by J. A. Jance
With that, and clearly expecting me to follow, he strode off down the dock, back the way I had come. Old times may be old times, but I didn't like his attitude. I resented his trying to lay on some kind of guilt trip about how late I was in getting back to him, especially since Sue and I had been trying to track the man down all afternoon.
"Look, bub," I told him brusquely. "Get off your cross. My partner and I stopped by twice earlier today. No one was home."
"Oh," he said. "I went out to check on something. It took longer than I thought. I guess we're not all that late, though. Happy hour runs until seven."
"Happy hour?" I echoed.
That was the last thing I needed-an escorted happy-hour tour of Seattle with some supposedly reformed drunk who was about to fall off the wagon in a big way. Not only that, we were going in his car, and he was driving. Good planning.
I tried to stall. "Hey, Alan, how about if we sit around and shoot the breeze some other time? I don't do the happy-hour scene anymore. I didn't think you did, either."
Alan stopped beside a much-dented Mercury Cougar that dated from somewhere in the mid-eighties. The car was silver except for the right front fender, which was white. He looked at me across the top of the vehicle.
"This isn't a social visit," he said tersely. "I want to talk to you about Gunter Gebhardt, and I don't want to do it here."
Enough said. I stopped trying to argue my way out of it and went along for the ride. Using the term "ride" loosely. Alan Torvoldsen's Cougar beat walking, but not by much.
The passenger door opened only from inside. Most of the car's headliner had come loose from its moorings, so I sat with an unwelcome scarf of smoke-saturated felt draped around my ears. The lights from the parking lot revealed an overflowing ashtray. The ashes, apparently free of butts, formed a small white mound that resembled a miniature sand dune, puffs of which blew off when we opened and closed the doors. None of the dash lights worked, and it took three tries before the starter kicked in, but once Alan got the engine to turn over, the damn thing did run. Noisily so, however. And once we started moving, I realized the Cougar's suspension system was totally shot. So was the muffler.
I figured the first cop who saw or heard that wreck moving in traffic would haul us over. No such luck. Where do you find a cop when you need him? Without incident, we rumbled through Ballard, making our way up Fifteenth and turning right on Eighty-fifth. The whole while we were driving, Champagne Al didn't say a word, and I followed his lead.
We stopped in front of a dingy-looking bar with a collection of Harleys parked haphazardly outside on the sidewalk. Great, I thought. Just where every homicide cop in the world wants to spend the evening happy hour-in a biker bar.
The sign outside said Club 449, but the sign just inside the door proclaimed, ABANDON ALL DOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE. Another, written in big red letters, said NO DRUGS. NO WEAPONS. NO GANG ATTIRE. NO EXCEPTIONS. Oh. That Club 449.
I guess I must have heard about Club 449 at an AA meeting somewhere, but before that evening with Alan Torvoldsen, I had never been there. It's owned and operated by a now-sober bartender who, once he stopped drinking, didn't have a comfortable place to socialize. He missed the bar scene so much that he started a joint that had all the right ambience for some displaced boozers, a place they could call home.
The number in the name, 449, refers to a page in Alcoholics Anonymous, known affectionately among AA members as "the Big Book." That page deals with acceptance. And looking around, I would have to say Club 449 was a pretty damn accepting place. Some of the customers were downright scary-looking, as were the ramshackle, dingy surroundings.
The room was furnished with a collection of battered cocktail tables and run-down chairs. The big dance floor was empty. The place was smoky and noisy, but it was nevertheless surprisingly familiar. It reminded me of all those places where I squandered large chunks of my misspent youth.
There were bursts of raucous laughter from a group of guys playing darts, while the sound of breaking pool balls crackled occasionally in the background. A guy with a stringy ponytail that ended below his belt fed a steady stream of quarters into a rumbling, sputtering video game. A compact-disc-playing jukebox shrieked out music that didn't at all match the mute MTV images gyrating on the TV set mounted above the bar. Next to the color screen and within easy view of the bartender was a small black-and-white monitor showing a series of interior views of the bar as seen through the watchful eye of a constantly scanning video camera.
