The Deader the Better

THE DEADER THE BETTER

A LEO WATERMAN MYSTERY

G. M. FORD

To Merla…when it was good, it
was good
.

Contents

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42

NOWADAYS, HE WAS JUST A PIMP WITH A
LIMP. A WIRY specimen with a head too big for his body and a string
of two dozen call girls he ran out of a limousine service in south
Seattle. The girls called him Baby G, but I remembered a time when he
was plain old Tyrone Gill, a playground legend who could take you off
the dribble and stick it in the hole with the best of them. The
Rocket Man, we’d called him…after that old Elton John song. That
was back before he made what he now liked to call “a series of
unfortunate self-medication choices.” Back before a rival procurer
tried to amputate his foot in a Belltown alley. Back before a lot of
things. For both of us.

“Gonna call it Ho-Fest Two
Thousand.”

He nudged me hard in the ribs. “Can
you see it, man? The tents. The banners. The food stands.”

“Food stands?”

I caught his feigned astonishment
from the corner of my eye. “Man do not live by pussy alone,” he
said gravely. When I reckoned how he might be right, he went on.

“Culturally coordinated, too, my
man.”

“How’s that?”

“You know, man, like we got one
tent set up for the regular trade. Missionary position types. Right
next store we got some comfort food. Strictly meat and potatoes.
Grits and gravy. That kinda shit.”

“Oh?”

He cut a swath with his hand. “’Cross
the way we got the Greek tent. You know…for the backwards types.”

I pulled one hand from the wheel and
held it up. “No. No. Let me guess. Dolmas, kabobs, and rice pilaf.”

He grinned and nudged me again. His
big head bobbed up and down like one of those spring-loaded dolls. “I
knew you was a man of vision, Leo.”

Vision was precisely what I didn’t
have. The Explorer needed new wipers. Despite slapping back and forth
at breakneck speed, the worn blades merely flattened the intermittent
rain across the glass, smearing the muck into pulsating blobs of form
and color that reminded me of long-ago light shows and psychedelic
drugs. The unwanted memory tightened my lower jaw and sent a shiver
sliding down my spine. I clapped my free hand back onto the wheel and
scrunched down in the seat, peering out at the thick traffic through
a small, unsullied crescent of glass at the bottom of the windshield.

Baby G snapped me back.

“That’s why you got to help me
out wid this,” he said.

“Ain’t nobody else could do it
but you, man.”

I shook my head. “You got to get
real here, G. No way anybody is going to give you a city permit to
stage…” I looked over at him. “What did you say you wanted to
call it?”

He wore a blue silk suit.
Three-piece. Tailored to him like it was made of iron. And a bright
yellow tie.

“Ho-Fest Two Thousand,” he said.

“Not gonna happen in any city park,
man. No point even talking about it.”

As G opened his mouth to protest, I
leveled him with the coupe de grace. “Even my old man couldn’t
have pulled that shit off,” I said.

He recognized this as a serious
rejoinder, indeed. His face clouded. He closed his mouth so hard he
looked like a large-mouth bass and then began staring sullenly out
through the windshield.

My old man had parlayed an early
career as a union thug into eleven terms on the Seattle City Council.
In the course of his storied thirty-year career of public service.
Wild Bill Waterman had tilled previously unimagined ground in the
fertile fields of influence peddling, insider trading and familial
hiring preferences. When I turned forty-five, I was in line to
inherit a bundle of ill-gotten downtown real estate, and to this day,
twenty-five years after my father’s death, nearly every city
department is still being run by somebody related to me either by
blood or by marriage.

That’s how come G had spent the
ride from downtown filling my ear with his nonsense about wanting me
to use my connections to help him get a permit to use Discovery Park
for some kind of a superbowl of suction. Mostly, though, he was just
talking to hear himself talk. He was nervous about our errand
tonight. He wasn’t letting on, but I could tell. Those huge hands
were twitchy.

“There’s Darlene,” she said.

First time she’d spoken. G had
introduced her as Narva. The professional makeup job made it hard to
tell, but I made her to be about thirty. Better than six feet, light
green contact lenses, short blond hair, smooth and curled under.
Impeccable in a blue microfiber raincoat, she sat in the center of
the backseat, her perfect face as smooth and unmoving as a
figurine’s. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have made her for a
corporate type. Big-time Ivy League. Stocks and bonds. Maybe a junior
partner attorney. Never for a hooker. No way.

Up ahead on the right, wedged between
Watson’s Plumbing Supply and a boarded-up beauty college, the Pine
Tree Diner lurked in its own shadows, like one of those Edward Hopper
paintings. At once welcoming and onerous, a classic silver diner,
back before they added on and became“family restaurants.” From a
distance, the rounded silver edges and the solid band of light along
the front facade made it looklike a jukebox buried to its neck in
asphalt. I moved the Explorer into the right lane. Just as you’d
never make Narva for a whore, you’d never make Darlene for anything
else. The girl had the look down. Texas teased hair, a white fur
bolero jacket over what appeared to be a red rubber dress. Knee-high
white boots that laced up the side.

I pulled off the highway and into the
parking lot. Sliding along the front of the building to the far end,
I turned the car back toward the highway, killed the lights and shut
off the engine. The silence was broken only by the soft ticking of
the motor as it began to cool.

G pulled a fresh photograph of Misty
McMahon from an envelope and passed it over the seat to Narva.

