Salvation Lake (A Leo Waterman Mystery)

by G. M. Ford

  I’d never really thought about the possibility of doing hard time before. Sure, I’d done a day here and two days there, for stuff like withholding information or interfering with an investigation, but nothing life-changing like this.

  I started running scenarios in my head. You know . . . the kind of thing a person does when facing the unknown. Cellblocks and sliding doors. Mess halls. Walled yards and bad tattoos. Every prison movie I’d ever seen flashed through my mind as I sat there in that rancid cell, imagining how I was going to survive in that hell we call the American prison system. The place where we lock up anybody who doesn’t fit the mold—the criminal, the crazy, the poor, the disenfranchised, the wretched refuse of our teeming shores. Anybody who threatens to interfere with shopping.

  It wasn’t till I heard the voice that I realized someone was standing outside the door of my cell. “You ready to confess?” he said.

  In the window on the other side of the corridor, light was fading from the sky.

  Lieutenant Timothy Eagen. Come to smirk, I guessed. To revel in the fact that he finally had me where he wanted me.

  “You want to talk to me, call my lawyer,” I said, without looking his way.

  “Hey,” he said.

  I looked over. He was holding a bunch of papers in his hand.

  “You know what this is?” he asked.

  “Why don’t you enlighten me.”

  “It’s the autopsy report on Richard Seigal.”

  I kept my mouth shut.

  “Says Mr. Seigal was killed between eight and ten Sunday night.”

  I turned his way, trying not to look like a kid on his birthday. “I’ve got an alibi for that time period.”

  “I know,” he said. He peeled several pages off the back of the bundle. “This is a statement taken earlier today from Dr. Rebecca Duval. Says you two were together doin’ the horizontal bop during those hours. Also says she was asleep during part of the time period in question. Enough time for you to go outside and knock off Mr. Seigal and come back in. So it don’t necessarily get you off the hook.” He gave an exaggerated shrug. “Now normally I’d figure an alibi from the suspect’s girlfriend was about worth wiping my ass with, but . . .” He paused. “But I’ve worked with that woman for the better part of fifteen years now.” He shook his head. “For the life of me, I never could figure out what the fuck she saw in you, but . . . you know . . . notwithstanding her appalling taste in men, that woman’s as straight as an arrow. She’s not alibiing anybody for murder. Not even you.” He rocked back on his heels. “So why don’t you tell me how your fingerprints got all over the murder weapon.”

  I gave it some serious thought. Trying to decide whether Eagen had an angle I couldn’t figure, and was simply looking to put the final nail in my coffin. In my mind’s ear, I could hear Ms. Thatcher telling me to keep my mouth shut.

  I decided to take a chance.

  “I took it away from him some night early last week,” I said finally. “He was drunk and waving it around.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  I did. At great length. Leaving out nothing.

  “What’s Mrs. Seigal saying about it?” I asked at the end.

  “Not much,” Eagen said. “She gave us a brief statement and then lawyered up. Supposedly she’s under heavy sedation and won’t be making any further statements in the foreseeable future. And you know what?”

  “What?”

  “I can’t find any doctor anywhere who’s diagnosed her with MS.”

  That’s when it finally dawned on me. Like a cloud lifting. What I should have picked up on from the very beginning. “She set me up,” I said, as much to myself as to Eagen. “She saw me coming from a mile away. Captain Magnolia to the rescue. I couldn’t figure out why that idiot was so sure I was messing with his wife. But . . . it was her! She was feeding him that crap. Fanning the flames.”

  Eagen made a dubious face. “If what you’re telling me is true, she took one hell of a chance assuming you’d be alone.”

  I shook my head. “She had every reason to assume I’d be alone in the house last night. Since they moved in, I’ve always been alone. If my car was in the drive, I was there by myself. Rebecca and I just got back together a couple days ago.” I threw an angry hand in the air. “She walks that damn dog out in front of my house several times a day. Nobody was more familiar with my comings and goings than she was.”

