The Deader the Better

by G. M. Ford

  “Besides that,” he went on, “they’ve got no regard for the fishery. They ignore the catch limits. They gill net; they dynamite. Heck, I’ve seen ’em shoot fish. To them it’s just a resource that’s always been. No matter how many times you tell them, they just can’t imagine that the fish won’t always be there.” He skipped another rock. Five skips. “Guy that owns the tackle shop in town, name of McGruder…that SOB likes to brag about how one time he and his brother-in-THE DEADER THE BETTER | law wired two volleyball nets together, came down here and netted themselves up the better part of a ton of Chinook salmon in one night.” He shook his head sadly. “You came through town, didn’t you? You saw what they did to the land. How you going to be reasonable with people like that?”

  When I told him I didn’t know, he became even more animated.

  “And the bridge and stuff was just the beginning. Suddenly the electrical wiring in the new cabins—which they’d preinspected and approved—all of a sudden, it was no good. Nope. They waited until I had all the finish work done and then told me they’d changed their mind and none of it passed inspection. Heck, I’ve had the interior finish work on some of those cabins done three separate times.”

  It went on and on. All that was missing was the CIA involvement. As he recounted his litany of conspiracy, I couldn’t help but notice how different he seemed from the person I’d met a couple of years before. The guy with the twinkle in his eye and the very real sense that his life was charmed suddenly seemed mortal.

  He threw up his hands. “I should have been open for business six, eight months ago. Took me ten years to build my client list and now I’m losin’ ’em. One by one I’m losin’’em. I don’t know how much longer…” He caught himself.

  “You know, Leo, I almost called you a couple of times. I thought maybe…you know…a detective could find out what the heck is going on around here.” He looked up at the sky.

  “Except, of course, I wouldn’t be able to pay you, either.”

  I couldn’t decide whether he was just letting off steam or whether, at this point, I was supposed to volunteer to help him out, so I chose my words carefully.

  “If what you needed was a detective, the money wouldn’t be a problem,” I told him. “We could work that out.”

  Not carefully enough. I watched as his face took on that same knotted quality I’d seen back in the cabin. “You don’t believe me, do you?” he said suddenly.

  “If you’re asking me whether I think you’re lying, the answer is no.”

  “Oh…so what I need is a shrink instead of a private detective.”

  “If you’re asking my opinion, I think you need an attorney.”

  “I don’t have time for—”

  Above the rushing of the river, Claudia’s voice. “Jaaay Deee,” she called. Then again. “Jaaay Deee.”

  He brushed his hands together and then wiped them on his back pockets.

  “We better get back,” he said.

  He talked as we picked our way among the rocks. How he’d hired state-certified inspectors of his own. How he was taking it to court. Already won the wiring battle. Plumbing was next. How he’d been in contact with the state Attorney General’s Office. He stopped at the bottom of the boat ramp and pulled the Avon farther up out of the water.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to lay a bunch of stuff on you. I’m just frustrated.” He kicked a rock down into the water. I told him not to worry about it.

  “Gotten so bad, Claudia’s working at the daycare center over on the res. She and the kids putt over in this thing every morning.”

  The slap of little feet pulled my attention up the ramp. It was a race. Giggling madly, both children ran down the slope, nearly out of control, rushing headlong toward their father. J.D. met them halfway, scooping one up in each arm, swinging them around his head as they squealed with delight. He carried them the rest of the way to the top on his shoulders while they laughed and struggled to escape. At the top, he set the kids back on their feet. Rebecca was wearing her coat, twirling her keys. The little boy ran to Claudia’s side. Tugged on her dress. She scooped him up, resting him on her hip. He whispered in her ear.

  “Adam needs to use the potty,” she announced proudly. Adam swallowed his fist and kicked his feet. “Let me take him inside, then we can say goodbye.” She turned and started for the house. The little girl ran over and grabbed Rebecca by the hand.

  “Come on, Aunt Rebecca; let’s go watch.”

  Rebecca left in tow. She looked back over her shoulder. Look number forty-two. Hang in there, baby. This won’t take long. We be gone.

