Slow Burn (12 page)

"There she
is . . . Miss America . . ."

"Could I
have your attention, please?"

". . .
there she is . . . your ideal . . ."

"This
calls for a drink," I screamed.

It worked every
time. They sang my praises and took me literally. Turned out no less than nine
of them had something to nip on secreted somewhere on their persons.

I held up a
hundred-dollar bill. "I'm going to get you all back to The Zoo by
cab," I announced. More hosannas. "The rest is for a couple of rounds
on me when you get there." I took several bows and waved like the Queen.

"Bonnie
says you can use the old cooler out in back to change clothes in. It's
important that you keep what you're wearing now in real good shape. For the
first couple of days, it might be best only to wear the outfit while you're
working; otherwise, if you look bad in that neighborhood, you're going to get
pinched for sure. Okay?"

The mob was
fickle. As quickly as my stock had risen, it now plummeted. No way were they
putting that old crap back on.

"Okay,
okay," I relented. "But you gotta stay neat and clean."

Scout’s honor,
all of them. Behind them, at the corner of St Pike and Third, Rebecca had
corralled three cabs. Two Gray-Tops and a Yellow. "Ladies and
Gentlemen," I announced, "your chariots await."

I slipped
George a hundred and watched as they thundered over toward Duvall and the cabs.
In the gloom, an even dozen bags of old clothes squatted among the rough stones
like fungi.

We
drove
separately, which was fine with me. I was in no hurry. As I
turned-right onto Eastlake and the traffic thinned, I found myself
behind one of those new Honda vans,
sporting a yellow bumper sticker that read "HONK IF YOU ARE JESUS."
What the hell. I gave a little toot. The driver stuck an arm out the
window and
shot me the finger. I figured it came with the martyrdom territory, so
I honked
again.

I tried to
recall the last time I had laid eyes on the family digs. I've reached that
point in life where I constantly underestimate how long ago it was that
something happened. If my first instinct is three years, it's always been at
least five. Worse yet, my confusion seems to exponentially worsen the longer
the time frame involved. Any utterance of mine concerning something as ancient
as, say, ten years or so ago can instantly be translated into a span
considerably closer to twenty. My first instinct said Bill and Ellen Levine had
lived there for six years, so, using the new and revised Waterman approach to
time estimation, I figured that made my last visit to this neighborhood,
conservatively speaking, about ten years whence.

I
crested the
side of the hill on Taylor and drove down until I almost ran into
Crockett Avenue. In the driveway, my mind's eye saw the shadows of the
various low-slung
chariots of the fifties and sixties that my old man had owned and that
we'd
washed out here on Sunday afternoons. In the streets, I could imagine
the
nights of the parties. The cars of my parents' friends lining the
narrow street
on both sides, leaving only a thin nerve-racking slot for passersby.
But what
were the neighbors going to do? It wasn't like you could call the cops
on my
old man or anything.

The younger
guys drove gleaming triple-finned Pontiac convertibles half a block long, while
the more substantial "drove big, three-porthole Buicks with plush seats
and wide white tires. But it was the Caddies that interested me. The vast fleet
of Cadillacs, black or dark blue, resting nose to tail around the hill like
chrome Conestoga wagons, belonged to the real downtown movers and shakers.

The recalled
smell of gasoline reunited me with a forgotten fascination concerning the gas
tanks of certain Cadillacs. The ones where you pushed a little button in the taillight
and the whole light assembly swung straight up, revealing what was to me, for
some childish reason, a precious pearl of a gas cap. I'd wait until the party
was in full swing, then sneak out of the house in my pajamas to circle the
block, looking for the right models, and I'd try them all, just to make sure
they worked.

Rebecca's blue
Ford Explorer sat square and high in the driveway.. Duvall, on the other hand,
slouched curved and low on the front steps, leaning back against the risers,
staring out at the street.

I took a seat
beside her. "Hiya, Toots."

She looked over
her shoulder at the house. "It's huge," she said. "When I came
up before, it was full of people; there was all this scaffolding over it and
all these trucks around. It didn't seem so big and imposing then."

I threw an arm
around her shoulder. "It's just a house."

"I can't
believe your mother didn't like it."

"She liked
it just fine. It's just that it wasn't up on Capital Hill, where she figured a
swell like the old man should be."

Rebecca dangled
the keys in front of my face. "Shall we?"

I rose and
offered her a hand. "After you, madame."

I pulled her to
her feet. She got the keys right on the first try, swung the big rounded door
open and disappeared, I took a deep breath, stepped inside and was stopped in
my tracks.

The place bore
almost no resemblance to the theater of my childhood. The house, as I
remembered it, was a place of heavy drapes and dark wood, where silence and
shadow were valued above all. A place to whisper rather than shout. To turn on
more lights rather than open the drapes. All that was gone. Hell, the stairs
were gone.

Used to be that
when you walked in the front door, you were faced with a wide expanse of stairs
leading to the second floor. To what my mother called the Ballroom. To the
right of the stairs was the front room; on the left, the parlor; and behind the
stairs, the kitchen and servants' areas.

They'd gutted
the place. Now all was light and airy. What appeared to be a rough-textured
plaster had replaced the dark wood. The narrow, twelve-pane windows had been
removed, the openings expanded and new white windows installed. We stood in the
middle of the gigantic front room, which now rose above us for the full two
stories of the house. Whatever the upstairs looked like, one thing was for
sure: -the Ballroom was long gone.

"How's
your checking account?" Duvall asked.

