Long Time Gone (10 page)

Mel’s motivation was simple. If she could nail Ron with his ex-wife’s murder, Mel would be reclaiming a measure of justice not only for Rosemary but also for Mel’s long-deceased mother. If she succeeded and Ron went to prison, I would be losing a good friend and three wonderful kids would be losing their father.

Mounting evidence to the contrary, I hoped to hell that wouldn’t happen.

Looking back at what I had told Mel about Ron, I was struck by my sins of omission, by what I’d left out of the story—the web of cracks that seemed to be appearing in his ostensibly happy marriage to Amy; the constant and unwelcome presence of a difficult sister-in-law; a rebellious and possibly drug-using daughter. Had all of those, combined with new demands from his ex-wife, turned into a volatile mix that had pushed Ron over the edge?

After drinking so much coffee, I didn’t expect to fall asleep in my chair, but I should have known better. I did, only to awake, stiff and sore, at four o’clock in the morning. I dragged my butt off to bed, but then I tossed and turned and went right back to worrying about what would happen to Ron and Amy and the kids. Finally, conceding there was no hope of going back to sleep, I went out to the kitchen and made more coffee.

My old SPD shrink, Dr. Baxter, always said that the best cure for insomnia is to work on something other than what you’re worrying about. With that in mind I hauled out the tape Freddy Mac had brought me and stuck it into the VCR. I saw at once what he had meant about there being a breakthrough. This time when he put Sister Mary Katherine under, there was far less resistance to going back to that Saturday afternoon. In her little-girl voice, Bonnie Jean Dunleavy was able to talk about what was going on outside the kitchen window without having to interpose a make-believe camera between herself and the action.

This time Fred focused Bonnie Jean’s attention on the vehicle that the killers had driven into Bonnie’s neighbor’s driveway.

“What’s it like?” he asked.

“Big,” Bonnie Jean answered. “It’s a big car.”

“What color?”

“Red,” she answered. “Sort of red. And the nose is empty.”

“Empty?” Fred asked.

“It’s just round. There’s nothing on it—nothing shiny.”

“You mean there’s no hood ornament?”

Bonnie Jean shrugged her shoulders. “I guess,” she said.

I put the VCR on pause and reached for the file folder of material I had collected from the
P.-I
. And there it was parked in the background of the photo taken after Madeline Marchbank’s funeral. Behind Madeline’s brother, Albert, and his wheelchair-bound mother was the naked-nosed hood of an automobile—a 1949 or 1950 Frazer Deluxe.

I’m far from being a car nut who knows the make, model, cubic inches, and horsepower of every vehicle ever made. What I had instead was direct personal experience with a very similar car.

One of my high school buddies, Sonny Sondegaard, was another Ballard kid who went salmon fishing with his dad’s commercial fishing crew. The year we all turned sixteen he came back to school at the end of the summer with a pocketful of money. He spent two hundred bucks of his hard-earned cash buying himself a teal-blue 1949 Frazer.

During our junior year we had some great times in Sonny’s car. Back then hood ornaments were all the rage, but the Frazer didn’t have one. We teased Sonny endlessly about it, even threatening to steal an ornament off someone else’s car and graft it onto his. Sonny took the teasing in stride. The Frazer was a fun car to fool around in right up until the beginning of our senior year. On Sunday of Labor Day weekend, coming back from a kegger on Camano Island, Sonny ran off Highway 99 and wrapped the front end of the Frazer around a telephone pole. He was dead before they ever removed him from the wreckage. My whole senior year was colored by the fact that the first day of school started with classes in the morning and ended with Sonny’s funeral later that afternoon.

And here, all these years later, I was dealing with another Frazer and another death. Leaving the VCR on pause, I once again dialed law enforcement’s special twenty-four-hour number at the Department of Motor Vehicles. This time I went straight to a human being, as opposed to a recorded message. When I told the clerk who I was and that I was looking for licensing information from 1950, I expected her to laugh her head off, but she didn’t. “One moment, please,” she said.

I heard the clatter of computer keystrokes in the background. Then, within seconds, I had my answer. Albert and Elvira Marchbank had indeed owned a 1950 Frazer—a Caribbean coral Deluxe. I had no doubt that in the eyes of an unsophisticated not-quite-five-year-old girl, coral would indeed be “sort of ” red.

