Thicker Than Water (A Leo Waterman Mystery)

by G. M. Ford

  He frowned. “Is Waterman Irish?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s not.”

  Like so many before him, he didn’t find me amusing. He rubbed his palms together in a gesture of finality. “Soooo…unless I can interest you in a yacht…”

  “Not today,” I said.

  “Wish I could have been more help,” he said.

  “Thanks,” I lied.

  He padded back down the hallway, turned left into his office, and closed the door.

  Something about the silence unsettled me. I was overcome with an eerie feeling, a sense of displacement, as if the world had somehow shifted five inches to the left while I wasn’t paying attention. The discomfort nearly made me stupid. I was in a fog. I started to wander back out into the rain, caught myself, and instead walked over to the wall of employee photos and took out my notebook.

  Instead of turning right and heading back up to my car, I stepped out the door and walked down three stairs. The late afternoon rain had grown more insistent and the wind had decided to stop fooling around and blow full time, a steady fifteen or twenty knots, I guessed. Over on the public section of the dock, the metal forest of sailboats rocked back and forth as the rush of air slapped halyards against masts, rapping and pinging like a symphony of tone-deaf tinkers.

  From where I stood, not a single empty slip was visible. Looked like Jorgensen had fifty or so boats for sale. Even with my limited arithmetic, this was a big inventory. Lotta money tied up during a very slow economy. I hunched down into my jacket and strolled out onto the dock.

  The oversized motor cruisers bobbed nervously in the roiling water, squeaking and groaning their discomfort. Each boat was festooned with several of Millennium’s trademark blue and white signs. The tide was all the way in. Lines and fenders fought to keep the shiny playthings from ripping themselves to pieces on the concrete dock. Somewhere out in front of me a mashed fender screamed its displeasure.

  They kept the big brutes out at the far end of the dock where they had more room. According to the sign, a one-hundred-and-five-foot Nordlund was a real steal at $3.99 million. The ninety-two-foot McQueen from the mid-1980s was marked down to seven hundred thousand bucks and had, if the sign were to be believed, a highly motivated seller. I was betting that “highly motivated” didn’t begin to cover it.

  I spied a pair of feet sticking straight up in the air, moving rhythmically as if pedaling a bicycle. Above the growl of the wind, I heard a curse and then the guttural grunt of physical exertion. Once, twice, and then three times. Another curse blew off to the south like airborne litter. Curious, I jammed my hands into my pockets and wandered in that direction.

  The boat was a late 1960s Tollycraft, maybe forty-eight feet. I sidled over to the stern and peered down onto the deck. The engine compartment was propped open. Assorted wrenches were strewn here and there on the deck. Individual pieces of what appeared to be a water pump lay scattered among the tools.

  The feet belonged to a guy in a pair of filthy pinstriped coveralls. He’d crawled headfirst as far down into the bulkhead as he’d been able. I watched as he tried to lever himself back above decks and once again failed. More colorful cursing ensued. He’d gone so far down into the bilges that getting himself back on deck was no longer a straight line and required something of a contortionist.

  “Need a hand?” I inquired.

  “No…no…I’m…uh…I’m okay…”

  “Okay,” I said without moving.

  This was hard for him. I could tell. Manly maritime types don’t like being rescued. Bad for the testicularity. It was, however, getting late in the day. Night was fast upon us, and the prospect of spending the evening wedged in the bilges of a fifty-year-old motor cruiser held limited appeal, even to the saltiest of souls.

  Didn’t take long for sanity to rear its head.

  “Hey!” he hollered.

  “Still here,” I said.

  “Yeah…maybe I could use…you know…”

  Took us three or four minutes to wiggle him all the way out. Tore a jagged hole in the shoulder of his coveralls in the process, but at least he was right side up.

  He was pushing fifty, with a weathered, windblown face, and a body lean and lithe for a guy his age. He ran a greasy hand through his hair and introduced himself as Neil Robbins.

