Cold Smoked

by K. K. Beck

  Carver nodded with a serious expression, brow furrowed, mouth turned down as if to say “I have a powerful intellect and the ability to grasp complexities.” But the dull glaze in his heavy-lidded, cowlike brown eyes gave him away.

  “I’m not really interested in full-time,” she said. “I have an income of my own.”

  Now she had his attention. There was an eager flicker in those dull eyes. He picked up a pencil and gazed at it thoughtfully. He nodded again. “Well,” he said, “maybe we can work something out. On a per word basis. I guess you know the trade press doesn’t really pay that well. And frankly, things are tight in the seafood business. It’s no secret our ad pages are down. The book is half the size it was three years ago.”

  Jane nodded. Carla had said he would poor-mouth. “I understand completely,” she said. “I just happen to love this industry, and I’d like to keep my hand in. And of course, a byline in Seafood Now would mean a lot to me.”

  He leaned back on his chair and made a pompous little cathedral with his fingertips. “We are the best seafood magazine around. No question. I’m sure you’re familiar with our competitors, Seafood Leader and Seafood Business. Have you seen our sales materials?”

  Carla had also told her that Norman had no interest in the editorial content that he was compelled to include between the ads. Jane looked attentive as he went into a canned pitch about the merits of the magazine. “We’re reaching key buyers in all industry segments,” he said, flapping through a sales kit with some bar graphs. “We’ve got decision makers all down the line—your big institutional buyers, retail fish buyers, wholesalers, distributors, executive chefs—and we’ve got key people at point of purchase—right down to your seafood manager at your local grocery store.”

  He leaned over in a manner Jane imagined he’d learned at some school for salesmen and looked her right in the eye. The effect was more bovine than dynamic. “They all rely on Seafood Now in their decision making. We keep them in the loop. We give them product information, marketing ideas, we let them know about pricing and supply, new value-added products, the whole ball of wax. Processing, too. If there’s a new way to handle parasites or a new H and G concept, we clue them in.”

  Jane nodded. A new way to handle parasites sounded like a useful social skill, but he was presumably talking about marine rather than human worms. What “H and G” stood for, however, was a total mystery.

  “Would you like to see my clips?” she said, handing over the sheaf of material she and Carla had dummied up together at Sudden Printing, pasting Jane’s byline over the pseudonym Carla had used when freelancing for other magazines. Jane had skimmed the titles of the articles, which she had found oddly evocative: “Out of Africa: Is There Nile Perch in Your Future?”; “Abalone without You: A West Coast Resource Threatened with Extinction”; and the slightly heretical “In Cod We Trust.” She had actually read “Trash Fish: Underutilized Species Can Be Gourmet Treats” and discovered that the Canadians especially had high hopes for various worms, barnacles, and fish that looked like an aquatic Quasimodo or the Elephant Man.

  “I’ll take a look at these later,” Norman said without conviction. He placed the stack of photocopies between two large messy piles of papers so they formed a little bridge and made one large messy pile. “If I get you started right away, do you think you could give me a thousand words on Alaska halibut? I can sell a page right next to it.” He plucked a Post-it note from his computer screen and examined it with a puzzled expression, then moved it to his phone, where he reapplied it with a decisive gesture.

  “No problem,” said Jane. Here was her chance to close. She gave Norman Carver a serious look, leaned forward just as he had done a moment ago and said: “If we can meet the client’s editorial needs, everybody wins, right?”

  “I really appreciate your attitude,” he said. “Naturally, we’ll interview the company concerned for the story. They’re very big in halibut, and they have strong feelings about how the resource up there in Alaska should be managed.”

  “Fine,” said Jane. “Which reminds me, I was speaking with the Norwegian contingent at the seafood show. They were excited about having Carla come over and do that cod story. Would you like me to handle that?”

  “I’ve been concerned about that trip,” he said. “They’d worked up a whole itinerary, and of course, with the Norwegians paying, it seems a shame not to extend the magazine’s editorial reach.”

