Seattle Noir (3 page)

We got out of my car and climbed the mossy concrete steps, but McKean held up a hand and paused to listen. From inside came a slow Native American drumbeat accompanying a male voice singing in a high pitch—a tremulous wail of indecipherable syllables punctuated now and then by unfamiliar consonants: a “tloo” here, a “t’say” there. McKean nodded in thoughtful recognition.

“Lushootseed,” he whispered.

“Lu-what?”

“The local dialect of the Salish language. Beautiful, isn’t it?”

I listened a moment, thinking McKean’s definition of beautiful and mine might vary by a bit, but enjoying the song until it ended with three strong drumbeats.

McKean rapped three times on the weather-beaten door and soon we were greeted by an old, gray, short, and almost toothless lady whose round wrinkled face broke into a broad gummy grin at the sight of McKean.

“Ah!” she cried in a tiny but vibrant voice. “You! After so much time. Welcome!”

She ushered us into a dim, cluttered front room, where a dilapidated couch was occupied by two mongrel dogs that appeared too tired to lift their heads let alone bark and, leaning forward in an overstuffed chair whose arms were losing their stuffing, Frank Squalco, holding a round tambourine-like drum in one hand and a leather-headed mallet in the other.

“Hui!”
he said, smiling up at my tall companion, who nodded a hello.

“Peyton McKean,” the old woman said. “I was teaching Franky a song to call the salmon home, and instead we called Franky’s old friend.”

She introduced herself to me as Clara Seaweed, then brought us Cokes on ice and offered McKean a comfortable rocking chair near the fireplace, relegating me to the only other seat available, a corner of the couch next to an almost hairless spotted mongrel. I sank into the mangy-smelling cushion with a set of rusty springs croaking.

“So,” said Frank, “what brings you here?”

“I came to discuss red tide poison,” replied McKean firmly.

“I know you did,” said Frank, his smile fading. He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, looking nervously from McKean to Clara as if realizing the only words possible in this room were truthful ones. He started without prompting.

“Shamans used to make a kind of potion from red tide.”

“How was that done?” asked McKean, perking up like a dog on a scent.

“Don’t know.”

“But you know something. I could see it on your face the other day.”

Frank looked at the floor. “Yeah. I know something.” He looked up at McKean and said, “Henry George knows how to make the poison.”

“Perhaps he’s our murderer,” I said, to a resounding silence.

“Naw,” said Frank. “He’s a harmless old geezer, part Muckleshoot and part Suquamish.”

“And all crazy,” interjected Clara. “Stays with folks on charity. Been under this roof a few times.”

“But he’s a real shaman,” said Frank. “Knows the old ways. Told me once, when I was a kid, about making red tide poison. I don’t remember much except you skim the pink foam off the water, then you make it into poison.”

“Where can we find this Henry George?” asked McKean.

“He sometimes stays down along the river in our village.”

“Village?” I said. “I didn’t see any Indian village down there.”

“Our village is gone,” said Squalco. “White folks burned us out in the 1890s—nothin’ left standing. Used to be across the street from where they’re building the new longhouse.”

“Or,” said Clara, “try upriver at Terminal 107. Our village was all along there, for a mile or more by the Duwamish riverbanks. You look for Henry anywhere in there. A lot of bushes and trees and places to camp.”

We left to search for Henry George, but first went to The Spud at Alki Beach on the west side of West Seattle to get some fish and chips and Cokes to go. At Herring’s House Park we ate lunch in the car to avoid a drizzle and then got out to find George. After some searching along trails in the wet undergrowth that paralleled a meandering loop of the main channel, we checked a culvert through which Puget Creek trickled into the Duwamish River and found the old man camped in a lean-to made of blue tarps.

“Poison?” he said bitterly when McKean explained our interest. “I got white man’s poison in me right now. Alcohol. Tide’s running against Duwamish people these days. We had it running our way a few years ago when Clinton signed a piece of paper saying Duwamish was a recognized tribe. Then Bush came along and crossed out every order Clinton made. Just like that. Swept us out like trash. A’yahos knows why.”

“A’yahos?” I asked, getting out a pen and notepad. “Who’s that?”

“The two-headed serpent god, like the river slithering first this way, then that way, with the tide. He brings strong medicine from the sea, but he can take away stuff too, like people’s lives. He’s part of the balance of nature. In, out, back, forth, everything moves in time to the tides. Someday the white man’s tide will go out.”

