Rainy City (19 page)

I went in and searched the Nadisky place. It was still unlocked. It was empty. Thoroughly empty and cold. The family that lived there might never come back.

We paraded around the city, growing more and more discouraged, growing desperate enough to cruise past the Crowell mansion in the dark. Nothing. We checked the Greyhound bus depot and the train station and found only stranded travelers, soldiers, and bag ladies. Melissa had vanished into thin air.

“Maybe she went to a friend’s?” Kathy suggested.

“Who should we try first?”

“I don’t know.”

“She told me she had no friends.”

“That’s probably true. She didn’t even seem friendly toward me anymore. It was like she’d just spent ten years in another country.”

When we got back to the house, it was five A.M. I heated up two cups of Swiss Miss and we sat across from each other at the kitchen table staring bleary-eyed at the walls. Finally, I broke the silence. “Which set of clothes did she wear?”

It took a few seconds for the implications of my query to sink in. When they did, Kathy sprang up, scurried to the basement door and burst down the stairs. Thirty seconds later, she staggered back into the kitchen, visibly upset.

“She wore her old clothes, the blouse with one button and the skirt slit up to her gizzard. Why, Thomas?”

“Don’t know. I guess it was all too much for her to handle.”

“You don’t think she went back to…Tacoma?”

“She may have. I really don’t know.”

“Would it do any good to go fetch her again?”

“You tell me. What did you two talk about down there? I heard you talking before I dozed off.”

“Melissa hardly said a thing. She asked about the burglar. She saw some of the broken stuff and asked me about it.”

“Did you give her the whole skinny, about being tied up, too?”

Nodding, Kathy said, “Maybe I shouldn’t have gone into all the gory details?” Her voice became small and withdrawn.

“You have any more visions? Anything to add to what you told me the other night?”

Kathy averted her eyes. “I don’t want to say it.”

“I think you’d better. Talking about it isn’t apt to make it happen, you know. Talking about it may even help stop it.”

“It’s about the little girl. It’s awful.” Kathy folded the borrowed pea coat over a kitchen chair and walked to the stairs. She didn’t finish replying until she was in the stairwell, out of sight, her voice barely discernible. I knew enough to trust her intuitions. Her hunches were right more often than they were wrong.

“Kathy?” I was afraid she would go downstairs without telling me.

“I just have a mental picture of this little girl with a man. The man is…”

“What?”

“I think he’s going to kill her.”

“Who do you see with her?”

“Nobody. I mean, it’s nobody I can recognize, just a man, a grown man. Only I have the feeling it’s worse than just that.”

“What could be worse than that?”

“I see a girl in a deep pit. It’s dark. And there is something else in the pit with her. A body. Or bones. Maybe both.”

I brooded over that for a few seconds. Kathy generally had a difficult time talking about her visions, and I could tell this one was harder for her to talk about than anything she’d ever told me. “Who’s the little girl?”

“It’s…” She trailed off and I wondered whether she even knew the answer to that question.

“Is it Angel?”

“It’s Angel and isn’t Angel. It’s Angel and Melissa both combined. I’m not sure who it is, I just know I had the strongest premonition I’ve had in a long while when I found out Melissa was missing. Thomas, you have to do something. We can’t let anything happen.”

“Did you tell any of this to Melissa?”

“Certainly not. No.”

“Are you sure you can’t tell me who the man is?”

“I don’t know who he is. I’ve said too much already.” She fled down the stairs. Leaving me in limbo. If Kathy was right, all my thinking on the case so far was cockeyed, for I had-believed Angus Crowell when he told me business rivals were after him. And I did not see how bones in a pit could possibly have anything to do with my theories. A body in a pit, yes, but not bones. It took years for a body to become a pile of bones. That meant all this was connected to something that had happened long ago.

The jangling phone woke me at ten. A scratchy voice prodded me awake.

“Mr. Black? Mr. Black? Clarice here. You gave me your card? Remember? I found out some things I’m sure you’ll want to hear about. It’s just horrid all the secrets this family has. It really is. Mary Dawn was seeing a psychiatrist. Had been for years.”

“Where are you?”

“Did I waken you? I’m sorry if I did. It never occurred to me a private detective would be sleeping late. In Malibu, we rise at five-thirty and take the dogs for a walk on the beach. The dogs love it.”

