Hard Rain

by Waverly Fitzgerald

  Every year on the anniversary of K’s death, Darrell went over to the UW. And then he went to sit by his uncle’s grave at Lakeview Cemetery, looking out over Union Bay. Every year he found fresh flowers on the grave but he never ran into the person who left them.

  Chapter 11

  Leave it to Thom to bring a party dress to the hospital. He’s always encouraging me to break out of what he calls my uniform—the black pants and tunic tops I favor—and wear something that accentuates my curves. This was a long knit dress in a reddish gold material. And luckily I could wear it without underwear. I ducked into the bathroom in the hall and pulled it on. The hospital staff had given me a plastic bag with handles to carry out my wet clothes.

  “What happened, Rachel?” Thom asked as we walked out to his car, a low-slung BMW convertible. Thom is a psychotherapist and makes a good living listening to people tell him their woes. I couldn’t handle listening to people talk about their pain after two years working as a counselor. I wanted to get in there and fix the situations that were troubling my clients. That tendency cost me my job but led to my new career as a private investigator.

  I explained the whole thing to Thom as we drove through the evening. The sun was just beginning to go down. It stays light until about ten PM in Seattle in the summer. I finished my story just as he pulled into his garage on the alley side of our building.

  “Are you going to be OK?” he asked, as he walked me to my door, which he opened with his key. He handed it to me. It was just beginning to sink in that I was going to have to replace everything in my purse. A task for the next day. Although it might be a good idea to cancel the credit cards tonight, in case, my purse floated to the surface of the lake and someone snagged it.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “At least, I’ve got a home. I’m worried about Matt.”

  “Matt’s like a cat,” Thom said, who had met him a few times and heard me talk about him more than that. “He’s got nine lives. Which one do you suppose he’s on?”

  “Probably life number three,” I said, with a rueful laugh. I gave Thom a quick kiss. “Thanks for rescuing me.”

  “Let me know if there’s anything else I can do,” he said. It turned out there was.

  The house was dark when I walked in. I heard rustling in the dining room. The ferrets were moving around, anxious to get out and play after hours cooped up. The sweet smell of privet blossoms filled the room, drifting in through the screens on the living room windows.

  I flicked on my desk lamp and to my surprise, there was my purse, sitting on top of one of my manila folders. It was still damp and when I picked it up, I saw the moisture had leaked through to the folder beneath, causing the ink to bleed so that I could barely read the blurry letters of the message scrawled in blue ink.

  So sorry

  Did not mean to hurt you.

  Tell Matt he was lucky.

  I called the police, of course, and they came and took a report. One of the cops, a short Asian man in a sports coat, introduced himself as Dale Tanaka and said he was a friend of Matt’s. He had been looking for Matt ever since he heard about the explosion on the houseboat but I didn’t know where Matt was. Hard to say since Matt doesn’t have a cell phone.

  The forensic techs dusted for fingerprints but didn’t find any. They also didn’t find any signs of forced entry. The screens were all tight. The door had been locked.

  The keys to my apartment were in the purse, but if the intruder had used them to enter the apartment, he had also wiped them clean. The police went door to door, talking to my neighbors, but no one had seen anything unusual.

  Thom was sure the purse had not been on the desk when he entered the apartment to find the dress he brought to the hospital so it seemed likely the intruder had gained access during the half hour it took for Thom to drive to the hospital and drive me home.

  The police finally left around three AM, taking only the folder. Tanaka promised he would have the handwriting expert look at the note first thing in the morning, but he didn’t sound confident they would find much.

  “Obviously the perpetrator tried to disguise his writing,” he said, pointing to the tiny meticulously formed block letters.

  Thom wanted me to come over and stay in his guest room. But I thought I could handle being alone in my apartment despite the violation.

