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  Out front sat a bright red 1939 Ford coupe, a beautiful car.

  I whacked the door twice with a hinged brass knocker in the shape of a naked lady working her legs. Mike Stark answered the door, wearing a dark blue Amsterdam Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt with a red marijuana leaf on it. He was a short man with a black beard and mischievous brown eyes. He was smoking a neatly rolled joint.

  “May I help you?” Stark asked. He looked quizzical. He made no effort to hide the joint, which he held between his thumb and forefinger, his little pinkie in the air.

  “Well,” I said. “My name is John Denson; I’m a private investigator here in the Seattle area. I’m looking into the disappearance of Judge Moby Rappaport. I’m told you were scheduled to appear as an expert witness in the Cowlitz fishing rights case.”

  “Private investigator? I’ve already talked to the police.”

  “Judge Rappaport held a life-insurance policy. His wife is the beneficiary.”

  “Oh, oh, I see. I’ll be glad to answer your questions, Mr. Denson, although I don’t think I can add anything to what I’ve already told the police.” Stark took a hit on his joint and giggled. “Good thing you aren’t a narc, isn’t it? The Cowlitz are a lovely people. Listen, I’ve got something I want you to see. Come on in here and take a look.” He handed me the joint, as if there were no doubt but that I smoked pot.

  “Thanks.” I took a toke to be friendly and followed him across the polished hardwood floor into an earthen-colored, tiled kitchen with handsome enameled cookware hanging from wooden hooks on the ceiling.

  But the centerpiece, what Stark wanted to show me, was piled on top of a newspaper in the center of the cherrywood kitchen table. Stark stood by the table and grinned hugely, grinned proudly. “Aren’t they wonderful? They’re wonderful. Aren’t they beauties? Aren’t they? Look at ‘em. Fat babies. Cantharellus cibarius.”

  Cantharellus cibarius was apparently the Latin name for some apricot-colored mushrooms on the newspaper. Vertical wavy gills ran down much of the length of the stem, getting wider as the mushrooms blossomed out at the top. “Impressive,” I said.

  “You bet. Chanterelles. They’re delicious. The Pacific Northwest is marvelous for mushroom hunting, marvelous. All this rain — once in a while we get a little sun. Have you ever eaten Chanterelles, Mr. Denson?”

  “Well, no, I haven’t.”

  “Let me fry us some in a little butter while we talk. There are thousands more where those come from. They’re delicious, you’ll see. The French have orgasms at the very thought of them. The ones you buy in stores are Agaricus bisphorus. Agaricus pissporus, I call ‘em.” Stark took another hit on his joint and set about cutting up some Chanterelles on a butcher-block table mounted on casters. Stark was quick with a knife: chop-chop-chop, chop-chop-chop. “I used to be married to a Cowlitz, do you know that, Mr. Denson? The jolly Jaw and his Indian wife. Woo, woo, woo!” Stark did a parody of an Indian dance as he chopped mushrooms. “Melinda Prettybird, her name is. Cute? Is she cute? She has these eyes. Oh, my man!”

  I didn’t say anything. Better to let him talk. Stark seemed not to know Melinda was missing, but I knew better than to accept anything he said at face value. Neurotics make good liars. If he was as crazy as Willie said, he was capable of anything.

  “You must never believe anything a Cowlitz says about me, Mr. Denson. Melinda and I had an ugly parting, and there were claims made.” Stark smiled. “The Cowlitz hang together; I’ll give them that. Fish stories. Do you know what a fish story is?” He flopped a wad of butter, plup, in a cast iron skillet.

  “Oh, sure.”

  “I suppose everybody has told one at least once in his life. Looking back, the fish look a little bigger, don’t they? They fought a little harder. There were a few more of them. I guess most fish stories are harmless enough. But you need to be careful, Mr. Denson. How about some coffee while these cook? Little caffeine’ll do us good.” He poured us each a cup. “Smell these babies. Just smell ‘em.”

  I inhaled deeply. “Oh, boy!”

  Stark set about rolling another joint. “Melinda has this way of looking you straight on with those brown eyes of hers and lying like hell. Have you met her? Have you? Have you seen those eyes? She pulled that stunt with the divorce judge, you know, called me every name in the book going blink, blink, blink all the while. God, what I wouldn’t have given for a woman judge.”

