Slow Burn (20 page)

"A pity we
cannot keep it so." "Maybe we can."

He arched a
knowing eyebrow at me. "What have you in mind?"

"Maybe we
can get this whole thing over with before it spills over into the
convention."

"By
handing them the murderer," he said.

"All we've
got to do is compare where they said they were between two forty-five and five
or so with where they each actually went and when they actually came back.
Whoever lied is probably a good candidate for a murder rap."

Rebecca moved
the last chanterelle mushroom around her plate in a clockwise direction,
plowing little furrows in the last of the dill sauce.

"You look
tired," she said.

"Nothing a
good night's sleep won't cure."

We were the
only diners at Cool Hand Luke, a great little hole-in-the-wall restaurant in
Madrona Park, a section of Seattle which was, depending upon your outlook,
either the best part of the ghetto or the worst part of the high-rent district.
In Seattle, it all depends upon whether or not water is visible. In a single
block, you can crest a hill, find one of the lakes or the Sound suddenly come
into view, and move from Thunderbird in a bag to an audacious little '93
zinfandel.

Four-thirty is
a bit late for lunch and a bit early for dinner. In an hour or so, a table
would involve a thirty-minute wait. "Your lunch was good?"

Duvall put the
fork down, leaving the mushroom to drown, and reached over, dropping her hand
on mine.

"Not that
I don't appreciate it, Leo, but you seem to be very concerned about whether or
not I liked my lunch."

She was right.
I'd asked her about six times. I hate it when women are observant. "I
guess I feel like I ought to apologize for having all this crap going on right
in the middle of when we're moving."

She shrugged.
"So apologize."

"You'd
have to meet this group to know what I mean, but I really thought they were
just a bunch of idiots with more money than brains. I took the talk of"—I
drew imaginary quotation marks with my fingers—" 'mortal danger' to be . .
. you know . . . the worst sort of overstatement for effect. I mean these
people take themselves pretty damn seriously. I figured what we had here was a
bunch of habitual self-dramatizers." My turn to shrug.

"But
somebody's dead."

"Yeah.
Somebody's dead. The cops have pulled my license. They've got me for
obstruction and tampering, if they want to pursue it. They're probably out
looking for the crew by now. Fearless Fosdick here has failed to stop exactly
the kind of disaster he was hired to prevent. And on top of this crap, the
whole thing makes me look like I'm getting cold feet about our move."

"Are
you?"

"No. Are
you?"

"A
little."

"Me,
too."

"Under the
circumstances, I think a little apprehension is an appropriate response,"
she said. "You do?"

"Certainly.
If s a big move for both of us."

"Good."

"Good
what?"

"Good that
we're of the same mind." "Are we?" "I hope so."
"Me, too."

I began to
chuckle to myself. Duvall shook her head.

"Listen to
us," she said. "We sound like the Marx Brothers."

"Abbott
and Costello's "Who's on First?'"

"You know,
Leo, sometimes I worry that two grown people shouldn't have this much trouble
talking about their relationship."

"I'm not
good with 'should,' Rebecca. I mean, is there a standard out there someplace
that we're falling short of? I mean, like, are we being plotted on a graph
somewhere?"

"Not that
I know of."

"Good, because
one of the first things I learned from being a private eye is that there are no
perfect people out there. I used to think there was this class of people who
skated through life. Who made all the right moves, who played the game the way
it was intended to be played and in return got to forgo the pain and suffering
that marked the rest of us."

"And then
you saw the light?"

"And then
I got a peek behind their closed doors. They started hiring me to find their
runaway kids and thieving chauffeurs. And you know what? They were the same as
us, but with lots of money."

"And all
the money didn't help."

"Sometimes
it did; sometimes it didn't. Mostly, it just postponed the pain."

"I'm kind
of lost on the point here, Leo."

"The point
is that what we should be doing is whatever we are doing. If we were supposed
to be some other way, we'd be that way."

"Isn't
that just a wee bit circular and convenient?"

"Maybe,
but as far as I'm concerned, you and I are a special case, not a statistic. I
mean, how many other couples in our situation have been dating for the better
part of twenty years?"

"Hopefully,
not too many."

"We've had
a lot of practice at pretending. I figure it's going to take a bit of practice
to stop."

"Pretending?
What pretending? I'm not pretending." "Oh, come on, Dr. Duvall,"
I joshed. "Think about it. Let's be honest here. You and I missing each
other was a classic case of overthink. Two otherwise intelligent people managed
to rationalize themselves all the way past the exit to truth and into the next
county. How did we do that? It was always obvious to everybody except us. My
mother—I mean, what—we were in the sixth grade or something and she used to
tell me to latch onto you." I waved a finger and used my shrill Wicked
Witch of the West voice. " 'That girl is going somewhere, Leo,' she'd say.
Then she'd shake her head in wonder and go. 'And she likes you, Leo.' Even the
other kids always teased us. Remember?"

"That was because
we always had to dance together because we were taller than everybody
else."

"Even when
I was married to Annette, my aunts still used to ask about you. Hell, they
still know everything we do. They always knew. Why didn't we?" "It
was more complicated than that." "Don't I know it. Hell, I married a
woman pretty much just to get my old man's attention."

"And I
listened to the 'worked my fingers to the bone' stories for so long I started
to believe them. So what? That's all ancient history."

"I makes
me nervous, is all. If I was that stupid then and didn't know it, how can I
ever be totally sure I'm not doing it again and don't know it again?"

