Long Time Gone jpb-17

by J. A. Jance

  “Beau?” Lars said, sounding relieved. “I’m glad you’re there.”

  “Why? Is something wrong?”

  “Ya, sure,” he said. “I yust got back from the hospital. They took Beverly over to Swedish in Ballard.”

  I felt my heart constrict. “What’s wrong? Do you need me to go there?”

  “No. Not now. She’s sleeping. Has a touch of pneumonia, is all. They’re keeping her for a day or two.”

  I wasn’t reassured. At age ninety-one, “a touch” of pneumonia can be very serious. And I was also more than a little annoyed that no one had bothered to let me know that Beverly’s condition had changed from being a little “under the weather” to something potentially fatal.

  “Are you sure there’s nothing I can do?” I asked. “What about taking you back to the hospital in the morning? Will you need a ride?”

  “No. I talked to the lady at the front desk. Queen Anne Gardens has a van that takes residents where they need to go. I’ve already lined up a ride. Now I yust want to go to bed.”

  “You’ll call if you need anything?”

  “You bet,” he said and hung up.

  Mel was watching me closely. “Is someone ill?” she asked.

  I nodded. “My grandmother. She’s ninety-one, and they’ve slapped her in the hospital with pneumonia.”

  “She’s the one who made the afghan?” Mel asked.

  I nodded again. “Beverly Jenssen. My mother was pregnant with me and unmarried when my father died in a motorcycle accident. My grandfather-my biological grandfather-disapproved of unwed mothers and threw Mother out of the house. She raised me on her own and remained estranged from her parents for as long as she lived. In fact, I never met them until I stumbled across them by accident a few years ago. By then my grandfather had suffered a stroke and was ready to let bygones be bygones. After my grandfather died, Beverly met and married an old friend of mine, Lars Jenssen. He’s the one who just called. He’s also an independent old cuss who won’t even let me give him a ride to the hospital.”

  I didn’t add that, other than my kids, Lars and Beverly were all the family I had left in the world, but I think Mel picked up on that anyway. “You’re sure there’s nothing we should do?”

  “Lars as good as told me to mind my own business.”

  There was a knock on the door, and it startled me. Belltown Terrace is a secure building. People inside the building usually don’t go knocking on doors at that hour of the night, and if it was someone from outside, either the doorman should have let me know a visitor was coming up or that person should have announced himself over the security phone at the front door or in the elevator lobby.

  “Who is it?” I asked without opening the door.

  “It’s me,” Paul Kramer growled from the far side of the door. “Now let me in before I break the damned door down!”

  I opened the door to find him, bristling with rage, standing in the corridor.

  “Who let you up here?” I demanded.

  “My badge let me up here,” he returned. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, Beaumont?”

  “Until you knocked on the door, I was sitting in my own living room and minding my own business. Why?”

  “I want to know what you’re up to. If you had told me what the deal was instead of going off and leaving me with that evidence box and nothing to go on, maybe she wouldn’t be dead.”

  “Who’s dead?” I asked, sure his answer would be Sister Mary Katherine. It wasn’t.

  “Elvira Marchbank was found dead this evening at the bottom of her basement stairs,” he said. “And I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that she would die under suspicious circumstances on the very same day I catch you prowling around the cold case file of her sister-in-law, who was murdered some fifty-plus years ago. So now that you’ve managed to get my name instead of yours on the checkout sheet for that evidence box, you’re going to tell me what the hell is going on.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Don’t blame me because your name is on the sheet. I seem to remember your insisting on taking charge of that cold case box all on your own.”

  Kramer looked as though he was going to explode. “I asked you straight out what this was all about and you-”

  “Is something the matter?” Mel asked, stepping into view behind me.

  Kramer was taken aback. Clearly he hadn’t expected me to have a visitor at this hour of the night. If Elvira was dead and the captain was worried about a public relations problem, the last thing he needed was a witness to this little tirade. I, on the other hand, was worried about Sister Mary Katherine for fear she could be next on someone’s list.

