The Art of Deception b-8

by Ridley Pearson

  She feared the CAP sergeant might resolve the situation with a baseball bat, and no one needed that.

  “It’s open this time of night, right?” he asked.

  She answered with a don’t-ask-me-to-do-this look.

  “The Sarge wants him in for questioning. I want answers how he got your cell number. Call whoever it is you gotta call down there, and let’s get the flock out of here. It smells funky in here, you know that?”

  “Boy, you really know how to flatter a girl.”

  “Yeah,” he fired back at her. “That’s what they say.”

  It came together for Matthews slowly, like learning the steps to a dance. Not something she could jump into, this idea of Walker in the Shelter. Like so many times before in other investigations, she found the early information too much to process as a whole, a stew stirred up that had to settle before being tasted, its in-gredients properly understood. For LaMoia, it wasn’t stew but spaghetti, and he was throwing it at the wall as he always did, waiting to see what stuck. For him, she was part of the mix-he’d thrown her up there, too, by including her in his theory.

  LaMoia didn’t develop theories so much as test them. He didn’t put his work on paper, he put it in the field, and that pretty much explained to her why she found herself strapped into the passenger seat of his Jetta shortly before midnight. Another of LaMoia’s wild hairs, and she along for the ride, as much for the company as anything else.

  “You feeling better?” he asked. LaMoia drove fearlessly-his approach to so much of life. She envied him that, while at the same time hated being his passenger.

  “I resent you dragging me along, John.”

  God, he loved women.

  She fought against the silence that followed. She said, “Your mind goes to strange places when you feel yourself under attack.”

  “You’re safe with me,” he said in the most serious voice she’d ever heard him use. “Always, and forever. No one will ever get to you with me around, Matthews.”

  She didn’t want to cry in front of him. She glanced out her side window only to have her focus shift and the mirror image of her glassy eyes superimpose itself. LaMoia gallant? Who would have thought?

  She said, “Making statements like that can get you in trouble.”

  “I’m always in trouble,” he said.

  He won a private smile from her.

  “From here on out you’ll stay at my loft. End of discussion.”

  She laughed into the car. “That’ll be the day.”

  “No, that’ll be tonight. That’ll be until we clear this thing.”

  She searched his profile for any indication he was kidding.

  The car drifted through yet another greasy turn, and she made no attempt to steady herself. Instead, she settled into the seat, wondering how and why everything suddenly felt a whole lot better.

  “Pack a bag.” He reached across and took up her left hand-an impossibly caring gesture for John LaMoia. She did not recoil, did not tease him. For an instant they met eyes. He squeezed her hand gently, ran his thumb down her palm. She felt it to her toes. “I know you think I’m crazy. That’s all right, Matthews. You, and everyone else.” He flew through traffic, colored lights reflected in the black shine of the wet street. “This too shall pass.”

  Snuffing the Flame

  They started with LaMoia entering the Shelter alone, just as he assumed Walker would have done. Matthews entered a moment behind him, waved hello to the attendant, checked the guest book, and then walked past a screen to roam the aisles between the cots.

  With the midnight curfew a half hour off, a fairly steady stream of desolate young women trickled in as LaMoia stood before a gunmetal gray steel desk listening to a woman who had more chins than a shar-pei as she explained the Shelter’s women-only policy to him. The arriving girls read a page of rules and disclaimers before signing in. As the hefty woman in charge oversaw this procedure, a neglected LaMoia looked quickly for where Walker might have picked up Matthews’s cell phone number, his eyes combing several bulletin boards, paperwork on top of the desk, and a handful of flyers offered to arrivals. To his discouragement, the only phone number he could find on any of the literature was the Shelter’s toll-free hotline.

  “Matthews,” he called out loudly, finding himself on the verge of being thrown out, cop or not.

