Sea Change

by Dave Balcom

  She waved and blew a kiss as she walked out of the house.

  I turned to a bunch of outside chores that had been neglected, and when I came up for air, I found Jan doing the same kind of things inside. I walked past her on the way to the garage, patted her rump and she smiled. I told her about dinner plans, and she checked the clock. “What’ll we take?”

  “Nothing I know of, but maybe you should call Shirlee to find out for sure.”

  And that’s the form our lives melted into as days and weeks went by without any talk of The Outfit or my anger.

  I shot quail in the foothills and pheasants on the James Ranch. I hunted chukar with Matt and Brian Liske, and marveled at the ease with which they handled the vertical challenges those birds create.

  We made sure to keep in touch with Betty Liske, and through her we became friends with the Whitmans.

  Jensen checked in from time to time to update us on the trial process in Canada, but he had nothing to say about Crocker, The Outfit or any of that business.

  In March I received a summons to testify in British Columbia Supreme Court “in the matter of the Crown v. Martini, et al.” I would be expected to appear on the thirteenth day of June at 9 a.m.

  The summons carried the Crown Counsel’s name, Richard Thorsen. I knew from reading that the Crown Counsel was a prosecuting attorney in the Canadian justice process.

  I started carrying my Taurus everywhere that day, and a week later I finally received a nifty little Colt Mustang XSP, semi-automatic with a slick purse holster for Jan. We’d ordered it online back in May, and it had taken months to arrive at the gun shop in Pendleton.

  Jan had taken the conceal-and-carry class, and applied for her permit through the sheriff’s office in Pendleton. She’d had the permit for weeks before the handgun arrived.

  We had been shooting in the “backyard” almost daily, and Jan had come to confidently handle the compact, twelve-ounce weapon chambered in .380.

  Luke Whitman called in May and asked if I was going to testify at the trial in June, and I told him I was planning on it. “So are we,” he said without emotion. “We’re going to be staying in a house right in Victoria. It’s a big place, and we’ll need the room because we’re going to have family. I’ve hired some security folks to make sure nothing goes wrong. I was wondering if you’d like to stay there with us.”

  “How long do you think we’re going to be there?”

  “I know the date in my letter was the thirteenth, but that’s the first day of jury selection, and so forth. Richard Thorsen told me he expected the prosecution’s case would take no more than two days, and then the defense would take over. He said he couldn’t guess how long that would take.”

  “I think it would be great to see you folks again, and staying there makes some sense considering the threats that have been made against all of us. But when I spoke with Martini I came away thinking that he never thought those threats were real for him. In fact, I’m surprised he hasn’t pleaded guilty.”

  “I wondered about that too, but from what I hear it’s a great deal more comfortable in Victoria than it is at Maximum Security Kent in Agassiz. In any event, I’ll e-mail you the address and directions to the house. You have my phone number, don’t you?”

  “I do. And I thank you.”

  “Oh, no. We thank you, Jim. You were a good friend of Stan’s, but you’ve been an even bigger friend to me and my family. Your response to the threat on your life has been an inspiration to Mary Lou, me, and the kids. We are not going to be frightened any longer.”

  I was flattered, but also wary of encouraging false bravado. “I firmly believe that a healthy dose of fear is an essential ingredient in survival; the trick is keeping that fear at bay enough so you can still think and react. Once people like you apply your minds to the issue, you always seem to find the right mix of fear and resolution.”

  “I look forward to seeing you in June,” he said, and with that he hung up.

  Jan was excited to hear about the invitation. “How are we going to get our weapons into Canada?”

  “We aren’t. We’ll store them at the border and retrieve them when we come out.”

  “How come that doesn’t sound as safe to me as having my Mustang in my purse?”

  “It’s Canada, kiddo. But I’ll ask Jensen about it.”

  Jensen ran the question up his command, and called me back a week later. “You’ll be flying in from Bellingham on a RCMP chopper. You’ll be given an RCMP permit to carry, but you’ll leave your weapons at the door of the court house, along with cell phones and all the usual prohibitions that remind us that the Twenty-first Century is not any less complicated than the ones before it.”

  “That’s terrific. Are the Feds flying the Whitmans into Victoria as well?”

  “They are. You’ll get an e-mail with an itinerary on it a week or so before the trip.”

  “Will you be up there?”

  “I will, as will Veragas and my partner, Mike Rhodes. We’ll be sharing your security coverage with members of the RCMP anti-terrorist squad out of Vancouver. Good people. Serious folks.”

  “I understood that Luke Whitman had hired private security folks to protect us all while we were in Canada.”

  “I talked to him about that, and he agreed to give them a holiday while he’s under our care. By the way, he told me you inspired him and Mary Lou to testify.”

  “That’s what he said. I think he’s a good guy. Hell, he was good enough to be Stan’s friend, and Liske was no slouch at reading people.”

  “I would’ve liked to have known him.”

  “Funny, but we would go months without talking when he was alive, and it was no big deal. Now I miss him every day.”

  41

  On June 13 we were all sitting on the front porch of the twenty-room house the Whitmans had rented and watching the sunset over the harbor in Victoria.

