Thicker Than Water (A Leo Waterman Mystery)

by G. M. Ford

  In a perfect world, I could have blamed her for walking out on me. Called her a faithless ho and drunk myself to sleep at night. But what can I say? She wanted somebody with the same hopes and dreams as her own, not some overgrown kid who played at being a private cop and whose only real ambition was to live to be forty-five. Who could blame her? I could miss her, but I couldn’t blame her.

  We started back in the fifth grade. For reasons I’ll never understand the powers-that-be were determined we learn to dance. The well-rounded young person or some such tripe. So Thursdays after lunch, they’d bus Seattle Preppies like me over to Holy Names Academy to trip the light fandango with the Catholic girls. Talk about awkward. The airborne hormones were thicker than string cheese. Exhibiting great social sensitivity and savoir faire, they matched us up according to height. As Rebecca and I were both a head and a half taller than anyone else in the room, we were a natural fit. She found my clumsy attempts at dancing hilarious, and there was absolutely nothing about her that didn’t amuse or excite me, so we just kept dancing, year after year, until she walked off the floor and took the music with her.

  I took a shallow breath and started for my front door. Iris hadn’t moved. She stood on the carpet, rigid as a fencepost, her mouth thin enough to pass for a scar.

  I took my time. Moving slowly, thoroughly wiping my feet before closing the door. I swallowed a sigh, turned, and ambled her way.

  She just couldn’t resist. “Nice crowd there,” she commented.

  I’d long ago decided that life was too short to trade oneliners with Iris. We’d already said what we had to say to one another, on several occasions at great length and at top volume. No point in going over that same old pile of beans again. A tedious moment passed. The silence was deafening.

  I finally broke the spell. “What can I do for you, Iris?”

  Funny I should ask.

  “I haven’t heard from Rebecca in over a week,” she said.

  My body began to vibrate. Felt like I’d dropped a quarter into one of those old-time Magic Fingers motel beds, and was lying there waiting for my fillings to shake loose.

  I did what people do in moments like that. I tried to come up with a scenario that would explain the unexplainable. Maybe she did this. Maybe she did that. Perhaps this, perhaps that. I led a rather rich fantasy life, but nothing whatsoever came to mind.

  A day seldom passed when Rebecca didn’t speak with her mother. Usually more than once. A week was impossible. The family mythos depended upon it. The promises of deferred gratification demanded it. As the saga went, Iris had sacrificed everything for her daughter. Held down three jobs. Scrimped and saved, and then scrimped and saved some more. The undisputed queen of the single momdom, trudging onward and upward after the death of her shiftless, alcoholic husband. Putting her daughter through the University of Washington, through med school, through a pathology residency. All of it, and I mean all of it, a tribute to grit and steely feminist determination.

  “What’s Brett got to say?” I asked.

  Brett Ward. The guy Rebecca married a couple of years back. A seriously handsome rake of a guy who drove a Porsche and sold yachts for a living. Snappy dresser. Fast talker.

  Iris’s glare went halogen. “He says they had a fight. Says she walked out on him. Just packed a suitcase and left. Said she needed to get away and think. Brett says he doesn’t know where she is.” She started to add something but stopped herself.

  “You believe him?”

  “No.”

  “What else?” I prodded.

  “He came to my house looking for her. Drunk.” She made it plain that she was holding something back. I went along for the ride.

  “And?”

  “He had a gun.”

  “Really?”

  “I saw it in the waistband of his pants.”

  “What else?”

  She met my gaze. “He said he thought she’d probably come running back to you. Said he was going to come over here and find her. Drag her back home.”

  “Haven’t seen him,” I said with a glum shrug.

  “Of course you haven’t,” she scoffed. “You whipped him like a dog. He wouldn’t dare come over here and bother you.”

  I winced. Knocking Brett Ward stiff wasn’t something I was proud of. First off, it was too easy. He was drunk; I wasn’t. I was big; he wasn’t. Secondly, it was childish on both our parts. He made it a point to invite me to his bachelor party, just so he could tell his friends he had. “Hell, Bob, I even invited the big idiot.” He’d already won the girl, but just had to rub it in. Wanted to show his buddies how thoroughly he’d defeated his rival.

