A Confession to

the Murder of the

Queen of England
By John MacBeath Watkins

Let me begin by saying that I am now convinced that none of these events happened as I recall them. I

have checked the dimensions of the storm drains, the incline of the area in question, rainfall on that day. I

have searched in vain for the delicatessen. The rainfall checks out, but not much else. None of it

happened, it's as simple and complex as that.

You should know that I have a history of mental instability. This does not mean that nothing
happened. It only means that I cannot trust my own mind or my own memory. We all use our minds to

construct the world we perceive. Most of us can tell the real from the unreal. I am impaired in that

respect. In most other respects I am completely normal. Whatever that is. My blood pressure is on the

low side. I am myoptic, dyspeptic, ectomorphic, solipsistic, pessemistic, and according to Doctor

Motherwell, not at all narcissistic.

This all happened years ago. My recollection might be so unreliable as to be irrelevant, but here is

what I hold in memory. The New York run of the play I starred in, "The Torturer's Apprentice," had

closed two months after I turned over the lead role to an Oscar-winning movie star who wanted to prove

he had the chops for the part. I had time off in Seattle while Max Milligan, the director, arranged

financing to turn it into an independent film. I had gone to a stamp shop near Pioneer Square; I am an

admitted philatelist. (Of course, when I checked later it turned out that the stamp shop never existed. But I

digress.)

It was an odd day, but a glorious one. The sun shined on the low, old brick buildings, buses

growled and winos muttered. Tall cumulus clouds like an Italian oil painting swept into view, far more

beautiful than the gray watercolor skies that drip slowly and sadly on Seattle so much of the time.

After I left the store I pulled the stamp out of its wrapping paper to examine it in sunlight. A gust

of wind blew it from my palm and my treasure flew into a storm drain.

"Damn!" I yelled. "I've been looking for one of those things for three years."

"Just a second," said a voice from the drain. "It fell on my cot."

Then a dirty thumb and forefinger grasping my stamp appeared between the bars of the grating. I

took it, grateful but perplexed.

"Thanks."

"Sure, no problem," the voice beneath the street said. "I used to collect stamps too." The voice

echoed in the hard-walled hollow of the drain. (The city has, since my release from the hospital,

confirmed that the storm drain is too small for man and cot.)
 "Who are you?" I asked.

"Watters."

"That's your name?"

"Right. Dumb question."

"So you're a critic. Did you say you have a cot down there?"

"Yeah. It's not right under the grating, though. I found out that's not a good idea."

"Because of the rain?"

"If it was just that, I could move it when it rains. People spit through that drain. They got no

consideration."

"I suppose they don't know you're down there."

"Heh. That's the whole idea. See, I'm hiding out."

He sounded like a grown man.

"Who are you hiding from?" I asked, seating myself on the curb. I didn't have a good angle on the

sun -- it was mid-afternoon -- and I couldn't see Watters's face directly below me.

"Hidin' from the cops. They don't come down here."

"Been down there long?"

"Three months. I could stay here for years. See, I'm Mormon. Had plenty of food put up, plenty

for both me and the missus. When I killed Ann, I just moved down here. My buddy Goose brings me

water. Rigged up an old wine skin with a piece of surgical hose. Goose, he's just an old wino, nobody

watches him. He puts the hose down inside this long tweed coat and through the drain and fills up my

bottle. Nobody the wiser. I give him some food each time. No water, no food. You gotta have rules with

guys like Goose."

"Sounds like a civilized arrangement. He's reliable?"

"Goose is a bum. Haven't seen him in four days. My throat feels like the Sahara, but I don't dare

come out. I got the hole blocked anyway.

 "See, how I got in here, there's this whole network of sidewalks and stuff from when the street

level was a floor lower. I was going to hide there, but people in the buildings saw me a couple times. Then

I found this hole in the storm sewer, made by somebody who was throwing stuff away. Drums of stuff

marked PCB. And asbestos insulation, stuff like you can't throw away at the local dump. They had the

hole blocked, but it washed out in bad weather.

"So I get in here, move all my food here, and one day I hear work going on down at the hole,

which is maybe 100 yards from where I am. Somebody's making a more permanent fix out there. Okay,

fine, I says to myself, when I want out one day I'll lift a manhole cover. Jeez, you know what those things

weigh? I'm down here for a while. I ain't too strong right now. I got sick down here. God, I wisht I had

some water."

A cloud blocked the sun. It probably wouldn't make another appearance that day, I thought,

looking up at the darkness of the cloud bank.

"You'll have water soon. It looks like a storm is coming in."

"Right. You want me to drink water that's been in the gutter?"

"I'll get you some water. But hey, why don't you just come up here and get your own? I'll help with

the manhole cover."