  We had arrived on Sunday in time for dinner, and this day had been spent lazing around the place. We had been advised that our stay would not include forays to explore Victoria; the protection issues would make such trips impossible.

  “We’re house-bound,” Luke summed up our situation with a smile. “I never knew house arrest could be so much fun.”

  The Whitman family members were all avid gamers. Board games, video games, card games ... you name it, and they played it with a vengeance. “Is there a cribbage board in this house?” I asked.

  Luke Junior beamed, “Ah, a man of resolute character and math skills. Let’s go!”

  Jan looked up from her crossword puzzle book. “Junior, you don’t know what you’re in for.”

  The young man feigned fright. “Is he that good?”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that,” she replied in her best stage voice, “but I do know that he’s addicted to the game and is relentless. I doubt if you’ll outlast him.”

  Rubbing his hands like a mad scientist, Junior replied, “Come on, Mr. Relentless. Let’s see what you’ve got.”

  Jensen broke up the party about five o’clock. “Folks,” he said quietly. “This is over. Martini interrupted the jury selection process by pleading guilty to all charges. Thorson, the judge, and Martini’s crown-appointed lawyer met in chambers for about an hour. When they came out, the judge announced the plea had been accepted, the case was closed and sentencing would occur on June twenty-second.

  “Thorson told us after adjournment that he had made several efforts to bargain with Martini for the possibility of parole or shortening the term in exchange for elocution, but Martini never said a word in response, just shook his head.”

  I was relieved that there wouldn’t be a long drawn out trial, but I wasn’t surprised either. “Just cop a plea and say nothing; we’ve heard that before, right Veragas?”

  Leslie nodded. “The Outfit must have found somebody that Martini cares about.”

  “It might be you, Jim,” Jensen said. “He left word that he’d like another interview with you, on the same te
rms as before, if you can do it before you leave.”

  I thought about it for a minute. “What do you think?”

  Jensen scratched his head. “I guess you might hear something that could help you on that other deal, but I’m not sure I want you involved in that stuff...” He shrugged. “It’s your call.”

  I looked at Jan, and she shrugged as well.

  “I guess I’ll go. Can you set it up for tomorrow?”

  He nodded, opened his phone and started walking away from the porch.

  Martini was brought into the same room as before just after nine the next morning. He was hooked up the same way, and the guards gave me the same instructions about leaving.

  “You wanted to see me?”

  He smiled a weary smile. “I did, thanks for coming. I’m betting you think The Outfit got to me, but they didn’t. I wanted you to know that Angelina had no knowledge of my plans when we pulled out last May. I told her I was going to quit The Outfit, and I wanted her to go with me. She was terrified, but agreed to go.

  “She was in Seattle all summer; in an apartment I had her rent under her real name. She thought I was on the run; laying low. When we got done with the plan, I showed up on her door, and took her boat shopping.

  “She wondered about the money, and I told her only that I had made one last score, it was a big one, and I’d done it without Outfit sanction. We had to disappear. The plan was to use the boat to head for South America in a very leisurely manner. Most of my crew had split. Some were headed for Malaysia; Philippe was going to sail with us as far as Mexico. Angel had no part in any of the kidnapping or murders. I don’t want her taking the fall, but she has no future on the street.”

  “You mean that if she beats the conspiracy rap, The Outfit will kill her?”

  He nodded. I asked the next obvious question, “Why didn’t you leave like you planned?”

  “Passports. Remember? I vowed to be legal in every way after the caper. We had a civil ceremony and got married. We applied, and we waited. They arrived on the day of the arrest. We had just topped off the boat with fuel and supplies. We were going to leave the next morning...”

  “So what do you think I can do for you or her?”

  “I think her only protection is if The Outfit loses its head.”

  “I don’t think I follow you.”

  “I want The Outfit blown up. I want them so fragmented that Angel won’t even show up on their radar.”

  “How do I do that?”

  “There’s this woman who runs the entire operation from a house on the hill in Portland. She’s guarded very tightly and the house is a fortress. She does all of her work through that lawyer, Crocker. They’re about the same age, and from what I’ve been told, they grew up together in San Francisco.

  “Her neighbors probably think she’s just some rich eccentric kook, but she’s one vicious bitch. She’s the one who offered the mil for you.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Rhonda Robertson.”

  I reacted as if I had been punched. The room was tilting again, and I needed some air.

  “You gonna be all right?” Martini was staring at me with concern. “Can you get to the door? If you go down, they won’t come in here until the half hour is up...”

  I shook my head, searching for my center. I took a deep breath and felt my adrenaline start to wear off. “I’m going to be okay. That just really hit me.”

  “You know her?”

  I remembered the young woman I’d met, the daughter of “Big Mike” Robertson, the kindly innkeeper who had dabbled in antiques over the Internet. I recalled that Rhonda had been raised as a member of the wealthy San Francisco family for whom Mike and his wife had been servants.

  I remembered the story that she had joined her father in tiny Mineral Valley, Michigan after a bad breakup, and how she’d found employment at Jan’s newspaper in advertising sales.

