J. Jance - Long Time Gone

“Yes?” she asked.

“I’d like to see William Winkler.”

“One moment,” she said and disappeared.

I cooled my heels for the better part of five minutes before the door opened again. This time a heavyset, bulldog-faced black woman stepped into the office alcove. “What do you want?” she demanded.

“I’m here to see William Winkler.”

“Is Mr. Winkler expecting you?”

“No,” I said. “It’s a surprise.”

“Our guests don’t like no surprises,” she said. “Can I tell him what this is about?”

I have a problem with gatekeepers. I’ve always had a problem with gatekeepers. If and when I get to heaven, I’ll probably end up arguing with Saint Peter himself.

“It’s a private matter,” I said, handing her one of my cards. “If you don’t mind, I’d rather discuss it with Mr. Winkler directly.”

The woman held the card at arm’s length to read it. “All right,” she said with a sigh as she stuffed the card into her pocket. “This way.”

I followed her down a narrow corridor to the back of the house. Along the way we went past a series of rooms, all of them with their doors propped open. A television game show blared from one. In others I caught sad glimpses of aged residents sitting quietly in chairs positioned next to grimy windows. There were no bars on the windows, but the inmates of Home Sweet Home were as much prisoners in their individual rooms as if they were incarcerated felons sentenced to solitary confinement. And William Winkler’s existence was no different from that of any of his fellows.

Because his room was at the very back of the house, he had two dirty windows instead of the usual one. His view consisted of a dilapidated garage and a moss-encrusted block wall, so having those two windows didn’t offer much of a benefit. And since his chair was positioned with its back to both windows, I doubt Wink spent much time savoring the view. He sat dozing in a vinyl-covered recliner that resembled the leather one back home in my condo, but stuffing poking through holes on the arms testified to years of very hard use. A walker with traction-enhancing tennis balls on the feet was parked within easy reach next to his chair.

“Mr. Winkler,” my escort said. “Someone’s here to see you.”

Startled awake, he gave me a sour look. “Who are you?” he demanded querulously. “I suppose you’re some lawyer that jerk of a son of mine has sent around to hassle me some more, right? He can’t wait for me to die. Cheated me out of my own company. Now he wants to declare me incompetent so he can have control of whatever pittance I have left. How’s that for gratitude?”

Having been warned that Wink was somewhat cantankerous, I wasn’t surprised by his initial tirade. “My name’s Beaumont,” I said. “J. P. Beaumont. Marty Woodman said I could find you here.”

“Oh,” Wink said, softening a little. “Marty sent you? That’s different then. Have a chair.”

The black woman had lingered in the room during this exchange. Now, evidently satisfied that I was an approved visitor, she left Wink and me alone. Next to the bed sat a single chair. I picked it up and dragged it over closer to Wink’s.

“What do you want?” he asked once I was seated.

“I work for the Washington State Attorney General’s office with the Special Homicide Investigation Team. I’m looking into one of your cold cases from years ago.”

Wink’s countenance brightened with a hint of interest. “One of mine,” he muttered. “Which one?”

“From May of 1950,” I said. “Madeline Marchbank. Her friends called her Mimi.”

That brief flicker of interest went away, not because it burned itself out but because Wink Winkler slammed the door shut on it. “Don’t recall it at all,” he said firmly.

There’s a new technology out these days, a new kind of lie detector-or rather truth detector. It measures the way a subject’s brain waves react to familiar information. Lie detectors measure respiration, blood pressure, and galvanic skin responses when the interviewee gives untruthful answers to questions. The problem with that is that experienced lie-detector subjects can sometimes train themselves to outwit the old machines. With this new equipment measuring involuntary brain waves, it’s impossible to trick the brain into reacting to familiar information as though it were unfamiliar.

I may not be new technology, but I operate on a similar system. I could see from that initial involuntary reaction that Wink Winkler remembered exactly who Madeline Marchbank was as well as what had happened to her. If he was prepared to lie about it more than fifty years later, I wondered why.

“Madeline was a young woman who was supposedly murdered by an intruder in her home with her mother confined to a bed in a nearby room,” I explained smoothly, going along with the program that Wink remembered nothing. “But now a new witness has surfaced,” I added. “An eyewitness who saw the whole thing and says the initial attack occurred outside the house, near the back porch. It’s possible the victim was still alive when she was carried into the house, where she died.”

“You say all this happened way back in 1950?” Wink asked, still playing dumb. “Where’s the supposed eyewitness been all this time? If she knew about this, why didn’t she come forward years ago?”

She! I caught the slip almost as soon as it was out of Wink’s mouth. I had made no mention that the newly discovered witness was female, but Winkler already knew that. That meant that regardless of whether or not he had questioned Bonnie Jean Dunleavy, he had known about her existence all along. Not wanting to reveal that he had tipped his hand, I glossed it over as well as I could.

“Let’s just say she’s been out of touch,” I said.

He stared at me for some time without speaking. “Well, like I said, I don’t remember anything about it, so you’re barking up the wrong tree asking me.”

“You had a pretty good closure rate back in those days, didn’t you?” I asked.

“So what if I did?”

“It just seems odd to me that you don’t remember one you didn’t close.”

“Are you calling me a liar?” he demanded.

“No,” I returned. “Just surprisingly forgetful.”

“Wait till you’re my age,” he said. “See how much you remember.”

I took my leave then. There was no sense arguing with the man. No matter how much I didn’t want to, it looked as though I was going to have to go back to Paul Kramer with my hat in my hand and beg him for a look at the Mimi Marchbank evidence box. And since there’s no sense in putting off the inevitable, I headed straight for police headquarters. Once again I went through the whole check-in procedure. This time, though, rather than stopping off at Records, I went on up to Homicide on the seventh floor.

And was astonished. This was my first visit to Homicide since the move to the new building. And it wasn’t just the building that was new. No wonder all the old broken-down furniture had been abandoned in the basement of the Public Safety Building. All the furniture here was new. Somewhere a high-tech company had disappeared and some City of Seattle budget genius had used the resulting bankruptcy proceedings to furnish the new building-in cherry. Cherry cubicle dividers! Cherry desks! Cherry shelves! I felt like I’d landed in a cabinetry warehouse instead of a homicide squad.

I wandered through a sea of unfamiliar faces before someone called my name. “Hey, Beau,” Clarence Holly said, coming forward to shake my hand. “I thought you gave this stuff up.”

Clarence, who had been coming into Homicide from Patrol just as I was leaving, seemed happy to see me.

“Stopped by for old times’ sake,” I said. “Which way is Kramer’s office?”