by JA Jance
“Is something wrong?” he asked, stopping in the doorway and not inviting us to step inside.
“No,” I said. “Not at all. We’re with the Special Homicide Investigation Team. My partner, Ms. Soames, and I would like to ask you a few questions about a cold case we’re working on.”
Frank frowned. “Is this about my brother?” he asked.
“No,” I answered. “Nothing to do with your brother. It’s about a homicide that happened years ago in Seattle. My partner then, Detective Watkins, and I interviewed you and Donnie about it at the time.”
In homicide investigations, timing is everything. The pauses between the time a question is asked and the time the answer is given are sometimes more telling than the answers themselves. This time, not only was the pause far too long, but so was the glance Frankie shot back over his shoulder, as though he was making sure his family members were out of earshot.
At that point, in most interviews, we’d either be sent packing or be invited inside. In this case neither happened. Instead, Frank stepped out on the porch and pulled the door shut behind him.
“This is about the woman in the barrel?” he asked. He had been so young at the time that the young woman who had been a “girl” to us had been a “woman” to him.
“Yes,” I said. “That’s the one.”
“What do you want to know?”
“We’re having difficulty locating the records from then,” I said. “What can you tell us?”
He closed his eyes for a long moment before he answered. “It was late at night. My brother, Donnie, and I were outside, doing something we weren’t supposed to be doing, and we saw this guy drive a pickup into the yard next door.”
“You’re sure it was a guy?”
Frank nodded. “He pushed a barrel out of the back of the pickup and rolled it down the hill. Then he drove off. The next day Donnie and I went looking for the barrel. When we opened it, that’s when we found the dead woman, stuck in there with a bunch of greasy stuff.” He paused, looked at me, shuddered, and then shrugged his shoulders.
“That’s it,” he added. “That’s all I remember.”
It was such a blatant lie that I wanted to poke him with my cane, just to let him know I knew, but I didn’t.
“My partner at the time and I came to school to talk to you about it. As I recall, your brother did most of the talking.”
“My brother’s dead,” Frank offered.
“But why was that?” I asked, ignoring his comment. “Why did you leave it up to him to do the talking for both of you? Or was it always like that? He was sort of the ringleader and you just went along with the program?”
“Why are you asking me about this now?” Frank demanded. “We were just kids back then. You can’t possibly think we were the ones who killed her. That’s crazy.”
“What we think is that you’re hiding something,” Mel said softly. “What?”
The wary look Frank turned in her direction told me that Mel had nailed it. He really was hiding something.
He shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about this. As far as my kids are concerned, Howard Clark is the only grandfather they’ve ever known. I don’t want to have to explain all of that other stuff.”
“What other stuff?” Mel asked. “Are you saying your stepfather is responsible for what happened to that girl?”
Frank suddenly drew himself up so that he looked a good three inches taller. “Absolutely not!” he declared hotly. “He wasn’t even in the picture then. At least, if he was, Donnie and I didn’t know it. When he asked Mom to marry him a couple of weeks later, it was all news to us. As for coming back over here to live? That was fine with us, too.”
“So what aren’t you telling us?” Mel asked. “I’m guessing there’s something you and your brother knew that you didn’t tell anyone at the time.”
Mel is great when it comes to talking softly and carrying a big stick. Her tone of voice was gentle but utterly firm. Nothing about her allowed for any wiggle room. I suspect Sister Mary Katherine would have approved.
Frank looked her full in the face and then his eyes slid away. “We were scared,” he said.
“Scared of what?” I asked.
“Not of what,” he answered despairingly. All the fight had gone out of him. “Of who. I saw the face of the man who was driving the truck, the guy who dumped the barrel. I recognized him. He told us if we ever told, he’d come after us, and we believed him. I still do.”
“Who was it?” I asked.
“A cop.”
We already knew that much. I wanted to shake the guy and knock some sense into him. “What was his name?” I insisted.
“I don’t know. We never knew his name. He was our father’s bodyguard.”
“Wait. I thought you said your father wasn’t involved.”
“Howard Clark is my stepfather,” Frank Dodd declared. “He’s my adoptive father and the only one I’ve ever known. The other guy was a rich guy, a sperm donor only. Oh, he paid the rent for the house where we lived. And he paid for food and for us to go to school. But I understand now that he only came by for what people these days call booty calls. Paying for us to go to school was his way of getting his regular rolls in the hay. Donnie and I were a means to that end. He also expected us to be properly grateful, to not talk back, and to do exactly what he said. If we didn’t, the belt came out.”
I didn’t like how this was going. It was like stepping on what you thought was firm ground and feeling the slippage as it gave way to seeping quicksand. Some guy who could ride around town with a Seattle cop serving as his bodyguard was a guy whose name we probably didn’t want to know.
“We need a name,” Mel said softly. “Please.”
Frank took a deep, shuddering breath. “Daniel DonLeavy,” he said, with his voice barely a whisper. “Daniel McCoy DonLeavy.”
I’m sure my jaw dropped. “As in Mayor Daniel DonLeavy?”
