Last Ditch

by G. M. Ford

  I figured in for a penny, in for a pound, so I spoke up.

  "Near as I can tell, you and I couldn't agree on so much as the weather or the time of day."

  She drew a hand to her throat, closed her eyes and took several deep breaths.

  "I feel so much better."

  "Me too," I offered. "Can we go home now?"

  "You mean like separately?"

  I gave the Scout's honor sign.

  "Absolutely."

  "In a minute." She forked in half the salad and then washed it down with a healthy slurp of wine. When she finished swallowing, she said, "You know ... if you're going to make a go at this dating thing, Leo, you're going to have to get rid of those bleeding-heart, man-of-the-people politics of yours. There's no future in that. Women hear that stuff, they start picturing life in a mobile home."

  A strong man, an assertive man, a man in complete charge of his faculties would have smiled knowingly and said nothing. At least that's what I figure. If I ever meet one, I'll ask him.

  "Oh, yeah? Well, what about your elitist, spoiled-little-rich-girl, fresh-out-of-journalism-school politics? Nobody with a brain bigger than a lima bean or a heart bigger than a gnat will listen to that 'them and us' crap for a minute."

  She chewed and swallowed the last of the salad and then began to wave her fork in my general direction.

  "And that corny, cynical private-eye stuff."

  "Ohhhhh so insensitive ..." I scoffed. "... and thus doubly offensive to an assertive, fork-waving woman such as yourself."

  She grinned madly and nodded.

  "Exactly."

  We both burst out laughing. She had a piece of lettuce on her front tooth. I raised my glass. "To us," I toasted. We downed our wine. We hadn't yet ordered entrees, so I threw forty bucks on the table, rescued her coat from the coatroom and drove her directly home. No kisses. No hugs. Just enough of a smile to assure the lettuce was still locked in place and an awkward handshake. An odd night to be sure, but, if nothing else, it .cured me of blind dates, once and for all.

  Interestingly enough, over the next ten years, fate and those same mutual friends kept throwing Claire Wells and me back together. We kept running into one another at Christmas parties, political fund-raisers and summer birthday bashes. She was working her way up the corporate ladder with the Post-Intelligencer. For a while, she'd tried her hand at news writing, but had eventually decided she was more interested in telling people what to do, so she went into financial administration. I was scratching out a living serving legal papers. Dashin' for cash, we used to call it. Maybe it was because neither of us was having much luck with our dating lives, but, after that, whenever we found ourselves in the same room, we'd invariably gravitate toward some empty corner where we'd gossip about our partners of old and our companions du jour, and eventually we'd get around to reliving that strange night long ago, and then we'd again attempt to unravel the knot of how that aborted evening had, in some peculiar way, cemented a lasting bond between us.

  That's how I knew that if I showed up on Monday morning, down at the security desk at the Post-Intelligencer, she'd come down and rescue me. Friends don't leave friends at the security desk. I told the guard my name was Randy Metzger and asked him to inform Claire Wells that I was in the lobby.

  I was hiding in a copy of Outdoor Life, learning to hunt mule deer from a tree stand, when I heard her heels on the floor. There was no mistaking the sound. Claire Wells was the fastest walker in the world. Even handicapped by a pair of four-inch heels and a tight red skirt, she'd leave all those wiggly-ass Olympic-style walkers in the dust

  She clicked to a halt about a foot from my shins. She was a slender woman of about forty, five-eight or so, wearing a black silk blouse and shoes to match the skirt. Her thick brown hair was shorter and not quite the shade I remembered, but she had those same gray eyes. She tapped the toe of one red shoe and then spoke, barely moving her lips.

  "The name thing. Was that supposed to be funny?" "I couldn't very well give him my own name, could I?" She paced around in a small circle, her hands on her hips.

  "Make my day, Leo. Tell me you're here to give the paper an exclusive on this Peerless Price thing."

  I shrugged. "You wouldn't want me to start lying to you now, would you, Claire? Not after all these years."

  She raised her voice. "The hat and the glasses are supposed to make you invisible, is that it?"

  "Shhh. I'm undercover."

