by G. M. Ford
“How ya doin’?” he asked.
I assured him I was peachy and ordered a Heineken.
He swept his eyes over the dining room below. “Looking for someone?”
“Old girlfriend,” I said.
“Sometimes it’s best to just let ’em go,” he offered with a knowing smile.
“Can’t live with ’em, can’t live with ’em,” I joked.
Before we could continue our manly repartee, a piano began to tinkle the opening bars of “Body and Soul.” On my way in, I’d somehow failed to notice the grand piano squatting in the front corner of the room, an eight-hundred-pound oversight that suggested I might be a bit more overwrought than I was willing to admit.
The lady at the piano had a delicate touch and a nice sense of timing. She slid into the chord changes much the way I imagined she’d slid into her blue cocktail dress.
Bruce poured my beer and set it on a cardboard coaster. “What makes you think your friend’s way out here?” he wanted to know. “This is seriously off-season for this place. Soon as the tooth and wallet specialists hit the road, this place is gonna be deader than heaven on a Saturday night.”
“I ran into her mother the other day,” I said. “She thought Rebecca said she was coming out here to get away from it all.”
“‘Away from it all’ we got plenty of,” he conceded.
Seemed like Bruce wanted to talk, so I decided to take a chance and push a little harder. “I figured, you know, what the hell, I had some business out in Port Angeles, figured I’d stop by.” I shrugged helplessly. “You never know,” I said.
“Yeah,” he offered. “I know how it is.”
“Figured she wasn’t going to be hard to find. There’s not that many six-foot-two inch women traipsing around the Pacific Northwest.”
My description straightened his spine and flexed the muscles along the side of his jaw. He noticed that I noticed and slid himself to the far end of the bar with a bit more nonchalance than the moment called for. I watched as he busied himself with a stack of receipts, then poured a club soda over ice and delivered it to the lady playing the piano. He leaned in close and whispered in her ear. She said something. He shook his head and then whispered some more. As he walked away, she pulled her eyes from the keyboard for long enough to flick an inquisitive glance in my direction.
Once back behind the bar, Bruce experienced an overwhelming need to straighten and dust his liquor inventory. He found a white metal stool, climbed up onto the middle step, and dusted the shelves, top to bottom, one at a time. I listened to the piano and sipped at my beer as he worked his way in my direction.
When the passage of time and empty state of my beer glass made it impossible for him to ignore me any longer, he inquired, “Another?”
“Was it something I said?”
He stepped over to the register, pulled a stack of credit card receipts from beneath the cash drawer, and shuffled his way toward the bottom of the pile. He separated one from its brethren, returned the rest, and slid the drawer shut.
“This your friend?” he asked.
I took the receipt from his hand. Chase MasterCard. Rebecca Ann Duval.
“That’s her,” I said.
The pianist segued into a stately version of “Take the ‘A’ Train.”
“Maybe it’s best,” Bruce said resignedly.
“Maybe what’s best?”
“That you stopped by,” he said. “Sometimes these things just work out.” He waved a knowing hand. “You know—cosmically.”
“Ah,” I said, as though I knew what in hell he was talking about.
A waiter arrived with a drink order. Bruce ambled down to the far end of the bar and got busy mixing up a couple of mojitos.
By the time the waiter had disappeared with the drinks, the song had moved to Cyndi Lauper’s “Time after Time,” and Bruce was leaning on the bar in front of me.
“Way I hear it…,” he began. “They had to send security out to her cabin this morning.”
I tried to remain calm. “Really,” I said. “How come?”
“To get her out of there.”
“She wouldn’t leave?”
“Not from what I hear.”
“Why did they want her to leave?”
“All of a sudden her credit was no good.”
“Any idea why?”
“I hear the bank turned her card off.”
Of course they did. The minute Marty Gilbert requested Rebecca’s credit card history, Chase security had automatically been notified. Police inquiries make banks nervous and banks take very few chances with their own money. Your money, they’d bet on a Tijuana cockroach race. Their money is a whole different story. The frequency of use, combined with the unusual geographical location of the charges and a police inquiry, had set the bank’s algorithms to dancing the tarantella. Bingo. Stop payment.
“So what happened?”
The telling made him nervous. He double-checked the surrounding area. “Hey…,” he wheedled. “…you know I’m just the messenger here. I probably shouldn’t even be…”
I reached over and put a hand on his shoulder. “No trouble from this end,” I assured him. “Just tell me what happened.”
He wiped the corners of his mouth with his thumb and forefinger. “Last week or so she was here…” He paused again. “One of the locals…a real jerk…” He stopped talking, trying to choose his words carefully. “His name’s Teddy. Teddy Healy. Teddy’s a first-class pain. Comes down here, puts the moves on every female under sixty. Gets in fights with patrons.” He waved an angry hand. “Teddy’s just a pain.”
“What’s Teddy got to do with this?” I pressed.
“He was all over her,” Bruce said. “Buying her drinks. Buying her dinner. Trying to work his way…you know…”
“Into her pants,” I finished for him.
“Yeah,” he said.
