Thicker Than Water (A Leo Waterman Mystery)

by G. M. Ford

  About the time I was running out of evasions and half-truths, the other state trooper came bopping back into the room. He bent at the waist and whispered at length into the detective’s ear. Bradley whispered back and the trooper nodded.

  I watched the uniform reach into his pants pocket and pass Bradley something under the table. The detective peered down into his own hand for several moments. His lips nearly disappeared as he turned whatever it was around in his fingers, checking it out from all angles. He and the trooper exchanged emphatic whispers again.

  Bradley heaved a sigh. When he finally met my gaze, his disappointment was palpable. Cops like things simple. You know, Mom catches Pop flying United with the next-door neighbor and blows both of them into the middle of next week. That sort of thing. Mysteries hold little or no appeal for cops, especially in these economically troubled times, when duty rosters are short and overtime unthinkable. He made a locking-the-door motion with his free hand. The trooper to my right got to his feet, pushed me forward in the chair, and removed the handcuffs.

  Bradley waited until I’d rubbed some life back into my wrists and tried unsuccessfully to untie the knot that was my shoulders before he threw what looked like a stainless steel washer up onto the table, where it wobbled to a stop next to the sap.

  “Ever seen that before?” he asked.

  I poured myself a glass of ice water and drank it. “What is it?” I asked when I was finished.

  “GPS tracking device.”

  “Nope,” I said.

  “We found it attached to your car,” he said. “Up under the bumper, on the air conditioning compressor.”

  I remembered Mr. Moto disappearing from view while my car was stuck in that damn Capitol Hill alley. Hadda be him, I figured. When I didn’t say anything, Bradley got to his feet, gathered up his outerwear, and ambled for the door. He leaned his back against it, allowing the troopers to precede him into the corridor.

  Heartsick that he wasn’t going to be able to send me to the penitentiary for the rest of my life, he settled for having the last word. He broke out his wolf grin and said, “So I guess your friend wasn’t looking to be rescued.”

  I matched him tooth for tooth. “Turned out she wasn’t my friend,” I said.

  I’d like to tell you how I used my vast array of private eye skills to ferret her from hiding, how I tapped shady contacts, called in overdue markers, and annexed secret databases known only to illuminati such as myself. It would make a great story, but unfortunately, it wouldn’t be true.

  Truth was, all I had to do was to pull out my notebook, open to the page where I wrote down all the Millennium Yacht Sales employees’ names and go online to White-Pages.com. There she was in black and white. Rosemary De Carlo, 2573 Harrison Avenue East, #309, Seattle, 98102. Badda bing.

  Last night in Teddy’s boudoir, I’d recognized her the second I’d managed to focus on her face. How had that boat mechanic Neil referred to her? “The big blonde honey from the desk,” if memory served. The one who left the dealership right after Brett Ward went off to repo boats for a living. Turned out that Neil was right on both counts. She was at least six feet tall in her stockinged feet and, while she certainly wasn’t Rebecca Duval, I could personally attest to the fact that she was a real blonde.

  Suffice to say that my exit from the Alderbrook Resort and Spa ranked highly on the Martha Stewart social stigmata scale. Apparently, my early morning tryst with law enforcement, combined with a leaking ear bandage the size of a baseball mitt, had considerably lowered my GDI (Guest Desirability Index). I checked out amid a sea of averted eyes and shielded whispers, all of which I belligerently chose to ignore.

  My ear throbbed like a boil as I drove the sixty miles to the ferry and caught a ride back to the mainland. I stayed in my car and held a one-man brood-fest for the forty-minute passage. If I was worried before, now I was terrified. I couldn’t imagine a scenario where Rebecca willingly gave up her identification and credit cards. Worse yet, the only reason I could think of as to why somebody would want the world to believe Rebecca Duval was alive and well was that she wasn’t.

  Soon as the ferry workers dropped the safety chain, I bounced the Tahoe off the boat and began to drive like a maniac, weaving in and out of traffic, taking crazy chances just to gain a car length or two, none of which did any good of course, as I-5 South through Northgate was a traffic knot twenty-four hours a day, but at least I felt like I was doing something.

