Cold Smoked

by K. K. Beck

  “Jack,” she began, “I understand—”

  “The thing is, I met someone else.”

  “I understand perfectly, Jack. I hope you’ll be very happy.”

  “You’d like her a lot,” said Jack. “She’s a therapist down here in L.A.”

  “I’m happy for you, Jack,” said Jane, wishing he’d just get off the phone.

  “She says it’s important that I don’t have any unfinished business in my life,” he said.

  “I’m sure she’s right,” said Jane. “So let’s consider it finished. It was great, and you’re fabulous, too.”

  “You sound a little hostile,” he said. “What I hear you saying is—”

  “What you hear me saying is good-bye,” Jane replied. “Listen, I really am in a hurry.”

  “Laura’s a very up-front person,” he said. “As a matter of fact, she’d like to talk to you. She wants to make sure no one gets hurt.”

  “If I want to talk to Laura, I’ll come down there and pay her ninety bucks an hour,” Jane said impatiently. “Really, I’m sorry, but I’ve got to go.”

  “You are special,” he said.

  Gunther, now buttoned up in a raincoat and carrying his briefcase, came into the hall and looked pointedly at his watch. Jane made a circular gesture with her hand, to indicate she was trying to get the caller to wrap it up.

  “Laura’s right here,” said Jack.

  “I hope you are both very happy,” Jane said, trying not to imagine Jack and Laura calling from bed in the nude. “I’m glad you told me about Laura. It was great. Good-bye and good luck. And Jack, I don’t think we need to talk again, okay?”

  She put down the phone. “Damn,” she said. Why hadn’t she had the presence of mind to dump him sooner? She hadn’t followed her instincts. It was partly because she’d still been fond of Jack and looked forward to his visits.

  “Is everything all right?” said Gunther, looking concerned.

  “Yes, of course,” she said, picking up her overnight bag and thinking what a hash she had made of the whole affair. She wondered if Laura were younger and prettier, then consoled herself with the thought that she sounded like a meddling ditz, wanting to get on the phone and counsel Jane about her loss. Good luck to both of them.

  It was raining, and the windshield wipers made a noisy, clacking sound. Gunther was silent. She was sure he had heard enough to figure out she’d just been dumped. It was humiliating, but she wasn’t about to cry on his shoulder or tell him her side of it. Instead she mustered what dignity she could and acted all brisk and businesslike.

  “I think I should tour Putnam’s plant first and then we’ll do dinner,” she said. “I’ll see if we can’t build a little rapport before I bring up blue salmon.”

  Gunther nodded. “Try to get him to take you to dinner at the hotel. I understand the food is very good.”

  Jane thought this sounded like a cheap move—as if she would be implying that the two of them could pop up to her room right after dessert.

  “All right,” she said. “Once I have his attention, and run blue salmon by him, what approach do you suggest I take?”

  “I’m interested in finding out more about his relationship with his brother.”

  “From what I can tell,” said Jane, “Don is kind of nuts, and Bob keeps an eye on him. Sort of a protective older brother thing. Covers for him. Lets him tag along.”

  Gunther frowned. “Donald is the one obsessed with fish farming. Robert may share this obsession and simply be more crafty. His desire to get involved with the farmed sector is rather suspicious.”

  Gunther explained that the sabotage itself was fairly simple, requiring tampering with bags of feed supplement, adding a chemical. “This has been done at the farm. The manufacturers have satisfied us that it has nothing to do with them, and we have discovered tampered products in storage areas at various farms around the world. The problem is, the fish appear normal as they are swimming around. It isn’t until they are gutted that you know the flesh is blue, and by then the perpetrator is long gone. In any case, these are remote places, with very little security. The farmers look out for seals or birds or human poachers, but no one has paid much attention to storage areas where the supplies are kept.”

  “How sophisticated do you have to be to come up with whatever makes the fish blue in the first place?” said Jane. “I can’t imagine Don as the mad scientist in the lab coming up with synthetic compounds.”

