The Five Point housed a bar to the left and a restaurant to the right. The banner in the window declared it was Seattle’s oldest family-owned restaurant—Seattle people liked to commemorate themselves. The pictures on the walls were of luminaries posed next to Kitsap, who didn’t seem pleased with his groupies.
We sat at the counter and ordered. The Indian behind the cash register was wooden, not bronze, but he didn’t look any happier than Kitsap—I had a feeling I was about to be scalped. When I looked at the TV for diversion, what I saw was a laundromat. They take their soap operas literally, apparently.
“The coffee’s not great,” Fiona said when the waitress left. “But I’m sick of Starbucks’ overroasted shit. So you’re looking for Nina Evans,” she segued smoothly.
I nodded. “Know her?”
“Some. Mostly I know her stuff. She worked with Gary, too, which means we’re in the same club. Sort of like Holocaust survivors.”
“So you weren’t friends.”
“With Nina? No chance. She kept to herself, pretty much, plus I did fashion and cheesecake and trade shows so I wasn’t a serious artist as far as she was concerned.” The words were clipped and sardonic.
“Tell me more about Richter.”
She shrugged. “A hustler with talent. Lethal combination.”
“Do you know where he does his darkroom work?”
She shook her head. “He used to have a place out by Shilshole but he had to give it up.”
“Why?”
“Couldn’t afford it. But I heard he came into some money. Someone saw him driving a Porsche.”
“Black?”
“Red. Why? You don’t look like a Porsche man.”
“What does a Porsche man look like?”
She glanced out at Kitsap. “Like him only with lots of gold chains.”
“Was Richter involved with the porn industry?”
“He sells to them, if that’s what you mean. The magazines, at least.”
“Is that mob activity in this part of the country?”
“No one ever talks about it that way. Not to me, at least. Of course I’m not a candidate for that market anymore.”
“Why not?”
She glanced down. “They like thirty-eight triple Ds. Minimum.” She looked up. “You look like you expected a more philosophical answer.”
“Not really.”
“Hey. If I had the tools, I’d use them. Men like naked women. If all they do is look, I’ve got no problem with it.”
“And if looking makes them do something else?”
“Like what? Beat off?”
“I was thinking of sexual assault.”
“There’s been no proof of a connection despite what redneck preachers and Andrea Dworkin want you to believe.”
I didn’t know if she was right or wrong; I doubt if she did, either. In the Information Age, truth tends to get lost. “You implied Richter wanted you to prostitute yourself,” I said.
“Yeah, well, I was exaggerating a little.”
“There must have been something.”
“All he wanted me to do was go to some parties.”
“What kind of parties?”
“Parties with guys who like to hang out with pretty women. I told him right off I wasn’t interested.”
“Did he try to get all his models to these parties?”
“Probably, but I don’t know for sure. The girls didn’t talk much. Attractive women tend not to like each other.”
I didn’t know if she was right about that, either. “If someone was after Richter, who do you figure it would be?”
“Most likely a model or one of their boyfriends. Gary hits on women the way birds peck at seeds—it’s genetic. He only teaches at the academy so he can recruit students to pose for him. But if he’s in trouble and it’s not something like that, I don’t know. Could be the mob, I guess, if he stiffed them or something. Of course anyone who dealt with Gary for five minutes despised him, so it’s a long list.”
“You don’t know of a specific grudge?”
She shook her head and her brow furrowed. “What’s happened to him? He’s not dead or anything, is he?”
“Not that I know of. Why?”
“He owes me money on my last shoot. I’d hate to think someone got to him before he paid off.”
I thought of the mess in Richter’s studio. “What’s with the pictures of young kids I saw in his place?”
“School pictures. Gary’s the photographer for the best private schools in town—Lakeside, Bush, Carlile. He gets a pretty penny to make the rich kids look glamorous, which is why he keeps his T&A work under wraps.”
“Is his stuff valuable? His art photographs?”
She shrugged. “He always has good drugs; he gives his models nice presents in the initial stages of the hustle. So yeah, his stuff is worth something. Some of the shots he took of me are in SAM, and some are in Magnolia and Laurelhurst, too.”
“SAM?”
“Seattle Art Museum. Magnolia and Laurelhurst are two of the upper-crust neighborhoods in town.”
“Do you know where Richter might be if he isn’t in his studio?”
“Sponging off his girlfriend, maybe.”
“Who’s she?”
“Don’t know.”
“How about the stripper?”
“Who? Oh. The exhibit. That’s Mandy.”
“Who’s she?”
“She worked for Gary for a while. When they broke up, she took it hard.”
“Where does she live?”
“No idea, but the last time I saw her, she looked like she wouldn’t live long.”
“Drugs?”
Her eyes flattened. “Everything.”
“Is the Blitz Club a strip joint?”
“Never been in the place, but that’s what the ads say.”
“Did Nina ever do Blitz type of work?”
Fiona shook her head. “Nina was serious about modeling. It wasn’t just a job for her; she really thought it was art.”
“Was it?”
