by Jack Lynch
I found her name listed in the Seattle telephone directory, which surprised me some. If Marietta Narcoff had the sort of money that George the bartender implied she had, I wouldn’t have expected her to have her name in the telephone directory. When I dialed the number, there was no answer. I drove on back into downtown Seattle. It was after four o’clock by then and I tried phoning her again. This time she answered. I introduced myself and told her I had some information she might find of value.
“Information you’re selling, Mr. Bragg?”
She had a low, rich voice that sounded as if she got a lot of fun out of life.
“No, not selling, Miss Narcoff. Passing it out free of charge.”
“But if you’re a private detective, you root up information for a fee, do you not?”
“Ordinarily, I do. But this information I’d give you is incidental to the real job I’m on. Maybe you can give me some information in return. That would be fee enough. And also I’d like you to look at a photograph.”
“Do I smell a whiff of attempted blackmail here?”
“No, Miss Narcoff.”
“Good, because I never would pay blackmail money for any photographs somebody might have taken of me, no matter how compromising.”
“These are perfectly decent photographs,” I told her. “A freelance writer-photographer took them in the course of an assignment. They’re family photos. I want to show them to you to see if you can identify somebody in them.”
“You do spin an intriguing tale, Mr. Bragg.” She paused a moment, and I heard what sounded like the turning of pages. “Are you, by any chance, related to Lorna Bragg?”
I cleared my throat. “She’s my ex-wife.”
“How droll. I must meet you, then.”
She gave me directions to Luckner Plaza, an eight-story building on Third Avenue, west of the Post-Intelligencer plant. It was a mixed office-and-residential building that had been put up in the past dozen years or so. Marietta Narcoff lived on the top floor in a roomy apartment with burgundy carpeting, comfortable, dark old furniture and a spectacular view to the west of Elliott Bay and, on a clear day, the snowcapped Olympic Mountains beyond.
Beverly Beyerly had been in her early twenties when she took her own life, and Benny had told me Roger Hampton was six or eight years older but young looking for his age. I expected Marietta Narcoff to be in her late twenties or early thirties. That had been kind of me. She had, by now, sailed easily into her forties and didn’t go out of her way to conceal it. She was a large woman, five feet eight or nine inches tall. She’d gotten a little thick through the hips and had some lines around her eyes and neck, which a good plastic surgeon could have tucked away easily if that sort of thing were important to her. She had long brunette hair, a wide mouth that smiled most of the time and a look around her eyes that made me feel that she did indeed enjoy a drink now and then. She wore dark slacks and an off-white knit sweater that clearly showed she wasn’t wearing a bra, even though her breasts could have used one. That didn’t bother her, either. She was one of the most completely at ease women I’d ever met. She offered me a drink, which I declined, poured herself a glass of white wine, settled comfortably in a corner of a long mohair sofa near the chair she’d directed me to and began to grill me.
“When were you and Lorna married?”
“A long time ago.”
“Here?”
“We started out here. Broke up in San Francisco.”
“Why did you break up?”
“She left town with a musician.”
“Do you keep in touch?”
“We ran into each other a few evenings ago for the first time in many years.”
“How does she seem to you now?”
“A lot younger than I would have expected.”
“Were you civil to each other?”
“Yes, we were civil to each other.”
She would have been a good cop. She picked up on something about the way I answered that. “Have you been intimate with each other since you met the other evening?”
I couldn’t believe the way things were going. I wondered if she was going after the gory details as Beverly Beyerly had.
“You don’t have to answer that,” she continued. “It was discourteous of me to ask. But I’m insatiably curious about people. Did either of you remarry?”
“I haven’t. Lorna did—a couple of times, she says.”
“Lorna remarried? Why does she still call herself Bragg?”
“She isn’t married now. She told me she liked my name in combination with her own given name better than she liked the names of the other people she’d married or her own maiden name. So after the last marriage she changed it back to Bragg. It all sounds a little silly to me, but there you are.”
“It sounds deeply complex to me.”
“I doubt that it is. I don’t think Lorna is a deeply complex person. Where did you meet her?”
“She catered my sister’s most recent marriage. She’s very good at what she does.”
“The catering, you mean?”
Marietta Narcoff didn’t answer right away but held her wineglass up toward the dim light given off by a floor lamp of Italian marble over beside the windows. The only other light came from a small lamp on a table across the room. She seemed to prefer a deeply shadowed setting. It had started raining again, in peppery little flurries against the tall windows.
“No,” she said finally. “I didn’t necessarily mean the catering. She could be successful at any number of things. I was speaking more of the way she manages people.”
“People working for her, you mean?”
“Those and others. How long were you two married?”
“Several years.”
“You should know that better than I, then.”
I shrugged. “Maybe I can’t, or rather couldn’t, see that. Maybe that’s why she took off with the horn player.”
She guffawed. “I’m sorry. But is that what he was?”
“With the Stan Kenton orchestra.”
