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Devlin’s Deadline

by Anthony Royka

PROLOGUE

I'M SNOWBOUND IN A DEAD MAN'S CABIN BY KACHESS LAKE, not far from

Snoqualmie Pass. The hunger, the fear and the cold don’t help these tremors one little bit, but thinking about you does.

My Child!

I WANT YOU TO KNOW WHO I AM, or was.

I started working on this long-winded letter as soon as I got word that you were likely to come into this world not long after I've left it.

I’m like the title character in Oliver Twist -- the orphan who had the audacity to ask for more gruel -- I find myself boldly petitioning the outrageous Unknown for just a little more time, time enough to catch one killer and confront another, time enough to finish this letter, and maybe, just maybe, time enough to see your amazing face at least once before I die!

THAT MIGHT NOT HAPPEN.

I’ve got killers after me and another killer inside my head pounding to beat them to the quick.

Unless I come back as a banshee, there’s not much chance that we'll meet, except in these pages, but wade through these words and you'll know me well at the end. I can’t promise that you’ll love or even like your old Da when you’re done, but you’ll know me better than I knew my own Da, and even better than that, you’ll be part of an adventure yourself!

Steady yourself for the ride, kid, because off we go!

1 - Bad Night At Bitter Lake

I WAS TRAPPED AT THE TOP OF A ROLLER COASTER WITH A YELLOW-EYED witch and a drunken maniac was taking potshots at us from the Playland Midway below.

It was, or should have been, my first clue that a drastic change was percolating inside me.

We'd been enjoying a chilly November night ride when the Giant Dipper, the pride of Playland Amusement Park in Seattle, had stalled.

My date barely seemed to notice. She seemed thrilled just to have a visit to Playland. I half suspected that she thought I owned the amusement park, since it was long since closed for the off-season, yet there we were, on a private midnight ride.

She was talking enthusiastically in a thick accent about the moon, pointing to it. It was partially covered by nuvole, clouds, which made it appear boot-shaped to her, the shape of her home country, Italy.

I smiled. Her accent was like aural velvet, musical, passionate. Her command of English wasn't great, but I understood her red lips and full figure perfectly. I noticed her scent was the scent of African Violets, specifically that of the species grown in the Nguru mountains of Tanzania, and I told her so.

I know. Too much detail. Why didn't I just tell her that she smelled wonderful?

I can't help it. I notice things. I notice and then remember situations, sights sounds clearly. I think maybe that's why I started writing.

My Spanish mother had taught me how to write when I was three, and then started telling me to write things down, probably with the vain hope that if I wrote things down I would stop overwhelming her with loquacious detail.

I notice things. Women love me for that quality until they learn to hate me for it, usually some time after I'm too bored with them to mention what I’ve noticed.

She seemed puzzled.

"I smell-a like violence?"

"Flowers, baby, you smell like flowers."

"That sweet man...Signore Abravanal? He is to start the coaster-roller soon?"

"Who? Oh the night watchman. I paid him to stop the... coaster-roller right here, where we're closest to the moon, how you say it, la luna?"

She giggled. "You pay?"

I'd bribed Henry Elevari for the late night ride, of course, but I hadn't anticipated that the contraption would quit on us. The visit to Playland had been at the lady's request, and with Franco Devlin, a lady could always get what she wanted, that is, until she wasn't wanted anymore. At the moment I was mad for Signorina Fortuna Soriano.

"Old Henry will probably get the coaster running soon."

Hopefully, not too soon. I caressed her cheek.

"Are you scared?"

"Che?"

"Afraid. Are you afraid?"

"Of you, silly man? No, no, I fear nothing. I am, how you say, less fear."

"Me too, Fortuna. I fear no man or no thing."

She kissed me back, and said:

"Maybe you speak too soon, eh?"

****

MARIA LAUGHED AND THEN I LAUGHED and then we laughed, and then I stopped laughing and she didn't. She laughed so long that I actually took out the pocket watch that had been my Da's. I had to use my butane lighter to check the time. She stopped laughing at precisely seven minutes until midnight.

It was the longest minute in history. Then her face displayed the kind of calm that overtakes you when you’ve had a good, long laugh, or when you’ve finally made a difficult decision. In a sing-song voice, she said:

"I have a-something..for you…"She reached down for something on the floor, giving a pleasant hint of cleavage as she bent forward.

"I like them," I said.

She pointed to her chest.

"Not these, mio tesoro...THIS--"

My gift turned out to be a stiletto knife, its long silver blade jumping out of its black handle before I knew what it was, her thrust making it clear that she intended to filet me with it.

--What the heck--?"

In the middle of a perfectly promising late night adventure her eyes suddenly flashed from chocolate brown to black cat yellow, and she launched into her attack faster than Johnny Weissmuller wrestling a crocodile in Tarzan and His Mate.

I jumped out of the car, which was exactly the wrong thing to do, and went exactly in the wrong direction, too far away from the car to take hold of even the edge of it. I stood briefly in a vain attempt to balance myself, and when that didn’t work, I quickly genuflected.

She lunged toward me again, and again, stabbing wildly, spitting epithets at me in English, Italian and unknown tongues between knife thrusts, as I twisted left and right in the wind. I might have scratched my head in wonder if I hadn't already been dodging a knife, ducking bullets and trying to keep from falling.

I tried to scramble away from her, but made it just far enough away to notice that the track was about to take a decidedly precipitous drop.

I had nowhere to go but down. She threw the knife toward me and I just barely dodged it. It flew past me, dinged the metal of the roller coaster, and presumably fell to terra firma, and I couldn't help praying it would pierce the skull of the twit with the rifle. Then I though about Henry. If the stiletto or a stray bullet found Henry, he’d leave a widow with eight hungry children.

"SHOOT HIM," she screamed to her cohort on the midway, and then to me:

"Oh, I should have cut off your testículos and fed them to you when I had the chance."

"Does this mean that the wedding is off?"

****

THIS WASN'T MY FIRST BAD NIGHT in the aptly named Bitter Lake section of Seattle.

I had married another bitter and black-haired beauty there back in 1931, just after a two month dance marathon at the Playland Ballroom. That gig had ended badly too, but it was bliss compared to the big finish my assailants had planned.