  “Turned your wallet over to her, I take it.”

  “I think she married me mostly because I had inherited a few bucks. She didn’t want to run around in the mountains looking for mushrooms. She was into things, man. She loved the feel of a credit card, loved it; I think it made her nips turn hard. She hit me for two-hundred grand when we split. I knew I’d been had the second she walked into the courtroom. She looked like Sacajawea.”

  “So what do you think about Rappaport’s disappearance, Mr. Stark?”

  “I don’t have any idea. Listen, on that business with my ex-wife. The police have sworn affidavits on my whereabouts on each occasion. I assure you, the administration at the university would frown on one of its professors lying under oath, much less beating up on people. I’m a scholar, not a thug. I write articles for journals nobody reads. Besides that, I had witnesses, man, witnesses.” Stark slid a couple of plates on the table along with some forks. “It’s hard for me to believe Willie would even think of doing anybody harm. Rodney, now, he’s something else. That man has a temper.”

  “I have to admit I thought it was a farfetched idea to begin with, but if I don’t ask all the questions the insurance people’ll want to know why.”

  Stark stirred the frying mushrooms with a wooden spoon. “Melinda Prettybird would never give big bucks to a lawsuit and live in the Montana Verde unless there were bucks at the end of the march. I suppose you have to check everything out. There are a number of people who would have benefited from Moby Rappaport’s death. It all depends …”

  “On what?”

  “On your reading of his comments in court and the questions Rappaport asked of the various attorneys involved. There’s a lot of money to be won or lost in any salmon decision, depending on how the courts divvy the fish. If you’re trying to make sense out of the salmon-fishing industry, you have to understand the economics. If the Prettybirds win their lawsuit, they get treaty rights to salmon entering the Columbia. The salmon have to go up the Columbia to get to the Cowlitz.”

  “And Doug Egan wouldn’t like that.”

  “Doug Egan’s the biggest commercial fisherman in Astoria. His boats fish out of the Columbia. The Prettybirds are ordinary commercial competition now, but give them treaty rights and they’re another kind of competition entirely. They can take a court-ordered treaty share to the bank to borrow money for more boats.”

  “I can’t imagine Egan wants more boats in the water.”

  “There are only so many fish to be had, Mr. Denson.”

  “And Judge Rappaport was about to do what?”

  Stark looked surprised. He used the wooden spoon to slide the sautéed mushrooms onto our plates. “Why nobody knows! Judges have clerks do their research for them and sometimes even draft opinions. That’s a lot of influence, man, a lot of influence. I have graduate assistants who help me with my work. When I’m writing an article, they know pretty much what I’m thinking. As long as judges have clerks, there’s a possibility of leaks.”

  “So who stood to win or lose?”

  “They all stand to gain; they all stand to lose — it depends. I’m talking all of them: seiners, gillnetters, trollers, sportsmen, Indians. You’re talking about a lot of money, hundreds of thousands of dollars. Personally, I’d like to see the Prettybirds win their case. What’s fair is fair. My being divorced from Melinda doesn’t have anything to do with it. Willie’s a good guy, though. It’s hard not to like Willie. Aren’t these good? Yummy!”

  “Delicious,” I said. That was no lie.

  Stark was pleased. “Willie Prettybird really loved to
hunt wild mushrooms, you know. I got him all turned on and he was good at it. Got himself a microscope so he could check spore prints, the works. I can find six or eight different kinds of edible mushrooms within a few hundred yards of here. Those babies love all this rain. You can find a couple kinds of Boletus, including mirabilis and edulus; two or three kinds of Suillus; you can find Cow Mushrooms, Chicken of the Woods, Lion’s Mane, a couple of different coral mushrooms, Spreading Hedgehogs, these Chanterelles, of course.” Stark looked happy. “And that’s not to mention Morels in the springtime.”

  “These sure are good.” I decided I’d have to get Willie to teach me about mushrooms.

