Slow Burn

by G. M. Ford

  When he wasn’t buried beneath a pile of bags and boxes, Bart was a real good-looking kid. Six two or so, black hair, blue eyes. He looked like one of the models in a Sears catalog.

  “Don’t they ever get tired of that?” he asked Rickey Ray.

  “Near as I can tell, no.”

  He stuck out his hand. “Bart Yonquist.”

  I took it. “Leo Waterman.”

  The sound of broken glass sent Rickey Ray into motion.

  “Ah, sheeeet. I best break it up.”

  The voices soared again as he crossed the room. I turned back to Bart. “What’s a nice kid like you doing in a place like this?”

  He told me. He was in his second year of medical school when he got a notice in the mail. It said the next check he got from his parents’ trust fund was also going to be the last. At that point, he was twenty-five and had never held a job. Talk about rude awakenings.

  Anyone who’s ever had to look for work knows how he felt by Friday afternoon, after a solid week of pounding the bricks. The Fates provided Dixie, who, it just so happened, was between escorts at the time and thought Bart was, as she put it, “ just as cute as a bug’s ear.”

  Bart, while being both desperate and young, but neither blind nor stupid, respectfully declined. She told him it paid two thousand a week, cash, no taxes. Bart did a little mental math. He figured six months would get him through school and a year might get him an office.

  “And you’d be surprised how much better it sounded to me.”

  It was crude; I admit it. I’d just met the guy, but I had to know.

  “Do you, like…you know…” I was prepared to go on indefinitely without ever using a verb, but Bart got the idea.

  “No, man. It’s not like that. She had all of that she could stand by the time she was thirty. Just ask her. She’ll tell you. She wants a full-time gofer and somebody to be seen with. It’s the being seen that really gets her off.”

  “At two grand a week,” I said, “a guy could be seen quite a lot.”

  “That’s what I thought. Beside, Dixie’s got a good head, she really does. She’s a bit off the wall, but she’s good people.”

  I liked the kid. He still hadn’t gotten a steady job at twenty-six. You had to admire a guy who could cheat the system for that long.

  “Gotta go,” he said. “Take care.”

  I stood alone for a few moments. The suite had suddenly gone quiet. As I pulled open the door and walked out into the hall, I kept repeating Señor Alomar’s words: Money is no object, money is no object…

  I rode the soundless elevator down to the ninth floor. In the twenty minutes I’d been upstairs, my bag had been unpacked, my clothes hung neatly in the closet, my unmentionables stowed in the dresser, and my toiletries geometrically arranged on the bathroom counter. Dude. The red light on the phone by the bed was blinking. Two messages. Call Rebecca about when to meet at new house. Call Karen at work.

  The new house was actually the old house. My parents’ house on the east side of Queen Ann Hill. The trust allowed me either to live there rent-free or to lease it out and keep the proceeds. I’d always opted for the latter, feeling that I somehow didn’t belong there without them. As if, even as a child, I had simply wandered into the middle of a scene that began before my time and that surely would outlive us all.

  Rebecca Duvall and I had known each other since grammar school. If you discounted the three years I’d been married, we’d been dating for nineteen years. Rebecca was the only child of a shore-leave shimmy between her mom, Letha, and an alcoholic merchant marine whose identity had been systematically reduced to the pronoun “him.”

  My earliest memories of Duvall are of the tall girl with the blue barrettes who sat up front in the third grade and knew the answers to just about everything. According to the oft-told legend, Letha had worked three finger-to-the-bone jobs to get Rebecca through medical school. As if in penance, Rebecca had pledged to see her mother through old age. We had an unspoken understanding that whenever Letha turned in her lunch pail, we would sit down and decide what to do next about our relationship. We counted on her dying, not on her wanting a roommate.

  Letha’s stormy relationship with her only sister, Rhetta, an equally ancient crone from Lincoln City, Oregon, had mellowed significantly in recent years. What had once consisted of minimal contact followed by months of heated recrimination had weathered into a cozy little ménage of mutual deterrence. The old women now wanted to live out their days in sibling synergy. Time doth make cowards of us all.