I remember sailing with Moira on Lake Washington on a sunny day in July of ’32. That was the day she ended the marriage, confronting me about the many women, the long hours of work, the long hours of play and the too few hours spent alone with her.

That was the day she compared the way I treated women to the way I boxed in the gym. She said I was full of charm and flashy foot work in round one, scored a few hard and sweaty hits in the clenches in round two, but became so tired and bored with the match that by round three, I was emotionally down for the count and too soon out of the ring.

I didn’t argue. She was mostly right.

She tossed her wedding band into the water. It was an expensive baptism.

I baptized mine there too, and we silently silently steered the sailboat to shore. No more verbal sparring, no more battles of wits, no more hits. It was over.

Not that I ever hit Moira, though her little fists had stung my chest and face a well-deserved time or two. I don't hit women, but at the moment I was tempted to belt a certain Italian wench.

For her part, Fortuna Soriano, or “Sally Stiletto,” or whatever her real name was, didn’t want to hit me. She apparently wanted to gut me and scream with delight as my carcass followed my innards down to the main drag of the midway below.

She screamed to the air, a piercing scream. I'd have covered my ears, but my hands were otherwise engaged in trying to keep me alive.

"SHOOT US! He's MINE! He killed my sister!"

I was scared spitless, but I had to laugh, since in my jaded past I'd earnestly offered the following excuse several times before.

"I didn't even know you had a sister!"

This time, finally, it was true. I didn't know her sister, and if her sister was anything like her, I didn't want to know her sister.

"Did you laugh, puerco, when you killed her?"

Far below us, the baritone with the slurred speech and the exaggerated Teutonic accent laughed, his voice amplified as if he'd spoken through a megaphone.

“En-choying da ride? Ve do shooding match und rollercoaster combo, ya, doo games for da price of vun, und den you die!” Then Sally Stiletto gave me a quizzical stare that I immediately returned and in unison we screamed:

“WHAT?”

I’m not sure that even with our scream, exactly how he could have heard us, but he responded as if he had indeed heard us.

“I ZED..we hev doo games for da price of VUN, und den you die. Doo, idiots – Vun und vun makes DOO, mean-ink you und YOU. Now stay still vhile I shood you boat.”

There was, I suppose, the tiniest benefit to being in the bag at the moment: inebriation made me want to see the humor in everything, especially when there wasn’t any.

Okay, I wasn't merely "in the bag."

Your old Da was spiffed.

“That’s the worst German accent I EVA hoid,” I said to Miss Stiletto, using the worst Groucho Marx impression that ever was. My Groucho accent was almost as bad an accent as the one the Erich Von Stroheim wannabe on the midway was using. His accent sounded as if he'd visited the Egyptian Theater on University Way for too many Saturday matinées. He'd obviously gone insane from watching the evil Stroheim character feud with Richard Dix and Joel McCrea in The Lost Squadron.

Surely if he'd been the one who'd stopped the coaster, he'd have waited until it was closer to the ground. After all, an armless, legless alcoholic with astigmatism in his right eye and a cats-eye marble in his left socket would have had better aim than this jerk.

Sally Stiletto wasn't amused with my attempt at levity, nor was she exactly delighted the jerry's aim. On the other hand, she didn't seem to care whether he shot both of us. In fact, she almost seemed to prefer it.

For my money, I'd have preferred room service and an upgrade from my normal haunt at the Roosevelt Hotel on 7th street to the presidential suite, but that obviously wasn't going to happen.

Oddly enough, I was almost as irritated about that as I was scared, and I was nearly jumping out of my argyles with fright.

I was afraid, afraid and irritated about being afraid.

After all, I had a reputation for being an Irish tough guy, despite my dark hair. I have a baby face that resembles my Da and half-brother Danny's face more than my mothers, but I'm tough enough, and I have Da's and Danny's height and weight, too. I've won more fights than I've lost, to be sure.

But even the roughest bum this side of Idaho would shudder if his date’s eyes changed color and she suddenly turned from being a willing woman to a murderous wretch.

I forced myself to grin.

"Honey, I can't help noticing that your English has suddenly improved."

"Esta la noche de acentos falsos, Francisco."

"A night for false accents? You mean, you're not Italian?"

"Is the German swine down on the midway German? Are you the Groucho?"

"You're Spanish! That's why you said 'testicles' in Spanish!"

"You THINK with your testículos!"

"Why did you lie?"

"Why do you lie, Franco?"

Suddenly I was Franco.

Just then a shot buzzed by me so closely that I could feel the wind behind it, and the dark Seattle sky picked just that moment to have a hard cry. Not a light rain, like normal, but one of her rare tantrums, a hard rain, sudden, not necessarily of long duration but soaking us just the same and with the wind kicking up a few knots, making it hard for either of us to stay where we were.

All that I could see now were the yellows of her eyes. I figured that my only option -- other than tackling her and giving Lady Yellow Eyes a much deserved spanking on our way down to oblivion -- was to get my arse back to that coaster car. If I fought her we both could fall to our deaths. If I tried to climb over her, one or both of us could fall. Even if I could have forced myself to kicked her beautiful Spanish derrière off the coaster, she would probably have grabbed my leg and yes, we would both have fallen.

Negotiation was my only option.

I would have to negotiate with an insane person, a murderous, insane person with a death wish, and hanging just like me, onto a narrow metal rail seventy feet in the air, in the wind, in the cold, hard rain.

I slid closer toward her on the rail.

"Come closer still and I will kill you, puerco ebreo!"

For a moment, I lost my temper, which wasn't by any means a good idea.

"Listen HERE, you yellow-eyed la bruja! For the record, I happen to be legitimately Irish. But how 'bout we leave politics and religion for later? I mean, we're in real jam right now, WOULDN'T YOU SAY?"

I briefly released my right hand from the rail and replaced it with my left. The idea was to give my right arm some rest, but I almost slipped and fell into oblivion during the switch.

Meanwhile, the wind was becoming as angry and aggressive as the rain, almost as aggressive as my adversaries had been.

Old Henry had turned on the roller coaster lights before he had started us on our fateful ride, and some of the light poles on the Playland Midway were always kept on at night to detract vandals, but suddenly all the lights went out.

