by Robert Crais
Brownell lived across the Duwamish Waterway in an older, working-class part of West Seattle called White Center. It is a community of narrow streets and old apartments and wood-framed homes surrounding a steel mill. Young guys with lean, angry faces hung around near the mill, looking like they wished they could get work there. The ground floor of Brownell’s building fronted the street with a secondhand clothing store, a place that refinished maritime metalwork, and a video rental place called Extreme Video. The video place was papered with posters of Jackie Chan and young Asian women tied to chairs with thousands of ropes. Extreme.
I missed Brownell’s building twice because I couldn’t find the building numbers, then found it but couldn’t find a place to park. I finally left the car by a hydrant six blocks away. Flexibility in the art of detection.
Three young guys in T-shirts were hanging outside the video place when I got back, drinking Snapple. One of them was wearing a Seattle Mariners cap, and all of them were sporting black Gorilla boots and rolled-cuff jeans. A stairwell protected by an unlocked wire door had been carved from the corner of the building just past the metalwork place. There was a directory on the wall, and a row of mailboxes with little masking-tape tags for names and apartment numbers, only Brownell wasn’t one of the names on the directory and the names on the masking tape had faded to oblivion. I said, “Any of you guys know Wilson Brownell?”
The one with the cap said, “Sure. He comes in all the time.”
“You know which apartment he’s in?”
“I’m pretty sure it’s apartment B. On the second floor.” You see how friendly it is in Seattle?
I took the stairs two at a time, then went along the hall looking for B. I found it, but the apartment across the hall was open and an older woman with frizzy hair was perched inside on an overstuffed chair, squinting out at me. She was clutching a TV remote the size of a cop’s baton and watching C-SPAN. I gave her a smile. “Hi.”
She squinted harder.
I couldn’t hear anything inside Brownell’s apartment. No radio, no TV, no voices making furtive plans, just the C-SPAN and street noises. It was an older building without air-conditioning, so there would be open windows. I knocked, and then I rang his bell.
The woman said, “He’s at work, ya dope.” Just like that, ya dope. “Middle’a the day, any worthwhile man finds himself at work.” Eyeing me like that’s where I should be.
She was maybe seventy, but she might’ve been eighty, with leathery ochre skin and salt-and-pepper hair that went straight up and back like the Bride of Frankenstein. She was wearing a thin cotton housecoat and floppy slippers and she was pointing the remote at me. Maybe trying to make me disappear.
“Sorry if I disturbed you.” I gave her my relaxed smile, the one that says I’m just a regular guy going about a regular guy’s business, then made a big deal out of checking my watch. “I could’ve sworn he said to come by at two.” It was six minutes before two. “Do you know what time he’s due back?” The World’s Greatest Detective swings into full detection mode to fake out the Housebound Old Lady.
The squint softened, and she waved the remote. Inside, congressional voices disappeared. “Not till five-thirty, quarter to six, something like that.”
“Wow, that’s a lot later than I planned.” I shook my head and tried for a concerned disappointment. “An old buddy of ours is in town and we’re supposed to get together. I wonder if he’s been around.” For all I knew Clark was inside asleep on the couch. You cast a line, you hope for a bite.
She made herself huffy. “I wouldn’t know. I don’t spy on people.”
“Of course.”
“People come and people go. You’re old and livin’ alone, no one gives you the time a day.” She went back to C-SPAN, and now I could smell cat litter and turnips.
“Well, he’s a little shorter than me, thinner, glasses, a hairline back to here.”
She turned up the sound and waved the remote. “People come, people go.”
I nodded, Mr. Understanding, Mr. Of-Course-I-Wouldn’t-Expect-You-to-Remember. Then I slapped my head and made like I’d just realized that I was the world’s biggest moron. “Jeez, he must’ve wanted me to meet him at work! I’ll bet we’re supposed to meet there, then go out! Of course!” The World’s Greatest Detective employs the Relatable Human Failing technique in an effort to cultivate rapport.
The woman frowned at her television, then muted the sound again. “What a bullshit story.”