  She smirked. "What makes you think I'm going to let you stay that way? Huh? You can run out of here with your coat over your head and we'll still be miles ahead of the competition."

  "You wouldn't do that"

  "Why not? You're the hottest story in town. Right now, you're the only story in town."

  " 'Cause, first off, you're not that kind of girl."

  She opened her mouth, but I cut her off.

  "Besides which, you're a bean counter, not a newshound."

  "So what? Regardless of my function, I work for a newspaper. What do you suppose my bosses would think if they knew you were here, and I didn't tell anyone?"

  I ignored the question, instead taking the offensive.

  "Besides that, you owe me."

  "For what?" she demanded.

  I tried to look hurt. "How quickly they forget." She wasn't giving an inch. "Howsabout the aforementioned Randy Metzger?"

  She winced. "I can't believe you'd stoop so low."

  "If I recall correctly, my dear Claire, it was you who was about to do the stooping."

  About five years ago, Claire had gotten engaged to a guy named Randy Metzger. Good-looking blond guy about her age from Mukiteo. Some sort of high-priced software engineer for Boeing. At least that's what he claimed. I ran into the happy couple coming out of the Metropolitan Grill one Friday night, and, even though we spent no more than five minutes trading banalities on the sidewalk, something about the guy bothered me. In my business, I get lied to a lot. Lies have a certain rhythm of their own, as if in some odd way they slip out from between the lips more easily than the truth. Two minutes into the conversation, Randy Metzger had my bullshit meter reading maximum, but, at a time like that, what was I going to say? "Nice to see you again, Claire. Boy, is this guy you're going to marry next month full of shit." Naaah. I don't think so.

  A couple of weeks later, I was up at Boeing's manufacturing facility in Everett trying to run down a former avionics engineer who'd skipped on a thirty-thousand-dollar bond. After I came up empty on the bail jumper, something clicked somewhere in my mind, and I asked my source to run the name Randy Metzger through her computer. Came up—not currently employed by the Boeing Company. Do not rehire. Not only that, but, a couple of years prior, when he had briefly been employed, it was in the capacity of an apprentice airframe mechanic, not a code writer. Not only that, but gosh and b'golly, my inquiry on Randy Metzger was not the first. No, Mr. Metzger was also currently being sought by authorities in Sand-point, Idaho, where he still had a wife whom he had severely battered and three children whom he was accused of having sexually molested.

  I'd mulled the news over for a couple of days and then called Claire. Like I figured, her first instinct was to shoot the messenger. She went postal on me, calling me a no-good busybody motherfucker, saying I was jealous of her happiness and all that. As I recall, she also questioned the fiber of my morality, the validity of my parentage and the quality of my tumescence before finally hanging up in my ear.

  A couple of weeks later, she'd called me and come as close to saying thanks as she was able. She'd made a few calls, found out I was right and then turned Randy in to the Washington State Police, who'd promptly extradited his butt back to Idaho. Funny though, when she got through telling me of the lame excuses she'd been forced to make to her family and how embarrassed she was about the whole thing, she'd hung up in my ear all over again. Dude.

  She swiveled her neck, taking in the lobby, and then flipped the magazine over. "Oh . . . nice . . . Outdoor Life. Goes with t
he disguise."

  "I need your help."

  She put her hands on her hips. "Oh, stop it. I hate it when you give me that puppy-dog look. It may have worked on your mother, but it doesn't work on me."

  "It didn't work on her either," I confessed.

  Again, she peered furtively around the crowded lobby. "I can't take you to my office without a badge, and I can't get you a badge without ID," she muttered.

  I shrugged.

  "Come over here," she said, motioning to the hall which led to the public restrooms. "Before somebody sees you."

  I jogged along behind as she clicked across the lobby and down the uncarpeted hall. She led me down to the end, past the restroom doors, to a small bench with a black plastic cushion. I sat.

  "What do you want?"

  "Peerless Price ..." I began.

  "The cops took it all this morning. They had a court order for all of it." "All what?"

  "Said the case had been officially reopened. Backed a truck right up to the shipping dock and loaded the stuff in. Boom. They're gone."

