Earl W. Emerson

by The smoke room: a novel of suspense

  “He would have known that? That the man was her lover?”

  “I assume so. I don’t pretend to understand even half of what goes on between the two of them, but I wasn’t going to stand around and watch him shoot you down.”

  “What happened to your real mother?”

  “She moved to Wichita. Married a man from the old neighborhood—

  our real estate agent, in fact. My father tends to attract faithless wives. Iola’s his third.”

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  She walked me up the street to my Subaru and seemed reluctant to let me go, engaging in small talk for five minutes after I unlocked my car.

  “You seeing anybody?” I asked finally.

  She stiffened and stepped back. “Not that you would notice.”

  Before I could say anything else, she turned on her heel and went back down the hill. Like two small nations threatened by a larger entity, we’d established an uneasy truce after her father showed up, but a truce was all it was.

  27. BITCH DRIVE SOUTHWEST

  W FRIDAY, I ARRIVED at seven-thirty, a full half hour before the appointed time, and was surprised to see Tronstad’s new orange truck already parked in the long drive, and beside it, Johnson’s shiny new Cadillac.

  The house was on Beach Drive—or Bitch Drive according to Tronstad—a scenic, winding road stretching along the Puget Sound from the Alki Point Lighthouse south to Lincoln Park. As the name suggested, it followed the beach on the western side of the peninsula that comprised West Seattle. With its barnacle-and seaweed-strewn rocks, it wasn’t much of a beach, not compared to Alki north of the point. From time to time as I drove, I spotted the wreckage of the sunset through the trees and houses. I loved this part of town, so full of wealth and privilege, as well as teenagers speeding around in Porsches or Infinitis. I would have given almost anything to have grown up here. It was ironic how much I’d craved money my whole life and how revolted I was now with the twelve million dollars in my possession.

  This was an area of West Seattle the hoi polloi rarely saw, houses your average peasant like me never visited, not unless you showed up to install a sprinkler system, clip grass, pick up dog shit, or help tote in a piano with rags tied around your shoes. I’d done that in high school. It was such a contrast to the housing where I lived on the other side of the promontory: shacks left over from when the steel mills had been going gangbusters, little more than two or three rooms and a toilet. Tronstad’s real estate license gave him access to almost any house for sale in the area, a privilege he abused at will. He’d had his license for two years, but lethargy and indolence limited his sales to the infrequent stroke of good luck or an acquaintance in the fire department who hadn’t been warned about him. His commissions were always gone within days.

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  I parked behind them, noticing that the bed of Tronstad’s Ford was crammed full of belongings, including his motorcycle, which he’d roped down securely. I squinted through the darkness to where a single porch light burned over a utility-door entrance. As far as I could tell, it was the only light on in the house.

  “Hey, man!”

  “Jesus,” I said. “You scared me out of my boots.” Robert Johnson had been sitting inside his dark car as I walked past.

  “Tronstad was already here at seven. Think he’s setting a trap? You give him the bonds and he eliminates the last two witnesses?”

  “You don’t really think that, do you, Robert?”

  “Why not?”

  “I just don’t believe it.”

  Johnson climbed out of his Caddy and closed the door quietly. “Tronstad’s a loose cannon. There’s no telling what he’ll do.” He pulled his jacket back until I saw the butt of a semiautomatic pistol in a shiny holster on his belt.

  “Oh, no, Robert. What are you planning?”

  He brushed past me and walked toward the house. “The question is, what is he planning?”

  “I’m not going in if you’re carrying a weapon.”

  “You think Tronstad doesn’t have a gun? You think I won’t be protecting you as well as myself ?”

  “I think . . . Oh, heck.”

  As we walked side by side to the house, I took some comfort in the fact that Robert distrusted Tronstad even more than I did, and that he and I had formed an alliance of sorts. There was no overestimating the maniacal thinking of a man like Tronstad, no overstating how fast a man with no conscience could move when you put the squeeze on him.

  “You should get yourself a weapon,” Johnson said. “Pick up a rock or something.”

  “I’m not very good with rocks.”

  Just outside the door, Johnson said, “By the way, where are the bags?”

  “Inside.”

  “In the house?”

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  “I’ll tell you inside.”

  He wasn’t happy with that, but there wasn’t much he could do. The house was a two-story Georgian, white with dark green trim. The estate grounds comprised half an acre, all of it carefully groomed and maintained. The door was unlocked when Johnson tried it, pushing it open with the pads of his fingertips. “Hello? Tronstad?”

  We went inside, proceeding toward a source of illumination at the rear of the house, Robert switching on lights as we entered each room. The house was furnished, though sparsely, as if raiders had taken favorite pieces, an open space here, an empty room there. On the walls were squares of lighter paint where artwork had been removed. As we headed toward a light at the back of the house, I looked through the living-room windows and scanned the last of the pink-andpurple sunset over the Olympic Mountains. Puget Sound stretched out below the house, and at the end of the lawn a small dock jutted into the inky water.

  “Took you so long?” Tronstad was in a chair at the head of the diningroom table, sitting in the dark, a bottle of Seagram’s on one side, a halffilled cut-glass tumbler on the other. He was slumped, so his head was almost below the level of the table, sipping from the glass, handling it with the familiarity of a man who was already half-tanked.

