Rainy City (14 page)

“Did Mary have any sort of drinking problem?”

“How did you know about that? She was a practicing alcoholic most of her life. She’d been out to the farm to dry out two or three times. Two years ago when we came up she was stoned day and night.”

“She never had any men around?”

“Mary was a confirmed old maid. Poor dear. Mary never wanted to have anything to do with the opposite sex. Not her.”

“What about Harry?”

“Yes. There was Harry. But that didn’t amount to much.”

In the back of my mind I wondered if perhaps Mary and Melissa had had some sort of improper relationship. I wanted to ask her if Mary ever had anything to do with the same sex, but I suspected Clarice wouldn’t take it well. It would shatter our delicate courtship, I with the solicitous inquiries, she with the fawning replies.

Surreptitiously, I handed her my card and told her to give me a ring if her husband decided he wanted to fill me in on the family history. She said she would try to talk him into loosening up. She said it as if she had been trying for years. When Ed Crowell sauntered into the foyer, we said our good-byes and thanked each other as if we meant it.

Clarice kept her raisin eyes on me as I trotted through the rainy parking lot to my truck. She observed me with extreme care while she waited for her husband to fetch their car.

I drove home in the splashing rush-hour traffic, mesmerized by the headlights knifing through the raindrops.

Some pundits claimed the weather was growing worse each year, that we were plummeting into another ice age. It did seem to be colder and wetter than last year. Maybe another ice age was possible. Maybe things were going from bad to worse. I knew one thing. We were all involved in an intricate pattern of violence that was slowly escalating, just like the winters. ?

THE MORNING SKY WAS I1T UP IN THE EAST LIKE A HOUSE on fire. The weather people had assured us it was only a temporary lull in the rains, that the clouds would move in and drench our fair city by noon.

She lived in a basement apartment, almost a nook, in the back of a large sprawling complex of stucco apartments on Capitol Hill. It was early, before seven-thirty, when I tramped through the tall, wet lawn and knocked, catching her as she was getting ready to leave.

Her front door was in a well, all the windows barred with wrought iron. It was the least accessible and most isolated apartment in the complex, the only one that had iron bars across the windows.

Jerking open a small peekaboo window in the door, she rose up on tiptoe and peered at me.

“Ms. Gunther?”

“You?”

“I need to speak to you about Melissa Nadisky. I believe you treated her at the clinic.”

The woman behind the door thought that over for a long while. “Is that what that fiasco was all about the other night? That sham?”

“I’m a private detective. I’m looking for Melissa. She’s been missing for over a week.”

“Go to hell.” She slammed the peekaboo window. It made a tinny thud. I thumbed her doorbell and held it.

After thirty seconds, the peekaboo window screaked open again.

“You’re no detective,” she said.

I passed a photostat of my license through the five-inch window: She grabbed it, read it, tore it into quarters and stuffed the pieces through the hole.

“I’m sorry about the other night,” I said. “But Melissa’s been missing for over a week, her daughter has been kidnapped, and her husband is in the clink in Bellingham.”

“Burton?”

“The police have him.”

“What for?”

“Murder.”

Ms. Gunther closed the small window and latched it. Then she opened her front door as far as a fragile burglar chain would allow. She stood warily in the crack, one gray eye exposed, watching me pick up the scraps of my photostat. “It really is important” I said.

“You said her daughter’s been kidnapped?”

“That’s what said.”

“Why wasn’t it in the papers?”

“Melissa’s father kidnapped her.”

“I don’t want to get messed up in any family squabbles.”

“Could I come in for a few moments?”

Gunther looked me over again, then unchained the door and sidestepped the doorway. I wiped my sopping shoes carefully on her jute doormat. She watched, as if she wanted to inspect the job I’d done.

She wore a jumper, black stockings, and a pair of clunky boots. She moved stiffly across the room, turned, tilted against a wall and folded her arms selfconsciously across her breasts. She still didn’t know quite what to make of me.

“I’m on my way to work,” she said. ‘You’ve got about two minutes of my time. After that, it’s hasta la vista, mucacho.”

The apartment was pleasant, prim and spotless, an array of yellows and pinks. It was a single woman’s abode that might have been a model for House Beautiful.