  Gunther clicked the tip of his tongue in a European, “no, you’ve got it wrong” gesture. “Drug dealers often have a working knowledge of chemistry. As for the method involved, there’s still some question about the formula.”

  “Well, if you think Don has been doing this, why am I schmoozing up Bob?”

  “Because Bob is attracted to you. This gives us an opening. It is my belief that a saboteur like this one secretly wants to tell the world how clever he has been. And if he thought this would make him seem dashing and clever to a woman, that is who he might tell.”

  “Am I going to be wired for sound today?”

  “No, we’ll do that when we think the time is right. These things take time.”

  Jane had a mad vision in which she got the whole story—Bob chuckling into his drink and gloating about how he and his loony brother had run around the world turning salmon blue—and she wasn’t wired up to tape it. She started to say something, then had an unpleasant vision of Gunther fumbling under her clothes with adhesive tape. She’d do it his way. Besides, she found the whole scenario incredibly unlikely. It was better not to think about the twenty thousand dollars and be grateful for the generous per diem he was paying her.

  Anacortes was a quick drive up the interstate and a short run on Highway 20 across a bridge to Fidalgo Island. The town was bounded on three sides by the waters of Puget Sound and had a newish downtown with a Kentucky Fried Chicken and Safeway and various strip malls, all of which looked as if it could be anywhere in the country.

  Farther down the main drag, Commercial Street, was the old part of town, including a lot of nicely restored Victorian houses and plain, sturdy commercial buildings in weathered brick. The ferry to the San Juan Islands left from here, and there seemed to be a lot of businesses catering to tourists: galleries, bookstores, gift shops and T-shirt boutiques.

  The hotel was just as Gunther had described it. In her last cases she had spent a lot of time in depressing motels with cottage-cheese ceilings and cigarette burns on the plastic furniture. Jane got a perverse satisfaction from the fact that Gunther was hunkered down in one of those places, while she was staying in a classy auberge with soft, sponge-painted walls and lots of pretty old woodwork.

  She had called Bob Putnam the day before, and he’d suggested she call him after she checked in. He was in his office and sounded pleased to hear from her.

  “This place is a zoo right now,” he said. “We’ve got a delegation of important Japanese buyers coming through, and my plant manager is all tied up. Dinner is great, but maybe we can reschedule the plant tour.”

  “No problem,” said Jane, thrilled that she’d avoided a chilly visit, during which she would be expected to admire the heading and gutting equipment and the pollock roe separator. “I’ve got plenty to do this afternoon.” She had her cover stories ready and Gunther’s memo in her hand, but Putnam didn’t seem interested.

  “I wouldn’t mind trying the restaurant at my hotel,” she said, “I understand it’s pretty good.”

  “It sure is,” he said. “I’ll be over around six.”

  After she hung up, she called Gunther at the motel across the street and told him she was set for dinner. “I might wander around the town a little,” she said. “Look like I’m researching my story.”

  “Do what you want,” he said. “I cannot risk making an appearance, the town is too small. I shall be here in room seventeen all afternoon.”

  She felt suddenly sorry for him. “Do you have something decent to read?” she said.
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br />   “Thank you. Yes. I have a book. And I will also use the time to do some reports on my computer,” he said in his usual stiff way, not acknowledging that she’d shown him a little sympathy.

  She took a walk up and down Commercial Street in the light rain, finding the profusion of gift shops and all that careful restoration strangely depressing. There had obviously been a massive civic push here, and the result was a pretty classy upgrade of an old downtown that could have died. Up and down the street, buildings had been dressed up with historical murals, and weedy planters revealed it must look very pretty in summer, full of petunias and pansies. But now, off season in the middle of the week, it was cold and deserted, with no one to appreciate the effort.

  She retreated to her hotel room, pretty and pastel but with a gloomy light from the gray muffled sky coming from the windows, took a nice hot bath in the deep tub, tried to read for a while and then decided to mope and wallow a little about Jack Lawson.

