by Dick Lilly
“No, but I think he’s had enough, too. You leave, it’s time to shut down. He sees that.”
“And Adrian? Perhaps Adrian won’t see it that way.”
Carl had no answer for that.
Chapter 12, Harms’ Deck
Wednesday June 11, 7 p.m.
A pulsating police siren interrupted their conversation. Bobby Harms found his Blackberry among the bottles on the picnic table between them and pushed the button to answer. The noise stopped. He raised the phone to his ear.
Falconer turned his attention to the view from Harms’ deck, Bainbridge and Vashon islands and the Olympics, the sun descending toward the mountains, finally liberated from the day’s rain clouds. Harms listened, his mood darkening, his brief replies staccato and profane. After a couple minutes, he switched the phone off.
“Clever ring. You download that from some special cop website?”
“Same place we do all our online shopping for Tasers and Mace and little American flag lapel pins.”
“Oh, yeah, ‘Copco.’ How could I forget?”
“Not funny. Neither is this. Williams said Barclay shook his tail, obviously deliberately and apparently with some skill. He knew we were watching him, no surprise there. Upside is it pretty much proves he’s involved in some way.”
“Or that your guys are inept.”
“Why do I ever tell you anything? Someday you should experiment with humble gratitude instead of insults.”
“I’ll take that under consideration. Theresa thinks I’m mellowing with age. Maybe I could graft humble gratitude onto that process. This just happen?”
“Yeah. He walked from his office to P. F. Chang’s, went through the bar and out onto Fourth, then into Oliver’s. So we thought. Luckily, the second guy spotted him coming out of Andaluca and followed him to the Westin where he caught a cab. Our car was still in the loading zone in front of the Mayflower so he was gone.”
“In a test of humble gratitude, I’m not repeating my earlier comment. I will also be grateful if you hand me the opener.” Falconer pried the cap off another Redhook. Both men drank and looked toward the islands. A couple of ferries carrying commuters home incised wedges westward across the deep blue water.
“So, Bobby, we’ve got a couple of guys killed out there, no clue who they are except they’re probably pros and probably not locals, no clue who the killer or killers are except a possible connection to Carl Barclay. That’s it, right? And the only lead you’ve got other than following Barclay is a needle-in-a-haystack search for wherever it was and whoever it was kept the twin to Barclay’s boat.”
“Jesus, Eric, that’s wholly not fair. We’re certain to find where they moored it. It may take time, but we’re certain to find it and then we’ll have the leads we need to move ahead. Give me a break.”
“Bobby, you don’t know what’s going on here. I don’t either. But somebody spent a lot of time and money setting it up and it looks like it was worth killing to keep it hidden. How smart are they? I don’t know, but maybe we let Carl Barclay’s fancy boathouse fool us. Those boats are big but maybe not too big to be hauled around on a trailer and launched at a ramp. If that’s what they were doing, there’s your needle in a haystack: every oversize garage and equipment shed in ten counties. I wish you luck.”
“Oh fuck.”
“Yeah, oh fuck. But you’ve still got Carl Barclay. I just don’t think you’ve been looking at him right. Upstanding citizen. Influential. And he’s involved. You’ve been right about that all along. Messy as the killings were, Barclay’s involvement says white collar crime to me.”
“These guys were almost certainly smuggling. I don’t see that as white collar.”
“Let me put it another way. I’m going to guess that whatever they were doing involved people we don’t think of as criminals, associates of Barclay’s, people he would ordinarily do business with for all his usual reasons. Among them is your man.” Falconer laughed at the phrase. “Or woman.”
“I won’t say bullshit.”
“Good. Good for you to practice humble gratitude.”
“I won’t say it.”
“OK. Think it. And while you do that I’m going to have someone start scouring Barclay’s client lists for who knows what.”
“And as always, I am going to warn you not to mess with a police investigation . . . but you better fucking well let me know if you find anything.”
“Favor for favor.”
“More than that. How long have we known each other, Eric?”
“Since the fraternity. And except for meeting you and a couple other guys, that was a crap experience I wouldn’t do again. Sometimes I wonder – funny we never talked about it back then – how you got in among the all-whites on Greek Row?”