The night was as black as a tar pit. Just what we needed! I focused on her yellow eyes and tried to talk to her.

"So do you come here often? Have we met before? I mean, dames don’t usually want to do me in until they’ve known me a day or two. How about a temporary truce? You can kill me later. I promise!”

"You will die forever. I will die, but not die."

This was not going well, but I slid closer to her anyway. My arms were weary, my legs were like jell-o, and I was getting my arse in the coaster car one way or another.

"I know what you are doing, so do it, swine, and be quick. Come closer and we will fall together since the swine below has such bad aim."

I sensed no movement from her, either toward me or away from me, but it was difficult to say that for certain. She seemed defeated, almost depressed. Her sadness was so feminine and seductive that I had to force myself not to feel sorry for her.

"Why you think I killed your sister?"

"Because you killed her, or will!"

"When? Where? Who? Why?"

"I know of your travels, when you will go, where you go and yet do not go."

Now that was downright cryptic.

"Can we stop the guessing game?"

I was tired and disgusted and, suddenly, weak.

I wasn't used to feeling weak. I'd played baseball, track and field in school. I lifted weights three times a week. I played tennis, golf, and even boxed. Though I’d stopped far short of winning golden glove in amateur competitions back in high school at St. Theresa of Avila in Seattle, thirty minutes with a punching bag was still part of my routine at the gym. There wasn't a lot of fat on my six-foot-four, 188 pound frame.

I took a lot of pride in my strength, but at that moment I was wondering where my strength had gone. I couldn't have known then what I knew much too well later on, that my unpredictable brain was telling me to get ready, that something awful was building inside it.

"Will you please scoot your arse toward the coaster car, and let me climb in behind you. We’ll duck until your partner runs out of bullets. What do you say?"

The yellow eyes disappeared for a few seconds.

"C'mon, Fortuna, let me in there!"

"It is too late. You are not dead."

"Sorry that's such a disappointment to you."

I carefully edged up the rail toward her. I was close enough now to just barely see that her eyes were chocolate again. I was soaked and chilled and nearly fell a couple of times just then and still I couldn't help noticing that her soaked blouse was clinging to her breasts perfectly. It was almost enough to make me forget that she'd tried to slay me. I forced myself not to think about a warming fire and dry silk sheets and us between them. She climbed into the coaster car and just as I was right behind her, she swung around. I dodged and nearly slipped but she wasn't trying to attack me. Instead, she touched my face. Her hand was trembling but amazingly warm, and surprisingly gentle.

"You may have the coaster car now, Francisco Devlin, but you will not die in peace unless you undo the killings. The time is past and you will soon travel and not. You must undo the killings!"

I wanted to ask her how exactly do you un-murder someone, because that's a neat trick, isn’t it? I wanted to ask her why was she suddenly talking in the plural tense, killings, rather than killing. I wanted to ask her that if nothing else, could she at least tell me her sister’s name, so that I could un-murder her?

I wanted to ask her all that, but I wanted more not to die just then. First things first.

"You climb in first! Try anything crazy and I swear I'll forget you're a wom--"

"Did you not hear me, papista arogante?

"Why do you not listen, asasino judío?"

I'd had epithets hurled at me before by angry women, but these were new ones.

Arrogant Papist, eh? Obviously she knew nothing of my misgivings about my father's religion. Jewish Assassin? I was a Jew by birth, of course, but it wasn't something I'd thought one way or the other about in nearly twenty years.

That I was arrogant was no secret, nor was it a secret that I had been mostly raised Irish Catholic.

But few people knew that my poor dead mother had been a Spanish Jew, and thusly, I was Jewish.

Even stranger, she knew my full name, something I thought no one alive in 1937 knew.

"You know of my mother."

"I know of her, but do you?"

Just what in the name of Dantes Inferno had she meant by that?

Another shot from the idiot below barely missed her. The German jerk had obviously stopped for a moment, maybe for beer, bratwurst and bullets, but he was back, refreshed and reloaded.

"FORTUNA! For God's sake, get down in the car and let me down in there with you!"

"Fortuna? She is not here."

"Look, Fortuna Soriano or Sally Stiletto or Eleanor Roosevelt, or whatever the hell your name is, I don't particularly want to die just now! For crying out loud, will ya let me into the car with you? If not for me, then for mama's sake?"

"Yes, I know of your Mother."

This was encouraging. Granted permission or not, I was coming into the car like a regular Clark Gable whether she liked it or not. I was priding myself for my masculine strength of will when, just as I was almost inside the car, I slipped and I bumped my elbow hard against the edge of it. Clark Gable, my arse. Dagwood Bumstead was more like it.

I tried to ignore both the embarrassment and the sharp pain in my funny bone and forced myself upward then eased my tired carcass down into the car. I knew the elbow was bleeding but I was so relieved to be off the railing that I didn't give a damn. I was beside Fortuna now and with my right hand, I forced her down to a crouch. She was surprisingly cooperative. I could feel heat emanating from her which had to somehow be more than simple body heat. Where was it coming from? I wondered. Hell, or heaven, but who the hell cared? I felt like the first hominid who discovered fire must've felt as and warmed himself over a nice blaze while roasting a road-kill mammoth or barbecuing a neighbor who'd stopped by for dinner and had ended up as the main course.

It was warm! It felt good! I grinned.

"You were saying?"

"I know that you killed her, or will," she said, calmly.

In Spanish, I said: ¡Mi madre ha estado mucho tiempo muerta, Fortuna!

"Your mother is long dead, yes, but not."

In English, she said: "Did your mother not tell you every day of your life that a speech belongs half to the speaker and half to the listener?"

How had she known that that? She probably wasn't more than six or seven years old when my mother had died and I knew that I'd never met Fortuna before. You don't meet a woman with a face and a body like that and forget her.

"I don't get it, Fortuna. First you want to filet me and then you want to lecture me. Personally, I'd almost prefer the stiletto!"

"Did your mother not tell you every day of your life that --"

"-- Okay! Yes, she did!"

My mother's father had spoken Asturian, which was a language of western Spain where he'd been born. In Asturian, I repeated the words my mother had said so many times: "La palabra ye metá de quien fala y metá de quien escucha ."

"Then why, Franco."

"What do you mean?"

