Slow Burn (8 page)

"Oh, now,
Rickey Ray," she chided.

"He had me
throw 'em out of the suite in Dallas. Two hours later, they come and hauled his
ass to the pokey on contempt charges. Took us two days to get him out. The ol'
boy was not a happy camper."

She looked at
me. "I hope you won't judge Jack by this, Mr. Waterman. He's really a
warm, loving human being. Kind and generous to a fault and very
self-actualized."

"I'm not
in the judging business, Miss Atherton, I'm in the security business. I'm just
trying to make his visit to Seattle as pleasant as I can. My employers were
concerned that, you know, with Mr. Del Fuego and Ms. Meyerson and Mr. Reese all
here under the same roof—"

Candace
interrupted, her eyes wide. "Mason Reese is here?"

"Room
eight-fourteen," I said.

"We ain't
even goin' to the show till Tuesday," Rickey Ray said quickly. "I
don't figure we're gonna have no problems at the show."

I pulled my
notebook from my pocket. "What’s your schedule for tomorrow?" I
asked.

"Oh,
Jack'll be clearin' his sinuses till noon, then we'll head down to the new restaurant,
and he'll gum up the works down there till dinnertime, and then we'll head back
here. After that, ifs anybody's guess. Just depends on what comes into his
head."

"Anything
I can do for you?" I asked.

Rickey Ray
moved out from behind the bar, standing between Candace Atherton and me, wiping
a glass with a small towel. The knuckles of his hands were buried beneath a
half-inch ridge of brown calluses.

"Things
ain't gonna get dicey till Friday. That’s the night of the barbecue. You know .
. . the . . ."

"Hasn't
anybody tried to talk him out of it?"

Rickey Ray
shook his head. "Hell, everybody's tried."

"Jack's a
very determined man," Candace added.

"Got a
head like a rock."

Candace
Atherton leaned in close. "He was originally going to stage the barbecue
in Cleveland, but there were some problems."

"The
stampede?" I ventured.

"No, that
was Atlanta," Candace said.

"Yeah, in Cleveland it was every goddamn animal rights activist in the world," Rickey Ray
reported. "All out in the streets with signs and shit. Hell, we had to get
outta Dodge, three days before the opening. City charged Jack thirty-five grand
for the mess."

"You think
he can pull it off this time?"

"Oh,
yeah," he said. "You can pretty much count on it. This time he's the
man with the plan. And the closer we get to that, the more downright
interesting thmgs're gonna get."

The distant
voices rose an entire octave, dueling tenors.

"I better
go," Candace said, hurrying off toward the din.

I watched her
go. Candace in motion was balm to the eye.

"Jack's a
lucky man," I said.

"Luck got
nothin' to do with it," Rickey Ray said. "Bought her a new Mercedes
convertible for her last birthday and a little cabin on Lake of the Ozarks the
year before that."

"How long
has she been with Jack?"

"We both
been 'round a couple of years. Me, a little longer."

"How'd
you—" I started.

Rickey Ray
looked over my shoulder, "Hey, Bartster."

When he wasn't
buried beneath a pile of bags and boxes, Bart was a real good-looking kid.
Six-two or so, black hair, blue eyes. He looked like one of the models in a
Sears catalog.

"Don't
they ever get tired of that?" he asked Rickey Ray.

"Near as I
can tell, no."

He stuck out
his hand. "Bart Yonquist."

I took it
"Leo Waterman."

The sound of
broken glass sent Rickey Ray into motion. "Ah, sheeeet. I best break it
up."

The voices
soared again as he crossed the room. I turned back to Bart. "What's a nice
kid like you doing in a place like this?"

He told me. He
was in his second year of medical school when he got a notice in the mail. It
said the next check he got from his parents' trust fund was also going to be
the last. At that point he was twenty-five and had never held a job. Talk about
rude awakenings.

Anyone who's
ever had to look for work knows how he felt by Friday afternoon, after a solid
week of pounding the bricks. The Fates provided Dixie, who, it just so
happened, was between escorts at the time and thought Bart was, as she put it,
"just as cute as a bug's ear."

Bart, while
being both desperate and young, but neither blind nor stupid, respectfully
declined. She told him it paid two thousand a week, cash, no taxes. Bart did a
little mental math. He figured six months would get him through school and a year
might get him an office.

"And you'd
be surprised how much better it sounded to me."

It was crude; I
admit it. I'd just met the guy, but I had to know.

"Do you,
like . . . you know ..." I was prepared to go on ^definitely without ever
using a verb, but Bart got the idea.

"No, man.
It's not like that. She had all of that she could stand by the time she was
thirty. Just ask her. She'll tell you. She wants a fuU-time gofer and somebody
to be seen with. It's the being seen that really gets her off."

"At two grand
a week," I said, "a guy could be seen quite a lot."

"That's
what I thought. Beside, Dixie's got a good head, she really does. She's a bit
off the wall, but she's good people."

I liked the
kid. He still hadn't gotten a steady job at twenty-six. You had to admire a guy
who could cheat the system for that long.

"Gotta
go," he said. "Take care."

I stood alone
for a few moments. The suite had suddenly gone quiet. As I pulled open the door
and walked out into the hall, I kept repeating Senor Alomar's words; Money is
no object, money is no object . . .

I rode the
soundless elevator down to the ninth floor. In the twenty minutes I'd been
upstairs, my bag had been unpacked, my clothes hung neatly in the closet, my
unmentionables stowed in the dresser and my toiletries geometrically arranged
on the bathroom counter. Dude. The red light on the phone by the bed was
blinking. Two messages. Call Rebecca about when to meet at new house. Call
Karen at work.

