The Smoke Room (23 page)

33. A MAJOR CLUE FOR ALL YOU THIEVES, MURDERERS, ARSONISTS, TURD-DROPPERS, AND MOTHER-BEATERS

TWO UNEVENTFUL DAYS
passed, where I didn’t see or hear from Tronstad. Then Tuesday’s shift came and went, also uneventfully. By Wednesday morning, when I got in my car, I was getting pretty nervous.

As soon as I rounded the corner, I downshifted and pushed the accelerator to the floor. As the turbocharger kicked in, the forward momentum pinned me against the seat back. I loved rowing through the WRX’s gearbox, working the clutch and shifter with split-second precision.

I tore through the quiet streets, making a right turn at speed, zipping onto California Avenue and into the residential streets, racing down the hill on narrow Ferry Avenue until my tires were screeching, then cruising south on Harbor Avenue along the West Seattle waterfront while “Something Vicious for Tomorrow” by Built to Spill played in the background.

I might have gone past Iola Pederson’s place, except I knew on the days she worked she didn’t leave until just before nine, and on the days she didn’t work she hung around even longer. In either case she would be home, and I couldn’t retrieve the bonds while she was guarding the place.

On Genesee I parked in front of my rental. Because I was frequently gone twenty-four hours at a pop, I left the living-room drapes cracked open to give the place a lived-in look. This morning the drapes were tighter than a freshly dug clam.

Somebody had been inside.

The place was a mess, pictures on the wall askew or thrown to the floor, the sofa upside down, panels ripped open with what appeared to be a sharp knife, the television on its face, glass shards everywhere, and a dirty boot print outlined in blue toothpaste depressing the service panel on the back. The rooms were uncharacteristically cold, and in addition, there was a stench I could not identify at first.

As I picked my way through the rooms, stepping over items and clothing strewn on the carpet, I found the lock broken on the back door, the door wide, as were the doors on the refrigerator and freezer. Nothing had been stolen that I could tell, but plenty had been destroyed: my VCR, the DVD player, a small audio system I bought during my first six months in the department.

As I explored the rooms, I located a turd on the carpet next to my bed. If I suspected Tronstad, the signature giveaway was the etching on the bathroom mirror that said,
ass wipe,
one of Tronstad’s favorite verbalisms.

He’d pulled everything out of every cabinet, dumped every drawer, and walked over most of it in his motorcycle boots. In the garage he’d climbed up through the attic scuttle and put his foot through the ceiling from above several times, leaving ragged holes with insulation poking through like pinched underwear.

What frightened me more than the wanton destruction was the fact that I could not ignore this the way I’d been ignoring everything else. The affront here was entirely too personal. Funny how my brain worked. I stood mute while Tronstad murdered people, but when he stepped on my toothpaste and took a crap on my carpet, things had gone too far.

Panic didn’t set in until I realized my address book was missing. When I punched her number into my cell phone, she answered on the second ring. “If he’s there, just say, ‘Yes, I think so.’ ”

“He’s left.”

“You sure?”

“Positive. I’ve had the neighbors in helping to clean things up. We’re just about finished.”

“Did he hurt you?”

“No.”

“Do you know who he was?”

“One of the men you work with. I saw him at your station. I don’t recall his name.”

“He have a patch over his eye?”

“How did you know?”

“You sure he didn’t hurt you?”

“I’m okay.”

“Did you call the police?”

“A very nice man took a report and said to call if I saw him again.”

“I’ll be right there. Don’t let anybody else in.”

“Don’t worry about it. He was like a rooster, all strut and no bite. You’d be surprised how insignificant this is in the grand scheme of things.”

If I could ever see the grand scheme of things, I’m sure I would have agreed with her. “I’ll be there in half an hour.”

Hurriedly, I nailed my back door shut, cleaned the carpet, and performed a perfunctory search for the cat, Abraham, an old white tabby who’d been roaming the neighborhood when I moved in and who’d adopted me. I expected I’d seen the last of him for a few days.

