by J. A. Jance
With a resigned sigh, Marsha Longmire turned to us. “After you,” she said.
Chapter 6
For years, the Rainier Club was the last bastion of male privilege and exclusivity in downtown Seattle. It was built in that separate but equal era when “men were men.” For social interaction, women were expected to toddle off to the Women’s University Club, for example, and not make a fuss about it.
All those male-only rules are changed now, and the Rainier Club’s lobby has changed, too. The living room in the governor’s mansion was reminiscent of all those bad old days, and it hadn’t changed a bit. It was fully stocked with reupholstered period furniture that was long on looks and short on comfort. I hoped that somewhere upstairs there was another living room with furniture that was actually comfortable.
Unwilling to let the evidence boxes out of our direct control, Mel and I carried them into the living room. Gerry Willis rolled his chair to a place of prominence in front of an immense fireplace while the rest of us arranged ourselves around him as best we could. Mel and I sat side by side on a sofa that had been built without taking the vagaries of the human shape into consideration.
“Well?” Gerry demanded abruptly. “What’s going on?”
His barked question could have been answered by any of us, but Mel and I stayed quiet, leaving the field open for Marsha to respond.
She did so, giving her husband an abbreviated version of Josh’s overnight adventures. She told about his being spotted making his rope-ladder exit and how, upon his return, she had confiscated his iPhone in punishment. She ended by relating her discovery of the appalling video and making the fateful call to Ross Connors.
“I had to do that,” she said. “I couldn’t just ignore it.”
“No,” he said. “You couldn’t. Show me the film. I need to see it.”
“Gerry, it’s really rough. Are you sure?”
“Show me,” he insisted.
Glancing in Mel’s direction, Marsha nodded. Without a word, Mel donned a pair of gloves. Then she opened the box, retrieved the phone, turned it on, and held it up for Gerry Willis’s viewing pleasure while she played the vile video in question.
I was more than a little surprised by Gerry’s response or, rather, by the lack thereof. He watched the film from beginning to end without comment and without blanching. It made me wonder what Mr. Gerard Willis had done before he became “First Spouse.”
The video ended. Mel switched off Josh’s iPhone and returned it to the box.
“That doesn’t mean anything,” Willis said. “Just because that video turned up on his phone doesn’t mean Josh is involved in what happened.”
Parental denial is pretty much standard the world over. “Whatever it was, my kid (or grandkid) didn’t do it. Couldn’t possibly have done it!”
Next Mel retrieved the bag containing the scarf and handed it over.
“We found the scarf in his bedroom,” Mel said quietly. “It was concealed between Josh’s mattress and the box spring. Josh claims it was placed inside his locker at school without his knowledge.”
“That isn’t necessarily the same scarf,” Gerry argued, handing it back.
Mel smiled at him before returning the scarf to the box. “Believe me, Mr. Willis,” she said. “We’re going to make every effort to determine if this is the same scarf.”
“Where’s Josh now?” Gerry asked.
“He’s upstairs with his attorney, Mr. McCarthy,” Mel said. “Your wife saw fit to-”
Gerry turned a disbelieving eye on Marsha. “Does that mean you’ve hired Garvin to be Josh’s defense attorney?”
“He’s good,” Marsha said quickly. “He’s very good.”
“He’s also very expensive.”
Marsha nodded. “He is that, but you need to go back to bed now, Gerry. It’s four o’clock. It’s time for your medication-the one you’re supposed to take with food.”
“I’m not going back to bed,” Gerry said determinedly. “I need to think. If you’ll bring the meds, I’ll take them here.”
Looking depleted, Marsha Longmire stood up. Right that minute she was a long way from being Governor Longmire.
“I’ll go make some sandwiches for everyone, then,” she said. She turned to Mel and me. “Is tuna on whole wheat okay?”
I remembered then that we hadn’t had lunch.
“Sure,” I said. “Tuna would be great.”
I should have thought that the governor would have a cook at her beck and call. There’s a good reason I don’t play poker. Most of the time the expressions on my face are a dead giveaway. That’s what happened this time, too.
“Today is the chef’s day off, and we’ve had to cut back on her helper’s hours. So on Mondays Gerry usually cooks. Not at the moment, however, so you’ll have to settle for what he likes to call my burnt offerings.”
For the first time I saw a look of genuine affection pass between the governor and the First Husband.
“You’re not such a terrible cook,” Gerry said. “I don’t think anyone is going to starve.”
Marsha smiled gamely. Since we had been turned into inadvertent guests who were evidently going to be there for a while, she must have decided that a bit of hospitality was in order.
“What would you like to drink?”
“It’s summer,” I said. “Iced tea if you’ve got it.”
Marsha turned to Mel. “And for you?”
“Iced tea would be great.”
As Marsha walked past her husband’s wheelchair, she gave Gerry a breezy buss on the top of his balding head. Once she disappeared through an open doorway that led into an immense dining room, Gerry Willis immediately turned to us.
“How much do you know about my grandson?” he asked.
Whenever possible, it’s always a good idea to let the subjects of interviews ask and answer their own questions. A lot of times they’ll blurt out exactly what you need to know. Or, by carefully avoiding a topic, they’ll still give themselves away.
