First Avenue by Lowen Clausen Page A

from Harborview. She had the baby there. Did you know she’s from Yakima ?”
    “No.”
    “I called her parents yesterday. They said she ran away from home when she was sixteen. They hadn’t seen her for a year and a half and didn’t know where she was. They came as soon as I called. They’re pretty broken up about the whole thing. First they lose a daughter, then a grandchild. Tough, huh?”
    Sam nodded and looked at the first page
Markowitz
gave him. It was a photocopy of her hospital record. He found the line he was looking for.
    “The father’s name was withheld,”
Sam
said.
    “That’s not unusual. Sometimes they say that instead of unknown.’ Makes it sound better, I guess. Any chance she was a prostitute?”
    “Not from what I saw. It looked like she took good care of the baby.”
    Markowitz’s eyebrows lifted above his glasses. The heavy black frames had once been stylish. His hair was gray at the temples, but his face seemed as young as
Sam
remembered from the time he and
Markowitz
had worked together on the street. That was a long time ago.
    “Oh sure,”
Markowitz
said. “That room was a great place to raise a kid.”
    Markowitz was right, of course. Who would choose a place like that? It was not his job to defend her, to excuse her, to make her a saint. What did he know about this girl?
Sam
looked down at the paper in his hands. It seemed to confuse him rather than clarify. He knew he could let it go and join
Markowitz
in his harsh appraisal. They had seen it all, had they not—fathers who beat the mothers, mothers who left the children, children who were not children at all, but old and wise and perverse? He was not a rookie who had never seen anything. He could let it fall that way.
    “Can I have a copy of this?” he asked.
    “Sure,”
Markowitz
said. “You can have anything you want.”
    “Just this.”
    Markowitz took the sheet of paper and walked over to the copy machine in the center of the room. He punched the button, and the machine started to whirl. There was a flash like the last surge of a light bulb before burning out.
Markowitz
pulled the paper from the rollers as the copy appeared and put it down on the desk beside
Sam
.
Sam
looked at it again, folded it into sections, and put it into his shirt pocket.
    “She never went on welfare, I’ll say that for her,”
Markowitz
said. “The hospital bill was paid in cash. This
Pierre
guy—he didn’t seem very eager to talk to me yesterday when I dropped by.”
    “He’s not eager to talk to me either. I’ve been going in there quite a bit lately to show the flag. He hasn’t had the Donut Shop too long. A year, maybe a little more. I began noticing him when kids started hanging out there all the time. Street kids, mostly. No curfew anymore, you know. We can’t haul them away like we used to. He claims to be some sort of godfather. Did you see the newspaper article he’s got on the wall?”
    “I missed that.”
    “The Tribune did a story about him. Took his picture in front of the Donut Shop. Said what a swell guy he was to provide a sanctuary for the forgotten kids of
Seattle
. ‘Sanctuary,’ that’s what they said. Bunch of junk like that. He’s providing a lot more than sanctuary, you can be sure of that, but he’s hard to get to. These kids are afraid to cross him.”
    “They’ll cross him. Find one of them dirty, and then see how loyal the kid is.”
    “Maybe. But he’s got them scared. They’re scared, and you can see it, but they still hang around there. It doesn’t make sense. Did Pierre tell you anything about Alberta ?”
Sam
asked.
    “He said she quit a couple weeks ago. He said he didn’t think anything about it. People quit all the time.”
    “Do you believe him?”
    “No, and he had this look as though he knew I didn’t, but he didn’t care. I ran a check on him, but he’s not in the system.”
    “I know,”
Sam
said.
    “I know one thing,”
Markowitz
said. “I’d never eat a doughnut that creep