Family Values

by Ford, G. M.

  I wasn’t even quite sure why I was there. Thought maybe I’d like to have another look at the park, or maybe see if there wasn’t something I could do for his wife and family. But standing there in the street, both reasons suddenly seemed puerile at best, so I grabbed the door handle and started to climb back into my car. A shrill voice stopped me. “Mr. Leo the Lion man.”

  It was Nikka, off the porch and out on the sidewalk now.

  “Hi, Nikka,” I said.

  She held out her hand. Mama had trained her well. She wasn’t setting foot in the street, so I hip-checked the car door closed and crossed to her side. She grabbed me by the hand. “Come,” she said. “Come see Mama and the social lady.”

  She began to tug me toward the door. “Come on, Mr. Leo man,” she chanted as she pulled me toward the three concrete stairs.

  “What’s a social lady?” I asked as Nikka hauled me toward her front door.

  Next thing I knew, she had the door open and was shoving me over the sill.

  Bedlam. Ibrahim’s wife and another woman held down the middle of the living room. Little sister was running in circles screaming her head off. Mrs. Durka was seated in a worn wing chair under the window, looking like she hadn’t slept in a month.

  The other woman was dressed in what I identified as traditional African garb of some nonspecific variety or another. If you counted the twelve yards of material she had turbaned on top of her head, she was damn near as tall as I was. Bright green and red and yellow flowers everywhere. Sure to brighten up any room.

  “Mr. Leo the Lion man, Mama,” Nikka shouted as she pulled me along.

  Mama managed a wan smile and a feeble wave. The other woman looked me over like a lunch menu. “And you’d be?” she asked.

  “Leo the Lion man,” Nikka shouted again.

  I told the woman who I was and how I knew the Durkas. “I thought maybe Mrs. Durka could use a little help,” I said. Sounded lame as hell, but it was the best I could come up with.

  “Of course she needs help,” the woman blurted. “She’s been made a widow. She doesn’t speak the language. She has two little children to care for and absolutely no experience dealing with anything except the home.” She stomped across the room and grabbed a thick pile of envelopes from the desktop. “Favor has never paid a bill in her life,” she said. She dropped the pile back onto the desk. “Husbands do such tings in her culture. She has never written a check. Never written anything.”

  As if on cue, little sister came toddling back into the room in full scream. Mrs. Durka rose wearily from the chair, scooped her youngest child onto her hip, and carried her from the room with Nikka following along behind. I heard a door close. The noise level went down considerably.

  I walked over to the African woman and held out my hand.

  “Leo Waterman,” I said.

  Took her a while to decide whether or not to take it. Maybe it was a cultural thing, I don’t know, but finally, she reached out and gave me a brief, limp shake.

  “Talia Madibo.”

  “You friends with Mrs. Durka?”

  “No. I’m from the South Sudanese Social Organization.” Her face took on a rueful expression. “Which is part of the problem,” she said. “Most of the Sudanese in Seattle are from South Sudan, which is where Mr. Durka was from, but Favor is from North Sudan. Her dialect is very different. I can understand some of what she says but not all of it. I’m trying to find an interpreter.”

  Even with the door closed, the child’s crying was permeating the house now. Talia Madibo heaved a considerable sigh, excused herself, and strode off into the fray, leaving me standing alone in the Durkas’ living room.

  I wandered over to the desk and picked up a neatly stacked pile of bills: mortgage, car, Seattle City Light, cable, storage unit, the usual crap. Several raised voices flew into the room when somebody opened the bedroom door. I dropped the bills back onto the top of the desk, where they spread out like playing cards.

  When I looked down, Nikka was standing at my side. She pointed down at the pile. “Papa’s lockup,” she said. She held a finger to her lips. “Shhhhh,” she shushed. “Mama don’t know about the lockup.” Her big brown eyes rolled upward. “Papa say be quiet when the other men came.”

  “What other men?”

  Her eyes grew big. “Scary men. They made Papa cry.”

