Long Time Gone Part 10

"Sure," I said, "but only if it's my treat."

Sister Mary Katherine waited while I negotiated with the waitress for eggs and bacon. Once the server departed, I reached for my briefcase. "I brought along few things for show-and-tell," I told her.

"Tell me this first," she said. "I need to know. Were Mimi's killers ever caught?"

"No," I said. "They never were."

Disappointment shrouded her face. "They probably would have been had I told the authorities what I had seen at the time."

"Maybe," I said. "But you need to know that it's possible the perpetrators were very influential people in Seattle at the time of the murder."

Her eyes widened. "You've actually identified suspects?"

I nodded. "Have you ever heard of the Marchbank Foundation?" I asked.

Sister Mary Katherine nodded. "I believe it was started by Madeline's brother and his wife."

Now it was my turn to be surprised. "You know about Albert and Elvira Marchbank then?"

Sister Mary Katherine laughed and shrugged. "I live on Whidbey Island, not on the moon," she said. Then she grew serious. "After you and Fred left last night, I called home. Sister Therese got on the computer and tracked down some information for me on Madeline Marchbank. In the process I learned something about her brother and sister-in-law as well."

"Have you seen pictures of them?" I asked. "There are photos posted on the Web site."

Sister Mary Katherine shook her head. "I won't have a chance to do that until later on this evening, when I get home."

"You don't have to wait that long," I said, pulling out my file of photos. "I brought them with me. Take a look at these."

Sister Mary Katherine's hand shook slightly as she opened the file. The topmost photo was of the Marchbank Foundation headquarters. Frowning, she studied it for some time. "This one looks familiar somehow, but I don't know why," she said. "I've had dealings with many of the local charitable foundations, but not this one. I never remember going there."

She put that paper down and picked up my copy of the newspaper photo taken after Madeline Marchbank's funeral. Sister Mary Katherine stared at it in utter silence for the better part of a minute. As she did so, all color drained from her face. At last she opened her fingers and the photo drifted away like a leaf caught in a breeze. I reached out and caught it in midair.

"You recognize them?"

Sister Mary Katherine nodded. "The man and woman in the picture are the ones I saw that day," she said in a voice that was barely audible. "The woman in the wheelchair was Mimi's mother. I remember all of them now. I remember everything. The looks, the smells, the colors." She shuddered.

Freddy Mac had suggested that seeing the photos might finally unleash the memories Sister Mary Katherine had kept buried for more than fifty years, but I guess I hadn't really expected it to happen. Alternating waves of shock and horror registered on Mary Katherine's face. Watching her, I realized she was once again reliving that terrible Sat.u.r.day afternoon. This time, though, she was doing so without the emotional buffer that had vividly preserved the awful memories, all the while keeping them safely out of conscious reach.

I'm a cop, not a counselor, so while Sister Mary Katherine grappled with this new reality, I sat there feeling like a dolt and fervently wishing Fred MacKinzie were on hand to do and say the right things. For several long minutes she sat with her head bowed and with one hand covering her eyes. I wondered if she was crying or praying. At last she seemed to get a grip.

"It was so awful," she said at last. "No wonder I suppressed it."

"Are you going to be all right?" I asked.

"I think so," she said.

For the next hour or so, over the comforting everyday background noises of clinking gla.s.sware and cutlery, we went over everything Sister Mary Katherine was now able to recall from that terrible afternoon-the gory details her conscious mind had concealed for so many years. I took careful notes, but it turned out there was little an adult Sister Mary Katherine could add to the hypnotically induced revelations Bonnie Jean Dunleavy had already made. A lesser woman might have fallen apart during that stressful interview, but once Sister Mary Katherine had regained her composure, she kept it.

At last, exhausted, she leaned back in her chair. "Why?" she asked. "What made them decide to kill her? What could possibly have been so bad or so important that murder was their only option?"

