by Earl Emerson
He gave me an acerbic look, one he saved for gas jockeys and other miscreants, and said, pointedly, “I was under the impression you worked for the Seattle Police Department.”
“I worked for the police department for ten years. Im private now.”
He pursed his lips and waved the pipe like a pointer. “Then I assume you have some sort of license.”
“I had a photostat. Helen Gunther shredded it yesterday.”
“Ohhh.” He said it as if he were trying to make a sound on a piccolo.
“You want a connection between the two murders?” I asked. “The connection is this: a young woman is missing. I was enlisted to find her. The young woman was being treated by Helen Gunther. Coincidentally, she happened to be the niece of Mary Crowell.”
“The niece? Courtland brooded over that for a moment, fondling first his pipe bowl and then his whiskers, his fingers lingering as if stroking a kitten.
Does that mean anything to you, Dr. Courtland?”
“The newspapers led me to believe Helen’s death was some sort of random sex killing.”
“That’s always a possibility. Or it’s also possible some lunatic connected to my missing persons case is running around bumping off anybody who might be able to tell me something.”
His leg began swinging wildly. “Are you suggesting I might be next?”
“I wouldn’t know. I keep trying to get closer but nobody will talk. It seems more convenient to get murdered than to talk.”
I got up to leave. His leg pendulumed crazily and I could tell from the way his teeth gnashed the pipe stem that his brain was blazing away in overdrive.
“That sounds like a threat.”
“No threat. It’s just the way things have been.”
“Just a minute. Mr. Black? What is it exactly that you need to know? Mary’s dead now. She had no immediate family. I suppose I can operate under the assumption it would do little if any harm if some of her background came out. After all, this is a rather special circumstance.”
“Why was she seeing you?”
Some of the anxiety drained from his tense limbs, but his face was as stiff as a turkey in a freezer. Now Elliot Courtland had the opportunity to submerge himself in his own element. He petted the pipe bowl and puffed and mulled over the question.
“Why was she seeing me?’ he asked, buying time to compose a sufficiently sophisticated reply.
“Yeah.”
“Mary had a whole host of problems. She’d been visiting my office for almost ten years. If you wanted to get to the crux of the matter, you’d have to go back to her childhood.”
“Go on.” I had an eerie feeling that I already knew what he was going to say.
“Her father committed suicide.” “That’s what I understood.”
“She was raised by another family from the age of eight, and it was only there that her conscious memory began. Though she never lost her curiosity about it, nobody would tell her anything concrete about her father’s death. About three years ago, she went through some papers left by the family who had taken her in.
“That was when the truth came out. It seemed one of her brothers had had a serious run-in with her father. At the time of her father’s demise, the authorities suspected foul play.”
“You mean her father may not have committed suicide, he may have been murdered?”
“Nothing ever came of it. It haunted Mary. She began making some rather feebleminded connections between her father’s death and her fiancé’s suicide several years ago.”
Which brother had the run-in with the father?”
“I was never concerned with that. Don’t you see? For my purposes, it clearly made no difference.”
“I was wondering if it could have been the father of the niece I was looking for?”
“I have no idea.”
“Supposing it was,” I said. “Just for the sake of discussion. Supposing a murder had been committed fifty some odd years ago. And supposing one of her brothers did do it. Is a thing like that likely to come out later in life? Or do you believe it was just something an immature kid might get caught up in?”
“You mean, might we expect this person to commit other murders? Or to be capable of committing other murders?”
Yeah.
Courtland lapsed into his actpuffing, producing the small noises a baby makes sucking on his foot, squinting, his eyes wandering to the ceiling, finally alighting on an ornamental fig tree in the corner.
“A boy in his teens or late teens who displays a predisposition toward this pattern of behavior is apt to maintain the predisposition throughout lifethat is, unless he is treated for it. Mind you, nothing was ever proved. We have only Mary’s conjectures. I wouldn’t even mention it except for the fact that other…murders have been committed.”
