The Deader the Better (23 page)

To this day Kurtis claims that, having paid off his debt and
socked a little away for himself besides, the burglary he was caught
committing was to have been his last. It was ugly. They not only got
him for the hotel room he was caught in, but his fence rolled over on
him and then it turned out that they were already hip to him on the
society burglaries, so, in spite of being a first-time offender,
Kurtis ended up doing the three of a three-to-five on McNeil Island,
where he went to burglary college.

The difference between Kurtis and your average convicted felon is
that Kurtis is highly intelligent, while most of them are dumber than
dirt. He’d picked the brain of every thief, second-story man and
cat burglar in the institution and returned to Seattle a true master
of his trade. He still spent quite a bit of time in police stations,
because anytime anything of great value was missing, he was number
one on the“usual suspects” list, but, to my knowledge, he had
never done any more serious time.

Kurtis lived in the Ravenna area, up on the hill behind the
university. He rented the upstairs of a blue and white Edwardian
house from a pair of married attorneys who just happened to be his
attorneys of record. Interesting arrangement, I’d always thought. I
pushed his button on the door. Voice-over speaker.

“Be right down.”

Kurtis is a handsome fellow with a thick shock of what used to be
called strawberry-blond hair, beginning to grow slightly gray at the
temples and worn long. He was what I’d call willowy rather than
thin, as if he weren’t connected quite as tightly at the joints as
the rest of us. He gave the impression of flowing from point to
point. We shook hands. “There was buzz that you came home on your
shield, Leo,” he said with a perfect smile. “So glad to see the
rumor was unfounded.”

“That makes two of us,” I assured him.

We walked down to the Queen Mary Tea Room, ordered coffee and
traded recent life stories for a few minutes. Seems the Bellevue
police were making his life miserable over a burglary-related
shooting. “Hayseeds,” he was saying. “As if…like I’m going
in armed.” As far as Kurtis was concerned, any thief who went out
armed was lower than whale shit. You did your homework. You made your
entry. Took what you came for. And then made your exit. Period. If
something went wrong, you kept your mouth shut until your lawyer
arrived. He claimed to have talked his way out of darkened rooms on
more than twenty occasions, and I believed him. Kurtis had even less
patience with small talk than I did. Before we got our first refill
he said, “On the phone, you didn’t say much.”

“Cell phone.”

He held up a hand to say he understood.

“I need a man of your talents.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Which ones?”

“Breaking and entering.”

“Ooooh.”

“To get in and out of places.” I pointed a finger. “Don’t,”

I said.

First he looked hurt, then bored. “Any competent locksmith—”

“Under adverse conditions.”

“Aaah,” he said. “Why me?”

“Because I need somebody who Carl Cradduck will work with, and
you know what an incredible pain in the ass he is.”

“When you’re as good at what you do as Uncle Carl is, you get
to be as eccentric as you want to be,” he said.

“I’ve heard several buzzes that said you’ve worked together
before.”

“I don’t think it would be telling tales to say that the
horrific Mr. Cradduck and I have on several occasions consulted.”

“That’s why I’m coming to you first.”

“You and him are tight,” he scoffed. “He wouldn’t turn you
down.” His eyebrows went up a notch. “This wouldn’t perchance
be pro bono, would it?” he inquired.

“No,” I said. “I’ll pay you for your time, but there isn’t
going to be any score at the end of it. I want to let you know that
right now.”

“Talk to me.”

I did. I gave him the abridged version. “Interesting,” was all
he said.

“So…what do you say?” I asked.

He steepled his fingers. “I’ve been in remission lately…what
with those Bellevue hicks and all.”

“So…a week out of town.” I knew better than start in on the
fresh air and sunshine shit with him. Kurtis was strictly indoorsey.

“In the event of mishap?”

“In the event of mishap, I personally guarantee to bail you out
for any bailable offense and James, Junkin, Rose and Smith are riding
legal shotgun for us until your attorneys arrive.”

“I’m in,” he said.

I left the café feeling like Lee Marvin, as Captain John Reisman,
in the beginning of
The Dirty Dozen
, when he’s going from
cell to cell deciding exactly which raving lunatic to take on the
mission. I tried to remember the theme so I could hum it.

