Proof of Life Read online

  Stunned by this unanticipated development, I believe my jaw literally dropped. “Are you kidding?”

  “Nope,” Bob replied with a grin. “Obviously someone out there in the world of matchmaking is trying to see to it that chain smokers hook up with other chain smokers. Makes life easier for everyone else. Helen says they’re planning on getting married in Vegas on Valentine’s Day. Your smoke-drenched invitation is probably already in the mail.”

  “I can hardly wait,” I said, heading onto the elevator. “That’ll be one to remember.”

  “Your fault,” Bob said as the door started to slide shut.

  I pushed it back open. “Nope,” I told him, “not mine, yours.”

  I rode on upstairs and let myself into the penthouse unit. I had inherited a fortune from my second wife, with the money landing during what had been a serious downturn in terms of Seattle’s real estate. I had bought the condo at Ralph Ames’s suggestion because it was totally a buyer’s market back then, and the developer needed to unload it. Now it’s worth far more than I paid for it.

  One of the things I like about living in a high-rise is that you can go away for days or weeks or even months at a time, but when you come home, it’s always there waiting for you—just the way you left it. Nobody has broken out one of the windows or strung your trees full of toilet paper.

  Without turning on any of the interior lights, I walked over to the windows and stared outside. The Space Needle was lit up, still lined with red and green lights and topped by the traditional tree. Brightly lit trees in Seattle Center sparkled through the downpour, as did the decorated radio towers on the flanks of Queen Anne Hill. As far as Seattle was concerned, Christmas wasn’t over, but seeing all the celebratory decorations reminded me of everything that had been lost the previous Christmas. On the drive down, I had about talked myself out of going to a meeting that night. Why not just stay at home, holed up from the cold and wet? But now, thinking about Ross Connors losing his life and Harry losing his legs made me do an about-face.

  Besides, I could hardly cite inconvenience as an excuse for not going. When I first landed in AA, my meetings of choice had taken place a few blocks up the street at a lowbrow dive on Second Avenue called the Rendezvous. Back then, a lot of the attendees were beaten-up old construction workers and ex-fishermen. (Sorry, I refuse to use the more politically correct version, fishers. I believe “fishers” are actually weasel-like mammals, but I digress.)

  One of the regulars at the Rendezvous had been a grizzled old retired halibut fisherman named Lars Jenssen, who first became my AA sponsor and eventually my step-grandfather as well, when he married my widowed grandmother, Beverly Piedmont. Although both of those wonderful folks are gone now, their short-but-sweet happily ever after was almost as unanticipated as the newly announced romantic entanglement between Marge Herndon and Harry I. Ball. Go figure.

  Now, with the Regrade’s ongoing gentrification, the local AA meeting is held much closer to home—directly across Clay Street from the entrance to Belltown Terrace’s parking garage—in a building that was once a union hall which has now been transformed into a church. The distance I have to travel up and down in the elevator is farther than I have to walk to get from one building to the other.

  As for the meeting itself? That has changed, too. For one thing, attendees are younger. As Amazon takes over more and more pieces of South Lake Union, the electricians and carpenters have been replaced by IT guys and gals, and yes, these days more women have been added to the AA mix. Even so, when I showed up that night, there were still a few old-timers around who recognized me on sight. One by one they came up to greet me, shake hands, and remind me to “keep coming back.”

  I’m not one of those superobservant AA guys. I’m not someone who goes to a meeting every day (Did that. Ninety meetings in ninety days. Got the T-shirt.) or even every week. Despite the objections of straight-arrow AA guys, I drink the occasional nonalcoholic O’Doul’s, and I go to meetings when I need to go to meetings—as in when I’m down in the dumps. This was one of those times.

  Roger, the guy who stood up and spoke at the meeting that night, looked like a kid. He was probably midthirties, which means, compared to me, he really was a kid. He’d been picked up for DUI on Christmas Eve. When he’d called his wife to come bail him out, she had told him to go to hell. When he’d finally gotten cut loose and made it home on Christmas morning, his wife had packed up the two kids and gone home to her mother. I looked at the nodding heads around the room as we all remembered our own holiday screwups, which had routinely devastated our kids and broken our spouses’ hearts.

