Nothing Left to Lose

by Dick Lilly

  “Your turn.” Theresa was back with the coffees in white ceramic cups.

  “Carl Barclay, the political – I should say ‘public affairs’ – consultant.”

  Theresa slid onto her stool. “Consummate insider, kingmaker, super skilled at staying on good terms with everybody who counts, never saw a problem he couldn’t solve, a deal he couldn’t cut.”

  “None other.” Eric got up to hold the café door for a couple of women about Theresa’s age pushing strollers with bicycle wheels, the kind joggers use. Clear plastic windshields were snapped in place to protect the kids from the drizzle. The women shook water off their hats, let their hair fall to their shoulders, and settled in at a table.

  Theresa looked away, stared at the tan whorls of coffee marking the foam in her cup. “In a different life.”

  “What?”

  “Just might-have-beens . . . Nothing. Go on with Carl Barclay.”

  “He’s involved with something. Bobby Harms thinks so. I think so. We just can’t figure out what.”

  “Oh, yeah. The “death boat” in the blog and today’s papers.”

  “At least two guys get killed, messily, with large caliber weapons on a sport-fishing boat that’s identical to Barclay’s, and I mean identical. Make, model year, equipment and state registration numbers. They’re twins except for one thing. The tax stickers on the murder boat are fakes, perfect copies, nice computer graphics, peel-off-stick-on, but fakes.

  “Why would someone – or Barclay himself – do that? Smuggling. That’s the first thing you think of. Every so often another bunch figures they can take a yacht or some seiner far enough off shore to rendezvous over the horizon with a Mexican tuna boat carrying heroin. Remember that freestyle skier who bought a C&C 61 about 1980 and got caught, almost caught anyway, returning with sail bags full of dope. The Feds got the boat and the dope but this guy got away. I forget how. Changed his name and lived in Colorado for almost 20 years before he turned himself in. That’s why I remember it, ’cause he lived on the lam for so long. Almost romantic: Robin Hood bringing dope to the poor, happy-go-lucky ski bums and snow boarders.

  “Nowadays, there’s still plenty of dope moving, more hard stuff now, but the real cash cargo is people, illegal immigrants, around here mostly Chinese, some Koreans and Vietnamese. They bring them in from Canada. Bobby and I think maybe that’s it. But why Barclay? It doesn’t look like he needs the money. Why a duplicate boat? My theory – Bobby won’t tell me his, you know, he just nods, you can’t tell if it’s politeness or agreement or he thinks I’m a dumb asshole, probably that – my theory is that it’s a decoy. The real boat is the decoy. Barclay crosses legally, checks in with customs and immigration, and the registration number – stick-on vinyl letters and numbers on the bow - goes into the computer cleared for Canadian waters. Meanwhile the twin boat cruises on a different errand, apparently legal to any patrol boat that happens to look at the numbers through binoculars. It works the same returning to the States. Computer puts the registration number on the right side of the border and no one has any reason to stop the boat and see if it’s really Carl Barclay at the helm.

  “The theory fits some of the facts, anyway. Carl and Sally cross every month or six weeks even in the winter.”

  “Why on earth? That’s suspicious enough.”

  “Not really. They share a house on South Pender Island with a Canadian couple from Vancouver. They’ve been going up there for almost 10 years. Boat’s pretty new though. He got it from the factory in Florida in 2001, just before the worst of the dot-com crash. Bobby says – I talked to him a couple hours ago – that about the same time one of the big California yacht brokers, Ardell or somebody like that, sold a sister ship to a retired guy in San Diego. Early in 2003, the retired guy sold the boat for a lot of cash. He told the cops who dropped in on him early this morning that, yes, he thought the buyer was a dope dealer because of the cash but, hey, he broke his hip and he wasn’t going to be using it again. The manufacturer’s hull number molded into the transom says that’s our twin, probably trucked up I-5 shortly after they bought it.

  “Right now Bobby’s trying to figure out the smuggling deal and get something on Barclay. He’s watching Barclay in town and he’s got the Everett port cops watching the dock up there. But where’s that going to get him? With one of the boats wrecked, whatever they were doing, they’re out of business. They can’t commit a crime, at least not the one Bobby’s got them figured for.