"Why do you talk so much and listen so listen. You have mostly stopped listening, Franco." I wasn't exactly sure what she'd meant by that, but I was fairly certain that I didn't want to know what she meant, so I abruptly changed the subject.

You certainly know more about me that I do about you, lass."

"Oh, but you think you know so much, Francisco Quintanal Devlin."

2 - Tossed Typewriters and Tadpoles

I GUESS THE CRAZY WITCH WAS RIGHT .

I have – until recently – been altogether too fond of my own wisdom. As a child I had learned to love knowledge simply for the sake of understanding. Later my experience taught me exactly the wrong lesson about knowledge.

I began to view knowledge almost exclusively as a means of gaining power. Since I'd made a good living mostly by acquiring and expressing knowledge as information, my love of knowledge had morphed into a kind of lust. Knowledge was information and the right information made me money, gained me access and therefore gave me the illusion of being powerful. Like every arrogant bounder who thinks he’s at the top of his game and on top of the world, I’d been blissfully unaware that I was bound for a tumble, a prime candidate for a fall, and not just the kind of fall that tends to occur when you’re standing on top of a roller coaster and trying to keep your balance in the tumultuous wind and rain.

The “fall” had only begun on that roller coaster ride from hell.

****

JUST FOR THE RECORD MY NAME really is Francisco Quintanal Devlin. My Spanish Jewish mother called me Franco, and coming from her lips, it sounded like “FRAHN-ko.” My hulking Irish Da and big brother had both called me Frankie. Most friends and enemies know me simply as Devlin and women in towns as large as Paris and as tiny as Puyallup have names for me that I don’t care to repeat just now.

Not long after that nightmarish encounter with Stiletto at Playland, the night terrors began, visions of my death which always appeared in phantom news headlines, dates and articles obscured, but the headline always read:

REPORTER FOUND DEAD.

You’d think I’d have finally believed that phantom headline the thirty-first and final time I saw it in late May of 1938, four hours before the Seattle Post-Union's daily deadline.

But my capacity for dismissing the night terrors as bad dreams or as the by-product of good Bushmill’s Irish Whiskey or bad spaghetti and meatballs was apparently limitless. The night terrors and the fact that I had apparently blacked out on the coaster, and had bsolutely no memory of how I’d gotten to ground level the night of the strangest roller coaster ride in history should have been my first clues that my life was about to change forever. Henry remembered Fortuna's figure, because she was beautiful and he also recalled her first name, because shee shared the same first name as Henry's elderly aunt. But everything else he'd missed, including the stalling of the coaster and the jerry with the rifle.

"I must've had a blackout. I'm sorry, Mr. Devlin. I hope you'll keep this between us. I guess I should've told you no, but I needed the money. And I sure shouldn't have been drinkin' on the job."

"I shouldn't have asked you to break the rules in the first place, Henry."

"I needed the dough. But I shouldn't've been drinkin'."

"We probably both should have gone less heavy on the booze that night."

"I'll tellya though. Blackout or no, I'd still remember that girl. She was a looker!"

I wanted to make sure she was real, so I asked him to describe Fortuna in detail, which he did, right down to her sensible shoes. But there was no stiletto, no drunken German marksman, nor even a high wind or a heavy rain, for that matter.

No evidence at all except my memory of the event and Henry's memory of meeting her.

I had used all the reportorial skills I could muster and called in all the chits I could to find this Fortuna Soriano, if that was her name, and had rolled snake-eyes in every attempt to find her.

So after a time, I did the human thing. I pretended to forget her, secretly hopin that she'd either been a delusion or, just in case she was real, that she would forget me!

She didn't.

****

MAY 23rd, 1938 WAS A MONDAY.

I was working a hot story during the day and looking toward to taking a hot date that night to the Egyptian to see Errol Flynn in Robin Hood. I'd last seen his famous mug that morning at Newsstand Charley's on 6th Street, grinning at me from the cover of Life Magazine. Before that, I’d met him when I was briefly in Spain the Civil War back in ‘36. I'd conned my editor at the Intelligencer into letting me serve as a war correspondent and I wasn't in Spain two days before I stumbled into Flynn at a watering hole in Seville. A nicer rogue I've never met than Flynn. We spent several days drinking, chasing Spanish girls, and at least once, getting into an hellacious bar fight that ended with me being carted off to a dingy hospital in Seville, my right leg in a cast and right arm in a sling. Flynn had insisted on paying my way back to the States, and when I refused, he sent three Antequeran beauties to my bedside to seduce me and capture me. I was shanghaied to Cádiz and woke up on a steamship headed for New York and anote from Flynn telling me when I could pick up my train ticket in New York. I was mad as hell at Flynn. When I wired my editor at the Intelligencer from New York for cash, he fired me. I never did get back to Spain, nor did I get ever get even with Flynn.

I was looking forward to the movie and the brunette, but first I knew that I was going to have to get tough with a fatuous tadpole.

****

I ALWAYS ENJOYED IT WHEN MY NEWS STORIES portrayed the Seattle police as good guys, and that's what most of them were: good guys. Some were even heroes.

Of course, there were always a few cops who'd gone bad or more likely started out bad and in time, had gotten worse. Then there were the get-a-long guys who would do the right thing as long as it was comfortable or the bad thing if someone with a stronger will and a weaker conscience intimidated them. The weaklings would go along with the evil deed because it was easy, but as soon as they were in a jam, they would drown themselves in guilt and eventually blow the whistle.

Billy Meeker was that kind of "weak sister," the type of cop that might normally mean "bread-and better" for an ethical or at least, an ambitious D.A., but not his time.

Our D.A., Tom Pupkins, was normally as ethical as any hired serpent, ambition enough to swallow criminal rats whole without stopping for so much as a drink, but again, not this time.

D.A. Pupkin was definitely "in the tank" with the cops and sadly, most of the public regarding the slaying of Freddie Carson, so Billy Meeker had sent a note to me through the best of my go-betweens, Alfred "Newsstand Charley" Hauser.

I had acted like a pal to Billy to get the story, but the truth was, I've never had much stomach for Billy's kind. Being a get-along guy, he'd watched helplessly while two senior cops had beaten Freddie Carson to death.