  Matthews found herself entering the dormitory and reliving the day she’d sat down with Margaret trying to convince the girl to contact her family-she recalled the conversation nearly word for word, her own frustration at Margaret’s impertinence. She remembered taking the Sharpie from her purse and using the indelible ink to make a point about her determination to help.

  She remembered so well inking her cell phone number down the girl’s forearm. This recollection hit her like a slap in the face. She spun on her heels and ran, coming around the privacy screen and meeting back up with LaMoia. She stopped abruptly, unable to get a word out.

  He tested, “You okay?” and stepped closer. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  Mention of this raised the head of the attendant. He had spoken a Shelter watchword without knowing it. Expectancy hung in the air like static before a storm as this woman and LaMoia awaited her response. The smell of hot chocolate permeated, as did the distant nasal whine of a girl’s earphones as she listened to rap music on a portable CD player.

  “Other way around,” Matthews said hoarsely, her voice belying her stoic exterior. “I think the ghost saw me.”

  “For once, Matthews, you lost me, not the other way around.”

  “Her forearm,” Matthews said. “I wrote my cell number on her forearm with a Sharpie.” She hollered out the general alarm, “Man on the floor!” As LaMoia was led around the privacy screen, he saw several dozen teens-most all wearing surgical scrubs as pajamas. They sat on the edges of their cots aiming their hollow faces in open curiosity. Some girls came down a hall with wet hair. The announcement of a man had cleared the showers.

  “Walk me through this,” LaMoia said quietly, aware of their audience. “I’m not sure what you’re getting at.”

  “There are two possibilities,” Matthews said. “Either Walker met up with Margaret sometime later and she told him what that number on her arm was-”

  “I have serious reservations about that.”

  She nodded her agreement, surprising him. “Second possibility: He overheard my conversation with Margaret and saw me write my cell number on her arm … in real time … right as I did it. Right here.”

  LaMoia mulled this over, his brown eyes shifting and lighting on various focal points: her face, the wall, her face again.

  He asked, “That’s the best you’ve got?”

  “John, you know when you know something, and you really know it, no matter how much you can talk yourself out of it?

  You’ve been there, right? We’ve all been there before. This is one of those times. I’m right about this. One hundred percent.”

  He glanced around the room, saw the girls watching them like some kind of freak show.

  “And there’s something else,” Matthews said, her voice returning to that warm, dark, husky complaint she’d fallen into only moments earlier. Her tone suggested conspiracy, so he leaned even closer to her, to where her breath ran warm on his neck. “For months, the girls have been complaining about this place being haunted.” She caught his condescending expression.

  “No, no. Hear me out! Not creaky-noises-kind-of-haunted, but being watched-the feeling they were being watched. Especially in … the … showers.” Was it her imagination, she wondered, or had the whole room gone quiet? LaMoia looked in the general direction of the showers. For her, the hallway suddenly seemed to stretch much longer. “John?” she asked.

  “You trust this?” he questioned.

  “Completely and absolutely.”

  He whispered back at her, “Then we’ll start in the showers so the girls can’t see what we’re doing.”

  “Agreed,” Mat
thews said.

  “And Matthews, just for the record: If we strike out, you never talked me into doing this. If I get tagged as a ghostbuster, I’ll never live it down.”

  “I was told this room was probably a salting room at one point,”

  Matthews said, explaining the large drain in the shower room’s brick floor at which LaMoia was staring intently.

  “Or a stable or carriage house,” LaMoia suggested. “You put a drain in a basement, Matthews, especially one close to water, as we are here, and you’re going to have water in your basement. Fact of life.”

  “Meaning?”

  “If the Sarge wasn’t all hot and heavy about these EMTs mentioning the Underground, then maybe I wouldn’t go there.

  But a drain in a basement? I don’t think so. I think this thing was at ground level at some point.”

  She looked around, studying the shower room’s old stone walls. Gray mortar, added sloppily in the not-too-distant past, lay frozen where it seeped from the seams. “You’re saying it isn’t dirt on the other side of these walls?”