Tronstad hadn’t made nearly the mess in my mother’s apartment he had in mine. “You all right, Mom?” I asked, kissing her forehead.

“I’m fine.”

“Sure?”

“Just fine.”

“Did he touch you?”

“He didn’t mean to. He told me to stand in the corner.” My mother was a small woman, barely five feet tall, and had been under a hundred pounds when she was healthy. I hated to think what she weighed now.

“He said all he wanted was some money you hid. I gave him thirty dollars and some coins. It was all I had.”

“Did he hit you?”

“He did a lot of yelling was what he did.”

“But did he hit you?”

“He might have slapped me.”

I could tell she’d been crying before I got there and clearly had been terrified during the break-in. Her hands were still shaking, her face paler than I’d seen it since her last trip to the hospital. My mother was forty-one, but since her diagnosis she’d been hanging out with people much older, perhaps because they were closer to death than the other forty-somethings she knew.

“He said he was from the fire department. He said he was president of Local Twenty-seven. That there’d been an accident. I thought you were hurt, so I let him in.”

“Did you tell the cops you knew the guy?”

“I didn’t know what you’d want me to do.”

“He’s dangerous, Mom. Tell them.”

“But what do
you
want me to do?”

“His name is Theodore Tronstad. I’ll write it down for you. You can call as soon as I leave.”

“Are you sure that’s what you want me to do?”

“Do it.”

She sat at the kitchen table and considered me. Nobody looks at a person in quite the proprietary way a mother does, and I basked under her gaze as if she were a second sun in the sky. “He said he owes money to some bad people and he can’t pay them until you pay him.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if he was in the hole for a good little bit.”

“Seventy-five thousand, he said.”

“Jesus. Listen, I’ve got some cleaning to do at my place. Then I’ve got an errand to run. After that I’m free till Sunday. Think about where you want to go.”

“You don’t need to spend all your time with your mother.”

“That is
exactly
what I need to do. I’ll put gas in the car, get some cash at the bank, and be back in an hour. How’s that?”

“It’s still warm east of the mountains.”

“Good. You navigate and I’ll pilot.”

I filled the tank with premium, checked all the fluids and the pressure in the tires, then drove to the other end of West Seattle. I eased down the hill to Hobart Avenue and cruised past the Pederson homestead for one last attempt at retrieving the bonds.

Fortunately, neither Iola nor Bernard looked out at the road, the epitome of blissful matrimony as they soaped and washed her Land Cruiser in the driveway. It was all very convivial and sudsy and no doubt postcoital, and they looked as if they were settled in for the day. He must have taken today off.

On the drive back to my place, I made a call on the cell phone. “Robert?”

“Hey. I wasn’t really trying to follow you this morning. You know that, don’t you? I was horsing around.”

“You followed me?”

“I couldn’t keep up. That car of yours moves like stink.”

“Tronstad broke into my place. He broke into my mother’s, too. He roughed her up.”

“Now are you ready to do something about him?”

“Not what you have in mind.”

The line was silent for a few seconds. “You got the bags yet?”

“There’s bound to be a window of opportunity, but not today.”

“Tonight?”

“I’m leaving town. I’ll be back after our four-off.”

“Tronstad’s going to be pissed.”

“I hope he is.”

I tidied up two rooms so I wouldn’t be coming home to a complete piggery, asked Mrs. Macklin to feed the cat, then packed a small bag and called Tronstad on my cell phone. No answer. I called his house, but the phone had been disconnected.

Later, as I was driving up the hill toward my mother’s apartment, my cell rang. Tronstad sounded either sleepy or drunk, his voice thick, guttural, and surprisingly friendly. “Hey, peckerwood. You got my stash yet?”

“I should kill you, you bastard!”

“Now, hold your horses.”

“She knows you, Tronstad. She’s been to the station.”

“Who knows me? What are you talking about?”

