Rainy City (18 page)

“Can you describe him a little better?”

“He’s a pimp.”

“Black or white?”

“Hard to tell. He’s kinda old for the game.” He picked up the Reader’s Digest and tried to find his place.

Kathy and I left by the back door so that I could reconnoiter all the exits. It was an old battle habit. Kathy, who had been skimming through the Tacoma News Tribune, said, “I found nothing in the paper about Ms. Gunther.” Breathing heavily as she skipped along trying to keep to my pace, Kathy said, “Where are we going?”

“We’re looking for a cut-rate pimp.”

“Melissa’s not…”

“That’s what they tell me.”

“She’s not!”

“I think she is.”

“Where?”

“Right up there.” I could see the cheap neon sign advertising Bra.verman’s from the mouth of the alley behind The Last Inn. Braverman’s was a small, windowless cocktail lounge.

A Pontiac with serious ring problems was double-parked in front of Braverman’s, puking smoke into the city evening. Kathy started into Braverman’s, but I grasped her arm and pulled her back.

“Wait here a minute,” I said.

“You know that guy in the car?”

“He lives in Ballard.”

“So?”

“Across the street from Melissa and Burton.”

“Oh.”

Sidney Iddins grinned idiotically as I walked around the car into the street next to the driver’s door. The grin looked more foxlike when I spotted the .357 magnum tucked snugly between his fat thighs. ?

IT WAS A DEBATE WHETHER TO HIGHTAIL IT OR TO COLDCOCK Sidney through the open window of the Pontiac before he could train the gun on me. I did neither, and to my surprise he left the gun where it was—between his legs.

“Hey, guy,” Sidney said, flashing a toothy grin, doing a Groucho with his eyebrows. “Who’s that cunt? Pretty nice.”

“She’s a woman cop,” I lied. “She’d just as soon castrate you as look at you.”

The grin melted off his face. “Well, she ain’t got no cause to be gunnin’ after me.”

“If she heard what you just called her she’d cut you off at the knees.”

“What? What’d I call her?”

“Never mind. What are you doing here?”

“Helga got a call from Blondy. Wants a ride home, I guess. She’s inside talking to somebody now. I brought Myrtle along for comfort.” He took two fingers and patted the .357 between his thighs.

“Is Melissa Nadisky inside?”

“Ain’t been in. Don’t know. She said on the phone she’d meet Helga here. I guess she figured good old Helgy could get her out of any fix.”

“How long has your wife been inside?”

He glanced at his watch. “‘Bout five minutes.”

Escorting Kathy through the front door into the dark lounge, I said, “Keep cool, Kathy. Stay by the door and pretend you’re not with me. Just in case.”

“Just in case what?”

“Let’s hope we don’t find out what.”

I spotted Helga Iddins strutting from the rear of the lounge, indignation reflected in her walk, but still conscious of the male eyes on her. She thought men looked at her because she was appealing. If she’d watched them carefully she would have seen that they were ogling her glandular endowments. In a raunchy way it was kind of sad.

She didn’t recognize me until I blocked her path. Halting, slamming her fists onto her hips, she searched my face.

“You? Well, you’ve almost found her. She’s sitting back there.” Helga gestured toward the rear of the cocktail lounge with a toss of her long brown hair. I couldn’t see Melissa or anyone who looked like a pimp, but there were booths around a corner.

“Your husband said she called you.”

“This afternoon. Shit. And I have to work tonight. I should be there right now. She calls me up, whines about being scared to leave without a friend along, then when I get here she won’t budge.”

“She give a reason?”

“Reason? Hell, she won’t even talk. Not a squeak.”

“Is he back there?”

“Yeah, but he left. How ‘bout that reward? Can I get it now?”

“You’ll find a number in last night’s paper. Call it.”

“Shit. She could have scrammed with me. I told her Sidney was outside with a gun. We could have gotten her home. Shit. Shit.” She stormed off toward the exit.

As I followed Helga’s backside, Kathy locked eyes with me across the smoky room and shot me a scathing look. For a split second I grinned wickedly.

I located Melissa in the last booth, her back to the wall, as if afraid to let anybody or anything sneak up behind her. She was slouched over a cup of coffee, fanning the lazy snakes of her own cigarette smoke out of her eyes with a cheap mimeographed menu. She held her cigarette the way a new smoker does. I recalled no ashtrays at the Nadisky house. She had adopted the habit within the last ten days, along with some other habits. I had to wonder how it would feel to be sitting across the table from her haggling over prices and contemplating what she was going to do upstairs at The Last Inn.

