Long Time Gone

CHAPTER 12

While waiting for Mel to arrive, I finally got on the phone to my insurance guy, who told me he’d make arrangements to have a car delivered to Belltown Terrace for me in the morning. I also tried calling Lars and Beverly. When there was no answer at their place, I left a message on their machine saying I was thinking about them. Then I took a shower and put on clean clothes.

A little over an hour later, when I opened the door in answer to Mel’s ring, she walked into my apartment in a pungent cloud of garlic.

“Hope you don’t mind chicken or garlic,” she said. “It’s shish tawouk from the Mediterranean Kitchen. They’re right next door to where I live.”

“I didn’t know you lived on Queen Anne Hill,” I said.

She looked at me and rolled her eyes. “I don’t,” she said. “I mean the one in downtown Bellevue. I live in the Parkvue Apartments, just down from Bel-Square.” She set the bags of food on the kitchen counter, along with a bottle of chardonnay. “And I brought along an opener in case you didn’t have one.”

“I have openers,” I said. “And glasses. I just don’t keep wine around anymore. Or booze.”

“In AA?” The offhand way she asked the question made it sound as though she knew something about the subject. I nodded.

“My ex sobered up after we got a divorce,” Mel said with a shrug. “Pissed the hell out of me, too. I guess I thought he should have done it for me, but of course he had to do it for himself in order for it to take. We’re on reasonably good terms now,” she added, “as long as he stays on his side of the country and I stay on mine.”

“That what caused the divorce?” I asked. “Drinking?”

“Booze was only a part of the problem,” she said. “He’s a liberal and I’m not. I think I thought I could fix that, too, but I couldn’t. We called it irreconcilable differences. Fortunately, we didn’t have any kids, so there wasn’t anyone else for us to screw up.”

In a matter of a few minutes I learned more about Mel Soames than I had picked up in months of working with her, and her lighthearted way of chatting about things put me at ease in a way I hadn’t expected. While I busied myself with uncorking the wine she made herself at home, searching through cupboards and drawers until she found enough dishes and silverware to set the table. She had transferred the food to serving dishes and was surveying her handiwork when I handed her a glass of wine.

“Thanks,” she said. “Now what are you going to drink?”

“Coffee,” I answered. “I made a new pot just before you got here.”

“You can drink coffee at night and it doesn’t bother you?”

“I can drink coffee round the clock,” I said. That wasn’t entirely true, but I thought the comment hit the right notes of casual macho-dudeness.

“You’re lucky,” she said. “The other night I hardly slept at all after you filled me full of caffeine.”

“Sorry about that,” I told her.

“Don’t apologize. Staying awake late at night is good for me sometimes. Gives me a chance to think about stuff I usually manage to ignore during the day.”

I like to think of the Mediterranean Kitchen’s shish tawouk as garlic squared. The fluffy saffron rice is infused with garlic and then the grilled hunks of chicken are covered with a milky crushed-garlic sauce and it comes with lentil soup and salad. The first savory bites were nothing short of glorious.

“You like it?” she asked.

“Love it,” I returned.

She grinned. “My ex didn’t like garlic, either. Now maybe you’d better tell me how come you called. I have a feeling something happened.”

There it was again, that sudden switching of topics and moods that women do so effortlessly and, in the process, drive men nuts. Because I knew I was about to breach Ron’s confidence, it took me a moment to answer.

“Ron Peters fired his attorney today,” I said for starters.

Mel nodded. “I know. I met him-Ralph Ames. Didn’t expect to like him, but he seems like a pretty squared-away guy.”

“Ralph is squared away,” I told her. “And he would have done a good job for Ron. The problem is, I believe Ron is getting ready to plead guilty to a murder he didn’t commit.”

“I think you’re right,” Mel Soames said.

That stopped me. I hadn’t expected the two of us to be on the same side of this question. “But the other night I thought you said…”

“I wouldn’t be much of a cop if I let my personal experience get in the way of an investigation, would I?” she asked.

“No, but what changed your mind?”

“Facts, mostly,” she said. “Like the fact that someone had wiped down Ron’s Camry for fingerprints, but they left all the blood in the trunk. Brad and I think someone’s trying to frame Ron Peters for his ex-wife’s murder, and we’re thinking whoever did it is likely one of his own family members.”

