Second Watch (6 page)

“Where was he?” Watty asked again.

“You ever hear the phrase ‘queer as a three-dollar bill’? ” Harlan asked.

Watty nodded.

“Well, that’s Stevie for you. Doesn’t look like a pretty boy by any means. And people who think they can push him around for it generally don’t try that stunt a second time. But I’ll tell you for sure, my cousin Stevie wouldn’t be caught dead with a woman, and most especially not a coed from the University of Washington. He barely finished eighth grade.”

“I still need to know where he was on Friday.”

“Probably at home with my aunt Nelda and her cats, same as he is every night. Her place is over by the airport. He looks after her, but he wouldn’t be driving around late at night because he doesn’t have a license. Can’t read well enough to pass the test. So if you’re thinking he’d be out somewhere hanging out with a cute coed type, you’ve got another think coming.”

“What about the driver?”

“His name’s Manny Ortega, but I’m telling you, as far as Manny is concerned, it’s the same thing.”

“What do you mean the same thing?” Watty asked.

“Manny would be at home on Friday night and Saturday night, too, with Aunt Nelda and Stevie. She lives downstairs, they live upstairs.”

“Wait, Stevie and Manny are a couple?” Watty asked. Something about his professional Homicide demeanor had slipped. He looked more than a little shocked.

Harlan Bates shrugged. “Whatever turns them on, I suppose. Before those two guys got into AA, they used to have some hellacious fights. Now they’re both sober. Except for the occasional lovers’ spat, I couldn’t ask for a better team.”

Watty said nothing. He seemed to be concentrating on closing his notebook and putting away his pen. If there was an interview lesson for me in all this, I doubt it was the one he had intended.

“Anything else, gentlemen?” Harlan Bates asked.

“No,” Watty said quietly. “I believe we have everything we need at the moment.”

We went outside and got back into the car. Watty hadn’t told me where we were going next. I fired up the engine and a filtered Winston and sat there smoking with the car idling while Watty got on the radio. A few minutes later, the clerk in Records read off an address on Twenty-first Avenue South.

“That’s where we’re going?” I asked.

“Yup,” Watty said. “We’re going to go ask Harlan’s aunt Nelda a few questions before we interview Manny and Stevie.”

Tossing my half-smoked cigarette out the window, I turned and reached into the backseat for the ragged
Thomas Guide,
a dog-eared paperback collection of street maps for Seattle and King County that was standard equipment in every vehicle operated by Seattle PD back before the advent of GPS technology.

While we made our way south and west, Watty shook his head in dismay. “Just looking at that guy,” he said, “I never would have guessed.”

“Me, either,” I agreed. “Never in a million years.”

CHAPTER 5

T
he last thing I remembered, I had been lying awake, listening to the whispered murmurs of the mattress and the continuous motion of the passive-movement exercise machine and thinking about that long-ago time. I had no idea I had drifted off to sleep until good old Nurse Keith came hustling in to disturb my slumber yet again. It was still dark outside, but I saw the occasional flash of lightning in the window, accompanied by the low rumble of thunder.

“It’s been pouring for over an hour now,” he said. “I guess summer’s over.”

It was mind boggling to be transported across forty years in what seemed like the blink of an eye. In 1973 the very idea of a pair of guys living openly as a couple was enough to give even a seasoned homicide cop like Watty a bit of a pause. Back in those homophobic good old days, as far as most of us were concerned, the word “gay” had meant nothing more nor less daring than “happy.”

I also recalled that way back then most nurses had been women. They wore white uniforms and funny white caps with a black bar across the top. Keith’s colorful scrubs were a long way from that. First he took my vitals, and then he dealt with the surgical drains on both my incisions. I think he called them “pomegranates,” or some other kind of blood red fruit, but that could just be my random access memory being screwed up due to the drugs. I did notice that Keith was wearing what looked like a wedding band, which might or might not mean what it used to mean. However, since he was clearly good at his job, I didn’t ask about his personal life. It was none of my business.

I dozed again after Nurse Keith left, and it was probably the continuing rumble of thunder that took me back to that other time and place. When the next guy to come into the room was wearing a set of fatigues, I wasn’t even surprised. The fatigues weren’t the new desert-style BDUs that showed up sometime in the early eighties, but the old familiar olive green ones that we used back in ’Nam.

My new unexpected visitor walked over to the bedside table and pulled a deck of playing cards out of his pocket. He peeled off four cards and laid them out in front of me, facedown on the table next to my pitcher of water. I knew without looking that if I reached out and turned them over, they would all be aces of spades. I looked up and saw exactly what I expected: a crooked, chip-toothed grin; a handsome face; penetrating blue eyes; short blond hair. It may have been close to fifty years since I’d seen Second Lieutenant Lennie Davis last, but you never forget the face of the first guy who saved your life.

“Hey, asshole,” he said, grinning. “You got old.”

And you didn’t.
That’s what I wanted to say, but of course I didn’t. When you’re in the presence of ghosts, even drug-induced ghosts, I don’t suppose it’s polite to point out that they’re dead and you’re not.

He turned and glanced around the room. “What’s this?” he asked. “And what’s wrong with you?”