  "What stuff?"

  "The whole Peerless Price archive. The whole kit." "What archive?"

  "We kept all his stuff together down in the basement, instead of putting it on microfilm. That way, every time somebody wanted a copy, we didn't have to go looking for it."

  I must have looked baffled.

  "We get asked for Peerless Price material all the time, Leo. Almost daily. Counting for labor and materials, we spent nine thousand dollars last year sending out Peerless Price information to other news agencies. Nine thousand dollars. He's the Jimmy Hoffa of the Northwest Heck, we've even got a standard press kit we send out as bulk mail."

  A short East Indian woman came down the hall toward us, the rubber soles of her shoes squeaking with every step. She wore a shiny silver blouse outside a pair of black stretch pants.

  Claire looked back over her shoulder. "Hello, Bharti," she said.

  The woman's black eyes moved back and forth between us.

  "Hi, Claire. How are you doing?" "Fine."

  She straight-armed the door to the women's room and disappeared inside. The door eased shut.

  "Does it have his last columns?" I asked.

  "The last month or so. It's got a bio and family background. You know, all the standard crap."

  "Can I have one?"

  She was skeptical. "That's it?"

  "No. I need something else." I hesitated. "And I need it to be just between us."

  "You mean like ..."

  I didn't let her finish.

  "Kind of like Randy Metzger. That kind of just between us."

  Suddenly the air between us grew thicker.

  "Are you threatening me, Leo? Are you suggesting ..."

  I wasn't sure whether she meant it or whether she was pulling an end run on me, so I interrupted.

  "No," I said quickly. "You misunderstood me, Claire. What's between us is between us and always will be. Anything else would be a breach of trust. I'm just calling in my marker is all."

  Her eyes searched my face and came up empty.

  "It's a guy thing,'' I added. "Accountability."

  The door to the women's room hissed open. The roaring of a hand dryer arrived in the corridor before Bharti, who stepped out, gave each of us a quizzical smile and then squeaked her way back up the hall. Claire waited until the woman was out of sight.

  "I'm sorry. I don't know what made me say that. That was a rotten thing to say."

  "Yeah. It was."

  "I haven't heard that name in a long time. When the guard called ..." She stopped herself. "What do you need?"

  I pulled a yellow piece of paper from the pocket of my jacket and handed it to her. "I need you to check with circulation. I need an address for this guy."

  "Edward Albert Schwartz," she read. "Who's he?"

  I shook my head.

  "What makes you think this guy reads the paper?" "If he's still alive and living around here, he gets the paper."

  Claire folded the yellow paper twice and slipped it between her fingers. She heaved a sigh. "Where are you parked?" "In front. Out on Elliott."

  "You still drive that, little green . . ." She searched for a word. "Yeah."

  "I'll meet you out there," she said.

  When she'd clicked off, I ambled back through the lobby and out into the parking lot. I didn't need a weatherman. It was as dark as dusk. To the east, steel clouds cut off the tops of the hills on the far side of Western Avenue. To the west, out over the water, a blanket of gray had swallowed the mountains whole. The front of the storm was over Bainbridge Island and running hard this way, its diaphanous curtains of rain sweeping and weaving before it like ghostly dancers.

  Ten minutes later, the storm had rolled halfway across the sound and was bearing down on the city like a locomotive. Claire Wells came clicking out the side door and across the street at about fifteen miles an hour. In her left hand, she held a spiral-bound booklet with a clear plastic cover. When she got close, I reached for the booklet, but she quickly pulled it back.

  "Did you really pull Stone Sanders's wig off?"

  "What kind of name is that anyway? Stone."

  "What's wrong with Stone? We had a Rock."

  "Hell, we had a Pebbles and a Bamm Bamm. But Stone? Jesus."

  "And Cliff," she added. "Don't forget Cliff."

  I reckoned how I should have known better than to start with her.

  She kept the papers out of reach. "Did you?"

  I nodded. "I left it with the security guard over at KTZZ before I came over here this morning."

