“Welcome to the privileged few,” Markowitz said. “Wright here thinks the world is coming to an end.”
Sam slid a report over the desktop in front of her.
She began to read, noticing some words as if they were in bold lettering but which were no more bold than the rest: “CONFIDENTIAL INFORMANT, POLICE OFFICERS, MCDONALD AND FISHER, BELIEVED TO MEET WITH SUSPECT BERNARD, ACCEPT FREE COFFEE.”
Sam took the report from her when she finished and handed her another. All three exchanged looks, but it was clear that nothing would be said until she read the second report. It detailed the drowning of Ben Abbott.
“I’m not turning these reports in,” Sam said. “And no copies. I’m taking them home until we find out what’s going on. I don’t want anybody else to know about this.”
Markowitz nodded. Sam looked at her, although she had not even considered that her consent might be needed. She was not even certain why she was there.
“I think old Sam is beginning to see ghosts,” Markowitz said. “A cup of coffee and he thinks he’s got a conspiracy.”
“It’s not the coffee,” Sam said. “It’s everything together. I hope like hell there’s nothing to it.”
She could see Markowitz hoped the same thing. She did, too, but not in the same way and not to the same degree. Maybe they had more at stake. They knew these men and had worked with them before she had even thought of becoming a police officer, before it was even possible. She thought of the beat men on her shift who stood in the front row at roll call and answered their names with proud, booming voices. No woman had yet walked a beat with these men.
“It could all be coincidental,” Markowitz said. “What have we got here? Your informant sees Pierre leave after the cops have been there. Big deal. He leaves all the time. Your informant believes they know each other. So what? Why wouldn’t they know each other? These guys have been walking that beat for years. Sure, they’re not supposed to take free coffee, but they’re from the old school. I still see it. So do you. Anyway, how reliable is this informant?”
“Reliable, I think, but I could be wrong. This one is different. Informants always want something, but I can’t figure out what this one wants.”
“See. That’s what I mean,” Markowitz said. “We can’t crucify these guys because they take a free cup of coffee.”
“I know. We need more. This girl, Diane, thinks something is going to happen soon.”
“Drugs. My god, these guys wouldn’t get mixed up in that,” Markowitz said. “Narcotics might already be working on the Donut Shop.”
“But what if they aren’t? I don’t think we should talk to anybody in the department until we know where this is going. I’ve been thinking that maybe we should talk to the Feds instead,” Sam said.
“Oh sure,” Markowitz said. “We have two cops taking a free cup of coffee and you want to talk to the Feds. They’ll really want to know about that. Then, when nothing else happens, you can explain to the Chief why we didn’t work inside the department. No thanks.”
Katherine watched the two men disagree, or perhaps they agreed but did not like their agreement. This disagreeing agreement made her realize that it might have been better to stay with Hennessey.
“In the meantime,” Sam said, “let’s be careful what goes in the file. Leave out the stuff about Ben Abbott for a while. See what we have first.”
“I guess we can do that,” Markowitz said. He reached into the file drawer of his metal desk and pulled out a file already an inch thick. He quickly flipped through the pages.
“What do you think?” Markowitz asked him. “Any chance Ben Abbott killed Alberta, assuming she’s dead?”
“Could be, I guess, but I think that son of a bitch Pierre is the one.”
“What do you think, Murphy? Are you stuck on Wright’s favorite bogeyman, too?”
“It could be anybody,” she said. “It could even be McDonald or Fisher.”
That made them sit up, these men who had seen the old days together. She thought they would look at each other and pass along some familiar, evolved level of communication predating her, but they didn’t. They remained silent in all their forms of communication and looked at her instead.
Chapter 23
Sam had not meant to oversleep. Now and then he would intentionally avoid setting the alarm and let the telephone wake him in the morning when the sergeant called after roll call. That was an acceptable way to find another hour’s sleep on First Watch, as long as it didn’t happen too often. He had set the alarm, but this morning he didn’t immediately sit up on the edge of the bed as he knew he must. He should have gotten up this morning. Kat would have come to the dock and waited.
By the time he arrived at the station, there was no reason to hurry. He was late enough that a minute here or there didn’t matter. He checked out a radio from the property room and walked down the hall to the office. He stuck his head in the door. “It was a bit cloudy this morning, Sarge,” was all he said. The sergeant checked him off the roll call sheet with a pencil and waved him out. Then with a change of mind the sergeant called him back. Sam turned around and casually sauntered back into the office.
“You still butting into Homicide’s business?”
“You mean Sanchez? Who says that’s Homicide’s business?”
“I’ve been going through the log sheets. The guys are going to start bitching if you’re logged off on that deal all the time.”
“Are they bitching?”
“Not yet, but even the lieutenant was wondering why you were spending so much time on this.”
“Are you kidding me? The lieutenant? Well, if he wants to know what I’m doing, he can get off his fat ass and come out in the street and see.”
“Hey, don’t get mad at me. I’m just passing this along.”
