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  The Rainy City

  Earl W. Emerson

  AVON

  PUBLISHERS OF BARD, CAMELOT, DISCUS AND FLARE BOOKS

  Chapter One

  ON SATURDAY SOME GHOUL MURDERED MY DOG.

  It surprises you when they do something like that.

  I expect to be flattened by snarling eighteen-wheelers on the freeway. I expect to be lunged at by booze hounds with broken beer bottles in taverns. I expect to be slapped by loose women who aren’t quite as loose as I thought. But it surprises you when some spook caves in your dog’s skull on a rainy Saturday evening.

  I had squandered the day polishing off a dismal case.

  A pipefitter with long arms and long teeth named Bruce Lemay hired me to discover what his girlfriend played at while he worked the night shift at Lockheed. I found out and even turned down a modestly tempting opportunity to play at it with her. When poor Bruce received the news he flew off the handle.

  He launched a sloppy, right cross at my chin and then boasted he was going to sue me for slander.

  The right cross missed, and he missed again when he tried to plunk down into a chair after I frisbeed a packet of photos at him. The three-by-five’s were nothing grandiose. I had once immortalized a state representative flagrante delicto with another man’s wife while he sprayed Reddi Wip on her nude body from a pressurized can.

  These were nothing like that, just simple snapshots of his bosomy Amanda hoisting brews with three different bozos on three different nights.

  She had sworn to Bruce she had been in bed with a migraine each of those nights. Maybe one of Bruce’s pals was named Migraine. I could not really blame the grimy pipefitter for growing irate and taking a poke at me.

  “How come this kind of stuff always happens to me?” Bruce Lemay moaned. “My ex ran away with our meter reader. Can you believe that? The electric meter reader, for christsakes.”

  I drove my Ford pickup home in the dark. The streets were awash under a solid, slanting November rain. It was funny. I didn’t even like dogs.

  He wasn’t much; never had been. Only a jaunty little mutt who found and adopted me four years ago. I’d even trained him to do all his numbers next door under Horace’s hydrangea. The city was full of mutts. Hell, they were cheap. I could fetch another one tomorrow. The pound gassed eighty a day.

  As I angled up the driveway, the truck’s headlights cut a brilliant swath through the downpour and I saw him sprawled under the Adolf Horstmann like a discarded rag doll. A length of pipe which I later assumed to be the murder weapon lay next to his stiffened legs. It was hard to tell how long he’d been gone because everything was soaked by the rain, everything damp and slick to the touch.

  Leaving the Ford’s headlights on to bleach the scene, I fetched a spade from the garage and buried him deep. Next spring I would sink a Whiskey Mac over him. Roses always grew tall and luxurious over graves.

  If you’re a private detective and somebody plays lead-pipe polo with your dog, you have to rake over your memory and the cases you’ve handled recently. You have to wonder who might be sporting a grudge. I could think of some people but they were out of town or at the crossbar hotel. Bruce Lemay’s check was the first sniff of professional money I’d had in six weeks. It was too soon for him to be stalking through my yard killing pets. I had only quashed his romance with Amanda an hour earlier.

  Mine was a modest frame home off Roosevelt in the University District: two bedrooms upstairs and a bachelor apartment in the basement which I rented to a student.

  My needs were few, my life tranquil except for an occasional messy divorce case. My truck was thirteen years old and squeaked in places I could not find with a grease gun. I pedaled a bicycle when the Seattle rains abated. Having been a cop for almost ten years, I was living largely off the LEOFF pension system. I had been a good cop. In those days I knew it all. I was going to be the Chief one day.

  After horsing down a cold meat loaf sandwich, I submerged my weary bones in a hot tub and scrubbed and listened to the blather of a talk show on the radio, lazily watching the soapy water slosh around my limbs.

  I might have dived straight into bed but there’s a certain stink that clings to you when you bury something.

  Kathy doesn’t knock and enter so much as she slugs the door and barges in. Familiarity will do that. I recognized her wooden clogs on the basement steps which led directly to my kitchen. Before I could escape, she was sitting on the closed lid of the throne beside me, fretting. Kathy was the student, first year law, who rented my basement.

  On her way through the kitchen, she had snatched up my dog’s collar, along with a bell she had given the mongrel several years ago for some forgotten occasion.

  “What’s this?” Kathy said, clicking off my radio and dangling the collar. A newspaper clipping was crimped in her other hand. “Where’s a-mutt-named-Jeff?”

  “In the rose bed.”

  “It’s raining.”

  “He’s dead. Murdered,” I said.

  “Dead?” Kathy frowned, cooed and thought about it for a few moments. ‘That’s awful. Who… ? J.D.s?”

  “Somebody came into the yard and whacked him with a piece of pipe. You didn’t see anything funny today, did you?”

  Kathy shook her head and pondered the development.

  “Why would anyone kill your dog?”

  “Maybe for no reason. Maybe for laughs.”

  “Horace next door wouldn’t do it, would he?”

  “Naw. He’s just a grump. He’d toss Ex-Lax in the mutt’s dish, but he wouldn’t have the nerve to kill him.”

