Sick Man

by Paul Spencer

  What next? I had to talk to someone, but who? I knew I should call the cops, but after the time I’d already spent with them today, I wasn’t ready to go there yet. I still had Casey’s card in my pocket. The cops had taken my cell phone, but I was old-fashioned enough to have a land line, so I gave her a call.

  “Casey Raife.”

  “Ms. Raife, it’s Mick Wray. Something weird just happened.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I told her about coming home and finding the coaster.

  “Where is it now?”

  “On my coffee table.”

  “Good. Leave it there. Don’t touch it again. You need to call Buchanan and tell him.”

  I was afraid she would say that. “Yeah, I know.”

  “And you need to find somewhere to stay tonight. You can’t stay there. Do you have some place to go?”

  “I think so,” I said. There were a couple of buddies I could call, and if they didn’t come through I could just about afford a motel room.

  “Good. I’m going to hang up now. Call Buchanan. And call me back if anything else happens.”

  “Okay, thanks,” I said, but she had already ended the call.

  I still remembered the Portland Police detectives’ office number from my days as a defense attorney, so I gave them a call.

  “Portland Police.”

  “Can I speak to Detective Buchanan, please?”

  “He’s not here,” the dispatcher drawled.

  “It’s important. It’s to do with the body you found in Mount Tabor Park this morning.”

  That changed his tune. “Hold on, I’ll connect you to his cell phone.”

  I heard ringing, then Buchanan answered.

  “Buchanan here. Who is this?”

  “Detective Buchanan, it’s Mick Wray.”

  “This better be good, Wray. I just sat down to dinner with my wife.”

  “I think you’ll want to hear it,” I said. I told him about the coaster.

  “Are you serious? You’re not fucking with me?”

  “It was right there when I got home.”

  “Isn’t that convenient?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Do you think I’m an idiot, Wray? You drink at Holman’s so often they should charge you rent. Now a death threat just happens to show up to throw us off your trail. Written on a Holman’s coaster. Honestly, I thought you were smarter than that. You could at least have used plain paper.”

  “Fuck you, Buchanan. I called you with evidence in a murder case. If you don’t want it, just say so. I’ll throw it in the trash.”

  “All right. I’ll send someone over to collect it. Don’t touch it until he gets there.”

  “What about some sort of protection for me?”

  “Get a gun.” He hung up.

  I had nothing better to do while I waited for someone to collect the coaster, so I tidied up the mess the cops had left when they searched my place. I started with the kitchen. It didn’t take me long to get my few dishes put back in the cupboards. At least nothing appeared to be broken. I checked the freezer. Sure enough, the weed was gone.

  I was just about done when someone knocked on my door. My pulse quickened.

  “Who is it?”

  “Portland police.”

  I went over to the door and looked through the spy hole. There was a uniformed officer outside. I hadn’t been that happy to see a cop in a while. I let him in.

  “Where is it?”

  I showed him the coaster. He picked it up with a pair of tweezers, looked at both sides, then put it in a clear plastic evidence bag.

  “Was there anything else?” he said.

  “No, just that.”

  “Okay. Thank you.”

  He left. I closed the door behind him and leaned against it. Who was I going to call? I’d made some reasonable friends in the last couple of years, once I’d got my life back together. But I didn’t want to drag them into this new craziness. I had avoided my friends and colleagues from my old life since my flameout, mostly out of embarrassment. But I figured I had to get past that now. I needed help.

  Chapter 8 – A Time For Friendship

  I decided to call Tony da Costa. Tony was an investigator I’d worked with often back when I was practicing. I chose Tony for two reasons. First, he was the best investigator I knew, and I needed someone good to help me figure out why someone wanted to kill me. And second, he was one of the few people who didn’t abandon me when I was on the downward spiral. Maybe he’d stand by me now. I dialed his number.

  “This is da Costa,” he said. I could hear music and voices in the background.

  “Tony, it’s Mick Wray. I need to talk to you.”

  “Mick? Really? Holy Christ, it’s been a while. It’s good to hear your voice, man. What’s up?”

  “It’s a long story. Can we meet somewhere?”

  “Yeah, sure. I’m at Victory. Do you want to come over?”

  “Yeah, that works. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  I hung up and grabbed my coat. On impulse, I threw a change of clothes in my backpack and took that too. Even if Tony couldn’t put me up, I wasn’t coming back here tonight.

  When I got to the apartment building door, I stopped and peered outside. Full dark had settled in, and I wouldn’t have been able to see anyone even if they were out there. I took a deep breath and hurried over to my car, then got inside and locked the door.

  My car was a late eighties BMW 3 series with 210,000 miles on it. I’d had it since I was in law school. The paint had faded off in patches, and the window trim leaked. Given how much it rained in Portland, the car’s interior smelled like wet carpet all year round. It ran well, though. I’d always enjoyed working on cars, and back in my old life I spent my spare time restoring old sports cars for a hobby. I didn’t have the room or the money for hobby cars anymore, but I kept my hand in on the old Beemer.

