Family Values

by Ford, G. M.

  “They’d always lived in Geneva with Charlie’s mother. When she died a while back, they didn’t have any place to go except to their father, who, I’d like to mention, was adamantly opposed to the idea of them moving in with him. Mother said he went completely off the handle. Offered to buy them a house in Europe. It was my mother who insisted they come to Seattle. She and Sidney had quite a row over it. Mother gave them the family name because . . . as I’m sure you’re aware, there are certain advantages to being a Harrington.” Her eyes clouded a bit. “As you also probably know, I had a younger brother, Robert, who died in a boating accident when he was quite young. I’ve often thought she was just trying to fill the gap that losing Robert left in her life and maybe that was why she insisted the kids come to live with Sidney . . . despite his vehement objections.”

  “Tell me about Tracy,” I prompted.

  Her brow furrowed, as if my questions had dragged her back to a land she no longer wished to inhabit. “What’s any of this to you?” she wanted to know.

  “A case I was working on . . . it keeps coming back to the period of time when Tracy was killed. I can’t tell you what’s going on, because I don’t know. I’m just out here kicking over rocks—you know, seeing if anything metaphorically crawls out.”

  “You do realize, don’t you, Mr. Waterman, what a difficult and painful subject this is for my family?”

  “I assure you, I wouldn’t be dredging all this up if I didn’t think I had a good reason.”

  “Which is?”

  “The Innocence Project thinks Lamar Hudson is almost surely about to be granted a new trial,” I said, “which, of course, will reopen your stepsister’s murder investigation.”

  “I thought new evidence of his guilt had come to light.”

  “Maybe . . . maybe not.”

  She gave it some thought.

  “Young women don’t get more troubled than poor Tracy,” she said after a pause. “I don’t think in all my life I’ve ever met anybody with quite the set of issues Tracy was walking around with.”

  “Such as?”

  “It all started with the drugs. It was like she was born with a heroin habit.” She looked at me hard. “Have you ever spent time with a junkie, Mr. Waterman?” She didn’t wait for me to respond. “Nothing in the universe matters to them except getting their next high. They’ll lie, cheat, steal . . . anything so they don’t get sick. They lie when there’s no need to lie. You can’t believe a single word they say. It makes them nearly impossible to deal with on a day-to-day basis.”

  “There’s an epidemic of it going around.”

  “Tracy was our own personal epidemic.” She closed her eyes for a moment, going back in time. “She’d been with us for about six months when things started to go missing around the house. Small, expensive things. Money. Prescription drugs. Anything that wasn’t nailed down.” She heaved a sigh. “It was one of those situations where, after a while, we all knew what was going on, but nobody wanted to say it out loud . . . almost like it would go away if we didn’t verbalize it.”

  “And nobody—not the former wife, not Sidney, none of them—bothered to mention that this girl had a heroin habit?”

  “No,” she said. “It came as a bolt out of the blue.”

  “How’d it come to light?”

  “The Zieglers.”

  “What’s a Ziegler?”

  “Eustace Ziegler. He’s a famous Alaskan painter. He and my great-grandfather were chums back in the forties. We had half a dozen of his paintings hanging around the house. You know, the kind of thing that had been on the wall for so long that nobody noticed them anymore—until a couple of them turned up missing.”

  “And?”

  “And . . . as I said, it wasn’t like, on some level, we didn’t know what was going on. Tracy would stay out for days at a time and then come home looking like death warmed over. Lock herself in her room, not eat . . . sleep for days on end.” She made a disgusted face. “On some level, we all knew what the problem was.”

  “What happened when the paintings turned up missing?”

  “The art dealer—he has a gallery in one of the downtown hotels—specializes in Northwest painters. He took one look at the paintings and immediately knew who they belonged to. He called Mother.”

  “And?”