Carl Cradduck and I went back to the days before no-fault divorce,
when I earned my living kicking in doors, taking pictures and running
for my life. They weren’t the kind of pictures you could take down
to the local drugstore, so every PI had to have some guy who did his
developing. Carl was mine. He’d had a one-man shop south of the
city. Before losing his legs in an auto accident, he’d been a
photographer for the AP. He’d been in Seattle visiting his sister
when a teenage driver lost control and put him in a wheelchair for
life. The way he saw it, where a cripple lived didn’t much matter,
so he’d stayed.

Over a twenty-year span, the camera shop had mutated into an
electronics and stereo store, then into the first place I could
remember that sold car alarms and those portable phones in a bag and
satellite dishes, and then eventually turned into Advanced
Electronics, Inc., a high-tech security firm specializing in the
detection of audio/visual electronic monitoring devices. In other
words, if you thought maybe the competition had you bugged, you
called Advanced Electronics.

He still ran an outlet for used electronic gear in Lake City. He
claimed it was just a way to get some return on last year’s gear,
but I knew better. He liked working the store, though he’ll never
admit it. He was a guy who could pay cash for any house in the
greater Seattle area but lived in four small rooms behind the store,
because, like I said before, he figured where a cripple lived didn’t
much matter. The front door buzzed as I stepped into the shop. He
came rolling out from behind the counter.

“Merry Christmas,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “I got so excited about the festivities I’m
just now taking solid food again.”

The walls of the shop were covered with Carl’s old
APphotographs. Vietnam. Kent State. Altamont. And here and there Carl
with this guy or other. When you looked at him in the photos, you
could tell he was about six feet tall, yet when you saw him sitting
there in the chair, it didn’t seem possible that he’d ever been
that big. He wore a red plaid Pendelton blanket across his lap and,
unless he’d turned over a new leaf, a Beretta automatic rested
somewhere within the folds of the blanket.

We shook hands. “I heard you were going to be laid up for
months,” he said. I pulled up my pants leg and gave him a look.

Carl asked the professional’s question. “So…you got
careless, or what?”

I thought it over. “No,” I said. “Not really. Even when I
look at it now, there wasn’t anything to get careless about.”

I told him the story from beginning to end, leaving out only the
personal shit between Rebecca and me. When I finished he said, “Well,
don’t mind me saying, Leo, you look pretty fuckin’ bad for a guy
who was careful.”

“That’s not what I meant. What I got wasn’t careless; it was
more like fixated. I had this mind-set that said nobody gets that
upset over a fishing hole. And another one that said J.D. Springer
was financially in over his head and that maybe he’d pushed an old
man a bit too hard, and that people had noticed and that he was just
doing that thing that people do when they’re ashamed of themselves.
How they get paranoid and blame everybody else for the situation
they’re in.”

“And now?”

“Now I’m asking myself, ‘What if?’ What if this doesn’t
have anything to do with boat launches or fishing holes? What if J.D.
was right? What if all these forces were conspiring against him for
some reason or other?”

“That’s a mouthful of ‘what ifs,’” he said.

“Think about the overreaction,” I said. “Rebecca and I are
closing up the place. We’re leaving town. If everything goes
according to plan, they’re never going to see our asses again.
Sure, we’ve bent a few noses by getting their eviction order
postponed and by finding J.D.’s cause of death, but, you know, when
it comes to finding out why or who killed J.D. Springer, we haven’t
accomplished a damn thing. If anything, we’re more confused than
when we started. And they try to punch our tickets. Why?”

“So, other than my own special brand of Yuletide cheer, what do
you want from me?”

“Depends on how busy you are.”

“Depends on how much money you’ve got.”

“I can pay my way.”

He pushed the button on his chair, rolled over to the door and
turned the sign to CLOSED. “Come on in the back,” he said. He
talked as he drove. “You know what my business has come to?”

“What?”

