by Ford, G. M.
“That’s why I need a babysitter,” I said. “Whoever did this is either desperate, crazy, or both.”
“I saw in the Times where your girlfriend got suspended.”
“It’s bullshit,” I said.
He didn’t believe it but said nothing.
“Howsabout it?” I pressed.
“I might know somebody.”
“Right now she’s in Harborview. After that, probably at my place. I’m gonna need him till this thing is over.”
“They tell me you finally came into your old man’s pile.”
“Yup.”
“Gabe’s a thousand a day, plus expenses.”
“Done.”
“We’ll settle up afterward.”
“So Gabe will be here when?”
“What room?”
“Four oh eight.”
“An hour tops.”
“Thanks.”
“You need anything else, give me a jingle.”
I assured him I would.
Forty minutes, actually. Rebecca was still zonked out. I’d pulled the faux-leather chair over by the window and was gazing mindlessly out over the newly refurbished Yesler Terrace neighborhood when the door eased open.
Before I’d moved back into the family manse, I’d lived up on Capitol Hill for a decade or so. That’s where I discovered something about myself that I hadn’t known before. I’m a classifier. I look at something and just naturally begin to find a slot for it. Ugly car. Good-looking woman. Tough-looking dude. Runt. That sort of thing. Everything’s got a slot.
What I discovered was, when it came to people, my unconscious classification system began with gender. I found this out when a business in my neighborhood hired a person whose gender was a complete mystery to me.
As a result, I found myself at a loss. I’d go to another, longer, checkout line just so my brain didn’t have to deal with the accursed uncertainty. Not because I didn’t approve, but because my psyche didn’t have a plan in place to deal with somebody I couldn’t classify.
So when the door opened and Gabe stepped into the room, I sunk into full mouth-breather mode. Gabe was maybe five ten. Stocky. Within spitting distance of two hundred pounds. Old-fashioned crew cut. Carrying a black leather Gladstone bag. Walked like a man but looked like maybe it was a woman. My brain began singing that old Kinks song about Lola . . . L-O-L-A, Lola.
“You Gabe?”
“That’s me,” Gabe said.
“Joey fill you in?”
“Says there might be a couple hitters trying to take her out.”
“They damn near got it done . . . twice.”
“Not gonna happen while I’m here.”
Normally, I would have questioned his or her bona fides, but Gabe came from Joey Ortega, so I had no doubt he or she was up to the task.
I stood up, pulled one of my old business cards out of my wallet, wrote my cell number on the back, and handed it over.
“Call me when she wakes up.”
Gabe pocketed the card, walked around me, and sat down in the chair. I watched as he or she shed the coat, pulled out what looked like a GLOCK 9, slipped it between the fabric folds, and leaned back in the seat.
“You need anything before I go?” I asked.
“I’m good” was the answer. “I get hungry, I’ll order out.”
I stood in the doorway for an extra beat or two. Gabe leaned back into the chair and read my mind.
“Somethin’ you want to ask me?”
“No,” I lied.
Gabe smiled. “Does it matter?”
I thought about it. “No,” I said finally. “I guess not.”
“If you’re lookin’ for a pronoun, I prefer they.”
“They? Like plural?”
“It’s like Walt Whitman said: there are multitudes of me.”
I pulled open the door, stepped partway into the hall, and then looked back. “Sounds like you’ve got a tapeworm,” I said with a grin.
Nothing like getting back to your car and finding a ticket on the windshield. A hundred and fifty-nine bucks for leaving it in the fire lane. Matter of life and death, you say? They could give a rip. Just make damn sure we get paid. And promptly too. And if you want to pay over the Internet—you know, make it so no human being has to actually do anything—that’ll be an extra four bucks. Convenience charge, you know.
I was sitting there stewing over the infamy of it all when the phone began to ring. I pulled my cell out of my coat pocket, but it wasn’t lit. I pushed the button. Nada. I shook it. Nothing. Another ring. Still no light on the phone. And then it hit me.
I reached over, grabbed the bag of throwaways on the passenger seat, and dumped them out. Another two rings before I found one that was lit up. I got there just in time to hear the break in the connection.
