Last Ditch (12 page)

My
nose felt
thick with dust. I started down the length of the room. As I passed the
carriage, I glanced down into its interior. Lying there on the cracked
little
mattress was a child's toy. A brown and white monkey twisted and sewn
from
several pairs of socks, winking with a missing eye, its wide red lips
puckered
for a kiss. When I picked him up, the little bell on the top of his hat
tinkled
and instantly, I knew he was mine. Mikey the Monkey accompanied me down
to the
file cabinets. He wasn't much of a talker, but it beat hell out of
going alone.

MY
FEAR OF the
darkness began to subside with the realization that the world outside
my
family's walls was, often as not, unlike anything I had known. That in
other
houses shouts and footsteps regularly rang through the halls, and
windows were
for something other than blinding with blinds and draping with drapes.
Still
later, I came to see that the darkness always traveled with me and knew
that
deep inside I had a keep, a flickering tunnel where absolutely no one
else was
welcome. Not a dungeon—but a root cellar where the refuse of my heart
could be
safely shielded from prying eyes and pointing fingers, a place where
everyone
agreed that my inability to conjure the faces of my doomsters merely
made the
threat more dire.

REBECCA
STIFLED
A yawn with one hand and rubbed the back of my neck with the other.
"I'm
going to bed," she said. "What time is it?"

"Ten-forty."
She yawned again. "I've got an early day tomorrow. Staff meeting." I
turned the little blue book over so I wouldn't lose my place and
stretched my
arms up and back, pulling her toward me.

"I'll
be
up in a while," I said. "Just want to finish going through this one
again."

I'd
brought
down the three books which covered nineteen sixty-nine and left Mikey
the
Monkey to guard their place in the file. Fourth of July weekend was
near the
end of the middle book. I was making my third pass through that
particular
volume. Each successive pass brought further spasms of lucidity,
wherein I
would suddenly understand what had up until that point seemed nothing
more than
alphanumeric gibberish, so then I'd have to go back and read everything
again.

She
patted me
on top of the head.

"You
must
be tired. You've been at it all day."

"It
took
me a long while to figure out his shorthand."

"Find
anything?"

"Nothing
I'd write home about."

She
leaned over
my shoulder. "What are the big numbers at the bottom of each page?"
It read: 15,789.

'
'Mileage on
the city car. The city only paid for mileage when my father was
actually in the
car. He paid for Bermuda's mileage out of his
own pocket. From the time Bermuda left him off
at night, to the time he picked him up again in the morning, those were
personal miles."

For
nearly
twenty years, Ed "Bermuda" Schwartz
had been my old man's personal driver and confidant. His promising
career in
the SPD had ended one night during a high-speed chase through the
Rainier
Valley, when Bermuda's police cruiser T-boned a garbage truck, killing
his
partner instantly and leaving the young officer Schwartz with a broken
back and
one mangled leg four inches shorter than the other.

Despite
its
tragic overtones, the situation had a couple of things going for it.
First off,
right about that time, one of my old man's many real estate scams had
incurred
the wrath of a couple of old-time land barons. The way they told the
story,
he'd used his official clout to lose some of their paperwork and then
had
appropriated their recently refurbished eight-story building on Third Avenue
for little
more than the price of back taxes. A ploy which, interestingly enough,
turned
out to be precisely how they'd gotten hold of the building in the first
place.
These were the kind of guys who were used to paying off politicians,
not
getting fleeced by them, so needless to say, they were miffed. So
miffed, in
fact, that they let it be known on the street that were my old man to
appear
suddenly before the headlights of the wrong automobile some dark and
lonely
night, he might well turn up late for supper.

Secondly,
and
of equal importance, Officer Ed Schwartz was, at that time, the SPD's
sole and
token Jew. Not only that but Schwartz didn't want to go on disability.
He
wanted to stay on the force. At a desk if he had to, but on the force.
As any
cop will tell you, you can't have a uniformed officer pushing a walker
around
the squad room. It's bad for morale. It's hard enough to put on the
badge and
go out every day, knowing that any routine traffic stop could well be
your last
act, without having to look at it every morning.

