Who in Hell Is Wanda Fuca? (3 page)

I plopped myself down on the single stool facing the door. Patsy finished up
his conversation with the guy on my right and shuffled over. He read my face
like a book.

"Leo," he said with a phony Mr. Ed smiled, "haven't seen you
in a while. Just when I thought you'd fixed that drinking problem of
yours."

"I don't have a drinking problem," I said. "I have a stopping
problem."

Patsy'd heard them all. Within the limits of commerce, he'd always made it a
point to keep me as sober as possible. When sobriety wasn't possible, he'd
always shoveled me into a cab and seen to it that I got home.

"What'll it be today?"

"Better make it an iced tea, Patsy."

With an almost invisible nod of approval, Patsy receded into the gloom, only
to appear a minute later with my drink. Before we had a chance to exchange
further pleasantries, the guy on the stool at my right piped up.

"I'm tellin' you, mister, I'll cut you a hell of a deal."

"I'm sure you would, my good man," Patsy replied, "but, as I
was saying, I don't need a new car."

Before the guy could go back into his spiel, Patsy inclined his head at me.

"Now Leo here is a guy who could use a new car." He turned to face
me. "Friends don't let friends drive Fiats," he said with a real
smile this time.

The guy didn't seem to know when he was being kidded. On autopilot, he
stayed with the sales pitch. We tried to ignore him.

"Rough day?" Patsy asked.

"As a cob," I said, sipping my tea. The salesman wasn't finished.

"Sixty months, five-point financing - "

"Stay sober," Patsy whispered.

" - a five-year lease with a minimal payoff - "

"I will," I said without much conviction.

"Leo" - Patsy leaned in close - "you got anything going with
Tim Flood? I mean, I don't want to pry or anything, but - "

Before he could explain, the salesman clambered from his stool and weaved
over. He put a brotherly arm around my shoulder. Patsy, knowing how little I
liked to be touched, began sweeping the immediate area with his eyes, looking
for expensive, breakable items.

A dark circle of perspiration stained the underside of the suit jacket where
it made contact with my shoulder. The alcohol was beginning to separate his
skin from his bones. His face looked partially melted, as the whole puffy mass
of veined skin worked its way south. A couple more years and he'd be a walking
neck. He slobbered in my ear.

"I can put you in a Probe."

"A what?"

"A Probe. A Ford Probe." He bobbed his head up and down.

"Who in hell would name a car that?" I asked. "Kinda makes it
sound like the seats would be uncomfortable, don't you think?" He stared
at me blankly. "Thanks, but I'm holding out for the Chevy Catheter."

He must have had some experience with hospitals. Unconsciously, he dropped
his arm from my shoulder and reached protectively for his groin.

"Hey, I was just tryin' to be helpful, man. No need to talk like
that."

"We appreciate it, buddy, we really do," I said. "It's just
that neither of us is in the market for a car right at the moment."

Before he could respond, Patsy jumped in.

"Why don't you let the house buy you a drink, my friend?"

The guy waved him off. "Gotta get back to work. Got a couple coming in
to pick up a new Explorer." He headed for the door, stopped briefly,
turned. "I'll be back after my shift."

"See you then," said Patsy. We watched as he lurched over, yanked
open the door, and stood for a moment transfixed by the light.

"See, Patsy, now you've got something to look forward to."

"I'll quiver with anticipation until his return."

The door hissed shut. Everyone inside was blind again. I turned back to
Patsy. "You were saying?"

"Oh, yeah, I was asking whether you had anything going with Tim
Flood." He mopped the section of bar where the guy had been sitting and
changed the ashtray.

"Why do you ask?"

"Well, I was wondering . . . " Patsy was seldom at a loss for
words.

"Is this just part of some massive list of philosophical problems that
you've been pondering, or was there some special reason for your
interest?"

He finished up and leaned in close again. "Frankie Ortega's been in a
couple of times this week asking around for you. Real laid-back-like."

"Interesting," I said. "Laid-back?" You mean like he
wasn't working?"

"Yeah," said Patsy. "Had a drink each time. Real
relaxed."

