More Perfect Union (9780061760228)

by Jance, Judith A.

  Officer Jackson got out of the patrol car and came over to me while I was still fuming. “I’ve called Harbor Patrol,” she said. “They say it’ll be awhile. There’s been an accident in the locks.”

  My legs still quivered as misdirected adrenaline burned off through my system. I had to really concentrate before Merrilee Jackson’s spoken words penetrated the fog of anger and made any sense.

  The Hiram Chittenden Locks form a narrow bottleneck between Lake Union and Shilshole Bay. The lake is freshwater and the bay is salt, a part of Puget Sound. The locks raise and lower boats to allow access between the two bodies of water. On sunny summer days, mobs of amateur water-jockeys and serious drinkers simultaneously attempt to maneuver their boats through the locks. It can be tricky under the best of circumstances, because currents in the locks behave far more like those in rivers than they do those in lakes. Which is how Seattle ends up with weekend watercraft traffic jams that can rival any freeway.

  If that was what this was, we could be in for a long wait. “Great,” I muttered. “That’s just great.”

  As Officer Jackson headed toward the dock once more, Cassie Young came up to me in a blind panic. “Why’s that guy fastening tape to our boom?” she asked. “What’s going on?”

  “We’ve got a hotshot detective here who thinks the sun rises and sets in his ass.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Cassie demanded.

  “That he needs to be taken down a peg or two.” I left her standing there fuming and went looking for Woody Carroll. I found him in the midst of the bunch of milling reporters.

  “Where’s the nearest phone?” I asked.

  “That one I used, down on the wingwall.” He pointed, but that phone was already well inside Paul Kramer’s barricade of Day-Glo tape.

  “That one won’t work. Are they any others?”

  Woody shrugged. “Go on into the administration building. The girl in there will let you use one.”

  As I walked toward the office I remembered Ralph Ames, my attorney in Arizona, complaining that what I really needed was a car telephone in the 928. Ames is a gadget nut, especially when it comes to telephones. For the first time, I thought maybe he might be right about a car phone.

  The “girl” in the Lake Union Drydock office was probably pushing sixty-five. “It’s not long distance, is it?” she asked in response to my request for a phone.

  I shook my head and she pointed me toward a conference room where a high-tech pushbutton phone sat on a battered wooden desk. I went so far as to pick up the receiver and punch the first three digits of Sergeant Watkins’ home phone number. Then, stopping in mid-dial, I stood there holding the phone.

  The socialization of little boys includes very strong interdictions against carrying tales. My first lesson came when I was five. I’ve never forgotten it. My mother’s alteration shop in Ballard was next door to a bakery owned by a friendly old man. One afternoon I overheard several older boys bragging about how a whole group of them would go into the store at once. One or two would occupy the baker’s attention while others smuggled doughnuts out from under his nose.

  Offended by their blatant dishonesty, I told my mother who in turn told the baker. He caught them in the act the very next day. Two days later, the older kids waylaid me in the alley behind the shops. I don’t know how they found out, but they accused me of being a tattletale and a sissy. They dumped me out of my Radio Flyer wagon and proceeded to beat the holy crap out of me. When it was over, my shirt was so badly torn it had to be thrown away before my mother saw it. I cleaned myself up as best I could, and when my mother asked what happened, I told her I tipped over in the wagon.

  But I had learned my lesson. Permanently. And some forty years later, that lesson was still there, its taste as strong and bitter in my mouth as the dirt and blood from that long-ago alley.

  I put down the phone without ever finishing dialing Watty’s number. I’d take care of Paul Kramer myself, one way or the other.

  “Nobody home?” the receptionist asked as I came back past her desk.

  I shook my head. “Nope. I’ll try again later,” I said.

  The aid car was just leaving as I walked back outside. I waved them down. “The lady’s all right?” I asked.

  The driver nodded. “Like you said, she just fainted. No big deal.”

  His partner leaned forward and grinned. “Yeah, we’ll be happy to come back and administer first aid to her anytime.”

