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?”
