The Deader the Better (24 page)

“I’ll pay you—” I started.

He cut me off. “Me you can have for free. I’m so fucking
bored, I was thinking about taking a cruise. Can you picture that?”
Frankly, I couldn’t. “I’m gonna need Robby to do my legwork,
and the van. You’re going to have to take care of him and pay
expenses for the van and for the cherry picker and…”—he
hesitated for effect—“any equipment we can’t retrieve is on
you.” I agreed to his terms.

“What else are you going to need?” I asked.

“Someplace in that downtown area where we can park the van
without attracting unwanted attention. We can monitor for up to four
miles, but it’d be better if we were right there.”

“I’ll work on it.”

“We’re going to need to do the pole work on a Sunday. Nothing
worse than having the real fucking phone company show up while you’re
up one of their poles.”

“I’ll plan around it,” I said.

“When?” he asked.

“It’s the twenty-seventh,” I said. “Thursday is the first.
What say you plan on doing the pole work on Sunday the fourth? I’ll
get in on Friday and have things set up.”

He nodded. “What else have you got in mind for raising their
blood pressure?”

I told him. He actually smiled.

“You’ve got a mean streak, you know that?” Coming from Carl,
I took that as the highest form of praise. I turned the sign on the
door back to OPEN on my way out. Not that long ago, Lake City Way had
been a viable means of getting from Seattle to the eastside without
driving on the bridges. Six or seven miles of car dealerships,
muffler shops, crummy strip malls and bad Chinese restaurants that
wound around the northern edge of Lake Washington all the way to the
eastside’s interstate parking lot, I-5. No more. You know traffic
is bad when you pass the same guy on a bicycle six or seven different
times in the same half hour. I’d have been better off stuck on the
bridge. At least the view would have been nice.

Unlike Carl, Lenny Duke had evolved backward. As I understood it,
he’d started out as a successful small-time counterfeiter. He made
tens, they say. And good ones. When technological innovations made
counterfeiting impossible, he’d moved into counterfeit documents.
Driver’s licenses. Social Security cards. Passports. Whatever you
were looking for, Lenny could put you together a facsimile that would
pass muster. By the time computer technology made false documents a
thing of the past, the printing shop he’d started as a cover for
the document business was flourishing. Lenny, being an agreeable
soul, rolled with the punches and went legitimate. More or less.
Mostly less.

The printing plant looked like an IBM showroom. The clattering
noises had been replaced by the snap of paper and the whoosh of air,
and Lenny’s two sons now ran the shop. Although he no longer toiled
at the business he’d created, Lenny still kept a small office
against the back wall. They stored paper on the roof.

I should have been suspicious when the receptionist refused to
open the door for me. The way she smirked and hurried back across the
floor. When I yanked open the door, Lenny Duke was right there in
front of me. Sitting behind a battered steel desk staring at a
computer screen with his pants around his ankles. The screen was
filled with a full-color picture of a blond woman in a red headband
and a light coat of machine oil, engaged in what can most charitably
be described as out-of-species dating.

“You ever see anything like that?” he asked without taking his
eyes from the flickering screen.

“I never imagined you could train a dog to do that,” I said.

“Dog, hell…,” he growled. “It’s a chimp.”

I’ll never know for sure. My psyche was too battered for animal
husbandry. I sat down on a folding chair at the end of the desk,
where the screen was pointed the other way. I watched as he pushed
some keys. He looked up at me. “Hey, Leo, Merry Christmas,” he
said.

“Hey, Lenny. Merry Christmas to you, too.”

“Wait till you see this next one,” he said. “You still have
those letters Charlie Boxer used to send out?”

“The tax stuff?” He sat back in the seat. “Yeah, I’ve
got’em. Why?”

“I want to put together a set.”

He snorted, and started to swing the screen my way.

“Can you do it for me?”

He pushed some more keys. “Sure. By when?”

“Middle of next week.”

“Sure. Leave the info on the desk.”

