The Alpine Decoy (15 page)

Vida gave a sad shake of her head, making the perky magenta beret slip a notch. “Marilynn won’t talk about Jerome,” she said. “Too tragic, it seems.”

Winola tried the chicken. It looked lethal in its sea of jaundiced yellow sauce, but she ate without comment. When she finally spoke again, her voice was listless. “Jerome was a musician. He did coke. Marilynn hated that, but she loved Jerome more than was good for her. They’d fight. Oh, Lordy, how they’d fight!” Winola rolled her eyes and shook her head. “He wanted to move in, but Marilynn, she finally say no. Then he beat her up some more. I come home once and found her passed out. She wouldn’t go to the hospital—she said it would embarrass her! Shit, she be half dead!” Winola shuddered in revulsion at the memory.

I shuddered, too. Vida, eating her pie, frowned. “Really, Winola, we had no idea what a terrible ordeal Marilynn went through with Jerome. I can certainly understand why she moved to Alpine. Let’s hope he doesn’t find out where she is and come looking for her.”

With her fork in the broccoli, Winola turned a puzzled face on Vida. “What you talkin’ ’bout? You believe in ghosts?”

Vida’s knowing guise cracked a jot. “Ghosts? Why, yes,” she answered, recovering quickly. “I do indeed. My Uncle Osbert is a ghost. He haunts the holding pond across from the golf course.”

Averting my eyes lest Winola see the rampant disbelief that shone there, I coughed. “Excuse me, I’ve never glimpsed Uncle Osbert.”

Winola, however, wasn’t as credulous as Vida had hoped. She put down her fork and her mouth set in a stern line. “Mrs. Runkel, I do think you must be a fraud. Why you comin’ around here, snoopin’ and sniffin’? Marilynn’s got troubles enough without people like you pryin’ into her life. Leave her be, she wants to start over. It’s a damned shame Kelvin went to Alpine!” Angrily, Winola stood up, almost knocking her chair over. Tears had filled her eyes and her thin body was trembling. “I don’t want your lunch and I don’t want your lies! Go back where you come from! I got to be buryin’ my man!” On rubber-soled shoes, Winola fled the cafeteria. Several of the staff members watched curiously;
a few of them put their heads together. Their manner was sympathetic. The hospital grapevine seemed to flourish as vigorously as Alpine’s.

Vida ate the last bite of pie, then sat with her chin on her hand. “My. We didn’t acquit ourselves very well, did we?”

I didn’t know what to say. “Jerome is dead,” I commented at last. “Where do we find out how he got that way?”

Vida reached over to scoop up some of Winola’s untouched fruit salad. “Milo can do that,” she replied absently. “It would help to have a last name for this Jerome.” She buttered Winola’s roll. “Poor Marilynn. I hope she’s not the sort of woman who has a weakness for bad apples.”

“It sounds as if they both did,” I remarked, watching two earnest young men, who appeared to be interns, sit down at the table next to us.

“Both?” Vida looked up from Winola’s applesauce. “You mean Marilynn and Winola?”

I nodded. “Kelvin Greene may not have beaten Winola, but he sounds like a loser.”

“Yes, he does,” Vida agreed. “He lost his life. So, I gather, did Jerome.” She tried the rice pilaf. “I wonder what those two women had in common besides dead beaux?”

Puzzled, I frowned at Vida. “They’re both nurses. They worked here together. They’re about the same age.” I didn’t add that they were also both black.

Vida, however, was shaking her head. “No, no. Oh, certainly they have superficial things in common. But they couldn’t be more unalike. Winola—let’s face facts—is somewhat coarse. It has nothing to do with race, you understand. I could name twenty equally coarse white women in Alpine, but I’d rather not, because it’s sufficient to have to talk to them on the phone every so often. You know who I mean. They’re common, and their ethnic roots are all over the globe.” She gave me a hard stare. Names whirled around in my head. I could only come up with a dozen, offhand. “Marilynn is cultured, charming, self-possessed, if self-effacing,” Vida continued, no doubt with a parade of Alpine vulgarians marching through her head. “Really, so much of racial prejudice is based on how people speak. It may not be fair, but think how we react to all sorts of
accents—the Deep South, Texas, Brooklyn, and, of course, foreigners. George Bernard Shaw was an old fool about some things, but he was right about that. Look at Eliza Doolittle. Marilynn sounds like a lady. Why would she choose someone like Winola as a roommate?”

“Why would Carla choose Libby?” I countered. “They’re opposites, too, in many ways.”