  Fortunately for Roger, someone had dragged him to an ER to go through withdrawal under medical supervision. The idea that DTs can actually kill you isn’t something widely recognized outside the world of Alcoholics Anonymous. Now, having been properly medicated, Roger was through the worst of it—including the shakes, chills, and hallucinations—but this was his first regular meeting. I gave him high marks for having balls enough to stand up, say his piece, and remind the rest of us why we were there.

  When the meeting was over, I walked back across Clay, rode upstairs in the elevator, went to bed, and slept like a baby for the first time in weeks.

  The next morning, at what seemed like the crack of dawn, I headed for Ballard, the neighborhood north of Seattle where Scott and Cherisse live. Ballard is also where I grew up. Back then, it was primarily a Scandinavian enclave. I was raised in an apartment situated over a bakery where I lived with my mother who was a World War II–vintage single mom.

  My mother, left to raise a child on her own and with little formal education, had supported us by working out of our home as a seamstress. Women in town would bring her photos of dresses gleaned from catalogs and magazines, and she would make knockoff copies. She was obviously very talented, something I regret to say I failed to recognize as a kid. Going to school in a shirt she’d made on her Singer sewing machine was always something of an embarrassment when all the other boys were wearing clothes from JCPenney or Sears. I should have told her I was sorry about that before she died, but of course I never did.

  These days, Seattle cops, even cops in the Tactical Electronics Unit, are strongly encouraged to live inside the city limits. Because Cherisse’s IT job comes with flexible hours and the ability to telecommute on occasion, it wasn’t necessary for Scott and Cherisse to live close to her job and out in the burbs on the east side of Lake Washington. Originally they had made an offer on a house in a suburb called Burien, south of Seattle proper. When that deal fell through, they ended up buying a place in Ballard, a sweet little 1930s bungalow on NW 57th Street just a few blocks from the now long-demolished apartment building where my mother and I had once lived.

  I never met my father. He died before I was born and before my parents married as well. A few years ago I met up with some long-lost relatives, including my father’s aging sister, Hannah Mencken Greenwald. She generously saw to it that both of my kids—Scott and Kelly—came into sizable inheritances that grew out of a collection of family-owned oil wells in eastern Texas. My last name, bestowed on me by my unmarried mother, came as a result of where my father was from—Beaumont, Texas—rather than his family name.

  Hannah’s bequest meant that Scott had been able to quit a well-paying engineering job in Silicon Valley, one for which he had trained extensively but ended up hating, and left him free to sign up for his dream job—at Seattle PD. When I learned my son was intent on following my footsteps and going into law enforcement, you could have knocked me over with a feather. His work in the TEU is a whole different can of worms from working Patrol or Homicide, but a cop is still a cop.

  Armed with their inheritance, Scott and Cherisse had been able to pay cash for their new house and completely update it before move-in day. (A long family history of my never exactly completed DIY remodeling projects may have had something to do with that.) They had also been able to retire their mutual collection of student loans, so n
ot only were they living mortgage-free, they were almost completely debt-free as well. I could have helped them on both of those scores. My second wife, Anne Corley, left me with a bundle, but they seemed to view help from me as coming with some kind of strings attached, while the money from a great-aunt they had never met could be accepted and used without similar complications.

  I pulled up in front of their house at seven thirty on the dot. Then, with Scott belted into the passenger seat, I made my way through gridlocked traffic going back into the city. His appointment was with a dentist in downtown Seattle on Olive in a building unimaginatively named the Medical Dental Building. I slid into the coffee shop on the third floor, whipped out my iPad, and spent the next two hours or so reading the news and, yes, doing that day’s crossword puzzle. At the ripe old age of seventy-two, I find that even the Friday puzzles no longer faze me. Practice makes perfect.