I was accustomed to Kathy’s place, its busy clutter and the invariable project arrayed in the center of the living room rug. If Gunther was in the midst of any projects, they were carefully concealed.

“I’m really sorry about the other night. We shouldn’t have done it?”

“No, but you had a damned good time, didn’t you? All at my expense. I may be more gullible than some, but I’m not a moron. I figured it out later.”

“I’ve apologized twice now.”

Gunther reached over to a table and picked up her enormous tortoiseshell glasses, donning them fastidiously. I sensed that she didn’t need glasses to see, that she wore them to place a barrier, however small, between herself and me.

“Melissa’s been gone since a week ago Sunday.”

She adjusted the glasses using the middle fingers of both her hands. “I wondered. They missed an appointment.”

“I need your help.”

“Go to the police.”

“The police aren’t going to look for someone who’s been missing a week, especially when she’s got a history of taking off.”

“I can’t help you.”

“You mean you won’t help me.”

“I do not betray confidences,” she said, imperiously. “We have a code of ethics in our profession.”

“I need to know some things about Melissa.”

“Obviously, you found out some things. My personal files on the Nadiskys had been tampered with. You did it while your girlfriend lied to me out in the hall.”

Our charade, had been a frontal assault on her self-image. I could see it in her cloudy gray eyes. Maybe people had been telling her she was gullible all her life and she had been telling them she wasn’t. Maybe down deep she had been a little unsure about it. Now there was no disputing it. She was a chump.

“Sunday, a week ago, Melissa disappeared without a trace. She didn’t say good-bye to her husband, to her

little girl, she just walked out the door. Do you have any idea where she might be?”

Ms. Gunther shook her head, her thick, evenly cut pageboy flopping against her face. “If I did, I wouldn’t tell you.”

“I thought it was your job to help people. Your clients are in serious trouble and you don’t give a hoot.”

“I do!” she protested. “I do. But we have rules. Don’t you understand?”

“I wonder if you understand, Ms. Gunther. Rules are supposed to protect innocent people, not endanger them.”

“What do you mean endanger?”

I plopped down onto a plaid cloth couch, leaned back, crossed my legs and surveyed the place.

“What do you mean endanger?” she repeated.

“What do your friends call you?”

Bashfully, she tightened her forearms on her chest and said, “Helen.”

“Helen, I began looking for Melissa as a favor for a friend. Since then, the friend has been tied up and was probably about to be tortured before I accidentally walked in. Melissa’s daughter was kidnapped by her grandfather. And last week, Melissa phoned her aunt. She wanted to go up there and stay for a while. But she never showed. Yesterday, her aunt was murdered. The police in Bellingham think Burton did it.”

“Oh, Judas Priest,” said Helen Gunther, stumbling across the room to sit on the arm of an overstuffed chair opposite me. Using the middle finger of her hand, she shoved her glasses back up onto her nose. Her fingernails were painted fuchsia, matching the slash of color on her full lips.

“Did Melissa have any lesbian tendencies?”

“I can’t tell you that,” she snapped. But she did tell me. From the look on her face, I judged it was something that had never occurred to her in relation to Melissa.

“How about old boyfriends? Her neighbors tell me there was an old boyfriend hanging around.”

“Really, Mr. Black. Maybe you are a private detective. But I can’t tell you these things. I really can’t. It’s against

I don’t know.” She peeled off her glasses and rubbed her eyes with a pale hand. “You fooled me once before. How do I know this isn’t all some ruse?”

“Helen,” I said. “We think Melissa’s in Tacoma somewhere. Was there an old boyfriend down there? From the look on your face, I’m thinking there was.”

Helen Gunther sighed and snagged her glasses back around either ear. “You’ll have to leave now. I need to be at the clinic in fifteen minutes.”

“Call Bellingham,” I said. “Ask the police if they’re holding Burton. I’ll be back this afternoon.”

“I won’t be here, Mr. Black.”

“Call me Thomas. This evening, then.”

“Mr. Black, I’ve already spoken too long. This is just one of those things. I’m sorry, but I cannot reveal confidences.”

