Salvation Lake (A Leo Waterman Mystery)

by G. M. Ford

  “From what?”

  “From the stories that are told about him. From the way he’s still portrayed, whenever his name comes up in the media. From the guy who never approved of a single thing I ever did.”

  “Maybe you’d feel better if you took all that money that he supposedly squeezed out of the city coffers and gave it back.”

  “Fat fucking chance.”

  We both laughed out loud.

  “Have you still got that enormous bathtub with the jets?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Let’s go back to your house and roll around in it together.”

  “Best idea I’ve heard this week.”

  She’s naked. She smiles at me, shy and a little uncertain, as she steps back into the tub. The tub is only half full of water because we’ve sloshed the rest of it all over the floor. I stand up, put my hands on her shoulders, and turn her around. It’s always been amazing to me that this powerful woman becomes so compliant with all her clothes off. She’s quite beautiful. Tall, slim. A tangle of dark hair between her legs. I pull her to me and nestle against the crack of her ass. Makes me feel paralyzed, like I’ll never be able to move again, which, under the circumstances, would be just fine by me.

  I find the soap and begin to soap her breasts. Then I scrub her back. I run my fingers over the vertebrae. She emits a low groan. The movement of the water is reflected on the ceiling as I rinse the soap from her body.

  I’ve got a hard-on that feels like forever. I pick her up and set her on the floor beside the tub, then I get out, wrap her in an enormous white towel, and carry her to the bedroom. We lie across the bed diagonally, and I begin to draw the towel apart, slowly, as if I’m removing a bandage. Her flesh still smells of soap. My hands find her wet flesh. She raises her legs and pulls me down. I feel myself enter her. Her breath suddenly leaves her. She arches her back as I bury my face in her white throat.

  When it’s over, we fall asleep without a word.

  I came off the bed like a rocket. Sitting there, not sure of anything, until the house phone rang again. Second time in five years. I checked the clock. Only 9:30. Rebecca groaned and rolled over. I stretched out, reaching for the receiver. I brought it to my ear and lay back against the damp sheets. “Yeah,” I said.

  “Dis you, Leo?” a familiar voice asked.

  “Who’s this?” I ask.

  “Charity, mon. It’s Charity.”

  “How’d you get this number?” was all I could think to say.

  “Got it from Mr. Carl’s number book. But listen, mon. He’s hurt real bad. I stopped by to help him get to bed. Somebody done kicked down the door and beat the bloody shit out of him. Done beat him like a dog.”

  I found myself sitting up, jamming the phone into my ear, like I was trying to push it through my head. Rebecca picked up the vibe. She leaned against my back and put a comforting hand on my shoulder.

  “Call 911,” I said.

  “Already done it, mon. Cops too. Ambulance come and took him away. I don’t think he gonna make it, mon. His head’s all stove in.”

  “Where’d they take him?”

  “Northwest Hospital. ’Bout five minutes ago.”

  “I’m on the way.”

  Hospitals make my skin crawl. Breathing that recycled air makes my lungs feel like somebody punched holes in them, but tonight it didn’t matter.

  It was a little after ten when I roared into the Northwest Hospital parking lot. Rebecca’d been in my ear all the way from home. “Take it easy. For God’s sake, slow down. He’s in good hands. I’m sure they’re doing everything possible for him.”

  We sprinted into the ER hand in hand. Little redheaded nurse took one look at me and held up a restraining hand.

  “Carl Cradduck,” I growled.

  She checked her clipboard and pointed down the hall. I dropped Rebecca’s hand and ran in that direction. The sight of half a dozen green-clad personnel huddled around a gurney in a room to my right brought me to a stop. Blood was all over the place. I watched as they worked feverishly. Hooking up multiple intravenous bags. My heart threatened to jump out of my chest as I watched them wheel in a ventilator. I don’t know much about medicine, but I knew that meant he’d stopped breathing. So did I.

  Rebecca was back at my side. “Nurse didn’t know anything,” she said. “She just came on shift.” She read my mind and threw an arm around my waist. I shrugged her arm and started into the room. The nearest doctor stepped away from the others and blocked my path.

