by J. A. Jance
Peters nodded in agreement. “Yes, it is. Did Darwin ever indicate to you that his marriage was in trouble?”
Andi Wynn sipped her coffee and considered the question before she answered. “I remember him mentioning that they were going for marriage counseling. That was some time back. A year ago, maybe a year and a half. He never said anything more about it. Whatever the problem was, they must have straightened it out.”
I was growing restless, sitting on the sidelines. “Tell us about your cheerleading squad,” I said.
“The cheerleaders? What about them?”
“Give us an idea of who they are, what they’re like.”
“They’re mostly juniors and seniors…” she began. Then she stopped and looked at Peters. “You talked to most of them yesterday. What more do you need to know?”
“Most?” Peters focused in on the important issue. “I only met most of them? Where were the others?”
“Two were missing. One was home sick. She has mono. The other quit, transferred to a different school.”
Peters had gotten out his notebook and flipped through several pages. “What are their names?” he asked, his pen poised above the paper.
“Those who weren’t there yesterday?” Peters nodded in reply. “Amy Kendrick and Bambi Barker.”
“Bambi? As in Walt Disney?”
“That’s right.”
“Which one has mono?” Peters asked.
“Amy.”
“So Bambi transferred to another school,” I said. “Recently?”
“Monday of this week.”
“What is she, a junior?”
Andi Wynn shook her head. “A senior.”
“And she’s transferring this late in her last year? What’s her problem? Flunking out? Having trouble with grades?”
“No, nothing like that. Her father just up and shipped her off to a private school in Portland, a boarding school.”
“Which one?” Peters asked, still holding his pen.
Andi frowned. “St. Agnes of the Hills. I think that’s the name of it.”
Peters wrote it down. “Do you have any idea why she was sent away?” he asked.
“Not really. Her father’s Tex Barker, though.”
Peters dropped his pen on the table. The name meant nothing to me, but I saw the spark of recognition flash in Peters’ eyes. “Wheeler-Dealer Barker?”
“That’s the one.”
I was tired of sitting on my hands. “Who the hell is Wheeler-Dealer Barker?”
“Beau here doesn’t watch TV, Andi,” Peters explained with a smile. Andi Wynn smiled back.
“Okay, you two. Stop making fun of me. Who’s this Barker character?”
“He runs Tex Barker Ford in Bellevue,” Peters told me. “His commercials are reputed to be some of the worst in the country.”
“That bad?”
Peters and Andi nodded in unison. “Somebody gives out awards for the worst television commercials. It’s like Mr. Blackwell’s worstdressed list. Barker won one last year, hands down.”
“What else do you know about him?” I asked. Because of Peters’ voracious reading, he always seemed to know something about practically everything. Wheeler-Dealer Barker was no exception.
“He came up here from Texas four, maybe five, years ago and bought up a failing Ford dealership on auto row in Bellevue. Within months, he had moved it from the bottom of the heap to one of the top dealerships.”
“So the commercials haven’t hurt him.”
“Are you kidding? He’s like that character with his dog Spot, one of those guys people love to hate, but they do business with him right and left. I understand he’s made offers on two more dealerships, one in Lynnwood and the other down in Burien.”
“And he lives on Mercer Island?” I asked, turning once more to Candace Wynn. “How did the daughter of someone like that fit in on Mercer Island?”
“Bambi landed in the in-crowd and stayed there. She never had any problem.”
The picture Joanna Ridley had handed me passed through my mind. Bambi Barker had problems, all right, I thought to myself. Lots of them. They just didn’t show. “When did you find out Bambi was being transferred?” I asked.
“She was at school Friday morning. I saw her. Then, right about noon, her father came to pick her up. I didn’t see it, but I understand there was quite a scene in the office. Yesterday, her mother officially checked her out of school. You know, got the withdrawal forms signed, turned in her books, cleaned out her lockers, that kind of thing.”
“Did you talk to her, the mother?”