“They fixed my knees. Replaced them.”

He gave me a quizzical arched-eyebrow look that would have passed muster with
Star Trek
’s Mr. Spock.

“With what?”

“Titanium.”

“No shit! They can do that now?” He shook his head in pure wonder.

The truth is, these days medical science can do a lot of things that they couldn’t back then. A lot of military folks, our wounded warriors, survive injuries that were fatal back in Vietnam. They not only survive, they return to serve again. Not Lieutenant Davis. Not Lennie D.

He walked away from my bed and stood looking out the window where, framed by neighboring buildings, the Space Needle was barely visible in the rain-blurred distance.

“I wanted to come to Seattle for the World’s Fair,” he said. “By then I was already at West Point. Never made it.”

Looking at him standing there, big as life, I felt a lump forming in my throat. He had been a smart guy. The first time I saw Lieutenant Davis, he was sitting outside his tent reading a grubby copy of
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
I was new to C Company, and I wasn’t sure that having a bookworm for a platoon leader was necessarily a good idea. It was mid-July and hot as hell in the Pleiku highlands, hot and dusty.

“At ease, soldier,” he told me, once I introduced myself. About that time, he caught me looking questioningly at the book. “Ever read it?”

Reading books was always a chore for me. I only read for book reports, never for fun. The idea of spending an afternoon with a tome that looked as though it weighed in at well over a thousand pages wasn’t my idea of a good time. I shook my head.

“The bad guys lose eventually,” he said, “but it’s a hell of a fight to take them down. When we’re not out chasing Charlie, reading’s about the only thing there is to do here. I’ll be done with it this afternoon. I’ll be glad to let you give it a try.”

From the way he was holding the book, it looked as though he was only two-thirds of the way through. I may have been the new guy in town, but I knew better than to piss off the second lieutenant.

“Sure thing,” I said. “I’d like that.”

It’s amazing to realize that life and death turn on such small exchanges.

“Thank you,” I muttered to my hospital visitor. It was difficult to speak because of the lump in my throat.

“For what?”

“For saving my life.”

“That was my job,” he said. “You were one of my guys. So what have you done with yourself?”

“I wanted to help people,” I answered. “I’ve been a cop, first at Seattle PD and later for the attorney general’s office.”

“Married?”

I nodded. I didn’t say, “Third time’s the charm,” but that’s what I meant.

“I never got to tell her good-bye,” he said quietly.

He didn’t say who. I knew Lieutenant Davis had been engaged at the time of his death, but that was all I knew. Once he was gone, I wasn’t close enough to know all the gory details, and the guys who were close enough—the ones who were still alive—were all too broken up about losing him to talk about it. As far as they were concerned, Lennie D. was the best and the brightest. And if it’s true that the good die young, what am I doing still hanging around?

“I knew you had a girl back home,” I said.

It was his turn to nod. “Bonnie and I were engaged. I couldn’t talk her into marrying me before I shipped out. We were going to get married in Japan on my R and R.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“Me, too,” he said. “I just wish she knew how much.”

Just then Mel appeared in the doorway. The moment she did, Lieutenant Davis disappeared. The playing cards on my hospital tray vanished. I hadn’t thought I was asleep, but I must have been.

“Talking in your sleep?” Mel asked, entering the room like a fast-moving storm. “How are you feeling? Did you sleep well? Breakfast is on its way. The lady with the trays is two doors down the hall.”

Just that fast, she swept away my nighttime’s worth of strange visitations.

“I heard your voice as I was coming down the hall,” she said, kissing me lightly on the forehead. “I thought the nurse might be in here with you.”

“Nope,” I said as brightly as I could manage. “Nobody here but us chickens.” I wasn’t about to tell her I had been busy having a heart-to-heart conversation with a fifty-year-old Ghost of Christmas Past.

“I’m on my way to work,” she continued. “Thought I’d stop by and check in with you before I hit 520.”

The Seattle area branch of the attorney general’s Special Homicide Investigation Team is located in the Eastgate area of Bellevue, across Lake Washington from our downtown Seattle condo. We used to cross Lake Washington on I-90, a bit south of the 520 bridge. Now, since the state has seen fit to start charging outrageously expensive tolls on 520—the Money-Sucking Bridge, as Mel calls it—traffic on it has dropped remarkably, while traffic on I-90 has gotten terrible. Since we can afford the tolls, we usually opt for less traffic.

“From here I’ll take the scenic route,” she said. “I’ll go through the arboretum.”

Nurse Keith came in just then. “Vitals before you get breakfast,” he said, slapping the blood pressure cuff around my arm. While he was inflating it, I introduced him to Mel.

Melissa Soames is very easy on the eyes under the worst of circumstances. Dressed as she was for work, she looked downright spectacular, and I did notice that her looks weren’t lost on Keith, either. Clearly my previous musings about his possible sexual preferences were totally off the mark.

“What’s on the agenda for today?” Mel asked.

She was being a little too cheerful. That meant she was still worried about me, even though she wouldn’t come right out and say so.