“Melissa?”

Her pale blue eyes seemed to sink back into her brain. I sat down across from her in the booth, wishing my back wasn’t exposed to the open room. Somewhere nearby was a gentleman who liked to stick people.

In hushed tones, she said, “You must be looking for someone else. My name is Blue.”

“Sure it is,” I said, flopping the photograph I’d been carrying for three days onto the tabletop. She peered at it, pretending not to be startled.

“Blue,” I said. “Melissa Crowell Nadisky Blue. You’ve got a little girl who needs you badly.”

Melissa picked up a tarnished spoon and dunked it into her coffee cup, watching the swirls of steam rise off the surface of the liquid. She wore .a shiny black blouse unbuttoned far enough to see the tops of her thin, cream-colored breasts.

“I’m a detective, Melissa. An ex-cop. You don’t have to worry about escaping from whoever you’re with. I can get you away. Your friends hired me to find you.”

“Friends?” She glanced around the lounge. It smelled of popcorn and booze and stale cigarette smoke. It smelled like a stall in purgatory. Striving to look as bored as humanly possible, she said, “I don’t have any friends.”

“Kathy Birchfield is your friend. She hired me. She’s at the front door right now.”

The look of contained boredom vanished for a moment. “Kathy?”

“You going back with us?”

“God, no! Just go away. All of you go away. Before you get into trouble.”

“You called Helga and then when she got here you didn’t want to leave. Why?”

“She brought her…”

“Because she brought her husband along? I don’t blame you. He’s a bum.”

“You a cop?” Her voice was small and faded and almost as delicate as the alabaster skin of her face and neck. My indictment of Sidney Iddins had won her over. Except for the gaudy makeup, the blue eyeliner and the painted cheeks, she looked enough like Burton to be his sister. Somehow Kathy executed the whore makeup routine better.

“I was a cop. Now I’m a private detective. I’m a friend of Kathy’s. She asked me to find you.”

“Why?”

“She was worried about your little girl.”

“Angel? How is Angel?”

“She needs you.”

The entire conversation was moving along without any eye contact. I was speaking to a sad young woman, but the sad young woman was speaking to the spoon in her fingers.

“Nobody needs me. Nobody at all.” She stubbed out her cigarette and watched the tiny orange glow die out as if she had a bet on how long it would take.

“Angel needs you. She needs you to get her away from your father.”

“My father?” Animation infused her eyes for the first time since we’d met. “My father? What does my father have to do with anything?”

“He spirited Angel away from Burton this past Sun-day. He feels he is better qualified to raise her than Burton, especially since you’ve split the family up. He also thinks she might be in danger because of his business rivals.”

Her hand darted across the table, upsetting the coffee mug and flinging hot coffee across the tabletop in a screwball arc. She ignored the spreading puddle, grabbed me and dug fingernails like talons into the back of my hand.

“Tell me you’re lying, God damn it. Tell me you’re lying. He wouldn’t dare take her!”

She had the eyes of a three-week-old kitten being flushed down the toilet.

“There’s only one way to get her back,” I said. “You and Burton have to appear together in court. Burton already tried it alone. Your father’s lawyer bamboozled the court, said they took her on your say-so.”

When she finally set my hand free I discovered four bloody bird tracks across the back of it. I pulled a clean handkerchief out of my coat and wound it around the hand.

“Melissa?” I said. “Are you coming back to Seattle with us?”

Her brain tried to focus, but her eyes remained blurry. Still transfixed mindlessly on the spill, Melissa blurted, “I’m scared of what he’ll do. He fools everyone. He’s devious.”

“I’ve seen it all, Melissa. I’m devious, too.”

Without focusing, Melissa slid toward the aisle and began to rise, dragging her purse and coat along. Nothing had been promised, but physically and psychically we had decided to leave together.

As we rose, a small man dressed in a white pin-striped suit bounded up to us. He was small and mean-looking and compact enough to be quicker than I. He kept one hand in his coat pocket, as if caressing a talisman of some sort. Or a switchblade. He was swarthy, appeared to be of Mediterranean stock, in his late forties or early fifties. His face needed a shave and specks of lint festooned his shiny black hair.