“Excuse me?”
Her face cracked into a thin, angry smile that said she was as sharp as a straight razor, and if a guy like me didn’t watch out she would hand back his head. “If there’s something you wanna know, just ask. You don’t have to make up a bullshit story about old friends getting together. What a crock!”
I smiled again, but now the smile was saying, okay, you nailed me. “Sorry about that.” Shown up by the Bride of Frankenstein.
She made a little shrug, like it wasn’t a big thing. “You hadda try, you just went too far with it. A guy making out as nice as you wouldn’t be caught dead being friends with an ass-wipe like Will Brownell.” I guess they didn’t get along. “What’s the real story?”
“Brownell’s friend owes me six hundred dollars.”
She cackled and shook her head. “I mighta known. Sooner or later it always gets down to money, doesn’t it?”
“Uh-huh.” Everyone relates to greed. “How about the guy I described? Has he been around?”
She made the shrug again, but it seemed sincere. “That’s not much of a description, young man. Could be anyone.”
“Fair enough. Can you tell me where Brownell works?”
“He works at some printing place.”
“New World Printing?”
“Maybe.” The other Seattle number that Clark had phoned.
I said, “You won’t tell Brownell that I was around, will you?”
She turned back to the television. “What’d the sonofabitch ever do for me?” Nope, I don’t guess they got along.
I went back down the stairs to the street and checked out the building. Two of the kids were gone, but the kid in the Mariners cap was sitting in the doorway to the video store on a wooden stool, inspecting a car magazine. The C-SPAN Lady’s apartment was above the metalwork place at the front of the building, which meant Brownell’s apartment was in the rear. I walked down to the end of the block, rounded the corner, then came up the service alley. A rickety fire escape ran up the back of the building to the roof like a metal spider-web. I counted windows and visualized the location of the C-SPAN Lady’s apartment so that I would know which windows belonged to Brownell. There were a lot of windows. Potted plants nested around some of the windows and drying clothes hung from the rails outside others, and a kid’s tricycle rested on the fire escape outside still another. Figure that one. Brownell’s windows were closed.
I used a Dumpster to reach the fire escape ladder, chinned myself to the rail, and let myself into Wilson Brownell’s dining area. One should always lock one’s windows, even in friendly cities like Seattle.
Clark Haines was not asleep on the couch. The apartment was quiet and warm from having been closed, and smelled of coffee and Jiffy Pop. The dining area opened into a living room ahead of me and a kichenette to my right. Beyond the kitchenette was a door that probably led to a bedroom and a bath. A vinyl couch and a mismatched chair filled one corner of the living room opposite a Sony Trinitron and a VCR. A coffee table was angled between the couch and the chair, scattered with magazines and a yellow rotary phone. A small pine table and three chairs sat in the dining area, along with an IKEA shelving unit showing a couple of plants, a bright orange goldfish in an oversized pickle jar, and some photographs of an African-American woman with a pretty smile. The woman looked young, but the photographs looked old, and I thought that the woman might now be, also. Precise, photo-realistic drawings of the woman had been framed and hung on the walls. They were signed Wilson, but in style and tec
hnique they looked exactly like the drawings that Clark Haines had done of his children.
You hope for the obvious: a sleeping bag and pillows on the couch, a suitcase, a note stuck to the fridge saying “meet Clark at 5,” anything that might indicate an out-of-town guest, or the location of same. Nada. A case of beer cooled in the fridge and the cabinets were filled with enough booze for a booksellers’ convention, but that didn’t mean Brownell had company. Maybe he was just a lush. The magazines turned out to be trade catalogs for commercial printing equipment and industry magazines with dog-eared pages and supply brochures. The marked pages all noted paper and ink suppliers in Europe and Asia. Four of the catalogs still had their mailing labels, and all of the labels were addressed to Wilson Brownell. A hot topic in most of the magazines seemed to be Digital Micro-scanning Architecture for Zero Generation Loss. Whatever that meant. I guess if you’re a printer, you like to read about printing.
