We had not been friends. We became even less so when he showed up at a dance with a very cute girl named Karen. Not only did I snag her away from him at the dance, I married her, too. Talk about adding insult to injury, and Max was still pissed about it. While I was off doing my duty in Vietnam, Max found a way to stay home. He had gone to work for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, where he was now firmly ensconced on the police beat.
“Hey, Beau,” he said when he saw me. “What’s the deal down there? I understand some neighborhood kids found a dead woman. Can you confirm that?”
He made it sound like we were the best of pals. The other reporters in the group, thinking he had some kind of an in, backed off and gave him the floor. It did my heart good to tell him, along with the rest of his newsie gang, everything I was allowed to say, which was pretty much nothing.
“Sorry,” I said. “Can’t confirm or deny.”
Grimacing, Max went trudging after MacPherson, but Mac already knew there was no love lost between me and the P-I’s self-proclaimed ace reporter.
“You heard the man,” Mac said. “Mum’s the word. Check with the public information office.”
We got into our patrol car. Mac took off like a bat out of hell, and nobody bothered trying to follow us. If they had, they wouldn’t have had to go far, since we stopped again two blocks up the street, where Amherst Place West intersects with W. Plymouth Street.
“You take that side, I’ll take this one,” Mac said. “And you could just as well skip the house back there on the corner of Twenty-third. That’s where Donnie and Frankie live. Their mother was a screaming banshee when we brought the boys home. She threatened to tear those poor kids limb from limb when she found out they had been down on Pier Ninety-one instead of where she thought they were, safely stowed at a movie.”
“She was probably just worried about the boys messing around down by the railroad tracks,” I suggested.
Mac gave me a wink and a lip-smacking, lecherous grin. “Maybe so,” he said. “But I doubt it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I think it had a lot more to do with Watty and me interrupting whatever it was she and her boyfriend were doing when we brought the boys home. From the looks of it, I’d say the two of them were getting it on pretty hot and heavy. The guys from Homicide are the ones making the big bucks. Since they’ll most likely have to talk with the boys again, why should we have to deal with a lady tiger?”
Why indeed? With that, Mac and I hit the bricks.
It was close to dinnertime. As expected, the warm April weather had brought out the early-bird outdoor cooks. Smoke from a dozen separate Weber grills filled the evening air on the southern end of Magnolia Bluff. Residents of Seattle recognized this early bit of faux summer, the exact opposite of Indian summer, for what it was. Soon the sunshine and dry weather would be gone, not to return until sometime in early July. The people we dragged in from their backyard activities weren’t especially welcoming or eager to talk to us. Other than using up some shoe leather, we gained precious little information in the process.
The house where the barrel’s track originated had been vacant for several months, caught up in the midst of a rancorous divorce. One neighbor mentioned that she thought a sale was now pending, even though the real estate sign in the front yard didn’t mention that. No one had noticed any unusual activity around the house in the past several days, although the same neighbor, a Mrs. Jerome Fisk, said she thought some of the neighborhood kids had been hanging around in the backyard of the vacant house and using it as a hideout for smoking cigarettes.
“I didn’t turn them in for it, though,” she told me. “Those poor boys have a tough enough row to hoe. I didn’t want to add to their troubles.”
“You’re saying what exactly?” I asked.
“Their mother, you know,” Mrs. Fisk added confidentially. “Amelia Dodd’s a bit of a wild thing. Gentlemen callers coming to the house at all hours of the day and night.”
“Gentlemen callers? You mean there’s no husband in the picture?”
“Not so as you’d notice,” Mrs. Fisk replied. “There are probably plenty of husbands in that group of men swarming around the honey pot, but I doubt any of them belong to her.”
“You’re saying she’s a … professional?” I asked.
Mrs. Fisk shrugged. “Believe me, she has plenty of special male friends, and she doesn’t appear to have any other kind of job, so you tell me. When I see those two boys left to their own devices so much of the time, it breaks my heart.”
I know more than a little about what it’s like to be raised as a fatherless boy. I looked at the houses on the street. When I was growing up, my mother and I lived in a tiny Ballard-area apartment located over a bakery. Because of the ovens down below, the apartment was warm in the winter without our having to turn on the heat, but it was hot, hot, hot in the summer. I remember very clearly that when clients came to my mother’s place for fittings, I was expected to make myself scarce.
Nevertheless, this Magnolia neighborhood was a big step up from the walk-up apartment where I was raised. I suppose there were plenty of people back then, including my own grandfather, who called my mother a “loose” woman because there was no man in our lives and no ring on Mother’s finger. Her fiancé, my father, died in a motorcycle wreck soon after she got pregnant and before they had a chance to marry. Defying her father’s wishes, Mother refused to give me up for adoption. Instead, she had raised me entirely on her own. At the time I was interviewing Mrs. Fisk I had no idea that one day in the far distant future I would be reunited with long-lost members of my father’s family.
At the time, I regarded Mrs. Fisk as a mean-spirited gossip, a little too eager to condemn her attractive young neighbor to anyone who would listen. It seemed likely that any number of old biddies had probably concocted and spread similar stories about my own mother. In many close neighborhoods and small towns, the single mother was, and still is, a target of scrutiny, if not suspicion.
But even if it was true—if working as a lady of the evening turned out to be Frankie and Donnie’s mother’s only means of support—she must have been successful in her line of work. After all, Magnolia Bluff was one of Seattle’s solidly middle-class neighborhoods. If a working gal was able to earn enough money to maintain a house there, she had to be more of a call girl than a streetwalker, one with a well-heeled, generous clientele with maybe a few power brokers added into the mix.
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
