Last Ditch

by G. M. Ford

  Trujillo flipped open his notebook. "Let's see here. We interviewed the president of Triad, who assured us that no one fitting your description is in any way associated with Triad Trading. Frank and I, we're very thorough, you know, so we double-checked with both payroll and personnel ..." He gave me a wink. "You know, just to be on the safe side. Same deal. No such person. Then we spoke with every guard who works the gate on Pier Eighteen. None of whom, incidentally, recall a man with no ears."

  "Not even a one-eared guy," Wessels added.

  Trujillo licked his finger and turned a page. "We spoke with security for the cold-storage company next door and guess what . . ." he waited. "You guessed it. They'd never seen anyone even remotely like that either." He flipped another page. "Finally, we even asked the crew working on the ferry on the other side of the river. The ones who hustled around and saved your butt, and lo and behold, they didn't know a thing about a guy with no ears either." He snapped the notebook closed and returned it to his pocket.

  "So . . . unless you've got something else you'd like to share with us . . . this is about as far as it goes."

  "Some lunatic attacks me, throws me and my car in the river and you're going to forget about it"

  He smiled. "You know, considering that nobody but you has ever seen this earless guy and the doctors tell us you don't have a mark on you after this guy supposedly coldcocked you ..." He let it ride. "I hope you won't mind if we don't exhaust our entire investigative arsenal on this one."

  "He hit me with a rubber mallet," I said.

  Trujillo nodded with mock gravity. "Boing," he said.

  "The man with no ears thumps the man with no brain who found the man with no hand." Wessels chortled from the corner. "I think there's a definite pattern here, Trujillo."

  It was hard to argue with. I seemed to be developing a disturbing penchant for people with missing parts. "Is that all?"

  Trujillo walked over to the side of the bed. "No . . . as a matter of fact it's not." He looked over at Duvall and then turned back to me. "I have been requested by my superior, Lieutenant Franklin, to tell you that the Seat-tie Police Department is currently conducting an open investigation into the death of Peerless Price and that your assistance will be neither required nor tolerated." He fixed me with a long baleful stare. "We don't know what you were doing on Pier Eighteen, but we don't like the smell of it. There's general agreement that you're inclined to poke your nose in where it doesn't belong. We figure this whole thing with Price is going to be too much of a temptation for a guy like you, Waterman. So, as an aid to your recuperation, as of this moment, we're pulling your PI license and both of your gun-carry permits until further notice." He dropped a single sheet of folded paper into my lap, executed a crisp military turn and headed for the door. Wessels gave me a toodles wave on the way out.

  I tried to sit up. The sudden flow of blood to my head made me dizzy. I closed my eyes. Just for a second.

  When I opened my eyes again, the light in the room had shifted. Duvall was gone and Patrick Waterman was standing in the middle of the room looking about as uncomfortable as I'd ever seen him look.

  "You look dreadful," he said.

  "You ought to see it from this side."

  "Everyone's very worried about you." You cur.

  "I was a little concerned there for a while myself."

  He made a quick inspection tour of the room.

  "Catholic hospitals even smell differently," he said. "I think it's the piety." I figured he'd beat around the bush, but he surprised me and got to the point.

  "I'm certain I speak for the rest of the family when I say we're relieved to see that you're all right, and we all certainly hope a lesson has been taken here." You cur.

  I reached over to the bedside table and got my water glass with the nifty articulated straw. I took a long sip and then put it back.

  "What sort of lesson did you have in mind?"

  "That perhaps sleeping dogs should be allowed to he." He lifted the newspaper from the chair and held the front page up for me to see. "This would have been over by Friday. The carrion eaters would have latched onto some other poor family and their tragedy and we could have gotten on with our lives. Surely this . . ." He rattled the paper and then returned it to the chair. "... must suggest to you that some measure of discretion is called for here." You cur.

  When I didn't answer, he went into the prepared section of his presentation. "Has it ever occurred to you, Leo, that perhaps we were never intended to know our parents in the way we know other people."

