Thicker Than Water (A Leo Waterman Mystery) (2 page)

Large Marge and Red Lopez were regulars at the Eastlake Zoo and two of the more sentient examples of an otherwise insensate crowd. The kind of people who reminded you that it took only a couple of bad decisions to start your life circling the bowl. That the line between the middle class and out on your ass was thinner than a piece of Denny’s bacon.

Marge was, as advertised, large. Almost as tall as I was. A former working girl, she’d been reduced to penury by a series of bad relationships and a serious heroin jones. You wanted to end up with your front teeth in your shirt pocket, you just put your hand on Marge somewhere she didn’t want a hand put. Apparently Marge would be rendering no further services.

Red was an Inuit from somewhere up in the Northwest Territories and a sad example of the genetic intolerance to alcohol so common among his people. Four drinks and he was either on all fours barking at the ants or out stone-cold, drooling among the peanut shells. With Red, you didn’t have to wonder what his problem was. It was his penchant for exposing himself in public places that most seriously curtailed his career opportunities and so vexed the local authorities. His habit of whipping it out and asking “Ain’t it a beauty?” proved to be a social faux pas too serious to surmount, earning him repeated stretches behind bars and a level-one sex-offender designation. He and I had reached an accord. I wouldn’t show him mine, if he wouldn’t show me his. So far, so good.

They had an interesting approach to landscaping work. First they drank all the beer. Forty-eight of them. Quick as you could say, “Ticonderoga,” they were up to their ankles in empties and the cooler was bare. Suitably fueled, they bent to the pick-and-shovel work, digging up the dead rhody and casting it aside. By the time they finished the exhumation, Billy Bob Fung was on his lips, facedown in the loam, snoring softly. The other four dragged him out of the way as they bantered and bickered their way through the planting of the first new bush.

That’s when things took a sudden sloppy turn. Probably my fault. I should have seen it coming. Lots of people in this world you wouldn’t want to have a gun. Some you wouldn’t want driving cars. Still others you wouldn’t want making the final decision on anything at all, no matter how minor. These guys…these guys you wouldn’t even give a garden
hose. Not with water anyway. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking.

By the time I pulled my mind from the many faces of my old man and my eyes from the slate-gray clouds moving in from the West, all three of them were breaded like veal cutlets. Head to toe. Covered with mud. Soaking wet. Brown M&M’s with eyes.

Ralph slapped his muddy hands together and reckoned how he’d just step inside the house and clean himself up a mite.

I came out of the lawn chair like a Scud missile. “Nobody’s going inside the house,” I announced.

The cleaning service had made its weekly appearance yesterday and I had no intention of letting these maniacs trash the joint. Bad enough that I felt guilty about not doing my own housework. If I had to have it done twice in the same week I may have been forced to take holy orders, pledge myself to poverty, and that kind of stuff.

I pointed at the other rhododendron. “Plant that damn thing,” I said. “I’ll go inside and get you all some clean clothes.”

“We’re getting a little parched too,” George grumbled to my back as I headed for the house.

“Plant it,” I growled over my shoulder.

I was gone for the better part of ten minutes. All the way up to the attic, where I’d come across the old trunk several weeks back. I couldn’t keep a smile from creasing my lips as I hoisted the steamer up onto my shoulder and tiptoed down the narrow stairs, through the kitchen and out the back door. Sigmund Freud would have had a field day with me.

They’d managed to muscle the bush into the ground. The poor thing looked like it had survived a hurricane. The beleaguered shrub leaned east at about a thirty-degree angle. Leaves littered the ground around the base. I made a mental note to straighten it out after they left. Wouldn’t want to hurt their feelings. They were hosing each other off as I came out the door.

I set the trunk on the back steps, flipped the brass fasteners, and lifted the lid. A pair of worn leather straps prevented the lid from flopping all the way open. Inside were my father’s clothes. I guessed that his sisters must have packed them up after his funeral, expecting that I’d donate them to charity or something, but somehow I missed the memo and wasn’t aware of their existence until I stumbled upon them while poking around the attic one rainy February afternoon.