  J.D. and I wandered up toward the cars. The cleared area at the far end was the helipad. Let ’em keep the darn bridge. Said he was only about twenty hours short of his commercial chopper license. He explained how he was going to fly customers directly from Seattle. Groups of four. Wine ’em, dine’em, limit ’em out for a few days, back to the city for a new group. Eventually hire another guide, get both boats working. Eight cabins at a grand a day. Do the math. The newly bulldozed edge of the forest seemed embarrassed by its silver nakedness. Several of the trunks showed the brown gouge of the blade. Halfway up the hill, the frail tops of the hemlock shivered in the breeze. J.D. pointed toward the back of the clearing. A new aluminum shed, maybe thirty by forty. A couple of big black storage tanks. A white U stenciled on one. A white D on the other. A dusty Honda ATV. Big grassy traffic circle in the center of the area. Big enough that boats on trailers could easily be backed up next to the fuel tanks. Some sort of crude stone marker adorned the center of the circle.

  “See that pile of rocks?” J.D. asked.

  “Yep.”

  “Chappy,” he said. “I promised Ben we’d work around him.”

  We rode in silence. All the way back to the working bridge, back through Stevens Falls. Took the right fork over toward the coast, instead of the left toward J.D.’s and the end of the road before she broke the spell.

  “Sorry,” was what she said.

  “Nothing to be sorry about. You had no way of knowing.”

  She made a rueful face. “Not exactly what I had in mind for cheering you up.”

  No argument there. The Olympics filled the windshield. Looming slate gray against a cantaloupe sky. Two miles later, she gave me the rundown from Claudia. How this whole thing with the business seemed to have driven a wedge between them. How Claudia felt they were slipping apart and didn’t know what to do about it.

  “You and J.D. talk?”

  “A little.”

  “And?”

  And I ruminated for a moment on how Claudia spoke exclusively of relationships, while J.D. had confined his talk to the business. Why wasn’t I surprised?

  Then I gave her the rundown. Conspiracy Theory 1.

  “What was your take on it?” she asked when I’d finished. All I knew was that the more I thought about it, the more unlikely it seemed. Sure…I could see a few redneck fisherman getting real upset about losing their boat ramp to some tree hugger. And Lord knows there’s no telling what a crazed cracker will do behind half a gallon of Jim Beam. Yeah, I could see good old boys ripping out a fence and pushing a car in the river. No problem there. But town government? County government? They’re all conspiring? Over a fishing hole? Please.

  “That’s quite an operation they’re trying to put together there,” I said finally. “I think it’s most likely they just plain bit off more than they can chew.”

  She nodded in agreement.

  “Claudia wants him to ask his parents for money, but he won’t.”

  I didn’t mean it, but I said it anyway. “He’ll figure it out.”

  I leaned my head against the window and closed my eyes. Funny how people are. To keep our pain at bay, we create a hierarchy of suffering. For reasons I don’t understand, it seems like we automatically place our own brand of agony at the bottom of the order. Relegating it nearly to the status of the mundane. At the other end of the pain chart are the suffer
ings of others, whose tribulations always seem so much more romantic, so much more dramatic, and, in the end, so much more life-threatening than our own. Go figure.

  5

  FLOWING DOWN FOURTH AVENUE IN AN ADRENALINE MIST. The red bows on the lampposts whispering a reminder that Christmas isn’t optional. You will participate and you will have a good time. You will participate…Seems like it never ends. Before the Halloween pumpkins have even begun to rot, the Christmas decorations are everywhere. No wonder it drives us nuts.

  Rebecca had a list. A “Things to Be Buried with the Pharaoh” scroll. She worked it hard with a pencil. Crossing out, then erasing and then crossing out some more. I heard her rolling it back up and then heard the snap of her purse.

  “Done,” she announced. My heart soared like a pigeon.

  “Ready to head back to the car?” she asked, removing the other parcel I’d been squeezing with my forearms. That left me with one jammed under each arm and a shopping bag in each hand. She reached for another bag. I shook my head.

  “I’m good,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  We surfed down Fourth Avenue on a wave of hustling humanity.

  “I wanted to compliment you, Leo on how patient you’ve been.”

  Across the street, a four man steel drum band played a reggae version of “Deck the Halls.” The sound of Salvation Army bells came from several directions at once and, although there wasn’t a tree in sight, the air smelled of pine boughs.