“If somebody’s life was at stake, could your “Whose life would that be?”

“How about Melissa’s? Whoever murdered her aunt might go after her next. Maybe she’s dead now.”

Helen Gunther shuddered but then shook her head stubbornly. “I’m not telling you or anyone else secrets my clients have disclosed. That’s just the way things are. Good-bye.”

“What about Melissa and her father? What was the problem?”

Helen Gunther got up and opened the front door, staring at the floor. Reluctantly, I left. Ten minutes later when she came out, I tailed her. She clambered into a dented MG and drove to a lot near the Hopewell Clinic. She ate four frosted donuts at a shop across the street, quaffed a coffee and then ducked into the Hopewell.

I went back home, exercised, ate and moped around the house the rest of the morning, fretting about Kathy. Though it was a million-to-one shot, I kept imagining some ogre would snatch her off the street. Some ogre with a penchant for electric ranges.

Without gaining an ounce of good for my troubles, I telephoned all the remaining phone numbers on my list. Nobody in any of the pest companies I contacted admitted to knowing a Romano. None of the Romanos I got in touch with admitted to knowing a pest company. Life was just peachy keen. Mother had been right. Everything just dropped into your lap if you were a good boy.

Shortly after noon, the phone jangled. I knew exactly who it was because I was naked in the tub. “Kathy?”

“You must have been sitting on the phone.”

“No, I’m re-reading Shakespeare. I’m into the last act of Henry VIII. Lord Chamberlain has just come in. The phone happened to be next to the book here.”

“Very funny.”

“You sound tired.”

“I’ve been in the stacks for hours. Pick me up at the library?”

“At the U?”

“Ride your bike down here and we’ll walk back. We’ll talk then.”

“I’ll be down in a few minutes.” I toweled off, dressed and coasted down through the campus.

I spotted Kathy sitting demurely on some brick steps in the quadrangle beside the library. I freewheeled across the bumpy brick walk and called out, “Hey, little girl. Want some candy?”

A passing undergraduate lacking a sense of humor gawked at me and frowned. Kathy egged the undergraduate on. “Geez, mister. After what I had to go through last week to get those Mountain bars …I dunno.” The undergraduate eyeballed us from a distance, adjusting his load of books and keeping careful tabs on my movements.

“What are you doing down here?”

“Looking up Angus Crowell.”

“What did you find?”

“Talk about making your mark in the world. He’s the president of the Coalition for Better Universities. He’s the chairman of the local Boy Scout Council. He was even a state representative for four years way back in the fifties. He founded his church. He spearheaded a drive to sponsor Cambodian refugees in the state. I made a list of some other groups he’s either president or chairman of. It goes on and on. How could one man possibly do justice to that many activities?”

“Organizations feel the need to plaster a big name across the top of their roster, someone to boast about. The more things a fellow belongs to, the bigger his name. There’s a hardworking housewife somewhere transacting the real business in each of those groups.”

“You think so? Let’s go this way.”

Kathy guided me toward the Ave. The street signs called it University Way N.E. but students had been calling it the Ave for eons. It was on our way, a visual treat, and generally it attracted quite a hodgepodge of people to its myriad of shops and stores. We ambled up the sidewalk, me wheeling my Miyata and Kathy riffling her notes on Angus Crowell.

“Really, Thomas. The more I tell you about Crowell, the more you’ll have to respect the man.”

“Let’s start respecting.”

“He’s been written up in hundreds of different articles. Some of them decades old. Some of them as recent as this month. It’s my feeling that he really thinks what he’s doing is the right thing. Taking his granddaughter. He’s just too much of a VIP to break the law like this without good reason.”

“What else did you dig up?”

She gave me a disgruntled look. “At twenty, he was decorated by the Navy. Their ship had a fire and he managed to drag somebody out of it. Eleven others died. He went to school right here, at the U. In the Second World War, he went to work at Boeing. He stayed more than ten years. When he left, he had worked all the way up from a riveter to one of the top management positions. He joined an investment company for a few years, then he was a state representative and then, in the fifties, he founded Taltro Incorporated with some other man. He’s been there ever since. He’s the president.”

“How long has he been the president?”