The Bum's Rush

by G. M. Ford

  "Take the 520 bridge," I said as I got in.

  "Climbing?" he said.

  "According to my map, she's inside that big apartmentcondo thing over there in Bellevue. Up by the crossroads."

  "The one with the big white wall that the neighbors sued over?"

  "Yeah. I think it's called Overlake Village."

  "You really think they're going to have somebody on duty at this tune of night? In Bellevue?" He chuckled.

  "You're way out of date, man," I said. "That part of Swellvue has gone straight to hell. The state made the city live up to the low-income-housing guidelines. You know, so many low income for so many upscale. They built this huge complex. Put 'em all in one place, then walled the sucker in. It's a Little Saigon, with ten thousand recently arrived Russians thrown into the candy like peanuts. For the 'burbs, it's downright nasty, my man. These days, if I have to go in there on business, I generally hire a couple of leg breakers for backup."

  Jed mulled it over. We rolled past the Arboretum and onto the floating bridge in silence. Finally, Jed broke the spell. "Those papers that magically appeared," he said. "Yeah?"

  "Very interesting." "How so?"

  "If I'm reading them right--which I am--Sub-Rosa has nothing to either gain or lose from the question of Lukkas Terry's estate. As near as I can tell, their end of the profits is ironclad. They get their end right off the top. Sure--the kid's death amounted to killing the goose. They'd be better off if he was still making records, but they get their percentage of whatever there is, no matter what. Their asses are covered. The contract's good. In keeping with recent equity rulings, too."

  Even at this time of night, the bridge was full, an undulating backbone of red taillights moving east, and insistent yellow beams squinting west. "Equity rulings?"

  "Courts have been upholding intellectual property rights lately." He could sense my confusion. "You know, like how in the old days guys would make a record, have a huge hit, but not really make anything out of it, because they'd signed these shitty contracts with some record company that ended up with all the cash." "Yeah."

  "The courts have put a stop to that lately. Started right around here, when the State of Washington Supreme Court gave royalty rights back to Jimi Hendrix's family, even though he'd repeatedly signed them away."

  "I vaguely remember that."

  "The court called bullshit on 'em. Said that when it comes to intellectual rights, contracts that did not meet fairness standards would now and forever be subject to review. Started a trend all over the country. There's enough precedence to choke a goat out there now. You sign a contract with any kind of artist or musician, you better make damn sure he and his heirs are getting what they deserve or you might stand to lose your end of the action."

  "Really?"

  "Really. And Sub-Rosa's financial position isn't half bad. I had one of the associates run it for me. They're on a roll. The Terry kid was their biggest star, but they're doing pretty damn good otherwise too. Whenever the new record hits the stores, they're fat city. I just don't see them giving a shit whether the kid had a mother or not."

  "They sure didn't seem to."

  "That's because whatever she gets is coming out of somebody else's end, not theirs."

  "Curiouser and curiouser.''

  "What's really interesting is the other end."

  "What other end?"

  "Terry and Conover."

  "What about it?"

  "They're not just artist and manager. They're full partners, with full survivorship rights."

  "Do tell."

  " 'Deed I do."

  "You, of course, know what that suggests."

  "Except for the very prominent fact that the kid was the golden goose. Nobody ever profits from killing the meal ticket."

  Jed had a point. "Get off at one-forty-eighth," I said. "And, by the by, Leo--good work. The papers, finding this woman. All of it. Good work." "We're not home free yet," I said.

  23

  The booth was small and white; the guard was big and black. We rolled by close enough for me to see him moisten his fingers at his small mouth and delicately turn a page in a crisp National Geographic.

  "What now?" Jed asked as we cruised past.

  "Go up to the light and take a right."

  He followed directions. "Keep following the wall," I said as we headed north down 144th. Piece by piece, a steel-and-Plexiglas Metro bus stop extruded itself into the headlights' path.

