by G. M. Ford
The willies followed me into the house on tiptoe. I turned the thermostat to Caribbean, then went around flipping on lights until the place was ablaze, none of which seemed to lessen the sense of dread that shadowed me from room to room.
I opened the front door and used the remote to close the gate. The complete whiteout in the front yard made me feel clammy, like I was wrapped in wet felt. I closed the door, double-locked it, and then activated the security system, which I generally never turn on, because between the screaming of the alarm and the banks of halogen security lights, my neighbors tend to get seriously pissed off when it’s tripped.
Last of all, I opened the hall closet and reached back into the darkness, behind the coats and boots and scarves, all the way to the corner. I pulled out my 12-gauge Mossberg Slugster shotgun. I grabbed the box of ammo from the upper shelf and fed five bright red shells into the magazine. Way I figured it, if I couldn’t stop ’em with five of those cannonballs, I probably deserved whatever came next.
Anybody who believes that people can’t levitate should have seen me at 2:47 A.M., when the security alarm went off. I lifted out of the seat like a friggin’ moon rocket. Last I recalled, I’d just finished scarfing down the last of the previous night’s mac and cheese and was ensconced in my favorite chair watching an episode of True Detective that I’d seen three or four times before. The one where Rust and Marty go to the tent revival.
The security buzzer was hammering nails in my ears, making it nearly impossible to collect my thoughts. I ran a hand over my face and scrambled to my feet. I was relieved to see the shotgun still resting in the corner. I reached over and grabbed it.
I held the Mossberg in my left hand as I started down the hall. My first instinct was to pull open the front door and confront whoever or whatever was out there. Instead, I turned right into the dark front parlor, slipped over to one of the front windows, got down on one knee, and peeked between the thick curtains.
The fog was mostly gone. In the harsh film noir light, a shimmering veneer of water clung to the upper reaches of the grass like a crystal tiara.
I stepped around the corner, found the switch inside the closet, and turned off the buzzer. Silence settled around me like new-fallen snow. Further fumbling produced a jacket and a big rubber flashlight.
I put the jacket on, slipped the security remote into the pocket, and, with the shotgun in one hand and the flashlight in the other, hustled toward the back door. On the way through the kitchen, I snatched my keys from the counter.
I held my breath as I opened the back door and duck-walked out onto the porch. I locked the kitchen door and then made my way to the far corner, where I could see in two directions at once. Nothing behind the house in the garage and garden area. Nothing to the south where the old orchard used to be either.
Under normal circumstances, I think I probably would have let it go at that. I’d have convinced myself a seagull or something wild must have landed on the lawn and set off the system, but I was feeling a little jumpy, so I pulled the remote from my jacket pocket, doused all the lights, and waited. Listened. Somewhere in the distance, a car alarm was bleating its plaintive cry. Went on for a full minute and then, mercifully, stopped.
Somebody whistled. I strained to hear. Voices? Maybe. I tiptoed down the back stairs and went around the house to the right. Walking on the grass so my shoes wouldn’t make noise on the walkway, scanning the shrubbery for movement as I crept along. The voice again. And another whistle. The temperature was about fifty, but I was sweating like a racehorse.
I stayed in the grass as I made my way toward the gate. I was twenty feet away when I heard another rustle in the bushes. I stopped and dropped to one knee. And then the sound reached me again, louder this time.
Slowly, trying to keep the noise to a minimum, I pumped a shell into the chamber, then set the stock on the driveway while I rummaged around in my pockets for the remote. Sounded like somebody was moving between the shrubbery and the wall; I took a deep breath and then hit the red button on the remote.
The place lit up like a carnival. I jammed the shotgun stock into my shoulder and sighted down the barrel, then slipped my finger inside the trigger guard.
“You better come out of there,” I shouted.
Nothing.
“I mean right now, motherfucker,” I screamed.
And then he did. The Seigals’ little yip-yap dog, Poco, or whatever the hell its name was, came trotting over to my side. Sat down right in front of my foot and looked up at me with big liquid eyes.
“I think maybe you’ve got a little too much gun there,” a voice said.
Janet Seigal was standing outside the gate, wearing the same white bathrobe she’d been wearing the other night.
“Peashooter’d be too much gun for him,” I groused.
I scooped the dog up in my free hand and wandered over to the gate, where I passed him through the bars to Janet.
“Sorry,” she said. “He got out the front by mistake.”
I waved her off. “Don’t worry about it. I’m a little bit jumpy these days.”
I cast a glance across the street. One of her garage doors was open. One of the his-and-hers Lexuses was gone.
She read my mind.
“We had a fight,” she said. “That’s how Poco got out.” She gave a slight shrug.
There didn’t seem to be anything to say, so I kept my mouth shut.
“Well . . . thanks for not blowing Poco to kingdom come,” she said with a wan smile as she started away. I stood and watched as she took a couple of steps, lost her balance, and dropped to one knee. Poco jumped from her arms and began bouncing around her in a circle, yipping and yapping.
I opened the gate and started for her. By the time I’d gotten to her side, she’d wobbled up to her feet again. She made a disgusted face as she dusted her hands together.
“Not very clever, I’m afraid,” she said.
