Rainy City Page 5

  Fifteen hundred hours of combat training on the police range went down the tube.

  I could have let it go and pretended everything was hunky-dory, put in for a desk job or a sleepy-hollow beat, but I couldn’t leave it at that. I squawked. My career was a crushed dream and I no longer wanted anything to do with it. I had to be the best or I had to be nothing at all. I squawked and they mustered me out and called the reason a bum knee. They were generous.

  Now I was a PI. A peeper. Now I took pictures through windows, tailed philandering husbands who were plugging bottle-blondes, searched for runaway teenagers, and was always first to hit the dirt when the lights blinked. Who the hell wanted to be Chief anyway?

  Besides, I had come to like snooping on people. It was fun. Sure, I was a voyeur. So was anyone who ever watched Doris Day mug with Rock Hudson, or gawked at Bill Holden kissing Kim Novak. We’re all voyeurs and life is a picnic. People have little boxes in their living rooms and they sit in front of the boxes six or eight hours a night and goggle at other people living their lives. It’s called television by some. Me, I call it voyeurism.

  “You were very brave tonight, Kathy,” I said. “I mean that. I admired you.”

  She had thrown on some sort of East Indian robe for supper. It extended all the way to the floor and hobbled her, forced her to take tiny, mincing steps. Her hair was long and loose and freshly combed. She looked good. In fact, the only physical marks left by her ordeal were a set of rather measly scrape marks on her wrists and a red cheek where he had cuffed her.

  When she spoke, her voice was fogged with emotion, and I had the feeling she was about to burst into tears. “I guess the dollar damage downstairs isn’t as bad as I thought at first. Under two thousand.” Noticing where my eyes rested, she rubbed her cheek and avoided my gaze as she continued. “Mainly the stereo and the television. And some records. How was it up here?”

  “You stopped him before he got out of first gear. He got those two pictures and the lock on the back door. And of course, the basement door. I’ll fix the doors in the morning.”

  “Who was he? What did he want? Thomas, do you know?”

  I told her I had no idea, although I had a dozen gruesome ideas. If I’d arrived twenty minutes later it would have been a different story, a story some newspaper writer would be pounding out at this very minute.

  Co-ed Tortured and Killed by Intruder.

  Kathy stepped close to me, laid her head gently against my chest and clasped her arms tightly around my waist. “Can I sleep with you tonight?” She sounded desperate.

  “Sure.”

  “No. I mean with you. In your bed.”

  Her strong arms pulled against me, generating an easy feel for all her contours. “I had it in mind all along.”

  We slept with the .45 under a book on the nightstand beside the bed. The book was a Doubleday. The gun was a Colt. Kathy was a gem.

  She hauled a down comforter up from her apartment and curled into a catlike ball on top of my covers. I didn’t know precisely what she had in mind, but I could sense that she was amenable to almost any move I made.

  When I kissed her forehead she smiled slightly, and when I kissed her lips she kissed back for as long as I did. But there was a certain temperance to the exchange, a certain chaste lack of absolute passion that somehow made me angry. She was using me, and maybe I was using her, and using was not what I wanted my life to be about. I decided, amenable or not, she would be better off with a comforter rather than with me on top of her.

  Before she dozed off, Kathy ran a warm hand across my face and said, “You awake, chum?”

  I grunted. I was more awake than she. The thought had occurred to me that the prowler might backtrack and try to finish the job.

  “I was thinking about it today. I did tell Angus Crowell your name: Remember when you asked me about that? I saw him Friday morning at his office in south Seattle. He works for Taltro Incorporated. He was a real peach. I only saw him for a few moments, but I do remember telling him your name. Why? Was that important?”

  “Go to sleep.”

  “I just want to know how you’re doing on this case.”

  “Yeah, maybe it was important. It’s possible he was so upset about somebody butting in on what he considered his own business that he came here Saturday night and killed my dog as a warning. Or had someone do it. It’s possible, but it sounds goofy, even to me.”

  “Or he might have paid someone to break in here for the same reason. To warn you off?”

  “That’s what I was thinking.”

  “Thomas?”

