Last Ditch

by G. M. Ford

  She peeled the gloves from her hands and dropped them on the littered ground. We started toward the house together, when Tommy called out to one of the technicians. "Miller," he shouted. "Bring that thing over here and give it a runover before we box it."

  I'd never seen this Miller guy before this evening. He was a short little specimen with a wiry halo of black hair surrounding an otherwise bald head. His yellow wind-breaker rustled as he came trotting past us with a small gray metal detector thrust out before him like a lance. Rebecca threw an arm around my waist and spun me slowly around.

  We watched in silence as he started down by the feet and got an immediate hit. A couple of minutes of sifting through the debris yielded six small metal eyelets, which Tommy held in his palm.

  "From his shoes," he announced with a toothy grin.

  Before he was through congratulating himself, the machine emitted another series of electronic beeps, louder this time. It only took a second for Miller to reach in and come up with a rusted belt buckle, which joined the eyelets in .Tommy's hand. Miller worked his way silently up the bones, until, just about level with the top of the rib cage, the metal detector went batshit, squealing almost continually, its little red and green lights blinking like an accident scene.

  The noise brought the medical examiner himself trotting in from the darkness. When Byrne arrived, Tommy was bent over the area, running his hands through the remaining dust. Suddenly, Tommy stopped rummaging and looked up at his boss. A puzzled expression spread over his face as he pulled his hands from the dust Because his back partially obscured the object in his hands, my brain discarded its first impression of what he was holding. It wasn't until he turned my way that I could see I had been right the first time. He had three hands. The two God gave him and the one he'd just fished out of my backyard.

  Interestingly enough, it was the uncommunicative Mr. Byrne who got his wits together first and uttered the line which was to become a permanent part of Northwest folklore.

  "Holy Christ it's Peerless Price," he whispered.

  Chapter 5

  Opinions differ Sharply as to both what Peerless Price became and what became of Peerless Price. For a public life of nearly three decades to end on such an uncertain and tremulous note allowed for a wide range of speculation among those familiar with the story, and thus, lacking the comfort of ready answers, unwittingly provided the raw material of legend. Although the phrase has surely fallen from use among today's youth, few of whom are aware of anything that transpired prior to their last tattoo, to many of us ancient Northwesterners, the phrase "Pulling a Peerless" still referred to getting lost in a hurry and staying that way.

  Peerless Price was the only son of Tyler K. Price, a prominent local clothing manufacturer whose company, Peerless Products, had grown prosperous outfitting starry-eyed miners bound for the Klondike. After graduating from Stanford, ignoring his father's invitation to join the family firm, Peerless Price instead joined the Marine Corps, where he distinguished himself in the Pacific theater of W.W. n. Peerless assuaged his thwarted literary ambitions through frequent letters to his father, vividly describing GI life and death on the Pacific front Tyler Price was understandably proud of his son's contribution to the war effort, and during a businessmen's luncheon at the Cascade Club one afternoon in nineteen forty-three, he casually showed one of his son's letters to his longtime friend R. C. Gamble, who was, at that time, editor in chief of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Whether Gamble was greatly impressed by the young man's prose or whether he perhaps printed the letter merely as a favor to his old friend will never be known. Either way, reader response was immediate and overwhelmingly positive, and so, for the duration of the war, every Sunday, Peerless Price became Seattle’s link to life on those faraway front lines.

  Peerless Price returned to Seattle in the rainy winter of nineteen forty-five with a bronze star on his chest and a stainless steel hand at the end of his left arm. In the closing days of the war, only weeks before VI Day, his luck deserted him when, in an unthinking moment, he tried to slip a booby-trapped codebook out from under the arm of a dead Japanese major. There are those who say that the remainder of his life could be traced directly back to the loss of his hand, but I'm not so sure. That he had returned disillusioned, embittered and no longer at peace did not significantly differentiate him from the thousands upon thousands of other young men and women who likewise shed their youth and enthusiasm on those same beaches. What can be said with some certainty, however, is that the war gave the young Peerless Price an insatiable appetite for contention and a political stance just slightly right of Atilla the Hun, both of which would serve as hallmarks for the remainder of his life and career.

