Contract Killer Read online

  The next day Stevens arrived for the treaty signing. The Governor was drunk. He said sign the treaty. Tleyuk said he would not sign. The Governor said all the tribes would have to sign or there would be no treaty. Tleyuk refused. The Governor said, okay, not only is there no treaty but you aren’t chiefs anymore, and he took away their chief’s papers. This aggrieved them greatly.

  The other tribes were eventually accommodated by other treaties, leaving the Cowlitz alone without a share of the salmon that had been theirs. There had been failed Cowlitz lawsuits before. But the Prettybirds, intent on justice, brought the issue before the court yet one more time. The Cowlitz chief had signed the treaty in good faith, they argued. He wasn’t responsible for Tleyuk’s stubbornness or Isaac Stevens’ drunkenness.

  When Rodney Prettybird cast his nets off the mouth of the Columbia, as he was licensed to do, he incurred the wrath of Doug Egan. Egan, who fished out of Astoria, on the Oregon side of the river, didn’t like competition — especially Indians. The idea that Rodney was in court seeking a treaty share of the salmon infuriated him. He blamed the Native Americans for the decline in salmon stocks and had taken to “corking” Rodney Prettybird’s nets — placing his nets in front of Rodney’s to rob Rodney of his catch.

  I said, “It could be Egan, too. Have you ever thought about that? It could be Egan.”

  “If Egan’s the guy, I suppose I could understand why Rodney wants to take care of it himself. I would, too.”

  “Rodney’s a Cowlitz who wants treaty rights. Maybe it is Egan,” I said. “You have to consider all possibilities. We’ve got Mike Stark to think about. We’ve got Egan.”

  “Doug Egan doesn’t give a damn about Melinda’s love life. He just wants all the salmon.”

  “I think I should talk to Melinda some more. Hear what she has to say.”

  Willie took a sip of beer. “I’ll give her a call and see if it’s okay for us to drive on down now.” He got up and went to the phone booth and was back in a couple of minutes. “Sure. No problem,” he said. “Melinda says to come down. She’ll tell you everything you want to know. She can handle it now. Prib’s with her, so she’s safe. I’ve mentioned Prib before, haven’t I?”

  “A couple of times.”

  “He’s the bricklayer, guy I grew up with. We better get going.” Willie Prettybird was a worried big brother. He had a right to be.

  3 - DISCOVERY IN THE PARK

  A cold, wet mist rode a hard wind that swept in from Puget Sound as Willie Prettybird drove me to the Montana Verde apartments in south Seattle, where his sister lived. There were times, in weak moments, when I felt the weather in the Puget Sound should be included retroactively, in Hades, or purgatory, or wherever it is people are supposed to suffer for their sins. There were some politicians I could think of who should be made to pace the Seattle waterfront, naked save maybe for a few chains, for eternity. I had grown up in desert country in northeastern Oregon, where you could use a frozen cow pie for a discus in the winter and your feet stuck to asphalt streets in the summer. Now this. Was there no justice?

  Willie Prettybird didn’t think so. He got angrier and angrier as we drove through the rain, listening to the click, click of the windshield wipers. “You know it’s not right, Denson, for a guy like Mike Stark to terrorize a woman. He’s got bucks and he’s a professor, so people say, hey, he’s not the kind of screwball who’d beat up a woman. It’s his word against a Cowlitz squaw.”

  “It’s always best to keep a clear mind, Willie. All we’re after is the truth so we can protect Melinda and keep Rodney out of trouble. How often does Rodney come to Seattle?”

  Willie slowed for a stop light. “Not much. Maybe once a month, something like that. There’s the Montana Verde up there on the left.”

  If I remembered my Spanish, Montana Verde meant green mountain. The architecture of the apartment complex was urban-renewal-utilitarian — or maybe poor-people-drab — as opposed to anything Spanish. Because of its location at the base of a ridge, the residents of the Montana Verde were blocked from seeing the Cascades, or even Mt. Rainier. Owing to a high-rise insurance building, they couldn’t see the snowcapped Olympic range on the far side of the sound. In fact, the Montana Verde was probably the only apartment building in the Seattle area where clear days weren’t blessed by a fabulous view of a mountain. This was a remarkable achievement by the developer.

