Cape Disappointment (7 page)

“Maddox was a square peg in a round hole.”

“That's not how he presents it.”

“I'm not sure he ever knew.”

“IN THE NEXT FEW WEEKS
this campaign is going to heat up, and what we don't need is surprises. For whatever reasons, he's not willing to tell me much about his career in the police department, so maybe you'll tell me exactly how he was a square peg. You know him from that period, and you obviously had a good rapport or you wouldn't be here now.”

“We didn't really cross paths until the end of my career when he did me a small favor.”

“It must not have been too small.”

“Small to him. Big to me. As far as I know he didn't have any friends in the department. When he was working for SPD, he went into the hospital for heart surgery. I had a friend who had to take him some official paperwork to sign, and at the time Maddox told him not one member from the department visited him during the five days he was there. He was a guy who was basically insulated from everyone around him. But here's the funny part. He loved to run for office. Union rep. Union secretary. Anything that was up for grabs. He repeatedly set himself up so people could vote against him.”

“I like how your mind works,” Deborah said, switching the conversation abruptly from Maddox to the two of us. Her look lasted just long enough to make me uncomfortable, and when I get uncomfortable I drop my eyes. Without realizing it, my glance dropped to her breasts,
and when I looked up I could see she'd misinterpreted my gaze. “What was Maddox like on the job?” she asked, smiling.

“A lot like he is now. Cool. Efficient.”

“He talks like he was a tough police officer.”

“On the street there's two kinds of tough. There's the kind when you're running down a dark alley chasing a half-crazed wife beater you know has a weapon, and there's the other kind. I never saw it, but I heard stories about his bullying handcuffed suspects.”

“What else? Bear in mind I would never repeat any of this.” Deborah was probing for parts of Maddox's story she didn't need to know, but there was no harm in sharing it with her. Gossip cements a bond between people. Tonight I was becoming an insider.

“The worst thing I ever heard about Maddox involved a shootout he and a partner had in which they went into a supposedly vacant house in the Rainier Valley to do a welfare check. Maddox and his partner walked in on a burglary. Shots were exchanged. Maddox's partner got shot several times, superficial wounds, but was able to describe both burglars to a T; Maddox, on the other hand, wasn't hit and could not describe the assailants. Afterward, his partner accused Maddox of cowering behind a door during the shootout. I don't know what actually happened, but Maddox claimed he'd fired multiple times, that he'd been in the thick of it, and that his partner was simply too excitable and unprofessional to accurately remember what happened. But then the department did its investigation and discovered Maddox's service pistol hadn't been fired. In the police department, a story like that sticks like flypaper. I heard it dozens of times. Eventually, Maddox took a desk job and worked his way up through the ranks without going back on the street. Later, when he found himself in charge of officers who
were
on patrol, he made a habit of refusing to cut malefactors any slack. As you might imagine, none of this earned him any friends.”

“But you were his friend?”

“I knew him.”

In the middle of my tale, we had each been given a small plate of hors d'oeuvres by a passing caterer. I must have spilled some of the dip on my chin, because Deborah stepped close and wiped my lower lip with her napkin, making an elaborate production of dabbing at my
face. I laughed, and looking out at the crowd, caught a glimpse of Kathy watching us through about six layers of people. I waved, but the crowd sealed itself before I could tell if she saw me. Drat. Ordinarily, it would have meant nothing, but tonight things between us were strained.

A moment later, a heavyset woman accompanied by a grumpy-looking man approached us, the woman smiling broadly.

“Letha,” I said, holding my arms out. “Letha Fontaine.” We hugged and then stood back and looked at each other. She smelled of lavender.

“Thomas Black. How have you been?”

“Terrific. Really terrific.”

Letha had entered the Seattle Police Department in the same academy class I had, and for a time we'd carpooled to class. In her first year on the street, she had three serious automobile accidents in her patrol car, after which she worked in administration in clerical positions. People like Letha tended to find a niche and hide out in it. The last I'd heard, she was pushing paper in the dispatch center.

“I want to hear all about you,” Letha said. “Don't leave anything out.”

“You first.”

“I'm doing the same thing I was doing when you left. Dispatch. Hey. I'm sorry about how things went down when you left. I never had a chance to talk to you about that.”

“Water under the bridge.”

“Seems like yesterday, though. You look terrific. Somebody told me you got married. Is this your wife?”

The comment was Deborah's signal to blush, but she didn't. Instead she gave me a look that I couldn't quite figure out. It was almost as if she was trying to see if I was embarrassed. “No. My wife is out there somewhere. This is Deborah Driscoll, a co-worker.”

After they chatted a bit, Letha turned back to me. “I heard your wife was a defense attorney.”

“Right now she's working on the Sheffield campaign as well.”

“I think Sheffield's great.”

“Isn't she?” I said, watching Deborah try on a smile.

“Tell me exactly what you've been doing. I want to hear everything.”

“I don't want to bore these people.”

“No,” Deborah said. “I want to be bored.”

“I don't mind,” said Letha's companion.

“Sure. Okay. There's not much. I left the police department and for about a year I worked for a private investigator, also a former officer with Seattle. Then I opened a small office. Times were lean for a while, but lately I've been passing up more work than I accept. Unfortunately, a lot of it is just mining information through the Internet. I also do interviews for defense attorneys and for insurance companies, mostly fraud and theft, some accident investigations. I still do a lot of biking. Right now I'm working for the Maddox campaign.”

“They have a problem? A break-in or something?”

“I'm on staff.”

