by G. M. Ford
King County had been kind enough to hold my cell for me. The “JESUS LOVES ME” suite, as I liked to call it, was exactly as I’d left it. Disgusting.
Like I’d figured, a pair of King County mounties had roared up right behind the fire truck. They’d taken one look at the late Chauncey Bostick and immediately jumped my bones. I spent the next hour and a half chained in the back of a county cruiser, getting my foot tended to by county EMTs and watching fire trucks and aid units come and go, before a couple of Seattle uniforms finally showed up in an SPD van and transported me back downtown.
I’d been in the “JESUS LOVES ME” suite all night. I knew something was up when the jailer showed up, unlocked my cell door, handed me the artisanal scrambled eggs and toast, and then walked away without locking the door.
I was choking down the last piece of roofing material toast when I heard footsteps coming down the corridor. I didn’t need to look up; I knew who it was.
“Twice in one week,” Eagen said.
“Yeah. But this time I did shoot the guy.”
“You could play ping-pong through the hole in that fella’s chest.”
“I’m not much with a gun,” I admitted with a shrug. “I need something you can just point and pull the trigger.”
“Speaking of your last supposed victim,” he segued.
“Seigal?”
“Turns out you had some interesting ideas last time we chatted.”
“Like?”
“Seems they did have a prenup. According to that, she walks away with four hundred grand and half the community property.”
“Not a bad day’s work.”
“But . . .” He gave it a long pause. “With the demise of Mr. Seigal at the hands of person or persons unknown, she now comes into his insurance, which is good for two mil, and another two mil from a policy his firm kept on him, plus whatever she gets out of the house and other property. We figure, even allowing a cool million for lawyers’ fees, she’ll end up walking with about seven and a half mil by the time the whole thing is settled.”
“What does she say about it?”
“Absolutely nothing,” Eagen said. “Her attorneys have informed us that she won’t be making any further statements. Now or ever. They’re practically daring us to charge her with something.”
“You gonna?”
He spread his hands. “We haven’t got squat. We charge her, she sues us for malicious prosecution and walks away with another coupla mil.”
“They find Biggs yet?” I asked.
Eagen shook his head. “Nope,” he said. “We’ve got everybody and his brother looking for him, but he’s still at large out there someplace.”
I stood up. “Am I free to go?”
He nodded. “Everybody seems to agree that you saved the day. The little girl thinks you’re Captain America, for Christ’s sake.” He pulled open the cell door. “The shotgun’s evidence. We’ll be keeping that. I’ll send a cruiser round with the rest of your gear later in the week.”
I moseyed out into the corridor. “What’s going on with the Townsend family?” I asked. “They okay?”
“Stayin’ over at the W until we get through taking formal statements from them. From what they tell me, the house is a total loss. What wasn’t burned up was so smoke and water damaged it ain’t worth talking about.”
We walked down the corridor side by side.
“Any idea what happened to my car?” I asked.
“We had it towed up to the SPD garage on Twelfth.” He patted me on the shoulder. “You’re gonna be needin’ a rental for quite a while.”
Eagen and I parted ways at the property room. I collected my belongings and mamboed out onto Fifth Avenue, where it looked a lot like spring had finally shown up. The city felt light and bright and clean. To the west, sunlight glittered on the patch of Puget Sound visible at the bottom of Seneca Street. I pulled my collar up around my neck and walked a block downhill to Fourth Avenue. Whatever those EMTs had given me for my foot was wearing off. One downhill block and it was starting to throb like a bad tooth.
The desk clerk at the W made a valiant effort not to notice that half my shoe was missing, but couldn’t manage to pull his eyes from the hunk of bloody gauze so close to defiling his Berber carpet. I asked for Aaron Townsend. The clerk made a hushed call and informed me somebody would be down. I limped over to the nearest chair and took a load off.
Ten minutes later, Alice Townsend stepped from the elevator, caught sight of me, and wandered over and sat down in the chair next to me. We made quite a pair. The whole left side of her face was swollen. One side of her jaw was turning the color of an eggplant and I was even worse. Virtually no square inch of me wasn’t scratched, scraped, bruised, or blackened.
“How’s everybody?” I asked.
She looked down at the carpet and sighed. “Rough night,” she muttered.
“Lila okay?”
“Kids are resilient,” she said. “They just shake it off and go on.”
“That what you did?” I asked. “Just shook it off and went on?”
She pinned me with an angry glare. “You know, Leo, the self-righteous thing really doesn’t become you. I appreciate what you did for us. I really do. But, you gotta understand. I did what I needed to do. Believe me when I tell you, you had to be in my shoes to get it.” She straightened herself in the chair. “I’ve got no apologies for any of it. If you’ve come here looking for some kind of contrition from me . . .”
“I’m just looking for a couple answers is all.”
“Some things are best left alone,” she said. She started to get out of the chair, changed her mind, and plopped back onto the seat, with anger in her eyes. “Why are you so damn nosey?”
“Not knowing things wears on me,” I said. “They stick in the back of my mind and drive me nuts. It’s just how I am.”
“What do you want to know?” she asked.
