'It's all relative,' I said.
'I'm not a blind date, Jonas,' she chided gently. 'You don't have to impress me.'
Touche. She had me dead to rights. Neither of us said a word while the busboy whisked the appetizer dishes out of the way of a waiter poised to deposit our entrees.
'Your grandfather was not a mean man; he just had no idea how to bend,' Beverly Piedmont said. 'In retrospect, I can see that what he did to your mother was heartless. It was only days after your father died in that motorcycle accident that Jonas and I found out our daughter was pregnant. He wanted her to give you up, and she refused. They had a terrible fight. I have to say your mother gave as good as she got. After that, there was no turning back for either one of them. And not for me, either.
'Through the years, it broke my heart to know that my only grandson was growing up right here in Seattle, almost under my nose, and yet I couldn't have anything to do with him. With you. I suppose I could have ignored your grandfather's wishes-done something underhanded and gone behind his back-but that's not the kind of person I am.
'I'm an old woman now, Jonas,' she continued. 'I never got to hold you when you were a baby or to save your first tooth in my jewelry box or to watch you unwrap your very first Christmas presents. Or any Christmas presents at all, for that matter. Now that I'm alone, I want to make up for lost time. I promise not to be a pest, but I do want to spend time with you, to get to know about who you are and how you think.
'And there are things I want to tell you, about what your mother was like when she was a little girl. About the places we lived when she was growing up and the things we did. Does that make any sense?'
I nodded. That's all I could manage.
'The food is very nice here,' she went on, 'but you don't have to take me to fancy restaurants. We could go someplace like Zesto's or Dick's Drive-In, or we could just sit at the house and talk. Mandy would like that. I swear that dog is lonely, too.'
Beverly Piedmont put down her fork and then fumbled in her purse until she located a white lace-edged handkerchief, which she used to dab at her eyes.
It's a funny thing about Adam's apples. On special occasions, mine swells until it is approximately the size of a basketball. When that happens, I find it very difficult to talk. Impossible even. Rather than embarrass us both, I reached into my pocket and dragged out my notebook.
On the first blank page, one just beyond my hastily scribbled notes about Hans Gebhardt and Sobibor, I wrote myself a note. I put it in a spot where I was sure to stumble across it first thing the following morning.
'CALL KELLY,' I wrote, printing my daughter's name in large capital letters. 'INVITE TO T-DAY DINNER.'
Who says you can't learn from someone else's mistakes?
19
Sue Danielson and I had agreed to drive to the Ballard Fire House in separate vehicles. It was later than it should have been when I dropped my grandmother off at her house and headed that way.
Back when I was a kid, the Ballard Fire House was still just exactly that-a firehouse. That was its raison d'etre from the old horse-drawn fire-engine days back in the early 1900s. Sometimes in the early seventies, the firemen moved into more modern quarters, and the old firehouse was transformed into a trendy sort of night- club/restaurant. It has operated in that guise ever since.
The Fire House was evidently a popular place. I had to park two blocks away. When I reached the entryway alcove, I found both Sue Danielson and June Miller waiting for me. Former congressman Miller was nowhere in evidence, and I had to look twice before I recognized Sue.
I'm used to seeing Detective Danielson in her work mode down at the department, dressed in what passes, I guess, for women's business attire-skirts, blazers, sensible heels-if heels can ever be said to be sensible, that is- and in blouses so prim, they leave absolutely everything to the imagination. The outfit she wore salsa dancing had barely any blouse and even less skirt. As soon as I saw her legs, I realized with a shock that I'd never noticed them before. It made me wonder if I'm getting old.
Dressed as she was, Sue was no slouch, but next to June Miller, I could see why Sue might have felt a bit drab in comparison. The wife of the former congressman was pencil-slender, but still curved in all the right places. She wore a sophisticated long black dress with an attention-capturing, knee-high slit up one side. Inch-wide straps ran across otherwise bare shoulders. She didn't walk. When she moved, she glided.
While I stopped at a table and forked over the cover charge, June and Sue went on inside and staked a claim to a spot three tables from the dance floor and right on top of the bank of electronics handled by the band's chief soundman.
I caught up with the women just as the band began revving up. 'Your husband won't be joining us?' I shouted to June over the cacophony.
She shook her head. 'Not tonight,' she yelled back, followed by something totally incomprehensible.
'What?'
'Brett's having some friends for overnight.'
More's the pity, I thought.
A cocktail waitress came by, and we ordered drinks-tall 7-Ups with lime all around. No wonder there was a cover charge. The Ballard Fire House wasn't making any money on drinks at our table, and it turned out that most of the others were pretty much the same way. Whether the drinks had booze in them or not, people tended to nurse them rather than swill them down. As far as I could see, most of the people came there to dance, not to drink.
And I do mean dance with a capital D.
People hit the dance floor the moment the band-a twelve-member, all-male outfit named Latin Expression- finished tuning up and struck the first note of the first number. Thanks to Ralph Ames, I've been in enough Mexican restaurants to have a nodding acquaintance with mariachi music, which generally sounds to me like Polish polka with a south-of-the-border twist. And the words 'salsa dancing' had made me think that what I was in for was a group of round, sausage-shaped guys wearing sombreros and glitzy Cisco Kid costumes. Wrong.
These were good-looking young men in white shirts, splashy up-to-the-moment ties, and double-breasted suits. The two backup singers were as energetic and as well orchestrated as the Supremes. The three singers belted their hearts out in what sounded to me like Latino-beat rock, and I never understood a single word-for two reasons:
Number one: Everything except the between-song patter was in Spanish. Listening to it reminded me of a disastrous recent date with Alexis Downey where I had been force-fed a Chinese-made art flick. Alexis had assured me in advance that we were attending a must-see film with some of her friends and that she knew I was going to love it. I didn't come close to loving it-I didn't even like it, and I don't think English subtitles would have helped.
Number two: The music Latin Expression played at the Ballard Fire House was far louder than the small space could accommodate, which made it much too loud for me. I remember telling my mother once long ago that you can't have too much bass. Latin Expression proved me wrong. The deafening roar of the bass guitar thrummed in the tabletop and shivered the back of my chair. The decibel level may have turned my ears to mush, but it didn't seem to faze the dancers.
They were there to dance, and dance they did. To every single song. There was none of this phony hanging back and waiting to see who would go first, or if the band would play fast tunes or slow ones or something in- between. People grabbed partners and headed for the dance floor as soon as the first note blasted through a pair of two-story-high collections of speakers stacked in the front corners of the room.
Sue and June were old hands at this. Within minutes they both saw people they knew and recognized from other salsa-dancing venues. Guys stopped by the table long enough to shout dancing invitations to the two women. Soon both my tablemates were led onto the crowded floor, where they danced their hearts out to numbers that could have been rumbas or sambas or tangos or some variation on all of the above. Fortunately, no one asked me to dance.
Everyone seemed to be having a good time. Everyone but me. Somewhere in the middle of the third number,