“Heather,” I said at once.

“The younger daughter,” Mel confirmed with a nod. “The one who was the subject of the custody battle and who didn’t want to go live with her mother.”

I felt a sudden wave of relief. If Mel and Brad had already reached many of the same conclusions, that let me off the hook.

“Have you spoken to her directly?”

“No. For the moment, it’s easier for us to play along and act like Ron’s the only game in town. In the meantime, we’re talking to everyone else and gathering what additional information we can. We’re hoping to have what we need so we can question Heather either before tomorrow’s funeral or after it.”

“Ron isn’t going to want you anywhere near her.”

“What Ron Peters wants and what he gets are two entirely different things,” Mel said.

“Are you looking at anyone else for this?”

Mel looked at me sharply. “Any suggestions?”

“What about Michael Lujan? He was at Ron and Amy’s this afternoon, raising hell about the funeral tomorrow, throwing his considerable weight around, and insisting Bread of Life be part of it.”

“Ah,” Mel said. “Rosemary’s attorney. Now there’s a guy who’s completely convinced Ron did it no matter what the evidence may say. What happened?”

“Ron told him to take a hike, and he did, running his Escalade over my 928 in the process.”

“Ouch,” Mel said. “Hope he didn’t hurt it.”

“Smashed it flat is more like it, but getting back to Rosemary, I’m worried about having tunnel vision here. Lujan is certainly more involved than I’d expect. And what about the clients who show up at Bread of Life? Did any of them have some kind of beef with the victim?”

“You don’t want us to look at Heather any more than her father does,” Mel observed with a smile.

“I suppose you’re right about that.”

“But think about it. She lives there. She’d have access to her father’s car keys, and my guess is that she also knows how to gain access to his weapons. According to Tracy, Heather went to her room right after dinner that night and stayed there.”

“That’s not what I heard,” I told her. “That may be the story she and Tracy told Ron and Amy, but I have it on good authority that Tracy and Heather let themselves in and out of the house overnight with complete impunity.”

“That’s pretty typical,” Mel said. “When I was in junior high and high school, I pulled that same stunt.”

“Maybe not quite,” I said. “According to a kid named Dillon, Heather Peters spent most of Friday night at his house.”

“Dillon would be Dillon Middleton,” Mel said. “Tracy told us about him. He’s the boyfriend, isn’t he?”

I nodded.

“How do you know him?”

“I never heard his last name, but the little creep gave me a ride down the hill in his garbage-heap Ford Focus.” I retrieved my notebook from the entryway table, tore out the page with Dillon’s plate number written on it, and handed the paper over to Mel.

“He’s Canadian, then?” Mel asked after studying it for a moment.

“Maybe,” I said. “But whatever nationality he is, he’s also a worm who ought to be brought up on charges of statutory rape. Heather’s still not sixteen.”

“Not old enough to screw around,” Mel said, “but she’s old enough to be a homicide suspect. There’s something wrong with that picture.”

“What about the security video?” I asked. “Can you tell whether or not she’s the one driving the car?”

“It’s grainy. You can see the vehicle but not the driver. We’ve sent it off to the FBI in hopes their people can enhance it. And Brad has been collecting security tapes from Friday night and early Saturday morning on every route we can think of from here to Tacoma and back in hopes of coming up with a video that might give us a clearer shot of the Camry and its occupant or maybe even occupants.”

“As in more than one?”

“Rosemary wasn’t a tiny person,” Mel said. “If Heather actually did it, she might have needed help.”

“Heather and Dillon together?” I suggested.

“Maybe. The crime lab folks are going over the car looking for anything and everything. One way or the other, we will find out who was driving the car.”

“And break Ron Peters’s heart,” I said.

“That, too,” she agreed.

When dinner was over, we cleared away the dishes and then adjourned to the living room. I turned on the gas log fire while she settled in the window seat. “So tell me about the case you’re working on,” she said.

I did. Mel listened, making occasional comments and suggestions as I told her about Sister Mary Katherine and her long-suppressed memory of a brutal murder. The easy give-and-take between us was almost like…having a partner again, and that worried me. Over the years I’ve been very hard on partners.