  “’Preciate the help,” he said disgustedly. “Had to practically dismantle the exhaust system just to change the damn water pump,” he complained. “By the time I got it outta there wasn’t nothing left to lever myself out with.”

  He began to pick up his tools. I stood on the rolling dock and watched as he worked at making the Tolly shipshape. I looked around the marina. Still not an empty slip in sight. “Looks like there’s no shortage of work to be had,” I commented.

  “The work’s easy,” he growled. “It’s gettin” paid that’s the trick.”

  “Tough times,” I said.

  “Used to be, three of us couldn’t keep up with the work. Now…” He threw a greasy hand in the air. “These days I gotta work on whatever I can.”

  “Nobody pays his boat mechanic first.”

  “Or second or third…” He found a hose and washed off the deck. “These days we get ’em back way more often than we ship ’em out.”

  I gestured with my head. “Millennium looks like its hanging in there.”

  He shook his head. “They’re circling the bowl,” he said. “Wasn’t that he owned the building, he’d be out on his ass like the resta them. That’s the only damn thing keeping him afloat, ’cause he sure as hell ain’t moving any boats.”

  “How long you been busting knuckles around here?”

  “Nine years.”

  “You know any of the salesmen?”

  “Sales associates,” he corrected with a malicious grin.

  I laughed.

  “They’re all gone. All off selling refrigerators or something.”

  “You know Brett Ward?”

  “At least he could actually drive a boat,” the guy said as he gathered the water pump parts and stowed them in the lazarette. “Some of these yahoos…” He rolled his eyes.

  We both knew exactly what he was talking about. While society at least goes through the motions of making sure someone knows the rules of the road and is prepared to operate a motor vehicle in traffic, no such precautions are deemed necessary when it comes to boats. Anybody with gas money and a watery wish is permitted to operate a boat, which, of course, produces predictable results, particularly among the big boat set.

  For reasons best left to psychoanalysis, there seemed to be a feeling among the well-to-do that the skills necessary to operate the vessel were transferred along with the title. After all, these were people who’d attained a certain level of success and thus had displayed a certain level of competence. They were good at things. Why shouldn’t they be good at operating a yacht?

  Usually they had to lose an anchor or crash into the fuel docks or run over half-a-dozen bow lines and foul the prop before they figured out that boats don’t just turn left when you want them to, that little things like the wind and the tide and the forces of motion and inertia affect boats in ways theretofore unimagined. At that point they either get somebody to show them how to properly slide a vessel of that size around and then practice their little hearts out, or they read the handwriting on the wall and hire a professional to do it for them. Still others just kept bumbling around. The SPD water cops and the Coast Guard were busy all year long.

  He threw his tool bag over his shoulder and held out a hand. I yarded him up onto the dock in a single smooth motion. Wasn’t till he was standing beside me that he realized how big I was. He looked up and grinned. “It was you stuck in there, we’dda had to gut her to the waterline to get your big ass out.”

  I held up a testifying hand. “Not me in there,” I swore. “Nobody in the history of mechanics has ever been less adept with a wrench than I am. I can turn a thirty-dollar job into a nine-hundred-dollar job in about as much t
ime as it takes to sneeze.”

  We started down the dock side by side.

  “Ward…he was the first one outta here,” the guy said. “Then the big blonde honey from the desk.” He waved his free hand in the air as if to shoo the breeze. “After that, they all just melted off into Neverland, one by one.”

  “Any idea what Ward’s doing now?”

  He stopped walking and looked up at me. “What you wanting him for?”

  “It’s kind of personal,” I said.

  “You ain’t the cops.”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “Bill collector?”

  Another shake.

  “Process server?”

  “Like I said, it’s personal.”

  That was good enough for him. As far as this guy was concerned some things were best left unsaid.

  “By then Jorgensen was mostly usin’ him as a repo man anyway. The dealership had all these units up in B.C. that was way behind in their payments. Most of ’em not even fighting it. Wanted to give the damn boats back.” His expression said, “You know how people are when money gets tight.” He started walking again. “Mr. Ward…he’d fly on up there, get all the Canadian paperwork straight and then run ’em back down here.”

