The Big Both Ways (9 page)

Hanson had grown up knowing the world of the docks. There had been stevedores and wharf rats coming to their back door for meals ever since he could remember. He had helped his father stitch up men who were unrecognizable from their beatings. His first few years on the force he tried to stay away from the waterfront, but gradually he ended up near the beach, drawn by the smell and the call of the gulls, drawn by the bodies that
had a way of washing up there. George had seen the corruption moving into the labor rackets, kickbacks and bribes that flowed up the chain of authority in a way that would have sickened the Finn. The docks were becoming another grift, and he didn’t mind putting the bite on some of these new union boys, but he still couldn’t stand to be around Floodwater operatives.

Floodwater Security was an old company from the Midwest. The first office opened up in Winona, Minnesota, when the town was broken open by spring floods and the local authorities couldn’t stop the looting. The first Floodwater ops were just a couple of thugs beating anyone they caught carrying goods down the street. After the First World War they started their own security firm and moved out to the West Coast. In San Francisco they worked the docks for the big shipping companies and hired more big boys who carried themselves like cops but never learned any other skills than sapping down looters in the mud.

Or so it seemed to George. He was thinking about this because his good leather shoes were sinking into a muddy bank somewhere the hell and gone out in White Center and a clodhopper of a shamus was preventing him from looking at a body some good citizen had bothered to find. Ben Avery had been the best of the Floodwater rat terriers on the docks and as such he was the worst of the thugs, but still, George thought, he deserved a few questions asked about his murder. He had hated Avery, but he harbored a special sliver of disgust for Avery’s boss.

“Boss said I’m ’sposed to keep people away from here,” the operative said from under the brim of his hat.

“I’m not people,” George said, and he held up his badge and shouldered past the dick. He stumbled down the slippery bank over root wads and rusted rigging cables toward the sodden pile that someone had decorously covered with a raincoat. There were men in civilian clothes walking up and down the river, each of them carrying a kerosene lamp. The effect made George think of a bunch of farm boys looking for goats in the dark.

George was looking around for the body in all of the confusion. In the murky light he saw some Floodwater boys carrying a stretcher up the slope. He started to yell to them when he heard heavy footsteps coming up behind him.

“I wouldn’t want to be the man who shot Ben Avery,” a voice said, and George turned to see Tom Delaney standing in his raincoat with the brim of his hat dripping water.

“You know it was a man?” George asked, still looking at the body. “Wasn’t Ben known to have a fairly complicated love life?”

“No dame is going to shoot Ben Avery with his own gun,” Delaney said. “It was one of those goddamn Reds. They killed the trade unionist up north and they did this to Ben.” Delaney walked around to the head of the corpse and squinted down into the dead eyes. “There’s a shit storm about to come down on those Bolshevik bastards,” he said.

There were two bodies in two days. One was this shit heel Ben Avery who was found in the grass out here in bumfuck White Center southwest of downtown. The other was the trade unionist they found in the trunk of a Lincoln in a slough up north. George had already heard the story of the trade unionist. Yesterday afternoon a kid fishing from a bridge twenty miles north of Lake City saw the fat tires of a new Lincoln poking up out of the muddy water and he ran home to tell his mother. When the locals came and pulled the car out, the trunk broke open from the weight of the water and the bloated body of Dave Kept flopped out like a dead walrus.

Dave Kept was a trade union organizer who had been making quite a stir along the Washington waterways getting the dock workers to both stand up for themselves and keep their jobs. Kept was considered the lesser of two evils by management. Now he wasn’t worth considering at all.

Dave Kept’s murder was being handled out of Everett, which was the next town of any size north of Seattle. It had been made famous in George’s father’s day when the Everett
cops shot up a couple of boatloads of Wobblies trying to land at the dock for a rally. Kept had given a speech in Everett the day before his body was found. The Everett cops believed he had been killed in their jurisdiction and was then driven south. George had heard about the case from the investigating officer, who had called down to George’s office wanting some background on Kept and the rest of the labor scene.

