Last Ditch (22 page)

He
matched me
tooth for tooth. "My pleasure," he said.

I
high-fived
Bobby on my way by and got back in the car. With a squeal of the tires
and toot
of the horn, I bounced out onto Twelfth Avenue and headed north
toward the University of Washington, with an ache in my head but
a song in my heart. I almost made it, too.

I
was coming up
Pacific Avenue
about four blocks south of the main campus, feeling better than I had
in
several days. I had the radio going. Del Shannon was singing
"Runaway." It wasn't raining.

The
car stopped
running. No coughing, no sputtering, no missing or lurching. Just
running one
minute and shut down the next. I coasted to the curb in a bus stop, set
the
e-brake and turned the key. Nothing. Not a sound. I checked my watch.
One-thirty. I waited five minutes and tried the car again. Dead as a
doornail.

I
released the
brake and coasted the car downhill toward the back of the bus stop,
about as
far out of the way as I could get it I locked up and started trudging
up University Avenue
toward the campus. One of the nice things about owning a Fiat is that
if you
park it illegally, most folks assume it's broken down and cut you some
slack.

DR.
MILTON
FITZROY tore another strip of masking tape from the roll and attached
the last
corner of the plat map to the blackboard.

"There,"
he said, surveying his work.

I
stepped to
the front of the room and took a look. He'd enlarged the entire section
of the
city into a four-by-six-foot blueprint. Everything below First Avenue
from Pike down to Yesler in
July of nineteen sixty-nine inscribed in bright blue.

He
pulled one
of those flashlight pointers out of his pocket and stepped back. "Where
to
begin," he said. He looked my way. His eyes were bright. "What say we
begin with restaurants," he said.

"Why
not."

Follow
along
with the little red dot of light.

"On
the
waterfront, at that time, there were but two. Elliott's and Ivar's." He
looked at me as if to ask whether he should go into greater detail.
There was
no need. Both restaurants had been in operation since the beginning of
time and
would probably still be dispensing clams and oysters to the tourists
long after
I was gone. The thing that brings locals to that part of town is
visiting
relatives from the Midwest. The waterfront was
far too public for anything the old man would have felt necessary to
hide from Bermuda.

"No,"
I said. "Nothing touristy."

He
was taken
aback. "Well . . . you realize, of course, that. . ." he
puffed,"..... well, that very nearly eliminates everything in the area.
As
I told you earlier, the composition of that area was then, much as it
is now,
industrial-commercial. I most certainly wish you had told me," he
sputtered. "I could have saved myself considerable effort."

Fitzroy
was
right on both counts. I should have told him he could leave out the
tourist stuff.
And, if you subtracted that crap, there really wasn't much down there.
The area
was a no-man's-land, a buffer between the land of the tourists down on
the
central waterfront and the real business of the city taking place
further up
the hill.

When
the founding
fathers and a hundred thousand Chinese laborers washed the tops of the
hills
down onto the tide flats, they created most of the terra firma which
today is
downtown Seattle. Unfortunately, they never envisioned the automobile.

By
the early
sixties, downtown traffic had become so choked and motionless that the
city
fathers had little choice but to act. The only flat and thus practical
route by
which to channel traffic up and away from the downtown core was along
the
waterfront. So they built the Alaskan Way Viaduct, a piggyback elevated
roadway
whose massive concrete edifice rose not twenty feet in front of the
buildings
along Alaska Way, blocking any view of the sound and creating an area
of
perpetual shade in a city of perpetual rain. Nowadays it's all metered
parking
and lowlife. Late at night, under the viaduct is as good a place to get
yourself killed as anywhere in downtown Seattle.

"Sorry,
Doctor," I said. "Please forgive me. I'm feeling my way along here. I
don't really know what I'm looking for."

He
harrumphed a
couple of times and then pointed his little flashlight. "Well then, I
suppose the Chase Hotel would have to be
considered the epicenter of the area."

He
cast a quick
glance in my direction. I didn't have the heart to tell him that the
Chase was
the only place I knew for sure my old man didn't go, so I let him do
his
number. I let him go through everything else he'd come up with. I shut
up and
took notes. Floral Expressions halfway down the hill on Marion. Open
till eleven on Friday nights.
Two coffee shops along Western
Avenue, Danny's Western Grill and the
Soundview
Diner, both open till eleven Monday through Saturday. Warehouses,
packing
companies, a couple of lunch-only joints. It went on and on. Nothing
rang a
bell. Nothing held the slightest clue as to what my father might have
been
doing in that desolate part of the city.

When
he
finished, I asked, "That's it?"

He
clicked off
his light and stuck a finger in his collar.

"There
were two others."

I
waited.
Mistake. He started in on the no-verbs rambling.

"I
hesitate to suggest that a man of your father's prominence would ...
for a
moment ... the idea is of course ridiculous ... a completely different
element
of society . . . which is not to suggest ... far be it from me ... the
last one
to judge . . . changing societal attitudes ..."

If
I let him
keep talking I was going to be here all night.

"What
two
others?"

He
looked
uncomfortable.

"At
the
corner of Madison and Western during that time period . . ." He
hesitated,
swallowed once and spit it out. "The Western Steam Baths. Open
twenty-four
hours a day."

I
grinned and
tried to picture the old man sitting around in the fog with a bunch of
other
guys in towels. Maybe it was that same defense mechanism Pat spoke of
the other
day, but I could no more work up an image of my father having a suds
party with
somebody named Pete than I could picture my parents doing the
horizontal bop.

"I
don't
think so," I said. "And, of course, the Garden of Eden." I knew
I'd heard the name lately, but couldn't put my finger on where. "What's
that?"