The new house
was actually the old house. My parents' house on the east side of Queen Ann
Hill. The trust allowed me either to live there rent-free or to lease it out
and keep the proceeds. I'd always opted for the latter, feeling that I somehow
didn't belong there without them. As if, even as a child, I had simply wandered
into the middle of a scene that began before my time and that surely would
outlive us all.

Rebecca Duvall
and I had known each other since grammar school. If you discounted the three
years I'd been married, we'd been dating for nineteen years. Rebecca was the
only child of a shore-leave shimmy between her mom, Letha, and an alcoholic
merchant marine whose identity had been systematically reduced to the pronoun
"him."

My earliest
memories of Duvall are of the tall girl with the blue barrettes who sat up
front in the third grade- and knew the answers to just about everything.
According to the oft-told legend, Letha had worked three finger-to-the-bone
jobs to get Rebecca through medical school. As if in penance, Rebecca had
pledged to see her mother through old age. We had an unspoken understanding
that whenever Letha turned in her lunch pail, we would sit down and decide what
to do next about our relationship. We counted on her dying, not on her wanting
a roommate.

Letha's
stormy
relationship with her only sister, Rhetta, an equally ancient crone
from Lincoln City , Oregon, had mellowed significantly in recent years.
What had once consisted
of rninimal contact followed by months of heated recrimination had
weathered
into a cozy little menage of mutual deterrence. The old women now
wanted to
live out their days in sibling synergy. Time doth make cowards of us
all.

All bets were
suddenly off. No matter that the Duvall digs up in Ravenna technically belonged
to Rebecca. No way Letha was moving to Bumfuck, Oregon. So that meant Rhetta
was coming to Seattle. Duvall's choices were thin. Live in the house with the
two of them and go shopping for orthopedic shoes, or make other arrangements.
It was simple enough. Rebecca kept paying the mortgage; the old ladies got the
house and it was time for me to putt or get off the green.

Just
so
happened that the family manse was between tenants. When the Levines
moved to Tennessee, the trust took the opportunity to have the place
inspected. As might be expected
in a sixty-year-old house, which had been leased out for the better
part of
twenty-five years, major renovations were needed. They'd sent me the
standard
courtesy letter detailing what they proposed to do, which was damn near
everything, and what it was going to cost me, which was about a hundred
eighty
thousand bucks. And that wasn't the bad part. The bad part was that I'd
made
the mistake of complaining about it to Duvall.

All attempts to
convince her that it might be best to start this new phase of our relationship
on neutral ground had been met with deaf ears. For reasons I'll never
understand, the lure of a rent-free, completely renovated, twelve-room house
overlooking Lake Union was more than Rebecca could withstand. We were moving in
this weekend.

She answered on
the first ring. I could tell from the static that she was in her car.
"Yes," she said.

"You get
my other message?"

"You're
sleeping at the hotel?"

"My place
is all packed up. Ifs a godsend."

A short but
meaningful silence ensued. Then she said, "I'm going to run some errands
before we go up to the house."

The work crews
were finished. The house was supposedly ready to go. We had agreed to take a
look at it together, this afternoon.

"I'm gonna
be late."

"Leo,"
she said, "you're not cheesing out on me, are you? I mean, I don't want to
feel like—"

I cut her off.
"I'm doing exactly what I want to do, with exactly who I want to do it
with. Period. That's it."

"Okay,"
she said, without much enthusiasm.

"I've just
got a lot of stuff to do."

"Like
what?"

I told her.
Beneath the clatter of the static, I could hear her rich laughter. "This
I've got to see," she said when I'd finished.

"I'm
meeting them in front of the Rainier Club at four. I could use some help."
"Like what?" I told her what I wanted.

"Do you
have any idea how hard it was for me to find someone to cut my hair?"

"It's
right in the neighborhood. We can all walk."

"He'll
shit."

"I'll pay
the going rate and tip twenty-five percent."" I heard her chuckle
again. "I'll give him a call." "See you at four." "All
right."

"We'll go
up to see the house when we're done." ''Mmmm," she said and hung up.

I dialed Karen
and sat through a lovely Lennon Sisters a cappella rendition of "Let Me
Call You Sweetheart" before she finally hit the line.

"You
always did know how to pick 'em, Leo."

"How's
that?" . "Have you seen today's Post Intelligencer?"

"No."

"Well,
when you get a chance, treat yourself to page three of Section D. It's a
full-page ad. Your friend Jack Del Fuego." "Oh, no."

"You have
no idea what's been going on around here." "Tell me."

"Less than
an hour after I spoke to you, in walks the mayor's monkey."

"Harlan
the Hatchet was in your office?" "I've still got the windows
open." "What'd he want?"

"Harlan
tells me to find something, anything, to stop Mr. Del Fuego's cookout on Friday
night. He doesn't care how I do it, just do it, he says. Not a 'howdy' or a
'please.' Just do it, and he's gone."

"Harlan
was the first successful recipient of the charisma-bypass procedure."

"You ain't
just whistling Dixie," she said. "So I'm still stomping around the
office an hour later when he comes strolling back in, with that stupid grin of
his plastered all over his face."

"The one
where he looks like a sheep?"

"The very
same."

"Lucky
you."

"Oh, yeah.
And guess what?" "What?"

"A
complete reversal. The barbecue is to go off on schedule. The mayor and his
wife will be in attendance, as will be Mr. and Mrs. Chief of Police and so on
down the line. SPD will provide any extra needed security. I am to resist any
and all pressure. Bingo. He's gone."

"What
pressure would you need to resist?"

"Ah, Leo.
You think like a true Waterman. I wondered the same thing, so I called Mary
Beth Erdman."