She knocked on the door and heard Sam’s voice muffled. He opened the door, took her hand with a sigh of relief, and brought her inside. Then she saw a girl standing at the kitchen door.
“What’s going on, Sam?” She heard the unintentional sharpness in her own voice.
He dropped her hand and gestured toward the girl. “This is Maria. She works at the Donut Shop. As you can see,” he said with exaggerated precision, “she’s had a hell of a day.”
The girl’s face was cut and bruised, and there were streaks of blood on her white blouse. The pain in the girl’s eyes made Katherine forget all the questions that sprang into her mind. She went over to the girl and touched her face.
“Sam, do you have some ice? We should put some ice on your face,” she said to the girl.
Sam walked past them into the kitchen. He seemed glad to have something to do. He pulled ice trays from the refrigerator and banged them against the sink.
“Does it hurt a lot?” Katherine asked and studied the girl’s face for a sign that would explain the pain in her eyes.
“I’m okay.”
She led the girl into the living room and sat down beside her on the couch. Sam brought a plastic bag of ice wrapped in a towel and gently placed it on her temple where the swelling was worst. “Hold it there,” he said and gave up his hand when hers took over. Katherine watched a tear stream into the waiting towel, but only one.
“There now,” Sam said. “Soon you’ll be as pretty as you were before.”
He sat down in a stuffed chair closest to the couch and looked at Katherine.
“Maria has been working in the Donut Shop and has been helping me watch what’s going on. They found out. I don’t know how because I haven’t told anybody about her. Not even you. Somebody must have seen us together. This afternoon two guys trapped her down in the basement below the Donut Shop. It happened right at shift change. They wanted to know what she had told me. One of them is a guy named Richard Rutherford. He goes by the nickname Shooter.”
“One of the boys on Ben Abbott’s boat,” Katherine said.
“That’s right. Maria doesn’t know about that. They beat her up pretty badly.”
“Bastards!” Katherine said.
“He stopped them,” Maria said.
“Bastards!” Katherine repeated.
He moved his chair closer and leaned toward them.
“Maria was the one who told me about McDonald and Fisher. This afternoon, we added another cop to the list—Captain Russell.”
“From this department?” Katherine asked.
“That’s right. Second Watch captain. He’s the man in the bookstore. It was Maria who saw them. Her description fits Russell to a tee. She saw him buy a book that had a cannon on the cover, and the title had something about ‘stillness’ in it. I saw the book today in Russell’s office. Stillness at Appomattox—it’s a Civil War book. There’s a cannon on the cover.”
“What were you doing in his office?”
“He called me in there. Said he didn’t like the way I handled the situation here with Maria. He wanted to know what I was doing on First Avenue after my shift was over. Said he was going to transfer me if I didn’t have a satisfactory explanation. He’s as dirty as they come.”
“Why would he get mixed up in that?” Katherine asked. “Why would any of them?”
“It’s got to be the money,” Sam said. “I’ll bet there’s more money than we can imagine.”
“Even so, why would they risk it?” Katherine asked.
“I found a hundred dollars one time in the back of my patrol car,” Sam said. “Five twenties rolled up in a little ball. It was stuffed behind the seat. One hundred bucks. The rule is you turn it in. Right? What happens then? The cop who had the car before me has to explain why it’s there. He’s supposed to check the seat, but hell, who bothers half the time? So he gets into trouble, and the money goes into the city coffers for some bureaucrat to hire a consultant for an hour. I tell myself I can use the hundred dollars to do something better—pay for some information maybe, get a kid off the street for a couple nights—but I don’t do it. Instead I begin to think of things I might want to buy for myself. I deserve it, don’t I? It’s only a hundred dollars.
“I decide to buy a new saw. I buy the saw thinking that I’ll put the hundred bucks into my account to cover the check, but when I get home, I decide I don’t want to think about that hundred bucks every time I cut up a board. So I leave the money where it is.
“A while later, I buy a TV thinking I’ll put the hundred bucks in the bank to cover part of that, but then I don’t want to think about that money every time I watch a football game. Finally I decide I can’t afford that hundred bucks anymore. You know what I did? I took it out in the kayak and tossed it in the Sound. I should have burned it though. It’s bad luck. Some fish will probably swallow it, and then some poor bastard will catch it, and now he’s got it. He thinks that hundred bucks is a windfall, but that money is only bad luck.
“I came that close to keeping the money,” he said and held up his thumb and index finger an inch apart. “If it had been a thousand dollars, I would have turned it in. Or if it had been a dollar, I would have stuck it in my pocket and never thought about it again. But those hundred dollars—they stayed with me a long time. All I’m saying is that it happens. A guy like me, he makes up his own rules as he goes along. What if I had actually used those first bills and then took other money out of the bank and threw that away? Would that get rid of it? It gets complicated before you know what happens.”
He stood in front of her, looking at her and expecting her to understand. She didn’t understand. She didn’t see what his story had to do with Captain Russell. Besides, what difference was one hundred dollars instead of one thousand?
