The Sixth Mystery

by Lee Semsen

“You didn’t ask me about her,” she said.

  “On Tuesday you were answering questions before I asked them.”

  “Only the questions you were thinking of asking. Is Driscoll your deputy?”

  “For ten years now,” Inch said, and when he heard himself say it, he wondered how so much time could have passed.

  “You and he must get along pretty well, then.”

  “We’re used to each other,” Inch said. “He’s a good man. Not as –” he hesitated – “as intuitive as you, but clever in other ways.”

  “And you’re a good boss?”

  “You’ll have to ask Driscoll,” said Inch. “I have another question for you when you’ve finished your salad.”

  “You haven’t spoiled my lunch so far,” she said, “so go ahead.”

  “How well do you know your ex-sister-in-law?” said Inch.

  “Darlene? I met her once or twice. We didn’t get along very well. Neither, after a few years, did her brother and I.”

  “Did you ever meet her husband?”

  “She wasn’t married, not when I knew her.”

  “Somebody she might have called her husband, then,” said Inch.

  “She had a boyfriend. One of those men who wears dark glasses indoors. He didn’t have much to say to me after he found out what I did for a living.”

  “Do you remember his name?”

  She thought for half a minute. “Derek. I can’t remember his last name.”

  “Bender?” said Inch.

  She stared at him. “Is this a test? Why are you asking me questions that you already know the answers to?”

  “I’m not trying to trap you,” said Inch. “I wanted to make sure that he was the same man who used to work as a dealer at the Umatilla Casino.”

  Her eyes widened. “Now you’ve surprised me. So he and Charlie knew each other?”

  “In a way,” Inch said. He told her how Derek Bender had been accused of cheating and threatened with a knife, and how Charles Evans had intervened.

  “Charlie was good in situations like that,” she said. “I remember he once talked an armed man who had barricaded himself in his house into walking out and giving himself up.” She picked up her fork and put it down again. “What happened to Derek? Did he quit after that?”

  “He really was cheating the customers, as it turned out,” said Inch. “And the casino, too. But he must have escaped prosecution because he and Darlene were caught running the same scam over in Snohomish County a year later.”

  “So they’re in jail now?”

  “He is,” said Inch. “We don’t know what happened to her.”

  “Are you thinking that she may have been in touch with Richard?”

  “Possibly,” said Inch. “I guess I didn’t surprise you with that one.”

  “It was the obvious next question. I haven’t seen Richard for –” she stopped for a moment – “four years and eight months.”

  “He doesn’t visit your son?” said Inch.

  “Not since he moved,” she said. “He lives somewhere in southern California. I never tried to find the exact address. He sends his child support, though, every month. Direct deposit. Charley doesn’t remember him, which is just as well.”

  “Charley is your son?”

  “It’s his middle name. His first name is Richard, and after his father left ….” She didn’t bother to complete the sentence.

  “Charley is how old, seven?” said Inch.

  She smiled. “Now that must have been an actual guess. Yes, seven-and-a-half.”

  “Doesn’t he ask about his father?”

  “He did for a while. Especially when he first started school. But his best friend’s mother is a single parent, too, and that helps.”

  Inch nodded. He’d read that one-third of all children in the United States lived in single-parent households, and the great majority of those households were headed by mothers. That statistic had been accompanied by an opinion piece lamenting the breakdown of the nuclear family and the abdication of American men from the responsibilities of fatherhood. Inch was careful to avoid making such judgments himself because he’d been a mostly-absent father after he and Lynn had divorced. Their son Scott had been eight at the time, about the same age as Charley is now.

  Charley’s mother broke into his thoughts. “You don’t think Darlene had anything to do with Charlie’s murder, do you?”

  The juxtaposition of the name and the word “murder” jarred Inch for a moment. “Charles Evans? I don’t see how she could have been involved. And her boyfriend’s alibi strikes me as more than adequate.”

  “Then you’re not trying to find Darlene.”

  “No,” said Inch. “I’ll leave that for the Snohomish County Sheriff. I was just curious.”

