Again, I wanted to say, “Already?” I guess it would have been more of a whine than a question, but my ringing cell phone spared me from embarrassing myself.
“How’s it hanging?” Harry asked.
I already warned you that the man doesn’t have a politically correct bone in his body.
“Better than I expected,” I said.
“Thanks for insisting that Mel come in,” he said. “I need her bird-dogging the situation in Bellingham. Can’t afford to have any screwups on that one. With you out of play, she’s the best man for the job. Do you need anything?”
“No,” I told him. “I’m fine.”
By then call waiting was letting me know I had yet another caller.
“Gotta go, Harry. My son’s on the line.”
“Hey, Dad,” Scott said. “How’s it going?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “The surgery went well. They’ve had me up walking twice so far, and the pain’s not bad at all.”
The lack of pain probably had more to do with the meds they were plugging into my body than it did with the success of the procedure, but I kept quiet about that. Most of the time when people ask how you’re doing, they’re looking for your basic generic answer. If someone asks you, “How was your root canal?” they most likely don’t want chapter and verse. That was the case here, too. Scott wanted to know how I was. He didn’t need to know the gory details about the bloody drain bags the medical folk laughingly referred to as “grenades” or about the weirdly vivid dreams that kept taking me down memory lane. Now that I thought about it, I noticed I hadn’t mentioned the dreams to Mel, either. Call it a sin of omission.
There were several more telephone calls from well-wishers after Scott’s. They came in one after another. By then the meds I had taken earlier were kicking in and I was ready to stop talking. How many times can you say “I’m fine” without sounding curmudgeonly? When the occupational therapist finally showed up with her walker, I was more than ready to leave the phone in my room and do another forced march down the hall. Once that was over, I was happy to go back to bed, where I did myself the favor of first taking myself out of circulation by pulling the plug on my bedside phone and then switching off my cell.
I slept for a while before they woke me up for lunch. At that point I was beginning to feel bored, so I switched on the TV set. Nothing was on. My iPad was under lock and key in the closet, so I asked the next nurse who came to check my vitals to get it out for me.
People who know me well understand that I had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the computer age, first protesting the existence of cell phones and then trying to cling to a typewriter when Seattle PD was switching over to computers. So the idea that I would fall in love with my iPad was not exactly a foregone conclusion, but when Kelly and Scott teamed up to give me one for Father’s Day this year, I was hooked. I’ve even taken to doing my crossword puzzles on it.
In this instance I wasn’t looking for crossword clues. I wanted to know about whatever happened to Hannah and Eugene Wellington in the years since their daughter’s lifeless body had been found in a barrel of stale grease at the bottom of Magnolia Bluff. I had met them at Monica’s funeral, and going to her memorial service in the picturesque town of Leavenworth was one of my first official detective duties when I moved up to the fifth floor.
As soon as I googled the words “Eugene Wellington, Leavenworth, Washington,” the first link was to the man’s obituary:
Eugene Harold Wellington, a lifelong Leavenworth resident, succumbed after a brief illness. For many years he and his wife operated the Apple Inn outside Leavenworth before it was lost to a forest fire. Services are pending with Wiseman Funeral Chapel. Mr. Wellington is survived by his wife of fifty-five years, Hannah; his son, James; and three grandchildren. He was preceded in death by his beloved daughter, Monica.
What rocked me about that was how little there was of it—a whole life summed up in less than a hundred words. I remembered Eugene as a tall, powerfully built man whose rugged six feet six frame seemed crushed by the terrible weight of losing his daughter. At the funeral, just as Watty had told me about the trip to the morgue, Eugene was the one who sobbed inconsolably all through the service, while his tiny wife had sat stoically beside him, like a dry-eyed sparrow poised to take wing.
Letting the iPad drop onto my chest, I lay there recalling every detail of that first grueling week, the beginning of my career in Homicide.
Initially, Karen had been thrilled when I gave her the news of my unexpected promotion to the rank of detective. Her pleasure quickly dimmed when she learned how much money I had spent in my unauthorized shopping spree at the Bon. And she was even less pleased when she found out that, as a detective, I’d still be pulling hours that weren’t remotely related to bankers’ hours. I’m not sure why, but Karen had somehow assumed that homicides happen and are investigated on a nine-to-five basis, Mondays through Fridays only. Not so.
“We’ve got a conference on serial killers down in Olympia this weekend,” Detective Powell had told me when he stopped by to see me late Wednesday afternoon. “It’s all hands on deck because they’re bringing in a guy from the FBI to teach the class. We’ve all signed up and paid to attend, so you’re elected to do funeral duty for Monica Wellington.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you show up at the funeral and at any reception following the service. It means you’re polite to the family members. You let them know we’re sorry for their loss and we’re working the case, but while you’re there, you keep an eye out for anything that seems off or anyone who seems off, too. You do not let on that you’re a greenhorn. You wear a suit and tie. Got it?”
“Got it,” I said, wondering all the while how long it would take for my tiny pay raise to make up for the upgrade to suits and ties required by my new status as a detective.
There’s a uniform allowance for cops on the street. There’s no such thing when you’re working in plainclothes out of the fifth floor. At that stage in my life, I didn’t actually own a suit, unless you counted the baby blue tux I wore when Karen and I got married. Even if it still fit, the tux wasn’t going to cut it for a funeral. But I also knew that if I was going to get a suit and have it altered in time to wear it to a funeral on Saturday, it had to be purchased that very day—before I went home and gave Karen the news. So that’s what I did. Fortunately, it turned out there was still enough room left in our Bon charge account to make that work.
By the time I broke the news to Karen that I would be spending all of Saturday driving to and from Leavenworth to attend a funeral followed by a reception, my wife was barely speaking to me. She stuck Scott in my lap, told me she was going to the store, and why didn’t I figure out what we were having for dinner for a change. Cooking has never been my strong suit. I rose to the occasion by opening a can of SpaghettiOs, to which I added some frozen hamburger that I had thawed out and fried. When she came back from the store, Karen ate my slightly burnt offering without comment. I could tell she was neither pleased nor amused, although it was the best I could do with Scott screaming bloody murder the whole time I was trying to cook.
Believe me, I already suspected Karen’s job of stay-at-home mom wasn’t easy, but that evening’s meal made it blazingly clear to all concerned.
On Thursday I left the domestic warfare at home and showed up on time and properly dressed, Homicide style, on the fifth floor. Watty directed me to a cubicle near his that gave evidence of having been recently vacated by someone else—clearly someone who smoked, as there was a dusting of cigarette ash everywhere and a faint whiff of smoke still lingering in the air.
“Don’t get