Flesh Wounds Read online

  The bitter beer was good, the bar was appropriately impersonal, and when I walked back into the street I was buoyed by my undemonstrative welcome to the city—I hate it when strangers pretend they like you. I stood on the corner and looked around. There was water off to my front and a big white boat racing a big gray cloud my way: I figured the boat for a ferry. A forest of skyscrapers loomed to my left, a hodgepodge of architecture that lay somewhere between offensive and important, which put it a cut above San Francisco’s ungraceful spires. An object I presumed was the famous Space Needle jutted skyward to my right, and to my rear some nondescript buildings flanked something I would have guessed was a aqueduct if I’d been in ancient Rome instead of fin de siècle Seattle. A moment later, the aqueduct turned into a monorail.

  The restaurant where I was to rendezvous with Peggy was in the direction of the skyscrapers, so I walked that way, wondering what I should say to her about, well, about us, knowing deep down that I shouldn’t say anything at all, that words would make it worse. More alert to my interior landscape than to my surroundings, I roamed the city for close to an hour.

  There weren’t many people around, since it was Sunday, but there were several items of interest—a building that looked like a pencil balanced eerily on its point in defiance of gravity and good sense; an underground bus line as sumptuous as the Moscow subway but eerily abandoned nonetheless; several buildings that had once been grand but now were empty; and an artificial waterfall that wasn’t as silly as it sounded. Every other window sported a sign that advertised espresso.

  An assortment of ranters and ravers kept me on my toes, but there weren’t nearly as many as used to occupy Civic Center Plaza or Union Square before the mayor launched his crackdown. I remembered that Seattle had passed a law that made it illegal to sit on the sidewalk. After an hour of meandering, I was tempted to become a criminal.

  When I stopped to wonder what I thought about the place, I decided I was disappointed. Not that it wasn’t spiffy, not that it wasn’t clean, not that people weren’t cheerful and even gregarious, just that it was generic. Nothing screamed Seattle. Nothing shouted salmon, or timber, or airplanes, or software, or whatever else made the city burst with pride. Seattle has been so much in the news of late, with so many touting its virtues, I suppose I’d expected too much and resented my gullibility. Maybe I’d see the light after Peggy gave me the grand tour.

  I dawdled in a mallish enclosure called the Westlake Center long enough to be certain Peggy would arrive at the restaurant first, so she would have to wait for me and not vice versa. But just because the mall boasted an assortment of bookstores and gift shops and lingerie boutiques to divert me, it didn’t mean they got the job done. By the time I opened the door to the Dahlia Lounge I was more nervous than I’d been since the last time a psychotic held a gun on me.

  I spotted her right away, partly because she was the only person alone in a booth but mostly because I’d carried her image in my mind for six long years, examining it like an artifact during sleepless fits both late at night and early morning, until its conformation became indelible.

  I looked at her, then looked away. Looked back until I saw that she saw me, then looked away again. Looked back, waved timidly, smiled, waved more vigorously, then headed in her direction, heedless of the hostess saying something at my back. My breath was high in my chest and my field of vision was the size of a dime. If I had fainted dead away or stumbled over a potted plant, I wouldn’t have wondered why.

  As I neared the booth I was buffeted by impressions—she was a little heavier, a lot grayer, a little paler, and a lot happier than when I’d seen her last. Her eyes preened with pleasure, her hair fell lushly in a short soft wave that looked expensively sculpted, her dress was a simple yet elegant suit—gray jacket with white windowpanes and black buttons, white top square at the neck and snug at the bodice, skirt just short enough to show a slice of thigh. Peggy had turned natty, if that was a word that applied to a beautiful woman—when she’d worked for me, natty wasn’t in her budget.

  Up close, some details asserted themselves, like the string of small pearls at her neck and the single gold hoop on her wrist and, as I felt more than observed when she slid out of the booth and embraced my hand in both of hers, the diamond the size of a crouton on her third finger left hand. We kissed each other, briefly and aridly, careful to preclude contact at breast or pelvis, then backed away and took a more languorous inventory.

  “You’re looking good, boss,” Peggy said theatrically, a layer of brass masking whatever her urges were up to.

  “Same to you, sweetheart.” Whenever Peggy was around, I opted too often for Bogart.

  She reddened and waved her hand. “Have a seat. Order a drink. I’ve already started,” she added, pointing to the gold in her wineglass as we eased onto the benches.

  A waitress drifted by and Peggy corralled her. “He’ll have scotch on the rocks. Ballantine’s.” She looked at me.

  “Right.”

  “Double?”

  “Not unless I’m going to need it.”

  Peggy shook her head and the waitress drifted off. I leaned back against the padded booth and looked for ambiguity or ambivalence or even animosity. Thankfully, I didn’t find any of those things, which made my smile grow fatuous.

  Peggy was nervous, as was I, and in compensation was trying to be raucous and blasé. But behind her scripted sass was genuine pleasure, I decided, an unadulterated delight that we were together again, however clinical the occasion. That’s what I thought I saw, in any case, and what I wanted to see as well. I hoped she saw the same in me.

  I offered the cliché that came to mind. “It’s been a long time.”

