Family Values

by Ford, G. M.

  “Really?”

  “Right after he got elected for the first time, he came to my office on a couple occasions. He didn’t come right out and say it, but he was trying to tell me what it would be nice if I would find. Like I was going to adjust my findings to suit his need to make a case. I set him straight on the subject. He’s never been too fond of me since.”

  Before I could think of anything else to say, Stacy Chen was back.

  “Continuing with our story.”

  Voice from the great digital beyond: “The following may be disturbing to some of our viewers. Parental discretion is advised.”

  I was hoping the disclaimer was for something fun like nudity but got a pair of beefy specimens in plaid flannel shirts glaring into the camera instead. Looked like they had to be brothers. Big, bushy, black beards, eyebrows that met in the middle; they gave the impression that they might be haired over like gibbons.

  They were standing out in front of the downtown courthouse, a bunch of reporters pushing microphones into their fuzzy chops. Three or four equally beefy city cops were circling behind them like caged lions. Apparently, the situation had already gotten somewhat tense. SPD was taking no chances with these two.

  A banner appeared at the bottom of the screen. CORY AND BRUCE DELANEY. BROTHERS OF KEVIN DELANEY, CONVICTED OF THE MURDER OF FRANCIS BOSSIER AND HER SIX-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER, EMILY.

  The brother on the right stepped forward. He waved a disgusted hand at the cops behind him. “I don’t care how many *beeping* cops they send out here. That *beep* has got to pay for this. That *beeping beep* needs to spend some time behind bars. My little brother’s spent years in a mother*beeping* jail cell, ’cause this *beeping* medical examiner lied her *beeping beep* off.”

  The other brother reached out and put what I took to be a restraining hand on his shoulder. The first brother angrily shrugged it off. Instead of calming down, he jabbed a thick finger at the nearest TV camera and then stuck his hairy mug right up into the lens. His eyes were rolling in his head like a spooked horse. Flecks of spit had collected at the corners of his mouth. “You out there, *beep*? That Duvall *beep*. You watchin’ this?” He jabbed again. This time he hit the lens. The TV camera wobbled and pulled back. “We’re comin’ for you, *beep*. One of these dark nights, you’re gonna pay for what you done to our family. You’re gonna pay for all those *beeping* years you took from my little brother. I’m gonna come to your house, I’m gonna grab hold of your—”

  Mercifully, that was as far as he got. The circling cops had heard enough and decided to put a stop to it. A pair of uniforms stepped into view, grabbed brother number one by the shoulders, and pulled him back from the bank of microphones, at which point, the other brother, who I’d been seeing as a peacemaker, stepped in and head-butted the nearest cop full in the face. The cop’s nose exploded, instantly sending a river of blood and mucus rolling down over his chin.

  The sound of the struggle and sight of blood sent the crowd scurrying in all directions at once. The sounds of shouts and slapping feet filled the air. Brother number one hauled off and punched an Asian policewoman, who went down in a heap. Brother number two had another officer in a headlock and was pounding him in the top of the head with his free hand.

  That’s about the time it started raining cops. Must have been a dozen of the boys in blue out there by the time they finally got the brothers handcuffed facedown on the sidewalk. From the look of it, both brothers were still screaming themselves purple despite the six hundred pounds of cop kneeling on the backs of their necks.

  I decided I’d had enough of this gaiety and turned off the TV. We sat there for several minutes without saying anything. I could hear water rolling through the pipes in the ceiling.

  Finally, Rebecca broke the silence. “Kevin Delaney I remember,” she said. “His girlfriend finally had enough of his abuse and told him she was leaving. That miserable son of a bitch beat her to death with a claw hammer, right in front of her little daughter. Then he raped and strangled the child. It’s not the kind of thing one forgets.”

  A chain saw couldn’t have cut the air in that room. Seemed to me we’d reached the point where things couldn’t get a hell of a lot worse, so I sucked it up and fessed up to something I’d been holding back all day.

  “You know . . . evidence rooms being what they are today, if somebody really did steal the files . . . then I’m guessing the theft pretty much has gotta be at your team’s end.”

