by G. M. Ford
"On the waterfront, at that time, there were but two. Elliott's and Ivar's." He looked at me as if to ask whether he should go into greater detail. There was no need. Both restaurants had been in operation since the beginning of time and would probably still be dispensing clams and oysters to the tourists long after I was gone. The thing that brings locals to that part of town is visiting relatives from the Midwest. The waterfront was far too public for anything the old man would have felt necessary to hide from Bermuda.
"No," I said. "Nothing touristy."
He was taken aback. "Well . . . you realize, of course, that. . ." he puffed,"..... well, that very nearly eliminates everything in the area. As I told you earlier, the composition of that area was then, much as it is now, industrial-commercial. I most certainly wish you had told me," he sputtered. "I could have saved myself considerable effort."
Fitzroy was right on both counts. I should have told him he could leave out the tourist stuff. And, if you subtracted that crap, there really wasn't much down there. The area was a no-man's-land, a buffer between the land of the tourists down on the central waterfront and the real business of the city taking place further up the hill.
When the founding fathers and a hundred thousand Chinese laborers washed the tops of the hills down onto the tide flats, they created most of the terra firma which today is downtown Seattle. Unfortunately, they never envisioned the automobile.
By the early sixties, downtown traffic had become so choked and motionless that the city fathers had little choice but to act. The only flat and thus practical route by which to channel traffic up and away from the downtown core was along the waterfront. So they built the Alaskan Way Viaduct, a piggyback elevated roadway whose massive concrete edifice rose not twenty feet in front of the buildings along Alaska Way, blocking any view of the sound and creating an area of perpetual shade in a city of perpetual rain. Nowadays it's all metered parking and lowlife. Late at night, under the viaduct is as good a place to get yourself killed as anywhere in downtown Seattle.
"Sorry, Doctor," I said. "Please forgive me. I'm feeling my way along here. I don't really know what I'm looking for."
He harrumphed a couple of times and then pointed his little flashlight. "Well then, I suppose the Chase Hotel would have to be considered the epicenter of the area."
He cast a quick glance in my direction. I didn't have the heart to tell him that the Chase was the only place I knew for sure my old man didn't go, so I let him do his number. I let him go through everything else he'd come up with. I shut up and took notes. Floral Expressions halfway down the hill on Marion. Open till eleven on Friday nights. Two coffee shops along Western Avenue, Danny's Western Grill and the Soundview Diner, both open till eleven Monday through Saturday. Warehouses, packing companies, a couple of lunch-only joints. It went on and on. Nothing rang a bell. Nothing held the slightest clue as to what my father might have been doing in that desolate part of the city.
When he finished, I asked, "That's it?"
He clicked off his light and stuck a finger in his collar.
"There were two others."
I waited. Mistake. He started in on the no-verbs rambling.
"I hesitate to suggest that a man of your father's prominence would ... for a moment ... the idea is of course ridiculous ... a completely different element of society . . . which is not to suggest ... far be it from me ... the last one to judge . . . changing societal attitudes ..."
If I let him keep talking I was going to be here all night.
"What two others?"
He looked uncomfortable.
"At the corner of Madison and Western during that time period . . ." He hesitated, swallowed once and spit it out. "The Western Steam Baths. Open twenty-four hours a day."
I grinned and tried to picture the old man sitting around in the fog with a bunch of other guys in towels. Maybe it was that same defense mechanism Pat spoke of the other day, but I could no more work up an image of my father having a suds party with somebody named Pete than I could picture my parents doing the horizontal bop.
"I don't think so," I said. "And, of course, the Garden of Eden." I knew I'd heard the name lately, but couldn't put my finger on where. "What's that?"
"An ... er ... a nightclub." He started babbling again. My head began to pound. "... entertainment . . . would now be considered quite tame . . . less tolerant attitudes . . . status-quo morality ..."
I massaged the bridge of my nose. The action merely spread the pain over a wider area of my head.
"What is it? A whorehouse or something?" I blurted.
He straightened himself. "Oh ... no ... by no means. No. Quite the contrary." He giggled at his little joke. "It was a gay bar."
