Chump Change (8 page)

Took over an hour before Carl sat back in his chair. “Guy doesn’t exist,” he said.

“Why would you lie about your name?” I asked myself out loud.

“Lots of reasons,” Carl growled. “Maybe he was on the run.”

“He sure didn’t act like a guy on the run,” I said. “This was a guy with a resting pulse rate of about fourteen. He wasn’t jumpy enough for a guy on the run. And I’d bet my ass that Gordy was his real first name. Just the way he answered to it.”

Carl started typing again. “Just the state of Washington lottery. Let’s just do Gordon,” he said. “First name, last name, we don’t give a shit.”

I waited until he sat back in the chair again.

“How many Gordons?”

“Fourteen, but only two where Gordon is the first name.”

Another minute passed. Carl leaned forward. “One of the first-name Gordons recently changed his last name.”

“From?”

“Gordon Hardvigsen.”

“To?”

“Gordon Stanley.”

“No shit.”

“Yeah . . . and this Hardvigsen guy took the Washington state lottery for thirteen million six . . . seventeen months back.”

I must have whistled or something. Carl nodded his head. “Lotta dough,” he said.

“How do you lose that much money in just over a year?”

“My first wife,” Carl piped in. “That bitch could vaporize money.”

“Let’s see what we can get on this Hardvigsen guy,” I said.

We got everything, from his birth certificate onward. He was the only child of two only children. Sarah Jane Wilder and Robert F. Stanley, who brought forth a son, forty-seven years ago, in Lewiston, Idaho’s Valley Hospital. Robert drops out of the picture almost immediately, never to reappear. Sarah Jane marries the Hardvigsen guy, and the rest is just boilerplate Americana. No death certificate for either parent. Asotin County records say they own a ranch called The Flying H, on the Washington side of the Snake River. Nine hundred acres, with water rights, on which the yearly taxes are thirteen thousand and change.

Gord was an unspectacular student, graduated just about in the middle of his class . . . all forty of them. Tried Idaho State for one semester, then dropped out and went to work for the Idaho Noxious Weed Abatement Section. Living in one state and working in another was how come he didn’t show on the Washington State employment rolls. That lasted until the week he won all that money, at which point he quit his job, changed his name, and headed for greener pastures. How you gonna keep em down on the farm and all that? Carl tapped the screen.

“Originally he opted for the annual payout, but changed his mind on the twentieth of May last year, when he ate the thirty percent penalty and took the rest of it up front. The state paid out just over nine million six on the ninth of June.”

“I need to call Rebecca,” I said as much to myself as to Carl.

He looked surprised. “You two . . . are you . . .”

“No,” I said. “ME’s office has Gordon’s body listed as a John Doe. I don’t get ahold of Rebecca, the poor bastard’s gonna end up in potter’s field with the rest of the unfortunates.”

“She work weekends?”

I shook my head.

“And you don’t have her cell number anymore.”

Another shake.

Carl pushed a button on his keyboard.

“You seen this?” he asked.

I followed his eyes to one of the computer screens.
KOMO NEWS SPECIAL
.

Triple homicide on Greenwood Avenue. About three miles from here.
LIVE
in red letters down in the right-hand corner of the screen. Cops, cruisers, and yellow crime-scene tape everywhere.

“She’s gotta be there,” he said. “We don’t get that many triples.”

He may have said something else, but I missed it on my way out the door.

SPD had the whole North Greenwood Manor apartment complex cinched up tighter than a frog’s ass. Nobody in, nobody out. To a man, they seemed remarkably unimpressed with my PI credentials. Took me fifteen minutes of solid bitching before somebody even sent word inside that I needed to see Dr. Duvall, and another fifteen before she put in a guest appearance. The set of her jaw said she was seriously annoyed. She kept the yellow crime-scene tape between us.

“What, Leo?”

“Sorry to bother you,” I said.

She wanted to go off on me, I could tell. The muscles along her jawline writhed like snakes. “Guy’s wife wants a divorce, so he kills himself and the kids.”

“Some folks just can’t let it go.”

“Kids are four and six years old. A boy and a girl. He took a linoleum knife and . . .” She stopped herself before she slid off the rails.

If there was something you said at a moment like this, I sure didn’t know what it was, so I kept my big mouth shut.

She took a deep breath. “To what do I owe the honor . . . ?” she asked.

“I know who he is. The guy with the scars.”

Her green eyes flickered. “So do I,” she said, disgustedly. “Now . . . if you’ll excuse me . . .” She spun on her heel and started back toward the building.

“How do you know that?” I said to her back.

She stopped and looked back over her shoulder. “His sister picked up the body earlier today. Said they had a family plot they were going to put him in.”

“He doesn’t have a sister,” I said.

An awkward moment passed. She thought about walking off. I could tell from her body lean. Instead, she turned back my way.

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

“She had his birth certificate.”

“I’ve got a copy in my car,” I said.

“Why would someone claim a body they had no right to?” she demanded. This kind of thing had always been difficult for her. She’d always toed the straight and narrow, and, on one level at least, couldn’t imagine why anyone would do anything else.

