The Deader the Better

by G. M. Ford

  “So…what do you say?” I asked.

  He steepled his fingers. “I’ve been in remission lately…what with those Bellevue hicks and all.”

  “So…a week out of town.” I knew better than start in on the fresh air and sunshine shit with him. Kurtis was strictly indoorsey.

  “In the event of mishap?”

  “In the event of mishap, I personally guarantee to bail you out for any bailable offense and James, Junkin, Rose and Smith are riding legal shotgun for us until your attorneys arrive.”

  “I’m in,” he said.

  I left the café feeling like Lee Marvin, as Captain John Reisman, in the beginning of The Dirty Dozen, when he’s going from cell to cell deciding exactly which raving lunatic to take on the mission. I tried to remember the theme so I could hum it.

  Carl Cradduck and I went back to the days before no-fault divorce, when I earned my living kicking in doors, taking pictures and running for my life. They weren’t the kind of pictures you could take down to the local drugstore, so every PI had to have some guy who did his developing. Carl was mine. He’d had a one-man shop south of the city. Before losing his legs in an auto accident, he’d been a photographer for the AP. He’d been in Seattle visiting his sister when a teenage driver lost control and put him in a wheelchair for life. The way he saw it, where a cripple lived didn’t much matter, so he’d stayed.

  Over a twenty-year span, the camera shop had mutated into an electronics and stereo store, then into the first place I could remember that sold car alarms and those portable phones in a bag and satellite dishes, and then eventually turned into Advanced Electronics, Inc., a high-tech security firm specializing in the detection of audio/visual electronic monitoring devices. In other words, if you thought maybe the competition had you bugged, you called Advanced Electronics.

  He still ran an outlet for used electronic gear in Lake City. He claimed it was just a way to get some return on last year’s gear, but I knew better. He liked working the store, though he’ll never admit it. He was a guy who could pay cash for any house in the greater Seattle area but lived in four small rooms behind the store, because, like I said before, he figured where a cripple lived didn’t much matter. The front door buzzed as I stepped into the shop. He came rolling out from behind the counter.

  “Merry Christmas,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I got so excited about the festivities I’m just now taking solid food again.”

  The walls of the shop were covered with Carl’s old APphotographs. Vietnam. Kent State. Altamont. And here and there Carl with this guy or other. When you looked at him in the photos, you could tell he was about six feet tall, yet when you saw him sitting there in the chair, it didn’t seem possible that he’d ever been that big. He wore a red plaid Pendelton blanket across his lap and, unless he’d turned over a new leaf, a Beretta automatic rested somewhere within the folds of the blanket.

  We shook hands. “I heard you were going to be laid up for months,” he said. I pulled up my pants leg and gave him a look.

  Carl asked the professional’s question. “So…you got careless, or what?”

  I thought it over. “No,” I said. “Not really. Even when I look at it now, there wasn’t anything to get careless about.”

  I told him the story from beginning to end, leaving out only the personal shit between Rebecca and me. When I finished he said, “Well, don’t mind me saying, Leo, you look pretty fuckin’ bad for a guy who was careful.”

  “That’s not what I meant. What I got wasn’t careless; it was more like fixated. I had this mind-set that said nobody gets that upset over a fishing hole. And another one that said J.D. Springer was financially in over his head and that maybe he’d pushed an old man a bit too hard, and that people had noticed and that he was just doing that thing that people do when they’re ashamed of themselves. How they get paranoid and blame everybody else for the situation they’re in.”

  “And now?”

  “Now I’m asking myself, ‘What if?’ What if this doesn’t have anything to do with boat launches or fishing holes? What if J.D. was right? What if all these forces were conspiring against him for some reason or other?”

  “That’s a mouthful of ‘what ifs,’” he said.

