More Perfect Union (9780061760228) (8 page)

J
ust when I figure I can count on Peters to wake me up, he lets me down. The next morning he didn't call, and I slept until after nine. Fortunately, I didn't have to be at work early that day. In fact, I didn't have to go to work at all.

My head was pounding. I lay there in bed trying not to move for fear I would shatter into a thousand pieces. Try as I might to remember, the end of the evening was a total blank.

From seven o'clock on, it had been one long wild party all over the Sheraton. Booze flowed like water. Vaguely I could recall closing down Gooey's in the wee small hours. There's an old country-western song that talks about how even ugly girls look good at closing time. I must have been thoroughly smashed. My last coherent thought was that maybe Cassie Young wasn't that bad-looking after all.

I finally dared open one eye. Glaring sunlight exploded in my head. Then, cautiously, I peered over at the other side of the bed. Thankfully, it was empty. I was all right so far. Hung over as hell, but otherwise all right.

Dragging my protesting body into the bathroom, I stood for a good twenty minutes under a steaming torrent of water. I should have felt guilty. Profligate even. It had been such a long, dry summer that the City of Seattle had limited yard-watering and was asking for voluntary cutbacks on indoor water usage. But I couldn't help it. It was either take the shower or stay in bed.

I ordered breakfast sent up from the deli downstairs and was beginning to feel halfway human by the time I finished my third cup of coffee and a handful of aspirin. Mornings aren't good for me even under the best of circumstances. This was not the best of circumstances.

I was glad I had called in the day before to tell Sergeant Watkins we were done filming and to let him know I was on vacation until after Labor Day. Watty had suggested I go out and have fun, but the
Death in Drydock
party had been almost more fun than I could stand. By the fourth cup of coffee, I was ready to admit it was just as well my good drinking buddy Derrick Parker was on his way back home to Hollywood.

As the juices gradually began to flow I turned my mind over to the assignment Peters had given me the day before. After we had finished
talking, there had been very little time to think about what he had said. On reflection, I could see that there was some merit in Peters' theory. Maybe Linda Decker was scared and hiding out. Despite what Red Corbett thought, it was possible Katherine Tyree had been jealous of more than just the boat.

Carrying Peters' conjecture one step further, I remembered something else Corbett had said, something about there being plenty more fish in the sea. If Logan Tyree had been mixed up with more than one woman in the apprenticeship program, nobody, including Katherine Tyree, had ever cornered the market on jealousy.

Both lines of reasoning were worth pursuing.

I already had Linda Decker's mother's name, address, and phone number jotted in my notebook. I didn't have a clue about Katherine Tyree. I turned to the detective's greatest ally—the telephone book. Logan Tyree wasn't listed there. K. A. Tyree was. The address given was on the Maple Valley Highway in Renton. That certainly squared with what Red Corbett had told me.

As I drove toward Renton, I wasn't looking forward to meeting Katherine Tyree. I'm not predisposed to like women who, deservedly or not, toss their husbands out of the house without much more than the clothes on their backs.

The house, a small, two-story bungalow, was on a wooded lot and set some distance back from the road. There were two cars parked out front, an older pickup and a late-model Honda.
The man who answered the door was still buttoning his shirt. He told me his name was Fred McKinney, but he didn't say what he was doing there. When I showed him my badge, he invited me inside.

“Kate's upstairs taking a shower,” he said. “She'll be down in a few minutes. The services are this afternoon, you know. Can I get you a cup of coffee?”

I followed Fred into the kitchen. He located two coffee mugs without having to look in more than one cupboard.

“Sugar? Cream?” he asked.

I shook my head. “Black.”

He stirred several spoonfuls of sugar into his own cup and then offered me a place at the kitchen table. Fred, whoever he was, seemed to have an extensive working knowledge of Katherine Tyree's kitchen.

“Are you a relative?” I asked.

“Friend of the family,” he said. “She's taking it pretty hard, you know,” he added. “I mean the divorce wasn't final yet. It's like they weren't exactly married and they weren't exactly not. Know what I mean?”