  She tried to remind herself that what had seemed awfully attractive in the rural setting where they’d met hadn’t transferred too well to urban life. Let’s face it, she thought, Jack looked a lot better on a horse than he did in town. The injection of psychobabble into his drawling, sexy voice hadn’t been an improvement, either. She supposed it was all for the best and told herself that Jack probably wasn’t her last lover. Somehow this thought didn’t seem particularly comforting, either. Maybe it was time to find the last one and hang on to him.

  Bob Putnam called her from the lobby promptly at six. They met in the dining room, an attractive aquamarine space with a high ceiling and a view of a small, walled garden. Jane sat across the table from him and studied Putnam’s bland but amiable face.

  She decided to launch right into it. “What’s the industry saying about the blue salmon incident?” she asked.

  He smiled. “These marketing geniuses don’t seem to know which way to play it. I got a fax from Amanda Braithwaite saying that it isn’t toxic, they’re trying to find out more, but she also said that it’s a prototype product and still unavailable commercially.” He shrugged. “You never know what’s going to be hot. Remember when monkfish was a trash fish? Now it costs an arm and a leg.”

  “I wonder who figured out how to get the fish blue,” said Jane. “Don’t you think that was kind of clever?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe it’s a mutation. Listen, there’s something I’ve got to tell you. This Gunther character. After our little confrontation that night in Bergen, I made a few calls, checked into him. He’s not what he seems.”

  “What?”

  “That company in Zurich says they never heard of him.”

  “Really?” said Jane. Should she tell him she’d called Zurich and they seemed to know who he was? Maybe Putnam had been a little more thorough. The woman she’d talked to had certainly acted as if there was a Gunther Kessler on the payroll. Either the man she knew as Gunther had simply expropriated the identity of the real Gunther Kessler or the company policy was to neither confirm nor deny the identity of its employees. Another possibility was that Putnam was mistaken somehow. Or that he was lying. But why?

  Keeping the last possibility in mind, she decided to play it perfectly innocently. “Then who is he?” she said. “He seemed to be accepted by all those salmon people.”

  “Beats me,” said Putnam. “Maybe he’s the mad genius behind the mysterious blue salmon.”

  He broke off as a waiter arrived with their drinks, then leaned forward in a confidential manner. “You said he was checking into the death of that little demo girl? Did he tell you that?”

  “No, it was just a rumor I heard,” said Jane.

  Putnam looked thoughtful. “Interesting. Did you ever find out how he got into your hotel room?”

  “No,” she said. “To tell you the truth, it was all so unpleasant I just wanted to forget about it.”

  “Those electronic hotel key things are supposed to be pretty secure,” said Putnam. “If he can get through them, he could easily get into that hotel room where the girl got shot. Was he in Seattle for that seafood show?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Jane, who knew that he was. He’d seen her singing in the Fountain Room.

  He shook his head. “It’s pretty weird. I was kind of shocked when he turned up at the Four Seasons the other day. Are you sure he isn’t stalking you?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said, although once she had thought just that. She smiled at Putnam. “If you hadn’t told me he was in Seattle, I wouldn’t have known he was in town.”

  “Well, just be careful,” he said. “That’s all I have to say.”

  “I will,” she said. Maybe Putnam had a point. She realized she’d decided Gunther was all right because he’d misted up at “O soave fanciulla.” Maybe her judgment was a little shaky.

  She ordered salmon, thinking it would give her another chance to reintroduce the topic of the blue version, but Putnam took control of the conversation.

  “So tell me about yourself,” he said. “To be honest, you sure don’t remind me of those Women’s Seafood Network types.”

  “Like Carla Elroy?” said Jane. She smiled and said bitchily, “The women in this industry seem to wear tons of that fish jewelry, don’t they.”

  He laughed. “The guys, too. My brother’s got that fishhook tie tack.”

  “How is your brother?” said Jane. “He’s sure got some interesting theories about aquaculture.”

  Putnam laughed again. “Don’t pay any attention to Don. He’s always been kind of eccentric, ever since he was a kid.”

