Rainy City Read online

  “The Hopewell Clinic?

  “How did you know? Yeah, I told her about that place. Margaret,” she said, nodding her head toward the woman breast-feeding in the corner. “Margaret works there parttime for college credits. She’s always tellin’ us about the crazy palookas who come in.”

  “What else did Melissa say? She mention Tacoma, by any chance?”

  “Naw.” Helga Iddins raised her arms over her head, fiddling with her hair. The movement cracked open the front of her robe, revealing an interesting wrinkled cleft between her sagging breasts. “She did tell me about some guy named Romano who seemed to be giving her a lot of trouble.”

  “That his last name or his first?”

  “Just Romano. Kind of a Latiny-looking guy. She used to be involved with him and now he won’t let her alone. Like I said, Melissa had a hard time saying no. Christ, she was messed up. Tell you the truth, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear she killed herself.”

  “You think that’s a possibility?” I jammed my hands into my pockets and got a fistful of milk-soaked towel.

  Staring at her own face in the mirror as if seeing it for the first time, Helga nodded and the whole business I was watching shook.

  “You’ve seen this Romano character?”

  “Sure. From across the street. He used to show up maybe once a month, once every other month. A real creepy guy. Old enough to be her father. He’d drive over and stay a couple of hours in the afternoon, if the husband wasn’t home. I wisht she’d called me. I would have busted his chops.”

  “What’d he drive?”

  “Nothin’ much. It was an old pest control van. Acme? Admiral? Something like that. I can’t really remember. I guess nobody ever told poor Melissa she didn’t have to lay down and spread her legs for every Tom, Dick and Harry who wanted to see what it was like. She’s such a smart little girl, too.”

  “She say what this Romano guy wanted with her?”

  “She didn’t have to. They had an affair once years ago, maybe when she was in college. Now he shows up. What do you think he wants?”

  I had to stop and mull it over for a few minutes. Melissa had had sex with her husband only three times in almost four years, yet the neighbor across the street wanders over and jumps on her five minutes after they meet. And then some Latin roach-killer makes regular trips to her place to get his pencil sharpened. I wondered what dear Burton would think of all this if he knew. Burton the cuckold. I wondered if he knew.

  “Think you could remember the name of the company on the side of the van?”

  “I only remember it was a pest control company. After I found out who he was, I kept thinking how ironic. After all, he was the pest.”

  “When was the last time you saw the van in front of their place?”

  “He didn’t always come in a van. Sometimes he showed up in a real old Cadillac, all spruced up. They used to call them pimpmobiles. That’s what he had last weekend. Not this past weekend, but the week before. I think it was Sunday, but it might have been Saturday. He didn’t stay very long that time.”

  “You see him leave?”

  “Sidney and me were having a little spat.”

  “I was wondering if he left alone.”

  “You mean maybe Melissa went with him? I couldn’t tell you. I only seen him pull up. But that’s an idea. Don’t think I seen her since. Is that when she ran off?”

  “Last weekend,” I said.

  “Maybe she went with him. Christ, people do dumb things.”

  “You wouldn’t remember his license plate, would you?”

  “You think if I had that kind of brain I’d be working here?”

  “I guess not,” I said, moving to the door.

  “One thing, though.”

  “Shoot.”

  “It wasn’t a Seattle plate. I remember that. The first letter was a b.”

  “Tacoma, Pierce County,” I said.

  “Yeah. You gonna stay for the show?”

  “Not tonight.”

  “We could, uh, maybe have a drink after.”

  “I’ve got an appointment.”

  “Sure.” She turned to the mirror as if I had never existed.

  I reached the first set of doors in the main room before the Navy kid jumped me. The auditorium was dark and they were projecting blue movies onto a hoary screen behind the stage. First a movie, then a dancer, then another movie. It was an endless cycle of sterling entertainment.

  Two of his friends stood off to one side. I looked around in the darkness for a bouncer. Places like this always had them, ex-football players or karate freaks.

