Dancing Bear

by James Crumley

  “Don’t mention it.”

  “And I wanted to apologize for my behavior that—ah, night…”

  “Behavior?”

  “I just had a childish fit of jealousy,” she said, “perhaps as much directed at Cassie as at you. She is—ah, an impressive-looking woman without her clothes.”

  “Impressive?”

  “Yes,” she said, “but it’s none of my business. My business is the proposed Dancing Bear Wilderness Area. A friend of mine in D.C. has gotten a line on the owners of the old C, C&K Railroad sections—some holding company out of Luxembourg—and he thinks they will go for a land swap, since most of the timber on their sections is third growth and on sidehills too steep to log economically under currect regulations. And I’ve been working on your deal—”

  “My deal?”

  “My God, you really are out of it, aren’t you!” she said. “I’ve arranged for a plaque to be placed in Camas Meadows and come up with private monies to supplement the price we can offer, and I’ve also decided that those private things we talked about can be arranged.”

  “Private things?”

  “You know,” she said, snuffing out the cigarette butt, “the weekend in Seattle, the night on your grandfather’s grave…” Even in the fading light her dark hair glistened, and a blush rose from beneath the collar of her brown satin blouse, flushed across her neck and softened the rough planes of her face.

  I leaned over, brushed her cheek with my lips, then whispered in her ear, “You listen to me, lady…” She tried to move away but I pulled her closer. “And listen good. I am about to go fucking insane, lady, my house has been burned down, people have been trying to kill me, and I’ve seen enough dead bodies in the last week or so to last a lifetime, and I’m in no mood to talk about some goddamned wilderness area. If you don’t tell me where the fuck Cassandra Bogardus is, I’m going to rip this ear right off the side of your head.” I took a sturdy grip on her ear with my teeth. From someplace so deep in my chest that I couldn’t imagine it, a low, rumbling growl rattled.

  Only Simmons saved me. He came in without knocking, the martini pitcher and two glasses in his hands.

  “Oops! Sorry, boss,” he said, then unloaded the drinks on the table, excused himself again, and rushed out of the room as I released Carolyn’s ear, straightened up, and stopped growling. At least I couldn’t hear it anymore, but I felt it down there waiting to be let out again.

  “Jesus Christ,” I sighed, “I’m sorry, babe.” But when I put a hand on her shoulder, Carolyn bolted for the bathroom, her face in her hands.

  When she came out, I sat slumped in a chair at the table, feeling as small and tired as Charlie Two Moons had looked in the cab of his pickup. I had poured a martini, but it sat untouched before me, the crystal liquid still trembling in the dim light. Carolyn switched on the hanging lamp over the table.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “it’s been—”

  But she held up her hand to stop me. She gunned the martini I had poured and wiped the tears off her tough face. Then she stood across the table from me, saying, “Don’t interrupt me, Milo, please. I do not know where Cassie is, I do not know what sort of trouble she is in, and I do not think I can stand one more second of this goddamned cowboy-and-Indian shit. It is just too crazy for me.” She paused to take a deep breath. “And now will you do me a favor?”

  “Anything, love.”

  “Will you please stand up and hold me?”

  I did, standing up, then lying down in our clothes on the thick fur of Brother Silvertip, held her until she finally went to sleep. I went into Simmons’ room to borrow a blanket. He was watching Blood on the Moon with Robert Mitchum, a movie I hadn’t seen since my childhood. But I didn’t have time to watch it now.

  “Anything I can do, boss?” he asked.

  “Watch this movie for me,” I said, then used his telephone to call the young lawyer, McMahon, at his home number in Seattle. He wasn’t there, so I tried his office, even though it was late. He was there, but it sounded as if a party was going on around him. He had news, but not good news. Multitechtronics, Inc., was a wholly owned subsidiary of a Hong Kong import-export firm, which in turn was owned by a Bangkok holding company. A paper maze, he explained, that only more money could solve. I promised to send more money, then went back to cover up Carolyn’s sleeping body.