“My mother. And you
know
what I’m talking about.” There was a long pause while Tronstad tried to remember if he’d actually met my mother. “I kicked the crap out of you once. I can do it again.”

Tronstad laughed, and I could feel rage coursing through my bloodstream like an illegal drug cut with cleanser.

I drove two blocks with the phone pressed to my ear, the line silent except for static. Finally Tronstad said, “You’re treading on thin ice, buddy. You get those bonds and put an end to this shit. That’s all you gotta do. Just go get ’em, and we’ll divvy them up.”

“You shouldn’t have gone to my mother’s.”

“Don’t fuck with me, Gum. Try turning me in, I’ll swear you were in on it. Every last bit of it, including the car fire. You fuck with me, I’ll burn your place down. I’ll burn your mother’s place down.”

“I wouldn’t be setting too many fires. Those bonds are paper.”

The line was silent for a few moments while he considered the prospect of accidentally destroying twelve million dollars. “Gum, I gotta get the money today. They’re going to hurt me. God, we never should have turned it over to you. I’m sleeping in my truck. I got cheated gambling. All I got is twenty bucks cash.”

“What happened to the other ten my mother gave you?” I asked, breaking the connection.

I found my mother upstairs at the kitchen table, packed and dressed for travel, the morning newspaper in front of her, sipping tea from a china cup and looking about as content with life as a sassy sparrow in a tree. The only remaining trace of Tronstad’s visit was a picture frame on the kitchen counter waiting to heal, held together with glue and a congregation of rubber bands. The photo in the frame was of me standing alongside my mother at my fire department drill school graduation, sunlight glinting off the silver buttons on my black wool uniform, my mother looking ten years younger and fifteen pounds heavier. She’d wanted me to finish school and become a teacher or an attorney, but in the photo she was just as proud as if I’d been elected President.

I packed my mother’s bags into the back of the WRX and belted her in. A block south of my mother’s apartment house, I spotted Tronstad’s orange pickup truck. Maintaining a block gap, Tronstad followed us through traffic. Just a clue for all you thieves, murderers, arsonists, turd-droppers, and mother-beaters: you want to tail somebody surreptitiously, don’t do it in a bright orange pickup truck jacked up so high you can run over stray dogs without getting dirt in their ears.

I went through a yellow at Thirty-fifth, and he caught the red as we headed down the hill to the West Seattle viaduct. I knew he’d be thinking he could hotfoot it down the hill and quickly catch up, and it might have worked, too, except that once we were over the crest of the hill, where he couldn’t see us, I gassed the WRX and hit speeds that made my mother’s knuckles go white on the door handle, weaving in and out of traffic, doing everything but running over the tops of vehicles in my way.

He was nowhere in sight by the time we were on I-5 heading south to the Albro exit. I turned north and used surface streets on the east side of the freeway until we hit Rainier Avenue. From there we crossed Lake Washington on the floating bridge and headed toward the Cascade Mountains.

“I suppose there was a reason for driving like an idiot,” my mother said.

“I think I’ve pretty much turned into an idiot.”

34. DECISION BY PARALYSIS

THE HIGHWAY TRAVERSING
Snoqualmie Pass rose only three thousand feet above the level of the ocean, but no road bisecting the Swiss Alps could have been more magnificent. Mom asked me to stop at the summit so she could spend a few minutes in the sunshine. It sounds macabre, but I’d come to the conclusion that the whole point of these trips was so she could get in touch with the earth before rejoining it.

She sat on a rock in the sun watching a group of mountain bikers unload their bikes from the back of a huge SUV. When she asked why they had different styles of bicycles, she was offered a lengthy explanation on mountain-bike design and told the differences between standard and downhill bikes. She had so much to be inward about, and yet every aspect of her life was threaded outward, each day spent learning as much as was humanly possible about the creatures around her and how they interacted with the world.