  All bets were suddenly off. No matter that the Duvall digs up in Ravenna technically belonged to Rebecca. No way Letha was moving to Bumfuck, Oregon. So that meant Rhetta was coming to Seattle. Duvall’s choices were thin. Live in the house with the two of them and go shopping for orthopedic shoes, or make other arrangements. It was simple enough. Rebecca kept paying the mortgage; the old ladies got the house and it was time for me to putt or get off the green.

  Just so happened that the family manse was between tenants. When the Levines moved to Tennessee, the trust took the opportunity to have the place inspected. As might be expected in a sixty-year-old house, which had been leased out for the better part of twenty-five years, major renovations were needed. They’d sent me the standard courtesy letter detailing what they proposed to do, which was damn near everything, and what it was going to cost me, which was about a hundred eighty thousand bucks. And that wasn’t the bad part. The bad part was that I’d made the mistake of complaining about it to Duvall.

  All attempts to convince her that it might be best to start this new phase of our relationship on neutral ground had been met with deaf ears. For reasons I’ll never understand, the lure of a rent-free, completely renovated, twelve-room house overlooking Lake Union was more than Rebecca could withstand. We were moving in this weekend.

  She answered on the first ring. I could tell from the static that she was in her car. “Yes,” she said.

  “You get my other message?”

  “You’re sleeping at the hotel?”

  “My place is all packed up. It’s a godsend.”

  A short but meaningful silence ensued. Then she said,

  “I’m going to run some errands before we go up to the house.”

  The work crews were finished. The house was supposedly ready to go. We had agreed to take a look at it together, this afternoon.

  “I’m gonna be late.”

  “Leo,” she said, “you’re not cheesing out on me, are you? I mean, I don’t want to feel like—”

  I cut her off. “I’m doing exactly what I want to do, with exactly who I want to do it with. Period. That’s it.”

  “Okay,” she said, without much enthusiasm.

  “I’ve just got a lot of stuff to do.”

  “Like what?”

  I told her. Beneath the clatter of the static, I could hear her rich laughter. “This I’ve got to see,” she said when I’d finished.

  “I’m meeting them in front of the Rainier Club at four. I could use some help.”

  “Like what?”

  I told her what I wanted.

  “Do you have any idea how hard it was for me to find someone to cut my hair?”

  “It’s right in the neighborhood. We can all walk.”

  “He’ll shit.”

  “I’ll pay the going rate and tip twenty-five percent.”

  I heard her chuckle again. “I’ll give him a call.”

  “See you at four.”

  “All right.”

  “We’ll go up to see the house when we’re done.”

  “Mmmm,” she said and hung up.

  I dialed Karen and sat through a lovely Lennon Sisters a cappella rendition of “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” before she finally hit the line.

  “You always did know how to pick ’em, Leo.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Have you seen today’s Post Intelligencer?”

  “No.”

  “Well, when you get a
chance, treat yourself to page three of Section D. It’s a full-page ad. Your friend Jack Del Fuego.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “You have no idea what’s been going on around here.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Less than an hour after I spoke to you, in walks the mayor’s monkey.”

  “Harlan the Hatchet was in your office?”

  “I’ve still got the windows open.”

  “What’d he want?”

  “Harlan tells me to find something, anything, to stop Mr. Del Fuego’s cookout on Friday night. He doesn’t care how I do it, just do it, he says. Not a ‘howdy’ or a ‘please.’ Just do it, and he’s gone.”

  “Harlan was the first successful recipient of the charisma-bypass procedure.”

  “You ain’t just whistling Dixie,” she said. “So I’m still stomping around the office an hour later when he comes strolling back in, with that stupid grin of his plastered all over his face.”

  “The one where he looks like a sheep?”

  “The very same.”

  “Lucky you.”

  “Oh, yeah. And guess what?”

  “What?”

  “A complete reversal. The barbecue is to go off on schedule. The mayor and his wife will be in attendance, as will be Mr. and Mrs. Chief of Police and so on down the line. SPD will provide any extra needed security. I am to resist any and all pressure. Bingo. He’s gone.”