  “I do, or I did. I met her in Michigan. I think her father was the head of The Outfit. He got killed by one of his capos, but she probably blames me for his death...” I shook myself again, got up and paced a bit. “Does she live under that name, or does she have an alias?”

  “I don’t know of any alias. I only met her once, right after she took over after the Peddler died.”

  “Peddler?”

  “Yeah, it was a corny nickname. Something to do with antiques. I didn’t understand the connection.”

  I could only shake my head in wonder. I had never thought he was involved in anything as big as The Outfit.

  “So, will you do it? Will you burn their house down to save Angel?”

  “You think getting her arrested will do that?”

  “No, but killing her would; I think The Outfit would implode if they realized somebody had leaked her role and whereabouts.”

  “I can’t just kill someone on your say so.”

  “You can. I see the killer in you. You’d love to kill me, but you can’t. You can kill her.”

  I shook my head sadly. “No, you have me wrong. Yes, I would have killed you for Stan Liske if there had been some way, but this is better for me. This way you go to jail, off the streets, caged. My anger toward you is scabbed over. I want you to live, in prison, for years and years.

  “If I’m going to help Angela, I’ll have to tell the police about this information. You’ll have to approve that based on the ground rules here.”

  His look of astonishment couldn’t have been faked. “You mean you didn’t tell anyone about our last talk?”

  “Not a word.”

  “Not to your wife? Not to the Fed, Jensen?”

  “No. I used the information you gave me as background to focus my questions for Jensen and others. I had planned on confronting Crocker and finding out who had offered the ransom to kill me, but I would never violate the confidentiality of a source.”

  “No shit!” He started laughing. “You are really serious?”

  I sat quietly, waiting.

  He gathered himself. “Don’t quote me until she’s off the street. I don’t want Angel tainted by my talking to you. Okay?”

  “That’s a deal.”

  “Mister, you are really amazing. I mean it. You hate me like the devil, but you’ve kept your word to me.”

  I thought about Veragas and his comment to Jan, “Call it an occupational disease.”

  42

  When I left the correctional facility, Jensen and Jan were waiting in a car to take us to the helicopter for the ride back to Bellingham.

  I kept my thoughts to myself during the car ride, and the noise of the chopper made conversation impossible during the flight.

  Once on the ground and back at our truck, I asked Jensen if he could spare a few minutes to talk about what I’d learned from Martini.

  “Are you out of your mind?!” Jensen blurted when I had finished recapping my interview and telling him about Rhonda Robertson.

  Veragas just sat at the table in the State Police station and shook his head.

  “I’m telling you what he told me. If I were wearing a wire, and approached that house on the hill and asked for a meeting... Well, it could work, couldn’t it?”

  “We’ll never know; will we?” Jensen said.

  Jan had sat in a corner with her mouth open in amazement as I told the officers of our history with Rhonda. “She told me she just couldn’t stand being in that house, in that town with all the memories and bad memories at that. We gave her a going away party and we all chipped in on a gift... I always wondered what happened to her and where she had landed, but she never called... and then her e-mail address no longer worked... my God!”

  “I’m telling you again, Jim, go home,” Jensen said firmly. “Enjoy your life. This is none of your concern. I’ll get with my folks in Portland and the cops there. We’ll figure something out.”

  I was hurt, and I let him know it. “That’s B.S., and you know it. If I’m in there, and she talks with me, you’ll have an open and shut case; the kind of c
ase that might cut an innocent girl some slack.”

  “And that’s another thing. How innocent can a hooker be? Really. I can’t believe you. Reporters are supposed to be the kings of cynicism; have you been retired that long?”

  I looked at the ceiling, thinking about my center, my pulse and my breathing, and getting more frustrated by the minute.

  He continued, “Go home. Add this new address to the others. Stay away. Jan, please take this guy home and talk some sense into him; will ya?”

  “Come on, Jim,” she said. “Let the pros handle it.”

  We drove home on I-90 through Snoqualmie Pass and then down I-82 through the TriCities, and across the Columbia River and then back to I-84 east to our exit in the Blues.

  Jan tried talking, but I wasn’t participating so she hid in her crossword book.

  In the house, exhausted, we went to bed. “I’m sorry you’re angry with me,” she said as I was nearly asleep.

  “Don’t be silly. I’m not angry with you. I’m plotting.”

  The next morning I called Sylva and got him on his cell, “Junior, I need to talk with you.”

  “Perfect, that’ll piss Jensen and his folks no end.”

  “They already talked to you?”

  “Sure, first thing this morning, about six, a whole bevy of Fibbies with Jensen in the lead broke up our staff meeting with the news that The Outfit was not only real, but that they now know something of its structure, and it’s all thanks to you.”

  “Some thanks. Did he tell you about my idea...?”

  He cut me off, “Of course he did. We all had a big laugh about that.”

  “Thanks, buddy. Thanks a lot for that.”

  “Hey, if I can think of some way you can help us without putting your head in a lion’s mouth, I’ll call you. Promise.”

  I hung up on him and immediately felt guilty for it. Telephone manners are important.

  I walked up to the Nelsons, retrieved Judy and set off on the two-track headed for the ridge. I was gone for an hour, and when I came back there were three police vehicles parked in my driveway and the street.