I took a quick peek in the bath, then went to the bedroom. Clark Haines wasn’t there either. A neatly made double bed sat against the wall, along with a chest and a dresser and a drafting table. I glanced into the closet. One bed, one toothbrush, one set of toiletries, one used towel, no luggage or alternative bedding. More photographs of the same woman sat upon the chest and the dresser, only some of these showed a smiling African-American man. Wilson Brownell. An in-progress drawing was tacked down onto the drafting table, pen and ink, done with very fine lines, showing an almost photographic reproduction of the Seattle skyline. Wilson Brownell might be a lush, but he was also a gifted artist and I wondered if it was he who had trained Clark. Maybe Clark had come up here for art lessons.
I went through the nightstand and the chest, and was working through the dresser when I noticed a small Kodak snapshot wedged along the bottom edge of the dresser’s mirror, half hidden behind yet more photographs of the woman. It was a color shot of two couples standing on a fishing pier, one of the couples Brownell and the woman, the other a much younger Caucasian couple. The Caucasian woman had dark wavy hair, pale skin, and glasses. She looked exactly like an older, adult version of Teresa Haines. She was smiling at the camera, and holding hands with a thin guy whose hairline was already starting to recede. I took down the picture and turned it over. On the back, someone had written: Me and Edna, Clark and Rachel Hewitt, 1986. I looked at the picture again. The Caucasian woman had to be Teri’s mother, and the man had to be Clark, only the name wasn’t Haines, it was Hewitt.
I put the picture in my pocket, made sure everything else was like I had found it, then let myself out the window, walked around to the street, and once more climbed the stairs. The C-SPAN Lady’s door was still open, and she was still shaking her remote at her television. Guess if I watched Congress all day I’d want to shake something, too.
I said, “One more thing.”
Her eyes narrowed, and she muted the sound.
I held out the picture, and this time I didn’t bother to smile. “Is this one of the people who come and go?”
She looked at the picture, then she looked back at me. “He owe you money, too?”
“Everybody owes me money. I have a generous nature.”
She held out her hand and brushed her thumb across her fingers. “How about extendin’ some’a that generosity my way?”
I gave her a crisp new twenty.
“He showed up a week ago, Thursday. Stayed a couple of days, then left. You shoulda heard all the carryin’ on.”
“What do you mean?”
She made a sour face and waved the remote. “Moanin’ and cryin’, moanin’ and cryin’. I don’t know what all was goin’ on in there.” She made a little shudder, like she didn’t want to know. “I ain’t seen him since.”
“Appreciate the help.”
She turned back to the C-SPAN and made the twenty disappear. “Don’t mention it.”
Sooner or later it always gets down to money.
8
New World Printing was east of the Duwamish Waterway between Georgetown and Boeing Field in a tract of older industrial buildings that were built when red bricks and ironwork were cheap. The front of the building contained a fancy glass entrance and a receptionist who would pick up her phone and tell Mr. Brownell that a Mr. Cole wanted to see him. Considering Mr. Brownell’s uncooperative response when I phoned, it was likely that Brownell would (at worst) refuse to see me, or (at best) be warned of my approach and therefore prepared to stonewall. This was not good. I have found that if you can surprise people in their workplace, they are often concerned with avoiding an embarrassing scene, and you can jam them into cooperating. This is advanced detective work at its finest.
I parked at the curb and walked around to the loading dock on the side of the building where two men were wrestling a dolly stacked with about ten thousand pounds of boxed paper into a six-wheel truck. “You guys know where I can find Wilson Brownell?”
One of the men was younger, with a thick mustache and a hoop earring and a red bandana tied over his head like a skullcap. “Yeah.” He pointed inside. “Down the aisle, past the desk, and through the swinging door. You’ll see him.”
“Thanks.”
I followed an endless aisle past shipping flats stacked with boxes of brochures and magazines and pamphlets. I picked up two boxes and carried them with what I hoped was a purposeful expression, just another worker bee lugging paper through the hive.