  “Mother had finally had enough. Told Sidney to do something or she’d call the police. Sidney went crazy. Tracy ran off.” She threw a disgusted hand in the air. “Then she ran back home and things just got worse, to the point where Mother finally made Sidney throw her out of the house. Told the gate not to let her in anymore. Cut off her trust fund. Tried to get her into a halfway house . . . everything . . . .the whole nine yards . . . all for nothing. Every time Sidney found her a new treatment facility, she’d run away.” She paused and took a deep breath. “The amazing thing . . . what was truly extraordinary was that she always managed to get drugs somehow. No money. No place to live. Not a coat on her back. It didn’t matter. She always managed to keep herself in drugs.”

  Kinda made me wonder if Tracy hadn’t maybe taken up being a working girl in order to support her habit. That’s why most of the hustlers are out on the streets these days. Supporting a jones of some kind, or a boyfriend with a jones, or a kid with a jones. Far as I’d seen, you don’t start selling your ass for money until things are about as bad as they can get. Not that I was about to make any such suggestion to a Harrington family member, mind you. Mercifully, Jessica Harrington went on.

  “When they finally threw her out of the house that time, she started telling anybody who would listen that she’d been a victim of sexual abuse. That Sidney had been abusing her since she was five. That the house phones were bugged. That my mother had tried to kill her, for pity’s sake. It was beyond ridiculous.”

  She checked the time again.

  “What happened to Charlie?” I segued.

  Her face morphed from anger to sadness in an instant. “Poor Charlie. The sweetest kid. Smart. Just naturally kind and considerate. Everything you could want a kid to be, and now . . .” She let it trail off.

  I waited.

  “All he ever wanted was for his big sister to be well.”

  “They don’t get well,” I said. “The smart ones just stop using.”

  “I’m convinced Charlie went out that night to help his sister. I think she called and talked Charlie into bringing her some money. You know what he got for his trouble?”

  “What?”

  “She stabbed him with him some kind of speedball. The needle broke off in his chest. He had some sort of drug-induced aneurism or stroke of some kind . . . the doctors aren’t sure. Eventually, she managed to drag him down into the hole she was in.”

  “I thought I detected quite a bit of friction between your mother and Sidney on the subject of Charlie’s medical treatment.”

  She glared at me. “You do have a knack for putting your finger on the sore spot, don’t you, Mr. Waterman?”

  “It’s a gift,” I said. “Who’s Dr. Thorpe?”

  She huffed out a huge sigh. “After Tracy’s death, Charlie was a complete mess. Barely conscious. Couldn’t do anything for himself. He was being cared for in a treatment center Dr. Thorpe runs downtown. My mother knew Dr. Thorpe from somewhere. He runs Homewood Recovery Center. Dr. Thorpe thought the worst was behind us. He thought Charlie was making progress.”

  “And?” I pressed.

  “Then all of a sudden Sidney insists on moving him out to Issaquah. Mother was adamantly opposed. They’ve been arguing about it ever since. Mother’s had Thompson drive her out there half a dozen times. Charlie’s always asleep. Every time. Mother wants a second opinion, but Charlie is, after all, Sidney’s son, so she defers to Sidney on the matter.”

  “What do you know about Charlie’s caregivers?”

  “Sidney found them,” she said. “I believe he knew them from his last posting.”

  “What’s a posting?”

  “Sidney was in
the diplomatic corps. Third assistant secretary to the cultural affairs secretary, something of that nature. All very midlevel.”

  “Where was this?”

  “The Balkans somewhere. He pretends the details are classified so he can’t talk about them, but my uncle Harry—who was with the State Department since the Nixon administration—told me Sidney left the service under some sort of very serious cloud. All very hush-hush. Things he wasn’t allowed to be specific about. Harry made a concerted effort to talk Mother out of getting involved with him, but when my mother doesn’t want to hear something, she doesn’t.” She shrugged. “She’d been alone for nearly twenty years at that point. He’s charming. She was smitten.”

  She leaned forward across the desk. “Sidney’s mostly a professional board member these days. Whereas Mother will lend her name to charity, she’s not inclined to actually attend the board meetings. She sends Sidney instead. He loves it. Makes him feel like he’s still involved and important.”

