Page 45 of Den of Iniquity

He had said the car restoration outfit was in Seattle. That wasn’tentirely true. To people from outside the area, the wordSeattleincludes the entire metropolitan area. In actual fact, the address I keyed into my phone’s GPS was in Woodinville, a suburb located on the far northeast side of Lake Washington and a good twelve or thirteen miles from Seattle proper. That address was fine with me, however, since Greta and her husband lived in Sammamish, which is also on the Eastside.

Leaving Sarah in the car, I accompanied Hank into the garage to take a gander at his restored Shelby. It was gorgeous—a sight to be seen! It looked as though it was fresh out of the factory and sitting on an original showroom floor. It was blue with gray racing stripes. Blue happens to be my favorite color.

“Love the color,” I murmured.

Hank nodded. “Sapphire Blue and Silver Mist,” he said, “the original factory colors.”

He opened the driver’s door and took a seat. I bent down to examine the interior. It was mostly black with gray leather seats and a matching steering wheel that were the same color as the racing stripes on the exterior.

“Nice,” I said.

“And take a look at this,” Hank added, patting the gearshift. “It comes with original equipment antitheft protection—a standard transmission.”

I was still chuckling about that as I drove away, heading south. Since traffic had been nonexistent, I had some extra time on my hands before my appointment with Greta Halliday, so I stopped off at Burgermaster along the way and ordered a pair of burgers—a plain one for Sarah and a loaded one for me. I didn’t envy thecarhops who cheerfully delivered our food despite the miserable weather, but the burgers were great.

As soon as we turned east on I-90, I saw a sign on the roadway warning that Snoqualmie Pass was closed at the summit due to accidents. Fortunately for us, we weren’t going that far. After dinner the previous evening I had done some research on Greta and her husband, Connor. They were clearly your basic power couple. He was a Microsoft exec, while she was listed as the top-selling agent in her real estate office. The two of them were front and center at local art scene events and charity galas. She had left her humble beginnings in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood far behind. No wonder she was so dismissive of her underperforming and now deceased brother.

So why, if Greta was that well-off, had she been so angry to learn that Alma had been continuing to provide financial support to Loren despite the presence of that no-contact order? Or was she simply pissed over her mother’s continuing enabling? As the King of Siam would say, “Is a puzzlement.”

E. Sammamish Parkway runs north and south along the east side of Lake Sammamish. The steep driveway leading down to the Hallidays’ lakefront home would have been a nail-biter if the snow had actually been sticking, but this was snow mixed with rain, and right then the rain was still winning. When I parked in front of their three-car garage, Sarah sat up and looked around. I had a leash and could have taken her for a brief walk, but she’s still a California dog at heart, and she made her feelings clear by shaking her head, doing three full body turns, and then lying back down. In dog language, that’s known asThanks, but no thanks.

People who can afford sprawling water-view homes in the Seattlearea all have one thing in common—they’re loaded. So when I rang the bell, the woman who came to the door wasn’t what I expected. Dressed in a pair of old sweats and grimy tennis shoes, and with her blond hair pulled back in a noticeably damp ponytail, Greta didn’t look anything at all like the social butterfly I’d seen in photos of her at various galas.

“Mr. Beaumont, I presume?” Greta Halliday asked, holding out her hand and delivering a surprisingly firm handshake. “Come on in. Please pardon the outfit,” she added, “I just came inside from working on the boat.”

She led me into a living room with what would have been a gorgeous view of the lake. Today, however, the only view available was an expanse of gray on gray.

“A little cold to be out working on a boat,” I commented by way of making polite conversation.

“Oh, I wasn’t outside,” she said, gesturing me toward an easy chair facing a wall of floor-to-ceiling lake-view windows. “When we bought this place three years ago, it came complete with an empty boathouse, so I bought something to put inside it for my husband’s fiftieth birthday—a 1956 twenty-six-foot Chris-Craft Flybridge Sedan. We’ve renamed her theMidlife Crisis.”

That comment made me smile. The Hallidays’ midlife crisis vehicle was ten years older than Hank’s.

“So far it’s been more of a project boat than a pleasure one,” she went on. “We’ve had to replace engines, repaint and revarnish inside and out, and put in a new Garmin GPS. We’re currently having all the upholstery redone. My job is polishing the chrome, and believe me there’s a lot of that. Thank God for gel manicures, otherwise my nails would be a mess. But by the time summercomes around this year, after two years of work, she should be ready to do a star turn around Lake Sammamish.”

Greta Halliday was a boat owner who actually polished her own chrome? The woman was becoming more unexpected with every word she uttered.

“Didn’t your father own a boat repair shop?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “It was called the Lake Union Boat Shed. That’s how come I knew that if I was going to buy a boat for Connor, it needed to be a classic. That’s also where I learned to polish chrome. James and I—James is my older brother—worked in Dad’s boathouse from sixth grade on. He paid us, of course, and encouraged us to save every penny. That’s how Jimmy and I both worked our way through college—working for our dad on weekends and during summer vacations. I’ve never understood why the hell they didn’t do Loren the same favor.”

I was surprised that she was the first one to mention her late brother’s name.

“I understand he was a lot younger than you,” I ventured.

“That’s true,” she answered. “Ten years younger than me and twelve years younger than James. By the time he came along our parents were totally different people from who they’d been when Jimmy and I were little. For one thing, my mother almost died in childbirth when Loren was born. She was in the delivery room for more than an hour before they finally did an emergency C-section.

“Loren was always mean, from the time he was a toddler. I’ve long suspected that he might have had some frontal lobe damage that could have been attributed to that difficult delivery situation. And then, once he got to school, there was a lot of bullying because of his dyslexia, but Mom always handled him with kid gloves. Hewas an annoying, spoiled brat as far as I was concerned, but she treated him like he was made of spun gold.”

So far this was sounding like a case of plain old, ordinary sibling rivalry. Had it somehow turned deadly along the way? But letting Greta tell the story her way seemed to be working, so I stifled the questions I’d been planning to ask and listened instead.

“Loren worked in Dad’s boat shop the same way James and I did. In fact, after he dropped out of high school, that’s the only place he ever held a steady job, but he wasn’t much of a worker. I remember Dad complaining that he was lazy and undependable. When Dad had to retire due to health issues, he sold out to his partner who didn’t waste any time giving Loren his walking papers. From then on Loren became my mother’s problem. Once a mama’s boy, always a mama’s boy.”

I noticed that version of the story was slightly different from the one Alma had told Yolanda. According to Alma, Loren had quit. According to Greta, he’d been fired.

“When Dad died, he left my mother in pretty good financial shape, but that was for her on her own. Since Loren didn’t work and was dependent on her for everything, he was a big drain on her finances, but that was the least of her problems.

“Even as a kid, Loren had a hair-trigger temper. I suspected he was mistreating her because I saw bruising on her arms a couple of times, but she always brushed it off—claimed she’d tripped on the staircase or banged her arm on a car door. But that day in 2014 when I walked in on them unexpectedly, he had blackened both her eyes and left her with a bloody nose and with her upper lip bleeding. When I called 911 to report it, he kept screaming at me to put down the phone. Mom was yelling the same thing. But thenhe lunged at me, trying to take the phone away from me. That’s when I put him down.”

---