Salvation Lake (A Leo Waterman Mystery)

by G. M. Ford

  She stopped rubbing the back of his neck and looked up at me.

  “No,” she said. “Please don’t do that.”

  “He’s got no right to put his hands on you.”

  She pushed herself to her feet, and, for the second time, I noticed how bad her balance was. Almost seemed like she was drunk. When she put a hand on my shoulder, I couldn’t decide which of us she was trying to steady.

  “He didn’t mean it,” she assured me.

  “They never do,” I said. “That’s exactly why we need to call.”

  “No,” she said again. “Please. Don’t do that.”

  I didn’t say anything. Just stood there and watched as she got down on her knees again and began to minister to her husband. I’d spent twenty years sticking my nose into other people’s business for a living, and one of the things I’d learned is that there’s a fine line between doing your civic duty and being a pain-in-the-ass busybody. Last thing on earth I wanted to be was one of those self-righteous twits with an unquenchable desire to tell other adults what to do. I mean, if I look over and you’re about to step in front of a bus . . . yeah, I’m gonna stick out my arm. But other than that, presuming you’re all growed up and haired over, as they say in Texas, as far as I’m concerned, you’re pretty much on your own.

  Hubby was up on his knees now. He twisted his neck and looked up at me. A line of green spittle still connected his lower lip to the pavement below. His narrow face was the color of an eggplant.

  “Stay down,” I advised him.

  His lower lip quivered a couple of times, as if he had something to say. An awkward second passed before he thought better of it and simply turned his face away from me.

  “Poco,” his wife said. “Poco, come here.” The hair ball gave hubby a wide berth as it skittered over in her direction. She reached down and scooped up the dog. And then her free hand was on my chest, pushing me backwards up the driveway.

  “We’ll be okay,” she kept repeating in a soft voice as she nudged me backwards. The dog seemed to agree.

  I let her move me all the way to the street, and then made one last plea. “You don’t have to put up with that crap,” I said.

  Behind her, hubby had pushed himself to his feet and was staggering toward the front door. I watched as he wrenched it open, stumbled inside, and slammed the door. The whole glass front wall of the house undulated from the impact.

  “It’s okay,” she said.

  I reached out and put a finger on her damaged face. The dog started to growl.

  “Just go,” she said with a sigh.

  So I went. Hesitatingly. Under protest. Turning back every couple steps. Noticing what a crooked, unsteady line she walked back to the house, and how she hesitated for a long moment before grabbing the handle and disappearing inside.

  A hot shower had seldom felt better. By the time I’d scrubbed the stink off, found a set of clean clothes, and brewed up a cup of coffee, one of Jimmy Hallinan’s On the Go Pro auto-detailing trucks was parked behind my rig out in the driveway, and one of his crews was crawling all over my ride.

  Wasn’t that long ago I’d have been out in the driveway cleaning the damn car myself. Not these days though. These days I’m a lot more likely to solve problems with folding money than with elbow grease.

  My life of sloth started right after I moved back into the ancestral manse. Six weeks later, the place looked like it was inhabited by a troop of baboons. I was kicking stuff out of the way as I walked down the halls, and eating sandwiches off thrice-used paper plates. About the time I found myself staring down at the kitchen counter, trying to decide if that dark spot was a black olive and whether or not I was going to eat it, only to have it scurry off into the darkness, I knew something had to be done.

  Housecleaning was first. An army of maids arrives on Tuesday mornings and gives the place the full monty. I drive over to Beth’s Café for breakfast while they’re thrashing about. By the time I get back, the place is spic-and-span and, with a little creative rationalization, I can pretend I had something to do with it.

  I know people who just aren’t content unless they’re doing something. It’s like they can’t be left alone with themselves, or they’ll go nuts. I don’t have that problem. I’m perfectly happy doing nothing at all. Ask anybody.