  “Think you’re pretty hot stuff,” said the Navy kid. As soon as he spoke, I could see he’d had a snootful. “Talkin’ to the strippers. Mr. Cool.”

  I wasn’t in the mood to get bounced around by someone who wasn’t even old enough to recall Adlai Stevenson. He smirked at his two pals, as if to say, “Doin’ pretty good, huh guys?” He wasn’t as stuporous as you’d hope a drunk attacking you would be.

  I could see he wasn’t going to stop until I hit him or the bouncer broke his arm, and I couldn’t see a bouncer anywhere. Probably sipping tea in the back room with a Harlequin romance.

  “Oh, geez,” I said, incredulously, glancing in the direction of the screen. “I didn’t think that was possible.”

  When the Navy kid wrenched his head around, I doubled up my right fist and gave him a stiff shot directly below the belt. He folded up, making a groaning sound the way a record played too slowly does. His body slapped the hard sticky floor with a thud. It made a sweet sound like a sack of sugar tumbling out of a grocery cart.

  I gave his two buddies a sloppy salute and left as they both bent over, searching for him in the darkness. I wasn’t much of a boxer but I could sucker punch with the best. ?

  Chapter Ten

  I PICKED UP KATHY AT HER FRIEND’S APARTMENT. ON THE way home she hammered me with questions about Melissa, but I found it difficult to answer them. I told her about Romano. I was struggling to form an accurate mental image of the missing woman.

  Her photo told me she was pretty. Her husband told me she was sensitive. Her neighbors told me she was weak and neurotic. Yet, her father told me she was a slut. Whatever she was, I didn’t feel it was my duty to besmirch her reputation any further. But so far, I hadn’t discovered anything that was going to do her reputation a hell of a lot of good. When I found her, if I found her, she could speak for herself.

  I felt like a fool, but before I allowed Kathy in, I hauled the heavy .45 from behind the truck seat, pointed it and searched the house, upstairs and down. Still dressed in her strumpet costume, she had scrubbed her face and combed her hair. Even so, I didn’t want to see her die in those clothes. They were fine for a lark but not for dying.

  “Can I stay up here again?” she asked, in a small, meek voice.

  “You scared?”

  “Maybe I am. I don’t want to find out. Not until we learn who that was in the mask.”

  “Fair enough. I’ll sleep on the couch this time.”

  “Not on your life,” she said. “I’m not going to kick you out of your own bed. Besides, I like that couch. I’ll take the couch.”

  Her violet eyes bored into mine as if she were trying to read my mind. I wondered what she hoped to see. Sometimes I had the niggling suspicion Kathy and I avoided physical intimacy because we didn’t want to sully a perfect friendship.

  Before I slipped under the covers, I examined the Colt -again, brooded about it for a long while, then dismantled the semi-automatic and put it back into its nook inside the closet wall. rd shot only one human in my time and I very much wished to keep the tally at one. Even now, four years later, I often woke up in the night thinking about that kid and feeling the sweat trickle down the small of my back.

  If some boob stumbled into the house in the night, I guess I’d have to take him on hand-to-hand or maybe with a heavy slipper from under the bed.

  After the house was still and dark
and I thought she was fast asleep, Kathy called from the living room, “You awake? Thomas?”

  My answer was a bovine grunt.

  “Tomorrow I’ll dig up everything on record about

  Angus Crowell.”

  “Good.”

  “What are you going to do tomorrow?”

  “Think I’ll try to find this Romano creep. Maybe get Burton squared away so you can go to a judge with him. If everything doesn’t work out right away, I’m driving back up to Bellingham.”

  “You think her aunt knows something?”

  “I know she knows something. I just don’t know if it’ll help us. Or whether she’ll tell me.”

  “I thought the jig was up when Ms. Gunther and I walked in on you.”

  “I got involved in what I was reading.”

  “Was it something weird?”

  “It was private.”

  “About Burton and Melissa?”

  “Yeah. I’ll tell you if you want, but it was private.”

  She thought about it for a few moments. “Maybe I’d better not hear.”