  Victory was only a couple of miles away, down on Division. I took the back streets so I could see if anyone was following me. Portland is laid out in a grid pattern, which made it easy to see if anyone was behind me. I must have checked the rear view mirror fifty times, but no headlights appeared. I parked a block down from Victory on 37th, grabbed my backpack, and hurried inside.

  I looked around the room. As usual, the place was crowded and noisy. I hadn’t been in there for a while, but it hadn’t changed. Yanni, the owner, was working tonight. Yanni was an artist before he got into the bar business, and he’d done the interior himself. The place looked like an old Parisian cocktail bar, only with artwork and drapes inspired by George Orwell. The food was great, the drinks were great, and Yanni was drop-dead gorgeous. I would have hated him if he weren’t such a nice guy.

  Tony waved at me from a table near the back. I went over to meet him, glad to see he was alone. He sprang out of his chair and hugged me.

  “Mick, great to see you, man,” he said. “It’s been what, two years?”

  “More than three. Good to see you too, Tony. Thanks for meeting me.”

  “No problem, man. Tell me what’s going on.”

  We sat down. Tony was about five ten, thin as a rake, and he moved like a whippet. He claimed he’d been a boxer as a kid in Mexico. He didn’t look big enough to me, but he sure was quick, and his nose looked like it had been broken more than once.

  A waitress walked past our table, and Tony held his empty glass up. She stopped.

  “I’ll take another,” he said.

  “Aviation Martini?” she asked him.

  “Yes. Mick, are you drinking these days?”

  “Yeah, I’ll take a beer.” I squinted at the draft list on the chalkboard by the bar. “You got a good Pilsner on tap?”

  “We’ve got Radeberger.”

  “I’ll take a pint of that.”

  Tony looked at me funny, but he didn’t say anything. I knew what he was thinking. Booze had been center stage in my collapse. I’d always liked a drink, but I threw my so
ul into it after Ciaran died. At my worst I drank better than a fifth of vodka a day. Over the last couple of years I’d managed to dial it back a little, but I still hit it hard too often. At least I didn’t start at breakfast any more.

  The waitress left. Tony leaned forward on the table.

  “What’s going on, Mick?”

  I told him the whole story, from me clocking Aaron to the coaster under my door. Our drinks appeared during the telling. I finished my story and took a long pull on my beer.

  “You gotta be fucking kidding me,” Tony said.

  “No shit. That’s what happened. I’m sure that prick Malone still thinks I did it.”

  “Crazy, man.” He sighed. “What are you gonna do?”

  “I need to figure out who wants to kill me. I need to start with why. That’s why I called you. I figured we could bounce some ideas off each other, like we used to.” I paused for a moment. “And I need somewhere to stay. I don’t want to go back to my place tonight.”

  “Hey, no problem. You can stay with me, man.”

  “Thanks, Tony. I appreciate it.”

  “Have you eaten yet?”

  “No.”

  “Finish your beer. We’ll grab some takeout at the Thai joint and head back to my place.” He drained his martini, stood up, and threw some cash on the table. I chugged about half my beer and followed him out the door.

  Tony lived in a small house on Cesar Chavez Boulevard. He’d moved in when it was still called 39th Avenue, and he was just about the only local resident happy about the name change. But there weren’t many Mexicans left in this part of town now the money was moving in.

  We stopped at Authentic Thai and made small talk while we waited for our takeout. You can’t swing a cat in Portland without hitting a Thai restaurant, and most of them are good. Authentic was no exception. All I’d eaten all day was the slice of pizza I grabbed on my way home from the detention center, and the smells were killing me.

  The rain had picked up again by the time we got our food. Tony’s place was only a couple of blocks away. We walked quickly, our hoods up, not talking.

  We shook our coats off in Tony’s mud room, hung them up, and went inside. Tony’s place was warm and cozy. Like most of the places around here, it had been built in the Twenties. The previous owner had remodeled it and flipped it, so it was in good shape. Tony kept the place nice, too. He lived alone, mostly because he loved women too much to ever settle down with just one.

  I put the food on the dining table. “Where do you keep the plates?”

  “Sit down, Mick. I’ll get them. Do you want a beer?”

  “Sure.” I sat.

  Tony brought our plates and beers, and we ate in silence for a while. Tony shoveled curry and noodles down like it was going out of style. He’d always had a huge appetite, but he never put on any weight. God knows where he put it all.

  I ate my fill, then sat back and sipped my beer while Tony ate some more. When he finished, we cleared the table. Tony grabbed us two more beers, and we headed for the couch.

  “What do you think,” he said. “Any ideas?”

  “No. None. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I don’t even know what you’ve been up to for the last couple of years. Who have you been pissing off?”

  “Tony, I hardly even talk to anyone these days. I go to work, I come home, I try to keep my head down. That’s it.”

  “So what’s work? What are you doing?”

  “I’m at United Streetcar. I make suspension assemblies.”

  “That’s quite a journey. From lawyer to mechanic. At least you put all that time you spent screwing with cars to good use.”

  “Yeah, well, they were hiring.” I liked my job well enough, but it’s not like I had a lot of choice. Not many companies wanted to hire publicly disgraced ex-attorneys.

  “Are you sure you haven’t pissed anyone off there?”

  “Not enough for them to want to kill me. No, they’re a good crew. No way it’s a work thing.”