"Pretty
good," I said. "Why?"

"Because
everything you and I own, separately and collectively, doesn't begin to make a
dent in furnishing this room. The other eleven rooms I don't even want to think
about."

"We'll do
what me and the old man did after she died."

"What's
that?"

"We just
decided what parts of the house we were actually going to live in, and closed
off the rest of it." A chill ran down my spine as I recalled, the
disconnected feeling that the old man had once described as "like living
in a museum."

I'd come back
only long enough to lay him out in the front room, before the mile-long funeral
procession took him up by Volunteer Park to the Lake View Cemetery and laid him
next to my mother while the fire department band played "Across the River
and Far Away." I'd never set foot inside this house since that day.

The stairs now
came down in two stages, on two sides. The kitchen was where it had always
been, but was completely renovated into something out of a magazine, with a
half-acre center island and enough recessed lighting to land airplanes.

The
back of the
house, which hung out over the cliff, was now completely glassed in,
offering a
panoramic view of Lake Union, the west side of Capital Hill and the
glistening Cascade Mountains beyond. My parents had no interest in the
view. The help lived on the view
side. My parents had no interest in looking out; what they wanted was
to make
damn sure others couldn't look in.

Rebecca took my
hand. "Come upstairs," she said.

I let her pull
me to the second floor. We started at the top of the stairs and worked our way
through the maze of skylighted conversation areas, bathrooms, walk-in closets,
and as nearly as I could tell, about six bedrooms. At the far end of the hall,
a master suite hung out over the corner of the house, looking both east over
the freeway and north over the urban sprawl of Seattle. The room was furnished.

"What's
this?" I said.

"It's our
new bedroom furniture."

"It's beautiful,"
I said honestly.

The bed was an
antique. Walnut. Ornate and rounded all over in an Art Deco sort of way. The
footboard was decorated with intricately carved seashells. The matching
nightstands and the trunk at the end of the bed were part of the same elaborate
set.

I put both arms
around her from behind.

"How'd you
get all this stuff up here?"

She squirmed
out of my arms and escaped. "I got Tyanne's boyfriend and a couple of
buddies to do it."

"How'd you
know where to tell them to put it?"

'1 called the
architect," she said smugly, sounding just like she used to in school when
she was the only one who knew the answer.

"Oh, well,
missy, I guess that big-time education of yours is paying dividends now, isn't
it?"

"Except in
my personal life."

"Oh,
yeah?" I patted the bed. "Howsabout we try this thing out? A little
test drive. You know, just to make sure if s not defective."

She closed the
nearest Levolor. "I wouldn't dream of keeping you from your fancy hotel
room. What did you call it ... a godsend. That was it, wasn't it?" If she
hadn't been working her way around the room, closing the blinds, I would have
been worried.

I said, "I
think I should tell you . . . I'm really not that kind of girl."

She killed the
lights. "You can be the girl later, if you want."

Dixie
and Bart were the first to show. By my
watch it was nine forty-nine A.M. when they came out of the elevator arm in arm
and headed directly for the escalator. Dressed in a gray herringbone sport coat
over a black silk T-shirt, Bart looked like the kind of kid you hoped would
show up to take your daughter on a date. He kept his eyes pointed forward as if
walking down a tunnel. Dixie Donner was a sight to behold. If the brown suit
hadn't been spray-painted on, you - couldn't have been absolutely certain that
she wasn't wearing drawers, and if the shoes hadn't had four-inch heels, which
forced her to place one foot directly in front of the other, the unfettered
thrashing of her buttocks would surely have been less noticeable than it was.
The crowded lobby ground to a halt as she wobbled across the marble floor.

When I gave
George the sign, he fell in behind the pair and rode down to the street not
three steps behind.

Frank and Judy
were having coffee in one of the conveniently located conversation areas around
the lobby. Big Frank cocked an eyebrow my way, letting me know he was ready if
anything happened before George got back. It didn't.

Five minutes
passed before George was again at my side.

"Who was
that?"

I told him. He
wrote it down.

"You mean
the kid ain't her son?"

" 'Fraid
not," I said.

"They took
a cab. Normal and Billy Bob are on 'em," George announced.

We'd given each
of the crew a hundred bucks, a notebook and a pencil to keep track of comings
and goings, and a stirring admonition to stay alert and sober. I could only
hope.

Mason Reese was
next. At ten-twenty, he poked his head out of the elevator, twitched his
whiskers, then darted across the lobby toward the reception desk, like a possum
crossing the interstate.

"Mason
Reese," I said to George. He made a note.

Reese strained
up over the counter as he spoke with Marie, who lifted the phone, spoke at some
length and hung up.

His business
completed, he jammed his hands into his pants pockets and made for the great
outdoors, with George in hot pursuit.

I strolled over
to the desk. Marie looked up with a smile. "Mr. Waterman, what can I do
for you?" "What did Mr. Reese want?"

Her eyes darted
to the right and then seemed to look inward.

I tried to make
things easier on her. "You can check with Ms. Ricci, if you want," I
said. "I won't be insulted."

The idea seemed
to terrify her. "Oh, no, sir. N-no," she stammered. "Mr. Reese
wanted to check on a voice-mail message he'd received late last night."

"What did
he want to know?"

"He wanted
to know why he hadn't heard the ring." "And?"

"The
operator said the party had requested voice mail because it was so late. The
party hadn't wanted to disturb Mr. Reese."

"Does the
hotel still have a recording of the message?"