  She smirked and handed me the booklet. "I wrote Mr. Schwartz's address on the first page," she said. "Weekdays, he gets three papers. Two on Sunday. You were right."

  "Thanks," I said.

  The damp breeze shimmied through her black blouse. She hugged herself and looked out over the sound, where the surface of the black water roiled like braided serpents. She brushed her hair from her face. "What do you want out of this, Leo?"

  I thought it over. "I think I'm pretty much trying not to think about that," I said finally.

  "Not knowing what you want is very dangerous."

  I allowed how I was aware of that fact."

  "I hope you're not looking to prove your father's innocence or something really stupid like that."

  "Funny, I kinda figured he was innocent. I had this weird idea that was how the system worked."

  She gave me the fish-eye. "You don't really believe that, do you?"

  When I didn't answer, she turned her face to the wind. A volley of huge raindrops spattered about us, slapping down onto hoods and windshields. She held out her hand as if to catch one.

  "Back then, when we used to run into each other a lot, you know . . . those were the unhappiest days of my life."

  "Gee, thanks."

  She laughed. "That disaster with Randy. I mean . . . that was the last straw. Something about that whole mess . . . something finally told me I was trying way too hard. Gave me my first real look at what a desperate creature I was." She massaged the back of her neck. "There didn't seem to be anything to do but back up and get straight with myself."

  As I waited, the rain stopped splattering and the wind suddenly died. Like I figured, she wasn't through.

  "I was unhappy because I didn't know what I wanted. I thought I wanted ..." She used her fingers to etch quotation marks in the air. "... a relationship, you know . . . like everybody else wanted, and it used to drive me crazy thinking that there was something wrong with me. Like I was the most relationship-challenged person on the planet. It was like, no matter how good things started out, after I slept with a guy about five times, I was always looking at my watch, wishing he'd go home."

  "So what did you do?"

  "I finally figured out that a . . ." Quotation marks again. "... relationship was what my mother wanted and what my aunts wanted and my sisters. I'd just sort of inherited the idea. What / actually wanted was a whole lo
t easier to find than a relationship." She bapped herself in the side of the head with her fingertips. "Turns out I just like to get laid on a regular basis*"

  She read the expression on my face.

  "So shoot me. I mean, it's not like I'm an uncaring person or anything. I like me. You like me. Lots of people like me. I'm just not emotionally equipped to actually live with anybody."

  "So?"

  "So, now I'm happy as a clam, Leo. I keep a steady stream of hard-bodied twenty-somethings running in and out of my life." She dug me in the ribs and winked. "If you'll permit me the unmixed metaphor. No bullshit, no promises, no overnighters, just a healthy little poke in the whiskers and hit the road, Jack."

  Something deep within me, something middle-aged, was offended. I could tell, because I said something incredibly stupid.

  "I'll bet they're dazzling conversationalists."

  She chuckled and bopped me on the shoulder. "We don't talk much, Leo. We just get naked and do all night long what it takes guys your age all night long to do. Now get the hell out of here before I change my mind and sic the newsdogs on you."

  Chapter 9

  I headed up Elliot, got lucky at the light on the comer of Western Avenue and turned left, rolling north past a ramshackle collection of old lumberyards, plumbing wholesalers and machine shops that littered the length of the narrow valley between Queen Anne Hill and the Magnolia Bluffs.

  My luck held as I drove toward Ballard. I made the lights all the way past the Magnolia Bridge, getting nearly to Fisherman's Terminal before the sky unloaded. Within a minute, the little split in the convertible top that I'd been promising myself I'd fix was channeling a steady trickle of water into the hollow of the passenger seat. A sudden gust of wind moved the car a half a lane to the right. Quickly, I checked the mirror. Couldn't see a thing. Gritting my teeth, I eased the Fiat all the way into the right lane and slowed to thirty.

  I was leaning forward out over the steering wheel, peering through the intermittent little fans scraped clear by the wipers. Outside, trees thrashed about in the gale, and the air was filled with debris and the last leaves of fall, torn loose now and riding on the back of the fifty-mile-an-hour breeze. I kept both hands on the wheel.