by J. A. Jance
When I opened it, a single photograph fell out.
At first glance, it seemed to be a picture of a man embracing a woman in what appeared to be a motel room. Closer examination revealed the man to be Darwin Ridley, but the woman wasn’t a woman at all. She was a girl. A blonde girl. She was still wearing a bra, but the camera had caught her in the act of slipping out of her skirt. A short, gored, two-toned skirt.
A cheerleader’s skirt.
I shook my head and handed the picture over to Peters. He looked at it and dropped the picture on the coffee table like it was too hot to handle.
Captain Powell’s sensitive case had just turned into Maxwell Cole’s dynamite. I wondered briefly if it was too late to get the captain to put two other detectives on the case instead of us. I didn’t think I wanted to be anywhere within range when this particular shit started hitting the fan.
I looked at Joanna Ridley then, standing there with her pregnant silhouette framed against the curtained window, with the muted sunlight filtering through her backlit hair. She was a picture of totally vulnerable, abject despair.
And in that instant, I knew what she was feeling.
She had lost the man she loved, and now even her memories of him were being shredded and torn from her. I knew all too well that sense of absolute loss.
I got up and went to her. Somebody needed to do it, and Peters wasn’t going to. He didn’t understand what was happening. I reached out for her and held her. She fell against my chest, letting my arms support her, keep her from slipping to the floor. Everything that stood between us, every conceivable barrier, disintegrated as I cradled her against me.
“Did you kill him, Joanna?” I asked, murmuring the question through her hair.
“No, I didn’t.”
From that moment on, I never doubted for a minute that she was telling the truth.
CHAPTER
11
By the time Joanna drew away from me and I led her from the window back to the couch, Peters was ready to go straight up and turn left. He was there to investigate a homicide, not to offer emotional support and comfort to a bereaved widow, one he considered to be a prime suspect. I couldn’t have explained to him what had just happened. I couldn’t explain it to myself.
With an impatient frown that was far more exasperation than concentration, he picked up the picture once more and examined it closely. His brows knit.
“Can you tell which cheerleader it is?” I asked him. After all, Peters had been the one who had spent the afternoon interviewing the Mercer Island cheerleaders the day before.
He shook his head. “Not for sure.” He glanced at Joanna, who was gradually pulling herself together. “Do you know?” he asked Joanna.
“No.” Her voice was flat, her face devoid of expression.
Peters, reluctant to give up that line of questioning, took another tack. “Your husband never mentioned any of the cheerleaders to you by name?”
“Never.”
Peters passed me the picture again. I examined it more carefully this time, looking at it less for its shock value than as an integral part of the puzzle that marked the end of Darwin Ridley’s life.
I studied the background of the picture. Definitely a motel, and not a particularly classy one at that. The picture had evidently been taken through a window from outside the room. I don’t know a lot about cameras, but I recognized this was no Kodak Instamatic. The clarity of detail, the finite focusing even through glass said the picture had been taken with topflight equipment. Scrutinizing the background of the picture, I wondered if someone in the crime lab could blow the photo up large enough to read the checkout information in a framed holder on the room door behind the fondly embracing twosome.
“Could we take the picture, Joanna? It would help if we knew where and when this was taken. And by whom.”
All the fight had been taken out of her, all her strength. She nodded in agreement.
“Did you have separate checking accounts?” Peters asked suddenly. “Checking accounts or charge cards, either one?”
“No.” Joanna looked genuinely puzzled. “Why?”
“He had to pay for motel rooms some way or other. Do you mind if I look through his desk?”
“Go ahead.”
Peters went to the little study, leaving Joanna and me alone. “Had you been planning to divorce your husband before the phone call?” I asked.
Joanna shot a darting look in my direction. “We were having a baby,” she replied, leaving me to draw my own conclusions.
“But you believed the man who called you. Instantly. Even before he sent you the photograph.”
“It wasn’t the first time,” she said quietly.
“Another cheerleader?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t care. Maybe the same one. It doesn’t matter. The marriage counselor said Darwin was going through a mid-life crisis, that he’d get over it eventually if I was patient.”
A part of me objected to the term mid-life crisis. It’s a handy rationalization that covers a multitude of sins. I’ve used it myself on occasions, some of them not very defensible. “Counselor?” I asked.
“We went to the counselor together, last year, a lady family therapist. I could tell something was wrong, but I didn’t know what it was. All I knew was that I wanted to stay married. Being married was important to me.”
“And in the course of counseling you found out your husband was having an affair.” It’s an old story.
She nodded. “He promised he’d break it off. He said it was over, and I believed him.”
“And you decided to have a baby to celebrate,” I added.
“We both wanted one,” she said. “We had been trying for years. It was an accident that I turned up pregnant right then. Besides,” she added, “I thought a baby would bring us closer together.”
The look on her face, far more than what she said, told me exactly how badly Joanna Ridley had been taken in by the old saw that babies fix bad marriages. It certainly hadn’t worked in this case. My heart went out to the lady who would be raising her child alone.
Sometimes, life isn’t fair. Make that usually.
