Past Crimes (7 page)

T
HE BUILDING AT 495
East Pike was less than a mile away from Harborview. It was a large, two-story brick structure with a chiropractor on the second floor and a Mailbox Worldwide shipping franchise on the first.

It was before the lunch hour, and the Mailbox office was quiet. Between the painted words on the windows, I could see a young woman behind the counter, sealing boxes with strapping tape.

A man walked in and headed for the bank of golden-doored boxes on the side wall. I followed him inside and pretended to be listening intently to my phone while finding Box 1701, high on the right side. I watched as the man used a short silver key with a circular head to open his box. Dono had a similar silver key on the big key ring in my pocket.

When the woman carried the cardboard box into the back, I walked over to the wall and opened Box 1701 with Dono’s key. It was crammed full of envelopes and postcards. A lucky spin for me that Dono hadn’t picked up his mail in a while. I stuffed the stack of mail into my jacket and left. I sat in the driver’s seat of the Charger to leaf through J. T. Callahan’s correspondence.

Most of the stack turned out to be advertisements. Tool shops obviously liked Callahan. The more personal items included a bank statement,
a couple of letters from workman’s associations, and an envelope from Western Maritime.

I opened the envelope. It was a receipt correction and a letter, apologizing to Mr. Callahan for the incorrect pricing of his purchases in February and hoping that he was enjoying them to the full. I looked at the receipt. A Lowrance HD Chartplotter, a Garmin VHF radio, and other equipment. Over four grand of new electronics in all.

Which confirmed that Dono had acquired a boat, and recently. But it didn’t tell me where it was.

I checked the bank statement. It was short. The balance was just under twenty thousand. There had been automated withdrawals for his mailbox, for the car insurance on the Lincoln, and for Altamont Garage, which I guessed was where he kept the Lincoln.

And one more withdrawal, for something called BLUERIDGE MOOR LLC. I took out my phone and searched for the name. There was a Blue Ridge Marina, a couple miles north of the big public piers at Shilshole Bay in Seattle.

Hot damn.

AT FIRST GLANCE THE
marina didn’t look like much. Just a row of six or seven short docks separated from Puget Sound by a breakwater. Maybe two hundred slips in all. But the resident vessels were upmarket, mostly oceanworthy sailboats and tall cruising yachts. I saw a lot of varnished teak and shiny brass fittings that managed to gleam even on this overcast day. It was Monday, and the docks were empty of people.

Each floating dock had its own entrance door, made of flat steel mesh with side extensions and razor wire on the top to keep the riffraff from climbing around to the ramp.

I knew from Ganz’s guy at the DMV what I was looking for. A twenty-two-foot gray Stingray speedboat. All the boats near that size were parked in the slips closest to shore, because they had shallower drafts than their bigger cousins. I walked down the row of docks, looking at them. Most were white, with a few blues and blacks. Only one was gray.

The lock on the steel gate was a heavy mechanical combination type. Six punch buttons marked with letters of the alphabet, A through F. I had a pry bar from the truck under my coat, but a quick glance at the lock told me I wouldn’t need it.

Four of the six buttons were shiny from repeated use. Each button can only be used once in a mechanical lock, since each corresponds to a separate tumbler inside. Four buttons, twenty-four possible combinations. When I put a little tension on the door handle and pressed gently on each button, I could tell by touch that button C was first in the sequence, because its tumbler wasn’t providing as much resistance. Eight possible sequences left. By trial and error, I had the gate open in forty more seconds.

It had been a long time since I’d greased a lock with just my hands. Score one for the riffraff. I walked down the dock to the boat.

The Stingray was a sport boat, built for zipping between islands on day trips or dragging water-skiers behind it. About half of its length was the sleek bow section in front of its raked windshield. No name was painted on the stern. Nothing about the boat stood out as particularly unique. Even the gray paint was dull.

There was a buff-colored canvas cover over the entire cockpit and engine, to keep both shielded from the weather. The cover was fastened in place with hooks and elastic cord every foot or two around the edges of the hull. I unhooked the cord and pulled the canvas back until I could fold it out of the way onto the foredeck.

The engine was a monster, a black Mercury 300-horse. Dono had covered it with a rubber muffling cowl to help keep the noise from rattling his eardrums loose. There were two red five-gallon jerry jugs tied to the inside of the stern, spare fuel tanks that could be connected with a hose directly to the thirsty engine.