The interview was predictably off the record. Billy understood if his cronies knew he was blowing the whistle, he was as good as dead. He'd arranged to meet me secretly in Tacoma on Saturday and we sat in a secluded cemetery while he unburdened himself and also lightened considerably the weight of a bottle of Bushmills.

I guess Billy figured that if i could find out facts that corroborated his story, then the news might change public opinion a bit and maybe the D.A. would be willing to offer him some kind of deal.

I did. Billy's story backed up Vina Corrigan's. Vina was one of those too soon worn-out working girls. Maybe she had once been possessed by a heart of gold, but if that was true, she'd since pawned it to buy cigarettes and beer. She certainly hadn't used it to pay her rent at the Fujiyama Hotel near first and Yesler!

Vina was three months behind and still had the nerve to complain one to many times to the night clerk about the lack of hot water, so he'd called the cops.

Eddie Dugan and Andy Strickland were the two other cops sent to apprehend Melvina who had set about tearing up the hotel lobby after she'd learned that the clerk had summoned the law.

Freddie Carson, a transient originally from Pittsburg, Pennsylvania was probably the only person within a three block radius who wasn't disturbed by Melvina's fit. He entered the lobby several hours before, asking if he could wait for someone and hadn't left. Instead, he had passed out. The clerk asked the cops to either run him off or in, but according to hairdresser Argus Jollie, Freedie had been difficult to wake up and once awakened had made the terminal mistake of cursing at a white officer.

Jollie was an unemployed hairdresser, late of Portland, who was in town staying with a male "friend" at the hotel. His story, told on the record, corroborated Billy Meeker's.

The two older cops, Tully Johnson and Steve Yarborough ididn't realize that they'd beaten Freddie Carson to death because he didn't take his breath until he'd been carried into custody. Before they left the cops had threatened Melvina and sent her packing and they had given Jollie $85 and told him that if he wanted to live, he'd better get the hell out of Seattle and get back to Portland. Jollie had left Seattle, but he hadn't exactly fled to Portland. He was staying in Tacoma with his aunt.

Billy told me that Freddie had died from his wounds and the cops had closed ranks to cover it up, but I knew that to share that highly flammable fact I would need external corroborating sources, because I'd given my word to keep it off the record.

But Vina's story had backed up Jollie's, so I had more than enough corroboration to back up Jollie's story, and I'd written a great story that was front page material. That didn't impress the Tadpole, however.

"You expect me to ruin the careers of two honest public servant because some drunken bum negro got what he deserved."

I gritted my teeth.

"No, boy, I only expect you to print the facts."

"Alma says no, and I--I agree with her."

"Your old man would have given me the go ahead. I never got along with him well, lad, but he recruited me from the Intelligencer because he knows I'm pretty close to the best at my job."

"So what. He's dead. I'm in charge. So --"

"--So let me do my damned job. What if I can get one of my off the records to go on the record. Would you print it then?"

The kid was sweating. I offered him one of my monogrammed silk handkerchiefs but he refused it. I took a deep breath.

"Did you know Tad, that you are the very embodiment of irony?"

"I don't --"

"No you probably don't, Tad. Let me help you understand, kid. Taddie, for a guy with such an engorged gut, you can be pretty gutless. Don't you care that two bad eggs are gonna get away with murder?"

"You don't know that."

"You're right. I don't. Look, I'm not necessarily on anyone's side here. I want to tell the truth, and this time the truth is these guys beat this guy half to death at the Balihana Hotel in and bribed a witness. Of that much, I have corroboration. Three sources, Tad, count 'em."

"Get outta my office!"

"It should be Wally's office."

I started to walk out, but I'd lit a fire under the porky twit and he wasn't done with me yet.

Keep your cool, Devlin, I said to myself. Yu don't need the P.U. to get this story out. You have other venues.

We were standing nose-to-nose in the P.U. city room. My breath might have had the slightest scent of whiskey, but Thaddeus W. Brinkley the third had breath that smelled like last week's sauerkraut. The publisher's grandson had moxy, though. I'd give him that much credit. In fact, I might even have admired his mule-headed attitude if it had been backed up by anything other than halitosis, prejudice and stunning stupidity.

Taddie's first and last act as the P.U.’s temporary Managing Editor had been to kill in ten seconds an investigative piece I'd been working on for four weeks.

I threatened to quit, figuring I could cut a deal and get the kid to back down, to do even a little bit of the right thing. No such luck. Little Tad - all two hundred and fifty pounds of him -- threw a fulminating fit. Less than a minute into his rant I was calmly weighing the pros and cons of ripping out his tongue.

"Now would be a good time to back off and shut your cakehole, Taddie.”

"I'll teach you, Frank Devlin!"

I never had much luck in persuading newspaper editors and publishers -- a generally spineless lot -- to let me use the diminutive first name that my mother had given me. The racist troglodytes had invariably considered the name "Franco" to be too "ethnic."

"Brilliant, Taddie! Well, done! You've actually completed a sentence. Now be a good boy and fire me so I can take my story to the Intelligencer."

Wally Spence tried to calm us down. I'd broken my rules about editors when it came to City Editor Wally Spence by allowing myself to like the guy. He'd been a good reporter and was a fair editor. Tad had usurped him for the managing ed position.

"Why don't we step into Tad's office fellas? I expect we can work this thing out."

To me that statement meant that Wally had changed his mind and was now willing to back me up. I was that thinking that he might talk Tad into keeping the story.

I extended my right hand.

"What do you say, Mr. Brinkley?"

Tad said not a word.

Instead, he took several exaggerated strides toward my desk and did the unexpected. He scooped up my typewriter -- my typewriter, mind you, not the P.U.'s -- and waltzed his fat arse over to an open window.

"Think twice, lad. I know it's a tough gig for you, but try. Pitch my private property through that window and I swear I will send you out after it."

The overstuffed tadpole didn't believe me. He pitched my Smith- Corona through the window and down two stories, making a big impression on the roof of a parked '38 Buick. I pitched Taddie.

The kid was resilient, I'll give him that. I suspect that if he'd landed on his head, he'd have bounced. As it was he collided with a dog walker and a vagrant and made pancakes out of two poodles doing their business on the Sixth Street sidewalk.

