downstairs.
I think Donnie, Belltown Terrace's graveyard-shift doorman, was most likely snoozing at his desk, but he lurched to his feet as soon as the elevator door opened.
'Mr. Beaumont,' he said, a little too eagerly. 'You're up and around early. Or is it late?'
'Early,' I said. 'Do you know a good place to get breakfast around here at this time of day?'
'Here in the Regrade?'
I nodded. 'Someplace within walking distance.'
'There's Caffe Minnie's,' he suggested helpfully. 'It's just down the street.'
I've been in Caffe Minnie's a time or two. It's at the corner of First and Denny, one of those oddball spots where Seattle's various early-day surveyors couldn't come to any kind of sensible agreement. As a result, the corner lot is triangular, and so's the building that sits on it.
Caffe Minnie's has an eclectic crowd. Some are of the purple-haired, earringed sort, while others are of the vacationing schoolmarm variety as well as assorted types between the two extremes. Caffe Minnie's late-night customers tend to view anyone who looks like a police officer with suspicion verging on outright hostility. I wasn't up to that.
'No,' I said. 'Not my style.'
'How about Steve's Broiler up on Virginia?'
I had tried Steve's as well. For some reason, I found it depressing. 'I don't think so.'
'What about the Five Point?' he asked. 'It's over on Cedar at Fifth, just under the Monorail.'
'The Five Point isn't open, is it? I thought they closed early-around eleven.'
'Not anymore. After the Doghouse closed, they went twenty-four hours.'
'Oh,' I said.
It was amazingly quiet on the street. As I walked, the lateness of the hour combined with the muffling qualities of the fog gave me the sense of being the only person left alive in downtown Seattle. But when I reached Cedar, there were three empty Farwest Cabs lined up on the street.
The neon sign in the window of the restaurant, the one that says COOK ON DUTY, gave the fog outside a ghostly pink glow. The fog was so thick, in fact, that from the front door I couldn't see as far as Chief Sealth standing in his winter-dry fountain a few feet away in the middle of Tillicum Square.
Right inside the door, a wooden cigar-store Indian waited beside the cash register. Back in my drinking days, I didn't venture into the Five Point much. For one thing, the black-and-white tiles on the floor, counter front, and ceiling can be a little disorienting when you're operating under a full load of McNaughtons.
Furthermore, legend has it that back in the old days, a Five Point bartender once asked me to leave when I tried to strike up a serious conversation with the wooden Indian. I don't remember the incident, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen.
Alexis Downey-my sometime girlfriend-didn't like the Doghouse; didn't approve of it. While the Doghouse was still open, I once offered to take her to the Five Point for a Sunday-morning breakfast. She refused to go. I could have handled it if her objection had been based on smoke or greasy food. I was thunderstruck when it turned out to be on the grounds of sexual discrimination.
I'm not sure how Alex heard about the men's rest room at the Five Point. Through the creative use of a periscope, users of the urinal-presumably all male-have an unobstructed view of the top of the Space Needle. Alex told me she wasn't setting foot inside the place until women could take advantage of the same view. I took this to be a new front in Seattle's potty-parity war between the sexes.
The sign on the front door of the Five Point made no mention of rest-room inequality. Instead, it announced SMOKERS WELCOME. NONSMOKERS BEWARE. That statement pretty much covered it.
Inside the small dining room, a predictable pall of cigarette smoke hung in the air. It may have been the middle of the night, but it was also the first of the month. The place was crowded with what seemed like a group of regulars. Four oversized cabdrivers-a crowd all by themselves-took up the better part of three tables.
There was only one empty seat left at the counter. I slipped into it. I had barely started looking around to get my bearings when someone slammed a full cup of coffee onto the counter in front of me. Some of the coffee slopped over the top onto the Formica.
'It's about time you got around to dropping in here. What'll you have-bacon and eggs, hash browns crisp, whole-wheat toast, and a small OJ?' The voice was familiar. So was the peroxide-blond beehive hairdo.
The waitress was Wanda, one of my old favorites from the Doghouse.
'Wanda!' I exclaimed. 'What the hell are you doing here?'
'Whaddya think? I'm just working to wear out the uniform.' She grinned. 'Besides, I'm way too young to retire. Now are you going to order or what? I don't have time to stand around here jawing all night.'
'You're right,' I said. 'I'll have the usual.'
'By the way,' she returned. 'For future reference, that's a number four.'
Wanda hustled off. I'm not that good a judge of women's ages. Perpetually blond hair tends to throw me off, but if I were going to guess, I'd say Wanda was somewhere right around seventy.
When she came back with my orange juice, she slapped a slightly used, grease-stained newspaper on the counter in front of me.
'Sorry it's so messy,' she apologized. 'This is the only one I could find where somebody hadn't already worked the crossword puzzle. Do you need a pencil?'
'No, thanks,' I said. 'I've got one.'
I opened the paper up to the right page. First I read 'Mike Mailway,' then I started working the puzzle.
For the first time in months, I felt as though I'd come home.
13
James Gleason, the author of that morning's New York Times Crossword Puzzle in the Seattle P.-I., must have been my blood brother. Or maybe he's a twin, and the two of us were separated at birth. Whatever the connection, we were on the same wavelength. I banged my way through the entire puzzle without a single hitch or hang-up. I finished it completely in twenty minutes flat-while I was eating breakfast.
Only when I was in the process of refolding the paper to leave it for the next guy did I see a copy of Bonnie Elgin's Identi-Kit sketch right at the top of the front page in the local news section. It was good positioning for that kind of piece. I know for a fact that people read that section of the paper more than any other.
It's easy to close our eyes and ignore what's going on in Washington, D.C., or to gloss over the latest episode of bloodthirsty carnage in Bosnia or the Middle East. It's a lot more difficult to blind yourself to what's going on in your own backyard. Readers tend to skip over the blaring headlines on the front page in favor of devouring in detail-down to the last sentence-what's happening at home. For some reason, news of murder and mayhem next door is almost always more compelling and more interesting than systematic genocide as it is practiced in other, more distant parts of the world.
Seeing the picture there in the P.-I. served notice to me that Sue Danielson had kept right on working throughout the afternoon. She had talked about visiting hospitals with our missing hit-and-run victim's picture, but she must have faxed copies to some of the media as well. I doubted she had actually stepped inside that heavily guarded, impregnable fortress-the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
I gave Sue credit for both initiative and hustle, especially considering the fact that her partner du jour had spent most of the afternoon and all of the evening literally lying down on the job. I allowed myself only the smallest twinge of guilt. After all, Sue hadn't spent the previous night poking around in the still-warm ashes of that house fire up on Camano Island.
Intrigued by the reproduction of the sketch, I broke my own protocol and actually read the accompanying article. In brief, it said that detectives were looking for the man depicted in the picture as a 'person of interest' in the fatal fire at Fishermen's Terminal two days earlier. The reporter went on to say that there was some speculation about his possible link to another fatal arson fire as well, one that had occurred the following day on Camano Island.
The reporter stated that although the two fires were thought to be related, investigators had so far declined
