Flesh Wounds Read online

  “I was wondering which unit is hers.”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  I smiled. “Business.”

  “What kind of business?”

  “Personal business.”

  “You got the back rent?”

  I shook my head.

  He sniffed and ran his tongue across his teeth. Whatever he encountered made him pucker. “Are you, like, official or anything?”

  “I’m officially unofficial. What unit is hers?”

  “None of them.”

  “I was told she lived here.”

  “She did but she don’t. Just like I told her old man.”

  “Her father was asking about her?”

  He nodded. “Month ago. What is he, a preacher or something?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Guy made me feel like I was shit in a suit. He’s worse than my old man, for Christ’s sake, and that takes work. Know what he gave me for Christmas?”

  “Mr. Evans?”

  “My old man. A subscription to fucking Forbes. Might as well have given me a subscription to Ladies’ Home Journal, the bastard.”

  It was time to end the soliloquy. “What did you tell Mr. Evans about his daughter?”

  “I told him what I knew, which is that she used to live in three but didn’t pay for April. I didn’t hear nothing and didn’t see her around, so on the tenth I posted a notice to quit, and rented the unit May one. You got a problem with that, you can talk to my lawyer but it won’t do no good. I never had an eviction voided yet.”

  “Did you see Nina again at all?”

  “Nope.”

  “She have money on deposit?”

  “Six hundred last month’s rent; eight hundred damage and security.”

  “Pretty steep deposit.”

  “Steep, shit. Half the time they barely leave the Sheetrock. I lose my ass on refurbishment, let me tell you.”

  “Do you own the building?”

  “Yeah. Well, technically I’m partners with the old man, that way he can tell the boys at the club his son’s in real estate.” His grin was pitiless. “The charade works till I show up on the first tee to give him his take. Last time he hit a duck hook that cold-cocked some skirt on the next fairway.” His smile turned giddy. “Yeah, whenever I’m around the old boy uses too much right hand.”

  I tried to get him back on track. “Did Nina tell you she was going to be leaving?”

  “Nina didn’t tell me nothing. Not lately, she didn’t. All of a sudden, I wasn’t worthy of attention.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “She and her new pal thought they were so cool they cracked. Looked at me like I was scum squared.”

  “Who was this new friend?”

  “Don’t know. Never got introduced.”

  “Can you tell me anything at all about him?”

  He shrugged. “Actor, maybe; dressed the part, anyway. Nina always hung around with arty types. If he was an actor he was a rich one—cool duds, cool car, cool customer. Maybe he was one of the guys from ‘Northern Exposure.’ The TV series? They tape over the pass in Roslyn but they hang around Seattle a lot.”

  “But you don’t know that for sure.”

  “Hell, no. Like I said, no one introduced me.”

  “Was Nina an artist herself?”

  “She wore black. That means she’s creative, right? Poet. Painter. Whatever. I got no time for it myself. Art’s the new opiate of the masses, man: TV, movies, rock and roll—brainless drivel to keep the people’s minds on money and sex and off of exploitation.”

  “What exploitation would that be?”

  “Economic oppression, man. Tax laws, S&Ls, stock options, junk bonds—Generation X works in a fucking franchise while Yuppies live like potentates. America’s worse than Brazil, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Have you been to Brazil?”

  “No, but I been to Rainier Valley. Same difference.”

  He didn’t quite convince me. “Did you ask the other tenants if they knew where Nina had gone?”

  “Hell no. I got the deposit; I got her rent; I got stuff I can sell to cover my losses. What do I care where she went?”

  “So for all you know her next-door neighbor knows exactly where she is.”

  “Her next-door neighbor is a power lifter—what he knows is ’roids. Anyone knows where Nina is, it’s Willie.”

  “Willie who?”

  “Willie Gamble. Unit 4.”

  He started to close the door but I stopped him. “You said something about selling her stuff.”

  “Yeah. She left a bunch of crap behind. She doesn’t show in a month, I sell it to a junk dealer. So what?”

