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buckle. The thought had been there, poking around the edges of my mind, but with all the hubbub of the afternoon and evening, I hadn't been able to make any connections.
    Now though, as I sat in the comfortable silence of my living room with the icy glass of MacNaughton's in my hand, it finally came to me.
    Someone in my building. Someone from the ironworkers' local across the alley had rented a unit in Belltown Terrace. I knew it because, as one of the members of the real-estate syndicate which owns the building, I am apprised of comings and goings of tenants. I remembered the lady who handles rentals laughing and telling me that the new renter's vertical commute would be longer than his horizontal one since his office was in the Labor Temple across the alley at First and Broad. I tried to remember what else she had said about him. He was one of the union bigwigs, a business agent or something, not one of the regular working stiffs.
    I felt better then, relieved somehow. It was a bit of information I could pass along to Manny and Kramer. Well, to Manny, anyway. Paul Kramer was a prick. I wasn't going to lift a finger to help him.
    After two weeks it was good to know that no matter how long my exile in La-La Land might last, I was still a detective at heart. My mind would still work away at solving puzzles, even when it wasn't supposed to. With that knowledge, my body finally began to unwind.
    I was going to have one more drink, but I never got around to it. I fell asleep in my chair without bothering to get up and pour that last MacNaughton's.
    And without having anyone there to tell me it was time to wake up and go to bed.

CHAPTER  4

    R on Peters woke me at seven o'clock on Sunday morning. It was a good thing, but not quite good enough. I was supposed to be on the set by six-thirty.
    Peters and I were partners until a car accident broke his back and put him in Harborview Hospital on a semipermanent basis. By then he had been confined there for five long months and had finally worked his way onto the rehabilitation floor. The doctors said there was no way he'd ever be a detective again, but the department had cleared the way so that whenever he was ready to come back to work, on either a full-or part-time basis, a place would be waiting for him in the Public Information Office. Try as I might, I can't remember to call it Media Relations.
    Despite his injury, things were starting to look up for Ron Peters. He had fallen hard for Amy Fitzgerald, his physical therapist. Fortunately, the feeling was mutual. The two of them were busy planning a late September wedding that would include Peters' two daughters, Tracie and Heather, as dual flower girls. They were all four counting the days.
    While Ron was hospitalized, I had installed the girls along with their live-in baby-sitter, Mrs. Edwards, in an apartment on the eighteenth floor of my building. It was a lot easier for me to keep and eye on things with them seven floors down than it was to trundle back and forth across ten miles of bottlenecked Lake Washington bridge traffic.
    "What are you up to?" Ron asked cheerfully. He is disgustingly bright-eyed and bushy-tailed early in the morning.
    "Still asleep," I muttered. I'm not a rise-and-shiner, never have been, never will be. "What time is it?"
    "Seven," he answered. "Aren't you working this morning? I thought they were scheduled to shoot all weekend long."
    "Shit! You're right. I'm late." I struggled to sit up. The foot of the recliner dropped with a resounding thump.
    "This won't take long," he said. "I need a favor."
    "What's that?"
    I paused long enough to let my head clear, more than half resenting the fact that Peters sounded bright as a new penny. That's one thing about hospitals that has always puzzled me. If patients in hospitals are supposed to be there to rest and get well, how come nurses wake everybody up at the crack of dawn, feed them, take their temperatures, and then leave them to spend the rest of the day