“Mommy and Daddy divorced when I was twelve. I spent the next three years living in the garage and smoking as much pot as I could find, which was quite a bit in those days. What else do you need to know?”
“How are those relationships now?”
“With my parents? What difference does it make?”
“Please answer the question.”
“My mom and I get along as long as we don’t talk about where I’ve been or where I’m going. My father and I got along until he brought some mother superior home for dinner and she took it as an invitation to move in.”
“That sounds a little Freudian.”
“It’s a lot Freudian. Which makes me part of a noble tradition of daughters who’ve been screwed by their daddies.”
“You don’t mean literally, I hope.”
“What difference does it make? Figuratively hurts just as much.”
As a consequence of my amative turmoil, I slept late: when I opened my eyes it was 9 A.M. Maybe it was the neutral surroundings, far removed from the city where I had collected animosities the way others collect painted plates. Or maybe it was because my relationship with Peggy had reached some sort of closure—she had gone to another man and was content with her choice; I was just here to cement her future. Or maybe the glimmer I’d gotten of Ted Evans’s oddly intimate involvement with his daughter allowed me to wonder if Peggy’s newfound love was flawed and I still had a chance with her. Whatever the reason, I’d slept the sleep of the sweet and didn’t regain my faculties until I’d downed three pancakes and four cups of coffee in the restaurant that adjoined the motel.
The first item on my agenda was to talk with Nina’s mother, to see if her daughter had been in touch of late, but my plans got changed in a hurry. When I got back from breakfast, two men were waiting in my room.
One was tall and slim and detached, one short and stocky and self-absorbed. The tall one had wispy brown hair that flew haphazardly about his head and a scar at the crest of an eyebrow. The short one had a pelt of black hair that was cut to the nub and a bit of a lisp when he talked. The tall one was Gary Cooper; the short one was Bob Hoskins. The tall one looked only at me; the short one was quickly seduced by his reflections in the motel mirrors.
“One of us has the wrong room,” I said to get it started.
“Are you Tanner?” the short one asked, as gruff as a nurse at a physical.
“Sure am. You must be the limo service.”
“Never mind who we are. What we want to know is who the fuck are you and what are you doing in Seattle?”
“I’m in a bit of a hurry. If you’ve got a questionnaire, I’ll fill it out later.”
The tall one pulled out a leather wallet and flipped it to reveal a shield. “I’m Detective Molson; that’s Detective Nudge. Seattle P.D. This is an official call.”
“Glad to hear it.” I looked at the open door. “I’d like to report a breaking and entering.”
“Who are you, Tanner?” Nudge demanded heavily. “Besides a guy with bad taste and a smart mouth?”
“That about covers it.”
“I mean what the fuck are you doing nosing around in Gary Richter’s business?”
“I was in the market for a passport photo.”
Nudge’s already dark face turned almost black and the muscles in his arms seemed to double in size. “Passport, my ass. Answer the fucking question.”
When I spoke I spoke to Molson. “My name is John Marshall Tanner. I’m a licensed private investigator from San Francisco. I’m here on business.”
“Yeah?” Nudge grumbled as Molson made no move toward comment. “What kind of business?”
“I’m looking for someone.”
“Who?”
“I won’t tell you that, but I will tell you it’s not Gary Richter.”
Nudge started to say something else but Molson held up a hand that stopped him. “We’ve been in two places in the last twelve hours—one last night and one this morning. The minute we start asking about Richter, we hear you beat us to it. We’d like to know why.”
I opted for modified limited candor. “I thought he might know the whereabouts of the person I’m looking for.”
“Did he?”
“I don’t know; I never caught up to him. If you find him first, tell him I’d still like to talk to him.”
My request didn’t make a dent. “What’s the connection between Richter and the guy you’re after?”
I answered Molson’s question with a question. “What’s happened to Richter?”
“What makes you think something happened to him?”
“Because all of a sudden this has the smell of a homicide.”
Nudge got back in the game. “Yeah? What kind of smell is that?”
I smiled. “Your cologne doesn’t come close to covering it up.” I looked at Molson. “Is Richter dead?”
The tall man made do with a brief nod. “They found him late last night.”
“Where?”
“That’s confidential at this point. Where were you between eight and midnight?”
I looked around the room, then remembered the mission to Capitol Hill. “Nowhere I can prove.”
Nudge barely muffled a chortle. “Let’s take him down to the building, Hal. Show him the facilities. Get some tips on interrogation techniques from the big bad boy from Frisco.”
Molson didn’t even look at him. “You the one who tossed Richter’s place?” he asked me.
I shook my head. “It was that way when I got there.”
“But you got inside?”
“No comment.”
“Take anything?”
“I know better than that.” The stone in my pocket was a sharply chiseled lie.
“Got any idea what they were looking for? Or who might have wanted rid of him?”
I had at least three ideas; two of them were named Evans and one was about to be. “I wasn’t looking for Richter except as a lead,” I said instead. “I’ve only been here a day and a half and I never laid eyes on the guy. If he was in the kind of fix that could get him killed, I didn’t know what it was.”
