The Art of Deception

by Ridley Pearson

  He and Matthews met eyes, hers filled with alarm. “ Sometimes I hate being right,” she said.

  One of the girls asked what was going on, and LaMoia vamped, saying he was a city engineer checking “structural consistencies of the chemical compounds used in the mortar mixture.” This seemed to satisfy the girl and confuse her as well. “You’re working a little late, aren’t you?” He answered, “I’m volunteering my time, young lady. I haven’t been home for dinner yet.” “You’re pretty buff for an engineer,” she said. This, from a seventeen-year-old with a tattoo. LaMoia mugged for Matthews, shutting her up before she leveled him with another sarcastic remark. They reconvened outside the Shelter’s main door, in a musty basement hallway that was part of the church.

  “I feel sick to my stomach,” she said, arms crossed tightly. “That is so disgusting . . . so invasive . . . so awful!”

  “So common,” he said. “Guys start poking holes in walls when they’re about eight, Matthews.”

  “You?”

  “Don’t ask. The point now is to find these bastards—because these aren’t prepubescent kids who don’t know any better. These are pervs, cave-dwelling troglodytes that deserve to have their equipment surgically removed.” He looked around somewhat frantically. “Give me the dime tour, would you? These guys are on the outside of these walls, and we gotta find out how the hell they got there.” He added, “Now, while we can still rain on their parade.”

  31 Ancient Doors

  The Second Presbyterian Church that hosted the Shelter in its basement labyrinth remained open from 6 A.M. to midnight seven days a week, hours the Shelter kept as well. Matthews led LaMoia back to the bottom of an extremely old stone staircase that they’d descended on their way in. A few thousand runaways had traveled this same route over the last year.

  “After this we’re gonna want to take a lap around the block,” he said, “looking for jimmied doors, storm drains, basement windows—something with access to whatever’s on the other side of these walls.” The walls had been constructed of large stone and whitewashed. “But even though we gotta do that, my money’s on the Blessed Virgin—or whatever the flock this particular set of bells is called—because with them leaving the doors open all hours, the bums have got all sorts of access. One door somewhere down here, a few loose stones is all it would take.”

  “You’re a real poet, you know that?”

  “Do we know where either of these doors lead?” They were heavy doors, old and of dark wood and cast-iron hardware. Medieval, like something from a castle dungeon. One sat at the end of a small dead-end hallway; the other was set into what appeared to be an exterior basement wall. Both doors were locked.

  “We do not,” she answered, emphasizing their partnership. “There’s a lot of history down here. A lot of mystery, too.”

  He pointed out that both doors had locks that would likely open with skeleton keys.

  She said, “Which speaks to the age of this place.”

  “I was thinking more like how tough they’d be to pick,” he snapped sarcastically. He turned to face her. “We’ve got two choices here: We can talk to the holy roller, whoever’s in charge, or, it being midnight, I can do my thing and we can be through either of these doors in about three minutes.” He produced a Leatherman utility knife. “Don’t leave home without it.”

  “As long as I’m involved, I’d appreciate it if we did things legally, as unsettling to you as that may be.”

  “So now you’re going to reform me?”

  She looked around at the rock walls, the Gothic arches overhead. “Seems as good a place to start as any.”

  Fifteen minutes later, both doors hung open. The minister was a bald man with an oily complexion, a slight frame, and cantilevered eyebrows that looked sewn onto his forehead. He had a quiet but sunny disposition, as if being rousted at midnight was part and parcel of his job. Perhaps it was.

  One of the doors led to storage, a massive masonry cave nearly rectangular in shape, lit by bare bulbs and strewn with cobwebs and layers of dust. Wooden chairs were stacked haphazardly; red velvet seat cushions, the fabric torn open by homesteading mice, leaned as unstable towers; a leather chair had its covering peeled back from the arms like skin from a bad burn. There were candlesticks and file cabinets, steamer trunks and even an abandoned pulpit canted to one side so that its cup runneth over. Old rust-covered chains were bolted to the far wall. Matthews commented on the enormity of the space—it looked to be sixty feet deep or more. LaMoia strategically wormed his way inside, discovering a tunnel with a low ceiling that led to a former wine cellar, also long since abandoned. The dust alone announced that no bums had trodden here.

