The Bum's Rush (21 page)

Darkness was driving the express lane tonight.
Behind me, low over the Olympics, a thick band of braided clouds
squeezed the remaining light into a thin low-wattage line, recessed
behind the tops of the mountains, leaving even the early commuters to
chug home in the dim fluorescent gloom. The kid came bouncing out the
revolving door.

"I done it," he announced.

He was about ten, maybe sixty pounds, in an
oversize Oakland Raiders pullover, a pair of black canvas pants that
would have fit Orson Welles, and Reeboks with no laces. "She say she
send it right up."H >;

"Good job," I said. I pulled a five-dollar bill
from my pocket and held it out. The kid snatched the bill and began to
skip backward, as if I were going to change my mind and try to take the
money back. When I didn't move, he stopped. "You a spy or somethin',
man?" he asked.

"Bond," I said. "James Bond."

"My ass," he said with a grin and turned and left.

I retrieved the Fiat and fought the traffic north, up Third Avenue with the buses, sliding down to Mercer,
facing the bobbing web of lights now, as the late-afternoon flow of the
interstate began to swell in the deep cuts along the side of the hill,
where a bazillion highways, state routes, arterials, just plain roads,
and maybe even cul-de-sacs parceled out their meager portions of the
swell and began to move it toward home and the dubious promise of
another morning commute.

I followed a new black Jaguar up Eastlake, where
the uneasy tension between tradition and the profit motive hung in the
air like diesel smoke. The new Seattle has for twenty years been
chipping away at the rough-handed, old-time commercialism that
surrounds the city's downtown lake. Wedging fancy eateries in along the
shore, cheek to jowl with the commercial fishermen, the shipyards, the
smalltime maritime fabricators who stubbornly cling to their soiled
lots like fifth-generation barnacles. Unable to either muscle or buy
them out, the city now sought to displace this tawdry blue-collar
enclave by making the whole damn thing a park. Someplace nice for the
kiddies and the cocker spaniels, you know. Fuck the jobs. We'll put it
on the ballot. Progress is, after all, our most important product.

For the second time this week, I could hear my
phone ringing through the door. This time, though, I didn't hurry. I
hung my jacket on the oak stand in the hall and my keys on the hook by
the breakfast bar. Thus organized, I ambled toward the phone. No
matter. It kept ringing.

"Leo Waterman," I said.

"I seem to have forgotten the part of the meeting where they opened their files to us."

"The ravages of advancing age," I suggested.

"Can they be traced to you?"

"Only through rumor and innuendo. Nothing that will stand up in court," I assured him.

"You're sure?"

"Positive." -

A lengthy silence ensued. "Why am I overcome with
the feeling that a similar level of commitment to finding Karen
Mendolson just might produce similarly startling results?" Jed said
finally.

"A jaded and churlish nature?" I suggested.

"I'm serious, man," he snapped.

"That makes two of us," I said. "I'm doing
everything that can be done. This girl kept to herself. She's not using
her credit cards."

"You heard from Paul?"

"I stopped by his office after I saw the boys. We did lunch."

"Shit."

I tried to cheer him up. "The boys took the bed back."

"I know. I called."

"Ye of little faith."

"Shit," he repeated. "I was hoping--goddamn it, Leo, you said--"

"It was always a long shot. I was just covering our
bases," I interrupted. "She's a bright woman. She reads a lot. She
knows the score. She's got a nearly unlimited supply of cash. As long
as she keeps her head down and doesn't leave a paper trail, not me, not
the cops, the friggin' FBI, nobody is going to find her ass." Now it
was my turn to get nasty. "If you've got somebody you think can do a
better job, maybe you better trot them out now, because other than this
Internet thing, I'm fresh out of ideas."

I spent the next minute or so listening to the static on the line.

"Close of business Friday," he said sullenly.

I changed the subject. "You get a chance to look at that paperwork?''

"It'll be tonight before I have time. For obvious reasons, I'm not going to be able to farm it out to one of the kids."

"Thanks for filing the order."

"No problem."

"Heard from any of them again--Prowell, Conover--?"

He wagged his big head. "Nary the peep."

