by G. M. Ford
"Sorry," I said. "I guess I'm a little off my feed." She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. "Can't say as I blame you. This is pretty rough." I did the manly thing. I changed the subject. "Have you seen the keys to the attic?" "What's in the attic?"
"I was going to see if I could find my father's daybooks from about the time Peerless Price disappeared."
For much of his public life, the old man had weathered a veritable hail of independent investigations, fact findings, closed-door hearings and internal audits, all instigated by Peerless Price. The barrage of litigation had forced my father to document his each and every move. Every hour of his professional life, every reimbursable expense, every mile of official business driven by the city vehicle in his possession. All of it. My father kept track of this torrent of minutia in a series of small blue notebooks which were, when I look back at it now, the precursor to the day planner. He filled up three or four a year, marked the dates of their inclusion on the spine and then filed them chronologically, in preparation for the next audit. He called them his daybooks and never left home without one in his pocket.
I could tell from Rebecca's expression that she wanted to say something but was holding back. "What?"
She jammed her hands into her pants pockets and shook her head.
"You think I'm being stupid, huh?"
"I think it's a thirty-year-old case," she sighed. "I think high-profile cases like this are like quicksand. The more you wiggle around in them, the faster you sink."
My turn to sigh.
"As you already so kindly pointed out, that was more or less Pat's point of view." She shrugged. "Sorry," she said. "I've got to do something." "I know."
"I mean, it's not like I expect to find some little notation . . . you know . . . like . . . July third, nineteen sixty-nine, ten-thirty P.M., kill Peerless Price, or something like that. I just thought maybe I'd look and see what my father was doing and then maybe check with the paper and see what Peerless Price was working on and you know ... see if . . ." I let it go.
"There's a big ring of those old skeleton keys in the front part of the drawer with the silverware. It's probably one of those."
When I didn't move, she stepped over and took me by the hand.
"Come on," she said. "I'll show you."
WHAT I REMEMBER most about my parents' house was the silence. How, in every room, from floor to ceiling, for as long as I could remember, the butt ends of whatever they had to say to each other but couldn't bring themselves to utter had floated about like airborne dust. Even as a young boy, I had come to realize that something within that silent space had swallowed their love and ripped them asunder. Why? Who knows? I guess the answer depends on whether you're more inclined to believe in miracles or in mistakes.
I STOOD AT the bottom of the fold-down stairs, looking up into the semidarkness, brandishing a black rubber flashlight like a scepter.
"You wanna come up?" I asked.
"You want me to?"
"No," I said. "I know where they are. Shouldn't take long."
"You sure?"
I didn't like the expression on her face. "What? You think I'm afraid of the dark?" "I didn't say that."
I lifted one foot and placed it carefully on the first tread.
"I'll be right back," I said with a bit more bravado than I felt. I began to climb. I climbed fast and without looking back, putting one foot above the other, until I stood on the rough board floor at the head of the stairs. I turned and pointed the thin yellow beam back toward the square of light at my feet, and then I realized I'd been holding my breath. I took in some new air and looked around.
On my left, two small triangular windows flanked the chimney, throwing wide shafts of light out on the far end of the room. Behind me, the three gables of the front facade divided the remaining interior into alternating patches of dark and light. I switched off the flashlight.
I saw what I was looking for. The four brown file cabinets into which my father's life had been squeezed were huddled together down by the chimney. As I looked down the length of the room, it struck me that some unknown force in the attic had divided my parents' afterlives along precisely the same lines which they themselves had chosen to divide things during their tenure on earth.
On the left was the guy stuff. The folding Ping-Pong table. The croquet set and volleyball net. The bent basketball hoop that used to grace the front of the garage. And of course, all the boxes upon boxes of Christmas ornaments and lights, which, every holiday season, he and I had struggled to hang from every eave and bough on the property. When I was young, it was my father hanging from the ladder and crawling across the roof. My lot was merely to fetch and tote. Later, I did the high-wire part of the act, while he stood on the ground, smoking cigars and waving his long arms. Later still, in the years after she died, he hired it out, and we stood together on the frozen grass, shoulder to shoulder, drinking whiskey and stamping our feet while the workmen wrapped the place in Yule-tide cheer.