“I’m glad you threw that money away,” Maria said. She had removed the ice pack from her troubled face and was looking at Sam. She had hardly looked anywhere else. She understood what Katherine had missed.
“I am, too,” Sam said.
“What are we going to do now?” Katherine asked. Enough stories, she thought.
“I need to talk to Markowitz,” Sam said. “I called, but he’s not back in the office yet. He’s probably still at the Donut Shop. And we need to find a safe place for Maria. She lives by herself. I don’t think they’ll try to bother you again,” he said to the girl. “But we don’t want to take any chances either.”
“Maria can stay at my place,” Katherine said, then realized that Maria might have something to say about that. “That is, if you wouldn’t mind.”
“I don’t want to cause any trouble for you,” Maria said.
“It’s no trouble.”
As she led Maria to her car, she had to walk with rapid steps to keep ahead of the girl. Inside the car Maria edged close to the door although Katherine had more room than she needed.
“I have some aspirin in my apartment,” Katherine said. “That will take away some of the pain.”
Maria looked at her briefly, and Katherine thought she would say something. She did, but not with words.
“Some of the pain,” Katherine repeated. “We’ll stop at your place first and pick up a few things. You’ll feel better to get out of those stained clothes. I’m afraid I don’t have any clothes that will fit you.”
The girl’s eyes lost some of their detachment.
“I’m staying in a motel in the University District,” the girl said. “I haven’t been in Seattle very long. My room is probably a mess.”
“A girl has other things to do than clean her room.”
“I don’t do many things.”
“We won’t worry about that. We’ll just pick up a few clothes and leave.”
Maria was staying in an old motel in the University District on Northeast 45th Street. Her room was on the second floor. Katherine followed the girl up the exterior stairway.
“I couldn’t afford anything else,” Maria said apologetically as she opened the door.
“I understand,” Katherine said. “When I was going to the University, I lived just a few blocks from here.”
Maria picked up loose clothes from the floor and stuffed them into a dresser drawer. Then she pulled an overnight case out of the closet and carried it into the bathroom.
Katherine remained at the door so that Maria would not think she was intruding. She remembered what her apartment had been like when she was Maria’s age—the old, worn-out furniture, the brown stove, and the green bathtub. She even remembered the first picture she hung on the wall. It was a photograph of her father standing in front of the horse barn squinting into the sun with his seed corn hat pulled down low on his forehead. She had taken the picture herself with a Brownie camera won in 4-H.
Maria had no pictures on the wall, but Katherine could not help noticing one that was on the nightstand beside the bed. Even from where she stood, she recognized the boy in the picture. She walked over to it and picked it up carefully like a piece of evidence on which she didn’t want to leave fingerprints.
Maria started to come out of the bathroom, but froze in the doorway when she saw Katherine with the picture.
“It’s Sam, isn’t it?” Katherine asked.
“That picture wasn’t supposed to be out,” Maria said softly.
“It’s out. And who is this?” Katherine pointed to a young woman in the photograph beside him.
“My mother.”
Katherine studied the picture—a boy in a lumberjack shirt holding hands with a girl, unwrinkled smiles, a beach with driftwood behind them. In love, almost certainly in love.
“When was this picture taken?”
“Before I was born.”
It was not difficult to add or subtract the years. Still standing motionless in the doorway with a small suitcase in her hand, Maria looked as if her trip had just been canceled.
“Sam is your father?”
Maria put the overnight case down but didn’t move from the bathroom doorway. A mask, one part from the girl, one part from the lumberjack in the picture, covered her face.
“Does he know?”
Without voice and with barely perceptible movement, Maria’s bruised face and tightened mouth said no.
Katherine marveled at how long this girl must have held the mask in front of her. Still holding the picture, Katherine sat down on the edge of the bed and patted the spot beside her. They would talk here, she decided.
Silently she waited while Maria complied with her invitation—an uncertain first step and then several of firmer resolution. She didn’t sit where Katherine’s hand had touched, but she didn’t move all the way to the opposite end of the bed either.
“I wish you would tell me about it,” Katherine said. “I think we both have an interest in this boy.” She held the picture up as a prompt for Maria.
“My mother gave me that picture before she died,” Maria said. “I was eight years old. She had cancer, and she wanted me to know who my real father was in case I wanted to find him. It was up to me, she said. He never knew anything about me, about her having a baby. It just happened, she said—that summer when the picture was taken. My mother told me she had loved him. She thought he had loved her, too, in a certain way.
“He fished in my mother’s village in Alaska. Boys would come for a year or two to work on the boats or in the cannery. Sometimes they would get a boat of their own. He never came back after that summer.
“I don’t know why she never tried to find him. That was her way, I guess. She heard a little about him through the village. She knew he had become a policeman. Somehow she got a book of poems he had written. She was in some of those poems, but she never tried to find him. She said I was to keep the picture and the poems for myself.
“My mother was very intelligent, not what most people think of an Indian girl in a fishing village—not what most people here think, anyway. She went to the university in Anchorage and got a scholarship after her first year. She took me with her. My grandparents were unhappy that she wouldn’t let them keep me, but then she didn’t do anything they wanted.