I checked voicemail. It was Eagen with his Robby the Robot contraption.
“There’s five files they can’t find. Kevin Delaney, Terrence Poole, Willard Frost, Gilberto Duran, and Lamar Hudson. Gone with the fucking wind.” Click.
I wrote down what he’d said, then checked the mirrors, removed the SIM card from the phone, dropped it in my pocket, and got out of the car. I placed the phone behind the rear wheel, climbed in, and backed over it on my way out of the parking lot.
I pointed the car downhill, feathering the brakes all the way to Western Avenue, where I turned right and headed north toward Ballard and points beyond. What I needed now was everything I could get on Willard Frost. As luck would have it, I knew just how to make that happen.
Overhead, fluffy, white clouds marched across the sky like a ghostly train as I blew through Belltown and out onto Elliott Avenue, rolling past the steel-and-glass techno temples that lined the shores of Puget Sound these days.
Fifteen minutes later, I stepped out of the car. The wind had grown colder. I hunched my shoulders and stepped up onto Carl’s front porch.
A while back, a couple of goons had tried to hammer Carl’s head flat, so these days the place was buckled up like Fort Knox. Burglar bars covered every downstairs window, and you’d need a bulldozer to get through the steel front door.
I rang the bell and listened to the whir of the camera. Ten seconds later, the door buzzed, and I stepped inside. The place smelled like nobody’d opened a window in four or five years, which probably wasn’t too far from the truth.
Twenty years ago, Carl Cradduck had been a famous battlefield photographer. A real name. Coupla Pulitzer nominations, a regular in Time, Newsweek, Life. Five years in Vietnam without a scratch, and he kept rolling—right up until Bosnia, September 1993, when a hunk of shrapnel insisted he start doing his rolling in a chair. Which he did, with nary a bump, putting his photographic chops to use building a highly successful surveillance business. For going on twenty years, Carl and his guys handled all my peeper work.
The advent of no-fault divorce was even worse news for the surveillance industry than it was for the private eye trade, and Carl wanted no part of industrial espionage, so Cradduck Data Retrieval was born. Now he was a skip tracer par excellence—the scourge of fled felons, freeloaders, and deadbeat dads. If he couldn’t find you, you weren’t there.
He came rolling out of the kitchen in his mechanized wheelchair. Looked like he’d been wearing the same set of clothes since early in the Truman administration.
“Where the hell have you been?” he demanded.
“Arizona,” I said. “I was late to the fair.”
“What else is new?”
I told him the story as I knew it so far. Flowers and candy, UPS guys and gas, the break-in at my house, and somebody killing the wrong woman in intensive care. How the cops didn’t want to hear about it. Calling Joey. Gabe showing up. All of it.
His face took on a pained expression. “You sure about this?” he asked.
“About what?”
“About your girlfriend.”
I started to protest, but he cut me off. “I been following this thing with Rebecca in the p
apers. The DA’s makin’ a whole lotta noise about this thing. The kinda noise they only make when they’ve got a slam dunk. You know—regular case, they don’t want to give the defense anything they can use, so they clam up. But when they’ve got a sure thing, that’s when you see ’em on the news making hay for the next election. And that, my old buddy, is what I’m seeing now.” He showed his palms to the ceiling. “What if . . . ?”
“What if what?”
“What if she’s got something going on in her life that you don’t know a damn thing about?” he asked. “What if she really did all this shit they say she did?”
Somewhere in my brain, I could still hear Eagen telling me that prisons were full of people convicted of doing seriously out-of-character things. As far as I was concerned, Rebecca had always been the straightest, do-it-by-the-numbers person on the planet. But who knew? One of the great lessons of having worked as a private eye for twenty-some years was the revelation that you never know what’s going on behind closed doors. Only chumps imagine they do. And that you never know other human beings all the way down to the bottom of their souls, because we all hold something in reserve. Some atoll of secrecy to which we can retreat when the ocean of life goes rogue.
