Slow Burn

by G. M. Ford

  Aimes pushed the red button on the walkie-talkie he held in his right hand and opened his mouth to speak. Lance beat him to the punch. “No. Go downstairs, man,” he said, pawing at the device.

  The doors began to close. Aimes, looking confused, used his forearm to force them back open. “What are you—” he started.

  “Just do it, man. Go down and get the cops.”

  Lance turned my way. “I’ve got something to settle with Waterman here. Waterman here is going to resist being taken into custody.”

  Linc didn’t like the idea one bit. “Aw, now, Lance, man, remember what Mr. Conlan said. We should just—”

  Lance was a poor listener. Using both hands, he pushed Aimes deeper into the elevator. “Marty’s not here, man. He took his old lady to a movie. You just call the cops. You’re out of it, okay?” I heard him say. “He didn’t bust your thumb,” he added, reaching in and pushing a button.

  Lincoln Aimes was still protesting as the doors hissed shut.

  The sleeve of Lance’s blue blazer had been split up the seam to allow for the cast, with only a safety pin at the wrist keeping the thing from flapping in the breeze. He jerked the pin loose and started shuffling down the hall in my direction with the torn sleeve hanging straight down, feeling around the floor with his lead foot like he expected a trapdoor or something. I held up a hand.

  “This may not be the time for this, kid.” I said.

  “Oh, it’s the time, all right,” he said.

  He held his left arm forward like a ram, allowing the right one to dangle down by his right knee as he moved slowly forward.

  One thing was for sure. If he hit me with the cast, I was going to the graveyard, not the hospital. The more swings he got, the better his chances became. No doubt about it. This was going to have to be short and sweet.

  I let him get within about eight feet and then began to match him shuffle for shuffle; every one he took forward, I took one back, until I sensed we’d found a rhythm, and then, as he lifted his lead foot to plod forward, I closed the distance in a hurry.

  He brought the cast up and over the top, not so much trying to punch me as to drive me through the floor. I was one step too quick and took his forearm high on the shoulder. The force jammed my neck into my torso, sending an electric shock racing down my spinal column and momentarily loosening my joints.

  I could smell the old coffee on his breath as I grabbed both of his ears and drove my forehead upward, aiming at an imaginary spot about a foot behind his face. I remember the sound of impacted flesh as bone met bone with a wet crack, and a brief recognition that Lance had a head like a rock…then, only the giddy feeling of flight.

  I saw a green dragon kite darting in a clear blue sky, one moment climbing hard, the next angling dangerously toward the whitecaps. The dragon needed a longer tail. I reached to jerk the string hard, to turn and run toward land, when, without warning, the dragon hovered for a moment above the waves, looked me right in the eye, then shimmied tail first down into the blue water. The string had broken.

  I overheard one of the uniforms telling a new arrival that they’d found us lying on the carpet with our legs entwined, both of us out cold. I wasn’t a bit surprised. I had a knot on my forehead the size of a bread box and a brain tumor headache.

  I didn’t know what the hell had happened to Lance. He was gone when the smelling salts cauterized my nasal passages and dragged me back to consciousness. All that remained were two small bloodstains on the hall carpet. At his end, not mine, I was glad to see.

  It was six-fifteen; I was sitting with my hands cuffed to a wide leather belt which was locked around my waist, so I could still read my watch. It was odd to be sitting there, doing nothing, in a room two doors down the hall from Mason Reese, while an army of cops and technicians scurried about the eighth-floor corridor.

  I’d given the two SPD detectives my name, rank, and serial number and then completely clammed up. My attorney, Jed James, had arrived thirty minutes later and was now making waves somewhere down the hall. For the Seattle law enforcement community, Jed James was a nightmare come true. Jed’s ten years as the ACLU’s chief litigator in New York had cultivated a confrontational manner seemingly designed to appall the average, ever-polite Seattleite. No cause was too unpopular, no infringement too slight. To my knowledge, if you counted appeals, his record remained unscathed.

  I heard his voice rise from somewhere in the hall. I could only catch the words “brain damage,” but was comforted to know he was thinking of me.