“No idea,” I admitted. But then again, there were a whole lot of things about ol Gordo’s living and dying that I didn’t understand. Primary among the mysteries was how whoever picked up the body even knew he was dead. It’s not like anybody notified his next of kin. Then there was the little matter of those horrible scars on his back, and changing his name in his mid-forties, and, of course, the ever-popular
Where the hell’s Missy Allen and all that damned money?

I’d stopped at Carl’s hoping to put this thing behind me. So I could jettison Gordo and his missing millions from my consciousness forever, and get back to my favored states of procrastination and sloth. The visit had, however, produced exactly the opposite effect. Seemed like the closer I got to Gordon Stanley, the less I knew about him.

Rebecca was pissed. This was a woman who didn’t tolerate mistakes. Hers or anybody else’s. She must have been called down to the morgue this morning. No way anybody in the ME’s office was gonna let a John Doe go without her say-so, and now she felt like she’d mailed it in, because it was a Saturday and maybe she wasn’t as careful as she might have been during regular business hours. She started to walk off and then stopped. She turned back my way. “I can’t leave here right now,” she said.

“I know.”

It got quiet enough to hear the traffic on Greenwood Avenue.

“I’ll be in the office early tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow’s Sunday,” I said.

“I’m aware of that.”

“See you there,” I said.

“I don’t like this at all.”

“Me neither.”

“The scars . . . somebody claiming to be his family . . . this is all very sinister.”

I nodded in agreement.

“Be careful,” she said.

“I will.”

And that was that.

“How’d it feel seeing Rebecca again?” Rachel asked.

“Very uncomfortable,” I said.

We were hunkered down in front of the TV, in what used to be my old man’s office. As soon as I came into my trust fund, I’d had it ground-up renovated into something I could live with. Had I left it the way it had been, he’d always have been sitting behind the desk, glowering at me, disapproving of damn near everything I did. The enormous oil portrait of him that used to hang across from his desk may have been packed in a crate up in the attic, but some astral vestige of Big Bill Waterman still seemed to hang in the air like cannon smoke.

Rachel snuggled deeper into the crook of my arm. “Uncomfortable is good,” she said around a mouth full of popcorn. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“That’s one of the things I like about you. You’re honest, even when it’s nasty.”

“When it comes to you, big fella, I can get downright avaristic.”

“Avaristic . . . is that a word?”

“It is now.”

I laughed. “Somebody way back in the seventeen hundreds said that ‘avarice is the sphincter of the heart.’ ”

She laughed out loud. “Some aspects of human nature defy time.”

An electronic signal began to beep.

“What’s that?” Rachel asked.

“The security system. Probably a rabbit on the lawn or something.”

The beeping stopped.

And then started again. More insistent this time.

I slid myself out from under the blanket and made my way to the front hall, where I pulled open the closet door and hit the master switch. All ten cameras blinked to life. The yard lit up like Safeco Field. My neighbors hate it when I do that.

A pair of legs were hanging down the front wall. I watched in silence as they eased their way to the ground, dusted off, and turned my way. It was him. The kid cop.

Keith. I sighed and shut the system down.

He was reaching for the bell when I jerked open the door.

“Thought you were going back home,” I said, testily.

“I did.”

“And?”

“They put my stuff in the street.”

“Who did?”

“The county. I’d been staying in one of their subsidy units. Rent-free. You know . . . until my probationary period was over and I could afford something of my own.”

“And they evicted you?”

“Twenty-four-hour notice right there on the door.”

I wanted to say “I told you so” but stifled it.

“I’ve got company” was all I could think to say.

“Oh . . . I’m sorry . . . I’ll . . .” He gestured toward the street.

“Hang on,” I said, handing him the door.

I turned and walked back into the den, as I called it these days. Rachel looked up when I stopped in the doorway.

“We’ve got company,” I said.

“Really?”

I gave her the
Reader’s Digest
version of The Keith Taylor Story. “He doesn’t seem to have anyplace else to go,” I said at the end.

“Then you should invite him in,” she said.

I pointed at her. “Maybe you want to . . .”

She looked down at herself and smiled. “You mean my tits.”

“Yeah,” I said. “You might want to . . .”

She scrambled to her feet. “I’ll find a few more clothes,” she said with a malicious grin, and padded off toward the master bedroom at the back of the house.

While she gussied herself into semi-respectability, I found the kid another ancient Diet Coke and ensconced him at the kitchen table.

“I should go,” he said.

“Go where?” I asked.

He thought it over. “Home, I guess,” he said after a pause.

“Sometimes that’s best,” I said in my Yoda voice.

Rachel rescued us from further inanities by walking into the kitchen, wearing my new bathrobe and a smile. I got the impression the kid had never been that close to so much prime woman flesh before. I recognized the shallow breathing and moronic expression. Happened to me every time she took off her clothes.

I introduced them. Everybody made nice.

“This must be very difficult on you,” she said to him.

The kid took a pull on the Coke. “This sure isn’t how I planned it,” he allowed.

I busied myself with making a pot of coffee while Rachel went about the business of helping him get in touch with how he was feeling. Same thing she did for a living with unhappy couples. She was good at it. Not leading, but guiding him along his own pathways, until he finally said, “I’ll get over it, I guess. It’s just that I never really failed at anything before.” He wiped the corners of his mouth with his thumb and forefinger. “Maybe I wasn’t top of the class, or first team . . . but I was always more than . . . you know . . . more than respectable.”