“Was she going for it?”
“Not at first.”
“But he wore her down.”
His turn to shrug. “Looked that way to me.”
A trio of waiters arrived with drink orders. Bruce straightened up.
“Why do you say that?” I pressed.
“She…you know, after they threw her out of the cabin…”
“Yeah.”
“She left with Teddy.” He looked over his shoulder at the impatient trio of waiters. “You want to know about Teddy, ask Patty.” He nodded at the piano lady. “She can tell you a lot more about Teddy Healy than I can.”
Patty’s age was hard to tell. She could have been a hard-driven thirty-eight with a lot of city miles on her, or a well-preserved fifty-five that had been garaged and only driven on Sundays. Either of which worked for me.
I remembered my reaction to Rachel Thoms earlier in the day and wondered why, all of a sudden, I found myself physically attracted to women. I hadn’t thought about women in years. At least not in that way. I’d been way too busy feeling sorry for myself to be concerned with such tawdry urges and now, all of a sudden, at the least appropriate moment imaginable, I was like a slumbering bear, suddenly out of hibernation and lumbering around the neighborhood looking for a meal.
I sipped at my beer and wondered, for the umpteenth time, about the walking contradiction that was Leo Waterman. I spent an uncomfortable twenty minutes wandering through the ins and outs of my tortured psyche before I finally came to my senses. Too much introspection always made my head hurt, so I simply leaned back against the bar and listened to the music.
She played another couple of numbers and finally ended with a flourish that said tonight’s musical interlude was over. As the last strains of a tune I didn’t recognize floated through the air, I slid from my stool, and walked toward the piano at the far end of the room.
She saw me coming, retrieved a sequined clutch purse from inside the piano bench, and staged a hurried exit. Like I told Ricky Waters, I was faster than I looked. I made up the distance in half-a-dozen strides and stepped arou
nd her.
“Might I have a word?” I asked in my most courtly manner.
Apparently, chivalry wasn’t my strong suit. She turned her shoulders, slid past me, and started down the stairs at a dainty lope.
I trailed along in her wake. Past the phones and the elevators, past the dazed-looking concierge sitting at his desk, and out into the lobby, where she finally tired of me filling up her rearview mirror and stopped walking. She turned to face me.
“You don’t seem to be getting the message,” she said.
“The bartender said…”
She went shopping for angry but came back from the store with scared. “Bruce is an idiot. He needs to learn to mind his own business.”
She caught me reading her anxiety and started walking again, faster now, heels clicking on the polished wooden floor, veering left toward the Dutch door to the left of the reception desk. Checked luggage and coatroom.
Not wishing to loom, I stayed at a nonthreatening distance as she retrieved a long, black wool coat and shouldered her way into it.
Newly armored, she exchanged a few words with whoever handed her the coat, and then walked over and stood as close to me as personal space considerations would allow. “Do I have to call security?” she asked in a low voice.
Up close and personal, she was about my age. Middle to late forties somewhere. She’d had work done. Good work. Expensive work. You had to look closely around the corners of the eyes and the backs of her ears to see the spiderweb traces. Fifteen more years, four excellent plastic surgeons, and she’d begin to have that startled “what the hell just happened?” look they get when modern medical technology has gone one step too far in its quest to stave off the ravages of time. But for now, the illusion was alive, well, and working just fine.
Not only that, but she’d meant what she said about calling security. I could feel it. This was the only chance I was going to get so I went straight to it.
“I’m really worried about a friend of mine,” I said.
Apparently she didn’t share my anxiety. She turned and walked away.
As for me, I stayed right where I was. Further pursuit would almost certainly result in answering pointed questions from square-headed people, so I just stayed put. Either the magic of human decency was going to work, or it wasn’t.
She straight-armed one of the massive front doors and disappeared from view.
I waited.
A minute passed.
And then two.
Before the door swung open and Patty walked back inside with a look on her face that said her worst fears were confirmed. I was still standing there. Right where she left me. Not doing a thing that would give her an excuse to call security. She swallowed a curse and ambled in my direction, taking her time, making me wait.
“What are you, the jilted lover?” she asked.
“Not the way you mean it,” I said.
“What way’s that?”
“The way where I just can’t seem to get on with my life. Where I’m following her around, making an ass of myself. Stuff like that.” I shook my head and looked her in the eye. “Nothing like that.”
“No?”
“I skulked off into the bushes like a gentleman.”
Her eyes crinkled at the corners. “Maybe you didn’t love her so much after all.”
“Maybe I respected her choice,” I said evenly.
We had a short staring contest. “Big, tall gal?” she asked.
“Yep.”
“Blonde?”
“More like brown.”
She shrugged. “You know women and their hair.”
I said I did.
“What’s your story?”
I gave her the condensed version. No names, places, or dates.
“Why would the mother come to you?”
“I used to be a private investigator.”
“What do you do now?”
“As little as possible.”
“Which explains her choice of partners, I guess.”
“More or less,” I admitted.
She walked away from me again. Out into the center of the lobby, to a pair of cowhide club chairs. Yee ha. She removed her coat and sat down on one of the former Guernseys. I wandered over and occupied the udder.