  The door opened and Jed began to back in. He was still talking to someone I couldn’t see. “I can’t promise anything, Detective,” he was saying. “Let me have a few words with my client and I’ll get back to you.” The other person said something, but I couldn’t make it out.

  Jed closed the door behind him and walked over and sat on the edge of the bed, pushing his face in close to mine, speaking softly.

  “You really did tell them nothing.”

  “Correctomundo.”

  “And when we talked before, you told me everything.” He made it a statement but meant it as a question, so I told him again.

  “Well, then,” he said, “I know this is going to sound weird coming from me, Leo, but, all things considered, my best advice is to tell them everything you know.”

  My head throbbed as I raised it to look in his eyes. He didn’t look drunk or stoned, so I said, “I’m found lying stone cold outside the door of a guy with his brains blown out, and what’s supposed to be the most incisive legal mind in the Pacific Northwest is advising me to spill my guts?”

  He folded his arms across his chest. “They don’t make you for the murder, Leo. They keep saying they do, but they don’t mean it. They sure as hell are going to keep pretending they do, though, unless you give them a hand. If we give them what we have on the murder, they’ll back off the rest of the shit. You know the game as well as I do, my man.”

  “What rest of the shit?”

  “The first-degree assault, the tampering with evidence, the breaking and entering, that little shit, you know. The shit you’re actually guilty of.”

  “The kid attacked me.”

  “We’ll worry about that later. Whadda you say?”

  “I don’t want to admit to being in the room,” I said.

  “You said you didn’t touch anything.”

  “I didn’t. But they’re really not going to like me being in there.”

  “They’ve got a maid who says somebody was in eight-fourteen about five minutes before she reported it to security. If you tell them that wasn’t you, it changes the whole direction of the investigation.”

  “They’re gonna go rat-shit,” I insisted.

  “You let me worry about that. We’ll trade them what you know for what you did.”

  I thought it over. He was right. “I’d have to talk to my client.”

  Without a word, he left the room, leaving the door open. SPD uniforms leaned against the wall on either side of the door. Through the opening I saw a medical examiner’s assistant named Morris scurry by and realized that I’d never been sure whether Morris was his first or his last name. I was still ruminating on this quirk of nature when Jed reentered the room carrying a standard black desk phone, which was, I suspected, the same one they’d taken out of here earlier.

  He attached the cord to the jack in the back of the phone, stretched the cord out, and set the thing in my lap. With his left hand, he held the receiver to my ear. “Number,” he said.

  “One-six-zero-zero.”

  He dialed. I listened as Rowcliffe answered.

  “Sir Geoffrey Miles’s suite,” he said.

  “Rowcliffe. It’s Leo Waterman.”

  “Good evening, sir.”

  “I need to talk to Sir Geoffrey.”

  “Sir Geoffrey is dressing, sir, and, if I may say so, having a rather dreadful time with his tie. This might not be an altogether propitious moment.”

  “Tell him Mason Reese is de
ad,” I said.

  The guy was amazing. “Very good, sir” was all he said.

  Jed was staring intently at me. I nodded my head.

  Miles came on in a rush. “You say?” he huffed.

  “I do.”

  “Report.”

  He never interrupted for the ten minutes it took me to give him the whole ball of wax. When I’d finished, he said.

  “You are indubitably correct. I’m amazed the police have not been at my door already.”

  “It won’t be long,” I said. “Too many people know.”

  I heard him take a deep breath. “Better here than at the banquet, I suppose,” he said finally. “Yes, Mr. Waterman, by all means. We have no choice but to cooperate fully with the authorities.” Another deep breath. “I leave the matter to your discretion.” With a click, he was gone.

  Jed replaced the receiver and unplugged the phone, allowing the cord to fall upon the carpet.

  “Tell the cops I want to chat,” I said.

  He carried the phone with him out of the room. I sat there and fiddled with the pair of handcuffs that connected my hands to the thick leather belt around my middle. Jed appeared in the doorway.

  “They’ve got a stenographer downstairs,” he said.

