Long Time Gone

by J. A. Jance

  “Ross Connors is making it my business, Kramer. And the same holds true for the Elvira Marchbank and Wink Winkler cases. You want to write ’em off? So be it, but I’m not going to. Timely case closures may count for something when it comes to promotions at Seattle PD, but Ross takes a longer view of things. He’s interested in solving cases right however long it takes rather than solving them fast and wrong.”

  For a moment Kramer said nothing. I couldn’t see his face, but I could imagine it. Once again I was thankful I wouldn’t be anywhere near his office when he started cutting loose.

  “You stay out of my way and out of my people’s way, understand?” he said at last.

  “I hear you, Kramer,” I told him. “But I’m not listening.” I put the phone down and finished printing my document. When I delivered it to Harry’s office, he was just hanging up his telephone.

  “Paul Kramer?” I asked.

  “How did you know?” Harry returned with a grin. “He wants me to take you off the Marchbank case. He feels your presence is disruptive to the investigation.”

  “What investigation?” I demanded. “He refuses to interview Sister Mary Katherine about what happened to Mimi Marchbank, and he’s as good as washed his hands of both Elvira Marchbank and Wink Winkler.”

  “Well, then,” Harry said, leaning back in his chair. “I guess you’d better see what you can do about it.”

  “I guess I’d better.”

  I went back to my office and sat there for a time, thinking. My early-morning revelation about the payoff Fords had convinced me that someone else was involved in this mess, someone who was well aware of everything that had gone on in May of 1950. The challenge was finding out that person’s identity.

  And then I remembered. Once, when I was a boy, my mother lost her purse. In those pre-credit-card days, losing your purse or wallet was a serious crisis, especially for someone of my mother’s limited means. She finally found it—in the refrigerator, tucked in with the vegetables in what used to be called a humidrawer. She told me afterward, “I found it in the very last place I looked.” And that was true on any number of levels. Of course it was the last place she looked, because as soon as she found it, she stopped looking. But the refrigerator was also the very last place she would have thought to look.

  In this case, I decided to take a page from my mother’s book and to go looking in the least likely of places—somewhere most cops, including Paul Kramer, would be loath to look. My reasoning was simple. Whatever had happened to Wink Winkler and Elvira Marchbank had its genesis in what had happened to Madeline Marchbank. The answer, if it actually existed, might well be found in old newspaper files. Paul Kramer wouldn’t go through those on a bet, and he wouldn’t let his people do so, either.

  I drove straight to the offices of the Post-Intelligencer, sweet-talked my way down to the morgue, and threw myself on the mercy of Linda Carter, the same helpful intern who had worked with me days earlier.

  “Good to see you again, Mr. Beaumont,” she said with a cordial smile. “How can I help you?”

  “I need you to take me back to the fifties one more time,” I told her. “The big difference now is, I know more or less what I’m looking for. The files are indexed, aren’t they?”

  “Pretty much,” Linda agreed. “Why?”

  “I want to see all references to people named Marchbank—Elvira, Abigail, Albert, and Madeline—along with anybody else named Marchbank that I may not happen to know about. I’d also like to see anything on Albert’s partner, Phil Landreth.”

  “Starting when?”

  “Let’s say the late forties and early fifties.”

  Soon I was again scrolling through the blue-and-white pages. Once I located the articles, I went ahead and printed them without necessarily reading them all the way through. More from sheer boredom than anything else, Linda joined me in tracking down articles.

  “I’m not sure this is something you want,” she said. “It’s a wedding announcement from the society section.”

  “Go ahead and print it,” I said. “I’ll read it later.” I didn’t add, “When I’m wearing my reading glasses so I can see the damned print,” but that’s what I meant.

  Two hours later, after thanking Linda profusely, I left the P.-I. morgue with a stack of reading material. It was noon by then, so I picked up a sandwich on the way and went back up the hill to Belltown Terrace to read the articles.

