Field of Steve

The Kim and Steve saga, of which there were several chapters on this blog, appears to have ended thanks to Kim’s inability to stay away from someone from whom she was legally required to maintain a distance. It wasn’t Steve. I can’t remember who it was. I think it was a woman.

After several reports of the two of them, or one of them, heard on the police scanner and making brief appearances in the police blotter, the pair has drifted away. Steve’s whereabouts are unknown to me, though it seems the lack of Kim has made it easier to not draw attention from the cops. I haven’t heard a thing about him in weeks.

Kim, on the other hand, will be making her home in jail for the next several months, after the third violation of a no-contact order. The other person had the same order, so both might be jailed.

Of course this could be a good thing for both Steve and Kim. Steve gets to get on with his life without her and she has a year to stay sober. I’m not sure either of those results will play out just like that, but we can all hope.

As for me I rarely visit the Sev anymore, but I still check the reports to see if Steve will make a new appearance. How much do I hope to never see either name in a police report again? More than life itself.

I’ve been preoccupied. I’ve got a story to tell you about Apollo. Well, I think I’ll tell it. Until then, or something else, let this tide you over.

Steve and Kim were visited by police again today. Details when I get them.

By now almost everyone has seen the clip of Susan Boyle. If you haven’t, go to the link before reading on. You can read this stuff anytime. You shouldn’t wait another second before seeing her.

A piece by Lisa Schwarzbaum at Entertainment Weekly encapsulates well why this video resonates, even brings tears to my eyes.

In our pop-minded culture so slavishly obsessed with packaging — the right face, the right clothes, the right attitudes, the right Facebook posts — the unpackaged artistic power of the unstyled, un-hip, un-kissed Ms. Boyle let me feel, for the duration of one blazing showstopping ballad, the meaning of human grace.

Schwarzbaum writes more that I would have included, except that it would have made it almost unnecessary for you to go to the EW site, and I’m sensitive that her work should be seen where it was originally posted, giving EW another penny and a half because you stopped by.

The scene causes me to wonder about Boyle’s 47 years. She lives with her cat. She’s never been married or even kissed. Somehow in anonymity she walked out on stage without a lick of style or an ounce of pretense. She was who she was, convinced that her voice would overcome what she lacked in appearance, or naive to the fact that often the giftwrap matters more than the gift. Maybe that was her strength. She lowered our expectations and then blew us away.

My prayer for Boyle is that this moment launches her into a better 47 years than the ones she’s had. She is revered now. My hope is she never arrives at a place in which she’s despised for her success, as so many who achieve loftiness are. I hope this story is as amazing as it seems right now, that I can always point to her performance as one that rocked us all on our heels and woke us up, that Susan Boyle forever becomes the definition of happily ever after.

Years ago a friend had a sandwich shop and the idea sparked my thoughts about what I thought would be a great concept for one. The only problem was I had no interest in running that kind of business. So I offer the idea to anyone willing to give it a go. You have to have it in a politically conscious area. You’d name it something like “Capitol Sandwich,” or something far more clever. The real cleverness would be the names of the sandwiches. On the list would be the “pork barrell,” which would have all kinds of, you know, pork. Then you could have the “conservative,” which would be something simple like peanut butter and jelly. Filibuster style would be extra long. You get the idea. Run with it.

For my next business idea, though, this does have real relevance to me, since it involves the industry I work in. I received an e-mail at work today about former Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporters trying to start a publication using the donation route and they’re asking for contributions of $20 a month. They’re calling the new outfit the Seattle PostGlobe. By the time you read the site might actually be at the address http://seattlepostglobe.org.

Here’s why I don’t think the idea might not have long-term legs. Years ago I was used to the idea of getting one newspaper. I’d pay for it and hope that it had all the news I needed.

Now, though, I regularly read newspaper sites from all over the country, and I don’t want to give that up. I want the local content, such as the stuff seattlepostglobe might offer, but I also want the news written far away. So give me something that perhaps will make me pay, but will let me have both local and national content.

If this idea has been tried or there are obvious reasons why it would not work, I’m all ears. Let me have it, or them.

