Slow Burn

by G. M. Ford

“How do you do that?” I asked.

  “Do what, sir?”

  “Answer the door instantly, like you’ve been camped out the whole time waiting for somebody to knock.”

  “Practice, sir” was his reply.

  I waded through the carpet, following the butler into the bedroom. The current book was Full House by Stephen Jay Gould. Pink silk jammies and sheets today. No comment.

  “Ah, Mr. Waterman,” Sir Geoffrey said. “Apparently, you were indeed in competent legal hands.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Rowcliffe spoke with your spousal unit, a Ms….”

  The butler appeared in the doorway. “Duvall, your lordship.”

  “Of course…yes, Ms. Duvall assured us that you were being well represented and would be expeditiously liberated.”

  “It’s an occupational hazard,” I assured him.

  He looked peeved. “I must say, I myself found the experience unsettling, to say the very least.”

  “Cops give you a hard time?”

  “They were as rude to me as they dared,” he sniffed.

  “Certainly not as peremptorily as the others were treated, but…”

  “What others?”

  “That whole dreadful knot of Meyersons and Del Fuegos. They questioned us all until nearly dawn. Where had we been. Whom had we seen. It was interminable. They seemed to be convinced that someone in that room was responsible for Mr. Reese’s demise.”

  “It’s a good bet.”

  “They went so far as to suggest that I, of all people, also had reason to wish Mason Reese dead. They even questioned Rowcliffe at great length.”

  “I’d pay good money to watch that.”

  “It was rather amusing,” he conceded.

  I didn’t even bother to ask about the details of Rowcliffe’s interview. Instead, I asked Sir Geoffrey, “What did you tell them?”

  “Regarding?”

  “What I was doing for you.”

  “Merely that you had been retained as security liaison for Le Cuisine Internationale.”

  “That’s it?”

  “They were highly objectionable young fellows.”

  “You didn’t tell them that we were following people?”

  He folded his arms high across his chest. “Certainly not. I had no way of knowing what your situation was. God only knew what you were telling them. I had no choice but to quibble.”

  “You’d make a good crook, Sir Geoffrey.”

  He made that noise with his lips again. “They inquired about someone named George. I told them I had no knowledge of your exact arrangements and had never heard of the gentleman in question.” He showed me a palm. “Which was technically true, of course. That seemed to satisfy them.”

  “Not for long.”

  “You think not?”

  “They’re going to go through the staff like locusts, and when they do, I figure it’s a good bet one of the valets is going to remember George and the rest of the crew. Or they’re going to find out from the desk personnel that I had extra keys made to my room. They’re not stupid. It’s going to get sticky before it’s over.”

  “Of course, you’re right.” He sighed. “It’s tempting to think of the police as a pack of bumbling boobs.”

  “They’re not,” I said. “As a matter of fact, they tend to be quite good at what they do.”

  He pursed his lips and marinated the idea for quite a while, finally breathing out hard from his nose and saying, “As I see it, we are still holding the trump cards.”

  “No doubt about it, Sir Geoffrey.”

  “We know what they’d like to.”

  “But pretty soon they’re going to know that we know.”

  “And they will surely ferret out these men of yours.”

  “Yes, they will.”

  I had no illusions about it. Nobody on my crew was spy material. They all drank too much for anything clandestine. These were the kind of people who, while supposedly hiding out, get hammered and brag to anybody who’ll listen that they’re hiding out. It shouldn’t take long.

  “You said that both you and Rowcliffe were present when the Meyerson and Del Fuego contingents gave the cops their stories about where they’d been and when.”

  “Certainly. The swine kept us all sequestered in a single large room downstairs. Imagine, if you can, being retained in the same space with that malignant mob. It was hideous.”

  “The good news is that the papers are carrying it as a hotel murder. The convention wasn’t even mentioned in the morning edition.”