  “Go to sleep.”

  “Isn’t that a little farfetched?”

  “Yeah, it is.”

  “I think the dog and the burglar are coincidental. Sometimes these things just happen, you know?” “I know.”

  “I saw a body. Some bones, that is, in a pit. And a little girl was there, crying.”

  “Is this your vision?”

  “Yes.”

  “Go on.”

  “There was a terrified little girl. And some bones at the bottom of this pit.”

  “Who was the girl? Angel?”

  “I don’t know. Angel. Or maybe Melissa. You have to find her. There is something dangerous going on, something involving Melissa. I know it. Do you believe me, Thomas?”

  “I believe you.”

  “What do you think it could be about?”

  “Sleep. Go to sleep.” Outside I could hear the wind riling up the night. We both drifted off.

  I awoke bolt upright, the .45 in my fist. It was cocked and the safety had been thumbed off. I was pointing it at the window. It was a quarter to four in the morning. In my sleep, I thought I had heard something chafing the windowpane. There it was again. A bush swayed against the pane to the tune of the wind. If only it had been a face in a ski mask, I could have let fly. I could have fired. I think I could have.

  My body was bathed in a cold sweat, and I knew it would be a good half hour before I would saw any more zzzs.

  Quietly, I uncocked the automatic and snicked the safety on, sliding it back under the Doubleday. Outside, roly-poly clouds scudded across a low sliver of a moon. A thin chalky light fissured through the bush at the window and marbled the bedroom with light.

  I brushed a hand across Kathy’s hair. It was thick, almost wiry.

  She was breathing heavily, her mouth slack. She stirred and one of her feet poked out from beneath her homemade comforter. She had stitched it herself. She was interested in all the old-fashioned arts, adept at most of them, and gathered new hobbies into her fold every year. She even had a loom.

  For a long while I lay awake on one elbow and watched her sleep. In the moonlight, her oval face took on an almost boyish grace, an innocence. There was a chameleon quality about her. People she knew could bump into her in the street and not recognize her. It wasn’t only her costumes and lavish collection of historical clothing, it was her. It was difficult to describe. She had a smooth, oval face and she could make it up a hundred different ways. Beautiful. Silly. Plain. The vamp. She tried them all.

  It took me an hour to get back to sleep. It was the second time in my life I had slept all night with Kathy. We had never made love. ?

  Chapter Seven

  MINDLESSLY, I MENDED THE TWO DOORS THE NEXT MORNING, first the back door, which had merely been rifled, and then the door which led to the basement. It had been nearly ripped off its hinges. Jagged splinters of bare wood hung from the frame and reminded me of the hideous reality of yesterday’s events. When the case was finished I would replace them both.

  Kathy had woken up sprawled across me, had stretched hard like a cat, grinned and said, “You’re a sweetheart.”

  “Oh, pooh. I thought I was macho. At least

  quasimacho.”

  “Didn’t he used to ring bells?”

  “You called me Sam Spade the other day.”

  “That was before I found out you were a puppy-dog.”

  Sh
e got off to her first class in a 1930s formal gown covered with a long fur coat she’d picked up cheap at an auction. At ten, she had an appointment with one of her law professors who owed her a favor. They were going to request an immediate injunction to return Angel to her father. I wondered if Kathy was planning to change clothes before she went downtown.

  In the cold light of day, the .45 looked ridiculous, resembling something archaic from a long-forgotten war, an artifact some dumbfounded farmer had plowed up and turned in to the government. Ejecting the clip, I forced out the round in the chamber and returned the whole business behind the sliding, secret panel of’ my closet.

  I had some phone calls to make, but I didn’t want to make them from my home phone. I had spotted a suspicious coffee-colored van parked across the street. Perhaps I was getting paranoid, but I strapped on a knapsack and wheeled my ten-speed out through the spongy grass in the backyard to the alley. It didn’t join my front driveway, so some yokel tailing me wouldn’t be expecting it.

  At the alley, I stopped, cleaned out my cycling cleats using a key, then rolled away. Portions of the sky were blue, although the roads were still damp and oily. If my luck held, I wouldn’t get wet.

