Second Watch Page 4

  I may have been relatively new to the force, but I was smart enough to figure out that in a pissing match between power brokers and a uniformed cop, I was the one who was going to come up with the short end of the stick.

  In other words, Mrs. Fisk’s comments combined with what Mac had said earlier about the mother in question made me more than happy to give Frankie and Donnie’s house a wide berth. By the time we finished our canvass of the neighborhood and returned to the patrol car, the enticing aroma of grilling burgers had done its trick. It was now long after dinnertime, and we were both famished.

  “Dick’s?” he said, putting our police-pursuit Fury in gear.

  “Amen,” I said.

  And that’s where we headed, for Ballard and the nearest Dick’s Drive-In.

  When the first Dick’s opened in the fifties, it was in Seattle’s Wallingford neighborhood. For a kid too young to drive back then, it was close but no cigar. The only way to get there was to drive. I was a junior in high school when the one in Ballard opened, and it was cause for a school-wide celebration. That’s where we headed now.

  We were parked in the car munching burgers and fries when Mac said, “I wouldn’t mind a piece of that.”

  For a moment I wasn’t sure if he was talking about my burger or about the shapely carhop who had just delivered our food. Turns out it was neither.

  “I’m talking about Frankie and Donnie’s mom,” he explained. “The woman may have been mad as all hell, but she was a dish, all right—blond, stacked, and gorgeous.”

  That was when I finally got around to telling him what Mrs. Fisk had said about Frankie and Donnie’s mom. When I finished, Mac shook his head sadly. “Too bad. She’s probably out of my league.”

  “What’s the matter with you?” I said. “You’re married.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “But I’m not dead, and neither are you.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Somewhere along the way I had fallen back asleep. When I awoke again it seemed like I was still smelling one of Dick’s hamburgers, but it turned out Mel was sitting in the chair next to my bed, munching away on a burger of her own.

  “Hey, sleepyhead,” she said. “When are you gonna wake up? It’s time.”

  It took a moment for me to make the transition from the world as it was in 1973 to the world as it is now, and it was quite a jolt.

  “That was weird,” I said.

  “What was weird?”

  There was a lot of stuff in my head right then that I didn’t particularly want to discuss with Mel Soames. Generally speaking, we didn’t talk about my life with Karen back when the kids were little or about what I referred to as the “good old days.” Discussions of those always seemed to introduce a certain level of tension into the conversation.

  I suppose I need to clarify this some. I’m not talking about old love affairs here. I’m referring to my carousing days when I’d have a drink or two before going to work without giving it a second thought. That, by the way, is one of the reasons I’m in AA now. So rather than go into any of those gory details with Mel, I glossed them all over.

  “I was dreaming about hamburgers,” I said, “and here you are eating one.”

  “Sorry about that. I was hungry, but don’t expect me to share, because you’re not allowed solid food yet. Jackie will be back in a minute.”

  “Who’s Jackie?”

  “Your nurse. She’s on a break, but she gave me strict orders before she left. You can have water or you can have broth. That’s it.”

  Right that minute, neither water nor broth was very high on my wish list. In fact, I still had to fight to keep my eyes open.

  “Whatever they gave me really knocked me on my butt,” I said.

  “It’s supposed to,” Mel told me. “It’s called anesthesia.”

  The same nurse reappeared—the stout one. This time I noticed that her name badge said she was Jackie Morse. That sounded familiar. Wait, Nurse Jackie. Wasn’t that a television show of some kind? From what I remembered of the show, that particular Nurse Jackie wasn’t exactly a picture of sweetness and light. It turned out this one wasn’t, either.

  “Okay,” she said after checking my vitals one more time, just for the hell of it, “let’s give that broth another try.”

  She handed me a cup with a straw in it. The stuff inside the cup was no longer hot—far from it—but to my surprise, when I swallowed a sip, it actually tasted good.