  "Pull over up here. Up past the bus stop," I said. Jed slipped the car to the curb, shut down, and turned off the lights. We were at the north side of the complex. Ryder Avenue Northwest. Even in the ghostly purple light, decline peeked out from the untrimmed shrubs, littered low with cans and bottles, decorated above with shiny bits of windblown refuse stuck crookedly up among the knobby roots.

  Middlebrow 'burbs working their way toward low. A scant three blocks from the strip malls, which even here lit the night to the point where no stars were visible in a clear sky. Probably changed hands and lost a lot of equity when they put this pig of a project in across the street. They'd fought in court for years, but eventually lost out to the powers that be. From across the narrow road, the view from the front windows must have been like being in the warden's house of a maximum-security prison. All wall.

  We opted for geezer easy, dragging the green metal trash container from the bus stop to the base of the wall, climbing up and over in two long steps. Easy. Getting down the other side was, however, another matter. When I was a younger man, I could jump from considerable heights and land lightly, feathering down quietly, bouncing once on the balls of my feet as if the dictates of gravity had been waived. Nowadays, something has changed. Something scientific, I'm convinced. My specific gravity, maybe. It must be something like that, because lately, if it's much more than, say, six feet, I hit the ground with all the wild-eyed finesse of a dairy cow flailing down an elevator shaft.

  My single source of solace was that Jed was even worse, landing piteously, splatting like a rotten melon, barely missing a thick little rhododendron whose pruned, upraised fingers would surely have probed him unspeakably. Instead, at the last moment he landed on his side in a great whoosh of air Like some subterranean digging creature found beached in beauty bark.

  We both checked for broken bones and chipped teeth as we limped along the sidewalk next to the buildings. Building thirty-seven. We were looking for seventeen. Thirty eight. Wrong way. To the rear march.

  Half a block up, I stepped out into the street to look at the handy map. Even beneath the swirls of spray paint, I could see that the place was drawn out like a wheel. The hub was the office, along with the fitness center, a couple of pools, and some sort of communal party area. The buildings fanned out from there in groups of eight, eventually reaching the round border road that we now were on. The spaces in the corners, where the circle met the square of the outside wall, were little mini-parks and play areas. How nice. Seventeen was closest to the hub five streets up. I stepped back up on the sidewalk and started in that direction.

  "Doesn't look so bad," Jed commented as we walked along.

  At first glance Overtake Village was much like any other ant-colony apartment complex. I'm sure they wanted it that way. When you forcibly inject thousands of recent immigrants into as chichi and trendy a community as Bellevue, you better do everything possible to be unobtrusive. Of course, it hadn't worked. After a protracted court battle, the result was that Bellevue now had both a right and a wrong side of the tracks.

  West of the interstate was the Bellevue of old Bellevue Square German car, pinkie-in-the-air rich, spread out along Meydenbaur Bay and Lake Washington, hiding behind gates and shrubs all the way up to Medina, where Bill Gates was building the missus a quaint little bungalow about the size of Grand Central Station.

  East of the highway, always the more commercial poor relation anyway, had been thrown to the dogs of development and diversity and summarily swallowed whole. As its opponents had so lou
dly insisted, Overtake Village had merely been the beginning. Hindsight.

  The cars were an odd mixture of older American gas hogs and thrashed imports. Almost nothing new. In the first recreation area we passed, the basketball stanchions held netless rims that had been bent all the way down like dejected lower lips. Jed put a hand on my arm.

  Up ahead, several bodies moved about in the shadows. I kept walking. Jed tagged along. "Are you armed?" he whispered to my back.

  "Thought you said it wasn't so bad," I said. Asian kids. Out crawling cars. Looking for trouble while their parents were out killing themselves, working double and triple shifts, earning a living. Four, maybe five of them, wearing the uniform of the day. Prison chic. Huge saggy pants over expensive unlaced Nikes. Enormous hooded sweatshirts, hood up, covering knitted watchcaps pulled down nearly to their eyes. They milled around, pretending they didn't see us, bouncing to the beat of their internal hip-hop. I kept walking. They had their choreography down. The collective body language screamed that they'd done this before.