  This morning’s Post Intelligencer had chronicled the whole sordid history of the great Meyerson–Del Fuego dispute. For the better part of two full pages, years of outrageous accusations and heartfelt denials had made for exceptionally lively reading.

  “A pity we cannot keep it so.”

  “Maybe we can.”

  He arched a knowing eyebrow at me. “What have you in mind?”

  “Maybe we can get this whole thing over with before it spills over into the convention.”

  “By handing them the murderer,” he said.

  “All we’ve got to do is compare where they said they were between two forty-five and five or so with where they each actually went and when they actually came back. Whoever lied is probably a good candidate for a murder rap.”

  Rebecca moved the last chanterelle mushroom around her plate in a clockwise direction, plowing little furrows in the last of the dill sauce.

  “You look tired,” she said.

  “Nothing a good night’s sleep won’t cure.”

  We were the only diners at Cool Hand Luke, a great little hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Madrona Park, a section of Seattle which was, depending upon your outlook, either the best part of the ghetto or the worst part of the high-rent district. In Seattle, it all depends upon whether or not water is visible. In a single block, you can crest a hill, find one of the lakes or the Sound suddenly come into view, and move from Thunderbird in a bag to an audacious little ’93 zinfandel.

  Four-thirty is a bit late for lunch and a bit early for dinner. In an hour or so, a table would involve a thirty-minute wait.

  “Your lunch was good?”

  Duvall put the fork down, leaving the mushroom to drown, and reached over, dropping her hand on mine.

  “Not that I don’t appreciate it, Leo, but you seem to be very concerned about whether or not I liked my lunch.”

  She was right. I’d asked her about six times. I hate it when women are observant. “I guess I feel like I ought to apologize for having all this crap going on right in the middle of when we’re moving.”

  She shrugged. “So apologize.”

  “You’d have to meet this group to know what I mean, but I really thought they were just a bunch of idiots with more money than brains. I took the talk of”—I drew imaginary quotation marks with my fingers—“ ‘mortal danger’ to be…you know…the worst sort of overstatement for effect. I mean these people take themselves pretty damn seriously. I figured what we had here was a bunch of habitual self-dramatizers.” My turn to shrug.

  “But somebody’s dead.”

  “Yeah. Somebody’s dead. The cops have pulled my license. They’ve got me for obstruction and tampering, if they want to pursue it. They’re probably out looking for the crew by now. Fearless Fosdick here has failed to stop exactly the kind of disaster he was hired to prevent. And on top of this crap, the whole thing makes me look like I’m getting cold feet about our move.”

  “Are you?”

  “No. Are you?”

  “A little.”

  “Me too.”

  “Under the circumstances, I think a little apprehension is an appropriate response,” she said.

  “You do?”

  “Certainly. It’s a big move for both of us.”

  “Good.”

  “Good what?”

  “Good that we’re of the same mind.”

  “Are we?”

  “I hope so.”

 
; “Me too.”

  I began to chuckle to myself. Duvall shook her head.

  “Listen to us,” she said. “We sound like the Marx brothers.”

  “Abbott and Costello’s ‘Who’s on First?’ ”

  “You know, Leo, sometimes I worry that two grown people shouldn’t have this much trouble talking about their relationship.”

  “I’m not good with ‘should,’ Rebecca. I mean, is there a standard out there someplace that we’re falling short of? I mean, like, are we being plotted on a graph somewhere?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Good, because one of the first things I learned from being a private eye is that there are no perfect people out there. I used to think there was this class of people who skated through life. Who made all the right moves, who played the game the way it was intended to be played, and in return got to forgo the pain and suffering that marked the rest of us.”

  “And then you saw the light?”

  “And then I got a peek behind their closed doors. They started hiring me to find their runaway kids and thieving chauffeurs. And you know what? They were the same as us, but with lots of money.”

  “And all the money didn’t help.”

  “Sometimes it did; sometimes it didn’t. Mostly, it just postponed the pain.”

