Long Time Gone Part 16

"I have counsel," she said firmly.

"If you're thinking of me as counsel, you need to know I don't count. You should have an attorney present. Maybe your friend at the archbishop's office could help."

"Our Father in Heaven is my counsel," Sister Mary Katherine declared. "He's all I need."

It would have been rude of me to mention the number of vehicles I've seen hauled away from accident scenes to wrecking yards while still proudly displaying their "G.o.d is my copilot" b.u.mper stickers. So I kept my mouth shut and kept driving.

Heavy snowfall followed by two days of warm drenching rain had brought every river in western Washington above flood stage. As we drove east toward Mount Vernon, the fields on either side of the road were inundated with water, making it seem as if we were on a causeway rather than a highway. Living in the city, it's easy to forget that out in the hinterlands people often have to resort to sandbags in order to wage hand-to-hand combat with Mother Nature.

Just north of Marysville, my cell phone rang. "We've got a problem," Kendall Jackson told me. "Captain Kramer wants to see you ASAP."

"Since Sister Mary Katherine and I are already on our way to meet with you, that should be easy to arrange."

"Not as easy as you think," Kendall responded. "It's about Wink Winkler."

"What about him?"

"He's been reported missing. From his retirement home in West Seattle. According to the person who called it in, he left in a cab shortly after talking to you-left and never came back."

I thought about the bulldog-faced woman at the nursing home to whom I had given my card. With that card and with Wink Winkler having at one time been the lead investigator in the Madeline Marchbank homicide, it hadn't taken long for Kramer to connect the dots. I was connecting the same dots. If Winkler had disappeared after talking to me, then in some way I didn't yet understand, I was probably responsible for that disappearance. No wonder Kramer was on the warpath.

"Tell him I'm on my way. I'll see him when I get there." I hung up the phone.

"Winkler," Sister Mary Katherine mused. "Isn't that the name of the detective on Mimi's case?"

"That's right. I talked to him yesterday afternoon, about the same time you were talking to Elvira. Now she's dead, and he's missing. The nursing home said he left in a cab shortly after I did."

"A cab?" Sister Mary Katherine asked suddenly. "What kind of cab?"

"I don't know. Detective Jackson didn't say. Why?"

"There was a yellow cab parked right behind my van when I left Elvira Marchbank's home. I noticed it because it was parked so close to my b.u.mper that I had to work to get out of the parking place without hitting the cab or the car in front of me."

I picked my phone back up and dialed Detective Jackson. "Check with Yellow Cab," I told him. "Find out whether or not they're the ones who picked Wink Winkler up. If they did, find out where and when they took him."

"Will do," Jackson said.

When I glanced back in Sister Mary Katherine's direction, I found that my phone call had left her shaken. "What if he's dead, too?" she asked.

Sister Mary Katherine had dealt with the news of Elvira's death with far more equanimity than she showed at hearing that Wink Winkler had gone missing. Where Elvira was concerned, Sister Mary Katherine was operating with the firm conviction that the woman had gone to her death with her soul saved. If Wink was dead now, too, she couldn't be so certain.

"He may have just wandered off," I suggested, trying to make us both feel better.

"No," Sister Mary Katherine insisted. "All of this is happening because of me-because I turned up after all these years and brought Mimi's death back to the forefront."

"That may be true," I agreed. "But the real problem is that there are still people around here who, even after all this time, don't want Mimi's homicide solved."

"But why?" Sister Mary Katherine asked.

"Once we know that," I told her, "we may know everything."

When we reached Seattle PD we had to go through the routine of collecting our visitor's badges before we were met by Detective Jackson and escorted upstairs. I thought we'd be going into one of the interview rooms. Wrong. We were taken directly to Homicide and crammed, cheek by jowl, into Kramer's new gla.s.s-lined office. In the old building, we'd have been inside the gla.s.s-lined Fish-bowl with everything done there coming under the scrutiny of the entire squad room. In his new office with gla.s.s walls opening on a window-lined corridor, only pa.s.sing seagulls and pigeons had a bird's eye view. Dealing with Paul Kramer in relative privacy didn't make it any easier.

Kramer is one of those negative people who go through life spreading ill will and divisiveness in their wake. I had been hoping to establish a good working relationship with Detective Jackson and the other investigators a.s.signed to the two Marchbank cases, but Kramer's MO was to lop cooperation off at the knees. He's also one of the enforcers of that old saw "No good deed goes unpunished." Most homicide cops would have been happy to have a leg up in an investigation. Not Kramer. His opening question to me, asked without benefit of introductions, made his lack of grat.i.tude perfectly clear.

"How is it you happen to know that Wink Winkler left Home Sweet Home yesterday afternoon in a yellow cab?" he demanded.

"I didn't actually know anything of the kind," I said. "I merely asked the question. Are you saying that checked out?"

I glanced at Detective Jackson. He nodded slightly in my direction but said nothing while Captain Kramer glowered at both of us.

"Yes, it did," he answered. "According to Yellow Cab's log, they dropped him off-"

"In front of the Marchbank Foundation," Sister Mary Katherine interjected.

