Last Ditch (17 page)

I
shook my
head. "Now it's personal."

"Oh?"

"They
took
my monkey."

She
threw the
Explorer in gear and backed out into the street.

Dr.
Milton Fitzroy
answered his phone on the first ring.

"History
Department, Fitzroy."

"Dr.
Fitzroy," I began, "this is Leo Waterman. I don't know if you recall
but a few months ago ..."

"Of
course
I recall, Mr. Waterman." He cleared his throat. "So sorry about the .
. er . . . the recent turn of events."

"Thanks,"
I said. "I was hoping maybe you could help me with something."

"By
all
means. Anything. I am most assuredly in your debt. I don't know whether
you
realize it, but the information which you provided me was of
incalculable value
to an overall understanding of the sociopolitical infrastructure of the
city
prior to nineteen eighty."

I
was terrified
he'd explain it to me, so I lied and allowed how I was aware of my
substantial
contribution to his work.

"What
can
I do for you?"

"If
I
wanted to know what was open for business in a certain section of the
city, in
a certain year, could you provide me with that information?"

It
was a long
shot, and I knew it. All I had going for me was that whatever my father
was
about had to be of sufficient importance that he felt impelled to leave
Bermuda
out of it, and it had to be somewhere right there in that neighborhood.
That,
and whatever it was, had required him to be, uncharacteristically, in
possession of folding money.

He
thought it
over. "Certainly. Of course, we would only have access to legitimate
business, for which a license had been issued and from whom taxes were
being
collected. Such things as sidewalk stands and after-hours clubs, and .
. . er
. . . anything illegal or illicit would, of course, escape our
scrutiny."

"What
I
had in mind was everything below First Avenue, from Pike Street
on the north to Yesler on the
south. That whole area of Alaskan
Way and Western Avenue between First Avenue
and the sound. I need to
know what was there that would possibly be open on a Friday night.
Would that
be possible?"

"I
don't
see why not," he said. "That particular portion of the city should,
in all probability, be relatively easy to plot. I suspect that its
composition
was much as it is now. What year did you say?"

"The
summer of nineteen sixty-nine. And I'm looking for things that would be
open on
a Friday night, which works great for what you said about legitimate
businesses. It's too late for sidewalk business and too early for
after-hours
clubs."

He
coughed
again. "Yes, of course. Of course. Quite. Nineteen sixty-nine, you
say."

I
could hear
him mumbling to himself. "Of course, for an accurate picture, I would
have
to cross-reference the plat maps with business licenses and liquor
licenses in
order to determine hours of operation."

"Of
course."

"And
of
course, we would have no way of plotting anything residential."

"How
long
do you think it would take for you to come up with the information?"

"Oh
. . .
well, no more than a day or so, I should say."

I
explained
that circumstances had forced us to leave the phones unplugged and
asked him to
leave me a message when he had the information collected. He assured me
he
would.

Two
hours and
two pots of coffee later, my scalp was beginning to tingle from the
caffeine,
and I'd had to break out that pair of glasses I don't need. The
Post-Intelligencer press packet had been copied so many times the
letters
looked like ancient runes and the pictures had taken on the amorphous
quality
of Rorschach renderings.

During
the last
days of Peerless Price's professional life, he had written on only
three
subjects: the Yellow Peril and the Red Menace, which, fashion
considerations
notwithstanding, were the same thing, as far as Peerless Price was
concerned.
Next was the, and I quote, "rot at the center of American morals" as
personified by the recent proliferation of gay and lesbian clubs in the
Seattle area. And finally,
he wrote incessantly about the upcoming Fourth of July parades, which,
of
course, was where my old man got mixed into the pudding.

According
to
Price, antiwar activists should be held personally accountable for each
and
every American death, should be prosecuted for aiding and abetting the
enemy,
meted out lengthy jail terms and then, upon release, should be
summarily
deported to those countries with whom they had chosen to cast their
lot. And
those were the lucky ones.

For
my old man
and the others who had consistently spoken out against the conflict and
who had
finagled the permit for the antiwar demonstration, Price was willing to
skip
all that tiresome law and order stuff and get right down to a series of
public
executions, a myth-making spectacle which he was convinced would
considerably stiffen
the city's, if not the nation's, badly wavering moral fiber.

According
to
Peerless Price, this moral rot was most visible in the phenomenon
commonly
known as the "sexual revolution." In his view, every citizen of the
state was put at risk by the half dozen, and I quote again, "pervo
palaces" which had sprung up throughout the city, catering to the
recently
radicalized element of the gay and lesbian communities, whose members
he
considered to be "abnormal abominations" and "an affront to both
man and God."

Particularly
galling to Price was the SPD's refusal to enforce a tum-of-the-century
city
ordinance which made it a crime for members of the same sex to engage
in any
type of physical display or contact whatsoever. Unable to budge the SPD
hierarchy on the issue, Peerless Price had taken matters into his own
hands.
He'd coerced a rummy SPD lieutenant named Bailey into pulling a raid on
one of
the downtown gay bars. A place called the Garden of Eden. According to
Price,
the raid had netted a bevy of Seattle's
best and brightest citizens engaged in acts of such perversity as to
make a
Roman orgy seem like a Lutheran coffee social.

At
last,
Peerless Price had them right where he wanted them, or so it seemed.
Problem
was that by noon the next day, not only had they all made bail, but
every shred
of documentation pertaining to their arrest and booking had
miraculously
disappeared from the Downtown Precinct house, never to be seen again.