Rebecca and I had been apart for the better part of four years. That part of her life was a complete blank to me. She’d married some asshole yacht salesman drug runner who’d damned near gotten us both killed. Was there something hidden in those years? Something that hadn’t gone away but had, instead, lingered in the shadows of her life? The possibility depressed me.
I took a deep breath, shrugged the idea to the floor, and pulled my notebook from my pocket. “This whole thing with Rebecca got started when a guy named Kevin Delaney filed his umpteenth appeal of a murder conviction. Wanted independent testing of his forensic material. The Ninth Circuit Court said he had a right to have the material tested by an independent lab. When they went to get the file, it was gone, so they started checking. They found five files were missing. Kevin Delaney, Terrence Poole, Gilberto Duran, Willard Frost, and Lamar Hudson.”
Carl sat there for a few seconds deciding whether to let it go, then said, “And you want everything you can get on them.”
“For starts.”
“What else?”
“The DA’s office has been checking Rebecca’s work for the past few months or so. We need to know why these five guys. Do they have something in common? Are they known associates of one another? Have they done time together? That sort of thing.”
He waved a cautionary hand. “Whatever’s on public record, we can have a look at, but, like I’ve told you before, there’s no outright hacking these guys. They’ve got serious firewalls. So not only would it be a long process to get inside—weeks, at least, maybe months—but if anything goes wrong, we end up in Walla Walla with our pants around our ankles, which ain’t how I plan to spend my golden years. Capiche?”
He rolled over to the bank of monitors on the south wall and started pushing buttons. The screens came alive. I stood there with my mouth hanging open for about five minutes, watching the flashing screens like a monkey with a mobile.
I was rescued from my stupor by the buzzing of the doorbell. I checked the monitor above the kitchen door. It was Charity, with an armload of white plastic bags.
Charity was a local Jamaican guy who looked after Carl. Made sure he ate, called the maids, and got the place hoed out once in a while—that sort of thing. Once a day, he showed up with takeout, and the two of them chowed down on whatever he brought.
Carl buzzed him in. I watched as Charity elbowed the door open, ducked his shoulder into the crack, and slid inside. Proof positive that stereotypes are true at least some of the time, Charity moved from place to place as if a Bob Marley tune were playing somewhere in his brain at all times.
“Leo . . . my man,” he sang.
“What’s up?” I said.
He raised the bag. “Curried goat be up,” he said with a grin.
I tried to recall the last time I’d eaten. The only image I could readily bring to mind was of airline peanuts puked onto Rebecca’s toney Berber carpet.
“Got some jerk chicken, got some Geera pork and Aloo pie too,” Charity cooed as he slithered toward the kitchen. “You hungry, man?” he asked over his shoulder. “’Cause I got plenty. Sheere was gonna come, but she had to go help her mama wid something.”
“I’ll choke some down. Thanks.”
Charity swivel-hipped it straight for the kitchen, with Carl rolling along hard on his heels. I stopped on the way and took a leak. By the time I got to the kitchen table, they’d already fanned out paper plates, found some mismatched cutlery, and were at the swallowing stage of things.
I was so hungry I was halfway through my second jerk chicken leg before my mouth got hip to just how hot this shit was. Felt like another couple of degrees and my eyebrows would burst into flame.
“Why do you guys from hot countries always like spicy food?” I groused.
“Meat tends to spoil in hot countries,” Charity said between bites. “Spices got antimicrobial qualities.” He grinned. “Cover up the smell too.”
“Makes ya sweat,” Carl piped in. “Helps the body cool off.”
“If this shit cools you down, you should look for a fireman, ’cause your ass is on fire.”
By the time we finished, I was sweating like a racehorse, and my stomach had turned to ash. Everything from the roof of my mouth to the pit of my stomach felt like it must be glowing by now. I was barely being manly about my discomfort, when, out in the front room, the computers began chirping like gerbils. Carl wiped his mouth with his sleeve, rolled himself back from the table, and motored out of the room.
I helped Charity with the cleanup, gargled another glass of milk, and then wandered out toward the front of the house.
