The Sixth Mystery

by Lee Semsen

  Inch turned so he was facing the lobby. He wasn’t sure what to make of Jody Graham, and he was still feeling foolish, although he couldn’t tell whether it was the result of her actions, or of his reactions.

  “If you’re thinking that I’m not taking you seriously,” she said, which was precisely what he was thinking, “don’t worry. I have great respect for you and for the job. I’d just forgotten how much I missed it, and this is how I keep my distance.”

  Inch turned to look at her, but all he could see was her profile.

  “You probably want to know why I quit the job if I liked it so much,” she said.

  “I probably do,” said Inch.

  “I said I was going to let you ask the questions, didn’t I? I’ll try to behave from now on.” She continued to scan the lobby, turning her head back and forth very slightly. “You could say I quit in protest. I was young and idealistic, and I thought that Charlie had been treated unfairly.”

  “By the county commissioners?” said Inch.

  “Yes, although I had the impression that there was somebody behind them pulling the strings. But I didn’t know who, and I never found out.”

  “Then you don’t know why he was asked to resign?” said Inch, feeling more comfortable now that he’d managed to ask a question before she answered it.

  “Not a clue,” she said. “If it was something to do with a case, or something that had turned up in an investigation, he never let me in on it. The first time the commissioners called him in, I asked him straight out what was wrong, but he wouldn’t tell me. He said I didn’t want to know.”

  “Maybe he meant that if he told you,” Inch said, “you might get in trouble, too.”

  “I think that’s exactly what he meant,” she said. “Charlie always tried to protect me from the unpleasant aspects of the job. Once we were out on a missing persons case and we came across a body floating in an irrigation canal. It had been there for several days; you know what they look like. Charlie wouldn’t let me see it. He actually put his hands over my eyes and turned me around and marched me back to the car.”

  “You must have resented that,” said Inch.

  “He couldn’t help himself.” She glanced at Inch briefly. “He had a daughter, you know.”

  “I didn’t know,” said Inch. “I didn’t even know he was married.”

  “He wasn’t,” she said. “Not when I knew him. His daughter died when she was seven. He and his wife divorced six months later. That was before my time, though.”

  “How long did you work for him?”

  “Three years,” she said. “Best years of my life.”

  “So far, you mean,” said Inch. “You’re still young.”

  “Thirty-six,” she said. “But sometimes I feel twice that age.”

  Inch sometimes felt older than his years, too – he couldn’t remember ever feeling younger – but he’d never truly understood what a particular age felt like until he reached it. That was a minor bit of wisdom that would be of no use whatsoever to Jody Graham, and he decided to change the subject. “Did you know the man who was deputy before you?” he asked.

  “I met him a few times,” she said. “Old codger. He’d had the job for 42 years. To me, he seemed more like someone’s maiden aunt than a law enforcement officer.”

  “Do you know if he’s still alive?”

  “I know that he isn’t,” she said. “He died a year after he retired.”

  “It must have been a big adjustment for Mr. Evans when you took the job,” said Inch. “Someone less than half the age of his previous assistant.”

  “Someone female, you mean.” She shrugged. “I said that Charlie treated me as if I were his daughter. I suppose he treated old Sam like a doddering grandparent. Maybe it wasn’t such an adjustment for him after all.”

  “When was the last time you saw Mr. Evans?” said Inch.

  “Getting down to basics?” she said. “Do you want to know my whereabouts on the night of October 12th?”

  “Do you want to tell me?” said Inch.

  “I don’t mind,” she said. “I was at home with my son.”

  “Can he corroborate that?” said Inch.

  “Only until 8:30,” she answered in the same mock-serious tone. “Then I put him to bed.”

  “And as a responsible parent, you wouldn’t have left him alone,” said Inch. “I won’t ask him about it unless I need to. But I am interested in knowing when you last talked to Mr. Evans. Had you seen him recently?”

  “Actually, I hadn’t seen Charlie for several years.”

  “How many years?”

