I’D BEEN GONE FOR A LONG TIME, BUT UNLIKE HILDA Tanner’s Rocky, Lucy doesn’t hold grudges. She greeted me with a thumping tail wag and immediately assumed her customary automotive position with her chin glued to my shoulder.
Walking to the car, I had noticed that although my jacket had mostly dried out, my shoes hadn’t. But dry or not, the jacket was in exceptionally sorry shape. Earlier I’d made note of the developer listed on the coming-attractions sign located on Agnes Mayfield’s property—Highline Development. A quick check online told me that the Highline corporate office was only a mile or so away, right there in West Seattle. It would have been simple to stop by in passing, but then something my mother always used to say came to mind: “You never get a second chance to make a good first impression.”
Right then my torn and mud-splattered jacket wasn’t nearly up to “good first impression” standards. Between that and the reality of worsening afternoon traffic, I headed for Belltown Terrace instead, hoping there would be no unfortunate mishaps between hither and yon. One of Seattle’s most spectacular traffic-jam events featured a semi loaded with frozen crab that had overturned near the West Seattle Bridge, turning hour-long commutes into six-hour nightmares. (If you think I’m kidding about that, you can always Google it and see for yourself!)
While my jacket might not have been fit for a drop-in visit to a real-estate developer’s office, it was just fine for stopping by the Pecos Pit Bar-B-Que. As I said, the outlet in West Seattle was brand-new—at least it was new to me. For decades Pecos Pit operated out of a born-again gas station across from Sears on Seattle’s First Avenue South. That’s how people used to give directions to the place—it’s right across from Sears. Now that Sears is going the way of the dodo bird, those directions no longer work. The building once occupied by Sears now functions as the headquarters for Starbucks. From what I understand, Safeco Field is about to be renamed for a cell-phone company, and the Kingdome is long gone, too. Clearly I’m turning into one of those cranky old codgers who pine for the way things used to be as opposed to appreciating how they are now. But I digress. Again!
At Pecos Pit I ordered up some carry-out dinner fixings—a quart each of beef brisket, baked beans, and coleslaw in foam containers along with a dozen sesame-seed-covered hamburger buns. For dinner that evening, I’d be serving barbecue-beef sandwiches, some assembly required.
I was standing at the counter waiting while the staff put together my to-go order when my phone rang, Al Thorne’s name appearing in the caller ID. Clearly he was off work now and using his cell phone.
“How’s it hanging?” he asked when I answered.
Al’s standard bad-taste greeting never varies. His sense of humor is only one step up from fourth-grade-level knock-knock jokes, and he’s a walking, talking catalog of clichés, but he’s a good guy with a heart in the right place, so I try to overlook his linguistic shortcomings. Since he was calling me, I assumed that meant he had news.
“What have you got for me?” I asked.
“The Mount Baker Tunnel,” he replied.
The Mount Baker Tunnel is on I-90 between the bridge across Lake Washington from Mercer Island and the Rainier Avenue interchange. When you’re traveling westbound, that’s the first freeway exit inside Seattle proper.
“What is this?” I asked. “An afternoon traffic report?”
“That’s where the aid car picked up Naomi Dale, just to the west of the Mount Baker Tunnel,” he told me. Somehow or other she made it over the Jersey barrier and was standing there on the shoulder of the interstate, trying to wave down a passing vehicle. A Metro bus driver called it in. She was staggering all over the place, and he said he missed hitting her by bare inches. The poor guy almost crapped his pants. If he had hit her, she would have been squashed flatter than a pancake—her and that unborn baby of hers, too. When a squad car showed up, the cops on the scene figured out she was in labor. They’re the ones who summoned the ambulance. The EMT didn’t know what she was on at the time, but he told me she was high as a kite. He said they dropped her off at Harborview at eleven forty-five the night of January twenty-third.”
“And Athena was born a while after that,” I concluded.
“Any luck getting a line on the missing mama?” Al asked.
“Not so far,” I replied. “I found out where Naomi used to live and got a line on who the likely father might be, but I have no clue about what became of her after she left the hospital.”
“How’s the baby doing?” Al wanted to know.
“As far as I can tell, the baby’s doing fine. It’s her grandfather I’m worried about. The poor guy is in his sixties and has worn himself down to a nub looking after a newborn on his own. I’m letting them stay at my Seattle condo for the time being, until he can get the parental-rights thing handled. And I’ve hired someone to come in and take over some of the baby-tending duties so he can have a moment to himself—maybe even take a nap.”
