by J. A. Jance
"We can do that later. I'd rather go see Else Gebhardt first."
"Fine."
Jared ate his cheeseburger and drank his shake in sullen silence. Sue and I talked some over ours, but by mutual-if-unspoken consent, neither one of us said anything more about the case. When we dropped Jared back at the duplex, he didn't bother to say thank you. Or even kiss my ass. Not to me and not to his mother, either.
"Sorry he was so rude," Sue apologized after her son slammed the car door shut and sauntered off up the walk.
"Don't worry about it," I reassured her. "That's what twelve-year-old kids are like these days. Give him ten or twelve years. Maybe he'll improve with age."
"I hope so," she said.
I do, too, I thought as we headed for Ballard. For Sue's sake as well as Jared's.
Ballard as a district is considered to be Seattle's Scandinavian enclave. Whenever the king of Norway comes to town, somebody always schedules a ceremonial visit to Ballard. Whatever goes on there is headline-making news in the Ballard-based Western Viking, one of this country's two surviving Norwegian-language newspapers.
Ethnic jokes may be politically incorrect in the rest of Seattle, but down on Market Street, it's still open season on Sven and Ole jokes. People from Ballard don't necessarily see much humor in Garrison Keillor's tales of Lake Wobegon, because, as far as Ballardites are concerned, that's "yust the way things are." And when Ballard folks say " Uff da," or " Ja, sure, you betcha," it's no "yoke." And it's not sarcasm, either. Even down through third-generation Sons of Norway.
Blue Ridge, the neighborhood where Gunter Gebhardt had lived with his wife, Else, is upper-crust Ballard, which isn't the oxymoron one might think. In Seattle, the price of houses always goes up the closer you get to the water, and the Gebhardts' house was on the view side and in a cleft at the bottom of Ballard's westernmost glacial ridge. The corkscrew street was named Culpeper Court.
The house Sue stopped at was a tidy if unassuming sandstone-veneer 1950s-era rambler. It may have been a "view property" once, but a newly constructed house with recently planted landscaping had been built directly across the street in a way that pretty much closed off the Gebhardts' visual access to the water and the shipping lanes.
Several cars were grouped in and around the driveway of the unfenced, meticulously mowed and landscaped yard. Three women, presumably friends, neighbors, or relatives of Else and Gunter Gebhardt, stood in a tight knot on the front porch. They eyed Sue and me suspiciously as we stepped up onto the porch from the manicured brick walkway.
"Can I help you?" one of them asked, but she moved in front of the doorbell and effectively blocked our access to it.
"We're police officers," I explained, displaying my badge. "Detectives. Is Else Gebhardt here?"
The women exchanged guarded glances, but finally, with a shrug, the one blocking the doorbell stepped aside. "Else's in the kitchen," she said. "Go to the end of the entryway and turn right."
In addition to Else, there were another seven or eight women milling about in the spacious country-style kitchen-middle-aged and older ladies who looked very much alike with their ice-blue eyes, more-than-ample figures, and blond hair going gray. Like the women outside the house, these turned on us as well with an unmistakable solidarity of distrust. Their collective message was clear. Mourners were welcome. Inquisitive strangers were not.
"Are you reporters?" one of them demanded.
This time, while Sue dragged out her I.D. and explained who we were, I caught sight of Else on the far side of the room. She was seated at a small desk that had been built into a bank of knotty-pine kitchen cabinets. Her back was to the room, and she was talking on the telephone.
"Please, Michael," she was saying, her voice controlled but pleading, her whole body tense with suppressed emotion. "Please put Kari on the phone. I've got to talk to her."
There was a momentary silence on Else's end of the line. The other women in the kitchen shifted uneasily. One of them offered Sue a cup of coffee more as a diversionary activity than out of any real interest in hospitality.
"Else's on the phone right now," the woman explained, edging Sue toward the door. "Wouldn't you like to wait in the living room until she's free?"
Sue seemed to take the hint, allowing herself to be herded toward and through the doorway, but something about the obvious discomfort of the women gathered in the kitchen, something about the tense set of Else Gebhardt's shoulders, kept me from following suit.