My idea is that since we’re getting much of our news from the Internet, we could pay for it from where we get our Internet service. U.S. newspapers would have to work cooperatively on a plan that would have customers pay for news content, but they would not pay for it like a subscription to the print product they do now. You wouldn’t go to www.kitsapsun.com to subscribe to the online version of the Kitsap Sun. Instead, you’d go to your Internet provider. When you subscribe to the Kitsap Sun, you also get access to the Baltimore Sun, the New York Times, the Washington Post and every Herald,Tribune and Gazette in the country.

Such an arrangement might only solve part of the problem, the money papers have lost from shrinking circulation. However, smarter business minds than mine might be able to start with this idea and find a price point that works, perhaps even enough to pick up some of the lost classified and display advertising revenue.

This idea presents a lot of obstacles, more than I can imagine in one sitting. But I can’t imagine that they couldn’t be overcome. The big one would be getting readers to pay for it, even if you’re making it as painless as possible. I think, however, people would, or enough would to make it worth it to cut off those who wouldn’t.

In some cases it might create markets we don’t have now. Colleges could make the subscription part of the regular fees it charges. Businesses, those that wouldn’t have a policy against employees looking up news sites from work, could have the news at every computer.

The biggest challenge is that it would take virtually every print news organization cooperating to make it work. It would take agreeing on how revenues would be distributed. Would subscribers in Multnomah County in Oregon automatically see their fees go to the Oregonian? What about areas with two or more publications? What if a new publication wanted to start up and buy in? Would that suck revenue away from the established dailies?

These are all questions I again leave to those with bigger business brains than mine.

Run with it.

When I read that I was about to enter the mother of all anti-MSM rants I got a bit excited, expecting to laugh and then ultimately quit halfway through, tired of illogic and profanity. That’s what rants, especially written on the Internet by the anonymous, usually are. I was somewhat disappointed.

For starters, the writer made some sense. For enders, I leave the column feeling like it was written by someone who is little but bitter. So it’s hard for me to mingle the lot that made sense with the fact that the sense was put forth by someone who has been sucking on sour grapes for some time.

The parts that make sense to me, generally, are that much of the whining about the state of the newspaper business relies on some good-natured philanthropist or a large number of unwitting taxpayers coming in to save us. The philanthropy part could work, I suppose, but the idea that we need to be saved out of some sort of sympathy is appalling to me. I think people, despite all the bile they spew about us, appreciate what we do, especially when we do it well. To have a consistent operation that keeps government and others in check there needs to be a financial incentive, because while reporters accept low pay, they won’t do it for free. Somehow, someone’s going to find an economic model that works. Or maybe one model will work in one market and another will work in another. I don’t know that I’ll be involved in that news gathering when the new model arises, but I trust someone will be. Some entrepreneur, or a few of them, will hit on something.

I also liked the part about the idea that journalism schools are kind of a waste. I went to a good school and through a good journalism program. In the end, though, I think I would have been better off minoring in journalism and majoring in something else like political science or history. I also appreciated the thought that journalists kind of accept the low pay without much argument. I don’t do my job for the money, but I couldn’t afford to do it if it didn’t pay enough to meet our basic needs. The reason we’re in the Pacific Northwest, aside from the breathtaking landscape, is the news business pays better here than elsewhere. It does for now, anyway, because of the businesslike negotiating unions did up here.

What made me dislike the anonymous piece was pretty much at the end, when the writer revealed the self to be a former reporter. I got the sense this was someone whose genius wasn’t recognized, as one commenter wrote, and left bitter because of it. Frankly, that was me for a while, for the while that I was out of the business. So that person can rejoice at the news of newspapers dying for some legitimate reasons, but ultimately I believe the anonymous writer will never return, because that writer’s genius will never be recognized as much as the writer believes it should be.

Lookee up top and you’ll see once you click on the “About” button that I’ve actually made it useful. Now I just have to finish that page and do the other ones, too.

The whole point of this blog was to have something with a history once I released another book.

