Family Values

by Ford, G. M.

  When I looked up, Thompson and his bulge had magically reappeared in the doorway.

  I followed him down the hall. “I take it they don’t agree on Charlie’s care.”

  “Big-time bone of contention,” he said as we walked along.

  “How long you been with the Harringtons?”

  “Forty-seven years,” he said.

  “Long time to do anything.”

  “It’s a living.”

  I nodded at the bump under his arm. “They really need armed security?” I asked.

  “Money changes everything.”

  Couldn’t argue with that either.

  “Charles Malcolm Harrington the Second,” Carl announced. “Legal name change about three years ago.”

  “Changed from what?” I said.

  “Don’t say. Malcolm was Patricia Harrington’s grandfather’s name,” Carl said. “He’s the one who loaned Bill Boeing the money to build that first seaplane. That family’s been shittin’ in tall cotton ever since.”

  “They told me Charles doesn’t live at home. That he requires round-the-clock care, but . . . you know . . . the missus didn’t seem comfortable with the arrangements.”

  “Shouldn’t be too hard to find. They must have medical insurance. You don’t stay that rich by spending any more than you have to. Cheapest fucks I ever met all had more money than they knew what to do with. That’s how you stay rich.

  “Got something else for ya.” He started pushing buttons. The overhead screens started to blink and roll. Half a minute later, five nearly identical text documents appeared all in a row on the biggest screen. Carl pointed upward. “Ya see it?” he asked.

  I scanned the screens for a couple of minutes. Arrest jackets for each of the five missing files.

  “Look at the dates,” Carl suggested.

  I stood up and walked closer to the screens. “Four of them . . . Poole, Duran, Frost, and Delaney got themselves arrested on the night of September eleventh, twenty twelve. Everybody except Lamar Hudson, who wasn’t arrested for Tracy Harrington’s murder until the next day.” Carl pointed at one of the screens. Article from the Seattle Times on Tracy Harrington’s death. Carl read it out loud.

  “On the night Tracy Harrington was killed, they found her brother Charles passed out on the grass next to her. I remember it. They musta taken him to juvie.” He spread his hands. “No record of it whatsoever. Like it didn’t happen.”

  “How do we get a look at those sealed juvie records?” I asked.

  “We get somebody else to do it for us. Somebody who moves around a lot.”

  “You know such a somebody?”

  “Charity’s got a cousin.”

  “Charity’s always got a cousin.”

  “He ain’t cheap. But it won’t come back at you.”

  “How much?”

  He told me. “Jesus,” I said. “That’s more than my first car cost.”

  “Hey, man . . . this is serious shit. He’s gonna have to get online someplace public but with no CCTV, which is damned near impossible these days. Whatever computer he uses is going to have to disappear from the universe. And then he’s gonna have to get his own ass lost for a while, ’cause they’re gonna know somebody’s been in the cookie jar just as soon as it happens. About two minutes after he gets ahold of those sealed records, there’s going to be an army of cops headed his way.”

  I sighed. “Okay. Okay. Howsabout you give him a jingle.”

  “I’ll make the call. Won’t be any data till tomorrow at the earliest, though.”

  “Okay. What about the medical insurance angle? Can we find out where Charles lives and what’s wrong with him? That sort of thing.”

  “Half an hour or so,” he said, and then went back to pushing buttons.

  I hate standing around waiting for computers to do their thing, and I was hungry enough to eat the Harringtons’ brass door knocker, so I said, “I’m gonna run down and get a Cuban sandwich at Un Bien. You want anything?”

  “Bring me a number two with extra jalapeños,” he said, without taking his eyes off the bank of overhead monitors.

  Un Bien was only about a half a mile down the hill, but, as usual, every construction worker in town had his hard hat in line, so it was the better part of forty-five minutes before Carl buzzed me back in the front door.

  I followed Carl into the kitchen, where we sat at the chipped Formica table and ate like rabid wolves. The Cuban pork and onions was the best damn sandwich in town. No doubt about it. I had to put the thing down once in a while just to make it last.