I shot her a look that was meant to say "Stifle," but my warning came too late. It was as though everyone and everything in that seventh-floor room went into a state of suspended animation. No one spoke or moved except for the hands on the clock on the credenza behind Kramer's desk.

"And who exactly are you?" Kramer demanded.

I answered first. "This is Sister Mary Katherine, mother superior of Saint Benedict's Convent on Whidbey Island."

"All right. Fine. Glad to make your acquaintance." Then he turned back to me. "But what the h.e.l.l is she doing here?"

"Excuse me, Captain Kramer, is it?" Sister Mary Katherine asked. "I'm perfectly capable of answering questions on my own without requiring Mr. Beaumont's help. Years ago I was an eyewitness to Mimi Marchbank's murder. It's been suggested that you or someone like you might want to talk to me about it."

Kramer's eyes narrowed. His forehead bulged. "An eyewitness?" he asked. "To a homicide that happened more than half a century ago?"

"I was quite young at the time."

"And where have you been since then? What kept you from coming forward until now?" Kramer asked.

I had Freddy Mac's videotapes in my briefcase and was prepared to show them. I started to say as much, but Sister Mary Katherine silenced me with a wave of her hand.

"It was a brutal murder," she said evenly. "Seeing it was traumatic enough that I repressed the memories completely. Only recently, with the help of a hypnotherapist, have I been able to bring them to the surface."

Kramer looked shocked-like a little old lady who has suddenly encountered the unexpected use of the F-word in public. "A hypnotherapist?" he repeated, but he was looking at me. "You set up this meeting with four of my top homicide detectives-pulled them off the streets-to discuss the findings of a hypnotherapist!"

It was a statement, not a question. I simply nodded.

Kramer stood up. "I always knew you were a crackpot, Beaumont. If this is where your yellow cab information came from, it just about takes the cake. Good-bye. Get out of here, and don't be wasting any more of my detectives' and my valuable time."

I was more than ready to take the man at his word. I stood up to go. Sister Mary Katherine didn't budge.

"I understand Elvira Marchbank died yesterday," the nun said. "I believe I was one of the last people to see her alive. I should think you would want your detectives to speak with me even if you're too busy."

"My dear lady," Kramer said in his most condescending fashion, "you being a nun and all, you might not be aware of this, but whenever news of an unexpected death happens, there are always plenty of people who line up outside waiting to tell us what they know." He used his fingers to create imaginary quotation marks around the word "know." "If what you have to tell us is what some quack was able to dredge up while you were under his suggestive spell, I doubt it's going to be of much help. Now, if you don't mind, we have work to do."

I had sidled over to the door. Now Sister Mary Katherine stood, but she leveled a reproving look at Captain Kramer through her wire-framed gla.s.ses. "There are people in this world, Mr. Kramer..." His use of the word "lady" may have deprived Sister Mary Katherine of her rightful t.i.tle, but at least none of her subordinates had been in the room to hear it. Kramer wasn't so lucky. His demotion from captain to mister fell on the ears of four of his top detectives. Sister Mary Katherine knew it, he knew it, and so did everyone else in the room. None of his rapt detectives cracked a smile. Neither did I.

"...people," Sister Mary Katherine continued firmly, "who pray to G.o.d for help in their hour of need and then refuse to accept that help when it's offered. If the answer doesn't arrive in exactly the guise they expect, they a.s.sume no answer was given. I regret to say, Mr. Kramer, that you may very well be one of those unfortunate people. For a man in your position, that's not only surprising, it's also quite unfortunate. Good day to you, Mr. Kramer. And good luck. You'll most likely need it."

As we walked down the corridor, I glanced back at Kramer. His face was beet red. He looked ready to explode. I was glad I would be out of earshot when it happened. His quartet of detectives wouldn't be that lucky.

"What a disagreeable man!" Sister Mary Katherine exclaimed as we walked unescorted toward the elevator. "Are all police captains that incredibly rude?"

I laughed. "Don't judge everybody by Paul Kramer. He's in a cla.s.s by himself."

We were handing in our visitor's badges downstairs when my cell phone rang. It was Detective Jackson. "We'd still like to talk to you and Sister Mary Katherine, only not officially. If you happened to be going to lunch somewhere where we just might run into you..."

"I'm feeling a lot like a turkey sandwich," I said.

In the world of Seattle PD the words "turkey sandwich" and a place called Bakeman's on Cherry west of Second Avenue are synonymous. It was close enough to police headquarters to make the idea of "running into one another" a lot more believable. It was also right next door to the place where I'd parked my rented Taurus.

Bakeman's is a deli-a joint that's open for lunch and that's it. Every weekday they roast nine turkeys, make thirty pounds of meat loaf, and bake eighty loaves of bread, and the food is good enough that it's all gone by the time they close at three in the afternoon. Knowing the head cook's propensity for yelling at indecisive customers, I handled the ordering.

Sister Mary Katherine and I split a huge turkey sandwich on fluffy white bread and waited for Detective Jackson and his cohorts to show up. We were done with our sandwiches and still waiting when Sister Mary Katherine reached into her purse and pulled out a small manila envelope, which she handed to me.

