Last Ditch

by G. M. Ford

  "In case you think of anything else."

  He nodded.

  "See ya, huh?" I said.

  He nodded again. I let myself out.

  Chapter 10

  I Confess I'm the last human being in America over the age of nine who doesn't own a cellular phone. Not only that but—gird your loins now—I don't have any intention of owning one, either. Not only that, but you know that bumper sticker? YOU'D PROBABLY DRIVE BETTER WITH THAT CELL PHONE UP YOUR ASS. Granted, it's a bit crude, but I've driven behind those people, and so have you. Need I say more? As far as I'm concerned, cellular phones and beepers are to human beings what leashes and choke chains are to dogs. In spite of this, however, there have been several occasions when, to be quite honest, I've cursed my own cussedness and longed for the convenience of such post industrial marvels. And this most definitely was one of those times.

  Twenty minutes after leaving Bermuda, I was standing in a phone booth on Forty-fifth Street. The rain had calmed to a mere typhoon. The inside of the booth was awash with a swirling armada of cigarette butts and pop tops about three inches deep. My feet were soaked. Half a baloney sandwich on whole wheat bobbed contentedly about my ankles. On top of that, I was having one of those phone days. The ones where nobody you call is in, or, if they are in, they can't come to the phone at this time, and either way it doesn't matter because you're getting nothing but machines who regret that So-and-so isn't home or at his desk and would you please leave your message after the beep. Beep.

  I fed another quarter into the box and dialed Rebecca at work. Even if Duvall was in a meeting, I knew the intern, Tyanne Cummings, would answer the phone. I'd already decided. If I got another machine, I was using my last quarter to call Dr. Laura for advice.

  "King County Medical Examiner."

  "Hi, Tyanne. Is Rebecca available?"

  I heard her catch her breath.

  "Oh . . . Leo . . . you still don't know, huh?"

  I hate it when conversations begin like this. Already, I was beginning to pine for an answering machine.

  "Know what?"

  "The police. She left. They served her with a warrant this morning about eleven-thirty." "What kind of warrant?" "A search warrant." "For what?"

  "For her . . . your ... the house where you guys live."

  I don't remember whether I thanked her or not. As a matter of fact, the whole ride back to the house was pretty much a blur. I don't recall anything until I slid around the corner on Crockett and bounced up into the driveway next to the blue-and-white SPD truck.

  I used the booklet I'd gotten from Claire Wells as a hat, setting it directly on my head as I stepped out into the driveway. The slanting rain slapped down onto the clear plastic cover, adding its irregular tapping to the hissing sound of water moving everywhere around me.

  I peeked into the truck on the way by. Inside, strapped two to a side, stood the four file cabinets from the attic. Strapped to the back wall was the two-drawer oak model from my office. On the right, in the cabinet closest to me, the middle drawer had been closed on Mikey the Monkey's brown tail. When I turned toward the house, a small river ran down my collar and I shuddered. A blue plastic carpet runner ran from the back of the truck straight into the garage. I stepped onto the plastic path and headed off in search of Rebecca.

  She was sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee and reading the lifestyles section of the paper. On the table, by her elbow, the headline screamed the question BLOOD FEUD? directly above side-by-side shots of Peerless Price and Wild Bill Waterman. I could hear voices and footsteps up on the second floor. Sitting there, holding her head in one hand while she read, Rebecca looked as tired as I'd ever seen her.

  "Hey," I said.

  She looked up from the paper and smiled. "Hey yourself." "Tyanne said ..."

  She lifted the front page from the table. I crossed the room, dropped the dripping booklet onto the table and picked up the warrant. Judge Ellen Gardner, in and for the county of King, in the state of Washington, had decreed that duly appointed members of the Seattle Police Department should be entitled to search the residence at two twenty-four Crockett Avenue for any and all documents pertaining to the public career of William G. Waterman. Including, but not limited to . . . yadda yadda yadda. Two pages' worth.