  R. C. Gamble, in his memoirs, would later claim that his offer of a full-time reporting job with the Post-Intelligencer had been purely a product of his great faith in the young Price's abilities rather than an act of patriotic Christian charity, as many suggested. Either way, old R. C. made out like a bandit.

  Over the next ten or twelve years, Peerless Price ascended from an occasional features writer to the lead man in the metro section. From weekly first-person accounts of dog shows and charity auctions to a featured six-day-a-week column which was the first thing everyone in Seattle turned to over coffee. By nineteen fifty-four, he had his own logo. A caricature, really. A little drawing of him with an oversized head, sitting at an undersized desk, wearing an eyeshade, an old-fashioned fountain pen wedged behind his ear. Typing . . . with one hand.

  As is often the case, his success was, to some degree, partially attributable to good timing. Peerless Price and the fifties were made for each other, or perhaps more likely, from each other. Like the strange decade which molded him, Peerless Price led a double life. On the outside, smug and self-satisfied, as only the victors of wars are permitted, but on the inside frustrated, perverse and paranoid. On one hand, fueled by an unquestioning belief in truth, justice and the American way. On the other hand, sufficiently self-righteous and fearful of change as to make one wonder if perhaps he didn't protest just a bit too much.

  Although always a staunch defender of the status quo, Peerless didn't truly hit his stride until he encountered the proper enemy. Sure, he was a Red-baiter second only to Joe. McCarthy. Sure he could find the makings for a Communist conspiracy at a PTA bake sale. Here was a guy who orchestrated a massive bonfire of rock and roll records, which were, he claimed, a cleverly disguised Russian mind-control technique intended to compromise the virtue of America's youth. All of that, however, was merely the pre-game warmup for the sixties.

  As luck would have it, Tyler K. Price died in the spring of nineteen sixty-two leaving the family business to Peerless and his three younger sisters, Emily, Justine and Elizabeth. Having neither the necessary business acumen nor the slightest inclination to run a manufacturing operation, the children quickly sold out to a British firm. Each of the children received, after taxes, slightly less than three million dollars.

  While his sisters used their wealth to ascend to the very apex of Seattle high society, Peerless lived simply. He had no interest in fast cars or fancy houses. Yachts held no fascination. He never married, or, for that matter, showed any interest whatsoever in the opposite sex. What fascinated Peerless Price was power, and toward that end, he invested his newfound fortune.

  Although in most things an arch-traditionalist, Peerless Price was in one respect a forward thinker. Much like his avowed hero J. Edgar Hoover, Price realized early on that information was power and set about making sure that he always had more information than the next guy. Seattle in the early sixties was a city in a state of flux. The old-time systems of police payoffs and governmental influence pedaling were coming to an end. All aspects of the public sector had come under ever-increasing media scrutiny and were responding by mutating into the well-meaning but mostly incompetent organizations we've all come to know and distrust.

  Peerless Price filled the graft vacuum. Every cop in town knew that a few extra bucks
would miraculously appear every time he shared what he knew with Peerless Price. Every clerk in every city and county office knew where that new winter coat could be had. Every hooker, doorman, valet, bellhop, bartender, cabby and parking attendant knew exactly where talk wasn't cheap. And you didn't have to look the other way or drop your pants, either. All you had to look for was a phone booth, and all you had to drop was a dime.

  The Vietnam War provided Peerless with precisely the sort of simpleminded dilemma best suited for his politics.

  He became the hawk's hawk and began a systematic character assassination of any public figure who dared express opposition to the conflict. To incur the wrath of Peerless Price was to have that long-ago affair with your secretary plastered all over the Thursday edition, or to find an exhaustive interview with your step-grandfather Ned, retired now and dabbling in bondage down in Scottsdale, Arizona. To some, Peerless Price became the last true defender of the faith. To others, he became the most feared and hated man in Seattle.