Andi nodded. “Briefly. Tried to anyway. I tried to explain how tough it would be for Bambi to change schools this close to graduation, but she said it was too late, that they had taken Bambi down to Portland over the weekend.”
“And this school…” Peters paused and consulted his notes. “St. Agnes of the Hills, you said. Where is it?”
“Somewhere in Beaverton, I guess.” Andi paused, thoughtfully. “I still don’t understand. What exactly does all this have to do with Darwin? I thought he was the main reason you wanted to talk to me.”
I took the plunge. Peters would have walked around it all day. “Did you ever hear any rumors about Bambi Barker and Darwin Ridley?” It was the most delicate way I could think of to phrase a most indelicate question.
For a moment or two Andi Wynn looked at me as though she didn’t quite grasp what I was saying. “Rumors?” she asked. “What kind of rumors?”
Peters cleared his throat. “We’ve been informed by a reliable source that there’s a possibility that Bambi and Darwin Ridley were having an affair.”
Shock waves registered on Andi’s face. “That’s a lie!”
“It’s not a lie, unfortunately,” I said. “We’ve seen proof. We just didn’t know who the girl was. Now we do.”
Candace Wynn drew herself up sharply and looked me right in the eye. “You don’t expect me to believe that, do you? Darwin Ridley was a fine man. His memory deserves to be treated with respect.”
“Andi, it’s not a matter of disrespect…” I began, but she didn’t wait long enough to hear me out. Instead, Candace Wynn angrily shoved her chair back from the table, rattling the silverware and glasses on the table next to us. She bounded to her feet.
“I won’t listen to this! Not a word of it!” With that, she turned on her heel and stamped out of the restaurant.
“Nice going, Beau,” Peters said. “What do you do for an encore?”
I watched Candace Wynn storm across the street and out of sight behind a wall of buildings. I shrugged. “After all, she’s the cheer-leading advisor. If she’d been doing her job right, maybe she would have noticed something funny was going on.”
Peters leaped to Candace Wynn’s defense. “You expect her to be psychic? Ridley wasn’t exactly advertising the fact that he was screwing around. His wife didn’t know about it. The girl’s parents apparently didn’t know. Why should a teacher? From the sound of it, she’s got her hands full with a dying mother.”
I have to confess, I didn’t have a pat answer for that question. Why should Candace Wynn have known? I said nothing, and my mind went wandering down another track.
“What else do you know about this what’s-his-name, Wheeler-Dealer? Would he really mail a copy of that picture to Joanna? A picture of his own daughter? I’m a father. It doesn’t sound to me like something a father would do, not even a shitty father.”
Peters agreed and offered an alternate suggestion. “Maybe somebody else sent pictures to both of them.”
I gave that idea some thought. It seemed somewhat more plausible. “But who?” I asked.
Peters shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. What now?”
“We’d better drag our butts down to Portland and talk to Bambi Barker.”
“Today?” Peters asked in surprise, glancing at his watch. It was already well after three.
“Why not today? If we left right now, we could just bea
t the traffic out of town. Besides, we wouldn’t have to cross any bridges.”
Peters shook his head. “It would be midnight before we got back. I don’t like to come home that late. Heather and Tracie still get upset if I’m not home before they go to bed.”
After the divorce, Peters’ two girls had spent some time in a flaky religious commune with their equally flaky mother. With the help of my attorney, Ralph Ames, we had managed to get them back home and in Peters’ custody late the previous fall. Kids are pretty resilient, but the two girls still hadn’t adjusted to all the abrupt changes that had disrupted their young lives. They were still basically insecure. So was Peters.
“Why don’t I drive down by myself, then?” I suggested. “It’s no big deal for me to come home late. Nobody’s there waiting. Besides, it’s important that we talk to Bambi before her dear old dad has any idea we know what’s been going on.”
“You’ve got yourself a deal,” Peters told me. “You drive to Portland, and I’ll handle the paperwork.”
Talk about getting the best of the bargain! I headed for my apartment. No way was I going to drive one of the departmental crates to Portland when my bright red Porsche was longing for the open road.