  He didn’t say anything. Just stood there mulling it over.

  “Be interesting to know whether the Seigals had a prenup,” I said after a while.

  “Is that what you steely-eyed private dicks would do?”

  I ignored the sniping. “And I’d like to know how much he was insured for, and who ends up with the dough.”

  “Sam Spade on the case,” he said.

  I watched as he folded the paperwork and slid it into the inside pocket of his suit coat.

  “One more thing,” I said as he began to walk away.

  “What’s that, hotshot?”

  “Like I told you, when I took that gun away from him, I removed the magazine and jacked one out of the chamber. The one from the chamber’s probably still on my neighbor’s lawn. Up front near the driveway.”

  “You don’t say.”

  The cuisine left a great deal to be desired. I felt pretty certain that the pile of yellow stuff they were calling scrambled eggs had never been anywhere near a chicken. The toast was so over-toasted you could snap it in two like a cracker. I smeared it with the little packet of grape jelly and choked it down anyway.

  Just after noon, a pair of beefy jailers came in, chained me up hand and foot, and waddled me over to my bail hearing. As we turned the final corner, I found myself staring into a bank of TV cameras. My first instinct was to raise my hands, to cover my face Mafia-style, but I thought better of it and lifted my boyish chin instead.

  The minute I walked in the door, I could tell something was up. The crew from the DA’s office was welded chest to chest out in front of the prosecution table. Looked like they were having either a collective stroke or an argument in pantomime.

  Jed and Rebecca were sitting side by side in the back row. Half a dozen reporters were huddled together behind the defense table. The jailers deposited me in the chair next to Ms. Thatcher and lumbered to the back of the room.

  The judge entered the courtroom, the bailiff began to drone, everyone scurried for a seat except for an assistant DA whose face I recognized but whose name escaped me. Walton or Waltman, something like that. He walked to the front of the courtroom and began whispering into the judge’s ear. The expression on the judge’s face suggested either she’d slipped a disk on the way in, or she didn’t like what she was hearing at all.

  A minute later she lifted a hand and made a “scat” motion with her fingers.

  The assistant DA slogged back to the defense table and sat down.

  At which point the judge noticed Jed sitting in the back of the room. She looked out over her half glasses. “To what do we owe the honor of a visit from the most honorable Jedediah James?” she inquired.

  Jed got to his feet. “Your Honor, I am present purely as a private citizen. Mr. Waterman is a former client and one of my oldest friends.”

  “Ah,” she said. “Moral support.”

  Thatcher jumped to her feet. “Your Honor, if I may, I would like to protest, in the strongest terms, my client being dragged into this courtroom chained up like an animal. It’s prejudicial in the extreme. I—”

  The judge raised a stop sign hand. “Save it, Ms. Thatcher,” she said and then looked over to the prosecution table. “Mr. Wagner, I am given to understand that the district attorney’s office is not prepared to charge Mr. Waterman at this time.”

  Wagner stood up. Coughed into his hand. “No, Your Honor. We are not, but . . . to reiterate what Your Honor said, we are declining to press charges . . . at this time. We reserve the right to reinstitute these charges at any time in the future.”

  �
�So noted,” she said, then turned to me. “Mr. Waterman, you are hereby released on your own recognizance. You are ordered to surrender your passport and not leave the friendly confines of King County without this court’s expressed written permission. As an additional aid, we’re going to issue you an Omnilink monitoring device for your ankle. We’ll send someone over to your house in the morning to install it and collect your passport. Be home. Do you understand?”

  I said I did.

  BANG. She slammed the gavel down and then waved the little hammer angrily at the back of the room. “Get Mr. Waterman out of those damn manacles,” she said.

  My babysitters hustled up and relieved me of the hardware. They sounded like the Ghost of Christmas Past as they clanked off. The bailiff began to drone again. Everybody stood up. The judge nodded curtly and strode out the side door.