  "Can't say it has."

  He hooked a thumb under his chin, ran his index finger up the side of his face and tilted his head.

  "Have you ever pictured your parents making love?" he asked.

  "Mercifully no," I said.

  I started to laugh, but it hurt my head.

  He smiled. "Notice how you answered. You said 'mercifully.' You couldn't keep a straight face. I have precisely the same reaction. That's because the picture of our parents in the throes of passion is more than we can imagine. Our parents aren't people in the normal sense. At least, not to us. To us, they're characters of mythic proportions. Far above the tawdry demands of biology."

  I figured there was a lesson in here somewhere and I figured he'd sure as hell get to it He didn't disappoint. "Your father was a complicated man who led a complicated life, Leo."

  I started to speak, but he raised his voice and kept talking.

  "You have no context, Leo. The social forces which shaped your father, the times, the entire context is lost now. There's nothing you can do for him. The only people who are affected by actions such as yesterday's debacle are your family. I implore you, Leo. Please don't make this any more painful for us than it has to be."

  I had the urge to sit straighter in the bed but couldn't muster the strength. I settled for another sip of water.

  "So," I said, holding the cup on my chest with both hands. "Let me see if I've got this straight. Because I can't conjure up a picture of my father hunched up behind my mother doggie-style, I ought to stand around doing nothing while everybody in the city talks about how he murdered a newspaper reporter thirty years ago and planted him in his own backyard. Is that it? Am I getting warm here, Pat?"

  "There's no need to be objectionable. I should Ihink your recent testimony in the Brennan case would have salved your need for the public eye. I fail to see ..."

  "Brennan?" I said. "Why do you keep bringing up Brennan? What's he got to do with . . ."

  It felt like a small animal was trying to dig its way out of my head. I closed my eyes. Just for a minute.

  "I'm tellin' ya, he's crapped," the familiar voice said.

  I cracked one eye. The bed had been lowered. I was lying on my side, and it was dark outside. I rolled to my back and looked out over my feet George and Harold were passing a pint of vodka back and forth between them, smacking their lips as they took in the room.

  "Hey . . . hey," George said. "The king lives."

  I groped around until I found the electronic control for the bed and then brought myself about halfway to sitting up.

  "How'd you two get in here?" "Fire stairs," said Harold.

  George took a sip and then wiped his mouth with his sleeve.

  "We come earlier but that goddamn blue-nose uncle of yours told the nurse you was sleeping and shouldn't be disturbed."

  "Where's Ralph and Normal?"

  "You know Normal," Harold said. "He don't like these places. He kinda got this thing that if he comes in one of these places they're just naturally gonna keep him."

  "And Ralph?" I pressed.

  George passed the bottle to Harold. He spoke without looking my way. "You know how Ralphie is, Leo. We all shared the dough we got from you with him. He's been knee-walkin' hammered ever since."

  "A fool and his money are soon partying," added Harold, just a bit too quickly.

  Something in the way they refused to meet my eyes made me nervous, but I didn't have
the strength to wring it out of them.

  George must have sensed what I was feeling. He suddenly became animated, waving the him in the air. "A little nip?"

  "I'll pass on the vodka," I said. "But I'd love some fresh water out of that pitcher." I pointed to the sweating metal container on the table by the bed. "I'm dying of thirst."

  These were guys who knew about thirst. They bustled around and came up with a fresh glass filled with fresh water and a brand new flex-straw. Couldn't leave a guy parched, after all.

  "The whole crew was worried about you, Leo," Harold said.

  "The pictures on the news looked real bad. Couldn't hardly tell it was you they was stuffin' in the meat wagon," said George.

  "Tell everybody I'm okay. They say I'll be out of here on Friday. I'll stop by the Zoo and see everybody."

  "What happened?" Harold asked. "How'd you end up in the drink?"

  "I had a bad Tuesday."

  "Ain't no other kind," said George grimly.

