A more perfect union

CHAPTER 11

Marilyn Sykes fixed breakfast for us the next morning. It was the kind of breakfast that made me think I'd died and gone to heaven-crisp bacon, over-easy eggs, toasted English muffins, black coffee, fresh orange juice. When she stopped beside me long enough to pour a second cup of coffee, I gave her a playful pat on the rump.

"You're my kind of woman," I said. "Your breakfast ranks right up there with the Doghouse."

She laughed. "Just don't let anybody around my department hear you say that. After all, I have a certain professional image to maintain, you know."

"You mean the chief's not supposed to cook great over-easy eggs."

She smiled. "Among other things."

"Don't worry. Your secret's safe with me."

When it was time to leave, Marilyn walked me to the door. By then she had put on her dress-for-success costume as well as her sensible shoes. The transformation seemed complete, but at the door she took hold of the two loose ends of my tie, pulled me close to her, and tied it for me. A perfect four-in-hand.

It was an awkward moment. I didn't know what to say, so I leaned over and kissed her. "I had a wonderful time," I said. "Thanks."

"Me too," she murmured. "We'll have to do it again sometime."

Marilyn's condominium complex has a guard shack with twenty-four-hour coverage. A young security guard had noted down my license number the night before when I brought Marilyn home, and now another beardless youth waved and checked off something on a clipboard as I drove past. I admit to feeling a little guilty, which was silly since Marilyn Sykes and I are both well past the age of consent. Nevertheless, it's one thing to do a sleep-over. It's something else to have a security guard taking down your vehicle license number while you do it.

I was soon too immersed in traffic to worry about the security guard. Living downtown, I seldom had occasion to drive from Mercer Island back into the city during morning rush-hour traffic. I hope I never have to again. It was a mess. Despite years of work, that section of I-90 still wasn't complete, and I soon discovered what Mercer Island commuters have been saying all along, that there aren't nearly enough onramps to allow island residents adequate access to the roadway.

I inched forward, one car length at a time. It wasn't as though there was a tangible reason for the problem on the bridge, not even so much as a flat tire or a fender-bender. I guess rush-hour traffic moves like that every day of the week. It would drive me crazy. It makes me glad I can walk to work.

Back home in Belltown Terrace finally, I had just time enough to change clothes before my scheduled interview with Martin Green. To reach his office, all I had to do was go downstairs and cut through the garage entrance on Clay. That's my idea of commuting. It was evidently Martin Green's as well.

The Labor Temple has been at First and Broad for as long as I can remember. It's a low-rise, two-story building that occupies the entire half-block. My only previous visits had been on election day when I went there to vote. The building directory told me Ironworkers Local 165 was located on the second floor.

There were a few men lingering in the gray marble hallway outside the ironworkers' office, burly men in plaid flannel shirts and work boots with telltale faded circles of tobacco cans marking their hip pockets. On the door was a typed notice announcing that the office would be closed the next day from 1 to 4 P.M. so office staff members could attend the funeral of deceased member Angie Dixon.

I stepped inside and announced myself to a female clerk who was seated behind a counter. She glanced uneasily over her shoulder in the direction of a closed door. "Is Mr. Green expecting you?" she asked.

"Yes," I said. "My name's Beaumont. I have an appointment at nine-thirty."

She looked slightly hesitant. "He has someone with him just now, if you don't mind waiting."

I sat down on a surly, swaybacked vinyl couch that squatted against the outside wall. Next to it sat a scarred end table with a few dog-eared magazines and a smelly, overflowing ashtray. If ironworkers had heard anything about the Surgeon General's warning on cigarettes, they weren't paying attention.

At the far end of the room, a second woman finished running an exceptionally noisy copy machine and returned to her desk. In the newly silent office, I became aware of the sound of raised voices coming from behind the closed door I assumed led to Martin Green's private office. I was looking at it when the door flew open and a man stormed out.

"I quit, goddamnit! If all I'm fit for is to sit in a tool shack and make up bolts, that's what I'll do, but I'll be goddamned if I'll do this son of a bitch of a job one more minute."

Saying that, he slammed the door to Green's office with such force that the frosted glass window shattered and slipped to the floor. As he rushed past, I realized it was Don Kaplan, the man I'd met on Martin Green's balcony the night before. He strode by me without any sign of recognition. I don't think he noticed anyone was there.

The two women working in the outer office exchanged guarded looks, then one of them rose and stepped gingerly toward the broken door. Instead of speaking to Martin Green through the jagged hole in the glass, she carefully opened the door.