“But I thought you said your wife—”

“Is working for Sheffield. I'm working for Maddox. I'm glad you caught that.”

“Gee, isn't that … ?”

“We hardly fight over it. When it gets real bad, after dinner sometimes we load pistols in the backyard and let fly until one of us draws blood.”

Letha laughed so loudly people around us turned and stared. Years ago she'd had a crush on me and had always found me amusing. What I liked about Letha was that even in her darkest moments, she was relentlessly cheerful. “The last time I saw you, you were going out with that Russian.”

It was my turn to laugh. “I forgot. That was a long time ago.”

“So how'd you and your wife meet?”

“Kathy and I took a law class together back when I was still in the department. Criminal Justice. The professor had obsessive-compulsive disorder or something, so he seated us all in alphabetical order. Birch-field, Black. Over the course of the semester my renter moved out and Kathy started renting my basement apartment. Things went on from there.”

“Darn. I should have snagged you when I had the chance.”

“Should have.”

“Still live in that same old place?”

“Right. The dump over on Roosevelt.”

“It was never a dump. It was just—”

“I keep meaning to fix it up, but we're so busy. Besides, it gives the street character. Helps keep prices down so ordinary folk can move into the neighborhood.”

“You still have that old couch on the front porch?”

“Uh, no.”

“And that old truck? I remember you always drove the oldest, most beat-up truck around.”

“It got wrecked.”

We nattered for a few more minutes before Letha Fontaine and her date ambled off toward the refreshments.

Deborah turned to me and said, “You had a Russian girlfriend?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“What was she like?”

“You know. The normal. She could tow a railroad car with her teeth. Used to kiss me and afterward my face would be all black and blue. Weighed about three hundred pounds.”

Deborah laughed. “You're never serious, are you?”

“I was just trying to draw a picture for you.”

“What was that she was saying about the way you left the department?”

At the best of times, I didn't like talking about this, but especially here, among all this jabbering. I told her the story quickly. How a fifteen-year-old kid in a stolen car had trapped me on foot in a Belltown alley and how I drew my service pistol and fired a round through the windshield when he tried to run me down. How he died.

“I'm assuming you were exonerated.”

“I was, but it didn't make me feel any better. He'd be in his late twenties now. He probably would have gotten his life straightened out.” We thought about it for a moment while the party began to boil up around us. More people crowded into the hall and the noise level became frightening. Off in one corner a band began testing sound equipment.

“I didn't know you rode a bike,” she said.

“When I'm in shape and have time.”

“I used to race. Back at Wellesley after I hurt my knee fencing. I have a carbon-fiber bike. Small world, isn't it?”

“We'll have to ride sometime. I didn't know you went to Wellesley. What else do I not know about you?”

“Want the whole résumé?”

I nodded.

“Take notes because I'm not going to repeat any of this. I was a straight-A student all through high school. I ran cross-country and played tennis. I took up fencing at Wellesley because I was having knee problems running. Unfortunately, the knee problems worsened in college. That's when I turned to biking. Early in my junior year of high school I discovered boys, or to be more specific, boys discovered me. Until then, I'd been a tall, gawky girl in thick glasses and braces, but contact lenses and straight teeth did wonders for my social life. Somewhere around Christmas, my mother leafed through my diary and decided I had become promiscuous. Just for the record, I was not by any stretch of the imagination what you would call promiscuous. Still, I suppose by my mother's standards … We lived in Vermont, and nearby there just happened to be an all-girls prep school. After Christmas, I was trucked off to the school like so much dirty laundry. I guess they were hoping I would come back a virgin. Am I making you uncomfortable?”

“Not at all.” But of course, she was. Any time a married man stood around a party talking with a woman on a topic that needed to be discontinued the instant somebody else walked up, he was flirting with trouble. She was trying to make me uncomfortable.

“Ironically, there was a boys' school close by where, in the backseat of many a car, I in fact did experience everything my parents were trying to shield me from and probably a good deal more. My parents were both doctors, so money was not a problem and I knew my college tuition had been put aside long before I was born, but in my senior year our English teacher asked some of us to submit essays to
Seventeen.
First prize was a four-year scholarship. I wrote about presidential powers and won.

“I went to Wellesley, where, believe it or not, I started off as an archaeology major. I switched to art and then English before I found public relations. I had an affair with one of my professors, thinking it was something you were supposed to do. He got fired over it, which I
still feel bad about, and ended up teaching community college somewhere in Arizona. My name stayed out of the headlines, but he left school in a blaze of infamy. God knows what sort of Freudian scenarios I was working through. I continued to distinguish myself in academics, which had always been easy for me, and graduated with a minor in psychology. I went to graduate school at Yale. After I got my master's, I went to New York, where I worked in an advertising agency and met my first husband, Frederick. Three years later our marriage unraveled when he had a series of affairs. After the divorce, in a friend's hot tub, I met the man who would become my second husband. Curiously, a year later, in that same hot tub, we had the argument that was the beginning of the unraveling of our marriage. Dan couldn't stand the fact that the water was too hot for me and that I had to keep standing up to cool off. After that divorce, I moved to Washington, D.C., and got a job in the State Department. A year later I was recruited by one of Maddox's people to work in the international security firm he started. I've been with him five years, and now I'm working on his campaign.”

Out of nowhere, Kathy joined us in time to overhear the last part of Deborah's bio. “Gotta go,” Deborah said, nodding to Kathy as she left. “Sorry we couldn't talk, Katie.”

After she was gone, I said, “Why would her husband get in a fight with her because she was standing up in the hot tub?”