While the City Slept (7 page)

A
t the end of the next workday, Teresa finds Jennifer, says, “Where do we have to go so that I can kiss you again?”

They go to South Park, to Teresa’s house, which she shows off with that line, “I know it’s not much, but it’s mine.” Jennifer has never been to the neighborhood before, even though she’s spent most of her life in Seattle. Didn’t even know it existed, which is not uncommon in this city, where the major thruways have been constructed in a manner that reinforces the idea of South Park as a place to drive past, not through. She notices the rows of small, single-family houses and assumes from their 1930s architecture that early Boeing workers once lived in them. This is true. She thinks of her father’s father, the one she saw occasionally in summers growing up, the one who’d taught her to fish. He was a career pattern maker for Boeing, outlining, for mass production, the parts that made the planes. She imagines South Park back then as “this very middle-class, American-dream neighborhood, where people owned their homes, and drove to work, and took care of each other.” This is also true. People back then drove across the steel-beamed South Park Bridge to Boeing Plant 2, where the B-17s were made, past checkpoints when fears were high, to a workplace protected from possible enemy bomber strikes by an entire fake neighborhood constructed atop the plant’s roof as camouflage. In a fake pasture in this fake neighborhood, a fake cow was said to roam.

The South Park that Teresa lives in is still the same in many respects,
except Plant 2 is soon to be razed for environmental remediation, the racial makeup of the neighborhood is now less monochrome, and due to stagnant wages and rising home prices the middle class is now insecure and in decline. Jennifer meets Teresa’s two cats, Carter and Nixon. (“She wanted a well-balanced household,” Jennifer says.) She hears how much Teresa loves her neighbors, and meets them, too. She passes Teresa’s tests. “Does it bother you when I chew gum?” “Do you hate these pants?” Teresa is conducting an extended experiment, and what she appears to want to know, bottom line, is whether Jennifer will accept her for who she is, or whether she’ll demand a lot of changes. “I took it lightly,” Jennifer says. “I remember saying to her, ‘It’s kind of an as-is sale, Teresa.’”

Teresa doesn’t want to be physical right away, tells Jennifer it’s because she did that in previous relationships that didn’t work out. This is fine with Jennifer. “So we waited,” she says. Each weekend they spend together, they become closer, and during the week, when Jennifer stays with her grandmother to help keep an eye on her, excitement builds for the next Friday night, when she’ll be back in the red house with Teresa. Feeling safer and bolder, Jennifer comes out to her grandmother again, this time with less concern about the reaction. Again, her grandmother is upset. “That’s really sad,” Jennifer tells her. “If we’re not going to have a very close relationship, it makes me sad. But I still love you.” She isn’t negotiating on this one.

The new couple learn each other’s rhythms. The way Teresa can be a little short with Jennifer in the morning. The way Jennifer, an only child, is accustomed to moving through home life in a more self-contained manner. When she gets up from the couch to grab a glass of water, for example, she doesn’t automatically ask if anyone else wants one, while Teresa, one of eleven kids, retains the reflexes of a member of a pack. She also retains her strident and confrontational side, which has its problems and also its highs, as when, one day at work, Teresa notices her purse has been stolen from her desk and figures out the thieves are probably a couple of strangers who’ve just been wandering through the hallways on the
twenty-second floor of the City Centre building. Teresa calls her credit card company to see where the most recent transaction was, races over to the nearby mall where it occurred, finds the thieves, and with a security guard chases them through the mall shouting “Citizen’s arrest!”

The two of them sit on the couch and watch movies and eat kettle corn with Milk Duds melted into it by the microwave, Teresa’s favorite. They head to Teresa’s church on many Sundays. It’s important to Teresa, and Jennifer comes to enjoy the services. She has been to church before, with Ann, and is still eclectic and ecumenical when it comes to spirituality. They begin doing service work together, volunteering for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, joining the board of a homeless advocacy organization.

—

They break up, for a brief moment at the seven-month mark, over the question of whether Teresa loves Jennifer. “Love” is a word Teresa doesn’t use lightly in her most serious relationships. She ends phone calls with friends saying, “Love ya, mean it,” but with someone like Jennifer she wants to be deliberate. Paradoxically, she also wants to be spontaneous. What she means, it seems, is that it should feel exactly right, never forced, never casual.

Jennifer already knows she’s in love with Teresa, is ready to use the word heavily, regularly, and finds it too painful to think the same might not become true for Teresa. There’s a concert they’ve long been planning to attend, and after the breakup they still go but don’t sit together. Instead, Jennifer spends the concert watching Teresa from a distance, and as Teresa does her thing—the clapping, the laughing—Jennifer feels herself crying.

