"I called Ron," Bonnie answered. "Luckily, he was still home. He asked me if the car was drivable, and I told him I didn't know. So he came down to see. And it was. We got it home all right. I've called the dealer. He's sending out a driver to pick it up sometime this morning. He's bringing me a loaner."
"Your husband said something about a wrench."
"That's right. It's still in my purse. I'll go get it."
"Tell us about it first."
"When Ron got there, he turned the key in the ignition, and the car started right up. But then he noticed that the hood ornament was missing. You know about Mercedes hood ornaments, don't you? It's better now, but there was a real epidemic of hood-ornament theft a couple of years ago. We lost seven by the time it was all said and done. It's a small thing, really, but it drives Ron bonkers.
"As soon as he saw it was gone, he turned off the motor and said we weren't leaving until we found the damn thing. And we did, surprisingly enough. It's in my purse, too. That reminds me. I've got to remember to give it to the loaner-car driver so the body shop can put it back on the hood when they fix the car. Hang on. I'll go get them both while I'm thinking about it." Bonnie Elgin put her coffee mug down on a cut-crystal coaster and dashed off upstairs. She returned a few minutes later.
"It's bent," she said matter-of-factly, looking down at the shiny round chrome object in her hand. "I didn't notice that before. We'll probably have to get a new one anyway."
"Could I see the wrench?" I asked.
She handed me a small box-end wrench-about a 5/16, although oddly enough, there were no markings on it to indicate what size it was or who had made it, either. And for some strange reason somebody had painted it with a solid layer of enamel.
Sue and I weren't playing with a full deck of information, but since we had been sent because Bonnie Elgin's hit-and-run supposedly had something to do with the homicide on the Isolde, it was best to treat the wrench as though it were an important piece of evidence. Better safe than sorry. Using a cloth handkerchief and a glassine bag, I stashed the wrench in my inside jacket pocket. Meanwhile, Bonnie Elgin continued talking.
"I found the wrench first, before Ron caught sight of the hood ornament lying over against the curb. He said the wrench probably belonged to the guy I hit-that the impact most likely knocked it out of his pocket. He said that if we ever found out who that was, maybe we could give it back to him. Ron's a big believer in complete sets of tools."
"Me, too," I said.
"So do you need to look at the car?" she asked. "Or did the two cops get enough information on that earlier? I'm really not sure whether or not the man I hit was in the crosswalk. There is one around there, but I don't remember exactly where I was in relation to it when all this happened. Are you going to give me a ticket?"
"Mrs. Elgin," Sue Danielson explained. "We're not really here to investigate the automobile accident. That's up to Patrol. We're here because of a fatal fire at Fishermen's Terminal early this morning. It was discovered a few minutes after your accident. We have reason to believe it was an arson fire, so anyone seen running from that same general area around the time the incident occurred would certainly be a person of interest. What, if anything, can you tell us about the man you hit?"
"He was Hispanic," Bonnie Elgin said immediately. "I know that much. He had an accent. A heavy Spanish accent."
"You said he was injured and bleeding. Where?"
"There was a cut over his eye."
"Right or left?"
She stared for a moment and then gestured to an invisible point in space. "Left, I think."
"And his leg?"
"It was definitely the right leg. And that was bleeding, too. Pretty badly, I think. From a cut on his knee. My guess is that one will probably need stitches."
"What was he wearing?"
"Jeans. Tennis shoes. A jacket-a green jacket. Only a windbreaker, really. It didn't look like it was warm enough for this weather."
"Any identifying features-a beard, mustache, that kind of thing?"
"Not that I remember."
"How tall was he?"
"Not very. Only five-five or maybe five-six. And not very heavy, either. Medium build."
To me, five-five sounded smaller than medium, but that's all a matter of perspective.
"Which way did he go when he walked away?" I asked.
"The same way he came," Bonnie Elgin answered. "Back down the embankment to the railroad tracks. It seemed like he was more scared of talking to the police than he was of being hit by a car. Right then I couldn't understand why he was leaving, but if he was involved with the fire, I suppose then it all makes sense, doesn't it?"
"Yes," I said. "I suppose it does."
By the time we left Bonnie Elgin's house on Perkins Lane, it was almost ten-thirty. The fog had burned off fairly well. Out on Puget Sound, the water was still mostly gunmetal gray, but here and there overhead were occasional chips of pale blue sky.
"Back to Fishermen's Terminal?" Sue Danielson asked as she started up the Mustang.
"Let's swing by that crosswalk on Gilman," I told her. "I want to get out and take a look around."
It wasn't difficult to find the location of the accident. A splatter of shattered glass marked the point of impact. As far as that was concerned, Bonnie Elgin was in luck. The glass was well south of the crosswalk. Generally speaking, it's not good to hit pedestrians at all. But if you have to hit one, it's better not to do it in a marked crosswalk. Everyone, from judges to insurance companies, takes a dim view of that.
Sue parked the car. I got out and walked over to the guardrail on the far side of the street. Heading down the embankment, a trail of footprints dug deep into the soft, wet earth on the other side. The person who had left those tracks had been in one hell of a hurry. From where I stood, I could look across the railroad cut and see the long creosoted beams that formed the retaining wall for the bank on the far side of the cut, but the metal tracks themselves were out of sight.
Avoiding the footprints, I hitched my legs over the guardrail and climbed down. Even stepping carefully, the compressed mud squished beneath my feet, bubbling up around my heels and into my shoes. I stopped at the edge of the embankment. Just below me, hunkered up against the retaining wall on my side of the cut, was a makeshift tent. A blue tarp had been draped over a sheltering framework of blackberry bramble. Inside was a single box spring, minus the mattress, and the remains of a recent campfire.
I had stumbled uninvited into the home of one of Seattle's homeless, and from the looks of it, so had the injured victim of Bonnie Elgin's hit-and-run. There were several bright red bloodstains on the fabric of the box spring.
As I scrambled back up the incline to the guardrail, it struck me how little physical distance separated the Elgins' marble foyer with its magnificent domed ceiling from this tarpaulin-covered hovel. Existing almost side by side, both were part of Seattle's Magnolia Bluff community, and yet they represented realities so separate and alien that they could just as well have been on different planets.
Or else in parallel universes.
5
Sue Danielson wanted to go straight back to Fishermen's Terminal and see what was happening there, but I persuaded her otherwise. Until members of the crime-scene team finished up with their physical examination of the Isolde, there wasn't all that much for a couple of stray homicide detectives to do but to stand around with our hands in our pockets and look useless and/or pretty, depending on your point of view.
So we turned off Emerson onto Twenty-third, parked in a triangular chuck-holed mire that passed for a parking lot and did an impromptu but thorough shoe-leather tour of the neighborhood. The strip of land on the far side of the railroad tracks contained a collection of small, one- and two-man businesses. We must have dropped in on ten or twelve offices and shops in the area bordered by Emerson and West Elmore. Most of them faced southwest and overlooked the railroad cut that sliced across the northeastern slope of Magnolia Bluff.