by Richard Hoyt
“I had clip-ons in high school,” I said cheerfully. “Nobody in my family knew how to tie ties. My old man worked with his hands. I also had a crewcut that I rubbed alum on so the hair stuck straight up like hard little spikes. Really, if you’re the kind of guy who wears ties, I’d think clip-ons would be just the thing. You just slide ‘em on your collar there, and bingo! You’ve got that executive look, a professional.” I started to lift Willis’s collar but he drew his head back.
Willis made a curious sound in his throat, half rumble, half growl. He had made a decision to accept me, a private detective, responsible to very little that he could see — a flake on the make for an easy laugh.
Juantar Chauvin saw us and came over, going through one of his hippity-hop routines like an overgrown, bearded rabbit. He waggled his eyebrows. He gave Willis one of the Dole’s whorehouse tokens — his gift to new customers.
Willis read it and burst out laughing.
“Everybody in here likes to dole,” Juantar said. “You’re the first bow-tied man we’ve had, the very first. Is this an occasion? Are you some kind of preacher?” He looked at me. “Are you born again, Denson? Praise Jesus!”
“We’re going underground tonight, Juantar,” I said.
“Down there?” Juantar motioned toward the floor with his forehead. “Denson, Denson, there could be a boogie down there butchering people. Steady customers are hard to come by. I value my portion of your income.” He whistled a little riff. “What can I get you?”
“We’ll each take a double whiskey,” Willis said.
Juantar said, “The man on the tribe news said they found a rump roast across the street last night. Belongs to a younger man.” He made a loud sucking sound, wzzzpt, and looked salacious. “Oh, Sodom! Sodom!” Juantar headed for the bar to get our drinks and change the reggae tape.
Willis stared after Juantar. “Jesus Christ!”
“Could the younger man be Kim Hartwig?” I asked.
“I’d bet on it. Frozen solid and packed away in an RV freezer like the good judge.”
When Juantar got back with our drinks, he asked Willis whether or not it was illegal to run an ad in the Times and P.I. saying people could drink beer at the Doie and watch meat deliveries at the pergola across the street.
A half-hour later, Richard Willis and I eased open the door in the Doie’s basement and stepped onto the underground sidewalk. I had a new flashlight but wished I hadn’t drunk the whiskey. Aside from a beer or a little screw-top red, I’m not much of a drinker. Whenever I drink distilled liquor, gnomes hop up and down on my brain with their feet.
“Turn that fucking thing out,” Willis whispered.
I turned my light out, remembering the rat that had run up my arm the night before. “There’re rats down here.”
“A rat now and then’s good for you. Right now we’ve got a psychopath on our hands.”
We squatted there, listening. We heard a rustle down the sidewalk in the direction of First Avenue.
“Rat,” I said. “Didn’t I tell you?”
I heard a muffled yipping. “What’s that?” One more yip.
“The coyote!”
“Shhhh!” Willis shushed me quiet.
“It wasn’t a rat.”
“I said shhh.”
I stayed shushed until the sound was gone. “There’re underground sidewalks on both sides of the street. That’s not to mention all the abandoned underground businesses. He could be anywhere. He’s got all night.”
“You may be right about that.” Willis started walking slowly in the direction of the sound we had heard, feeling the block wall of the street side as he went.
I followed, saying nothing. My stomach rumbled loudly, beginning with a high-pitched weemie-weemie sound that ended with a mournful, gurgling lament. I hoped it would stop but it didn’t. Weemie-weemie, gurgle-gurgle; it got louder. A detective was supposed to be stoic and silent on a job like this. “I had onions on my cheeseburger. I am handy though. I’ve had girlfriends say I have quick hands.”
Willis sighed in the darkness. “I bet,” he said. “We need more people to do this. Somebody for the other side of the street. Three teams if we could get them, two at a minimum.”
Willis wasn’t going to save his hide by running to his colleagues for help. He wanted to do this by himself. “Just who do you think we should get?”
“Well, Janine Hallen for starters.” I heard another sound up ahead.
“Hear that?” Willis whispered.
“I heard it.”
“A rat this time,” he said.