The doorbell rang, and Joanna hurried to answer it. Meanwhile, Peters returned from his examination of the desk. “Nothing there,” he said.
Joanna ushered a heavy-set woman into the room. She was evidently a neighbor. In one hand she held a huge pot that contained an aromatic stew of some kind. In her other hand she carried a napkin-covered plate heaped high with some kind of baked goods. She glared at us, making it clear that we were unwelcome interlopers.
“You have anything to eat today, Joanna, honey?” she asked, still glowering at us, but speaking to Joanna.
“No, I…” Joanna trailed off.
“Now you listen to Fannie Mae, girl. You got to keep up your strength, for you and that baby. I’ll just put this food in the kitchen.” She bustled out of the room. Joanna returned to the couch.
“What did you do after you left the Coliseum?” Peters asked as soon as she sat back down.
Joanna regarded him coolly. “I drove to Portland,” she replied.
“Portland, Oregon? Why?”
“To see my father.”
“And did you?”
Joanna’s eyes never strayed from Peters’ face. “No. I drove past the house, but I didn’t go in.”
“Wait a minute. Let me get this straight. You left the Coliseum after talking to your husband, drove all the way to Portland to talk to your father, and then didn’t go in to see him once you got there?”
“That’s right.”
“Why not?”
“Because I changed my mind. I realized I’d never go through with it, the divorce, I mean.”
If I had been trying to sell Peters Fuller Brushes right then, I would have known I’d blown the sale. He lay his finger next to his nose, the palm of his hand covering his mouth. He wasn’t buying Joanna’s story. Not any of it.
“What time did yo
u get back?” I asked, stepping into the conversation.
“Midnight. Maybe later.”
“Did you see anyone along the way? Someone who would be able to say that they saw you there during that time?”
She shrugged. “I stopped for gas in Vancouver, but I don’t know if anyone there would remember me.”
“What kind of station, Joanna?” I prompted. “Can you remember?”
“A Texaco. On Mill Plain Road.”
“How did you pay? Credit card? Cash?”
“Credit card. I think I used my VISA.”
“Could you give us that number?”
Joanna retrieved her purse from a table near the front door where she had left it when she first entered the house. As we had talked, there had been sounds of activity in the kitchen. Now Fannie Mae reappeared, carrying a tray of coffee cups, a pot of coffee, and a plate of homemade biscuits. Joanna dictated the number to Peters while I helped myself to coffee, biscuits, and honey. Naturally, Peters abstained. Health-food nuts piss me off sometimes.
Within minutes several other visitors showed up, and it seemed best for us to eave. I wasn’t looking forward to being alone with Peters. I figured he’d land on me with all fours. I wasn’t wrong.
“You’ve really done it this time!”
“Done what?” I made a stab at playing innocent.
“Jesus, Beau. We never even read her her rights.”
“We didn’t need to. She didn’t do it.”
“What? How can you be so sure?”
“Instinct, Peters. Pure gut instinct.”
“I can quote you chapter and verse when your instincts haven’t been absolutely, one hundred percent accurate.”
I could, too, but I didn’t tell Peters that. Instead, I said, “Ridley was too big. With the morphine, he would have been all dead weight. She couldn’t have strung him up, certainly not in her condition.”
“She could have had help.”
“She didn’t.”
Peters wasn’t about to give up his pet suspect. “What about her father? The two of them could have done it together. She said she got back around midnight. The coroner said he died about two A.M. Portland doesn’t give her an alibi, if you ask me.”
I thought about Joanna’s father, the kindly, stoop-shouldered old man who had let us in the house the day before. “No way,” I said. “It’s got to be somebody else.”
We let it go at that. Neither of us was going to change the other’s mind.
Before leaving Joanna’s house, we had decided to stop by Mercer Island High School in hopes of determining the identity of Darwin Ridley’s cheerleader. With that in mind, I turned off Rainier Avenue onto an on-ramp for I-90. Unfortunately, I had been too busy talking to notice that traffic on the ramp was stopped cold, three car lengths from the entrance.
Unable to go forward or back, we spent the next hour stuck in traffic while workers building the new floating bridge across Lake Washington escorted traffic through the construction, one snail-paced lane at a time.
We should have phoned first. We got to the school about twelve-fifteen, only to discover that Candace Wynn wasn’t there. Her mother was gravely ill, and Mrs. Wynn had taken the day off.
Ned Browning’s clerk wasn’t exactly cordial, but she was somewhat more helpful than she had been the previous day. She gave us Mrs. Wynn’s telephone number in Seattle. We tried calling before we left the school, but there was no answer.
Back in the car, we started toward Seattle. Thinking the other bridge might be faster, we avoided I-90 and circled around through Bellevue. Unfortunately, a lot of other people had the same idea, including two drivers who managed to smack into one another head-on in the middle of the Evergreen Point span. It wasn’t a serious accident, but it was enough to tie us up in traffic for another hour, along with several thousand other hapless souls.
