Thicker Than Water (A Leo Waterman Mystery)

by G. M. Ford

  What looked to be an eighty-ton travel lift straddled the haulout slip like a giant blue mantis, its polyethylene lifting straps hanging lank above the inky water. If I recalled correctly, a lift that size was good for at least eighty-footers. Maybe as big as a hundred, depending on the make and model.

  I followed the “office” arrows around the south side of the building. Twenty feet of old twelve-pane windows and a peeling green door looked out over the yard. The glass was filthy, inside and out, the glazier’s putty so dissolute it had fallen out in many places. A single arm of blackberry vine, bristling with thorns and thick as my wrist, wandered unimpeded over the front wall.

  I checked the area immediately around the door. No stickers or decals. Apparently, not Zagat rated. No “this business is protected by” such and such security company either. I checked the door and didn’t see any obvious alarm wiring, but then again, you’re not supposed to. No alarm bells under the eaves. Besides which, this didn’t look to me like the kind of property where anybody was going to be willing to foot a monthly security bill. Looked like the metal thieves had already lifted anything ferrous that could be toted off and sold. What was still lying around the yard was either too big to mess with or without value. Tentatively, I turned the knob. The door swung open.

  The moment my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I could tell I was too late. Somebody had gotten there before me. Everything that opened was open. A number of things that didn’t open had been smashed on the floor, as if destroyed in frustration rather than as part of the search. Whoever had preceded me apparently wasn’t having any more luck finding Brett Ward than I was, and was none too happy about it either.

  I stepped inside, found a light switch to the right of the door, and flipped it on. Several banks of old-fashioned fluorescent lights began to hiss and blink.

  The room was maybe ten by twenty. Fake wood paneling, circa 1950s rumpus room. Metal desk down at the end. Coupla cleavage calendars pinned to the wall behind the desk, three metal file cabinets to the right, and a couple of motel chairs for guests. Couple of other racks and tables scattered about the walls, one piled with paperwork, another with paint cans, and yet another with all the carcinogenic condiments and plastic stirring implements necessary for making truly wretched coffee.

  It was, however, the black metal door directly opposite where I stood that hijacked my attention, or rather the collection of waffle-soled boot prints scattered about the surface. Bunches of them, high and low, left, right, and middle. Several of them upside down, where he’d stood with his back to the door and tried to horse kick it in. No doubt about it, somebody had worked up a hell of a sweat trying to get through that door, all to no avail too, which probably explained all the unnecessary breakage.

  Now, if you knew Brett Ward, you knew that he was a smooth kind of guy. Not the sort to be lugging around a big set of keys that made lumps in his pockets and screwed up his pleats. No, no. That wasn’t Brett at all. What knowing Brett Ward told me was that if Brett Ward had the key to that door, he wouldn’t be carrying it in his pockets. No sir. It would be right here someplace, where he could lay hands on it with a minimum of effort. I’d bet on it.

  First, I had to lift the desk back onto its feet. That was the hard part. Absolutely amazing what those old metal desks weigh, especially if one of your arms isn’t working. On the other hand, the key was exactly where I’d imagined, front and center in the top drawer of the desk, so I guess the aggravation evened out.

  I snapped the bolt back and pulled open the door. A narrow trapezoid of light raced across the floor. I felt around both sides of the door but couldn’t find a light switch of any kind, so I took a couple of tentative steps into the room and waited for my eyes to adjust. As my pupils expanded, I could make out what looked like a hotel room or, more likely, the master stateroom from a salvaged yacht. Nicely appointed and anonymous. Little fridge. Couple of mirrors. Big platform bed, end tables, lamps, the whole ball of wax. The bed was even made. The pillows fluffed.

  Maybe it was just me, but around the time the novelty wore off, the room started to look sad and a bit depressing. Like what was wrong with a grown man who went to this much trouble just to boff the company receptionist. It boggled the mind.

  I edged toward the brass table lamps that flanked the bed. Tried one and then walked around and tried the other, neither of which worked, so I followed the wires up the right side of the bed and around the corner, where I found a pair of wall outlets and plugged in.

