by J. A. Jance
"Keep it," she said. "That's your copy." I folded up the piece of paper and put it in my pocket.
"Bonnie Elgin did a good job," Sue continued. "We were through with the whole deal, prints and sketch both, by eleven o'clock. After we finished up, I went down to the Millionair Club to have lunch with a guy named Edward G. Jessup."
The Millionair Club is a Seattle social service agency that provides meals, medical care, and temporary job placement to the homeless. I've eaten there on occasion as my part of the new police chief's policy of community outreach. Plain meals, made of donated food, and served cafeteria-style, don't make for a trendy luncheon-dining experience. But then, having just come from my boardlike burger in Renton, who was I to talk?
"Sounds like you're dining out in style," I said. "So who's Edward G. Jessup? A new boyfriend? Does your son Jared know about this?"
Sue smiled slightly in response to my teasing, but her answer was serious. "Jessup is a former Magnolia Bluff resident who used to live on a box spring under a blue tarp."
"Good work! How did you find him?"
"He found me. Or rather, his job-placement counselor did. The guy was there last night when the evidence van picked up his box spring. The crime lab tech told him it had something to do with a homicide investigation. He went into the Millionair Club for a job call this morning and talked to his job-placement counselor about it. The counselor went through channels and tracked me down.
"The counselor was downright belligerent with me-said he was tired of Seattle P.D. picking on his clients just because they're homeless. He was ripped because we'd ‘illegally confiscated' Jessup's property. Not only that, he said Jessup was prepared to take a blood test, if necessary, to prove the blood wasn't his."
"Did you schedule a blood test then?" I asked.
"Naw," Sue Danielson said with a casual shrug. "I decided not to bother."
That sounded like sloppy police work to me. "Why not?" I demanded.
"Because Edward G. Jessup wasn't home when Gunter Gebhardt's boat caught fire. The man has an airtight alibi."
"And what would that be?"
Sue grinned. "He was in the King County Jail overnight," she said smugly. "Drunk and disorderly. He was booked at twelve-oh-three A. M."
You win some; you lose some. "That's airtight all right," I agreed. "So what's next on your agenda?"
"I plan on spending the afternoon checking emergency rooms around town to see if anyone remembers treating Bonnie Elgin's hit-and-run victim. What about you?"
I gave her the Cliff's Notes summary of my morning with Detective Stan Jacek and Deanna Meadows, then I settled down at my desk and went to work. I checked voice mail for messages. There weren't any. I dialed Maxwell Cole's number at the P.-I.
"Leave your message at the sound of the tone," Max's cheerful recording told me in his own voice. "I'll get right back to you."
Like hell he would. He hadn't so far. I didn't bother leaving another message. I didn't want to give him the satisfaction of knowing I'd called back.
As far as writing reports is concerned, my intentions were good. What was it my mother used to say? Something about the spirit being willing but the body weak. My body was weak, all right.
I started off like gangbusters, but the greasy lunch combined with serious sleep deprivation zapped me before long. By two-thirty, I had nodded off at my desk with my pen trailing aimlessly across and off the edge of the paper. I was dead to the world when Sergeant Watkins stopped by and woke me up.
"Maybe you ought to go home and grab some shut-eye," he suggested. "I wouldn't mind, but you're snoring so loud no one else can concentrate."
"Snoring? Was it really that bad?" I asked.
Watty shook his head and grinned. "Naw," he said. "No louder than a buzz saw. How are you coming on your paper, by the way? Captain Powell wants a status report ASAP, particularly on the Maxwell Cole leak."
"Tell him I'm working on it," I said.
I pushed the reports I had completed across my desk. Standing in the doorway to my cubicle, Watty pulled out a pair of reading glasses and then scanned through what I had written. When he finished, he took off the glasses and stowed them in his pocket.
"If I'm reading the time lines right, you must have spent most of the night up on Camano Island. I know for a fact you've been on the job since eight o'clock. You've had what, three hours of sleep?"
