Cape Disappointment (8 page)

“Think about it.”

“I already thought about it.”

“They were nude, dear.”

“Oh.”

“She was standing nude in somebody's face, probably some drooling male who wasn't her husband.”

Having Kathy solve the mystery made me feel even more stupid than normal. “I thought you had to circulate.”

“I
did
circulate. I came back to save you. It's a woman's thing, honey. And I know what you're thinking. It
is
dyed and those aren't her real breasts.”

“No, I wasn't thinking that at all. I was thinking she called you Katie.”

“Don't worry. She can't get my goat. I'm willing to wager that the whole monologue she gave you was salted with sexual innuendo. Let me guess. Her first experience with a boy. Lesbian experiments with roommates. All the titillating details of her sexual past disguised as her life story? Tell me that's not what she did, because I wouldn't want to think that while I was over there working, she was over here turning your brain to mush. Tell me that didn't happen.”

“Of course it didn't.”

I HEARD SOMEBODY PICKING THE LOCK
before I saw the shadow of a man in a cowboy hat crouching on my front porch, his steel picks gnawing at the brass locks. The thought of a home invasion frightened a lot of people, but my experience in the Seattle Police Department told me most bad guys broke into homes they knew were empty.

He'd been knocking for some time, at both the front and back doors, had even tapped at the side windows along the driveway like a drunk locked out of a party. Now, while he fiddled with the locks, the streetlight threw his shadow on the window next to the front door. He unlocked the doorknob lock with little trouble but had to slave away at the dead bolt for several minutes before sliding the bolt. Weaponless, I sat in the dark and watched him pick his way into my haven. I was in a stupor, drugged on my own feelings, or lack of same, too enervated, careworn, and just generally whipped to answer the door, to tell him to go away, or to fight him off. I'd been alone for days. Maybe I wanted the company. I was watching
Groundhog Day,
my fifth viewing in succession.

When the front door inched open, he had a gun in his hand. It was early evening, autumn, and the only light in the room was radiating out of the television like a small sun from behind a cloud. I froze the picture as Bill Murray and the groundhog drove the mayor's pickup truck
off a bluff to their conjoined deaths. “Hurry up and get in here. I'm trying to watch Bill Murray kill himself.”

The rim of his cowboy hat edged around the door. “It's me. Don't shoot. It's your old friend Snake Slezak.”

“You're the one with the gun.”

“You didn't answer, so I …”

“Broke in? You used to be faster working a lock.”

“You got a new dead bolt. The new ones are hard.”

“It's got six tumblers. They told me nobody could open it.”

“How the hell do you expect any visitors if you keep getting new locks?”

“Most of my visitors don't pick the lock.”

“I've been phoning for a couple of days. You never answer.”

“That's right. I don't.”

I pushed a button on the remote and watched Bill Murray and the groundhog crash their stolen pickup truck and burst into flame. I laughed a loud and wicked laugh.

“Thomas, are you okay?”

“Fit as a fiddle.”

Same as me, Elmer Slezak made a living as a private investigator. We'd worked together before, but in the main, our business dealings did not intertwine. We'd been friends for years, and while I didn't subscribe to all of his tactics, he'd taught me valuable lessons about interview technique, and he kept up on the latest electronic gadgetry. I tried to live by a strict moral code and rarely violated my principles, yet there were two people on the planet who knew enough about my past that they could get me tried for murder. One of those was Kathy and the other was Elmer Slezak. While I didn't think I deserved a prison sentence and neither did either of them, going by the letter of the law, and given a strict judge, a bumbling defense attorney, and a typical jury ad-dlepated from too much television, it was not unthinkable that I could receive a quick trial and a long sentence. I knew an equal number of secrets about Elmer, though none as dramatic, and had shared a few of what I considered to be the funnier ones with my wife, which was probably the reason Kathy regarded our friendship with distrust.

While I fed my indolence with the electronic ether, I was vaguely aware that Snake had begun touring the house like a strange dog who'd
been let in by accident. He deposited a sheaf of papers next to my feet on the end of the couch and continued to clomp around in his high-heeled cowboy boots, sniffing through the house as if I'd hidden a ten-dollar hooker somewhere.

The home I'd shared with Kathy for the past several years was a one-story grandma-style house with two bedrooms, an overlarge old-fashioned kitchen with a bay window looking out onto our driveway, and a daylight basement that had been turned into a mother-in-law apartment we rented out to an engineering student from the University of Washington. Though remodeled and updated, it was the same basement Kathy had rented from me.

I was aware that the place was a mess and that I hadn't showered in days, that I was wearing pajama bottoms, grungy socks, and an old sweatshirt speckled with pinpoint holes and traces of my last meal. My hair was matted and my face felt as if I'd been eating greasy chicken wings for three days.

Snake caught me sniffing one of my armpits as he came back and stood in the doorway. “Mind if I disarm?”

“You planning to stay?”

“I'd like to sit down, but I can't do it with all this metal on me.”

“Disarm.”

“We were worried about you.”

“Who's we?”

“Everybody. The pope. The vice president of the United States. Really. He called the Maddox headquarters to ask after you.”

“The vice president is a moron.”

“I see you're in a good mood.” He laid three revolvers on the coffee table in front of the sofa. I knew he still had at least one weapon somewhere on his person, because Snake never disarmed completely, not if he could help it. He probably had a derringer behind the silver world championship bull-riding belt buckle he was never without.

