Family Values

by Ford, G. M.

  Eventually, he got to his feet and began ambling slowly in the direction of his house. I kept pace. The sodden air felt like we were wading. I’m generally comfortable with silence. Most of what I hear in the course of a day is the same ol’, same ol’ anyway. I’ve always been of the opinion that if people could just bring themselves to say “I don’t know” when they don’t know, we’d all live longer and have to listen to a whole lot less bullshit. But that’s not how people are. People hate to say “I don’t know.” They’ll speculate, gesticulate, and just plain make up shit to avoid saying the words out loud.

  We were nearly back to his front door before he said anything.

  “They sent a man with a paper this morning. He came to my house.”

  “What paper?”

  “I must appear in court on Friday.”

  “A subpoena?”

  He nodded.

  “Just tell the truth and you’ll be fine,” I assured him.

  The look in his eyes said he knew better. “Dr. . . . she’s like family to me,” he said. “I don’t want to . . . The last thing I would ever want . . .”

  I put a hand on his shoulder. “Whatever they ask you, you just tell ’em the truth as you know it. That’s all you can do.”

  He straightened his spine and tried to stare a hole through my skull.

  “Family is all that matters,” he said. “There’s nothing else.”

  Hard to argue with that, so I didn’t try.

  Forrest Blaine lived way the hell up north in Pinehurst. Figured I’d get him out of the way before rush hour screwed things up. I decided not to mess with the freeway, so I bounced over the University Bridge and just kept on going, rolling through the neighborhoods until the sidewalks petered out and you could actually park for free in front of your own house. What a concept!

  I parked on the dirt shoulder across Eighteenth Avenue from Forrest’s sixties trilevel. The fog hadn’t crept this far north, just the damp. I could see the bottom half of Forrest sticking out of a bush at the far end of the house. I walked that way. Cue the Aerosmith music.

  He was whacking away at a blackberry bush with a machete. His body language made it plain that the blackberry bush was ahead on points. I’ve always figured that in the event of a holocaust, the only two things that were sure to survive were PVC pipe and blackberry bushes.

  Forrest was a stocky local kid from Ballard who’d tried this and that after high school—construction, mortgage broker, property management, and such crap—until he came up with the medical examiner assistant gig and discovered the joys of unionization and the public dole. I’d always figured he was gonna be a city government lifer.

  Interestingly enough, from the moment I’d met him at a Fourth of July picnic, he’d treated me like I was a long-lost buddy. Like somewhere in the past we’d shared something so profound that it automatically joined us at the hip for eternity. I was flexible on the subject. Way I saw it, buddy-buddy worked for me, so I’d always made it a point to keep up my end of the homeboy business.

  He was running his sleeve over his brow when he noticed me coming across the lawn. “Hey, man,” he said, waving the machete in my direction.

  “Tough going, eh?”

  He pointed the machete at the blackberry bush. A seeping red scratch adorned the back of his machete hand. “Shit bites back,” he said.

  “They’re friggin’ indestructible,” I allowed.

  “You got any idea what’s going on down at the office?” he asked.

  “That’s what I came to ask you.”

  He hacked out a bitter laugh. “You come to the wrong place, bro. All I know is they suspended me with pay until this thing shakes out.” He threw me a big grin. “Several months of this shit would be fine with me,” he joked. “I might even get a few things done around here before the place sinks into the ground.”

  “We really can’t do much until we know who signed off on the deliveries.”

  He looked a bit sheepish and turned away, like somebody who had something to say but wasn’t sure it was a good idea. He checked the area like he was in a bad B-movie street scene.

  “What?” I pushed.

  Took him a second. “Findin’ that out ain’t gonna be a hell of a lot of help neither,” he said.

  “Why’s that?”

  “This is off the record, right? You’re working for the Doc.”

  “Nothing we say here is ever going to be attributed to you.”