  “No,” he said through his mask. He was an East Indian, or a Pakistani, something like that. “You can’t come in here. If you want to help this man, please just let us work.” He turned and hurried back into the room. Someone called for a vessel clamp. A voice droned. “Blood pressure one seventy-three over forty-seven.” Somebody called for forty CCs of something.

  Two nurses moved to the far side, and for the first time I saw Carl. He looked like a child lying there, except that even through the mound of bandages, I could see that his head wasn’t round anymore. I turned away and stifled a sob. Rebecca pulled me away, down the hall toward the nurses’ station.

  “Come on, come on,” she chanted as I reluctantly backpedaled. “He’s in the best possible hands. Come on. We’ll wait over here.”

  They were at it for nearly an hour before two nurses and an orderly wheeled the gurney out into the hall, rolled it into an elevator, and disappeared from view.

  A couple minutes later, the doctor who’d barred my way stepped out into the hall, dropped his mask, and began to pull off his gloves. I started to get up. But Rebecca threw an arm across my lap. “Let me handle this,” she said.

  I watched as she walked down, introduced herself, and then showed him her King County ID. They had a nice, long, doctor-to-doctor confab before he disappeared into the elevator and Rebecca came back my way.

  “So?” I said after she plopped down next to me.

  “They’ve taken Carl down to the ICU. He’s hypercritical.”

  “Which means what?”

  She hesitated, took a deep breath. “It means they’re not at all sure he’s going to make it.” I put my hands over my face and bent low over my lap. She patted my back. “He’s got a severe depressed skull fracture. A broken jaw. Two basal fractures of the eye orbits, several broken ribs, and at least four missing teeth. He stopped breathing in the ambulance, but the techs were Johnny-on-the-spot and auto-ventilated him.”

  “Can I see him?” I asked.

  She shook her head and began rubbing my back.

  “No,” she said. “All we can do now is wait. If he makes it through the night . . . maybe we’ll know more in the morning.”

  “I’ll wait,” I said.

  “There’s nothing you can—”

  “I’ll wait anyway.” I pulled my car keys out of my pocket. “Take the car,” I said. “I know you need to be at work tomorrow. I’ll just hang around here. I’ll leave my phone on. Anything changes, I’ll let you know.”

  She tried a couple more times to talk me out of staying, then kissed me on the cheek and headed for the door.

  I spent the next couple hours wondering who would do such a thing to a little guy in a wheelchair. Was it something random? Was Carl working on something that brought the wolf to his door? There was just no way to tell.

  I was nodding at 2:30 A.M. when the sound of my name jerked me back to reality. Charity. It was Charity sitting in the seat beside me.

  “How’s my man doing?” he asked.

  “Not so good.”

  “He gonna make it . . . right?”

  “It’s still up in the air,” I said.

  Nobody said anything for a while, then Charity said, “Had to get my cousin Zag Boy to come over wid some plywood . . . you know, board up the door. Mr. Carl wouldn’t like nobody messing with his stuff. Zag Boy staying in de odda bedroom till we get somebody to come out and put on a new door.”

  “Thanks.”

  “No need to thank me, Leo
. He be my friend too.”

  “I know.”

  He slid a long arm across my shoulders. “Cops thinkin’ it was a home invasion. Dey done tore the place all up. Everything scattered all over. Cops want to know what’s missing, but how in hell anybody but Carl know dat?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “And Carl’s never gonna get the Betty Crocker housecleaning award. I doubt if even he knows what was in there.”

  “We be hea when he wake up in the morning.”

  “Yeah.”

  Next thing I remember, it was 5:50 A.M. A hand was shaking my shoulder. When I opened my eyes, Charity was spread out over three chairs, snoring lightly. The doctor from last night was saying, “Sir . . . sir . . . sir . . .”

  “You’re Mister Cradduck’s friend?” he asked.

  “Ahhh . . . yes,” I managed to stammer out.

  “We’ve put your friend into a medically induced coma,” he said.

  “Why? I mean, why would you do that?”

