Rainy City Page 11

  “Why would the police arrest him?” Clarice asked, sipping coffee. I noticed ashes from her Pall Mall floating on the surface of her Java.

  “The police arrest a lot of people,” I repeated, trying not to grow impatient with their blind trust in authority. “Some of them turn out to be guilty, some just turn out to be convenient.”

  “You never did tell us what you were here to see Mary about,” said Ed Crowell. “I presume it concerned Melissa?”

  “I spoke with your sister Sunday. She agreed to meet me again. She also stated there was something important she had to tell me. But she wouldn’t give me any hint of it over the phone. You wouldn’t happen to have any idea what it was, would you?”

  “Us?” said Clarice, startled that I would even ask.

  Ed Crowell eyeballed a boisterous group of teenagers waiting to be led to a table. I could tell by the dour look on his face he hoped they weren’t seated anywhere near us.

  “We only saw Mary once a year. We’d motor up for a weekend every autumn and take in the North Cascades Highway together. All the autumn foliage. Sometimes we’d take in a musical comedy in Seattle. Since I’ve retired, I’ve begun enjoying life more thoroughly. I’ve taken up photography. Bought myself a Nikon system.”

  His wife was bored with his discourse. Her foot bumped mine under the table.

  “Were you in touch with her?”

  “Certainly,” said Ed Crowell. “We phoned.”

  “But not since a month or so,” added Clarice. “Maybe even longer. I think it might even have been Labor Day…the last time we spoke to Mary.”

  “It was Labor Day,” concurred Ed, stroking his chin with a large, hirsute hand. “She had dinner with some friends of hers. Some people from her office. We called and I remember telling her to buy gold. But she refused. She was like that.”

  “Where did she work?”

  “Masdan Insurance.”

  “That’s a big outfit.”

  “Been there since 1953. She was thinking about retirement. I had her almost talked into it. I’ve got her into some smart investment programs. I even had her buy into some real estate.”

  “What sort of real estate?”

  “Nothing important. She’s got some land near Sultan.”

  Catching my eye with her dark brown raisinlike pupils, Clarice said, “You’re trying to find Melissa? Where do you think she is?”

  “I wish I knew. She called Mary last week and wanted to come up here and visit. But she never showed up.”

  “How long has she been gone?” Ed asked.

  “A little over a week.”

  “It’s been so long since we’ve seen little Melissa,” mused Clarice. “We might not even recognize her.”

  “You might not.”

  “Oh, it hasn’t been all that long,” contradicted her husband.

  “Sure it has,” said Clarice. “I don’t think we’ve seen little Melissa since she was in high school. That was at least eight years ago. It was right after Herb died. Remember?”

  “Oh, it wasn’t that long ago. More like four years.”

  “I’m more interested in some of your family history, Mr. Crowell. I found out today you have another brother besides Angus.”

  “Two others. Stephen and Charlie. Chuck lives in Minnesota with his wife. Grace isn’t well. Steve is in Missouri in a rest home. He had a stroke, oh, about a year back. He can talk now, but he doesn’t get around much.”

  “Four children in all?”

  “Our family? No, there were five.” He stirred his coffee, banging his spoon on the sides of the cup so hard I thought he might crack the glass.

  Clarice explained. “A younger sister died right after she was born. That’s when your mother passed away too, wasn’t it, honey?” Crowell grunted, as if being reminded of it still hurt, even after all these years. He clearly didn’t appreciate the direction our conversation was heading. But Clarice loved gossip and ancient history, and she loved to prattle. There was no stopping her.

  “It really was sort of a tragic upbringing,” continued Clarice. “I don’t know how you all turned out so well. Mary in insurance. An executive, two lawyers and a mortician.”

  “A funeral director,” said Ed, correcting his wife. “But, honey, how did you all turn out so normal? Look, your father committing suicide and all that? Your moth-er dying. I guess poor Mary had the worst of it. She was the youngest, wasn’t she,. honey?”