  "You know ..." Harold mused. "Tuesday's a shitty way to have to spend one-seventh of your life."

  My head throbbed. They were working their way through the rest of the week when I closed my eyes. Just for a minute.

  Chapter 14

  You know what they say: when the chips are down, the buffalo's empty. And the chips were definitely down. They sent me home on Friday morning with three bottles of pills and a list of "thou shall nots" that would have made a Jesuit blush. Near as I could tell, for the next week or so, my activities were limited to low-impact needlepoint and the contemplation of my navel. At least, that's what I promised.

  I lasted for about forty-five minutes after Rebecca went to work. Then I made the mistake of plugging the phone back in. Wedged in among the interview requests and sales pitches was a message from Bobby Alston, my mechanic down at Mario's Foreign Auto Repair. According to Bobby, they'd dried the Fiat out as best they could but needed the keys so they could see if it would start. I mean, what was I gonna do? Leave my car down there with strangers?

  Dr. Fitzroy had called also. It took him a full five minutes to hem and haw his way to saying that he thought he had the information I had requested . . . documentation suggests . . . only preliminary . . . future research might well reveal . . . conclusions might be hasty at this time. The guy could over-qualify a nocturnal emission.

  The secret of getting around while concussed, I'd discovered, was moving slowly. As long as I didn't make any sudden moves, I felt decent and my vision more or less kept up with the movement of my head.

  I shuffled over to the kitchen counter and shook out the manila envelope containing my personal belongings. The watch, the keys and the spare change were sandy but undamaged. My pocket notebook was soaked through and bleeding ink onto the counter. My wallet came out with a wet plop and lay dripping on the counter like a shelled mollusc.

  I rinsed and dried the watch, keys and change, put the watch on my wrist and the keys in my pocket. The wallet and notebook, on the other hand, needed serious work.

  I peeled the various folds of the wallet apart, rescued my driver's license and the credit cards and then spread the notebook, the wallet and all of its sodden contents around the heat registers in the kitchen floor, weighed them down with a pair of slippers and turned up the heat. Then I called my aunt Karen in County Records.

  "Records."

  "Karen. It's Leo."

  "You're not supposed to be using the phone."

  If information circled the globe at half the speed it moves through my family there'd be no need for satellites.

  "Who says?" I demanded.

  "Rebecca called Betty last night."

  Much as it pained me, I had to admit it was a canny move on Duvall's part. Let your fingers do the walking. One-stop gossip-mongering at its finest. Calling my cousin Betty was the civilian equivalent of issuing an all-points bulletin. Today Betty, tomorrow the world. When America's Most Wanted came up empty, they called Betty. She reminded me of that old blues song about how "Your Mind Is on Vacation, But Your Mouth Is Working Overtime."

  "I'm feeling okay," I said.

  "You're supposed to be resting. Do you know how worried we all were about you?"

  Karen, unlike her brother Patrick, wasn't asshole enough to start a guilt fest with me so I said, "Tell everybody I'm fine. A little fuzzy, but fine."

  "Well, kiddo, that picture of you on the front page the other day didn't look any too fine." She laughed. "And heck, Leo, you've been a little fuzzy since the late sixties."

  "That's precisely why I need your help."

  "You're not supposed to be working."

  "I'm not working. I'm just sitting home being nosy."

  I heard her sigh. "About what?"

  "About an import company named Triad Trading."

  She asked me to spell it. I did.

  "What did you want to know?"

  "Mostly who owns it, but I'd be interested in anything else you had lying around."

  "I'll see what I can do, but I'm not going to be able to get to it for a while. Call me later this afternoon."

  "You're such a dear," I cooed.

  "Oh, stuff it," she said. "And you better not tell Rebecca that I did this for you. She'll have me on a slab."

  "I pledge my troth."

  "What's troth, anyway?" she asked.

  "No idea."

  Click.

  I called the university. Fitzroy wasn't available to come to the phone, but he had office hours from one till three in Denny Hall.

  Click.

  I pulled a fresh notebook from the top drawer and called a cab.

