Lying in Wait (9780061747168) (8 page)

As we walked away from the house and threaded our way through the collection of parked cars, I was struck by how commonplace and ordinary the house looked. Yet inside those sandstone walls there had been a world of multigenerational conflict—years and decades of parents and children at war with one another.

Of course, everyone tries to pretend to the out
side world that his own family isn't at all like that, but maybe if you scratch the surface, most of them are just that way. Sue Danielson's family certainly wasn't absolutely smooth and trouble-free. The little lunchtime set-to with Jared had proved that.

I left the Gebhardts' home in Blue Ridge convinced that Else and Gunter's seemingly troubled existence, one filled with marital and parental strife, wasn't all that different from anyone else's.

Mine included.

Sue Danielson
and I drove back to Fishermen's Terminal and hit the bricks, or rather the planks. We stumped up and down the separate docks, asking questions, talking to folks.

That first pass wasn't particularly productive. No one had seen anyone acting strangely the night before. No one had noticed anything out of the ordinary. When you're working a homicide investigation, those kinds of answers are to be expected, either because the various witnesses really haven't seen anything or because they don't want to become involved. It's also the reason why detectives seem to go back over the same ground, asking the same questions again and again.

Gradually, however, through the eyes of Gunter Gebhardt's peers, a complex picture began to emerge. “That damn hardheaded Kraut,” as Gunter was referred to more than once, wasn't what you could have called Mr. Personality.

Despite thirty years spent working there, he hadn't been especially well liked in Ballard's fishing community. Grudgingly respected, yes, but not necessarily liked. A few people made wryly derogatory comments about Gunter's fishing capability.
I wasn't able to sort out if they were just making fun of him—which in Norwegian fishing circles pretty much goes with the program—or if Gunter Gebhardt really hadn't been all the good a fisherman. Still, not even his most outspoken critics faulted Gunter's general business acumen and sense of duty.

We spent almost half an hour with Dag Rasmussen, a grizzled and opinionated old salt whose boat,
The Longliner
, was berthed two boats away from the charred remains of Gunter Gebhardt's
Isolde
. Clad in greasy coveralls, Dag was elbow-deep in overhauling the main engine on his boat when we interrupted him.

“Gunter Gebhardt was one tough son of a bitch and hell to work for, too,” Dag told us. Leaning on the rail of
The Longliner
, he seemed unperturbed by our dragging him away from his work.

“You have to remember that Kraut was still making money when lots of the other guys were falling by the wayside. And don't forget, either,” Dag added, shaking a gnarled finger in my face, “after Henrik Didriksen's heart attack, Gunter was the one who held things together for Inge, and him only a son-in-law. I give him plenty of credit for that.”

“What do you mean he was hard to work for, Mr. Rasmussen?” Sue asked.

Dag laughed and sent a brown wad of spittle arcing into the water between his boat and the one alongside. Several of his teeth were missing. The ones that remained were stained brown with tobacco juice. It reminded me why the Ballard area is sometimes referred to as Snoose Junction.

“He was big on busywork; always wanted the guys on his boat to work like dogs. Behind his back, they used to call him ‘Gunter the Nazi.'”

Sue and I exchanged veiled glances. Those words might have been truer than anyone speaking them could possibly have suspected. Dag continued with his garrulous recitation.

“He didn't want to pay them nothing, either. He made up his own rules and docked his guys' pay for every infraction. Years ago, he opted out of the Vessel Owners Association. Said he was sick of settling up according to the set-line agreement when he wasn't getting nothing for it. That's about the time he stopped taking union crews and started negotiating his own deals.”

“Why was that?”

Dag looked at Sue as if she must have just crawled out from under a rock. “So he wouldn't have to pay union scale,” he answered simply.

“But people still worked for him anyway?”

“Ja, sure,” Dag said. “You know how it is. The ones who need money bad enough don't give a damn about union wages, and the newcomers don't know the difference. They're just happy to have a job.”

The possibility of union/nonunion difficulties was something to think about—a new wrinkle in our inquiry. If it turned out that labor relations had something to do with the case at hand, it wouldn't be the first time union wrangling had ended up as part of a Seattle P.D. homicide investigation.

“Would you happen to know the names of any of these nonunion crew members?” I asked.