“I remember how that worked,” Al said. “The wife and I had two kids under the age of three, and I don’t think either Jan or I got more than an hour’s worth of sleep at a time, and that was with two of us looking after them. I can’t imagine surviving looking after a newborn all on my own, especially not as old as I am now. Let me know if there’s anything more I can do to help.”
“You already have helped,” I told him. “Thanks for that.”
My order came up. To spare Lucy any kind of temptation, I loaded the food in the trunk for what turned out to be an excruciatingly slow trip home. My first choice for getting back to Belltown Terrace from West Seattle has always been Highway 99 to the two-level roadway called the Alaskan Way Viaduct, where I exit at Columbia and then make my way northward to Belltown through downtown Seattle. The local traffic planners, an oxymoron if ever there was one, have decided in their infinite wisdom that the sixty-year-old viaduct has to go, and in a year or thereabouts it’ll be torn down. So whenever I drive that way now, it’s with an advanced case of separation anxiety. On this trip my sense of unease was exacerbated by my singular lack of progress on the case.
If anything, my afternoon chat with Hilda Tanner had elicited a lot of information, none of it helpful to my client. If anything, it had made things worse. Now instead of needing to locate one missing person, I needed to locate two—Alan’s daughter, Naomi, and her AWOL boyfriend or maybe spouse, Petey Mayfield. I suspected him of being Athena’s supposedly “unknown” father. Once he was located, and if a DNA match revealed him to be her biological father, then Alan would need both Naomi and Petey to relinquish their parental rights. Good luck with that! They sure as hell didn’t seem to be taking much responsibility at the moment!
Driving north on Fourth Avenue, between Stewart and Bell, there’s a point during that stretch of street when suddenly the futuristic centerpiece of the Seattle’s World Fair, the Space Needle, materializes right there in front of you. It’s one of those deals where, because of surrounding buildings, now you see it, now you don’t. That day in the traffic barely inching northward, seeing the Space Needle suddenly appear sent me down a rabbit hole of memory.
I graduated from Ballard High School in 1962. Commercial fishing was a way of life in Ballard back then, and most of my friends spent their summers working with the fishing fleet on family boats—boats that belonged to their fathers or their uncles—and they made tons of money doing so. I tried fishing once and was sent home in disgrace with a nearly fatal case of seasickness. So that summer after graduation, when all my pals took to sea, I went to work at the World’s Fair as a groundskeeper. I worked the late shift, and when the monorail cars finished their last runs of the evening, one of my jobs involved cleaning them.
The whole time I was growing up, I loved bubble gum. That one summer of cleaning those cars cured me of bubble gum for life.
Be that as it may, the other thing that summer did for me was turn me into a Space Needle junkie. My kids and grandkids have loved having dinners in the revolving restaurant at the top. It used to be that whenever the Space Needle came into sight in the Seattle skyline, either driving or flying, I always felt a profound sense of homecoming, but now everything has changed.
That appalling traffic accident, the one that cost Ross Connors his life and Harry I. Ball his legs, has colored my thinking about the Space Needle. At the time it happened, Seattle Center had been full of merrymakers celebrating the season and the Needle itself had been decked out like a Christmas tree. Having lives snuffed out or permanently changed against that backdrop of seasonal celebration had infused a dose of melancholy to my attitude toward the Space Needle. That afternoon driving home from West Seattle, rather than seeing it as welcoming, I felt something close to despair.
The parking garage was still open, so I left the bags of food from Pecos Pit with the parking attendant and took Lucy to the dog-walking area just across from the garage entrance.
Through the years what was once routinely referred to as the Denny Regrade has morphed into being called Belltown. When I first moved into my condo, the building across the street was a union hall. Over time, the union sold out and the building was occupied by one of those megachurches. The Congregation remodeled the interior but left behind a small patch of grass—the only one for blocks, as it turns out. As a public service, the church maintains that as a dog-walking area. Until Lucy came into my life, that part of the church’s good-neighbor policy was entirely invisible to me.
Originally this was just a harmless piece of grassy lawn, but now, like the Space Needle, the churchyard, too, had taken on a darker meaning. This was the place where Ken Purcell had come looking for Mel, with the deadliest of intentions in his heart and a knife in hand. It’s the place where I came close to losing both Mel and Lucy. The dog had deflected Purcell’s attack on Mel, and he had stabbed Lucy instead. With Lucy out of commission, the only thing that had turned the tide of battle in our favor had been the timely intervention of a homeless guy named Sam Shelton and his trusty pit bull, Billy Bob. With Lucy down for the count, Sam and Billy Bob had sprung into action. Not only had Sam’s dog disarmed the asshole, he’d done a credible job of mangling the guy’s hand before Sam saw fit to call him off.