  “Nobody ever called to ask me about her. I suppose they talked to Richard. He wouldn’t have been hard to find….” She straightened in her chair. “Almost 2:00. I need to get back to the bank.”

  “I’m out of questions,” said Inch. “Thanks for sharing your lunch hour.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said. “There is one more question you could ask.”

  “What would that be?” said Inch.

  “Remember I met with the lawyer yesterday? The question is, what did Charlie leave me in his will?”

  “As questions go, that’s an interesting one,” said Inch, “but is it relevant?”

  “It might be,” she said. “He left me everything.”

  Chapter 4

  Driscoll kicked himself verbally for a full five minutes when Inch told him how Stacy Reed was connected with Charles Evans. It took him less time to figure out why he hadn’t been able to find her: in the Union-Bulletin’s initial article about the death of Emily Reed, her last name had been spelled “Reid,” and her parents’ names had not been mentioned in any subsequent reports. Discovering what had happened to the Reeds after that was more of a challenge, although, Driscoll told Inch an hour later, tracking Darren Reed was much easier than following Stacy, who had changed her name twice in the past ten years.

  Three months after their daughter had been killed, the Reeds had walked away from their rental house in Walla Walla and moved to Bend, Oregon. Stacy had found work in a dentist’s office, but the job that Darren had been promised hadn’t materialized, and after another three months Darren had gone down to Klamath Falls and the two had divorced. Stacy had stayed in Bend for two more years and then quit her job and moved back to her parents’ home in Baker City, where she had reclaimed her birth name. A year later she had remarried – a high-school boyfriend, Driscoll said – and then she and her new husband had moved to Pocatello, Idaho – for no reason, as far as Driscoll could see, but to put a few hundred miles between them and their parents. Since then, she’d stayed put.

  “Her last name now is Campbell,” Driscoll said. “I have her phone number. Do you want to call her?”

  “I don’t know that there’s any point to it,” said Inch.

  “It would close this line of inquiry, sir,” Driscoll said.

  “I suppose it would.” Driscoll had printed the number on a slip of paper. Inch took it and dialed; on the fourth ring, a woman’s voice answered with a breathless “hello.”

  Inch identified himself as the Walla Walla County Sheriff, an announcement that was greeted with several seconds of silence.

  “Don’t tell me –” she began, and then lapsed into silence again.

  “It’s not what you’re thinking, Mrs. Campbell,” Inch said. “I’m calling about Charles Evans.”

  More silence. “Has something happened to him?”

  “I’m sorry to have to tell you that he was killed a few days ago,” Inch said. “You were listed as his emergency contact.”

  “But I haven’t heard from him in ages.”

  “This was on a job application he filled out ten years ago,” Inch said.

  “When he went to work at that casino?” she said. “That’s right; I remember.”

&n
bsp; “Then you must have kept in touch with him after he resigned,” said Inch.

  “For a while,” she said, and then her voice took on an edge. “Were you part of that?”

  “Part of what?”

  “You said ‘resigned’. He never talked about it, but I know what happened. They made him quit.”

  “I didn’t mean –” Inch stopped and tried again. “I never knew Mr. Evans. I was living in Seattle when he was … made to quit.”

  She didn’t reply immediately, and when she did, her voice was quieter. “He was a nice man. They shouldn’t have done that to him.”

  “You mean the county commissioners?”

  “Whoever they were.”

  “Do you know why they made him resign?” said Inch.

  “No. There were rumors, though.”

  “What sorts of rumors?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Something he did that made somebody mad. Or made them scared they were going to get caught.”

  “Do you remember anything specific?” said Inch.

  “No….” She let the word trail off. “That was a bad time for us.”

  “I know,” said Inch. “I understand.”