About a decade ago I had a novel published, though that sounds haughtier than it really is. I had to pay a little bit, though not the typical vanity press fees. I had worked for a small publisher before and the fees seemed reasonable, because I was going to have the book edited and designed, or so I believed. In the end I was the editor and I wish I had been the cover designer. I lost all enthusiasm for the book once I got my copies and didn’t do a thing to market it. Friends and family who read it liked it, but what friend or family would say otherwise? Overall it was a nice learning experience and the book is a good reflection of where I was in my life before I got married. I thought there was valuable stuff for anyone in the story. The book sold a few dozen copies and you can still see it, or buy it, on Amazon. If the link doesn’t work, search for “Going Too Far” under “Steven Gardner.”

The desire to write books has never gone away. After 10 years of reporting I believed I’ve learned a lot about telling stories and plan to use whatever skills I have to tell my own growing up story. The story ends as I leave my family to begin serving my LDS mission. I hesitated for a long time to write the story, because I didn’t know what kind of hook I could have that would make the autobiography. Eventually I just started writing some of the stories I remembered in hopes that one day I’d stumble upon a theme that would work. Early on I considered the main theme being one of walking in two worlds, caused by my family’s conversion to Mormonism when I was 11. That may still be the overall theme that generates whatever may be interesting. But also in telling stories verbally I’ve found it not as difficult as I once thought to make the tales fun. I’m still writing the first draft. The next piece of work will be compiling a mountain of stories and weaving a tale that remains engaging throughout. It means I’ll have to throw out a lot of what I’ve written, or save it for some future project.

A few weeks back I came upon the idea of doing some research that can only be done in California, since that is where I grew up. I won’t give too many details, because it is, from what I can tell, still a unique way of weaving the story together. It does involve newspaper archives. So sometime before summer’s out I’ll make a drive down to Southern Cal. I hope to crash on someone’s floor for about a week as I make daily visits to the Los Angeles County Library in West Covina. I had thought about going as early as May, but that doesn’t look like it will work, because that butts up against our wedding anniversary and because the library will be open one fewer day than in a regular week.

I’m going to make several pitches to go get an agent or a publisher, but I’m also open to self-publishing. The process is much less expensive these days. I can find someone to edit for me so that I’m sure it’s a quality project. Designing a cover shouldn’t be difficult, especially for Diana. And I believe I can make the book sell well enough that writing books will be a worthwhile second career until it becomes a first one. After this book I want to do the same for my father, which would mean making another trip to Los Angeles and to Denver. Besides flattering my own ego and that of my father, doing these books will teach me skills in gathering historical evidence. With that experience it could make me even better suited for taking on more expansive projects, the kind of work done in The Devil in the White City, or American Lightning.

Steve and Kim, of the Steve and Kim fame, found their way into the police reports again. Thanks to a cohort for giving me the story. There were no arrests.

Someone called about a couple fighting near a convenience store (not the Sev). When Kim talked to police she was apparently drunk. Go figure. They couldn’t get much out of her, other than Steve didn’t hit her. They were arguing over a bag.

Earlier, according to Steve, they had been inside a nearby restaurant enjoying a sundae in a “honeymoon” style, feeding each other. The officer reported Steve still had fudge on his face.

Apparently there was beer in the bag.

After a night meeting in Bremerton a couple weeks ago I took to talking to a woman I’d witnessed earlier on. She was hard to miss. She was in one of those scooter electronic chairs to help her get around. She looked to be in her 70s, was severely overweight and had oxygen fed into her nostrils.

At the meeting the audience was divided into separate groups in which the people would haggle over parking and greenery, with an easel of paper serving as the focal point. This woman stayed on the periphery, not offering up any ideas of her own. Once in a while someone would stand directly in front of her. After a few minutes something would spark a reminder that the woman was interested, even if she wasn’t involved. The ones who had been blocking her view would beg her pardon and get out of the way, occasionally asking if she had input she’d like to offer. She didn’t.

As she waited for the bus to come to take her home, she told me of her life.

She lived in the neighborhood under discussion and was content to learn what everyone was planning and to make sure it wouldn’t affect her too much. Edna, the woman, was filling a role her husband once played. Floyd and Edna had been married 60 years when he died in early 2008. They had a daughter and volunteered for several organizations over the years, including the Washington Association of Retarded Children. When it came to city government stuff, Floyd was the more interested of the two.

