Small Sacrifices (26 page)

on that day, she started at their address. She knocked on the door and finally Nora answered.

"She began to tell me what I should do about my marriage, my relationship with Lew-everything--and I just lost my cool. "ne d hurt him so much. I don't usually swear. But I told her ^_^k off!' and I slammed the door in her face." HLew had told Diane more than once that he might just pack 772 ANN RULE

everything in and go back to Texas. "We went to Texas--not for good, but for a two-week vacation. While we were sitting at dinner at friends' one night, the phone rang. It was Diane.

"I asked her where she got the phone number and she told me she memorized it. Well, I asked her where she memorized it from, and she wouldn't tell me. Then I knew the only place she could have got it was to go through my wallet while I was sleeping one night."

Stunned to find that Lew had gone to Texas without telling her first, Diane assumed the worst--that Lew had left her for good. Diane then flipped the first domino in what would prove to be a chain reaction; she requested a transfer from the Chandler post office to the Eugene area. She could count on a job. Wes and Willadene wanted her and the kids up in Oregon and Wes had assured her employment was no problem.

Chandler postal administrators had accepted her application for transfer with alacrity; she was a strange, disruptive woman. Her affairs and her often scanty attire were common knowledge, and yet she refused to deliver copies of Playboy or Penthouse to subscribers on her route. Her temper tantrums had become legend.

"They put her transfer through effective in April," Lew ' remembered. "She called me in Texas and told me I wouldn't

have to transfer; she was going to go to Oregon. I think she meant to scare me, and she was sure I'd follow her."

Lew came home from his vacation in early March to find that Diane had begun yet another project. She was taking flying lessons from Bob Barton, a co-worker at the post office. Barton said she was good, completely unflappable in the air. Diane paid

$28.00 an hour to rent the Cessna-152 and $18.00 an hour to Barton.

When Lew and Nora returned from Texas, Lew didn't go

back to his apartment right away; he stayed at home with Nora. Diane was stunned. For a time, she saw him only at work. When he moved back into his apartment, she gave him her picture; he gave her some raingear to wear while she walked her route in Oregon.

The physical affair resumed as it always had.

Lew Lewiston had felt guilty, a little sorry for Diane. He t grimaced as he recalled making a gesture that was the second domino. Diane had only two-and-a-half weeks left in Arizona. Lew asked her to move in with him, stay with him until it was time for her to go.

From what the detectives knew about Diane Downs by now,

lew's invitation must have been—for her—as good as forever. Welch remembered that she had told him and Tracy about it two days after the shooting: " Once I was cooking supper and he carted—big old tears got in his eyes, and I went over and I kneeled down and I said, 'What's the matter?' and he said, 'It just makes me so sad when I think of you leaving.' I mean there was a bunch of promises that were made, so many dreams that were planned, and he says, 'I want you to ask the postmaster to let you stay,' and I said, 'OK,' and he had his gold chain . . . He's the only person that's ever worn that chain ... I wear two gold chains with diamonds on it—and he goes, 'Take that shit off your neck,' and I went 'What? My gold and diamonds?' and he says,

'Yeah, take if off,' and I took it off and I said, 'All right, why?' and he goes, ' 'Cause you're going to wear this; you're Lew's woman,'

and I said, 'OK,' and he took his chain off and he put it around my neck, and if that isn't love—I mean the chain that's never been off his neck . . . God, there's so many promises and so many deep feelings. I know he really cares."

Diane asked Garni to tear up her transfer request. He refused. But Lew's gold chain around her neck meant that he was bound to her forever. The one thing she wanted now was for Lew to get a rose tattoo.

"She made an appointment with 'Swede' for me. I argued about it, and then I agreed to do it. We had a few drinks and I got the rose on my arm." Lew rolled up his left sleeve, and showed the detectives the tattoo. He had balked at having Diane's name beneath it.

"She wanted me to meet her parents. They drove down to Chandler to help Diane (and Kathy and Israel) move to Oregon. Christie, Cheryl, and Danny were going to ride to Oregon with her folks, and she was going to go on April second." Wes had told Lew that he could have his choice of three jobs in the Eugene area if he wanted to move up there. Lew was uncomfortable as he sat at Sunday dinner with the Fredericksons.