  To his lasting consternation, the one guy Peerless Price could never make a dent in was my old man. By the time Peerless hit his stride, Wild Bill Waterman had been in office for sixteen years and twice run for mayor. Plenty of time for a man with Bill's nepotistic inclinations to have salted the bureaucratic mine with vast numbers of his family nuggets. While the rest of Seattle's movers and shakers cowered under a deluge of audits and investigations, the old man went about business as usual, just keeping it in the family, so to speak. Not only was he insulated from the nitpicking of Peerless Price, but he was also Seattle's most visible and insistent antiwar advocate. For most of the sixties, Peerless Price seldom referred to Wild Bill Waterman as anything except Hanoi Bill. If deflating those in power was to be Peerless Price's job, dethroning my old man became his obsession.

  According to urban legend, their mutual animosity finally boiled over in nineteen sixty-eight when, after a heated shouting match in the Green Parrot Lounge, my old man called Peerless out. Said if he wanted to keep running his lip, why didn't he step outside in the alley for a minute and settle the matter in the time-honored manner of men.

  Peerless Price, who basked in a well-deserved reputation as a barroom brawler, immediately picked up the gauntlet, and out into the alley they went. I remember the big bandage on my father's head and how, for weeks afterwards, he stayed at home, conducting business by phone in his darkened study. My old man always claimed that he got the twenty-three stitches in his forehead when Peerless sucker punched him with the stainless steel hand and that the beating which put Peerless in the hospital on thirty-day medical leave had been administered purely as an act of self-defense.

  Just as an entire generation of Americans can remember precisely what they were doing when John F. Kennedy was killed, a great many Northwestemers can likewise recall what they were about when Peerless Price disappeared. It was easy. It was the Fourth of July weekend and, for the first time in its history, the city had issued permits for not one, but two holiday parades. While the traditional patriotic pageant was scheduled to be prancing downtown, a massive antiwar rally, led by none other than old Hanoi Bill himself, had been planned for Broadway.

  I remember sitting between my parents on the stage in Volunteer Park on the night that Peerless Price disappeared, listening to speaker after speaker deride that faraway conflict and call for the immediate withdrawal of our troops. Sitting until the wee hours, dressed like a miniature FBI agent, until, finally, it was my father's turn to speak. I remember the harsh yellow light. And being too tired to follow his words and becoming lost in the sea of faces.

  In the weeks preceding the holiday, Peerless had viciously attacked anyone and everyone he deemed responsible for issuing the demonstrators a permit to march, branding them as fags, traitors and Communist sympathizers. So incensed was Peerless Price that, against the wishes of his employers, he cast aside any vestige of journalistic impartiality and publicly proclaimed his intention to march at the head of the downtown parade, right next to the mayor. Needless to say, his failure to show up for the parade did not go unnoticed.

  The initial police investigation revealed that he was last seen on the night before, July third, nineteen sixty-nine, at about eight o'clock in the evening when he used a credit card to pay for a meal at a Chinese restaurant in the International District. Two days later his car was found parked and locked in a pay lot on South King Street, a block and a half from where he had eaten his last meal.

  Despite the Price family's public offer of a hundred-thousand-dollar reward for information regarding the whereabouts of their beloved brother, over the next two months, the largest manhunt in the history of the Pacific Northwest yielded absolutely nothing, and the disappearance of Peerless Price became the stuff of legend.

  When the investigation was, at long last, drawn to an unsuccessful close, Bill Moody, the police commissioner, was asked by a reporter how it could be that the best investigators in the department had failed to turn up even a single suspect.

  "Oh, we've got plenty of suspects," he said.

  "Who?" pressed the reporter.

  "Just open the phone book," Moody replied.

  And to mink, after nearly thirty years of rumors and speculation, of the insistent story of how he'd been poured into the foundations of the Kingdome, or paved over when they built the new freeway, or, my personal favorite, how he'd been shredded and sold for crab bait, all the while Peerless Price had been resting comfortably in my backyard. Dude.