  I made a show of looking around again. “Doesn’t look like Jorgensen needs any more inventory,” I commented.

  “Shit no,” he agreed. He waved his calloused hand again. “Ward had some other deal goin’ on. Musta worked out something directly with Northwest Maritime.” He shot a glance up at the office. “That’s the lender Jorgensen uses for Canada. Ward musta made some kind of deal with them. He was cleaning ’em up someplace up on Northlake and wholesaling them off somewheres, gettin’ whatever he could for the bank.”

  He looked up for the briefest of moments and smiled. Above us in the front window of Millennium Yacht Sales, Jorgensen stood with his arms folded tight across his chest, gazing down on us like the lord of the manor.

  “Taking a slice for himself and avoiding the middleman.” He smiled and flicked another glance at Jorgensen.

  “Bound to be better than not sellin’ yachts for a living.”

  “Were there hard feelings about his leaving?” I asked. He shook his head. “Not as far as I could tell,” he said. “I got the impression Harvey was glad Brett found something else. The handwriting was on the wall by that time. The economy was full scale in the shitter. Wasn’t nobody buying boats. They were all standing around the office pickin’ each other’s ass.”

  I followed him up a set of metal stairs onto the side deck of Daniel’s Broiler. The deck was desolate and deserted. Inside the window, half-a-dozen early diners chewed contentedly on fifty-dollar steaks and gazed out on to the turbulent waters.

  “He have any particular friends on the crew?”

  He thought about it. “Used to go to lunch sometimes over at Hooters with that Ricky guy.”

  “Ricky?”

  “Ricky, Richie…Something like that.” He cut quotation marks in the air with his greasy fingers. “One of the sales associates. He’s sellin’ shoes up at the Northgate mall. I seen ’em when I went up there with my sister the other day.” He grinned. “He pretended not to recognize me.”

  I trailed him up the remainder of the stairs, up along the back wall of the kitchen where the smell of seared meat coming from the massive exhaust fans was strong enough to paralyze vegans, and then up and out into the parking lot, where I thanked him for his help. He said it was no big deal, resettled the tool bag on his shoulder, and strode off.

  I stood in the rain and watched him disappear into the gathering darkness, then ducked my head into the wind, and began jogging toward my car.

  When you poke your nose into other people’s business for a living, it’s best to operate from the assumption that somewhere out there somebody’s still holding a grudge. Lots of people in this world just aren’t able to take responsibility for their actions, so they decide that the only reasonable thing to do is to shoot the messenger. That’s how private investigators end up with their skulls cracked and their noses broken, or worse yet, gunned down by some out-of-his-mind, about-to-lose-everything husband or wife.

  Since I stopped working, I’d gotten out of the habit of looking over my shoulder. I told myself that was because I was in the best physical shape of my life and therefore ready for anything, even if I wasn’t paying attention. Truth was, I went to the gym every day in order to fill time rather than to exercise any sense of professional responsibility. No doubt about it, I’d lost whatever edge I’d once possessed, presuming, of course, I’d ever had one to lose.

  I wanted to make it all the way downtown to the King County Coroner’s Office before everybody went home for the day. Going through the middle of the city at that time was out of the question, so I planned to get myself up onto Capital Hill, just far enough from the I-5 to avoid the commuters, and then make my way south through the neighborhoods.

  If I’d taken any other route I’d never have noticed them. My mind was in outer space. I was bellyache-worried and not paying the slightest attention to the world around me as I turned right off Fairview and started up Eastlake.

  The derelict smokestacks of the old Seattle City Light steam plant seemed to be giving me the finger as I rolled up the grade, past ZymoGenetics and the back of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, up to the top of the hill, where a forest of concrete pillars suddenly sprouted on my left and the roar of the freeway began to seep into the car’s interior.

  As I crested the grade, I checked the surrounding area. Three blocks down, along the front of REI, a knot of traffic shimmered in the rain. Brake lights threw jagged shafts of red on the asphalt. I slowed to a crawl. A moment later the light changed and suddenly the street was empty. I fed the car a little gas.

