between the baby and him, just in case. Given her unfortunate history, I didn’t blame her a bit.
Without disturbing any of the three, I placed Alan’s sandwich on the table next to his cup before retreating to my own chair and my own thoughts, which under the circumstances turned out to be more than slightly problematic. Naturally my mind wandered back to the night before Jasmine Day’s final performance at the 5th Avenue Theatre. I couldn’t come up with an exact date, but I estimated it must have been somewhere in the late eighties—1988 or so. And there are plenty of reasons my thought process about those times and places is somewhat fuzzy.
Let’s just say that the eighties weren’t especially good for me. For one thing I was still drinking at the time—drinking a lot. When Karen divorced me, I did what every drunk in the world always does—I blamed her for everything. The fact that our marriage had ended was all her fault. It had nothing whatsoever to do with me or with any of my actions. And trust me, my actions back then were pretty far out there.
And then a miracle happened, A spark of light—a beautiful lifeline, I thought—named Anne Corley appeared on the scene. She was like a brilliant shooting star blazing through my universe. One moment she was there, and the next, just as suddenly, she was gone. She left me with money—a fortune, in fact—but she also left me with a broken heart, and after she died at the base of Snoqualmie Falls, I was in far worse shape than ever, and so was my drinking.
People don’t just happen to drop in on their local neighborhood AA meeting for no reason at all, without having done some pretty scuzzy things that finally bring them to the realization that they’re in deep trouble. At the time I was an unmarried heterosexual male—both divorced and widowed. I was also oversexed and underfed, which means I was out on the prowl and looking for action way more often than was good for me or for anybody else. Thank God that was long before the #MeToo movement arrived on the scene—otherwise I would have been run out of town on a rail.
By the late eighties, the sexual revolution was a couple of decades old. The pill was readily available, and hookups and one-night stands were pretty much the order of the day. Unfortunately, one of my one-night stands happened to have been with Jasmine Day. It had been a put-up deal. I’d been called to the theater to investigate the death of that murdered stagehand. Eventually it turned out that the traveling show company had been using the tour as cover for transporting illicit drugs back and forth across the country.
When I turned up at the theater asking awkward questions, the stage manager had been anxious to keep a lid on the investigation, at least until after Jasmine’s gig was over. With that in mind, he’d comped me to a front-row ticket. What I didn’t realize at the time but what Jasmine understood full well was that whoever ended up in that comped seat on any given night also got to have Jasmine Day’s “companionship” that evening after the show. It was one of those standing pay-to-play arrangements. Jasmine had wanted a comeback tour, and playing escort to the producer’s “honored guests” was the price of admission. What she hadn’t known was that most of those comped-seat introductions placed her in the presence of known drug dealers, thus steering suspicion away from the real bad guys and onto Jasmine herself. I didn’t exactly tell her right off that I was a cop working a case, and it turned out I was doing “undercover” work in more ways than one.
After a dinner with way too much booze under our belts and not nearly enough food, Jasmine’s and my trip to the bedroom and everything that happened therein had been consensual on both sides. I seem to remember that she’d ended up driving us back to my place from the restaurant, something I seldom let happen. But our so-called affair was what it was—a one-night stand with no strings attached. Two days later, the morning after the whole drug-transportation conspiracy had exploded into two more homicides, Alan Dale and I had both been waiting outside the King County jail when they released Jasmine from custody on the homicide charge. She came through the door and immediately broke into sobs, walking