It
was one of
those sweet deals that politicians so love. The kind that works out all
around.
The police department got to look benevolent. Bermuda
got to stay on active duty and work toward his pension; the city got to
make
good on its racial and ethnic guidelines and, most importantly perhaps,
my old
man got a full-time gofer with a gun. A fearful symmetry indeed.

I
turned the
page. "See ... top of the next page. Car mileage first thing in the
morning." 15,805.

"Sixteen
miles," she said.

"Right.
Wherever Bermuda lived back then, it was
sixteen miles round-trip from right here." I tapped the table and began
to
flip through the pages. "Every night, the same thing. He'd drop the old
man off, drive home and then come back in the morning to get him."

I
pointed down
onto the page. "See . . . B-CAR, seven forty-five p.m. 16,432." I
turned the page. "CAR Official seven fifty-five a.m. 16,449."

"What's
B-CAR?"

"It
means Bermuda had the car for the night." "Which he
did every night."

"Mostly,"
I hedged. "That's the only inconsistency I can see. Other than that
these
guys were like clockwork." "What's that?"

I
checked the
notepad at my elbow. "There may be more, but so far, between the middle
of
May nineteen sixty-nine and the end of June of the same year, just
prior to
when Peerless Price disappeared, there are two occasions when my father
took
the city car home for the night."

"So?"

"Those
are
the only times, during the whole year, when that happened. Twice during
that
six-week period." "So?"

"He
had a
car at home." "Maybe it was in the shop." "For six
weeks?"

I
thumbed ahead
in the book. CAR-ME Per. "And look, both times he takes the car, he
gives Bermuda fifty bucks in personal money. Probably for cab
fare home and then back in the morning." B-$50 per.

"So?"

"It's
just
odd, that's all. Picture it. They're downtown somewhere." I nipped the
page and pointed at the next day's mileage. Only a five-mile
difference.
Wherever my father had gone, it was somewhere downtown. I flipped back.
11:15
p.m. "It's the end of the day. He hands Bermuda,
who, by the way, walks with two canes, fifty bucks and tells him to
take a cab
home. I mean . . . why would he do that?"

She
thought it
over. "Sounds like he had something to do that he didn't want Mr.
Schwartz
to know about."

"That's
exactly what got my attention. I mean what could he possibly be doing
that he
didn't want Bermuda to know about? They'd been
together for years. Bermuda knew where all the
bodies were buried." I stopped myself. "Figuratively speaking, of
course."

"Why
don't
you ask Mr. Schwartz?"

"I
don't
even know if he's still alive," I said.

"How
old
would he be?"

"I'm
not
sure. Maybe seventy-five, eighty or so."

I
rolled the
chair backward toward the counter and pulled the phone book out of the
bread
drawer. She watched with a wry grin.

"The
amazing tricks you gumshoes know."

I
ignored the
jibe. Ninety-eight out of every hundred people are listed in the phone
book.
Way back when, I'd once looked for a guy for a day and a half before a
brainstorm sent me to the white pages.

No
Edward
Albert Schwartz. No E Schwartz of any kind. I lobbed the book back into
the
drawer and rolled it closed with my foot.

"It's
like
Sherlock said. First you eliminate the obvious; then you get weird from
there."

"Those
were his exact words?"

"More
or
less."

"Did
Mr.
Schwartz have a family? A wife? Kiddies?" "I don't know," I
said.

