A more perfect union

CHAPTER 5

Once you've seen a burned-out fiberglass boat, you don't forget it in a hurry. It's a scary sight.

Just as Harrison had told me, Logan Tyree's Chris-Craft Boomer had burned right down to the waterline. Most of the wheelhouse had disappeared, melted into a gaping hole in the deck. What little was left of the superstructure was lined with an eerie fringe of blackened icicles which were actually melted fiberglass. It had obviously been one hell of a fire.

If Logan Tyree had been blown clear by the force of the explosion, he must have died instantly. On that score, I counted him among the lucky ones. To my way of thinking, instant death is preferable to enduring the well-meaning tortures of a burn unit's intensive care. If that ever happened to me, I'd want to go quick.

"Were you a friend of his?"

Startled by the sound of a voice, I turned from studying the charred wreckage to see a wizened old man limp onto the dock from a peeling junker of a boat that looked more like a derelict tug than anything else. The deck was cluttered with an odd assortment of mismatched patio furniture and the unassembled parts of several bicycles. Two lines of clean laundry hung lifeless from wires strung between the cabin and the bow.

"I'm a police officer," I said, flipping open my identification wallet to show him my badge.

"Your friends have already come and gone if that's who you're looking for," he said. He was smoking a cigarette. He finished it and tossed the stub into the water between the two boats, where it disappeared with a minute sizzle. At first I thought the man was entirely bald, but closer inspection revealed his head was covered with a thin fuzz of iron-gray hair. The unshaven stubble on his jaws was much more plentiful. If he owned a set of dentures, he wasn't wearing them.

He ran one hand over the top of his head and then reached quickly for a baseball cap which stuck out of a frayed hip pocket. "Chemotherapy," he explained self-consciously, covering his scraggly head. "The name's Red Corbett." He held out his hand in greeting. The jutting toothless chin evidently didn't bother him the way his bald head did. His handshake was firm and thorough enough to belong to an old-time politician.

"Those other guys told me to keep everyone away, but I suppose it's all right for you to be here. After all, you're one of them."

Not exactly, but I didn't disabuse him of the notion. "Who told you to keep an eye out? Detective Davis or maybe Detective Kramer?"

The old man nodded. "That last one. At least I think that was his name." He reached in his pocket, pulled out a bedraggled package of unfiltered Camels, and offered one to me.

"No thanks," I said. "I don't smoke."

He paused long enough to extract a cigarette and light it with a match from a book stored inside the cellophane wrapper. "I figure they can't hurt me any more than they already have. Why give 'em up?" He took a pensive drag on the cigarette. He seemed to have forgotten me completely.

I reminded him. "You were telling me about the detectives."

"That's right. They said it would only be for a day or two, until his family decides what to do with it. Logan's ex isn't going to be wild about payin' the moorage fees. I expect she'll get out from under 'em just as soon as ever she can."

"She'll get rid of the boat?"

Red Corbett nodded vigorously. "You'd better believe it. She'll take the insurance money and run. That broad's a lulu. Logan was right not to have nothin' to do with her after they split up. She's the jealous type, you know, one of them screamin' Mimis. And jealous of a boat besides. If that don't beat all. Anyone who hates boats the way she does has to have some kind of problem."

"Tyree and his wife were divorced?" My question was calculated to prime Red Corbett's pump. It worked like a charm.

"Separated," Corbett replied. "His wife gave him a choice between her and the boat, and he took Boomer. As far as I'm concerned, he made the right decision. That Katherine's nothin' but a ring-tailed bitch."

"Where does she live?"

Red Corbett shrugged. "Who knows? Down around Renton somewhere, I think, but I don't know for sure. Poor Logan was all broke up when Katy-he called her Katy-when she told him she was actually filing for a divorce. He come creeping onto that there boat of his with his clothes in a box and his tail tucked between his legs. I felt sorry for him. He acted like it was the end of the world. I told him not to worry, that there were plenty of other fish in the sea. It didn't take him no time at all to figure out I was right, neither."

"He found someone else?"

Corbett nodded. "That little Linda ain't no bigger 'an a minute, but she'd make two or three of those Katherine types easy. I'd pick Linda over Katy any day of the week."

"Linda's the girlfriend?"

He nodded.

"Do you know her last name?"

"Decker. Linda Decker. I told those other guys all about her just this morning. Don't you work together?"

For a change, a plausible lie came right to my lips. "One of the two detectives is pretty new on the job," I said casually.

Corbett gave me a sharp look then nodded sagely. "And you're backstoppin' him to make sure he don't miss nothin'?"

"That's right," I answered. My logical-sounding reply not only placated Red Corbett, it gave me some real pleasure. In actual fact, it wasn't that far from the truth, but Detective Paul Kramer would shit a brick if he ever got wind of it. "Tell me what you can about this Linda Decker," I urged.