  Carl wiped his mouth with his sleeve, balled up the sandwich bag, and lobbed it at the garbage can. He missed the can but didn’t give a shit.

  “Tiger Mountain,” he said around a toothpick. “Tiger Mountain Lodge.”

  “What about it?”

  “That’s where your boy Charles Malcolm Harrington lives. It’s a real fancy rehab center slash loony bin. He employs a pair of full-time caregivers with Croatian names. I couldn’t find anything on any of them. I also couldn’t find out how much Harrington pays the joint ’cause he apparently doesn’t, so I ran the Tiger Mountain Lodge itself. His mama owns it. Turns out the Harringtons are invested in rehab centers in a big way. Forty or so different facilities in five states.”

  “Addiction’s big business.”

  “‘Get-tin’ better ev-ry day,’” Carl sang.

  “Any idea what’s wrong with him?”

  He pointed up at the screen on the far left. “No medical records that I can find, but here’s a list of the medications he makes co-payments for.”

  “Print that,” I said. “I’ll ask Rebecca what they are.”

  We kept at it for another half hour or so, at which point Carl looked up from the keyboard. “I thought he was supposed to have special needs.”

  “That’s what his mother told me.”

  “Says here he graduated from Lakeside School.”

  Lakeside School was Seattle’s most elite private school. Grades five through twelve, if I recalled. Bill Gates graduated from Lakeside School, immediately prior to becoming the richest man in the world. Like Bill, most Lakeside graduates toddled off to Ivy League universities and then came back and ordered the rest of us around.

  “Attended?”

  “Nope . . . graduated. June two thousand twelve. Three point four five GPA. Number thirty-seven in a class of one hundred sixty-three.”

  “Lakeside wouldn’t have me,” I said. “My old man inquired.”

  “So that means that whatever happened to him must have happened the night his sister got killed. There was a rumor that the junkie sister injected him with something.”

  “How long has Charles been living in Issaquah?”

  He hammered a few keys. “Five months. Ever since his sister was killed.”

  “Maybe the rumors were true,” I tried. “And that was just the kind of thing the Harringtons didn’t want to be reading about.”

  “Or . . .”

  My phone began to buzz in my pocket. I fished it out. It was Eagen on his own phone. I’d left him a message this morning saying I wanted to meet.

  “Meet me at Vito’s in an hour,” Eagen’s voice said, and he hung up.

  Vito’s was the kind of retro fifties joint where you half expected Sammy Davis Jr. to leap out of one of the Naugahyde booths and start tap-dancing. It’s right in the middle of First Hill, within walking distance of most city government buildings, so my old man and his cronies used to hang out there in the late afternoons. They got too drunk to walk, they’d toddle across the street to the Sorrento Hotel and take a little siesta.

  Over the years the place got progressively seedier and more run-down, until, back in 2008, somebody walked in and blew another customer’s head off while he was sitting on a bar stool. They closed for renovations, presumably to scrape the poor guy’s brains off the ceiling. When it reopened a couple of years later, it looked exactly like it had back when my old man hung out there. Sorta like an
oldovation, instead of a renovation.

  Eagen was waiting for me. He was sitting at the close end of the bar with his back to the door. I slid onto the stool next to him and ordered an iced tea. The bartender barely managed to suppress a sneer.

  “I think you may have missed the craft cocktail movement,” Eagen said.

  “Always figured booze was the one vice I could do without,” I said. “Besides, man, I was making a living as a private eye. Just too much of a cliché for me.”

  “You’ve got a point,” he conceded. “But it’s my day off.” He toasted me.

  “Things must have calmed down a bit, if you wanted to meet here,” I said.

  “Woodward’s moving heaven and earth to get this thing swept under the rug as soon as possible. They’re all sitting around city hall on the edge of their seats, waiting to see how much Rebecca’s gonna sue them for.”

  “You hear anything about that van they towed from up by the golf course?”

