Justice Denied

CHAPTER 3

After leaving DeAnn Cosgrove’s place in Redmond I started back to Seattle and then thought better of it. Since I was going to be approaching the LaShawn Tompkins situation pretty much without portfolio, I needed to track down whatever information was out in public-as in the news media. Since Mel and I had been gone all weekend, whatever had been on local television or radio news had passed me by. As for newspapers? That’s another story.

In the old days, I never subscribed to one. I bummed them, used, in restaurants and coffee shops so I could work the crossword puzzles, but as far as having one show up outside my door on a regular basis? Never. Until Mel Soames turned up in my life, that is.

She’s a news junkie. She listens, watches, and reads. I finally got tired of her griping about not having a morning paper. When I said fine, let’s have one, then, she went ahead and ordered two-both the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Seattle Times. (Give the girl an inch and she thinks she’s a ruler.)

We are, however, newspaper-compatible and divide our consumption into two separate but unequal parts. I own the crosswords; she reads everything else. If she came home and discovered I had been scrounging through her dead newspaper collection for actual news, she would know at once that something was up. Instead, I stopped off at the Starbucks on Rose Hill, bought myself a latte, settled into one of the easy chairs, and logged on to the Internet to read the weekend newspapers online.

LaShawn Tompkins’s murder had indeed been big news over the weekend. Not so much on Saturday when the victim’s name had yet to be released and the death had been reported simply as a shooting in Rainier Valley. No biggie there. But by Sunday, word was out. In the Sunday paper, which is still supposedly a joint endeavor by the staffs of both the Times and the P-I, there were three separate stories, all viewable on the virtual front page-one about the murder itself, one rehashing the flawed case that had sent LaShawn to prison years earlier, and a third under the byline of my old nemesis, columnist Maxwell Cole.

Max and I have never been friends. A very long time ago, however, we were fraternity brothers when we were both students at the University of Washington, known locally as the U. Dub. Everything was fine until he showed up at a mixer with a cute blond girl named Karen Moffitt. Much to Max’s dismay, Karen and I hit it off immediately, and eventually we ended up getting married. Years passed. Karen and I eventually divorced and she subsequently died, but Max has never gotten over the fact that I stole her away from him in the first place. I think his long-running feud with anyone and everyone at Seattle PD is symptomatic of his long-running feud with me. But then maybe I’m suffering from delusions of grandeur on that score.

Naturally, I harbor no ill will at all about any of this. Right. Of course not. Which is why I read Max’s piece first. It was prominently placed, right there below the virtual fold.

LaShawn Tompkins: 1975–2005

A life transformed; a life destroyed

by MAXWELL COLE

Special to the Times

LaShawn Tompkins was nineteen years old when he was arrested and charged with the brutal rape and murder of a fifteen-year-old prostitute named Aleta Princess Jones. He was twenty-one when he was convicted of aggravated first-degree homicide and sentenced to death. He was twenty-eight when DNA analysis of the evidence in that flawed case caused him to be released from his cell on death row with no new charges filed against him. Now, at age thirty, he’s dead, gunned down execution-style in the doorway of his mother’s Rainier Valley home.

I’ve always been amazed how Max can dredge up yesterday’s news and turn it into fodder for one of his bleeding-heart columns for which someone actually pays him money. I could tell from the opening paragraph this one would be no exception.

As a child, LaShawn was a bright student who got good grades and a series of Sunday school perfect-attendance records from his neighborhood church, the African Bible Baptist Church. By junior high, though, Sunday school was a thing of the past. He was running with the wrong crowd-a much older crowd-that automatically put him on the wrong side of the law. By fifteen, he had dropped out of school, had several juvenile offenses on his record, and was on the fast track as an up-and-coming lieutenant in the local Crips organization. From there it was only a short hop and a skip to death row.

Yes, Sunday school kiddo goes bad. Yadda, yadda, yadda. Had I been reading a hard copy of the story, I would have been tempted to wad up the newspaper and pitch it across the room. There was no way, however, I was going to throw my laptop, so I gritted my teeth and kept reading.

“Despite being convicted of a crime he didn’t commit, LaShawn used the time in prison to turn his life around completely,” says Mark Granger, executive director and pastor of the King Street Mission where Tompkins had worked as a counselor since his release from Walla Walla two years ago.

“After being wrongly convicted, he could easily have become hardened and bitter. Prison, especially a death row existence, tends to do that. Instead, LaShawn devoted his life to Christ and to helping those he considered less fortunate than himself.”