  Maybe Derrick Parker didn’t like her much, but Hannah Boyer was obviously a hit with Seattle’s Medic One.

  By the time I collared Manny, my temper was fairly well back under control. “If that asshole Kramer wants a search, let’s give him one, but let’s get it over with now while we wait for Harbor Patrol to show up.”

  So for the next forty-five minutes, while we waited the arrival of the police boat, we diligently combed every inch of the area Kramer had cordoned off. It didn’t take long, and it wasn’t tough, either. The creosoted wooden planks yielded nothing useful. The whole dock was clean as a whistle. By the time Harbor Patrol got there, even Kramer was ready to admit defeat.

  Harbor Patrol Three arrived along with two Seattle P.D. old-timers, Jim Harrison and Ken Lee, both of whom are contemporaries of mine. They brought their thirty-eight-foot Modu-Tech alongside the dock and gently eased in close enough to reach the corpse with a body hook.

  That particular piece of police equipment is very much like a ten-foot-long question mark. The long handle has foam floats to help keep it on the surface of the water. Despite its name, the implement is neither pointed nor sharp. The curve at the end, formed by one continuous U-shaped piece of tubing, is about the size of a basketball hoop.

  Harrison gently maneuvered the metal half-circle around the midsection of the corpse and pulled it toward the boat while Ken Lee untied the body basket from where it was stowed on top of the cabin. The basket, a man-sized frame of galvanized tubing lined with small-mesh chicken wire, was dropped into the water and positioned under the corpse. Once the body was tied in place, they hefted it into the boat.

  All this was done with absolutely no discussion. Lee and Harrison worked together quickly and efficiently, the way good partners are supposed to.

  Only when they were finished and had covered the body with a disposable paper blanket did Harrison look up. “Sorry it took so long for us to get here, Manny,” he said. “We were stuck in the locks. Do you want him here on the dock, or should we take him back to Harbor Station?”

  Kramer answered before Manny had a chance. “Here,” he said.

  That’s when I hit the end of my rope and bounced into the fray. “Wait a minute,” I said, turning to Wilson. “Is it going to make any difference to you if you look at him here or there?”

  “None whatsoever,” Wilson replied. “Either place is fine with me, although I think the dock over at Harbor Station is a little easier to work from.”

  “Then how about doing it there?” I suggested. “That way these people can get back to work.”

  Kramer started to object, but for a change Manny beat him to the punch and backed me up. “Good deal,” he said to Harrison. “Take him down to Harbor Station and off-load him onto your dock. We’ll meet you there in a couple of minutes.”

  “Okay.” Harrison nodded. “You’re the boss.”

  Kramer’s face turned beet-red. With a little help from his friends, J. P. Beaumont had won that round fair and square. I motioned for Officer Jackson. “Do you see those two people standing there with Derrick Parker?” Derrick was standing in a tight little threesome with Sam Goldfarb and Cassie Young.

  Officer Jackson looked where I pointed and nodded. “I see them,” she said.

  “Go tell them to start getting their people lined up. Now that the body’s leaving, we’ll be able to get back to work.”

  Merrilee Jackson flashed me a smile. “I’ll be more than happy to do that,” she said.

  Jim Harrison finished securing the body
to the deck and straightened up. Catching sight of me, he gave me a half-assed salute. Naturally, he was wearing surgical gloves.

  In the good old days at homicide, we wore gloves only when dealing with bloated and decaying flesh, bodies like this one. We wear them more often now. They’re considered essential equipment, right along with our badges and our guns.

  I wondered suddenly if the good old days really had been that good, or if I was just an antique.

  The real answer was probably a little of both.

  CHAPTER

  3

  By the time they resumed filming that afternoon, we had indeed lost the light. Goldfarb got in a huge shouting match with several members of his crew. As usual, the director carried the day. Over strenuous objections, Sam “The Movie Man” decreed they would reshoot the fight scene while somebody rewrote the script so the body could be found at night rather than in daylight. Meantime, techs scurried this way and that, bringing in more equipment, including a tractor-trailer rig containing a huge whispering generator to provide the juice to run the carbon arc lamps required for a night shoot.

