Salvation Lake (A Leo Waterman Mystery)

by G. M. Ford

  Everything about this guy screamed of hard living. His feet were hard and horny. He hadn’t had a haircut this century. He could have been thirty; he could have been sixty. He’d been eroded by the torrents of life. Lots of sleeping outdoors. Lots of secondhand cigarettes. Maybe five feet ten, he couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred thirty pounds soaking wet, which, from the look of him, was how he spent most of his time.

  “Well?” Eagen said from behind me.

  “Well what?”

  “You know either of these guys?”

  “Nope,” I said. “Never seen either one of them before.”

  “Cliff,” Eagen said.

  I looked over my shoulder. Watched as Eagen’s man rummaged around on the floor in the far corner for about five seconds, found what he was looking for, and then started across the room with whatever it was draped over his arm like a vestment.

  The minute he hit the glare of the overheads, I knew what he was carrying. Hell, half the people in the Pacific Northwest could have told you too.

  It was my father’s overcoat. The one he bought in London, back when I was in high school. Forty square yards of the heaviest, ugliest tweed money could buy. Made by some famous British tailor, supposedly worth its weight in gold, it was quite possibly the least attractive piece of attire I have ever seen.

  First time he wore it, everybody in his inner circle lost their minds. His secretary, his sisters, his cronies down at the courthouse. Everybody told him he couldn’t possibly wear that atrocity in public. I remember my Aunt Jean telling him he looked like a bad motel carpet walking down the street. It fell on deaf ears though.

  Either he’d paid so much for the coat that he was unwilling to part with it, or wearing it was just his way of telling them all to piss off, but he wore that damn coat for the rest of his life. Hell . . . he had it on the day he dropped dead coming out of the Fairmont Hotel.

  “My father’s coat,” I said to nobody in particular.

  “They were covered with it,” Eagen said.

  Cliff stood next to Eagen and held the coat by the shoulders, like I was going to slip it on or something. I reached out and folded the right side of the coat back. The label was still there. CROMBIE, SINCE 1865. HAND TAILORED FOR WILLIAM H. WATERMAN.

  Somebody’d taken a knife and sawn off the bottom foot or so of the coat, a move which, considering the physical enormity of my old man, had probably been a safety measure. Here and there along the impromptu hem, thick tendrils of fabric hung down like fungal fringe.

  “And you’ve never seen them before in your life?” Eagen prodded.

  I looked over at the two guys again. Shook my head. “Nope,” I said.

  “When did you last see the coat?”

  I thought about it. “Sixteen years ago. Coupla months after my father died,” I said. “His sisters came over the house one Saturday, packed up all his personal stuff, and took it all down to Goodwill or to the parish or something like that.”

  “I’ll need to talk to them,” he said.

  “You’ll need to stage a séance, then. They’ve been dead for years.”

  He was about to start over with the questions. Cops like to do that. See if they can push you into making inconsistent statements so they can jump all over you like a trampoline. I wasn’t up for playing that game, so I beat him to the punch.

  “That all you needed?” I asked.

  He clamped his jaws together hard enough to stamp license plates and flicked his eyes in Rebecca’s direction. Like most everybody else in town, he knew about our prior relationship. He was a torn man. He really wanted to jerk me around, but wasn’t at all sure he wanted to do it in front of her. To make matters worse, SPD, like many urban police departments, was, at the moment, under quite a bit of pressure to provide a kinder, gentler brand of law enforcement. The kind that doesn’t look like Ferguson, Missouri, or Staten Island, New York.

  Eagen opted for discretion. He nodded over at Cliff and the coat, then looked at Rebecca and raised an eyebrow. “You finished with the coat?” he asked.

  “I’ve got everything I need,” she said.

  “It’ll be in the North Precinct property room, if you need it again.”

  She thanked him.

  He snuck a glance at me that would have wilted kale, nodded at his toady again, and headed for the door. I knew he wouldn’t make it.

