A Hopeless Case

by K. K. Beck

  “I see,” said Jane.

  “But I certainly want you to succeed,” said Bucky, looking just a little too sincere to be sincere.

  After lunch, Jane went back to the offices of Carlson, Throckmorton, Osgood, Stubbins, and Montcrieff, where she received a copy of the will, a check for three thousand dollars, and a key to Uncle Harold’s house on Federal Avenue East.

  Thanking him effusively for lunch, she fended off Bucky’s attempts to offer her any further assistance and went to a bank on the corner. There she opened a checking account with her advance, using her passport for identification (and hoping they wouldn’t check the status of her accounts at the Crédit Lyonnais and the Algemene Bank of the Netherlands, or her current status with Visa; they didn’t).

  She cashed the last of her traveler’s checks and bought an international money order to send to Jean-Pierre, her last serious lover. He had probably forgotten about the five thousand francs Jane owed him, but she hadn’t.

  Jean-Pierre had been a turning point. He was sleek and handsome in an older, silver fox sort of way, and he’d been crazy about her. And he was so rich. But near the end, when she realized he’d just become a pleasant habit, she made herself stop taking money from him.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” he’d said. “I have plenty and you don’t and if we’re going to be together I want to be comfortable.”

  “But it makes me feel like a rich man’s mistress,” she’d said. And he’d replied, astonished, “But of course. That’s what you are. Do you want to get married? Would that make it different? We could get married.” He’d said it with the air of a puzzled aristocrat, indulging some bourgeois whim of a straitlaced American.

  She’d borrowed that last five thousand francs to get herself to Amsterdam, because she knew she didn’t want to marry him, and she couldn’t give him up and stay in Paris. And the unhappy reason she couldn’t give him up, beyond missing the comfortable life they had developed together, was that she was afraid of starving to death in some grim little flat. She was also faintly horrified to find herself casting around for someone else to take her on.

  Here in Seattle, all that seemed ridiculous. Like something from a Henry James novel.

  She hadn’t driven for a while, and she was rather startled by the high-tech gadgets on the rental Chevy: digital clock, alarms that sounded when the key was in, a seat belt that loomed at her when she closed the door, a scanner on the radio. She felt disoriented, and vaguely ashamed that she had somehow let the world pass her by.

  She thought she could navigate from downtown Seattle up to Capitol Hill, but downtown looked entirely different, with lots of new buildings, festively encrusted with postmodern details and plazas dotted with concrete tubs bursting with flowers. The simple, rigid grid pattern of serious buildings had been glitzed up so that she was completely lost. Besides the new topography, there seemed to be many more one-way streets.

  Instead of getting out the map that came with the car and plotting out a route to her destination, Jane drove up and down the streets, looking around. Even the people looked different. When she was a girl, downtown used to mean white men in business suits and white women dressed up to go shopping or to work in offices. Now there was more of a bazaarlike quality—more blacks and Asians, more aggressively chic young people, and—something she’d never seen before in Seattle—mad-looking, apparently homeless people, carrying their belongings with them, or hunkered down on street corners.

  One thing hadn’t changed. Pedestrians waited politely on the curb for the light to change, and motorists waited politely for them to cross. Nobody jaywalked, and nobody leaned on the horn. In all her travels, especially to Latin countries, Jane had made the necessary adaptation to chaos and learned to break the rules to keep the flow going. But she had always felt guilty, as if she were betraying the pleasant orderliness with which she had grown up.

  When she did get herself across the freeway and up to Capitol Hill, she realized that Uncle Harold’s quiet neighborhood of big, boxy houses built in the first decade of the century hadn’t changed much at all. The house, however, was bigger than she had remembered, almost what you’d call a villa in Europe. But then everything back home seemed bigger than she remembered, after years of living in hotel suites with Bernardo and later in a series of small European apartments.

  It had begun to rain, and as she stood on the porch fiddling with the key, she listened to raindrops splashing on the shiny leaves of the overgrown camellias that flanked the porch. She opened the door and went inside with the slight sadness one feels when entering a house that isn’t lived in.