"A gay bar?"
"Rather famous ... or infamous, I suppose, depending upon one's outlook. Live entertainment. Female impersonators. And ..."
Suddenly, it came to me. Peerless Price's final columns. The Garden of Eden was the place that the cops raided and the records disappeared. If memory served, Peerless recommended the place be burnt to the ground—preferably with its customers inside.
"And what?" I prodded.
"Well, most coincidentally to our inquiry, it happens that the Garden of Eden was open only on Friday nights. According to the liquor license, from eight until closing at two, every Friday evening."
"Really?"
"Indeed."
I eyed him closely. "Did you ever ..." I began . . . "I mean, have you personally ..."
"Oh, no," he said emphatically. "Although I must say that I personally harbor no . . ."
I wasn't sure where I'd imagined my little fishing expedition was going when I'd started poking my nose into the past a couple of days ago, but gay bars and steam baths had certainly not been on the agenda.
"Famous how?"
"Oh, several academic studies have been made of the Garden of Eden and one rather famous book was written on the . . . er . . . social scene surrounding the club and the baths . . . which, as I recall, were ... I suppose 'linked' would be a proper term ... by ... a pivotal period ... a seminal period . . . sociologically speaking of course ..."
I checked my notes. "So, what we've got then, excluding the tourist joints on the waterfront, is a florist, two coffee shops, a steam bath and a gay bar."
"Precisely."
He seemed pleased. That made-one of us.
"Of course, this excludes the residential consideration," he added. Excluding it was just what I had in mind.
The only person I'd ever known who'd lived down under the viaduct had been a guy named Charlie Boxer. Charlie had been a full-time hustler and part-time private eye around Seattle for forty years. During one of his drunk and disorderly periods, between wives, he'd rented a loft on Western from an elderly Korean gentleman named Walter Lee.
I remember because Charlie used to love to tell the story of how, after moving in, he discovered he was sharing the space with half a dozen rats the size of llamas. He told of going to Walter Lee to complain that not only was he forced to sleep with all the lights on, but, despite the full hundred-and-fifty-watt glare, the critters had eaten his shoes while he was in the shower. The old man listened until Charlie finished raving, nodding sympathetically at each turn of the story.
At this point in the tale, Charlie would go into character, assuming the manner and speech of the elderly Korean. He'd stoop low and squint his eyes.
"I tol you, Mista Boxer ... No pets! You hava pets, you gotta go!" At least, that's how Charlie told the story.
Fitzroy produced a stack of papers stapled in the upper left-hand corner. "I had my TA . . . uh . . . a summary . . . incomplete of course . . . standard bibliography ..." I thanked Fitzroy for his trouble and for the hard copy of the report, shared several promises about keeping in touch and then effected my escape.
I turned right out of Denny Hall and walked downhill. I felt spacey, as if I'd been smoking pot. Everything seemed just a bit more interesting and complex than usual. The roots of t
he massive oaks had cracked and buckled the sidewalk into a rolling concrete mosaic. Overhead, the nervous trees waved about in the wind. I turned my collar up around my ears and headed for the street.
When I reached Fifteenth Avenue, I stopped and rested for a moment. From where I stood, the downtown skyscrapers peeped up over the north flank of Capitol Hill like candles on a birthday cake.
I walked along next to the moss-covered cement wall that worked its way in serrated sections down the hill. Ahead of me at the bus stop, four Asian girls in big bell-bottom pants and huge clunky shoes milled about the kiosk, whispering quietly but laughing loudly.
I let gravity pull me past them. Something about me sent them into peals of laughter, but I couldn't work up anything even close to caring. I kept one hand on the wall as I walked down the hill past the Henry Art Gallery and the underground parking garage, closing in on the car. I'd already made up my mind. If the Fiat didn't start, I was calling AAA to tow it back to Mario's and then calling a cab for myself. I'd had all the excitement I could stand. My head felt as big as Charlie Brown's. I needed a nap.