  “This is police business,” Kramer snapped. “Tell your girlfriend it’s got nothing to do with her and to stay the hell out of it.”

  I was about to explain that Mel Soames was a colleague of mine and not a girlfriend, but Mel handled that on her own.

  “Would you like to see my badge?” she asked sweetly. “Or should I do us all a favor and start out by shoving it up your ass?”

  I could have kissed her-probably should have, especially considering the fact that her comment left Kramer utterly speechless for the better part of a minute. Finally, with blood throbbing in his temples, he turned his fury on me.

  “If Mrs. Marchbank’s death could have been prevented by my knowing what was going on-”

  “Wait a minute, Kramer,” I interrupted. “I told you if you wanted that information, you should call my boss. I even gave you his number. Did you call him?”

  “Well, no, but-”

  “Sorry. No buts allowed,” I returned. “If you had gone by the book, you would have had the info. Aren’t you the guy who’s always such a stickler for going through channels and across desks? As I told you before, I don’t work for you or Seattle PD anymore. If you’ve got questions about my case, talk to Harry I. Ball or, better yet, talk to Ross Connors himself. Once they give the okay, I’ll be glad to talk to you or your investigators about this. Just have them drop by. Obviously you know where I live.”

  Kramer turned and stalked back down the hallway. “Why didn’t you tell him about Sister Mary Katherine?” Mel asked, once the elevator door shut behind him.

  “He’s a jerk,” I replied.

  “That’s true,” she said, “and readily apparent. But I still don’t know why you shut him down like that.”

  “Because Paul Kramer and I have a history,” I replied.

  I expected her to argue the point or to ask for more details, but she didn’t.

  “Okay,” Mel said. “Makes sense to me.”

  With that she went back over to the window seat, plugged her feet back into her shoes, and picked up her coat. “It’s late,” she said. “I need to be going.” She paused by the door. “See you tomorrow. At the office?”

  “Probably.”

  She left then. As I took the last of the Sister Katherine tapes out of the VCR, I asked myself Mel Soames’s question. Why hadn’t I told Kramer? Wasn’t I being as territorial as he had been in the evidence room? And I would be talking to him or at least to the detectives assigned to investigate Elvira Marchbank’s death. All I was doing was putting him off for a few hours-until the AG’s office was open for business the next morning.

  But the really troubling part was a question raised by Kramer himself. Had my refusal to give him the information contributed to what had happened to Elvira? She had been found at the bottom of a flight of stairs. Had she fallen or had she been pushed? By being stubborn, I had put myself out of the loop. Paul Kramer didn’t know about Sister Mary Katherine, but I didn’t know about Elvira. In the game of tit for tat I was as much of a jerk as he was. That was not high praise.

  So what was I going to do about it? I worried about it for a while. Finally I picked up the phone and dialed a number I knew by heart, one that brought me to the homicide desk at Seattle PD. Sergeant Angie Jerrold answered the phone. I was relieved to hear a familiar voice, and she seemed happy to he
ar from me as well.

  “What can I do for you?”

  “Who’s assigned to the Marchbank case?” I asked.

  “Which one?” she asked. “As of tonight, there are two of them on the board,” she said. “Madeline and Elvira.”

  I was stunned to learn that based on Elvira’s death, Kramer had reopened Madeline’s long cold case. I was stunned and a little relieved.

  “Either,” I said. “Whoever’s available.”

  Which is how I ended up talking to Detective Kendall Jackson. “What can I do for you, Mr. Beaumont?”

  Jackson had been a uniformed officer and still working the cars when I left the department. Having him call me Mr. Beaumont made me feel slightly ancient.

  “Which Marchbank belongs to you?” I asked.

  “Elvira,” he said. “Hank and I just got back from the crime scene.”

  Hank was Detective Henry Ramsdahl.

  “I’m working Madeline,” I said. “For the AG’s office. Captain Kramer was here a little while ago. He suggested it might be a good idea if we compared notes.”

  “Sure thing,” Jackson said. “Sounds good to me. What do you have?”

  “An eyewitness.”

