Slow Burn (23 page)

Brie Meyerson
was nearly back at the table when Lobdell spoke. "Miss Meyerson."

She turned to
him. "Yes?"

"I'm
afraid we have a problem with your statement."

"What?
Oh." Brie had not inherited the family stoneface from her mother. The girl
looked terrified. Forks poised in mid-stroke. Wine went unswallowed.

"I remind
you, Miss Meyerson, this is a murder investigation."

When the girl
didn't speak, he played his card.

"Perhaps I
should tell you that the security floors in this hotel are monitored by
surveillance cameras and that, while everyone else's coming and goings are
confirmed by the tape, you do not appear on it until five-twenty P.M."

"I don't
understand," the girl stammered.

"It's very
simple You told us that after returning to the hotel at two-thirty, you went
straight to your room for a nap because you were feeling poorly." He drew
the words out. "You do not appear on the tape, Miss Meyerson. So . . . if
you weren't in your room, where were you?"

The girl
instinctively turned toward her mother for help.

Some help.
Abigail Meyerson sat at attention. "Well?"

Brie glanced
across the room toward the Del Fuego delegation.

"I . .
." She started to speak.

Lobdell began
yapping. "I repeat, Miss Meyerson, this is a murder investigation. Where
were you?"

In a touching
display of sibling support, Spaulding piped up. "Leave her alone, dick
face."

Lobdell gave it
the voice of doom. "Miss Meyerson?"

From the corner
of my eye I the movement as Candace Atherton put her napkin on the table and
stood.

She spoke
directly to Brie. "He's right. I'm afraid we'll have to tell them. I'm so
sorry."

Whereas all
eating had stopped a couple of minutes back, all breathing was now temporarily
suspended.

"We . .
." The girl seemed to be slipping into vapor lock.

Candace now
turned to Lobdell. "This is going to be somewhat awkward, Detective, and I
must apologize." She cast a quick sidelong glance at the Meyerson
contingent. "Miss Meyerson went to the movies with Mr. Tolliver and
myself. We didn't say so before because we were afraid her mother ..."

"Nonsense."
Abigail Meyerson was on her feet.

Candace kept
talking. "Up at What’s called the Broadway market. A film named Bound.
None of us liked it much. We left before it was over."

"My daughter
went absolutely nowhere with these—"

Lobdell cut her
off. "Well, Miss Meyerson?"

We had a mass
exhale and waited.

The girl had
gathered herself. "All right. All right. Ifs true."

A couple of
hundred pins dropped.

Sir Geoffrey
seemed amused. "Indeed."

They'd been
right to worry what Abby Meyerson would think. As she dabbed at her hps, it was
hard to tell where the white linen napkin left off and her face began.

She stood and
picked her black purse up from the table. Her expression held no clue. She may
well have been the coolest cucumber I can ever remember. Must be that Dove Bar,
I mused.

"I
apologize for my daughter," she said to Lobdell. "I had no
idea." She straightened her spine even more. "I assure you that my daughter
will have no further contact with these people, and as of this moment, I shall
require any further contact whatsoever with me or my family to pass through my
attorney."

She pulled a
business card from her purse and laid it on the table. Spaulding grabbed his
crotch on the way out. Brie tried to linger.

"Brie,"
was all her mother said from the doorway. Abby never looked back as she closed
the door behind them.

Rickey Ray
whispered. "She's in the frying pan now."

His lordship
had his hands folded over his middle and his lips pursed. He spoke without
opening his eyes.

"There
are, I suppose, worse places to be."

There's a
couple of necks out there in a white Chevy," Terry whispered in my ear.
"They been in asking for you and Georgie by name. Got descriptions of the
rest of your crew. They got uniforms out pushin' the neighborhood hard for the
last couple of days."

I put my mouth
to his ear. "Actually, there's probably more like four of them out there
now. I just dragged a couple more of them with me from the hotel."

I'd
picked them
up right away. A couple of bulls in a blue Ford Taurus, hanging about
five cars
back and two lanes over as I rolled up the freeway toward The Zoo.
Trying for
all the world to look like a pair of weightlifters on their way to the
gym at
ten-thirty in the morning. Sure. The minute I ducked down the Lakeshore
Drive exit, they allowed the gap between us to widen. They knew where I
was going.

I motioned for
Terry to lean in closer, but he shook his head, turning instead toward the far
end of the bar, staying completely rigid as he moved. I followed him down the
length of the bar.

"The
back's still bad?" I inquired as I walked.

He waved an arm
at me, telling me to follow. He wore the same black polyester pantsuit he'd
worn every day for the past fifteen years or so. It was the white patent
leather belt and shoes, however, that made the ensemble.

"Killin'
me, Leo. Doc says I got a disintegrating vertebra."

Terry lifted
the hinged section of bar and headed toward the back of the building, pushing
chairs out of his way as he shuffled along.

"Wants me
to go under the knife," he continued. "But I don't know, man. You let
people be cuttin' into your back, you could end up on a creeper with a cup full
of pencils, if you know what I mean."

I told him I
understood and followed him out the back door, onto the rickety back porch of
the bar. He left the door ajar behind us.

The plywood
floor sagged from the weight of the recycling barrels. Three for brown glass.
Two for green. Terry checked the area.

Satisfied, he
put a hand on my shoulder. "Those two outside was in for a while
yesterday. I don't know what they was doin' back there." He shrugged and
pointed to his ear. "You never know."

Two battered
brown Dumpsters gagged on the oversized loads of refuse that had been packed
into their mouths, leaving the covers now propped agape on the chain-link fence
that separated this space from the peeling yellow house beyond.