  “Must be middle age,” I said.

  Distressingly, she agreed with me.

  We turned right down Olive, passing under the Monorail, then cut diagonally across Fifth Avenue and around the corner toward the Vance Hotel. The Explorer was parked about four blocks up Stewart. We were giving a scant nine bucks to park for the afternoon. In this neighborhood it’s a buck a block. Every block closer to Third costs you another dollar, until it peaks at fifteen bucks a pop to leave your car for a couple of hours. Joni Mitchell was right. You want good advice. Put up a parking lot.

  By the time we’d stuffed our second load of holiday cheer into the Explorer, rear visibility was a thing of the past. Hell, there was barely room for us as we bounced down Boren.

  “You ask the Boys to the party yet?” she asked.

  “I can’t find ’em. I asked around the square the other day and nobody’d seen ’em for a couple of weeks.”

  The Boys weren’t exactly boys. As a matter of fact, with the exception of Nearly Normal Norman, they were all pushing seventy. The remains of my old man’s political machine, Harold Green, George Paris and Ralph Batista had all managed to drink their way out of the middle class and into the streets. They’d been homeless since before there was such a thing as homeless. Back then, they’d just been bums. What I discovered, however, was that, if I kept them relatively sober, they made excellent street operatives, because they could hang around places for hours and nobody noticed; they were invisible.

  Nowadays, I try to find them a little work whenever I can. Between their meager monthly pension checks and what I throw their way, they manage to stay juiced nearly all of the time and out of the rain some of the time. Works for them. Rebecca and I had been thinking about throwing a little Christmas party for them. Maybe the week before the holi day. Wasn’t like you could have a big regular Christmas bash and just invite them along with the rest of the crowd.

  “You mind swinging by the Zoo on the way home?” I asked, naming their favorite hangout. She said she didn’t and took a hard left on Fairview.

  The Eastlake Zoo had occupied the corner of Lynn and Eastlake for as long as I could recall. It hadn’t always been called the Zoo, but it had always been a tavern. Fisher’s back in the forties. Then Mac’s and then Hank’s. I remember my old man bringing me into Hank’s and how I used to love to play the bowling machine. The one where you slid the little shuffleboard disks at the pins and how they folded up when you hit them. I could still hear the kaa-ching sound. That was back in the days when it was illegal to walk around with your beer and ladies were allowed to sit only in the booths. Back in my heyday, the seventies, it was called the In and Out. A place where you could always find a cold beer and a good blues band on Friday and Saturday nights. Rebecca pulled the car into a loading zone across the street and I hustled inside. Terry the bartender was polishing glasses behind the bar. I nodded on my way by. A dozen people were spread throughout the gloom, a couple of pool games in progress, a couple playing pinball, half a dozen smokers up in the balcony. But nobody I knew.

  “Ain’t been here in a couple of weeks,” Terry shouted.

  “None of ’em,” he added. Terry had bad feet. Always walked like he was barefoot in broken glass. He motioned me up to the far end of the bar. “They found a crib.”

  “Really? Where?”

  He told me.

  “You’re shittin’ me,” I said.

  He held his hand over his heart. “Swear to God,” he said.

  “Stopped in last week to see for myself. Ya can’t miss it, Leo. Gotta see it wid your own eyes.”

  “You go in?”

  “Hell no. No way in hell you get me in there.”

  We parked way up the street so’s not to blow their cover. Two square condos. Identical and ultramodern. Brown. Built on a highly questionable piece of ground between a freeway exit and the base of Capitol Hill. Everybody remembers when these two started sliding down the hill because they’d closed the whole northbound half of 1-5 for three days while they figured out what to do next. What that did to traffic will live in commuter infamy for years.

  Generally, any house that slides thirty feet downhill is firewood, and anybody who has the misfortune to be inside becomes the dear departed. What saved both the occupants and the structures was the sheer enormity of the piece of ground that moved. The entire section of hill upon which the structures stood, at least three acres square, had separated from the surrounding earth as if sliced by a spade, and slid the better part of thirty feet closer to the highway. Everything went in one piece. The concrete sidewalks showed no cracks. Hell, from what I could see from behind the police barrier, the shrubbery was still alive down there. The original fear had been that any further slippage might result in the condo’s sliding the rest of the way down the hill and landing on the interstate. That’s why they shut it down. After surveying the scene and crunching some numbers, state and federal engineers, however, assured the city that were further slippage to occur, the hill and the houses would surely take the steeper line down the gully to the south and therefore posed no danger whatsoever to the highway. I remember reading in the paper that the reason the condos hadn’t been razed was because the insurance companies were suing the county, claiming that building permits should never have been issued for such an unstable piece of property. The county was countersuing…yamma…yamma.

