Rainy City (7 page)

On Tuesday evening, Mary Dawn Crowell’s phone number in Bellingham had indeed received an incoming call from Tacoma. Melissa had phoned collect, otherwise we never would have found out where she had been. She had the loot for a bus ticket but not for a phone call. Somebody on the other end of the line made a computer hookup and told Smithers it had originated at a pay phone on Pacific Avenue. Melissa and her aunt had gabbed a little less than one minute.

I recognized the address of the pay phone. It was a few blocks from the Greyhound station in Tacoma. Great. A pay phone and a leased car. People were covering things like cats in the garden.

While he still had them on the phone, I asked Smithers to ask his contact to trace the number in the ad Kathy had showed me. I had called the number earlier in the morning, reached a recorded message and hung up. It turned out to be a phone line in the Taltro complex in Georgetown. Everything was ending up at Taltro.

On a hunch, Smithers phoned the dicks downtown and inquired about Julius Caesar Holder. Furrows broke across the smooth fatness of his brow and he grew somber, almost gloomy as he listened.

When he hung up, he swiveled toward me and said, “The guy used to be a boxer. He’s trouble. He killed a guy in the ring. A private eye down in San Diego crossed swords with him a coupla years back and hasn’t been heard from since. No body. No traces. No nothin’. The snooper’s widow stirred some politicians up and accused Holder, but nothing ever came of it. I would stay away from the guy.”

“Does he always carry a piece?”

“They didn’t say anything about that.”

“Get an address on him?”

“He moves around a lot. He got in an argument with some woman in Chinatown a few months back. Slapped her silly. A coupla of off-duty dicks stepped in and he knocked ‘em both through a plate glass window. The boys were a little on the drunk-and- rowdy side, so it was hard to build a case on Holder. I guess he’s always had woman trouble. They say he’s married and divorced the same woman five or six times. Cuckoo.”

“That sucker is almost as mean as I am.” Smithers exploded into laughter.

“Met a great gal,” said Smithers, walking me to the door. “I found this place that’s just incredible for meeting real women.”

“A club or something?”

“It’s called Overeaters Anonymous.”

He was serious. I guess if he was hunting for the reincarnation of his ex-wife, that was the place to hunt. It was my turn to laugh, but I did it after Smithers had closed the door.

It took ten minutes to cycle to the Hopewell Clinic. Burgling the Hopewell would best be done during the next nuclear war. It squatted on one of the busiest blocks on Capitol Hill. Across the street stood a gay bar, open and overflowing with noisy crowds until all hours. Behind the clinic was a well-lit parking lot, and fronting the lot, with a clear view of the backside of the clinic, stood a four-story apartment house. Cater-cornered from the clinic was a bustling all-night grocery store.

On its own, the clinic posed no problems. A converted mansion, it was splintered into offices and meeting areas. I could have picked a lock or jimmied a window in a minute. The hitch was, I would have to be invisible to pull it off. Perhaps if I suited up in a uniform, a police uniform… I’d used the ploy before, but somehow I wasn’t that desperate. Not yet.

I got home at one, soaked to the skin from the rain. The coffee-colored van was still slotted across the street, but it had been moved several parking spaces farther north. It was impossible to see through the dark windshield. I dragged out a pair of battered Bushnell’s, focused them, jotted down the plate number, and phoned it to Smithers. Twenty minutes later, Smithers returned my call and advised me that it belonged to one of my neighbors, a guy who lived six houses down. I wondered why I had never noticed it before.

I began simmering a stew, fooled with the weights and a jump rope in the spare bedroom for an hour, skimmed the afternoon paper and then dipped into a piping-hot tub. On cue, the back door opened. I could tell who it was by the footsteps. I had just gotten the .45 hidden under a towel when she came around the corner and sat on the throne, sorting her rain-soaked mail.

“You botched the stew,” said Kathy, without looking at me. “The meat’s burned.”

She had changed her clothes. She wore a pantsuit, a frilly white blouse and a black string bow tie. She looked very much the way I expected a lady lawyer to look.

When I had arranged the washcloth in a satisfactory formation, I spoke. “How’dit go downtown? You guys get an injunction?”

“We didn’t get anything.” She looked up and frowned when she noticed the washcloth. Pulled back into a severe bun, her hair glistened like a lump of shiny wet coal.

“What do you mean?”

“Burton chickened out. He’s afraid of his father-in- law. He thinks Angus will run off to Brazil and take Angel if he makes any legal moves.” Kathy shook her head and scanned the rest of her mail.

