Contract Killer Read online

  “I buy it at the Pike Place Market all the time. Expensive.”

  “The people here at Hillendale’s tell me they want salmon that’s been smoked by Indians in a traditional Indian manner. Probably pressure from liberals, there’re plenty of those in New York — all those Jews and all. You know what I mean, Denson. They want the best. That’s what they pay me to buy. That’s what I’m gonna buy. By God, that’s a Texan’s way of doing business. Ain’t that right?”

  “Oh, hell, yes. I think an outfit on the Quinault Indian Reservation smokes some quality fish. I’m not sure who else.”

  “Why, those are our people. SalPaclnc, it’s called. I’ve got an appointment to take a look at their setup on Tuesday. Yes, SalPaclnc. I want to make sure Hillendale’s gets what it pays for.”

  That seemed easy enough. “I don’t know why not,” I said.

  “We’ll eat a little smoked fish and drink whatever it is they drink up there in the Pacific Northwest.”

  I checked my little notebook. “Tuesday looks good by me. It’ll cost you three hundred bucks a day and expenses.”

  “You pay people right and you can expect good work. I pay first-class prices for first-class service. Say, how would it be if my secretary leaves word with your answering service so you can meet me at the airport? She can leave the flight number and all. Would that be a big bother, Mr. Denson?”

  “No bother at all. That’d be Sea-Tac. See you Tuesday,” I said. With all his y’alls and all, Augustus Poorman didn’t sound very New York and Hillendale’s, but that was okay; I tried not to be prejudiced against Texans or anybody else until I caught them crapping in my oatmeal.

  I cracked a can of Oly, kicked back in my chair, and turned on the radio to see if there was any new outrage being reported from Pioneer Place Park. There was. Another human steak was found in the grass there — just behind the pergola bench.

  14 - MAN IN A WHITE HAT

  Augustus Poorman’s secretary gave Emma the flight number and the time of her boss’s arrival at Sea-Tac Airport, but not a whole lot more. I didn’t know what he looked like. I got my corduroy jacket cleaned for the occasion — although I thought a necktie was a bit much — and was at the correct arrival gate at the appointed hour to meet the Hillendale’s buyer. I waited, somewhat nervously, as the passengers disgorged from the Boeing 747. What would a man like Poorman wear?

  Then a tiny little man stepped through the door, and I knew I had my man. For some reason he looked like he had a big voice. He wore an elegant suit of tailored British wool and a white, high-peaked cowboy hat, like Tom Mix wore in the movies and Dan Blocker in the Bonanza television series. And gloves. He wore neat little black gloves, an affectation that somehow enhanced the cowboy hat. He glanced about the waiting area, looked at me, grinned, and walked my way, hand extended.

  “Name’s Augustus Poorman. Y’all’d be John Denson, I’m bettin’.”

  “That’s my handle,” I said.

  Poorman laughed. “Y’all had the look of a man waiting for someone he hadn’t seen before. I shoulda said something to my gal.”

  “You’d make a pretty fair detective yourself, Mr. Poorman. I do like that hat.” The gloves, too, I might have added. He was either a fraud or the genuine article cast against type by a cunning Hillendale’s management. I didn’t see how he could be much in the middle.

  “Folks got a right to expect a little extra when they’re dealing with a Texan, Mr. Denson; I learned that when I bought for Neiman-Marcus. A weasel-mouth can’t wear a hat like this and get away with it, if y’all know what I mean.”

  I’d seen all kinds of weasel-mouths in my time, but I let that one pass. “Pleased to meet you. I’ve got my Fiat gassed, and we’ve got people waiting to see us at the Quinault Indian Reservation. It’s a bit of a drive. We have to go south through Tacoma to Olympia at the southern end of the Sound, and from there to the coast.”

  “Don’t mind a little drivin’, I grew up in West Texas. Thought nothing of drivin’ a hundred miles to do a little honky-tonkin’.” He pronounced Texas Tex-is. That sounded genuine.

  We retrieved Poorman’s luggage and in a half-hour were on our way south, moving through a light rain. Poorman seemed to enjoy the ride and was full of questions as he read road signs.

  “Y’all’ve got some mighty pretty country up here, Mr. Denson, but with all this rain, I’d be afraid of having my joints rust.”

  “You’re probably better off in Arizona if you have arthritis,” I said.