“You were there. You saw that kid. If I want to spend a little time on this instead of rousting the goddamn drunks, I don’t think anybody’s got a bitch. If Markowitz thinks I’m getting in the way, he’ll tell me.”
“Fine. Okay. Since when did you get so thin-skinned? I just want to let you know all your fine effort has attracted the brass’s attention.”
“I’ll bet.”
“Use good judgment, that’s all.”
“Anything else?”
“No. That’s it,” the sergeant said, frowning. He had not expected Sam’s aggressive response and was not happy with it. But that was too damn bad, Sam thought, as he nodded in a final reply and walked away. He continued to mutter profanities as he walked down the hall toward the steel door of the garage. It was fortunate no one was on the other side of the door.
Statistics. That’s all they wanted. Number of calls, contacts, arrests. All of it amounting to nothing. You moved ahead by writing traffic tickets, generating revenue. Olivia was a net loser, money down the drain. There was nobody pressing to find out what happened to her or to Alberta. She wasn’t the mayor’s kid. Old Sanchez had no pull. As he sat in the car, he looked around self-righteously at the dismal garage walls.
Who was he kidding? he wondered, knowing as he framed the question that he was the only one around. The speechmaker, the audience, the critic. All things to all of himself. The sergeant was right after all. When had he gotten so thin-skinned?
“Start the car,” he muttered aloud.
He started the car but didn’t move. He looked at the blank concrete wall and saw one of the ghosts Markowitz had asked about. What brass was interested? he wondered. Next time, instead of running off at the mouth, he had better shut up and listen.
The morning had begun without him. Cherry Street, running east to the sun, was awash with light. While he waited for the red light on Fourth Avenue, he picked up his clipboard and began filling in the log sheet. He looked up in time to see the light change. A car ran through it from the south, and he saw clearly the driver’s dismayed face as it passed in front of him. Great place to run a light, Sam thought. The driver must have known that, too. The car slowed and
pulled over to the curb halfway down the block.
“Your lucky day,” Sam said aloud as though the driver could hear him. In silent protest to statistics and all their followers, he conscientiously ignored the violation and kept heading east up the hill, under the freeway, past the street where Katherine parked, past the hospital and the college. He simply wanted to drive in a straight line a while before he logged on to Radio and was twisted around.
He need not have worried about twisting calls. It was Sunday morning. The office buildings were empty and few stores were open. Silve was closed, too, and the Donut Shop—balancing good and bad.
Sunday mornings at the end of summer were an easy time on First Avenue. Its residents came out slowly, blinking in the sunshine, stretching, looking to the sky as if after a storm. They could not quite believe the silence. They had it to themselves, finally—the way it was supposed to be.
Midway through his Sunday shift he drove up to Queen Anne Hill, which was just north of his district. He parked before a large brick building and logged out to eat. He was not going to eat. Instead he entered the building and walked down the long hallway. He said hello to the nurses and aides who knew him well. His father’s room, at the end of one wing, was sunny and pleasant—as pleasant as it could be.
His father’s white hair reflected in the sunshine where he sat in his wheelchair beside the window. His head was bent as he earnestly picked imaginary objects from the air in front of him. It seemed he didn’t want an imaginary object after all and shook his fingers to free them from it.
“Hello, Dad,” Sam said. “How are you doing this morning?”
His father, once a tall man, taller than his son, answered, but it was not an answer to the son’s question. Sam opened the closet door and removed a folding chair from behind a row of clothes. He unfolded the chair and placed it in front of his father.
His father’s feet worked vainly against the wheelchair brake. Perhaps not vainly, for inch by inch, he moved the chair away. Sam looked into his father’s eyes, which had a wild sort of look, and waited for the old man to notice him. After a few minutes Sam released the brakes on the wheelchair and pulled his father slowly toward him.
“It’s Sam, your son,” he said.
Again his father spoke his own peculiar language and Sam leaned closer, hoping to understand. Sometimes he understood a few words, but mostly it sounded like a stutter of incomprehensible and random syllables.
His father had once been meticulous with grooming. He had fine hands, and he had cared for them diligently. It was an odd trait for a cabinetmaker. Many in the profession had missing fingers, but his father’s hands had been perfect—the nails cut, clean, lotion in the morning and at night. His mother had always been proud of his father’s hands. The hands were not perfect, he reminded himself. He looked at the crooked little finger on his own hand that was an inheritance from his father.
Now his father’s fingernails were too long, and there were black streaks beneath them. Unruly hairs poked out from his eyebrows and nostrils and earlobes. If his mother had been alive, she would have trimmed them, but his father had only a son to look after him. Indirectly, the disease that was taking his father had taken her, too. It had been more than her heart could stand.
His visits, now farther apart, had become mostly technical. He made sure that the bills were paid, that the insurance was in order, that the doctor had been there. He could not yet bring himself to trim his father’s fingernails as his mother had done.