  “It’s for sure the one from the Durka hit-and-run. I’m hearing they found a couple pounds of Mr. Durka wedged up in the frame.” I winced. He went on. “According to DMV, the van was crushed and scrapped four years ago, so it don’t look like that line of inquiry is going anywhere either.”

  “I went out to see Patricia Harrington today.”

  He looked up from his drink. His brow wrinkled. “Don’t fuck with those people, Leo. One word from her and Seattle ain’t a place you can live anymore. I don’t care who your father was.”

  “I know. I know.”

  He took a sip of his drink. “So?”

  “You know anything about her son Charles?”

  He thought for a minute. “Disabled, as I recall. That same night the daughter died, Patricia Harrington’s husband . . . what’s his name . . .”

  “Sidney Crossfield.”

  “Yeah . . . supposedly he overheard the girl calling her brother for drug money, followed him up to Volunteer Park, and found them together on the ground. She was dead. The brother was in some sort of drug-induced coma. Did some sort of permanent damage to his brain, from what I hear.”

  “I’m gonna bop out to Issaquah and have a word with him.”

  “Kid gloves, man. Kid gloves.”

  “The very soul of discretion and tact.”

  He laughed. “That’d be a first.”

  “Hey, and while I’m at it . . .”

  “What?”

  I told him what I’d found out about Willard and the whorehouse. “They’re tellin’ me it’s kids, man. Kids. The idea of a kid . . .” I let it go. Not for his sake, but for mine.

  Eagen took another sip of his drink and shrugged. “I could run it by vice, but you know as well as I do what’s gonna happen. If this Asian humpathon has been going for as long as you think it has, then somebody’s running interference for them. Somebody savvy enough to know that anything going on after two A.M. is going to draw attention, the way shit draws flies. Somebody on third-shift patrol for sure. Somebody with buddies on the second shift too. That way, they’ve got it covered from both ends. So vice is going to refer this thing down the line, where it’s going to land in the lap of the same people who are running interference for them. At which point, they’ll pack up and move the operation someplace else, and we’ll be even further from doing anything about it than we are now.”

  “Ain’t life grand,” I said. I downed the rest of my tea and hopped off the stool. “If I’m not back in three days, send out the dogs.”

  Back before Columbus, they used to think there was an “end of the world.” Someplace where you were just sailing along and then suddenly dropped off into nothing. They had it right. They just didn’t know it was located in Issaquah.

  Seattle isn’t one of those places where urban life slowly peters out and gives way to farmland. Nope. You drive fifteen miles east to Issaquah, and one minute you’re in the trendy burbs, and the next minute you’re about as far out in the woods as you care to be. And it stays that way until you get all the way over east of the Cascades, at which point there’s nothing but wheat and high desert for the next thousand miles or so.

  I pulled off I-90 at the second Issaquah exit and wheeled past the obligatory collection of car dealerships and into downtown Issaquah, which looked a lot like something out of Leave It to Beaver. I stopped at a Shell gas station and asked for directions. The kid working the register didn’t know where he was, let alone where I was going, so after I filled up, I wandered over to an antique shop two doors down from the station and found a nice elderly woman who actually knew where she was standing.

  Took me twenty minutes to find the gate and another ten to negotiate the long paved driveway. The Tiger Mountain Lodge looked, for all the world, like some sort of trendy vacation spa. All fieldstone and stained wood, backed up against the looming bulk of Tiger Mountain.

  I followed the signs to the visitor’s parking lot, got out, and headed for the administration building. Cute African American girl personing the desk. Nametag read LATEISHA. Gave me a big, bright smile as I walked up. “Can I help you, sir?” she asked.

  “I’d like to see Charles Harrington,” I said.

  She was shaking her head before the words were out of my mouth. She came out from behind the desk, took me by the elbow, and led me back through the entrance. The mountain air was filled with the sounds of wind and rushing water. She pointed at a separate stone building way over on the far side of the parking lot.

  “Mr. Harrington . . . he’s separate,” she said.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “That’s Mr. Harrington’s part of the facility over there. He’s not technically a patient of the Lodge. He has his own private caregivers and doctors. The only thing the staff does for him is clean the building on Thursdays.” She leaned in close. “I heard his family owns the whole place.”

