The Deader the Better

by G. M. Ford

  We worked our brandies. Except for the hissing of the fire, the room was silent.

  “That was quite a trauma you two had.”

  I hadn’t thought of it before, but I said, “I don’t think she’s ever been scared like that.”

  “Most people haven’t.”

  “I don’t think she knows how to handle it.”

  “Most people wouldn’t.”

  “Stop being sensible, will you?”

  “Have you thought that this may not be the best time in your life to be making decisions?” he said. When I didn’t answer, he continued. “Like when a spouse dies, they say not to do anything drastic for a year. Don’t quit your job, don’t sell your house, that kind of thing. The suggestion being that trauma quite often does not for wise choices make.”

  “What happened to us in Stevens Falls just amplified what was already going on,” I said.

  “Which was?”

  “I think that would depend upon which one of us you asked.”

  “If I asked you?”

  “If you asked me, I’d say…maybe I’m feeling a little chafed. Like my relationship isn’t so much part of my life as much as it’s becoming my life, and I don’t know how I feel about that. It’s like for the first time in my life, I pretty much know what next week is going to look like.” Before he could say anything, I held up my hand. “But I don’t want it to sound like it’s something Rebecca’s doing to me, because it’s not. Lots of it is internal.”

  I got to my feet and walked over to the fire and turned my back to the flames.

  “I’m feeling like an old fart. There’s nothing on the radio I like anymore. It’s like I’ve been banished to either the jazz channel or the oldies station. I watch these TV shows and they’ve got kids who don’t shave yet playing grizzled homicide dicks, on programs I can’t remember the names of. The only programs that sell anything I might even remotely want to buy are golf tournaments, and I’m telling you, man, that just scares the hell out of me.”

  “What is it you’re afraid of…ending up like everybody else?”

  I wouldn’t have put it that way, but, “Yeah, I guess it’s something like that.”

  “Notice how we keep getting back to the things about you that I love.”

  “You lost me.”

  “That’s where we were a while back, on the question of why you’ll never be one of those guys calling his broker at six in the morning. It’s the same answer. It’s because you’ve got your own thing going on, your own set of standards, your own set of goals about which…”—I started to speak, but he raised his voice—“about which—and this is the crux of the issue—about which you do…not…compromise, Leo. And that, my old friend, while a noble and romantic stance, will get you old and alone.”

  I could feel the blood rising to my cheeks.

  “So what, then? I take a job for one of the big outfits? Wear a tie? Spend my days tracking skip traces by computer?”

  “Certainly not. Not only would it kill you, but you’d be lousy at it.”

  “Being a PI is all I’ve ever done.”

  “You’d be useless at anything else. A clockwork orange.”

  As usual, Jed had hit it right on the head. At this point in my life, whenever I pictured myself in another career, the image I saw always seemed as unnatural and unnecessary as a piece of mechanical fruit. I tried to lighten things up.

  “Well, of course, there’s playing lead guitar for the Stones, but you know Keith’s already got the gig.”

  “Dreams die hard,” he said. I took a sip of the cognac and let it roll around on my palate before swallowing. For the first time in weeks, the burnt smell was missing from my nostrils. I swirled the liquor and took another sip.

  “About a month ago, I’m having lunch with Charlie Cook. You remember Charlie?” Jed nodded. “At the Two Bells Tavern on Fourth. Anyway…before I start this story, I should give you a little history. Charlie’s about three years older than I am. I used to look up to him like the big brother I didn’t have. We used to do a lot of crazy things together.” I took another sip of my cognac.

  Jed raised his glass in a toast. “Ah, youth.”

  “The one that comes to mind is the time he had a date with this Italian girl. Name of Carlotta Something or othera. Very strict old-school parents. They wouldn’t let Charlie take Carlotta out unless he got a date for her little sister Rosie, which, of course, is where I come into it. So we show up on Friday night. The family had this delicatessen down in Garlic Gulch. Parents have gone home for the day. The only one there is this brother Mario, who, while the girls are on their way down, tells us all the things he and the family are going to do to us if we put so much as a hand on their girls.”