  “That leaves the dead guys. No leads, nothing. Both had impeccable fake I.D., still in their pockets, making them residents of non-existent houses in a La Jolla subdivision. No prints on record for the big guy, not much in the way of fingers on the other one. Sea creatures took care of that. Bobby tells me the big guy “had an accent,” according to the clerk at the Seahawks team store who sold him a Twelfth Man jersey. Nobody else in the whole metro area seems to have laid eyes on him. The driver’s license pictures are being circulated. Right now, it looks like the best chance for a lead is finding where they kept the second boat, the wrecked one. The cops, with help from half a dozen cities and the eight counties on Puget Sound are canvassing every marina from Olympia to Bellingham and out to Port Angeles. I wish ’em luck.

  “Anyway, sooner or later, it’s going to make a great story on the blog. What we have up now – same stuff as the P-I and the Times – barely scratches the surface.”

  “You know, Eric, I enjoyed being a reporter and an investigative reporter when they let me do it and I enjoy being a private investigator despite the sleazy parts. But these kinds of stories, where such horrible, brutal killings are just business as usual . . . I have a hard time admitting that into my world. I can understand screw-ups and venal sins and all the sad bleakness in people’s lives, but I cannot understand cold-blooded evil for even one second. Who are these people?”

  Falconer shook his head. He had no answer for that.

  Along the avenue of plane trees, they walked back to the courthouse through a steady drizzle. It always rained half of June but at least it wasn’t cold. Tiny drops of water strung themselves along the strands of Theresa’s hair that, escaped from her ponytail, framed her face. Falconer thought she looked beautiful, but he didn’t say anything.

  Chapter 8, WAC

  Wednesday June 11, 1 p.m.

  Carl Barclay and Victor Wallingford met for lunch in a private dining room on the 15th floor of the Washington Athletic Club where Victor was immediate past president. The room was trimmed in dark wood. Above he wainscoting there were paintings of bird-hunting scenes.

  “Did he say why, who they were?”

  “No. He was as opaque as ever. ‘Some old business, finished now,’ in that accent of his. He apologized about the boat, though. Hit a vessel traffic mid-channel buoy ‘rather fast.’ I got the impression, but he never quite said, that he hit it on purpose. You can imagine that: a couple landlubbers standing around, maybe gunmen according to the papers; without warning they hit a ten-ton buoy at 30 knots. They’re slammed to the deck and our boy, braced in the helmsman’s chair, suddenly has the upper hand, element of surprise, et cetera. Dieter was a commando in at least one of his secret past lives. That would be my guess. He may think it’s ‘finished,’ whatever ‘it’ was,” sarcasm flowed from Wallingford, “but he has left us with some nasty loose ends.”

  “Would have been nice if you’d told me earlier.” It was as close to a rebuke as Barclay dared with Victor. “The cops were a nasty surprise. Scared the shit out of me. Really, I thought I was going downtown in handcuffs until everyone figured out if our boat was there, the heat was off.”

  “Carl, think about it,” Victor said, making his point as though Barclay were a slow pupil. “The surprise was essential. If you’d been expecting them, you’d have been acting. They would have sensed something phony and it would be worse.”

  Barclay looked down at his food to hide his anger at being manipulated.

  They ate grilled Copper River salmon, del
icate green patty pan squash, fennel mashed potatoes. An astringent blackcurrant sauce was drizzled in artful arcs on the fish and white china.

  “More than loose ends, don’t you think,” said Barclay, obliquely conveying his worry to Wallingford. “We have the L.A. money to move and, depending on what they want up there – what 10, 20 kilos? – to get to B.C. and no boat. We’re sure as shit not driving it across the border.”

  “Of course, that’s a problem. But there are other things that are more bothersome, Carl. I think you’ll see that. These fellows, these killers, whoever they were, seem to have searched the world to find our Swiss fellow. The possibility exists, and here is the danger, that they also found us. Do you see the problem, Carl?”

