A more perfect union

CHAPTER 3

By the time they resumed filming that afternoon, we had indeed lost the light. Goldfarb got in a huge shouting match with several members of his crew. As usual, the director carried the day. Over strenuous objections, Sam "The Movie Man" decreed they would reshoot the fight scene while somebody rewrote the script so the body could be found at night rather than in daylight. Meantime, techs scurried this way and that, bringing in more equipment, including a tractor-trailer rig containing a huge whispering generator to provide the juice to run the carbon arc lamps required for a night shoot.

Screwed up and incomprehensible as it may seem to a rank outsider, making a movie is a lot like living life. You work with little bits and pieces without ever getting a look at the big picture. It comes together gradually, in order or out of it, with no discernible pattern. No rhyme or reason, as my mother used to say.

I was doing my best to follow the story, but it wasn't easy. From scattered fragments, I had managed to determine that Death in Drydock was nothing more or less than an old-fashioned melodrama.

According to the story, Hannah Boyer, playing a somewhat less than virginal heroine, inherits a failing family business-the drydock company of the title. While attempting to turn the business back into a money-making proposition, she becomes romantically involved with a land-grabbing developer. The developer turns up dead in the water, and naturally the sweet young thing is a prime suspect. The lead detective on the case, played by Derrick Parker, is totally smitten once he encounters his gorgeous suspect.

The story itself was nothing short of ridiculous, and the idea of a cop falling for his suspect sounds like an overused cliche. It may be overused, but it does happen on occasion, even to the best of us. I should know.

The crew reshot the fight scene first, then they began working on the scene where make-believe cops pull the make-believe corpse out of the water. At least the water was real.

The retrieval scene was enough to make me want to turn in my technical advisor badge. Permanently. For one thing, Goldfarb couldn't be bothered with a boat. They dragged the body out of the water and dumped it directly onto the dock. For another, the dummy, fresh from the prop shop, had suffered none of the damage real corpses do. When they dropped it on the dock, the makeup was still totally in order, and all hair, fingers, and toes were still completely intact.

In addition, despite having seen a real body hook in action that very afternoon, Goldfarb insisted on using a sharply pointed metal hook to retrieve the body. All my pleas for realism fell on deaf ears. I tried to explain to Cassie Young that sharp hooks were used only for dragging the bottoms of rivers and lakes. I even offered to call Harbor Patrol and ask to borrow a real body hook to use in the scene. No dice. Cassie didn't pay any attention. She told me Goldfarb wanted a sharp point on the end of his body hook. That was what the script called for and that was the way it would be.

The reason Goldfarb wanted a sharp hook was soon obvious. Part of the retrieval scene included a special-effects sequence in which the sharp end of the hook is pulled free from the make-believe skin of the make-believe corpse. I took Cassie aside and attempted to explain that real human skin is amazingly tough, that body hooks catch on clothing, not on skin, but unrealistic or not, Goldfarb liked that ugly scene. He climbed down from the boom and crawled around on all fours to lovingly direct the cameras in capturing the sharp end of the hook as it came loose from the all too lifelike plastic skin.

For some reason, neither Cassie Young nor Hannah Boyer found any of this pretend gore the least bit distressing. So long as I live, I never will understand women.

In the end, the scene stayed as is. I didn't. I left the whole bunch of them to their own devices and went in search of Woody Carroll. If I had walked off the set completely, if I had pulled up my pants and gone home, there would have been hell to pay. I didn't need to have both Captain Powell and Mayor Dawson on my back. I was mad, but not that mad. Not yet.

After all, orders are orders. Instead, I hid out with Woody Carroll and some of the Lake Union Drydock employees. We settled down in the employee locker room and played several friendly hands of Crazy Eights on sickly green wooden lunchroom tables while Goldfarb went right on having his stupid cops do stupid things.

No matter what I did and no matter what Captain Powell wanted, the fictional Seattle cops in Death in Drydock were going to be a bunch of incredibly asinine jerks.

I stuck it out until almost midnight when Goldfarb finally called it a day. By then, even though I'd been off my feet for the last couple of hours, my heel was hurting like hell. The mobile canteen folks had brought dinner hours earlier, but it was that so-called nouvelle cuisine-the kind of food that looks real pretty on the plate but you're hungry again by the time you finish chewing the last bite. As I limped toward my Porsche parked five blocks away on Fairview Avenue East, I was craving a hamburger-a nice, greasy, juicy hamburger.

Derrick Parker hailed me from behind before I opened my car door. "Hey, Beau. Are you going straight home, or do you feel like stopping off for awhile?"

