Black River (8 page)

Wednesday, October 18

6:44 p.m.

“W
e have no vacancy,” the guy said. “We have a vacancy, I put a sign out in the street. Apartments here never vacant long.”

Southeast Asian. Couldn’t have been much over five feet tall, standing ramrod straight in the door of his apartment. Mid-sixties. Close-cropped hair and a pair of black eyes that could stare a hole in a brick.

“I didn’t come about an apartment,” Corso said. “I came about a former tenant named Donald Barth.”

“Ah,” the man said. “Quite sad. The police came yesterday.”

“Mr. . . . ?”

“Pov,” he said quickly. “Nhim Pov. I am the manager here.”

Nhim Pov stepped out onto the tiny concrete porch and closed the door behind himself. “What about Mr. Barth?” he asked. “What business of yours is his unfortunate death?”

“I’m a writer,” Corso said. “And I’m trying to figure out what it was about his life that induced somebody to shoot him nine times and then bury him and his truck in the side of a hill.”

“I told the police. Mr. Barth was very quiet, a very private man. I know nothing personal about him whatsoever.”

“How long did he live here?”

“Five years, I think. I come here as manager three years ago. Mr. Barth was married then. Then last year this time she left, and he live here by himself.”

“He have any problems with any of his neighbors?”

“He make trouble, he would not be living here still.” He offered a small smile. “I run what you Americans call a tight ship, Mr. Corso. People who make difficulties do not get their leases renewed.”

“He pay his rent on time?”

Again the little man smiled. “Same answer. The county has a long waiting list. People can no longer afford to live around here. They get old. They have no money. Where else can they go?”

Nhim Pov was right. The emerald city had become so glitzy that a little two-bedroom fixer-upper was the better part of three hundred grand. A decent apartment was a thousand dollars a month. It had gotten so the people who made the city work could no longer afford to live there. Not just blue-collar folk, either. Across the lake in trendy Bellevue, the new mayor, who was bringing down a cool hundred and fifty thousand a year, applied for and was granted another hundred grand as a housing allowance, because Bellevue has an ordinance that says the mayor has to live within the city limits, and without the extra stipend he couldn’t afford to do so.

“When did you first realize that Mr. Barth wasn’t coming back?”

“A few weeks after he left,” he said. “Mr. Barth always paid his rent on the first of the month. Always. So I look in the parking lot and see his truck is gone. I have no need to go in and make sure he is okay, right? I think maybe he is away somewhere. Maybe have an emergency.” He waved a hand around. “Some of these people very old. If I don’t hear from them I call. They don’t answer, I knock on the door. Sometimes they’re sick. Sometimes they’re dead.”

“So after a couple of weeks, you start to wonder.”

“I go in his apartment.” He shrugged. “Everything is just as he left it, I guess. I never been in there before.”

“Then?”

“Then I wait for the rest of the month. When he still doesn’t come, I move his furniture out to the shed, clean up the apartment, and rent it to Mr. Leng.”

“You still have his stuff?”

“What else am I to do with a man’s life, sell it?”

“Lotta people would.”

“Many people have no honor.”

“Could I look through his belongings?”

“Police already been all through it.”

“Just a short look. I won’t take long.”

Nhim Pov thought it over and then suddenly stepped back inside his apartment. Through the crack in the door, Corso could see a print of Buddha on the far wall and a small shrine set up in the corner.

In a moment, Mr. Pov was back on the porch, holding a set of brass keys in one hand and a dictionary in the other. “What is this word
induce
you said before?” he asked Corso.

“Did I?”

“You say you wanted to find out what would
induce
somebody to kill Mr. Barth and bury the body.”

“It means to lead or move, by persuasion or influence.”

Pov found the word in his dictionary. His lips moved slightly as he read the words. “So then…the force comes from without,” he said.

“Yes,” Corso said. “You’re quite a student of the language, Mr. Pov.”

“Nice of you to say,” he said. “I have worked hard on my English.”

“You’re quite good.”

The little man beamed. “Thank you.” He bowed at the waist. “From a writer, I take that as highest honor.”