  “Say, Mr. Denson, if you should happen to talk to any of the Prettybirds in your investigation, I do wish you would take anything they say about me with the proverbial grain of salt. You’ll find Melinda Prettybird to be a lively, charming young woman. A beauty. But she’s also a skillful, unconscionable liar. A liar like you just can’t imagine. You must believe me.” He paused. “There’s one other thing I should tell you, I suppose, since we did bring it up and all. I said a judge’s clerks tend to be the most frequent source of judicial leaks — this goes all the way to clerks of the Supreme Court, by the way …”

  “And?”

  “Well, I don’t know if it’s worth anything. It’s probably nothing, but I was down at Ivar’s a couple of weeks ago having some oyster stew. And do you know Doug Egan was there eating fried razor clams and having a little tête-à-tête with a young man I know to be a law clerk to Moby Rappaport. You know, I think it was that young man who is missing. I can’t remember his name. Hartung. Hartburn. Something like that.”

  “Hartwig.”

  “Yes, Hartwig. Interesting.” Mike Stark bunched his face in a merry grin. His eyes danced and teased. “I just love gossip, don’t you? I just bet Doug Egan paid for the clerk’s razor clams; those things are so damned expensive. Both a judge and his law clerk are missing. Isn’t it fun to speculate, Mr. Denson? I bet that’s why you’re a detective.” Stark took a long, deep hit on his joint. “God, aren’t these mushrooms great? I know where I can get these big old Boletus edulus. Ceps, the French call them. Fat mothers. They make wonderful soup.”

  Mike Stark certainly didn’t seem like the kind of guy who would run around threatening women, but then, as I learned long ago, a case like this was like playing Killer: I couldn’t trust anybody.

  7 – WARRIORS

  It was impossible to hang out at the Doie without considering that thing at the base end of Pioneer Place Park. When I first moved to Seattle, I thought it was a gazebo. I knew what a gazebo was — or thought I did — because I had seen the movie with Walter Slezak when I was a kid. The residents of Seattle called it a pergola, however, possibly as a challenge to people who don’t do crossword puzzles. I had to look the word up, same as everybody else. My dictionary says a pergola is: 1. an arbor formed of horizontal trelliswork supported on columns or posts, over which vines or other plants are trained; 2. a colonnade having the form of such an arbor.

  The Pioneer Place pergola fits definition two. I suppose it’s difficult in these days of municipal labor unions to hire people with the background necessary to train vines to grow over a trellis. Besides that, there’s all the expense of maintenance. Anyway, Pioneer Place is located at the intersection of First Avenue and Yesler Way, the southern end of Seattle’s mean street, if by that you’re talking about a city’s inevitable avenue of tattoo parlors, hookers, and skin flicks. In contrast to the emotional thicket of First Avenue sleaze, the tiny patch of grass at Pioneer Place is a rose.

  Alaskan Way is Seattle’s waterfront street, and reckoning from there to the interior of the city, to the sterile obelisks of the international style of architecture, the avenues run north and south — parallel to the water. They’re numbered after Alaskan Way, lowest numbers closest to the water. The Pig’s Alley had been located near the intersection of First Avenue and Pike Street. The triangle-shaped Pioneer Place was nine blocks south of the market — where First turns to the southwest following the curve of the harbor.

  The apex of the small triangle — which was bordered by a wrought-iron fence maybe thirty inches high — faced north, up the avenue of lost dreams. This apex was marked by a fifty-foot totem pole with winged turquoise and black figures sitting butt on head and facing Canada. The pergola, built along the base of the triangle, faced Juantar’s Doie Bar, and five blocks behind that — to the south — the Kingdome.

  The pergola was made of jet-black iron strips and had glass on top rather than vines. The columns, made of vertical metal lattice, were open and airy, made to suggest Victorian imitations of classical Roman architecture. The cornice of each column, which held the weight of marble in the Doric originals, was in this case metal strips peeled back like wood before a carver’s knife or curls of apple skin. Somehow, I always expected to see corseted Victorian ladies sitting on the bench under the shelter of the glass top — ladies with delicate parasols and wide-brimmed hats, and an artist, maybe, wearing a neat little beret.

