Thicker Than Water (A Leo Waterman Mystery)

by G. M. Ford

  I told him I understood. He clapped me on the shoulder.

  “One hundred and seventy-five,” he said.

  I said something terribly intelligent like, “Huh?”

  “That’s the number of AK-47 shell casings they found on the lawn.”

  Roddy had an officer drive my car back from the island, so by the time I finished giving my statement, the Tahoe was waiting for me in the parking lot.

  I don’t remember the drive back to Seattle. By the time I got to Harborview Hospital, Marty had already been pronounced to be in serious but stable condition and transferred to Swedish Hospital, about three blocks up the street.

  I left the Tahoe in the Harborview parking garage and covered the distance on foot. It was raining buckets. By the time I got to Swedish, I looked like I’d been swimming. The old lady in the information booth took one look at me and started giving me directions to the ER. I assured her that I felt considerably better than I looked and she reluctantly told me where to find Marty. Seven-oh-three. West Tower.

  If I’d been expecting another cop convention on the seventh floor, I’d have been disappointed. Two cops in overcoats formed a muttering knot along the right-hand wall. On the opposite side of the hallway a young female patrol officer sat with her hat in her lap. Other than that, the corridor was empty. If you closed your eyes, only the faint hum of electronics and the stale, recycled air reminded you where you were.

  The cops unwound themselves and started my way. I recognized the one in the lead. Captain Andrew Hardy, a serious old-school cop and Marty’s direct supervisor. Hardy was a nondescript guy just this side of sixty, with a head of salt-and-pepper hair slicked straight back. He had a reputation as being a stickler for detail and a hard guy to get along with. He didn’t bother to introduce his toady.

  He shook my hand. “What the hell happened up there?” he asked.

  I told him. Took me a full ten minutes to get it all in. Like Marty, Hardy was a hell of a listener. “So whose boat did you guys rock?” he asked when I’d finished.

  “Gotta be Junior Bailey,” I said.

  He took a minute to digest what I’d told him. “OK,” he said finally. “We’re forming a joint task force with the Vancouver PD.” He looked me dead in the eye. “You’re out of it now,” he said. “We appreciate your efforts thus far, but as of right now, you’re no longer part of this investigation.”

  I kept my mouth shut. This wasn’t a guy to screw with. He could put me on seventy-two-hour remand as a material witness with a nod of his well-groomed head and the last thing on earth I needed was to spend the next three days in jail.

  “Did you hear me?” he pressed.

  “I heard.”

  “’Cause you’ve got a reputation as a guy who has trouble taking no for an answer.”

  “Dogged. That’s me,” I said.

  He leaned in close. “Don’t fuck with me, Mr. Waterman. If you still had a PI ticket I’d be obliged to tell you to just stay out of the way. But you don’t. You’re just a civilian these days, so I’m telling you to get all the way lost here.” He cut the air with the side of his hand. “The mother needs an update, tell her to call my office.”

  “I’m going to keep looking for Rebecca Duval for as long as it takes,” I said.

  The air in the corridor was thick.

  “They were right about you,” he said.

  “Who’s they?” I asked.

  He reached a hand back over his shoulder. The toady slapped a manila envelope into his palm. He held it out to me. “Here’s what you and Detective Sergeant Gilbert had working on the Duval missing person’s case.”

  I took it from him.

  He nodded toward Marty’s room. “Peg and the daughter are in there now. Then it’s going to be me and a police stenographer.” He nodded at the female officer across the hall. “So it’s gonna be quite a while.”

  For once in my life, I took the hint and headed for the elevators.

  Ten minutes later, I was sitting behind the wheel using a damp roll of paper towels to dry myself and running the car heater on high. Having inventoried my options, I decided to see if I couldn’t catch up to the boys, on the off chance that one of their surveillance teams had seen something, anything. What was certain was that when “the boys” were your best option, things were about as bad as bad could get.