  After tooling through the neighborhood streets until I was certain nobody was trailing along behind, I pedaled a mile through the thick of the University District to a three-story white house on Fifteenth.

  Smithers had mustered in with me fourteen years ago. He had always been at the bottom of the police academy class while I was at the top, but somehow we had forged a bond of friendship. A year earlier, he had divorced a woman who weighed one hundred pounds more than he did, and now he was bouncing around in a barn of a house all by himself. Doreen had taken night classes in Spanish, and the Spanish professor had taken night classes in Doreen. It seemed like every couple I knew was splitting up.

  Chubby-cheeked, fat, jolly and perfectly contented that way, Smithers was impossible to envision in a police uniform unless you had seen it. He wore his Sam Browne belt wrenched around so that the service pistol was almost in back, as if some prankster had attached it when he wasn’t looking. He worked from eight at night till four in the morning, so he was usually around when I needed him.

  “Don’t tell me,” said Smithers, raising a pudgy pink hand as he swung the door open. “You need me to call in some numbers.”

  Wheeling my Miyata into his entranceway, I unlaced, then heeled off my cleated cycling shoes. “Sorry I only get over here on business. But let’s be thankful for that, otherwise we might never see each other.”

  Smithers chuckled and closed the front door. He had been tottering around in slippers and a bathrobe, balancing a mug of coffee. It was a curious house, all hardwood floors, no rugs and little furniture. Doreen had pirated it all when she absconded with the professor.

  “Coffee?”

  “No thanks.” I was peering out his front window at the street, one last looksee, wondering if I had been followed. Maybe I was getting paranoid.

  “You look grim. Somebody tailing you?”

  “Last night a guy busted into my place. You remember Kathy?”

  “The, gal who wears the funny clothes?”

  “That’s her. Somebody busted into my place and Kathy interrupted him. He tied her to the shower rod. She’s okay, but I think he had some unwholesome plans for her.”

  “What stared him off?”

  “I did. I got home at just the right minute and spooked him.”

  “You know who it was?”

  “He wore a ski mask.”

  “How about prints or…”

  “The guy was a pro. Or he acted like one. Dressed all in dark. Cotton work gloves. Didn’t even say anything.”

  “But you have an idea?”

  “Ever hear of a guy named Holder? A big fella? A little on the mean side?”

  “Holder? Holder?” Smithers sipped steaming coffee from a mug and tapped a fingernail against his stubby front teeth. “Holder.” Tap. Tap. Tap. “I know I’ve heard that name.”

  “A tall guy. Black and Mexican mixed, maybe. Or Indian. For some reason, I get the feeling he was foreign-born.”

  “Julius Caesar Holder!” exclaimed Smithers. Tap. Tap. Tap. “Yeah, he had some trouble with the dicks downtown a few months back. I never paid much attention to it. They weren’t happy with him.”

  “Can you find out about him for me?”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  “Also, this license number. Holder was driving the car yesterday. It’s probably registered to him, but I want to make certain. Then there’s this phone call. I need some records from the phone company. Can you get them for me?”

  “Geez, I dunno.”

  “It’s not going to court or anything. A woman I’m tracking made a phone call to Bellingham Tuesday night around nine o’clock. I believe she phoned from Tacoma. I’d like to find out for sure.”

  “Don’t want much, do ya?” chided Smithers.

  “This is serious business,” I said, grinning.

  Smithers slurped coffee and sucked striped candies while he made the calls. It didn’t take long. When cops start running errands for each other, things flow along pretty smoothly.

  The tan sedan Holder had driven Sunday morning was leased by Penworthy Investigations, Incorporated, leased from a local car dealership. Two more calls produced this nugget: Penworthy contracted security work to Taltro Incorporated, the same company Angus Crowell worked for.

  On Tuesday evening, Mary Dawn Crowell’s phone number in Bellingham had indeed received an incoming call from Tacoma. Melissa had phoned collect, otherwise we never would have found out where she had been. She had the loot for a bus ticket but not for a phone call. Somebody on the other end of the line made a computer hookup and told Smithers it had originated at a pay phone on Pacific Avenue. Melissa and her aunt had gabbed a little less than one minute.

