“I said I’d leave you alone, too.”
Jeff frowned uncertainly. “Yeah. You did. What happened?”
“You didn’t leave you alone. You got crude and brutal and irrational. You used your position to initiate some sort of experiment in clinical psychology. You put a private agenda above the welfare of your readers.”
“Bullshit. I’ve got the biggest readership on this pathetic fucking rag. I’m the only one who gets any mail besides the subscription department.”
“No question. But your readership believes it’s getting the truth; it believes it can trust you; it believes you care about them enough to give them straight information about their lives, and we believed that, too. When you write something that abuses that trust, such as trying to wean people away from normal, healthy sex, we edit it.”
“Abuse of trust? How the fuck would you know an abuse of trust when you spend all day sucking Lattimore’s cock?”
“The paper costs money, Jeff. I do what I have to do to assemble enough funds to put it out every week. That seems sort of an entry-level obligation for a publisher. And I’m not about to take lessons in personal ethics from someone who thinks people need to be encouraged to stick needles through other’s cheeks.”
“You may not need them from me, but you need them from someone. I seem to remember in your last editorial you jumped on board with the Seattle Commons crowd, people who want to turn half the city into Disneyland and piss on the wretches who lose jobs and homes in the process.”
“The commons is part of an integrated master plan that will—”
Jeff leaped from his chair and confronted his boss with equal parts rage and physique. “Master plan, Brian? Master-fucking-plan? The last guy who had a master plan was Hitler.”
Jeff Evans flashed Brian Lux a Nazi salute, then turned on his heel and left. I waved goodbye to Lux and hurried after my quarry. When I caught up to him he was about to climb into a 240Z whose once-black paint had been worn to a rusty red.
“Can I talk to you a minute?” I asked as he fished for his keys and adjusted his suspenders.
He looked me over, his chest heaving from the fury of his outburst and the pace of his exit. “I don’t give private instruction,” he sneered. “Spend a quarter and read the column.”
I gave him a second to calm down. In the interim, he looked me over a second time and apparently saw something that piqued his interest.
“Hey. Is it true guys’ dicks shrink when they get old? And women dry up so you can’t do it without greasing the pole? When does that stuff start happening—I need to do a column on geriatric sex. Give our readers a peek at what’s waiting out in senior land. You read anything on it? Come on, man; I need a resource person on this.”
I waited for his brushfire of enthusiasm to die down. “I need to talk about your sister.”
It took him a while to shift gears. “What’d she do, dump you? Don’t feel bad about it. She’s left a fucking landfill of guys in her wake.”
“My problem isn’t being dumped, my problem is I don’t know where she is.”
He shook his head impatiently. “That makes two of us. Try to be as happy about it as I am.”
“When’s the last time you saw her?”
“Weeks. Months. Years, in the spiritual sense.”
“You don’t have any sense that she’s in some kind of trouble?”
“She’s always in trouble.”
“With what?”
“Drugs. Men. Money. Whatever. Nina’s got problems; I got problems; all God’s chillen got problems. It’s sort of life’s little cover charge.”
“How about her mother?”
“Judy? What about her?”
“Does Nina keep in touch with her?”
He shrugged. “On and off. They fight. They make up. They fight again. Sort of like a family round-robin.”
“What do they fight about?”
“For some reason Mom had trouble with the concept that her daughter was making a living letting some guy make postcards of her cunt. But hey, Judy still sees Nina as a Brownie and me as a Cub Scout. She was thrilled by my piece on nipple clips and cock rings, needless to say.”
“Where does your mother live?”
“Mom? Phinney Ridge.”
“Which is where?”
“By the zoo. Who are you, mister? You can’t be from here if you don’t know Phinney.”
“I’m a friend of a friend of your sister’s.”
“Bullshit.” He found his key and fitted it in the car door. “Not that it matters who the fuck you are; I’ve got no time for talk, I got to decide whether to walk out on this rag.”
“Is the publisher as venal as you say?”
“Ah, Brian’s all right. There are plenty of places worse than Lattimore to get funding. He could be tapping something truly nasty, like the NEA or the Washington fucking Arts Council.”
CHAPTER 14
“Nice office,” she observes, admiring the glass and the brass and the tile and the view of the bay and Olympics.
“Thank you.”
“This is where you charm the customers, I suppose.”
“Something like that.”
“And impress them with your derring-do.”
“Right again. Luckily it’s not as hard as it was when we started, now that we have a track record.”
“That nature of which you’re about to explain.”
“That’s correct.” He gestures toward a logo on the wall. “The company is called DigiArt.”
“I gathered as much. There must be a dozen of those things between here and the front door.”
“In the software trade, it doesn’t pay to be shy.”
“Not in my trade, either.”
They smile jointly and he allows himself a chuckle. The laugh is cool and collected, like the rest of him. He is so different from Gary, she considers arranging a meeting, so Gary can see who and what she left him for. Then she remembers Mandy, and is all the more determined to disappear behind the digital wall that this handsome young man is offering to build for her.