  “Think about the overreaction,” I said. “Rebecca and I are closing up the place. We’re leaving town. If everything goes according to plan, they’re never going to see our asses again. Sure, we’ve bent a few noses by getting their eviction order postponed and by finding J.D.’s cause of death, but, you know, when it comes to finding out why or who killed J.D. Springer, we haven’t accomplished a damn thing. If anything, we’re more confused than when we started. And they try to punch our tickets. Why?”

  “So, other than my own special brand of Yuletide cheer, what do you want from me?”

  “Depends on how busy you are.”

  “Depends on how much money you’ve got.”

  “I can pay my way.”

  He pushed the button on his chair, rolled over to the door and turned the sign to CLOSED. “Come on in the back,” he said. He talked as he drove. “You know what my business has come to?”

  “What?”

  “Cameras in the women’s restroom. Yep…a big problem for big business. You just let one honey find out somebody’s been taking pictures of her wiping her twitchit and you’ve got a lawsuit to put the fear of god in you. They sue the business, the building, the city, everybody.”

  “No kidding?”

  “Oh no. Not only are we growing perverts in record crops, but there’s a big market for hidden camera shots out on the Internet. We find cameras all the time. It’s cheaper to pay us to check the place than to pay lawyers and judgments.”

  “What’s the world coming to?”

  “I’ll show you the tapes sometime. Got one girl, looks Armenian—”

  When I reckoned on how maybe I’d pass on that honor, he motioned for me to have a seat at the ancient kitchen table. “You got something more interesting than fat girls in the crapper?”

  “I think so…yeah.”

  “Lay it on me.”

  I told him what I had in mind. “I take it you’ve got no paperwork on this thing.”

  “You mean, like court orders for electronic surveillance…that sort of thing?”

  “Yeah, Sherlock…those little details that will keep us out of the lockup.”

  “’Fraid not,” I said.

  I expected a hard time. Instead, he said, “Good. What’s the layout?”

  He found an old blueprint; I used the back to draw a makeshift map of beautiful downtown Stevens Falls, Washington. He kept checking me for distances. How far was this from that, and that from the next thing. When I’d finished, he sneered at the drawing.

  “Christ…place like that, you give me a couple of days and we’ll be able to tell when and if anybody in that burg takes a dump. Here’s what I’ve got in mind…”

  When he finished outlining his plans, I stood openmouthed.

  “You can do that?”

  “Shit yes,” he said. “That’s why I started Advanced. So I could do stuff like this. I figured if we were going to keep running wires on people, we better know what we were up against in the way of detection systems. So I started a detection company. Anytime anybody invents anything new, they send it to me to see if I can detect it. I end up with everything. I’ve got stuff the FBI won’t have for another five years. But”—he held up a bony finger—“when it comes to the phones, you’re living in the past. Phones are a bitch these days. Fiber-optics make it almost impossible to isolate lines from the outside.”

  “I’ve got Kurtis Ryder to do inside work.”

  “And I’ve got Robby to handle the technical end, but that don’t help the phone problem. Problem with the phones is that most of the shit that’s been manufactured in the last ten years isn’t intended to be repaired. You’re supposed to use it till it falls apart and then just shitcan it and buy another one. So, for the most part, p
hones don’t come apart any more. They’re all just molded plastic. Which means you’d need Robby to go inside with Kurtis.” He shrugged. “Even with somebody as good as Robby, you figure fifteen minutes a phone, so that makes, what? An hour, hour and a half.”

  Carl was right. No way we could be inside anything for that long.

  “So what are we going to do?” I asked.

  “We’ll wire the offices instead of the phones. Then we wire their rides so’s we can keep track of what they do next.

  Where they go. That is what you have in mind, isn’t it? Stirring up the whole crock of shit to see which turds float.”

  “Nicely put,” I said.

  “So…what are you going to do to stir the pot?”

  “Depends on whether or not you can still get Social Security numbers.”

  “Went up to fifty bucks a pop.” His eyes narrowed. “You gonna steal Charlie Boxer’s old tax number, aren’t you?”

  “Sure stresses folks out,” I said. “Lenny Duke’s still in business, isn’t he?”