  I recognized the address of the pay phone. It was a few blocks from the Greyhound station in Tacoma. Great. A pay phone and a leased car. People were covering things like cats in the garden.

  While he still had them on the phone, I asked Smithers to ask his contact to trace the number in the ad Kathy had showed me. I had called the number earlier in the morning, reached a recorded message and hung up. It turned out to be a phone line in the Taltro complex in Georgetown. Everything was ending up at Taltro.

  On a hunch, Smithers phoned the dicks downtown and inquired about Julius Caesar Holder. Furrows broke across the smooth fatness of his brow and he grew somber, almost gloomy as he listened.

  When he hung up, he swiveled toward me and said, “The guy used to be a boxer. He’s trouble. He killed a guy in the ring. A private eye down in San Diego crossed swords with him a coupla years back and hasn’t been heard from since. No body. No traces. No nothin’. The snooper’s widow stirred some politicians up and accused Holder, but nothing ever came of it. I would stay away from the guy.”

  “Does he always carry a piece?”

  “They didn’t say anything about that.”

  “Get an address on him?”

  “He moves around a lot. He got in an argument with some woman in Chinatown a few months back. Slapped her silly. A coupla of off-duty dicks stepped in and he knocked ‘em both through a plate glass window. The boys were a little on the drunk-and- rowdy side, so it was hard to build a case on Holder. I guess he’s always had woman trouble. They say he’s married and divorced the same woman five or six times. Cuckoo.”

  “That sucker is almost as mean as I am.” Smithers exploded into laughter.

  “Met a great gal,” said Smithers, walking me to the door. “I found this place that’s just incredible for meeting real women.”

  “A club or something?”

  “It’s called Overeaters Anonymous.”

  He was serious. I guess if he was hunting for the reincarnation of his ex-wife, that was the place to hunt. It was my turn to laugh, but I did it after Smithers had closed the door.

  It took
ten minutes to cycle to the Hopewell Clinic. Burgling the Hopewell would best be done during the next nuclear war. It squatted on one of the busiest blocks on Capitol Hill. Across the street stood a gay bar, open and overflowing with noisy crowds until all hours. Behind the clinic was a well-lit parking lot, and fronting the lot, with a clear view of the backside of the clinic, stood a four-story apartment house. Cater-cornered from the clinic was a bustling all-night grocery store.

  On its own, the clinic posed no problems. A converted mansion, it was splintered into offices and meeting areas. I could have picked a lock or jimmied a window in a minute. The hitch was, I would have to be invisible to pull it off. Perhaps if I suited up in a uniform, a police uniform… I’d used the ploy before, but somehow I wasn’t that desperate. Not yet.

  I got home at one, soaked to the skin from the rain. The coffee-colored van was still slotted across the street, but it had been moved several parking spaces farther north. It was impossible to see through the dark windshield. I dragged out a pair of battered Bushnell’s, focused them, jotted down the plate number, and phoned it to Smithers. Twenty minutes later, Smithers returned my call and advised me that it belonged to one of my neighbors, a guy who lived six houses down. I wondered why I had never noticed it before.

  I began simmering a stew, fooled with the weights and a jump rope in the spare bedroom for an hour, skimmed the afternoon paper and then dipped into a piping-hot tub. On cue, the back door opened. I could tell who it was by the footsteps. I had just gotten the .45 hidden under a towel when she came around the corner and sat on the throne, sorting her rain-soaked mail.

  “You botched the stew,” said Kathy, without looking at me. “The meat’s burned.”

  She had changed her clothes. She wore a pantsuit, a frilly white blouse and a black string bow tie. She looked very much the way I expected a lady lawyer to look.

  When I had arranged the washcloth in a satisfactory formation, I spoke. “How’dit go downtown? You guys get an injunction?”

  “We didn’t get anything.” She looked up and frowned when she noticed the washcloth. Pulled back into a severe bun, her hair glistened like a lump of shiny wet coal.