Iwas eating a bowl of chowder inside Ivar’s Salmon House on Lake Union, and things were not going well. It was an unusually sunny October day, and sitting across from me was Seattle Times columnist Paul Dorpat. He was eating a salmon sandwich, occasionally letting me know how good the sandwich was and how he would soon be on a diet that wouldn’t allow such luxuries.
We were having lunch because I wanted information about Ivar Haglund, the kooky restaurateur behind the seafood empire that bears his name. Dorpat is something of an expert on him. The bearded 80-year-old spent hundreds of hours with Ivar before his death in 1985, but Dorpat was proving to be less helpful than I had hoped, because he had never asked Ivar the question I was dying to know the answer to: How did it feel to be connected to one of Seattle’s most infamous serial killers?