As we rolled down the slopes of the Cascade Mountains into Eastern Washington, cattle grazed in fields scorched brown from the hot summer. Horses stood like statues under the sun. The second mountain pass, Blewett, was a twisty, two-lane highway for most of the route, and once on it I passed slower vehicles at will, letting the turbo kick in as we climbed again into the cool mountain air.

It was late afternoon when we pulled into Winthrop, a dusty little Old West movie set of a town in the Methow Valley of north-central Washington. In keeping with the theme, the buildings lining the short main street all had false fronts of clapboard siding and sidewalks constructed of rough-hewn wood planks. When the snow flew, Winthrop metamorphosed into a mecca for cross-country skiers and snowmobilers; in the summers it attracted hikers, rock climbers, mountain bikers, equestrians, fly fishermen, and anybody else looking to get away from the clouds and rain on the west side of the mountains. It was just the sort of backwater bucket of humanity my mother loved to soak up, the chatty locals and atmosphere acting like Epsom salts on her woes.

We ended up staying at the Rio Vista, smack on the main drag in Winthrop. The hotel had burned to the ground a few years earlier but had been rebuilt. Mom got the story when she asked about a color photo of the fire that was hanging in a frame on the wall. Since I had entered the fire department she’d been fascinated by fires, car wrecks, air crashes— anything in which my job might involve me.

Our room at the Rio Vista looked west out over the Chewuch River, which had dwindled to a trickle under the October sun. After opening the patio slider and spotting a bald eagle in a tree forty yards away, my mother got out her binoculars and I lay down on the second bed. I’d worked the night before, and that combined with the five-hour drive and my current situation had put me under enough stress to bend steel.

I woke up an hour and a half later, and by then my mother was asleep on the other bed. I’d noticed lately her naps were getting more frequent and longer, and that she was slower than Christmas waking up. It was one of those observations I didn’t speak about and was sorry I’d made.

She’d never really told me the details of her illness, only that she had breast cancer, that it had spread long before they found it. After a recent miserable course of chemotherapy, she told her doctors she would rather live the rest of her life taking painkillers in front of sunsets than undergoing expensive and ultimately ineffective medical procedures in windowless rooms.

In reviewing statements she made over the years, most of which seemed inconsequential at the time, I came to the conclusion that my mother had always been comfortable with the thought of death, comfortable in the same way that many old people get comfortable with it.

The four days we spent in the Methow were in the eighties, with a high overcast and some sun, and I wore shorts, though my mother bundled her frail torso in khakis and a fleece vest. We stayed three nights, taking short early-morning hikes each day before returning to the hotel for a nap. For the first time, she’d begun taking a second nap during the day, often inadvertently while reading in the afternoon on our room’s patio, or while I was out in the hills on a rented mountain bike.

It became our custom to eat dinner at the Duck Brand Cantina across the street from the Rio Vista, where we eschewed the popular multilevel wooden decks outdoors in favor of eating amid a riot of ever-present Christmas lights in the back of the restaurant, beneath the Texas longhorn trophy. For breakfast each morning we walked down the street to the main intersection of town to eat at a place called Three Fingered Jack’s, billed as the oldest legal saloon in the State of Washington. The Old West atmosphere there was slightly tarnished by the big-screen TV blaring in the corner, but I guess that was part of the fun.

Mom spent time talking to the locals, forming a particularly close attachment to a heavy-bottomed waitress named Doris at Three Fingered Jack’s. They promised to write, and I believed Doris actually would. My mother carried on a humongous e-mail correspondence, spending hours each day keeping up with various friends and acquaintances and, in some cases, people she’d met and knew only through the Internet, from as far away as Australia and South Africa.

On our final morning, after we’d paid our bill at Three Fingered Jack’s, she was sipping tea as I read a hundred-year-old ad on the wall for a single-cylinder automobile that cost two thousand dollars. She leaned across the table and fixed me with her steely gray gaze. Her scarf was pulled tight across her forehead. Once or twice on trips I’d caught her banging around our hotel room without her scarf, and seeing her bald head was as much of a shock as if I’d caught her nude.