The sight of his tweed overcoat, rough to the hand and big enough for a four-man tent, nearly took my breath away. I stepped aside and gestured at the trunk. “Have at it,” I said.

Ralph was too far gone to recognize his own mother. Billy Bob was down for the count. Red and Marge had never met my father, so none of them had a clue.

George, on the other hand, knew immediately. His redrimmed eyes ran over my face like an ant colony. “These are…,” he began.

“Yeah,” I said. “They are.”

He sat on the step next to the trunk and stared off into space.

Marge, Red, and Ralph rummaged through the mound of clothes like mad moles.

For the sake of modesty, I encouraged Marge to use the back porch as a changing room. Red and Ralph shed their sodden rags right there in the backyard. After appropriating most of a tuxedo, Marge disappeared up the stairs.

Ralph Batista naked was more than I could bear. I turned away and went back to studying the rapidly approaching weather. The spaces between the steel-gray clouds were disappearing. The wind had begun to freshen in the trees. That’s when I heard the magic words. “Ain’t it a beauty?” Red Lopez inquired.

I cringed and studied the sky harder.

“Leo,” George said.

I kept my face averted. “Is he dressed yet?” I asked.

“Leo,” George repeated.

When I met his watery gaze, he threw his bloodshot eyes toward the corner of the house.

She was standing on the flagstone walkway, her purse clutched in front of her with both hands, the little going-to-church hat resting atop her head like a thorny crown. All things considered, she was doing a pretty good job of pretending there weren’t two naked winos standing there on the lawn, one of them wanting to know what she thought of his prominently proffered package.

Normally I would have been greatly amused by her discomfort. Problem was, the sight of Iris Duval meant that somewhere in the universe pigs had officially taken wing. The mountain had come to Mohammed, and nothing but disaster could possibly have impelled Iris Duval to come looking for me.

Iris Duval had a disapproving mouth. The more she disapproved of something the thinner her lips got. The sight of my face had always puckered her up tight enough to stamp license plates, and today was no exception. She never said a word and never took her eyes off my face as the crew got dressed and lurched their way around toward the front of the house.

I took her inside and invited her to sit on the sofa, asked if I could get her anything, but she just glared me off, so I left her standing in the middle of my front parlor looking out through the open door while I stuffed the crew into a cab and sent them on their way, fifty bucks apiece burning a hole in their pockets, an extra twenty to the cabbie for putting up with the singing.

A light rain had begun to fall, darkening the pavement, hissing softly onto the magnolia leaves as I stood in the driveway and watched the cab roll out through the gate. I didn’t want to go back inside the house. Didn’t want to hear whatever it was that Iris had come thirty miles to tell me. Avoidance was a specialty of mine. You name it, I could pretend it didn’t exist. I liked to tell myself it was better than taking Prozac.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not claiming eternal sunshine or anything like that. I’m only human. Like most folks my age, I’ve got a long list of regrets. Things I wish had turned out differently. Things I’d like do-overs on. That’s the way life is, trial and error.

If there was any aspect of my past that haunted me on a daily basis, however, it was Rebecca Duval, Iris’s daughter. In a couple of weeks it would be three years since we’d parted ways, and I still wasn’t “over it.” Truth be told, I didn’t want
to be “over it.” The sense of longing I felt whenever I thought of her connected us in a way I didn’t understand but wasn’t prepared to abandon. Pain was something and something was better than nothing.

In a perfect world, I could have blamed her for walking out on me. Called her a faithless ho and drunk myself to sleep at night. But what can I say? She wanted somebody with the same hopes and dreams as her own, not some overgrown kid who played at being a private cop and whose only real ambition was to live to be forty-five. Who could blame her? I could miss her, but I couldn’t blame her.