The guffaw turned into a fruity giggle. “This is terrible of me. But you must see the humor in it yourself or you wouldn’t tell me about it.”
“I can sort of smile about it now. It didn’t seem all that funny at the time.”
“Of course not. When one party in a marriage abandons the other…well, never mind about that. Are you sure you wouldn’t care for a drink?”
“No, I’m not so sure any longer. The only thing is, yesterday I was questioning a woman who has a horse ranch up near Bellingham. The only way she’d talk to me was over a bottle. I had enough to drink, so I had to crash at a motel up there overnight.”
She got up with a big, generous grin on her wide mouth. “I promise I won’t give you that much to drink. What would you like?”
“I’d ask for a martini if we were going to continue talking about my failed marriage. But instead of what I’d like, I’ll have a gin and tonic, if you have it.”
“I have it. I’ll even join you with one.”
She went out of the room. I heard her fussing around with ice and things, but it wasn’t just in the next room. She had a lot of space to herself. She came back with the drinks. She handed me mine and turned on another lamp on a stand next to my chair, then returned to the sofa.
Now I could see her face better. I had the feeling she was enjoying herself, and I still hadn’t really figured out how I was going to tell her that a man who looked half her age was going to try to bilk her out of some money. She, along with the rest of the town, had me a little off center.
“All right,” she told me. “I’ve been nosy enough. Why don’t you tell me what you came to tell me.”
“You’re a mind reader.”
“You’re getting edgy. I know my men well enough to tell when they’re getting edgy. And I don’t like men to get nervous around me. I like them too much for that.”
“Maybe after the story I have to tell you, you won’t like them as much.”
“Try me.”
So as briefly as I could, I told her about the conversation I’d had the day before with Barbara Beyerly. Then I told her about the troubles Benny had been having and his connection with the Beyerly family. And then I told her what George the bartender had told me, well, some of it anyhow, and took the photo of Roger Hampton out of the envelope I carried it in and asked her if he was the same person she knew as Kirby. She stared at it for a very long moment before replying.
“Yes, that’s Buddy. At least that’s the name he’s using now. Buddy Kirby.” She got up and turned on a few more lamps here and there, then sat back down and studied the photo again. “Can there be any mistake about all this?”
“I doubt it. The Beyerly woman wasn’t any too happy telling me the story she told me. I don’t think it’s anything she would have made up, even with a stranger like me. And I’ve known Benny for a couple of decades or more. He hasn’t seen this photo to positively identify it as being the man he knew as Roger Hampton, but he directed me to the negative and this is the only young man who appears in the photos showing the woman who took her own life.”
“How old was the woman who took her own life?”
“Twenty-one or -two. Something like that.”
She sat in thought for a moment, then got up and went across the room to a buffet against one wall and took a filter tip cigarette from a red lacquered box. She returned to the sofa, lit the cigarette and stared out the windows.
“Well, I’m not twenty-one or -two,” she said finally. “And I certainly wouldn’t be apt to take my own life over any bends my relationship with the man I know as Buddy Kirby might take. But I’ll hand it to you, Bragg. You did prompt me to light up. I’m trying to quit. This is the first cigarette I’ve had in five days.”
“I’m sorry about that. Quitting’s tough. I had a terrible case of the flu one year. This was when Lorna and I were still married. I was sick enough so I didn’t want to smoke or do anything else except maybe die. It was a good start, so I kept at it. Went three and a half months without a cigarette.”
She looked across at me. “Then you went back to them?”
I nodded. “The day Lorna left town with the horn player.”
“But you’re not smoking now?”
“No. About a year and a half after I started up again, a doctor noticed a funny little growth inside my mouth. He told me it was the sort of thing that could turn cancerous. He said he could remove it surgically, but it would just come back again if I kept smoking cigarettes. That was the day I quit, many years ago. For good.”
“Good for you. Maybe that’s what all of us need. A funny little growth inside the mouth. But then I’ve never been all that heavy a smoker. Less than a pack a day.” She stubbed out the cigarette in a large onyx ashtray beside her. “As for Buddy Kirby, I don’t know what to think. It wouldn’t surprise me if he were after my money. Some of it, at least. I have to expect that sort of thing. I know it’s like robbing the cradle, a woman my age frolicking around with a boy his age.”
“My friend told me he’s several years older than he looks.”
“It doesn’t matter. We have a good time together. But there’s never been any sort of talk about marriage. I’ve been quite candid with him. I like his body and his sense of humor. He’s good company.”
“How did you meet him?”
“Through a friend. I’ll have to ask my friend a bit more about him. And I’d like the name of that woman in Bellingham you spoke to. And a telephone number where you can be reached.”
I told her about Mary Ellen and gave her the phone number. She couldn’t tell me much more about the man she knew as Buddy Kirby. Nor did she have an address for him. Or a phone number.
“You’ve been running around with this cowboy for two months and you don’t know where he lives or have a phone number for him?”