“Janine’s smarter than hell. She’s got a cool head.”
“You can do without getting in her pants for a couple of nights, Denson. Quit thinking through your pecker.”
“If the killer is down here, he could either be on the east or west side of First Avenue or the north or south side of Yesler Way. You have to go above ground to cross over, so we wouldn’t be able to hear his brick saw if we’re on the wrong side.”
Willis knew I was right. “Okay, what’re you thinking?”
“Janine Hallen and me, one team. Humor me. Juantar Chauvin and you, the second team. We can figure out some kind of systematic sweep.”
Willis muttered, “Shit,” in the darkness. “Two of us down here chasing rats is stupid, and you know it.”
“Who is Juantar Chauvin?”
I waited for my stomach to finish gurgling again. “The guy up there who owns the Doie.” I had an idea that wasn’t going to go over well.
“What?” Richard Willis almost broke his professional whisper. “That fool.
“Used to be a lawyer before he got fed up with dealing with guys like you.”
“In a pig’s ass. Is that true, Denson?”
“Praise Jesus!” I mimicked Juantar’s Bayou drawl.
Richard Willis fell into a stubborn silence. He didn’t want to give up on catching the butcher by himself; this was important to his dream of vindication, of giving a big raspberry to the department suck-butts, of surviving the departmental effort at busting a cop whose standards were too high to include everybody. Janine and Juantar were the only two people I could think of. I certainly couldn’t go to Willie Prettybird or his friend Prib Ostrow.
We sat there in the musty air saying nothing for more than half an hour. We listened to the rats, to our breathing, to my stomach gurgling. There were occasional footsteps on the ground-level sidewalk above us — a few drunks, a solo traveler, Juantar’s customers going to and from the Doie. We heard several couples stop in front of the huge window that was the sidewalk side of Buck Bohannon’s brightly lit RV showroom.
I was the first one to break the silence. “I know what this means to you. It’ll be your show, Richard. Your nab. Janine is already drawing maps showing how this place evolved. If there’s been an unrecorded change made or something overlooked, she’ll find it. She’s smart as hell, I tell you.”
“That’s different than stalking a psychopath in this damn maze. There’s nobody down here except him and us.”
“She’s a careful, intelligent woman. I’m sure she can take care of herself. We’ll give her a weapon?”
Willis sucked air in between his teeth. “What kind of piece do you carry, Denson?”
“I don’t.”
“You what?” Willis nearly broke his whisper.
“Can’t see the point in it. I’m essentially chickenshit in the presence of violent people. Don’t like to be around ‘em. I’m fast, though. I’ve been told that. Chickenshit to the core and faster than a dose of Epsom salts.”
“I bet you are.”
“I think Janine should carry something though.”
“It’s your hide.”
“You don’t need to worry about me,” I said. “You know, the motor on a brick saw makes a lot of noise, and Bill Speidel runs tours down here all day long. That means the butcher has to work at night, around Speidel’s tours.”
Willis agreed. “I can work the psycho
angle in the mornings and take naps in the afternoons. I’m supposed to show up at the office but I don’t have anything to do. No problem taking a good nap in the afternoon.”
“I think that’s the way to go.”
“Do you think your Praise Jesus friend can stop giggling long enough to help us out?”
“Juantar’s not crazy or anything like that, you know. He’s just too smart not to recognize the insanity everywhere. He knows it’s the small pleasures that count.”
“And you’re pretty much the same, huh, Denson?”
“Pretty much,” I said. I was the opposite in temperament of Richard Willis, but I liked him. He was tidy and orderly, the responsible firstborn. I was loose, intuitive. But Willis was intelligent, give him that. He had integrity. He was an honest man. “The thing we have in common, Willis, is that we don’t fit very well in organizations. Your expectations are too high, so they’re trying to get rid of you. I don’t have any at all, so I quit. Put me in a meeting and I start giggling like Juantar.”
“Dammit, Denson, these guys are cops. They’re supposed to be professionals.”