He slipped a red felt bookmark into the page and set the dictionary on the floor inside his front door. He closed the door, tried the knob to make sure it was locked, and then turned to Corso. “Now, Mr.—” he began.

“Corso. Frank Corso.”

Nhim Pov was smiling now. “Mr. Corso, you have kindly
induced
me to show you the remains of Mr. Barth’s belongings.”

Corso followed the little man down the sidewalk and then across the wet grass between buildings. They emerged onto a grassed-over area running along the edge of the marsh. Nihm Pov stopped and pointed out over the water. “At night…sometimes…the moon and the water—they remind me of my homeland.”

“It’s what’s left of the Black River,” Corso said.

“Oh.” He looked up at Corso. “How so what’s left?”

Corso walked over to the edge of the water. “The Black River used to be the major drainage for Lake Washington. All these little creeks running in, feeding the lake, and the Black River draining it out into the Cedar River and then the White and the Green, until they all got together as the Duwamish and emptied into Puget Sound.”

“What happened?”

“People just couldn’t leave things alone. When they dug the Lake Washington Ship Canal, they lowered the water level of Lake Washington by nine feet and suddenly the Black River was gone.” Out in the middle of the marsh, several dozen ducks bobbed about on the rippled surface, asleep, heads tucked under their wings. “Except that the Black River wouldn’t die,” Corso continued. “It went underground.” He swept his hand around. “It pops up as marshes and seepage all over this part of the county. They can’t build on it, so they’ve turned it into bird sanctuaries.”

“It is a river’s nature to remain a river,” Nhim Pov said.

“Yes,” Corso agreed. “It is.”

“That is the beauty of America, is it not?” Pov said, as they turned away from the water.

“What’s that?”

“That a man such as myself can arrive on these shores and create a life for himself and his family without having to give up his beliefs and customs.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Ten years.”

“From?”

“I came from Thailand, where I was in a refugee camp for nine years.”

“From where originally?”

“I am Cambodian. I am in America now, but I will always be Cambodian. Like this Black River, I will always be what I am.”

They rounded the corner of the final building. A line of half a dozen sheds stood along a row of trees. Nhim Pov strode over to the nearest shed, slipped a key into a shiny silver lock, and slid the door aside. He stepped inside, reached up, and pulled an unseen cord. A single bulb illuminated the interior with weak yellow light.

Nhim Pov stepped back outside and gestured with his head. Corso stepped inside. The air smelled of fresh earth and mildew. Donald Barth’s possessions had been piled on either side of a narrow central aisle. Corso walked to the back wall without touching anything and then turned and walked halfway back.

In the center of the couch a Dole pineapple box held half a dozen framed photographs. Probably the stuff he had hanging on the wall, Corso figured. An old photo of a woman in a patched housedress, her narrow expressionless eyes squinting into the sun: maybe his mother. Another of a thin young man wearing a set of marine dress blues.

A crude wooden frame held an oval picture of a handsome couple, smiling and holding hands on an arched garden bridge. He was a good-looking fellow, with a thick head of dark hair and a noticeable cleft in his chin. She was younger, a pretty girl with a small mouth and even features. Corso held the picture up. “This Mr. Barth?” he asked.

Nhim Pov nodded. “And Mrs. Barth.”

Corso leaned the picture against the side of a box and picked up another. Inside a black metal frame, a young boy of seven or eight sat in the sand wearing a green bathing suit. Laughing in the gentle surf, with what looked a lot like the Santa Monica Pier in the background.

Corso pulled the picture of the couple on the bridge from the box again and held it up next to the picture of the boy. The resemblance was unmistakable. Corso showed the picture to Pov.

“His son,” Pov said.

Corso was about to put both pictures back in the box when he noticed the disparity in the color of the paper. Although decades newer, the picture taken on the bridge was yellowed and brittle looking.

Corso returned the boy’s picture to the box. He turned the photo of the couple over. A rectangular piece of cardboard was held in place by six wire nails.

He looked over at Mr. Pov. “Mind if I take this apart?” he asked.

“As long as you put it back,” the man said.