"We may be losing our touch." "Sorry about before,"
he said suddenly. "I know you're doing the best you can. I'm getting a
lot of pressure from the mayor's office, that's all."

"Don't worry about it," I said.

"Actually, fucking around with these music types is fun."

"Ain't it, though."

"Later."

Five-twenty. A little over an hour and a half until
I was scheduled to pick up Rebecca for dinner. Freezing in here. I
turned the thermostat up to eighty, punched the red button on the surge
protector, and headed for the shower, where, due to the special
acoustic qualities of my glass-walled stall, I was able to
simultaneously warble all four parts of the Dell Vikings' doo-wop
masterpiece "Come Go with Me," melting the seemingly disparate parts
into a sonic stew of such harmonic richness and tonal quality as to
surely warrant professional archiving.

Five-thirty-five. The place was a sauna. I lowered
the heat to sixty and opened the office window. After configuring my
PPP, I checked my Email.

I pulled the little West Bend timer from the top drawer of my desk and set it for an hour. Rebecca had
bought me the timer for my last birthday. It was all she'd bought me
for my birthday. I was fresh out of mistakes. No more innocent faces
about how I'd gotten involved on-line and lost all track of time.
Absolutely none of that shit was going to float anymore. I was ready.

Twenty minutes later, right at the beginning of the
second part of the digest, nestled between a rave review of an L.A.
detective novel called Violent Spring and a call for mystery titles
involving sleuths who were also gay exercise therapists--I made a
mental note to check back on this one--Karen Mendolson got her two
cents' worth in.

DATE: Mon, 19 Feb 96 18:21:42-0600 FROM: J. P. [email protected]. SUBJECT: Sayers' Values

In a recent posting by Jeff Meyers he quoted Tracy
Sheen as saying "The writer has an obligation to rise above the petty
prejudices of his or her time". I would be much obliged if he or Mrs.
Sheen would give me a list of precisely which current social attitudes
will be deemed incorrect sixty or seventy years from now and a complete
list of the reasons why this has transpired. How could anyone doubt
that the reason anti-semitism is now unacceptable is because of the
Holocaust and the lessons people have (hopefully) learned about the
ends of prejudice.

J. P. Beaumont (J. A. Jance's Seattle Detective.) J. P.Beau @magic.net.com.

I copied her address into my address book and then
read the rest of the digest. Good thing. Right near the end, the
handwriting showed up on the wall. It was now or never. Karen's pet
issue was about to become a thing of the past.

Date: Mon, 19 Feb 96 15:13:41 EDT From: "Kara L
Robinson" Subject: Re: SAVERS AND
ANTI-SEMITISM To: ALL

Okay My loyal DorothyLers,

The time has come to put an end (as in halt,
desist, stop already) to this Sayers thread. It is time to agree that
we will never all agree on the issue of Dorothy L. Sayers and her
purported anti-semitism, so it is time to put down our keyboards and
move to other issues.

Thanks a ton for your cooperation in murdering this thread:)

Danger Mouse AKA Kara L. Robinson Co-Listowner: DorothyL

I clicked and scrolled my way back to Karen's
message and put together a pithy reply. This was going to be the only
chance I got.

DATE: Mon, 19 Feb 1996 18:21:42-0600 FROM: [email protected]

SUBJECT: Sayers Thread TO: J. [email protected].

JP,

I couldn't agree with you more; hindsight is always
twenty-twenty. I can't believe some of these people. Alas, perhaps
Danger Mouse is right. This particular issue does seem to be
particularly contentious. It doesn't seem to be bringing out the best
in any of us. As she suggests, this might be best discussed off line.

Leo Waterman

I wasn't at all sure about the alas, but the rest
of it sounded pretty good. Send. I followed Carl's directions. Leave
the computer on-line. Unpack the SuperFinder. Click the installer.
Wait. Make sure the program completely loads. Okay. Clicking find
produces a dialogue box. The directions say to type my own E-mail
address. [email protected]. Click OK. Another dialogue box. Type "all,"
lowercase. Click OK. Big black letters moved across the screen like
marching soldiers:... R ... E ... A...D... Y...R...E...A...

The timer went off. I took the machine at its word and went in search of some clothes.