  “We’ll wait long enough to check your vitals one more time, Jonas,” she said. “If you’re still steady as she goes, we’ll get you wheeled out of here and up to your room. That way you’ll be somebody else’s problem.”

  When people call me by the name of Jonas, I can never quite wrap my head around the idea that I’m the person they’re addressing. Of course, in Nurse Jackie’s case, when she used the word “we,” it wasn’t the royal we, by any means. It was the dismissive form of the word, the one favored by grade school teachers talking down their noses to classrooms full of bored kids.

  It must have been the better part of another hour before Nurse Jackie finally pronounced that “we” were sufficiently recovered for me to leave the recovery room. As two uniformed attendants wheeled me into the hallway, I felt as though I had finally graduated from one of the levels of Dante’s Inferno. They rolled me down the hall, into the elevator, and then up into a room that was bigger than some hotel rooms I’ve seen. It had windows, a view of other buildings, and room for more than one bed, although only one bed seemed to be called for at the time.

  Once in my new digs I was sufficiently awake to be less concerned about Nurse Jackie and far more worried about what was to come. What if my new knees didn’t work? What if I fell flat on my face the first time they tried to stand me up? What if I was destined to spend the rest of my life on one of those little scooters that they’re always advertising on the boob tube? Mel was right there, of course, but I didn’t mention any of those worries to her. Why would I? Instead, I lay in the bed, with Mel dozing off and on in the chair beside me. The only sound in the room was the soft whisper of the bedsore-preventing mattress under me. Other than that, I did my worrying in complete silence.

  Fortunately, however, the orthopedic group didn’t leave me there stewing and worrying forever. In advance of the surgery, I had read all the “what to expect” booklets my orthopedic surgeon had sent out. Yes, I had read the part about the “recovery team” getting people back on their feet as soon as possible. Somehow I didn’t expect it to happen so soon, not the very same day as my surgery, but it did.

  A bare three hours after I had been rolled into the new room, I was approached by a band of three waiflike young women, stick figures every one, who announced they were my PT squad and that they were there to get me out of bed and “up and at ’em,” as the one who looked to be in charge told me jauntily.

  I didn’t share their enthusiasm, or their positive mental attitude. My first, unspoken response was a heartfelt “No way!” I was convinced it was much too soon and that the very idea of expecting me to stand up was an invitation to disaster. I’m sure I outweighed all three of them put together. I doubted they’d be able to support my weight. I could see myself falling to the brightly polished floor and smashing the new synthetic joints in my knees, to say nothing of my face, to pieces, but it was three to one—four, counting Mel—and they were not to be dissuaded. With the help of a strategically placed hoist, they pulled me up into a sitting position and then eased my legs over the edge of the bed. Once I was upright, they planted me in front of a walker.

  I remember taking a very deep breath. The next thing I knew, I took my first step and didn’t fall down. That’s when a very real miracle happened. For the first time in at least ten years or so, I realized that my knees didn’t hurt. Of course, I was on plenty of pain meds at the time, but the steady pain that had ground away at me for years, waking and sleeping, simply wasn’t there anymore.

  With my helpers and Mel cheering me along, I too
k one small, careful step after another. I didn’t walk all that far—out of the room and into the hallway. I went as far as the nurses’ station and then back to my room, where they returned me to my bed. The whole excursion left me feeling inordinately proud of myself—as though I’d just run the equivalent of a marathon. Before my head hit the pillow, I was back in never-never land.

  Through the years, booze has always been my drug of choice—booze and, a long time ago, cigarettes, too—but I’ve never been tempted to wander into the world of harder drugs. For one thing, my fear of needles makes it unlikely that I’d ever manage to be a successful IV drug user. But now, for the first time, lost in the dreamland world of medicinal narcotics, I got a taste of their allure.

  For one thing, under the influence of the pain meds my dreams were astonishingly vivid and, in some cases, entirely welcome. Regular dreams tend to dissipate the moment I awake, but that was not the case here. The details stayed with me long after the dreamscape itself was gone. For all intents and purposes, it was a trip down memory lane.