  A few miles south of the Montana Verde was the city of Renton, the suburban Seattle site of one of the Boeing Company’s aerospace assembly plants — one of several in the Puget Sound area. Whether it made 747s or surface-to-air missiles, Boeing employed a lot of workers. When Boeing fell on hard times a few years back, someone erected a sign at the Seattle city limits saying the last person out of town should turn out the lights. But Boeing’s fortunes prospered with President Reagan’s decision to rebuild the military, and so did Seattle’s.

  The Montana Verde, probably built in the early 1960s, was the home of several hundred blue-collar workers and divorced women with children — women trying to make do on the salary of a receptionist or clerk and child support that might or might not be paid. It was hard to believe that Melinda, having come into a two-hundred-thousand-dollar divorce settlement, would turn her money over to fishing boats and legal fees and live in a place like this.

  The asphalt on the apartment parking lot had long ago been destroyed by George’s Cheap Mart oil dripping from the bottoms of old, large Buicks and Oldsmobiles — the kinds of “good transportation” that go for a few hundred bucks in a car lot. Several decrepit cars and pickup trucks, in such sorry shape that even the loan companies shunned them, had been abandoned in the lot. The decaying hulks were the bodies of dinosaurs too old and too slow to survive and so were stuck in a modern tar pit. That the Detroit engineers who designed them had brains the size of walnuts, I did not doubt.

  There was a complicated tower of monkey bars in the center of the grassy area around the tar-pit parking lot. The grassy area was originally intended by a landscape architect to give the Montana Verde a touch of verde, but it had been pounded to hard, sour earth by the feet of running children.

  Willie Prettybird parked his Toyota in a parking slot that was filthy from accumulated petroleum goo. Willie shook his head. “When we get the company turned around a little, I’m getting Melinda out of this fucking place.”

  Willie led me up the sidewalk toward the main entrance of the left side of a V-shaped apartment building. I stepped over a tricycle minus its front wheel and picked up the remains of a frisbee. The frisbee had once been part of a department-store promotion. Around the edges of the moon-shaped fragment was a promotion for something called the Puget Sound Value Days:

  LIVE, IN PERSON, TOBY KN

  OYS, JULY 15-17

  I followed Willie through a large room intended for parties and large gatherings for residents of the Montana Verde. There were rips and tears in the plastic covers of the sofas and chairs in the commons.

  “The elevator works but I like to walk,” Willie said. He started up the concrete stairs. He took the stairs two at a time. He was light on his feet.

  “Slow down, Willie.”

  Willie slowed. “By the way, Prib’s real name’s Gary. Rodney and I call him Prib, that’s for priblige, on account of once when we were kids and’d had too much beer and were in the giggle stage, he managed to call himself a pribliged character. We called him Priblige for years, then we shortened it.” Willie smiled at the memory of how the Pribliged Gary had become Priblige, then Prib.

  I was starting to puff, thinking maybe I ought to lay off the mayonnaise and egg yolks.

  Willie paused on the stairs. “Prib’ll appreciate any chore you can give him, John. He gets pissed at people who mistreat Melinda.” Willie started taking the stairs two at a time again.

  “We’ll see what happens,” I said.

  Willie Prettybird thumped cheerfully on the door of his sister’s apartment. “Her damn bonger went out. I’m gonna have
to fix it for her.” He waited, and when there was no answer, he banged on the door with his fist. “Hey, Melinda!” he called.

  There was no answer.

  “Melinda!” he yelled. The color drained from Willie Prettybird’s face. He banged again. He tried the door handle. Locked. He looked at me, panicked.

  “Why don’t you read the note?” I said.

  “What note?” Willie looked wild-eyed.

  “The one under the door there.”

  Willie, looking foolish, retrieved an envelope whose edge stuck out from under the door. He retrieved a slip of paper from the envelope and we both read it:

  Dear Willie,

  Sorry to stand up you and your friend but Prib had to go and I got scared here by myself: Don’t blame Prib. My fault. I’ll call you soon.

  Melinda

  Willie folded the note and tucked it into his wallet.

