Rainy City

by Earl Emerson

  “Seattle?”

  “Tacoma. Said she was calling from someplace in Tacoma. Why she’d be clean down there, I have no notion. Course, what do I know? I’m just old aunty Mary. I don’t rate much more than a nickel card every other year when they can afford one.”

  “She tell you why she wanted to stay with you?”

  “Just that something from her childhood was bothering her.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “Melissa isn’t much of a conversationalist. I had the feeling somebody was waiting on her, the way she tried to rush-rush everything along. Said she’d bring Angel along. Asked would it be all right if they stayed a few days. I said it would. Even stocked some butter brickle ice cream for her. That was always her favorite when she was a little tyke. Used to come up and spend a week with me every summer. That was back when Harry was still alive…”

  “Harry, your husband?”

  “Nah. Although we were going to get married. He was Angus’s business partner, the brains of the company. Things were swell in those days. Me and Harry. And Melissa coming up every summer.” The old woman’s voice grew sorrowful and her mind seemed to retreat to another dimension.

  “

  till she got older,” she said, snapping out of it, completing a sentence I hadn’t heard the first half of. It’s still okay. You locate her, you tell her she can stay with her old aunty anytime she wants. Can bring her baby, too. I’m not anxious to have that piker husband of hers here, though.”

  “They tell me he’s quite the poet.”

  “You listen to that claptrap? Poetry won’t put that baby into shoes.”

  “I understand Melissa spent most of a summer up here while she was in high school. If she was in the habit of spending -one week up here each season, why did she suddenly come up and stay most of the summer?”

  “Who told you that?” she asked.

  “Burton.”

  “Did Burton tell you why she spent the summer up here, Mr. Black?”

  “I was hoping you would.”

  She glowered at me. She tapped the ends of her gnarled fingers together. It was apparent that I had wormed as much out of this old gal as she wanted me to worm.

  I took a deep breath, rubbed a knuckle into my eye and said, “Angus Crowell is your older brother?” I was fishing.

  She snapped up the bait. “Born ten years before I was. He left home for the Navy when I was nine.”

  “And you don’t get along.” “Never have. Don’t make no bones about it. He’s not my kind of people. Neither is that wife of his,” she stated, bluntly.

  “In what way?”

  “In every way. He was a mean kid and he turned into a shrewd, crafty adult. I don’t like them kind. Used to torture little animals when we were children. Set fire to more than one cat in the neighborhood. Had a dog once almost walk away with his hand. Whatever Angus was up to, you can be sure that pooch had good cause.”

  “Angus took his granddaughter today. Took her by force. Kidnapped her, actually.”

  Mary Dawn Crowell had a tendency to tip forward when she spoke. This time she almost tumbled out of her chair. “Angel? Melissa let her father take Angel? I don’t believe you.”

  “Melissa didn’t have anything to do with it. She’s still off somewhere. Angus took the baby from his son-in-law.”

  “I’ll bet he just handed her over, too! That spineless

  ”

  “Now, it wasn’t Burton’s fault. Your brother brought friends along. They overpowered him.”

  She tried to settle herself down. She was like a nervous chicken -after the hound has been shooed out of the coop. “Melissa loves that child. I know that for a fact.”

  “I’m sure she does. Help me find her and we’ll get the baby back.”

  Mary Dawn Crowell squirmed in her seat, crossed and uncrossed the bones she called legs and nibbled on her thin upper lip, sucking it into her mouth like a kid playing contortionist games. Finally she came to a decision.

  “In her senior year of high school, Melissa came up here to have a baby. She was three months pregnant. While she was here, she miscarried. I dunno, maybe it was the best thing. In September of that year, she enrolled at the University of Washington. She was a torn-up girl, Mr. Black. Something was awfully wrong in her life.”

  It was obvious from her teary eyes that she harbored a warm feeling for her niece, that she had mothered her and thought about her often.

  “Do you know who the baby’s father was?”

  “Nary a hint.”

  “Burton?”