  Oh, I admit it. I should never have taken him up on it. I was being just as childish as he was. Worse yet, I saw trouble coming, right from the start. I could have nipped it in the bud and stopped him while he was working up the nerve. I could have walked right out of the Waterfront Restaurant and taken a cab home. But I didn’t. I let him paddle all the way up Stupid Creek. Let him get his blood in a boil to the point where he felt confident enough to take a poke at me and then walk off. I coldcocked him right in front of his friends and family. Party’s over. Thanks for coming, folks.

  Not one of my finer moments.

  I asked Iris the obvious question. “What about the people at work? Vaughn…Sandy…” Rebecca was the chief forensic pathologist for King County and, although nobody was truly indispensable, she came pretty close. As far as Rebecca was concerned, the only excuse for not showing up at work was death in the family…your own. Another integral part of the Iris-as-hard-working-heroine myth. That was subplot 3-B, about how Iris instilled proper values in the girl.

  “She took an indefinite leave of absence,” Iris said.

  My mouth hung open. “When?”

  “Two weeks this Thursday.”

  “Did you know she was going to do that? Was she planning something?”

  “Never said a word to me.”

  A strange situation was getting stranger by the moment. The idea that Rebecca Duval hadn’t bothered to discuss something like an indefinite leave of absence with her mother was absurd. Another quarter dropped into the Magic Fingers slot. The vibrating escalated to jackhammer proportions.

  “You been to the cops?” I asked.

  “They checked with the people at the medical examiner’s office. Said she arranged her own leave of absence.” She anticipated my next question. “Listed ‘personal’ as the reason.” She tore a hand away from the purse and waved it. “Even interviewed and hired a temporary replacement for herself. Other than that, the cops said she was an adult and entitled to go wherever she wanted to go. Said they didn’t have time to be out looking for people who left of their own volition.”

  “They’ve got a point,” I admitted.

  “Do I have to explain this to you?” She didn’t wait for me to answer. “Do I?” she shrieked. She sensed she was getting a mite shrill and pulled herself together.

  “Could she be pregnant or something?” I asked.

  “I’d have known,” Iris said, without hesitation.

  And she would have. And we both knew it.

  Once again I rooted around for an explanation and came up empty.

  “The relationship…,” I began. “I mean, before the night they had the fight and she walked out on him…I mean…how was it going? Were they…”

  “Like all relationships,” she hedged.

  “How’s that, Iris?” I wasn’t about to let her euphemize the question out of existence.

  I understood that this was hard for Iris. She’d given Brett Ward her personal seal of approval. To admit that everything had gone less than swimmingly would be tantamount to admitting she’d been wrong…and we certainly couldn’t have that, now could we?

  To my astonishment, she came right out with it. “Rocky,” she said. “They’d been having some trouble lately.”

  “Trouble about what?”

  “What do couples argue about?” she shot back.


  “You tell me.”

  Her neck got stiffer. Her lips all but disappeared. “She wouldn’t tell me. She just said they were working it out together.”

  “Working it out how?”

  She swallowed hard. “I think they were seeing someone.”

  “Therapy?”

  “I think so.”

  “You know who?”

  “Whom,” she corrected.

  “A name,” I growled.

  She shook her head and looked away. “No idea,” she said.

  “I’ll make a couple of calls,” I said.

  “Find her,” she demanded. “Get out there and find her.”

  “I don’t do that kind of work anymore,” I said.

  “You don’t do any kind of work anymore?” she snapped.

  I refused to allow myself to be drawn into her spurious web of contention. “There’s nothing one man can do that the SPD can’t do fifty times better.”

  “Unlike you, Leo, the police have other things to do.”

  “Yeah,” was all I could think to say. “They do.”

  “Same damn thing we told the mother,” Marty Gilbert said.