"George
said you would know what he was talkin' about if I said he was with Piggy and
Roscoe and that they had a camp that was right back in the same place as the
old camp. He said for you to remember the place where Cappy burned his
truss."

Oh, yeah, like
I was ever going to forget the smell of that thick yellow smoke rising to the
roaring ceiling and then spreading out in both directions as the old man limped
around the fire humming opera.

"I'm gonna
leave from here," I said. "After a bit, the necks are gonna come in
to see what the hell happened to me. You can handle it?"

"Be my
pleasure to Schultz 'em, Leo. Hell, it's about the most fun I can have with
this back," he replied.

"I'm gonna
need a couple of candy bars," I said.

Terry nodded.
"Always a good idea." He pulled the door open and eased himself
inside, placing his white feet with great care, as if walking on hot coals. The
steel door bumped twice on its cylinder and then snapped behind him. For some
reason, the Dumpsters smelled worse in the silence.

The way I saw
it, I had a case of Rickey Ray's limited options. The longer the heat looked
for the crew, the more of them they were going to find. I had no illusions.
This was not the Double-O Section. Some of them were going to get shitfaced and
run their mouths to somebody who was going to flap his gums to somebody else
who was going to make some folding money out of it. I needed to see George, and
I needed to see him now. The good news was that the camp was within easy
walking distance of where I stood.

The bad news
was that I was about to use up one of my free Lose The Cops cards. Any damn
fool can dump a tail if the tail doesn't know he's been spotted. About the time
tails decide they don't give a damn whether or not you know you're being
followed, it becomes exponentially more difficult. Once you make them look bad,
and the four guys outside were going to be up shir's creek for losing me, then
you become subject to all the high-tech, tag-team surveillance they can muster.
It can still be done, but it takes quite a bit more finesse.

If they were
smart, one of the cars would be parked halfway up Lynn, facing downhill, with a
nice view all the way to Lake Union, while the other would be along the curb on
Eastlake Boulevard, covering the terrain north to south. Sadly, that left
only the Dumpsters and the fence.

The door
opened; Terry's hand appeared and dropped a Snickers bar and a bag of M&M
Peanuts into my hand.

"Thanks,"
I said, but the door had already snapped shut.

 I stashed the
goodies in my jacket pocket, then stepped off the porch. I wiggled sideways
into the space between the Dumpsters and levered them apart. Each box had two
sets of U-shaped ears welded to the side, lift handles for the garbage trucks
that slipped their hydraulic tongues into the slots.

Reluctantly
gripping the edge of each Dumpster, I boosted myself up onto the lower set of
handles. The yellow house on the other side of the fence had a ragged backyard
barely big enough for a faded blue wading pool, partially collapsed and sagging
under the weight of green water and sodden leaves. Several pieces of ancient
firewood, some cross-. hatched with the bite of the ax, Uttered the yard, along
with a white bleach bottle, whose bottom was cut out. No doghouse. No food
dishes. No bones. Good.

I considered a
number of methods by which I could possibly climb up and over the garbage
without touching a single exposed surface, but eventually said screw it and
propelled myself up to the higher set of handles and then up onto the top,
careful of my footing lest I slide down the lid and into the Dumpster, in which
case suicide would surely be the sole remaining option.

I sidestepped
to the top of the lid and jumped. About halfway down, I felt pretty good. That
was before I realized that what I had taken to be the ground was merely the top
of waist-high field grass. The resultant glitch in my athletic timing drove my
knees up under my chin with a crack and then catapulted me back into the lower
part of the fence like a missile. The fence groaned and rattled.

I sat in the
damp, rough grass with my palms up, as if hoping to stem the torrent of dead
leaves showering down upon my head and into my lap from the shaking blackberry
bush which had woven itself into the fabric of the fence. I blinked once and
then remembered where I was.

I struggled to
my feet, stepped around the sad little pool and followed the cracked cement
path which led around the right side of the house. Nobody had walked this way
in quite a while. I could tell because, two steps in, I took a three-pound
spiderweb full in the face. If the thing had been any bigger and stronger, I'd
have had whiplash.

By my
reckoning, a good, fresh spiderweb in the mug is one of life's least endearing
experiences. I rank it right up there with getting parking tickets and stepping
in dog shit as serious day killers. Imagine how other insects felt about it.

I squatted and
duckwalked the rest of the way, using my hands to hack an imaginary path into
the air before me. At that point, I was not prepared to consider how stupid it
certainly must have looked. Arrrg.

I was still
rubbing and picking at my face when I emerged onto Eastlake Boulevard, a block
north of the white Chevy Blazer. After checking both ways, I dipped across the
street and started up the hill/where I leaned back against a storefront and
pawed at the imagined maze of filament which my central nervous system insisted
was still stuck to my face, but which my fingers could not detect. Nothing
short of a shower was going to suffice.

Resigned, 1
trudged the two steep blocks up to Boylston and then turned right. The Taurus
was just where I thought it would be, straddling the little grass island on the
right of the street. 1 turned up my collar and crossed Lynn a block and a half
behind the two cops, taking my time, making sure that if they happened to
snatch a rearview look at me, there'd be nothing sufficiently remarkable about
my presence to command their attention.

Three
blocks in
front of me, Boylston Avenue seems to allow but two choices. You can go
straight ahead onto the Interstate, or you can duck left under the
bridge and
run along the face of Capital Hill and the high-rent homes looking out
over Lake Union from the east. Either way, you're a long way from terra
firma. I took the third
route.

Under the
overpass, the ground falls off sharply as it works its way in a series of
gullies down toward the lake, and for about half a mile, all twelve lanes of
the freeway are held aloft by a forest of cement columns and buttresses that
stretch forward into the darkness farther than the eye can follow, a woodland
excavated and exposed to the air for the first time in centuries.