Thicker Than Water (A Leo Waterman Mystery)

by G. M. Ford

  “I’m sure you do,” the lawyer said.

  “And rightly so,” Billy added. “A healthy respect for law enforcement is the cornerstone of civilized society. Any society…”

  Sounded like Billy was prepared to go on at some length, but Roddy cut him off. “Considering the nature of his offense, Mr. Collins was remanded on a one-hundred-thousand-dollar bond.”

  “And?”

  “In less than twenty-four hours, the destitute Mr. Collins was back on the street.”

  The lawyer opened his mouth to speak, but again Roddy kept talking.

  “We have it on good authority that it was young Mr. Bailey who put up his bond.”

  Billy opened his mouth to say something but a quick glance from his attorney encouraged him to swallow it.

  “That used to be your old stomping ground, didn’t it?” Roddy pressed.

  “Excuse me?” Billy said.

  “Over there on the island. Over by Dashwood. That’s where you lived before…” Roddy swept a hand in a grand ironic gesture. “…before all of this.”

  Neither of them said a word. At this point they weren’t even willing to talk about where Billy Bailey used to live, which told me that the conversation had reached the point of diminishing returns. These guys weren’t going to tell us anything useful. Billy had invited us over for the sheer fun of it. He wanted to parry and banter, to revel in his triumph over the forces of darkness. And then we spoiled the party. Touched a nerve right out of the gate. Ruined everything by bringing up his ne’er-do-well son, the royal idiot as it were, whose ham-handed criminal career was a very real threat to his father’s political ambitions.

  This was one of the rare instances where being a private investigator had it all over being an actual cop. Despite the obvious manpower and technological advantages enjoyed by modern police departments, policemen adhere to a fairly exacting protocol. They need probable cause. They need warrants. They have to be polite and not step on anybody’s toes unless they can prove they are lawbreaker toes, and even then they have to be careful about how they go about their business, lest their quarry get off on some crappy little technicality.

  Not so the PI. When things don’t seem to be going anywhere, a private eye can start turning over rocks to see what’s on the other side. He can annoy people on purpose, show up at the same places over and over, and ask the same questions until somebody snaps and something breaks loose from the log jam.

  I was deciding who to insult about what when I was upstaged by the echoing sound of a raised voice, followed by the distant boom of the two-ton front door.

  I snapped a look back over my shoulder just in time to see Miss Panty Girdle abandon her post at the library door and hustle off toward the racket.

  Another shout, much closer this time, seemed to set everyone in motion. Spearbeck bumped himself off the corner of the desk and straightened his tie. Billy Bailey folded his hands in front of him like he was praying.

  A moment passed, and then I heard two voices entwined in conflict. I could hear the sound of their feet scraping the flagstones as they approached. “Like I give a fuck,” the male voice said.

  He came barging through the door like a black squall, throwing an angry hand in the air, speaking directly to Billy Bailey. “You ought to teach that twat some manners,” he said.

  Junior Bailey couldn’t have been more than a couple of Oreos short of three hundred pounds. A corpulent corpuscle in a hideous purple suit, he looked like a Cuban headwaiter who had been held hostage in a doughnut shop. Except for the rosebud lips, he bore little or no resemblance to his father.

  “Bitch forgets she’s the hired help,” he said.

  I snuck another backward peek. Her cheeks were burning, but her ice-sculpture veneer remained intact.

  “I told him you were engaged, sir,” she said.

  Billy unlaced his fingers and showed a “not to worry” palm. “It’s fine, Evelyn,” he said. “Would you excuse us please?”

  There was something about the way he begged her pardon that told me they were sleeping together. Just a tad more concern for her feelings than the standard employer-employee relationship called for. The kind of compromise a man makes only when his dick is involved.

  She managed a thin, insincere smile and headed for the hall. She flicked a surreptitious glance my way as she eased by. I flicked back. She pretended not to notice and instead raised her nose an inch and a half and picked up her pace. I had no doubt that Billy would suffer for this little indignity at some later date. No doubt at all.

