“Doc Baker’s not my problem,” Detective Powell said pointedly. “You are.”
He reached into his pocket, pulled out a small camera along with several rolls of film, and handed them over. “You’re in charge of photos,” he added. “Now make yourself useful.”
I did as I was told and went about snapping one picture after another.
Eventually the M.E.’s beefy helpers turned up with their gurney. By then it was clear that the only thing in the barrel besides the body was the rest of the grease. The victim was naked. There was no clothing and no identification, so the investigation’s first problem was going to be identifying who she was. As the M.E.’s assistants wrestled the dead woman into a body bag for transport, Powell motioned to me.
“Let’s work our way up the hill.”
Spotting the track was easy enough, even if climbing the hill to follow it was not. The rolling barrel had left a clear path as it careened down the hill. In the process it had torn through thickets of blackberries and left a trail of flattened ferns and broken sprigs of grass along with slick patches of slimy spilled grease. Gravity had worked for the barrel on the steep hillside, but it worked against us. So did the thick tangles of blackberries. If you’ve ever hiked through blackberry brambles, you know climbing uphill through them isn’t exactly a stroll in the park.
The sun was almost gone by the time we finally made it to the spot where Donnie and Frankie had found the barrel hung up on a bramble and pried off the lid. The lid was still there, and so was the stick the two boys claimed they had used to unleash what turned out to be their own private nightmare.
“Poor kids,” Detective Powell muttered. “They had no idea what they were letting themselves in for.”
By then enough time had passed that it was going on full dark. I was using the flash to take a few more photos when Mac came roaring down the hill with Detective Watkins limping along behind him.
“Are you about done?” Mac asked. “I’m parked up there,” he added, pointing toward the top of the bluff.
“Did you see anything important?” Powell asked.
Mac shook his head. “There’s a vacant house up there. It looks like the barrel started down the hill right at the end of the driveway.”
“Any vehicle tracks?” Powell wanted to know.
Mac shook his head. “No such luck,” he answered. “Asphalt.”
I looked to Detective Powell for direction. “You two don’t have to stick around here,” he said. “I’ve called for lights and generators that should be here soon. In the meantime, I’d like you two to go back up and start canvassing the street. See if anyone noticed any unusual traffic coming or going from the house.”
Expecting to be unceremoniously sent back out on patrol, I was glad to be given another job to do. Once we clambered our way to the top of the hill, however, we had a nasty surprise waiting for us. Someone had alerted the media. A clutch of reporters, attracted by the flashes of the camera, stood waiting for us next to the patrol car. Among them was one of my least favorite people in the whole world, a cub reporter named Maxwell Cole.
As I mentioned before, Max and I had been fraternity brothers at the U-Dub. We had not been friends. We became even less so when he showed up at a dance with a very cute girl named Karen. Not only did I snag her away from him at the dance, I married her, too. Talk about adding insult to injury, and Max was still pissed about it. While I was off doing my duty in Vietnam, Max found a way to stay home. He had gone to work for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, where he was now firmly ensconced on the police beat.
“Hey, Beau,” he said when he saw me. “What’s the deal down there? I understand some neighborhood kids found a dead woman. Can you confirm that?”
He made it sound like we were the best of pals. The other reporters in the group, thinking he had some kind of an in, backed off and gave him the floor. It did my heart good to tell him, along with the rest of his newsie gang, everything I was allowed to say, which was pretty much nothing.
“Sorry,” I said. “Can’t confirm or deny.”
Grimacing, Max went trudging after MacPherson, but Mac already knew there was no love lost between me and the P-I’s self-proclaimed ace reporter.
“You heard the man,” Mac said. “Mum’s the word. Check with the public information office.”
We got into our patrol car. Mac took off like a bat out of hell, and nobody bothered trying to follow us. If they had, they wouldn’t have had to go far, since we stopped again two blocks up the street, where Amherst Place West intersects with W. Plymouth Street.
“You take that side, I’ll take this one,” Mac said. “And you could just as well skip the house back there on the corner of Twenty-third. That’s where Donnie and Frankie live. Their mother was a screaming banshee when we brought the boys home. She threatened to tear those poor kids limb from limb when she found out they had been down on Pier Ninety-one instead of where she thought they were, safely stowed at a movie.”
“She was probably just worried about the boys messing around down by the railroad tracks,” I suggested.
Mac gave me a wink and a lip-smacking, lecherous grin. “Maybe so,” he said. “But I doubt it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I think it had a lot more to do with Watty and me interrupting whatever it was she and her boyfriend were doing when we brought the boys home. From the looks of it, I’d say the two of them were getting it on pretty hot and heavy. The guys from Homicide are the ones making the big bucks. Since they’ll most likely have to talk with the boys again, why should we have to deal with a lady tiger?”
Why indeed? With that, Mac and I hit the bricks.
It was close to dinnertime. As expected, the warm April weather had brought out the early-bird outdoor cooks. Smoke from a dozen separate Weber grills filled the evening air on the southern end of Magnolia Bluff. Residents of Seattle recognized this early bit of faux summer, the exact opposite of Indian summer, for what it was. Soon the sunshine and dry weather would be gone, not to return until sometime in early July. The people we dragged in from their backyard activities weren’t especially welcoming or eager to talk to us. Other than using up some shoe leather, we gained precious little information in the process.
The house where the barrel’s track originated had been vacant for several months, caught up in the midst of a rancorous divorce. One neighbor mentioned that she thought a sale was now pending, even though the real estate sign in the front yard didn’t mention that. No one had noticed any unusual activity around the house in the past several days, although the same neighbor, a Mrs. Jerome Fisk, said she thought some of the neighborhood kids had been hanging around in the backyard of the vacant house and using it as a hideout for smoking cigarettes.
“I didn’t turn them in for it, though,” she told me. “Those poor boys have a tough enough row to hoe. I didn’t want to add to their troubles.”
“You’re saying what exactly?” I asked.
“Their mother, you know,” Mrs. Fisk added confidentially. “Amelia Dodd’s a bit of a wild thing. Gentlemen callers coming to the house at all hours of the day and night.”
“Gentlemen callers? You mean there’s no husband in the picture?”
“Not so as you’d notice,” Mrs. Fisk replied. “There are probably plenty of husbands in that group of men swarming around the honey pot, but I doubt any of them belong to her.”
“You’re saying she’s a … professional?” I asked.
Mrs. Fisk shrugged. “Believe me, she has plenty of special male friends, and she doesn’t appear to have any other kind of job, so you tell me. When I see those two boys left to their own devices so much of the time,