  “Six years.”

  “Seems like longer.”

  “I know.”

  All of a sudden her lip began to tremble and her eyes glistened until she blinked away the polish that forecasts a rush of memory. This time when she spoke, the words didn’t come from a script.

  “I hurt you when I left,” she said softly. “I want you to know that I know that, Marsh; I’m sure it was a difficult time for you. Before we go further, I want to tell you I’m sorry.”

  I said what you say at such times. “There’s nothing to be sorry about. You did what you had to do, and justifiably so. I was a jerk there at the end.”

  She waved away the indictment. “Just so you know that’s not why I left. To hurt you, I mean. I just … everything was upside down. I’d done things that were inconceivable to me, things diametrically opposed to the way I wanted to live and the woman I thought I was, things that horrified and disgusted me. Disgusted both of us.”

  I started to object but she didn’t let me.

  “I could see it in your eyes. Your contempt. And worse, your disappointment. The bottom line was, I had no idea who I was or why I’d done the things I’d done, I just knew I had to get away so I could find out. And so I wouldn’t see my mistakes reflected in your eyes.”

  It was painful to be described as her persecutor. To reduce the urge to counterpunch or to indulge in self-reproach, I examined the decor for as long as I could, then wrenched the issue toward its end. “Did it work? Did you find out what you needed to know about yourself?”

  It took her a while to respond. “Not right away, but eventually. I’m not as bad as I feared or as good as I hoped, which I suppose is where most people come out if they bother to think about it. I think that who I am is pretty close to the person who applied for a job with you way back then, the one who told you she’d water your plants but wouldn’t make coffee. Famous last words.”

  I smiled. “I haven’t had a decent cup since you left.”

  We shared some mutual recollection and maybe a dollop of regret that issues were no longer that simple between us.

  In the echo of our implicit truce, we sipped our drinks and inspected our fellow diners and tried to recover our balance. I glanced at the menu without absorbing it. The waitress returned, lingered, and left. Time w
as glutinous and thick with memory, combined pain and pleasure in a simmering stew that was too problematic to sample. When I looked at Peggy she was crying.

  “There’s no need to rehash it,” I said softly. “It was a difficult time for both of us, but the good news is it’s over. You’re happy, right? That’s what’s important. What happened back then, and why, doesn’t matter anymore. The only way it can do more damage is if we let it.”

  “But it changed my life. Our lives. We might have been … you know what we might have been.”

  “Leave it, Peggy. Just leave it. It might have been great or it might have been awful, but now it’s just one more thing we’ll never know. Like what was on the Watergate tapes.”

  After enduring my wit and wisdom, Peggy sighed and shrugged and threw off her mood. “I’ll try to take your word for it.” She dredged up a grin and glanced at the menu. “I assume from the phone call that your tastes in food haven’t changed much.”

  “Not true. Sometimes I go gourmet.”

  “Which means?”

  “Fig Newtons instead of Oreos.”

  “Fat-free, I hope.”

  I made a face.

  She shook her head in exasperation and gestured with the menu. “I think you’ll like the chicken.”

  “Fine.”

  “And I’ll have the Walla Walla salad and salmon mousse.”

  “What are Walla Wallas?”

  “Sweet onions. Some people eat them like apples.”

  I summoned the waitress and gave her the order. She obtained some details, including my request for another round of drinks, then went off to start the process of overfeeding us.

  “Have you been in Seattle all this time?” I asked, just to be saying something.

  She nodded.

  “What made you pick it?”

  She shrugged. “A year full of rainy days seemed appropriate at the time.”

  “Is Allison still dancing?”

  Peggy shook her head. “Performance art. She adopts the roles of various people involved in the Hill-Thomas hearings, only reverses their race and gender.”

  “That could get to look a lot like a minstrel show, couldn’t it?”

  She laughed, though not quite on cue. “I’m afraid to ask. So have you gotten engaged or anything since I’ve seen you?”

  “No.”

  “Not even once?”

  “Nope.”

  “Must be a lot of broken hearts down there.”

  “Besides mine, you mean. Sorry,” I said quickly when I saw that I’d hurt her. “So tell me about your fiancé.”

  “Why?”

  “You know why.”

  She blinked as if her answer came in semaphore. “Ted’s a banker, sort of.”

  “What’s a ‘sort of’ banker do?”

  “He’s more like a venture capitalist.”

  “Venture capitalists tend to be rich, don’t they?”

  She couldn’t quite meet my eye. “Ted inherited a lot of money and he’s putting it to good use.”

  “Good for him. What’s he look like?”

  “He’s tall, gray, and handsome. He golfs and collects Native American artifacts; there was a big write-up on his collection in the Times a while back. And he’s very kind, Marsh. Conservative, and kind.”

  “That sounds like one trait too many.”

  She reddened as though I’d caught her shoplifting. “He’s okay as long as I forbid him to watch Rush Limbaugh.”

  The subject was hot so I dropped it. “He was married before?”

  She nodded. “He’s been divorced for twelve years.”

  “His doing or hers?”

  “His.”

  “Where’s the ex-wife?”