“We did. You just forgot. It wasn’t as important to you.”
“Not like me.”
“You weren’t a reporter then. It was my grandfather, my white grandfather. He was a member back in the 30s so I was a legacy pledge and I had an Anglo name, so no red flags. And you remember pledge week: end of summer, all the white guys tan from time at the beach, out water skiing, that stuff. I fit right in, tan not black. I was just a white boy whose tan never faded. Plus the Civil Rights Act had softened them up and they wanted athletes and there I was. I got in.”
“And there we were, room mates.”
“Worst experience of my life. You were so fucking messy Falconer and you never washed your sheets until they turned yellow.
“And in all this time, we’ve almost never talked about race, just race.”
“What’s there to say, buddy? You are what you do. That’s all I can tell.” They bumped fists and drank.
Falconer’s phone rang. He fished it out of the pocket of his jeans. “I’m having a beer with Harms. Sure. We’re almost done. Mutual irritation has peaked. Twenty minutes if the viaduct’s still standing. Rush hour’s way over so it’ll be just the eaters and drinkers going into Belltown.”
Falconer started to gather the empties for recycling. “Six pack left, Bobby. We’re slowing down.”
“More beer, right here at the Harms’ West Seattle aerie when you’ve got some suspicions to share.”
“As always.”
Chapter 13, Blogging
Wednesday June 11, 9 p.m.
Falconer had Kim’s Wrangler. His A4 was in the shop. The Jeep had vinyl sides. Enough to keep out the rain earlier, but noisy and none of her CDs appealed. Somehow Pearl Jam and Nirvana had passed him by. Dave Mathews? Not right now. He drove home on the two-level viaduct that walled the city away from the bay, always a love-hate experience: great views of the container docks and mountains, the office buildings reflecting the summer’s late-setting sun, but why from a speeding car? The 50-year-old dirty concrete viaduct between downtown and the city’s historic piers sent waves of noise crashing onto the streets below. Tourists walking among the fish and chips shops had to raise their voices to tell each other how quaint it all was.
In Ballard, he parked in one of Falconerblog’s leased spaces in a fenced lot a block away from the Starlight. Bar patrons’ cars filled the street most nights and towards the weekends spilled in rows along Shilshole Avenue in front of the cement plant and warehouses. Tonight was no different. A year ago he gave up the fight for parking and rented. Kim and Danny thought it was a cool perk.
“OK. Here’s what I got.” Danny in a tee shirt and board shorts and untied shoes was gaming when Falconer arrived. The kid – Falconer’s affectionate thought – put it on hold, switched screens, leaned back in his chair.
“I found two girls at Roosevelt who were at the party with their boyfriends. You could tell they were pissed that the party was broken up. Same story, though. According to them, neither they nor their boyfriends knew the guys with the drugs. They said for sure Lynne Roberts didn’t know them. They heard her say that, trying to get them to leave. But the crashers acted like they knew everybody else so they were always someone’s friends and most o
f the kids were too out of it to care so the Roberts kid couldn’t get them to leave.
“It was two guys and a girl. The girl was stoned, totally, walking comatose, the Roosevelt girls said. Really comatose,” Danny repeated for emphasis. “The guys drank beer but handed out drugs, mostly supposed to be Ecstasy. Like the paper said, police report says they also found meth, quite a lot, small bowls of it on the coffee table. Can you believe that? Not a recreational drug for that crowd. Grass the kids already had plenty of. Then about eleven the police and fire trucks came and my informants said it wasn’t until the flashing lights rousted them from the bedrooms that most of the kids noticed the bonfire down by the beach. On that part of East Laurelhurst Drive the houses are on a bluff above the water, so the beach and boathouses are down below and quite a ways away. When the cops came, as the P-I said, the party crashers were gone. Long gone. Apparently, no one ever saw their car. I got maybe one useful thing, though. The older guy – girls figured him for late twenties, maybe thirty, and they thought that was weird – had tattoos all over his forearms. Both of the girls remembered a snake’s head on the back of one of his hands. I didn’t put that info in the item, though. Cops may not have it yet. It’s not in any of the reports and I didn’t want to tip these creeps that we know anything that could identify them.”