“I want to know how come two of your ex-husbands came out to your new house, walked into your new life, and then ended up dead in the trunk of a car. Let’s start there.”
“I can’t talk about that.”
“Can’t or won’t?” I asked.
“Doesn’t really make much difference, does it?”
“Must have given you quite a start when they showed up on your doorstep.”
“They were looking for . . . Theresa Calder. Blaine managed to find Chuck. I don’t know how, but he did. They both knew she’d been one of Aaron’s parishioners; they were hoping Aaron knew where they could find her.”
“Little did they know, you were standing right next to them.”
“Blaine was relentless that way. The golden boy wasn’t used to losing. Nobody was going to walk out on him.”
“Especially with a pile of his cash.”
“I only took what was coming to me. In case you’ve forgotten, this is a community property state. That money was going to end up in my pocket either way.”
“And neither of them had the faintest idea they were standing right next to the woman they were looking for.”
She made a face. “I think Blaine may have . . . right there at the end.”
“How so?”
“My voice. I think he may have picked up on my voice.”
“And then?”
“And then Chuck started losing his mind. I mean . . . he just went berserk, screaming at Aaron, screaming at Blaine, throwing himself around the yard.”
“And?”
“I told you. I can’t talk about that.”
“Why not?”
Another voice piped in, “’Causa me.”
Lila stepped out from behind a potted palm.
“Lila, go back to—”
“I gotta tell him what I did, Momma. Leo saved Buster.”
“Do as I tell you.”
Lila backed into the shelter of Alice’s legs and leaned back against the chair.
“I pushed the shaggy man in the lake,” she said.
I looked ov
er at Alice. “Chuck Stone,” she said.
“He was yelling at my daddy. He wouldn’t stop. So I pushed him off the dock.”
Alice pulled Lila close. “It wasn’t her fault,” she said in a low voice. “He was wearing this huge coat. It just pulled him right to the bottom.”
“And then the other man jumped in to save him,” Lila said.
“Blaine went in the lake after him?”
Alice nodded. “Blaine the hero,” she said bitterly.
“And they both drowned?”
“No,” Alice said. “That’s the strange part. Blaine got him out. They were both laying there on the grass, spitting water, and then, all of a sudden, they both stopped breathing and fell over dead.”
I reached over and patted Lila on the cheek. “Wasn’t your fault, honey. Things like that just happen sometimes.”
“He was yelling at my daddy,” she said again.
“I know,” I said. I raised my eyes to Alice. “I’ll bet I can guess the rest of it.”
She turned her face away.
“About the time you’re trying to figure out what to do with a couple of dead bodies, Biggs and Bostick show up and offered to get rid of them for you.”
“They thought we’d tell them where Nate Tuttle hid his cash if they did—and we let them think that. We needed those bodies gone.”
“And so you made a deal with the devil.”
Alice nodded again. “We had no choice. When they came back, we told them the truth. But they didn’t believe us. They thought we were playing games with them. So they searched the church and everywhere else they could think of. They just waltzed in and out of our house whenever they felt like it,” she said. “Took anything they wanted. Walked off with whatever they could sell.”
“So that’s why you and your husband were so dead set against calling the police. You were afraid that Biggs and Bostick would implicate Lila.”
“It wasn’t her fault,” Alice insisted.
“Nobody has to know but us,” I said.
She took a moment to read my face. “You’re serious.”
“Nobody’ll hear it from me,” I said. “Not now. Not ever.”
She opened her mouth to speak, but I cut her off.
“But I’ve got a couple more questions. When I showed you the pictures of your exes, they had little stickers in the corner of them. Something my friend Carl puts on everything he touches. That’s how Biggs and Bostick found out about him, wasn’t it?”
She nodded. “They wanted to know about you. What your part in all of this was. Aaron tried to appease them. They were slapping him around.” She looked over at me now. “What else was he going to do? They’re animals. They hurt people for fun.”
I swallowed my rage and bent over and got close to Lila. “Would you do me a favor, Lila?” I asked.
“Sure, Leo.”
“Would you go upstairs and see how your daddy’s doing and maybe give Buster a hug for me while you’re there?”
She looked back over her shoulder at Alice. “Go ahead,” Alice said.
“See ya later, Leo,” she said as she skipped off.
When she was gone I said, “One last thing.”
“Yeah.”
“Where’s the real Alice Brooks?”
She sighed and looked away. “Alice and I used to work the same motels in North Vegas for a while.” She shrugged. “Real low-budget shit. She was a sweet kid with a two-hundred-dollar-a-day heroin habit. She OD’d one night and the motel manager . . . guy namea Cliff . . .” She took a deep breath. “Motherfucker just put her out with the trash.”
She got to her feet. “My whole life has been about making sure I don’t go out like that, Leo. You can think what you want, but I’m not ending up in a landfill.”
I watched her as she crossed the lobby and got into the elevator, then I walked outside and asked the parking attendant to call me a cab.
The rental car beeps. It beeps when you open the door. It beeps if it senses something in front of you. It beeps if it thinks you’re about to back over something. It’s like riding in a car with your friggin’ grandmother.