  “Sarah’s father threatened to put my scrotal sac through an offset press.”

  For the first time in weeks, I laughed. “So the girls show up and they’re both gorgeous and nice and we take ‘em out to a movie— A Shot in the Dark, I think it was the first Pink Panther flick. Anyway, we’re bringin’ ‘em home when they say they want to stop at the deli. So we stop. They drag us inside, where they snag a couple of bottles of chianti from the shelves and lead us up onto the roof, where, much to my and Charlie’s amazement, they turn out to be the horniest creatures either of us had ever encountered. Within minutes I’m naked and doing all the things I always thought I wanted to be doing. Charlie’s over on the far side of the roof with the sister, but, you know, I can hear that the same thing is going on over there.”

  “Your first time?” Jed asked.

  “No…but pretty close. It was the first time it wasn’t pitchblack and there wasn’t a gear-shift lever involved.”

  “Go on.”

  “Okay…to make a long story short, about the time we’re halfway to paradise, the brother Mario shows up and can hear what’s going on up on the roof. Thank God one of the sisters locked the door to the roof. So Mario goes ballistic. He’s throwing himself at the door, screaming in Italian. By then we’d put away the wine, so we’re all laughing our asses off while we’re trying to get it down, but you know…I’m young and I’ll be damned if I’m going to stop until I get some relief…but I’m laughing my ass off, which is not helping the matter at all.”

  “A dilemma.”

  “Well, anyway, about the time the fire axe starts to come through our side of the door, Charlie and I figure it’s time for our withdrawal.”

  “Literally and figuratively.”

  “Except there’s no way down. Not even a drainpipe to climb down, so, in order not to become geldings, we end up having to jump two stories into a dumpster full of spoiled fruit.”

  Jed gave me another toast. I did my end.

  “So…thirty years later, I’m sitting in a tavern with this same guy and he’s got his glasses on and he’s studying the menu like there’s going to be a test, when he looks over at me and he says, ‘I’m gonna be really bad today. I’m gonna have the chicken.’”

  Jed burst out laughing.

  “I mean, it was like a moment of epiphany for me. What the hell has happened to us? How’d we get to where being‘really bad’ involves ordering the chicken instead of the fruit plate? What happened to those kids on the roof? To the spontaneity…the joy?”

  “Same dilemma you’re faced with now.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Whether to follow your instincts and get the hell off the roof, or stay with the girl and risk being neutered.”

  “Neutered is too strong a word.”

  “What would you prefer?”

  I thought it over. “Diminished, maybe.”

  “Or maybe tamed.”

  “Something like that,” I admitted.

  “I’m sure it won’t be news to you if I say that life is a system of trade-offs.”

  I started to speak, but thought better of it. I could think of thirty more things to say, but in the end, all of them, in some manner or another, validated my feelings and trivialized Rebecca’s. So I shut up a
nd finished my cognac in silence. I set the empty glass on the mantel and said, “Hey, man…thanks for putting up with me.”

  He got up and gave me a hug. We were embracing and patting one another on the back when Maria poked her head in the door to say she was going home for the evening. I gave her a salacious wink over Jed’s shoulder. She closed the door. “Maria’s going to think we’re gay,” I said.

  “Who cares?” he said and hugged me tighter. Used to be I could count on Jed to come to my aid at a moment’s notice. These days it’s not that simple. “Hey,” I said as we patted ourselves back into shape. “First week after the new year, I’ve got a little something going on…I was wondering if you could maybe lawyer for the crew if necessary.”

  “Are you anticipating problems?”

  “No,” I said honestly. “Just as a failsafe.”

  “This wouldn’t include a little fishing vacation, would it?”

  “It might,” I said.

  He motioned toward the half-empty cognac bottle. “Care to tell me about it?”