  She anticipated my next question.

  “Mother met him at some sort of embassy charity function in New York. He swept her off her feet. He makes witty cocktail party chitchat. He looks good in a tuxedo. Just between you and me, I’m with Uncle Harry: Sidney’s always seemed more than a bit dodgy to me. He’s always so circumspect. Never answers a question directly. But he makes Mother happy, so I guess that’s enough.”

  “Your mom was quite a catch for a defrocked diplomat,” I commented.

  “Actually—not that he admits to it—but Sidney seems to have his own money. He claims to be living on his pension and some family bequests, but any time he needs to come up with some cash, he seems to be able to.”

  “And you don’t worry that he’s in line for the Harrington gravy train?”

  “First of all, Sidney’s only in line for my mother’s money. The Harrington money is a whole different matter. My mother and I share power of attorney for the Harrington money. Anything Sidney might have in mind, over and above community property, would require both of our signatures, and that, I can assure you, isn’t going to happen.”

  Third glance at the watch. She got to her feet.

  “Afraid I’ve got to go,” she said.

  “Thank you for your time,” I said, getting to my feet.

  “Hope I was of some help. Lord knows we’d love to put this awful tragedy behind us for good.”

  Yeah, I thought to myself. You and everybody else.

  Two days later, I got a musical message from Eagen—Al Green singing “Take Me to the River.” And, for the first time ever, Eagen was waiting for me when I got there. The air was still, so I could smell the river. There are no words, lyrical or otherwise, to describe the odor of that tidal sludge.

  “Clerical error,” he sneered.

  “So Lamar Hudson was in jail at the time of Tracy Harrington’s murder.”

  “John Doe Number Three, on September eleventh. I watched the interview tape. It’s him. They ask him who he is. He asks them why he’s been arrested. That goes on for twenty minutes. They figure him for a moron, give up, and throw him back in holding. Next day they find out his real name because his prints are in the system. They also find out he’s nineteen years old and transfer him over to the county jail, where they log him in by his real name as being arrested on the twelfth. And since they caught him choking his Chihuahua on a bench in Volunteer Park on the night of the eleventh, the Tracy Harrington investigation team drops by—you know, just covering their bases, see if maybe he didn’t see something. Never for a minute imagining he’s a suspect. They show him a few crime scene pictures and he fucking confesses.”

  “Your bosses know about this?”

  “Not yet.”

  “How we gonna do this?”

  He slashed the still air with his hand. “Sure as hell can’t be either one of us.”

  I nodded. He was right. No way he could be poking the departmental bear. That would surely be the end of his career. And if it came from me, they’d have a pretty good idea where I got it from.

  “I’ve got an idea.”

  “Better be damn good. “

  “I know just the folks for the job.”

  “Innocence Project. Angela St. Jean.”

  “I need you guys to discover something.”

  “What?”

  I told her. At considerable length.

  Long silence to follow. “Are you serious? Can this possibly be true?”

  “It’s real important that you guys discover it on your own.”

  “Why’s that?”

  I told her that too, without using Eagen’s name.

  “There’s an actual interview tape?”

  “The juvenile facility on Twelfth Avenue. John Doe Number Three on the night of September eleventh, twenty twelve, according to my source. They signed him at the county jail the next day, when they figured out who he was and how old he was.”

  “Do you have a copy of the tape?”

  “You guys will have to do that on your own,” I said. “And I’m guessing that, if you give the SPD much notice, the tape will suddenly cease to exist.”

  She laughed. “We have quite a bit of experience dealing with matters such as disappearing evidence,” she assured me. “Thank you. And I’m sure Mr. Hudson thanks you too.”

  “How you doing with that sample from Mr. Hudson?”

  “It’s being sequenced as we speak.”