  She looked beyond me. “About four blocks from here. She’s got a dress shop down by the market. Her home is out on Phinney Ridge.”

  “What market is that?”

  “You don’t know the Pike Place Market? It’s our chief tourist attraction. I’d take you down there except I can’t think of a single thing you’d find remotely interesting. Except maybe the bar at Il Bistro.”

  “Why that?”

  “They specialize in single-malt whiskeys.”

  I smiled. “I’ll check it out once I’ve finished the job. Which I can start as soon as I know what the hell it is.”

  Peggy wrinkled her nose and dabbed her lip with her napkin. “Can’t it wait till after dinner?”

  CHAPTER 4

  “Nina? Hi. It’s Roan.”

  “Hey.”

  “How’s it going?”

  “I’ve been better. You?”

  “I’m cool. Cleared sixty bucks on the Ave today.”

  “Great.”

  “So what did you do with the pus bucket?”

  “I dumped him.”

  “When?”

  “Ten days ago.”

  “For real?”

  “For real.”

  “What’d he do?”

  “About what you’d expect.”

  “He didn’t, like, hurt you, did he? He gets pretty amped sometimes. He pulled a knife on Mandy once.”

  “No knife.”

  “How about the scuzz who’s been stalking you?”

  “I haven’t seen him for a while.”

  “You should tell the cops about it, Nina.”

  “Tell them what? That some old man has the hots for me? What are they supposed to do—give him a cold shower?”

  “I guess. It’s creepy, though. And speaking of creepy, there’s some of Gary’s stuff in the new Erospace show.”

  “Yeah? What stuff?”

  “Just stuff. Political, I guess. That’s what he’s into now, right?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Well, his politics seem pretty sick to me.”

  “Sick how?”

  “You know.”

  “How would I know? I haven’t seen the exhibit.”

  “But some of them are you. All of them, in fact.”

  “Couldn’t have been. Some of the work I did with Gary was silly, but none of it was sick.”

  “You let him put stuff in you.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “There’s all kinds of things sticking out of you in those pictures.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “I don’t want to validate it by discussing it.”

  “Come on, Roan.”

  “I’m serious. It’s very upsetting to me. I don’t see how you could let him do that to you. You must have been into some pretty heavy dope.”

  The meal came and went. It was good, I guess, but then most meals are good except for inedible stuff like squash and sushi. We spent the time chewing and chatting like siblings—Peggy asked about people she’d known in San Francisco, including several clients who had become her friends, and I brought her up to date even though for several the status was less than optimum. For my part, I asked for details about her job, and her home, and her social life, and it was all very civilized and companionable, yet somehow beside the point. By the time we were helping ourselves to decaf espresso and flan, I found myself a trifle bored, the one reaction I hadn’t anticipated.

  When Peggy moved her dessert plate an inch toward the center of the table, I seized the chance to shift gears. “Enough with etiquette,” I said, more gruffly than I intended. “Let’s talk business.”

  I expected a halfhearted protest but what I got was equivocation, beneath a pair of skittish eyes. “All of a sudden it seems silly, bringing you up here like this. There’s probably nothing you can … what I’m trying to say is, there may not be a problem. I think I got you here on a ruse, just so I could get some gossip and a free meal.” She was trying to be jovial and indifferent but her expression remained overwrought.

  “I don’t want to bust your bubble, Ms. Nettleton,” I said in keeping with her lead, “but there’s nothing free about it.” I patted my stomach. “This baby goes straight to the expense account.”

  It was a stupid a
nd bogus joke, since the last thing in the world I would do was submit a bill to Peggy, but she took me seriously. “Of course. I didn’t mean … should I give you a retainer or something? Of course I should.” She hauled her purse to the table and began to paw through it. “Let me write you a check.”

  “No check.”

  She looked up. “I don’t carry much cash.”

  I grasped her wrist and extracted her hand from the bag. “We’ll settle up later.”

  “I just don’t want you to think that I’m the kind of person who expects you to—”

  “The only thing I think is that you’re procrastinating.” I waited until she looked at me again. “What the hell am I doing here, Peggy?”

  She dodged my stare but answered the question. “You’re going to help me find my future stepdaughter.”

  I raised a brow. “She’s missing?”

  Peggy nodded. “It seems so.”

  “How long?”

  “Two months.”

  If you’re from California, the word “missing” conjures one image above all others these days, that of bright-eyed Polly Klaas, the twelve-year-old who was kidnapped at random from her home in Petaluma and left dead near an abandoned mill by a lifelong criminal who had no business being on the streets. That was the backdrop I had in mind, at least, as I began to pluck details from the mind and heart of my reticent client.

  “How old is she?” I asked.

  “She’ll be twenty-five next month.”

  I was relieved that she was an adult, so at least part of the analogy was inaccurate. “Was she living at home?”

  Peggy shook her head. “Not since I moved in with Ted. She had an apartment in the U District.”

  “U is for what? University?”

  “Yes.”

  “She’s a student?”

  “Yes. That is, she was. Part-time, at least. She dropped out last term.”

  “Was she working?”

  “Probably. I don’t know where.”

  “Was she getting money from Daddy?”