  Junior lumbered back and forth in front of the desk, looking us over like a general inspecting the troops. “These the cops?” he asked his father.

  Junior had one of those Jersey City tough guy walks, like his balls were so big he had to walk around them. You could tell he spent a lot of time practicing in front of a mirror, strutting and hitching up his pants.

  He pointed at Roddy. “Yeah,” he said. “I remember that one there.”

  “These gentlemen have some questions regarding Jordan Koontz and Lui Ng,” his father said evenly. Despite the moderate timbre of his voice and the bland facial expression, Billy Bailey looked like a man sitting on a wasp’s nest.

  “What about ’em?” Junior asked.

  “You know a guy named Brett Ward?” I tried.

  “Never heard of him,” he said immediately.

  It wasn’t that he was a lousy liar; it was that he was too arrogant to try, as if he thought it was more important for us to know how little he thought of us than it was to bother with any tawdry attempts at deception.

  “That’s funny,” I said. “Your friends Koontz and Ng spent the last week or so down in Seattle looking for him.”

  “So what?”

  “So…since neither of those guys takes a shit without your say-so, I figured it must have something to do with you.”

  The fat bulged into rolls on one side of Junior’s neck as he cocked his head at me. Appeared he wasn’t used to being pushed. “Told you,” he said. “I don’t know any Warren guy.”

  “Ward,” Marty corrected. “Brett Ward.”

  “Him neither.”

  “How about Trevor Collins?” I asked.

  “Who’s he?”

  “A loser from over on the island. A loser who assaulted one of our provincial constables,” Roddy said.

  “Never heard of him neither,” Junior said.

  He looked over at his father, seeking approval, trying for what must have been the thousandth time to make a positive impression on an old man who saw him as nothing but a personal disappointment and a political liability.

  For his part, Billy gazed out the window. Out over the heaving gray water, where a pair of heeled-over sailboats raced the storm to landfall. The glassy look in his eye said he was somewhere else, somewhere in the past probably, wondering where he’d gone wrong, another wistful expression with which I was sadly familiar.

  I shifted my gaze to Junior in time to watch a wave of color travel up his throat and redden his ears. He was staring at his old man. It was like the rest of us weren’t there and these two were yoked together, plowing fallow ground for all eternity.

  Since I already hated him, and he was already pissed off at his father, Junior Bailey pretty much volunteered to be the subject of my irritability project.

  “You think it could be the name?” I asked.

  Junior seemed surprised by the question. “You talkin’ to me?” he asked.

  “Travis Bickle,” I said.

  His face was blank as a cabbage, so I helped him out.

  “You know, Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver,” I said.

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “I was just wondering if being named Junior had maybe gotten you off on the wrong foot in life. It’s kind of a diminutive, isn’t it? Like you’re somehow smaller or lesser than others of your kind, assuming, of course, there are any others of your kind. I was wondering if that fresh-out-of-the-chute insult w
asn’t a bit more that your tortured little psyche was able to bear.”

  “My tortured what?”

  “Psyche.” I spelled it for him.

  Junior frowned. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “You already used that line.”

  Marty used his elbow to dent one of my kidneys.

  Spearbeck could see where this was going and didn’t like it a bit. He moseyed over next to his client and said to Marty and me, “Well, I guess then that’s it, isn’t it?”

  When nobody said anything, he tried again. “Sorry we were unable to help you with your problem,” he said without sincerity. He gestured toward the door. “So, if you don’t mind…” He let it dangle.

  Junior wasn’t ready to let go, however. He walked right up into my face.

  “You ain’t no cop,” he announced.

  I leaned even closer, nearly bringing our noses into contact. He smelled of old sweat and new onions. “This isn’t going away,” I promised him. “A good friend of mine is missing and some way or other you’ve got something to do with it. I’m not going away until I find out what happened to her.”

  “You got quite an imagination there, Ace.” He peered back over his shoulder at his father. A brief father-and-son staring match ensued before Junior turned back my way. “You know what I’m thinking?” he asked.