  I shook my head. “Couldn’t possibly do it,” I said. “Not with you being an officer of the court and all.”

  19

  SOME PEOPLE YOU PICTURE IN YOUR MIND’S EYE AS A smile or a unique tilt of the head. Others are most readily recalled by the ear as a hearty laugh or a breathy tone of voice. Floyd was the only person in the world whom I associated with a smell. On three prior occasions, I’d hired Floyd to protect me. In each case, someone had died violently. The last one heaved his final breath in the front seat of my former car. It had probably been my imagination, but after that night in west Seattle, I’d never been able to get behind the wheel of that car without the sweet smell of brains tickling my nostrils, and to this day, the mention of his name carries that faintly metallic odor to my nose like a breeze.

  Even now, the smell loitered in the air around me as I dialed the number you started with, if you were looking for Floyd. “Windjammer,” the rough voice answered.

  “I’d like to talk to Floyd,” I said.

  His routine never varied. “Got nobody here with a name like that,” he growled.

  “In case you do,” I said. “Have him call Leo Waterman.”

  I left the cell phone number.

  “Whatever floats your boat, buddy,” he said and hung up. I snapped the phone closed, turned the ringer all the way up and put it in my jacket pocket. Floyd would get back to me when he could. Time to find Kurtis Ryder III. Kurtis was the black sheep of the socially prominent Ryder clan. A solitary stain on an otherwise pristine landscape of old money and privilege that for four generations had occupied the very apex of Seattle society. And what a black sheep he was.

  Kurtis came out before most people were aware there was a closet. He was neither flamboyant nor apologetic about his preferences, but merely went about his life in the manner he saw fit. Despite the narrow-minded attitudes of the time, the family, to its credit, closed ranks around Kurtis, and for a while became ardent financial supporters of the burgeoning gay and lesbian rights movement. Interestingly enough, Kurtis’s problems had nothing to do with his sexual preferences. Kurtis liked to gamble. By the time he’d graduated from Stanford with an electrical engineering degree, he was over three hundred thousand dollars in debt to a pair of Oakland bookies. He claimed he was so naive he figured he’d just move home to Seattle and that would be the end of it. Predictably, the bookies didn’t see it that way. A week after graduation, two gentleman in bad suits pulled him from his car, dragged him into the alley behind what was then the Green Parrot Lounge and beat the living crap out of him with iron rods. They told him they hadn’t broken his knees only because they wanted their money and breaking his legs would have delayed that process. They gave him ten days to get even or, as they put it, get measured for a creeper. Kurtis, naturally, went to his father.

  His father, naturally, said no. Not only no, but he forbade anyone else in the family, on pain of disinheritance, to assist his irresponsible and ungrateful son in any way. Kurtis made the rounds of the relatives, but it was no go. By the time the family dust settled, Kurtis had six days left until he became differently abled. He spent a day and a half considering everything from suicide to the Alaskan wilderness and then came up with the plan that was to change his life forever.

  He remembered a party he’d been to a couple of months before, during spring break. A friend of a friend of a friend. Some people with a big new house up on the Magnolia Bluffs. He remembered his amusement at how eager they had been to show off their newfound wealth in an obvious and ostentatious way that would have appalled the bluenose members of his own family. Money and jewelry strewn about. How she’d insisted he look in her jewelry collection, and how the husband had dragged him around by the elbow showing off his new burglar alarm setup, and how he’d stood there thinking that anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of electronics could walk right through something like that.

  I still remember when he told me about that night, and the look he had in his eyes while he recounted the story of bypassing the alarm with a piece of tinfoil, creeping around the house, with his heart pounding out of his chest, and then finding what he was looking for right there in the bedroom with the couple. “And when I was standing there in the dark,”

  he told me, “I’ve got all this stuff in my arms, and it’s deadly quiet and both of them are laying there snoring…man, I’m telling you, I had a religious experience. I felt like electricity was running through my body, and in that moment I knew that all that money I’d pissed away gambling had just been for the risk…I didn’t like gambling. I like risk. I knew right then that burglary was my calling.”