Corbett eyed me uneasily. "She's a nice girl. Don't you go gettin' no funny ideas about her. The way I understand it, Logan met her in an apprenticeship class down at his union hall. He was teaching welding. She needed to be a certified welder in order to work as an ironworker." Corbett stopped short and looked at me with a puzzled expression on his face. "You got any idea why a cute little gal like that would want to work at a job like ironworking? I mean it's hard work, and dangerous too, walking them beams way up in the air and such."

"I can't imagine," I said, although I suspected that money had something to do with it.

"Anyways," Corbett continued. "They met there in that class. He came by here that night to have a beer and tell me all about this lady he had met. You'da thought it was love at first sight, I swear to God. He was grinnin' from ear to ear like the cat that swallowed the canary. And it went on from there. She was real nice to him, helped him work on his boat on weekends. And he idolized those two little kids of hers. He would have been a good father. Katy refused to have any kids, you know. Just out and out refused.

"So like I was sayin', Linda and Logan got along great. My wife and I looked after the kids a few times for them when they went out. You forget how hard it is to find a baby-sitter once you don't have to use 'em anymore. The wife and I figured they'd wind up married sooner or later-I mean, as soon as the divorce was final. I was real sorry when they broke up."

"When did that happen?"

He shrugged. "Not long ago, I guess. Week before last maybe. Linda came over and they had a hell of a row. I heard 'em yellin' back and forth. As long as they'd been together, I'd never heard 'em exchange so much as a cross word. When they left, Linda's kids was both cryin' fit to kill."

"Did he say what the fight was about?"

"Not really. He was real upset about it. I figured it had something to do with work, but he never said what. All he told me was that sometimes a man has to do what's right no matter what."

"And Linda Decker hasn't come back around?"

"No. Not even after the article about the fire was in the paper. That kinda surprised me. I expected to see her. I mean, they'd had a fight and all, but I woulda swore she'd care about what happened to him. Course, she mighta been out of town and just didn't hear about it. That could be it."

"So you haven't seen her at all?"

"Nope. Not since the night they had that fight."

"Do you know if anyone from the department has talked to her?"

Corbett shook his head and blew a cloud of smoke into the air. "I doubt it. You know how it is. After the fire some guys came around lookin' for the next of kin, and Linda wasn't that. I gave 'em his wife's name, and Linda's too, although I got the feeling that there wasn't much chance anybody'd be interested in talkin' to an ex-girlfriend. I was gonna give it to your detective friends this morning, but they said the same thing, that the wife's name was enough. Said they'd get Katherine to identify the body."

"Kramer and Davis didn't bother to take Linda Decker's name?"

"Maybe they wrote it down. I don't recollect exactly, but they said that with an accident like this the wife would be all they'd need."

An accident. Jim Harrison at Harbor Station had called it that too, but that was a Coast Guard finding made in a vacuum with no knowledge of an ex-girlfriend and an ex-wife. A jealous ex-wife.

"Somebody already mentioned that to me," I said. "Something about the gas-fume sensor or the blowers being out of commission. What do you think?"

Red Corbett tossed the butt of the second cigarette into the water with a contemptuous shake of his head. "Well sir," he said finally. "It sure don't sound like the Logan Tyree I knew."

I had been chatting easily with Red Corbett, but that remark put me on point. He had my undivided attention. That kind of comment is a shot in the arm for homicide detectives. It's what makes them go combing through whole catalogs of victims' friends and acquaintances. Something in the circumstances surrounding the death that doesn't fit, something that isn't quite right.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"Logan loved that boat. He worked on her and tinkered with her every spare minute. He kept her shipshape."

"You mean if something wasn't working right, he would have noticed right off and gotten it fixed."

"You're damn right!"

"Did you tell Detectives Davis and Kramer that?"

Corbett laughed. "Are you kiddin'? I didn't tell them two nothin'. They didn't ask."

I felt like I had stumbled into something important, and I didn't want to let it loose. "You wouldn't happen to have this Linda Decker's address and phone number, would you?" I asked.

Corbett gave me a wily toothless grin. "I sure do. Like I said, me and the wife looked after her kids a couple of times. Linda lived with her mother and she left us her mother's name, address, and phone number just in case there was an emergency. We never had any call to use it, but it's still written down inside the cover of the phone book. You want it?"

I nodded. Corbett turned and walked unsteadily back toward his boat. In a few minutes he reappeared on deck, trailed by a woman who appeared to be several years older than he was and in equally bad shape. She stopped on the deck long enough to gather up the laundry while Red tottered over to me with a ragged phone book clutched in his hand. "Leona Rising," he read, gasping for breath. The phone number and address he gave me were in Bellevue, a suburb across Lake Washington from Seattle.

As I finished jotting the information into my notebook, the woman stepped forward, stopping at her husband's side. She looked at me quizzically. "Red said you wanted Linda's number. Will you be seeing her?" she asked.