  “What pressure would you need to resist?”

  “Ah, Leo. You think like a true Waterman. I wondered the same thing, so I called Mary Beth Erdman.”

  “Remind me, who’s that?”

  “Your uncle Pat’s second wife. She’s in Finance.”

  “And?”

  “Seems the mayor got a call this morning from an animal rights group demanding he put a stop to the cookout.”

  “Did he faint and wet himself?” That’s just the sort of PC pressure that usually gets old Norm to soiling his briefs.

  “No. Quite the contrary.”

  God, how this woman treasured a good secret. I waited.

  “So guess who heads this particular group?”

  “I’ll bite. Who?”

  “Clarissa Hedgpeth.”

  “That weepy woman with the white poodle? Meat Is Murder and all that crap?” As far as I was concerned, the only people entitled to complain about animal rights were barefoot, vegetarian nudists. The rest of us were guilty. Such is life in the food chain.

  “That’s the one,” Karen said.

  “Isn’t she the one who—”

  “Yep, the same one who threw a quart of blood on the mayor’s wife during one of those anti-fur demonstrations. Outside the opera house a couple of years ago, when he was just a councilman.”

  “Mink, as I remember.”

  “Blond mink and uninsured, I’m told.”

  “And you know how cheap that man is too,” I said.

  We shared an “Ooooh.”

  “So His Honor has decided that the shindig is going to go on, no matter what,” she said.

  “I’m not going to get any help from you, am I?”

  “No can do, kiddo.”

  “Thanks anyway, Karen.”

  “So…you’re moving into the old house,” she said before I could break the connection.

  “Let me guess. Maureen again.”

  “No, Ruthie told me,” she said, naming a cousin so distant I was unable to bring any image of her whatsoever to mind.

  I may have growled before I hung up; I can’t be sure. Either way, I carefully replaced the receiver and went out to meet the Meyersons.

  “Spaulding,” she said in a low drawl, “fetch the videotape.”

  “Aw, come on. This guy doesn’t want to…”

  He was moving toward the hall even as he whined. The fact that I’d known the boy for only about ten minutes had not prevented me from forming an intense desire to kick his pimply ass. Spaulding Meyerson was maybe nineteen. An oily-faced little sack of shit, with a voice like fingernails on a blackboard and a thinning head of black hair that was never going to see forty. He’d inherited the family teeth from his mother.

  She’d opened the door herself, but she wasn’t alone. On her right, leaning back against the peach-colored drapes, was a guy in a gray silk suit and a narrow black tie. Then there was the matter of the shadow behind the door being way too wide for this tiny woman.

  She was no more than five feet tall in heels. Her perfectly arranged hair was the reddish color of a calico cat. She had a shrewd pair of brown eyes, set in close to a turned-up nose. The rest of her face was mouth. If she were a foot taller, she could have been one of those Kennedy women. The ones who don’t even have to crack a smile to show a full square yard of carefully tended dental work.

  “Ms. Meyerson, I presume,” I said with my best rugged grin.

  It’s not like I expected her to get all dewy-eyed or anything, but I don’t think it would be bragging to say that I can still muster a certain amount of boyish charm. She looked me over like I was the last brassiere on the sale table.

  “And you would be?” Blanche DuBois on Valium.

  “Leo Waterman. I’m with convention security.”

  I presented my ID, which she passed to the guy leaning on the drapes without so much as a glance.

  “Yes,” she said. “Sir Geoffrey Miles himself called.”

  Drapeman passed my ID behind the door.

  She looked over at Drapeman, who looked behind the door and nodded. “Won’t you come in,” she said with a degree of warmth and enthusiasm generally reserved for a yeast infection.

  The suites were, indeed, mirror images of each other. What I had presumed to be an armoire in Jack’s suite was, however, actually an entertainment center, with a big-screen TV and a videotape player. The Kansas City Chiefs were playing the San Diego Chargers. A lank-haired kid was stuffing his face with Cheetos and watching the game.

