A Man's Game

by Newton Thornburg

  For Lee Jeffers, it had not been a good day. In fact, it had been a perfectly miserable two days, considering that she had spent most of that time helping Joe Daniels on the Munson case, which meant reinterrogating a lot of people who hadn’t wanted to be interrogated in the first place: welfare mothers mostly, down and dirty sisters who as usual seemed to despise Lee on sight, even more than if she’d been some snooty blond chick from the suburbs. Then, midway, she had arrived home yesterday at seven, desperately looking forward to chilling out with her one true love—her very own, recently purchased old Wallingford bungalow—only to discover that there was no water pressure upstairs and four inches of the stuff downstairs, covering the basement floor. Three hours and almost five hundred dollars later, the bandit plumber cheerfully informed her that the water pressure was back and that most of her plumbing was lead pipe and would have to be replaced with copper. He himself could do the job for as little as three thousand dollars.

  As a result, Lee got to bed late and slept poorly, counting thirty-five hundred disappearing dollars instead of sheep. She never seemed able to save any money. The house was already mortgaged to the rafters, and now it had lousy pipes, just like one of her ex-lovers, who toward the end of their relationship had begun wheezing during the act, a turnoff if ever there was one. So this morning, sleepy and cranky, she had set out on another day with Daniels, whose great size and shaved black head and weary scowl seemed to command instant respect, even from the sisters. Which definitely was not the case for Lee, and for reasons not entirely clear to her, though she imagined it had something to do with her café-au-lait color, her green eyes and wavy black hair. And some of the sisters, the serious carbo-loaders, probably didn’t like the way she dressed either, accentuating her trim figure with tight jeans and no blouse under a sharp, tailored jacket.

  “I’d like to ask you a few questions,” she would say.

  “Well, you can ask all you want—don’t mean you gonna hear nothin back, though.”

  This, while looking at Lee as if she were a gaudy Sea-Tac hooker instead of a detective appointed to Seattle’s elite Metro Squad. Unfortunately it was a scene that played right into Lee’s growing alienation from her own people, or at least those people everybody considered to be hers. In reality, Lee’s mother was white and her father was probably an octoroon, that horrible word she had learned as a child in Louisiana. And in anybody’s math, that meant she was fifteen-sixteenths white, maybe not enough to be judged white, but certainly more than enough not to feel any overwhelming affinity with the ladies in the projects.

  For that matter, she really didn’t care one way or the other. Like most police officers, she had come to feel that there were only two races in America now anyway: us and them, cops and the rest of the population. So it was not an identity crisis she was having so much as a crisis of competence. She simply wasn’t getting the job done. Not yesterday. Not today. And it galled her.

  The Metro Squad had been formed originally to handle cases that spilled over into suburban and other jurisdictions. But as time passed and the squad’s reputation grew, it increasingly was brought in on the department’s hardest cases, important ones that had gone unsolved too long as far as the brass was concerned. Though Lieutenant John Pearson was nominally in charge of the squad, Sergeant Bleeding Hart Lucca—Lee’s partner—pretty much ran the show. Each of the squad’s eight detectives had his or her own cases, assigned according to workload and specialty, but they also had to assist each other a good part of the time, the assignments usually coming from Lucca, as in this case.

  The Munsons were brothers, ages five and three, wide-eyed little black boys who had disappeared from the Alder Vista apartment complex four months before. A week later their mutilated bodies were found in a downtown dumpster, each enclosed in a green plastic trash bag, which predictably resulted in the media labeling the unknown culprit “the trash-bag killer.” Since the boys had disappeared from the project playground, left there by their mother while she went shopping, the police figured that somebody somewhere in the area had to have seen something. The project after all was not some high-rise monstrosity like Chicago’s Cabrini Green, but a handsomely laid out apartment complex not much different from private ones nearby. Its two-story, eight-unit buildings were set among trees and green space, with covered parking, a playground, even a swimming pool.