  She was generally very defensive about her department and her employees, so I was expecting serious pushback, but, as usual, she surprised me.

  “Yeah,” she said in a low voice. “I know it does.”

  We hadn’t spent any time talking about how her department operated because we both already knew. Rebecca and Patrick Dovel performed all the autopsies. They had a couple of other forensic pathologists on call in case they got buried, but day to day, it was just the two of them. When all the tests were done, she signed off on everything, locked up the remaining evidentiary material, and then submitted the results to the PA/DA. If the PA/DA decided there was enough evidence to go to court, she had one of her three assistants hand deliver the evidence material to the arresting officer’s precinct. Files got shifted back and forth between the medical examiner’s office and the various precincts all the time. All very on-camera, scan-your-badge-and-sign-here kind of stuff. In capital cases, the evidence files and the forensic material were stored until the last appeal had been exhausted.

  “Ibrahim, Micah, and Forrest have worked for me forever,” she said. “I just can’t believe one of them would . . .” She stopped herself.

  “Every chain has a weak link,” I threw in.

  “They’re all suspended too, until the matter is resolved.”

  I ran that news through my circuits. “Which has gotta mean that all of them signed off on at least some of the missing stuff.”

  She looked blankly in my direction.

  “If all five files had been picked up or delivered by one guy, he’d have been the only one suspended. Pretty much says to me that each of them signed off on at least one of the files in question. Which means there’s not only multiple precincts, but multiple messengers involved.”

  “And that’s just way too many people,” she said. “Way too many moving parts. Has to be simpler than that. There’s only one person with access to all of the files.” She shrugged. “And that would be me.”

  “Yeah . . . pretty much looks that way.”

  “This can’t be happening.”

  If being a PI for twenty years had taught me anything, it was that you never know what’s going on behind someone else’s closed doors. Any notion that you do is outright dangerous. Everybody has secrets, some of which are best left that way.

  “Weird shit happens.”

  “You don’t say,” she deadpanned.

  Willard Frost had teeth like toenails. Big ones, little ones, some of them far enough apart to finger floss, and all of them the color of very old piano keys.

  The building at 407 Walter Street was a six-story dump, with a rippled brick facade and a faded serape covering one of the windows on the third floor. A class joint, I could tell.

  It had taken me forever to get out of the house this morning. Something in me wanted to mansplain everything to everybody, to feel like every detail was firmly under my control before I walked out. Eventually, about the time Rebecca’s new attorney was about to arrive, she and Gabe lost patience and shouldered me out the door.

  I’d arrived at 407 Walter Street about three minutes before ten in the morning and was standing across the street wondering why the city hadn’t condemned this dump thirty years ago, when Willard Frost jerked open 407’s steel front door and began jogging directly at me, leaving me very little choice but to move in his direction. We passed, shoulder to shoulder, no more than a foot apart. I gave him the standard macho nod. He grunted, flashed his rat teeth, and quickened his stride.

  I may have been a bit la
te for private eyes, but, by scumbag standards, Willard was a crack o’ dawn guy. I’d planned on easing into this, asking a few questions around the neighborhood and having a couple more cups of coffee before I got around to getting up close and personal with Willard. Now that he’d seen me, though, I was going to have to switch to plan B, so I kept walking, stepped up onto the opposite sidewalk, and, first chance I got, hooked a quick right onto First Avenue.

  Soon as I was out of sight, I cut diagonally across the street, pulled a Mariners cap from my jacket pocket, and put it on; then I took my jacket off, tied it around my waist, and hurried back to the corner. Willard was jogging away from me.

  He was a stocky little specimen, with a bowlegged gait. One of those guys who wasn’t small; he was just short. The kind of runt who’d be tough on the shins.

  Willard was a little man in a big hurry. To keep pace, I had to stretch my legs as he jogged down South Main Street toward the water. I hustled over to the sidewalk on the north side of the street and kept loping along, weaving among the construction debris like a matador. The closer we got to Puget Sound, the fresher the air got, which was good, because long-distance running wasn’t exactly my strong suit.

