Blue Molly (Danny Logan Mystery #5) (12 page)

He was right—it was simple—nothing that I thought Pavel Laskin or any other drug dealer would be interested in. I turned to Doc. “Any questions?”

He shrugged. “Nope.”

I thanked him and wished Kentucky good luck in the NCAA tournament next month.

* * * *

Next on the list was the Freeman Fine Art Photography Studio, Evelyn Freeman, proprietor. A sign on the front door read:

“Evelyn’s our longest-term tenant,” Sylvia said. “She’s been here more than ten years. She travels a lot, and she closes her store while she’s gone. She’s in Germany on a shoot now, but I have her permission to go inside whenever we need to.” Sylvia unlocked the door and flicked the lights on. The space was larger than the health-food store, stretching from the Occidental Mall on the west all the way to the ally on the east. Much as in Sylvia’s gallery, partition walls extended out from the building walls and created artful places to hang large prints. About 80 percent were black-and-whites, most of which were images of buildings with stark angles reflecting off water. It must have been an Evelyn Freeman trademark.

At the back of the space, near the door to the ally, a partition separated the display area in the front from the work area in the back consisting of a small studio, complete with floodlights and a framework for hanging backdrops. In the middle of the space were a large worktable, a restroom, and an office.

Suddenly, something hit me. “Where’s the stairway?” I asked. “The stairway to the basement?”

“Oh, the space here on the ground floor was so large that Evelyn didn’t want the basement when she rented the place, so we just covered up the stairway when she moved in,” Sylvia said. She looked around, then said, “It’s probably somewhere around here, but as you can see, it’s hidden.”

“So who’s in her basement space?” I asked.

“Nobody. It’s empty. That’s probably the case with half the basements around here. Unless the tenant really wants the space for some reason—as in Aaron’s case, or in mine for that matter—there’s no real reason to pay to have it improved or for someone to pay rent for it. We don’t get much rent for the space, but we don’t just give it away either.”

We looked around for a moment longer, and then I shook my head. “Good enough. I can’t see anything here that someone like Pavel Laskin would just have to have.”

* * * *

Carta Rarus was next door to Sylvia’s gallery around the corner on Main Street. It was owned by a chubby, bald-headed black man with a silver beard named Omar Reynolds.

“Collectable books,” he said, when I asked him what Carta Rarus did. “
Carta rarus
means ‘rare books’ in Latin. We deal in rare and antique books, out-of-prints, one-of-a-kinds, first editions—that sort of thing.”

“No book-of-the-month club,” I said.

He frowned. “Certainly not. No book-of-the-month clubs, no overstocks, no
New York Times
best-seller lists—no Amazon e-books, God forbid.”

“That’s cool,” I said, looking around. “How’s business?” There wasn’t a soul inside except for us.

“Our business is fine,” he said. “We have no need to rely on foot traffic.”

“So the Russian harassment thing isn’t bothering you?”

“Generally no, although I certainly don’t appreciate the spray paint or the broken glass. But, at least in our case, it’s mostly just me who has to walk past it.”

“Do you have a basement?” I asked.

“I do. I understand you’d like to take a look.” He led us downstairs to a basement/workroom/storage room. Shelves holding boxes of books lined two of the walls, and more boxes of books sat on the floor. A large light-gray worktable sat in the center of the room.

“There are a lot of books in here, Mr. Reynolds,” I said.

He nodded. “More than four thousand volumes. And please, it’s Omar.”

I nodded. As was the case in Cunningham’s space, the windows along the areaway were all bricked in, and the areaway door itself was padlocked shut.

We shook hands with Omar and thanked him for the tour, and then we walked back upstairs. Outside, we walked with Sylvia back to her gallery. I took a deep breath, letting it out slowly before shaking my head. “I gotta say, maybe I’m missing something, but I haven’t seen anything upstairs or down that looks like someone would just have to have this place. Everything looks completely normal to me.” I looked at Doc. “What do you think?”

“Agreed. I don’t see anything, either.”

“That’s the way we feel,” Sylvia said. “Mike and I have spent a good deal of time on it, trying to figure why someone would want to overpay. We haven’t come up with anything, either. Maybe it’s got something to do with the areaway. You said you wanted to have a look. You still up for it?”