  Carl said he was. “Lenny’s got the same friggin’ problem I do. We both spent so many years creating a front business that the damn thing eventually took over and made more dough than the scams we were using it to cover for. I mean, the only reason I started the damn business was to cover the kind of thing I was doing for guys like you.” He shrugged.

  “You think that’s what they meant when they said crime doesn’t pay?”

  I allowed how I thought maybe they had something else in mind.

  “Who’s gonna answer the phone?”

  “I figured George could handle it.”

  He rolled over to the kitchen sink, opened the small drawer on the left and pulled out a small wire-bound notepad. “Write down the names of the people you need numbers for and where they work. I’ll call Buster when he gets home from work today.”

  “This means you’re in.”

  He waved a finger at me. “You know me, Leo…what’s that song say about being caught between the yearning for love and the struggle for the legal tender?”

  “I’ll pay you—” I started.

  He cut me off. “Me you can have for free. I’m so fucking bored, I was thinking about taking a cruise. Can you picture that?” Frankly, I couldn’t. “I’m gonna need Robby to do my legwork, and the van. You’re going to have to take care of him and pay expenses for the van and for the cherry picker and…”—he hesitated for effect—“any equipment we can’t retrieve is on you.” I agreed to his terms.

  “What else are you going to need?” I asked.

  “Someplace in that downtown area where we can park the van without attracting unwanted attention. We can monitor for up to four miles, but it’d be better if we were right there.”

  “I’ll work on it.”

  “We’re going to need to do the pole work on a Sunday. Nothing worse than having the real fucking phone company show up while you’re up one of their poles.”

  “I’ll plan around it,” I said.

  “When?” he asked.

  “It’s the twenty-seventh,” I said. “Thursday is the first. What say you plan on doing the pole work on Sunday the fourth? I’ll get in on Friday and have things set up.”

  He nodded. “What else have you got in mind for raising their blood pressure?”

  I told him. He actually smiled.

  “You’ve got a mean streak, you know that?” Coming from Carl, I took that as the highest form of praise. I turned the sign on the door back to OPEN on my way out. Not that long ago, Lake City Way had been a viable means of getting from Seattle to the eastside without driving on the bridges. Six or seven miles of car dealerships, muffler shops, crummy strip malls and bad Chinese restaurants that wound around the northern edge of Lake Washington all the way to the eastside’s interstate parking lot, I-5. No more. You know traffic is bad when you pass the same guy on a bicycle six or seven different times in the same half hour. I’d have been better off stuck on the bridge. At least the view would have been nice.

  Unlike Carl, Lenny Duke had evolved backward. As I understood it, he’d started out as a successful small-time counterfeiter. He made tens, they say. And good ones. When technological innovations made counterfeiting impossible, he’d moved into counterfeit documents. Driver’s licenses. Social Security cards. Passports. Whatever you were looking for, Lenny could put you together a facsimile that would pass muster. By the time computer technology made false documents a thing of the past, the printing shop he’d started as a cover for the document business was flourishing. Lenny, being an agreeable soul, rolled with the punches and went legitimate. More or less. Mostly less.

  The printing plant looked like an IBM showroom. The clattering noises had been replaced by the snap of paper and the whoosh of air, and Lenny’s two sons now ran the shop. Although he no longer toiled at the business he’d created, Lenny still kept a small office against the back wall. They stored paper on the roof.

  I should have been suspicious when the receptionist refused to open the door for me. The way she smirked and hurried back across the floor. When I yanked open the door, Lenny Duke was right there in front of me. Sitting behind a battered steel desk staring at a computer screen with his pants around his ankles. The screen was filled with a full-color picture of a blond woman in a red headband and a light coat of machine oil, engaged in what can most charitably be described as out-of-species dating.

  “You ever see anything like that?” he asked without taking his eyes from the flickering screen.

  “I never imagined you could train a dog to do that,” I said.