  “Is that her handwriting?” I asked.

  “It looks like it, but she could have written it with a knife at her throat. This isn’t like her, Denson. She just wouldn’t take off like this.”

  “She could have gotten scared like the note says.”

  “Where did she go?” Willie said. “She said to come right down. She said Prib was with her. Where did she go, Denson? Where?” With that the panicked Willie stepped back and rammed the door with his shoulder like in the movies.

  “Hey! Hey! Whoa!” I said. “You’re gonna hurt your shoulder for nothing.” I retrieved my car keys from my pocket and unfolded a little tool from the ring that I used on the lock to Melinda’s apartment door. “Lots easier this way, Willie.” The lock clicked open and we stepped inside.

  Melinda Prettybird’s apartment looked orderly enough. There were no signs of violence. The top two drawers of her bureau were empty save for a bra with a broken strap. Her closet was mostly empty except for summer clothes. In the room where her two small sons slept, the winter clothes were also missing.

  “Neat job of packing,” I said. “That’d take a while.”

  Willie clenched his jaw. “Let’s get out of here,” he said.

  “Do you know how to find Prib?”

  “No,” Willie said. He folded the letter and started down the stairs. Halfway down, he said, “Prib’s been hanging out with Rodney lately. Maybe he’s with Rodney.”

  The drains of the Montana Verde’s parking lot were plugged and we had to wade back to Willie’s car. We waited for the engine to warm and for the defogger to clear the windows. “If somebody was watching her, the stupidest thing she could do was take off like that,” Willie said.

  “Maybe she just got scared, like she said. If I were you, Willie, I’d get on the phone to the cops pronto.”

  “Police!” Willie was disgusted. “The cops come out to a place like this and their minds are half made up before they walk in the door.”

  “Those guys have to be careful. More people get hurt intervening in lovers’ quarrels than any other kind of call.”

  “The cops find out Melinda’s a Cowlitz and they think, oh, shit, Redskins.”

  Willie needed a break from my questions. I turned on the radio and picked up the Sonics in the fourth quarter in Los Angeles. It was early October and already the long season of the National Basketball Association was underway. The Sonics were up by four in a tight game; I listened to the game and left Willie to worry in peace. The Sonics held on to win by three and I turned the radio off.

  The water on black asphalt made the streets mirrorlike, shiny, a little dangerous because they were both slick and hard to see. Willie slowed and checked his headlights to make sure they were on. Willie braked and swerved to avoid a VW that had pushed a yellow. Willie glared at the bug.

  “When something like this happens to one of us, I mean like this guy beating up Melinda’s boyfriends, why it’s embarrassing. The police come out and talk to Melinda in that damn place back there, and what do they conclude? A squaw. Melinda doesn’t have to live there, you know, she gives her money to the lawsuit same as Rodney and me. She’s bright, besides being good-looking. But it’s hard for any woman to have a social life when she has two children to take care of. What do you say let’s finish the day off at the Pig’s and join the wake. I can call the cops from there.”

  “Sounds like a deal to me,” I said.

  “I can’t imagine the cops’ll do any good,” Willie said. He didn’t have a whole lot of confidence in the local Forces of Good. He turned his car across town, toward the waterfront and the Pig’s Alley.

  There, arm-in-arm with our old friends, we got thoroughly sloshed and sentimental. The jazzmen played melancholy riffs with lips of midnight. We drank. We talked. We remembered. We sang songs. We were being evicted from our comfortable spot by Seattle’s chi-chi crowd, and we resented it. The fashionables got first dibs on everything worthwhile but were too shallow, in our opinion, to appreciate anything except hot tubs and cars with silver paint. This sardonic view of life was no way diminished by the story carried from the streets by an inebriated messenger a half hour before closing time.

  To the crew at the Pig’s, the news was part of a faint whinnying that they had often discussed on long rainy afternoons. The whinnying somehow got louder each year. The horses were skittish, as the riders of the apocalypse prepared to mount: The drunk said a large chunk of flesh from a still-warm human corpse had been found inside Pioneer Place Park down on First Avenue; it was on the radio.