  She didn’t hesitate. “Five. It was just after my divorce, and I decided to call him up and ask him to go out for a drink. The trouble was, I was already drunk, and Charlie knew it. We talked for a while, probably not about anything in particular, although I can’t remember what I said, and then I fell asleep. Somehow I managed to hang up the phone first. So I didn’t see him; I just talked to him, and I don’t even know what we talked about.”

  “That was the last time?” said Inch.

  “That was the very last time.”

  “And before that?”

  “Before that I was married,” she said. Then she glanced at Inch again and added, “That’s not really an answer, is it? Shall I tell you the whole story?”

  “If you think it’s relevant,” said Inch, “and if you want to.”

  “I’m pretty sure it’s irrelevant,” she said, “and I’m not sure that I want to tell you, but I’m going to, anyway. I was in love with Charlie Evans.” She stopped, and when Inch realized that she was waiting for a response, he said, “I see,” because he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  This time she turned and faced him squarely. “Maybe you do. Or will. I suppose it would be more accurate to say that I had a crush on him. When I got the job, I was 22, fresh out of college, and he was 49. The crush lasted for the entire time we worked together, three years, four months, and 12 days, and it was one-sided from beginning to end. As I said, he treated me like a daughter. Like a competent deputy sheriff, too, but still like a daughter. I was happy, though, because I saw him every day and that was enough. And when they forced him to resign, I quit, too, because I didn’t want the job if I couldn’t work with Charlie. The day we both quit was the first time in my life that I ever got drunk. Charlie didn’t; he could make a glass of beer last for hours even after it got warm and flat. The second time I got drunk was one month later when Charlie told me that he didn’t want me to call him anymore; that I should get on with my life and meet new people; you know the sort of thing. He said it better than that. The third time was the night before my wedding. I phoned him at 1:00 in the morning and told him I couldn’t go through with it. I suppose I said that, because I’d been thinking it the whole day, but I don’t actually remember anything either of us said, so maybe I didn’t. But I did go through with it, and the marriage lasted three years, and I never once talked to Charlie during that time.”

  “So you called him once more, three years later, and that was it?” said Inch.

  “I got drunk once more three years later, and that was it. You could say the two were connected.”

  She had related all this so matter-of-factly that when she finished, all Inch could say was, “He must have been a good man to inspire such loyalty.”

  “He was,” she said. “He was a good policeman, too.”

  “I’m sure he was.”

  “You seem to do all right yourself,” she said. “I see your name in the paper every so often.”

  “I’ve been lucky a few times,” said Inch.

  “Luck,” she said. “Charlie said there was no such thing. So what happened to him, if you don’t mind telling me?”

  “Someone hit him on the head with a fireplace tool.”

  She winced. “Forced entry?”

  “No sign of it,” said Inch. “Mr. Evans probably let his murderer in through the front door, although the man who found him got i
n through an open window.”

  “I saw the name of the man,” she said. “Russian?”

  “Chechen,” said Inch. “I don’t consider him a suspect.”

  “Do you consider anyone a suspect?”

  “Not so far,” said Inch. “All I know – and I won’t say that I know it for certain, only beyond a reasonable doubt – is that it wasn’t random. So I’m looking for someone with a motive, and it’s possible that the motive is ten years old or more.”

  “Which is why you came to see me,” said Jody Graham.

  “Partly,” said Inch. “Mostly because I was curious and because you’re working only a few blocks away.”

  “I hope it was worth the walk.”

  “It was,” said Inch. He turned to face her. “I’ll probably want to talk to you again.”

  “You’d better,” she said. “You haven’t asked the obvious question. You were leading up to it, but you stopped before you got there.”

  “You mean who might have had a motive for killing Charles Evans?” said Inch. “I figured you would have told me by now if you knew the answer.”

