by Jack Lynch
“Please come up for a bit. I don’t want to be alone just now.”
It didn’t make a lot of sense to me, but then neither did anything else that had happened since I hit town. I followed her up the stairs and into her place. She turned on some dim overhead track lighting and hung her coat in a closet. She moved like a sleepwalker. She stood at the closet door a moment, then crossed to sit on the sofa. She sat on its edge, her chin in her hands, staring out the plate-glass windows at the twinkling lights of Ballard. Even a rowdy place like Ballard can look romantic at night from a couple of miles away. Of course I’d been out of touch long enough, so I didn’t even know if Ballard was still a rowdy place, with its blue-collar mill industries and fishing fleets, pool halls and beer taverns and auto wrecking yards.
I turned back to stare at Lorna. I didn’t really know her any longer, either. She’d never been a woman to cry, the wife I’d known. She could be bitchy and steely cold and even throw things in anger, but I’d never seen her cry. It seemed all a part of that vulnerability I’d noticed back in the restaurant. Maybe it was the flip side of a strong-willed woman who trades in her failed marriages for a business career.
I went out to the kitchen and poked through cupboards until I found the liquor supply. I found a bottle of Rémy Martin I took out, then looked some more until I found a couple of balloon glasses. I turned on the warm water tap and let it run for a bit, then filled both glasses with hot water and let them sit. I tried not to stare at Lorna. She was slumped back in a corner of the sofa now with her face in her hands. I poured out the water and put a generous splash of Rémy into both glasses. I switched off the kitchen light and went in and sat down next to my ex. I put my own snifter down on the rug nearby.
“Here,” I told her, taking her hand and placing the other snifter in it.
She opened her eyes and took the brandy with a little nod of thanks. Then I did one of those things that are common with me from time to time when in situations of stress and ambiguity. I kicked over the other snifter of cognac on the rug where I’d left it so as to have both hands free to pass the ammunition to Lorna.
“Shit,” I murmured.
Lorna giggled.
I went out into the kitchen to wet a sponge. I carried it back and mopped the rug. I made a couple more trips to the kitchen to rewet the sponge. I was going to do it another time, but Lorna stopped me.
“Never mind, darling, that’s good enough. Stay here and hug me and tell me things are going to be all right.”
I stood there a little dumbfounded. We’d never been ones to use that sort of endearment. I think she’d called me darling maybe twice in our entire married career. She took my hand and tugged me down on the sofa beside her and put her arms around me. I hugged her in return. It wasn’t a passionate embrace. It was the sort of reassuring homecoming type of hug a couple would give each other if they’d been married the way we had and parted amicably and a little sadly, instead of one of them having run off with a horn player in the Stan Kenton band. We broke it off mutually after several seconds.
“Thanks,” she said, reaching over to get her brandy snifter. “I needed that.”
“Okay,” I told her. “Now what’s the trouble?”
She made a little moan and shook her head, then sipped at the brandy and handed the snifter to me. I sipped in turn while she told me about things.
“It’s just the very old story of a woman trying to make it in the professional world being expected to throw her body into the bargain.”
“Who expects it?”
“Everybody,” she said, looking up at me. “Well, not everybody maybe, but enough of them. Clients. Suppliers. My boss.”
“Your boss? I thought you were a partner.”
“I am. A junior partner. Enough of a junior partner so whenever Gene Olson gets stubborn about things, I pretty much feel I have to go along with whatever it is he wants.”
“Even to going to bed with people?”
“Oh, he doesn’t say it in so many words. But he says an attractive woman is an asset to any business venture and that all of a firm’s assets should be used to best advantage. It doesn’t take too much reading between the lines to know what that sort of pep talk is all about.”
“Is this Seahawks guy one of the ones he has in mind?”
“Very much so. He says I should cruise by their office some day. Show the flag.” She reached for the brandy snifter. “Show my legs, is what he means.”
“What’s Thackery’s position in the organization?”
“I don’t know. He’s a former player. Now a front office man of some sort. He arranges the team parties, among other things.”
“What about Olson himself? Does he feel the firm’s assets should be available to him as well?”
“No. I’ve been able to evade that little scene so far.” She gave a little shudder and sipped at the brandy. “We’d skirted around some of these things just this afternoon,” she continued. “I hadn’t expected him to be at the restaurant this evening or I wouldn’t have taken you there. And when they came over to the table, well, you were there. You heard the conversation.”
“I wasn’t paying all that much attention. What was said?”
“God, what kind of a detective are you? Gene practically came out and told him I’d be available for some extra innings if we got the catering contract.”
“Overtime,” I told her.
“What?”
“In football it’s overtime they go into if the regular game ends in a tie. Baseball goes extra innings.”
“It means the same thing.”
“I admit I was a little startled when you told Thackery you wanted to accommodate his football team. In some circles that would mean…”
“I know exactly what that would mean in some circles. Gene suggested I try to work something like that into the conversation the next time I encountered Brad. God, I could learn to hate men.”