  “Good night, Kathy.”

  “Thomas?”

  “Eh, Pancho?”

  “Do you think he’ll come back? The man in the mask? Do you think he’ll come back?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “He had something to do with Melissa, didn’t he? The burglar?”

  “The way I see it we have three basic possibilities. Either Crowell did it, or orchestrated it. Maybe he doesn’t want us to find Melissa, maybe he’s trying to throw some stumbling blocks into our path.”

  “Why?”

  “Who knows? Maybe Melissa stole something from him, something he doesn’t want anyone else in the world to see. I don’t really have a glimmer.”

  “What are the other two possibilities?”

  “Number two: that Holder broke in on his own, without Crowell’s knowledge. I told you before that Holder would do anything for a buck. And there’s a two-thousand-dollar reward for finding Melissa. It could be he just wants to derail the opposition, meaning us, only long enough so he can find her himself.”

  “What’s the third possibility?” Kathy asked.

  “That the burglary has no connection to any of this. That it was a random crime like hundreds of other random crimes across this city every day.”

  “Thomas? Maybe Melissa’s been kidnapped.”

  “I’ve thought of that. That would be a reason her father wouldn’t want us messing around. Maybe he’s trying to scrape together a ransom. Maybe they’ve threatened to kill her if he calls the police. The only trouble with that is, why would he put the ad in the newspaper?”

  Tuesday, we caught Nadisky early, hauled him out of bed and began haranguing him about his daughter. It took him only a minute to acquiesce. Kathy did the talking and this time it looked like it might stick. The story about the spilled milk was what tipped it. Tears slid from his pale blue orbs. He jumped into blue jeans, a flannel shirt and boots and was ready.

  Burton was now more dignified than I had seen him. The mouse under his eye was shrinking and he looked a whole lot better without Holder standing over him slapping his brains out.

  Before we left, I stopped him at the front door and put a hand on his narrow shoulder. “A couple other things, Burton.”

  “Sure, sure, sure,” he said, nervously. He was worried about testifying before a judge. My guess was he didn’t usually fare well in front of authority figures.

  I signaled Kathy to vamoose. It took her a moment to realize what I was saying with my eyebrows, but then she obediently walked into the kitchen.

  “You haven’t heard anything from your wife, have you?”

  Burton knit his wheat-colored brows together into a frown and shook his head. His body was stiff from the cold in the house and from the tension. “No, why? Have you?”

  I shook my head. “She know anyone in Tacoma? Either of you know anyone in Tacoma?”

  “Nobody that I can think of right off the bat. We haven’t been down in a coon’s age. Two years, maybe. I went to the writers’ conference there.”

  “How about an old boyfriend? Melissa have any old boyfriends?”

  “I didn’t feel I had the right to question her about ex-beaux.”

  It was a pretty good bet Burton was the only one on the block who used the word beaux.

  “What about the name Romano? That mean anything to you?”

  Burton combed his fingers through his shock of blond hair and shook his head. I could tell by the blank television-eyes, he was telling the truth. “What’s in Tacoma?” he asked. “You think Melissa went to Ta-coma?”

  “I told you that last night. But you must have been rummy. How about somebody in a pest control van? You ever see anybody in a pest control van?”

  “A pest control van? What has that got to do with anything?” Burton winced like a child getting a hypodermic injection.

  “You’ve seen one, haven’t you?”

  “There was a guy here visiting Melissa about a year ago. He drove a pest van. She said he was an old friend…of the family.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  Studying his scuffed hiking boots, Nadisky measured his breathing for a few counts, then finally spoke. “I was working at the Esso station, but I got sick, so I came home early. This man was here. A tanned fellow. Italian, he looked like. About forty-five or fifty, maybe. Melissa said he was here to see if we had mice. But she was real fidgety. He kept grinning. He wouldn’t stop staring at me and he wouldn’t stop grinning. It made my skin crawl.”

  “Did you have mice?”

  “Once, yeah. But something else was going on. I never found out what. I had the feeling she knew the guy real well from before, you know? He just kept grinning.”