  Rebecca peered down at the square roofs and laughed out loud. “No way I’m going down there,” she said. She held a hand to her throat and chuckled some more.

  “I’ll either be here or in the car. Give the lads my love.”

  I had a feeling that this was going to be something worth seeing, but Rebecca Duvall wasn’t the type of person one talked into or out of anything, so I didn’t bother trying. I said I’d tender her regards to the troops and set about looking for how it was they got down there. Two things I knew for sure. First, the path wouldn’t be hard to find. Stealth required just a bit too much attention to detail for this group. Second, it would not be hard to negotiate. These guys got way too drunk for anything even remotely athletic. If they could get there, Stephen Hawking could get there.

  It was like I figured. A hundred yards up the sidewalk, I stepped over the cable guardrail onto a dirt path that meandered along the top of the freeway wall. Nice and wide. Chain-link fence to hold on to. Following the contour of the land downward until, eventually, I took a right through a grove of scrub oak and stepped onto the lawn of the nearest condo. Fine, unless you turned and looked back at the hill,
where a wall of mud loomed overhead like a cresting brown tidal wave. I made a mental note not to look in that direction and started across the patch of grass separating me from the porch.

  From the street above, the structures appeared to be sitting more or less on the level. From here it was obvious that they sloped away from the hill at a fairly substantial angle. I walked gingerly toward the door. I knocked hard. Silence.

  “Shhhhhhhhhhhh,” I heard. “Shhhhhhhhhh.” Then the sound of feet. I knocked harder and longer.

  “Open up. It’s Leo,” I said. More scuffling feet and then a watery red eye at the peephole. A full thirty seconds of fumbling before the door finally swung open. Ralph Batista had once mustered the longshoreman vote for my old man. Pound for pound he was the biggest lush of the lot and could, in any given day, put away more booze than anyone I’d ever met. He was full-scale hammered and having trouble with the slope, weaving and sliding back along the incline until his grip on the doorknob jerked him to a stop. “Leo,” he slurred. “Whatcha…Hey hey hey…”

  I checked my watch. Bad timing. Three-thirty-five. I’d caught them at the low point in their drinking day. Especially if they had a crib. Having a crib completely changed their drinking habits. While the average citizen would relish being able to sleep dry and warm, the boys saw the windfall in totally different terms. To them, having a place meant they didn’t have to drink in bars, which, in turn, meant that the price of booze went radically down, which likewise meant they could drink even more than usual. Not only that, but a crib meant a place where they could pass out whenever they wanted without risking waking up at either the King County Jail or the Union Gospel Mission. Yeah, three-thirty was just about nap time for this crew.

  I kept one hand on the wall as I stepped inside. The floor listed forward at a twenty-degree angle. I kept my butt back and my steps short as I worked my way past Ralph and tottered into the living room. The place was completely furnished. It hadn’t occurred to me, but I guess if your house slides thirty feet down a hill with you in it, you don’t call Bekins to come back for your furniture. You just take the insurance money and thank the fates. At the far end of the room, a striped mattress had been thrown up against the double glass sliding doors. Kind of a safety barrier, I guessed. In case a guy worked up a head of steam on his way across the room and couldn’t stop. Billy Bob Fung and Big Frank sat on the floor leaning back against the mattress, chins on chests and a bottle of gin on the carpet between them. In the high-rent district along the left wall, everybody had his own bottle. Gravity had pushed Norman, Harold and George down to the low end of a black leather sofa, where they sat pressed together hip to hip, heads loll ing. In front of the sofa, a rosewood coffee table with a glass top. They’d nailed a two-by-four to the floor at the far end to keep it from sliding and cut five inches off the near legs to level it. At least three of them were snoring. The air smelled like wet dog.