On the right, a wide-hipped mannequin lorded over the wretched refuse like an indoor scarecrow. They'd removed the round mirror from her walnut dresser and pushed it back up under the eaves. The antique wicker baby carriage—she always called it a perambulator—sat atop a pile of old windows, next to an ornate wooden birdcage big enough for a California condor. We'd always had the cage. Never had a bird. But always had the cage.
My nose felt thick with dust. I started down the length of the room. As I passed the carriage, I glanced down into its interior. Lying there on the cracked little mattress was a child's toy. A brown and white monkey twisted and sewn from several pairs of socks, winking with a missing eye, its wide red lips puckered for a kiss. When I picked him up, the little bell on the top of his hat tinkled and instantly, I knew he was mine. Mikey the Monkey accompanied me down to the file cabinets. He wasn't much of a talker, but it beat hell out of going alone.
MY FEAR OF the darkness began to subside with the realization that the world outside my family's walls was, often as not, unlike anything I had known. That in other houses shouts and footsteps regularly rang through the halls, and windows were for something other than blinding with blinds and draping with drapes. Still later, I came to see that the darkness always traveled with me and knew that deep inside I had a keep, a flickering tunnel where absolutely no one else was welcome. Not a dungeon—but a root cellar where the refuse of my heart could be safely shielded from prying eyes and pointing fingers, a place where everyone agreed that my inability to conjure the faces of my doomsters merely made the threat more dire.
REBECCA STIFLED A yawn with one hand and rubbed the back of my neck with the other. "I'm going to bed," she said. "What time is it?"
"Ten-forty." She yawned again. "I've got an early day tomorrow. Staff meeting." I turned the little blue book over so I wouldn't lose my place and stretched my arms up and back, pulling her toward me.
"I'll be up in a while," I said. "Just want to finish going through this one again."
I'd brought down the three books which covered nineteen sixty-nine and left Mikey the Monkey to guard their place in the file. Fourth of July weekend was near the end of the middle book. I was making my third pass through that particular volume. Each successive pass brought further spasms of lucidity, wherein I would suddenly understand what had up until that point seemed nothing more than alphanumeric gibberish, so then I'd have to go back and read everything again.
She patted me on top of the head.
"You must be tired. You've been at it all day."
"It took me a long while to figure out his shorthand."
"Find anything?"
"Nothing I'd write home about."
She leaned over my shoulder. "What are the big numbers at the bottom of each page?" It read: 15,789.
' 'Mileage on the city car. The city only paid for mileage when my father was actually in the car. He paid for Bermuda's mileage out of his own pocket. From the time Bermuda left him off at night, to the time he picked him up
again in the morning, those were personal miles."
For nearly twenty years, Ed "Bermuda" Schwartz had been my old man's personal driver and confidant. His promising career in the SPD had ended one night during a high-speed chase through the Rainier Valley, when Bermuda's police cruiser T-boned a garbage truck, killing his partner instantly and leaving the young officer Schwartz with a broken back and one mangled leg four inches shorter than the other.
Despite its tragic overtones, the situation had a couple of things going for it. First off, right about that time, one of my old man's many real estate scams had incurred the wrath of a couple of old-time land barons. The way they told the story, he'd used his official clout to lose some of their paperwork and then had appropriated their recently refurbished eight-story building on Third Avenue for little more than the price of back taxes. A ploy which, interestingly enough, turned out to be precisely how they'd gotten hold of the building in the first place. These were the kind of guys who were used to paying off politicians, not getting fleeced by them, so needless to say, they were miffed. So miffed, in fact, that they let it be known on the street that were my old man to appear suddenly before the headlights of the wrong automobile some dark and lonely night, he might well turn up late for supper.
