Long Time Gone Part 20

I put down the papers and reached for my phone book. In the Ls, I found no listing for Thomas Landreth, but there was one for F. D. Landreth. It came with a downtown Seattle telephone prefix but no printed address. I picked up the phone and dialed.

"h.e.l.lo." The woman's voice sounded as if she was probably the right age-a bit more mature than mature.

"Is this Faye Landreth?" I asked.

"Who's calling, please?"

"My name's Beaumont," I said. "J. P. Beaumont. I'm an investigator for the attorney general's Special Homicide Investigation Team. It's about-"

"Mimi Marchbank's murder," she interrupted. "I was wondering if anyone would ever get around to talking to me about that."

I felt a rush of excitement. Elvira Marchbank's death had probably garnered front-page treatment in today's newspapers, but Faye Landreth was more concerned about Mimi's murder-an unsolved homicide from fifty-plus years earlier.

"Would it be possible to meet with you?" I asked. "Today, maybe?"

"Today would be fine," she said. "What time and where?"

"Where do you live?" I countered.

"In a condo downtown," she said. "Cedar Heights on Second Avenue."

She had no idea that I was calling from only a block away at Belltown Terrace.

"I can be there in ten minutes," I said.

"Should I put the coffeepot on?"

"That would be great."

Ten minutes later, she buzzed me into the building, and I made my way up to the ninth floor. The woman who opened the door looked to be in her early seventies. She was relatively tall and unbent. She wore her hair in a short pixie cut, but there was nothing pixielike in her firm handshake.

"Mr. Beaumont?" she said cordially. "Won't you come in?"

She ushered me into a well-kept room. Her unit was much lower than mine and smaller, but the territorial view of the s.p.a.ce Needle and the bottom of Lake Union was similar to what I see from my penthouse bedroom. The furnishings were simple and not particularly elegant. Large, colorful pieces of inexpensively framed artwork filled the walls. I walked close enough to one of them that I could decipher the signature scrawled in the lower right-hand corner: F. D. Landreth.

"Yours?" I asked.

She nodded.

"They're very good," I told her. She flushed slightly at the compliment.

"Thank you," she replied. "Painting is the only thing that keeps me from running the streets. Help yourself to a chair. How do you take your coffee-cream and sugar?"

"Black, please," I told her.

Faye Landreth ducked into the tiny galley kitchen while I made my way to a comfortable leather couch at the far end of the combination living/dining room. On the end table next to where I took a seat stood a gilt-framed eight-by-ten photo of a handsome young man wearing his United States Marine Corps dress uniform.

"Your son?" I asked as she handed me a mug of coffee.

Faye nodded. "Timothy," she said. "Timothy Acton Landreth. He's been gone for a long time now-ten years. It's the old story," she added. "Drugs and booze. He went through treatment a couple of times, but he just couldn't get his act together. That's why I keep this particular photo-because he looks so good in it. Being a marine was the best thing that ever happened to him. After that, life was all downhill."

"I'm sorry," I said.

She smiled. "I know. So am I. I wanted to help him, but I just couldn't. He's why I'm talking to you now, though. I wouldn't do it while Timmy was still alive. Things were tough enough between him and his father. I didn't want to do anything that would make their relationship worse, but now..."

I was impatient. I wanted Faye Landreth to move on to the subject of Mimi Marchbank and how she had known I would be asking questions about that long-ago murder, but good sense won out. Like Sister Mary Katherine, Faye had kept whatever she was going to reveal secret for a very long time. I'd be better off waiting for her to relay the information in her own fashion and in her own good time rather than trying to rush her into it.

"You're a widow, then?" I asked finally.

"A widow?" she repeated, then laughed outright. "Hardly. I've been divorced for years. In fact, Tom announced he was leaving the night before our thirtieth anniversary. He left the house that night and married his secretary, Raelene Jarvis, the day the divorce was final. His second wife, Raelene, happened to be two years younger than Timmy."

"Which probably didn't do much to improve father-son relations," I suggested.

