water. What was visible could hardly be called a face. His features were distorted and out of focus where skin slippage and feeding fish had done their ugly work. His hair, slicked down against his scalp, was dark and shiny, matted with oil from the lake.
Horror movies manufacture phony death masks all the time. Cassie Young was in the movie business. I found it surprising that she took it so hard, that she was so shocked and shaken, but of course horror-movie masks are done in the name of good clean fun. This wasn't fun or make-believe.
This was real-all too real.
I turned around to assess the situation. It was as though everyone on the set was frozen in place. Nobody moved. Nobody said a word. On the top surface of the wingwall stood a cluster of men, grouped in a tight circle around what I assumed to be a stricken Hannah Boyer. I was grateful someone had managed to catch her and drag her to safety. If a twenty-foot fall doesn't kill you, it cripples you up real good.
The first person to move was Woody Carroll, who hurried toward me as fast as his seventy-year-old legs would carry him. He stopped beside me and looked into the water.
'Call 911,' I ordered. 'Have 'em send an ambulance for Hannah and a squad car for him.' Without a word of protest, Woody nodded, turned, and hurried away toward a phone which was visible near the base of the wingwall.
Lake Union Drydock consists of some 500,000-odd square feet, all of it sitting over thirty-five feet of water. Walking or driving, you have to cross a city-owned moat to get there. The various shops and docks are thrown together in a crazy-quilt, hodgepodge pattern. The company has been in continuous existence and use since 1919. Buildings and docks have been added whenever and wherever the spirit moved, giving the whole place a haphazard, thrown-together appearance.
Looking now at the maze of buildings and docks, I wondered how emergency vehicles would ever manage to find us. We were clear out near the base of the largest drydock.
Woody picked up the receiver of the phone. No sooner had he spoken into it than a shrill whistle sounded, sending five short sharp blasts into the air. Woody put the phone down and hurried back to me.
'You'd better go meet them and direct them here to us,' I told him. 'Otherwise they'll never be able to find us.'
Woody laughed. 'Those other guys I told you about are already on their way. That's what the whistle's for. Don't worry. They'll find us.'
Woody had informed me earlier that a skeleton safety crew was playing cards upstairs in an employee locker room. I hadn't thought we'd need them. Now I was more than happy they were there.
Goldfarb, down from his overhead perch, stormed up behind me. 'What's going on, Beaumont?' he demanded. 'We've got a movie to shoot. We're losing the light.'
In the days I had been on the set I had found Goldfarb to be an altogether disagreeable little man who put his bad temper on a pedestal and called it 'Artistic License.' I had watched over and over as the whole crew leaped to satisfy his slightest whim. But that was movie business. This was police business, my business-maybe homicide.
The crew suddenly came unstuck. They edged forward, trying to catch sight of whatever was under the dock. I shooed the nearest ones away.
'Get your people out of here, Mr. Goldfarb. We've got emergency vehicles on the way.' Even as I spoke, I heard the thin wail of an approaching siren.
'Cops?' Goldfarb screeched, his voice becoming shrill. 'You mean somebody's called the cops?'
'That's exactly what I mean, Mr. Goldfarb,' I returned.
Goldfarb wasn't my boss, and I had developed a certain immunity to the director's ravings. He was a chronic complainer, always bitching and moaning, always at the top of his lungs.
'You can't do that, Detective Beaumont,' he roared back. 'You can't bring cops in here and order me to clear out my people.'
'Watch me,' I said. I turned to Woody. 'Do it.'
He did, quickly and effectively, leaving Sam 'The Movie Man' Goldfarb hopping from foot to foot in total frustration.
'Cassie, can't you stop this?' he wailed. From bellowing one minute, Goldfarb was reduced to whining the next. 'Robert Dawson's going to hear about this,' he continued to me. 'I'll see you fired before the day's over.'
Hizzoner can stick it in his ear, I thought. I said, 'Be my guest. You do that.'
Seattle's Medic One has some of the best response times in the country. An aid car was the first emergency vehicle to appear on the scene. It rattled noisily over the wooden planks and jerked to a stop. I hurried to meet it and directed the medics to the stairs. 'The woman's up there,' I said, pointing. 'On the wingwall.'
'Great,' the driver replied, shading his eyes and evaluating the perpendicular wall with its steep wooden staircase. 'What's wrong with her?'
'Fainted probably.'
He drove the aid car as close as he could to the bottom of the steps. He and his partner leaped from their vehicle just as a Seattle P.D. squad car pulled up on the dock behind me. Two uniformed officers got out, a man and a woman.
The man was a guy named Phil Baxter. I had seen him around the department before, although I had to check his name tag before I could remember his name. The woman was a young black with the name 'Jackson' pinned to the breast pocket of her blue uniform. She was new to me.
'What's going on here?' Baxter demanded of no one in particular. 'Who's in charge?'
'Looks like he is,' Goldfarb said disgustedly, pointing at me.
I answered with no further prompting. 'A body,' I told Phil. 'Over there. In the water.'
Baxter walked to the edge of the dock and looked down. Sheer force of habit made me follow. It was still there, slapping against the wooden piling as the wake of a landing float plane rippled across the lake.
As the body rose and fell, a large decorative brass belt buckle glinted briefly in the sun, just under the water's surface. There was a design on it of some kind, and some printing as well. I squinted my best middle-aged squint. Try as I might I couldn't make out the letters.
'Can you read what it says on that buckle?' I asked Baxter.
He too squinted. 'Not from here,' he answered.
I hadn't noticed, but his partner, Officer Jackson, had followed us. 'It says ‘Ironworker,'' she remarked quietly.
I glanced back at her in some surprise. She was several feet farther away than I was, and she was able to read it when neither Baxter nor I could. 'My vision's twenty-ten,' she explained with a smile that made me feel ancient.
For the first time Officer Baxter looked me full in the face. 'Why, excuse me, Detective Beaumont. I didn't recognize you. How'd homicide get here so fast? I was just getting ready to call you guys.'
'Go ahead and call,' I told him. 'I'm not here representing homicide.'
'You're not?'
I didn't want to go into all the gory details of why I was there. 'Trust me on this one,' I said. 'Call Harbor Patrol and have them send somebody out.'
Baxter turned to his partner. 'Do that, would you, Merrilee?'
With a nod, Officer Jackson headed back toward the patrol car.
I felt a tap on my shoulder. When I turned, there was Derrick Parker. 'Hey, Beau. What's going on?' he asked tentatively. 'Hannah really got an eyeful. She fainted dead away.'
'How is she?'
'Hyperventilating. She was coming around, but she had a relapse as soon as the medics showed up. Hannah's got the hots for guys in uniform.'
Derrick Parker wasn't the least bit fond of his female costar. He and I had chummed around together some while he had been in Seattle. We shared similar tastes, although his ran to Glenlivet rather than MacNaughton's. He seemed to enjoy slumming in some of my favorite watering holes. The waitresses at the Doghouse still hadn't tumbled to the fact that he was a genuine celebrity. Parker said he wanted to keep it that way.
'Who was he?' Parker asked, nodding toward the water.
'The dead man?' I shrugged. 'That's up to the medical examiner and the detectives on the case.'
