The Bum's Rush (5 page)

' 'Oh, that investigation."

"That's the one."

"What next?"

"As your attorney, I advise you to buy this woman
breakfast. As you and I know only too well, my friend"-- he patted my
shoulder--"women of this mettle are few and far between. I recommend
the standard introductory patter, followed by a whirlwind courtship."

I turned to Selena. "You heard him," I said. "Only a fool disregards the advice of his attorney."

Selena Dunlap did not require further prompting. Jed and I followed her vapor trail to the street.

She ate like my ex-wife used to pack a suitcase.
Methodically, almost ceremoniously, stuffing every obscure compartment
with its ordained freight. Over the past forty-five minutes she'd gone
through two eggs up, two eggs scrambled, a short stack, an order of
bacon, four link sausages, and now two orders of toast. She'd washed it
all down with five Rainier Lites. Watching her weight, I supposed. Her
recent call for hash browns and another beer suggested that she had a
few compartments to fill.

"Ya know," she said between bites, "we busted a
couple of guys, saved another guy's ass, got thrown in the can
together, and I don't even know your damn name."

"Leo."

"How come you know those guys?" she asked while she chewed.

"What guys?"

"George and Normal and such."

"George and Harold were friends of my old man."

"Your father?"

"Yeah. He was kind of like a local celebrity."

"That's what the dyke meant when she said you had connections?"

"Probably."

"What was his name?"

"Bill Waterman. Folks called him Wild Bill."

"The politics guy?"

"That's the one," I confirmed.

She chewed this news along with her toast.

My father had turned an early career as a labor
organizer into eleven terms on the Seattle City Council. He'd run for
mayor four times, each time suffering a narrow defeat. While it was
great fun to have Wild Bill Waterman sitting on the council, making
ridiculous proposals, campaigning in costume from the back of a beer
wagon, the good people of Seattle had instinctively known that Wild
Bill Waterman was by no means the kind of guy to be left running the
store. As more than one of his opponents had suggested, Wild Bill's
sense of humor was simply too far advanced for any office with wide
discretionary powers. This was, after all, the guy who had on numerous
occasions suggested that budgetary problems could be surmounted by
simply giving the city back to the several bands of Indians from whom
it had been stolen.

"The one who used to lead that goat around on a leash?" "Only in election years," I countered.

"And gave away all the free beer." *

"For purely medicinal purposes."

I'd heard all the stories more times than I could
bear. The line between the historical character and the man I
remembered was forever fuzzy, leaving me with a makeshift image of the
old man that was, I suspected, an apocryphal melange of the mythic and
the mundane. I changed the subject as quickly as possible.

"These days they work for me sometimes."

She bobbed her head up and down and shook the toast.

"You're the detective guy, huh? The one George and them always braggin about workin' for."

"I'm the one."

"I always thought they was full of shit."

"They are full of shit. Just not about that."

She nodded again and went back to work on a newly
arrived plate of hash browns. I leaned back against the cold vinyl of
the booth.

"What did you mean back there in the jail when you said that was your boy in the paper?''

She kept her eyes on her plate. "Didn't mean nothing," she said, pushing potatoes around the rim with a triangle of toast.

She read my eyes. "You think I'm lyin'?"

"I didn't say that," I protested.

"But that's what you're thinkin'. It is, huh?"

"Don't put words in "

"You ain't the only one allowed to be related to
somebody famous, ya know, Mr. Connections. I wasn't born no damn bum. I
had me a life like anybody else. I " She waved the toast at me. "Never
mind."

Lukkas Terry had been a dominant light on the
Seattle music scene. Not grunge. Not punk. Not alternative. No
particular label except his own. He was a technical wizard of a one-man
band whose laboriously layered studio renderings successfully crossed
all generational and genre lines. God knows, I'd tried not to like his
music. I'm a dinosaur. For the most part, except for jazz, I make it a
point not to like anything recorded after 1979. There are few
infringements so tyrannical as being forced to listen to some other
generation's music. Terry's music, however, had been an exception.

