J. Jance - Long Time Gone

I called Wall Street Tower. When no one answered the phone in Marty’s room, I drove straight to the Five-Spot and parked on the street at a parking meter that had an astonishing thirty-nine minutes still left on it. Darting inside out of the rain, I spotted Marty sitting alone in a booth at the far end of the room, absently stirring a cup of coffee while staring down at the black-and-white-tiled floor.

“Hey, Marty,” I said. “How’s it going?”

“Who is it?” he asked, holding out a tremulous hand. “Can’t see the way I used to, you know. This damned macular degeneration.”

“Beaumont,” I said. “J. P. Beaumont.”

Martin Woodman’s hand may have trembled when he offered it to me, but his grip was as bone-crushingly firm as ever.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “I remember you. From Seattle PD. You’re with that new outfit now, aren’t you, the one from the AG’s office? What’s its name again?”

“Special Homicide Investigation Team.”

He nodded sagely. “That’s right. SHIT. Hell of a name, if you ask me. Wouldn’t have gotten away with calling it that back in the old days, never in a million years. Have a seat, J.P. What can I do for you?”

Marty’s vision may have been going, but his mental faculties were as sharp as ever.

“I’m looking for William Winkler,” I said without preamble. “I was wondering if he’s still around.”

“Wink? Oh, sure. Lives at a retirement home over in West Seattle. It’s not that good a place, but it’s the best he could afford. Wink’s cantankerous as hell, but then he always has been. I’m guessing his son put him there when he and his wife couldn’t take care of him anymore or when they couldn’t stand being around him.”

“Health’s no good?” I asked.

“Hell,” Marty replied. “At our age, if you’re still alive, you shouldn’t complain. Doesn’t do any good, anyway. What do you want him for?”

“I’m following up on a case of his from a long time ago. I wanted to see if he could shed any light on it.”

Marty Woodman frowned. “You know he left the department…”

“Under a cloud?” I supplied. “Yes, but all this went on quite a while before that. You wouldn’t happen to have his address or telephone number, would you?”

“I do, but it’s back at my apartment. If you wouldn’t mind walking me over there. They keep trying to get me to use this.” He picked up a white cane and tapped it impatiently on the floor. “But it’s hard teaching an old dog new tricks. So usually, when I’m ready to go back home, I call the reception desk and they send someone over to walk me there.”

As we walked through the rain across the plaza and into the lobby of Wall Street Tower, I wondered how someone as blind as Marty Woodman would be able to find and decipher an address or phone number, but I shouldn’t have worried. Marty’s one-bedroom apartment was tiny and immaculate. Most of the living room was occupied by an enormous dining-room table, the surface of which was almost completely covered with an array of complicated computer equipment and a snarl of cables.

Standing next to the CRT, Marty clapped his hands once and the familiar start-up screen appeared. “Works just like one of those clickers,” Marty said with a grin. “One clap turns it on, two turn it off. When I told Footprinters I was going blind, some of them came over and jury-rigged this sound-and-voice-activated outfit together for me. They didn’t want me to quit working, especially since nobody else wants to do what I do. Have a chair,” he added. “This shouldn’t take too long. I call her Joyce, by the way.”

And it didn’t take long at all. In order to access his database, he spoke into some unseen microphone. His voice-recognition software responded in the form of a computer-generated female voice. Marty’s “Joyce” sounded just like the woman who has spent years annoying everyone unfortunate enough to venture into the phone company’s version of voice-mail hell. Before long Joyce was reeling off Wink Winkler’s telephone number along with an address on Thirty-fifth in West Seattle. I jotted them down as she delivered them.

“You get all that?” Marty asked.

“Yes, I did. Thanks. But you were wrong.”

Marty frowned. “About what?”

“You said you were too old to learn new tricks. Obviously you have.”

The frown disappeared. Marty gave the top of his CRT an affectionate pat. “Modern science is a miracle, isn’t it? Without her I’d be just plain useless.”

I had to agree with him there. Modern science was a miracle. “You’re right,” I said. “It’s downright amazing, but you might think about giving that cane of yours a try, too.”

“Why?” he asked. “So I can walk in front of a bus?”

“Never mind,” I said.

When I left, Marty walked me as far as the door. “I don’t know what kind of a case you’re working,” he said, “but don’t be too hard on poor old Wink. He did all right when he first left the department-had a lot of helpful connections and made some good investments, but then things started falling apart. Drank too much, gambled too much, his marriage broke up. You know the drill.”

I nodded. It was an end-of-career path for far too many of the cops I knew.

“He and his son wound up owning a place called Emerald City Security, a moderately successful rent-a-cop company,” Marty continued. “That went on until a few years ago. I’m not sure of all the details, but when the dust settled, the kid had the company and Wink ended up with next to nothing.”

“I’ll bear all that in mind,” I said.

As I rode down in the elevator, I realized that the very existence of Marty Woodman’s computer setup was one of those things where what goes around comes around. For a change it had happened the right way. After all the years Marty had spent making sure Footprinters weren’t forgotten, it was nice to know that they had returned the favor.

People who live in Seattle have two constant sources of complaint. We’re forever whining about either the weather or the traffic, or both. It seems to me that people who don’t like the weather should leave. That by itself would probably go a long way toward fixing the traffic woes. And then, the next time our elected officials ask for money to fix the roads, the complainers who stay on should all belly up to the bar and offer to pay their fair share.

All this is to say that the drive to West Seattle, which should have taken about twenty minutes in the middle of the day, ended up taking an hour and twenty minutes. I hadn’t called ahead to say I was dropping by because I didn’t want to give Wink Winkler an opportunity to tell me not to. Besides, I didn’t want to give him too much time in advance to wonder about why I was paying him a visit.

Even from the street, Home Sweet Home Retirement Center looked depressing. Someone had carved a steep wheelchair ramp up the bank between the street and a tiny front yard that was a sea of melting snow and mud and punctuated with cigarette butts. A second ramp, a makeshift plywood travesty covered with frayed indoor-outdoor carpeting, went from yard level to a rickety front porch. A hand-stenciled sign on the door casing announced “All Visitors Check with Front Desk,” but of course there was no one manning the dingy front desk. The place smelled of mold and mildew and years of bad cooking, but a current health inspection certificate was prominently displayed behind the desk as if defying anyone to question the center’s good reputation.

Home Sweet Home made Marty Woodman’s digs at Wall Street Tower and Lars and Beverly Jenssen’s cozy apartment at the Queen Anne Gardens seem downright palatial.

There was a bell on the desk. I rang it three times before anyone appeared, then a door opened and a tiny Asian woman stepped through a swinging door. She looked old enough and frail enough to be one of the residents, but she was wearing a baggy flowered uniform and carried a broom with a handle that was a foot taller than she was.