  My frustration meter was redlined. I felt useless, like I was madly treading water and going absolutely nowhere. I had no idea what sort of trouble Brett Ward had managed to get himself into, other than it involved boats and quite probably that scumbag Junior Bailey. Worse yet, I was no closer to finding either Brett or Rebecca than I was when I’d started looking.

  I got rock-star parking right outside of the Eastlake Zoo. I stood in the doorway for a minute, letting my eyes adjust to the cave-like gloom and then wandered inside. The place was deserted. One of the younger bartenders whose name I couldn’t recall was stocking beer glasses under the bar.

  “Rolling Rock,” I said.

  By the time I reached the end of the bar, he had a cold beer waiting for me. “Half an hour or so,” he said to my back as I moved on past. “They been sleepin’ in lately.”

  I took the beer and the SPD envelope up to the mezzanine. I sat, sipping at the beer, looking out the window as East Lynn Street fell steeply downhill toward Lake Union. Twenty-five years back, in looser times, I used to sit here with my friends and smoke pot and drink beer until the place closed. Nobody gave a damn. That was before the new puritans took over the city. Before political correctness became the rage and melted all of us into a single amorphous dung heap.

  I sighed and opened the envelope. Marty had left nothing to chance. Patrol was checking the Madison Park condo hourly. Additionally, they’d gotten an “exigent circumstances” warrant and looked around inside. I read the report. No sign of any kind of violence. Nothing out of place other than the occupants.

  Information Technology was monitoring all cell phone and credit card activity. The SPD techie had gone back three months, looking for a pattern of communications or expenditures that might show a pattern of behavior that would point us in one direction or another. The algorithm came up empty.

  They’d interviewed everybody down at the morgue, including the janitor. Talked to Rebecca’s friends. Even talked to people at the gym where she worked out three times a week. Likewise, nada.

  At the bottom of the pile was an old-fashioned computer printout. Those green and white striped sheets that were all connected to one another like a paper accordion. Took me a couple of minutes of flipping back and forth to figure out what it was and where it started.

  I’d given Marty the names of Brett’s lovers, at least the parts I had. Rosemary D, Serena A, Amy T, Kathy K, Lyssa R, and Barbara P. I had no idea of what use they might be, but for my own sanity, I had to make sure nothing was left to chance.

  Whoever was working IT for the SPD had gone the extra yard. After exhausting all the normal informational channels, they’d annexed the King County Elections Board rolls and scanned voter registration records for Caucasian women between thirty and fifty years of age, then cross-referenced with the DMV for driver’s license photos. There were nine Rosemary D’s, sixteen Serena A’s, sixty-three Amy T’s, fifty-three Kathy K’s, eleven Lyssa R’s, and a whopping seventy-nine Barbara P’s, each accompanied by an address, a current phone number, and DMV photo so muddy and generic the image could have been John Wayne or one of the Golden Girls.

  I was still squinting at the first page of Serena A’s when the street door burst open and someone shouted for the barkeep. Caesar’s lesions had arrived en masse, stumbling in from the great outdoors like lemmings in search of an arctic precipice.

  I watched as they assembled at the end of the bar and began to steel themselves for yet another round of debauchery. It was the usual crew with the usual banter about who owed who a drink and what social atrocity so-and-so had committed the night before. George and Ralph and Billy Bob Fung. Large M
arge and Heavy Duty Judy with their arms slung around Red Lopez as he bellied up to the bar. Coupla guys I didn’t know. And Norman. Nearly Normal Norman stood head and shoulders above everybody else in the room; his great mop of red hair seemed to dust the ceiling as he sluiced around the corner of the bar.

  I hadn’t seen Norman in some time. Word was he was doing a county stretch for resisting arrest, which was more or less what he always went down for. The original complaint would always be something harmless, like sitting on the sidewalk or pissing in a public place, but when you’re six-eight and about two-seventy, when you’re determined not to go quietly and it takes a Taser and a half-dozen stout lads with badges to cuff you and stuff you into a patrol car, the original charge tends to get lost in the scuffle and they segue your ass directly into a charge of resisting arrest, which is an ironclad ninety-day misdemeanor.

