The Art of Deception

Voices in the Dark

The beat-up red door, caked and cracked with generations of paint, hid behind a Dumpster down a dead-end alley a half block from the church’s west wall. LaMoia might have missed seeing it had a street person not materialized out of thin air. But with this man’s appearance in the alley where a moment before there had been no one, the detective sought an explanation. He and Matthews rolled the Dumpster aside, and LaMoia turned the rust-encrusted doorknob.

The door opened behind the complaint of its hinges. The smell of human piss wafted up, stinging his eyes. He covered his face and turned away.

“Let’s call for backup,” he said. “This could get ugly.”

Thirty minutes later, shortly after one in the morning, LaMoia led the way down a set of steep, rickety, wooden stairs into ripe, musty air, guided only by the narrow beam of a penlight. Matthews followed closely on his heels, and behind her, four uniformed patrolmen, two with nightsticks in hand, two brandishing handguns. Cobwebs, pipes, wires, and valves. “Lions and tigers and bears,” LaMoia whispered over his shoulder through the pitch-black. The comforting sounds of the city faded, lost overhead, suddenly translated into a deep, penetrating rumble that rattled one’s chest.

Matthews reached out and took hold of his deerskin jacket, a child with mommy’s apron. She let go then, LaMoia pretending not to have noticed.

His penlight shone barely five feet ahead, illuminating broken wooden planks that had once been a sidewalk. Together they sidestepped the debris, following along the wall of a perfectly preserved brick building, the windows with much of the glass still in place. LaMoia directed the beam through one of these windows: piles of broken furniture and junk, untouched for years. A time warp. They passed a barber shop and a millinery, the hat racks still in place.

Twenty yards later the wall changed from brick to stone, and LaMoia used sign language-forming his index fingers into a cross-to indicate that he believed this was the church wall.

Matthews concurred with a nod, then pointed out the narrow arrows of white light that crossed the sidewalk ahead.

As they slowed, the dust from behind them carried forward and illuminated those shafts of light even brighter. Five white beams in all.

Cupping his hand to her ear he said that someone had to look inside and that it shouldn’t be him. Matthews agreed and stepped forward, placing her eye to the breaks in the wall.

Pulling her eye away, she confirmed, “It’s the showers,” her heartache obvious even through a whisper.

The smell in the air was of peppermint, sour and all too human. The voyeurs had ejaculated onto the walls and the sidewalk.

Matthews covered her mouth, suddenly nauseated. A hundred crime scenes or more, and this was the first time she’d felt ready to vomit.

Suddenly the four uniformed patrolmen pushed past them, a flurry of hand signals and quick preparation of their weapons.

LaMoia returned hand signals, taking charge, a silent orchestra-tion of the minutes yet to come.

She understood the urgency then: From up ahead and around the corner she heard the distinct and unmistakable sound of laughter.

They walked inside what amounted to a tall tunnel, the church’s basement wall, once at street level, to their right, the mortar-and-stone retaining wall, built to enclose the city block and elevate the street a century earlier, to the left. Overhead, dust-covered wires, encrusted conduits, rusted water pipes, and gas lines had been added haphazardly over the years, tangled like veins in a limb. A halo of purple light fanned out from what had once been a skylight in the overhead sidewalk, back during the decades of reconstruction, when the two sidewalks, the two different street levels, had been forced to coexist, one of the old Seattle, the other representing improvement and change. The din of drunken male voices grew more present, a pack of wild dogs encountered in the forest.

LaMoia, the hunter, cut ahead of the uniforms and peered around the corner. He held up four fingers. To Matthews, it sounded more like ten. Adrenaline cocktails for all, charging her system with a menthol-like chill and drying her throat. LaMoia articulated a series of hand signals to the patrolmen and she envied him his cool. She felt lucky: He was the cop you wanted at your side in situations like this. He thrived on adversity. She recalled his telling her that she was safe while under his care, and though loath to admit it, she knew this was true, accepted it as fact.

In military-like precision the six of them rounded the corner, moving swiftly but silently, her courage returning quickly as she thought of Margaret and the other girls in those showers, the jaundiced eyes of the drunk and the desperate peering in on them. She fed on these guys, her bread and butter. She opened up their heads like cracking nuts.