  Scenes from forty or even fifty years ago danced back through my head in full Technicolor splendor and in almost 3-D detail. In one, I was standing outside a hospital nursery looking down at the sweetly sleeping swaddled baby that was my newborn son, Scott. In another, I was a callow twenty-year-old youth, still a student at the University of Washington, sitting at my mother’s hospital bedside and watching the morphine drip as she slowly, ever so slowly, lost her battle with breast cancer.

  In others I walked long-ago crime scenes in more or less chronological order with partners both living and dead. In one I stood on the sidelines while medics tried to revive Milton Gurkey when he suffered a fatal heart attack after a violent confrontation with a homicide suspect. In some I was back in the car with Ron Peters, my former partner, when he was a young, gung-ho guy as well as a newly minted vegan. At the time, he hadn’t yet taken his nosedive off a highway overpass and wasn’t in a wheelchair, and I was still trying to figure out if I could work every day with a partner who wasn’t a carnivore. In others, I was partnered with Big Al Lindstrom. In one I was even back in the elephant enclosure in the Woodland Park Zoo.

  Eventually, in the dreams, as I had in real life, I found myself working with Sue Danielson. Even in the depths of sleep, my heart filled with dread, knowing that soon I would once again find myself in Sue’s living room reliving the horror that had been part of my life from that day to this. Unable to help her, I had watched my partner and a great cop bleed to death on the floor of her own living room, gunned down by her enraged estranged husband. By the time I finally awoke fresh from the all-too-familiar scene of Sue’s fallen-officer memorial, I was exhausted, physically and emotionally, and my cheeks were wet with tears.

  That was about the time I began questioning whether I was dead or alive. Maybe I had died on the operating table and this trip through dreamland was God’s way of having a little joke with me. Maybe He was using pieces of a lifelong jigsaw puzzle to allow my whole life to pass before my eyes in one disjointed scene after another.

  But what had jostled me awake this time was the appearance of yet another nurse. This one was a beefy, much-tattooed guy named Keith who came to take my vitals, check my drains, and see if I needed more pain meds.

  Why do they do that? People are in hospitals for a reason—to get better from an illness or to recover from surgery. If patients are sleeping peacefully, why wake them up to see if they’re all right? Why not let them sleep until they wake up on their own, at which time they can ring the bell and let someone know if more medication is in order? But let’s not even go there, because that’s not the way hospitals work, and it isn’t going to happen.

  So after Nurse Keith confirmed that I was still alive, if not kicking, I tossed around for a while. Wide awake, I would have been glad to have Mel’s company about then, but when Keith had woken me up, I’d finally insisted that she go home to get some rest. She had been at the hospital all day long and would willingly have stayed longer, but I told her I was in good hands and that she was the one who needed relief. She had issued instructions to all our friends that no one was to show up at the hospital that first day. It comes as no surprise that not a single person had dared disobey Mel’s orders.

  So there I was, alone and awake, with only the haunting memories elicited by those vivid dreams to keep me occupied. Karen was always a big Simon and Garfunkel fan, and one of her favorite songs by them was “Sounds of Silence.” In this case, the sleeping vision that was planted in my brain was that of the dead body of a naked girl, spilling out of a yellow barrel in the bright afternoon sunlight. Her long blond hair was in a greasy tangle and her fingernails, poking out of the mire, were covered with garish red polish.

  Since I didn’t have anything else to think about at the moment, I walked myself back through that pivotal case that would eventually pull me out of a patrol car and drop me into a desk in Homicide on the Public Safety Building’s fifth floor.

  That Sunday afternoon it didn’t take long for Larry Powell and Watty Watkins to sort out the identity of the Girl in the Barrel. Her name was Monica Wellington. She was an eighteen-year-old honor student, valedictorian of her high school graduating class at Leavenworth High School, and a recently enrolled freshman at the University of Washington.