"At least the only option they could see," I countered. "And the answer to your question is that I have no idea. Desperate people seldom see the world in the same terms you and I do. On the tapes you mentioned several times that the man, Albert, seemed angry when he was talking to Mimi. You said you thought he was asking Mimi for something and that she kept telling him no."

"Maybe his business was in some kind of trouble," Sister Mary Katherine speculated. "Maybe he needed money."

"That could be," I told her. "Money woes often translate into motives for murder, but as I said before, Albert Marchbank was a big deal in Seattle back then. If he was in any kind of financial difficulty at the time, I should be able to find some record of it. But then again sometimes murders grow out of nothing more than a bad case of sibling rivalry."

"Like Cain and Abel," Sister Mary Katherine murmured.

"That's right," I said. "So maybe sometimes it's not such a bad thing to be an only child."

She shook her head. "The whole idea is awful."

"Murder is always awful," I returned. "For everyone involved. No exceptions. Now, if you're up to it, let's go back to the murder scene again. Can you tell me anything at all about the weapon?"

"About the knife?" Sister Mary Katherine frowned in concentration before she answered, as though trying to peer at the scene through the fog of time. "It was just a regular knife-an ordinary kitchen knife-but it came from Elvira's purse. I saw her open the purse and take it out."

"But the newspaper article said that police thought the knife was most likely taken from Mimi's own kitchen."

"Then the article and the police were both wrong," Mary Katherine declared. "Or if it was Mimi's knife, it was taken from her kitchen at some time other than on that day. I saw Elvira take it from her purse after she got out of the car. And if they brought the knife along with them when they came to Mimi's house, wouldn't that mean premeditation?"

"Yes, it would," I agreed. "You mentioned Elvira getting out of the car. Let's talk about that vehicle for a moment." I returned to the file folder and pulled out a stock photo of a 1949 Caribbean coral Frazer Deluxe, one I had downloaded from the Internet. "Does this look familiar?"

Sister Mary Katherine studied the photo for only a matter of seconds before she nodded. "This is the one," she said. "Or one just like it."

"The officer in charge of the investigation was a Seattle Police Department detective named William Winkler. Do you ever remember talking to him about what you had seen?"

"No."

"And you never spoke to any other police officer about what happened that day?"

"As far as I know, no one ever asked me about any of it," Mary Katherine said. "They may have talked to my parents, but not to me. They should have, shouldn't they?"

"If they'd been doing their jobs," I responded.

Bonnie Jean may have been scared by what she had witnessed and by being threatened by one of the killers, but I couldn't believe she would have kept quiet if any of the detectives on the case had actually bothered asking her about it.

"What about Mimi's funeral?" I continued. "Did you go?"

Sister Mary Katherine shook her head. "Not that I remember. My parents probably thought I was too young to understand what was going on."

"Did your parents attend?"

"I don't believe so, but I don't know for sure."

"But the woman was your friend," I objected. "It seems to me they would have gone if for no other reason than to pay their respects."

"It's strange," Sister Mary Katherine said. "It's as though seeing the pictures has reopened that whole chapter in my life. Now I remember it all-not only Mimi's death, but the rest of it, too. I thought we were friends, but Mother didn't agree. She said Mimi felt sorry for us because she was rich and we were poor. Mother said that whatever Mimi did for me she was doing out of pity or charity, not out of friendship. But regardless, Mimi was nice to me. She seemed magical, almost like a fairy G.o.dmother. She taught me to play hopscotch and jacks. Sometimes she'd read to me from books she brought home from the library. A few times, we even walked up the street to the drugstore and she bought me strawberry sodas."

Mary Katherine reached across the table and picked up the picture of the Marchbank Foundation headquarters. This time she nodded in recognition. "Now I remember. That's her house-the one where Mimi used to live. The house we lived in, Mrs. Ridder's house, was right over here-to the right of this driveway."

On the tapes, Bonnie Jean couldn't remember the landlady's name. Now the name emerged effortlessly.

"How long did you live there?"

"Not very long-a few months maybe. We must have moved out within weeks of when Mimi was killed, but I could be mistaken about that."

"Any idea where you went?"

