by G. M. Ford
Zipper-head curled a disdainful Elvis lip. “Tight fit,” he said.
“They’re not making alleys like they used to.”
He nodded at the broken mirror. “Looks bad,” he said.
“Speaking of bad looks,” I said, “you need to do something about yours, man. This leather zipper-head thing you’ve got going on here…”
The corners of his eyes narrowed. “Smart guy, huh?”
“Also, whoever writes your dialogue definitely needs to be replaced. That old film noir shit…”
Apparently I touched a nerve. The Elvis lip straightened itself. “You sayin’ I’m stupid?” he demanded.
“Perish the thought,” I deadpanned.
“You’re sayin’ I’m stupid.” Not a question this time. Apparently he’d had some previous experience along this conversational tack.
He took a step back and surveyed the scene. That’s when I realized that the other guy was nowhere in sight, but I didn’t have time to ponder. Zipper-head was looking for some way to get back to where I stood, without coming over the top of the car.
Mr. Moto popped back into view. They exchanged a glance.
“You best mind your own business and butt out,” Zipperhead said. “You been puttin’ your face where it don’t belong.”
“You followed me all over the city just to tell me that?”
“I see you again, I’m gonna fuck you up.”
“Providing you remember.”
He was going to go into it again. The stupid thing. I could tell.
Mr. Moto toddled around the back of the Escalade and pulled himself into the driver’s seat.
“He got blocks on the pedals?” I asked Zipper-head affably.
“Next time I’ll let you ask him yourself,” he promised.
I smiled. “I’ll leave myself a note on my BlackBerry.”
Without another word, he launched a karate side-kick at the front of my car. If he was trying to impress me, it worked. The whole car rocked from the force of the blow. I heard the headlight shatter and fall to the ground. He stepped to the left and duplicated the maneuver on the other headlight, with much the same result.
“Next time it’ll be your lights I put out,” he promised.
Before I could come up with another snappy rejoinder, he turned and ambled back toward the Escalade, slithering with a loose-hipped lizard swing as he crossed the street and climbed into the car.
I stood where I was until the Cadillac hissed out of sight.
By the time I got my car towed to the Chevy dealership and signed my life away for a rental car, it was quarter to nine. Took me another half hour to get over to the mall at Northgate and canvass the shoe emporiums, so, by the time I’d finished my first pass of the stores, they were less than a half hour from closing.
He must have been on a break or hanging out in the back room the first time I strolled by. Second time I walked past the All-Star Sports store, he was standing at the cash register chatting with a customer.
Richard Waters, aka Ricky, was a good-looking young fella. Smooth, even features and good hair. Bright red polo shirt with an embroidered logo on the chest. He’d put on a few pounds since his Millennium photo, but it was him all right. Probably eating more starches and less steak than when he was in the yacht business, I figured.
He handed a purple plastic bag to the customer and waved him on his way. Soon as the customer turned his back, the boyish smile disappeared and then, a coupla seconds later, so did Ricky.
I waited for one of the other clerks to ring up a customer, and then, with the counter area finally deserted, slid through the opening, past the “Employees Only” sign and into the dusty back room.
Floor-to-ceiling unpainted metal racks awash in shoe boxes. Dirty bathroom on the left, battered metal desk on the right. Nobody’d swept the floor in a month.
He had the back door propped open with a storage bin and was standing outside power-smoking a cigarette. His eye caught my movement.
“Hey, hey,” he said. “Didn’t you read the damn sign? You can’t be back here.”
I ignored his admonition and kept coming. When he flicked the butt behind himself and slid the storage bin aside, I bellied him back through the doorway and out into the service road that ran behind the mall.
A quarter mile of green dumpsters, cardboard balers, and loading docks. He tried to swim his way around me but I straight-armed him backward. While he fought to regain his balance, the door slammed shut on its own.