From my hideout near Snoqualmie Pass, I'd heard that he'd been unconscious for two days and had finally awakened, bruised and battered, with both of his legs in a cast. The poodles weren't so lucky. As for me, my buddies in the newsroom said that I passed out right after the toss, dead weight, hitting the floor. I never pass out and in war and ostensible peace I've seen things and probably done things much worse than tossing a fat lug out a second story window. The boys said I was out for a few minutes and they had to carry me out of the news room and down to the basement to hide me in case the cops showed up. I suspect that was my second blackout, the first one being during the ride with the yellow-eyed witch!

During that second blackout I saw the last phantom headline, a vision of the front page of the P.U. same as before, except this time the headline read:

EX-REPORTER FOUND DEAD.

But I wasn't dead. In fact, I wasn't even arrested. My cronies in the news room had insisted the kid had jumped. Like me, these guys could be ruthless when fighting for white space and bylines, but they hated Tad more than I did. I can't say I wasn't proud of those guys for their loyalty, but I wasn't particularly happy with me. Like a coward I’d allowed them to smuggle me out to a deserted cabin for a week.

My only companions were a few cans of beans, a lonely bottle of Bushmill's and four decayed books my Da had left behind: Songs of A Sourdough by Robert W. Service, The Light That Failed, by Rudyard Kipling, The Man Who Was Thursday, by G.K. Chesterton and The 39 Steps, by John Buchan.

The bottle of Bushmills remained lonely. And full.

I had miscontrued the blackouts. I figured they were the product of beer and Bushmills consumed in much too large quantities for much too long.

I spent my 30th birthday piddling with a hopelessly broken ham radio, longing for my saxophone or at least a woman to distract me, and trying to shake my absolute certainty that poor Tad Brinkley would die and then the Brinkley clan would tag me and the cops would arrest me for murder. They never did. At the start of my seventh day in exile, I was already filing that mental headline away as a delusion and was well on my way to forgetting it.

Two days later I was back in Seattle. I was out of a job but no charges were pending. My news hound buddies said that the Brinkley clan was afraid that word might get out about Tad's poodle massacre and his typewriter tantrum, but Wally Spence said it was because Alma was close to inking a deal for sale of the P.U. to the Hearst newspaper syndicate and thought bad publicity could squelch the deal.

I wasn't dead or arrested but I was definitely an ex-reporter. The edict had been issued by the wealthy elite, no doubt in private clubs, that no paper in Washington state and probably the greater northwest should hire the admittedly mercurial Devlin, or risk heavy financial punishment.

By the time I'd gotten back to Seattle from my hideout, it was too late to take me story to the Intelligencer. Billy and Vina and Jollie had all spilled their guts to other reporters, and besides, I was poison at the Intelligencer just like I was poison everywhere else.

I wasn't worried. I had a few bucks, and I'd been toying with quitting the news business anyway. Within a week I'd half way convinced myself that leaving the news business had been my own idea.

Bob Huffman, who'd been my favorite journalism profession at the University of Washington, had always admonished me to keep a "go to hell" fund handy in case I quit a paper over an ethical matter or got fired for same. He couldn't have envisioned me getting canned for tossing a Tadpole, but through the years I had attempted to take his advice. Even when I lived the high life, which was most of the time, I socked back a buffalo here and there and I had a few bucks. A few. The go to hell fun lasted less than a week.

I shouldn't have been in dire financial straits. After all, I was a real estate tycoon. I owned a third of the upper half of Gracie's building that I could rent out or maybe hole up in for a while if the Roosevelt became too pricey for me, but getting renters wouldn't be easy in times as hard as these and the upper half of the building was completely empty. No furniture, and no electricity either.

I knew that if all else failed, I could rely on my trusty saxophone for comfort and coin, as I had in New York and in Paris back in the twenties. That was a back-up plan that I wasn't crazy about, so I took the first two jobs that I was offered.

The first gig was as weekend hotel dick at the Savoy Hotel on 2nd Street, a gig procured for me by G.D., who filled in for the regular weekday dick from time to time. For that job, I went by name of Devlin Adair. I 'm not sure why, except that the Savoy was as sleazy as the Roosevelt was ritzy.

The second gig was even less glamorous. Albert Rudney had been ghosting as Mary Morris -- of the Mary's advice to the lovelorn column in the Tacoma News Tribune and Ledger -- since the original Mary had died in the flu epidemic of 1918. The elderly Rudney had recently overdosed on pills. With a job like that, who could blame the old bachelor? He'd done the crappy column for nearly twenty years. Three days of doing it and I was almost ready to jump off the Aurora Bridge!

One of Bob's former students was the editor at the TNTL and had asked Bob to find someone to temporary answer and sometimes write AND answer the letters. Instead of asking a student, Bob had asked me to help out for a few weeks. To his amazement, I accepted, because I could mail the column in anonymously and the checks would be made out to Bob's ancient aunt, and signed over to me. Easy money, right? Wrong!

By the fifth of June, I was already a week into my two anonymous jobs, utterly miserable, but thankfully, independent. The invitations for golf and dinner and parties and country club shindigs were still coming in, though they were trickling into my mailbox at the Roosevelt less and less. Women were still swooning and mooning over me and even spooning with me, though maybe not quite as much as they had before. Life was barely as much fun as it had been before I had tossed Tad. Just barely.

Then a bar fight bough me temporary residence in the Seattle City Jail.

3 - Good Riddance, Broadview and Brannie's

FATHER COUGHLIN STARTED IT.

Well, Father Coughlin and Alma Brinkley.

Believe it or not, your grandmother had her hands in it too, indirectly, but it was Franco Devlin who threw the first hard punch.

Tiny Moran, all six foot eight and three hundred pounds of him, seemed to think this was a wrestling match rather than a barroom brawl. One of his open, meaty hands was reaching down for my head while the other was grabbing for my groin. I slammed the ball of my right fist squarely into his bulbous red nose, which immediately started spurting red.

Sully Considine, Tiny's shorter half brother had a mud-pie for a brain, but compared to Tiny he was practically George Bernard Shaw.

Sully giggled, probably in an attempt to get me off my guard. It didn’t work. He wasn’t exactly Alma Brinkley or Adolf Hitler, but he’d do just fine as a proxy just then.

“Well, ye fight like an Irishman at least… an’ not the jewboy y'are!”

