It was an odd week, with the Fourth of July celebration falling on a Wednesday. Jonas and I were at the range doing target practice when we got a call out on the sad case of what, pending autopsies, was being considered murder-suicide. The previous Wednesday, an old guy over in Ballard, a ninety-three-year-old named Farley Woodfield, who had just been given a dire cancer diagnosis, went home from his doctor’s office, grabbed his gun, loaded it, and then took out his bedridden wife, the woman for whom he was the primary caregiver. After shooting her dead, he had turned the weapon on himself. Several days after the shootings, the Woodfields’ mailman had stepped onto their front porch to deliver a package and had noticed what he termed a “foul odor.”
The word “foul” doesn’t cover it. Like I said, it was July. The house had been closed up tight. I had been feeling punk over the weekend with something that felt like maybe a summer cold or a case of the flu. I wasn’t sick enough to stay home from work, but I can tell you that being called to that ugly crime scene didn’t help whatever was ailing me. We found Farley’s note on the kitchen table: “With me gone, there goes the pension. Jenny will have nothing to live on and no one to look after her. I can’t do that to her. I won’t. Sorry for the mess.”
He was right about the mess part. It was god-awful. Seeing the crime scene and the note made it clear what had happened, but when you’re a homicide detective, that doesn’t mean you just fill in the boxes on the report form and call it a job. Once the bodies were transported, Jonas and I spent the day canvassing the neighborhood, talking to people who had lived next to the old couple. From one of the neighbors, we learned that there was a daughter who lived in St. Louis, but there had been some kind of family estrangement, and the daughter had been out of her parents’ lives for years.
As for the neighbors? None of them had paid the least bit of attention to the newspapers piling up on the front porch. None of them had noticed that Farley wasn’t out puttering in his yard or that the grass he always kept immaculately trimmed with an old-fashioned push mower was getting too long to cut. By the end of the day, I was mad as hell at the neighbors, because I could see that the old guy had a point. With the couple’s only child out of the picture, and if Farley wasn’t going to be there to look after his wife, who was going to do it? Nobody, that’s who!
We had taken the Woodfield call about eleven o’clock in the morning, and it was almost eight o’clock that night when we headed back downtown to file our reports. As usual, Jonas was at the wheel. We were driving east on Denny. When I suggested we take a detour past the Doghouse to grab a bite to eat, he didn’t voice any objections. Instead of heading down Second Avenue, he stayed on Denny until we got to Seventh.
The Doghouse is a Seattle institution, started in the thirties by a friend of mine named Bob Murray. It used to be on Denny, but in the early fifties, when the city opened the Battery Street Tunnel to take traffic from the Alaskan Way Viaduct onto Aurora Avenue North, the change in driving patterns adversely affected the restaurant’s business. Undaunted, Bob pulled up stakes and moved the joint a few blocks away to a building on Seventh at Battery. The Doghouse has been there ever since. It’s one of those places that’s open twenty-four hours a day and where you can get breakfast at any hour of the day or night.
It’s no surprise that cops go there. In the preceding months, Jonas and I had been to the Doghouse together on plenty of occasions, grabbing one of the booths that lined the sides of the main dining room. This time, though, when Bob tried to lead us to a booth, I could see we were headed for Lulu McCaffey’s station. That’s when I called a halt.
Lulu was one of those know-it-all waitresses who was older than dirt. One of the original servers who had made the transition from the “old” Doghouse to the “new” one twenty years earlier, she always acted like she owned the place. Unfortunately and more to the point, this opinionated battle-axe also bore a strong resemblance to my recently departed mother-in-law.
Years ago, I had made the mistake of wising off in front of Lulu. She got even with me by spilling a whole glass of ice water down the front of my menu and into my lap. Ever since, I avoided her station whenever possible. This day in particular, I wasn’t prepared to deal with any of her guff, so I asked Bob if we could be seated in the back room.
It turns out that as far as the Doghouse was concerned, Jonas was a back room virgin. There are plenty of restaurant back rooms in Seattle—at the Doghouse, Rosellini’s, Vito’s, and the Dragon’s Head. It’s no surprise that many of the people who congregate in those back rooms and play the occasional game of poker are local cops and elected officials who want to keep up appearances as far as the voting public is concerned.
The back room is where Bob delivered us, safely out of Lulu’s territory and firing range.