"There's a Mr. Beaumont here to see you," she said. Green must have said something in return because she motioned to me. "You can come in now, Mr. Beaumont."

Martin Green came to the door to greet me. "You'll have to forgive the mess," he apologized. "We've had a little problem here this morning."

"I noticed."

He ushered me into the room. "We've got a hell of a union here, Mr. Beaumont, almost perfect. But it's like anything else. There are always people who don't like the way things are going."

"People who want it to be more perfect?" I asked.

Green nodded. "You could say that," he said with a laugh. "A more perfect union."

He directed me to one of the two chairs facing his desk. Perfect or not, Martin Green's union work space was a far cry from his private living quarters in Belltown Terrace. His apartment was definitely upscale, first-class cabin all the way and spare no expense. In contrast, Ironworkers Local 165 had him in lowbrow digs. The chair he offered me was one of the gray-metal/green-plastic variety. I recognized it instantly as a littermate of chairs we still use down at the department. You don't often see relics like that anywhere outside the confines of municipal police departments and old county courthouses.

Martin Green seated himself in a creaking chair behind a battered wooden desk and smiled cordially. "Now what can I do for you, Mr. Beaumont?" Under his outward show of easy congeniality, I sensed that he was still deeply disturbed by whatever had gone on between him and Don Kaplan.

"The Bentley, remember?" I reminded him.

"Oh, yes, that's right. In all the hubbub it slipped my mind. Is it going to be fixed soon?"

"Within a matter of days, we hope. In the meantime, we have the Cadillac. I know it's not quite in the same class…"

"Oh, the Cadillac's fine," he interrupted, waving aside my explanation. "As long as there's something available. Forgive me. I never should have gone ahead and mailed that letter to you. I was just so irritated. My mother would have been thrilled to be picked up at the airport in something as exotic as a Bentley. You know how mothers are."

I was a little taken aback by Green's total about-face, but I wasn't going to argue the point. If he was happy, I was happy.

"Does that mean you won't be taking us to the Better Business Bureau?"

"Of course not. There's no call to do that, none at all. As I said, I was upset at the time, but I'm not an unreasonable man, Mr. Beaumont. Surely you can see that."

"Indeed I can." I hadn't anticipated that the interview would go quite so smoothly. Martin Green was already getting ready to show me out of his office and I hadn't had time to mention my other reason for coming. "By the way, I noticed on the front door that one of your members passed away. That wasn't the woman who died in the accident at Masters Plaza on Monday, was it?"

He rose and came around the desk, stopping in front of me with his arms crossed, nodding his head sadly. "I'm afraid it was. Angie Dixon was one of our newer apprentices. A most unfortunate circumstance, but then nobody ever said working iron wasn't dangerous."

Green motioned toward the broken window. "Actually, the guy who was in here just a few minutes ago, Don Kaplan, I think maybe you met him last night. He's the one who's in charge of our apprenticeship program. He's taking Angie's death real hard. Personally, I guess you could say."

Martin Green moved away from the desk and led me to the door. "Watch your step," he cautioned as I started across the jagged shards of glass. "I wouldn't want you to slip and fall. Kim, is someone going to clean this mess up?"

The woman who had let me into his office nodded. "I've called maintenance, Mr. Green," she answered. "A janitor is on the way." Something about the speed of her response, her quick retreat to the safety of her typewriter made me suspect Martin Green wasn't an altogether easy man to work for.

I stopped beside the counter and turned back to where he was still standing in the layer of broken glass. "By the way," I said. "Thanks for the champagne last night. I didn't mean to crash your party."

He waved. "Think nothing of it," he replied absently. With that, he turned and disappeared back into his office, closing the shattered door behind him while the two secretaries exchanged discreet looks of undisguised relief.

I left the Labor Temple with the feeling that my mission had been totally successful from a property management point of view. I had gotten Martin Green off the backs of the Belltown Terrace management group and made sure the Bentley wouldn't cause us any more adverse publicity. Green was willing to let bygones be bygones, and so were we.

In addition, I had discovered that Don Kaplan, someone I knew, if only slightly, was a person I could talk to in order to learn more about the ironworker apprenticeship program. How I'd go about it and under what pretext were details I hadn't quite handled yet, but at least I knew who to ask.

When I got back home there was a message on the answering machine from Margie, my clerk down at the department. The message said to give her a call.

"What are you doing, working on your vacation?" Margie asked.

"What makes you think that?"

She laughed. "Easy. I've got a message here for you from Gloria over at the phone company. She says the address you need is 24 Pe Ell Star Route. Where's that?"

"Beats me. Down around Raymond somewhere, I think."