  Screwed up and incomprehensible as it may seem to a rank outsider, making a movie is a lot like living life. You work with little bits and pieces without ever getting a look at the big picture. It comes together gradually, in order or out of it, with no discernible pattern. No rhyme or reason, as my mother used to say.

  I was doing my best to follow the story, but it wasn’t easy. From scattered fragments, I had managed to determine that Death in Drydock was nothing more or less than an old-fashioned melodrama.

  According to the story, Hannah Boyer, playing a somewhat less than virginal heroine, inherits a failing family business—the drydock company of the title. While attempting to turn the business back into a money-making proposition, she becomes romantically involved with a land-grabbing developer. The developer turns up dead in the water, and naturally the sweet young thing is a prime suspect. The lead detective on the case, played by Derrick Parker, is totally smitten once he encounters his gorgeous suspect.

  The story itself was nothing short of ridiculous, and the idea of a cop falling for his suspect sounds like an overused cliché. It may be overused, but it does happen on occasion, even to the best of us. I should know.

  The crew reshot the fight scene first, then they began working on the scene where make-believe cops pull the make-believe corpse out of the water. At least the water was real.

  The retrieval scene was enough to make me want to turn in my technical advisor badge. Permanently. For one thing, Goldfarb couldn’t be bothered with a boat. They dragged the body out of the water and dumped it directly onto the dock. For another, the dummy, fresh from the prop shop, had suffered none of the damage real corpses do. When they dropped it on the dock, the makeup was still totally in order, and all hair, fingers, and toes were still completely intact.

  In addition, despite having seen a real body hook in action that very afternoon, Goldfarb insisted on using a sharply pointed metal hook to retrieve the body. All my pleas for realism fell on deaf ears. I tried to explain to Cassie Young that sharp hooks were used only for dragging the bottoms of rivers and lakes. I even offered to call Harbor Patrol and ask to borrow a real body hook to use in the scene. No dice. Cassie didn’t pay any attention. She told me Goldfarb wanted a sharp point on the end of his body hook. That was what the script called for and that was the way it would be.

  The reason Goldfarb wanted a sharp hook was soon obvious. Part of the retrieval scene included a special-effects sequence in which the sharp end of the hook is pulled free from the make-believe skin of the make-believe corpse. I took Cassie aside and attempted to explain that real human skin is amazingly tough, that body hooks catch on clothing, not on skin, but unrealistic or not, Goldfarb liked that ugly scene. He climbed down from the boom and crawled around on all fours to lovingly direct the cameras in capturing the sharp end of the hook as it came loose from the all too lifelike plastic skin.

  For some reason, neither Cassie Young nor Hannah Boyer found any of this pretend gore the least bit distressing. So long as I live, I never will understand women.

  In the end, the scene stayed as is. I didn’t. I left the whole bunch of them to their own devices and went in search of Woody Carroll. If I had walked off the set completely, if I had pulled up my pants and gone home, there would have been hell to pay. I didn’t need to have both Captain Powell and Mayor Dawson on my back. I was mad, but not that mad. Not yet.

  After all, orders are orders. Instead, I hid out with Woody Carroll and some of the Lake Union Drydock employees. We settled down in the employee locker room and played several friendly hands of Crazy Eights on sickly green wooden lunchroom tables while Goldfarb went right on having his stupid cops do stupid things.

  No matter what I did and no matter what Captain Powell wanted, the fictional Seattle cops in Death in Drydock were going to be a bunch of incredibly asinine jerks.

  I stuck it out until almost midnight when Goldfarb finally called it a day. By then, even though I’d been off my feet for the last couple of hours, my heel was hurting like hell. The mobile canteen folks had brought dinner hours earlier, but it was that so-called nouvelle cuisine—the kind of food that looks real pretty on the plate but you’re hungry again by the time you finish chewing the last bite. As I limped toward my Porsche parked five blocks away on Fairview Avenue East, I was craving a hamburger—a nice, greasy, juicy hamburger.