  “Salad, I hope.”

  The room seemed to hold its breath. Took him a minute, but eventually he got the joke. He nodded in the direction of the door. “Go on…get the fuck out of here,” he said.

  Like I said, cops have to respect boundaries. When a citizen says he doesn’t want to talk anymore and that you should get your ass out of his house, they either have to make an arrest or beat a hasty retreat. Roddy and Marty started for the door.

  I, on the other hand, had an aching in my gut and, as I saw it, damn little to lose, so I stood my ground and asked him again. “Why are those two goons of yours looking for Brett Ward?”

  “Never heard of the guy,” Junior repeated.

  I took a half step back, giving myself enough leverage to wipe that smirk off his face with a good solid right, something with my hip and shoulder behind it, something he’d recall as he sat in the dentist’s chair getting his front teeth replaced, but Marty read my mind, and just as I started to cock myself, I felt his fingers circling my wrist.

  “Leo,” he said.

  I was so angry I could feel my body shaking. So could Marty.

  “Let’s go,” he said, using my arm as a lever to turn me away from Junior Bailey’s leering face. I took a deep breath and let Marty and Roddy escort me from the room.

  Marty was a good listener. Must have been three or four minutes before he thanked whoever was on the other end and broke the connection.

  We were sitting in the parking lot outside Provincial Police headquarters. We’d tendered our thanks and were getting ready to fight traffic back to the border when Marty decided to check his messages. He pocketed the phone and looked over at me.

  “They’ve been through every piece of real estate Billy Bud owns, rents, or leases in King County. No sign of Rebecca anywhere. We’ve got requests into both Pierce and Kitsap Counties asking them to do the same. Pierce says it’ll be a few days. Kitsap is having trouble finding a judge who’s willing to go for probable cause.” He made a disgusted face. “Lotta rugged individualists out there,” he said.

  Before I could respond, a clap of thunder shook the car. Marty and I looked at one another, both of us thinking this was a weird time of year for a thunderstorm. I leaned my face against the side window and looked up at the sky. A sheet of low clouds rolled overhead like a steel escalator. Down on terra firma the ornamental trees decorating the parking lot cowered, as if girding themselves for the oncoming onslaught.

  “Junior lied to us about knowing this Collins guy,” Marty said. “Kinda makes a body wonder why something like that is worth lying about.”

  As usual, Marty had a point. Why bother to lie about something so seemingly trivial? So you knew him. So you bailed him out of jail. So what?

  The first raindrops were huge. I sat in the driver’s seat and watched in glum wonder as they thumped onto the hood of the car. I was about to comment on their ungodly proportions when suddenly, another, much closer, clap of thunder rumbled and roared and, before you could blink, a deluge of biblical proportions poured down on us.

  A minute later, the wind arrived, swirling from all directions at once, sweeping up bits of litter and tree debris from the parking lot and spiraling it aloft. The newly sprouted daffodils bobbed and weaved their bright yellow heads like punch-drunk fighters.

  The Tahoe rocked on its heavy-duty springs as the deluge reached a hammering crescendo, making it impossible to converse, reducing a couple of grown men to sitting there, gawking out the side windows as the squall swept up and over the city, sitting there watching the high-rises disappear into the front wall of the storm, seemingly evaporated by nature’s fury, only to reemerge a few moments later, as the squall raced toward East Vancouver and the mountains beyond.

  “You know what I’m thinking?” I asked when the racket died down.

  “Almost never,” Marty said.

  “I’m thinking we ought to go over to Dashwood and poke around a bit. See if we can pick up anything about this Trevor Collins from the locals.” I dropped a disgusted hand in my lap. “We already pissed away the whole day. Maybe we can come up with something useful over in Dashwood.”

  Marty thought it over. “We’re here,” he said finally. “This is as close as we’re gonna get to Vancouver Island.” He shrugged. “Why not?”