"That's a little outside the city limits, isn't it?" Margie asked.

She was teasing me, and I knew what she was thinking. Cops do it all the time, use official channels to get the address or phone number of someone they've met and want to see again. It isn't legal, but it does happen.

"Leave me alone," I said. "Anything else?"

"As a matter of fact, there is one more message. It's from Big Al. He wants to know when you're going to stop farting around and come back to work."

"Tell him Tuesday, and not a minute before."

"Will do," she answered with a barely suppressed giggle. "He misses you."

Once I was off the phone, I dragged my worn Rand McNally Road Atlas off the bookshelf. It was several years out of date, but I suspected the only real difference would be in a few freeway interchanges. The rural roads, especially ones running through little burgs like Pe Ell, would be essentially unchanged.

The town was right where I thought it would be, about twenty-five miles off Interstate 5 between Chehalis and Raymond on Highway 6. I had never been there, had never wanted to go there, but I was going nevertheless.

By noon, I was on the freeway, headed south. Traffic was fairly heavy as out-of-state recreational vehicles lumbered home toward Oregon, California, and points south and east. There weren't any log trucks, though. The lack of rain had turned Washington's lush forests tinder-dry and shut down the woods to logging and camping both.

As I drove, I tried tuning in the radio. I heard a snippet of news reporting a fatal fire somewhere on the east side of Lake Washington. I switched the dial. I wanted music, not news. I was on vacation, out of town. Whatever was on the news wasn't my problem.

Highway 6 turned off at Chehalis and meandered west through wooded hills. Sometimes it ran under trees so thick they formed an impenetrable green canopy over the roadway. Other times it moved along near the bed of the shallow headwaters of the Chehalis River. I stopped at a wide spot in the road, a hamlet called Doty, to buy a soda and ask directions.

"Where does Pe Ell Star Route start?" I asked the woman clerk as she gave me my change.

"Just the other side of town," she answered, eyeing me suspiciously. "How come you wanna know? Lookin' for somebody in partic'lar?"

"A friend of mine from Seattle," I said. "She just moved down here."

"You must mean that crazy lady with the two little kids. Yeah, she's up the road here apiece-five, six miles or so. It's a blue house on the left. You can't miss it. Looks more like a jail than the real one does over in Chehalis."

I puzzled over that remark, but only until I saw the house. It was easy to find. The house, just across the road from the river, was nestled back against the bottom of a steep, timber-covered bluff. It was small, as two-story houses go. All the windows and doors on the lower floor had been covered with ornamental iron bars. It did indeed look like a jail.

A beat-up Datsun station wagon was parked near the house. On one side, two children were playing under a towering apple tree. A little girl sat in a swing with her hair flying behind her, while a boy, somewhat older, pushed her high enough to run underneath the swing when it reached its highest point.

I drove all the way past the house once, then made a U-turn and came back from the other direction. As I pulled into the driveway behind the Datsun, the little boy grabbed the rope and stopped the swing so abruptly the little girl almost pitched out on her face. He grabbed her by one arm to keep her from falling and pulled her down from the swing.

Stepping out of the car, I called across to them. "Hello there. Is your mother home?"

The little girl opened her mouth as if to answer, but the boy yanked on her arm and dragged her toward the house.

"Wait a minute," I said. "I just need to ask you a couple of questions."

Without a backward glance, the two of them scurried away from me like a pair of frightened wild animals, with the boy urgently tugging the girl along beside him. I paused long enough to look toward the house. An upstairs curtain fluttered as though someone behind it had been watching us.

I closed the car door and started after the children. When I rounded the end of the house, I expected to see them there, but they weren't. The back porch was empty. I stepped up onto the porch and tugged at the iron grillwork over the door. It was still securely fastened from the inside. That puzzled me. I didn't think the children would have had enough time to get inside the house and relock the door.

Just then I heard what sounded like a door slamming shut on the backside of the house, the side closest to the steep bluff behind it. I walked around the corner and looked, expecting to find an additional outside entrance. Instead, the only thing I could see was a rectangular box built next to the foundation of the house. The top of the box was a full-sized wooden door. The door itself was slightly ajar, resting on an empty metal padlock hasp that had been closed inside.

Was this the door I had heard slam, or was there another one, farther around toward the front of the house? I walked around to the front door. It too was protected by a formidable grillwork cover, the kind that give fire fighters nightmares. I tested the bars. They had been carefully welded and solidly set by someone who knew what he was doing.

There was a doorbell next to the door, so I rang it. I heard a multi-note chime ring in the bowels of the house, but no one came to the door-not the kids, and not whoever had been watching from the upstairs window, either.