“Show her this,” he said. “And
make goddamn sure that crack-smokin’ bitch knows what the hell
she’s talkin’ about, too.”

Narva made no move to take the
picture. Her gaze was level. “You want to make an anti-drug speech
to her, G, you go on out there and you talk to her.”

He scowled and began waving the
picture about. “You know goddamn well she ain’t gonna talk to
me.”

Only her eyebrows moved. “Perhaps,
if you’d didn’t beat people up, you’d create more long-term
goodwill,” she said affably.

“You tellin’ me how to run my
business?”

“I’m merely suggesting that when
one uses beatings as exit interviews, one severely compromises one’s
future credibility.”

“Hey.” He waved the picture
again. “You hold that college girl crap of yours, you hear me? I
don’t want to hear it.”

“Just trying to help,” she said.

The way Darlene was wobbling across
the lot toward us, you’d have sworn the heels weren’t attached to
the boots. G turned in his seat and met Narva’s gaze. “She was
holding out on me,” he said. “And you know, baby…that just
can’t be. You let one ho hold out on you and the next thing you
know, they lose all respect. Two weeks”—he snapped his long
fingers—“you got no girls. You sellin’ yo own ass out on
Jackson Street.”

Narva favored him with a small smile.
“What do you charge for that bony little butt of yours, G…three,
four bucks a pop?”

A vein bulged in his temple like a
thick brown worm. I unhooked my seatbelt and got my hip out from
under the steering wheel…G didn’t take much shit from his girls.
Way I figured it, he was going to go over the seat after her and I
was going to have to stop him, and no matter what happened after
that, finding Misty McMahon and returning her to her grandmother was
going to get a whole lot harder. To my amazement, however, he merely
smiled back, matching her tooth for tooth. His voice was calm.
“Please,”

he said. “Just show her the damn
picture.”

She shot me a quick victory glance
and then plucked the photograph from his stiff fingers. We sat in
silence as she got out of the car and ambled away with one of those
languid one-foot-in-front-of-the-other walks designed to pop coffin
lids open. She met Darlene out in the center of the lot. As the women
embraced, Darlene kept her wide eyes locked on the car. Sensing the
woman’s discomfort, Narva threw us a quick look, took Darlene
firmly by the elbow and moved her away from the car, back toward the
rusted chain-link fence running along the north side, talking as she
walked, moving the woman back behind the Explorer, into the deepest
recesses of the gloom. G read my mind. “She ain’t like the
others. I got a different arrangement wid her than wid the regular
girls.”

“So I see,” I offered.

He couldn’t let it go. “Her and I
work a straight percentage. She do her business, slide me ten percent
for keepin’ the riffraff off her ass. That’s all. Nice and
clean.”

“Nice and clean,” I repeated.

He folded his arms across his chest,
lifted his chin and made his surprised face. “I showed her that
other picture you give me, and lo and behold if she don’t jump all
over it. I mean, this honey ain’t exactly the whore wid the heart
of gold, if you catch my drift, Leo, so when she says she’ll get
some copies out to the street girls, I figure, you know…she wants
to go to a bunch of trouble…you know…what the hell, let her.
’Sides”—he looked around furtively—“that way nobody know it
comin’ from me. Figured we might get better results that way.”

“On account of that credibility
problem of yours that Narva was talking about?” I inquired.

He sneered at me but didn’t answer.
I sat staring out the side window into the gloom, squinting my eyes
at the abstract pattern of leaves plastered to the fence and
ruminating about how the problem with missing kids is that you’ve
got to find them in a hurry. The street eats them up. You leave them
out there too long and there’s nothing to bring home. At least
nothing Grandma was gonna want around the house. I had met Constance
Hart in the coffee shop of the Westin Hotel. Her message on my voice
mail said she was going to be in town for the day and wanted to meet
me for lunch to discuss me finding her granddaughter for her. Finding
runaway kids is among the most frustrating and heartbreaking
assignments a private investigator can take on. Most of the time I
make up reasons why I’m too busy, but since she hadn’t left a
number where I could call her back, I felt like I had an obligation
to show up and give her the bad news in person.

I put on a nice pair of gray
gabardine trousers, a blue silk shirt and my best black blazer.
Poised and professional, five minutes early. Figured to get myself
settled with a cup of coffee on the upper level, looking down onto
Fifth Avenue. Firmly in charge of the high ground, moral and
otherwise.

She was already there when I arrived.
Drinking tea at the exact table where I’d envisioned myself turning
her down. She rose as I ascended the final pair of steps. I checked
her shoes. Flats. One tall woman, six-two if she was an inch, with
thick salt and pepper hair, wound into an elegant braid that circled
her head and then ran down her back. A black wool dress, understated
but classy. Diamond as big as the Ritz worn on the right hand.
Staying at the hotel. No coat…no purse. She extended the hand with
the rock and I took it. Her palm was callused and her grip strong.

“Thank you for coming,” she said.

I told her not to mention it, settled
into the chair across from her and ordered coffee. We traded
pleasantries until the waiter delivered my order, inquired as to the
state of my immediate needs and then left.

The secret of turning down a case is
not to give the prospective client a chance to tell their story, so I
brought my big guns out right away. “You said on the phone that it
was your granddaughter you wanted me to find. Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“You said she was thirteen years
old.”