“That’s foolish.”

“I know. But he’s such a loving man, it’s hard to get ticked off at him.”

“There’s a difference,” I said, “between being loving and being a doormat.”

“What’d you find out about Melissa?”

“That she phoned her aunt last Tuesday and was expecting to be in Bellingham Wednesday morning with her daughter.”

“With Angel?”

“That’s what she told her aunt. She phoned from Tacoma. She know anybody in Tacoma?”

Kathy hummed and thought about it. “Not that I can recall.”

“She still might turn up on her own.”

“I noticed tonight’s paper on the table. Read it yet?” “The reward was there again. Same wording and phone number as before.”

“Maybe we should dial it and see who answers.”

“It’s a recording. Leave your name and number and they’ll get back to you. The phone is in the Taltro building downtown.”

“It must be Melissa’s father.”

“Yeah. I didn’t see any point in leaving a number. It would be awfully hard to worm information out of someone on the phone. Besides, the guy is obviously looking for her himself.”

“Oh, Thomas. I want you to talk to her father and see if you can get him to give Angel back. Would you do that for me? Burton’s so pathetic without her. He’s cleaned up the whole house and he’s dragged out a collection of her toys and spread them across the living room as if she’s been playing with them. It’s pathetic.”

Reviewing the one snatch I’d seen of Angus Crowell, commandeering the steering wheel of his Cadillac as-if it were a chariot from hell, I deliberated. I said, “You think he’ll listen to me?”

Kathy pursed her lips. “Can’t you try?”

“Sure. If you bop over to the Hopewell Clinic with me.” “The what?”

“The Hopewell. On Capitol Hill. Melissa wrote a check to the joint a couple of weeks back. They do cut-rate counseling and psychiatric work for the downtrodden, I thought you and I could go in and be downtrodden.”

“Us?”

“All I want is a quick peek into their files.”

Kathy clucked her tongue and looked at me reprovingly. “Thomas! How can you be like that?”

“You want to find Melissa? Tell you what. I know she might be in Tacoma. What do you say we drive down and start knocking on doors with a Polaroid of her? That might take about five years, providing we start within the hour and brown-bag all our meals.”

“We could tell them who we are.”

“No social worker or psychologist is going to spill anything to a detective. Or to anybody.”

She sighed, squinted at my carefully arranged washcloth, and chewed her lips as she decided. “Do we dress up for this?”

“I do,” I said. ?

SHE DRESSED LIKE A WHORE. IT WAS FUNNY AND RIDICULOUS and interesting all at the same time. She wore tall, shiny, black leather boots and Levi’s so tight I doubted she could sit in them. Over her blouse, she wore an open, waist-length fur coat. It had taken a passel of dead rabbits to make it. The perfect chippy.

Oh, we were going to stop traffic tonight. Kathy’s teased hair ballooned around her head like an enormous black helmet. She was out of makeup downstairs, she had to be; it was all daubed onto her face. Her cheeks were tinted ruby, scarlet and a tinge of cinnamon, her eyelids heavily white, spattered in indigo. Her eyelashes were bat wings. She was simply not recognizable as Kathy Birchfield.

I wore a tee shirt and a pair of dirty jeans reserved exclusively for working on my truck. She made me take a rakish-looking golf cap she had surprised me with last Christmas. To cut the wind, I threw on a worn-out leather Air Force flight jacket.

While Kathy buffed her nose and played with her hair in the rearview mirror, I tilted the seat forward and stashed my loaded .45 into the space between the gas tank and the seat springs. In all probability, I would not use the pistol, but I wanted it handy.

First we drove by the Nadisky household in Ballard. Kathy wanted me to speak to Burton, talk him into standing up for his rights. The house was dark and no one answered the door. Burton was undoubtedly down at the public library brushing up on his Emily Dickinson. I said as much.

“Give the kid a break,” urged Kathy, popping a wad of bubble gum. “We can’t all be brave, hey Cisco?” “Hey, Pancho.”

The Hopewell was closing for the day when we strode up the front steps together. An old woman wearing a bitter face crossed our path in the doorway, muttering to herself. She looked at my flight jacket disgustedly and said, “You merchant marines are all alike. Sailors!”

The hallway was bare wood and gritty, grime tracked in from a day of the downtrodden. The plaster on the walls was cracked. One window was chipped and scarred.