Later that night, Teresa gets in touch. “Just come over,” she says. Jennifer doesn’t think it a good idea. She asks if Teresa can ever love her. Teresa’s response: “I already do.” After that, it’s like a whole new relationship.

Things begin moving fast. Three months later, the two of them are at Wildrose on Gay Pride weekend. It’s now coming up on a year since that first kiss in the parking lot, and in an outdoor beer garden set up to handle the crush of Pride weekend visitors, in front of Teresa, another woman tells Jennifer she looks adorable. When the woman leaves, Teresa says, “I’m gonna have to get you off the market, aren’t I?”

“Well, yeah!” Jennifer says.

“Okay. When?”

“And we just kind of dealt with it that night,” Jennifer says. “I don’t think we talked to anyone about it. We just had a good night.” Same-sex marriage is still illegal in Washington State, so technically what they’re planning will be a commitment ceremony, but to Teresa and Jennifer it’s a wedding. They tell their friends. A date is set for just over a year out: September 12, 2009.

—

Not all the Butzes are willing to attend, Norbert senior chief among the resisters. “In my heart of souls, I would not have attended that wedding,” he says. “I believe that God put male and female together. It goes back to the beginning of time.” He has internal negotiations about it, though. He thinks he might come to Seattle to support Teresa and Jennifer but skip the ceremony. He wonders whether, once in Seattle, he might take one more step and show up. He recalls the character Tevye in
Fiddler on the Roof,
who, upon seeing his daughters heading toward marriages he doesn’t support, says, in Norbert senior’s paraphrasing, “If I give you the blessing, I have to bend, and if I bend anymore, I’ll break.” Dolly, after her own internal negotiations, decides she will come to Seattle that weekend. “I thought, ‘This is a big occasion for her,’” Dolly says. “There is no way I could not be there with her.” Whether or not Dolly will be at the ceremony, she doesn’t know.

One Butz certain to attend is Norbert Leo Butz. Conveniently, as the
date nears, he’s already in Seattle, playing a leading role as an obsessed, determined FBI agent in the out-of-town preview of
Catch Me If You Can,
a show that is eventually headed to Broadway. That summer of 2009, Norbert says, “I spent a lot of time with Terese.” Which means spending a lot of time fending off her many suggestions for fun to be had.

“It would be like a Tuesday night,” Norbert says, “I would have been rehearsing all day, it’d be ten o’ clock, she’d be like, ‘Yo. There’s a band you gotta go check out with me.’

“I’m like, ‘Teresa, I’m exhausted.’

“‘Screw that. What time you gotta be up tomorrow?’

“‘I gotta be up at 8:00.’

“‘I gotta be up at 6:30. I’m coming to get you in fifteen minutes.’

“‘Do not come get me in fifteen minutes. I have to sleep.’

“‘Okay.’

“The next night: ‘There is a softball game that you have to come to, and after that there is a karaoke session at this bar. You have to come. You have to come. I can’t—you have to come. I’m coming to pick you up.’

“I saw her more in the four weeks before she died than I’d seen her in ten years.”

She tells Norbert about Jennifer. He talks to her about his struggles raising his daughters. She listens, reassures him. One night, Teresa tells Norbert he has to come see Jennifer sing in a small competition at a club, and Norbert, who has been listening to Teresa go on about her girlfriend’s voice all summer, thinks to himself, “Yeah, I’ll go humor you, I’ll go humor you. Show up and see this little amateur competition.” He stands in the back of the club, near the bar, watching. “She takes the stage,” Norbert says, “and she busts into a version of ‘Feel Like a Natural Woman,’ and I went, ‘Holy shit.’ Teresa actually—she underplayed how Jen can sing.” Jennifer remembers Norbert walking slowly from the back of the room to the front and, when she was finished singing, his clapping, his beaming.

—

On Sunday, July 19, 2009, Teresa is supposed to meet Norbert at his place near the 5th Avenue Theatre so they can go to church together. She doesn’t show. “Then the phone started ringing a lot,” Norbert says.

His brother Tony reaches him. “He said, ‘Meet me downstairs.’ And then he told me on the street there, in front of the hotel.”

The preview is suspended for two weeks. “We got her home to St. Louis,” Norbert says. “And we buried her.”