  “They do,” I said.

  “As far as I know, Mr. Harrington doesn’t take visitors.”

  “Well then, you probably better go back inside, honey, because he’s about to get one whether he likes it or not.”

  She put a hand on my arm. “His caregivers . . . they . . .”

  “They what?”

  “They’re not very nice,” she said.

  “Me neither,” I said, and started across the lot. When I looked back over my shoulder, she was still standing there watching me go.

  The closer I got, the bigger the building looked. Same stained wood and stone. Must have been four thousand square feet, all on one floor. There was a door on this side that looked like nobody used it much. The three windows evenly spaced across the back of the building were dark and unblinking. I was guessing that the house was designed to face out toward the forest, so I walked around to the south until I found the driveway. Two vehicles were parked side by side in the paved yard next to the building. A black Chevy SUV about a year newer than mine and an oversize white Mercedes van with a rack on top, something like a plumber would use.

  No matter who you are, keeping out of the rain is high on the list of Pacific Northwest priorities, and that meant that the entrance to Casa Charles was likely to be as close to where they parked the cars as possible. I walked between the cars and proved myself right.

  Charles Malcolm Harrington himself was sitting in a redwood Adirondack chair, reading what looked to be a comic book, when I tiptoed around the corner of the house.

  He was a mousey-looking little thing. Maybe five-eight, a hundred fifty pounds or so. The tight curls clinging to his skull didn’t look natural to me. Like maybe he’d had a perm or something. Unlike his sister the professor, he didn’t look a bit like Patricia Harrington. Much narrower face and a pair of close-set, expressionless eyes. And most interesting of all, he was wearing a GPS ankle monitor. I know because a year or so back I’d worn one for a couple of weeks, when the cops thought I might have offed one of my neighbors because I was sleeping with his wife. Turned out to be the wife who did the offing.

  He looked over at me and fol
ded the magazine in his lap. “You’re not allowed to be here,” he said.

  I shrugged. “But I am.”

  I could hear his ragged breathing from where I was standing. “You have to go now.”

  “I’d like to talk to you about—”

  “I didn’t mean it. Please. You can’t be here. They’ll . . . I don’t want to go to jail. Please . . . if I . . . I didn’t . . .” I watched his thoughts scatter like windblown leaves as one of the huge glass panels that made up the front of the house slid back and two men dressed in blue scrubs filed out. You want to talk about a Maalox moment. You could almost hear the roulette balls of recognition clicking into place. It was the fake UPS guys. Both of them. I knew for sure. And they knew that I knew. Worse yet, I knew that they knew that I knew.

  I was still at the stammering stage when the second guy out the door stepped around his friend, pulled a chrome automatic from behind his back, and pointed it at my forehead. The gun was rock steady. Parts of me contracted like a dying star.

  The guy with the gun motioned me toward him.

  “Over here,” he grunted in an accent thicker than a brick.

  Wasn’t going to happen. Every instinct in my body told me that putting myself in their hands would be the last thing I ever did.

  The other guy started for me. I let him get close, feinted a right to his head, and then buried a left hook into his solar plexus. He huffed out a great burst of air, bent double, and staggered two steps backward, sucking air like a broken bilge pump.

  Charles Harrington was on his feet now, his face the color of an eggplant. “Oh please . . . oh please,” he whispered. He was hopping from foot to foot. I’d seen the look in his eyes before. Equal parts fear and longing. Fear of what tomorrow brings and a deep longing for whatever peace they’d once known.

  The guy with the gun took two steps forward. His black eyes were telling me my time had come. I held my breath.

  “Sir.” The voice rose above the rushing in my ears.

  The barrel of the gun looked to be the size of a bowling ball. I tore my eyes from it and threw history’s quickest glance over my shoulder. LaTeisha. The receptionist. When I turned back, the guy had the gun hidden behind his back. With his free hand, he reached down and hauled his partner to his feet.