CHAPTER 6
One of the things Mel and I share in common is that we’re both terrible cooks. Yes, we can make coffee. And toast on occasion. And, according to Ron Peters’s girls, I could brew a mean cup of hot chocolate in my day. So we don’t eat at home, unless it’s carry-out or carry-in, as the case might be. Mostly we go out. Fortunately, since the Denny Regrade is full of restaurants, trendy and otherwise, we’re in no danger of starving to death.
Our current favorite is a little French place called Le P’tit Bistro two blocks up the street. I know, I know. Over the years I’ve developed a well-deserved reputation for unsophisticated dining, and some of my old Doghouse pals would choke at the very idea of me hanging out in a French dining establishment. But now that the Regrade has morphed into Belltown, that’s how much things have changed around here in the past few years. Maybe that’s how much I’ve changed, too.
I’m guessing Le P’tit Bistro comes close to being the French approximation of an old-fashioned diner. The food doesn’t put on airs, and neither does the waitstaff. Just for the record, real men do eat quiche-and crepes, too, for that matter.
“Maybe I should stay in Bellevue while the kids are here,” Mel suggested as she sipped a glass of red wine. I was having Perrier. As I said, the place is French.
It was almost as though Mel had implanted a listening device in my head and overheard my disturbing conversation with Kelly. “No way!” I responded.
Mel ignored me. “With the funeral and all,” she continued, “emotions are bound to be running high, and daughters can be…well, let’s just say they can be a little territorial.”
“Did Kelly say something to you about this?” I demanded.
Mel shrugged. “Not in so many words,” she replied. “She didn’t have to. I got the message.”
That’s another thing about women. You’re damned by what they do say and you’re damned by what they don’t say. For a guy, it’s lose/lose either way. It would have been nice to be able to change the subject again-to talk with Mel about something easy, like murder and mayhem and who blasted LaShawn Tompkins to smithereens, but that would have gotten me in trouble with Ross Connors, so I soldiered on.
“Look,” I said, “it’s bad enough that we have to play hide-and-seek with the guys at work, but I’m damned if I’m going to play the same game with my kids. You’re in my life because I want you in my life. Everybody’s just going to have to get used to it-Kelly and Scott included.”
Under the circumstances that seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to say, but the next thing I knew Mel was crying, mopping away tears and mascara with her cloth napkin while the lady who’s the co-owner of the restaurant shot daggers at me from her station behind the dessert case. Some days you really can’t win.
Mel was pretty quiet-make that dead-quiet-the rest of the time we were eating. I thought I was in more trouble with her than I was with the lady at the restaurant. On our two-block walk back to Belltown Terrace, however, Mel slipped her arm through mine, then leaned into my shoulder. “I think that’s one of the nicest things anybody’s ever said to me,” she said.
We went home. It was still early, but we went to bed anyway, and not to watch Fox News Channel, either. Later, with Mel nestled cozily against my side and sleeping peacefully, I lay awake for a long time. I realized that there were many things I was more than willing to give up for the sake of my children, but Melissa Soames wasn’t one of them. With a smile on my face I finally drifted off to sleep as well.
My mother was perpetually whipping out little aphorisms in the hope, I suppose, of turning me into an upright citizen. Some of them are still imprinted in my brain: “Save the surface and you save all.” “A stitch in time saves nine.” “God helps those who help themselves.” At four o’clock the next morning, when I was wide awake and Mel wasn’t, the saying that came most readily to mind was “Early to bed; early to rise…” I was up early, all right. Not wanting to awaken Mel, I bailed out of bed. Out in the living room I dredged my laptop out of my briefcase, booted up, and logged on.
Less than two months ago I had been down in the morgue at the
In reality it took a little more than that, but before long I had the information on LaShawn’s payout from the state-$250,000. Not that much, considering he’d been wrongfully imprisoned for seven years. And much less when you took into account the fact that his attorney probably walked off with half the settlement. Etta Mae had told me her son had spent his money on fixing up her house. The house on Church Street wasn’t large, but remodeling anything costs a bundle these days. It seemed safe to assume that there probably wasn’t a whole lot of LaShawn’s windfall left for anyone to fight over. Which probably took money out of the murder-motive equation.
Next I went looking for Elaine Manning, LaShawn Tompkins’s girlfriend at the King Street Mission. She had been sentenced to prison in North Carolina for robbing a Krispy Kreme. A doughnut shop, for God’s sake? And then, after some kind of difficulty inside the prison in Raleigh and for some inexplicable reason, she was shipped off to Washington State to complete her sentence. People who watch
On to Pastor Mark Granger, the head of the mission. His story was a little less typical because he was maybe a little smarter than that. Came from a good middle-class background. Got screwed up on drugs in college and went to prison for second-degree murder from a drug deal gone bad when he was twenty years old. Got a mail-order degree-in divinity, of all things-while he was still in prison. So Pastor Mark really was a pastor.
It turns out there are lots of King Street missions in this country. The one in Seattle was housed in what had once been a derelict flophouse near the railroad. In the mid-nineties it had been purchased and refurbished by an outfit called God’s Word, LLC. My searches on them led me from one blind real estate trust to another. Only lawyers’ names appeared on the documents I was able to track down. Whoever was behind God’s Word was anonymous and fully intended to stay that way. Goody Two-shoes ex-cons are suspicious enough, but I can accept that they exist. Anonymous do-gooders? Not likely. Those are, again as my mother would have said, scarce as hens’ teeth.
I was still looking for traces of God’s Word when I heard the toilet flush. It’s one of those newfangled power-assisted things that sound like somebody is strangling a cat. The racket gave me enough warning that I was able to log off LexisNexis. By the time Mel started the coffee and came into the living room, I was perusing the online edition of the
“Good morning,” she said, kissing me hello. “You’re up early. Why do you insist on reading those things online? The paper’s right out in the hall. All you have to do is open the door, pick up the paper, and take off the rubber band.”
“I seem to remember you prefer finding your newspapers in pristine condition,” I replied. “I’m only thinking of you.”
“Thanks,” she said.
When it comes to lying, I’m getting better all the time.
Mel collected her papers. Then she went over to the window seat, wrapped a throw around her shoulders, and settled down in one corner to read the headlines and await the end of the coffee-brewing cycle. On a clear day someone sitting in the window seat can see Mount Rainier to the south and east and the Olympics to the north and west, with a vast display of water and/or city in between. This was March. The only thing visible was rain-lots of it.
“Did you get the flowers?” she asked.
The puzzled look on my face must have been answer enough.
“For Beverly’s funeral,” she reminded me. “You were going to order more, right?”
“Right,” I said. “But Ballard Blossom isn’t open right now. It’s too early. I’ll have to call later.”
“And then you should probably drag home some groceries. The kids will be here at least part of the time.”
“What kind of groceries?” I asked.
“You know. The usual. Sodas, cereal, milk, bread, peanut butter, animal crackers.”