Eagen had heard right. The Townsend house was a goner. Only the entranceway and the garage were still standing. The rest of it had burned to cinders and collapsed into the basement. The acrid smell of fire hung in the air like a damp shroud as I retrieved the bag from the backseat and started around the side of the house.
I stood for a minute looking out over the obsidian sheen of Salvation Lake. Thinking about how, somewhere in my heathen mind, salvation was linked to the notion of atonement. Of somehow making up for all the bad shit you’d done, and wiping the slate clean so you were ready for whatever came next. For the life of me, I couldn’t see anybody who’d come out of this mess with clean hands, except maybe Buster, and I wasn’t sure he counted.
I unpackaged the gloves, put them on, and then walked out onto the dock, knelt down, and filled the jar with water. I set the jar on the dock and screwed the lid on. Then I put the jar and the gloves into a white plastic Bartell Drugs bag that I’d brought from home for that purpose.
I threw the Townsend place a final look over my shoulder, aimed beeping Betty between the trees, and headed back for the city.
“Anatoxin-a,” Rebecca said. “I’m going to have to notify the Department of Ecology and the EPA. They’re going to want to know about this.” She looked over the lab table at me. “Jed called and said you were back in jail, but not to worry. How’d you come up with the sample?”
“They cut me loose early this morning. I rented a car and drove back out to the Townsend place,” I said. “I figured if Stone and Peterson hadn’t drowned, then it had to be something about the water.”
“It’s a cyanobacteria. It attacks the central nervous systems of mammals.”
“How’d it get in the lake?”
“Believe it or not, it’s a natural occurrence. Rare but completely natural. Happens every spring about the time the skunk cabbage blooms. It’s a blue-green algae. It only shows up in truly toxic levels once in a great while. Mostly in man-made bodies of water, where the water transfer rate is fairly low. Green Lake’s been closed three or four times in the past decade because of the same thing. Not anywhere near this level of toxicity, but enough to make you wish you’d stayed away from it. When the toxicity gets this high, bacteriologists used to refer to it as a ‘VFDF’—short for ‘Very Fast Death Factor.’ Depending on the dose, its potency, and the size of the victim, anatoxin-a can kill a person in less than three minutes.”
“I don’t know why, but somehow I feel better that my old man’s coat didn’t drown the poor guy.”
She wagged a finger at me. “I told you back when this started. There was no water in their lungs.”
“Because they didn’t breathe it in, they swallowed it.”
“Right . . . so by the time the bodies got to me, they’d been drying out in the trunk for a couple of days, during which time, they’d absorbed the lake water, which left no sign of the cyanobacteria in the bodies.”
“From what I’m told, the Stone guy got crazy and jumped in the lake and then Peterson jumped in to save him.”
I was taking a big chance here. First off, there was no way she was going to let me tell her how to do her job, and secondly she always knew when I was lying. Always.
“I’ll be sure to include that in my report,” she said, without looking my way.
“I’m betting the Peterson family will feel a little better knowing their son was doing the right thing when he died.”
“No doubt,” she said as she turned off the lights. “You ever find out how they got in the trunk of that car?”
“Nope,” I lied.
“You going to buy me dinner?” she asked as we headed for the door.
“I heard the Sorrento Hotel did a major overhaul of everything, including the menu. Maybe we ought to try it out.”
She looked down at my foot. “Can you make the walk?” she asked.
“Long as we go slow.”
“Not too slow,” she said. “I’ve got a seven o’clock budget meeting at city hall.”
“And here I was hoping for a bit of late-night tea and sympathy.”
“This weekend,” she said.
“I’m not big on deferred gratification,” I groused as we walked along Ninth Avenue.
She patted my arm. “I know,” she said. “I’ll make it up to you.”
As I drove up Magnolia Boulevard, I finally found a song on the radio I recognized. The sound of Lloyd Price singing about how the night was clear and the moon was yellow, set my little heart aflutter, “. . . and the leaves came tumbling down.”
I was bopping along, alternately singing and using a Sorrento Hotel matchbook to pick the last of the short ribs from my teeth, when I rounded the corner to my house and saw the moving truck.
White truck. Big green letters. BEKINS. Sitting right there in the Seigals’ driveway. Looked to be about half a dozen guys pulling stuff out of the house and packing it into the truck. The silver Lexus was parked over on my side of the street in front of the Morrisons’ place. The blacked-out SUV was sitting half a block north. Obviously, Eagen still had a couple of his men keeping an eye on the proceedings.
I drove by, keeping my eyes straight ahead as I pulled up to my gate and got out to fetch the mail. Usually, as long as it wasn’t raining too hard, I’d sort through it before I got back into the car, but not tonight. Tonight, I tucked the pile under my arm and walked straight back to the car. That’s when it hit me: I didn’t have the remote for the gate. It was still in my car someplace. I was going to have to do it manually.
I leaned over the seat, found the envelope I’d gotten from the police property room, and shook out my key ring.
I got out and started for the gate, when I was stopped dead by a voice from behind.
“How’s Captain Magnolia tonight?”
I took a deep breath and turned around.
The widow Seigal and her dog.
“I was told you’re not talking,” I said.
“I’m moving instead,” she said.