  “Can I see it?”

  “Naw, I … hey. You got business with Nina, maybe I’ll sell it for what you owe her. Sort of an informal garnishment, if you get my drift—keep the lawyers out of it, more for everyone that way. I’ll give you a good deal, man—I need to clear the space.”

  I pretended to think it over. “I guess it wouldn’t hurt to take a look,” I said reluctantly.

  He led me to the back of the building and opened the steel-wrapped door to the basement. There was an oil furnace and two giant water heaters down there, along with a host of junk presumably accumulated from flighty tenants like Nina: bicycles, skis, bowling balls, exercise equipment, even a dollhouse and tricycle and jungle gym. At the far end were two rooms locked with padlocks and labeled STORAGE with a Magic Marker.

  The manager opened the door on the left, flicked on a dim light, and stepped aside. “Hers is in front of the Ping-Pong table. You see anything you like, make an offer. I’m easy, like I said, but you do your own hauling. I’ll be down by the boiler; fucker’s losing pressure again.”

  The manager was an interesting blend of socialist urges and capitalist behavior—his daddy hadn’t been entirely ineffective. I entered the windowless cavern and rummaged around in Nina Evans’s abandoned property.

  It didn’t take long to conclude that she hadn’t been kidnapped. The stuff in storage was mostly junk—trashy novels, broken furniture, dented appliances, ripped bedding, unfashionable clothing. There was a lot of it, to be sure, but it was still junk: no stereo, no TV, no CDs, no jewelry. The only items that retained utility were large and unwieldy—couch, chair, dresser, desk—which indicated Nina had skipped with the things she could carry unobtrusively and without help. If it wasn’t portable, it got left.

  Just because it was junk didn’t mean it didn’t contain a clue to her whereabouts, however, so I made a pretense of inspecting the treasure trove more closely. The manager didn’t worry that I was a thief—he was still berating the furnace.

  The most promising resource was the desk. It was one of those pressboard jobs you buy at Kmart or Target, painted green, bearing the scars of knife cuts and cigarette burns and tattooed with doodles in ballpoint. The doodles didn’t reveal anything other than a preoccupation with daisies and diamonds and the drawers were empty except for several scraps of paper, most of which seemed to be trash, and some fairly recent issues of Modern Photography and something called New Media. The only other objects of interest were some dull X-Acto blades and a flattened tube of rubber cement—I guessed Nina had been mounting some pictures.

  I abandoned the desk and moved to the books. I riffed quickly through them, but nothing fell out except a bookmark from the University Bookstore and a flyer from a tanning parlor. There weren’t any notes in the margins either, except on the title page of a novel called Exposure was the word GARY, written in pen and ink and traced over and over until it was thickened into boldface. Below Gary’s name was a drawing of something dark and dangerous that looked like the profile of a pistol.

  I pawed through the clothes and cookware and linens. There were stains on the sheets, but I guessed their source was menstrual, not criminal. There were holes in some of the clothes, but I guessed they were normal wear and tear. There was some white powder in one of the drawers, but it tasted more lik
e talc than cocaine. Otherwise, nothing turned up except mildew.

  I collected the scraps of paper in a pile and went through them more carefully. One was a cash machine receipt from Seafirst Bank dated March 16, not long before Nina had disappeared. I jotted down her account number and balance—$5,435.27—which seemed a bit large for a woman who bought cheap desks and used dented cookware. Another piece of paper was a sales receipt from a place called Intimates. The date was March 18; the amount was $367.17. A third was a business card from something called DigiArt, with an address on Western Avenue. The rest of it was dross.

  I found the manager and told him I couldn’t use any of Nina’s stuff. Since he was still warring with the boiler, he didn’t try to renegotiate. I headed for Unit 4.

  The woman who answered my knock was such a contrast to the phlegmatic manager she seemed like an interloper. Bright-eyed, kinetic, eager to the point of evangelism, she looked at me so intently I began to feel like some sort of savior except I suspected she’d already found one.