  “One of your cases?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that. Maybe you’ve noticed. I haven’t been real busy lately.”

  “You haven’t?” A musical note of hope infused Kathy’s voice.

  “What’s on your mind?” I asked, draping a flowered washcloth across myself.

  “That looks ridiculous,” said Kathy, without glancing away from the newspaper clipping in her hand. She had obviously pawed and perused the clipping repeatedly, but she sat and read it again, word by word. ‘You don’t have to display any false modesty around me.”

  “What’s false about it?”

  “I know you love to show off, Thomas. I know it.”

  “Sometimes I wish you wouldn’t catch me this way. What do you do? Hear the tub running, wait five minutes and then dash upstairs?”

  Kathy ignored me. She was wearing one of her more traditional outfits: thick knee stockings, a tweed skirt and a tightly knit navy-blue sweater without the benefit of a brassiere underneath. She had small, buoyant, rounded breasts that men loved to stare at. Her long, dark and wavy hair drifted past her shoulders and danced with the electrical charges it got after being brushed.

  She focused her violet eyes on me and said, “I’ve got a case for you. If you’ll take it.”

  “Who’s the client?”

  She gnawed at the inside of her cheek and said, “That’s just it. I don’t know. I suppose I would be.”

  “I’ll get dressed and we’ll talk about it.” When Kathy didn’t budge, I scuffed some water across my legs, hoping the noise would break the standoff. “You have the advantage of me here.”

  Apparently she hadn’t heard, or if she had, it hadn’t fazed her. Sh
e handed me the crumpled newspaper dipping. I read it, trying to keep from getting it wet. A mere three lines:

  Persons having information on the whereabouts of Melissa Crowell Nadisky please contact us at 867-5249. A reward of $2,000 has been posted.

  “So?”

  She’s a friend, Thomas. My friend. I went to school with her. Actually, we roomed together for a quarter. She was… well, anyway, I phoned the other day and Burton said she had been missing since last Sunday. That’s six days she’s been gone. Then I found this ad in the paper.”

  “Burton?”

  “Her husband.”

  “Okay, she’s missing.”

  “Can you find her?”

  “If she hasn’t gone too far. The question is, do I want to find her?”

  “Thomas, don’t be difficult. Something awfully suspicious is going on here, and I want you to find her before…” Kathy hesitated. I had seen the look on her face in the past.

  “Before what?”

  “It’s only one of my silly feelings.”

  I had learned long ago there was more to Kathy’s “silly feelings” than most people were ready to accept. If you wanted to call them something, you could call them premonitions. She never flaunted the ability. It was just something eerie that was a part of her.

  Once, driving on the freeway with her, she suddenly slumped forward and began weeping. When I questioned her, she said she was shook up about the accident ahead of us. On that particular sweep of interstate, you could see for miles. The road ahead was clear. Totally clear. Three minutes later, we rounded a curve and rolled past one of the most grisly motorcycle accidents I had ever seen.

  When I told her to look, that she’d been right, she clasped her face in her lap, saying that she didn’t want to see the “woman in red.”

  Two bikes had spilled. Two males and their female passengers had been thrown to the pavement. Three of them were dead.

  A woman in the remains of a red touring suit was being worked on by two perspiring paramedics and a team of firemen. I knew their motions were perfunctory, recognizing their haste as a mere public display. Only a miracle was keeping the woman alive. A miracle from hell. If fate were related to decency she would have expired with the others.

  Call it clairvoyance, intuition, ESP, Kathy had a real dose. She wasn’t particularly fond of it, but she availed herself of it when it suited her.

  “So you think something’s the matter? Something more than a housewife running away?”

  “I do. I can’t say what, but I’m worried. Real worried.”

  “Is this one of your ‘feelings’?”

  “It sure is.”

  “What did her husband say? He worried?”

  “With Burton it’s hard to tell. I almost have the suspicion he knows where she went.”

  “Look,” I said, rearranging the washcloth, “if they’re only having a lovers’ spat…”

  “I talked to her father.” Kathy became animated, her violet eyes widening and absorbing me. “He must be the one behind that newspaper blurb. Don’t you think? Why would he tell me he wasn’t worried and then put up two thousand dollars to find her? Does that make any sense?”

  “Kathy,” I said, swirling the water around my knees. “I’m getting cold.”

  She looked at me blankly for a moment, then tossed me a towel, failing to remove herself from the room.

  “You’ll find a pen and paper in the other room,” I said. “Write down everything you know about her. List her friends. Where she works. Schools she went to. Everything of a factual nature. You’ll be surprised. It’ll probably only take you a minute or two.” I was fervently hoping it would take at least a quarter of an hour.

  Bounding into the other room on her noisy wooden clogs, Kathy shouted over her shoulder, “I knew you’d help me. I knew it.”

  “No promises. I’ll look. That’s all.”

  Kathy stuck her head back around the corner as I was getting up.

  I hastily wound the towel around my middle.

  “By the way,” she said, “it does too float.”

  “What?”

  “You know. And your face is turning pink.”

  “I don’t know anything,” I said, disgruntled.

  “It floats.”

  “Who said it didn’t?”