\ looked at him, and I remembered that Diane said he'd fooled

^th her when she was young."

Lew was on the fence. Diane was being so loving to him; she

^n picked all the lima beans out of a package of frozen mixed

^getables because she knew he didn't like them. The sex was as good—better—than ever. Everything was great until he went home 174 ANN RULE

to help Nora around the place, and until Diane started to nag at him.

He hadn't had a clue in hell what he was going to do.

"I kept saying to Diane, 'If it's meant to be, it will be.' " In Diane's mind it was all set. Her kids were already up there her belongings. Her job was over in Chandler. It was time to leave and wait for Lew. The drive to Oregon took Diane two days. She had a wonderful time. "I wondered what Oregon looked like; I wondered if it would be like the Oregon I remembered from seeing it in childhood. I remembered a fantasy land.

"I played tapes, and I got a suntan through the sunroof of my car. I thought I'd see Lew again."

Diane sang along with the New Wave tapes on her cassette deck. Duran Duran sang of love and desire, loneliness and passion. Their words told her she'd been right to believe in Lew. Damn Garni for telling her she would never get Lew. She had won! Couldn't she feel the warmth of Lew's gold chain around

her neck, burning a hot circlet into her tanning skin?

Diane swore by omens and tokens of love. Roses first. Then gold. And, finally unicorns.

"That chain meant that / was Lew's woman. He never sends his chain anywhere he isn't going to be shortly."

She went ahead only to prepare a place for him.

Mit

Lew recalled to Doug Welch that his affair with Diane had continued right up to the day she left for Oregon in April 1983. And then it was over.

Even as Diane sang along with "Hungry Like the Wolf as she headed north, she had lost her desperate gamble. But she didn't know that Lew had already made up his mind to try to salvage his marriage.

"Once the sound of her talking stopped--once my head cleared--I could think again. I didn't want to be with Diane; I wanted to be with Nora. But I still couldn't go home because I didn't want Nora to see that damn tattoo," Lew said softly. "I was just relieved--totally relieved."

Diane called him each morning from Oregon. She sent him a profusion of romantic cards. Alton asked, "We understand you started refusing her mail. Why?"

"I just realized that I did not love Diane enough to divorce my wife and give up my job at the post office and move to Oregon I finally just told her over the telephone that it was over. I wasn't coming and that's all there was to it."

"What was her response to that?"

"She didn't believe me. Before she had gone to Oregon, she had given me five hundred dollars in case I needed some money because ... I had bills to pay. I had the house payment to make ror Nora ... I had all the bills. I gave her my gold chain for

security. Over the phone, she told me that when she received the ^e hundred dollars back, she would know that it was over. Well,

wrote a check out that morning--April twenty-first--and sent it 10 her. She got it and she cashed it."

^When Diane continued to call him. Lew asked fellow workers ife: r

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to say he wasn't there. "She would ask for other people at the post office and talk to them."

"About you?"

Lew shrugged. "I don't know if it was about me because I made a firm habit of not asking anybody what she had to say. I was afraid if I asked anyone what Diane had to say, she would interpret that as me caring and me wanting to know what she was doing—and I didn't. I didn't care what she was doing."

"Then the last time you saw her was when she drove off to Oregon at Easter?" Alton asked, knowing that the answer should be No.

"No. I saw her once more. She came back to give me my gold chain."

Alton had listened to the tapes Welch and Tracy had—Diane's recounting of a last bittersweet meeting with Lew: "He did ask if I would send it [the gold chain] back, and I said, 'I can't. I can't take it off,' 'cause he told me 'Don't you ever taken that off,' and I went back to Chandler this last time to see him." Lew remembered the surprise visit well. April 28—exactly a week since he'd told her it was over. Diane had borrowed a truck from another of her ex-lovers and she'd pulled up behind him on his route about ten in the morning. He'd had no warning she was in town.