“Why did the authorities feel there had been foul play?”
“I couldn’t tell you. We never delved that deeply into the contents of the letter. I was more interested in Mary’s reactions than in what caused them.”
“Are you saying one of Mary’s brothers may have murdered their father and you didn’t care who it was?”
“I suppose I am. Yes.”
“And Mary never told you who the brother was?”
“She told me several times, though not recently. It’s merely that I paid little attention.”
“Do you keep tapes of your conversations, doctor?”
“I don’t operate that way.”
“Did he live around here? In town?”
“I really couldn’t tell you.”
“What did this all mean to Mary?”
“In general, a person’s problems are not linked to any one event in their lives, but to an entire pattern of events and thinking. Mary was withdrawn, asocial. She found it extremely difficult to form any attachment to persons of the opposite sex. In layman’s terms, she thought very little of herself.”
“An inferiority complex?”
“That is an overworked phrase, but in this instance, it fits rather remarkably well. She had other problems as well. As I said before, she entertained the odd notion that somehow her father’s suicide was related to her fiancé’s death.”
“And what do you know about his death? Her fiance?”
“I believe that, too, was a suicide. Yes, I recall now. He jumped off the Aurora Bridge. They never found the body. He just left some clothes and a typewritten note back at his office. That was one of the elements that disturbed Mary. The typewritten note. She claimed her fiancé didn’t type. And the note wasn’t signed.”
“Had Mary or you ever discussed the possibility of her acting on her suspicions?”
Mary constantly harped about her sneaky brother. That’s what she invariably called him. Her sneaky brother. It’s one of the reasons I cannot recall his name.
She very keenly felt he was solely responsible for the death of her fiancé.”
“He wouldn’t be some bird named Harry, would he? Her fiancé?”
“As a matter of fact, I believe Harry was his name. That was when she first began seeing a professional counselor.”
“So it was a number of years ago? When her fiancé died?”
“I believe so.”
“Do you know how many?”
“Not sure. Twenty, maybe. Yes. It must be about twenty.”
Twenty years ago, Melissa had been three or four, the same age her daughter was now. I contemplated Melissa’s life. For years, she had been sinking into an emotional and psychological bog. I wondered if her problems might not have issued from the same source Mary Dawn’s had, if she might not have been living a rerun of her Aunt Mary’s life. If that were true, Angel might be sinking into the same morass. For some reason, I found it all very hard to accept. I had to be on the wrong track. ?
Chapter Twenty-two
IT BEGAN RAINING ON THE WAY BACK TO MY PLACE. THE Miyata threw up tall sprays of water from its fenderless wheels. I was soaked to the skin by the time I whee
led the bicycle through the back door.
Kathy was loitering in my kitchen. She had been hypnotically rearranging my spice rack.
“Where have you been?” Kathy blurted. “Your truck was here but you were gone.”
“I thought I told you to leave that rack alone.”
“Some awful woman was here when I came back. She was poured into this yucky pantsuit. She had these little tiny buggy eyes and I think her face was coated with some sort of Teflon.”
“Have you heard from Melissa?”
“Who was the woman?”
“You haven’t heard from Melissa?”
“I was just going to ask if you had.”
“Nothing. I’m heading for Tacoma after I make a few calls.”
“Why? What have you found out?”
“Things. I understand Burton got sprung from jail. I’ll call Bellingham in a minute and get the scoop.”
“You think Melissa went back to that crummy pimp?”
“Yes, I think she did.” “But why would a girl like Melissa go back to him?”
“Why would a girl like Melissa be with him in the first place?”
Kathy shrugged and frowned. I had a -point, and it caused us both to stop and think. I picked up the phone and dialed Smithers. He snapped it up on the third ring. Since his marriage had disintegrated, he answered the phone a lot quicker.