“It's tough,” I said, nodding. “It makes it difficult to know just how to act.”

In another part of the house the sound of running water stopped. Katherine Tyree was evidently finished with her shower. Fred got up from the table. “I'll go tell her you're here.”

I glanced around the kitchen. It was full of the
kinds of decorative bric-a-brac popular with ceramic hobbyists—cutesy wall plaques complete with familiar Bible verses and age-old proverbs. To be honest, I suppose I had a preconceived notion of Katherine Tyree as some sort of femme fatale. Nothing would have been further from the truth.

The woman who followed Fred into the kitchen was a frumpy, overweight type wearing a frayed housecoat and floppy bedroom slippers. A damp bath towel was wrapped around her wet hair. She nodded silently in my direction when Fred introduced us, then went straight to the counter and poured herself a cup of coffee.

“Please accept my condolences, Mrs. Tyree,” I said. She nodded again but then she turned away from me. Looking out the window over the sink, she quickly wiped her eyes. Fred had been right when he told me she was taking it hard. She seemed genuinely grief-stricken over Logan Tyree's death. It was a full minute before she turned back around and faced me.

“Fred tells me you're with the Seattle Police,” she said, making a visible effort to control her emotions. “What can I do for you?”

She hadn't asked to see my identification, and I knew Fred hadn't examined my ID closely enough to remember my name. I decided to jump in with both feet. “I'm sorry to bring all this back up, especially since you've already been interviewed by a number of law-
enforcement people, but I'd like to ask a few additional questions.”

“What do you need to know?”

She came back over to the table and sat down between Fred and me. He reached over and patted the back of her hand. “Are you sure?” Fred asked solicitously.

“It's all right,” she said wearily to Fred, and then to me. “Go ahead.”

“A number of people seem to be operating under the assumption that your husband's death was an accident. I'm wondering if you have an opinion about that one way or another.”

It was a back-handed way to start the conversation, but it struck a spark. The atmosphere in the room was suddenly charged with a surge of emotional electricity. Instantly Fred's hand closed shut around Katherine Tyree's fingers. His knuckles turned white. Fred's powerful grip must have hurt. Katherine Tyree winced but made no effort to pull away. The stricken look they exchanged told me I had unwittingly stumbled into volatile territory.

“You'd better tell him, Kate,” Fred said grimly.

Katherine Tyree shook her head stubbornly. “No. I don't want to, not today, not like this.”

“If you don't, I will.” His words were weighted with gloomy determination.

Katherine stole a glance at me then dropped her gaze to her lap. “I can't,” she murmured, her voice a strangled whisper.

Fred sat up, squared his shoulders, and looked me straight in the eye. “What she means to say is, we're engaged,” he announced defiantly. He paused, waiting for a reply. When there was none, he continued, his voice somewhat more subdued. “We had planned to be married just as soon as her divorce was final. We had no reason to kill him. Logan and I were friends once—asshole buddies.”

The fact that Fred assumed I was accusing them of murder led me to believe there was a whole lot more to the story than anyone had let on so far. I kept quiet, leaving an empty pool of silence between us. Fred rushed in to fill it up.

“You see,” he said, “what you don't understand is that
Boomer
was my boat originally.”

“You say you
were
friends? I take it that means you weren't any longer?”

Katherine Tyree started to say something then stopped.

“Nobody planned it this way. That's just how it worked out,” Fred said. He shrugged. “Things sort of happened, got out of hand.”

“Maybe you'd better tell me about it.”

“Do you know what a boomer is?”

“Not really.”

“In the trade it's a hand who knocks around the country, going from place to place, wherever there's work.”

“What kind of work?”

“Construction. Working iron. That's how Logan and I met, on the raising gang down at Co
lumbia Center. I came up here from California as a boomer and was living on the boat. Logan was interested in boats, had always wanted one. When he offered to buy mine, I took him up on it. I was tired of banging my head on the doorway every time I needed to take a leak.

