First Avenue (2 page)

“It’s been dead a long time,” he told Hennessey, who joined him at the crib. He didn’t know whether to call the baby a he or she and didn’t want to think of it that way. “Call the sergeant. We’ll need Homicide, too. Tell them 1-David-4 is with you and will handle the paper.”

“Never had a chance,” he said softly. He stood beside the crib after Hennessey had left and allowed himself to come dangerously close to thinking about the baby instead of holding it away. “Never had a chance.”

He turned away, intending to not ever look back, and tried to see the rest of the room the way a cop was supposed to see it. There was little to see. A dresser with most of its handles missing. Several cans of food on top of it. A hot plate beside the sink. A washed plate and bowl, a fork and spoon stacked neatly on a towel on the other side of the sink. A baby’s spoon. Inside the single closet, there were clothes on the floor, probably the mother’s—blue jeans, shirts, and a woman’s underwear.

Who was the mother? he wondered as he bent down to inspect the clothes. They needed to know what had happened to her, why she had not come back. If she had abandoned the baby intentionally, she was a murderer, but something else may have happened. Crying night and day, the old woman had said.

Hennessey had gone out to the hallway to use the radio, and
Katherine
stood at the doorway looking in. Her face was without color in the insufficient light, and her hand shielded her nose.
Sam
had forgotten her. He shook his head when he saw her eyes.

“We’ll lock it up and wait for the sergeant. Do you want me to get a First Watch car up here?”

“No,”
Katherine
said. “We’ll stay and finish this.” Hennessey, standing beside her in the doorway, nodded his agreement.

“Might as well start getting statements then,”
Sam
said. “Do you want the manager or the woman?” he asked
Katherine
.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Take the woman. See if you can get some idea how long that baby cried and when it stopped. Find out if she knows anything about the mother. We want a signed statement for Homicide. Hennessey, you take the manager. Keep him away from the woman. I’ll start banging on doors.”

Even without his uniform, he was now in the familiar police mode. Training took over. They would find out what had happened, but that was probably all they could do.

With his fist, he beat on the door of the adjoining room so hard that the whole frame shook. He told himself to take it easy, to think only about what he had to do. There was no answer. He went to the room on the other side and banged just as hard. A man opened the door, and other doors up and down the hall opened cautiously.

“Police,” he said, showing the man his badge. “Seattle Police,” he shouted to the eyes peering at him from darkened rooms. “Keep your doors open. We need to talk to everybody.”

The man who had opened the door returned to his bed and sat down. He lit a cigarette and coughed violently. He thought he might have heard something, some sort of noise from the room, but could not remember when. “Was the noise like a fight, like a struggle?”
Sam
asked. Might have been. Like a radio? Might have been that, too. Ever hear a baby crying? Was there a baby in that room?

Sam went from room to room. Each one was similar—paint stained by layers of yellow tobacco smoke, a small worn-out bed. In most there were bottles on the floor, bottles on the dresser, sacks overflowing with bottles. Through all the rooms there was a sense of impermanence. There were no pictures on the walls, although in two or three of the dingy rooms, small framed photographs were propped up on the dressers. When he was a young cop, he might have picked up a picture and found out who it was. Now he simply wanted to get the necessary information and get out.

The First Watch sergeant, his sergeant, found
Sam
in the hallway on the fourth floor. The sergeant was from the old school so he still wore a hat when he got out of the car. He was old enough that he usually made
Sam
feel like a young cop.
Sam
led him to the locked door and told him what they knew.
Sam
also explained how he happened to be with 3-David-4, the night crew.

“I already called Homicide,”
Sam
said. “I didn’t think I needed to wait.”

“It’s your call,” the sergeant said, reaffirming an unspoken agreement between them. As long as
Sam
’s decisions brought no heat to the sergeant, he could make decisions as he wished. According to the book, wherever that was, the sergeant was supposed to make that call.

Sam inserted the key in the door lock. “We haven’t touched anything inside,” he said. “The baby is face-down in the crib. It looks like it’s been there a long time.”

“Abandoned?” the sergeant asked, taking a deep breath. He was still breathing deeply after the four flights of stairs.

“I don’t know.”

Sam opened the door and stepped back. The sergeant turned his head away as though to shift the impact of a blow. It was a bad place to be out of breath. The sergeant stood for a moment in the doorway to steady himself.

“We opened the windows,”
Sam
said. “It was even worse before.”

Sam waited at the door for the sergeant to finish his brief inspection. There was no need for him to go into the room again. He had investigated crimes where half the police department had tromped by to look, like spectators at a car accident. That was before he learned to lock the door.

When the sergeant rejoined him,
Sam
pointed to the small stack of washed dishes beside the hand sink.

“Would the mother wash the dishes if she didn’t intend to come back? Would she stack them to dry? If you were going to abandon your baby, would you care about dirty dishes?”

“Who knows what some people think?”

“She’d have to be awfully sick to do that.”

“There are plenty of sick people around here.”