The hardest part of her illness for me was acting normal, acting as if I didn’t notice, and if I did notice, pretending I didn’t care. She needed that from me during these last few months, to know it wasn’t bothering me. Above all else, she craved normalcy.

“I know you’re in trouble, Jason. And I know you don’t think you have any way out.”

“You’re not going to tell me to have faith in God, not after what He’s done to you?” We’d spent so much time avoiding talk of religion and any discussion of her impending death that I was almost as embarrassed by my statement as she was.

Even though we both knew I was lashing out at her in order to fend off inquiries about my own problems, she said, “What’s God done to me? I’ve had a
wonderful
life.”

“I love you, Mom, but you’re forty-one years old, you’ve lived most of your life in poverty. You don’t even own a car. You’re dying of cancer. I don’t call that being watched over by God. I just don’t.”

“Are you saying if I had a Mercedes, that would be a signal God was taking care of me? Don’t be silly. My life with you was a miracle. I’ve been blessed.”

“Your life with me was a struggle.”

“Don’t ever start feeling sorry for me or yourself, Jason. You were born in the wealthiest country in history. Most people on this earth survive on less than two dollars a day. Thousands of children starve to death each day, and we all march ahead as if it isn’t happening. Don’t ever feel sorry for yourself. And as far as me dying at forty-one? It’s only been the last hundred years or so women even lived this long.”

She stared at me, her gray eyes more earnest than ever. “Jason, don’t ever feel sorry for me.
I
don’t.”

“Okay.”

After checking out of the hotel, we drove to the Grand Coulee Dam and spent an hour at the visitors’ center, then walked along the sidewalk on top of the dam and took the tour inside. Everything about the dam fascinated my mother: the immensity, the historical footnotes concerning the construction, the permanence. On the way home we explored Native American hieroglyphics in the boulders off the highway and hiked up into the caves with a smattering of other intrepid travelers. Later we had dinner in Wenatchee, a good-sized agricultural town just this side of Blewett Pass, where she ordered a salad but then had it boxed up on the pretext that she’d eat it later.

I’d taken this trip in the mistaken belief that travel might clear my head, but the longer we stayed away from home, the more antsy and chaotic my thoughts became, until I thought I was going mad. Four people—no, six people—were dead, and had I done things differently, they would all be alive still. My primary character trait these days seemed to be paralysis.

Ted Tronstad had gone from being a small-time prankster and troublemaker to being a thief, then from a possibly accidental killer to an intentional one. A smarter, more confident Jason Gum could have stopped every one of those deaths.

Mom didn’t wake up until I was driving up the hill into West Seattle. “Going to be a nice evening,” she said, sleepily. “The pollution always makes the sky pretty.”

“Yes, it does.”

The way I saw it, I had three choices.

I could turn the bonds over to Tronstad and Johnson and wait to see what transpired.

I could do something to stop Tronstad, either by myself or in conjunction with Robert Johnson.

I could go to the authorities.

Each alternative involved risk. If I turned the bonds over to Tronstad, the odds were he would try to get rid of me as an unwanted witness, maybe by firebombing my car or my house. If I
stopped
him, Johnson’s euphemism for killing him, I would become what he’d become. I knew I couldn’t live with that. If I went to the authorities, I would most likely end up in a cell.

I carried my mother’s bags upstairs, made certain she was secure, kissed her brow, then went back out to my car, half expecting Tronstad to be lurking about, though he wasn’t.

When I parked in the short driveway in front of my garage door, Mrs. Macklin was staring at me from her front doorway, one of her unshaven adult sons alongside. “Good evening, Mrs. Macklin. What’s going on?”

I glanced to my right and saw what I should have seen when I pulled up.

My living-room window had a long crack running from bottom to top, and the drapes had been pulled off the wall.