“Not much,” I admitted with a shrug.
“This is a second marriage for Marsha and me,” Gerry explained. “We met at a party for lobbyists while Marsha was still in the state legislature. My wife died years ago in a car accident in eastern Washington. Marsha was divorced, amicably so. Sid, her ex, works as a lobbyist for the Master Builders Association. He and Marsha have a joint custody agreement that has gone surprisingly smoothly. It turns out their relationship was a lot better after they were divorced than while they were married.
“Marsha and I got married within a matter of months before she started campaigning for governor the first time. Lucy, my first wife, and I married young. Marsha married much later. Her two daughters, Giselle and Zoe, are only a couple of years older than my grandson.”
As Gerry related the story, some of the details were beginning to come back to me, although I have to admit the idea of lobbyists marrying politicians doesn’t exactly leave me feeling all warm and fuzzy. Gerry looked to be somewhere in his early seventies. Since Marsha was my age, if she had kids who were still that young, she probably hadn’t gotten around to doing the parenting thing until very late in the game, when her biological clock was ticking in overtime.
“When my first wife died,” Gerry continued, “my daughter, Desiree, was still in high school. We were both grieving. She needed more from me than I was able to give her. Long story short, I blew it. I let her down. She ended up falling in with the wrong crowd and went completely haywire. She dropped out of school and made a complete mess of her life. I tried to help her over the years, but there was really nothing I could do. She ended up getting involved in drugs. She married a jerk, a guy who went to prison and is still in prison for drug dealing. Desiree died of an overdose in a meth lab out in the woods down by Long Beach a little over three years ago.”
The regret in his voice over his fatherly shortcomings was heartbreaking, especially when I knew firsthand how fatherly failures stick with you and your kids pretty much f
orever.
Gerry paused for a moment and then went on.
“Since you’re cops, I suppose you’ve seen meth labs?”
Mel and I both nodded.
“By the time Marsha and I married, I had completely lost track of my daughter,” Gerry continued. “It was just too painful to see what she was doing to herself. I didn’t even know Josh existed until he was nine. That was six years ago, right after Marsha and I got married. When I found out about the squalor he was living in, I tried to get him out of it. Marsha was willing to adopt him, and for a time Desiree was willing, but then, when the father refused to sign away his parental rights, she backed out, too.
“A year later, when Josh ended up in foster care, I tried suing for custody. Desiree found herself a lawyer who managed to make it sound like her Big Bad Powerbroker Daddy and his wife, the Governor, were trying to run all over poor little her. I’ll say that much for Desiree. She was a very capable liar. The social workers at CPS seem to have or at least had a real bias toward keeping families intact.”
“They gave him back to her,” Mel said.
Gerry nodded. “We finally got custody three years later when Desiree died, but I’m afraid it was too late. Josh was twelve by then, and the damage was done. He came straight from foster care. He had the clothes on his back. Everything else was in a single grocery bag.”
I’ve seen kids come out of homes where the parents abuse drugs-crack, cocaine, meth, it doesn’t matter which one. The parents care far more about their next high than they do about their offspring. The kids are lucky to have clothes to wear or food to eat. As for going to school? That doesn’t happen, and once they get into “the system,” that often makes bad situations worse. A lot of foster parents do good work, but there are also some bad apples out there pretending to be do-gooders when they’re not.
The story Gerry Willis related was sad and all too familiar. I found myself feeling sorry for the First Husband and for Josh Deeson, too. I was also feeling a tiny bit sorry for Governor Longmire. Yes, she was beyond exasperation with the kid now, but once upon a time she had been willing to adopt him. When you try to do a good deed, it’s not nice when it comes back years later and bites you in the butt.
Gerry continued. “Josh can read. He taught himself. Used it as a mental escape hatch when he was living in terrible circumstances, but when it came to academics? Forget it. Giselle and Zoe were both in Olympia Prep when he came to live with us. Josh was so far behind his grade level, there was no way he could cut that, so we sent him to a public school. That’s why he’s taking classes this summer-trying to catch up. At least he was supposed to be catching up.”
So Zoe and Giselle went to a private school while Josh was relegated to public. I love it when politicians put their kids in private schools. A little bit of the feeling-sorry stuff for Governor Longmire went away.
“We tried to make him feel like a member of the family,” Gerry went on. “We offered him a room on the second floor just like everybody else. At the time he came to live with us, the girls-Zoe and Giselle-were willing to share a bedroom so he could have one of his own, but Josh wasn’t having any of that. He’s the one who decided he wanted to live up in the damned attic.”
Okay, so now I learned that Josh’s supposed Prisoner of Zenda plight was entirely self-imposed. Two points for Zoe and Giselle. Take one away from Josh. This was like an emotional tennis match, and I was having a hard time keeping score.
“But Josh didn’t want to have a family,” Gerry said. He paused and then asked, “Do you ever read Dean Koontz?”
As far as I was concerned, this was a question from way out in left field. I shook my head. “Doesn’t he write horror stuff, sort of like Stephen King?”
In high school, my son, Scott, was a huge Stephen King fan. Me, not so much. I was a homicide cop. I didn’t need to read about horror. I saw too much of it every day.