  He gave it some thought. “Because . . . you know, man, I’m real fond of the Doc. I feel like I ought to be straight with you here. Because you need to know . . .” He hesitated, then let it out. “Whoever signed off for the stuff isn’t necessarily the same person who delivered it.”

  Gotta admit, I went full mouth breather for a second or three. We’d bet the farm on being able to find out who delivered the samples to whom and when. Neither of us had said it out loud, but both Rebecca and I were hoping that once we had the specifics, the mix-up would become obvious, and the current shit storm would magically disappear. My stomach felt as if I’d swallowed a basket of ball bearings.

  “How’s that?” I choked out.

  “You know, bro. I don’t have to tell you, man . . . city traffic’s terrible. Getting to the precincts during the day is a first-class pain in the ass. You get unlucky, and you can waste half a friggin’ day at it and then come back and have to finish your work on your own time. So . . . you know, like, we hear somebody else say, ‘I’m going to the North Precinct. Anybody got anything that needs to ride along?’” He showed his palms to the leaden sky, machete and all. “We sign the paperwork, slap one of the Doc’s labels on it, and give it to whoever’s going over there. It just makes sense. No extra trips. No extra budget items we gotta justify. End o’ friggin’ story.”

  “And nobody at the precinct end objects?”

  He made a face. “Everybody knows everybody forever.” He shrugged. “It’s just business as usual, bro.”

  Micah Lowery, on the other hand, hated my guts. Somehow, despite seeing each other on a regular basis, we’d never managed to make the human connection necessary for a relationship. Which was odd, because, generally, if I see somebody often enough, I start to notice how we’re similar rather than how we’re different, and we manage to find some common ground. But with Micah . . . We’d always seemed to repel each other in the manner of opposing magnetic poles.

  Micah was a morbidly obese little guy, somewhere between fifty and sixty. Bald as an egg, he’d always smelled a bit moldy to me, the way people who live on sailboats often do. Anybody who believes that gay men “decide” to be gay ought to spend a day or two with Micah. I’m betting they’d come away from the experience transformed . . . so to speak, anyway.

  Problem was, unlike the other LGBT people I knew, the vast majority of whom just wanted to be treated like everybody else, Micah always seemed to feel that his sexual orientation entitled him to a little something extra. Some kind of universal forbearance because it was harder to be gay than it was to be straight. Like in figure skating, where you get extra style points for a triple toe loop.

  As for me . . . I simply didn’t agree. I figured out a long time ago that just because I was one of those blokes for whom sex was simple—you know, nothing more complicated than phalange A seemed to fit nicely into grommet B—that didn’t mean that things were that simple for everybody. I treated Micah like I treated everybody else, a fact he sorely resented.

  His roommate, Clint, told me I could find him over where Madison branches into Union. Take the second left. Half a block of flat black facade. Shimmering silver, LEATHERS, and a bevy of CC cameras spaced along the wall. According to the marquee, tonight’s band was Throbbing Gristle. Be still my foolish heart.

  Micah was sitting at the far end of the bar, swirling a flat beer round and round in a glass. Sinatra was crooning it his way over the sound system. Other than Micah and the big chin whiskers polishing glasses behind the bar, the place was deserted.
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  When I slipped onto the stool beside him, Micah turned his bleary little eyes my way. Took him a few seconds to focus. “Wadda you want?” he slurred.

  “You got any ideas about what’s going on with this missing evidence thing?”

  He rocked on the stool. Wiped his lips with his sleeve. “My union rep says I shouldn’t talk about it”—he waved an angry hand at me—“so get the fuck out of here.”

  He chugged the rest of his beer and banged the glass on the bar. Chin Whiskers had disappeared into the walk-in cooler. “Bobby . . . lemme have another,” Micah yelled.

  “So you got any idea what’s going on?” I pressed.

  “Bobby,” he bellowed.

  “Somebody was fucking with my livelihood, I’d want to know what in hell was going on,” I said.

  “Why don’t you take your big homophobic ass out of here.”

