[SS01] Assault and Pepper

by Leslie Budewitz

  Kristen’s brow wrinkled. “Why? Isn’t your father Indian, too?”

  “Yes, but American-born. They hated that she chose her own husband and started a career here. They were afraid that she would never return to India to live if she married him. And they were right. When I was five and my brother three, my grandmother faked a heart attack so my mother would come back to Delhi, and bring the kids. She thought she could get us to stay, but my mother tumbled to her tricks and we left after a week. When she really did have a heart attack a few years later, my mother hired a doctor friend from convent school to make sure it wasn’t another con. It wasn’t and she went, alone.”

  Had Tory suspected Doc of faking, like Seetha’s grandmother?

  “So your grandmother destroyed what she wanted most—her family—by trying to hold on to it so tightly.” Kristen squeezed Seetha’s hand.

  We sat in silence until the sun disappeared.

  “Movie time,” Laurel said. She piled the plates and silver on a big tray.

  “Change in plans,” she said once we’d reassembled in the living room, a second bottle of wine uncorked and a pot of decaf scenting the air. “We need a major comfort movie. Nominations are open!”

  “Love Actually,” Kristen said. “I don’t care if Christmas is months away.”

  “Ruby Sparks,” Seetha said.

  “Oh, the girls and I loved that,” Kristen said. At Flick Chicks, no one minds watching a movie we’ve already seen. Plus, some nights, the movie is beside the point. We’d been inspired to start the group by the Senior Señoras, a group my mother belonged to before the move south. But we didn’t care about improving our Spanish, or improving ourselves at all. We just wanted to hang out with good friends and talk and eat.

  We ended up watching Chocolat, one of my personal faves, eating salty oatmeal cookies and ginger ice cream, and dipping into a bowl of glazed spiced nuts. Right about the time the mayor broke into the shop to eat the chocolate window display, Gabe wafted in, lured by the warm cookies. Hugs all around, then he settled on the floor in front of his mother with a bowl of cookies and ice cream. Snowball, the fluffy white dock cat who’d adopted them, curled up in his lap.

  I passed the bowl of nuts around. Because when our secrets cause us pain, nothing soothes the soul better than good friends and good food.

  Twenty-six

  Seattle. You’ve got to love the rain.

  —Mark Knopfler, “Seattle”

  Wednesday morning didn’t exactly dawn. It slunk in, wet and soggy, reeking of diesel fumes and that faint ocean smell of salt water, decayed fish, and seaweed. And seagull poop.

  A rainbow of colored umbrellas punctuated the black bumbers favored by the suited class. I opted for a purple hooded rain jacket.

  “You’re sure in a good mood,” I told Sandra after she’d been in the shop ten whole minutes, whistling while she worked, and hadn’t groused once about Kristen being late for the Wednesday morning staff meeting. “Mr. Right feeling frisky last night?”

  “Hot and spicy,” she said, “like our fall mixes.”

  Zak choked back a laugh.

  “I just feel better when it rains,” she said. “You know?”

  It meant hiding my pink shoes in the closet until spring. “It’s nothing magic—just a change in barometric pressure.”

  “Right. Burst my bubble. Thanks.”

  Moments later, Kristen stood in the doorway, shaking out her black raincoat. I let her in, and we all gathered in the mixing nook. Even Sandra’s mood dimmed a bit as the reality of Tory’s absence sank in.

  “Zak, wanta ride with me to Doc’s service?”

  “I thought I’d go see Tory instead. They won’t let her out.” He studied his hands, then raised his head. “On top of losing him, she gets the blame. Sucks big time.”

  Yep.

  I’d have to crash the funeral alone. Okay—easier to eavesdrop that way.

  “Sandra will be out making more tea this afternoon, so Reed and Kristen, the shop is yours.” They nodded solemnly. “That’s a figure of speech, not a gift. Hey, we all feel like rotten eggs, but we have to perk ourselves up, for the customers.”

  I cleared my throat and went on. “I hate to say this, but we need somebody to fill in a few days a week. Until Tory gets back. Any suggestions, let me know.”