“Hell, no!” Dag Rasmussen answered. “Most
didn't stay with him long. They got fed up and moved on. And the last few years most of 'em didn't speak English, leastwise not good enough so as you could understand 'em.”

“They're immigrants, then?”

“Yeah, foreigners of some kind.”

“Where from?”

He shrugged. “I dunno. Mexico maybe. Or maybe farther south. Speak Spanish mostly, and don't know nothin'.”

Dag's words meandered off, spinning long, drawn-out, and dreary tales about the good old days when most members of the fleet had been born in Norway. Meanwhile, I wandered off on a separate tack of my own. Bonnie Elgin's missing hit-and-run victim. She had told us earlier that the injured man hadn't wanted to wait around long enough for either an ambulance or a police officer to arrive on the scene. She had also told us he was Hispanic. Was it possible he would turn out to be one of Gunter's nonunion fishermen? If so, that would be an unqualified Bingo.

I caught Sue's eye. She gave me a knowing nod that let me know I wasn't the only one making that potentially important connection. On our list of persons of interest, Bonnie Elgin's missing accident victim had just shot up to the very top. He was someone we would want to locate as soon as possible.

I jotted down a couple quick notes. One was to make arrangements to have someone pick up that bloody box spring and haul it down to the crime lab for analysis. The other was to try to lay hands
on whatever initial reports Bonnie Elgin's accident might have generated.

It was possible the patrol officers who had responded to her frantic 9-1-1 call might have elicited some critical piece of information that she had inadvertently neglected to tell us. Years of doing this job have taught me that often the most mundane details—ones it's easy to overlook—turn out to be vitally important.

Well after five in the afternoon, Sue and I headed back down the dock, leaving Dag Rasmussen to return to his greasy engine overhaul. As we neared the Mustang, I reached into my pocket, pulled out the glassine bag, and examined the black-enameled wrench inside it.

“I guess we'd better get this down to the crime lab right away. And we'll need to make arrangements about getting that box spring picked up.”

“Good thinking,” Sue said.

I glanced up the darkening dock. Twice in the course of the afternoon, we had dropped by
One Day at a Time
in response to Watty's urgent lunchtime message to see Alan Torvoldsen. No one had been aboard Alan's boat either time. Now there was a light on inside, meaning he was most likely home. “How about paying a late-afternoon call on Alan Torvoldsen?”

Sue glanced at her watch. “Today's my turn to drive the car pool, and soccer practice gets over at six. If I don't leave before long, the kids will be left waiting in the park after everyone else goes home.”

Such are the joys of single parenthood.

“That's okay,” I said. “You go on and do what
you have to do. I can handle the Torvoldsen interview.”

“But you rode with me,” Sue objected. “How will you get home?”

I laughed aside her concern. “I'm a big boy, Sue. And Al's an acquaintance of long standing. When we finish up with whatever he has in mind, I'm sure he'll drop me off at Belltown Terrace.”

She thought about that for a second. “All right then,” she agreed reluctantly. “Give me the wrench. I'll handle both that and the box-spring problem when I drop the Mustang down at the department. It seems like cheating, though. I don't like bailing out while you're still working. I like to carry my weight.”

I handed her the bag containing the wrench. “Don't feel guilty. Believe me, Alan Torvoldsen and I won't be working all that hard. My guess is that he wants to shoot the breeze and talk over old times. We'll most likely sit around and reminisce about our glory days as Ballard High School Beavers. It would bore you to tears.”

“You're just afraid I'll pick up a few too many stories about BoBo Beaumont and carry them back down to the department, aren't you?”

“You wouldn't do that, would you?” I asked apprehensively.

Sue Danielson grinned. “Not on your life. I'm a great believer in what goes around comes around. I'd be mortified if Paul Kramer or one of those other jerks on the fifth floor ever got wind of the fact that in high school people used to call me Suzy Q.”

Sue Danielson walked away and left me stand
ing there on the end of the dock. She got in the Mustang and drove off before I realized what she had done—that she had given me the gift of trust. She was long gone before I had gathered my wits about me enough to realize I hadn't said thank you.

As I headed toward
One Day at a Time
, I noticed how cold it was. Once again a pall of thick fog was settling over the city. I stepped aboard Alan's boat and knocked on the galley door.

“Who is it?” he called from inside.

“Beau,” I said.