I rang again, and again nothing happened. Linda Decker must have given her children absolute orders about not speaking to strangers. That's not such a crazy idea. I believe in that myself, but I was sure there was someone else in the house, some adult. That's the person I wanted to talk to. I needed some answers.

I rang the bell a third time.

"What do you want?" A woman's voice wafted down to me from an upstairs window. I stepped back far enough to see. Above the front door a window stood open, but the curtain was drawn. No one was visible.

"Are you Linda Decker?" I asked.

Instead of answering my question, she asked another of her own. "How did you find me?"

"Your brother," I said.

"What did you do, promise him a ride in that fancy car of yours if he'd tell you?" There was a hard, biting edge to her words. There was also a hint that the information wasn't news to her.

"It wasn't like that," I said. "He was upset. He had missed his bus. I gave him a ride to the center, that's all. I'm a police officer," I added.

"Right, and I'm the Tooth Fairy," she responded.

"Look," I said. "I've got my ID right here. Come to the window. I'll toss it up to you."

"Go ahead," she said.

I felt like an absolute idiot, standing out front of the little house, throwing my ID packet toward an open window. It took several tries, but finally I made it. My ID dropped inside the windowsill and fell between the window and the curtain. There was a slight movement behind the curtain as someone stepped forward to retrieve the wallet.

"See there?" I called. "That's me. That's my picture. Can I come in now?"

"Why are you here?"

"I'm investigating the death of Logan Tyree. I want to ask you a few questions."

"Just a minute," she said.

She was gone a long time, not one minute but several. I still couldn't see her, but eventually she returned to the window and tossed my ID back down to me. "You can come in now," she said, "but you'll have to use the kids' door."

"Where's that?"

"Out back along the side of the house."

"The side!" I echoed. "But there isn't any door there."

"The coal chute."

"That's how they get in and out?" She didn't answer. I was right then-the kids had gotten into the house some other way besides the back door. I couldn't help wondering what kind of mother would make her children come in and out of the house through a coal chute. Not your standard, garden variety, cookies-and-milk type mother, that's for damn sure.

"I'll meet you in the basement," Linda Decker called down to me. "I'll go switch on the light."

With a sigh I turned away from the front door of the house. The woman at the store in Doty was probably right. Linda Decker was crazy as a bedbug.

Regretting that I was wearing good clothes, I walked back to the coal chute and lifted the door. It was heavy but not so heavy that kids wouldn't be able to open and close it themselves. There was no squawk of protest from the hinges. Although there was still some rust showing, they had recently been thoroughly oiled.

I paused long enough to run my hand over the padlock hasp on the outside of the door. I wondered if sometimes Linda locked her children inside the house when she was away. If she did, she wouldn't be the first mother who made that sometimes fatal mistake in houses with barred doors and windows. They lock the doors to protect their children, and the children die of smoke inhalation or worse. The idea made me shudder.

I peered down into the coal chute. The top of a ladder was visible, coming up out of the darkened depths of the basement. It leaned against the inside of the box close enough that the top rung was within easy reach. A light switched on in the basement below me. I heard Linda Decker's voice again.

"Just step over the edge of the box and climb down the ladder."

Beneath me, the ladder seemed to be set firmly enough on a bare concrete floor. I put one hand on it and tested it for stability. It didn't wobble at all. If Linda Decker trusted the ladder enough to let her children climb up and down it, I supposed it was good enough for me. Not only that, the coal chute itself looked as though every trace of coal dust had been carefully scrubbed away. That must have taken some doing.

Swinging one leg up and over the side of the box, I found the top rung of the ladder with one foot and stepped onto it. Before starting down the ladder, I took one last look around outside. I was half afraid some neighbor would see me and think I was breaking into Linda Decker's house. There was no one in sight.

The ladder was solid and steady beneath my feet. I started down, one rung at a time. As my shoulders and head descended into the basement, I could see that the room was nearly empty, except for a scatter of boxes and a few odd pieces of discarded furniture. The room was lit by the glaring glow of one bare bulb dangling from an ancient cord in the middle of the raw plywood ceiling.

One foot was on the floor and the other was still on the bottom rung of the ladder when suddenly the heavy door to the coal chute slammed shut over my head. At the same instant the light went out, plunging me into total darkness.

Above me, I heard somebody struggling with the hasp. The padlock! Someone was trying to fasten the padlock!

Scrambling hand over hand, I raced back up the ladder only to crash head-first into the door just as the lock clicked home.

"We got him, Mommie," a child's voice crowed in triumph. "We got him."

They sure as hell had.