He had worked every holiday since his mother’s death the year before—Christmas, Thanksgiving, New Year’s—volunteering even if the holiday fell on his day off. He wondered if he was destined to be like his great-uncle Nels, the old bachelor who had sat discreetly at the edges of all family gatherings. He was a quiet, generous man accustomed to solitude, speaking only when addressed and then with a trace of surprise. Uncle Nels always received socks for Christmas. He thanked them for giving him socks. What was everyone thinking? That he could not buy his own? Sam would rather work than get socks for Christmas.
His father stirred and his wrist and forearm formed an arc as though casting a fishing line. Was he fishing now? He never liked to fish.
“I remember the time you took me fishing,” Sam said.
His father would not be disturbed and continued to cast his line.
“I got the fishhook stuck in my cheek,” Sam prompted.
He had been fooling around with his fishing pole contrary to his father’s instructions, and when the hook caught his cheek, he dropped the pole into the water and as he lunged to catch it came close to capsizing the boat and both of them with it. The hook came out as the pole went down, and he remembered seeing his father holding the sides of their little rented boat. His father’s big hands steadied the boat, and the boy assumed that the lecture would begin. Why couldn’t he use sensible caution, just sensible caution for once, instead of practically losing an eye, not to mention the fishing pole that wasn’t free either. Instead his father spoke words of concern that caught him off guard. His father tended the wound below Sam’s right eye. He washed it with seawater and found a Band-Aid for it. He had thought to bring along Band-Aids. The hook had not hurt that much, and he would never have cried if his father had done what was expected. Instead of canceling their outing, his father gave him his pole and sat with him through that afternoon when all the fish had gone south. His father was probably the only man in Seattle who didn’t like to fish.
“That was a good day,” the son told his father, who had ceased casting his line. “We never caught a thing.”
The old man looked at him, and his eyes quieted a bit as they often did with Sam’s voice. Sam kept a few books in the drawer beside his father’s bed to read when he could think of nothing to say so that they wouldn’t have to sit in silence.
“I wrote something this morning,” Sam said. “Maybe you would like to hear it.”
He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out the many-times-folded information bulletin he had used as scratch paper.
“I call it ‘Sunday Morning.’ It goes like this.”
In the distance, a faint chant from the Viaduct
mumbles its way to us as we sit
silently in a market pew.
Old John is here, his face lifted in ecstasy,
spit flowing down his chin, onto his coat of all seasons.
I am beside him,
as far as the bench permits,
looking skyward as he looks with closed eyes,
waiting for sunrise.
It has been a time, he tells me if I listen
to wordless voices and recreate
the night with empty bottles still sacked at his feet.
Penance will soon begin. The red-eyed devils who just now peer
over the tops of buildings will join us on the bench.
I will leave then,
and old John will meet them alone,
wide-eyed with solitary horror
this Sunday morning.
With glove removed, I feel for pulse beneath his collar and
indifferently but not cruelly,
I hope, poke for morning life with my nightstick.
If any is there, I will not find it
and now sit in perplexed and concrete silence.
The street mass from the Viaduct
rises in volume,
and beckons us on the bench to join in, but we remain
waiting for sunrise.
Sam often wondered what the poems were for, but this time he knew. He hoped this poem would create a miracle. He hoped his father might look at him again, his only begotten son, and smile one time more.
The old man closed his eyes, and his head sank to his chest. Sam touched the small scar below his right eye and got up to leave.
Chapter 24
Sam sat in the patrol car parked on the north side of Pike Street with his window down. There were no cars between him and Second Avenue, and on all four cor
ners the few early-morning pedestrians self-consciously stood and waited for the walk signals. He watched the buses cross on Third Avenue, a block to the east. From the way he parked, he looked as if he were watching for cars to run the red light. He would have left his car engine running if that were his plan.
A small man in white tennis shoes crossed the street in front of him. He walked more slowly than others heading for work and seemed particularly interested in the cop inside the car. When the man approached on the sidewalk, Sam leaned his head out the car window.
“How you doing, Henry? Still have those shoes, I see.”
Behind Henry were the big windows of a clothing store whose mannequins reached out toward the walkers with silent hands. In contrast to the mannequins, Henry’s face was very much alive.
“Sure I do. I thought it was you, all right,” he said as he stepped jauntily up to the car.
“Where are you going so early in the morning?”
“Down to the Pike Market. I hear you can get some work unloading when the trucks come in.”
Sam looked at Henry with more interest. He had shaved within the last day or so, and he had changed his clothes. Although they didn’t fit well, they didn’t look too bad either.
“You’re looking good, Henry. What’s going on?”
“Nothing much. I got me a room at the Lutheran mission. They treat you pretty good there. Say, I told them how I got these shoes, and you know what? They wouldn’t believe me. I think they figured I stole them.”
“Maybe I’ll stop by and set them straight one of these days.” Sam spoke the words, but he was looking away from Henry and out the front window as another bus stopped at the corner.
“That would be real nice,” Henry said. “You think you could do that?”
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