  Funny thing though . . . I’ve always felt a little bit guilty about throwing money at problems, which is weird, because guilt is not big on my “ways to feel” list. The life I’ve led doesn’t much lend itself to second-guessing. If my family crest had a motto, it would be: “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  So, a couple hours later, when one of the car detailers knocked on my front door and told me my car was once again ready for human habitation, I stepped outside to grease some palms and further assuage my conscience.

  I gave the car a quick once-over, inside and out. Looked and smelled great. The kid who’d come to the door told me he’d leave the plastic on the seats for a couple of days, if he was me. I said I would.

  I thanked them all and gave each of them a twenty for a tip. As they turned and started walking toward the On the Go Pro truck, one of the Mexican guys turned to the guy beside him and said, “Hombre extraño. Tener una imagen de ese chico predicador, al igual que.”

  “Hijo de puta estaba muerto,” the other guy said.

  First guy nodded in agreement. “Ambos estaban muerto.”

  I know just enough Spanish to be dangerous, but I was pretty sure a predicador was a preacher and was damn sure that muerto meant dead.

  “Who was dead?” I asked.

  Everybody stopped walking and turned back my way. I repeated the question.

  “In the car,” the guy who’d come to the door said.

  When I didn’t get the message, he walked back to my car, opened the door, and pulled something from the dashboard, then walked over and put the envelope containing Rebecca’s postmortem photos in my hand.

  “They was on the floor in back,” he said.

  “Did he say something about a preacher? Un predicador.”

  He turned to the others and rattled off something in machine-gun Spanish. The other two took turns answering. It went on for a while. All of it in Spanish and coming by way too fast for me.

  Door Guy translated. “They call him ‘the Preacher’ ’cause he’s always talking about God and angels and hell and how we’re all sinners and everything like that.” He tapped his temple with his finger and nodded knowingly. Apparently, the consensus was that our boy the Preacher wasn’t quite right in the cabeza.

  “Who calls him the Preacher?” I asked.

  Another rapid-fire discussion ensued. “The other people in the homeless camps,” Door Guy said finally. “They say he’s a crazy homeless guy. Lives around in the camps. Always drives people crazy after a while—you know, with all that God talk of his—so he has to move around a lot. Last time they seen him he was living under the freeway. You know . . . down a couple blocks south of Madison.”

  I tried a few more questions, but all I got was opus two. They were being polite but starting to get antsy. I guess twenty bucks doesn’t buy what it used to.

  I watched them back out of the driveway, music crankin’, bumpin’ so hard the sheet metal on the van shimmied like a stripper. I grinned, threw the photo envelope onto the passenger seat, and swung the car door closed. The rain had stopped, but a crystalline hiss lingered in the air. Boxcar clouds hurried across the western horizon, like they were scheduled to be somewhere else. To the east, out over the top of the house, the sky was bruised and broken. I stifled a shiver.

  On any given night, there’s something like nine or ten thousand homeless people in Seattle. Of that number, six thousand or so find a roof somewhere among the tent cities, the missions, and the shelters, which leaves about four thousand souls sleeping outdoors in a climate better suited to ducks than derelicts.

  So, when I poked my head out the kitchen door the next morning and found myself staring at a stead
y, slanting rain, I had a pretty good idea how I was going to spend the day.

  By two thirty, I’d worked up a full sweat tromping around beneath the maze of freeway ramps and intersection overpasses that form the southern border of the International District. Like I’d hoped, the rain had kept most of the denizens of the damp rolled up in their bedrolls, waiting for fairer skies. Not that it had done me any good.

  I’d shown the Preacher’s photo to a good fifty or sixty urban campers, none of whom had shown the slightest glimmer of recognition. I’d been cursed and growled at more times than I could count, outright threatened on two occasions, and, to put the icing on the cake, I’d just stepped in shit for the second time.

  I was cursing under my breath, standing on one leg, using a broken piece of concrete to scrape the shit from the sole of my shoe. I rubbed the last of it off on the packed dirt and looked back down the incline. Half a dozen one- and two-man camps littered the barren hillside. Everything from ancient Sears tents to blue plastic lean-tos to nothing more than a pile of dirty cardboard. Trash everywhere. Three or four dogs wandering about. The wretched refuse of our teeming shore.