“You goin’ somewheres, baby?”

Melissa looked up at me as if seeing me for the first time and said, “He’ll do somethin’ terrible. I know he will.”

“You must be Romano Solomon,” I said, extending a hand. He didn’t take it. His fist stayed in his coat pocket, the fist that may or may not have been wrapped around some tempered steel.

“Bledsoe,” he said. “Romano Bledsoe. Some folks calls me Solomon but that’s jus’ a nickname.” He reached across to pull Melissa to him, but before he could, I took her by the shoulders and swung her behind me.

“It’s all over, Bledsoe. Melissa’s going home now.”

Running his free hand through greasy hair, dislodging one or two particles of lint, Bledsoe tried to see over my shoulder to Melissa. I purposely blocked his vision with my shoulder. He had a tough decision, whether or not to make a scene. Whether or not to risk pushing and maybe yelling and maybe spilling some blood on all that white he was wearing. He looked me over carefully and then opted for discretion.

“See ya later, toots,” he said, plopping down awkwardly in the booth where Melissa had been sitting. I watched him dunk the elbows of his white suit into the spilled coffee without seeming to notice.

At the door, Kathy took Melissa by the arm, helped her slip on her coat, and guided her out into the cold Tacoma night. I was surprised to find that Kathy was embarrassed by the situation, didn’t know quite what to say.

Wordlessly we walked to the parking lot, got into the truck, and drove out of the city. It was beginning to mist.

“Maybe you would feel better staying with me,” said Kathy, after half an hour of driving. We were crossing the .Duwamish River. “Your place might be kind of lonely.”

“I should see Burton,” she said, resolutely. “I should see him tonight.”

Kathy, who was sitting by the window, peered around the blonde and caught my eye. I shook my head almost imperceptibly, indicating that I hadn’t told her about Burton’s incarceration.

Kathy said, “I have some clothes you could wear.”

Melissa glanced down at herself. “Oh,” she said.

“That’s an idea. Thanks. I’ll change first.”

Kathy gave me a meaningful look. We both knew after Melissa heard the whole story she wouldn’t have the heart to spend the night alone at their rented house.

She took it well, or seemed to. Kathy helped her change, scrubbed her face, gave her something solid to eat and hauled her back up to my kitchen. We all sat around the kitchen table munching on a batch of freshly made popcorn.

We explained to Melissa exactly what had been happening in her absence. At first, she didn’t utter a word. Then she asked a couple of questions, but they seemed almost perfunctory, as though she were asking things she thought we would want to hear her ask.

I should have known. The wordless, stunned reaction of Melissa to her husband’s plight, her aunt’s demise, her father’s actions, her daughter’s kidnapping, her counselor’s murder; it had all been too calm, too mannered. They went downstairs and prepared for bed and I should have known.

Switching off the lights, I drifted around in the dark, watching the rain patter on the kitchen windows, checking the street in front for unfamiliar vehicles, locking up, and skimming the evening paper. There was no mention of Helen Gunther’s death in the Times.

It was three in the morning when I heard bare feet padding up from the basement and into my bedroom. “Thomas?” It was Kathy. “She’s gone.”

“How long ago?”

“I don’t know.”

“When did you wake up?”

“Just a minute ago.”

Flinging the covers off, I said, “I bet you heard the door closing. She’s probably still within the block!”

“Think we can find her?”

Scrambling into a pair of faded jeans that had been draped across the back of a chair, I said, “The door closing is what always wakes me up. I bet she’s not even two hundred yards away from the house.”

Without asking, Kathy groped in my closet and selected a Navy pea coat, donning it over her nightgown. “I didn’t realize you had so much experience being walked out on,” she said, her face a stunning deadpan.

I interrupted my scramble long enough to bestow a long, laborious look upon her. The corners of her mouth wrinkled upwards impishly and we both marched out through the kitchen. ?

IT WAS THREE-THIRTY WHEN WE STARTED THE TRUCK. THE streets were wet and slick and deserted. We looped around the block, then headed for the nearest bus stops. Half an hour into our search we drove to Ballard. The Nadisky house was dark and empty, the grass tall and damp, the rusty wheelbarrow still canted against the front porch. Across the street, Sidney Iddins was anchored in front of the boob tube gorging on beer. I had always thought the TV stations closed down before three.