When the car started on the first turn of the key, I was a bit disappointed. I guess I'd been looking forward to the surety of the cab ride. Anyway, the street was empty, so I pulled a U-turn and started down Pacific Avenue toward the Mondake Bridge, rolling along parallel to the ship canal past the University Health Center until the huge steel chevrons of Husky Stadium bracketed the sky, and then turned right, over the bridge and down the ramp toward the freeway and home.
ACCORDING TO KAREN, Triad Trading was a division of Pacific Rim Trading, which, in turn was a wholly owned subsidiary of Eastern Expediting, doing business as a limited partnership between Fortune Enterprises and Canton Carriers, which, as the name inferred, was a shipping company based out of Taipei, Taiwan.
"What's all of that mean?" I asked.
"It means you better not want to sue these guys."
She started to say something and then stopped. I waited.
"Fortune Enterprises ..." she said after a moment.
"What about it?"
She took a deep breath.
"That's Judy Chen."
"Really?"
Judy Chen owned the International District. In my mind's eye I could see her picture in the newspaper, cutting ribbons and accepting awards. Over the past thirty-five years, she'd systematically purchased nearly all the property in what had once been known as Japtown. That's what they'd called the International District back before the war. Before they shipped their Japanese neighbors off to desert concentration camps and appropriated their hard-earned lives. Judy Chen had her finger in a lot of pot-stickers. If it came into Chinatown, it went through Judy Chen and some of it ended up in her pocket. You could say she was the Asian version of my old man. Sort of like Szechwan, half a dozen of the other.
"You want to hear what Judy Chen owns?"
I picked up my notebook. "Go for it."
She ran it by me. At great length. It took a full five minutes. Restaurants, bakeries, warehouses, laundries, produce companies, a beer distributorship, insurance offices, travel agents, video stores, two bars and, if I counted correctly, just over twenty buildings.
"Quite the Horatio Alger story, huh?" she said.
I played along. "Judy Chen is either a very astute businesswoman or very lucky ... or both."
"Well," she began, "there was always that persistent rumor that Judy Chen had friends in high places."
"Makes sense," I said.
Usually she makes me work like-a galley slave for these tidbits, but today she came right out with it.
"They always said she had your father in her pocket." "Who always said?"
"Everybody. The wags, Peerless Price. Everybody. It was always the talk that he was her rabbi." "Was it true?"
She hesitated for a long moment. "You really want to know? You know, kid, sometimes it's better to let bygones be bygones."
I was losing my sense of humor about that particular piece of advice. "Was it?" I snapped. "Yes," she said. "You sure?"
"Absolutely positive. I worked for the assessor back then. The word was that whatever Judy Chen wanted, Judy Chen got."
I mulled it over, remembering what LaFontaine said about somebody having a lot of city pull down on the docks. I didn't like it a bit. The idea that my father could be even indirectly connected to fourteen dead people was more than I was willing to consider. I almost liked the gay bar and the steam bath better than this. Almost.
She sensed my discomfort. "It was a long time ago, Leo. In those days it was pretty much standard operating procedure. It was just the way business was done. Nobody thought anything about it. Nowadays, it's the city that cuts itself in on the action. They just eliminated the middleman is all."
"Why would he do that for her?" I asked.
"There's a lot of money to be made on the docks," she said quickly. Too quickly. Almost like it was a prepared statement.
"There's a lot of money to be made a lot of places," I countered. "Why there? Why her?"
I heard her sigh again. Her discomfort was palpable.
"Hang on for a second," she said in a weary voice.
I said I would. I could hear her heels as she crossed the room and closed the door to her office and then walked back to the phone.
She came out of left field. "You remember . . .I'm sure . . . that your mother and I ... we didn't . . ."
I helped her out "You didn't get along."
"No," she said. "We didn't. But Lord knows Bill . . . your father . . . was a long way from perfect."
I held the phone tight to my ear and waited for her to work it out.
"She had this air ... as if the whole lot of us were beneath her station," she said. "I was young and proud, and I had a big mouth." I could almost hear her shrug. "Things got said. The kind of things that can't be taken back."