McKean scowled, impatient to learn what we’d come to find out. “Can you tell us,” he said, stooping to look George in the eye, “how to make red tide poison?”

The old man stared at McKean for a moment, then picked up a stick and poked at a little smoldering fire. “You take two canoes out on a calm day, towing one behind the other. You find some big eddy lines of the pinkest foam on the water. Then you take your paddle and skim the foam and put it in the second canoe until it’s full to the gunnels. Then you paddle somewhere people can’t see, like over on Muddy Island, and you mix the foam with sea water and some pieces of whale blubber.”

“Who can get whale blubber?” I asked.

“Indian people can get lots of stuff,” he said, flashing a gap-toothed grin. “After you soak up enough poison to make the blubber blood-red all the way to the middle, then you put it in a pot and add firewood ashes and heat it till it melts. Then you skim off the grease, and the water’s all dark red now. Then you dry it. It’s a blackish-red powder. Don’t taste like nothing. Don’t smell like nothing. Just poisons folks real good. Lotta work, though. Takes all the foam you can get into a boat to make a few doses. Takes a lotta time.”

“Assuming you’re working alone,” said McKean.

“Shamans always work alone. You don’t ask your mother to help you gather poison. She’d tell everyone.”

McKean questioned George further, but there was little else to be gleaned, especially as the old man sipped wine from a pint flask until his eyelids drooped and he lay down and fell asleep next to his cold fire.

Heading back along the footpath to the parking lot, we found our way blocked by a young Indian man. He was dressed in a long black leather coat, had his black hair braided on each side, wore a scowl on his otherwise handsome dark face, and, ominously, carried a woodsman’s hatchet.

“What you white folks want with Henry George?”

McKean said, “We’re here about a poisoning. You know anything?”

“Wouldn’t tell you if I did. You leave the old man alone.”

McKean sized up the young man. “What’s your name?”

“Won’t tell you that either. Now, you’d best move along.” He stepped aside to let us pass, pointing the way with his hatchet. He tailed us back to the lot, keeping his distance.

Nervous about his intentions, I hurried into my car and quickly fired the engine while McKean got in. As I drove away, the young man stopped beside a shiny black Dodge Ram pickup that hadn’t been there before, conversing sullenly with its occupant, a tall man silhouetted through a tinted windshield. I turned onto West Marginal Way and headed for downtown, slugging down some Coke to sooth a fear-parched throat. “Now what?” I asked.

McKean tapped his own Coke against mine in a mock toast and took a long pull. “Leave nothing but footprints,” he said, “and take nothing but pictures.” He held his cell phone so I could see the image on its screen. He’d snapped a photo of the man beside the pickup. “We’ll ask Frank to tell us who that is. Oh, and a bonus,” he said. “I got their license plate in the shot.”

Peyton McKean is, among other things, the inventor of a couple dozen DNA forensic tests, so he is pretty well connected for a man who doesn’t carry a detective’s badge. As I drove, he called an acquaintance who owed him a favor: Vince Nagumo of the Seattle FBI office. Within minutes, Nagumo had identified the owner of the pickup as Craig Show-alter, age thirty, of White Center. McKean asked him to look into the man’s background and Nagumo promised to get on it right away. I had another sip of Coke and then set it down in its cup holder.

“Do your lips tingle?” I asked McKean.

“I was hoping it was just the chill air,” replied McKean thoughtfully.

Adrenaline ran through me like an electric shock and I pulled to the side of the road. “Have we just been poisoned?” I asked. Without comment, McKean opened his door, put a finger down his throat and vomited. I followed suit, splattering the pavement on my side as well.

“That may be too little prevention, too late,” said McKean. “Depending on the dose. Can you drive, Fin?”

“To the hospital?”

“No. Take us to my labs, quickly.”

I floored the gas and he got on his phone. “Janet, get all the mouse antiserum together. Get it ready for injection into two patients.”

“There’s not enough blood in a mouse—” I began, but McKean interrupted.

“You can dilute antisera vastly. A little may go a long way.”