Sister Mary Katherine shook her head. "We moved so many times over the years, I'm really not sure."

The waitress stopped by to refill our cups. "Is Elvira Marchbank still alive?" Sister Mary Katherine asked.

"I don't know," I told her. "She could be. Nothing I found this morning indicated otherwise. Albert died in the early seventies, but as far as I know, Elvira's still around."

"That doesn't seem fair," Sister Mary Katherine said. "How is it possible that Mimi died so young and yet Elvira is still walking around free as a bird after all these years? If she's still alive, she must be in her eighties. I can't imagine living with that kind of guilt for so many years. I wonder if she ever feels any remorse about what she did."

"I doubt it," I said. "Most of the killers I've met come up short in the remorse department."

"After such a long time, could she still be convicted and go to jail?"

"There's no statute of limitations on murder," I said. "And I'm sure they have some sort of geriatric wing in the women's prison down at Purdy, but I wouldn't count on a conviction if I were you."

"Why not?"

"Time, for one thing. As you said, the crime happened years ago. I'm going to do my best to send her there, but you'll have to be patient. It won't be easy."

"Why not? There's a witness," Sister Mary Katherine objected, "an eyewitness who saw the whole thing."

"Yes, but we're talking about an eyewitness who took half a century to speak up. A good defense attorney will tear your testimony to shreds. And a jury is going to wonder what caused you to suddenly recall those events now. There are a lot of people out there who don't go along with the idea of repressed memories, so I can't base my entire case on your word alone. I'm going to have to dig up enough corroborating evidence that a prosecutor and a jury will be willing to go with it."

"Can you find that kind of evidence?" she asked.

"I'll do my best," I told her. "Finding evidence is what I do. It's what I've done all my life."

"While all I've been doing is praying and sewing," she said. I heard the self-reproach in her voice and knew Sister Mary Katherine was still holding Bonnie Jean Dunleavy's silence against her.

"Sometimes," I told her, "praying is the only thing that works."

"It seems to me I should be the one telling you about the wonders of prayer," Sister Mary Katherine said with a tight smile.

"That's all right," I told her. "No extra charge."

She raised her hand, flagged down the waitress, and asked for her bill. She turned down my offer to pick up the check. "I like to pay my own way," she said. "And I need to be heading out. I have some shopping to do before I leave town, but Sister Therese expects to have the road cleared by early this afternoon, and I want to be home well before dark."

"I hadn't realized the highway on Whidbey was closed."

"Not the highway," she said. "That's open. The problem is our road-the private one that goes from the highway to the convent. There's snow and several downed trees as well. But I've been away for days now, and I'm ready to be home, even if I have to get out and walk."

Sister Mary Katherine struck me as the kind of woman who wouldn't be above hiking through snow and ice to get where she wanted to go, but I wondered if she was strong-willed enough to deal with all the emotional fallout from that long-ago Sat.u.r.day afternoon.

I helped her retrieve her bags from the bellman, then we stood together under the covered portico waiting for our vehicles to be brought around. A steady downpour was falling on the street outside. Compared with the previous days of bitter cold, the forty-degree weather felt downright balmy.

"Are you sure you're going to be all right?" I asked again.

Sister Mary Katherine nodded. "Yes," she said. "But it's not easy. I just never thought I'd be involved in something like this. These kinds of things aren't supposed to happen to people in my line of work."

"You'd be surprised," I said.

The parking valet drove up in a white Odyssey minivan. Once Sister Mary Katherine's bags had been loaded, she turned back to me and held out her hand. "Thank you, Beau," she said. "I'm sure working with you and Freddy-with people I know and trust-has made this far less traumatic than it would have been otherwise."

"You're welcome," I said. I handed her one of my cards. "Call me if you remember anything more."

She studied the card for a moment before slipping it into the pocket of her coat. "All right," she said. "And you'll let me know what's going on?"

"Yes, but remember, this is going to take time."

"I'll keep that in mind," she said.