  We got to the Quinault Reservation a little more than an hour later, and I pulled up at the information center. A pregnant girl with pretty brown eyes gave us a map of the reservation. She used a stubby pencil to trace the route to the SalPaclnc smokehouse. “Mr. Davis is expecting you, Mr. Denson,” she said. She could hardly keep her eyes off Augustus Poorman and his hat. “I hope you like our salmon,” she said. “They say it’s the best in the world.”

  “I’m sure I’ll like it a lot,” Poorman said. When we got into the Fiat, he said, “Advertising people are pretty damned good at writing fiction, Mr. Denson. Y’all’d just be amazed at what people will feed you and call good food. Sometime when you’ve got an empty stomach, y’all should ask me about the chocolate mousse I sampled down in Dallas one time. Folks had the gall to think they were gonna sell that stuff to a Neiman-Marcus buyer. Hell, I had refried beans in Nacogdoches once that tasted a damn sight better, if you know what I mean.”

  I said, “The way I hear it, a Texan’ll try to sell you anything.”

  Poorman laughed heartily. “Hell, son, all Texans’re full of manure, we both know that. When I got hooked up with Hillendale’s, ah had to set a lot of that aside. Not all of it, mind you — oh earn my livin’ from my charm. You know, Hillendale’s pays well enough, I guess, but the folks there ain’t a whole lot of fun. The executives there wash their hands after they drain their lizards. Now that don’t make a whole lot of sense, does it?”

  I looked at Poorman and blinked.

  He grinned. “Down in Texas daddies teach their kids not to go pee-pee on their fingers.”

  August Poorman believed in doing an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay. The Hillendale’s people wanted charm, they got charm. I followed the directions on my map and soon we saw the smokehouse — a low, modern-looking building a couple of hundred yards up from the Pacific Ocean.

  Poorman smiled. “Y’all suppose they always had smokehouses like this, Mr. Denson? I mean when Captain Grey sailed up the Columbia and all.”

  The SalPaclnc smokehouse and cannery was a building of uninspired, cheapskate modern — it could have been a motel, a minimum-security prison, or a schoolhouse, depending on your imagination. “Times change,” I said.

  “As long as the salmon is what they say it is, that’s all I care, Mr. Denson. I don’t care for fish stories, if you know what I mean.”

  Jim Davis, the man in charge of the reservation smokehouse, had been warned that the man from Hillendale’s was on his way. He was at the front door to meet us, clipboard in hand. He wore blue jeans, a brown tweed jacket, and a western string tie. He had a long black pigtail running down the back of his jacket. He was not a full-blooded Indian. His eyes were a disconcerting green.

  “Mr. Denson. Mr. Poorman.” Davis shook our hands solemnly. If the SalPaclnc smokehouse sold to Hillendale’s, its owners had a ready-made endorsement for their advertising. “If you gentlemen will wait here a moment I’ll tell the people out back that you’re here. We ordinarily don’t have visitors. We’ve got too much work to do. We’ve had a few mechanical problems lately, but we’ve got that squared away.”

  Davis walked quickly down a hall, opened a door, and said something to whoever was inside.

  Poorman said to me, “It may be true that he doesn’t look like he stepped off a nickel, Mr. Denson, but remember, the salmon’s the thing.” When Davis returned, Poorman said, “Could you tell us your marinade formula, Mr. Davis? I’ve been told the secret of good smoke
d fish is the marinade.”

  “And the wood you use,” Davis said. “I’m sorry, I won’t be able to give you the recipe for the marinade. In this case it’s a tribal secret; it’s why our fish is better than the next guy’s. You wouldn’t want us to give away something like that, would you?”

  Poorman looked thoughtful and adjusted his Stetson. White folks paid top dollar for mystique. “I see,” he said.

  “I can take you to the smoking bodge,” Davis said. He gave Poorman his clipboard. “As you can see, these fish are all caught by Indians. We log in the fisherman’s name and the time and place the fish was caught.” Davis waited while Poorman examined the chart. “We feed all this information into a computer and it helps us increase the catch from year to year.”

  I said, “You wouldn’t happen to buy fish from the Prettybird brothers, would you? Willie’s a dart-throwing friend of mine.”

  Davis cleared his throat. “Why, yes, I’ve bought fish from Willie and Rodney.”