  Inside, there was a musty smell, probably from Uncle Harold’s cigars. The place would need a general airing out and a good cleaning. She set her suitcase in the hall, then wandered, rather dazed, through the rooms. Could she actually use all this space? There were good-sized rooms with dark beams running along the ceiling and built-in bookcases and sideboards and niches of various kinds. With new paint and better lighting it wouldn’t be gloomy at all. Pruning back the overgrown camellias would help, too.

  There was some dusty-looking mohair furniture around, and some very decent but worn Orientals on the floors. The kitchen had apparently not been remodeled since the fifties. The refrigerator had rounded corners, and there was a lot of pink Formica. Upstairs were a couple of bedrooms, charming rooms with coved ceilings, yellowed wallpaper, diamond-paned windows, and window seats.

  It was a comfortable house, well made and a good example of turn-of-the-century reaction to Victorian excess. And besides, she felt rather close to Uncle Harold here. She wanted to feel close to him. He had—it seemed so far, anyway—saved her. In a way, she thought grimly, she had been feeling like a pretty hopeless case herself.

  She sat down heavily on one of the mohair sofas and gazed over at the tiled fireplace. Hanging over the mantel was a big etching in a dark wooden frame. Saint George, with a resolute expression and flowing hair, was inserting a lance purposefully into the flank of a twisting dragon.

  Hopeless cases. Funny how that phrase kept coming up. Her mother used it when she talked about Uncle Harold’s foundation. And then, Bucky had used it. It was apparently what the board wanted her to come up with in the next six weeks.

  Or had Bucky used it? No. He’d used “pathetic” cases. But he’d used it in another context. What was it? She concentrated, then remembered. It was how he’d described that seedy investigator’s legal cases. What was the guy’s name? Calvin. A very upright kind of name for someone prowling outside of a hotel room with a video recorder. His last name was Dixon. No, Mason. Calvin Mason.

  Chapter 4

  The trustees met the following evening at a restaurant in downtown Seattle. Jane remembered the restaurant from when she was a girl. It was the sort of place, that, although open to the public, managed to resemble the dining room of a private club. The furnishings were dark and respectable, and there were plenty of heavy draperies and carpeting to muffle the sound. The menu ran to roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, and lamb chops. The waiters were elderly and never introduced themselves by name or recited additional selections that had not been printed on the menu.

  When she arrived, she had been surprised to learn that the actual meeting would take place in a private room. The restaurant itself seemed private enough—dim and quiet in a way modern restaurants never even tried to be. The place was empty except for two old ladies eating Caesar salads in silence; a family party with several twentyish children; and, tucked behind a potted palm, a couple in their forties with the intense, furtive look of middle-class adulterers.

  Jane followed the maître d’ to a long windowless room, overheated and giving the impression that it needed dusting. There, six white-haired gentleman rose courteously. One of them was George Montcrieff, who introduced the others.

  Bishop Barton was recognizable by his dog collar and the gleam of Episcopal purple beneath his black suit. Judge Potter wore a white carnation in his lapel. Professor Grunewald, b
eaky and square-jawed, hunched over and peered at her through trifocals. There was also Franklin Glendinning, a retired banker with a wintry look in his blue eyes, and Commander Kincaid, a retired navy man with ramrod-straight posture and an engaging way of talking out of the side of his mouth, as if every remark were a wisecrack.

  “Really amazing,” continued George Montcrieff as they all scraped their chairs and sat, continuing to gaze at her with well-bred curiosity. “Mrs. da Silva and I spotted a red-tailed hawk from my office window the other day.”

  They all ignored him.

  “It was circling its prey,” Montcrieff persisted.

  “Nature red in tooth and claw,” said the bishop, waving vaguely, then reaching for his highball glass with a gnarled hand. “Something to drink, my dear?”

  “Yes, thank you,” said Jane. “A sherry, please.”