She started to say something cynical, then seemed to change her mind. “Once in a while it was. Even with Gary, once in a while it had something to say. Once it a while it seemed important.”
CHAPTER 10
When she is dressed, she experiences an unaccustomed dread as she waits for Chris to repack the camera in its case.
“So how’d I do?” she asks, knowing from the alacrity with which he had moved her through balletic positions and gymnastic movements that he had been as captivated by her lines and energies as Gary had been.
In the middle of the shoot, when she had decided that she really needed the job, she had begun to assert herself. Swimming in the air and light, casting strange new shadows on the backdrop, she had cast a spell with the aid of only effort. His eyes were enameled with awe as they ducked behind the camera and nestled against the viewfinder, which followed wherever she led it.
“You did fine,” Chris replies with studied nonchalance. “Excellent, in fact.”
“Good. So what now?”
“I ask you some questions.”
“Is the question bit really necessary? I thought if the shoot went well enough I wouldn’t have to, you know, be treated like a game show contestant.”
His smile is insufferably paternal. “Why are you trying to hide from us, Nina?”
“Don’t be silly.”
“Then why are you resistant to the interview?”
“Because it’s not what I do; it’s not who I am; it’s irrelevant.”
“Not to us.”
“What’s with this us? All I see is you. Who makes you us?”
“I told you, I can’t discuss that.”
“What if I won’t go ahead till I know?”
“Then we’ll find someone less inquisitive.”
“Okay, okay. Will you tell me some day, at least? Before the thing is over?”
“I’ll ask him. That’s all I can say. The nature of his invo
lvement is entirely up to him—he does what he wants when he wants to do it and what he wants is usually unpredictable.”
She makes a prediction anyway. What he will want is me, she whispers, though only to herself.
I went back to the motel to reconnoiter and take a nap. When I got to my room the message light was blinking. I assumed it was a call from Peggy, but the desk clerk told me that a package had been delivered for me about an hour ago and I could pick it up in the office at my convenience.
The package turned out to be a manila envelope with my name written on the front in the thick black strokes of a Magic Marker. The slant and script were familiar, but I waited until I was back in my room to make sure.
There were two items in the envelope. One was a note from Peggy: “I need to see you; something upsetting has happened. Please come to the house at nine. Wait for Ted to leave with the dog, then walk down the drive and knock at the door to the sun-room. Please. PS. This is the paper Jeff writes for—his column is on page 12. See you tonight.”
The other item in the envelope was an issue of Salmon Says, dated the previous Monday. I took it out and paged through it.
The Salmon was typical of its genre. Iconoclastic and raunchy, it was filled with weird comic strips and primitive cartoons, irreverent reviews of bands and books and movies, and ads for places like Funk You funky threads, Skin Art Tats—by which I assumed they meant tattoos—and Positive Affinities, a dating service for people who were HIV positive. There were lots of ads for fare in the local clubs and a letters section full of rants about everything from the attributes of Generation X to the corruption of the Seattle scene by the money spread around by big record labels. The personals section featured the usual Girls Seeking Boys and variations thereon, but what was new to me was a rather jarring section called Other Options, in which sadists and masochists sought others of their stripe and heterosexual couples looked for a third participant in their wanton activities. I wondered if the ads were for real and decided they probably were.
Jeff Evans’s column was entitled “Taboo” and it began with a confession: “I’ve never successfully beat off. That is, I’ve never pounded the pud with sufficient skill to come all over my sheets or my jeans or whatever. Never, that is, until I talked to Paul. Paul is the Mozart of Masturbation. Paul could get the Pope turned on to self-abuse (if he isn’t already). Beating his meat to a fare-thee-well is Paul’s life’s work—he is the best there is at what he does. He is the King of Come, the Oracle of Onanism.”
Jeff went on to describe a variety of techniques, most involving mundane appliances available at something called the QFC. Satisfaction was guaranteed or Paul would come to your house to instruct you himself with proven hands-on methods. By the time I neared the end of the piece I was laughing. But then I stopped.
A portion that was clearly serious came in the final graph. After wrapping up his ode to autoeroticism, Jeff stuck on an addendum: “And as always, Mandy, I love and want to help you. Please call when you can. None of this has to happen.” With that, Jeff Evans signed his name, in a singular, splashy stroke.
I put the note and the Salmon back in the envelope and lay down on the bed to rest. The room was a clone of all such rooms, barren of charm and lacking in stimulus, predictive of only perdition. You are confronted with too many aspects of yourself in rooms like this. There are too many mirrors, there is too much time, there is too little in the way of diversion, there is too much that is alien and too little that is friendly. It takes a better man than me to find solace in such an environment; the only antidotes are sleep or defection. I closed my eyes and opted for the former.
I hadn’t gathered enough information to learn where Nina Evans was hiding herself or perhaps was being hid, so I didn’t have enough ingredients for deduction. But thanks to the photos I’d seen at Erospace and in Gary Richter’s studio, I had plenty of stimulus for the more carnal creases of my brain. Not long after I lay down, I reached the suspended state of inhibition that lies between slumber and wakefulness and found myself in the middle of an erotic entanglement that was a candidate for the walls of Erospace itself.