  “Phooey. That was long before she met that stumble-bum. Matter of fact, I don’t think she saw a lot of boys in her high school years.”

  “Know who the father was?”

  “Nope. Melissa wasn’t going to talk about it. She was so depressed and weepy that summer, I didn’t dare broach the subject. Never had occasion to bring it up since.”

  “Why did she come up here? To you?”

  “What are you getting at, Mr. Black?”

  “Her parents are wealthy. I gather they could have sent her almost anywhere in the world. To a doctor in Sweden. A Swiss sanitarium. Anywhere.”

  Mary Crowell pursed her lips until her whole face was nothing but crow’s-feet centering on her mouth. “Like a lot of other well-to-do people, Angus is a tin-plated cheapskate. Besides, Angus has developed an unbelievably strict code … of behavior, not ‘just for himself so much, as for other people. Melissa was on the wrong side of that code. He was on the point of disowning her.”

  “What caused the rift between her and her father?”

  “Morals. It’s all morals. Melissa was a sixties baby. Angus is rooted in a past that we’ll none of us ever see again. That’s all. It’s the old story. Every generation gets tangled up in the same dilemma. I remember one of my girl friends ran off and became a flapper years ago. Her papa and brothers wanted to shoot her. Same thing.”

  Fooling with something inside her mouth, her tongue pushing around some unknown object, possibly dentures, Mary said, “Melissa is one of those girls who’s so at odds with her folks that she lives her life with only one object in mind—to irritate them. Oh, she doesn’t perceive her life that Way, but that’s precisely what she does.

  “And the funny thing is, if you met Melissa, after a few minutes you wouldn’t believe any of this. She’s so quiet and shy and well-mannered. But there’s an avenging angel buried somewhere deep inside, Mr. Black, trying to seize repayment for all those years of strife with her mother and father.”

  “She ever run away from home as a teenager?”

  “Not that I know of. That wasn’t her way. She was more adroit than that.”

  “How so?”

  “She associated with the lower elements. Almost married a biker once. You know, one of those greasy chaps in leather pants on a Harvey Jonathon?”

  “Harley Davidson.”

  “Whatever. I don’t know how he did it, but Angus put the kibosh on that one.”

  “It wasn’t anybody she still might be seeing?”

  “Melissa is a married woman.”

  “Married women have been known to step out.”

  “I don’t think so. One rumor had it that Angus paid him a small fortune to go off and join the Army. Some members of the family told me he broke his neck in a helicopter accident shortly thereafter. I don’t know if that’s true or not.”

  “How old was Melissa when that happened?”

  “Must have been a little past twenty.”

  “For two people who don’t get along worth beans, their lives seem to stay intertwined.”

  “Kids are that way. Sometimes it seems like the more trouble a kid has with her folks the more ties she has to them,” said Mary Dawn, gazing out the window at the rainy night.

  “Miss Crowell?”

  Slowly she came out of her rain-induced trance. “Call me Mary.”

  “Why don’t you see your brother and urge him to give Angel back? Won’t he listen to yo
u?”

  “Angus listen to me? Hmph.”

  I had the distinct feeling the old woman had skipped something in her tale, something vital. Mary was a raconteur, but she had been stifled by something I had said. Something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. As a youth, her brother had tortured little animals. I wondered what sorts of games he had played at with little sisters.

  It drizzled most of the way back to Seattle. I got stalled in a hazy mist in the U District. Forty-fifth was jammed with glowing brake lights, weary students in idling cars returning to the university after a weekend at home trying to finagle mom into doing the laundry.

  He came out quickly when I pulled into the driveway, a pair of long, dark legs racing through my headlights. He sprinted across my backyard and vaulted over the tall back fence.

  It was a man’s stride. A tall, athletic man. I was sleepy and bushed. I had two choices. I could chase him without knowing what he had done, if anything, and without knowing whether he was armed. Or I could venture inside to see what he had been dallying at, if he’d even been inside. Perhaps I’d merely startled a casual prowler. I let him flee.

  The back door stood wide open to the misty night.