  The first batch from the archives I had brought home—the ones on Madeline Marchbank’s murder—had been relatively interesting. As expected, the articles in this one were incredibly boring. Most of them concerned Albert Marchbank’s business dealings. Each time he and his partner, Phil Landreth, added another radio station or two to their growing media empire, the purchase was duly reported in the newspaper. The first time I saw the name Landreth, it leaped out at me. I remembered seeing that name on one of the police reports I hadn’t gotten around to reading completely before I fell asleep. So I stopped right then and dug the report in question out of my briefcase.

  There wasn’t much to it. After giving her name, address, and phone numbers to investigating officers, Raelene Landreth had reported that she was the executive director of the Marchbank Foundation. She had last seen Elvira Marchbank about noon on the day in question, when she went from her office to Elvira’s next-door residence with some papers to be signed. She heard and saw nothing more until late that evening, when a police officer came to her home in Medina to tell Raelene and her husband that Elvira was dead. End of story.

  Having learned little, I turned back to the unstintingly boring articles that recorded the growth of the Marchbank-Landreth media empire. In their enthusiasm to tell the local-boys-make-good saga, the writers took the position that bigger was better without ever once mentioning how the local radio stations—the small outlets in Bellingham and Chehalis and Ellensburg—regarded being swallowed up by Seattle’s neophyte media moguls.

  One story in particular struck me as significant. On June 16, 1950, Phil and Albert had closed on the purchase of a total of five separate stations. This particular transaction, the largest one so far, was the only one that listed Abigail Marchbank as a partner. Was that why Albert had come to see his mother that day? Had he come to Mimi’s house in order to ask his mother for funds to complete this purchase? If so, Mimi’s standing on her back porch and telling him no might have been what sealed her fate.

  The last article I picked up happened to be the one Linda Carter had found for me, a wedding announcement from the June 4 issue of the paper. It was something less than a paragraph in a column called “Comings and Goings.”

  On May 13, Seattle residents Faye Darlene Downs and Thomas Kincade Landreth were united in marriage at a small private ceremony in Harrison Hot Springs, B.C. Faye is the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Acton Downs. Thomas is the son of Mr. and Mrs. Philip Landreth.

  The day leaped out at me—May 13, the Saturday Mimi Marchbank was murdered. Hadn’t there been some mention of a wedding in one of the previous articles I had read? I retrieved my first set of duplicated P.-I. articles and rummaged through it. It didn’t take long to find what I was looking for:

  Mr. Marchbank told reporters that he last saw his sister and mother on Friday afternoon, shortly before he and his wife left for Harrison Hot Springs in British Columbia, where they attended a wedding.

  Attending that wedding had provided Albert and Elvira Marchbank with an airtight alibi at the time of Mimi’s murder. I wondered if Wink Winkler had ever bothered to check to see if they’d actually been there.

  I went back to the paltry announcement. Usually the weddings of offspring of local luminaries are given the full journalistic treatment. Mr. and Mrs. Downs may have been social nobodies, but Mr. and Mrs. Landreth certainly weren’t. I recognized at once what most likely wasn’t being said about this “small private ceremony.”

  How small and how private? I wondered. And is there anyone around who would still remember the guest list of a shot
gun wedding that happened back in 1950?

  I put down the papers and reached for my phone book. In the Ls, I found no listing for Thomas Landreth, but there was one for F. D. Landreth. It came with a downtown Seattle telephone prefix but no printed address. I picked up the phone and dialed.

  “Hello.” The woman’s voice sounded as if she was probably the right age—a bit more mature than mature.

  “Is this Faye Landreth?” I asked.

  “Who’s calling, please?”

  “My name’s Beaumont,” I said. “J. P. Beaumont. I’m an investigator for the attorney general’s Special Homicide Investigation Team. It’s about—”

  “Mimi Marchbank’s murder,” she interrupted. “I was wondering if anyone would ever get around to talking to me about that.”

  I felt a rush of excitement. Elvira Marchbank’s death had probably garnered front-page treatment in today’s newspapers, but Faye Landreth was more concerned about Mimi’s murder—an unsolved homicide from fifty-plus years earlier.