  Matthews picked her way through the rubble, following him.

  Together they faced a bricked-over stone arch. In a soft voice LaMoia said, “We want to be wherever that once led.”

  The minister overheard his comment and informed them that to his knowledge any doorways and windows that had once communicated with what had then been a sidewalk, a hundred years earlier, had all been brick-and-mortared closed. “ Permanently sealed” was how he put it.

  A storyteller by nature, he held them captive with a tale about an old rum-running smugglers’ tunnel said to have run up Skid Row—now Yesler Way—leading from the waterfront and connecting to several churches and speakeasies that predated the Great Depression and Prohibition. “They connected the old smuggling tunnel to these underground sidewalks, where they had quite the black market going for themselves.”

  LaMoia gave the man only half an ear, impatient to open the second door. When it was finally opened, the other door led to a long underground hallway, off of which was a music room, a small library with dehumidifiers running, a vestments closet, and several more stone-walled rooms dedicated to church administration and service utilities. They took their time to study each in turn, searching for hidden access to the Underground, which from the discovery of the peepholes, and the minister’s stories, seemed likely to exist.

  While inside what amounted to an oversized custodial closet, a room filled with steel pipe and electric water heaters, LaMoia silenced Matthews and the minister—who, once started talking, proved hard to quiet—and pressed his ear to the cold, sweating stone. Leaning away from the wall, he motioned for Matthews to listen.

  “Tell me what you hear,” he whispered.

  Matthews pressed up against the damp chill, her face then approaching the color of the whitewashed stone. “Voices,” she muttered. “Men’s voices.”

  32 Voices in the Dark

  The beat-up red door, caked and cracked with generations of paint, hid behind a Dumpster down a dead-end alley a half block from the church’s west wall. LaMoia might have missed seeing it had a street person not materialized out of thin air. But with this man’s appearance in the alley where a moment before there had been no one, the detective sought an explanation. He and Matthews rolled the Dumpster aside, and LaMoia turned the rust-encrusted doorknob.

  The door opened behind the complaint of its hinges. The smell of human piss wafted up, stinging his eyes. He covered his face and turned away.

  “Let’s call for backup,” he said. “This could get ugly.”

  Thirty minutes later, shortly after one in the morning, LaMoia led the way down a set of steep, rickety, wooden stairs into ripe, musty air, guided only by the narrow beam of a penlight. Matthews followed closely on his heels, and behind her, four uniformed patrolmen, two with nightsticks in hand, two brandishing handguns. Cobwebs, pipes, wires, and valves. “Lions and tigers and bears,” LaMoia whispered over his shoulder through the pitch-black. The comforting sounds of the city faded, lost overhead, suddenly translated into a deep, penetrating rumble that rattled one’s chest.

  Matthews reached out and took hold of his deerskin jacket, a child with mommy’s apron. She let go then, LaMoia pretending not to have noticed.

  His penlight shone barely five feet ahead, illuminating broken wooden planks that had once been a
sidewalk. Together they sidestepped the debris, following along the wall of a perfectly preserved brick building, the windows with much of the glass still in place. LaMoia directed the beam through one of these windows: piles of broken furniture and junk, untouched for years. A time warp. They passed a barber shop and a millinery, the hat racks still in place.

  Twenty yards later the wall changed from brick to stone, and LaMoia used sign language—forming his index fingers into a cross—to indicate that he believed this was the church wall. Matthews concurred with a nod, then pointed out the narrow arrows of white light that crossed the sidewalk ahead.

  As they slowed, the dust from behind them carried forward and illuminated those shafts of light even brighter. Five white beams in all.

  Cupping his hand to her ear he said that someone had to look inside and that it shouldn’t be him. Matthews agreed and stepped forward, placing her eye to the breaks in the wall.

  Pulling her eye away, she confirmed, “It’s the showers,” her heartache obvious even through a whisper.