  I checked the rearview mirror. Back at the bottom of Eastlake Avenue, a white Cadillac Escalade with British Columbia plates was moving uphill inside a self-generated cloud of mist, its otherworldly white halogen headlights bouncing this way and that as it navigated the minefield of potholes.

  I crested the hill and veered hard into the right-hand lane, getting as far from the concrete divider as possible, before swinging back to the left, gritting my teeth hard as I swung across three lanes, barely avoiding the concrete traffic island designed to prevent precisely this grossly unlawful maneuver.

  I made it with an inch to spare and was halfway up the ramp, driving over the freeway, congratulating myself, checking the mirrors for cops, when I saw that the Cadillac had not only performed the same illegal maneuver but had also closed the distance between us by half.

  I had a “hmmmm” moment. The first time I’d seen them, they had their lights on, and now the driver had turned them off. And it wasn’t like visibility had improved either. Quite the contrary. It was getting darker and drearier by the second. A steel ball bearing rolled down my spine. Why no lights?

  I could understand how my scofflaw maneuver might have nurtured the worst instincts in my fellow citizens and I sorely regretted being such a poor role model, but the lights? The lights made no sense at all unless somebody was trying a little too hard to not be noticed. The Twilight Zone theme began to toot in my head.

  A dry laugh escaped my throat as I eased up to the stop sign. “A bit paranoid or what?” my inner voice asked. Hell, on my worst day it took me several hours to piss somebody off enough to be following me over hill and dale. I’d been looking for Rebecca for only an hour. So…unless I was about to set new annoyability records…

  Just as sanity was about to prevail, I checked the mirror again. The Escalade was standing still, wipers swishing back and forth, big silver raindrops plopping all around, the driver refusing to get closer to me. That’s when my other voice piped in.

  “Only one way to find out,” it said.

  Almost without willing it so, my foot jammed the gas pedal all the way to the floor, sending the car roaring up Belmont, the tires whirring for traction on the stee
p hill, the scream of the engine drowning out the rising weather.

  A hundred yards up the hill I swung a hard right onto Bellevue. As the car fishtailed once and then righted itself, I mashed the brake pedal to the floor, threw the transmission into reverse, intending to jam the car into a narrow alley between apartment buildings. Or at least, that was the idea.

  I used to drive a Fiat, a little POS whose only virtue was that it didn’t take up a lot of space and was relatively easy to push by hand. My recently acquired Chevy Tahoe, however, while far more commodious for a man of my dimensions, regrettably was also considerably less accommodating.

  The scream of warping metal and the tinkle of broken glass made it apparent that both my depth perception and my driving skills had suffered the same ignoble fate as my wariness. The passenger side of my car was no more than an inch from the Sir Galahad Apartments. I checked the rearview mirror. It was gone.

  Worse yet, the driver’s side was no more than a foot from the north wall of Bellevue Court. No way I could open the door. I stewed for a few seconds, resigned myself to the ignominy of it all, and lowered the rear window. Nothing like crawling around the inside of an automobile to give a man a little humility. Accompanied by a symphony of grunts and groans, I extruded myself over and around two sets of seats, and finally crawled out the back window feetfirst, where I stood precariously on the plastic bumper, hanging onto the ski rack for all I was worth, looking out over the length of the Tahoe toward the rain-slick street.

  Worst of all, my little maneuver had failed to fool my pursuers. Just about the time I had steadied myself on the bumper and looked back over the length of the car, they stepped into the mouth of the alley. Two of the strangest-looking dudes I’d ever laid eyes on. The little guy was under five feet tall. Big round glasses half the size of his head. Looked like Peter Lorre as Mr. Moto.

  His partner was downright reptilian. Leather-scary. More zippers than a set of slipcovers. Big, square noggin sporting a platinum blond flattop hairdo. With lightning bolts cut into both sides of his head, he looked like something straight out of a comic book. Captain Carnal maybe. Definitely not something you’d bring home to mother. Or bring home, period.