Yes, and the crippled shall walk and the blind shall see, I thought. So which one of those “less fortunates” plugged him full of lead?

It was his wrongful conviction in the death of fifteen-year-old murder victim Aleta Jones that put LaShawn Tompkins on death row. According to Philippa Jones, Aleta’s mother, LaShawn had, in the years since his release, gone out of his way to befriend her and other members of Aleta’s family.

“Two months ago, on the anniversary of her death, we held a prayer vigil in my daughter’s honor. LaShawn was right there with us the whole night,” Ms. Jones said. “I’m sorry he got sent to prison for something he didn’t do, and I’m real sorry he’s dead. He was a good man.”

That’s why detectives investigating Tompkins’s apparent homicide are so puzzled by his violent death last Friday. “As far as we’ve been able to learn, Mr. Tompkins has had zero involvement in criminal activity since his release from prison,” says one Seattle homicide detective close to the case who wished to remain anonymous.

That last comment caught my attention. I wondered which Seattle PD detective Maxwell Cole had managed to cozy up to and co-opt now. The people at Media Relations are the ones who are supposed to talk to reporters. Homicide detectives, even anonymous ones, are expected to keep their mouths firmly shut.

Tompkins had come to his elderly mother’s home on Friday, as he did twice every day, morning and evening, to check on her, to help dispense her medications, and to prepare her meals. There was no sign of forced entry. Indications are that Mr. Tompkins willingly opened the door that allowed his killer access to the home.

“Shawny went out into the kitchen to heat up my Meals-on-Wheels mac and cheese,” said the victim’s bereaved mother, Etta Mae Tompkins. “The next thing I know he was lying there on the floor by my front door with blood everywhere. He was such a good boy, and he was doing the Lord’s work. The only good thing about this is that I know my son was saved and he’s gone home to Jesus.”

Ms. Tompkins may be sustained by faith in this difficult time, but the same can’t be said for many of her Rainier Valley neighbors, who fear some new killer now stalking their streets.

Ms. Janie Griswold, who has lived next door to Etta Mae Tompkins for the past twenty-five years, is very disturbed by what happened last Friday. “It’s one thing for drug dealers to go around killing other drug dealers,” she said. “But when they can walk right up to someone’s front door and just start blasting away, it’s scary.”

Attorney Amy Duckworth, who now works for Gavin, Gavin, and Plane, a Bellevue area law firm, was one of a number of students who worked on LaShawn Tompkins’s case as part of the Innocence Project, an organization devoted to post-conviction examination of DNA evidence. It was their efforts that revealed Mr. Tompkins had been wrongly accused and wrongly convicted.

“I was there in Walla Walla the day LaShawn walked out of prison,” a tearful Ms. Duckworth said in a telephone interview. “It was so inspiring. He just hugged me and thanked me for everything we had done. He was glad to have a second chance. We all put so much work and effort into this, and now to have him end up murdered is a real tragedy.”

He probably had plenty of second chances, I thought. This one turned out to be his last second chance.

And so, while friends and coworkers grieve over the death of LaShawn Tompkins and while investigators try to piece together what happened, plans are moving forward on funeral services that are expected to be held sometime later this week-most likely at the King Street Mission where he worked.

To have a young life redeemed and then so senselessly lost is, I believe, a peculiarly American tragedy.

I was about to go on to the next article when my cell phone rang. As soon as I saw the Queen Anne Gardens number on the readout, my heart fell. Lars Jenssen is an old-fashioned kind of guy. He doesn’t like cell phones, and I knew he would call me on mine during work hours only as a last resort and for the worst possible reason.

“It’s Beverly,” he said.

“How bad?” I asked.

“Ja, sure,” Lars answered. “It’s pretty bad. I hated to call and worry you, but I t’ink you should probably come now.”

Lars is an old Norwegian, a retired halibut fisherman, whose accent gets markedly worse the moment he comes in contact with a telephone.

“I’m on my way,” I said. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

Driving down 405, I called Mel at work and told her what was going on. “I’ll let everyone here know,” she said. “If you want me to, I’ll drop everything and meet you there.”

“No,” I said. “That’s all right. I’m okay.”