Snake and I were a study in contrasts. He was small and wiry, what some would call scrawny, and as close to a true paranoid as you could get outside of a straitjacket, while I was optimistic and living a life that was, until recently, filled with sunshine. Where he looked for flaws, I saw the good in people. I was tall and angular, well muscled from pumping iron in my makeshift weight room in the garage. I had never
seen Snake strip down to anything less than the long underwear he wore all year; when Kathy saw him in the underwear she said he looked like a dead chicken in a laundry sack. I had a history of amateur athletics and spent my spare time with friends or reading at home, while he had a history of bull riding, cigarettes, alcohol, wild women, and homegrown cannabis. I was a lifelong teetotaler, while he had been a drunk until a couple of years ago. He cursed like a longshoreman and believed in armament “in case he needed to shoot somebody on short notice.” He carried as many guns as he could conceal on his person, while I no longer carried anything more lethal then a fountain pen. Despite our differences, we did a lot of laughing together, sometimes too much.

As he settled onto the sofa and propped his cowboy boots on the coffee table, he let out a couple of grunts that were more bovine than human. He knew Kathy didn't want his boots on the table. I said nothing. “You been home all week?” he asked.

“Far as I remember.”

“Having trouble with your memory?”

“Not that I recall.”

“Probably a lot of things you'd rather forget.”

“A few.”

“I
have
been calling.”

“Lot of people been calling.”

“You going to keep watching that damn movie all night?”

“It's on some sort of psychotropic loop. I can't seem to get away from it.”

“Mind if I watch with you?”

I shrugged.

We hadn't been together very long when Snake spotted my collection of movies neatly cataloged in a bookcase, along with about four hundred books. “Hey. You've got
Last of the Mohicans.
Mind if we watch that?”

“Help yourself.”

He inserted the Michael Mann flick. “You don't mind, do you?”

“I already know how this one turns out.”

While he tinkered with my player, I glanced at the stack of newspaper
clippings and computer-generated news reports he'd brought. For the first time in days I felt like reaching out with a purpose. The top article had caught my eye: STILL NO CLUES IN SHEFFIELD S DEATH. EIGHT PIECES OF WRECKAGE RETRIEVED. I didn't know whether it was my inertia or my unwillingness to show somebody else how totally at sea I was with regard to the news of the world, but I did not budge.

After the opening credits began, Snake said, “You been sitting here in the dark all week?”

“It hasn't been a week, has it?”

“Prett'n near. Been eating?”

“Dinner last night. Or the night before.”

“I'll fix you something later. You don't mind if I stay the night, do you?”

“You got an angry husband on your tail?”

“I haven't had anything like that happen in … and that Heatherton woman don't count. She told me she was separated.”

“Wasn't she the one with the glass eye?”

“You got a memory for other people's infirmities. Thanks for coming to pick me up that night.”

“What's going on tonight?”

“They're fumigating my building. Cockroaches. They say it's all right to stay there, but I'm thinking I need to be gone for at least twenty-four hours.”

“I don't mind, but I'm keeping pretty erratic hours.”

“I'm just glad to have a roof over my head.”

We watched the movie for a few minutes. I knew there was no cockroach-spraying program at his apartment house. He'd come to check on me and was going to hang around until he was certain I wouldn't kill myself. It suddenly occurred to me that I'd been hypnotized by a movie in which Bill Murray killed himself dozens of times, that I'd been watching it for days on end. Was I exploring the possibility of my own suicide? Or was I indulging in somebody else's misery to put my own into perspective? Or was Bill Murray's conversion what interested me? I'd never been in a blacker mood, had never had so many things in my life go so wrong in such a short span.

“You been keeping up with the news?” Snake asked.

“Not really.”

“I brought you some clippings from
The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal.
There's a few from
The Seattle Times
and the
Post-Intelligencer,
too.” When he realized I wasn't going to respond, he added, “So how are you doing? Really.”

“Ducky.”

“Don't bullshit me. You look like you been dragged through a pig farm behind a leaky rendering truck. That kitchen looks like there was a food fight. But hey, it's only natural. I mean, it might take a year just to assimilate what happened. And hell, it's been what? A week? You want the truth, if what happened to you happened to me, I'd go back to the baby.”

“Heroin?”

“Or hard liquor. Probably both. I can't say I know how you feel, because I never had anybody like Kathy to lose. Nobody even close to her caliber. But I'm here for you, man. I'm here for you.”

“Thanks.”

“No, really. Anything you want, I'll do it.” He picked up a .44 Magnum off the coffee table and waved it at the television. I wasn't sure if he was trying to be funny or if he actually meant he was prepared to shoot me in the event I wanted to die and didn't have the guts to pull the trigger myself. Given the right circumstances, I had no doubt Elmer would shoot almost anybody— nobody hauled around that many guns without a secret hankering to use them. But then, there were other ways to kill myself. The fact that I could think of three of them right off the top of my head told me suicide had been closer to the surface than I realized. Maybe it was a good thing Snake had showed up.

“You mind putting the gun down?”

“Kathy never did like me, did she?”

“She liked you.”

“You don't have to be making excuses. It doesn't bother me that she thought I was a scoundrel. I
am
a scoundrel. And Kathy was sweet. It's only natural she would be repulsed by me.”

“She was never re—”

“In a funny way, I believe what caused the whole issue between her and me was she thought if you hung around me long enough, I would corrupt your ethics. There was never any chance I would corrupt your
ethics. If anything, it was the other way around. You make me a better person. You really do, Thomas.”

We watched the movie. After a while, I nodded off. It had been some time since I'd slept more than a couple of hours at a stretch, and my nervous system was in a netherworld. When I woke up, Snake was still engrossed in the saga of Hawkeye. I tried not to stare at the pile of newspaper clippings.