  A warm glow enveloped the room. Maybe a little brighter than I would have chosen for a romantic interlude, but passable nonetheless. I guessed Brett liked to see who or what he was doing. Probably told her she was so beautiful he didn’t want to miss a thing. A couple of quick involuntary images of Brett Ward hunched up behind Rosemary De Carlo made my head swim. I hadn’t slept much lately and felt a bit woozy, so I leaned against the wall and took a minute to regroup.

  I don’t know why it caught my eye, but it did. Over in the back corner of the room. A pair of nondescript blue wires jutted from under the carpet, made a quick right turn, and disappeared through the adjoining wall. For what? The room’s electricity was obviously on the same circuit as the lights. The digital clock had blinked midnight ever since I plugged in.

  Then it came to me, like the proverbial bolt out of the blue. I chided myself for being stupid, blamed it on sleep deprivation, and walked over to the corner of the room. Took me under a minute to figure out. Once I pulled the dresser out from the wall, I found there was no damn wall, just a framed-out rectangle where, if I got down on my hands and knees, I could crawl back into some sort of hidden corridor.

  I sighed. I wasn’t crazy about cramped spaces, and crawling back into Brett Ward’s private porno palace was going to put me a lot closer to him than I wanted to be. I’d have killed for a pair of coveralls and a surgical mask as I got down on one knee and wiggled my shoulders through the opening.

  Turned out there was a little Flip HD movie camera secreted behind each of the mirrors. He had a plank set up to hold the Dell laptop that he used to burn his DVDs. I turned the PC on, opened the media player, hit Play, and there he was, Brett Ward, buck naked, with his mouth locked on the crotch of a fleshy brunette, whose impassioned urging seemed to spur him to ever greater ministrations. I had the odd thought that viewed dispassionately and from just the right height, human beings engaged in sex must be a rather confounding sight. I pictured antennae aliens looking down and wondering: “Just what the hell are they doing?”

  I chided myself for being silly and ejected the disc, turned off the Dell, unplugged it, and slid it under my arm. A quick search turned up seven DVDs, each of them labeled with a different woman’s name or initials. I figured the one marked Rose Mary D to be Rosemary De Carlo. Not much gets by old Leo.

  I also figured that none of these women deserved to wake up some morning to find themselves on YouTube doing the horizontal bop with Brett Ward, so I pocketed all the discs, removed the cameras from their mountings and crawled back out into the love nest. I was feeling so queasy I didn’t even look around; I just kept walking until I was outside in the yard.

  The cold, wet air blowing in from Puget Sound was a blessing.

  I’d never felt more like I needed a shower.

  What should have been a five-minute drive took more like twenty. Rush hour was looming and everybody in town was trying to get a jump on the traffic, which, as might be expected, produced precisely the opposite effect. Seemed like I was always ten cars back at traffic lights and just missed making every one of them.

  I followed Google’s pulsing blue pin and made a quick stop at Northwest Maritime’s office at Fisherman’s Terminal. Caught the agent just as he was locking the place up for the night. Guy in a plaid shirt with wild and wooly eyebrows told me if I wanted a piece of Brett Ward I was going to have to take a number and get in line. Said Northwest held the paper on something like eighty boats that were behind in their payments, half of them in Cana
dian waters. Said he’d been using Millennium to carry out the repos until Brett Ward showed up at the Northwest office one morning with the proverbial offer they couldn’t refuse.

  Brett said he could save Northwest the twenty-five percent “agency fee” that Jorgensen was charging them. Since Brett was the person actually carrying out the repos and already had a working relationship with the pain-in-the-ass Canadian authorities, and twenty-five percent was, after all, twenty-five percent, Northwest Maritime decided to go along for the ride. Brett said that all he needed was some boatyard space where he could do the necessary repairs, so Northwest gave him the use of Shilshole Marine, on which they also held the paper and which was sitting vacant at the time. Seemed like a match made in heaven.