"Probably," I said.

"Well, you tell her Doris and Red are thinking about her. Tell her we're real sorry about the way things worked out."

"I'll be sure to do that," I said. Turning, I walked away, leaving the two wizened old folks standing side by side. When I reached the car, I was still holding my open notebook with the scribbled name and address plainly visible. Looking down at them I knew I had stepped off the dock at the Montlake Marina and onto the horns of a dilemma.

What the hell was I going to do about that name and address? Look into them myself? Why? It wasn't my case. Turn them over to Manny and Kramer? Fat chance. They were already working on the assumption that Logan Tyree's death was an accident. I might be totally convinced that their assumption was wrong, but any contradictory suggestion from me was bound to cause trouble.

In the end, I decided to talk the whole situation over with Ron Peters. Young as he is, he's got a cool head on his shoulders. What's more, he has the ability to see several sides to any given argument.

I glanced up at the sky. It was almost afternoon. Over the past few months, I had made a habit of spending Sunday afternoons with Peters' two daughters, taking them to visit their father at the hospital and then messing around with them for the rest of the day. Our Sunday outings gave their baby-sitter, Maxine Edwards, a much-needed break. It was good for her, good for the girls, and good for me too.

I wondered briefly if I should go back to Lake Union Drydock and see how things were going, but even thinking about Cassie Young and her moviemaking cohorts filled me with a flood of resentment. It only took a moment to make up my mind. The day was an unauthorized day off, but it was still a day off, a jewel to be treasured. I hadn't had a break in over two weeks, and neither had Mrs. Edwards.

Maxine wasn't just relieved when I offered to take the girls off her hands. She was downright overjoyed. Less than forty minutes from the time I called downstairs to extend the invitation, the girls were at my door ringing the bell-freshly showered, shampooed, and dressed to go visit their father.

I looked them up and down and gave a low whistle. "Why so dressed up?" I asked.

Tracie's answer was serious. "Amy said she has our dresses ready to try on, so if we came over today we should wear our good shoes and stuff."

Amy Fitzgerald, Peters' fiancee, had been busy sewing wedding clothes for herself and for both of the girls as well. With the wedding less than a month away, activity was definitely switching into high gear. Women are like that. If men know what's good for them, they keep their heads low and go along with the program.

"So that's how it is. If Amy wants you dressed up, dressed up you'll be," I told them.

I traded my two-seat Porsche for Peters' rusty blue Toyota sedan. It was a considerable sacrifice on my part, but I believed in kids using seat belts long before the State of Washington made it a law. Once the girls were securely belted in, we headed for Harborview Hospital on First Hill-Pill Hill according to long-term Seattlites.

Peters' room was on the fourth floor, the rehabilitation wing. Over the months the hospital had become far less strange and forbidding for all of us. In the beginning, Peters had been totally immobilized, his back and neck held in rigid traction, but now he had finally worked his way into a wheelchair. Part of every visit included the girls wheeling him around the floor to call on some of the other patients. When they took off on their little jaunt, Amy Fitzgerald and I were left to chew the fat.

"You sure lit a fire under Ron this morning," Amy said with a fond laugh.

"What do you mean?"

"When I got here, all he could talk about was some boat that burned up out on Lake Union last week. I'm glad you let him help with your cases, Beau. It's good for him. It makes me feel like he's still making a contribution."

Of course, Logan Tyree and his burning boat weren't my cases at all, but I didn't tell Amy that. After all, why muddy the water with departmental nitpicking?

"He is making a contribution," I said. "Just because his legs don't work doesn't mean there's anything the matter with his brain."

Amy Fitzgerald laughed again, the sound of it bubbling to the surface like an irrepressible spring.

Peters and the girls came back from their trek around the floor with Tracie pushing the chair and Heather walking dejectedly alongside, her hand resting on her father's knee. She was weeping silently. Peters was doing his best to console her.

"Don't worry about it, Heather," he was saying. "It wasn't that big a deal."

"What's the matter?" I asked.

Heather looked up at me with two huge tears still glistening on her cheeks. "I didn't do it on purpose, Unca Beau," she lisped.

She was totally crushed, and my heart went out to her. "What happened?" I asked.

Peters chuckled in spite of himself as he answered. "Heather couldn't see where we were going. She ran my chair into a garbage can. It wasn't that serious, but one of the nurses climbed all over us."

Amy stood up quickly. "I'll bet I know which one, too," she said. Then she knelt down in front of Heather and wiped the tears from her face. "It's all right, hon," she said. "Let's go down to the car and get the dresses. Would you like that?"

Heather's broken heart was mended almost instantly. She nodded quickly and went racing off to call the elevator. Tracie, always the more reserved of the two, walked sedately down the hallway with her hand in Amy's.