“Cameras in the women’s restroom. Yep…a big problem for big
business. You just let one honey find out somebody’s been taking
pictures of her wiping her twitchit and you’ve got a lawsuit to put
the fear of god in you. They sue the business, the building, the
city, everybody.”

“No kidding?”

“Oh no. Not only are we growing perverts in record crops, but
there’s a big market for hidden camera shots out on the Internet.
We find cameras all the time. It’s cheaper to pay us to check the
place than to pay lawyers and judgments.”

“What’s the world coming to?”

“I’ll show you the tapes sometime. Got one girl, looks
Armenian—”

When I reckoned on how maybe I’d pass on that honor, he motioned
for me to have a seat at the ancient kitchen table. “You got
something more interesting than fat girls in the crapper?”

“I think so…yeah.”

“Lay it on me.”

I told him what I had in mind. “I take it you’ve got no
paperwork on this thing.”

“You mean, like court orders for electronic surveillance…that
sort of thing?”

“Yeah, Sherlock…those little details that will keep us out of
the lockup.”

“’Fraid not,” I said.

I expected a hard time. Instead, he said, “Good. What’s the
layout?”

He found an old blueprint; I used the back to draw a makeshift map
of beautiful downtown Stevens Falls, Washington. He kept checking me
for distances. How far was this from that, and that from the next
thing. When I’d finished, he sneered at the drawing.

“Christ…place like that, you give me a couple of days and
we’ll be able to tell when and if anybody in that burg takes a
dump. Here’s what I’ve got in mind…”

When he finished outlining his plans, I stood openmouthed.

“You can do that?”

“Shit yes,” he said. “That’s why I started Advanced. So I
could do stuff like this. I figured if we were going to keep running
wires on people, we better know what we were up against in the way of
detection systems. So I started a detection company. Anytime anybody
invents anything new, they send it to me to see if I can detect it. I
end up with everything. I’ve got stuff the FBI won’t have for
another five years. But”—he held up a bony finger—“when it
comes to the phones, you’re living in the past. Phones are a bitch
these days. Fiber-optics make it almost impossible to isolate lines
from the outside.”

“I’ve got Kurtis Ryder to do inside work.”

“And I’ve got Robby to handle the technical end, but that
don’t help the phone problem. Problem with the phones is that most
of the shit that’s been manufactured in the last ten years isn’t
intended to be repaired. You’re supposed to use it till it falls
apart and then just shitcan it and buy another one. So, for the most
part, phones don’t come apart any more. They’re all just molded
plastic. Which means you’d need Robby to go inside with Kurtis.”
He shrugged. “Even with somebody as good as Robby, you figure
fifteen minutes a phone, so that makes, what? An hour, hour and a
half.”

Carl was right. No way we could be inside anything for that long.

“So what are we going to do?” I asked.

“We’ll wire the offices instead of the phones. Then we wire
their rides so’s we can keep track of what they do next.

Where they go. That is what you have in mind, isn’t it? Stirring
up the whole crock of shit to see which turds float.”

“Nicely put,” I said.

“So…what are you going to do to stir the pot?”

“Depends on whether or not you can still get Social Security
numbers.”

“Went up to fifty bucks a pop.” His eyes narrowed. “You
gonna steal Charlie Boxer’s old tax number, aren’t you?”

“Sure stresses folks out,” I said. “Lenny Duke’s still in
business, isn’t he?”

Carl said he was. “Lenny’s got the same friggin’ problem I
do. We both spent so many years creating a front business that the
damn thing eventually took over and made more dough than the scams we
were using it to cover for. I mean, the only reason I started the
damn business was to cover the kind of thing I was doing for guys
like you.” He shrugged.

“You think that’s what they meant when they said crime doesn’t
pay?”

I allowed how I thought maybe they had something else in mind.

“Who’s gonna answer the phone?”

“I figured George could handle it.”

He rolled over to the kitchen sink, opened the small drawer on the
left and pulled out a small wire-bound notepad. “Write down the
names of the people you need numbers for and where they work. I’ll
call Buster when he gets home from work today.”

“This means you’re in.”

He waved a finger at me. “You know me, Leo…what’s that song
say about being caught between the yearning for love and the struggle
for the legal tender?”