Which wasn’t exactly true. This was hitting me very hard. Beverly Jenssen was my last surviving elder. She and my grandfather had been estranged from my mother and me for many years both while I was growing up and long into adulthood. My grandfather, a man of unbending principles and scant human kindness, had thoroughly disapproved of the fact that my mother had not only gotten herself pregnant outside the bonds of holy matrimony but had also adamantly refused to “do the right thing” and give me up for adoption. It was only in the past ten years or so-and long after my mother’s death-that I had established a connection with them at a time when my hard-nosed grandfather had been on his last legs.

It was then, after all those years, that I had learned how my grandmother, forbidden by her husband to have any contact with either my mother or me, had faithfully followed as many of my exploits as she could. She had kept voluminous scrapbooks that included clippings of everything to do with J. P. Beaumont. Some had been as early as Cub Scout endeavors. They included high school athletic competitions and later news mentions drawn from my long career at Seattle PD. There had been copies of Scott’s and Kelly’s newspaper birth announcements as well as a mention of Karen’s and my divorce proceedings. Wifely duty had kept Beverly from contacting me against her husband’s wishes, but seeing those secret scrapbooks, ones my grandfather had known nothing about, had told me everything I needed to know about Beverly Beaumont’s selfless love and constancy.

And then she met Lars. That had been an incredible bonus for all of us. Widowed by then, Beverly had come to help out at the memorial service for my late partner, Sue Danielson. Somehow my grandmother and Lars, my AA sponsor, ended up doing dishes together in the party-room kitchen at Belltown Terrace and had hit it off. They had married within months of meeting, and everything had been fine. Until now.

At Queen Anne Gardens I parked in the visitors’ lot and then signed in. “She’s not in their apartment, you know,” the desk clerk told me. “She’s been moved to our Care Center.”

Euphemistically speaking, Care Center was assisted living code for ICU. I thought they should have called it IWU-intensive waiting unit. There were two beds in the room, but only one was occupied. Lars, leaning on his cane and staring off into space, was seated next to Beverly. When he saw me he smiled and made an effort to rise.

“Sit,” I told him. “What’s happening?”

He shrugged and sank back down. “She’s sleeping now,” he said. “But she was asking for you earlier. That’s why I called.”

I looked at Beverly sleeping. I had never before seen her without her false teeth. That alone made her seem less dignified and far frailer. Somehow she appeared to be much smaller than I remembered, even though I had seen her only a few days earlier, shortly before Mel and I left for Ashland. At the time she had still been in their apartment. There she’d had Lars to see to it that she got wheeled back and forth to the dining room and to make sure she was eating. I doubted she was taking much nourishment now.

“Is she in any pain?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “She’s yust tired. We both are.”

A glance at Lars’s weathered face told me that was true. His eyes were red-rimmed and watery. “We had some good times,” he added. “But she’s ready to move on.”

I looked around the room. There was no heart monitor. No oxygen equipment. “Isn’t there something we should do? Some treatment? Something?”

Lars shook his head and gestured toward the bright yellow do not resuscitate placard that had been affixed to the door. “No.” he said. “There’s nothing. She yust needs to rest a little.”

“And so do you,” I said. “I’m here now. Why don’t you go take a nap?”

I was surprised by his ready agreement. “Ja, sure,” he said, getting shakily to his feet. “I t’ink you’re right.”

Left alone in the room with Beverly, I sat there for a long time simply watching her sleep. She seemed serene, untroubled, and unafraid. Leaving her asleep, I went out into the corridor and placed the necessary calls, telling Scott and Kelly what was going on. They both wanted to know if they should drop everything and come home.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “When I figure it out, I’ll let you know.”

“Have you talked to her doctor?” Kelly demanded. How my daughter somehow had transformed herself from a headstrong, dippy teenager into an amazingly practical adult is one of the mysteries of the universe, and it never fails to surprise me.

“Not yet,” I told her. “But I will.”

Ten minutes after I finished giving the news to my son Scott, my cell phone rang. “Sorry about this,” Dave Livingston said. “Anything I can do?”

Dave is my first wife’s second husband-Karen’s official widower. He’s also my children’s stepfather. I suspected that Kelly was the one who had seen fit to call him and let him know, but it could just as easily have been Scott. Dave is a likable guy and both my kids look up to him. Either way, I was glad someone had notified Dave, and I was touched that he had gone to the trouble of calling.

“No,” I said. “For right now, I guess it’s just a matter of waiting.”

“Waiting’s tough,” he said. I understood without anything more being said that the man knew whereof he spoke.

Back in Beverly’s room I castigated myself for not stopping by Belltown Terrace on the way and picking up Kyle’s picture. Not that it would have made any difference. She was asleep, and I doubted if she would ever waken enough to see the framed photo Kelly had wanted Beverly to have.