I found my way to Phinney Ridge though not without some doing—the road kept twisting and turning and telling me not to enter. The ridge really was a ridge, it turned out, the plateau a verdant swath that encompassed the Woodland Park Zoo, the flat-lands below defining the neighborhood known as Ballard. The steep sides were striated with horizontal strings of homes that were clinging to the cliff by their fingernails in search of a spectacular view.
Judy Becker lived on Palatine Avenue, two blocks below Phinney Avenue near the corner of Sixty-second Street, in a bungalow blessed with a panoramic perspective—standing on the front stoop and looking back across the street, I could see the west flank of Seattle, the incision of the Ship Canal, the blue slab of Puget Sound, the tuft of Bainbridge Island, and, in the hazy distance, the jagged fence of mountaintops that rose out of the Olympic Peninsula.
The house was a gray stucco bungalow, single story, with a blue composition roof, a sloping front yard primarily devoted to shrubbery, and a deck atop the garage that extended toward the street from the portion of the house to the right of the front door. Clay pots and planter boxes sported a colorful variety of flowers, some of which were petunias and others of which were marigolds, the rest of which were beyond my store of botany. Four wooden chairs of Adirondack design were arranged in a convivial circle around a Plexiglas table; a barbecue bubble was charred from frequent use. An awning on wire runners could be pulled over the deck to shade it from sun or, more likely since this was Seattle, from the spray of winter drizzle.
The door opened before I had a chance to knock. “Are you here for the Stevenson dress?”
I shook my head. “I’m here for information.”
“What kind of information?”
Her eyes narrowed and her lips pursed, creating grommets of white stitches at the edges of her tanned complexion. She was handsome and with some effort could be more than that, but as if to stifl
e such tendencies she wore torn Levi’s, a faded sweatshirt, and blue running shoes without the aid of socks. The front of her sweatshirt glistened with what I thought were sequins but turned out to be dozens of straight pins that made her shirt a coat of armor. Her hair was brown and streaked with gray and cinched in a ten-inch tail. Her eyes were suspicious; her hands were small and lively and cut and callused.
“I’m here about your daughter,” I said into her lengthy assessment of my purpose.
“Nina?”
I nodded.
“What do you want with her?”
She seemed too sensible and self-possessed to be finessed. “I take it the police haven’t been here yet.”
She stiffened and stepped back. “Why would they be?”
“Because a man your daughter has been working with has turned up dead. Sooner or later they’ll want to talk to her about it.”
“I still don’t—”
“He was murdered.”
Her brow crumpled. “Murder? You can’t be serious.”
“I’m afraid I am.”
“Well, I’m sure Nina knows nothing about it.”
“That may be. But the police will want to question her nonetheless.”
“If they need to talk to Nina, why would they bother me?”
“Because no one seems to know where she is. Do you?”
She started to answer, then stopped herself. “What do you have to do with it?”
“My name’s Tanner. I’m a detective from San Francisco.”
“Police?”
“Private.”
She looked over my shoulder, her eyes sweeping the street for confederates. “Is this some sort of trick? Is one of Nina’s friends making one of those home movies that make people look like morons because they aren’t in on the joke?”
“This is no joke, Ms. Evans.”
“I’m not Ms. Evans; I’m Ms. Becker. Judy Becker. And I still don’t know what your interest is in Nina.”
“I just want to find her.”
“Why?”
“To confirm that she’s all right so I can put people’s minds at rest.”
“What people are those?”
“I can’t say. I’m sorry.”
She crossed her arms above the straight pins. “Are you telling me my daughter committed murder?”
I shook my head. “I’m just saying the police will want to talk to her. And I’m saying she might be in danger herself.”
Her eyes bulged with dismay. “Why? Danger from what?”
“I don’t know yet. Have you seen Nina in the past month?”
“No.”
“You’re not worried about her?”
Her expression turned arch and defensive. “I learned long ago that worrying about Nina didn’t make any difference—she did what she did and worrying never changed anything.”
In the middle of her peculiar creed, I decided to do more digging. “Do you mind if I come in and talk for a minute? It would be to both our benefits if I could get a line on your daughter.”
“I still don’t see why. Is it because of this man who died? What man was it?”
I explained the connection between Nina and Gary Richter without describing the nature of the collaboration.
Judy Becker looked at me, then past me toward the distant mountains that wore a yarmulke of snow despite the heat of early summer, then up and down the silent street, then back at me again. She fiddled with the pins in her shirt as if the shiny slim devices were tiny transistors that contained important messages.
When she caught me watching the play of her fingers, she dropped her hands to her sides. “I sew,” she explained with shyness. “That’s what I do—make dresses. Mostly wedding dresses. I sell out of a shop in the market.” She sighed. “Let’s sit on the deck. The house is a mess when I’m working, which is pretty much always, thank the Lord.”
“How much do you charge for a wedding dress?”
“Depends on fabric, style, amount of lace and beadwork involved, lots of things. I can make one for two hundred dollars and I can make one for five thousand. Do you have a daughter who’s getting married?”
I shook my head. “Not now. Maybe someday.” The acknowledgment seemed only slightly fraudulent. I was getting used to being a father, or whatever it was I was.
