"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."