  Two blocks in front of me, Puget Sound folded green and white. The far side of Alaskan Way looked like a war zone. They were rebuilding the century-old seawall; everything was torn to shit. Construction equipment loomed in the shadows of the Alaskan Way Viaduct like steel predators.

  Halfway down South Main, Willard skidded to a stop, pulled out a ring of keys, and let himself into the last door before the alley. I hurried across the street and grabbed the door handle. It was locked. I took a step backward and stared up at the brick face of the building. I was still working on what to do next when the commotion started.

  Shouts seeped through the door like rainwater into a basement. And then louder shouts and banging. Sounded like somebody was rolling a cobblestone down a flight of wooden stairs, getting closer and louder with every impact.

  I hustled across the mouth of the alley and stepped up into the next doorway. The glass door read: ROBERT A. CHRISTOPHEL, CPA. I leaned back against the door, and, of course, somebody immediately pulled the door open, sending me staggering backward into the foyer just as Willard Frost and another guy boiled out onto the sidewalk, arms and legs piston pumping, a tight, grunting knot of humanity, rolling around the sidewalk like fighting dogs.

  I steadied myself and looked back over my shoulder. Tall, middle-aged bald guy. “Can I help you?” he asked.

  I pointed at the melee on the sidewalk.

  “Things were getting a little dicey outside,” I explained.

  He nodded his understanding, reached around me, and closed the door.

  Willard and his adversary had, by this time, rolled over into the mouth of the alley, improving our view considerably. The other guy had the classic look of a biker. Long, greasy, braided hair, lots of tats, earrings, and a long, billy-goat beard with two green rubber bands holding it together.

  If he’d had the slightest idea how to fight, the biker should have dispatched our boy Willard fairly quickly. Despite a noticeable advantage in height, weight, and reach, it looked like Bikerman was more accustomed to sucker punching people and having them curl up on the floor so he could kick ’em a few times. Willard, however, was not being nearly so accommodating.

  When they regained their feet and the guy started a haymaker whistling toward Willard’s head, Willard sneered, stepped left, let the punch rocket past his ear, and then kicked the guy square in the nuts. Almost lifted him off the pavement with the force of it.

  “Oooooh” escaped from the throat of the accountant behind me.

  Funny thing was, the nad mashing didn’t seem to bother the biker guy a bit. He sucked in a big mouthful of air and then started another death punch in Willard’s direction, and, not surprisingly, got pretty much the same result. Willard easily avoided the blow, stepped up belly to belly, and then used the power of his legs to drive his head up under the guy’s chin. Hard.

  Bikerman went all bobblehead. His eyes rolled back in his skull as he staggered backward across the sidewalk. The blood rolling down his chin announced that, somewhere along the line, his tongue had neglected to avoid his teeth. It got worse for him. He brought his hand to his mouth and then pulled it away. He was still staring stupidly at his bloody fingers when he stumbled one step too many across the sidewalk. I watched in horror as his back foot begged for traction but found only air. Took all I had not to close my eyes.

  Pioneer Square was built before the turn of the last century. The curbs are solid pieces of stone, intended for horses and wagons, not for modern cars. Lots of places in the square the curbs are so tall that, if you park next to them, you can’t open the passenger door, so it was a long way down for Bikerman when he executed an impromptu swan dive and went hurtling toward the street like a sack of rolled oats.

  The thump was audible through the glass door as Bikerman bounced his forehead off the rear of a green Subaru Outback and then pinballed down into the canyon between the Subaru and the black Lexus snugged up behind it.

  Willard didn’t hesitate. He bodysurfed across the hood of the Lexus and then hopped down into the street, where he grabbed the guy by the hair with both hands and began to haul him out from under the parked cars.

  The trouble with street fights is that there’s a strict time limit. You have only about three minutes before the excess adrenaline in the air convinces some bystander he’s just got to get involved, or, worse yet, some concerned citizen dials 911 and the heat show up. This one was getting up around the red line.

  I assumed Willard had yarded Bikerman’s ass out from under the car so’s he could whomp on him some more, but Willard had other ideas. Once he’d dragged the guy out into the street, instead of beating on him, Willard bent over and started going through the guy’s pockets, and kept at it until he found a thick roll of bills hiding in the guy’s jeans.