I grunted and got up and took the snifter out to the kitchen and poured a little more brandy into it. I didn’t bother refilling the snifter I’d knocked over. I preferred drinking out of the same glass Lorna used. Her lipstick was imprinted on the rim. It had a nice flavor to it. Better than the brandy, I thought. I went back in and handed her the glass.
“So, Mr. Bragg. How does a girl handle this sort of problem?”
“I’m not sure. One thing, though. I think maybe before going into a business venture with somebody of the opposite sex, I’d make up my mind as to whether I’d be willing to do that sort of thing or not. And if not, I’d make that emphatically clear from the start.”
“Well yes, that’s a slick idea, except this isn’t the start. We’ve been in business for nearly four years now. It didn’t come up at the start.”
“When did it come up?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I even sometimes wonder if I’m only imagining all this. If I’m reading something into our conversations that isn’t really there. But we’re getting ready for a major expansion. We’re going to open a branch of Scandia Farms and eventually move our catering operation to a new commercial center going in right down there in Ballard, out near the locks. It’s a place called Potlatch Bay.”
“So that’s what that’s all about.”
“What?”
“Potlatch Bay. I’ve seen some billboards around town touting it.”
“Oh yes. It’s going to be Seattle’s newest razzmatazz development. Nearly everyone in town wants in on it. Anyway, we’re going to be a part of it. They’re having a luncheon next week to celebrate the lease-signing with everybody. They’re just starting construction, but you’d think it was going to open next month from the publicity it’s getting. And when we open down there, we’re anticipating business to really take off. Well, that’s not quite accurate. What we’re anticipating is a need for business to really take off to pay for all the additional help we’ll need to hire and operational costs. And Gene has sort of hinted I might be better equipped than he is to bring in
that new business.”
“But you say this is still all kind of vague.”
“Yes, that’s exactly what it is, kind of vague, and I don’t really know how to cope with it. And all of this came flooding back when the two of them came over to the table, and I already was in a nervous state being out with you, so I just began to bawl and…”
She bit off the statement and drank the brandy. When she lowered the glass, she stared at me and blinked her eyes a couple of times. “So there. Now you know.”
“Know what?”
“How I feel about you after all these years. The last thing in the world I ever expected. I’d grown just plain tired of you down in San Francisco, but when you came into Dolly and Benny’s home last night, I turned absolutely sappy. You’ve matured in a way I’d never thought possible. You’re like a different man, almost. Tougher, sexier…If you’d told me when you brought me home last night that you wanted to make love to me, I couldn’t have refused you to save my soul.”
My mouth fell open and I probably gaped.
“Don’t get me wrong, Peter. Tonight’s not last night. I’ve thought about it some since then and I don’t know if that would be such a good idea. And after the evening I’ve had, it just wouldn’t work tonight anyhow. But you might as well be forewarned. I might wake up in the morning feeling that same sappy way and come chasing after you with all colors flying. You deserve to be aware of this. You might have feelings one way or the other about it yourself. You might not want to see me anymore. I do remember, after all, the circumstances under which I left San Francisco.”
I sat stock still, studying her in the room’s dim light. She gave a little sigh, and before I knew what was going on, any resolve or willpower I might have had just turned to tapioca pudding. I put my arms around her again and she came into them with an eagerness that nearly belied what she’d said about what would or wouldn’t work out that night. We clung that way for a long time. This wasn’t homecoming; this was holding on for dear life in the haunted house that stores all the emotions we aren’t sure of. It wasn’t until I lowered my head and brushed a kiss against her ear that she pushed me back.
“No, Peter. I meant what I said. I think you should go now.”
She got up and led me to the door. I straightened my jacket and smiled at her. She opened the door, but turned back with one hand on my chest to keep me a moment longer.
“What do you feel about all this?” she asked. “Think we should see any more of each other?”
“Lorna, I don’t know what to think. No, that’s not right, either. Look, I think I’d like to see more of you. If nothing else, I’d like to try to think of some way to get things back on a businesslike basis between you and old Gene.”
“If that’s what’s needed,” she told me. “But I’d just die if you or I or anybody else brought it up and it turned out I was all wrong about things, that I’d just been reading things into his remarks. That’s what makes it so difficult. I just don’t know.”
EIGHT
The Jackson Detective Agency was on the upper floor of a two-story brick building down on lower Second Avenue. It wasn’t a smart part of town. The neighborhood had pawn shops, camping goods stores, small secondhand merchandise marts and more than a few abandoned storefronts. The air in the building was musty, and the wooden stairs I climbed had the worn grooves made by heavily shod men going up and down them over several decades. The agency office itself had the same old-time bare-knuckle feel to it as the streets outside. Just inside the outer door was a small reception area with a couple of straight-back chairs. A wooden slatted counter, waist high with a locked gate in it, separated the reception area from the main part of the office, which was about forty feet wide and twice that deep, with a walled-off inner office at the rear of the room. Scarred brown linoleum covered the floor and bare light bulbs screwed into green metal shades hung from the plaster ceiling. There were several banks of file cabinets and a number of desks spotted here and there.