  The smell in the air was of peppermint, sour and all too human. The voyeurs had ejaculated onto the walls and the sidewalk.

  Matthews covered her mouth, suddenly nauseated. A hundred crime scenes or more, and this was the first time she’d felt ready to vomit.

  Suddenly the four uniformed patrolmen pushed past them, a flurry of hand signals and quick preparation of their weapons. LaMoia returned hand signals, taking charge, a silent orchestration of the minutes yet to come.

  She understood the urgency then: From up ahead and around the corner she heard the distinct and unmistakable sound of laughter.

  They walked inside what amounted to a tall tunnel, the church’s basement wall, once at street level, to their right, the mortar-and-stone retaining wall, built to enclose the city block and elevate the street a century earlier, to the left. Overhead, dust-covered wires, encrusted conduits, rusted water pipes, and gas lines had been added haphazardly over the years, tangled like veins in a limb. A halo of purple light fanned out from what had once been a skylight in the overhead sidewalk, back during the decades of reconstruction, when the two sidewalks, the two different street levels, had been forced to coexist, one of the old Seattle, the other representing improvement and change. The din of drunken male voices grew more present, a pack of wild dogs encountered in the forest.

  LaMoia, the hunter, cut ahead of the uniforms and peered around the corner. He held up four fingers. To Matthews, it sounded more like ten. Adrenaline cocktails for all, charging her system with a menthol-like chill and drying her throat. LaMoia articulated a series of hand signals to the patrolmen and she envied him his cool. She felt lucky: He was the cop you wanted at your side in situations like this. He thrived on adversity. She recalled his telling her that she was safe while under his care, and though loath to admit it, she knew this was true, accepted it as fact.

  In military-like precision the six of them rounded the corner, moving swiftly but silently, her courage returning quickly as she thought of Margaret and the other girls in those showers, the jaundiced eyes of the drunk and the desperate peering in on them. She fed on these guys, her bread and butter. She opened up their heads like cracking nuts.

  The patrolmen reached them first, knocking away the beer cans, taking them completely by surprise. But then there was a burst of activity to their right—not four guys, but more like ten, the other six scattering like seeds in the wind.

  “Walker!” she called out, believing in the dim light she’d recognized the back of a head. Confusion, as two of the patrolmen took off after them. A flurry of cursing and yelling. One of the homeless guys vomited.

  A patrolman who had run off in pursuit returned empty-handed.

  “Yo! Listen up! You, too, turd breath,” LaMoia addressed the one who’d puked, a bearded guy wearing an old ratty jacket to what had once been a nice suit. “Police,” LaMoia said, like a southern cracker. “Me and her, too. We’ve got a couple simple questions for you. This is not the ringtoss: You don’t get three chances. You talk, you walk. You lie, and it’s straight downtown to central booking—a night in the can courtesy of your city government. We’ll check for priors, warrants, parole status, and we’ll cash in our miles, all at your expense. So, for the next five minutes, try your level best to do something smart like listen, ’cause me and her, we know the way it is, and if you go all squirrelly on us, we’re gonna know that too, and trust me, you don’t want to see what happens next. Any questions?” No hesitation on his part whatsoever. “Okay, good. Then let’s keep our hands where we can see them, ladies. Sit your butts down on the ground, and we’ll do some business.”

  A moment later, all six sat on the wooden planks of the ancient sidewalk like kids in kindergarten.

  LaMoia asked about peeping the showers and got six heads all shaking no at him.

  “Don’t know what I’m talking about?” LaMoia picked two out of the group, “Him and him,” instructing one of the patrolmen to cuff them and “get them downtown.” One of these two immediately spoke up, confessing the peeping, insisting, “Didn’t do nothing wrong.” LaMoia allowed this one to stay behind. He nodded, and the patrolman headed off down the tunnel with the other.

  “Any other takers?”

  They raised their hands sheepishly, all avoiding eye contact with Matthews.

  “Let’s hear about it,” LaMoia said. “First to speak up gets a gold star.”