  “Would it be possible to meet with you?” I asked. “Today, maybe?”

  “Today would be fine,” she said. “What time and where?”

  “Where do you live?” I countered.

  “In a condo downtown,” she said. “Cedar Heights on Second Avenue.”

  She had no idea that I was calling from only a block away at Belltown Terrace.

  “I can be there in ten minutes,” I said.

  “Should I put the coffeepot on?”

  “That would be great.”

  Ten minutes later, she buzzed me into the building, and I made my way up to the ninth floor. The woman who opened the door looked to be in her early seventies. She was relatively tall and unbent. She wore her hair in a short pixie cut, but there was nothing pixielike in her firm handshake.

  “Mr. Beaumont?” she said cordially. “Won’t you come in?”

  She ushered me into a well-kept room. Her unit was much lower than mine and smaller, but the territorial view of the Space Needle and the bottom of Lake Union was similar to what I see from my penthouse bedroom. The furnishings were simple and not particularly elegant. Large, colorful pieces of inexpensively framed artwork filled the walls. I walked close enough to one of them that I could decipher the signature scrawled in the lower right-hand corner: F. D. Landreth.

  “Yours?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “They’re very good,” I told her. She flushed slightly at the compliment.

  “Thank you,” she replied. “Painting is the only thing that keeps me from running the streets. Help yourself to a chair. How do you take your coffee—cream and sugar?”

  “Black, please,” I told her.

  Faye Landreth ducked into the tiny galley kitchen while I made my way to a comfortable leather couch at the far end of the combination living/dining room. On the end table next to where I took a seat stood a gilt-framed eight-by-ten photo of a handsome young man wearing his United States Marine Corps dress uniform.

  “Your son?” I asked as she handed me a mug of coffee.

  Faye nodded. “Timothy,” she said. “Timothy Acton Landreth. He’s been gone for a long time now—ten years. It’s the old story,” she added. “Drugs and booze. He went through treatment a couple of times, but he just couldn’t get his act together. That’s why I keep this particular photo—because he looks so good in it. Being a marine was the best thing that ever happened to him. After that, life was all downhill.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  She smiled. “I know. So am I. I wanted to help him, but I just couldn’t. He’s why I’m talking to you now, though. I wouldn’t do it while Timmy was still alive. Things were tough enough between him and his father. I didn’t want to do anything that would make their relationship worse, but now…”

  I was impatient. I wanted Faye Landreth to move on to the subject of Mimi Marchbank and how she had known I would be asking questions about that long-ago murder, but good sense won out. Like Sister Mary Katherine, Faye had kept whatever she was going to reveal secret for a very long time. I’d be better off waiting for her to relay the information in her own fashion and in her own good time rather than trying to rush her into it.

  “You’re a widow, then?” I asked finally.

  “A widow?” she repeated, then laughed outright. “Hardly. I’ve been divorced for years. In fact, Tom announced he was leaving the night before our thirtieth anniversary. He left the house that night and married his secretary, Raelene Jarvis, the day the divorce was final. His second wife, Raelene, happened to be two years younger than Timmy.”

  “Which probably didn’t do much to improve father-son relations,” I suggested.

  “No, it didn’t,” Faye agreed. “Tim stopped speaking to his father then and there. I always hoped they’d reconcile, but they never did. And I kept quiet because…” She paused and gave a self-deprecating laugh. “Well, I had been quiet for so long by then that it didn’t seem to make much difference. After Tim died, though, I told myself that if anyone ever did get around to asking me about what happened, I was going to tell what I knew.”

  “Which is?”

  Faye sighed. “Tom and I had to get married,” she admitted.

  I’d already figured that out on my own. “I know,” I said. “May 13,1950. Harrison Hot Springs, British Columbia.”

  She gave me a searching look, then continued. “I was sixteen. He was nineteen. Tom’s father was furious.”

  “That would be Phil Landreth, Albert Marchbank’s partner?”

