The Laundress

Crime Fiction by Russell Thayer

“I don’t like costume parties,” said Gunselle.

The beefy thug sitting across from her had demanded an emergency meeting through her discrete answering service. She’d chosen an Italian restaurant on Powell. The place would be crowded at lunchtime, but this didn’t feel like a setup.

“Wear it anyway. Boss’s orders.” He handed her the female copper’s uniform on a wooden hanger, along with a thick yellow envelope that opened on the short end. She lay the outfit across her lap and dug inside the envelope, which contained instructions and pile of C-notes. Gunselle didn’t think of the Oakland mobster as her boss.

She unfolded the instructions, sipping wine as she read. The target location lay in the direct path of the Atlas Creek fire now raging in the Oakland Hills. Rich people lived up there in the piney air with their thousand-mile views and rarefied tastes. The morning Chronicle had reported that some of them vowed to stay in their homes even if it meant they’d be grilled like the spicy sausages on Gunselle’s plate. A stubborn soul at the enclosed address owned a priceless painting. The envelope contained a black and white print torn out of a fancy art book. Young dancers in ballet costumes posed with arms curved like swan’s necks.

“Why do you need me up there?” asked Gunselle. “I’m not looking to get burned alive.” She’d grown up in the mountains of Idaho. She knew what fire could do.

“Because nobody else wants to do it.” He reached into the inner pocket of his jacket. “I was told to offer you another grand if you balked. Everyone knows how much you like the green stuff.” He held the chunk of cash in his hand, which seemed unprofessional. Gunselle snatched it before it caught the eye of an off-duty cop with half a brain.

“It’s not just about money,” she said. “I take pride in my work.”

“I’ll bet you get a tingle between your legs every time you put someone’s lights out.” The thug chuckled as he scanned the other diners.

“How do you know he’s still in the house?” asked Gunselle, trying to remain professional. She dropped the money into her purse with the envelope after holding up a twenty for her favorite red-haired waitress to snag when she passed the table.

“The old man’s still up there,” said the thug. “He can’t drive anymore. He’s trapped like a rat in a cage.”

“Does he have kids?”

“A son. Rat Junior. Good pal of the Boss.”

“Why can’t the son go up and get him?”

“Junior doesn’t want the old man rescued. Everything is insured. Old man. Painting. Get it? Or do I have to write it out on a chalkboard.”

“You can write? That’s cute.” Gunselle took a bite of sausage. “Won’t the insurance man notice one of the paintings is missing? They’re that good, you know. Even after the place has burned to the ground.”

The thug pushed a large leather portfolio from the side of his chair to side of hers.

“Just get going.” He got to his feet. “And make it look good. The house burns, see, but you gotta get the real painting out. The old man? He could take a fall if he’s not careful.”

“Don’t tell me how to do my job,” she said, popping the last bit of sausage into her mouth. She wiped her greasy fingers on the sleeve of the uniform in her lap.

The red-haired waitress let Gunselle change into the policewoman’s skirt and tunic in the kitchen bathroom. The girl was smart and would keep the purse and money safe.

Gunselle’s freshly scrubbed Studebaker Commander waited at the curb outside. She followed the haze of smoke in the east hills as she sped across the Bay Bridge, explaining at a busy checkpoint in Redwood Heights that she’d been instructed by the sheriff to clear a couple of stubborn individuals from a threatened home. No one questioned her. The men seemed nervous at their long, painted sawhorse.

Thick evergreens lined both sides of the gravel road as Gunselle roared on a switchback through the outer perimeter of the mushrooming fire, smoke scouring her nostrils and eyeballs as sparking cinders blew across the windshield or bounced like firecrackers along the roadster’s front hood, making her wish she’d had time to borrow a car.

Six miles deep in the forest, she braked outside a driveway at the top of a ridge, backing the machine to the front of the house so she could flee downhill in a hurry. The police tunic was thick and uncomfortable, an outsized seven-pointed star blazing on the left breast pocket. Gunselle thought it must be awful to work as a lady cop.

She hurried toward the wide porch of the two-story bungalow, a Pulaski handle she kept under the driver’s seat in one hand, the leather portfolio slung over her shoulder.

The bell wouldn’t clang. Power out. Door unlocked.

“San Francisco PD!” she shouted, stepping into the dim, slate-floored vestibule. “Is anyone at home? Hello! We’ve got to go. Right now!” She could feel a breeze kicking up behind her. The door slammed shut.

A faint cry came from the rear of the house. Gunselle hurried toward it.

“Hey, Pops,” she said, spotting a frazzled old man on the floor of a study. He’d apparently collapsed while dragging a large painting into the room. Many of its doomed friends had been hauled there already, leaning against an inner wall, huddled together for efficient incineration. “San Francisco P.D. We’re evacuating the last of you stubborn fools. The fire’s coming on quick.”

“San Francisco, huh?” The old man tried to sit up. “This is Alameda County. You got no business here.”

“I work for morons today. Where’s the picture?” Gunselle lifted the Pulaski handle.

“So that’s how it is,” he said, noticing the club. He raised his chin toward the door. “I haven’t taken it off the wall in the dining room. Didn’t want to handle it in a panic.”

“I’ll be gentle, Pops.”

The colorful dancers hung next to a heavy oak table. Gunselle pried the masterpiece out of its overelaborate frame, then carefully wrapped it in a large square of clean cotton fabric she found folded in the portfolio. After hauling it to the front door, she returned to insert the fake canvas into the empty frame, then took it to the study to perish. The original, she guessed, would soon hang somewhere in Europe, in a mansion paid for by the death of all the other art in the house. And one old man.

“My son loves that painting. The real one.”

“More than he loves you.”