  “You didn’t figure maybe he was someone she used to date?”

  Dual lumps of anguish knotted Burton’s cheeks and forced his mouth into a pout. “Why do you have to ask these questions? I don’t want to know.”

  “The guy was seen here last weekend. I think Melissa went off with him.”

  “She wouldn’t run off with that guy.” “I think she did.”

  “She wouldn’t do that!” he shouted. His face burned a bright pink. Kathy appeared in the kitchen doorway for a moment, then disappeared. “Melissa wouldn’t run off with a…man.”

  “What makes you so certain?” Burton shrugged, embarrassed, one eyebrow quivering.

  “Is it because Melissa isn’t capable of enjoying sex with a man?”

  “God…” Burton’s startled eyes widened and he stared at me. “How do you…where…?”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’m not blabbing it to the congregation at your church. I may not even write it on any rest room walls. You saw me send Kathy out of the room. I’m not trying to put anybody on the spot. I only want to find out anything that might help me locate your wife. Right now I’m not sure what the hell is going on. If knew the exact reason she left I might have more clues.”

  “She didn’t go anywhere with a man. I’m sure of that. Melissa doesn’t like men. We only…”

  “How do you know?”

  His voice shrank. “She has a lot of trouble sleeping. One time, when she was a little girl, something happened in the night. Something awful. Most nights I slept in the bedroom and she slept with Angel.”

  “Was that what you were seeing Ms. Gunther about?”

  “You’ve pried into everything, haven’t you?” It was a statement more than an accusation. He was resigned to it.

  “I’m only trying to find your wife. There’s some real trouble beneath all this.”

  “We talked to Ms. Gunther about sex, but that wasn’t why we went, not initially. Melissa has this thing about her father. They’ve got a real love—hate thing going. Ms. Gunther told her she was going to have to confront her father.”

  “How did Melissa take that?”

  “Badly. Ms. Gunther told her she was going to have to tell him what she really though
t of him. Ms. Gunther is a real believer in clearing the air. I suppose part of it was my fault. I’m real close to my folks, and I’ve always urged her to mend the fences. Melissa got a little hysterical.”

  “Hysterical? In what way?”

  “She went flippy. It was the week before she left. She kept talking about confronting her father. She didn’t want to do it, but Ms. Gunther convinced her she had to. I guess maybe it could have had something to do with her leaving.”

  “Did Melissa make contact with her father that week?”

  “Not that I know of. But if she did…it was the kind of thing Melissa would have done on her own, after work or sometime. Melissa did some sneaky things where her father was concerned. I remember once, she took a bunch of money out of savings and bought him a cable-knit sweater. Didn’t even ask me. A hundred bucks.”

  “You said something happened when she was a kid. What?”

  “I don’t know. She never got it clear enough in her own head to talk about.”

  “But it was something ugly?”

  “I only know about it from the nightmares she used to have. She would cry in the night and have these ferocious nightmares.”

  It was a quarter after nine when I dropped off Kathy and Burton at the county courthouse where they were to meet one of Kathy’s law professors. Brusquely, Kathy turned back to me at the half-open Ford window and said, “Be careful, Big Boy.”

  I nodded absently, my mind already light-years away.

  “Hey, Cisco?”

  Snapping out of it, I met her worried smile. “Hey, Pancho.”

  She wore a chic pantsuit. A fraction of my mind was disappointed that she had no more occasion to dress like a strumpet. In its own way, it had been interesting.

  I had a hunch. A strong hunch. I didn’t get them often, so when I did I rolled with the crazy things. I had awakened that morning with an urgent desire to speak to Mary Crowell again. I parked the truck, found a pay phone and dialed her Bellingham number. It rang twelve times before she picked up the receiver and coughed into it.

  When she was finished coughing, Mary Dawn Crowell spoke in a crisp, scholarly manner. She was so melancholy and yet so precise in her enunciation that I suspected she’d been tippling, was trying to camouflage signs of it