The Big Bitch

by John Patrick Lang

  The manager’s office was a pink triple wide with a garden and awning and a sign stating when rent was due and when rent was delinquent. Office hours were 10 to 4:30, closed for lunch from 12-1. The sign said the office was open today, Saturday, from 10 to 12. A sign just below it in fancy script said, Heloise McCoy, Manager. It was 11:30 when I entered and approached a makeshift counter. An obese woman of seventy-something made her way from the other room. If she had been two inches taller, she would have been perfectly spherical. She walked with a limp, her dentures seemed to clack as she moved and her hair, dyed the color of cranberry sauce, was about two weeks overdue on a touchup. I handed her my business card and told her I was investigating a thirty-year-old murder—the Eve Smith murder—and I was wondering if she or anyone she knew of in the park had been there at the time.

  “I’m Heloise. I been here thirty-four years. So yes, I remember Eve. But ….” She held her index finger to her mouth to shush me. She leaned her head back to listen to the television in the other room. After a beat, she said, “Goddamn. I knew it. I knew Jason was a no-good bastard.” Looking back at me she continued, “I missed my soap yesterday, but I TiVo’d t. I can’t talk now. When it’s over it’ll be lunch, and I’ll be closed. And I’ve got to go to the store; I’m out of wine. You’ll have to come back next week.”

  “I need to stop at a store, anyway,” I said as she turned to go. “Where’s the closest one that has the type of wine you like?”

  She gave me directions to a store three blocks up Columbia Boulevard, and the brand name and type of wine she preferred. When she reached for her purse I told her I was on an expense account.

  “And get a bag of ice. Cocktail ice.”

  “Ice?”

  “They never keep the half gallons of vin rose chilled.”

  In ten minutes I was back with her wine and ice. I sat in the makeshift lobby of her trailer and waited until her soap was over. When she came out she said, “Two bottles. How generous.” I reminded her that I was on an expense account.

  She put a closed sign on the front door and got two water tumblers. She filled one halfway full of ice and then filled it to the top with wine. She took a long draw on her drink before she said, “Where are my manners? How do you take your poison?”

  I tried to pass but she insisted, and I had her pour me a short one with no ice. She ushered me into her living room. The couch, easy chair, and love seat were all covered with plastic. The room looked like an exhibit preserving the 1970s. I expected that any minute President Jimmy Carter would be making a State of the Union address on the old Magnavox wooden console television set.

  “As I mentioned earlier, I’m a detective working on a case that has to do with the murder of Eve Smith,” I said when we were settled.

  “I never drink before noon, and nothing ever but red wine,” she offered almost defensively. “Red wine is one of the healthiest food groups there is.”

  “That’s what my doctor told me,” I lied.

  “You must have a good doctor, ’cause most doctors don’t know that.”

  “I know your time is limited, and I appreciate you taking time off to talk to me,” I said as an opening into the interview.

  When she offered me a plate of air cheese, crackers, and processed ham, I told her I’d had a big breakfast.

  I sniffed my wine and pretended to drink as she poured another full glass for herself and studied my business card.

  “You’re from California,” she said.

  “Now. But born and raised in North East Portland.”

  “Then maybe you know what they call this park?”

  “I’ve heard it referred to as Felony Flats,” I responded.

  “Well, all kinds of goings-on go on around here. My late husband Herb used to say, ‘In this here park, every day is Halloween, and every night’s a full moon.’ Once a week we get city police, county sheriff, a parole officer and then once in a while, every other month or so, maybe the FBI in here looking for somebody. Those people are real good at asking questions, but real poor at answering them.” She shifted on the couch and looked out the window.

  “I remember Eve Smith,” she said after a moment. “Pretty. Movie star pretty if you know what I mean. Anyhow, I remember when Eve was killed. Nobody was surprised, least of all me. Married to that pill-head sonofabitch, Smitty.”

  She washed some ham, air cheese, and crackers down with vin rose.