  When Cliff had pulled open the door and stepped into the hall, Eagen turned back my way. “This wasn’t an invitation for you to get involved, Waterman.”

  “I understand,” I said.

  “I find you’ve got your nose stuck in this, I’ll bury you so deep it’ll take your fancy-ass lawyer a week to find you in the system.”

  “Got it,” I said. I wanted to give him a big grin and a two-fingered salute, but restrained myself.

  Rebecca and I stood silently and watched as the two cops walked past the Plexiglas window and disappeared from view.

  “I’m impressed,” she said, when they were gone.

  “’Bout what?”

  “Your discretion. I thought for sure you’d give him a raft of crap. And then he’d cuff you and stuff you in the back of a cruiser and poor Jed would have to go down and bail your butt out of jail for the umpteenth time.”

  “Eagen’s nobody to fool with,” I said earnestly. “He knows how to play the game. Besides, I don’t do that kind of work anymore. I’m retired.”

  “You were, more or less, always retired,” she said.

  Having traipsed beneath this conversational trellis before, I quickly changed the subject. “Where’d they find these guys anyway?” I asked.

  “In the trunk of a Zipcar, over on Pontius,” she said.

  “Both of them?”

  A nod.

  “Together. Like in one trunk?”

  Another nod.

  “We know who they are?”

  Shake of the head this time. “Not a stitch of ID on either of them, and neither of them comes up in the national IAFIS fingerprint database either.”

  I walked over and stood between them, looking from one to the other.

  “Odd couple,” I said.

  “Very,” she agreed.

  “These two in the trunk of the same car is like finding Nancy Reagan and Charlie Manson in a shallow grave in Bakersfield.”

  She chuckled.

  “What’d they die of?”

  A scowl and another shake of the head. “No idea.”

  “Really?” I bordered on agape. This was the girl who always knew the answers to everything. I’d heard her assistants joke that she could determine cause of death from the coffee shop across the street. Not knowing must be killing her.

  She shrugged disgustedly. “Everything I’ve done so far speaks of oxygen deprivation. But I can’t find anything that might have caused it. It’s like somebody put them in a big glass jar and screwed on the lid. Toxicology won’t be in for a couple of days,” she said. “Maybe we’ll get something there.”

  She didn’t think so. I could tell.

  A strained silence spread over the room like an oil slick. Funny how difficult conversation had become for us. After twenty years together, you’d think we’d have a storehouse of anecdotes that would make conversing with one another easy, but somehow it hadn’t worked out that way. Quite the opposite. Since we’d moved on from one another, all of our shared experiences didn’t seem to matter anymore. We were more like strangers than strangers. Love’s a funny thing, I guess.

  I stood in the silent room as she wheeled the odd couple back from whence they’d come. We’d talked about maybe making a go of it again. Of putting all the crap behind us and seeing if some of the spark was still burning, but somehow it never came to pass. Neither of us seemed to be willing to take that first step. So when she reemerged from the darkness at the back of the room and asked, “How’s Rachel?” I kind of came up short.

  It was like she had some kind of radar. Rachel Thoms was the woman I’d been seeing for the past year
or so. Up until a few months ago, anyway. I thought about saying “fine,” and hoping like hell that would be the end of it. But no. She’d have seen through me in a heartbeat.

  “Last time I heard from her, she was fine,” I said instead.

  No way she was going to ask me. She just stood there giving me the fish-eye.

  “She’s in Nashville,” I said finally. “Down at Vanderbilt. Teaching undergraduate classes for a friend of hers who’s having a baby.”

  “Love is strange,” she said with a grimace.

  “I don’t believe that particular word ever came up,” I said.

  She started for the door. “Come on,” she said. “I’ve got a floater waiting for me in room one. You can observe if you want.”

  “Think I’ll pass,” I said. “But hey . . . you think I could get a couple of postmortem head shots of those two?”

  She gave me that look again. Wagged a finger at me.

  “For my scrapbook,” I threw in quickly.

  She cocked an eyebrow. “You heard what the man said.”