  “Yes. Tom’s dad wanted him to go to college and then on to law school, but that wasn’t possible, not with a wife and baby to support. Against his parents’ wishes, Tom dropped out of college and went to work for his grandfather—his mother’s father—as a manager in his car dealership.”

  My ears pricked up. “Car dealership? Which one?”

  “Crosby Motors,” she said. “It was a Ford agency up on Aurora Boulevard.”

  I thought about those two brand-new Fords—the one that had gone to Sean Dunleavy and the other that had gone to Wink Winkler. Was that where they had come from—Crosby Motors?

  “The dealership’s been gone for years now,” Faye went on. “Grandpa Crosby made a nice piece of change for himself, first when he sold the agency, and then later, when he sold the land itself. By then, Tom had enough management experience that Phil and Albert hired him to work in their company.”

  “With the radio stations?”

  Faye Landreth nodded. “Tom worked for Albert, who managed the overall holding company. Other people managed the stations themselves, but it wasn’t just radio. Albert Marchbank saw the coming boom in television very early on. He moved from radio broadcasting to television without ever missing a beat. Everybody connected to the company made money, Tom and me included.”

  “Sounds like Tom was in the right place at the right time,” I suggested.

  “It wasn’t all luck,” Faye Landreth said. For the first time I heard the bitterness in her voice.

  “What was it?” I asked.

  “They weren’t there,” she said.

  Faye’s sudden segue caught me off guard. “Who wasn’t there?” I asked.

  “Albert and Elvira,” Faye answered. “In Harrison Hot Springs. I know the newspaper notice said they came to our wedding, but that wasn’t true.”

  “And what about your folks, Faye?” I said. “Did they suddenly become the proud owners of a brand-new 1950 Ford? It seems like someone was passing them out for free right about then.”

  She ducked her head. Finally she raised it defiantly and looked me full in the eye. “Yes,” she admitted. “Yes, they did.”

  “From Crosby Motors?”

  She nodded.

  “Who bought it?”

  “I don’t even know. Does it matter? My folks needed a car. All I had to do for them to have one was keep my mouth shut.”

  “Which happened to give Albert and Elvira Marchbank an unbreakable alibi for murder,�
�� I added.

  “I’m not proud of what I did, but yes.” Her voice was very small.

  “And you never told. Why not?”

  “For one thing, I was scared to death of Albert. I think Tom was, too. If the man was willing to stab his own sister to death right there in broad daylight, what kind of person was he? And I don’t think Elvira was much better than Albert. They were both ruthless people. The problem was, Tom told me that keeping quiet about what happened made us all accessories after the fact to what they had done—my parents, too. He said we’d all be held responsible for Mimi’s murder, every bit as much as the people who actually stabbed her.”

  “Why are you telling me this now?”

  “Because Timmy’s dead,” Faye Landreth said. “Tom’s parents are both gone now, and so are mine. If somebody wants to arrest me for my part in the cover-up, so be it, but it would have been wonderful if they had put Elvira on trial for murder, convicted her, and hauled her off to prison.”

  “But she’s dead now, too,” I said.

  Faye nodded. “I know,” she said. “I saw it in the paper this morning.”

  “And so is a man named William Winkler. Wink Winkler was the detective who investigated Madeline Marchbank’s murder back in 1950,” I added. “Investigators think he committed suicide within hours of Elvira Marchbank’s fatal fall. According to my count, that doesn’t leave behind very many people from back then. If the people are gone, so are all the witnesses.”

  “Except for me,” Faye volunteered. “I would be one; Tom’s the other.”

  “You’re suggesting that your former husband might be involved in all this?”

  “He was involved in 1950,” Faye said. “Why wouldn’t he be involved now?”

  “And if he were to go to jail because of his involvement? What then?”

  Faye Landreth smiled. “That would be his problem, now wouldn’t it. His problem and Raelene’s.”

  I don’t remember who it was who said “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” and all that jazz, but he must have had someone like Faye Landreth in mind. She had waited almost a quarter of a century to lower the boom on her philandering ex-husband and his new wife. Now she was doing it—in spades.