refuse to accept that help when it’s offered. If the answer doesn’t arrive in exactly the guise they expect, they assume no answer was given. I regret to say, Mr. Kramer, that you may very well be one of those unfortunate people. For a man in your position, that’s not only surprising, it’s also quite unfortunate. Good day to you, Mr. Kramer. And good luck. You’ll most likely need it.”
As we walked down the corridor, I glanced back at Kramer. His face was beet red. He looked ready to explode. I was glad I would be out of earshot when it happened. His quartet of detectives wouldn’t be that lucky.
“What a disagreeable man!” Sister Mary Katherine exclaimed as we walked unescorted toward the elevator. “Are all police captains that incredibly rude?”
I laughed. “Don’t judge everybody by Paul Kramer. He’s in a class by himself.”
We were handing in our visitor’s badges downstairs when my cell phone rang. It was Detective Jackson. “We’d still like to talk to you and Sister Mary Katherine, only not officially. If you happened to be going to lunch somewhere where we just might run into you…”
“I’m feeling a lot like a turkey sandwich,” I said.
In the world of Seattle PD the words “turkey sandwich” and a place called Bakeman’s on Cherry west of Second Avenue are synonymous. It was close enough to police headquarters to make the idea of “running into one another” a lot more believable. It was also right next door to the place where I’d parked my rented Taurus.
Bakeman’s is a deli-a joint that’s open for lunch and that’s it. Every weekday they roast nine turkeys, make thirty pounds of meat loaf, and bake eighty loaves of bread, and the food is good enough that it’s all gone by the time they close at three in the afternoon. Knowing the head cook’s propensity for yelling at indecisive customers, I handled the ordering.
Sister Mary Katherine and I split a huge turkey sandwich on fluffy white bread and waited for Detective Jackson and his cohorts to show up. We were done with our sandwiches and still waiting when Sister Mary Katherine reached into her purse and pulled out a small manila envelope, which she handed to me.
“I thought you might want to see these,” she said. “It’s what I saved from the box of mementos my foster mother kept for me all those years.”
The words “Bonnie Jean” were written on the envelope in the spidery, old-fashioned Spencerian style of penmanship that had gone out of vogue before I ever sat down to learn the dreaded Palmer method in second grade.
When I opened the envelope, out fell a few black-and-white photos with their deckle Kodak print edges. Someone had printed names and dates on the backs of the photos, but I didn’t need to read the caption to recognize the subject of the first one: Little Bonnie Jean, her smiling face framed by a mass of perpendicular curls, was dressed in a frilly white dress.
“Your First Communion?” I asked.
Sister Mary Katherine nodded.
The second showed a young couple, probably in their late twenties, holding hands and laughing while sitting side by side on a porch swing. The resemblance between the woman in the photo and Sister Mary Katherine was striking.
“Your folks?”
“Yes.”
I remembered what Sister Mary Katherine had told me about her parents defying their respective families and eloping. Judging from that particular photo, I would have to say the families had been wrong. “They look happy.”
“I think they were,” Sister Mary Katherine said. “They didn’t have it easy, but they always seemed to enjoy being together. I didn’t understand it at the time, but now I believe it’s a blessing the two of them died together. I think whoever was left behind would have been lost without the other.”
Next came a picture of an older man wearing a clerical collar. “That’s Father Mark,” Sister Mary Katherine said. “He’s the one who looked out for me after my parents died.”
The last photo was one of Sister Mary Katherine as a little girl standing beside her father. Barefoot and wearing a sundress, Bonnie Jean posed for the camera, squinting into the lens from a perch on the hood of a vehicle. Her father wore jeans and a white T-shirt with a pack of cigarettes rolled into one sleeve. He stood with his arms folded across his chest, grinning proudly.
“New car?” I asked.
Back when I was growing up and even earlier, photographing young men with their new cars was a rite of passage. Guys bought new cars. Then, as soon as they had them home, they posed with their new prize and had their pictures taken.
“It’s the only new car my father ever owned,” Sister Mary Katherine said.
I took out my reading glasses and studied the photo up close. The hood ornament and the bumper details told me I was looking at a 1950 Ford Custom Deluxe. Sister Mary Katherine said the car was new. She had also said that her parents had struggled to make ends meet. The sundress and glaring sunlight told me it was summer in Seattle, the summer of 1950, a month or two after Mimi Marchbank’s murder.
“Did your father ever say how he came to have this car?” I asked.
Sister Mary Katherine shrugged. “I always assumed he bought it. Why?”
I collected the photos and returned them to the envelope as a way of avoiding answering her question, but I suddenly had a much better idea of why the Dunleavy family might have moved to a new home within days or weeks of Mimi’s death. And I thought I also had a better idea of why Wink Winkler hadn’t interviewed Bonnie Jean in the course of his homicide investigation.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “But as soon as I figure it out, I’ll let you know.”
CHAPTER 14
It was after one when I finally gave up on what was supposed to be an “accidental” rendezvous with Detective Jackson.
“I hate to leave,” I told Sister Mary Katherine. “But there’s a memorial service starting at two, and I need to be there.”
“I could stay here and wait for him,” she suggested.
“No,” I told her. “Once this place shuts down, where would you go? Why don’t you ride along with me? Maybe we can hook up with Detective Jackson later.”
I knew that Ron had specified that Rosemary’s memorial service would be private. I wondered how upset he’d be if I showed up with a stranger in tow, but the truth was, by then it was so late that there wasn’t enough time for me to stop by Belltown Terrace and drop Sister Mary Katherine off.
“Fine,” she said.
While we waited in the garage entrance for the attendant to return my rental car, I checked my phone and was annoyed to see that I had missed two calls, both of them from Jackson. In all the hubbub of Bakeman’s, I hadn’t heard the ringer. I returned his call immediately.
“We’ve been called out on something else,” he said guardedly. “I’ll have to get back to you later.”
From the way he said it, I guessed he was replying under the watchful eyes and ears of Captain Kramer- another very good reason to be working for Harry I. Ball and the SHIT squad rather than for Seattle PD. Better Ken Jackson than me.
“Who died?” Sister Mary Katherine asked, once we had settled into the Taurus.
“The former wife of a good friend,” I said. “She was murdered last weekend down in Tacoma.” I could have said a lot more than that, but I didn’t. There was no need to burden Sister Mary Katherine with the gory details of yet another homicide investigation. She was already dealing with two as it was.
“I’m sorry,” Sister Mary Katherine said.
“So am I.”
“Are you sure the family members won’t mind if I tag along?”
“Ron Peters, the ex-husband, is a police officer,” I said. “He’ll understand.”