  “I don’t see the bags. You didn’t leave them out in your car, did you?”

  “They’re not here.”

  “You didn’t get them?” Tronstad didn’t even raise his voice. He was in a semi-stupor. “You didn’t fucking get them?”

  “No, and I’m glad I didn’t.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re drunk.”

  “I ain’t that drunk.”

  “The bonds are safe. I just can’t lay my hands on them tonight.”

  “You trying to buy more time? Is that what this is about? So you can think through the ethical implications of your measly little life? Because if that’s what you’re up to, I got news for you. You’re already on the wrong side of the fence.”

  “I couldn’t get on the property.”

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  “What do you mean you couldn’t get on the property?” Johnson asked. Although he kept his voice calm, I’d been around him long enough to know he was pissed.

  “They’re on somebody else’s property.”

  “Go back for them now,” said Tronstad, calmly. “We’ll wait. Better yet, we’ll come with you.”

  “Not tonight. I almost got shot.”

  “You put them on somebody else’s property?” Johnson was growing more and more indignant. “Why would you do a fool thing like that?”

  “If you haven’t noticed, I don’t own any property of my own. Besides, somebody already tried to break into my rental. If I’d kept them at home, they might be gone now.”

  “Who tried to break in?” Tronstad asked.

  “I thought it was you.” I stared at Tronstad. “One of you guys.”

  “I didn’t do it. Swear to God.”

  Johnson pushed a button on the wall and a dim overhead chandelier came on. Tronstad’s face looked yellow, the
circles under his eyes dark, as if he’d been made up like a pirate. His red shirt contributed to the effect.

  “Hell, I knew you weren’t dumb enough to keep the stuff at home,”

  Tronstad said, laughing. “You’re not the sharpest pencil in the box, Gum, but you’re not that stupid, either.”

  “Who tried to break in?” Johnson asked. “Who else knows?”

  “Brown knows,” I said.

  “If he doesn’t,” said Tronstad, “he sure as hell suspects. And then, of course, there’s Heather. And whoever else she told, probably that whole lesbian rugby team.”

  “They’re not lesbians,” I said.

  “Carpet munchers,” said Tronstad. “All of ’em. Take my word for it.”

  “Brown’s the one worries me,” I said. “And whoever comes after him.”

  “We’re getting off topic.” Tronstad remained implacable. The times I’d seen him drunk, he’d been like this, sluggish, unconcerned, agreeable.

  “So we don’t have the stuff tonight. When do we get it?”

  “Like I said. I’ll try tomorrow.”

  “We’re working tomorrow.”

  “I’ll take the day off.”

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  “Great. I already called in sick.”

  “I called in sick, too,” said Johnson.

  “Jesus, you guys. Don’t you think that’s going to look funny? The whole crew out sick?”

  “Fuck, they shoulda given us merits off,” said Tronstad. “We went through some major trauma. Our lieutenant. Our chief.” He sipped, poured himself more booze, then laughed. “Yeah, man. We been through minor-league hell, us three. And you, Doublemint. You’re a fuckin’ hero again. Surviving the whirlpool that got Sears. Every time I turn around you’re a hero. Go ahead. Take the day off, you’ll probably rescue a baby on the way home. The mother’ll be a producer of the evening news. She’ll give you a blow job and put you on national television. Afterward, they’ll run you for senator. You’re golden, man. The only thing you gotta worry about is when they accidentally prick your tittie pinning all those medals on your chest.”

  “Brown will be back,” I said. “If not him, then the next guy.”

  “I’ll take care of the geezer,” Tronstad said. “Just give us the bonds.”

  “You’re going to have to give me another day or two.”

  Tronstad waved his hand in the air. The lids of his eyes had become heavy. “I guess if you were going to run out on us, you’d be somewhere else by now. South America or wherever.”

  “I like it here.”

  “My question to you, Tronstad,” Johnson said, “is why is your truck packed full of stuff ?”

  “Moving my girlfriend.”

  “You don’t have a girlfriend,” Johnson said.

  “Fuck you. Fuck you both. I got into a beef with the landlord. Is that okay with you?”

  “Why lie about it?” I asked.

  “Because I knew how you two anal retentives would react.”

  “You’re leaving town as soon as you get your share,” Johnson said.

  “Aren’t you?”

  “I don’t even know why you care.”

  “Because it’ll point the finger at us,” I said. “Once you vanish, they’ll start looking more closely at us.”

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  “Why would they look for me? I lost my lieutenant and resigned. That’s not so strange.”

  “Bullshit,” said Johnson.

  After it was decided all three of us would show up for work in the morning, Johnson and I walked back to our vehicles in the dark. I said, “I hope he doesn’t kill himself with booze and drugs.”

  “Maybe you should hope he does.”

  28. KISSABLE

  W I LET JOHNSON leave first, then reversed onto Beach Drive and backed into the neighbor’s driveway, where I shut off my lights and engine and took my foot off the brake. Except for the pinging of my aluminum engine block as it cooled, the neighborhood was hushed. Something about the way he’d sent us off made me wonder about Tronstad’s intentions. The whole time we’d been inside he’d made no effort to get up from the dining-room table. For someone as nervous as he habitually was, that in itself was noteworthy.

