Thicker Than Water (A Leo Waterman Mystery)

by G. M. Ford

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright ©2012 by G.M. Ford

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN-13: 9781612183787

  ISBN-10: 1612183786

  For Arnie

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  About the Author

  My old man was right. From the very beginning, he understood that leaving a pile of money to a guy like me just wasn’t a good idea. It didn’t take a genius to see I wasn’t the sort who’d stash the cash and then trot off to work the following morning. That part was easy. I’d been a slacker since birth. As far as I was concerned, Manual Labor was a former governor of California.

  What took insight on his part was realizing that I also wasn’t the type to fritter away ninety percent of it on whiskey and women and then waste the rest. To his credit, he recognized that I was moored somewhere between lazy and crazy and thus my draconian trust fund had sprung to life.

  I think it was the paper route that sealed the deal. I was fourteen when I signed up to deliver the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. My first job other than mowing lawns. He tried to talk me out of it. Took me into his office, a dark sanctum from which I was otherwise forbidden, and put on his most ominous Big Bill Waterman scowl. Said it was a hell of a responsibility…neither rain nor sleet nor dead of night, and all of that…but I was too stoked to listen to reason and eventually badgered him into signing the parental paperwork.

  I lasted a week and a half. A particularly bad spate of weather combined with a persistent head cold quickly doused my ardor. He ended up having his driver/bodyguard deliver the papers until they could get somebody else to take over the route. Early on, he told his cronies, it had cost him three grand. By the time of his death, that accursed paper route had supposedly cost him a house on the Amalfi coast.

  So he doled out the ill-gotten bundle with the stipulation that I didn’t see the first installment until I reached the ripe old age of forty-five. Wasn’t like he had a wealth of options. I was, after all, his only child. The sole issue, as it were. What else was he going to do? Leave the pile to the cat? Despite his well-founded misgivings regarding my work ethic, in the end, blood turned out to be thicker than Little Friskies.

  At that point, I’d been attending the University of Washington for the better part of seven years and was inching triumphantly toward full junior status. He must have figured the only way to avoid perpetual tuition and a lifetime roommate was to find me something useful to do. As I spent a great deal of my free time reading detective novels, he just naturally figured that’s what I’d like to do with my life, which probably explains why the he pulled a thousand strings and finagled me a King County Private Investigator’s license.

  As a private eye, I had my moments. I plied the trade for the better part of twenty years, made a decent living, got myself in the papers on a number of occasions, made the front page once or twice, and, I’d like to think anyway, managed to help quite a few people in their times of need.

  Being a PI is a touchy business. People hire private investigators only out of desperation. When all else has failed, when the cops have moved on to something more current, when your friends are sick of hearing you bellyache about it, only then do people go out looking for a gumshoe. Most of the time they’re not even clear what it is they want. Somewhere in their hearts they know there’s virtually nothing a PI can do that can’t be better accomplished by a modern police department. It’s just common sense, but that’s not the point. The point is that if they’re ever going to be able to look at themselves in the mirror again or ever get a good night’s sleep, then they’re going to have to be able to tell themselves that they’ve done absolutely everything they possibly could. That’s where private dicks come into it. We’re kinda the last bent straw in the milkshake of their lives.

  My forty-fifth birthday rolled around about six months back and the timing couldn’t have been better. The advent of no-fault divorce combined with the digital revolution had reduced my calling to little more than data input. As skiptracing and bail recovery held little appeal, I found myself at a middle-aged crossroads. Had it not been for my old man’s long-ago insight, I’d probably be working in a Burger King by now.

  Instead, I was stretched out on a chaise lounge in the backyard of the family manse, a cold one hard by my elbow, kicking back, enjoying the intermittent sunshine, watching the remnants of my father’s political machine stumble and cavort around a pile of fresh topsoil like decadent earth trolls.

  Big Bill Waterman’s political empire hadn’t survived his passing. Before he was cold in the ground, several of his closest confidants were indicted and later convicted on a laundry list of charges ranging from fraudulent appropriation of public funds to immigration-law violations. City and state government spent a decade and over three million dollars trying to wrest his considerable estate back into the public pocket—and out of mine—but failed miserably. Even in death, he was slicker than they were.

  The local press had a field day with it. For the better part of a month after his death, his face adorned section A of both papers, as the newshounds sought to sell papers and grease the slow-turning wheels of justice. All of which made it kind of hard for me to mourn my father’s passing. The guy in the paper—the one they accused of all those improprieties—that big, scowling visage bore scant resemblance to the man I’d always called Dad. To me, my dad was just my dad. All the hoopla made it so I wasn’t quite sure which one of them was real and which one wasn’t, which of them deserved my sadness and which deserved his fate…or either…or neither…or both.

  There weren’t many of his old cronies left anymore. Most of them had passed away. All that remained were a couple of minor functionaries who’d managed to avoid the dragnet, the last of the crew of drunks and reprobates for whom I still felt a certain sense of personal responsibility. No telling what course their lives might have taken had they not become entwined with my old man and his backroom dealings.