"You stupid? I'm a murderer. They'd put me in jail."

"You're in jail. You've locked yourself in the sewer for three months already. The state would give

you better quarters."

"This ain't a sewer, it's a storm drain. It's clean, and I'm a free man down here."

"You could be a free man up here. There's lots of murderers walking around loose. I'm one."

At last, I had confessed it to another human being. I was warming to my fellow felon. His open

way of talking about his crime made me feel like part of a brotherhood of the guilty, as if a flash of

recognition had told him I was one of those who live outside the law.

Some people like the role so well that while breaking the law in large ways, they keep breaking it
in small ways as well, asserting that they are outside, challenging society to catch them, asserting the

power of the outlaw to be free of even the most reasonable constraints.

Being recognized as part of this brotherhood made me feel there might be a way to live with even

the my blighted conscience.

A child of about eight or nine was standing across the street staring at me. Actors get used to

people staring at them on the street, and come to regard the recognition as a mark of success. But the

grimy-faced urchin was no theater-goer. Perhaps, I thought, he was bemused by my costume, safari shorts,

a loud Hawaiian shirt and a pith helmet -- but no, city kids get jaded early.

No, he clearly noticed that I was conversing with a storm drain.

It was starting to rain. The murderer beneath the street had been quiet for nearly a minute.

"You're pulling my leg," Watters said at last. "You never killed nobody."

"Killed an actress more than two years ago. We were lovers, also the stars of the same play."

"Me and Ann came here from Idaho," Watters said. "This was like years ago, when there was no

work in Idaho. My brother-in-law said hey, you can get work in Seattle welding. So we come here, I get a

job, lose it, hit the skids. Ann started to get on me for my drinkin', callin' me a Jack Mormon, which I was,

and I would just hit her 'til she stopped. Hit her too much once. I ain't worth the rope to hang me, but I still

ain't gonna let the cops catch me."

Big drops of rain started coming down. The boy across the street still stood and stared.

"You're going to get wet down there. It's really starting to come down," I told Watters.

"No chance. I'll be drier than you. See, I just lay down on my cot and let the water run under it. I

seen plenty of rainwater down here, and it don't get too deep most of the time."

"Look, I'm getting damned wet," I told Watters. "I'll wait this out in the deli down the street, then

bring you that water."

"No sweat. I'll be here."

Which raised an interesting point.

 "Say, why did you tell me you killed your wife?" I asked. "I now know who you killed and where

you are. What if I turned you in?"

Watters was silent for a time.

"Guess I'm going loony. Killing Ann, it's all I ever think about. Guess I didn't have nothing else to

talk about. Goose, he don't talk much. You're the first one I've talked to, really, since I got down here."

"Okay," I said rising. "Sit tight. I won't forget the water."

"Thanks."

Already I could hear water rushing in the storm drain under Watters's cot. Thunder cracked so

close that there was almost no echo, just a sharp report.

The deli was an old one, which struck me as odd. Most of the Pioneer Square area is renovated,

with new shops and art galleries in refurbished old brick structures. Seattle rebuilt in brick after the big

fire of 1889, later built the roads up a level in the area that had been constructed on tide flats. That old part

of town was run down in the '60s, but they reclaimed it in the '70s. And in the '90s it started downhill

again, like a wino who's tried getting off the sauce and then slid back into the bottle.

Yet here was this deli, with terra cotta floor and glass-topped tables, a patina of dirt marking the

areas less walked upon. The fixtures looked outdated but not quite old enough to be of interest to

collectors. Behind the counter a grizzled, portly man was pulling boxes from under the glass cases that

displayed the food and piling the boxes on top. (I've looked for him since then. You can guess…)

He gave me an irritated look.

"Hey, buddy, I ain't serving. I'm going to get flooded out," he said, and returned to his work. The

urchin with the steady stare had slipped in with me and he sat down at my table, where he continued his

wide-eyed vigil.

"The rain's not that bad," I said. It was coming down hard, but I figured a drain big enough for a

man to hide in could handle the volume.

"Look," the proprietor said, "this place is going to flood. I've been here for years, I know what I'm
saying."

"Seattle doesn't have floods. We get so much rain, we're ready for it."

"Yeah. We're ready for it to come down slow, day after day. We're not ready for this stuff. Looks

like the tropics out there, I bet we get three inches in an hour. Here, that means a flood."

"Why here?" I was beginning to wonder what a flood would mean to Watters.

"Low place, maybe. And the drains haven't worked right lately. You put in the fact that the city's all

on hills above here to the east and north, and this block is lower than the block to the west, you get a deli

with no carpets. I ain't bitching, though. It'll give me leverage to get lower rent. You wouldn't believe the

rents around here."

