by G. M. Ford
Carl, Maxie, and Charity were in front of us in Carl’s tricked-out, handicap-accessible van, and me and Gabe were in a rented Lexus RX as we tooled down Pacific. With Carl along for the party, we either had to be on the ground floor or the joint had to have an elevator, so I’d opted for the new downtown Courtyard Marriott.
We did a full drive around, checking out the terrain on all sides, finally rolling down the alley behind the hotel, past the service garages, where the hotel had everything delivered. Looked like there was a door between the two garages.
I’d reserved four suites up on the ninth floor, including the only adjoining rooms in the joint, so’s Charity and Maxie could look in on Carl without going out into the hall. Gabe, who’d by that time graduated to a blue plastic walking boot, had the room down at the far end of the hall, across from the emergency stairs.
By the time I’d managed to shower and change my clothes, Carl and Charity had their own encrypted Internet hotspot up and running so we wouldn’t have to go through the hotel’s website and were setting up a couple of computer monitors.
“Might as well run my new paperwork by the cops and see what happens,” I said.
Carl and Maxie both looked insulted. “Yeah, mon, whatever,” Maxie said.
I took the elevator downstairs and then let Mrs. Google direct me to the cop shop, a lovely midcentury cinder block in the North Korean Revival style. I gave my name to the desk sergeant. Told him Detective Shirley was expecting me, which was at least partially true, because I’d been there when Eagen had called him yesterday and assured him I could both walk on and pass water simultaneously and mentioned he’d probably be seeing me the next day.
Shirley had an office of his own, which, in the cop business, spelled big-time. I introduced myself. We shook hands over the desk. He was nearly as tall as I was but real skinny. Big, shiny bald head and an air of mistrust that wafted from him like cheap cologne.
“Tim Eagen says you write true-crime books,” he said.
“Depends on which critic you ask,” I said.
I pushed my driver’s license and Associated Press pass across the desk. Detective Sergeant David Shirley sat down and brought them up close to his face and studied them like there was gonna be food involved.
“You mind if I make a copy of these?” he asked after a while.
I said it was no problem and sat there while he crossed the room and punched up a few copies. “You know I can’t go into the details with you,” he said. “It’s still an ongoing investigation, so there’s not much I can share at this point.”
“Just trying to be courteous,” I said. “You start digging holes in another man’s backyard, you probably ought to tell him about it first.”
“Where you know Tim Eagen from?” he asked on his way back to his desk.
I gave him a cock-and-bull story about how we’d worked together on a case one time, a story I’d worked out with Eagen a couple of days ago. Detective Shirley was one of those cops who took nothing at face value. It happens to cops after they’ve been lied to several million times. I was betting Eagen was going to get a phone call about two minutes after I left the building.
“Why Everett, Mr. Marks? What is it about the Matthew Hardaway tragedy that attracted you?”
Yeah . . . that was me. Leon Marks, from Grosse Pointe, Michigan. Must have been true, ’cause I had the paperwork to prove it. Longtime AP stringer and true-crime writer. According to my Amazon author page, Matthew Hardaway and the murder he committed would be my fourth true-crime book. I put a picture of my former neighbor’s dog, Pocco, in the author photo window. Left all the personal info blank, like about two-thirds of the bozos on Facebook do.
Like I figured, Shirley was all over it like a cheap suit. “I notice there’s no author picture on your Amazon page,” he said.
“Being recognized don’t make for very good investigative technique,” I told him.
“No mystery here, Mr. Marks. No whodunit.”
“I’m more interested in whydunit,” I said.
I could tell he was choosing his words carefully.
“You know, Mr. Marks . . . took a long time for this to scab over. Feelings were pretty raw around here for a long time. And I think it’s safe to say, there’s any number of people in this town who’d just as soon this whole thing didn’t get dredged up all over again. Matthew Hardaway was a very troubled kid. Maybe you ought to just leave it at that.”