Falconer nodded his approval. Danny went on. “I called the two officers whose names were on the report. Reached one. He said they weren’t looking for the party crashers. No, they weren’t checking fingerprints on any beer bottles. That would not be a good use of police resources. He got kinda patronizing and explained like I was a dummy that a kids’ party, even a wild one, is not a big deal. I said what about prints from the little bowls of crystal meth that witnesses said were on the coffee table? Kids said there was a lot of meth there, quite a lot. Any interest in that? ‘That investigation is ongoing,’ he said, ‘There’s nothing we can tell you.’ Typical opaque response.”
“Talk to anybody else?”
“I got cell numbers for Lynne Roberts and Amanda Wallingford but neither has called me back. No surprise there. Their dads probably confiscated the phones, anyway, to make sure they shut up. Here’s what I think we ought to file. It’s short.” Falconer came over to Danny’s side of the desk and bent down to see the image on the screen. The story was nine or ten short paragraphs with an inset photo of the Roberts’s house. “I drove out there.”
The screen showed the blog’s “Updates” page headlined “Mystery party crashers brought the drugs, kids say. Arraignment Friday for governor’s son,” followed by Danny’s story:
The hard drugs – allegedly crystal methamphetamine and Ecstasy – police found at a Laurelhurst house party attended by Governor Maureen Collins’ son, Will Collins, were brought by party crashers no one knew, according to interviews with some of the 17 high school students who were there.
The students, all from Roosevelt and Lakeside high schools, also claim it was the mystery interlopers who started a large bonfire on the beach at the Laurelhurst waterfront home that led neighbors to call 9-1-1. When police arrived with the fire units they found the party in progress, including several kids “inebriated or high on drugs” watching firefighters from a deck overlooking the beach. A couple of the girls were wearing only bra and panties, according to the police report.
The party was at the home of Superior Court Judge John Roberts and his wife, Carol Roberts, a prominent land-use attorney. They were away for an extended weekend. The Roberts’ daughter, Lynne, 18, gave officers permission to enter the home where they found small bowls of “a crystalline substance” on a coffee table along with “drug paraphernalia” and pills believed to be Ecstasy, the police report says.
According to the students interviewed by Falconerblog and police, the serious drugs were brought by party crashers, two young men and a woman, whom none of the Roosevelt or Lakeside kids had seen before. The kids believe that after handing out the drugs, the crashers went down to the beach and lit the fire and then left before police arrived. The fire was set in an old wooden rowboat, according to a Fire Department spokeswoman.
“The kids interviewed deny using the crystal – believed to be methamphetamine and which police have sent to a lab for testing – or Ecstasy found in the home. They told Falconerblog that they smoked marijuana – saying it was “no big deal” – and were drinking beer.
Will Collins, Lynne Roberts and Amanda Wallingford, all 18, are schedule for arraignment Friday on drug possession charges. All the other teens at the party were under 18 and in keeping with journalistic practice Falconerblog does not name minors involved in crimes unless the circumstances are exceptional.
The three 18-year-olds could also be charged with contributing to the delinquency of their younger classmates and with possession with intent to sell, depending on how the prosecuting attorney’s office decides to treat the case.
Collins, Roberts and Wallingford are scheduled to graduate from high school in the next week. Roberts attends Roosevelt; Wallingford is a Lakeside classmate of Will Collins’. She is the daughter of Victor and Margaret Wallingford, who live on Webster Point a few houses from the Robertses. Victor Wallingford is a scion of the Wallingford timber family and CEO of Wallingford Evergreen Corp., a holding company for the family’s timber, real estate and investment businesses.
Neither Lakeside nor Seattle Public Schools would comment when asked if the drug charges would prevent the students from graduating.”