  “Whatever happened to Brett Ward started when he repo’ed that damn boat.” I said it as much to myself as to Marty, trying to convince myself that we were making progress, that we weren’t just thrashing around and going nowhere.

  “How long to Dashwood?” Marty asked.

  “Depends on the Nanaimo ferry. If we catch the first ferry, three, maybe four hours. If there’s a line, we add an hour for every ferry we don’t catch.”

  Marty sighed. “I’ll call Peg,” he said. “She hates if I have dispatch call her for me. She always thinks they’re calling to tell her I’m dead.”

  Four hours flat and we were a couple of miles south of Dashwood, tooling along in a icy rain, on what they called the Island Highway, forest primeval on the left, dark, churning water on the right. According to Google, the CrossCurrent Marina was supposed to be somewhere up ahead on the right.

  We’d spent the sixty-minute ferry ride drinking coffee in the snack bar and reading the Vancouver PD file on Trevor Collins, who turned out to be pretty much as advertised, a lifetime scumbag, low-level drug dealer, and part-time burglar, with no previous history of violence whatsoever, a fact that immediately caught Marty’s eye.

  “Shooting at a policeman is way out of character for this guy,” Marty commented.

  “Repo men and process servers make people absolutely nuts,” I said. I knew too. Couple of times in the beginning of my PI career, I’d had to serve process in order to make a living. Hundred bucks a pop and what you learned right away was that there was something about having a subpoena slapped in your hand that brought out the very worst in people. Made ’em do things they normally wouldn’t even consider. Crazy things, way beyond what the situation called for. Next thing you know you’ve got a podiatrist chasing you with an ax.

  Marty wasn’t buying it. When you’ve been a cop for as long as he has, you assume everybody’s lying to you all the time, and thus operate from the assumption that nothing is quite as it seems. It’s why cops have a tendency to hang out exclusively with other cops. That way, at least everybody’s on the same page.

  “Not that nuts,” he said. “This guy’s been in the joint a couple of times. He knows how the system works.” I watched from the corner of my eye. I could tell he was editing himself, trying not to say something that he thought would make me feel worse than I already did.
r />   “What?” I pressed.

  He looked over at me. “Unless there was something that scared him more than a long stretch in the joint.”

  Ricky Waters came immediately to mind. I could still see the self-loathing behind his eyes and feel his pain.

  A quarter moon poked a hole in the cloud cover and oozed its pale blue light down on the dark expanse of water. Otherwise, it was just a rural highway, anywhere in North America, on a cold spring night.

  Marty pointed toward the water. Down by the rocky shoreline, several banks of overhead lights glowed in the gloom, illuminating an area about the size of a Little League baseball field.

  “Gotta be the marina,” he said.

  “Shall we?”

  “Why not?”

  I turned right and bumped down the gravel drive.

  New day, new marina, same hard-luck story. Like most of its brethren, Cross-Current Marina had fallen on hard times. The yard was mostly deserted and the weeds along the fence line were chin-high. The half dozen derelict vessels scattered here and there looked a lot like fossil remains in the harsh overhead lights.

  The rain had turned to mist and was hissing on the hood as I turned off the Tahoe and climbed out. On the other side of the car, Marty stretched and groaned.

  The roll-up door on the big Quonset hut stood partially open. I could see a pair of legs moving around inside. A moment later a cascade of welding sparks began to flow onto the floor like falling stars.

  I was about to head in that direction when the office door swung open with a bang and a guy in white coveralls stepped out onto the macadam. Six feet, maybe thirty-five years old, with crude jailhouse tattoos decorating the backs of both hands. He had a lumpy asymmetrical face that looked like it had been assembled from spare parts. The red and white patch on his chest read, “Rudy.”

  He walked our way. “Help ya?” he asked.

  We introduced ourselves. Marty showed him his badge.

  “Seattle, huh?” was all the guy said.

  “Your friendly neighbor to the south,” I threw in, trying to lighten things up.

  “Kinda far out of your jurisdiction,” the guy noted.