  Twenty-five seventy-three Harrison was just what I expected. Capitol Hill personified. One of those brick, midsized—somewhere between twenty and thirty units—apartment buildings this part of Seattle was absolutely lousy with.

  For the first time all day, I got lucky. Small lucky, but lucky nonetheless. As I was walking up the front walk, a thirty-something woman and a four- or five-year-old girl came out the front door holding hands. The woman held the door for me. The little girl threw her head all the way back and looked up at me, all sticky-mouthed and stupid.

  “He’s biiig, Mommy,” she slurped.

  The woman smiled a weak apology and towed the kid toward the street.

  I stepped into the foyer. Four-story walk-up. Old-fashioned brass mailboxes on the left. A gateleg table where the mail carrier probably left packages. Other than that, everything was carpet. A bold floral print of such power and complexity you could have slaughtered livestock on it and, once the fluids dried, nobody would have noticed.

  Three-oh-nine was the back right corner apartment. I stood directly in front of the peephole and knocked hard. Nothing happened for a moment and then I heard the sound of her feet trying to be quiet. The peephole darkened.

  “Remember me?” I asked.

  Nothing.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” I said. “Open the door. We need to talk.”

  Again nothing, so I knocked harder and longer this time.

  “Go away or I’m calling the cops,” she whispered through the door.

  I raised my voice several decibels. “Good,” I said. “You do that. We can all have a nice little chat about identity theft. About obtaining goods and services under false pretenses.” I rambled on, doing my best Perry Mason impression, making it up as I went along.

  Still nothing, so I got louder. “Not to mention the fact that Teddy Healy took a bullet in the head sometime last night…” I paused for effect. “…which, I imagine, the local cops would very much like to have a few words with you about,” I finished.

  I heard the dull thump of feet on the stairs. A pair of lank-haired skater types in oversized sweatshirts and skinny jeans gave me the hairy eyeball as they carried their skateboards into an apartment down the hall, checking back over their shoulders every few steps like they were the building centurions or something.

  I waited. Inside the apartment, chains began to rattle. She peeked out. The mouse under her eye looked a little better than it had the last time I’d seen it. The shiner, however, was in full bloom. Puffed up like an egg, several shades of purple and green, the eye was very nearly closed. The slit that was still visible was bright red.

  “Shhh,” she hissed.

  “We need to talk,” I said.

  “How’d you find me?” she demanded.

  “Great cunning and dare.”

  “What?”

  I was past the snappy rejoinder stage, so I put a big smile on my face and pushed my way into the apartment as gently as possible, moving around her as much as I was able, brushing her aside when I had no other choice. Quite frankly, the girl looked like she’d had about all the abuse she could stand. I almost felt bad about bracing her for information. Well, maybe not bad, but it did occur to me.

  The place was shabbier than it was chic. Too many knick-knacks, doodads, and votive candles for my liking. Looked like she had passable taste but a serious shortage of folding money. On the far wall, the metal mount for a flat screen TV hung empty and forlorn, like some kind of post-recessional wall art denoting the end of civilization as we knew it.<
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  “Here’s what you’re going to do for me,” I said.

  Her lumped-up face filled with “oh God, not again” concern.

  “Not like that,” I assured her. “What you’re going to do is tell me everything you know about how and why you found yourself at the Alderbrook Resort registered under the name Rebecca Duval. You’re going to tell me where you got her ID and everything you know that might help me find Brett Ward.” She started to speak but I stopped her with a cautioning finger. “You do that and I’ll forget about you. You screw around with me and I’ll put you together with cops.”

  I made the Boy Scout’s honor sign.

  She took me at my word. “That son of a bitch,” she said.

  “I take it we’re talking about Brett Ward.”

  She nodded. “Called me about a week ago. He knew things were tough for me. Knew I was having trouble making the rent since my unemployment ran out. Said he needed me to go out to this place in the woods and pretend to be his wife. She’s some kinda doctor or something. Said it had something to do with insurance. Said I could eat, drink, and be merry on her dime. No problem. Just stay in character. Call him if I need anything. He’d slip me a few bucks when it was over.”

