Thicker Than Water (A Leo Waterman Mystery)

by G. M. Ford

  When a long-term relationship breaks down, people often feel the need to take a side and, while Rebecca and I still had a few mutual friends, most of the people we used to spend time with had chosen one camp or the other. Add that to the fact that couples tend to hang out with other couples and it was safe to say that the diameter of my social circle was considerably smaller than it had been a few years back.

  By the time the Danish disappeared and the dregs of the coffee were cold, I had a pretty good idea what I was going to do. I hated the idea to the very depths of my childish soul, but I was going to do it anyway.

  If anyone other than her shrink knew what was going on in Rebecca’s life, it would be Monica Muller. They’d been friends and confidants since grammar school. It had always been my understanding that they shared whatever girlie secrets girlies shared with other girlies.

  First problem was that Monica and I had never been terribly fond of one another. Nothing personal really, just something about being rivals for Rebecca’s time and attention. Second was the fact that Monica had gotten remarried since I’d last been in contact with her, and I had no idea what her new last name was.

  I did, however, have a pretty good idea of how I might find out, so I got on the horn and starting making calls to the other side of the great social divide. Took me nearly an hour and half and a dozen calls to people who were no longer speaking to me before I worked my way to Judy Lombardi.

  Judy refused to give me Monica’s number but said she’d leave her a message saying that I’d been trying to get in touch. I gave her my contact information and told her to say that Iris hadn’t heard from Rebecca for over a week and had asked me to look for her. She said she would. I told her it was an emergency.

  I was on the phone trying to come up with a number for Fran and Larry Fitzgerald when call waiting began to vibrate. Number blocked. I thumbed the button.

  “Leo Waterman,” I said.

  “Judy said you called.” Her tone held all the warmth of a walk-in freezer.

  In a perverse way, it was nice not to feel compelled to go through all the long-time-no-see bullshit that precedes getting around to what it was you really called about, so I dispensed with the niceties and got right to it. I told her about Iris Duval coming to my house. About Rebecca’s leave of absence. About being unable to contact Brett Ward. I was prepared to keep talking until she either came around or hung up on me, but that was all it took.

  “I haven’t been able to reach her either,” Monica said. “I’ve been worried.”

  “Do you know what’s going on?” I asked.

  “Just that they were having some sort of trouble in their relationship.”

  “But you don’t know what?”

  “She wouldn’t say.”

  A fact that was troublesome in its own right. If Rebecca wasn’t telling Monica, she wasn’t telling anyone, which I suppose explained why she’d felt the need to hire somebody to listen to her. The hole in my stomach got deeper and colder.

  “I don’t have to tell you how out of character this is for her.”

  Long pause. “No, you don’t,” she said finally.

  “Everybody seems to think that she and Brett are seeing somebody about it.”

  “They are,” she said without hesitation.

  “You know who they’re seeing?” I asked.

  “She,” Monica corrected. “He only went twice.”

  “Do you have a name?”

  Longer pause as she tried to decide whether or not to tell me.

  “Rachel Thoms,” she said finally. “She’s in one of those office buildings…”

  “Right by the interstate,” I finished for her.

  “If you already knew, Leo, why call me?” she asked disgustedly, and hung up.

  East Tower, seventeenth floor, suite 1751. Rachel Thoms, MSW, ACSW, LICSW, Relationship Analysis. I eased the door open and took a seat in the waiting room. I could hear the dull mumble of voices in an adjoining room but made it a point not to listen.

  The room was carefully designed to promote peace of mind. All muted browns and yellows. Fresh fall floral display on the central coffee table. Three small still lifes and a big painting of a suspension bridge arching into a distant, fog-shrouded shore. Either a transformation metaphor or an invitation to jump. I wasn’t sure which.

  Thirty-five minutes later, the door on the opposite side of the room opened and an anorexic young woman in her midtwenties stepped into the room. She was strangling a hankie and dabbing at her bloodshot eyes. One look at me and she bolted across the room like an Olympic speed walker, snuffling a garbled curse in my direction as she streaked out into the hallway and slammed the door.