I sat for some time, studying the freeze-frame likeness of Sister Mary Katherine staring back at me from the television screen. Bonnie Jean Dunleavy had been an eyewitness to Mimi Marchbank’s murder. Given that circumstance, surely the killers must have been caught, right? So I called the Records department at Seattle PD to see if Madeline Marchbank’s killer had ever been apprehended. Once again, after a surprisingly few keystrokes, I had my answer, and it wasn’t one I liked. Madeline Marchbank’s 1950 murder, perpetrated by person or persons unknown, was still listed as an open case of homicide—fifty-four years after the fact.

After checking in and letting Barbara Galvin know I’d be working outside the office all day, I spent the next hour or so researching the Marchbank Foundation. It had been created in 1972 on the occasion of Albert’s death from colon cancer. The financial arrangements weren’t spelled out in the material available to the general public through the foundation’s Web site. I had a feeling, though, that some provision had probably been made for Albert’s widow throughout her lifetime and that, upon Elvira’s subsequent death, any residual assets would revert to the trust. Creating a charitable foundation had no doubt been a way of dodging state and federal estate taxes while still allowing the family to maintain some degree of control over the disposition of assets. The Marchbank Foundation was into the fine arts in a big way. The Seattle Opera, the Seattle Symphony, and the Seattle Art Museum were all major beneficiaries of Marchbank Foundation grants, but other smaller organizations were listed as well.

Each time I went back to the Web site’s home page, I looked at the formally staged portrait of the founders taken on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary and only a short time before Albert’s death. He couldn’t have been much older than his early sixties, but he already had a gaunt and fading look about him while his wife looked robust—and immensely pleased with herself. In the photo they looked like the fine upstanding citizens the Marchbank Foundation PR flacks claimed them to be. Could these two people, smiling broadly into the camera’s lens, actually be a pair of cold-blooded killers?

I wondered about whether or not I should print a copy of the photo to take with me when I went to see Sister Mary Katherine. I had gone off to the Westin in such a hurry the night before that I hadn’t taken my copy of the
Post-Intelligencer
photo along with me. Finally, when it was late enough to be halfway civilized, I called Freddy Mac at home.

“What’s up?” he asked. “Did you find a record of the car?”

I said, “Albert Marchbank owned a 1949 Caribbean coral Frazer—a vehicle with no hood ornament, just like Bonnie Jean said. I’ve also located photos of Mimi Marchbank’s brother and sister-in-law. One is contemporary, taken the day of Mimi’s funeral. The other is from the early seventies, almost twenty years later.”

“And?” Fred asked.

“I’m wondering if it’s a good idea to show them to her.”

Fred took his time before answering. “Well,” he said finally, “it’ll go one of two ways—either she’ll remember or she won’t.”

“Do you want to be there when I show them to her?”

“Can’t,” he said. “I’m backed up with appointments all morning long, and I know Sister Mary Katherine is hoping to head back to Whidbey sometime this afternoon.”

“But you don’t think seeing the pictures will hurt her?” I pressed.

“In my personal opinion, not remembering is what’s hurting her,” Fred countered. “If seeing the photos happens to jar her to conscious memory of what went on back then, that should be all to the good.”

With Fred MacKinzie’s Good Housekeeping seal of approval, I printed a copy of Albert and Elvira’s official Web-site photograph as well as a photo of the Marchbank Foundation corporate headquarters, an imposing-looking two-story Georgian with an address that put the place just north of the University of Washington on Twelfth Avenue NE.

At 10:00
A.M.
, I stuffed everything I’d gleaned through my research efforts into my briefcase and headed for the Westin for my meeting with Sister Mary Katherine. It was raining hard when I drove the 928 out onto the street from the Belltown Terrace. Rain, especially a warm rain like this one, was good news. It meant the snow would melt that much faster and life in Seattle would soon return to normal. As I waited for the light at Second and Wall, I realized that I hadn’t heard a word from Ron or Amy Peters.

Oh, well,
I told myself.
Maybe no news is good news.

That was wrong, of course, but I wouldn’t find that out until much, much later.

S
ISTER MARY KATHERINE WAS WAITING
for me as I walked into the hotel café. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” I said. “People will talk.”

She smiled and shook her head. “People aren’t interested in nuns,” she said. “They’re a lot more interested in what some priests have been up to—and with good reason. Compared with misbehaving priests, nuns are a pretty boring lot.”

Considering what I’d learned about Sister Mary Katherine herself in the course of the last several days, I could have argued the point, but I didn’t.

“Would you like some breakfast?”

“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 Saturday 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 glassware 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 godmother. 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 Saturday 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.”