“Fifty-plus years later, you work on a cold case for what-two days-and it’s solved already? How could the detectives have missed it the first time around?”

“Wink Winkler missed it because he wanted to miss it,” I said. “Why else would he have lied about it today? And how else would he have known that the eyewitness was female?”

“What’s your plan?” Mel asked.

“Since Elvira is evidently still alive, I’m going to track her down and see what, if anything, she has to say.”

“You’ve already identified her as a suspect. Are you going to read her her rights?”

“Absolutely. I’m not going to do anything that might screw up this case. Would you mind taking a look at the Sister Mary Katherine videos? You might notice something I’ve missed.”

“I’d love to,” Mel Soames said, and we did. For the next two hours or so, we sat side by side-with me in my recliner and Mel cross-legged on the floor-and watched the videos, starting, stopping, and replaying them as we went. I was about to put the last one into the VCR when my phone rang.

It was late by then, almost ten. I checked the number on caller ID. When the name Lars Jenssen appeared, I picked up.

“Beau?” Lars said, sounding relieved. “I’m glad you’re there.”

“Why? Is something wrong?”

“Ya, sure,” he said. “I yust got back from the hospital. They took Beverly over to Swedish in Ballard.”

I felt my heart constrict. “What’s wrong? Do you need me to go there?”

“No. Not now. She’s sleeping. Has a touch of pneumonia, is all. They’re keeping her for a day or two.”

I wasn’t reassured. At age ninety-one, “a touch” of pneumonia can be very serious. And I was also more than a little annoyed that no one had bothered to let me know that Beverly’s condition had changed from being a little “under the weather” to something potentially fatal.

“Are you sure there’s nothing I can do?” I asked. “What about taking you back to the hospital in the morning? Will you need a ride?”

“No. I talked to the lady at the front desk. Queen Anne Gardens has a van that takes residents where they need to go. I’ve already lined up a ride. Now I yust want to go to bed.”

“You’ll call if you need anything?”

“You bet,” he said and hung up.

Mel was watching me closely. “Is someone ill?” she asked.

I nodded. “My grandmother. She’s ninety-one, and they’ve slapped her in the hospital with pneumonia.”

“She’s the one who made the afghan?” Mel asked.

I nodded again. “Beverly Jenssen. My mother was pregnant with me and unmarried when my father died in a motorcycle accident. My grandfather-my biological grandfather-disapproved of unwed mothers and threw Mother out of the house. She raised me on her own and remained estranged from her parents for as long as she lived. In fact, I never met them until I stumbled across them by accident a few years ago. By then my grandfather had suffered a stroke and was ready to let bygones be bygones. After my grandfather died, Beverly met and married an old friend of mine, Lars Jenssen. He’s the one who just called. He’s also an independent old cuss who won’t even let me give him a ride to the hospital.”

I didn’t add that, other than my kids, Lars and Beverly were all the family I had left in the world, but I think Mel picked up on that anyway. “You’re sure there’s nothing we should do?”

“Lars as good as told me to mind my own business.”

There was a knock on the door, and it startled me. Belltown Terrace is a secure building. People inside the building usually don’t go knocking on doors at that hour of the night, and if it was someone from outside, either the doorman should have let me know a visitor was coming up or that person should have announced himself over the security phone at the front door or in the elevator lobby.

“Who is it?” I asked without opening the door.

“It’s me,” Paul Kramer growled from the far side of the door. “Now let me in before I break the damned door down!”

I opened the door to find him, bristling with rage, standing in the corridor.

“Who let you up here?” I demanded.

“My badge let me up here,” he returned. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, Beaumont?”

“Until you knocked on the door, I was sitting in my own living room and minding my own business. Why?”

“I want to know what you’re up to. If you had told me what the deal was instead of going off and leaving me with that evidence box and nothing to go on, maybe she wouldn’t be dead.”

“Who’s dead?” I asked, sure his answer would be Sister Mary Katherine. It wasn’t.