I told him to call Carl later tonight for the names and numbers.
He stopped me on my way out the door. “You want the ‘we were
wondering about this or that’ letter or you want the ‘you’ll
like federal prison’ special? You want the fear of god, you got to
have somebody working the phone. With that one, they call the
number.”

I told him I’d take the latter.

“You remember how Charlie ran it?” I asked. His eyes stayed
glued to the screen. Mine to the ceiling.

“Sure…he’d be just nasty as hell on the phone, and then he’d
always give ’em an appointment a couple of weeks down the road. He
liked for ’em to sweat it out. After everybody called, he’d fix
the phone so’s anybody called, they went on to perpetual hold. Used
to play the same Lennon Sisters song at ’em, over and over. Thought
it was funny as hell.”

I pulled out a business card and scribbled on it. “Use this for
the phone number for the letters,” I said. He leered at the screen.

I let myself out. I shot the receptionist a dirty look on the way
by. She gave an exaggerated shrug. “They put him on the Net last
Christmas, when he retired,” she said. “He only goes home to
eat.”

ON NEW YEAR’S EVE, I THOUGHT OF CONSTANCE Hart and Wayne
Bigelow. I pictured them wearing pointed hats in a conga line,
blowing noisemakers and drinking champagne. Wondered whether Wayne
got lucky, but had my doubts. Worse yet, I wondered about me getting
lucky and had even more doubts.

I sat up and switched off the TV. The ball had dropped in Times
Square an hour ago. After that, I’d alternated between checking the
local festivities down at the Space Needle and an old Randolph Scott
western on Channel Twenty-two. It was . The Fop Formerly Known as
Prince was going to make another fortune.

I stood in the dark by the side of the bed, dropped my jeans and
shirt into a pile and crawled into the sack. “Happy New Year,”
she said.

“Happy New Year.”

“I’m going back to work on Monday,” she said. “Tommy’s
going to pick me up and drive me home.” Neither fact was
surprising. She couldn’t drive because of the angle of the cast on
her left arm, but she was going crazy hanging around the house. And
Tommy Matsukawa had spent the past twenty years or so hoping I’d
fall in a hole and disappear so he could bowl in Rebecca’s pagoda.
It made complete sense.

“I can second on autopsies and do paperwork. Who knows…I might
even catch up with my paper-shuffling.”

“Sounds good,” I said.

Over the past four days we’d both made serious attempts to talk
our way through our problem, but the same thing happened every time.
We’re both clever, caring, educated people, with gifts of gab and
enough social awareness to know that making the other party wrong is
not the way to fame and fortune when it comes to conflict resolution.
So we’d backed off, softened our stances and analyzed and wheedled
and analogized and taken our feelings to whole new levels of
abstraction, and yet every time, when I lay there at night unraveling
the serpentine paths of our conversations, I could see that we never
really got past the original question of who was right and who was
wrong. Even yesterday, when we’d reasoned ourselves all the way to
the very high state of agreeing to disagree, somewhere inside each of
us, a voice whispered that we were right and the other poor misguided
soul was wrong.

“What about you?” she asked from the darkness.

“You want to do this now?”

She turned over and levered herself up on her good arm.

“Is there a better time?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

I sat up and flicked on my light. She was wearing that ratty old
flannel nightgown again. “I’m not trying to be a pain in the ass
about this,” I said.

She made a “so what?” face but said, “I know.”

“Friday, I’m going back over to J.D.’s place. The county’s
offer on the place closes the fifteenth. I’m going to use the time
in the middle to do what Claudia’s paying me to do, which is to get
a line on who killed her husband.”

She hooded her eyes, looking down at the bed. “I’m going to
have to work on that agreeing to disagree stuff,” she said.

“I’m not very good at it.”

“Me neither,” I admitted.

In the basement the furnace turned on. I could feel the warm air
from the register in the ceiling. “You know, Leo…in the past
several months I’ve been making an effort to push our lives
together more into the…into a more traditional pattern.”

Hence all the dinners with couples, the opera, her sudden
insistence that I attend pathologist and medical examiner functions
with her.

“More into the mainstream,” I said.

“Is there something wrong with that?”