“Breakfast and then a round of physical therapy,” Keith answered. “Jonas here may think he’s on vacation, but he’s wrong about that. The PT team will see to it that he doesn’t just lie around getting his beauty sleep. We’ll have him up and out of bed in no time.”

“I told Harry I’d be in today,” Mel said. “I already know he wants me up in Bellingham, but I could always call him and let him know I need to take another day off.”

Harry was Harry Ignatius Ball, Squad B’s hopelessly politically incorrect leader. We generally refer to him in public by his preferred moniker, Harry I. Ball, because it’s usually good for a laugh, one Harry enjoys more than anyone else. The fact that Mel avoided using that name with Nurse Keith told me she wasn’t in a lighthearted mood. I also knew that her asking for the day off wasn’t going to work.

The previous week there had been a supposedly “peaceful” rally just outside the Western Washington University campus in Bellingham. Peaceful is a relative term, and this one had devolved into a window-smashing flash mob in which not just one but three WWU students ended up being Tasered by members of the local police department. Naturally, the errant students were claiming police brutality, even though so far the dash cams on the cops’ patrol cars seemed to back up the officers’ claims that they had considered themselves to be in grave danger at the time.

I’ll never understand why kids think it’s okay to come to “peaceful demonstrations” armed with baseball bats, but maybe that’s just me.

As soon as the police-brutality claim was raised, Bellingham’s chief of police, Veronica Hamlin, was on the phone to the attorney general’s office down in Olympia, pleading for backup and for an unbiased investigation. At that point, the police-brutality investigation could have landed with the Washington State Patrol, but Attorney General Ross Connors, as the ultimate boss of both that agency and ours, was the one who made the call to use Special Homicide.

I doubt Chief Hamlin was thrilled when she learned that Squad B, under Harry’s leadership, would be the ones handling the investigation into her department and being responsible for pulling her bacon out of the fire—or not. After all, years earlier in her role as assistant chief, Ms. Hamlin had been the prime mover behind Harry’s being given his walking papers from that very same department.

Sometimes what goes around really does come around. Of course, Harry wouldn’t ever leave some poor street cop hanging out to dry just to get even. He insisted that the investigation be scrupulously unbiased, which is why, as soon as it came up on Friday, Harry had put Mel in charge. She had spent Saturday and Sunday in Bellingham conducting interviews, and had returned to Seattle late Sunday evening so she could be on tap Monday morning for my surgery.

“You know you can’t do that,” I said. “Harry needs you.”

“Veronica Hamlin is a witch,” Mel said. “She’d sell those two poor cops down the river in a minute if she didn’t think that ultimately it would make her look bad.”

“Which is why you need to go to work instead of hanging around here looking after me.”

“What’s the matter?” Keith asked, grinning at her. “Don’t you trust us?”

A lady waltzed into the room carrying my breakfast tray. The food looked better than it tasted. The omelet was rubbery, the orange juice was anything but fresh squeezed, the toast was unbuttered and cold, and the coffee was only remotely related to the high-test stuff we make at home, but I was hungry enough that I ate it all. And I was glad when Mel gave me a breezy good-bye peck on the cheek and then took off rather than sitting there watching me eat.

True to Keith’s word, the PT ladies appeared the moment breakfast was over. Once again, they pried me out of bed. Then they put a second hospital gown on backward to cover my backside while we hit the corridor and walked. I wasn’t as worried this time, not as much as I had been the day before. I noticed that there were lovely pieces of art lining the wall—something that had escaped my notice the day before. I also noticed that this time the nurses’ station didn’t seem nearly as far away as it had the first time we went there. I climbed back into bed, proud of myself and thinking that was it for the day.

“Oh no,” the therapist told me with a laugh. “Next up is occupational therapy. They’ll be here in an hour or so. Those are the people who will teach you to go up and down stairs and get in and out of beds and cars.”

Again, I wanted to say, “Already?” I guess it would have been more of a whine than a question, but my ringing cell phone spared me from embarrassing myself.

“How’s it hanging?” Harry asked.

I already warned you that the man doesn’t have a politically correct bone in his body.

“Better than I expected,” I said.

“Thanks for insisting that Mel come in,” he said. “I need her bird-dogging the situation in Bellingham. Can’t afford to have any screwups on that one. With you out of play, she’s the best man for the job. Do you need anything?”

“No,” I told him. “I’m fine.”

By then call waiting was letting me know I had yet another caller.

“Gotta go, Harry. My son’s on the line.”

“Hey, Dad,” Scott said. “How’s it going?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “The surgery went well. They’ve had me up walking twice so far, and the pain’s not bad at all.”

The lack of pain probably had more to do with the meds they were plugging into my body than it did with the success of the procedure, but I kept quiet about that. Most of the time when people ask how you’re doing, they’re looking for your basic generic answer. If someone asks you, “How was your root canal?” they most likely don’t want chapter and verse. That was the case here, too. Scott wanted to know how I was. He didn’t need to know the gory details about the bloody drain bags the medical folk laughingly referred to as “grenades” or about the weirdly vivid dreams that kept taking me down memory lane. Now that I thought about it, I noticed I hadn’t mentioned the dreams to Mel, either. Call it a sin of omission.