  The next woman through the door was most everything the first one wasn’t and then some. She wasn’t skinny and she wasn’t crying. Like the first woman, however, she also wasn’t in the least pleased by my presence.

  She was a handsome woman. Five-ten without the shoes. Big boned and big featured, with a thick head of chestnut hair pulled to the back of her head and pinned up. The kind of woman who looked you dead in the eye and challenged you to bring it on. The kind of woman you’d like to climb up on the furniture and then dive into. I restrained myself but couldn’t help but notice that, despite that cold steel feeling in my gut, my blood had begun to redistribute in a rather unwelcome manner.

  “You violated that woman’s privacy,” she said.

  “I’m sorry. That certainly wasn’t my intention.”

  “Didn’t the girl at the desk tell you to wait downstairs?”

  “I skipped the desk and came straight up here.” I anticipated her next question. “I was afraid you wouldn’t see me.”

  She blinked once and picked at her tweed skirt. “And why would I refuse to see you?” she asked.

  “I’m looking for Rebecca Duval,” I said.

  I watched as the veins and tendons in her neck tightened. She cocked her head like the RCA dog and took a moment to look me over.

  “You’d be Leo Waterman,” she said.

  “Yes, I would.”

  She folded her arms over her luxurious chest. “As you must know, Mr. Waterman, I can’t discuss my patients. Just admitting that she was a patient…” She let the self-admonition peter out.

  “She’s missing,” I said.

  She did that cocking of her head thing again, making me wonder whether the gesture might be shrink body language that showed the patient you were listening.

  “Missing in what sense?” she wanted to know.

  I gave her the Reader’s Digest version of the story. Not surprisingly, she was a good listener.

  “That’s very worrisome,” she said when I finished.

  “I’m scared to death,” I admitted.

  “Perhaps you should contact the police.”

  “Been there, done that,” I said, and then told her what Marty Gilbert had told me.

  She checked her watch. “I’ve another patient in five minutes,” she said. “You’re going to have to go.”

  “Anything you could do that might help me find her…”

  She waved me off, walked across the room, and opened the door to the hallway. The sound she made when moving would have been illegal in seven southern states.

  “The relationship between a patient and her therapist is a sacred trust,” she said as he pulled the door all the way open.

  I took the hint and stepped out into the hall. “This is an emergency. If you could just…,” I began.

  “Do you have a business card?” she interrupted.

  I fished around in my wallet and came out with an old, tattered private eye card with somebody else’s number written in red pen on the back.

  She slid a pair of red half-glasses onto the end of her nose. I watched her eyes slide over the surface. She gave me a curt nod, stepped back, and closed the door.

  Five hundred seventy-seven dollars and twelve cents. That’s what it cost to replace the Tahoe’s headlights. Throw in another two hundred or so
for the mirror, yet another forty-seven for the rental car and insurance and I was out eight hundred bucks or so, five hundred of which was coming out of my pocket. Not to mention I had to listen to a lecture from the guy in the body shop about how the space-age polymers in the headlights were warranted to withstand everything short of small arms fire without cracking or breaking, and that however I managed to smash them without demolishing the front of the car should probably be avoided in the future. I gritted my teeth and assured him I’d be more careful.

  So it’s no surprise that my mood was about as sunny as the weather as I headed back toward downtown in a cold drizzle. A full day’s work had yielded nothing other than the fact that I wasn’t the only one looking for Brett Ward, which made the situation all the more troubling. Worse yet, whatever was going on involved those two hired freaks in the Cadillac. Freaks who had managed to instill an absolutely primal fear in Ricky Waters. Guys who’d hurt him in ways he didn’t want to talk about. No doubt about it. I didn’t like it one bit.

