The Bum's Rush

by G. M. Ford

  "Ya know," she said between bites, "we busted a couple of guys, saved another guy's ass, got thrown in the can together, and I don't even know your damn name."

  "Leo."

  "How come you know those guys?" she asked while she chewed.

  "What guys?"

  "George and Normal and such."

  "George and Harold were friends of my old man."

  "Your father?"

  "Yeah. He was kind of like a local celebrity."

  "That's what the dyke meant when she said you had connections?"

  "Probably."

  "What was his name?"

  "Bill Waterman. Folks called him Wild Bill."

  "The politics guy?"

  "That's the one," I confirmed.

  She chewed this news along with her toast.

  My father had turned an early career as a labor organizer into eleven terms on the Seattle City Council. He'd run for mayor four times, each time suffering a narrow defeat. While it was great fun to have Wild Bill Waterman sitting on the council, making ridiculous proposals, campaigning in costume from the back of a beer wagon, the good people of Seattle had instinctively known that Wild Bill Waterman was by no means the kind of guy to be left running the store. As more than one of his opponents had suggested, Wild Bill's sense of humor was simply too far advanced for any office with wide discretionary powers. This was, after all, the guy who had on numerous occasions suggested that budgetary problems could be surmounted by simply giving the city back to the several bands of Indians from whom it had been stolen.

  "The one who used to lead that goat around on a leash?" "Only in election years," I countered.

  "And gave away all the free beer."*

  "For purely medicinal purposes."

  I'd heard all the stories more times than I could bear. The line between the historical character and the man I remembered was forever fuzzy, leaving me with a makeshift image of the old man that was, I suspected, an apocryphal melange of the mythic and the mundane. I changed the subject as quickly as possible.

  "These days they work for me sometimes."

  She bobbed her head up and down and shook the toast.

  "You're the detective guy, huh? The one George and them always braggin about workin' for."

  "I'm the one."

  "I always thought they was full of shit."

  "They are full of shit. Just not about that."

  She nodded again and went back to work on a newly arrived plate of hash browns. I leaned back against the cold vinyl of the booth.

  "What did you mean back there in the jail when you said that was your boy in the paper?''

  She kept her eyes on her plate. "Didn't mean nothing," she said, pushing potatoes around the rim with a triangle of toast.

  She read my eyes. "You think I'm lyin'?"

  "I didn't say that," I protested.

  "But that's what you're thinkin'. It is, huh?"

  "Don't put words in "

  "You ain't the only one allowed to be related to somebody famous, ya know, Mr. Connections. I wasn't born no damn bum. I had me a life like anybody else. I " She waved the toast at me. "Never mind."

  Lukkas Terry had been a dominant light on the Seattle music scene. Not grunge. Not punk. Not alternative. No particular label except his own. He was a technical wizard of a one-man band whose laboriously layered studio renderings successfully crossed all generational and genre lines. God knows, I'd tried not to like his music. I'm a dinosaur. For the most part, except for jazz, I make it a point not to like anything recorded after 1979. There are few infringements so tyrannical as being forced to listen to some other generation's music. Terry's music, however, had been an exception.

  His anguished, angry lyrics screamed the fears and disappointments of an entire generation, while awesome sequencer rhythm sections drove the music forward like a runaway train.

  Several hundred million other souls agreed. His work regularly went multiple platinum prior to release. Lukkas Terry had truly been gifted by the muse. Unfortunately, Lukkas Terry was also dead.

  Both daily papers had kept strict track of the legal wrangling surrounding his estate. According to the last article I'd read, a bit over fifty million dollars was being held in escrow as the state waited the obligatory ninety days for familial claims. If I remembered correctly, if no family appeared, both the present estate and future royalties would fall to his manager and business partner, Gregory Conover, and his record company, Sub-Rosa Records. And none of that was the real prize. The big bucks lay in Crotch Cannibals, Lukkas Terry's as-yet-unreleased final CD. The music trade magazines claimed that advance orders for Crotch Cannibals would make it, upon the first day of its release, the largest-selling CD of all time.