“I’m afraid we’re closing for the day,” said a woman at the end of the hallway, as she stabbed a key into a door. She wore enormous tortoiseshell glasses. Her arms were burdened with files, folders, papers and books. She maneuvered unsnapped galoshes like snowshoes.

“We sure need your help,” said Kathy, enunciating around her wad of bubble gum. “My husband here don’t know who he is. And when he does know who he is he thinks he’s someone else, if ya know what I mean.”

“We’re closing for the night. I’ll give you one of our cards.”

“I mean, he’s got like three, four, six different people inside him. Really. Right now he’s a bum named Joe Blooey. I hadda haul him away from the dumpster at Safeway. I mean…” She snapped the gum deftly inside her mouth. “Can ya help him? He thought he was a jet pilot two days ago. They didn’t stop him till he taxied a 747 right out onto the runway at Sea-Tac. I wouldn’t be so worried, but sometimes he thinks he’s like that Ted Bundy, you know, the mass murderer? Buries gals up in the mountains? Oh, don’t worry. He ain’t dangerous now. Now he’s Joe Blooey. Now he’s so stupid he hardly knows what we’re saying.”

I grinned moronically.

The woman in the tortoiseshells squinted at me, shoved her glasses back up onto her nose and unlocked the door she had just locked. Switching on the yellowish lights, she ushered us in and bade us sit together on a ramshackle sofa.

“My name is Ms. Gunther,” she said, primly. I’m a psychologist. I work here at the clinic two days a week.” She eyeballed me. I grinned my best Jack Nicholson grin, not caring if a trail of saliva snaked down my chin.

Her gray eyes radiated visions of treatises, newspaper articles, magazine spreads, a book and perhaps movie rights. Perhaps, one day, her own syndicated column. “How do you know he has different personalities?”

“Cause I seen him change,” said Kathy. “He changes three, four times a day. His daddy used to beat on him. That’s what started it, I guess. He used to get these headaches. Then one day he thinks he’s this Dr. Richards, a gynecologist. I come home and he’s got some woman in these stirrup things.”

Ms. Gunther frantically grabbed a stenographer’s pad and a pen out of a desk drawer. “What are your names?”

“Ixnay,” said Kathy, masticating her wad of chicle loudly.

“Pardon me?”

“Ixnay on the amesnay.” She jabbed her thumb in my direction. She peeled off the wrapper on another block of bubble gum and popped it into my mouth, a mother feeding her child. “Maybe we better do some of this amenay usinessbay omewhereelsesay? Huh? Some people get real upsetnay about it.”

“Oh,” said Ms. Gunther, eyeing me warily, as if I might metamorphose into a full-blown madman in front of her. “Sure. Where would you like to…”

“Maybe if we left him here and went into another room? I hate to move him once he’s settled this way. Sometimes it starts him acting up.”

“Acting up?”

“That Undybay person is hard to control.”

“Oh.”

At the door, Ms. Gunther peered back at me and paused. “It’s okay,” said Kathy. “Long as nothing disturbs him, he’ll sit that way for hours.”

“Fascinating,” Ms. Gunther remarked. “Absolutely fascinating.”

As far as I could ascertain, only the three of us were left in the building. Kathy’s loud footsteps were clearly audible as they walked down the hallway. I was counting on those loud boots of hers to signal the alarm when they came back.

Two gray, paint-chipped file cabinets stood behind the desk in the corner. The first cabinet was unlocked and didn’t contain much of interest, primarily pamphlets and magazine reprints categorized according to topics. The indexed titles read like rock albums. Grief. Weight Loss. Depression. Holiday Blues.

I wasn’t much good at locks and the second cabinet was a bitch to pick. The top two drawers belonged to a Dr. Weaver. The bottom two to a number of others, including Ms. Gunther. I flipped through the folders as quickly as I could, scanning hundreds of names. “Nadisky” did not appear.

I blew almost three minutes in an adjoining room, picking the lock on a file cabinet. Nothing but financial information and bookkeeping records.

It wasn’t until I had roosted on the couch again to wait for Kathy and the psychologist, that it occurred to me to riffle through the stacks of papers and files Ms. Gunther had abandoned on the desk top.

This was it. El Dorado! The third file was a manila folder labeled “Nadisky.” I tried to speed-read it, but the process was aggravating. She had only sketched her thoughts. To make matters worse, Ms. Gunther’s penmanship could have been improved by a bird fresh from an ink well.