We started back in the fifth grade. For reasons I’ll never understand the powers-that-be were determined we learn to dance. The well-rounded young person or some such tripe. So Thursdays after lunch, they’d bus Seattle Preppies like me over to Holy Names Academy to trip the light fandango with the Catholic girls. Talk about awkward. The airborne hormones were thicker than string cheese. Exhibiting great social sensitivity and
savoir faire
, they matched us up according to height. As Rebecca and I were both a head and a half taller than anyone else in the room, we were a natural fit. She found my clumsy attempts at dancing hilarious, and there was absolutely nothing about her that didn’t amuse or excite me, so we just kept dancing, year after year, until she walked off the floor and took the music with her.

I took a shallow breath and started for my front door. Iris hadn’t moved. She stood on the carpet, rigid as a fencepost, her mouth thin enough to pass for a scar.

I took my time. Moving slowly, thoroughly wiping my feet before closing the door. I swallowed a sigh, turned, and ambled her way.

She just couldn’t resist. “Nice crowd there,” she commented.

I’d long ago decided that life was too short to trade oneliners with Iris. We’d already said what we had to say to one another, on several occasions at great length and at top volume. No point in going over that same old pile of beans again. A tedious moment passed. The silence was deafening.

I finally broke the spell. “What can I do for you, Iris?”

Funny I should ask.

“I haven’t heard from Rebecca in over a week,” she said.

My body began to vibrate. Felt like I’d dropped a quarter into one of those old-time Magic Fingers motel beds, and was lying there waiting for my fillings to shake loose.

I did what people do in moments like that. I tried to come up with a scenario that would explain the unexplainable. Maybe she did this. Maybe she did that. Perhaps this, perhaps that. I led a rather rich fantasy life, but nothing whatsoever came to mind.

A day seldom passed when Rebecca didn’t speak with her mother. Usually more than once. A week was impossible. The family mythos depended upon it. The promises of deferred gratification demanded it. As the saga went, Iris had sacrificed everything for her daughter. Held down three jobs. Scrimped and saved, and then scrimped and saved some more. The undisputed queen of the single momdom, trudging onward and upward after the death of her shiftless, alcoholic husband. Putting her daughter through the University of Washington, through med school, through a pathology residency. All of it, and I mean all of it, a tribute to grit and steely feminist determination.

“What’s Brett got to say?” I asked.

Brett Ward. The guy Rebecca married a couple of years back. A seriously handsome rake of a guy who drove a Porsche and sold yachts for a living. Snappy dresser. Fast talker.

Iris’s glare went halogen. “He says they had a fight. Says she walked out on him. Just packed a suitcase and left. Said she needed to get away and think. Brett says he doesn’t know where she is.” She started to add something but stopped herself.

“You believe him?”

“No.”

“What else?” I prodded.

“He came to my house looking for her. Drunk.” She made it plain that she was holding something back. I went along for the ride.

“And?”

“He had a gun.”

“Really?”

“I saw it in the waistband of his pants.”

“What else?”

She met my gaze. “He said he thought she’d probably come running back to you. Said he was going to come over here and find her. Drag her back home.”

“Haven’t seen him,” I said with a glum shrug.

“Of course you haven’t,” she scoffed. “You whipped him like a dog. He wouldn’t dare come over here and bother you.”

I winced. Knocking Brett Ward stiff wasn’t something I was proud of. First off, it was too easy. He was drunk; I wasn’t. I was big; he wasn’t. Secondly, it was childish on both our parts. He made it a point to invite me to his bachelor
party, just so he could tell his friends he had. “Hell, Bob, I even invited the big idiot.” He’d already won the girl, but just had to rub it in. Wanted to show his buddies how thoroughly he’d defeated his rival.

Oh, I admit it. I should never have taken him up on it. I was being just as childish as he was. Worse yet, I saw trouble coming, right from the start. I could have nipped it in the bud and stopped him while he was working up the nerve. I could have walked right out of the Waterfront Restaurant and taken a cab home. But I didn’t. I let him paddle all the way up Stupid Creek. Let him get his blood in a boil to the point where he felt confident enough to take a poke at me and then walk off. I coldcocked him right in front of his friends and family. Party’s over. Thanks for coming, folks.