Corso set the frame face down on the couch. He rummaged in his pants pocket and came out with a handful of change, from which he extracted a dime. He used the dime to pry the nails up, then used his index finger to bend them back and out of the way, until he could lift the piece of cardboard free and set it aside.

He scratched one corner of the picture loose and peeled the whole thing up off the glass. It was a wedding invitation, framed in such a way as to allow only the picture to be visible. Below the picture, it read:
Marie Ellen Hall and Donald J. Barth invite you to share the joy of their coming nuptials
.
WHERE
:
Blessed Sacrament Church, 5041 9th Avenue NE, Seattle, Wash
ington, 98107
.
WHEN
:
Saturday April 3rd, 1993. Reception to follow in the Parish Hall
. RSVP:
206-324-0098
.

“Be all right if I took this with me?” Corso asked Pov. “I’ll bring it back as soon as I’m finished.”

Pov nodded. “Okay,” he said.

Corso spent another twenty minutes going through the remains of Donald Barth’s life. “I guess that’s it,” he said finally, dusting his hands together.

Mr. Pov pulled the chain on the light and they walked outside together. Overhead a full moon ducked in and out of a starless steel-wool sky. Mr. Pov slid the door closed and snapped the padlock back in place.

“A philosopher once said that a man’s true worth is not measured by the extent of his possessions but by the paucity of his needs,” Corso said.

“Ah,” Pov said. “What is this
paucity
?”

Corso told him and then spelled it.

“If such is true, then Mr. Barth was a wealthy man indeed.”

Corso thanked Mr. Pov for his help. The men shook hands and parted company. Nhim Pov turned left, toward his apartment, and Corso went right, toward the hissing purple lights of the parking lot.

Gerardo was outraged. “What the hell’s he doin’ here for a damn hour, anyway? He don’t got nothing to do with this. Every place we go, this guy’s pokin’ his nose in our business.”

“He’s got some connection going for himself.”

“What connection is that?”

“Between the girl and the guy in the truck.”

Gerardo scowled. “Like what?”

“Damned if I know,” Ramón said.

“Maybe he knows the Ball guy buried the truck for us.”

“How would he know that? He’s just supposed to be some nosy-ass writer who’s always talkin’ shit about the boss.”

“Here he comes,” Gerardo said, pointing out through the darkened window. As they sat in the gloom, the Subaru rolled out from behind the Briarwood Garden Apartments and bounced into the street. Gerardo started the Mercedes’s engine. He waited until Corso was halfway up the block before turning on the lights and following.

“We maybe better figure out where this guy fits into the picture,” Ramón said, as they followed the Subaru up the freeway entrance ramp.

“Soon,” Gerardo agreed. “Real soon.”

Wednesday, October 18

9:03 p.m.

“S
top,” Ramón said.

Half a block up Ninth Avenue, Harborview Hospital rose into the night sky like a stone rocket ship on a launching pad. Gerardo and Ramón watched as Corso stopped at the gate, plucked a ticket from the automatic dispenser, and wheeled the Subaru out of sight.

Gerardo pulled the car to the curb in a tow-away zone. “You goin’ in?”

“Yeah.”

“What for?”

“I dunno. I got a feeling.”

“What kinda feeling?”

Ramón checked his watch. “He’s gotta be visitin’ somebody.”

“Like who?”

“That’s what I’m gonna find out.”

“You want in the trunk?”

“I’m just goin’ to look.”

A hospital security guard left the entrance and began limping their way.

Ramón popped the door and stepped out into the street. “Take it around the block,” he said. “I’ll catch up with you in a bit.”

The guard was still coming. “Oughta blow his fat ass up,” Gerardo groused, but Ramón didn’t hear. Ramón was already jogging up the sidewalk, cutting through a flower bed to the corner of the building, where he stood and watched as Corso crossed the parking lot and entered the back door of the hospital. Ramón hopped over the shrubbery and stood on the sidewalk, watching Corso stride down the shining hallway.

Wednesday, October 18

9:29 p.m.

