by Jack Lynch
He scratched his chin and stared at the ceiling. “No,” he said after a minute. “Doesn’t sound like anything I’d know about. Somebody just called him up and told him to get out of town? That it?”
“About that.”
“Huh. A strange one, for sure. And yeah, he pretty well described the talk we had. I naturally didn’t want him to slander the agency. When’s that story coming out, you know?”
“He said any day now. In something called Sound Sounds.”
He grunted again and picked up an old-fashioned fountain pen to jot a note on a pad beside him. “Like to see that when it comes out.” When he had finished making the note, he looked up at me. “That it?”
“Yes, sir, I guess it is,” I told him, getting out of the chair.
“Sorry I couldn’t be more help,” he told me, coming around from behind the desk and putting one hand on my shoulder as he opened the door. “Where are you staying, in case I hear something?”
I told him and gave him Benny’s office number as well.
“Okay. And you steer clear of them queers, you hear?”
He stood in the office doorway cackling behind me as I made my way back up front with a friendly smile for all the hired help. The fellow with gray hair was cursing at somebody over the telephone. He seemed to be discussing a bill. The younger man up front buzzed me back through the gate. His holster and gun was back out alongside his ashtray. At least the old man back in the rear office hadn’t been wearing a holster. Probably kept a sawed-off shotgun in his desk.
My first look at Julius “Bomber” Hogan that afternoon was of his sitting behind the wheel of a fourteen-foot power boat towing a young woman on water skis out on Lake Washington. From what I could see of him, Hogan had a tanned round face and seemed to be grinning around the corners of a cigar he had in his mouth. He was wearing a dark blue skipper’s cap and a black turtleneck sweater beneath a blue jacket. The girl on water skis behind the boat appeared to be in her twenties. She had a full-bodied figure encased in a white one-piece swimsuit. Long blonde hair hung in a braid down her back. She was grinning too as they zipped past out beyond the small dock down where the back lawn of Hogan’s home met the lake. It wasn’t sunny and warm out there on the water, but it wasn’t raining, either, and the sky was only partly overcast and in Seattle you take what the Good Lord gives you.
I stood beside a dark-complexioned man in his mid-forties wearing a chauffeur’s uniform. He’d been polishing a Lincoln Continental parked in a driveway off to one side of the house when I’d driven up. The two-story Colonial-style home was set on a half-acre lot of lush lawn. On one side of the house was a swimming pool, on the other a rose garden. When I’d rung the front door chimes, a woman wearing a maid’s uniform had answered. For a man who’d done time in the state pen at Walla Walla, Hogan led a comfortable life.
He spotted us standing there at the top of the lawn and waved, then made a final loop out into the lake and swung in past the shore. The woman skied up onto where the lawn met the water. Hogan throttled back and pulled into the dock. The chauffeur went on down to secure the boat.
The girl was toweling off at the lake’s edge. Hogan climbed stiffly out of the boat. He had a short, squat figure and he walked with a rolling gait over to the blonde. He said something that made her laugh, then gave her a pat on the fanny and made his way up to where I stood. He had an affable grin and a firm handshake.
“You Bragg?”
“That’s right, and you must be Mr. Hogan.”
“Call me Bomber. Let’s go up to the house and get comfortable.”
Getting comfortable involved sinking down into a pair of dark leather chairs in a large study that had a roaring fire in a fireplace and a full bottle of just about every kind of liquor that’s made on a nearby side table. A servant came in and Hogan asked him to fix a Dewar’s White Label on the rocks.
“You, Bragg?”
“No thanks. It’s a little early for me.”
“Oh, have a drink, for Christ’s sake. Unbend.”
I asked for a tall bourbon and water, short on the bourbon. The manservant poured, then went out of the room and closed a pair of tall wood-paneled doors behind him. Hogan and I raised our glasses to each other and drank.
I looked around me some. “Nice place.”