  Al Michaels was doing the play-by-play.

  “…third down seven on the KC thirty-six…”

  The guy behind the door was pretty much another Drapeman. Both were about forty, well groomed, and had mastered that stone-faced professional sheen so often seen on Secret Service agents.

  “Spaulding,” she said, “please turn that off.”

  “Why do I gotta?” he whined. “You guys go out in the hall.”

  “…three-step drop, Bono flares a little swing pass…”

  “You can watch the game in your room,” she tried.

  “Go talk in your room,” he insisted.

  “…Allen finally steps out at the San Diego fifteen.” Drapeman crossed the room to the entertainment center and pushed the power button. The big screen went blank from the center out. The kid jumped up from the couch and tried to get at the controls. Working like a cutting horse, Drapeman kept his body between the kid and the button as the kid jumped wildly about.

  Frustrated, Spaulding Meyerson turned my way.

  “Yeah, Gordo here’s a big man when it comes to kids,” he said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder at Drapeman. “A real big man. Ask him about how Rickey Ray cleaned both their asses up in about five seconds. Ask them about that, whydoncha? How he sent the stooges here crawling back holdin’ their ’nads and crying like little girls.”

  “Spaulding,” she snarled. “That’s enough.”

  This time she got his attention. Mine too. He shut up, jammed his hands in his pockets, and started to stalk from the room. Halfway across, however, I could tell he wasn’t going to leave. He wasn’t going to give us that satisfaction. Instead, he ducked in behind the bar, pulled a can of Coke out of the fridge, popped the top, and took a healthy swig. The room was silent except for swallowing.

  “Please excuse my son, Spaulding,” she said. “I assure you he doesn’t always act this way.”

  Sure he didn’t. Unless I missed my guess, Spaulding Meyerson was well down the road to a lifetime of serious ass-holery. As if in confirmation, Spaulding belched and gave us a
toothy grin.

  “These gentlemen are Mr. Francona.” She nodded toward Drapeman. “And Mr. Hill.” Neither man made a move to shake hands, so I stood still. “They handle all of my security needs. As I told Sir Geoffrey, beyond their able services I have no need for special security assistance.”

  “Except for when Rickey Ray beats the holy hell out of them, that is,” Spaulding added.

  I was getting the brush-off, so I waded right in.

  “I was hoping we might be able to put our heads together on how best to stop Mr. Del Fuego’s—uh—” I stammered.

  She helped me out. “Barbecue.”

  “Yeah. The barbecue.”

  “Old Jackeroo is gonna roast old lardass.” Spaulding smirked.

  She shot her son a quick, murderous glance.

  “I assure you, Mr. Waterman, no such event shall take place.”

  “You sound pretty confident,” I said.

  “The Lord works in mysterious ways.”

  “Care to share?”

  “I’m afraid not,” Abby said. “For my daughter’s sake, for the sake of decency, this abomination must surely be stopped. Bunky must be saved. I have faith.” She said it like a chant.

  “But…” I looked around the room. “What if Bunky is already, you know…shrink-wrapped.”

  “Have you seen today’s paper?” Abby inquired.

  “Haven’t had the chance.”

  She stuck out her hand like a surgeon waiting for a tool. The one she’d called Hill slapped a section of newspaper into her small hand. She held the newspaper under her and let it unfold. It covered half of her petite body.

  “Come On Down, Folks. Feed Yer Face at the FeedLot” was all it said. It was the picture. That and the facial expressions. Ol’ Jackeroo held a carving knife in one hand and a leash in the other, his face a slanted mask of malignant mischief. The leash was attached to the halter of an enormous black bull, whose liquid eyes seemed to say he somehow had an idea of what in hell was going on and didn’t like it one damn bit.

  Worse yet, someone had taken a piece of white chalk and divided the animal’s gleaming black hide into a series of irregularly shaped quadrants. The sections were labeled. The one at the rear read, “rump.” T-bone, porterhouse, sirloin, short ribs, chuck, tri-tip, and London broil, they were all there. I changed my mind. The bull didn’t look worried; he looked embarrassed.