The whole package wasn’t as fast or as flashy as a go-fast boat, the kind made famous by drug smugglers around the world. But I would lay money that the deep spearhead of its hull could manage forty knots an hour on a flat sea without straining. Add in the extra fuel tanks and the boat might have a range of a hundred miles or more.

Two short, narrow doors separated the cockpit from the cabin. They were locked. One of the little gold keys attached to the chunk of red driftwood matched.

The cabin had a single cushioned seat on each side and room forward of the seats to sleep two people on a thin sectional mattress. The mattress pieces were shaped to fit the sloping V of the boat’s bow. Under the mattress was a big trapezoid area for storage. Bolted to the cabin wall, on a swing arm so it could be pulled out and seen from the cockpit, was the Chartplotter depth sounder I’d seen listed on the Western Maritime receipt mailed to J. T. Callahan.

I pulled the seat cushions and mattress pieces into the cockpit and searched the cabin.

The storage area was divided by wooden slats into sections. Most of what I found inside was normal pleasure-boat stuff. Lines and life vests and foul-weather gear.

There was a set of scuba gear. One tank and a regulator. A buoyancy-control vest and a weight belt. And a wet suit that looked like it would fit Dono. The set looked used but in good shape.

I sniffed at the wet suit. It had been rinsed clean, but rinsing never fully got the saltwater smell out. I looked closely at the tank. There was a little salt rime in the grooves of the valve handles.

I was sure the gear had been used sometime recently. A week ago, maybe. No longer than a month.

Stranger and stranger. Dono hadn’t bought the speedboat just to motor around the sound, and he didn’t dive for the fun of it either. At least not when I’d been with him. I wasn’t even aware that he knew how.

The ivory paint on the wooden bottom of the storage space was fresher than the shade on the sides. I knocked the wood, and it echoed. I felt around the edge. On the aft side, there was a small half circle cut in the wood, just out of sight.

I put my finger in the little hole and pulled up, revealing a shallow space along the V of the hull. A bolt-action Remington 30.06 hunting rifle was secured with rubber ties on the starboard side. There was a slim stainless-steel case that I opened to find an older Beretta handgun and boxes of cartridges for it and the rifle.

The Remington and the Beretta were safety measures, just like the life jackets. If Dono had had to choose between the two, he’d have taken the guns.

I climbed out of the cabin, back into the cockpit. There were watertight compartments along the sides of the cockpit seats. I opened them with the same key as for the cabin.

The forward compartment held the VHF radio and thick books of nautical charts. I pulled out the books. They were a set of three, covering the West Coast from southern Oregon up through Washington and the San Juan Islands and farther into British Columbia, as far north as Queen Charlotte Sound.

An idea struck me, and I turned on the VHF. The monotone voice of NOAA Weather Radio came out. NOAA was the coastal marine forecast, broadcasting out of Port Angeles on a continuous loop.

Like a car radio, the VHF had a row of buttons for preset channels. I hit the next button, and there was the same recorded voice again, much fainter. I listened until it identified itself as being for the Bellingham area, just an hour south of the Canadian border. The third channel gave me only garbled static.

Tucked under the VHF was a paper booklet that looked like it had come with the radio, covering basic radio protocol and a long list of channels and their uses for the Northwest coast. The frequency shown on the radio’s display for the third channel matched the Weatheradio Canada broadcast out of Vancouver. The fourth, fifth, and sixth buttons were not preset, showing the end of the VHF frequency range.

North, then. Dono had taken the boat north, and not too far or he’d have needed the weather station for farther up the Canadian coast.

Fast boat. Longish range. Maybe up as far as Canada. Had Dono been smuggling something?

Smuggling wasn’t his usual racket. Moving contraband was Hollis Brant’s line of work. And why Dono’s sudden interest in scuba? I put everything back in the storage area and locked up the cabin and the compartments.

The sun was low on the horizon. Its light bounced off the calm sound, making a glowing white rift in the wide expanse of steel-colored
water on either side. Across the water was the dark green line of Bainbridge Island, and far beyond that the jagged white-gray of the Olympics. The mountains here looked different from the ones in Afghanistan. Gentler. The Afghan ranges were like cliffs, shaped into crude knife edges at the top.

I checked my watch: 1815. Davey would be at the Morgen soon.

I took Dono’s key and turned it in the ignition. The big Mercury gave a high roar and then settled back into a bubbling growl. I’d drive the boat up to Hollis’s slip at Shilshole and ask him to look it over. His practiced eye might spot something about the gray Stingray that I’d missed.

