Lying in wait

6

The instant Jared Danielson trailed out of the duplex on his mother's heels, I knew why she wanted to brain him. In fact, so did I. On sight.

He was a gangly, scrawny kid who shuffled along in unlaced high-tops. He wore a Depeche Mode sweatshirt, the sleeves of which ended several inches below his longest finger. Although early November means legitimately winter weather in Seattle, his legs were bare. His ragged jams seemed to be several sizes too large for his narrow hips.

I know the look. The oversized clothing means only one thing to me, and I was sure it sent the same insulting message to his mother. Jared Danielson was a gang wannabe.

The drooping crotch of his pants hung down almost to his knobby knees. Had I been walking behind him, I think I would have been tempted to give them a yank. It wouldn't have taken much effort to have dropped them around his ankles.

For some unknown reason, kids who insisted on wearing their baseball caps backward six months ago have now, for no apparent reason, collectively turned them bill forward. Jared Danielson was no exception. At least the maroon-and-gray Washington State University baseball cap perched on his head was turned in the right direction. The dark brown hair sticking out beneath it fell well below his shoulders, and a small gold hoop earring pierced the lobe of one ear. He sported a spectacularly black-and-blue bruise under his right eye.

I'm old enough and old-fashioned enough so that the combination of earring and shiner jarred. When I was growing up, a boy who wore earrings wasn't likely to be hauled into the principal's office for fist-fighting. I take that back. They got in fist fights, all right, but they usually weren't the ones who started them. This punk looked as if he had mouthed off to the wrong person.

Just one look at his typical twelve-year-old-tough-guy pout as Jared Danielson slouched into the backseat of the Mustang was enough to make me regret having offered to take the little ingrate along to lunch. But then, settling back into my own seat, I managed to find something positive in the prospect. Lunch with Jared Danielson was all I was in for. He was Sue Danielson's son. She was stuck with the kid for life.

"Where to?" Sue asked me, once she resumed the driver's seat.

Attempting to play the role of polite host, I turned to Jared. "What would you like for lunch?" I asked.

Jared glowered back at me and shrugged. "I dunno," he said.

"Fair enough. It's my call then. Let's try that little diner up on Forty-fifth," I said. "The one just across from the Guild Forty-five Theater."

Ever since the Doghouse Restaurant closed in downtown Seattle, I've felt like a displaced person. Over the past few months, I've auditioned a few other hangouts, but so far none of them quite measures up.

I hate to admit it, but I miss the thick gray haze of secondhand smoke. I miss the butt-sprung orange plastic booths with their distinctive, triangular tears and duct-tape patching. I miss the basic "Bob's Burger" with the onions fried into the meat. But most of all, I miss the crusty old-time waitresses who always knew how I liked my coffee and who saved me a daily collection of crossword puzzles from various abandoned newspapers.

The diner on Forty-fifth was trying hard-too hard-to achieve a "real" 1950s look and atmosphere. Their recipe for authenticity was missing several essential ingredients. What was needed was more grime, more cigarette smoke, a few nonconforming extension cords strung along the moldings, and some hash-slinging waitresses at least one of whom would have a racing form handily tucked in her apron pocket.

Jared skulked into the far corner of a booth. Sue slid in beside him. We had no more than picked up our menus when Sue's pager went off. She headed for the pay phone in the back. "Order me a burger with fries and a cup of coffee," she said on her way. "I'll be right back."

I turned to Jared, who was scowling at the menu. "What'll you have?" I asked, trying once again to break the ice.

"I dunno," he said. "A cheeseburger, I guess."

Such unbridled enthusiasm, to say nothing of gratitude. I wanted to slug him.

He avoided my gaze by staring out the window. "So what are you?" he mumbled sarcastically. "My mom's new boyfriend? Are you two going out or something?"

Boyfriend? Going out? If I had ever been tempted to cut the kid any slack, that just about corked it.

"The lady happens to be my partner," I explained as civilly as I could manage. "We're working a homicide case together. Period."

He looked at me then, his eyes angry and accusing. "Well," he said, "you're taking us to lunch. It seems like a date to me."

The waitress showed up at the booth and saved me from knocking the presumptuous little shit upside the head. I ordered burgers for Sue and me, then stewed while Jared unconcernedly ordered a cheesburger and chocolate shake. I waited until the waitress left the table before I answered.

"Look, Buster. Your mother had to squander her lunch hour checking on a smart-mouthed kid who just happened to get his butt kicked out of school for the next three days. So for the record, I'm taking my partner to lunch. At the moment, however, I seem to be baby-sitting you, and it sounds to me as if you need it."