  “And you went for it.”

  “I’ve been eating a lot of Top Ramen lately,” she said defensively. “A week in a spa on somebody else’s dime was just too damn good to turn down.”

  I could see her point but didn’t say so. “You sleeping with him?” I asked.

  “Not lately,” she groused. “Lately Bretsey’s got…” She made quotation marks in the air with her fingers. “Bretsey’s got ‘erection issues’ all of a sudden.”

  “How lately?

  “Last couple of weeks.”

  “So?”

  “So he picks me up here, gives me her ID and credit card, and then drives me way the hell out into God’s country to the Alderbrook, and leaves me there. Says he’s gonna be back to get me in a week or so, have fun, and then he drives off.”

  “And all of a sudden the credit card wasn’t good anymore.”

  “I tried to call him.” She shook her fist in anger. “Son a bitch deserts me out in the middle of nowhere. Won’t answer his goddamned phone. No money, no nothing!”

  I watched in silence as she started to lose control of herself. Tears rolled down her bruised cheeks. “And then that Teddy pig…he…what he did…” She looked at me with that horrible red eye, as if she needed something from me, understanding or forgiveness perhaps, it was hard to tell.

  Whatever it was made me uncomfortable, so I changed the subject. “How long had you and Brett been sleeping together?”

  “Coupla three months,” she sniffled.

  “Where?” I asked.

  “Where what?”

  “Where did you guys hook up?” I looked around the room. “Here?”

  She shook her head and said, “At his place.”

  “His condo?”

  “No, no. Never there. He’s got this office out by the Ballard Locks.”

  I pressed her for details, but all she knew was how to drive there and get laid. Somewhere between the Ballard Locks and Shilshole Bay was the best she could do. On the ship canal side. Big old boathouse. Used to be painted green but most of the paint had long since peeled off. Seemed Brett kept a little love nest behind the boatyard office. Classy guy, that Brett.

  I kept at her until she ran dry. Got more of her life story than I wanted to hear, but that happens sometimes. Once you open the floodgates, the pond’s gonna drain. She’d come out to the West Coast from Poughkeepsie, New York, about twenty-five years ago. Had a full-ride basketball scholarship from Seattle Pacific U, but blew out her knee early in her sophomore year. School wasn’t really her thing anyway, so she dropped out and kicked around a bit. Did the Europe thing. Did the Mexico thing. Coupla bad marriages—at least they didn’t have any kids—string of dead-end jobs, yadda yadda, ain’t it funny how time slips away?

  By the time she was finished, I felt pretty certain I’d gotten whatever there was to get. She didn’t have any more idea where Brett Ward could be found than I did, and I didn’t have so much as a suspicion.

  I walked over to a desk. Six or eight framed photographs were arranged on the surface, mostly family stuff. Rosemary and what figured to be her mother and father sitting at a picnic table together. A younger woman who looked enough like Rosemary to be her sister and what I assume to be her three kids, all smiling like crazy into the camera. Picture of a sailboat on a lake. A black Lab drooling on a tennis ball. Standard family photo stuff. The kind of thing that passes for memories these days.

  On the back left of the desk sat a gold-framed Brett Ward. Mr. Preppy in a red sweater vest over a crisp white pullover, braced behind the wheel of a sailboat, Space Needle looming over his left shoulder, hair blowing in the breeze, big, bright virile grin. All very GQ bright and shiny.

  I picked it up and held it in my hands. “Can I have this?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “Take it. I never see that face again it’ll be too soon.”

  I dug out another old business card out of my wallet and handed it to her.

  “If you think of anything else,” I said.

  Despite Rosemary De Carlo’s vague recollections, I’d found the place with little trouble. Problem was that Shilshole Marine Yard was no longer in business. A quarter mile of temporary chain-link fence ringed the property from sidewalk to waterline. A red and white plastic sign wired to the front gate said to contact Northwest Maritime if you were interested in buying the property and to otherwise keep the hell out. Somebody had spray-painted a blue Latino gang sign over the phone number, making it impossible to read. Scattered around the property, vessels in varying stages of decomposition slouched on the blacktop like vagrants.