  My phone began to tinkle in my pocket. Normally, I don’t answer the phone while I’m driving. First of all, it’s illegal to have a phone in your hand while driving in the state of Washington. Absolutely everybody still does it, but technically it’s illegal. Second, and more to the point, I don’t flatter myself to imagine that my doings are of sufficient import as to require immediate attention. Ninety-nine percent of the time whoever is on the phone can wait till I get to where I’m going. The other one percent are wrong numbers.

  Today, however, feeling hollow and somber, I immediately began to pat myself down looking for the phone. Must have looked like I was on fire, slapping this pocket and that, trying to locate my personal device. All I managed to do was to weave from lane to lane like I’d had a stroke. An irate chorus of horns snapped my attention forward just in time to avoid rear-ending the FedEx truck in front of me.

  I gulped air and got the hell off the road before I hurt somebody, pulling into a strip mall parking lot and jamming the car into Park in front of a pho parlor, before resuming my search for my phone, which had by that time ceased tinkling.

  Took me the better part of three minutes to figure out it was an e-mail message and then retrieve it. No subject. Sent from a Hotmail account. Marty Gilbert, I figured, trying to help me out but taking no chances with his pension.

  No message, but attached was a spreadsheet packed with tiny numbers. Screens and screens and screens of them. I zoomed in, turned the device sideways, and worked my way across the top line like a stadium reader board. Rebecca Ann Duval. MasterCard number such and such. Transactions. Date. Location. My eyes clicked back to the date like a slot machine settling on the cherries. The card had been used yesterday. I scrolled back to the left and started down the list of transaction dates. Her MasterCard had been used multiple times every day for the past two weeks or so.

  My emotions bounced around like a ping-pong ball. One part of me wanted to be joyous. To exalt. Another part warned me not to get ahead of myself. All it meant was that somebody had used the card. That’s all it meant. I kept telling myself that.

  I stopped at the house for long enough to pack an overnight bag and use the computer to read the rest of the information Marty had sent me. It was all there in black and white. For the past week, Rebecca had been charging food, drink, and sundries at the Alderbrook Resort and Spa. Same thing with the phone. All of her phone calls had originated from that same out-in-the-middle-of-nowhere area code. Most of them to a Seattle number I didn’t recognize.

  An hour after I’d arrived back at the family manse, I was on the road again, heading downtown toward the Pier 56 Ferry Terminal where I could catch a ride over to Bremerton from whence I could drive to the bottom of the Hood Canal, which really wasn’t a canal at all, at least not in the man-made sense, but rather was a long, thin fjord within a fjord whose sole claim to fame was that it separated the Kitsap Peninsula from the Olympic Peninsula and thus required a bridge.

  Forty minutes on the ferry followed by an hour and a half’s driving would get me down to Union, where the Alderbrook Resort squatted by the dark shores of Puget Sound. The place had been there forever, since 1913 or something. Started out as one of those resorts where, as was the fashion of the day, outdoorsy city people in bowler hats and high button shoes abandoned their privileged lives in favor of sleeping in tents, and otherwise communing with nature. Same people you saw in the old photographs, climbing Mount Rainier dressed for a garden party. Hardy souls those.

  I googled the Alderbrook website while waiting for the ferry. Nearly a hundred years and half as many owners later, the Alderbrook had moved upscale with Irish linens, four-star restaurant, world-class spa, eighteen-hole golf course, and all. Your year-round getaway destination. I took the virtual tour and then booked myself a room.

  By the time I rolled through Belfair, it was mostly dark and I had a plan pretty much worked out. I opted for discretion. I needed to satisfy myself that Rebecca was okay without invading her privacy or looking like a complete fool if maybe she and Brett were reconciling and making wild whoopee in the woods.

  If I started showing photos around the lobby and asking questions, I was bound to attract whatever passed for security, at which point all hope of anonymity would be out the window, so I’d decided to fly under the radar, which, my brain noted, wasn’t going to be easy if the place was deserted. In the past hour I’d passed maybe a dozen cars, the majority of which were headed in the other direction.