“But never anything violent before this incident . . .”
“Until we get a look at his medical records, I really can’t speak to any of the specifics.”
“What’s the holdup?”
“His father hired a big-time lawyer. Taking us to the mat on this one. Won’t sign off on anything—medical, school, psychiatric—not giving up a darn thing. He’s claiming that since it isn’t a matter of evidence—you know, there’s not going to be a trial or anything—he claims the state has no right to violate his son’s privacy.”
“You’d think he’d want to get this thing over with, not draw it out.”
“He was under a lot of pressure from the media and the gun control nuts. They were all over him day and night for months. Hounded him. I think he may be looking for a little payback.”
“Things must have cooled down by now.”
“The Snohomish County DA can’t put the Hardaway case to rest.”
“If everybody wants this case to go away, why would the DA keep it open?”
“There’s a hundred-year-old state law that says a case isn’t officially closed until the appeal process is completed.”
I started to speak, but he cut me off. “If he’d been convicted of the crime and then killed himself in jail, prior to the end of his appeal process, his conviction would have automatically been vacated. That’s the law. The Snohomish County DA is currently suing the state attorney general, trying to close the case, claiming exigent circumstances, but the state AG isn’t going for it. And as long as Hardaway’s father stonewalls us on anything that might be considered exculpatory evidence, this thing is gonna hang over this community like a shroud.”
He had a point. In order for something like this to fade to obscurity, people needed to be able to tell themselves they knew why it had happened and thus had a leg up on how it might be prevented in the future. People have to be able to tell themselves it’s a one-off, that it’s not going to happen to them next time they walk out the door. That’s what lets them go on with their lives. It’s what keeps people together as a community.
“You got any ideas why Matthew would suddenly do such a thing?” I asked.
He shook his bald head. “That’s way above my pay grade,” he said.
“You suppose I could see the CC tape from the night of the shooting?”
I watched him swallow a grin. “Long as you get a Freedom of Information Act ruling. That’s what they made the Sound Sentinel do, and I’m pretty sure that’s what they’ll require of you too.”
I got to my feet. “Thanks for taking the time to see me,” I said.
“Good luck, Mr. Marks. You come up with anything earth shattering, you be sure to give me a jingle.”
Sometimes people tell you something useful when they’re trying not to. The Sound Sentinel was down in the south end of town on Forty-Third. Unlike the cops, newspapers were in the business of spreading the news around, so within ten minutes of walking in the Sentinel’s front door, I was seated at a desk in the far corner of the newsroom watching the CC tape of the city council meeting.
I was on my second time through the footage when a young man sat down next to me. Young and buttoned down. Thirty at the outside. Nice looking. Even features. Hair getting thin up at the crown of his head. Joe College ten years down the line. I stopped the tape and turned in his direction.
“Ben Forrester,” he said.
He didn’t offer a hand, so I didn’t either.
“Leon Marks,” I replied.
“Janice says you’re a writer—thi
nking about writing a book about Matthew Hardaway.”
“I’m just in the preliminary research stages,” I told him.
“I covered the story for the Sentinel,” he said. His words carried a hint of a whine. Like what he wasn’t saying was that the Hardaway story belonged to him, and I was treading on his turf. Not wishing to debate the point, I tacked.
“What’s with the guys in the street dressed like Uncle Sam?”
“Vets. Navy.”
“Every place got navy vets,” I said. “But mostly they aren’t hanging out on street corners in the rain, waving Old Glory at passing pickups.”
“Lots of tension around here,” he said.
I was pretty sure he was going to explain it to me, so I shut up and waited.
“If it weren’t for the navy,” he began, “this place might have closed up and floated away by now. The navy’s just about the only thing keeping the local economy viable since the wood products industry took a nosedive.”
“But why all the flag waving?”