For a moment I was tempted to let my reunion with Davey slide. But I was coming up dry on learning what action had been keeping Dono busy lately. Finding his boat had added more questions than it had answered.

Maybe blowing off some steam would do me good. Have a beer and a laugh before I found myself head-butting a wall.

D
ONO AND ALBIE BOYLAN
had bought the Morgen over thirty years ago, before I was born. Dono had the money, and Albie had a criminal record free of felony convictions, so the two men went into partnership on the bar. Real estate in Belltown was a hell of a lot cheaper back then. They secured a fifty-year lease on the first floor of an apartment building for less than it would cost to buy a condo in that same building today.

The deal was that Albie ran the place and Dono kept it afloat by laundering his stolen money through the accounts. Bars were great for that. Lots of cash changing hands.

As a kid I’d been a little scared of Albie. I remembered him being lean as a viper and about as sociable. There was never a bouncer at the entrance of the Morgen. If Albie didn’t care for the look of you, he’d catch your eye and angle his head back toward the exit. And if you were stubborn or just slow on the uptake, two or three of the patrons would suddenly invite you to go elsewhere for your evening’s libations.

I was surprised at how eager I was to see the bar again. I walked down the alley off Battery Street to the dark green door with no sign on it and pulled on the carved iron handle. It swung open easily, revealing the wide expanse of the main room.

The place looked like it had been waiting for me. The same square
plank tables, scarred and stained, crudely arranged into rows. A long bar covered in pallid ash veneer snaked along the curve of the opposite wall, with matching pale shelves stocked with liquor and glasses standing behind.

Instead of a mirror over the bar, there was a tapestry, a crude medieval image of a woman on horseback racing through the ocean surf. It was the thing about the bar I remembered best.

When I was around ten years old and waiting for Dono to finish some deal back in the billiard room, I had screwed up my courage and asked Albie if the woman was a queen of some kind. The laughter of the men at the bar was the only answer I got.

I sat silently, fuming, until Dono came back and we left. I had sour rage all the way up to my hairline. The old man seemed cheerful enough, with an envelope of cash under his jacket and a few shots under his belt. I took advantage of his good humor and asked him about the woman. He told me that she was a pagan harlot who had slept with the devil and tried to escape the wrath of the sea.

I hadn’t understood, but I didn’t press for details. He might have laughed, too.

If the decor hadn’t changed with the times, the clientele had made up the difference. The bar was nearly full. The crowd was mostly college-age or a little older, draped across the chairs and booths. There were also more women than I’d ever seen in the Morgen, where females had been tolerated if not encouraged in Dono’s time. The bar may have adapted to survive, but I wasn’t going to complain.

As I scanned the crowd, Davey Tolan stood up, grinning at me.

His brown hair was longer, and he’d added maybe a nickel to his buck-and-a-quarter frame, but the grin was exactly the same—an even mix of genuine happiness and self-mockery. Davey had been my best friend from the day we met in second grade until the night I’d left town. My only friend, by most people’s definition of the word.

We hugged. “Goddamn, Van. Holy shit,” he said.

“How are you, Davey?” He let go, and we stood there. His eyes moved to the scars on my face.

“Tough about Dono, man.”

I nodded. “No change yet.” For two days I’d done nothing but talk and think about Dono’s shooting. I needed to shove the topic to the back of my mind for a while.

I motioned for Davey to sit. “How’s Juliet?”

“She’s great. Here.” He took out his phone and started showing me pictures of his wife and baby.

Davey still dressed like a teenager. He wore a black concert T-shirt for a band I hadn’t heard of, threadbare grayish jeans, and black sneakers. A leather motorcycle jacket was thrown over the back of his chair; the chair’s strut poking through a tear in the shoulder. At the table nearest us, two college girls kept peeking around their laptop screens at him. Women had always cast glances Davey’s way, and he was always a little oblivious, which only seemed to add to his charm.

He was telling me about baby Frances starting preschool, when he stopped short and set the phone down in midsentence. “You’re a real fucker, you know that?”

I leaned back in my chair. “I pissed you off.”

“I didn’t let anybody even mention your name around me for like a year after you’d left.” He ran his hand over his head. “I imagined all kinds of shit. Like you and Dono got into another fight, and it went too far, and he’d killed you and buried you somewhere.”