I nodded. “Yeah. We want to check out the whole place.” Suddenly I stopped and looked down at my feet.

“What?” Doc asked.

“See that?” I pointed to what appeared to be a number of pieces of round glass embedded in the sidewalk. The light lavender glass looked thick, like the bottom of a bottle.

“You mean the glass?” he asked.

“Yeah. Those are actually skylights. They let the light shine from up here straight through to the areaway underneath.”

“We’re going down there?” Doc asked, a hint of alarm in his voice.

“Yeah. Why? What’s the matter?”

“You said you wanted to check out the building. You didn’t say anything about going in any tunnels.”

This was a bit of a surprise. Doc never questions my plans, not unless I’m asking for a critique.

“I mentioned the areaways. I thought you knew what they were.”

He gave me a semi-nasty look. “No, I don’t believe I do. I thought they were like little alleyways between the buildings.”

I shook my head and pointed downward. “No. The areaways are the old sidewalks down there.”

He looked at me, confused.

I looked over toward the park. “Okay. Back in the late 1800s, this whole area here was lower than it is now by fifteen, twenty feet or so. It was all originally a tidal flatland from Elliott Bay. A lot of it got filled up with sawdust from Henry Yesler’s original log mill a few blocks away. Being so low, the whole area flooded all the time. And then things got even worse when they started installing the new indoor flush toilets. They found out that when the tides were high, the sewer lines would actually flow backward. You’d go to flush the john and you’d get a nasty geyser shooting straight up in your face.”

“That couldn’t have been any fun,” Sylvia said.

I shook my head. “I imagine not. So in true Seattle-pioneer fashion they came up with a quick fix. They just nailed a set of tide tables alongside each toilet to tell you when not to flush. But, as you might imagine, this wasn’t foolproof and the accidents were . . . unpleasant. But it didn’t matter for long, anyway, because in 1889, this whole area burned down in a huge fire. Everything in Pioneer Square gone in something like twelve hours.

“The good news is that when it came time to rebuild, the city saw the opportunity to fix both the flooding and the flushing problems at the same time, so they passed a law and said they were going to raise all the streets in Pioneer Square. How? They decided to keep the lower sidewalks down there where they always were, but they built retaining walls behind each curb and filled up the streets in the middle. Then they built these metal archways connecting the new street level up here to the buildings. They eventually poured new sidewalks across the top of the archways and voilà! Problem solved. That’s where we’re standing right now, on the new sidewalk. What was the building’s second floor became the main floor, and what had been the main floor became the basement. And these skylights you see here are providing light to the old sidewalks down beneath us. Thus, the areaways. Got any problems now?”

He glanced from Sylvia to me and then gave a quick shake of his head, meaning no, no problem. But he was hiding something. There definitely
was
a problem. I’d have to ask him before we started any sort of major activity in the tunnel.

“Okay,” I said to Sylvia. “Lead on.”

* * * *

Sylvia led us into her basement. It was a large square space. All the windows to the areaways were filled in with brick, same as the other basements we’d seen, and the doors, one on each exterior wall, were made of heavy iron with padlocks (also the same). Libby Black was working on a frame on one of the two large worktables.

“Hi, y’all!” she said, enthusiastically. “Y’all fightin’ crime and makin’ the world a safer place this mornin’?”

I smiled. “Yeah, something like that. Right, Doc?”

He nodded. Since his normal demeanor was stoic; I needed to check his pulse now. I turned to Libby. “We’re headin’ on into the areaway; going to check things out.”

“Really?” she said. She gave a little shiver. “That place gives me the creeps. I sit down here and I hear things coming from the other side of that door: weird things—eerie, creepy things.”

I glanced at Doc and, if I didn’t know better, I’d have sworn he was scared. I’ve seen him take on five grown men at the same time in a dark alley, and he had never before looked scared. Amused? Yeah. Scared? No way.

But now? His eyes were wider than normal. He kind of leaned forward, on the balls of his feet, like he was ready to take off.

Libby noticed, too. “You alright there, big guy?” she asked. “You’re lookin’ a little peaked.”

