Last Ditch (8 page)

The
initial
police investigation revealed that he was last seen on the night
before, July
third, nineteen sixty-nine, at about eight o'clock in the evening when
he used
a credit card to pay for a meal at a Chinese restaurant in the
International
District. Two days later his car was found parked and locked in a pay
lot on South King Street,
a block and a half from where he had eaten his last meal.

Despite
the
Price family's public offer of a hundred-thousand-dollar reward for
information
regarding the whereabouts of their beloved brother, over the next two
months,
the largest manhunt in the history of the Pacific Northwest yielded
absolutely nothing, and the disappearance of
Peerless Price became the stuff of legend.

When
the
investigation was, at long last, drawn to an unsuccessful close, Bill
Moody,
the police commissioner, was asked by a reporter how it could be that
the best
investigators in the department had failed to turn up even a single
suspect.

"Oh,
we've
got plenty of suspects," he said.

"Who?"
pressed the reporter.

"Just
open
the phone book," Moody replied.

And
to mink, after
nearly thirty years of rumors and speculation, of the insistent story
of how
he'd been poured into the foundations of the Kingdome, or paved over
when they
built the new freeway, or, my personal favorite, how he'd been shredded
and
sold for crab bait, all the while Peerless Price had been resting
comfortably
in my backyard. Dude.

If
What I did
Saturday night could be called sleeping, then I guess what I did Sunday
morning
could be called waking up. After six hours of watching horror movies on
the
inside of my eyelids, I stumbled downstairs, feeling far worse than
when I'd
gone to bed. Instead of making my usual beeline for the kitchen, I
crossed the
living room and peeked out through the drapes. We were down to two TV
trucks. I
figured the other guys were off visiting the Hair Club for Men.

I'll
admit it.
I smiled when I saw the hairpiece on the kitchen counter. As a matter
of fact I
smiled all the way through my first cup of coffee. Right up until I
opened the
morning paper.

HOLY
CH**ST,
IT'S PEERLESS PRICE

Biggest
typeface since Princess Di. I sailed the front page over into the comer
of the
room and concentrated on the sports section. The Sonics were about to
open
training camp. After an entire year of listening to Shawn Kemp
complaining about
his contract, George Karl was now bitching about his own contract. Go
figure. I
read the article three times and still had no idea exactly what Karl's
problem
was. I heaved a sigh and then waddled over and retrieved the front page.

The
most
enduring mystery in the history of the Pacific Northwest
was solved yesterday when the body of Peerless Price—

The
story went
on and on, covering half the front page and all of page two. There was
even a little
box directing readers to other related articles throughout the paper.
Pictures
of the bones, of the front of the house, of me, of the old man, of
Peerless and
of course of our beloved medical examiner Jeff Byrne. I followed the
various
articles around the paper. They had it all. They'd even dug up that old
AP
photo of Peerless Price after he duked it out with the old man. The one
where
his left 'eye was completely swollen shut and his nose was over by his
ear.

They
never came
right out and said that Peerless Price had been offed by former city
councilman
Bill Waterman, or that well-known politico Waterman buried the reporter
in his
backyard, but they sure didn't leave their readers many other choices.
The way
I read the articles, either my old man was guilty, or we had us a case
of alien
abduction. I could feel the blood rising to my face.

I
thumbed my
way back to the front page. The lead article was by somebody named
Brian
Swanson. I followed directions back to page eighteen, and as I
suspected, there
at the end of the article were both an E-mail address and a phone
number for
this Swanson dweeb. What the hell. Why not start the day by screaming
into
somebody's voice mail.

Fortunately,
where cold reason failed, technology intervened. When I plugged the
phone back
in, I got that pulsing dial tone that meant I had messages. I dialed
the access

number
and then
my secret code. Bong de de bing. "You have forty-three new messages. To
listen to new messages, push one. First message . . . recorded last
evening
at.. ."

It
took the
better part of an hour to work through all the messages. I knew better
than to
move on to the next message before the prior caller hung up. All that
did was
transfer the damn things to the Saved Messages folder where they would
remain
until Armageddon. All but two were from the media. As the night wore
on, the
messages got shorter and shorter. The last few were hang-ups.

At
seven-thirty
this morning, Tommy Matsukawa had called for Rebecca. A preliminary
check of
dental records confirmed the identity of the bones. Rebecca had been
right. The
slug was a thirty-two. Tommy acknowledged his lunch debt. The other
call was
from my uncle Pat.

Patrick
S.
Waterman was the youngest of the three Waterman brothers, my father the
oldest
In between were Edward, who died when I was a child, and the four
sisters
Karen, Hildy, May and Rochelle. Like everybody else in the family, Pat
had
lined his pockets buying real estate on my old man's inside
information. For
the past twenty years or so, he had been more or less a professional
board
member and social butterfly.

I
called the
number he left. The static told me he was in the car.

"Yeah."

"Pat.
It's
Leo."

"Don't
you
check your messages?"

As
usual, his
voice held an underlying tone of dissatisfaction. Sort of a "you cur"
understood. And, as usual, it annoyed me.

Pat
and I had
never gotten along well. My mother used to claim it was because Pat had
never
married and wasn't accustomed to dealing with children, but in my
heart, I'd
always known better. It was more than that. On some fundamental level,
we saw
the world in completely different terms. And unable to identify the
source of
the friction, we'd allowed it to slop over into all our dealings,
creating an
air of discord which, for the last thirty years, had drifted over the
field of
our linked lives like cannon smoke.

