by Jack Lynch
“You’re either a good listener or asleep with your eyes open,” I told her finally.
She smiled and reached out her hand again, this time to rest it on my shoulder. “No, not asleep. They’re nice stories you tell. But you didn’t mention any girls.”
I shrugged. “I finally reached a certain age and began to notice them.”
In another moment she took away her hand and finished her wine. She uncurled gracefully and got up and went over to the refrigerator. She brought over a jug of Chablis and refilled our glasses.
“You trying to get us drunk?”
“I don’t know. A little, maybe.” She returned the wine to the refrigerator, then came back to sit down beside me again, this time close enough so we were touching.
“Let me tell you about my paintings,” she said after another sip of her wine. “None of the people in them are fully clothed. Most of the men figures are totally nude, because partially clad men, wearing contemporary clothing styles, look clumsy and awkward, but the naked male body itself is not clumsy and awkward, not by any stretch of the imagination. It is something I first noticed, I suspect, at an age somewhat younger than you were the day you blinked and realized there were little girls out there around you.”
“Little girls beginning to grow into big girls.”
“Of course. And while my male figures are nude, most of the female figures are at least partially clothed. And why should that be, Mr. Bragg?”
“Because a partially garbed female figure can be a whole lot more cha-cha-cha than a totally naked one. I’ve never understood why the people who put out those raw girlie magazines don’t see that.”
“You’re right, of course. Anyway, that’s what I allude to in my paintings. Boys and girls, and men and women, in various acts of eroticism. They are, for the most part, quite naughty. And that is why I now do a good business with my painting, but you have to know what to look for. Let me show you.”
We went back out into the studio. She led me over to the spotlighted painting I’d noticed earlier, with the bare-chested man with the astonished look on his face.
“This is just a brief moment in time between a man and a woman,” she told me. “Let me tell you what led up to this moment. They were caught in a thundershower while out walking in the fields. They have known each other only a short period of time. Caught in the rain, they have run hand in hand back to the small lodge where the woman is staying. They are both sopping wet when they gain the shelter of the lodge. He quickly stokes up the fire in the small fireplace. She brings him a large towel and urges him to strip off his wet clothes and dry himself. While he does this, she goes into a nearby room. When she comes to the doorway again, he is standing before the fire, naked except for the towel wrapped around his middle. She stands staring at his body in the firelight. He senses her and turns. She has changed into a dry russet skirt, but she is still wearing the blouse she wore when caught in the downpour. She has a hand on the top button of the blouse as if to change it, but now she crosses the room, slowly lowering her hand. She is wearing nothing beneath the blouse. Her neat breasts and nipples are clearly limned beneath the thin, wet material.”
Zither turned to me. “What do you think he feels as he sees her thusly, Mr. Bragg?”
I cleared my throat. “I think he might feel a certain sense of arousal if he’s hooked up right.”
Zither smiled. “There you have it. And in this painting I have captured the instant in which this rather emboldened woman has slipped her hand beneath the towel and grasped that which betrays his arousal.”
“Is that what happened there?”
She took a sip of her wine. “Yes, that is what happened there. Can you see it now?”
“No, but I sure wish I could.”
“Study it some.”
I backed off a ways and squinted. I was beginning to get hints and impressions, but it was nothing I could have thought of myself without her telling me. There was very little of the woman figure in the painting. In a lower corner I could just make out what might have been a thin white wrist crossing the top of what Zither said was the towel wrapped around the fellow’s waist. The sneaky hand at the end of the wrist wasn’t in the painting but below the field of vision. Out of sight and into mischief, from what she’d told me.
“He looks to me,” I told her, “as if he’s just been shot.”
“You oaf,” she said a little impatiently. “She’s just caressed his you-know-what.”
I grunted. “Is there any more to the story?”
“My God, yes. Wouldn’t you suppose so? For starters, I’d suspect he takes her in his arms and kisses her rather roughly. But from this moment on, it is a tale for each individual to complete for himself.”
“Well, if there are people who can see all this in these things, I can tell why you’re making money at it.”
She led me around the room and told a couple of more naughty tales leading up to the works she wanted me to be able to interpret. I wasn’t any better at seeing what was going on in them than I had been with the one showing the man who looked as if he’d been shot. One concerned a woman equestrian with riding crop and one of her stable boys. Another was something about some twin sisters and their younger nephew in a wooded glade. Her stories were all right, but the paintings eluded me. And I told her so.
“Well, I don’t suppose it matters greatly,” she told me. “I was hoping, though, that they might titillate you a bit.”
“Like the fellow who looks as if he’s been shot?”
“Something like that. And I’d still like for you to pose for me before you leave town. It wouldn’t take too much time. I’d want to make some preliminary sketches. Then I take photographs as well, to work from later on.”
“Like these people you’ve described? In my birthday suit?”
She turned to me with a little smile. She took the goblet of wine from me and put it down along with her own on a nearby stand. She looped her arms around my neck and winked. “Who knows? You might even grow to like it, if you’ll excuse the expression.”