  An uncomfortable silence followed.

  “What about the new labels?” Reed asked.

  I tried wiggling my eyebrows, but had never mastered the trick. “Soon. And you’ll love them, I promise.”

  “Oh, goodie!” Kristen clapped her hands. “I love Fabiola’s designs.”

  “Just you wait and see.”

  • • •

  BY midmorning, the rain had stopped, and I headed out to make a few deliveries. On my way back to the shop, I glanced in the window at Starbucks and did a double take.

  It hadn’t changed much since 1971. Packed as usual with tourists paying homage to the shop that launched coffee as we now know it, the place radiates a kind of golden glow, richly scented with coffee, steamed milk, and a hint of vanilla. And today, wet wool.

  “Gentlemen.” I greeted my friends.

  “Fine day out, Ms. Reece.” Hot Dog said.

  “For a fish. May I join you?”

  Jim offered me his stool and moved over one, so that I was flanked by the two men.

  Hot Dog whipped out a Starbucks gift card. “Got this in my hat one day. Figured it were a joke, it wouldn’t have nothing but a few pennies on it, but she said everybody needs a treat, so here we are. What may we get you?”

  I started to protest, not wanting them to spend their treat money on me. But everyone likes to be generous now and then. “Double shot nonfat latte, a dash of cinnamon.”

  “Grande?” he asked. I nodded. He bowed and left to place my order.

  I turned to my other companion. “Good to see you, Jim. Keeping dry?”

  “Oh, yes. I’m not homeless, you know. I’ve got an SRO in the Market.” Single room occupancy. “But walls make me antsy. I’d rather walk than sit around with the old folks, playing cards or shooting the breeze.”

  Easy to imagine. “I’m afraid I scared our friend yesterday. I suggested he might tell the police what he saw, and he took off.”

  “Hot Dog and I met up with him last night.” Jim raised a hand. “Please don’t ask where. But I don’t think it’s the police he’s afraid of.”

  “Social workers?”

  He tightened his lips. “They call ’em psych wards ’cause they make you crazy.”

  Hot Dog reclaimed his stool, buttoning the gift card safely into the breast pocket of his wool shirt, a classic brown-and-gold Pendleton plaid, slightly frayed of collar and cuff. “Ms. Reece, I sure am sorry those police arrested Miss Tory. She be the sweetest, most generoustest girl. I was plum shocked.”

  The light dawned. “Hot Dog, I respect your privacy, and you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. But it might help Tory.”

  The barista called my name and Jim slid off his stool to fetch my coffee.

  “Did she take you to the doctor? To her father’s clinic?”

  “Yes, ma’am, she did. I got a hole in my heart. Cut my boxing career short.” He thumped his chest with his forefinger. “That’s why Jim keeps an eye on me, why he and the fellas make sure I don’t let my mouth get me into trouble.”

  I remembered “the fellas” holding him back when the suburban teenagers came spoiling for a fight.

  “The docs in the Market clinic do a good job, but it were acting up and she thought I needed a little exter attention. So she took me up to Pill Hill. Paid for the cab and all.”

  Proof that Tory managed to support herself in retail while keeping her heart open.

  “Which doctor did you see?”

  “Ken Griffey.” His eyes twinkled
. “Not that Ken Griffey. She talked with him private, then he saw me. Listened to my ticker. Ran some tests. Checked me out good, and din’t charge me a dime. Din’t charge her, neither—I made her promise he were doing this outta the good of his heart.”

  Or to get into her graces. But why? Did Griffey not realize how little influence she had over her father? “Did you know Dr. Griffey was her father’s partner?”

  “No, ma’am. Not till we left. It got late and the place were shut down. This old guy stormed in. Not so old, I guess. Same eyes, but they be a sight prettier on her. They shared some—unpleasant words.”

  Jim set my latte and the cinnamon shaker on the bar in front of me.

  Hot Dog went on. “He said something like, ‘You wanted nothing to do with me or medicine, until some freeloader needs help.’ And she got mad. She said, ‘What good is it if you don’t use it for the people in need?’ Now I know that was Doc, and he were her daddy. I felt real bad, I did, being the reason they argued.”