“You okay?”
She heaved a giant sigh and caught my gaze with hers.
“I’ve been diagnosed with MS,” she said. “Richard’s having a hard time with it.”
“Sorry to hear that,” was the best I could do.
She scooped the dog up again. “Richard’s the kind who likes everything planned right down to the smallest detail.”
“Life’s seldom so accommodating.”
“Neither is Richard,” she said as she started across the street.
I turned away, stepped back inside the gate, and closed it. I was reaching for the red button to shut off the lights when suddenly my body came to attention.
I’d been so focused on the noise in the bushes that I’d never looked behind me. Out on the lawn. Two sets of footprints. Instinctively, I began to move in that direction. In the harsh overhead light it was easy to see where their feet had kicked the water from the grass. Halfway down the west wall, a series of muddy scrapes showed where they’d climbed over and then slid down to the ground. A little further along, they’d propped the gardener’s wheelbarrow against the wall and used it to boost themselves back over. Not exactly Ninja warriors, these two, whoever they were.
I leaned the shotgun against the wall, stepped up into the wheelbarrow, and chinned myself up to where I could see over the top. The flower bed that ran along the outside of the wall had been mushed flat by a tire. The muddy rut was beginning to fill with water. They must have climbed up on the vehicle and then dropped into the yard.
I grabbed the Mossberg and followed their tracks from the base of the wall out into the middle of the old orchard, where they’d tripped one of the motion sensors. The state of the grass suggested they’d stumbled around in a panic and then made a beeline back to the wall, grabbing the wheelbarrow on the way.
Despite the bumbling nature of the incursion, I decided to err on the side of caution. I locked the place up tight, turned the alarm system back on, and took the shotgun with me to bed.
The Archdiocese of Seattle was within easy walking distance of the
medical examiner’s office, so I parked in the ME’s lot, where the parking enforcement guys would recognize my car and assume I was visiting with Rebecca. By the time I’d slapped myself into semiconsciousness and hoofed it over to holy ground, it was quarter to eleven.
While the archbishop himself was otherwise engaged in ecclesiastical enterprise, his secretary was at least willing to listen.
“What can we do for you?” she asked.
I pulled out the photo and the plaque and laid them on her desk. She looked them over, crossed herself, and then looked up at me. “Poor soul,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“What’s his name?”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out.”
She picked up the plaque and turned it over in her hands.
“And you think this is one of ours?”
“Maybe,” I said with a shrug.
“Are you a parishioner?”
“No,” I confessed. The I knew it look on her face didn’t bode well for my chances, so I played the only card I could think of. “But my Aunt Jean used to be real active over at Our Lady of Fatima in Magnolia.”
“Jean?”
“Jean Pomeroy.”
She sat back in the chair and folded her arms across her chest.
“Jean Waterman?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She gave me the gimlet eye. “That’d make you Big Bill’s boy.”
I nodded. “Leo,” I said.
She looked me up and down. “The acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
“He was a lot bigger tree,” I said.
She picked the ruined plaque up from her desk and examined it again. Then looked back down at the postmortem photo and shook her head.
“I called a guy I know,” I said. “Teaches over at Eastside Catholic. We played ball together a long time ago. He said he thought the archdiocese kept a full set of yearbooks for all the schools. That I might be able to save myself quite a bit of time and energy by coming over here rather than going to each school individually.”
She got to her feet. “Your friend was right,” she said. “Follow me.”
She led me down one of those austere parish house hallways. All dark, carved wood and uncomfortable furniture. Pious portraits staring down from the gloom, in case you, even for a moment, forgot where you were.
She opened the second door on the left and stepped aside. The room was floor-to-ceiling books. One of those old-fashioned libraries with a ladder you could roll around the room on a brass rail. She pointed at the south wall.
“Those are the high schools,” she said. “The red-and-white books are Holy Names Academy. The blue-and-whites are from Forest Ridge School of the Sacred Heart. Those are girls’ schools, so it’s a pretty good bet that poor soul didn’t attend either of those.” She pinned me with a gaze. “Put everything back where you found it,” she said. “I’m getting too old for ladders.”
I came upon him about an hour later. I’d already been through Archbishop Murphy, Eastside Catholic, and Bishop Blanchet high schools when suddenly there he was staring back at me from the “Class Prophecy” section of the Kennedy Catholic High School yearbook circa 1987. Most Likely to Succeed. Charles W. Stone. “Chuck” to his friends. Younger, cleaner, and back before the perils of existence had drained the hope from his eyes, but it was him all right.
Presuming he was about seventeen years old when he graduated from high school, that made him something like forty-five years old at the time of his death.
I was still sitting there, staring at his face, pondering the vagaries of existence, when my phone began to buzz in my pocket.
“Where are you?” Rebecca’s voice demanded.
“Why?”
“Because the parking enforcement people just called to ask if you were up here visiting me. They’re thinking about towing your car.”
“You didn’t let ’em, did you?”
“Not yet.”
“I’ll be right over. I’ve got something to tell you.”
“So tell me. I’ve got meetings this afternoon.”
“Not over the phone.”
Click. Dial tone.