His anguished, angry lyrics screamed the fears and
disappointments of an entire generation, while awesome sequencer rhythm
sections drove the music forward like a runaway train.

Several hundred million other souls agreed. His
work regularly went multiple platinum prior to release. Lukkas Terry
had truly been gifted by the muse. Unfortunately, Lukkas Terry was also
dead.

Both daily papers had kept strict track of the
legal wrangling surrounding his estate. According to the last article
I'd read, a bit over fifty million dollars was being held in escrow as
the state waited the obligatory ninety days for familial claims. If I
remembered correctly, if no family appeared, both the present estate
and future royalties would fall to his manager and business partner,
Gregory Conover, and his record company, Sub-Rosa Records. And none of
that was the real prize. The big bucks lay in Crotch Cannibals, Lukkas
Terry's as-yet-unreleased final CD. The music trade magazines claimed
that advance orders for Crotch Cannibals would make it, upon the first
day of its release, the largest-selling CD of all time.

I don't listen to his CDs anymore. My hand quivers
as I pass over them in the racks, but I leave them where they lie. The
circumstances of his passing somehow negated whatever joy they might
still impart. A heroin overdose, for chrissakes. Found blue-faced on
the floor of his Bell town condo with his pants full of shit. What a
shame. What a cliche. Cue the Righteous Brothers. The heavenly band
just got bigger and better.

Selena poured the rest of the beer down her throat, wiped her lips with the rumpled paper napkin, and slid out of the booth.

"I'm outta here," she announced, heading for the door.

"Wait," I said. "Can I--" 

She stopped, turned, and gave me a rueful smile.
"You can't nothin', Leo. How many times I got to tell you? You keep
this up, I'm gonna have to get you a bell and a tambourine."

"Well, then, thanks for the help back there in the hotel."

"Makes us even," she said. She turned and opened the door.

" 'Sides," she said over her shoulder, "you got bigger problems than that."

"Like what?" I shot back.

She reached into her pocket. Her big red-knuckled hands squeezed a familiar wad of bills.

"Like payin' the bill, sport. Remember, last time you had one of these Mother Teresa attacks, you gave me all your cash."

"James, Junkin, Rose and Smith."

"Hi, Charlotte. It's Leo."

"Leo?" She feigned confusion. "Not the Leo who used to work as a gumshoe hereabouts?"

"The very same."

"How's the ass?"

"It was a hamstring wound," I said. I heard her giggle.

"What, pray tell, brings your wealthy self out into the tawdry world of commerce?''

The friendly abuse was to be expected. I hadn't
worked in quite a while. Back in early September, I'd picked up a major
finder's fee when I'd located a homegrown bail jumper named Adrian
Jolley. Adrian and I had played Pop Warner football together during the
rainy fall of my tenth year. He was big for his age but never really
had the stomach for it. While the rest of us were testing our
testosteronic mettle on assorted fields of dreams, Adrian was selling
dime bags over at the grammar school. Few find a calling so early.

A couple times, when my old man was faced with
something or other so serious he couldn't even send his driver to get
me, Mrs. Jolley had found me standing in the rain, the last one after
practice, waiting for my ride. She'd taken me home with her, let me use
the phone, and fed me incredibly dry peanut butter sandwiches and
mercifully cold milk until the old man could make the proper
arrangements. 

Faced with a second major drug trafficking
charge and a forty-year stretch of hard time, Adrian Jolley had
liquidated his resources and successfully fled the country. Or so it
was rumored, anyway. Every skip tracer in town had used every
connection he'd owned to try to get a line on the good Mr. Jolley. No
go.

As for me, I couldn't see any point in reinventing
the wheel. Lots of good men were already doing all the obvious things
and getting nowhere. Besides that, I had this little intuition tweaking
my frontal lobes. I kept seeing the three of us in her kitchen, washing
down those sandwiches, watching the looks that passed between them.
Seeing their entwined arms and braided hands. Sensing their palpable
need for physical contact with each other. Wondering what it would be
like to be that close to either of my parents. Once in a while, I still
wonder. A couple of weeks of replaying that little maternal matinee and
I started calling contractors.