My grandmother had been a young bride when she had my mother, and my mother had been a very young not-bride when I was born. And so at a time when other men my age were losing their mothers, my mother, who had died young, was already gone, and I was losing my grandmother instead.

I sat there for the rest of the long afternoon listening to Beverly breathe, thinking about the few short years we’d had together, and regretting the many years we’d spent apart. I was glad for the happy times she and Lars had shared and felt sad when I realized how much it would hurt for him to lose a second well-loved wife.

In his day, Lars had been a serious drinker (that’s why he was my AA sponsor, after all). He had loved his first wife, Hannah, but I knew from things he’d told me over the years that he’d also neglected her-the way alcoholics often do, not out of any particular malice but because nothing’s more important to them than booze. Lars had done much better by Beverly, and losing her would be hard on him. I wondered, in fact, if he’d survive it.

Lars came limping back into the room and resumed his bedside watch about the time the sun went down behind the grain terminal out in Elliott Bay. The sky was layered with banks of clouds that turned pink, purple, and finally gray as the setting sun sank beneath the western horizon. I went down the hall to the nurse’s station and brought back a second chair.

“No matter what,” Lars said quietly, “I wouldn’t have missed this.”

I nodded. That’s always the bottom line where love is concerned. Is loving someone ever worth the ultimate price of losing them?

“And she’s very proud of you, Beau,” Lars added. “Always has been.”

That got me. “I know,” I said, blinking back tears.

Mel turned up about then, bringing with her Kyle’s missing photo. I was grateful she had gone to the trouble in the few spare minutes she had between the end of work and the start of her evening board meeting. After showing Kyle’s photo to Lars, who was suitably unimpressed, I placed the small framed photo on the nightstand next to Beverly’s glass and water pitcher. Mel was smart enough not to ask how I was doing or how long I’d be because I had no idea.

I badgered Lars into going down to the dining room for some dinner just before they closed. He offered to take me along, but I wasn’t hungry. He had barely left the room when Beverly’s eyes popped open. She looked first at the chair Lars had just vacated, then gazed anxiously around the room.

“It’s all right,” I assured her. “He went downstairs for some dinner.”

“Oh,” she said.

Then she mumbled something I couldn’t make out. For a moment I wondered if she even knew who I was. When I asked her to repeat what she’d said, she opened her eyes and looked at me impatiently.

“Where’s Mel?” she demanded.

That was clear enough. It left no doubt about whether she recognized me, and it told me plainly enough that my grandmother was in full possession of her faculties.

“Mel had to go to a meeting,” I said. “She’ll be back later.”

“Lars said you were on a trip,” Beverly mumbled a few seconds later. “Did you marry her?”

So that was it. Beverly had evidently decided that Mel’s and my trip to Ashland had been something it wasn’t.

“No,” I said. “We drove down to Ashland to see Kelly and Jeremy and their new baby…” I reached for the photo to show Beverly her new great-great-grandson. Ignoring Kyle, Beverly stared directly into my face.

“Marry her,” she commanded forcefully. “Mel’s a good girl, and she’s good for you. Don’t let her slip away.”

That single fragment of forceful and lucid conversation seemed to sap all Beverly’s strength and energy. She soon drifted off to sleep once more and was still asleep when Lars returned from the dining room.

“How is she?” he asked.

“Still sleeping,” I said. Somehow I didn’t mention to him what she had said earlier. I didn’t say anything then and I didn’t later as the night wore on and Beverly’s breathing grew more and more shallow. I didn’t want to admit to Lars that she’d roused herself long enough to give me one last set of marching orders. And I didn’t want him to know that, in what might well be her last waking moments, Beverly had been thinking about me rather than him.

By midnight it was over and she was gone. I stayed with Lars long enough to see him settled in the apartment he and Beverly had shared. By the time I left Queen Anne Gardens the clouds had returned and it was raining again. A little past one, I let myself into the condo at Belltown Terrace. Mel, with her feet tucked under her, was curled up in my recliner, sound asleep. I stood there for a long moment or two watching her-stunned by how amazingly beautiful she was and wondering how much time we might have to be together, or if we even should. Finally I reached out and touched her gently on the shoulder. She awakened instantly.

Mel searched my face and read what was written there. “Beverly’s gone, then?” Mel asked.

I nodded.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“So am I,” I agreed. “Sorrier than I would have thought possible. Let’s go to bed.”