She
started for
the door. "Well, Sherlock, I'll be upstairs whenever you get through
sleuthing." I closed my eyes, listening to the sound of her footsteps
on
the stairs and wondering how I could recall so little about the life of
a man
who knew so much about mine. Other than tooling around in the city car
with my
father, Bermuda's main task had been toting me
around. I mean, my mother didn't drive—hell, for the most part, she
didn't even
go out—and it wasn't like either of them was going to sit through
Little League
baseball games or anything. Fat chance. But I always knew that before
the game
was over, Bermuda would show up to get me, in
that long black car. Rain or shine, he'd always try to make as much of
the game
as he could No matter where I was on the field, I'd hear him clanking
up into
the stands with those aluminium canes of his, wearing that same black
suit with
the jacket buttoned. Always in the front row, sitting like a rock,
right next
to the over-involved, maniac parents, because that was as high as he
could
climb. I remembered how he never had a word or an opinion about
anything unless
you asked him directly, and then he had words and opinions about
everything,
because he cover-to-covered three newspapers a day, and did all the
crossword
puzzles while he was sitting on his duff waiting for my old man. Half
the
useless crap running around in my head, I'd learned from Bermuda
Schwartz, and
all I could recall was his satchel face, his big red hands and the
silly name
everybody called him. Go figure.

In
a pulp
novel, an erstwhile local private dick like me, faced with finding an
old
ex-cop, would simply call his cynical, weather-beaten buddy on the
police
force. He'd have the buddy see if the pension check was still going
out, and,
if so, where to. Wham bam thank you ma'am. Problem was, I didn't have a
buddy
on the police force. Quite the contrary. As a matter of fact, it was
generally
agreed that one of the quickest and surest paths to a lifetime of
obscurity on
the Seattle Police Department was to have anything to do with me.
That's
because my ex-wife Annette was now working her marital magic on a
certain Seattle police captain
named Henry Monroe. He'd started out cheerful enough. Henry the
Magnanimous,
always greeting me loudly and clapping me on the back, in the assured
manner of
a man who feels certain he's grabbed the brass ring. Not for long,
though. No
... a couple of years of connubial bliss and, without so much as a
word, he'd
started having me removed from the Public Safety Building whenever he
saw me in
the halls. Couldn't say as I blamed him either. I figured it was one of
those
unfortunate "Friends don't let friends ..." kind of things. Love may
be blind, but marriage is a real eye-opener. I'd met Claire Wells right
after
my divorce, when well meaning friends had fixed us up on a blind date.
She'd
recently separated from some guy named Joe. Yeah, I knew better, but in
those
days my urges usually got the upper hand, so to speak. I'd taken her to
Ristorante Isabella, an atmospheric Italian joint on Third Avenue.
You know, a little wine, a little
pasta, a couple of choruses of "Volare." Whoa oh. You never know. It
could happen.

Not
this time
though. Hell, we never even made it through the salad. Half a glass of
wine and
twenty minutes of inane conversation later, she looked out over the rim
of a
nice glass of Estancia Chardonnay, narrowed her slate-gray eyes and
popped the
question.

"Are
you
having a good time?"

Usually,
answering a question such as this is easy, because, unless you're a
barbarian,
your options are limited. As I see it, you either pass the buck with a
question
of your own such as "Are you?" A pathetic, shopworn ruse lacking in
both style and originality. Or you try to change the subject to
something . . .
anything less threatening than your own feelings. "How's the wine?"
for instance. The problem with this sort of random segue is that, a la
Groucho
Marx, anybody who'd fall for it wouldn't be somebody with whom you'd
want to be
sharing a meal. So you're pretty much left doing what everybody does in
a
moment like that, you tell 'em what it is you think they want to hear.
"Oh, yeah. Real good." It's like apres sex. I mean, what the hell are
you going to tell somebody you've just been doing the hokey pokey with
when
they look over and give you some variation of the old "It was good for
me;
was it good for you?" I mean, it's not like you can yawn into the back
of
your hand and reckon how, all in all, you'd rather have been pulling
weeds in
the front yard. No sir. You can't even sidestep the issue with
something like
"I especially liked the part where you moved." No . . . no. Unless
you want to be short-listed for the Goth of the Month Award, you come
up with
something life-affirming. Period. No matter what anybody says, some
situations do
not cry out for candor.