  Driscoll was curious about the former deputy sheriff, and Inch became so annoyed with his questions that he said that in one respect Jody Graham was a better deputy than he was because she usually knew what her boss was thinking, and she would have figured out by now that it was time to shut up. Driscoll, who was generally more sensitive to his own feelings than he was to others’, was clearly hurt by this, and after several minutes of silence, Inch decided that he ought to apologize, and he did so by saying that on the other hand, if the roles had been reversed, he doubted that Jody Graham would have been able to find James Driscoll as quickly as he had found her. This restored Driscoll’s usual good humor, and Inch asked him if he’d succeeded in locating any of the people whose names he’d given him earlier. Driscoll said that he was still working on them, and so far he was three for five. Inch asked him which three he’d found.

  “The dealer was the easiest, sir,” Driscoll said. “He and his wife tried the same scam at the Tulalip Casino over in Marysville. One of the floor managers caught him. Evidently he wasn’t very subtle about what he was doing; the night he was arrested he had over five thousand dollars in chips in his pockets. After that, he took up residence in the Snohomish County Jail.”

  “That lets him out,” Inch said, thinking that he hadn’t been a plausible suspect in the first place. “What about his wife?”

  “I haven’t found her yet,” said Driscoll. “The sheriff’s office questioned her after her husband was arrested, but she said she didn’t know that he’d done anything wrong. She said that he often stayed to play poker after his shift was over, and he always brought his winnings home in chips and gave them to her. She liked to play roulette and usually came out ahead, too, or so she told the sheriff.”

  “Not a bad story,” said Inch, “but I’m surprised they let her go, knowing that she and her husband had tried the same thing before.”

  “They didn’t know it at the time. The names she and her husband were using in Marysville and the names they used here were aliases. It took the sheriff a few days to make the connection, and by then she’d disappeared.”

  “Did you find out their real names?”

  “I did,” said Driscoll. “His was Derek Bender.”

  “And hers?”

  “Darlene Graham.” Driscoll grinned and raised his eyebrows.

  “It’s a common name, Driscoll.”

  “She has a brother named Richard.”

  “It can’t be the same one,” said Inch.

  “It is,” said Driscoll, and he grinned even wider.

  Inch didn’t waste any time wondering if Jody Graham knew about the connection between Charles Evans and her ex-husband, although he wondered if she would have told him about it if she did. He considered taking another walk to the bank but decided to stay and listen (patiently, if he could) to the rest of Driscoll’s account of his efforts to find the five missing people.

  Two of the other names – the two personal references – turned out not to be missing at all. One was a childhood friend; Driscoll had found a telephone number, called him, and learned that he and Charles Evans had grown up next door to one another in Wenatchee. He – the man’s name was Irving Gust – hadn’t seen Charlie for several years, hadn’t known that he’d died, was very sorry to hear it, and asked if he should send flowers. Driscoll told him that he’d let him know. The other was a professor emeritus of criminal justice at Washington State University who had retired to a cabin near Lake Chelan. Driscoll had spoken to him briefly; the professor had remembered, even after 40 years, that Charles Evans had been one of his best students; that he’d expected him to go far in the profession; and that he’d been disappointed when he’d settled for a dead-end position in an out-of-the-way place like Walla Walla because he’d felt that Evans had more potential than that. Driscoll had ended the call with the feeling that both he and Inch had been insulted, and several minutes later he’d realized that Dr. Arnold Mendel had written one of the textbooks he’d used as an undergraduate, one that he’d thought was even duller and less readable than most of the books he’d been assigned during his college career.

  Philip Marconi, the man who had threatened Derek Bender with a knife, should have been easy to locate, Driscoll said, and he was clearly frustrated by his inability to discover any trace of him. The address he’d given the tribal police – in La Grande, about 50 miles east on Interstate 84 – turned out to be false, and the telephone number belonged to a cell phone purchased six months ago by the proprietor of a tourist shop near Steens Mountain in southern Oregon. There was one Philip Marconi in the National Crime Information Center database; his last known address was in Boise, Idaho, and at first he’d seemed like a possibility, but then Driscoll had called the Umatilla Tribal Police and learned that they’d taken a photocopy of Marconi’s driver’s license. The Philip Marconi on record with the tribal police was 42 years old, 26 years younger than the Philip Marconi living in Boise.