  “What about Sarah?”

  “Come on, Tony. You got to bring that shit up?”

  “We’re trying to figure out who wants you dead, man. And she blamed you for Ciaran. Sorry if I hurt your feelings.”

  “Yeah, you’re right. But no, not her. That whole shitfight about Ciaran is over. She knows there was nothing I could do to stop it happening. And she’s still sitting pretty with lover boy. I got a call today because the alimony check was late, but it’s not like she’s going to kill me for it.”

  Sarah was a lot of things – ex-wife and queen bitch amongst them – but she wasn’t a killer. She had been smart enough to walk out on me before I hit rock bottom, but long after it was already over. She filed for divorce when I got shitcanned by the bar, claiming irreconcilable differences. The primary difference being between my sudden lack of income and what she wanted to spend.

  “Yeah, you’re right,” Tony said. “You’re no good to her dead.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “You said it first. What about at Holman’s last night? Did you see anyone who might have it in for you? Have you had any trouble there before?”

  “I knew maybe a dozen people in there, out of forty or so. Mostly just drinking buddies. It’s a mellow crowd.”

  “How about ex-clients? You used to represent some nasty motherfuckers.”

  “I’m already thinking about that. No obvious answers yet, but we’re going to work that angle.”

  “What about that embezzler dude? The one who was skimming money from that liquor distributorship. Didn’t he try to have a witness whacked?”

  “Yeah, but he’s still inside. Will be for a while. And I think he actually liked me, even though we lost.”

  “Did you ever have a murder case?”

  “No. Closest I came was a drunk driver who killed a couple of teenagers. I had a couple of nasty rape cases, couple of pedophiles, but I think those guys are all still locked up too. I’m not saying everyone I represented loved me, but the more I think about it, the harder it is for me to come up with anyone who would actually want me dead.”

  “Not even Larsen?”

  “Fuck, you had to go there, didn’t you?” Arnold Larsen’s case was the reason I got disbarred.

  “Look, Mick, I’m just trying to help,” Tony said. He paused for a moment. “You know, you never told me what really happened.”

  I sighed, then drained my beer and shook the empty bottle at him. “You got anything stronger than this?”

  Chapter 9 – Getting Serious

  Tony went to the kitchen, and came back with a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle 15 year old and two glasses. He poured us each a large measure. I’m usually more of a single malt guy, but the Pappy was a good drop. I savored it, letting the alcohol burn the back of my throat, stalling for time. I didn’t enjoy thinking about what had happened, but I owed it to Tony to be straight with him.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  “What did you hear?”

  “Same thing everyone else heard. You showed up in court drunk, the judge declared a mistrial, and the Bar Association yanked your ticket. Details are thin on the ground.”

  “Yeah, well, you got the gist of it.”

  “That’s not enough, Mick. I know you were in a bad way, but you weren’t that messed up. I know you. You’d never fuck up in court like that.”

  I took a sip of my bourbon. Tony was right, in a way. I’d been struggling with booze and pills for a while before Arnold Larsen’s case, but I never went to court loaded.

  “Yeah, I know. I just couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t stand the idea of that evil bastard being back on the streets because of me.”

  “Bullshit, Mick. You were a defense attorney. It’s not about that, and you know it.”

  “Yeah, but Larsen was different. Or maybe just the straw that broke the camel’s back. I don’t know.”

  “He was different how?”

  “You remember his case, right?”

/>   “Yeah, of course I do. White supremacist preacher with a bunch of Hitler wannabe followers. They set a Mexican family’s house on fire while they were eating dinner. The little girl got burned bad, if I remember right. A lot of people wanted him to go down, me included. But so what?”

  “He was a complete piece of shit. I knew he’d do the same again or worse if he got off.”

  “So tell the judge.”

  “I did. I even filed a formal motion to withdraw. He denied it without even reading it. All he did was ask me if I had knowledge that Larsen was pursuing a course of action I reasonably believed was criminal or fraudulent. I pointed out four different sections of rule 1.16 that gave me good grounds to withdraw, but he acted as though he didn’t know the rules of professional conduct. Smug bastard just told me I had to honor my duty to my client and profession. I think he wanted to avoid having a lengthy retrial added to his docket with summer coming on.” I shook my head. “Fat lot of good it did him.”

  “Still, I don’t get why you fucked up the way you did.”

  “I was winning the case, Tony. The DA was a moron. Didn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground. I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t stand the thought of Larsen getting away with it because of me.”

  I had represented Larsen two years earlier on a malicious harassment charge. He and a group of his followers had been arrested for yelling death threats at patrons outside a gay bar in the Burnside Triangle. I got him acquitted on First Amendment grounds, which wasn’t my proudest moment as an attorney. The story got some coverage in the local press, and I received a few death threats of my own for my efforts. I almost turned him down when he came to me on the arson charge, but I was already deep in the hole. I needed the money, and I didn’t have much pride left. I still wished I’d had the backbone to turn him away.

  “So what?” Tony said.

  “I got fucked up and came to court. I knew the judge would have to declare a mistrial. And you know what? It worked. Larsen got convicted at the retrial.”