That set me to giggling. “Supposed to be professionals? Come on. What are you talking about, Willis? My man! My man! You’re talking about the Seattle Police Department. The larger the circus, the more curious the show. Everybody knows that. You’re pissed off because there’re too many clowns who aren’t funny. The thing to do is shuck all that.”
“No, no, Denson. You got it wrong. I’m a professional cop, a good one. I’m pissed off because the clowns wind up in charge. They think they’re funny and they’re not.”
I shut up. Of course the clowns wound up in charge. That was the first rule of John Denson. Most people have to believe in something. No use in arguing with a believer, though. You either believe or you don’t.
I didn’t know what to believe when the howling started up again. It sounded like a coyote to me — or a damn good imitation of one.
Willis grabbed me by the arm. “There it is again!”
“You’re right about that.”
“What is it?”
“Sounds like a coyote to me. Maybe a dog.”
“A dog of some kind,” Willis said. There was a break while Willis blew his nose. “The only thing I can’t figure out is what would a dog be doing in the Seattle underground.”
We both shut up and listened. If it was a coyote and not a man or dog, it was a coyote out of place. The lonesome, melancholy howling was an anguished supplication to a moon that could not be seen in the musty, rat-infested bowels of the Seattle underground. I had heard howls of coyotes before, when I was a boy in Cayuse, Oregon, on the banks of the Columbia River. I whistled again, as I had the night before. “Here, George. Come here, boy.”
The animal in the bowels of the underground howled once more, then fell silent.
27 - BUZZING OF A SAW
Cayuse was on the banks of the Columbia — way out there in desert country. There were no natural trees in the country around Cayuse; except for some stunted sagebrush and small cacti, the land was bare to the edge of the water. The original settlers had hopes, though, and there remained an occasional poplar or locust by a dry stream bed, just as there were abandoned farmhouses in the most unlikely locations. I chased lizards when I was a kid, shot at scorpions with a BB gun, watched for rattlers sunning by the railroad tracks.
The call of a coyote was always special to me. I was a reader when I was a kid and knew about the Coyote stories the Indians told. I heard coyotes on warm summer evenings yipping and yelping on the desert behind the bluff that rose from the Columbia. They gathered in groups up there and held mysterious, feral concerts. They yipped and yapped, shadows in the light of a yellow moon, calling to one another and petitioning the stars. I saw them at dusk one night, silhouettes on a distant ridge. They turned their throats to the stars when they howled.
The howls also came from the barren Horse Heaven Hills across the Columbia. The barks came small across the water. The howling was dim as well, almost subliminal, as I listened to it in bed at night. In the winter the howling was a spooky presence behind the noise of the electric heater on the sleeping porch that served as my bedroom. When I was a kid, I believed in Coyote with a capital C every bit as much as some people believe in Jesus or the prophet Muhammad. The only difference was that Coyote talked to me at night, reminded me of his restless presence.
Richard Willis sat beside me, silent by agreement, his impatience momentarily corked while I gave Juantar Chauvin the details of our problem and the nature of our request.
Juantar Chauvin waggled his eyebrows, inflated his cheeks, and whistled a phrase out of “Entrance of the Gladiators,” the familiar circus song associated with steam calliopes. “Gentlemen! Gentlemen!” he called, imitating a ringmaster. Then he dropped his voice almost to a whisper, a dramatic trick he’d learned from listening to evangelical preachers. “Y’all’re nuttier than a fruitcake if you expect me to go down there at night with a loon on the loose.” He drew his head back and appraised each of us in turn. “Praise Jesus, how dumb do you think I am? No, no, no. I’m a barkeep, Denson, I’ve got customers to entertain.”
I said, “Juantar, you got tired of being a lawyer, right? Why was that?”
“BOOaaarrriiinnnggg!” Juantar said. He held his nose between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand.
“So you quit.”
“I like to doie, Denson. You know that.” Juantar stood and did a little dance.
“Well, this isn’t lookie and this isn’t feelie. Sometimes you have to get your blood pumping to remind yourself that you’re alive.”
“But Denson, Denson, there’re rats and spiders down there, butcher murderers. You and your friend Dickie the cop here even said there was a coyote or damn dawg down there a-howling and making a racket. That’s just too much pumping of blood. Too much.” Juantar sighed and did his best to look demented.