  Everything from her short brown hair to her short white skirt jiggled and jumped as I told her who I was. “Hi, Mr. Tanner,” she responded happily.

  “Hi. Is Willie here?”

  “I’m Willie.”

  “Sorry, I just assumed—”

  “It’s all right. Everyone does. But, like, I refuse to go by Wilma anymore—no one should be a Wilma at my age, do you think?—so Willie’s what I’m left with. If you’re collecting for charity, I’m basically broke. They laid me off at Tower. I was too peppy, they said; plus I was, like, the only one there who was into Mariah Carey.”

  I smiled. “I’m not collecting for charity, I’m looking for Nina Evans.”

  She glanced to her right, in the direction of Nina’s former abode. “Nina’s not here anymore.”

  “I know she isn’t. I thought you might know where she went.”

  She seemed puzzled. “Why would I?”

  “I heard you were friends.”

  She shook her head. “Not really. I mean, I knew her to speak to and everything, but she was, like, way too cool for me. Especially lately.”

  “What happened lately?”

  Her round face elongated with uncharacteristic censure. “She made noise, for one thing. Coming and going at all hours, waking me up in the middle of the night—I was, like, bummed about it, since I need my eight hours to feel good about myself. I didn’t say anything, of course, because I don’t do confrontation. But I wanted to.”

  “Are you a student, Willie?”

  “Sure. Almost everyone around here is.”

  “Was Nina a student, too?”

  “She used to be, but she dropped out.”

  “What was she studying?”

  “Art, I think. Or maybe art history. There was always a lot of those types coming around. They acted like I was some sort of Jell-O mold if I didn’t know where she was. But I was, like, I’m not her mother, you know?”

  “Why did she drop out of school?”

  “She said she was bored.”

  “It doesn’t sound like she was bored, what with all the activity.”

  “She had some new friends, I think. I don’t know who they were, but they were rich, I know that much. One of them drove a car that was to die for.”

  “What kind of car?”

  “Convertible. Black seats, black top, black everything. I’m, like, why don’t guys like that ever hit on me? Not really,” she corrected quickly, in case I got the wrong impression.

  “What make was the car?”

  “I’m not sure. Foreign, I think. Like maybe a Porsche? Is that foreign?”

  I told her I thought maybe it was. “Do you know any of her friends’ names?”

  She shook her head. “She used to hang out at the Brooklyn, I know, so you might try there.”

  “What’s the Brooklyn?”

  “The Last Exit on Brooklyn. Next door.”

  “I thought this was University Avenue.”

  “It is. The Brooklyn used to be on Brooklyn, but they lost their lease and moved up here. The Brooklyn and the Blue Moon are the hippest places around that I know of, so you might try there, too. Sorry I’m not real helpful, but I’m not into creativity myself. I mean, I’m, like, just sort of happy the way it is, you know? People sort of hate me for it, but I can’t help it. I just don’t think life is all that awful. That’s not, like, immoral or anything, do you think?”

  I told her I didn’t think being happy was ethically suspect.

  CHAPTER 6

  Her Americano has turned tepid; her fellow patrons are reduced to two, both of whom look as depressed as she is. Maybe she should go on Prozac, like everyone else in the Western world except sorority girls and fundamentalists.

  What should she do? What can she do, except give in to the impulse she always has when confronted by a masculine adversary, which is to win him with her body, to give him what he wants. No. Not this time. This time, she will fight with other weapons.

  But how? She has neither money nor power nor the courage to fake such armaments. She has no friends who are influential, no friends, in fact, who are not linked, through the network of artists and photographers that haunts the bistros of Fremont and the U District and Capitol Hill in search of means to underwrite its talent, to her tormentor. Plus, how can she fight him if she can’t even find him? She has called his apartment a dozen times, and gone by half that number, to vent her spleen or commit a felony, but she still hasn’t caught up to him.