"I thought you might want to see these," she said. "It's what I saved from the box of mementos my foster mother kept for me all those years."

The words "Bonnie Jean" were written on the envelope in the spidery, old-fashioned Spencerian style of penmanship that had gone out of vogue before I ever sat down to learn the dreaded Palmer method in second grade.

When I opened the envelope, out fell a few black-and-white photos with their deckle Kodak print edges. Someone had printed names and dates on the backs of the photos, but I didn't need to read the caption to recognize the subject of the first one: Little Bonnie Jean, her smiling face framed by a ma.s.s of perpendicular curls, was dressed in a frilly white dress.

"Your First Communion?" I asked.

Sister Mary Katherine nodded.

The second showed a young couple, probably in their late twenties, holding hands and laughing while sitting side by side on a porch swing. The resemblance between the woman in the photo and Sister Mary Katherine was striking.

"Your folks?"

"Yes."

I remembered what Sister Mary Katherine had told me about her parents defying their respective families and eloping. Judging from that particular photo, I would have to say the families had been wrong. "They look happy."

"I think they were," Sister Mary Katherine said. "They didn't have it easy, but they always seemed to enjoy being together. I didn't understand it at the time, but now I believe it's a blessing the two of them died together. I think whoever was left behind would have been lost without the other."

Next came a picture of an older man wearing a clerical collar. "That's Father Mark," Sister Mary Katherine said. "He's the one who looked out for me after my parents died."

The last photo was one of Sister Mary Katherine as a little girl standing beside her father. Barefoot and wearing a sundress, Bonnie Jean posed for the camera, squinting into the lens from a perch on the hood of a vehicle. Her father wore jeans and a white T-shirt with a pack of cigarettes rolled into one sleeve. He stood with his arms folded across his chest, grinning proudly.

"New car?" I asked.

Back when I was growing up and even earlier, photographing young men with their new cars was a rite of pa.s.sage. Guys bought new cars. Then, as soon as they had them home, they posed with their new prize and had their pictures taken.

"It's the only new car my father ever owned," Sister Mary Katherine said.

I took out my reading gla.s.ses and studied the photo up close. The hood ornament and the b.u.mper details told me I was looking at a 1950 Ford Custom Deluxe. Sister Mary Katherine said the car was new. She had also said that her parents had struggled to make ends meet. The sundress and glaring sunlight told me it was summer in Seattle, the summer of 1950, a month or two after Mimi Marchbank's murder.

"Did your father ever say how he came to have this car?" I asked.

Sister Mary Katherine shrugged. "I always a.s.sumed he bought it. Why?"

I collected the photos and returned them to the envelope as a way of avoiding answering her question, but I suddenly had a much better idea of why the Dunleavy family might have moved to a new home within days or weeks of Mimi's death. And I thought I also had a better idea of why Wink Winkler hadn't interviewed Bonnie Jean in the course of his homicide investigation.

"I'm not sure," I said. "But as soon as I figure it out, I'll let you know."

CHAPTER 14.

IT WAS AFTER ONE when I finally gave up on what was supposed to be an "accidental" rendezvous with Detective Jackson.

"I hate to leave," I told Sister Mary Katherine. "But there's a memorial service starting at two, and I need to be there."

"I could stay here and wait for him," she suggested.

"No," I told her. "Once this place shuts down, where would you go? Why don't you ride along with me? Maybe we can hook up with Detective Jackson later."

I knew that Ron had specified that Rosemary's memorial service would be private. I wondered how upset he'd be if I showed up with a stranger in tow, but the truth was, by then it was so late that there wasn't enough time for me to stop by Belltown Terrace and drop Sister Mary Katherine off.

"Fine," she said.

While we waited in the garage entrance for the attendant to return my rental car, I checked my phone and was annoyed to see that I had missed two calls, both of them from Jackson. In all the hubbub of Bakeman's, I hadn't heard the ringer. I returned his call immediately.

"We've been called out on something else," he said guardedly. "I'll have to get back to you later."

From the way he said it, I guessed he was replying under the watchful eyes and ears of Captain Kramer-another very good reason to be working for Harry I. Ball and the s.h.i.t squad rather than for Seattle PD. Better Ken Jackson than me.

"Who died?" Sister Mary Katherine asked, once we had settled into the Taurus.

"The former wife of a good friend," I said. "She was murdered last weekend down in Tacoma." I could have said a lot more than that, but I didn't. There was no need to burden Sister Mary Katherine with the gory details of yet another homicide investigation. She was already dealing with two as it was.

"I'm sorry," Sister Mary Katherine said.

"So am I."

"Are you sure the family members won't mind if I tag along?"

"Ron Peters, the ex-husband, is a police officer," I said. "He'll understand."

We drove to Bleitz Funeral Chapel, which is west of the Fremont Bridge and only a few blocks from where my former partner, Sue Danielson, died. I had managed to avoid that neighborhood ever since her death. Returning to it now on the occasion of another murder made me uneasy-right up until I saw the gang of reporters ma.s.sed outside the front door. That made me mad.

"d.a.m.n!" I muttered under my breath.