  After all these years, Marty was still skinny. He’d been a beanpole in high school and taken quite a bit of goodnatured ribbing about it, but his thin genes were paying compound interest in middle age. While the rest of us fought love handles, Marty had put on maybe five pounds in twenty-five-plus years.

  As we spoke, he was seven months from early retirement and holding down the second shift watch commander’s desk at the East Precinct. Marty was no fool. No sense risking your ass on the street when you’re staring your twenty-five in the eye. He was gonna desk-duty his way out the door and right into that condo he and Peg had bought down in San Diego, so they could get out of the rain and be near the grandkids.

  “Rebecca made plans to leave. She left. Other than that it’s none of our business.” He allowed his hands to fall to his sides and made a resigned face. “And after meeting the mother…” Marty gave discretion its due and let the rest of it hang.

  I resisted the urge to chime in on the subject of Iris Duval.

  “I’m worried,” I said instead.

  “People go through changes, Leo. You, of all people, ought to know…there’s no telling what goes on behind closed doors.”

  I turned my face aside, hoping he wouldn’t sense my grudging agreement.

  “What did Brett Ward tell you guys?”

  “Same thing he told the mother. They got into it. She packed up and left. He hasn’t seen her since. What did he tell you?” Marty asked.

  “He’s not answering his phone and his mailbox is full.” I cut the air with an angry hand. “I ran by their place on the way over here. Neither car is in the garage.”

  “Last time I checked, that wasn’t illegal either,” Marty noted.

  I walked over to his desk, peeled a piece of paper off his note pad, and scribbled a single short line. Recent credit card activity and phone logs? Her car?

  Marty glanced down, casually picked it up, and fed it into the shredder beneath his desk. He clapped me on the arm. “Wish I could do more to help you, buddy,” he said. “I’ll keep my ear to the ground. I hear anything, I’ll give you a jingle.”

  We shook hands for the sake of surveillance cameras. I thanked him for giving me some of his time and headed for the door.

  A relentless rain had nearly cleared Twelfth Avenue East. Everybody who had a place to go had up and gone. Those without shelter were hunkered down in doorways and under trees. I pulled my coat over my head and sloshed across the street.

  As my old friend Joe Ruggio liked to say, “Living in Seattle is like being married to a beautiful woman who’s sick all the time.” But what the hell, if the weather were better, half of Orange County would have moved up here by now. As it was, the city was nearly impossible to get around. A couple of million more people and we’d have L.A. gridlock redux, so I counted us lucky and noted for the umpteenth time that life is mostly a series of highly dubious trade-offs.

  I rolled away from the curb, made a quick right, and headed down Pine Street. My tires hissed and splashed through the rapidly gathering rainwater as I passed the ball field, bumped over Broadway, and started down Olive. Toward downtown. Toward South Lake Union, Millennium Yacht Sales, and Brett Ward.

  South Lake Union was, as the wags liked to say, “an area in transition.” What had, for most of the city’s history, been an enclave of mom-and-pop businesses was now in the process of being gentrified out of existence by Paul Allen and his minions at Vulcan. Money talks, and he had more of it than anybody except his old Microsoft partner, Bill Gates, so he got to turn the neighborhood into just another collection of condos, IT companies, and supposedly upscale office buildings that looked more like old-school Soviet bloc architecture than anything you’d want to immortalize on a brochure.

  Like I said, money talks.

  I rounded the corner on Fairview and cast myself headlong into what was known locally as “the Mercer mess,” the extreme south shore of Lake Union, where a dozen seemingly random lanes of traffic from all over the city converged, bumping and grinding around the south end of the lake in a horn-honking frenzy reminiscent of rush hour in Beirut. I forced my way into the right lane and bumped over the curb into a nearly empty restaurant parking lot.

  Two minutes and eight bucks later I was hustling across the puddled pavement. A blue and white sign on the side of Daniel’s Broiler read, “Millennium Yacht Sales.” The red arrow pointed down the wide concrete stairs. I loped down the stairs, two at a time.