  I was wrong. I couldn’t take a bath, which is what I usually do to relax before going to bed. The idea of being naked made me feel too vulnerable. Instead I crawled into bed but I couldn’t sleep. All the once familiar sounds of my house and my neighborhood—the beams creaking, distant voices in the night—sounded ominous.

  Around four AM, the birds began to sing.

  Around seven AM, my phone started ringing. It was Matt.

  “Thank God, you’re OK,” I said. “Where are you?”

  “Ah, I went and stayed with Jessica,” he said. He sounded pleased with himself. Jessica was a gorgeous brunette who worked for the prosecutor’s office and lived in a high rise downtown. “Didn’t get a lot of sleep last night,” he went on.

  “Yeah, well neither did I.” I paused, rueful, thinking it was for an entirely different reason than Matt’s insomnia. “Matt, someone returned my purse.”

  “That’s great news, Rachel,” he said.

  “Not really. The same person broke into my house, plunked the purse down on my desk and left a note saying you were lucky but he would try again. The police took it away to analyze it. A friend of yours, Dale Tanaka, was here. He wants you to call him.”

  “Will do,” said Matt.

  “Someone’s trying to kill you, Matt!”

  “Yeah, and that means other members of my old platoon might be in danger. Didn’t you say you had found someone else?”

  “Oh, that’s right. I never got a chance to tell you. I found a guy named William Riley.”

  “William Riley?”

  “Went by the name of Boo.” I said.

  “Oh, Boo! Sure I know Boo.”

  I logged onto my computer and got Boo’s address.

  “Really?” Matt said. “He’s still in Bellingham?”

  I read him the address again.

  “Wow!” Matt said. “That will be a flashback to old times.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That’s where Boo was living when I got out,” Matt said. “I went and stayed with him for a while.”

  “What’s happening with your houseboat?” I asked.

  “Going to have to start over,” Matt said, “but I’ve got insurance.”

  I wanted to keep him on the phone. There’s something about almost getting killed together that make you feel closer to someone. But Matt was on his way back to court and I had work to do. I didn’t feel so much like reading about student radicals but I had old copies of the Freebie waiting for me at Special Collections so after breakfast and ferret play time, I took the bus to campus.

  Chapter 12

  It didn’t really occur to me until I was sitting on the 43 bus, staring out the window, as the bus rolled down 23rd Avenue on its way to the University of Washington, that it might have been the police who broke into my apartment and returned the purse. After all, how did Darnell know so much about me? Or maybe it was the FBI? Had they followed me to Matt’s houseboat?

  And did the intruder go through the folder on my desk? It was the one containing the list of the platoon members I was locating for Matt. If it was the killer, he would now have the address where Rivers lived and the information on the suicide of Hank Baker, but presumably he already knew all of that, since they were both dead. But the folder also contained the information I had dug up on the City Councilman in Oakland. I would have to warn Matt. Right beneath it was the folder of research I was doing for Joel Friedman.

  As the bus rattled across the Montlake Bridge, I realized, with a start, that I was way behind on that project. I had gotten so hung up on learning more about the ROTC bombing because it involved my parents, that I was neglecting the critic
al issue: Ellie’s involvement in the bank robbery. So when the bus dropped me off in front of campus, instead of going to the Special Collections department where the old copies of the Freebie were waiting for me, I headed to the lower level of the main library, where the microfilmed newspapers were kept.

  The microfilms were kept in long gray filing cabinets that pulled out, revealing reels of tape. I had used them before on a previous case so I knew how to find the right tape, and how to thread the brittle film through the apparatus of a microfilm reader set up against the wall. These readers were a little more modern than the ones at the Seattle Public Library, throwing the image onto a white slanted board. I leaned in, trying to block out the glare on the screen from the fluorescent lights overhead.

