The porch may have been sagging and peeling, but on that unusually summery June morning it was also warm and sunny. A well-fed, blue-eyed Siamese cat occupied a place of honor directly in front of the door. Ignoring us completely, he concentrated on washing one luxuriously outstretched hind leg. Only when I knocked on the door behind him did the cat give his head a disdainful shake, stand up, arch his back, and stalk off the porch. In the cat’s book, we were unwelcome interlopers who had invaded his private patch of sunlight.
The door was an old-fashioned one with horizontal wooden panels across the bottom and a frosted woodland scene etched into the glass window near the top. After knocking, we waited several long minutes, but there was no answer. I knocked again, louder this time, but still no one came to the door. Disregarding years of my mother’s patient training, I pressed my face against the window in the door and peered inside.
Curtains covered most of the window, but toward the bottom, below the intricate frosted design, the curtains parted slightly. Through the narrow opening I could see the disorderly shambles inside. Clothes were strewn everywhere. Trash littered the floor next to an overturned garbage can. A wicker chair lay on its side near the door.
“Ransacked, you think?” Al asked when I stepped back from the window and told him what I had seen.
“Can’t tell. Maybe, or maybe Richard Dathan Morris was just a first-class slob.”
We had no search warrant and no reason to disregard proper channels for obtaining one. Besides, searching the house was premature until we had at least verified Doc Baker’s preliminary identification. We decided to canvass the neighborhood in hopes of gleaning some useful bit of information about Richard Dathan Morris.
We worked our way through a series of nearby apartment buildings one by one, including those on either side of Morris’s house as well as the one directly across the street. No luck. Nobody knew anything, or if they did, they weren’t talking. We unearthed no connections between the surrounding apartment dwellers and their deceased neighbor in the derelict little house.
Shoe-leather work takes time. Walking and talking and fishing for information isn’t an instantaneous process. An hour and a half or so later, we emerged from the semidarkness of the last apartment-building foyer and blinked our way into blinding morning sunlight. Walking side by side and squinting into the unaccustomed sunlight, we headed for the car, only to dodge out of the way of a speeding minivan. It almost took a chunk out of Al’s kneecap as it skidded to a stop in front of our vehicle.
“Hey, watch it,” Al cautioned the driver, who bounced out of the van and hurried around to the back of the vehicle, where he pulled open a cargo door.
“Sorry about that,” he said.
We got into our car. Al was driving. He started the motor and looked out the back window to check oncoming traffic. Meanwhile, I watched as the driver of the van and his helper removed a stretcher from the van and started purposefully toward the small house, carrying the stretcher between them.
“Al, take a look at that.”
They carried the stretcher onto the porch, knocked, and then stood waiting. Moments later the front door swung open and the cat sauntered outside. In our absence, someone had come home and let the cat in. The door opened wider, revealing a young man wearing a white uniform of some kind. There was a short conversation; then he motioned the two men to bring their stretcher into the house.
“We’d better check this out,” I said.
Al nodded and shut off the engine. We scrambled out of the car and were on the porch almost before the door finished slamming shut behind the men with the stretcher. When I knocked, the man in the white uniform returned to open the door.
He was maybe five ten or so, with short, clean-cut hair that reminded me of a fifties flattop. His narrow, handsome face had a gaunt look to it. Dark shadows under his eyes said he wasn’t getting enough food or sleep or both. A name tag on the breast pocket of his white uniform told us he was Tom Riley, R.N.
“Detective J.P. Beaumont, Seattle P.D.,” I said, holding out my ID.
“Nobody called for any cops,” Riley said abruptly. He turned away and slammed the door behind him.
“Guess he doesn’t care much for police officers,” Al muttered.
“Did you see that?” I asked.
“See what?”
“The mess. Inside. Somebody cleaned it up.”
“Maybe we’d better try again,” Big Al said. This time he knocked.
When the door opened the second time, I positioned myself so I could peer into the room over the shoulder of Tom Riley, R.N. Behind him I caught a glimpse of the driver and his helper busily dressing for what looked like a field trip into an operating room. Both had put on surgical masks and germ-free booties and were in the process of donning rubber gloves.