  She sips the dregs and makes a face. Maybe it’s not as bad as she thinks. Her face isn’t all that obvious, after all, and there are certainly enough diversions from that part of her anatomy. Maybe no one but Roan suspects it’s her up on the wall at Erospace, and Roan can be bought off. Maybe someday she will smile at it in the carefree way the guy taking the seat across from her is smiling.

  “Hi,” he says. Entry-level hustle.

  “Hi, yourself.”

  “Are you Nina Evans?”

  “Maybe. Who are you?”

  “My name is Chris.”

  “Chris what?”

  “Chris is enough for now.”

  “Why the dodge? Are you famous or something?”

  “Not significantly.”

  “That’s rather coy. Should I have heard of you?”

  “I have some notoriety in certain circles.”

  She shakes her head. “Notoriety is what I don’t need at the moment.”

  She signals for another Americano, which gives her time to decide what she wants to do about this guy. He’s cute, for one thing. And sophisticated, for another. And he looks prosperous. She has a use for all three attributes.

  “I admire your work,” he says gently, as though she is working now.

  “What work is that?”

  “The Drew show, for one.”

  “You saw that? How did you hear about it? Are you a pal of Gary’s?”

  He shakes his head. “I knew about the show because I’ve been following your progress for quite some time.”

  “Great.”

  “You’re marvelous, you know.”

  She smiles. “I know. But thanks.” In a burst of resolution, she decides this isn’t the time or the place to submit to this stuff. “Look. I’ve got things to do. What can I do you for, Chris?”

  “I’d like to discuss your coming to work for me.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Doing what you do. I’m looking for a suitable subject for a project I’m planning, and I think you might be just the ticket.”

  “Suitable for what, exactly?”

  “It would be much like the work you did for the Drew, but different in some ways, too.”

  The Drew had collected Gary Richter’s best work and consequently hers as well. Black and white; figure only; abstract yet sensuous; classic yet postmodern. The reviews had been generous—Gary had parlayed them into half-a-dozen minor jobs.

  “You’re a photographer yourself?”

&nb
sp; “Of a sort.”

  “This isn’t for some sex book, is it? I don’t do core. Hard or soft.”

  “I guarantee this is legitimate.”

  His eyes are so kind she is tempted to hear him out, but unfinished business remains with Gary. The Erospace images are still too vivid for her to want to work again, even with a person as unthreatening as this one.

  “Not interested,” she says. “Sorry.”

  He responds didactically, as if he is her academic adviser. “If you’re selected as our subject, it will be the most profitable position you’ve ever held.”

  She is quickly tempted, but something about his archness puts her off. “Maybe some other time,” she says.

  He reaches into his pocket and hands her a card with some technobabble on it and a phone number and address on Western. “Call me if you change your mind. If I don’t hear from you in two weeks, I’ll go with someone else.”

  “Two weeks,” she repeats, then looks at him, then looks at her watch to check the date.

  The Last Exit on Brooklyn was no more déclassé than the Caffè Trieste or the Bohemian Cigar Store, the North Beach joints where Charley Sleet and I hung out, but it was bigger than either San Francisco establishment and served a wider variety of food and drink. The hand-lettered sign out front announced that the place had been founded in 1967 and that it claimed the title as the city’s oldest coffeehouse. I wasn’t in position to argue.

  Coffee had assumed totemic proportions in Seattle, I’d read, so the variety of options on the menu was daunting—Doppio, Americano, Medici, Panna—but the beverage of choice was a latte, it seemed, so I ordered the cheapest version they had, which wasn’t all that cheap. Then I looked around until I spotted a seat at a table against the west wall, beneath a mural that featured tropical birds and monkeys.

  The seat turned out to be a picnic table that had been painted with green enamel by way of conversion to indoor use. It looked neither sanitary nor comfortable but it was the only unoccupied space in the place so I wedged myself onto the bench and took my first sip of a latte. Mostly what I tasted was warm milk beneath a skim of itchy foam—the object of Seattle’s ardor had less in common with java than with baby formula.