  “We’re going to give his brain a rest,” he said. “For the next forty hours or so.” He handed me a slip of paper. “That’s my cell phone number. Give me a call Wednesday morning. At that point—” He stopped himself. I could tell . . . he didn’t want to make any promises he couldn’t keep. He shrugged and walked off.

  I sat there and collected my wits for a few minutes.

  Charity came awake with a start. I told him what the doctor had told me.

  “No point in bein’ hea den,” he said.

  “No . . . I guess not.”

  Charity headed for the door. I went over to the restroom, brushed my teeth with my finger, and washed my face. Wasn’t till I got outside and the freshening breeze slapped me wide awake that I remembered Rebecca had taken the car.

  Took most of the towels I owned to wipe up the water on the bathroom floor. I was on my second load, throwing the towels in the dryer and the sheets in the washer, when someone began pounding on my front door. And I mean pounding.

  I dropped the laundry and hot-footed it out to the front of the house. I was reaching for my shotgun when a voice boomed through the door. “Seattle Police Department. Open the door. Open the door, now.”

  I looked out through the peephole. Sure enough . . . cops. Tactical cops with ballistic shields and a battering ram. A bunch of them.

  “I’m coming out,” I shouted. “I’m not armed.”

  “Open the door,” the voice boomed.

  I pulled back both bolts, opened the door, and then laced my fingers together on top of my head and stepped out.

  In the movies this is where the snappy dialogue always happens. Where our hero flogs his tormentors with withering repartee. In reality, at this point, doing anything other than exactly what you’re told will, almost certainly, get you killed. Before another word was spoken, a pair of enormous cops were on me like ants at a picnic. One behemoth was kneeling in the middle of my back, grinding my face into the concrete porch while his buddy was busy handcuffing my hands somewhere up behind my neck. As they hoisted me to my feet, I could feel my nose bleeding.

  “One of you guys wanna give me some idea as to what’s happening?” I asked.

  The two of them grabbed my elbows and nearly lifted me off the ground. Felt like both arms were going to break.

  “You’re being arrested for suspicion of capital murder,” a voice behind me said.

  “Anything you say can and will be . . .”

  Only thing worse than hospitals are jails. At least in hospitals, excrement isn’t considered a means of expression. I didn’t know who wrote “JESUS LOVES ME” on the rear wall, but I had a pretty good idea what it was written in.

  Other than that, I didn’t know any more than I did when I’d opened my front door to the cops about four hours ago. I had the cell to myself, and had deduced from the fact that a jailer walked by every five minutes that they thought I might harm myself and were taking precautions.

  I’d made my one phone call. Called my longtime lawyer and friend, Jed James, on his private number. Jed was a judge these days and therefore not able to directly advise me. He was also still the principal partner in Seattle’s most prestigious law firm. He recused himself whenever the firm was involved in a case. He’d reminded me that he was no longer my attorney and then assured me he’d be sending the cavalry forthwith.

  I had no doubt that, by this time, his minion was already working at it, so I wasn’t surprised when my private jailer escorted a studious-looking young African American woman to the corridor outside my cell and set up a folding chair for her.

  He was hanging around like he was planning to stay for the party. She had other ideas. She poked her nose right up in his face. “I remind you that, according to the U.S. Supreme Court, my client and I have an expectation of complete privacy here. No recordings of any kind are permitted. So if you’d excuse us.”

  She waited until he’d shuffled off to Buffalo before she sat down.

  “I’m Laurie Thatcher,” she said. “Mr. James sent me.”

  “Good to see you,” I said.

  “What have they told you?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “What have you told them?”

  “Absolutely nothing.”

  “Good.”

  “I don’t even know who I’m supposed to have murdered.”

  “Someone named Richard Seigal.”

  “He’s a neighbor of mine.”

  “I don’t know what they have. They’re playing it extremely close to the vest until your arraignment first thing tomorrow morning, but I get the distinct feeling they’re almost giddy about their case against you.”

  “I didn’t kill anybody.”