Jared Danielson was used to dishing out free-floating hostility to any and all comers. He wasn't used to taking it, especially not from a complete stranger. My returned volley of dispassionate animosity caught him off guard.

"I hate school," he said, as though that somehow justified his rude behavior. "I hate this town. I hate my mother."

"So give her a break. Go live with your dad," I said amiably. "Good riddance. You'll be doing your mom a favor. What's stopping you?"

For a moment, his chin jutted defiantly, then his face fell. "I can't," he croaked.

"Why not?"

Jared Danielson shrugged. The tough-guy mask disintegrated. His lower lip trembled, while his eyes filled with self-pitying tears. The surly, belligerent teenager faded into something younger and much more vulnerable.

"We don't know where he is," Jared answered, while his changing voice cracked out of control. "He's supposed to pay child support, but he doesn't. He left town, and Mom can't find him. She thinks he went to Alaska."

Sue Danielson came back to the table. "You two look serious," she said, her questioning glance shifting apprehensively between Jared and me. "What's going on? What are you talking about?"

For the first time, Jared Danielson's eyes met mine in a silent plea for help. "Football," he finally mumbled.

We were? I needed a second to take the hint. I took a clue from the WSU baseball cap still parked on his head and tried to follow his lead.

"How about those Cougs," I said, feigning an enthusiasm for collegiate football that I don't feel. "We were wondering who would win the Apple Cup this year-WSU or the U-Dub. Who do you think, Jared?"

As quickly as the boy had emerged from his hard little shell, he retreated back inside. "Who cares?" he muttered before lapsing once more into a stubborn, resentful silence, but not before I caught a glimpse of what was ailing Jared Danielson.

I never knew my own father. He died as a result of a motorcycle accident eight months before I was born. Days before he and my mother planned to elope, my father was headed back to the naval base at Bremerton after a date with her when the motorcycle he was riding skidded out of control and threw him directly into the path of an oncoming truck. He died two days later without ever regaining consciousness.

Faced with Jared Danielson's pain, I could see now how losing a parent you never knew was different from being willfully abandoned by a father you had grown to know and love. Having a parent die on you is a long way from having your father run away. One loss leaves a clean break that eventually heals. The other leaves in its wake a lifetime of hurt, of unanswered questions and emotionally charged blame.

In spite of myself, I felt sorry for Jared Danielson-baggy pants, smart mouth, and all.

I expected Sue to see right through the phony football ploy, but she seemed to fall for it. "Football," she said, sliding back into the booth. "That counts me out. Oh, by the way, that was Watty. Alan Torvoldsen called in and wants us to come by and see him sometime this afternoon."

"We can do that later. I'd rather go see Else Gebhardt first."

"Fine."

Jared ate his cheeseburger and drank his shake in sullen silence. Sue and I talked some over ours, but by mutual-if-unspoken consent, neither one of us said anything more about the case. When we dropped Jared back at the duplex, he didn't bother to say thank you. Or even kiss my ass. Not to me and not to his mother, either.

"Sorry he was so rude," Sue apologized after her son slammed the car door shut and sauntered off up the walk.

"Don't worry about it," I reassured her. "That's what twelve-year-old kids are like these days. Give him ten or twelve years. Maybe he'll improve with age."

"I hope so," she said.

I do, too, I thought as we headed for Ballard. For Sue's sake as well as Jared's.

Ballard as a district is considered to be Seattle's Scandinavian enclave. Whenever the king of Norway comes to town, somebody always schedules a ceremonial visit to Ballard. Whatever goes on there is headline-making news in the Ballard-based Western Viking, one of this country's two surviving Norwegian-language newspapers.

Ethnic jokes may be politically incorrect in the rest of Seattle, but down on Market Street, it's still open season on Sven and Ole jokes. People from Ballard don't necessarily see much humor in Garrison Keillor's tales of Lake Wobegon, because, as far as Ballardites are concerned, that's "yust the way things are." And when Ballard folks say " Uff da," or " Ja, sure, you betcha," it's no "yoke." And it's not sarcasm, either. Even down through third-generation Sons of Norway.

Blue Ridge, the neighborhood where Gunter Gebhardt had lived with his wife, Else, is upper-crust Ballard, which isn't the oxymoron one might think. In Seattle, the price of houses always goes up the closer you get to the water, and the Gebhardts' house was on the view side and in a cleft at the bottom of Ballard's westernmost glacial ridge. The corkscrew street was named Culpeper Court.

The house Sue stopped at was a tidy if unassuming sandstone-veneer 1950s-era rambler. It may have been a "view property" once, but a newly constructed house with recently planted landscaping had been built directly across the street in a way that pretty much closed off the Gebhardts' visual access to the water and the shipping lanes.