  I flipped the warrant back at the table where it landed face-down.

  "These assholes served you at the office?"

  She used her foot to push the chair across from her out from the table. "Sit," she said. "I can see you working yourself up here, Leo. They could have jimmied the front door. Legally, they have the right. Coming to the office first was a courtesy."

  I began pulling sections of the paper from the table.

  "Did they ..." I whispered.

  "The three blue books you left here on the table?"

  "Shhh."

  She waved a hand at me. "They found those first thing. That's how come I had to tell them about the rest of the stuff upstairs."

  "Shit."

  I could hear the sound of footsteps on the stairs.

  Detective Trujillo was natty in a gold sport jacket and deep brown slacks. Matching tie and hanky again. Custom-made shirt, too. Brown tasseled shoes this time. He pranced into the room and pushed a clipboard under my nose. A blue pen hung from a metal chain attached to the top of the board.

  "Nice you could make it," he offered.

  I couldn't come up with a sentence that didn't include the word "motherfucker," so I kept my mouth shut He jiggled the board.

  "Here's the inventory of what we took. You want to come out and check this against what we got in the truck, feel free."

  When neither of us moved, he went on. "Sign on the bottom two lines. Initials where I've got the X's."

  I took the clipboard and followed directions, scribbling my way to the bottom of the page.

  "When can I expect my property back?" I asked.

  "When we're finished with it," he snapped. "We've got a six-man task force set to go through the material. When they get through with it, you'll get it back."

  I held on to the clipboard. "Why do I find that less than informative, Detective Trujillo?"

  He reached over and plucked the clipboard from my hand. He tore a perforated strip from the bottom of the page, wiggled out a yellow copy and handed it to me. "You had your chance to cooperate, Waterman. You wanted to be the smart guy. Now you take what that gets you."

  "Are you finished?" I asked.

  Trujillo smirked. "I'll let you know when we're finished, Waterman. In the meantime,-do us both a favor and try to stay out of the way."

  "Don't let the door hit you in the ass, Trujillo."

  He turned on his heel and followed the runner out into the garage.

  Frank Wessels stood in the doorway grinning. "Gee, Leo," he said. "Way to leave the little lady to handle it by herself there, Hercules. A real stud superhero you are, leaving your girlfriend here to clean up your family's dirty laundry."

  I was still deciding which hand to hit him with and where, when Rebecca materialized at my elbow. "Detective Wessels," she said, stepping around me. "I am neither a little lady nor a girl." He started to open his mouth, but she moved right up into his face. I could tell he wasn't used to women who were as tall as he was. She practically had her nose on his. "And if you ever refer to me either publicly or privately as anything other than 'Dr. Duvall' again, I will bring departmental sexual harassment charges against you so fast it will make your head spin. And you know, I don't think you want to find out which of us is considered more indispensable by King County, do you, Officer Wessels?"

  He shifted his weight from foot to foot and checked his shoes for laces. "No," he said finally. "My apologies for any misunderstanding."

  "Apology noted, Officer. Now why don't you follow my boyfriend's suggestion and watch out for that proverbial door."

  He didn't need to be told twice. He threw me a quick sneer and headed out through the garage. Rebecca walked over to the doorway
and watched him go. "I believe I could develop a real dislike for that man."

  "You'll have to get in line and take a number," I said.

  Two uniforms came by, rolling the plastic runner before them. I heard them close the door to the garage behind themselves. I threw an arm around Rebecca and pulled her close. I could feel her anger. In the driveway, the police van started and backed out, the throbbing of its exhaust finally fading into silence.

  "What was that guy's name who worked for the U? The guy who borrowed all my father's stuff so they could copy it for their archives?"

  No answer. She looked blank.

  "What?"

  "Remember? The Seattle history guy. The one who came here to the house that time right after we moved in."

  "Oh," she said. "The little man with the red beard and the elbow patches on everything."

  "And the loud bow ties," I offered.