  I decided I’d had enough. Whatever perverse curiosity my father’s long-lost overcoat had instilled in me had been sorely diminished by my odyssey.

  It had been years since I’d found myself in a place like this. Guys like George and Ralph and Harold had long since learned how to work the system to keep a roof over their heads. The people I’d met this morning weren’t the old-time park bench bums of the past either. They were way younger, and way meaner. Waxen, hollow-eyed, and angry, these were the collateral damage of broken dreams and failed relationships and unspeakable sexual abuses. Kids who seemed to have fallen from grace without ever having attained it.

  I looked around. Seemed like the best way out of here was to go up, toward the bottom of the roadway. That way I could peek out and see exactly where I was and decide which way to go from there.

  I was angling across the face of the slope, working my way toward a chevron of light in the upper right-hand corner, when I noticed a little one-man camp set up directly beneath the underside of the pavement. Loud. Dirty. The low-rent district of the no-rent district.

  I reversed field and moved in that direction. He’d dug out a terrace for himself. A place flat enough so he wouldn’t roll off down the hill. That way he commanded the high ground, with six vertical feet of concrete covering his back. I was about halfway to the top when he heard me coming and sat up.

  He was maybe seventeen. He had a knit cap pulled down so far over his ears nothing showed but an oval of face so dirty it looked like he was wearing a Lone Ranger mask.

  “Ain’t nothin’ here for you, man,” he said. He kept one hand hidden in his bedroll, making like he maybe had a weapon.

  I showed him my palms. “No trouble,” I said. “I just want you to look at a picture.” I reached inside my coat. Above our heads, traffic roared like a hurricane.

  He pushed himself up to his knees. Turned out he wasn’t bluffing. He had a knife. One of those serrated bread knives you buy in supermarkets for a buck ninety-nine.

  “I ain’t lookin’ at nothin’,” he shouted at me.

  I pulled out the photo, unfolded it, and faced it in his direction.

  “You ever seen this guy?” I yelled.

  He looked away. “Get out of here, man,” he said.

  I took two steps forward, waving the photo as I struggled up the steep bank.

  He came bursting out of his nest like a scalded rat, slashing the knife back and forth, missing the front of my coat by about three inches, before turning tail and escaping back to the safety of his bedroll.

  “Take it easy, man,” I chanted. “Take it easy.”

  “I’ll cut you,” he yelled. “Don’t think I won’t.”

  I held up my hands in mock surrender. “You win, kid,” I said. “I’m outta here.” I watched his eyes flick over at my right hand, where I held the postmortem photo, flick back to my face, and then be drawn back to the photo almost against his will.

  “Is that . . .” he started, but stopped.

  “Is that what?” I asked.

  “You know . . . like . . .”

  “Like what?”

  “Dead. That guy dead?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Somebody found him in a car trunk up in South Lake Union.”

  He thought it over. “You a cop?” he asked after a minute.

  “Nope.”

  “Then what’s it to you?”

  I told him about my father’s overcoat.

  “Biggest coat I ever seen,” he said.

  “My father was about the biggest dude anybody ever seen,” I said.

  “Bigger than you?”

  “Way bigger.”

  He was duly impressed. He looked over at the picture again.

  “Somebody off him?”

  “Actually, they don’t know what killed him. They’re workin’ on it.”

  “Wasn’t a bad dude,” he said. “If he’da just shut up once in a while.”

  “You know his name?”

  He shook his head. “People call him the Preacher, ’cause he’s always running his mouth about God and shit.”

  He walked over to a black plastic bag wedged under the roadway and started sliding it down the hill in my direction. “This here’s his stuff. I told him I’d watch it for him ’till he come back, but I guess he won’t be needin’ it now.”

  “He say where he was going?” I tried.

  “Just said he was gonna find the prophet of the Lord.”

  “Maybe he did,” I said. I squatted down and untied the knot at the top of the bag. Above our heads, a sudden screech of tires filled the air in the second before the unmistakable sound of one car plowing into another reached us. Horns began to honk.