Secondly, and of equal importance, Officer Ed Schwartz was, at that time, the SPD's sole and token Jew. Not only that but Schwartz didn't want to go on disability. He wanted to stay on the force. At a desk if he had to, but on the force. As any cop will tell you, you can't have a uniformed officer pushing a walker around the squad room. It's bad for morale. It's hard enough to put on the badge and go out every day, knowing that any routine traffic stop could well be your last act, without having to look at it every morning.
It was one of those sweet deals that politicians so love. The kind that works out all around. The police department got to look benevolent. Bermuda got to stay on active duty and work toward his pension; the city got to make good on its racial and ethnic guidelines and, most importantly perhaps, my old man got a full-time gofer with a gun. A fearful symmetry indeed.
I turned the page. "See ... top of the next page. Car mileage first thing in the morning." 15,805.
"Sixteen miles," she said.
"Right. Wherever Bermuda lived back then, it was sixteen miles round-trip from right here." I tapped the table and began to flip through the pages. "Every night, the same thing. He'd drop the old man off, drive home and then come back in the morning to get him."
I pointed down onto the page. "See . . . B-CAR, seven forty-five p.m. 16,432." I turned the page. "CAR Official seven fifty-five a.m. 16,449."
"What's B-CAR?"
"It means Bermuda had the car for the night." "Which he did every night."
"Mostly," I hedged. "That's the only inconsistency I can see. Other than that these guys were like clockwork." "What's that?"
I checked the notepad at my elbow. "There may be more, but so far, between the middle of May nineteen sixty-nine and the end of June of the same year, just prior to when Peerless Price disappeared, there are two occasions when my father took the city car home for the night."
"So?"
"Those are the only times, during the whole year, when that happened. Twice during that six-week period." "So?"
"He had a car at home." "Maybe it was in the shop." "For six weeks?"
I thumbed ahead in the book. CAR-ME Per. "And look, both times he takes the car, he gives Bermuda fifty bucks in personal money. Probably for cab fare home and then back in the morning." B-$50 per.
"So?"
"It's just odd, that's all. Picture it. They're downtown somewhere." I nipped the page and pointed at the next day's mileage. Only a five-mile difference. Wherever my father had gone, it was somewhere downtown. I flipped back. 11:15 p.m. "It's the end of the day. He hands Bermuda, who, by the way, walks with two canes, fifty bucks and tells him to take a cab home. I mean . . . why would he do that?"
She thought it over. "Sounds like he had something to do that he didn't want Mr. Schwartz to know about."
"That's exactly what got my attention. I mean what could he possibly be doing that he didn't want Bermuda to know about? They'd been together for years. Bermuda knew where all the bodies were buried." I stopped myself. "Figuratively speaking, of course."
"Why don't you ask Mr. Schwartz?"
"I don't even know if he's still alive," I said.
"How old would he be?"
"I'm not sure. Maybe seventy-five, eighty or so."
I rolled the chair backward toward the counter and pulled the phone book out of the bread drawer. She watched with a wry grin.
"The amazing tricks you gumshoes know."
I ignored the jibe. Ninety-eight out of every hundred people are listed in the phone book. Way back when, I'd once looked for a guy for a day and a half before a brainstorm sent me to the white pages.
No Edward Albert Schwartz. No E Schwartz of any kind. I lobbed the book back into the drawer and rolled it closed with my foot.
"It's like Sherlock said. First you eliminate the obvious; then you get weird from there."
"Those were his exact words?"
"More or less."
"Did Mr. Schwartz have a family? A wife? Kiddies?" "I don't know," I said.