Nudge was crafting yet another pedestrian curse when the telephone rang. I looked at the cops. When they didn’t do anything to stop me, I picked it up.
“Marsh? It’s Peggy.”
“Hi.”
“Where were you last night?”
“I got tied up. I left a message at your office.”
“I thought I saw your car.”
“Must have been someone else.”
“Oh. Well, I still need to see you.”
“Good. Me, too.”
“Can we meet for lunch?”
“I think so. Where?”
“There’s a … you sound funny. Are you all right?”
“Fine and dandy.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yep.”
“I … Is there someone with you?”
“Yep.”
“Oh. Is it … are you in trouble?”
“Not at the moment.”
“Is it the police? Are you being questioned about something?”
“Yep.”
“Oh no. Has something happened to Nina? If it has, you have to tell me.”
“Nothing like that. Not that I know of.”
“Thank God. Well. I guess we should wait till later to talk. Are you sure you can make lunch?”
“I’m not sure but I’ll try.”
“There’s a Greek restaurant at University and Forty-seventh. Costas. I’ll meet you there at twelve-thirty.”
“Okay.”
She paused. “If you don’t show, shall I assume you’ve been arrested?”
“It’s probably a good idea.”
“I’ll get a lawyer to stand by. Don’t do anything dumb on my account. Please, Marsh?”
I told her I wouldn’t and hung up. Molson was smiling when I looked at him.
“Client?”
“Friend.”
“Sounded female.”
“Was female.”
“You move fast in a day and a half.”
“Friend from the old days.”
Molson nodded. “They’re the best kind.”
“Let’s take him down to Third Avenue, Hal,” Nudge said again in the midst of the sociology. “He’s dancing us around, making us look like jerks.”
Molson kept his eyes on mine. “You’ve got no privilege in this state,” he said to me.
“Not in any state, that I know of.”
“I could get you in front of a grand jury and give you immunity and make you talk or do time for contempt.”
“Yeah, but it would take you a month to do it.”
He shook his head once. “I’ve done it in less than a week. In the meantime, we could jam you up pretty good.”
“No question.”
“But we still wouldn’t have what we want.”
“Nope.”
“So why don’t we make it easy on both of us?”
I smiled. “I’m listening.”
“How long you been a PI?”
“Fifteen years.”
“You must know some guys on the force down there.”
“My best friend is Detective Lieutenant Charles Sleet. You can reach him at the Central Station, but have him call you back, don’t let them put you on hold.”
“Why not?”
“He doesn’t spend much time at his desk.”
“He’ll vouch for you? This Sleet?”
“He will if he knows it’s serious. If he doesn’t, he’ll claim I’m a louse and a deadbeat.”
“Why would he do that?”
“We play cards. I usually owe him money. I usually also owe him a favor. Sometimes I don’t pay debts in a timely fashion.”
Molson thought it over while Nudge seethed and glowered when he wasn’t preening and flexing at the mirror, doing amazing things with his neck.
“Here’s the deal,” Molson said finally. “If you check out with Frisco, we’ll leave you be unless you’re in deeper than it looks. In return, two things. One, you come across anything about who might have had it in for Richter, you give it to us.”
I nodded. “What’s number two?”
“You tell me, right now, without names, what kind of job you’re on.”
I decided I owed him that much. “I’m looking for a woman who’s on the run from her family. No evidence of foul play, probably a runaway, but they want her back. Or at least to know where she is and that she’s all right.”
“And the connection with Richter?”
“You look around in his place?”
He nodded. “Nice stuff, Some of it. Some of it not so nice.”
“The woman I’m looking for used to pose for him.”
“Shit,” Nudge swore. “Woman’d do that’s nothing but a whore. Folks ought to leave her be—good riddance to bad rubbish.” He looked at his partner and pleaded. “Let’s take him down, Hal. Come on. He’s a major asshole.”
Molson’s smile was as lazy as Louisiana. “That’s okay, Burt. So are we.”
CHAPTER 12
“Is that it?”
“No. Now we get into abstractions.”
“Like what?”
“Like, first of all, why do you do what you do?”
“You mean for a living or in general?”
“For a living.”
“You’re serious, I suppose.”
“You may be assured that everything I do is serious.”
“You need to lighten up, you know that?”
“I lighten up on my own time, not Mr. Lattimore’s.”
“Whoops.”
“As you say.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone.”
“Thank you.”
“So who is this Lattimore guy? The name’s familiar, but I don’t—”
“You have no need for that information at this time. And you should certainly not take anything I’ve said to suggest that Mr. Lattimore has anything whatsoever to do with—”
“Computers, right? He’s that computer guy.”
“As I said, you have no reason to suppose Mr. Lattimore has anything to do with why we’re here. Now. What is your answer? Why do you do what you do?”
“I do what I do because I like it. And respect it. And because I’m goddamned good at it.”
“Have you ever posed for sex magazines?”
“No.”