  Poorman gave the clipboard back to his host. “I take it I can buy a few fish to sample before I place a larger order for my clients.”

  “Certainly,” Davis said. “We ordinarily don’t like people going in and out of the smokehouse because it changes the humidity. We do our best to re-create the interior of a traditional smoking hodge, Mr. Poorman, but we do have state and federal sanitary regulations to follow. I’m sure you understand.”

  “Damn government’s everywhere, that’s a fact,” Poorman said.

  “We use only hardwoods indigenous to the Pacific Northwest,” Davis said. “That’s guaranteed, as is the authenticity of our marinade.” He was calm in the presence of a Hillendale’s buyer, I granted him that. We followed him down the hall to the door opposite the one he had opened earlier. Inside the smoking hodge, a conveyor belt of heavy-gauge wire screen emerged from the smoking chamber.

  “We move our salmon in and out of our smoke hodge on this conveyor belt so as to reduce handling by human hands. When one of our customers orders a whole smoked salmon, he wants it to look like a salmon. Cooked fish doesn’t hold up under a lot of handling.”

  “We don’t sell food that don’t look handsome,” Poorman said.

  Davis looked solemnly at his clipboard. “Now, then, Mr. Poorman, as you will see, each one of these fish is identified by a large numbered tag. I’ll start the conveyor belt, and as the salmon come out of the smoke and pass by us, I’ll give you the identifying data of each fish and you can select or reject them as you please. The choice is up to you. The fish I’m showing here are our best; they’re line-caught, by the way.” Davis, too, had read the blurb in the Hillendale’s catalog. All three of us knew the line-caught business was nonsense.

  “We want the best,” Poorman said. “Y’all’ve got quite a setup here.”

  Davis pushed a small red button and the wire belt started moving. We watched the first salmon emerge from the smokehouse.

  “Okay, now this first fish — fish number one — is an eighteen-pound Chinook caught by James Whitewater just off Moclips yesterday afternoon. James is a Quinault. Do you want the time on that?”

  “You can skip the times. Good-looking fish. I’ll take it,” Poorman said.

  Davis apparently needed reading glasses, because he held the clipboard in front of him at nearly arm’s length and squinted. “Fish number two was also caught off the mouth of the Columbia by Rodney Prettybird, a Cowlitz.” Davis glanced at me. “This is a coho, or what we call a silver here in the Northwest. This one’s eight pounds. These smaller fish can sometimes be the best. Hillendale’s would be getting chinook only, however — no silvers.”

  “I’ll take that one, too,” Poorman said.

  So it went, all the identifying data as the fish passed by on the belt. Augustus Poorman bought four fish. Then, he said, “If we could also see the canning facilities.”

  “Certainly,” Davis said. He led us to the far end of the building, into a large, steamy room, with shiny cans moving herky-jerky along a cable that had supports on either side to keep the cans upright. “Here’s our canning room. We have the latest, most up-to-date canning equipment — imported from Sweden. Everything exceeds federal safety standards.”

  “You have to be careful when you’re talking canned fish,” Poorman said. He didn’t need to mention the Alaskan botulism that had financially destroyed a cannery.

  “Believe me, we’re careful,” Davis said. “We’ve got our reputation.”

  “Mr. Denson here is gonna have to give a report to our insurers — do you suppose you could take us right up to the line there? Let us take a look.”

  Davis nodded and led the way to cans of smoked canned salmon as they inched their way to the sealer machine that slapped a lid on then made a little whump-huff sound. It went whump-huff, whump-huff, whump-huff, as the cans went through one, two, three.

  Poorman said, “You might want to examine a few cans at random, Mr. Denson; you want to be able to include that in your report. Looks impressive there.”

  “Help yourself,” Davis said. “As you can see, we’re generous with the fish. We’re not selling cans of water. We let other people do that.”

  “How long before this gets on the market?” Poorman asked.

  “Once these cans go through the labeler there, we box them and put them on the truck. We deal in quality fish. We don’t let it back up and stand around. You’ll be able to buy these cans tomorrow afternoon at the Pike Place Market or in your better shops.”