  Back when I was a full-time PI, I used to invent work for them. By that time, they’d succumbed to serious substance abuse and perennial homelessness and needed all the help they could get. Besides, if you could keep them conscious, they made excellent surveillance operatives. In urban society, the homeless and destitute have become virtually invisible. We treat them like some kind of nasty apparition and subconsciously train ourselves to look the other way. They could loiter outside a building for days without anyone taking the slightest notice.

  These days I find them odd jobs whenever I can. Today it was gardening, replacing a couple of ancient rhododendrons that had perished over the winter. Coupla days back I’d stopped by the Eastlake Zoo, told Manny, the daytime bartender, that I was looking for a little landscaping help on Saturday. Free beer and a shovel. A little pocket money on the way home. Tell the boys if they happened to stop by. Manny picked his teeth with a matchbook and said he’d pass it on.

  Five of them showed up. Late, drunk, and in shambles, but that was to be expected. George Paris was one of the originals. Somewhere around seventy now, he had a face like a satchel and a body to match. G
eorge used to be a prominent local banker. One of the cadre of financial specialists who hatched the serpentine scheme to launder my old man’s money. Just far enough down the authority ladder to avoid criminal prosecution, he’d been summarily cast adrift by the bank, divorced by a well-to-do wife, and jettisoned into the streets like a discarded gum wrapper. For the past twenty years, he’d bounced from gutter to gutter. Blown by the wind, fueled by an ocean of cheap booze and bitter memories, he’d managed to maintain both his keen intelligence and his acidic sense of humor.

  Ralph Batista wasn’t so lucky. Bleary-eyed and thin as a wire, he’d been a midlevel official for the Port of Seattle when my old man died and the excrement met the proverbial cooling device. Served short time in the county lockup on a plethora of charges relating to the smuggling of human cargo through the port and then was likewise cast upon the streets. The years hadn’t been as kind to Ralph as they’d been to George. Decades of self-abuse had cut his functional IQ in half. Ralph wandered through the world, looking for his next drink in a constant state of wonder and semi-confusion. If it weren’t for George looking out for him, he’d undoubtedly have been dead by now.

  The other three I’d picked up along the way. Billy Bob Fung had a thick Tennessee drawl and skittered through his days in a state of mild amusement, nodding and smiling at everything that went on around him. If you’d put a gun to his head, cocked it, and told him you were about to blow his brains out, he’d have grinned that gap-toothed grin of his and said, “Yeah, man. Yeah. Go for it.”

  Large Marge and Red Lopez were regulars at the Eastlake Zoo and two of the more sentient examples of an otherwise insensate crowd. The kind of people who reminded you that it took only a couple of bad decisions to start your life circling the bowl. That the line between the middle class and out on your ass was thinner than a piece of Denny’s bacon.

  Marge was, as advertised, large. Almost as tall as I was. A former working girl, she’d been reduced to penury by a series of bad relationships and a serious heroin jones. You wanted to end up with your front teeth in your shirt pocket, you just put your hand on Marge somewhere she didn’t want a hand put. Apparently Marge would be rendering no further services.

  Red was an Inuit from somewhere up in the Northwest Territories and a sad example of the genetic intolerance to alcohol so common among his people. Four drinks and he was either on all fours barking at the ants or out stone-cold, drooling among the peanut shells. With Red, you didn’t have to wonder what his problem was. It was his penchant for exposing himself in public places that most seriously curtailed his career opportunities and so vexed the local authorities. His habit of whipping it out and asking “Ain’t it a beauty?” proved to be a social faux pas too serious to surmount, earning him repeated stretches behind bars and a level-one sex-offender designation. He and I had reached an accord. I wouldn’t show him mine, if he wouldn’t show me his. So far, so good.

  They had an interesting approach to landscaping work. First they drank all the beer. Forty-eight of them. Quick as you could say, “Ticonderoga,” they were up to their ankles in empties and the cooler was bare. Suitably fueled, they bent to the pick-and-shovel work, digging up the dead rhody and casting it aside. By the time they finished the exhumation, Billy Bob Fung was on his lips, facedown in the loam, snoring softly. The other four dragged him out of the way as they bantered and bickered their way through the planting of the first new bush.

  That’s when things took a sudden sloppy turn. Probably my fault. I should have seen it coming. Lots of people in this world you wouldn’t want to have a gun. Some you wouldn’t want driving cars. Still others you wouldn’t want making the final decision on anything at all, no matter how minor. These guys…these guys you wouldn’t even give a garden hose. Not with water anyway. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking.

  By the time I pulled my mind from the many faces of my old man and my eyes from the slate-gray clouds moving in from the West, all three of them were breaded like veal cutlets. Head to toe. Covered with mud. Soaking wet. Brown M&M’s with eyes.

  Ralph slapped his muddy hands together and reckoned how he’d just step inside the house and clean himself up a mite.

  I came out of the lawn chair like a Scud missile. “Nobody’s going inside the house,” I announced.