  She knit her brow. "Fitz something."

  "Patrick."

  "No."

  "Henry."

  "Not Henry either." "Roy," I said. "Fitzroy."

  She nodded. "That's it. Dr. Milton Fitzroy. I remember we figured he was the type to wear tailored pajamas and that they probably had leather patches, too. What do you want with him?"

  I told her about finding Bermuda and what he'd said about my father taking the car. "I thought maybe Fitzroy would know what was in that neighborhood way back when."

  "How do you know that whatever he was doing was in that neighborhood? He had the car, Leo. He could have gone anywhere."

  "Because of the mileage. When Bermuda got to the house on the following Monday mornings, the mileage difference was always five miles."

  "So?"

  "So, from downtown to the house here is damn near five miles. Wherever he went, it wasn't very damn far from where he left Bermuda off."

  "Presuming the mileage is correct."

  "It's like Bermuda said. Only an idiot lies about anything he doesn't have to."

  She didn't seem convinced.

  "At least, I'm working from that presumption," I added.

  She said, "That guy Fitzroy left a business card. I think I stapled it into the Rolodex in your office." She kissed me on the cheek. "I need to get back to work." She retrieved her green rain jacket from the back of the chair. "Don't wait up. Everybody else is working on Peerless Price. So, I'm stuck with the rest of it. I'm up to my armpits in stiffs."

  I walked her out to her car. She got in and started the engine. Her window slid down. "I don't suppose there's anything I could say that would induce you to let this thing go, is there?"

  I shook my head. "Now it's personal."

  "Oh?"

  "They took my monkey."

  She threw the Explorer in gear and backed out into the street.

  Chapter 11

  Dr. Milton Fitzroy answered his phone on the first ring.

  "History Department, Fitzroy."

  "Dr. Fitzroy," I began, "this is Leo Waterman. I don't know if you recall but a few months ago ..."

  "Of course I recall, Mr. Waterman." He cleared his throat. "So sorry about the . . er . . . the recent turn of events."

  "Thanks," I said. "I was hoping maybe you could help me with something."

  "By all means. Anything. I am most assuredly in your debt. I don't know whether you realize it, but the information which you provided me was of incalculable value to an overall understanding of the sociopolitical infrastructure of the city prior to nineteen eighty."

  I was terrified he'd explain it to me, so I lied and allowed how I was aware of my substantial contribution to his work.

  "What can I do for you?"

  "If I wanted to know what was open for business in a certain section of the city, in a certain year, could you provide me with that information?"

  It was a long shot, and I knew it. All I had going for me was that whatever my father was about had to be of sufficient importance that he felt impelled to leave Bermuda out of it, and it had to be somewhere right there in that neighborhood. That, and whatever it was, had required him to be, uncharacteristically, in possession of folding money.

  He thought it over. "Certainly. Of course, we would only have access to legitimate business, for which a license had been issued and from whom taxes were being collected. Such things as sidewalk stands and after-hours clubs, and . . . er . . . anything illegal or illicit would, of course, escape our scrutiny."

  "What I had in mind was everything below First Avenue, from Pike Street on the north to Yesler on the south. That whole area of Alaskan Way and Western Avenue between First Avenue and the sound. I need to know what was there that would possibly be open on a Friday night. Would that be possible?"

  "I don't see why not," he said. "That particular portion of the city should, in all probability, be relatively easy to plot. I suspect that its composition was much as it is now. What year did you say?"

  "The summer of nineteen sixty-nine. And I'm looking for things that would be open on a Friday night, which works great for what you said about legitimate businesses. It's too late for sidewalk business and too early for after-hours clubs."

  He coughed again. "Yes, of course. Of course. Quite. Nineteen sixty-nine, you say."

  I could hear him mumbling to himself. "Of course, for an accurate picture, I would have to cross-reference the plat maps with business licenses and liquor licenses in order to determine hours of operation."

  "Of course."

  "And of course, we would have no way of plotting anything residential."