T
he room was quiet, the burnished metal stillness broken only by the underlying hum of machinery somewhere deep in the building. Nurse Rachel Taylor leaned over Dougherty’s bed, adjusting the flow of an overhead IV. Tonight’s cardigan was bright red. Corso cleared his throat. The woman looked back over her shoulder, smiled, and held up a finger. A minute turned to two before the woman walked across the room to Corso’s side.

“Don’t you ever go home?” Corso asked.

“Not according to my daughter,” Rachel Taylor said, with a sigh. “To hear Melissa tell it, my insistence that we remain fed and clothed amounts to abandonment.”

“How old?”

“Fourteen.”

“Great age for girls,” Corso offered.

“Yeah…if you don’t mind their brains being controlled from outer space.”

Corso walked to the side of the bed and looked down. Dougherty lay on her back. Yesterday’s stained bandage had been replaced, but she was still little more than an inanimate maze of tubes and wires, stiff and unmoving beneath the crisp white covers.

“How’s she doing?” Corso whispered.

“Her vital signs are better, but the brain swelling is worse.”

“What now?”

She took Corso by the arm and moved him toward the door. “Come on,” she said. Corso followed her out into the hall. “I hate to talk about comatose patients as if they’re not there,” she explained. “I always have this feeling that on some deeper level they may be listening.” Corso nodded his understanding.

“What next?” he asked.

She wrinkled her nose. “Next we iron out a couple of administrative matters.”

“Such as?”

“I had a very unhappy financial administrator down here this evening.”

“And?”

“And he wants to move Miss Dougherty up to Providence Hospital.”

“Why would he want to do that?”

“Because we’re chock-f of patients and Providence is only sixty percent full, and because neither Miss Dougherty nor the young man with whom she lives has any kind of health insurance.”

Corso trapped the words in his throat. What started as a profane protest came out as little more than a low growl. He closed his eyes for a moment and rubbed the growl. He closed his eyes for a moment and rubbed the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. In the darkness behind his eyelids, he could see the endless halls of the veterans’ hospital where his father had coughed out his last breath. Where he and his mother and his brother and sister had traveled every Tuesday night for seven years to pay homage to a man they barely knew—a man who left whatever decency he might once have possessed lying in the bottom of a frozen Korean foxhole and came home with little more than an unquenchable thirst and an ungovernable temper. Corso’s nose stung with the smell of stale urine along the maze of scuffed hallways. He could see the ghosts sitting outside their rooms in the late evening, mouths agape, stubbled black-tooth chins resting on stained gowns. The burned and the legless, the lame and the disjointed, the shakers, the droolers, and the goners, all lined up along the halls like sentinels.

When he opened his eyes, the nurse held up a moderating hand. “It’s standard procedure,” she said. “Providence is a full-service—”

Corso cut her off. “Providence is a dump. I want her to stay here.”

“If she stays here, she’s going to have to move to a semiprivate room.”

“A ward.”

“There are no”—she made quotation marks in the air with her fingers—“
wards
anymore. The most patients we have in a single room is four.”

“She wouldn’t like being in a room with other people.”

Rachel Taylor made a resigned face. “Sometimes, Mr. Corso—”

“I’ll take care of the bill,” Corso said suddenly.

The nurse took a step back, looking at Corso as if for the first time. “Do you have any idea how much money we’re talking about here?”

“No,” he said, “and I don’t care. Whatever it is, I’ll take care of it.”

“Her present bill alone…You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“I don’t have many friends,” he said. “I can’t afford to lose any.”

The sadness in his eyes told her he wasn’t kidding. “You have to work it out with the business office.”

“How do I do that?” he asked.

She took him by the elbow. “Come down to the nurses’ station, and I’ll get you started on the paperwork,” she said. Before he could move, she gripped his arm tighter. “If you don’t mind me saying it, Mr. Corso, she’s a very lucky woman to have a friend like you.”

Corso grunted and started down the hall.

Ramón was backed into a service alcove, a collapsible wheelchair on either side of him, as he peeked down the hall toward the red-sweater nurse and the nosy-writer man. He’d watched as they came out of the room together. Watched as they talked and then disappeared down a hall to the left. He checked the area. Nothing. Nobody. He stepped out and started down the hall. His shoes squeaked with every step as he made his way down the gleaming corridor. Still nobody in sight as he used his right hand to push open the door of Room 109.