  At forty cents on the dollar from a fence, he hadn’t pulled enough jewelry out of the Magnolia house to pay his whole debt, but he had bought himself some time. Time that he used to get himself reestablished on the local highbrow party scene, where his scandalous presence brought an air of insubordination to what might otherwise have been a series of opulent but dull gatherings. Like clockwork, however, a couple of weeks after the party, the hosts would brush the sleep from their eyes to find their family’s most treasured baubles missing and presumed fenced.

  To this day Kurtis claims that, having paid off his debt and socked a little away for himself besides, the burglary he was caught committing was to have been his last. It was ugly. They not only got him for the hotel room he was caught in, but his fence rolled over on him and then it turned out that they were already hip to him on the society burglaries, so, in spite of being a first-time offender, Kurtis ended up doing the three of a three-to-five on McNeil Island, where he went to burglary college.

  The difference between Kurtis and your average convicted felon is that Kurtis is highly intelligent, while most of them are dumber than dirt. He’d picked the brain of every thief, second-story man and cat burglar in the institution and returned to Seattle a true master of his trade. He still spent quite a bit of time in police stations, because anytime anything of great value was missing, he was number one on the“usual suspects” list, but, to my knowledge, he had never done any more serious time.

  Kurtis lived in the Ravenna area, up on the hill behind the university. He rented the upstairs of a blue and white Edwardian house from a pair of married attorneys who just happened to be his attorneys of record. Interesting arrangement, I’d always thought. I pushed his button on the door. Voice-over speaker.

  “Be right down.”

  Kurtis is a handsome fellow with a thick shock of what used to be called strawberry-blond hair, beginning to grow slightly gray at the temples and worn long. He was what I’d call willowy rather than thin, as if he weren’t connected quite as tightly at the joints as the rest of us. He gave the impression of flowing from point to point. We shook hands. “There was buzz that you came home on your shield, Leo,” he said with a perfect smile. “So glad to see the rumor was unfounded.”

  “That makes two of us,” I assured him.

  We walked down
to the Queen Mary Tea Room, ordered coffee and traded recent life stories for a few minutes. Seems the Bellevue police were making his life miserable over a burglary-related shooting. “Hayseeds,” he was saying. “As if…like I’m going in armed.” As far as Kurtis was concerned, any thief who went out armed was lower than whale shit. You did your homework. You made your entry. Took what you came for. And then made your exit. Period. If something went wrong, you kept your mouth shut until your lawyer arrived. He claimed to have talked his way out of darkened rooms on more than twenty occasions, and I believed him. Kurtis had even less patience with small talk than I did. Before we got our first refill he said, “On the phone, you didn’t say much.”

  “Cell phone.”

  He held up a hand to say he understood.

  “I need a man of your talents.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Which ones?”

  “Breaking and entering.”

  “Ooooh.”

  “To get in and out of places.” I pointed a finger. “Don’t,”

  I said.

  First he looked hurt, then bored. “Any competent locksmith—”

  “Under adverse conditions.”

  “Aaah,” he said. “Why me?”

  “Because I need somebody who Carl Cradduck will work with, and you know what an incredible pain in the ass he is.”

  “When you’re as good at what you do as Uncle Carl is, you get to be as eccentric as you want to be,” he said.

  “I’ve heard several buzzes that said you’ve worked together before.”

  “I don’t think it would be telling tales to say that the horrific Mr. Cradduck and I have on several occasions consulted.”

  “That’s why I’m coming to you first.”

  “You and him are tight,” he scoffed. “He wouldn’t turn you down.” His eyebrows went up a notch. “This wouldn’t perchance be pro bono, would it?” he inquired.

  “No,” I said. “I’ll pay you for your time, but there isn’t going to be any score at the end of it. I want to let you know that right now.”

  “Talk to me.”

  I did. I gave him the abridged version. “Interesting,” was all he said.