  I poured a martini and took it out to the balcony. The moon had waxed toward fullness since last I saw it, and in its quiet glow the rushing waters of the Meriwether looked like a sheet of black ice. Maybe if I took a steam bath, sweated the confusion and poison out of my bloodstream, then slept, I would know what to do tomorrow—a three-day steam bath and a long winter’s nap, maybe. Sarah, Gail, poor Johnny Rideout/Rausche with his saluting son and Sally with the cancer behind her eye, Korean nightmares in Elk City, a dawn full of guns and drugs, dead bodies and fire, that goddamned Cassandra Bogardus and her windy tale of poachers who acted like a Mafia family…

  Maybe she had already called Goodpasture in Albuquerque to tell him where the fat lady sang, maybe she hadn’t lied about that. But as I thought of the fat lady, I remembered the fat cocaine dealer on the Olympic Peninsula fingering the thick plastic wrapping, the odd pinkish-gray powder, and telling me I must have balls the size of a gorilla. And the brain of an addled chicken, lizards with feathers. She had seen the black plastic and the powder before. Maybe she knew where it came from. Whatever, at least it was a place to begin again, something to do besides watch the Meriwether run its rocky, cold course to the sea.

  —

  After Simmons and I had shed our rich duds and loaded all our goods, except the grizzly hide, into my pickup, I tried to wake Carolyn, but she had fallen so deeply asleep that she didn’t even stir. I lifted her limp body off the bed as Simmons tugged the bear hide from beneath her, then I laid her back in the middle of the bed. We rolled up the skin and head in the tarp, and I got the keys to Carolyn’s Mustang out of her purse.

  As we struggled out the side door with the heavy bundle, a pair of drunks were coming in, faces red with whiskey and cold. One held the door for us, and the other laughed and said, “Hey, buddy. Whatcha got there? A dead body?” I guess the look I gave him wasn’t exactly pleasant. “It’s a joke, buddy, a joke,” he added lamely.

  “You’re the fucking joke, jerk,” I said, but he acted as if he hadn’t heard.

  “Easy, boss,” Simmons huffed.

  “Right.”

  As soon as we managed to fit the hide into the small trunk and slammed the lid, I started to worry about it. What if it froze and cracked? Or the cold made the hair fall out? But, like Charlie Two Moons, I was glad to be rid of bad medicine, so I shoved the worries aside and went back up to leave Carolyn a note.

  Love, you were sleeping hard, and we had to split. Sorry. Hope you wake from happy dreams. Brother Silvertip is in your trunk. Keep him for me, please, and if I don’t come back—well, I trust you to do something appropriate to his spirit. Sorry we didn’t meet in another world. Take care.

  “What now, boss?” Simmons asked when I got back to the pickup.

  “Listen, son, I’m sorry I don’t ever tell you what we’re doing until it’s too late, and I appreciate your backing me up and not asking too many questions…”

  “Shit, I trust you, Milo.”

  “God knows why, Bob,” I said, “but trust me now. If I can’t work out this shit in Seattle this trip, I’m going to give it to the law dogs and run for Mexico—”

  “I ain’t never been to Mexico, boss,” he interrupted, grinning.

  “You son of a bitch,” I said to his grin. “Let’s drop your rent car at the airport and head out into the sunset, Mr. Autry.”

  “Mr. Rodgers,” he said, and we shook on it.

  —

  We made good time on the plowed and sanded interstate, kept our noses clean, stayed sober, and made Seattle by dawn, in time to catch the first ferry to Bremerton. We had breakfast in Poulsbo, then I called the number the fa
t girl had given me and left the message about Leroy and the basket of crabs. She called back in five minutes, suggested we meet on neutral ground on the Port Angeles-Victoria ferry that noon, no guns, no drugs because we would have to clear Canadian customs going and American coming back. “And no funny shit with hand grenades, okay?” she said with a laugh.

  It took us longer to drive to Port Angeles than I had thought it would, so I had Simmons drop me at the dock, where I left him with my pickup, all the weapons and cocaine, told him to check into the Holiday Inn and wait for my call.

  “Thanks, boss,” he said as I stepped out of the cab.

  “Thanks?”

  “For not thinking I’d run with all the goods.”

  “Shit,” I said, “it never crossed my mind.”