  She raised a stiff finger to her lips and shook her head. “Don’t say anything,” she whispered. “I don’t trust these people one bit. This place is probably wired for sound.” She got to her feet. “They’ve got you on suicide watch, so you should be fine until morning. Mr. James asked me to assure you he’d be making some calls for you.”

  I nodded that I understood. He meant he’d call Rebecca.

  “I’ll see you in the morning,” she said.

  The only words I uttered at my arraignment were “Not guilty, Your Honor.” Like Ms. Thatcher had so astutely noted, the DA’s people were snarky confident about their case. Richard Seigal had been found in the street early yesterday morning, just outside my wall, with a single bullet hole where his right eye used to be. Not only that, but they’d found my fingerprints on both the gun and the magazine. In a brief statement to police, Janet Seigal had confirmed a certain amount of bad blood between her husband and me, including a tidbit about how I’d threatened to kill him a few days before he was killed. To top things off, my neighbor Wilson Harvey had given the SPD a statement to the effect that he’d witnessed an altercation between Richard Seigal and me the previous Tuesday evening.

  The only ace I was holding was that I hadn’t been alone much on Sunday, the day Richard Seigal had been killed. I’d picked Rebecca up for the funeral at two thirty and wasn’t alone until I got home from the hospital yesterday morning, so determining a precise time of death was going to be crucial to my future freedom. The real eyebrow-raiser of the proceeding was when it was announced that an autopsy was presently being performed by Snohomish County medical examiner Peter Nance, as the King County medical examiner, Rebecca Duval, had recused her office from the case because of what she described as a personal relationship with the defendant. Results were expected later in the afternoon.

  Things didn’t get contentious until the matter of bail arose. The charge of murder is a non-bailable offense in the state of Washington. However, as Ms. Thatcher so ably pointed out, I hadn’t yet been charged with anything. I was merely being held on suspicion. Thatcher was all over them about how I was deeply rooted in the community, had never been convicted of a violent crime, how I would be willing to turn in my passport, and pay any reasonable bail.

  The judge just sat there doing her impression of Moun
t Rushmore. I was remanded to custody until further notice. The only point we won was my right to meet with my lawyer after the arraignment.

  They took off my cuffs and shepherded me into a room two doors down from the courtroom. Ten minutes later, Thatcher showed up looking a bit ashen.

  She sat down across from me. “It’s not good at all,” she said. “If we went to trial tomorrow, we’d lose. The jury’d be out about ten minutes.”

  “You don’t have to sugarcoat it for me.”

  “This isn’t funny,” she snapped. “They have physical evidence and two eyewitnesses. Ninety percent of the people in prison are there on a lot less than that.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “We’re going to make no statements while we wait for the autopsy results. They’re very likely going to give you somebody to talk to, in hopes you’ll say something incriminating.” She got to her feet. “I’m going to file an appeal on the matter of bail. I need to get it filed by noon, so it will be on the docket for tomorrow . . . so if you’ll excuse me.”

  I waved a good-bye. Next time the door opened, a pair of King County mounties came in, shackled me hand and foot, and shuffled me back over the sky bridge to my cell.

  That Thatcher woman was right on the money. Suddenly I had a cellmate. Guy about thirty with Celtic rune tattoos on his forearms and a fashionable five o’clock shadow.

  I turned to the jailer. “Get this guy out of here,” I said.

  He ignored me, walked down the corridor, and disappeared.

  “That ain’t real friendly,” my new cellmate said.

  I walked over and stood in front of him. “Listen, asshole,” I said. “You’re either a cop or some kind of jailhouse rat trying to get your sentence reduced by making up some shit I supposedly said. Either way, this is the last conversation we’re ever gonna have. You start running your mouth or come over to my side of the cell, and you’re gonna become the world’s foremost expert on dental implants. You hear me?”

  He didn’t say anything. Just stood there, chewing a piece of gum, trying to look tough.

  I walked over to the bunk on the far side of the cell and sat down. He must have had a pager in his pocket, because ten minutes later the jailer showed up and took him away. No shackles either, which made him a cop rather than a snitch.