I’d never given Davey the whole truth about the Shaw family line of work. But there was no way to keep Davey from knowing that Dono and I had butted heads repeatedly during those last couple of years at home. Or from sensing my grandfather’s capacity for violence.

“I needed a clean break, Davey,” I said.

“Every couple of days, I’d come by the house, hoping you’d turned up. I didn’t trust Dono to be straight with me if I just called. Finally he showed me some papers that had been sent to the house instead of to you. That’s how he found out you’d joined the army.”

“And he wouldn’t even have learned that without the mail screwup. That’s how I wanted it.”

“Just a big fuck-you to everybody, huh?”

The server came over and put down two chocolate-brown pints in front of us. “Saw’s Porter,” she said.

Saw’s had been Dono’s brew of choice when he wasn’t drinking whiskey. It was the first drink Davey and I had ever stolen a taste of as kids. And it was an uncommon brand.

I raised my eyebrow at Davey. “You ordered already?”

The grin reappeared, wider than before. “Nope.”

We both looked at the waitress. She was tall and in her mid-twenties, with hair the color of polished brass, cut to a length that showed off her good shoulders. Square jaw, wide cheekbones. She had on a white shirt with the sleeves rolled to her upper arms, black jeans, and a short, cream-colored bar apron. Even a little disheveled from the evening rush, she was a beauty.

“Anything else I can get you?” She was looking at me, not both of us.

“A first name,” I said.

The waitress’s mouth stayed serious, but there might have been amusement in her light gray eyes. “Miss,” she said.

“Good to know.”

She nodded and headed back to the bar. I tried not to admire her too openly as she walked away, but it took an effort. The black jeans fit very well.

I turned to Davey. “So when did you tell the waitress about this?” I tapped the glass.

His smirk was unforgivable. “I haven’t said a word to the woman, I swear.”

Davey was going to have his fun no matter what. To keep from giving him any more satisfaction, I took a healthy pull on the pint. It was rich and tasted a little like coffee. Perfect.

I got out the note that Davey had left on the door at the house and showed him the logo at the top. “Frazier Bros Electric. Is that where you work?”

“Yep,” he said, beaming. “Union man. It’s good money. Speaking of.” He put two fifties down on the table. “The night’s on me.”

“To payday,” I toasted him.

“D’you like the army?” His eyes went to my scars again.

“I like the guys in my unit. And I like the toys they let us play with,” I said, grinning.

“Not married?” said Davey.

“I got close, at least once. I’m never in one place for long.”

“Hell, you’re here now.” He pretended to scope out the room. “I’m sure one of these girls is drunk enough.”

“Let me catch up to the lucky winner first.” I drank another mouthful of porter.

Davey glanced over my shoulder toward the far end of the bar. “Hey, there he is.”

I looked to my right. The fire exit was propped open. A young guy carrying a pony keg was working his way through the tables toward the bar. He was large enough that the keg didn’t give him much trouble. He had curly black hair and sideburns and wore a blue plaid lumberjack shirt and jeans. He looked a little familiar at first, and then suddenly it clicked.

“Holy shit, Davey,” I said. “It’s Mike.”

Davey nodded. “I do recognize my own brother. But it’s early yet.” He took another mouthful of beer.

Michael Tolan was Davey’s younger brother and only sibling. Twenty-two or twenty-three years old now.

I got up. “Be right back.”

“Take your time. I’m going outside.” Davey fished a pack of American Spirits out of his jacket.

I walked over to where Mike was hooking up the keg to a tap under the bar. “Mike,” I said. “It’s Van Shaw.”

He looked up, and his eyes widened. “Hey!” He rose, and we shook hands. He had half a foot on his older brother and a broad, solemn face. Davey looked like their mother, Evelyn, small-boned and blue-eyed. Evelyn’s husband, Joe Tolan, had left the family around the time Davey and I met; I barely remembered him at all.

“How’d you end up working for Albie?” I asked.

“Albie Boylan?” he said. “Albie’s dead, Van. Three or four years back. Heart attack. Dono gave me this job.”

I stared at him. “I didn’t know you and Dono even knew each other.”

“We didn’t. I was looking for someplace I could balance with my classes. Mom called Dono. You know her, the Irish network.”

And Evelyn would have known that Dono would pay Mike under the table. Tax-free tuition money.

“You went into the army, right?” Mike said.

“Yeah. Just back for a few days.”

“I heard about Dono,” he said. “I’m sorry. You have to come by. Ma will want to see you again.”

“Still the same house?” I said.