  “And the police …” said Heloise, “don’t get me started on the police. They acted like it was an interruption in their coffee break to come here when she was shot. She was killed in late September, or early October. I remember that ’cause I remember they wanted to finish up in a hurry so they could watch the World Series. Woman shot dead in front of her two little kids and the police just wanted to go watch a baseball game. They didn’t even much care about the other woman who was staying with Eve and Smitty. Couldn’t be bothered.” She set down her glass and clacked her dentures.

  “What other woman?”

  “Don’t know who she was; saw her once but not up close. She was here maybe a week or two, tops. Someone told the police she was a babysitter. Mary Grace, Eve’s little girl, told the police she was her aunt. Police asked me about it ’cause they wanted to notify next of kin but couldn’t find any kin. I remember I pulled out their rental application and Eve had a name with a disconnected phone number. I think it was a woman, but I don’t remember the name or the relation. Long time ago. All those records in the dump years ago.”

  “What about the other people here at the time?”

  “Nobody left but Ed Shultz in Space Sixty-One. Ed doesn’t remember who he is, much less anything about anybody else. As for others, even if there were others that knew anything, you need to remember that a lot of the folks here been in jail or prison where you don’t get up into other people’s business. And a bunch of folks here got warrants out on them or process servers looking for them. If you got a secret, this here is a good place to come and keep that secret. As for other people’s business and other people’s troubles, you need to understand this: see, this ain’t like the regular world. In Felony Flats, no one cares what’s happening, as long as it ain’t happening to them. Like I say, it’s not like the regular world.”

  She had another glass of wine and added ice. “You know,” she said, “I haven’t thought about any of this since that other detective came by asking about Smitty and the kids.”

  “Other detective?”

  “Yeah, two, three months ago. Maybe. Mostly asked about the kids. Mary Grace and John Junior. Couldn’t tell him much. No kin was found so they went to foster homes, as I remember. Cute kids. Kind of mischievous. Always looked like they had a secret, you know. Don’t know what became of John Junior. I heard Mary Grace became a model. Don’t doubt it, if she grew up looking like her mama.”

  “Do you remember the detective’s name?” I reached in my jacket for a pen.

  “Irish. Had an Irish name and an Irish nickname.” She washed some cheese and crackers down with wine. “He was older, and not well-dressed and good looking like you.” She smiled and blushed. “And wasn’t polished like you. Didn’t have good manners, you know. Don’t remember his name.” She shook her head.

  “Do you remember his nickname?”

  “It was like an Irish song. Sad song you always hear on St. Patrick’s Day.”

  “Danny Boy?”

  “Danny Boy! Yes.” Heloise wiped at some spilled wine on the table.

  “Danny Boy Devlin?”

  “Sounds about right. I know he was local.”

  I put my pen away. I didn’t need a note to remind me that the detective who also had been looking into the Smith family was Danny Boy Devlin. And I’d already made a mental note of who his client probably was.

  “He wasn’t all that interested in the murder. He was interested, it seemed, mostly in the kids—particularly Mary Grace. And he had a lot of questions about Smitty, but like I told him, I never saw any o
f them after the murder. That detective wasn’t here that long once he found that I didn’t have any records going back that far.”

  We spoke for ten more minutes before it became obvious that Heloise had told me everything she knew and remembered. I thanked her while she poured her fourth glass of wine.

  As I drove away her words rang in my ears. See, this ain’t like the regular world. In Felony Flats, no one cares what happens, as long as it ain’t happening to them.

  I thought Heloise ought to get out more often.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  There really is a Boring, Oregon; it’s about twenty miles from downtown Portland, and the place more or less lives up to its name. I drove out Columbia Boulevard, then out Burnside until the street turned into Highway 26 and then I turned onto Highway 212, which is the road to the town of Damascus. I turned left on the road to Damascus into Boring and found Donahue Drive and the rambling farmhouse that belonged to Reed Olson.