"I sat in the jeep," Lew said as he lit another cigarette and stared at the smoke curling in the air. "She had on jeans and a kind of string bikini top. She stood outside—and I remember she was barefooted—and she had this package—this package she'd sent Express Mail and that I'd refused before. She showed me the contents of the package. There were pictures—some of them were of her new friends in Oregon. There were these dried up flowers—

roses, other flowers—stuff like that. She told me that she'd smoked marijuana and snorted coke with Steve the night before." Diane had tried very hard to put on a cheerful face. She would bleed to death before she allowed him to see her wounds, and she would smile as the last drop left her veins.

Lew knew how she worked and he was wary.

"I did not kiss her. I did not hug her. I didn't tell her I loved her. I didn't say anything."

Diane's taped statements to Welch and Tracy had been much more detailed and dramatic: "I just walked up and I said, 'Hello Lew, how are you doing?' and he said, 'Just fine. What are you doing here, Diane?' and I said . . . 'This chain is not my chain. I M

don't care if it's $500 worth of gold or what, it doesn't mean a damn thing except the love that you put around my neck, and it's not mine. It's not mine to keep and if you don't want me, if you don't want me to be Lew's woman anymore, then I shouldn't have it,' and I said, 'I want you to have it back,' and I couldn't--I tried to take it off and I still couldn't. I said, 'I just can't do it. Would you please unhook it?' So he undid the clasp and then I took it out of his hand and I said, 'I'm going to do the same thing to you that you did to me.' I took it out of his hand and I put it around his neck and I said, 'You wear this 'cause I love you.' " Lew winced as Welch paraphrased that scene for him, but he nodded his head. The story sounded just like Diane, only it wasn't true.

"I only said about twenty words to her the whole time she was there. I told her I wasn't going to Oregon. I told her I just didn't want to be a daddy. She talked at me--like always." Out there on Lew's mail route, the morning was only halfspent. The sky was still blinding blue and a couple of birds sang cheerily as if Diane's plans for a passionate reunion hadn't crumbled.

After Diane stopped talking and after Lew said the few words he intended to signify the absolute end of their relationship, the two of them stood--frozen in time--staring at each other. And then Lew was gone, caught up in a spume of road dust, continuing on his route.

One can picture Diane gazing after him. How naked her neck must have felt, vulnerable now that the heavy gold chain was gone. She had come so far to see Lew, and it was all over in twenty minutes of strained conversation.

"You didn't see her again?" Welch asked.

"Nope. When I got back to the post office, I found a rose in my box. Garni said Diane had been in. He said she was smiling ^hen she told him she'd talked to me and everything was great

between us. He asked her to leave because she was practically "ude on top. She left that day at one o'clock and flew back to

Oregon."

"You never heard from her again?"

Lew's hands trembled slightly. "Not until last week--she

^lled to tell me about . . . about what happened." ^'As far as you know, did Diane have any guns?"

"I saw a .22 rifle on the closet shelf of her apartment on West ^y . . June of '82 was the first time I saw a .22 target pistol as

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she described it—and she told me it was Steve's. I didn't actually see the pistol—but I saw the case, and its weight made a dent on the water bed."

"Any other guns?"

"Just before she went to Oregon, she had a .38 pistol and the target pistol in the back of her car. I actually saw both of them there."

"How long before she left?" /

"The night before ..."

Alton's face didn't change as he probed to assure himself that Lew had, indeed, seen the .22 in Diane's car. Lew described the red Nissan; he knew that car well. The guns—the .38 and the

.22—had been in plain sight in the carpeted area just behind the rear seat.

Diane had told detectives that she offered it first to Lew

"because Steve was threatening him," but Lew didn't want it.

"Then I put it behind the seat in Steve's truck the week after that, before I left for Oregon."

Diane's reasoning was convoluted, to say the least. She had offered the missing .22 pistol to Lew so that he could protect himself from jealous reprisal from Steve Downs. How counter to her original intent for her to give the gun to the very man she'd characterized as so dangerous: Steve.

Lew had never seen Diane fire her guns but she had once

challenged him to go target shooting. "I made a comment that, you know, I'm sure I was better than she was, and she said something like, 'Well, now—I'll just have to show you,' ... but we never went shooting at all. She went hunting one time with a couple of guys from the post office—Jack Lenta and Bob Barton. At that time, she had—ahhhh—a shotgun."