  “Angus was the youngest boy and Mary was ten years younger than-him. We were mostly grown up when it all happened.”

  “But it was such a tragedy. Your mother dying like that. And Angus had some sort of beef with your father, didn’t he?”

  “Father was from the old school. We all had trouble with him from time to time.” Ed was doing his best to play down the dramatic aspects of the family history just as surely as his wife wanted to relive them.

  “Trouble?” said Clarice. “He used to whip all of you boys. I thought you said he almost killed Angus once, right before he ran off and joined the Navy. He whipped him until he almost died.”

  “I actually don’t recall.”

  It seemed to me an event like that would be hard to forget.

  Clarice looked at me conspiratorially and spoke in a lower tone. Edward winced. This particular act had been played out before in their lives. “Their father committed suicide only a week after Angus left for the Navy. Isn’t that strange?”

  We all chewed that one over for a moment or two. I said, “Is there any particular reason Angus and his sister weren’t on speaking terms?”

  The couple exchanged glances. This was a new one for both of them. Clarice said, “Muriel had some sort of spat with Mary, but Angus spoke to Mary. Of course, while Muriel and Mary were on the outs they couldn’t have any family get-togethers or anything like that, but for goodness sakes, they were brother and sister. Of course they spoke to each other.”

  “I understood they hadn’t spoken to each other in years.”

  “That’s wrong,” said Clarice. “A brother and a sister? Of course they spoke. They were close.”

  Edward Crowell stood up, jangled some coins in his trousers pocket, glanced around the room with the pretension of idleness and said, “I’ll pay.” The conversation was at an end as far as he was concerned.

  Clarice and I walked into the foyer together while Edward paid the tab, a peeved look on his face. The timid girl at the cash register was frightened of him. Our words had disturbed him. Raking up the family skeletons wasn’t his idea of muskrat heaven. I continued pumping Clarice, who took it all very personally, simpering and batting her false eyelashes at me. We might as well have been playing footsie at the beach.

  “Did Mary have any sort of drinking problem?”

  “How did you know about that? She was a practicing alcoholic most of her life. She’d been out to the farm to dry out two or three times. Two years ago when we came up she was stoned day and night.”

  “She never had any men around?”

  “Mary was a confirmed old maid. Poor dear. Mary never wanted to have anything to do with the opposite sex. Not her.”

  “What about Harry?”

  “Yes. There was Harry. But that didn’t amount to much.”

  In the back of my mind I wondered if perhaps Mary and Melissa had had some sort of improper relationship. I wanted to ask her if Mary ever had anything to do with the same sex, but I suspected Clarice wouldn’t take it well. It would shatter our delicate courtship, I with the solicitous inquiries, she with the fawning replies.

  Surreptitiously, I handed her my card and told her to give me a ring if her husband decided he wanted to fill me in on the family history. She said she would try to talk him into loosening up. She said it as if she had been trying for years. When Ed Crowell sauntered into the foyer, we said our good-byes and thanked each other as if we meant it.

  Clarice kept her raisin eyes on me as I trotted through the rainy parking lot to my truck. She observed me with extreme
care while she waited for her husband to fetch their car.

  I drove home in the splashing rush-hour traffic, mesmerized by the headlights knifing through the raindrops.

  Some pundits claimed the weather was growing worse each year, that we were plummeting into another ice age. It did seem to be colder and wetter than last year. Maybe another ice age was possible. Maybe things were going from bad to worse. I knew one thing. We were all involved in an intricate pattern of violence that was slowly escalating, just like the winters. ?

  Chapter Fourteen

  THE MORNING SKY WAS I1T UP IN THE EAST LIKE A HOUSE on fire. The weather people had assured us it was only a temporary lull in the rains, that the clouds would move in and drench our fair city by noon.

  She lived in a basement apartment, almost a nook, in the back of a large sprawling complex of stucco apartments on Capitol Hill. It was early, before seven-thirty, when I tramped through the tall, wet lawn and knocked, catching her as she was getting ready to leave.