“This is a very divided town. Old money, new money, and no money. The old money around here feels like they’re being invaded. They sit there in the north end and up on Rucker Hill, and it looks to them like the Huns have showed up.” He sighed. “What happened was folks fleeing the Seattle rents started moving up here and gentrifying parts of the north end, which of course drove real estate prices through the roof. Most of the unemployed mill workers couldn’t afford their property taxes anymore, so they sold out and left town, leaving a void that got filled up by immigrants. You know . . . the Southeast Asians, the Mexicans. All kinds of people. Ricardo Valenzuela was the point man for the newcomers. Started something called the Social Justice Project. He was calling for a fifteen-dollar minimum wage, like they have down in Seattle. He opened a free medical clinic. A methadone treatment center. Day care facilities. Food banks. Legal aid services for the poor. To make it worse, he told anybody who’d listen he was a socialist, which just drove the locals and the retired military people apeshit. Far as they’re concerned, that’s the same thing as a communist. You asked most of those guys, they’d tell ya the city ought to give Matthew Hardaway a medal for services rendered.”
“You know, I checked the paper when I first started looking into this . . . Seemed like you guys dropped the story after less than a week.”
He made a disgusted face. “The Sentinel’s a community newspaper. The paper’s mission is to keep the residents up to date on things like the downtown sewer project, not to sensationalize once-in-a-lifetime events that make the city look bad.” He checked the area. Then checked it again. “That’s what I was told by my editor anyway,” he said in a low voice.
I looked the place over. “Not many of these small papers left,” I said.
“Swallowed whole by the Internet,” he said. “I wanted to be a reporter since I was five, and now . . . now it’s just another data entry position.”
I kept my trap shut. He went on. “Been thinking about going back home,” he said out of the blue.
“Where’s home?” I asked.
“Indiana,” he said. “Bloomington.”
“That where you went to school?”
“Hoosier pride,” he joked.
Seemed like we were about to have a nostalgia fest, so I motioned toward the screen. “The voice is fuzzy,” I said. “What exactly does he say right before he shoots Mr. Valenzuela?”
“He says, ‘fucking communist bastards,’” Forrester told me. “Later, when he backs out the doors after the shooting, he screams, ‘Get away from me . . . get away from me’—says it several times.”
A heavyset young woman with purple hair walked out from the cubicles. “Ben,” she said. “You’ve got a call from the planning commission on line five.”
He got to his feet. “The exciting life of the journalist,” he said as he headed off.
He stopped and turned back. “If you need anything . . . you know I’d like to . . .”
“I’ll keep it in mind,” I assured him.
I waited until he disappeared into the maze of space dividers, then wound the tape back and started from the beginning. One of the few advantages of middle age is that your senses, by necessity, get smarter as time passes. Because they’ve happened before, things that at one time seemed almost miraculous become recognizable moments of potential insight. A little blinking light from deep space that you have to learn to see.
I got to the part where Matthew Hardaway walks into the SRO City Council meeting room, and the guy in the back corner sees the woman get up from the seat and then gestures to Matthew as if to say, “There’s a seat for ya,” and then Matthew skitters over and sits down as the woman strolls out. And then the gesturing guy strolls out, and then a few seconds later another guy tiptoes out of the room, and then another. Maybe twenty seconds of the tape. Something about it bothered me. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew for sure that something about those ten seconds was blinking my cosmic light, so I ran it again, and then again. Still blinking. Sixth go-round was the charm. That’s when I figured out which knob to turn so’s I could watch it in slo-mo. That’s all it took. Make the tape speed even slower than my brain speed.
When you watched it in slo-mo, it looked like a dance routine. Choreographed.
Matthew Hardaway pulls open the door to the council chamber. The guy leaning against the wall says something—doesn’t look like he’s talking to anybody in particular, but then the woman immediately gets up from the seat as the guy in the corner gestures to Matthew to take the seat, which he does. The woman leaves. The guy in the corner follows her out. Then the guy who originally said something ambles out next. And finally, another guy standing near the seat heads for the door and disappears.
