Chump Change (3 page)

“I want to see the body,” I said.

“Let me see what I can do,” he whispered. “Rachel’s waiting in the car.”

Jed walked me all the way out the door.

The rain began as a thin, insistent drizzle, then, as is its habit in the great Northwest, morphed into a relentless downpour. Rachel and I were sitting cheek to cheek, so to speak, in the back of Jed’s new Lexus 600h L. “First one in the state,” he’d bragged to me.

Rachel had taken care of everything. Closed up the house, packed our stuff, called the property management people, gone shopping for the suit, and had it all ready to go by the time I walked out the side door of the Lewis County Law and Justice Center a free man.

Jed arrived a minute or two later. Like many well-heeled Seattleites, Jed had developed truly mad umbrella skills. He managed to keep it open and above himself until he was fully ensconced in the front seat, at which point he shut it, shook it, and stowed it in a single fluid motion, without allowing so much as a drop to slop into his new car.

He looked back over his shoulder at Rachel and me, and grinned.

“You guys are
both
going to love this,” he said.

I was in no mood for guessing. “They gonna let me see the body or not?”

“It’s not here,” he said.

“Where is it?”

“This is the part you’re going to love,” he cooed. “They don’t do their own forensics out here. Don’t have the funds or the facilities. They farm it out to . . .” He cocked his head and repeated the dumb grin.

“King County,” Rachel said with a hearty chuckle.

“Bingo. The lady wins the Kewpie doll,” Jed said as he started the car.

I kept my mouth shut, looking out through the rushing wipers as Jed wheeled out into the street and started through the middle of town, rolling east toward the highway.

Rachel patted my arm. “You two don’t talk, do you?”

I kept it as simple as I could. “No” was what I said.

The
you two
Rachel was referring to were me and my former paramour Rebecca Duvall, who just happened to be the chief forensic examiner for King County. After twenty-five years of dating, Rebecca finally had enough of my lack of ambition and what she called my
post-adolescent posturing
, so she bolted for what seemed the greener pastures of a devilishly handsome yacht salesman by the name of Brett Ward, who, as fate would have it, turned out to be a sleazeball of monumental proportions. A man whose greed and stupidity damn near got all of us killed.

On the day of his funeral, Rebecca and I promised to keep in touch, but it hadn’t happened. Not a call. Not a card. I figured it was because she was embarrassed, and I didn’t blame her. I married a low-grade moron like Brett Ward, I’d be embarrassed too.

Jed broke the silence. “Why’d you want to see the body anyway?” he asked.

I didn’t answer right away. I kept my mouth shut as we rolled up the entrance ramp to Route 609 and found a spot in the center lane, where we wouldn’t be eating some eighteen-wheeler’s rooster tail all the way back to Seattle.

“There’s something I haven’t told anybody,” I said finally.

Neither of them asked what.

“Something he said right before he died.”

Again, I got the silent treatment.

“He looked up at me and said . . .” I admit it; I paused for effect. “He said . . .
‘Leo?
’ ”

Like they say in Brooklyn, “Ya coulda hoid a pin drop.”

Rachel let go of my arm. Searched my eyes. She’s big on that.

“You’re sure?” she asked.

“Positive,” I replied. “He knew who I was. I’m certain of it.”

I’d been a PI for over twenty-five years. Even if you’re not the brightest bulb in the box, you do something for that long and you’re gonna get good at it. That’s just the way it is, and these two knew it. If I said the guy knew me, then he knew me.

“And you have no idea who he is . . . was?” Jed asked from the front seat.

“As far as I know, I’ve never seen that guy before in my life.”

Margot, Rebecca’s receptionist, seemed to be having one of those “What’s wrong with this picture?” moments. She kept blinking her eyes. The closer I got, the faster she blinked.

Margot was pink and puffy. The hair, the sweater, the earrings, the shoes . . . all of it . . . all the time, pink and puffy.

As seemed to be all the rage these days, she said, “Leo?”

“How goes it, Margot?” I asked cheerfully.

She swallowed hard. “Is she expecting you?”

“Nope,” I said.

She scrambled to her feet. Waved a confused hand. “I think she’s . . . I’ll have to . . .”

“I know,” I said. “Tell her I’m here on business.”

Rebecca let me cool my heels for a bit. Musta sent Margot on her break. Left me alone in the tombstone silence. I figured there was a message in there somewhere.

She was pulling off a pair of blue latex gloves, one finger at a time, when she backed through the swinging door. I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t still have a little place inside of me that yearns for her. A place that remembers it all. A word here. A kiss there. An afternoon spent sailing the Sound. It’s all stored in there someplace. Twenty-five years of sharing your life with somebody will do that.

“Leo,” she said with a halfhearted smile. “Long time no see.”

“I gave up cadavers for Lent.”

She almost smiled, but caught herself. The silence was deafening. We’d never talked about it. Never mentioned the gunfight down in Tacoma. The mess her husband got her into, and I had to get her out of. I’d kept my mouth shut. I led everybody to believe Brett Ward had gotten himself killed while trying to rescue Rebecca from the heavies. No sense letting on how, at the moment of his death, all he was doing was trying to save his own ass. Didn’t seem to be any point. Rebecca knew what had happened. I could tell. That was enough for me.