  It seemed the proper drink for a gathering like this. “I am so glad to meet you all,” she continued, vaguely aware of the schoolgirlish tone to her voice. “I look forward to working with you.”

  And, she thought to herself, you’d better not give me any trouble, either. Powerful old men, she thought to herself. All civic leaders with long, distinguished careers behind them. And they had absolute power over her future and her money.

  Powerful old men, she had noticed, often had an irritating vagueness and cautiousness. It made you wonder how they had ever made it to the top. Only the navy man, Commander Kincaid, looked decisive. The rest had that dithery quality, and Glendinning, the banker, looked like big trouble. He was watching her carefully, his small mean mouth in a little frown.

  When her sherry came, she raised her glass, and said “Please join me in a toast to Uncle Harold.”

  “To righting wrongs,” said the bishop. “Your uncle’s customary toast at these gatherings.” He brought his glass to his lips with a trembling hand, ice cubes rattling furiously.

  “How much,” the bishop continued, “do you know about your uncle Harold and his work?”

  “He was always rather secretive,” said Jane. “In the family, we always thought of him, I suppose, as quiet and conservative, and with a terrific sense of noblesse oblige. He was too modest to talk much about his work. But I know he helped people.” They were looking at her expectantly, so she continued.

  “Mother told me so. Her hairdresser had a problem once. Something about a husband who’d disappeared and left her to raise her kids alone. Uncle Harold found him for her. He’d been living bigamously in California. Mother said Uncle Harold found the guy and managed to get him to pay a ton of money in back child support, and then he got her a decent divorce so she could remarry.”

  “Precisely,” said the bishop. “Now if that hairdresser had only had the money, she could have hired a crack private investigator to ferret out the absconding husband. But she didn’t, so your uncle Harold took on the job.

  “It all began,” he went on, “with a rather simple case, much like the one you describe. Harold’s housekeeper had a son who was arrested for a crime he didn’t commit. The boy may well have committed other, similar crimes, but Harold was convinced he hadn’t committed this particular offense. It was a matter of finding a missing witness. Harold pulled it off, and the boy was saved. The experience convinced him there was an unmet need for investigative work to benefit those who couldn’t afford it, or, whose cases seemed too daunting or dicey for a regular private investigator.”

  Professor Grunewald chuckled. “Like that business with the Boeing janitor and the glamorous female Russian spy.”

  Jane raised her eyebrows. This sounded rather promising.

  “She wasn’t really a glamorous Russian spy,” countered the bishop, waving his hand impatiently. “The poor fellow just thought she was. Actually, she was a Swedish dental assistant.”

  “With thick legs,” added Commander Kincaid. “She had him running around town dropping off secrets for a while, before she told him she’d just as soon have the cash. Your uncle managed to get him out of her clutches and gather up all the secret papers and destroy them.”

  The bishop laughed. “The secret papers were things like vacuuming schedules and requisitions for industrial cleaning preparations, but she had him scared, all right. Harold got him a job somewhere else, anyway, just to be sure.”

  Jane wished the bishop hadn’t laughed at the besotted janitor. She imagined how desperate he must have felt. “I think it’s wonderful that Uncle Harold helped these people,” she said.

  “Harold loved the work. He liked poking around, finding things out,” said Judge Potter. “Claimed it gave him a sense of adventure. The rest of his life was pretty straightforward. Not like his father’s.”

  Uncle Harold’s father, Jane’s great-grandfather, had made a lot of money in Alaska. He’d outfitted miners in the gold rush, selling them pickaxes and hard tack, and later he’d racketed around up there himself, running a saloon in Skagway, which Jane had always suspected might also have been a brothel. What was certain, though, was that the beer he served was a loss leader. He made a lot of his money off the poker games. He had died many years before Jane was born, but tales of his ability to recite interminable verses of the poetry of Robert W. Service had been passed down in family lore.