  The argument Robbie the cabdriver had witnessed. “It wasn’t your fault, Hot Dog. It was an old argument, and I don’t think it was really about medicine.”

  “He yelled at Dr. Griffey, too. ‘You can’t get to me through her. Don’t even think about it.’ Last thing I want to do now is make things worse for Miss Tory by saying how angry she were at her daddy, but it’s the truth, and if anybody asks me about it, I’ll have to tell.”

  I cradled the hot cup, hoping it would warm the chills running laps on my spine. Hot Dog feared he was pointing the finger at Tory, and it was true, Tracy and Spencer would think his story proved their theory. Proved it twice over: Not only did she nurse a grudge against her father for attempting to squash her dreams, but he had also stomped on her charitable spirit.

  Too bad “he had it coming” is no defense to premeditated murder.

  How did Ken Griffey, MD, fit into this deadly tangle? Had he been trying to get something from Finch, through Tory, not realizing that was a dead end?

  Without realizing it, Hot Dog may have given me the clues that would get both Sam and Tory off the hook.

  The physical muscle might be defective, but there was no hole in his true heart.

  • • •

  WHEN I left the corporate world, I donated my suits and heels to a “Dress for Success” program for women entering the job market. It felt a little strange, helping women find jobs in the world I couldn’t wait to leave, but I like to think of it from an HR perspective as one last supportive gesture.

  Besides, they were great outfits. Not their fault my job evaporated.

  But I’d stashed a couple of favorites in the back of the closet, just in case. After my coffee break, I dashed back to the shop, then down to the loft, and Presto! Chango! Transformed from funky-chic shop girl to Urban Professional.

  I zoomed out of the parking garage and up to Broadway, then worked my way to the Episcopal cathedral. Used to seem like anybody who was anybody in Seattle, if they weren’t Catholic or Jewish, was buried from St. Mark’s—the default church for the undeclared. But times change, and it’s acceptable to be secular in public now.

  Designed in the 1920s as a grand cathedral in the European tradition, the partially finished building fell victim to foreclosure in the early 1940s. Local lore says it served briefly as a military training center—the airmen even left behind a mural in part of the crypt, or so the story goes—reopening for services before the war ended. Somehow, it acquired a famous organ and still hosts choral and organ recitals.

  But while Brother Cadfael would be baffled by the Book of Common Prayer—not to mention modern English—I’m sure he’d feel at home in the place.

  Its calm grace enveloped me the moment I stepped out of the Mustang.

  Inside, the church glowed. The pews gleamed in the soft light made evanescent by the stained glass.

  It’s a cliché to say your heart twists—if it does, you seriously need a cardiologist—but mine made some pretzelish movements. With sorrow not for Doc, although I supposed he deserved some sympathy, but for Marianne, who did seem to love him.

  And mostly for Tory, deprived of a father’s support and shown his scorn. Now wrongly blamed for his death.

  I hoped the jail staff would take pity and give her an extended visiting hour. Maybe one-on-one, so she could touch Zak’s hand. So he could clasp her to his broad chest.

  After what I’d heard about Damien Finch’s sharp tongue and hard heart, the size of the crowd surprised me.

  I slid into a rear pew, the better to see who was there. And perhaps, to avoid being seen.

  Near the front, behind Marianne and two tall men I judged to be her sons, sat Ken Griffey and a blonde, no doubt his wife. Three other couples filled the row—probably more doctors and spouses. (Shouldn’t the plural be spice?) And behind them, several women, including Stephanie, the job-hunting receptionist.

  “Nice to see you honoring the dead.”

  I sat bolt upright, eyes wide, then glared at Detective Tracy. So much for not being seen. “You scared the parsley out of me.”

  He grinned. “That’s a new one.”

  “We’re in church. Where’s your partner?”

  He pointed with his head and I spotted her, sitting a few rows in front of us on the far aisle.

  In the movies and on TV, police go to funerals to spy out the killer. But these two thought they had their man—or woman. “Why are you here? You’ve got your suspect in jail.”