Half-a-dozen brightly painted garbage trucks were lined up along the back of the mall. The roar of diesels mixed with the whine of hydraulics to form a wavering wall of sound, punctuated now and then by the rap of metal on metal as the trucks banged the last flattened remnants from the big green trash containers.
“You crazy?” he yelled above the din. “I’m gonna have to walk all the way around the fucking building to get back to the store.”
“You don’t answer my questions you’re not going to be able to walk around the building,” I promised with a smile.
He took a step backward. His boyish face clouded. “You kiddin’?” he asked.
“If I was kidding, I’d be wearing a balloon hat and no pants.”
Somewhere in his head a lightbulb went on. “You’re the guy.”
“What guy?”
“The guy from the bachelor party. You’re the one who…”
“Yeah,” I said. “I am.”
The admission had the desired effect. He showed me a pair of cautioning palms. “Hey, I don’t want any trouble here,” he assured me.
Guys like Ricky never do; that’s how they keep those boyish good looks. But something in his expression caught my eye. Something furtive and pained.
“I’m trying to find Brett Ward,” I said amiably. “He doesn’t answer his phone and his mailbox is full.”
“How would I know where he is, man?” he whined. “I haven’t even talked to the guy in a couple of months. We worked at the same place. Went out to lunch once in a while. Went to a Huskies game together one time.” He threw his palms at the ceiling and shook his head. “That’s it, man.”
The adamant denial struck a discordant note. He was trying way too hard to convince me that he didn’t know anything. “If you needed to find him, what would you do?” I pressed.
“Call his old lady, I guess,” he answered quickly.
“She’s missing too.”
“Then how in hell am I supposed to…”
I straight-armed him again. He staggered back two steps.
“I’m not feeling very patient,” I told him.
Ricky checked over his shoulder, thinking about making a run for it.
“I’m a lot quicker than I look,” I warned him.
He took me at my word. “Come on, man. I’ve got a wife, a kid, and another on the way. I need to make a living here. I can’t take any more of…”
“Any more of what?”
He pressed his lips together and looked away.
A lightbulb went on in my head. “I’m not the first person to come asking about Brett Ward, am I?” I tried.
He set his jaw and looked away. “I can’t, man,” he said finally. When he turned his gaze my way, his eyes were on the verge of welling over. Obviously, something had happened. Something that could make a grown man cry.
“What happened?”
He turned his face away again.
The scream of hydraulics filled the air, making it impossible to talk.
“They said they’d come back,” he said when things quieted down.
I put a reassuring hand on his shoulder. An ongoing shiver ran through his body like an electric current. He flinched and hunched his shoulders.
“‘They’ who?” I pressed.
He shook his head and hunched harder.
I took a shot. “Blond flattop hairdo? Lightning bolts cut into the sides?”
Had he been able to tie his shoulders in a knot around his neck, I believe he would ha
ve. “That Koontz guy…,” he began.
I couldn’t believe it. “You know that guy?” I asked.
“He’s famous, man,” Ricky whined. “Jordan Koontz. He’s that Canadian mixed martial arts fighter who killed the guy in the ring up in Vancouver. Remember? The one who attacked the referee when he tried to stop the fight. Busted the ref’s neck. Banned from MMA for life. Ended up going to prison for a while.”
As a matter of fact, I did vaguely remember. Five or six years back, it had been all over the news. As I recalled, the referee suffered some degree of permanent paralysis. The Canadian bluenoses had gone wild. The incident had nearly led to the banning of mixed martial arts in Canada.
“And the other one,” he snuffled. “Little Asian guy with big round glasses, he just held the gun on me. Koontz, he made me…” He wanted to blurt it out, but couldn’t bring himself to do it. I watched in silence as he backed up and tried again. “He took his hand and…” He shook his head in resignation. Not only was he unable to spit it out, but by now I was pretty sure I didn’t want to hear it. Whatever he had to say would surely drag me to a place I didn’t care to visit.