In the middle of the third day, I had a spasm of
lucidity and called my aunt Karen in the city license department. A
building permit issued to Marlene Jolley? Sure enough. A two-man
general contracting operation up in Lynnwood. Dave and Donnie. Double D
Contracting. Hell, yeah. A complete renovation. Turned a dank basement
into a regular pleasure palace. The old girl spent the better part of
forty grand on the job. Paid in cash too. Probably would have done
better to just sell the place and get something else, but she didn't
want to hear about it. What can we say? Ya gotta do what the customer
wants.

I took what I had to the King County prosecutor's office. 

It took them all of forty minutes to muster a search party, coax a warrant out of old Pterodactyl Turner, and get on the road.

I knocked on the back door, waited, and then
knocked again. Only the smallest movement of the tangerine-colored cafe
curtains suggested habitation.

"It's Leo Waterman, Mrs. Jolley," I said to the door.

The three Tac Squad cops pressed harder against the
house as the door began to rattle and move. By the time the door was
open a full inch, the first cop was up the four concrete stairs and
through.

Unfortunately for Officer McNaughton, despite the
orthopedic shoes, the support hose, and the cherubic countenance,
Marlene Jolley was fast on her feet. Overcome by maternal zeal, she
went absolutely batshit, lofting a boiling pot of egg noodles at the
officer, whose Kevlar vest merely served to funnel the steaming mess
inexorably south. While Officer McNaughton was occupied with his
steaming briefs, Marlene wound up and skulled him with the pot,
shattering his plastic face mask and sending him spiraling to the
floor. Suddenly the room was full of cops. I stood on the brown lawn
and waited until things calmed down in the house.

When I walked into the kitchen she was on the
floor, Maced and manacled, allowed to snuffle about on the worn
linoleum while the EMTs administered to the fallen cop. She gazed up at
me through swollen eyes. "You dirty bastard," she shrieked. "I put food
in your mouth. I fed you peanut butter and jelly, you ungrateful son of
a bitch."

"Just peanut butter," I'd corrected. "No jelly."

They'd found Adrian reclining in his BarcaLounger,
wearing a pained expression and a freshly pressed pair of baby blue
boxer shorts. The months of momma's cooking had ballooned him up
somewhere around two-seventy. As a pair of burly cops stuffed him into
a gray SPD sweatsuit and pushed him before them up the stairs, into the
hall, Adrian neither helped nor resisted. He merely stared out over our
heads as if focused on some distant beacon.

Marlene Jolley was now seated at the dinette,
leaning forward out into the room, away from her cuffed hands. The
sight of her swollen eyes triggered some primal force deep within
Adrian Jolley. With the roar of a bull, he sent cops spinning from him
in all directions. "Momma!" he bellowed, lumbering across the room
toward his manacled mater.

In the ensuing melee I was jammed hard against the
wall, nearly upsetting Marlene in her chair as I was forced back into
her. Perhaps, even in that moment of chaos, she knew it was me. I'd
prefer to think that it was merely a random act of violence. Either
way, when Marlene Jolley found herself confronted at close range with
the very stuff of one of her tormentors, she opted for one last angry
gesture. She bit me hard in the upper leg, fastening herself onto the
back of me like a mastiff, grunting and shaking her head, as if
determined to tear off a pound of flesh. I screamed and tried to push
my way to the center of the room. She held fast. I screamed again,
flailing at her.

A blow from a metal baton loosened her jaws. Still
yelling, I shouldered my way out the door into the backyard, where I
walked in tight circles, flapping my arms, waiting for the pain to
subside.

"Son of a bitch," I chanted. "Son of a bitch."

An EMT appeared at my side. "Better let me have a look at that. Human bites are incredibly septic. Drop your pants."

It was then that I heard it for the first, but most unfortunately
not the last, time. Standing out there on the lawn with my drawers
around my ankles. A low rumble of laughter from inside the house. "She
bit him in the ass," a voice said. Somebody snorted.

"Hold on, now. This is gonna smart a bit," said the EMT.

"It's in the upper leg, right?" I said through gritted teeth.