  These days, mom-and-pop boatyards are every bit as much an endangered species as Midwestern family farms. Just keeping up with the escalating environmental requirements costs a fortune, and then, to add to the problem, as the potential value of the property increased, so did the size of the tax bite. Unless you happened to be the darling of the deep pockets set, your two hundred feet of waterfront was worth more than the business was ever going to be, no matter how long your family had been there or how good a businessperson you were. All of which made it even more tempting to take the money and run.

  And lord knew Seattle had no shortage of newly moneyed morons who’d pay whatever freight was necessary for a glimpse of something wet. Sound, lake, canal, river, bay, sump. It didn’t matter. All it had to be was wet. If it was wet, it was scenic, and if it was scenic, they’d build on it. Real estate ads contained phrases like “partial seasonal water view,” which meant that if you stood at the peak of the roof in the dead of winter and, at the time, were neither fogged in nor being blinded by sleet, you could just about make out this body of water in the distance.

  It was the lure of the salt, I figured. Something in our shared embryonic past calling us back to the warm water of the womb. Didn’t matter whether it was distant or dangerous, if it was placid or polluted, the siren song of our collective consciousness kept calling us home to “waterfront property.”

  In an attempt to stem the relentless tide of gentrification, King County had begun making it nearly impossible to move from a commercial to a residential property designation, which, as far as I could see, was the only reason why this particular piece of property hadn’t morphed into thirty or forty luxury condo units at a million-three a pop.

  I parked my car in front of the Tides Tavern, crossed Shilshole Avenue, and walked east along the fence line with the sky the color of slate and the icy onshore flow from Puget Sound jabbing at the back of my neck. I shuddered inside my coat and turned up the collar.

  At the far end of the boatyard, almost in the neighbor’s parking lot, I found an overturned oil drum nestled among the weeds, rolled it from the bottom side up, climbed on, and boosted myself to the top bar of the fence.

  Ju
mping from heights is one of those moments where you first notice you’re getting older, that the balance isn’t quite what it used to be, and the knees aren’t as nearly as accommodating about absorbing shocks as they once were.

  My body acted as if I’d jumped off the Space Needle. I staggered forward on impact and nearly turned an ankle, stumbling spastically through knee-high brush and brambles until I was able to regain some semblance of balance and composure.

  I took a minute to count body parts and make sure nobody had seen me staggering around like a drunk. My ear throbbed to the beat of my heart. The impact with the ground had aggravated my shoulder. I cradled myself until it calmed down. I was grateful for something else to think about when out in the street an eighteen-wheeler came growling by. Moving slowly up through the gears until it finally blended into the general hum of the city.

  As I saw it, I didn’t have the luxury of being surreptitious. If somebody saw me, then they saw me. I’d burn that bridge when I came to it. Nobody had seen Rebecca in something like a week and, even presuming she was out there somewhere mucking around on her own, whatever she was doing, she was doing without her cell phone, driver’s license, and credit cards. My gut felt as if it was full of nails.

  I cut left around the stern of an old wooden fishing vessel. The Cheryl Anne. Blue and white up top, black beneath the waterline. Didn’t take a marine engineer to see that the old girl wouldn’t be going anywhere. The entire transom had fallen off, exposing her nautical ass in a most unseemly manner.

  The yard arrangement was classic. Little boat shed for little vessels with little money. Big boat shed for bigger vessels with serious folding cash. Everybody else was propped up on jack stands outside in the yard, “on the hard” as they liked to say.

  Out in the ship canal, an enormous red and white Crowley tug was motoring its way out toward Puget Sound. I watched as whoever was at the helm of the Response raised his hand. I thought he was waving hello, as boaties are inclined to do, and was about give the obligatory return wave when the sudden blast of his air horn shook me to my core. I shuddered again and hunched my shoulders against the chill.