"Because I don't want to give you the message, that's why!" Else said sharply into the telephone mouthpiece. "This is important! I want to talk to Kari myself! Put her on the phone. Now!"
There was another brief pause. "Hello?" Else said a moment later, depressing the switch hook several times in rapid succession. "Hello? Hello? Why, that lousy little bastard! He hung up on me!"
"Else, such language!" an elderly woman exclaimed in a voice still thick with old-country inflections.
Across the room from where I stood was a small oak kitchen table. Seated at it, with her back to the window and with a sturdy wheeled walker stationed nearby, was a rosy-faced white-haired woman. She held a clattering cup and saucer in her palsied hand. Keeping her eyes focused on Else, the woman lifted the dainty china cup to her mouth and took a sip of coffee. When she put the cup back down, it rocked and rattled dangerously, but not a single drop of coffee spilled into the saucer.
"Be quiet, Mother," Else Gebhardt said sharply. "I'll talk about that rotten little creep any damned way I want."
Unperturbed, the old lady shrugged and took another sip of coffee. "I told Gunter he shouldn't have done that," she continued, her false teeth chattering loosely as she spoke. "I told him no good would come of it if he threw Kari out; that it would come back on you in the end. But would he listen? I'll say not. Not at all! Gunter Gebhardt never once listened to anybody else in his whole life!"
Else stood up and leveled a chilly, blue-eyed glare at the woman seated at the table. "I'm warning you, Mother. I don't want to hear another word about it. Kari's father is dead, and I'm going to tell my daughter about this myself if I have to drive all the way up to Bellingham and break down the door to do it."
Another woman moved quickly to the old woman's side. "Please, Aunt Inge," she said soothingly. "Let Else be. She has enough to worry about right now."
But Else's widowed mother, Inge, wasn't so easily stifled. "She certainly does," Inge Didricksen sniffed. "And she should have started worrying about it a long time ago. She always let that man rule the roost like he was the king of Prussia. Now just see where it's got them!"
"Mother!" Else exclaimed furiously. "Drop it."
From the way they were going at it, I figured Gunter Gebhardt must have been a bone of contention between mother and daughter since day one. Just then Else caught sight of me standing across the room. Her face flushed with embarrassment. "I'm sorry, BoBo," she said. "I had no idea you were here."
"Detective Danielson and I came to talk to you, if you have time," I said. "We need to gather some information about your husband. Is there some place a little more private than this? A place where we could talk?"
Behind me in the entryway, the doorbell chimed again. No doubt another group of sympathetic friends was arriving. Still holding the cup and saucer that had been thrust in her hand, Sue Danielson appeared in the doorway. Else looked from her to me and then down at her mother, who, totally unperturbed, continued to drink her coffee.
"Come on," Else said at last. "We'll go downstairs. No one will bother us there. Just come get me if Kari calls back, would you?"
The woman, who was evidently a cousin, nodded and said she would. Meanwhile, Else turned on her heel and led us out the back door. Just outside, between the back door and one leading into the garage, was a cement slab. Yet a third door opened off it. Else paused before the third door long enough to extract a key from her pocket.
"Gunter always kept the workshop door locked," she explained as she worked with the key. "He never l
iked having people go down there, but I can't see that it matters that much now. He didn't want people walking in on him when he was working. And, of course, I'm sure the collection itself is very valuable."
Stepping into the darkened stairwell, Else switched on a single overhead bulb, dimly illuminating a set of heavily timbered stairs. Under the banister, on either side of the risers themselves, lay a pair of railroad ties. The rough wood had been notched to fit the steps to keep them from slipping. I saw them, but only enough to notice them, as Sue and I followed Else down the stairway and off across the darkened, dungeonlike basement.
The mistress of the house knew where she was going. We didn't. Stumbling forward in the dark, I slammed my knee into something sharp and hard. The pain of the blow was enough to make me yelp.
"What's wrong?" Sue demanded, groping for my arm. "What happened?"