  EVERY MECHANIC IN the place stood around the Fiat in a loose semi-circle. "What?" I demanded. "These guys don't have any cars to work on? For what they get, they ought to at least pretend."

  "Mario took his old lady to Mazadan for the week," Bobby Alston said as we crossed the garage together. "We got a pool going. Actually several of them."

  "On what?"

  "On whether or not it will start. On whether the salvage guy will give us anything for it or whether we'll have to pay him to take it. On whether or not weird stuff is going to come out of the tailpipe. That sort of stuff."

  "It'll start," I said, without believing it

  Quite frankly, the Fiat looked better than usual. It was cleaner and the convertible top, in spite of now being ripped in two directions, looked far better for having been mended with matching black tape.

  "We done what we could," Bobby said. "I took the fuel and ignition systems apart and dried them out. Last two nights we took it over to the body shop next door and left it overnight in the oven they use to cure the paint jobs." He shrugged. "When they been underwater, you never know," he said. "They can be a little squirrely."

  A low murmur rose from the assembled multitude as I strode to the side of the car and pulled open the door.

  "Where's the 'it won't start' money?" I demanded.

  A big blond guy with a flattop stepped forward. The red embroidery on his coveralls read YURI.

  "How much?" he asked.

  "I got twenty says it starts right up."

  He wiped his hands on a coarse red rag.

  "What's right up?"

  "Before the battery goes dead."

  "Even money?"

  "Yep." .

  "You're on."

  Of course I was on. Twenty bucks meant nothing to these foreign-car repair guys. These guys made more than U.S. senators. They drove newer and better cars than their clientele. They took longer and better vacations. If I ever have children, I'm not wasting my money or their time on college. I'm training them as BMW mechanics.

  I slid into the seat, being extra-careful not to bump my head on the way down. I slipped the key into the ignition, pumped the gas pedal twice and turned the key. The engine ground once around, coughed . . . and sprang to life, purring right along as if nothing had ever happened.

  Above the engine noise, I could hear shouts and whis-des. I gunned it a few times.
It ran great. Outside the car, money was changing hands; men were spreading out over the garage. I left the car running and got out. The blond guy was fishing behind his coveralls for his wallet. He produced a twenty. "I don't believe it," he said.

  I gave him a grin. "You wouldn't mind getting the door for me, would you, Yuri?" I asked.

  He matched me tooth for tooth. "My pleasure," he said.

  I high-fived Bobby on my way by and got back in the car. With a squeal of the tires and toot of the horn, I bounced out onto Twelfth Avenue and headed north toward the University of Washington, with an ache in my head but a song in my heart. I almost made it, too.

  I was coming up Pacific Avenue about four blocks south of the main campus, feeling better than I had in several days. I had the radio going. Del Shannon was singing "Runaway." It wasn't raining.

  The car stopped running. No coughing, no sputtering, no missing or lurching. Just running one minute and shut down the next. I coasted to the curb in a bus stop, set the e-brake and turned the key. Nothing. Not a sound. I checked my watch. One-thirty. I waited five minutes and tried the car again. Dead as a doornail.

  I released the brake and coasted the car downhill toward the back of the bus stop, about as far out of the way as I could get it I locked up and started trudging up University Avenue toward the campus. One of the nice things about owning a Fiat is that if you park it illegally, most folks assume it's broken down and cut you some slack.

  DR. MILTON FITZROY tore another strip of masking tape from the roll and attached the last corner of the plat map to the blackboard.

  "There," he said, surveying his work.

  I stepped to the front of the room and took a look. He'd enlarged the entire section of the city into a four-by-six-foot blueprint. Everything below First Avenue from Pike down to Yesler in July of nineteen sixty-nine inscribed in bright blue.

  He pulled one of those flashlight pointers out of his pocket and stepped back. "Where to begin," he said. He looked my way. His eyes were bright. "What say we begin with restaurants," he said.

  "Why not."

  Follow along with the little red dot of light.