“Yep. I’m still living there, too. Davey and Juliet escaped to their own place.” Mike shook his head, mock mournful. “Lucky shits.”

I smiled. “Don’t knock it too much. You’ll probably miss the meals.” Evelyn Tolan had been a good cook, I remembered. Dinner with the Tolans had always been a nice break from Dono’s potatoes-and-meat served seventeen ways.

Mike picked up a case of beer and began unpacking the bottles into a fridge under the bar. “If it got me my own apartment, I’d live off cat food. Or even cats. It’s good to see you, man.”

“You, too.”

I turned to see the blond server standing by our table and watching me and Mike. She’d traded her tray for a clipboard, and she had three shot glasses of golden whiskey already set on the table.

“A touch of Frost,” she said as I sat down, quoting an advertising slogan. Galway Frost was a brand I hadn’t even seen since leaving home. Hollis used to acquire crates of it.

I was about to surrender the game and ask her directly how she knew me when the clipboard in her hand gave it away. With it she didn’t look like a waitress. She looked like a boss.

Albie Boylan was dead. Maybe his half of the bar hadn’t defaulted to Dono. Maybe it had gone to Albie’s nearest relative.

“How you been, Lucy?” I said.

She smiled. “Glad you caught up. I’m good. And it’s Luce now.”

“I’m sorry about Albie.”

“I’m sorry about Dono.” She picked up one of the shot glasses. I did the same. “To the boys at the bar,” she said, and we downed the whiskey.

It took ten seconds for my throat to open up again. “When was the last time we saw each other?” I said.

“It was right here at the Morgen,” she said, “in the back room. You were here with Dono. You played your Game Boy while I read magazines.”

“Your memory’s a hell of a lot better than mine.”

“I was only pretending to read. But you ignored me.”

I grinned. “Well, I was pretty stupid then. Fourteen?”

“Around that age. I was eleven.” She set her shot glass down on the table. “Are you here to talk business?”

“Do we need to?”

Luce’s gray eyes narrowed a fraction. “Eventually.”

If Dono died, I’d inherit his half of the Morgen. Was she worried about that? Or was she more concerned about the loss of cash flow if Dono wasn’t washing stolen money through the bar’s registers?

Maybe it was both. No wonder Luce was giving me the charm offensive.

“He’s not dead,” I said.

The skin tightened around her good bone structure. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

“Thanks for the drink.”

She stood a little taller, then turned and walked back to the bar. Her hair was a much darker blond than when we were children.

Davey passed her on his way back to the table. He pointed at the empty shot glass of whiskey in front of me. “Now you’re talking.”

Another server took over our table for the next round, and the rounds that followed, and it wasn’t until Davey got up to take a leak that I thought to look for Luce again. She wasn’t behind the bar anymore. The place had thinned out, and the remaining staff was busy cleaning
up for the night. Before long they would start to throw hinting glances in our direction.

Davey came back to the table. “I think she left,” I said to him.

“Who? Oh.” He laughed. “Her.”

“Didn’t say good-bye,” I said.

“Didn’t she? No, I guess not. We’d remember that, wouldn’t we?”

It had been a while since I’d thrown it back with such enthusiasm. Damn nurses hadn’t allowed booze in the hospital at Landstuhl.

“What?” said Davey.

“What what?” I said.

“You said something about damned nurses. I don’t think lovely Luce is a nurse as well as a bartender, buddy.”

Hmmm. “I’m drunk, Davey. And I’m going home. You, too. Juliet will be waiting up.”

“Ah, my Julie. Too fine a girl for me,” he said. I was a little afraid he’d break into song. “You driving us?”

“I’m paying for our cab. We can get the cars tomorrow.”

Twenty minutes later I watched sleepily as Davey clambered out of the backseat of a taxi onto the sidewalk in front of his house. The living-room lights were on. I had called it right. Juliet had a candle burning to mark the way home for her man.

“‘Home is the sailor, home from the sea,’ ” said Davey.

“That’s an epitaph, Davey,” I said.

“A what?”

“It’s for a gravestone.” I closed my eyes.

“Oh,” he said. “Crap. G’night, Van.”

“Night, Davey.” I gave the cabdriver careful directions, probably unnecessarily, as he drove me two miles north to my own street. I handed him a wad of bills and got out. The streetlights were weaker than ever in the night fog. I stretched my legs and took in slow drafts of the chill air until my head cleared a little. In front of me, the old house was dark.