  Chapter 6

  If What I did Saturday night could be called sleeping, then I guess what I did Sunday morning could be called waking up. After six hours of watching horror movies on the inside of my eyelids, I stumbled downstairs, feeling far worse than when I'd gone to bed. Instead of making my usual beeline for the kitchen, I crossed the living room and peeked out through the drapes. We were down to two TV trucks. I figured the other guys were off visiting the Hair Club for Men.

  I'll admit it. I smiled when I saw the hairpiece on the kitchen counter. As a matter of fact I smiled all the way through my first cup of coffee. Right up until I opened the morning paper.

  HOLY CH**ST, IT'S PEERLESS PRICE

  Biggest typeface since Princess Di. I sailed the front page over into the comer of the room and concentrated on the sports section. The Sonics were about to open training camp. After an entire year of listening to Shawn Kemp complaining about his contract, George Karl was now bitching about his own contract. Go figure. I read the article three times and still had no idea exactly what Karl's problem was. I heaved a sigh and then waddled over and retrieved the front page.

  The most enduring mystery in the history of the Pacific Northwest was solved yesterday when the body of Peerless Price—

  The story went on and on, covering half the front page and all of page two. There was even a little box directing readers to other related articles throughout the paper. Pictures of the bones, of the front of the house, of me, of the old man, of Peerless and of course of our beloved medical examiner Jeff Byrne. I followed the various articles around the paper. They had it all. They'd even dug up that old AP photo of Peerless Price after he duked it out with the old man. The one where his left 'eye was completely swollen shut and his nose was over by his ear.

  They never came right out and said that Peerless Price had been offed by former city councilman Bill Waterman, or that well-known politico Waterman buried the reporter in his backyard, but they sure didn't leave their readers many other choices. The way I read the articles, either my old man was guilty, or we had us a case of alien abduction. I could feel the blood rising to my face.

  I thumbed my way back to the front page. The lead article was by somebody named Brian Swanson. I followed directions back to page eighteen, and as I suspected, there at the end of the article were both an E-mail address and a phone number for this Swanson dweeb. What the hell. Why not start the day by screaming into somebody's voice mail.

  Fortunately, where cold reason failed, technolog
y intervened. When I plugged the phone back in, I got that pulsing dial tone that meant I had messages. I dialed the access

  number and then my secret code. Bong de de bing. "You have forty-three new messages. To listen to new messages, push one. First message . . . recorded last evening at.. ."

  It took the better part of an hour to work through all the messages. I knew better than to move on to the next message before the prior caller hung up. All that did was transfer the damn things to the Saved Messages folder where they would remain until Armageddon. All but two were from the media. As the night wore on, the messages got shorter and shorter. The last few were hang-ups.

  At seven-thirty this morning, Tommy Matsukawa had called for Rebecca. A preliminary check of dental records confirmed the identity of the bones. Rebecca had been right. The slug was a thirty-two. Tommy acknowledged his lunch debt. The other call was from my uncle Pat.

  Patrick S. Waterman was the youngest of the three Waterman brothers, my father the oldest In between were Edward, who died when I was a child, and the four sisters Karen, Hildy, May and Rochelle. Like everybody else in the family, Pat had lined his pockets buying real estate on my old man's inside information. For the past twenty years or so, he had been more or less a professional board member and social butterfly.

  I called the number he left. The static told me he was in the car.

  "Yeah."

  "Pat. It's Leo."

  "Don't you check your messages?"

  As usual, his voice held an underlying tone of dissatisfaction. Sort of a "you cur" understood. And, as usual, it annoyed me.

  Pat and I had never gotten along well. My mother used to claim it was because Pat had never married and wasn't accustomed to dealing with children, but in my heart, I'd always known better. It was more than that. On some fundamental level, we saw the world in completely different terms. And unable to identify the source of the friction, we'd allowed it to slop over into all our dealings, creating an air of discord which, for the last thirty years, had drifted over the field of our linked lives like cannon smoke.