  Although we were going about our business as if everything were hunky-dory, I knew nothing would be the same between the three of us. Once you were involved in another man’s death, you thought about it when you woke up, when you waited at a stoplight, in line at the grocery store, and at night brushing your teeth. Not a day would go by that I wouldn’t think about Fred and Susan Rankler, Russell Abbott, and Sweeney Sears—and what I might have done to keep them alive. The most depressing aspect of it all was that I was aware of the magnitude of our collective folly, while the other two saw only dollar signs. Flash a few million in front of your average Joe-Blow Americano, and all electrical impulses to the nut shut off.

  I waited in the car until well after eight o’clock. I couldn’t help thinking people had been hidden in the house when Johnson and I were inside—Tronstad’s biker buddies with rusty pipe wrenches—and that if I waited long enough, I might see them leave.

  At a quarter to nine, a vehicle on Beach Drive stopped directly in front of me in the street. At first I thought it was somebody who wanted the driveway I was in, but the lights moved on and the vehicle pulled in next door.

  The vehicle was a black SUV, a Nissan Pathfinder, dirty from a recent

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  road trip. A minute later I walked to the property and spotted, barely visible through the muck on the truck windows, a red IAFF union sticker: International Association of Fire Fighters. The Pathfinder was vacant, the door unlocked, so I got in, picked up some of the papers on the seat, shuffled them, and found the words to the hymn we’d sung at Sears’s funeral yesterday afternoon. He will guide my pathway, e’er I trust his staff. The Pathfinder had belonged to Sweeney Sears. I detected the faint aroma of perfume, the fragrance Heather Wynn wore. Feeling the guilt that comes with pawing through a dead man’s belongings, I went back to my car and watched the house through the wrought-iron fence. Fifteen minutes passed. Twenty. Surely, once she saw how potted he was, she would bail out.

  When she still hadn’t come out by nine-fifteen, I fired up the Subaru and left.

  F I V E M I N U T E S L AT E R I found myself parked on Alki Avenue, across the road from the bike shop. I was only blocks from the Pederson place up on the hill. After a few minutes I went around to the back of my car, took out my in-line skates and helmet, and was soon relishing the hard sound of the plastic wheels on concrete as I launched onto the path along the beach. Because Alki Avenue was lit up like a circus ramp, you could skate there all night without bringing your own light. I skated east to the viewpoint across from downtown Seattle, then rounded the point and headed south toward Salty’s. Across the water, the high-rises were lit up and looked stark and clean against the dark horizon. Even though the path extended another mile or so, I turned around at Salty’s in order to avoid Friday night drunks in pickup trucks crossing the trail as they came out of the restaurant parking lot. On my second lap, I stopped at my car, doffed my jacket, swigged half a bottle of green Gatorade, and resumed skating. I hadn’t gotten any exercise in a couple of days, and my pent-up energy propelled me to speeds that made my legs ache and my lungs feel as if they were bringing up blood. I skated for an hour. I wanted to skate all night. I wanted to skate for the rest of my life.

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  The weather was cool, and the stars winked in black patches of sky where the clouds separated. I saw a pair of heavyset women on the path. An old man wearing so much body armor he looked like something out of a Monty Python movie. A few other skaters.

  There were people who skated everywhere with one arm behind their backs. There were those who refused to lift their feet. Those who picked up their feet as if wa
lking through deep snow. Some skated upright. Others in a racing crouch. Others took on an odd rhythm with their hips. All of that was fine for a recreational skater, but economy of movement was key for speed, and most of an individual’s identifying characteristics were imperfections of style. Ten expert skaters, it was hard to tell them apart. A slight tailwind had boosted my speed just before I spotted a woman skating a quarter mile in front of me. I closed the gap, watching her move, thinking I knew who she was.

  She was headed the same direction I was, and as was her habit, she wore wrist protectors but no knee pads and no helmet. I pulled alongside, dragging a skate with a rattling noise that startled her. “You?”

  “You, too,” I said.

  She wore the same short-sleeved shirt she’d had on at the house a couple of hours earlier with grass stains on the knees of her jeans. If you looked only at her face with her wind-tousled bangs, she appeared to be around ten years old, yet she had a woman’s wide hips to go with that bony frame and a good rhythm to accompany the coltish movement of her arms.

  She sped up as if to skate away from me, but I paced alongside her easily, then behind her, on the other side, in front. I did a hop and a twist and skated backward ten feet in front. Showing off.

  “You down here for the exercise, or are you following me?” I said.

  “I didn’t have anything else to do.”

  “No hot date? It’s Friday night. I would think you would have a hot date.”

  “I had a date. I whipped his ass and sent him home.”

  “Ouch. That hurts.” We skated in silence for half a minute. “What do you do?”

  “I’m a cop for the City of Seattle.”

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  “Funny, I work for the city, too.”

  “I know. You’re a fireman.” She accentuated the “fire” as if it were hilarious.