"I
unplugged the phones. It's a fucking circus over here."

He
was silent
for a long moment. We both knew what came next. God knows we'd run
through the
scene enough times. Somehow it always happened when I talked to Pat. I
knew he
hated profanity, and although I had no conscious desire to offend him,
something inside of me always had the uncontrollable urge to swear like
a drill
sergeant.

"Must
you?" he intoned.

"I'm
having a bad morning."

Above
the
static and road noise, I heard him sigh.

When
I was younger,
Pat and I used to compete for my father's attention, acting more like
feuding
brothers than like uncle and nephew. It took me twenty years of that
foolishness to figure out that the old man fostered the rivalry between
Pat and
me as a means of controlling us, the way he controlled everything else
in his
universe, but by that time, the bones of contention were buried too
deep to be
exhumed.

.
"Yeah.
They've been all over me, too," he said. "I'm on my way back from the
airport. I just put your aunt Rochelle on a plane to Portland. Sent her
down to Ed's mother's
place until this is over."

"Probably
best," I agreed.

"She
hasn't been the same since Ed died."

Roughly
translated, this meant that I'd know about what was going on with my
father's
youngest sister if only I kept in better touch with the family, which I
don't
You cur.

After
my
father's death, Pat slid noiselessly into the role of family patriarch.
He was,
after all, the sole living Waterman brother and, as such, the heir
apparent to
the mantle. For reasons I can't explain, something deep in my heart
sorely
begrudged him that role. Maybe it was because, in my family, the
patriarch is
the keeper of the family story. At least the one we tell in public. And
Pat
never told it the way I remembered it. That's why I stopped going to
most of
the big family gatherings. I was afraid that right in the middle of
some
otherwise joyous holiday moment, he was going to start holding forth
about some
Christmas or Easter past and I was going to lose it, spring to my feet
and
shout, "That's not it. That's not how it happened," and the whole
slack-jawed multitude would gaze at me as if I'd just dropped my pants
and
crapped in the corner. Better to stay home, I figured.

I
dreaded the
next act, so I tried something noncommittal.

"Sorry
to
hear that."

I
should have
known better. It didn't matter how I responded. I could have said, "I'm
on
my way to the Polo Grounds to fuck Hitler's mother," and his response
would have been exactly the same. With Pat and I, it was as if our
conversations
crouched behind our lips like predators, silently marking time until
the moment
of the kill.

"She
was
terribly upset when she saw the story on the news. She's not strong,
you
know." You cur.

What
came next
was the part where we worked out who was suffering more. Prizes were
awarded in
this category. Winner got a crown of thorns, and the right to assume
the
position; loser got the hair shirt and self-flagellation rights. I
figured
martyrdom was a dying business, so I cut to the chase.

"What
do
you need from me?"

Silence.
This
wasn't how it was supposed to go. You cur.

After
a moment,
he said, "How you guys holding up over there?"

"It's
a
ffffff . . . it's a state of siege."

I
had him going
now. He shifted gears.

"We
need
to get a lid on this."

"I
don't
think the toothpaste is going back in the tube, Pat."

"No,
but
we can certainly control the flow." "How's that?"

"I've
got
a meeting set up for two o'clock this afternoon at the Cascade Club."

"A
meeting
with who?"

"Whom,"
he corrected.

"Yeah,
so
whom's gonna be there?"

I'm
not sure,
but I thought I heard him grinding his teeth.

"The
PFs
going to send •their lawyer. I don't know who's coming to represent the
Price
family . . . probably another lawyer. Most likely Henry McColl."

"And
you
want me to come?"

He
hesitated.
"I thought you'd want to be there," he said.

Roughly
translated, this meant that since I'd been sufficiently thoughtless as
to find
the damn body, I had an obligation to suffer along with the rest of
them. You
cur.

"What
are
we going to meet about?"

Now
I was sure
I heard his teeth.

"What
we're going to meet about, Leo, is how to keep this thing contained.
How to
keep the journalism responsible. How to keep this thing from disrupting
our
lives any more than is absolutely necessary. Of course, if you have no—"

I
cut him off.
"I'll be there," I said. He jumped in quickly, before I could hang
up. "And Leo ..."

"Yeah?"

"You
will
wear a suit, won't you?" You cur. "Fuckin' A," I said.

One
second
after I replaced the receiver, the phone began to ring. Since the voice
mail
had done such a fine job last evening, I couldn't think of a single
reason why
it shouldn't get another chance, so I unplugged the phone and headed
for the
shower.

On
a good day,
I can shower, shave and shinola in twenty minutes flat, start to
finish, out
the door. Today, it was a good thing I had a few hours. I had a bad
case of the
slows. I stood under the steaming shower until the hot water gave out
and then
cut myself twice while shaving.

When
I padded
back into the bedroom looking for clothes, Rebecca was gone and the bed
was
made. The choice of attire should have been simple. After all, I only
owned one
good suit. Nope. Turned out the only thing simple was me. I stood in
the closet
for a good twenty minutes pawing everything I owned and then finally
selected—yup, you guessed it—my good suit.

By
the time I
got downstairs Rebecca had already finished a pot of coffee and read
the entire
Sunday paper.

"Oooh,"
she said. "Don't you look nice."

"I
better," I said. "You look sloppy at the Cascade Club somebody'll
hand you a mop."