With Floyd gone Edna was left to her own devices to get to the bottom of the planning process going on in her neighborhood. She contacted the local transit agency to arrange for rides on the buses specifically designed for the handicapped and made a day of it. She fit in a doctor’s visit to Silverdale and had dinner plans on the agenda until it became clear she couldn’t do the dinner and the meeting.

The oxygen was for the Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. She has diabetes. Edna has had two hip replacements and has four broken screws in the same place. With the weight, the COPD and diabetes, there’s too much going on for doctors to risk operating on her anymore.

Edna lives in the same house she and Floyd moved into about a half century ago. The scooter is too big for many of the doorways, so she uses crutches mostly at home. She wants to find an assisted-living center to move to, somewhere close to her daughter, but can’t afford the rent and doesn’t qualify for assistance.

So she gets out a couple times a week fro trips to the doctor, to Family Pancake House, The Dollar Store and Grocery Outlet. And she hopes for karma, that all the years she and Floyd volunteered and served in ways to make life better for other peoples’ children, especially the “retarded” ones, will come back to her now in ways that will make her final years more enjoyable.

This is the last of 17 chapters to tell a story that ended just fine. If you’ve come to this chapter first, I encourage you to scroll down to chapter one and work your way up.

Today we’re agog about retention bonuses for employees at AIG. Many of them were for more than a million and were used to entice them to stay until their part of the business closed shop.

I was first introduced to the concept of retention bonuses about a decade ago when Geneva Steel was giving them to executives to keep them on board as the company worked through its bankruptcy reorganization. Rank and file employees were ticked, as angry as people are now about AIG.

In today’s conversation is a discussion of whether AIG can influence its bonus recipients to be good, by giving at least some of the money back.

It has caused me to wonder whether I would choose to be good if I were in their shoes. They have no obligation to give anything back and retention bonuses are a commonly used device to keep people with certain skills when they could find it easier to work in a ship that has promise of sailing for a while.

For those of you who think it would be an easy choice, and I’d like to think you’re correct, I saw something last night that made me wonder.

ABC has a show called What Would You Do? They set up these phony scenarios and see how people react. In one case they set up an informercial for a product that was supposed to help grow hair back. There advertised for people willing to participate, offering a specific payment.

There were a series of tests these people went through. First they saw a woman put some of the stuff in her hair. First it burns, then her hair comes out. Almost everyone stayed. Then the people were all willing to say they used the product, reading from a script. They were told to talk about the 100 percent money-back guarantee, which they were told might not happen, but it was going to be advertised that way anyway. Then they were told one in three get cancer from the stuff and they continued to sing the product’s praises.

Some did leave at various stages. The rest, however, had their excuses as to why they stayed. One guy said the company has insurance and it’s on them to guarantee his claims. Another woman said she wanted to be an actress and saw it as a way to further that wish.

The payment was $75, which illustrates that the amount of money probably doesn’t matter. Perhaps that $75 meant more than the seven figures those other executives are getting. It doesn’t take a million to convince someone to forget about being good.

My wife will sometimes tell me I’m a good guy, and it means a lot to me. I’m not always great. I don’t do all the service I could, sometimes I’m short with the kids and there are time at work where I feel like I’m terrible. I’m kind of going through that right now.

Steve asked for a ride and I gave him one. When the night was over I imagined that Steve and Kim were headed for disaster, that Kim was unstable and Steve was a man with few options. He’s also a scrapper. And in some instances he’s able to show he cares for someone other than himself. He knew he probably wouldn’t be welcome, but Kim would be. When he was asked to leave and he stayed anyway, I believe he probably figured a night in jail would be more comfortable than a night outside. It was bitter cold back then.

What I’ve learned about them since is that both have substance abuse problems, that he’s probably an abuser and that she seldom operates coherently. They’re liars for sure, and they might be capable of lying to get revenge.

This was the couple I had in my car.