Finishing off the soda crackers, Vida considered. “True, but only up to a point. Oh, well—I’m sure I don’t know.” Brushing off her pleated skirt, Vida got to her feet. “Now I suppose you’ll want to go shopping?”

I grimaced a bit. “Actually, I thought we’d have lunch.”

Adjusting her beret, Vida began to stride from the cafeteria. “Goodness, not yet! I couldn’t eat a thing! That pie was awfully filling.” In passing, she nodded absently at various bewildered staff members as if she’d known them all her life.

Maybe she had. Nothing about Vida would surprise me.

Twenty-two years had passed since my internship at
The Seattle Times
. I still recognized the bylines of a few old-timers, but I had no real contacts there. Vida, however, insisted I exert what little influence I might possess.

“I thought you said we’d leave this part to Milo,” I argued, as we drove away from Pill Hill and headed for Fairview Avenue where the
Times’
editorial and advertising offices are located.

“I thought it over,” she replied, sunk down in the bucket seat next to me. “Milo will scoff at us. We’re right here, practically on top of
The Times
. We shouldn’t pass up the opportunity.”

I hadn’t been inside the building since I left in 1971 to go to Mississippi and have my baby. I’d walked out on the job, my senior year at the University of Washington, my tiny apartment in the U District—and Tom. Not a word, not a look, not a tear. Ben, in his first year on the Mississippi Delta, had greeted me in a daze. As a priest, he knew he had to take me in and give me comfort. As a big brother, I knew he wanted to kick me in the butt and send me back to Tom.

Vida and I got as far as the security guard, a cheerful
man in his fifties. We explained our place in the journalistic fraternity while he scanned names on a lengthy list.

“I don’t think any of our crime reporters are in,” he said, with polite regret. “Would you settle for somebody on the city desk?”

Vida wouldn’t. “What about your morgue?” she asked.

But the guard shook his head. “It’s not open to the public anymore. Too many requests. You have to go through channels.”

“Channels!” Vida was exasperated. “See here, young man, we’ve come all the way from Alpine on this murder-investigation story. We started out with one body—now we have two. Would you like to try for three?” She leaned on the desk, the beret slanting down over one eye.

The guard, who looked more amused than intimidated, picked up his phone. “Let me see what I can do.”

Ten minutes later, we were immersed in microfiche. “We could have done this at the public library,” I muttered. “Why are we starting with August?”

“You’re
starting with August,” Vida snapped. “I have September. That’s because I’m assuming Jerome hasn’t been dead for more than nine or ten months. Think about it, Emma. Marilynn came to Alpine less than a month ago. If this beau of hers was killed, it could have happened as recently as April. But if his killer was caught, then there would have been a trial. That wouldn’t have taken place right away, not in King County. Let’s say it was early in the spring. So that would put the actual murder back in the late summer or early fall.” Vida lifted her chin and peered at the microfiche through her tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses.

At a nearby machine, a balding man with a thin mustache gave us a dirty look. I assumed he was a staffer, and not pleased with strangers using the newspaper’s facilities. A few moments later, I heard him mutter something about “stats lie” and “scumbag Seahawks.” He left. I moved on to October.

“It might be a small story,” I cautioned Vida, who seemed to be taking forever to get through September. I had the feeling she was catching up on items she’d missed along the way.

“Yes, yes,” she replied testily. “I know how to read a met daily.”

I didn’t doubt it. Still, I’d finished August and October by the time she started on November. The room was stuffy, without adequate ventilation. My stomach was growling. It was almost one o’clock, and breakfast had been meager. A chic young woman with an expensive haircut glided over to the files. I wondered how much they paid reporters these days at
The Times
. I had a feeling they made more than I did as an editor-publisher. I thought of Carla, eking out her four hundred a week, and I felt guilty. No wonder she couldn’t afford a six-hundred-dollar apartment on her own. Maybe I should give her a raise. Ed, too, if he continued to perform. And Ginny, who certainly deserved an increase in salary.

“Bingo!” Vida exclaimed, startling the sleek-looking young woman in her three-hundred-dollar summer suit. Leaning over, Vida beamed at me. “Jerome Cole, twenty-nine, was shot and killed the day after Thanksgiving in an apartment on Capitol Hill. Here, Emma, read this. It’s short, but let’s hope there’s a follow-up.”

There was. The following day, a neighbor, Wesley Charles, had been arrested for the murder of Jerome Cole. Again, the story was brief, and confined to the local section of the paper.

