by Jack Lynch
“At the intersection of Second Avenue, I blew right through a red light, missing the front end of a Diesel bus by about eighteen inches and giving the driver a near coronary. I finally, as my entire life was passing before my eyes for the third time, managed with a little help from the hand brake to sideswipe three parked cars and a Dempster-Dumpster trash receptacle and bring Bronco Billy to a halt up on the sidewalk. I swear to God, I was so shaken up it was twenty minutes before I could speak.”
He sat hunched over, reliving it. There was sweat on his brow. I waited.
“Brakes failed, did I say?” he asked. “Not quite. What had happened, see, was that somebody hacked or sawed through the little copper lines that carry the brake fluid to the brake drums. All four! But Hamilton said so far as the guy from the police garage could tell, I probably broke the copper lines crashing into things on the way down the hill and jumping the curb. It’s plain bullshit, of course, but try telling that to the cops. They gave me a ticket for defective equipment, and my insurance company already has heard from the owner of one of the three parked cars I slam-bammed against to save my scrawny neck.”
“When did you get the phone call?”
“That night. I answered the phone and this voice coming from what sounds like the bottom of a rain barrel says, ‘What happened today was no accident. Pack up. Leave town. Or you’re a dead man.’ Click went the phone.”
“Did you tell the cops about the phone call?”
“Of course. They looked at me as if I were making it all up. I mean, they asked me a bunch of questions about what I do and any enemies I might have and stuff like that. The problem, of course, is that there’s no reason for anybody—I mean anybody—to want me out of town. I’m not a threat to anybody. I know that and now the cops know that, so they figure I’ve been working too hard or something.”
“Forgetting the phone call for a minute, could it have been an accident? Could some other part of the brake system have failed and the lines been broken off, like the cops suggested?”
“No, Pete, no way. I’d had the car greased and the oil changed just two days before, at my friendly neighborhood garage and service station. Been going there for years. Buzz does a thorough job. He knows I’m a mechanical illiterate. I mean, I can write about this and that if somebody else explains it to me first, but when it comes to just looking at a piece of machinery and seeing what’s there in front of my eyes, I’m no good. Buzz knows this and looks after the car real well for me. I asked him if he’d checked the brakes and things when he serviced the car. He said sure he had. Everything was in good shape.”
“Still…”
“Still nothing. Let me tell you about the day before yesterday, Friday. I was out at Woodland Park, researching a piece on a new feed grain they’re using in zoos. Has some kind of property that repels mites and gives the animals’ coats a glossy sheen. Real space-age stuff they developed down at the University of California at Davis, not far from your neck of the woods. I’m leaving the park and starting to get into this loaner Buzz is letting me use while the guys in the body shop are trying to get Bronco Billy back on his feet. Anyway, I’m climbing into the front seat when I hear these two blams! And this tear of metal. Somebody was shooting at me. Me! One of the shots put a crease in the roof of the loaner.”
“Did you call the cops?”
“Not immediately. First thing I did was hunker down and take off out of there like a flying saucer was after me. About six blocks away from there, I pulled over to the curb and sat there trembling for a while. Then I found a pay phone and called the cops. A patrol car picked me up and we went back to the parking lot, but guess what—they couldn’t find anything.”
“Did you show them the crease on the car roof?”
“Certainly. They said it was inconclusive. And they looked around the area where I’d been parked, but they didn’t find anything they said looked like a bullet.”
“Did Hamilton get in on this?”
“Yes. I told the patrol officers about the earlier incident, so they got in touch with Hamilton and he drove out and poked around some. I must say I had the feeling he tended to believe me more about the shooting than he did about the brakes. He even went across Phinney Avenue and asked questions at a couple of buildings over there, but he didn’t turn up anything.”
“Was that where the shots seem to come from, across the street from the parking lot?”
“Yeah, that’s what it sounded like, at least. There’s an old folks’ home or something over there. I guess most everybody over there’s half deaf. Nobody could tell Hamilton anything, at least. Hamilton even went up on the building roof with another cop to look around for spent shell casings or something. Came up with zip. He finally shrugged and suggested I hook up a tape recorder to my phone in case Deep Throat phones again. Said to let him know if anything else untoward happens. That’s the word he used. Untoward. He said the only other thing he could suggest until they got more to go on would be for me to hire myself a bodyguard or a private investigator or something. That rang a bell, of course. That’s when I thought of calling you.”
TWO
Benny grabbed his cigarette pack off the desk.
“You’ve already got one going in the ashtray behind you,” I told him.
“Oh yeah, thanks.”
“It sounds scary, Benny.”
“Believe it. I feel like I’m walking around with a blown-up balloon in my chest.”
“You said you almost changed your mind this morning and called to tell me not to come up. What prompted that?”
He made a face and rolled his shoulders. “Whaddaya suppose? I feel like a jerk. There is no way on God’s earth this really can be happening to me.”
“But it is.”