Frankie Ortega worked for Tim Flood. Tim liked to call Frankie his arranger.
The Nelson Riddle of violence. If you got behind in your payments to Tim,
Frankie arranged for your appliances to disappear. If you still didn't get your
vig paid on time, Frankie arranged some sort of colorful maiming. A broken arm,
something like that. Nothing too serious. Nothing fatal. The dead can't pay.

"Nope," I said. "Tim and I haven't exchanged words since the
old man's funeral. Hell, I figured he was dead by now."

"How old you figure he is?" Patsy asked. I thought about it.

"Well, if my old man was still alive, he'd be eighty-one. They were
just about the same age. Tim's maybe a couple of years older, so he's gotta be
in his mid-eighties. Somewhere in there."

Tim Flood and my father had started out together working for Dave Beck and
the Teamsters. At the time, they'd been known as labor organizers.

Revisionist history now labeled them as thugs. Neither of them minded the
shift. My father had parlayed his local notoriety into eleven terms on the
Seattle city council. He'd run for mayor four times and had been narrowly
defeated each time. While it was fun to have Wild Bill Waterman sitting on the
council, making absurd proposals, keeping the bureaucrats on their toes, the
good people of Seattle had instinctively known that Wild Bill was not the kind
of guy you'd want running the whole show.

Tim Flood had gone in another direction. He'd used his Teamster connections
to become the Northwest's biggest and most successful fence. My first apartment
had been furnished with a wide array of items that, according to Frankie Ortega
had "fallen offa truck."

Tim, like any good conglomerate, had branched out. If Seattle, had anything
that could be labeled as organized crime, Tim was it. Mostly it was
loan-sharking, bookmaking, punch cards, and the old-time trades. He stayed away
from drugs and women. By the time my father died, about ten years ago, Tim was
mostly legitimate. Mostly. Old habits die hard.

I hadn't heard from his since the day of my father's funeral. With Frankie
Ortega carefully holding a huge black umbrella over him, Tim waited for the
bereavement line to end before approaching me. As I watched the last of the
throng tiptoe off through the steady drizzle that had turned the graveyard into
a bog, I felt someone beside me.

"He was a hell of a good man, Leo," Tim had said. I agreed.
"If it hadn't been for me, he'd have been mayor." I nodded again.

My father's political opponents had never failed to exploit his well-known association
with the shadowy Tim Flood. The old man never denied it. He always responded to
the effect that those were different, desperate times for organized labor,
calling for different, desperate measures. Besides, as he pointed out, nobody
had ever convinced Tim Flood of a damn thing. This was America, wasn't it? A
man was till innocent until proven guilty, wasn't he? It was just the sort of
speech my father favored.

N reality, Tim Flood hadn't cost my father a thing. The old man ran strictly
for the fun of it. It gave him a chance to exercise his sense of humor. He
showed up for the first great mayoral debate dressed as Mahatma Gandhi, leading
a goat. He campaigned from atop a spewing beer wagon, wearing a red tuxedo.
When questioned about the ongoing issue of daylight savings time, he took a
firm stand in favor of waltz time. "Three-four for evermore," was his
slogan.

I couldn't come up with a single good reason why Tim Flood should be looking
for me. Patsy waited.

"So, you say Frankie didn't seem to be working?" I asked him.

"Well, we both know he don't break wind unless Tim tells him, but if
you ask me, it was informal." I was about to inquire how he'd reached that
conclusion, but he anticipated me. "Frankie don't drink when he's on the
job. He's all business. Besides that, he told me to tell you it was personal,
not professional. Whatever the hell that means. I figured you'd know."

"Not a clue," I said. "I even have trouble with the notion
that either of those guys has anything you could call a personal life."

    "Yeah, me too," said Patsy.
"You haven't gotten any messages from them or anything?"

I shook my head. "I can't see either of them leaving their names and
numbers at the beep, can you?"

"Mules will sing opera first."

Another pilgrim wandered in from the light and took over the stool to my
right. Patsy took care of him and came back.

"What should I tell Frankie when he comes back?" he asked.

"What makes you think he's coming back?"

"He's been in every day this week. He'll be back."

The matron at the other end of the bar banged her glass three times in what
I supposed to be prearranged signal for another double.

"Tell him you told me," I said to his back.

"You going to get in touch?" He was still walking.

"Just tell him you told me. That gets you out of it."