Doc glanced at her, then nodded quickly. “I’m okay. Thanks.”

“Got your light?” I asked Doc.

He nodded.

I shrugged, then I turned to Sylvia. “Okay, then. We’re ready.”

“Libby?” she said. “Would you grab the key?”

Libby popped up and walked over to a nearby shelf where the key was hanging from a hook. She walked over and unlocked the padlock.

“Here you are, boys.” She pulled the heavy door back, and we stepped through into the areaway.

Even though it was broad daylight outside and the overhead sidewalk outside of the Lyon Gallery still had many of the purple-tinted prism skylights installed to light up the areaway, inside it was definitely murky, if not downright dark. The prisms were so tinted and covered over with dust, we hardly knew they were there, unless we happened to look up. It was going to take a few minutes for our eyes to adjust.

“So,” Sylvia said, “I’ll tell you what I know. You’re on Main Street. Uphill that way to the east there,” she pointed her light off into the dark, “you’ll eventually run into Second Avenue.” I shined my flashlight that way as well. It’s very powerful, but still the way got murky after a hundred feet or so.

“How far do you think it goes?” I asked.

“To the fire station on the corner, probably eighty yards or so. I think I read somewhere that the whole block is 250 feet square.”

I nodded.

“The other way here,” she said, turning to the west, “only goes about twenty feet before you hit a solid plug of concrete. The city poured that in late 2000. See the street wall there?” She shined her light directly across from the door, ten feet away. “That’s the retaining wall that holds the street up at the higher level. In 2000, the city engineer said that the wall needed reinforcing at the corners, so they poured the concrete. Perfect timing, because a year later, the Nisqually earthquake hit, and there was no damage to the street or the upper sidewalks around here.”

I nodded. “Worked out well, then.”

“It did. Except now it completely blocks the areaway. Not that there’s anyone strolling around down here nowadays, but for you guys, when you go to check out the areaway on Occidental Mall and over on Jackson, you’ll need to come back into the gallery and use the other door. It goes out on the other side of the concrete.”

“Easy enough,” I said. “They didn’t pour concrete up at the corner at Second and Main?”

She shook her head. “Nope. On this entire block, they just reinforced the street walls here at Occidental and Main, and on the opposite corner on Jackson and Second.”

I nodded just as a low moaning sound came from somewhere in the darkness.

“Oooh!” Libby said, stepping back away from the door. “Y’all hear that?”

Doc shifted nervously.

“I think those are just these pipes,” Sylvia said. She shined her flashlight straight up. Suspended from the sidewalk above were a half-dozen pipes running parallel to the overhead sidewalk, covered in dust and spiderwebs. The dust webs hung in long streamers.

I took a deep breath. “Okay, then. We’re ready. We’re going to close this, so our eyes can adjust,” I said to Libby as Sylvia stepped back into the basement. “Don’t lock it.”

She smiled. “Y’all might be down here forever if I did that. You and the other ghosts, that is.”

“Thanks for the thought,” I said. “See you guys in a bit.” I swung the door closed, and we were plunged into darkness.

* * * *

Fortunately, after a couple of minutes, our vision began to adjust, and the light wasn’t so bad. The outside of the Lyon Gallery basement from the areaway sidewalk looked almost the same as the floor above, except darker. That and the windows were bricked over. The ground itself was uneven, most likely the result of 120 years of sawdust-filled dirt settling. In fact, the cracked and heaved concrete was completely missing in some areas. Here and there, old boards and pipes and even furniture were strewn about. The areaways were definitely not in prime condition.

“May as well go this way first,” I said, pointing east up Main Street. I took a couple of steps, but then I noticed that Doc wasn’t following. I turned. “You coming?”

He didn’t move, simply stared at me. I’d never seen him like this before.

“Dude,” I said, walking back to him. “What the hell’s the matter with you?”

“This is tough, man,” he said.

“What?”

“Caves. Tunnels. Underground. I’ve got a problem being underground.”

“I’m starting to see that.”

He nodded.

“Claustrophobia? Because if that’s it, we can knock off, and I’ll come back with Toni.”

He shook his head. “No. That’s not it.”

“Afraid we’ll get lost?”