Mayor DonLeavy had arrived on Seattle’s political scene in the late sixties with a program for cleaning house in city government, for cutting waste and corruption, for shaping up the police department. Ironically, DonLeavy had done so with enough shady dealings on his part that by the late seventies the former mayor and a number of his “kitchen cabinet” had not only been indicted, but had also been sent to the slammer.
Frank Clark nodded. “That’s the one,” he said. Then, motioning toward a wooden swing on the porch, he added, “It’s a long story. Care to have a seat?”
By then I had been leaning on my canes for what seemed like forever. I gratefully accepted. Mel and I sat together on the swing while Frank took a seat on the front step.
“My mother and Howard Clark were high school sweethearts,” he explained. “They went together during their first two years of college. Then, something happened and they broke up. At that point, my mother dropped out of college and went to work as a cocktail waitress at Vito’s. I suppose you know where that is?”
I nodded.
For decades Vito’s, a combination bar/restaurant, had been the in place for the in-crowd’s wheeling and dealing in Seattle. That’s where the top-tier guys from the cop shop had gone to mingle with the politicos and the well-heeled attorneys, while the guys lower down on the food chain had tended to gather in joints in the International District where the food was cheaper and the atmosphere wasn’t quite as alive with political infighting.
“That’s where she met DonLeavy?”
It was Frank’s turn to nod. “The old story. He was married. Once she got pregnant with my brother and me, he tried to talk her into giving us up, but she wouldn’t. And she wouldn’t agree to an abortion, either, mostly because they were both good Catholics—well, maybe not exactly good. Anyway, DonLeavy ended up setting her up with a place to live. He gave her money to live on and food to eat. And that’s just the way things were. He took care of us. Paid for us to go to that school. He also beat the crap out of us if he thought we were out of line.”
“Did you know the man was your father?” I asked.
Frank shook his head.
“Not really,” he said. “Our mother told us he was just a friend, but it turns out she had a lot of friends.”
Frank Clark drew imaginary quotation marks around the word. It was an admission that didn’t require any more detail than that. The gesture told me that Donnie and Frankie had known what their mother was back then, and that old story didn’t need rehashing now.
“According to our mother,” Frank continued, “the guy was like our uncle—our uncle Dan. The other guys came and went from time to time, but Uncle Dan was different. He showed up on a regular basis, always with a driver who hung around outside while Dan was inside the house visiting.”
His fingers drew another set of invisible quotation marks around the word “visiting.” I took that to mean that the boys had known what was going on. They had understood.
“A driver and a bodyguard, then?” Mel asked.
Frank nodded. “Donnie and I figured out the bodyguard was some kind of cop, even before that night, the night he showed up at the house next door with the barrel in the back of his truck. When he turned around after pushing the barrel down the hill, he saw us. We were hiding under the back porch, but he saw us anyway. He pulled a gun on us and ordered us to come out from under the porch. That’s when he told us that if we ever told anyone that he had been there that night or if we ever talked to anyone about Uncle Dan or him, we were done and so was our mother.”
“So he threatened you, and you believed him?” Mel asked.
Frank nodded. “We were kids. He was holding a gun. Of course we believed him.”
“But you still went down and looked at the barrel,” I said. “Why?”
“It was a dare,” Frank said sadly. “One of Donnie’s famous double dares.”
“When you found there was a body in the barrel, you still called it in. Why?”
“If the guy could do something like that to her—to the woman in the barrel—we were afraid he could do the same thing to our mom or to us. We thought the cops would figure out who had done it on their own—that you would figure it out,” he added, casting an accusatory glance in my direction. “Donnie and I didn’t dare try to help much. We were too scared.”
“This guy you thought was a cop. Did you ever see him again?” I asked.
Frank nodded. “He was there at the house that Sunday evening.”
“The day you found the barrel?”
Frank nodded again.
“What happened?”
“He came to the house and talked to Mom. I don’t know what he told her, but I know she was upset and crying after he left. Five days later, Howard Clark showed up at our house. Within a matter of weeks, he and Mom got married—by a justice of the peace—and we moved back here.”
“What about DonLeavy?” I asked.
“I never saw him again. I didn’t know the whole story—that he was our biological father—until our mother was in the hospital. When she realized she was dying, she decided it was time to tell me the truth. I’m not sure why. It didn’t make any difference.
“She said that at the time we were leaving Seattle, someone was threatening to tell DonLeavy’s wife about us. She was sure there was going to be a terrible scandal. Mom had burned her bridges with her own family years earlier. She was desperate. She called Howard Clark to ask for his advice and that’s when he came riding to the rescue. He brought us back over here. He took care of Mom and of Donnie and me, too. As far as I’m concerned, he’s the only father I’ve ever needed or wanted.
“After Mom died, I went on the Internet to find out what I could. That’s when I discovered that Daniel DonLeavy has been dead for fifteen years. His widow is still around, but I don’t feel right showing up and saying, ‘Surprise, guess who I am?’ So I haven’t done that, and I have no intention of doing so, either.”