  And for the first six or seven months, it was. As most of the repos were voluntary, it was mostly a matter of dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s, and then motoring the boats down to Seattle. They were averaging two a week. Seemed like everybody was happy with the arrangement until about the time that damn fool on Vancouver Island started waving a gun around and things suddenly went to shit.

  Quite naturally, his talk of gun-waving piqued my interest.

  He said I’d have to check with Canadian authorities if I wanted the whole story, but what he’d heard was that one of the owners went psycho when Brett showed up to repo his sixty-foot Hargrave. Claimed he didn’t know anything about any fucking repo and wasn’t about to give his boat up. Pulled a gun and stuck it in Brett’s face.

  I suppressed a malicious grin and let him continue.

  Quite wisely, Brett backed off and called the Provincial Police and, to make a long story short, they had this big ugly confrontation where the guy ended up taking a shot at a Canadian policeman. Took an extra week to get the boat back to Shilshole and, from that point on, things were never quite the same.

  After that, seemed like it took longer and longer to work through the Canadian end of the process, longer to make the repairs, longer for Northwest Maritime to get their money, until, finally, a couple of weeks back, Brett stopped answering his phone altogether and the repos started piling up, at which point Northwest pulled his ticket and put the boatyard back up for sale, which wasn’t going to happen unless they could get the zoning changed to residential, which wasn’t going to happen anytime this century.

  Nobody had heard from Brett Ward since, and, by the by, if I happened to run into that son of a bitch, tell him he was fired.

  I shook his hand, thanked him for the help, and started toward my car.

  “Hey,” he called to my back.

  I turned. He walked over to me. His forehead was furrowed. His eyebrows looked like mating caterpillars. “One strange thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Boat show last week,” he started. “I’m manning the company booth when an old friend drops by to say hello. Ronnie Brewer. Runs a marina over on Lake Washington. Tells me he’s got a real deal for me.”

  “Don’t they all?”

  “Showed me a photo of a Mainship Pilot 30. Said he can let me have it for sixty-five. Just about half the book value.” He bobbed his prehensile brows up and down. “Rare boat,” he said. “I recognized it right away. It’s one of our repos.”

  “So?”

  “So I pumped him a bit. Seems a guy named Brett Ward wholesaled him the rig for fifty-nine nine.”

  “So?”

  “That’s the same price he charged us,” he said.

  “So Brett broke even on the boat?”

  “Near as I can tell,” he said.

  “How could that pencil out?”

  “You tell me,” he said.

  I drove around the lake, moving at the speed of lava, lost in one of those semiconscious states where you manage to operate a motor vehicle without being aware of having done so. That occasional out-of-body experience, where a phantom crawls up in your lap and drives while you’re busy doing whatever. Next thing you know you’ve arrived at your destination, without the slightest recollection of how you got there.

  That was me as I slid the Tahoe to the curb a block north of the Eastlake Zoo. I turned off the engine and sat there for a moment, blinking myself back to reality.

  I took several deep breaths, checked to make sure I was all present and accounted for, and stepped out into the street. It was dark enough for the streetlights to be doing some good. The air was ten degrees warmer than it had been down by the water. As I ambled along the sidewalk, I slid my hands into my jacket pockets and came upon my cell phone, which got me to trying to remember the last time I’d used it. Sometime during last night’s festivities I’d inadvertently turned off the ringer. I had five messages. Four of them from Iris Duval and another from a local number I didn’t recognize. As the chances of me calling Iris were slightly less than the likelihood of my winning the lottery, and I had no desire to speak with strangers just about then, I thumbed the ringer back to off and dropped it back in my pocket.

  I didn’t know exactly where the boys flopped anymore. At one time, they lived together in an abandoned condo, but that thing had long since slid down under the freeway and disappeared into the mud. For a while, they had a house up on Franklin, but that deal went sour a couple of years down the road and they were back on the street. Lately I think it’s been catch-as-catch-can. Anyplace dry and reasonably safe where there’s room to bend an elbow and a soft place to crash.