  “You did. You told me once they don’t float.” Then she was gone, giggling to herself, a mere whiff of her perfume lingering to taunt me.

  “Me? I never said any such thing.” But I was talking to the walls. ?

  Chapter Two

  “HI HO, SAM SPADE. GET YOUR TRENCH COAT OFF THE NAIL. You and I are going to look for the lost Princess today.”

  She was garbed like a clown, in white face with a red bulb nose, baggy black canvas trousers, and a tiny, black top hat. It is not every day that a clown wakes you up carrying a pan of hot biscuits and a jar of homemade blackberry preserves. I crawled out of bed and got dressed. Gobbling biscuits smothered in jam, we sat at the kitchen table, our chairs shoved up against the baseboard heater, sharing the waves of heat that feathered upwards and tickled our backsides.

  Kathy Birchfield had been leasing my basement apartment for almost four years. From time to time, one of us splurged on a Sunday morning breakfast for the other, generally at a time when we wished to discuss Saturday night’s companions. Not many men could truly call a woman their best friend, but I could call Kathy mine.

  We had met at the university in a pre-law course I was taking for the police department and she was taking on her way to a bona fide law degree. The professor was a neat-freak, insisting that we all sit in precise alphabetical order. That’s how we met. Thomas Black. Kathy Birchfield. Three times a week for three months we sat side by side, scribbling notes and whispering. It was the year I left the department, no longer destined to be Chief, and I needed someone to lean on, needed her badly.

  My life had capsized, my brain flipped inside out, feeling the way a wet tee shirt does when you pull it off. Kathy had seen me through some ugly times. She had always been staunch, no matter what shape her own life was taking, and I owed her. It was partially on the, basis of our history that I was so easily persuaded to poke into the affairs of her missing friend. That and the fact that Kathy had a premonition about her. If Kathy thought you were in trouble, you were in trouble.

  Along with the biscuits and blackberry preserves, Kathy hauled up an enormous glass pitcher of apple juice. As we ate she gradually filled me in on Melissa Crowell Nadisky’s life.

  “How about if we mosey over to Burt’s and then you can drop me off at Eloise’s birthday party? She’s having four clowns there, all told. Why don’t you come? It’ll be fun.”

  “We’ll see what happens at Burton’s first. Besides, four clowns might be more than I can handle. I have enough trouble with just one sometimes.” Kathy grinned impishly, folded her palms under her chin as if framing a flower and batted her eyelashes. It made me laugh in spite of myself.

  As she clambered into the truck, the mound of fresh wet earth beside the Adolf Horstmann caught my eye. I surveyed the neighborhood. Who the hell would have slipped into my yard—in the rain yet—and brained my dog? Being a reasonable man, I had to believe there was a reason. I wondered whether I would ever find out.

  “Melissa was one of those ugly ducklings you see arriving at college and blooming right before your eyes,” Kathy said. “She was so shy and backward when I first met her that she almost seemed retarded. That’s a terrible thing to say, but it’s true. What do you think, Thomas? Think we can find her?”

  “Does her husband want us to look?”

  “I don’t know what Burton wants.”

  “What about mom and pop? You saw them? What did they say?”

  “I only met him. He’s a fancy Dan executive for one of those big conglomerates. He might even own the company for all I know. I told him

  I suggested to Mr. Crowell how strange it was that he didn’t care where his daughter was. He got real annoyed
when I mentioned I had a private detective friend who would find her.”

  “You happen to mention my name?” I glanced across the seat at her.

  “I don’t remember. What do you think the chances of finding her are?”

  “It’s more likely she’ll come back on her own. On the other hand, some people who run away want to be found. So they don’t go far and they don’t put much thought or worry into covering their trail.”

  Kathy was silent for a long while. When I looked across at her, she was examining the close rows of pre-war housing we were passing near the zoo. For a moment, I admired her clean profile below the top hat.

  The missing woman’s husband lived in Ballard and the drive was a short one. Kathy and I wouldn’t have long to talk. I pushed in the choke on the Ford. The motor coughed.

  “I only had the one

  whatever you want to call it. Just this one-time feeling that something too awful was going to happen.”

  “To Melissa?”

  Kathy cleared her throat. I could see where the white paint ended just above the hollow at the base of her neck. “I don’t know. Maybe it has something to do with her little girl. But it has everything to do with her disappearance. It’s all connected somehow.”

  “You didn’t tell me she had a little girl.”

  “Angel? She’s three. She’s a darling. Gosh, I hope this costume doesn’t scare her.”

  “I have a feeling there are a lot of things you haven’t told me. Last night you started to go into something about Melissa and then you stopped yourself. What was it?”

  “You caught that?”

  I grunted. “What was it?”

  “In college Melissa was so bashful at first, you almost had to feel sorry for her.

  Then she went through a phase. It must have been about her junior year. She became a…kind of a tramp. Nothing else you could call it. Then she settled down and was quiet again. I wasn’t seeing much of her at that time, but I heard about it from mutual friends.”

  “You mean she dated a lot of different guys?”

  “She dated every guy, practically. And the way I understood it, she slept with all of them.”