In my way of thinking it was a good thing to do. Foolish, perhaps, but in the end I go back to the sense I felt before deciding to take them. Despite that, I’d probably tell them “no” next time.

My fears that night were, based on history, justified. The man behind me had shown a willingness to be violent, though I didn’t know that at the time.

It’s hard to say now, about two months later. It was awfully cold that night.

What I’ve come to believe since is that being good is important, but perhaps it would be better to be a little more aggressively good, rather than waiting for opportunities to be good.

A woman I spoke with the other night talked about the volunteer work she did with mentally challenged kids back when everyone called them “retarded.” She spoke of some of the other work she did. That was goodness.

A guy I used to work with became a kind of surrogate father for a boy whose father abandoned him and his mother. The guy was never going to marry the boy’s mother, but he cared about both of them to be a Boy Scout leader and do other things for the benefit of the boy. That, my friends, is goodness.

That’s the kind of good I want to be.

This is the 16th of 17 chapters to tell a story that ended just fine. If you’ve come to this chapter first, I encourage you to scroll down to chapter one and work your way up.

A few days ago I decided the next chapter in this series would be the last one, because I lost confidence I was ever really going to see the police reports I requested. That would have been fine for everyone, I’m sure, if anyone is still paying attention. The problem with that decision, though, was nights would pass and I still didn’t write the final piece.

Today I got the call that the records were ready. So this is the second-to-last in our story. The next one will put to conclusion what value I think there was in the experience. Maybe I learned something. You’ll have to wait at least one more day to find out.

The police records I received begin in August of last year and go all the way up to the night before I gave Steve and Kim a ride. The request was related only to Steve, but Kim appears in most of these.

Friday, August 15, 2008, 9:40 a.m.

An officer notices a pickup truck being driven by someone who knew before had a suspended license. Coincidentally, this happens close to the 7-Eleven where I picked Steve and Kim up. Steve was the passenger. The driver was handcuffed because a police check confirmed his license was still suspended.

The officer asked for Steve’s identification and then did a check on him and found that Steve had two outstanding warrants, one of which was for assault–domestic violence.

The driver was released. Steve was arrested and jailed.

Tuesday, September 30, 2008, 1:48 a.m.

Kim called police saying she was punched in the head by a man she didn’t know. When police arrived at the house (By the way, every other incident happens at this same house. It’s not close to the 7-Eleven or to the place they were going to have me drop them off, but it’s a couple blocks away from house that one year for Christmas had on display Santa on a crucifix.) she was holding an ice bag to the side of her head. The officers wrote that she wasn’t crying and appeared intoxicated. In the living room was a coffee table there were beer cans and other alcoholic drinks.

An officer asked Kim what happened. The most she said was, “The guy who hit me is downstairs. He pulled my hair and hit me in the head.” But she didn’t know his name and only described him as white. She didn’t say any more about the alleged assault. The officer asked her to pull away the ice bag and he saw no bruises, cuts or swelling. He did see some redness on the right side of her face.

Two others in the room said they didn’t see anything. The officer went downstairs and found Steve lying in bed. He also seemed intoxicated. They went upstairs and Kim said, “That’s him.”

Outside, Lomax said, “I didn’t touch her.”

Kim got in an ambulance and went to the hospital. Steve’s case was sent to the prosecutor’s office.

Saturday, October 11, 2008, 6:22 a.m.

A woman called police saying she was being hit with a stick by a man. She said she was there to pick up her sister. The two women were outside the home when police arrived. The one woman said her sister called at 5:20 a.m. for a ride. When she got there, she said, she heard her sister arguing with a man in the house and then saw him say, “You are not leaving,” and swung a cane or a stick at her.

The officer was suspicious of the story that she was coming at 5:20 in the morning to pick up her sister. The two women stuck to their stories. The men inside, however, said the women arrived together and that they were trying to get money from the man. When he didn’t give any money, the men said, the women began taking some of the man’s stuff, including a check book.

The women said they didn’t have any of the man’s belongings and a search showed that to be true.

Steve was in the house at the time and told the officers that the other man had invited the women over for “company,” code for prostitution. The women had been there 10 minutes and then asked the man for money. He said he had none, so the women began taking things from the house.