  “I’m saying the Sarge is trying to make a connection between a possible underground section of the old city and Hebringer and Randolf. He’s the one who put a bug in my ear. Now you raise the possibility of a peeper down here, and I gotta go with that, with you, because you’ve got this thing-you know what I mean? — and I’ve gotta take this wherever I can take it, as stupid as it may seem.”

  “I’m not saying it’s stupid, John.”

  “I am, Matthews. It is stupid. But to overlook it? That’s even stupider.”

  “There’s no such word.”

  “Yeah? Well, at the end of this there may be,” he said. “Stay tuned.”

  The cast-iron drain, twelve inches across, was positioned directly in the center of the large room. Some white PVC plastic pipe had been suspended from the stone ceiling as temporary plumbing to supply the shower water. The space smelled of young women, shampoo, and soap, nothing like a men’s locker room, and this made LaMoia uneasy. In all his vast experience with women, he had never entered a girls’ locker room.

  “Turn out the lights,” he instructed.

  Matthews obeyed without comment, without interrupting his train of thought, ushering the room into total darkness-the only sounds the steady, rhythmic splash of water dripping from the showerheads. That, and LaMoia’s shallow breathing.

  “How ’bout a flashlight?” she whispered expectantly, even a little anxiously.

  Instead, LaMoia struck a match, shadows jumping and bending across the crumbling brick walls. The room was set into motion as he moved carefully along the far wall, the match held close to the bricks and mortar. The flame burned brightly at first, then shrank, the shadows fading, and LaMoia tossed it to the floor. He lit another. The dripping water mimicked a heart beating. LaMoia worked the flame high to low, left to right, his own pagan ritual. The fire flickered, danced, and then blew out, enveloping them in darkness once again.

  “Bingo,” LaMoia said softly.

  With another lit match, he tested the same spot again-a slice of mortar about shoulder height. Again, long shadows raked the walls as the small flame first flickered and then was extin-guished.

  Matthews asked, “Why keep putting the match out? What’s the point?”

  “It’s not me,” LaMoia answered. “It’s wind.” He held another match between them so they could see each other, but the effect was disorienting. Now the shadows waved and commingled on the floor. “There’s a hole poked through the mortar here,” he said, pointing, “and here. Peepholes, Matthews. Not ghosts. Not goblins. Dirty old men, I’m guessing. And maybe one much younger. One with a thing for a very pretty cop.”

  She crossed her arms against the chill. “Oh, God,” she moaned. “We’d better call SID.”

  “Let’s wait on that. It may be nothing,” LaMoia suggested, much to her obvious consternation. He stepped forward and whispered into her ear, “He may be watching.”

  Twenty minutes later LaMoia had marked with chalk another four such rents in the mortar, all with unobstructed views of the shower stalls where the young women had bathed themselves.

  He made one last test alongside the brick wall that faced the cot where Matthews and Margaret had spoken. The match’s flame blew out.

  He and Matthews met eyes, hers filled with alarm. “Sometimes I hate being right,” she said.

  One of the girls asked what was going on, and LaMoia vamped, saying he was a city engineer checking “structural consistencies of the chemical compounds used in the mortar mixture.” This seemed to satisfy the girl and confuse her as well.

  “You’re working a little late, aren’t you?” He answered, “I’m volunteering my time, young lady. I haven’t been home for dinner yet.” “You’re pretty buff for an engineer,” she said. This, from a seventeen-year-old with a tattoo. LaMoia mugged for Matthews, shutting her up before she leveled him with another sarcastic remark. They reconvened outside the Shelter’s main door, in a musty basement hallway that was part of the church.

  “I feel sick to my stomach,” she said, arms crossed tightly.

  “That is so disgusting … so invasive … so awful!”

  “So common,” he said. “Guys start poking holes in walls when they’re about eight, Matthews.”

  “You?”