Club 449 boasted all the things you'd naturally expect to find in a bar-with one notable exception. Booze. Instead, the hand-lettered blackboard menu offered a selection of seltzers. Happy hour there referred to all espresso drinks. A buck a shot.
Seltzers and espresso may sound trendy, but Club 449 bore not the vaguest resemblance to a yuppie "fern bar." Far from it. The no-nonsense message was clear. "If you're clean and sober, you're welcome."
As any reformed drunk can tell you, clean and sober doesn't come easy. Some of those folks look as if they had just stepped out of detox and were hanging on to sobriety one fingernail at a time, to say nothing of one day. And although they may have all been sober, they weren't necessarily all on the up-and-up.
On the wall above the nicked and battered bar, next to the menu, was a second hand-lettered sign. This one was entitled BAD CHECK LIST. I counted twenty-six names on the list in all. Three had been crossed out. That meant three out of the twenty-six must have come in to make their bad checks good. I guess 23-to-3 is measurably better than 26-to-0, but it doesn't make staying in business very easy.
The bartender looked like someone who belonged to one of those mondo Harleys parked outside. He wore faded Levi's, leather boots, and a black T-shirt with a pack of cigarettes rolled into the sleeve. A line of complicated tattoos ran from his wrist up his arm until the pattern disappeared under the cloth of his shirt. He had a bulbous and much-flattened nose, but when he caught sight of Alan Torvoldsen, he grinned, and his eyes crinkled a friendly welcome.
"Hey, Al," he said. "How's it going? Whaddya want, the usual?"
Alan nodded. "And what about your pal there?" the barkeep continued. "What'll he have?"
The question was addressed to Alan as though I were some kind of nincompooop totally incapable of ordering for myself.
I'm a self-respecting Seattleite. When called upon to do so, I can speak espresso with the best of them. "I'll have an Americano," I told him.
The bartender nodded. "Coming right up," he said.
Instead of settling on a bar stool, Champagne Al threaded his way down the bar to a newspaper-cluttered table sitting just inside the front window. Behind us, in a locked display case, was a collection of AA tokens and memorabilia, all for sale.
Alan swept the papers aside, settled into a chair, and motioned me into another. He shook a Camel out of the package in his shirt pocket, then lit it, leaned back, and stared off into space. For a man who supposedly wanted to talk to me, he was having a hell of a time getting around to it.
"What's up, Alan?" I asked him, hoping to prime the pump. "You look like a man with something on his mind."
He squinted at me through the smoke. "I guess you know about my baby brother," he said.
"What about him?"
"Lars is dead," he said softly.
I remembered Lars Torvoldsen as a fuzzy-faced kid two years younger than I was. Lars tried like hell to live up to his big brother's reputation, but he never quite managed. Lars was neither a good enough athlete nor a fearless enough thug.
"I'm sorry to hear that," I said.
Alan nodded. "Five years ago, the Princess went down in the Gulf of Alaska. Guys from another boat hauled me out of the water, but Lars didn't make it. We never found him."
"I didn't know anything about it."
The bartender brought our coffees. I paid.
"I guess I'm not surprised you didn't know," Alan said. "Boats go down all the time. Other than the local Ballard paper, it ra
rely makes page one. As far as most reporters are concerned, what's one dead fisherman more or less?"
He was right. Commercial fishing boats do go down every season-salmon seiners, longliners, crabbers. Anyone who thinks fishing for a living isn't dangerous ought to stop by Fishermen's Terminal and check out the memorial they've built down there. It lists the names of all the members of the fishing fleet who have died each decade. There's a whole new set of names cast in bronze every single year. Often one surname will appear two or three times when fathers, sons, brothers, and cousins who worked together on the same vessel end up dying together as well.
"We were partners, you know," Alan continued. "From the time our dad died, we were equal partners, but mostly I was so drunked up that Lars had to carry me. And he never complained about it. Always passed it off like it was no big deal. Like, ‘He ain't heavy, he's my brother,' or something equally dumb."