By four, I was cruising down Interstate 5, headed south. Once I passed the worst of the Seattle/Tacoma traffic, I set the cruise control to a sedate sixty-two. Red Porsches draw radar guns like shit draws flies. Sergeant Watkins had given me a long lecture in community relations on the occasion of my second speeding ticket. I had slowed down some since then.
As I drove, I was conscious of springtime blossoming around me. Spindly blackberry clumps were green with a thin covering of new leaves. Here and there, hillsides were graced with farmhouses surrounded by blooming fruit trees.
Between Seattle and Portland, I-5 bypasses dozens of little western Washington towns—Lacy, Maytown, Tenino, Kelso—places travelers never see in actual life. They’re nothing more than signs on the freeway and names and dots in a road atlas. Nevertheless, bits and pieces of small-town life leaked into my consciousness. There was the ever-present message from an eccentric Centralia dairy farmer whose private billboard still wanted to get us out of the UN, and the new chain-link fence surrounding the juvenile detention center in Chehalis that said we don’t want our town contaminated by these kids. Further south, another billboard proclaimed the Winlock Egg Days.
I had never attended an egg festival. Or wanted to.
The day was flawlessly clear and bright. To the left across the freeway, Mount Rainier majestically reflected back fragile spring sunlight. It was too dark to catch sight of the shattered, still-steaming profile of Mount St. Helens.
I savored every moment of that drive south, from the thick papermill-flavored air of Longview to the cheerful lights on the grain elevator at Kalama. With every mile, the case receded into the far reaches of my mind. For those three quiet hours, I forgot about Darwin and Joanna Ridley, about Bambi Barker and her father, Wheeler-Dealer.
As a homicide cop, that’s a luxury I don’t give myself very often, but Candace Wynn and her mother had brought back memories of my own mother and her painful death. It had pulled me up short and forced me to recognize exactly how precious life is, had shocked me out of the trap of drifting through life without tasting or noticing.
I owed Candace Wynn a debt of gratitude. Sometime I’d have to call her up and thank her.
CHAPTER
13
St. Agnes of the Hills School sits well back from the road in the middle of Beaverton. It boasts an expanse of beautifully manicured, discreetly lit grounds sandwiched between business parks and new and used car lots. It was late evening when I drove up the circular driveway and parked in front of the building. Spotlights showed off the golden bricks and arches of a graceful Spanish facade on the front of the building.
In the darkness, one front window of the building glowed industriously. I climbed the circular stairway and tried the heavy, double door. It opened into a highly polished, tiled vestibule. Directly ahead, the doors to a plain chapel stood open, but the room itself was deserted. To one side of the vestibule, the fluorescent glow of a light revealed a tiny receptionist’s cubbyhole. There was, however, no receptionist in sight. From a room beyond that room, through a half-opened door, I heard the hollow clacking of an old manual typewriter.
I paused in the doorway of the second room. A woman in a prim white blouse with a short blue-and-white wimple on her head sat with her profile to the door, leaning over a typewriter in absolute concentration, her fingers flying. She was a bony woman with a hawkish nose. Wisps of gray hair strayed out from under her headpiece.
She was typing at a small, movable typing table. The large wooden desk beside her was polished to a high gloss and devoid of any clutter. An equally polished brass nameplate on the desk pronounced “Sister Marie Regina O’Dea” in a way that said the lady brooked no nonsense.
As the unchurched son of a fallen-away Presbyterian, what I knew about Catholic nuns could be stacked on the head of a proverbial pin. My previous knowledge was limited to the convent scenes in The Sound of Music, which was, for many years, my daughter’s favorite movie. The sum of my stereotypes went little beyond the schoolboy rumors that roly-poly equals pleasant and angular equals mean, and ugly girls become nuns when nobody makes them a better offer.
Looking at Sister Marie Regina’s narrow face, I wondered if anybody had ever made her an offer of any kind.