N
ine o’clock on a Friday morning, summer of 2009, a police manhunt under way, and in the suburbs south of Seattle a public bus rolling past a strip mall, through a neighborhood of low houses, up a steep hill. On one side of this hill, the rocky banks of Puget Sound. On the other, the muddy banks of the Green River, tributary of the Duwamish. At one time, almost everything that can be seen from this bus route sat beneath thousands of feet of ice: the suburbs, the city, the sound, the river valleys draining the Cascade Mountains. The ice advanced, weighing on the land, sinking it hundreds of feet, wrapping itself around surface rocks of all compositions. Created in obscurity, the rocks now faced an altering in obscurity. The ice retreated and, as it did, revealed which of them remained unchanged by the pressure, the scraping, the gouging, the attachment, the cracking, the melting. Not many.

A man boarded this bus wearing a green jacket and dirty jeans. The bus continued toward the top of the hill, which is wide and runs from south to north, as most large features in the area do, because the last glacier to leave pulled south to north as it retreated. The driver of the bus recognized this man, believed he was the same one who’d refused to pay a fare in a past still present in the driver’s mind. The man had a pit bull with him, brought the animal on the bus, and let it stretch out on the seats next to him. The driver asked the man to get his pit bull off the seats, and the man, Isaiah Kalebu, twenty-three years old, told the driver to shut up and keep driving. Passengers began yelling at Isaiah, telling
him to put his dog on the floor. Isaiah told them to shut up, too. Everyone needed to leave him alone.

The son of an immigrant, Isaiah now began berating the driver for being an immigrant. He moved toward the front of the bus, stood over the driver, told him, “You are a fucking servant.” Told him, “If you don’t learn how it works here, you should go back to Mexico.” Soon the passengers who had been yelling at Isaiah changed course, and a pattern that had been repeating itself for the last two years repeated itself one last time. People within range of Isaiah’s fury became alarmed, including the bus driver, who hit an emergency alert button several times and then pulled the bus over. People separated themselves from Isaiah, most of the passengers fleeing out the bus doors. The difficult, threatening person was left behind, isolated, and then the police arrived. They talked to Isaiah, found no cause to detain him within the letter of the law, and sent him on his way.

A
s funeral preparations were being made in St. Louis, Detective Duffy and her partner, the improbably named David Duty, narrowed on a single suspect. Local television had been describing the crime as one of the worst authorities could remember, and Detective Duffy had found herself chasing leads, and hoping for a break, with unusual intensity. “What he did to them made me want to find him,” she said. It seemed clear to her, from interviews with Jennifer and from the evidence, that the crime was motivated not by the women’s sexual orientation but by their gender. She worried he might do it again. She worried he might simply disappear. “A lot of people get away with a lot of shit,” Detective Duffy said.

A sketch artist had been sent to see Jennifer first thing and had produced an image that led to many tips. None led anywhere. Scores of on-file prints were run against prints found inside the red house. None of them matched. Video was collected from stores and gas stations in the area, and Detective Duty wandered the homeless encampments around South Park, including one self-governing camp calling itself Nickelsville, the name intended to remind Seattle’s mayor at the time, Greg Nickels, that he was presiding over a period of vivid inequity, similar to the time when Hoovervilles lined the city’s southern edge. At Nickelsville, Detective Duty learned that a man roughly matching the police sketch had been denied entrance the night of the attacks, for “obnoxious behavior and no current identification.” It was interesting, but it didn’t give Detective
Duty a suspect he could lay hands on. A meeting was held at the South Park Community Center to try to calm neighborhood residents, whose windows, even amid the string of exceptionally warm nights, were now uniformly shut. “All of them were open before this,” said Judy Mills, fifty, who’d been in South Park for fifteen years. She lived alone and was presently sleeping between two golf clubs and two guns.

—

The break came on a Thursday, the day before Teresa was buried and four days after the attacks, when Detective Duffy received a call from the state crime lab. A woman on the other end of the line told her DNA from the South Park crime scene matched DNA collected just over a year earlier as part of an unsolved break-in investigation in Auburn, a suburb in a valley southeast of Seattle. There was a surveillance video associated with that crime. Detective Duffy drove straight down to Auburn to have a look.

The video had been sitting in a police evidence locker since the break-in occurred, and it showed images of an unknown man wandering around the service entrance to the Auburn City Hall on the evening of March 20, 2008, looking for a door that might open, finding one, breaking in, and then leaving within a few minutes, empty-handed, his pit bull in tow. An officer just three months out of the police academy had investigated and did a rather thorough job considering nothing was stolen and little damage was caused. He even went so far as to send traces of blood left on a broken lockbox to the state crime lab. At the time, they’d produced no DNA matches, and no other fruitful leads emerged, so the surveillance video was stored away and the DNA sample kept on file, just in case.