“Yeah,” he said quietly. “But it is.” He looked up at me. “Christ, Pete, it ain’t fair. I’ve worked my butt off for what I’ve got, and I haven’t got all that much. A fine wife, two grand kids, a modest roof over my head, and Bronco Billy, but damn little else. Why is somebody trying to scare me out of here? I can’t just pick up and leave. I’ve got contacts here—out at the university, at Boeing, a few other places around town. They help me research. They answer questions and give me leads. There’s three or four ad agencies in town I can go to sometimes when I’m a little on the shorts. They’ll take me on as a temporary copywriter. There’s a zillion other reasons why I can’t just pack up and leave Seattle. My whole life is here.”
“Take it easy, Benny. We’ll find out what’s behind it and put a stop to it, but don’t let yourself get all rattled. What does Dolly say about it? Does she have any ideas?”
“Naw. She’s more puzzled over it than I am. I suggested after the shooting Friday that maybe she and the kids should take off. Go up to her folks’ place in Sequim or something. She flat out refused. Can’t jerk the kids out of school like that, she told me. If it were summer, she said, she’d think about shipping out with them. Not now. Not yet.”
“Do Timmy and Al know what’s going on?”
“Christ, no. They have overactive imaginations enough.”
“You’d better tell them.”
“They’d just blab it around school.”
“Fine. The more people who know about it, the better. People you work with, neighbors. Anybody who might be able to notice something or somebody out of the ordinary. Get yourself an early-warning network. Get all the help you can—for yourself, for Dolly and for the boys.”
“You don’t think anybody’d try something with the boys…”
“Just let’s not be careless about any of this. Has anything else funny happened recently?”
“No, not really. Well…”
“Come on, Benny, has it or hasn’t it?”
“I don’t know. It’s just that maybe somebody has been going through my desk and things here. Only I’m not sure.”
“What makes you wonder?”
He nodded toward the door. “Mary Ellen Cutler, across the hall. She makes t
hese weird mobiles and jewelry and a bunch of different stuff. Her studio’s been broken into a time or two. She’s been looking around for some sort of safe she can have installed. In the meantime, once last week she had a little box of gemstones she was planning to use on some piece. She asked me to stash them in here until she was ready to use them. I mean, who would ever toss a writer’s office, huh? Nothing much in here but a bunch of books and a feeble idea or two, right? So I stashed this box for her. I could swear I put it under some folders in that tub file over in the corner. Mary Ellen came over a couple of days ago and said she was ready for the stones. I went to the tub file and they weren’t there.”
“How big was the box?”
“Small, about the size a pair of earrings would come in. They were small stones. Anyway, when she asks for them back, I empty out that tub file and lo and behold, no little box, with Mary Ellen standing there in the doorway with this impatient look on her face. I mean, it was embarrassing. I felt about the way I did when the little buckles on my cowboy boots triggered the metal detector at state prison over in Walla Walla. So anyway. About forty minutes later, after Mary Ellen has gone back to her studio convinced I’ve hocked her gemstones, I found the little box in a lower drawer of my desk here.”
“You’re sure you put it originally in the tub file.”
“No, damn it, I’m not sure of anything these days. I thought I put them in the tub file. But wherever I put it, I first did some thinking about where a good hiding place would be.”
His eyes darted over the cluttered bookcase and file cabinets lining the walls. “I could have changed my mind and switched the hiding place while thoroughly distracted, thinking about whatever magnificent story I might have been working on at the time. Sorry, Pete, I’m just not sure. But on the other hand, while feverishly searching for the stones, I came across a couple of other things here and there which I thought I’d stored someplace else. Maybe I’m just going nuts.”
“Or maybe somebody’s just trying to make you think so.”
“Same difference, ain’t it?”
We talked some more. I asked him what sort of articles he’d been working on in recent months, about business dealings he might have had or any run-ins of any kind with people, no matter how minor they seemed. Benny was a fairly competent photographer as well, so he could illustrate the various trade stories that might call for that. I asked him about the photos he’d been taking lately. And as we talked, I could understand how the cops must have felt about things. Benny just wasn’t the sort of fellow who stepped on people’s toes. The stories he’d been working on were the same sort of obscure writing he’d been doing for two decades. His only business dealings, aside from paying the bills that came regularly in the mail, was to send off queries to editors of various journals suggesting stories he could do for them.
“I did disappoint the editor of Concrete Today,” he told me. “Went up to a place just outside of Vancouver, B.C., to do a yarn about an outfit fixing to build a bunch of elegant houseboats on ferroconcrete hulls, but they went bankrupt at the last minute so there was no story there after all. But that’s hardly enough to kill over.”
I asked embarrassing questions Benny swore not even the cops had asked, like was he running around on the side with somebody else’s wife? Did he have a homosexual lover? Did he have any other secret passions or vices nobody was supposed to know about? He just sat at his desk and giggled at all these things.
“Okay, I give up. For tonight, anyway,” I told him. “We’ll go at it again tomorrow.”
Before he closed up the office, Benny called home to tell his wife he was running a little late. He still didn’t tell her I was in town. I complained about that after he hung up.