  In the living room, I found a picture hanging crookedly on one wall, slash marks across the face of it. He had been inside. He had begun ransacking the upstairs but hadn’t completed the chore. The picture was ruined. Muddy, indistinguishable footprints were tracked across the kitchen linoleum. The door to the basement was partially open.

  “Sweet Jesus, no,” I said. “Kathy

  ” ?

  Chapter Six

  I WAS NOT CONSCIOUS OF MOVING, BUT SUDDENLY I WAS downstairs in Kathy’s apartment.

  Furniture was smashed and splintered, phonograph records cascaded across the floor, the contents of a closet were dumped helter-skelter into the center of the room. Something thumped heavily in my throat.

  For some oddball reason all four burner units on her electric range were switched on, glowing orange-hot and smelling menacingly of electricity. Picking my way through the flotsam, I clicked off the burners. Had the intruder been trying to set the house on fire?

  It would take a solid week to clean up this hodgepodge. Her stereo and both speakers had been smashed to bits. Textbooks and school papers were strewn across the living room. But where was Kathy?

  I booted the heaps of clothing in the center of the room, testing. No bodies. I searched the empty closet. Only a few shoes remained. There was only one other spot, the tiny bathroom.

  She looked like something on the cover of True Detective. He had tied her hands over her head, tied them to the shower rod and gagged her. She wore leotards and that skin tight body suit dancers use. The suit was torn.

  “Kathy?”

  She moaned. Her eyes opened. They were frightened pools of violet. She was alive.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “He took off across the back fence.”

  She slumped forward like a swimmer finishing a race.

  Untying her gag, I reached into the medicine cabinet and found a razor blade which I used to slash the knots at her wrists. She had been tied with her own nylons. Her arms didn’t come down, so much as they fell, flopped to her sides as if she’d been in that position longer than she could tolerate. After the first few moments of freedom, of shrugging and shaking to work the circulation back into her shoulders, she reached up limply to adjust the rips in her body suit. Clumsy hands had mutilated the suit in several strategic places.

  I had to admit she was a cool one. I would have to add that to the list of her traits that I admired. Cool under fire.

  She cleared her throat and spoke softly, too softly.

  She spoke to me exactly the way she imagined an ex-cop wanted to be spoken to under these circumstances. “He had brown eyes. He wore a ski mask, so that was all I could see. He was tall, dressed all in black. A black turtleneck and black slacks. Not jeans, but slacks. He hit his head on the top of that doorway. He hit it hard. That’s when he spoke. And it was the only thing he said.”

  Stepping into the doorway, I straightened my spine. My head just brushed the top. I was six-one.

  “What did he say?” I asked.

  “’Muthefucka.’ Just like that. `Muthefucka.’ I kept asking him what he wanted, but he wouldn’t answer. He seemed to know exactly what he was doing.”

  “How long was he here?”

  “It seemed like forever. What time is it?”

  I glanced at my wrist watch. “Five to seven.”

  “I started my exercise routine at six forty-five. I was almost six minutes into it when I heard something upstairs. Gosh, I guess he was only here three or four minutes. It seemed like about a lifetime.”

  “It would.”

  “At first I thought it was you up there,” Kathy said, softly. “Then there was this banging. It didn’t sound quite right. And I didn’t hear your truck. So I went up. I shouldn’t have. He spotted me right away. I made a beeline for the basement door. I thought if I could lock it, I might be able to dive downstairs and get out the side door. But I didn’t even get it locked. He grabbed me by the hair on the stairs, tied me up and

  oh, my God.” Kathy had just stepped out of the bathroom to catch her first glimpse of the havoc.

  “Looks like a giant egg beater ran amok,” I said. The cops who came to investigate and take our report were women. I didn’t recognize either of them. They were sympathetic and sharp. Afterwards, as they went out the front door, one of them spoke with empathy to Kathy. “Do you have a place to stay tonight?”

  Kathy tilted her head up at me with only the glimmer of a smile and said, “I think so.”