In the green glow of the life-support machines, he could make out a single heavily bandaged figure lying propped halfway up in bed. As he started to step into the room, he glanced to his left and caught sight of a long black cape hanging on the wall. His breath suddenly lay frozen in his chest. He could feel the bile rising in his stomach. His mouth tasted like sheet metal.

He stood, one foot in the room, the other still in the corridor, when a voice said, “Excuse me.” Startled, Ramón turned quickly toward the sound. A thick little Japanese guy, looked like a doctor: all in blue, stethoscope flopped up over one shoulder, wearing a fruity-looking shower-cap thing.

“Wrong room,” Ramón said with a smile.

“You better check in at the nurses’ station,” he said. “This is the ICU. We can’t have you wandering around in here.”

Ramón pulled his foot out of the door and then pointed down the hall to his right.

The guy nodded. “Right down there,” he said.

“Thanks.”

Ramón kept the smile plastered to his face as he sauntered along. Fifty feet ahead the bright lights of the nurses’ station washed across the dim corridor. He checked back over his shoulder. The nosy Jap doctor man was back at the corner checking up on him. He could hear voices ahead.

The red-sweater nurse looked up. “Can I help you?”

“Loooking por maternity,” Ramón said, with a thick Cuban accent.

The nurse straightened up and came rustling out from behind the desk. “You’re lost,” she said. “Maternity’s on the ninth floor. Come with me.”

As she took Ramón by the elbow, the writer man looked up and made a flicker of eye contact. Ramón didn’t like what he saw. Something hard. Something sure. Not the usual tourist bravado. The guy was a player.

Unnerved, he stumbled slightly as he walked up the hall toward the pair of elevators along the left wall. She pushed the
UP
button, and immediately the silver door on the left slid open with a
bing
. Ramón kept smiling as she shepherded him inside and then reached in and pushed 9. “There you go,” Nursie said.

Ramón resisted the urge to stop the elevator. To get off and hurry back to the street. No. Just be cool. Nursie seemed like the kind of bitch gonna stand there and make sure the car went to 9. Ramón did not wish to be remembered.

Hospital elevators are built for comfort, not for speed. A full five minutes passed before Ramón stepped back out onto Ninth Avenue. A thick icy drizzle hissed on the awning above his head. Gerardo and the car were nowhere in sight. To the north, the lights of a red-and-white fire department aid car tore circles in the darkness, as the crew rushed a gurney into the emergency room. Ramón jammed his hands into his pants pockets, nodded at the security guard, and hustled north, toward the puddles of darkness beneath skeletal oak trees.

He was half a block past the oaks when Gerardo swung the Mercedes around the corner of Ninth and Madison and began coming his way. He heard the door locks pop as the car slid to a stop in front of him and then heard the noise again as he slid into the seat.

“What now?” Gerardo asked.

The radio was on the Spanish-language channel, Música del Mundo. A soft samba spilled from the speakers. “I don’t know,” Ramón said.

For a moment, Gerardo stopped breathing. He squinted at Ramón in the darkness. Turned the radio off. Something was bad wrong. Ramón always knew what to do next. Gerardo swallowed some air and waited.

“We got problems,” Ramón said.

“Like?”

“Like that girl who crashed her car is still alive. In the hospital. That’s who he’s visiting in there.”

“What’s the writer guy got to do with her?”

“I haven’t got a fuckin’ clue,” Ramón said. “It’s like he’s got the eye on us or something.”

Gerardo scowled. Lifted his hands from the wheel. “You said you seen her head come clean off.”

“I did,” Ramón said with a shrug. “Musta not been bad as it looked.”

“That’s not good. She seen us both.”

“No shit,” said Ramón. He slipped into his seat belt. “Let’s get outa here.”

“What about the writer guy?”

“Fuck him,” said Ramón. “We gotta decide what to do, man. Things are gettin’ outa hand here.”