Alan Torvoldsen blinked, shook his head, and ground out his half-smoked cigarette. "Shit!" he muttered. "I guess I still miss him."
"Alan…" I began, but he held up his hand and silenced me.
"Now that I've started, let me finish. Lars was always a good kid-a good man, I mean. When he went down, he had a nice wife-a pretty wife who loved him and who was seven months pregnant. He also had a three-year-old son. The previous year had been a pisser. We barely made enough for me to scrape by, and I didn't have a family to support. So when Lars ran short, he more or less stopped paying some of the bills, including insurance on the boat and his own life insurance."
The Torvoldsens' family boat-The Norwegian Princess — had been one of the graceful old two-masted schooners. Compared to it, Alan's One Day at a Time was little more than a sea-going scow.
"That's where the family boat went?"
Alan nodded. "But it was only a boat, you know? I should have been grateful just to be alive, but did I fall down on my knees and thank God? Hell no! I blamed Lars. Said it was his fault that we were ruined, and then I climbed on my pity-pot, got drunk, and stayed drunk. Finally, about a year ago, Aarnie Knudsen-you remember Button, don't you?"
"I remember Button."
"He tracked me down in a beat-out dive down in Astoria. He told me I'd better come home because my mother was dying. So I did. My mother was happy to see me, even after all that. It was just like the story in the Bible about the damn prodigal son. She died two days later. I haven't had a drink since."
I've heard some pretty dramatic drunkalogues in my time. We weren't even in a meeting, but Champagne Al's story put gooseflesh on my legs.
"What I've done in the last year," he continued, "is to try figuring out why I'm still alive. If Lars is dead and I'm not, there must be some reason, some plan. I've tried to make amends for what I didn't do before. I'm doing what I can to help Krissy-that's Lars's wife…widow. I spend every Sunday afternoon with my nephews. They're cute kids, but life without a father is pretty damn tough."
He stopped talking as though he had used up all the words at his command, but something was still missing. We sat there in silence while the jukebox blared behind us. He lit another cigarette.
"Alan," I said finally. "I don't understand why you're telling me all this."
"Because I want you to know who I am now," he returned gravely. "You probably remember me from the old days. It's taken almost thirty years, but I've finally grown up. I'm not Champagne Al anymore, and I'm man enough to tell you that although I may have been married five times, I've only been in love once. Else Didriksen is the one who got away, Beau. And maybe I still care too much. But when I tell you what I'm about to tell you, I don't want you to think it's sour grapes talking."
"When you tell me what?"
"Gunter Gebhardt was a rotten son of a bitch," Alan Torvoldsen said through clenched teeth. "He had a girlfriend on the side. She lives in a house up on Camano Island."
"How do you happen to know where she lives?"
"Because she showed up in the parking lot down on the dock today. I'd seen her before, lots of times. I saw her driving around in the lot just before I called down to the department looking for you. I thought maybe you'd get there in time to talk to her, but you weren't in. When she left, I followed her home."
"Who is she? What's her name?"
"That I don't know, but I can give you her address. She's a looker all right. She's maybe all of twenty-five, and she's got a figure that won't quit."
He pulled a ragged scrap of paper out of his shirt pocket and handed it over. A street address had been penciled on it in a careless, masculine hand.
"Can I keep this?"
He nodded. "All I ask is one favor in exchange."
"What's that?"
"I've seen this same broad coming and going from the Isolde off and on for months now. I kept hoping that someday someone would tell Else about it or that maybe she'd find out on her own. When you tell Else about this, it's going to be real tough on her. Even with Gunter dead, it's still going to break her heart. So don't tell her how you found out, okay? Whatever you do, don't tell her it came from me."
I raised the cup that still held the dregs of my Club 449 Americano and toasted Champagne Al Torvoldsen in a heartfelt salute.
"You've got it," I said. "My lips are sealed."