  A cloud of mildew floated out of the bag. I pulled my head back. I’m not the squeamish type but, right at that moment, I’d have parted with serious money for a pair of latex gloves.

  I held my breath and started pulling things out. It’s all relative, I suppose, but I’m guessing you’d have to be down and out and homeless to understand why anything in that bag was worth toting around with you. I’m not altogether sure what freedom is, but it’s sure as hell something more complicated than nothing left to lose.

  One piece at a time, I unwadded everything and laid it out on the ground. Everything was damp and dirty and smelled of mold. An old wool blanket, army green. A pair of jeans with the seat blown out. A couple bath towels whose original color it was no longer possible to ascertain. The remnants of a bar of white soap. Two sweaters and a gray hoodie. Another black plastic bag with three holes cut in it. I was guessing he used it as a poncho when the weather went from bad to worse.

  Finally, I turned the bag inside out and a couple pieces of paper and a piece of wood fell out onto the hillside. The papers turned out to be a pamphlet on personal hygiene from a local mega-church called Mount Zion Ministries and a folded-up picture of Jesus looking all blond and Swedish-like.

  That was it. The sum of this man’s life lying out on the ground and not one thing to tell me who he was, or even who he’d once been, as if poverty and degradation not only robbed a person of their dignity but of their identity as well. Almost like it didn’t matter who they were anymore, ’cause they didn’t own enough stuff to be listed among the living.

  I used my toe to turn over the piece of wood. It was an award plaque. Or at least it had been once. I picked it up. Screwed to the bottom was a brass plate. The words MOST LIKELY TO SUCCEED were engraved into the metal. Above the words, the only thing that hadn’t been scratched off was the number seven. The upper half looked as if it had once been a photograph of the recipient, likewise scraped to nothing.

  I walked uphill and handed it to the kid. He ran his fingers over the face of it several times, and then handed it back.

  “You think it was his?” he asked after a minute.

  I shrugged, then s
at down and held the ruined plaque in front of my face with both hands. This wasn’t a casual scratch-out. Whoever had defaced it had spent a lot of time and energy doing it. They’d taken some sharp object and gouged all the way through the metal in places. I wondered what inner demons had fueled that much effort. Anger? Hate? Self-loathing? Something strong, for sure.

  “Assuming it was his,” I mused, looking around, “looks like he took one hell of a fall since he was voted most likely to anything.”

  The boy folded his arms across his skinny chest and sat rocking on his tailbone while he thought about it. “Ain’t so far anymore,” he said, finally.

  “What’s not far?”

  “Ain’t very far from top of the class to out on your ass,” he said.

  Took me thirty-five minutes to get back to South Plummer Street where I’d parked my car. Somewhere in my travels I’d passed completely under the freeway, so I had to walk all the way up to the overpass at Madison to get back to where I’d started.

  As I’d trudged along, my mind kept wandering back to what the kid had said. About how it wasn’t all that far from living in suburbia to living under a bridge. I kept wondering whether the American dream was dead, or if it had just morphed into something else while I was busy figuring out what wine went with what.

  By the time I hopped up onto the plastic covering my car seats, I was bone tired and working my way to clinically depressed. I dropped the remains of the plaque on the passenger-side floor and fired her up. I told myself I was waiting for the heater to warm up, but mostly I just sat there looking out through the windshield, feeling like one of those Scandinavian detectives who spend most of their time staring out at dark water and brooding.

  The dash clock read 4:10. The prospect of sitting in rush hour traffic held sufficient terror to snap me out of my stupor. I dropped the Chevy into gear and rolled down the hill. For once, my timing was perfect; I beat the thundering herd out of downtown and was heading north on Elliott in about ten minutes.

  On my left, popping in and out of view between buildings, Puget Sound was ruffled with whitecaps. I fought the traffic lights past the exit for the Magnolia Bridge, all the way down to Dravus, so I could do a little shopping on the way home.