  Matthews felt sick to her stomach as she learned that they’d treated the peeping like a drive-up window. It was guys like this that supported the stripper joints on First Avenue, the adult bookstores and video booths. Diluted beer and sticky floors.

  LaMoia seethed beneath the veneer of comic impatience.

  “Who here’s good with faces?” he asked. “It buys you a trip downtown tonight, but a hall pass the next time there’s trouble. Community Chest time, people! Anyone interested?” No one volunteered. He selected the least drunk of the group, a guy probably in his late twenties who looked about fifty. Cheap booze did that. So did the street drugs. Or maybe he had the virus.

  LaMoia and the other cops slipped on disposable gloves, indicating an end to discussions.

  Matthews slipped on a pair as well, thinking disposable lives.

  The final patrolman emerged from the dark with two more of the escapees. No sign of Walker.

  Had she imagined that? Wishful thinking?

  “Time to peep mug shots instead of naked teenagers, you perv.” LaMoia grabbed hold of the street person’s red handkerchief, knotted around the man’s neck, and led him like a dog back down the tunnel.

  At Public Safety, LaMoia’s attempts to win the man’s cooperation ended with the detective providing him hot coffee and buying him a carton of Marlboro cigarettes. At two in the morning, he then worked him through a few dozen mug shots until confident of the man’s sobriety and his ability to make identification. The man picked out the faces of three vagrants he’d seen in the Underground. With an anxious Daphne Matthews monitoring the event from the corner of the small interrogation room, LaMoia arranged yet another array—six faces in small windows on a single card—and slid it in front of the homeless man.

  Dirty fingers with jagged nails took hold of the card like a nervous gambler toying with his cards. The guy studied the faces in the cutout windows. The cracked skin of his dirty hands flexed as he stabbed a face—bottom left. “This guy’s been there a bunch.”

  LaMoia turned the card around for Matthews to see as she stepped closer.

  “He ever use the gallery? The peepholes?” LaMoia asked.

  “Sure. All the time.”

  His finger rested on the photo that was not a mug shot but a driver’s license ID. The face belonged to Ferrell Walker.

  “We call him the fisherman,” the homeless man said, “ ’cause he stinks like shit.”

  33 A New View of Things

  Matthews had been to one or two parties in LaMoia’s loft apartment, huge affairs, teeming masse
s, noisy, with music blaring. Empty, it looked less like a bachelor’s pad than she’d expected. The collection of modest, mostly mismatched furniture was complemented by the dramatic lighting—nothing but funnel lights on brightly colored wires. The focus of the area was the large, well-equipped kitchen and what was obviously a stunning view of Elliott Bay, for it looked so even at night.

  “Wow,” she said.

  “Yeah, I know.” Ever the modest one. He shut and locked the metal door with three locks. Like her and the houseboat, he’d bought his place for a song. He, at a time when the neighborhood had been a needle park and the mayor had been offering tax incentives. Riding the wave of “Californication” and the SoDo neighborhood’s gentrification (back when there had been a Kingdome), he now found himself with a piece of a trendy location rejuvenated by the construction of the Safe and the new football stadium. Like her own houseboat, the loft was now worth a small ransom, and like her, LaMoia would one day cash in on his good fortune and ride into the sunset in one of his trademark Camaros.

  Blue sighed from the couch and thumped his tail on the cushion. LaMoia scolded the dog for being on the furniture but then greeted him warmly when the dog bothered to say hello. A weekend architect, LaMoia had constructed a few walls into the enormous space, dividing it nicely, but leaving much of it open. Off the central living/dining area and kitchen was a master bedroom and a bath to the south that he showed her with pride, pointing out several details like high-speed Internet connection. To the north of the kitchen was an office with a single twin bed as a couch and a guest bath across a wide hallway. He placed her bag in the office, left her for a minute or more, and returned with a red beach towel, making apologies for his linen.

  The towel proved heavier than expected, and before she unfolded it he said, “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

  “Understood.”

  “The registration comes back expired. Previously owned by a man who smoked too much and died behind the wheel of a Ford Pinto.”