  “To Madeline’s murder?” He sounded incredulous. “From 1950?”

  “Yup.”

  “When can we talk to this witness?”

  “That’s a little tougher,” I said. “She’s a nun. Lives in a convent up on Whidbey Island.”

  “Can I call her up?”

  That was when I realized that in all my transactions with Sister Mary Katherine, no one-not Sister Mary Katherine and not Freddy Mac-had given me her phone number. I knew the convent had to have a telephone. Hadn’t she told me someone named Sister Therese had surfed the Net for information on Alfred and Elvira Marchbank?

  “I don’t have that number right now,” I said. “Once I get it, I can have her call you. Or better yet, maybe I can convince her to come talk to you.”

  “If you can talk a nun out of a convent, you must be some kind of guy.”

  “We’ll see,” I said. “If I can get her to come to town, how hard will it be to meet up with you?”

  “Not hard at all,” Jackson returned. “You tell us when and where, and Hank and I will be there. Captain Kramer gave us our marching orders. Both cases are highest priority.”

  Captain Kramer! Just hearing the word captain used in conjunction with Kramer’s name rankled, but I was going to have to get used to it.

  “All right, then,” I said. “Let’s see what we can do.”

  Good to my word, I was up and on the phone to Freddy Mac bright and early the next morning, asking for Sister Mary Katherine’s phone number.

  “Is it too early to call?” I asked after he gave me what I needed.

  “Hardly,” Fred said with a laugh. “You won’t be waking her. She tells me morning devotionals start at five A.M.”

  So I dialed Saint Benedict’s and was put through to Sister Mary Katherine. “Beaumont here,” I said. “I’m wondering if you can come back to Seattle today to meet with some Seattle PD detectives.”

  “This evening, perhaps,” she said. “Sister Therese and Sister Margaret just left in the van to run some errands. They won’t be back until around lunchtime. I could leave after that.”

  I didn’t want the meeting with the Seattle PD homicide detectives to conflict with Rosemary Peters’s funeral. I needed it to be earlier instead of later. “What if I came out to Whidbey and picked you up?”

  “That seems dreadfully inconvenient for you. Does it really have to be today?” Sister Mary Katherine asked. “I’ve been away for several days, and I just got home late yesterday.”

  “Elvira Marchbank is dead,” I told her.

  “Oh, no,” Mary Katherine murmured. Her regretful tone surprised me. “She was fine when I saw her. What happened?”

  “When you saw her?” I repeated. “When was that?”

  “Yesterday afternoon,” Sister Mary Katherine said. “After our lunch. I decided to drive back to the old neighborhood just to look around. I stopped outside the foundation office and wondered what to do. Finally I worked up my courage and went inside. When I asked to see Mrs. Marchbank, the woman there told me Elvira wasn’t available. But as I was leaving, a limo drove up to the house next door-the place where my parents and I used to live. It turns out that’s where Elvira lives now. The limo was bringing her home from a doctor’s appointment. Even after all these years, I recognized her the moment she stepped out of the car.”

  I was thunderstruck. “You didn’t talk to her, did you?”

  “Of course I did,” Sister Mary Katherine said. “After all these years, it seemed like the right thing to do, and I’m glad I did, too. She was old and frail and she told me she was sorry.”

  “Sorry?” I asked.

  “Sorry about the part she played in Mimi’s death. She said she’d always known I’d come back someday and that she was finally ready to ‘do the right thing.’ I took that to mean that she was prepared to turn herself in and accept responsibility for her actions. What happened to her?”

  “She fell down a flight of stairs. The detectives working the case seem to think she was pushed.”

  “That’s terrible,” Sister Katherine said. “I’m so sorry.”

  From my point of view, terrible just about covered it. Sister Mary Katherine had just gone from being a homicide eyewitness to being a possible homicide suspect.

  “I’m on my way to pick you up,” I said. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  CHAPTER 13

  It took time to make Enterprise shape up and come through with the rental car the insurance company had ordered for me. Once it appeared, I headed north on I-5. After the 928, the Ford Taurus was a bit of a letdown. As the ads say about Porsches: There is no substitute. I had been told that the adjuster would be getting back to me either that day or the next with the verdict as to whether or not the 928 was totaled. In the meantime, the Taurus was my ride.