"What makes you think the drains aren't working right?" I wondered if it had something to do with

a man living down there.

"It was maybe four, five months ago there was water over the curb, then it went down when one of

the storm drains sprang a leak and sent the water into the underground sidewalks from when the street was

lower. Stuff must be plugging the drains."

So it was an incipient flood that opened the drain so that Watters could get in. I wondered if he

knew.

Outside, the rain still streamed down. It was like viewing the Niagara from the inside.

"Look, do you mind if I stay here for a while?" I didn't feel like standing in the rain, and with

stormwater flowing through the gutters, it would be impossible to transfer clean water through the grating.

"I'm meeting a friend."

"Suit yourself. You could call your friend and arrange to meet him where the floors stay dry. If you

don't have a cell, there's a pay phone around the corner."

"No thanks. Say, do you have any bottled water?"

"Perrier."

"Two of the big bottles."

 He banged them on the counter, rang up the sale and made change for me, then went back to

moving lutefisk, the hereditary curse of Norwegians, into a portable cooler filled with ice.

The kid stared at me. I stared at the Perrier, thinking the purchase seemed inappropriate. I wasn't

even sure why I wanted to help a wife beater and murderer.

"You want a hose?" the kid asked.

I gave the child a sidelong look and nodded. He slipped out the door. A moment later, I followed,

and the boy appeared with a Spanish wineskin with a length of surgical hose wrapped around it and pulled

over the spigot.

"Goose uses this," he announced.

Apparently, Watters wasn't living as secretly as he thought.

I took the hose and my bottles of Perrier with me into the rain, feeling futile and wishing I had a

long tweed coat, and walked up the street toward the drain.

Jaundiced fingers grasped the metal grate at Watters' drain. I called his name.

"Help me!" he yelled, "The water's up to my neck!"

"Where's the manhole cover? I'll help you lift it."

"That's way up stream. I could never get there. I'm gonna die. I'm gonna drown in this dirty water.

God found me. He's puni... (there was a sputtering noise) he's punishing me. Leave me here."

"No, I'll get you out!" I yelled, grabbing the grating with both hands and heaving. It didn't budge.

"Please get me out. Please save me. Oh, God, I'll confess, I'll go to jail, just let me live," Watters

sobbed.

"I'll get help."

I ran back to the deli.

"We've got to help him," I told the proprietor. "He'll die there."

The man was holding a box of his wares. He added it to the pile on the counter.

"Who's dying?"
 "Watters. Down in the storm drain. Under the street."

"That's where water's supposed to be."

"You don't understand!"

I ran into the street thinking I would go to the pay phone he'd mentioned earlier, then remembered

the hose. Running to the drain, I unhooked it from the wineskin, in the process finally dropping and

breaking my foolish bottles of Perrier. The sparkling water mixed with fallen rain and sluiced on down the

gutter. I pushed one end of the hose down the drain next to Watters' fingers and felt him tug it into his

mouth. He didn't talk this time. I think he may have been under water. Moisture bubbled from the end of

the tube as he tried to clear the hose so he could breath.

I blew on my end of the tube to clear it for him, but then his fingers slipped from the grating. If I

didn't get him out, he would be dead in moments. Grasping the grating again, I heaved and sobbed and

heaved until my fingers were bloody and too tired to grip the slippery metal.

"Watters! Watters! Watters!" I howled, over and over for how long I don't know. The drain had

flooded over and water on the street was ankle-deep already. Down the street at the deli, water was already

over the sidewalk and probably over the venerable floors. The rent would go down.

A police car rolled cautiously around the corner. It stopped and an intelligent-looking young cop

stepped out.

"What seems to be the problem?"

"Watters!" I howled.

"Let me take you where it's dry, then."

"He's dying."

"Who is?"

"A murderer. Listen, I've killed someone myself."

"Let me advise you of your rights."

A larger, older cop stepped out of the car and came close enough to listen.
 "Elizabeth Tudor." I told them.

"Come again?" the young cop asked. He had a soft southern accent.

"I killed Elizabeth Tudor."

"That mean anything to you?" the older cop asked the younger policeman.

"Sure," the younger one said. "Elizabeth Tudor was the daughter of Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, queen

of England. She liked Sir Francis Drake but never married anyone, and she's the lady the state of Virginia

was named after. The Virgin Queen."

Of course, I had known the historical significance of the name Liza gave herself when she became

an actress.

The young cop looked at me pityingly and pronounced judgment.

"This guy is out of his skull."

All around me the rain was falling and the water was running down the street in an ever-deeper

river. I realized Watters must be dead. The sound of rain and running water became deafening. I don't

remember anything else until I was in the hospital.