  I don't listen to his CDs anymore. My hand quivers as I pass over them in the racks, but I leave them where they lie. The circumstances of his passing somehow negated whatever joy they might still impart. A heroin overdose, for chrissakes. Found blue-faced on the floor of his Bell town condo with his pants full of shit. What a shame. What a cliche. Cue the Righteous Brothers. The heavenly band just got bigger and better.

  Selena poured the rest of the beer down her throat, wiped her lips with the rumpled paper napkin, and slid out of the booth.

  "I'm outta here," she announced, heading for the door.

  "Wait," I said. "Can I--"

  She stopped, turned, and gave me a rueful smile. "You can't nothin', Leo. How many times I got to tell you? You keep this up, I'm gonna have to get you a bell and a tambourine."

  "Well, then, thanks for the help back there in the hotel."

  "Makes us even," she said. She turned and opened the door.

  " 'Sides," she said over her shoulder, "you got bigger problems than that."

  "Like what?" I shot back.

  She reached into her pocket. Her big red-knuckled hands squeezed a familiar wad of bills.

  "Like payin' the bill, sport. Remember, last time you had one of these Mother Teresa attacks, you gave me all your cash."

  6

  "James, Junkin, Rose and Smith."

  "Hi, Charlotte. It's Leo."

  "Leo?" She feigned confusion. "Not the Leo who used to work as a gumshoe hereabouts?"

  "The very same."

  "How's the ass?"

  "It was a hamstring wound," I said. I heard her giggle.

  "What, pray tell, brings your wealthy self out into the tawdry world of commerce?''

  The friendly abuse was to be expected. I hadn't worked in quite a while. Back in early September, I'd picked up a major finder's fee when I'd located a homegrown bail jumper named Adrian Jolley. Adrian and I had played Pop Warner football together during the rainy fall of my tenth year. He was big for his age but never really had the stomach for it. While the rest of us were testing our testosteronic mettle on assorted fields of dreams, Adrian was selling dime bags over at the grammar school. Few find a calling so early.

  A couple times, when my old man was faced with something or other so serious he couldn't even send his driver to get me, Mrs. Jolley had found me standing in the rain, the last one after practice, waiting for my ride. She'd taken me home with her, let me use the phone, and fed me incredibly dry peanut butter sandwiches and mercifully cold milk until the old man could make the proper arrangements.

  Faced with a second major drug trafficking charge and a forty-year stretch of hard time, Adrian Jolley had liquidated his resources and successfully fled the country. Or so it was rumored, anyway. Every skip tracer in town had used every connection he'd owned to try to get a line on the good Mr. Jolley. No go.

  As for me, I couldn't see any point in reinventing the wheel. Lots of good men were already doing all the obvious things and getting nowhere. Besides that, I had this little intuition tweaking my frontal lobes. I kept seeing the three of us in her kitchen, washing down those sandwiches, watching the looks that passed between them. Seeing their entwined arms and braided hands. Sensing their palpable need for physical contact with each other. Wo
ndering what it would be like to be that close to either of my parents. Once in a while, I still wonder. A couple of weeks of replaying that little maternal matinee and I started calling contractors.

  In the middle of the third day, I had a spasm of lucidity and called my aunt Karen in the city license department. A building permit issued to Marlene Jolley? Sure enough. A two-man general contracting operation up in Lynnwood. Dave and Donnie. Double D Contracting. Hell, yeah. A complete renovation. Turned a dank basement into a regular pleasure palace. The old girl spent the better part of forty grand on the job. Paid in cash too. Probably would have done better to just sell the place and get something else, but she didn't want to hear about it. What can we say? Ya gotta do what the customer wants.

  I took what I had to the King County prosecutor's office.

  It took them all of forty minutes to muster a search party, coax a warrant out of old Pterodactyl Turner, and get on the road.

  I knocked on the back door, waited, and then knocked again. Only the smallest movement of the tangerine-colored cafe curtains suggested habitation.

