by Jack Lynch
“Dear me,” said Winslow, beaming up at the two of us. “You two do make a striking pair together. Maybe you should rethink things,” he said, nudging his partner. “What, Bruce?”
Sherman mumbled something indistinct with a shy smile.
“As a matter of fact,” Lorna told them, “we’ve been doing just that.”
I could have kicked her, but she probably had her reasons. Sherman’s smile broke into a ragged grin beneath his droopy eyes, and Winslow looked as if he’d just won a bingo game.
“Now pull up chairs and show us what you have,” Lorna told them.
The two developers unrolled several tubes of drawings. They were handsome enough, the way architectural projections of a project are apt to be more handsome than the finished project itself. They showed a stylish three-story frame building with a dramatic forward-soaring roof looking out over the Lake Washington Ship Canal. The structure had a lot of glass and gave an air of spaciousness. Lorna studied them critically but seemed favorably impressed as the two visitors pointed out this and that, chuckling proudly at the creation they’d ordered up.
“And the nice big parking area in back for your delivery vehicles and suppliers,” bubbled Winslow. “Wide loading dock and integrated kitchen to serve the restaurant in front and caterer to the side. Storage here and main offices on the floor above, and then master offices for the company kingpins on the top level. Nice views in all directions. Blond wood furnishings. Smart, smart, smart.”
“It’s impressive,” Lorna told them. “And when will it be ready for us to move in?”
“Lease signing and money package on Monday,” said Bruce Sherman.
“Then we roll up our sleeves and spit on our hands and turn the crews loose,” said Marvin Winslow. “Four months tops, I make it.”
“We could move in by the spring, then,” said Lorna.
“Looks like it,” said Winslow. “May be a spot of work or two left on some of the other structures, but yours should be a cinch by then.”
“Gene will be pleased,” Lorna told them.
They carried on for another ten minutes or so. I edged around the desk, staring at the various drawings. They showed viewpoints of the building from all directions and overhead as well. I waited quietly as more pleasantries were exchanged and the two men finally rose to leave.
“Oh, but here, don’t you need these?” Lorna asked, indicating the drawings.
“Oh, dear, no,” Winslow told her. “These are your copies. Pin them on the walls. Fill people with envy.”
When they were gone, Lorna settled back into her chair with a little sigh. “Well, what did you think of them?”
“They seemed to be pleasant enough chaps.”
“And the drawings?”
“They’re pretty. But a little incomplete, aren’t they?”
“How do you mean?”
“Aren’t you supposed to get a look at the actual building plans or whatever they’re called these days?”
“Why? I’m not going to be in there with hammer and saw and do the hard work. Maybe Gene will want to see them.”
She made me promise to call her at home after work. I got my car and drove on down to the Public Safety Building. Hamilton was up in his office and seemed to be in a friendlier mood. I asked him what the technicians had to say about the explosive device that had rocked Benny’s office.
“Probably dynamite,” he told me. “At least it was some sort of low-order explosive. You know anything about bombs?”
“Not this sort.”
“I don’t, either, but the techs said the device had what they call a pushing effect. The edges of cabinets, the typewriter remains, and other damaged items had a sort of mangled or bent edge to them. A high-order explosive, like plastic, they tell me, has more of a cutting effect, leaving sharp angles on whatever it tears through.”
“Does all that mean anything to you?” I asked him.
“Not much. Except that if it was dynamite it would be pretty easy for somebody to put their hands on it and pretty hard for us to trace. Another thing, it had some crude gizmos on it to make it explode on contact with a solid surface. The techs say it went through the glass window without detonating and probably went off when it hit the desk. But even if it had exploded when it went through the glass, it would have done a job on anybody sitting just inside.”
Hamilton also gave me a copy of the composite sketch that had been put together of the man who had tried to talk Timmy and Al into taking a ride on their way home from school two days earlier. I studied it some, but I’ve never been all that good at picking out the salient features in that sort of mock-up and be able to pick them out on somebody I meet on the street.
“Would you recognize this man if you bumped into him on an elevator?” I asked.
Hamilton shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. Like a lot of other things, it’s all a matter of percentages. I could spot a certain number of people who just might be the man in the composite. I could spot another certain number of people who probably could be dismissed. We’re dealing with the memories of witnesses and the interpretive skills of an artist cop. Although in this case the witnesses were kids, whose memories generally are more accurate than those of most adults. How does it look to you? Didn’t you see the man talking to them?”
“He was just a male-looking figure on a sidewalk, slightly bent over, talking to the boys. By the time I got close enough to have been able to tell anything more about him, he was in the car and the car was pulling away from the curb. I didn’t even get close enough to get the license plate number.”
“Well, take the composite with you anyhow. As long as you’ve got your nose into this thing, you might encounter the same man again. And if you live through the encounter, you might be able to help our artist modify the composite.”
From a pay phone down in the lobby I called my office in San Francisco. “How’s the weather?” I asked Ceejay.
“Clear and balmy. You know how the autumn can be down here. What’s it like up there?”