I watched her drive away. By then my 928 was there as well. I got into the Porsche and headed for SPD. Melting snow and the warm driving rain combined to turn Seattle's downtown streets into rivers. I felt sorry for hapless pedestrians trying to stay out of the way of rooster tails of oily, dirty spray kicked up in the wake of pa.s.sing cars.

Even though the department is now in its new digs up the hill from the old Public Safety Building, out of habit I drove to the old parking garage on James where I used to be a regular customer. No one there recognized me or the 928. And the same thing was true for the new Seattle Police Department Headquarters building on Fifth Avenue. None of the officers on duty in the cla.s.sy lobby had any idea of who I was. After being issued a visitor's pa.s.s, I went upstairs to Records.

When I told the woman in charge what I wanted, she shook her head. "Oh, honey," she said. "All cold case stuff that old is still down in the vault at the old Public Safety Building. You know where that is?"

"I'm pretty sure I can find it," I a.s.sured her.

"Good. You go right on down there then. I'll call ahead and let them know you're coming."

Being a typical Seattle native, I have a natural aversion to umbrellas. By the time I walked first up the hill and then back down again, I was wet through. And once I reached the building that had been my place of employment for so many years, I found out you really can't go home again. The Public Safety Building, soon scheduled to meet the wrecking ball, was a pale shadow of its former self. One side of the once busy lobby was stacked with the cots used by a men's homeless shelter that temporarily occupies that s.p.a.ce overnight. A janitor was haphazardly mopping the granite floor. He nodded at me as I made my way to the bored security guard stationed near the elevator bank.

"Bas.e.m.e.nt, right?" he asked, putting down his worn paperback.

That meant someone had called ahead to say I was coming. "Yes," I said.

"Downstairs," he said. "Take a right when you exit the elevators and go to the end of the corridor."

Here no pa.s.s was necessary. The lobby may have been a cot warehouse, but the bas.e.m.e.nt corridor was worse. It was stacked floor to ceiling with a collection of decrepit gray metal desks, shelving units and cubicle dividers, along with dozens of broken-down desk chairs missing backs and casters. I suspect my old fifth-floor desk was there in that collection of wreckage that looked more like a gigantic garage sale than a corridor.

I dodged my way through the maze of furniture and into what's called the vault. The clerk in charge of the evidence room was a middle-aged lady whom I didn't recognize. "This is from a long time ago," she said, examining my request form complete with the specifics of the Mimi Marchbank murder. "It may take a while for me to dig this out," she added. "Why don't you have a seat?"

The only place to sit was at a battered wooden study carrel that looked as though it predated the junk in the corridor by several decades and made me wonder if it wasn't a displaced refugee from an early version of the U. Dub Library.

Convinced I had come into the building entirely under everybody's radar, I was taking a load off when, two minutes later, the door slammed open. A fighting-mad, rain-drenched Paul Kramer marched into the room.

That would be Captain Paul Kramer. At the time I left Seattle PD, it may have looked to the world as though I was bailing because of Sue Danielson's death. Sue, my partner at the time, had been gunned down by her ex-husband, and I admit it-her murder was a contributing factor to my leaving when I did. Sue's senseless slaughter was one more than I could stand. But the other part of it was the fact that the departmental hierarchy had seen fit to promote a backstabbing worm like Paul Kramer to the rank of captain.

Sure, he had aced the test. I don't question the fact that he had the scores to justify a promotion. What Kramer didn't have were people skills. He was an ambitious, brownnosing jerk who flimflammed his superiors by being utterly scrupulous about his paperwork, but he wasn't above hanging his fellow detectives out to dry whenever it suited him. He and I had been on a collision course from the first day he turned up in Homicide. Back then it was all I could do to tolerate being in the same room with him. In the aftermath of Sue's death, the idea of having to report to the guy was more than I could handle.

Now, years later, someone had gone to the trouble of sounding an alarm and letting him know I was in the building. Territorial as any dog, he had hurried down the hill and down to the bas.e.m.e.nt to lift his leg metaphorically and pee in my shoe.