  "It's Leo Waterman, Mrs. Jolley," I said to the door.

  The three Tac Squad cops pressed harder against the house as the door began to rattle and move. By the time the door was open a full inch, the first cop was up the four concrete stairs and through.

  Unfortunately for Officer McNaughton, despite the orthopedic shoes, the support hose, and the cherubic countenance, Marlene Jolley was fast on her feet. Overcome by maternal zeal, she went absolutely batshit, lofting a boiling pot of egg noodles at the officer, whose Kevlar vest merely served to funnel the steaming mess inexorably south. While Officer McNaughton was occupied with his steaming briefs, Marlene wound up and skulled him with the pot, shattering his plastic face mask and sending him spiraling to the floor. Suddenly the room was full of cops. I stood on the brown lawn and waited until things calmed down in the house.

  When I walked into the kitchen she was on the floor, Maced and manacled, allowed to snuffle about on the worn linoleum while the EMTs administered to the fallen cop. She gazed up at me through swollen eyes. "You dirty bastard," she shrieked. "I put food in your mouth. I fed you peanut butter and jelly, you ungrateful son of a bitch."

  "Just peanut butter," I'd corrected. "No jelly."

  They'd found Adrian reclining in his BarcaLounger, wearing a pained expression and a freshly pressed pair of baby blue boxer shorts. The months of momma's cooking had ballooned him up somewhere around two-seventy. As a pair of burly cops stuffed him into a gray SPD sweatsuit and pushed him before them up the stairs, into the hall, Adrian neither helped nor resisted. He merely stared out over our heads as if focused on some distant beacon.

  Marlene Jolley was now seated at the dinette, leaning forward out into the room, away from her cuffed hands. The sight of her swollen eyes triggered some primal force deep within Adrian Jolley. With the roar of a bull, he sent cops spinning from him in all directions. "Momma!" he bellowed, lumbering across the room toward his manacled mater.

  In the ensuing melee I was jammed hard against the wall, nearly upsetting Marlene in her chair as I was forced back into her. Perhaps, even in that moment of chaos, she knew it was me. I'd prefer to think that it was merely a random act of violence. Either way, when Marlene Jolley found herself confronted at close range with the very stuff of one of her tormentors, she opted for one last angry gesture. She bit me hard in the upper leg, fastening herself onto the back of me like a mastiff, grunting and shaking her head, as if determined to tear off a pound of flesh. I screamed and tried to push my way to the center of the room. She held fast. I screamed again, flailing at her.

  A blow from a metal baton loosened her jaws. Still yelling, I shouldered my way out the door into the backyard, where I walked in tight circles, flapping my arms, waiting for the pain to subside.

  "Son of a bitch," I chanted. "Son of a bitch."

  An EMT appeared at my side. "Better let me have a look at that. Human bites are incredibly septic. Drop your pants."

  It was then that I heard it for the first, but most unfortunately not the last, time. Standing out there on the lawn with my drawers around my ankles. A low rumble of laughter from inside the house. "She bit him in the ass," a voice said. Somebody snorted.

  "Hold on, now. This is gonna smart a bit," said the EMT.

  "It's in the upper leg, right?" I said through gritted teeth.

  He grinned up at me. "Whatever you say, buddy."

  After taxes, my 5 percent of the half-amillion-dollar bond had amounted to a little under nineteen thousand bucks. Color me irresponsible, but the combination of a sore leg and having nineteen grand in my bank account pretty much made honest toil out of the question.

  Not only was it the most money I'd ever had at one time in my life, but the sudden riches also served to prove, once again, that my old man had been right to leave the family fortune in trust until I turned the ripe old age of forty-five. Whatever his other failings, the old boy was universally renowned as an astute judge of character. He'd sensed in i me something less than a wild-eyed commitment to the puritan ethic and had arranged to protect me from my own worst instincts. The result was a trust fund of truly Florentine complexity. For nearly twenty years the trust had rebuffed all attempts to break it. A succession of greedy relatives, annoyed creditors, and one incredibly determined ex-wife had squandered bales of cash, only to be left on the outside looking in.