  “No, you don’t!” she said sharply, and then, “I’m sorry. Maybe you do. Mr. Evans did. His little girl was killed just like Emily. And the police couldn’t find out who did it, and then Mr. Evans came and said he would try to help, and he did try; I know he did because he called every day to tell us what he’d found, even if it was nothing. Then they fired him, but he said he’d keep trying. He said it would make a difference knowing who did it, and maybe it would have, but we never found out, and after a while we just couldn’t keep living there where it happened, and we left and moved to Bend. Mr. Evans called a few times after that, but he never had any news except to say that he hoped we were doing better. But we weren’t, and then Darren left…. After that, I asked Mr. Evans not to call again because it was too painful and I didn’t want to be reminded. I wasn’t very kind about it. I think he was hurt.”

  “You didn’t hear from him after that?” said Inch.

  “No. Look, Mr. – what did you say your name was?”

  “Inch.”

  “Mr. Inch, I’m sure you’re a nice man, but I don’t want to talk about this anymore. It’s supposed to be good to get things out in the open, but it isn’t. All it does is make you remember, and I’d rather forget.”

  Jason Moore called back late that afternoon. He remembered writing the opinion piece on the county commission, not so much for its contents as for the effect it had on his career. When the newspaper had refused to print it, he’d put a copy in the morgue – as an act of defiance, he said – and then he’d quit; he’d emptied his apartment into a U-Haul trailer and driven to Seattle. Writing for the Weekly hadn’t paid much, but it got him an interview with the Times. It wasn’t the lifetime job he’d hoped it would be ten years ago, but lately he’d started writing a blog on state and local politics. He was averaging over 500 hits a day, so he wasn’t worried. Leaving Walla Walla for Seattle was the best thing he’d ever done for himself.

  Inch refrained from telling him that leaving Seattle for Walla Walla was the best thing he had ever done for himself.

  “I’m mainly interested,” Inch said, “in the reason why the previous sheriff was forced to resign. You mentioned it twice.”

  “I used that as an example because everybody knew about it,” said Moore. “One day the county had a sheriff; the next day it didn’t. It was something people could relate to. Or could have related to.”

  “Did you ever hear why he was fired?” said Inch.

  “Not a whisper,” said Moore. “For all anybody knew about how those guys were making decisions, they might as well have been meeting on the moon. Surrounded by vacuum, that’s what they were.”

  “What about the other issues you mentioned? Rezoning, issuing contracts, allocating funds?”

  “That’s all standard stuff, isn’t it?” said Moore. “Business as usual, or it would have been business as usual if they’d conducted it in open meetings the way they should have. The problem wasn’t that they were making bad decisions, or decisions that unfairly favored some group or individual. I couldn’t see that they were, anyway, but I’d been in town only six months and I didn’t know my way around very well. The problem was that they made all their decisions in private. Four people would go into a room, the three commissioners and the secretary, and a few hours later four people would come out again. If they took a vote, the secretary wrote it down. Not who voted aye or nay or why or how they’d arrived at that vote, just the result in as few words as possible. ‘Additional 20,000 dollars to Public Works for snow removal.’ That sort of thing.”

  “It’s hard to imagine why they wanted to keep it a secret if that’s all they were doing,” said Inch.

  “I have a pretty good imagination,” said Moore, “and I couldn’t figure it out. Unless they were keeping it all a secret so the one big secret wouldn’t stand out.”

  Inch had accepted Gregory Luke’s invitation without asking himself why it had been issued, or whether it was appropriate for him, an outsider, to attend. Maybe the invitation had been only a courtesy, in which case Inch should have politely declined, saying that he was pleased to have been asked, but he hadn’t known Mr. Evans and wouldn’t want to intrude on the grief of those who had. On the other hand, maybe Luke had meant him to attend and listen and observe and possibly learn something that would aid him in finding Evans’s murderer. Or maybe Luke had assumed that Inch would want to honor the man who had preceded him as sheriff. Inch thought back to Luke’s brief call from a few days ago but decided, after a few minutes’ reflection, that he had no way of knowing what had been on Luke’s mind.

  Although it was barely light when Inch left his house at 7:00 a.m., the sky was clear, and by the time he had passed through Milton-Freewater and climbed the hill to the plateau south of town, it was almost full daylight – “almost” because the sun had not quite succeeded in surmounting the Blue Mountains. But it was high enough to bring color to the sky, and even though the landscape was drab by comparison, Inch felt an elevation of mood that he hadn’t expected to feel.