"An
... er
... a nightclub." He started babbling again. My head began to pound.
"... entertainment . . . would now be considered quite tame . . . less
tolerant attitudes . . . status-quo morality ..."

I
massaged the
bridge of my nose. The action merely spread the pain over a wider area
of my
head.

"What
is
it? A whorehouse or something?" I blurted.

He
straightened
himself. "Oh ... no ... by no means. No. Quite the contrary." He
giggled at his little joke. "It was a gay bar."

"A
gay
bar?"

"Rather
famous ... or infamous, I suppose, depending upon one's outlook. Live
entertainment.
Female impersonators. And ..."

Suddenly,
it
came to me. Peerless Price's final columns. The Garden of Eden was the
place
that the cops raided and the records disappeared. If memory served,
Peerless
recommended the place be burnt to the ground—preferably with its
customers
inside.

"And
what?" I prodded.

"Well,
most coincidentally to our inquiry, it happens that the Garden of Eden
was open
only on Friday nights. According to the liquor license, from eight
until
closing at two, every Friday evening."

"Really?"

"Indeed."

I
eyed him
closely. "Did you ever ..." I began . . . "I mean, have you
personally ..."

"Oh,
no," he said emphatically. "Although I must say that I personally
harbor no . . ."

I
wasn't sure
where I'd imagined my little fishing expedition was going when I'd
started
poking my nose into the past a couple of days ago, but gay bars and
steam baths
had certainly not been on the agenda.

"Famous
how?"

"Oh,
several academic studies have been made of the Garden of Eden and one
rather
famous book was written on the . . . er . . . social scene surrounding
the club
and the baths . . . which, as I recall, were ... I suppose 'linked'
would be a
proper term ... by ... a pivotal period ... a seminal period . . .
sociologically speaking of course ..."

I
checked my
notes. "So, what we've got then, excluding the tourist joints on the
waterfront, is a florist, two coffee shops, a steam bath and a gay bar."

"Precisely."

He
seemed
pleased. That made-one of us.

"Of
course, this excludes the residential consideration," he added.
Excluding
it was just what I had in mind.

The
only person
I'd ever known who'd lived down under the viaduct had been a guy named
Charlie
Boxer. Charlie had been a full-time hustler and part-time private eye
around Seattle for forty years.
During one of his drunk and disorderly periods, between wives, he'd
rented a
loft on Western from an elderly Korean gentleman named Walter Lee.

I
remember because
Charlie used to love to tell the story of how, after moving in, he
discovered
he was sharing the space with half a dozen rats the size of llamas. He
told of
going to Walter Lee to complain that not only was he forced to sleep
with all
the lights on, but, despite the full hundred-and-fifty-watt glare, the
critters
had eaten his shoes while he was in the shower. The old man listened
until
Charlie finished raving, nodding sympathetically at each turn of the
story.

At
this point
in the tale, Charlie would go into character, assuming the manner and
speech of
the elderly Korean. He'd stoop low and squint his eyes.

"I
tol
you, Mista Boxer ... No pets! You hava pets, you gotta go!" At least,
that's how Charlie told the story.

Fitzroy
produced a stack of papers stapled in the upper left-hand corner. "I
had
my TA . . . uh . . . a summary . . . incomplete of course . . .
standard
bibliography ..." I thanked Fitzroy for his trouble and for the hard
copy
of the report, shared several promises about keeping in touch and then
effected
my escape.

I
turned right
out of Denny Hall and walked downhill. I felt spacey, as if I'd been
smoking
pot. Everything seemed just a bit more interesting and complex than
usual. The
roots of the massive oaks had cracked and buckled the sidewalk into a
rolling
concrete mosaic. Overhead, the nervous trees waved about in the wind. I
turned
my collar up around my ears and headed for the street.

When
I reached Fifteenth Avenue,
I
stopped and rested for a moment. From where I stood, the downtown
skyscrapers
peeped up over the north flank of Capitol Hill like candles on a
birthday cake.

I
walked along
next to the moss-covered cement wall that worked its way in serrated
sections
down the hill. Ahead of me at the bus stop, four Asian girls in big
bell-bottom
pants and huge clunky shoes milled about the kiosk, whispering quietly
but
laughing loudly.

I
let gravity
pull me past them. Something about me sent them into peals of laughter,
but I
couldn't work up anything even close to caring. I kept one hand on the
wall as
I walked down the hill past the Henry
Art Gallery
and the underground parking garage, closing in on the car. I'd already
made up
my mind. If the Fiat didn't start, I was calling AAA to tow it back to
Mario's
and then calling a cab for myself. I'd had all the excitement I could
stand. My
head felt as big as Charlie Brown's. I needed a nap.

When
the car
started on the first turn of the key, I was a bit disappointed. I guess
I'd
been looking forward to the surety of the cab ride. Anyway, the street
was
empty, so I pulled a U-turn and started down Pacific Avenue toward the Mondake Bridge,
rolling along parallel to the ship canal past the University Health
Center until the huge
steel chevrons of Husky Stadium bracketed the sky, and then turned
right, over
the bridge and down the ramp toward the freeway and home.

ACCORDING
TO
KAREN, Triad Trading was a division of Pacific Rim Trading, which, in
turn was
a wholly owned subsidiary of Eastern Expediting, doing business as a
limited
partnership between Fortune Enterprises and Canton Carriers, which, as
the name
inferred, was a shipping company based out of Taipei, Taiwan.

"What's
all of that mean?" I asked.

"It
means
you better not want to sue these guys."

She
started to
say something and then stopped. I waited.

"Fortune
Enterprises ..." she said after a moment.