“Similar but different,” Gerry said. “One of Koontz’s books is called Watchers. It’s about a DNA experiment gone horribly awry. Two things come out of the experiment and they are the exact opposite. One is this incredibly intelligent golden retriever named Einstein. The other is a terrible monster. They turn out to be Good and Evil personified. And the scene that got to me in that book-”
“I know,” Mel interrupted. “The scene in the cave-the monster’s carefully made bed and his treasured Disney toys.”
“That’s it exactly,” Gerry Willis said.
Then he buried his face in his hands and sobbed. It took some time for him to get himself back under control and dry his eyes. In the meantime I was left thinking about how much more than a purse Mel Soames had brought with us to this interview.
“We noticed the book on the Spanish Inquisition,” I said when Gerry finally had regained his equanimity enough that he could once again answer questions. “Where did that come from?”
“I ordered it for him from Powell’s down in Portland,” Gerry said.
In terms of bookstores, Powell’s is a Pacific Northwest institution. They sell new books, of course, but they also have a huge reputation and a well-oiled system for tracking down old books, some of which are quite valuable.
“It’s an old college textbook,” Gerry continued. “As far as I know, it’s considered to be one of the definitive books on the Spanish Inquisition, and it’s been out of print for years. Josh was doing a history report and ended up being fascinated by the subject. That’s why I bought it for him.”
“You’ve seen his drawings, then?” I asked.
Gerry gave me a hollow look and nodded. “Until today I honestly thought they were just drawings,” he said.
“The girl in the video,” Mel said. “Did you recognize her?”
“No.”
“Is there a chance that she’s a friend of your grandson’s?”
“I doubt it,” Gerry said. “As far as Marsha and I can tell, Josh doesn’t have many friends, at least none who ever come here to visit.”
I surmised that the rope-ladder routine meant Josh did have friends somewhere, just ones he couldn’t or didn’t want to bring back to the house.
The governor chose that moment to return from what must have been a fairly distant kitchen. When Marsha walked into the living room she was carrying a tray stacked with sandwiches. A slim blond girl wearing short shorts and an even shorter tank top followed her. The girl carried a second tray loaded with glasses, spoons, various sweeteners, and a pitcher of iced tea. The hair, the skin, the vivid blue eyes indelibly marked this sweet young thing as her mother’s daughter.
“Zoe, this is Mr. Beaumont and Ms. Soames,” Marsha said. “These are the people I was telling you about. This is Zoe, my younger daughter. Would you please go get Gerry’s prescription bottle off the counter in his bathroom? It’s the one he’s supposed to take every four hours.”
Zoe gave us a quick smile, then dashed off to do as bidden while Marsha handed out paper napkins. Mel took the tray of sandwiches and passed it around while Marsha poured the iced tea. Then she settled on a straight-backed chair and pulled it close to Gerry’s.
“I suppose you’ve told them the whole sordid mess?”
Gerry nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I have.”
Zoe returned to the room with a pill bottle. She handed that to her stepfather, grabbed two sandwiches from the stack, and then raced off in the direction of the stairs.
“Zoe,” Marsha commanded. “Remember your manners.”
Zoe slid to a stop on the hardwood floor on the landing. “Nice meeting you,” she said over her shoulder. “Bye.” Then she disappeared up the stairs.
The truth is, Governor Longmire wasn’t much of a cook. The iced tea was okay, but the tuna sandwiches were just that-tuna. There was butter on the bread, but that was it. No mayo. No seasoning of any kind. If this was Marsha’s idea of feeding folks, the whole family must have dreaded the cook’s day off.
Once Zoe was gone, Marsha reached out and gave Gerry’s knee a comforting pat.
“I know,” her husband said. “I’m sure you did the right thing. That goes for calling in Garvin as well. But if Josh really did do this terrible thing”-Gerry paused for a moment, gathering himself-“then I should pack up and move the two of us out of here right now. None of this has leaked into the public yet, has it?”
That question was directed at Mel and me. We both shook our heads.
“That’s a blessing,” Gerry said. “But it’s a reprieve that won’t last long. Even if these folks don’t do it, someone will leak word to the press. Once that happens, the opposition will be calling for your head on a platter. The party will drop you like a hot potato. Just you wait, the next time you’re up for reelection, the party bigwigs will be backing someone else in the primary. If Josh and I leave now, before this all hits the fan, we might be able to do some damage control.”
“You’re not leaving,” Marsha said firmly. “Neither one of you is leaving.”
There were steps on the stairs-heavy steps-that were definitely not Zoe’s.
Garvin McCarthy poked his head around the end of the archway. “You shouldn’t be talking to these people,” he said curtly, addressing the governor. “You shouldn’t, and neither should your husband.”
I didn’t like it that he spoke about the First Husband rather than to the First Husband when Gerry Willis was right there in the room. Subtract two points from Mr. McCarthy, although, being a criminal defense lawyer, in my book he was already in negative territory to begin with.
“Call me at the office,” McCarthy added. “Or on my cell. You have them both.”
Marsha nodded.
“Don’t bother showing me out,” he added gruffly. “I know the way.”