It was a flawless spring day, without a cloud in the sky, with Lake Washington glassy and smooth beneath us, and with Mount Rainier a snow-covered vision to our left. Unfortunately, Peters was still ripped about Joanna Ridley, and I was pissed about the traffic, so we weren’t particularly good company, and we didn’t spend that hour admiring the scenery.
We finally got back to the department around two. I took Joanna’s photograph and envelope down to the crime lab to see if they could lift prints or magnify the photo enough to read the print in the notice on the motel room door. Meanwhile, Peters settled down in our cubicle to try to track down Candace Wynn. By the time I got back to the fifth floor, he had reached her and made arrangements for us to meet her at a Greek restaurant in Fremont in half an hour.
Fremont is a Seattle neighborhood where aging hippies who’ve grown up and gone relatively straight try to sell goods and services to whatever brand of flower children is currently in vogue. Costas Opa, a Greek restaurant right across from the Fremont Bridge, is quite a bit more upscale than some of its funky neighbors. It was late afternoon by then. The place was long on tables and short on customers when we got there.
We sat at a corner window table where we could see traffic coming in all directions. Across the street, Seattle’s favorite piece of public art was still wearing the green two days after St. Patrick’s day. Waiting For The Interurban is a homey piece of statuary made up of seven life-size figures, including a dog, whose face is rumored to bear a remarkable resemblance to one of the sculptor’s sworn enemies. They stand under what seems to be a train station platform, waiting for an old Seattle/Tacoma commuter that has long since quit running.
Throughout the year, concerned citizens and frustrated artists make additions and corrections by adding seasonal touches to the statues’ costumes. That day, they all wore emerald green full-length scarves.
I expected Candace Wynn to drive up in her red pickup. Instead, she arrived on foot, walking the wrong way up a one-way street. The Fremont Bridge, a drawbridge, was open. Candace darted through stopped vehicles to cross the street to the restaurant.
Her outfit wasn’t well suited for visiting invalid relatives. She wore frayed jeans, a ragged sweatshirt, and holey tennis shoes. Sitting down, she ordered coffee.
“I’m in the process of moving,” she explained, glancing down at her clothes. “The house is a mess, or I’d have invited you there.”
“You live around here?” Peters asked.
She pointed north toward the Ship Canal. “Up there a few blocks, in an old watchman’s quarters. View’s not much, but I couldn’t beat the rent. I’m moving back home, though, at the end of the month.”
“Back home with your mother?”
She nodded.
“How is your mother?” I asked. “I understand she’s very ill.” Sometimes it surprises me when the niceties my own mother drilled into my head surface unconsciously in polite company.
Candace Wynn’s freckled face grew serious. “So, so,” she said. “It comes and goes. She’s got cancer. She’s back in the hospital right now. I’ll be home to help her when she gets out. I was up with her all last night and couldn’t face going to school this morning. Once I woke up, though, I decided to tackle packing. It was too nice a day to waste.”
I had to agree with her there. If you’ve ever spent time with a cancer patient, you should know better than to squander a perfect day being miserable over little things like stalled traffic.
Somehow I had forgotten. I had spent the day blind to blossoming cherry trees and newly leafing trees. It took Andi Wynn’s casual remark to bring me up short, to make me remember.
We had yet to ask her a single question, but already I was prepared to mark the interview down as an unqualified success. Whether or not she identified Mercer Island’s precociously amorous cheerleader.
CHAPTER
12
After the waiter set down her coffee, Candace Wynn took one demure sip and then looked expectantly from Peters to me and back again. “You said you needed to talk to me.”
I gave Peters the old take-it-away high sign. After all, Candace Wyn
n knew Peters somewhat better than she knew me. Besides, Peters’ earnest, engaging manner encouraged people to spill their guts. I had seen it happen.
“That’s right; we do,” Peters said. “How long have you been at Mercer Island?”
“Ten years.”
“All that time as counselor?”
“No. I’ve only been in the counseling department for the last year and a half. Before that, I taught math.”
“And what about the cheerleaders?”
“I’ve had them the whole time. I was a cheerleader at Washington State in Pullman.” She stopped and gave Peters an inquiring look. “I thought this was going to be about Darwin.”
“It is, really, in a roundabout way,” Peters said. “You told us yesterday that you were a friend of his. How good a friend, Mrs. Wynn?”
“Andi,” she reminded him. She shrugged. “Fairly good friends. When I started teaching there, a bunch of us used to play crazy eights in the teachers’ lounge in the morning—Coach Altman, Darwin, and a couple of others. You get to be friends that way.”
“Playing cards?”
“That’s right. And in the afternoons, some of us would stop by the Roanoke and play a few games of pool.”
“Including Darwin Ridley and yourself?” Peters asked.
Andi nodded. “Yes.”
“Did you know anything about his personal life?” Peters continued.
“Some, but not very much.”
“Have you ever met his wife, Joanna?”
“No. I never even saw her. She didn’t come to school, and she never showed up at any of the faculty functions, at least not any of the ones I went to.”
“And she never came to the Roanoke?”
“No.”
“Did you know she’s pregnant?”
Andi looked at Peters. She seemed a little surprised. “Is she? I didn’t know. That’s too bad,” she said.