A balding guy with a potbelly and tiny, mean eyes was sitting at the desk, talking to a younger guy with a prominent Adam’s apple. The balding guy was thin in the arms and chest and neck, but his belly poked out beneath his beltline as if someone had slipped a bowling ball in his pants. He squinted at me the way people do when they’re trying to remember who you are, but then I was past him and through the swinging door and into a cavernous room filled with whirring, ka-chunking, humming machines and the men and women who operated them. A woman pushed a dolly past me and I smiled. “Wilson Brownell?”
She pointed and I saw him across the room, standing at a large machine with two other people, one a kid in a KURT LIVES T-shirt, and the other a middle-aged guy in a suit. A large plate had been removed from the side of the machine so that they could see inside.
Wilson Brownell was in his early sixties, and taller than he looked in the pictures at his home. He was dressed in khaki slacks and a simple plaid shirt, with short hair more gray than not and black horn-rimmed glasses. Professorial. He was using a pen to point at something inside the machine. The guy in the suit was standing with his arms crossed, not liking what he heard. Brownell finally stopped pointing, and the suit walked away, still with crossed arms. Brownell said something to the younger guy, and the younger guy got down on the floor and began working his way into the machine. I walked over and said, “Mr. Brownell?”
“Yes?” Brownell looked at me with damp, hazel eyes. You could smell the booze on him, faint and far away. It was probably always with him.
I positioned myself with my back to the kid so that only Wilson Brownell would hear. “My name is Elvis Cole. I’ve phoned you twice trying to find a man named Clark Haines.”
Brownell shook his head. “I don’t know anyone by that name.”
“How about Clark Hewitt?”
Brownell glanced at the kid, then wet his lips. “You’re not supposed to be here.” He looked past me. “Did they let you in?”
“Come on, Mr. Brownell. I know that Clark phoned you six times from Los Angeles because I’ve seen his phone record. I know that he’s been at your apartment.” He wasn’t just stonewalling; he was scared. “I’m not here to make trouble for you or for Clark. He walked out on his kids eleven days ago, and they need him. If he isn’t coming home, someone has to deal with that.” Elvis Cole, detective for the nineties, the detective who can feel your pain.
“I don’t know anything. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He shook his head, and the booze smell came stronger.
“Jesus Christ, those kids are alone. All I want t
o do is find out if Clark’s coming home.” You’d think I wanted to kill the guy.
He held up both hands, palms toward me, shaking his head some more.
“This isn’t an earthshaker, Wilson. Either I’m going to find Clark, or I’m going to turn his kids over to Children’s Services, and they’re going to take custody away from him. You see what I’m saying here?” I wanted to smack him. I wanted to grab him by the ears and shake him. “Clark is going to lose his kids unless he talks to me, and you’re going to be part of it.” Maybe I could guilt him into cooperating.
Wilson Brownell looked past me, and his eyes widened. The bald guy with the bowling-ball paunch was standing in the swinging doors, frowning at us. Brownell’s face hardened and he stepped close to me. “Do everybody a favor and get your ass out of here. I’d help you if I could, but I can’t, and that’s that.”
He turned away but I turned with him. “What do you mean, that’s that? Didn’t you hear what I said about his kids?”
“I said I can’t help you.” Wilson Brownell’s voice came out loud enough so that the kid on the floor peeked out at us.
Two men had joined the bald guy in the swinging doors. They were older, with thin gray hair and windburned skin and the kind of heavy, going-to-fat builds that said they were probably pretty good hitters twenty years ago. The bald guy pointed our way and one of the new men said something, and then the bald guy started toward us. Brownell grabbed my shoulder like a man grabbing a life preserver. “Listen to me, goddamnit.” His voice was a harsh whisper, lower now and urgent. “Don’t you mention Clark. Don’t even say his goddamn name, you wanna walk outta here alive.” Wilson Brownell suddenly broke into a big laugh and clapped me on the shoulder as if I’d told him the world’s funniest joke. He said, “You tell Lisa I can get my own date, thank you very much! I need any help, I’ll give’r a call!” He said it so loud that half of British Columbia could hear.
