town. That’s what they called it back before WWII. Back before they packed all those loyal Japanese Americans off to godforsaken relocation camps and appropriated their private property. These days it goes by the more politically correct moniker of the International District. Same place, different sensibility.
The Hotel Baltimore was a four-story, redbrick hangnail of a joint. Maybe twenty rooms wedged between a defunct dry cleaner and a Chinese auto body shop on South Larimore Street. Unlike most roach hotels, which, over time, devolve into slums, the Hotel Baltimore had been a roach pit from the very beginning. In 1898, the Klondike Gold Rush had stuffed the city to the bursting point with wide-eyed would-be millionaires on their way to the Alaskan goldfields. The Hotel Baltimore had been slapped together in a scant three weeks, for the purpose of packing them in like cordwood, six to a room, sniffing each other’s feet, for four bucks a night, while they waited anxiously for the next passage north.
Negative fourteen stars in the Forbes Travel Guide, the place smelled of piss and poverty. The guy manning the desk wore a wifebeater undershirt and one of the worst toupees I’d ever seen. Looked like a cat had curled up on his head for a nap.
Over to the left of the window, what I figured to be the Hotel Baltimore’s complaint department lounged in a battered Morris chair from the 1930s. Guy looked like a pro wrestler gone to seed. The sight of me approaching the desk garnered his attention. Apparently, I didn’t look much like a customer, which, as I saw it, was a good thing. He dropped the racing form onto his belly and pulled his outstretched brogans back under himself.
“Help ya?” the guy behind the desk asked.
I smiled
and slid the photo his way. “You know this guy?”
He pretended the picture wasn’t there. Just kept looking at me.
“You want a room?”
“I want to know if you’ve ever seen this guy.”
The bruiser pushed himself up out of the chair and began shuffling in my direction. I tapped the photo. “What about it?” I asked the clerk.
“We got a real discerning clientele,” Wifebeater said with a gap-toothed grin. “Real touchy about their privacy, you know.”
“I’m not a cop,” I said.
“You sure look like a cop.”
I turned toward the voice. The bouncer came bellying right up to me. Close enough to smell the onions on his breath. “You probably oughta get the fuck outta here,” he said.
“When I’m done,” I replied.
That seemed to amuse him. He showed me an acre of yellow teeth. “Believe me, asshole, you’re done,” he assured me, and reached out to clamp a big hand on my shoulder. It never arrived.
I put everything I had behind a short, straight right to the middle of his solar plexus. He whooped out a great rush of air, staggered backwards two steps, and dropped onto the filthy carpet, barking for breath, trying to force air into his spasming lungs. I’ve been on the other end. It’s not a pleasant experience.
I turned back to the desk clerk. He had his right hand under the counter.
“I wouldn’t,” I cautioned.
Took him all of a second to decide I was right. Behind me, the big guy was rolling back and forth on the floor, making noises like a broken bilge pump. Wifebeater threw a disgusted glance at his disabled musclehead, then looked down at the photo and nodded. I watched as he fingered his way through an old-fashioned card file, extracted one, and slid it across the desk to me.
“You’re sure,” I pushed. “Cause if this turns out to be bullshit, you’re going to be seeing me again.”
He nodded so hard the toupee slipped. He pushed it back into place.
“Last Tuesday and Wednesday nights,” he said. “Paid cash.”
I pocketed the card. Dropped the key on the counter. “That yours?” I asked.