I stood quietly, watching her type. The woman had no idea I was there. She typed copy from a neat stack of handwritten pages. When she reached the bottom of a page, she stopped, moved the top sheet to the bottom of the stack, straightened the pile with a sharp, decisive thwack on the table, and put them down neatly again.
When she stopped to change pages the second time, I decided to go ahead and interrupt her. “Excuse me, but I’m looking for the lady in charge, Sister Marie Regina, I believe,” I said, nodding toward the polished brass nameplate.
Startled, she jumped, her hand knocking the stack of papers to the floor. Without a word to me, she bent down, retrieved the papers, and straightened them completely before she ever officially acknowledged my existence.
“Yes,” she replied crossly, eventually, her tone saying she welcomed me about as much as someone welcomes the twenty-four-hour flu. And that was before she knew who I was or what I wanted. “What can I do for you?”
“For starters, could you tell me where to find Sister Marie Regina?”
“I’m Sister Marie Regina.”
“Good. My name is J. P. Beaumont. I’m a detective with Seattle P.D. I’d like to speak to one of your students.”
I held out my ID for her to look at, but her shrewd eyes never left my face, nor did she reach out to take the proffered identification.
“Which one?” she asked coldly. She knew which student I wanted, and I knew she knew. I went along with it, though, playing dumb just for the hell of it.
“A new student,” I said innocuously. “One who’s only been here a few days.”
Sister Marie Regina O’Dea rose from the typing desk and walked to a tall, brown leather chair behind the polished wooden desk. With slow, deliberate movements, she picked up a blue blazer that was hanging there and put it on. She buttoned the front buttons with a flourish, like someone donning a full suit of Christian soldier armor.
When she spoke, her voice was crisp and peremptory. “Detective Beaumont, I’m sure you understand that the young woman you mentioned is here because she’s undergone a severe emotional upheaval. Her family has no wish for her to be disturbed by you or by anyone else.”
I matched my tone to hers. Two can play Winning by Intimidation. It’s more fun that way.
“Sister Marie Regina, I’m here because I’m conducting a homicide investigation. Bambi Barker is a material witness. I’m afraid her family’s wishes have nothing whatsoever to do with it.”
She smiled, a brittle smile calculated to be totally unnerving. I�
�m sure it struck terror in the hearts of recalcitrant fifteen-year-olds. “If you’re from Seattle P.D., aren’t you somewhat outside your jurisdiction?”
Unfortunately for Sister Marie Regina, I’m a hell of a long way past fifteen. “Concealing material evidence to a capital crime is somewhat out of yours as well, wouldn’t you say, Sister?”
She sat down in the high-backed chair and leaned back, clasping her hands in front of her. She regarded me thoughtfully. I don’t believe Sister Marie Regina was accustomed to counterattacks.
“Exactly what is it you want, Detective Beaumont?”
“I want to talk to Bambi Barker.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Why?”
I refused to budge under the weight of her level stare. For several long moments we remained locked in visual combat before I took the offensive and attacked her sense of order. I took a straight-backed chair from its place near the wall, moved it to a position in front of her desk, turned it around so the back faced her, and sat astride it with my arms resting on the back of the chair.
“What kind of financial arrangements are necessary to get a girl transferred into St. Agnes over a weekend three months before she’s supposed to graduate?”
Sister Marie Regina didn’t answer. She didn’t flinch, either, but I continued in the same vein.
“Enough to maybe buy a personal computer to replace that ancient typewriter?” I asked. “Or what about a new car? Didn’t I see a new Ford Taurus sitting out front, a silver station wagon with temporary plates?”
She blinked then, and I rushed forward into the breach. “I could make a real case in the papers that the car was a bribe, you know. Payment in advance for keeping the girl away from our investigation.”
“But that’s not true,” she blurted. “It was only to get her admitted…” Sister Marie Regina stopped abruptly, clenching her narrow jaws.
“You know that, Sister. And maybe I know that, but that’s not how it’s going to read in The Oregonian.”
“You wouldn’t.”