  “Never hurts to keep your eyes open.”

  “Lot of people here, considering how many of them disliked Damien Finch.”

  The organist changed hymns and the congregation rose.

  “Grief means different things to different people,” Tracy said.

  I considered that as I watched the celebrant process up the center aisle. For some here, grief meant genuine sorrow. For some, a job search. For others, relief. And for someone, if I dare say this in a church, satisfaction.

  It was, as nearly everyone connected with Damien Finch liked to say, complicated.

  But when I turned to suggest as much to Detective Tracy, he had disappeared.

  • • •

  “I feel like I should go,” the receptionist said to another woman outside an hour later. They were standing near the Mustang.

  “Not me,” came the reply. “Graveyards give me the creeps.”

  “Need a ride?” I said. “Pepper Reece. We met the other day at the clinic.”

  “I remember you. Thanks, yeah.” She waved good-bye to the other woman and opened the passenger door. “Nice car.”

  “Thanks. I’m a friend of the family,” I said, stretching the truth and sliding into reverse. “How long did you work for Dr. Finch?”

  “Stephanie Niehaus. Too long.” Her left hand flew to her mouth. “Sorry. My mother raised me better than that.”

  “She did. That’s why you went to the funeral, and now you’re going to the burial.” I turned off Tenth onto Blaine, headed for Lake View Cemetery. “Don’t worry about it. I’m guessing he wasn’t any easier on his staff than on his family.”

  “Half the time, he acted like we weren’t there. But when he needed something, it was crack the whip, hop to it, why didn’t you know what I was thinking and have that file or form or whatever it was ready for me.”

  “So why’d you keep working there?”

  “Needed a job. And he paid well—he had to, to keep everybody from quitting.”

  “What about the other doctors? The clinic partners?”

  “He drove them away, too. Of course, they weren’t actually partners, so when they didn’t get what they wanted, they quit or got fired.”

  One more reason to pay your staff well and treat them nicely. If you don’t, they lose their manners and loosen their tongues when you die. “Aren’t all doctors in a clinic partners?”


  “Some clinics run that way, but Dr. Finch hired them as employees so he could fire them. That’s how it struck me anyway. He was always in a tussle with somebody.”

  I eased the Mustang into a parking space. “Dr. Griffey managed to hang in there.”

  “He wanted to buy the clinic. But Dr. Finch decided to sell it to somebody else.” She gave me a quick sidelong glance. “I hear things.”

  Now we’re cooking with gas, as my grandfather used to say. Had that person sped up the process a bit by offing Finch? “Who?”

  “Not sure. But you know, he seemed different somehow, before he died. He came in regularly and I got the sense that he was trying to—oh, I don’t know. Change his ways. Probably my imagination.”

  We walked up the sidewalk, following a stream of men and women in dark suits or raincoats, umbrellas in hand.

  Like other Capitol Hill kids, I’d spent hundreds of hours playing and hanging out in Volunteer Park or riding my bike through this cemetery. In eighth grade, our Washington history class made a field trip here to see the graves of Princess Angeline, daughter of Chief Seattle; pioneer families; and the Nisei War Memorial to the Japanese-American veterans of World War II. My mother had enjoyed walking here, especially in spring when the budding trees framed the view of Lake Washington. My dad had stopped by now and again to pay respects to Bruce Lee and, later, his son Brandon.

  But I’d never attended a service here. Among the weathered angels, saints, and other monuments dating back to the 1870s, the most striking has to be the woman seated in a chair, a young girl standing before her. Moss and algae stained the pedestal, and behind it, willow branches stood stark against the gray sky.

  I shook off the melancholy it always gives me and told myself to pay attention.

  We neared the Garden Mausoleum and I hung back, not sure I belonged. The man I’d known—Doc, the mysterious street man—hadn’t actually existed.

  Griffey, his wife—sporting a baby bump—and other doctorly types stood behind Marianne and her sons, along with two women I presumed were their wives. Stephanie joined a clutch of women at the group’s edge. I glanced around, expecting to see Tracy or Spencer lurking behind a tree. But if they were here, they were well hidden.