There were text messages from the man’s phone to one of the women that could have provided code for what was going to happen, but she said the battery fell out and all the text messages were erased. When the officer said those messages get erased with a “delete all” function, not with a battery falling out, the woman denied erasing them.

The woman said she had been dropped off at the house by her sister and said she had been a prostitute for about two years, forced into it by a former boyfriend. She said she hadn’t been doing that for about a year, but had had sex for money with the man within the previous two months. There was no question, the officer wrote, that sex would happen and money would change hands as a result.

One woman was arrested and taken to jail for prostitution and lying to a cop.

The man said he never paid for sex, that he only gave her money as a loan out of the kindness of his heart.

Steve said he was smitten with the other woman, but denied trying to get her to have sex for money. He wrote the text message about an hour before the women arrived, though, which contained a phrase akin to “I have bills and you have pockets.” Steve said he only wrote that hoping to get the woman to come over.

The officer referred the case on the men to the prosecutor’s office.

Sunday, November 9, 2008, 9:28 p.m.

Police received a call of a woman at a gas station who had been assaulted. She was bleeding from her head and entered the station asking for help.

The woman was Kim. She was bleeding from the side of her head and the back of her left ear. She said she was at a house watching a movie when a woman she didn’t know came in and started yelling at her and punching her. Kim was, according to the officer, “extremely intoxicated and hysterical,” and it was tough to get a clear story from her. She said she didn’t know why the woman started punching her. Kim went to the hospital by ambulance.

The officers went to the house and Steve was there with three men and one woman. Steve and the others were uncooperative and vague, the officer wrote, but then reluctantly said that Kim had been lounging around naked on the couch all day and was told several times to put her clothes on. She ignored that request.

Kim began arguing with another woman they all had just met that night. They all said they weren’t in the room when the fight started, which the officers didn’t believe.

The case was sent to the detectives.

Thursday, January 1, 2009, 8 a.m.

Police received a call at a house there might be someone there unwanted. Steve was outside. He said he left to go get more beer and when he returned his belongings were put on the front porch and door was locked. He knocked several times, but no one let him in. The officer wrote that Steve appeared intoxicated.

The officer talked to another resident, who said Steve was drunk and he wanted him out of the house. Steve had been living there for a few months, to help the man recover from a leg injury. But Steve had stopped paying rent and he wanted him out.

The officer explained that the man would have to go through a civil eviction process. Steve was let back in.

Thursday, January 1, 2009, 9:06 p.m.

Police were called for a domestic “altercation.”

Steve was there, smelling of intoxicants, saying he’d had about three beers. He said Kim was also drinking heavily. He said he and Kim had been dating two months and that sometimes she stays at the house.

The officer asked why Kim had called police. Steve said she was drunk, crazy and wanted him out so she could have sex with his roommate. He said he and she had argued earlier because he found out she was cheating on him. He said he went to a living room couch to be alone, that she came in and hit him in the face and that he defended himself by pushing her away. She then sat down on the coffee table, he said.

Kim, meanwhile, said Steve had thrown her down onto the coffee table. Another one there said he saw nothing, but another said Steve and Kim had been fighting all day. The altercation was mutual, he said, but at one point Steve attempted to choke Kim on the couch.

An officer told Steve he thought his story was implausible, that it was unlikely Kim had sat down on the coffee table. Steve said the fight was never physical. When the officer reminded Steve that he had said he pushed her away, he still denied the fight was ever physical.

Because the witness appeared to corroborate Kim’s story more than Steve’s, Steve was arrested and jailed for domestic violence assault.

A night later, returning from another beer run, Steve was locked out of the house again. This time the officers could not get anyone inside to answer the door.

Friday, January 16, 2009, 1:05 p.m.

Steve and Kim called police about a fight. Steve said earlier he was assaulted by another woman. He said the woman repeatedly punched him in the eye and kicked out his teeth. When asked why, Steve said he had no idea why and was just sitting on the couch when she attacked.