  Victor could be amazingly patronizing with almost anybody. Carl figured it came with a name like Wallingford and money more than a century old piled up by his family as they cut down the rainforest. Four generations in Seattle took you back before the fire when Wallingford’s great-grandfather arrived - story had it with a tradesman’s last name – homesteaded somewhere in the neighborhood north of Lake Union that bears – or inspired – his name, and began buying and cutting timber.

  Once the athletic ne’er-do-well in the family, Victor was well into his thirties by the time he finished playing in Sun Valley and came home to manage the money. Now 55, he had settled into his role as squire, his pin stripes grown to size 44, his speed diminished, a polite loser at handball and racquetball on the WAC courts downstairs where the members got business done.

  “I worry about a leak, Carl. Has our loquacious L.A. partner been indiscreet, bragged about his wonderful source, the purity of product? Who else down there knows? We need to find out. Of course, I’d hate to think our Adrian, pursuant to some scheme of his own, told them on purpose. I don’t rule it out, though. I’ve known him for years, several decades, really. He gets a certain intellectual satisfaction from his complex schemes.”

  “But he doesn’t know Dieter.”

  “Unfortunately, he does. You might say their paths have crossed.”

  It was always this way around Victor. There were always things Carl didn’t know, little facts omitted; what he was told like hints in a game of twenty questions, reminding him that he was only a peripheral player. Sometimes he thought, maybe victim. His stomach churned.

  “Plus, our useful Swiss is blown. He must assume he is; so must we. Somebody out there – where? L.A., London, Bogata, Kabul? – expected the dead guys back, or a report or something, a couple weeks ago. Somebody will come looking, won’t they, Carl? And even a good killer, especially a good, well-trained killer like ours, won’t wait around to be found. I suspect our employee is about to disappear and I don’t think he’ll be giving us two week’s notice.”

  “You said he was there this morning. They’re still crankin’ the stuff out . . .”

  “Amusing pun, Carl. And I suspect that tells us Dieter thinks the product from this run is going into his suitcase to finance relocation to a remote Caribbean island – though I think I can counter that problem with a respectable cash offer.”

  “In which case it’ll be less than two weeks and we’ll have another 10 kilos for Adrian, another 10 and twice the money for B.C. And no boat, Victor, no goddamn boat!”

  “We have a boat.”

  “No!” Carl groaned, anguished at this glimpse of a future he did not want, another hopeless, maybe unavoidable step deeper in. God, he wished he’d never started, never met Victor. “Please, not my boat.”

  “We use it all the time.”

  “As a decoy, Victor, as a decoy. Sally goes with me. You know that. We don’t carry anything. I don’t carry anything. That’s the deal. The stuff goes with the Swiss and his two Russians.”

  “Carl, relax. Of course, it’ll be you and Sally. She’s a big plus. The customs guys at Sydney and Roche Harbor see you every month or two. Sally’s probably got them charmed. It’s all check-in by phone anyway except coming back and you’ll be clean then. You’re routine.” Carl had stopped eating. Victor reached over and speared the remaining salmon off his plate.

  “Victor, all due respect. This is a brilliant operation and it’s all yours. You are the mastermind, the business whiz that makes it all work. What have you made on this, ten, twenty million since the dot-com crash? And you’ve been generous with me. I’m really grateful for that. But right now you’ve got to think cops, you’ve got to think prison, you’ve got to think risk.” This was Carl Barclay, political consultant, full of professional persuasion, talking to a client. “Those detectives, Harms and Williams, they’re not dumb. They think there’s a connection between the two boats and they’re right, you know that. They just don’t know what it is, at least not exactly. But you can bet smuggling’s high on their list of possibilities. Dope. People. Whatever. Since the publicity about the “death boat” this is not routine. They are watching my every move to find out. I think they’re even tailing me in the city. Maybe that’s just paranoia, but if I move my boat, they’ll know it. They’ll follow it. They can have the Canadians search us just for the hell of it. Think about that. We can’t hide two carry-on bags full of meth and money on a 34-foot sport fishing boat.” Carl’s imagination skipped past the mustached customs inspector with his harmless clipboard who sometimes came down to the dock in Sidney and pictured the Canadian Coast Guard coming alongside, men on deck with machine guns.

