Long Time Gone (14 page)

“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.”

I
T TOOK TIME TO MAKE
Enterprise shape up and come through with the rental car the insurance company had ordered for me. Once it appeared, I headed north on I-5. After the 928, the Ford Taurus was a bit of a letdown. As the ads say about Porsches: There is no substitute. I had been told that the adjuster would be getting back to me either that day or the next with the verdict as to whether or not the 928 was totaled. In the meantime, the Taurus was my ride.

I lucked out and caught the Mukilteo Ferry and headed for Useless Bay on Whidbey Island. Useless Bay is useless because it’s so shallow that at low tide it’s little more than a glorified mudflat. On the way I called into the office to let people know what I was up to.

“Keeping a low profile, I see,” Barbara Galvin observed.

“No, I’m working,” I told her. “If you like, I’ll be glad to talk to Harry.”

“Wouldn’t recommend it,” she returned. “He’s still on the warpath about your five o’clock news appearance. If I were you, I’d give him more time to cool off—unless he calls you, that is.”

It seemed like a good idea to take Barbara’s advice as far as Harry was concerned. “What about Mel?”

“She and Brad are in Seattle doing interviews,” Barbara said.

If one of the people they were interviewing was Heather Peters, that meant I didn’t want to talk to Mel, and I certainly didn’t want to talk to Ron or Amy. I put my phone back in my pocket and hoped it wouldn’t ring.

Once on Whidbey, I left the Clinton Ferry Dock behind and drove north, past the turnoff to Useless Bay Country Club and onto Double Bluff Road. Evidence of downed trees was everywhere. The entrance to Saint Benedict’s was barred with an imposing iron gate. Alongside were a keypad and an intercom.

When the invisible gatekeeper allowed me entrance, I was amazed. The convent grounds had been lovingly landscaped into something that rivaled Victoria’s famed Buchart Gardens. On this midwinter day, nothing was in bloom, but the snow was mostly gone, and the carefully tended beds were clean and empty and ready for planting. A coveralls-clad woman with a noisy leaf blower was herding the last few fallen leaves off the manicured and graveled pathways. She looked up and nodded as I drove past, but she didn’t stop what she was doing.

The convent’s several buildings, nestled in a slight hollow, looked old and European. Thick hay-bale walls were covered with whitewashed stucco. The roofs were covered with red clay tiles. The centerpiece of the place was a tiny chapel, no bigger than a two-car garage.

As I stopped beside what appeared to be the main building, the door to the chapel opened and Sister Mary Katherine stepped out. She was dressed in an old-fashioned flowing habit.

“I was saying prayers for Elvira Marchbank,” she said. “If you’ll come in and wait for a few minutes, I’ll change into civilian clothing for our drive into town.”

She led me into the main building and left me seated on a couch in front of a cheerfully crackling fire. The fire may have been cheerful, but I wasn’t. Not telling Sister Mary Katherine to stay away from Elvira Marchbank had been a serious error on my part. I hadn’t mentioned it because it hadn’t seemed necessary. It never occurred to me that Sister Mary Katherine would want to have anything to do with the woman who had helped murder her friend, Mimi. I understood that my refusing to give Paul Kramer information about the cold case I was working hadn’t caused Elvira’s death, but it was likely that she had been killed because I was working the Mimi Marchbank case.

One way or the other, that made what had happened my fault. But even with all that free-floating guilt, somehow the warmth of the fire got to me. I was dozing in front of it when Sister Mary Katherine opened a heavy wooden door and reentered the room. She was wearing the same skirt, blouse, and cardigan she had worn the first time I saw her. “Ready?” she said.

I nodded and stood.

“It’ll be a long time before the next ferry,” she announced. “We could just as well drive around.”

“How long will it take us to get to downtown Seattle from here?”

“Two hours or so. Maybe more, depending on traffic.”

I called Detective Jackson and gave him our ETA. Then, once we were in the Taurus, I waited until we had left the convent grounds before I lit into her. “What were you thinking?” I demanded. “Why on earth did you go see Elvira?”

Sister Mary Katherine seemed totally unperturbed by my question. “I didn’t do the right thing when I was a girl,” she returned. “I wanted to talk to Elvira about it. I wanted to know if she was sorry for what she’d done—and she was.”

I could just imagine how hearing that would go over with the Seattle PD detectives. “So you actually spoke to her about Mimi’s murder?”

“Yes, of course I did. I already told you that. I went up to the door and knocked. When she opened it and I told her who I was, she invited me in and we had tea.”

“How civilized. You sip tea and talk murder.”

“We sipped tea, and I prayed with her,” Sister Mary Katherine corrected. “I believe Elvira was glad to see me—glad to have a way to put what she and Albert had done behind her.”

This was not going to go over at all well with my fellow detectives. “When did you leave?” I asked.

“About three-thirty,” Sister Mary Katherine said, “but I didn’t kill her, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“I may not be thinking that,” I grumbled back at her, “but other people will be. Like the Seattle homicide detectives working the case, for instance. I don’t know about the time of death, but if you were one of the last people to see her—”

“I’m not a detective,” she interrupted. “I’m a woman of God. Once I remembered what had happened, I admit, my first reaction—my very human reaction—was to want to see Elvira Marchbank punished for what she did. But after I left you at the Westin, I came to my senses. My real purpose in life is saving souls, not in seeing that the guilty go to prison. In the case of Elvira’s soul, I think I may have been of some help.”

“She confessed to you, then?” I asked.

“Certainly not,” Sister Mary Katherine responded. “I’m a nun, not a priest. She’s an Episcopalian, you know.”

“So she didn’t come right out and admit to you that she helped murder Madeline Marchbank, but she said she was sorry?”

“She didn’t have to say she did it. I know she did it,” Sister Mary Katherine said, verbally underscoring the word
know
. “I saw her do it, remember?”

We rode for some time in silence. I tended to believe that Sister Mary Katherine was telling the truth, that she had gone to Elvira’s house in hopes of saving the woman’s soul. I doubted my former colleagues in the homicide section of Seattle PD would see things in that same light.

“I’m sorry if what I did disappointed you,” she added finally. “We seem to be working at cross-purposes here. Tell me, who exactly are we meeting with once we get to town?”

“We’re meeting with four Seattle PD homicide detectives. Two of them are assigned to Elvira’s case. The other two are working Madeline’s.”

“They’ve reopened it?”

“Yes.”

Sister Mary Katherine sighed. “But Elvira’s dead. So that will finally be the end of it.”

“Probably,” I agreed. “For Madeline’s homicide, anyway. Closing a case with a dead defendant isn’t nearly as difficult as convicting a live one. Detectives don’t have to develop evidence that will hold up in court, and they don’t have to prove culpability ‘beyond a reasonable doubt.’ In Elvira’s case, however, it seems likely that you may have been one of the last people to see her alive. That means you may be considered a person of interest, if not a possible suspect. You probably shouldn’t go to this meeting without counsel.”

“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 “God is my copilot” bumper 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 bumper 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 glass-lined office. In the old building, we’d have been inside the glass-lined Fish-bowl with everything done there coming under the scrutiny of the entire squad room. In his new office with glass walls opening on a window-lined corridor, only passing 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 assigned 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 gratitude 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 hell 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.”