“Elvira Marchbank was found dead this evening at the bottom of her basement stairs,” he said. “And I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that she would die under suspicious circumstances on the very same day I catch you prowling around the cold case file of her sister-in-law, who was murdered some fifty-plus years ago. So now that you’ve managed to get my name instead of yours on the checkout sheet for that evidence box, you’re going to tell me what the hell is going on.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Don’t blame me because your name is on the sheet. I seem to remember your insisting on taking charge of that cold case box all on your own.”

Kramer looked as though he was going to explode. “I asked you straight out what this was all about and you-”

“Is something the matter?” Mel asked, stepping into view behind me.

Kramer was taken aback. Clearly he hadn’t expected me to have a visitor at this hour of the night. If Elvira was dead and the captain was worried about a public relations problem, the last thing he needed was a witness to this little tirade. I, on the other hand, was worried about Sister Mary Katherine for fear she could be next on someone’s list.

“This is police business,” Kramer snapped. “Tell your girlfriend it’s got nothing to do with her and to stay the hell out of it.”

I was about to explain that Mel Soames was a colleague of mine and not a girlfriend, but Mel handled that on her own.

“Would you like to see my badge?” she asked sweetly. “Or should I do us all a favor and start out by shoving it up your ass?”

I could have kissed her-probably should have, especially considering the fact that her comment left Kramer utterly speechless for the better part of a minute. Finally, with blood throbbing in his temples, he turned his fury on me.

“If Mrs. Marchbank’s death could have been prevented by my knowing what was going on-”

“Wait a minute, Kramer,” I interrupted. “I told you if you wanted that information, you should call my boss. I even gave you his number. Did you call him?”

“Well, no, but-”

“Sorry. No buts allowed,” I returned. “If you had gone by the book, you would have had the info. Aren’t you the guy who’s always such a stickler for going through channels and across desks? As I told you before, I don’t work for you or Seattle PD anymore. If you’ve got questions about my case, talk to Harry I. Ball or, better yet, talk to Ross Connors himself. Once they give the okay, I’ll be glad to talk to you or your investigators about this. Just have them drop by. Obviously you know where I live.”

Kramer turned and stalked back down the hallway. “Why didn’t you tell him about Sister Mary Katherine?” Mel asked, once the elevator door shut behind him.

“He’s a jerk,” I replied.

“That’s true,” she said, “and readily apparent. But I still don’t know why you shut him down like that.”

“Because Paul Kramer and I have a history,” I replied.

I expected her to argue the point or to ask for more details, but she didn’t.

“Okay,” Mel said. “Makes sense to me.”

With that she went back over to the window seat, plugged her feet back into her shoes, and picked up her coat. “It’s late,” she said. “I need to be going.” She paused by the door. “See you tomorrow. At the office?”

“Probably.”

She left then. As I took the last of the Sister Katherine tapes out of the VCR, I asked myself Mel Soames’s question. Why hadn’t I told Kramer? Wasn’t I being as territorial as he had been in the evidence room? And I would be talking to him or at least to the detectives assigned to investigate Elvira Marchbank’s death. All I was doing was putting him off for a few hours-until the AG’s office was open for business the next morning.

But the really troubling part was a question raised by Kramer himself. Had my refusal to give him the information contributed to what had happened to Elvira? She had been found at the bottom of a flight of stairs. Had she fallen or had she been pushed? By being stubborn, I had put myself out of the loop. Paul Kramer didn’t know about Sister Mary Katherine, but I didn’t know about Elvira. In the game of tit for tat I was as much of a jerk as he was. That was not high praise.

So what was I going to do about it? I worried about it for a while. Finally I picked up the phone and dialed a number I knew by heart, one that brought me to the homicide desk at Seattle PD. Sergeant Angie Jerrold answered the phone. I was relieved to hear a familiar voice, and she seemed happy to hear from me as well.

“What can I do for you?”

“Who’s assigned to the Marchbank case?” I asked.

“Which one?” she asked. “As of tonight, there are two of them on the board,” she said. “Madeline and Elvira.”

I was stunned to learn that based on Elvira’s death, Kramer had reopened Madeline’s long cold case. I was stunned and a little relieved.

“Either,” I said. “Whoever’s available.”

Which is how I ended up talking to Detective Kendall Jackson. “What can I do for you, Mr. Beaumont?”

Jackson had been a uniformed officer and still working the cars when I left the department. Having him call me Mr. Beaumont made me feel slightly ancient.