1 dipped (he twisted end of my napkin back into my
ice water and went to work on my shirt. Just to the left of the fourth
button, a jeering glob of barbecue sauce the size of a fingernail had
welded itself to the fabric and was worming its way into the heart of
each tiny fiber, where it would surely dwell and stain forever. Arrrgh.

"I wish you'd told me you wanted to eat here," I whined. "I'd have worn old clothes."

"You're such a slob," she sympathized.

"It's not that I'm a slob," I protested. "It's
merely the luck of the draw. Some people are just born to stay clean.
Some aren't. That's it. End of story. You"--I pointed with the wet
napkin end--"could snort a bowl of chili and not get anything on you."
I rubbed harder. "I, on the other hand, am destined to always wear my
lunch. That's just the way it is." The deep blue of the shirt had begun
to come off on the napkin. Not surprisingly, however, the glob of sauce
remained unscathed. ?

Willie's Taste of Soul was, if food was the sole
criterion, perhaps the best restaurant in Seattle. If the location at
the top of the hill off the Swift-Albro exit in South Seattle was a bit
out of the mainline, the mouthwatering beef brisket more than
compensated. Whatever the small dining area may have lacked in ambience, Willie's homemade
Louisiana Hot Links would make you forget about in a hurry. By the time
you'd choked down a piece of his legendary sweet potato pie for
dessert, you were way past thinking about restaurants; you were
thinking about cardiologists and dry cleaners.

I gave up on the shirt, leaned back in my chair,
and watched the thin line of traffic making its way down Beacon. From
the corner of my eye, I could see Rebecca was studying me like a lab
specimen. Instinctively, I knew it was one of those moments. The ones
where you don't get the test results until years down the road, when,
smack-dab in the middle of some seemingly innocuous and totally
unrelated conversation, she throws back a shawl, tosses her hair, and
says, "And then there was that time my mother was thinking about moving
in with her sister, and you '' God help you then.

I decided to take the initiative. "So," I started.
"What do you figure are the chances of the old girls actually moving in
with each other?"

"I think time doth make cowards of us all," she said, eyeing me.

I figured she probably didn't want me to tell her how the Vince Lombardi quote really went, so I said, "All? Us too?"

She held my gaze. "Us especially."

''You really think they'll do it, huh?''

"I've got a feeling they will."

I took a deep breath, cleared my throat. "Okay,
I'll jump right in here. If that happens are you in favor of making
some, like, major adjustments in our ... our... current relationship?"

"Are you?"

"You're not going to let me palm this one off on you, are you?"

"Not a chance."

I was ready. "I think we ought to talk about it."

Worst-case scenario. "All right. Let's talk about it," she said.

We were still talking about it thirty minutes later
as we cruised under the green lights of the Washington State Convention
Center, tacking back and forth through the hazy heart of Seattle.

"I was just saying that first we ought to analyze
whether we want anything to change before we go plunging in and
screwing up a good thing," I wheedled. "I never once said I was or was
not in favor of making any changes of any kind."

"What is it you're not satisfied with?"

I was barely holding my own. A babe in the woods.
Each statement, no matter how closely couched, seemed to tip some
cosmic scale further against me, leaving me naked and defenseless
against unimaginably Florentine translations of my own seemingly simple
phrases. Mercifully, my beeper went off. I checked my hip. The pay
phone in the Zoo.

In spite of being no more than two miles away, I
nearly killed us both as I cut across two lanes of traffic, leaving a
white Mercedes weaving in my wake. An angry blast of a horn followed us
up the Olive exit, left, and up to what used to be a Red Robin burger
joint but had recently transformed itself into a more egalitarian
Boston Market. Good Hearty Fare. Fair being the key word.

The restaurant and its parking lot sat on a little
disconnected triangle of land where Olive, the aptly named John, and
Summit all came together to form one of the busiest intersections in the city. I cut left on Summit,
rolled the forty yards to the rear point of the triangle, and
doubleparked below the phone booth. I flipped the emergency flashers on
and pulled the door handle. "Be right back," I said. No response. "I'll
leave it running. In case, you know ... a cop." I swear she growled. I
kept moving.