Kim said the woman hit her in the forehead, causing her to black out for several minutes. The officer saw a bruise on Kim’s forehead. Kim said she had never met the woman before entering the house the night before. She said the attack was completely random.

Police found the woman and in doing a search found in the bra line a credit card and in her front pocket was a toothbrush container that had a glass tube. The woman said it was a crack pipe. More searching resulted in credit card applications for one of the other men inside the house.

The woman said Kim and Steve arrived at the house the night before and Kim appeared to have a swollen right eye when she got there. Steve was drunk, had come to the house to do more drinking, and the woman believed the two had been fighting. The woman went downstairs and said she heard Steve and Kim arguing upstairs.

In the morning, the woman said, she went upstairs and saw Kim asleep on the floor. She tried to wake her and saw the lump on her forehead. The woman told Steve to leave, but Kim got mad at her for it. She told Steve she wanted him gone when she returned to the house. When she came back Steve and Kim had both left.

The officer said the woman showed no signs of having been in a fight. She was arrested for theft and for possession of drug paraphernalia.

Steve and Kim said one of the men in the house “just sat there and watched” as they were being assaulted. The other people in the house, though, all said they didn’t see the woman assault anyone, that Kim had arrived at the house with the bump on her head. One said Steve and Kim had a violent relationship and that he knew Steve regularly assaulted Kim. He also said Kim told him she was afraid of Steve.

One witness said he didn’t think it would have been possible for him to have missed the fight had it happened the way Steve and Kim explained, and that the woman was not capable of inflicting that kind of damage if it had. Another witness said she knew the fight didn’t happen.

One officer wrote that Steve said the woman had kicked out his teeth, but the officer knew from previous encounters that Steve was missing teeth.

The officers determined that Steve and Kim made up the story because they were mad that the woman said they needed to leave the house.

The woman, by the way, was the ex-wife of the property owner.

Thursday, January 29, 2009, 10:35 a.m.

Police were called to a house for a possible burglary. The caller said Steve and a woman were inside the house. The caller was the property owner. He said everyone had been evicted the week before. Steve had lived there and the female stayed there from time to time.

The property owner said he entered the house that morning and smelled smoke. He walked into the living room and saw Steve and the woman. They stood up, gathered their things and left. The man found a boarded up window that had the plywood sheeting torn off.

Another officer found Steve and Kim walking blocks away. The property owner was taken there and identified the two as the ones who had been in his house.

Kim said she wouldn’t answer any questions. Steve waived his rights. He said they went in through that basement window, that both of them had torn off the plywood.

The officer mentioned the eviction and that Steve had to know he wasn’t supposed to be in there. “I know, but we did not want to freeze to death,” Steve answered. Both Steve and Kim were jailed for trespassing and malicious mischief.

Steve told me he and Kim spent that night at a county shelter that was opened temporarily because of the extremely cold temperatures.

The next night they got a ride to Poulsbo.

This is the 15th of I-don’t-know-how-many, probably 17, chapters to tell a story that ended just fine. I think it did. I guess technically it’s not over, because there is still a set of police records I’m planning to read. If you’ve come to this chapter first, I encourage you to scroll down to chapter one and work your way up.

My records request continues to be delayed. I found out today that getting eight different police records takes some time. There might be names to black out in those reports.

In other news, Steve and Kim found their way back into the police reports today. According to a colleague, Kim was being visited and arrested on a theft. The couple was found in a house that in the past has been known as a drug house. The police report indicated that they were squatting in the house, meaning they were living there without permission. They had been staying there, apparently, when the landlord kicked the one legitimate tenant out, then boarded out the windows. Steve, the report indicated, had punched out one of the windows and he and Kim lived there a while.

Steve himself was angry at Kim, because before she was hauled off to jail she managed to take Steve’s prize pool cue and pawn it.

This was done to add value online to this story about the guy in the video below.

This is the 14th of I-don’t-know-how-many, probably 16, chapters to tell a story that ended just fine. I think it did. I guess technically it’s not over, because there is still a set of police records I’m planning to read. If you’ve come to this chapter first, I encourage you to scroll down to chapter one and work your way up.