The three of us were sitting there in silence when the front door opened and a woman stuck her head out. She looked worried. “Is everything all right?” she asked.
“It’s okay,” Frank said quickly. “Just some old stuff from when we lived in Seattle.”
She nodded and disappeared back inside.
“My wife,” he explained. “She knows about all this. My kids don’t. As far as they’re concerned, Howard Clark is their grandpa. Why screw that up?”
Why indeed?
“So what do you want from me?” he asked. “Why are you here?”
“A few days ago a decision was made to reopen the Monica Wellington homicide,” I said. “As soon as we did so, we discovered some irregularities in the handling of the evidence in that case. Since then, Seattle PD homicide detective Delilah Ainsworth, the investigator who was assigned to work that case, has been murdered, and so has the guy who was my partner back at the time of the original homicide.”
“The guy who came to the school to interview us?”
“No, Mac MacPherson. On that Sunday Mac and I were still working patrol, and we were the ones who took the call when you and Donnie reported finding the barrel. We’re the ones who picked the two of you up down by the waterfront before you took us back to the barrel.”
“Two more people are dead?” Frank asked.
I nodded. “Because of the mishandling of the evidence, we have reason to believe that the person we’re looking for is also a police officer. Based on what you’ve told us, I think we’re all looking for the same guy—the one who threatened you. Can you tell us his name?”
Frank shook his head. “No idea,” he said. “When our mother had company, she made sure Donnie and I didn’t hang around. All I can remember is that he was a big guy, with dark hair. That’s all—that and the gun in his hand. That’s something I’ll never forget. I wish I knew more, but I don’t.”
I used the canes to lever myself upright. “You’ve already been a big help,” I told him. “If the guy we’re looking for was assigned to Mayor DonLeavy, we’ll be able to find his name.”
“Is all this going to have to come out?” Frank asked. “My mother turned her life around. She and Howard have been pillars of this community for years. They’ve been good parents. I’d hate to think that their names would have to be dragged through the mud . . .”
“Mr. Clark,” I said. “I’d like you to take a moment to think about the dead girl’s family—about Monica Wellington’s family.”
“What about them?”
“There’s a good chance that the guy who killed her is the same guy who victimized you and your brother. Probably even your mother as well.”
“So?”
“This is a guy who has gotten away with murder for the better part of four decades while you’re still afraid of him and while Monica’s family is still waiting for answers. If there was a chance that your testimony would put this guy away for murdering Monica Wellington all those years ago, what do you think your mother would want you to do? What would both your parents—the real people here in Yakima who raised you—want you to do?”
“No question,” Frank said. “They’d want me to come forward.”
I nodded. “That’s what I thought. If there’s any way we can do this without calling on you for help, we will. But if you’re our last hope, we’ll be back.”
“All right,” Frank said, but he didn’t sound entirely convinced.
“One last question,” I said. “How old were you when your mother and Howard got back together—ten or so?”
“Eleven,” Frank answered.
“And in all the intervening years, there had never been any connection between them?”
“Not as far as I know. After Mom and Howard broke up, he evidently married someone else, but that marriage ended in divorce or maybe an annulment. I’m not sure which. All I know is, one day, the week after all this happened, the doorbell rang and here was this guy I’d never seen before standing there on the front porch. ‘I’m looking for Amelia Dodd,’ he said. ‘Tell her Howard’s here. I’ve come to take h
er home.’ ”
“And that’s all there was to it?”
“As far as I know. They took up together as though the years they’d been apart had never happened,” Frank said. “Howard treated my mother like gold. She couldn’t have been happier.”
“She had you and Donnie to thank for that,” I said.
Frank looked puzzled. “I don’t understand.”
“Think about it,” I said. “When you and your brother did the right thing by calling in the report, you also called the killer’s bluff, but he probably didn’t let it go at that.”
Frank frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Yes, he had threatened you, but he wasn’t sure you’d keep your end of the bargain. I’m betting he put the screws to your mother, too. He backed her far enough into a corner that she had to go looking for help. Luckily for all of you that Howard Clark is the guy she called.”
Frank seemed stunned. “That never occurred to me,” he said. “Never.”
“Well, it makes perfect sense to me. And if we need your help, we’ll have it, right?”
“Right,” Frank agreed. “Whatever you need me to do, I’ll do.”
CHAPTER 20
Mel and I didn’t say another word until we were back in her Cayman and headed for Seattle. “You didn’t exactly go easy on him,” she said.
“If we need his help, I wanted to know we could count on it.”
“What do we do now?” she asked. “Take another spin through HR?”
Sometimes I forget that Mel is a relative newcomer on the Seattle scene. She doesn’t have the local history drummed into her head the way I do.
“No need,” I said. “We’ve got a whole lot better source for information than that.”
I already had my phone out and was speed-dialing Ross Connors’s home number. Long before Ross became the Washington state attorney general, long before he became the King County prosecutor, he had been fresh out of law school and had gone to work as a lowly newbie in the same prosecutor’s office he would one day use to pole-vault himself to statewide office.