Peters watched the three of them step into the elevator with a happy grin on his face. "They really like her," he said wonderingly.

That was obvious to even the most casual observer. "You lucked out, Peters," I said. "That's some girls' trio you have there."

I had watched from the sidelines as Peters' and Amy's romance blossomed. Amy Fitzgerald had never been married before, and she didn't have any children of her own. At first I had some serious misgivings about whether or not it would all work, but now, as the elevator door closed on a sudden gale of laughter, I could see it was going to be fine. Amy Fitzgerald was a born mother, and both girls seemed to accept her without question or reservation.

"They're okay," Peters agreed quietly. He turned back to me. "So did you finish the movie then? From what you said this morning, I thought you'd be busy all day."

"The movie's not finished, but I am," I said.

"So that's the way it is." Of all the people around me, Peters was the only one who really understood my frustration and boredom with the moviemaking assignment. Neither one of us was any good at enforced idleness although Peters was learning to deal with it better than I was.

I nodded. "For today anyway." I changed the subject. "Amy tells me you've been tracking after the boat fire."

"The explosion happened last Tuesday, just before midnight. A forty-two-foot fiberglass cruiser named Boomer. The missing man's name is Logan Tyree."

"I know."

"How do you know that?" Peters demanded.

"I stopped by Harbor Station before I came over here."

"Has anybody besides us made the connection yet?"

"Jim Harrison said Kramer and Davis are tracking after it. They had already been to the marina by the time I stopped there this morning."

"Oh," Peters said. He sounded disappointed. "I thought maybe we'd beat them on this one."

"We may have," I said. "I talked to Tyree's neighbor, an old codger named Red Corbett. He says Davis and Kramer are calling it an accident-faulty equipment. Corbett says that doesn't jibe with the Logan Tyree he knew."

"How's that?" Peters' curiosity was aroused the same as mine had been. I told him briefly everything Red Corbett had told me. He listened in silence. When I finished, he nodded slowly.

"It sounds like Kramer's up to his old tricks again."

"What do you mean?"

"Doesn't it seem a little odd to you that they've already decided it was an accident?"

"Corbett didn't tell them everything he told me."

"Because they didn't ask. Kramer's in the market for quick fixes, Beau. That's how he made such a name for himself in robbery, how he got on a fast track for promotion. He's left behind a trail of cases that got closed on paper, whether the close was for real or not."

"I thought maybe this was just a mistake."

"Mistake my ass!" Peters flared. "There's no mistake. Believe me, I've seen it before. You could wallpaper your house with his paper clears. They don't mean a goddamned thing but they look real good in the record books."

"But what about Manny?"

"You know Manny. He's easygoing. He'll take the line of least resistance, and that doesn't include standing up to Kramer's constant pushing."

"So what do you suggest we do?" I asked.

There was a long silence. Finally Peters looked over at me. "Would you consider checking this out on your own without anyone being the wiser?" he asked.

"I suppose so," I replied.

"Then do it," Peters said. "If there's anything to what that old man said and if Logan Tyree really was murdered, I'd love to see Paul Kramer take it in the shorts."

"Consider it done," I told him. "It'll be a pleasure."

Amy and the girls came back into the room just then. I was reluctantly drafted into the hem-pinning process. My job was to help the girls hold still while Amy measured the hem with a yardstick and stuck pins in the gauzy material.

"Did you know Amy made our dresses all by herself?" Heather asked.

"Yes, I did," I said, "and it doesn't surprise me. She's a pretty talented lady."

When we left the hospital, I took the girls to McDonald's for Big Macs. They promised they wouldn't tell their dad. Big Macs are not on his health-food list. Afterwards, Heather wanted to go down to Myrtle Edwards Park to feed the ducks. Myrtle Edwards is only about three blocks from Belltown Terrace. I knew from things the girls had said that they went there often with Maxine.

For me the problem with Myrtle Edwards Park was that I hadn't been back there since that unforgettable day when I had married Anne Corley in a simple sunrise wedding. I didn't want to think about it.

In the end, I caved in and went only because I didn't want to have to explain to Heather and Tracie why I couldn't go. I sat on a bench overlooking the water and tried not to think while the girls played tag and climbed up and down the rock sculpture.

When we got home to Belltown Terrace, it was time for dinner. I barbecued hot dogs outside on the recreation floor. I was standing over the grill, but my mind was still on Anne Corley. Heather came dashing up to me just in time to see me wiping my eyes on my sleeves.

"What's the matter, Unca Beau? Are you crying?"

She had me dead to rights, but I didn't admit it. "No," I told her. "It's nothing, just the smoke."

Satisfied with my answer, Heather went skipping off to the sport court where she and Tracie were playing badminton.

"Damn you, Anne Corley," I said aloud.

She broke my heart, goddamnit. In the process she made me a homeowner again and gave me back a barbecue grill.