  Thatcher was staring at the side of my head. “What just happened?” she asked.

  “It was a miracle,” I said.

  “My butt.”

  I was rescued by the arrival of Jed and Rebecca. Hugs and handshakes all around.

  “You had me more than a little worried there, big fella,” Jed said.

  “Me too. Believe me, I’ve spent the last two days running George Raft movies in my head.”

  He patted me on the arm and inclined his head toward the side door. “I’m going to leave through the judge’s room,” he said. “There’s quite a few cameras out in the hall. It just wouldn’t look right to . . . you know.”

  I told him I understood. We shook hands. “Nice work, Ms. Thatcher” was his final utterance before exiting stage left.

  Rebecca hooked her arm in mine. Thatcher rounded up her papers and stuffed them into her briefcase. “You must have somebody watching over you, Mr. Waterman.”

  “Two of ’em,” I said. “My best friend”—I jostled Rebecca with my shoulder—“and my worst enemy.”

  “I don’t understand,” Thatcher said.

  “I think it’s probably best we leave it that way.”

  We waited for the building to clear and then walked down to Cherry Street and devoured a couple of first-rate turkey sandwiches at Bakeman’s. “Eagen came to see me in my office yesterday afternoon,” Rebecca said as we were finishing up.

  “Came to see me in jail too.”

  “Had a forensics team go over your car. Asked me if I was sure about the times I’d given in my statement. I told him I was.”

  “You’re always sure of everything.”

  “You know what he also told me?”

  “What?”

  “He had this bullet he said he’d found on your neighbor’s lawn. Said he didn’t think you’d killed Seigal. Said it just wasn’t your style.”

  “He’s a good cop. Knows shit from shoe polish.”

  “He’s asked me out a few times, you know.”

  “I figured he had,” I said.

  “No cops,” she said.

  “Figured that too.”

  “You owe him a thanks.”

  “Not sure I could choke it out,” I said.

  “Work on it.”

  I promised I’d try.

  They’d left the search warrant standing up on my kitchen table. From the look of it, SPD’d been through my house from top to bottom. Every door and drawer was open. All my guns and ammo were laid out on the living room floor. They’d been looking for anything that matched the peashooter that killed Richard Seigal. If they’d found anything, I’d still be downtown, staring at those dodgy scrambled eggs.

  What hospital and jails have in common is that both of them are the worst places on earth to try to get a night’s sleep. I put my arsenal back where it belonged, except for the Mossberg and a Smith & Wesson M&P 9mm. I carried those two and enough ammo to start a war in the Balkans into the bedroom with me. Cold comfort, but comfort nonetheless.

  Naturally, the cops had trashed the bed. Just in case I’d stashed a howitzer under the box spring, I guessed. I grabbed the comforter from the floor, found a couple of pillows at large beneath the wing chair, and threw myself into bed fully dressed.

  I slept for fourteen hours. With me, that much sleep is both a blessing and a curse.

  For reasons I’ve never understood, sleeping more than seven or eight hours gives me nightmares. The kind where Dracula swoops down and eats your liver, with a side of fava beans. Always happens in the morning, when I’ve slept too long.

  When I finally opened my eyes, I was in a partial panic and a full sweat. I felt like I’d been running for my life but couldn’t recall why. Only the flow of the cool air over my clammy skin made me certain it was true.

  I rolled over onto my back and dug around in my pocket for my phone. Found it.

  Pushed the button. Nothing. Pushed the button on top. Likewise nada. Thing was deader than a herring.

  I swung my feet over the edge, grabbed my weaponry, and headed for the kitchen by way of the bathroom. By the time I’d scrubbed the moss off my teeth, brewed up a pot of coffee, and swallowed most of it, my phone had collected enough of a charge to check my messages.

  Two from Rebecca telling me that a date we’d made for later this evening was going to have to wait, as she had three victims of an auto accident who were going to require her services even more than I did. One from my insurance agent that I didn’t listen to for long enough to find out what he wanted, and finally, one that came in about an hour ago, from Northwest Hospital, wanting to know if I had any information regarding Carl’s medical insurance or next of kin.