  When he and his friend Esther had visited the museum a few years ago, they had spent hours viewing the displays, going from room to room, sometimes stopping, sometimes backtracking, occasionally just resting. The exhibits were numerous and extensive, and Inch had assumed that they filled the entire building. This morning he discovered that he’d been wrong. When he arrived, he was ushered into a long, narrow room to one side of the entrance. It was dimly lit, and it wasn’t until his eyes had adjusted that he realized that what he was standing in was a building within a building – a replica of a Umatilla longhouse constructed not of lodgepoles and tule mats but of aluminum and canvas. He looked around; there were about 30 people present, some conversing in low tones with their neighbors, others just sitting quietly. Several, he saw, were garbed in traditional, even ceremonial dress. One of them raised a hand and motioned him over. It wasn’t until Inch had approached within a few feet of the man that he realized it was Gregory Luke.

  “A fine turnout, Mr. Luke,” Inch said.

  “Yes, I think so,” said Luke. “Many of these people are here on their own time, which speaks well of Mr. Evans. Would you care to sit down?”

  Inch said that he would and took a seat next to Luke.

  “How is your investigation progressing?” Luke said. “The two mysteries.”

  “I’m still some distance from solving them,” said Inch. “This –” he nodded to one side and then the other – “is an impressive structure.”

  “The longhouse serves many functions. Honoring the dead is one of them. But this will be less formal than usual because Mr. Evans was not a member of the tribe…. Then you haven’t found his murderer? Or the reason why he quit and left the position that you now occupy?”

  “I’m increasingly inclined to think that the two are c
onnected,” said Inch, “although I don’t believe I could tell you exactly why. Maybe because there’s so little about his life since he left the sheriff’s office that suggests a motive for murder. We did manage to locate Stacy Reed, his emergency contact.”

  “And who was he or she?” said Luke.

  “The mother of a little girl who was killed in a hit-and-run accident,” said Inch. “A case that turned cold almost immediately. Mr. Evans had promised Mrs. Reed that he would keep searching until he found the person responsible.”

  “Did he succeed?”

  “Evidently not,” said Inch.

  “A third mystery, then,” said Luke. He turned to face the other occupants of the room, the number of which appeared to have increased by a dozen or so in the past few minutes. “Shall we begin, Mr. Inch?” He didn’t wait for a reply, but brought up his hands and clapped them twice. The murmuring, which Inch had ceased to notice, abruptly stopped.

  “We are here,” Luke said in a voice that was only a decibel or so louder than that in which he’d spoken to Inch, “to remember Charles Evans, a man whom we all knew, some of us more than others, but all of us well enough to have been affected by his life and now by his death. I regret to count myself among those who knew him only slightly, a circumstance which, I have come to understand, was far more to my disadvantage than to his. Nevertheless, I hope to know him better after today.” He paused for a moment and turned to Inch. “We have a guest with us whom I wish to introduce before we begin. This is Abraham Inch, the sheriff of Walla Walla County, where Charles Evans lived much of his life. Sheriff Inch, perhaps you would like to be the first to speak.”

  Inch stiffened; he had expected only to listen. He turned to Luke and saw him smile almost imperceptibly. After clearing his throat as quietly as he could, he said, “Thank you, Mr. Luke,” and then paused to gather his thoughts. “Like you, I did not know Charles Evans well. In fact, I didn’t know him at all until after he died. Since then, what little I have learned about Mr. Evans has come from the people who knew him during the 22 years he served in the office I now hold. From their accounts of him, I have learned that he was a man of integrity and compassion.” Inch stopped, a little surprised at what he’d said, not sure how it would have sounded to his audience. He glanced around; they seemed to be waiting for him to say more. He cleared his throat again. “My hope, too, is that I will come to know Mr. Evans better during the next few hours, and I thank Mr. Luke for giving me that opportunity.”