Harry had said about my connection to Ross Connors. He was right. I was and am Ross Connors’s “go-to guy” for more reasons than Harry I. Ball knows.
Ross and I have dealt with similar tragedies. Anne Corley, my second wife, chose suicide by cop, although that was long enough ago that the term wasn’t in common usage at the time. Ross’s wife, Francine, was carrying on a torrid affair with the husband of a friend. In the process she let slip some information on a supposedly protected witness with fatal results for said witness. When Francine realized that the jig was up and we were coming for her, she went out into their backyard with a handgun and blew her brains out.
Ross and I had also had our difficulties with booze before those tragedies struck, and we both had to get a lot worse before we got better. Ralph Ames, who was once Anne Corley’s attorney and who is now my friend, helped get me into treatment. When Ross finally came to me for help, I did the same thing for him by personally escorting him into his first AA meeting.
People who venture into AA are given a sponsor-someone you can call in the middle of the night when the temptation to drink is too great and you need a human voice to talk you down out of the trees. My longtime AA sponsor is Lars Jenssen, a retired ninety-something halibut fisherman who became my stepgrandfather by virtue of marrying my widowed grandmother, Beverly Piedmont. He was my sponsor before he married my grandmother and he remains my sponsor to this day, even though, in the aftermath of my grandmother’s death, he took up with another widow, Iris Rasmussen, from Queen Anne Gardens, a Seattle-area retirement home, where the two of them are evidently scandalizing all concerned by openly living in sin.
But I digress. Ross wanted me to be his sponsor. I know from personal experience that having a sponsor who’s more than an hour away is a bad idea, so I found him a group and a sponsor in Olympia. That was the part Harry knew nothing about. Mel knew because she had been privy to some of the phone conversations when Ross called me looking for help, and I know for a fact that Mel can be trusted to keep her mouth shut.
Ross must have understood that, too, I theorized, or he wouldn’t have asked Harry to send both of us, but I couldn’t imagine why. What was going on that Ross couldn’t afford to hand the case off to his Squad A home team?
It had to have something to do with politics. Ross is a political animal. He’s won reelection to the position of attorney general over and over, usually by wide margins. The last election, after the scandal with Francine, he won again, but that one was a squeaker. He had hinted to me that after this four-year term, he most likely wouldn’t run again. Those weren’t words that made me feel all warm and fuzzy. S.H.I.T. has Ross’s own particular stamp on it, and I couldn’t really see myself-or any of us-working for someone else with the same kind of personal loyalty that we all give willingly to Ross Connors.
Whatever this case was, it was also big enough to bring people down.
Harry called while I was still stuck in the traffic jam waiting for the wreckage of the semi to be towed off the freeway.
“Ross says to meet him in the coffee shop of the hotel,” Harry said. “What’s the matter? Doesn’t that ‘dreaded Red’ have a bar? Or maybe their coffee shop serves booze.”
I knew that Ross and Harry had done some drinking together in the old days, but in this instance I played dumb.
“I’m sure you can get anything you want in the coffee shop,” I assured him. “Maybe he missed lunch.”
“Right,” Harry said sarcastically. “Whatever.” He hung up.
If you’ve been in any Red Lion Hotel in the continental United States, you know the drill. There used to be huge wooden carvings on the walls of the lobby and the restaurant. Whenever I saw them, I imagined some crazed woodcarver living off in the woods somewhere, cutting out those gigantic pieces and then warehousing them so there would be a ready supply waiting when it came time to open a new hotel. But things change, and time has taken its toll. Now the Olympia Red Lion lobby is cream and butter-yellow and stone. The crazed carver has probably hung up his chain saw and moved to Palm Springs, where he plays golf every day.
Mel had beaten me to the registration desk. When I walked up to ask for my room key, the desk clerk couldn’t help but give me a knowing leer.
“Ms. Soames has already arrived, Mr. Beaumont,” he said. “Your room charge is already paid, and she left a credit card to cover incidentals. Would you care to leave a card to cover your own?”
I was wearing my wedding ring, and I’m sure Mel was wearing hers. Her credit card charges and mine were all one account, but I didn’t bother explaining that or the last-name situation to the clerk. He was a young guy, somewhere in his late twenties, who seemed astonished by the idea that someone of my advanced age-older than dirt in the clerk’s eyes-could possibly be about to get lucky. I wanted to tell him, “Listen up, turkey. I already
Mel was upstairs in our room and totally unpacked by the time I got there. I told you she drives fast. Like her speedy showers, the unpacking part came from growing up as a military dependent. Every time her family was shipped to a new base, suitcases were unpacked immediately. With clothing in the drawers and closets, it was easier to feel settled faster. She had appropriated the room’s only decent chair and was working on her laptop.
“You took long enough,” she said.
“Harry called,” I told her. “We’re supposed to meet up with Ross in the coffee shop right about now.”
“I know,” Mel said. “I got a call, too, but there’s still no hint about what this is all about?”
“None,” I said.
“Most likely politics as usual,” she said.
“That would be my guess.”
Even though I would have been happy to leave my crap in my roll-aboard, I allowed myself to be influenced by peer pressure. I unpacked and put my underwear and socks in an unoccupied dresser drawer. I hung up my extra slacks and clean shirts, still covered with the dry cleaner’s plastic wrapping. I’m waiting for the day when someone decides that there has to be an extra charge for putting plastic around your freshly laundered shirts. It hasn’t happened so far, probably only because no one has noticed.
“You should check your e-mail,” Mel said, peering at her computer screen.
“Why? Something new from Barbara Galvin? Or is that nice Nigerian widow wanting to send me money again?”
My kids, Scott and Kelly, had been pretty much out of my life for years. When their mother died of cancer, we started trying to reconnect, an effort that was helped immeasurably by Dave Livingston, Karen’s widowed second husband and my kids’ caring stepfather. Kelly, her husband, Jeff Cartwright, and my two grandkids live in Ashland, Oregon. Scott and his wife, Cherisse, live in the Bay Area. For a long time we communicated back and forth by e- mail. Now my generation-X progeny mostly send me text messages or e-mail. Other than work-related messages, most of the other new mail in my e-mail account turns out to be spam.
Mel grinned at me and shook her head. “I was scanning down the junk mail in your spam folder. There’s something in there with a subject line that says ‘Beaumont, Texas.’ ”
The room phone rang just then. Mel picked it up. “Okay,” she said after a moment’s pause. “We’ll be right down.”
“Ross?” I asked.
She nodded.
“Just move that message to my new-mail folder,” I told her. “I’ll read it later. Right now we’d better go see what the boss has in mind.”
“And why he’d rather meet with us here instead of having us stop by his office, which, in my opinion, is a hell of a lot nicer than any hotel coffee shop, and a lot more private, too.”
I was glad to know I wasn’t the only one who had been wondering about that.
We found Ross in the coffee shop downstairs. It was still early enough that the room was mostly empty. The attorney general, with a cup and saucer in front of him, was seated in a booth in the far corner of the room under a huge oil painting that depicted a salmon heading upstream to a most likely unhappy end. From the morose look on Ross’s usually cheerful countenance, the painting seemed like an apt reflection of the AG’s current mood.
As a general rule, when I’m in public places I don’t like sitting with my back to the door. Neither does Mel. We both want to be able to see who is coming in and going out, just in case. In this instance, Ross had already appropriated the door-facing seat in the booth. Mel solved the problem by slipping into the booth next to our boss and letting me have the other side of the booth to myself.