“I guess so. I’m getting the names of everybody on this floor. Nobody knows much, not yet anyway. Hennessey is taking a statement from the manager.
Murphy
is getting one from the old woman who notified the manager. She’s so drunk I’m not sure what we’ll get, but she lived next door and heard the baby crying—sounds like for days. Then she noticed the smell.”

“
Jesus Christ
,” the sergeant muttered, shaking his head slowly, uttering a curse that was a prayer at the same time.

There were footsteps on the stairway, and they both turned to look at Hennessey coming up the last few steps.

“Take a look at this,” Hennessey said, holding up a sheet of paper. “Can you believe they actually fill out a rental application in this dump? Look where our
Miss
Sanchez
worked.”

Sam took the paper from him and skimmed down to the employment line.

“The Donut Shop. She worked for that son of a bitch,
Pierre
. Alberta Sanchez. I know who she is,”
Sam
said. “Do you know the girl?”

“I don’t get to know these people,” Hennessey said.

“I’ve seen the baby, too,”
Sam
said, passing over Hennessey’s remark. “I even held her once.
Jesus
, that’s the one.”

Not more than a few weeks before he had been standing at the window inside the Donut Shop looking out at the street when
Alberta
had come to the door. As he remembered, she had gotten part of the day off. She had a grocery bag from the Market in one arm and the baby in the other. He had hurried over and opened the door for her. That was all he had done, and yet she had seemed so surprised, so touched. He told her how pretty her baby looked with her pink cap pulled down over her ears.
Alberta
asked if he wanted to hold her. He forgot for a moment that he was in
Pierre
’s dirty little donut shop at
First Avenue
and
Pike Street
and awkwardly held the little girl, holding her away from his gun belt and bulletproof vest, smiling and trying to get a smile in return. He remembered
Alberta
’s face, the brief happiness of a mother whose child has cast her amnesiac spell over another adult.
Alberta
was not like the others in the Donut Shop who were afraid to say anything to him, who slinked into the corners whenever he walked in the door. Then he remembered the baby’s smile and the uncompromising delight in her eyes.

Sam also remembered
Pierre
at the cash register, staring, even when he handed the baby back—staring with open hatred, not trying to conceal it with his usual fake smile. Hate all you want, you bastard, he had thought, but
Alberta
handed me this baby and I made her smile. The anger rose in him again as he remembered
Pierre
’s face. He wished he could hold on to that anger until he was out of this hallway, out of this run-down hotel, away from this street, but the anger melted away and he was left with the nearly weightless impression of the child.

Why had
Alberta
given him her baby? Maybe she had forgotten his blue uniform for a moment. Maybe she had looked only at his face, or maybe she didn’t care. And the father? Who was he? Where was he? How could a father leave the mother and child in a place like this? He could answer none of his own questions. He knew only that
Alberta
had not abandoned her baby.

When the sergeant left, the three of them stood by the stairs and waited for the detectives.
Sam
could have begun his report, but the hallway was too dark and oppressive to think.

It was a half hour before the two detectives arrived. They had been called from home, from comfortable beds.
Sam
knew
Markowitz
well, the older of the two detectives. He didn’t know the other one. While
Markowitz
looked as if he had just gotten up and thrown on a pair of pants, the other detective was trim in his new suit and neatly brushed hair. He had an evidence case in one hand and a camera in the other. He didn’t have time for introductions.

“Which room is it?” he asked Hennessey.

“Four-oh-three.”

The detective went to 403 and put his case on the floor. The others followed. He tried to open the door.

“Anybody got a key?” Unless
Sam
was mistaken, there was a touch of sarcasm in his voice. There was a touch of something that grated.

Sam fished in his pocket and pulled out the set of keys. He selected the one for 403 and let the others dangle from the key ring. He handed the keys to
Markowitz
.

“The girl who lived here worked at the Donut Shop at First and Pike,” he told
Markowitz
, who had time to listen. “A lousy place, but the girl seemed okay. I talked to her a few times there. I haven’t seen her for about three weeks. It’s her baby in the room. A little girl. She’s been there quite a while. We have statements from the manager and the woman who called it in, and I have the names of the people who live on this floor. Nobody saw or heard anything. Just Hennessey and the sergeant and I have been in the room. Hennessey opened the window, but we didn’t touch anything else.”

“Are you working plainclothes now?”
Markowitz
asked.

“No. First Watch. Hennessey and Murphy had just picked me up and were giving me a lift to the station when the call came in. I’m handling the paper so they can get out of here.”

“That’s a good idea for all of us,” said the other detective, still waiting for the door to be unlocked.

Markowitz chuckled softly. “
Jim
likes these wake-up calls. He just came over from Auto Theft.”

Jim did not share
Markowitz
’s humor or else did not appreciate that he was labeled the new guy.

“Do you want us to wait for the coroner?”
Sam
asked.

“Damn right,”
Jim
said. “They might be in Mukilteo for all we know.”

“Mukilteo is in
Snohomish
County
,
Jim
,”
Markowitz
said, his patience fraying a little. “We’d appreciate it if you would,” he told
Sam
.