“Which Marchbank belongs to you?” I asked.

“Elvira,” he said. “Hank and I just got back from the crime scene.”

Hank was Detective Henry Ramsdahl.

“I’m working Madeline,” I said. “For the AG’s office. Captain Kramer was here a little while ago. He suggested it might be a good idea if we compared notes.”

“Sure thing,” Jackson said. “Sounds good to me. What do you have?”

“An eyewitness.”

“To Madeline’s murder?” He sounded incredulous. “From 1950?”

“Yup.”

“When can we talk to this witness?”

“That’s a little tougher,” I said. “She’s a nun. Lives in a convent up on Whidbey Island.”

“Can I call her up?”

That was when I realized that in all my transactions with Sister Mary Katherine, no one-not Sister Mary Katherine and not Freddy Mac-had given me her phone number. I knew the convent had to have a telephone. Hadn’t she told me someone named Sister Therese had surfed the Net for information on Alfred and Elvira Marchbank?

“I don’t have that number right now,” I said. “Once I get it, I can have her call you. Or better yet, maybe I can convince her to come talk to you.”

“If you can talk a nun out of a convent, you must be some kind of guy.”

“We’ll see,” I said. “If I can get her to come to town, how hard will it be to meet up with you?”

“Not hard at all,” Jackson returned. “You tell us when and where, and Hank and I will be there. Captain Kramer gave us our marching orders. Both cases are highest priority.”

Captain Kramer! Just hearing the word captain used in conjunction with Kramer’s name rankled, but I was going to have to get used to it.

“All right, then,” I said. “Let’s see what we can do.”

Good to my word, I was up and on the phone to Freddy Mac bright and early the next morning, asking for Sister Mary Katherine’s phone number.

“Is it too early to call?” I asked after he gave me what I needed.

“Hardly,” Fred said with a laugh. “You won’t be waking her. She tells me morning devotionals start at five A.M.”

So I dialed Saint Benedict’s and was put through to Sister Mary Katherine. “Beaumont here,” I said. “I’m wondering if you can come back to Seattle today to meet with some Seattle PD detectives.”

“This evening, perhaps,” she said. “Sister Therese and Sister Margaret just left in the van to run some errands. They won’t be back until around lunchtime. I could leave after that.”

I didn’t want the meeting with the Seattle PD homicide detectives to conflict with Rosemary Peters’s funeral. I needed it to be earlier instead of later. “What if I came out to Whidbey and picked you up?”

“That seems dreadfully inconvenient for you. Does it really have to be today?” Sister Mary Katherine asked. “I’ve been away for several days, and I just got home late yesterday.”

“Elvira Marchbank is dead,” I told her.

“Oh, no,” Mary Katherine murmured. Her regretful tone surprised me. “She was fine when I saw her. What happened?”

“When you saw her?” I repeated. “When was that?”

“Yesterday afternoon,” Sister Mary Katherine said. “After our lunch. I decided to drive back to the old neighborhood just to look around. I stopped outside the foundation office and wondered what to do. Finally I worked up my courage and went inside. When I asked to see Mrs. Marchbank, the woman there told me Elvira wasn’t available. But as I was leaving, a limo drove up to the house next door-the place where my parents and I used to live. It turns out that’s where Elvira lives now. The limo was bringing her home from a doctor’s appointment. Even after all these years, I recognized her the moment she stepped out of the car.”

I was thunderstruck. “You didn’t talk to her, did you?”

“Of course I did,” Sister Mary Katherine said. “After all these years, it seemed like the right thing to do, and I’m glad I did, too. She was old and frail and she told me she was sorry.”

“Sorry?” I asked.

“Sorry about the part she played in Mimi’s death. She said she’d always known I’d come back someday and that she was finally ready to ‘do the right thing.’ I took that to mean that she was prepared to turn herself in and accept responsibility for her actions. What happened to her?”

“She fell down a flight of stairs. The detectives working the case seem to think she was pushed.”

“That’s terrible,” Sister Katherine said. “I’m so sorry.”

From my point of view, terrible just about covered it. Sister Mary Katherine had just gone from being a homicide eyewitness to being a possible homicide suspect.

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