  “Good, because they’re dropping like flies. Of the four guys who were in that cell with Lamar Hudson that night, two of them are dead. You tell me one is in prison in Oregon, and the other one had some sort of stroke and is not taking visitors. The other guy was unconscious on the floor. That means Poole and Harrington are our only—”

  She cut me off. “Mr. Poole is completely off the board. He’s doing life without the possibility of parole and is thus disinclined to be of any help. We’ve approached him on several occasions, to no avail. We have nothing we can offer him. He won’t see us anymore, and, by the way, we’re now being told that the new evidence isn’t forensic. It’s Tracy Harrington’s driver’s license. Supposedly found on Lamar Hudson at the time of his arrest.”

  “Which leaves us with Charles Harrington.”

  I had an or, but I kept it to myself.

  Uncle Harry turned out to be Harriman Francis Standish III, Patricia Harrington’s older brother, who had, until his recent retirement, been in the diplomatic corps for nearly thirty-five years, according to LinkedIn. Western Europe mostly. I’d like to be able to tell you that if he hadn’t called me back, I’d have just given up and gotten on with my life, but truth was, this thing was gnawing at my insides like a bulimic beaver.

  When Harriman Standish returned my call about twenty minutes after I’d left him a short voicemail message, suffice it to say I was surprised.

  “Leo Waterman, please.”

  “Speaking.”

  “This is Harry Standish. Your message said you have something you’d like to discuss with me.”

  “Sidney Crossfield,” I said quickly. You know, what the hell, may as well cut to the chase.

  Thirty seconds of agonizing silence followed. I thought maybe he’d hung up on me and was about to open my mouth when he broke the spell.

  “My brother-in-law.” He said the words in much the same tone of voice people used when discussing lingering sinus infections.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What would your interest in Sidney be?”

  I gave him the whole load, figuring if his niece Jessica was right and he’d been seriously opposed to his sister’s relationship with Sidney Crossfield, maybe he’d see this as a chance to finally do something about it. Old grudges die hard.

  He listened to the whole gory story without interrupting. I’d always operated on the assumption that Mark Twain was on the mark when he’d noted that for many people the only thing better than hearing something good about themselves was hearing something bad about somebody else. Back when schadenfreude was known
as nasty.

  “You’ll have to come here,” he said, about two seconds after I stopped talking. “This isn’t something for the phone.”

  “Where’s here?” I asked.

  “Hat Island.”

  I stifled a groan. If The Highlands, with its fortified guard gate, was too public for you, you moved to someplace like Hat Island. Not only was it a ferry ride, but, if I recalled correctly, it was a ride on a passenger-only ferry that ran from Everett to Hat Island on a highly irregular schedule. Once off the ferry, your ass was on foot.

  “Take the ten o’clock tomorrow. I’ll pick you up at the dock.”

  Turned out he knew the ferry schedule. Not that it was hard to remember. The Hat Island ferry ran from the Everett Yacht Club on Wednesdays, Fridays, and weekends only. Took your ass out there at ten in the morning, picked your ass up at one that afternoon. You didn’t want to stay that long, you best break out the water wings.

  As promised, he was waiting for me at the end of the ramp. Sitting at the side of the road in an immaculately restored Chevy pickup truck. Beautiful turquoise paint job. Gleaming wooden side rails. Shiny as hope. Late fifties, I was thinking, as I pulled open the door and slid up onto the tuck and roll bench seat.

  We introduced ourselves and shook hands. He was a big man, with small features gathered in the center of his face, like they were having a meeting. The effect gave his face a pensive quality. Like he was working on a math problem he couldn’t quite get a handle on.

  “Fifty-nine?” I asked as he dropped the truck into gear.

  “Fifty-seven,” he said, as we rolled around in a circle and started up the hill.

  “Always wanted one of these,” I admitted, as we rolled along.

  He’d done a bit of homework on me. “Your old man certainly had the price,” he commented. “He cut quite a rather wide swath.”

  “My old man also had very definite ideas about what he was and wasn’t going to spend his money on. And believe me when I tell you, sir, my hormonal yearnings were not high on his fiduciary agenda.”

  “He was right,” Harrison Standish said. “Sentimentality is that which we fall back upon when true emotions fail.”