  I patted her on the head and was about to say my goodbyes and sneak out the door, when it came to me. When they’d escaped the Sudan, they’d gone to London first, and a lockup was what the Brits called a storage unit. I walked back to the desk and found the storage unit bill. Sodo Moving and Storage. Ninety bucks. Address on South King Street. I looked over at Nikka.

  “Papa got a key for his secret lockup?” I asked her in a whisper.

  She squatted down, pulled open a small bottom drawer in the desk. Her little hand fished around inside the drawer and came out with a silver key on a white plastic Sodo Moving and Storage fob. She stood up and handed it to me. I used my ankle to slide the drawer closed. I bent down and put my face in Nikka’s. I held a finger to my lips. “This will be our secret,” I said.

  “Shhhhh . . . ,” she said with a grin.

  I pocketed the key, figuring that, should this turn out to be a dumb idea, I could probably at some point find a way to return it. The noise from the other room had settled down. I figured this was as good a time as any to make my escape, so I said my goodbyes to Nikka and stepped out onto the porch.

  Storage must be a hell of a business. Some of the most desirable real estate in Seattle—real estate that you’d think would long ago have been made into pricey-view condos—was covered with brand-new storage units. Must have something to do with the minuscule size of city apartments and the amount of crap we inevitably collect as we go along. That and the fact that you can run a ten-thousand-square-foot storage operation with a single mouth-breathing desk clerk.

  Sodo Moving and Storage wasn’t in Sodo, which is short for south of downtown. Interestingly enough, Sodo Moving and Storage was in the International District, which back before World War II was known as Japtown—back in the days before we shipped its namesakes all off to relocation camps and made political correctness the national religion.

  The kid behind the desk looked up from his video game long enough to see the key and the fob, then pushed the button and buzzed me in. The key had 234 stamped in it, so I was pretty sure it was gonna be upstairs. Not much gets by old Leo.

  The place was cleaner and warmer than several of my early apartments. Whatever they had in mind for a numbering system was lost on me, so I just kept walking up and down the aisles. Eventually, I found 234 by attrition.

  Standard shoot it with a bullet padlock. I took it off and slipped the key and the lock into my pants pocket, where it hung dull and heavy like a cannonball.

  The first thing that crossed my mind when I pulled the door open was why a guy on the city payroll, with a wife and two kids, would blow ninety bucks a month on a storage unit with very nearly nothing in it.

  Sitting on the floor six feet in front of the rear wall was a red plastic tote, about two feet by three feet. The kind where the lid snaps on. That was it. Nothing else.

  I’ve got to admit to feeling a bit squeamish. I’d visited the guy yesterday, and an hour later he was dead. Today I’d manipulated his beautiful daughter, stolen something from his desk, and was now about to pry into something he’d kept secret even from his wife. I gave up guilt for Lent, so I got over it in a hurry.

  When I pried the lid from the tote, it took my brain a second to process what I was looking at. It was half-full of labeled manila envelopes. All of them in Rebecca’s handwriting. I fingered through them. They were all there. Kevin Delaney, Gilberto Duran, Terrence Poole, Lamar Hudson, Willard Frost.

  My brain was doing somersaults. Why would Ibrahim do such a thing? He was Rebecca’s oldest and most trusted employee. I leaned against the side wall of the unit, trying to get a hold of myself. Must have stood the
re with my eyes closed for a full five minutes or so.

  When I couldn’t come up with an answer, I moved on to something my feeble brain could handle, like what to do next. I went back to the tote, pulled off the top, and rearranged things. Then I snapped the lid back into place and carried the tote out into the corridor, where I locked the unit back up and pocketed the purloined key.

  On one hand, I was glad that I was going to return the conquering hero. Saving the land from pestilence was, after all, the specialty of the house. On another, I hated what this was going to do to Ibrahim’s family. To extricate Rebecca was to indict Ibrahim. There wasn’t going to be any middle ground in this thing. Whatever his reason for squirreling away these files, Ibrahim Durka was going to come out of this looking like a low-life scumbag. No way around it.

  I grabbed the tote and headed for the elevator. The kid’s thumbs were a blur as I backed out through the security doors.

