Once the chief finished complaining about the media, he went on to look a gift ride in the mouth and gripe about my Porsche. According to Rankin, his personal car is a two-year-old Buick Riviera. Without knowing any of my history, he seemed offended by the very existence of my aging and much repaired guard red Porsche, and I wasn’t inclined to enlighten him. By the time we got to the Doghouse parking lot, I was wishing I’d left him to walk, but that was only the beginning. It got worse.
I opened the front door of the restaurant to let him go first. He stepped inside, then turned back to me. “My God, it’s so smoky in there how can anybody see?”
The Doghouse, smoke and all, is a Seattle institution, but Rankin, as a relatively recent transplant, had clearly never set foot inside the place. Diana, the hostess, came up to me smiling her usual welcome. “Hi, Beau. You’re in the back room tonight?”
I nodded, and she led the way past the usual line of hopefuls waiting to do their bit for the state coffers and buy their weekly collection of lottery tickets.
“There’d better be a nonsmoking section,” Chief Rankin was saying under his breath.
I almost choked, and not because of the smoke either. If you want to sit in a nonsmoking section, don’t bother going to the Doghouse. Period. Because they are mandated by law, there are two designated nonsmoking tables in the middle dining room, but the entire rest of the restaurant is so totally permeated with residual smoke that it doesn’t make much difference.
The back dining room, with seating for a maximum of fifteen, is used primarily as a day-to-day club room for ham radio operators whose faded collection of QSL cards, showing contacts and call signs from around the world, decorates the equally faded walls. Here, too, stale cigarette smoke lingered heavily in the air. On the far side of the room is the only window in the entire restaurant that actually opens. Rankin hurried over and yanked it open, allowing in a whiff of fresh air. Chilly fresh air.
“How many will there be?” Diana asked me.
“Eight altogether.”
She deposited a set of menus on the table and retreated, leaving Chief Rankin and me alone. Moments later Lucille, one of the nighttime waitresses, popped her head into the room. “Chili burger, Beau?” I nodded. “Want me to take your order, or wait for the others?”
“We’ll eat now,” I said. “There may not be time later.”
“How about you?” she said to Chief Rankin, who had picked up a menu and was regarding it with obvious distaste.
“What do you recommend, Detective Beaumont?” he asked. “You must know your way around the menu. You seem to be on a first-name basis with everyone in the place.”
It was bad enough being the chief’s guide dog here to begin with. I wasn’t about to stumble into the trap of suggesting anything. “It’s all about the same,” I told him.
Rankin scratched his head. “I guess I’ll try the salmon,” he said grudgingly, “if it’s not too greasy.”
In the Doghouse, at that hour of the night, them’s fightin‘ words. Lucille peered at me over her glasses as if to say, “Where’d you find this live one?” “You bet,” she said aloud, and disappeared.
The back room isn’t big, so Rankin paced back and forth in front of the open window. “Do you think they’ll show?” he asked.
“They’ll be here.”
“I wouldn’t do this in Oakland in a million years,” he continued, “not without a whole squad of sharpshooters to back us up. Coming here by ourselves is irresponsible, crazy. I never should have let Freeman talk me into it.”
Lucille came in to deliver Rankin’s dinner salad. She set the bowl of semi-wilted lettuce on the table. He looked at it but didn’t sit down. “Are there sulfites on that salad?” he asked.
Lucille smiled at him with a benevolent, sixtysomething, peroxide-blonde smile. “Honey, I couldn’t tell you. They only pay me to deliver this food. I never see what goes into it before the cook hands it over.”
I’d never seen Lucille put on her dumb-blonde act before. She’s a savvy lady who can work her way through a racing form in ten minutes flat. Rankin didn’t have sense enough to quit while he was ahead.
“I’d better not eat any then,” he said. “I’m allergic to sulfites.” Lucille swept the offending salad bowl off the table and marched from the room.
Rankin sat now, looking dejectedly at his hands. “I came up here hoping to get away from gangs, you know. My wife doesn’t want me having to work around them. She’d have a fit if she knew I was waiting here in a dive, meeting a bunch of them for dinner, without even any kind of bodyguard.”
“I won’t tell if you don’t,” I assured him.
We sat quietly for a few minutes. It seemed to take forever for the minute hand on my watch to move from one slash mark to the next. Eventually, Lucille reappeared laden with two platters of food. She set the chili burger in front of me and slung the other one onto the table, where it came to rest in front of Chief Rankin. He stared down at it, dismay written on his face.
“This doesn’t look like salmon,” he said.
“It’s ham,” Lucille told him firmly. “We’re out of salmon.”
With that she flounced from the room before a stunned Chief Rankin had a chance to reply. It was all I could do to keep from laughing aloud. Rankin had violated one of the prime unwritten rules of Doghouse behavior- offending a waitress-and Lucille had seen to it that he was suitably punished.
I think he would have gone after her, but just then the door opened again, and our guests sauntered into the room.
I’ve been told all my life that America is a melting pot. The Hispanics may have given rise to the general theme of cool macho dudeness, but urban blacks have elevated it to an art form, and these six dudes were the coolest of the cool.
They came wearing the uniforms and colors-blues, reds, and blacks-of their three diverging armies. They wore leather and gold chains and three-inch Afros with shaved spots over some ears. They stalked into the room, but there was no elbowing, no jabbing or jibing or trading of insults. They filed in silently with all the solemnity of young men attending a funeral. Behind veiled eyelids, they sized each other up, but no one said a word.
Our guests were a disturbing-looking bunch, and the dead silence made it even worse. It got scarier still when the last to arrive peered into the room and then went away, returning with a large leather briefcase, a Hartmann. He set the case on the floor near the door with a resounding thump. The case was big enough to hold a whole arsenal of handguns and other death-dealing weapons. My tie suddenly felt a full inch and a half too tight.
Lucille followed the case into the room, order pad in hand, no-nonsense mask on her face. “Who all’s eating?” she demanded.
One of the six seated himself directly across the table from Rankin. Staring at the chief with undisguised, malevolent hatred, he assumed the role of spokesman. “Depends on who’s payin‘,” he said.
Despite his premeeting case of nerves, Chief Rankin seemed to have recovered his equanimity. He met the young man’s gaze. “I am,” he said. “Have whatever you want.”
Lucille turned to the person closest to her. He may or may not have been twenty-one. Unlike Rankin, he had obviously been a guest of the Doghouse on numerous previous occasions. Without needing to consult the menu, he ordered a Bob’s Burger and a beer, but the spokesman squelched the latter.
“No drinkin‘,” he rasped, aiming his smoldering gaze on the offending henchman. “No beer. We’re here to take care of business.”
No one spoke while Lucille continued taking orders. At last she left the room. “It might be nice if we started with introductions,” Chief Rankin began. “I’m Chief of Police-”
“No introductions,” the leader interrupted. “We don’t need no introductions. We don’t need no nicey-nice. We’re here to talk business.”
“What kind of business?” Rankin asked.
“Look, I got me a business. I go to work every day. It’s a capitalist business. Sometimes I got merchandise to sell. Sometimes I buy. It’s a free country, and my business is s’posed to make me a profit, but I’m in this squeeze play, man. I’m gettin‘ it in the shorts from both ends. I don’t mind payin’ protection. Like I said, it’s a free country. Cops got to make a profit too. What I do mind is gettin‘ squeezed even after I pay my protection. That’s not cool, brother. That is not the American way.”
