Chump Change (6 page)

I stopped at The Two Bells Bar and Grill on the way home. The meter maids in that part of town ride Segways and eat their young, so I grudgingly stuffed my debit card into the parking meter thing and waited about twenty minutes for the piece-of-shit machine to spit out a parking permit. Anything in the private sector that worked that frigging badly would be gone in an instant.

Two Bells owner Jeff Lee cleaned glasses and sympathized with my grousing while I wolfed down a couple of his excellent cheeseburgers and swilled a beer or two. By the time I pulled into my own driveway, it was damn near dark, and I was beginning to yawn.

I live in about half the downstairs of the house. The maid service cleans upstairs once a month or so, but I seldom ascend to such lofty domains. Whereas my old man was a public figure, and thus required a lot of entertaining space, everybody with whom I’m close would fit into his former office, with plenty of room to spare.

Since I came into the family pile, I’ve outsourced a bunch of the things I used to do for myself. I occasionally feel a bit guilty about it, but make it a point not to dwell on the subject. I don’t clean up after myself or tend to the landscaping anymore. Those Magnificent Maids show up on Tuesdays at the crack of dawn and go through the place like weevils. Kenji Yamada and his sons put in an appearance every ten days or so to spruce up the lawns and landscaping. What can I say? I don’t have to . . . so I don’t.

I still cook for myself upon occasion and
always
do my own laundry. I admit it: The laundry fetish is more or less symbolic. Something inside me needs to personally perform at least one of the thankless tasks of day-to-day existence, as a means of proving, beyond doubt, that I’m not the spoiled rich kid some people think.

I was moving my second load from the washer to the dryer when the doorbell rang. Just after nine
P.M
. A tad late in the day for the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and
I sure as hell wasn’t expecting company. Even curiouser, I’d closed and locked the gate behind myself when I got home from The Two Bells a couple of hours ago, so whoever was at my door wanted something bad enough to scale the wall and hoof it all the way up the driveway to the house.

On my way to the front hall, I snagged my revolver from my desk drawer, checked the load, and stuffed it into the back of my pants. By the time a working private eye gets to be my age, he’s dealt with a thousand or so divorces and custody battles and has made himself an enemy or three. Some people just don’t get over it. “Better safe than sorry” is my motto.

In my father’s time, there was a peephole way up high, just to the right of the door. He could stand on a little step inside the closet and see who was darkening his front porch. As I recall, the aperture made everybody look a bit like Gilbert Gottfried. When I renovated the downstairs of the house last year, I had the crew install something a bit more contemporary . . . a twelve-camera video surveillance system. Runs off motion sensors. If a mouse farts in the backyard, it’s recorded for posterity.

I pulled open the hall closet, touched the button for camera number two, and watched as the screen blinked to life. It was a young man. Under thirty, curly black hair and what would have been a nice clean profile, if it wasn’t for the enormous purple knot decorating the left side of his head. Took a second, but eventually my brain bulb snapped on. The kiddie cop. The one I’d punched in the head the other night.

I left the security system on, and pulled open the big front door.

“I’m . . . ah . . . Keith Taylor. I was—” he stammered.

I cut him off. “I know who you are. The question is what the hell do you want?” Before he could answer, the rest of it spilled out of me.
“
Cause if you’re looking for some kind of absolution, I suggest you try the Catholic church up the street.”

He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “I’m suspended,” he said.

“You oughta be,” I said quickly. “Because of you, a man’s dead.”

Right away, I didn’t like the way that sounded. Something a bit too self-righteous to be coming out of
my
mouth. Nobody with my record had any reason to talk.

As was my unfortunate habit, I made things worse by shutting the door in his face. When I reached into the closet, intending to shut down the monitor, I expected to see the back of him heading dejectedly back to his car. I could have lived with that . . . easy. But no . . . he hadn’t moved; he was still standing there on the front porch staring at the ancient alder planks. I heaved a sigh and cracked open the door.

“What is it you want, kid?”

“I didn’t mean to kill anybody,” he blurted.

“When it comes to life and death, kid, your intentions don’t matter.”

“He was a burglar,” the kid began. “He broke into that house.”

The kid was trying to sell me the same crap he’d unsuccessfully been trying to sell himself, with much the same result. I could tell. I had lots of firsthand experience with the art of self-delusion.

“He was just a poor, broke-down soul,” I said softly.

The kid stopped studying his shoes and met my gaze. “He said your name.”

I hadn’t realized he’d been close enough to hear. Couldn’t see any reason to deny it now, though. “Yeah,” I said. “He did.”

“How’d he know your name?” the kid wanted to know.

“It’s a long story.”

We stood there in silence for what must have been a full minute. Him on one side of the threshold, me on the other. Finally, I pulled the door all the way open.

“You might as well come in,” I said.

He followed me into the back of the house. Sat in the kitchen while I finished up the laundry and tried to get a handle on my feelings. I’m usually good at putting things behind me. At moving on and letting the past be the past. Call it what you will, but it’s just the way I am. I get over things. I could spend a lot of time feeling bad about how my old man came by all the dough. But I don’t. That was then; this is now. I was a kid. Whatever the dirty deeds, they had nothing to do with me. I just got lucky, that’s all.

This thing with Gordo. That was something different. I was having trouble throwing that one out the window. I could feel all the
coulda
s, the
woulda
s
,
and the
shoulda
s gnawing at my insides. Somebody
shoulda
told him that maybe he wanted to try something with training wheels before jumping on a full-dress Harley. Maybe that
woulda
changed everything.
Coulda
ended up completely different, if I’d only . . . yadda, yadda. Let the flogging begin.