“You look good,” I threw into the breach. Can’t claim I understand women, but I’m pretty sure most of them like hearing they look good. Her hair was a little longer and darker than I’d seen it before. Wearing a bit more makeup than I remembered. Looked like maybe she’d lost a few pounds too. From what mutual friends had told me, Rebecca was sort of in limbo these days, looking for herself, trying on metaphorical hats and dresses until she found something she could live with.

She got right to the point. “Thanks,” she said, wary now. “Margot said you had some business.”

“A body sent over by Lewis County.”

“Male or female?”

“Male. Big guy.”

She rolled her green eyes. “That poor soul.”

“Why poor soul?”

She had both gloves off now. “He’s what to you?”

Rebecca was almost messianic in her insistence that the privacy and dignity of the dead be preserved. The way she saw it, they’d already suffered the indignity of dying; the least she could do was protect them from wagging tongues and prying eyes.

“I was there when he died,” I said.

“Ah.”

I knew what that meant too. She wanted the details, so I gave them to her, leaving out the rolling-around-naked-with-Rachel parts, for the sake of brevity, of course.

She shrugged, as if to say she’d like to help me but . . . “We haven’t notified next of kin,” she offered, by way of explanation.

“Why not?” I asked. Usually, that was the first thing they did. Call the family. Give em the bad news about ol Uncle Jack.

“We don’t have an ID yet,” she said.

“No wallet?”

“No nothing. We put his postmortem photo out on the wire. Every cop in the country has seen his face by now. Maybe we’ll get something from the great beyond.” She read my mind. “He’s not in IAFIS either.”

The Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System
is the largest biometric
database
in the world, housing the
fingerprint
s and criminal histories of more than 70 million slimeballs, along with more than 34 million sets of civilian prints. If you’re not in the system, you’ve never served in the military, taught in the public school system, been arrested for a felony, applied for a liquor license, or had to pass a background check of any kind. You’ve been pretty much living under a rock.

She eyed me quizzically. “And his last word was
your
name?”

I gave her the Scout’s honor sign. “I swear.”

“And you’ve never seen him before?”

“Nope.”

“Eerie.”

I agreed. “What did he die o
f
?” I asked.

“Heart attack,” she said.

“Taser-induced?”

She nodded. “Blew his heart up like a cherry bomb.” She raised a restraining hand. “Not that he was long for this world in any case,” she added. “That man was a medical mess.”

“How so?”

“Long-term malnutrition, dehydration, heart, liver, and kidney disease. You name it, and it was about to kill him.” She started to say something else but stopped herself.

“What?” I prodded.

“Perhaps you should see for yourself,” she said with a sigh.

I followed her back through the swinging door, down the polished corridor, into the land of the dead. Just like you saw it on TV. Big white room. Three autopsy stations. A collection of oversized steel drawers lined the walls, like giant vegetable crispers.

She stalked across the room to a drawer marked 14-A.

Instead of reaching for the drawer, however, she picked the phone from the wall. “Ronald,” she said. “Bring us in the personal effects for Fourteen-A.”

She pushed aside a black plastic cart. Spread about the top of the cart was a collection of broken, yellowed bones. The top two-thirds of a skull. A lower jaw. What looked like a femur and a tibia and several ribs. I nodded at them.

“Those look like they’ve seen better days,” I commented.

Rebecca nodded. “About six hundred years ago,” she said, “they probably looked pretty good on some local Indian.”

“Indian, huh?”

She nodded. “They’re too degraded to determine anything more specific, but they’re definitely Native American.”

“You can tell that? From something that old?”

Rebecca had always been the girl with all the right answers. I figured I’d give her a chance to show off. She likes that.

“The proportions of the skull and the size of the eye and nose openings determine race,” she said.

“How’d you end up with them?”

“Tugboat company was digging some new footings down on Harbor Island. Came upon those about six feet down. They were thinking it might be foul play so they called us.” She pulled the surgical mask up over her face. “Guess what happened then?” she said with a twinkle in her eyes.

“What?”

“The Duwamish Tribe tried to claim the bones.”

“And?”

“Well, first of all, Leo, as you well know, Harbor Island is manmade. So whoever this guy was, he must have been from somewhere upriver and washed down with the silt they used to create the island. And secondly, if the U.S. was to allow the Duwamish to claim the bones, they’d be opening themselves up to that whole
Indian burial ground
fiasco, and the next thing you know, the Duwamish would own the Port of Seattle. And we
both
know that’s not going to happen.”

She pulled a fresh set of latex gloves from the dispenser on the wall and pulled out drawer 14-A.

Black body bag, zipped all the way up. She pulled the zipper about a third of the way down and peeled the black rubber back. “That him?” she asked.

I nodded. He’d been dead long enough that his skin had collapsed onto his bones. Everywhere you looked, there was a sharp edge. Made him look like he’d been assembled from spare parts. I leaned in closer, trying to conjure up some landscape, or sound or smell or song . . . anything to give me a hint where I’d seen that haggard face before, but I came up dry.

Rebecca pulled the zipper down another foot and pointed to a pile of puddled skin next to his left hip. “He used to be a much bigger man,” she said.