I took a step back and waited while he pulled himself together. He looked out over the line of trash receptacles and composed himself. Minutes passed. When he turned back my way he’d dried his eyes and had the look of a guy who wanted some payback. “There was one weird thing with Brett,” he said. “Something I didn’t tell those guys.”
“What’s that?”
“Brett’s wife sent a stripper to the office for his birthday.” He held his cupped hands in front of his chest in the international sign for “tits out to here.” “He’d been gone for months and months by that time. It was weird that she didn’t know.”
“And I suppose the rest of you sent the girl on her way with a nice tip in her pocket.”
He grinned sheepishly and shrugged. “You know, man. She was there, you know, ready to do her thing, all paid for and all. Seemed like we might as well, you know…”
I helped him out. “You let her do her thing. So she wouldn’t feel bad.”
“Yeah.”
I watched as something crossed his mind.
I poked him in the chest with a stiff finger. “What?”
“I gave Brett a jingle. You know, a one-guy-to-another kind of thing. Told him about the stripper showing up at the office. Just in case it came up, you know, in conversation or something like that.”
“You remember the girl’s name?”
He thought about it. “Sherry, Cherry, something like that.” He held up a finger as if to ask for a moment, dug into his back pocket, and came out with his wallet. He was one of those guys who makes a point of collecting business cards from everyone he meets. A salesman’s habit. You never know, you know.
Took him a minute of sorting through a fistful of cards but eventually he came up with a gold business card. Embossed belly dancer. Merry Storm. Exotic Dances for All Occasions. Seattle phone number at the bottom right.
“Thanks,” I said, pocketing the card.
“Hey look,” he said. “I got to go. We’re closing up. I got to be there.”
“Go ahead,” I said.
I stood on the asphalt, amid the roar and rumble of the garbage trucks, and watched as Ricky limped down the road like he was coming home from a colonoscopy. Forty yards down, he stopped and turned back my way. He yelled above the din.
“That blond one…he’s one a sick bastard. You better…”
“I’ll be careful,” I said.
Halfway down the mall, Ricky found another store’s back door open and ducked inside.
Ah, the heady aroma of the morgue in the morning. The bouquet opens with a piquant whisper of formaldehyde, and then as the palate slips into play, segues smoothly into earthy undertones, prior to a surprising finish that clings to the roof the mouth with the zeal of a Catholic communion wafer.
When I was younger, I had a much stronger stomach. I used to go downstairs, stand behind the thick glass windows, and watch as Rebecca and her colleagues performed their grisly duties. That’s where I learned that autopsy strategies were as individual as the people doing the saw work.
Rebecca treated the dead with great reverence. Her table was always neat and clean and the bodies were draped this way and that so as to keep prying eyes like mine from seeing anything they didn’t have to. She always said that people deserved the same dignity in death that they deserved in life.
Vaughn Tisdale, on the other hand, was all blood, guts, and veins in the teeth. He treated the dismemberment of a corpse as if he were parting out a 1967 Chevy. Red to his armpits. Body parts scattered hither and yon. Great gobs of goo everywhere. The fact that Rebecca thought very highly of his work made it plain that pathology allowed for different strokes for different folks. Metaphorically speaking, of course.
These days I stayed upstairs in the office area. That’s where I found Vaughn Tisdale. Vaughn was a big, fleshy guy with a bale of curly red hair clinging stubbornly to the back of his head. He was sitting at his desk, staring at a silver toaster, waiting for a pair of Pop Tarts to make an appearance. As usual he was wearing a three-dimensionally soiled smock and an even more execrable pair of latex gloves.
He looked up from the toaster. “Hey, big fella,” he said. “Long time no see.”
“The girl out front said Sandy was out of town.”
“Conference of some sort. Iowa or someplace, as I recall.”