  Millennium had occupied that spot for as long as I could recall. Even as the street level business had morphed from one thing to another over the years, from commercial boatyard to its present incarnation as an upscale steak joint, the yacht dealer had always been sitting just below, collecting the rent, bobbing along at water level, looking out over the marina.

  A brass bell tinkled several times as I pulled open the door and stepped inside. The room was empty and quiet, but otherwise looked like a yacht dealership should, all brassy and woody and nautical. Ocean Alexander posters. An entire wall of boat photos. On the wall directly in front of me, the sales staff each had a framed picture with a little brass plaque enumerating both their names and years of service to the company. Five men, two women. Third from the left, Brett Ward grinned out at the room.

  According to most folks, Brett Ward had charisma, that special something that lights up a room and draws every eye his way. Personally, I’d never seen it. It needs to be said that my views on the subject of Brett Ward should certainly be taken with a substantial grain of Freudian salt, as I was the loser in our little love triangle and as such must be considered to be, at best, unreliable, but even with that proviso, I’d never seen what it was that so attracted people to him. To me, he was just full of crap. A good-looking, elbow-fondling, affable sort who remembered everybody’s name and erogenous zones and just kept running his lips until he’d steered you wherever he wanted you to go. How anybody could take the guy seriously had always baffled me.

  But they did, a fact that had forced me to the conclusion that being full of crap was perhaps a far more important part of life in the modern world than I had ever given it credit for being. As Facebook and Twitter and their ilk allowed us a far wider circle of friends, the depth of those friendships got more and more shallow, until eventually you were a petri dish in the ocean of life.

  My ruminations were interrupted by the squeak of a door and the sounds of muffled footsteps. The guy who walked into the room looked like he’d just left the helm after an exhaustive ocean crossing. White hair and matching mustache, the Monopoly man on the bounding main. Crisp Ralph Lauren polo complete with ascot hiding his sagging neck. Pressed slacks. Topsider boat shoes, no socks. All he was missing was the little captain’s hat with the gold braid. Avast, matey.

  Took him all of three seconds to make me for a non-customer. No proffered hand, no we
lcoming smile. He stopped coming my way and stood his ground.

  “Help you?” he asked.

  “I’m looking for Brett Ward.”

  “Brett’s not with us anymore,” he said.

  I threw a glance at Brett’s picture on the wall. Commodore Commodious here was up there too. Far left. Bigger plaque than the others: Harvey Jorgensen, Founder-Owner.

  He read my mind. “Just haven’t gotten around to taking his picture down,” he said with an air of nonchalance.

  “You know how I can get a hold of him?”

  “I believe I have his number.”

  “He’s not answering his phone.”

  He found a pained expression. “Then your guess is as good as mine.”

  I looked around the room again. “Pretty quiet,” I commented.

  “Lunchtime,” he said.

  “Guy worked for you for a long time,” I said.

  “Salesmen…they come, they go.”

  “Ten to twelve years, wasn’t it?”

  He didn’t answer.

  I wanted to see how he’d react. “The downturn in the economy must be tough on the yacht business,” I ventured.

  “For some people,” he said imperiously, the implication being that the kind of people who bought yachts from dealerships of his magnitude…those people hardly noticed fluctuations in the tawdry, street-level economy.

  “What did you say your name was?” he asked.

  “I didn’t.”

  “That’s right,” he agreed. “You didn’t.”

  “Leo Waterman.”

  “Aaaaah,” he said as if confirming some previous notion.

  “Any idea what Brett’s doing these days?”

  “Big Bill’s boy?” he asked.

  “Yes indeed.”

  “I knew your father.”

  “Everybody knew my father.”

  His eyes narrowed. He took a step forward. “As I recall, you had a physical altercation of some sort with Brett.”

  “A momentary misunderstanding,” I assured him.

  “Aaaah,” he said again. “If the look of him was any indication, Brett got considerably the worst of that little failure to communicate.”

  “Luck of the Irish.”