"What have you got in mind?" I answered. Parker waved away a limo driver who had been following, waiting for him to get in. "I guess you want a ride," I added.

Parker was already climbing into the car. He leaned back into the deep leather seat with a grateful sigh. "I've got to get away from these people. They're driving me crazy." As I started the car, he glanced slyly in my direction. "Let me guess," he said. "What you need is a chiliburger and a MacNaughton's from the Doghouse, right?"

I laughed. "Right, although I hadn't gotten to the chili part of it yet. If they run you out of the movies, Derrick, maybe you could get work as a mind reader."

"That's a thought with a whole lot of appeal," Derrick Parker replied. "This has been a hell of a day."

He didn't get any argument from me about that. We had put in a good, solid eighteen hours, and although I was tired, I wasn't the least bit sleepy. Neither was Derrick. I drove us straight to the Doghouse at Seventh and Bell.

In all of Seattle, it's my home away from home. The place has changed little over the years. The walls are still a dingy, faded yellow. Stray electrical cords still meander up the corners of the rooms. The duct-taped patch in the carpet has yet to be replaced. It's the kind of place where a guy can really relax. You can sit there and see what work needs to be done and revel in the fact that you personally don't have to do any of it.

Parker and I went directly into the bar. The only pleasant part of my moviemaking experience had resulted from Cassie Young asking me, half seriously and half in jest, to keep an eye on Derrick Parker. Her thought was that I would keep him out of trouble, make sure he showed up on the set on time, that sort of thing. The whole thing was a joke. Leaving J. P. Beaumont in charge of Derrick Parker was like the blind leading the blind. We were either very good for one another or very bad, depending on your point of view.

From a strictly business view, the Doghouse loved it. Not that many people in their lowbrow clientele of drinkers consume Glenlivet on the rocks, and certainly not in Derrick Parker's prodigious quantities.

The night waitress in the bar was a seasoned veteran named Donna. It was late in her shift and her feet hurt, so she was moderately surly. On that score, she had my heartfelt sympathy. When my feet hurt, it's hard for me to be civil, let alone cheerful.

Donna took our dinner order at the same time she delivered our drinks. Derrick blessed her with one of his engaging, boyish grins, but Donna wasn't impressed. Derrick Parker might be a household name all across America, but not in Donna's household, and not in the Doghouse, either.

Whenever that happened, whenever a waitress didn't recognize him or throw herself at his feet, Derrick acted both pleased and mystified. He liked to experience that rare sensation of anonymity, but it bothered him too, made him uneasy.

Derrick picked up his drink and took a long pull of Scotch. When he put down the glass and turned to look at me, the smile he had used on Donna was gone. "Do you know that's the first time I've ever seen a real dead body?"

"Is that so?" I responded. I was surprised. I think people hold the idea that movie stars have been everywhere, done everything. Derrick's comment was remarkably ingenuous.

He nodded. "I've just never been around when someone died. My grandmother passed away years ago, but my family's into cremation. We don't do funerals with open caskets and all that jazz." He shuddered. "Do they all look that way?"

"What way?"

"That…" he paused, looking for a word. "…gross," he added finally.

Gross did pretty much cover it.

"The floaters usually look like that," I told him. "Sometimes better, sometimes worse."

He seemed shocked. "And that's what you guys call them? Floaters?"

I nodded.

"That's terrible. I thought that was just in scripts." Derrick sat quietly for a few minutes letting that soak in. "How do you think he died?" he asked eventually. It was as though the dead man held a terrible fascination for Derrick Parker, as though he wanted to know all about him and yet, at the same time, he wanted to think about something else. I have a more than nodding acquaintance with that compulsion myself. It's what makes me a detective instead of a stockbroker.

"I can tell you one thing. He didn't jump," I said.

"He didn't? How do you know that?"

"The jumpers end up with their clothes all screwed up. Either they're torn to shreds or wrapped around their necks, depending on how they hit the water. If they go off one of the high bridges, the Freeway or Aurora, their clothes are usually torn to pieces on impact."

Derrick signaled Donna and ordered another round. With the drink in hand, he stared moodily into it, shaking his head. "Jesus. That's what you call them really, jumpers and floaters?"

"You got any better ideas?"

"No."

There was another pause when Donna brought our food. For late on a Saturday night, the place was practically deserted except for a few sing-along types gathered around the organ at the far end of the room. Derrick waited until Donna walked away.

"So what happens next when you find a body like that?"

"We try to determine how he died and get a positive identification. Then we notify the next of kin."

"You have to do that?"