"Something like that, give or take."
"No wonder you look like hell. Go home. Get some sleep."
"But Sue and I were going to…"
My objection was strictly pro forma. Years ago, when I first came to work on the force, being up all night didn't faze me. Back then, a case would grab my attention and keep it. If I had to, I'd work round the clock, then sleep eight hours straight and be back on top of things again. I can't do that anymore. I'm like an aging rubber band that no longer bounces back to quite its original shape. I must be getting old, but come to think of it, I didn't recall ever seeing Watty use reading glasses before, either.
In any case, he cut me off in midsentence. "I said go home, and I meant it."
With no further discussion, I swiped the remaining papers off my desk and stuck them in a drawer. Then I stood up and pulled on my jacket. "Middle age is hell, isn't it?" I said.
Watty shook his head. "It beats the alternative," he replied. "Now get out of here before Captain Powell lays hold of you."
Usually, I'll toss off some kind of smart-ass comeback, but this time I was too brain-dead. And I'm glad I didn't. Watty was well within his supervisory rights to send me home. I was too damn tired to be out on my own recognizance.
After I retrieved my 928 from the parking garage on James, it was all I could do to stay awake long enough to drive home, park the car, and stagger from my parking place to the elevator. I was so tired, I think I might have welcomed some company in the elevator-even an unaccompanied dog. It would have given me something to lean on.
I didn't bother to stop for the mail, and I barely glanced at the blinking answering machine in the living room. I left it to its own devices without hitting the playback button. The messages would have to wait. I headed straight for the bedroom, where, after a moment's contemplation, I pulled the telephone jack out of the wall, stripped out of my clothes, and fell into bed. I slept for twelve hours straight. If I had any dreams-good or bad-I was sleeping too hard to remember them.
When I woke up, I was totally refreshed-bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, as we used to say. I was also starved. The only problem was, it was three o'clock in the morning-not a good hour to discover that the cupboard is bare. A cursory inventory of the kitchen revealed that other than a bag of whole-bean coffee that I keep in my freezer, there wasn't a stick of edible food in the house.
When Karen and I split up, that was one of the first and hardest lessons I had to learn about living on my own. Food doesn't automatically transport itself from grocery-store shelves to refrigerator and cupboards or table. Someone has to go to the store and actually bring it home. And meals-especially balanced ones-don't appear on the table magically. They require advance planning and preparation. When it comes to cooking, I'm a complete flop.
Food considerations, odd hours, proximity, and loneliness were the several factors that had caused me to gravitate to the Doghouse. At three o'clock that morning, I missed it more than ever.
I glanced outside. It was foggy again-foggy and cold. I pulled on some clothes and walked out to the living room. I hadn't taken the messages off the machine earlier, and there was even less sense in doing so now. You can't call people back at three o'clock in the morning. Closing the front door on the blinking light, I headed downstairs.
I think Donnie, Belltown Terrace's graveyard-shift doorman, was most likely snoozing at his desk, but he lurched to his feet as soon as the elevator door opened.
"Mr. Beaumont," he said, a little too eagerly. "You're up and around early. Or is it late?"
"Early," I said. "Do you know a good place to
get breakfast around here at this time of day?"
"Here in the Regrade?"
I nodded. "Someplace within walking distance."
"There's Caffe Minnie's," he suggested helpfully. "It's just down the street."
I've been in Caffe Minnie's a time or two. It's at the corner of First and Denny, one of those oddball spots where Seattle's various early-day surveyors couldn't come to any kind of sensible agreement. As a result, the corner lot is triangular, and so's the building that sits on it.
Caffe Minnie's has an eclectic crowd. Some are of the purple-haired, earringed sort, while others are of the vacationing schoolmarm variety as well as assorted types between the two extremes. Caffe Minnie's late-night customers tend to view anyone who looks like a police officer with suspicion verging on outright hostility. I wasn't up to that.
"No," I said. "Not my style."
"How about Steve's Broiler up on Virginia?"