  While the spaghetti sauce simmered, she trudged downstairs, changed her clothes, and tried to straighten up her apartment. It was funny. She had this prescience or ESP or whatever. She could see someone else’s misfortune coming but not her own. I hadn’t told Kathy about the business of the burner’s. Nor had I told the cops. I’d seen no point. One could only speculate on the reason, and speculation of that sort wasn’t going to help Kathy sleep at night.

  Working cops were hardened, caustic and suspicious by nature. Elaborate theories eluded their easy grasp. If they believed me about the burners they would attribute it to something innocuous. People did not go around torturing other people. Not in Seattle. As a matter of fact, they had already chalked the whole incident up to a simple interrupted burglary. Maybe they were right. Maybe that’s all there was to it.

  First my dog. Then my house. But Kathy had interrupted him. The brute hadn’t even been aware there was an apartment in the basement. Most people weren’t. But instead of dispensing with her and going back to work on my place, which he could have easily done, he had set out to systematically decimate her apartment, too.

  Late in the evening I was thinking pretty hard, visualizing those four glowing burners I’d seen on Kathy’s electric range. A burner could manufacture a nasty burn. A mere touch would do it If someone big and strong were to take a body part, someone else’s body part, and force it down and hold it there, the pain would be excruciating. The injuries would be permanent, physically and mentally. Of course, it might have been intended merely as a threat, a scare tactic. Or maybe my imagination was running hog-wild. Maybe he was planning to cook four soups before he left.

  “Why so glum?” said Kathy.

  “Just thinking.”

  “Don’t hurt yourself.”

  “It was lucky I got home when I did.”

  “Thomas?” -

  “Yeah.”

  “Is that a gun in your belt?”

  I hoisted up my shirt tail so she could see the handle of a .45 automatic I had dug out of its hiding place. Normally, I kept all my guns concealed inside a secret’ compartment in a wall. I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d burrowed into the cache and loaded one.

  “I thought you didn’t use guns anymore. I thought you had sworn them off.”

  There was no reply to that. I wa
sn’t sure I could use the automatic. I wasn’t even certain that I would remember the weapon in an emergency. Four years ago, I had been mustered out of the police department largely because of my antipathy toward guns. The official pension hearing had blamed it on a bum knee, but everyone knew my days as a gun toter were finished. Once, I had been as gung ho as the next rookie. I had been ranked third in the city in combat-style shooting, had practiced religiously twice a week.

  When those baddies drew on me I was going to put dimes in their eyes. And then one day a baddie did draw on me.

  He took a stolen Volvo and tried to crush me against the wall of a downtown alley with it. Geez, I was good. I nailed him in the kisser. The bullet puckered the windshield and blasted bits of glass and shredded lead into his face, wreaking incredible damage. He was fifteen.

  Had he died instantly, I might not have felt it so keenly. But he didn’t die instantly. He talked to me before he died. He said he was sorry. While the medic unit wailed in the distance, he wept through the blood and the glass and bits of face and told me to apologize to his mother for him: a promise I never kept, was incapable of keeping. And then he had the audacity to linger on through a seven-hour operation at Harborview, passing on only when the entire family had gathered in the hallway to confront me with their big brown, matching brother-sister-father-mother eyes.

  I was exonerated. My partner and two civilians in an apartment building had all witnessed him trying to run me down. I was exonerated, but I was not guiltless. I replayed that ten-second episode a thousand times a day, calculating dozens of ways I could have stopped him without resorting to murder.

  It was said that a lot of cops required counseling after a shooting. I had never reckoned myself as a candidate for a post-shooting counseling session and I shunned it. I told myself these feelings would pass in time. But they did not; they became more acute, more troublesome.

  After a while, I stopped carrying the mandatory hideout gun off-duty, but still I steered clear of the police psychologist. Then one day, on duty, I was forced to draw my pistol on a wife-beater.

  It was a messy business to begin with, but it became messier when my gun arm began wagging and he could see that I was scared. And I was. Not of him. But of shooting him. I didn’t ever want to shoot another human again.