  “Scout’s honor.”

  She thought it over. “See Margot on your way out,” she said finally.

  She patted me on the shoulder and strode off down the corridor.

  By the time I got back to my car, I’d worked up a full chafe. Felt like somebody was sandpapering my inner thighs. The car’s interior smelled like a bus station bathroom. I wrinkled my nose, winged the postmortem photos in the direction of the backseat, and reluctantly climbed in. The smell was overwhelming, so I rolled down all the windows and went roaring up Jefferson Street in a self-generated gale.

  The skyline looked as if the city was under siege. Something like twenty construction cranes hovered over downtown like steel mantises. Entire city blocks were being razed. Anything lacking historical significance was pretty much destined to disappear overnight. We’ve got detours that lead directly to other detours without intermediate ground. Traffic moves at the speed of lava.

  I ducked down off Capitol Hill, slid onto Denny, and started across the city at a crawl. On my right, South Lake Union bristled with the shards of progress. What had, five years ago, been the last of the downtown mom-and-pop business districts was nearly gone now. Everywhere you looked, plastic-shrouded, twelve-story pachyderms rose to fill the horizon. An overnight frenzy of building designed to fill the needs of the army of thirtysomething techno-geeks flooding our glacial shores these days. The hour of the hipster was upon us. God help us all.

  While Rust Belt behemoths like Detroit fought for their very existence, Seattle had more money than it could spend. Fresh money, young money, Amazon money. You could see it in the artisan cheese, the German cars, the fancy eateries, the wine bars, and the herds of techies skittering among the food trucks at lunchtime.

  I inched my way down Elliott, creeping along in a light rain, past the Pier 86 grain terminal and up onto the Magnolia Bridge. Built in 1930, the bridge looked like it belonged in Beirut. Seemed as if the thick, iridescent moss must be the only thing holding it together.

  Like the rest of the city, my neighborhood was abuzz with transition. The stolid folks who built the massive houses back at the turn of the twentieth century had long since passed away. Over time, their proud homes had passed from immediate family to distant relatives and finally to those who had no connection to the place at all. Folks who bought million-dollar houses so they could bulldoze them to the ground and build something else. Something newer. Something better.

  Fifty years ago, my old man bought the house from a frozen fish magnate with eight kids and a gambling problem. A huge, ponderous Tudor, perched high on the north end of the bluff, staring out over Elliott Bay and Puget Sound like some disapproving dowager aunt.

  I live in the downstairs of the house. A few years back I’d staged a major renovation of the ground floor. Updated everything. Got rid of my old man’s office. Opened the space up quite a bit. Not quite open concept, but not the dark rabbit warren of rooms it used to be either. A couple times a year, the Maid Brigade goes upstairs and rearranges the dust. Other than that, I pretend the other two floors don’t exist.

  When I was a kid, the mail carriers had a key to the gate. They used to let themselves in, walk up the long driveway, and drop the mail through a brass chute in the front door. Somewhere in my mind’s ear, I could still hear the clatter it made when it hit the slate floor every morning.

  Nowadays, mail carriers have a union, and I’ve got a mailbox bolted to one of the stone pillars that supports the gate. I pulled over next to it and got out of the car. The rain had thickened, but, considering how I smelled, the icy downpour was more of a relief than a bother.

  I stood by the mailbox, shuffling through the usual collection of utility bills and once-in-a-lifetime offers, when I heard the yelp. My first thought was that it was a puppy. I threw a glance across the street. What had always been a big green-and-white colonial belonging to the Moody family was gone now. Replaced by something made to look like it was from the mid-fifties. Mid-century modern I think they call it. Single story, flat roof, lots of glass, it looked like a light-blue junior high school. About as appropriate to its Northwest surroundings as a barnacle in a béarnaise sauce, but you know . . . different strokes and all that.