Which was a pity, because Sandy McGinty managed the business end of the county morgue operation like a pit bull manages a kitty cat. Sandy was known as a micromanager of subatomic proportions and would surely have known whatever there was to know, whether the knowers knew it or not. If that makes any sense.
“Iris Duval came to my house yesterday afternoon.”
“Lucky you,” Tisdale joked.
“Iris tells me she hasn’t heard from Rebecca in over a week.”
Vaughn rocked forward in his chair. The Pop Tarts popped. He ignored them. “How can that be?” he asked.
“I was hoping you could enlighten me.”
“I just know what everybody else knows.” He snagged the nearest tart and, irrespective of how hot it must have been, swallowed half of it. “You know how Rebecca is, Leo. She’s pretty damn self-contained.” He took another bite and the tart was gone. “Not one of those people who put their personal business in the street, if you know what I mean, and I know you do.”
“So nobody down here knows anything about the specifics. Anything about what was going on that required a leave from her job.”
He accessed the second tart. “The rumor mill says she’s having problems with the hubby.” In two quick bites the pastry disappeared. “I can tell you this; she was taking long lunches on Mondays and Fridays. If you ask me, they were getting some professional help for whatever problems they were having.”
“Why do you say that?”
“She alluded to it once.” He wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “She was sitting on the wall outside reading over some folded-up paperwork. I asked her, you know just conversationally, how things were going. She said she had some homework to do before today’s session.”
“Session, huh?”
“That’s what she said.”
“You’re right. Sounds like marriage counseling.”
Vaughn nodded. “And those people are always giving the happy couple these vitriolic little assignments to complete between sessions. You know…” He raised his voice an octave and a half to Julia Child’s pitch: “‘I want both of you to write down the five things you most detest about one another. We’ll share the next time we see each other.’” He ended with one of the waxiest grins I’d ever seen.
I laughed aloud, despite my mood and the cold, empty feeling in the pit of my stomach. “You sound like you’ve had some experience in these matters of the heart.”
He made a disgusted face. “I’ve been married five times, Leo. My head’s been shrunk mo
re times than a virgin wool sweater.”
“But you’ve got no idea who they were seeing.”
“Nope,” he said. “I can tell you one thing, though. Coupla weeks after she started taking long lunches, I asked her if maybe she couldn’t bring me back a sandwich or something. She showed up with this great big belly-bomb of a sandwich.”
“Yeah?”
“I know where the sandwich came from.”
“Where?”
“You know, that place with ‘Corned Beef’ painted in red on the side of the building. Up there close to the freeway.”
“Mike’s Market.”
He nodded. “And there’s absolutely no place to park in that frigging neighborhood. Anyplace you could legally put the car would cost you more than the damn sandwich.”
“Rebecca’s a very frugal girl,” I said. “That wouldn’t work for her.”
“So you have to figure she was already parked when she went for the grub.”
“You’re thinking those big office towers across the street.”
“That’s what I’m betting,” he said as he dusted crumbs from his gloves and pushed himself to his feet. “Nice talking at you, Leo,” he said. “But I’ve got some more bowel sections waiting for me downstairs.”
I didn’t offer to shake hands.
The Metropolitan Park Towers sat at awkward angles to one another on opposite sides of Minor Avenue, as if a skyhook had dropped them in place and wherever they landed was where they stayed. A quick perusal of one building’s directory made it apparent that if Rebecca had been seeing someone in these the buildings, I was going to need a lot more information. If I was doing the math correctly, between the two buildings there were somewhere in the vicinity of four hundred tenants, many with remarkably uninformative company names like Internal Solutions Corporation, which as far as I was concerned could have involved anything from integrated business software to gastrointestinal distress.
The rain had momentarily relented, so I bought myself a latte and a cheese Danish from the Starbucks on the ground floor and repaired to the outdoor plaza to contemplate my next move. I used the brown Starbucks paper napkin to dry the bench and then sat there under steel wool skies asking myself how I could get a line on Rebecca’s marriage guru.