  At ten thirty-five, Scott sent me a text saying that he was done and ready to go home. We went downstairs, where the attendants extricated my Mercedes from its individual elevator-accessed parking spot and sent us back up the narrow driveway and out onto Sixth Avenue.

  Full confession here. I love watching America’s Funniest Videos. I worked as a cop all my adult life. Out on the street, people who do stupid stuff often end up dead. The people pulling stupid stunts on AFV may end up bruised and battered on occasion, but they aren’t dead, and I find that refreshing.

  So I’ve seen the videos—several of them prize winning—of drugged-up folks yammering away while being driven home from dental procedures—usually the extraction of wisdom teeth. Maybe it’s a sudden lack of wisdom that makes them blab their heads off. Although I didn’t have a camera running, that was certainly the case here. Scott was high as a kite and running off at the mouth.

  “Am I too old?” he mumbled.

  “Too old for what?” I asked. “Too old to have your wisdom teeth pulled?”

  “Too old to have kids. Cherisse always said she didn’t wanna have kids, and now all of a sudden I think she does.”

  Because of the meds, he had trouble getting his tongue around the necessary s’s. Listening to him try to talk around that severe lisp made it hard to keep from laughing, but I managed.

  “Look,” I said. “From where I’m sitting, age forty-four looks like a long way from the end of the line. You’re just a couple of years older than that Ross guy who hit a home run for the Cubs in the final game of last year’s World Series. I was twenty-eight when you were born. Your sister was eighteen when she had Kayla, so we’re all over the map here. If you and Cherisse want to have kids, go ahead and have ’em.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “My gut’s telling me that it’s just too late.” At that point he burst into tears.

  There’s no sense trying to reason with people who are a) drunk or b) high, so I didn’t. Instead I drove Scott home, handing out a huge helping of well-worn platitudes along the way. I walked him into the house and settled him in a recliner in the family room. (Scott is his father’s son, after all. Of course he has a recliner.) After making sure his iPad, the TV remote, and a pitcher of water were all within easy reach, I let myself back out of the house and drove back to Belltown Terrace.

  “So what do you think’s going on with him?” Mel asked.

  It was Friday evening, and we were having our late dinner in our favorite quiet corner of El Gaucho, seated in a raised booth that nonetheless gave us a front row view of the frenetic action happening in the kitchen.

  “I don’t know. Midlife crisis maybe? I didn’t bother asking him, not when he was clearly under the influence. That’s a conversation we’ll need to have some other time when he isn’t.”

  Mel sighed. “Could be it has nothing to do with how old he is and there’s something else going on with the marriage.”

  Mel’s pretty much on the beam when it comes to relationships, and I had a feeling she might be right. “Could be,” I agreed.

  “How about my own guy’s postmidlife crisis?” she asked, breezily changing the subject and pointing the conversation in my direction. I’m gradually adjusting to Mel’s sudden shifts in conversation and learning to negotiate same, but that one still caught me flat-footed.

  “I’m bored,” I admitted finally, after a pause. “I miss the action. I miss doing something useful.”

  What was it my mother used to say? “Ask and you shall receive.” In this case it was a matter of from my lips to God’s ears. I was about to be thrown back into the action, all right—in spades.

  CHAPTER 2

  PART OF THE GENERAL MALAISE THAT HAD BEEN AFFECTING me was only to be expected. Mel and I had just come through a frenetic round of holiday activities, an overly booked endurance race that had started with a driving trip from Bellingham to Ashland for Thanksgiving with my daughter and her family and hadn’t let up until well after New Year’s Day, when the last college bowl game finally came to an end.

  This time around, with Mel fully preoccupied with her new job, the complex holiday preparations, which she had previously handled effortlessly and without so much as turning a hair, had all fallen on my inexperienced shoulders. That had included sending out the Christmas cards and seeing to the holiday decorating at both places—the new house in Bellingham as well as the condo in Seattle. It had all gotten done eventually but not, I’m sorry to admit, without a bit of serious grousing on my part.