  But no. The dispossessed and heavy-drinking Native Americans of Seattle apparently identified with the totem pole, because the small triangle of grass that was Pioneer Place was their spot, at least unofficially. The pergola, with its dry bench, was their refuge. They gathered there to drink fortified screw-top, the cheapest firewater available. Although I’ll pass on port or madeira, I have to say that my taste, too, runs to screw-top. Many’s the night I’ve contemplated the city lights over a jug of Mr. Gallo’s zinfandel. I’m always suspect of people who say they love opera or really can tell the difference between one expensive wine and the next. The gentlemen in the shelter of the pergola were out to get sloshed, which is more honest than a man with pointy-toed shoes using a bottle of thirty-dollar Bordeaux to impress a blond with green Maybelline on her eyelids.

  Having called them Native Americans, I’ll back off a bit and say I usually call them Indians. There is a reason for this. Years ago, I was the first reporter on the Honolulu Star-Bulletin to get away with using Black rather than Negro in a story. I called Stokey Carmichael a black because he told me that’s what he wanted. His desire was fine by me, although judging from the reaction of my city editor, you’d have thought I’d tried to torch him with napalm. When Willie Prettybird asked for the same consideration, I could hardly say no. Willie Prettybird called a bathroom a toilet. He called a custodian a janitor. In his opinion the term Native American was mostly insisted upon by breast-beaters who sang folk songs and drove Renaults. Willie said the folks under the pergola most likely called themselves Indians, although this was changing in some quarters. As for him, he said, “Call me a ‘Native American’ and I’ll cut your tongue out, white man.” Thus it was that around Willie Prettybird, at least, I stuck to calling Native Americans plain old Indians.

  The Indians wore rumpled, undistinguished old trousers, Goodwill ski jackets, and woolen stocking caps to their powwows in the shelter of the pergola. The stocking caps took the edge off the wind.

  Since poverty and alcoholism are color-blind, I suppose there should be more mixing of races on First Avenue than in other parts of Seattle. The fact is that even there the ideal was elusive have-nots were as conscious of race as the haves. Given their druthers, blacks somehow found blacks, whites preferred whites. A Native American was most comfortable with a fellow Redskin.

  The gentlemen of the bottle who made their rendezvous at the First Avenue bench were part of the white man’s legacy; their nineteenth-century ancestors suddenly had alcohol thrust upon them. They had not had their systems inured by centuries of drinking, as had the French trappers, British traders, and American settlers.

  The men who gathered there — the Pergola Warriors, Willie called them — turned to their spot out of instinct, it seemed, as though they were hankering for something under it, something in the soil, perhaps, maybe something that had been covered over by the city. They were under the shelter of the pergola all day
long, in groups of two or three. But at about eleven at night, they began to gather in larger numbers, moving through the shadows of the street, bottles of port or muscatel in paper bags. They stood and talked quietly, one foot on the bench, paper bags in hand, or sat, staring at the ground, paper bags between their feet. They powwowed. They discussed the day’s adventures, assessing wounds with a shake of the head. They smoked the peace pipe — Prince Albert or Velvet, hand rolled, or a joint if they could come by one. They drank. They listened to the city. They watched people come and go on the sidewalk. The city grew around them and closed out their past.

  The Indians at First Avenue and Yesler Way were out of sight and so out of mind, except by cops and social workers and folks on their way to see a ballgame at the Kingdome. Local newspaper editors, o.d.’d on the subject, assigned a feature on the park’s inhabitants once a year. The assignment was most often given to someone new on the staff, a woman preferably, so that the story would be liberal and poignant and so nonracist.

  The latest feature was an advance on a rally and fund-raiser for various Native American causes. In order to extend the interest beyond the hard core who already knew about and were concerned with Indian problems, the organizers added Indian storytellers to the program, which was to be held on Halloween day. The storytellers, according to posters in bars and coffeehouses across the city, would talk about Coyote, who could change himself into a man if necessary to teach the ways of the animal people. There was first the Great Spirit, the posters said, then the animal people.

  One of the Indians interviewed by the newspaper reporter said Coyote lived in the desert country south of Hanford, where they built reactors in World War II to provide fuel for the first atomic bombs. When Coyote appeared as a man, he said, he wore a red bandana around his neck.