She started for the door. "Well, Sherlock, I'll be upstairs whenever you get through sleuthing." I closed my eyes, listening to the sound of her footsteps on the stairs and wondering how I could recall so little about the life of a man who knew so much about mine. Other than tooling around in the city car with my father, Bermuda's main task had been toting me around. I mean, my mother didn't drive—hell, for the most part, she didn't even go out—and it wasn't like either of them was going to sit through Little League baseball games or anything. Fat chance. But I always knew that before the game was over, Bermuda would show up to get me, in that long black car. Rain or shine, he'd always try to make as much of the game as he could No matter where I was on the field, I'd hear him clanking up into the stands with those aluminium canes of his, wearing that same black suit with the jacket buttoned. Always in the front row, sitting like a rock, right next to the over-involved, maniac parents, because that was as high as he could climb. I remembered how he never had a word or an opinion about anything unless you asked him directly, and then he had words and opinions about everything, because he cover-to-covered three newspapers a day, and did all the crossword puzzles while he was sitting on his duff waiting for my old man. Half the useless crap running around in my head, I'd learned from Bermuda Schwartz, and all I could recall was his satchel face, his big red hands and the silly name everybody called him. Go figure.
Chapter 8
In a pulp novel, an erstwhile local private dick like me, faced with finding an old ex-cop, would simply call his cynical, weather-beaten buddy on the police force. He'd have the buddy see if the pension check was still going out, and, if so, where to. Wham bam thank you ma'am. Problem was, I didn't have a buddy on the police force. Quite the contrary. As a matter of fact, it was generally agreed that one of the quickest and surest paths to a lifetime of obscurity on the Seattle Police Department was to have anything to do with me. That's because my ex-wife Annette was now working her marital magic on a certain Seattle police captain named Henry Monroe. He'd started out cheerful enough. Henry the Magnanimous, always greeting me loudly and clapping me on the back, in the assured manner of a man who feels certain he's grabbed the brass ring. Not for long, though. No ... a couple of years of connubial bliss and, without so much as a word, he'd started having me removed from the Public Safety Building whenever he saw me in the halls. Couldn't say as I blamed him either. I figured it was one of those unfortunate "Friends don't let friends ..." kind of things. Love may be blind, but marriage is a real eye-opener. I'd met Claire Wells right after my divorce, when well meaning friends had fixed us up on a blind date. She'd recently separated from some guy named Joe. Yeah, I knew better, but in those days my urges usually got the upper hand, so to speak. I'
d taken her to Ristorante Isabella, an atmospheric Italian joint on Third Avenue. You know, a little wine, a little pasta, a couple of choruses of "Volare." Whoa oh. You never know. It could happen.
Not this time though. Hell, we never even made it through the salad. Half a glass of wine and twenty minutes of inane conversation later, she looked out over the rim of a nice glass of Estancia Chardonnay, narrowed her slate-gray eyes and popped the question.
"Are you having a good time?"
Usually, answering a question such as this is easy, because, unless you're a barbarian, your options are limited. As I see it, you either pass the buck with a question of your own such as "Are you?" A pathetic, shopworn ruse lacking in both style and originality. Or you try to change the subject to something . . . anything less threatening than your own feelings. "How's the wine?" for instance. The problem with this sort of random segue is that, a la Groucho Marx, anybody who'd fall for it wouldn't be somebody with whom you'd want to be sharing a meal. So you're pretty much left doing what everybody does in a moment like that, you tell 'em what it is you think they want to hear. "Oh, yeah. Real good." It's like apres sex. I mean, what the hell are you going to tell somebody you've just been doing the hokey pokey with when they look over and give you some variation of the old "It was good for me; was it good for you?" I mean, it's not like you can yawn into the back of your hand and reckon how, all in all, you'd rather have been pulling weeds in the front yard. No sir. You can't even sidestep the issue with something like "I especially liked the part where you moved." No . . . no. Unless you want to be short-listed for the Goth of the Month Award, you come up with something life-affirming. Period. No matter what anybody says, some situations do not cry out for candor.
That's why the words that escaped my lips so startled me.
"Not a bit," I said.
Claire Wells smiled. "So . . . it's not just me," she began. "I was afraid that maybe I wasn't ready for something like this. That maybe it was just too soon for me." She took another sip. "But it's not that, is it? We don't agree on anything, do we?"