  Tall and wiry, Reed met me at the front door wearing a Pendleton shirt, faded Levi’s 501s, Clarks desert boots and generally looking like a page out of an L.L.Bean catalogue. He gave me the nickel tour of his home, which had wagon wheels, a reproduction of a Frederic Remington sculpture, and C.M. Russell prints. He said that he’d brought in a professional decorator who fused a postmodern rustic motif with a Nuevo Old West concept. Reed snickered as he told me all this and then laughed out loud when he said there was a possibility that his home might be featured in Sunset Magazine.

  He took me into his large office with mismatched shelves and unframed posters of Che Guevara, Miles Davis and Chief Joseph. Books, CDs, papers—some of which looked like contracts—and some spiral bound volumes that looked like instruction manuals fell out over the floor. Several computer monitors, two laptops, and three printers stood out in the chaos.

  “What’s the motif here? Postmodern colorblind college sophomore?” I inquired as I removed three packages of typing paper, two printer cartridges and a large unidentifiable item and took a chair by his desk.

  “Careful where you sit,” said Reed. “The last time I saw my missing cleaning lady she was somewhere in the vicinity of all that debris.”

  He offered me a drink, which I refused, and he grabbed a liter bottle of Pellegrino from a small refrigerator behind his desk. I noticed that he didn’t seem to have changed much.

  The first time I met Reed we were in rehab together and he was reading Raymond Carver’s Cathedral. I walked over to where he was sitting, and when I remarked to him that I thought the only reading material we could get in there was Louis L’Amour or James Patterson, he looked up though rimless eyeglasses with intelligent blue eyes full of merriment and mischief and said, “Aren’t you Doc Holiday? The banking guy?”

  When I admitted I was he said, “Just what kind of banker were you? Investment? Commercial?”

  “The kind of banker that gets indicted. I understand you’re an attorney. Corporate? Criminal? What kind?”

  “The kind that gets disbarred.”

  He and I became instant friends. An alum of Harvard Law, he owed his downfall to speedballs and a woman named Louise, who to use his words was “an escort service sex worker who I made the grave error of falling in love with.” With the thin rationalization that addicts always have, Reed believed that if he had stuck with just mixing his heroin with cocaine instead of crystal meth, he likely wouldn’t have commingled over a quarter of a million dollars in his clients’ trust fund accounts. Having said that, he also believed that having an emotional relationship with a call girl was where he crossed the Rubicon and ended up in what he matter-of-factly termed an unsustainable lifestyle.

  The high profile Seattle law firm he worked for covered his crimes as far as they could, and he went quietly away. He completed rehab and then ten months of an eighteen-month prison sentence in a Club Fed. His law career behind him, he decided to write self help books and did so successfully. For the last three years I followed his career by occasionally pulling up his website: MadeSimplebyReedOlson.com. His books and CDs included such titles as Taxes Made Simple, Real Estate Made Simple, Divorce Made Simple, and so forth. I had even seen Reed on late night cable infomercials hawking his books.

  He sat at his desk and looked at me through his round rimless glasses à la John Denver and stared at me with his Jack Nicholson maniacal grin. To make conversation, I asked about his lady of the evening.

  His bright blue eyes dimmed for a moment as he stared at the wall. “Louise was her name. She’s dead.” His voice was calm and empty.

  “I’m sorry,” I offered.

  “The upside of falling for a hooker is that as long as you have a telephone and five hundred dollars, you can always have another Louise.” Reed shrugged and sounded resigned, but he didn’t sound convincing so I changed the subject.

  “You seem to be doing all right, Reed,” I said. “Although I must confess that I’ve never read any of your books.”

  “Well, Doc Holiday,” he was the only person I knew who used my whole nickname every time he spoke to me, “if you were to read one of my books it would probably be a sign that you’d had a stroke. But yes, I’ve done well in my new chosen profession. Friends and family used to say I’d end up either rich or in jail. Well, I’ve been rich twice and only been to jail once.” He examined an empty computer disk on his desk. “This self-help books thing …. You don’t need to know anything more about the subject than your average high school graduate, and you only have to write as well a B student high school sophomore.” He took a sip of mineral water. “But you’re not really here to congratulate me on my success at selling fake shortcuts to the masses.”