  I did, however, know where to find them at this time of day. Whatever their failings—and they were legion— the boys were creatures of habit. If they were broke, they’d scrounge up all the cheap booze they could lay their hands on and go to ground. If they had money, which I knew they did because it was still early in the month and I’d augmented their drinking fund a couple of days before, then they’d be at the Eastlake Zoo yukking it up. As Ralph liked to say, “A fool and his money are soon partying.”

  By this time of day, they’d already had a couple of eye-openers just to firm the chin and get them up and lurching, followed, at a suitable interval of course, by a medicinal midmorning phlegm cutter or two, intended purely to keep the pipes clear, as they segued into the inevitable few beers with lunch, thus providing a solid-food foundation for several midafternoon bracers as they prepared themselves for yet another evening of enchantment.

  The gala was already in full swing when I arrived. As usual, they’d commandeered the floor space back around the corner from the bar. The place where the stage used to be, back before the neighbors got snotty and called the city about the noise, resulting in an official “no more music” injunction. These days, the Zoo didn’t hire a band except on special occasions, when somebody’s birthday party or wedding reception money made it possible to factor in the $750 fine and still break even.

  The two things I’d always liked about the Zoo were the clientele and the jukebox. The Zoo serviced the entire gamut of neighborhood residents. Everything from my degenerate friends in the back of the room, to houseboat yuppies out slumming, to corporate secretaries, to local businesspeople, and aging junky bikers. Everybody was welcome and, for the most part, everyone got along splendidly.

  The jukebox was every bit as eclectic as the clientele. Everything from Sarah Vaughn to the Butthole Surfers. Green Day was belting out “American Idiot” as I pulled open the front door and stepped inside.

  I stopped at the bar and waited for Louie to deliver a couple of boilermakers to the café racers sitting in the front booth. He smiled at the sight of me, made his way through the gate at the end of the bar, and wandered in my direction.

  “Leo,” he said, extending his hand.

  We shook hands and exchanged pleasantries.

  “Your copy machine working?” I asked.

  He said it was. I handed him the picture of Brett Ward I’d gotten from Rosemary De Carlo’s apartment and dropped a ten-dollar bill on the bar.

  “Hows about making me six copies?” I inquired.

  Louie palmed the cash and reckoned how it would be no prob
lem at all.

  Don’t want to be an American idiot. One nation controlled by the media.

  Two minutes later I rounded the corner with a smile on my face, the photocopies dangling from my hand, and Green Day still blasting in my ear.

  Welcome to a new kind of tension. All across the alien nation.

  I was greeted like Caesar returning from Gaul. I’d have preferred to think my popularity was a product of my stunning good looks and innate charisma, but since my arrival at the Eastlake Zoo always coincided with a free round of drinks, I made it a point not to get too far ahead of myself on that one.

  “It’s Leo,” somebody shouted and the melee was on. A crowd of hand-shakers and back-patters gathered round and collectively pumped and pounded me like a cube steak. As sore as my ear was, the outpouring of affection nearly brought me to my knees, as I glad-handed my way across the room toward the mismatched collection of Naugahyde booths lining the back wall, one of which held George and Ralph and a guy in a red plaid jacket.

  George looked up as I approached the table, dug an elbow into Ralph’s ribs and nodded in my direction. Took Ralph a minute to process, but eventually he looked over in my direction and grinned that gap-toothed grin of his.

  “Fellas,” I said.

  The third guy was short and stout and greasy. Some kind of Southeast Asian or maybe a Filipino. His sullen eyes said he’d started drinking early today and wasn’t going to last much longer. I leaned down, smiled, and looked him in the eye.

  “You suppose I could have a private word with these two?” I asked.

  “Huh?”

  “I need to have a word with these two gentlemen.”

  He wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his jacket and picked up his beer. “I ain’t movin’ nowhere,” he said.

  I gestured toward the bar where Louie was pouring everybody what they wanted on my dime. “Lemme buy you a drink,” I offered, patting him on the shoulder. “Tell Louie I said to make it a double.”