“I wish I was a dog.”

“I did waken you!”

“I was out late chasing bad guys. What else did you find out?”

“Oh, I’ve got a whole assortment of things to tell you. But I’d better see you. Don’t you think? This is really such a personal matter.” Her tone portended trouble.

“Are you here in town?”

They were staying with her husband’s brother. When I gave her directions, she promised she would be out in twenty minutes. Before I could ask her to delay that for an hour, she banged the receiver down.

A dirty yellow cab disgorged her onto my front doorstep sixteen minutes later. Horace, my retired neighbor, was out front in an Air Force parka and hip waders, proudly sponging the flanks of his Buick, when Clarice arrived. Quickly, she paid the driver and shooed him off. Horace gave her the once-over, obviously disapproving. Horace disapproved of ‘everything that happened on my side of the fence. I could be certain the word gigolo would crop up in his conversation sometime during the next week. Watching him swish the sponge across his chrome, I wondered if the rat trap was still intact under his bumper.

“Goodness,” Clarice Crowell said, negotiating my front steps on a pair of rickety high heels, as if she had never been up steps before, “you’re not even dressed yet.”

She blitzed through my living room, toured the kitchen, peered into both bedrooms and then looked at me. I was aghast.

“You have such nice shoulders. No, don’t cover them up. I love to see a man dress. You’re a bachelor, aren’t you?”

I wore jeans, Pumas, and a sleeveless undershirt. I went into the bedroom, made a point of shutting the door, and selected a shirt from the closet. When I emerged, Clarice was in the kitchen, the knob to the downstairs door held fast in her grubby little nicotine-yellow knuckles.

“You have a basement, too? This little shanty is larger than it looks from outside. What’s down there?” She made a move to descend the stairs.

“The old slave quarters. Don’t go. I keep women down there.” Clarice Crowell stared at me. In her circles, people did not joke like that. “Little women. Little teeny hunch backed women.”

She didn’t bat an eye. She merely went into the living room and picked a comfy spot on my couch. I followed her and offered her things to eat, but that wasn’t what she had in mind. She spanked a cushion close beside her hips and motioned for me to sit down on it.

“Have to stand,” I said. “It’s an old war wound. It flares up from time to time.”

“Goodness,” she said, concern gracing her hoarse voice.

“Those dirty Huns,” I grumbled.

She’d been playing eye games from the moment she crossed the threshold, the kind of games you learn all about at your first pre-teen dance.

“Your husband didn’t come.”

“No. No.” She patted her hairdo. It had cost some poor sap Of a hairdresser a pair of faded blue hands and some blistered eatdrums. “Edward is very upset. I’m most certain he would not want me divulging any of this.”

“But you’re going to anyway,” I said.

“You’re a detective. You have your job to do just like the rest of us.” She was right. I located missing wives. Edward Crowell buried bodies and no doubt fleeced the relatives. God had given us all our own little missions. Clarice Crowell spent her spare time trying to get laid by younger men.

Without asking permission, Clarice fumbled with a package of Pall Malls, ignited one with a gold-plated lighter and began producing smoke. With each puff she exhaled in a different direction, making certain every corner of my house was permeated with the stench. It took a while for her to notice the absence of ashtrays. When she did, she stubbed the butt out in a planter and lit another.

“So what did you find out?”

“Oh, tons. Absolutely tons.” She crossed her legs and began playing with her knee, as if to attract my attention to the knobby thing. And then it all gushed out of her. Holding in gossip even that long had been an unnatural torment. Her eyes turned from raisins to prunes.

“Ed’s father committed suicide years ago. Blew his head right off with a gun. It all had something to do with Angus. Ed won’t tell me exactly what happened, but it had something to do with Angus. And Angus never even showed up at the funeral.”

“When was all this?”

“Their papa got so mad at Angus that he dragged him down in the cellar and nearly whipped him to death. He used to use an old buggy whip, Ed says. Right after that, Angus ran away to join the Navy. Now, don’t tell me you see nothing queer in that.”

“If he joined the Navy, he must have been close to being an adult, if he wasn’t one already,” I said. “Ed says he thinks he must have been about seventeen.”