  I nodded as someone spoke in the hall. The two cops on the door came in, took me by the elbows, and hoisted me out of the chair.

  Jed still held the phone when I was propelled out into the hall and up toward the elevators. On the far side of the bank of elevators, a yellow police ribbon was stretched across the hall. About five thousand dollars’ worth of SPD overtime milled about the corridor in small groups.

  The underlying buzz of conversation ground to silence as I walked up the hall with my escorts. The county Mountie stepped away from the doors as we approached. As the cop on my right let go of my arm and reached for the button, the light came on, the bong sounded, and the center door slid open. George Paris stood swaying in the car, his tie loose at the neck and his new blue double-breasted suit buttoned wrong.

  His bleary eyes took me in. He got half a step forward before the King County cop bounced off the far wall and pounded him in the chest with a stiff arm, sending him staggering back into the darkness at the rear of the compartment.

  The county cop turned to my keepers. “I’ve told this joker three times that he can’t come up here. I’m taking him in.” As the two cops grunted their approval, he reached behind him for his handcuffs.

  “Officer George,” I yelled. “You and your friends better get out of here, you hear me? Get lost, Officer George.”

  His hand hesitated at the snap to his handcuff case. He looked quizzically in my direction. “My name’s not George.”

  I suddenly ran toward him, dragging my escorts with me. I heard the muted bell as Jed dropped the phone. The county cop took three quick steps in our direction, put both hands on my chest, and stopped me in my tracks. The elevator doors slid shut.

  “Shit,” he said, looking over his shoulder. I pushed hard against his hands, again diverting his attention.

  Jed was at my side. “Don’t hurt him. Don’t hurt him. He’s had a blow to the head. He’s delusional.”

  From the doorway of 814 a short man in a blue suit hurried our way, pulling a uniformed SPD officer in his wake.

  “What’s your name?” he demanded of the county cop.

  “Jacobson, sir.”

  Blue Suit pushed the down button several times as he spoke. “Get on your radio and tell your boys downstairs to stop and detain that man—and anybody he’s with,” he added.

  Jacobson opened his mouth and then changed his mind, opting instead to do as he was told. Using the radio on his shoulder, he relayed George’s description to somebody named Bobby in the lobby.

  “Sixty to sixty-five, maybe five ten, one-fifty or so. Little skinny guy, white hair slicked straight back. Blue suit, red tie. Yeah…Yeah, that’s right.”

  The elevator arrived with the usual fanfare, and the SPD officer started down after George. Jacobson looked pained.

  “Is your name George Jacobson?” Blue Suit asked.

  “No, sir. Jeff.”

  “Then what do you suppose all that Officer George crap was about, Officer Jacobson? Got any ideas? Take your time now.”

  Jacobson traced a design in the carpet with his toe. “He was telling the old guy to get lost, wasn’t he?”

  “Very good” was all Blue Suit said to the cop. Then, he stepped close to me, pushing his face in mine. “You think you’re pretty cute, don’t you?”

  “I have a fairly positive self-image.”

  “My client has had an extreme trauma,” Jed began.

  “When we get your little friend back up here, we’ll see about your self-fucking-image, pal.”

  I turned to Jed and said in my best Bugs Bunny voice, “He said a baaaad word.” Jed’s mouth twitched, but he hung in there.

  “See, I told you,” Jed said to the cop.

  “Tell me about the rabbits, George. Tell me again about the rabbits,” I said to Jed. Unable to keep his face together, he stepped over and pushed the down button. Just to make sure.

  Blue Suit stood there staring at me in stony silence, playing some sort of mind game with me, he imagined. I think maybe I was supposed to get all mushy and then beg him to let me kiss his ring and confess. My head hurt too badly for any more snappy repartee, so, in an unusual show of restraint, I shut up.

  Jacobson’s radio was squawking, He turned away so we couldn’t hear. Blue Suit hustled over. I watched as Jacobson filled him in. Blue Suit listened for five seconds and then began barking orders in a strangled whisper. As he spoke, the county cop leaned away and poured the translation into his shoulder. I couldn’t hear what was said, but one thing was sure. They didn’t have George. I could tell by their body language. George should have been in the lobby and in custody by now, and he wasn’t. The old dog was running.