I nodded.

"How old do you think he was?"

I shrugged. "I don't know. Thirtyish. Somewhere around there."

"And how do you go about finding next of kin?"

"What's with all the questions, Derrick? Have you decided you want to be a cop when you grow up?"

Derrick shook his head. "Nothing like that. I don't know what it is. I can't seem to get him out of my mind. It must be awful, having to talk to families like that, having to find them and tell them."

"It's no picnic," I said. "You're certainly right about that."

The conversation had set me to thinking about the dead man too. I remembered the sunlight glinting off his brass belt buckle. "He was an ironworker," I remarked offhandedly.

Derrick looked thunderstruck. "One of those guys who builds tall buildings? The ones who walk out on those high beams? How in the hell did you figure that out-his build maybe?"

I laughed. "His belt buckle," I said. "He was wearing one that said ‘Ironworker' on it."

"Oh." Derrick sounded disappointed, as though he had wanted my answer to be more exotic or complex, something brilliant out of Sherlock Holmes. It occurred to me then that Parker was getting his eyes opened about the reality of being a cop the same way I was learning about the reality of movies and movie stars. The lesson was clear: nobody has life completely sewed up. Not even Derrick Parker.

There was another lull in the conversation. I was thinking about Paul Kramer and about what an arrogant bastard he was, when Derrick interrupted my train of thought.

"You must really like it," he said.

"Like what?" I asked, puzzled. He had lost me.

"What you do. I mean, I've seen your place, your car. You're not stuck being a cop because you have to be. You must get a kick out of tracking things down, out of figuring out what really happened."

His comment made me laugh out loud. It was the other side of the coin, the same thing Kramer had said only turned around so it was a compliment instead of an insult. I had never given the matter much thought, but Derrick was right.

"I do like it," I told him. "When I finally break the code and know who did what to who, when I figure out how all the pieces fit together, I'm on top of the world. Not even a screw-up prosecutor losing the case later in court can take that away from me."

Derrick got up abruptly and signaled for the waitress. "I'm paying tonight," he said.

Donna brought the check and Derrick Parker paid for both our meals. He left a sizable tip on the table when we walked out. "It's nice to go someplace and not be hounded for autographs," he said.

The cast for Death in Drydock was staying in the Sheraton at Sixth and Pike. I dropped Derrick there and went home to Belltown Terrace. I was alone in the elevator all the way from P-4, the lowest level of the parking garage, to the twenty-fifth floor. Late at night, riding alone in the elevator is like being in a decompression chamber. I could feel the residue of the day's hassles dropping away from me. By the time I opened the door to my apartment, I was home. And glad to be there.

The red light on my answering machine showed there had been a number of messages while I was out, but it was after one in the morning, far too late to return any calls, so I didn't even bother to play them back. Instead, I poured myself a nightcap and settled into my recliner.

I was as bad as Derrick Parker. My mind was restless. No matter what, it kept coming back to the dead man in the water. The fact that he was none of my business didn't make any difference. It's not your case, Beaumont, I tried telling myself. He's not your problem. But the dead man wouldn't go away.

Ironworker. What was it about ironworkers? There was something about ironworkers that had been trying to nose its way into my consciousness ever since Merrilee Jackson had read the word to me off the glinting belt buckle. The thought had been there, poking around the edges of my mind, but with all the hubbub of the afternoon and evening, I hadn't been able to make any connections.

Now though, as I sat in the comfortable silence of my living room with the icy glass of MacNaughton's in my hand, it finally came to me.

Someone in my building. Someone from the ironworkers' local across the alley had rented a unit in Belltown Terrace. I knew it because, as one of the members of the real-estate syndicate which owns the building, I am apprised of comings and goings of tenants. I remembered the lady who handles rentals laughing and telling me that the new renter's vertical commute would be longer than his horizontal one since his office was in the Labor Temple across the alley at First and Broad. I tried to remember what else she had said about him. He was one of the union bigwigs, a business agent or something, not one of the regular working stiffs.

I felt better then, relieved somehow. It was a bit of information I could pass along to Manny and Kramer. Well, to Manny, anyway. Paul Kramer was a prick. I wasn't going to lift a finger to help him.

After two weeks it was good to know that no matter how long my exile in La-La Land might last, I was still a detective at heart. My mind would still work away at solving puzzles, even when it wasn't supposed to. With that knowledge, my body finally began to unwind.

I was going to have one more drink, but I never got around to it. I fell asleep in my chair without bothering to get up and pour that last MacNaughton's.

And without having anyone there to tell me it was time to wake up and go to bed.