  In one apartment after another, Lee continued to get the same response. Young or old, the tenants complained that they already had given their story to “them other poh-leece”—the homicide detectives—and didn’t have anything new to add. And over and over Lee heard that the two little boys had run wild and that their mother was no damn good, a crackhead, a ho.

  When Lee groused to Joe Daniels about her lack of success, he gave her a pep talk.

  “Hey, babe, it ain’t you—they dish out the same shit to everybody. You just gotta roll with the punches and keep comin back at ’em, like you can’t hear nothin negative.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe if I shaved my head and put on three hundred pounds, maybe then they’d open up a bit.”

  He laughed loudly, shaking his big bowling ball of a head. “Man, I don’t know about you. You as mean and low-down as any of ’em.”

  “That’s for sure,” she said.

  Despite the pep talk, Lee was not irritated in the least when Sergeant Lucca had her beeped and she was told to meet him at Harborview Hospital. And not until she had arrived and roused the sergeant from one of his semi-slumbers did she learn that she was there in regard to one of her own cases, the Heifitz rape-murder, which happened during Christmas week and was followed three months later by a rape-and-attempted-murder with similar characteristics.

  She found Lucca in the old main lobby off Ninth Avenue, sprawled across a delicate little loveseat like a bear dozing in a bed of posies. As usual, he was wearing one of his lumpy tan sportcoats, shiny polyester brown pants, Hush Puppies, and a shirt and tie that looked like a unit, something he put on and took off together, saving to wear later, unlaundered. His colorless hair was almost gone on top, his face drooped, and his red, weary eyes looked as if they hadn’t gazed upon anything of interest in decades, which definitely was not the case, since he had one of the best conviction records on the force. He was widely unloved.

  Seeing Lee, he sat up a little straighter to give her room. But there was no greeting.

  “What’s up?” she asked.

  “A rape. Went down last night, over near Volunteer Park, in some hermit’s front yard. Rape Unit didn’t think it was anything special, so they sat on it all day. But one of the uniforms who rolled on it—Mister Ambition, I guess—he also rolled on your Miss What’s-her-name, the Seafirst Bank gal. And he saw certain similarities. Rape didn’t give him the time of day, so he eventually calls us. I guess he remembered you were working the other one. Probably wants to get in your pants.”

  “That’s sexual harassment, Sergeant.”

  “So sue me.”

  “What similarities?” Lee asked.

  “The severity of the beating. Man used either some kind of rough gloves or a meat tenderizer—it’s hard to tell. Also there was no penetration. And her sweatshirt is missing, like he might have used it to wipe her off with, keep us from having a semen sample.”

  “That’s kind of a stretch, isn’t it?”

  “It’s something at least.”

  “I guess so. Anyway, good for the uniform. Hope he’s chief someday.”

  “Be an improvement.”

  “What do you think?”

  Lucca shrugged. “I don’t think it’s our boy. Crandall, in Rape, she says the girl hadn’t reported any harassment—no one walking her home from the bus and rhapsodizing about his joint. And there weren’t any cuts. No little red symbols carved into her body.”

  “Just the possibility he masturbated on her. And the beating.”

  “Yeah—the beating.” Lucca shook his head. “Kid’s face looks like a black-and-blue pump
kin.”

  “We can talk to her now?”

  “Why else would I call you?”

  Lee smiled coldly, a habit she figured all Lucca’s partners had to develop sooner or later. Either that or transfer. “This Crandall, she still around?”

  Lucca grinned. “Jeffers, will you stop being such a goddamn wimp. That’s what being in Metro means—you just move in and snatch their cases right outa their grubby little mitts. They say anything, you spit in their eye.”

  “I wanted to ask her a few questions, that’s all.”

  “Sure you did.”