“Threatening to rain. But then that’s how the autumn is apt to be up here. Besides, it’s almost winter. Any messages or cries for help?”
“Nothing from around here, but you got a message from up there. A Mary Ellen Cutler called. Know her?”
“Yes, she has a studio in the same building my friend is in.”
“She wants you to get in touch with her. She said it was important. Not urgent, but important. She said you had checked out of your motel up there. Does that mean you’re on your way home?”
“Not yet. I just wanted to resettle somewhere else. I’ll let you know when I’ve found another place to stay.”
Ten minutes later, I was sitting in Mary Ellen’s studio with a mug of coffee in my hand. Mary Ellen was pacing around the studio, darting nervous glances at a frail figure with overly neat rust-colored hair and wispy chin whiskers who was hunched down in a chair across from me going through some manila file folders. The figure in the toupee and fake beard was Benny Bartlett.
THIRTEEN
“I heard noises from across the hall about an hour ago,” Mary Ellen said, “When I went across to investigate, I found this one banging file drawers open and shut.”
“Some of them stuck,” said Benny, not looking up from the file folders. “Bomb damage, you know. Besides, I was mad. I’ve been mad since about an hour after me and Dolly and the kids fled home last night with our tails between our legs, headed for the Edmonds ferry slip.”
“You had good cause to be fleeing.”
“Did I, now? Maybe Dolly and the kids, but…” He looked up at me then, blinking at me from behind the thick lenses of his eyeglasses.
“You know, Pete, I’m not a big, rough tough guy like you. I don’t carry guns and I can’t fight my way out of a wet paper bag, but goddamnit, I still like to think of myself as a man. With honor and integrity and pride. You know what pride is, buddy? Maybe you don’t even think about it, because your brute force keeps you out o
f situations where you have to think about it. But with me, it’s different. I guess you could say I’ve got a little man complex. My pride is important to me. Especially in front of Timmy and Al. How do you think it feels to be chased out of your own home under the watchful stares of a couple of your boys? And so I got mad and I started spouting off about it, and then when we got to Edmonds we’d just missed the ferry and I just said to hell with it and threw old Bronco Billy into reverse and drove back to the highway and found a motel where we could spend the night. And before we all settled in for the night, I told Dolly I was going to stay around here and fight this thing. I’d be sneaky about it if I had to. I’d get a disguise. But nobody’s chasing me out of Seattle. Nobody.”
“That toupee looks ridiculous,” I told him. “Every hair in place. Somebody could spot it a block away.”
“I wear a hat over it when I go out,” he told me. “As a matter of fact, you sort of look like hell yourself this morning. What were you doing last night?”
I looked away and sipped the coffee.
“And something else we did last night,” Benny continued. “We held a little family brainstorming session. The four of us. We hadn’t done that before, to do with these threats and shooting and everything. Dolly and I would have whispered conversations from time to time, but last night we threw the floor open to free discussion. I told them what you’d said, Pete, about it probably being something connected with a story I’d written sometime in the past or something I’d been working on recently. And we’re all of us batting it around here and there when out of the blue, Timmy, the genius of the family, said, ‘How about the ones that didn’t make, Pop?’ And I smacked my forehead and said to myself, Jesus Christ, the kid’s got something.”
“What did he mean?”
“What do you mean, what did he mean? You used to work for a newspaper, for Christ’s sake. He meant the stories I’d written or worked on over the years that never sold to anybody. And believe me, pal, I’ve had my share of those. You query an editor with a story idea and if he likes it he says, Sure, take a whack at it, but ninety-nine percent of the time that’s done on speculation. There’s no guarantee they’ll like or buy or run the finished article.
“That’s why I was banging through the file cabinets across the hall. Pulling out the limbo files. That’s what these are. That’s why I’m going through them right now. Searching for something I don’t even know I’m looking for. Hunting for a clue. You know what that’s like, don’t you, pal? Looking for something that’ll tell me who the sons of bitches are that are trying to run me out of my own hometown.”
Mary Ellen made a curt “Oh!” that implied her biting impatience with the male mind and sank into a nearby chair, cupping her chin with one hand.
“What about Dolly and the kids?” she demanded. “Where are they?”
“I don’t know,” Benny said, his face back down among the papers and photos in the file folders. “There was a lot of back and forth discussion about that. I wanted them out of town at first, but then Dolly said something else that made sense. She said I’d gotten a new lead worth pursuing from Timmy when we tossed it all out for family discussion. She said that was one of our great strengths, the way we do things as a family. I know it isn’t that way with everybody these days. But it works for us. We do things as a family. Through thick and thin, to dust off a creaky phrase.”
He looked up at me again. “And Dolly said maybe that was the way we should tackle this one as well. That if one of us was going to dig in his heels and refuse to run, then maybe that was best for all of us. And that’s how we left it, kind of up in the air like that. I told Dolly to think it over and to do whatever she thought was best. I told her to go on back to the ferry slip if she decides to and head for the hills. I told her I’d be here at Mary Ellen’s if she decides to stay.”