  “So thanks,” he said, grinning.

  Instead of searching for the fat girl, I went up to the bow to watch the ferry back away from the dock and turn into the Juan de Fuca Strait. A light mist mixed with an occasional snowflake, which melted as soon as it touched the deck, seemed to hang in the air between the lowering clouds and the gray sea as deep, heavy swells rolled down the Strait with a power that suggested they had risen in the middle of the Pacific with the sole purpose of washing down the rocky bluffs of this narrow neck of water. The fat girl came up beside me, slipped her hand into the pocket of my parka, and nestled her fingers in mine.

  “Hello,” she said. Her hair had been curled, her face softly made up. Even in the electric-blue down parka she seemed slimmer somehow, and in her gold-rimmed granny glasses she might have been a schoolteacher playing hooky. “No business for a while,” she said, then helped me stare at the mists as if we could see the far shore on Vancouver Island.

  “I don’t know your name,” I said.

  “You can call me Monica. I’ve always thought of myself as a Monica. And yours, sir?”

  “Carlos.”

  “Have you ever been to Victoria, Carlos?”

  “Only in the summertime.”

  “Let’s have lunch at the Oak Bay Hotel.”

  “I’ve been drunk there,” I said. “One of my favorite places.”

  “I reserved a room, just in case.”

  “Good idea, as long as we catch the last ferry back to Port Angeles.”

  “No problem. We’ve got all the time in the world,” she whispered into the rain.

  Over a slow lunch in a dining room that might have been brought over from England brick by brick, beam by beam in the hold of a clipper ship around the Horn, gazing out the wide windows into a light rain that seemed British in its damp stodginess, we got our stories straight. I had been a friend of her father’s when she was growing up someplace dull, Cleveland or Pittsburgh, Des Moines or St. Paul, and she had always had a crush on me. We had happened upon each other in this English village of a city so far from home. Monica had been around a bit too much to suit herself, and I was once again between marriages, and as we walked hand in hand up the carpeted stairway we trembled like children.

  We nearly missed the ferry back to the States, and stood again on the bow as the mist became snowflakes. When we could see the gray form of the Port Angeles dock, she shook her wet curly hair and said, “What did you want to know?”

  “The coke you bought from me,” I said, “you’d seen that powder-coated plastic before, right?” She nodded carefully. “Can I ask where?”

  “If this comes back on me, man, I am not just dead,” she said softly, “I am bad hurt before I get a chance to die. You understand that?”

  “Monica…”

  “Carlos,” she said, “goddammit,” then gave me an address on West Marginal Way in Seattle, a pat on the cheek, a damp kiss. Behind her foggy glasses, her blue eyes turned dark-gray. “Good luck.”

  “Thanks,” I said, “but I’m not afraid anymore. For the first time since all this started.”

  “Maybe you should be,” she said and walked back toward the warm lights of the passenger lounge. Once she was safely inside, I turned back to face the black waters, the heavy, tolling swells.

  —

  It was past midnight by the time Simmons and I drove back to Seattle, but I was determined to get to the address anyway. Even though the dank air seemed to absorb the glow from the street lights, I could make out the small sign on the chain-link gate: ENVIRONMENTAL QUALITY CONTROL SERVICES, INC.

  “What the hell does that mean?” Simmons asked.

  “Garbage,” I said, “fucking garbage.”

  Chapter 12

  It took McMahon, the young lawyer, all day and a large jolt of cash, but by seven o’clock that evening in his office, he was able to hand me a fairly complete file on EQCS, Inc., and its president and founder, Richard Tewels.

  During WWII, Tewels had served in the European theater as a supply sergeant for a motorized transport outfit. After he mustered out at Fort Lewis, and with money he said he had won in a crap game on the troop ship back to the States but which one reporter suggested had come from a black-market operation in gasoline and tires, he bought a junkyard south of Tacoma. From there on, Tewels was an American success story.