“Sure. But it’ll be his one day. Everything will. What’s his hurry?” The old man struggled to get his legs under him. “Help me up. I’ll be okay once I get to my feet.”

“The paintings are insured, Pops. And you are, too.” She noted the billowing smoke outside the window.

“Tall frame. Dark hair. Pretty face.” He looked her up and down. “I know who you are.”

“Only the best for you.”

“I’m honored, but is there any way we can iron out this mess?”

“I always finish the job,” said Gunselle.

“My own son.” The man rubbed his eyes.

“Some people are impatient, Pops.”

“A carcinoma’s gonna get me soon. The little shit can’t wait a few months to watch me suffer? He’d like that. He’s always hated my guts.”

“Want me to add him to my list? I’m busy, but I’m efficient.”

“That’d be a switcheroo. Then everything would go to my granddaughters before he gambles it all away. They’re my real treasures. What would it cost?”

“A grand is the cheapest I’ll go. Just for you.”

“That’s mighty decent, but I don’t keep that much cash in the house.”

“Too bad,” said Gunselle, moving in close enough to clobber him.

“Wait.” He tried to get up again, in pain. A broken hip, perhaps.

“Make it quick, Pops. I don’t have time for long confessions.”

“It’s not that.” He wheezed at the effort, smoke starting to rake his lungs. “There’s another painting. It’s worth well over a thousand. It’s not insured with the others. Even my son doesn’t know about it. It’s hanging in the laundry room. Please. Take it.”

“Won’t do me much good on a wall in my apartment.”

“Art is vice, my dear. You don’t wed it. You rape it.”

“Not sure what you mean, Pops. But okay.”

“His name is John Ward. My son. There’s a picture of him on the desk. He never misses a private poker game at the Palace Hotel. A reserved room behind the bar. Every Wednesday. Game begins at eight. Goes until all hours. You could rob him on the way to his automobile. Put a bullet in his head. He usually wins big.”

“Your boy won’t win this time. You’ve got my word.”

After easing the old man’s suffering, Gunselle found the photograph on the desk. A handsome son with two little girls. She looked back at the dead eyes. A salty old specimen. Smart. She hadn’t had to diagram his future on a chalkboard, and he found revenge at the end instead of begging.

Then she wondered if all the underworld figures in central California saw her as greedy for money or sexually sparked when she killed a man. They’d be wrong. It was the danger that gave her the tingle, the challenge of solving problems and getting away clean. Each job was like a chapter in a Pearl White moving picture serial, something a little girl might enjoy at her local movie palace on a Saturday morning. For a dime.

Gunselle collected her thoughts and noticed the wildfire had backed down. It began to look as though the flames might actually spare the house. Finding the laundry room, she removed a small painting from the wall. The size of a magazine cover, it depicted a pretty young woman with dark hair and bare shoulders sweating over a heavy black iron. Centered on a white background, the brushstrokes focused on the figure. The woman resembled Gunselle in the way that Gunselle liked to pile her own dark hair on her head when she cleaned the apartment. The painting would look cute hanging in her kitchen next to the ironing board that dropped out of a shallow cupboard to do its job when needed. As she lifted it, the canvas popped out of its plain wooden frame. A simple word in printed letters became visible at the bottom left corner. Degas.

Gunselle loaded the two paintings into her car, then removed a five-gallon can of motor fuel she kept in the trunk for the long drives she often took to a gun range west of Petaluma. She lugged the sloshing container toward the house. A ladder she discovered next to a shed helped her to the porch roof, where she splashed a gallon of fuel onto dry cedar shakes. After returning the ladder to the shed, she found a smoldering trunk at the edge of the property and dribbled a trail of fire through dead brush to a tree with limbs over the porch. To hurry things along, she drenched a stick with fuel and set it aflame before heaving it onto the porch roof. She wondered how good the insurance inspector would be. The stakes were high, but she’d done her job and collected her fee. If somebody else got caught in a fraud, it wasn’t her problem.

Safe at the wheel of her Studebaker, Gunselle watched the roof ignite. She smiled as the animated flames spread with wide strokes into the second-floor windows, then grimaced with bared teeth when they roared into dry trees surrounding the building and hurried along the unburned ridge toward another house a hundred yards away. Fire is unpredictable, she wanted to say out loud to someone as she started the engine. Someone with reproachful eyes. Then she spotted a woman with blonde hair run out of the threatened home, waving her thin arms in the air. A man followed, grabbing a hose next to the porch. Water blew weakly out of it as he began to wet the surrounding shrubs and young trees. A generator for the pump must be purring somewhere.

“You should’ve cleared that underbrush away from your house long before today,” Gunselle said out loud, then accelerated her machine to the road. As she passed the driveway leading to the neighboring house, she stopped. The woman looked at her, sweat soaking through her blouse as she shoveled dirt into a bucket and threw it at the flames.

Gunselle stared down the road in front of her, then turned into the driveway, a mess of her own staring her in the face. She parked in an open area alongside another vehicle.

“Thank God you stopped, officer!” the woman shouted when Gunselle opened the car door. It made her feel as though she’d entered a different world. A world where people were happy to see her coming.

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Bio: Russell Thayer’s work has appeared in Brushfire, Tough, Roi Fainéant Press, Guilty Crime Magazine, Mystery Tribune, Close to the Bone, Bristol Noir, Apocalypse Confidential, Cowboy Jamboree Press, Hawaii Pacific Review, Shotgun Honey, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Rock and a Hard Place Press, Revolution John, Punk Noir, Expat Press, Pulp Modern, The Yard Crime Blog, and Outcast Press. He received his BA in English from the University of Washington, worked for decades at large printing companies, and currently lives in Missoula, Montana. You can find him lurking on Twitter @RussellThayer10

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