Delaney was probably right. The two murders were connected. But there was no way of knowing how. George believed that if Ben were still alive he would have told the Everett cops that his car had been stolen. Unless, of course, he was going to confess to murdering the union man, which seemed unlikely. No, there were only two dots right now. It wasn’t worth even trying to draw a line between them.

George took out a small notebook and a nub of a pencil. “I’m going to need a list of everybody who’s here on the scene and I’d like to get a look at their shoes just so I can make some sense of the tracks around here.” George looked over at the Floodwater op and waited, his pencil poised.

Delaney turned slowly and stood up. He was looking down on George even though he was standing downhill. His jaw was set hard and he said nothing.

George dropped his hands to his side but he didn’t put the pad and pencil away. “Tom, we’ll find the guy.”

“With all due respect, George, you aren’t the man for this case. We’ll take care of this and the situation up in Everett.”

“You’re saying I’m not the man for this case because of what?”

“Again, with all due respect to you and your father, George, we’ve got this covered. We’ve got authorization. We’ve got the governor and the senator on this. Hell, they can get right to the president if we want. You don’t have to have it on your books and you don’t have to waste any of your officers’ time.” Then Tom Delaney reached over and flipped George’s notebook shut.

“They’ve brought this on themselves. You know it’s true, George,” Tom said almost tenderly.

The one thing George had inherited from his father was his hatred of private security goons. He hated their phony badges and he hated their air of superiority, particularly when the bastards knew nothing about being peace officers. Hell, they couldn’t resolve a dispute between two chained-up mutts.

“Brought this on themselves,” George muttered to himself, while he stumbled back up to his car. The Big Finn would have thumped that bastard Tom Delaney and dumped his body in a wood chipper. But George was a city employee. He would think of other ways.

He opened his notebook again and made a few notes. It was a body dump and Delaney had told him the killers had used Ben’s own gun. Usually George would work this from the ground up. He’d have men all over the city looking for the car and shaking down Ben’s contacts on the waterfront. But this was going to be different. George wasn’t even going to call the captain. He knew it was true. It was not much of an exaggeration to say that Floodwater could get Governor Martin to clear a revenge killing. George was not going to fight that war. It would cause him to have to make promises to his bosses that he had no intention of keeping. As he got to his car George knew he was going to have to work from the top down.

“I’m going to bed,” he said, then pushed the starter with his left foot. When the engine caught, George Hanson wheeled up onto the river road and drove home to his wife, his new electric icebox, and his nice, dry bed.

The next morning brought a break in the rain and cold. Sunlight sprawled through his kitchen as he drank his coffee. Kids were playing up and down the street, and his wife stood at the window staring out at the soggy patch of grass that served as a yard.

“You going to be able to pick up a cake at the bakery tonight?” she asked.

“They got it in our name?” he asked without turning his head toward her.

She nodded, and he stood up to put on his jacket.

“You sleep all right?” she asked, as he was heading for the door. “It’s like you didn’t sleep at all.”

George turned and looked at her, trying to recognize something in her tone, something that worried him.

“Yeah, I’m fine. I just have something on my mind.” He walked to the door, and she turned back to the window where the sun dappled down mingling with the voices from the street.

“Okay then, just remember the cake. You want me to write you a note?”

“Naw.” He moved over to her, paused, and quickly kissed her neck, then turned to go before she had a chance to face him.

In an hour George was knocking on an unpainted door up on Queen Anne Hill. A massive round-faced man with sleep in his eyes came to the door.

“Fatty! Good to see you, boy!” George said as he shouldered past him.

“Christ, George, I just got to bed.”

“I’m sorry, Fatty, but you know us government workers. Regular hours and all that.” George stood next to Fatty’s chair, where his gun and Floodwater badge hung, glinting in the light. George absently fingered the heavy metal badge.

“You got any coffee?” George asked.

“I was asleep, I told you.” Fatty rubbed his eyes and shut the door.

“Don’t bother making any for me then.” George sat in the straight-backed chair and dropped his hat over the toe of his shoe.