Rebecca smoothed the folds out of the Xerox copy of the yearbook page and set it on the desktop next to the postmortem photo.
“Yep,” she said, after a minute. “That’s him.”
“Hard to believe he was ever that young.”
“Hard to believe any of us were ever that young,” she said.
She leaned back in her chair. “I wasn’t going to tell you this . . .” she began.
“What?”
“The cops identified the other guy.”
“Who?”
She pulled open the center drawer, extracted a yellow folder, and opened it. “Blaine Peterson.” She read me an address in Medina, which was about as far removed from sleeping under a bridge as you could get in these parts. What living in Medina got you was the same zip code as Bill and Melinda Gates.
She read my mind. “That’s all they told me,” she said. “You gonna tell the cops about Mr. Stone here?”
“Nope.”
“Eagen finds out you withheld information, he’s going to be a very unhappy man.”
“I know.”
“You’re not going to let this go, are you?”
“Nope.”
“You really think figuring it all out is going to do something about the gulf you feel between you and your father?”
“Probably not.” I lifted a hand and then let it drop to my side. “I don’t know any more about my old man than everybody else in town knows. It wasn’t like he had a public and a private persona. At home, he was the same guy everybody saw on TV.”
“So, what? You’re going to spend the rest of your days trying to find out who he was, and by extension who you are?”
“Jesus, I hope not.”
Back in the day, Carl Cradduck had been one of America’s most storied battlefield photographers. Two Pulitzer nominations. His work in Time, Newsweek, Life, and every other big-time photo rag of the era. He skated through five years in Vietnam without a scratch and was at the very top of his game when a piece of Bosnian shrapnel severed his spine in late September of 1993.
Paralyzed from the waist down and relegated to a wheelchair, Carl had parlayed his photographic expertise into a highly successful surveillance business. For the better part of two decades, Carl and his more mobile minions did all of my peeper work for me. You needed a glossy of the hubby humping Flossie, Carl was your guy.
Problem was, no-fault divorce was an even bigger buzz-kill for the surveillance industry than it was for the private eye trade. While I was willing to work for just about anybody, Carl had always hated big business and refused to work the industrial espionage angle and so, when the irreconcilable differences of marriage lost its commercial luster, Carl segued into the information business. Cradduck Data Retrieval specialized in skip tracing: finding felons, freeloaders, and deadbeat dads. He was the Duke of the Database. Unless you were planning to dig yourself a bunker somewhere in the wilds of Montana, Carl was going to find your ass, sooner rather than later.
He’d bought a little three-bedroom Craftsman over on Crown Hill a few years back and wired himself up to the world. Eleven monitors lined the north wall of what used to be the front parlor, each keeping track of something different.
I’d spent the drive over with Rebecca’s voice ringing in my ears, trying like hell to conjure up a good reason why I was still pushing on with this thing, but even my finely honed capacity for denial and self-delusion wasn’t up to the task, so I just chalked it up to bullheadedness and kept driving.
Carl asked the same question every time I walked in his door.
“What, are you playing at being a detective again?”
“I had some uninvited visitors last night.”
“Any idea who?”
I shook my head. “That’s why I’m here.”
“You been working late
ly?”
“Nope.”
I told him about my neighbor. About the two stiffs the cops found in the car trunk. My old man’s coat. Putting a name on the homeless guy. The guy with the Medina address. The incursion into my yard last night. All of it.
He rolled back over to his bank of computers. “What’s Mr. Medina’s name again?” he asked.
I checked my notes. “Blaine Peterson. 11232 North East Twenty-Fourth Street.”
He did a little typing, pushed a few buttons, and then sat back in his chair. Up on the overhead bank of screens, characters blinked and gamboled, whole screens slid by at warp speed, only to be replaced by another and then another and another, like some garish electronic dance working itself up to a frenzy.
“You bring your checkbook?” he asked.
“It’s in the car,” I said.
“Go get it.”
One of the first things I learned as a private eye was that no matter how orderly and mundane people’s lives may appear from the outside, they’ve all got secrets.
From the outside, Blaine Peterson looked like the very personification of the American dream. First in his high school class. Baseball and track star. Shipped off to Harvard, where he graduated magna cum laude, and then on to the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business for his MBA. Opted to come back home and go to work for Hindeman and Lowe, a Bellevue investment firm started by his grandfather. Made full partner in just under four years. Made his first million at twenty-nine. Married and divorced along the way. Parents still lived over on the Eastside, up on the plateau in Newcastle. Kinda guy could give an average fella an inferiority complex, and yet, somewhere along his well-scripted way, he’d come across someone who had stuffed him, stark naked, into the trunk of a rental car, alongside a demented homeless man, and then left them both on a dark city street to ferment. Go figure.
Chuck Stone was another matter. Him I recognized all too well. Maybe weller than I wanted. One of those unfocused souls who never quite found his niche in life. Graduated in the top half of his high school class. Bumped from college to college to college until he finally graduated from Seattle Central with an associate’s degree in business marketing. Tried his hand at real estate, mortgage banking, car sales, and a number of other tough rackets, until 2006 when he too got divorced and then, within six months, completely dropped off the grid.