I was more Irish than Sully. His grandfather had come to Seattle with the Denny party when they settled Alki Beach in in 1851. His mother was French, his grandmother German, hell his great-aunt was Spanish, yet there he was, talking like a leprechaun with an Irish potato up his arse!

By the time he’d uttered the epithet ‘jewboy,” he had shot like a cannon, head-first into the chest of my best pal Godfrey Daniels, which was like slamming an overripe banana into a fireplug. There wasn’t much chance he’d do any damage. What he did do was cause G.D. to spill a perfectly good drink.

****

I REMEMBER EXACTLY WHAT TRIGGERED THE BRAWL, but first a few words are due about Coughlin, Alma and Querida.

Charles Coughlin was a Fascist/Socialist priest some genius had given a microphone and a radio show. He'd garnered millions of listeners during the '30s, and had regularly trashed Jews from his radio pulpit.

Alma Brinkley, poor Taddie's stepmom, was both a racist and a vengeful hag. The two time widow wasn’t even thirty and now she was suddenly the new owner of the P.U. daily poop sheet and was enjoying the power her hourglass figure and aged husband's heart attack had bought for her.

As I've said, the Widow Brinkley - who wasn't more than five years older than her corpulent stepson -- didn't have me arrested for tossing Taddie. Instead, she had enlisted a cadre of private dicks to dig up dirt on Franco Devlin. In her Mussolini-loving mind, the worst dirt they uncovered about me was that I was Jewish. Being Catholic and Irish was bad enough, but being Jewish was infinitely worse. She and her country club cronies had spread the "word" about me.

I'd found out one day in early June of '38. I was set to play a friendly Saturday game of golf with my old journalism professor Bob Huffman at the Broadview Country Club golf course.

The normal prelude to our friendly grudge match was an early breakfast at the Broadview Restaurant at 7 AM. plan was to meet for an early breakfast at the Country Club restaurant, something we’d done a dozen times before. We’d met up at 7:00 as planned, but skipped breakfast.

I was no longer welcome at the Broadview restaurant. I was frankly and summarily informed that JEWS weren't allowed.

You couldn't be a reporter in Seattle in the 1930s with knowing that Jews were excluded from membership in the Broadview as well as other clubs and golf courses. Some neighborhoods didn't even allow them to buy homes there. So I knew of anti-semitism. I knew "of" it but I'd never experienced it first hand. As an Irishman I'd felt the cold hand of prejudice a time or two, but never as a Jew. As a reporter, I prided myself in my ability to not let anything shock me, yet there I was, with egg on my face, stunned not only at being denied entrance to the club because I was Jewish, but also because I’d been publicly informed that I was, in fact, a Jew!

I’m Jewish. I knew that, intellectually at least. I guess that in a strange way, I'd always been even more distanced from that fact than the fact that I am also an Irish Catholic.

Da was an Irish Catholic, Mama was a Spanish Jew. I never tried to hide the fact that I was Jewish. I simply never thought about it. Looking back, though, I can see that Mama hid our Judaism from the Catholics so that I could go to Catholic school.

She probably had also done it to protect me from the prejudice of evil witches like Alma Brinkley.

****

I WAS A DEVLIN, SO I'D always thought of myself as Irish.

Everybody knew a man named Devlin was Irish. Not many knew my mama was Spanish. I was dark haired, but there are ‘black’ Irish folk, so nobody thought much about it, even me.

Most folks knew me as ‘Devlin’, or from my stories, ‘Frank Devlin.’ Friends I’d gone to to school with knew me as ‘Frankie.” Even when they called me Franco Devlin, it came out as “Frank O’Devlin.”

Nearly everyone who knew Querida from a distance, including the Catholics, assumed that since she was Spanish had that she was just as Catholic as Da was, and for her part, she never discouraged the misperception.

Our farm east of North Bend was ten miles from town, and nowhere near a Catholic Church, much less a Temple. After Da was gone, we occasionally traveled in Mr. Myrick’s Model A truck over to a temple in Tacoma for Shabbat. I never did have a Bar Mitzvah.

Even when we lived in Seattle, where there was a small, but faithful gathering of Sephardi and a perfectly good temple, Mama went there weekly for Shabbat, but only took me by train once and a while for Shabbat at the temple in Tacoma. By the time I was twelve, I had stopped attending altogether.

She had obviously wanted me to be aware of my heritage. She just didn’t want me to be hurt or my education to suffer because of it.

It was just a fact that I was both Catholic and Jewish, just as I was Irish and Spanish, though I guess I thought of myself as more Irish than anything else.

Besides, neither religion had exactly enthralled me.

I was more interested in girls, sports, writing, music, and more girls to be bothered by silly things like theology.

By the time I was grown, the dual facts of my religions were of no interest to me at all.

I was Jewish, yet in my mind and actions, I mostly wasn’t. I was Catholic, but not so Catholic that you’d notice. I was functionally agnostic. I believed all those things I’d been taught, even with the contradictions, but I believed them from a distance.

Except for doing the right thing from time to time and sticking up for the down and out, I was completely comfortable with keeping my religions mostly out of sight and out of mind.

It took Tommie Winston, general manager of the Broadview to remind me of my Hebrew heritage. I had never liked the fey and pretentious butt-kisser.

“You’re no longer welcome here, Rabbi Devlin.”

“Huh?”

“You’re a hebe, Devlin!"

He put his hands at his hips with his elbows sticking out north and south.

"Alma Brinkley told me to tell you she’s personally seen to it, and she doesn't care if you know that."

Normally I'd have a sardonic line for Tommie to gnaw on, but for once I was speechless. For the first time I could remember, Bob Huffman wasn't.

Tommie, your lisp is showing.

Tommy looked down at his zipper before he realized that Bob had said "lisp."

Tell me, Tomboy, does the Broadview membership committee know that you bunk with boys?"

His face flushed from pink to red. If I hadn't been shocked at the indignity I was facing, I'd have been stunned at Bob's behavior. I'd always known him as a quiet, bow-tied professor. Suddenly he was Groucho Marx.

"You're lying, I'm not --"

"--interested in girls? Tell us something we don't know, Tom."