“Listen, Fatty, I’m going to call in my marker.”

Fatty Miller was not just overweight. He had a fat man’s sad
aura. He walked like a fat man, he breathed like a fat man, and he had the mournful slit-eyed countenance of a man whose personality was hiding deep down in his flesh. He padded across the bare wood floor into the bathroom, where he put on his pants and swung his suspenders over his undershirt.

“I know I owe you, George. But don’t ask me what I think you’re …”

“Tell me who you are going to finger for Ben’s killing.”

“Christ, George, you know I can’t do that.” Fatty was holding his socks from last night in one hand and scratching between his toes with the other. He had to strain to reach his feet with his arms fully outstretched.

“I know you can. I know you will. I still have the file, you know. Photographs I took down at the baths, witness statements, everything. It wouldn’t bother me at all to turn it over to the District Attorney. In fact it would help me out. You know, I get a call from that boy’s mother about every two months or so. She says he still walks funny. She says he can’t breathe right through his nose.”

Fatty didn’t bother putting on his socks. “Jury’s not going to believe that little fairy,” he muttered.

“It doesn’t really matter what a jury believes, Fatty. The people who know you …” George twisted a bit in his chair and made a show of polishing the shamus’s badge with his sleeve. “The people you work with are going to believe him.”

Fatty leaned back in the overstuffed chair, put his hands on his thighs, let out a long soggy breath, and didn’t say a thing.

“Tonight,” George said. “I’ll meet you outside the baths. Six o’clock. It will be a good reminder of our friendship.”

Fatty offered up some weak resistance as George walked out the door into the banana-yellow sunlight of a Seattle morning.

Three feet down the sidewalk, George winced. He had almost forgotten about picking up the cake for his wife, and the bakery
was just down the hill. Not that he wanted the cake for himself, but she’d want to eat around six. She’d want to light the candles. She’d be sad of course but she’d still treat it like a birthday. She’d set the boy’s picture in his place. It was almost too much to think about. If he was going to meet Fatty at six, George would have to be late for dinner, the cake and the candles. Maybe that was all right. Maybe he’d go to the bakery before the meeting. He’d pick up something for the fat man. Christ, he thought, he didn’t want to go home.

Back at his desk, the first thing George saw was a letter from the captain saying that they had entered a memo of agreement with Floodwater Security regarding the murder of their operative Ben Avery. The death of Dave Kept would be handled by the Everett P.D., and George was directed to offer his “full and unqualified support in the joint effort to bring both cases to a quick and successful conclusion.”

He set the paper down on his desk. There was going to be no “successful conclusion” to Floodwater’s handling of this case. Until he got some news from Fatty, the best way to keep track of their investigation would be to watch the hospitals.

“There’s water coming in back here,” Ellie said without showing much concern.

Slip stopped rowing and grabbed a bucket from under one of the seats. The sockets for the oarlocks were sloppy and pulling loose from the rails of the dory. One oar caught the water and levered back into Slip’s chest, almost knocking him into the water.

“Here,” Ellie said. She stepped over Slip, grabbed the bucket, and started to bail. “Row, row, row,” she hissed.

Slip grabbed both oars again and awkwardly started to scissor the water, splashing the surface a few times until he gained purchase, and pointed the bow downwind so that the small boat wouldn’t make such a big target for the waves.

“Pull more to the left,” Ellie said softly, while she bucketed the water out of the boat and the girl pulled even deeper into her umbrella.

“You should call it port,” Annabelle said flatly from under her black umbrella.

“What?” Slip asked without turning around.

“When facing the bow, the boat’s left is called port and the right is starboard. It doesn’t matter whose left or right or what way they’re facing. It’s just the boat’s port and starboard.”

“Really?” Slip asked. “How do you know that?”

“I dunno. I read it somewhere, I guess.” Annabelle’s disembodied voice was floating out over the water. “P-o-r-t has the same number of letters as l-e-f-t and that’s how you remember that port is the boat’s left side.”

“All right. If you say so,” he mumbled.