I had tried Steve's as well. For some reason, I found it depressing. "I don't think so."
"What about the Five Point?" he asked. "It's over on Cedar at Fifth, just under the Monorail."
"The Five Point isn't open, is it? I thought they closed early-around eleven."
"Not anymore. After the Doghouse closed, they went twenty-four hours."
"Oh," I said.
It was amazingly quiet on the street. As I walked, the lateness of the hour combined with the muffling qualities of the fog gave me the sense of being the only person left alive in downtown Seattle. But when I reached Cedar, there were three empty Farwest Cabs lined up on the street.
The neon sign in the window of the restaurant, the one that says COOK ON DUTY, gave the fog outside a ghostly pink glow. The fog was so thick, in fact, that from the front door I couldn't see as far as Chief Sealth standing in his winter-dry fountain a few feet away in the middle of Tillicum Square.
Right inside the door, a wooden cigar-store Indian waited beside the cash register. Back in my drinking days, I didn't venture into the Five Point much. For one thing, the black-and-white tiles on the floor, counter front, and ceiling can be a little disorienting when you're operating under a full load of McNaughtons.
Furthermore, legend has it that back in the old days, a Five Point bartender once asked me to leave when I tried to strike up a serious conversation with the wooden Indian. I don't remember the incident, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen.
Alexis Downey-my sometime girlfriend-didn't like the Doghouse; didn't approve of it. While the Doghouse was still open, I once offered to take her to the Five Point for a Sunday-morning breakfast. She refused to go. I could have handled it if her objection had been based on smoke or greasy food. I was thunderstruck when it turned out to be on the grounds of sexual discrimination.
I'm not sure how Alex heard about the men's rest room at the Five Point. Through the creative use of a periscope, users of the urinal-presumably all male-have an unobstructed view of the top of the Space Needle. Alex told me she wasn't setting foot inside the place until women could take advantage of the same view. I took this to be a new front in Seattle's potty-parity war between the sexes.
The sign on the front door of the Five Point made no mention of rest-room inequality. Instead, it announced SMOKERS WELCOME. NONSMOKERS BEWARE. That statement pretty much covered it.
Inside the small dining room, a predictable pall of cigarette smoke hung in the air. It may have been the middle of the night, but it was also the first of the month. The place was crowded with what seemed like a group of regulars. Four oversized cabdrivers-a crowd all by themselves-took up the better part of three tables.
There was only one empty seat left at the counter. I slipped into it. I had barely started looking around to get my bearings when someone slammed a full cup of coffee onto the counter in front of me. Some of the coffee slopped over the top onto the Formica.
"It's about time you got around to dropping in here. What'll you have-bacon and eggs, hash browns crisp, whole-wheat toast, and a small OJ?" The voice was familiar. So was the peroxide-blond beehive hairdo.
The waitress was Wanda, one of my old favorites from the Doghouse.
"Wanda!" I exclaimed. "What the hell are you doing here?"
"Whaddya think? I'm just working to wear out the uniform." She grinned. "Besides, I'm way too young to retire. Now are you going to order or what? I don't have time to stand around here jawing all night."
"You're right," I said. "I'll have the usual."
"By the way," she returned. "For future reference, that's a number four."
Wanda hustled off. I'm not that good a judge of women's ages. Perpetually blond hair tends to throw me off, but if I were going to guess, I'd say Wanda was somewhere right around seventy.
When she came back with my orange juice, she slapped a slightly used, grease-stained newspaper on the counter in front of me.
"Sorry it's so messy," she apologized. "This is the only one I could find where somebody hadn't already worked the crossword puzzle. Do you need a pencil?"
"No, thanks," I said. "I've got one."
I opened the paper up to the right page. First I read "Mike Mailway," then I started working the puzzle.
For the first time in months, I felt as though I'd come home.
