“That’s just it,” I said. “There was other stuff going on, but not the way you think. Things the investigators don’t know about.”
Blanchard stopped drawing on his pad. “Like what?”
“Couple months ago Anderson was a beneficiary in the will of a rich dead guy from Chicago. He received a check for a quarter of a million dollars.”
Now I had his attention. “How do you know this?”
“A lawyer involved in the case. He’s all bent out of shape over this and convinced Anderson didn’t do it.”
“Just because of the money? Proves nothing.”
“I know,” I said. “And that’s something my guy hasn’t considered, because he’s never been a cop. You’re thinking Anderson comes into this money, decides he wants to reinvent his life, and though he was okay with the wife and kid before, he doesn’t want them hanging around his neck now, taking up space on his new beach towel.”
“Why did you quit the job?” Blanchard asked. “Seems to me you might not have been the world’s worst cop.”
“But here’s the thing,” I said. “That check was never cashed. He had it for a month before he disappeared. Even if you’ve decided you’re going to move to Mexico and grow fat on fish tacos and Dos Equis with a series of loud women, you’re going to open an account and put that money in the bank. Not take the risk of this new life getting lost or stolen—or found out by your wife.”
Blanchard’s eyes were on the wall behind my head now, or at a point somewhere in between it and me. He ran his tongue around his mouth for a moment, then nodded once.
“Okay. Maybe. What’s this guy’s name? The lawyer?”
“Gary Fisher. I don’t know the name of his firm.”
“But he’s on the level?”
“I’ve known him a long time.”
“You got a number for him?”
“I left it back at the hotel.”
He looked at me. “Right. Have it your own way, concerned citizen. I’ll talk to some people, throw this into the pot. See if I can get anyone to care.”
“Thank you,” I said, standing up.
“We’re here to serve. In the meantime go home and stay out of trouble.”
“What?”
He stared me straight in the eye. “You just got that look about you. You did the first time I ever saw you.”
I’d told myself I wasn’t going to do it, but I’d known that I was lying. I did what I could to avoid it. I called Fisher, arranged to hook up later at the bar at the foot of Madison where I’d met Georj. I then took a long walk in the wrong direction, as the afternoon got grayer and darker and colder. As I walked, I noticed more than ever the shape of the land, the way it tilted sharply down toward Elliott Bay. Walking to the natural contours, seeing buildings only as things in my way, it was as if the work of man became insubstantial. I knew from my tourist visit with Amy that there had been extensive regrading work throughout the city in the last century. Given how hilly it remained, it would have been hard to imagine what attracted people in the first place, if you didn’t know that the ridge had once been thickly covered in profitable trees. I cut diagonally down to hit First and kept going south. Followed the odd forty-degree swerve that First makes around the bottom of James, and continued toward Yesler Way, where the streets suddenly run east-west instead of parallel to the water. I hadn’t headed for this area in particular, but it seemed that whenever I went walking in Seattle it was where I wound up, as if the city tipped me down in this direction.
I stopped at the corner of First and Yesler, looking across at the totem pole on the corner of Pioneer Square. On the other side was the terra-cotta bulk of the Yesler Building, to its right a monstrosity of a parking lot, built in the sixties to replace the fine old Occidental Hotel and so ugly it helped spark the campaign that saved the old town from being leveled into yet more parking lots. A few homeless people walked this way and that in the drizzle, single men, shoulders hunched. The irrelevance of the surrounding buildings seemed even more acute here, as if they could have no bearing on these passing humans and their lives. These were street dwellers, not the building kind. If they had a home in this city it existed at ground level only, and the appearance of sidewalks and road surfacing had not changed it much.
I went and stood in Pioneer Square, under blood-leaved trees in front of the drinking fountain with the Indian’s head on it, and read that it showed Seattle himself, chief of the local Suquamish tribe, one of the peoples who’d been living here before the white man came. This fountain, the city’s name, and the totem pole appeared to be the sole memorials to the tribe’s passing. There are middle-class dogs that have done better than that. I wondered if Seattle or his forebears had ever stood on the shores of the bay and seen tall ships in the distance and what their response had been. Whether they could have done things differently and, if so, whether anything would have changed.
There was something calming about the square, and I stayed awhile, sitting on a bench. Then I walked through the old town, stopping in the Elliott Bay Book Company, killing time any way I could. I stood in front of the bookstore’s True Crime section, wondering if I had it in me to produce something that could be filed next to the single copy of The Intruders they stocked. I doubted it, and wasn’t sure I wanted to. The big local seller of the moment appeared to be a garish hack job on the darker corners of Seattle’s last few decades. Arson and scandal. Famous suicides and murders. A long series of unexplained disappearances in the seventies, eighties, and early nineties, kidnappings of young girls, only a couple of badly mangled bodies ever being found, both having suffered abuse even this author balked at specifying, along with cuts into their faces so deep they’d gouged the bone.
I put the book back on the pile. I didn’t want to write that kind of thing, and even if I had, someone had beaten me to it. In the end I bought a thin précis of the city’s early history and wound up walking the streets again, until they ran out and deposited me unceremoniously in a tangle of busy new roads that showed so many twisting ways to go that ultimately there was no way to decide.
So I turned back around and tried to go some other place. Anywhere except where I’d been heading all along. But a little before five o’clock, I still found myself walking up Post Alley, in the direction of the Kerry, Crane & Hardy offices.
I went straight past their offices and checked out a couple of things. Then I returned to the corner deli with the window seats. I got a coffee and sat facing back up the alley. I had no way of telling if Crane was in there, and I told myself this was a good thing. I’d just sit awhile. Watch people go in, come out. Then people only coming out, and finally the lights dimming, and someone shutting and locking the door behind him at the end of the business day. Crane was a big wheel. Chances were that he’d be out of the office, sitting in some other people’s boardroom, making them feel good about whatever he wanted them to do. That was his job, and when we met, I’d been able to tell that he would be good at it. He’d go straight from the meeting to dinner with a client, or home to his picture-book family, and that was for the best. Sooner or later I’d get tired and bored and thirsty and hoist myself up off the stool and go into the night.
I sat there forty minutes, becoming more and more convinced of this scenario. Then Todd Crane came out.
He was alone, and he looked preoccupied. I was paid up and ready to go, in position at the door within seconds. He didn’t do what I expected, however. My scouting around had been to establish the closest entrance to the multistory parking lot. It was back up the alley, and I’d assumed that Crane would be the kind of man to arrive at work in something expensive. But he was walking toward me instead.