When I made the records request on Monday, I expected to be able to read them right then. When I was told I wouldn’t get them that day, I assumed I’d get them Tuesday. Not so. I don’t know when I’ll get to read the final piece I want to see before closing the book on this story.

What did happen today, though, is Kim showed up in the police records. She called police complaining of a shattered knee, not saying how it happened. When police arrived she had decided she was fine. The guy that was with her, not Steve, said he’d only talk through a lawyer.

This is the 13th of I-don’t-know-how-many, probably 15, chapters to tell a story that ended just fine. I think it did. I guess technically it’s not over, because there is still a set of police records I’m planning to read. If you’ve come to this chapter first, I encourage you to scroll down to chapter one and work your way up.

In Chapter Four I wrote, “He was taking special care a lot that evening to make sure she knew he loved her. To me that seemed like the behavior of someone who felt guilty for abuse.”

Less than two weeks before I gave Steve and Kim a ride they had called police, reporting that a woman in their Bremerton home had beaten them up. Kim said the woman knocked Steve’s teeth out and left her with the bruise that still lingered the night I had them in my car. But the record I was reading was the night after the fight. Kim and Steve said the woman was only arrested on theft charges.

That was true. They arrested the woman because they found someone else’s debit or credit cards on her. One was hidden in her bra. The woman said she had permission. The owner of the card said otherwise.

Nonetheless, no one thought the woman had beaten up Steve and Kim. Even the guy whose cards were stolen said he thought Steve and Kim were saying that because the woman had said they could no longer stay in the house. They suspected Steve of doing it, saying the couple had fought loudly in the past.

Today I also made a request for eight different police records going back to midway last year. While at the police station I also turned in the planner. An officer came out to talk to me. I told him I wanted to turn it in and that I didn’t want to open it in case there was something illegal in there. The planner, though, looked somewhat like to one I used to use. He opened it and pretty quickly I knew it wasn’t mine.

The officer opened up the planner, saw the name at the top of one of the pages, repeated the woman’s name and uttered an expletive. The officers know this woman well. There were pills inside and a photo of the woman with what looked like could be her son.

I expect that once I read the final records, that will be the end of this tale, save for one chapter that will be an epilogue. But there’s still those other records.

This is the 12th of I-don’t-know-how-many chapters to tell a story that ended just fine. I think it did. I guess technically it’s not over as long as there’s a planner in my possession. If you’ve come to this chapter first, I encourage you to scroll down to chapter one and work your way up.

Nothing new today, really. I did look at the Washington court records to see how often this pair showed up in courts. Steve has 15 records and I’m pretty sure they’re all his, because his last name is pretty unique. For Kim there are 128, but her name is probably held by dozens in the state today. My name is in there 146 times, but only one is for me. Oh wait, I mean two. I got a ticket in 2004 on Bainbridge Island and another one in 2006 in Benton County. Those are both on the list.

I also looked up the name of the woman they said beat them up. It makes me want to spend some time with the Superior Court records again next week to see if the incident they told me about shows up, the one where she beats the both of them up. I still don’t understand how someone could do that much damage and only gets busted for theft.

At work I started talking about the names associated with this story. The term “frequent flyer” came out. It means at least one of them is often in the police records we read.

When you pick someone up off a curb in front of a 7-Eleven you really don’t have any reason to expect that this is someone who lives a near perfect life and just happened to have bad luck one night. So there should be no surprise there is a history here. It’s just that when they are in the car with you, you don’t know details. Even if I had an iPhone or Blackberry I wouldn’t have been able to find out that night any of this couple’s history. So I relied on what I always have, the idea that if something was going to wrong I’d know it before I agreed to take the anywhere. I’d know it. No logic involved, I would just know it.

As for Kim’s reason for leaving in an ambulance that night, I probably won’t ever know why. Criminal records are easy to find. Health records are not. My assumption is that whatever was making her dizzy when she was with me was still going on later. The drugs, the rest of which are likely still in the planner I have, probably helped for a while. But she probably got the beer she wanted, and might have been due for another pill. At any rate she got the help she needed. And Steve slept somewhere warm.