She patted my
hand once more. "Neither of us exactly came from a background that was an
ad for connubial bliss."

"Yeah, I
used to think that, too. Until I met these Del Fuego and Meyerson clans. These
people have a soap opera going on that makes our childhoods look like The
Partridge Family. They've got old grudges. They've got new grudges. They've got
husbands and wives dead under suspicious circumstances. Meyerson's got a daughter
named Penny she hasn't spoken to in years." "Do you know why?"

 "It seems
Mama Meyerson felt the girl married considerably beneath her station."
"But all women do, Leo."

I decided I
didn't like her smile, so I ignored her.

"Del
Fuego's got an ex-wife who follows him into the bathroom. A girlfriend young
enough to be his daughter. A bodyguard who looks like the Creature from the
Black Lagoon. A couple of stepkids running around out there somewhere who
nobody seems to have a clue what happened to. These are some seriously strange
folks."

"See,"
Duvall said. "We're not so screwed up after all."

"Yeah, but
think of all the gas we could have saved."

"You're
such a romantic, Leo."

I changed the
subject. "The cops aren't going to leave me alone until they get this
thing solved." "Meaning?"

"Meaning
that I better not be going out to the house anymore. I think I can pretty much
expect to be under surveillance soon, and I don't see any sense in adding the
cops to the moving mix."

"We can't
postpone, Leo. Rhetta's van full of stuff arrives on Saturday morning. I've got
to be out by then."

'The move goes
off on schedule," I said. "The boys will be at your place at eight in
the morning on Wednesday."

We'd hired a
sixteen-foot truck, along with my nephew Matthew and three of his burly
fraternity brothers to do the actual lifting and toting. One full day should
move us both.

"But
you're not going to be around."

"Probably
not. You think you can handle it?"

"The
problem is not whether I can handle it, but how I feel about having to."

"I guess
this gets me to the apology part," I said. "Sorry. I didn't mean for
this to interfere."

" 'Sorry'
is a good description of it," she said, rising.

It was a quiet
ride back to the hotel. I had her leave me a block up from the hotel, on
Seneca. "What's the remote code for the voice mail at the house?" I
asked as she pulled the car to the curb.

Rebecca reached
behind the driver's seat and dragged her briefcase into her lap. "I don't
have it memorized yet," she said while rooting around in the bag. She
pulled out her day planner.

"Keep it
that way," I said. "Until this thing is over. Next time you're at the
house, unplug the phones. Use your cell phone. The voice mail will still take
messages."

She read me the
number. I turned to the front of my little notebook, to a series of notations
that were several months old, and wrote the number in the margin.

"One more
thing."

"What?"

"Thanks,"
I said. "I'll call you later." "On my cell phone, of
course," she said. I settled for escaping with my life.

We don't
believe you've been completely truthful with us, Mr. Waterman." Martha
Lawrence had all of her stuff symmetrically arranged in front of her again.
Today, she was in a three-piece knitted green suit that matched her eyes, with
her red hair held atop her head by a big tortoiseshell clip. No Lobdell. I guess
he didn't want to play with me anymore.

We were back in
the Senate Room. I'd come into the hotel through the Seneca Street doors and
gotten no more than a dozen steps across the carpet when a couple of dicks took
an unhealthy interest in my elbows. My feet barely touched the ground on our
way up to the mezzanine, where they plopped me in a chair and now stood one
pace to the rear. "Am I under arrest?" "Would you prefer to
be?" "If you're going to detain me, arrest me." "We're not
detaining you, Mr. Waterman. We are merely giving you the opportunity to
exercise the kind of public-spirited cooperation which Mr. James assured Judge
Gardner you were prepared to provide. You do, after all, have such close ties
to the community."

Talk about a
snappy rejoinder. The good Ms. Lawrence was giving me a chance to dig my own
grave. If I walked, she'd request another bail hearing in the morning. She'd
trot the bruise brothers in to swear I'd refused to cooperate, and they'd reset
bail up in Charlie Manson land.

"What's
your story, Lawrence? How come I seem to have your undivided attention? You
strike me as a competent person. Unlike your friend Lobdell, I might mention.
You know I didn't kill Mason Reese. What’s the deal here?"

"Let’s
just say I have an aversion to people who think the rules don't apply to
them."

"People
who think the rules don't apply to them are responsible for most of the
scientific and artistic breakthroughs."

"Somehow,
I don't think that applies to low-rent private eyes."

"There you
go with those aspersions again, Lawrence." The color was rising in her
cheeks. I could see her freckles now.

"You don't
even have a valid-PI license. You have a judicial variance, whatever legal
travesty that may be."

"So what?
So twenty years ago, my old man pulled some strings and got me a ticket. What’s
that to you? I've been at it for twenty years. I've got a good
reputation."

She heaved a
sigh. "Please."

"You know
what I did for the first three years? I served process. Divorce papers.
Eviction notices. Bond revocations. Repossession notices. Ever slapped an
eviction notice in the palm of an unemployed shopfitter with four kids,
Lawrence? Ifs a real treat, believe me."

"You have
no credentials whatsoever."

"Is that
what this is about? Credentials?"

"Most of
us earn our way, Mr. Waterman."

As I'd
apparently left my capacity for guilt in my other suit, I said, "What say
we get on with this?"

She hesitated.
She wanted to argue some more. Instead, she said, "Your answers had best
get better, Mr. Waterman."

"Maybe if
you ask better questions, I'll have better answers."