"No, it didn't," Faye agreed. "Tim stopped speaking to his father then and there. I always hoped they'd reconcile, but they never did. And I kept quiet because..." She paused and gave a self-deprecating laugh. "Well, I had been quiet for so long by then that it didn't seem to make much difference. After Tim died, though, I told myself that if anyone ever did get around to asking me about what happened, I was going to tell what I knew."

"Which is?"

Faye sighed. "Tom and I had to get married," she admitted.

I'd already figured that out on my own. "I know," I said. "May 13,1950. Harrison Hot Springs, British Columbia."

She gave me a searching look, then continued. "I was sixteen. He was nineteen. Tom's father was furious."

"That would be Phil Landreth, Albert Marchbank's partner?"

"Yes. Tom's dad wanted him to go to college and then on to law school, but that wasn't possible, not with a wife and baby to support. Against his parents' wishes, Tom dropped out of college and went to work for his grandfather-his mother's father-as a manager in his car dealership."

My ears p.r.i.c.ked up. "Car dealership? Which one?"

"Crosby Motors," she said. "It was a Ford agency up on Aurora Boulevard."

I thought about those two brand-new Fords-the one that had gone to Sean Dunleavy and the other that had gone to Wink Winkler. Was that where they had come from-Crosby Motors?

"The dealership's been gone for years now," Faye went on. "Grandpa Crosby made a nice piece of change for himself, first when he sold the agency, and then later, when he sold the land itself. By then, Tom had enough management experience that Phil and Albert hired him to work in their company."

"With the radio stations?"

Faye Landreth nodded. "Tom worked for Albert, who managed the overall holding company. Other people managed the stations themselves, but it wasn't just radio. Albert Marchbank saw the coming boom in television very early on. He moved from radio broadcasting to television without ever missing a beat. Everybody connected to the company made money, Tom and me included."

"Sounds like Tom was in the right place at the right time," I suggested.

"It wasn't all luck," Faye Landreth said. For the first time I heard the bitterness in her voice.

"What was it?" I asked.

"They weren't there," she said.

Faye's sudden segue caught me off guard. "Who wasn't there?" I asked.

"Albert and Elvira," Faye answered. "In Harrison Hot Springs. I know the newspaper notice said they came to our wedding, but that wasn't true."

"And what about your folks, Faye?" I said. "Did they suddenly become the proud owners of a brand-new 1950 Ford? It seems like someone was pa.s.sing them out for free right about then."

She ducked her head. Finally she raised it defiantly and looked me full in the eye. "Yes," she admitted. "Yes, they did."

"From Crosby Motors?"

She nodded.

"Who bought it?"

"I don't even know. Does it matter? My folks needed a car. All I had to do for them to have one was keep my mouth shut."

"Which happened to give Albert and Elvira Marchbank an unbreakable alibi for murder," I added.

"I'm not proud of what I did, but yes." Her voice was very small.

"And you never told. Why not?"

"For one thing, I was scared to death of Albert. I think Tom was, too. If the man was willing to stab his own sister to death right there in broad daylight, what kind of person was he? And I don't think Elvira was much better than Albert. They were both ruthless people. The problem was, Tom told me that keeping quiet about what happened made us all accessories after the fact to what they had done-my parents, too. He said we'd all be held responsible for Mimi's murder, every bit as much as the people who actually stabbed her."

"Why are you telling me this now?"

"Because Timmy's dead," Faye Landreth said. "Tom's parents are both gone now, and so are mine. If somebody wants to arrest me for my part in the cover-up, so be it, but it would have been wonderful if they had put Elvira on trial for murder, convicted her, and hauled her off to prison."

"But she's dead now, too," I said.

Faye nodded. "I know," she said. "I saw it in the paper this morning."

"And so is a man named William Winkler. Wink Winkler was the detective who investigated Madeline Marchbank's murder back in 1950," I added. "Investigators think he committed suicide within hours of Elvira Marchbank's fatal fall. According to my count, that doesn't leave behind very many people from back then. If the people are gone, so are all the witnesses."

"Except for me," Faye volunteered. "I would be one; Tom's the other."

"You're suggesting that your former husband might be involved in all this?"