"Watch out," I told her. "There's stuff around here that will break your leg." While we stood waiting for Else to switch on the lights, I rubbed my knee with one hand and reached out to touch whatever I had run into with the other.
It felt like a motor of some kind, and that wasn't too surprising. In the last few years, we've had a number of serious windstorms in the Puget Sound area. Damage to downed wires has sometimes knocked out power for as many as several days at a time. Feeling the metal object, I supposed it was one of those gas-powered generators that have become almost standard equipment in the basements of some storm-lashed neighborhoods.
A moment later, Else flipped another switch, and the room lit up. It turned out I was almost right. What I had thought to be a gas-powered generator was actually a small engine block for a diesel generator set, the kind fishing boats use to drive auxiliary generators and hydraulic pumps. For ease of moving, it was mounted on top of a raised four-wheeled dolly. I didn't find it at all surprising that Gunter Gebhardt would use his basement for off-season storage and maintenance of some of his equipment.
When the lights came on, Sue and I found ourselves standing at one end of what was apparently a single room that ran the entire length of the house. Unlike most basements I have known and owned, this one was clean and neat. The white tile floor gleamed in the glow of overhead fluorescent lighting. One end of the room was devoted to storage. There the carefully organized shelves held the kinds of tools and equipment you'd expect in the workshop of a boat-owning fisherman. And those didn't interest me very much. After all, if you've seen one bench vise, you've seen them all.
What intrigued me were the wooden display cases that lined the entire opposite wall. I started toward them, but Else stopped me.
"Don't move until I turn off the alarm," she said. I heard several electronic beeps from a keypad as Else punched in a code to turn off what was evidently a silent home-security system.
"Okay," she said. "It's off now."
By then I was already moving toward the well-lit, glass-enclosed curio cases. Metal locks had been slid in between the two separate glass panels that formed the front of each section of case. The glass shelves were lit from both above and below by a bank of fluorescent fixtures at the top and bottom of each case. And standing on the sturdy glass shelves were literally hundreds of tiny figures-toy soldiers, each standing on his own private base.
I remember having some lead soldiers of my own once back when I was a little kid. My set contained only a dozen soldiers in all-G.I.'s decked out in full combat regalia. I loved those damn soldiers, played with them every day, cried when I lost one, and begged my mother for more. But toy soldiers like that were too expensive for my single mother's limited means. Those twelve in that one set were all I ever owned.
It wasn't until I was in high school and found the last one lurking in a bottom dresser drawer that my mother told me, with no little shame, that my precious set of soldiers had come to me via a Toys for Tots drive at our church. Mother's obvious chagrin at having had to resort to charity was contagious. I threw away that last remaining soldier, although now I wish I'd kept him.
And so, those ranked figures on the well-lit shelves held a childish, almost magnetic attraction for me. Enchanted at the prospect and walking like one lost in a hypnotic trance, I moved across the glaringly clean tile of Gunter Gebhardt's basement floor. My mind was alive with anticipation, knowing that I would be delighted by the engrossing detail of what I'd find there.
And I was, too, but only for a moment. Only until I recognized the uniforms.
These were combat-ready troops all right-World War II-vintage soldiers circa 1940 or so. But these weren't my old G.I. pals, not by a long shot.
No, Gunter Gebhardt's soldiers were German troops, down to the last tiny, gruesome detail. On each hand-painted, khaki-colored uniform, the awful black-and-white swastika insignias were clearly visible.
7
I'm not sure why it surprised me so, but the shock on my face must have been readily apparent.
"Gunter's father was a piliot in the Luftwaffe," Else explained. "He was killed shortly before D-day. Gunter's been making these soldiers for years. It was his way of honoring a father he barely knew."
I only half heard what Else Gebhardt was saying. I was studying the collection of miniature soldiers in their painstakingly painted Nazi uniforms and thinking about my own father. He died just before D-day as well. Same war. Different side.
Looking around the basement now, I saw it through different eyes and felt as though I had been given a glimpse of not one but two dead men-an unsung war hero, a man who had presumably died honorably while fighting on the wrong side of a lost cause. And his son, who had spent his entire adult life living in a country where his father's wartime exploits would have been anathema to anyone Gunter chose to tell. Rather than discussing his father aloud, he had created this secret basement shrine.