  The story of the 1979 Mutual Bank robbery had been the front page story in the Seattle Times for several months. It all began in December of 1978 when nineteen-year old Julia Stanton, heiress to the Stanton logging fortune, was kidnapped from her dorm room at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma. A radical group calling themselves Weevil, sent a ransom note to her father, Frank Stanton, demanding that he donate half of his fortune (at that time estimated at 50 billion dollars) to the care of the poor in Washington State. Stanton arranged to send $500,000 to various charitable agencies but Weevil rejected this, calling it a hollow gesture representing less than one percent of his wealth and questioning his concern for his daughter. At the same time, they published photos of Julia, dressed in Army fatigues and wearing a beret, along with a statement, allegedly from Julia, declaring that she had joined Weevil and was going to help them take down “capitalist pigs” like her father.

  The media scrambled for information about Weevil, but there was little to go on, just the manifesto they delivered a few weeks later, saying they were eating away, like a boll weevil, at the rotten heart of capitalism until it collapsed. Several videotapes were released showing Julia giving a Black Power salute and practicing target shooting but the faces and identities of the other members of Weevil were not clear. What was clear was that the FBI and the Seattle police were working desperately to find Julia, who was viewed as a victim of brainwashing, like Patty Hearst, who had been kidnapped four years earlier.

  Then on February 18, 1979, Weevil hit the front pages again. A group of Weevil members charged into Mutual Bank, a small community bank in the Central District of Seattle, dressed in their Army fatigues and black berets, sporting AK-47s and wearing Ronald Reagan masks. The handful of bank employees scrambled to do their bidding, which included opening the vault and shutting the customers into an employee bathroom, while alerting the police by activating a secret alarm. In a few minutes, the bank was surrounded by law enforcement: Seattle police, King County sheriffs and the FBI. One of the robbers fired a shot at the police and a furious gun battle erupted, which killed five Weevil members, Julia Stanton, two policemen, the bank manager, a teller and a female customer. I wrote down the names of the dead, but I wouldn’t be interviewing them.

  Only one Weevil member had escaped: Ellie Foley had apparently burst into the bathroom where the customers were huddled, shot a young mother named Marla Mills who was trying to stop her, and crawled through a vent which connected to an adjoining building from which she made her escape. The public was outraged. Stanton was furious and blamed the police for mishandling the situation. The police, the sheriffs and the FBI conducted a house-to-house search of the immediate area looking for Ellie Foley but she had gotten away.

  The other members of Weevil were identified—four young women and one man—and their stories began to emerge in the following days. I studied their photos. They looked so earnest and so young. Most had been involved in student protest movements in the early Seventies: two were previous members of SDS. They had become frustrated by what they perceived as a lack of change. They fell under the spell of a charismatic leader, who called himself Don Rebel, an older man who had done jail time for armed robbery and become politicized in prison. He preached that violent revolution was the only solution to widespread societal problems, but the prevailing public opinion was that he was a clever con man who had been able to manipulate a group of young idealists, most of them women, into committing crimes on his behalf.

  Authorities located their headquarters, a rental house on a five-acre property in a rural area near Sultan, a small town in the mountains outside of Seattle. I scribbled down the address. The house was full of inflammatory literature, incendiary devices and a stash of assault rifles. On the property, they found silhouettes of policemen mounted on hay bales for target practice.

  One of the Mutual bank tellers, Joyce White, identified Ellie Foley as a new customer, a mother who came in with her young daughter to open an account about a week before the robbery. She had been dressed conservatively, said Joyce, and the child was well-behaved. Ellie, who had used the name Elaine Roth, had asked if her daughter could use the bathroom. Obviously, she was casing the bank, using her child as a cover.

  On the day of the robbery, Ellie had dropped her daughter Sky off at a day care in the Central District: Rainbow Children. My heart thumped. Rainbow Children was the name of the preschool I attended until I was old enough to go to elementary school. I had vivid memories of the dim, low-ceilinged rooms in the basement of the brick Baptist church, the faded green linoleum floor of the classrooms, the reddish colored cinders that defined the small playground. My mother had worked there.