  In less than five years he owned half-a-dozen junkyards, a small trucking outfit, and three sand-and-gravel pits. When the pits were exhausted, he turned them into private landfills. In 1964, outside Chicago, where he had been raised, he bought his first garbage-truck company from a small town that could no longer afford to operate it themselves. By 1972 he owned over three hundred garbage trucks and more than twenty landfills in small towns and medium-sized cities from coast to coast, and he incorporated as EQCS, Inc. He kept growing richer and richer on garbage and junk. Along with his fortune, he also collected a number of indictments, but no convictions, for possession of stolen automobile parts and illegal dumping. At the same time, he was cited for achievement by state environmentalists from sea to shining sea.

  In 1976 he sold EQCS, Inc., to an international consortium, although he remained president and a major stockholder. The consortium, based in Luxembourg, held controlling interests in casinos in the Caribbean, oil tankers, wheat farms in eastern Washington, hog farms in Iowa, and the usual range of investments. In 1980 EQCS bought a small tanker ship from one of its sister corporations and converted it into a floating furnace for the disposal of liquid toxic waste. The onboard incinerators could achieve Fahrenheit temperatures above 2500 degrees, hot enough to dispose of even the dreaded chemical polychlorinated biphenyls, PCBs. The tanker operated out of Tacoma and burned waste in international waters, four or five hundred miles out in the Pacific.

  Well, the information didn’t cause me to see a burst of clear, absolute light, but it did give me some notion of whom I had been dealing with, running from. Starting at the lowest end, junkyards had always been perfect covers for chop shops that dealt in stolen automobile parts. Say, for instance, that you stole a Caddy worth twenty thousand; you might be able to fence it for a third of its value, but if it was cut up into body parts, you could sell it for two or three times the original value. Or say you wanted to ship some cocaine or stolen arms or hot money across the country. Why not hide it in a barrel of PCBs, a toxic liquid so deadly that some environmental experts considered even one part per million part of water as carcinogenic? And say you had been at sea burning toxic wastes on board your own ship. What sort of customs agent would crawl around in the holds of your tanker searching for cocaine?

  Here I thought I had been playing gunfire games with something as nice as a large drug ring, and it turns out that I am playing hardball with a multinational corporation with a gross profit larger than two thirds of the countries in the world. Suddenly I felt even worse than I could deal with. When the father of a friend of mine found out he was dying of cancer, he went to see all his old friends and greeted them with, “Boys, you’re looking at a dead man.” Well, I couldn’t beat them, and running would be a waste of time, but at least for Sarah’s sake, I could go out in a small match flare of glory, maybe make the bastards flinch.

/>   Or so I thought, dead as I assumed I was, as I looked at the rest of the file.

  Although Tewels never gave interviews, McMahon had enough contacts in Seattle to find out that he lived in a large house on Capitol Hill, had a ranch in the Sierras west of Tahoe, a midtown Manhattan apartment, and a seventy-five-foot yacht. He was a large contributor to Seattle social and artistic organizations. He had three children—a daughter who was an off-Broadway set designer, another who was an anesthesiologist in Santa Barbara, and a younger son from a second marriage who was a tight end for Stanford. At fifty-nine, Tewels was still a nationally ranked seniors squash player.

  After I went through the notes one more time, I handed them back to McMahon, then told him to get out his tape recorder. When I finished telling him everything that had happened and everything that I suspected, he whistled, then stood up. “I sure as hell hope I don’t have to defend you, man,” he said.

  “It’ll never come to that,” I said. “They’ve covered it too neatly. I just wanted somebody to have a record, if—ah, worst comes to worst…”

  “Sure. What about your friend in the waiting room?”

  “I’m going to try to fire him,” I said, “and I want you to draw me a will.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Damn right,” I said. “There’s an old woman I owe, seriously.”

  While he got the forms, I went out to talk to Simmons. He lounged in a chair beside a stack of tattered Field and Streams, thumbing through one carefully as if he planned a long fishing trip to some distant exotic land.

  “Okay, Bob,” I said, “you’re fired. It’s over. I’m paying you off, and you’re walking.”

  “You can pick your nose, boss, but you can’t pick your friends,” he said quietly. “No more of this thirteen-month-tour crap, man. I’ve signed up for the duration.”

  “You got any family?”

  “A little brother in a foster home in Denver,” he said, “and two little girls living with my ex-wife down in Casper.”