We might have gotten into a bit of mischief ourselves right then, Zither and me, and changed the whole direction of the rest of my stay in Seattle. Only we didn’t, because right then some kind of explosion rocked the old building, knocking plaster from the walls and dust from the ceiling. It was from somewhere downstairs—up at the north end of the building, where Benny’s office was.
TEN
I ran down the stairs with Zither right behind me. People stood out in the hallway gaping up toward Benny’s end of the building, to where dust and smoke were curling around the corner. I got up there as fast as I could. I were relieved to find Benny and Mary Ellen Cutler standing just outside her studio, staring pop-eyed into Benny’s office. The office door had been blown half off its hinges, and the pane of pebbled glass was shattered.
“What happened?” I asked them.
“A nasty suspicion just saved my life,” Benny told me. “I had a phone call. When I answered, nobody said anything. They just hung up. With all the other funny stuff that’s been happening, I decided to get the hell out of there. I crossed to Mary Ellen’s to use the phone and call you upstairs. I’d just started dialing, when BLAM!”
His mouth twitched a couple of times. I stepped into his office. The window in front of Benny’s desk had been blown out as well. The desk itself looked as if it’d been cleared with an angry hand. Burned and curled papers and folders were strewn around the floor, along with shards of glass. His chair had been blown into kindling. The top of his desk was scorched black, desk drawers had been blown out of their tracks and his typewriter was here and there all around the office.
“They did a real number this time, huh?” Benny asked.
“They did indeed. Okay, Benny, this is it. Call the cops, tell them what you can, then go get Dolly and the kids and get out of town. I mean tonight.”
“But that’s just what they’ve wanted all along.”
“I kno
w, and now you’re going to do it—until the cops or I or somebody finds out what’s going on. We can’t…”
“Pete!” cried Benny, staring over my shoulder.
I spun around. A figure loomed in the darkness, just outside Benny’s shattered window. Whoever it was carried something in a two-handed grip. I gave Benny a hard shove back into the hall. “Everybody duck!”
The person outside began shooting as we went through the doorway. The gunman fired in quick succession. The shots sounded as if they were large caliber. Zither screamed as a bullet smacked into the outer wall of Mary Ellen’s studio. I slammed the sagging door to Benny’s office. It didn’t catch, and swung right back out again as I shoved everyone in sight into Mary Ellen’s studio.
“Cops!” I yelled again as Benny slammed the door behind them.
I ran back down the hallway. Some private dick I’d turned out to be. Flirting around upstairs with the skinny painter lady while the attempted murder of my old buddy Benny Bartlett was in the process of execution. I ran outside to the rental car, unlocked the glove compartment and got out the Smith & Wesson revolver. Combat Masterpiece, the S&W people had named it. Good name, good gun. Marines in Korea had given me this one on a bleak wintry day when I’d grown about twenty years older just like that. One minute I’d been a scared teenage kid, a navy aircrewman who’d been lucky enough to stumble onto a squad of marines after I’d had to bail out of a single-engine attack plane that crashed with a dead pilot in the cockpit. The marines had given me some rudimentary soldier training the first day I met up with them. They gave me a rifle and a hand grenade—just one—and told me how to use them. A few days later, we were crossing a rocky slope when an enemy machine gun above had opened fire on us, or rather on the rest of the withered squad. I’d fallen back to adjust a sock chafing me inside my boot. I was out of sight of the enemy gunners, but the rest of the squad wasn’t. They were scrambling desperately for cover, but they were very exposed. And at that moment, with the machine gun firing at the people who’d taken me in, a cold emotional paralysis had gripped the scared teenage kid. Reason went out the window. I ran back a short distance, then sprinted up the slope, keeping low, moving as fast as I could, until I’d flanked the two men at the machine gun and shot and killed them both. Later I couldn’t believe what I’d done. But the marines assured me that I had, and a scrawny sergeant from Brownsville, Texas, had given me the .38 revolver that had belonged to their lieutenant. He’d been killed two weeks earlier. There had been a lot of killing going on back then. There was apt to be more going on now. The .38 had spent its last moment joy-riding around in the glove compartment of the rental car.
I made it up to the corner of the building a lot quicker than I had made it that day to the high ground above the machine gun. It was dim up there. There were streetlights up in the next block and over by where the street crossed the railroad tracks, but they didn’t help matters much up at the end of Benny’s building. A ship out on the bay hooted. I squatted down and took a peek around the corner of the building. The dim figure was still there. He’d moved up to the window ledge and was looking around, as if he couldn’t make up his mind what to do next. A siren in the distance made up his mind for him. He jumped back from the window just as I yelled at him.
“Stop, or I’ll shoot!” I cried.