“Logan and Kate here invited me out to dinner. Christmas, Thanksgiving, summer barbecues. That sort of thing. Kate and I just hit it off, didn't we.”

Katherine Tyree gave a barely perceptible wordless nod.

“So that's how it started out, innocent like that. Once Logan had that boat, though, he wanted to spend every spare minute on it. He was gone a lot—on weekends, in the evening, after work. That's when things got out of hand with us, with Kate and me I mean. Like I said, we didn't intend for it to happen.”

The last sentence lingered in the air for several seconds. I'm not exactly sure who Fred was trying to convince most—Katherine Tyree, me, or himself.

“Where were you two last Tuesday night?” I asked.

Fred didn't flinch or try to duck the question. “Right here,” he declared resolutely. “Upstairs in the bedroom screwing our brains out.”

“Fred!” Katherine Tyree wailed. “Don't!”

“Kate, honey, I've got to. Don't you see?” He let go of her hand and reached up and ran a finger tenderly along the full curve of her cheek.

“We're better off telling him right up front, hon. It would be worse if he found out later. Lots worse. Besides, we had no reason to kill Logan. In another month the divorce would have been final and we could've been married, no questions asked. I'm sick and tired of sneaking around. With Logan gone, I don't care who knows about us. It's nobody's business but our own.”

Fred's forthright narrative was pretty tough to counter. My gut reaction was that he was telling the truth, that his involvement with Katherine Tyree hadn't been planned or premeditated and that he was sincerely saddened by his former friend's death.

“Tell me about the boat,” I said.

Fred shrugged. “There's not a lot to tell. It wasn't new. I bought it used for a song. Gasoline boats are a whole lot cheaper than diesel ones. I'd been living on it for a couple of years when I sold it to Logan.”

“What did you think about it?” I asked, turning to Katherine. “About your husband's boat.”

“I hated it,” she said softly. “It was the last straw. I felt like he was using it to run away from me. It was a place for him to go, to hide out, instead of doing things around here.”

“Was he hiding out?”

My question heaped salt on an open wound, but that's one way to get honest answers, to ask while people are still down for the count, before
they have a chance to get up off their knees and reactivate their defenses.

“Yes,” Katherine said softly.

“Why? What from?”

“I don't know. We were just too different, I guess. We sort of drifted apart. We got married way too young. Everybody said so—his family, my family. He wanted to have kids, I didn't. I wanted to travel, he didn't. When I met Fred, I could see how wrong it had been the whole time. We were only staying together because we didn't know what else to do.”

“There are lots of marriages like that in this world,” I observed. “Most of them end in divorce, not murder.”

Fred leaped to his feet and slammed a fist onto the table in front of me so hard the three coffee cups went skittering in all directions. “Goddamnit! I already told you, we had nothing to do with it!”

I ignored him and once more directed my question to Katherine Tyree. “Does the name Linda Decker mean anything to you?”

There was a flicker of recognition in her eyes, but nothing else. No hurt, no animosity. “Yes,” she answered quietly. “Linda was Logan's girlfriend.”

“Did you ever meet her?”

Katherine shook her head. Satisfied that I was no longer on the attack, Fred sat back down.

“When they met, he was already living on the boat. I was glad for him when we heard about
it,” Katherine continued, “glad he had found somebody.”

“But you don't know anything about her?”

Katherine shook her head. “I do,” Fred offered. “I saw Linda down at the union hall a few times. When she and Logan started dating, word spread like wildfire. She's a little mite of a thing, but tougher 'an nails. Understand she's a bodybuilder. According to everybody I talked to, she was doing fine. Then, a week or so ago, she walked off the job, turned in her union book, and quit.”

“She quit the apprentice program?”

Fred nodded.

“Any idea why?”

Fred shook his head. “I thought maybe she and Logan had gotten into some kind of fight.”

I took a minute to go back over my notes, checking to see if there was anything I had forgotten to ask. I returned to the boat. “Tell me more about
Boomer
. You said this was Logan's first boat, is that true?”