  I needn’t have worried. The parking lot was jam-packed with luxury vehicles. The rich rumble of laughter and voices spilled from the front of the main building as I gave the kid my bag and started up the wide front stairs. In between the two sets of double doors, a reader board welcomed the twenty-third annual Pacific Northwest Cosmetic Dentistry Association to its annual get-together. SmileFest, I guessed.

  Place looked like some Hollywood set designer’s conception of a wilderness experience. The Pasadena Ponderosa. Giant fireplace crackling at the far end of the room, urban art on rustic walls, lots of thick, rich-looking furniture arranged this way and that, at least a dozen separate seating areas where guests could commune in bucolic luxury.

  I registered as Tom Van Dyne, one of several borrowed identities I’d used back when I’d worked as a PI. The real Tom Van Dyne was serving life without the possibility of parole down in Pelican Bay, so I didn’t figure he’d mind me co-opting his identity. He might be doing forever for offing and then partially consuming both his wife and his mother, but thanks to me he had a perfect driving record and his credit was top notch. The way I saw it, the guy ought to be grateful.

  The gorgeous East Indian girl at the desk volunteered that SmileFest was drawing to a close. Only the awards dinner remained and they were staging that little gala next door in the Vancouver Room as we spoke.

  I let the kid carry my bag all the way to my room. His name was William and he was taking a couple of semesters off from Central Washington University to raise funds for grad school. I slipped him a five on the way out. I’m all for education.

  The room was as advertised, sumptuous and nobly appointed. As was my habit, I hung my things in the closet, and then unpacked. Something in me feels more settled and at peace if I take my things out of the bag and stow them in the dresser drawers. Don’t ask me why.

  After delivering my shaving kit to the bathroom, I sat down on the edge of the bed and looked around. The digital clock read 6:02. I stretched and yawned. I lay back, half on, half off the bed, and closed my eyes. Just gonna rest for a second.

  Sometime during the two hours I was out cold, I’d sleepwalked most of the rest of me up on the bed, where I awoke to find myself lying crossways with my lower legs hanging over the edge of the mattress. Wasn’t until I sat up that I realized everything from my knees down was fast asleep. I sat on the bed, stomped my feet several times, and began massaging life back into my lower legs.

  I don’t generally remember my dreams, but as I sat
there trying to knead some feeling into my calves, I recalled where I’d been for the past couple of hours. I’d been involved in a frantic pursuit, trapped inside a rotting Victorian mansion, where one shabby room led to another and another, to deadfalls and trap doors and secret staircases, where toothless, wild-haired maniacs barred my way at every turn. I saw it all in a single somber second. I saw a terrified Rebecca, stretching, reaching for me but always just beyond my grasp. I cried out to her and then the movie faded to black.

  By nine thirty, I’d showered, shaved, and stuffed myself into a suitable pair of trousers and a Tommy Bahama shirt. I’m not much of a dress-up guy. I’m pretty sure my tenuous relationship with fashion dates to my childhood. For reasons I’ve never fully understood, my parents had a nearly uncontrollable urge to dress me like a miniature FBI agent. Birthdays, Easter, Christmas, you name the occasion and there I was in some old photo, squinting into the sun, wearing a Mike Hammer porkpie hat and a John Cameron Swayze trench coat with enough epaulets to tie down a load of lumber.

  The Overlook Bar lived up to its billing. It overlooked the dining room, which in turn overlooked the dark waters of Puget Sound, thus allowing me to scan the dinner crowd without actually being among them. It was a big room in the shape of a fan. From above, it looked like a galaxy of flickering candles with waiters flitting from flame to flame. Beneath it all, the clink of flatware and the dull undertones of conversation rose from the room like a long, low musical note. I ran my eyes over the tables one by one, taking my time, making sure. No Rebecca.

  I must have unconsciously sighed or something, because the bartender who’d been kept busy by a succession of waiters fetching drinks for their tables, suddenly looked up from the cash register and ambled in my direction. Mr. Nondescript in a black shirt and matching trousers. Maybe fifty or so. Fit and trim for a guy his age. Good teeth shining in the semidarkness. The gold name tag read “Bruce.”