  On Friday night, she had gone out on what was purported to be a blind date. When she didn’t come back to the dorm, her roommates had called her parents in Leavenworth on Saturday to let them know. The parents in turn were the ones who had called in a missing persons report to Seattle PD later on that same day.

  Missing persons reports often get short shrift, but Seattle was starting to see a flurry of women going missing, particularly young coeds. We were right on the cusp of what would later be called the Ted Bundy era. If a prostitute or two went missing back then, no one paid a lot of attention, but when female students from solid families, especially girls in good academic standing, went missing, some effort was made to connect the dots. In this case, the dots were connected early on.

  By late Sunday afternoon, while we were still tramping around in the blackberry bushes on Magnolia Bluff, Hannah and Eugene Wellington had driven over to Seattle from Leavenworth. They were doing a full-court press on local television news outlets pleading for information about their missing daughter. One of the guys in missing persons, David Larson, who was interviewed by a local reporter and who had seen a photo of the missing coed, happened to hear that Larry and Watty were investigating a possible homicide. David took it upon himself to bring a copy of the photo to the morgue.

  By the time Doc Baker got the layer of grease washed off the body, it was clear that the girl in the photo matched the face of the victim. The Wellingtons were staying at a low-cost motel up on Aurora, and Watty was dispatched with the unenviable job of giving them the bad news that an unidentified body had been found and that there was a good chance the victim would turn out to be their daughter. Watty was also tasked with bringing the parents to the morgue to do the ID.

  I didn’t know about any of this at the time because Mac and I were still too busy chowing down at Dick’s, but Watty told me much later that Eugene Wellington, all six feet six of him, wept like a baby, all the way from the motel to the morgue. Once there, he was the one who fainted dead away when it came time to identify the body. It was Hannah, the mother, all five feet two of her, who made the identification and then helped her sobbing, grieving giant of a husband out of the room.

  As for Mac and me? We finished out our shift and our burgers and went home.

  Back when Karen and I were in the market for our first house, Boeing was going through a world of hurt. That meant the local real estate market was in the toilet, which is how we’d lucked into and been able to afford our place on Lake Tapps.

  The house was one of those Pan Abode manufactured homes, built of cut cedar logs and then put together elsewhere. Ours was one of the early models that had been built in the fifties. The ori
ginal owner was halfway through a do-it-yourself remodel when he died of a heart attack. His widow blamed the house for doing him in and wanted nothing more to do with it.

  That’s why we got the place for such a bargain-basement price, but some of the projects that were left unfinished by the previous owner remained unfinished on my watch, too, and that continued to be a big bone of contention between Karen and me. She had one little kid, was pregnant with another, and wanted things done yesterday. I spent all week working and didn’t want to spend my days off working on the house.

  Lake Tapps is thirty-five miles south of Seattle. On a good day or late at night, I could get from downtown Seattle to the house in about forty minutes. During busy times of the day, the same trip could take an hour or longer. I used that time to decompress—to put the job away.

  And that was how I used the drive that night. It was somewhere between the Public Safety Building and home that I finally realized what was wrong with the place where we found the barrel. There was no path there leading up the hill, no reason for the boys to have gone there. From the bottom to the top, the bluff had been covered with blackberry brambles. That realization brought me to a simple question: What had Donnie and Frankie been doing there?

  It was an interesting question, but there wasn’t much to do about it right then. I was in my VW bug. If I called to talk to Larry or Watty about it, I’d have to make a long-distance call from our home phone. We weren’t dead broke, but with only one of us working, we were in a financial situation where pinching pennies was a necessity. Making unnecessary long-distance calls was not considered essential.

  Monday and Tuesday were my regular days off. I figured the next time I went to work would be soon enough to broach that topic with the detectives. In the meantime, I did my best to put the Girl in the Barrel out of my head.