To get to one from the other, boats have to pass through Salmon Bay and the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks. As Heather Peters told me once in an elegantly simple but apt description, locks are nothing but elevators for boats. And that's true. When heading out to sea, boats come into the lock area from Salmon Bay and then tie up at a pier. When the lock attendants let the water out, the effect is similar to pulling the plug in a bathtub. The water level goes down, and so do any boats inside the lock. When the operation is over, the boats are lower than they were when they started.
In the summer or during peak fishing and boating seasons when hundreds of boats come and go through the locks each day, it would be virtually impossible to learn whether or not a particular boat had cleared the locks. But this was late fall, and traffic was down. Most boaters, recreational and commercial alike, were content to spend the winter months landlocked and couch-bound in front of their glowing television sets.
Not only was it winter, it was night as well. Nighttime traffic on the locks would be even lighter than during the day. In addition, Alan Torvoldsen's One Day at a Time was one disreputable-looking tub. Old T-class army lighters, born again and refitted as longliners, aren't all that common in the halibut fishery. If a vessel like that had passed through the locks sometime between 9:00 P. M. and midnight, someone-most likely one of the dockside attendants-was bound to remember.
I borrowed the Millers' nearest phone and placed a call to the Lockmaster. It rang for a long time with no answer. Finally, when I was almost ready to give up, someone came on the line. "Locks," he said.
"This is Detective J. P. Beaumont," I said. "Seattle P.D. We've got an emergency here. I want you to hold all traffic until we get there. It should only take ten minutes or so."
"No problem," the man returned. "We've got almost a half-hour wait right now. What's your name again?"
"Beaumont. Detective J. P. Beaumont."
"You come ahead on down. I'll have someone go over and unlock the gate."
As Sue and I stood up and headed for the door, June Miller walked into the living room carrying a tray loaded with cups full of steaming cocoa. She looked disappointed. "Don't you want to drink some of this before you go?" she asked.
I was grateful when Sue answered for us both. "I'm sorry, we just realized there's something we need to check right away."
But June Miller wasn't about to take no for an answer. "I'll pour it into paper cups for you," she said. "That way you can take it with you. And wouldn't you like to borrow one of John's jackets?" she said to me. "Your clothes are still wet."
At Sue's insistence, I accepted the traveling cup of cocoa with good grace, but I turned down the use of a borrowed coat. After all, wimps wear coats. Cool macho dudes don't.
"No thanks," I said, "I'll be fine."
Famous last words, of course, but I was too intent on noodling out where Alan Torvoldsen might be going to bother with the mundane issue of whether or not to wear a coat. At the time, it didn't seem all that important.
Out in the driveway, Sue and I settled on using one vehicle-mine. We had to back her Escort out of the way in order to get to the 928, but minutes later, properly belted into the Porsche, we were racing back down Fifteenth from Blue Ridge toward the locks. I drove, while Sue sipped quietly on her cocoa for the better part of a mile.
"When you come out of the locks into Shilshole Bay, you only have two choices," she said thoughtfully. "You either have to go north or south, right or left. Which do you think he'd take?"
"It depends on what he wants to accomplish," I answered. "If he wants to head for the open sea, then he has to head north along the shipping lanes and out through the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Every ship out there has an American pilot who comes on board at Port Angeles, and all those ships are in constant radio contact with Marine Traffic Control. Someone would be bound to see them."
"What about south of here?" Sue Danielson asked.
"There's lots less shipping traffic," I answered. "If they wanted to hide out until the heat let up a little or to dock somewhere long enough to refit the One Day so she wasn't quite so readily recognizable, they might head south. There must be hundreds of places tucked away in among the islands between here and Olympia at the south end of Puget Sound where a boat could duck in and disappear. Most of those sheltered bays and coves have summer cabins built near them, but in the winter they're pretty much deserted."
By then we were at the locks. We parked in an almost deserted lot. As promised, the gate was closed but unlocked. We made our way into the office, where we found the two on-duty attendants sipping coffee, complaining about the weather, and huddling next to a wall heater to stay warm.
"What can we do for you?" one asked.
The speaker's disembodied voice came through the kind of synthesizer they use on people who've lost a larynx to throat cancer. That must not have made much of an impression on him, however, since he and his colleague were both still smoking. Not only did that defy the rules of good sense, but it was most likely against the law as well. Smoking in the workplace is very much against the rules in Seattle, a place that prides itself on being the secondhand-smoke conscience of the world.
We showed the two men our badges, but they seemed singularly unimpressed. "You could help us by letting us know whether or not a fishing vessel named One Day at a Time came through the locks earlier tonight," I said.
The man with the tinny voice shrugged his shoulders. "Don't bother asking me," he said. "How about it, Hank? You were taking lines tonight. Do you remember a boat by that name or not?"
"Not many boats through here tonight," Hank answered, sucking on his smoke. "What's it look like?"
"It's an old T-class freighter."
Hank nodded sagely. "Oh, yeah," he said. "That one. Ugly as sin. Came through long about ten or so."
"Who was on it?" I asked. "Did you see anybody?"
"One guy. Red hair. Going a little bald. He was handling all the lines himself. Really had to scramble."
"Did you see anyone else on board?"
Hank shook his head. "Nope," he said. "Not a soul. Should I have?"
"No," I answered. "I was hoping is all."
"So you're cops," Voice Box said, now mulling the significance of our badges, which had long since been put away. "What's this guy done? Killed somebody or something? How come you're looking for him?"
"Stolen goods," Sue answered quickly, speaking up before I made a botch of it.
Hank laughed outright at that, ending with a rattly, cigarette-induced cough. "Dumb bastard," he said. "Pro'ly stole that godawful boat itself, come to think of it. While he was tying up, I tried to tell him there's a front blowing in from across Vancouver Island. Small-craft advisories. Gale-force winds. But you know those stubborn damn fishermen. ‘Been out in lots worse than this,' he tells me."
The hell he has, I thought angrily. Alan Torvoldsen might have been out in some pretty rough seas in his time, but I doubted he'd been in this much hot water.
25
By three o'clock Sunday morning, I was seeing the Seattle Police Department's bureaucratic inaction in action, which is to say, nothing was happening. For one thing, the shit had already hit the officialdom fan over what was now being called the "Culpeper Court break-in." The brass was worried about long-term repercussions from the warrantless search. What is sometimes overlooked down in the south end's Rainier Valley can provoke a firestorm of reaction and protest when it happens elsewhere in the city. It's been my experience that nothing moves slower than a publicity-shy bureaucracy.