  "How long do you think it would take for you to come up with the information?"

  "Oh . . . well, no more than a day or so, I should say."

  I explained that circumstances had forced us to leave the phones unplugged and asked him to leave me a message when he had the information collected. He assured me he would.

  Two hours and two pots of coffee later, my scalp was beginning to tingle from the caffeine, and I'd had to break out that pair of glasses I don't need. The Post-Intelligencer press packet had been copied so many times the letters looked like ancient runes and the pictures had taken on the amorphous quality of Rorschach renderings.

  During the last days of Peerless Price's professional life, he had written on only three subjects: the Yellow Peril and the Red Menace, which, fashion considerations notwithstanding, were the same thing, as far as Peerless Price was concerned. Next was the, and I quote, "rot at the center of American morals" as personified by the recent proliferation of gay and lesbian clubs in the Seattle area. And finally, he wrote incessantly about the upcoming Fourth of July parades, which, of course, was where my old man got mixed into the pudding.

  According to Price, antiwar activists should be held personally accountable for each and every American death, should be prosecuted for aiding and abetting the enemy, meted out lengthy jail terms and then, upon release, should be summarily deported to those countries with whom they had chosen to cast their lot. And those were the lucky ones.

  For my old man and the others who had consistently spoken out against the conflict and who had finagled the permit for the antiwar demonstration, Price was willing to skip all that tiresome law and order stuff and get right down to a series of public executions, a myth-making spectacle which he was convinced would considerably stiffen the city's, if not the nation's, badly wavering moral fiber.

  According to Peerless Price, this moral rot was most visible in the phenomenon commonly known as the "sexual revolution." In his view, every citizen of the state was put at risk by the half dozen, and I quote again, "pervo palaces" which had sprung up throughout the city, catering to the recently radicalized element of the gay and lesbian communities, whose members he considered to be "abnormal abominations" and "an affront to both man and God."

  Particularly galling to Price was the SPD's refusal to enforce a tum-of-the-century city ordinance which made it a crime for members of the same sex to engage in any type of physical display or contact whatsoever. Unable to budge th
e SPD hierarchy on the issue, Peerless Price had taken matters into his own hands. He'd coerced a rummy SPD lieutenant named Bailey into pulling a raid on one of the downtown gay bars. A place called the Garden of Eden. According to Price, the raid had netted a bevy of Seattle's best and brightest citizens engaged in acts of such perversity as to make a Roman orgy seem like a Lutheran coffee social.

  At last, Peerless Price had them right where he wanted them, or so it seemed. Problem was that by noon the next day, not only had they all made bail, but every shred of documentation pertaining to their arrest and booking had miraculously disappeared from the Downtown Precinct house, never to be seen again.

  Bailey was suspended indefinitely and eventually opted to retire rather than face departmental charges. Publicly prodded by Peerless Price, the SPD staged a perfunctory investigation into the missing paperwork, but nothing ever came of it, because, once again according to PP, strings had been pulled at the very highest levels of city government. In the week prior to his death, Peerless Price had promised his readers that he was about to name those public officials responsible for sweeping the matter under the rug.

  The third subject dear to Peerless Price at the time of his disappearance was the wave of Asian refugees who were flooding into the city. Old Peerless made no distinction among the various Asian communities, labeling them all as "wogs" and demanding that they be immediately shipped back from whence they had come. To Price, the increased pace of immigration from that part of the world was little more than a thinly disguised attempt to undermine us from within. Not only were thousands of these inferior beings using our overly permissive laws against us, but we were also besieged by another silent wave of illegal immigrants whose insidious plan to infiltrate both our nation and our gene pool constituted "the most severe threat to our national sovereignty since the War of 1812."

  Peerless was convinced that the Seattle waterfront was a major port of entry for Chinese refugees fleeing the atrocities of the Cultural Revolution. In his final column of July third, Peerless Price had promised his readers that those responsible were about to be unmasked.