  Stacy Reed, the emergency contact, had been just as elusive. Driscoll had tried the telephone number on the application, first as a local call and then with each of the area codes assigned to Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, and although he’d reached three active telephone numbers among the eleven that he’d dialed, none of the people who had answered had heard of Stacy Reed, and all of them had had their telephone numbers for 15 years or more. A search for Stacy Reed on the Internet had turned up five matches in eastern Washington. Four of the five had working phone numbers, but none had been home when Driscoll called. Or none had chosen to answer.

  There were any number of ways Inch could occupy himself in the evenings and, if he wanted to, forget about the case he was working on. When he was alone, as he was on most weeknights, the New York Times crossword was the most effective, although less so early in the week when the puzzles weren't very difficult. This was a Tuesday, and the puzzle had taken him less than half an hour to complete, so at 7:15 he was left with a choice: find another means of diversion, or spend the rest of the evening thinking about the same things he’d thought about all day and would probably think about all day tomorrow.

  As soon as he made his choice – or allowed it to be made for him – he realized that the most intriguing aspects of the case didn’t necessarily have anything to do with the death of Charles Evans. Who had killed him didn’t seem nearly as compelling a question as why he’d been fired ten years ago, or – an even more peripheral issue – why Jody Graham hadn’t mentioned that her ex-brother-in-law had dealt blackjack at the casino where Charles Evans had worked as a security guard, or, what might be more pertinent, whether Darlene Graham or Charles Evans knew who the other was. Although Inch had no idea whether solving any of these minor mysteries would bring him closer to solving the major one, he knew that he’d be able to focus more easily if he put the irrelevant issues to rest. For two of them, it meant another meeting with Jody Graham,
but he’d leave that for later.

  Of the people in Walla Walla whom Inch could call his friends – those he could call on a Tuesday evening for no other reason than to satisfy his curiosity – the only one who had lived in the area when Charles Evans was the sheriff was John Bennings, the medical examiner. Inch had no qualms about disturbing him for a trivial matter; in all the years they’d worked together, he couldn’t remember a single conversation in which Bennings had come right to the point about anything, or given a straight answer when a crooked one would do as well – and for Bennings, a crooked one always did better. Inch dialed Bennings’s home number; he answered immediately, as if he’d been waiting for the call, and when Inch identified himself, Bennings said that he’d been expecting to hear from Inch and that he knew why he’d called.

  “Everybody seems to know what I’m going to say before I say it,” Inch said.

  “I know what you ought to say,” Bennings answered. Inch didn’t respond, and after several seconds of silence, Bennings said, “Well, go ahead.”

  “Go ahead with what?” said Inch.

  “Your confession,” said Bennings. “I know you want to tell somebody, and since you’re not a religious man, you should tell your doctor. I’m as discreet as any priest.”

  “You’re not my doctor,” said Inch. “And what am I supposed to be confessing to?”

  “To the willful murder of Charles Evans, former sheriff of Walla Walla County.”

  If anyone else had made that pronouncement, particularly if he’d made it with such gravity, Inch would have been dumbfounded. As it was, he was speechless only for a few seconds. “That isn’t funny, Doc,” he said.

  “Did you detect any attempt at humor in my delivery?” said Bennings.

  “No,” said Inch. “I didn’t detect any success at humor, either.”

  “Sarcasm won’t save you, Abe,” said Bennings. “Get it off your chest. You’ll feel better.”

  “Tell me why I’d want to kill Charles Evans,” said Inch.

  “Jealousy,” said Bennings. “Charlie Evans was a paragon. Highly respected, even revered in some quarters. I won’t say that most people don’t find you tolerably likable, but Charlie was universally admired. After years of listening to others talk about his character and his accomplishments, you came to hate him as the man you could never hope to be. Finally you snapped.”