“Smitty? Thomas here. I’ve got a name for the boys downtown. He’s flirting at being a small-time procurer in Tacoma. Somebody told me he was a biker years ago in the Seattle area.”
“Sure thing, Thomas. You got any club colors or anything?”
“He might have been with the Skeletons.”
“A bad crowd. Not many of them left. What’s his name?”
“Romano Bledsoe. If nothing comes out, you might try those two names in combination with Solomon. He uses Solomon as an alias.”
“I’ll call you right back.”
I carried a change of dry clothes into the bathroom and locked the door in Kathy’s face. Disgruntled, she stood outside and spoke through it.
“Who was that hoity-toity Teflon woman, Thomas?”
“A blind date.”
It was quiet outside the door. “You’re kidding.”
“I’m going out with her older sister next week.”
Silence reigned for a few long moments. “Very funny, Thomas.”
“She’s one of Melissa’s aunts. She and her husband flew up to make funeral arrangements for Mary Dawn.”
“Oh,” said Kathy.
“Her older sister’s supposed to be a whiz at racquet-ball.”
She ignored my jesting. “If they’re setting Burton free, they must have found the real killer, don’t you think?”
Rubbing my damp hair dry with a towel, I trudged into the living room, plopped into a chair and picked up the phone. “I don’t know. I’ll call Percy now and find out.”
“Thomas? I want you to promise me one thing.”
Placing the receiver back into the cradle, I said, “Sure.” Her tone had stopped me dead.
“Promise me that those things I told you about, my premonitions…promise me they won’t go any further than you. Promise me you won’t drag them out into the open.”
“You mean about the girl in the pit? The bones?”
“Precisely. I just don’t want everyone knowing about this psychic thing I have.”
“Why not?”
“It’s kind of embarrassing.”
Kathy chewed her lower lip when she got nervous and she was gnashing it now. “I promise.”
“Thank you.”
“By the way, I just came back from an interview with Mary Dawn’s psychiatrist.”
Kathy nodded somberly.
“I’ll fill you in later.”
I dialed the Bellingham police. I was connected to Detective Herman Percy almost immediately. He was cordial, more cordial than I had expected.
“You were right on the button,” he said. ‘We’ve got witnesses who place Nadisky leaving the building while the woman was still alive. One of the neighbors heard her open her door and let somebody in later. But nobody saw anything. Typical. And we’ve got the report on the fingerprints. They aren’t Nadisky’s. The only good thing about the case is the murder weapon. That bottle of ketchup takes a good print. We’ve got several good ones. Now if we could only find a suspect to match them to.”
“Crowell’s niece was seeing a psychologist by the name of Helen Gunther here in Seattle,” I said. “Somebody strangled her two days ago.”
The line went silent for ten seconds. “That’s the murder on Capitol Hill? What are you saying? You don’t think the two killings are coincidental? You think maybe this missing niece is running around knocking people off?”
“I couldn’t say. I thought I’d mention it. You might want to contact the boys on the Seattle case. Compare notes.”
“Thanks for the tip.”
“You might mention my name. I should have said something to them earlier but it slipped my mind.”
“I’ll bet.”
Smithers rang me as soon as I hung up. “Not a thing, Thomas. Must not be his real name. We tried every combination. Bledsoe. Solomon. Romano Chuck couldn’t put word-one on the screen downtown. If this cat’s got a record, it’s not in Seattle.”
“Thanks anyway, Smitty.”
I borrowed Kathy’s rattly ‘66 Volkswagen bug, tanked it up with Texaco’s finest and swung onto 1-5 south-bound. Tacoma was a forty-five-minute drive. Kathy was going back to campus to try to catch up on some of her studies, so I wasn’t anxious about her. On campus she was lost to the world. Holder might pop up again, but I would have to handle that when and if it occurred.
What worried me more than anything was Melissa. I wasn’t certain what her reaction would be to my second appearance. Last night, we had dragged her back to Seattle more because we caught her by surprise than anything else. Today might be a different matter. Today, she might put up a struggle. Today, she might sic Bledsoe on me. She might even holler for the cops.