I burrowed through December; Vida took January. On December tenth, Wesley Charles was arraigned for murder. He entered a plea of not guilty.

We didn’t find another reference until early March. The trial was set; the jurors were being chosen. On March eleventh, a verdict was handed down after two hours of deliberation: Wesley Charles was found guilty of second-degree homicide. A week later, he was sentenced to twenty years in prison. He still claimed to be not guilty. His attorney vowed to appeal.

Marilynn Lewis’s name was mentioned only once, in connection with the murder site. According to the testimony of a mutual friend, Kelvin Greene, Wesley Charles had bragged that he was “going to do Jerome Cole.” Charles, said Greene, had a romantic interest in the woman who
lived in the apartment where Cole was shot. Her name was Marilynn Lewis. Winola Prince wasn’t mentioned.

I had finally managed to steer Vida to a restaurant on Lake Union. It was almost two, and I was afraid we’d miss the lunch setting. The hostess at Chandler’s Crabhouse assured us we weren’t too late. Vida insisted she couldn’t eat more than a small salad, then ordered a ten-dollar crab Louie and ate most of the bread that arrived before the entrée. I chose the Copper River salmon special.

“Now what do you think?” Vida demanded after our drink orders had gone to the bar. “This poor Wesley fellow was defending Marilynn from another savage beating?”

I shrugged. “That didn’t come through in the trial. Wesley kept insisting he was innocent.”

“His attorney was an idiot,” Vida declared, as the waitress brought her white wine and my screwdriver. “He tried to prove that someone else had killed Jerome Cole. He failed miserably, with some hogwash about a stranger in a leather jacket. The interesting part is Kelvin Greene. At least as far as we’re concerned. Now why did he come to Alpine?”

A terrible thought flew through my mind. Judging from the look on Vida’s face, it had struck her, too. “Oh, no!” I breathed. “Not Marilynn!”

“What do you mean?” Vida uttered the question through lips that scarcely moved.

I took a quick sip of my screwdriver. “What if Marilynn was somehow implicated in Jerome Cole’s murder? What if Kelvin Greene was blackmailing her?”

Vida remained expressionless.
“Implicated?
Is that what you really mean?”

It wasn’t exactly, but I refused to play out the shocking scenario that had leapt into my brain. Would a smitten Wesley Charles take the rap for Marilynn Lewis? But he hadn’t—not really. He had claimed to be innocent. “It’s fair to say that Kelvin Greene came to Alpine to see Marilynn Lewis,” I said slowly. “His visit probably had something to do with Jerome Cole’s murder. Maybe he had additional information. Maybe Marilynn wasn’t even there when it happened. Maybe Kelvin was bringing a love letter from
Wesley or a last-gasp message from Jerome or …” My voice trailed off.

Vida sniffed. “You make it sound so civilized. Whatever the reason, the result is that Kelvin got killed, too. I wonder where Wesley Charles is incarcerated.” Without another word, Vida got up and marched toward the front of the restaurant. The waitress arrived with our entrées before Vida returned. Not wanting my salmon to get cold, I began eating. When Vida finally resumed her seat, she was looking Vexed.

“I called the state Department of Corrections,” she said, spearing a crab leg out of her salad, “and got put on hold. I heard half of Simon and Garfunkel’s entire repertoire while I waited. I’d hoped that Wesley Charles had been sent to the reformatory at Monroe, but he’s still down at Shelton, waiting to be processed. He probably won’t be sent to Monroe until June. We’re going to have to leave this part to Milo after all.”

“Oh.” I, too, was disappointed. We could have stopped at the reformatory on our way back to Alpine. Shelton, located on a southwest arm of lower Puget Sound, was a two-hour drive from Seattle. “We’re going to have to badger Milo.”

Vida gave a single sharp nod. “Of course we are. And we may not like the results.”

I knew that. The more we learned about Marilynn Lewis’s background, the less I liked it. But I still liked Marilynn Lewis. I couldn’t believe she’d killed Kelvin Greene or anyone else, no matter what the provocation.

I also knew I could be wrong.

I
T’S A WONDER
I didn’t end up buying a chenille bathrobe and fuzzy slippers with glass eyes and whiskers. Vida spun me around Nordstrom’s like a top, chased me up Fifth Avenue as if I’d stolen her purse, and absolutely refused to stop at more than one boutique in the Westlake Center. Nothing, she insisted, was worth trying on, and the prices were outrageous.