Taking the Fifth(38)
“Thanks, Janice,” I said, backing away from her table. “You’ve been a big help.”
“Thanks, Janice,” I said, backing away from her table. “You’ve been a big help.”
“Any time,” she said with a smile. “That’s what I get paid for.”
Back upstairs, I found a message waiting for me from one of the guys on night shift. He had taped it to my phone so I would be sure not to miss it. Reverend Laura Beardsly of the Pike Street Mission wanted me to drop by and see her as soon as possible. The message was marked urgent.
The Pike Street Mission is only a block from the Pike Place Market and six blocks from the Mayflower Park Hotel. There was just time enough to go see Reverend Laura before my scheduled meeting with Alan Dale. At nine-fifteen, I pulled into a thirty-minute parking place on First Avenue in front of a defunct office-supply store. Two minutes later, I was pushing open the alley entrance to the Pike Street Mission.
Reverend Laura Beardsly has been the director of the mission for several years. She’s lasted longer than any of the do-gooders who have preceded her. They mostly burned themselves out trying to rescue ungrateful wretches who didn’t particularly want to be rescued.
Reverend Laura, a raw-boned, plain-looking woman, has built quite a following among Seattle’s street people. She has a reputation for helping people when they want help, without unnecessary moralizing or haranguing. And she has brains enough to leave them alone the rest of the time. I first met her when Peters and I were working a bum-bashing case where a college student got his rocks off by setting fire to drunks in downtown alleys.
It wasn’t an auspicious beginning, but in the period of time since then, Reverend Laura had established a good working relationship with the department in general and with Peters and me in particular. When she hollered, we listened.
Reverend Laura’s mission, housed in what used to be one of Seattle’s seedier taverns, seemed to be thriving, at least from a user’s point of view. I knew the overnight shelter was usually full even though the treasury was not. The mission’s telephone had long since been disconnected for nonpayment, which is why I couldn’t phone, why it was necessary to stop by in person.
The “born-again” tavern occupies the subbasement of an office building. It opens, by means of a steep, narrow stairway, onto a stretch of alley that fills up with rats and drunks every night as soon as the sun goes down.
Reverend Laura, impervious to her surroundings, lives there twenty-four hours a day, sleeping on a simple cot in a room behind the chapel. Another room, off to the side of the chapel where the former establishment ran an illegal card room, has been converted into a six-cot dormitory where homeless derelicts can bed down for the night. The Spartan accommodations are free and available on a first-come, first-served basis.
A tinkling bell above the chapel door announced my arrival. Reverend Laura hurried down through the chapel to meet me, her work-roughened hand extended in greeting. Her buck-toothed smile was one of genuine welcome.
“Hello, Detective Beaumont. Thank you for coming,” she said. “I was afraid she’d changed her mind.”
“Who would change her mind?” I asked.
Reverend Laura didn’t answer. Instead, she turned and hurried back the way she had come. I tagged along behind her. When we reached the door to the bunk room, she stopped and opened the door.
“It’s time,” she announced in a businesslike tone that brooked no nonsense.
Inside, the group of ragged derelicts who had spent the night were busy gathering their meager possessions for yet another day on the street. Reverend Laura waited beside the door as they shuffled out one by one. Only when the last one had made his way down the aisle and out the door at the back of the chapel did she turn and continue on her way, leading me past the spare wooden pulpit at the front of the room and into her own private living quarters.
People who send their cast-off clothing to St. Vincent de Paul or who mail checks once a year to the Salvation Army pat themselves on the back for their generosity without ever being sullied by the grim realities of poverty. The donors to that kind of sanitary, twice-removed charity never see or touch or smell the recipients. Especially smell.
Reverend Laura, on the other hand, lives in the trenches next to her charges. At that very moment, her room reeked of the unmistakable odor of unwashed destitution.
At first glance, I thought the windowless room was empty, that the “she” Reverend Laura had mentioned had made a break for it and disappeared. On one side of the room a narrow, neatly made cot was pushed against a bare brick wall. On the other side sat a desk, an old, metallic green office discard, covered with several stacks of books and a disorderly scatter of papers.