The unmistakable sound of gunshots booms from the hallway. A guy sticks his head through the doorway, and then, just as suddenly, pulls it back and disappears.
The office chair let out a squeak as I leaned back in the seat. I was trying to decide whether I was just overreaching here, or whether something truly was amiss about the CC footage, when Ben Forrester walked out of cubicle city and sat down next to me again. “You know . . . ,” he began. “If you need any help . . . you know . . . if you decide you want to do this . . . I could, you know . . . maybe help you fill in some of the blanks.”
I thought about it. He was a nice enough kid, and God knew I could use all the help I could get. Especially the kind of insider knowledge he was likely to possess, so I decided to encourage him a bit, see if maybe he couldn’t be of use.
“Watch this and tell me what you think,” I said, as I wound the tape back to Matthew’s entrance. I pointed at the guy leaning against the wall next to the woman’s seat.
“Look at this guy,” I said, pointing at the screen. “Don’t watch Matthew Hardaway. Watch him.” Forrester got up from his seat and leaned down close to the screen. I could smell his breath mints.
I pushed the button and ran it for five seconds.
“Wonder what he said,” was his reaction.
“Almost had to be something to her,” I said, pointing at how the woman was already half out of the seat and the guy back in the corner had already started his gesture toward the seat, which wasn’t quite empty yet. Like a troupe of actors hitting their marks.
“Run it again,” the kid said.
I did. Same deal. “What’s it look like to you?” he asked.
“Look at the guy standing near the soon-to-be empty seat. He’s not looking at the city council meeting; he’s watching the damn door. The minute Matthew Hardaway comes in, he tells the woman it’s time to vacate the seat; the guy in the corner shows the seat to Matthew, who hustles over and takes it.”
Forrester pointed at the last guy to leave. “What’s he doing?”
“I think he was there in case they needed a blocker. Somebody to make sure it was Matthew who got the seat. Maybe take the seat himself if it proved necessary.”
“I’ve seen the man in the c
orner but can’t remember where from.”
“What about the others?”
“They all seem vaguely familiar to me.”
We sat in silence. Somewhere in the maze of cubicles, a phone began to ring. Somebody answered. And then another.
“I could introduce you around,” Forrester said. “And I’ve got a pretty good set of notes.”
I pointed at the screen again. “What’d you think?” I asked. “Am I making mountains out of molehills?”
He thought it over. “I’m wondering why nobody else noticed,” he said. “Makes me a little nervous that a couple of geniuses like us picked up on something a bunch of other professionals missed. You know what I mean?”
I said I did. He went on. “But when you look at the footage that way, when you don’t focus on Matthew Hardaway . . . I gotta admit it looks like the whole thing was planned and worked out ahead of time. It really does.”
“I need to know who those people are. The woman, the guy in the corner, the guys against the wall. How are we gonna find out who those people are?”
“Ben.” Same purple-haired woman. “Ron wants to see us in his office.” She rolled her raccoon eyes. “He’s überpissed,” she stage-whispered, and then flicked her eyes in my direction. “Come on.”
I wound the tape back to the beginning and was about to watch it one last time, when Ben came scooting, white-faced, back into the room. “I’m sorry . . . you gotta go. The boss is really pissed Janet let you see the CC footage.”
Muffled shouting found its way to my ears. Ben and I made eye contact.
“You better go,” he said. “I think he just called security on you.”
I pulled a bright-green index card from my wallet that contained the number of the burner phone I was using. “You come up with anything else . . .”
He grabbed the card, stuffed it in his pocket, and then loped off into the maze. I headed for the fire door in the corner of the room so I wouldn’t have to walk back through the office and maybe be forced to deal with security. I pushed it open; an alarm began to sound. The bell hammered my ears as I descended the metal fire escape and eased down to the parking lot into—yeah, you guessed it—a driving rainstorm. Above my head, the sky looked like asphalt. The black trees waved back and forth like ghostly dancers.