  Jane’s great-grandfather had two sons late in life. Uncle Harold, and Jane’s own grandfather, Victor. The latter had run through his inheritance back in the twenties, spending a small fortune on bathtub gin and the flat-chested floozies of the period. Not having inherited his father’s skill at the gaming table, he lost the balance of his estate one afternoon in Monte Carlo, thereby managing to get a leg up on everyone else by starting out the Depression flat broke.

  Victor returned to Seattle, married a gentle spinster, fathered Jane’s mother, and lived out the rest of his days in a maroon silk monogrammed bathrobe, while his wife eked out a living giving piano lessons and sight reading popular songs at Woolworth’s for customers contemplating buying sheet music.

  Jane had a dim memory of him in the famous bathrobe, playing solitaire and humming.

  His brother, Harold, however, had set himself up in the office supply and typewriter repair business, avoiding the stock market because he thought it was really just gambling, of which he didn’t approve. Years of selling accordion files, three-by-five cards, filing cabinets, rubber thumb protectors for file clerks, bottles of ink, and reams of paper, did convince Harold, however, that in the future, office procedures could be simplified with modern technology. It became clear to him sooner than to almost everybody else, it seemed, that buying stock in International Business Machines might be a good investment.

  Judge Potter spoke up winsomely. “Let me say that it is a little unusual for us to be meeting here with an attractive young girl. It will take some getting used to, don’t you think, gentlemen?”

  “I’m not really young,” she protested. “I’m thirty-seven.” Jane was embarrassed by her generation’s tendency to persist in thinking itself young well into middle age, and often conducting itself like a bunch of whiny adolescents as a result.

  “That’s young,” Commander Kincaid said firmly.

  Jane, in an effort to impress the board with her seriousness, thought of pointing out that two times thirty-seven was seventy-four, and as such she might as well be considered middle-aged. After all, she was sure that when they were thirty-seven they considered themselves at the height of their powers. It was a safe bet they had assumed serious responsibilities, and, like her own father at that age, wore gray suits and felt hats and acted completely grown up. But she decided not to point all that out. It wouldn’t be tactful to remind them of their own actuarial status.

  “Tell me what is expected of me,” she said instead. “Mr. Montcrieff has given me the basics.” She managed to look a little helpless, trying to convey that it was his fault if she was ignorant of her new duties. “And your description of some of Uncle Harold’s cases has given me a better idea.”

  “You are expected,” said the
judge, “to find cases of injustice requiring investigative skills. Cases which cannot be solved by ordinary means or regular methods, because the facts have been obscured.”

  “Cases in which the laws of men have proven to be inadequate,” said the bishop.

  “Cases in which only quick action and persistence bring justice to bear,” added the commander. “Finding ’em yourself is half the battle. Harold had a real nose for people’s troubles. Why, I remember he got involved in that missing baby thing eavesdropping on the bus! Harold was a real snooper.”

  Jane brightened a little. So was she. She’d been known to change a seat in an airport lounge to overhear what looked to be a promising conversation.

  “Missing baby?” she asked.

  “Harold got it back. A berserk hospital nurse managed to spirit away half of a pair of twins, fool around with the records. Amazing deal. The mother was anesthetized during the birth. Didn’t even know she’d had twins!”

  “So I’d be running a kind of nonprofit detective agency,” said Jane, rather astounded at the mystery of the missing twin. She imagined Uncle Harold restoring the bundled-up infant to its mother on the doorstep, and its mother setting it gently next to its identical sibling. The picture practically brought tears to her eyes.

  “That’s right,” said Glendinning. “The only funds involved are the funds which you will receive as income, should you choose to take up the work, and should we approve of your cases and your handling of them.”

  There. It was out. They’d mentioned money. She smiled. “I’m very much looking forward to it,” she said. “What are your criteria for suitable cases? And for proper handling of them?”

  “Simple enough,” said the commander, as the waiter passed around plates of cream of asparagus soup. “It’s got to be some kind of mess that needs fixing. Life is pretty messy, you know. And you have to find the messes yourself. Show initiative.”

  “It must be,” said the bishop, raising a bony finger, “a problem that mere money cannot solve. I mean, you’ve got to use your wits.”