  “I’m kind of lost on the point here, Leo.”

  “The point is that what we should be doing is whatever we are doing. If we were supposed to be some other way, we’d be that way.”

  “Isn’t that just a wee bit circular and convenient?”

  “Maybe, but as far as I’m concerned, you and I are a special case, not a statistic. I mean, how many other couples in our situation have been dating for the better part of twenty years?”

  “Hopefully, not too many.”

  “We’ve had a lot of practice at pretending. I figure it’s going to take a bit of practice to stop.”

  “Pretending? What pretending? I’m not pretending.”

  “Oh, come on, Dr. Duvall,” I joshed. “Think about it. Let’s be honest here. You and I missing each other was a classic case of overthink. Two otherwise intelligent people managed to rationalize themselves all the way past the exit to truth and into the next county. How did we do that? It was always obvious to everybody except us. My mother—I mean, what—we were in the sixth grade or something and she used to tell me to latch on to you.” I waved a finger and used my shrill Wicked Witch of the West voice. “‘That girl is going somewhere, Leo,’ she’d say. Then she’d shake her head in wonder and go, ‘And she likes you, Leo.’ Even the other kids always teased us. Remember?”

  “That was because we always had to dance together because we were taller than everybody else.”

  “Even when I was married to Annette, my aunts still used to ask about you. Hell, they still know everything we do. They always knew. Why didn’t we?”

  “It was more complicated than that.”

  “Don’t I know it. Hell, I married a woman pretty much just to get my old man’s attention.”

  “And I listened to the ‘worked my fingers to the bone’ stories for so long I started to believe them. So what? That’s all ancient history.”

  “It makes me nervous, is all. If I was that stupid then and didn’t know it, how can I ever be totally sure I’m not doing it again and don’t know it again?”

  She patted my hand once more. “Neither of us exactly came from a background that was an ad for connubial bliss.”

  “Yeah, I used to think that too. Until I met these Del Fuego and Meyerson clans. These people have a soap opera going on that makes our childhoods look like The Partridge Family. They’ve got old grudges. They’ve got new grudges. They’ve got husbands and wives dead under suspicious circumstances. Meyerson’s got a daughter named Penny she hasn’t spoken to in years.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “It seems Mama Meyerson felt the girl married considerably beneath her station.”

  “But all women do, Leo.”

  I decided I didn’t like her smile, so I ignored her.

  “Del Fuego’s got an ex-wife who follows him into the bathroom. A girlfriend young enough to be his daughter. A bodyguard who looks like the Creature from the Black Lagoon. A couple of stepkids running around out there somewhere who nobody seems to have a clue what happened to. These are some seriously strange folks.”

  “See,” Duvall said. “We’re not so screwed up after all.”

  “Yeah, but think of all the gas we could have saved.”

  “You’re such a romantic, Leo.”

  I changed the subject. “The cops aren’t going to leave me alone until they get this thing solved.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning that I better not be going out to the house anymore. I think I can pretty much expect to be under surveillance soon, and I don’t see any sense in adding the cops to the moving mix.”

  “We can’t postpone, Leo. Rhetta’s van full of stuff arrives on Saturday morning. I’ve got to be out by then.”

  “The move goes off on schedule,” I said. “The boys will be at your place at eight in the morning on Wednesday.”

  We’d hired a sixteen-foot truck, along with my nephew Matthew and three of his burly fraternity brothers to do the actual lifting and toting. One full day should move us both.

  “But you’re not going to be around.”

  “Probably not. You think you can handle it?”

  “The problem is not whether I can handle it, but how I feel about having to.”

  “I guess this gets me to the apology part,” I said. “Sorry. I didn’t mean for this to interfere.”

  “‘Sorry’ is a good description of it,” she said, rising.

  It was a quiet ride back to the hotel. I had her leave me a block up from the hotel, on Seneca. “What’s the remote code for the voice mail at the house?” I asked as she pulled the car to the curb.