  Derrick Parker hailed me from behind before I opened my car door. “Hey, Beau. Are you going straight home, or do you feel like stopping off for awhile?”

  “What have you got in mind?” I answered. Parker waved away a limo driver who had been following, waiting for him to get in. “I guess you want a ride,” I added.

  Parker was already climbing into the car. He leaned back into the deep leather seat with a grateful sigh. “I’ve got to get away from these people. They’re driving me crazy.” As I started the car, he glanced slyly in my direction. “Let me guess,” he said. “What you need is a chiliburger and a MacNaughton’s from the Doghouse, right?”

  I laughed. “Right, although I hadn’t gotten to the chili part of it yet. If they run you out of the movies, Derrick, maybe you could get work as a mind reader.”

  “That’s a thought with a whole lot of appeal,” Derrick Parker replied. “This has been a hell of a day.”

  He didn’t get any argument from me about that. We had put in a good, solid eighteen hours, and although I was tired, I wasn’t the least bit sleepy. Neither was Derrick. I drove us straight to the Doghouse at Seventh and Bell.

  In all of Seattle, it’s my home away from home. The place has changed little over the years. The walls are still a dingy, faded yellow. Stray electrical cords still meander up the corners of the rooms. The duct-taped patch in the carpet has yet to be replaced. It’s the kind of place where a guy can really relax. You can sit there and see what work needs to be done and revel in the fact that you personally don’t have to do any of it.

  Parker and I went directly into the bar. The only pleasant part of my moviemaking experience had resulted from Cassie Young asking me, half seriously and half in jest, to keep an eye on Derrick Parker. Her thought was that I would keep him out of trouble, make sure he showed up on the set on time, that sort of thing. The whole thing was a joke. Leaving J. P. Beaumont in charge of Derrick Parker was like the blind leading the blind. We were either very good for one another or very bad, depending on your point of view.

  From a strictly business view, the Doghouse loved it. Not that many people in their lowbrow clientele of drinkers consume Glenlivet on the rocks, and certainly not in Derrick Parker’s prodigious quantities.

  The night waitress in the bar was a seasoned veteran named Donna. It was late in her shift and her feet hurt, so she was moderately surly. On that score, she had my heartfelt sympathy. When my feet hurt, it’s hard for me to be civil, let alone cheerful.

  Donna took our dinner order at the
same time she delivered our drinks. Derrick blessed her with one of his engaging, boyish grins, but Donna wasn’t impressed. Derrick Parker might be a household name all across America, but not in Donna’s household, and not in the Doghouse, either.

  Whenever that happened, whenever a waitress didn’t recognize him or throw herself at his feet, Derrick acted both pleased and mystified. He liked to experience that rare sensation of anonymity, but it bothered him too, made him uneasy.

  Derrick picked up his drink and took a long pull of Scotch. When he put down the glass and turned to look at me, the smile he had used on Donna was gone. “Do you know that’s the first time I’ve ever seen a real dead body?”

  “Is that so?” I responded. I was surprised. I think people hold the idea that movie stars have been everywhere, done everything. Derrick’s comment was remarkably ingenuous.

  He nodded. “I’ve just never been around when someone died. My grandmother passed away years ago, but my family’s into cremation. We don’t do funerals with open caskets and all that jazz.” He shuddered. “Do they all look that way?”

  “What way?”

  “That…” he paused, looking for a word. “…gross,” he added finally.

  Gross did pretty much cover it.

  “The floaters usually look like that,” I told him. “Sometimes better, sometimes worse.”

  He seemed shocked. “And that’s what you guys call them? Floaters?”

  I nodded.

  “That’s terrible. I thought that was just in scripts.” Derrick sat quietly for a few minutes letting that soak in. “How do you think he died?” he asked eventually. It was as though the dead man held a terrible fascination for Derrick Parker, as though he wanted to know all about him and yet, at the same time, he wanted to think about something else. I have a more than nodding acquaintance with that compulsion myself. It’s what makes me a detective instead of a stockbroker.

  “I can tell you one thing. He didn’t jump,” I said.