  "I hear you had a busy night, Leo."

  "Too busy for old farts."

  "I'll say. Hisself came staggering in about a half hour ago with steamer trunks under his eyes and your name fresh on his lips. I was just going to call you."

  "Really?" I checked the clock over the sink. Twelve-fifteen.

  "He wants to talk to you."

  "What about?"

  "I've got no idea. He insists on discussing it with you personally."

  "Must be a doozie."

  "Hang on. I'll put you through."

  I sat through a'lovely orchestral rendition of "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head" before Jed hit the line.

  "Leo. I need you."

  "Oh, Jed. I've waited years to hear you say that."

  "I've got a job for you."

  "Okay," I said.

  "Strictly confidential."

  "Aren't they all?"

  "No. I'm serious. This isn't something I could use one of the other agencies for. Even if I hadn't saved your miserable ass last night, you'd have been hearing from me this morning."

  "Hold the guilt. I'm yours. What's the deal?"

  "I need you to get down to the city library and see " I could hear papers shuffling. "Lynn Former. The deputy director and chief operating officer of the library system."

  "What for?"

  "We've got a problem."

  "We who?"

  "Me, the city, your uncle Pat, the universe. Pat's on the library board, you know."

  "Pat's on every board."

  "I gather you two aren't close."

  "You gather correctly."

  Actually, my father's youngest brother, Patrick William Waterman, and I had been out of touch since the early seventies, when during a family Easter dinner at my parents' house, he'd caught me getting his youngest daughter Nancyjean stoned in the potting shed. We'd have been okay if the sight of his purple face hadn't given both of us an incurable case of the giggles and if I hadn't been wearing her drawers on my head at the time.

  "What's the problem?"

  "One of the librarians is missing."

  "A lost librarian? Oh dear me, whatever shall we do?"

  "It's not funny, Leo. She's not all that's missing."

  I wasn't in the mood to guess.

  "Some money."

  "Purloined overdue charges. What's the world coming to?" "Just a bit under two hundred thou."

  "No shit."

  "No shit."

  "How is it that a librarian makes off with two hundred grand?"

  "It's a long story.
Former will fill you in."

  "Why the hush-hush routine?"

  "Use your imagination, Leo. The Commons, man. I know you're not in favor of the project, but the voting public doesn't need this crap. They're surly enough as it is. We're already into their pockets for the new Mariners stadium and the Kingdome renovations. I don't know whether you've been reading the papers, but we're less than two weeks from another vote on the Commons project. It's gonna be close again. Something like this could tilt the balance. The city can't take this kind of foolishness right now. The press will have a field day with it."

  He had a point The plan to replace the blue-collar commercial squalor at the south end of Lake Union with an urban-renewed yuppie paradise had been contentious from the beginning, pitting the forces of tradition against the omnipresent army of drooling developers and provoking political dissension among those who usually agreed. The measure had narrowly gone down to defeat at the last general election. Jed, forsaking his usually egalitarian stance, was a major supporter. Being rather fond of squalor, I'd voted against it, knowing full well that the forces in favor would surely keep sticking it on the ballot until it passed. While it was certainly true that one couldn't fight city hall, one did what one could.

  "Former is expecting you at two. And Leo "

  "What?"

  "No paperwork. Just report to me, okay?"

  "You're starting to sound like my old man, Jed."

  "Scary, isn't it?"

  "Fiat rate. A percentage? What?"

  "Regular daily rate after we're even. You owe me six hours at my rate. Which is" I could hear the wheels turning "a couple of days, give or take, at yours. Let's call it two days even." Before I could object, he added, "And that's not to mention the shit I'm taking from my insurance company about this newly hired employee of mine who's up in Swedish."

  "There is no justice."

  "Amen, brother." The line clicked, and I was back with Charlotte.

  "Does this mean I should add you to the active file?" she asked.