“Willard Frost. Homegrown, standard-issue scumbag,” Carl announced. He looked up at me. “You know in the movies, that moment when they find out the fresh-faced boy next door is really the serial killer and everybody shakes their bewildered heads and says”—he raised his voice two octaves—“‘But he was such a nice boy’?”
“Yeah.”
“Well . . . I’m bettin’ nobody ever said that about Willard Frost. Willard came out of the chute as a full-blown pain in the ass.” Carl lobbed a hand into the air. “This shit isn’t even interesting.” He pointed at the monitor on the right. “Breaking and entering. Burglary. Lewd and lascivious behavior. Receiving stolen goods. Theft of services. Grand theft auto. Assault two. Menacing. Stalking. Felonious assault . . . Pandering . . . Pandering . . . Pandering . . . It goes on and on. This son of a bitch has spent more time behind bars than he has on the street.”
He pointed up at one of the other screens. The photo was of a scowling Asian man. Spiked hair. Fierce macho snarl.
“Don’t look much like a Willard Frost,” I commented.
Carl pushed a few more computer keys. Two new figures appeared on the overhead screen. Nondescript, all-American couple in their fifties. Standing by a red Chevy crew-cab pickup. Smiling, arms around each other. BOEING emblazoned on the building in the background. The blue-collar American dream.
“Willard Senior and his wife, Bonnie,” Carl intoned. “Adopted Willard Junior when he was four. He’s either Cambodian or Laotian. The United Nations relief agency that assisted with the adoption couldn’t pin it down any closer than that.” He pointed again. “A sealed juvie file when he was eleven and another when he was fourteen. I’m betting they’re not for overzealous charity work.”
“They seal ’em, it’s usually got some sort of sexual element,” I offered.
Carl grunted and pushed some more buttons.
“He could have been the victim of abuse,” I hedged.
Carl sat back in his chair and folded his arms across his bony chest. “Yeah,” he said after a minute. “That’s a definite possibility.”
The printer began to hum. I ambled in that direction.
I reached down and pulled a handful of paper out of the printer tray. About the time I straightened up, my phone began to buzz down in the bottom of my pocket, creating a sensory experience considerably more user-friendly than the present situation called for.
I made a quick stab for the phone just as the wad of papers slipped from my grasp, spreading themselves over the carpet like refugees.
“Yeah?” I said into the phone.
“She’s awake,” Gabe growled. “She needs you to bring her some clothes.”
“Tell her I’m on the way,” I said, as I broke the connection and began raking the story of Willard Frost’s misspent life into a ragged pile.
Charity came bopping out of the kitchen. Carl waved goodbye with one hand and hammered the keyboard with the other.
“Bath tomorrow,” Charity said as he pulled open the front door.
Carl looked horrified. “Like hell,” he said. “I ain’t takin’ no bath.”
“Bath tomorrow,” Charity said again.
“You and whose fucking army?” Carl snarled.
“Gonna bring my cousin Tommy. Gonna scrub your moldy ass wid a stiff brush.”
“I’ll lock you the fuck out.”
“Got me a key . . . remember?”
When Carl didn’t respond, Charity turned my way. “Good to see ya, Leo.”
“You too,” I said as I tried to pat the porcupine of paperwork into some semblance of order. I turned to Carl. “I gotta go too,” I said.
Carl pointed at the unruly paperwork wedged in my armpit and smirked. “Take that pile of shit with you. I’ll keep at it on this end. I get anything worth a damn, I’ll give you a jingle, but I’m tellin’ you right from the get-go, before we start getting into this shit—I don’t see how a low-life bottom-feeder like Frost comes into this thing. Who’d be going to any trouble to spring him? What’s that little shit doing in the pile?”
As usual, Carl had a point. “Yeah,” I said. “I’m thinkin’ we better find out.”
“See now? Things are improvin’. At least you’re thinkin’ for a change,” Carl muttered as I stepped out onto the porch.
Gabe was sitting in the visitor area leafing through a dog-eared Guns & Ammo when I stepped off the elevator. “They want you to stop at the nurses’ station and sign her out.”