  The new silver Lexus sitting in my driveway belonged to Nancy Pometta, Rebecca’s new lawyer. They were sitting together at the kitchen table when I came in the back door. I set the tote on the table between them.

  The lawyer was a woman of about forty. Trim and fashionable, wearing enough gold jewelry to open a store. She didn’t seem pleased to be interrupted.

  Rebecca threw me an exasperated look. “Leo . . . we’re working here,” she groused. I was trying not to look like the cat who ate the canary but apparently wasn’t pulling it off. Problem was, in all the years I’d worked as a PI, I’d never had a case just pop wide open like this one had. Yeah, I’d kicked over rocks here and there, found out this and that, contributed to the successful resolution of cases on many occasions, but I’d never gone from zero to a hundred in about ten seconds before. Not once.

  “What’s that look?” Rebecca wanted to know.

  “It was Ibrahim,” I said.

  “Ibrahim what?”

  “Ibrahim who stole the files.”

  Pin-drop moment. The two women exchanged puzzled looks.

  I pulled the top from the tote, grabbed the envelopes, and put them on the table. “They’re all there. All five of the cases in question.”

  I backed over to the kitchen counter and watched as Rebecca pawed through the files. I watched as she considered opening one of the files, thought better of it, and set it back down. She looked up at me in wonder. “How . . . how did you . . .”

  “Dumb luck,” I said and told her the story. How the whole thing sprung from the mouth of a babe and how I just happened to be standing in the right place at the right time.

  She stood up, threw a bear hug on me, and waltzed me all over the kitchen. The whooping and hollering rattled the rafters. It lasted for quite a while.

  “I don’t understand,” she said, once we’d disentangled and calmed down. “Why would Ibrahim do something . . . something like . . .”

  “That’s the Double Jeopardy question,” I said. “Whatever was in it for him had to be real important for him to do something like that.”

  “But what?”

  Rebecca may have been somewhat at a loss, but her lawyer wasn’t.

  “We’ll demand a complete exoneration,” she said. “In the press. In public. And then we’ll talk about punitive damages.”

  Rebecca waved dismissively. “I don’t know about punitive damages,” she said. “Anything like that would just drag Ibrahim through the mud more than this is already going to. Might even give the county reason to think about not paying out his insurance and pension to his family.” She looked up at the other woman. “I won’t be party to that.”

  The lawyer got to her feet and shrugged herself into her coat. “Before we do anything, I want to run this by the senior members of my firm. I’ll get back to you this afternoon. In the meantime . . . needless to say, mum’s the word.” She stopped. “And whatever you do, don’t say anything to anyone about how you’re not going to sue,” she said. “The fear of God makes them ever so much easier to deal with.”

  Gabe was in the kitchen making grilled cheese sandwiches when Rebecca and I returned from letting Nancy out.

  “Hail the conquering hero,” Gabe joked.

  Rebecca took a sip of tea and leaned back in the chair. She was torn, I could tell. Part of her was overjoyed to be out from under a cloud of suspicion. Another part of her was worried about Ibrahim and his family. She was like that. Nothing was ever simple.

  “Why do you suppose Ibrahim hung on to those files?” she asked. “If the idea was for the files to disappear, why not just destroy them?”

  I’d thought about it. Ascribing motivations to other people is always dicey. I don’t even know why I do the things I do, so I’ve always been unable to imagine how anybody else could have a clue.

  “If I had to guess,” I said, “maybe he felt guilty about what he’d done. Maybe some part of him wanted to be able to fix it, if things got too ugly for you.”

  “So why do it to begin with?” Gabe asked. “You don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.”

  “That’s the question, isn’t it?” Rebecca said to nobody in particular.

  I gave it some thought. “Seems to me the idea had to be either to exact some sort of revenge against you personally—which, with the culprit turning out to be Ibrahim, seems ridiculous—or the whole mess was started in motion to get one of those people out of jail.” I looked around. “Unless one of you can think of something else.”

  The silence suggested not, so I kept talking.