  “Word is the Norwegians are going to be tripling their U.S. promotion budget,” Jane said with a knowing air. “I think it might be a good idea to get over there right away.” She paused, and then just to make sure he got it—it was hard to tell how much he got and how much he pretended to get—she said, “They might buy some ads from you.”

  “I had thought of taking that trip myself,” he said.

  “Of course, you couldn’t possibly write,” Jane said as if it were somehow on a par with making the coffee or sweeping out the place. “With business the way it is, I imagine you’re really working hard on the big sales push. Your special talents are needed elsewhere.”

  “My wife and I enjoyed a lovely free trip to New Zealand,” he said. “It is one of the nice perks attached to this business. We went in July, though, which is winter there. That’s when the hoki are harvested, so I didn’t have much choice. But they aren’t into central heating down there. It was cold. And my wife found the food disappointing.”

  “Well, Norway in winter might be interesting,” said Jane. “I think it’s okay as long as you’re inside. I don’t know what it would be like on the deck of a boat out there above the Arctic circle. And I understand seagull eggs are a great delicacy there. Maybe they’ll be in season.”

  Norman took this in and looked thoughtful for a moment. Then he said, “Perhaps you should go ahead and take that trip.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  From the magazine’s offices Jane drove to the Fremont Bridge and waited in line outside the Bleitz Funeral Home because the bridge was up. A tugboat pulling a barge with a stack of containers and somebody’s tall yacht sailed through the channel, and the two halves of the bridge went back down again.

  She wasn’t really in the mood for another session of fish school, but she decided to get it over with. Besides, Carla was eager for the debriefing.

  Jane drove along Leary Way past a microbrewery, lots of industrial businesses, and several boatyards to Carla’s residential neighborhood, where she lived in a basement apartment underneath a big white house.

  Basement apartments, some of them illegal, were a Seattle staple, and Jane had found the idea depressing. They sounded damp and cold, with the ghosts of old garden tools and broken croquet sets haunting the place, and the sound of the landlord’s feet clomping around overhead all day. However, Carla’s apartment, she had been pleased to learn on her last visit, was quite pleasant.

  Jane walked on stepping-stones through the grass in the side yard and down the concrete steps that led to a blue door with a brass lobster knocker and rapped firmly.

  Carla opened the door and peered out with her glassy green eyes into the light. “How did it go with Norm?” she said. “Come on in.”

  Although the place seemed murky, there was an inviting sofa with lots of printed cushions and a big coffee table and a couple of chairs. Green light filtered through hanging ferns from high rectangular windows, giving Jane the feeling she was under water. As she sat down, she noticed all the cushions were in tropical fish prints. Perhaps any moment now bubbles would float out of Carla’s mouth.

  “He bought it,” said Jane. “I got the Norwegian trip. But our first assignment is a thousand words on Alaska halibut.”

  She had expected Carla to act pleased, since she was getting some freelance ghost work while she looked for a new job. But instead she looked hurt. “Did he say anything about me?” she said.

  “No, not really,” said Jane, realizing she was dealing with grief. “He’s probably ashamed of himself. He knows you’re irrep
laceable.” Carla brightened just a little.

  “After all,” Jane continued in a reassuring tone, “the clips were all yours, so really he’s replacing you with you. I can’t imagine there are many people who could step in there and get the job.”

  Carla gave a bleak little smile. “Let me pull my files on Norwegian cod. And on Alaska halibut. You might want to borrow my multilingual fish dictionary, too, but be careful with it.” She got up and went over to a collection of cardboard boxes clustered around her desk. Jane could just see her lugging those boxes tearfully to the car after the ax had fallen.

  “I’ve devoted years to this industry,” she said bitterly, kneeling in front of the boxes and stirring around in them. “I feel like useless by-catch.”

  Jane, who had had a great many jobs, always felt it was a mistake to identify too much with your work. “Any new job leads?” she said in a cheerful voice.