  Once debts, both real and imaginary, had been settled and everybody had a drink firmly in hand, the assembled multitude dispersed itself about the room. Several of them headed for the pinball machines along the south wall. Couple of others started dropping quarters into the pool tables and sighting down warped pool cues. George and Ralph each carried a pitcher of beer toward their usual booth.

  I stood up. The movement caught George’s eye. He nudged Ralph and started for the stairs. I sat and watched as two guys who habitually lurched from place to place climbed a set of rickety stairs without spilling so much as a drop.

  I knew better than to try to make conversation before they’d quaffed a beer or two. I watched in silence as a quartet of secretaries groped their way through the gloom. Looked like they’d never been here before and were having serious reservations about their choice of a hostelry. They took a table at the rear of the bar and waited for somebody to take their orders. It was going to be a long wait.

  Norman walked by and waved up at me. “Thanks, Leo,” he said.

  I nodded and waved back.

  George wiped his mouth with his sleeve and set the glass on the table. “You find her, Leo?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  “We got nothin’ neither,” he said. “Had a couple of people lookin’ around the boatyard with some real estate guy.” He finished his second glass of beer and poured another. “Red and Judy got pinched down by the condo.” He shrugged. “Both of ’em had failure to appear warrants out on ’em,” he explained.

  They’d get pinched for something petty and stupid and then fail to make their scheduled court appearance, which was an offense about ten times as serious as whatever they’d been arrested for in the first place. The proverbial vicious circle of song and story.

  Norman walked by a second time, still waving, still thanking me.

  “You got any idea what he’s thanking me for?” I asked George.

  He hesitated for long enough for me to know the answer. He shrugged. “Long as I was down there bailing out Red and Judy, I figured, you know, what the hell, might as well get old Normy outta there too, while I was at it.”

  “With my money?”

  George winked at me. “Is there any other kind?”

  “Who’s all these lookers?” Ralph wanted to know.

  Ralph was pawing through the computer printout. I got the impression that his hazy vision somehow meshed with the blurred photographs.

  “Just something I was working on,” I told him.

  He began to read out loud. “Amelia Tasker, 17334 Cherry Street, Seattle,” then shuffled through the pages and read another…and then another. George sighed and made an “if it makes him happy” face.

  “Kathy Krause, 2611 Winona Road, Kirkland.”

  Norman made another pass down below.

  “Don’t mention it,” I told him this time. He waved again.

  “Kathy Kahn, 8769 North Sixtieth Avenue, Seattle,” Ralph intoned. Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle. “Lyssa Redfelt, 456 Queen Anne Avenue North, Seattle.”

  “You want we should stay on duty?” George asked.

  I told him no. “The cops are all over it now.” I filled him in on everything that had happened since the last time I’d seen him. About Koontz and Ng and Junior Bailey and Marty getting shot in Canada. By the time I’d finished, so was the pitcher of beer.

  “This ain’t good,” he said as he chugged the dregs.

  “No,” I said. “It’s not.”

  “Barbara Peterson, 3614 Rainier Avenue South, Seattle,” Ralph recited.

  I snuck a peek at the secretaries, trying to see whether they’d figured out that they were going to have to order at the bar, but Red had spotted them first. He was standing next to their table, talking and waving his left hand in the air. I winced. With Red, you always had to wonder what he was doing with the other hand. Didn’t take long to find out, because that’s when I heard the magic phrase.

  “Ain’t it a beauty?” Red inquired.

  “Barbara Parkland, 4509 Eastern Avenue, Seattle.”

  Apparently the young ladies were not nearly as enamored with Red’s tumescence as was Red. They began whooping and wailing, calling for the manager, and sprinting for the door. I smiled for what felt like the first time in a week. Maybe mirth was the answer, because that’s when my brain finally clicked into gear.

  I grabbed Ralph by the shoulder. “Lemme see that,” I said.