  Reading on, I learned that Silvia Stern, the director of the day care, had taken Sky home when Ellie failed to show up at the end of the day. Something stirred in my memory. A little girl in green corduroy overalls with reddish-brown braids. My parents arguing viciously. The girl crying. A neighbor coming to fetch me and my sister. When we returned, the little girl was gone. My mother was grim and silent. My father was gone too. He stayed away for a week, that time.

  According to the newspaper article, Silvia Stern had called the police to report the child’s whereabouts and the child had been taken into custody. The police made several pleas to Ellie to turn herself in, using the forlorn face of her child as a lure.

  Most people believed that Ellie had been wounded in the shootout and had later died of her injuries. That seemed the only possible explanation of why she did not return for her daughter and why she was never captured, although her face was everywhere. The FBI Most Wanted photo, which had been taken when Ellie was released from prison, showed a short-haired woman with a haggard expression and a bitter twist to her lips.

  But as I studied the photo, I realized I knew another bit of this story. I recognized that face. It was the face of the woman I saw with my father at the Woodland Park Zoo. I had been on a field trip with my high school science class. My mother, by then, had given up on public education and insisted on sending me and my sister to Holy Names, an all-girls Catholic school, so we were all wearing our grey and maroon uniforms. I hated mine and was skulking in the Nocturnal Habitat when I noticed a couple with a little girl in front of the sloths. The adults had their arms around each other and were kissing. Then the little girl started whining, and the father bent down to pick her up. I saw his face and realized that the man was my father. And the woman, when she turned her head and looked at me, was the same woman I saw in the wanted photograph, with her high cheekbones, and her striking light-colored eyes, and her pointed chin.

  My father followed me out of the building. He told me the woman was a client of his and she had asked him to take her and her daughter to the zoo. He begged me not to tell my mother. He promised to buy me a car if I would keep my mouth shut. But I was tired of his lying and cheating, the way he kept hurting my mother, their constant arguments. I told her. As soon as I got home. Of course, I told her. I described the woman. I told her that my father had tried to bribe me to keep it a secret. There was an even bigger fight than usual that night. And a week later my father left for good.

  Chapter 13

  I decided to walk to get to my car, which was still in Matt’s parking lot,
hoping the twenty minute walk in the fresh air would clear my mind. There seemed no way to disentangle my past from my current case and that made me jumpy. What did I know? That my mother had been the one who handed Ellie’s daughter over to the police? That I had caught my father kissing a federal fugitive?

  I did the math in my head. If that was the year I was a freshman, it was 1983. Ellie had been in hiding for four years. No wonder my mother freaked out. It wasn’t just the infidelity. She had dealt with that before. She must have been outraged that my father was jeopardizing his career and our safety by consorting with a federal fugitive. My mother was already becoming more and more protective of us. That was one reason she put us into Catholic school.

  As I approached the University Bridge, a horn sounded. Red lights flashed and the gates came down. It’s one of the things I love about Seattle: the working bridges in the heart of the city that can stop all traffic when a boat wants to pass beneath them. I stood looking down into the water. The sky was so clear, the surface of the lake was like a mirror, reflecting the underside of the bridge, the trees overhanging the bank.

  The sides of the bridge cranked up slowly, quivering as they stood poised like two praying hands pointed at the sky. A tall sailboat glided soundlessly through the opening, leaving behind the fresh water of Lake Washington, heading west through the top of Lake Union, towards the Ballard Locks and the salt water of the Puget Sound.

  Once the sides of the bridge had folded gracefully down, and the traffic began to move across the waffled iron pattern of the bridge grating, the tires making a whirring sound, I crossed, as well, using the pedestrian sidewalk on the side of the bridge. An abrupt right turn at the end of the bridge took me down along the eastern edge of Lake Union to a series of parking lots that served the colony of houseboats off the shore. Each group had a locked gate which admitted residents and guests to the docks lined with the floating homes.