  I noticed he said shops, not markets. You had to have a few bucks to spring for this fish. I picked up a can and examined the contents, although I didn’t have any idea what I was supposed to be looking for. I tried not to breathe or shed dandruff or something. It looked like good salmon to me. It certainly smelled good. I handed it to Augustus Poorman and he looked at it also. He insisted on being dramatic with each can, lingered over it, peering at each close up, like he really knew his stuff. We went through this boring charade for ten or twelve cans before I’d had enough.

  The whole thing was so dumb. I should have known something was wrong. What kind of Texan is it who takes five minutes to examine a can of fish? For that matter, what kind of Texan is it who wears gloves all the time? Texans want to show off the domestic crude under their nails. A man from Hillendale’s wearing a white Stetson? That was just a bit much, if I’d really thought about it.

  15 - FOXX JENSEN

  I drove Augustus Poorman to Olympia, where he could make airline connections to New York, and turned south on 1-5, listening to reports of a frozen foot being found in the Pioneer Place. Thanks to the Hillendale’s assignment, I was already sixty miles south of Seattle, and there was no reason I could see not to take advantage of a head start. I drove to Ilwaco at the mouth of the Columbia River, a rainy three-hour grind; I wanted to talk to William “Foxx” Jensen, champion of the sport fisherman.

  It was easy to find Jensen’s motel; Foxx Jensen’s Chinook Inn was the largest and newest in Ilwaco and had a fine view of the fishing harbor. The windows of the Inn’s restaurant were steamed from the warmth inside; it looked charming, welcoming, a cozy refuge from the cold mist. I shook the rain off my Irish walking hat and opened the door to the smell of frying Walla Walla sweets and the muted clunk clunk of dishes in the kitchen. The tables and chairs were made of varnished knotty pine; there were elks’ antlers on the walls, stuffed pheasants, stuffed mallards and chukkers, mounted chinooks and silvers. Some of the fried onions were crammed inside cheeseburgers on the tray of a waitress on her way to a table of fishermen.

  “Those onions smell good,” I said. “I’m looking for a man named William Jensen.”

  The waitress smiled. “The onions on that grill sell a lot of cheeseburgers. Everybody calls him Foxx. He and George just got in from Seattle.” The waitress motioned to an enormous fireplace in the main dining room. The fireplace was made of Oregon rainbow, a rose-colored stone streaked with lavenders, yellows, and greens.

  The red
oubtable Foxx Jensen himself, gentleman and sportsman, sat in a rocking chair drinking a cup of coffee and stroking the belly of his affectionate dog. It was the same dog who had been at his side when I saw him on television. The grateful dog turned on his back. He smiled a dog’s smile; his brown eyes turned to look at me, but his head never moved.

  Jensen was in his late forties. His neck rose from his shoulders like one of Mike Stark’s Chanterelle mushrooms. His face, colored by wind, sun, and bourbon whiskey, looked like a freshly scrubbed red potato. He wore a wool shirt with large red-and-black checks, like sportsmen wear in Field & Stream magazine. I gave him my line about representing a life-insurance company. He rolled his eyes and grinned a lopsided sardonic grin.

  Jensen waved at his waitress. “Another cup for me and one for my friend here. Sure, Mr. Denson, I’ll tell you what you want to know. We don’t have anything to fear from the truth. The truth never hurt anybody. Ain’t that right, George?” He gave the dog a pat. “Little more truth and we’d all be better off.”

  “The truth is all I’m interested in.”

  Jensen shook his Chanterelle neck vigorously, with much sincerity. “Glad you came down, Mr. Denson, I mean that. There’s so much bullshit about this so-called ‘Indian rights’ business that you just wouldn’t believe it. Oh, George, George.” He rubbed the dog’s belly.

  I sat down and accepted the coffee.

  “George’s a hunter. He points. He retrieves. He does everything. He’s a German shorthair. There’s no reason to feed a big lummox of a dog. The breeders got smart, started moving toward smaller dogs. You just love the water, don’t you, George?” Jensen stroked George’s upturned belly. “I’ve been up in Seattle talking to reporters and the television people. I want to tell you something about this fishing hoorah that’s a fact, Mr. Denson. If you take into account what people spend in motels and restaurants, sportsmen spend about thirty bucks for every fish they take out of the water. Thirty bucks! You can troll a lot of damn lures in the water without destroying the salmon run. If we sportsmen weren’t organized, there wouldn’t be a damn salmon left in these rivers.”