  He frowned and handed over the printout. I ran my finger down the Barbara P’s until I found Parkland. Forty-five-oh-nine Eastern Avenue. Well la-de-da. Exactly the same neighborhood where Rebecca had gotten those two unexplained parking tickets. I checked the DMV picture. The likeness was better than most. Maybe. Just maybe, I’d seen that face before. Except it had more of a pained expression the last time I’d seen it.

  I threw a handful of money on the table. “Buy everybody a drink for me,” I told George as I headed for the front door.

  The house was set back a little farther from the street than its neighbors. I suspected that whatever grand edifice had originally stood on the property had been torn down and something with a sleeker, greener profile had been built on the lot. They’d used the leftover acreage to put in a driveway and a two-car garage, a modern amenity enjoyed by very few in this “park out front in the street” kind of neighborhood. Brett Ward’s blue Porsche Carrera sat in the right-hand stall. A dusty film said it had been sitting there for a while. I tiptoed back to the street to work up a plan of action. The rain had stopped altogether. The trees were still and silent. A couple of cars eased by on their way up to the main drag at Forty-fifth.

  A direct assault was out of the question. Kicking in the front door and dragging him out by his heels might or might not put Brett Ward in the hands of the SPD, but it would sure as hell land me in a jail cell.

  Problem was I didn’t have time to be screwing around. I needed to find him and find him now, so I hoofed it back to the Tahoe, found what I was looking for in the glove box, and then retraced my steps back to 4509, and rang the bell.

  I heard the sound of heels on a hardwood floor. She answered the door on the second ring. Barbara P, Brett’s latest lover, the one of the unwitting screen test. Our Lady of the Clothespins. The top half of the door was glass. She pulled back the lace curtain, took one look at me, and closed them again. I strained my ears and listened hard but didn’t hear the sounds of retreating feet. She was still standing on the other side of the door.

  I knocked this time, hard and insistent. The edge of the curtain quivered. I heard her breath catch in her throat. A moment passed before I heard a chain rattle and the door eased open a crack. A brown, Botoxed eye peeped through the crack.

  “What’s this about?” she asked.

  “It’s a DVD of you making love with Brett Ward.”

  She made a rude noise with her lips and closed the door.

  I raised my voice. “In that love nest of his down at the boatyard,” I added.

  The door opened again. No chain this time. Her face was drawn tight as a drum. “Are you saying he…?”

  “He had half-a-doz
en women,” I said. “Digitally photographed all of you in intimate moments.” I shrugged. “I guess that’s how he gets his kicks.”

  “That’s absurd,” she sputtered without a hint of conviction.

  “Can I ask a question?”

  She started to close the door.

  “Those clothespins pinching your nipples…didn’t that hurt?” I asked.

  She slapped me hard across the face. I stood there and took it. She drew her hand back again, but managed to restrain herself, which was a good thing, because another would have exceeded my “women get one for free” limit.

  I reached out and offered her the DVD. “Probably be a good idea if you didn’t let that fall into the wrong hands,” I said.

  She hesitated and then carefully slipped the disc from between my fingers.

  “To my knowledge, that’s the only copy,” I told her.

  “What do you want?” she asked. “You want money?”

  “I want Brett Ward,” I said.

  She waggled the disc. “How do I know this is what you say it is?”

  “See for yourself. Go pop it in the DVD player. I’ll wait right here.”

  I stood there and watched as she came to grips with it. It’s always hard when somebody turns out to be something other than what you imagined, especially in matters of the heart. Her hand shook as she slid the DVD into her back pocket.

  She tried for a snarl, but her voice was unsteady with pain. “That son of a bitch,” she said.

  I took that to be an invitation and stepped inside the foyer. She spun and took off, clickety-clacking toward the back of the house, with me glued to her backside as we wound our way to what must have been the family room, where Brett Ward was stretched out on a black leather sofa, watching What Not To Wear on a big flat-screen TV. Clinton and Stacy were trashing somebody’s wardrobe.

  She was on him like ugly on an ape, landing in the middle of his chest with both knees, pummeling him with both hands, screeching and screaming unintelligibly as she rained blows on his head and shoulders.