I wondered if Gunter Gebhardt ever knew how lucky he was. He had been fortunate enough to find a wife who had understood and accepted his need to honor his father. I saw Else Gebhardt in a whole new light as well.
"How did your husband happen to come to this country?" Sue Danielson asked.
Else beckoned for us to follow her and led us to a small workbench area where three tall stools were grouped around a waist-high countertop. We each settled on a stool.
"I've never been quite clear on how it happened, but somehow Gunter and his mother ended up in Norway after the war. Her name was Isolde. That's where the name of Gunter's boat came from. She married a Norwegian fisherman named Einar Aarniessen who happened to be my father's second cousin. When Gunter was in his mid-teens, both his mother and stepfather were killed in an automobile accident. When Gunter wanted to come to this country, my father sponsored him."
"That's how you two met?" I asked.
Else nodded. "I didn't know it then, but I think it was a put-up deal. My father wanted a son, you see-someone to fish with, someone to leave his business to. And since his only child was a girl-me-the best Daddy could hope for was a suitable son-in-law. As far as that was concerned, Gunter was perfect. He was a hard worker. He didn't smoke or drink."
Unlike a certain hell-raising boyfriend named Champagne Al Torvoldsen, I thought. I said, "Gunter didn't smoke, he didn't drink, and he needed a father."
"That, too," Else Gebhardt said with a wistful little half-smile that made me wonder if she, too, was comparing those two very different young men as they must have been back then-the wild-haired, happy-go-lucky Alan and the straight-arrow, serious Gunter.
She gave me a searching look. "I suppose you knew we had to get married?"
I shook my head. What must have seemed like the central tragedy of her teenage years had been invisible to me and probably to most of the other kids at Ballard High as well.
"I mean, I had to marry someone," she added, "and Alan was long gone. My father saw to that. Fortunately for me, Gunter stepped in, but then I lost the baby anyway, when I was five months along. Our own daughter-Gunter's and mine-wasn't born until much later, when we were both beginning to believe we would never ha
ve a child."
Else shook her head sadly. "It's funny, isn't it, the things you think about at a time like this. Gunter and I had a good life together. He was a difficult person to understand at times, but we got along all right. I wasn't in love with him when we got married, but I came to love him eventually."
She was silent for a moment, looking across the room at the shelves filled with handmade soldiers. It seemed to me that she welcomed the chance to talk, to unburden herself of the secrets she had kept bottled up for years.
"It's strange. My father adored the ground Gunter walked on. My mother liked him all right at first, but later, especially these last few years, it seemed as though she resented every breath he took. Then there's my daughter, Kari. Not just my daughter, she's Gunter's daughter, too. Kari hasn't spoken to him or to me for almost four years now. And that boyfriend of hers wouldn't let me talk to her today, wouldn't even let me give her the news that her father is dead. I don't know if she'll bother to come to his funeral."
Else Gebhardt stopped speaking and looked bleakly from Sue Danielson to me. "I'm sorry to go blithering like this. You probably hear these kinds of sordid little tales time and again, don't you? And I don't suppose you stopped by expecting to hear all this ancient history."
"It helps," Sue Danielson put in quickly. "It allows us to form a more complete picture of who-all is involved. Besides you, who can tell us about your husband's associates, his working relationships?"
"If you ask around Fishermen's Terminal or the Norwegian Commercial Club, I'd imagine most people would tell you that Gunter drove a hard bargain, and that's true. He wasn't easy to get along with, but he was a man of his word. And there was no one in the world he was harder on than on Gunter Gebhardt himself."
"He took over your father's fishing business?" I asked. "Or did Gunter buy your father out?"
A pained shadow crossed Else's face. "My father had a heart attack at age fifty-seven. He was totally disabled for five years before he died. If it hadn't been for Gunter, Daddy and Mother would have lost everything-the house, the boat, the cabin on Whidbey Island."