"I've been twelfth-stepped a couple of other times in my life," he said. "Some were real hassles. You know-guys coming over to preach in your face and set you on the straight and narrow. At least that's how it seemed at the time. You really listened to me today, Mr. Beaumont, and I want you to know it helped. It helped a lot. I appreciate it."
I drove away from the Red Lion carrying a heavy load of J.P. Beaumont special-reserve guilt. I had gone on an intelligence gathering mission that Guy Lewis had understandably mistaken for a legitimate twelfth-step call.
He had told me a lot-far more than I deserved to know. And as I drove toward Medford's Jackson County Airport, I realized that-preserving the confidentiality of a meeting-I wouldn't be able to use any of it.
CHAPTER 15
For outlying towns in the Pacific Northwest-the isolated Pullmans, Wenatchees, and Walla Wallas-Horizon Air's busy fleet of small planes fills a very real need. In some markets around Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, those diminutive planes constitute pretty much the only air-travel game in town. Seeing Horizon's fleet of DeHavilland Dash 8's parked in tight clusters at Seattle's C-concourse and dwarfed by the much larger 747s and 767s, I'm always reminded of a swarm of hornets. But they do fly.
When the Medford-Portland-Seattle shuttle came in for a landing, I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. The plane was one of the new Dash 8's. I couldn't believe my luck. At six-three and 185 pounds, I can ride in a Dash 8 in relative comfort. My good fortune lasted only as far as Portland. There, I was herded onto a sardine-can Metroliner for the rest of the trip to Walla Walla. An hour or so in a Metroliner puts a permanent crick in my neck and creases in both knees, but it beats walking. Just barely.
Summer comes late to the Northwest. In terms of heat, the end of June is only the very beginning of hot weather, but during this relatively dry year, fire season was already under way. We flew east along the Columbia River, maneuvering around an immense pillar of smoke that rose from an uncontained fire burning out of control in the Mount Hood Wilderness area.
No doubt some anonymous forest-service official was busy at his computer totaling up numbers and figuring out accountability, trying to decide if this particular blaze should end up on the "natural" or "man-caused" side of the forest-fire ledger. That was a moot question for the unfortunate animals who had once called that corner of old-growth forest home. Rather than cause, they worried about effect-about battling for bare survival and searching for some new place to live.
In a way, those poor hapless creatures were not unlike Guy Lewis. He, too, had been laid low by complicated events he could neither explain nor fathom. When trees disappear, the animals don't have the time or energy to investigate the cause of destruction. The same for Guy Lewis. Daphne was dead, murdered. Unlike many in his situation, the grieving widower apparently had little curiosity about who had killed her. Just like those ill-fated squirrels, deer, and other wildlife scrambling desperately to escape the raging inferno far below the moving shadow of my plane, he was too numb, too paralyzed, too traumatized, to think linearly.
I, on the other hand, like that fire-counting minion from forest-service officialdom, live in the accountability sector, the cause-and-blame sector, the let's-find-out-why-this-happened department. It's a mind-set, a way of life, that doesn't go away just because your calendar or Tony Freeman says you're on vacation. So I sat in the plane and tried to force what I had learned about the two murders into some kind of meaningful whole.
That didn't work very well. Nothing connected to this case turned out to be quite what I expected. My interview with Guy Lewis was a prime case in point. After hearing him talk openly in the N.A. meeting about his deteriorating second marriage, I was struck by the depth and obvious sincerity of his grief.
Maybe society had jokingly referred to Daphne as his trophy wife; maybe people had derided the king of chemical toilets for being a rich old fool-laughed at him because Daphne led him around by the gonads. But Guy Lewis' relationship with Daphne was no joke to him. He had cared for her deeply and still did. Even though she was dead, Guy was fully prepared to stand up for her-to defend her memory in public if necessary despite the posthumous disclosure of Daphne's none-too-savory past.
And the lady did have a past. That set me to wondering about Daphne herself, about whether or not Guy Lewis' feelings for her had been reciprocated. Daphne had divorced Martin Shore, yet she had somehow managed to keep him hanging around on the sidelines, an arrangement my mother would have referred to as having your cake and eating it, too.
What kind of tortuous, winding path had carried Daphne Lewis from the modeling-scam/porno-queen days of her presumably first marriage in Yakima to the position of sought-after society matron in well-heeled Seattle? There's a hell of a climb between those two extremes, and I'm not just talking about the Washington Cascades, either. How had Daphne managed to travel the distance from point A to point B, and what had she done in between?
A cool $150,000 was missing from the Lewis family financial coffers. Guy suspected Martin Shore and Tanya Dunseth had conspired together in some kind of scheme to blackmail Daphne. As far as I was concerned, that sounded like a bad case of wishful thinking on Guy's part. Believing a complex conspiracy theory was probably a way for him to discount the disturbing reappearance of longtime rival Martin Shore.
I tried to compare the two vastly different versions of the Daphne Lewis/Tanya Dunseth story. Things didn't quite add up. The chronology continued to be slightly off. Tanya claimed to be twenty-five years old. She also had told us that the Martin Shore video had been filmed when she was fifteen. Guy Lewis, on the other hand, maintained that he and Daphne had been together for a full ten years, and that her moviemaking days had ended years before that.
Which story was true? One wild card in the deck was Daphne herself. She was, after all, a con artist-a professional liar. There was always the possibility that the original story she told Guy-the one she used to land him-was an outright lie. For instance, she might have said she was out of the movie business when she was still in it up to her long-lashed eyeballs. She could also claim to have broken off with Shore when that wasn't the case.
My first instinct was to trust Guy's story, as far as it went. His version of life with Daphne was punctuated by easily verifiable facts-public records of marriages and divorces, events hosted and attended, etc. Tanya's version had been short on actual dates. She had told us the Martin Shore movie had been filmed when she was "around" fifteen.
When people toss out the word "around" in that fashion, they're usually hedging, giving themselves the benefit of the doubt. "Around" allows for a certain amount of slippage in either direction and makes corroboration difficult.
Based on that analysis alone, it was far more probable that Guy Lewis' version offered more of the truth, but again, only insofar as he knew it. Prior to ten years ago, however, when it came to what Daphne had told him, all bets were off. Between Daphne and Tanya, I didn't know which one to believe.
I was aware of a growing sense that something was basically wrong with Tanya Dunseth's story. It's like a tooth going bad. At first, the only thing that bothers is maybe a slight twinge when a chunk of cold lettuce wraps itself around the surface of the tooth. It's not that serious, and it goes away, but that first shock of cold is symptomatic of something worse going on-something ominous beneath the surface and out of sight that says a root canal is coming.