  I lucked out and caught the Mukilteo Ferry and headed for Useless Bay on Whidbey Island. Useless Bay is useless because it’s so shallow that at low tide it’s little more than a glorified mudflat. On the way I called into the office to let people know what I was up to.

  “Keeping a low profile, I see,” Barbara Galvin observed.

  “No, I’m working,” I told her. “If you like, I’ll be glad to talk to Harry.”

  “Wouldn’t recommend it,” she returned. “He’s still on the warpath about your five o’clock news appearance. If I were you, I’d give him more time to cool off-unless he calls you, that is.”

  It seemed like a good idea to take Barbara’s advice as far as Harry was concerned. “What about Mel?”

  “She and Brad are in Seattle doing interviews,” Barbara said.

  If one of the people they were interviewing was Heather Peters, that meant I didn’t want to talk to Mel, and I certainly didn’t want to talk to Ron or Amy. I put my phone back in my pocket and hoped it wouldn’t ring.

  Once on Whidbey, I left the Clinton Ferry Dock behind and drove north, past the turnoff to Useless Bay Country Club and onto Double Bluff Road. Evidence of downed trees was everywhere. The entrance to Saint Benedict’s was barred with an imposing iron gate. Alongside were a keypad and an intercom.

  When the invisible gatekeeper allowed me entrance, I was amazed. The convent grounds had been lovingly landscaped into something that rivaled Victoria’s famed Buchart Gardens. On this midwinter day, nothing was in bloom, but the snow was mostly gone, and the carefully tended beds were clean and empty and ready for planting. A coveralls-clad woman with a noisy leaf blower was herding the last few fallen leaves off the manicured and graveled pathways. She looked up and nodded as I drove past, but she didn’t stop what she was doing.

  The convent’s several buildings, nestled in a slight hollow, looked old and European. Thick hay-bale walls were covered with whitewashed stucco. The roofs were covered with red clay til
es. The centerpiece of the place was a tiny chapel, no bigger than a two-car garage.

  As I stopped beside what appeared to be the main building, the door to the chapel opened and Sister Mary Katherine stepped out. She was dressed in an old-fashioned flowing habit.

  “I was saying prayers for Elvira Marchbank,” she said. “If you’ll come in and wait for a few minutes, I’ll change into civilian clothing for our drive into town.”

  She led me into the main building and left me seated on a couch in front of a cheerfully crackling fire. The fire may have been cheerful, but I wasn’t. Not telling Sister Mary Katherine to stay away from Elvira Marchbank had been a serious error on my part. I hadn’t mentioned it because it hadn’t seemed necessary. It never occurred to me that Sister Mary Katherine would want to have anything to do with the woman who had helped murder her friend, Mimi. I understood that my refusing to give Paul Kramer information about the cold case I was working hadn’t caused Elvira’s death, but it was likely that she had been killed because I was working the Mimi Marchbank case.

  One way or the other, that made what had happened my fault. But even with all that free-floating guilt, somehow the warmth of the fire got to me. I was dozing in front of it when Sister Mary Katherine opened a heavy wooden door and reentered the room. She was wearing the same skirt, blouse, and cardigan she had worn the first time I saw her. “Ready?” she said.

  I nodded and stood.

  “It’ll be a long time before the next ferry,” she announced. “We could just as well drive around.”

  “How long will it take us to get to downtown Seattle from here?”

  “Two hours or so. Maybe more, depending on traffic.”

  I called Detective Jackson and gave him our ETA. Then, once we were in the Taurus, I waited until we had left the convent grounds before I lit into her. “What were you thinking?” I demanded. “Why on earth did you go see Elvira?”

  Sister Mary Katherine seemed totally unperturbed by my question. “I didn’t do the right thing when I was a girl,” she returned. “I wanted to talk to Elvira about it. I wanted to know if she was sorry for what she’d done-and she was.”