I nodded. “It happened a long time ago. I got winged by a bullet in the shoot-out. Once the doctors got through with me, Ron Peters was the one who dragged me home from Harborview Hospital. Not here-but to my old apartment. This is the one I bought after Anne died, and soon after I found out how well off she had left me as far as money is concerned.”
Mel looked around the room as if taking it in for the first time. “She left you all this?”
I nodded. “And more.” I was silent for a long time. I didn’t resume the story until Mel shifted restlessly on the window seat.
“But to go back to Ron. When we came home from the ER, he helped me up to my room in the Royal Crest. There, right in plain sight on the kitchen counter, was what was left of our wedding cake. Ron never said a word. He just picked it up and stuffed it down the garbage disposal. We’ve been friends ever since. Later on, Ralph Ames, who was Anne’s attorney originally, helped Ron get his kids back from a drug-dealing commune in eastern Oregon, where Rosemary had taken up residence.”
“So the three of you have a history.”
“You could say that,” I agreed. “Just call us the three musketeers.”
I talked about Ron then, telling Mel everything I knew about him. She took notes and asked occasional questions. I probably sounded pretty lame. Maybe I was hoping that if I could convince Mel that Ron Peters was a good guy, I could also get her to disregard the mounting evidence against him. The unchanging expression on her face told me I wasn’t making any progress.
“So that’s it, then?” she asked when I finally ran out of steam.
“Pretty much.”
She closed her notebook, stuffed it in her purse, and retrieved one of her boots from the floor.
“Where is he?” I asked, expecting her to say the King County Jail in downtown Seattle, or else the Justice Center out in Kent.
“He’s back home for now,” Mel answered. “At least until the preliminary hearing. We were going to arrest him, but none of the local jails would take him.”
“Because he’s a cop?”
“That’s part of it,” Mel conceded. “But also because of his physical situation. Mrs. Peters and your friend, Ralph Ames, made it quite clear that wherever he ended up, the facility needed to be prepared to handle his ongoing medical needs.”
“As in elimination issues?” I asked, stating what I knew about Ron’s physical challenges as diplomatically as possible.
Mel simply nodded. “That and the possibility of his developing bedsores-or maybe they call them chair sores. If the AG’s office had its own detention facility, it might be different, but none of the jail commanders we talked to were willing to accept the liability. We had to take him back home for now.”
“Doesn’t that leave Ross Connors open to charges of playing favorites?”
Finished zipping up her second boot, Mel gave me a wan smile. “Maybe. But even Ross Connors doesn’t carry much weight when it comes to local officials worrying about possible liability claims. Besides, realistically speaking, Ron Peters doesn’t seem like much of a flight risk. His kids and his wife are here. We’ve confiscated his Camry and his weapons. What’s he going to do?”
I thought of Jared not wanting his daddy to sleep over anywhere else. For tonight, at least, that was true. “Sounds like it’s handled,” I said.
Mel gathered up her purse and coat and started for the door. She paused in the entryway with her fingers on the doorknob. She turned back to me. Once again, her blue eyes were ablaze, but this time her anger wasn’t directed at me.
“I was eleven the first time the cops carted my dad off to jail for beating the crap out of my mother,” she said. “And all the while they were putting the cuffs on him, she kept screaming that it was an accident, that he never meant to hurt her. As soon as they let him out, it started all over again. I moved out when I was seventeen, when I couldn’t stand to be around it a minute longer. Five years later and three years after she divorced him, he came after her again. That time he killed her.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. What else was there to say?
She nodded. “Me, too. And I’m sorry that Ron Peters is your friend, Beau. Because it looks like he murdered his ex-wife.”
With that she opened the door and walked out. The Rosemary Peters homicide was a case Melissa Soames was taking personally. And so was I-for entirely different reasons.
Mel’s motivation was simple. If she could nail Ron with his ex-wife’s murder, Mel would be reclaiming a measure of justice not only for Rosemary but also for Mel’s long-deceased mother. If she succeeded and Ron went to prison, I would be losing a good friend and three wonderful kids would be losing their father.
Mounting evidence to the contrary, I hoped to hell that wouldn’t happen.
Looking back at what I had told Mel about Ron, I was struck by my sins of omission, by what I’d left out of the story-the web of cracks that seemed to be appearing in his ostensibly happy marriage to Amy; the constant and unwelcome presence of a difficult sister-in-law; a rebellious and possibly drug-using daughter. Had all of those, combined with new demands from his ex-wife, turned into a volatile mix that had pushed Ron over the edge?
After drinking so much coffee, I didn’t expect to fall asleep in my chair, but I should have known better. I did, only to awake, stiff and sore, at four o’clock in the morning. I dragged my butt off to bed, but then I tossed and turned and went right back to worrying about what would happen to Ron and Amy and the kids. Finally, conceding there was no hope of going back to sleep, I went out to the kitchen and made more coffee.
My old SPD shrink, Dr. Baxter, always said that the best cure for insomnia is to work on something other than what you’re worrying about. With that in mind I hauled out the tape Freddy Mac had brought me and stuck it into the VCR. I saw at once what he had meant about there being a breakthrough. This time when he put Sister Mary Katherine under, there was far less resistance to going back to that Saturday afternoon. In her little-girl voice, Bonnie Jean Dunleavy was able to talk about what was going on outside the kitchen window without having to interpose a make-believe camera between herself and the action.
This time Fred focused Bonnie Jean’s attention on the vehicle that the killers had driven into Bonnie’s neighbor’s driveway.
“What’s it like?” he asked.
“Big,” Bonnie Jean answered. “It’s a big car.”
“What color?”
“Red,” she answered. “Sort of red. And the nose is empty.”
“Empty?” Fred asked.
“It’s just round. There’s nothing on it-nothing shiny.”
“You mean there’s no hood ornament?”
Bonnie Jean shrugged her shoulders. “I guess,” she said.
I put the VCR on pause and reached for the file folder of material I had collected from the P.-I. And there it was parked in the background of the photo taken after Madeline Marchbank’s funeral. Behind Madeline’s brother, Albert, and his wheelchair-bound mother was the naked-nosed hood of an automobile-a 1949 or 1950 Frazer Deluxe.
I’m far from being a car nut who knows the make, model, cubic inches, and horsepower of every vehicle ever made. What I had instead was direct personal experience with a very similar car.
One of my high school buddies, Sonny Sondegaard, was another Ballard kid who went salmon fishing with his dad’s commercial fishing crew. The year we all turned sixteen he came back to school at the end of the summer with a pocketful of money. He spent two hundred bucks of his hard-earned cash buying himself a teal-blue 1949 Frazer.
During our junior year we had some great times in Sonny’s car. Back then hood ornaments were all the rage, but the Frazer didn’t have one. We teased Sonny endlessly about it, even threatening to steal an ornament off someone else’s car and graft it onto his. Sonny took the teasing in stride. The Frazer was a fun car to fool around in right up until the beginning of our senior year. On Sunday of Labor Day weekend, coming back from a kegger on Camano Island, Sonny ran off Highway 99 and wrapped the front end of the Frazer around a telephone pole. He was dead before they ever removed him from the wreckage. My whole senior year was colored by the fact that the first day of school started with classes in the morning and ended with Sonny’s funeral later that afternoon.