"I'll tell him," he said, refilling the old lady. I chugged the
rest of my tea. Patsy wandered back. I reached in my pocket. He stopped me.

"Tea's free."

"But vodka's - "

"Nothing rhymes with vodka," he said with a wink.

I made it home sober. I stopped at four more bars but managed to stick to
soft drinks. I told myself that it was the atmosphere, the camaraderie, the
easy laughter and built-in excuses that I craved, not the buzz. I tell myself a
lot of things. My last stop before turning up the hill to my place was the Zoo.

It was an old-time saloon in the truest sense of the word. An ornately
carved stand-up bar, complete with brass footrail, ran the full length of the
room. I'd always favored stand-up bars. They kept a guy honest. It was too easy
for a guy to drink himself senseless while perched on a padded stool.

Standing up was another matter. A guy had to maintain some semblance of
sanity or risk falling among the phlegm, the cigarette butts, and the peanut
shells littering the filthy planked floor. Around here, it was known as huggin'
the rail. Too much huggin' the rail would get a guy eighty-sixed.

Much like the Alaskan caribou, drunks follow a strict migrational pattern.
The process usually begins in some neighborhood fern bar hard by the office,
where the stressed-out go for just a few after work.

The Zoo is at the other end of the spectrum. The Zoo is the last stop a
Seattle drunk makes before tottering down to Pioneer Square and taking up
permanent residence in the streets. When it got so bad a guy got eighty-sixed
from the Zoo, from then on he did his drinking alfresco.

The left-hand wall comprised a series of brown leatherette booths. The
management kept the regulars standing. The booths were for walk-ins. The booths
were empty. The bar was full. Two steps inside the place, I was greeted like a
returning war hero.

"Leo, Leo, where've you been?" It was Buddy Knox. A short, dumpy
little guy, Buddy looked a bit like Fred Mertz. Buddy had, years before, been
an editor at the Times. A taste for single-malt Scotch had careened Buddy
through three short=lived marriages and a series of increasingly less
responsible editing positions into his present status as resident arts and
literature critic of the Zoo. Hereabouts, Buddy was the final authority.

"How you been, Buddy?"

"Hanging in there, Leo. We haven't seen much of you lately."

"By design, Buddy."

"Staying sober, huh?"

    "I'm working at it. You're looking
good. Looks like you've gained a little weight, right?" I said poking him
gently in the waist.

"Maybe a few pounds," he admitted, checking himself out. "But
remember, Leo" -  patting his formidable girth - "a waist is a
terrible thing to mind."

He pivoted back toward the bar. "Hey Terry, how about a Coke down
here/" He turned back to me. "Coke okay?"

"Coke's fine," I said. Buddy set about creating a reunion.

"Harold, Ralph, George, look who's here," he shouted down the bar.
"It's Leo." One after the other, like the June Taylor Dancers, they
each leaned back and squinted up front to see what the commotion was. One by
one, they detached themselves from the bar and wandered up. Handshakes all
around. The bartender shuffled over like he was walking on broken glass and set
my Coke on the bar. I ordered a round for the boys. The gesture was greeted
with unanimous acclaim.

Harold Green, Ralph Batista, and George Paris had, like Buddy, once been
local people of some note. The four of them shared the enormous front room of a
rooming house up the hill on Franklin. Last time I'd had business cards
printed, I'd briefly considered changing the logo to read Waterman and
Associates. I did, after all, use these guys quite a bit. Maybe they deserved
billing. Sanity prevailed. I stuck with Waterman Investigations. God forbid
anybody wanted to meet the associates.

Harold had sold men's shoes at the Bon. He used to be taller. The years had
carved even more meat from his already gaunt frame, further emphasizing his
baseball-size Adam's apple and prominent ears.

Ralph, who'd picked up and kept whatever weight Harold had lost, used to be
some sort of port official. The extra folds of skin on his face, combined with
a startling lack of functioning brain cells, gave him the benign countenance of
the Mona Lisa. Inner peace by default.

George had been one of the first high-level bankers to get the axe in the
great merger mania but was hanging in there pretty good. His finely chiseled
features and slicked-back mane of white hair made him look like a boxing
announcer. If you didn't look into his eyes or down at his shoes, you could
mistake George for a functioning member of society.