Panicky minutes followed as my car roared and McKean described the very symptoms I was experiencing. “Depending upon the toxin dose, the sensation of tingling lips progresses to tingling of fingers and toes—” I felt my fingers tingle as I wrenched the steering wheel and skidded onto the ramp of the West Seattle Bridge; my toes tingled as I floored the accelerator and the tires screamed. “Next,” McKean continued as we streaked across the highrise span above the Duwamish River, “you may lose control of your arms and legs—” I struggled to keep in my lane as the Mustang rocketed northbound on the Alaskan Way Viaduct toward downtown. “Some victims experience a sense of floating or vertigo—” My head swam and my vision grew hazy while I fought to keep from driving through the railings and dropping us fifty feet onto the railroad tracks.

“How about going blind?” I gasped. “I’m having trouble seeing the road. It’s all going red.”

McKean thought a moment. “Blindness is not a part of this syndrome. But seeing red is common when people feel extreme rage or fear.”

“I’m feeling both right now.”

“Is your heart pounding?”

“Isn’t yours?”

“Seeing red occurs when blood pumps so rapidly it floods the retina of the eye until one can actually see it. I suggest you keep cool, Fin.”

“Keep—” I tried to protest but gagged on my pounding heartbeat.

My vision grew redder, my hearing roared, and McKean’s voice receded as he said, “Finally, the chest muscles become paralyzed and the victim stops breathing.”

Just two blocks from the lab, my vision went from red to black.

“Wake up, Fin.”

An angelic voice brought me back and I looked around groggily. “Wha—? Where?”

“You’re with me, Fin,” said Kay Erwin, her pretty face coming into focus above me. “You’re at Seattle Public Health Hospital. How do you feel?”

“Better than yesterday,” I said, noticing Peyton McKean leaning over her shoulder, observing me like I was a lab rat.

“Better than two days ago,” he corrected. “You’ve been comatose for forty-eight hours. Took one sip more than I did. The antibodies barely pulled you through.”

“But your vital signs are great this morning,” said Kay. “No permanent damage.”

“How’d I get here?” I asked, struggling to remember missing events.

“You managed to get us to the lab, Fin,” said McKean, “though it was close. Janet met us at the curbside and injected half the antibodies into each of us, then called an ambulance. Kay tended us through the crisis. We’re both well on the way to recovery. My antiserum worked!”

The next day, as Kay signed my release papers, McKean rushed into my room. “I hope you’re up for a drive, Fin. Vince Nagumo just called with news. The police are after Craig Showalter. They raided his home and found a methamphetamine lab. Two of his henchmen dead in a gun battle, but Showalter’s still on the loose. He hightailed it the evening before, according to his girlfriend.”

“So, what next?” I asked.

“Let’s go have a powwow.”

An hour later, sitting in Clara’s living room, McKean showed Frank and Clara his photo of the man by the pickup. Clara gasped, “That’s my nephew, Billy Seaweed. He’s a good kid.”

Frank shook his head. “Got some strange friends, though, like Erik Torvald. For a white guy, he was all right, but still a white man to the bone, because he was using Billy’s tribal rights to get geoduck licenses. Used power gear to siphon up half the sea bottom when he took ’em. Not like we used to do: dig ’em up with a stick and fill in the hole. Still, Torvald was a lot nicer than Billy’s new partner.”

“Craig Showalter?” asked McKean.

“How’d you know that?”

“I’ve got connections. Vince Nagumo, FBI.”

“Billy’s an Internet addict,” said Frank. “A kinda Indian Goth. Obsessed with darkness and apocalyptic stuff. But I don’t think Billy’s a killer.”

“Showalter’s a bad choice of friends,” said McKean. “According to Nagumo, he’s got quite a rap sheet: ex-con, home invasion robbery, drug dealer.”

The scruffy dog came to its place beside me and began nibbling a bare patch at the base of its tail. I withheld my dismay, but the dog abandoned itself to a frenzy of licking and nibbling, raising a stench that nauseated me. I got up, trying to look nonchalant by wandering to a back window while McKean continued his discussion with Frank and Clara. I gazed at the trees overarching the house but then spotted something on a back drive that sent a chill through me: a black Dodge Ram pickup exactly like the one at the park when we were poisoned. Immediately certain it was Craig Showalter’s, I made a small wave to catch McKean’s eye, then pointed out the window.

“What is it, Fin?” he asked without the faintest effort to keep my concern a secret. He came to the window, saw what I had seen, and turned to look expectantly at the people in the room. Clara flinched first.