"I won't dignify that remark with a --"

"--You wouldn't know dignity if it bit you on the ass, but then, you like anonymous one-on-ones, don't you, Winston?

"You sir, I can't ask to leave without permission." He turned toward me and stepped forward until his face was inches from mine. Tommie was brave, I'll give him that.

"But you, sir, YOU aren't a member anymore, Devlin, or whatever you real name is! Get off this property immediately or I’ll have you arrested for trespassing!”

Bob was right behind him. He reached up and tapped Tommie on the left shoulder and spoke to him in a soothing tone.

"Easy, Tom, easy now. We'll leave quietly."

Tommy topped six foot easily. He was a golfer and a former tennis pro. Bob, on the other hand, would only top five ten if he stood on a chair. Tommie was a gregarious athlete. Bob was an introverted, chain-smoking asthmatic who'd only taken up golf on orders from his physician.

But ten seconds later it was Tommie knocked flat on his back. Bob had scored two lucky punches. He held his left hand in the other.

"We're leaving quietly now Tommie, as promised. In case you're wondering, I hereby resign my membership. Now if you'll excuse me, I believe I've broken my hand."

****

I can't say that I remember exactly how I got back tot he Roosevelt. I was numb.

Cal Hopkins, the doorman, smiled me and touched his hat at usual as usual, but this time his grin seemed a bit forced, like his shoes were too tight.

As I entered the lobby, Hank at the front desk and Bobby the bellhop disappeared, one into the office, the other into the stair well.

Something was amiss.

I walked behind the counter and pulled a note from my mailbox, written on Roosevelt stationary.

Mr. Devlin,

We sincerely hope that you’ve enjoyed your visit at the Roosevelt.

We’ve certainly enjoyed having you as a guest. Unfortunately your room is no longer available, as of checkout time tomorrow. If you need assistance with packing or in obtaining a room at a nearby hotel, please ask the front desk for a list of hotels in the Seattle area.

Sincerely,

Management

I’d been a "guest" at the Roosevelt since just after Teddy's nephew became president and now I was suddenly persona non grata.

Gertie, a terminally married hotel phone operator who always professed a mad affection for me had tearfully offered me the real scoop that evening.

My eviction had been secured by none other than Alma Brinkley, and I shouldn’t expect to get a reservation at any of Seattle’s finer hotels in the near future.

Clearly the only place I could hang my hat within the downtown area would be the Savoy Hotel, which was a bit seedy even in those days.

I gave Gertie a well-deserved kiss and dug up Bobby the Bellboy. I slipped him a ten-spot and cab fare to pack my bags for me, with a warning of what might happen if so much as a silk handkerchief or a buffalo nickel was missing. Then I telephoned Gracie Gilder and asked her to meet Bobby at her café, so she could let him in at the empty office above her.

Gracie Gilder had been a faithful friend and insistent business partner since 1935, when I had helped prove that she hadn't killed her ex-husband. I had refused any payment, but that Christmas she had given me co-ownership, along with Gracie and her beau, Godfrey Daniels, n the brownstone that she'd inherited from her ex. She had opened Good Gracie's Cafe the next day. I had supplied the name for the joint.

Godfrey, or G.D., as he preferred to be called, was an ex-Pinkerton detective who'd abandoned New York in the mid-thirties. He'd landed in Seattle, which, he said, had been as far away from his soon-to-be ex-wife as his ready-money could take him.

G.D. often said that he'd found the rainy weather to be "a serendipitous surprise," since it suited his personality perfectly.

****

By the time I’d reached Brannie’s Pub on Post Street near Pike Place Market, I had already moved from being stunned to being outraged.

I’d actually come to Brannie’s with Da and Danny back in the summer of 1919, not long after he came back. Barney Brannigan’s Da owned the pub back then and Barney and Da had worked on the fish boats together. He showed us off to his Irish drinking pals as if we were his most prized possessions.

I had a fair voice before it changed and Da had me stand on a table and belt out “Danny Boy.”

Before we headed home, with strict orders to keep our visit to Brannigan’s a secret, I’d earned five bucks for my crooning and had my first tastes of beer and whiskey.

I returned in 1928 and ’29 a couple of times, and by 1930 it had become my regular haunt. Tuesday, June 14, 1938 I would have my last drink there. It had been a good run that ended badly.

****

COUGLIN WAS ALREADY THE SUBJECT of debate at the bar by time the time I’d arrived.

“Coughlin’s Irish an’ he’s a godly priest, lad. We hafta back him up. Besides, what he says makes sense,” said Connie Cahill, his hand gesticulating wildly around and above his perch at the bar and his right hand clenching a beer mug.

A bald headed little man I didn’t know spoke out just then.

“You ask me, Couglin preaches hate. I got no likin’ for Jews. They kilt Christ after all, but I don’ hate ‘em. If Jesus don’ hate 'em, then I don’.”

Tiny Moran was already drunk and it was early yet.

“Nobody asked ye! Jesus never met Jew bankers or Jew bosses who want to steal our money. Coughlin’s right, it’s a Your-peein’ conspiracy.”

G.D. had been waiting for me at the bar. He wasn’t one to frequent bars unless he was sharking pool or darts, but Gracie had sent him to look after me.

“Excuse me for interrupting, my simian friend,” he said, directing his comments to Tiny, and winking at me as I sauntered toward my favorite bar stool.

“You make an interesting point.”

“I do?” said Tiny.

“Indeed you do, sir. Everyone knows that the Jews have conspired to undermine our way of life. They have their tendrils into everything.”

“Yeah,” said Tiny.

“May I congratulate you for that perfunctory and utterly egregious affirmation sir. May I ask your name?"

"Folks call me Tiny."

"Of course they do. No doubt they look beyond mere physical stature and attach the nickname because of your intellectual capacity, or is it a double entendre regarding the infinitesimal size of your member? "

"Huh?"

"Let me elucidate. As I said, the Hebrews have their Semitic appendages into every pot and pie. They conspire against us, as the noble priest has said. I too, have evidence of their diabolical Master Plan and the evil pograms they would incite against us."

"You do?"

"Indeed I do! I was short changed at the liquor store the other day. I suspect that the proprietor was Jewish and thus, had robbed me and cleverly used the proceeds of his theft to fund the Jewish Conspiracy."

"Really?"