“He calls here every morning around nine, and we talk about our plans for the day. We don’t spend all our time together. We don’t even see each other every day. He told me he shares an apartment with three other men in West Seattle. He said all of them are sort of in between jobs. Their phone isn’t connected right now.”
I rolled my eyeballs. Her smile wasn’t as generous when I left as it had been when I’d arrived. I’d cut into her fun some. She told me she’d let me know anything else she might learn about her young boyfriend. I thanked her and took the elevator down and drove over to see the woman who a dozen years earlier had left San Francisco on the arm of a horn player and started me back on cigarettes.
EIGHTEEN
They were holding a late-afternoon rally up in the Scandia Farms offices. A secretary told me a business conference was in progress in Gene Olson’s office, which was just beyond the reception area and clearly visible beyond a glass partition. Olson and Lorna were in there, along with Marvin Winslow, the cheery-faced chap with the scraggly moustache from Potlatch Bay. Also in there, which caused me to raise an eyebrow, was the bullet-headed man with the scowling face who’d been on the phone the day I went up to the Jackson Detective Agency.
The meeting broke up about ten minutes later with a lot of hand shaking and good-natured banter. As they filed out, the Jackson operative and I locked eyes a moment without exchanging any greetings. Winslow tipped his bowler hat to me and went out with the Jackson man. Olson and I exchanged hellos, and Lorna tugged me off down a short hallway to her own office.
“I seem to have done about all I can do for one day,” I told her. “How about some dinner before I take you home?”
“I’d love it.”
I helped her into the forest-green tweed jacket that matched her skirt. She also wore a dark-orange-colored silk blouse. The jacket and a cameo brooch that clasped the blouse at her throat suggested a certain demureness. It was a little hard to tell what sort of role Lorna was into from day to day. She had on a pale shade of lipstick that matched her blouse and highlighted the burnished color of her hair. She was one fine-looking woman, my ex-wife. She watched me staring at her and gave me a different kind of smile.
“Are you starving?” she asked.
“Not really.”
“Then I’d like to show you something.”
We went down to the garage, where I’d left the car. “Where are we going?”
“I want you to see the Potlatch Bay site, out along the ship canal. We had a few last-minute details to iron out. Monday, we and the others coming into the project are signing the leases. We’re having a big luncheon at the Olympic Hotel. Inviting the press and everything.”
I drove us out to Elliott Avenue and headed north, toward Ballard. It was raining harder now, drumming down on the car roof. Lorna scrunched over closer and rested one hand on my leg.
“Did you know that the stumpy fellow with the sour puss who was in Olson’s office with Winslow is with a private detective agency here in town?”
“Mr. Brand. Yes, I know. He’s the one who ran the credit check on us.”
“Credit check? That doesn’t sound like the sort of work he would do. What do you need a credit check for?”
“Financing for the Potlatch project. Interest rates are just blistering these days. If you’d been to your friendly local banker asking for a loan recently, you might have noticed.”
“So who does the Jackson man work for?”
“Potlatch. They’re tapped into a money source.”
“The developer provides his own financing? That sounds a little different.”
“You have to be creative in order to borrow big sums these days. Potlatch found some sources in Hong Kong, some of those people anxious to liquidate and get out of there before the Chinese take over. That’s why we’re getting a break on the interest rates. They’re willing to take less just to get their money working over here. Seattle First Trust is acting as agent for the fund transfer. We’ll pay an advance fee for the loan, but we’re getting the money at such a bargain-basement rate that Gene and I even considered asking for a larger loan
than we needed, just so we could invest in Treasury bonds. It could almost be like a no-interest loan if we managed that.”
“So why don’t you?”
“The Potlatch people discourage it. They have other projects they want to finance with the same money source.
“Oh God, Peter, this rain. You know what I’d like to do?”
“No, what?”
She gave my leg a squeeze. “Look. Up ahead there, on the right.”
Up ahead there on the right was a two-story U-shaped structure that called itself the See Fair Motel. It was a little play on Seafair, what they called an annual summer celebration of parades, hydroplane races, and general carrying on.
“It even has a vacancy sign,” Lorna giggled. “Let’s go there. For a quickie.”
“Right now? Are you nuts?”
“No, I’m not nuts. I’ve reason to celebrate this day. It’s pouring rain, and that alone is enough to make me want to get under some sheets. And on top of that it’s getting so every time I’m around you I just want to climb out of my clothes. Do it. Turn in.”
She reached as if to turn the steering wheel herself. Maybe she had the right idea. We never used to do that sort of spontaneous thing when we lived together. I parked in front of the office. There was a small market next door.
“You register,” Lorna told me, ducking her head to get out of the car. “I’ll get some champagne.”
I had to wait for the clerk to finish processing another man’s registration. I handed over my American Express card and began filling out the registration slip. I was signing the Amex tag when the door opened behind me.
“Hurry up,” Lorna told me. “You can finish that later if you’re not done yet.”
“I’m done,” I told her. The clerk handed over our key with a straight face.