  “You know . . . for a guy who started out dodging bullets in North Africa, Ibrahim’s pretty much got the American dream going on. Steady union job. Beautiful wife, two beautiful daughters, car, nice new townhouse. I just don’t get what could have motivated him to do this.”

  “He’s up at the top of the salary schedule,” Rebecca added. “Makes seventy-something a year. Full bennies . . . The whole ball of wax. It just doesn’t make any sense.”

  “So I guess you crazy kids won’t be needing me anymore,” Gabe said.

  I held up a restraining hand. “Let’s wait till this whole thing shakes out before we make any changes,” I said. “This thing’s still got way too many loose ends for my taste.”

  Gabe chomped a grilled cheese sandwich in half. “My time is your time.”

  At four in the afternoon, the battle plan was fully in place. Rebecca and her lawyer were holding a downtown press conference at ten thirty tomorrow morning. By the time Rebecca got off the phone with Nancy and ran it by me, her lawyer had talked her into suing for punitive damages and using the money to start a trust fund for Ibrahim’s kids, which pretty much made sense all around. It provided for the kids’ futures and made it so Nancy’s law firm came out of it with a goodly piece of change. A match made in lawyer heaven; assuming, of course, that lawyers and heaven were not, as many contended, mutually exclusive.

  “What say we celebrate?” I suggested.

  “Like what?” Rebecca asked.

  “Let’s go out to dinner. Maybe have a libation or two.”

  The idea was greeted with wild acclaim, so I called Lark and begged and pleaded and managed to get us in at six fifteen. A mite early for continental dining, but it was the only table they had open until next Wednesday, so I went for it.

  And so it was with a slightly fuzzy head and a very full stomach that I found myself strolling contentedly down East Seneca Street a little after nine that night. Gabe had commandeered a toothpick and was working several pieces of pork belly out from between their teeth as we ambled back toward the car. Rebecca was hanging on my arm like it was a life preserver. All things considered, it had been a hell of a good day.

  Maybe it was the liquor. Or just having the shit storm lifted from our shoulders. I don’t know, but about a block and a half before we got to the car, Rebecca asked, “How’s Nikka doing?”

  “Beautiful kid. Sweet,” I said.

  “I mean physically? Is she still up and around?”

  I stopped walking and looked ove
r at her. “Why wouldn’t she be up and around?”

  “She’s got Sanfilippo.”

  “Sounds like a vacation destination.”

  “It’s a fatal metabolic disorder, dolt.”

  “You’re sure?” I asked.

  “Ibrahim’s been fighting the insurance company for years now. I’ve written letters of support for him. It’s genetically transmitted, so the insurance company claims it’s the ultimate preexisting condition. I showed up at two insurance advisory board meetings in his defense. Things got quite heated.”

  “And they won’t pay?”

  She made a face. “Actually, until lately there hasn’t been much to pay for. Up until recently, Sanfilippo was considered incurable. There’s a couple new therapies being developed right now. Gene therapies. Some of them, I understand, are very promising, but they’re superexpensive and still experimental, so, of course, the insurance carrier doesn’t want to fork out for them.”

  “So why did you think Nikka wouldn’t be up and around anymore?”

  She went into textbook mode. “Sanfilippo affects mostly the central nervous system. Over time, brain cells fill up with waste that the body can’t process. Children experience hyperactivity, sleeplessness, loss of speech, mental retardation, cardiac issues, seizures, loss of mobility, dementia, and finally death, usually long before adulthood. That’s why they list it as a childhood disease.”

  “’Cause nobody survives childhood,” Gabe tossed in.

  “Seemed like a regular, healthy, happy kid to me,” I said.

  “I have everybody’s medical files,” Rebecca said out of the blue.

  “I thought those were always superconfidential.”

  She shrugged. “They drive city vehicles. They’re subject to drug testing. They sign away their confidentiality rights when they sign up for the job.”

  “But not the families.”

  “But the way the computer system works, if you have access to the employee account, you have access to all the accounts connected to it. They’re all the same budget item as far as the county is concerned.”