First Avenue by Lowen Clausen Page B

made. I wonder how he gets any business.”
    “I wonder what his business is. I have a feeling it’s not doughnuts. I’ll poke around a little and see what I can come up with.”
    “Tell me something,”
Markowitz
said. “Why all the interest in this case? I know it’s a kid and all that, but that’s life in the big city, isn’t it?”
    There were too many ways to answer, or maybe there was no way. He had held the baby once. Was that it? And he had seen the baby lying alone and helpless and could not forget the drunken woman’s description of the endless crying. Beyond that, however, beyond this child, there was something else. He couldn’t explain it to himself and certainly not to Detective Markowitz sitting at his gray metal desk among the dozens of other gray metal desks.
    “You know how it is,
Fred
,” he explained to the other cop, his voice dropping to little more than a whisper. “Every so often something yanks your chain. I hope you don’t mind me sticking my nose in this?”
    “That badge you’re wearing says
Seattle
. You can stick your nose wherever you want. I’m happy for any help I can get.”
    “Appreciate that.”
    “How long have you been back downtown?”
Markowitz
asked.
    “A couple years.”
    “Better than the hill?”
    Sam sat back in the chair and thought for a moment before answering.
    “It’s all about the same, isn’t it?”
    “Probably. We used to do quite a bit of business together when you were up there.”
    “Quite a bit,”
Sam
said. “Too much, I guess. That’s why I finally transferred back downtown. Do you remember that guy who killed his mother-in-law with a sewing machine?”
    “Sure,”
Markowitz
said, shaking his head and laughing softly through disbelief. “He was screwing both the daughter and the mother—he was married to the daughter, I think—and then the mother told the daughter, and all hell broke loose. I forgot you had that.”
    “Radio told us it was a disturbance,”
Sam
said. “When we show up, this guy is just standing on the porch waiting. Calm as anything. He takes us into the dining room and points out his mother-in-law on the floor with her brains running out of her head. There’s this portable sewing machine beside her all smashed up. The daughter is screaming in the bedroom. He tells us he got mad and hit the mother with the sewing machine. That’s it. He just got mad. These things happen, right?
    “On the way to the station,”
Sam
continued, “I was sitting in the backseat with him, and do you know what I was thinking about? Not about the dead woman. Not about this murderer next to me. I’m thinking that the shift is almost over, and I have two days off, and I’m going fishing. This guy is sitting beside me, big strong guy, and he had just killed his mother-in-law with a sewing machine, and I’m thinking about fishing. You investigate an accident on Twenty-third Avenue , and when you’re done you go down to Twenty-ninth and see about a family disturbance. Something about a sewing machine. Call number 12. Call number 13. They’ve all become the same.
    “When I was taking him into the holding room, it hit me all of a sudden that the calls weren’t the same. I asked myself, ‘Am I leading this guy or is he leading me?’ Fishing. I was thinking about fishing. That’s when I decided I needed to do something different. So I switched to mornings for a change of scenery if nothing else and ended up back on First Avenue . My life’s story. How about you? You going to rust up here forever?”
    “Probably.”
    “No interest in getting back to the street?”
    “None. You know what they say. Once you get on the gravy train, there’s no getting off.”
    “Is that
Jim
what’s-his-name your partner on this?”
Sam
asked. “The guy who just transferred from Auto Theft?”
    “No, it’s
Richards
, but he’s on vacation for two weeks. Fishing in Canada.”
    They could have laughed then. In each man, there was a rumble in the gut;