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 Seattle Post-Intelligencer personally combing through brittle rolls of old microfiche on the trail of a case that had been cold for more than fifty years. Between then and now, though, SHIT had entered the information age. Ross Connors had sprung for an agency-wide subscription to LexisNexis, which meant that with my secret password (well, maybe “doghouse” isn’t all that secret), the whole world of cyber news and public records was open to me without my having to do all the searching myself. With a click of a mouse, as they say.
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 Cops on TV are always amazed that the crooks are so amazingly stupid. It’s no surprise to me. And someone who would use a weapon to rob a Krispy Kreme most likely wasn’t a mental giant.
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 Seattle Times.
“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.”
“Where the hell do they keep animal crackers these days?”
“Same place they always have, but when you get to the store, ask,” she said patiently. “Someone there will be able to tell you.”
Mel left for work a little past seven. I went back to surfing the net, where I was still trying to track down principals in God’s Word when Ross Connors called me at home a little after eight.
“Sorry to hear about your grandmother,” he said. “Harry told me you weren’t coming in.”
Since he had called on my home number and not on my cell, I had already figured that out. “Thanks,” I said. “But I’m still working. It would be a hell of a lot easier on me if I could talk to Mel about this Tompkins situation. I don’t like sneaking around on her. It feels like cheating.”
“Indulge me,” he said. “I’m not ready to start connecting the dots yet. What have you found out on LaShawn so far?”
“According to Detective Jackson at Seattle PD, it could be nothing more or less than an old-fashioned love triangle with both LaShawn and Pastor Mark from King Street Mission going after the same girl.”
“Who also happens to be missing at the moment,” Ross supplied.
In other words, I wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t already know. So why did he need me?
Ross answered the question without my asking it. “Find her,” he said. “There is nothing that would make me happier than to know LaShawn Tompkins is dead because he fell in love with the wrong girl.”
This was not a throwaway comment. There was an urgency in Ross’s voice that I recognized. Something was going on-something Ross was not yet prepared to divulge-and LaShawn Tompkins’s murder, inconsequential as it might seem in the big scheme of things, was somehow the tip of that iceberg.
“You know,” I said, “it might be easier to fix this problem if I knew what the hell was really going on.”
“Just find the girl,” Ross said. “Find Elaine Manning. Maybe this is nothing more than what Kendall Jackson says it is, a love story gone awry, and maybe I’m just over the hill, full of crap, and pushing panic buttons for no reason. That’s what I’m hoping.”
I knew for certain that Ross Connors was anything but over the hill and full of crap, so I kept my mouth shut. When he hung up, he left me with the sure knowledge that I’d better hit the road and do what I’d been ordered to do-find Elaine Manning. And the first place to look was King Street Mission.