Several cars were grouped in and around the driveway of the unfenced, meticulously mowed and landscaped yard. Three women, presumably friends, neighbors, or relatives of Else and Gunter Gebhardt, stood in a tight knot on the front porch. They eyed Sue and me suspiciously as we stepped up onto the porch from the manicured brick walkway.

"Can I help you?" one of them asked, but she moved in front of the doorbell and effectively blocked our access to it.

"We're police officers," I explained, displaying my badge. "Detectives. Is Else Gebhardt here?"

The women exchanged guarded glances, but finally, with a shrug, the one blocking the doorbell stepped aside. "Else's in the kitchen," she said. "Go to the end of the entryway and turn right."

In addition to Else, there were another seven or eight women milling about in the spacious country-style kitchen-middle-aged and older ladies who looked very much alike with their ice-blue eyes, more-than-ample figures, and blond hair going gray. Like the women outside the house, these turned on us as well with an unmistakable solidarity of distrust. Their collective message was clear. Mourners were welcome. Inquisitive strangers were not.

"Are you reporters?" one of them demanded.

This time, while Sue dragged out her I.D. and explained who we were, I caught sight of Else on the far side of the room. She was seated at a small desk that had been built into a bank of knotty-pine kitchen cabinets. Her back was to the room, and she was talking on the telephone.

"Please, Michael," she was saying, her voice controlled but pleading, her whole body tense with suppressed emotion. "Please put Kari on the phone. I've got to talk to her."

There was a momentary silence on Else's end of the line. The other women in the kitchen shifted uneasily. One of them offered Sue a cup of coffee more as a diversionary activity than out of any real interest in hospitality.

"Else's on the phone right now," the woman explained, edging Sue toward the door. "Wouldn't you like to wait in the living room until she's free?"

Sue seemed to take the hint, allowing herself to be herded toward and through the doorway, but something about the obvious discomfort of the women gathered in the kitchen, something about the tense set of Else Gebhardt's shoulders, kept me from following suit.

"Because I don't want to give you the message, that's why!" Else said sharply into the telephone mouthpiece. "This is important! I want to talk to Kari myself! Put her on the phone. Now!"

There was another brief pause. "Hello?" Else said a moment later, depressing the switch hook several times in rapid succession. "Hello? Hello? Why, that lousy little bastard! He hung up on me!"

"Else, such language!" an elderly woman exclaimed in a voice still thick with old-country inflections.

Across the room from where I stood was a small oak kitchen table. Seated at it, with her back to the window and with a sturdy wheeled walker stationed nearby, was a rosy-faced white-haired woman. She held a clattering cup and saucer in her palsied hand. Keeping her eyes focused on Else, the woman lifted the dainty china cup to her mouth and took a sip of coffee. When she put the cup back down, it rocked and rattled dangerously, but not a single drop of coffee spilled into the saucer.

"Be quiet, Mother," Else Gebhardt said sharply. "I'll talk about that rotten little creep any damned way I want."

Unperturbed, the old lady shrugged and took another sip of coffee. "I told Gunter he shouldn't have done that," she continued, her false teeth chattering loosely as she spoke. "I told him no good would come of it if he threw Kari out; that it would come back on you in the end. But would he listen? I'll say not. Not at all! Gunter Gebhardt never once listened to anybody else in his whole life!"

Else stood up and leveled a chilly, blue-eyed glare at the woman seated at the table. "I'm warning you, Mother. I don't want to hear another word about it. Kari's father is dead, and I'm going to tell my daughter about this myself if I have to drive all the way up to Bellingham and break down the door to do it."

Another woman moved quickly to the old woman's side. "Please, Aunt Inge," she said soothingly. "Let Else be. She has enough to worry about right now."

But Else's widowed mother, Inge, wasn't so easily stifled. "She certainly does," Inge Didricksen sniffed. "And she should have started worrying about it a long time ago. She always let that man rule the roost like he was the king of Prussia. Now just see where it's got them!"

"Mother!" Else exclaimed furiously. "Drop it."

From the way they were going at it, I figured Gunter Gebhardt must have been a bone of contention between mother and daughter since day one. Just then Else caught sight of me standing across the room. Her face flushed with embarrassment. "I'm sorry, BoBo," she said. "I had no idea you were here."

"Detective Danielson and I came to talk to you, if you have time," I said. "We need to gather some information about your husband. Is there some place a little more private than this? A place where we could talk?"

Behind me in the entryway, the doorbell chimed again. No doubt another group of sympathetic friends was arriving. Still holding the cup and saucer that had been thrust in her hand, Sue Danielson appeared in the doorway. Else looked from her to me and then down at her mother, who, totally unperturbed, continued to drink her coffee.