As my thoughts lingered over a little girl named Eleanor who was growing by leaps and bounds in a grandiose home in San Francisco, Judy Becker gestured toward one of the Adirondack chairs. I took a seat. She sat across from me and crossed her legs. Our glances met somewhere above the petunias. She was nervous, and irritated, and frightened of me or of some other aspect of her life, but it seemed not to occur to her that she had the right to order me off her property.
“I was talking to your son a while ago,” I said before she summoned the courage to restrict me.
The reference seemed to alarm her. “Jeffrey? What about?”
“I was asking if he’d heard from his sister lately.”
“What did he say?”
“That he hadn’t.”
She shook her head glumly. “They’re not close.”
“Why not?”
Her glance left my face and found new focus in a potted plant. “No one in the family is close. We broke apart in a big bang and nothing ever put us back together. We lost our center of gravity; we’re as scattered as the solar system.” She shook her head. “I tried, believe me. But they won’t even come to dinner.”
“You’re not in touch with Nina at all?”
Her eyes glistened momentarily, then dulled to a soup of resignation. “Sometimes I am. Sometimes we go places and have lunch and have the nicest time you could imagine, just the way you think you will when they’re small and you dream of when they grow up. But other times we don’t speak for months.”
“Whose doing is that?”
“Hers. Naturally. I’m always glad to see Nina. She leads an interesting life. Rakehell at times, but interesting. It’s hard when the only thing you’ve done in life is be a mother and your children keep secrets from you,” she continued dolefully. “Of course I brought it on myself.”
“How?”
“By making a bad marriage and a worse divorce. It changed them, even though they were so little you’d think they couldn’t … but they absorbed it all, somehow; it got in their pores and their brain cells. The evil. The anger. They were different afterward, sour and mistrustful, even of each other. Dale and I were so hateful that our kids became better at it than we were.”
I blinked at the sudden dissonance. “Who’s Dale?”
“My husband. Ex-husband.” Her look was pinched and pained.
I looked to the mountains to make sure they were still there. “I thought your ex-husband was Ted Evans.”
She laughed dryly. “I’ve got more than one of them. Lucky me. Ted’s my second ex-husband. Dale Crowder was my first.”
“Dale Crowder is the father of Nina and Jeff?”
She nodded.
“Do they know it?”
She closed her eyes and rubbed them with her fingertips. “I … we … no. They don’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because I decided it would be better if they thought they came from a nice family like Ted’s rather than a family without love or self-respect, a family full of meanness and intoxication.”
“You mean Crowder.”
She nodded. “He didn’t deserve them. He never did anything but treat those babies like a rash he couldn’t get rid of. Every time they’d make a sound, he’d light into them. One night I thought for sure he was going to strangle them, he got so mad when they wouldn’t stop crying. And I was so young and ignorant, I didn’t think I had the right to do anything about it.”
“Sounds like a tough marriage.”
Her voice became heated and rhetorical. “If you spent every night with a drunk and a sadist and a malcontent, how do you think you’d like it?”
“Not much. How old were the kids when
you left Crowder?”
“Jeff was two; Nina was four. Jeff doesn’t remember him at all. All Nina remembers is her father taking baths with her. She thinks it was Ted, but it wasn’t.” She started to add something, then stopped.
“Do you have any idea where Nina might be, Ms. Becker?”
She shook her head. “I’ve been trying to reach her for weeks. Her phone’s been disconnected; she’s moved out of her apartment; I don’t know what else to do. Maybe you should talk to Ted.” The name came crisp with resentment.
“He hasn’t seen her, either. Do you know any reason why Nina might have wanted to drop out of sight?”
She turned my question back on me again. “Do you?”
“Not unless it’s connected with Gary Richter somehow.”
“The dead man.” Her voice rose like a whistle in the wind. “Why are you here? Are you the police? You act like the police. I saw plenty of police when I was with Dale, let me tell you. At the end they were at the house every night, it seemed like—the neighbors had all they could take of his tirades. I had to bail Nina out a time or two as well, later on. Oh, I know plenty about the police, don’t think I don’t.” Her words lingered like a stench in the still air.
“Why was Nina arrested?”
“Drugs. She never went to jail or anything, just juvenile probation. But I had to handle it. Ted was too busy and I wasn’t about to hunt up Dale, so I’m the one who had to get her out. Men aren’t worth a damn in an emergency, do you know that, Mr. Tanner?”
Our eyes faced off. I decided not to defend my gender, in part because I wasn’t sure I was up to the task. “Has Nina been in trouble as an adult, Ms. Becker?”
She straightened her back and spoke with conviction. “Not once. She gave up drugs and running around and got herself together. I’m real proud of her, but I can’t take credit for the change—the people at Roosevelt were wonderful with her. They saw to it she did her studies and went on to college. She was doing fine till she got obsessed with this modeling thing.” She made it sound like an obsession with satanism.
“So you knew about that.”
She nodded.
“Did it bother you?”
“Because she took her clothes off and let men take her picture? It’s just life, isn’t it? It’s what men have always done, make pictures of naked women. The museums are full of them.” Her voice dropped to a weary anticlimax. “Nina was always artistic.”
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