Finished reading, Falconer straightened up, glad to take the strain of bending off his back. “You know, Danny, sometimes I wonder if we’d have more readers if we weren’t so straight and reputable sounding. Maybe we should play around a bit, go for something like ‘Drug bust has rich kids with tits in wringer.’ Of course, that doesn’t apply to all of them. Maybe ‘tits and privates in a wringer’ would be more apt. Probably nobody’d get the joke, would they? I imagine you have to be over 60 to have seen or even heard of a wringer washing machine. My dad had these color slides, though, of buxom Marilyn Monroe types with their breasts rolled through wringers, big aureoles looking right at you. Every year he’d stick them in with the Mt. Rainier or Yellowstone Park vacation slides. Real eye-openers for us kids, scandalized tut-tutting from the moms. That was family life in the tract-house 60s. Now we have misogynistic music videos.”
Falconer in the past again. If Kim had been there Danny would have shared an eye-roll.
“Anyway, good job. Publish it. Stay on it tomorrow. Drop by a few of the bars where druggies hang out, maybe try a few street corner conversations in Belltown. You know the spots. Actually, you could start there tonight. Needle in a haystack, I know, but maybe someone will know this guy by his tattoos. Let me know what you find and if you talk to any cops again see if you get any sense there are political guys or private investigators sniffing around for more on Will Collins, or if anybody else seems to be looking for Snake’s Head. I’m going to go the arraignment day after tomorrow and see if I can find an opportunity to talk to the governor.”
“Frame-up, isn’t it? You think this is a frame-up, these mystery party crashers showing up and laying real drugs on these high school kids, right?”
“Yep, Danny, I do. Motive? Embarrass the governor. Or the Roberts family – prominent judge – or Victor Wallngford could be the target but I doubt it. Who’s behind it? Who knows? Great story if we can find out. I should say great story if we can prove it, because with these things we may really know but be far short of the proof we’d need to publish names without risk of a libel suit. I’m hoping we at least get to the point where we can lay out the story, the motive, let the readers and the dailies and the politicos take it from there.”
“We’re the source, man. The source.”
“Absolutely. Thanks for another good day.”
“Kim left you a sandwich.”
The last of the daylight was aquamarine above the Olympics as Falconer crossed the roof garden to his penthouse. The sandwich, unde
r plastic wrap, was pork tenderloin leftover from grilling on the weekend, red pepper and avocado. Why’d she put in avocado? It was just going to squish out and fall in a mess on the plate.
Chapter 14, Bourbon and Brel
Thursday June 12, noon
Falconer was on the deck at Ray’s waiting for his order, cod and chips because he hadn’t really had breakfast. A pint of Redhook rested on the varnished tabletop in a pool of condensation. He stared for a long time at the Olympics, soft in the summer haze and then at the number he had typed into his cell phone. Finally, he tapped the green dot and the screen said connecting.
“Theresa, I want to hire you for a little investigation.” That didn’t sound right. “Well, maybe a big one, really. It could get big.” And it could get dangerous. This was a bad idea. Falconer knew that. After uselessly agonizing, he’d called Theresa anyway.
“Why me, Eric? Why now? You’ve never done this before, not anytime in the last five years when you could’ve. Are you patronizing me? Do you think I need the work?”
This was not going well. “No, Theresa. I think you’re the best and most trustworthy P.I. I know, and this is no Peeping Tom job.”
“Peeping Tom job! Is that what you think I do, fill my days stalking errant spouses with a 500 millimeter lens? You are so insulting.” Then she laughed, heartily. “I only do that one day a week.”
It was one of those moments when Falconer wanted to tell her he loved her but as usual he didn’t. She’d told him enough times to cut the crap, they were just friends. It was best that way. Trainable, he kept his mouth shut. He’d listen to sad folk music, sip some bourbon, agonize about it later. That’s what he always did.
“So what’s the deal?”
“The case we talked about yesterday, our friend Carl Barclay the solid citizen. Connected to two murders by his boat but police can’t find anything else or what the twin boats thing really means. They’re working on it but, you know, not warp speed. The victims aren’t locals, no apparent connection to local crime and they really don’t think Barclay was the trigger man. Interest is limited. Right now, I even think Bobby would let the case go cold if he and Williams weren’t so pissed at Barclay for giving them the slip last night.”