Usually I welcome such dreams at any time in any guise, since they make up a significant percentage of my sex life, but it was five in the afternoon and I was fully dressed, so it was probably fortunate that a door banged shut down the hall and roused me in time to prevent me from making a mess of the sort that Jeff Evans had written a column about.
I got up, took a cold shower, got dressed again, paged through a copy of the Seattle Weekly that I’d picked up down at the desk, and decided on a place to eat. The place turned out to be on the edge of Pioneer Square, a refurbished part of town down by the bay and the Kingdome that was populated by what passes for chic in every reclaimed Old Town in every city that has one—art galleries, bookstores, dance clubs, and Italian eateries. The restaurant was called La Buca and it was more than adequate and even interesting, given its cavernous atmosphere, exuberant wait staff, and well-made risotto and house red.
I spent most of the meal thinking about Peggy. Not that I believed there was any place to go with our relationship, not that I hoped to undermine her engagement; just that I needed to be sure she was truly gone and to know that the place she’d ended up was at least a safe haven. Plus, she’d asked me to drop by, so that’s what I would do. I asked the maître d’ how to get there and was on my way before weighing the advisability of the foray for even an instant.
As instructed, I timed my arrival for nine. By the time I neared her neighborhood I was light-headed with anxiety and sweaty with anticipation. I wanted to see this guy, this Ted, the guy she was going to marry, the guy she’d linked with when she’d known she could have come back to me with no questions asked and no demands beyond proximity. I wanted to see him and take his measure and tell myself he wasn’t my equal in any respect that mattered. I wanted it to be crystal clear that Peggy was making a mistake she would regret for the rest of her life, which would make her an eternal match with me.
I wanted more than I deserved.
The neighborhood was called Capitol Hill and its main street was Broadway, a commercial strip inhabited by elaborately garbed gays and extensively pierced punkers and a healthy supply of mind-altered transients. Peggy lived on the north end, on Thirteenth Avenue East between Aloha and Prospect near an open space called Volunteer Park.
The street was quiet and self-possessed. The house was large and well landscaped, its mock classical design featuring high white columns supporting a double-decked porch, glistening white doors, and large leaded windows beneath a cornice and an architrave and similar motifs from the past. It was a handsome and mature and reliable structure, much like its owner, I suspected; everything that I was not. I parked far enough down the block to remain incognito and waited for Ted and the dog. He appeared at nine sharp, as his fiancée had predicted.
The dog was an unprepossessing black Lab. His owner was tall and fit and clean-shaven, with thinning gray hair and an aquiline nose and a glint in his eyes indicative of purpose and commitment but not a whit of humor. His stride was brisk, his posture martial, his clothes—cords and sport shirt and windbreaker—casual but crisp, as if they’d never known a spot of sweat or suffered to the extent of a wrinkle. The man looked on the outing as a forced march and the dog was tugged back on track the minute he wandered toward shrubbery. The dog abandoned his ambitions sooner than he should have.
He was wrapped pretty tight, this Evans guy, tighter than I would have guessed for a good match with the Peggy Nettleton who had worked for me. But there are times when security and sobriety and dependability look a whole lot better than their opposites, and those times become frequent as your years sneak up on fifty. When Ted and his dog disappeared in the direction of the park, I got out of the car and stretched.
The house seemed even larger than before, the neighborhood even more elegant. Somewhere in the distance, the dog barked and was chastised. A car passed me at a crawl—a Mercedes
the size of Michigan. I got back in the car and closed the door.
Peggy had asked me to come see her, and I wanted to do her bidding, but right at that moment I couldn’t. Although part of me wanted to examine the fine lines of her life to see if they had anything in common with the one she had lived before, much more of me couldn’t bring myself to confront such a contrast to my station. What did I have that could eclipse the endowments of a guy like Ted? Why did I think Peggy was the kind of woman who could be on the brink of a vow to cherish him unto death, then run off with the first idiot who offered an option? What could I promise that she hadn’t already turned down?
When I got back to the motel, I called her office and left an apology on her voice mail. The voice mail didn’t seem mollified.
CHAPTER11
“If we’re going to do it, let’s do it,” she asserts with more bravado than she possesses.
“Let’s start with the basics. Where were you born?”
“West Seattle.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-four.”
“Brothers or sisters?”
“Brother; twenty-two.”
“What does he do?”
“He’s a … journalist.”
“You seemed to hesitate.”
“I almost made a snide remark but I changed my mind.”
“You and your brother don’t get along?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Ask him.”
“I’m asking you.”
“He thinks I’m spoiled and egotistic. I think he’s sadistic and unfeeling.”
“What does he think of your work?”
“I doubt that he’s ever seen it.”
“How about your parents?”
“What about them?”
“Are they alive?”
“In the biological sense.”
“You seem to have a lot of hostility toward your family, Ms. Evans.”
“That’s what families are for, aren’t they? If you don’t know that, you don’t watch enough daytime TV.”
“What problems has your family caused you?”
Flesh Wounds Page 9