For Juantar Chauvin, doie was not just a screw, as on his hooker tokens. For him it meant to act. To know risk. To live. People who were satisfied with lookie and feelie were people who watched television. In Juantar’s opinion, the madam who priced the tokens was right: doie was worth five times as much as lookie. I said, “Just as I thought, Juantar, you’re all lookie and no doie. We need help.”
Juantar looked hurt.
I shook my head. “All lookie. I wouldn’t have believed it of you, Juantar. I’m embarrassed for you.”
“Dickie the cop’ll save me if we meet spookies, won’t he? Won’t you do that, Dickie?”
“Richard’s a professional,” I said. “He knows what he’s doing.”
“There’ll be no damn Praise the Lording down there either,” Willis said. “We’ve got a job to do.”
“Praise Jesus, I wouldn’t do that,” Juantar said. He whistled some more circus music. “But what about my Halloween party coming up? I love costumes. I’ve got folks coming dressed up to frighten people. I do Frighten Your Neighbor on Halloween, Seduce Your Friend on New Year’s Eve, and Mardi Gras in February. I’ve promised prizes. The Doie’s reputation is at stake here. What’m ah gonna do?” Juantar turned deliberately Southern on the last sentence.
“Let Tom do it,” I said. Tom was Juantar’s assistant.
“Well, okay, I’ll do it, but you have to buy me a pretend sheriff’s badge to pin on my shirt. I’ve always wanted one of those.”
“Done, I’ll buy you a badge.”
“Can I wear it on my shirt when I’m down there with you, Dickie?”
Willis looked at me, disgusted.
“Doie! Doie! Okay!” Juantar rubbed his hands together.
Juantar Chauvin was going underground with us in pursuit of the butcher murderer.
The first thing on our agenda was a report from Janine, who had researched the underground at the library and had gone on one of Bill Speidel’s underground tours.
“Well, from everything I can tell, everything’s like it’s supposed to be down there,
” she said. “I don’t see anything added or subtracted. The walls and rooms and sidewalks all conform to the maps. There is, however, one possibility we might think about.”
“Praise God!” Juantar said.
Willis said, “What is it, Janine?”
“That area was gutted by fire in 1889 and was rebuilt within a few years and still later restored. That’s why you have the pergola and the lovely architecture of Occidental Park and Mall. Just after the turn of the century, when the underground was yet flourishing, there was a proposal to dig tunnels through the streets to Pioneer Place Park. The tunnels would meet there and link up the undergrounds of both sides of First Avenue, Yesler Way, and James Street — sort of an early shopping mall. If you hooked the streets up people wouldn’t have to go upstairs and cross the street in the rain.”
What an idea! “Why didn’t they do it?”
“From the newspapers I was able to find, the street-level merchants thought it was a little too good an idea. They were afraid of the competition, and there were more of them than businessmen with shops underground.”
“Nobody started digging the tunnels or anything like that, did they?”
Janine said, “There’s no mention of it that I could find. They could have, though. An ambitious owner on one side or the other could have closed down for a few weeks and started tunneling. There are months of newspapers that are missing, records that are gone.”
“Anything’s possible,” Willis said.
With that, the four of us sat down to plan our pursuit of the killer. We decided the most likely hours for the butcher murderer to be in his underground hideaway — if our theory was correct — was somewhere between eleven o’clock at night and five in the morning. Juantar would turn the Doie over to his assistant so he could sleep in the daytime and prowl with Willis at night. Willis came up with snub-barreled .38s and shoulder holsters for Juantar and Janine. I carried nothing; I had gotten along without a weapon so far.
It was agreed that Janine and I would start in the south underground of Yesler Way, maybe, or the east underground of First Avenue, then switch with Juantar and Richard Willis — going west or north. With James Street to watch, too, we really needed four or five teams. To get around that problem, Willis asked his police computer to give him a patternless, random rotation that varied both times and directions of our movements. The computer obliged with shift printouts. Willis also came up with two modern versions of the walkie-talkie so we could communicate between streets.