A tall hatchet-faced man with straight black hair slicked back on his head was banging his way through file drawers, looking for something. Another man, built like a fireplug with gray crewcut hair, was at one of the desks talking on a telephone. Both of those men had their coats off and their sleeves rolled up. Both of them wore shoulder holsters that had handguns in them.
A third man, younger than the others but just as raw looking, also was on the phone at a desk a little ways beyond the counter and gate. An ashtray to one side of his desk was overflowing with old butts and he had a cigarette going in his mouth. He also was in shirtsleeves, but he wasn’t wearing a shoulder holster with a gun in it. That was on the desk next to the ashtray. He looked me over thoroughly while he finished his conversation, then he got up and came over to the counter with a raised eyebrow. I gave him one of my business cards.
“The name’s Bragg. I’d like to see Grady Jackson if he’s available.”
The guy nodded and whistled lightly through his teeth as he studied the card. He turned and went over to his desk, put the holster and gun inside one of the drawers and locked it, then walked back to the office in the rear of the room. He went through a door with a pane of translucent glass in it and was in there maybe a couple of minutes before he came out again. During the couple of minutes, the other two guys were committing me to memory. The guy who’d been banging through the file cabinets was at a desk and on the telephone now. The older fellow was off the phone and rubbing one hand across his blunt jaw. He picked up a file folder on the desk in front of him and began paging through it. It was about as no-nonsense a place as I’d ever seen.
The younger fellow came back up front and pushed a button on his desk that buzzed open the gate in the counter. “Go on back,” he told me. I did as he said.
Grady Jackson’s office was a little less utilitarian than the outer office. He had carpeting on the floor, a couple of comfortable-looking leather padded chairs with armrests—one for him, one for visitors—and a dark wooden desk. A Tiffany-style glass lamp hung over the desk, which had piles of papers scattered across it. Open shelves to one side held an array of folders, road maps and telephone books. A window in the wall behind the desk looked out at the back of another brick building across an alley.
The man studying me from behind the desk was in his late sixties. He sat tall and erect but had slack facial muscles that gave his wide mouth a rubbery look. Like the fellows out front, he worked in his shirtsleeves. A gray suit jacket hung from a coat tree in the corner. He had on a white shirt and a wide blue-and-white-striped cravat that had been made about the year the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. His eyes were the color of his suit and they stared at me noncommittally. He stood and leaned across the desk with a bony hand extended.
“Welcome to Seattle, Bragg.”
He had a quick way of speaking, as if he didn’t like much to do it.
“Thanks. Actually, I grew up in this town,” I told him, sitting in the leather chair he waved me to.
“What made you set up shop down in that land of queers?” he asked, looking at my business card.
I smiled patiently. “They don’t bother a person much. There probably aren’t as many of them there as people in other places think. Outside of a couple of areas in town where they live and caper, you hardly notice them. I used to work for one of the newspapers in San Francisco. That’s how I opened my office there.”
The older man grunted. “Shoulda seen the newspaper picture they ran here a while back. Taken in San Francisco on—what is it they call it? Fag Freedom Day?”
“Gay Freedom Day.”
“Anyways, there musta been thousands of ’em, bare-chested and smooching all over the goddamn place. Jesus Christ, was enough to make a man puke. You’re not one of ’em, are you? You don’t look it.”
“No, sir. I’ve preferred girls my whole life. And the photo you saw probably was a little misleading. That annual celebration they have with a parade and all attracts people from all over the West. If it
was like that there all the time, I’d probably move.”
That seemed to satisfy him. He looked at my card again. “You working or just bumming around the old hometown?”
“A little of both. Actually, what brought me up here, and eventually to see you, is a problem an old school chum who lives here has been having.”
“What kind of problem?”
“Somebody wants to get him out of town. He’s had some phone threats. Somebody took a couple of shots at him up by Woodland Park one day—monkeyed with his car brakes. Things like that. I thought maybe I could try to get to the bottom of it for him. I haven’t done so well up to now. The only reason I came to see you is that by now I’m really clutching at straws.”
He didn’t make a move, but something in his face made me feel he was putting a little distance between us. “What sort of a straw am I?”
“He said he had a talk with you a while back. And I’m to the point where I’m checking in with anybody he’s had contact with lately. I can’t find any obvious reason for the things that have been going on.”
“What’s this fellow’s name?”
“Benny Bartlett. He writes freelance articles. Said he did a piece on detective agencies in the Pacific Northwest that’s due to run soon.”
“Oh yeah yeah yeah, I remember that fellow. Owly-looking little man. Wears glasses and squints a lot.”
“That’s the one.”
Jackson chuckled. “You figure maybe we’re trying to stifle the press, something like that?”
I smiled back at him. “Not really. I wouldn’t just come dancing on in here and lay it all out for you if I really believed that. Benny said when he told you why he needed to mention your agency—to show how things work in Olympia and what he intended to write—that you were reasonable enough about it. I just want to hear you say the same thing. Maybe ask if you have any ideas on the matter. See if you’ve heard of anything similar happening around town recently.”