  The cleaning service had made its weekly appearance yesterday and I had no intention of letting these maniacs trash the joint. Bad enough that I felt guilty about not doing my own housework. If I had to have it done twice in the same week I may have been forced to take holy orders, pledge myself to poverty, and that kind of stuff.

  I pointed at the other rhododendron. “Plant that damn thing,” I said. “I’ll go inside and get you all some clean clothes.”

  “We’re getting a little parched too,” George grumbled to my back as I headed for the house.

  “Plant it,” I growled over my shoulder.

  I was gone for the better part of ten minutes. All the way up to the attic, where I’d come across the old trunk several weeks back. I couldn’t keep a smile from creasing my lips as I hoisted the steamer up onto my shoulder and tiptoed down the narrow stairs, through the kitchen and out the back door. Sigmund Freud would have had a field day with me.

  They’d managed to muscle the bush into the ground. The poor thing looked like it had survived a hurricane. The beleaguered shrub leaned east at about a thirty-degree angle. Leaves littered the ground around the base. I made a mental note to straighten it out after they left. Wouldn’t want to hurt their feelings. They were hosing each other off as I came out the door.

  I set the trunk on the back steps, flipped the brass fasteners, and lifted the lid. A pair of worn leather straps prevented the lid from flopping all the way open. Inside were my father’s clothes. I guessed that his sisters must have packed them up after his funeral, expecting that I’d donate them to charity or something, but somehow I missed the memo and wasn’t aware of their existence until I stumbled upon them while poking around the attic one rainy February afternoon.

  The sight of his tweed overcoat, rough to the hand and big enough for a four-man tent, nearly took my breath away. I stepped aside and gestured at the trunk. “Have at it,” I said.

  Ralph was too far gone to recognize his own mother. Billy Bob was down for the count. Red and Marge had never met my father, so none of them had a clue.

  George, on the other hand, knew immediately. His redrimmed eyes ran over my face like an ant colony. “These are…,” he began.

  “Yeah,” I said. “They are.”

  He sat on the step next to the trunk and stared off into space.

  Marge, Red, and Ralph rummaged through the mound of clothes like mad moles.

  For the sake of modesty, I encouraged Marge to use the back porch as a changing room. Red and Ralph shed their sodden rags right there in the backyard. After appropriating most of a tuxedo, Marge disappeared up the stairs.

  Ralph Batista naked was more than I could bear. I turned away and went back to studying the rapidly approaching weather. The spaces between the steel-gray clouds were disappearing. The wind had begun to freshen in the trees. That’s when I heard the magic words. “Ain’t it a beauty?” Red Lopez inquired.

  I cringed and studied the sky harder.

  “Leo,” George said.

  I kept my face averted. “Is he dressed yet?” I asked.

  “Leo,” George repeated.

  When I met his watery gaze, he threw his bloodshot eyes toward the corner of the house.

  She was standing on the flagstone walkway, her purse clutched in front of her with both hands, the little going-to-church hat resting atop her head like a thorny crown. All things considered, she was doing a pretty good job of pretending there weren’t two naked winos standing there on the lawn, one of them wanting to know what she thought of his prominently proffered package.

  Normally I would have been greatly amused by her discomfort. Problem was, the sight of Iris Duval meant that somewhere in the univers
e pigs had officially taken wing. The mountain had come to Mohammed, and nothing but disaster could possibly have impelled Iris Duval to come looking for me.

  Iris Duval had a disapproving mouth. The more she disapproved of something the thinner her lips got. The sight of my face had always puckered her up tight enough to stamp license plates, and today was no exception. She never said a word and never took her eyes off my face as the crew got dressed and lurched their way around toward the front of the house.

  I took her inside and invited her to sit on the sofa, asked if I could get her anything, but she just glared me off, so I left her standing in the middle of my front parlor looking out through the open door while I stuffed the crew into a cab and sent them on their way, fifty bucks apiece burning a hole in their pockets, an extra twenty to the cabbie for putting up with the singing.

  A light rain had begun to fall, darkening the pavement, hissing softly onto the magnolia leaves as I stood in the driveway and watched the cab roll out through the gate. I didn’t want to go back inside the house. Didn’t want to hear whatever it was that Iris had come thirty miles to tell me. Avoidance was a specialty of mine. You name it, I could pretend it didn’t exist. I liked to tell myself it was better than taking Prozac.

  Don’t get me wrong. I’m not claiming eternal sunshine or anything like that. I’m only human. Like most folks my age, I’ve got a long list of regrets. Things I wish had turned out differently. Things I’d like do-overs on. That’s the way life is, trial and error.

  If there was any aspect of my past that haunted me on a daily basis, however, it was Rebecca Duval, Iris’s daughter. In a couple of weeks it would be three years since we’d parted ways, and I still wasn’t “over it.” Truth be told, I didn’t want to be “over it.” The sense of longing I felt whenever I thought of her connected us in a way I didn’t understand but wasn’t prepared to abandon. Pain was something and something was better than nothing.