“Hey, not to worry. Look, some guys once in a while bring home flowers. I sometimes bring home a tall drink of water from the past. It’ll floor her.”
He turned out the lights and closed and locked the door. People were talking in the studio across the hall and the door was partly open. Benny rapped on it and stepped inside. It was twice the size of Benny’s office, filled with glass display cases, work tables, and benches. A woman in her mid-forties, stout, with gray-streaked bangs hanging limply across a broad forehead, was sitting in an overstuffed chair. A younger woman, tall, pale skinned and thin as a rail, sat on a nearby sofa that was losing some of the stuffing out of one of the cushions.
“Hi, Mary Ellen. Hello, Zither,” said Benny. “Want you to meet a friend of mine.”
“Come on in, Benny,” said the older woman, getting to her feet. “Have a glass of wine?”
“No thanks, Mary Ellen, we’re just on our way home.”
“Nonsense,” said Mary Ellen, crossing to a loudly humming refrigerator. “Won’t take a minute to toss back a glass of jug Chablis. Bring your friend in.”
We crossed the studio while she poured wine into a couple of jelly glasses.
“This is Peter Bragg from San Francisco,” Benny said. “And these two sexy broads,” he told me, “are Mary Ellen Cutler, who makes exotic jewelry down here, and Zither Lawrence, who paints exotic paintings upstairs.”
We exchanged hellos. “Bragg’s a former ace newspaperman turned private investigator. He’s come back to his old hometown to try to save the spindly body of yours truly. I’ve had some strange things happening to me lately. Like getting death threats.”
Mary Ellen gasped. Zither sipped her wine. After a brief glance at Benny, she looked back toward me. It seemed she’d been staring at me since we came through the door.
“Am I doing all right?” Benny asked me.
“You’re doing swell,” I told him. “Rally the troops. Put out the pickets.”
Benny briefly recounted the perils that had befallen him. Mary Ellen Cutler listened with rapt expression. Zither’s eyes stayed with me. It was a kid’s game she was playing. I glanced at her, smiled, then looked away and sipped my wine. Zither reminded me of a woman who’d caused a mild sensation on late-night television years earlier on the West Coast. She’d hosted old movies, as I recall, and presented a stark appearance under the stage name Vampira. The woman on the couch might have been her daughter. She had long, lank black hair. She was wearing black slacks and a white silk blouse. She highlighted her pale skin with scarlet lipstick on her thin mouth and matching polish on her long fingernails. When I looked back at her, she was still staring at me. I went over and sat down beside her.
“When I was growing up here, the girls weren’t this forward,” I told her.
“Is that what I’m being?” she asked in a quiet voice.
“Aren’t you?”
She tilted her head. “I’m not sure. You have an interesting face. And body, for that matter. I was thinking I might like to paint you sometime.”
“Oh.”
Put properly in my place, I turned back to listen to Benny telling Mary Ellen about the hair-raising ride down the hill in old Bronco Billy. A moment later Zither reached out and touched my arm. I looked across at her.
“I said I wasn’t sure,” she told me. “Maybe I was being a little forward, as well. I have small breasts and a skinny frame. A girl has to compensate.”
We just looked at each other for a moment. She looked as if she’d be fun to flirt with. There was a look about her eyes that suggested she might feel the same about me.
I turned my attention back to Benny. When he’d finished his tale, Mary Ellen asked him a lot of the same questions I’d asked him, trying to help figure out who might be coming after him and why.
Zither touched my arm again. “Are you married?”
“No.”
“Mmmmmmm. Steady girl?”
“One who’s kind of special.”
“Where is she?”
“In a little town down in California.”
“A long way from here.”
“You’re right, it is. Quite a coincidence about you two.”
“What is?”
“She’s a painter too. A pretty good o
ne.”
“What sort of work does she do?”
“She used to do a lot of seascapes, with fishing boats and docks and scattered tackle and gear in them. She lives right on the coast. Lately, though, she’s been branching out, doing less representational pieces. I don’t know what you’d call it, really. She uses a lot of spirals and different gewgaws. But she puts it all together in an interesting way. I don’t understand what it’s supposed to mean, but I find myself sort of transfixed by some of it.”
“Has she ever done you?”
“Painted me, you mean? No. Figure painting doesn’t interest her. Is that what you do?”
“Uh-huh. Most people find them quite sensual. Maybe you’d like to look at some of them sometime.”
“Maybe so. When are you there?”
“Most all of the time. I live in a corner of the studio. It has everything I need. Bathroom. Hot plate and refrigerator. Bed.”
“Sounds comfortable.”
“It is. And with all those sexy paintings on the walls. Benny said you’re on the way to his place now?”
“That’s right.”
“Too bad.”
She finished her wine and got up and crossed over to Mary Ellen. She bent to give the older woman a quick kiss on her cheek.
“Thanks for everything, love,” she told Mary Ellen. “I have to get out of here before I do something really embarrassing.”
“Oh yeah, like what?” asked Benny.