by Thomas Hopp
“What is it, Fin?” he asked without an effort to keep my concern a secret. He came to the window and when he saw what I had seen, he turned to look expectantly at the people in the room. Clara flinched first.
“Oh, dear,” she moaned, her eyes welling with tears. She fanned her throat and then quit trying to hide the obvious. “He’s here!” she admitted, sobbing. “They’re both here. They’re in the basement. Billy’s been staying here for a couple of days now.” She covered her eyes and wept. “Poor Billy!” she gushed between wet hands.
McKean went to her solicitously. “Don’t be so sure we’re here to get Billy in trouble, Clara. He’s unlikely to be the murderer.”
A voice came from a back doorway. “I’m just as much to blame as Craig Showalter. I made the poison he used.”
We all turned to see Billy Seaweed standing in a doorway at the top of the stairs that came from the basement. “It’s all gonna come out pretty quick,” he mumbled. “So why hide any more?” He stood in the doorway with one hand braced on the jamb and an odd, faraway look on his face, seeming not to hear anyone’s exclamations of concern or questions.
“I was just tryin’ out the old man’s recipe,” he went on slowly. “Internet guys was stoked. I thought we’d try it on somebody’s dog or something. But Craig talked me into giving him some. When Erik Torvald turned up dead I knew I was in deep shit. Showalter poisoned Torvald so he could take over his business.”
“I figured that,” McKean responded.
“Showalter was looking for a way to get out of the meth business; go legitimate.”
“If you can call it legitimate,” I interjected, “to kill a man for a few geoducks.”
“Lotsa money in geoducks, these days.”
“Was he the one who tried to kill us at the park?” McKean asked.
Billy nodded. “We was here at Aunt Clara’s the first time you guys came by. We heard what you said to Frank, so we knew you were onto us. Craig jimmied your car door and poisoned your Cokes while I was in the woods yelling at you guys. I didn’t know it till later. I was tryin’ to protect the old man but Craig was tryin’ to get rid of you for good.”
“We were on the right track,” McKean asserted, “but unfortunately you were always just a step ahead of us.”
Billy laughed in an odd, sad way. “I’m still one step ahead.”
McKean’s dark eyebrows knit. “How’s that? And where is this dangerous Showalter fellow?”
After a long moment Billy turned robotically, saying to no one in particular, “C’mon. I’ve got something to show you.”
Frank and McKean and I followed him down the stairs, leaving Clara weeping upstairs. In the basement day room a TV was showing a sequence from Dancing With The Stars. At one end of the day room was a door through which a sink and toilet could be seen. Through a second we glimpsed a disheveled bed. In one corner of the day room a tall man appeared to be sleeping in a reclining chair facing the TV. My pulse shot up when I realized it must be Craig Showalter, but McKean went to him and pressed his fingertips to a carotid artery. Then he straightened and looked from Frank to Billy to me, shaking his head in the negative.
“I killed him with the poison,” Billy explained. “We got high on some red wine first so I knew he wouldn’t feel it coming on.”
“The police are gonna want to talk to you,” murmured Frank.
Billy shook his head slowly. “No, they won’t.”
I said, “I don’t see how you can stop that.”
“I do,” Billy replied. “I saved enough poison for me. Gettin’ a little woozy right now.” His eyelids drooped. McKean cell phoned for an ambulance but Billy was nearly gone when it arrived, slumped on the bed in the basement bedroom. He was on death’s door when Kay Erwin admitted him to Seattle Public Health Hospital, and although McKean had double-checked with Janet about antiserum as we followed the ambulance, Janet only confirmed that the antiserum was consumed completely in saving him and me. With no other source of antidote, Billy’s death was a foregone conclusion.
* * * * *
Several days later, McKean called me at my office to fill me in on developments.
“They’re closing the case,” he said, “after restating it as murder with Craig Showalter the perpetrator and, of course, justice delivered by one Billy Seaweed whose own death is listed as a suicide.”
“Sad,” I remarked, “but at least the case is solved.”
“Yes,” McKean agreed, “and you’ll be happy to know all’s well enough with Aunt Clara. Frank’s taken her under his wing. He’s going to look in on her regularly, and perhaps even move her into his house sometime soon.”
“Frank’s willing to take Billy’s place as her new angel of mercy, then?”
“Answer: yes,” McKean replied. “And I’m sure he’ll dispatch his duty faithfully.”
“Couldn’t she apply to the tribe for some money?”
“I was wrong about Muckleshoot Casino money, Fin. Only Federally recognized tribes can share casino profits, and therefore the Duwamish are excluded. Furthermore, the Gates and Allen money is all tied up in constructing the new longhouse. Duwamish resources are thin. Hence, Clara’s poverty is unchanged.”
“She could move to a reservation. There are a dozen in the region.”
“Yes, and there she’d be entitled to receive some financial help. But you’re forgetting that she’s a proud member of the Duwamish Tribe and has no intention of leaving the place where her ancestors lived, to join another tribe. She once told me that her home was built on land that’s been in her family since the beginning of time. As mind-boggling as that concept seems, I can’t find fault with it. No wonder she’s persisted there under less-than-happy conditions for so many years - her very sense of who she is, is at stake.”
Several days after that, McKean and I went to find the old shaman in his shabby camp. He came out to the riverbank with us, leaning on a tall wooden staff with totemic animals carved on it, and we discussed the circumstances of Billy Seaweed’s death. As we talked, a bald eagle called several times from a snag tree across the river on a little island. Two more eagles flew overhead and the first eagle flapped off to follow them toward the mouth of the Duwamish River, flying under the gray rainbow of the West Seattle Freeway bridge.
“That’s a fledgling,” remarked Henry George. “Joining Mom and Dad for his first hunt, going fishing along Alki Beach. Maybe Billy Seaweed’s spirit is in that eagle.”
“Too bad about Billy,” McKean sympathized.
“Billy’s buried now in the white man way,” George murmured. “Highpoint Cemetery. He should be over there on Muddy Island, left in a canoe until the birds pick his bones clean. Then you put the bones in a cedar box and maybe make a totem. Billy wasn’t rich or famous enough for a totem, I suppose.”
We stood in silent contemplation until the old man said, “Look at Muddy Island, over there. White men cut it in half, shrank it, polluted it, gave it a white man’s name, Kellogg Island. Treated it just like they treated the Duwamish people. We’re a little polluted island of Indians in a white man’s world nowadays. New things like freeway bridges and Microsoft computers and Boeing airplanes and Amazon books go right over our heads.”
“I’m sorry,” McKean consoled. “You strike me as one who could benefit from leaving here for a reservation where you’d be better accommodated.”
The old man laughed and answered McKean with a question. “Why don’t you leave Seattle and go live some other place?”
For once, McKean seemed at a loss for words. After a moment’s thought he said, “I get your point.”
“You don’t need to feel sorry for me,” George went on. “You see, the old ways aren’t all dead yet. The river still snakes past here like A’yahos. It goes this way and that with the tide,” he made slithering motions with a hand. “Billy proved A’yahos’ medicine is still strong. Now, President Bush, he took his pen and wiped us Duwamish people off the map but we’re still here and there’s anot
her president. A’yahos knows better than presidents. The tide will turn again.”