  That’s the point where I noticed the door they’d rolled out of was standing wide open. I couldn’t see what, if anything, was inside, because the door opened in my direction and completely shielded the entranceway from view.

  And then Willard looked up at the doorway for long enough to tell me somebody was standing there. Then, whoever was in the doorway said something. Willard replied. I watched as he pocketed the wad of cash and scrambled to his feet.

  He shouted something at the guy on the ground, kicked him twice in the ribs, and then shinnied up onto the sidewalk, where he checked the street in both directions before disappearing into the building and pulling the door closed behind him.

  I turned and stuck out my hand. “Leo Waterman,” I said.

  He took my hand. “Bob Christophel.”

  “Thanks for the hospitality,” I said.

  “Don’t mention it.”

  “You got any idea what goes on over there?” I asked as I eased open the door.

  He shook his head. “Not a clue,” he said. “It’s always older guys, though. They come and go all day long. Asians, mostly. Never seen a woman go in the building.”

  “Really?” I said as I stepped out onto the sidewalk.

  He stuck his head out the door. “You know, during tax season, I sleep in the office once in a while. Nights get really busy over there,” he said, jerking his thumb toward the joint next door. “It’s a revolving door. There’s somebody in and out every five minutes.” He raised a finger. “That little Asian guy . . .”

  “Yeah?”

  “At night he’s the one that lets the guys in and then shows them out.”

  Sounded like a bouncer to me. And Willard had sure turned out to be a significantly bigger badass than I’d imagined. Question was . . . bouncing for what?

  I thanked him and started up the sidewalk.

  Bikerman was back on his feet and moving now. He’d found a blue bandanna and had it pressed to his mouth as he zigzagged up the sidewalk toward First Avenue, leaving thick dro
ps of blood behind him on the concrete like bread crumbs. I stood and watched his grim visage part the remaining crowd like Moses at the Red Sea.

  I considered hanging around for a while—see if maybe Willard wouldn’t put in another guest appearance—but I was feeling way too itchy for anything that even resembled a stakeout. I had too many loose ends dangling to stand around waiting for a skell like Willard Frost.

  In Seattle, old-fashioned gin mills are getting to be relics. Everything is becoming gentrified. Shit-hole taverns have become gastropubs, complete with twenty-dollar hamburgers and duck-fat French fries. Neighborhood bars have morphed into Château Le Douche. Sustainable and locally sourced, you know.

  The Eastlake Zoo was a remnant of a bygone era. No plastic. Cash only. If you wanted to nosh, you better have a hankering for packaged peanuts or beef jerky, otherwise you should feel free to visit the pizza joint next door. And by the way, shut that fucking cell phone off before you come in here. The Management Thanks You.

  I stood in the doorway, letting my eyes adjust to the deep-space dark. Serious speed metal blasted from the speakers. Young music. Angry music. I vaguely remembered being an angry young man, but, for the life of me, couldn’t recall what I was so pissed off about. I covered my ears and started for the back of the room.

  George Paris, Ralph Batista, and Harold Green were the last living members of my father’s political machine. George had been one of Big Bill’s bankers. Money launderer, the authorities said. At the time of my old man’s demise, George had owned a big house over in Madrona Park, had a high-society wife, and was thinking about buying a second condo on Maui for his daughter. When the shit hit the fan, George was fired by the bank, divorced by his fancy wife, and summarily convicted of misappropriation of public funds. George served eighteen months in the county cooler before being jettisoned back onto the streets like a wadded-up gum wrapper. He’d been sharing an apartment with a telephone pole ever since.

  Ralph Batista had been my old man’s Port of Seattle connection. According to the cops, he’d been the one who’d looked the other way while hundreds, possibly thousands, of illegal Chinese were smuggled into Seattle. When my old man popped a heart valve out in front of the Fairmont Olympic Hotel and his whole house of cards came tumbling down, Ralph was picked up as a material witness. They grilled him for nearly a week before letting him go, which wouldn’t have been so bad, except that fourteen Chinese nationals ended up locked in a shipping container on Pier 23 in ninety-five-degree temperatures for almost a week. Six of them died.