  4 – KILLERS

  On Saturday, our last night at the Pig’s Alley — with sentiment pouring as freely as the Rainier and Henry Weinhard’s — Federal Judge Moby Rappaport joined Melinda Prettybird on Seattle’s missing-persons list.

  The Pig’s was chaos in its dying hours. Some of the regulars, stoned on southern Oregon bud, listened to the Irish folk singers honored with the last gig at the Pig’s and reminisced about characters they had known and women they had met in the Pig’s. These conversations usually led to a consideration of a former habitué of the Pig’s, a construction worker. named William DuPreis, Bill to us, who announced one afternoon that he had begun taking hormone shots and was going to have his weasel surgically removed so that he could become Wilma. Some patrons watched a Clint Eastwood movie on the tube above the bar. It didn’t matter to the Dirty Harry fans that they couldn’t hear the dialogue; they cheered enthusiastically whenever Eastwood blew away a jerk with his .44 Magnum. A few couples caught up by the sentiment of the occasion pawed one another in steamy closeness.

  Some of us played darts, remembering how it was in the days we had won some of the Pig’s house trophies that now collected dust on a shelf above the bar.

  I had arrived early, hoping to get a shot at the chair that was the prize of Pig’s Alley. The chairs at the Pig’s were so scarred and carved up, so old and corroded by accumulations of sweat, beer, and smoke, that they were worthless on the market. It was understood by the owner and the Pig’s regulars that there would be none remaining at closing. The prize chair was one in which a failed pornographic artist had once committed suicide by ramming a knife into his stomach, hara-kiri-style.

  When I stepped through the door, the rotund Stan, owner of the Pig’s, got up from the chair to help with a faulty beer keg. All right! I thought. I slipped my jacket over the back of the chair and left a half-empty glass of beer on the seat every time I left it to go to the john.

  All of the regular dart players of the Pig’s were there and feeling good. There was Mike Odell, Captain Mikey. Mike Scanlan, Scabby, originally Scablan, famous for his wretched sevens and elevens. Ron Cardinal, Rodent Clone — sometimes R. C. Darryl. Bean, the Beaner, known for his scores of twenty-four, called Beaners by those who knew him. There was Willie, of course, Chief Dumbshit, and me, the Natural Assholete and Master of Zen Darts.

  We shot for the bull’s-eye to see who got to name the game. I slipped my quarter into the ashtray that banked the pot and took my shot. My dart wound up alone in the double-bull. I chose Killer, which was what we called it when
there were women present. Otherwise it was Fuck Your Buddy. It was a simple game: you set the number which has your three lives by throwing at the board with your off hand; once you hit the double of your own number you’re a killer and can throw at the doubles of your opponents; each time your number is struck, it’s a life — three lives and you’re dead.

  Killer is especially amusing because it sets players against one another — some players are uncertain, some cunning, some brazen. The usual strategy was for weaker players to gang up on the stronger. Stronger players sometimes combat this by forming an alliance of their own. When this happens weaker players deny being any part of a conspiracy. Character is revealed.

  “Asshole,” Rodent Clone said, when I called Killer.

  “That’s the way the mop flops,” said Captain Mikey.

  Willie and I kept our eye on the tube because the Sonics were winning in Los Angeles and there would be highlights following the game. Willie was a passionate Sonics fan. He was also the best player in a game of Killer, and so the rest of us conspired to get him first.

  Willie grumbled at the dubious honor of having to defend himself first. After him we’d go for Captain Mikey, Scabby, or the Rodent Clone, depending on how their games were going. My strategy was to lay low and repeat how I was the worst player in the pot, a threat to no one. I ran my private-eye business pretty much the same way. The Beaner made crass wisecracks, aimed equitably at everyone in turn.

  Willie adjusted his flights. It was his turn. “Ever since this happened to Melinda I’ve been thinking Cochise, Geronimo.” He stepped up to the line and fired at my number — thump! thump! thump! — taking two of my allotted three lives, and walked away, grinning triumphantly.

  “Hey, why crap on me?” I said. “What about Captain Mikey or the Scab?”

  Rodent Clone said, “Because he doesn’t go along with your game of turning us against one another while you stand there with that stupid grin on your face.”