  Lee suddenly became aware of an elderly woman sitting bolt upright in the chair next to them. The woman looked more appalled than frightened, much as if she had overheard a couple of teenagers planning a cruel prank. Using a laquered bamboo cane, she got to her feet and set out across the carpeted floor toward the espresso shop. She was an impressive-looking woman, expensively dressed, with an air of casual refinement and elegance that fit beautifully into the tasteful old art-deco lobby, with its golden banisters and marble wainscoting. Watching her, and knowing that they must have shocked her, Lee wondered if she and Lucca had not become some sort of modern barbarians, persons so steeped in violence and brutality that they had lost all sense of proportion, all sense of decorum. The thought frightened her, enough so that she pushed it away.

  “Well, let’s go talk to the girl,” she said. “We can’t make any money here.”

  Two

  Sitting in his car, watching the distant bus stop, Baird came to the conclusion that he would have made a lousy private investigator. Even as keyed up as he was, as anxious for the thing to be over and done, he still found it hard to just sit there and do nothing. For the first time in ages, he wished he still smoked. It would have been so easy to reach into his shirt pocket and flip one up, light it, drag. It was a warm day again. The car’s windows were down. He could almost see the blue smoke drifting out the passenger side, fouling the air and turning up the noses of the joggers and power-walkers as they chugged along the cinder path that came within twenty feet of his car. He had pulled onto the grass alongside the park’s curving blacktop drive at a point about two hundred feet from the park entrance on Fifteenth Avenue, across which was the bus stop where Kathy would be arriving soon.

  His original plan, once he saw the man get off the bus behind her, was to jump out of his car and follow the two of them on foot, do a little power-walking of his own. From the bus stop it was about a quarter mile to Baird’s house, so he would have had plenty of time to catch up with them, be right behind Kathy in case the guy stepped up his campaign and did something more than just walk along and utter his sweet nothings about violent sex or violent death, the one apparently as attractive to him as the other.

  But then Baird decided that it would be better to stay in his car, since he wasn’t as likely to be discovered that way and yet would still be close enough if Kathy needed him. The important thing, once she was safely home, was to follow the guy and find out who he was and where he lived. According to Kathy, he liked to refer to himself in the third person, as “old Jimbo,” as if he were some sort of folksy country character, someone people just couldn’t help loving. But Baird, like Kathy, preferred to think of him as simply “the creep.”

  Meanwhile the minutes passed as slowly as the joggers on the path. Baird absently reflected that at least he had a pleasant spot to sit and wait, for the Park Service did what it could to maintain the place, despite all the picnics and parades and flag-burnings and drunks in four-wheelers, who would tear up the sod at night doing figure eights as large as football fields. To Baird’s right, out the passenger window, the scarred lawn stretched for a quarter mile, shaded by scores of trees, everything from towering firs to modest dogwoods, some set in flower gardens and others edging the avenue, above a thick undergrowth where two weeks earlier the body of a murdered drug dealer had been found. It shocked and worried him, a killing so close to home. But even as he was thinking about it, he saw the bus coming up Fifteenth, virtually soundless, drawing its power from the hot wire overhead. He started his car and waited.

  The bus stop was situated just off the avenue, on the narrow street that ran downhill from the park. As a result, the huge vehicle practically had to stop as it negotiated the tight corner. Pulling alongside the curb, it then hissed to a full stop and its doors flew open. Baird felt his body tense as the passengers began to emerge, stepping down from the back door. Kathy was the third one off, an eyecatcher even at that distance, with her wavy dark hair and trim figure, a short electric-blue dress showing off her long legs. As she came back to the corner and started across the side street, Jimbo was already after her, a muscular young man wearing jeans, boots, and an open leopard-skin vest over his bare torso. His hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and even as far away as he was, Baird could see the man’s earring sparkle.

  By the time Kathy reached the other side of the street, heading home along the avenue, the creep caught up and began to walk backwards in front of her, like a teenager with a crush. Baird put the Buick in gear and pulled onto the blacktop drive, moving slowly. At the park entrance, he saw that the traffic was going to be too heavy for him to crawl along following Kathy, so he accelerated onto Fifteenth and drove ahead two blocks. At the street there, he turned right and proceeded downhill for a short distance before pulling into a driveway and backing around. Then he came up toward the avenue again, parking finally just short of the corner. To his right was Lookout Park, which ran along the escarpment that eventually would angle behind Baird’s house. From this second park a person could see much of Lake Washington and the Cascades; and from where he was, Baird could see anyone crossing the small, narrow park and heading down Alton Place, Baird’s own street.