“She met my father, my stepfather, in college. He was a teacher there. I can barely remember him before they got married. I don’t think I was very nice to him. I didn’t see why my mother needed to find somebody else. My stepfather was divorced and had two daughters. I think they were ashamed to have me around. They’re white, like my stepfather—like my father. I don’t know if I should have come here.”
“Oh, Maria,” Katherine said, moving closer to the girl and reaching for her hands. “I have a feeling you should have come a long time ago.”
Her face, her poor face, Katherine thought, showed how badly she wanted to believe.
“He wants to know. I’m sure of that,” Katherine said.
“Do you think so?” The mask was disappearing, line by line.
Katherine had to say yes, but how could she be sure? She hardly knew this man, this unknown father, any better than the girl. It didn’t matter, not anymore.
“Yes,” she said, then pounded Maria’s clasped hands onto the bed. “I’m sure of it.”
The vigor of her actions surprised both of them, and they lost their balance for a second.
“I wish I could tell you more about Sam’s family,” Katherine said after releasing the girl’s hands. “He has no other children—at least none that I know about. His mother is no longer living. His father, your grandfather, is in a nursing home. He has uncles. I know he has uncles.”
“What about you?”
“Me? I have a big family.”
“I mean, you and Sam. You like him, don’t you?”
“Of course I like him, but that’s not important right now. Does your stepfather know where you are?”
“Yes, he knows. After my mother died, he did the best he could. He tried to like me.”
“I’m sure he did like you.”
“It wasn’t easy for him, you know. He got me because of my mother, and then he lost her.”
“I’ll bet he was glad to have you.”
“He didn’t want me to come to Seattle alone, but I wanted to do this myself. I went to the police station when I got here. I thought I would meet him there, but I got scared. What if he didn’t want to see me? At the police station they said he spent a lot of time in the Donut Shop, so I got a job there. I thought if I could see him while he was working, I would know if I had done the right thing by coming. It didn’t work out the way I thought it would.”
Her voice thickened as though she had a cold, and she struggled with the words so much that Katherine wished she could help them come.
“I thought maybe he would just know. After my mother died, I would put on a pink dress she had given me and walk down to the post office and stand there and watch the people go in and out. I thought maybe my father would see me, would see what a pretty girl I was in that pink dress. It didn’t make any sense, but that’s what I did. It was stupid to think he would know me, but I had come so far.”
And could go no farther. She put her hands up to her mouth to stop the quivering of her lips, then brushed tears from her eyes, but there was too much for her hands to do.
“Don’t worry,” Katherine said. “We’ll work it out somehow.”
Brave words.
“Do you have a pink dress like the one you used to wear?”
“I brought some dresses,” the girl said. “I don’t know if there’s anything like that.”
“Let’s take a look,” Katherine said. “I’m sure it won’t matter, but it wouldn’t hurt to knock him off his feet just once.”
Chapter 36
Sam found Markowitz pacing back and forth in front of his desk with the telephone to his ear, but he was not talking to anyone. It was after five, and except for Markowitz, the desks in Homicide were empty. When he saw Sam, he dropped the telephone back into its carriage.
“Damn it, Sam, where have you been? I’ve been trying to find you for the last half hour.”
/> “Getting the girl stashed away. Why? What’s up?”
“Read this.” Markowitz pulled a typed statement out of his briefcase and handed it to Sam.
Sam scanned the statement and looked back at Markowitz.
“How did you get him to talk?”
“When I got him alone and told him he’s looking at second-degree assault and a long vacation at taxpayer expense, he decided to sing. Read.”
Sam began reading standing up, then sat down next to Markowitz’s desk. Markowitz continued to stand guard. Sam read the statement through once and then again to make certain he understood.
“Who else knows about this?”
“Do you think I’m crazy?” Markowitz finally sat down and moved his chair close to Sam. “I was alone with the kid, and I told him to keep his mouth shut around everybody else. At first I thought you were out of your mind, but now you’ve got me looking over my shoulder, too.”
“Do you believe this kid?”
“Don’t you?”
“I guess I do.”
“Damn right you do. Look, the kid says this deal is supposed to go down tonight, and he’ll tell us where it is if we give him his walking papers.”
“Come on, Markowitz. These guys can’t be that stupid. After what happened today, every one of them will be looking for a hole to crawl into. Nothing is going to happen tonight.”
Before Markowitz could respond, Sam crumpled up the statement sheet into a little ball and threw it into the wastebasket. Markowitz nearly exploded from his chair, but he caught the look from Sam just in time. Markowitz didn’t move. A figure was weaving silently toward them through the rows of desks.
“Hi ya, Captain,” Markowitz said. “What brings you up to this part of the world?”
“I thought I might find Officer Wright here. We seemed to get off on the wrong foot a little earlier. I just want to make certain that personal feelings don’t interfere with the job we have to do.”
“I appreciate that, Captain,” Sam said. “I think I got out of line. A little too pumped up, maybe.”
“Sure. Sometimes the old adrenaline kicks in, and we don’t stop and think the whole thing through. So how’s it going here?” the captain asked.
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