“Your friend’s got trouble,” she said as I settled in.
“This Teddy character?”
“Yeah. Teddy Healy.”
“Rebecca can take care of herself,” I said.
Her eyes clouded. “Not with Teddy, she can’t.”
“Why’s that?”
She thought about it for a second. “He’s got a real nose for weakness. One minute talking to a woman, and he knows what she does and doesn’t like about herself. It’s uncanny. He’s like a lion looking at a herd of zebras and immediately being able to pick out the slow and the weak.”
“Rebecca’s neither of those.”
“Neither was I,” she said.
I believed her but didn’t want to say so. My silence seemed to make her uncomfortable, so she began to talk. Seemed Patty Franklin was from L.A. Learned to play piano from her grandma. Worked the L.A. club circuit. Wasn’t getting rich but playing jazz beat the hell out of bag lunches in a cubicle. She’d been here in the tulles for about three months, tending to an estranged father who was dying of colon cancer. Back then, his doctor claimed he had a month to live, but the old man seemed hell-bent on defying the odds. No telling how long he was going to be with us. She hated the Alderbrook, the state of Washington, the weather, and every other damn thing around here and was going to be back in SoCal about five seconds after her old man cashed his chips. Whenever in hell that turned out to be.
Pops had a sister who came over most nights and helped out, so Patty took the gig at the hotel just to keep her chops honed and her spirits uplifted. An old friend of hers had once said that the most miserable creatures on earth were people who got stuck caring for other people. At the time, she’d thought he was just being mean-spirited. Lately, though, she’d changed her mind.
Teddy Healy was nothing like her type. Not even close. She didn’t do rural. Back in L.A., she’d have sent him on his way without a second look. But she was bored and horny and miserable about being stuck out in the woods so she let him buy her drinks. Listened to his pathetic redneck chatter for a month or so before…before she had a few too many one night and found herself at his place.
She caught herself running off at the mouth and looked away from me. I could feel the ambivalence churning inside her. Part of her wanted to cough it up like a fish bone. To finally tell somebody what had happened between them, and how she’d been forever damaged by the experience. Another part of her was so consumed by shame and self-loathing that the very idea of anyone else knowing the details was more than she could bear.
“All the more reason I need to find Rebecca,” I said, hoping we could keep this thing on track.
The rush of feet and the sound of voices pulled my attention over toward the desk, where the last toothy knot of dentists was checking out. A parade of bellboys and car jockeys was carting their baggage out through the big front doors. They toodel-ooed the hired help and followed their belongings into the great outdoors.
“He’s got a place on Prescott Creek.”
“You think that’s where they went?”
“I know that’s where they went. That’s what he does. He gets you out there where nobody’s going to interrupt his…” She censored herself. “By now he’s got her so coked up she’ll…”
“How do I get there?” I interrupted.
“You’d never find it. It’s a driveway off a dirt road. Way the hell out there.”
“Show me.”
“Pffffft,” she scoffed. “Like I’m gonna get involved with that.”
“Maybe it’s time Teddy got what was coming to him,” I suggested.
I watched as the idea took a bite out of her. As I’d hoped, the prospect of retribution held a certain primal appeal. Human beings are
like that. You do them wrong enough and they start making up little seek-and-destroy Clint Eastwood movies in their heads. Ninety-nine percent of the time, nothing happens because, first of all, the opportunity never presents itself, and secondly, because they don’t really have the balls to do anything about it, even if it did. Tonight, however, Patty Franklin found herself traipsing among the other one percent. Here she was, face-to-face with the possibility that her revenge novella could, quite possibly, come true, a prospect that excited her in a way and to a degree with which she wasn’t particularly comfortable.
“You don’t know what Teddy’s like,” she hedged.
“What’s he like?”
“He likes to humiliate people.”
“He’s not going to humiliate me,” I said.
“He’s got this little…” She searched for a noun but came up empty. “This piece of lead, I guess. It’s wrapped in leather. It’s got this loop that goes around his wrist.” She made a striking motion with her left hand.
“A sap?” I tried.
“Yeah. Yeah. That’s it. A sap. He always has it in his pocket.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I promised.
“He’s quick with it.”
“You’ve seen him use it?”
She hesitated a beat. “Out in the parking lot one night…some drunk followed me out of the bar, started hitting on me.” She rolled her eyes. “Poor guy was stone cold before he ever knew what hit him.”
“I’ll keep that in mind too.”
“Know what Teddy did?”
“What did he do?”
“He pissed on the guy, and then left him laying there in the parking lot.” She showed her palms to the ceiling, as if to ask the universe, “What’s with that?”
“Show me how to get to Teddy’s place,” I said again.
This time she thought about it. She threw a glance over at the checked baggage window. I watched as she ran her revenge movie again.
“I’ll change my clothes,” she said.
“Leave the keys,” Patty said as I jammed the Tahoe into Park.
She insisted I park out in the road. Made me turn the car around so it was facing back the way we’d come. Not taking any chances, this girl.