  Jane nodded. “What does he do for you in the business?”

  “Oh, a little of this, a little of that,” Putnam said vaguely. “The thing about relatives is they’re always loyal. It doesn’t hurt to have someone around you can trust and who always wants the best for you.”

  “That’s very touching,” said Jane. “A lot of people can’t get along with their relatives at all. In fact, there are plenty of disloyal relatives and jealous siblings and horrible blowups in family businesses.”

  Putnam put down his fork. “We’re different, Jane. There’s just the two of us. Our parents died when we were young, and we were kind of shifted around from place to place together. We’ve been through a lot. It wasn’t always easy for Don. He had learning disabilities, trouble in school. I did what I could.”

  Jane nodded attentively, encouraging him to continue with her silence and her eyes—wide open and receptive.

  “Anyway,” Putnam went on, resuming eating, “I figure I’ll always look out for him. He’d do anything for me.”

  “He’s lucky to have a brother like you,” said Jane.

  “To be honest, I think he’s the reason I was able to clean up my own act and get through rehab.” He took on a slightly smug look of someone who knew that redemption, especially where substance abuse was concerned, was chic. Boasting about one’s rehabilitation could mean “I am interesting but no longer dangerous.”

  Jane inadvertently glanced at his wineglass. He caught the gesture and laughed. “No, booze wasn’t the problem. But back in the eighties, like a lot of people, I got into coke. There was a lot of it going around the industry. No one knew how bad it was for you.”

  “I’m glad you emerged okay,” she said. For good measure, she threw in a little talk show host stroke. “It’s really great that you were able to admit you had a problem and had the courage to change.” He acknowledged the compliment with a humble little nod.

  “Did Don have a problem, too?” she asked. Don on coke was an awesome thought.

  “No, thank God! But like I say, if it hadn’t been for him, I might never have cleaned up my act. He needed me. I’ve always known I have to be there for him.”

  He didn’t say anything about his brother having served time on cocaine trafficking charges. Jane didn’t know quite what to make of Bob Putnam, but she reminded herself that she didn’t really have to come up with any conclusions. That was Gunther’s job
, always supposing Gunther was Gunther.

  Putnam’s suggestion that he was some kind of impostor brought up an alarming question. Would she get paid for the work she was doing now?

  Once again Bob Putnam shifted the conversation back to her. He asked her where she came from and what she’d done and how she’d gotten into the fish business. She gave him the basic biographical details, fudging a little on the fish issue. His manner was that of someone on a first date, politely getting to know the other person, looking for things in common, without flirtatiousness but with a twinkly-eyed sense of interest that seemed to say it might develop into something more later.

  After dinner he said, “I have an idea! Let’s swing by the plant now. Those Japanese guys should be gone, and I’ve got a third shift running tonight. I can show you around. I think you’ll be interested in some of our specialized cutting equipment. We can do amazing things, portion control–wise.”

  “Sounds great,” she said, trying to sound convincing. “And don’t forget to show me that pollock roe separator,” she added enthusiastically.

  They drove a few blocks down toward K Street, then turned toward the water. The plant was an old brick building with a chain-link fence around it, a loading dock with a jumble of big plastic boxes that Jane had learned were called fish totes, and a forklift parked at one side.

  “Used to be a cannery when this place was really jumping a few generations back,” Putnam said. “We’ve got a bigger plant up in Kodiak, but I think you’ll agree we’ve used the space wisely. We push some really nice high-value product out of here.”

  He pulled into a slot marked “B. Putnam,” next to one marked “D. Putnam,” and took out a bunch of keys to let her into a little hall with linoleum floors. “Come into the office,” he said. “I’ll just check the fax and the voice mail, and then we can suit up.”

  Jane smiled and thought, Oh, hell, another set of gum boots that don’t fit, another lab coat with arms down to my knees and another hair net.

  He gestured her to a guest chair while he sat behind the desk, punched some buttons and, smiling at her, listened to his messages. The fax machine had produced an overseas order.