“You could at least have sent the boys up to Dolly’s parents,” I suggested, “while you and Dolly snuck back into town.”
“Not those two clowns, we couldn’t,” Benny told me. “They’d just sneak back on their own and put us under surveillance. I told you, Pete, you’ve been away for too long. You don’t know how those scamps think. They’ll go on up to Sequim with Dolly if she goes, but they won’t be shot out of town on their own.”
“How did you get back here?”
“Same as you. Had Dolly drive me to a rental car place.”
Mary Ellen and I exchanged glances. She raised one shoulder in resignation. I sipped coffee and stared at the ceiling.
Benny continued his search through the files. A few minutes later, he looked up at me and blinked. “How come you checked out of your motel? I tried phoning you there earlier.”
“I had a caller last night who sounded the same as the fellow who called you. As if he were talking from the bottom of a rain barrel.”
“Oh yeah? What’d he want?”
“He didn’t want anything that I could tell. He just said I was a dead man. ‘Bang-bang dead,’ is how he quaintly phrased it.”
“What do you think that means?”
“I guess he wants me out of town too.”
“You changed motels last night?”
“I would have, but Lorna suggested I spend the night at her place.”
He gave me a look.
“She has an extra bedroom,” I said.
Benny just stared at me. Then he whistled one of those things they called a wolf whistle when I was growing up. The sort of whistle sailors and truck drivers would whistle when they saw a pretty girl.
“Don’t be silly,” I told him. “I said she has an extra bedroom.”
“Sure.”
Mary Ellen gave me a look that said I wasn’t all that welcome around there any longer. Zither, of course. Zither would have told her what we were doing upstairs when the bomb had gone off. And I supposed there wasn’t much sense trying to continue the charade with Benny, because the next time Lorna talked to Dolly, I was sure there would be a vivid description of the night I spent at her place and there wouldn’t be any mention of an extra bedroom. It was the same sort of stupid predicament I used to get into in Seattle when I was growing up. Some things never change. Not in Seattle, at least.
It was twenty minutes later when Benny straightened, put down the file and checked through another, then said, “I think I’ve found something, Pete.”
Mary Ellen looked up from a workbench where she’d been sorting out some metal clasps, the sort of work you do when you want to put distance between yourself and others nearby. I got up and went over to Benny.
“What is it?”
“No, it’s not something I can show you, it’s what I can’t show you.” He stared off into the distance. “You know when I told you about the stones Mary Ellen had me stash away for her and how I couldn’t find them where I thought they should have been.”
“Yes, I remember. You thought somebody might have been going through your files.”
“That’s right. And now I’m sure of it. Somebody’s swiped some stuff.”
“What sort of stuff?”
“Photos, and a partly written article. I noticed the photos were missing first. It was about a family called Beyerly. I was working on what was to be one of a series of articles being run by one of the national mags. People, I think it was. About how the rich and influential live in different parts of the country. This man Beyerly lives, or at least used to live, up north, outside of Bellingham. He’d been a big banking muck-a-muck. He had an interesting family, a boy and a couple of daughters. Well, I noticed the photos of the family were missing. So I cross-checked the limbo writing file. All my notes and the partly written story are missing as well. If I were a detective, I’d find that very significant.”
“And with good reason. How come the story didn’t run? You sound as if you hadn’t even finished writing it.”
“That’s right. There was a death in the family. One of the daughters. There was something funny about that too. It was just called a sudden d
eath, only the family wouldn’t talk about it, and old man Beyerly packed enough clout in those parts so the coroner’s people and cops wouldn’t say zip about it, either. But I don’t think it was an accidental death.”
“Wouldn’t the cause of death be public record?”
“Ordinarily. And if anything good could have come from it, I would have gotten me a lawyer and made a stink about it. I was being given the triple runaround, though, and when I queried the magazine people, they scrubbed it. They wanted upbeat stories about the rich and spoiled, not the rich and tragic.”
“When did this happen?”
“Couple of years ago. But when you stop to think about it, why the hell would anybody want to pinch that particular material? I told the family the story was being dropped. It never ran. So why should somebody get all excited about it at this late date?”
“I think those are questions that need to be answered,” I told him. “These people live outside Bellingham? Do you have an address or phone number for them?”
“No, everything was in here together—raw notes and partial manuscript. But they’re well enough known in the area. You could just drive up and ask most anyone in town. They live out east somewhere, on a horse ranch. I think I read since then, though, that the old man died. Maybe the family scattered. Hell, I could drive on up there and ask around myself.”
“No, I’ll go. You’re in hiding, remember?”
“How could I forget it?” he asked, scratching the wig on his head. “These things aren’t all that much fun.”
“Do you have a pair of contact lenses?” I asked him.
“Yeah, I have a pair. I don’t like them much.”
“Do you have them with you?”
He nodded. “They’re in my suitcase.”
“Start wearing them whenever you go outside. Put away the glasses.”
“Why?”
“They’ll make you look ten years younger and go a lot further to change your appearance than the wig and fake beard will.”
“Hmmmm. I’ll give it a try.”
“Is there anything else missing from your files you know about?”