  The tallest of the group, pushing six feet, leaned back against the peeling hood of a red Camaro, extending his crossed feet over the sidewalk, forcing me to either walk in the flower bed or step over him. I stopped and looked down at his shoes and then back up at the kid. He was maybe seventeen, with the broad, flat face common to Southeast Asia and the lifeless eyes common to wannabe gangstas. The other four, all younger and smaller than Mr. Feet, began to flare out in a loose circle as we passed. I kept my eyes on Mr. Feet. If there was going to be trouble, and there sure as hell was, it would come from him. I probably should have tried harder to talk us through it, but it had been a hell of a day, and I'd long since used up my ration of patience.

  "This here is a toll road," he said without moving. "You don't say."

  "Yeah, but I do." He showed me an acre of teeth, then looked past Jed toward his buddies.

  "Nice shoes," I said. "You blow somebody for them?"

  His wide nostrils flared and the black eyes twitched, but I'll say this for the kid, at least he wasn't into idle chatter. No threats. No snappy rejoinders. He bumped himself off the car. We stood no more than a foot apart. He covered my eyes with his for a long moment and then looked down at the space between us and turned away. With a resigned shrug, he stepped around to the left into the gap between cars and took a single long stride out toward the street. Just one.

  For a kid, he was good. In a single oiled motion, he pulled his left hand from his coat pocket as if to steady himself on the hood and then, using the car for leverage, pivoted himself quickly back my way. His right hand came straight over the top, airmailing a wicked pair of brass knuckles straight at my forehead. I could smell the cheap metal as it whisked just over my head. If I hadn't been ready, he would have checked me into either the hospital or the graveyard.

  I moved all of me two feet to the right and stepped quickly into the breach, kneeing him in the balls while the force of his own blow still carried him toward me. With the snap of a sail, my knee drove the sagging crotch of his pants the two feet back up where it belonged. The force of my knee nearly lifted him from the ground. A round mouth sucked in a huge chunk of air. Both hands flew to his groin.

  I grabbed him by the back of the hood, spun him, and drove his face down onto the hood of the Camaro with a long, hollow bong. His nose made a noise like the snapping of a stale Saltine, mostly crisp but a little doughy in the middle.

  The cap came off in my hand as he slid to the pavement. He fought so hard for breath, he hadn't even noticed his nose. I turned toward Jed and the others. Just Jed. The others were slapping soles and fading blurs in the distant streetlights.

  "Nice friends," I said.

  "Jesus, Leo. You didn't have to--"

  "Yeah." I smiled. "I do kinda feel like Bernie Goetz."

  When I got through with the laughing fit, I wiped my face with my hands and stood upright.

  "I think I'm getting giddy," I said. "Let's go. I don't want to have to worry about those little pricks being behind us."

  I took him by the arm and marched him around the writhing figure on the sidewalk. "What about--"

  "He'll be okay," I assured him. "Once they clean out their drawers, the others will come back for him."

  He kept looking back over his shoulder as I hustled him up the sidewalk, moving around the loop until the much distressed Mr. Feet was out of sight. i

  I changed the subject. "How do you want to handle 1 this?"

  "Firmly."

  "We gonna talk our way in or are we just plain going in?"

  "We're going to try the former and be prepared for the 1 | latter. I think when she hears what I have to say, she'll come around."

  We continued up the sidewalk until the little blue sign on the corner said 7-14. Seven-oh-three was on the top floor of the building, hardly more than a good piss from the back door of the indoor pool. The smell of institutional chlorine levels and fresh paint swirled about our heads as we stood on the ribbed concrete on either side of the door.

  Jed tugged the knitted part of his brown leather jacket back down around his waist and then found my eyes. He nodded. I pounded the door hard five times and waited.

  From behind the door, "Who is it?"

  I pulled my license from my pocket, held it up in front of the peephole for a second, and then snapped it shut.

  "Seattle Police, Miss Mendolson. Open the door."