  I’d watched it go up over the past seven or eight months but really hadn’t paid a heck of a lot of attention. I’d also seen the couple whom I assumed were building it. Hadn’t paid much attention to them either. Late thirties, drove matching silver Lexuses. Seemed like they came out once a week or so to stand around in the rain and check the progress of the house. He was always huddled under a huge blue-and-white golf umbrella, like if he got wet he’d melt into the pavement, whereas she used her baby-blue bumbershoot to shield the little white dog she always seemed to have tucked under her arm. A matter of priorities, I’d guessed.

  We’d exchanged curt nods and a couple of halfhearted waves on occasion, but that’s as far as it had gotten. Probably my fault. Not only am I not the most social of creatures, but my place is surrounded by an eight-foot stone wall, a holdover from my old man’s time, a rather imposing barrier that makes it hard to show up on my front porch with a Bundt cake, even if you wanted to.

  But there they were. Mr. and Mrs. Lexus. Standing there on their new fieldstone front walk screaming at each other like a couple of fishmongers. Above the hiss of the rain and the sound of my idling engine, I could hear the dog yapping like crazy, but couldn’t quite make out what the Lexus twins were screaming at each other.

  What I was sure of was that I didn’t want to add to these people’s embarrassment by standing there gawking at them, so I closed the mailbox and double-timed it for the car on tiptoes, hoping I could make my escape before either of them noticed I was there.

  I threw the mail in the car window, grabbed the door handle, and started to lever myself up into the seat. From the corner of my eye, I caught the arc of his hand as it sliced through the rain and made contact with the side of her head.

  She went down in a heap. The dog began to howl. I shouldered the car door back open and hopped out onto the pavement, at which point Mr. Lexus caught my movement in his peripheral vision, pointed a bony finger in my direction, and shouted something.

  I didn’t know what he said and didn’t much give a shit. In a dozen strides, I was across the street and jogging up their driveway.

  As I approached, Mr. Lexus set his umbrella on the hood of the car, took off his glasses, and set them next to the umbrella. Like he was getting ready for a little knuckle action. Without the glasses his face had a pinched, ascetic look to it.

  “Get the fuck out of here,” he said to me.

  He was damn near my height, but skinny in that health club sort of way. A cross-trainer rather than a weight lifter. Unless we were going to start this thing with a wheat-grass enema and a road race, he didn’t figure to give me much trouble.

  “Get away from here,” he said. “This is none of your damn—”


  I ignored him and kept coming, using my bulk to shoulder him aside as I turned the corner and started for his wife, whose efforts to regain her feet were being hampered by a voluminous white terry-cloth bathrobe that seemed to be everywhere at once.

  The moment I bent and offered her my hand, he leaped onto my back. I have no idea what in hell he thought he was doing. Under the circumstances, piggyback rides were pretty much out of the question. Or maybe he had watched too many mixed martial arts programs on TV and figured he was going to choke me unconscious or something. Either way, it wasn’t the best idea he ever had.

  I bent at the waist, reached over my shoulder, and peeled him off my back like a sweater. He landed on the stone walkway. The impact drove the breath from his lungs in a great, wet gust. The little dog began to worry him like a terrier tearing at a rat. He groaned, took a backhanded swipe at the snapping mutt, missed, and then tried to suck air, only to discover that his diaphragm was on vacation. His eyes got wide with panic. His face began to redden. He grabbed his throat, hiccupped a couple of times, and then rolled over onto his belly and began to retch.

  I reached down and lifted the woman to her feet. She had an angry red blotch on her left cheek and difficulty maintaining her balance. I kept a hand on her shoulder until she stopped waving around in the breeze.

  She was a good-looking woman. Everything the media told little girls they ought to be. Maybe five nine, with a thick head of what used to be called strawberry blonde hair and the kind of trim figure you get from never eating anything white.

  She shrugged my hand from her shoulder and knelt down beside her hubby, who was still barking at ants down on the walkway.

  “You okay?” I asked her.

  She didn’t answer me. “Richard,” she whispered. “Richard.”

  I pulled my cell phone from my jacket pocket. “I’m going to call 911,” I said.