  Rebecca reached behind the driver’s seat and dragged her briefcase into her lap. “I don’t have it memorized yet,” she said while rooting around in the bag. She pulled out her day planner.

  “Keep it that way,” I said. “Until this thing is over. Next time you’re at the house, unplug the phones. Use your cell phone. The voice mail will still take messages.”

  She read me the number. I turned to the front of my little notebook, to a series of notations that were several months old, and wrote the number in the margin.

  “One more thing.”

  “What?”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll call you later.”

  “On my cell phone, of course,” she said.

  I settled for escaping with my life.

  “We don’t believe you’ve been completely truthful with us, Mr. Waterman.” Martha Lawrence had all of her stuff symmetrically arranged in front of her again. Today, she was in a three-piece knitted green suit that matched her eyes, with her red hair held atop her head by a big tortoiseshell clip. No Lobdell. I guess he didn’t want to play with me anymore.

  We were back in the Senate Room. I’d come into the hotel through the Seneca Street doors and gotten no more than a dozen steps across the carpet when a couple of dicks took an unhealthy interest in my elbows. My feet barely touched the ground on our way up to the mezzanine, where they plopped me in a chair and now stood one pace to the rear.

  “Am I under arrest?”

  “Would you prefer to be?”

  “If you’re going to detain me, arrest me.”

  “We’re not detaining you, Mr. Waterman. We are merely giving you the opportunity to exercise the kind of public-spirited cooperation which Mr. James assured Judge Gardner you were prepared to provide. You do, after all, have such close ties to the community.”

  Talk about a snappy rejoinder. The good Ms. Lawrence was giving me a chance to dig my own grave. If I walked, she’d request another bail hearing in the morning. She’d trot the bruise brothers in to swear I’d refused to cooperate, and they’d reset bail up in Charlie
Manson land.

  “What’s your story, Lawrence? How come I seem to have your undivided attention? You strike me as a competent person. Unlike your friend Lobdell, I might mention. You know I didn’t kill Mason Reese. What’s the deal here?”

  “Let’s just say I have an aversion to people who think the rules don’t apply to them.”

  “People who think the rules don’t apply to them are responsible for most of the scientific and artistic breakthroughs.”

  “Somehow, I don’t think that applies to low-rent private eyes.”

  “There you go with those aspersions again, Lawrence.”

  The color was rising in her cheeks. I could see her freckles now.

  “You don’t even have a valid PI license. You have a judicial variance, whatever legal travesty that may be.”

  “So what? So twenty years ago, my old man pulled some strings and got me a ticket. What’s that to you? I’ve been at it for twenty years. I’ve got a good reputation.”

  She heaved a sigh. “Please.”

  “You know what I did for the first three years? I served process. Divorce papers. Eviction notices. Bond revocations. Repossession notices. Ever slapped an eviction notice in the palm of an unemployed shipfitter with four kids, Lawrence? It’s a real treat, believe me.”

  “You have no credentials whatsoever.”

  “Is that what this is about? Credentials?”

  “Most of us earn our way, Mr. Waterman.”

  As I’d apparently left my capacity for guilt in my other suit, I said, “What say we get on with this?”

  She hesitated. She wanted to argue some more. Instead, she said, “Your answers had best get better, Mr. Waterman.”

  “Maybe if you ask better questions, I’ll have better answers.”

  “Perhaps,” she said. “Let’s see if I can learn from my own mistakes.” She leaned over and put both hands on the table.

  “Mr. Waterman…yesterday,” Lawrence began.

  “That would be Monday,” I interrupted.

  Her green eyes narrowed. “Yes, Monday.”

  “I just wanted to do my part for being clear.”

  She gave me a smile thin enough to pass for a scar.

  “Yesterday…Monday,” she began again. “In the course of your work for Le Cuisine Internationale, did you have occasion to have a number of people followed?”