  Her front door was in a well, all the windows barred with wrought iron. It was the least accessible and most isolated apartment in the complex, the only one that had iron bars across the windows.

  Jerking open a small peekaboo window in the door, she rose up on tiptoe and peered at me.

  “Ms. Gunther?”

  “You?”

  “I need to speak to you about Melissa Nadisky. I believe you treated her at the clinic.”

  The woman behind the door thought that over for a long while. “Is that what that fiasco was all about the other night? That sham?”

  “I’m a private detective. I’m looking for Melissa. She’s been missing for over a week.”

  “Go to hell.” She slammed the peekaboo window. It made a tinny thud. I thumbed her doorbell and held it.

  After thirty seconds, the peekaboo window screaked open again.

  “You’re no detective,” she said.

  I passed a photostat of my license through the five-inch window: She grabbed it, read it, tore it into quarters and stuffed the pieces through the hole.

  “I’m sorry about the other night,” I said. “But Melissa’s been missing for over a week, her daughter has been kidnapped, and her husband is in the clink in Bellingham.”

  “Burton?”

  “The police have him.”

  “What for?”

  “Murder.”

  Ms. Gunther closed the small window and latched it. Then she opened her front door as far as a fragile burglar chain would allow. She stood warily in the crack, one gray eye exposed, watching me pick up the scraps of my photostat. “It really is important” I said.

  “You said her daughter’s been kidnapped?”

  “That’s what said.”

  “Why wasn’t it in the papers?”

  “Melissa’s father kidnapped her.”

  “I don’t want to get messed up in any family squabbles.”

  “Could I come in for a few moments?”

  Gunther looked me over again, then unchained the door and sidestepped the doorway. I wiped my sopping shoes carefully on her jute doormat. She watched, as if she wanted to inspect the job I’d done.

  She wore a jumper, black stockings, and a pair of clunky boots. She moved stiffly across the room, turned, tilted against a wall and folded her arms selfconsciously across her breasts. She still didn’t know quite what to make of me.

  “I’m on my way to work,” she said. ‘You’ve got about two minutes of my time. After that, it’s hasta la vista, mucacho.”

  The apartment was pleasant, prim and spotless, an array of yellows and pinks. It was a single woman’s abode that might have been a model for House Beautiful.

  I was accustomed to Kathy’s place, its busy clutter and the invariable project arrayed in the center of the living room rug. If Gunther was in the midst of any projects, they were carefully concealed.

  “I’m really sorry about the other night. We shouldn’t have done it?”

  “No, but you had a damned good time, didn’t you? All at my expense. I may be more gullible than some, but I’m not a moron. I figured it out later.”

  “I’ve apologized twice now.”

  Gunther reached over to a table and picked up her enormous tortoiseshell glasses, donning them fastidiously. I sensed that she didn’t need glasses to see, that she wore them to place a barrier, however small, between herself and me.

  “Melissa’s been gone since a week ago Sunday.”

  She adjusted the glasses using the middle fingers of both her hands. “I wondered. They missed an appointment.”

  “I need your help.”

  “Go to the police.”

  “The police aren’t going to look for someone who’s been missing a week, especially when she’s got a history of taking off.”

  “I can’t help you.”

  “You mean you won’t help me.”

  “I do not betray confidences,” she said, imperiously. “We have a code of ethics in our profession.”

  “I need to know some things about Melissa.”

  “Obviously, you found out some things. My personal files on the Nadiskys had been tampered with. You did it while your girlfriend lied to me out in the hall.”

  Our charade, had been a frontal assault on her self-image. I could see it in her cloudy gray eyes. Maybe people had been telling her she was gullible all her life and she had been telling them she wasn’t. Maybe down deep she had been a little unsure about it. Now there was no disputing it. She was a chump.

  “Sunday, a week ago, Melissa disappeared without a trace. She didn’t say good-bye to her husband, to her

  little girl, she just walked out the door. Do you have any idea where she might be?”

  Ms. Gunther shook her head, her thick, evenly cut pageboy flopping against her face. “If I did, I wouldn’t tell you.”