Hogan shrugged. “Yeah well…forty years in the business, you know. You either end up like this or at the bottom of the river.” He laughed loudly. I joined in politely.
“But you didn’t come here to bullshit about old times, most of which I wouldn’t tell you about anyhow. I’ve got the advantage on you. Drocco gave me a pretty thorough rundown on you. Your rep and all. What you did for his daughter. And you don’t know beans about me except I been an active man who’s done all right for himself.”
“And served a little time in Walla Walla.”
“Yeah, but that was nothing. A political thing more than much else. Two years is all. A lot of people owed me favors. They went out of their way to make my stay as comfortable as they could.”
“I didn’t know Walla Walla could be comfortable for anybody.”
He shrugged and gestured around the room. “I gave a lot of books to the prison library. They let me work there. I had a cell to myself and certain commissary privileges. I said ‘yes, sir’ and ‘no, sir’ to the guards and there wasn’t anybody in the population there foolish enough to try laying a number on me. It was like two years in the army, only I didn’t have to worry about anybody shooting at me. And I knew when I got out, I’d be going into more or less retirement and had this waiting for me.”
“A guy could do worse. Is that where you’re at now, in more or less retirement?”
He nodded and sipped his Scotch. “I’m not active in any of the enterprises. People come out to visit from time to time. I’m sort of a consultant, and not just to people I used to work with. Cops come visit—sometimes just to get a general drift of things if they’re having problems. But mostly I just fart around the place here. Do a little traveling with Kathy. We just got back from Puerta Vallarta. Kathy, that’s the blonde you saw on water skis, and no, she isn’t my daughter.”
He was grinning. I gave my head a brief shake of admiration and sipped the bourbon.
“Now what’s this about problems this writer fellow is having? He visited me in the joint, you know. A funny little man. I liked him.”
“That’s good. He’ll be mighty pleased to hear it.”
And then I laid out the troubles Benny had been having—all of it, including the suspected abduction try on his kids. I told him about Benny’s background and the sort of stuff he wrote, and when I’d finished, Hogan sat staring into the flames, then got up and went over to pour some more Scotch into his glass.
“That doesn’t make much sense, does it?”
“Not to me it doesn’t, so far.”
“Well, you don’t have to ask if anybody I know could be involved. They’re not. In fact, if it should turn out in the course of all this that you need a little help, I can give you the names of a couple of good men in the area.”
“Thanks, but I’d like to avoid that if I can.”
“Yeah, Drocco said you were a little skittish. But that’s how I feel about the funny little man. We had a good visit, and I liked the story he wrote. He made me sound even friendlier than I really am. I mean, jeez, after all, you don’t get a name like Bomber for nothing, right?”
He laughed again and I laughed right along with him.
“Tell you what,” he said. “You just wait here and make yourself comfortable. Help yourself to anything you want. I’ll go make some phone calls, see if I can come up with anything.”
“I appreciate your taking the time.”
He waved a hand in dismissal and left the room. He was gone for more than twenty minutes, and when he came back into the room he was thoughtful.
“Well, I didn’t come up with a whole helluva lot,” he told me, settling back into the chair. “Nobody I talked to has ever heard o
f your friend. They don’t know of any scam of this kind. In fact, the only funny sort of thing going on around town wouldn’t have any connection at all with Bartlett near as I can make out.”
“Can you tell me about it?”
“No. Not now anyhow. It isn’t all that firm. I just have some friends who are very sharp when it comes to matters of commerce. They’ve been mildly curious about some little patterns they’ve noticed recently. Nothing involving us—my former colleagues, that is—but there might be something just a little funny going on. Involves some foreigners, they said.”
“I’ve heard there’s a lot of Japanese money coming into town. Could it be them?”
“I don’t know. I told them to try looking at it a little closer, see what more they can find out. Where can I reach you if I get anything?”
I took out one of my cards and wrote a bunch of numbers on it. My motel, Benny’s office and home and Lorna’s. “If I’m not at one of these places, you can leave a message and I’ll get back to you.”