When Alan came out, he was carrying an old corduroy jacket. The baseball cap had been replaced by a worn watch cap. He emerged grumbling, in a cloud of cigarette smoke.

“What the hell took you so long?” he demanded. “I was about to give up on you.”

With that, and clearly expecting me to follow, he strode off down the dock, back the way I had come. Old times may be old times, but I didn't like his attitude. I resented his trying to lay on some kind of guilt trip about how late I was in getting back to him, especially since Sue and I had been trying to track the man down all afternoon.

“Look, bub,” I told him brusquely. “Get off your cross. My partner and I stopped by twice earlier today. No one was home.”

“Oh,” he said. “I went out to check on something. It took longer than I thought. I guess we're not all that late, though. Happy hour runs until seven.”

“Happy hour?” I echoed.

That was the last thing I needed—an escorted
happy-hour tour of Seattle with some supposedly reformed drunk who was about to fall off the wagon in a big way. Not only that, we were going in his car, and he was driving. Good planning.

I tried to stall. “Hey, Alan, how about if we sit around and shoot the breeze some other time? I don't do the happy-hour scene anymore. I didn't think you did, either.”

Alan stopped beside a much-dented Mercury Cougar that dated from somewhere in the mid-eighties. The car was silver except for the right front fender, which was white. He looked at me across the top of the vehicle.

“This isn't a social visit,” he said tersely. “I want to talk to you about Gunter Gebhardt, and I don't want to do it here.”

Enough said. I stopped trying to argue my way out of it and went along for the ride. Using the term “ride” loosely. Alan Torvoldsen's Cougar beat walking, but not by much.

The passenger door opened only from inside. Most of the car's headliner had come loose from its moorings, so I sat with an unwelcome scarf of smoke-saturated felt draped around my ears. The lights from the parking lot revealed an overflowing ashtray. The ashes, apparently free of butts, formed a small white mound that resembled a miniature sand dune, puffs of which blew off when we opened and closed the doors. None of the dash lights worked, and it took three tries before the starter kicked in, but once Alan got the engine to turn over, the damn thing did run. Noisily so, however. And once we started moving, I realized the
Cougar's suspension system was totally shot. So was the muffler.

I figured the first cop who saw or heard that wreck moving in traffic would haul us over. No such luck. Where
do
you find a cop when you need him? Without incident, we rumbled through Ballard, making our way up Fifteenth and turning right on Eighty-fifth. The whole while we were driving, Champagne Al didn't say a word, and I followed his lead.

We stopped in front of a dingy-looking bar with a collection of Harleys parked haphazardly outside on the sidewalk. Great, I thought. Just where every homicide cop in the world wants to spend the evening happy hour—in a biker bar.

The sign outside said Club 449, but the sign just inside the door proclaimed,
ABANDON ALL DOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE
. Another, written in big red letters, said
NO DRUGS. NO WEAPONS. NO GANG ATTIRE. NO EXCEPTIONS
. Oh. That Club 449.

I guess I must have heard about Club 449 at an AA meeting somewhere, but before that evening with Alan Torvoldsen, I had never been there. It's owned and operated by a now-sober bartender who, once he stopped drinking, didn't have a comfortable place to socialize. He missed the bar scene so much that he started a joint that had all the right ambience for some displaced boozers, a place they could call home.

The number in the name, 449, refers to a page in
Alcoholics Anonymous
, known affectionately among AA members as “the Big Book.” That page deals with acceptance. And looking around, I would have to say Club 449 was a pretty damn
accepting place. Some of the customers were downright scary-looking, as were the ramshackle, dingy surroundings.

The room was furnished with a collection of battered cocktail tables and run-down chairs. The big dance floor was empty. The place was smoky and noisy, but it was nevertheless surprisingly familiar. It reminded me of all those places where I squandered large chunks of my misspent youth.

There were bursts of raucous laughter from a group of guys playing darts, while the sound of breaking pool balls crackled occasionally in the background. A guy with a stringy ponytail that ended below his belt fed a steady stream of quarters into a rumbling, sputtering video game. A compact-disc-playing jukebox shrieked out music that didn't at all match the mute MTV images gyrating on the TV set mounted above the bar. Next to the color screen and within easy view of the bartender was a small black-and-white monitor showing a series of interior views of the bar as seen through the watchful eye of a constantly scanning video camera.