  I called Carl’s home number. Zag Boy answered. “Cradduck place,” he said.

  “You Charity’s cousin?” I asked.

  “That be me.”

  “I’m his friend Leo.”

  “Heard ’bout you, mon.”

  “I need you to do something for me.”

  “What be that?”

  “Carl keeps his wallet in the junk drawer in the kitchen. Last little drawer, over by the window. I need you to go over there, find his medical insurance card, and read me the company and the number.”

  “Hang on, mon,” he said.

  I found an old golf pencil and a piece of an envelope to write on.

  “Premera Blue Cross,” Zag Boy said.

  He read me a thirty-seven-digit number. I wrote it down.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I gotta go.”

  “He’s got no next of kin,” I said for the third time. “Years ago he had an older brother who died in some kind of industrial accident. That was it. He never married. Never had any children. Lived by himself. Anything you need signed, I’ll sign. You need somebody to be financially responsible for whatever his insurance doesn’t cover, just show me the dotted line.”

  “You do realize the degree of legal liability involved in the—”

  “Where do I sign?” I said a little louder than necessary.

  His name was Paul Edlund. Chief of the Neurosurgery Department. A stout-looking fellow who looked like he’d spent a lot of time in the weight room.

  He bent over and had a whispered conversation with the hospital administrator, whose name I hadn’t caught. She pulled some paperwork from the top drawer of her desk and slid it over to me. Somebody’d thoughtfully pasted bright yellow arrows, pointing at the places I needed to sign. I went through it and signed them all.

  When I’d finished, I looked up at Dr. Edlund. “I thought you guys were going to try to bring him out of his coma today,” I said.

  “I’m afraid that won’t be possible,” he said. “Now that the swelling has gone down marginally, we can see quite clearly that his skull is touching his brain, in two places. That has to be remedied before we have any hope of him regaining consciousness.”

  “How do you do that?” I asked.

  “We drill holes in his skull. Outside the fractured area. We save the bone fragments and bone dust for later reconstruction of the holes.”

  Just the sound of it made me wince.

  He went on. “The fractured segmen
ts are then removed. If the fragments are interlocked, a routine craniotomy is performed, including the depressed fracture.”

  I was sucking air through my teeth. He stopped talking and gave me a chance to regain my composure and then went on. “The bone flap is then turned upside down and the fragments are reduced using a mallet.” He waited to see how I would react.

  I looked away. Closed my eyes. “And then . . . ?”

  “The bone flap is returned to the skull and fixed in place. At which point the bone dust from the burr holes is used to refill the openings.”

  “What’s the prognosis for something like this?”

  He waggled a noncommittal hand. “Quite frankly, it’s a miracle that he’s still alive at all. His vital signs are actually improving, and God knows he’s got a hell of a will to live, but none of that’s going to matter even a little bit if we can’t take the pressure off of his brain.”

  “You know what Carl would say?” I asked.

  “What’s that?”

  “He’d want to know why we’re standing here running our mouths about it, instead of getting the damn job done.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I knew him before he lost the use of his legs. That man took being paralyzed with a grace that was hard to believe. He never blamed anybody and never asked anybody for help. He just sat his skinny little ass in that wheelchair and made a life for himself like nothing had happened. So . . . yeah, I’m sure.”

  He nodded solemnly and then checked his watch. “I can have the team ready in two hours.”

  “Let’s do it,” I said.

  They were at it for four and a half hours. When Edlund came out of the operating room, he looked like he’d just run a marathon. He checked the waiting room, making sure we were alone. “That’s the toughest little son of a bitch I’ve ever seen,” he said.

  “He made it?”

  “He’s alive. For now, that’s all I can say.”

  “When will we know?”

  “The next forty-eight hours are critical. If he’s still alive on Friday, anything’s possible.”