Thicker Than Water (A Leo Waterman Mystery) (6 page)

As a matter of fact, I did vaguely remember. Five or six years back, it had been all over the news. As I recalled, the referee suffered some degree of permanent paralysis. The Canadian bluenoses had gone wild. The incident had nearly led to the banning of mixed martial arts in Canada.

“And the other one,” he snuffled. “Little Asian guy with big round glasses, he just held the gun on me. Koontz, he made me…” He wanted to blurt it out, but couldn’t bring himself to do it. I watched in silence as he backed up and tried again. “He took his hand and…” He shook his head in resignation. Not only was he unable to spit it out, but by now I was pretty sure I didn’t want to hear it. Whatever he had to say would surely drag me to a place I didn’t care to visit.

I took a step back and waited while he pulled himself together. He looked out over the line of trash receptacles and composed himself. Minutes passed. When he turned back my way he’d dried his eyes and had the look of a guy who wanted some payback. “There was one weird thing with Brett,” he said. “Something I didn’t tell those guys.”

“What’s that?”

“Brett’s wife sent a stripper to the office for his birthday.” He held his cupped hands in front of his chest in the international sign for “tits out to here.” “He’d been gone for months and months by that time. It was weird that she didn’t know.”

“And I suppose the rest of you sent the girl on her way with a nice tip in her pocket.”

He grinned sheepishly and shrugged. “You know, man. She was there, you know, ready to do her thing, all paid for and all. Seemed like we might as well, you know…”

I helped him out. “You let her do her thing. So she wouldn’t feel bad.”

“Yeah.”

I watched as something crossed his mind.

I poked him in the chest with a stiff finger. “What?”

“I gave Brett a jingle. You know, a one-guy-to-another kind of thing. Told him about the stripper showing up at the office. Just in case it came up, you know, in conversation or something like that.”

“You remember the girl’s name?”

He thought about it. “Sherry, Cherry, something like that.” He held up a finger as if to ask for a moment, dug into his back pocket, and came out with his wallet. He was one of those guys who makes a point of collecting business cards from everyone he meets. A salesman’s habit. You never know, you know.

Took him a minute of sorting through a fistful of cards but eventually he came up with a gold business card. Embossed belly dancer. Merry Storm. Exotic Dances for All Occasions. Seattle phone number at the bottom right.

“Thanks,” I said, pocketing the card.

“Hey look,” he said. “I got to go. We’re closing up. I got to be there.”

“Go ahead,” I said.

I stood on the asphalt, amid the roar and rumble of the garbage trucks, and watched as Ricky limped down the road like he was coming home from a colonoscopy. Forty yards down, he stopped and turned back my way. He yelled above the din.

“That blond one…he’s one a sick bastard. You better…”

“I’ll be careful,” I said.

Halfway down the mall, Ricky found another store’s back door open and ducked inside.

Ah, the heady aroma of the morgue in the morning. The bouquet opens with a piquant whisper of formaldehyde, and then as the palate slips into play, segues smoothly into earthy undertones, prior to a surprising finish that clings to the roof the mouth with the zeal of a Catholic communion wafer.

When I was younger, I had a much stronger stomach. I used to go downstairs, stand behind the thick glass windows, and watch as Rebecca and her colleagues performed their grisly duties. That’s where I learned that autopsy strategies were as individual as the people doing the saw work.

Rebecca treated the dead with great reverence. Her table was always neat and clean and the bodies were draped this way and that so as to keep prying eyes like mine from seeing anything they didn’t have to. She always said that people deserved the same dignity in death that they deserved in life.

Vaughn Tisdale, on the other hand, was all blood, guts, and veins in the teeth. He treated the dismemberment of a corpse as if he were parting out a 1967 Chevy. Red to his armpits. Body parts scattered hither and yon. Great gobs of goo everywhere. The fact that Rebecca thought very highly of his work made it plain that pathology allowed for different
strokes for different folks. Metaphorically speaking, of course.

These days I stayed upstairs in the office area. That’s where I found Vaughn Tisdale. Vaughn was a big, fleshy guy with a bale of curly red hair clinging stubbornly to the back of his head. He was sitting at his desk, staring at a silver toaster, waiting for a pair of Pop Tarts to make an appearance. As usual he was wearing a three-dimensionally soiled smock and an even more execrable pair of latex gloves.

He looked up from the toaster. “Hey, big fella,” he said. “Long time no see.”

“The girl out front said Sandy was out of town.”

“Conference of some sort. Iowa or someplace, as I recall.”

Which was a pity, because Sandy McGinty managed the business end of the county morgue operation like a pit bull manages a kitty cat. Sandy was known as a micromanager of subatomic proportions and would surely have known whatever there was to know, whether the knowers knew it or not. If that makes any sense.

“Iris Duval came to my house yesterday afternoon.”

“Lucky you,” Tisdale joked.

“Iris tells me she hasn’t heard from Rebecca in over a week.”

Vaughn rocked forward in his chair. The Pop Tarts popped. He ignored them. “How can that be?” he asked.

“I was hoping you could enlighten me.”

“I just know what everybody else knows.” He snagged the nearest tart and, irrespective of how hot it must have been, swallowed half of it. “You know how Rebecca is, Leo. She’s pretty damn self-contained.” He took another bite and
the tart was gone. “Not one of those people who put their personal business in the street, if you know what I mean, and I know you do.”