Tacoma was cloudy and dingy, but the streets were dry. I double-parked and checked Braverman’s first. It was overstocked with weary businessmen from the lower echelons of the corporate ladder. Polyester suits and K-Mart ties, trousers baggy in the butts. I spotted no pimps and only two women who both looked like parttime hookers. I think they were housewives on a toot, though. Neither was blonde.
I drove down the hill and coasted into the alley behind The Last Inn. The buzzard was still perched behind the counter, leaning on both sharp elbows, perusing a dog-eared copy of the December 1961 Playboy. He slid his tongue into his cheek and tried to decide how much he was going to take me for this time.
“You again,” he said.
Flashing the photo of Melissa Nadisky, I said, “You see her today?”
“How much it worth to ya?”
You got any big friends?
He eased up off his bony elbows and spoke warily. “A couple. Why?”
“Bigger than me?”
“She’s upstairs. 301.” I headed for the staircase and the old coot added, “Her man friend is with her.” Considering what had recently transpired between us, he was more than generous with his information. I suppose he didn’t relish the idea of scrubbing blood out of the carpets. Maybe he was running low on Lysol.
Vintage thirty-year-old jazz oozed out of 301. I rapped on the door and waited. I rapped again.
Eventually a thickened voice slurred, “What you want?”
I couldn’t tell if it was Bledsoe. I tried the doorknob. The door swung open, the bottom edge rasping on the thick multiple layers of carpeting.
Bare legs crossed, Melissa hunkered in a corner, smoking hash from a long, slender, imitation corncob pipe. She wore a skimpy pair of black bikini briefs and nothing else.
Judging from the glazed look in her pale blue orbs, she had more than just hash racing through her veins. Romano Bledsoe squatted on the bed. He wore a
misshapen sleeveless tee shirt and white trousers that belonged to the suit Id seen him in yesterday. The suit jacket was slung over a chair, the elbows still discolored by coffee. His Pat Boone whites were lined up on the dresser as though his mother might have done it. I didn’t see his mother anywhere.
Bledsoe pawed through an assortment of fuzzy Polaroids spread across the sheet. The blankets and bed-spread had been ripped off the bed and flung against the wall. It only took a pinch of imagination to guess what had been transpiring.
“Get the hell out of here!” snarled Bledsoe.
I closed the door behind myself and spoke evenly. “Put your clothes on, Melissa.”
Dropping the pipe, she covered her breasts and looked at me, wide-eyedwide-eyed but not innocent. Smoldering particles of hashish splashed onto the carpet and glowed like cats’ eyes in the night.
Scuttling down the length of the bed on his knees, Bledsoe tumbled off the end and sprang toward me, a six-inch knife clutched in his fist.
The blade looked wicked and sharp, as if he honed it every hour on the hour. One of the Polaroids got sideswiped off the bed and landed next to his skinny, stockinged foot. It was a shadowy photo of Melissa having sex with a middle-aged fat man. The picture was made more than obscene by the fact that the fat man had doffed all of his clothes except his long black socks and his hat.
It wasn’t hard to figure
Distraught and confused, Melissa had run back to Bledsoe. Seizing upon his opportunity, the scumbag had doped her, gave her to the first wino he found sober enough to handle it and froze the whole nauseous affair on film. Now, she was his. If she wanted to leave, he could flash the photos around. If she got a job he could flash them in front of her boss. Her mother. Father. Even her kid. They would be a hell of a lever.
He came at me like a snake, weaving from side to side, the knife flicking from left to right. It was a steel tongue and I was a tidbit to sample.
“Out,” he whispered. “Out. Get the goddamn fucking hell out of here. This ain’t no goddamned business of yours. This is strictly private. The little lady and I are going into business fucking full-time and no smart-mouth like you can do a thing to stop it.”
