“In a heartbeat,” Bob Murray said. “Be here tomorrow morning at ten, and I’ll see to it.”
The next morning at ten o’clock sharp, I entered the Doghouse for the first time since the shooting. The booth where the two killers had sat that fateful afternoon had an OCCUPIED sign on it even though the only thing there was a collection of wilting bouquets, their bedraggled flowers dripping dead petals. Around that small sad memorial, the rest of the Doghouse bustled with business as usual.
Bob Murray met me at the host station and escorted me to a seat at the far end of the counter. “As soon as Alfonso gets here, I’ll send him your way.”
I was halfway through a plate of ham and eggs when a smallish Mexican man slipped quietly onto the stool beside me.
“You the detective?” he asked.
I held out my hand. “J. P. Beaumont,” I said. “And you are?”
“Alfonso Romero of Al’s Produce,” he said. “I’m Al.”
It made sense. In Seattle’s white-bread business districts, a Hispanic vegetable delivery guy could pass himself off as white or at least as Italian by plastering the name Al on his truck, and the only people that ruse fooled were the people who needed to be fooled.
“Bob says I should talk to you,” he said. “About the skips.”
“You think it’s a pattern?” I asked.
The waitress brought him coffee and a platter of breakfast that included bacon, eggs over easy, crisp hash browns, whole wheat toast, coffee, and orange juice. It must have been a standing order that was put in place the moment he turned up because Romero hadn’t been there nearly long enough for even the fastest short-order cook to deliver a breakfast like that in such a timely fashion.
Romero nodded. “Five different restaurants that I know about, including this one, but those are only the ones I work with. There are a lot of restaurants out there and a lot of produce guys just like me.”
“Do you know some of them?” I asked. “Your competition, I mean.”
Romero shrugged. “Of course I know them,” he said. “We get our stuff from the same suppliers; we’re out on the docks, loading our lettuce and tomatoes at the same time before we head out on our routes.”
“Would these other drivers know if the same thing was happening at other restaurants?”
“Sure,” Romero said. “Owners talk. Waitresses talk. They’re all in the same business, and everybody knows what everybody else is doing.”
“If I showed up on the dock at the same time, would the drivers talk to me?”
Alfonso thought about that for a moment before he answered. “Maybe,” he said. “But only if I asked ’em.”
Which is how, the next morning, I found myself on the loading dock of a huge warehouse off Rainer Avenue at O-dark-thirty in the morning. Having Bob Murray vouch for me was good enough for Alfonso, and having Alfonso making the introductions was good enough for the other drivers. They all knew that Lulu McCaffey had been murdered, and they were eager to help. By the time I left the dock and headed into the department, I was as excited as a kid on his way to see Santa Claus because I knew I was on to something.
There was a pattern here, and over and over it was the same thing. Two guys—customers who have never been there before—show up in a restaurant, order, eat, don’t pay, and go. According to the drivers, it happened mostly in the evenings, just at rush hour, at restaurants all over the city—from north to south, east to west, but never the same restaurant twice. I took down the drivers’ names and phone numbers. I asked them to keep checking. Back at the department, I had a decision to make. I knew from the scuttlebutt that Lieutenant Tatum was waiting for Pickles to recover enough to be let out of the hospital, at which point he intended to make an arrest and formally charge him in the death of Lulu McCaffey.
If I had thought Tatum was a square shooter, I would have gone straight upstairs with what I had found from Alfonso and the other drivers, but he wasn’t, and I didn’t.
Cops patronize restaurants. We go to restaurants at every hour of the day and night, so it wasn’t necessary to launch an official investigation in order to launch an investigation. I just had to get word out to the beat cops and to the guys on patrol and to the detectives riding around in their unmarked cars that the restaurants in Seattle were suffering from an epidemic of check skippers, and that we needed to be good neighbors and help our friends in the restaurant business find these guys.