  “I thought it was your job to help people. Your clients are in serious trouble and you don’t give a hoot.”

  “I do!” she protested. “I do. But we have rules. Don’t you understand?”

  “I wonder if you understand, Ms. Gunther. Rules are supposed to protect innocent people, not endanger them.”

  “What do you mean endanger?”

  I plopped down onto a plaid cloth couch, leaned back, crossed my legs and surveyed the place.

  “What do you mean endanger?” she repeated.

  “What do your friends call you?”

  Bashfully, she tightened her forearms on her chest and said, “Helen.”

  “Helen, I began looking for Melissa as a favor for a friend. Since then, the friend has been tied up and was probably about to be tortured before I accidentally walked in. Melissa’s daughter was kidnapped by her grandfather. And last week, Melissa phoned her aunt. She wanted to go up there and stay for a while. But she never showed. Yesterday, her aunt was murdered. The police in Bellingham think Burton did it.”

  “Oh, Judas Priest,” said Helen Gunther, stumbling across the room to sit on the arm of an overstuffed chair opposite me. Using the middle finger of her hand, she shoved her glasses back up onto her nose. Her fingernails were painted fuchsia, matching the slash of color on her full lips.

  “Did Melissa have any lesbian tendencies?”

  “I can’t tell you that,” she snapped. But she did tell me. From the look on her face, I judged it was something that had never occurred to her in relation to Melissa.

  “How about old boyfriends? Her neighbors tell me there was an old boyfriend hanging around.”

  “Really, Mr. Black. Maybe you are a private detective. But I can’t tell you these things. I really can’t. It’s against

  I don’t know.” She peeled off her glasses and rubbed her eyes with a pale hand. “You fooled me once before. How do I know this isn’t all some ruse?”

  “Helen,” I said. “We think Melissa’s in Tacoma somewhere. Was there an old boyfriend down there? From the look on your face, I’m thinking there was.”

  Helen Gunther sighed and snagged her gla
sses back around either ear. “You’ll have to leave now. I need to be at the clinic in fifteen minutes.”

  “Call Bellingham,” I said. “Ask the police if they’re holding Burton. I’ll be back this afternoon.”

  “I won’t be here, Mr. Black.”

  “Call me Thomas. This evening, then.”

  “Mr. Black, I’ve already spoken too long. This is just one of those things. I’m sorry, but I cannot reveal confidences.”

  “If somebody’s life was at stake, could your “Whose life would that be?”

  “How about Melissa’s? Whoever murdered her aunt might go after her next. Maybe she’s dead now.”

  Helen Gunther shuddered but then shook her head stubbornly. “I’m not telling you or anyone else secrets my clients have disclosed. That’s just the way things are. Good-bye.”

  “What about Melissa and her father? What was the problem?”

  Helen Gunther got up and opened the front door, staring at the floor. Reluctantly, I left. Ten minutes later when she came out, I tailed her. She clambered into a dented MG and drove to a lot near the Hopewell Clinic. She ate four frosted donuts at a shop across the street, quaffed a coffee and then ducked into the Hopewell.

  I went back home, exercised, ate and moped around the house the rest of the morning, fretting about Kathy. Though it was a million-to-one shot, I kept imagining some ogre would snatch her off the street. Some ogre with a penchant for electric ranges.

  Without gaining an ounce of good for my troubles, I telephoned all the remaining phone numbers on my list. Nobody in any of the pest companies I contacted admitted to knowing a Romano. None of the Romanos I got in touch with admitted to knowing a pest company. Life was just peachy keen. Mother had been right. Everything just dropped into your lap if you were a good boy.

  Shortly after noon, the phone jangled. I knew exactly who it was because I was naked in the tub. “Kathy?”

  “You must have been sitting on the phone.”

  “No, I’m re-reading Shakespeare. I’m into the last act of Henry VIII. Lord Chamberlain has just come in. The phone happened to be next to the book here.”

  “Very funny.”

  “You sound tired.”