He did what most people do when I yell something like that. He spun and took a couple of wild shots in my direction, then started running like hell up the block, away from the waterfront. I fired a couple of times myself to let him know I wasn’t bluffing, then took off after him. He did a little dodging from side to side as he ran, then shouted something. Another figure stepped out of a doorway near the corner. He raised his hands, and I ducked and scrambled for the recessed entryway to a nearby storefront as three or four more shots came zinging in my direction. I tucked myself around and got into a firing position as another slug made a tearing sound in a wooden sill over my head. It looked as if they were gutting the upper floors of a building behind me. A huge metal trash container had been parked in the street. I fired once up the street, then ran down across the sidewalk and behind the trash bin. By the time I’d worked to the upper end of it out in the street, I couldn’t see either of the gunmen. I started trotting up the street again and paused beside a car parked at the curb. I still didn’t see them. I left the car and started on up toward the street above me. That’s when car headlights came around the corner and pinned me out in the middle of the street like a moth. I lunged back behind the parked car and threw myself toward the gutter, banging my knee on the pavement and my head against the curb. Talk about being down and out in Seattle. At least I hadn’t knocked myself brainless—and thank God for that, or it would have been the end of me and any future career as a hotshot detective. A single shot plinked the nearby pavement as the car sped past. Then I heard the screech of brakes, followed immediately by the low whine of the car engine. They were coming back for me.
I clambered out of the gutter and, by crouching low and moving nimbly, managed to keep the trash bin between me and the backing auto. Below the trash bin again, I darted across the street. The men in the car would have been looking for me over their shoulders.
The car braked again near where I’d been in the gutter. More sirens were approaching. The driver shifted gears again and started to make a U-turn, but the street wasn’t wide enough for him to do it in one swing. He braked at the opposite curb and backed up. As the car began its turn to head back up the street, I shot at them twice more. No fool, I. I wanted them headed away from me before I revealed my position. I aimed for the dark figure in the passenger seat. What I hit was one of the rear windows. The car roared up to the end of the block and squealed around the corner. I dropped the revolver into my jacket pocket, dusted myself off, and went back to spend the next hour or so yammering with Benny and Mary Ellen and Zither and a bunch of cops.
The bomb-damaged office was the real thing. The attempts on Benny’s life weren’t just speculation any longer. Lieutenant Hamilton had come out on overtime to take a look at things for himself. His attitude, finally, was that of the concerned public safety officer.
“I want those two slugs you had at my office yesterday,” he told me, his Adam’s apple a-jiggle. “The ones you said you dug up out at Woodland Park.”
“I didn’t have to dig them up,” I told him. “I just went inside the fence and searched the ground some and found them lying right out there for anybody to see and pick up. And I can’t give them to you now.”
“Why not?”
“They’re on their way to a first-rate criminalistics lab down in California. When they’re finished going over them and have made their report, I’ll ask them to mail them back to you.”
Before I’d been a nuisance. Now, his expressive face told me, I was somebody he could actively dislike.
“At least,” I told him, “you’ve got the fragments of the—what do you call it these days—explosive device? That should give your people something to sink their teeth into.”
“Bragg, I want a copy of whatever the people in California have to say about those two slugs. I want it the same day you get it.”
“I might be back down there by the time they’re finished with them.”
“Then you can pick up the goddamn telephone and read it to me.”
“Yes, sir.”
I turned and went into Mary Ellen’s studio, to where Benny was flattened out in an easy chair. His head was tossed back and his arms and legs were flung wide. He looked like a pancake man somebody had dropped there.
“How are your nerves holding up?” I asked him.
“They aren’t.”
“Have you called Dolly?”
“Yeah. She’s packing. For all of us. Don’t know if we’ll be able to catch the ferry out of Edmonds this time of night, but she’s checking. And she’s warning her parents we’re all on our way. If we can’t catch the ferry tonight, we’ll just hole up somewhere until morning.” He was sil
ent a moment, staring straight ahead. Then the bitterness overcame his jitters.
“Goddamnit,” he said bleakly.
I went over and gave his shoulder a squeeze. “I know what you’re thinking, but it’s for the best. And I’d like a key to your place. Out home.”
He looked up. “Okay, but what for?”
“I don’t know. If I run out of other things to do, I might just spend a little time hunkered down in there. Watch traffic go by. Things like that.”
“You think they might be checking up on me?”
“I hope they do. I’d like just one clean crack at whoever these people are.”
“What were you doing when you ran out of here earlier?”
“Chasing them. There were two of them, the man at the window, who must have tossed in the bomb, and another one up the street. We did some shooting at one another.”
Benny sat up straight. “Jesus, Pete. You okay?”
“Aside from a scraped knee and a bang on the head.”
“Hey, I’m sorry, man.”
“Benny, it’s what I do for a living.”
“Think you hit one of them?”
“No. I didn’t get a really good shot until the very end. Then I missed the guy I was shooting at by about two feet.”
“You just said you did this sort of thing for a living.”
“He was in a moving car. But it’s nice to hear you’re getting your spirits back.”
After the cops left, I followed Benny home. I didn’t bother to tell Hamilton about the exchange of gunfire I’d taken part in. I didn’t see anybody well enough to identify him, and I didn’t want to spend the next three hours looking at mug shots. And I didn’t think the people I’d chased would go driving brazenly around with a bullet hole or two in their car window. Even if this was Seattle. They’d get it fixed.
When Benny and Dolly and Timmy and Al finally turned out the lights and piled into old Bronco Billy, I trailed them in the rental car long enough to make sure there wasn’t anybody following them. Then I drove back to my motel.