“He thinks? Can’t he remember? Or figure it out?”

“Don’t bark at me, Tom. You should be thanking me. It took me practically all night to wheedle this out of Ed. Ed doesn’t like to talk about his family. I heard more the other night than I’ve heard in the last ten years. You really should be thanking me.”

“Thank you, Clarice.”

She simpered. “You’re welcome.”

“You say he almost whipped Angus to death?”

“The neighbors had to go down to the cellar and stop it. If they hadn’t stepped in, he might have killed Angus. The boys said he was in a blind rage that night. Of course, Angus, with his hot temper, swore revenge. He ran off and joined the Navy. A week later their father put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Ed said there was a long letter, but the pastor came and read it and took it.”

“Does somebody still have the letter?”

“Nobody in the family has ever seen it, as far as Ed knows. At least, he’s never seen it.”

“How old was Mary Dawn when all this happened?”

“Oh, she was only a baby. Eight years old. She didn’t have anything to do with it all. As a matter of fact, with her father dead and her mother long since passed away, she went to live with the pastor’s family. I do know this about Mary Dawn, though. She was seeing a shrink.” Clarice said it the way she would have said Mary Dawn had syphilis.

“Are you certain?”

“Ed found some papers and bills and whatnot when we were going through her apartment. I wrote down the name. He’s right here in Seattle. He used to be in Bellingham but he moved. Muriel knew all about him. She was a physical therapist. Still got some friends in the medical community. She is one strong woman. I’ve seen her pick up a couch all by herself.”

She fished a Dentyne wrapper out of her purse and handed it to me. The psychiatrist’s name was scrawled on the back in tiny script. Dr. Elliot Courtland. The address was in a plush district on the other side of the Arboretum near Lake Washington.

I went to the phone, looked up his number in the white pages and dialed.

Clarice spoke musically. “I guess she’d been seeing this head doctor for years and years. That’s what Ed thought…from the papers he found.”

When the doctor came on the line, I fudged the truth a bit and told him I was a detective working on the Mary Dawn Crowell case. On the assumption that I was a cop, he made an appointment to see me at his office in thirty minutes.

Grabbing a jacket, I rushed out the back door. Clarice puttered after me with tiny mincing steps. Women like her mocked femininity. She stood on the back porch and sang out, “Tom. Oh, Tom? Are we finished? Tom?”

“Call a cab and lock up when you leave,” I said. As I started to step up into the Ford, I noticed a smattering of white crystals on the side of the pickup. I found more crystals on the ground beside the pickup door. Still more of the white stuff clung to the gasoline intake spout. Kneeling, I licked a finger, pressed it to the substance and tasted. Sugar. Damn.

Somebody had poured sugar into my gas tank. If they hadn’t been so sloppy, I would have driven it and destroyed the engine. Up until two weeks ago, I’d had a locking gas cap, but I lost it and replaced it with a standard cap. Damn.

I went back into the house, changed into cycling shoes, dug my .45 out of the closet, inserted a clip, checked the tire pressure on my Miyata and carried it to the back porch.

Clarice Crowell still hadn’t given up hope. “Tom. Tom? I may have more information later. Can I call?”

“Sure,” I said, making certain the .45 was well hidden under my windbreaker.

“Ed’s real mad today. He found out from that Negro detective in Bellingham they’re going to let Burton out.”

I looked up at her. “When did they decide this?”

“Some stupid neighbor up there claims she saw him leaving almost an hour before Mary died. Some poops will say anything. And they seem to be having a problem trying to match the fingerprints they found to Burton. It’s all been bungled.”

“Great,” I said, leaping onto the bicycle saddle and launching down the alley. “Call if you get more information. I’d appreciate it.”

A block later, it became readily apparent that someone was following me. ?

HE WAS IN A SHARK-GRAY DODGE, AND HE WAS GOOD. HE intentionally lagged far enough behind so that I wouldn’t recognize him.

He followed and I let it ride. I let him tail me down Seventeenth Northeast right through the University of Washington campus and out the other side by the football stadium, although I could have foiled his plans at any point. I knew a dozen choice footpaths I could have detoured onto. By the time I crossed the Montlake Bridge, I knew who he was and I had a good idea what he wanted.