  “Dog, hell…,” he growled. “It’s a chimp.”

  I’ll never know for sure. My psyche was too battered for animal husbandry. I sat down on a folding chair at the end of the desk, where the screen was pointed the other way. I watched as he pushed some keys. He looked up at me. “Hey, Leo, Merry Christmas,” he said.

  “Hey, Lenny. Merry Christmas to you, too.”

  “Wait till you see this next one,” he said. “You still have those letters Charlie Boxer used to send out?”

  “The tax stuff?” He sat back in the seat. “Yeah, I’ve got’em. Why?”

  “I want to put together a set.”

  He snorted, and started to swing the screen my way.

  “Can you do it for me?”

  He pushed some more keys. “Sure. By when?”

  “Middle of next week.”

  “Sure. Leave the info on the desk.”

  I told him to call Carl later tonight for the names and numbers. He stopped me on my way out the door. “You want the ‘we were wondering about this or that’ letter or you want the ‘you’ll like federal prison’ special? You want the fear of god, you got to have somebody working the phone. With that one, they call the number.”

  I told him I’d take the latter.

  “You remember how Charlie ran it?” I asked. His eyes stayed glued to the screen. Mine to the ceiling.

  “Sure…he’d be just nasty as hell on the phone, and then he’d always give ’em an appointment a couple of weeks down the road. He liked for ’em to sweat it out. After everybody called, he’d fix the phone so’s anybody called, they went on to perpetual hold. Used to play the same Lennon Sisters song at ’em, over and over. Thought it was funny as hell.”

  I pulled out a business card and scribbled on it. “Use this for the phone number for the letters,” I said. He leered at the screen.

  I let myself out. I shot the receptionist a dirty look on the way by. She gave an exaggerated shrug. “They put him on the Net last Christmas, when he retired,” she said. “He only goes home to eat.”

  20

  ON NEW YEAR’S EVE, I THOUGHT OF CONSTANCE Hart and Wayne Bigelow. I pictured them wearing pointed hats in a conga line, blowing noisemakers and drinking champagne. Wondered whether Wayne got lucky, but had my doubts. Worse yet, I wondered about me getting lucky and had even more doubts.

  I sat up and switched off the TV. The ball h
ad dropped in Times Square an hour ago. After that, I’d alternated between checking the local festivities down at the Space Needle and an old Randolph Scott western on Channel Twenty-two. It was . The Fop Formerly Known as Prince was going to make another fortune.

  I stood in the dark by the side of the bed, dropped my jeans and shirt into a pile and crawled into the sack. “Happy New Year,” she said.

  “Happy New Year.”

  “I’m going back to work on Monday,” she said. “Tommy’s going to pick me up and drive me home.” Neither fact was surprising. She couldn’t drive because of the angle of the cast on her left arm, but she was going crazy hanging around the house. And Tommy Matsukawa had spent the past twenty years or so hoping I’d fall in a hole and disappear so he could bowl in Rebecca’s pagoda. It made complete sense.

  “I can second on autopsies and do paperwork. Who knows…I might even catch up with my paper-shuffling.”

  “Sounds good,” I said.

  Over the past four days we’d both made serious attempts to talk our way through our problem, but the same thing happened every time. We’re both clever, caring, educated people, with gifts of gab and enough social awareness to know that making the other party wrong is not the way to fame and fortune when it comes to conflict resolution. So we’d backed off, softened our stances and analyzed and wheedled and analogized and taken our feelings to whole new levels of abstraction, and yet every time, when I lay there at night unraveling the serpentine paths of our conversations, I could see that we never really got past the original question of who was right and who was wrong. Even yesterday, when we’d reasoned ourselves all the way to the very high state of agreeing to disagree, somewhere inside each of us, a voice whispered that we were right and the other poor misguided soul was wrong.

  “What about you?” she asked from the darkness.

  “You want to do this now?”

  She turned over and levered herself up on her good arm.

  “Is there a better time?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”