  “I’m not homophobic,” I said amiably. “I’m rectophobic. It’s assholes, not gay dudes, I’ve got a problem with.” I smiled wide and shrugged. “Probably explains why we never got along.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Never on the first date.”

  Movement on my left pulled my attention back behind the bar.

  It was Chin Whiskers, carrying a foamy draft beer. He set the beer on the bar in front of Micah. “This guy bothering you?” he asked, throwing me his most baleful stare. I stifled tears.

  “Just another day-tripper,” Micah said.

  “‘. . . a Sunday driver, yeah,’” I sang.

  They both looked at me like I’d cursed somebody’s mother.

  “I think you better go,” the bartender said.

  “When I’m done talking to Micah here.” I turned back to Micah. “You keep track of which samples you take to the precinct personally and which ones somebody else delivers for you?”

  He had to chew on that one for a few seconds before his color returned and he straightened himself on the stool and said, “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.” He gave me the finger and then twirled the stool so his back was to me.

  “I’m not telling you again,” the bartender said.

  I thought about hopping over the bar and busting him in the chops a couple of times for practice but managed to stifle the urge. Good thing too.

  The kitchen door burst open. A guy wearing a stained white apron appeared. He was holding a German shepherd on a purple leash.

  I made a surrender sign with my hands and slid off the stool.

  “Isn’t it illegal for an animal to be in a place they serve food?” I asked, as I shambled across the room.

  “He’s a service dog,” Chin Whiskers said.

  “Exactly what service does he perform?” I inquired as I reached for the door handle.

  Behind the porcupine beard, he smiled. “You wanna find out?” he asked.

  I smiled back. “Nah. Think I’ll take a rain check on that.”

  The closer I got to salt water, the thicker the fog became. I’d tried calling Rebecca, but her phone went directly to voicemail—which, the way I saw it, was as good a reason as any to make a pit stop back home. You know, use the john, swap information, figure out what to do next, that sort of thing. At least, that’s what I told myself.

  By the time I got all the way down to Elliott and started rolling north toward Magnolia, the afternoon traffic was beginning to swell, and the glass tech palaces that line Puget Sound were winking in and out of the fog like half-erased pencil drawings.

  Must have been a slow news day. The same two news teams as last night had returned. I pushed the button for the gate, swung the car all the way across the oncoming lane, and squealed through the opening before Snowdrift Dawson could even get out of the truck. I watched him in the rearview mirror, waving the microphone like a flag, shouting something at my back, as the gate slid closed in his face.

  I pulled the car all the way around the back of the house and popped the door handle. I was halfway out of the seat when I noticed the bag of throwaway phones over on the passenger side. I grabbed it, got out, and let myself in the kitchen door. Two steps inside, the door swung closed behind me. I looked over my shoulder. Gabe was behind the door. I watched as the chrome Smith & Wesson disappeared under the wide black belt.

  “How goeth the battle?” Gabe asked.

  “He returneth,” I announced. “Battered, bruised, and damn near dog bit, but undaunted.” I threw the bag of phones on the kitchen table. “How long have those assholes been camped outside the gate?”

  “Since about half an hour after you left. They’ve set the system off twice by touching the gate. I followed your suggestion and called the cops.” Gabe grinned. “Of course, they sent the SWAT team right out.”

  These days in Seattle, anything short of a mass decapitation, and you could get an anchovy pizza delivered before the cops would show up.

  Rebecca poked her head out of the hall. “Hey,” I said.

  I could see the strain gathering around her eyes.

  “You retrieve your copies of those files?” I asked.

  She brightened three watts. “Yep.”

  I leaned out the door and hung my jacket outside on the porch wall.

  “You found a lawyer?” I asked as I closed the door again.

  “Come and gone,” she said with a wan smile.

  I walked over to her, threw an arm around her shoulders, and pulled her up the hall with me. She leaned her head on my shoulder. Gabe followed along.

  “Nancy Pometta. Soon to be the newest partner at Kellogg and Haynes.”