  When the two of them appeared again, they were less than fifty feet from where Baird was parked. So he got his first good look at Jimbo’s face, which was unremarkable except for its pale gray eyes and the way he held his mouth, the upper lip arched in a frozen sneer. Heading through the park, the creep started walking very close to Kathy, ostentatiously sticking his face in front of hers, as if he were mugging with an infant. But she went on as if he were not even there, striding along with her eyes downcast, her face set.

  Next to him, she looked so small and vulnerable that Baird came close to jumping out of the car and running to her rescue. And if he had, he wouldn’t have gone empty-handed either, would have carried the sawed-off pool cue he kept under the car seat. He didn’t even consider the gun he had in his briefcase, probably because the only reason he’d bought it was for protection when he dropped off his orders at the warehouse at night. But even intervening with a pool cue would have been stupid, he knew, ending probably with the police charging him with a crime, not the creep. And that was not the kind of help Kathy needed.

  So he continued to sit there in the car, tense and sweating, watching his daughter as she came to the end of the park and went on down the street, heading for home. Twice the man put his hand on her, first on her shoulder, then on her hip, and each time she angrily slapped it away. Finally she broke into a run, but he went right along with her, laughing and flapping his arms like a chicken, ridiculing her pathetic attempt to get away from him.

  Because Baird’s house was situated at the corner, where the street angled back toward the avenue, he was able to watch the two of them all the way to the front door. If Jimbo suddenly had gotten rough with her or had tried to force his way into the house, Baird would have been there in a few seconds. Then too, he saw his wife’s car already in the garage. A part-time librarian at the university, Ellen worked such a varied schedule that Baird seldom knew when to expect her home. As it turned out, though, Kathy didn’t give the man the opportunity to do much of anything. The moment she reached the front walk, she made a sudden dash for the door, leaving Jimbo standing there in front of the house. He yelled something at her, then turned and headed back. Halfway across the small park, he stepped off the sidewalk
long enough to kick at a flower bed, sending an explosion of bright color into the air. An elderly woman sitting on a nearby bench said something to him, and he gave her the finger as he walked on, not even bothering to look back at her.

  Baird kept watching him until he crossed the street and went out of sight, blocked by the houses and apartment buildings along Fifteenth. Even then Baird didn’t follow until he judged that Jimbo was close to the bus stop. But when he finally started his car and turned onto the avenue, he was surprised to see Jimbo crossing to Volunteer Park and walking up the same drive where Baird had parked earlier. For a time, Baird figured that the creep was heading for his car, evidently having left it somewhere in the park earlier. And this would have been good news, since it meant that Baird would have been able to get his license-plate number right off—the one bit of information the police probably needed most. But when Jimbo reached the museum drive, he crossed it and kept on walking, heading out over a broad open space toward an outdoor-theater stage, behind which was the park’s men’s room, widely known as the city’s most notorious pickup spot for homosexuals.

  Rather than get out and follow the man across the lawn, Baird stayed in his car and took the winding road that circled below the restrooms, a road he and Ellen sometimes followed in the course of an evening walk, even though it was often bumper-to-bumper with the parked cars of men and boys who carried on as if they had never heard of AIDS. Feeling decidedly uneasy, Baird parked and waited, and in time he saw Jimbo emerge from the restroom and head down the hill in the company of an older man in a business suit. The two of them got into the man’s BMW and drove away.

  Baird followed them to a new apartment building that overlooked the interstate and Lake Union. The BMW disappeared into the building’s underground garage for almost an hour, during which Baird again sat and stewed, though now with the added burden of knowing that the creep could kill his daughter without even intending it, could get the job done just by raping her, just by having sex with her.