  Fortunately, when it came to organizing and installing decorations, I’d had professional help from our interior designer, Jim Hunt, who saw to it that all our halls were decked to the max, at both places.

  Mel is big on family, and the decorations in Seattle were mostly part of our family holiday celebration. As for the ones in Bellingham? Those were mostly business—Mel’s business.

  I think that I may have mentioned before that when Mel landed her new job as chief of police, she walked into a political maelstrom. She immediately launched what she likes to call a “charm offensive,” which entailed the two of us hosting several preholiday parties—one for Mel’s top brass, another for her rank and file, and a third for her civilian employees.

  Yes, I spent years being a cop, but somehow it never occurred to me that the job of chief would turn out to be quite such a social undertaking, but then perhaps I hadn’t ever envisioned someone like Mel Soames tackling that role.

  The preferred management style of Bellingham’s previous mayor, Adelina Kirkpatrick, had been to create as many adversarial situations as possible. While her underlings went after each other tooth and nail, the mayor had been free to do whatever she damned well pleased. Mel’s idea, revolutionary as it might seem, was to get people to work together, and those preholiday gatherings had been part of Mel’s determined effort to put some of the department’s previous bad blood in the rearview mirror and come up with strategies for dealing with the incoming administration. My role in the festivities had been that of corporate/political spouse, which is to say, I arranged for the caterer. When it came to the events themselves? I made sure I was on hand, properly bibbed-and-tuckered, and prepared to make a certain amount of inoffensive small talk. It was also my job to oversee the cleanup of several spilled beverages. In other words, you can mark me as present but not essential.

  Now, though, at the end of the first week in January, the last of the decorations in both places had been taken down, packed up, and put away. I was dealing with a curious combination of relief and letdown. Given the weather at the moment, I was probably also suffering from something locals like to refer to as SAD—seasonal affective disorder.

  “So how’d it go with Mayor-Elect Appleton?” I asked, as our favorite waiter at El Gaucho cleared away dinner plates to make way for dessert. We’d already decided on the bananas Foster.

  “Okay, I think,” Mel said. “He seems like a pretty squared-away guy.”

  “He’s a politician,” I warned.

  “A beginning politician,” Mel said. “This is his first elected office.”

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sp; “They all have to start somewhere,” I said.

  “Ross Connors started out as King County attorney,” Mel countered.

  She had me there. Ross, our much-lamented late boss, had indeed started his political career by running for elected office as the King County prosecutor. He had gone on to spend several decades as Washington State’s attorney general, where his bipartisan support had meant he had served with governors on both sides of the aisle. That’s where Mel and I had both encountered Ross and each other—when we’d signed on to work with his statewide Special Homicide Investigation Team.

  “Okay,” I said, conceding defeat. “You’ve got me there. And I hope you’re right—that Lawrence Appleton turns out to be the same kind of straight shooter Ross Connors was.”

  “Larry,” Mel corrected. “He told me to call him Larry not Lawrence.”

  “That’s a start then, I suppose.”

  “Well, well,” someone said, stopping next to our table. “I spotted you earlier as you came in. What are you doing in town? I heard you’d moved up north.”

  Fully expecting the arrival of the bananas Foster dessert cart, I was dismayed to find myself looking into the face of one of my least favorite people on the planet—Maxwell Cole, a former columnist for a now Internet-only newspaper, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Suffice it to say, Max and I have a long history together, and not in a good way.

  It had been years since I’d seen the man, and at first I almost didn’t recognize him. For one thing, he was much smaller than I remembered—thin, almost. Where he had once boasted a full head of hair, his head was now shaved bald, and his signature handlebar mustache was nowhere in evidence. Standing there in the aisle, he leaned heavily on one of those three-pronged, self-standing canes. Parked behind him was a rolling portable oxygen container. My first impression was that the intervening years had been far harder on Max than they had been on me, but I said nothing to that effect. We were out in public. There was no point in being rude.