"He was involved in 1950," Faye said. "Why wouldn't he be involved now?"

"And if he were to go to jail because of his involvement? What then?"

Faye Landreth smiled. "That would be his problem, now wouldn't it. His problem and Raelene's."

I don't remember who it was who said "h.e.l.l hath no fury like a woman scorned," and all that jazz, but he must have had someone like Faye Landreth in mind. She had waited almost a quarter of a century to lower the boom on her philandering ex-husband and his new wife. Now she was doing it-in spades.

"Any idea where I could find Tom Landreth about now?"

"He's retired. He still lives in our old house over in Medina, but I hear he likes to hang out at the clubhouse at Overlake Golf and Country Club, even when it's too cold to play golf."

"And Raelene?"

"She's the breadwinner now. Still works full-time."

"For the Marchbank Foundation," I said.

Faye nodded. "Interesting that she'd manage to fall into a job like that, wouldn't you say?"

I didn't know Tom Landreth, but I felt a twinge of sympathy for the man. He had walked away from his marriage vows all those years ago thinking that he was getting off easy. He must have thought all the divorce would cost him would be whatever the presiding judge decided he owed his ex-wife in terms of property settlement and alimony. He was about to find out those were small sums in comparison to the price Faye Landreth prepared to extract from him now. She was going for his jugular. If what she said was true, he deserved it, but right at that moment, the poor unsuspecting b.a.s.t.a.r.d had no idea it was coming.

Woman scorned, indeed!

CHAPTER 17.

WHEN I LEFT FAYE LANDRETH'S CONDO, I was floating on air. Suddenly I had a legitimate suspect-someone who had been involved in the aftermath of Mimi Marchbank's murder back in 1950. Considering the part Tom Landreth had played in the cover-up, it seemed reasonable to a.s.sume that he might have some compelling motive for keeping the names of the real perpetrators in that case from surfacing.

For one thing, Faye had told me that with Tom retired, Raelene's job as executive director of the Marchbank Foundation now provided a major portion of the family's income. Elvira Marchbank and, to a lesser extent, Tom Landreth, had partic.i.p.ated in Mimi's murder. Once that news leaked out, the Marchbank Foundation and Raelene's plush little job would both be doomed. Bad publicity and nonprofits do not go together. People don't like giving money to organizations whose founders or current managers are caught doing bad things-and murder is a pretty bad thing.

Before I interviewed Tom Landreth, I needed to interview his wife. Detectives Jackson and Ramsdahl had asked Raelene about what she had seen and heard on the day Elvira Marchbank died. I wanted to ask about Tom Landreth. I also needed to collect a Kevlar vest. My current one had been hauled off in the trunk of the 928 when the tow truck took it away, but there was an old one still gathering dust in my hall closet. When I tried to put the d.a.m.ned thing on, I was sure it had shrunk. I was struggling to fasten it when the phone rang.

"Jonas?" Beverly Jenssen asked.

I was instantly awash in guilt. I had promised to call this morning and had neglected to do so. "Beverly," I said. "It's good to hear your voice. How are you?"

"Weak," she said. "Still sleeping a lot of the time."

"I'm sorry I didn't get by the hospital to see you..." I began.

She cut me off. "Don't worry about it," she said. "I was asleep there, too. I probably wouldn't have noticed if you'd been there."

Just because Beverly seemed to be giving me a free pa.s.s didn't mean I deserved one. And it turned out it wasn't free after all.

"I was hoping, though, that I could talk you into coming up to our place for dinner tonight."

"Are you sure you're up to having company?" I asked. "I mean, if you just got out of the hospital..."

"Oh, for goodness' sakes, Jonas. It's no trouble. I'm certainly not going to cook. We have to go down to the dining room to eat. Besides, I have something to show you-a surprise."

Having been remiss in not stopping by the hospital, I knuckled under immediately. "Of course," I said. "What time?"

"The dining room starts serving at five-thirty. We usually go early, but anytime between then and eight o'clock will work, so whenever you can make it will be fine."

"I'll see you as close to six as I can."

"Good," she said. "We'll be expecting you."