Detective Duffy drove back to Seattle and had the video prepped for release. It went to officers in a special bulletin. Then, on Friday morning, as Teresa was being buried, and not long after the bus rolling through the suburbs south of Seattle had made its emergency stop, the video was released to the public. Seattle’s television stations put it on the noon news; blogs and newspaper Web sites kept it up all day. Within a couple
hours, the police received a call from Isaiah’s mother. “That’s my boy on the video,” she told Detective Duty. “Don’t shoot him.” Detective Duty asked the woman if she was sure, and she replied, “Mister, I know my own boy. And I recognize his dog.” She didn’t know where either of them might be.

—

Another call came in from a police officer who’d responded, earlier that morning, to the emergency alert from the public bus rolling up the hill south of Seattle. He recognized the man in the video as the same unruly passenger he’d detained and then released. The police soon broadcast an alert to all public bus drivers in King County, and within a few hours James Gayden radioed from a route he was driving and said, “I think the guy you’re looking for just got off my bus.” He’d been a driver for about seven years and on that day was assigned to drive the 74 Express, which originates in downtown Seattle and heads northward toward Magnuson Park, a small peninsula jutting like a bent thumb into Lake Washington. The park is 350 acres, home to a large off-leash dog area and plenty of places where a person can rest comfortably in warm weather, unnoticed.

The man who’d just gotten off Gayden’s bus had on a winter jacket and long pants, which was odd because the temperature that day was in the nineties. He was unkempt and tired looking, too, and so stood out from the students and downtown professionals who normally ride the route. As he exited, his odor caused Gayden to recall working night-owl shifts. “I picked up a lot of homeless people,” he said. “And it’s just a certain smell you get from people who haven’t bathed in a while.” The man didn’t pay, telling Gayden, “I don’t have any bus fare.”

—

The police swarmed the area. Officer Leon Towne, who happened to be inside Magnuson Park when the call went out, spotted Isaiah first. “I stepped out of my car,” Towne said. “I stayed right next to it, and as he
gets close enough, I address him. I advised him to secure his dog to a fence—a post that he was next to at that point—and he did. He continued to approach the car. He came right up to the front of the hood.” At that point, Towne’s backup arrived.

Towne asked Isaiah for identification. Isaiah said he didn’t have any. Towne put Isaiah in the back of his patrol car and took him straight downtown, to Detectives Duffy and Duty, and as he drove, he, too, noticed the odor. “Like he had been living on the streets for a while,” Towne said. As he sat in the interview room, Detective Duffy watched Isaiah on closed-circuit video. He appeared calm, though at one point he bit his nails, which she interpreted as a sign of anxiety. “I got him some water,” she said. “I think he said, ‘Thank you.’ Very respectful.” He asked her, “Hey, can I take my socks off?” He said, “Sorry I smell.”

—

Detective Duffy has a dead-level gaze, a slight rasp to her voice, and a confidence honed in interviews with suspects of all kinds over the years. She also has what she calls “the gift of gab,” and she led with this. Sensing that Isaiah had a soft spot for his pit bull, she started talking to him about her Rottweiler, Tug, who’d just passed away. Isaiah didn’t take the bait. “He just point-blank said, ‘I’m not into this conversation.’” He asked for a lawyer.

They made him change into a jail uniform, took pictures of his clothes, noticed bloodstains on them, and also noticed he wasn’t wearing any underwear. This provoked in Detective Duffy a euphoric feeling of things clicking into place. A pair of men’s boxers had been found at the red house, and she’d thought them an important enough lead to get in touch with Jennifer, even though she was in St. Louis for the funeral. “I hated to interrupt,” Detective Duffy said, “but this was so important.” She’d sent a picture over e-mail, and Jennifer had confirmed: the boxers weren’t theirs. The man who attacked them must have worn them and then left without them.

“We knew we had the guy,” Detective Duffy said. Isaiah looked like the man in the video from the old Auburn case, and he matched Jennifer’s description of the man who attacked them. There would be fingerprint and footprint evidence to explore further. With Detective Duty, she took Isaiah to Harborview for a court-ordered blood draw so that his DNA could be definitively connected to the crime scene, and then they took him to jail. In transit, they asked him what he liked to do for fun. He replied that he liked to read, particularly chemistry and physics
books.