  “Well,” said Carla, “I went to the Women’s Seafood Network monthly dinner last night. I networked a lot. I fact, I was Networker of the Night.”

  “You were?” said Jane. “What’s that?” Whatever it was, it sounded grim and like nothing related to easy social intercourse.

  “I was the seventh person to shake the hand of the secret networker,” Carla said proudly. “It was a woman who sells marine insurance. I won a species identification handbook. Anyway, I put out the word I was looking.”

  “That’s good,” said Jane, imagining a dreary gathering of Carla clones, vestal virgins of fish, all draped with fish jewelry. “You must know tons of people. I bet you’ll find something soon.”

  “Oh, sure,” said Carla, sounding unsure about it. “After all, I’m one of the leading fish journalists in the country. People in the industry take me seriously.”

  Jane remembered Carla rushing around the salmon reception, bothering everyone. No one seemed to take her seriously there. But then Jane found it hard to take fish itself seriously. She supposed she’d better learn to if she was going to pose as an eminent fish journalist.

  “Listen, Carla,” she said, “what does ‘H and G’ mean? Norm was talking about that.”

  “Headed and gutted,” said Carla, frowning at Jane’s appalling ignorance.

  Jane tried to commit it to memory. “I hope I’ll be able to carry this off,” she said.

  Carla, defensive, said: “It took me years to learn the business.”

  Jane tried to look humble for Carla’s benefit, but actually she was feeling smug. She was sure she’d be able to fake it. She realized that Carla had an awesome store of fish knowledge, but her own social skills were superior. When all else failed, Jane usually managed to talk her way in or out of anything.

  Back home, she made herself an espresso in her new machine. She had justified buying it, despite her shaky finances, after learning about the heavy markup on all the coffee sold on Seattle street corners. The biggest mover, a tall latte, espresso with lots of hot milk, fetched around two bucks and apparently cost the barista around a quarter to make.

  She took great satisfaction in tamping down the coffee in its little stainless-steel cup and pulling the handle over to one side, then watching the double stream of coffee come out into a little white demitasse cup, giving the kitchen the smell of Italy.

  Just as she finished and flipped the grounds into the garbage disposal, the phone rang. Coffee in hand, she went into the hall to answer it. It was Norman Carver, who announced that an itinerary and some tickets from SAS had arrived in his office.

  “I can give them to you later, when we see the Putnam brothers, those halibut guys,” he said. “We’re meeting them for a drink at Chinook’s this evening. Did I tell you? I figure I can sell them half a page.”

  He hadn’t told her, but Jane just said, “That’s fine.” She had hoped she wouldn’t have to continue her fishy charade any more than was necessary. She’d try to get her hands on the airplane tickets first, in case she disgraced herself by her ignorance of halibut and he decided to take the trip himself.

  She also had no idea what Chinook’s was, other than remembering vaguely from her Pacific Northwest youth that it was a kind of salmon. She’d call Carla.

  Carla gave her a brace of questions to ask and provided her with a few additional halibut facts. It was hard for Jane not to let her mind wander. There seemed to be some issue about how the resource was managed, short openings and high prices meaning that a few times a year a million boats went out and grabbed as much as they could for twenty-four hours, so that all the fresh halibut came to market at once, and the rest of the year it was frozen, only they were changing all that now.

  “So who is it you’re meeting?” Carla said with the forlorn air of someone who wasn’t being invited to a high school dance.

  “Their name is Putnam,” said Jane. “You know them?”

  Even over the phone, Jane could hear Carla’s tongue click in derision. “I’m afraid they are very poor representatives of the industry,” she said primly. “That’s all I’m prepared to say for now.”

  As Carla drew in a breath to tell her more than she wanted to know, Jane rushed in and said: “How about if I just tape the interview and you can write it up?”

  “That’ll work,” said Carla. “Just let them talk. They have a lot of theories, and they can get nasty when people don’t agree with everything they say.”