13
James Gleason, the author of that morning's New York Times Crossword Puzzle in the Seattle P.-I., must have been my blood brother. Or maybe he's a twin, and the two of us were separated at birth. Whatever the connection, we were on the same wavelength. I banged my way through the entire puzzle without a single hitch or hang-up. I finished it completely in twenty minutes flat-while I was eating breakfast.
Only when I was in the process of refolding the paper to leave it for the next guy did I see a copy of Bonnie Elgin's Identi-Kit sketch right at the top of the front page in the local news section. It was good positioning for that kind of piece. I know for a fact that people read that section of the paper more than any other.
It's easy to close our eyes and ignore what's going on in Washington, D.C., or to gloss over the latest episode of bloodthirsty carnage in Bosnia or the Middle East. It's a lot more difficult to blind yourself to what's going on in your own backyard. Readers tend to skip over the blaring headlines on the front page in favor of devouring in detail-down to the last sentence-what's happening at home. For some reason, news of murder and mayhem next door is almost always more compelling and more interesting than systematic genocide as it is practiced in other, more distant parts of the world.
Seeing the picture there in the P.-I. served notice to me that Sue Danielson had kept right on working throughout the afternoon. She had talked about visiting hospitals with our missing hit-and-run victim's picture, but she must have faxed copies to some of the media as well. I doubted she had actually stepped inside that heavily guarded, impregnable fortress-the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
I gave Sue credit for both initiative and hustle, especially considering the fact that her partner du jour had spent most of the afternoon and all of the evening literally lying down on the job. I allowed myself only the smallest twinge of guilt. After all, Sue hadn't spent the previous night poking around in the still-warm ashes of that house fire up on Camano Island.
Intrigued by the reproduction of the sketch, I broke my own protocol and actually read the accompanying article. In brief, it said that detectives were looking for the man depicted in the picture as a "person of interest" in the fatal fire at Fishermen's Terminal two days earlier. The reporter went on to say that there was some speculation about his possible link to another fatal arson fire as well, one that had occurred the following day on Camano Island.
The reporter stated that although the two fires were thought to be related, investigators had so far declined to comment on the possible connection between them. Gunter Gebhardt was mentioned by name. Denise Whitney was not.
I was relieved that the appalling details of the murders themselves had been left out of the article. As a police officer, I found it com
forting to know that not every aspect of Stan Jacek's and my two separate investigations had become public knowledge. More important than not disrupting our work, the fact that some of the gory details were missing from the article also served to spare the victims' families considerable pain.
Now that I was buoyed by my decent night's sleep, the food, a successfully completed crossword puzzle, and a little camaraderie with an old friend, even reading a newspaper didn't get to me. I left the Five Point and sauntered back to Belltown Terrace feeling almost human.
Once in my apartment, I was impatient to get to work, but common sense prevailed. Four-forty-five was way too early to show up for my shift down at the Public Safety Building. The guys on night duty would have thought I'd lost my marbles. That hour was also still too early to begin returning phone calls, but I did settle down in my recliner to take the messages off my answering machine.
The collection of calls was about what you'd expect in a downtown high-rise. One enthusiastic telemarketer wanted to know if I wanted to subscribe to The Wall Street Journal? It could be delivered directly to my door. No, I did not. Someone else wanted to know if I'd like to subscribe to a credit-card protection program. I didn't bite on that one, either.
Heather Peters called from downstairs where she lives with her father, Ron Peters-one of my former partners-and her stepmother, Amy. Sounding like a very dignified and old-for-her-age eight-year-old, Heather informed me that she now had a weekend job that would pay ten dollars a day for four whole days, but that she would tell me more about it later when she saw me in person. Way to go, Heather!
The next call was from Maxwell Cole. Unlike voice mail, my old answering machine doesn't time-date the calls, but since this message came in after Heather's, Max must have called me back fairly late in the day-sometime after three o'clock or so.
"Hey, J.P.," Max said. "Long time no see. How's it going?" He spoke in one of those gratingly familiar, hail-fellow-well-met tones that comes across as phony as a three-dollar bill.