“Fine. And don’t forget about the men I mentioned. You wouldn’t have to look at it as a favor. I’d be doing it for the funny little man. I put his story in my scrapbook.”
NINE
I phoned Benny’s office to see how things were going.
“Nobody’s shot at me today anyhow,” he told me. “I’ve got Bronco Billy back out of the shop and Dolly borrowed the neighbors’ car to drive the boys to school this morning. She’s picking them up in, oh, about forty minutes. And you were right about the cops. When I told Hamilton about the move on the boys, he took a new and sudden interest.”
“What’d he do?”
“He had me drive them into town last night. He had a guy waiting with one of those kits with different kinds of facial features in it, noses and eyes and things. They had Timmy and Al come up with a likeness of the man who got out of the car and told Timmy he’d won the drums. Oh, and Hamilton wants to talk to you too.”
“What about?”
“Get your description of the car you tried to chase.”
I decided to get that out of the way and told Benny I’d stop by his office later. The sun had come out to tease everybody for a while. I parked down the street from the Public Safety Building and went up to Hamilton’s office only to be told he was out for the rest of the day. I asked if Hamilton had run off reproductions of the face Timmy and Al and the police identification man had come up with. They said he had, but nobody knew where he’d put them. I drove on over to Benny’s office.
“You’re too early,” he told me, turning briefly from the typewriter. “I want to get this piece into the mail tonight. Go do something for an hour or so.” He started to turn back to his work, but then called me again on my way out the door.
“Go upstairs and visit with Zither. She’s been asking about you. She wants to show you her etchings or something.”
What he suggested wasn’t a bad idea. I was feeling all mixed up about my ex-wife. Maybe a little companionship with somebody else could put things in perspective for me. Maybe. I went back down the hall and up to the second floor.
Zither’s studio was in the middle of the building, on the side looking out over the nearby waterfront. Her door was open and I just stood there a moment looking over the place. The light in there wouldn’t have been too good even on a sunny day. It was blocked by an overhead viaduct that had been built to speed traffic from the residential north end of the city to the more industrial south end, back before I-5 had been built. So somebody had installed long banks of fluorescent tubes that made it as bright in there as a photo studio. It was a big place, as large as Mary Ellen Cutler’s studio downstairs.
Zither was at an easel over by the tall windows. I couldn’t see what she was working on, but I looked around at some of the other work she had hanging from the walls and propped up here and there on workbenches and chairs. Some of them were portraits. She showed an obvious talent, but there was something about those renderings that put me on edge. They had a starkness that reminded me of the painter’s own features. Then I saw what it was. She had a way of emphasizing the facial bone structures. These people all looked as if they’d been on starvation diets or had just come out of an internment camp.
Her other work didn’t make any sense at all to me. I could pick out a human figure or two, but what they were doing was a puzzle. Zither herself was wearing a pair of blue denim jeans and an old white shirt with its sleeves rolled up. Over that, she had on a paint-smeared oilcloth apron that carried a big red and white advertisement for Beefeater gin on the front of it.
She stepped back from her work to study it. When I cleared my throat, she turned and stared quietly at me.
“So there you are,” she said finally.
“Hi. Benny chased me out. He has something he wants to get finished. If this is a bad time …”
“No, this is a fine time. I was just about ready to wrap it up.” She spent a few minutes tidying up her paints and pots and brushes, then took off the apron. “Come on in. Shut the door behind you.”
I did as she asked and stared around some more. “I’m impressed,” I told her.
“I make a living,” she said. “At long last. Would you like some wine?”
“Sure. Sounds good.”
She went through a beaded curtain off to the left. When she came back, she was carrying two huge glasses of white wine. They were schooner-sized beer glasses. She must have kept them in the refrigerator, because they were chilled.
“When the lady pours a glass of wine, the lady pours a glass of wine,” I observed.