It was damn near eleven thirty by the time I’d finished telling him the story, over whiskey and bologna sandwiches. I slid the dishes into the sink, where the maids would probably find them before they petrified. I had my back to him when he asked.

“What do you figure he was doing out there anyway?”

I wiped my hands with a dish towel and thought it over. My brain kept running the movie of how his back had looked.

“He rented that house, a while back. I think maybe he was trying to come back to the last place he could remember being happy,” I said.

The notion proved to be a conversation stopper. For the next couple of minutes, both of us drifted off into our own little worlds.

“All I ever wanted to be was a cop,” he slurred, finally.

I’d been so lost in my own thoughts, I hadn’t noticed the kid was sloshed.

“Maybe you better start making other plans, kid. They’re gonna hang you out to dry on this one, sure as God made little green apples.”

I probably shouldn’t have said it, but it was true. Either the kid was going to be the scapegoat for Gordy’s death or Lewis County was going to take the rap, and somehow, I just couldn’t see the county fessing up to anything.

He didn’t want to hear it, of course. He was still young and green enough to think life was supposed to be fair. That good intentions count. That good prevails over evil and all that rot. He pushed himself indignantly to his feet, fumbled around in his pockets until he came out with his car keys.

I reached out and snatched them from his fingers.

“Top of the stairs. First room on the right.”

He started to protest. I waved him off.

“You’re way too drunk to drive, kid,” I said. “You’ve got enough problems without adding a DUI to the mix. The maids leave the room ready to go. Go sleep it off. We’ll talk about things in the morning.”

The way I figured it, if a night’s sleep didn’t bring him back to reality, the seventy-five-dollar parking ticket he was going to find on his windshield for not having the correct zone parking sticker should be a real eye-opener.

I was on my second cup of coffee when he came tottering into the kitchen with his shoes in his hand. “Sorry about barging in here like that last night,” he offered.

I gestured toward the table. “Have a seat. How do you take your coffee?”

“Don’t drink coffee,” he said, as he slid into a chair.

Which, in Seattle, is like saying you don’t exhale. The place runs on coffee. Morning, noon, and night. If you fell in a manhole, you’d land on an espresso stand.

“So . . . whadda you drink in the morning?” I asked.

“Hot chocolate usually,” he said.

I did good. I didn’t laugh.

We settled on a Diet Coke that had been in the fridge since the Eisenhower administration. He took a big pull, set it on the table, and said, “I guess I just felt like I had to
do
something,” he said, around a belch.

The doing something about Gordy part wasn’t a subject I much wanted to think about, so I asked him about himself. In my experience, most people are just dying to tell their stories; all you’ve gotta do is get them started. The kid was no exception. He was twenty-seven. Born and raised in some godforsaken burg in Nebraska. Dad passed away when he was eight. Mom still lives there, as does an elder brother.

Graduated from Iowa State, with a degree in criminal justice. What with the economy and all, finding a job was a whole lot harder than he’d been led to believe by the school’s placement office, so he took advantage of the U.S. Air Force’s new two-year enlistment offer and did a deuce in Texas as an MP, which made him want to be a cop even more, so when he got out, he went back on the job hunt and came up with the gig out on the peninsula. He’d been there about five months, and was just about to move out of his probationary period when the shit hit the fan the other night.

He finished the Coke, stifled another belch behind his hand, and stood up.

“Listen, kid—” I began.

“Keith,” he said. “My name is Keith.”

“Listen, Keith . . . you made a mistake. Everybody does. It’s the story of our species.” I shrugged. “Don’t let this define you. You’re young. Move on to whatever comes next in your life.” He still looked like a beaten puppy, so I tried to give him an out. “I have it on good authority that Gordy wasn’t long for this world. He was a very sick man. All you did was hasten the process a little.”

Ten seconds of silence ensued.

“I was scared,” he said, finally.

“Know the feeling well,” I said, unabashedly.

“Really?”

“All the time,” I assured him.

I watched as he slipped his feet into his shoes. When he finished, he looked over at me. “I still feel like I’ve got to
do
something,” he said. “Apologize to his family. Put flowers on his grave . . . something.”

“First off, ki . . . Keith . . . we don’t know if he’s even got a family.”

“We need to find out, then.” He said it as if it had just occurred to him.

I wagged a stiff finger. “No, Keith . . .
you
need to find out.” When he didn’t say anything, I went on. “This was a guy who breezed in and out of my life in the space of two weeks. I don’t know a damn thing about him, except that he seemed like he was a nice guy, he had a bunch of money and real bad instincts for women.” I cut the air with the side of my hand. “And to tell you the truth, beyond that it’s absolutely none of my damn business.”

He said he understood. He didn’t, but at least he was being a big boy about it.

He thanked me for the hospitality again and started for the front door. I followed him out into the hall, turned off the security system, and opened the gate for him. Toodles.

He gave me a desultory nod, hunched his shoulders, and started hoofing it out toward the road. I locked the door behind him.

Ten minutes later, I was in a full froth, brushing my teeth like crazy, looking like a mad dog, when the doorbell rang. I sighed, decided that whatever sorry-ass salesman was out there deserved me au naturel, and headed for the door.

I didn’t bother with the security cameras, I just yanked the door open and stood there, shirtless, with the toothbrush sticking out of my mouth at a jaunty angle.

The kid, again. “Somebody stole my car,” he bleated.