  “I need your expertise on a legal matter.”

  “You know I’m not licensed to practice law anymore.”

  “If you were, I wouldn’t need your help.”

  Reed laughed, “Now who would have guessed that, Doc Holiday?”

  I gave him a written draft of what I wanted. Reed looked at it, asked several questions, made several suggestions, and took two notes.

  “How soon do you need this?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t really have a lot of time. When can you do it?”

  “Twenty minutes. My deadline for Credit Repair Made Simple isn’t until next Tuesday. Why not go outside, breathe some clean Oregon air, and look at Hood?”

  I went out to the deck and checked my voicemail. No word from Grace, but a call back from Father Dunphy.

  “It’s not her,” he said when I got him on the line. “I’m certain that that’s not the woman I saw Father Cortez with at the airport.”

  “You sound positive, Father.”

  “I am. Certainly a handsome woman, though—quite beautiful, in fact. She looks Eastern-European or Middle Eastern. The woman in the picture is too exotic looking to be the woman I saw. That woman at the airport was, what do you call it, WASP looking. She had an All-American look about her.”

  That gave me an idea. A long shot, but still an idea. I thanked Father Dunphy and told him I might have another picture for him. He said he’d be happy to look at it.

  Fifteen minutes later I was starring at the August snow above the timberline on Mount Hood when Reed called me in. We sat in his office and he handed me a document.

  “This is for California, but no sweat. You’ll need it notarized, a thumbprint, and get it recorded in the appropriate county. Nothing to it. The notary will be able to give you any additional details.”

  “Do you think this will stand up? In court, if it has to?”

  “Sure, it’s mostly boilerplate. The intent’s legal and clear. It will be enforceable as soon as you get it notarized and recorded.”

  “Thanks, Reed. What do I owe you?”

  “Owe me? I ought to pay you. I’ll be able to tell my grandchildren that I once rode with Doc Holiday.” He took another sip of water, then leaning forward in his chair, said in a quiet, serious voice, “But I do hope you know what the fuck type of game you’re playing.”


  “So do I, Reed. I think it’s called the Endgame.”

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  I drove directly to the Portland airport and moved my flight time to San Diego forward. Then I phoned Rosa Morales, the mobile notary whose card I had found in Smitty’s house, and left her a voicemail telling her that I was standing in for Jack Polozola and had some papers I needed signed and notarized. A call to Smitty went unanswered. Presumably he was out in his driveway finishing up the last details to what would be the most dramatic shift in personal transportation since the internal combustion engine replaced the horse-drawn carriage.

  Finding a quiet table just outside the airport bar, I checked my messages. I had a voicemail from Hobbs, but I made a local call first.

  Danny Boy Devlin had been a member of Portland’s Finest, and therefore a former colleague of both my father and Mickey Mahoney. Devlin spent a good portion of his career in Internal Affairs Division, better known as The Rat Squad, and was generally disliked by his fellows, in particular, Mickey. This enmity between them might have been because Mickey had more dirt on more policemen and civilians than the entire Rat Squad, or maybe because Mickey knew where the bodies were buried; often he himself had helped bury them.

  Mickey claimed he hated Devlin because Danny Boy had married an Episcopalian and in becoming a convert to that faith, had rejected Catholicism. This seemed an unlikely basis for the feud; the last time Mickey had attended Mass, it was still celebrated in Latin. Whatever his reason was, on one St. Patrick’s Day at Jake’s Crawfish on West Burnside in downtown Portland, he unceremoniously walked up to the bar and knocked Devlin unconscious with a left uppercut. He then went behind the bar, picked up a bottle of Bushmills Irish Whiskey, and pouring the entire contents on Devlin, said, “Here’s some Protestant whiskey for you, you Protestant Loyalist cocksucker. You need to change your nickname from Danny Boy to God Save The Queen.”