"Come on," Else said at last. "We'll go downstairs. No one will bother us there. Just come get me if Kari calls back, would you?"

The woman, who was evidently a cousin, nodded and said she would. Meanwhile, Else turned on her heel and led us out the back door. Just outside, between the back door and one leading into the garage, was a cement slab. Yet a third door opened off it. Else paused before the third door long enough to extract a key from her pocket.

"Gunter always kept the workshop door locked," she explained as she worked with the key. "He never liked having people go down there, but I can't see that it matters that much now. He didn't want people walking in on him when he was working. And, of course, I'm sure the collection itself is very valuable."

Stepping into the darkened stairwell, Else switched on a single overhead bulb, dimly illuminating a set of heavily timbered stairs. Under the banister, on either side of the risers themselves, lay a pair of railroad ties. The rough wood had been notched to fit the steps to keep them from slipping. I saw them, but only enough to notice them, as Sue and I followed Else down the stairway and off across the darkened, dungeonlike basement.

The mistress of the house knew where she was going. We didn't. Stumbling forward in the dark, I slammed my knee into something sharp and hard. The pain of the blow was enough to make me yelp.

"What's wrong?" Sue demanded, groping for my arm. "What happened?"

"Watch out," I told her. "There's stuff around here that will break your leg." While we stood waiting for Else to switch on the lights, I rubbed my knee with one hand and reached out to touch whatever I had run into with the other.

It felt like a motor of some kind, and that wasn't too surprising. In the last few years, we've had a number of serious windstorms in the Puget Sound area. Damage to downed wires has sometimes knocked out power for as many as several days at a time. Feeling the metal object, I supposed it was one of those gas-powered generators that have become almost standard equipment in the basements of some storm-lashed neighborhoods.

A moment later, Else flipped another switch, and the room lit up. It turned out I was almost right. What I had thought to be a gas-powered generator was actually a small engine block for a diesel generator set, the kind fishing boats use to drive auxiliary generators and hydraulic pumps. For ease of moving, it was mounted on top of a raised four-wheeled dolly. I didn't find it at all surprising that Gunter Gebhardt would use his basement for off-season storage and maintenance of some of his equipment.

When the lights came on, Sue and I found ourselves standing at one end of what was apparently a single room that ran the entire length of the house. Unlike most basements I have known and owned, this one was clean and neat. The white tile floor gleamed in the glow of overhead fluorescent lighting. One end of the room was devoted to storage. There the carefully organized shelves held the kinds of tools and equipment you'd expect in the workshop of a boat-owning fisherman. And those didn't interest me very much. After all, if you've seen one bench vise, you've seen them all.

What intrigued me were the wooden display cases that lined the entire opposite wall. I started toward them, but Else stopped me.

"Don't move until I turn off the alarm," she said. I heard several electronic beeps from a keypad as Else punched in a code to turn off what was evidently a silent home-security system.

"Okay," she said. "It's off now."

By then I was already moving toward the well-lit, glass-enclosed curio cases. Metal locks had been slid in between the two separate glass panels that formed the front of each section of case. The glass shelves were lit from both above and below by a bank of fluorescent fixtures at the top and bottom of each case. And standing on the sturdy glass shelves were literally hundreds of tiny figures-toy soldiers, each standing on his own private base.

I remember having some lead soldiers of my own once back when I was a little kid. My set contained only a dozen soldiers in all-G.I.'s decked out in full combat regalia. I loved those damn soldiers, played with them every day, cried when I lost one, and begged my mother for more. But toy soldiers like that were too expensive for my single mother's limited means. Those twelve in that one set were all I ever owned.

It wasn't until I was in high school and found the last one lurking in a bottom dresser drawer that my mother told me, with no little shame, that my precious set of soldiers had come to me via a Toys for Tots drive at our church. Mother's obvious chagrin at having had to resort to charity was contagious. I threw away that last remaining soldier, although now I wish I'd kept him.

And so, those ranked figures on the well-lit shelves held a childish, almost magnetic attraction for me. Enchanted at the prospect and walking like one lost in a hypnotic trance, I moved across the glaringly clean tile of Gunter Gebhardt's basement floor. My mind was alive with anticipation, knowing that I would be delighted by the engrossing detail of what I'd find there.

And I was, too, but only for a moment. Only until I recognized the uniforms.

These were combat-ready troops all right-World War II-vintage soldiers circa 1940 or so. But these weren't my old G.I. pals, not by a long shot.

No, Gunter Gebhardt's soldiers were German troops, down to the last tiny, gruesome detail. On each hand-painted, khaki-colored uniform, the awful black-and-white swastika insignias were clearly visible.