  Another elevator arrived. The cop in charge of my left elbow put out a hand to hold the door open and said, “Lieutenant Driscoll.”

  Blue Suit glanced over disgustedly and nodded. “Tell them I’ll be down shortly,” he said. The last image I captured before being led into the elevator was that of Blue Suit whispering heatedly into the county cop’s ear. Jacobson just kept agreeing and checking the carpet for clues.

  We got off on M, for mezzanine, turned left down the deep red carpet, and then up a short flight of stairs into what the hotel called Embassy Row, a series of elegant meeting rooms lodged between the second and third floors on the north side of the building. With all the movable walls in place, there were three rooms on each side of the hall. The common area between the rows of rooms was littered with both city and county officers, who stopped their banter to watch me go by.

  The last door on the left held a gold plate that read, SENATE ROOM. The cop on my right held my elbow with one hand while he opened the door with the other. Jed slid by the cops and entered first, ranting as he walked. “What kind of inquisition is this?”

  There were three people in the room. Alone on the left side of the long table was a woman of about fifty-five with hair more salt than pepper, done up in a kind of Lady Bird Johnson double flip. She had a glass of water and a court stenographer’s machine in front of her.

  Except for the extreme corners, the table was covered with a spotless white linen. At the far end, between the suits, the cloth was covered by the contents of my wallet and card case, spread out in rows. The bare corners were occupied by a man and a woman. Each had a neatly arranged assortment of pens, pencils, highlighters, notebooks, and pocket tape recorders laid out and ready. Looked a lot like the first day of school.

  The man was pushing forty and already bald. Hawk faced, he had an athletically trim figure that, even as he sat, spoke of fitness. A gold name tag read, “Det. Sgt. Rob Lobdell.” One of the new breed of detectives, I guessed. Probably had a law degree and probably would never pull his piece in anger. Kind of made me nostalgic for
thugs.

  The woman was a bit younger and rather heavyset. A redhead with one of those almost pure white complexions prone to freckles. She wore a simple blue dress with a wide skirt. She spoke first. “Mr. Waterman, my name is Martha Lawrence. I’m an assistant district attorney for the City of Seattle.” She gestured slightly toward her right. “This is Detective Lobdell of the SPD.” She looked at Jed for the first time.

  Jed was not prone to wasting time on introductions.

  “I trust that since my client has offered his full cooperation, you will now be able to see your way clear to remove these morbid manacles from his person.”

  Lobdell curled his lip. “Like hell. This man is—”

  Lawrence waved him off. While the cops disconnected me from both the belt and the cuffs, Lobdell sulked and pretended to check his notes. I thought he was going to object again when she told the officers to wait outside, but he settled for shaking his head in disgust.

  “Mr. James,” she said with a sigh.

  “Ms. Lawrence. So nice to see you again,” he said.

  “You’re sure of that, are you?” she inquired.

  “Oh, but I did so enjoy our last little tryst.”

  “Yes…I’ll bet you did.”

  “It is so much easier when one wins,” he admitted.

  She burned a hole in his brain with her green eyes and then shifted her gaze to me. “Mr. Waterman, I don’t know what happened upstairs, but I’m going to advise you of your rights. Forgive me if you’ve heard this before.” She did it without reading it off the card. I was impressed.

  “Please have a seat.”

  Jed and I sat across from the stenographer.

  “I am told that you wish to cooperate with us in the matter of the death of Mason Reese.” She spelled out the last name.

  I let Jed do the talking. “I wish to make a statement on behalf of my client,” he said.

  “Then do so,” Lawrence said.

  “My client wishes to state, for the record, that he has no knowledge of, and was in no way party to, the death of Mason Reese. Like any other concerned citizen of our republic, Mr. Waterman, of course, wishes to cooperate with the duly appointed authorities in any way possible and to aid in the speedy disposition of this affair.”