“So nobody down here knows anything about the specifics. Anything about what was going on that required a leave from her job.”

He accessed the second tart. “The rumor mill says she’s having problems with the hubby.” In two quick bites the pastry disappeared. “I can tell you this; she was taking long lunches on Mondays and Fridays. If you ask me, they were getting some professional help for whatever problems they were having.”

“Why do you say that?”

“She alluded to it once.” He wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “She was sitting on the wall outside reading over some folded-up paperwork. I asked her, you know just conversationally, how things were going. She said she had some homework to do before today’s session.”

“Session, huh?”

“That’s what she said.”

“You’re right. Sounds like marriage counseling.”

Vaughn nodded. “And those people are always giving the happy couple these vitriolic little assignments to complete between sessions. You know…” He raised his voice an octave and a half to Julia Child’s pitch: “‘I want both of you to write down the five things you most detest about one another. We’ll share the next time we see each other.’” He ended with one of the waxiest grins I’d ever seen.

I laughed aloud, despite my mood and the cold, empty feeling in the pit of my stomach. “You sound like you’ve had some experience in these matters of the heart.”

He made a disgusted face. “I’ve been married five times, Leo. My head’s been shrunk more times than a virgin wool sweater.”

“But you’ve got no idea who they were seeing.”

“Nope,” he said. “I can tell you one thing, though. Coupla weeks after she started taking long lunches, I asked her if maybe she couldn’t bring me back a sandwich or something. She showed up with this great big belly-bomb of a sandwich.”

“Yeah?”

“I know where the sandwich came from.”

“Where?”

“You know, that place with ‘Corned Beef’ painted in red on the side of the building. Up there close to the freeway.”

“Mike’s Market.”

He nodded. “And there’s absolutely no place to park in that frigging neighborhood. Anyplace you could legally put the car would cost you more than the damn sandwich.”

“Rebecca’s a very frugal girl,” I said. “That wouldn’t work for her.”

“So you have to figure she was already parked when she went for the grub.”

“You’re thinking those big office towers across the street.”

“That’s what I’m betting,” he said as he dusted crumbs from his gloves and pushed himself to his feet. “Nice talking at you, Leo,” he said. “But I’ve got some more bowel sections waiting for me downstairs.”

I didn’t offer to shake hands.

The Metropolitan Park Towers sat at awkward angles to one another on opposite sides of Minor Avenue, as if a skyhook had dropped them in place and wherever they landed was where they stayed. A quick perusal of one building’s directory made it apparent that if Rebecca had been seeing someone in these the buildings, I was going to need a lot more information. If I was doing the math correctly, between the two buildings there were somewhere in the vicinity of four hundred tenants, many with remarkably uninformative company names like Internal Solutions Corporation, which as far as I was concerned could have involved anything from integrated business software to gastrointestinal distress.

The rain had momentarily relented, so I bought myself a latte and a cheese Danish from the Starbucks on the ground floor and repaired to the outdoor plaza to contemplate my next move. I used the brown Starbucks paper napkin to dry the bench and then sat there under steel wool skies asking myself how I could get a line on Rebecca’s marriage guru.

When a long-term relationship breaks down, people often feel the need to take a side and, while Rebecca and I still had a few mutual friends, most of the people we used to spend time with had chosen one camp or the other. Add that to the fact that couples tend to hang out with other couples and it was safe to say that the diameter of my social circle was considerably smaller than it had been a few years back.

By the time the Danish disappeared and the dregs of the coffee were cold, I had a pretty good idea what I was going to do. I hated the idea to the very depths of my childish soul, but I was going to do it anyway.

If anyone other than her shrink knew what was going on in Rebecca’s life, it would be Monica Muller. They’d been friends and confidants since grammar school. It had always been my understanding that they shared whatever girlie secrets girlies shared with other girlies.

First problem was that Monica and I had never been terribly fond of one another. Nothing personal really, just something about being rivals for Rebecca’s time and attention. Second was the fact that Monica had gotten remarried since I’d last been in contact with her, and I had no idea what her new last name was.

I did, however, have a pretty good idea of how I might find out, so I got on the horn and starting making calls to the other side of the great social divide. Took me nearly an hour and half and a dozen calls to people who were no longer speaking to me before I worked my way to Judy Lombardi.

Judy refused to give me Monica’s number but said she’d leave her a message saying that I’d been trying to get in touch. I gave her my contact information and told her to say that Iris hadn’t heard from Rebecca for over a week and had asked me to look for her. She said she would. I told her it was an emergency.

I was on the phone trying to come up with a number for Fran and Larry Fitzgerald when call waiting began to vibrate. Number blocked. I thumbed the button.

“Leo Waterman,” I said.

“Judy said you called.” Her tone held all the warmth of a walk-in freezer.

In a perverse way, it was nice not to feel compelled to go through all the long-time-no-see bullshit that precedes
getting around to what it was you really called about, so I dispensed with the niceties and got right to it. I told her about Iris Duval coming to my house. About Rebecca’s leave of absence. About being unable to contact Brett Ward. I was prepared to keep talking until she either came around or hung up on me, but that was all it took.

“I haven’t been able to reach her either,” Monica said. “I’ve been worried.”