  The waiter knocked, rolled in a wooden dessert cart, cleared and poured coffee. Carl got up stiffly and walked over to the window. The sky was a featureless bright gray. It was raining lightly. Across the room, Victor lit a cigar, offered cognac from the private bar. Numb with worry, Carl turned from the window, poured Courvoisier into his coffee, left the bottle on the table.

  “As you say, they’re still ‘crankin’ it out, so in ten days we’ll have a delivery for Adrian. I will go along unless I can plug the leak before then. Vancouver even sooner. You are very convincing, Carl, and your advice has paid off for me before, so maybe not on your boat. Maybe another way.”

  “For Chrissakes, take your own boat, Victor. For cover load it up with guys from the club off for a weekend of fishing and drinking and a night prowl looking for sweet young stoners in the marijuana bars on Granville Street. Amuse yourself. Do a dope deal under their noses at the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club. Then close the lab and quit.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I didn’t sign up for this, Victor.”

  “Don’t bullshit me, Carl. No one is just a little bit corruptible. It’s always just a question of price and as you said, I’ve been quite generous.”

  Chapter 9, Sixth Avenue

  Wednesday June 11, 3 p.m.

  Imprisoned in his fear and walking head down against the summer drizzle, Carl Barclay was still on Sixth Avenue only a block from the WAC when the shadow he’d thought was paranoia appeared by his side.

  “Mr. Barclay, excuse me, let me walk with you a minute. I have some friends who would like to employ a public affairs consultant and I’d like to talk with you about that.”

  “It might be better to call my office and make an appointment, Mr. . . .?”

  “Oh, I am sorry. I know this is a bit unusual.” The stranger extended a hand from a pale gray raincoat. He looked mid-thirties, dark tan, black full beard carefully trimmed, hair expensively cut. His English was precise, a bit formal but barely accented, not enough to give Barclay any clue where he was from. Europe someplace, Barclay thought. “I am Edmund Hanran. The people I represent are in the logistics business and they plan to expand here on the West Coast, including the Port of Seattle.”

  “Walk along if you like, then, Mr. Hanran, or we can duck in around the corner for a coffee, get out of this bit of rain.” Always make the client comfortable, take some time, get to know each other. Listen, sympathize, understand their problems. Those were Barclay’s rules. Built his success on them, that and knowing nearly everybody in town.

  “Walking is fine, Mr. Barclay. There is
a concern about confidentiality.”

  “Of course.”

  “Let me get right to business then.” Hanran took Barclay’s elbow, leaned toward him. “You may have clients in, shall we say, the shipping business – or perhaps you are an investor yourself. In any case, I’m sure you know of the boat that was recently lost, along with unfortunate loss of life.”

  Barclay’s chest tightened, pain hit him in the ribs. Not for the first time he wondered if this was the heart attack he expected sooner or later would kill him. He stopped for a moment, looked down at the pavement, imagined lying there looking up at strangers, unable to speak, thinking, “Call 9-1-1.”

  The pain faded. They were still walking, Hanran smiling at him, almost sweetly, wet lips shining. “It is possible not everyone on board died, Mr. Barclay, and since the newspapers report that this boat was painted with numbers to look like yours, the people I represent wanted me to ask if you knew anyone else who was on board when the accident occurred.”

  “That’s a rather offensive suggestion. Insulting, and I resent it.” Barclay followed his script. “As I have told the police, the papers and everyone a hundred times, there is no connection between me or my boat and that other boat. None. Nada. Whatever they were up to served their purposes. I have no idea what or why. That’s it. And that’s enough.”

  “That’s what I told them you’d say. And you know what they said? They said, ‘Tell him to think about it for a couple of days.’ They said they’d call then and make you an offer for your information.”

  Barclay’s voice rose. A couple passers-by raised their umbrellas to look his way. “I don’t have any goddamn information. I don’t know anything I can tell anyone. Tell your friends to ask the goddamn cops.” Then, regaining control: “Enough, Mr. Hanran. Good bye!”