"What's that got to do with Judy Chen?" I prodded. She thought it over for quite a while. "I guess what it's got to do with Judy Chen is that my relationship with your mother gives me pause to question my own motives here, Leo."
The phone company was right. You could hear a pin drop.
"They always said ..." She stopped. "They who? Same 'they' as before?" "Yes." "Yeah."
"They always said . . . that they . . . your father and Judy Chen . . . had a . . . were a ... an item." "You mean . . . ?" "Uh-huh." "When was this?"
"For years and years. Till the end," she added.
"Right up until he died?"
"Yeah."
She tried to lighten things up.
"You know, Leo, I don't think the Waterman men have the marriage gene," she said. "Look at Edward. The way I hear it he and Joan didn't speak to one another in private for the last five years of his life. Pat never married. You had that cup-of-coffee marriage with Annette way back when . . . Your father and mother . . . well ..." She showed some restraint and let it hang.
We both knew their marriage bore little or no resemblance to the Partridge Family. From about the time I was seven, I couldn't remember a time when they'd slept in the same room or eaten together at the same table. Other than that, things were quite cheery around the house.
"Did my mother know?"
"Oh, sure," she said. "She'd never admit it, of course. That wasn't her way. But she knew. She had to."
I was angry. Not about my father and mother, either. What passed between them was past. No, I was angry that I hadn't known of any of this and angry that he hadn't
seen fit to tell me. And most of all I was angry about all the people who, over all the years, I'd offhandedly dismissed when they spoke of my father. Turned out, they might have known more about him than I did. Maybe Pat was right. Maybe everybody was right.
I thanked her. Mercifully, Karen was every bit as uncomfortable as I was and made it easy to get off the phone. I could feel the blood under the skin of my face, and my head had begun to throb in earnest. I pushed myself to my feet and headed for the couch. Na
p time.
Chapter 15
" At first 1 thought I was paralyzed. I awoke at rime-fifteen Friday morning in exactly the same position on the couch that I'd assumed fifteen hours earlier. Sometime during the night, Rebecca had stuffed a pillow under my head and covered me with the red plaid blanket we took to Husky football games. I was so stiff I could barely lever myself into the sitting position. My neck felt like I'd been hung. Arrrgh.
After ten minutes of massaging myself and groaning, I got to my feet and shuffled into the kitchen like I was walking on broken glass.
Rebecca had left a note on the table.
Since you're obviously well enough to be driving around, why don't you meet me at the Coastal at one. Lunch is on you. If you can't make it, leave a message with Tyanne. R.
She'd also been thoughtful enough to leave the morning paper propped open on the counter so I couldn't miss it. The three stooges stared out from the front page in black and white. This time, I was in the middle. The Larry Fine position, LEGACY OF VIOLENCE?
I extracted the sports page and threw the rest of the paper in the garbage can. I put together a cup of coffee and settled in at the table. The Sonics were off to a great start. Other than squandering a twenty-point lead to Dallas in the final quarter on Thursday night, they were undefeated and blowing opponents out by an average of fifteen points. The Seahawks were right where they always were—mediocre and considering a coaching change. As for me, other than the fact that my father may have been gay, or at least partially responsible for the deaths of fourteen people, or both, I was just peachy.
By the time I'd worked my way through three cups of coffee and the girls' basketball scores, I was beginning to feel human, so I ransacked the kitchen, came up with a week-old hockey-puck bagel and some cream cheese that was still reasonably white. On the theory that stale and toasted are somewhat akin, I toasted the bagel, stirred the viscous liquid back into the cream cheese, spread one upon the other and wolfed them down. Bon appetit.
FORTUNE ENTERPRISES OCCUPIED a white two-story stucco building on South Lane Street, directly across from the International Children's Park. I rolled the Fiat to the curb right next to the blue dragon slide, locked up and started across the street. From the Lane Street side, trucks drove up a ramp to the second-floor loading docks. A red-and-white sign with an arrow said the offices were down around the comer on Fifth Avenue South. I'm hell with directions.