“Nope. I’ve been doing my end, haven’t I? I showed up. I was
polite.”

“That’s all you did.”

“Most of the people you’re talking about—I mean, what can I
say?—I just don’t have much in common with them. It’s all
investment strategies or office politics or how they’re in therapy
together and learning so much or their next crosscountry skiing
trip.” I sighed. Same old, same old. “Maybe it’s me,” I said.

“Doesn’t it seem odd to you that you’re middle-aged and half
the people you know are criminals?”

“I’m in the crime business.”

“What you’re in is denial.”

“Should I go over and lie down on the couch, Doctor?”

I shouldn’t have said it, but there’s something about being
psychoanalyzed by amateurs that brings out the worst in me. I always
figure that since I don’t have the faintest idea why I do some of
the things I do, it’s a good bet that nobody else does, either.

“Sorry,” I said.

She flopped down onto her back and stared at the ceiling. After a
while, she said, “This isn’t getting us anywhere.” I told her I
agreed. She said, “Didn’t I hear you on the phone with George
yesterday?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t tell me you’re getting that bunch of drunks and
donothings involved in this?”

When I didn’t answer, she pressed, “Well?”

“You told me not to tell you.”

She rolled away from me. “Turn off the light,” she said. I had
the urge to laugh boldly and call out,
Drunks and
do-nothings,
my ass; hell, girl, I’ve got a gay burglar, a pervert
forger,
a crippled wireman, a couple professional thugs and
a
who
—Nah…not even in my dreams do I tell her about that one.

Floyd lived directly across the street from the Kingdome, in an
ancient building without doors or windows on either of the first two
floors. I know how that sounds, but trust me, I’ve walked all the
way around and looked. More than once. The only hint as to how such a
building might have come to be is found on the north and west sides,
where patches of darker bricks betray a pair of windows on the north
and, on the west, what at one time must have been a wide loading
door, before it, too, was bricked in. All I could think of was that
the place must have once been some sort of warehouse from which you
then entered the floors above. Floyd gets in and out, so obviously,
somewhere belowground, it’s connected to one of the nearby
buildings, which, as it happens, in this part of the city is not
nearly as unlikely as it might seem. In , when much of the city burnt
to the ground, city officials decided to cure an old mistake and
raise the level of Pioneer Square a bit higher above the tide line,
so that the newly fashionable flush toilets would stop becoming
sewage fountains during high water. Many of the brick buildings in
Pioneer Square that had survived the fire were then buried alive up
to their second stories, which became ground level, leaving a
five-square-block area of the city with a town beneath its feet. For
a mere six bucks you can take a tour. Maybe even have a commemorative
rat named after you. What you did was push the buzzer that was
mounted directly into the brick on the King Street side. Then you
walk across the street and stand in front of the parking lot fence.
Floyd will be along in a few minutes. You screw around and push the
button for fun, and Floyd will be down even quicker, but you won’t
be standing for long. I’d heard street talk about Floyd for years.
Nothing solid, just a few murmurings to the effect that this guy was
a serious shooter for hire. I’d originally gotten the Windjammer
number from an old enforcer friend of my father’s named Frankie
Ortega. Since Frankie himself had occupied the“baddest motherfucker
in the valley” seat for the better part of twenty years, I was
impressed when he told me to keep my mouth shut about where the
number came from, because, as he put it, “I’m too old for the
likes of that crazy motherfucker.”

When Floyd and I spoke a few days ago, we’d settled on a price.
Talked it over and decided that we needed another hand. Floyd said he
had a guy he’d worked with before. A Russian. That he’d had
occasion to see the guy in action and had been suitably impressed. I
said okay, but I wanted to meet him. We’d agreed that I’d come by
the building, push the button and then meet them over at the Red
White and Blue Café, a greasy spoon on Second Avenue. Floyd was a
big guy, six-four or so, with the biggest wrists I’ve ever seen. He
had curly hair, little close-set eyes and thick lips, under a nose
that had seen a lot of wear and was flat at the tip. All that was
left off his right ear was a withered flap of skin that stuck
straight out from his head like a dried apricot.