Bailey
was
suspended indefinitely and eventually opted to retire rather than face
departmental charges. Publicly prodded by Peerless Price, the SPD
staged a
perfunctory investigation into the missing paperwork, but nothing ever
came of
it, because, once again according to PP, strings had been pulled at the
very
highest levels of city government. In the week prior to his death,
Peerless
Price had promised his readers that he was about to name those public
officials
responsible for sweeping the matter under the rug.

The
third
subject dear to Peerless Price at the time of his disappearance was the
wave of
Asian refugees who were flooding into the city. Old Peerless made no
distinction among the various Asian communities, labeling them all as
"wogs" and demanding that they be immediately shipped back from
whence they had come. To Price, the increased pace of immigration from
that
part of the world was little more than a thinly disguised attempt to
undermine
us from within. Not only were thousands of these inferior beings using
our
overly permissive laws against us, but we were also besieged by another
silent
wave of illegal immigrants whose insidious plan to infiltrate both our
nation
and our gene pool constituted "the most severe threat to our national
sovereignty since the War of 1812."

Peerless
was
convinced that the Seattle
waterfront was a major port of entry for Chinese refugees fleeing the
atrocities of the Cultural Revolution. In his final column of July
third,
Peerless Price had promised his readers that those responsible were
about to be
unmasked.

The
last
article in the booklet was not written by Peerless Price. As a matter
of fact,
it wasn't even from the Post-Intelligencer, but from the rival Seattle
Times,
written by one Judi Hunt, who was identified in the byline as a Times
staff
reporter. It was dated July ninth, nineteen sixty-nine. Six days after
Peerless
Price's disappearance, a customs inspector named Gaylord LaFontaine was
summoned to Pier Sixteen by an unnamed yard boss, who was concerned
about the
ungodly odor emanating from an unmarked and unclaimed shipping
container
sitting alone on the far side of his yard. LaFontaine used a borrowed
bolt
cutter to pop the lock and, much to his revulsion and dismay, found the
decomposing bodies of fourteen Chinese nationals, including four
children,
huddled together on the ribbed metal floor of the box. It was almost a
shame
that Peerless Price hadn't been around to say, "I told you so."
Almost.

I
dialed the
Seattle Times.

"Judi
Hunt, please."

I
could hear
her pushing buttons. "I'm sorry, sir, but I'm not showing a listing for
a
Judi Hunt." "Could you give me the metro desk, then." "Yes,
sir. Thank you."

Three
clicks
and "Metro." A deep man's voice. I went for the cheery good ol' boy
approach. "What's a guy gotta do to reach Judi Hunt?" "You'd
either see a priest or you'd call the Psychic Hotline." "Oh?"

"Judi
died
in eighty-four or -five. Ovarian cancer."

I
mumbled a
thanks, but, mercifully, he was already gone. Undaunted, I rolled
backward and
pulled the phone book out of the bread drawer, thumbed my way back to
the L's
and followed my finger down the page. The Times article said Mr.
LaFontaine was
twenty-nine years old at the time of his grisly discovery, so I was
guessing he
was still with us; Yep. Gaylord LaFontaine. Twenty-nine seventy-four Fifteenth Avenue East.
Three two nine, sixty-four eighty. With a name like that I figured
there
couldn't be two of them, so I dialed the number.

"Yah."

I
could hear
the sound of children's voices in the background.

"Is
this
Mr. Gaylord LaFontaine?" "Yah. Wadda ya need?" "Are you
with U.S. Customs?"

"Used
to
be. Who is this?"

Before
I could
respond, the background voices grew shrill and he said, "Wait a sec."
And was gone.

"Anyway,"
he said when he came back. "Sorry about that. Who did you say you
were?"

"My
name
is Leo Waterman." I waited to see if he'd been reading the papers.
Apparently,
he hadn't.

"Wadda
ya
need, Mr. Waterman?"

I
wasn't sure
how to express it. It came out like "I wanted to ask you some questions
about nineteen sixty-nine. That container."

No
hesitation.
"What about it?"

"I'm
a
private detective. I'm looking into something that may or may not be
connected
to that tragedy."

"If
you
don't mind me saying, Mr. Waterman, whatever trail you're following
must be
pretty damn cold by now. That was a hell of a long time -ago."

"Yeah,"
I said, "that's why I was hoping—"

"Hang
on," he said again. The phone clattered in my ear. I could hear his
voice
in the background but couldn't make out the words. He was gone for a
couple of
minutes. When he returned, he sounded short of breath, and I could hear
crying
in the background.

"Sorry
about that. Listen. I got a minor emergency here I gotta take care of.
You
wanna come over, I'll tell you whatever I can, but you've got to be
quick about
it 'cause I promised the kids a movie at four-fifteen." I checked the
clock—two forty-five—got directions from LaFontaine and headed for the
door.

The
rain had
turned to an insistent mist which seemed to wet everything at once,
rather than
a drop at a time. I sprinted for the Fiat, threw myself into the
driver's seat
and then . . . son of a bitch! For the second time today, my feet were
completely awash. The rain had soaked its way through the passenger
seat and
filled the foot well with six inches of greasy-looking water upon which
several
petrified McDonald's French fries now floated. I eased the car forward
into the
garage.

I
got out,
found a bucket and an old margarine container and bailed out the floor
of the
car. Then dragged the shop vac over and sucked up the rest of it. While
I was
inside changing my shoes and socks, I appropriated one of the old
towels from
the laundry room and a roll of duct tape from the kitchen drawer. You
know what
they say. If you can't fix it with duct tape, that sucker can't be
fixed.

What
in better
weather had seemed a mere slit had somehow mutated into an
eighteen-inch gash
in the rough black fabric. I dried the area off as best I could and
used up
half a roll of the silver tape to put the top back together. Okay, so
it looked
like hell. I made a mental note to go out and buy some black tape as
soon as
the weather cleared.