CHRISTMAS IN PUYALLUP
BY DANIEL CLARKE SMITH
Copyright 2011 Daniel Clarke Smith
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I had just finished pushing my dad back to his room after the Thanksgiving feast when my cell phone rang. “Is that you, Parker?” said Molly on the other end. I had abandoned sarcasm in my teens, so I bit my tongue.
“You bet,” I said. The aide in my dad’s room waved to me. She’d put him back to bed.
“Sorry to bug you on a holiday. The boss wanted me to call.”
“The party’s over,” I said. I started walking down the waxed corridor toward the exit. I’ve gotten used to the smell of the place, but after every visit I go straight home and take a shower. I function better that way. The aide in the glassed in booth waved to me and buzzed the lock. Molly described her morning with her fiancé’s parents. Her family lives where there is always snow this time of year. She visits them when the weather is better.
The parking lot held some residual puddles from a rain shower. I slalomed around them and went to the corner where I had left my car. Molly concluded her monologue as I closed the door. “Any way, I left a folder on your desk yesterday and forgot to tell you. A new case. Can you get started first thing Monday?”
“Why wait?” I said.
Holiday traffic allows the illusion of speed and convenience to exist for a few hours in the urban jungle. I set a new personal record for driving to Tacoma from Everett. I found the file waiting for me and decided to read it, and then decide if I’d start Friday or Monday.
Jacobs, Warren Jr.
DOB 6/14/1970
Amount of Bond: $10,000
Date of forfeiture: 10/31/2010
Last known address: 592 3rd St SE Puyallup
Bond Guarantor: Brenda Jacobs, 592 3rd St SE Puyallup
The rest of the file contained the depressing details of the life and hard times of Warren Jacobs, Jr. I didn’t need to read it, but I did. Nothing in his past was going to make my job any easier. This was a small time case for a small amount of bail bond recovery. The bail recovery company must not have enough in the bank to pay the light bill or something. Criminals weren’t in short supply, but in the lousy economy bail recovery agents were popping up like mushrooms after a rain. A rival group had just opened an office down the hall from us. Two guys recently discharged from the 42nd Military Police Brigade at Ft. Lewis thought the life of a bounty hunter might supply them with tension similar to what they had known in the Army. That’s what they told me when I met them walking out of the building a couple of weeks before. They were full of swagger and dressed like they were going on a mission in downtown Baghdad: camo BDUs, Kevlar vests, and canisters of pepper gas and Berettas on their belts. I tried to make a joke about it and got a seriously stony response. Their target was known to me: a diabetic amputee that I had caught six months before after he jumped bail for kiting some checks. “He’ll be at his sister’s house in Olympia,” I said. “She has a dog, but it’s blind, too.”
Tacoma turns into Puyallup if you drive east far enough. I took the road along the Puyallup River because I wasn’t in a hurry. I doubt I saved much time. My GPS wanted to divert me to an alternate route, so I eventually switched it off, even though I like the voice I selected for the test-to-speech function. The town is laid out on a grid so it’s easy to find places. I drove south on Meridian, which cuts the town in half. Just past the railroad tracks I crossed Main Avenue and parked the car. I switched the GPS back on and punched in Brenda Jacobs’ address. Turned out I wasn’t far away. I kept going south on Meridian, past a jeweler’s, a deli, a pawn shop, barber shop , hardware store, bank and the Safeway supermarket.
The Jacobs house was across the street from the junior high school. A white picket fence separated the yard from the sidewalk and an enormous hardwood tree spread a canopy of shade well into the street. The span of the branches was greater than the width of the lawn. I took it to be an oak of some kind. The diameter of the trunk was close to five feet at the base. It had to be a couple of hundred years old, at least. The tree had seen the changes in the valley from the habitation of the Puyallup tribe, the incursion of white settlers in the latter half of the 19th century and the internment of Japanese-Americans in the 1940s. I looked for a commemorative plaque but there was nothing, just weathered bark. Eight feet off the ground, anchored with a combination of metal cable and 2x 4s nailed to the trunk was a kid’s tree house.
The residence had started out a small cottage but expansions and additions created three distinct segments. The walls were a cheery sunflower yellow and under each window hung a flower box, each one filled with a symphony of brightly colored flowers. I opened the gate and approached the front door. Only then I noticed the flags displayed in the front right window: an American flag and one of equal size with the silhouette of a man in the foreground, head bowed. In the background was a hut-like structure sitting on a tower constructed of criss-crossing beams. Above the tableau was printed in bold: POW * MIA.
I was just about to knock when the door opened inward and I faced a woman of about seventy who had the leathery skin of a lifetime smoker. When she spoke it only confirmed my hypothesis. She was tiny, a whole head shorter than my five feet ten, and wore faded green slacks and a sweatshirt with “Huskies” printed on it. She looked me up and down.
“What do you want?” she said.
“It’s about Warren. Your son, I mean.” I didn’t think she could be married to a forty year old, but you can’t always tell about people.
“He isn’t here.”
“I know. I want to ask some questions,” I said
“You from the bail bond company?”
I get asked that a lot. I don’t fit the stereotype. No reason I should. I don’t get into it unless somebody presses me. She frowned when I said yes.
“I suppose you got a warrant. You’re wasting your time. He doesn’t come around when he skips bail. He knows better.”
That didn’t surprise me. Neither her denial nor that he’d jumped bail before. Bail skipping becomes a career, part of a criminal’s MO. It’s unusual for fugitive not to ask a relative to hide him. Wives, girlfriends, parents; it doesn’t matter. She was right about the warrant. I always carry one. It allows me to kick down the door if I have to. My boss would have. I don’t operate that way.
I walked past her into the living room and was struck by the orderliness of everything. The carpet was spotless, the furniture old but well tended. The walls were decorated with framed photographs, mainly of outdoor scenes as you’d expect in the Northwest: Mt Rainier, the Olympic range, some massive evergreens in the rain forest, the ocean beating upon a beach, ferries in Puget Sound. Some of the photos were of people. The biggest showed a young couple: the woman in white with a veil half lifted off her face gazing with absolute adoration at the man, handsome in his uniform, looking like a world beater with his dress hat at a jaunty angle.
I sat on the edge of the couch, not wanting to somehow leave a mark on the slip cover. I waited for Mrs. Jacobs to sit, but she didn’t. “Would you like coffee?” she asked.
“No thanks. Really, I don’t want to bother you. I want you to get a message to Warren. It’s not as bad as he thinks if he turns himself in. I can help.”
“That’s what his lawyer said too. He doesn’t trust authority. It’s on account of his stepfather.”
I pointed at the wedding portrait and raised my eyebrows.
“No, that’s his real father. He never saw him. Warren Sr. was shot down over North Vietnam when Warren Jr. was two weeks old. He never came home. His body, so they say, was never recovered. I re-married
real fast. Maybe too fast. I don’t know why, but Warren Jr. never could get along with Dick. They fought like animals and Dick and I got divorced when Warren Jr. was sixteen. I never had more kids. The doctors said my loss made me barren.
Mrs. Jacobs stood beside the kitchen entryway, in front of a door that could have been a closet. I gave her my card and told her to call me if she heard from her son.
A few minutes later I was back in my car, headed toward downtown. I remembered the barber shop and decided to get a trim before next week. The shop had two chairs and one talkative barber. I asked him if he knew the Jacobs family. It turned out he had gone to school with Warren Jr. “Never knew him real well. He was different, you know. Didn’t go out for sports. Didn’t have a girlfriend. He got expelled senior year for vandalizing a store owned by some Vietnamese people. Real nice family. Christians. Warren