  “And she said?”

  I steered her into what had once been my father’s office. The inner sanctum from which I’d been perpetually banned, and from which all Big Bill’s nefarious schemes had once been hatched. Gabe lounged in the doorway.

  A while back I’d completely renovated the first floor of the house and turned the office into what has become popularly known as a man cave. Nothing crazy. No neon beer signs or any schlock like that, just a flat-screen TV the size of Vermont and enough soft furniture to accommodate a football team. And . . . oh yeah . . . the big ol’ stainless steel refrigerator back against the far wall. No sense traipsing back to the kitchen every time I . . . you know what I mean.

  Rebecca sat down heavily in the red leather chair. “Nancy said . . .” She heaved a massive sigh. “You know how lawyers are. She wasn’t making any promises.” Rebecca leaned back and folded her hands in her lap. “She didn’t say so, but I don’t think she liked the lay of the land at all. She’s down at the courthouse right now pushing back against the timeline the DA wants to establish. Claiming she hasn’t been given sufficient time to review my case.”

  “Good.”

  She shook her head. “But she doesn’t think it’s going to do much good.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because, like you and I figured, Woodward and his minions want this thing to make as much noise as possible. She thinks they’re going to call in every judicial marker they own to milk every PR drop out of it they can.”

  “Can’t she do anything about it?”

  “Not until we get to the trial phase of things, by which time the media will have long since moved on to something else, and the other side is in a better position to manage the news, which, according to Nancy, is the object of the exercise. At the trial phase, we’ll have a right to know what the prosecution has in the way of evidence and a right to sufficient time to prepare a defense. Before that, though, we’re more or less at their mercy.”

  “Ibrahim said he’s been subpoenaed to appear on Friday.”

  She looked surprised. As if she’d been so busy handling her end of things that she hadn’t had time to wonder what I was up to. “You saw Ibrahim?”

  “I visited all three kings.”

  Her face wanted to know whether I’d come up with anything.

  “Just about what you’d expect. Anybody trying to get anything out of Ibrahim had better heat the pliers red hot, because that
old boy is tellin’ nobody nothin’. Forrest is enjoying the time off, and Micah wouldn’t piss on me if I was on fire.”

  “You’re way too alpha for him.”

  “Personally, I’d like to beta the crap out of him.”

  I brought the Olympic eye-rolling finals to halt when I said, “I did come up with one not-so-minor problem.”

  “Yeah?”

  Discretion being the better part of valor, I took an extra second to choose my words. “I’m guessing you weren’t aware of how your guys handled the evidence delivery on a day-to-day basis.”

  “What do you mean?” Something in her eyes told me she wished I’d shut up.

  I told her what Forrest had told me. Not the Reader’s Digest version either. The whole damn thing, about all of them covering for one another on evidence deliveries. She went from red to white and back to red. An uncomfortable silence slipped over the room. And stayed there for what seemed like a year and a half.

  “It’s my fault,” she said finally. “The buck stops with me.” She threw a hand in the air. “I sign whole sheets of ME seals at the beginning of the week.” She caught the surprised look on my face. “It’s not like they can come running to me every time they need to ship something over to a precinct. Most of the time, I’m up to my elbows in someone’s remains.” She shook her head in disgust. “Besides which . . . shit rolls downhill, and I’m the one who’s forever carping at them over the damn budget.” She appeared to be having an argument with herself and losing. “And, much as it pains me to admit, delivery was one of those things I made it a point not to be too aware of . . . if you know what I mean.”

  Did I ever. Me and denial were friends with benefits. I couldn’t think of anything sufficiently self-serving to say, so I didn’t bother to try.

  “Forrest’s right,” she said after another tense interlude. “It is silly to make more than one trip to a precinct on any given day.” She made a rueful face. “I’ve always known what we were doing was at odds with the protocol, but that’s the way it’s always been done. The way Harry Doyle did it before me and, for all I know, how the guy before Harry did it.