The patrolmen reached them first, knocking away the beer cans, taking them completely by surprise. But then there was a burst of activity to their right-not four guys, but more like ten, the other six scattering like seeds in the wind.

“Walker!” she called out, believing in the dim light she’d recognized the back of a head. Confusion, as two of the patrolmen took off after them. A flurry of cursing and yelling. One of the homeless guys vomited.

A patrolman who had run off in pursuit returned empty-handed.

“Yo! Listen up! You, too, turd breath,” LaMoia addressed the one who’d puked, a bearded guy wearing an old ratty jacket to what had once been a nice suit. “Po-lice,” LaMoia said, like a southern cracker. “Me and her, too. We’ve got a couple simple questions for you. This is not the ringtoss: You don’t get three chances. You talk, you walk. You lie, and it’s straight downtown to central booking-a night in the can courtesy of your city government. We’ll check for priors, warrants, parole status, and we’ll cash in our miles, all at your expense. So, for the next five minutes, try your level best to do something smart like listen, ’cause me and her, we know the way it is, and if you go all squirrelly on us, we’re gonna know that too, and trust me, you don’t want to see what happens next. Any questions?” No hesitation on his part whatsoever. “Okay, good. Then let’s keep our hands where we can see them, ladies. Sit your butts down on the ground, and we’ll do some business.”

A moment later, all six sat on the wooden planks of the ancient sidewalk like kids in kindergarten.

LaMoia asked about peeping the showers and got six heads all shaking no at him.

“Don’t know what I’m talking about?” LaMoia picked two out of the group, “Him and him,” instructing one of the patrolmen to cuff them and “get them downtown.” One of these two immediately spoke up, confessing the peeping, insisting, “Didn’t do nothing wrong.” LaMoia allowed this one to stay behind. He nodded, and the patrolman headed off down the tunnel with the other.

“Any other takers?”

They raised their hands sheepishly, all avoiding eye contact with Matthews.

“Let’s hear about it,” LaMoia said. “First to speak up gets a gold star.”

Matthews felt sick to her stomach as she learned that they’d treated the peeping like a drive-up window. It was guys like this that supported the stripper joints on First Avenue, the adult bookstores and video booths. Diluted beer and sticky floors.

LaMoia seethed beneath the veneer of comic impatience.

“Who here’s good with faces?” he asked. “It buys you a trip downtown tonight, but a hall pass the next time there’s trouble.

Community Chest time, people! Anyone interested?” No one volunteered. He selected the least drunk of the group, a guy probably in his late twenties who looked about fifty. Cheap booze did that. So did the street drugs. Or maybe he had the virus.

LaMoia and the other cops slipped on disposable gloves, indicating an end to discussions.

Matthews slipped on a pair as well, thinking disposable lives.

The final patrolman emerged from the dark with two more of the escapees. No sign of Walker.

Had she imagined that? Wishful thinking?

“Time to peep mug shots instead of naked teenagers, you perv.” LaMoia grabbed hold of the street person’s red handkerchief, knotted around the man’s neck, and led him like a dog back down the tunnel.

At Public Safety, LaMoia’s attempts to win the man’s cooperation ended with the detective providing him hot coffee and buying him a carton of Marlboro cigarettes. At two in the morning, he then worked him through a few dozen mug shots until confident of the man’s sobriety and his ability to make identification. The man picked out the faces of three vagrants he’d seen in the Underground. With an anxious Daphne Matthews monitoring the event from the corner of the small interrogation room, LaMoia arranged yet another array-six faces in small windows on a single card-and slid it in front of the homeless man.

Dirty fingers with jagged nails took hold of the card like a nervous gambler toying with his cards. The guy studied the faces in the cutout windows. The cracked skin of his dirty hands flexed as he stabbed a face-bottom left. “This guy’s been there a bunch.”

LaMoia turned the card around for Matthews to see as she stepped closer.

“He ever use the gallery? The peepholes?” LaMoia asked.

“Sure. All the time.”

His finger rested on the photo that was not a mug shot but a driver’s license ID. The face belonged to Ferrell Walker.

“We call him the fisherman,” the homeless man said, “ ’cause he stinks like shit.”