  Jane managed to cut her off again and ask what Chinook’s was. Chinook’s, it appeared, was a restaurant inside the Fishermen’s Terminal complex on Salmon Bay.

  After she hung up, Jane went into the little office across the hall. There was a tape recorder in the closet there, left over from Uncle Harold’s day, and Jane thought she’d better make sure it had batteries.

  In the office, she felt that something was different, but she wasn’t quite sure what. Then she realized the air was strange somehow. There was a very odd smell here. It was familiar and reminded her vaguely of childhood, but she couldn’t place it.

  A glance at the desk gave Jane the impression that the papers there—just some letters and bills—had been moved. She told herself she was imagining it all and took a look around the room, then felt a stab of fear.

  The top drawer of the file cabinet in the corner was hanging out. She hadn’t left it that way. She had opened that drawer only once, some months ago when she was making a general inspection after first moving in. The drawer had been empty.

  Jane went slowly through the house for more signs of invasion, telling herself she must have pulled out that drawer herself. The television, VCR and CD player were all where they belonged. She calmed down and went up into the bedroom and looked to see if her jewelry was all there. It was.

  Jane sat on the side of the bed and tried to remember pulling out that drawer. She thought for just a second about calling the police. But what would she tell them? Somehow she didn’t think that when she told them someone had opened an empty drawer and moved the phone bill a few inches, they’d rush right over and dust for fingerprints.

  She walked back downstairs, wondering how anyone could get in. She had thought the place was pretty secure. Maybe she’d get an alarm system installed. She hated the idea that life in Seattle, a town that had always seemed so peaceful, required that kind of siege mentality, but she knew that lots of people here on Capitol Hill had alarm systems.

  The problem was, she couldn’t really afford it right now—she’d been trying to hold on to as much of the money she’d received for her last case as she could—but she could at least find out how much money it would cost.

  She didn’t like going back into the office. The space felt tainted. She decided she’d go ahead and get that alarm system no matter how much it cost. She hated feeling this vulnerable to intruders. Had she scared them away when she’d come in the front door? Would they have ripped her off if she had come in later?

  She went to the closet and opened the door and heard a horrible half-human yell. A figure came rushing out of the closet toward her. She felt hands
in some kind of cloth gloves pushing at her face and smelled that smell much more strongly. Now she knew it was camphor, the smell of moth-balls.

  Letting out a halfhearted scream, she landed on her back and felt the thing that had rushed out of the closet scrabbling over her. Jane felt as though it were an animal. No, it was human, she told herself, logic struggling through the fear, her heart beating hard and fast, but what kind of a human being was hard to say.

  She tried to prop herself up on her elbows and looked up. The thing was looming over her in a half crouch. It was wearing a ratty old fur coat, flapping with strips of torn skin. The effect was grotesque and hellish.

  More frightening, however, was the fact that the creature was wearing a navy blue ski mask, so its head looked like a little knob coming out of the pile of matted fur.

  Jane tried to scramble up. She felt at a terrible disadvantage being on the floor. “Just go,” she said, trying and failing to sound calm. “Just go, right now.”

  She wanted the thing to answer her so she would hear a human voice come out of it. That initial cry, when she’d disturbed it in its lair, a mixture of fear and anger, had been frightening. She wanted to look at its face, see the human eyes there. She had a vague impression of them blinking, but fear kept her from looking at it directly.

  A foot came out from under the fur and pushed her back down by her shoulder. The foot was wearing a scruffy-looking canvas tennis shoe in a style that could have belonged to either sex. That tennis shoe and the accompanying blue denim leg of a pair of jeans finally made Jane sure that she was dealing with a person.

  The figure jumped back, as though it were frightened. She decided not to startle it. She propped herself up on her elbows and pushed back along the floor, away from it. “Go!” she said, watching it back out of the room, hearing crazy feet running down the hall, finally hearing the front door slam.