  Jed's eyebrows formed a pair of question marks. Hearing a scratching noise on the inside of the door, I stepped back to the far rail. The door opened on two inches of gold chain. One frightened brown eye peeked out. I took two quick steps forward and hit the door with my hip, tearing the cheap hasp from the door frame, sending the woman reeling back into the room. I grabbed Jed by the arm, propelled him into the room, and locked the door behind us.

  She wore a burgundy sweatshirt with "Harvard" emblazoned across the front, a pair of gray sweatpants, and fluffy black slippers. No longer reeling, however, she held an aluminum baseball bat in what appeared to be a pair of skilled hands. Down at the end. No choking up. Her feet were spread and moving. She held the bat high and waved the end at us, kind of like Edgar Martinez sitting on the fastball. Her stance suggested competence born of repetition. I kept my distance.

  "You're not the police," she said. "You get out of here, you hear me? You get out of here."

  We stayed put. "No. We're not the police," 1 said. "My name is Leo Waterman." I reached into my pocket. She became more agitated, moving around in the batter's box now, more like the manic twitchings of Gary Sheffield than the calm resolve of Edgar Martinez. I held up my license. "I'm a private investigator. This is Jed James." He waved a business card. "Mr. James is vice chairman of the King County library board." Take that.

  I'd expected her to wilt. No such luck. She dug in. Moving back in the box. Wiping out the rear line. Spreading her stance and leaning pugnaciously out over the plate like Albert Belle doing his famous impression of Mike Tyson brandishing a big twig.

  "You get out," she repeated.

  Jed picked up the ball. "You can have us or you can have the police. Take your pick." He suddenly moved across the room to the wooden apple box working overtime as an end table and lifted the receiver from the white princess phone. "Make up your mind, honey. Tell me how you want it. Either put down that bat and talk to us, or let's let the cops sort this out." He started to dial.

  The bluff worked. "Stop," she said after Jed pushed the second button. Jed paused, finger poised. A series of thin wrinkles I hadn't noticed before crept out from her eyes, and her mouth turned down. She flipped the bat out onto the blue carpet where the dinette set would have been. She put her hands on her hips and turned her back on us, wandering behind the breakfast bar back into the kitchen.

  "It's over," I said soothingly. "Relax. We're going to try to help you as much as we can."

  She was every bit as sharp as everyone had said. It took her only about ten seconds to regain her composur
e and think her way through it.

  "Bullshit," she said under her breath. She turned quickly and moved toward the bat. I was standing on it. She began yelling. "You're not going to call the cops. If you two were willing to call the cops, you'd have done that already. You would have showed up with them."

  She took another step toward me.

  I shook my head. "I generally try not to hit women," I said. "But there have been exceptions."

  She stepped right up into my face. "You think you're pretty tough, don't you now, Mr. Detective?"

  "It's in the thug handbook." I gave her the scout's honor sign.

  "Thou shall not get beat up by librarians."

  "I want to see an attorney," she said.

  I poked my thumb over my shoulder. "You're in luck. Jed's an attorney. As a matter of fact, he's my attorney, and a damn fine one, I might add. I couldn't recommend him more highly."

  She stepped around me and faced Jed. "If you actually are an attorney which I doubt then you're an officer of the court, and I am telling you, as an officer of the court, that I, as a person with rights, want to consult an attorney." Same routine I'd run on Gogolac.

  "You'll do time," Jed said quietly. "Eighteen months minimum. I don't care who your attorney is or how spotless your record may be grand theft, public funds, a position of trust a considerable sum. If you get real good representation, and I mean stellar advice, maybe you get to do it in King County instead of at a state school, but either way, you do some time. The public will demand it."

  That one always worked. The mention of specific sentences and institutions, talking of hard time, rife with the veiled threat of unnatural acts always reduced the amateurs to jelly.

  "F. Lee Bailey couldn't keep you out of jail," I added for effect.

  "F. Lee Bailey couldn't keep himself out of jail," she sneered.

  "My point exactly," said Jed.

  "Maybe the public would like to know how its cherished library system really works," she spat. "The Times has always hated the library system. They've been waiting twenty years to get a story like this."