9
Alan Torvoldsen dropped me back at Belltown Terrace around nine-thirty. Our newest doorman, Kevin, let me into the lobby, where I stopped long enough to pick up my mail and punch the Up button on the elevator. When the elevator door opened, there was a dog inside-a dog and no one else. And not just one of those little, yappy waste-of-fur dogs, either. This was a big dog-tall, blond, and pointy-nosed. An Afghan maybe. Or perhaps a Russian wolfhound.
Whatever kind of dog it was, standing on all fours, its nose came right to the bottom of my tie. Fortunately, the tail was wagging.
"There's a dog in here!"
"That's just Charley," Kevin said, as though explaining the obvious. "Lives on nineteen. Haven't you two met before?"
"Never. What's he doing in the elevator?"
"Just riding around. Must get bored in the evenings sometimes, locked up in an apartment all day. Gail-the owner-lets Charley spend half an hour or so just before bedtime, riding up and down in the elevator and meeting people."
"He rides up and down all by himself?"
"Don't worry. Charley's very friendly."
"Thank God for small blessings."
Charley moved aside, giving me room enough to join him in the elevator. On the way up, I tried punching nineteen. The door opened on that floor, but Charley looked up at me quizzically and made no move to get off. Instead, he rode on up to twenty-five with me. When the door slid open on my floor, he started forward eagerly, as though he wanted to bail out right along with me.
"No, you don't, pal," I told Charley, barring the way. I was thankful that we were alone and that no one was there to hear me talking to a damn dog. It's bad for the tough-guy image.
"This is where I live," I added. "No dogs allowed."
Before exiting, I hit nineteen one more time for good measure, punched "door closed," and then made sure Charley was still safely inside when the elevator car started back down. I didn't know Charley's owner, Gail, from Adam's off ox, but someone would have to have a serious talk with the woman. Having a dog wandering around loose in a high-rise luxury condo building didn't seem like such a good idea to me.
I let myself into my apartment and started to put the mail down on the entryway table. I usually let it accumulate there for several days before I finally force myself to sit down and go through it all at one time. But the metal box was still there. My grandfather's ashes were still there. I put the mail on the dining-room table.
The red light on my answering machine was blinking steadily. Ralph Ames, my attorney, gave me the machine years ago. It's starting to wear out. Every once in a while, it goes crazy and either eats a tape or garbles a message. Or else it gets stuck in a loop and repeats my message over and over without ever sounding
the beep that would allow someone else to leave one for me. Ralph keeps telling me that I ought to get rid of it and sign up for voice mail with the phone company, but I don't want to.
I know all about voice mail. We have it on the phones down at the department. I prefer the machine. With the answering machine, if I'm home, I can screen my calls. When I hear the voice on the recorder, I get to decide whether or not I want to pick it up. With voice mail, there's no way to screen calls. It's potluck; either you answer or you don't. Voice mail may come with a lot of fancy new bells and whistles, but it doesn't come with blinking lights. My old-time machine does. I can count the number of blinks and know exactly how many calls I've had without even picking up the phone.
In this case, there had been only one. I decided arbitrarily that one message could wait, at least until after I had something to eat. By then it was a long time past my noontime burger.
I went into the kitchen and used the last two crusts of bread to make myself a peanut-butter-and-honey sandwich. Reminded by a mouthful of peanut butter, I made a mental note to call my grandmother to check on how her dog, Mandy, was doing. Then I grabbed a glass of milk from the fridge and made my way to the recliner. Once I settled in, I punched the Play button on the machine.
"Detective Beaumont," a familiar African-American voice said. "How you doing, my man? This is Rocky Washington from down at the crime lab. Janice Morraine asked me to call you. Says to ask you how come you're hanging out with folks from the Pentagon or maybe the Joint Chiefs. Give me a call back. I'll be here until eleven."
Rocky is a recent graduate from the University of Washington who is now serving an apprenticeship under the careful tutelage of Janice Morraine. Rocky has a quick mind and a great sense of humor. At work he speaks in perfectly articulated English, so he was clearly having fun and playing around when he left the message.
Joking is fine. We all need a little of that to lighten the load at times, but I couldn't figure out what the hell he was talking about. Pentagon? Joint Chiefs?