“I like to get a little swizzled when I finish for the day,” she told me. “And I don’t like to have to keep going back and forth to the refrigerator.” We touched glasses and sipped. She turned and indicated the work around her. “Do you get it?”
“I’m not sure I’m seeing everything there is to see.”
“Then you obviously don’t get it. I mean, can you see what’s going on in it?”
“The portraits are straightforward enough, although the people in them look a little bony.”
“Most of my clients want them that way. Who wants to look fleshy?”
“Those are all commissioned works?”
“Most of them. I have them back on loan from the clients just now for a show I’m having at one of the local galleries next week. But the portraits aren’t what I meant. I meant can you tell what’s going on in the other works.”
I walked over to study one of them, a somber-toned painting. I could make out a bare-chested man whose face had an odd expression on it, one of intense surprise, almost bordering on shock. He might have been a man astounded at having just been shot. The rest of it was all kind of indistinct.
I turned back to Zither. Her expression and thin smile were anticipatory. “Not really,” I told her. “Why don’t you explain a couple of them?”
She shook her head. Her long black hair was hanging loosely down her back. It shimmered gently when she shook her head. “Not just yet. Let’s have a little wine first. Then I’ll tell you about them.”
She crossed to a panel of switches on the wall and turned off the overhead lights. She left on a floor lamp to one side and went around to turn on several small spotlights mounted to illuminate several of the paintings. She crossed to the beaded curtain and held it open. “We can sit in here.”
I went into her living quarters. She had them behind the windows with the best view. They looked out over a gap in the warehouses and terminals along the waterfront onto Elliott Bay. As I stood looking out, a huge auto ferry slid into view, lights blazing. In front of the window was a low round table with several big floor cushions scattered around it. There was a sofa placed with its back to the beaded curtain, and on the wall opposite were a sink counter, small stove and refrigerator. A door beyond led to her bathroom. At the back of the enclosure, opposite the windows, was a wide, foot-high platform where she had a queen-size bed with a shelf to one side filled with books and
magazines, a box of tissues, a radio and other things a person might find convenient to have handy beside the bed. A small TV set on a portable stand was tucked away in a back corner. The floor felt as if it had a couple of layers of carpeting on it. It was a cozy place.
Zither settled gracefully on one of the cushions beside the low table, moving like a ballet dancer, and patted a cushion beside her. I joined her there, not nearly as gracefully.
“Tell me about yourself.”
I laughed. “That’s a tough order.”
“I’m not a native of here,” she told me. “Tell me what it was like growing up in Seattle.”
“God.” I shook my head. “I was quite a different person then.”
“We all were, growing up.” She reached across to touch my shoulder. “Tell me. Please?”
I sat and thought a moment with my chin on my fists, then began to ramble, telling her some of it. It was a strange experience. Nobody had ever asked me to give an accounting like that. As I got into the swing of it, I surprised myself with the things I remembered, going back all those years. Later, when I thought about it, I’d be amazed that I could rattle on like that to a woman who was little more than a stranger to me. Maybe the intensity with which she listened had something to do with it. She stared at me, hunched slightly forward, as if she were sitting on the edge of a chair, though we both were on floor cushions. She listened hard as I spooned it out, the daydreams along with the fistfights. Streetcars that used to rumble along Phinney Avenue, just a couple of blocks from where I grew up. The fire engines that would scream down the same avenue in the middle of the night, setting off a great wail and yelp from animals penned up at the zoo. Forest fires that could be seen across Puget Sound in the Olympic Mountains. The wintry displays of the northern lights, or aurora borealis, as we were taught to call them later. Pollywog ponds and hurt dogs and remembered deaths. The things that impress a boy strongly enough so he can recall them as a man and relate them to a narrow-faced, oddly compelling woman sitting beside him in a darkened studio looking out over the Seattle waterfront. I must have run on for twenty minutes, what with the pauses to remember and the sips of white wine.