“Ever been a stripper or a prostitute?”
“No. Not that I think there’s anything immoral about those activities. Not that I wouldn’t do them if that’s what it took to eat, for example. Or to buy ballet tickets.”
“Have you ever had sex for money?”
“Not unless Caesar salad has become coin of the realm.”
“You take off your clothes for a living. Your business is allowing people to make images of your body and sell them.”
“That’s one way to put it. A Puritan way, for example.”
“You don’t regard such conduct as immoral?”
“I regard it as exquisite.”
“You don’t find it embarrassing?”
“I found it embarrassing for ten seconds the first time I got naked in front of a Leica. After I heard the shutter start clicking, I wasn’t nervous, I was ecstatic. And then I got on with the job.”
“And what is the job, exactly?”
“To give the guy behind the camera what he wants. No. To give the guy behind the camera more than he wants. My job is to make him better than he is, sort of like I did with you twenty minutes ago.”
“How do you mean, better?”
“Someone like you starts a shoot with a vision. A theme. Something you’re trying to say with light and color and line and shadow. By the time you’re done, if you’re working with me, that is, you realize that your vision was far too narrow, your theme too mundane, your goal too unexceptional. I take you places you’ve never been; I make it impossible for you to be ordinary: I submit to the process more completely than anyone you’ve ever worked with. I become your equal as an artist, and together we create things that have never existed before.”
“Really?”
“Really. Of course the ultimate beneficiary is the consumer of the product. Hear that, Mr. Lattimore?”
“Please don’t make further mention of that name. Who is that consumer likely to be, by the way? What audience do you want to see your work? Who do you want to own it?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Surely that’s not true. Surely you want people of intelligence and sophistication to—”
“Anyone can appreciate what I do. Anyone can be excited by it, awed by it, changed by it. As far as ownership goes, they don’t own me. No one owns me. They just own what I did, what I was, what I wanted to be on such and such a date and time and instant. The moment the camera is put away, that date and time are history. The next time I’m someone else.”
“So you’re never really you when you’re working?”
“I’m always really me. But I’m never really me for longer than one five-hundredth of a second.”
On the way to lunch, I drove past Richter’s apartment to see if there was any police activity I could kibitz with, but if there was anything official happening I couldn’t see it from the street. I did see the guy who had squealed on me, though. He was sweeping the veranda in front of his place and looking as furtive as a peeping Tom. When he saw me watching from the curb, he dropped his broom and scurried inside, doubtlessly to cry wolf again.
Peggy was waiting at the restaurant when I got there. She wore a dark blue suit and an expression that was barely tamed. Her eyes were too bulbous, her hands too flighty—I hadn’t seen her that apprehensive since the creep down the hall was toying with her over the telephone.
The restaurant’s attire was far less kinetic—posters of Greece and cans of olive oil. “You weren’t arrested, were you?” Peggy asked as I sat across the table from her.
“Nope, th
anks to a decent cop named Molson. If his partner’d had his way, I’d be lying my guts out in an interrogation room.”
“Lying about what? Why are they after you?”
The waitress floated over as I was about to ease my way into an answer. Peggy ordered the Greek salad and a cappuccino. I ordered a gyro sandwich and plain coffee.
“Do you know how Nina is earning her living these days?” I asked when the waitress was back in the kitchen.
Peggy hesitated. “I’m not sure.”
“She’s a model. She poses for photographs. Nude photographs.”
Peggy closed her eyes. “Are you saying she’s some sort of porn queen?”
“No,” I said quickly. “I haven’t seen any sign of that at this point, although I’ll need to check it out if she doesn’t turn up. What Nina was about was art. Her friends say she was serious about it.”
Peggy shrugged to show her unconcern. “Nina was a nude model. So what? It’s not illegal, is it? What does that have to do with the police coming to question you? And how did they know who you were in the first place?”
“Nina was doing some work with a photographer named Gary Richter. Ever hear of him?”
Peggy shook her head.
“This Richter guy was legitimate—showed stuff in good galleries, taught at a photography school, even made a living at it. He wasn’t sleaze, at least not entirely.”
“But what does he have to do with the police?”
I waited till a customer moved out of earshot. “Gary Richter was found dead last night. Murdered, apparently.”
“My God.” Peggy’s hand flew to her mouth and her eyes exploded like popcorn. “What made the police think you knew anything about it?”
“I went looking for Richter yesterday, as a way to get a line on Nina. I talked to his next-door neighbor and I talked to the people at the photography school and I left the motel card with them so they could let me know if Richter showed up. The cops talked to the same people after the body was found. They wanted to know why I was hunting for the guy, naturally enough, and thanks to the cards they knew where to go for the answers.”
Peggy leaned toward me and grasped my hand. “What did you tell them?”
I met her look with difficulty. “I told them I was looking for a missing person and I thought Richter might have some information I could use.”
Peggy released my hand and slumped back in her chair. “So you told them about us.” Her voice was as flat as the table; the pronoun she employed didn’t encompass me.
Flesh Wounds Page 10