I had subsequently learned that Sam, an imposingly large and scary-looking black man, is also a Vietnam vet suffering from PTSD. Because he can’t tolerate being in crowds or enclosed spaces, he remains unwaveringly homeless. A fire-escape alcove from the church basement is his residence of choice, and he and Billy Bob spend their nights there, summer and winter, sleeping under the collection of tarps and blankets that Sam rolls around in an overburdened grocery cart.
After that almost-fatal encounter, I’d gone looking for Mel’s saviors. I had wanted to help them and even went so far as to locate a shelter where both man and beast would have been welcome. Sam’s response had been, “Thanks, but no thanks. Let us be.” So I’d backed off and minded my own business, but these days whenever I walked Lucy, I was sure to have a spare bag of kibble or a Milk Bone in my pocket for Billy Bob. This time was no exception, but since it was too early and they had not yet arrived on the scene, the kibble remained in my pocket.
Once Lucy finished up, we headed back inside. On the way through P-1, I noticed that Marge’s Kia Sportage was still parked in one of the public parking stalls, but once we arrived upstairs, she was nowhere in sight and neither was anyone else. I put the food bags on the counter and was feeding Lucy when Alan Dale finally made his appearance. He came into the kitchen carrying a basket of freshly laundered baby clothes and set about folding them.
“Hey,” I said, “how are things going?”
All afternoon I’d been wondering and worrying about how Alan and Marge would get along. His response surprised me.
“Where on earth did you find that wonderful woman?” he asked.
For me, as far as wonderful women are concerned, Mel Soames is the first name that comes to mind. “Which wonderful woman?” I asked.
“Marge,” he answered. “She’s a treasure. I got to sleep for three straight hours this afternoon and took a long, hot shower besides. By the time I woke up and came out of the bathroom, Marge had already done three loads of laundry.”
I don’t mind being wrong, but being wrong twice—first about Harry I. Ball and Marge and now about her and Alan Dale—was downright perturbing. The truth was, though, Alan looked far better than he had earlier that morning at the Silver Cloud. The dark shadows under his eyes were slightly less exaggerated, and I suspected that those three hours of sleep were more than he’d had at one time for as long as he’d been in Seattle.
Rather than comment on any of that, I focused on the food. “I picked up some takeout on the way home. Are you hungry?”
“Starving,” he said.
So even though it was earlier than Mel’s and my usual dinnertime, I heated the brisket and the baked beans. Alan and I were in the kitchen chowing down a few minutes later when Marge emerged from the guest room with baby Athena in hand. Marge deposited the baby in a little seat of some kind—a kind of slinglike thing that kept Athena at a gentle thirty-five-degree angle.
“Now that you’re finally home,” Marge said, giving me one of her disquieting looks, “I should probably head out soon.”
It occurred to me that if Marge made it to age ninety, she’d be able to give Hilda Tanner a run for her money.
“I know Harry used to love food from Pecos Pit,” I said. “Would you like me to bag up a to-go order for you both?”
“Probably a good idea,” she agreed grudgingly. “I’ll be getting home too late to cook.”
By then Alan was well into his second brisket sandwich and eating like he was one of those starving children from China my mother always used to warn me about. I left my own sandwich resting on my plate long enough to box up food for Harry and Marge. Even so, when I finished, I could see there was still more than enough left over for another meal for Alan, Mel, and me.
“Thanks,” Marge said as I handed her the to-go bag. “By the way, the rocker’s from Mrs. Bailey down in 1703.”
“What rocker?” I asked.
Marge gave me another stink eye. “If you’re going to have a baby around, you need to have a rocking chair,” she advised. “I asked Bob at the front door to track one down for us. It’s on loan for the duration.”
With that she flounced out, taking her food and her oversize purse with her.
“I can’t believe it,” Alan marveled after she left. “Marge is really terrific. She suggested that maybe I should try to grab a nap. While I was sleeping, she put away all the groceries, fed Athena, bathed her, and did a bunch of laundry. And once I woke up, being able to shower at leisure without worrying was amazing. Marge also said that she’s willing to drop by and help out whenever I need her. In fact, she’s coming back tomorrow so I can go talk with Athena’s caseworker from Child Protective Services, to see if there’s any way we can get provisional approval for me to take Athena home to Texas.”
“That’s Marge for you,” I said. “She’s all wool and a yard wide—with a heart of gold.”
And happy to bill me for every minute, but Alan Dale didn’t need to know any of those gory details. That arrangement was strictly between Marge and me, and I wanted to keep it that way.