  “Don’t ask. The point now is to find these bastards-because these aren’t prepubescent kids who don’t know any better. These are pervs, cave-dwelling troglodytes that deserve to have their equipment surgically removed.” He looked around somewhat frantically. “Give me the dime tour, would you? These guys are on the outside of these walls, and we gotta find out how the hell they got there.” He added, “Now, while we can still rain on their parade.”

  Ancient Doors

  The Second Presbyterian Church that hosted the Shelter in its basement labyrinth remained open from 6 A.M. to midnight seven days a week, hours the Shelter kept as well. Matthews led LaMoia back to the bottom of an extremely old stone staircase that they’d descended on their way in. A few thousand runaways had traveled this same route over the last year.

  “After this we’re gonna want to take a lap around the block,”

  he said, “looking for jimmied doors, storm drains, basement windows-something with access to whatever’s on the other side of these walls.” The walls had been constructed of large stone and whitewashed. “But even though we gotta do that, my money’s on the Blessed Virgin-or whatever the flock this particular set of bells is called-because with them leaving the doors open all hours, the bums have got all sorts of access. One door somewhere down here, a few loose stones is all it would take.”

  “You’re a real poet, you know that?”

  “Do we know where either of these doors lead?” They were heavy doors, old and of dark wood and cast-iron hardware. Me-dieval, like something from a castle dungeon. One sat at the end of a small dead-end hallway; the other was set into what appeared to be an exterior basement wall. Both doors were locked.

  “We do not,” she answered, emphasizing their partnership.

  “There’s a lot of history down here. A lot of mystery, too.”

  He pointed out that both doors had locks that would likely open with skeleton keys.

  She said, “Which speaks to the age of this place.”

  “I was thinking more like how tough they’d be to pick,” he snapped sarcastically. He turned to face her. “We’ve got two choices here: We can talk to the holy roller, whoever’s in charge, or, it being midnight, I can do my thing and we can be through either of these doors in about three minutes.” He produced a Leatherman utility knife. “Don’t leave home without it.”

  “As long as I’m involved, I’d appreciate it if we did things legally, as unsettling to you as that may be.”

  “So now you’re going to reform me?”

  She looked around at the rock walls, the Gothic arches overhead. “Seems as good a place to start as any.”

  Fifteen mi
nutes later, both doors hung open. The minister was a bald man with an oily complexion, a slight frame, and canti-levered eyebrows that looked sewn onto his forehead. He had a quiet but sunny disposition, as if being rousted at midnight was part and parcel of his job. Perhaps it was.

  One of the doors led to storage, a massive masonry cave nearly rectangular in shape, lit by bare bulbs and strewn with cobwebs and layers of dust. Wooden chairs were stacked haphazardly; red velvet seat cushions, the fabric torn open by home-steading mice, leaned as unstable towers; a leather chair had its covering peeled back from the arms like skin from a bad burn.

  There were candlesticks and file cabinets, steamer trunks and even an abandoned pulpit canted to one side so that its cup runneth over. Old rust-covered chains were bolted to the far wall. Matthews commented on the enormity of the space-it looked to be sixty feet deep or more. LaMoia strategically wormed his way inside, discovering a tunnel with a low ceiling that led to a former wine cellar, also long since abandoned. The dust alone announced that no bums had trodden here.

  Matthews picked her way through the rubble, following him.

  Together they faced a bricked-over stone arch. In a soft voice LaMoia said, “We want to be wherever that once led.”

  The minister overheard his comment and informed them that to his knowledge any doorways and windows that had once communicated with what had then been a sidewalk, a hundred years earlier, had all been brick-and-mortared closed. “Permanently sealed” was how he put it.

  A storyteller by nature, he held them captive with a tale about an old rum-running smugglers’ tunnel said to have run up Skid Row-now Yesler Way-leading from the waterfront and connecting to several churches and speakeasies that predated the Great Depression and Prohibition. “They connected the old smuggling tunnel to these underground sidewalks, where they had quite the black market going for themselves.”